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
When Anselm had fought this great fight he died, 1109, in the
sixteenth year of his reign as primate of the Church in England,
and was buried, next to Lanfranc, in his abbey church. His career
outwardly is memorable only for this contest, which was afterwards
renewed by Thomas Becket with a greater king than either William
Rufus or Henry I. It is interesting, since it was a part of the
great struggle between the spiritual and temporal powers for two
hundred years,--from Hildebrand to Innocent III. This was only one
of the phases of the quarrel,--one of the battles of a long war,--
not between popes and emperors, as in Germany and Italy, but
between a king and the vicegerent of a pope; a king and his
subject, the one armed with secular, the other with spiritual,
weapons. It was only brought to an end by an appeal to the fears
of men,--the dread of excommunication and consequent torments in
hell, which was the great governing idea of the Middle Ages, the
means by which the clergy controlled the laity. Abused and
perverted as this idea was, it indicates and presupposes a general
belief in the personality of God, in rewards and punishments in a
future state, and the necessity of conforming to the divine laws as
expounded and enforced by the Christian Church. Hence the dark
ages have been called "Ages of Faith."
It now remains to us to contemplate Anselm as a theologian and
philosopher,--a more interesting view, for in this aspect his
character is more genial, and his influence more extended and
permanent. He is one of the first who revived theological studies
in Europe. He did not teach in the universities as a scholastic
doctor, but he was one who prepared the way for universities by the
stimulus he gave to philosophy. It was in his abbey of Bec that he
laid the foundation of a new school of theological inquiry. In
original genius he was surpassed by no scholastic in the Middle
Ages, although both Abelard and Thomas Aquinas enjoyed a greater
fame. It was for his learning and sanctity that he was canonized,--
and singularly enough by Alexander VI., the worst pope who ever
reigned. Still more singular is it that the last of his
successors, as abbot of Bec, was the diplomatist Talleyrand,--one
of the most worldly and secular of all the ecclesiastical
dignitaries of an infidel age.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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