Page:A history of the Inquisition of the Middle Ages, volume 3.djvu/567

 SCHOLASTIC THEOLOGY. 551 tween the schoolmen and the inquisitors. The ardor of persecu- tion, which rendered the purity of the faith the highest aim of the Christian and the most imperative care of the ruler, secular and spiritual, created an exaggerated standard of orthodoxy, which re- garded the minutest point of theology as equally important with the fundamental doctrines of religion. We have already seen instances of this in the questions as to the poverty of Christ, as to whether he was dead when lanced on the cross, and as to wheth- er the blood which he shed in the Passion remained on earth or ascended to heaven ; and Stephen Palecz, at the Council of Con- stance, proved dialect ically that a doctrine in which one point in a thousand was erroneous was thereby rendered heretical through- out. Moreover, erroneous belief was not necessary, for the Chris- tian must be firm in the faith, and doubt itself was heresy.* The other tendency was the insane thirst which inflamed the minds of the schoolmen for determining and defining, with abso- lute precision, every detail of the universe and of the invisible world. So far as this gratified itself within the lines of orthodoxy laid down by an infallible Church it resulted in building up the most complex and stupendous body of theology that human wit has ever elaborated. The Sentences of Peter Lombard grew into the Summa of Thomas Aquinas, an elaborate structure to be grasped and retained only by minds of peculiar powers after se- vere and special training. When this was once defined and accepted as orthodox, theology and philosophy became the most dangerous of sciences, while the perverse ingenuity of the schoolmen, revel- ling in the subtleties of dialectics, was perpetually rearguing doubt- ful points, raising new questions, and introducing new refinements in matters already too subtle for the comprehension of the ordinary intellect. The inquirer who disturbs the dust now happily cover- ing the records of these forgotten wrangles can only feel re- gret that such wonderful intellectual acuteness and energy should have been so wofully wasted when, if rightly applied, it might have advanced by so many centuries the progress of humanity. The story of Roger Bacon, the Doctor Mirabilis, is fairly illus- trative of the tendencies of the time. That gigantic intellect Dulius.
 * Von der Hardt I. xvi. 829. — Bernardi Coinens. Lucerna Inquisit. 8. v.