What could be better or truer than this? Erasmus might almost have fancied that Colet himself had written these words, so fully do they seem to fall in with his views. But turning from the prologue, nothing surely could open the eyes of Erasmus more thoroughly to the real nature of scholastic theology than a further glance at the body of the treatise. For what was he to think of a system of theology a ‘brief’ compendium of which covered no fewer than 1150 folio pages, each containing 2000 words! And what was he to think of the wisdom of that Christian doctor who prescribed this ‘Summa’ as ‘milk’ specially adapted for the sustenance of theological ‘babes’! To be told first to digest forty-three propositions concerning the nature of God, each of which embraced several distinct articles separately discussed and concluded in the eighty-three folios devoted to this branch of the subject; then fifteen similar propositions regarding the nature of angels, embracing articles such as these:—
Whether an angel can be in more than one place at one and the same time?
Whether more angels than one can be in one and the same place at the same time?
Whether angels have local motion?
And whether, if they have, they pass through intermediate space?[204]
—then ten propositions regarding the Creation, consisting of an elaborate attempt to bring into harmony the work of the six days recorded in Genesis with mediæval notions of astronomy; then forty-five propositions respecting the nature of man before and after the Fall, the physical condition of the human body in Paradise, the mode by which it was preserved immortal by eating of the tree of life, the place where man was created before he was placed in Paradise, &c.; and then, having mastered the above subtle propositions, stated ‘briefly and clearly’ in 216 of the aforesaid folio pages, to be told for his consolation and encouragement that he had now mastered not quite one-fifth part of this ‘first book’ for beginners in theological study, and that these propositions, and more than five times as many, were to be regarded by him as the settled doctrine of the Catholic Church!—what student could fail either to be crushed under the dead weight of such a creed, or to rise up, and, like Samson, bursting its green withes, discard and disown it altogether?
Erasmus goes over to Colet’s view.
No marvel that Erasmus was obliged to confess that, in the process of further study of the works of Aquinas, his former high opinion had been modified.[205] He could understand now how it was that Colet could hardly control his indignation at the thought, how the simple facts of Christianity had been corrupted by the admixture of the subtle philosophy of this ‘best of the Schoolmen.’
And yet we may well be free to own that Colet’s not unnatural hatred of the scholastic philosophy had blinded him in some degree to the personal merits of the early Schoolmen. Deeper knowledge of the history of their times, and study of the personal character at least of some of them, might have enabled him not only to temper his hatred, but even to recognise that they occupied in their day a standpoint not widely different altogether even from his own.
The merit of the early Schoolmen.