Volume I Part 101 (1/2)

On regaining the library, I dozed away the remainder of the dark hours in the same commodious arm-chair, and as soon as the bell began to toll for the seven o'clock prayers, I pa.s.sed unnoticed out of the building and regained my lodgings.

”Been keeping a coast-guard night, sir?” said Mrs. Jollisole, as she set the breakfast things in order.

”Why, yes, Mrs. Jollisole,” I answered; ”I did enjoy some rather extensive prospects last night.”

And that was all that pa.s.sed. I had fixed it in my own mind that I would keep my own counsel strictly until I should have called at the palace, and communicated the whole of the circ.u.mstances in confidence to the bishop, with whom I was slightly acquainted.

This plan I carried into effect in the course of the morning. His lords.h.i.+p was at home, and listened with his customary kindness and courtesy to the whole of my romantic recital. Just as I was finis.h.i.+ng, his study door opened, and a young lady entered, dressed in black, tall, and strikingly beautiful, though looking pale and f.a.gged.

Glancing at me she gave a slight start, and taking a book from one of the shelves, instantly left the room, after a few muttered words of apology for disturbing the bishop. It was my companion of the library and the tower.

”I see,” said his lords.h.i.+p, ”that you have recognized the ghost. That young lady is an orphan niece of mine, and has been brought up in my house from her infancy. Never strong, she has reduced what vigor she possesses by her ardent love of books, and her intellectual interest is awake to all kinds of subjects. She is equally unwearied in visiting amongst the poor, and often returns home from her rounds in a state of exhaustion from which it is difficult to rouse her. About a twelvemonth ago we first noticed the appearance of a tendency to somnambulism. She was removed for several weeks to the sea-side, and we began to hope that a permanent improvement had set in. A severe loss, however, which she has lately sustained, has, I fear, done her great injury, and here is proof of the old malady returning. We are indebted to you, sir,” added the kind old man, ”for your judicious and thoughtful way of proceeding under the circ.u.mstances of last night, and for at once putting me in possession of the details, which will enable me to take the necessary precautions.”

Before leaving the bishop's company, I begged him to go with me into the cathedral, and to be present while a carpenter removed the woodwork of the library window in order to recover the key. This he consented at once to do, and we crossed the gardens by the very route which ”the ghost” and I had traversed during the night. On removing the panelling, we found that the depth of the c.h.i.n.k was comparatively trifling, and the key was soon seen s.h.i.+ning among the dust.

I was further gratified by another discovery, which, together with the extreme pleasure that it gave the bishop, quite indemnified me for my night's imprisonment. We noticed, partially concealed by rubbish in a niche of the wall below the panelling, the corner of a vellum covering. On further examination, this proved to be a MS. copy of St.

Matthew's Gospel, not indeed of the most ancient date, but adorned with very rare and curious illumination, and making an excellent addition to the stores of the library. After a _tete-a-tete_ dinner that evening with the friendly bishop, we spent a pleasant hour or two in a thorough inspection of the newly-found treasure.

It was little more than a month afterward that I heard the great bell in the western tower toll the tidings {685} of a death. One week more, and a sorrowing procession of school-children and women of the alms-houses filed from the transept into the quiet cloister-ground, there to bury the last remains of one who would seem to have been to them in life a loving and much-loved friend. It was so. The eager brain and the yearning heart, worn out with unequal labors, were laid to rest for ever. The bishop's frail nursling was dead.

From The Month.

CATHOLIC PHILOSOPHY IN THE THIRTEENTH CENTURY

The errors of the present day are generally the consequences of some false principle admitted long ago, and many may be traced clearly to the calamities of the sixteenth century. One of these is, that the mediaeval learning preserved (as was declared at the Council of Trent) chiefly among the monks was in its nature useless and trifling, fitted only to amuse ignorant and narrow-minded men in the darkness of the middle ages, and consisted in certain metaphysical speculations and logical quibbles, called scholastic teaching. Several French writers have done much to disabuse men of this prejudice, by making known the amount of knowledge and science attained by mediaeval scholars, whose works are despised because they are too scarce to be read, and perhaps too deep to be understood in a less studious age. One of these champions of he truth is Ozanam, who has traced with a master-hand the preservation of all that was valuable in antiquity, through the downfall of the empire; and he has rendered a subject which otherwise it would have been presumption to approach a plain matter of history, which the reader has only to receive, like other facts; so that we see how, under the safeguard of the Church, the same powers which were formerly used in vain by the philosophers for the discovery of truth, were successfully used for the attainment its deeper mysteries. But all that is human is marked by imperfection; and the very instinct which led philosophers to ”feel after” their Creator, and seek that supreme good for which we were created, was misled by errors which all ultimately ended in infidelity. It is not necessary to dwell on these.

A few words will remind the cla.s.sical scholar that the Ionian school, which sought truth by experiment, through the perception of the senses, leads to fatalism and pantheism; while Pythagoras, who sought by reason and the sciences him who is above and beyond their sphere, left the disappointed reason in a state of doubt and indifference, or else despair. Plato alone pursued a course of safety. Taking the existence of G.o.d as a truth derived perhaps from patriarchal teaching, he used the Socratic method of induction only for the destruction of falsehood, and received with fearless candor all that the poets taught of superhuman goodness and beauty; for though the symbolism of the poets degenerated into disgusting idolatry, they have been called the truest of heathen teachers. It is well known how Aristotle strengthened the reasoning power; but the mighty power had no object on which to put forth its strength, and the more n.o.ble minds rejected at once both reasoning and experiment, and sought for religion in the mysticism of Alexandria. Such was the wreck and waste of all that man could do without revelation, {686} and so sickening was the disappointment, that St. Augustin would fain have closed the Christian schools to Virgil and Cicero, which he loved once too well; but St.

Gregory, brought up as he was a Roman and a Christian, had nothing to repent of or to destroy, and cla.s.sic letters were preserved by Christians.

Ozanam found pleasure in believing that Christianity, while as yet concealed in the catacombs, was ”in all senses undermining ancient Rome,” and that it had an ameliorating effect on the Stoic, which was then the best sect of the philosophers; so that Seneca, instead of following the lantern of Zeno, who confused the natures of G.o.d and man, learnt from St. Paul not only to distinguish them, but also the relation in which man regards his Creator and Father, whom he serves with free-will and love, by subduing his body to the command of his soul. But the pride of philosophy may be modified without being subdued. The principle of heathenism is ”the antagonist of Christianity: one is from man, and for man; the other from G.o.d, and for G.o.d.” It was the object of St. Paul and the first fathers of the Church to liberate the intellect as well as the affections from perversion, and to teach how the treasures of antiquity might be used by Christians for religion, as the spoils of Egypt and the luxurious perfumes of the Magdalen. And after the fierce battle of Christianity with paganism was over, the triumph of the Church was completed under Constantine by the Christianization of literature; that is, by using in the service of truth all those powers which had been wasted in the ineffectual efforts for its discovery. ”A mixed ma.s.s of ancient learning was saved from the wreck of the Roman world; and as Pope Boniface preserved the splendid temple of the Pantheon, and dedicated it to the wors.h.i.+p of G.o.d glorified in his saints, so the doctors of the Church employed the logic and eloquence of the philosophers without adopting their theories. This was not always easy, and some, like Origen and Tertullian, fell into error; for the distinctive character of Christian teaching is to be dogmatic, not argumentative, submitting the conclusions of reason to the decisions of inspired authority, and the province of reason has bounds which it cannot pa.s.s.”

Gradually a Christian literature arose. Not only in the still cla.s.sical Roman schools, but in those of Constantinople, Asia, and Africa, pagan writings were used as subservient to the training of Christian authors, and the fourth century was the golden age of intellect as well as sanct.i.ty. The fathers employed their cla.s.sical training in the study of the Holy Scriptures; but, according to the true principle of sacred study, they sought from Almighty G.o.d himself the grace which alone can direct the use of the intellectual powers.

”From the three senses of Holy Scripture” (says St. Bonaventure, in a pa.s.sage quoted by Ozanam out of his _Redactio Artium ad Theologiam_) ”descended three schools of Scriptural teaching. The _allegorical_, which declares matters of faith, in which St. Augustin was a doctor, and in which he was followed by St. Anselm and others, who taught by discussion. The _moral_, on which St. Gregory founded his preaching and taught men the rule of life, in which he was followed by St.

Bernard who belongs also to the mystical school and by a host of preachers. While from the third or _a.n.a.logical_ sense, St. Dionysius taught by contemplation the manner in which man may unite himself to G.o.d.” Ozanam names a chain of authors as belonging to this school of ”Boethius, who on the eve of martyrdom wrote the consolations of that sorrow which is concealed under the illusions of the world; Isidore, Bede, Raba.n.u.s, Anselm, Bernard, Peter Damian, Peter the Lombard, who rejoiced 'to cast his sentences like the widow's mite into the treasury of the temple, Hugo, and Richard of St. Victor, Peter the Spaniard, Albert, St. Bonaventure, and St. Thomas.”

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”Under the barbarian rule, all the intellectual, an well as the devout, took sanctuary in the cloister; so that when the Arian Lombards attacked the centre of Christendom, they were opposed only by the teaching and discipline of the Church as perfected by St. Gregory; and the power of these must have been supernatural, as the influence of letters was nearly lost in Rome. Then, in defence of the faith, St.

Benedict marshalled a new band of devoted champions in the mountains of Subiaco, and he made it a part of their duty to preserve the treasures of learning, and to employ them in the service of religion; and these monks,” says Ozanam, ”who spent six hours in choir, transcribed in their cells the historians and even the poets of Greece and Rome, and bequeathed to the middle ages the most valuable writings of antiquity.”

It is agreed by all that Charlemagne was the founder of the middle ages; and he opened the schools in which theology was formed into a science, and gained the t.i.tle of scholastics. Alcuin was the instrument by whom Charlemagne remodelled European literature, with the authority of the Church and councils, tradition and the fathers.

Of these the Greek were little known west of Constantinople; and the chief representative of the Latin fathers was St. Augustin. There were a few later writers, as Boethius on the ”Consolation of Philosophy,”

and Ca.s.sidorus, who wrote _De Septem Disciplinis_.

”Every one knows,” says Ozanam, ”that when Europe was robbed of ancient literature by the invasion of barbarians, the remains of science, saved by pious hands, were divided into seven arts, and enclosed in the Trivium and Quadrivium.” These arts were grammar, rhetoric, logic, and mathematics, which last comprehended arithmetic and geometry, music and astronomy. ”The establishment of public schools in cent, ix.,” says Ozanam, ”a.s.sisted the progress of reasoning, till it became in itself an art capable of being employed indifferently to prove either side of an argument. The science of words was no longer that of grammar, but became dialectics; and words were used lightly as a mere play of the intellect, or as a mechanical process to a.n.a.lyze truth.” But it can never be lawful for a Christian to discuss what has been revealed, as though it were possible that those who reject it may be right; nor to consider truth as an open question, which is still to be decided, and may be sought by those rules of reasoning which had been laid down by Aristotle for the discovery of what was as yet unknown. It was for this reason that, as Ozanam says, Tertullian called Aristotle the patriarch of heretics; yet his rules of reasoning were right, and the error lay in using them amiss. Thus the Manichaeans reasoned when they should have believed, and the Paulicians subjected the Holy Scriptures to their own interpretation, and rejected all that was above their comprehension; and thus in after-times did the Albigenses, and then the Protestants of the sixteenth, and the Liberals of the nineteenth, century.

It was in 891 that Paschasius wrote, for the instruction of his convent, a treatise on the Holy Eucharist, in which he proved by reasoning that doctrine which ”the whole world believes and confesses;” but he was contradicted by Ratram, who first put forth the heresy that the real presence is only figurative, and then the Church p.r.o.nounced the dogma of transubstantiation. From that time theologians were obliged to confute the intellectual heresies of philosophers by fighting, as on common ground, with the weapons of argument which were used by both, in order to defend the doctrines which had been hitherto declared simply and by authority, as by our Lord himself. ”Now,” says Ozanam, ”mysteries were subjected to definitions, and revelation was divided into syllogisms. And as the love of argument 'increased, the disputants took up the question which {688} had been discussed among heathen philosophers as to the abstract existences which are called universal forms or ideas; types of created things eternally existing in the mind of G.o.d, according to the teaching of St. Bonaventure. And when these were discovered by metaphysics, logic was exercised upon them; and a dispute arose as to whether truth exists independently of the perceptions of man. The Platonists a.s.serted that it does, and this belief, which they called idealism, was held by the divines, and was called realism, while those who denied that it exists independently of man were said to be nominalists.” In modern days the dispute of realism and nominalism is laughed at as an idle war of words; but the war is, in truth, on principles, and still divides the orthodox and unbeliever, and the names of realism and nominalism are only changed for objective and subjective truth.

A painful experience had long prevailed that the spirit of controversy is destructive of devotion; and the more devout, weary of the wars of philosophers, rejected logic, and found in the mystic school that repose which had been sought even by heathens in a counterfeit mysticism, in which the evil powers deluded men by imitating divine inspirations. According to Ozanam, ”Christian mysticism is idealism in its most brilliant form, which seeks truth in the higher regions of spontaneous inspiration;” and he goes on to explain, from the writings of St. Dionysius, that its nature is contemplative, ascetic, and symbolical. It is _contemplative_, as it brings man into the presence of the immense indivisible G.o.d, from whom all power, life, and wisdom descend upon man through the hierarchies of the angels and through the Church, and whose divine influences act in nine successive spheres through all the gradations between existence and nothing. It is _ascetic_, as it acts on the will through the link which connects the body with the mind, and regulates the pa.s.sions through the inferior part of the soul. This ”medicine of souls” was taught by the fathers of the desert, who were followed by all the mystic doctors; and it was on this reciprocal action of physics and morals that St. Bonaventure afterward wrote the Compendium. It is _symbolic_, because it takes the creation as a symbol of spiritual things, and the external world as the shadow of what is invisible. The union of man with G.o.d is the object and fullness of the knowledge which regards both the divine and human nature, and levels all intellects in the immediate presence of G.o.d. This was imparted to Adam, and restored by Christ our Lord, who left it in the keeping of the Church. The first uninspired teacher of this mystic theology is thought to have been Dionysius the Areopagite, and the martyred Bishop of Athens, or, as some say, of Paris. In the festival of his martyrdom it is declared ”that he wrote books, which are admirable and heavenly, concerning the divine names, the heavenly and ecclesiastical hierarchy, and on mystical theology.” Ozanam quotes a fragment from his writings, which teaches that the indivisibility of G.o.d is intangible by mathematical abstractions of quant.i.ty, and indefinable by logic, because definition is a.n.a.lysis; and it is incomparable, because there are no terms of comparison.

The teaching of St. Dionysius was not forgotten when the knowledge of Greek was lost in the west. He was succeeded in this religious and Christian philosophy by St. Anselm in the eleventh century. In his _Monologium, De Ratione Fidei_, he supposes an ignorant man to be seeking the truth with the sole force of his reason, and disputing in order to discover a truth hitherto unknown. ”Every one, for the most part,” he says, ”if he has moderate understanding, may persuade himself, by reason alone, as to what we necessarily believe of G.o.d; and this he may do in many ways, each according to that best suited to himself;” {689} and he goes on to say that his own mode consists in deducing all theological truths from one point--the being of G.o.d. All the diversity of beautiful, great, and good things supposes an ideal one or unity of beauty, and this unity is G.o.d. Hence St. Anselm derives the attributes of G.o.d--the creation, the Holy Trinity, the relation of man to G.o.d, in a word, all theology. The _Proslogium_, or truth demonstrating itself, is a second work, in which St. Anselm proposes to demonstrate truth which has been already attained. ”As in the first he had, at the request of some brothers, written _De Ratione Fidei_ in the person who seeks by reasoning what he 'does not know, so he now seeks for some one of these many arguments which should require no proof but from itself. He was the first to use the famous argument, that from the sole idea of G.o.d is derived the demonstration of his existence. He thus begins the _Proslogium:_ 'The fool hath said in his heart, there is no G.o.d. Wherefore the most foolish atheist has in his mind the idea of the sovereign good, which good cannot exist in thought only, because a yet greater good can still be conceived. This sovereign good therefore exists independently of the thought, and is G.o.d.'” It is not worth while to follow out the errors which arose in the middle ages from nominalism. In the eleventh century Roscelin carried it to the absurdity of saying that ideas are only words, and that nothing real exists except in particulars. And Philip of Champeaux a.s.serted the opposite extreme, and denied the existence of all but universals; as that humanity alone exists, of which men are mere parts or fragments. It was in the twelfth century that Abelard, who had been trained in both these systems, came forth in the pride of his vast intellect to reconcile them by a new theory, but his search after truth was by a mere intellectual machinery, to be employed by science in order to construct general scheme of human knowledge; while it led to the rejection of that simple faith which believes without examination, and subst.i.tuted the system of rationalism, so fruitful to this day of error and unbelief.