Slow defeat of scholastic philosophy. 2. It might be supposed that the old scholastic philosophy, the barbarous and unprofitable disputations which occupied the universities of Europe for some hundred years, would not have endured much longer against the contempt of a more enlightened generation. Wit and reason, learning and religion, combined their forces to overthrow the idols of the schools. They had no advocates able enough to say much in their favour; but established possession, and that inert force which ancient prejudices retain, even in a revolutionary age, especially when united with civil and ecclesiastical authority, rendered the victory of good sense and real philosophy very slow.
It is sustained by the universities and regulars. 3. The defenders of scholastic disputation availed themselves of the commonplace plea, that its abuses furnished no conclusion against its use. The barbarousness of its terminology might be in some measure discarded; the questions which had excited ridicule might be abandoned to their fate; but it was still contended that too much of theology was involved in the schemes of school philosophy erected by the great doctors of the church to be sacrificed for heathen or heretical innovations. The universities adhered to their established exercises; and though these, except in Spain, grew less active, and provoked less emulation, they at least prevented the introduction of any more liberal course of study. But the chief supporters of scholastic philosophy, which became, in reality or in show, more nearly allied to the genuine authority of Aristotle, than it could have been, while his writings were unknown or ill translated, were found, after the revival of letters, among the Dominican or Franciscan orders; to whom the Jesuits, inferior to none in acuteness, lent, in process of time, their own very powerful aid.[722] Spain was, above all countries, and that for a very long time, the asylum of the schoolmen; and this seems to have been one among many causes, which have excluded, as we may say, the writers of that kingdom, with but few exceptions, from the catholic communion of European literature.
[722] Brucker, iv. 117, et post. Buhle has drawn copiously from his predecessor, ii. 448.
Commentators on Aristotle. 4. These men, or many of them, at least towards the middle of the century, were acquainted with the writings of Aristotle. But commenting upon the Greek text, they divided it into the smallest fragments, gave each a syllogistic form, and converted every proposition into a complex series of reasonings, till they ended, says Buhle, in an endless and insupportable verbosity. “In my own labours upon Aristotle,” he proceeds, “I have sometimes had recourse, in a difficult passage, to these scholastic commentators, but never gained anything else by my trouble than an unpleasant confusion of ideas; the little there is of value being scattered and buried in a chaos of endless words.”[723]
[723] ii. 417.
Attack of Vives on scholastics. 5. The scholastic method had the reformers both of religion and literature against it. One of the most strenuous of the latter was Ludovic Vives, in his great work, De corruptis Artibus et tradendis Disciplinis. Though the main object of this is the restoration of what were called the studies of humanity (humaniores literæ), which were ever found incompatible with the old metaphysics, he does not fail to lash the schoolmen directly in parts of this long treatise, so that no one, according to Brucker, has seen better their weak points or struck them with more effect. Vives was a native of Valencia, and at one time preceptor to the princess Mary in England.[724]
[724] Brucker, iv. 87. Meiners (Vergleich. der Sitten, ii. 730-755), has several extracts from Vives as to the scholasticism of the beginning of this century. He was placed by some of his contemporaries in a triumvirate with Erasmus and Budæus.
Contempt of them in England. 6. In the report of the visitation of Oxford, ordered by Henry VIII. in 1535, contempt for the scholastic philosophy is displayed in the triumphant tone of conquerors. Henry himself had been an admirer of Thomas Aquinas. But the recent breach with the see of Rome made it almost necessary to declare against the schoolmen, its steadiest adherents. And the lovers of ancient learning, as well as the favourers of the Reformation, were gaining ground in the English government.[725]
[725] Wood’s Hist. of University of Oxford. The passage wherein Antony Wood deplores the “setting Duns in Bocardo” has been often quoted by those who make merry with the lamentations of ignorance.
Veneration for Aristotle. 7. But while the subtle, though unprofitable, ingenuity of the Thomists and Scotists was giving way, the ancient philosophy, of which that of the scholastic doctors was a corruption, restored in its genuine lineaments, kept possession of the field with almost redoubled honour. What the doctors of the middle ages had been in theology, that was Aristotle in all physical and speculative science; and the church admitted him into an alliance of dependency for her own service. The Platonic philosophy, to which the patronage of the Medici and the writings of Ficinus had given countenance in the last century, was much fallen, nor had, at this particular time, any known supporters in Europe. Those who turned their minds to physical knowledge, while they found little to their purpose in Plato, were furnished by the rival school with many confident theories and some useful truth. Nor was Aristotle without adherents among the conspicuous cultivators of polite literature; who willingly paid that deference to a sage of Greece, they blushed to show for a barbarian dialectician of the thirteenth century. To them at least he was indebted for appearing in a purer text, and in more accurate versions; nor was the criticism of the sixteenth century more employed on any other writer. By the help of philology, as her bounden handmaid, philosophy trimmed afresh her lamp. The true peripatetic system, according to so competent a judge as Buhle, was first made known to the rest of Europe in the sixteenth century; and the new disciples of Aristotle, endeavouring to possess themselves of the spirit, as well as literal sense of his positions, prepared the way for a more advanced generation to poise their weight in the scale of reason.[726]