Beacon Lights of History, Volume 3 part 1: The Middle AgesLord, John
History
Beacon Lights of History, Volume 3 part 1: The Middle Ages
Lord, John
History
Anselm did not carry out metaphysical reasonings to such lengths as
did the Schoolmen who succeeded him,--those dialecticians who lived
in universities in the thirteenth century. He was a devout man,
who meditated on God and on revealed truth with awe and reverence,
without any desire of system-making or dialectical victories. This
desire more properly marked the Scholastic doctors of the
universities in a subsequent age, when, though philosophy had been
invoked by Anselm to support theology, they virtually made theology
subordinate to philosophy. It was his main effort to establish, on
rational grounds, the existence of God, and afterwards the
doctrines of the Trinity and the Incarnation. And yet with Anselm
and Roscelin the Scholastic age began. They were the founders of
the Realists and the Nominalists,--those two schools which divided
the Church in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, and which will
probably go on together, under different names, as long as men
shall believe and doubt. But this subject, on which I have only
entered, must be deferred to the next lecture.
AUTHORITIES.
Church's Life of Saint Anselm; Neander's Church History; Milman's
History of the Latin Church; Stockl's History of the Philosophy of
the Middle Ages; Ueberweg's History of Philosophy; Wordsworth's
Ecclesiastical Biography; Trench's Mediaeval Church history;
Digby's Ages of Faith; Fleury's Ecclesiastical History; Dupin's
Ecclesiastical History; Biographie Universelle; M. Rousselot's
Histoire de la Philosophie du Moyen Age; Newman's Mission of the
Benedictine Order; Dugdale's Monasticon; Hallam's Literature of
Europe; Hampden's article on the Scholastic Philosophy, in
Encyclopaedia Metropolitana.
THOMAS AQUINAS
A. D. 1225(7)-1274.
THE SCHOLASTIC PHILOSOPHY.
We have seen how the cloister life of the Middle Ages developed
meditative habits of mind, which were followed by a spirit of
inquiry on deep theological questions. We have now to consider a
great intellectual movement, stimulated by the effort to bring
philosophy to the aid of theology, and thus more effectually to
battle with insidious and rising heresies. The most illustrious
representative of this movement was Thomas of Aquino, generally
called Thomas Aquinas. With him we associate the Scholastic
Philosophy, which, though barren in the results at which it aimed,
led to a remarkable intellectual activity, and hence, indirectly,
to the emancipation of the mind. It furnished teachers who
prepared the way for the great lights of the Reformation.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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