For as earnestly as Colet himself was now seeking to bring the Christianity and advanced thought of his age into harmony, the early Schoolmen had tried to do the same thing in theirs. The misfortune of the Schoolmen was, that they had inherited from St. Augustine, and the Pseudo-Dionysius, the vicious tendency to fill up blanks in theology by indulging in hypotheses, capable of receiving the sanction of ecclesiastical authority, and then to be treated as established, although altogether unverified by facts. They had also to harmonise the dogmatic theology so manufactured with a scientific system as dogmatic as itself. For while theologians had been indulging in hypotheses respecting ‘original sin,’ ‘absolute predestination,’ and ‘irresistible grace,’ natural philosophers had been indulging in similar hypotheses respecting the ‘crystalline spheres,’ ‘epicycloids,’ and ‘primum mobile.’[206] And seeing that the method by which the Schoolmen attempted to fuse these two dogmatic systems into one, itself consisted of a still further indulgence in the same vicious mode of procedure, it was but natural that their attempt as a whole, however well meant, should leave ‘confusion worse confounded.’
The demerits of their successors.
Still it must not be forgotten that they did succeed by this vicious process in reconciling theology and science to the satisfaction of their own dogmatic age. This praise is, at least, their due. On the other hand, their successors in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries could not put forward any such claims for themselves. They did not succeed in harmonising the theology and the advanced thought of their age. They strained every nerve to keep them hopelessly apart. They blindly held on to a worn-out system inherited from their far worthier predecessors, and spent their strength in denouncing, in no measured terms, the scientific spirit and inductive method of the ‘new learning.’
Hence there can be little doubt that Colet’s hatred of what in his day was in truth a huge and bewildering mass of dreary and lifeless subtlety, was a just and righteous hatred. And though it took some time for Erasmus thoroughly to accept it, he could in after years, when Colet was no more, endorse, from the bottom of his heart, Colet’s advice to young theological students: ‘Keep to the Bible and the Apostles’ Creed; and let divines, if they like, dispute about the rest.’
IV. ERASMUS FALLS IN LOVE WITH THOMAS MORE (1498).
Amongst the broken gleams of light which fall, here and there only, upon the Oxford intercourse of Erasmus with Colet, there are one or two which reveal an already existing friendship with Thomas More, but unfortunately without disclosing how it had begun.
Introduction of More to Erasmus.
Erasmus, when passing through London on his way to Oxford, had probably been introduced by Lord Mountjoy to his brilliant young friend. It is even possible that there may be a foundation of fact in the story that they had met for the first time, unknown to each other, at the lord mayor’s table, or, as is more likely still, at the table of the ex-lord mayor, Sir Henry Colet. Erasmus, having perhaps been told Colet’s saying, that there was but one genius in England, and that his name was Thomas More, may have been set opposite to him at table without knowing who he was. More in his turn may have been told of the logical subtlety of the great scholar newly arrived from the Scotist college in Paris, without having been personally introduced to him. If this were so, the rest of the story may easily be true. They are said to have got into argument during dinner, Erasmus, in Scotist fashion, ‘defending the worser part,’ till finding in his young opponent ‘a readier wit than ever he had before met withal,’ he broke forth into the exclamation, ‘Aut tu es Morus aut nullus;’ to which the ready tongue of More retorted—so runs the story, ‘Aut tu es Erasmus aut Diabolus.’[207] Whether at the lord mayor’s table, or elsewhere, they had become acquainted, and a correspondence had grown up between them, one letter of which, like a solitary waif, has been left stranded on the shore of the gulf which has swallowed the rest. It reads thus:—
Erasmus Thomæ Moro suo, S.D.