Page:Illustrations of the history of medieval thought and learning.djvu/63

Rh unpardonable heresy. It was discovered that his opinions included the most opposite errors, the denial of the freedom of man's will, and of the necessity of divine grace.

Few disputes ever had a more accidental origin. Gottschalk, the son of a Saxon noble, was forced as a child into the monastery of Fulda. When he grew up he rebelled, and denied the obligation of his father's vow. A council at Mentz, to which he appealed against the authority of his superior, reversed the sentence (A.D. 829.). The powerful abbat, it was none less than Rabanus Maurus, brought the case before the emperor and won his cause. The youth was condemned for life to the rule of saint Benedict. But the high-spirited ambition of his birth was quickened, not quenched, by his bondage. The fame he would have made in the active life of a noble, he now sought in the adventurous paths of speculation. He removed to the monastery of Orbais near Soissons, and buried himself in saint Augustin. The theory he developed in this seclusion had a natural affinity with the morbid cravings, the vindictive passions, of a disappointed man. It assuaged his regrets for lost earthly prosperity by the confidence of eternal happiness hereafter. It gave him a weapon with which to assail his opponents: their reward was already decided for them. He pressed the certainty of their doom with fanatical violence. The controversy which followed is too purely theological, too unrelieved by any warmth of human sympathy, by any real sense of human needs, to detain us in its dark and weary progress. It is of importance as introducing us to that astonishing thinker whose aid was rashly invoked against the monk of Orbais. The theological dispute was for a moment merged in the deep sea of philosophy: when it rose again the monk Gottschalk was forgotten; the voice of orthodoxy on all sides was directed against Johannes Scotus, the belated disciple of Plato, and the last representative of the Greek spirit in the west.