590 THE MIDDLE AGES. A.D. 1049-1294.
not be established." Absslard was an exception, and reversed the order, making knowledge precede faith ; but all arrived at the same result. Revelation and reason, faith and science, theology and philosophy agree, for they proceed from the one God who cannot contradict himself.
In addition to the interest which attaches to Scholasticism as a distinct body of intellectual effort, is its importance as the ruling theology in the Roman Catholic Church to this day. Such dogmas as the treatment of heresy, the suprem acy of the Church over the State, the immaculate conception, and the seven sacraments, as stated by the Schoolmen, are still binding, or at any rate, they have not been formally renounced. Leo XIII. bore fresh witness to this when, in his encyclical of Aug. 4, 1879, he pronounced the theology of Thomas Aquinas the standard of Catholic orthodoxy, and the safest guide of Christian philosophy in the battle of faith with the scepticism of the nineteenth century.
The Scholastic systems, like all the distinctive institutions and movements of the Middle Ages, were on an imposing scale. The industry of their authors cannot fail to excite amazement. Statement follows statement with tedious but consequential necessity and precision until chapter is added to chapter and tome is piled upon tome, and the subject has been looked at in every possible aspect and been ex hausted. Duns Scotus produced thirteen folio volumes, and perhaps died when he was only thirty-four. The volumes of Albertus Magnus are still more extensive. These theo logical systems are justly compared with the institution of the mediaeval papacy, and the creations of Gothic archi tecture, imposing, massive, and strongly buttressed. The papacy subjected all kingdoms to its divine authority. Architecture made all materials and known mechanical arts tributary to worship. The Schoolmen used all the forces of logic and philosophy to vindicate the orthodox system of theology, but they used much wood and straw in their constructions, as the sounder exegesis and more scriptural theology of the Reformers and these later days have shown.
§ 96. DEVELOPMENT OF SCHOLASTICISM. 591
§ 96. Sources and Development of Scholasticism.
The chief feeders of Scholasticism were the writings of Augustine and Aristotle. The former furnished the matter, the latter the form ; the one the dogmatic principles, the other the dialectic method.
The Augustine, who ruled the thought of the Middle Ages, was the churchly, sacramentarian, anti-Manichcean, and anti-Donatist theologian. It was the same Augustine, and yet another, to whom Luther and Calvin appealed for their doctrines of sin and grace. How strange that the same mighty intellect who helped to rear the structure of Scholas tic divinity should have aided the Reformers in pulling it down and rearing another structure, at once more Scriptural and better adapted to the practical needs of life !
Aristotle was, in the estimation of the Middle Ages, the master philosophical thinker. The Schoolmen show their surpassing esteem for him in calling him again and again " the philosopher." Dante excluded both him and Virgil as pagans from paradise and purgatory and placed them in the vestibule of the inferno, where, however, they are exempt from actual suffering. Aristotle was regarded as a fore runner of Christian truth, a John the Baptist in method and knowledge of natural things — precursor Ohristi in naturalibus. Until the thirteenth century, his works were only imperfectly known. The Categories and the de interpretatione were known to Abaelard and other Schoolmen in the Latin version of ' Boethius, and three books of the Organon to John of Salis bury. His Physics and Metaphysics became known about 1200, and all his works were made accessible early in the thirteenth century through the mediation of the Arab philos ophers, Avicenna, d. 1037, Averrhoes, d. 1198, and Abuacer, d. 1185, and through Jewish sources. Roger Bacon laments the mistakes of translations made from the Arabic, by Michael Scot, Gerard of Cremona, and others.1
1 See Roger Bacon : Opus Majus, Bridges' ed. I. 54-56 ; Sandys, Class. Scholarship, pp. 507, 540-546, 568-sqq., and Seth, Enc. Brit., XXI, 419,