History of Free Thought in Reference to The Christian Religion

by Adam Storey Farrar

Lecture III. Free Thought During The Middle Ages, and At The Renaissance; Together With Its Rise in Modern Times.

Luke xxi. 33.

Heaven and earth shall pass away; but my words shall not pass away.

We have studied the history of unbelief down to the fall of heathenism. A period of more than seven hundred years elapses before a second crisis of doubt occurs in church history. The interval was a time of social dissolution and reconstruction; and when the traces of the free criticism of religion reappear, the world in which they manifest themselves is new. Fresh races have been introduced, institutions unknown to the ancient civilization have been mingled with or have replaced the old; and the ancient language of the Roman empire has dissolved into the Romance tongues. But Christianity has lived through the deluge, and been the ark of refuge in the storm; and its claims are now tested by the young world which emerged into being when the waters of confusion had retired. The silence of reason in this interval was not the result of the abundance of piety, but of the prevalence of ignorance; a sign of the absence of inquiry, not of the presence of moral and mental satisfaction.[251] Even when speculation [pg 076] revived, and reason re-examined religion, the literary monuments in which expression is given to doubt are so few, that it will be possible in the present lecture not only to include the account of the second and third crises which mark the course of free thought in church history, but even to pass beyond them, and watch the dawn of unbelieving criticism caused by the rise of the modern philosophy which ushers in the fourth of the great crises named in a previous lecture.[252]

The former of these periods which we shall now examine, the second in the general scheme, may be considered to extend from A.D. 1100 to 1400. Its commencement is fixed by the date at which the scholastic philosophy began to influence religion, its close by the revival of classical learning. The history of free thought in it is complicated, by being to some extent the struggle of deeds as well as of ideas, a social as well as a religious struggle. It was the period which witnessed both the dissolution of feudalism and the theocratic centralization in the popedom; and while reason struggled on the one side against the dogmatic system, it struggled on the other to assert the rights of the state against the church, and to put restraints upon the privileges, dominion, and wealth, of the pope and clergy. The social struggle, to vindicate the liberty of the state against the undue power of the church, so far as it is the effect of free thought, appertains to our subject, in the same manner as was the case with the early attempts of a converse character of the Roman emperors to deny due liberty to the church, whenever, as in the case of Julian, they were the result of a deliberate examination of religion. Free thought in the middle ages is at once Protestantism, Scepticism, and Ghibellinism.[253]

The intellectual action in this crisis is marked by four forms;—(1) the criticism created by the scholastic philosophy, which has been thought to mark in Abélard the commencement of doubt; (2) the introduction of the idea of progress in religion, in the sense that Christianity is to be replaced by a better religion; (3) the idea of the comparison of Christianity with other religions, so as to obliterate its exceptional character; (4) the traces of disbelief in the doctrine of immortality. The two former are free thought as doubt, the two latter as disbelief.

It will be necessary, for illustrating the first of those forms, to explain the nature of the scholastic philosophy, so far as to show how it might become the means of producing heresy or scepticism, when applied to theology.

Scholasticism is the vague name which describes the system of inquiry common in the middle ages.[254] In truth it marks a period rather than a system; a method rather than a philosophy. In spite of difference of form, it links itself with the speculations of other ages in community of aim, in that it strove to gain a general philosophy of the universe, to reach some few principles which might offer an interpretation of all difficulties.

In the present age the science which attempts this grand problem is denominated Logic, or Metaphysics, according to the different sphere which it covers.[255] But [pg 078] in the middle ages these two fields were not clearly distinguished; in the same manner as in the Διαλεκτικὴ of Plato, method and the realities attained by method were not separated.[256] Yet it was mainly in reference to the former that scholasticism wears the aspect of a method, and to the latter the aspect of a philosophy. Adopting deduction as the type of a perfect science, it assumed its data partly on the ground of innate ideas, partly from the truths of revelation, partly from the metaphysical dicta of Aristotle; and from these principles attempted to work out deductively a solution of universal nature. It was the Σοφία of Aristotle executed from a Christian point of view. In respect to the logical method there was a general agreement of opinion, but difference of system arose in the metaphysical. The form that the problem of science then assumed was peculiar. Instead of examining the data from which deduction starts, with a view of finding their subjective certainty as thoughts, the inquirers strove to settle the problem of their objective nature as things. The question asked was this: Are the genera and species which the mind contemplates, in its attempts to classify and interpret phenomena, real in nature, or produced only by human thought and speech? A comparison with the modern mode of investigation will explain the importance which the question possessed, and the reason why it monopolized the entire field of inquiry.

The progress of discovery has forced upon us a subdivision of the sciences into two classes, unknown in [pg 079] the middle ages; in one of which we discover causes; in the other, in which we are unable to find causes, we rest content with classification by species and genera. In the former we discover antecedents, in the latter types.[257] But in mediæval science, as in Greek, the latter class was regarded as the sole form of all perfect science. Hence the reason will appear why the question as to the true nature of genera and species had a monopoly of the field of inquiry; and also why the theory of predication was exalted into the most important part of logic.[258] Those who thought that genera had a real existence as essences apart from man's mind and from nature, were denominated Realists: those who denied to them any real existence, and considered them to be a common quality labelled by a common name, were Nominalists: those who held the intermediate view, and assumed them to exist, not only as artificial names but also as general classes in the human mind, were Conceptualists. With the realist, classification was not arbitrary, but true and determined for man. With the nominalist and conceptualist it was created by man, and amenable to correction.