Page:English Historical Review Volume 37.djvu/439

 1922 REVIEWS OF BOOKS 431 collective episcopate, and especially of the college of cardinals, sufficiently to satisfy the modern Koman Catholic who accepts the Vatican decrees of 1870 ; but he became the great champion of the papacy in the empire, and under Eugenius IV won from Aeneas Sylvius (who, as Pius II, was to make him his ' temporal vicar-general ' at Home in 1459) the title of ' the Hercules of the Eugenians '. We have a very full account of Nicholas's activity as a church reformer in 1450, when acting as legate of Nicholas V in Germany ; although the story of his journey in this capacity through the countries of the empire leaves on his biographer the impression of a ship cleaving its way through waters which immediately come together again, leaving no lasting trace of its passage. Dr. Vansteenberghe especially emphasizes his failure to reform clerical and monastic morals. That a relaxation of the requirement of celibacy might have been a more effectual method does not occur to him. Nicholas was not in this respect a forerunner of the Reformation ; but in his attitude towards popular superstitions (such as that concerning the bleeding hosts of Wilmac) he may be said to have been so ; and on this point Dr. Vansteenberghe is inclined to blame him for excessive severity. In 1452 Nicholas became bishop of Brixen. His tenure of this see, which he held till his death in 1464, was distracted by a prolonged struggle for its temporal rights against the count of Tyrol. His controversies were, however, not only in the field of practical conduct or public affairs. He wrote both against the Hussites and against the Mohammedans, for the Turkish peril was then a very real one in the eastern parts of the empire. Against the appeal of the former to Scripture he urged the claim of tradition and the right of the church to modify its practice in view of changed circumstances ; against the latter the testimony borne by the Koran to the religion of Christ. The second division of Dr. Vansteenberghe's book is devoted to Nicholas as scholar and thinker. In this capacity he became a precursor of Copernicus by contesting, though on metaphysical rather than on mathematical or astronomical grounds, the geocentric theory of the universe. He may even, in virtue of his denial of any fixed centre of the universal motion, be claimed as a prophet of the theory of relativity. He seems to have attempted the construction of a non-Euclidean geometry ; and his genius in this department has, we learn, been recognized by Cantor. He called in question, more than a century before Kepler, the perfect circularity of the orbits of the heavenly bodies. He did not refuse to indulge in speculations as to the probable date of the catastrophe predicted in Scripture as destined to overwhelm the present order of things. Here he took for a clue the notion that the career of the church is to follow the lines indicated by the earthly life of Christ ; and concluded that the victory over Antichrist would fall between 1700 and 1734, while refusing to determine the period which is to elapse between this event and the day of judgement. The study of the Cusan's philosophy hardly belongs to this Review ; but we may remark, as relevant to the history of ideas, that in his celebrated treatise De Docta Ignorantia, where he dis- tinguishes the maximum absolutum (God), the maximum contractum (the universe), and the maximum absolutum contractum (Christ), he is probably the first philosopher to employ in something like the modern sense the