Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 21.djvu/439

Rh S C H S C H 417 mits. of lustre, and stigmatized the windows as coloured blinds and picture transparencies. But the opposing party claimed for these modern revivals " the union of the severe and excellent drawing of early Florentine oil-paintings with the colouring and arrangement of the glass-paintings of the latter half of the 16th century." Schnorr's busy life closed at Munich in 1872. SCHOLASTICISM is the name usually employed to denote the most typical products of mediaeval thought. The final disappearance of ancient philosophy may be dated about the beginning of the 6th century of our era. Boetius, its last representative in the West, died in 525, and four years later the Athenian schools were closed by order of the emperor Justinian Before this time Christian thought had already been active in the fathers of the church, but their activity had been entirely devoted to the elaborating and systematizing of theological dogmas. Although the dogmas unquestionably involve philosophical assumptions, the fathers deal with them throughout simply as churchmen, and do not profess to supply for them a philosophical or rational basis. Only incidentally do some of them like Augustine, for example digress into strictly philosophical discussion. After the centuries of intellectual darkness during which the settlement of the new races and their conversion to Christianity proceeded and the foundations of the modern European order were being laid, the first symptoms of renewed intellectual activity appear contemporaneously with the consolidation of the empire of the West in the hands of Charlemagne. That enlightened monarch endeavoured to attract to his court the best scholars of Britain and Ireland (where the classical tradition had never died out), and by imperial decree (787) commanded the establishment of schools in connexion with every abbey in his realms. Peter of Pisa and Alcuin of York were his advisers in directing this great work, and under their fostering care the opposition long supposed to exist between godliness and secular learning speedily disappeared. Besides the cele- brated school of the Palace, where Alcuin had among his hearers the members of the imperial family and the dignitaries of the empire as well as talented youths of humbler origin, we hear of the episcopal schools of Lyons, Orleans, and St Denis, the cloister schools of St Martin of Tours, of Fulda, Corbie, Fontenelle, and many others, besides the older monasteries of St Gall and Reichenau. These schools became the centres of mediseval learning and speculation, and from them the name Scholasticism is derived. They were designed to communicate instruction in the seven liberal arts which constituted the educational curriculum of the Middle Ages grammar, dialectic, and rhetoric forming the trivium of arts proper, while geometry, arithmetic, astronomy, and music constituted the quadrivium of the sciences. The name doctor scholas- ticus was applied originally to any teacher in such an ecclesiastical gymnasium, but, as the study of dialectic or logic soon became the object of absorbing interest to the best intellects of the time, it tended to overshadow the more elementary disciplines, and the general acceptation of " doctor " came to be one who occupied himself with the teaching of logic and the discussion of the philo- sophical questions arising therefrom. The philosophy of the later Scholastics is more extended in its scope ; but to the very end of the mediaeval period philosophy centres in the discussion of the same logical problems which began to agitate the teachers of the 9th and 10th centuries. Scholasticism in the widest sense thus extends from the 9th to the end of the 14th or the beginning of the 15th century from Erigena to Occam and his followers. The belated Scholastics who lingered beyond the last-mentioned date served only as marks for the obloquy heaped upon the schools by the men of the new time. But, although every systematic account of Scholasticism finds it necessary to begin with Erigena, that philosopher is of the spiritual kindred of the Neoplatonists and Christian mystics rather than of the typical Scholastic doctors. In a few obscure writings of the 9th century we find the beginnings of dis- cussion upon the logical questions which afterwards proved of such absorbing interest ; but these are followed by the intellectual interregnum of the 10th century. The activity of Scholasticism is therefore mainly confined within the limits of the llth and the 14th centuries. It is clearly divisible (by circumstances to be presently explained) into two well-marked periods, the first extending to the end of the 12th century and embracing as its chief names Roscellinus, Anselm, William of Champeaux, and Abelard, while the second extended from the beginning of the 13th century to the Renaissance and the general distraction of men's thoughts from the problems and methods of Scho- lasticism. In this second period the names of Albertus Magnus, Thomas Aquinas, and Duns Scotus represent (in the 13th century and the first years of the 14th century) the culmination of Scholastic thought and its consolidation into system. It is a remark of Prantl's that there is no such thing as Logic philosophy in the Middle Ages ; there are only logic and and theology. If pressed literally the remark is hypercritical, tteol g for it overlooks two facts, in the first place that the main objects of theology and philosophy are identical, though the method of treatment is different, and in the second place that logical discussion commonly leads up to meta- physical problems, and that this was pre-eminently the case with the logic of the Schoolmen. But the saying draws attention in a forcible way to the two great in- fluences which shaped mediseval thought on the one side the traditions of ancient logic, on the other the system of Christian theology. Scholasticism opens with a discussion of certain points in the Aristotelian logic ; it speedily begins to apply its logical distinctions to the doctrines of the church ; and when it attains its full stature in St Thomas it has, with the exception of certain mysteries, rationalized or Aristotelianized the whole churchly system. Or we might say with equal truth that the philosophy of St Thomas is Aristotle Christianized. It is, moreover, the attitude of the Schoolmen to these two influences that yields the general characteristic of the period. Their attitude throughout is that of interpreters rather than of those conducting an independent investigation. And though they are at the same time the acutest of critics, and offer the most ingenious developments of the original thesis, they never step outside the charmed circle of the system they have inherited. They appear to contemplate the universe of nature and man not at first hand with their own eyes but in the glass of Aristotelian formulas. Their chief works are in the shape of commentaries upon the writings of " the philosopher. " * Their problems and solutions alike spring from the master's dicta from the need of reconciling these with one another and with the conclusions of Christian theology. The fact that the channels of, thought during the Middle Keason Ages were determined in this way by the external influence and of a twofold tradition is usually expressed by saying that ^ w reason in the Middle Age is subject to authority. It has not the free play which characterizes its activity in Greece and in the philosophy of modern times. Its con- clusions are predetermined, and the initiative of the individual thinker is almost confined, therefore, to formal details in the treatment of his thesis. From the side of the church this characteristic of the period is expressed in the saying that reason has its proper station as the hand- 1 The common designation of Aristotle in the Middle Ages. XXI. - 53