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certainly not in the Scholastics that the improvement occurred. Of some of the Scholastics we can only
say that they took every thing that was worst in Scholasticism and made it worse. They continued to
count the steps of logic; but every step of logic took them further from common sense. They forgot how
St. Thomas had started almost as an agnostic; and seemed resolved to leave nothing in heaven or hell
about which anybody could be agnostic. They were a sort of rabid rationalists, who would have left no
mysteries in the Faith at all. In the earliest Scholasticism there is something that strikes a modern as
fanciful and pedantic; but, properly understood, it has a fine spirit in its fancy. It is the spirit of freedom;
and especially the spirit of free will. Nothing seems more quaint, for instance, than the speculations
about what would have happened to every vegetable or animal or angel, if Eve had chosen not to eat the
fruit of the tree. But this was originally full of the thrill of choice; and the feeling that she might have
chosen otherwise. It was this detailed detective method that was followed, without the thrill of the
original detective story. The world was cumbered with countless tomes, proving by logic a thousand
things that can be known only to God. They developed all that was really sterile in Scholasticism, and
left for us all that is really fruitful in Thomism.
There are many historical explanations. There is the Black Death, which broke the back of the Middle
Ages; the consequent decline in clerical culture, which did so much to provoke the Reformation. But I
suspect that there was another cause also; which can only be stated by saying that the contemporary
fanatics, who controverted with Aquinas, left their own school behind them; and in a sense that school
triumphed after all. The really narrow Augustinians, the men who saw the Christian life only as the
narrow way, the men who could not even comprehend the great Dominican's exultation in the blaze of
Being, or the glory of God in all his creatures, the men who continued to insist feverishly on every text,
or even on every truth, that appeared pessimistic or paralysing, these gloomy Christians could not be
extirpated from Christendom; and they remained and waited for their chance. The narrow Augustinians,
the men who would have no science or reason or rational use of secular things, might have been defeated
in controversy, but they had an accumulated passion of conviction. There was an Augustinian monastery
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St. Thomas Aquinas
in the North where it was near to explosion.
Thomas Aquinas had struck his blow; but he had not entirely settled the Manichees. The Manichees are
not so easily settled; in the sense of settled forever. He had insured that the main outline of the
Christianity that has come down to us should be supernatural but not anti-natural; and should never be
darkened with a false spirituality to the oblivion of the Creator and the Christ who was made Man. But
as his tradition trailed away into less liberal or less creative habits of thought, and as his medieval
society fell away and decayed through other causes, the thing against which he had made war crept back
into Christendom. A certain spirit or element in the Christian religion, necessary and sometimes noble
but always needing to be balanced by more gentle and generous elements in the Faith, began once more
to strengthen, as the framework of Scholasticism stiffened or split. The Fear of the Lord, that is the
beginning of wisdom, and therefore belongs to the beginnings, and is felt in the first cold hours before
the dawn of civilisation; the power that comes out of the wilderness and rides on the whirlwind and
breaks the gods of stone; the power before which the eastern nations are prostrate like a pavement; the
power before which the primitive prophets run naked and shouting, at once proclaiming and escaping
from their god; the fear that is rightly rooted in the beginnings of every religion true or false: the fear of
the Lord, that is the beginning of wisdom; but not the end.
It is often remarked as showing the ironical indifference of rulers to revolutions, and especially the
frivolity of those who are called the Pagan Popes of the Renaissance, in their attitude to the Reformation,
that when the Pope first heard of the first movements of Protestantism, which had started in Germany, he
only said in an offhand manner that it was "some quarrel of monks." Every Pope of course was
accustomed to quarrels among the monastic orders; but it has always been noted as a strange and almost
uncanny negligence that he could see no more than this in the beginnings of the great sixteenth century
schism. And yet, in a somewhat more recondite sense, there is something to be said for what he has been
blamed for saying. In one sense, the schismatics had a sort of spiritual ancestry even in mediaeval times.
It will be found earlier in this book; and it was a quarrel of monks. We have seen how the great name of
Augustine, a name never mentioned by Aquinas without respect but often mentioned without agreement
covered an Augustinian school of thought naturally lingering longest in the Augustinian Order. The
difference, like every difference between Catholics, was only a difference of emphasis. The
Augustinians stressed the idea of the impotence of man before God, the omniscience of God about the
destiny of man, the need for holy fear and the humiliation of intellectual pride, more than the opposite
and corresponding truths of free will or human dignity or good works. In this they did in a sense
continue the distinctive note of St. Augustine, who is even now regarded as relatively the determinist
doctor of the Church. But there is emphasis and emphasis; and a time was coming when emphasising the [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]