The third principle which presents itself for analysis is known as mysticism. Both the teachings of Clement and the scholasticism of Origen exalted reason above faith. Mysticism was advocated by Origen and later by Augustine. It is defined as “that faculty of reason, from which proceeds the health and vigor of the mind, ... an emanation from God into the human soul, and comprehended in it the principles and elements of all truth, human and divine.”[80] There is a spark of divinity in every man. It is the object of Christian education to develop the image of Christ in the human being; but with the mystics, it was maintained that “silence, tranquillity, repose, and solitude, accompanied with such acts of mortification as might tend to extenuate and exhaust the body, were the means by which the hidden and internal word was excited to produce its latent virtues and to instruct men in the knowledge of divine things.”
Education continues to decline
It is not so much with the doctrine as with the results which were wrought by the teachings of such doctrine, that we are concerned. From an adherence to this method of reasoning arose the whole monkish system; for, says Mosheim, “This method of reasoning produced strange effects, and drove many into caves and deserts, where they macerated their bodies with hunger and thirst, and submitted to all the miseries of the severest discipline that a gloomy imagination could prescribe.” Egypt soon swarmed with these fanatics, and the whole history of the Dark Ages circles around them. They broke the bonds of family affection, overturned governments, and seated popes. Draper, speaking of the monks, says: “It is said that there were at one time in that country [Egypt] of these religious recluses not fewer than seventy-six thousand males and twenty-seven thousand females. With countless other uncouth forms, under the hot sun of that climate they seemed to be spawned from the mud of the Nile.” “From Egypt and Syria monachism spread like an epidemic.” “It was significantly observed that the road to ecclesiastical elevation lay through the monastery porch, and often ambition contentedly wore for a season the cowl, that it might seize more surely the miter.”[81]
Monks control schools
We shall need to study the monastic system as the repositories of learning in the Dark Ages, and therefore give but a passing glance at the origin of the order in the doctrine of mysticism. Its evils can not be portrayed without a blush, and it was against this system, taking as it did into its clutches the education of the masses, that the Reformation thrust its weight. We have seen truth struggling against error. It was in the schools of the early Christians that wisdom by faith was taught. It was into these same schools that pagan philosophy crept. It was the teacher who espoused this philosophy, and again a teacher who opposed it. Students imbibed the ideas of the leading educators, and became church teachers. The strongest minds, turning from the Word, and that alone, became expounders of philosophy and the sciences.
Schools of the Dark Ages
Gradually error prevailed, until in the schools, almost entirely in monastic hands, truth was so covered that D’Aubigné’s description of the work of the schoolmen of the Dark Ages is striking. He says: “These industrious artisans of thought had unraveled every theological idea, and of all their threads had woven a web, under which it would have been difficult for more skillful persons than their contemporaries to recognize the truth in its pristine purity.”
It is not the province of this chapter to deal with theological controversies in themselves. It is only as these controversies took possession of and molded the courses of study in the schools; only as they found their strongest supporters in the persons of teachers, and were carried to the world by students, that our attention is drawn to another line of argument, which, as it were, clenched the work of the papacy, and gave it its power over the minds of men.
Pelagianism taught