tempted to charge the seeming extravagance of St Paul's thought upon his Jewish inheritance, while modern Jews are tempted to stigmatize them as grotesque exaggerations of reasonable rabbinical doctrines. Probably both are right, and both wrong. The germs were Jewish; but, transported to a new soil, and watered with a new enthusiasm, they assumed new forms. These cannot claim the merit of correctness, but they are works of religious genius. At the same time, they employ all the resources of dialectic, and have, therefore, taken quite half the journey from primary religion to theology. But the dislocation of religious thinking, when Christianity ceased to be a Jewish faith and found a home with Gentiles, destroyed the continuity of Paulinism and of Jewish thought working through St Paul. In later times, when Paulinism revived, the epistles spoke for themselves, though they were not always correctly understood. It should be added that, according to A. Harnack, Hellenistic Judaism had worked out the principles of a theology which simply passed on into the Greek-speaking Christian Church.

of New Testameat.

Besides the teaching of Jesus (best preserved in the first three gospels) and the teaching of Paul (in six, ten, or thirteen Contents epistles), the recent "science" of New Testament theology finds other types of doctrine. The Epistle to the Hebrews is a parallel to Paulinism, working out upon independent lines the finality of Christianity and its superiority to the Old Testament. The Johannine Gospel and Epistles are later than Paulinism, and presuppose its leading or less startling positions. Whatever historical elements may be preserved in Christ's discourses as given in the Fourth Gospel, these discourses fit into the author's type of thought better than into the synoptical framework. They have been transformed. 1 Peter is good independent Paulinism. The Epistle of James may breathe a Christianized Jewish legalism, or, as others hold, it may breathe the legalism (not untouched by Jewish influences) of popular Gentile-Christian thought. The Johannine Apocalypse is chiefly interesting as an apocalypse. F. C. Baur and his school interpreted it as a manifesto of anti-Pauline Jewish Christianity; on the contrary, it closely approaches Paul's doctrine of the Atonement and his Christology. Other writings are of less importance. Acts is indeed of interest in showing us Paulinism in a later stage; the writer wishes to reproduce his great master's thought, but his Paulinism is simplified and cut down. Possibly the Pastoral Epistles show the same process. When we go outside the New Testament, this involuntary lack of grasp becomes even more marked.

Neither the theory of infallible inspiration, with its assertion of absolute uniformity in the New Testament, nor Baur's criticism, with its assertion of irreconcilable antagonisms, is borne out by facts. The New Testament is many-sided, but it has a predominant spiritual unity. Only in minor details do contradictions emerge. It is to be remembered that criticism has broken up the historical unity of the New Testament collection and placed many of its components side by side with writings which have never been canonized, and which conservative writers had supposed to be distinctly later. But in regard to date there has been a remarkable retreat from the carlier critical assertions. And at any rate, since the New Testament canon was set up, New Testament writings have had a theological influence which no others can claim.

"Enthus. lasm."

On both sides of the great transition from being a Jewish to being a Gentile faith, Christianity, according to recent study, manifested itself as "enthusiastic." We may distinguish several points in this conception. (1) Most important, perhaps the end of the world was held to be close at hand. "Kingdom of God" as generally used was an eschatological concept; and, whatever difficulties there may be as to certain gospel passages, Christ, to say the least, cannot have disclaimed this view. The watchword rings through all the New Testament"the Lord is at hand." A broader popular form was given to this expectation in "Chiliasm "-the doctrine of the Thousand" years' reign of Christ on earth (Rev. xx. 1-7). But even Chiliasm -which itself has its subtler and its grosser modifications-is found in early Gentile 'as well as in early Jewish Christianity. (2) 1 Corinthians shows us a Christian community filled with disturbances, and apparently without recognized officials. The democratic, or rather theocratic, rights of the spiritual man were for a time relied on to extemporize so much Church government as might be needed till the Master returned. Yet the beginnings of Church order come earlier than those of doctrine proper, and much earlier than the cooling of eschatological hopes. (3) There are traces inside and

Four hundred years is another significant figure in the Jewish book, 4 Ezra.

outside the New Testament of aversion to receiving back into Church fellowship those who, after confessing Christ, had been guilty of grave sins. The New Testament evidence is by no means uniform (contrast Heb. vi. 4-6, x. 26-31; 1 John v. 16; with 2 Cor. ii. 7); but this high conception of Church holiness is attested by a series of rigorist "heresies" during the early centuries; and nothing could be more characteristic of eschatological enthusiasm. Those who had fallen were not banished from hope, even by the rigorists. Still, their case was held over for a higher Judge; while the Church, especially in these more Puritian and separatist groups, kept her garments white. (4) The enthusiastic view of the possibilities of the Christian life-associated, as modern and especially Western Christians must suspect, with shallow external views of sin-lent itself to belief in sinless perfection. Even St Paul has been supposed, not without a certain plausibility, to teach the sinless perfection of real Christians. The West, with its theology protesting in the background, but in vain, still sings the prayer of the Te Deum:" Vouchsafe, O Lord, to keep us this day without sin." Why should theology labour at definitions? Such an enthusiastic temper does not lend itself to cool theory. "The Lord is at hand;" a Christian's one wisdom is to be ready to meet him. And yet materials for theology were richly provided even during this period. That is true above all of the man whom we know best in New Testament daysSt Paul. Himself through and through animated with the joyful hope, even when prepared to surrender (2 Cor. v. 8; Phil. i. 23, ii. 17) the prospect of personal survival (1 Thess. iv. 17; 1 Cor. xv. 51, 52) until that bright day, yet as a teacher he lays such stress upon Christ's first coming that the emphasis on the second Advent may be struck out-leaving still, we might almost claim, a complete Paulinism. He who planned his campaigns to the great civilized centres of Corinth, Ephesus and Rome, and thus prepared for a historic future of which he did not dream, drew his parallels of thought with no less firm hand, and showed himself indeed "a wise master-builder."

Material for theology.

Greek in fluence.

In one aspect Montanism is the central reaction of the primitive Christian enthusiasm against the forces which were transforming its character. Of course it had other aspects and elements as well. Hippolytus and Novatian repeat the protest less vehemently; Donatism shows it blended with later hierarchical ideas. But, when the enthusiasm cooled, it was Greck thought which interpreted the contents of Christianity. The process of change is called by Harnack sometimes "secularization" and sometimes" Hellenization." "Acute Hellenizing," we are told, took the form of Gnosticism. The Gnostics were the "first theologians." When the Church in turn began to produce a theology of her own she was imitating as well as guarding against those wayward spirits. What was to be the central topic? The Church's first creed had been "the Fatherhood of God and the Messiahship of Jesus" (A. Ritschl); but the "Rule of Faith " (Irenaeus; Tertullian, who uses the exact expression: Origen)— that summary of religiously important facts which was meant to ward off error without reliance on speculations such as the Logos doctrine-built itself up along the lines of the baptismal formula of Matt. xxviii. 19. There are traces in the New Testament of a baptismal confession simply of the name of Christ (1 Cor. i. 13, 15: Rom. vi. 2; cf. even the late verse Acts viii. 37), not of the threefold name. Moreover, textual criticism points to an early type of reading in Matt. xxviii. 19 without the threefold formula. Still, it is strange how completely this seemingly isolated passage takes command of the development of early theology.

Doctrine

of Trinity

and of

Christ.

Out of the Rule of Faith there came in time what tradition miscalls the Apostles' Creed-the Roman baptismal creed, a formulary of great importance in all the West; then other creeds, which also are in a sense expansions of the Rule of Faith. The Greek mind threw itself upon the problem-who precisely is Jesus Christ the Lord? His Messiahship is asserted; who then is the Messiah? and this second figure in the baptismal confession? A provisional answer, linking Christian theology with the philosophical theology of antiquity. Person of asserted Jesus Christ to be the divine Logos. But this assertion was expanded and refined upon till two great doctrines had been built up-that of the Trinity of divine Persons in the unity of the Godhead, and that of the union of two distinct natures, divine and human, in the person of Jesus Christ. It is curious that the Syrian church of the 4th century (e.g. Aphraates) was almost unaffected by the great dogmatic debates. But there is no hint of a reasoned rejection of Greek developments in favour of primitive simplicity, still less of any independent theological development. Aphraates accepts the Logos Christology, and, soon after his time, his church is found on the beaten track of orthodoxy.

a set of sanctioned phrases, and a longer list of phrases which are proscribed as heretical. The long and dubious conflicts of opinion concern Church history but left few traces on doctrine; Athanasius never flinched through all the reaction against Nicaea, and his faith ultimately conquered the Catholic Church. There is only this to notice, that it conquered under the great Cappadocians The Cap (Basil, Gregory Nazianzen, Gregory of Nyssa), who padocians, represented a somewhat different type of teaching. The Trinity in Unity stood firm; but, instead of recognizing God as one yet in some sense three, men now began to recognize three Divine beings, somewhat definitely distinguished in rank cach from each and yet in some sense one. Athanasius's picty is thus brought into association with the details of Logos speculation. The new type passed on into the West through Augustine, and the so-called Athanasian creed, which states an Augustinian version of Greek dogma. There is indeed one immense change. Subordinationism is blotted out, more even than by Athanasius. On these lines modern popular orthodoxy maintains the doctrine of the Trinity. It seeks to prove its case by asserting first the divinity of Christ, and secondly the personality of the Holy Spirit. The modern idea of personality, though with doubtful fairness, helps the change.

Augus. tine's Trinitari anism.

Doctrine

of the Spirit.

The first great supplement of the doctrine of the Logos or Son was the more explicit doctrine of the Holy Spirit. Macedonius, who defended the semi-Arian or Homoiousian position that the Spirit was merely a Divine influence Origen had held the Spirit to be a creature -was branded as a heretic (Synod of Alexandria, 362; Council of Constantinople, 381); a strong support to Cappadocian or modern Trinitarianism. Then, in the light of the affirmation of Christ's full divinity, the problems of His person necessarily received further attention. Did the Divine Logos take the place of the higher rational soul in the humanity of Jesus? So Apollinaris or Apollinarius of Laodicea taught, but the Council of Constantinople (381) marked the position as heretical. Did the two natures, human and divine, remain so separated in Jesus as to jeopardize the unity of His person? This was the view which Cyril of Alexandria ascribed to Nestorius, who hesitated to call Mary 0EOTÓKos, and represented the tradition of the Antiochene school. Such views were marked as heretical by the Council of Ephesus (431), the decision resulting in a profound and lasting schism. Did the two natures coalesce in Monophy. Jesus so as to constitute a single nature? This is sites. the Monophysite or Eutychian view, developed out of the Alexandrian tradition ("Eutychianism is simply Cyrillianism run mad," A. B. Bruce). The Council of Chalcedon (451) rejected the Alexandrian extreme in its turn, guided by Leo of Rome's celebrated letter, and thus put the emphasis on the duality rather than the unity in Christ's person. Another grave and lasting schism was the result. Two great doctrinal traditions had thus been anathematized; the narrow line of orthodoxy sought still to keep the middle track. Was there at Monothe least unity of will in Jesus? No, said orthodoxy; letes. He had two independent faculties of will, divine and human. The Maronites of Syria, reconciled to the see of Rome in 1182, probably represent the Monothelete schism. John of Enhypos- Damascus's theory of Enhypostasy (Christ's manhood tasy. not impersonal, but made personal only through union with His Godhead) is held by some to be the copingstone of this great dogmatic development.

In the Trinity the problem is to combine independence and unity; in Christology, to combine duality of nature with the The defl- unity of the person. Verbally this is done; is it nitions done substantially? The question, Who is Jesus in East Christ? has been pushed to the very end, and authoriand West. tatively answered in the definitions of Church orthodoxy. With these the Orthodox Greek Churches-and with Harnack and F. Loofs describe them as belonging to the Homoiousian party-believers in the Son's "likeness of essence" to the Father's, not "identity of essence." Bethune Baker vehemently denies that these great leaders were contented with Homojousianism. Anyway, we must remember that radical theology had gone to much greater extremes in denial (Anomacans-the Son unlike the Father). It was not by any means exclusively the "battle of a diphthong."

"

Spanish Adoptianism breaks up the unity almost without disguise.

their divergent decisions the various non-Orthodox Eastern Churches, Coptic, Armenian, &c.-desire to rest satisfied; theology has finished its work, unless in so far as it is to be codified. It is never true while men live that thought is at a standstill; but, as nearly as it may be true, Eastern theology has made it so. In the West the decisions of the great councils have been accepted as a datum. They enter into the basis of theology; results attained by long struggles in the East are simply presuppositions to the West; but, for the most part, no independent interest attaches to them in the Western world. They are taken as involved in redemption from sin-in the Atonement, or in the sacraments. Belief in the Trinity is almost unbroken. Western Christendom wishes to call Christ God; even the Ritschlian school uses the wonted language in the light of its own definitions. For others, the Trinity is the accepted way of making that confession. It becomes of practical importance, according to S. T. Coleridge, in connexion with Redemption. It passes, therefore, as a datum of revelation. In Christology the tradition has been more frequently challenged since the Reformation.

But

Harnack criticizes the doctrinal development. He considers that Christianity is best defended on the basis of the doctrine that Christ is a man chosen and equipped for His task by God. in the Eastern Church the religious interest, as he thinks, points to Monophysitism. Dyophysite orthodoxy has sterilized Eastern Christianity, or thrown it upon inferior forms of piety. Of course this does not mean that Harnack considers monophysitism nearer On the contrary, he would hold that the scholarly tradition of the historic truth, or nearer the normal type of Christian thought. Antioch more nearly reaches the real historical manhood of Jesus. But if it be presupposed that the purpose of Christ's mission was to deify men by bestowing physical immortality, then we must of His divine and human natures. assume, first, Christ's essential Godhead, and, secondly, the fusion Whatever be the truth in the assertion that death rather than sin is the enemy dreaded by Eastern Christianity, and immortality rather than forgiveness the blessing craved, it is difficult to take the talk about deification as anything more than rhetoric. Did they not start from belief in one God? Was not polytheism still a living enemy? It is a more obvious, if perhaps a more vulgar, criticism of the great development to say that it was too simply intellectual-seeking clear-cut definitions and dogmas without measuring the resources at the command of sometimes told that the councils simply denied error after error, Christians or the urgency of their need for such things. We are affirming little or nothing. But the Trinity and the Hypostatic Union are vast speculative constructions reared upon slender biblical data. To complain of the over-subtlety of a theological adversary is a recognized move in the game; it may constantly be played in good faith; it proves little or nothing. The facts appear to be, that the Church embarked confidently on the task of blending philosophy and religion, that the Trinity satisfied most minds in that age as a rational (i.e. neo-platonic) construction, able. If two natures, divine and human, are added to each other, but that in Christology the data or the methods proved less tractwhat can the humanity be except one drop in the ocean of divine power, wisdom, goodness? The biblical authorities plainly set forth "the man Christ Jesus," but theological science failed to explain how Godhead and manhood came together in unity. Fact and theory sprang asunder; for theory had done its utmost, and was baffled. Another admission ought to be made. Western contributions to the prolonged debate constantly tended to take the form of asserting truths of faith rather than theories. Yet what was the whole process but a colossal theory?

In Catho

licism.

One perplexity connected with theology is the question, How far does Christianity succeed in embodying its essential interests in its doctrines? The Orthodox Eastern Church Further might seem to have succeeded beyond all others. elements Factions of lay-folk, who quarrelled furiously over shades of opinion never heard of in the West, and scarcely intelligible to Western minds even if expounded, might seem to have placed their sincerity beyond all question. And yet there were at least two other developments which were important in the East and proved still more so in the West -the legal development and the sacramental. The name "Catholic is one which Protestant Christians may well

Cf. Aids to Reflection, Aphorism 2. Comment.

A. M. Fairbairn takes the rather unusual view that Greek Christian theology was the climax of the process of Greek philosophy, and so far alien to piety, although he is far from banishing speculation out of theology. Christ in Modern Theol., pp. 81, 90, 183.

hesitate to resign to their rivals. Yet there is convenience and no small significance in connecting the term with a certain characteristic and un-Protestant type of the Christian religion. Catholicism is not dogma only, but dogma plus law plus sacrament. From very early days Christianity was hailed as the "new law"; and the suppression of the rigorist sects, by definitely giving law supremacy over enthusiasm, aggrandized it, but at the same time aggrandized the sacraments. The Western Christian must needs hold that the Eastern develop ment was incomplete. It laid these things side by side; it did not work them into a unity. The latter task was accomplished with no little power by the Western Church in the period of its independent development. The Greek and the Roman Catholic Churches stand united against Protestantism in the general theory of law and of sacraments; but a Protestant can hardly doubt that, if Catholicism is to be accepted, a Catholic organization, and doctrine are better furnished by the Western Church than by the arrested development of its rival.

The theory of asceticism had also to be more fully worked out and better harmonized with Church authority The priesthood had successive rivals to face. First in the period of enthusiasm," the prophets; then the martyrs and confessors; finally the ascetics. Ascetic The last, in regulated forms, are a permanent feature of Catholicism; and the rivalries of these "regular" element. clergy with their "secular" or parochial brethren continue to make history to-day. That the ascetic life is intrinsically higher, that not every one is called to it, that the call is imperious when it comes, and that asceticism must be developed under Church control-all this may be common to East and West. But, in the utilization of the monks as the best of the Church's forces, the Western Church far surpasses the East, where meditation rather than practical activity is the monastic ideal. In the West, "enthusiasm," in the transformation under which it survives, is not merely bridled but harnessed and set to work.

fluence.

The new developments of the West could not grow directly out of Eastern or even out of early Western conditions. They Augus- grow out of the influence of Ambrose of Milan, but Une's in. far more of Augustine of Hippo; and behind the latter to no small degree there is the greater influence of St Paul. Intellectual developments do not go straight onward; there are sharp and sudden reactions. Pelagianism, the rival and contradiction of Augustinianism, represents a mode of thought which appeared early in Christianity and which could count upon sympathizers both in East and in West. But, when the Christian world was faced with the clear-cut questions, Was this, then, how it conceived man's relation to God? and Did it mean this by merit? Augustine without much difficulty secured the answer "No." In the East (Council of Ephesus, 431) he was helped by the entanglement of Pelagianism with Nestorianism, just as in the West the ruin of Nestorian prospects was occasioned partly by dislike for the better known system of Pelagianism. In Augustine's own case, reaction against Pelagianism was not needed in order to make his position clear. He may have left a vulnerable frontier in his earlier dealings with the same thorny problem of free will. Certainly his polemic as a Christian against the Manichaeism of his youth constitutes a curious preface to his vehement rejection of Pelagian libertarianism. Once again, a narrow track of orthodoxy midway between the obvious landmarks! But Augustine had a deeply religious nature, and passed through deep personal experiences; these things above all gave him his power. He was also genius and scholar and churchman, transmitting uncriticized the dogmas of Athanasianism and the philosophy of ancient Greece, according to his understanding of them. Without forgetting that Augustine was partly a symptom and only in part a cause-without committing ourselves to the one-sidedness of the great-man method of construing history-we must do justice to his supreme greatness. If earlier times lived upon fragments of Origen, the generations of the West since Augustine have largely lived upon fragments

Loots declares that the very conception of a means of grace is medieval.

of his thought and experience. On the other hand, not even the authority of Paul and of Augustine has been able to keep alive the belief in unconditional predestination. If in the West Athanasianism is a datum, but unexamined, and not valued for its own sake, Augustinianism is a bold interpretation of the essential piety of the West, but an interpretation which not even piety can long endure-morally burdensome if religiously impressive. The clock is wound up at the great crises of history, but proceeds to run down, and does so even more rapidly in Protestantism than in Catholicism. It may be held by hostile critics that the whole thing is a delusion. More sympathetic judgments will divine unquenchable vitality in a faith whose very paradoxes rise up in new power again and again. Augustine's (erroneous) interpretation of the Millennium (Rev. xx.), as a parable of the Church's historic triumph, stands for the final eradication of primitive "enthusiasm" in the great Church, though of course millenarianism has had many revivals in special circles.

Perhaps

Even if the Augustinian stream is the main current of Western piety, there are feeders and also side-currents. Ambrose, Augustine, erome, Gregory the Great are known as the four Latin Fathers. Jerome is very great as a scholar, and Pope Gregory as an adminis trator. As a writer, too, Gregory modifies Augustinian beliefs into forms which make them more available for Church teaching-a process very characteristic of Western Catholicism and carried still further in later centuries (notably by Peter Lombard). two side-currents of piety should be named. There is an ethical rationalism which can never be wholly suppressed in the Christian Church by the Pauline or Augustinian Soteriology. One thinks one sees traces of it, though held down by other influences, in the whole of medieval theology, and notably in Abelard. It disengages itself in the 17th century as Socinianism and in the 18th as Rationalism or Deism. Secondly there is a strong side-current in the mystical tradition, which we may perhaps treat as the modified form under which the philosophical theology of the Greek Church maintained its life in the medieval West. If so, Mysticism includes in itself a prophecy of modern Christian Platonism or idealism, with its cry of" Back to Alexandria."

Ethical rational Ism and mysti cism.

A Western echo of the Christological controversies of the East is found in the Adoptianism of Spain 785-818). These Adoptianists do not hold that Christ the person is adopted (He is God by birth), but his human nature may be. There might be need of this, indeed, if the Adoptianists' theory of redemption were to stand, according to which Christ had taken to Himself a sinful human nature, and had washed it clean. This extreme assertion of duality as against Christological unity was naturally marked as heretical.

Sacra

ments.

Great advance is made in organizing Catholic theology by the fuller theory of sacraments. The East had a tentative hesitating doctrine of transubstantiation; the West defines it with absolute precision (cf. Paschasius Radbertus against Ratramnus; the fourth Lateran Council, 1215). But if the medieval Church-and modern Catholics regard the Eucharist as the principal sacrament, Protestants can hardly keep from assigning the supreme place, in the medieval system, to the sacrament of penance. If early "enthusiasm " conceived the Christian as almost entirely free from acts of sin, and if Protestant Paulinism conceives the child of God as justified by faith once for all, the full Catholic theory, representing one development of Augustinianism, views the Christian as an invalid, perpetually dependent on the good offices of the Church. The number of sacraments is fixed at seven,' first by Peter Lombard, and the essence of the three sacraments which do not allow of repetition-baptism, confirmation, orders -is defined as a "character "" imprinted on the soul and never capable of being lost. We must mark the advance in formal completeness. Theology is now not merely the dogma of the Divine nature or of Christ's person; it is also a dogmatic

The term Adoptianism arose at this time. Modern theologians carry it back to much earlier views.

Until indeed, in modern times, Greek theology accepted the Western term and definition.

This, too, has been adopted in modern Greek theology, Augustine already has this conception (Loofs). A hostile critic might say that the conception affirms the absolute worth of sacraments while absolutely declining to say what they accom plish.

theory of how the Christian salvation is conveyed through sacraments to sinful men. On the other hand, a theology which is mainly sacramental is overtaken pretty soon by dumbness. It is of the essence of a sacrament to be an inscrutable process.

Theories of legal merit, amount of debt, supererogatory goodness, and ascetic claim representing the aspect of Catholicism as law are more and more worked out. The occasion of the formal separation of East and West-the Western doctrine of the twofold "procession of the Holy Spirit, incorporated in the (so-called Nicene) creed itself ("filioque ")-is of little or no real theological importance. The schism was due to race rivalries, and to dislike for the ever-growing claims of the see of Rome.

An important contribution to doctrine is contained in the Cur Deus Homo of Anselm of Canterbury. The doctrine of Anselm Atonement, destined to be the focus of Protestant on Atone evangelicalism, has remained undefined in Catholic meal. circles,' an implicate or presupposition, but no part of the explicit and authorized creeds. When treated in the early centuries, it was frequently explained by saying that Christ's sufferings bought off the devil's claim to sinful man, and some of the greatest theologians (e.g. Gregory of Nyssa) added that the devil was finely outwitted-attracted by the bait of Christ's humanity, but caught by the hidden hook of His divinity. Anselm holds that it was best for the injured honour of God to receive from a substitute what the sinner was personally in no condition to offer. Whatever other elements and suggestions are present, the atmosphere of the medieval world, and its sense of personal claims, are unmistakable. With Anselm Ritschl takes Abelard, who explains the Atonement simply by God's love, and thus is the forerunner of "moral or "subjective" modern theories as Anselm is of the objective " or " forensic "theory. It must be admitted, however, that there is less definiteness of outline in Abelard than in Anselm. He does not even deal with the doctrine as a specialist, in a monograph, but only as an exegete.

Contemporaneously with the new and vivid intellectual life of an Anselm or an Abelard, the "freezing up" of traditionalism is evidenced by the preparation of volumes of Sentences from Scripture and the Fathers. One of the earliest of such collections "Senis that of Isidore (q.v.) of Seville (560-636), who, from this tences." and other writings, ranks among the few channels which conveyed ancient learning to the middle ages. His Sentences are selected almost (though not quite) exclusively from Augustine and Gregory the Great. Direct influence from the Greek Fathers upon the West is vanishing as the Greek language is forgotten. The great outburst of Sentences at a later time has been referred to the consternation produced by Abelard's Sic et Non. The modern reader can hardly banish the impression that Abelard writes in a spirit of sheer mischief. Probably it would be truer to say that he riots in the pleasures of discussion, and in setting tasks to other irresponsible and ingenious spirits. He does not fear to contrast authority with authority, upon each point in succession; the harder the task, the greater the achievement when harmony is reached! In regard to Scripture alone does he maintain that seeming error or discrepancy must be due to our misinterpretation. If throughout the middle ages Scripture is treated as the ultimate authority in doctrine, yet Abelard seems to stand alone in definitely contrasting Scripture with later authorities. Moderns will question the possibility of asserting Bible infallibility a priori; but it is more really startling and noteworthy that Abelard should preserve a living sense of fallibility outside the Bible.

There are many great collections of Sentences, notably by Hugh of St Victor and Peter Lombard. The last-named-though with more continuity of texture than Isidore-quotes largely from the Bible and the Latin Fathers. If Abelard stands for the intellectual daring of scholasticism, Lombard represents its other pole -interest in piety, ie, in the Church. He is almost timidly cautious. He does not open up difficulties like Abelard, but smoothes them over. This suits the coming age. The great writers of the early centuries were to tell on men's minds not in the breadth of their treatment but in a theological pemmican. And the characteristic task for living theologians was to consist in writing commentaries on the Lombard's Sentences; for a time these Sentences themselves had been suspected, but they gained

immense influence.

Guaran tees of

Arabian

Aristotle,

Had this been all, Western theology might have sunk into a purely Chinese devotion to ancient classics. But the medieval world had not one authority but two. Thin and turbid, the stream of classical tradition had flowed on through Cassiodorus or Boetius or Isidore; through progress. these, at second-hand, it made itself known and did its work. But before the great outburst of scholasticism, ancient literature found a somewhat less inadequate channel in Arabian and partly even in Jewish scholarship. Aristotle was no longer strained through the meshes of Boetius; study of True, we must not exaggerate this influence. There was and the new light inspired Roscellinus with heresy. no genuine renaissance of civilization, such as marked the dawn of modern history. The medieval world did not copy the free scientific spirit of Aristotle; it made him, so far as known, a sort of philosophical Bible side by side with the theological Bible. But it was a very great matter to have two authorities rather than one. And if any man was to be put in the preposterous position of a secular Bible, no writer was fitter for it than Aristotle. The middle ages did their best in this grouping; only here and there a rare spirit like Roger Bacon did something more, something altogether superior to his age, in showing that the faculty of independent scientific inquiry was not quite extinct. It is possible to exaggerate the influence of the revived knowledge of Aristotle; but, so far as one can trace causes in the mysterious intellectual life of mankind, that influence gave scholasticism its vigour. (See ARABIAN PHILOSOPHY, SCHOLASTICISM.)

With the new knowledge and impulse, there came a new method. Alexander of Hales is the first to adopt it, in place of the "rhetorical" method of previous theologians. Everything is Scholastic now matter of debate and argument. The Sentences method. had resolved theology into a string of headings; with scholasticism each topic dissolves into a string of arguments for and against. These arguments are made up of "rationes" and auctoritates," philosophical authorities and theological authorities. They are as litigious as a lawsuit-without any summing up; the end comes in a moment with a text of Scripture or an utterance by one of the great Fathers. Once such a dictum has been cited, the rest of the discussion is treated as by-play and goes for nothing. "I am a transmitter," Confucius is reported to have said. The great schoolmen were transmitters-putting in order, stating clearly and consecutively, conclusions reached by wiser and holier men in earlier times. Are the systems self-consistent? Their guarantee is the tireless criticism carried on by rival systems. No parallel display of debating acuteness has ever been seen in the world's history. It is easy to underrate the schoolmen. Indolence in every age escapes difficulties by shirking them, but the schoolmen's activity raised innumerable awkward questions. On the other hand, they possessed to perfection the means of making their speech evasive. If there are hollow places in the doctrinal foundations of the Church, it will be a tacit understanding among the schoolmen that such questions are not to be pressed. Above all, one must not look to a schoolman to speak a piercing and a reconciling word. " There is no revision of the premises in debate from a higher or even from a detached and independent point of view. The premises from which he may select are fixed; many of the conclusions to be reached are also fixed. He speaks, most cleverly, to his brief, but he will not go outside it. He may argue as he likes so long as he respects the Church's decisions and reaches her conclusions..

The systems of the leading schoolmen must rank above their commentaries upon the Lombard's Sentences, as the greatest of all systems of theology. Especially is that honour due to St Thomas Aquinas's larger Summa Theologiae. We may Aquinas. well believe that he represents scholastic divinity at its best. He is not an Augustine, still less perhaps an Aristotle, but he is the Aristotle and the Augustine of his age, the normal thinker of the present and the lawgiver of the future. He teaches the medieval Platonic realism, but he accepts the Aristotelian philosophy of his day, marking off certain truths as proved and understood by the light of nature, and stamping those which are not so proved as not understood nor understandable, i.e. as “ mysteries,"

procedure of modern natural theology.