The Mediaeval Mind (Volume 2 of 2) / A History of the Development of Thought and Emotion in the Middle Ages

Bacon goes at some length into the errors of the Vulgate, and gives a good account of the various Latin versions of the Bible. Next, the “sextum peccatum is far graver than all, and may be divided into two peccata maxima: one is that through these errors the literal sense of the Vulgate has infinite falsities and intolerable uncertainties, so that the truth cannot be known. From this follows the other peccatum, that the spiritual sense is infected with the same doubt and error.” These errors, first in the literal meaning, and thence in the spiritual or allegorical significance, spring from ignorance of the original tongues, and from ignorance of the birds and beasts and objects of all sorts spoken of in the Bible. “By far the greater cause of error, both in the literal and spiritual meaning, rises from ignorance of things in Scripture. For the literal sense is in the natures and properties of things, in order that the spiritual meaning may be elicited through convenient adaptations and congruent similitudes.” Bacon cites Augustine to show that we cannot understand the precept, Estote prudentes sicut serpentes, unless we know that it is the serpent’s habit to expose his body in defence of his head, as the Christian should expose all things for the sake of his head, which is Christ. Alack! is it for such ends as these that Bacon would have a closer scholarship fostered, and natural science prosecuted? The text of the Opus minus is broken at this point, and one cannot say whether Bacon had still a seventh peccatum to allege, or whether the series ended with the second of the vices into which he divided the sixth.

Bacon’s strictures upon the errors of his time were connected with his labours to remedy them, and win a firmer knowledge than dialectic could supply. To this end he advocated the study of the ancient languages, which he held to be “the first door of wisdom, and especially for the Latins, who have not the text, either of theology or philosophy, except from foreign languages.”[637] His own knowledge of Greek was sufficient to enable him to read passages in that tongue, and to compose a Greek grammar.[638] But he shows no interest in the classical Greek literature, nor is there evidence of his having studied any important Greek philosopher in the original. He was likewise zealous for the study of Hebrew, Chaldee, and Arabic, the other foreign tongues which held the learning so inadequately represented by Latin versions. He spoke with some exaggeration of the demerits of the existing translations;[639] but he recognised the arduousness of the translator’s task, from diversity of idiom and the difficulty of finding an equivalent in Latin for the statements, for example, in the Greek. The Latin vocabulary often proved inadequate; and words had to be taken bodily from the original tongue. Likewise he saw, and so had others, though none had declared it so clearly, that the translator should not only be master of the two languages, but have knowledge of the subject treated by the work to be translated.[640]

After the languages, Bacon urged the pursuit of the sciences, which he conceived to be interdependent and corroborative; the conclusions of each of them susceptible of proof by the methods and data of the others.

Thus, with antique and mediaeval looseness, Bacon conceived this science. He devotes to it the long Pars quarta of the Opus majus: saying at the beginning that of—

Bacon adduces authorities to prove the need of mathematics for the study of grammar and logic; he shows that its processes reach indubitable certitude of truth; and “if in other sciences we would reach certitude free from doubt, and truth without error, we must set the foundations of cognition in mathematics.”[641] He points out its obvious necessity in the study of the heavens, and in everything pertaining to speculative and practical astrologia; also for the study of physics and optics. Thus his interest lay chiefly in its application. As human science is nought unless it may be applied to things divine, mathematics must find its supreme usefulness in its application to the matters of theology. It should aid us in ascertaining the position of paradise and hell, and promote our knowledge of Scriptural geography, and more especially, sacred chronology. Next it affords us knowledge of the exact forms of things mentioned in Scripture, like the ark, the tabernacle, and the temple, so that from an accurate ascertainment of the literal sense, the true spiritual meaning may be deduced. It should not be confused with its evil namesake magic,[642] yet the true science is useful in determining the influence of the stars on the fortunes of states. Moreover, mathematics, through astrology, is of great importance in the certification of the faith, strengthening it against the sect of Antichrist;[643] then in the correction of the Church’s calendar; and finally, as all things and regions of the earth are affected by the heavens, astrology and mathematics are pertinent to a consideration of geography. And Bacon concludes Pars quarta with an elaborate description of the regions, countries, and cities of the known world.

Bacon likewise was profoundly interested in optics, the scientia perspectiva, which he sets forth elaborately in Pars quinta of the Opus majus. Much space would be needed to discuss his theories of light and vision, and the propagation of physical force, treated in the De multiplicatione specierum. He knew all that was to be learned from Greek and Arabic sources, and, unlike Albert, who compiled much of the same material, he used his knowledge to build with. Bacon had a genius for these sciences: his Scientia perspectiva is no mere compilation, and no work used by him presented either a theory of force or of vision, containing as many adumbrations of later theorizing.[644] Yet he fails to cast off his obsession with the “spiritual meaning” and the utility of science for theology. He discussed the composition of Adam’s body while in a state of innocence,[645] a point that may seem no more tangible than Thomas’s reasonings upon the movements of Angels, which Bacon ridicules. Again in his Optics, after an interesting discussion of refraction and reflection, he cannot forego a consideration of the spiritual significations of refracted rays.[646] Even his discussion of experimental science has touches of mediaevalism, which are peculiarly dissonant in this most original and “advanced” product of Bacon’s genius, which now must be considered more specifically.

The speculative intellect of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries was so widely absorbed with the matter and methods of the dominant scholasticism, that no one is likely to think of the eminent scholastics as isolated phenomena. Plainly they were but as the highest peaks which somewhat overtop the other mountains, through whose aggregation and support they were lifted to their supreme altitude. But with Bacon the danger is real lest he seem separate and unsupported; for the influences which helped to make him are not over-evident. Yet he did not make himself. The directing of his attention to linguistics is sufficiently accounted for by the influence of Grosseteste and others, who had inaugurated the study of Greek, and perhaps Hebrew at Oxford. As for physics or optics, others also were interested—or there would have been no translations of Greek and Arabic treatises for him to use;[647] and in mathematics there was a certain older contemporary, Jordanus Nemorarius (not to mention Leonardo Fibonacci), who far overtopped him. It is safe to assume that in the thirteenth, as in the twelfth and previous centuries, there were men who studied the phenomena of nature. But they have left scant record. A period is remembered by those features of its main accomplishment which are not superseded or obliterated by the further advance of later times. Nothing has obliterated the work of the scholastics for those who may still care for such reasonings; and Aquinas to-day holds sway in the Roman Catholic Church. On the other hand, the sparse footprints of the mediaeval men who essayed the paths of natural science have long since been trodden out by myriad feet passing far beyond them, along those ways. Yet there were these wayfarers, who made little stir in their own time, and have long been well forgotten. Had it not been for the letter from Pope Clement, Bacon himself might be among them; and only his writings keep from utter oblivion the name of an individual who, according to Bacon, carried the practice of “experimental science” further than he could hope to do. It may be fruitful to approach Bacon’s presentation of this science, or scientific method, through his references to this extraordinary Picard, named Peter of Maharncuria, or Maricourt.

In the Opus tertium, Bacon has been considering optics and mathematics, and has spoken of this Peter as proficient in them; and thus he opens chapter xiii., which is devoted to the scientia experimentalis:

By following the text further, we may be able to appreciate what Bacon will shortly say of him:

It may be pertinent to our estimate of Bacon’s experimental science to query where the experimentator ever observed an eagle or a phoenix renewing its youth, outside of the Physiologus?

It is impossible to complete philosophy, usefully and with certitude, without Peter; but he is not to be had for a price; he could have had every honour from princes; and if he wished to publish his works, the whole world of Paris would follow him. But he cares not a whit for honours or riches, though he could get them any time he chose through his wisdom. This man has worked at such a burning-glass for three years, and soon will perfect it by the grace of God.

There is a great deal of Roger Bacon in these curious passages; much of his inductive genius, much of his sanguine hopefulness, not to say inventive imagination; and enough of his credulity. No one ever knew or could perform all he ascribes to this astounding Peter, from whom, apparently, there is extant a certain intelligent treatise upon the magnet.[649] And as for those burning-glasses, or possibly reflectors, by which distant fleets and armies should be set afire—did they ever exist? Did Archimedes ever burn with them the Roman ships at Syracuse? Were they ever more than a myth? It is, at all events, safe to say that no device from the hand and brain of Peter of Maharncuria ever threatened Turk or Saracen.

It is knowledge that gives insight. Modern critical methods amount chiefly to this, that we know more. Bacon did not have such knowledge of animal physiology as would assure him of the absurdity of the notion that an eagle or any animal could renew its youth. Nor did he know enough to realise the vast improbability of Greek philosophers drawing their knowledge from the books of Hebrew prophets. And one sees how loose must have been the practice, or the dreams, of his “experimental science.” His fundamental conception seems to waver: Scientia experimentalis, is it a science, or is it a means and method universally applicable to all scientific investigation? The sciences serve it as handmaids, says Bacon; and he also says, that it alone can test and certify, make sure and certain, the conclusions of the other sciences. Perhaps he thought it the master-key fitting all the doors of knowledge; and held that all sciences, so far as possible, should proceed from experience, through further observation and experiment. But he has not said quite this.

He is little to be blamed for his vagueness, and greatly to be admired for having reached his possibly inconsistent conception. Observation and experiment were as old as human thought upon human experience. And Albert the Great says that the conclusions of all sciences should be tested by them. But he evinces no formal conception of either an experimental science or method; though he has much to say as to logic, and ponderously considers whether it is a science or the means or method of all sciences.[650] Herein he is discussing consciously with respect to logic, the very point as to which Bacon, in respect to experimental science, rather unconsciously wavers: is it a science, and almost the queen? Or is it the true scientific method to be followed by all sciences when applicable?[651] Bacon had no high regard for the study of logic, deeming that the thoughts of untaught men naturally followed its laws.[652] This was doubtless true, and just as true, moreover, of experimental science as of logic. The one and the other were built up from the ways of the common man and universal processes of thought. Yet the logic of the trained mind is the surer; and so experimental science may reach out beyond the crude observations of unscientific men.

Manifestly with Roger Bacon the scientia experimentalis held the place which logic held with Albert, or queenly dialectic with Abaelard. He repeats himself continually in stating its properties and prerogatives, yet without advancing to greater clearness of conception. Pars sexta of the Opus majus is devoted to it: and we may take one last glance to see whether the statements there throw any further light upon the matter.

And Bacon says, as illustration, that you could never by mere argument convince a man that fire would burn; also that “in spite of the demonstration of the properties of an equilateral triangle, the mind would not stick to the conclusion sine experientia.”

After referring to Aristotle, and adducing some examples of foolish things believed by learned and common men alike, because they had not applied the tests of observation, he concludes: “Oportet ergo omnia certificari per viam experientiae.” He continues with something unexpected:

Any doubt as to the religious and Christian meaning of the last passage is removed by Bacon’s statement of the

These utterances are religious, and bring us back to the religious, or practical, motive of Bacon’s entire endeavour after knowledge: knowledge should have its utility, its practical bearing; and the ultimate utility is that which promotes a sound and saving knowledge of God. The true method of research, says Bacon in the Compendium studii,

It is as with an echo of this thought, that Bacon begins the second chapter of his exposition of experimental science in the sixth part of the Opus majus, from which we have but now withdrawn our attention. He anxiously reiterates what he has already said more than once, as to the properties and prerogatives of this scientia experimentalis. Then he gives his most interesting and elaborate example of its application in the investigation of the rainbow, an example too lengthy and too difficult to reproduce. In stating the three prerogatives, he makes but slight change of phrasing; yet his restatement of the last of them:—“The third dignitas of this science is that it investigates the secrets of nature by its own competency and out of its own qualities, irrespective of any connection with the other sciences,”—signifies an autonomous science, rather than a method applicable to all investigation. The illustrations which Bacon now gives, range free indeed; yet in the main relate to “useful discoveries” as one might say: to ever-burning lamps, Greek fire, explosives, antidotes for poison, and matters useful to the Church and State. Along these lines of discovery through experiment, Bacon lets his imagination travel and lead him on to surmises of inventions that long after him were realised. “Machines for navigating are possible without rowers, like great ships suited to river or ocean, going with greater velocity than if they were full of rowers: likewise wagons may be moved cum impetu inaestimabili, as we deem the chariots of antiquity to have been. And there may be flying machines, so made that a man may sit in the middle of the machine and direct it by some devise: and again, machines for raising great weights.”[656] The modern reality has outdone this mediaeval dream.

CHAPTER XLII

The opening years of the fourteenth century, so fatal for the papacy, were also portentous for scholasticism. The Summa of Thomas was impugned by Joannes Duns Scotus, whose entire work, constructive as well as critical, was impressed with qualities of finality, signifying that in the forms of reasoning represented by him as well as Thomas, thought should advance no farther. Bacon’s attack upon scholastic methods had proved abortive from its tactlessness and confusion, and because men did not care for, and perhaps did not understand, his arguments. It was not so with the arguments of Duns Scotus. Throughout the academic world, thought still was set to chords of metaphysics; and although men had never listened to quite such dialectic orchestration as Duns provided, they liked it, perceived its motives, and comprehended the meaning of its themes. So his generation understood and appreciated him. That he was the beginning of the end of the scholastic system, could not be known until the manner of that ending had disclosed itself more fully. We, however, discern the symptoms of scholastic dissolution in his work. His criticism of his predecessors was disintegrating, even when not destructive. His own dialectic was so surpassingly intricate and dizzy that, like the choir of Beauvais, it might some day collapse. With Duns Scotus, scholasticism reasoned itself out of human reach. And with him also, the wholeness of the scholastic purpose finally broke. For he no longer maintained the union of metaphysics and theology. The latter, to be sure, was valid absolutely; but, from a speculative, it has become a practical science. It neither draws its principles from metaphysics, nor subordinates the other sciences—all human knowledge—to its service. Although rational in content, it possesses proofs stronger than dialectic, and stands on revelation.

There had always been men who maintained similar propositions. But it was quite another matter that the severance between metaphysics and theology should be demonstrated by a prodigious metaphysical theologian after a different view had been carried to its farthest reaches by the great Aquinas. Henceforth philosophy and theology were set on opposite pinnacles, only with theology’s pinnacle the higher. In spite of the last circumstance, the coming time showed that men cannot for long possess in peace two standards of truth—philosophy and revelation; but will be driven to hold to the one and ignore the other. By breaking the rational union of philosophy and theology, Duns Scotus prepared the way for Occam. The latter also asserts vociferously the superiority of the divine truth over human knowledge and its reasonings. But the popes are at Avignon, and the Christian world no longer bows down before those willing Babylonian captives. Under such a blasted condition of the Church, how should any inclusive Christian synthesis of thought and faith be maintained?

Duns Scotus[657] could not have been what he was, had he not lived after Thomas. He was indeed the pinnacle of scholasticism; set upon all the rest. Yet this pinnacle had its more particular supports—or antecedents. And their special line may be noted without intending thereby to suggest that the influences affecting the thought of Duns Scotus did not include all the men he heard or read, and criticised.

That Duns Scotus was educated at Oxford, and became a Franciscan, and not a Dominican, had done much to set the lines of thought reflected in his doctrines. Anselm of Aosta, of Bec, of Canterbury, had been an intellectual force in England. Duns was strongly influenced by his bold realism, by his emphasis upon the power and freedom of the will, and by his doctrine of the atonement.[658] But Anselm also affected Scotus indirectly through the English worthy who stands between them.

This, of course, was Robert Grosseteste, to whom we have had occasion to refer, yet, despite of his intrinsic worth, always in relation to his effect on others. He was a great man; in his day a many-sided force, strong in the business of Church and State, strong in censuring and bridling the wicked, strong in the guidance of the young university of Oxford, and a mighty friend of the Franciscan Order, then establishing itself there. To his pupils, and their pupils apparently, he was a fruitful inspiration; yet the historian of thought may be less interested in the master than in certain of these pupils who brought to explicit form divers matters which in Grosseteste seem to have been but inchoate.[659] One thinks immediately of Roger Bacon, who was his pupil; and then of Duns, the metaphysician, who possibly may have listened to some aged pupil of Grosseteste. In different ways, Duns as well as Bacon took much from the master. And it is possible to see how the great teacher and bishop may have incited the genius of Scotus as well as that of Bacon to perform its task. For Grosseteste was a rarely capable and clear-eyed man, honest and resolute, who with the entire strength of a powerful personality insisted upon going to the heart of every proposition, and testing its validity by the surest means obtainable. By virtue of his training and intellectual inheritance, he was an Augustinian and a Platonist; a successor of Anselm, rather than a predecessor of the great Dominican Aristotelians. He was accordingly an emphatic realist, yet one who would co-ordinate the reality of his “universals” with the reality of experience. Even had he not been an Augustinian, such a masterful character would have realised the power of the human will, and felt the practical insistencies of the art of human salvation, which was the science of theology.

Views like these prevailed at Oxford. They may be found clearly stated by Richard of Middleton, an Oxford Franciscan somewhat older than Duns Scotus. He declares that theology is a practical science, and emphasises the primacy and freedom of the will. Voluntas est nobilissima potentia in anima. Again: Voluntas simpliciter nobilior est quam intellectus: the intellect indeed goes before the Will, as the servant who carries the candle before his lord. So the idea of the Good, toward which the Will directs itself, is higher than that of the True, which is the object of the mind; and loving is greater than knowing.[660] Roger Bacon had also held that Will (Voluntas) was higher than the knowing faculty (intellectus); and so did Henry of Ghent,[661] a man of the Low Countries, doctor solemnis hight, and a ruling spirit at the Paris University in the latter part of the thirteenth century. Many of his doctrines substantially resembled those of Scotus, although attacked by him.

So we seem to see the pit in which Duns may have digged. This man, who was no mere fossor, but a builder, and might have deserved the name of Poliorcetes, as the overthrower of many bulwarks, has left few traces of himself, beyond his twenty tomes of metaphysics, which contain no personal references to their author. The birthplace of Johannes Duns Scotus, whether in Scotland, England or Ireland, is unknown. The commonly accepted date, 1274, probably should be abandoned for an earlier year. It is known that he was a Franciscan, and that the greater part of his life as student and teacher was passed at Oxford. In a letter of commendation, written by the General of his Order in 1304, he is already termed subtilissimus. He was then leaving for Paris, where, two or three years later, in 1307, he was made a Doctor. The following year he was sent to Cologne, and there he died an enigmatical death on November 8, 1308. Report has it that he was buried alive while in a trance.[662] Probably there was little to tell of the life of Duns Scotus. His personality, as well as his career, seems completely included and exhausted in his works. Yet back of them, besides a most acutely reasoning mind, lay an indomitable will. The man never faltered in his labour any more than his reasoning wavered in its labyrinthic course to its conclusions. His learning was complete: he knew the Bible and the Fathers; he was a master of theology, of philosophy, of astronomy, and mathematics.

The constructive processes of his genius appear to issue out of the action of its critical energies. Duns was the most penetrating critic produced by scholasticism. Whatever he considered from the systems of other men he subjected to tests that were apt to leave the argument in tatters. No logical inconsequence escaped him. And when every point had been examined with respect to its rational consistency, this dialectic genius was inclined to bring the matter to the bar of psychological experience. On the other hand he was a churchman, holding that even as Scripture and dogma were above question, so were the decrees of the Church, God’s sanctioned earthly Civitas.

Having thus tested whatever was presented by human reason, and accepting what was declared by Scripture or the Church, Duns proceeds to build out his doctrine as the case may call for. No man ever drove either constructive logic or the subtilties of critical distinctions closer to the limits of human comprehension or human patience than Duns Scotus. And here lies the trouble with him. The endless ramification and refinement of his dialectic, his devious processes of conclusion, make his work a reductio ad absurdum of scholastic ways of reasoning. Logically, eristically, the argumentation is inerrant. It never wanders aimlessly, but winding and circling, at last it reaches a conclusion from some point unforeseen. Would you run a course with this master of the syllogism? If you enter his lists, you are lost. The right way to attack him, is to stand without, and laugh. That is what was done afterwards, when whoever cared for such reasonings was called a Dunce, after the name of this most subtle of mediaeval metaphysicians.

Thus a man is judged by his form and method, and by the bulk of his accomplishment. Form, method, bulk of accomplishment, with Scotus were preposterous. When the taste or mania for such dialectics passed away, this kind of form, this maze of method, this hopelessness of bulk, made an unfit vehicle for a philosophy of life. Men would not search it through to find the living principles. Yet living principles were there; or, at least, tenable and consistent views. The main positions of Duns Scotus, some of which he held in opposition to Thomas, may strike us as quite reasonable: we may be inclined to agree with him. Perhaps it will surprise us to find sane doctrine so well hidden in such dialectic.

He held, for example, that there is no real difference between the soul and its faculties. Thomas never demonstrated the contrary quite satisfactorily. Again, Duns Scotus was a realist: the Idea exists, since it is conceived. For the intellect is passive, and is moved by the intelligible. Therefore the Universal must be a something, in order to occasion the conception of it. Thus the reality of the concept proves the actuality of the Idea.[663] Duns adds further explanations and distinctions regarding the actuality of universals, which are somewhat beyond the comprehension of the modern mind. But one may remark that he reaches his views of the actuality of universals through analysis of the processes of thought. Sense-perception occasions the Idea in us; there must exist some objective correspondence to our general concepts, as there must also be in things some objective correspondence to our perception of them as individuals, whereby they become to us this or that individual thing. Such individual objectivity is constituted by the thisness of the thing, its haecceitas which is to be contra-distinguished from its general essence, to wit, its whatness, or quidditas. Duns holds that we think individual things directly as we think abstract Ideas; and so their haecceitas is as true an object of our thought as their quidditas. This seems a reasonable conclusion, seeing that the individual and not the type is the final end of creation. So our conceptions prove for us the actuality both of the universal and the concrete; and the proof of one and the other is rooted in sense-perception.

Nothing was of greater import with Duns than the doctrine of the primacy of the Will over the intellect. Duns supports it with intricate argument. The soul in substance is identical with its faculties; but the latter are formally distinguishable from it and from each other. Knowing and willing are faculties or properties of the soul. The will is purely spiritual, and to be distinguished from sense-appetite: the will, and the will alone, is free; absolutely undetermined by any cause beyond itself. Even the intellect, that is the knowing faculty, is determined from without. Although some cognition precedes the act of willing, the will is not determined by cognition, but uses it. So the will, being free, is higher than the intellect. It is the will that constitutes man’s greatness; it raises him above nature, and liberates him from her coercions. Not the intellect, but the will directs itself toward the goal of blessedness, and is the subject of the moral virtues. Such seems to be Duns’s main position; but he distinguishes and refines the matter beyond the limits of our comprehension.[664]

Another fundamental doctrine with Duns Scotus is that theology is not a speculative, but a practical, science—a position which Duns unfortunately disproved with his tomes of metaphysics! But in spite of the personal reductio ad absurdum of his argument, the position taken by him betokens the breaking up of the scholastic system. The subject of theology, at least for men, is the revelation of God contained in Scripture. “Holy Scripture is a kind of knowledge (quaedam notitia) divinely given in order to direct men to a supernatural end—in finem supernaturalem.”[665] The knowledge revealed in Scripture relates to God’s free will and ordainment for man; which is, that man should attain blessedness. Therefore the truths of Scripture are practical, having an end in view; they are such as are necessary for Salvation. The Church has authority to declare the meaning of Scripture, and supplement it through its Catholic tradition.

Is theology, then, properly a science? Duns will not deny it; but thinks it may more properly be called a sapientia, since according to its nature, it is rather a knowledge of principles than a method of conclusions. It consists in knowledge of God directly revealed. Therefore its principles are not those of the human sciences: for example, it does not accept its principles from metaphysics, although that science treats of much that is contained in theology. Nor are the sciences—we can hardly say the other sciences—subordinated to it; since their province is natural knowledge obtained through natural means. Theology, if it be a science, is one apart from the rest. The knowledge which makes its substance is never its end, but always means to its end; which is to say, that it is practical and not speculative. By virtue of its primacy as well as character, theology pertains to the Will, and works itself out in practice: practical alike are its principles and conclusions. Apparently, with Duns, theology is a science only in this respect, that its substance, which is most rational, may be logically treated with a view to a complete and consistent understanding of it.[666]

In entire consistency with these fundamental views, Duns held that man’s supreme beatitude lay in the complete and perfect functioning of his will in accordance with the will of God. This was a strong and noble view of man, free to think and act and will and love, according to the will, and aided by the Grace, of the Creator of his will and mind. The trouble lay, as said before, in the method by which all was set forth and proved. The truly consequent person who made theology a practical matter, was such a one as Francis of Assisi, with his ceaselessly-burning Christlike love actualizing itself in living act and word—or possibly such a one as Bonaventura with his piety. But can it ever seem other than fantastic, to state this principle, and then bulwark it with volumes of dialectic and a metaphysics beyond the grasp of human understanding? Not from such does one learn to do the will of God. This was scarcely the way to make good the ultimate practical character of religion, as against Thomas’s frankly intellectual view. Duns is as intellectual as Thomas; but Thomas is the more consistent. And shall we say, that with Duns all makes toward God, as the final end, through the strong action of the human will and love? So be it—Thomas said, through intellection and through love. Again one queries, did the Scotian reasoning ever foster love?

And then Duns set theology apart,—and supreme. Again, so be it. Let the impulsive religion of the soul assert its primacy. But this was not the way of Duns. Theology and philosophy do not rest on the same principles, says he; but how does he demonstrate it? By substantiating this severance by means of metaphysical dialectic, and using the same dialectic and the same metaphysics to prove that theology can do without either. Not by dialectic and metaphysics can theology free itself from them, and set itself on other foundations.

Duns Scotus exerted great influence, both directly and through the reaction occasioned by certain of his teachings. The next generations were full of Scotists, who were proud if only they might be reputed more subtle than their master. They succeeded in becoming more inane. There were other men, whom the critical processes of Duns led to deny the validity of his constructive metaphysics. Of those who profited by his teaching, yet represented this reaction against parts of it, the ablest was the Franciscan, William of Occam, a man but few years younger than Duns. He was born in England, in the county of Surrey; and studied under Duns at Paris. It is known that in 1320 he was lecturing with distinction at this centre of intellectual life. Three years afterward, he quitted his chair, and in the controversies then rending his Order, hotly espoused the cause of the Spirituales—the Franciscans who would carry out the precepts of Francis to the letter. Next, he threw himself with all the ardour of his temper into the conflict with the papacy, and became the literary champion of the rights of the State. He was cited before the pope, and imprisoned at Avignon, but escaped, in 1328, and fled to the Court of the emperor, Louis of Bavaria, to whom, as the accounts declare, he addressed the proud word: Tu me defendas gladio, ego te defendam calamo. He died about 1347.

The succession, as it were, of Occam to Duns Scotus, is of great interest. It was portentous for scholasticism. The pupil, for pupil in large measure he was, profited by the critical methods and negations of the master. But he denied the validity of the metaphysical constructions whereby Duns sought to rebuild what his criticism had cast down or shaken. Especially, Occam would not accept the subtle Doctor’s fabrication of an external world in accord with the apparent necessities of thought. For with all Duns’s critical insistency, never did a man more unhesitatingly make a universe to fit the syllogistic processes of his reason, projected into the external world. Here Occam would not follow him, as Aristotle would not follow Plato.

It were well to consider more specifically these two sides of Occam’s succession to Duns Scotus, shown in his acceptance and rejection of the master’s teaching. He followed him, of course, in emphasising the functions of the will; and accepted the conception of theology as practical, and not speculative, in its ends; and, like Duns, he distinguished, nay rather, severed, theology from philosophy, widening the cleft between them. If, with Duns, theology was still, in a sense, a science; with Occam it could hardly be called one. Although Duns denied that theology was to be controlled by principles drawn from metaphysics, he laboured to produce a metaphysical counterfeit, wherein theology, founded on revelation and church law, should present a close parallel to what it would have been, had its controlling principles been those of metaphysics. Occam quite as resolutely as his master, proves the untenability of current theological reasonings. More unreservedly than Duns, he interdicts the testing of theology by reason: and goes beyond him in restricting the sphere of rationally demonstrable truth, denying, for instance, that reason can demonstrate God’s unity, infinity, or even existence. Unlike Duns, he would not attempt to erect a quasi-scientific theology, in the place of the systems he rejects. To make up for this negative result, Occam asserted the verity of Scripture unqualifiedly, as Duns also did. With Occam, Scripture, revelation, is absolutely infallible, neither requiring nor admitting the proofs of reason. To be sure he co-ordinates with it the Law of Nature, which God has implanted in our minds. But otherwise theology, faith, stands alone, very isolated, although on the alleged most certain of foundations. The provinces of science and faith are different. Faith’s assent is not required for what is known through evidence; science does not depend on faith. Nor does faith or theology depend on scientia. And since, without faith, no one can assent to those verities which are to be believed (veritatibus credibilibus), there is no scientia proprie dicta respecting them. So the breach in the old scholastic, Thomist, unity was made utter and irreparable. Theology stands on the surest of bases, but isolated, unsupported; philosophy, all human knowledge, extends around and below it, and is discredited because irrelevant to highest truth.

Thus far as to Occam’s loyal and rebellious succession to the theology of Duns. In philosophy, it was much the same. He accepted his critical methods, but would not follow him in his constructive metaphysics. Although the older man was pre-eminently a metaphysician, the critical side of his intellect drew empiric processes within the sweep of its energies. Occam, unconvinced of the correspondence between the logic of concepts and the facts of the external world, seeks to limit the principles of the former to the processes of the mind. Accordingly, he rejects the inferences of the Scotian dialectic which project themselves outward, as proofs of the objective existence of abstract or general ideas. It is thus from a more thoroughgoing application of the Scotian analysis of mental processes, and a more thoroughgoing testing of the evidence furnished by experience, that Occam refuses to recognise the existence of universals save in the mind, where evidently they are necessary elements of thinking. Manifestly, he is striving very earnestly not to go beyond the evidence; and he is also striving to eliminate all unevidenced and unnecessary elements, and those chimeras of the mind, which become actual untruths when posited as realities of the outer world.

Such were the motives of Occam’s far from simple theory of cognition. In it, mental perceptions, or cognitions, were regarded as symbols (signa, termini) of the objects represented by them. They are natural, as contrasted with the artificial symbols of speech and writing. They fall into three classes; first, sense-perception of the concrete object, and thirdly, so to speak, the abstract concept representative of many objects, or of some ideal figment or quality. Intermediate between the two, Occam puts notitia intuitiva, which relates to the existence of concrete things. It serves as a basis for the cognition of their combinations and relationships, and forms a necessary antecedent to abstract knowledge. Notitia abstractiva praesupponit intuitivam.[667] Occam holds that notitia intuitiva presents the concrete thing as it exists. Otherwise with abstract or general concepts. They are signa of mental presentations, or processes; and there is no ground for transferring them to the world of outer realities. Their existence is confined to the mind, where they are formed from the common elements of other signa, especially those of our notitia intuitiva. “And so,” says Occam, “the genus is not common to many things through any sameness in them, but through the common nature (communitatem) of the signum, by which the same signum is common to many things signified.”[668] These universals furnish predicates for our judgments, since through them we conceive of realities as containing a common element of nature. They are not mere words; but have a real existence in the mind, where they perform functions essential to thinking. Indirectly, through their bases of notitiae intuitivae, they even reflect outer realities. “The Universal is no mere figment, to which there is no correspondence of anything like it (cui non correspondet aliquod consimile) in objective being, as that is figured in the thinker.”

It results from the foregoing argument, that science, ordered knowledge, which seeks co-ordination and unity, has not to do with things; but with propositions, its object being that which is known, rather than that which is. Things are singular, while science treats of general ideas, which are only in the mind. “It should be understood, that any science, whether realis or rationalis, is only concerned with propositions (propositionibus); because propositions alone are known.”[669]

It was not so very great a leap from the realism of Duns, which ascribed a certain objective existence to general ideas, to the nominalism, or rather conceptualism, of Occam, which denied it, yet recognised the real existence and necessary functions of universals, in the mind. The metaphysically proved realities of Duns were rather spectral, and Occam’s universals, subjective though they were, lived a real and active life. One feels that the realities of Duns’s metaphysics scarcely extended beyond the thinker’s mind. In many respects Occam’s philosophy was a strenuous carrying out of Duns’s teachings; and when it was not, we see the younger man pushed, or rather repelled, to the positions which he took, by the unsatisfying metaphysics of his teacher. History shows other rebounds of thought, which seem abrupt, and yet were consequential in the same dual way that Occam’s doctrine followed that of Duns. Out of the Brahmin Absolute came the Buddhist wheel of change; even as Parmenides was followed hard by Heraclitus. And how often Atheism steps on Pantheism’s heels!

Thus, developing, revising, and changing, Occam carried out the work of Duns, and promulgated a theory of knowledge which pointed on to much later phases of thinking. In his school he came to be called venerabilis inceptor, a proper title for the man who shook loose from so much previous thought, and became the source of so many novel views. He had, indeed, little fear of novelty. “Novelties (novitates) are not altogether to be rejected; but as what is old (vetusta), on becoming burdensome, should be abolished, so novelties when, to the sound judgment, they are useful, fruitful, necessary, expedient, are the more boldly to be embraced.”[670]

It is not, however, as the inceptor of new philosophies or of novel views on the relations between State and Papacy that we are viewing Occam here at the close of this long presentation of the ultimate intellectual interests of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. But rather as the man who represented the ways in which the old was breaking up, and embodied the thoughts rending the scholastic system; who even was a factor in the palpable decadence of scholastic thinking that had set in before his eyes were closed. For from him came a new impulse to a renewed overstudy of formal logic—with Thomas, for example, logic had but filled its proper rôle. Withdrawing from metaphysics the matter pertaining to the problem of universals and much more besides, Occam transferred the same to logic, which he called omnium artium aptissimum instrumentum.[671] This reinstatement of logic as the instrument and means of all knowledge was to be the perdition of emptier-minded men, who felt no difference between philosophy and the war of words. And in this respect at least the decadence of scholasticism took its inception from this bold and virile mind which had small reverence for popes or for the idols of the schools. We shall not follow the lines of this decay, but simply notice where they start.

In the growth and decline of thought, things so go hand in hand that it is hard to say what draws and what is drawn. In the scholastic decadence, the preposterous use of logic was a palpable element. Yet was it cause or effect? Obviously both. Scholasticism was losing its grasp of life; and the universities in the fourteenth century were crowded with men whose minds mistook words for thoughts; and because of this they gave themselves to hypertrophic logic. On the other hand, this windy study promoted the increasing emptiness of philosophy.

Likewise, as cause and effect, inextricably bound together, the other factors work, and are worked upon. The number of universities increases; professors and students multiply; but there is an awful dearth of thinkers among them. There ceases even to be a thorough knowledge of the scholastic systems; men study from compendia; and thereby remain most deeply ignorant, and unfecundated by the thoughts of their forbears. Cause and effect again! We can hardly blame them, when tomes and encyclopaedias were being heaped mountain high, with life crushed beneath the monstrous pile, or escaping from it. But whether cause or effect, the energies of study slackened, and even rotted, both at the universities and generally among the members of the two Student Orders, from whom had come the last creators—and perhaps destroyers—of scholasticism.

Next: the language of philosophy deteriorated, becoming turbid with the barbarisms of hair-splitting technicalities. Likewise the method of presentation lost coherence and clarity. All of which was the result of academic decadence, and promoted it.

So decay worked on within the system, each failing element being both effect and cause, in a general subsidence of merit. There were also causes, as it were, from without; which possibly were likewise effects of this scholastic decay As the life of the world once had gone out of paganism, and put on the new vigour of Christianity, so the life of the world was now forsaking scholasticism, and deriding, shall we say, the womb it had escaped from. Was the embryo ripe, that the womb had become its mephitic prison? At all events, the fourteenth century brought forth, and the next was filled with, these men who called the readers of Duns Scotus Dunces—and the word still lives. Men had new thoughts; the power of the popes was shattered, and within the Church, popes and councils fought for supremacy; there was no longer any actual unity of the Church to preserve the unity of thought; Wicliffe had risen; Huss and Luther were close to the horizon; a new science of observation was also stirring, and a new humanism was abroad. The life of men had not lessened nor their energies and powers of thought. Yet life and power no longer pulsed and wrought within the old forms; but had gone out from them, and disdainfully were flouting the emptied husks.

CHAPTER XLIII

The causes making the Middle Ages a characterizable period in human history have been scanned. We observed the antecedent influences as they finally took form and temper in the intellectual atmosphere of the latter-day pagan world and the cognate mentalities of the Church Fathers. We followed the pre-Christian Latinizing of Provence, Spain, Gaul, and the diffusion of Christianity throughout the same countries, where, save for sporadic dispossession, Christianity and Latin were to continue, and become, in the course of centuries, mediaeval and Romance. As waves of barbarism washed over the somewhat decadent society of Italy and her Latin daughters, we saw a new ignorance setting a final seal upon the inability of these epigoni to emulate bygone achievements. Plainly there was need of effort to rescue the disjecta membra of the antique and Christian heritages. The wreckers were famous men, young Boëthius, old Cassiodorus, the great pope Gregory, and princely Isidore. For their own people they were gatherers and conservers; but they proved veritable transmitters for Franks, Anglo-Saxons and Germans, who were made acquainted with Christianity and Latinity between the sixth and the ninth centuries, the period in the course of which the Merovingian kingdoms were superseded by the Carolingian Empire.

With the Carolingian period the Middles Ages unquestionably are upon us. The factors and material of mediaeval development, howsoever they have come into conjunction, are found in interplay. It was for the mediaeval peoples, now in presence of their spiritual fortunes, to grow and draw from life. Their task, as has appeared from many points of view, was to master the Christian and antique material, and change its substance into personal faculty. Under different guises this task was for all, whether living in Italy or dwelling where the antique had weaker root or had been newly introduced.

This Carolingian time of so much sheer introduction to the teaching of the past presented little intellectual discrimination. That would come very gradually, when men had mastered their lesson and could set themselves to further study of the parts suited to their taste. Nevertheless, there was even in the Carolingian period another sort of discrimination, towards which men’s consciences were drawn by the contrast between their antique and Christian heritages, and because the latter held a criterion of selection and rejection, touching all the elements of human life.

Whoever reflects upon his life and its compass of thought, of inclination, of passion, action, and capacity for happiness or desolation, is likely to consider how he may best harmonize its elements. He will have to choose and reject; and within him may arise a conflict which he must bring to reconcilement if he will have peace. He may need to sacrifice certain of his impulses or even rational desires. As with a thoughtful individual, so with thoughtful people of an epoch, among whom like standards of discrimination may be found prevailing. The ninth century received, with patristic Christianity, a standard of selection and rejection. In conformity with it, men, century after century, were to make their choice, and try to bring their lives to a discriminating unity and certain peace. Yet in every mediaeval century the soul’s peace was broken in ways demanding other modes of reconcilement.

What profiteth a man to gain the world and lose his eternal life? Here was the Gospel basis of the matter. And, following their conception of Christ’s teaching, the Fathers of the Church elaborated and defined the conditions of attainment of eternal life with God, which was salvation. This was man’s whole good, embracing every valid and righteous element of life. Thus it had been with Christ; thus it was with Augustine; thus it was with Benedict of Nursia and Gregory the Great; only in Benedict and Gregory the salvation which represented the true and uncorrupt life of man on earth, as well as the assured preparation for eternal life with God, had shrunken from the universality of Christ, and even from the fulness of desire with which Augustine sought to know God and the soul. In these later men the conception of salvation had contracted through ascetic exclusion and barbaric fear.

Yet with Benedict and Gregory, in whom there was much constructive sanity, and indeed with all men who were not maniacally constrained, there was recognition that salvation was of the mind as well as through faith and love, or abhorrent fear. It is necessary to know the truth; and surely it is absolutely good to desire to know the truth forever, without the cumbrances of fleshly mortality. This desire is a true part of everlasting life. Through it Origen, Hilary of Poictiers, Augustine largely, and after them the great scholastics with Dante at their close, achieved salvation.

But why should one desire to know the truth utterly and forever, were not the truth desirable, lovable? Naturally one loves that which through desire and effort one has come to know. Love is required and also faith by him who will have and know the salvation which is eternal life; the emotions must take active part. Yet salvation comes not through the unguided sense-desiderative nature. It is for reason to direct passionate desire, and raise it to desire rationally approved, which is volition.

Thus salvation not only requires the action of the whole man, but is in and of his entire nature. It presents a unity primarily because of its agreement with the will of God, and then because of its unqualified and universal insistence that it, salvation, life eternal, be set absolutely first in man’s endeavour. What indeed could be more irrational, and more loveless and faithless, than that any desire should prevail over the entire good of man and the will of God as well? Oneness and peace consist in singleness of purpose and endeavour for salvation. Herein lies the standard of conduct and of discrimination as touching every element of mortal life.

With mediaeval men, the application of the criterion of salvation depended on how the will of God for man, and man’s accordant conduct, was conceived. What kind of conduct, what elements of the intellectual and emotional life were proper for the Kingdom of Heaven? What matters barred the way, or were unfit for the eternal spiritual state? The history of Christian thought lies within these queries. An authoritative consensus of opinion was represented by the Church at large, holding from century to century a juste milieu of doctrine, by no means lax and yet not going to ascetic extremes. Seemingly the Church maintained varying standards of conduct for different orders of men. Yet in truth it was applying one standard according to the responsibilities of individuals and their vows.

The Church (meaning, for our purpose, the authoritative consensus of mediaeval ecclesiastical or religious approvals) always upheld as the ideal of perfect living the religious life, led under the sanction and guidance of some recognized monastic regula. So lived monks and nuns, and in more extreme or sporadic instances, anchorites and reclusae. The main peril of this strait and narrow path was its forsaking, the breaking of its vows. Less austerely guarded and exposed to further dangers were the secular clergy, living in the world, occupied with the care of lay souls, and with other cares that hardly touched salvation. The world avowedly, the flesh in reality, and the devil in all probability, beset the souls of bishops and other clergy. In view of their exposed positions “in the world,” a less austerely ascetic life was expected of the seculars, whose lapses from absolute holiness God might—or perhaps might not—condone.

Around, and for the most part below, regulars and seculars were the laity of both sexes, of all ages, positions, and degrees of instruction or ignorance. They had taken no vows of utter devotion to God’s service, and were expected to marry, beget children, fight and barter, and fend for themselves amid the temptations and exigencies of affairs. Well for them indeed if they could live in communion with the Church, and die repentant and absolved, eligible for purgatory.

For all these kinds of men and women like virtues were prescribed, although their fulfilment was looked for with varying degrees of expectation. For instance, the distinctly theological virtues, faith, hope, and charity, especially the first, could not be completely attained by the ignorance and imperfect consecration of laymen. The vices, likewise, were the same for all, pride, anger, hypocrisy, and the rest; only with married people a venial unchastity was sacramentally declared not to constitute mortal sin. For this one case, human weakness, also mankind’s necessity, was recognized; while, in practice, the Church, through its boundless opportunities for penitence and absolution, mercifully condoned all delinquency save obstinate pride, impenitence, and disbelief.