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They believe that man is the only animal capable of reasoning and that ever does reason. This is a view that makes the twentieth-century scientist smile. It is not modern at all. It is distinctly mediaeval. President Roosevelt and John Burroughs, in advancing such a view, are homocentric in the same fashion that the scholastics of earlier and darker centuries were homocentric.
For of this faith which believes that for Christ's sake the Father is propitious to us there is not a syllable in the scholastics. Everywhere they hold that we are accepted and righteous because of our works, wrought either from reason, or certainly wrought by the inclination of that love concerning which they speak.
Substance is to be defined by active force, by which we mean something different from and better than the bare possibility or capacity of the Scholastics. Because of its inner activity every existing thing is a determinate individual, and different from every other being. Substance is an individual being endowed with force.
Who does not see what preposterous thoughts our adversaries entertain? For this cannot be judged except from the Word of God, of which the scholastics, in their discussions, do not frequently treat. These were the reasons why, in the description of original sin, we made mention of concupiscence also, and denied to man's natural strength the fear of God and trust in Him.
By sacrificing His Son for us God revealed Himself to us as a merciful Father who donates remission of sins, righteousness, and life everlasting for Christ's sake. God hands out His gifts freely unto all men. That is the praise and glory of His mercy. The scholastics explain the way of salvation in this manner.
If it is true faith it will surely take Christ for its object. Christ, apprehended by faith and dwelling in the heart, constitutes Christian righteousness, for which God gives eternal life. In contrast to the doting dreams of the scholastics, we teach this: First a person must learn to know himself from the Law.
In proportion to the hatred of orthodox ecclesiastics like Anselme of Laon and Saint Bernard, was the admiration of young men and of the infant universities. Nothing embarrassed him. He sought a reason for all things. He appealed to reason rather than authority, yet made the common mistake of the scholastics in supposing that metaphysics could explain everything.
The notion of a special nature, a peculiar innate power and activity what the scholastics called a "substantial form" will be distasteful to many. The objection to the notion seems, however, to be a futile one, for it is absolutely impossible to altogether avoid such a conception and such an assumption.
He complains that on one hand the reformers left nothing untouched; that, on the other, the scholastics would retain every abuse, and every superfluity: Wisdom, he thought, lay between them; the reformers should have respected what antiquity consecrated; the Catholics should have abandoned modern doctrines and modern practices to the discretion of individuals.
Thus it was among the Greeks the sophists, then among the Christians the mystics, gnostics, scholastics, among the Hebrews the Talmudists and Cabalists, and so on everywhere, down to our own times.
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