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entire absence of a critical spirit, or indeed of any critical machinery, the want of historical knowledge, and the prevalent ignorance of Greek-to which St. Thomas forms no exception-were very serious hindrances to an adequate treatment of theological science. There was no criterion for distinguishing genuine from spurious authorities, and all alike were accepted and used with implicit confidence. None of the Schoolmen, for instance, entertained a doubt that the so-called works of Dionysius, the Areopagite, now universally acknowledged to be a compilation of the fifth century, and which had been translated into Latin by Scotus Erigena, were genuine; and this forgery, deeply tinged as it is with Neo Platonic pantheism, exercised a considerable, and by no means always a beneficial, influence on their writings. The teaching of the greatest of them, Aquinas, on questions of Ecclesiastical jurisdiction, is mainly based on a series of forged documents, composed by Dominican missionaries in the East, and sent to him by Pope Urban IV., who seems to have been himself deceived by them.'

His book Contra Errores Græcorum is

The forgery was exposed by Launoi, and other French divines of the seventeenth century, and admitted at the time by the Dominican editors of S. Thomas. An edition of Launoi's Epistles was published at Cambridge by Saville.

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derived exclusively from this compilation, and his reliance on it, as genuine, has naturally coloured his other writings also, including the Summa. He would hardly again have devoted a section of the Summa (Sda Sdæ, xi. 3) to an emphatic, though singularly feeble apology for the capital punishment of heresy, had he been aware that the odious system he was advocating owed its origin to the Priscillianist heretics, and that the first attempt to introduce it into the Church was met by the indignant protest of St. Martin of Tours. What he did know was, that the practice had been recently adopted by the Inquisition, and he therefore felt called upon to defend it. Of the many passages in the Fathers condemning persecution, he would of course see nothing in Gratian's Decretum, which was the great scholastic text-book, and into which the more important portion of the Isidorian forgeries had been incorporated, but only the few from St. Augustine, written under pressure of the Donatist controversy, which seem to tell in favour of it.

No one can reasonably affect to be shocked at my speaking of the Schoolmen often wasting their time on trifling or incongruous questions. It might be sufficient here to give two characteristic examples from a recent Catholic writer, who certainly has no prejudice

against them. them. The author of Christian Schools and Scholars tell us that they gravely disputed whether a pig driven to market is held by the man who drives it, or by the cord fastened round its leg, and whether the purchaser of a cloak has also purchased the hood fastened to it.' On the whole, I do not believe that any impartial reader, who is competent to form an opinion, will be likely to regard my observations on

1 Christian Schools and Scholars, vol i. p. 476. Examples of this sort of trifling on sacred subjects may be found in abundance in the notes to Gieseler's Lehrbuch der Kirchengeschichte, vol. iv. chap. 4, and in Discussioni di Constantino Grimaldi, Lucca, 1725. One comparatively inoffensive instance from a criticism quoted in the latter (p. 266) may suffice here: "Christum propriâ virtute ascendisse in cœlum, dogma est fidei; quomodo id factum sit, an corpori detractâ gravitate, an Christi vi sustentante corpus et sursum tollente, existimet unusquisque ut volet." Far more objectionable instances might be given from the speculations of the Schoolmen on good and evil angels. In some cases, their refinements led to the adoption of moral heresies, not unlike what Luther afterwards arrived at by a very different road. Thus Amalric taught at Paris, early in the thirteenth century, "quod in caritate constitutis nullum peccatum imputabatur. Unde sub tali specie pietatis ejus sequaces omnem turpitudinem committebant." And his followers said; "Si aliquis est in Spiritu Sancto et faciat fornicationem et aliquâ aliâ pollutione polluatur; non est ei peccatum quia ille Spiritus, qui est Deus, omnino separatus a carne, non potest peccare; quamdiu ille Spiritus, qui est Deus, est in eo, ille operatur omnia in omnibus." Cf. Gieseler, Kirchengesch. vol. iv. p. 414. Amalric's writings were condemned by the University of Paris, and the Papal Legate forbade the study of Aristotle, which however continued none the less to form the basis of the Scholastic philosophy. Matthew of Paris says of the Scholastics of the second period (1248), “Qui non verentes tangere montes, a gloriâ Dei opprimendi, nitebantur secreta Dei investigabilia temere perscrutari, et judicia Dei, quæ sunt abyssus multa, nimis præsumptuose indagare." Other writers of the period, and notably Roger Bacon, speaks quite as strongly.

the Schoolmen as either depreciatory or unjust. The result may be summed up in the words of one of the first of living divines, who says that, "as the scholastic theology was no new product of the medieval spirit, but was built up from a diligent and elaborate study of the patristic writings, so it must be the business of the theology of the present to go on building on the foundations of the Christian past, not exclusively of Scholasticism, and thus to bring its acquisitions into harmony with the requirements of the age." It should be remembered, moreover, as the same writer observes, that the Tridentine Fathers studiously adopted Patristic and Biblical in preference to Scholastic language, in drawing up their definitions. And this holds good also of the language of the Tridentine Catechism, which is the universal manual of instruction in Catholic doctrine, both for clergy and people.

2

While the present treatise is not in its form dogmatic or controversial, as was observed just now, it is

1 See Preface to the last volume of Kuhn's Dogmatik, p. iv. The whole volume (Die christliche Lehre von der göttlichen Gnade, Tubingen, 1868) is devoted to an examination of the Scholastic doctrine on grace, chiefly in reply to Schätzler's attack upon the author, "euphemistically termed criticism," but which appears from his account to be very much the sort of "criticism” we are accustomed to from writers of the same school in England. The book will well repay a careful perusal.

2 Ib. p. 401.

concerned with the history of dogma, and necessarily cuts across the controversies to which that dogma has given rise. It was, indeed, from what one cannot help seeing of the present result of those controversies in discrediting the doctrine of the Atonement altogether with many thoughtful and even religious minds, that the idea of undertaking it first occurred to me. I thought that the foreign accretions which had gathered round the doctrine in the course of ages, and especially during the period of the Reformation, some of which have so completely changed its whole character as to make it, in fact, quite another doctrine, would be most easily and most effectually discriminated from the truth they have only served to encumber, by an historical statement of their origin and growth. Meanwhile, whatever of light is shed upon that truth by doubtful or one-sided speculations, such as the patristic theory of a ransom to Satan, or St. Anselm's view of the necessity of an infinite payment for an infinite debt, would naturally come out in the course of the inquiry. Even the repulsive and immoral tenets introduced by the Reformers on human sin and divine grace are not without their importance, as illustrating the awful realities they so strangely caricature. On the other hand, while the

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