CHAPTER II

SOURCES OF WYCLIFFIANISM

Wycliffe's literary associations with Oxford His relation to Scholasticism The Scholastic method - Its rise and progress nalism and Realism - The teaching of Aquinas

- Nomi

Duns Scotus and Reaction in William of Ockham

"Defen

his absolutist doctrines sor Pacis" of Marsiglio - Difference between English and Continental Scholasticism - Wycliffe and the Nominalist controversy - His modified Realism - His attitude towards theological problems Thomas Bradwardine - Wycliffe's criticism of Bradwardine - Treatises on "Divine Dominion" and "Civil Lordship" - Wycliffe the last great Schoolman - His alliance with John of Gaunt - Conference of Bruges - Wycliffe's literary activity.

I

At this time Wycliffe had achieved the desire of his heart; his associations with Oxford were destined to be prolonged and memorable, and from there his prolific pen gave forth those larger works on philosophy and theology which are now seldom read. Many of his pamphlets and treatises on papal claims and imposts, the political status of the clergy, indulgences, and other contentious issues were also written at the University. His friendship with its teachers and doctors was a welcome aid and a protection in his hours of loneliness and danger. And when in his declining years its leaders forsook him, their desertion was a severe blow to his propaganda. In the interval, if the practical affairs of the nation were benefited by his diversified yet systematized knowledge, those which related to religious and clerical questions were quite as fortunate. His utterances and writings were very unequal in merit,

but the best of them were not mere turgid rhetoric profusely poured out; they crystallized around an axiomatic and intrepid reasoning which was the imperative working principle in many of his intellectual and literary efforts. His premises may not be ours; indeed, we may think them often obscure or incomplete, and at times unwarranted. Yet it is patent that some were carefully chosen, and while in the absence of the inductive method the matter of his argument was frequently at fault, its form was usually correct. In brief, Wycliffe was a Schoolman, whose strength and weakness were alike due to an inherited system which should be explained in order that his merits as a thinker may be appreciated.

Scholasticism was an able and praiseworthy attempt to reconcile the dogmas of faith with the dictates of reason, and thus formulate an inclusive system on the presupposition that the creed of the Church was the one reality capable of rationalization. As the product of Christian intellectualism, it acted under the Aristotelian method, and was governed by the fundamental assumption that all phenomena must be understood from and toward theology. The early Fathers had bequeathed to their successors a well-articulated and comprehensive theological dogma, and also the philosophical apparatus which determined and shaped its content. When the Schoolmen realized the nature of the bequest they endeavored to recover the spirit of inquiry which lay behind its results, and consequently the Church entered, almost automatically, upon a period of stress and strain similar to those she had previously experienced. Now, however, additional factors intervened and intensified the situation. The organization and growth of the Papacy reinforced the predicates of authority, catholicity, dogmatism, and the predominance of spiritual claims, while the imperial influence of St. Augustine was widely diffused in contemporary theology.

The Scholastic system can be surveyed in two nearly

equal divisions of the period extending from the ninth to the end of the fifteenth century. The first of these divisions, which terminated with the twelfth century, was represented by Erigena,1 Roscellinus, Anselm, William of Champeaux and his pupil Abailard; the second, by Albertus Magnus, Thomas Aquinas, Duns Scotus, and William of Ockham. The science of these scholars, in so far as that term is applicable, dealt almost exclusively with divinity. Yet theirs was an age of reason as well as of faith, and no part of their work could be canceled without a shock to the continuity of progress. It is easy for the disciples of later intellectualism to say that their pursuit of truth was a mockery, since they started upon the journey carrying their convictions with them, or that they fabricated absurd and ridiculous problems and then proceeded to demonstrate their validity or invalidity. The Schoolmen do not deserve these gibes; they keenly felt the spiritual experiences on which they discoursed, and craved an adequate defense for them. Careless criticism of their action has been displaced by the weighty judgment of Harnack, that their system "gives practical proof of eagerness in thinking and exhibits an energy in subjecting all that is real and valuable to thought to which we can find, perhaps, no parallel in any other age. If their philosophy was not an effective means for enriching knowledge, it was a method for the training of the intellect which strengthened the reasoning powers and prepared them for penetrative and comprehensive work. In these respects the metaphysic of the Middle Ages is closely related to that of later experimental schools; its mission was to expand and invigorate the human mind until the boundless fields of the natural sciences were opened to research.

"2

1 Erigena was really of the spiritual tradition of the Christian Mystics and intellectually a Neo-Platonist, rather than a typical Scholastic. He may be regarded as a connecting link between these schools and the more pronounced Scholasticism which predominated from the eleventh to the fourteenth centuries.

2 "History of Dogma"; Vol. VI, p. 25.

The two camps of Realists and Nominalists furnished the material for scholastic discussion. The Introduction to the "Isagoge" of Porphyry, the Neo-Platonist, anticipated the differences which afterwards separated them. "Next concerning genera and species the question indeed whether they have a substantial existence, or whether they consist in bare intellectual concepts only, or whether if they have a substantial existence they are corporeal or incorporeal, and whether they are inseparable from the insensible properties of things, or are only in these properties and subsisting about them, I shall forbear to determine, for a question of this kind is very deep." The majority of his readers will undoubtedly cheerfully acquiesce in this decision.

The Realists contended that reality belonged only to universal conceptions, and that particulars of any kind were merely mental conveniences. For example, the term "house" did not denote the thing itself, but only the immaterial idea. This reasoning was also applied to man, for whom reality consisted in the humanity shared with all men and not in a distinct ego. Individuality was entirely dependent upon its participation in the general essence of the species. Everything in heaven and on earth was primarily of one substance with the all-comprehending Universal Being. The germs of the Pantheism of Spinoza can be detected here, and also those of later forms of Idealism. The Nominalists maintained that universals were merely terms, and that reality had no meaning apart from the individual and the particular; intellectual conceptions and universal relations being purely mental processes without any actual existence. These unqualified assertions were sufficiently damaging to orthodoxy to alarm its supporters. Their instincts revolted against a doctrine of which, as Dr. Rashdall comments, the skeptical sensationalism of Hume and the crudest forms of later materialism were but illogical attenuations. Yet, while Nominalism did not secure any permanent hold upon the accepted theology of the Church,

its insistence that the particular and the individual were the only realities paved the way for the inductive method in physical investigation.

II

Realism received its greatest exposition and defense from St. Thomas Aquinas, an Italian of rank and the Schoolman par excellence, who lived from 1227 to 1274. The pupil of Albertus Magnus in the Dominican school at Cologne, in 1245 he followed his master to Paris, where he graduated in theology, after which he returned to Cologne to become assistant to Albertus. Aquinas surpassed all other teachers as the embodied essence of Scholasticism and the most admirable example of the spirit and doctrine of the medieval Church. His "Summa Theologiæ" is an unequaled effort, in which the mysteries of the Christian faith and the certitudes of the human reason are defined as the two sources of knowledge. While they are distinct in themselves, revelation has the indisputable priority, since, as the fountain of absolute truth, it manifests the life of Deity, and its sovereign precepts are the causes and not the results of that manifestation. Both faith and reason must be received as they are given, in their completeness and unity, with no part advanced at the expense of the rest. The Holy Scriptures and Church tradition being the appointed channels of Divine verity, the student should know the doctrines of the Bible and the interpretations of the Fathers, together with the decisions of the Councils thereupon.

Reason, as Aquinas conceived it, was infinitely more than the product of any single brain. It was the presiding and inspiring attribute of the collective human mind, which hitherto had found its freest vent in the meditations of Plato and the methods of Aristotle. The life of reason did not remain in a state of disintegration and confinement to 1 H. B. Workman: "The Dawn of the Reformation"; Vol. I, p. 132.