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In the time of Leo there were none of these things. It was a poor, miserable, ignorant, anarchical, superstitious age. In such an age the concentration of power in the hands of an intelligent man is always a public benefit. Certainly it was wielded wisely by Leo, and for beneficent ends. He established the patristic literature.
Nature was not destroyed by its novel appendages, nor did reason die in the cloister: it hibernated there, and could come back to its own in due season, only a little dazed and weakened by its long confinement. Such, at least, is the situation in Catholic regions, where the Patristic philosophy has not appreciably varied.
Mivart tells us that Catholic theology is in harmony with all that modern science can possibly require; that "to the general theory of evolution, and to the special Darwinian form of it, no exception ... need be taken on the ground of orthodoxy;" and that "law and regularity, not arbitrary intervention, was the Patristic ideal of creation," we have to choose between his dictum, as a theologian, and that of a great light of his Church, whom he himself declares to be "widely venerated as an authority, and whose orthodoxy has never been questioned."
Yet there was very little in the past learning of Christian teachers to guide them in these matters, for the patristic theories, which we have already described, and a few isolated passages cited in the Decretals of Gratian, formed as yet almost the only contribution to the study of these sciences.
Denial is useless, mere condemnation is of small value, explanation alone will meet the difficulty. Thus when we are brought face to face with the recital of magical wonders as attributed to Simon in the patristic legends, it is not sufficient to sweep them on one side and ticket them with the contemptuous label of "superstition."
His profound learning for he was acknowledged to be one of the most learned men in Europe especially his thorough familiarity with all precedents drawn from patristic antiquity, made him a great authority in the perplexities which from time to time divided the Nonjurors. It was mainly to him that Nelson owed his return to the established Communion.
Why don't you give us a touch, of learned discussion, such as the people hear every Sunday in the church of Reverend Doctor Heavyasbricks, when, with one eye on heaven and the other on the old man in the gallery, he speaks of the Tridentine theory of original sin, and Patristic Soteriology, Mediæval Trinitarianism, and Antiochian Anthropology?
All this did Leo, and his immediate successors. How much worse Roman Catholicism would have been but for his august example and authority! How much better to educate the ignorant people, who have souls to save, by the patristic than by heathen literature, with all its poison of false philosophies and corrupting stimulants!
The argument e Consensu Gentium has often been accredited with being peculiarly the patristic argument for the existence of God, and for this conclusion the use of it in Epicurean theology, and the doctrine of the natural, innate idea of God already considered, would fully prepare us; but the fact is that, apart from frequent passing references to the "natural opinion" mentioned in the preceding chapter, the instances in which the argument is explicitly made use of are not much more numerous than in the case of the other forms.
The new religion was long in adapting itself to literary form; and if, between the era of the Antonines and that of Diocletian, a century passes in which all the important literature is Christian, this is rather due to the general decay of art and letters, than to any high literary quality in the earlier patristic writing.
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