In a universe like that, a universe which was static, which had begun at a certain hour of a certain day in a certain year, and would end at another certain hour of a certain day in a certain year, which existed for the exclusive benefit of one and only one denomination, in such a universe there was no room for the prying curiosity of mathematicians and biologists and chemists and all sorts of other people who only cared for general principles and juggled with the idea of eternity and unlimitedness both in the field of time and in the realm of space.
True enough, many of those scientific people protested that at heart they were devout sons of the Church. But the true Christians knew better. No man, who was sincere in his protestations of love and devotion for the faith, had any business to know so much or to possess so many books.
One book was enough.
That book was the Bible, and every letter in it, every comma, every semicolon and exclamation point had been written down by people who were divinely inspired.
A Greek of the days of Pericles would have been slightly amused if he had been told of a supposedly holy volume which contained scraps of ill-digested national history, doubtful love poems, the inarticulate visions of half-demented prophets and whole chapters devoted to the foulest denunciation of those who for some reason or another were supposed to have incurred the displeasure of one of Asia’s many tribal deities.
But the barbarian of the third century had a most humble respect for the “written word” which to him was one of the great mysteries of civilization, and when this particular book, by successive councils of his Church, was recommended to him as being without error, flaw or slip, he willingly enough accepted this extraordinary document as the sum total of everything that man had ever known, or ever could hope to know, and joined in the denunciation and persecution of those who defied Heaven by extending their researches beyond the limits indicated by Moses and Isaiah.
The number of people willing to die for their principles has always been necessarily limited.
At the same time the thirst for knowledge on the part of certain people is so irrepressible that some outlet must be found for their pent up energy. As a result of this conflict between curiosity and repression there grew up that stunted and sterile intellectual sapling which came to be known as Scholasticism.
It dated back to the middle of the eighth century. It was then that Bertha, wife to Pépin the Short, king of the Franks, gave birth to a son who has better claims to be considered the patron saint of the French nation than that good King Louis who cost his countrymen a ransom of eight hundred thousand Turkish gold pieces and who rewarded his subjects’ loyalty by giving them an inquisition of their own.
When the child was baptized it was given the name of Carolus, as you may see this very day at the bottom of many an ancient charter. The signature is a little clumsy. But Charles was never much of a hand at spelling. As a boy he learned to read Frankish and Latin, but when he took up writing, his fingers were so rheumatic from a life spent fighting the Russians and the Moors that he had to give up the attempt and hired the best scribes of his day to act as his secretaries and do his writing for him.