Reginald Lane-Poole

“ Guitmund, archbishop of Aversa, speaking of the time when Fulbert, who died in 1029, came to govern the school of Chartres, which he made the chief home of learning in Gaul, confesses that at that time the liberal arts had all but become extinct in the land. A single name illuminates the literary record of the age, and Gerbert the Aquitanian, pope Silvester the Second, owes his unique position less to his writings than to his personal influence as a teacher; as a teacher too not of moral but of natural philosophy, as a master not of theology but of statecraft. ”

“ Genera and species, the categories and predicables, he refused indeed to endow with essence as things; they had no actual existence apart from the individual: nor was the universal, as William of Champeaux held, contained in its entirety within the particular. The process was the other way; it was from the particular that we arrived at the general by an effort of thought. On the other hand if the universals, if abstractions of all sorts, were the creations of the intellect, they were also its necessary creations; they were therefore so far real that the human mind could not do without them. ”

“ In the interval between the decline of the Carolingian house and the reformation of the eleventh century, Christendom sank into a grosser view of religion, into an abasement of morals that pervaded the clergy equally with the laity, into an ignorance all but universal. In this Dark Age, as it is well described, it is a thankless task to seek for the elements of enlightenment of which the vestiges are so scanty. Their existence, however, is proved by the life they manifested as soon as the spirit of religion was reäwakened. ”

“ With these various weapons, drawn from the armoury of reason, of experience, of religion, Agobard made war upon the superstitions of his age. He took his stand upon the unassailable ground of Christian verity, but he had his own opinions even in matters like the inspiration of the Bible. Thoughtful men over whose minds the authority of the Bible is supreme have always endeavoured to temper its severity by one of two modes of viewing it. ”

“ Faith therefore alone sufficeth not for life, except a man love his neighbour even as himself, and not only not do unto him the evil which he would not unto himself, but also do unto him the good which he would have another do unto him; and so fulfil the universal law, namely, to abstain from evil and to do good.
With these thoughts in his heart, and longing to impress them upon his generation, Claudius passed to his diocese of Turin. His fiery and uncompromising temper met opposition and peril as inducements rather than obstacles to action. ”

“ The age of the church schools is about to be succeeded by the age of the universities. The nature of the discussion indeed takes it out of the sphere of any but a professed history of philosophy, not merely because of its extremely technical form, which it is difficult to render into modern language, but also because the apparent minuteness and triviality of its distinctions, unless subjected to a long and searching examination, tend rather to conceal than to disclose the ferment of thought from which it sprang. ”

“ A man of his receptive nature was sure to exercise a personal attraction over those around him, and the power which Bruno possessed he used with a single purpose of leading them through learning to a wisdom that should raise them into another world than that gross and corrupt society in which they lived. His own example, much like king Alfred's, was a model of the union of a scholar and a statesman. Him self continually occupied with every sort of official business he always reserved his early morning hours for study. ”

“ It is not the form but the character of the constitution that makes it good or bad. As monarchy is the most perfect form, so on the other hand its opposite, tyranny, is the most corrupt and abominable. Aquinas distinguishes, as minutely as John of Salisbury, between the king and the tyrant; like John, he postulates for the former an absolute devotion to the duties of his office, and thus exalts him to so ideal a dignity that he is empowered to speak of him as [16] holding the same position in his own domain as God holds over the universe ”

“ Theology is no doubt the mode of medieval thought : the history of the middle ages is the history of the Latin church. The over mastering strength of theology, of a clergy which as a rule absorbed all the functions of a literary class, gave its shape to every thing with which it came into contact. Society was treated as though it were actually a theocracy : politics, philosophy, education, were brought under its control and adjusted to a technical theological terminology. ”

“ He had an immense energy of mind, a restless ambition to dominate other minds; and in his age supremacy was only attainable by adding a mastery of theology as a key-stone to unite and perfect the structure, in itself incomplete, of human knowledge. Nor would it be just to deny the natural significance of the connexion in which Abailard himself relates this passage in his life. He left his school on Saint Genevieve in order to visit his home in Brittany and to Hake leave of his mother who was about to withdraw into a nunnery. ”

“ If the clergy were free from civil control, society on the other hand had little or no protection against their license. To make the high ecclesiastical officers proudly independent of the sovereign was to introduce the influence of the Roman see into every court, and to put canonical obedience in danger of becoming a matter of common politics. If ecclesiastical property was released from civil obligation, the church was as much as before subject to the cares and the temptations of wealth. The spiritual basis of the hierarchical pretensions in fact at once broke down on trial. ”

“ Unlike Lanfranc, he belongs also to the far future: as a philosopher, he is in at least one notable train of reasoning the parent of Descartes. His serene vision overlooks the chasm of scholasticism; he is not engulphed in it. Some of the questions on which he meditated are so alien from the temper of his time that one cannot but ask whence he derived the impulse. To this question, however, no answer has yet been given, and for the present we may still believe that the idea of constructing an argument for the existence of God originated in his solitary thought. ”

“ He committed himself to controversy with each in succession, and such was the defiant and contemptuous tenour of his argument that he made enemies of them all. The very qualities which delighted his pupils, his dogmatism, his brave assurance, were just those which irritated his elders and contemporaries. In earlier years William of Champeaux had done everything in his power to keep his rival away from Paris: now it was Abailard's oldest master, the nominalist Roscelin, just closing his troubled career as a canon of Saint Martin's at Tours, who renewed the attack. ”

“ The general liberality of sentiment to which the work bears witness is all the more significant because of its author’s eminence in the religious world, which in turn gave his work a wider influence than if he had been suspected of making a compromise between orthodoxy and profane learning. Such men by their silent help towards raising the intelligence of their age have often done more than the ambitious protestant against established creeds or the wilful martyr of theological idiosyncrasy. ”

“ But, over and above these intrinsic defects, the idea of a catholic church was confronted and menaced by another idea that did not yield to it in the magnificence and universality of its pretensions. The circumstances of the time brought the pope into peculiar relations with Italy and Germany, the inheritors of the title and traditions of Roman empire. Hitherto the emperor had been understood to represent on earth the unity and order of the divine government, holding in the secular estate a rank equal, and often very far superior, to that occupied by the pope in the spiritual. ”

“ Gilbert thus hardly escaped the paradox of tritheism : and yet it is impossible to doubt that the heresy was one of expression, not of fact. The contradictions that make his study so con idea of a supreme Unity surpassing human thought or speech, a Unity which forbade the coexistence of multiplicity. He could only apply the analogy of his own realistic philosophy and infer, or lead his readers to infer, that as humanity was a single essence by participation in which individual men were said to exist, so did the three Persons subsist, as individuals, by participation in the one absolute God. ”

“ A still more suggestive line of enquiry is opened in the general history of thought and learning. The masculine spirit and the confidence with which the philosophers of the period carried on their speculations is hardly suspected by those who are not familiar with the original literature. Men who were least of all inclined to oppose anything that bore the stamp of traditional authority, displayed a freedom of judgement which could not but tend to consequences in one way or another divergent from the established system. ”

“ But it is plain that his not holding any rank in the church, which is all the words need mean, does not involve the consequence that John was not ordained. Abailard, for instance, had, in all probability, only minor orders until he was in middle life ; yet he afterwards was appointed abbat. It is no doubt the fact that John is never styled priest or monk by any of his opponents : nor does he ever describe himself as such, after the prevailing fashion, in his writings. But the latter circumstance, at least, has a very natural explanation : he desired to rank as a philosopher, not as a priest. ”

“ The body of man is restored to the elements ; these elements coalesce in the resurrection into a new body ; and this turns to spirit, the spirit reverts to its original causes, the causes to God. For God shall be all things in all things, when there shall be nothing but God alone. Is this restoration asserted of man alone or also of his brother animals ? of the good or also of the evil ? finally, of the individual or only of the race ? To these three questions John has his answer. The first gives him no difficulty. Immortality holds good not only of man, but of the whole animated creation. ”

“ Vain, says John, is the authority of all laws except it bear the image of the divine law; and useless is the decree of a prince unless it be conformable to the discipline of the church. Yet here too the theory is purely ideal; John's conception of a state is that it depends upon the absolute principles of righteousness, and it was inevitable in his surroundings that he should identify these principles with the actual church of Christ, which stood as the symbol of them. No man was more outspoken in exposing the vices and abuses with which it was attended. ”

“ With his ideal of a church in which these worldly ties have no existence, with his view of them as mere indications of the distance by which the actual church is removed from primitive purity, there is no room for any talk of ecclesiastical privileges or exemptions. The sole privilege of the clergy is their spiritual character. Temporal sovereignty or jurisdiction is an accident of their civil position ”

“ Being thus raised high above all earthly conditions, it is evident that the authority of the papacy altogether transcends that of the empire. The pope, says Trionfo, has the right not only of deposing the emperor but also of choosing one at his own discretion, supposing that there is a want of unanimity or other defect in the election, that the object of his choice is marked out by pre-eminent merit, or that the head of the church is able by this exercise of his prerogative to secure her peace or the overthrow of her spiritual enemies. ”

“ He began his book on the subject [2] by the announcement that true philosophy and true religion are identical; a solution of religious problems can only be effected by the aid of philosophy; and true philosophy rests on the basis of the unity of God. The oneness of his essence implies also a oneness of will, a will that can tend only towards good. To conceive a predestination to evil is to conceive a duality, a contradiction, in the divine nature. But predestination of any sort can only be improperly asserted of God, since lie is independent of time. ”