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WITH the death of Philip the Fair, in the autumn of 1314, the assault
of the French monarchy on the papal claims came to a sudden end. The
regime of co-operation between the two powers was resumed, if not in
all the friendliness of former days, at any rate with an equal
practical effectiveness; the peace, such as it was, would not be broken
until the very eve of the Reformation, two hundred years later. "Such
as it was", for not only had the issue between Boniface VIII and Philip
not been decided, despite the surrenders of Clement V -- so that it
remained a possible source of further disaster through all those two
centuries -- but there was a permanent memorial of the controversy in
the literature circulated by both parties during the fatal years. The
issue was practical, it was important, it was urgent -- and it has
never ceased to be so. "The pope's imperative intervention in French
affairs was not anything merely arbitrary and suddenly thought up, that
can be explained by the pope's ambition, or excused by the king's
tyranny. It was bound up with a body of teaching, with the supremacy of
the spiritual power as the Middle Ages had known and practised it, a
supremacy in which the Church still saw a lawful and necessary function
of the mission she held from God." [ ]
Both king and pope realised fully that the fight was no mere clash of
personal temperaments. That the temperamental weaknesses -- and worse
-- of the contending potentates had their influence on the course of
the struggle is evidently true, but these were not its most important
elements; they can, by comparison, be disregarded in a study of the
fight and its consequences, as we can disregard the slander and
invective of the controversialists. But the controversialists dealt
also with other things than slanders: on both sides, theories were set
out and defended, and the best writing of this sort was carefully
preserved, armament for future like conflicts, and -- this is true of
the anti-papal works at least -- carefully translated into French, so
that others besides the priest and the legist could see how right it
was for the king to challenge the pope. [ ] As this literature remained
and grew, in the course of two hundred years, to become a formidable
menace to Catholic unity, something more must be said of it and of how
the "grand differand" between Boniface and Philip continued to poison
Catholic life for generations after them. [ ]
With this in mind we may go on to note the attitude of the writers on
the papal side as an affirmative answer to the question "Did Our Lord
mean the Pope to be the Lord of the World?" This answer meant, in
practice, that the Church's mission towards the state included "not
only the consecration of kings, but also the verification of their
title, and the control of their administration. . . the right and power
to judge and correct their conduct [i.e. as rulers], to invalidate
their acts and, in extreme cases, to pronounce their deposition." [ ]
Kings, of course, did their best to escape the exercise of such powers
and, as they grew more literate, they began to raise doubts whether
they were indeed lawful powers. So Frederick II, in 1245, had denounced
his excommunication as "a misuse of priestly authority"; and he had
gone on to declare to the princes of Europe that "nowhere do we read
that by any law, divine or human, has power been given to the pope to
punish kings by depriving them of their kingdoms, or to pass judgment
on princes." Such a situation would be ridiculous, said Frederick, "the
claim that he who as emperor is loosed from all laws is yet himself
subject to law." [ ]
The emperor here is evidently setting up the law of ancient Rome
against what the pope claims of him as a disciple of Christ; but his
contention is also a reminder of another factor of the struggle that
must be ever before the mind of those who perhaps stand amazed at the
immensity of the papal claim. This is the fact that nowhere, in these
centuries, is it a question of conflict between the papal claims and
some royal scheme of a balanced distribution of royal and
ecclesiastical jurisdiction. From the moment when these fights first
began in the time of St. Gregory VII (1073-1085) was always between two
claims tobe absolute. These popes who, reforming the Church, slowly
drew Christendom back from the depths, found their greatest obstacle in
the actually existing, all-embracing, imperial and royal absolutism
which had all but merged the Church in the state. If the pope was not
to be all, [ ] then the king would be all; the pope must be all, or the
Church would be nothing. The alternative before Christendom was the
supremacy of the Church over the state, or else Caesar, to all intents
and purposes, the pope. The popes, with remarkable faith -- and courage
-- did not shrink from choosing; they dutifully climbed the heights and
thence proceeded to judge the world.
Did our Lord mean the pope to be the Lord of the World in this sense?
Canonists, by the time of Boniface VIII, had been saying so for a long
time, and saying it in such a way that they seemed to claim still more.
Hostiensis [ ] for example who died in 1271, one of the greatest of all
the eyes of his contemporaries, declared that it is the pope who is the
true source of all the state's authority; and that the state, indeed,
in all its actions, is really deputising for the pope; the emperor is
no more than the pope's vicar for temporal affairs. For there can only
be one Lord of the World, namely Christ, Our Lord; and the pope alone
is Christ's vicar, Who "committed all things to Peter", giving him not
a key, but the keys; "two keys" says the cardinal, by which are
signified the two fields of papal supremacy, to wit, the spiritual and
the temporal. And this strong doctrine is no more than a reflection of
what an equally eminent master in the law had proclaimed to all
Christendom when, having become pope, he was engaged in a life and
death struggle against the absolutist schemes of Frederick II. This was
Innocent IV (1243-1254) [ ] and against the emperor's claim to
incorporate the Church into the State, this canonist pope set up his
own, "We exercise the general authority in this world of Him who is the
King of Kings, who has granted to the prince of the apostles and to us
a plenitude of power to bind as well as to loose upon earth, not only
all persons, but all things whatsoever." We have seen Frederick's
scornful comment on this language. But the emperor's rejoinder was as
barren, apparently, as his military genius or political power. The
pope, in this particular conflict, was victorious and his high
conception of papal duties and powers seemed more firmly established
than ever.
When, fifty years later, the papacy, in the person of Boniface VIII,
next called up for judgment a powerful ruler, the spirit and tone of
the intervention was, if possible, more "Innocentian" than Innocent IV
himself ! but this time the royal rejoinder was far indeed from
fruitless. And Christendom saw the popes suddenly compelled to lower
their tone: the contrast between the actions (and the language) of
Boniface VIII and Clement V, less than ten years later, was something
to marvel at. Phaethon, it would seem, had fallen from his car. And,
whatever the rights of the question, the rebel responsible for the
catastrophe had not only gone unpunished, but had been lauded by the
victim for his good intentions. Here, surely, was mischief indeed,
grave scandal in the most literal sense. The crisis had produced a
stumbling block for Catholics over which many would continue to trip
until the Catholic state disappeared from the political world.
For Philip the Fair's challenge, whether the popes really possessed
such authority, was now set before the mind of Catholic Europe so
forcibly and so clearly, that the debate about it never really ceased
thereafter. In the two hundred years and more during which that
authority had been claimed, exercised and generally acknowledged, it
had come to be one of the fundamentals of the Christian political
system, of the Christian-religion-inspired civilisation of Western
Europe. Revolt here was revolt indeed, and when, from such a revolt,
the Church failed to emerge victorious and able to punish the rebel,
its prestige suffered a defeat that was irreparable. Never again does
the Church dominate the conflict from above; henceforth the popes too,
are in the arena, and if the high papal tone persists (as naturally it
does, for the popes do not immediately understand that the former
things have passed away) it serves as an additional aggravation to the
world. Gradually the popes came to abandon this position so long
defended by the great medieval canonists, this theory which had been
the Church's defence against the all-invading state; and it may be well
if, to avoid confusion, and the better to understand the tragedy which
accompanied the slow changeover, we remind ourselves what was really --
in the mind of the popes -- the nature of the power they had claimed,
and the kind of arguments by which they had defended it. " It was in
its source an authority that was spiritual, and it made no claim,
therefore, to absorb the authority of the state; but it was a power
that extended to the furthest boundaries of the moral order, and which,
as an inevitable consequence of this, included the right to survey the
conduct of rulers and to call them to account for their behaviour as
such, to correct them, to pass sentence on them if they were at fault,
and even to depose those who prove recalcitrant." [ ] The popes never
claim that they may administer France or Spain as though it were their
own Italian Papal State. But they do claim authority to correct the
rulers of these lands for sins committed in ruling, as they correct all
other delinquencies in the flock placed under their charge; and they
claim the right to correct rulers in a particular way, by
excommunicating them and declaring them to have forfeited the right to
rule. Boniface VIII's bull Unam Sanctam is nothing more than an
official statement of this theory and claim.
What of the standing of this papal claim to punish kings by deposition?
Whether it be true or not it " has never, in any way, been proposed as
a doctrine of the Church; but, nevertheless, it certainly won the
assent of many popes, and, in an especially grave moment of history, it
coloured the traditional background of the papal claims, namely in the
solemn document that expresses the distinctive views of Boniface VIII."
[ ] Perhaps it is here, in the association of a theory peculiar to a
particular age with a definition of general Catholic duty, that we must
look for the source of the most serious part of the ensuing and
mischievous misunderstanding. What was really defeated may indeed have
been no more than a "personal system", that is to say, a theory and
policy really " personal " to a succession of popes, but hitherto
everywhere taken for granted. But this "personal system" had now been
defeated and defied at a moment when it was set out in the closest
association with a solemn definition of essential Catholic duty. If the
one was defied the other could not but appear compromised. Henceforth
the first was always on the defensive and acceptance of the second
might suffer accordingly.
The debate between the canonists and legists had, then, revealed the
whole deep chasm that separated these antagonistic views of public
life. It had also produced that third theory from which the ultimate
true solution was one day to be developed, and had thereby thrown into
high relief the deficiencies in the canonists' argumentation and the
exaggerations in the claims they made. These exaggerations produced,
naturally enough, an exaggerated reaction that carried the canonists'
lay opponents to a denial of papal prerogatives and rights (in
spiritual matters).that were beyond all question. It is, for example,
from this time that the appeals from the pope to a General Council
first begin to appear with anything like frequency, a new tendency that
grows steadily through the next sixty years, and which the opportune
disaster of the Schism [ ] then so fosters that, at the Council of
Constance, an effort is actually made to give this abuse force of law.
[ ] Again, the canonists have quoted Scripture in support of their
assertions, but Scripture understood metaphorically. For example, two
actual swords had once been brought to Our Lord by the Apostles for his
defence: [ ] the canonists had read the act allegorically, and used
that allegory to justify a theory. Now, a critical attack was made on
this method of using Scripture -- an attack which could be supported by
the new, clear, strong teaching of St. Thomas Aquinas, that arguments
about doctrine can only be based on the literal sense of the sacred
text. [ ] Once this mentality developed, a whole host of arguments,
classic with the canonists for two centuries and more, would simply
disappear overnight. [ ] And much else would disappear too -- the
prestige of the theological scholar, for example, with that new
educated lay world which is the peculiar distinction of this fourteenth
century, the age where the greatest figures among orthodox scholars are
Dante and Petrarch, and where no cleric writing theology attains to
eminence and yet manages to keep entirely orthodox.
The latest historian to study the conflict of ideas that underlay the
crisis, analyses the works of some seventeen polemists. [ ] There are,
first of all, the antagonists who set out and defend the rival
theories: on the papal side two Augustinian friars, Giles of Rome [ ]
and James of Viterbo [ ]; on the king's side the authors of the
treatises called A Dialogue between a Cleric and a Knight and Rex
Pacificus. Next there is a group of nine writers whose aim is to find
some middle way in which to reconcile the rival jurisdictions. Working
from the papal side towards this are the Dominican John of Paris and
the authors of the gloss on the bull Unam Sanctam, and the treatise
called Quaestio in Utramque Partem: on the other side are six writers
the best known of whom is Dante? whose De Monarchia here comes under
consideration. Finally, there are considered four "practical" schemes.
It is hardly possible in a work of this kind to attempt anything more
than to list all these, and to refer those interested to the long
analysis of them (180 pages) in Riviere's authoritative work. But
something must be said of John of Paris -- as a critic of the papal
apologists -- for it was with his theory that the future lay; nor can
Dante be merely mentioned.
What the canonists held about the relation of the pope to Catholic
princes, considered as princes, has already been described. In the
controversies of 1296-1303 the two great theologians, Giles of Rome and
James of Viterbo, Augustinian friars both, strove to give these
theories a still greater prestige. The temporal ruler, they held, was
strictly subjected to the spiritual ruler; the pope, because the vicar
of Christ, was the source of all law and of all earthly power and
authority; the governmental action of pnnces was subject to the pope's
control; and these themes were, for Giles of Rome and James of Viterbo
[ ], part and parcel of the Catholic faith. It is the first merit of
John of Paris that, in the very hour when this inconveniently
favourable apologetic was born, he provided the needed theological
criticism.
The work in which the Dominican thus corrects the Augustinian -- Kingly
Power and Papal Power [ ] -- was written apparently in 1302, just
before the publication of the Unam Sanctam. Its author is not a
partisan, but well aware of the controversy -- as a lecturer in the
University of Paris could not but be aware of it; but he explicitly
detaches himself from the rival schools of thought, and sets himself to
the search for a via media. With all due submission he makes his own
analysis and he sets out his ideas as a hypothesis.
In his view there is not -- as the Waldenses continue to say -- any
inconsistency between the true Idea of the Church of Christ and a
concern with power in temporal matters. Nor -- as the theologians he
criticises assert -- is the Church's power in temporal matters a
consequence of its spiritual authority. It does not follow that because
the Church possesses authority over men in spiritual matters that it
also possesses authority over them in temporal matters -- an authority
which it allows the state to exercise as its vicar. Wherever the Church
does in fact enjoy authority in temporal matters, this is the outcome
of some grant made by the State "out of devotion". The two entities
Church and State -- though unequal in dignity -- are co- ordinate in
the exercise of authority. Both originate in the divine plan. The State
derives its authority from God no less really than does the Church. The
spiritual power is indeed the superior of the two, but it is not
superior in everything. The pope, though truly Vicar of Christ by
Christ's appointment, is not in fact heir to the totality of Our Lord's
universal royalty over men and kings. In its own order the State is,
under God, sovereign.
Has the spiritual power, then, no authority to regulate the temporal?
It has indeed; for the purpose of the spiritual power is a higher thing
than the purpose of the temporal, and the lower purpose is subordinate
to, and for the sake of, the higher. But -- and here again lies the
really great importance of John of Paris -- the Dominican insists that
the pope is to exercise this control by instructing the conscience of
the prince, and, if the prince fails, by administering correction that
is spiritual. The pope instructs the prince, he says, de fide and not
de regimine; [ ] the only instrument of the Church's empire over the
prince is its charisma to instruct the Christian mind in things of
faith and morals, and its moral authority over the Christian
conscience. [ ]
The presence of the great name of Dante among the parties to this
discussion, is a useful reminder that the quarrel’s importance was by
no means merely French. [ ] Again, while Dante is a layman, he is a
layman who is not a legist; and, like John of Paris, he has no official
locus standi in the quarrel. He is moreover a layman who, in refuting
the papal thesis as the canonists propound it, makes use of their own
chosen method of argument, and uses this to deny the validity of their
use of Scripture. All this is extremely interesting; we have here one
of the first appearances of the private lay citizen in the public life
of the Church. And he appears as not only a most orthodox believer, an
undoubted "good Catholic", but as the author of a theologico-political
treatise directed against currently accepted ecclesiastical theories,
and written to promote the revolution that will save the Church's soul.
Nevertheless Dante is to be classed with John of Paris; for he, too, is
looking for the via media. This has not, indeed, always been clear to
the readers of his treatise De Monarchia. [ ] The general theme of that
well-known book is that a universal monarchy is essential if
civilisation is to survive and humanity to make lasting progress.
Dante's arguments in proof of this build up a conception of monarchy so
high that only when a saint was the monarch would the system really
work: or so we might think as we read. But for Dante that ideal
monarchy was actually in existence. It was the Holy Roman Empire of the
German nation, and all that was needed for the millennium to arrive was
to convince the world of the duty of all princes to accept the
emperor's superiority. The greatest hindrance was nationalism, and for
nationalism -- "the nations that so furiously rage together, the
peoples that imagine a vain thing" [ ] -- Dante has strong,
religiously-phrased condemnation. How shall the universal monarch
accord with the universal pope? In the first place, he is politically
independent of the pope; and Dante, attacking, not indeed the papacy,
but the canonists who have devised the theory of the papacy's supreme
political authority, systematically reviews -- and denies -- all the "
spiritual" proofs these are wont to adduce: proofs from the sun and
moon, the two swords, Saul’s deposition by Samuel, Our Lord's promise
to St. Peter, all this is rejected as beside the point.
So far there is nothing to distinguish Dante's thought from that of
other contemporary writers -- not even the almost religious tone of his
language about the empire is personal to him. It is in the closing
chapter of the third book that he makes his own contribution, and that
very briefly. If the empire is independent of the Church -- and since
it existed before the Church this must be so -- and if the Church's
power is wholly spiritual, then the emperor's authority derives
immediately from God. The electors merely indicate the man who shall
lawfully wield this power. But the emperor yet remains in some way
subject to the pope "since mortal happiness is in some way established
with a view to immortal happiness." [ ] What is this way? and what, in
hard detail, does this relation involve, for both pope and emperor?
Dante does not tell us. But he says that the emperor receives from the
pope "that light of grace by which he may rule more virtuously"; and he
lays it down that the emperor shall act towards the pope "as a
first-born towards his father, so that radiating the light of the
father's grace, he may the more virtuously shine in all that world over
which he has been set by Him Who alone is governor of all things
spiritual and temporal."
This, it may be thought, is little enough and disappointing in its
generality. Yet it is a statement of principle. Dante conceives the
State as politically independent of the Church, and yet the temporal
power as subordinate to the spiritual; and he conceives it as possible
that these two realities -- independent, and yet the one subordinate to
the other -- can so co- exist. And it is on this note that the treatise
ends.
This, it is true, is not the aspect of Dante's political thought that
has chiefly attracted attention. What has been chiefly regarded is his
idealistic exaltation of the empire and his protest against the
medieval claim that the popes enjoyed, as popes, a primacy in political
matters; and his championship of the State's independence of such
ecclesiastical tutelage. In his own time also it was this which made
the great impression and Dante's De Monarchia suffered the reception
which received opinion inevitably gives to the pioneer! When, after his
death, during the war between the popes and the schismatic emperor
Lewis of Bavaria, these themes again became practical politics, there
was even for a moment the danger that Dante's bones would be digged up
and burnt as those of a heretic! [ ]
It cannot but be reckoned as a great misfortune -- even if perhaps an
inevitable misfortune, given that human nature influences scholars too
-- that, despite these artificers of the via media between the
contending absolutisms, it was the extreme theories of the canonists,
given theological form by the genius of Giles of Rome, which continued
to shape the mind of the papal champions; and that these theories
maintained their hold all through the next most difficult centuries,
through the time of the Schism and the Conciliar controversies, and the
Reformation, until the great spirit of St. Robert Bellarmine restated
and determined the issue. The great Jesuit doctor recognised John of
Paris as a distant ancestor of his own thought; and a modern, somewhat
disgusted, commentator -- a very great scholar indeed -- has presented
Dante as being not much better than Bellarmine. It is always a loss to
base a good case on poor argument -- and that was the loss which
champions of the papacy, often enough, suffered in those centuries. It
was an additional loss that, by their proscription of the theorists of
the middle way, the writings of this school passed into the armoury of
the enemy, and the obiter dicta of John of Paris (for example) became
the foundation of more than one useful plaidoyer for Gallicanism. [ ]
ii. The Problem of Faith and Reason
One of the most serious consequences of the duel between Pope Boniface
and the French king was, then, something quite unpredictable; namely,
that a considerable body of Catholic thought was now permanently
roused, not indeed, as yet, against any Catholic doctrine about the
papacy, but against a principle of administration which, for
generations, had been almost as sacred as doctrine, a principle with
which the prestige of the papacy was most intimately linked. Here, for
the future, there was a great division in Catholic thought. And,
unfortunately, it was not the only division. Already, only fifty years
after the death of St. Thomas Aquinas, Christendom was beginning to
suffer from the failure of its thinkers to rally to his thought, and
most of all from their failure to accept its supreme practical
achievement, the harmony he discerned between the spheres of knowledge
naturally known and of that which we know supernaturally, the true
character of the relations between reason and faith. The story of
philosophy among Catholics in these fifty years is, in that respect,
one of steady deterioration. Already, by the time John XXII canonised
St. Thomas (1323), the work was well begun that was to sterilise the
movement which was the glory of the previous century, to dislocate the
teaching in the theological schools (not the faith of the theologians
indeed, as yet, but their scientific exposition of it), to destroy the
theologians' confidence in philosophy and the pious man's confidence in
the theologians, and to leave the ordinary man, in the end, "'fed up'
with the whole business" [ ] of speculative theology.
What is the end of a society that ceases to have any use for thought,
or any confidence that thought can produce certitude? Pessimism surely
and despair, a flight to the material in compensation, or else to a
wrong -- because unintelligent -- cultivation of the mystical life of
devotion, to superstition thereby and to worse. For to this must
devotion come once it disinterests itself from that explanation of
revealed truth which true theology is, and once the mystic is tainted
with the fatal error that considers theology as mere scholarship, the
professional occupation of the theologian, whereas it is an essential
condition of healthy Catholic life; and for the mystic, especially, is
it important that theology should flourish and good theologians abound,
for in the guidance which objective theology supplies lies the mystic's
sole certainty of escaping self-illusion.
All of these calamities were to develop in time. Not all of them came
at once, nor within a few years. But it is now that the seeds of much
lasting disaster are sown, through the new philosophical theories of
leading Catholic thinkers. The two greatest names associated with this
movement away from the positions of St. Thomas Aquinas are John Duns
Scotus and William of Ockham, Franciscans both of them, and teachers of
theology at Oxford.
Before we consider how they came to build up their new critical
theories of knowledge, let us note, what we cannot too much insist
upon, namely, that the problem which all these thinkers were trying to
solve, about the nature of faith and of reason, and about the relations
between the two, is one of the permanent practical anxieties of
mankind. Upon all men, sooner or later, the hard experiences of life
force the issue. Are the relations between faith and reason such that a
reasonable man can continue to have faith without suppressing, or
ignoring, the activities of his reason? Here is the difficulty from the
side of the philosopher. Is theology -- the body of knowledge whose
first principles are truths known by God's revelation -- really a
science? i.e. is it a matter fit for, and capable of, scientific
treatment? Is it really a field for the exercise of the reason? Or is
not philosophy (where the reason has the field to itself), the exercise
of the natural reason, a thing to be feared by theology, the sphere of
the natural reason being so separated from the sphere of revealed
truths that the introduction of reason into this last cannot but be as
harmful as it is, scientifically, illegitimate? Here is the dilemma
from the side of the theologian.
St. Thomas had so understood faith and reason that he was able to
explain how, of their own nature, they are harmonious; they are means
of knowledge independent, indeed, the one of the other, but not
antagonistic; they are productive of distinct spheres of knowledge, but
spheres which are yet in contact, so that man's intelligence can
thereby be satisfied that to believe is reasonable, and be satisfied
also that faith is not a mere vicious circle in the mind.
This teaching of St. Thomas left man's mind at peace with itself. Man
was delivered from doubts about his power to know with certitude
natural reality external to himself; he was certain that he could know
with certainty, by the use of his reasoning intelligence, not only
facts but also general truths of the natural order. Beyond this sphere
of the natural truths lay that other sphere of truths, about God as
man's final destiny, unattainable by the merely finite, reasonable
intelligence. Many of these other truths had been made known to man --
revealed -- by God, and these truths man also could know with
certainty, through his belief in the divine veracity and his knowledge
that God had revealed them. Between these two ways of knowing -- by
reasoning out the truth from truths already known, and by acceptance of
the word of God revealing truths - - there was no conflict; nor was
there any conflict between what was known in the one sphere and in the
other; there could not, from the nature of things, be any such
conflict. And the two spheres were connected and interrelated, so that
man's reasoning intelligence could make with the sphere of faith that
contact without which man could never be satisfied, and at rest, about
the reality of belief, in that intellectual part of his soul whose
activity is the very foundation of all his life and happiness. The
means of this contact, the delicate all-important nexus, the medium of
the thinker's hold on the fact of that higher sphere's existence, was
reason's power to arrive, by its own natural operations, at the sure
knowledge that there is a God Who is the cause of all else that exists,
and at an equally sure knowledge about several of the divine
attributes.
Such a theory as this, about faith and reason and their interrelation,
is an evident aid for philosopher and theologian alike. It is even a
necessity, if philosophy is not to degenerate into scepticism or if
theology is not to become a mere psittacism. It guarantees the
integrity of both the sciences and the right of each to use the
methodology natural to it. The philosopher is saved from the temptation
to infidelity, and the theologian from reliance on rhetoric and
emotion. Now it was the unfortunate effect of the great thinkers who
followed St. Thomas that their theories of knowledge destroyed the all-
important nexus between the spheres of reason and faith, when they
denied the power of reason really to prove the existence of God.
John Duns Scotus and William of Ockham were, both of them, Franciscan
friars; they were Englishmen, and they taught theology, the one after
the other, in the university of Oxford. We are now assisting at the
very early appearance of what has been a recurring phenomenon of
history -- the confection in England of revolutionary doctrines fated
to pass across the Channel and to be productive, in the different
mental climate of the Continent, of really significant upheavals. The
University of Oxford had, from the beginning, very marked particular
characteristics. While Paris was, and continued to be, the first home
of pure speculation, the philosophers at Oxford, from the beginning,
were particularly attracted to the study of the physical universe. To
one of the earliest of these Oxford teachers, Robert Grosstete. we owe
a whole corpus of thought related to the theory of light. With another,
Adam Marsh, it is mathematics that colour his speculation. And the
pupil of these two doctors was the still greater physicist Roger Bacon.
[ ]
Roger Bacon, too, was a Franciscan, and, like all the thinkers of his
time, he was first of all a theologian. It is theology which is the
mistress-science, but philosophy is needed if theology is to be
explained. Bacon -- like his great contemporary, and superior, St.
Bonaventure, Minister-General of the Franciscan order -- holds that a
divine illumination of the mind is the beginning of all knowledge. He
explains how all knowledge, of natural things as well as of what is
sacred, has descended to us through the ages from a first divine
revelation. The Hebrew prophets and the Greek philosophers played
similar roles in the divine plan. The philosophers were the successors
of the prophets, they were themselves prophets. Nay, Roger Bacon is a
prophet too, and conducts himself as such, whence doubtless not a
little of the sufferings he had to endure from his brethren. He is a
fierce critic of all his contemporaries of the university world, and no
less fiercely he contests the prestige allowed the teachings of the
great men of the past. Aristotle, unexamined, is a superstition; the
only way to certain progress in knowledge is to return to the actual
sources, and to make experiments. [ ] Knowledge of the ancient
languages then -- no one should rely on translations -- of mathematics
[ ] and physics, and the capacity and habit of experiments; these are
the first things necessary in the formation of the true philosopher.
There is no natural certainty to equal the certainty produced by
experiment; indeed, by all internal and spiritual experiment we may
come to the highest flights of the mystical life. The use of
experimental method will reveal in time all the secrets of the world's
natural forces. The Church ought to foster such researches. Their
fruits will be invaluable to the Crusaders, for example, and also in
the approaching struggle with Antichrist that is at hand: for this
hard-headed critic of the superstition of Aristotle-worship was, in
many things, a fiercely faithful believer in the fantasies of Abbot
Joachim.
By the time Duns Scotus came to Oxford as a student [ ] his confrere,
Roger Bacon, was nearing the end of his very long life. The university
was still filled with the disputes caused by the Franciscan criticism
that the differences which characterised St. Thomas's philosophy were
not orthodox. [ ] The Dominican criticism of that philosophy, of which
also Oxford had seen a great deal, had been ended, in 1287, by the
instruction of the General Chapter of the order that the brethren were
to follow St. Thomas's teaching. But with the saint's chief Franciscan
opponent, the passionate John Peckham, still Archbishop of Canterbury,
his teaching was hardly likely to be favourably regarded at the English
university.
John Duns Scotus, indeed, was well acquainted with it, and in two ways
he shows himself a kind of product of the Thomist revolution. For
Scotus is an Aristotelian, breaking away and taking the schools of his
order with him, from the Augustinian theories dear to St. Bonaventure;
and he is so preoccupied with St. Thomas that his own major work is a
kind of critical commentary on the saint's achievement.
It is an erroneous and very superficial view that sees in Scotus a
conscious revolutionary, a turbulent Franciscan set on to vindicate the
intellectual superiority of his order against the Dominican rivals.
Duns Scotus has all the calm and the modesty and the detachment of the
theologian who daily lives the great truths of which he treats. Always
it is to the judgment of the Church that he submits his proferred
solutions; the spirit in which he presents his teaching could not be
more Catholic, more traditional. But it is not with the great
Franciscan as a theologian that we are now concerned, but with his
philosophical teaching, more particularly with his theories of
knowledge and what follows from them.
More than any other of the scholastics Scotus is preoccupied with the
problems of logic. It is not surprising that so studying logic in the
scientific and mathematical-minded university of Oxford, and in the
order that was the especial home of these studies, Scotus was most
exigent in his idea of what is needed to make a proof that is really
conclusive. We can argue to the existence of things either from their
causes, or from their effects. The first kind of proof is the better,
St. Thomas would say -- when we can get it; the second kind, though
inferior, is yet conclusive and so useful. But for Scotus, only the
first kind is really a proof.
And so there disappears a whole celebrated series of proofs from reason
of the existence of God: and with them go the rational proofs of the
providence of God, and of the immortality of the human soul. The human
reason cannot, by its own powers -- it is now said -- arrive at
certitude here. These are truths indeed, but truths only to be known by
faith. Theology is their true home, the learning which deals with
truths rationally unprovable. So, then, there disappears that middle
ground where philosophy and theology meet, the all-important nexus
between natural and supernatural know] edge; and there disappears with
it the notion that philosophy and theology have it in common to give to
man speculative knowledge: for theology is now rather a source of
practical direction for life than a science. Philosophy and theology
are no longer in contact. The day will come when they are conceived as
necessarily opposed. [ ]
Duns Scotus also moves away from St. Thomas, and again by what at first
sight may seem only a nuance of method, in that his philosophy makes
its first contact with God not in answering the question, Whether God
exists? but this, Whether there exists a Being who is infinite? The
truth of God's infinity is, in fact, central for Scotus: it is for him
God's "essential" attribute. [ ] And in association with this
characteristic approach there is to be noted the place the Franciscan
gives to the divine will. It is here, so he teaches, and not in the
divine intelligence, that the cause of things being what they are is to
be sought. A thing is good because God has willed it as it is. Had God
willed it to be otherwise, then it would equally have been good. Law is
right in so far as law is acceptable to God. From the point of view of
St. Thomas, this is a topsy-turvy way of regarding the matter: and in
its ultimate logical consequences it is, of course, far more serious
than that. Those consequences will in the next two hundred years be
worked out to the full.
Scotus, it may be thought, had a different kind of mind from that of
the great Dominican. His tendency to develop his thought through an
analysis of ideas already known, and to rely on such analysis as the
only way, are in great contrast to the versatility of St. Thomas. But
in this chapter we are merely considering the Franciscan doctor as the
first in time of the thinkers whose critique of the
philosophico-theological synthesis of St. Thomas did so much to prevent
the general acceptance in the Catholic schools of that metaphysical
teaching which later generations of Catholics have seen as a conditio
sine qua non of sound theology. [ ] To know Scotus in this role alone
is, of course, to know him barely at all. His theological teaching was
to form the piety of his order for centuries, under the active
patronage of many popes, and especially was it to be the inspiration of
the three great saints who revived the order in the dark days that
followed the Schism, St. Bernadine of Siena, St. John Capistran and St.
James of the March. The teaching of Duns Scotus on the Incarnation, and
the spirituality which flowers everywhere in it, are one of the
permanent treasures of Catholic thought. Most famously of all, Scotus
is the first great doctor to set out, as we know it to-day, the mystery
of Our Lady's Immaculate Conception and in one office for the feast
Duns Scotus is described as another St. Cyril, raised up to defend this
doctrine as St. Cyril was raised up to defend that of the divine
maternity.
John Duns Scotus was a holy man, venerated as a saint. and perhaps one
day to be officially recognised as such. Canonisation is a distinction
that no one has, so far, proposed for William of Ockham. Of Ockham's
early life we really know very little. He was younger by a generation
than Scotus, [ ] born somewhere about 1285. [ ] He joined the
Franciscan order and he studied theology at Oxford, where, however, he
never proceeded to a higher degree than the lectorate, i.e. the
apprentice stage where the graduate taught under the doctor's
supervision It was at Oxford that Ockham's career as a teacher began.
He never, it would seem, taught at Paris, and he was still busy with
his lectures at Oxford on the Liber Sententiarum of Peter Lombard (the
classic occupation at this stage of the theologian's career) when, in
1324, on the eve of his doctorate he was summoned to the papal court to
defend the orthodoxy of his views. He had, in fact, been denounced to
the pope as a heretic by the chancellor of the university, John
Luttrell,
Ockham's many writings are all extant, and the most of them have been
in print since the end of the fifteenth century. [ ] And, since 1922,
we possess the report of the Avignon Commission appointed by the pope
to enquire into his orthodoxy. [ ] Ockham's influence was undoubtedly
as mischievous as it was extensive. It is the mind of Ockham which,
more than all else, is to dominate the university world from now on to
the very eve of the Reformation, but it would be rash, [ ] in the
present state of our knowledge, to attempt to trace the pedigree of his
ideas. But Ockham was certainly anti-Scotist, in full reaction, that is
to say, against the super-subtlety and multitude of the new
distinctions which mark that system.
Perhaps the readiest way to make clear the nature of the harm Ockham
did, is to review the Avignon report, and to note [ ] how Ockham's
misunderstanding of the nature and limitations of the science in which
he excelled -- logic -- led him to deny the possibility of metaphysics,
to divorce completely the world of natural reasoning from that of
supernatural knowledge, and to colour even theology with the baneful
theory that all our knowledge that is not of singular observable facts
is but a knowledge of names and terms. In a curious subtle way the
reality of theological truth is thus dissolved, while the appearances
(and the terminology) remain the same. Ockham's nominalist theory about
the nature of our intellectual knowledge is far more radical than that
of Abelard; for him "general ideas cannot correspond to anything in
reality," [ ] a philosophical position which is not consistent with the
Faith. And he revealed himself as a philosophical revolutionary of the
first degree in the new classification of knowledge which he proposed.
There is a kind of knowledge which is self- evident, intuitive
knowledge Ockham calls it; this alone is certain knowledge, and this
alone enables us to say whether things exist or not. This alone can be
the foundation of scientific knowledge. All other knowledge -- of
images, of memories, of ideas -- abstractive knowledge, he names it, is
not really knowledge at all. [ ] It is not the business of this book to
demonstrate where Ockham's mistake lay -- this is not a treatise of
philosophy. But if Ockham were right, our knowledge would be no more
than a mere system of useful mental conventions with no objective
justification. We should, necessarily, from the nature of things, be
complete sceptics about everything except our own physical sensations.
Given such a conception of knowledge, there can hardly be any common
ground between reason and faith; and the two spheres are indeed, for
Ockham, entirely out of contact. So little can what goes on in the one
be related to the activity within the other, that faith may even assure
us of the existence of what reason tells us is impossibly absurd. This
separation of faith and reason was the greatest mischief of all. [ ]
Ockham, like Scotus, is fascinated by the truths of God's omnipotence
and of the divine infinity. For him, too, it is the will which in God
is all important. And he is thence led into developments that far
surpass the novelties of Duns Scotus. Even the divine command to love
God could, thinks Ockham, equally well have been the command to hate
Him; and God could, if He chose, damn the innocent and save the guilty.
The whole of our knowledge could be an illusion, God causing us
systematically to see and feel as existent things which actually do not
exist, and this without any reflection on the divine veracity, or
trustworthiness: our sole certitude that God does not so act lies, not
in any belief that God is Truth itself but in this that miracles are
not part of the ordinary machinery of the divine ruling of creation.
One day, what these subtly argued theses posit as possibilities will,
without any of Ockham's delicate argumentation, be crudely stated as
the fact, and God be hailed as an arbitrary tyrant who must therefore,
paradoxically, be merciful to man his victim. From Ockham to Luther is
indeed a long road, and the Franciscan's thought doubtless suffers many
losses as it makes the journey along it. But it is a road whose trace
is unmistakable, and the beginning of that road needs to be noticed.
From one point of view Luther has a claim to be regarded as the last in
the long line of Catholic theologians of the scholastic decadence. It
is not an unimportant point of view.
From this time onwards -- from the middle of the fourteenth century --
it is Ockham's system that dominates the minds of Catholic thinkers.
And this, strangely enough, despite the discovery of all its latent
mischievousness by the officials first appointed to judge it, and
despite the still more evident fact of Ockham's open rebellion against
the pope, and the subversive literature of propaganda in which he
justified this to all Europe.
The Avignon Commissioners noted in Ockham's philosophy the opinions
which might lead to errors in theology -- especially his theory that
the object of our knowledge is not reality but an idea of reality only
-- with special reprobation and alarm. They condemned his agnostic
notion that we cannot know anything more of God than the concept which
we form of God: this they declared was manifest heresy. His special
dialectical method they found to be " subversive of philosophy and of
theology alike." They had faults to find with his criticism -- as he
applied it to the doctrine of the Blessed Trinity -- of the current
philosophical teaching about relation. And, finally, they signaled for
condemnation a number of theological errors that were to have a great
fortune in the future, for they were to appear prominently in the
theological foundations of the new Protestant religion. For example,
Ockham's notion that, after justification, sin and grace can coexist in
the soul; his theory that the merit which a soul has in God's sight is
really wholly due to God's acceptance of man's actions as meritorious,
and in no way to any worth possessed by the act itself; moral guilt,
again, for him, is not so much a reality that inheres to the soul, as a
blameworthiness that cries out for punishment; [ ] and although Ockham
does not deny the defined teaching that Our Lord is present in the
Blessed Sacrament by transubstantiation, he declares that
"consubstantiation" -- the theory that the bread and the wine remain
after the consecration -- would be a more suitable theory.
Why, it may be asked, did there not follow upon this report a strong,
and even violent, condemnation of the English friar? Perhaps his sudden
flight to the schismatic emperor, and the new crisis that followed upon
this, first delayed that condemnation; and then, later, the need for it
was obscured by the resounding excommunication of Ockham for other
heresies. Certainly the pope, John XXII, had no doubts about the
quality of Ockham's Oxford work when he described him in a letter to
the King of Bohemia (July 27, 1330) as "a heresiarch who publicly
taught many heresies, and had composed writings full of errors and
heresies." On the other hand, Ockham does not always set out his ideas
as proven true, but often puts them forward as suggestions and
hypotheses. And he had, of course, a master mind, and the competence
that goes with such, in his special gift of dialectic. No doubt, in the
long four years he debated with the commissioners, he put up a good
defence. Even so, whatever be the reason for it, the escape of this
system in 1326 from the needed condemnation is something that still
surprises the historian. Certainly the alleged tyranny of the clerical
system over the mind of the medieval thinker seems at the moment to
have been functioning badly. [ ]
But Ockham's philosophical novelties did not by any means go entirely
uncondemned. If the papacy had other aspects of his career to occupy
its energies, the university of Paris, the capital of theological
studies, was immediately active against these. Ockhamism was gaining a
hold on the younger masters and a decree of November 25, 1339, forbade
the use of his books and the teaching of his theses in the faculty of
arts. The next year saw a still stronger condemnation of that teaching,
as definitely erroneous, and a ban on the use of the new dialectic in
argumentation in the schools. Then, in 1346, came the papal
condemnation of Nicholas of Autrecourt [ ] for teaching which is
distinctly Ockhamist, and the university's condemnation of two others
of the sect, Richard of Lincoln in 1346 and John of Mirecourt, a
Cistercian, in 1347. But, in the end, it was Ockhamism that prevailed
at Paris. More and more the great names are, all of them, his
disciples, Buridan, Marsiglio of Inghen, Peter d'Ailly and John Gerson.
By the end of the fourteenth century Paris is, indeed, the chief
stronghold of what is now called the via moderna, of its logic, its
metaphysics and its theology.
It may be asked why the antiqui proved so powerless against the
novelties? -- the followers of St. Thomas and Duns Scotus. So far the
answer to this natural question is not fully known. One part of it,
perhaps, is that the two schools were, increasingly, more interested in
fighting about their mutual differences than in continuing to study
reality. They contracted something of that fatal preoccupation with
mental processes for their own sake which is the characteristic vice of
the fourteenth century, and began to "philosophise about philosophies."
[ ] Had they, in truer imitation of their first begetters, given their
attention to the new problems of the new age, dealing less with St.
Thomas and Duns Scotus as antagonists, and more with what had been the
cause of their activities as thinkers, they would have discovered,
amongst other things, that they had more in common than they supposed.
[ ] Had they realised how, very often indeed, St. Thomas and Duns
Scotus complement and complete each other, the easy victory of the
followers of Ockham would scarcely have been possible.
But while Thomists and Scotists were thus locked in a chronic state of
sterile warfare, it was the new Nominalism that took up the new
problems raised by the new developments in the knowledge of nature.
These new truths could not, of course, cure the radical ills of the
nominalist philosophy; but in the association of those who discovered
these truths with the adherents of a philosophy more and more at odds
with Catholic theology, we may already see signs of the great
characteristic of later ages, the assumed necessary antagonism between
religion and science. St. Thomas had indicated the true starting point
for the harmonious development of natural knowledge and theology; and
with this he had exemplified the spirit in which the philosopher and
the theologian should work. Neither was to be regarded as the lucky
possessor of an armoury of solutions and recipes for all possible
problems that the future might throw up; but as a thinker, ready to
investigate everything, with a first hope always of assimilating
novelties, that derived from a passionate conviction of the unity of
all truth. Once that true starting point was lost, and that spirit
fled, there was no future for thought.
And this is what had happened round about the middle of the fourteenth
century. Henceforth there was stagnation in orthodox circles, and
elsewhere a steadily increasing disruption in the life of the spirit.
Once the Catholic mind had ceased to think, the faith of the multitude,
deprived of its natural protection, would be a prey for every vagary of
idea or sentiment. [ ]
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