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           Title: History of Dogma - Volume VI
      Creator(s): Harnack, Adolf (1851-1930)
   CCEL Subjects: All; History; Theology
      LC Call no: BT21.H33 V.6
   LC Subjects:

   Doctrinal theology

   Doctrine and dogma
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                               HISTORY OF DOGMA

    BY

DR. ADOLPH HARNACK

    ORDINARY PROF. OF CHURCH HISTORY IN THE UNIVERSITY, AND FELLOW OF THE ROYAL
    ACADEMY OF SCIENCE, BERLIN

   TRANSLATED FROM THE THIRD GERMAN
   EDITION

    BY

  NEIL BUCHANAN

  VOLUME VI
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TRANSLATOR’S NOTE.

   As at several places in this volume Latin quotations are largely introduced,
   so as to form portions of the text, these have in many cases been simply
   reproduced in English. Where the meaning is less obvious, and the reader
   might desire to be made acquainted with the original, the Latin has been
   inserted within brackets.

CONTENTS.

  PART II.

    DEVELOPMENT OF ECCLESIASTICAL DOGMA.

   BOOK II., Continued.

   Expansion and Remodelling of Dogma into a Doctrine of Sin, Grace, and Means
   of Grace on the basis of the Church.

   Page
   CHAPTER I [1] . — History of Dogma in the Period of Clugny, Anselm, and
   Bernard 1-83
     Introduction 1
   1. Fresh rise of piety 3-15
   Clugny. Renunciation of the world and rule over it. Monastic training of the
   clergy 3
   The Crusades and their consequences for piety 8
   The piety of St. Bernard 10
   Objectionable elements in his Mysticism 12
   2. Development of Ecclesiastical Law 16-23
   Development of the papacy into an autocracy. The Papal Decretals 16
   The new ecclesiastical law more definitely framed. Union of law and Dogma 19
   Jurisprudence as a dominant force 21
   3. Revival of science 23-44
   Essence of Scholasticism 23
   Scholasticism and Mysticism 25
   Preparation in history for mediæval science. Its relation to Greek science.
   The inherited capital 28
   The Carlovingian Era 30
   The period of transition 30
   The Eleventh Century. The prevailing influence of Realism. The question of
   the Universals. The Dialecticians 32
   “Aristotelianism” 36
   The negative and positive significance of the science of Abelard 37
   Disciples and opponents of Abelard. Reconciliation of Dogma with Aristotle
   42
   4. Elaboration of Dogma 45-83
   Introduction 45
   a. The Berengarian Controversy 46
     Doctrine of Transubstantiation as framed after the Controversy 51
   The importance of the Fourth Lateran Council for the doctrines of the
   Eucharist, Baptism, and Repentance 53
   b. Anselm’s doctrine of Satisfaction 54
     Criticism of this doctrine 67
   Its limited measure of influence 78
   Doctrine of the Merit of Christ. Abelard’s doctrine of Reconciliation 79
   Peter Lombard 81
   CHAPTER II.--History of Dogma in the Period of the Mendicant Monks, till the
   beginning of the Sixteenth Century 84-317
     Introduction 84
   1. On the history of piety 85-117
   St. Francis, the Apostolic life, the Franciscan piety (the Waldensians, and
   the “Poor” of Lombardy) 85
   St. Francis and the Church 91
   The doctrine of poverty, the different tendencies, the Fraticelli and the
   Spirituales 94
   Conservative influence of the religious awakening upon Dogma 96
   Mysticism and the Mendicant Orders 97
   Mysticism as Catholic piety 97
   Description of Mysticism, Pantheism, the rise of Individualism 101
   Thomist and Scotist Mysticism 105
   Quickened activity in practical life 108
   The awakening of the laity, free associations, and preachers of repentance
   110
   The stages in the development of piety 111
   Piety in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries; its opposition to the
   Church 113
   Piety, Dogma (unassailed), and the Church; glance forward to the Reformation
   116
   Gothic architecture as the style of building corresponding with mediæval
   piety 117
   2. On the history of Ecclesiastical Law. The doctrine of the Church 118-149
   The supremacy of the papal system; jurisprudence as a commanding influence
   118
   The leading thoughts in the papal system with regard to the Church 119
   The doctrine of the Pope; the new forgeries; infallibility 121
   The Concordats; national churches 126
   The slight share of theology in fixing the hierarchical conception of the
   Church 127
   The negotiations with the Greeks; Thomas’s conception of the Church 130
   The opposition to the hierarchical and papal conception of the Church is to
   be traced to Augustinianism 132
   The conception of the Church held by the opposing parties has a common root
   with the hierarchical, and differs only in its conclusions 134
   Hence the ineffectiveness of its criticism 136
   The opposition of the Waldensians, Apocalyptists, Franciscans, Imperialists,
   and Episcopalists 138
   The conception of the Church held by Wyclif and Huss, and their opposition
   to the hierarchy 141
   Criticism of this movement; Dogma, as strictly understood, remains
   unassailed 146
   Positive significance of the Wyclifite and hierarchical conceptions of the
   Church 147
   3. 3. On the history of ecclesiastical science 149-173
   The causes of the revival of science at the beginning of the thirteenth
   century (Arabs, Jews) 150
   The victory of Aristotle and of the Mendicant Orders. “Qualified” Realism
   151
   Scholasticism at its zenith, its nature, and relation to the Church and to
   reason 153
   The science of St. Thomas 157
   The “Summa” of St. Thomas 157
   Transition to Duns Scotus 160
   New stress laid upon reason and authority, Nominalism 161
   Probabilism, Casuistry, and fides implicita 162
   Elimination of Augustinianism 166
   Augustinian reaction in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Bradwardine,
   Wyclif, Huss, Wesel, Wessel 169
   Decline of Nominalism, the re-discovered Plato, the Renaissance 170
   4. The Moulding of Dogma in Scholasticism 174-317
   The pre-suppositions of the thirteenth century Scholasticism 174
   The finis theologiæ (the idea of salvation) and its main elements 174
   The old articuli fidei and the doctrine of transubstantiation 176
   The threefold task which Scholasticism carried out with regard to Dogma;
   strained relation with piety 176
   a. Revision of the traditional articuli fidei 178
   (1) The doctrine of God 178
   (2) The doctrine of the Trinity 182
   (3) The doctrines of creation, preservation, and government 184
   (4) The doctrine of the person of Christ (of the Holy Ghost) 187
   The doctrine of the work of Christ (satisfaction and merit) 190
   The doctrine of Thomas 191
   Of Duns Scotus 196
   Disintegration and reaction 198
   b. The Scholastic doctrine of the Sacraments 200
   Significance and principle 200
   Number of the Sacraments 201
   Definition (Hugo and the Lombard) 204
   Their nature, relation of grace to Sacrament 206
   Questions in detail 209
   The Thomist doctrine of the Sacraments 201
   (The Sacraments in their operation, their character 210
   Definition, materia, forma, etc. 212
   Necessity 213
   Effect 214
   Cause) 217
   The administrator of the Sacrament (minister sacramenti) 217
   Conditions of saving reception, disposition 220
   Attritio 225
   Peculiarities of the Scotist doctrine of the Sacraments 226
   The Sacraments singly. Baptism 227
   Confirmation 230
   The Eucharist 232
   Sacrament of Penance 243
   (Sorrow 248
   Confession 251
   Absolution 255
   Satisfaction 257
   Indulgence 259
   Opposition to indulgences; Wyclif, Huss, Wesel, Wessel) 267
   Extreme unction 269
   Ordination to the priesthood 270
   Sacrament of Marriage 272
   Transition to the doctrine of grace 275
   c. Revision of Augustinianism in the direction of the doctrine of merit 275
   The Lombard on grace, freedom, and merit 276
   Thomas. Elements of principle in the Scholastic doctrine of grace, the
   conception of God, grace as participation in the divine nature, merit 279
   Thomas’s doctrine of grace (lumen superadditum naturæ, gratia operans et
   cooperans, præveniens et subsequens), essence of grace, disposition for
   grace, its effects, forgiveness of sins, love, merits de condigno et de
   congruo 281
   Historic estimate of the Thomist doctrine of grace, connection with
   Augustine (doctrine of predestination) and Aristotle 295
   Thomas on the primitive state, original righteousness (justitia originalis),
   the Fall, Sin 297
   Evangelical counsels (consilia evangelica) 298
   The Thomist doctrine of sin and grace faces in two directions 300
   The later Scotistic Scholasticism: its doctrines of sin and grace 301
   Its doctrines of justification and merit (Bradwardine’s reaction) 308
   Supplement: The doctrines of the immaculate conception of Mary, and of her
   co-operation in the work of redemption 312
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   [1] The two chapters which make up this volume answer to Chapters VII. and
   VIII. of Part II., Book II., in the Original German Edition.
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CHAPTER I.

  HISTORY OF DOGMA IN THE PERIOD OF CLUGNY, ANSELM, AND BERNARD, TILL THE CLOSE
  OF THE TWELFTH CENTURY.

   A tenaciously maintained tradition relates that in the closing years of the
   tenth century the Christians of the West looked forward with fear and
   trembling to the destruction of the world in the year 1000, and that a kind
   of reformation, expressing itself in the keenest activity in all branches of
   religion, was the consequence of this expectation. This representation has
   long since been proved a legend; [2] but there lies at the basis of it, as
   is the case with so many legends, an accurate historic observation. From the
   end of the tenth century [3] we really discern the beginnings of a powerful
   rise of religious and ecclesiastical life. This revival grew in strength,
   suffering from no reaction of any consequence, till the beginning of the
   thirteenth century. During this period it released, and took command of all
   the forces of mediæval manhood. All institutions of the past, and all the
   new elements of culture that had been added were subjected to its influence,
   and even the most hostile powers were ultimately made to yield it service
   and support. In the thirteenth century the supremacy of the Church and the
   system of the mediæval view of the world appear in perfected form. [4]

   This perfecting is the conclusion, not only of Mediæval Church history, but
   also of that historical development of Christianity, the beginnings of which
   lie as far back as the history of the primitive Church. Certainly, if
   Christianity is regarded only as doctrine, the Middle Ages appear almost as
   a supplement to the history of the ancient Church; but if it is regarded as
   life, our judgment must be that it was only in the Western Church of the
   Middle Ages that the Christianity of the early Church came to its
   completion. In ancient times the Church was confronted with restrictions in
   the motives, standards, and ideas of ancient life. These restrictions it was
   never able to break through, and so it continued to be with the Church of
   the Eastern Empire: Monachism stood alongside the Church; the Church of the
   world was the old world itself with Christian manners. It was otherwise in
   the West. Here the Church was able to apply much more effectively its
   peculiar standards of monastic asceticism and domination of this world by
   the world beyond, [5] because it had not to subdue an ancient civilisation,
   but met with its restrictions simply in the most elementary forces of human
   life, in the desire to live, hunger, love and cupidity. It was thus able to
   propagate here through all circles, from the highest to the lowest, a view
   of the world which would inevitably have driven all into the cloisters, had
   not these elementary forces been stronger than even the fear of hell.

   It is not the task of the History of Dogma to show how the mediæval view of
   the world was fully constructed and applied from the end of the tenth (for
   here the beginnings lie) till the thirteenth century. Substantially not much
   that is new would be discovered, for it is still the old well-known body of
   thought; what is new is merely the application of the material to all
   provinces of life, the comprehensive control in the hands of the Pope, and
   the gradual progressive development in its prior stages of religious
   individualism. But before we describe the changes, partly really, and partly
   apparently slight, which dogma underwent down to the time of the Mendicant
   Orders, it is necessary to indicate in a few lines the conditions under
   which these changes came about. We must direct our attention to the fresh
   rise of piety, to the development of ecclesiastical law, and to the
   beginnings of mediæval science.
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   1. The Fresh Rise of Piety.

   The Monastery of Clugny, founded in the tenth century, became the centre of
   the great reform which the Church in the West passed through in the eleventh
   century. [6] Instituted by monks, it was at first supported against the
   secularised monachism, priesthood (Episcopate), [7] and papacy by pious and
   prudent princes and bishops, above all, by the Emperor, the representative
   of God on earth, until the great Hildebrand laid hold of it, and, as
   Cardinal and successor of Peter, set it in opposition to the princes, the
   secularised clergy, and the Emperor. What the West obtained in it was a
   monastic reform of the Church, that rested on the idea of a view of the
   world that made everything alike, and that consequently favoured the
   universal supremacy of Rome over the Church. What were the aims of this new
   movement which took hold of the entire Church in the second half of the
   eleventh century? In the first instance, and chiefly, the restoration in the
   monasteries themselves of the “old” discipline, of the true abnegation of
   the world, and piety; but then, also, first, the monastic training of the
   whole secular clergy, second, the supremacy of the monastically trained
   clergy over the lay world, over princes and nations; third, the reduction of
   national churches, with their pride and secularity, in favour of the uniform
   supremacy of Rome. [8]

   The attempt to control the life of the whole clergy by monastic rules had
   already begun in the Carlovingian period; but in part it had failed, in part
   the Chapters had only become thoroughly secularised. Now, however, it was
   undertaken anew and with greater efficiency. In the Cluniacensian reform
   Western monachism raised for the first time the decided claim to apply, and
   find recognition for, itself as the Christian order of life for all
   Christians of full age — the priests. This Western monachism could not
   withdraw from the. task of serving the Church and urging itself upon it,
   i.e., upon the clergy of the day, as Christianity. The Christian freedom
   which it strove for was for it, with all wavering, not only a freedom from
   the world, but the freedom of Christendom for unrestricted preparation for
   the life beyond, and for the service of God in this world. But no man can
   serve two masters.

   Herewith there was given also its relation to the laity, with the position
   of the latter. If the mature confessors of Christianity must be trained
   according to monastic rules, then the immature — and these are the laity —
   must leave an entirely free course to the former, and must at least pay
   respect to their majesty, that it may be possible to stand approved in the
   coming judgment. If Clugny and its great Popes required the strict
   observance of celibacy, the estrangement of the priests from secular life,
   and especially the extirpation of all “simony,” then this last demand of
   itself involved, under the then existing distribution of power and property,
   the subjection of the laity, inclusive of the civil power, to the Church.
   But what was the Church’s dominion over the world to mean, side by side with
   the renunciation of the world exacted of all priests? How does that power
   over the earth harmonise with exclusive concern for the soul’s salvation in
   the world beyond? How can the same man who exclaims to his brother who
   thinks of leaving him all the patrimonial property, “What an unjust
   division, — for thee, heaven, and for me, the earth,” and who then himself
   enters a monastery — how can this same man bring himself to contend from
   within the monastery for dominion over the world? Now in a certain sense
   this dominion is something substitutionary, so long as and because the true,
   universal Christianising has not been carried out. As long as all are not
   genuine Christians, the obstinate world and the half-developed Christendom
   must be governed and educated, for otherwise the gospel would be captured by
   the powers hostile to it, and would not be in the position to fulfil its
   mission. But the dominion is certainly not merely something substitutionary.
   Christianity is asceticism and the City of God. All earthly relations must
   be moulded by the transcendent and universal idea of God’s kingdom, and all
   national political forms of life must be brought under control in accordance
   therewith. But the kingdom of God has its existence on this side of things
   in the Church. The States, therefore, must become subject to the divine ends
   of the Church; they must merge themselves in the kingdom of righteousness
   and of the victorious Christ, which is a truly heavenly kingdom, because it
   has its source in heaven, and is ruled by Christ’s representative. Thus out
   of the programme of renunciation of the world and out of the supra-mundane
   world that was to permeate this world, out of the Augustinian idea of the
   city of God and out of the idea of the one Roman world-empire, an idea that
   had never disappeared, but that had reached its glorification in the papal
   supremacy, there developed itself the claim to world-dominion, though the
   ruin of many an individual monk might be involved in making it. With sullied
   consciences and broken courage many monks, whose only desire was to seek
   after God, yielded to the plans of the great monastic Popes, and became
   subservient to their aims. And those whom they summoned from the retirement
   of the cloisters were just those who wished to think least of the world.
   They knew very well that it was only the monk who fled from the world, and
   would be rid of it, that could give help in subduing the world. Abandonment
   of the world in the service of the world-ruling Church, dominion over the
   world in the service of renunciation of the world, — this was the problem,
   and the ideal of the Middle Ages! What an innocent simplicity, what a wealth
   of illusions, was involved in believing that this ideal could be realised,
   and in working for it! What a childlike reverence for the Church was
   necessary for developing that paradoxical flight from the world,” which at
   one and the same moment could join the fight and pray, utter cursing and
   blessing, exercise dominion and do penance! What a spirit of romance filled
   those souls, which at a single view could see in nature and all sensuous
   life an enchantment of the devil, and could behold in it at the same time,
   as illumined by the Church, the reflection of the world beyond What kind of
   men were they, who abandoned the world and gladsome life, and then took back
   from the hand of the Church the good things of earth, love-making, combat
   and victory, speculating and money-making, feasting, and the joys of sense!
   Of course, with a slight turn of the kaleidoscope, all these things were in
   ruins; there must be fasting and repentance; but again a slight turn, and
   everything was back again which the world could afford — but glorified with
   the light of the Church and of the world beyond.

   At the close of this period (about 1200) the Church was victorious. If ever
   ideals were carried out in the world and gained dominion over souls it
   happened then. “It was as if the world had cast aside its old garment and
   clothed itself in the white robe of the Church.” [9] Negation of the world
   and rule of the world by the Church appeared to men identical. That age bore
   in its culture “the pained look of world-renunciation on the one hand, and
   the look of strong character suggesting world-conquest on the other.” [10]
   But in the period we are reviewing the development, which had to cancel
   itself when it seemed to have come near its completion, was still in
   process. Much was still to be done in the way of excavating secularised
   Christendom from its rough surroundings. And the masses were really changed
   in temper and set on fire — set on fire to contend against

   the secularised clergy and against simonistic princes in the whole of
   Europe. A new enthusiasm of a religious kind stirred the nations of the
   West, especially the Romanic. The ardour of the Crusades was the direct
   fruit of the monastic papal reform movement of the eleventh century. In them
   most vividly the religious revival which had passed over the West revealed
   itself in its specific character. The supremacy of the Church must be given
   effect to on earth. It was the ideas of the world-ruling monk of Clugny that
   guided the Crusaders on their path. The Holy Land and Jerusalem were parts
   of heaven on earth. They must be conquered. The dreadful and affecting
   scenes at the taking of the sacred city illustrate the spirit of mediæval
   piety.

   Christianity is ascetism and the City of God — but the Church, which really
   fired souls for these ideas, lit also thereby the flame of religious
   individualism; it awakened the power which was ultimately strong enough to
   burst through the strict bonds of system and sever the chain. But it was
   long before things went so far as this. The Cluniacensian reform, if I see
   aright, produced as yet no religious individualism at all, in the sense of
   manifold expressions of piety. The enthusiastic religious spirit of the
   eleventh century was quite of the same kind in individual cases. Among the
   numerous founders of orders during this period, there still prevailed the
   greatest uniformity: spiritual need, flight from the world, contemplation
   — all of them are expressed in similar forms and by the same means. [11] An
   appeal must not be made to the Sectaries, already numerous in this century;
   they stood in scarcely any connection with the ecclesiastical revival, and
   had as yet no influence upon it. [12]

   Through the Crusades this became changed. The primitive Christian intuitions
   were restored. The sacred places stirred the imagination, and led it to the
   Christ of the Gospels. Piety was quickened by the most vivid view of the
   suffering and dying Redeemer; He must be followed through all the stages of
   His path of sorrow! Negative asceticism thus obtained a positive form, and a
   new and more certain aim. The notes of the Christ-Mysticism, which Augustine
   had struck only singly and with uncertainty, [13] became a ravishing melody.
   Beside the sacramental Christ the image of the historical took its place
   [14] — majesty in humility, innocence in penal suffering, life in death.
   That dialectic of piety without dialectic, that combined spectacle of
   suffering and of glory, that living picture of the true communicatio
   idiomatum (communication of attributes) developed itself, before which
   mankind stood worshipping, adoring with equal reverence the sublimity and
   the abasement. The sensuous and the spiritual, the earthly and the heavenly,
   shame and honour, renunciation and fulness of life were no longer
   tumultuously intermingled: they were united in serene majesty in the “Ecce
   homo.” And so this piety broke forth into the solemn hymn: “Salve caput
   cruentatum” (“O Lamb of God once wounded”). We cannot measure the effects
   which this newly-tempered piety produced, nor can we calculate the manifold
   types it assumed, and the multitude of images it drew within its range. We
   need only recall the picture — new, and certainly only derived from the
   cross — of the mother and child, the God in the cradle, omnipotence in
   weakness. Where this piety appears without dogmatic formule, without
   fancifulness, without subtlety, or studied calculation, it is the simple
   expression, now brought back again, of the Christian religion itself; for in
   reverence for the suffering Christ, and in the power which proceeds from His
   image, all the forces of religion are embraced. But even where it does not
   appear in its purity, where there is intermingled with it the trivial — down
   even to the heart-of-Jesus-worship [15] — the over-refined and studied, it
   can still be salutary and worthy of honour, more salutary and worthy of
   honour, at least, than the strivings of a purely negative asceticism
   governed by no living conception. Even, indeed, where it manifestly
   degenerates into paganism, there will still remain some remnant of that
   liberating message, that the divine is to be found in humility and in
   patient suffering, and that the innocent suffers that the guilty may have
   peace.

   In the period under review, this newly attuned piety, born of the Crusades,
   and nurtured on Augustine as now understood, was still in process of growth.
   But we have already alluded to the man who stood at the beginning, though he
   was himself no initiator, Saint Bernard. [16] Bernard is the religious
   genius of the twelfth century, and therefore also the leading spirit of the
   age. Above all, in him the Augustinian contemplation was revived. Too much
   is not asserted when it is said that he was Augustinus redivivus, that he
   moulded himself entirely on the pattern of the great African, [17] and that
   from him what lay at the foundation of his pious contemplations was derived.
   So far as Bernard furnishes a system of contemplation, and describes the
   development of love, [18] on to its fourth and highest stage, at which man,
   rising above self-love, is wholly absorbed in the love of God, and
   experiences that momentary ecstasy in which he becomes one with God — so far
   Bernard has simply experienced anew what Augustine experienced before him.
   Even his language indeed is to a very large extent dependent on the language
   of the Confessions. [19] But Bernard has also learned his relation to Jesus
   Christ from the great leader. Like the latter [20] he writes: “Dry is all
   food of the soul if it is not sprinkled with the oil of Christ. When thou
   writest, promise me nothing, unless I read Jesus in it. When thou conversest
   with me on religious themes, promise me nothing if I hear not Jesus’ voice.
   Jesus — honey to the taste, melody to the ear, gladness to the soul.” [21]
   But here Bernard has taken a step beyond Augustine. “Reverence for what is
   beneath us” dawned upon him, as it had never dawned upon any Christian of
   the older world (not even upon Augustine); for these earlier Christians,
   while revering asceticism as the means of escape from the body, still, as
   men of the ancient world, were unable to see in suffering and shame, in the
   cross and death, the form of the divine. The study of the Song of Songs
   (under the direction of Ambrose), and the spirit enkindled by the Crusades,
   led him before the image of the crucified Saviour as the bridegoom of the
   soul. In this picture he became absorbed. From the features of the suffering
   Christ there shone forth upon him truth and love. In a literal sense He
   hangs on His lips and gazes on His limbs: “My beloved, saith the Spouse, is
   white and ruddy: in this we see both the white light of truth and the ruddy
   glow of love” (in hoc nobis et candet veritas et rubet caritas), says
   Gilbert in the spirit of Bernard. [22] The basis for this
   Christ-contemplation — the wounds of Christ as the clearest token of His
   love — was laid by Ambrose and Augustine (Christ, mediator as man), and the
   image of the soul’s bridegroom goes back to Origen and Valentinus (cf. also
   Ignatius); but Bernard was the first to give to the pious spirit its
   historic Christian intuitions; he united the Neoplatonic self-discipline for
   rising to God with contemplation of the suffering and dying Redeemer, and
   released the subjectivity of the Christ-Mysticism and the Christ-Lyricism.
   [23]

   But in spite of all quickening of the imagination, and in spite of his most
   ardent devotion to the person of Christ, even Bernard was obliged to pay the
   heavy tribute that is exacted of every mystic, — the mood of abandonment
   after the blessed feeling of union, and the exchange of the historic Christ
   for the dissolving picture of the ideal. With him the latter is specially
   remarkable. It might have been expected that for one who became so absorbed
   in the picture of the suffering Christ, it would have been impossible to
   repeat the direction given by Origen and Augustine, that we must rise from
   the word of scripture, and from the Incarnate Word, to the “Spirit.” And yet
   this final and most questionable direction of mysticism, which nullifies
   historical Christianity and leads on to pantheism, was most distinctly
   repeated by Bernard. No doubt what he has written in ep. 106, on the
   uselessness of the study of Scripture, as compared with practical devotion
   to Christ, [24] may still be interpreted in the light of the thought, that
   Christianity must be experienced, not known. But there is no ambiguity in
   the ex-positions in the twentieth sermon on the Song of Songs. Here the love
   to Christ that is stirred by what Christ did or offered in the flesh is
   described as still to some extent fleshly. It is no doubt a valuable
   circumstance that Bernard does not regard the distress and anguish awakened
   by the picture of the man Jesus as the highest thing, that he rather sees in
   it a portion of the fleshly love. But he then goes on to say, that in true
   spiritual love we must rise altogether from the picture of the historic
   Christ to the Christ kata pneuma (after the spirit), and for this he appeals
   to John VI. and 2 Cor. V. 16. All the mysticism of after times retained this
   feature. It learned from Bernard the Christ-contemplation; [25] but, at the
   same time, it adopted the pantheistic tendency of the Neoplatonists and
   Augustine. [26] In the second half of the twelfth century the new piety was
   already a powerful force in the Church. [27] The subjectivity of pious
   feeling was unfettered in the monasteries. [28] But as the same man who, in
   the seclusion of his monastery, spoke a new language of adoration, preached
   flight from the world, and called to the Pope that he sat in Peter’s chair
   to serve and not to rule — as this man at the same time continued fettered
   by all the hierarchical prejudices of his age, and himself guided the policy
   of the world-ruling Church, even the pious in the Church in the twelfth
   century had not yet felt the contrast between Church and Christianity. The
   attachment of monachism to the Church was still of a naive kind; the
   contradiction between the actual form of the world-ruling Church and the
   gospel which it preached was felt, indeed, but always suppressed again. [29]
   That great mendicant monk had not yet come on the scene whose appearing was
   to work the crisis in the fluctuating struggle between renunciation of the
   world and lordship over it. But already the Church was beset all around by
   the wrathful curses of the “heretics,” who saw in the Church’s powerful
   exercise of her dominion and in the alienation of her gifts of grace the
   features of the ancient Babylon.
     _________________________________________________________________

   [6] The following partly corresponds with my Lecture on Monachism (3rd ed.
   1886, p. 43 ff.). Two sources appear in the tenth century from which the
   religious awakening proceeded, the Monastery of Clugny, and the Saxon
   dynasty. We cannot attach too much importance to the influence of Matilda
   (cf. in general the Essay by Lamprecht, Das deutsche Geistesleben unter den
   Ottonen in the deutsche Zeitschrift f. Geschichtswissensch. Vol. VII., part
   1, p. i. ff.). It extended to Henry II., and even, indeed, to the third
   Henry; v. Nitzsch, Gesch. des deutschen Volkes I., p. 318 f. For the history
   of the world the ecclesiastical sympathies of the dynasty, and the spirit of
   ascetic piety that emanated from the saintly devotee in the Quedlinburg
   Convent were of as great importance as the reformed monachism of Clugny. The
   history of mediæval Germanic piety may be said to have begun with Matilda.
   Charlemagne is still in many respects a Christian of the type of Constantius
   and Theodosius.

   [7] From Hauck (K.-Gesch. Deutschlands III., p. 342 ff.) and the work of
   Sackur, Die Cluniacenser in ihrer Kirchl. und allgemeingesch. Wirksamkeit
   bis zur Mitte des 11. Jahrh. (2 vols., 1892-1894) we learn that the reform
   of Clugny had for centuries to contend with the same difficulties against
   the secularised Church and the secularised, but also more independent
   monachism (see also Hauck, “Zur Erklärung von Ekkeh. Cas. s. Galli “ c. 87
   in the Festschrift f. Luthardt, p. 107 ff.) as had the old monachism
   formerly on its introduction about 400 into Gaul and Spain (and as had the
   Minorites at a later time). It is instructive to notice the attitude of the
   laity in connection with these three great reforms of the Church. Towards
   the first they were substantially indifferent, in the second they took a
   share from the outset (against the secularised clergy), the third (the
   Minorite) was simply carried out by them.

   [8] Sackur (II., p. 464 f.) characterises this French monastic reform thus:
   “The movement of Clugny did not start with announcing a programme: it was
   the product of a view of the world. It had no other aim than to oppose the
   coarse materialism of those days by reviving those institutions that
   admitted of an existence in sympathy with evangelical injunctions, even in
   the midst of a barbarised society. It was a formation of autonomous
   associations, such as usually arise in disorganised States under a weak
   central government, and serve to supplement by self-help the great social
   unions of, e.g., State and Church. From this there resulted the design of
   influencing from these institutions those around, and winning them for
   religion. The restored monasteries increased in number, the task became
   always greater; but it became in no way different. The winning of souls was,
   and continued to be, the real end. Connections became extended; we have seen
   how ready the princes were to support the efforts of the monks. Very soon
   every family of mark had its family monastery. . . . Monachism found its way
   to the courts . . . by means of a conspicuous social activity monachism
   gained hold of the masses. . . . Not a few bishops, especially in the South,
   were carried away by the current, friends of the movement came to occupy the
   Episcopal Sees. What followed was a spiritual transformation (but no
   transformation of any consequence of a literary and scientific kind. See
   what Sackur has stated, II., p. 327 ff.), giving pain to those who had
   previously built their house out of the ruins of the Carlovingian order of
   society, giving annoyance especially to a part of the Episcopate. . . . With
   this the opposition also was given. The ascetic Romanic movement issuing
   from the South mastered in the end the French North, captured the new
   Capetian dynasty, and here found itself confronted with an Episcopate which
   defended itself, in some cases, with desperation, against the assaults of a
   monachism that set out from the idea of a view of the world that made all
   things alike, from the thought of the universal Romanism, and that had no
   understanding for the independent pride of national churches. . . . The
   strict organisation of the German Imperial Church, its close union with the
   monarchy, the morality of the clergy (of a higher character as compared with
   the West-Frankian Church), still kept back the movement (at first) from the
   borders of Germany. It was only the process of ecclesiastical and civil
   dissolution, which began tinder Henry IV., that opened the breaches through
   which the monastic Romanic spirit could penetrate into the organism of the
   German State.” — On Clugny and Rome, see Sackur II., p. 441 ff.

   [9] The Cluniacensian monk, Rudolph Glaber, Hist. lib. III., 4.

   [10] v. Eicken, l.c., p. 155 f. If the early Church had had this latter
   characteristic expressed in its piety, it would inevitably have developed
   into Islam, or rather would have been crushed by the Roman world-empire. But
   the Mediæval Church from its origin (period of the migration of the nations)
   had absorbed into itself the Roman world-empire as an idea and as a force,
   and stood face to face with uncivilised nations; hence its aggressive
   character, which, moreover, it only developed after Charlemagne had shown it
   how the vicarius Christi on earth must rule. Nicolas I. learned from Charles
   I., the Gregorian popes from Otto I., Henry II., and Henry III., how the
   rector ecclesiæ must administer his office.

   [11] See Neander, K.-Gesch. V., 1, pp. 449-564.

   [12] Their doctrines were imported from the East — from Bulgaria; that old
   remnants of sects survived in the West itself (Priscillians) is not
   impossible. But spontaneous developments also must be recognised, such as
   have arisen in all ages of the Church’s history, from reading Scripture and
   the Fathers, and from old reminiscences. In the twelfth century, heresy
   became an organised power, frightfully dangerous to the Church, in some
   regions — indeed, superior to it; see Reuter I., p. 153 f., and Döllinger’s
   work, Beiträge zur Sectengesch. des Mittelalters, 2 Thl., München 1890, in
   which the Paulicians, Bogomili, Apostolic Brethren and Catharists are
   described.

   [13] See Vol. V., p. 124 f.

   [14] Bernh., Sermo LXII. 7, in cant. cantic: “quid enim tam efficax ad
   curanda conscientise vulnera nec non ad purgandam mentis aciem quam Christi
   vulnerum sedula meditatio?”

   [15] This certainly is also very old, and that, too, in had forms; it is not
   otherwise with the limb-worship of Mary. In the Vitt. Fratrum of Gerard de
   Frachet (about 1260), published in the Monum. Ord. Fratr. Prædic. Hist. I.
   (Louvain, 1896) the following is related of a brother: “Consueverat venerari
   beatam virginem, cor ejus, quo in Christum credidit et ipsum amavit, uterum,
   quo eum portavit, ubera, quibus eum lactavit, manus ejus tornatiles, quibus
   ei servivit, et pectus ejus, in quo recubuit, virtutum omnium apothecam
   specialiter venerans, ad singula faciens frequenter singulas venias cum
   totidem Ave Maria, adaptando illi virtutes, quibus meruit fled mater dei,”
   etc.

   [16] See the Monograph by Neander, new edit. (edited by Deutsch, 1889);
   Hüffer, Der hl. Bernard von Clairvaux, vol. I., 1886.

   [17] This is true to a much greater extent than Neander has shown.

   [18] Caritas and humilitas are the fundamental conceptions in Bernard’s
   Ethics.

   [19] v. the Treatise De diligendo deo.

   [20] v. the numerous passages in the Confessions.

   [21] Jesus mel in ore, in aure melos, in corde jubilus. In cantic. cantic.
   XV. 6.

   [22] How the cross of Christ is for Bernard the sum and substance of all
   reflection and all wisdom, see Sermo XLIII.; on loftiness in abasement see
   XXVIII. and XLII.; de osculo pedis, manus et oris domini III.; de triplici
   profectu animæ, qui fit per osculum pedis, manus et oris domini IV.; de
   spiritu, qui est deus, et quomodo misericordia et judicium dicantur pedes
   domini VI.; de uberibus sponsi, i.e., Christi IX.; de duplice humilitate,
   una vid. quam parit veritas et altera quam inflammat caritas XLII., etc.
   etc.

   [23] See the Poems of Bernard and the 86 Sermons on the Song of Songs, which
   determined the character of the piety of the following generations. These
   sermons became the source of the Catholic Christ-mysticism. Ritschl,
   however, (Lesefrüchte aus dem hl. Bernhard, Stud. u. Krit. 1879, pp.
   317-335) has noted (see Neander, 1.c. p. 116), that in these sermons true
   evangelical thoughts also find expression. “The cause of that I was
   constrained to see in this, that the preacher did not handle his doctrinal
   material in the historical order which dogmatic theology adheres to among
   both Catholics and Evangelicals — an order according to which the doctrines
   treated first are dealt with without regard to those that follow. We can see
   rather, without difficulty, that the preacher uses the points of doctrine as
   they present themselves in the practical circle of vision.” Ritschl points
   to the following passages (see also Wolff, Die Entw. d. einen christl. K.
   1889, p. 165 ff.): Sermo LXIX. 3 (the gravity of original sin: the degree of
   injury is determined by regeneration); Sermo LXXII. 8 (significance of
   death: among the redeemed “propter quos omnia fiunt,” it must be regarded as
   an expression, not of God’s wrath, but of His mercy, as the act of
   redemption from the conflict between the law in the members and the
   sanctified will); Sermo XXII. 7-11 (righteousness by faith; it is not
   equivalent to power given for good works, but “unde vera justitia nisi de
   Christi misericordia? . . .soli justi qui de ejus misericordia veniam
   peccatorum consecuti sunt . . .quia non modo justus sed et beatus, cui non
   imputabit deus peccatum”); Sermo XX. 2; XI. 3; VI. 3 (redemptive work of
   Christ: the work of love [“non in omni mundi fabrica tantum fatigationis
   auctor assumpsit”], of which the modus is the exinanitio of God, its fruit
   nostri de illo repletio, and which is divine, because Christ here kept in
   view the way of acting which is God’s way, who makes His sun to rise on the
   evil and the good. The communicatio idiomatum is not understood here in the
   Greek sense, but is exhibited in the motives of Christ; VI. 3: “dum in carne
   et per carnem facit opera, non carnis sed dei . . .manifeste ipsum se esse
   judicat, per quem eadem et ante fiebant, quando fiebant. In carne, inquam,
   et per carnem potenter et patienter operatus mira, locutus salubria, passus
   indigna evidentur ostendit, quia ipse sit, qui potenter sed invisibiliter
   sæcula condidisset, sapienter regeret, benigne protegeret. Denique dum
   evangelizat ingratis, signa præbet infidelibus, pro suis crucifixoribus
   orat, nonne liquido ipsum se esse declarat, qui cum patre suo quotidie oriri
   facit solem super bonos et malos, pluit super justos et injustos?” ): Sermo
   XXI. 6, 7; LXXXV. 5 (the restored image of God in man); Sermo LXVIII. 4;
   LXXI. 11 (the founding of the Church as the aim of redemption); LXXVIII. 3
   (Church and predestination); Sermo VIII. 2, XII. 11, XLVI. 4, LI. 5
   (conception and marks of the historic Church, where the rigidly juristic
   view is quite absent: in XII. 11, it is said that no individual may declare
   himself the bride of Christ; the members of the Church only share in the
   honour which belongs to the Church as bride). Cf. also Ritschl, Gesch. des
   Pietismus I., p. 46 ff., and Rechtfert. u. Versöhn, I.2 p. 109 ff., where it
   is shown how for Bernard the thought of grace controls everything.

   [24] “Why dost thou seek in the Word for the Word that already stands before
   thine eyes as Incarnate? Iie that hath ears to hear, let him hear Him crying
   in the temple, If any man thirst, let him come unto me and drink. . . . O,
   if thou only once tastedst of the rich marrow of the grain with which the
   heavenly Jerusalem is satisfied, how willingly wouldst thou leave the Jewish
   scribes to gnaw at their bread-crusts. . . . Experto crede, aliquid amplius
   invenies in silvis, quam in libris. Ligna et lapides docebunt, quod a
   magistris audire non possis.”

   [25] Bernard was reverenced as an apostle and prophet “among all nations of
   Gaul and Germany.” The lament of Odo of Morimond (see Hüffer, l.c. p. 21
   ff.) is very touching, and proves at the same time the incomparable
   influence of his personality. Since Augustine, no such man had been given to
   the Church. “Vivit Bernardus et nardus ejus dedit odorem suum etiam in
   morte.” “His life is hid with Christ in God,” with this the disciple
   comforted himself at the grave. “Verba ejus spiritus et vita erant.” The
   recollection of the days when Bernard wandered as a preacher of the cross
   through the districts of Germany long survived; for the Germans had never
   heard such a preacher. See the Historia miraculorum in itinere Germanico
   patratorum in Migne CLXXXV.; Hüffer, p. 70 ff. (who certainly is remarkably
   credulous). The correspondence of Bernard stands alone in the twelfth
   century as regards importance and extent. Almost 500 letters by himself are
   extant.

   [26] The “excedere et cum Christo esse” (S. LXXXV.) was understood even by
   Bernard as meaning, that the soul loses itself, and in the embraces of the
   bridegroom ceases to be a proper ego. But where the soul is merged in the
   Godhead, the Godhead becomes resolved into the All-One.

   [27] Follow Christ became the watchword; it broke through the restrictions
   which dogmatic had drawn, and turned to the Lord Himself. For all relations
   of life, the suffering, humble, and patient Saviour was presented as an
   example. What a quickening was the result! But from this point it was
   possible that a familiarity of feeling should develop itself, which
   conflicts with reverence for the Redeemer, and because the value of Christ
   was seen, in a one-sided way, in His example, other sides necessarily
   suffered neglect. With Bernard that was not yet the case; but already in him
   it is astonishing how the Greek dogmatic scheme of Christology had to give
   place in praxi to a scheme quite different. After he has shown in the 16th
   sermon that the rapid spread of Christianity was due simply to the preaching
   of the person of Jesus, that the image of Jesus had assuaged wrath, humbled
   pride, healed the wounds of envy, checked luxury, quenched lust, bridled
   avarice, and, in short, had driven out all the lower passions of men, he
   continues: Siquidem cum nomino Jesum, hominem mihi propono mitem et humilem
   corde, benignum, sobrium, castum, misericordem et omni denique honestate et
   sanctitate conspicuum eundemque ipsum deum omnipotentem, qui suo me et
   exemplo sanet et roboret adjutorio. Hæc omnia simul mihi sonant, cum
   insonuerit Jesus. Sumo itaque mihi exempla de homine et auxilium de
   potente.” Thus did one write, while in theory rejecting Adoptianism! This
   Bemardine Christology, of which the roots lie in Augustine, requires no
   two-nature doctrine; it excludes it. It is fully represented by the formula
   that Jesus is the sinless man, approved by suffering, to whom the divine
   grace by which He lives has lent such power that His image takes shape in
   other men, i.e., incites to counter love and imparts humility. Caritas and
   humilitas were practical Christianity, till St. Francis gave as much
   vividness of form to the latter in his demand for poverty as was to be
   exhibited by love in imitation of Christ in His course of suffering. All the
   ascetic treatises of the period speak of humility; see Petrus Comestor,
   Hist. evang. c. 133: “est debita humilitas subdere se majori propter deum,
   abundans (humilitas) subdere se pari, superabundans subdere se minori.” Note
   the distinction also, so important subsequently in the doctrine of the merit
   of Christ, between debita, abundans, and superabundans.

   [28] It counterbalanced the legal righteousness and “meritoriousness” that
   lay close at hand from other sides. Ritschl remarks very correctly (Rechtf.
   und Versöhn. I.2, p. 117): “It is an erroneous view that the Latin
   Catholicism of the Middle Ages was summed up in the cultivation of legal
   righteousness and meritoriousness.” It has as its correlate the mysticism
   that sacrifices the personal ego, to which at one time a
   theologico-acosmistic, at another time a christologico-lyrical character is
   given. But the simple trust in God, who reveals His grace in Christ, with
   the confession: “Sufficit mihi ad omnem justitiam solum habere propitium,
   cui soli peccavi” (Bernh. serm. in cant. xxiii. 15), was certainly not
   wanting in individual cases. Here and there, but above all in view of death,
   it triumphed, both over the calculations of legal righteousness and over the
   vagueness of mysticism. Flacius and Chemnitz were right in seeking and
   collecting testimonies for the evangelical doctrine of justification from
   the Middle Ages, and as Augustine in his day could justly assert that his
   doctrine of grace had its tradition in the prayers of the Church, so
   Chemnitz also was entitled to affirm that the cardinal evangelical doctrine
   could produce evidence for itself from earlier times, “Non in declamatoriis
   rhetoricationibus nec in otiosis disputationibus, sed in seriis exercitiis
   pænitentiæ et fidei, quando conscientia in tentationibus cum sua indignitate
   vel coram ipso judicio dei vel in agone mortis luctatur. Hoc enim solo modo
   rectissime intelligi potest doctrina de justificatione, sicut in scriptura
   traditur.”

   [29] The “eternal gospel” of Joachim of Fiore belongs to the close of our
   period, and for a time remained latent; see Reuter, l.c. II., p. 198 ff.
     _________________________________________________________________

   2. The Development of Ecclesiastical Law. [30]

   Let us notice at least in a few words the increased activity in
   ecclesiastical law in the period under review, which was not without its
   influence on the mode of conceiving of dogma, and on the history of dogma.

   First, it is a fact of importance that from the middle of the second half of
   the ninth century, Church law was framed more and more on a Pseudoisidorian
   basis. Second, the preponderating attention given to law in general, and the
   growing subjection of all ecclesiastical questions to legal conceptions are
   characteristics of the period. As to the first point, it is well known that
   the Popes always continued to take more to do with the administration of the
   dioceses, [31] that the old metropolitan constitution lost its importance,
   and that the old constitutional state of things in general — during the
   first half of our period — fell into decay and ceased to exist. The
   Episcopal power, it is true, strengthened itself in many places by assuming
   a civil character, and on the other hand, the Emperors, from Otto I. to
   Henry III. after having reformed the enfeebled papacy, brought it for a time
   into dependence on the imperial crown. But as they also deprived all laymen,
   who were not princes, of all share in the direction of ecclesiastical
   affairs, and as they suppressed the independence of the local ecclesiastical
   bodies (the congregations), in the interests of imperialism and of
   “piety,” only the Emperor (who called himself rector ecclesiæ and vicarius
   Christi), the Pope, and the bishops remained as independent powers. It was
   about the property of the bishops, and on the question as to who was the
   true ruler of the divine state and the vicar of Christ, that the great
   battle was really waged between the empire and the reformed papacy. In this
   struggle the latter, acting on the impulse given by Gregory VII., developed
   itself into the autocratic power in the Church, and accordingly after having
   freed itself in Rome from the last remnants of older constitutional
   conditions, framed its legislation by means of numerous decretals. At the
   “œcumenical” Lateran Synods of 1123 and 1139, the papacy left no doubt as to
   this new position which it meant to assert. [32] The Popes afterwards, till
   the time of Innocent III., defended and strengthened their autocratic
   position in the Church amid severe but victorious struggles. No doubt, they
   had to hear many an anxious word from their most faithful sons; but the rise
   of the papacy to despotic power in the Church, and thereby to dominion over
   the world, was promoted by the piety and by all the ideal forces of the
   period. Not in opposition to the spirit of the times — how would that have
   been possible? — but in union with it, the papacy ascended the throne of the
   world’s history in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. Its opponents, so far
   as they possessed religion, were its secret allies, or contended with
   doubtful consciences, or, at least, were unable to show that the benefits
   for which they fought (national churchism, etc.) were the highest and the
   holiest. Under such circumstances the papal decretals obtained an
   ever-increasing authority. [33] They took their place beside the old canons,
   [34] nay even beside the decrees of the œcumenical Councils. Yet, strictly
   speaking, the measure of their authority remained still quite uncertain, and
   prior to Innocent III. dogmatic questions were not treated in them, or
   treated only very seldom, while the Popes in general, in the period of 150
   years from the Synod of Sutri till 1198, had their hands fully occupied with
   establishing the Roman autocratic and monastic Church order. [35]

   In developing itself as the supreme court of jurisdiction, the papacy could
   never have obtained in the Church, which assuredly is fellowship in faith
   and worship, monarchical rule as regards faith and morals, had not the
   amalgamation of dogma and law become perfect in this period. It was not the
   Popes who brought about this fusion; they merely turned to account a mode of
   view which prevailed everywhere, and from which scarcely an individual
   dissented. In what has been represented from the beginning of Book II. of
   our Second Part, it has been shown that the legal view of religion was an
   old inheritance of the Latin Church; religion is lex dei, lex Christi. In
   principle, it is true, this view had been radically corrected by
   Augustinianism; but Augustine himself allowed the legal schemes to remain in
   many important particulars. Then there followed the mission of the Western
   Church among the foreign nations, pagan and Arian. With these it came into
   contact, not merely as an institution for religious worship, but as the
   Roman Christian system of civilisation and law. Not simply as a system of
   faith did it wish and venture to assert itself; it could assert itself at
   all, rather, only by placing its entire equipment, and all its principles,
   some of which had an extremely profane origin, under the protection of the
   divine law. Thus the Germanic and Romanic nations came to regard all legal
   ordinances of the Church as ordinances of faith, and vice versâ. Boniface
   and Charlemagne then set themselves to secure that the two would harmonise.
   The “must” became identical in the three sentences: “He who will be saved
   must believe as follows”; “the Christian must pay tithes”; “adultery must be
   atoned for by this particular penalty.” How busily the framing, or the
   codification, of Church law was carried on from the time when Dionysius
   Exiguus made his collection till the time of Pseudoisidore, is shown by the
   numerous collections which were everywhere produced — even in Rome still —
   by the rich synodical life of the provincial Churches, and which were meant
   to guard the independence, the rights, and the distinctive life of the
   Church in the new world of Germanic manners. Everywhere (prior to the ninth
   century) dogma fell quite into the background; but just on that account the
   feeling became habitual, of regarding all deliverances of the Church as
   legal ordinances. The Cluniacensian-Gregorian reform of the eleventh century
   put an end to numerous traditional ordinances pertaining to constitution and
   law, and replaced them with new ones, in which the independence of the
   Church in relation to the State, and of Roman universalism in relation to
   the national Churches, found ever stronger expression. As the result of
   this, there developed itself in the eleventh century an imposing
   legislation, which was gathered up and completed in Gratian’s collection —
   though this collection was in so far out of date and behind the facts, as in
   it the legislation was not yet determined throughout by the thought of the
   concentration of ecclesiastical power in the hands of the Pope. [36] But
   besides their adoption of the Gregorian doctrines, this collection, and some
   older ones that preceded it, show quite a new turn of things, for they are
   the product of a study of law. Here also Gregory VII. was epoch-making. He
   was the great jurist in the papal chair, and from his time onward, the
   treatment of all functions of the Church in accordance with juristic science
   began to be the main problem. The study of law, carried on chiefly in
   Bologna, [37] exercised an immeasurable influence on the intellectual vision
   of the Church throughout its whole extent; the study of law, indeed, moulded
   thought in general. Hellenism also at that time exerted an incalculable
   influence in the way of fostering this study. The Romo-Grecian legislation
   came into the West, and although, at the first, it began by modifying what
   was still a “barbarian” form of secular legal life there, and by building up
   a sovereign State with its laws and officials, it yet gradually exercised
   also a furthering influence on the construction of the strict monarchical
   Church system; for what is legal for the Emperor is allowable for the Pope;
   or rather — he is in truth the Emperor. It cannot be doubted that here also
   Rome knew how to gather grapes of thorns and figs of thistles. The new
   rights of its adversary, the Emperor, it applied to itself.

   What had formerly developed itself under the force of circumstances — the
   Church as a legal institution — was now strengthened and built up by
   thought. [38] Juristic thought laid its arrest on everything. And yet even
   here need controlled the situation. For when the impulse to reflect is once
   awakened, what else can those at first become, who still live in a world of
   abstractions and are blind to nature and history, but jurists and
   dialecticians? Thus there settled down upon the whole Church, even upon its
   faith, the spirit of jurisprudence, now grown conscious of itself.
   Everything was laid hold of by it. It was a strong force in what is styled
   “Scholasticism”; it governed the most powerful Popes (Alexander III. as
   Magister Rolandus), and it began to bring within its sweep the form in which
   the traditional dogmas were presented. Certainly this was an easy matter for
   it; for in their practical conclusions these dogmas had already been made to
   serve quite as legal means in a legal process. What still remained was to
   submit to juristic exposition even the central tenets of faith themselves,
   and so to justify and defend them “scientifically.” Here too, indeed, the
   material was not entirely in a raw state; to some extent, rather, the
   foundation stones had received a juristic shaping from the Latin fathers of
   dogma themselves (cf. Tertullian); but there was still an immense task
   presenting itself, to the full accomplishment of which an approach even had
   never been made; it was to re-think the whole dogmatic tradition in the
   spirit of jurisprudence, to represent every-thing under the categories of
   judge (God), accused, advocate, legal measures, satisfactions, penalties,
   indulgences, to make out of dogmas as many distinctions as obtain in secular
   legal order between universally valid, relatively valid, probable,
   consuetudinary law, positive law, etc., and to convert dogmatics into a
   chamber of justice, out of which there was afterwards to develop the
   merchant’s hall and the den of thieves.

   But in the period we are considering, the Church was certainly the basis and
   sum of the highest ideals of the mediæval man, and the enormous
   contradiction on which one proceeded — had proceeded indeed, from the time
   of Augustine — of regarding the Church as at once the society of the
   faithful (societas fidelium), and as the hierarchically organised assemblage
   (coetus), of recognising the secular power in its divine right and yet
   suppressing its authority, was by many scarcely felt [39] . Only at the end
   of the epoch did the inner antagonism become apparent; but the hierarchy had
   then already become the Church. Just at that time, therefore, the claim of
   the hierarchy, and specially of the papacy, was proclaimed as dogma, and the
   struggle of the civil powers against the despotism of the Pope was declared
   to be as really rebellion against Christ as was the assertion of the sects
   that the true Church is the opposite of the hierarchy. This will have to be
   dealt with in the following chapter.
     _________________________________________________________________

   [30] For the earliest period see Maassen, Gesch. der Quellen und Litt. des
   Kanonischen Rechts I. vol. (till Pseudoisidore) 1870. For the later period
   see v. Schulte, Gesch. der Quellen und Lit. des Kanonischen Rechts von
   Gratian bis auf Gregor IX., 1875. See the introductions to von Friedberg’s
   edition of the corp. jur. can.

   [31] Nicholas I., Leo IX., Alexander II., Alexander III. represent the
   stages prior to Innocent III. But Gregory VII. was the soul of the great
   movement in the eleventh century.

   [32] The numbering of the œcumenical Councils, which has now become a
   sententia communis among the curialist theologians, has been established on
   the authority of Bellarmin (see Döllinger and Reusch, Die Selbstbiographie
   des Cardinals Bellarmin, 1887, p. 226 ff. That previous to him Antonius
   Augustinus [ob. 1586] counted them in the same way, has been pointed out by
   Buschball: “Die Professiones fidei der Päpste,” separately printed from the
   Röm. Quartalschr. 10 Bd., 1896, p. 62). In the sixteenth century there still
   prevailed the greatest diversity in the enumeration: indeed the majority did
   not regard those Councils in which the Greek Church did not take part as
   œcumenical at all. There was likewise conflict of opinion as to whether the
   Councils of Bâsle, Florence (and Constance), were to be reckoned in.
   Antonius Augustinus and Bellarmin (in the Roman edition of the Concilia
   generalia of 1608 f.), included the Lateran Councils of 1123 and 1139 (and
   left out the Council of Bâsle). “The question, it is true, was of
   subordinate importance for Bellarmin, in as much as he places on the same
   level with the decrees of the General Councils those of the ‘Particular’
   Councils held under the presidency of the Pope, or sanctioned by him; but
   having in view those who held, not that the Pope, but that the General
   Council was infallible, it was certainly necessary for him to discuss the
   question as to what Councils are to be regarded as general.” But in thus
   determining the question, he naturally allowed himself to be influenced by
   his strong curialistic standpoint, that is, he set aside the Council of
   Constance and Bâsle, and placed among the œcumenical Councils that of
   Florence, the fourth and fifth Lateran Councils, the first of Lyons, and
   that of Vienna, on the ground that these favoured the papacy. He thus
   arrived at the number of eighteen approved General Councils (eight from the
   first ten centuries, the Lateran Councils of 1123, 1139, 1179, 1215, those
   of Lyons in 1245 and 1274, that of Vienna in 1311, that of Florence, the
   fifth Lateran Council, and that of Trent). But here also, as everywhere in
   Catholic dogmatics, there are “half” authorities, and half genuine coin, in
   spite of the Holy Ghost who guides into all truth. That is to say, several
   Councils are “partly ratified, partly rejected,” those of Constance and
   Bâsle being among them, and the Council of Pisa in 1409 is “neither
   manifestly ratified nor manifestly rejected.” Since the year 1870, the
   question about the number of the Councils has completely lost all real
   interest for Catholics. But reactionary Protestantism has every reason to
   feel interested in it. Buschball (l.c. pp. 60, 74, 79), holds that in the
   Middle Ages a distinction in principle was not made between the view taken
   of the Councils of the first thousand years and that taken of those that
   were later. But he adduces no proof that prior to the Council of Constance
   the later Councils were placed quite on a level with the earlier, and even
   by what he adduces for the time subsequent uncertainty is suggested. How
   could the Mediæval Councils be regarded even before the Council of Trent as
   quite of equal standing with those of the first ten centuries, when, up to
   the time of this Council, the general opinion was certainly to the effect
   that dogma was contained in fundamental and final form in the twelve
   articles, and in the interpretation relating to them which they had received
   from the older Councils! The process of equalising was probably begun by the
   Councils of Florence and Basle, with their high degree of self-consciousnes.
   That Councils at all could be pointed to in the long period between the
   ninth and the fifteenth centuries, was necessarily of more importance than
   the taking account of what was decided at these Councils, of how they were
   constituted, and of the authority that guided them. We may very well venture
   to say therefore: in the fifteenth century the equalising had begun with
   some hesitation, the Council of Trent favoured it by its weight, and it then
   became established.

   [33] On the development of the primacy in the eleventh and twelfth
   centuries, see Döllinger, Janus, p. 107 ff. (Schwane, Dogmengesch. des
   Mittelalters, p. 530 ff.). How much stronger was the Gregorian party in the
   eleventh century than the Pseudoisidorian in the ninth, and how much more
   revolutionary and aware of his aim was Gregory VII. than Nicolas I.! “He was
   the first who, with full, clear consciousness, was determined to introduce a
   new condition of things into the Church by new means. He regarded himself
   not merely as the reformer of the Church, but as the divinely chosen founder
   of an order of things such as had never before existed.” His chief means
   were Synods held by the Pope (this was begun by Leo IX.) and new
   ecclesiastical law-books. The nephew of Pope Alexander II., Anselm of Lucca,
   became the founder of the new Gregorian Church law, this being effected by
   him partly by making apt use of that of Pseudoisidore, and partly by a new
   set of fictions (e.g., that the episcopacy everywhere originated from Peter)
   and forgeries. He was followed by Deusdedit, Bonizo, and Cardinal Gregorius.
   Deusdedit formulated the new principle, that contradictions in the
   traditional Church law must always be harmonised by letting, not the older,
   but the greater authority, that is, the dictum of the Pope cancel the
   opposite view. In this way the autocracy of the Popes was established. On
   the series of new fictions and falsifications of the old tradition, see
   Janus, p.:12 ff. Specially important is the way in which history was induced
   to furnish testimony in proof of the infallibility of the papal decretals,
   and in which even Augustine was pronounced an authority for this new
   doctrine (p. 119 ff. ). A sentence of his was so manipulated that it came to
   mean that the papal letters stood on a level with canonical Scripture. Since
   then the defenders of the infallibility of the Pope, to which Gregory VII.
   already made a distinct claim, and, indeed, treated it as concessum (p. 124
   ff.), have always appealed to Augustine. Indeed, Gregory VII., following an
   earlier precedent, ciaimed for the Popes a complete personal holiness — for
   they have all that Peter had — and the Pope’s holiness, in addition to his
   infallibility, was so boldly taught by the Gregorians (imputation of the
   merit of Peter) that anything stronger in the way of claim became
   impossible.

   [34] Alexander II. wrote to King Philip of France, requesting him to rank
   the papal decrees along with the canons; see Jaffé, Regesta, 2 Edit., Nr.
   4525.

   [35] The Lateran Synods of 1123, 1139, 1179, contain nothing whatever of a
   dogmatic character (excepting the twenty-seventh canon of the Council of
   1179, which urges the extermination of the Cathari, but says nothing of
   their doctrine); see Mansi XXI., XXII., Hefele V.2, pp. 378 ff., 438 ff.,
   710 ff.

   [36] See v. Schulte, Lehrbuch des Kathol. und evang. Kirchenrechts 4 Aufl.,
   p. 20.

   [37] See Denifle, Die Univ. des Mittelalters I. 1885. Kaufmann, Gesch. der
   deutschen Univers. I., p. 157 ff.

   [38] See v. Schulte, Gesch. der Quellen, etc., I., p. 92 ff.; II., p. 512 f.
   As Gregory VII. held still more strongly than any of his predecessors that
   the Church is the kingdom founded upon Peter, and that everything is to be
   traced back to the power given to it, the legal organism was placed in the
   foreground; see Kahl, Die Verschiedenheit Kathol. und Evang. Anschauung über
   das Verhältniss von Staat und Kirche (1886), p. 7 f.: “The character of the
   Catholic Church as a legal organism is already involved in the doctrine of
   its founding, and in the conception of it.” The fullest and most reliable
   historic proofs in Hinschius, Kath. Kirchenrecht.

   [39] In the valuable inquiry of Mirbt, Die Stellung Augustin’s in der
   Publicistik des gregorianischen Kirchenstreits (1888) — cf. the same
   author’s work “Die Publicistik im Zeitalter Gregor’s VII.,” 1894 — the
   significance of Augustine for the struggles in Church politics in the
   eleventh century has for the first time been methodically and thoroughly
   described. It amounted directly to less than one would have expected, and it
   is noteworthy that the Antigregorians can show a larger heritage of
   Augustinian thoughts than their opponents (see Theol. Lit. Ztg., 1889, Col.
   599).
     _________________________________________________________________

   3. The Revival of Science. [40]

   Theologians and philosophers have vied with one another in endeavouring to
   find a specific definition of Scholasticism, and to differentiate what this
   term is meant to denote, from the theology and philosophy of the old (Greek)
   Church on the one hand, and from modern science on the other. These efforts
   have led to no accepted result; nor could they lead to any such, for
   Scholasticism is simply nothing but scientific thought. That this thought
   was governed by prejudices, [41] and that from these it in some respects did
   not free itself at all, and in some respects freed itself only slowly, is
   shared by the science of the Middle Ages with the science of every age.
   Neither dependence on authorities, nor the preponderance of the deductive
   method, was specially characteristic of Scholasticism; for science in
   fetters has existed in every period — our descendants will find that
   present-day science is in many respects not controlled merely by pure
   experience — and the dialectico-deductive method is the means that must be
   used by all science that has the courage to emphasise strongly the
   conviction of the unity of all that is. But it is not even correct to say
   that within mediæval science that method prevailed alone, or chiefly. The
   realism that was represented by Albert and Thomas, acting upon impulses
   received from Augustine, made excellent use of experience, and Scotism and
   Nominalism in particular are partly based on the empiric method, though as
   compared with the deductive, Duns may have found fault with this method as
   confused. What is of importance here is only this, that the observation of
   the external world was extremely imperfect, that, in a word, natural
   science, and the science of history did not exist, the reason being that men
   knew how to observe spirit, but not how to observe things of sense. [42] But
   least of all must Scholasticism be reproached with treating “artificial,”
   “fabricated” problems. On its premises they were not artificial, and if they
   were boldly wrought out, it was only a proof of scientific energy.

   The Scholasticism of the Middle Ages, then, was simply science, and it is
   merely perpetuating an unwarranted mistrust when it is thought that this
   part of the general history of science may be designated by a special name.
   [43] As if science in general had not its stages, as if the mediæval stage
   was distinguished from the rest by its unparalleled and culpable obscurity!
   On the contrary, it may rather be said that Scholasticism furnishes a unique
   and luminous example of the fact that thought finds its way even under the
   most adverse conditions, and that even the gravest prejudices that weigh it
   down are not heavy enough to quench its life. The science of the Middle Ages
   gives practical proof of eagerness in thinking, and exhibits an energy in
   subjecting all that is real and valuable to thought, to which we can find,
   perhaps, no parallel in any other age. [44]

   Hence it is useless to direct one’s ingenuity to answering the question as
   to what kind of science presents itself in Scholasticism; we have simply
   rather to inquire into the conditions under which scientific thought was
   placed at that time. Not equally useless, but vaguely treated, is the
   academic question, much discussed and marked by confusion and wearisomeness,
   with regard to the relation of Scholasticism to Mysticism. [45] If by
   Scholasticism there is understood (though this is arbitrary) “the hand-maid
   of hierarchism,” or, with sudden change of front, the “construction of
   systems without concern for the needs of the inner life,” or the
   “rationalistic craving for proof,” and if Mysticism is then placed alongside
   as the free pectoral theology, then the most beautiful contrasts can be
   drawn — Hagar and Sarah, Martha and Mary. But with little trouble
   Scholasticism and Mysticism can, on the other hand, be resolved into each
   other, and a daring dialectic performance can be carried on with these
   terms, which does honour to the acuteness of the author, but which has only
   the disadvantage that one is as wise after, as before, the definitions have
   been given. The thing to be dealt with here is simple. Scholasticism is
   science, applied to religion, and — at least, till the time when it
   underwent self-disintegration — science setting out from the axiom, that all
   things are to be understood from theology, that all things therefore must be
   traced back to theology. This axiom regularly presupposes that the thinker
   feels himself to be in entire dependence on God, that he seeks to know this
   dependence ever more deeply, and that he uses every means for the
   strengthening of his own religious life; for only in the measure in which he
   finds, and knows himself to be, under and in God, is he made capable of
   understanding all else, since, of course, to understand things means nothing
   else than to know their relation to the One and All, or to the Author (i.e.,
   in both cases, to God). From this it follows at once that personal piety is
   the presupposition of science. But in so far as personal piety at that time
   was always thought of as contemplation of the relation of the ego to God
   accompanied by asceticism, [46] Mysticism is the presupposition of
   Scholasticism; in other words, mediæval science bases itself on piety, and
   on piety, too, which is itself contemplation, which lives therefore in an
   intellectual element. From this it follows, that this piety itself prompts
   to thought; for the strong impulse to become acquainted with the relation of
   one’s own ego to God necessarily leads to the determination of the relation
   of the creation, of which one knows himself to be a part, to God. Now, where
   this knowledge is so pursued that insight into the relation of the world to
   God is sought for solely or chiefly with the view of understanding the
   position of one’s own soul to God, and of inwardly growing through such
   understanding, we speak of Mystic theology. [47] But where this reflex aim
   of the process of knowledge does not present itself so distinctly, where,
   rather, the knowledge of the world in its relation to God acquires a more
   independent objective interest, [48] the term Scholastic theology is
   employed. From this it appears that we have not before us two magnitudes
   that run parallel, or that, forsooth, collide with each other, but that
   Mystic theology and Scholastic theology are one and the same phenomenon,
   which only present themselves in manifold gradations, according as the
   subjective or objective interest prevails. [49] The former interest was so
   little lacking even to the most distinguished Schoolmen that their whole
   theology can be unhesitatingly described as also Mystic theology — for
   Thomas, Mysticism is the starting-point and practical application of
   Scholasticism — and, on the other hand, there are theologians who are
   described as Mystics, but who, in the strength of their desire to know the
   world, and to understand in a systematic way the Church doctrine, are not a
   whit behind the so-called Schoolmen. But in saying this the further position
   is already stated, that a specific difference between the scientific means
   had likewise no existence. Here also it is simply a question of shade
   (nuance). The view of the God in whom, and from whom, all things must be
   understood, was given by the Church tradition. But in this view also
   subjective piety was trained. The formal shaping elements were likewise
   everywhere the same. Inasmuch as the scientific means were derived entirely
   from the same three sources, the authoritative dogma, inner experience, and
   the traditional philosophy, any differences that would be more than
   varieties cannot be made out (a greater or less passing into the background
   of logical formalism, a preference for inner observation over authoritative
   tradition [50] ).

   Yet it is said that great inner antagonisms entered into mediæval science.
   Anselm and his opponents are pointed to, Bernard and Abelard, the German
   theologians of the fourteenth century and the Churchmen who pronounced them
   heretics, and from the contrasted positions in these cases the formula is
   framed, that here Mysticism is in conflict with Scholasticism. Differences
   certainly there are here; but that stock controversial term throws a very
   uncertain light on them. Above all, the phenomena here gathered together can
   by no means be united in one group. But before we deal with them, it will be
   well to answer the main question stated above, under what conditions the
   scientific thought of the Middle Ages was placed, or, let us say, how it
   developed itself, and what were the concrete factors which determined it (in
   the way of advancing or retarding), and thereby gave it its peculiar stamp.
   From this inquiry the proper light will naturally be thrown upon these
   “antagonisms” which are erroneously represented when they are described as a
   struggle of two opposing principles.

   The Middle Ages received from the ancient Church not only the substantially
   completed dogma, but also — as a living force — the philosophy, or say, the
   theology which had been employed in the shaping of dogma, and together with
   this also a treasury of classical literature, which had little or no
   connection with the philosophy and the dogma, but which answered to an
   element in the antique view of life in Italy and Byzantium that had never
   quite disappeared. These three things constituted the legacy of the old
   world to the new. But they already contained in them all the contrasts that
   came to view in the inner life of the Middle Ages, when consciousness of
   that inheritance had been awakened. These “antagonisms” were as actively at
   work in the Greek Church from the days of Origen and Jerome as they
   afterwards were in the Mediæval Church. In this sense all scientific
   developments of the West in the Middle Ages were simply a continuation of
   what the Greek Church had already partly passed through, and was partly
   still continuing to pass through in feeble movements. The difference
   consisted only in this, that in the West everything gradually developed
   itself to a higher degree of energy; that the Church, as the visible
   commonwealth of God on earth, impressed its stamp on all secular life,
   taking even science into closer connection with itself, giving it a higher
   flight, and at the same time requiring it by its authority to adopt juristic
   thought; and finally in this, that from Greek science Augustinianism was
   absent.

   We have remarked above that along with the substantially completed dogma the
   Middle Ages received from antiquity the related philosophy or theology. But
   this very circumstance introduced strain: for while this theology was
   certainly “related,” yet as certainly also did it contain, as a living
   force, elements that were hostile to dogma, whether we think of Neoplatonism
   or Aristotelianism. It is well known that in the Greek Church, from the
   fifth and sixth centuries, both schools worked upon dogma, and that
   “heresies” to the right and left were the result (pantheism and tritheism,
   spiritualistic Mysticism and rationalistic Criticism), and that then, from
   the Justinian age, the Scholasticism evolved itself which found the via
   media between the Areopagite and John Philoponus. [51]

   In the theological science of John of Damascus there presents itself the
   reconciliation of dogma with Neoplatonism and Aristotelianism. [52] Here the
   former plays the principal part in the principles, the latter in the working
   out; for with the help of dialectic distinction one can remove all
   difficulties and contradictions that emerge. But the independent force of
   the Neoplatonic and Aristotelian philosophies was not broken by the
   harmonising. The books in which they were contained continued to be read,
   and thus in Byzantium the strain did not cease. Mystic theology was further
   cultivated, Aristotle was studied, and although the acts of aggression
   always grew feebler, both of them threatened the Church with its dogma, the
   Church that was meanwhile growing more powerless in the embraces of the
   State. There were the further circumstances that memories of the
   theologically unconcerned age of antiquity had never died out, that a
   certain worldly culture, indifferent to religion, and often indeed
   degenerating into barbarism, still survived, which was strong enough to
   hinder the Eastern Church from ever making even an approach to the carrying
   out of its ideals and aims in secular life and secular culture. From the
   days of the Alexandrian Theophilus monks and pious laymen might lament over
   the godlessness of the ancient literature and wish it in hell, but no one
   was able either to banish it, or to purify it, and bring it entirely into
   the service of ecclesiastical science.

   If we pass now to the Carlovingian period, i.e., to the first epoch of
   scientific advance in the West, we find exactly the same elements side by
   side, only with one important addition (Augustinianism). There is an eager
   endeavour to become acquainted with the traditional dogma and to think it
   out, and, as the Adoptian controversy shows, there is at the same time a
   surrender to entire dependence on the Greeks. In the writings of Boethius
   and Isidore there is possessed a source, rich enough for that period, from
   which the dialectic science of method may be learned. As the work of John
   Scotus shows, the Neoplatonic Mysticism had already become known to the West
   from the writings of Dionysius and Maximus; besides this, however, it was
   represented in a theistic setting, and with incomparable attractiveness, by
   Augustine. Finally, the ancient literature (poets and historians) was sought
   out, and through contact with Italy there arose the seductive pictures of a
   blithesome life that had never altogether vanished.

   But the forces which the West had at its command at that time were still too
   weak to admit of working independently with the capital that had been
   inherited. To become familiar with Augustine and Gregory I., to understand
   the christological speculations of the Greeks, and to master the simplest
   rules of logic and method — that was the real task of the period. What was
   attempted beyond this, Scotus excepted, was a feeble renaissance: indeed the
   union of the antique with the theological at the court of Charles the Great
   has something childish. This union therefore was soon dissolved again. Not
   for the first time under Louis the Pious, but as early as the last years of
   Charles I. himself, the ascetic thought of the ancient Church asserted its
   influence even in science. And so it continued to be afterwards; we can
   observe indeed, on till the thirteenth century, a steady increase of
   aversion to the antique, while, no doubt, some bold spirits sought more than
   before to learn from it. In theory secular studies were discarded. Ancient
   literature was regarded as a source of temptations. All science which did
   not place itself under theology, i.e., which did not refer everything to the
   knowledge of God, was held to be pernicious, nay, to be a seduction of the
   devil. But as what is characteristic, in all fields, of the mediæval view of
   the world consists in this, that it aims at uniting the ununitable, and
   requires that negation of the world shall be attained in the form of
   dominion over it, so we observe here also that what is rejected is again
   adopted. Ancient literature and philosophy were certainly employed as a
   formal means of culture, and with a view also to the refutation of pagans,
   Jews, and heretics, and to a fathoming of the divine mysteries. It was to
   some extent the same persons who rejected them in the end, who on their
   slow, toilsome journey to the summit made use of them. And where they were
   different persons, yet there was at bottom between the two an elective
   affinity; for all thinkers who came to be influential, though some of them
   may appear to us “illuminists” (Aufklärer) and others traditionalists, were
   dominated by the same fundamental thought of tracing back all things to God
   and understanding them from Him. And when in the end the Church released
   Aristotle and allowed full use to be made of him, that was not done by way
   of yielding to outward constraint, but because the Church theology was now
   strong enough to master this master, and because he could furnish it with
   the most effectual help against the dangers of a bold idealism which
   threatened dogma. Though the schools, the universities, might not be
   ecclesiastical institutions in the strict sense of the term, science was
   ecclesiastical, theological. There was no lay science. The thought of such
   science was for that age equivalent to paganism and nihilism.

   From the Carlovingian period a chain of scientific tradition and schools of
   learning extends into the eleventh century; [53] but a continuous increase
   of scientific activity cannot be ascertained, and even the greatest masters
   (Gerbert of Rheims) did not produce effects that were epoch-making. Not till
   the middle of the century was the advancement begun that was followed by no
   further declension, and the thread formed that was not again to break. The
   inner rise of the Church was unquestionably the determining cause of this
   upward movement of science, although we are surprised at meeting quite at
   the beginning with a trained skill in dialectic for which we had not been
   prepared, and which must have gone on developing in the dark ages (saculum
   obscurum) in spite of their darkness. But how could the inner revival of the
   Church have continued without results for science? The Church conceived
   itself at that time as spiritual power, as the power of the supersensuous
   life over the sensuous; the subject of science was the supersensuous;
   science, therefore, was challenged by this revival! But even the science
   which revels in the transcendental, and which readily attaches itself to
   revelations, cannot deny its character as science. Even where it is, and
   wishes to be, the handmaid of revelation, it will always embrace an element
   by which it offends the faith which desires rest; it will exhibit a
   freshness and joy which to devoutness appears as insolence; nay, even when
   it knows itself to be one with the Church in its starting-point and aims, it
   will never be able to deny a negative tendency, for it will always be
   justified in finding that the principles of the Church suffer deterioration
   in the concrete expressions of life, and are disfigured by superstition.

   In the dazzling light in which Reuter, the marvellous master of that
   literature, has presented the conflicts between young mediæval science and
   the men of the Church (Berengar and Lanfranc, Anselm and his opponents,
   Abelard and Bernard), the persons engaged appear like spectral caricatures.
   Because this scholar tries to find “negative illuminism” everywhere in the
   movements, things are deprived of their proportion, and the common ground on
   which the combatants stand almost entirely disappears. With wonder and
   astonishment we see one Herostratus after another cross the stage,
   surrounded by troops of like-minded disciples; the “primacy of infallible
   reason” is set up by them, after they have destroyed authority; the
   antitheses become as abrupt as cliffs, and frightful chasms open up. But the
   biographer of these heroes, so far as he does not charge them with
   hypocrisy, must himself regularly acknowledge in some stray turn of thought,
   that they stood in closest connection with their age and with their
   opponents, that their enormously magnified performances were of a much more
   modest kind, and that the great illuminists were obedient sons of the
   Church. In opposition to this representation we follow out the hints given
   above, in order to elucidate and understand these struggles.

   In the higher rise of science three things were involved: the penetrating
   more deeply into the Neoplatonic-Augustinian principles of all theology, the
   dialectic art of analysis, and, united with both, a certain knowledge of the
   ancient classics and of the Church Fathers. As regards those principles, it
   was the spirit of the so-called Platonic Realism that prevailed. By means of
   it, as it had been derived from Augustine and from dogma itself, and from a
   hundred little sources also, dogma — but the world, too, as well — came to
   be understood, and all things came to be known from and in God. Till the
   beginning of the twelfth century this Platonic Realism, with its
   spiritualistic sublimating tendency and its allegorical method, reigned
   pretty much unbroken. It reigned all the more securely, the less a
   conception of it had as yet been consciously formed (as a theory of
   knowledge). [54] It was peculiar to it that it set out from faith, and then
   made itself master of dogma in the way in which dogma had formerly arisen
   (“credo ut intelligam” — this position of Augustine was not merely
   reasserted by Anselm, but was willingly assented to by all Church thinkers
   of the period). But it was, further, peculiar to it that it took a flight
   beyond dogma. This had occurred in Greek Mysticism as well as with
   Augustine, and it repeated itself, without the danger being observed, from
   the eleventh century (and just, too, among the “most pious” philosophers).
   Here lay the first antagonism. As one got to understand dogma by the help of
   the same means by which it had arisen, that idea of the immanence of God, of
   all things existing in God, asserted itself, before which the historical,
   and dogma itself, threatened to vanish, i.e., were viewed as the final stage
   needing sublimation. So Origen thought, so also had Augustine felt, and had
   expressed it at the outskirts of his speculation, [55] so was it taught by
   the Greek Mystics. [56] From this point, as by a circuit, a complete
   rehabilitation of reason could take place. After getting its dismissal at
   the beginning — revelation decides and authority — reason was now the means
   for removing out of the way whatever hindered the thought of the
   absoluteness, the immutability and immanence of God. It neutralised miracle,
   in order to give expression to the strict uniformity of the operation of the
   All-One; it neutralised even the history of salvation, and history in
   general, or transformed it into the circulating course

   of the operative Being that is, was, and shall be; it neutralised, finally,
   the creature. The “illuminist” of the eleventh and twelfth centuries would
   still have to be found who did not play his “illuminist” part under the
   influence of this mysticism, who did not likewise take the “credo ut
   intelligam” as his starting-point. Though, like Berengar, he might compare
   the literally understood Jewish law with the laws of the Romans, Athenians,
   and Spartans in order to give the palm to the latter, though like Abelard,
   he might unite into one the history of salvation and general history in the
   “philosophy of religion on a historic basis” — this was still done on the
   understanding that there was to be absolute validity obtained for all that
   the Church offered of material content, by means of sublimating (allegory);
   it was done in the name of the conception of God and of the theology which
   prevailed also among the opponents, so far as they thought at all, and these
   latter started back before conclusions which Justin, Origen, and the great
   group of Greek and Latin Fathers had long before drawn. [57] So it was not
   that principle stood opposed to principle, but the amount of application was
   disputed [58] — unless we should have to regard as the real principle of
   mediæval ecclesiastical theology, lack of thought, or blind surrender. But
   that was not what the Church Fathers taught, nor was it what the Church
   itself wished when it again conceived of itself as spiritual power in the
   eleventh century. How slight really is the distinction between Berengar and
   Anselm as theologians! It often entirely disappears; for how far were those
   represented as wild destroyers from drawing the conclusions in their
   totality, and from repeating, say, the thoughts of Erigena! They were not
   innovators, but restorers; not a trace is to be found in them of negative
   illuminism.

   In the Greek Church Aristotelianism had made its appearance when dogma and
   speculation could no longer be reconciled, and it rendered the Church
   invaluable service as the Horos which kept the Sophia of the Mystics from
   plunging into the abyss of the primeval Father. But along with these
   services it had at the same time brought at first unpleasant gifts in
   addition. While it checked unrestrained idealism, and at the same time set
   to work to make paradoxical and burdensome formulæ tolerable by means of
   distinctions, it also subjected to revision formulæ that collapsed as soon
   as their basis of Platonic Realism was taken from them. This
   Aristotelianism, which was so necessary, but of which there had been such
   bad experiences, as it appeared in John Philoponus and other Greeks, not to
   speak of the old Antiochian School, was known also to those in the West,
   through Boethius, and from other sources (in a poor enough form, no doubt,
   more directly as logical method), and long before had concluded (in the case
   of Boethius himself, e.g.), an irregular marriage with the Neoplatonic
   doctrine of principles. To the spirit of the West, which had more of
   understanding than of reason, and, as juristic also, constantly strove after
   distinctions, this Aristotelianism was congenial. From it there developed
   “dialectic,” at first, too, as scientific art. And as this scientific art
   always encourages insolence and pride where it is held to be the sum of all
   wisdom, so was it at the beginning of the Middle Ages. The schooled “
   dialecticians” of the eleventh century looked proudly down on the
   obscurantists who did not understand art, while these again became concerned
   about the traditional Church doctrine, although the operations of the
   youthful science only seldom touched the kernel of things, unless it was
   that one here and there ventured too far with his art in regard to dogmas
   that stood in the centre of vision (doctrines of the Trinity, of the two
   natures, of the Eucharist), and, anticipating the later Nominalism, or
   recalling unpleasant facts in the history of tradition, served up a
   questionable attempt at solving the trinitarian problem (tritheistic,
   Sabellian), or approached too near the old Adoptianism, or threw doubt on
   the current opinion about the external miracle in the Eucharist. In this way
   the first conflicts arose, which were lacking in real sharpness, however,
   because the dialectic itself stood in league with Platonic Realism, and at
   bottom did not know very often what it really wanted. At the same time it
   must not be denied, that wherever the understanding is brought in, it will
   assert its own rights and will overleap the limits of a purely formal
   activity. But it is shown, e.g., by the science of Anselm, how peacefully,
   under certain conditions, dogma, Platonic Realism, and dialectic harmonised.

   Yet in the twelfth century that came to be otherwise. In Abelard [59] both
   the critical tendency of Platonic Realism (cf. his view of history) and the
   critical tendency of dialectic grew stronger, without his abandoning,
   however, in the fundamental theses, his relation of dependence on the Church
   doctrine. Abelard was the boldest theologian of his time, because he
   understood how to derive the critical side from all elements of tradition,
   and was really persuaded of the defectiveness just of what was held valid.
   His opponents of his day thought that the dangers of his science arose quite
   essentially from his dialectic, and, accordingly, discredited this above
   everything else. In point of fact, boldness in submitting particulars to the
   treatment of the understanding was an outstanding feature in Abelard; the
   understanding, too, when once released, asserted its own rights, frequently
   overleapt the boundaries theoretically recognised, scorned authority, and
   proclaimed, with the support of a certain knowledge of ancient history, the
   eternal right of reasonable thought as the highest court of appeal. But that
   the most dangerous theses of the restless scholar sprang from Platonic
   (Augustinian) Realism, i.e., from the fundamental view that was adhered to
   by one’s self, was not observed. In principle Abelard certainly moderated
   this view by means of his critico-dialectic reflections. He was no more a
   representative of thorough-going Realism. He was rather the first to
   introduce into epistemology a kind of conceptualism, [60] to break through
   the strict doctrine of immanence, and, by beginning to restore independence
   to the creature, to begin also to emancipate the conception of God itself
   from pantheism. For Abelard, the dialectic art ceases to be mere art; it
   begins to become a material principle, and to correct the traditional
   (Neoplatonic-Augustinian) doctrines of the first and last things. The
   paradox in Abelard’s position consists in this, that on the one hand in
   contemplating history he drew certain conclusions from the Mystic doctrine
   of God (cf. Justin, Origen, but also Augustine himself) more confidently
   than his contemporaries, while, on the other hand, he allowed sober thought
   to have a material influence on the view taken of ground principles. His
   opponents saw in him only the negative theologian. This negative theologian
   really laid the foundation for the classical structure of mediæval
   conservative theology. [61] For the Church dogma could not be held by the
   thinking mind under the entire domination of the Mystic Neoplatonic
   theology. Although it was by this theology that it had been chiefly
   elaborated, yet the Church had always reserved to itself the supra-mundane
   God and the independence of the creature, and had formed a set of dogmas
   which Platonism could only sublimate, but could not justify as the final
   expression of the matter itself. The Church needed, therefore, the help of
   dialectics (of sober intelligence, and of juristic acuteness directed to the
   given formulæ ) and of a lowering of the lofty flight of speculation, and
   this help Aristotelianism alone could afford it, i.e., the Aristotelianism,
   which was then understood as such, and which was then exercising its
   influence, as the view of things according to which it is held — not that
   the phenomenal and creaturely are the form transitorily expressing the
   divine — but that the supernatural God, as Creator in the proper sense of
   the word, has created the creature and endowed it with independence. It
   needed the help of Aristotelianism to defend a set of dogmas in the form in
   which they were already established. [62] But still more was the
   “Aristotelianism” to do for it. Reason will never ultimately make a compact
   with authority, but the understanding will. Whoever has entered into the
   spirit of the All-One and embraces the doctrine of immanence, will feel
   himself to be as “God,” and will therefore reject all authority, of whatever
   kind it be. Whoever, on the other hand, feels his independence, side by side
   with other forms of independence, will become certain of his dependence
   also. He will no longer take part in the dialectic performance of exchanging
   his estimate of himself as the perfect nothing (as an individual) for an
   estimate of himself as the perfect being (as spirit); but while within
   certain limits, and perhaps with great tenacity, he will embrace a rational
   mode of view, he will, in that which lies beyond these limits, be ready to
   recognise authorities.

   Yet for the great inaugurator of Mediæval Scholasticism (for Anselm
   everything is still naive) — for Abelard, the elements were still vaguely
   intermingled. He set down already as force all that, in the time following,
   the period when Scholasticism flourished, was conceived of as mutually
   limiting potencies, or that then became differentiated as distinct
   tendencies. His contemporaries had as yet no presentiment, that an element
   in him which they specially censured would yet become the means of saving
   the Church doctrine. Orthodoxy and the Platonic Realism were still in
   closest union. The French Mystics declared the efforts of the
   “dialecticians” heretical; Aristotle was hated. When the great disciple of
   Abelard, Petrus Lombardus, published his Sentences, and in them fittingly
   placed the learning of his master at the service of the Church theology — as
   yet the Middle Ages had not possessed a compendium for the study of theology
   [63] — much would not have been required for even this book to be set aside
   on suspicion. No doubt, this work, because, from the patristic tradition
   being uncertain, it still frequently adds opinion to opinion, bears the
   stamp of a freedom which was afterwards lost. But the mere fact that it
   became the authoritative compendium of the thirteenth century is a proof
   that on the part of the Church free inquiry, dialectic investigation, and
   Aristotelian philosophy were now tolerated, not because inward freedom had
   increased, but because the faculty had grown for making friends with these
   forces, and because there began to be observed what the Aristotelian method
   and mode of thought could do for dogma. In the second half of the twelfth
   century the turn round of things was already preparing itself. The “pious”
   theologians (the Mystics), so far as they gave themselves up to the work of
   expounding and establishing dogma, were forced to see that by means of
   thoroughgoing Realism contemplation might be enriched, but the objective
   doctrine could not be defended. The coalition of naive faith on authority
   with a Mysticism that, in its ultimate ground, was not without danger, came
   to an end. Church faith, Mysticism, and Aristotelian science formed a close
   alliance. On the other hand, the dialecticians, in the degree in which they
   passed from the Aristotelian formalism to Aristotle’s doctrine of principles
   (perhaps the increasing knowledge of this philosophy contributed most to
   this), lost that audacity which had once given so much offence, and which,
   certainly, had often been only a sign of playing with empty forms. No doubt
   in connection with this many a fresh piece of knowledge came to be lost.
   [64] One who has much to carry gets more anxious, and moves more slowly,
   than one who marches under an easy burden. To this there came to be added,
   that from decade to decade the authority of the Church grew stronger. Though
   there was a growth also of opposition, which forced to anxious reflection
   (Mohammedans, Jews, heretics, knowledge of the ancient classics), [65] at
   the end of the twelfth century the Church outshone all else with its lustre.
   Its rights in respect of life and doctrine became the worthiest subject of
   investigation and exposition. Into this task blended the other, of referring
   all things to God and construing the knowledge of the world as theology. The
   theology of the ecclesiastical facts pressed itself on the theology of
   speculation. Under what other auspices could this great structure be erected
   than under those of that Aristotelian Realism, which was at bottom a
   dialectic between the Platonic Realism and Nominalism, and which was
   represented as capable of uniting immanence and transcendence, history and
   miracle, the immutability of God and mutability, Idealism and Realism,
   reason and authority? Thus it was only in the thirteenth century that there
   made its appearance the theology adequate to the Church and its dogma, and
   no longer viewed with suspicion, [66] after a new wave of piety (the
   Mendicant Orders) had imparted to it the highest measure of power of which
   the Catholic religion is at all capable. The fear of the Lord was also the
   beginning of this new wisdom. In form and contents, in its systematic
   method, and in the exhaustive fulness of its material, it is related to the
   theology of the twelfth century as, we might say, Origen was related to
   Clement of Alexandria. This is more than a comparison, for the course of
   events really repeated itself. Clement, the inaugurator, the bolder spirit,
   the less “enlightened,” who does not yet know that the full authority of the
   Catholic Church is against him; Origen, the man of system, more
   comprehensive, but at the same time more closely tied to the Church and its
   doctrine. The same relation obtained between the theologians of the twelfth
   and thirteenth centuries. (Compare, e.g., the “aggregating” character of the
   Sentences of Robert Pulleyn [Deutsch, p. 6 f.] with the Stromateis of
   Clement, and the great “Sums” of the thirteenth century with Origen’s De
   principiis.) In the following chapter we shall take up the thread here
   again. If we direct no further attention here to the Lombard, and especially
   to Hugo, the somewhat earlier, and, in respect of matter, the most
   influential theologian of the twelfth century (“a second Augustine”), the
   fact may serve as an excuse that the importance which the two obtained for
   the history of dogma appeared only at the great Lateran Council, and in the
   theologians of the thirteenth century. On Hugo’s Sentences see Denifle in
   the Archiv f. L-u. K.-Gesch. des Mittelalters III., p. 634 ff.
     _________________________________________________________________

   [40] See the histories of philosophy by Ueberweg, Erdmann and Stöckl;
   Prantl, Gesch. der Logik Bd. II.-IV.; Bach, l.c., I. and II.; Reuter, Gesch.
   der Aufkl. I. and II.: Löwe, Der Kampf zwischen dem Nominalismus und
   Realismus, 1876; Nitzsch, Art. Scholastische Theologie in der R.-E., XIII.2,
   p. 650 ff., where in p. 674 ff., the literature is noted. Dilthey, Einl. in
   die Geisteswissensch. I. Denifle, 1.c.; Kaufmann, l.c., p. 1 ff.; Denifle in
   the Archiv f. Litt.-u. Kirchengesch. des Mittelalters, I. and II.; v.
   Eicken, l.c., p. 589 ff.

   [41] The fundamental prejudice, which, however, Scholasticism shared with
   the theology of antiquity, and unfortunately also of modern times, was that
   theology is cognition of the world, or that it has to verify and complete
   cognition of the world. If it is said to-day that it has to supplement it,
   seeing that it steps in where knowledge fails, modesty has extorted the
   expression, but the same thing is still meant.

   [42] Yet even this does not apply to the whole of Scholasticism. Especially
   in its later period, it pointed also to the book of nature.

   [43] Kaufmann remarks correctly, p. 5: “There still attaches to the term
   Scholasticism something of the hatred and contempt which the Humanists
   poured upon it.” This hostile spirit is, no doubt, intelligible, inasmuch as
   Scholasticism still threatens our present-day science. Yet in more recent
   years a complete change of judgment has appeared, which comes to the help of
   the Pope in his renewed recommendations of St. Thomas. Indeed, in the effort
   to be just, the once disparaged Scholasticism is beginning to be
   extravagantly belauded, as is shown by the pronouncement of a very
   celebrated jurist. With this praise the circumstance may also have some
   connection, that the Schoolmen are now being read again, and readers find to
   their surprise that they are not so irrational as had been believed. The
   strongest contribution to the glorification of Thomas has been furnished by
   Otto Willmann in the second volume of his “Gesch. des Idealismus” (1896).
   Here Idealism and Thomism (of the strictest type) are simply placed on a
   level. Nominalism is the corrupt tree, which can hear no good fruit, and is
   to be regarded, moreover, merely as an episode, as a nubicula; for since its
   rising, the sun of the Thomist Realism has been always in the heavens, and
   has given warmth to every century. The real enemy of Thomas and of Idealism
   is Kantianism, which has slowly prepared itself, that, on its assuming its
   perfect form, it may forthwith be assailed and overthrown by the true
   Idealism. Protestantism is viewed as the continuation of monistic Mysticism
   (!), because it (v. the strict determinism) does not take account of the
   causes secundh. So Thomism alone, sans phrase, is the saviour of the holy
   things of humanity! Augustinianism at the same time still finds recognition
   here, but yet it is still no completed system; it only represents the way to
   the right one.

   [44] We may say, indeed, with the poet about that age: “Everything now aims
   at fathoming man from within and from without; truth, where hast thou an
   escape from the wild chase?”

   [45] On Mysticism, see the works which Karl Müller has cited in his krit.
   Uebersicht (Zeitschr. f. K.-Gesch. VII., p. 102 ff.). Above all the numerous
   works of Denifle and Preger (Gesch. der deutschen Mystik I., II.) have to be
   consulted; as also Greith, Die deutsche Mystik im Predigerorden, 1861. For
   the earlier Mysticism, cf. the monographs on Anselm, Bernard, and the
   Victorinians.

   [46] Piety is, above all, not the hidden temper of feeling and will, from
   which spring love to one’s neighbour, humility and patience, but it is
   growing cognition, begotten of steadfast reflection on the relation of the
   soul to God.

   [47] How largely dependent on Scholasticism the later Mystic theology in
   particular was; or, more correctly, how identical the two were, has been
   shown especially by the works of Denifle (against Preger in the histor.
   polit. Blattern, 1875, p. 679 ff., and on Master Eckhart in the Archiv f.
   Litt.-u. K.-Gesch. des Mittelalters II. Bd.).

   [48] It is only a question of difference of degree; very correctly Karl
   Müller says (Zeitschr. f. K.-Gesch. VII., p. 118): “The character of
   mediæval piety always expresses itself, more or less, even in the theoretic
   discussions of Scholasticism, because among the representatives of the
   latter the entire half of the way of salvation is dominated throughout by
   the interests and points of view of Mysticism, this circumstance having a
   connection with their monastic training and education. As soon as these men
   come to deal in their theoretical discussions with the appropriation of
   salvation, they bring along with them the presuppositions of their practical
   Mysticism.”

   [49] Even in Nitzsch’s determination of the relationship (l.c., pp. 651 ff.,
   655) I cannot find a clearing up, while in Thomasius-Seeberg the distinct
   vision of the matter is completely obscured by a mass of details. Nitzsch
   first accentuates strongly the formalistic character of Scholasticism, then,
   with a view to understanding Mystic theology, points to its origin, the
   Pseudo-Dionysian doctrine, and now concludes: “It is obvious that this
   theology of the soul, of feeling, and of direct intuition is fundamentally
   distinct from the Scholastico-dialectic theology.” But the assertion that
   the Scholastic theology is formalistic is scarcely cum grano salis correct,
   as will appear more clearly below. How can one call a mode of thought
   formalistic which takes the greatest interest in relating everything to a
   living unity? And if the means employed cannot secure the proposed end (as
   we think), have we therefore a right to reproach these scholars with a
   merely formalistic interest in things? But, further, the Pseudo-Dionysian
   theology is as much the presupposition of Scholasticism as of Mysticism, and
   that which Nitzsch calls “theology of the soul, of feeling, and of direct
   intuition” plays in both the same part, as alpha and omega, while the Mystic
   theology certainly keeps manifestly to its point of departure throughout the
   whole alphabet, the Scholastic, on the other hand, apparently forsakes it,
   but in the end (doctrine of the way of salvation) always returns to it,
   thereby showing that it has never really lost sight of it.

   [50] Scholasticism shares with Mysticism the “finis,” and Mysticism uses
   essentially the same means as Scholasticism.

   [51] v. Vol. IV. p. 232 f. of this work.

   [52] Vol. IV. p. 264 f.; see also p. 331 ff.

   [53] Berengar was a disciple of Fulbert of Chartres (ob. 1028); the latter
   had studied under Gerhert.

   [54] Till far on in the twelfth century the scholars were not first
   philosophers and then theologians; they possessed as yet no philosophic
   system at all; their philosophy rather was quite essentially dialectic art;
   see Deutsch, Abælard, p. 96: “The relation of philosophy to theology in the
   initial period of Scholasticism was essentially different from what it was
   at its maturity. In the earlier period a proper philosophic system, a view
   of the world developed on different sides, had as yet no existence. Only
   logic was known with some completeness . . .but, as a distinct discipline,
   metaphysic did not yet exist for the philosophers of that period. What they
   had of it consisted in single propositions, partly Platonic, partly
   Aristotelian. . . . Only when the Aristotelian writings became known in the
   second half of the twelfth century did the West learn to know a real
   philosophic system.”

   [55] See Vol. V., p. 125 ff.

   [56] Hence even in the question about the universals, which was already
   dealt with at that time on the basis of passages from Porphyry and Boethius,
   the treatment was almost entirely realistic: general notions exist in and of
   themselves, or they exist in things as their real essence (though very
   different turns of thought were possible here in matters of detail; see
   Prantl, Gesch. der Logik, II., p. 118 ff.). Certainly there were already to
   be found also in this period representatives of Nominalism, according to
   which general notions are intellectus, or, say, only voces; indeed, it
   probably always existed side by side with Realism; but theology still
   treated it with indifference. When the Nominalist Roscellin, the teacher of
   Ahelard, applied the Nominalist view to the doctrine of the Trinity, he was
   resisted by Anselm (v. Deutsch, p. 100 f.). The latter had no doubt that
   those who held the universales substantiæ to be mere votes, must err from
   the Christian faith, and were heretics. But how did it stand with those who
   logically applied the substantiality of general notions?

   [57] The inquiry would be interesting and important that would lead us to
   determine whether, and through what channels, the older Pre-Jeromic Church
   literature influenced Scholasticism; e.g., are the agreements of Abelard
   with Justin and Origen accidental, or only indirect, or direct? That the
   Shepherd of Hermas and the Didache continued to have influence admits of
   proof. Contradictions within tradition, between the older and the later, and
   again between tradition (the sacred canons) and Scripture had already been
   discovered in the Gregorian period, and up to a certain point had been
   admitted (see Mirbt, Augustine, p. 3 f.); but Abelard was the first to
   emphasise the importance of these contradictions, while on the other hand,
   certainly, he began to have an inkling of what his contemporaries were far
   from thinking of, namely, that errors promote the progress of truth.

   [58] It surely does not require to be specially noted, that no teacher of
   importance in this period drew all the conclusions of Platonic Realism (as
   little as Augustine did). They lay only on the horizon of their view, and
   were touched on in passages here and there. Till Abelard taught him better,
   William of Champeaux, it is true, seems to have asserted the full immanence
   of the generic notion, conceived of substantially, in every individual, a
   view which must necessarily have led to the doctrine of the one latent
   substance, and of the negating of all that is individual as mere semblance
   or mere contingency. This doctrine certainly lay on the outskirts of the
   view then taken of the world, and made its appearance in Mysticism as the
   expression of pious contemplation, afterwards even as a theoretic
   conviction. On Abelard’s having the credit of discarding it see below.

   [59] See the excellent monograph of Deutsch upon him (1883), the best book
   we possess on the history of the theological science of that period,
   distinguished pre-eminently by calmness and caution of judgment, as compared
   with the overstrained biographies to the right and left. In the
   introduction, p. 11 f., it is denied on good grounds that there was a widely
   prevailing negative illuminism in this period. What widely prevailed was not
   negative but ecclesiastical, and what was negative (frivolity of course
   there has been in every age; “the frivolity and avarice of the jeunesse
   dorée that vaunted itself in the apostolic chair up to the middle of the
   eleventh century”: Sackur) or expressly heretical had no widespread
   influence (to what extent at the time of the establishment of Clugny
   practical and theoretical atheism, frivolous criticism of the Bible, etc.,
   prevailed among the West-Frankian lay circles is shown by Sackur). That to
   Abelard there belongs a unique position in his time, Deutsch has grounds for
   asserting, but he is far from characterising him simply as an illuminist. If
   it were necessary to describe him as such, then it would be peculiar to
   Catholic religion to be purely acquiescent faith — but at that time at least
   it certainly had not yet made that claim; then Justin, Origen, and Augustine
   would be “creedless free-thinkers”; then Abelard himself would be a
   double-tongued hypocrite, for his wish was to be a Church theologian,
   believing in revelation, and yet at the same time one who could give account
   of his faith and was capable of showing it to be plain truth. That while
   this was his aim he became entangled in contradictions, that in undertaking
   to commend religion to the understanding he frequently had more regard to
   the judge than to the client, was certainly not peculiar to him as a
   theologian! For ascertaining the theology of Abelard the sentences of his
   disciple, Magister Roland Alexander III. (see the edition by Gietl, 1891,
   and Denifle in Archiv, Vol. I., pp. 434 ff. 603 ff.) may be consulted.

   [60] How his theory of knowledge is to be understood is a disputed point
   among scholars (v. Deutsch, p. 104 ff.). It is certain that he held a
   sceptical attitude towards Platonic Realism, that he rejected it indeed,
   without however passing over to Nominalism.

   [61] This seems paradoxical, and certainly other things come more
   prominently to view in Abelard at first: his genuine, unquenchable
   scientific ardour, his sense for the natural (sound human understanding),
   his ambitious striving, not devoid of vanity, his dialectic acuteness, his
   critical spirit, finally, the conviction animating him that the ratio has
   its own field of play, and that there are many questions on which it first,
   and it alone, must be heard (on his learning, which has often been
   over-rated, see Deutsch, p. 53 ff.). But on the other hand the following
   factors in his mode of teaching are to be noted, which obtained quite a
   positive importance for the time that followed (while we pass over what is
   an understood matter, viz., that even by him all knowledge was ultimately
   traced up to the revelation of God): (1) The man charged with
   “rationalism” has no great confidence in the capabilities of the human power
   of knowledge, and openly expressed this, in opposition to the self-assurance
   of the dialecticians and mystics; he did not possess it, but pointed to
   revelation, because he (2) did not regard thought and being as identical,
   but took up a critico-sceptical attitude towards the reigning Realism, such
   as was just required for the defence of the Church doctrine — as was taught
   by the time that followed. With this there is connected (3) that, while
   keeping very much on Augustine’s lines in the conception of God, he avoided
   those conclusions from his conception which led at one time to the
   assumption of a rigid, unchangeable divine working (a rigid order of
   nature), at another time to an unlimited arbitrariness on God’s part. This
   he effected by bringing in again (with Origen, partly against Augustine)
   very strongly though not at every point, the thought of the ethically
   determined character of the divine action, and of the limitation of the
   divine power by the notion of purpose (and so by what actually happens).
   With this he also drew a sharp distinction between God and the creature, and
   asserted the independence of the latter, corrected thereby the questionable
   Mystic conception of God, and prepared the way for the conception of God
   held by the great Schoolmen. His opponents, on the other hand, such as Hugo
   (and afterwards also the Lombard) adhered to that conception of God which
   afterwards proved more convenient in defending any kind of Church doctrine;
   but there is no question that Abelard was really the more positive. If he
   has nevertheless been classed with Spinoza, that only proves that there has
   been ignorance of the notion of God which elsewhere prevailed in his time
   among Church theologians, and that just that side in Abelard’s notion of God
   has been emphasised which was not peculiar to him, for he sought to unite
   the standpoints of immanence and transcendence, while his opponents assailed
   him from the standpoint of the “Spinozist” notion of God. (4) As with the
   doctrine of God so is it with all the other doctrines of the faith: here
   Abelard always set out from Augustine (see Deutsch’s account), keeps
   essentially to his formulations, but, with more courage and confidence than
   the great master, fettered by his Neoplatonism, strives to free theology and
   the objects of faith from the embraces of a Mysticism which is ultimately
   philosophy of nature. The ethical interest, the assurance that what answers
   to the moral law is also the holy and good before and for God, dominates
   Abelard (hence also his special interest in moral philosophy), and so far as
   this interest corrected the Mystical scheme of Christian doctrine in the
   thirteenth century, Abelard must be thought of as the pioneer. But if in
   this sense it may be said that Abelard laid the foundation for the great
   structures of Scholasticism in the thirteenth century — not only because he
   was the teacher of the Lombard, nor only because he was the acutest thinker
   of the period, but because he was the first to attempt that amalgamation of
   the immanence and transcendence doctrines, and taught that lower estimation
   of the principles of knowledge, which became the presuppositions of
   ecclesiastical systems — yet it cannot be denied that the following age did
   not attach itself directly to him. What he found independently the following
   age learned from Aristotle, who became more and more known to it from the
   second half of the twelfth century; it learned it only indirectly, or not at
   all, from Abelard. But that cannot diminish his fame. He was the first to
   show how all Church doctrines can and must be so treated that the principles
   of morality (the moral law) shall have as much justice done to them in the
   system as the fundamental thoughts of theological speculation on nature.
   That he did not solve this problem no one will make the ground of a
   reproach, for it is insoluble. But that it must be set down as the task of
   all ecclesiastical science — so long as this science at all declares that
   its ideal is that of knowing the world — is quite obvious. The
   contemporaries of Abelard were not willing to learn enough from him, and
   that, as a rule, determines the amount of influence that belongs to a
   teacher. They felt repelled (1) by the still novel form of the science in
   general; (2) by many propositions of Abelard, which were afterwards found to
   be tolerable — indeed to be the only correct ones; (3) by many individual
   negative, or critical judgments, both in regard to history and the validity
   of opinion prevailing at the time, and in regard to particular
   ecclesiastical doctrines, of which his defensive presentation was felt to be
   questionable (Sabellianism in the doctrine of the Trinity, yet see
   Augustine; strong inner variance in the Christology, which thus approached
   Nestorianism, yet see likewise Augustine). (4) It must not be denied that
   Abelard himself injured the influence of his doctrines by many
   contradictions and by the immaturity of his systematising. But how much
   could have been learned from him; compare only his admirable dis