The system of the Schoolmen professed to embrace the whole range of universal knowledge. It was not confined strictly to religion; it included, also, questions of philosophy and science. And these were settled by isolated texts from the Bible, or dicta of the earlier Schoolmen, and not by the investigation of facts. A theology so dogmatic and capricious could consistently admit of no progress. Every discovery of science or philosophy, contrary to the dicta of the Schoolmen, must be regarded as a crime. It was the logical result of an inherent vice in the system that Brunos and Galileos, in after ages, were tortured by successors of the Schoolmen into the denial of inconvenient truths.
The scholastic system not adapted to an age of progress and discovery.
This might do all very well in stagnant times, but in an age when the new art of printing was reviving ancient learning, and new worlds were turning up in hitherto untracked seas, men who, like Colet, entered into the spirit of the new era, soon found out that the summæ theologiæ of the Schoolmen were no sum of theology at all; that their science and philosophy were grossly deficient; and that if Christianity must in truth stand or fall with scholastic dogmas, then the accession of new light would be likely to lead honest enquirers after truth to reject it, and to accept in its place the refined semi-pagan philosophy which had accompanied the revival of learning in Italy. Yet these were the alternatives which the Schoolmen, in common with the champions of dogmatic creeds in all ages, tried to force upon mankind. Their cry was, as that of their scholastic successors has been, and is, ‘Our Christianity or none.’
Colet’s faith in facts and free enquiry.
Colet rests on the person of Christ and the ‘Apostles’ Creed.’
Colet had seen in Italy which of these two alternatives those who came within the influence of the new learning were inclined to take. But he had seen or heard, too, in Italy, of a third alternative. He had found a Christianity, not scholastic, not dogmatic, which did not seem to him to have anything to fear from free enquiry, for it was itself one of those facts which free enquiry had brought once more to light: the reproduction of its ancient records in their original languages was itself one of the results of the new learning. He had found in the New Testament a simple record of the facts of the life of Christ, and a few apostolic letters to the churches. It had brought him, not to an endless web of propositions to the acceptance of which he must school his mind, but to a person whom to love, in whom to trust, and for whom to work. He would not rest even in the teaching of his beloved St. Paul. He had been taught by the Apostle to look up from him to the ‘wonderful majesty of Christ;’[197] and loyalty to Christ had become the ruling passion of his life.[198]
Having rejected the summæ theologiæ of the Schoolmen, even before his faith had been shaken, by Grocyn’s discovery, in Dionysian speculations, his disappointment also in the latter would seem to have driven him back upon the Scriptures, upon the writings of St. Paul, above all upon Christ himself; until at last he had seemed to find in the simple facts of the Apostles’ Creed the true sum of Christian theology. Having entrenched his faith behind its simple bulwarks, he could look calmly out upon the world of philosophy and nature, with a mind free to accept truth wherever he might find it, without anxiety as to what the revival of ancient learning, or the discoveries of new-born science, might reveal, anxious chiefly to find out his own life’s work and duty, and right heartily to do it.
Colet’s advice to theological students to keep to the Bible and the Apostles’ Creed.
Erasmus came to England disgusted with theology.
Erasmus still a Schoolman.
Erasmus praises Aquinas.
Colet’s reply.
And having escaped the trammels of scholastic theology himself, he could urge others also to do the same. When, therefore, young theological students came to him in despair, on the point of throwing up theological study altogether, because of the vexed questions in which they found it involved, and dreading lest in these days, when everything was called in question, they might be found unorthodox, he was wont, it seems, to tell them ‘to keep firmly to the Bible and the Apostles’ Creed, and let divines, if they like, dispute about the rest.’[199]
But Erasmus as yet had far from attained the same standpoint.
He was himself in the very position above described. His experience in the Scotist college in Paris had not been lost upon him. It was not only that its filthy chambers and diet of rotten eggs[200] had ruined his constitution for life. He had contracted within its walls a disgust of all theological study. He describes himself as, previously to his visit to England, ‘abhorring the study of theology;’ and gives, as his double reason for it, the fear lest he might run foul of settled opinions; and lest, if he did so, he should be branded with the name of ‘heretic.’[201]