Page:Illustrations of the history of medieval thought and learning.djvu/62

44 to assail and overthrow its resistance to vital religion; and with this they were content. To enquire deeper into their master's thoughts, to speculate upon the mysteries of being and of God, was foreign to their purpose.

Agobard does, indeed, once venture upon the field of controversy in theological metaphysics; he wrote a book against Felix of Urgel, the adoptian: but here, too, he is still the theologian, not a philosopher. He recites the testimonies of the fathers, but he cares not to add to them his independent criticism. His reticence was justified by the experience of the years after him, when the attempt was made to a accommodate the spiritual system of Augustin to the concrete doctrines of the church (cf. Reuter I. 43.), and the amalgam proved the strangest product of that materialising age, the definition of the doctrine of transubstantiation. No innovation could have been better calculated to promote the decay of the moral individualism of Christianity, and the growth of a servile dependence upon the priestly order. It succeeded, not because it professed a conformity with saint Augustin, but because the age was tending towards intellectual degradation. When, however, some years later, Gottschalk, the medieval Jansen, revived from the same father an unconditional doctrine of predestination, the result was quite different. For this doctrine was as subversive as Claudius's puritanism of the newer theory of the church. A stimulus was given to controversy, but the issue was foregone. Latin Christianity had come to acquiesce in a belief which admitted God's predestination of the good, his foreknowledge only of the wicked; in the technical phrase of Calvinism, predestination but not reprobation. When Gottschalk affirmed both, the language of saint Augustin had to be explained away. It was impossible that his authority could support tenets which, it was seen, struck at the root of the power of the clergy, not only by the implied denial of the efficacy of the sacraments, but also of the value of human absolution. Augustin's unseasonable restorer appeared to be guilty of the most hopeless,