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The names of St. Bridget of Sweden and of St. Catherine of Siena,
coming upon every page of the critical story of the last two popes, are
a reminder -- should we need one -- that, beneath that history of the
Church which we see as a dramatic pageant, there lies another history,
the real and truly vital history of the Church, the history of the
inner life of each of the millions of Christian souls. To the
actuality, and to the paramount importance indeed, of this other
history the saints are, at all times, the standing witness, and it is
never an idle criticism of any account of Christian history to ask
"Where are the saints?" The presence of saints in the public life of
the Church, and the reception given to them, is indeed a kind of
touchstone by which we may judge the tone of that life in any
particular age.
In this interior history of the Church -- in its fullness known only to
God -- there is no distinction or rank, save that which comes from the
use of opportunities accorded. Here all are equal. Popes, bishops;
religious, clergy; kings, nobles; scholars, merchants; peasants,
townsfolk, beggars -- what more are any of these but souls equal in
their need of salvation, equal in their utter inability to achieve
salvation by any power of their own? And all the vast apparatus, at
once as simple and as complex as man himself, of theology, of ritual,
the divinely-founded Church, nay the sacred humanity itself of God the
Saviour, what are all these but means to that single end, the salvation
of man, the return of the rational creature to his Creator for the
Creator's greater glory?
Although we cannot ever know more than mere fragments of such a history
as here is hinted, this history is a fact never to be lost count of as
the more obvious maze of visible activity is explored and all that it
holds assessed. For example, the one sole business for which popes and
bishops and clergy exist is to lead man back to God Who is man's sole
happiness. All popes have known this, all bishops, all clergy; and
therein lies, not only the basis of the most terrible judgment that can
ever be passed upon them, but the reason for the horror which failure
on the grand scale in this primary pastoral duty caused to the
serious-minded among the contemporaries of such sinners, and also the
source of our own incredulity, as, to-day, reading much of their
history, we remind ourselves with an effort that these men were indeed
popes, bishops, religious, priests.
What has chiefly occupied this history, so far, is the story of the
ruling of religion, of the administration of the bona spiritualia, and
the care of the ruling authority to defend the greatest of these, the
freedom of religion, from forces that would destroy it in the interest
of civil government; it has been, also, a history Or thinkers, of
priests and of religious. Something has been told of the success of all
these eminent personages; of their mistakes also; of their failings and
their sins; and of their never-ceasing struggles. It has been very
largely the history of the Church teaching and ruling, rather than of
the Church taught and ruled, the story of the shepherds rather than of
the flock; and when the flock has been glimpsed it has been, very
often, at a moment when in hostile reaction against its shepherds. For
with whom else, in this constant battle, are the popes ever engaged but
with Catholics, their own spiritual children? It is important to see
history from the point of view of these also at whose expense history
is made. Quidquid delirant reges, plectuntur Achivi, and Church
History, too, has its Greeks; of whose lives we do not by any means, as
yet, know nearly enough to be able to call our story complete. What of
their spiritual history in these years of continual warfare between the
sacerdotium and the imperium? Much of it is written -- sometimes indeed
between the lines -- in the lives of the contemporary saints.
It must already be evident, even from the summary account which is all
that a general history can attempt, that during the hundred years
between Gregory X and Gregory XI (1276-1370) the pastoral sense in high
ecclesiastical authority had suffered grievously. From the point of
view of that internal history of which we have been speaking this might
seem the most important fact of all. But it is not the only fact; and
against it we need to set all that can be reconstructed of that inner
history. "It is the spirit that giveth life" and, lest we falsify by
omission, something needs to be said of those for whom attendance on
the Spirit is the main business even of earthly life. For this century,
that saw in the public life of the Church so many victories of the
world over the gospel, is also the century of the first great attempt
to popularise the mystical life by a literary propaganda that describes
its joys and analyses its processes; it is the century of Eckhart and
Tauler and Suso, of Ruysbroeck and Gerard Groote, of St. Luitgarde and
St. Lydwine, of Angela of Foligno as well as of Angelo Clareno, of St.
Catherine of Siena and St. Bridget of Sweden, of our own Richard Rolle,
of "The Cloud of Unknowing" and of Mother Julian of Norwich; it is the
century also of the "Theologia Germanica", of heretical mystical
Beghards, Beguines, and others innumerable; and it is the century in
which one of the greatest of English poets set out in his Vision of
Piers Plowman the whole theory of the life with God as St. Thomas
Aquinas had elaborated it, an achievement complementary to that of
Dante, and comparable with it. [ ]
What then of the saints of the time? Who were they, and in what corps
of the militant Church did they come to sanctity? What of the role of
these many celebrated pioneers of the literature of mysticism? And what
other new manifestation of the spirit does the century offer, whether
in religious orders, or devotional practice? [ ]
Dunng the hundred and four years which this book has so far covered
(1274-1378) there appeared, in one part of Christendom and another,
some 130 of those holy personages whom the popes have, in later times,
found worthy of public veneration, 27 as saints and 103 as beati. [ ]
Sixteen of the 130 were bishops, (four of these popes); fourteen came
from the old monastic orders; five were secular priests; twenty-one
were laymen; and seventy-four belonged to the new orders founded since
the time of Innocent III. The share of the new orders is really greater
still, for of the sixteen bishops eleven were friars, and of the
twenty-one layfolk sixteen were members of the various third orders. It
would, no doubt, be rash to say that the number of canonised, and
recognisably canonisable, personages alive at any given epoch is an
index of the general tone of the life of the Church. There are, it may
be supposed, many more souls, whose holiness is known to God alone,
than there are those whose repute brings them to the ultimate testimony
of canonisation. On the other hand, sanctity, in the technical sense,
involves the practice of all the virtues in the heroic degree and this
is not only a marvel so rare that it can hardly long escape
recognition, but it is the fruit of such extraordinary supernatural
action in the soul that it may almost be taken for granted that the
subject of that action is meant by God to be recognised as such.
Without, then, any desire to propose a few comparative statistics as a
new, rapid and infallible guide by which to assess in any given age the
force of the mysterious tides of grace given to man, we can perhaps
agree that there are times when saints abound and times when they are
rare, and examine with something more than curiosity the distribution
of these 130 personages over the century or so in which they
"flourished. "
The richest period of all is the first third of this century, the last
generation to be born in what has been called, with some excuse, "the
greatest of the centuries. " [ ] Between the second Council of Lyons
(1274) and the election of the first Avignon pope (1305) we can note as
many as eighty-eight "saints. " [ ] In the next generation (1305-1342)
they are fewer; thirty-seven of these eighty-eight have died, and only
seventeen new " saints " appear to fill the gap. In the thirty years
that follow next the lifetime of St. Catherine of Siena -- the "saints"
are fewer still; of the sixty-eight "saints" active between 1305 and
1342, forty-five have died and only twelve new " saints" appear. These
thirty years, from just before the Black Death to the Schism of 1378,
are, in fact, the most barren age of all. The actual period of the
Schism -- the forty years 1378-1418 -- reveals itself however, as a
time of revival; twenty-three of the thirty-five "saints" of the
previous generation have died by 1378, but they are replaced by no
fewer than thirty-five new "saints"; more new "saints, " in fact, in
forty years than in the previous seventy.
If we examine the list of those new " saints " whose appearance
relieves the sombre history of the disastrous fourteenth century so far
as we have traced it -- they are twenty-nine in all -- we notice among
them three bishops (one a Benedictine, [ ] two Carmelite friars [ ] );
there are two others from the older orders, namely the canon regular,
John Ruysbroeck and a second Benedictine; [ ] and there are eleven more
friars [ ] and the founder of a new order, the Jesuati. There are,
also, six nuns (who came, all of them, from the new orders), one layman
and five laywomen. The high direction of ecclesiastical affairs is,
evidently, no longer a nursing ground for saints, nor do saints any
longer appear among the princes of Christian thought. The most striking
changes, by comparison with the figures for the thirteenth and twelfth
centuries, are the greatly lowered number of saints among the bishops,
[ ] and the reduction to vanishing point of the saints from the old
monastic orders, from the Benedictines and the Cistercians especially.
It is the spirituality of the new orders of friars that gives to the
sanctity of this period its special characteristics; and the special
character of the vocation of the friars, and the new way of religious
life which they have constructed in order to carry out their special
work, are far-reaching indeed in their effect upon the whole interior
life of the Church. The friar is, almost by definition, a religious who
lives in a town. The life of the vows, with its foundation of the
divine office chorally celebrated, its discipline of fasts, vigils,
enclosure and other austerities, was now brought before the daily
notice of every Catholic. And as with the friars -- whose foundations
ran easily into tens of thousands by the beginning of the fourteenth
century -- so was it with the new orders of women associated with the
friars from the very beginning; their convents, too, were in the towns.
And around these numerous new town churches -- Dominican, Franciscan,
Augustinian, Carmelite and Servite churches -- whose very raison d’etre
was the sermon, churches of a new architectural type, great preaching
-- halls in fact, [ ] there speedily grew up the great militia of the
orders of penance: associations of layfolk who really formed part of
the new religious order, who continued to live their ordinary life in
the world, but in the spirit of the order, according to a definite rule
and under the guidance of the order's priests. St. Dominic's new
invention of the priest-religious who was an active missionary, and for
whom the monastic life was but the designed means to this apostolic
end, transformed the whole business of the management r of a Christian
life; and in nothing did this show so powerfully as in the sudden
appearance of a whole new literature treating | of this matter, a
literature in which, for the first time, the most I learned of
theologians and the most mystical of contemplatives said their say in
the vulgar tongue. The life of devotion -- la vie devote -- now became
the main business of thousands and thousands of lay men and women also,
and the immediate consequence was a great multiplication of pious
books. The Bible especially -- in translations -- was the popular
devout reading, book of this multitude, such classics too as St.
Augustine's City of God, St. Bernard's sermons, St. Gregory's
collection of the marvellous lives of the saints of old, and the
meditations on the ' Life of Our Lord still -- and for centuries yet to
come -- ascribed to St. Bonaventure, meditations in which the
imaginative art of the writer developed, above all else, the terrible
reality of the human agony of the divine Redeemer. Such a book -- well
in the new, Franciscan tradition and the kindred works of the Dominican
Ludolf of Saxony, [ ] gave new life (and a new direction) to the
popular devotion to the sacred Humanity; and these books were among the
main sources of those many forms of prayer to Our Lord in His passion
which are the best-known feature of the last two centuries of medieval
piety. In the statues and the painted windows and the pictures of the
time there is, from now on, no subject more frequent, nor any more
lovingly wrought. The same influence is to be seen in the countless
brotherhoods spontaneously formed to foster and to practise these
devotions, and it received a powerful aid in the Book of Revelations
written by St. Bridget of Sweden about the detail of the sacred
passion, and in the sermons and writings of the German Dominican, B.
Henry Suso.
Of new religious orders there is but one of any importance, that
founded by St. Bridget. This was an order for men and women,
consecrated to devotion to the passion of Our Lord. The nuns were
strictly enclosed, but the monks were preachers, itinerant
missionaries. The monasteries were subject to the bishop of the diocese
where they were founded, and, in honour of the Blessed Virgin, they
were ruled by an abbess. The first foundation was at Vadstena, in
Sweden, in 1371. The order grew slowly. By 1515 there were twenty-seven
houses, thirteen of them in Scandinavia. [ ] But everywhere the spirit
of Christian charity is seen active in foundations, now, of hospitals
and refuges of various kinds, in the organisation of companies of
nursing sisters and brothers, a movement that is summed up in the great
figure of St. Roch, the patron of the poor and needy sick, whose cult,
from the day of his death in 1350, has never ceased.
The outstanding feature of all this new birth of the spirit is the
avidity for news about the life with God -- unmistakable everywhere, in
all ranks of society -- and the literature which this need created.
From this literature we may gather some notion of the perfect life as
it was presented to the Catholics of these last generations before the
catastrophe of the Schism unchained the forces of anarchy; and we may
also read there signs of future development and, alas, of future
disintegration. For the life of devotion is not a thing antithetical to
the life of Christian thought, but, rather, closely dependent on it.
Mysticism and scholasticism are not alternative ways of arriving at the
one goal; [ ] and in some of the new spiritual exercises now devised,
and proposed to Christians as the way to union with God, we meet the
last, and the most ruinous consequence, so far, of the failure of the
Catholics of this century to rally to the thought of St. Thomas
Aquinas.
To-day the word "mystic" is used for so many purposes that it has
almost ceased to have any recognisably definite meaning beyond that of
emotional sensitiveness to the non-material. But for our purpose the
mystic is the man whose main interest and care in life is to unite
himself in mind and will with God. It is for men and women of this kind
that the monastic life was devised, as providing the ideal setting for
those activities to which they had chosen to devote themselves. And
now, in the fourteenth century, the kind of people we thus call mystics
had, largely through the activity of the various orders of friars, come
to be a very notable element of the public life of the Church. The new
literature of mysticism had developed in order to provide this new
mystical public with matter for its prayerful meditation, and with
advice about the pitfalls of this high adventure; but it also studied
the happenings of the mystical life so as to offer the mystic some
means of checking his course, and from this it was an obvious next step
to discuss the nature of mysticism, and especially the nature of the
mystic's union with God, and the role and importance of the unusual
happenings with which the lives of the mystics were, from time to time,
studded. The mystics whose needs called forth this new literature were,
as has been said, very largely the spiritual children of those new
religious orders, and it was these orders which also had created the
new scientific theology we call scholastic. That these corps of
professional theologians should be attracted to the study of mysticism
for its own sake, as one of the normal features of Christian life, was
inevitable. Soon, the discussions about the nature of the mystical fact
became a commonplace in theological literature. The solutions -- like
the advice offered to mystics and the practical recipes -- varied as
the theological colour of the different orders varied. There were to be
controversies between the different schools about mystical questions,
as there were controversies about so many other questions.
There are then, from this time, two kinds of mystical writing, that
written for the use and help of the mystics themselves, and that
written to analyse and explain what mysticism is and how it all comes
about. Among the writers of both types of book not only theologians are
to be found, but others too, with minds not trained perhaps to orderly
thought, or the saving niceties of technical correctness, but with a
tale to tell of experiences that have transformed their lives, and
driven by an apostolic charity to convey the glad news to whoever will
hear it.
Who these first pioneers of popular mystical literature were, what
story they had to tell, the different points of view from which they
told it, the variety of explanations they offered, and the sources
which -- often enough unconsciously -- influenced their mystical
outlook, may be read in the well-known book of M. Pourrat, who has
collected a list of some sixty or more writers active between the time
of St. Thomas and Luther's revolt. [ ] What a general history, it would
seem, needs to signalise as especially important in all this
development, is the emergence of a really new school, after nearly a
century and a half of the influence of the Friars; a school whose
influence continued and developed until the very end of the period this
volume studies. This is the school which produced the so-called Devotio
Moderna and, as cautiously as may be, [ ] something needs to be said of
the way in which some of its leading adepts regarded, not so much the
theologians of their time, as the role of the theologian and the place
of theology in the life of the spirit. And something must be said, too,
of the way in which, ever since Ockham, theologians had been moving
still further away from St. Thomas's conception that there is
necessarily a harmony between faith and reason. For these two
contemporary developments have the effect, ultimately, of converging
forces.
The simplest way in which to understand what is meant by the Devotio
Moderna is to take up again, and devoutly read, the Imitation of
Christ: for this is the classic production of the school. What is there
modern about it? how is it new? and who were the men that made up the
school whence came the Imitation and many other works, now perhaps
forgotten, of like character?
The Devotio Moderna was a product of the country we to-day call
Holland, and the pioneer in the movement was a native of Deventer,
Gerard Groote (1340-1384). He was a man of considerable education, bred
in the schools of his native town, of Aachen and in the universities of
Cologne and Paris. He never seems to have proceeded beyond his
mastership in arts, nor was he a priest; and for some years he led an
ordinary worldly kind of life until, when he was about thirty-five, he
was converted through his friendship with the greatest of all the
Flemish mystics, B. Jan Ruysbroeck.
In the last few years of his life Gerard, [ ] who died an early death
in 1384, gathered round him, in his native town, a group of like-minded
associates and together they formed the " Brotherhood of the Common
Life" (1381). The associates were not bound by any vows, but they met
for regular exercises of prayer, and they gave their lives to copying
pious books -- forming the equivalent, in that age, of a religious
press association. [ ] A later development was the foundation and
direction of schools for poor boys; the most famous of these, that at
Zwolle, came to number 1,200 scholars. In their youth Thomas a Kempis,
Nicholas of Cusa, Erasmus, and Luther too, came under the influence of
the brothers in their schools. From Deventer some of the brethren
passed to make a new foundation at Windesheim, but this group
definitely went over to the religious life in the technical sense of
the word, becoming canons-regular of the Augustinian type. The
congregation of Windesheim flourished, and next eighty years
(1384-1464) it came to number eighty-two priories. At Windesheim, and
in the other priories, the spirit of Gerard Groote inspired all, and
the priories also continued to be centres for the spread of spiritual
books. The best known of all these Windesheim canons is the German,
Thomas of Kempen, [ ] the most likely candidate for the signal honour
of being the author of the Imitation; and known to his contemporaries
as a calligrapher of unusual skill.
It was not in the minds of the pioneers of this movement that the
brethren should themselves be authors. But gradually books began to
grow out of the little addresses with which, within the seclusion of
these Dutch cloisters, they exhorted one another to perseverance in
virtue and prayer and recollection, and in fidelity to the life of
withdrawal from the world and its occasions of sin. And all these books
-- collections of sayings, or sermons, or set treatises on special
topics -- bear an extremely close resemblance to each other. There is
little sign anywhere of the diversity of personalities among the
authors. But what is everywhere evident -- and immediately evident --
to the reader is that the author is a man in whose life the loving
communion with God is scarcely ever interrupted. And the reader can
always understand what is written directly he reads. For the treatment
of the great theme is concrete, and practical. With a most finished,
albeit unconscious, artistry the writers set out their instructions in
maxims, simply stated, with all the finality of proverbs or axioms; [ ]
and always, the guidance offered is so perfectly related to what every
man knows the better side of himself craves for, that as he reads, it
seems rather as though he were actually listening to his own better
self. From time to time the flow of the maxims in which the reader sees
the better things, and once again professes them, is broken by touching
colloquies between the soul and Christ Our Lord.
Once these books composed by the new religious began to appear, they
made headway rapidly -- there was, of course, at work here, besides the
quality of what was offered, the new immense advantage that to
propagate such literature was the congregation's main activity. The
earliest manuscript of the complete Imitation that has survived is of
1427; in another forty years the book was known, and used, and loved,
all over Europe.
Criticism is always an ungracious task, and never more so, surely, than
when the critic is set to examine coldly the elements of a work
inspired by the love of God, and stamped in every line with generous
dedication of self to God's service. The Imitation of Christ, for
example, is a work that all humanity has agreed to call golden. This
makes the historian's task hard, but nonetheless necessary. For this
Devotio Moderna was not all-sufficient; and once it had passed beyond
the cloisters where it was born, and had begun to flourish in a
different setting, its insufficiency might, and did indeed, tell
increasingly.
The most notable insufficiency was that almost nowhere, in the
literature of this school, was piety related to doctrine, [ ] which is
as much as to say that about much of it there is nothing specifically,
necessarily, Catholic. It is a piety which, taken by itself, is, in the
modern phrase, very largely undenominational; and, as everyone knows,
the chef d’oevre of the school [ ] has for centuries been used as
extensively by those outside the Church as by those within. The absence
of any care to relate piety to those revealed doctrines which the
Church was divinely founded to set forth, is the more serious because
it was deliberate. Not, of course, that these writers were indifferent
to Catholic doctrine or hostile to it. They were, all of them,
excellent Catholics, as whole in faith as in charity or in zeal; they
would presuppose a dogmatic foundation, known and accepted. But they
were Catholics in violent reaction against the fashionable spirituality
of their time -- or rather, against its excesses -- and this had been a
learned spirituality, very much occupied with theories about the
mystical life, concerned to elaborate systems based on its theories,
and interested, in some cases perhaps over-interested, in theological
subtleties.
The great figure of this earlier movement had been the German Dominican
Eckhart; and the Dominican priories and the convents of Dominican nuns
in the Rhine provinces were the centres where it chiefly flourished.
John Tauler and Blessed Henry Suso, also Dominicans, masterly
theologians and great mystics, preachers and writers too, were the
leading figures in the world of mysticism during the generation in
which Gerard Groote grew up. Eckhart -- who had taught theology at
Paris during the years when Scotus taught there, and who was involved
in the controversies around the Franciscan's teaching -- was indeed a
theologian of the very first class. [ ] But over the end of his long
and active life there lies the shadow of the condemnation of many of
his doctrines -- after his death -- as heretical. [ ] About the exact
meaning of that condemnation scholars are now divided. The texts of
Eckhart's work, as they have been known for the last three centuries,
are far from trustworthy. It is only in the last few years, indeed,
that any critical work has been done on his Latin writings. But whether
Eckhart, the real Eckhart, was orthodox or not -- the gravest charge is
that he was, in fact, a pantheist -- he is in these texts extremely
obscure. This is by no means true of Tauler and Suso. Tauler was a
master of spiritual direction, as learned in the workings of the human
personality as in the ways of the Spirit, who had the rare gift of
bringing home to the most workaday congregation the real importance of
ideas. Henry Suso, no less learned in theology, and no less faithful,
like a true Dominican, to the duty of associating piety with what can
only be apprehended by the intelligence, namely truth divinely
revealed, was a more passionate soul. In burning words he preached to
all comers devotion to the divine intelligence, to the eternal wisdom
of God. It was around this love for the second Person of the Blessed
Trinity that all spiritual life turned for Suso; and to the propagation
of this devotion he brought -- what obviously the task requires -- deep
and sure theological learning. Above all others his master is St.
Thomas Aquinas, whose calmly-argued ideas break into flame once they
make contact with Suso's ardent mind.
The effect of Christian doctrine preached in this fashion had been to
produce a host of mystics of rare quality in the Rhineland, and
especially among the nuns of the order from which these preachers
chiefly came. The movement was not, however, confined to friars and
nuns; for it was one of the special characteristics of this Dominican
school to teach that the life of the mystic is open to every Christian;
that it is not, in kind, a new life which is the special privilege of
contemplative monks or nuns, but a simple extension of, and an
intensification of, that Christian life inaugurated in every soul by
baptism. Hence the care of these German Dominicans, as of Ruysbroeck,
to preach -- and also to write -- in their native tongues; and hence
also, what has often caused surprise, their preaching about these high
themes to the ordinary congregations who filled their churches.
It is not hard to understand that, once out of the hands of men really
masters of their task, really theologians as well as holy men, such an
apostolate could easily go astray. The subtle explanations of the
soul’s mystical union with God could, and did, give rise to idle and
mischievous debates among the less learned and the half-learned; the
delicate business of the practical relation of the workaday moral
virtues to the high theological virtues could be neglected, and men and
women, who visibly reeked of pride, insubordination, injustice and
intemperance of every sort, could ignore their sins while they busied
themselves with the higher prayer. And, of course, the movement will
not have been spared its host of camp followers, many times larger than
the army of disciples -- infinitely noisier and much more in evidence
-- whose main occupation was to exchange gossip masked in the phrases
of high theological learning, to turn these into party slogans, and, in
the devil’s eternal way, accomplish to perfection all the complicated
manoeuvres of the religious life while their hearts were wholly
unconverted, their wills obstinately unrepentant.
The reaction of the brethren of Deventer and Windesheim against what
has been called [ ] the speculative school of spiritual teaching, was,
no doubt, very largely a reaction against the dangerous humbug into
which this particular way of the interior life had tended to
degenerate. But it was a reaction that went much further than a protest
against abuses. For example, it was not merely the abuse of learning
that was now decried in many sayings of the Devotio Moderna, but the
idea that learning had any necessary part to play in the interior life:
"Henceforward," wrote Gerard de Groote in his rule of life, [ ] "no
more benefices, no more learned titles, no more public disputations. .
. . The learning of learning is to know that one knows nothing. . . the
one research that matters is not to be sought out oneself." " Do not
spend thy time," he also said, [ ] " in the study of geometry,
arithmetic, rhetoric, dialectic, grammar, songs, poetry, legal matters
or astrology; for all these things are reproved by Seneca, and a good
man should withdraw his mind's eye therefrom and despise them; how much
more, therefore, should they be eschewed by a spiritually-minded man
and a Christian. . . the purpose of a degree is either gain or
preferment, or vain glorification and worldly honour, which latter
things if they lead not to the former are simply useless, empty and
most foolish, being contrary to godliness and all freedom and purity."
Only the carnal-minded could, he thought, be happy in a university.
Nearly a hundred years later than Gerard Groote the same spirit can be
seen in one of the greatest teachers associated with the movement, [ ]
John Wessel Gansfort (1420-1489), a friend of Thomas a Kempis and a
pioneer in the business of systematic meditation. [ ] "There is a
strong and weighty argument against universities to be drawn from the
fact that Paul secured but little fruit at Athens, accomplishing more
in the neighbouring city of Corinth and in Thessaly, which was then
almost barbarous, than in the Attic city, at that time the fountain of
Greek philosophy. It goes to show that liberal studies are not very
pleasing to God." [ ]
There is a sense in which the Imitation, too, can be called "a late
medieval protest against the vanity of all philosophy," [ ] and indeed
the best known of such, and the most influential. All the world knows
the passages in the opening pages of the Imitation, "What doth it
profit thee to discuss the deep mystery of the Trinity, if thou art
from thy lack of humility displeasing to the Trinity. . . . I would
rather choose to feel compunction than to know its definition. . . .
Vanity of vanities, all is vanity save to love God and serve Him only.
. . . Have no wish to know the depths of things, but rather to
acknowledge thy own lack of knowledge. . . ." That goodness matters
more than learning, that it is the mistake of mistakes " to prefer
intellectual excellence to moral" [ ] no one will ever contest; nor
that the learned may need, even frequently, to be reminded of this. But
of all forms of goodness truth is the most fundamental, and yet, while
learning is the pursuit of truth, it is hardly deniable that the author
of the Imitation -- and others of this school with him -- do
continually suggest, at least, an opposition between advance in virtue
and devotion to learning, even to sacred learning; and certainly the
tone of such admonitions is far removed from the teaching of St. Thomas
that learning -- even the study of letters -- is a most suitable
ascetic discipline for religious. [ ] With these authors, however,
learning, it is suggested, is for most men the highroad to pride and
vanity -- "the greater part in knowledge than in virtuous living" --
and he who gives himself to the pursuit of holiness is in better case
if he is not handicapped by any desire to know. "Quieten thy too great
desire for learning, for in learning there is discovered great
distraction and much deception." As for the learned generally: "those
who are learned gladly choose to be regarded, and to be hailed as wise
men. . . . Would that their life were in accordance with their
learning, then would they have read and studied well." Again: "Happy is
the man whom Truth instructs through itself, not through passing images
and words, but as itself exists. . . . And wherefore should we be
anxious about genera and species? He to whom the Eternal Word speaks,
is set free from the multitude of opinions." Learning -- this is
definitely said -- is not, in itself, blameworthy, that is to say
"simple notions about things": it is indeed good, and part of God's
scheme of things, but a good conscience and virtuous living is always
to be preferred to it.
The facts are, however, that to all but a very select few, knowledge,
even of truths about supernatural reality, only comes through the
ordinary natural channels -- faith is by hearing. It is the natural
human intelligence [ ] that must lay hold of the truths of faith and
make the judgment that these are things it must believe. [ ] It is no
part of Christian perfection to neglect the ordinary means of making
contact with these truths -- namely the teaching of those already
learned in them -- and to trust for a knowledge of them to the
possibility of the extraordinary favour of a special personal
revelation. And although it is most certainly true that theological
learning is by no means a prerequisite for sanctity, such learning
remains, nevertheless, a necessary instrument for those whose lot it is
to journey towards sanctity by guiding others thither. Hence when good
men begin to suggest that the world of piety can manage very well -- if
not, indeed, very much better -- without the presence of theologians
acting upon it, there is surely something wrong; and when priests write
books about holy living which suggest that the theologians are more
likely to go to the bad through learned vanity than to save their souls
through the deeper knowledge of divine truth that is theirs, there is
something very wrong indeed. Once more we are brought up against the
all-important role of theological learning as the salt that keeps
Christian life healthy. And what theology is to piety, metaphysical
truth is to theology; for it is the natural condition, the sine qua non
of healthy intellectual certitude in the mind of the theologian. [ ]
Once the direction of so delicate a thing as the Devotio Moderna passes
into the hands of those unlearned in theology, all manner of deviation
is possible. It can become a cult of what is merely naturally good, a
thing no worse -- but no more spiritual -- than, say, the cult of
kindness, courtesy, tidiness and the like. And what the master,
unwittingly, is soon really teaching is himself; he is the hero his
disciples are worshipping; there are, in the end, as many
Christianities as there are masters, and chaos begins its reign.
Once it ceases to be recognised that there must exist an objective rule
by which to judge the whole business -- theory and practice, maxims,
counsels, exhortations, ideals, and criticism of other ways -- of the
inner life and the business of the director with the directed, and that
this objective rule is the science of the theologian, substitute rules
will be devised to fill the absent place, rules which, there is every
chance, will be no more than the rationalisation of a man's chosen and
preferred activities. Someone, somewhere, must be interested in
compunction's definition, or it will soon cease to be understood that
there can be, and is, a certainty about what compunction is and what it
is not; and if that certainty goes, very strange things indeed will
begin to wander about, claiming the name of compunction in the lost
land that once was Christendom. [ ]
Let us turn from the defects, now so easy to be seen, in the Devotio
Moderna, recalling only -- what will occupy us more hereafter -- how it
is into one of the priories of the Windesheim congregation that, some
eighty years ahead of the date our survey has reached, a pupil of the
Brothers of the Common Life, and now an unhappy lad of eighteen, will
be thrust to become, in spite of himself, a canon-regular, Erasmus Or
Rotter (lam: in his career we shall surely see the shortcomings of the
system hampering the greatest Catholic scholar of his generation, at a
time when Catholicism is fighting for its very life. Let us leave the
thought that Erasmus is the greatest witness to what the Devotio
Moderna lacked, and consider now another group of pious men who, in
this same late fourteenth century, are diligently sapping the
foundations of men's intellectual certitude about the saving faith --
though of this they are utterly unconscious. These are the new
theologians, products of the Via moderna, and they are, professedly,
defending the faith. But their faith has gone awry; in this fact --
that they are wrongheaded and are fashionable -- as in the deficiencies
of the spirituality of the pious Hollanders, we can read signs that are
ominous. At the moment when certain mystics were beginning to hint that
those who wished to advance in virtue had best leave theological
problems alone, since ability to discuss them would lead inevitably to
pride and vainglory, certain theologians were beginning to say that
these same problems were insoluble, since no one could know anything at
all with certainty, and that the only safe thing, for a Christian, was
to cease to think about divine truths and to content himself with a
faithful acceptance of them and a life of prayer. The influence of the
mysticism that despaired of the theologian's salvation, was to be
reinforced by that of theologians who now despaired of theology, and
this because they had come to despair of reason itself.
There is, for instance, the revealing story of Nicholas of Autrecourt,
a Parisian theologian, who has been called the Hume of the fourteenth
century, [ ] in whose work Ockham's principles reach their last extreme
consequences. Nicholas used the new dialectic to examine Aristotle, and
he finds thereby that Aristotle did not really know -- that is to say
possess certitude about -- any one of the basic metaphysical truths on
which his thought is built: for these truths -- if truths, and they may
be truths -- are not things that can be known. We do not know, and it
can't be known, that there are such things as substances, causes, ends,
and the like. There is, says Nicholas, no "evidence" for their
existence. "Evidence" is one of his favourite terms; "probable" is
another, and this word "probable" sums up increasingly the mentality of
the fourteenth-century thinkers. No philosophical truth is any longer
certain: probability is all that human reason can attain. For example,
Nicholas asks whether matter is eternal, and he answers that we cannot
say with certainty that it is; but that it is eternal is more likely
than not; it is probable. It is of course now, at this moment, that
this is probable; what it will be, hath not yet appeared, and Nicholas,
a devout ecclesiastic, conscious that thought (if this is all that
thought really is) cannot offer itself as a way to truth, whether to
Christians or to others, can only warn Christians of this and exhort
them to stick more closely to the teachings of faith. He has, of
course, if only by implication, suggested thereby to the Christian that
reason and faith tend to contradict each other, that they can be in
permanent opposition, [ ] after which it seems a poor way out, indeed,
to advise the Christian to stick to the one rather than the other. For
what is faith but an assent of the reason? and with what other reason
can the Christian give his assent but with that which has already been
described by Nicholas as necessarily incapable of certitude?
To study Aristotle is also, therefore, pure waste of time; and Nicholas
says so, expressly. Then what of the great doctors whose minds fed so
largely on him? St. Thomas, for example, and Duns Scotus. It is barely
thirty years since Scotus died, and not yet twenty since John XXII
canonised St. Thomas with the most resounding eulogy of his work; but
for Nicholas (and the many whom he will influence) the mass of all this
writing is but so much lumber. Advancing a stage from his great
discovery, "scared," says Gilson, "by the conclusions to which his
logic has brought him," this philosopher who is a good Catholic looks
for a remedy, and finds it; and here his solo voice anticipates what a
whole chorus of superficial simpletons [ ] will presently be bawling.
What is needed, he tells us, are "spiritual men who will not waste
their whole time in logical argument or the analysis of Aristotle's
obscure propositions, but who will give to their people an
understanding of God's law." [ ] It is the old final-wisdom-seeming
sophistry of the "practical" minded that is still with us. And this
first of such prophets is a man whose theories of knowledge "cut us off
from the only ways by which we can come to God." [ ]
Nicholas of Autrecourt was a good man [ ] who proposed to make the
world a safe place for Faith by showing the utter impossibility of
thought. It was not long before this tragic aberration brought him to
the notice of the authorities, and after Clement VI had condemned
eighteen of his leading theses, [ ] he made a humble submission. [ ]
Nicholas may seem an obscure personage, but the most astonishing part
of the story is this, that forty years later a personage who was by no
means obscure, a chancellor of the university of Paris, and one of the
two brightest ornaments of the world of Christian thought in that day,
was explaining that the real reason for the condemnation of 1346 was
jealousy, and offering as proof of this the fact that these theses were
now publicly taught in the universities. Such is Peter d'Ailly's
superficial comment on this grave affair. [ ] The other glory of Paris,
and of France and of Christendom, in this generation was d'Ailly's
pupil and successor as chancellor, Jean Gerson, one of the holiest men
of his time (1363-1429). He too was an Ockhamist, and he too sought in
the cult of the interior life an escape from these difficult and urgent
intellectual anxieties. " Lorsque la foi desespere de la raison, c'est
toujours vers l’intuition mystique et la vie interieure qu'elle se
retourne pour s'y chercher un plus solide fondement." [ ]
The Christian mind, then, unable to think itself out of the impasse to
which "thought" brought it, and mortally uneasy at the now unresolved
fundamental contradiction that the teachings of Faith and the findings
of reason may be incompatible, is bidden for its salvation resolutely
to ignore the contradiction, to stifle reason, and to seek God in the
interior life; again, to seek Him with what? With a mind accepting on
Faith what it knows may be impossible? The eternal lesson recurs, that
we cannot manage our religious affairs without true philosophy, however
elemental; that true religion does not survive healthily unless
philosophy flourishes. For without philosophy, or with a philosophy
that is false, the educated mind [ ] turns to scepticism -- theoretical
or practical; and assents to religious truth made by a mind that is
sceptical about natural truth, produce in the end superstition: and
from the educated mind the poison seeps down, until in time it corrupts
the faith of the whole community. [ ]
For the popular and fashionable philosophers and theologians Aristotle
was now, at the end of the fourteenth century, finished; and the famous
Thomistic alliance of thought and faith at an end. A further blow was
dealt to the prestige of that older school -- a prestige bound up
inevitably with the prestige of Aristotle -- by the appearance in these
same years of the first non-Aristotelian physicists, of the critical
work of Jean Marbres [ ] and, especially, of Nicholas of Oresme, [ ]
Bishop of Lisieux. It was theological speculation that set these
clerics to their radical reconstruction of Aristotle the physicist,
Oresme writing, perhaps all the more damagingly, in his native French
-- yet another of the many signs that a new age is at hand. From the
Bishop of Lisieux' work came ultimately three great discoveries linked
to three better known names, Copernicus' hypothesis of the movement of
the earth, Galileo's theory of the law of falling bodies, and
Descartes' invention of analytical geometry. Here are far-off medieval
origins of important elements in our modern scientific knowledge; in
the circumstances in which they appeared they served to give the coup
de grace to Aristotle as a force to be reckoned with in the university
world. And that world, in the fourteenth century, was in process of a
remarkable extension. Nine new universities were founded in northern
Europe between the years 1348 and 1426, [ ] and another nine [ ]
between 1456 and 1506. In the better part of these it was the Via
moderna that dominated the philosophical outlook.
And now it is that there befalls the Church one of the most fearful
calamities of all its long history, the so-called Great Schism of the
West -- a forty years wandering in a wilderness when no one knew with
certainty who was the head of the Church, a forty years in which the
unity of belief was indeed marvellously preserved, but in which
administrative chaos reigned and in which there sprang up an abundance
of new anarchical theories about the nature of the papacy and its role.
That catastrophe came at the end of a century when the whole strength
of the politicians had been exerted to compel the Church to retire from
all concern with temporal affairs; in an age when thinkers would have
had it retire from the field of thought, and mystics would divorce its
piety from the pursuit of truth; the trader, too, will be pleased if
religion will now abandon its claim to regulate the morality of
exchanges, and Marsiglio's ideal is only slumbering that will satisfy
all of these by making religion a matter of rites alone and of
activities within a man's own soul. [ ]
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