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In their zeal to uphold the claim of the throne to undivided loyalty, they charged Christians with treasonable propensities in that they avow fidelity to their Lord and Master. They arrayed forth sophistical arguments without the wit of Sophists, and scholastic tortuosities minus the niceties of the Schoolmen.
Coutenson, Theologia Mentis et Cordis, iii. 388-389, Paris, 1875; and Billnart, De Justitia, i. 123-124, Liège, 1746. Besides the Schoolmen, by whom the problems of life were viewed in the refracted light of theology and philosophy, there was another important class in mediaeval times which exercised itself over the same social questions, but visaged them from an entirely different angle.
They were satisfied with the consciousness of their own perseverance and ingenuity. But the most memorable body of men that adorned these ages, were the Schoolmen. They may be considered as the discoverers of the art of logic.
We see no severely logical Calvin, pushing out his metaphysical deductions until he had chained the intellect of his party to a system of incomparable grandeur and yet of repulsive austerity, exacting all the while the same allegiance to doctrines which he deduced from the writings of Paul as he did to the direct declarations of Christ; next to Thomas Aquinas, the acutest logician the Church has known; a system-maker, like the great Dominican schoolmen, and their common master and oracle, Saint Augustine of Hippo.
Indeed, directly one goes beyond the range of measurement and weighing and classification, one finds a sort of unprogressive floundering going on, which throws the strongest doubts upon the practical applicability of the current logical and metaphysical conceptions in those fields. We have emerged only partially from the age of the schoolmen In these directions we have not emerged at all.
Figuratively we may say that every mind is a world of ghosts, ghosts incomparably more numerous than the acknowledged millions of the higher Shinto Kami and that the spectral population of one grain of brain-matter more than realizes the wildest fancies of the medieval schoolmen about the number of angels able to stand on the point of a needle.
The monks of the Charterhouse, who died the death of martyrs rather than perjure themselves, win no meed of praise from Erasmus they were, forsooth, schoolmen; and the noble Friars-Observants who, when threatened with a living tomb in the river Thames, for the same cause, calmly replied that the road to heaven was as near by water as by land, are nothing to him, for did they not learn their theology of Duns Scotus.
But that nonconformity is neither scandal nor contempt, Parker hath made it most evident. For, as touching contempt, he showeth out of fathers, councils, canon law, schoolmen, and modern divines, that non obedire is not contempt, but nolle obedire, or superbiendo repugnare. Yea, out of Formalists themselves, he showeth the difference betwixt subjection and obedience.
Every day I hear "Cause," "Law," "Force," "Vitality," spoken of as entities, by people who can enjoy Swift's joke about the meat-roasting quality of the smoke-jack, and comfort themselves with the reflection that they are not even as those benighted schoolmen. Well, this great system had its day, and then it was sapped and mined by two influences.
Zeno of Elea, the friend and pupil of Parmenides, born 500 B.C., brought nothing new to the system, but invented Dialectics, the art of disputation, that department of logic which afterward became so powerful in the hands of Plato and Aristotle, and so generally admired among the schoolmen. It seeks to establish truth by refuting error through the reductio ad absurdum.
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