[383] “If I were writing a history of democracy,” comments E. B., “I should deal first with democracy in religion, which is Calvinism, founded by a great Frenchman at Geneva, and then with democracy in politics, which is the French Revolution, inaugurated by another great Frenchman at Geneva, Rousseau. (The parallel of these two is striking—both typical exponents of the French genius, in its ardent logic and its apostolic fervour which gives in a burning lava to the world the findings of its logic.) It is noticeable in England how democracy in religion (Presbyterianism, which is simply Calvinism, plus Independency or Congregationalism) leads straight under the Stuarts to the English democratic ideas of the seventeenth century. I do not think the democratic element in Protestantism is sufficiently appreciated in the text. Even Luther, in the early days of 1520, could write The Freedom of a Christian Man and champion the priesthood of each believer and his direct access to his Maker. Luther, it is true, changed by 1525, and became a monarchist, the apostle of a state religion, under a godly prince who was summus episcopus. Anglicanism was from the first a monarchist religion, under a Henry VIII who was supremum caput. But if Lutheranism became, and Anglicanism was from the first, a religion of the State, Calvinism was always the religion of resistance to the State—in Holland and in Scotland most especially. The Reformation thus produced two opposite effects in politics; so far as it was Lutheran and Anglican it was monarchist; so far as it was Calvinistic, it was democratic. It is at first sight curious, but it is really quite natural, that the Catholics of the counter-reformation should also have been democratic. The Catholics could not admit the control of the monarch in the sphere of religion any more than the Calvinist; and here, as in other things (e.g. in the claim to possession of infallible truth), the Catholic priest and the Calvinistic presbyter were agreed. Filmer, an exponent of Anglican monarchism, expresses this well when he says, in speaking of the doctrine of a social contract, that ‘Cardinal Bellarmine and Calvin both look asquint this way.’ For the doctrine of a social contract was the democratic doctrine put forward by Catholics and Calvinists in opposition to the Lutheran and Anglican doctrine of divine right.”
[384] Aristotle’s Organon, or logic, had always been in part known to the West and was known as a whole after about 1130. In the thirteenth century the rest of his writings became known, in two ways. One way was that of direct translation from the Greek into Latin: it was in this way that St. Thomas Aquinas knew the Ethics and the Politics (the latter translated about 1260 by William of Moerbeke, Archbishop of Corinth in the Latin Empire of Constantinople started under Baldwin of Flanders in 1204, and a Fleming himself). The other way was that of indirect translation, that is to say, of translations of Arabic paraphrases of, or commentaries on, the works of Aristotle, such as had been made by Averroes and by Avicenna before him. It was Aristotle’s Physics and (I think) Metaphysics that first became known in this way. In this latter way the West received a version of Aristotle which, like Bottom the Weaver, was strangely “translated.” Sometimes translations were made direct from Arabic into Latin; sometimes they were made first into Hebrew, and then new translations were made from Hebrew into Latin. As the Arabic version of Aristotle was not always itself direct, but sometimes made from Syriac versions of the Greek, confusion became confounded. The Latin translations of the Arabic Aristotle sometimes contained not translation, but transliteration of Arabic words or sentences; and Roger Bacon very naturally objected to their unintelligibility. What is more, Aristotle’s views, as well as his words, were transmogrified in the process. But the important thing is that for Aristotle’s Organon, Ethics, and Politics there were direct translations from the Greek. (See Sandys’ History of Classical Scholarship and Renan’s Averroes et l’Averroisme.)—E. B.
[385] I do not agree with this paragraph. In the first sentence things are alleged about Realism which are not justified. It was the philosophy of the priests and most humane thinkers of the Middle Ages, of St. Anselm and of John Wycliffe. Nor is it true that Realism was the philosophy of the church. It was, in the early Middle Ages; but after Occam (1330) Nominalism triumphed, and was the philosophy of the church till the Reformation. Luther denounced Nominalism.—E. B.
[386] Encyclopædia Britannica, article “Scholasticism.”
[387] The Medieval Mind, by Henry Osborn Taylor.
[388] This gives a wrong impression about Nominalism, that it was banned in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. The contrary is the case. The attempt of 1339 came to nothing; that of 1473 was belated and unsuccessful. Except Wycliffe, there is no considerable thinker of these centuries, so far as I know, who is not Nominalist. The triumph of Nominalism was no unmixed benefit. Its insistence on study of the individual was indeed favourable to natural science; and Harnack says that it led to good work in psychology. But its nescience about Universals led to obscurantism in theology. Wycliffe as a Realist could hold that God acted secundum rationes exemplares, by certain and known universal rules; the Nominalists reduced God to inscrutable omnipotence. They went on to add that He could therefore only be known at all by the miraculous intervention of the mass through the priesthood. Their scepticism about Universals thus overleapt itself, and fell on the other side, into obscurantist ecclesiasticism.—E. B.
[389] Cp. chap. ii, § 1, towards the end.
[390] See Gregory’s Discovery, chap. vi.
[391] Not from 1340-1360, under Edward III, but later under Henry V, 1413-1422.—E. B.
Edward had Flemish and Bavarian allies.—H. G. W.