Scholasticism.

Scholasticism. The term scholasticism specially designates the aims, methods, and products of thought which constitute the main endeavour of the intellectual life of the middle ages. As under the names of its leading representatives special accounts have been given of their distinctive teaching, it will here be sufficient to indicate the conditions from which scholasticism arose, the general course of its history, and the causes that wrought its decay. In the case of no other great development of human thought can we mark with such precision its beginning, process, and end.

It was with the reign of Charlemagne (died 814) that the start was fairly made towards a new civilisation with the Christian religion and theology for its basis, and with a character and aim of its own essentially distinct from the civilisation of antiquity which had died with the ruin of the empire of Rome. In the political confusions that followed the dismemberment of the Carolingian empire much was lost that had been recently gained, yet the tradition was never again lost of those ideals of a higher culture inaugurated in the schools founded by Charlemagne. In John Scotus Erigena (died 875) we have the first great thinker of the early middle ages. As he drew his inspiration from Plato rather than from Aristotle, however, and as his methods are not those of the schoolmen proper, he does not in strictness belong to the scholastic philosophy. It is by his translation of the writings of the Pseudo-Dionysius, a work which exercised the profoundest influence on the religious life of the middle ages, that he holds his place among the thinkers who have determined the development of Christian Europe. In the 10th century the tradition of higher studies was represented by one who, though also not a schoolman, cannot be passed over in any history of the origins of the new civilisation. By his great school at Rheims, Gerbert, afterwards Pope Sylvester II. (died 1003), kept alive in France that intellectual eagerness which it had mainly owed to the genius of Charlemagne, and which eventually justified the saying of the middle ages—'To the Germans the empire, to the Italians the pope, to France studies!'

During the 11th century western Europe grew to a clearer consciousness of the aims it had to follow in the development of the ideas on which the Christian society must be based. Till the year 1000 all endeavour had been paralysed by the belief that with that year God's account with men must close. As the dreaded hour was left behind, however, the sense of relief and gratitude showed itself in a quickened life in every field of human activity. The first crusade (1096) is conclusive proof that the church now confidently reckoned on a renewed term of terrestrial existence, and that it felt the duty of signalling the unexpected respite. In the sphere of thought, also, that movement now began which, in spite of its fatuities and eventual stultification, had for its essential aim the reasoned account of the ideas on which the new order was founded. In this endeavour there were initial conditions which at once determined the nature and direction of men's reasonings and vitiated at the source the value of their results. It is the essential distinction between the schoolmen and the thinkers of antiquity that the former were not left free to question the subject-matter on which their ingenuity was expended. Of all ultimate questions the church provided a solution ready to hand and beyond appeal. The liberty to choose or reject that solution would have nullified the very principle of the church's existence. Moreover, the intellectual life of the middle ages directly proceeded from the organisation of the church, and individual thinkers were but the organs of its doctrine and tradition. The mediæval university was as essentially a religious institution as a monastery or a cathedral, and its members held their place solely on condition of their acceptance of the church's standard of faith. But it was exclusively in the universities that intellectual life was then possible. With their thought thus fettered in its fundamental process, a natural development, following every indication of truth to its legitimate conclusion, could not be looked for in the schoolmen. The most daring conclusion they could reach was to question whether the teaching of the church could be made good to the mind by any process of merely human reasoning. Uniformity of method, and futile distinctions or petrifying routine, were thus the inevitable outcome of the mediæval philosophy.

According to the statement of Victor Cousin, now generally accepted as true, the fundamental problem of scholasticism had its first suggestion in a remark of Porphyry (died 304) regarding the difficulty of settling the question whether genera and species have a real objective existence or are merely abstractions of the mind. Put in as simple language as its nature admits, the problem is this: Is there or is there not an objective reality corresponding to our general notion, say of man, horse, flower, &c.? Those who answered the question in the affirmative came to be known as realists, their opponents as nominalists. Trifling as the question may appear in itself, for the schoolmen it lay at the root of every attempt to render account to human reason of divinely revealed truth. An abstract question assumed vital importance when the discontents saw behind it the doctrines of the Trinity, the Incarnation, the Immaculate Conception, and the nature and existence of angels. It was especially in its bearing on the doctrine of the Trinity that the question of Nominalism versus Realism for more than four centuries exercised the acutest intellects the world has perhaps seen. It was the contention of the Realists that on the principle of Nominalism the doctrine of the Trinity was irrational and inconceivable. Grant, they argued, that our general notions have objective reality, then, just as from the totality of men we have an objective unity in the notion man, so from the Divine Trinity of Persons we can conceive a Divine Unity of Substance. On the other hand, if general notions be mere names, the doctrine of the Trinity in Unity is absurd on the face of it. Of the two theories it was Realism which had the approval of the church, and which was associated with the pious feeling of the middle ages. Till its final triumph in William of Ockham Nominalism had to fight for its existence against the main current of the religious and speculative tendency of the mediæval church. The history of scholasticism is in large degree the history of the varying fortunes of these two rival theories and their rival champions.

An event of the first importance divides this history into two periods so distinctly marked that they have come to be known as the periods of the earlier and the later scholasticism. This event was the introduction into the Christian schools through the medium of the Arabian commentators (chiefly Avicenna and Averrhoes) of the writings of Aristotle on natural science, metaphysics, and ethics. Till the beginning of the 13th century Aristotle had been known to the schoolmen only by his writings on logic. From the knowledge of Aristotle's complete work, therefore, they received an impulse which led the way to bolder speculation, and gave birth to questionings that stirred the deepest consciousness of the later middle age. On the one hand, the new Aristotle ministered to the intellectual want of the time in supplying the material it needed to exercise those faculties which had been so assiduously trained by Aristotle's own dialectic. But Aristotle was a pagan, and many points in his teaching ran counter to Christian doctrine. To give him that place in the schools which many now wished would be a standing menace to the authority of the church. From the first appearance of the new writings, therefore, Rome steadily set its face against the 'Grecian Doctor,' and in a succession of anathemas forbade certain parts of his writings to be used in the universities. In the relation of thinkers to Aristotle we have thus the distinction between the earlier and the later scholasticism. Of the first period the great names are Roscellinus, Anselm, William of Champeaux, Abelard, and Peter Lombard; of the second, Albertus Magnus, Alexander of Hales, Thomas Aquinas, Duns Scotus, William of Ockham, and Jean Gerson.

The name of Anselm (1033-1109) is chiefly remembered in connection with his attempt to prove the existence of God from the innate idea which he supposed to be common to all mankind. His place in the line of the schoolmen, however, is not due to this argument, famous as it is in the history of thought. It was in his controversy with his contemporary Roscellinus (born near Soissons about 1050) on the burning question of universals that he entered the peculiar domain of scholasticism. Though not the first to renew the old controversy, Roscellinus, by the notoriety which he gave to it, may be regarded as the founder of the scholastic philosophy. With a skill and success that alarmed the authorities of the church he argued for the theory of Nominalism, Anselm taking up the contrary position with equal subtlety and persistence. It proves the importance assigned to the question at issue that in 1092 a council held at Soissons condemned the teaching of Roscellinus as implicitly involving the negation of the doctrine of the Trinity. As Roscellinus was the founder of Nominalism, William of Champeaux (1070-1122), the head of a famous school of logic in Paris, was the founder of Realism. It was in refuting his teaching that his pupil Abelard (1079-1142) gained the first triumphs of his extraordinary career. In Abelard we have the boldest thinker and one of the most striking figures in the history of the middle ages. His celebrated pamphlet Sic et Non was a manifesto of rationalism, which sent a shudder through the conservatism of the time. Selecting 158 points of Christian doctrine he arrayed the opinions of the most revered authorities on each. Presented in this startling fashion, the opinions of St Paul, Augustine, Gregory, Jerome, Athanasius, and others were seen to be so essentially self-contradictory that no doctrine was left on which an intelligent believer could rest. On the main question of the schools he rejected the orthodox Realism, and adopted an eclectic theory which was neither Realism nor Nominalism, but a middle position between each. A thinker like Abelard striking at the very root of the Christian tradition could not in the reason of things be tolerated by the church; and by a great assembly at Sens in 1140, and afterwards at Rome, his writings were ordered to be burned and himself prohibited from teaching. But the spirit of Abelard was never completely exorcised during the subsequent centuries, and he has always been regarded as the brilliant precursor of the modern time. By his 'Four Books of Sentences' (i.e. right rules) Peter Lombard (c. 1100-60), a pupil of Abelard, came to hold a place in the history of scholasticism hardly second to any other thinker. The object of his book was to be the antidote of Sic et Non; and in a different spirit from Abelard the Lombard brought together the opinions of the Latin fathers Augustine, Ambrose, and Hilary, as also of Cassiodorus. To each article he annexed a series of 'Distinctions,' in which he sought to define more precisely the doctrine under considera- tion. Though conceived in a spirit of orthodoxy, the 'Sentences' did not escape the leaven of Abelard's scepticism. Regarded with suspicion on its first appearance, it yet became the great text-book of the universities to the close of the middle ages, and was itself made the subject of interminable commentaries by subsequent schoolmen.

In the second period of scholasticism larger interests and more various problems quickened the speculations of the successive thinkers. During the 13th and 14th centuries the rivalries of the two mendicant orders, the Dominicans and the Franciscans, divided the schools, and introduced a polemical element into philosophical discussion unknown in a similar degree to the earlier period. Generally the Franciscans, as the body of democratic origin, counted in their ranks the bolder thinkers among the schoolmen. Thus, Roger Bacon, Duns Scotus, William of Ockham were Franciscans, Albertus Magnus and Thomas Aquinas Dominicans. The new Aristotle was the battle-ground of the two rival camps of thinkers, and specially the Aristotelian doctrine of the soul. As that doctrine had been expounded by the Arabian commentator Averrhoes, it involved the negation of the Christian doctrine of the resurrection and of the immortality of the soul. It is mainly by their attitude towards Averrhoes that we distinguish the different tendencies of the schoolmen of the 13th and 14th centuries.

An eclectic in his view of universals, Albertus Magnus (1193-1280) accepted Aristotle through the commentator Avicenna in preference to Averrhoes. The task of the later schoolmen was to harmonise the newly-received teaching of Aristotle with the doctrines of the church, and Albert was the first to bring together the materials for the furthering of this end. To effect this harmony was the life's endeavour of the most constructive mind of all the schoolmen, Thomas Aquinas (c. 1226-74). In his Summa Theologiae Aquinas sought to supply a complete repertory of human thought on all subjects touching religion and philosophy, the fundamental principle of his work being that as faith and reason have two distinct spheres, neither can conflict with the other. On the subject of universals he was an eclectic like his master Albertus. Even Aquinas did not escape the charge of heresy, and through the efforts of the Franciscans his teaching on the nature of the soul was formally condemned by the church. Eventually, however, he came to hold the first place as the oracle of divine and human wisdom, so that a pope could say of him that 'the articles of Thomas were so many miracles.' What Aquinas was to the Dominicans Duns Scotus (c. 1265-1308) was to the Franciscans. Roger Bacon (c. 1214-94), also a Franciscan, holds a place apart from the other thinkers of the middle ages by his contempt for the studies of the schoolmen. The introduction into the western schools of what is known as the Byzantine logic by Petrus Hispanus (1226-77) is a turning-point in the history of the scholastic philosophy. Through its influence logic in the teaching of Duns Scotus and William of Ockham assumed an importance which had the most disastrous results on the entire scholastic system. With an acumen which gained for him the title of 'The Subtle Doctor,' Duns applied the new logic to the main position of Aquinas that reason and revelation are two distinct sources of knowledge, and sought to prove that there is, in truth, no knowledge apart from the Christian teaching. On the question of universals he shows all his subtlety, but his position is virtually that of Aquinas himself. It was in the hands of William of Ockham (c. 1270-1349), a pupil of Duns Scotus, that the scholastic philosophy assumed a form which speedily led to its disintegration. By his triumphant demonstration of the theory of Nominalism scholasticism ceased to have a reason for its existence, and the foundation was laid for that method of experiment and induction which was the outcome of the long travail of the schools of the middle ages. With Ockham closes the line of the great schoolmen; and of the thinkers who followed him Jean Gerson (1363-1429) alone deserves to be mentioned as one of the representative figures of the later scholasticism. In certain of the great universities, indeed, the scholastic methods continued to prevail long after a better way had been opened up for the freer development of the human spirit. In the university of Paris scholasticism held its place into the 17th century; and in Spain, till comparatively recent years, it was still the only philosophy that could be learned by her students. By the close of the 15th century, however, scholasticism was dead as a vital phase of human thought. In itself it was an exhausted movement, and the revival of antiquity and the religious reformation of the 16th century supplied a fresh stream of ideas, which opened up a larger scope of the possible development of humanity.

It was natural that the humanists and the reformers should do their utmost to discredit the system from which they were seeking to emancipate their contemporaries; and so effectually did they do their work that not till within recent years has scholasticism been thought worthy of a serious attempt to understand it. At present the tendency is to recognise in it for its own time and place a perfectly rational system, yielding healthy exercise to the best minds of the middle ages. The ridicule of the humanists is seen to be true only of its later phases. While, therefore, from the very conditions of its origin and growth, scholasticism was debarred from that free and direct questioning of things which is the distinctive characteristic of ancient and modern times, it nevertheless, as in Dante and Thomas Aquinas, produced certain types of thought and feeling which could have sprung from no other system, and for the absence of which the world would have been emphatically the poorer.

See Hauréau, Histoire de la Philosophie Scolastique; Milman, History of Latin Christianity; Hampden, Scholastic Philosophy (Bampton Lecture, 1848); Cousin, Ouvrages inédits d'Abélard; Prantl, Geschichte der Logik im Abendlande; Jourdain, Recherches Critiques sur l'Âge et l'Origine des Traductions Latines d'Aristote (1843); Renan, Averroës et l'Averroïsme; also, the various histories of philosophy by Lewes, Schwegler, Ueberweg, and others.