History of Human Society

CHAPTER XXII

THE INTELLECTUAL AWAKENING OF EUROPE

Social Evolution Is Dependent Upon Variation. – The process by which ideas are born and propagated in human society is strangely analogous to the methods of biological evolution. The laws of survival, of adaptation, of variation and mutation prevail, and the evidence of conspicuous waste is ever present. The grinding and shifting of human nature under social law is similar to the grinding and shifting of physical nature under organic law. When we consider the length of time it takes physical nature to accomplish the ultimate of fixed values, seventy millions of years or more to produce an oak-tree, millions of years to produce a horse or a man, we should not be impatient with the slow processes of human society nor the waste of energy in the process. For human society arises out of the confusion of ideas and progresses according to the law of survival.

New ideas must be accepted, diffused, used, and adapted to new conditions. It would seem that Europe had sufficient knowledge of life contributed by the Orient, by Greek, Roman, and barbarian to go forward; but first must come a period of readjustment of old truth to new environment and the discovery of new truth. For several centuries, in the Dark Ages, the intellectual life of man lay dormant. Then must come a quickening of the spirit before the world could advance. However, in considering human progress, the day of small things must "not be despised." For in the days of confusion and low tide of regression there are being established new modes of life and thought which through right adaptation will flow on into the full tide of progress. Revivals come which gather up and utilize the scattered and confused ideas of life, adapting and utilizing them by setting new standards and imparting new impulses of progress.

The Revival of Progress Throughout Europe. – Human society, as a world of ideas, is a continuous quantity, and therefore it is difficult to mark off any definite period of time to show social causation. Roughly speaking, the period from the beginning of the eighth century to the close of the fifteenth is a period of intellectual ferment, the climax of which extended from the eleventh to the close of the fifteenth century. It was in this period that the forces were gathering in preparation for the achievements of the modern era of progress. There was one general movement, an awakening along the whole line of human endeavor in the process of transition from the old world to the new. It was a revival of art, language, literature, philosophy, theology, politics, law, trade, commerce, and the additions of invention and discovery. It was the period of establishing schools and laying the foundation of universities. In this there was a more or less continuous progress of the freedom of the mind, which permitted reflective thought, which subsequently led on to the religious reformation that permitted freedom of belief, and the French Revolution, which permitted freedom of political action. It was the rediscovery of the human mind, a quickening of intellectual liberty, a desire of alert minds for something new. It was a call for humanity to move forward.

The Revival of Learning a Central Idea of Progress. – As previously stated, the church had taken to itself by force of circumstances the power in the Western world relinquished by the fallen Roman Empire. In fighting the battles against unbelief, ignorance, and political corruption, it had become a powerful hierarchy. As the conservator of learning, it eventually began to settle the limits of knowledge and belief on its own interpretation and to force this upon the world. It saved the elements of knowledge from the destruction of the barbarians, but in turn sought to lock up within its own precincts of belief the thoughts of the ages, presuming to do the thinking for the world. It became dogmatic, arbitrary, conservative, and conventional. Moreover, this had become the attitude of all inert Europe. The several movements that sought to overcome this stifling condition of the mind are called the "revival of learning."

A more specific use of the term renaissance, or revival of learning, refers especially to the restoration of the intellectual continuity of Europe, or the rebirth of the human mind. It is generally applied to what is known as humanism, or the revival of classical learning. Important as this phase of general progress is, it can be considered only as a part of the great revival of progress. Humanism, or the revival of classical learning, having its origin and first great impulse in Italy, it has become customary to use humanism and the Italian renaissance interchangeably, yet without careful consideration; for although the Italian renaissance is made up largely of humanism, it had such wide-reaching consequences on the progress of all Europe as not to be limited by the single influence of the revival of the classical learning.

Influence of Charlemagne. – Clovis founded the Frankish kingdom, which included the territory now occupied by France and the Netherlands. Subsequently this kingdom was enlarged under the rule of Charles Martel, who turned back the Moslem invasion at Poitiers in 732, and became ruler of Europe north of the Alps. His son Pepin enlarged and strengthened the kingdom, so that when his successor Charlemagne came into power in 768 he found himself in control of a vast inland empire. He conquered Rome and all north Italy and assumed the title of Roman emperor. The movement of Charlemagne was a slight and even a doubtful beginning of the revival. Possibly his reform was a faint flickering of the watch-fires of intellectual and civil activity, but they went out and darkness obscured the horizon until the breaking of the morn of liberty. Yet in the darkness of the ages that followed new forces were forming unobserved by the contemporary historian – forces which should give a new awakening to the mind of all Europe.

Charlemagne re-established the unity of government which had been lost in the decline of the old Roman government; he enlarged the boundary of the empire, established an extensive system of administration, and promoted law and order. He did more than this: he promoted religion by favoring the church in the advancement of its work throughout the realm. But unfortunately, in the attempt to break down feudalism, he increased it by giving large donations to the church, and so helped to develop ecclesiastical feudalism, and laid the foundation of subsequent evils. He was a strong warrior, a great king, and a master of civil government.

Charlemagne believed in education, and insisted that the clergy should be educated, and he established schools for the education of his subjects. He promoted learning among his civil officers by establishing a school all the graduates of which were to receive civil appointments. It was the beginning of the civil service method in Europe. Charlemagne was desirous, too, of promoting learning of all kinds, and gathered together the scattered fragments of the German language, and tried to advance the educational interests of his subjects in every direction. But the attempts to make learning possible, apparently, passed for naught in later days when the iron rule of Charlemagne had passed away, and the weaker monarchs who came after him were unable to sustain his system. Darkness again spread over Europe, to be dispelled finally by other agencies.

The Attitude of the Church Was Retrogressive. – The attitude of the Christian church toward learning in the Middle Ages was entirely arbitrary. It had become thoroughly institutionalized and was not in sympathy with the changes that were taking place outside of its own policy. It assumed an attitude of hostility to everything that tended toward the development of free and independent thought outside the dictates of the authorities of the church. It found itself, therefore, in an attitude of bitter opposition to the revival of learning which had spread through Europe. It was unfortunate that the church appeared so diametrically opposed to freedom of thought and independent activity of mind. Even in England, when the new learning was first introduced, although Henry VIII favored it, the church in its blind policy opposed it, and when the renaissance in Germany had passed continuously into the Reformation, Luther opposed the new learning with as much vigor as did the papalists themselves.

But from the fact of the church's assuming this attitude toward the new learning, it must not be inferred that there was no learning within the church, for there were scholars in theology, logic, and law, astute and learned. Yet the church assumed that it had a sort of proprietorship or monopoly of learning, and that only what it might see fit to designate was to receive attention, and then only in the church's own way; all other knowledge was to be opposed. The ecclesiastical discussions gave evidence of intense mental activity within the church, but, having little knowledge of the outside world to invigorate it or to give it something tangible upon which to operate, the mind passed into speculative fields that were productive of little permanent culture. Dwelling only upon a few fundamental conceptions at first, it soon tired itself out with its own weary round.

The church recognized in all secular advocates of literature and learning its own enemies, and consequently began to expunge from the literary world as far as possible the remains of the declining Roman and Greek culture. It became hostile to Greek and Latin literature and art and sought to repress them. In the rise of new languages and literature in new nationalities every attempt was made by the church to destroy the effects of the pagan life. The poems and sagas treating of the religion and mythologies of these young, rising nationalities were destroyed. The monuments of the first beginnings of literature, the products of a period so hard to compass by the historian, were served in the same way as were the Greek and Latin masterpieces.

The church said, if men will persist in study, let them ponder the precepts of the gospels as interpreted by the church. For those who inquired about the problems of life, the churchmen pointed to the creeds and the dogmas of the church, which had settled all things. If men were too persistent in inquiring about the nature of this world, they were told that it is of little importance, only a prelude to the world to come; that they should spend their time in preparation for the future. Even as great a man as Gregory of Tours said: "Let us shun the lying fables of the poets and forego the wisdom of the sages at enmity with God, lest we incur the condemnation of endless death by the sentence of our Lord." Saint Augustine deplored the waste of time spent in reading Virgil, while Alcuin regretted that in his boyhood he had preferred Virgil to the legends of the saints. With the monks such considerations gave excuse for laziness and disregard of rhetoric.

But in this movement of hostility to the new learning, the church went too far, and soon found the entire ecclesiastical system face to face with a gross ignorance, which must be eradicated or the superstructure would fall. As Latin was the only vehicle of thought in those days, it became a necessity that the priests should study Virgil and the other Latin authors, consequently the churches passed from their opposition to pagan authors to a careful utilization of them, until the whole papal court fell under the influence of the revival of learning, and popes and prelates became zealous in the promotion and, indeed, in the display of learning. When the son of Lorenzo the Magnificent became Pope Leo X, the splendor of the ducal court of Florence passed to the papal throne, and no one was more zealous in the patronage of learning than he. He encouraged learning and art of every kind, and built a magnificent library. It was merely the transferrence of the pomp of the secular court to the papacy.

Such was the attitude of the church toward the new learning – first, a bitter opposition; second, a forced toleration; and third, the absorption of its best products. Yet in all this the spirit of the church was not for the freedom of mind nor independence of thought. It could not recognize this freedom nor the freedom of religious belief until it had been humiliated by the spirit of the Reformation.

Scholastic Philosophy Marks a Step in Progress. – There arose in the ninth century a speculative philosophy which sought to harmonize the doctrine of the church with the philosophy of Neo-Platonism and the logic of Aristotle. The scholastic philosophy may be said to have had its origin with John Scotus Erigena, who has been called "the morning star of scholasticism." He was the first bold thinker to assert the supremacy of reason and openly to rebel against the dogma of the church. In laying the foundation of his doctrine, he starts with a philosophical explanation of the universe. His writings and translations were forerunners of mysticism and set forth a peculiar pantheistic conception. His doctrine appears to ignore the pretentious authority of the church of his time and to refer to the earlier church for authority. In so doing he incorporated the doctrine of emanation advanced by the Neo-Platonists, which held that out of God, the supreme unity, evolve the particular forms of goodness, and that eventually all things will return to God. In like manner, in the creation of the universe the species comes from the genera by a process of unfolding.

The complete development and extension of scholastic philosophy did not come until the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. The term "scholastics" was first applied to those who taught in the cloister schools founded by Charlemagne. It was at a later period applied to the teachers of the seven liberal arts – grammar, rhetoric, and dialectic, in the Trivium, and arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy, in the Quadrivium. Finally it was applied to all persons who occupied themselves with science or philosophy. Scholastic philosophy in its completed state represents an attempt to harmonize the doctrines of the church with Aristotelian philosophy.

There were three especial doctrines developed in the scholastic philosophy, called respectively nominalism, realism, and conceptualism. The first asserted that there are no generic types, and consequently no abstract concepts. The formula used to express the vital point in nominalism is "Universalia post rem." Its advocates asserted that universals are but names. Roscellinus was the most important advocate of this doctrine. In the fourteenth century William of Occam revived the subject of nominalism, and this had much to do with the downfall of scholasticism, for its inductive method suggested the acquiring of knowledge through observation.

Realism was a revival of the Platonic doctrine that ideas are the only real things. The formula for it was "Universalia ante rem." By it the general name preceded that of the species. Universal concepts represent the real; all else is merely illustrative of the real. The only real sphere is the one held in the mind, mathematically correct in every way. Balls and globes and other actual things are but the illustrations of the genus. Perhaps Anselm was the strongest advocate of this method of reasoning.

It remained for Abelard to unite these two theories of philosophical reasoning into one, called conceptualism. He held that universals are not ideals, but that they exist in the things themselves. The formula given was "Universalia in re." This was a step in advance, and laid something of a foundation for the philosophy of classification in modern science.

The scholastic philosophers did much to sharpen reason and to develop the mind, but they failed for want of data. Indeed, this has been the common failure of man, for in the height of civilization men speculate without sufficient knowledge. Even in the beginning of scientific thought, for lack of facts, men spent much of their time in speculation. The scholastic philosophers were led to consider many unimportant questions which could not be well settled. They asked the church authorities why the sacramental wine and bread turned into blood and flesh, and what was the necessity of the atonement? And in considering the nature of pure being they asked: "How many angels can dance at once on the point of a needle?" and "In moving from point to point, do angels pass through intervening space?" They asked seriously whether "angels had stomachs," and "if a starving ass were placed exactly midway between two stacks of hay would he ever move?" But it must not be inferred that these people were as ridiculous as they appear, for each question had its serious side. Having no assistance from science, they fell single-handed upon dogmatism; yet many times they busied themselves with unprofitable discussions, and some of them became the advocates of numerous doctrines and dogmas which had a tendency to confuse knowledge, although in defense of which wits were sharpened.

Lord Bacon, in a remarkable passage, has characterized the scholastic philosophers as follows:

"This kind of degenerate learning did chiefly reign among the schoolmen, who – having sharp and strong wits and abundance of leisure and small variety of reading, but their wits being shut up in the cells of a few authors (chiefly Aristotle, their dictator) as their persons were shut up in the cells of monasteries and colleges, and having little history, either of nature or of time – did, out of no great quantity of matter and infinite agitation of wit, spin out unto us those laborious webs of learning which are extant in their books. For the wit and mind of man, if it work upon matter which is the contemplation of the creatures of God, worketh according to the stuff and is limited thereby; but if it work upon itself, as the spider worketh its web, then it is endless, and brings forth indeed cobwebs of learning, admirable for the fineness of thread and work, but of no substance or profit."33

Scholasticism, as the first phase of the revival of learning, though overshadowed by tradition and mediaeval dogmatism, showed great earnestness of purpose in ascertaining the truth by working "the wit and mind of man"; but it worked not "according to the stuff," and, having little to feed upon, it produced only speculations of truth and indications of future possibilities. There were many bright men among the scholastic philosophers, especially in the thirteenth century, who left their impress upon the age; yet scholasticism itself was affected by dogmatism and short-sightedness, and failed to utilize the means at its hand for the improvement of learning. It exercised a tyranny over all mental endeavor, for the reason that it was obliged in all of its efforts to carry through all of its reasoning the heavy weight of dogmatic theology. Whatever else it attempted, it could not shake itself free from this incubus of learning, through a great system of organized knowledge, which hung upon the thoughts and lives of men and attempted to explain all things in every conceivable way.

But to show that independent thinking was a crime one has only to refer to the results of the knowledge of Roger Bacon, who advanced his own methods of observation and criticism. Had the scholastics been able to accept what he clearly pointed out to them, namely, that reason can advance only by finding, through observation, new material upon which to work, science might have been active a full century in advance of what it was. He laid the foundation of experimental science, and pointed out the only way in which the revival of learning could be made permanent, but his voice was unheeded by those around him, and it remained for the philosophers of succeeding generations to estimate his real worth.

Cathedral and Monastic Schools. – There were two groups of schools under the management of the church, known as the cathedral and monastic schools. The first represented the schools that had developed in the cathedrals for the sons of lay members of the church; the second, those in the monasteries that were devoted largely to the education of the ministry. To understand fully the position of these schools it is necessary to go back a little and refer to the educational forces of Europe. For a long period after Alexandria had become established as a great centre of learning, Athens was really the centre of education in the East, and this city held her sway in educational affairs down to the second century. The influence of the traditions of great teachers and the encouragement and endowments given by emperors kept up a school at Athens, to which flocked the youth of the land who desired a superior education.

Finally, when the great Roman Empire joined to itself the Greek culture, there sprang up what was known as the Greek and Roman schools, or Graeco-Roman schools, although Rome was not without its centre of education at the famous Athenaeum. In these Graeco-Roman schools were taught grammar, rhetoric, and dialectic, music, arithmetic, geometry, and astronomy. The grammar of that day frequently included language, criticism, history, literature, metre; the dialectic considered logic, metaphysics, and ethics; while rhetoric contemplated the fitting of the youth for public life and for the law.

But these schools, though dealing in real knowledge for a time, gradually declined, chiefly on account of the declining moral powers of the empire and the relaxation of intellectual activity, people thinking more of ease and luxury and the power of wealth than of actual accomplishment. The internal disorganization, unjust taxation, and unjust rule of the empire had also a tendency to undermine education. The coming of the barbarians, with their honest, illiterate natures, had its influence, likewise, in overthrowing the few schools that remained.

The rise of Christianity, which supposed that all pagan literature and pagan knowledge were of the devil, and hence to be suppressed, opposed secular teaching, and tended to dethrone these schools. Constantine's effort to unite the church and state tended for a while to perpetuate secular institutions. But the pagan schools passed away; the philosophy of the age had run its course until it had become a hollow assumption, a desert of words, a weary round of speculation without vitality of expression; and the activity of the sophists in these later times narrowed all literary courses until they dwindled into mere matters of form. Perhaps, owing to its force, power, and dignity, the Roman law retained a vital position in the educational curriculum. The school at Athens was suppressed in 529 by Justinian, because, as it had been claimed, it was tainted with Oriental philosophy and allied with Egyptian magic, and hence could not develop ethical standards.

It is easy to observe how the ideas of Christian learning came into direct competition with the arrogant self-assumption and the hollowness of the selfish teachings of the old Graeco-Roman schools. The Christian doctrine, advocating the development of the individual life, intimate relations with God, the widening of social functions, with its teachings of humility, and humanity, could not tolerate the instruction given in these schools. Moreover, the Christian doctrine of education consisted, on the one hand, in preparing for the future life, and on the other, in the preparation of Christian ministers to teach this future life. As might be expected, when narrowed to this limit, Christian education had its dwarfing influence. If salvation were an important thing and salvation were to be obtained only by the denial of the life of this world, then there would be no object in perpetuating learning, no attempt to cultivate the mind, no tendency to develop the whole man on account of his moral and intellectual worth. The use of secular books was everywhere discouraged. As a result the instruction of the religious schools was of a very meagre nature.