The Mediaeval Mind (Volume 2 of 2) / A History of the Development of Thought and Emotion in the Middle Ages

by Henry Osborn Taylor

Here one has the plain reversal. We must first understand in order to believe. Doubtless the demands of Abaelard’s students to have the principles of the Christian Faith explained, that they might be understood and accepted rationally, echoed the master’s imperative intellectual need. Not that Abaelard would breathe the faintest doubt of these verities; they were absolute and unquestionable. He accepted them upon authority just as implicitly (he might think) as St. Bernard. Herein he shows the mediaeval quality of deference. But he will understand with his mind the profoundest truths enunciated by authority; he will explain them rationally, that the mind may rationally comprehend them.

Men of an opposite cast of mind foresaw the outcome of this rationalization of dogma more surely than the subtle dialectician for whom this process was both peremptory and proper. And the Church acted with a true instinct in condemning Abaelard in spite of his protestations of belief, just as with a like true instinct Friar Bacon’s own Franciscan Order looked askance on one whose mind was suspiciously set upon observation and experiment—and cavilling at others. Celui-ci tuera cela! The ultra-scientific spirit is dangerous to faith—and Bacon’s asseverations that no knowledge was of value save as it helped the soul’s salvation, was doubtless regarded as a conventional insincerity. Yet Roger Bacon had his mediaeval deferences, as will appear.[426]

Neither one extreme view nor the other was to represent the attitude of thoughtful and believing Christendom; not William of St. Thierry and St Bernard, nor yet (on these points) Abaelard and Friar Bacon should prevail; but the all-balancing and all-considering Aquinas. He will draw the lines between faith and reason, and bulwark them with arguments which shall seem to render unto reason the things of reason, and unto faith its due. Yet it is actually Roger Bacon who accuses Thomas of making his Theology out of dialectic and very human reasonings. It was true; and we are again reminded how variant views shaded into each other in the Middle Ages, and all within certain lines of similarity. Practically all mediaeval thinkers defer to authority—more or less; and all hold to some principle of faith, to the necessity of believing something, for the soul’s salvation. There is likewise some similarity in their attitudes toward intellectual interests. For all recognized their propriety, and gave credit to the human desire to know. Likewise all saw that salvation, the summum bonum for man, included more than intellection; and felt that it held some consummation of other human impulses; that it held love—the love of God along with the intellectual ardour of contemplation; and well-nigh all recognized also that the faith held mystery, not to be solved by reason. Thus all were rational—some more, some less; and all were devotional and believing, pietistic, ardent—some more, some less; according as the intellectual nature dominated over the emotional, or the emotions quelled the conscious exercise of reason, yet reached out and upward from what knowledge and reason had given as a base to spring from.

Thus the mediaeval spirit, variant within its lines of likeness; and of a piece with it was the field it worked in, which made its range and scope. Here as well, a saving knowledge of God and the soul was central and chief among all intellectual interests. None denied this. Augustine, the universal prototype of the mediaeval mind, had cried, “God and the soul, these will I know, and these are all.” But wide had been the scope of his knowledge of God and the soul; and in the centuries which hung upon his words, wide also was the range of knowledge subsumed under those capitals. How would one know God and the soul? Might one not know God in all His universe, in the height and breadth thereof, and backwards and forwards through the reach of time? Might not one also know the soul in all its operations, all its queries and desires; would not it and they, and their activities, make up the complementary side of knowledge—complementary to the primal object, God, known in His eternity, in His temporal creation, in His everlasting governance? Wide or narrow might be the intellectual interests included within a knowledge of God and the soul. And while many men kept close to the centre and saving nexus of these potentially universal themes, others might become absorbed with data of the creature-world, or with the manifold actions of the mind of man, so as to forget to keep all duly ordered and connected with the central thought.

So the search for knowledge might roam afield. Likewise as to its motive; practically with many men it was, in itself, a joy and end; although they might continue to connect this end formally with the salvation of the soul. Roger Bacon of a surety was such a one. Another was Albertus Magnus. The laborious culling of twenty tomes of universal knowledge surely had the joy of knowing as the active motive. And Aquinas too; no one could be such an acquisitive and reasoning genius, without the love of knowledge in his soul. Yet Thomas never let this love point untrue to its goal of research and devotion, to wit, sacred doctrine, theology, the Christian Faith in its very widest compass, yet in its unity of saving purpose.

In Thomas Aquinas the certitude of faith, the sense of grace, the ardour of love, never quenched the conscious action of the reasoning and knowing mind; nor did reasoning quench devotion. A balance too, though perhaps with one scale higher than the other, was kept by Bonaventura, whose mind had reason’s faculty, but whose heart burned perpetually toward God. Another rationally ardent soul was Bonaventura’s intellectual forerunner, Hugo of St. Victor. In these men intellect did not outstrip the fervours of contemplation. But such catholic balance did not hold with Abaelard and Bacon, who lacked the pietistic temperament. With others, conversely, the strength of the pietistic and emotional nature overbore the intellect; the mind was less exacting; and devotional ardour used reason solely for its purposes. The mightiest of these were Bernard and Francis. To the same key might chime the woman, St. Hildegard of Bingen. We narrow down from these to hectic souls content with a few thoughts which serve as a basis for the heart’s fervours.

The varying attitudes of mediaeval thinkers toward reason and authority, and even their different views upon the limits of the field of salutary knowledge, are exemplified in their methods, or rather in the variations of their common method. Here the factors were again authority and the intellect which considers the authority, and in terms of its own rational processes reacts upon the proposition under view. The intellect might simply accept authority; or, on the other hand, it might, through dialectic, seek a conclusion of its own. But midway between a mere acceptance of authority, and the endeavour of dialectic for a conclusion of its own, there is the reasoning process which perceives divergence among authorities, compares, discriminates, interprets, and at last acts as umpire. This was the combined and catholic scholastic method. It contained the two factors of its necessary duality; and its variations (besides the gradual perfecting of its form from one generation to another) consisted in the predominant employment of one factor or the other.

The beginning was in the Carolingian time, when Rabanus compiled his authorities from sources sacred and profane, scarcely discriminating except to maintain the pre-eminence of the sacred matter. His younger contemporary, Eriugena, was a translator of his own chief source, Pseudo-Dionysius, him of the Hierarchies, Celestial and Ecclesiastical. Yet he composed also a veritable book, De divisione naturae, in which he put his matter together organically and with argument. And while professing to hold to the authority of Scripture and the Fathers, he not only took upon himself to select from their statements, but propounded the proposition that the authority which is not confirmed by reason appears weak. Eriugena made his authorities yield him what his reason required. His argumentative method became an independent rehandling of matter drawn from them. It was very different from the plodding excerpt-gathering of Rabanus.

We pass down the centuries to Anselm. Contemplative and religious, his reverence for authority was unimpaired by any conscious need to refashion its meaning. Though he possessed creative intellectual powers, they were incited and controlled by his deep piety. Hence his works were constructed of original and lofty arguments, but such as did not infringe upon either the efficient or the final priority of faith.

With Abaelard of many-sided fame the duality of method becomes explicit, and is, if one may say so, set by the ears. On the one hand, he advances in his constructive theological treatises toward a portentous application of reason to explain the contents of the Christian Faith; on the other, somewhat sardonically, he devises a scheme for the employment and presentation of authorities upon these sacred matters, a scheme so obviously apt that once made known it could not but be followed and perfected.