Page:Illustrations of the history of medieval thought and learning.djvu/64

 dispute about predestination had long perplexed the Frankish world when Hincmar, the great archbishop of Rheims, applied to John Scotus for help. Gottschalk had received his sentence from the council of Quierzy, and died after a long confinement in the monastery of Haut-villiers. But the controversy had failed, as controversies usually fail, to secure conviction to either side, and John gladly assumed that the fault lay in the incompetence of theology by itself to decide the profound questions involved. He began his book on the subject by the announcement that true philosophy and true religion are identical; a solution of religious problems can only be effected by the aid of philosophy; and true philosophy rests on the basis of the unity of God. The oneness of his essence implies also a oneness of will, a will that can tend only towards good. To conceive a predestination to evil is to conceive a duality, a contradiction, in the divine nature. But predestination of any sort can only be