HAVING shown the folly and danger of mysticism, and considered the means by which to determine whether or not any given passage is to be regarded as figurative, and having laid down the rules by which such Scriptures are to be interpreted, it remains to notice another instrument of error and perversion yet more potent. In point of dignity the Dogmatic Method should first have commanded our attention, it being not merely the superior, but the master of mysticism, whose pliable power it wields in subserviency to its own purposes But as this course would have done violence to the historical and chronological aspects in which we deemed it proper to consider them, we have preferred to take them up in the order of their prominent development, as exhibited on the pages of the past.

      We know of no better method of making the reader acquainted with this subtle and pernicious power, than to exhibit it as it sways over society at large its unrestrained and unquestioned influence. And it is believed that we [113] shall be able to form a more accurate judgment concerning it by thus bringing it out in bold relief, than we should if we attempted to view it in the first place, as it now exists in connection with various modifying principles. Without pausing to define a term the meaning of which will be made evident as we proceed, the attention of the reader is invited at once to the Scholasticism of the eleventh, twelfth, and thirteenth centuries, as a fair specimen of the Dogmatic Method of biblical interpretation. While a condensed account of this remarkable system will be in itself interesting, it will furnish the key to unlock much subsequent religious history.

      Towards the close of the eleventh century many of the clergy began to study and profess the Dialectic Philosophy; "and in a few years they were able to introduce it into the schools, and have it adopted as a branch of public instruction."¹ Calculated as it was to add luster to the names of those who excelled in it, it is not to be wondered at that by the beginning of the twelfth century it had taken the lead of every kind of learning. To be a skillful dialectician was of more worth than eminence in any other department. The greatest men of the times were so captivated by the power and renown which the exercise of this art gave them, that some of them, not satisfied with the honors conferred upon them by their own nation, left their country and traveled in foreign parts for the sole purpose of disputation; a sort of logical knights-errant strolling about in quest of adventure. Abelard--whose celebrity is not wholly [114] philosophical--has left this exemplary account of himself: "Preferring the study of logic to all others, and the disputations of the schools to the trophies of war, I entirely devoted myself to this pursuit, and, like a Peripatetic philosopher, traveled through different countries, exercising myself wherever an opportunity offered."

      Indeed, no other branch of study was considered worth attention, except in so far as it contributed to the perfection of this all-absorbing and all-important art. Those who were masters of it were regarded with the highest veneration; crowds of admirers flocked around them; multitudes of pupils attended their lectures; their greatness and glory was the exhaustless theme of conversation; and their skill and profundity the pride and admiration of their countrymen. Believing that they had found in this art the long-coveted key of biblical knowledge which was to unlock and disclose to view the mysteries of revelation, we cannot marvel at their extravagant appreciation of it. What a charm is therein secret wisdom! How eagerly do men seek for it, and how indifferent they often are to that which is evident to all.

      Soon it came to pass that new and strange doctrines were propounded, and when propounded, argued and defended with a skill that none could gainsay or withstand. This aroused the watchful and jealous guardians of the church. It was necessary, they began to think, for something to be done; and as they could not answer the arguments of the dialecticians, they resorted to the more summary process of burning their writings, and censuring [115] the authors of them. The Synod of Paris, and the Council of Lateran, took the matter into their ecclesiastical hands, and as Aristotle was the Magnus Apollo in this heretical movement, his writings were prohibited from being read! This most sage proceeding had the effect it ever has, of increasing the desire to taste the forbidden fruit; and it was not long till the fondness for the subtleties of the Aristotelian logic and metaphysics had increased to such an extent that the clergy complained that "scholars spent their whole time in disputation."² This unlooked-for result seems to have suggested a new idea to the infallible guardians of truth: if this powerful influence cannot be destroyed, let us appropriate it to our own use; let us make it the handmaid of the church. A law is formed in accordance with this prudent suggestion, and the writings of Aristotle--physical, metaphysical, and dialectical--are admitted by express statute into the University of Paris. Being thus received into the bosom of the church, and his dialectic art made subservient to the maintenance of its dogmata, the Stagirite, by the end of the twelfth century, gained universal dominion. His philosophy became the main pillar of the ecclesiastical hierarchy, and his logic the main instrument of its defense. Thus by slow and sometimes imperceptible degrees did the leaven of his influence extend itself, until his philosophy became indissolubly incorporated with the doctrines of the church, and "the philosopher who had lived and died without a line of [116] inspiration, became the interpreter and the judge of the Apostles."

      Says Dr. Hampden: "The maintenance of the Latin Theology became the immediate limited object to which the schools, now passed into the hands of the ecclesiastics, were directed. Men expert in fighting the battles of the Lord, skillful in defending each disputed point, and in parrying the assaults of the heretic, were the kind of persons which the method of teaching pursued in the schools would particularly contemplate. There was no desire on the part of the Latin churchmen to encourage a freedom of inquiry, or a wide range over the field of literature; the adventurer in such a track might be dangerous to the repose of the church; might break that chain of dependence which bound the subject--people to the chair of spiritual authority. Only such a discipline of the intellect was provided as should sharpen and strengthen, without emboldening it; render it apt to object, to discuss, to infer, without tempting it to spread forth Dædalean wings, and soar above the labyrinth in which it was immured.   *     *     *   Their philosophy, consequently, was an insincere, unreal system, a collection of principles, the data not of investigation and experience, but of a prescriptive authority; the results of the labor and ingenuity of others taken in their concrete form without analysis, and applied as oracular texts for the deduction of truths."³ [117]

      From the twelfth century to the Reformation the whole world was disturbed by the idle disputes of this Scholastic Philosophy; "and so deeply did it take root," says an able writer, "that even to this day it has not been wholly extirpated." It is difficult for us to form an adequate conception of the refined folly and learned nonsense which characterized the mental labors of the greatest men of this period. The highest and proudest achievement of genius was to maintain a point by resorting to verbal quibbles and hair-splitting distinctions. The most abstruse, metaphysical, and incomprehensible subjects were gravely and earnestly discussed, as though the world's salvation had been suspended on their solution. Such subjects as identity, entity, hæcceity, formality, the first principle, etc. were voluminously treated, argued, defined, and illustrated, as not only worthy of consideration, but as being essential to the comprehension of the Christian religion.⁴

      The Scholastic Philosophy, says Mr. Hallam, upon the authority of Tennemann, "gave rise to a great display of address, subtlety, and sagacity in the explanation and distinction of abstract ideas, but at the same time to many trifling and minute speculations, to a contempt of positive [118] and particular knowledge, and to much unnecessary refinement; while the dry technical style of the Schoolmen, affecting a geometrical method and closeness, was, in fact, more prolix and tedious than one more natural, from its formality in multiplying objections and answers. And, as their reasonings commonly rested on disputable postulates, the accuracy they affected was of no sort of value."⁵

      When we reflect that this art was not the amusement of the few, but the business of the many; that it was not the appropriated luxury of worldly speculatists, but the daily staple of religious instruction, we may form some conception of its baneful influence. The clergy, practically leaving Christ out of Christianity, and no longer seeking to induce men to believe on and obey him, employed themselves in nothing else but the solution of abstruse and subtle questions, "which were always merely speculative, and often merely verbal." And this was the employment of them all. Education was narrowed down to a course of instruction in dialectics and metaphysics; and as the church was the great patron of the schools, and the Schoolmen the powerful supporters and defenders of the church, the whole Christian world became almost exclusively Scholastics. I cannot forbear inserting in this place the happily-expressed remarks of Sir James Mackintosh, in his Preliminary Dissertation in the Encyclopedia Britannica.⁶

      The Schoolmen, he says, "were properly theologians who employed philosophy only to define and support that [119] system of Christian belief which they and their cotemporaries had embraced. The founder of that theological system was Aurelius Augustinus, (called by us Augustin,) Bishop of Hippo, in the province of Africa; a man of great genius and ardent character, who adopted at different periods of his life the most various, but at all times the most decisive and systematic, as well as daring and extreme opinions. This extraordinary man became, after some struggles, the chief doctor, and for some ages almost the sole oracle of the Latin Church. It happened, by a singular accident, that the Schoolmen of the twelfth century, who adopted his theology, instead of borrowing their defensive weapons from Plato, the favorite of their master, had recourse for the exposition and maintenance of their doctrines to the writings of Aristotle, the least pious of philosophical theists. The scholastic system was a collection of dialectical subtleties, contrived for the support of the corrupted Christianity of that age, by a succession of divines whose extraordinary powers of distinction and reasoning were morbidly enlarged in the long meditation of the cloister, by the exclusion of every other pursuit, and the consequent palsy of every other faculty; who were cut off from all the materials upon which the mind can operate, and doomed forever to toil in defense of what they must never dare to examine."

      One exception to the general and continued acceptance of this system we have seen in a previous chapter; but of this, unhappily, we are in doubt whether it was an exception for the better. It was the exchange of the emptiness [120] and absurdities of abused reason, for the fantasies and dreams of abused imagination. To one who looks at them from the stand-point of the nineteenth century, it is difficult to determine whether anything was gained or lost by abandoning the intangible verbalisms of the Scholastics for the foolish extravagancies of the Platonized Cabalistics. There might have been grounds of preference between the two evils; but when each was alike destitute of truth, the exception can hardly be said to relieve, as a whole, the darkness of the picture.

      Do we now ask what was the essential evil of Scholasticism? The answer is, it was the abuse of that which in itself is good--the art of reasoning. Its logic was refined until nothing was too ethereal for its grasp, and was employed not in the investigation of truth, but solely in support of the doctrines of the Romish Church. "It assumed axioms without examination; made distinctions where there was no real difference; used terms without any precise meaning; and engaged in controversies upon abstruse questions, which, after endless skirmishes, it was impossible to bring to way issue, and which, notwithstanding the violence of the contest, it was of no importance to determine."⁷ Such an instrument is invaluable to the mere partisan. By its aid alone he can maintain dogmas however absurd, and give coloring to pretensions however extreme.

      But the evil of Scholasticism did not consist alone in the [121] abuse of the dialectic art, but also and chiefly, religiously considered, in the particular direction of that abuse--the employment of it to force a coalition between the philosophy of Aristotle and the doctrine of revelation. We have seen a similar process pursued by the Alexandrian converts to Christianity with reference to the New Platonic Philosophy. Their work was effected by means of allegorized mysticism; this union was formed through the influence of logical subtlety. The same effect produced by each of two different instruments; not that allegory and mysticism were ignored by the Scholastics, nor that a kind of logic was wanting to the Alexandrians, but that the latter mainly succeeded by means of allegory, and the former by dialectic refinement and skill. The effect of this last marriage of religion to philosophy is not unlike that which resulted from the first. As when the antediluvian sons of God took wives from the daughters of men, the consequence was an unexpected corruption and an awful curse. Respecting the union of Aristotle with the New Testament, the author of the Critical History of Philosophy says:--

      "Theology, already sufficiently clouded and corrupted by the speculations and disputes of former ages, by admitting into its service scholastic philosophy, involved itself in new obscurity; so that at length, instead of the plain and simple doctrine of religion, little else was to be found in the writings of theologians but vague notions and verbal distinctions. As an example of the mischief which arose to theology from this alliance, I may mention the doctrine of transubstantiation, which first sprung up at this period, [122] giving birth to the most violent disputes, till at length the absurd dogma passed into an article of faith."⁸

      It is thus when men set themselves to strive for victory instead of truth, and, to secure their end, resort to the help of confused notions, unmeaning distinctions, and barbarous terms, that they are finally rendered unable to distinguish truth from falsehood, or reason from absurdity, and are led to receive as evident truth dogmata not only preposterous, but inconceivable. To believe in transubstantiation, is to believe that Christ's body was broken and his blood shed many hours before his trial and crucifixion; that the disciples ate the one and drank the other while he was alive [123] and unharmed before them; that in the different parts of the globe he is crucified a thousand times every Lord's day at the same hour; that Christ is perpetually suffering⁹ the agonies of immolation; that the priests are innocent, while, by their own showing, guilty, of crucifying him afresh; and finally, that the senses of sight, touch, taste, and smell--senses upon the accuracy and reliability of whose judgments the very truth of Christianity is assured to us¹⁰--are not to be trusted! Yet such belief is produced and maintained by means of the Scholastic Method of searching the Scriptures; a method which jumps to a conclusion either without any shadow of Scripture warrant, or, what is even worse, because more delusive, from a hasty and incomplete [124] collection of disjointed texts, raises this conclusion to the dignity of a positive and unquestionable dogma, and then ever after reads the Scriptures for the purpose of finding it taught in them. By this process almost any propositions connected with religion or morals may be established, however antagonistic and irreconcilable; and hence it becomes the prolific source of so large a number of disputed points--none of which may be true, while each is propped up by a formidable array of Scripture proof-texts. It is, too, the grand system of self-imposition, causing honest men to mistake a dialectic conclusion for an undoubted truth. Precisely to the extent of its employment may we expect to find absurd tenets, rancorous discussion, opposing sects, uncertain interpretation, and unhallowed liberties with the word of God. It speculates revelation into theories, changes theories into revelation, and converts the word of truth: into an apparatus for carrying on a war of words.

      Though this brief chapter is but a meager outline of a system which flourished for many years over all the Christian world, and which, as we shall hereafter see, has transmitted much of its spirit and influence to our day, it would not contribute to our object to discuss the subject more thoroughly, or to examine its history more minutely. We have exhibited its grand characteristics as they are manifested, without relief, in the follies and delusions of the Schoolmen; and this will serve the purpose intended by it, of enabling us to recognize it when it shall subsequently [125] present itself, notwithstanding it maybe mingled with, and modified by, other influences.

      The sum of what we have learned of the Scholastics may be stated as follows:--

      Their theology was the result of a dominant ecclesiastical authority, imposed without mercy and received without examination. "They were doomed," as says Mackintosh, "to toil forever in defense of what they must never dare to examine." "They held first," says Hampden, "that no authority sanctioned by the church should be questioned; secondly, that nothing should be attempted to be established, independently of those authorities, or which could not be reconciled with them." Again, "Examination of principles was forbidden ground to the religionist and the philosopher." "The object was not to rise from individuals to general principles, but to descend from the highest abstractions to individual beings." But further, as commentators and expositors, let us note the principles that guided them. "What may be called an excess of legislation in matters of doctrine had taken place, through the mistaken notion on which divines had acted, that every variation of opinion required to be ruled by the coercive judgment of the ecclesiastical power. This state of things naturally led to the creation of a class of expositors and commentators who should maintain the consistency of this vast accumulation of decisions, bring to light what was obscure, and defend what was ambiguous from the perverse constructions of the [126] heretic." "It had not for its object to win men to the truth; it sought only to justify and secure an obedience to which the unwilling intellect was constrained."¹¹

      As viewed, then, in the light of its hermeneutics, it was a system which exerted all the power and skill of the most refined dialectics to justify from the Scriptures the doctrines, decrees, and dogmata of the Roman Catholic Church. It had nothing to do with the discovery of truth--that was treasured up in the canons and decretals of the councils and the popes. To question these was heresy, to reject them damnation; while, by the aid of Aristotle, to force the Scriptures into their support was at once the duty and the glory of all the faithful sons of the Church.¹² [127]

[TOOS 113-127]