Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: June 3, 2025
The theological education of the modern clergy, although very dry, gives us no idea of this, for the Renaissance has introduced into all our teachings, even the most irregular, a share of belles lettres and of method, which has infused more or less of the humanities into scholasticism.
What the Latin Church preserved was not the religion of Christ, which lived on by its inherent indestructibility, but parts of the Aristotelian and Platonic philosophies, distorted and petrified by scholasticism, a vast quantity of purely Pagan superstitions, and the arcana imperii of Roman Cæsarism.
Maximus represents almost the last speculative activity of the Greek Church, but the influence of the Pseudo-Dionysian writing was transmitted to the West in the ninth century by Erigena, in whose speculative spirit both the scholasticism and the mysticism of the Middle Ages have their rise.
The fact of the bare cohesion itself is all that the notion of the substance signifies. Behind that fact is nothing. Scholasticism has taken the notion of substance from common sense and made it very technical and articulate. Few things would seem to have fewer pragmatic consequences for us than substances, cut off as we are from every contact with them.
Thomas Aquinas, a summary of the earlier scholasticism, is like a vast bookcase with compartments, which, if Catholicism is to endure, will be of service to all time, the decisions of councils and of Popes in the future having, so to speak, their place marked out for them beforehand. There can be no question of progress in such an order of exposition.
The speculative synthesis of Greek and Alexandrine Science was a superb training in Deduction, in the descent from consciousness to Nature. Abstracted from its relations with reality, the scholasticism of the Middle Ages pushed Deduction to mania and moonshine.
If we hope to gain any understanding of these matters we must begin by taking them out of that heated and fanatical atmosphere in which the Hebrew tradition has enveloped them. The Jews had no philosophy, and when their national traditions came to be theoretically explicated and justified, they were made to issue in a puerile scholasticism and a rabid intolerance.
This is the old dispute of nominalists and realists, a piece of scholasticism long since obsolete applied to the problems of modern society, and not even worth refutation, least of all worthy of any man who has once correctly recognised the reality of human society, and made it the guiding motive of his thought.
Christian scholasticism was first based upon fragments of Aristotle and chiefly inspired by Neo-Platonism: through the Arabs it became acquainted with almost the whole of Aristotle and also with the special methods by which the Arabs approach the problem of this philosophy.
The empire was crumbling, and upon its ruins the race of the future and social conditions of modern times were forming. Paganism and Druidism would have been an impossibility. Christianity, even with its lustre dimmed, its purity tarnished, its simplicity overlaid with scholasticism, was better than these. The miracle had been accomplished. The great Roman Empire had said, "I am Christian."
Word Of The Day
Others Looking