Geneva. A Dominican, stimulated to stricter asceticism by the demoralized condition of the Church and of society, he poured out his rebukes without stint, until the political and religious elements that were combined against him, effected his destruction.1 He had pro nounced the excommunication, which was issued against him by the flagitious Alexander VI., void, had declared that it was from the devil, and he had continued to preach against the papal prohibition. In prison he composed a tract upon the fifty-first psalm, in which he comes so near the Protestant views of justification, that Luther published it with a laudatory preface. Savonarola did not despair of the cause for which he laid down his life, but predicted a coming Reformation. IV. We turn now to another class of men who powerfully, though indirectly, paved the way for the Protestant Revolution- the Mystics.2 Mysticism had developed itself all through the scholastic period, in individuals of profound religious feeling, to whom the exclusively dialectical tendency was repugnant. Such men were St. Bernard, Bonaventura, and the school of St. Victor. Anselm himself, the father of the schoolmen, mingled with his logical habit a mystical vein, and this combination was in fact characteristic of the best of the scholastic theologians. But with the decline of scholasticism, partly as a cause and partly as an effect, mysticism assumed a more distinct shape. The characteristic of the mystics is the life of feeling; the preference of intuition to logic, the quest for knowledge through light imparted to feeling rather than by pro 1 For an example of his denunciation of the venality and other sins of the clergy, see Villari, ii. 80:"Vendono i benefizi, vendono i sacramenti, vendono le messe dei matrimonii, vendono ogni cosa," etc. 2 Upon the Mystics, besides Ullmann's work, Die Reformatoren vor der Reformation, and Neander, v. 380 seq., see C. Schmidt, Études sur le Mysticisme Allemand au XIV. siècle (1847); Helfferich, Die christl. Mystik (1842); Noack, Gsch. d. Mystik (1853); R. A. Vaughan, Hours with the Mystics (1856). cesses of the intellect; the indwelling of God in the soul, elevated to a holy calm by the consciousness of His presence; absolute self-renunciation and the absorption of the human will into the divine; the ecstatic mood. The theory of the mystic may easily slide into pantheism, where the union of the human spirit with the divine is resolved into the identification of the two. This tendency is perceptible in one class of the ante-Protestant mystics, of which Master Eckart is a prominent representative. He was Provincial of the Dominicans for Saxony; the scene of his labors was in the neighborhood of the Rhine, and he died about 1329. Affiliated societies calling themselves the Friends of God, although they formed no sect, grew up in the south and west of Germany and in the Netherlands. They made religion centre in a calm devoutness, in disinterested love to God and in labors of benevolence. It was in Cologne, Strasburg, and in other places in the neighborhood of the Rhine, that the preachers of this class chiefly flourished. Of them the most eminent is John Tauler (1290–1361), Doctor sublimis et illuminatus, as he was styled, a pupil of Eckart, but an opposer of pantheism and a preacher of evangelical fervor.2 To him Luther erroneously ascribed the little book which emanated from some member of this mystical school, called "The German Theology," a book which Luther published anew in 1516, and from which he said that, next to the Bible and St. Augustine, he had learned more than from any other book of what God, Christ, man, and all things are. The mystics were eagerly heard by thousands who yearned 1 On the nature of mysticism, see Ritter, Gsch. d. christl. Philosophie, iv. 626 seq. Ritter explains especially the ideas of Gerson. See also, Hase, Hutterus Redivivus. 2 C. Schmidt, Johannes Tauler von Strasburg (1841); Life of Tauler, with Twenty-five of his Sermons, translated from the German by Susanna Winkworth, to which are added a preface by Rev. C. Kingsley, and an introduction by Rev. R. D. Hitchcock, D. D. (New York, 1858). 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.” 2 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 "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, Essy on Macchiavelli. Essays, i. (New York, 1861). 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." "For now the old epic voices ring again, And vibrate with the heat and melody, Stirred by the warmth of old Ionian days. 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. |