The attempt to control the life of the whole clergy by monastic rules had already begun in the Carlovingian period; but in part it had failed, in part the Chapters had only become thoroughly secularised. Now, however, it was undertaken anew and with greater efficiency. In the Cluniacensian reform Western monachism raised for the first time the decided claim to apply, and find recognition for, itself as the Christian order of life for all Christians of full age — the priests. This Western monachism could not withdraw from the. task of serving the Church and urging itself upon it, i.e., upon the clergy of the day, as Christianity. The Christian freedom which it strove for was for it, with all wavering, not only a freedom from the world, but the freedom of Christendom for unrestricted preparation for the life beyond, and for the service of God in this world. But no man can serve two masters.

Herewith there was given also its relation to the laity, with the position of the latter. If the mature confessors of Christianity must be trained according to monastic rules, then the immature — and these are the laity — must leave an entirely free course to the former, and must at least pay respect to their majesty, that it may be possible to stand approved in the coming judgment. If Clugny and its great Popes required the strict observance of celibacy, the estrangement of the priests from secular life, and especially the extirpation of all “simony,” then this last demand of itself involved, under the then existing distribution of power and property, the subjection of the laity, inclusive of the civil power, to the Church. But what was the Church’s dominion over the world to mean, side by side with the renunciation of the world exacted of all priests? How does that power over the earth harmonise with exclusive concern for the soul’s salvation in the world beyond? How can the same man who exclaims to his brother who thinks of leaving him all the patrimonial property, “What an unjust division, — for thee, heaven, and for me, the earth,” and who then himself enters a monastery — how can this same man bring himself to contend from within the monastery for dominion over the world? Now in a certain sense this dominion is something substitutionary, so long as and because the true, universal Christianising has not been carried out. As long as all are not genuine Christians, the obstinate world and the half-developed Christendom must be governed and educated, for otherwise the gospel would be captured by the powers hostile to it, and would not be in the position to fulfil its mission. But the dominion is certainly not merely something substitutionary. Christianity is asceticism and the City of God. All earthly relations must be moulded by the transcendent and universal idea of God’s kingdom, and all national political forms of life must be brought under control in accordance therewith. But the kingdom of God has its existence on this side of things in the Church. The States, therefore, must become subject to the divine ends of the Church; they must merge themselves in the kingdom of righteousness and of the victorious Christ, which is a truly heavenly kingdom, because it has its source in heaven, and is ruled by Christ’s representative. Thus out of the programme of renunciation of the world and out of the supra-mundane world that was to permeate this world, out of the Augustinian idea of the city of God and out of the idea of the one Roman world-empire, an idea that had never disappeared, but that had reached its glorification in the papal supremacy, there developed itself the claim to world-dominion, though the ruin of many an individual monk might be involved in making it. With sullied consciences and broken courage many monks, whose only desire was to seek after God, yielded to the plans of the great monastic Popes, and became subservient to their aims. And those whom they summoned from the retirement of the cloisters were just those who wished to think least of the world. They knew very well that it was only the monk who fled from the world, and would be rid of it, that could give help in subduing the world. Abandonment of the world in the service of the world-ruling Church, dominion over the world in the service of renunciation of the world, — this was the problem, and the ideal of the Middle Ages! What an innocent simplicity, what a wealth of illusions, was involved in believing that this ideal could be realised, and in working for it! What a childlike reverence for the Church was necessary for developing that paradoxical flight from the world,” which at one and the same moment could join the fight and pray, utter cursing and blessing, exercise dominion and do penance! What a spirit of romance filled those souls, which at a single view could see in nature and all sensuous life an enchantment of the devil, and could behold in it at the same time, as illumined by the Church, the reflection of the world beyond What kind of men were they, who abandoned the world and gladsome life, and then took back from the hand of the Church the good things of earth, love-making, combat and victory, speculating and money-making, feasting, and the joys of sense! Of course, with a slight turn of the kaleidoscope, all these things were in ruins; there must be fasting and repentance; but again a slight turn, and everything was back again which the world could afford — but glorified with the light of the Church and of the world beyond.

At the close of this period (about 1200) the Church was victorious. If ever ideals were carried out in the world and gained dominion over souls it happened then. “It was as if the world had cast aside its old garment and clothed itself in the white robe of the Church.” The Cluniacensian monk, Rudolph Glaber, Hist. lib. III., 4. Negation of the world and rule of the world by the Church appeared to men identical. That age bore in its culture “the pained look of world-renunciation on the one hand, and the look of strong character suggesting world-conquest on the other.”v. Eicken, l.c., p. 155 f. If the early Church had had this latter characteristic expressed in its piety, it would inevitably have developed into Islam, or rather would have been crushed by the Roman world-empire. But the Mediæval Church from its origin (period of the migration of the nations) had absorbed into itself the Roman world-empire as an idea and as a force, and stood face to face with uncivilised nations; hence its aggressive character, which, moreover, it only developed after Charlemagne had shown it how the vicarius Christi on earth must rule. Nicolas I. learned from Charles I., the Gregorian popes from Otto I., Henry II., and Henry III., how the rector ecclesiæ must administer his office. But in the period we are reviewing the development, which had to cancel itself when it seemed to have come near its completion, was still in process. Much was still to be done in the way of excavating secularised Christendom from its rough surroundings. And the masses were really changed in temper and set on fire — set on fire to contend against

the secularised clergy and against simonistic princes in the whole of Europe. A new enthusiasm of a religious kind stirred the nations of the West, especially the Romanic. The ardour of the Crusades was the direct fruit of the monastic papal reform movement of the eleventh century. In them most vividly the religious revival which had passed over the West revealed itself in its specific character. The supremacy of the Church must be given effect to on earth. It was the ideas of the world-ruling monk of Clugny that guided the Crusaders on their path. The Holy Land and Jerusalem were parts of heaven on earth. They must be conquered. The dreadful and affecting scenes at the taking of the sacred city illustrate the spirit of mediæval piety.

Christianity is ascetism and the City of God — but the Church, which really fired souls for these ideas, lit also thereby the flame of religious individualism; it awakened the power which was ultimately strong enough to burst through the strict bonds of system and sever the chain. But it was long before things went so far as this. The Cluniacensian reform, if I see aright, produced as yet no religious individualism at all, in the sense of manifold expressions of piety. The enthusiastic religious spirit of the eleventh century was quite of the same kind in individual cases. Among the numerous founders of orders during this period, there still prevailed the greatest uniformity: spiritual need, flight from the world, contemplation — all of them are expressed in similar forms and by the same means.See Neander, K.-Gesch. V., 1, pp. 449-564. An appeal must not be made to the Sectaries, already numerous in this century; they stood in scarcely any connection with the ecclesiastical revival, and had as yet no influence upon it.Their doctrines were imported from the East — from Bulgaria; that old remnants of sects survived in the West itself (Priscillians) is not impossible. But spontaneous developments also must be recognised, such as have arisen in all ages of the Church’s history, from reading Scripture and the Fathers, and from old reminiscences. In the twelfth century, heresy became an organised power, frightfully dangerous to the Church, in some regions — indeed, superior to it; see Reuter I., p. 153 f., and Döllinger’s work, Beiträge zur Sectengesch. des Mittelalters, 2 Thl., München 1890, in which the Paulicians, Bogomili, Apostolic Brethren and Catharists are described.

2. The Development of Ecclesiastical Law.For the earliest period see Maassen, Gesch. der Quellen und Litt. des Kanonischen Rechts I. vol. (till Pseudoisidore) 1870. For the later period see v. Schulte, Gesch. der Quellen und Lit. des Kanonischen Rechts von Gratian bis auf Gregor IX., 1875. See the introductions to von Friedberg’s edition of the corp. jur. can.

Let us notice at least in a few words the increased activity in ecclesiastical law in the period under review, which was not without its influence on the mode of conceiving of dogma, and on the history of dogma.

First, it is a fact of importance that from the middle of the second half of the ninth century, Church law was framed more and more on a Pseudoisidorian basis. Second, the preponderating attention given to law in general, and the growing subjection of all ecclesiastical questions to legal conceptions are characteristics of the period. As to the first point, it is well known that the Popes always continued to take more to do with the administration of the dioceses,Nicholas I., Leo IX., Alexander II., Alexander III. represent the stages prior to Innocent III. But Gregory VII. was the soul of the great movement in the eleventh century. that the old metropolitan constitution lost its importance, and that the old constitutional state of things in general — during the first half of our period — fell into decay and ceased to exist. The Episcopal power, it is true, strengthened itself in many places by assuming a civil character, and on the other hand, the Emperors, from Otto I. to Henry III. after having reformed the enfeebled papacy, brought it for a time into dependence on the imperial crown. But as they also deprived all laymen, who were not princes, of all share in the direction of ecclesiastical affairs, and as they suppressed the independence of the local ecclesiastical bodies (the congregations), in the interests of imperialism and of “piety,” only the Emperor (who called himself rector ecclesiæ and vicarius Christi), the Pope, and the bishops remained as independent powers. It was about the property of the bishops, and on the question as to who was the true ruler of the divine state and the vicar of Christ, that the great battle was really waged between the empire and the reformed papacy. In this struggle the latter, acting on the impulse given by Gregory VII., developed itself into the autocratic power in the Church, and accordingly after having freed itself in Rome from the last remnants of older constitutional conditions, framed its legislation by means of numerous decretals. At the “œcumenical” Lateran Synods of 1123 and 1139, the papacy left no doubt as to this new position which it meant to assert.The numbering of the œcumenical Councils, which has now become a sententia communis among the curialist theologians, has been established on the authority of Bellarmin (see Döllinger and Reusch, Die Selbstbiographie des Cardinals Bellarmin, 1887, p. 226 ff. That previous to him Antonius Augustinus [ob. 1586] counted them in the same way, has been pointed out by Buschball: “Die Professiones fidei der Päpste,” separately printed from the Röm. Quartalschr. 10 Bd., 1896, p. 62). In the sixteenth century there still prevailed the greatest diversity in the enumeration: indeed the majority did not regard those Councils in which the Greek Church did not take part as œcumenical at all. There was likewise conflict of opinion as to whether the Councils of Bâsle, Florence (and Constance), were to be reckoned in. Antonius Augustinus and Bellarmin (in the Roman edition of the Concilia generalia of 1608 f.), included the Lateran Councils of 1123 and 1139 (and left out the Council of Bâsle). “The question, it is true, was of subordinate importance for Bellarmin, in as much as he places on the same level with the decrees of the General Councils those of the ‘Particular’ Councils held under the presidency of the Pope, or sanctioned by him; but having in view those who held, not that the Pope, but that the General Council was infallible, it was certainly necessary for him to discuss the question as to what Councils are to be regarded as general.” But in thus determining the question, he naturally allowed himself to be influenced by his strong curialistic standpoint, that is, he set aside the Council of Constance and Bâsle, and placed among the œcumenical Councils that of Florence, the fourth and fifth Lateran Councils, the first of Lyons, and that of Vienna, on the ground that these favoured the papacy. He thus arrived at the number of eighteen approved General Councils (eight from the first ten centuries, the Lateran Councils of 1123, 1139, 1179, 1215, those of Lyons in 1245 and 1274, that of Vienna in 1311, that of Florence, the fifth Lateran Council, and that of Trent). But here also, as everywhere in Catholic dogmatics, there are “half” authorities, and half genuine coin, in spite of the Holy Ghost who guides into all truth. That is to say, several Councils are “partly ratified, partly rejected,” those of Constance and Bâsle being among them, and the Council of Pisa in 1409 is “neither manifestly ratified nor manifestly rejected.” Since the year 1870, the question about the number of the Councils has completely lost all real interest for Catholics. But reactionary Protestantism has every reason to feel interested in it. Buschball (l.c. pp. 60, 74, 79), holds that in the Middle Ages a distinction in principle was not made between the view taken of the Councils of the first thousand years and that taken of those that were later. But he adduces no proof that prior to the Council of Constance the later Councils were placed quite on a level with the earlier, and even by what he adduces for the time subsequent uncertainty is suggested. How could the Mediæval Councils be regarded even before the Council of Trent as quite of equal standing with those of the first ten centuries, when, up to the time of this Council, the general opinion was certainly to the effect that dogma was contained in fundamental and final form in the twelve articles, and in the interpretation relating to them which they had received from the older Councils! The process of equalising was probably begun by the Councils of Florence and Basle, with their high degree of self-consciousnes. That Councils at all could be pointed to in the long period between the ninth and the fifteenth centuries, was necessarily of more importance than the taking account of what was decided at these Councils, of how they were constituted, and of the authority that guided them. We may very well venture to say therefore: in the fifteenth century the equalising had begun with some hesitation, the Council of Trent favoured it by its weight, and it then became established. The Popes afterwards, till the time of Innocent III., defended and strengthened their autocratic position in the Church amid severe but victorious struggles. No doubt, they had to hear many an anxious word from their most faithful sons; but the rise of the papacy to despotic power in the Church, and thereby to dominion over the world, was promoted by the piety and by all the ideal forces of the period. Not in opposition to the spirit of the times — how would that have been possible? — but in union with it, the papacy ascended the throne of the world’s history in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. Its opponents, so far as they possessed religion, were its secret allies, or contended with doubtful consciences, or, at least, were unable to show that the benefits for which they fought (national churchism, etc.) were the highest and the holiest. Under such circumstances the papal decretals obtained an ever-increasing authority.On the development of the primacy in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, see Döllinger, Janus, p. 107 ff. (Schwane, Dogmengesch. des Mittelalters, p. 530 ff.). How much stronger was the Gregorian party in the eleventh century than the Pseudoisidorian in the ninth, and how much more revolutionary and aware of his aim was Gregory VII. than Nicolas I.! “He was the first who, with full, clear consciousness, was determined to introduce a new condition of things into the Church by new means. He regarded himself not merely as the reformer of the Church, but as the divinely chosen founder of an order of things such as had never before existed.” His chief means were Synods held by the Pope (this was begun by Leo IX.) and new ecclesiastical law-books. The nephew of Pope Alexander II., Anselm of Lucca, became the founder of the new Gregorian Church law, this being effected by him partly by making apt use of that of Pseudoisidore, and partly by a new set of fictions (e.g., that the episcopacy everywhere originated from Peter) and forgeries. He was followed by Deusdedit, Bonizo, and Cardinal Gregorius. Deusdedit formulated the new principle, that contradictions in the traditional Church law must always be harmonised by letting, not the older, but the greater authority, that is, the dictum of the Pope cancel the opposite view. In this way the autocracy of the Popes was established. On the series of new fictions and falsifications of the old tradition, see Janus, p.:12 ff. Specially important is the way in which history was induced to furnish testimony in proof of the infallibility of the papal decretals, and in which even Augustine was pronounced an authority for this new doctrine (p. 119 ff. ). A sentence of his was so manipulated that it came to mean that the papal letters stood on a level with canonical Scripture. Since then the defenders of the infallibility of the Pope, to which Gregory VII. already made a distinct claim, and, indeed, treated it as concessum (p. 124 ff.), have always appealed to Augustine. Indeed, Gregory VII., following an earlier precedent, ciaimed for the Popes a complete personal holiness — for they have all that Peter had — and the Pope’s holiness, in addition to his infallibility, was so boldly taught by the Gregorians (imputation of the merit of Peter) that anything stronger in the way of claim became impossible. They took their place beside the old canons,Alexander II. wrote to King Philip of France, requesting him to rank the papal decrees along with the canons; see Jaffé, Regesta, 2 Edit., Nr. 4525. nay even beside the decrees of the œcumenical Councils. Yet, strictly speaking, the measure of their authority remained still quite uncertain, and prior to Innocent III. dogmatic questions were not treated in them, or treated only very seldom, while the Popes in general, in the period of 150 years from the Synod of Sutri till 1198, had their hands fully occupied with establishing the Roman autocratic and monastic Church order.The Lateran Synods of 1123, 1139, 1179, contain nothing whatever of a dogmatic character (excepting the twenty-seventh canon of the Council of 1179, which urges the extermination of the Cathari, but says nothing of their doctrine); see Mansi XXI., XXII., Hefele V.², pp. 378 ff., 438 ff., 710 ff.

In developing itself as the supreme court of jurisdiction, the papacy could never have obtained in the Church, which assuredly is fellowship in faith and worship, monarchical rule as regards faith and morals, had not the amalgamation of dogma and law become perfect in this period. It was not the Popes who brought about this fusion; they merely turned to account a mode of view which prevailed everywhere, and from which scarcely an individual dissented. In what has been represented from the beginning of Book II. of our Second Part, it has been shown that the legal view of religion was an old inheritance of the Latin Church; religion is lex dei, lex Christi. In principle, it is true, this view had been radically corrected by Augustinianism; but Augustine himself allowed the legal schemes to remain in many important particulars. Then there followed the mission of the Western Church among the foreign nations, pagan and Arian. With these it came into contact, not merely as an institution for religious worship, but as the Roman Christian system of civilisation and law. Not simply as a system of faith did it wish and venture to assert itself; it could assert itself at all, rather, only by placing its entire equipment, and all its principles, some of which had an extremely profane origin, under the protection of the divine law. Thus the Germanic and Romanic nations came to regard all legal ordinances of the Church as ordinances of faith, and vice versâ. Boniface and Charlemagne then set themselves to secure that the two would harmonise. The “must” became identical in the three sentences: “He who will be saved must believe as follows”; “the Christian must pay tithes”; “adultery must be atoned for by this particular penalty.” How busily the framing, or the codification, of Church law was carried on from the time when Dionysius Exiguus made his collection till the time of Pseudoisidore, is shown by the numerous collections which were everywhere produced — even in Rome still — by the rich synodical life of the provincial Churches, and which were meant to guard the independence, the rights, and the distinctive life of the Church in the new world of Germanic manners. Everywhere (prior to the ninth century) dogma fell quite into the background; but just on that account the feeling became habitual, of regarding all deliverances of the Church as legal ordinances. The Cluniacensian-Gregorian reform of the eleventh century put an end to numerous traditional ordinances pertaining to constitution and law, and replaced them with new ones, in which the independence of the Church in relation to the State, and of Roman universalism in relation to the national Churches, found ever stronger expression. As the result of this, there developed itself in the eleventh century an imposing legislation, which was gathered up and completed in Gratian’s collection — though this collection was in so far out of date and behind the facts, as in it the legislation was not yet determined throughout by the thought of the concentration of ecclesiastical power in the hands of the Pope. See v. Schulte, Lehrbuch des Kathol. und evang. Kirchenrechts 4 Aufl., p. 20. But besides their adoption of the Gregorian doctrines, this collection, and some older ones that preceded it, show quite a new turn of things, for they are the product of a study of law. Here also Gregory VII. was epoch-making. He was the great jurist in the papal chair, and from his time onward, the treatment of all functions of the Church in accordance with juristic science began to be the main problem. The study of law, carried on chiefly in Bologna,See Denifle, Die Univ. des Mittelalters I. 1885. Kaufmann, Gesch. der deutschen Univers. I., p. 157 ff. exercised an immeasurable influence on the intellectual vision of the Church throughout its whole extent; the study of law, indeed, moulded thought in general. Hellenism also at that time exerted an incalculable influence in the way of fostering this study. The Romo-Grecian legislation came into the West, and although, at the first, it began by modifying what was still a “barbarian” form of secular legal life there, and by building up a sovereign State with its laws and officials, it yet gradually exercised also a furthering influence on the construction of the strict monarchical Church system; for what is legal for the Emperor is allowable for the Pope; or rather — he is in truth the Emperor. It cannot be doubted that here also Rome knew how to gather grapes of thorns and figs of thistles. The new rights of its adversary, the Emperor, it applied to itself.

What had formerly developed itself under the force of circumstances — the Church as a legal institution — was now strengthened and built up by thought.See v. Schulte, Gesch. der Quellen, etc., I., p. 92 ff.; II., p. 512 f. As Gregory VII. held still more strongly than any of his predecessors that the Church is the kingdom founded upon Peter, and that everything is to be traced back to the power given to it, the legal organism was placed in the foreground; see Kahl, Die Verschiedenheit Kathol. und Evang. Anschauung über das Verhältniss von Staat und Kirche (1886), p. 7 f.: “The character of the Catholic Church as a legal organism is already involved in the doctrine of its founding, and in the conception of it.” The fullest and most reliable historic proofs in Hinschius, Kath. Kirchenrecht. Juristic thought laid its arrest on everything. And yet even here need controlled the situation. For when the impulse to reflect is once awakened, what else can those at first become, who still live in a world of abstractions and are blind to nature and history, but jurists and dialecticians? Thus there settled down upon the whole Church, even upon its faith, the spirit of jurisprudence, now grown conscious of itself. Everything was laid hold of by it. It was a strong force in what is styled “Scholasticism”; it governed the most powerful Popes (Alexander III. as Magister Rolandus), and it began to bring within its sweep the form in which the traditional dogmas were presented. Certainly this was an easy matter for it; for in their practical conclusions these dogmas had already been made to serve quite as legal means in a legal process. What still remained was to submit to juristic exposition even the central tenets of faith themselves, and so to justify and defend them “scientifically.” Here too, indeed, the material was not entirely in a raw state; to some extent, rather, the foundation stones had received a juristic shaping from the Latin fathers of dogma themselves (cf. Tertullian); but there was still an immense task presenting itself, to the full accomplishment of which an approach even had never been made; it was to re-think the whole dogmatic tradition in the spirit of jurisprudence, to represent every-thing under the categories of judge (God), accused, advocate, legal measures, satisfactions, penalties, indulgences, to make out of dogmas as many distinctions as obtain in secular legal order between universally valid, relatively valid, probable, consuetudinary law, positive law, etc., and to convert dogmatics into a chamber of justice, out of which there was afterwards to develop the merchant’s hall and the den of thieves.

But in the period we are considering, the Church was certainly the basis and sum of the highest ideals of the mediæval man, and the enormous contradiction on which one proceeded — had proceeded indeed, from the time of Augustine — of regarding the Church as at once the society of the faithful (societas fidelium), and as the hierarchically organised assemblage (coetus), of recognising the secular power in its divine right and yet suppressing its authority, was by many scarcely feltIn the valuable inquiry of Mirbt, Die Stellung Augustin’s in der Publicistik des gregorianischen Kirchenstreits (1888) — cf. the same author’s work “Die Publicistik im Zeitalter Gregor’s VII.,” 1894 — the significance of Augustine for the struggles in Church politics in the eleventh century has for the first time been methodically and thoroughly described. It amounted directly to less than one would have expected, and it is noteworthy that the Antigregorians can show a larger heritage of Augustinian thoughts than their opponents (see Theol. Lit. Ztg., 1889, Col. 599).. Only at the end of the epoch did the inner antagonism become apparent; but the hierarchy had then already become the Church. Just at that time, therefore, the claim of the hierarchy, and specially of the papacy, was proclaimed as dogma, and the struggle of the civil powers against the despotism of the Pope was declared to be as really rebellion against Christ as was the assertion of the sects that the true Church is the opposite of the hierarchy. This will have to be dealt with in the following chapter.

4. Elaboration of Dogma.

The theological conflicts of the eleventh and twelfth centuries, as they were fought out between the dialecticians and their opponents, do not belong to the history of dogma. This science has to confine itself to showing what position dogma asserted in connection with the revival and the crises of theology, what enrichments it received, and how far the Scholastic activity (or the theological systematising) already influenced it. As to the first of these questions, the statement may be quite brief: dogma, as it was fixed by the Councils, as it had been described by Augustine and Gregory I.,So far as there was at all a single authoritative book here, it was Augustine’s Enchiridion. But it is characteristic that Abelard, in his systematic work, already added the Sacraments to faith and love. was the presupposition of all theological thought, and was held inviolate. Isolated exceptions were without any importance. The dialectic experiments on dogma were always based on the traditional view of it. As regards the third question, an influence on dogma of Scholastic activity and systematic theology can already be pointed to in the twelfth century; but the influence was still so much in its beginnings that it is better to treat it first in connection with the thirteenth century.The doctrine of the sacraments is chiefly thought of here. And so there remains only the question as to the “enrichments.” Strictly speaking, this question also would have to be answered in the negative,Almost everything that Bach has set forth in the second volume of his work on the history of dogma in the Middle Ages, including the “history of Adoptianism in the twelfth century” and the “systematic polemic against the dialecticians” (p. 390 ff.; Gerhoch against the German Adoptians, p. 475 ff.), belongs simply to the history of theology, and has no significance for the history of dogma. were it not that in the Berengarian controversy a movement presents itself, in which a dogma that had still always been the subject of dispute, attained a relatively complete form, and had not Anselm set up a doctrine of satisfaction, which, indeed, was a product of purely private work, and found few adherents, too, in the period that followed, but which brought before the Church a dogmatic problem that was hitherto unsolved, nay, had scarcely ever been touched as yet, but which was not again to pass out of view. In what follows, therefore, we have to treat of these two movements.

A. The Berengarian Controversy.

Besides its dogmatic, this controversyBesides Lessing’s well-known work and Vischer, De sacra cœna adv. Lanfrancum lib. posterior, 1834; also the Acts of the Roman Council (Mansi XIX., p. 761 ff.), see Sudendorf, Berengarius, 1850; Schnitzer, Berengar v. Tours, sein Leben u. s. Lehre, 1890; Bach I., pp. 364-451; Reuter I., p. 91 ff., Dieckhoff, Die Abendmahlslehre im Reform.-Zeitalter I., p. 44 ff. has a philosophicHere, for the first time, the categories “subjectum,” “quod in subjecto,” “de subjecto,” the distinction of “esse” from “secundum quod esse,” in short, the dialectic manipulations of the notion of substance (according to Porphyry, Boethius, etc.) were applied to a dogma in the West. interest, and an interest also in connection with Church politics.The outward political side of the controversy has been thoroughly treated by Schwane (Studien zur Gesch. des 2. Abendmahlsstreits, 1887, see Loofs, Gött. Gel.-Anz., 1888, No. 15), who follows Sudendorf. On the antagonism to Berengar, see the accounts of Schnitzer, l.c. p. 246 ff. The last of these interests may be left quite out of view here; the second is closely connected with the first. From the place which the dogma of the Eucharist held in the theory and practice of the Church, the criticism of it was a criticism of the reigning Church doctrine as a whole. When the youthful science, represented and led by Berengar of Tours, began at this point, charged the accepted view with error, and applied the scientific doctrine of method to the dogma of the Eucharist, expression was given to the thought, that there may not be a resting satisfied with mere Church tradition, with what is held as valid to-day. But this thought was not expressed in the name of a negative “illuminism,”Reuter’s judgment is, I., p. 97: “Thus the second controversy on the Eucharist became what the first was not, a struggle as to the supreme criteria of religious truth, a conflict of the tendency of negative ‘illuminism,’ directly with the authoritative ecclesiasticism of the time, indirectly with the Christianity of positive revelation.” This is to me utterly unintelligible. Even the most deeply convinced Romish theologian will hesitate to endorse this opinion. but, on the contrary rather, that the true tradition of the Church might be delivered from the embraces of a bad routine, that the spirit of the doctrine might be protected against a coarse and superstitious realism, that the λογικὴ λατρεία (reasonable service) might be maintained against a barbarian craving for mysteries, and that the mystery of faith might not be profaned. But combined with this interest, which was by no means merely pretended, there was the pleasure in thinking, and the daring reliance on dialectics as on “reason” in general. As theologians, Berengar and his followers were Augustinians, but, at the same time, Berengar had an enjoyment in criticism as such, and a confidence in “science,” that were not Augustinian.

Berengar, Director of the Cathedral School in Tours, from about 1040 Archdeacon in Angers (ob. 1088), had instituted studies on the doctrine of the Eucharist, searched through the Church Fathers, occupied himself with the first Eucharist controversy, and rejectedSee on this Reuter I., p. 95, “Paschasius ineptus ille monachus Corbeiensis.” Berengar is correct in seeing contradictions in Paschasius. The book of Ratramnus was then regarded as a work of John Scotus, and was condemned as such at Vercelli in 1050. the doctrine of Paschasius, long before a controversy developed itself. In the doctrine as it prevailed at the time he saw apostacy from the Church Fathers and unreason; for he saw in it only the view, that after the consecration bread and wine have disappeared, and in place of them there exist the real flesh and blood of Christ in so sensibly palpable a form that they are present as pieces (portions) of His bloody body. He was right; so the widely prevailing superstition taught;The confession of faith which was forced upon him in 1059 (composed by Cardinal Humbert), also contained the coarse view. Even Bach I., p. 366, n. 4, declares the confession “at least objectionable.” In Lanfranc de corp. et sang. dom. 2 (Migne CL.) the words occur: “panem et vinum quæ in altari ponuntur post consecrationem non solum sacramentum sed etiam verum corpus et sanguinem J. Christi esse et sensualiter, non solum in sacramento sed et in veritate, manibus sacerdotum tractari et frangi et fidelium dentibus atteri.” The most characteristic thing is that those who were quite logical declared even the word “sacrament” to be unsatisfactory: “The Eucharist is the mystery (sacramentum) in which there is no mystery, but all takes place vere et sensualiter.” That is the fundamental thought of Berengar’s opponents. That this was a falling away from tradition stands beyond doubt. But the traditional theologians, as is well known, are most fanatical, when to the old beaten track which they call tradition, or to their fancies, which, from their lack of understanding, they surround with the halo of the venerable, there is opposed the truth that has the protection of the true tradition. yet Paschasius had certainly taken also a more spiritual view of the change, and among the authoritative churchmen of that period such a “conversion” was not taught by all the more prominent.The controversy is also so uninspiring, because, as usual, the opponents exaggerated. Berengar proceeded as if he had only the view against him that parts of the bloody body of Christ are chewed by the teeth, while his adversaries asserted that according to him the elements were empty symbols. He had at any rate more right on his side in his description; yet not only Fulbert (Bach I., p. 365), but some also who were later, did not think of a spatial extension of the body of Christ in the converted elements. By means of a letter to Lanfranc, Berengar himself opened the controversy.See Mansi T. XIX., p. 768. We have his doctrine fully stated for us for the first time in his work de sacra cœna. adv. Lanfrancum (ab. 1073; anything earlier is almost entirely lost). His leading idea was to introduce reason into the Church doctrine, or, more correctly, to bring to light by means of reason the reason that lies in the divine doctrines of the Church. Dialectics, the science which had always differentiated, is nowhere more in its proper place than where there is a question about two objects, which, in one respect, are one, and in another respect are different. Thus the two-nature doctrine is very peculiarly its province; and so also is the doctrine of the Eucharist, with its earthly elements and its heavenly gift.Of course the chief arguments of Berengar are derived from Scripture and tradition. To them he attaches decisive weight. The distinction that already prejudges everything, between the sensible, the visible, and the sacrament, the invisible — Berengar had made it the basis of his doctrine and the starting-point of his dialectic, as long as he could think — originates with Augustine. With the dialectic there mingle the beginnings of a more independent, a critical view of history. Yet Berengar meddles with no decree of any Council. Only, the decrees connected with his subject are ridiculed by him. Berengar showed that the doctrine of the bodily transmutation was absurd (“ineptia”), and went directly in the face of the old traditions, as well as of reason, which we must make use of as reasonable beings created in the image of God.See Vischer, p. 600: “maximi plane cordis est, per omnia ad dialecticam confugere, quia confugere ad eam ad rationem est confugere, quo qui non confugit, cum secundum rationem sit factus ad imaginem dei, suum honorem reliquit nec potest renovari de die in diem ad imaginem dei.” He accordingly adopted the standpoint of Scotus (Ratramnus), as he understood it. He taught that the words are to be understood tropically; but he held this interpretation with much greater firmness than his predecessor, and gave it an exclusiveness of which his predecessor had not thought; Christ is spoken of under many symbols, hence the bread is also a symbol;1Berengar compares the description of Christ as a lion, lamb, corner-stone. Scripture teaches that, till His return, Christ remains in heaven;P. 199: “constabit, eum qui opinetur, Christi corpus cœlo devocatum adesse sensualiter in altari, ipsum se dejicere, quod vecordium est, dum confirmat se manu frangere, dente atterere Christi corpus, quod tamen ipsum negare non possit impossibile esse et incorruptibile.” a piece of bread is not capable of taking into itself the body born of the Virgin, and yet it is a question about the whole Christ;The last point was for Berengar of the greatest weight. He always regards his opponents as assuming that there are “portiunculæ” of the body of Christ on the altar, and objects to this, (1) that it is a question of the whole body (see pp. 148, 199 f.); (2) that the body of Christ is not something “corruptible,” which can be touched, broken, and bitten. Then, again, the bread is not capable of affording room for such a body, and then the “sensualiter” is above all objected to. The incorruptibility and uniqueness of the body of Christ are the presuppositions of his dialectic. A body so constituted cannot become sensible, and it cannot be at the same time in a thousand places. The expedient also of supposing a creating-anew of the body of Christ is effectively refuted by him; this would involve us in the thought of two bodies. a destruction of the subject (the elements) involves the destruction of all essential attributes of the elements, for concretely (in concreto) these cannot be distinguished from the subject itself (Nominalist tendency).Here Berengar emphasised the correct logical reflection, “quod in subjecto erat superesse quacunque ratione non potest corrupto subjecto” (p. 93), i.e., when the substance is destroyed, the essential attributes (taste, colour, form) cannot remain behind; or p. 59: “non potest res ulla aliquid esse, si desinat ipsum esse.” Even Protestant historians will take no account of such reasons. Yet the tropical view, as he did not stand by it, was not equivalent for Berengar to the symbolical. This latter view rather he explicitly rejected, in so far as he followed the old tradition, and recognised two things in the Eucharist, sign and sacrament. The elements become sacrament through consecration, and this implies that they now include something objectively holy. A “conversio” takes place; but for Berengar this expression has certainly an unusual sense.It most be assumed that it rests on accommodation; for although there answers to the sacrament a res sacramenti, which is created by the consecration, yet it is certainly not a question of transmutation. Nor did the old tradition furnish this term. In substance Berengar is a correct Augustinian; hence it is unnecessary to quote further passages. The proper expression for what Berengar means would be a divine “auctio” in the elements, and so also he has expressed himself, p. 98. On the other hand, it is said, p. 125: “per consecrationem altaris fiunt panis et vinum sacramenta religionis, non ut desinat esse quæ fuerant, sed ut sint quæ erant et in aliud commutentur.” It is meant to suggest that the elements remain what they are, but at the same time become the body of Christ. They become in a certain respect something different, i.e., there is now added to the visible a second element, which is real, but invisible. The consecrated elements remain in one respect what they are, but in another respect they become the sacraments, i.e., as the visible, temporal, and mutable subjects, they become the guarantees (pignora, figuræ, signa) of the reception of the whole heavenly Christ by the believer. While the mouth therefore receives the “sacrament,” the truly genuine Christian receives by discernment (“in cognitione”), and into his heart that which the sacramental elements represent, namely, Christ as food, the power of the heavenly Christ. Hence the enjoyment and the effect of the Eucharist are spiritual: the inner man (so it depends on faith, in addition to the consecration) receives the true body of Christ, and appropriates the death of the crucified Christ through believing remembrance).“Christi corpus totum constat accipi ab interiore homine, fidelium corde, non ore” (p. 148). At the same time also a memorial feast: “spiritualis comestio, quæ fit in mente.”

Augustine would have had nothing to object to this doctrine of the Eucharist, even though some dialectic arguments and devices in it had surprised him. But the men of the period were shocked, both at the result, and partly also at the course of thought that led to this result. At Rome and Vercelli (1050), in Berengar’s absence, the doctrine was condemned, on the ground of the letter to Lanfranc. Nine years later, after it had become artificially mixed up in France with ecclesiastico-political questions, but had thereby become for the time more tolerable for Rome, and after its author had suffered much from slander and imprisonment, Berengar was compelled to subscribe at Rome, under Nicolas II., a formula of faith, which made it clear that his worst fears with regard to the tyranny of superstition in the Church were not exaggerated.v. above p. 47, note 2. Having returned to France, he kept in retirement at first; but subsequently he could have no rest. He came to the front again with his doctrine, for which he had influential supporters in Rome itself, and a new, heated literary controversy was the result. During its course the most important writings on both sides were produced. Gregory VII. treated the controversy in a dilatory way, and with much indulgence towards Berengar, who was personally known to him: in all ages Rome has been clever enough not to be hasty in making heretics, and a Pope who, in ruling the world, must so often wink at things, knows also how to exercise patience and forbearance, especially when personal sympathy is not wanting.On the interesting relation of Berengar to the Curia and Gregory VII., see Reuter I., p. 116 ff., 120 ff. But in the end Gregory was compelled, in order not to shake his own authority, to force Berengar, at the Synod of 1079, to recognise the transmutation doctrine.The formula (in Lanfranc, c. 2) was milder than that of 1059, but yet sufficiently plain: “Ego Berengarius corde credo et ore confiteor panem et vinum quæ ponuntur in altari per mysterium sacræ orationis et verba nostri redemptoris substantialiter converta in veram et propriam et vivicatricem carnem et sanguinem J. Christi et post consecrationem esse verum corpus Christi, quod natum est de virgine . . .et quod sedet ad dexteram patris . . .non tantum per signum et virtutem sacramenti sed in proprietate naturæ et veritate substantiæ.” For a second time Berengar outwardly submitted; the Pope was satisfied with the form; but with this the cause which the broken scholar represented became lost.

The transmutation theory of Paschasius — the term transubstantiation was apparently first used casually by Hildebert of Tours (beginning of twelfth century) in his 93rd Sermon (Migne CLXXI., p. 776), and therefore already existedIn his two treatises (of date 1157) against the followers of Soterichos, in whose opinion the mass was not offered to the Son, but only to the Father and Spirit, Nicolas of Methone used the expression μεταστοιχείωσις, see Hefele V.², p. 568. These treatises were published by Dimitracopulos in the year 1865 (see Reusch, Theol. Lit.-Blatt, 1866, No. 11). — was further developed by the opponents of Berengar. Yet everything acquired settled form only in the thirteenth century: the questions resulting from the new doctrine are innumerable. First, the mystery was conceived of still more sensuously, at least by some (manducatio infidelium);Lanfranc, 1.c. c. 20: even sinners and the unworthy receive the true body of Christ. Only in this respect did Lanfranc develop the doctrine beyond Paschasius. secondly, there was a beginning, though with caution, to apply to dogma the “science” that was discredited in the opponent. The crude conceptions (which embraced the total conversion) were put aside, and an attempt was made to unite the older deliverances of tradition with the new transmutation doctrine, as also to adapt the Augustinian terminology, by means of dialectic distinctions, to the still coarsely realistic view of the object.There was an aiming above all at recognising the whole Christ as present in the host, at reconciling the Augustinian, as well as the older rich and manifold conception of the Eucharist as a whole, with the transmutation doctrine, at rationalising the relation of element to verum corpus Christi by dialectic distinctions of accident and substance, at reconciling the presence of Christ in heaven with the sacramental presence, and at not forgetting, too, in these speculations the Church as corpus Christi. Note here as specially important the treatise de corp. et sang. Christi veritate in eucharistia, by Guitmund of Aversa (Migne CXLIX.), who certainly learned from Berengar. For the theories of other opponents of Berengar (Lanfranc, Adelmann of Brixen, Hugo of Langres, Durandus of Troaune, Alger of Lüttich, Abelard [he taught differently from Berengar, see Deutsch, l.c. pp. 401 f., 405 ff.], Walter of St. Victor, Honorius of Autun, etc.), see in Bach p. 382 ff. On the German theologians who occupied themselves with the doctrine of the Eucharist, see ibid., p. 399 ff. (the Reichersberg theologians, Gerhoch, Rupert of Deutz; in the last named there is a peculiar, spiritualistic consubstantiation doctrine). Guitmund attributed the whole Christ to every particle, and thereby led on to the new view, first expressed by Anselm, that the whole Christ is container) in one form (ep. IV., 107); “in acceptione sanguinis totum Christum deum et hominem et in acceptione corporis similiter totem accipimus.” In this the dogmatic basis was laid for withholding the cup, which afterwards became the rule. There is interest connected with the timid attempts that were made to teach also a “certain” incorruptibility of the accidents of the converted substances (these terms are now used even by the orthodox). Yet appearance witnessed against this assumption, and there was not yet resolution enough to adopt the doctrine that even here the empirical misleads. That Lutheran theologians take sides with Berengar’s opponents (Thomasius-Seeberg, p. 48: “really religious position as opposed to the rationalising misinterpretation of this man,” cf. Reuter), although their final argument was the omnipotence of God, belongs to the peculiarities of the Romantic theology of the nineteenth century. Thomasius (p. 49) is specially delighted with the timid anticipations of the doctrine of the ubiquity of the substance of the body of the heavenly Christ in Alger (de sacram. corp. et sang. domini I., 11-16), whereby the difficulties which attach to the idea of the creatio of the Eucharistic body are to be set aside (Bach. I., p. 389 ff.): “Christ can be corporeally present wherever he wills.” For the rest (see Lanfranc), there was as yet no more declared than that with the body exalted to the right hand of God the Eucharistic body is identical, and yet not identical. How necessary here, therefore, was the so much despised dialectic of Berengar! The struggle of Berengar, therefore, did not continue altogether without fruit; but the fruit consisted essentially in this, that science was left quite free, because it was gradually seen that in face of the gravity of the problems the simplicity of faith was powerless. At the Fourth Lateran Council (1215) the mediæval doctrine of the Supper was solemnly framed as dogma in the famous confession of faith, which, previous to the Tridentine confession, was the most influential symbol (after the Niceno-Constantinopolitan; see Mansi XXII., p. 982; Hefele V.², p. 878 ff.; and the Corpus juris canonici, where the topic finds a place under X. I: de summa trinitate [I. 1]). What is important here is (1) that the doctrine of the Eucharist is immediately attached to the confession of the Trinity and Incarnation. In this way it is represented even in the symbol as having a most intimate relation to these doctrines, as, indeed, forming with them a unity; i.e., the state of things was now created that was disastrous even for the history of the Reformation: the real presence obtained the same value as the Trinity and the two-nature doctrine, so that every one was regarded as an ecclesiastical anarchist who called it in question. This valuation certainly corresponds with the development of the doctrine of the Eucharist, inasmuch as the Eucharist appears as the continuously present, earthly incorporation of the mysteries of the Trinity and Incarnation, but it robs the Gospel of its spiritual character. (2) Transubstantiation was now expressly taught; the words run: “moreover there is one universal Church of the faithful, outside of which no one whatever can be saved, in which Jesus Christ is at once priest and sacrifice, whose body and blood are truly (veraciter) contained in the sacrifice of the altar under the appearances of bread and wine, the bread being transubstantiated into the body, and the wine into the blood by divine power, so that for the effecting of the mystery of unity (ad perficiendum mysterium unitatis) we receive of His what He received of ours (here the conjunction with the Christology is manifest). And this sacrament especially (hoc utique sacramentum) no one can administer but the priest who has been duly ordained according to the Church authority (secundum claves ecclesiæ) which Jesus Christ Himself gave to the Apostles and their successors.” The symbol then immediately continues: “But the sacrament of baptism, which is consecrated in water on invoking the undivided Trinity, avails for salvation both to infants and adults, by whomsoever it is duly administered in the forms of the Church (in forma ecclesiæ). And if after receiving baptism any one shall have fallen into sin, he can always be restored (reparari) through true penitence.” Thus this line of development also is completed, and at the same time the related one (see Vol. V., p. 325), according to which every Christian must make confession of his sins before the parish priest (parochus). It is laid down in the twenty-first chapter: “Every believer, of either sex, after arriving at the years of discretion, must by himself (solus) faithfully confess all his sins, at least once a year, to his own priest, and must study to carry out to the best of his ability the repentance enjoined upon him, receiving reverently, at least at Easter, the sacrament of the Eucharist.” The novelty in the symbol — the direct attachment of the Eucharist dogma to the Trinity and Christology — is the most distinctive and boldest act of the Middle Ages. Compared with this immense innovation, the addition of the “filioque” weighs very lightly. But on the other hand, the symbol certainly shows also very plainly how the old dogmatic tradition still dominated everything, for it contains nothing of the specific Augustinian-Western propositions about sin, original sin, grace, and justification. “Dogma,” in the strict sense of the word, consists of the Trinity, Christology, the doctrine of the Eucharist, the doctrine of Baptism, and of the Sacrament of Penance. All else is at the most dogma of the second order. This state of things also was of the greatest weight for the history of the Reformation; the doctrines of the Trinity, of Christ and of the Sacraments (i.e., the doctrine of the three Sacraments, Baptism, Penance, Eucharist) constitute Catholic Christianity — nothing else.

B. Anselm’s Doctrine of Satisfaction, and the Doctrines of Atonement of the Theologians of the Twelfth Century.See Baur, Lehre von der Versöhnung; Hasse, Anselm, 1853; Ritschl, Rechtfertigung und Versöhnung 2 Aufl. I., p. 31 ff.

Ever since the days when an attempt was made to punish, without decimating the Church, the great apostasy occasioned by the Decian persecution, the positions were held as valid, that God’s mercy is unlimited, even as regards the baptised, but that only a satisfactio, consisting of legitimate penance (pœnitentia legitima), can move the offended God to regard the sinner again with favour. Since that time these ideas had obtained the widest circulation,See the confidence in the unlimited mercy of God on the part of the Carlovingian theologians, especially Alcuin (Hauck, K.-Deutschlands II., p. 136 f.). united themselves at a later period with Germanic ideas, and dominated the whole penitential system of the Church.See Vol. V., p. 323 ff. Connected with this system stood the conception of “merits,” i.e., of such supererogatory acts as establish a claim to reward, when no guilt exists to be expiated. Through this idea a calculation of the value of particular deeds was introduced, and of these calculations the whole ethical system was full. Whether an act was obligatory, or abundans, or superabundans, whether, under given circumstances, it was compensatory (satisfactory), or meritorious, had to be established in each particular case, so that each one might know how his account stood with heaven. The Augustinian conception of prevenient grace freely bestowed (gratia gratis data præveniens), which had been generally accepted, wrought no change on this view, but only made it more complicated.

Yet neither by Gregory the Great, nor by any theologian of the Carlovingian period, was this view applied to the work of Christ. Frequent reference, it is true, was already made to the “copiousness of the value of the mystery of the passion” (pretü copiositas mysterii passionis; see the fourth chapter of the Synod of Chiersey); but a theory had not been framed, because there was no reflection at all on the nature, the specific worth, and the effect of the redemption contained in the suffering and death of Christ. The Fathers, Augustine included, had handed down nothing certain on this. The only view taken by the Greeks was that the reign of death was broken by the cross and resurrection of Christ, or that mankind were thereby bought off, or cunningly wrested, from the devil. All that they said of the sacrifice in the suffering was quite vague. Only Athanasius spoke with noteworthy clearness of the penal suffering which Christ took from us and laid upon Himself. But, from the days of Paul, all of them testified that Christ died for us, and delivered us from the power of the devil. That was felt and proclaimed as the great act of redemption. Ambrose and Augustine had then emphasised the position that Christ is Mediator as man, and had given many instructions about particular points; but the question why that Man, who was at the same time God, was obliged to suffer and die, was dealt with by pointing to His example, or by reciting biblical texts about ransom, sacrifice, and such like, without the necessity of the death here coming clearly to view.The necessity resulted, no doubt, when the right of the devil over mankind was thought of. Beyond this, it may be said that we have in one respect an anticipation of the Anselmic representation in the sermon composed about 500 by a contemporary of Faustus of Reji: Why Christ redeemed mankind from the power of the devil, not through the use of His divine might, but by becoming man, fulfilling the law, suffering and dying. (Caspari, Briefe, Abhandlungen und Predigten, 1890, pp. 202 ff. 411 ff.). The whole view of redemption, it is true, is still given here under the scheme of redemption from the devil, but the mode of redemption is dominated by the thought that “deus est rationis atque justitiæ et auctor et exactor.” Something similar is also to be found in some homilies of Faustus (see Caspari, 1.c. p. 418 ff.). But Augustine certainly had laid the foundation for a new and vigorous apprehension of the significance of Christ’s work, by emphasising so strongly the gravity of sin, and by representing the relation between God and man under the scheme of sin and grace.

At this point Anselm came in. The importance of his doctrine of satisfaction, as developed in Book H. of his “Cur deus homo,”Edit. II., by Fritzsche, 1886. composed as a dialogue, lies in this, that he made use of all the factors of the Augustinian theology, so far as they came into consideration here, but that at the same time he was the first of all to frame a theory, both of the necessity of the appearing of the God-man, and of the necessity of His death. This he did by making the principles of the practice of penance the fundamental scheme of religion in general.Cremer (die Wurzeln des Anselm’schen Satisfactionsbegriff, in den Stud. und Krit. 1880, p. 7 ff.) has endeavoured to show that the fundamental thesis of Anselm’s satisfaction theory (I. 13: “necesse est, ut aut ablatus honor solvatur aut pœna sequatur.Edit. II., by Fritzsche, 1886. I. 15: “necesse est, ut omne peccatum satisfactio aut pœna sequatur”) is of Germanic origin. The correspondence is no doubt easily proved, but the Roman law also knows of this alternative in the case of private offences, and there can be no doubt that the Church, in its ordinances of penance, had acted on the principle, “aut pœnitentia legitima (satisfactio congrua) aut mors acterna,” long ere it learned to know Germanic law. In Tertullian, certainly, there still prevails another idea, when (de pudic. 2) he says: “omne delictum aut venia dispungit aut pœna”; but the fatal turn of thought is already anticipated, when he forthwith adds: “venia ex castigatione, pœna ex damnatione.” — Thus I had written in the first edition; since then, Cremer has again described his standpoint in the Stud. u. Krit., 1893 (pp. 316-345). I must adhere to the position that it is not necessary for understanding Anselm to have recourse to the Germanic notion of satisfaction, since the material in hand, of which we have to take account, is quite sufficiently given in the prevailing practice and theory of penance. These go back in the West to the time of Cyprian, or say of Tertullian (see Wirth, Der Verdienstbegriff bei Tertullian, 1892; see also Tertullian’s notion of “compensatio,” cf. Apolog. 50: “veniam dei compensatione sanguinis expedire”), and developed themselves everywhere in the same way. It may be enough to point to Sulpitius Severus (Dial. II. 10), who was certainly not affected by Germanic influence: “fornicatio deputatur ad pœnam, nisi satisfactione purgatur.” That is surely clearly enough the Anselmic scheme. (See other passages in Karl Müller, Abhandl. f. Weizsäcker, 1892, p. 290 f.: God is satisfied with a lesser performance; this appears sometimes as mutatio of, sometimes as compensatio for, the eternal penalty.) Nor is it advisable here, or in Tertullian, to speak of “compensating penalty” (“Ersatzstrafe”) as distinct from “compensation for injury” (“Schadenersatz”), for these notions cannot at all be strictly kept apart everywhere. “The sacrifices that are well-pleasing to God are a broken spirit, a broken and contrite heart.” From this passage and similar ones, from the consensus gentium also, which may very well be appealed to here, and finally from the rule, well-known even to the Romans, as to every other nation, that private injuries are cancelled by indemnifications which restore to the injured party his honour, it is quite sufficiently explained, how in the gemitus, lamentationes, humiliationes, etc., there should both be recognised mortificationes temporales, and also something seen which changes the feeling of the angry God and makes Him again gracious. That is compensation for injury as regards the honour of God (because voluntary self-humiliation), for in the normal relationship one is not obliged in such a way to testify his subjection (therefore it is also a “merit” — i.e., something which God gladly sees and prizes — when in this condition one nevertheless offers those performances, and under certain circumstances a saint can also offer them for a sinner). But it can also be described as compensating penalty, for the satisfaction, it is true, and even the Anselmic is no exception, is in no sense endurance of deserved penalty, but it is a performance, which to the performer is painful and arduous. In Roman public law the pœna is certainly the satisfactio — that has not been disputed — but, so far as I know, in the penitential discipline of the ancient Church the satisfactio was never thought of purely in the forms of Roman law (against Cremer, p. 316), but was always the evasion of penalty by acts which were at once (as castigatio) compensating penalties and (as surplus exercise of lowly submission to God) compensations for injury. It may be that to the man of the ancient world the compensating penalty was more distinctly present than the compensation for injury, although all public penal procedure has developed itself from compensating performances, and the consciousness of this has never disappeared (even “pœna” is originally “ransom”). But when Cremer asserts: “The term and conception ‘penance’ (Busse), in the penal law and current language of the Romish Church, springs from the satisfactio of German law,” that is an error which prejudices all his further exposition (see also Loots, Dogmengesch.³, p. 273 f.). At the same time it may be held by way of reservation that the transfusion of the penance discipline of the Church with Germanic ideas strengthened the theory, and gave a casuistic tinge and externality to the practice (Weregild, instead of, and in addition to, cor humiliatum and lamentationes). So also the peculiar expression Anselm gives to the notion “honour” of God is perhaps due to Germanic influence, although one must look very closely to discover a shade of difference on this point between Anselm’s God and the injured and wrathful God of Tertullian. Why then (according to Tertullian) is God injured by sins? Because the obedience is withheld which is due to His commands. When Cremer asserts (p. 329) that in the ancient penance discipline, the satisfactio congrua (“congrua” — that is, determined by the penance regulations; the expression can be pointed out already in the fourth century) was as much penalty as the mors æterna, that is certainly a wonderful statement. When, finally (p. 326), he throws on me the burden of proving that the Roman law, in the case of private injuries, recognises the alternative: “aut pœna aut satisfactio,” I grant that I expressed myself too strongly, and in a way not incapable of being misunderstood. The law, so far as it was publicly administered and codified, may no longer recognise this principle; but a jurist like Tertullian shows that the scheme must have been a familiar one, and how can we think of the settlement of private wrongs at all otherwise than by supposing that a satisfactio is rendered to the injured? The “necessity” was understood by Anselm in the sense of the strictest reasonableness, i.e., his aim is to show that even if we knew nothing of Christ, and such an One had never existed, reason would have to confess that men can only be saved if a God-man appears and dies for them. Augustine already propounded the question of the absolute necessity of redemption by means of the incarnation and death of the Logos, but answered it in the negative. He saw in this means not the only, though certainly the worthiest, way. Jews and pagans must be constrained to acknowledge this necessity. They, and unbelieving Christians, must see that it is unreason to assert that God could also have redeemed us by another person (whether man or angel), or that He could have redeemed us by a mere determination of His will; I. 1. they must perceive that the mercy of God does not suffer wrong through the death on the cross, and that it is not unworthy of God that Christ should have stooped to abasement and taken upon Himself the uttermost suffering. No doubt it holds good that we first believe and then see. “I. 2: Sicut rectus ordo exigit, ut profunda christianæ fidei prius credamus, quam ea præsumamus ratione discutere.” But though the attempt may fail — faith, of course, would remain unshaken — we must advance to the knowledge of what we believe, and in this case a perfect reasonable knowledge is possible.

At the outset Anselm rejects three ideas, one as insufficient, the others as erroneous. It is not sufficient to justify redemption through the death on the cross by emphasising the “conveniens,” i.e., the correspondence of the person and work of Christ with the person and fall of Adam; that is an asthetic view, which is correct, but which proves nothing until the “necessarium” is established.I. 3, 4: “. . .Multa alia, quæ studiose considerata inenarrabilem quandam nostræ redemptionis hoc modo procuratæ pulchritudinem (see Augustine) ostendunt . . .sed si non est aliquid solidum super quod sedeant, non videntur infidelibus sufficere.” It is erroneous to think that a man could have redeemed us; for we should then become the servants of him who should have delivered us from eternal death. But in that way our original dignity would not be restored, in virtue of which we were like the angels and servants of God alone.I. 5, It is erroneous, finally, to think that by redemption legal claims of the devil upon us had to be wiped out; for although by reason of our sins we have justly come under the devil’s power, yet the devil does not rule justly, but rather unjustly. He has obtained no claim upon us, and over against God he has absolutely no right.I. 6, 7. Before Anselm begins his process of proof, he further endeavours — the arrangement is extremely unskilful — to refute the objection that the suffering and death of a God-man, just because he is man, are without effect, because every man is bound to be obedient unto death. He rejects this view, which is only apparently supported by passages of Scripture that teach that the death of Christ was obligatory, because it was fulfilment of the divine will; a sinless man, rather — and the God-man was such — was only under obligation to observe justitia and veritas (righteousness and truth), but not to die, for death follows only upon sin.I. 8-10. In the 2nd Book this decisive point is repeatedly treated very fully in c. 10, 11 and 16, 18. Having now cleared the path for himself, he goes on to put the question thus: Assuming that we knew nothing whatever of the God‑man man and His action, what must take place, if men, who are created for blessedness in the world beyond, but who can attain to this blessedness only as sinless, have all become sinners? The most natural answer is (for it has already been said in I. 4, that it would not become God not to carry out His plan): sins must be forgiven. But how must that be done? What is foriveness of sin? What range has it? In order to answer this question, we must first ask, What is sin? With this the development begins.In the course of it (I. 16-18) the Augustinian theologoumenon, that the men destined to salvation take the place of the fallen angels, fills a large space. But it is in no way connected with the doctrine of satisfaction. Anselm differs from Augustine in this, that he thinks that the number of saved men is greater than that of the fallen angels; from the beginning God had in view the numerus beatorum as consisting of angels and men. Otherwise the creation of men would be simply a consequence of the fall among the angels, and there would result the inconveniens that we men should have to rejoice over this fall. This correction of the Augustinian doctrine does all honour to Anselm’s heart; but as the doctrine has its point in the equally great number of the fallen angels and saved men, it is really cancelled by Anselm. Yet he was himself not quite sure of his case. See I. 18, p. 37.

Every rational creature owes to God entire subjection to His will. That is the only honour which God demands. He who pays it is righteous; he who pays it not, sins; sin, indeed, is nothing else than the dishonouring of God by withholding from Him His own.I. 11: “non est aliud peccare quam non reddere deo debitum . . . debitum est subjectum esse voluntate deo . . .hæc est justitia sive rectitudo voluntatis, quæ justos facit sive rectos corde, i.e., voluntate, hic est solus et totus honor quem debemus deo . . .hunc honorem debitum qui deo non reddit, aufert deo quod suum est et deum exhonorat, et hoc est peccare.” This robbery God cannot tolerate; He must defend His honour. He must therefore demand that man restore it to Him, and, indeed, “for the insult inflicted, that he restore more than he took away”; otherwise he continues “in culpa” (under guilt).I. II: “non sufficit solummodo reddere quod ablatum est, sed pro contumelia illata plus debet reddere, quam abstulit, sicut enim qui lædit salutem alterius, non sufficit si salutem restituit, nisi pro illata doloris injuria recompenset aliquid, ita qui honorem alicujus violat, non sufficit honorem reddere, si non secundum exhonorationis factam molestiam aliquid, quod placeat illi quem exhonoravit, restituit. Hoc quoque attendendum, quod cum aliquis quod injuste abstulit solvit, hoc debet dare, quod ab illo non posset exigi, si alienum non rapuisset.” Every sinner, therefore, must furnish a satisfaction.I. 11 fin. God cannot dispense with this; for that would be equivalent to the impunity of sin, and would violate the divine honour. But the impunity of sin would be equivalent to God’s ceasing to be the controller of sin (ordinator peccatorum); He would let something disorderly pass in His kingdom (“aliquid inordinatum in suo regno dimittere.”) Right and wrong also would then become the same; the latter, indeed, would have the advantage, because, as unrepented of and unpunished, it would be subject to no law. No doubt we men are enjoined simply to forgive those who sin against us. But that is said to us, that we may not encroach upon the prerogative of God: “for it belongs to no one but Him to take vengeance.” Nor may we appeal against this to the omnipotence and goodness of God, and say that all that God does is good, even when He simply forgives sin therefore; for God’s power and goodness are determined by His will (“it is not to be so understood that if God wills something improper [inconveniens], it is right because He wills it; for it does not follow that if God wills to lie, it is right to lie”); hence, as God wills to do nothing wrong or disorderly (inordinate), the absolving without penalty of a sinner who does not restore to Him what he has robbed Him of, is not within the scope of the freedom or the goodness or the will of God.I. 12. The supreme righteousness, therefore, which is nothing else than God Himself, requires restitution or — this turn of thought appears first here — penalty.I. 13, see above, p. 56, note 3. Even the latter, that is to say, as deprivation of salvation (damnation), restores the divine honour, in as much as by it “man unwillingly pays back of his own what he took away .. . as man by sinning seized what is God’s, so God by punishing takes away what is man’s.”I. 14: “deum impossibile est honorem suum perdere: aut enim peccator sponte solvit quod debet aut deus ab invito accipit.” Even by penalty the beauty and order of the universe are maintained, which must never be shaken (of the honour of God in itself it holds good that it cannot be shaken; “for to Himself He is the incorruptible and in no way mutable honour. . . . No one can honour or dishonour God so far as He is in Himself.”)I. 15. But it is “extremely alien to God “that He should abandon His costliest work, the rational creature (creatura rationabilis), to complete ruin.In II. 4, it is said indeed (cf. I. 4): “Si nihil pretiosius agnoscimr deus fecisse quam rationalem naturam ad gaudendum de se, valde alienum est ab eo, ut ullam rationalem naturam penitus perire sinat.” I. 25, p. 52. But as, on the other hand, He cannot associate sinful men with the holy angels, satisfaction must come in (“hold this most firmly, because without satisfaction, i.e., without spontaneous payment of the debt, God cannot allow sin to pass with impunity”).I. 19. The objection that we are directed to pray to God for forgiveness, which would surely be unmeaning if only satisfaction were of any avail, is met by saying that the prayer for forgiveness is itself a part of the satisfaction.I. 19: The Interlocutor says: “Quid est, quod dicimus deo: dimitte nobis debita nostra, et omnis gens orat deum quem credit, ut dimittat sibi peccata? Si enim solvimus quod debemus, cur oramus ut dimittat? Numquid deus injustus est, ut iterum exigat quod solutum est? Si autem non solvimus, cur frustra oramus, ut faciat quod, quia non convenit, facere non potest?” To this Anselm replies: “Qui non solvit, frustra dicit: dimitte; qui autem solvit, supplicat, quoniam hoc ipsum pertinet ad solutionem ut supplicet; nam deus nulli quicquam debet, sed omnis creatura illi debet; et ideo non expedit homini, ut agat cum deo, quemadmodum par cum pari.” Unfortunately Anselm has forgotten this last thought in his exposition elsewhere. Now the satisfaction is subject to the twofold rule, that it must be, first, restitution, and secondly, smart-money (Schmerzensgeld).See above, p. 60, note 3. But what can man give to God which he was not already required to give Him in any case, since entire surrender is included in obligatory obedience? “If I owe Him myself and all I can do — even when I sin not, that I do not sin (so there is no thought here of supererogatory deeds), I have nothing that I can render back (reddam) for my sin.” The objection: “if I consider reasons (rationes), I do not see how I can be saved, but if I fall back upon my faith, then in Christian faith which worketh by love [hope that my salvation is possible,” is repelled; for here it is just a question of reason. I. 20. Man can therefore do nothing. And how much he would have to do! “Thou hast not yet considered of what gravity thy sin is.” Even the smallest disobedience entails an infinite guilt (even to gain the whole world one may not commit the smallest sin) for the guilt is to be measured by the God who is despised.See the exposition in I. 21. Because every sin is committed contra voluntatem dei, it is greater than the value of the world — infinitely great. Further (I. 22), because man in paradise preferred the devil to God, it is “contra honorem dei, ut homo reconcilietur illi cum calumnia hujus contumeliæ deo irrogatæ, nisi prius honoraverit deum vincendo diabolum, sicut inhonoravit ilium victus a diabolo.” But how can he do that? Man has therefore to furnish an infinitely great satisfaction, since it is already an established rule, that God’s honour does not permit of man’s receiving salvation, “if he does not restore to God all he has taken from Rim, so that as God has lost by him, He may also recover by him.”I. 23. The incapacity of human nature to furnish satisfaction can make no change on this law, which follows from the honour of GodI. 24. So therefore there remains only one solution, if the “convenientia” (the befitting) requires redemptionI. 4, and the strongest passage, I. 25: “Si deo inconveniens est, hominem cum aliqua macula perducere ad hoc, ad quod ilium sine omni macula facit, ne aut boni incepti pænitere aut propositum implere non posse videatur: multo magis propter eandem inconvenientiam impossibile est nullum hominem ad hoc provehi, ad quo factus est.” In II. 4, 5, it is said, indeed, that while God “nihil facit necessitate, quia nullo modo cogitur aut prohibetur facere aliquid,” yet an inner self-willed necessity exists for God’s carrying out His work: “necesse est, ut bonitas dei propter immutabilitatem suam perficiat de homine quod incepit, quamvis totum sit gratia bonum quod facit.” — namely, the God-man. There must be someone “who shall pay to God for the sin of man something greater than all that is, apart from God . . .it is necessary, therefore, that he who shall be able to give of his own to God something that shall surpass all that is under God, shall be greater than all that is not God . . .but there is nothing above all that is not God, save God. . .No one, therefore, is able to make this satisfaction save God.” Again, “nor must that satisfaction be made by anyone save man, otherwise man does not satisfy.” Conclusion: “If, therefore, as is certain (sicut constat), it is necessary that that heavenly State be made perfect from men, and this cannot be unless there is made the aforesaid satisfaction, which no one can make save God, and no one owes save man, it is necessary that the God-man shall make it.”II. 6.

For this is the third element in the piety of St. Francis — childlike confidence in the Church and unconditional obedience to the secular clergy. “Let all the Brethren,” so it runs in the Rule of 1209, “be Catholics, live and speak as Catholics . . . and let us regard the clergy and all religious persons as masters in those things which relate to the salvation of the soul, and do not deflect from our religion, let us reverence in the Lord both their rank (ordinem) and their office and their administration.” (See the Rule of 1221, c. 19).But in the year 1210, and later, Francis would not be induced to connect himself with an already existing Order, or to conform to the older Monachism, and in this obstinacy towards the Pope and the cardinals he showed that he knew the greatness of his cause. That a nature like St Francis felt oppressed by nothing external, if only free scope was given him for his ideal,This was not done indeed, and it led to sore distress on Francis’ part; yet Sabatier seems to me to have exaggerated this strain in relationship (see Mariano, and especially Hegler); the Cardinal to whom the movement was chiefly due also did the most to make it political. The relation of St. Francis to the Curia and to the Church politicians, or rather the relation of these to him, still needs a thorough investigation. Excellent discussions in Hegler, l.c. 436 ff. that he could maintain his inner freedom and pure cheerfulness of soul, even under quite other burdens than the Church then imposed, that he must have emptied himself of his very essence if he had undertaken to “abolish” anything, are things that are manifest. For him, obedience to all existing ordinances was as much a need as humility, and never assuredly did the shadow of a sceptical reflection as to whether the hierarchy was as it should be, or as to whether it should exist at all, fall upon the soul of this pure fool. But how could it fail to come about that the ideal of poverty and the ideal of obedience should come into conflict? We cannot here unfold the history of St. Francis and of the Minorite Order. It is well known against what mistrust he had to contend on the part of the secular clergy (even the curia), especially in France (but even on the part of the older Orders), and how the conditions reproduced themselves here which we have observed at the establishment of monachism in the end of the fourth, and beginning of the fifth, centuries, as well as in connection with the Cluniacensian reform in the West. It is well known also that “poverty” was the great theme in the history of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries; that there was as much stubborn and passionate controversy over it as in the fourth and fifth centuries over the natures of Christ, and that in this controversy as artful and clever formula made their appearance as at Chalcedon and Constantinople. For thousands, the controversy about poverty was a controversy about the gospel itself. By this conflict the formulæ of the old dogmatic were little or in no way touched; but they, so to speak, sank into the ground. The question about the nature of the gospel was narrowed down to a practical question about life-conduct. Even when we keep out of view the pedantic mode of treatment, the way of stating the question appears to us strangely inadequate. Yet “poverty,” certainly, was only the final expression for the whole sum of the virtues involved in imitating Christ. What the watchword “poverty” denoted was an immense step of advance from dead faith, and from a barren service of ceremonies and works to spiritual freedom in religion, and to an earnest personal Christianity. The new Order soon broke up into different sections. In the one principal section, the last to submit, it certainly wrought invaluable results in the first generations of its existence. Its preaching kindled an earnest Christian life, indeed in many regions it was the first thing that produced an individual Christianity at all among the laity — so was it in Germany. Yet as everything was brought by it into closest connection with the confessional, the sacraments and the Pope, as all greater freedom was repressed as sectarianism, or crushed out — just by the Mendicant Orders — only an inferior kind of existence was allowed to this individual piety of the laity. For what the Minorites were obliged to sacrifice to the hierarchy — it was nothing less than the chief part of their original ideal, only the shadow remaining — they, so to speak, indemnified their conscience by the unparalleled energy with which they served the Church in its plans for ruling the world, and won for it the interest and allegiance of the laity. Here, at this final stage, therefore, the enemy the Church had in her own midst was once more vanquished; the enormous force of world-forsaking Christianity, which threatened the political supremacy of the Church, became visibly her servant; the “exempted” Order became, along with the Order of Preachers, her surest support.

But in other sections the obedience was not powerful enough to control that force.Of course many personal elements entered also, such as we can study in the most interesting of the earlier Franciscans, Elias of Cortona. “Poverty” turned itself against the rich and worldly Church, and when there was to be threatening and forced silence, it threw off restraint. It called upon the Church to serve; it united itself with the old apocalyptic ideas, that had already been long exercising their power in secret; it adopted the critical attitude of the “Lombard Poor”; it joined hands readily with the new social, and even the new territorial, ideas, the conceptions that were taking shape of the inherent rights of nations and individuals, of States and Princes.See the writings of Joh. de Oliva and Ubertino de Casale (both were under the influence of the writings of Joachim of Fiore). The view of history friendly to the State as against the Secularised Church appears already in the middle of the thirteenth century (and even among the Dominicans): see Voelter in the Ztschr. f. K.-Gesch. IV., H. 3. On the “Spirituales,” and the “Fraticelli” (the latter are not to be identified with the former), as well as on the conflicts in the time of John XXII. and Louis of Bavaria, see Ehrle in the Archiv. f. Litt.-u. K.-Gesch. des Mittelalters, Vol. I. and II., Müller, Kampf Ludwig’s des Bayern 1879 f., the same author in the Ztschr. f. K.-Gesch. VI., part 1, Gudenatz, Michael von Cesena, 1876. While it declared the Church to be Babylon, and hierarchy Anti-Christ, it was not fastidious about its partnership. It left the dogmatic of the Church unassailed; but against the Church itself it declared war, an undertaking so full of contradiction that it was only possible in the Middle Ages, the period of contradictions and illusions; for did not this Church possess in its system of dogma the surest and most definite title for its existence? Only in one branch (the Fraticelli) did the contradiction become so radical that the fences dividing from the heretical sects (Apostolic Brethren, Beghards) became frail.

From these last-mentioned sections nothing permanent developed itself.At a later time Hussism incorporated and wrought over a great part of the Fianciscan and Joachimic-Franciscan elements (see Müller, Bericht uber den gegenwärtigen Stand der Forschung auf dem Gebiet der vorreformatorischen Zeit, in den Vorträgen der theol. Conferenz zu Giessen 1887 S. 44), and as it spread widely, even beyond Bohemia, among the lower orders it prepared the way for the great Baptist movement and the social revolutions of the sixteenth century. Yet creations of a lasting kind appeared here as little as permanent influences on the Church generally. But from the point of view of Church history and the history of culture, the study of the powerful movement, essentially one throughout, which began with Joachimism and culminated with the Hussites and Baptists, is of the deepest interest. Like the “Illuminism” (Aufklärung) in the eighteenth century, and the Romantic ideas in the nineteenth, Joachimism spread over Europe in the thirteenth century, not as a new system of dogma, but as a new mode of viewing history and the highest problems, comforting to the seriously disposed, because it flattered them; cf., e.g., the Chronicle of Salimbene (Michael, Salimbene und seine Chronik., Innsbruck 1889). Strange that this movement should have begun in the hills of Calabria, the most out-of-the-way district of Southern Europe! It is still too little studied, while it certainly belongs to a period more open to our inspection than any in which prophetism played a part. Where prophets appear and are welcomed, fabrications are the immediate sequel. But the history of Joachimism is the typical history of all prophetism. Of the way in which it succeeds in adjusting itself in the world, Salimbene also furnishes some beautiful examples.. The importance for universal history of the vast movement of the Mendicant Orders is not to be seen at all in new doctrines or institutions, though these were not entirely wanting, but lies rather in the religious awakening that was produced by them during a period of 150 or — if a time of slackened effort on the part of the Orders is overlooked — of 300 years. “The individual began to reflect on the saving truths of the Christian religion, to enter himself into a personal relation to them.” That is the highest significance of the Mendicant Order movement. In this sense the Orders were a prior stage of the Reformation. But when religion passed into the circles of the laity, and independent religious life was awakened there, it was a natural result that redoubled vigilance should be exercised lest the old dogma should be injured. So long as dogma is in the hands of priests and theologians, it can maintain a certain freedom; this is here natural to it, indeed. But as soon as the laity become thoughtfully interested in ecclesiastical Christianity, dogma becomes extraordinarily sensitive. Those who are entrusted with the care of the religio publica must—as the Mendicant Orders did — guard it with jealousy, if the result of the general interest is not to be a general running wild of religious speculation. The criterion of what is firmly fixed ecclesiastically must everywhere be applied without hesitation, especially if the Church practice of the present is to be corrected. On the other hand, the ecclesiastically pious laymen themselves demand that the dogma shall continue as a rocher de bronze, and they feel every movement or alteration of it to be an injury to their personal Christianity. This was the situation that was always becoming more firmly established in the three centuries before the Reformation. The larger the number grew of those who sought to become really familiar with religion, the larger became also the number of sectaries of all kinds; but the more inviolable also did dogma appear to the ecclesiastically faithful, and the greater were the efforts of the hierarchy to put down all “heresy.” Besides, dogma had come from the beginning, and indeed chiefly, to the mediæval nations, as a series of legal ordinances. This character it must retain, all the more if the spiritual life had a more vigorous and manifold development; otherwise the unity of the Church was lost. There must at least be an imperative demand for fides implicita, i.e., for respectful obedience. Thus the awakening, which in Germany seems to have gone on continually increasing from the middle of the thirteenth century, contributed to maintain the unalterable character of dogma. Ideally dogma had always been immutable; but now to the reality of this unchangeable thing there attached itself a profoundly practical interest.

The history of piety in the centuries immediately preceding the Reformation consists of a series of sermons on repentance and of revivals, of reforms with a view to a deepening of spiritual life that was to extend through the whole of Christendom. Only in its leading points have we to take a survey of it. What comes first under our notice here is the alliance of the Mendicant Orders with Mysticism.

By Mysticism, as has been explained above, there is to be understood nothing but theological piety (contemplation), having a reflex aim, modelled on Augustine and the Areopagite, and fertilised (though not thoroughly) by Bernardine devotion to Christ. That this theology should have been found congenial to the temper of the Mendicant Monks, as soon as they at all took to do with theology, is easily understood. Bonaventura, Albertus, and Thomas Aquinas were the greatest Mystics, not although, but because, they were theologians and Mendicant Monks.Herrmann remarks very correctly (Verkehr des Christen mit Gott I. Aufl., p. 100): “The (present day) lovers of Mysticism present on a diminished scale the same spectacle as the great Schoolmen; they seek repose from the work of their faith in Mystic piety.”. The same is true of David of Augsburg and Theodoric of Freiburg. Widely-extended investigations have been instituted with the view of classifying the Mystics, and it has been thought possible to distinguish between a Scholastic, a Romanic, and a German, a Catholic, an Evangelical, and a Pantheistic Mysticism. But at bottom the distinctions are without importance. Mysticism is always the same; above all there are no national or confessional distinctions in it. The differences never have to do with its essence, but only either with the degree, the way and the energy with which it is applied, or with its being predominantly directed upon the intellect or upon the will. Even as regards this last point it is only a question of difference of degree, and, at the same time, this last-mentioned distinction shows again very plainly the complete alliance of Mysticism with objective theology; for it is from this alliance that distinction springs. Mysticism is Catholic piety in general, so far as this piety is not merely ecclesiastical obedience, that is, fides implicita Just for that reason Mysticism is not one form among others of pre-reformation piety — perhaps the latent evangelical — but is the Catholic expression of individual piety in general. The Reformation element that is ascribed to it lies here simply in this, that Mysticism, i.e., Catholic piety, when developed in a particular direction, is led to the discernment of the inherent responsibility of the soul, of which no authority can again deprive it; and that it is thereby, at the same time, brought face to face with the question of the certitudo salutis (assurance of salvation), a question which can never again pass out of its view till it is solved in the act of faith. But where that question is determined, Mysticism points beyond itself; for the entire scheme of thought in which it moves always admits only of a perpetually increasing approach to the Deity, and never allows the constant feeling of a sure possession to arise. That, as a Christian, one must always be growing, was rightly discerned by the Catholic piety; but it never arrived at a clear and peaceful vision of the truth, that this growth can, and must, have its sure and inalienable basis in firm confidence in the God of grace, that is, in salvation. As for Catholic Christianity to-day, the Evangelical faith, described as “trust-faith” (“Fiduzglaube”), is a stumbling-block and foolishness, so also before the tribunal of Mediæval Mysticism it was a thing of which there was no understanding. For these Mystics, who framed and saw through so many sacred paradoxes, there was one paradox that remained hidden, namely, that in the spiritual life one can only become what he already is in faith. Only where they arrived at the discernment of this can they be described as precursors of the Reformation.

If Mysticism is withdrawn from the Catholic Church and set down as “Protestant,” then Catholicism is emptied of its character, and evangelical faith becomes deteriorated. Is there then to be no living and individual Catholic piety? But where should we have to seek it, if not in Mysticism? In the three centuries before the Reformation, where can we find even a single manifestation of truly religious life that had not its source in “Mysticism”? Or is Mysticism to be denied to Catholicism, because the latter requires, above everything else, devotion to the Church and the Sacraments, and because the history of Mysticism is the history of continual conflicts between it and sacramental and authoritative ecclesiasticism? But when did it become permissible to regard such conflicts as showing that one of the two factors is illegitimate? Is there not a conflict also between the unquestionably Catholic ideal of asceticism, and the equally unquestionable Catholic ideal of world supremacy? Are the great Mystics not the great Saints of the Church? Or shall it be held, against all that appears, that this Church cannot produce and tolerate independent piety within its own lines? Now, no Evangelical Christian, certainly, would ever think of confounding his delight in the warm spiritual life which Catholic Christianity exhibits in the centuries before the ReformationHerrmann (Verkehr des Christen mit Gott 3 Aufl., p. 21) justly emphasises the following also: “We must confess to ourselves that if we Evangelicals think we have another kind of religion, we are in any case still far from having reached the thoroughness of culture which Catholicism possesses in that Mysticism . . .it is a wonderfully perfect expression of a particular kind of religion. The speculations of Catholic Mysticism are of ancient date. Apart from Neoplatonism, it has little peculiar to it in this respect. But in the capacity to make personal life the subject of observation and delineation, it represents a height of attainment which Protestantism has not yet reached.” with full approval of it, if — one must, unfortunately, add it — he had made clear to himself what evangelical faith is. The inability to fight one’s way to such faith produces the craving for Mysticism which is then, as one is of course a Protestant, claimed for Protestantism. The fondness, it is true, for “German” Mysticism has received a severe check from records that have shown that if one is enthusiastic about Master Eckhart, etc., and derives edification from him, one must be still more enthusiastic about St. Thomas, or about the Areopagite and Augustine. But still more powerful checks will be needed if a view of history is to be got quit of, which seems the proper one to all fragmentary natures that deal in a dilettante way with religion, theology and philosophy — a Mystic that does not become a Catholic is a dilettante. For one, what is of value in the Mystics is their “individualism,” as if everything were already implied under this form; for another, it is their feeling, no matter what the “feeling” is for; for a third, it is the pantheistic metaphysic, which, without much trouble, can be abstracted from Mysticism; for a fourth, it is their ascetic views and their resolution of Christology into the Ecce Homo, or into the endless series of men travailing in birth with the Christ; for a fifth, it is the light of “illuminism” (Aufklärung) which broke forth from Mysticism. What historian, with clear vision, will be able to pass by these fruits of Mysticism without sympathy, or with amused indifference? What Christian will not draw with heart-felt delight from the spring of fresh intuitions which flows forth here? Who, as an investigator of history, will not readily acknowledge that an Evangelical Reformation was as impossible about the year 1200 as it was prepared for about the year 1500? But if Protestantism is not at some time yet, so far as it means anything at all, to become entirely Mystical, it will never be possible to make Mysticism Protestant without flying in the face of history and Catholicism.The right conception of Mysticism as Catholic piety has been taught — in opposition to Ullmann’s “Reformers before the Reformation” — by Ritschl (Rechtfert. und Versöhn. vol. I., Geschichte des Pietismus, vols. I.-III. Theologie und Metaphysik) who has also given hints for further investigation (connection of the Mystics with the Anabaptists, Hussites, etc.). He has been followed by a large number of more recent investigators. Besides the works named above, p. 25, among which those of Denifle are epoch-making, as having shown that Master Eckhart is, in his Latin writings, entirely dependent on Thomas, and even in other respects owes his best to him (Archiv f. Litt.-und K.-Gesch. des Mittelalters II., pp. 417-640; preparatory work had already been done here by Bach in his monograph on Eckhart), see Lasson, Meister Eckhart, 1866, also the more recent works on Tauler and the Friends of God (Denifle), Pfeiffer’s edition of the German Mystics (2 vols., 1845-57), Suso’s Works, edited by Denifle (1877), still further, Ritschl in the Zeitschr. f. K.-Gesch. IV., p. 337 ff., Strauch, Marg. Ebner und Heinrich v. Nördlingen, 1882. On the earliest German Mystics see Preger, Vorarbeiten z. einer Gesch. der deutschen Mystik (Ztschr, f. die hist. Theol. 1869, and several essays in the Abhandl. der hist. Klasse d. bayer. Akad. d. Wissensch., which, along with his comprehensive history of Mysticism, are rich sources of material). On Ruysbroek cf. Engelhardt, Rich. v. St. Victor und R. 1838; on Thomas à Kempis “de imitatione Christi” the literature is voluminous, cf. Hirsche, Prolegomena z. einer neuen Ausg. 2 vols. 1873-83, the same author on the Brothers of the Common Life in the R.-E ². In general: Denifle, Das geistliche Leben. Blumenlese aus den deutschen Mystikern und Gottesfreunden. 3. Aufl. 1880, A very full delineation of Mysticism is also given in Thomasius-Seeberg, D.-Gesch. 2 Aufl. II. 1 pp. 261 ff., cf. also Seeberg, Ein Kampf um jenseitiges Leben. Lebensbild eines mittelalterlichen Frommen., 1889. I give no extracts from the writings of the German Mediæval Mystics, because I should like to avoid even seeming to countenance the error that they expressed anything one cannot read in Origen, Plotinus, the Areopagite, Augustine, Erigena, Bernard and Thomas, or that they represented religious progress, while in respect of intrinsic Christian worth, their tractates really stand for the most part lower than the writings of Augustine and Bernard. The importance of those works rests in this, that they were written in German, and that they were intended for the laity. They are therefore of inestimable value within the history of the German church and dogma. But in general history we may, and must, content ourselves with a characterisation. Whether, perhaps, they represent a considerable advance in the history of epistemology and metaphysic, is a question I do not trust myself to answer, nor does it fall to he considered here. As to the idea of regeneration, which is strongly emphasised in many Mystic writings, we must take in connection with it the silence on forgiveness of sins, that we may see how even this idea stood under the ban of intellectualism. The “clarification.” which the Mysticism of the fourteenth century underwent in the fifteenth certainly related very specially to that aggressive intellectualism, so that the piety which expresses itself, for example, in the famous book de imitatione Christi (Thomas à Kempis) may he described as essentially Bernardine without Neoplatonic admixture, but yet only as Bernardine. A new, powerful element of joy in God, who forgives sin, and bestows faith, is sought for in vain.

2. On the History of Ecclesiastical Law. — The Doctrine of the Church.

“In the fifty years that elapsed between the appearing of the Gratian book of laws (which contains, besides the Isodorian, numerous forgeries of the Gregorian Deusdedit, Anselm and Cardinal Gregorius) and the pontificate of Innocent III., the papal system achieved for itself complete supremacy. In the Roman Courts justice was dispensed according to Gratian’s law, in Bologna the teaching was regulated thereby, even the Emperor Frederick I. already had his son, Henry VI., instructed in the Decretum and in Roman law. The whole decretal legislation from 1159 to 1320 was framed on the basis of Gratian, and presupposes him. The same holds good of the dogmatic of Thomas in the relative material, while the scholastic dogmatic in general was made entirely dependent in questions of Church constitution on the favourite science of the clergy at the time, namely, jurisprudence, as it had been drawn up by Gratian, Raymund, and the other collectors of decretals. The theory, as well as the texts and proofs relating thereto, were derived by the theologians from these collections of laws.”See Janus, p. 162 f. With regard to the nature of the Church, while the Augustinian definition was firmly retained, that the Church is the community of believers or of the predestinated, the idea was always gaining a fuller acceptance that the hierarchy is the Church, and that the Pope, as successor of Peter, and episcopus universalis, unites in himself all the powers of the Church. The German Kings themselves were in great part to blame for this development, for while they, and, above all, the Hohenstaufens, led the struggle for the rights of the State against the papacy, they left the latter to its own irresponsible action in the ecclesiastical domain. Only when it was now too late did Frederick II. point out in his address to the Kings of the Franks and Angles (ad reges Francorum et Anglorum) that the hierarchy must be restored by an inner reform to its original poverty and humility.See the passage in Gieseler II., 2, 4 ed. p. 153. In its development to autocratic supremacy within the Church and the Churches, a check was put upon the papacy from the beginning of the fourteenth century only from France. The “pragmatic sanction” of Louis the Holy is a forgery of the year 1438 (or about this time), as Scheffer-Boichorst has shown in the Kleinere Forsch. z. Gesch. des Mittelalters (Mitth. des Instituts f. österreich. Geschichtsforschung VIII., Bd. 3 part; published separately, 1887). In the first edition of this work I had still treated this sanction as genuine, but my attention was immediately directed to the mistake.

We cannot be required to show here what particular conclusions were drawn by the Popes and their friends from the idea of the Church as a civil organism of law in the thirteenth century and in the first half of the fourteenth, and in what measure these conclusions were practically carried out. The leading thoughts were the following: (1) The hierarchical organisation is essential to the Church, and in all respects the Christianity of the laity is dependent on the mediation of the priests (“properly ordained”), who alone can perform ecclesiastical acts. When we pass from Cyprian to Gregory I., from the latter to Pseudoisidore and Gregory VII., we might conclude on superficial consideration that the principle just stated had long been determinative. But when we enter into detail, and take into account the ecclesiastical legislation from the time of Innocent III., we observe how much was still wanting to a strict application of it in theory and practice till the end of the twelfth century. Only from the time of the fourth Lateran Council was full effect given to it, expressly in opposition to the Catharist and Waldensian parties.See especially the first and third decrees of the Synod; Mansi XXII., p. 982 sq., Hefele V., p. 879 ff. It was not, however, carried out to its full logical issue, as is shown by the admission of the right of the laity to baptise in case of emergency, by the recognition of absolution by a layman in casu mortis, and by the treatment of the sacrament of marriage. (2) The sacramental and judicial powers of the priests are independent of their personal worthiness. This also was an old principle; but after having been long latent, it was now strongly emphasised, asserted in opposition to all “heretical” parties, and so turned to account that by it the hierarchy protected themselves against all demand for reform, and, above all, evaded the appeal to resume the apostolic life. Whoever returned from the “heretical” parties to the bosom of the Church was required to declare that he recognised the celebration of Sacraments by sinful priests.See e.g. the confession of Durandus, Innocent III., ep. XI. 196. (3) The Church is a visible community with a constitution given to it by Christ (even as such it is the body of Christ [corpus Christi]); as a visible, constituted community it has a double power, namely, the potestas spiritualis and the potestas temporalis (spiritual and temporal power). Through both is it, as it shall endure till the end of the world, superior to the transitory states, which are subordinate to it. To it, therefore, must all states and all individuals be obedient de necessitate salutis (as a necessary condition of salvation); nay, the power of the Church extends itself even to hereticsOn the Inquisition, see Janus, p. 254 ff., and Thomas, Summa Sec. Sec. quæst. 11 art. 3 conclusio: “Hæresis est peccatum, per quod meruerunt per mortem a mundo excludi”; art. 4 concl. and heathen.Augustinus Triumphus (ob. 1328), Summa de potest. eccl. ad Johannem XXII., Quæst. 23 art. 1: “Pagani jure sunt sub papæ obedientia.” Yet this continued a controverted question in spite of the Bull “Unam sanctam.” Even these principlesThe hierarchy together with the monks are held as properly the Church. have their root in the Augustinian doctrine of the Church;There were certainly also passages to be found in Augustine that could be employed against the Gregorian claims of the Church, v. Mirbt. Die Stellung Augustin’s in der Publicistik des Gregor. Kirchenstreits, 1888. but from the logical expression and thorough-going application which they received between 1050 and 1300, they present the appearance of an unheard-of innovation. They obtained their complete formulation from Boniface VIII.;See note 2 on p. 122. but long before him the Popes acted according to these principles. The worst consequence was not the undervaluing,Gregory VII. carried to the furthest extreme the opposition to the evangelical doctrine that the powers that be are ordained of God; see epp. VIII. 21: “Quis nesciat, reges et duces ab iis habuisse principium, qui deum ignorantes, superbia, rapinis, perfidia, homicidiis, postremo universis pæne sceleribus, mundi principe diabolo videlicet agitante, dominari cæca cupiditate et intolerabili præsumptione affectaverunt.” But even according to Innocent III., the State arose “per extorsionem humanam.” On the other hand, even the strictest papalists, indeed Gregory VII. himself, were not clear as to the limits between civil and ecclesiastical power. repression and serious deterioration of civic life (here, on the contrary, there can be discerned also many salutary effects in the interests of popular freedom), but the inevitable profanation of religion, inasmuch as all its aims and benefits were perverted and falsified through the light being foreign to them in which they presented themselves from the standpoint of Church law; and obedience to an external human institution, that was subject to all errors of human passion and sin, was raised to the first condition of Christian life. “It was this Church on which there fell that heaviest responsibility that has ever been incurred in history: by all violent means it applied as pure truth a doctrine that was vitiated and distorted to serve its omnipotence, and under the feeling of its inviolability abandoned itself to the gravest immorality; in order to maintain itself in such a position, it struck deadly blows at the spirit and conscience of the nations, and drove many of the more highly gifted, who had secretly withdrawn from it, into the arms of unbelief and embitterment.”Burckhardt, Kultur der Renaissance, 3. ed. 2. vol., p. 228.

(4) To the Church has been given, by Christ, a strictly monarchical constitution in His representative, the successor of Peter, the Roman Bishop. Not only is all that is valid with regard to the hierarchy valid in the first instance of the Pope, but to him all powers are committed, and the other members of the hierarchy are only chosen in partem solicitudinis (for purposes of oversight). He is the episcopus universalis (universal bishop); to him belong, therefore, both swords, and as every Christian can attain salvation only in the Church, as the Church, however, is the hierarchy, and the hierarchy the Pope, it follows that de necessitate salutis all the world must be subject to the Pope. In numerous letters these principles had already been maintained by Gregory VII. in a way that could not be out-vied (cf. also the so-called dictatus Gregorii). Yet in his case everything appears as the outflow of a powerful dominating personality, which, in a terrible conflict, grasps at the extremest measures. In the period that followed, however, his principles were not only expressed, but were effectively applied, and, at the same time, as the result of a marvellous series of forgeries, were believingly accepted even by those who felt obliged to combat the papacy. At the time when the papacy saw itself confronted with a weak imperial power in the West, and with a still weaker Latin Empire in the East, this view of things established itself (from the time of Innocent III. onward) in the souls and minds of men. So far as I know, Thomas was the first to state the position roundly in the formula: “(ostenditur etiam), quod subesse Romano pontifici sit de necessitate salutis” (it is also shown that to be subject to the Roman pontiff is essential to salvation).Opusc. c. err. Græc. fol. 9. The Roman law was in general paraded in an extravagant way before the weak Greeks in the thirteenth century, and that had a reflex influence on the West. Then the whole theory was summed up in a form not to be surpassed in the Bull “Unam sanctam” of Boniface (1302), after the Popes for a whole century had strictly followed it in hundreds of small and great questions (questions of Church policy, of civil policy, of diocesan administration, etc.), and were in a position for daring to disregard all protests.The most important sentences of the Bull ran thus: “Unam sanctam ecclesiam Catholicam et ipsam apostolicam urgente fide credere cogimur et tenere. Nosque hanc firmiter credimus et simpliciter confitemur, extra quam nec salus est nec remissio peccatorum (the Church is now spiritually described with its head, Christ). Igitur ecclesiæ unius et uniæ a unum corpus, unum caput, non duo capita, quasi monstrum, Christus videlicet et Christi vicarius Petrus Petrique successor (there follows John XXI., 16; here the oves universæ were entrusted to Peter). In hac ejusque potestate duos esse gladios, spiritualem videlicet et temporalem, evangelicis dictis instruimur. Nan dicentibus apostolis: ecce gladii duo hic (Luke XXII. 38) in ecclesia scilicet, cum apostoli loquerentur, non respondit dominus nimis esse, sed satis. Certe qui in potestate Petri temporalem gladium esse negat, male verbum attendit domini proferentis; converte gladium tuum in vaginam (Matt. XXVI. 52). Uterque ergo est in potestate ecclesiæ, spiritualis scilicet gladius et materialis. Sed is quidem pro ecclesia, ille vero ab ecclesia exercendus. Ille sacerdotis, ille manu regum et militum, sed ad nutum et patientiam sacerdotis. Oportet autem gladium esse sub gladio et temporalem potestatem spirituali subici potestati, nam cum dicat apostolus (there follows Rom. XIII. 1) . . .non ordinatæ essent, nisi gladius esset sub gladio (the spiritual power trancends in dignity and nobility all earthly power as much as the spiritual the earthly). Nam veritate testante spiritualis potestas terrenam potestatem instituere” (is it literally institute? or institute in the sense of religious consecration ? or instruct? In view of the immediately following “judicare,” and of the sentence of Hugo St. Victor, which is here the source, the first meaning is the most probable; Finke [Rom. Quartalschrift 4. Supplementheft, 1896, p. 40] is inclined to adopt the second) “habet et judicare, si bona non fuerit (there follows Jerem. I. 10). Ergo si deviat terrena potestas, judicabitur a potestate spirituali, sed si deviat spiritualis minor, a suo superiori, si vero suprema, a solo deo, non ab homine poterit judicari, testante apostolo (1 Cor. II. 25). Est autem hæc auctoritas, etsi data sit homini et exerceatur per hominem, non humana sed potius divina, ore divino Petro data sibique suisque successoribus in ipso quem confessus fuit petra firmata, dicente domino ipsi Petro (Matt. XVI. 19). Quicunque igitur huic potestati a deo sic ordinatæ resistit, dei ordinationi resistit, nisi duo sicut Manichæus fingat esse principia, quod falsum et hæreticum judicamus, quia testante Mose non in principiis sed in principio coelum deus creavit et terram. Porro subesse Romano pontifici omni humanæ creaturæ declaramus, dicimus, definimus [et pronuntiamus] omnino esse de necessitate salutis.” As can be understood, the Bull at the present day gives trouble to not a few Catholics, and the attempt is made to strip it to some extent of its dogmatic authoritative character, or to find help in interpretation. A collection of the more important papal pronouncements from the time between Gregory VII. and Alexander VI. is given by Mirbt, Quellen z. Gesch. des Papstthums, 1895, p. 47 f. The setting up of strict monarchical power and the destruction of the old Church constitution is represented in three stages by Pseudo Isidore, Gratian, and the Mendicant Orders; for the latter, through the special rights which they received, completely broke up the local powers (bishops, presbyteries, parish priests), and were subject entirely to papal direction.Janus, p. 166: “Ready everywhere to interpose and take action as agents of the papacy, entirely independent of the bishops, and of higher authority than the secular priests and the local clergy, they really formed churches within the Church, laboured for the honour and aggrandisement of their orders, and for the power of the Pope, on which their privileged position rested.” All the premises from which there necessarily followed the infallibility of the Pope had been brought together; they were strictly developed, too, by Thomas, after new forgeries had been added.There are specially to be considered here the Pseudocyrillian passages; see the valuable inquiry by Reusch, Die Fälschungen in dem. Tractat des Thomas v. Aquin gegen die Griechen, Abhandl. d. k. bay. Akad. der Wissensch. III., Cl. 18, Bd. 3 Abth., 1889. On Thomas as the normal theologian for the doctrine of infallibility, see Langen, Das Vatic. Dogma, 3 Thl., p. 99 ff.; Leitner, Der hl. Thomas über das unfehlbare Lehramt des Papstes, 1872, Delitzsch, Lehrsystem der römischen K., I., p. 194 ff. Thomas, Summa Sec. Sec. qu. 11 art. 2: “Sic ergo aliqui doctores videntur dissensisse vel circa ea quorum nihil interest ad fidem utrum sic vel aliter teneatur, vel etiam in quibusdam ad fidem pertinentibus, quæ nondum erant per ecclesiam determinata. Postquam autem essent auctoritate universalis ecclesiæ determinata, si quis tali ordinationi pertinaciter repugnaret, hæreticus censeretur. Quæ quidem auctoritas principaliter residet in summa pontifce.” Sec. Sec. qu. 1 art. 10 (“utrum ad summum pontificem pertineat fidei symbolum ordinare?”). Here, as usual, the thesis is first denied, then follows: “editio symboli facta est in synodo generali, sed hujusmodi synodus auctoritate solius summi pontificis potest congregari. Ergo editio symboli ad auctoritatem summi pontificis pertinet.” Further: “Nova editio symboli necessaria est ad vitandum insurgentes errores. Ad illius ergo auctoritatem pertinet editio symboli, ad cujus auctoritatem pertinet finaliter determinare ea quæ sunt fidei, ut ab omnibus inconcussa fide teneantur. Hoc autem pertinet ad auctoritatem summi pontificis, ad quem majores et difficiliores ecclesiæ quæstiones referuntur (there follows a passage from the decretals). Unde et dominus (Luke XXII. 32) Petro dixit, quem summum pontificem constituit: ego pro te rogavi, etc. Et hujus ratio est: quia una fides debet esse totius ecclesiæ secundum illud I Cor. I. 10: Id ipsum dicatis omnes, et non sint in vobis schismata. Quod servari non posset nisi quæstio exorta determinetur per eum, qui toti ecclesiæ præest, ut sic ejus sententia a tota ecclesia firmiter teneatur, et ideo ad solam auctoritatem summi pontificis pertinet nova editio symboli, sicut et omnia alia quæ pertinent ad totam ecclesiam, ut congregare synodum generalem et alia hujusmodi.” The tenet, that to every Pope there belongs personal holiness (Gregory VII.), was no longer reasserted, because, as Döllinger (Janus, p. 168) supposes, the danger existed of arguing from the defective holiness of a Pope to the illegality of his decisions. Nevertheless, though the doctrine had long been recognised, that through a special divine protection the Roman Church could not entirely fall from faith, and was the divinely appointed refuge for doctrinal purity and doctrinal unity, beyond the groups that stood under the influence of the Dominican Order, the doctrine of infallibility did not command acceptance. The history of the Popes was still too well known; even in the canonical law-book there were contradictory elements, andSee the canon in Gratian ascribed to Boniface “Si Papa,” dist. 40, 6. On the whole question see Mirbt, Publicistik im Zeitalter Gregors VII., p. 566 ff. Popes as great as Innocent III. admitted the possibility of a Pope falling into sin in matters of faith, and, in that case, acknowledged the competency of the judgment of the entire Church. See the admission in Eymerici Director. Inquis., p. 295 (cited in Janus, p. 295). It was thus possible that at the University of Paris a decided opposition should establish itself, which led, e.g., to the Pope being charged with heresy in connection with a doctrine of John XXII. The indefiniteness in which many Church doctrines (and theories of practice, e.g., in regard to ordination) still stood, and the hesitating attitude which the Popes assumed towards them, also prevented the dogmatic authority of the papacy from being taken as absolute.See the question of reordination in connection with “Simonists.” Although the falsification of history, by the publication of historic accounts that painted over in an incredible way the great conflict between the papacy and the Empire, reached its climax about 1300,Martin of Troppau and Tolomeo of Lucca. and the principles of the Thomist policyThomas, de regimine principum, continued by Tolomeo. always received a fuller adoption, the decisive question of the infallibility remained unsolved. From about the year 1340, indeed, the literature in which the papal system was delineated in the most extravagant way,The most extreme works are those of Augustinus Triumphus, Summa de ecclesiast. potest. (ob. 1328) and of the Franciscan Alvarus Pelagius, De planctu ecclesiæ (ob. 1352). From the Summa de potestate eccl. of the former, and from the work de planctu ecclesia of the latter, Gieseler II., 3, 2 Aufl., p. 42 ff. and 101 ff., gives full extracts, which show that the glorification of the Pope could not be carried further in the nineteenth century. Augustinus asserted generally: “Nulla lex populo christiano est danda, nisi ipsius papæ auctoritate;” for only the papal power is immediately from God, and it embraces the jurisdictio et cura totius mundi. Alvarus carried the identifying of Christ with the Pope to the point of blasphemy, and at the same time declared the Pope to be the rightful possessor of the imperium Romanum from the days of Peter. At bottom, both distinguish the Pope from God only by saying that to the earthly “dominus deus noster papa” (see Finke, l.c., p. 44 ff.; observe that I have placed the word “earthly” before the expression, which indicates the trope here employed, so far as there is one), adoration is due only “ministerialiter.” (Finke, l.c., pp. 40-44, has objected to this last sentence, and believes he has refuted it from the source, Augustinus Triumphus. That, according to Augustinus, there belongs to the Pope the servitus summa [i.e., the Latreia, full divine worship] I have not asserted. But certainly Augustinus teaches that the Pope possesses participative and exercises ministerialiter the summa potestas [the dominatio, the divine power of rule]; in accordance with this therefore must the dulia also he defined which belongs to the Pope. Instead of the somewhat short expression “ministerialiter,” which it would be better not to use, I should have said: “The adoration” belongs in the way in which it is due to him who shares in the divine power of rule, and exercises it as an instrument of God.) ceased entirely to be produced. Only after 120 years did it reappear, when it was a question of rescuing and asserting the old claims of the papacy against the Council of Bâsle. It was then that Cardinal Torquemada wrote that defence of the papal system,De Pontifice Maximo et generalis concilii auctoritate; see also his Summa de ecclesia and the Apparatus super decreto unionis Græcorum. which, resting on a strict Thomistic foundation, was still regarded at the period of the Reformation as the most important achievement of the papal party. But from the middle of the fifteenth century the papal system, as a whole, was again gathering power, after the storm of the Councils had been happily exorcised by the brilliant but crafty policy of Eugene IV. Only the French nation maintained what ground of freedom was already won in opposition to the Pope (Bourges 1438). The other nations returned, through the Concordats, to their old dependence on the Autocrat in Rome;Rome, however, always understood these concordata as acts of grace, by which only the party admitted to partnership was bound. Even at an earlier time this view was maintained by Roman canonists, and was deduced from the supreme lordship of the Pope over all men. indeed, they were, to some extent, betrayed just by their own local rulers, inasmuch as these men saw it to be of advantage in hastening their attainment to full princely power to take shares with the Pope in the Church of the country.Think of the development of the territorial-prince system in the fifteenth century. Great rulers (Emperor Frederick III.) and small literally vied with each other, till far on in the sixteenth century, in injuring the independence of their national churches. The local princes derived a passing, but the Pope the permanent, advantage. This fate overtook, in the end, even the French national Church (through the concordat of Dec. 1516), and yet in such a way that the king obtained the chief share of the power over it. While, as the fifteenth century passed into the sixteenth, the Popes were indulging wildly in war, luxury, and the grossest simony, Cajetan and Jacobazzi wrought out the strictest papal theory, the former including in it the doctrine of infallibility.In the period of conflict between the Popes and the Councils the question about the infallibility of the Pope in matters of faith had retired into the background. At the Union Council at Florence it was not mentioned. Even Torquemada admitted the possibility of a Pope falling into a heresy; from this, however, he did not conclude that the council was superior to him, for a heretical Pope was ipso facto deposed by God. This impracticable, imbecile assumption was first rejected by Cajetan, who reverted to the doctrine of Thomas, which was based on fictitious passages from the Fathers, while he added himself a new falsification by suppressing the proposition laid down at Constance: “error est, si per Romanam ecclesiam intelligat universalem aut concilium generale.” With him also originated the famous proposition, that the Catholic Church is the born hand-maid of the Pope. The hopes of the nations in the Council were quenched, the old tyranny was again set up; it was complained, indeed, that the ecclesiastical despotism was worse than that of the Turks, but, nevertheless, men submitted to the inevitable. About the year 1500 the complaints were perhaps more bitter than at any other time; but the falling away was slight, the taking of steps less frequent. Heresy seemed to have become rarer and tamer than in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, especially after the Hussite movement had exhausted itself. The “heretics” — so it appeared — had really become the “silent in the land,” who shunned an open breach with the Church; their piety appeared less aggressive. “It was pretty generally felt that it had happened to the Church with the Reformation, as formerly it had happened to the King of Rome with the Sibylline books; after the seed of corruption sown by the Curia had, for fifty years, borne a much larger harvest, and the Church itself made no more effort to save it, the Reformation had to be purchased at a much heavier price and with still smaller prospect of success.” Janus, p. 365. The Lateran Council at the beginning of the sixteenth century, which treated with scorn all wishes of the nations and promulgated the papal theory in the strictest sense,The Pope, it is said in the Bull “Pastor acternus,” has the “auctoritas super omnia concilia”; he alone may convene, transfer, and dissolve them. as if there had never been councils at Constance and Basle, was tacitly recognised. But it was the lull before the storm — a storm which the Pope had yet to experience, who had entered upon his office with the words: “Volo, ut pontificatu isto quam maxime perfruamur.” (It is my wish that we may enjoy the pontificate in the largest measure possible.)On the handing down of this saying, see Janus, p. 381, n. 407.

Before the time of Thomas theology took no part in this imposing development of the papal theory; even after him the share taken by it was small. The development was directed by jurisprudence, which founded simply on external, mostly forged, historic testimonies, and drew its conclusions with dialectic art. The meagre share of theology is to be explained on two grounds. First, Rome alone had a real interest in the whole theory; but in Rome theology never flourished, either in antiquity or in the Middle Ages. There was practical concern in Rome neither with Scripture exposition nor with the dogmatic works of the Fathers. Whoever wished to study theology went to France. For the Curia, only the student of law was of any account; from the time of Innocent IV. a school of law existed in Rome; the great majority of the Cardinals were well-equipped jurists, not theologians, and the greatest Popes of the Middle Ages, Alexander III., Innocents III. and IV., Boniface VIII., etc., came to the papal chair as highly-esteemed legal scholars.See Döllinger, Ueber das Studium der deutschen Geschichte (Akad. Vorträge II., pp. 407 ff., 418 f. When it was now much too late, men with clear vision, like Roger Bacon, or pious patriots, like Dante, saw that the ruin of the Church was due to the decretals, which were studied in place of the Church Fathers and Scripture. The former, in particular, demanded very loudly that the Church should be delivered from the secularised Church law which was poisoning it. In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries there were complaints constantly made about the papacy, and about the corrupted Church law (“Jurists bad Christians”) as being the real source of all evil. It was the spirit of ancient Rome that had settled down on the Mediæval spirit, that Roman spirit of jurisprudence, which had now, however, degenerated into a spirit of tyranny, and used as its means audacious forgeries. But the slight share of theology in the development of the hierarchical conception of the Church is to be explained not merely from the lack of theology, but, second, from the fortunate incapacity of theology (till past the middle of the thirteenth century) to lower itself to this notion of the Church. Anyone who reflected as a theologian on the Church, instituted researches into the works of the Church fathers, especially Augustine. But here the spiritual conception of the Church (i.e., the Church as corpus Christi [body of Christ], as multitudo fidelium [multitude of the faithful], as universitas Christianorum [entire mass of Christians]) came so clearly to view that for the time it riveted reflection, and there was failure to force one’s way with any confidence to the hierarchical, not to speak of the papal, conception, or it was only touched on. This explains how all the great theologians before Thomas, from Anselm onwards, even those of Gregorian tendency, achieved as theologians very little in promoting the development of the hierarchical conception of the Church. They taught and wrote like Augustine, indeed they still remained behind him in precise definition of the Church as an external society.See Hugo of St. Victor, de Sacr. II., p. II., c. 2 sq. In his Sentences the Lombard made no mention whatever of the papacy! So far as others dealt with the Church at all, even the firmness of Cyprian in apprehending the hierarchical notion of the Church was not reached. Numerous proofs in Langen, Das Vaticanische Dogma, 2. Theil. If Hugo differs from the other earlier theologians in entering more fully into a description of the Church, this has a connection with his interest in the Sacraments. What he says about the hierarchy and the Pope falls behind the Gregorian ideas, and therefore does nothing to advance them. Even about the relation of the Church (the Pope) to the State he has still evangelical ideas. And yet here, as elsewhere also, he must be held as in many respects the precursor of Thomas. Theology did nothing for the development and establishment of the papal system till far on in the thirteenth century, and it may here be said at once in its honour, that with a single, and that even not a perfect, exception (Thomas), it did only half work in the time that followed, leaving the most to be done by the Post-Tridentine theology.It is amazing that in Thomasius-Seeberg (p. 196) the sentence: “As in general, so also with regard to the Church, Scholasticism set itself the task of proving that what exists ought to exist,” is followed at once by the other: “It must be emphasised here first of all, that Scholasticism does not know of a dogma of the Church.” So far as I know, there is nothing to be found in the theological writings of the Schoolmen in the shape of rounded off formulæ for, nothing of strictly systematic exposition of, the conception of the Church (as in the case of the doctrine of the Sacraments). On the other hand, both in Hugo St. Victor, and in the later Schoolmen also, not a few fundamental lines of proof with regard to the notion of the Church can be pointed to which were directly and without change taken over by the “heretical” parties, and by men like Wyclif.The agreement of the “heretics” with the fundamental Catholic notion of the Church was not unfrequently substantiated by their Catholic opponents. These men were still naïve enough to hold the conception of the Church as societas unitatis fidei as their own basis; see correct statement by Gottschick (Zeitschr. f. K.-Gesch. VIII., p. 348 f. ). What most simply explains this is that the patristic, and especially the Augustinian, expositions still determined theology. Yet it is not to be denied, that from the middle of the thirteenth century theology took a certain share in developing the conception of the Church. It was just the Mendicant Monks — to the shame of St. Francis — who, even as theologians, began to be enthusiastic for the papal theory, after there had been conferred upon them such excessive privileges as could only be held legal if the Pope was really the Lord of the Church. There was added to this, that in the thirteenth century, in the course of the negotiations with the Greeks, theology saw that it had to face the task of ingratiating them into the papal system also. It was in connection with this task that there was awakened the interest theology took in the hierarchical conception of the Church which formed the presupposition of the papal system,The Council of Lyons in 1274 was of epoch-making importance here. The vigorous re-awakening of interest in the theoretic statement and proof of the papal system in the middle of the fifteenth century likewise finds an explanation in the transactions with the Greeks. In this way the relation of the Greeks to the West came to be of sinister omen. There was a wish to win them for the papacy, and this became the occasion for developing “scientifically” for the first time — mostly by means of forgeries — the papal theory! and the great thinker, Thomas Aquinas, now developed at once the hierarchical and papal theory, together with a bold theory of the state.Thomas develops the chief attributes of the Pope (summus pontifex, caput ecclesiæ, cura ecclesiæ universalis, plenitudo potestatis, potestas determinandi novum symbolum). The discussions on the distribution of hierarchical power may here be left aside (on the development of the notion of the Church as a monarchy Aristotle’s influence was at work). We have only to note how entirely the second conception of the Church, i.e., the hierarchical, is dominated by the doctrine of the Sacraments. The particulars of the Thomist conception of the Church were not dogma in his day, but they afterwards became the norm for dogmatic construction. That Thomas, moreover, does not place the hierarchical notion of the Church side by side with the spiritual without indicating a relation has been shown by Gottschick, l.c. pp. 347-357. Yet it must not be forgotten that such tenets as those of Augustine regarding the Church (taken in connection with predestinarian grace) continued to exercise their own influence even when they were subordinated to alien thoughts. Thomas (Explanation of the Apostolic Symbol; see also “Summa” III., qu. 8) begins by representing the Church as a religious community (congregatio fidelium, corpus mysticum) whose head is Christ. But while so describing it — as the community of those who are united to Christ by the love that proceeds from God — he at the same time accentuates the moral character of the community, as an entire whole ruled by the divine law, which embraces the earth, heaven, and purgatory, and which has its end in the vision and enjoyment of God. In more precisely defining the compass of the Church, Thomas’s process of proof is affected by all the uncertainties which we already observed in Augustine, and which were due to regard on the one hand to predestinarian grace (in accordance with which all particulars are determined), and on the other hand to the empirical circumstances. Even the reprobi, according to him, are in the Church de potentia, that is to say, so long as they stand under the influence of the virtus Christi or still through their free will hold a connection with him. Now, so far as the Church imparts to the individual the love of God, and thereby sanctification, it is an external community like the state, is discernible by external marks, is defined by an external limit (excommunication) and requires the hierarchical organisation; for this last is the presupposition of sacramental celebration. If, until felicity is reached, the life of the individual as a believer proceeds by stages of faith (i.e., of holding true upon authority) and is regulated by the several sacraments which contain the saving grace, this implies that it is of the essence of the Church that it is the authority on doctrine and the administrator of the Sacraments. But this it can only be as a community with a strictly legal and hierarchical organisation. In this way the second conception of the Church is brought by Thomas into closest connection with the first, and Gottschick (p. 353) is quite correct in further pointing out that “faith in the objective sense is part of the commands of the law by which (see above) the Church must be guided.” The Church as a legal authority on doctrine, and as a priestly sacramental institution, is therefore the “exclusive organ by which the Ilead of the Church, Christ, forms its members.” One sees then that a very spiritual conception of the Church, nay, even the predestinarian, can be brought into combination with the empirico-hierarchical (Summa III., qu. 64, art. 2: “per sacramenta dicitur esse fabricata ecclesia Christi.”) As salvation is a mystery that cannot be experienced, i.e., as a certainty regarding its possession can never be reached, inasmuch as it consists of forces that mysteriously operate in the human sphere that is inaccessible to reflection, nothing remains but simply to surrender one’s self to the sacramental saving institution, which, again, involves the graded priesthood. In this way the authority of the clergy necessarily became absolute, and the spiritual (predestinarian) notion of the Church, so far from correcting, necessarily aided this advance of view. Hence follows the tenet of the infallibility of the Church, which was bound to issue in the infallibility of the Pope; for some kind of rock to build on must be sought for and found. If this does not lie in an overmastering certainty which the subject-matter itself brings with it, inasmuch as it transforms the absoluteness of the moral imperative into the absolute certainty of the grace of God in Christ, it must be given in something external. This external thing, certainly, the infallibility of the priesthood in teaching and administering the Sacraments, can never guarantee to the individual the possession of salvation, but only its possibility. But he was far from surrendering, at the same time, the spiritual conception of the Church, or — as was done in the Post-Tridentine period — from correcting it throughout by means of the hierarchical. With all his logical consistency in the development of the papal system, he certainly did not derive the powers of the bishops and priests entirely from the papal; in his “Summa” he still works to a great extent with the notion of the “Ecclesia” as having the force of a central conception, and in doing so has no thought of monarchy. For him it is no figure of speech that the individual bishop “is called specially the bridegroom of the Church as also Christ” (specialiter sponsus ecclesiæ dicitur sicut et Christus).Summa, III. suppl. qu. 40 art. 4 fin. But, so far as the influence of Thomas extended, the result was unquestionably a mingling of jurisprudence and theology in this department and the acclimatising of the hierarchico-papal notion of the Church. The attitude to the State was involved in the position that only the priest is able rightly to teach the law of God, but that even the States have no other task than to care for the salvation of the souls of their subjects by promoting the virtus that corresponds to the law of God. Yet his influence must not be over-rated. The Franciscan (Nominalist) dogmatic took little to do, so far as I know, with this development of the conception of the Church. Even at the beginning of the Reformation, the whole hierarchical and papal theory had no sure position in dogmatic — it was Romish decretal law. But it had attained more than a place in dogmatic. From about 1450 it was again energetically acted upon from rome, and the opposition to it appeared no longer so powerful as a century before.No good Catholic Christian doubted that in spiritual things the clergy were the divinely-appointed superiors of the laity, that this power proceeded from the right of the priests to celebrate the Sacraments, that the Pope was the real possessor of this power, and was far superior to all secular authority. The question, however, as to the Pope’s power to rule was certainly a subject of controversy.

This opposition we have still to review. Here it is to be observed, above everything else, that the imperfect public development of the conception of the Church was a matter of little importance, because in the doctrine of the Sacraments all was already acquired as a sure possession which could be expected from a formulation of the conception of the Church in hierarchical interests. From this, again, it followed still further, that the opposition to the hierarchical papal notion of the Church necessarily continued — in spite of all fostering — without danger, so long as the doctrine of the Sacraments was not objected to. But the latter again rested on the peculiar view of salvation, as the sanctification that leads to the visio dei, as active holiness (measured by the standard of the law of God). Here we must go back to an earlier point.A full understanding of the Catholic conception of the Church can only be reached by starting from the conception of the Sacraments, which, as has been observed, is dependent on the view taken of salvation. But from this point of view it can also be said that the Catholic notion of the Church forms the necessary supplement to the imperfect idea of faith. That which is lacking to faith, taken in the Catholic sense, namely, the certitudo salutis, is supplied by the doctrinal authority of the Church on the one side and by the Sacramental Church institution on the other, and yet in such a way that it is obtained only approximately..

Augustine combined the old Catholic notion of salvation, as the visio et fruitio dei (vision and enjoyment of God), with the doctrine of predestination on the one hand and with the doctrine of the regnum Christi (kingdom of Christ) and the process of justification on the other. As contrasted with the Greek view, both combinations were new; but the union of the idea of salvation with the process of justification and sanctification was easily effected, because this process was taken as regulated entirely by the Sacraments, while the Sacraments, as the Greek development shows, formed the necessary correlate to the idea of salvation. If in salvation, that is to say, the supramundane condition in which one is to find himself is mainly emphasised, then there answer to the production of this condition, means that operate as holy natural forces. When Augustine conceived of these natural forces as forces of love working for righteousness, a very great step of progress was taken; but no difference was made thereby in the general scheme, since love was regarded as infused. But certainly he made it possible that there should also be given to the whole process a very decided tendency towards morality — which had dropped out of the Greek view as held within the lines of dogma. The forces of love, that is to say, bring it about that here on earth the law of Christ, which is summed up in the commandment to love, can be fulfilled. In this way there arises from the forces of love, which are transmitted through the Sacraments as channels, the kingdom of Christ, in which righteousness reigns according to the example and law of Christ. The Sacraments have therefore the double effect, that of preparing for, and conducting gradually to the visio et fruitio dei, and that of producing on earth the Church in which the law of Christ reigns and by which the “bene vivere” (right-living) is produced. By the latter of these two views the position of the State is determined — as the bene vivere is its end, it must submit itself to the sacramental institution. But by the whole idea the priesthood as the teaching and sanctifying corporation is legitimised; for the administration of the Sacraments is tied to a particular order, whom Christ has appointed, and this order, at the same time, is alone empowered to interpret the law of Christ with binding authority. To them, therefore, there must be subjection.

This whole view, which, certainly, had not received a clear and precise expression from Augustine, obtained clearness and precision in the period that followed — less through the labours of the theologians than by the force of the resolute Roman policy. Because this policy aimed, above all, at monarchy in the Church, it had, as the result of its victorious exercise, brought out clearly for the first time, and at the same time created, the general hierarchical conditions requisite for the existence of such a monarchy. Yet, in spite of many forgeries, it could not bring it about that the factor of hierarchical gradation, comparatively insignificant from a dogmatic point of view, but extremely important from the point of view of practice, should obtain the support of an imposing tradition; for from Augustine and the Fathers in general it was as good as absent. But still further, Augustine, as we have noted above, combined with the dogma of salvation as the visio dei the doctrine of predestination, and developed from the latter a doctrine of the Church that held a neutral relation to hierarchy and sacrament. No doubt it can easily be shown that the predestinarian and the sacramental hierarchical notions of the Church are not necessarily mutually exclusive, nay, that in a certain sense they require each other, inasmuch as the individual’s uncertainty of his own election, affirmed by Augustine, necessarily forces him to make a diligent use of all the means furnished by the Church, and the explanation very naturally occurs that God effectuates the fulfilment of the predestinating decree only through the empirical Church with its Sacraments. But Augustine himself did not assert that; and although in the time that came after, this mode of adjusting things came to be very much in favour, yet, as there was no allowing the doctrine of predestination to drop out, there was involved in this doctrine an element that threatened, like an overhanging mass of rock, to destroy the existence of the structure beneath. Finally, Augustine had no doubt carried on a victorious conflict with Donatism; but there was still one point at which it was not easy to deny entirely the correctness of the Donatist thesis, and that was the sacrament of penance. It could certainly be made credible that baptism, the Lord’s supper, confirmation, ordination were valid, even when an unworthy priest dispensed them; but how was such a man to be able to sit in judgment upon the holy and the unholy, to apply the law of Christ, to bind and loose, if the load rested on himself of ignorance of sin? It was surely more than paradoxical, it was an inconceivable thought, that the blind should be able to judge aright as to light and darkness. Was excommunication by such a man to be held valid before God? Was his absolution to have force? There was no doubt an escape sought for here, also, by saying that it is Christ who binds and looses, not the priest, who is only a minister; but when flagrant unrighteousness was practised by the priest, when such cases increased in number, what was then to be done?Let it be distinctly noted here that it was just the strict papal system that had widely given rise in the period of the great conflicts (eleventh and twelfth centuries) to the greatest uncertainty about ordinations, seeing that the Popes cancelled without hesitation “simonistic” orders, and likewise orders of the imperial bishops, nay, even ordinations at which a single simonist had been present. Innocent II., indeed, at the second Lateran Council, pronounced invalid all ordinations of the schismatics, i.e., of the bishops who adhered to Pope Anaclete II. (“From him whom he hath ordained we take away the orders” [evacuamus et irritas esse consemus]; the curialist theologians are disposed to see in this only a suspension of the exercise of office; Hefele, Concil. Gesch. V.², p. 438 f., leaves the passage unexplained; Friedrich [in his edition of Janus, 2 Aufl., pp. 143, 456] holds to the cancelling of the orders.) Thus it was the Popes who were the instructors of those sects that spread the greatest uncertainty as to the most important Catholic question, the question regarding the validity of orders. At the time of the Schism it was laid down by the papal Secretary, Coluccio Salutato, that as all Church power emanates from the Pope, and as a wrongly elected Pope has himself no power, such an one can give none; consequently the bishops and priests ordained since the death of Gregory XI. were incompetent to dispense the Sacraments. If, accordingly, says Coluccio, a believer adores the Eucharist that has been consecrated by a bishop ordained in the Schism, he worships an idol (in a letter to Jost of Moravia in Martene, Thes. Anecd. II., p. 1159, quoted by Janus, p. 318).

The great advancement of mediæval science from the beginning of the thirteenth century was occasioned (1) by the immense triumph of the Church and the papacy under Innocent III. and his successors; (2) by the intensification of piety in consequence of the Mendicant Orders movement;On the entrance of the Minorite Order into the scientific movement, see Werner, Duns Scotus, p. 4 ff. (3) by the enrichment and extension of general culture, which was partly a consequence of inner developments, and partly arose from contact with the East, in Palestine, Constantinople, and Spain.Cf. Books 6-8 of the History of the Aufklärung by Reuter, especially the sections on the Averrhoistic Aufklärung, as well as on the importance of the Arabic and Jewish middle-men, also on the influence of the Natural Sciences and on the University of Paris in the thirteenth century. The Arabs Avicenna (ob. 1037) and Averrhoes (ob. 1198), the former supranaturalistic, the latter pantheistic, in his tendency, were the most important commentators on Aristotle, whose works became known to the West by means of Spanish Jews. But by Averrhoes, who exercised a powerful attraction, Aristotle was in the first instance discredited, so that several Church interdicts were issued against him. But it was soon observed that Aristotle, so far from favouring pantheism, really refuted it. Scotus Erigena and Averrhoes — his system meant for the Church of the thirteenth century what Gnosticism in the second century, Manichæanism in the fourth, Socinianism in the seventeenth, meant for Church Christianity, see Renan, Averroes et l’Averroisme — were now regarded as the real enemies of Church dogma. Naturalistic pantheism in general now became the chief object of persecution; to oppose it, the supranaturalistic elements were derived from Aristotelianism, and this Aristotelianism had the widest scope given to it (see Schwane, Dogmengesch. des Mittelalters, p. 33 ff.). Among the Jewish scholars it was chiefly Maimonides who influenced the Schoolmen of the thirteenth century. Thomas owed very much to him, and in part transcribed him (see Merx, Prophetie des Joel, 1879). In this way the juristic-casuistic element in Scholasticism was still further strengthened, and pharisaic-talmudic theologoumena crept into mediæval theology, which are partly traceable to the Persian age of Judaism. But besides this, Neoplatonic and Aristotelian material found its way to the schoolmen from the translations of the Jews, who had rendered the Arabic versions of the Greek philosophical writings into Latin; see Bardenhewer, Die Schrift de causis, 1882. Here the acquaintance, now obtained for the first time, with the true Aristotle, the teacher of logic, physics, ethics, and politics, became of supreme importance. His philosophy, understood as dogmatism,In the sense in which Kant exposed and refuted dogmatism. It was only Roger Bacon who stoutly fought his way out of these fetters in the thirteenth century; see Reuter, II., p. 67 ff. was hailed as a gospel, or at least as the necessary introduction to one (“præcursor Christi in naturalibus”) and through him the science of the thirteenth century received an almost incalculable amount of material, and, above all, impulses to master the material.

The two new forces of commanding importance in the period, the Mendicant OrdersAmong all the Orders the Dominican was the first to adopt into its rules directions as to study (see Denifle, Archiv. fur Litt.-u. Kirchengesch. des Mittelalters I., p. 165 ff. and Aristotle, had first to achieve a position for themselves. At the beginning they met with hostility from the old Orders, and from the teachers and universities that were in alliance with them. An attitude of self-defence was assumed towards both. The new Aristotelianism, indeed, came under ecclesiastical proscription, and there was a wish to exclude theologians of the Mendicant Orders from university chairs. There were always some, too, who still were influenced by the attacks in general on the scientific-dialectic theology, which had been made by such men as John of Salisbury and Walter of St. Victor.Cf. e.g., for the period about 1250 the Chronicle of Salimbene and Michael l.c., p. 39 f. That in the Dominican Order itself a tendency had at first to be checked, which, after the style of the older Orders, emphasised asceticism so strongly that no room was left for study, which indeed described science (including theology) as dangerous and pernicious, has been convincingly proved by Wehofer O. P. from the book of the Dominican Gérard de Frachet, “Vitas Patrum” (published not long after 1256, issued in the Monum. Ord. Frat. Prædic. Historica. Löwen, 1896), and from the attitude of Humbert of Romans (General of the Order from 1254 to 1263; Gorres-Jahrbuch f. Philos. Bd. IX., 1896, p. 17 ff.) That “propter philosophiam” one goes to hell or at least — after a great example — receives here already on earth a sound cudgelling from angels, was never forgotten in the Catholic Church. The founder of the Trappist Order simply attempted to bring into force again an old monastic tradition: “study, i.e., philosophy is sin.” But the new movement asserted itself with an irresistible energy, and the opposition was silenced.

Yet this was only possible because the new factors really furnished nothing new, but completed the triumph of the Church over everything spiritual. The new Aristotle, as he was understood, taught the theory of knowledge, metaphysics and politics, which admitted of a surer vindication of dogma against such opposition as had formerly appeared, e.g., in William of Champeaux and Roscellin, and offered a defence against the dangers both of an eccentric realism and of an empirical mode of thought. If it is permissible, nay necessary, to conceive of the universals on the one hand, as the archetypes that express the cosmos of ideas in the thought of God, then they exist ante rem (before the thing); if on the other hand they must be regarded as simply realised in things (categories and forms) then they are in re (in the thing); if, finally, it is undeniable that it is only by the observation of things that they are obtained, that accordingly the intellect derives them from experience, then they are post rem (after the thing). In this way it was possible to apply to every dogma the epistemological mode of view which seemed best fitted to defend it. The “qualified” realism, which could assume the most different forms, and which had been already represented by Abelard, certainly more in a spirit of sceptical reserve than with a view to speculative construction, became dominant in the thirteenth century. But what was of most importance was that the great theologians who developed it showed even greater energy than their predecessors in subordinating the whole structure of thought to the principle that all things are to be understood by tracing them back to God.

But the tracing back to God was equivalent to subjecting all knowledge to the authority of the Church. The same science which displayed an astonishing energy of thought, and through such scholars as Thomas made a really important advance upon antiquity in the ethical and political sciences, appeared in many respects still more fettered than the science of the eleventh and twelfth centuries; for in its view, not only the old dogma (“articuli fidei”), but the entire department of ecclesiastical practice, the principles of which were traced back to the articuli fidei, was absolutely authoritative, and it proceeded much more frankly than before on the principle that in particular questions every instance of authority had as much weight as a deliberate reflection of the understanding.

It was only in the thirteenth century — and by the theologians of the Mendicant Orders — that the whole existing structure of ecclesiasticism was theologically vindicated, and its newest and most questionable parts, as well as the oldest and most important, declared inviolate by “science”; it was only in the thirteenth century that there was introduced that complete interblending of faith on authority and of science which means that at one and the same level there is a working at one time with the “credo,” at another time with the “intelligo”; such interblending is not yet found in Anselm, for example. Certainly it was still theoretically held that theology, resting on revelation, is a (speculative) science.See the first question in Part I. of the Summa of Thomas; Art. I.: “Utrum sit necessarium præter philosophicas disciplinas aliam doctrinam haberi.” Art. II: “Utrum sacra doctrina sit scientia.” Answer: “Sacram doctrinam esse scientiam. Sed sciendum est quod duplex est scientiarum genus. Quædam enim sunt, quæ procedunt ex principiis notis lumine naturali intellectus sicut Arithmetica; quædam vero sunt quæ procedunt ex principiis notis lumine superioris scientiæ, sicut Perspectiva procedit ex principiis notificatis per Geometriam. . . . Et hoc modo sacra doctrina est scientia, quia procedit ex principiis notis lumine superioris scientiæ, quæ scil. est scientia dei et beatorum. Unde sicut Musicus credit principia revelata sibi ab Arithmetico, ita doctrina sacra credit principia revelata sibi a deo.” Art. III.: “Utrum sacra doctrina sit una scientia?” Conclusio: “Cum omnia considerata in sacra doctrina sub una formali ratione divinæ revelationis considerentur, eam unam scientiam esse sentiendum est.” Artic. IV.: “Utrum s. doctrina sit scientia practica?” Conclusio: “Tametsi s. theologia altioris ordinis sit practica et speculativa, eminenter utramque continens, speculativa tamen magis est quam practica,” etc.^. But it was not held as required, nor even as possible, to rear on the basis of faith a purely rational structure: there was rather an alternating between authority and reason; they were regarded as parallel methods which one employed. The object in view indeed continued to be the knowledge that culminates in the visio dei; but there was no longer the wish always to eliminate more fully as knowledge advanced the element of faith (authority) in order to retain at the last pure knowledge; at all stages, rather, the element of authority was held as justifiable and necessary. Nay, there was now the conviction that there are two provinces, that of natural theology, and that of specific (revealed). The two, certainly, are thought of as being in closest harmony; but yet the conviction has been obtained that there are things known, and these, too, the most important, which belong simply to revealed theology, and which can be interrelated certainly, but not identified with natural theology. Natural theology, moreover, must subordinate itself to revealed, for theology has its foundation in revelation. In point of fact, however, the dogmatic theologian alternated between reason and revelation, and his structure derived its style from the former; for in particular questions the content of revelation is not derived solely from the thought of redemption — however truly this, as the visio dei, may be the contemplated end — but is set forth also in a thousand isolated portions, which are nothing else than heterogeneous fragments of a real or supposed knowledge of the world. It was the effect of holding that very conception of the goal of redemption as visio dei that the view of the content of revelation threatened to become broken up into an incalculable number of things known, and, in spite of the still retained title, acquired the character of a natural knowledge of supernatural things. Accordingly there was now introduced also the idea of articuli mixti, i.e., of such elements of knowledge as are given both in a natural way and by revelation, only in the latter way, however, in perfection. What appeared outlined already in Tertullian (see Vol. V. c. ii.) as the distinctive character of Western theology, now came to its fullest development.

From the newly-discovered Aristotle the scholars derived courage to advance from the compilation of mere “sentences” to the rearing of entire doctrinal systems. The imposing form of the Church also, with the unfolding of its uniform power, may have been a co-operating influence here; for the Scholasticism of the thirteenth century presents the same spectacle in the sphere of knowledge, which the Church of which it is the servant presents in the sphere of human life generally. In the one sphere as in the other everything is to be reduced to subjection; in the one as in the other everything is to be brought into a harmonious system; in the one as in the other the position is held, tacitly or expressly, that the Church is Christ, and Christ is the Church. Thus the theological science of the thirteenth century can be described as the submitting to dialectic-systematic revision of ecclesiastical dogma and ecclesiastical practice, with the view of unfolding them in a system having unity and comprehending all that in the highest sense is worthy of being known, with the view of proving them, and so of reducing to the service of the Church all the forces of the understanding and the whole product of science. But most intimately connected with this end is the other, namely, the theologian’s attaining in this way to the visio (fruitio) dei; these two ends, indeed, are mutually involved, for all knowledge of Church doctrine and of Church practice is knowledge of God — this was taught by the Church itself. Now, if the gradual knowledge of God is the only means whereby the individual can attain to salvation (visio dei), then in theology the objective and subjective aims simply coincide; one serves the Church in serving himself, and the converse is equally true. The great Schoolmen by no means felt that they wrought as slaves, labouring under compulsion for their masters. The only end indeed that was clearly before them was their own advancement in the knowledge of God; but, standing as faithful sons within the Church, to which all power was given in heaven and on earth, their speculations necessarily served, with more or less of intention on their part, to glorify the Church’s power and give a divine character to all that it did. And yet how many things did they come to know, the truth of which is entirely independent of the truth of Church theory and practice; how necessary and how helpful was even this period in the general history of science and theology; and how many seeds were sown broadcast by the great Schoolmen, of the development of which they did not allow themselves to dream! Never yet in the world’s history was any science quite fruitless which served God with true devotion. Theology has at any time become a hindrance, only when it has lost faith in itself or become vacillating. We shall see that this was verified also in medieval theology.

For all that has been stated up to this point applies only to the pre-Scotist Scholasticism; it applies above all to Thomas. He exercised, moreover, an enduring influence on the period that followed, and his influence is still at work at the present day. His predecessors and contemporaries have passed out of view in him. The Thomist science, as embodied above all in the “Summa,” is characterised by the following things: (1) by the conviction that religion and theology are essentially of a speculative (not practical) nature, that they must therefore be imparted and appropriated spiritually, that it is possible so to appropriate them, and that ultimately no conflict can arise between reason and revelation; (2) by strict adherence to Augustinianism, and in particular to the Augustinian doctrines of God, predestination, sin and grace,Thomas shows himself an Augustinian by his estimation also of Holy Scripture. Scripture alone was for him absolutely certain revelation. All other authorities he held as only relative. Very many passages can be quoted from Thomas to prove that the “formal principle of the reformation” had a representative in the great Schoolman. Cf. Holzhey, Die Inspiration d. hl. Schrift in der Anschauung des Mittelalters, 1895. This book, which did not necessarily require to be written, gives an account of the estimation of Holy Scripture on the part of the mediæval theologians and sectaries from the period of Charles the Great till the Council of Trent. The author remarks very correctly (p. 164 f.) that the view of Holy Scripture, or the mode of apprehending the notion of inspiration, does not pass beyond what is furnished by the Church Fathers, and that even among the theologians from the time of Alcuin till the beginning of the sixteenth century the greatest agreement regarding Holy Scripture prevailed. But when the author says further, that the doctrine of the absolute perspicuity and sufficiency of the Bible finds no confirmation in the mediæval Church — for even if expressions of the kind were to be met with among the mediæval theologians, yet the living union with the Church and tradition is at the same time presupposed — then that is in one respect a platitude. It is such also (but only in one respect) when the author remarks that the Middle Ages always recognised the exposition of Holy Scripture as an attribute of the Church. But on the really interesting problem Holzhey has scarcely touched, namely whether even in the Middle Ages a unique importance does not belong to Scripture as rule for the vita Christiana and whether it was not held by very many in this respect as absolutely clear and sufficient. That this question is to be answered affirmatively is to me beyond doubt. To the sentence of Duns Scotus: “Sacra scriptura sufficienter continet doctrinam necessariam viatori,” many parallels may be adduced. Besides, there is still another question on which Holzhey has scarcely entered: since when was the decision of the Church in matters of faith placed as another kind of authority alongside Scripture as of equal weight? Certainly not yet since Thomas, scarcely only since Duns, but, as Ritschl likewise (Fides implicita, p. 31 f.) remarks, only since Occam, and even since his time not yet generally. but on the other hand by contesting on principle Averrhoism; (3) by a thoroughly minute acquaintance with Aristotle, and by a comprehensive and strenuous application of the Aristotelian philosophy, so far as Augustinianism admitted in any way of this (under the conception of God the Areopagitic-Augustinian view is only slightly limited); (4) by a bold vindication of the highest ecclesiastical claims by means of an ingenious theory of the State, and a wonderfully observant study of the empirical tendencies of the papal ecclesiastical and sacramental system. Aristotle the politician and Augustine the theologian, two enemies, became allies in Thomas; in that consists the importance of Thomas in the world’s history. While he is a theologian and an Augustinian, he is still always an absolute thinker full of confidence; and yet it must not be overlooked that in him there are already recognisable the seeds of the destruction of the absolute theology. Although hidden, arbitrary and relative elements have already found a place for themselves in him. It is still his aim to express all things in the firm and sure categories of the majesty of the deity whose pervasive power controls all things, and to prove the strict necessity of all theological deliverances: the Christian religion is believed in and demonstrated from principles; but yet at not a few points the strength failed, and the thinker was obliged to fall back upon the authority which supports the probable, although he understood how to maintain for the whole the impression of absolute validity.Anselm proves in part the articuli fidei; in principle Thomas refuses to do so (Pars. I., Quæst. I., Art. 8); yet the ratio bases itself on the articuli fidei in order to prove something else. We shall see how, as the development proceeded, Scholasticism always relied less on ratio in divine things. This may be an appropriate place for a short description of the “Summa” (see Portman, Das System der theol. Summe des hl. Thomas, Luzern 1885). The 1. Part (119 Quæst.) treats of God and the issue of things from God, the 2. Part (1. Sect.) of general morality (114 Quæst.), the 2. Part (2. Sect.) of special morality (189 Quæst.) from the point of view of the return of the rational creature to God, the 3. Part of Christ and the Sacraments (90 Quæst.) As a supplement there has been added, from the commentary on the Lombard, the concluding part of the doctrine of the Sacraments, and the eschatology (102 Quæst.) Every Quæstio contains a number of articuli, and every articulus is divided into three parts. First the difficultates are brought forward, which seem to answer in the negative the question propounded, then the authorities (one or more, among them here and there also Aristotle), then follows the speculative discussion, dealing with principles, and thereafter the solution of the particular difficulties (the conclusiones are not formulated by Thomas himself, but by his commentators). The scheme corresponds with the Pauline-Augustinian thought: “From God to God.” The introduction (Quæst. i) comprises the questions on theology as a science, on the subject (object) of theology — God and all else sub ratione dei, — on the methods (auctoritas and ratio, theology as doctrina argumentativa, sed “hæc doctrina non argumentatur ad sua principia probanda, quæ sunt articuli fidei, sed ex eis procedit ad aliquid aliud probandum . . .nam licet locus ab auctoritate quæ fundatur super ratione humana sit infirmissimus, locus tamen ab auctoritate quæ fundatur super revelatione divina est efficacissimus. Utitur tamen sacra doctrina etiam ratione humana, non quidem ad probandam fidem [quia per hoc tolleretur meritum fidei], sed ad manifestandum aliqua alia, quæ traduntur in hac doctrina. Cum enim gratia non tollat naturam, sed perficiat, oportet quod naturalis ratio subserviat fidei, sicut et naturalis inclinatio voluntatis obsequitur caritati. . . . Sacra doctrina utitur philosophorum auctoritatibus quasi extraneis argumentis et probabilibus, auctoritatibus autem canonicæ scripturæ utitur proprie et ex necessitate arguendo, auctoritatibus autem aliorum doctorum ecclesiæ quasi argumentando ex propriis sed probabiliter. Innititur enim fides nostra revelationi apostolis et prophetis factæ, qui canonicos libros scripserunt, non autem revelationi, si qua fuit aliis doctoribus facta”), on the exposition of Holy Scripture, etc. Quest. 2-27 of the I. Part treat of God’s existence (five proofs for God), the nature of God (primum movens, ens a se, perfectissimum, actus purus), His attributes, His unity and uniqueness, His knowableness, the name of God, further of the inner life-activity in God (of His knowledge, His world of ideas, His relation to truth, His life, His will, the expressions of His will, providence and predestination); lastly, of the outer activity of God or the divine omnipotence, and of the divine blessedness. Then follows in Q. 27-44 the investigation de processione divinarum personarum (Trinity); lastly, Q. 44-119, the doctrine of creation, and here (1) the origination of things (creation out of nothing, temporality of the world); (2) division of creation (doctrine of angels, doctrine of the world of bodies, doctrine of man, here minute investigations into the substance of the soul, the union of body and soul, the powers of the soul, human knowledge; then concerning the creation of man, the divine image in man, paradise and the original state); (3) the doctrine of the divine government of the world (on angels as means of providence, etc.). The II. Part (1 sect.) is grounded entirely on the Aristotelian Ethics. It begins with an introduction on man’s end (the bonum = beatitudo = deus ipse = visio dei), and proceeds to treat of freedom, the nature of free acts of the will, the goodness and badness of acts of the will (to the goodness belongs the rationality of the act of the will), merit and guilt (Q. 6-21). Thereon follow investigations into the emotional life of man (passiones), which is minutely analysed (Q. 22-48). Now only comes the account of the principles of moral action, of “habitus” or of the qualities of the soul. After an introduction (Q. 49 sq.) the doctrine of virtue is discussed (divided according to the object into intellectual, moral, and theological virtues), the cause of the virtues, their peculiarities (virtue as moderation or the “middle” course between two extremes) and the culmination of the virtues in the gifts of the Holy Ghost (the eight beatitudes and the fruits of the Spirit). This is followed by the doctrines of the nature of sin (contrary to reason and nature), of the division of sins, of the relation of sins to one another, of the subject (the will), the causes (inner and outer) of sin, of original sin and its effects (the deterioration of nature, darkening = macula, the reatus pœnæ, mortal sins and venial sins). All this belongs to the inner principles of moral conduct. This part concludes with the discussion of the outer principles, namely, the law and grace. The “law” is discussed on all sides, as eternal law (that is, the law according to which God Himself acts, and whose reflected rays are all laws valid for the creatures), as natural law, as human law, as Old Testament and New Testament law, and as law of “counsels” for special perfection. But the New Testament law, as it is inward, and infused by grace, is the law of grace, and thu the way is prepared for passing to the second outer principle of moral acts — to grace which gives man aid for the good. Grace is the outer principle of the supernatural good; in the intellectual sphere it is not necessary for the knowledge of natural truths, but it is so for the knowledge of the supernatural; it is likewise requisite for ability to do the supernatural good. Here there is a keen polemic against Pelagianism: man cannot by naturally good acts even prepare himself sufficiently for grace; he can neither convert himself, nor continue always steadfast in goodness. An inquiry into the nature, division, causes, and effects of grace (doctrine of justification, doctrine of the meritoriousness of good works), forms the conclusion. The II. Part, 2. section now contains special ethics, namely, first, the precise statement of the theological virtues (faith, hope, and love), the commands corresponding to these virtues, and the sins against them, then the discussion of the cardinal virtues, wisdom, righteousness (here in Q. 57-123 the most exhaustive account is given, inasmuch as religiousness as a whole is placed under this term), courage, and moderation; lastly, the discussion of the special virtues, i.e., of the gifts of grace and duties of station (Q. 171-189). Under this last title there are dealt with (a) the charisms, (b) the two forms of life (the contemplative and the active), (c) the stations of perfection (namely, the station of the bishops as the virtuosi in neighbourly love, and the station of the monks, with special reference to the Mendicant monks). The III. Part now aims at showing by what provision and means the return of the rational creature to God has become possible by way of faith, hope, and love, namely, through Christ and the Sacraments. To this there is the intention to add eschatology. Hence there is a treatment here (1) of Christ, in particular of His incarnation and His natures. After a discussion of the necessity of the incarnation (on account of sin, and since a satisfactio de condigno was requisite) for the removal of original sin, the personal unity, the divine person, of Christ, and His human nature are set forth (in which connection, Q. 8, there is reference to the Church as the mystic body of Christ, and the thought of “Christus” as the head of mankind is strongly accentuated); then the consequences of the personal union (communicatio idiomatum) and all bearings of the constitution of the Godman are explained. On this follows (2) a section on the work of Christ, which, however, contains almost no speculation whatever, but illustrates in an edifying way the history of Christ from his entrance into the world (Q. 27-31, the doctrine of Mary). In connection with the suffering and death of Christ, the point of view of the “conveniens” as distinguished from the “necessarium” has special prominence given to it. Immediately after the work of Christ the doctrine of the Sacraments is added (Q. 60 sq.); for redemption is imparted to individuals only through the Sacraments, which have their efficacy from Christ, and through which men are incorporated into Christ. The statement begins with the general doctrine of the Sacraments (nature, necessity, effect, cause, number, connection); then follows the discussion of baptism, confirmation, the eucharist, and penance. Here Thomas was obliged to lay down his pen. It was not granted to him to complete his “Summa.” What was still wanting, as has been remarked, was supplied from his other works; but in this supplement we miss somewhat of the strictness marking the expositions given by himself in the Summa, since it was mainly constructed out of notes and excursus on the text of the Lombard. Observe lastly, that in the Summa repetitions are not only not avoided, but occur to an incalculable extent.