Page:Illustrations of the history of medieval thought and learning.djvu/82

64 the church was not stationary but progressive; it was susceptible of development, of indefinite expansion. He discovered in Christianity the germs of all truth. Not only the idea of Christ but all those understood in dogmatic Christianity he applied and enlarged in such a manner that the result was rather a philosophy of religion, than a philosophy of Christianity: and thus to theology he contributed little that it could accept; to philosophy he added not a few of the salient ideas which we connect with the modern schools of metaphysics. His own views were doubtless buried with his writings: they were found out afresh by other men before their publication proved how they had been anticipated. Essentially his system would suffer little if we deducted from it all those Christian elements upon which he supposed it rested; we should find a philosophy in which the idea of God, the idea of evil, and many of its central features, resemble in a remark able way the thoughts of Spinoza. Yet it would be as dishonest to regard these Christian elements as adventitious, as it would be to ignore the Hebrew antecedents of the great Dutch philosopher. They were necessary to the Scot because he lived in a tradition of Christian theology, because this was the framework in which his thoughts were trained to move and from which he could not wholly free himself. Nevertheless he advanced so far in the direction of giving new meanings to old phrases that he was, speaking generally, unintelligible to his age.

At the same time the fact of his appearance in the ninth century, the fact of his apparently unbroken favour at the imperial court, is a remarkable evidence of the liberal spirit which remained with the successors of Charles the Great. It is not as though John was kept at the royal school, just as a miracle of learning, in ignorance of what he actually taught. On the contrary, Charles the Bald had received from his mother the empress Judith, the friend of the Jews, the double elements of a complete education, wide learning and the scholar's instinct