THE REVIVAL OF LEARNING.

67

for a more vital kind of religion than the Church had afforded them. The "Imitation of Christ," by Thomas à Kempis, a work which has probably had a larger circulation than any other except the Bible, is a fine example of the characteristic spirit of the mystical school.1 The reformatory effect of the mystics was twofold: they weakened the influence of the scholastic system and called men away from a dogmatic religion to something more inward and spiritual; and their labors, likewise, tended to break up the excessive esteem of outward sacraments and ceremonies. Standing within the Church and making no quarrel with it, they were thus preparing the ground, especially in Germany, through the whole of the fourteenth century, for the Protestant reform. With these pioneers of reform, and not with men like Huss and Wickliffe, the religious training of Luther and his great movement have a direct historical connection.

V. An event of signal importance, as an indispensable prerequisite and means of a reformation in religion, was the revival of learning. This great intellectual change emanated from Italy as its fountain. During the Middle Ages, in the midst of prevailing darkness and disorder, Italy never wholly lost the traces of ancient civilization. "The night which descended upon her was the night of an Arctic summer. The dawn began to re-appear before the last reflection of the preceding sunset had faded from the horizon." The three great writers, Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio, introduced a new era of culture. To the long neglect which the classic authors had suffered, Dante refers, when he says of Virgil that he

2

"Seemed from long continued silence hoarse." 8

The mind of Italy more and more turned back upon

its

1 Upon the authorship of this work, see Gieseler, III. v. 4. § 146; Ullmann,

ii. 711 seq.; Schmidt in Herzog's Real-Encycl.

2 Macaulay, Essay on Macchiavelli. Essays, i. (New York, 1861).

8 Inf., i. 63. "Chi per lungo silenzio parea fioco."

ancient history and literature. The study of the Roman classics became a passion. No pains and no expense were spared in recovering manuscripts and in collecting libraries. Princes became the personal cultivators and profuse patrons of learning. The same zeal extended itself to Greek literature. The philosophers and poets of antiquity were once more read with delight in their own tongues. The capture of Constantinople by the Turks, in 1453, brought a throng of Greek scholars, with their invaluable literary treasures, to Italy, and gave a fresh impulse to the new studies. From Italy, the same literary spirit spread over the other countries of Europe. The humanities-grammar, rhetoric, poetry, eloquence, the classical authors attracted the attention of the

studious everywhere.

"Other futures stir the world's great heart,

Europe is come to her majority,

And enters on the vast inheritance

Won from the tombs of mighty ancestors,

The seeds, the gold, the gems, the silent harps

That lay deep buried with the memories of old renown."

This movement brought with it momentous consequences in the field of religion. It marked the advent of a new stage of culture, when the Church was no longer to be the sole instructor; when a wider horizon was to be opened to the human intellect—an effect analogous to that soon to be produced by the grand geographical discovery of a new hemisphere. Christianity was to come into contact with the products of the intellect of the an1 George Eliot's Spanish Gypsy, pp. 5, 6.

THE DOWNFALL OF SCHOLASTICISM.

69

cient nations, and to assimilate whatever might not be alien to its own nature.

For several hundred years the Scholastic philosophy and theology had reigned with an almost undisputed sway. When the Schoolmen arose with their methods of logical analysis and disputation, the old compilations or books of excerpts from the Fathers, out of which theology, for a number of centuries, had been studied, quickly became obsolete, and the adherents of the former method were utterly eclipsed by the attractiveness of the new science. Young men by thousands flocked after the new teachers. From about the middle of the eleventh century Scholasticism had been dominant. Nor was this era without fruit. As a discipline for the intellect of semi-civilized peoples; as a counterpoise to the tendencies to enthusiasm and superstition which were rife in the Middle Ages; as a means of reducing to a regular and tangible form the creed of the Church, so that it could be examined and judged, the scholastic training and the intellectual products of it were of high value.1 But the narrowness and other gross defects of the scholastic culture were laid bare by the incoming of the new studies. The barbarous style and the whole method of the Schoolmen became obnoxious and ridiculous in the eyes of the devotees of classical learning. The extravagant hair-splitting of Scotus and Durandus, when compared with the nobler method of the philosophers of antiquity, excited disdain. The works of Aristotle, which were now possessed in their own language, exposed blunders in the translation and interpretation of him, which brought disgrace upon the Schoolmen. Their ignorance of history, their uncritical habit, their overdrawn subtlety and endless wrangling, made them objects of derision; and as the Schoolmen had once supplanted the Compilers, so now the race of syllogistic reasoners were, in their turn, laughed off the stage by the new generation of classical scholars.

1 Gieseler, Dogmengeschichte, p. 472 seq.

But the fall of Scholasticism did not take place until it had run its course and lost its vitality. The essential principle of the Schoolmen was the correspondence of faith and reason; the characteristic aim was the vindication of the contents of faith, the articles of the creed, on grounds of reason. This continued to be the character of Scholasticism, although the successors of Anselm did not, like him, aspire to establish the positive truths of Christianity by arguments independent of revelation. "Fides quærit intellectum was ever the motto. There were individuals, as Abelard in the twelfth century, and Roger Bacon in the thirteenth, who seem restive under the yoke of authority, but who really differ from their contemporaries rather in the tone of their mind than in their theological tenets. Scholasticism, when it gave up the attempt to verify to the intelligence what faith received on the authority of the Church, confessed its own failure. This transition was made by Duns Scotus. It was Occam, the pupil of Scotus, by whom the change was consummated. He was the leading agent in reviving Nominalism. Although both Wickliffe and Huss were Realists, it was Nominalism that brought Scholasticism to an end. In giving only a subjective validity to general notions and to reasonings founded on them, in seeking to show that no settled conclusions can be reached on the path of rational inquiry and argument, and in leaving no other warrant for Church dogmas except that of authority, a foundation was laid for scepticism. The way was paved for the principle which found a distinct expression in the fifteenth century, that a thing may be true in theology and false in philosophy. Occam was a sturdy opponent of the temporal power of the popes, a defender of the independence of the civil authority as related to them. When he suggests propositions at variance with orthodoxy and argues for them, he saves himself from the imputation of heresy by professing an absolute submission

THE MULTIPLICATION OF BOOKS.

71 to authority; but it is difficult to believe these professions perfectly sincere. Nominalism necessarily tended to encourage, also, an empirical method, an attention to the facts of nature and of inner experience, in the room of the logical fabric which had been subverted. The scholastic philosophy, when it came to affirm the dissonance of reason and the creed, dug its own grave. It may be mentioned here that Luther in his youth was a diligent student of Occam. From Occam he derived defenses, as to another Nominalist, D'Ailly, he owed the suggestion, of his doctrine of the Lord's Supper.2

But other effects of a more positive character than the downfall of Scholasticism flowed from the renovation of learning. The Fathers were brought out of their obscurity, and their teachings might be compared with the dogmatic system which professed to be founded upon them, but which had really, in its passage through the mediæval period, taken on features wholly unknown to the patristic age. More than this, the Scriptures of the Old and New Testament, the primitive documents of the Christian religion, were brought forward in the original tongues, to serve as a touchstone by which the prevailing doctrinal and ecclesiastical system must be tested. The newly invented art of printing, an art which almost immediately attained a high degree of perfection, in connection with the hardly less important manufacture of paper from linen, stimulated, at the same time that it fed, the appetite for literature. It is evident that the freshly awakened thirst for knowledge, with the abundant means for gratifying it, must produce a wide-spread ferment. A

1 On Occam, see Baur, Dogmengeschichte, ii. 236 seq.; Dorner, Entwickelungsgsch, von der Person Christi, ii. 447 seq.; Ritter, Gsch. d. christl. Phil., iv. 574 seq.; Haureau, De la Phil. Scholastique, t. ii.; Herzog, Real-Enc. d. Theol. art. "Occam" and "Schol. Phil."

2 Rettberg, Occam und Luther, Studien u. Kritiken, 1831, 1. Dorner, ii. 607. "Diu multumque legit scripta Occam. Hujus acumen anteferebat Thomæ et Scoto." Melancthon, Vita Lutheri, v.