of Aristotle, partly of dualism, prevented the organized church from taking any stand against slavery per se. But from Chrysostom and Ambrose on, both in the East and West, the pulpit enforced the equality of all men in Christ Jesus, and dictated conditions for the slave which had they been enforced would have made his labor highly unprofitable.1

The Germanic tribes accepted, on the whole, the social arrangements of the later Roman Empire, with, of course, modifications due to the economic situation. In fact, both religious and social forms seem to have profoundly suffered during the time called, for lack of a better name, the "Völkerwandering" or Germanic invasion. The period of ecclesiastical reconstruction and missionary effort introduced the RomanGreek civilization founded upon the formulated law of Justinian and Theodosius, and thus the way was made ready for the feudal Middle Ages.

The period is one of long incubation, but is neither so dark nor so reactionary as has been commonly represented.

When once more the human spirit awoke to a realizing selfconsciousness, it discovered the fact that it was now not a question of a small class but of the race. The national democracy of the Old and the race democracy of the New Testaments are not the only factors in this reawakening. All through the period from Gregory I to Charlemagne, Aristotle and Cicero were still at work, and the ancient philosophy and science were kept alive both in the cloisters and among the Mahometans. But the Christian church was the popular even if very inefficient teacher. It is quite useless to attempt to depreciate her services in the tone of Yves Guyot. The barbarism and darkness of this period were not her fault. They sprang from the giving way of the social structure under the weight of warlike impact from the north. The social structure was rotten before the Christian church had power, and the northern invasion would

1

1 Cf. Chrysostom, Epist. ad Eph. IV and Hom. 15: 3.

'Etude sur les doctrines sociales du Christianisme (Guyot et Lacroix), 1873, and new ed., 1903.

have been far more destructive of pagan law and culture had not the Christianized Papal church stood as mediator between two levels of culture and mitigated in a hundred ways the severity of the invasion.

Slowly but steadily the hierarchy became by processes of absorption and adjustment the almost perfect expression of the conglomerate religious life of the various national units that now rise on the ruins of Roman might. For one thousand years (400-1453) the Eastern church stayed the tide of Mahometan invasion, and bound together the life of the races to which she gave the only real unity they had. The Western church carried on her mission of culture and national unification with astounding vigor and enthusiasm. It must always be remembered, both by friend and foe, that neither the Eastern nor Western churches were the Christianity of the synoptic Gospels, nor even of John and Paul. Whatever may be our estimate of the elements that enter in, monasticism, Neoplatonism, oriental mysticism, etc., whether we regard them as obnoxious intrusions or as justified additions under the providential guidance of the promised Spirit, we must as historians take account of them and trace them to their sources as well as estimate their influence on the total culture. It is amazing that any man should really seek to explain the ethical ideals of the militant papal church from the pages of the New Testament alone. The papal church is herself wiser and more historical than that. She claims the inward authority of an infallible guidance progressively unfolding the truth according to her needs. From age to age she expects the same authority to guide her with equally infallible wisdom amid the future complications.

The logical modern Protestant has rejected all infallible guidance. He accepts unreservedly the relative character of all knowledge. All absolute truth is in the region of faith and hope. For him the period could hardly have been otherwise than it was, seeing that it had as its religious guides such very imperfect and yet such nobly imperfect ecclesiastics, whose ideals

were the product of an historic synthesis which faith calls providential, but which none the less combined many elements whose weakness we now easily discover and whose limitations were definite and marked.

CHAPTER VI

SCHOLASTICISM AND ITS ETHICS

I. Definition of Scholasticism and Its Beginnings-II. Constructive Scholasticism-III. Critical Scholasticism-IV. Mystical Scholasticism.

I. THE ETHICS OF SCHOLASTICISM

The definition of scholasticism for our purpose is not difficult to make. It was essentially the attempt to rationalize the growing experiences of the race within the limits of a system which, it was assumed, was closed. This closed system was the unorganized teaching of the culture-bearing church. She came to the Western world with the ethics of the Old and New Testaments, the ethics of Plato and the Orient, of Aristotle and the later Hellenism. All alike were accepted by her on the basis of tradition and fulfilled function. She in her turn gave them to the world of western Europe in the name of divine authority, and claimed for herself the right of final decision in all matters of ethical controversy. The innumerable contradictions within this conglomerate of systems she was altogether too busy to see. The supposed basis was her divine authority. What the faithful said or taught was final. The Fathers and the councils are ever on the lips of Gregory and Isidore.

In point of fact the system was one vast convenient compromise. The high religious culture of Judaism, with its lofty ethics culminating in the teachings of Jesus and Paul, was as much beyond the average comprehension as were the fine and subtile intellectual and artistic exactitudes reached by Greece at her best. The thorough-going metaphysical systems of the Orient, with their pessimism and passivity, were equally beyond the rude north, and were quite impossible teachings in the midst of her stern struggle with nature and life.

From all this past the hierarchy took elements which she needed for her purpose; she came bearing gifts from Egypt, Persia, Greece, Rome, and Judea, but supposed that all came from one Christian source and that the message she brought with her had a single inspiration. For her practical purposes Aristotle and Plato, speaking with the voice of Augustine or Athanasius, were as divinely inspired as Amos or Paul. She adapted as best she could the various messages to the nations she was trying to train. For the work and services of the church we should all be thankful, while yet remembering that she was only one agent of culture among many and that the child who really learns is largely self-taught.

From the time of Charlemagne onward the organization of life takes another step forward. With the so-called "conversion" of the Saxons the nominal subjection of the north to southern culture was completed. The child became a youth. It is quite unhistorical to think of the Middle Ages as "dark" or as a fearful fall from the heights of Hellenistic attainment. In those ages of intense activity the foundations were being laid in song and art, in language and in law, in logic and religion for that certainly larger and we hope fairer temple that is yet to crown the world's acropolis.

Alcuin was no scholastic; that is to say, he had no deliberate purpose to rationalize the heterogeneous elements of culture he highly prized and profoundly appropriated. He is one of the greatest products of the unquestioning acceptance by the Western and northern races of the culture brought from the south.

But even in the time of Alcuin the signs of a coming independence are not wholly lacking.

The influence of authority has its wholesome limits. We all enter life under authority. The child must obey. Its life depends in a thousand cases upon a prompt and unquestioning obedience to an experience which, however faulty, is far superior to the child's. The Roman hierarchy demanded this unquestioning obedience. Her voice was God's voice. And she was so vastly superior to the untrained north that she received, if not