Page:The Mediaeval Mind Vol 2.djvu/505

CHAP. XLI always to be using what has been attained, and never reach further for one's self."

It may be that Bacon was suspected of raising the philosophers too near the Christian level; and perhaps his argument that their knowledge had come from the prophets may have seemed a vain excuse. Says he, for example:

"There was a great book of Aristotle upon civil science, well agreeing with the Christian law; for the law of Aristotle has precepts like the Christian law, although much is added in the latter excelling all human science. The Christian law takes whatever is worthy in the civil philosophical law. For God gave the philosophers all truth, as the saints, and especially Augustine, declare. ... And what noble thoughts have they expressed upon God, the blessed Trinity, the Incarnation, Christ, the blessed Virgin, and the angels."

Possibly one is here reminded of Abaelard, and his thought of Christianity as reformatio legis naturalis. Yet Christ had said, He came not to destroy, but to fulfil; and the chief Christian theologians had followed Augustine in "despoiling the Egyptians" as he phrased it; the very process which in fact was making the authority of Aristotle supreme in Bacon's time. So there was little that was peculiar or suspicious in Bacon's admiration of the philosophers.

The trouble with Bacon becomes clearer as we turn to his views upon the state of knowledge in his time, and the methods of contemporary doctors in rendering it worse, rather than better. These doctors were largely engaged upon sacra doctrina; they were primarily theologians and expounders of the truth of revelation. Bacon's criticism of their methods might disparage that to which those methods were applied. His caustic enumeration of the four everlasting causes of error, and the seven vices infecting the study of theology, will show reason enough why his error-stricken and infected contemporaries wished to close his mouth. The anxiousness of some might sour to enmity under the acerbity of his attack; nor would their hearts be softened by Bacon's boasting that these various doctors,