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Updated: June 8, 2025
Here the scholastics wrangle about dialectic questions, they do not explain what original righteousness is. What else is this than that there were embodied in man such wisdom and righteousness as apprehended God, and in which God was reflected, i.e., to man there were given the gifts of the knowledge of God, the fear of God, confidence in God, and the like?
In the section on property we have shown that Aquinas, following the Fathers and the tradition of the early Church, was an uncompromising advocate of private property, and that he drew no distinction between the means of production and any other kind of wealth; in the section on just price we have shown that labour was regarded by the mediævals as but a single one of the elements which entered into the determination of value; and in the section on usury we have shown that many forms of unearned income were not only tolerated, but approved by the scholastics.
We dealt in the last chapter with the duties which attached to property in respect of its acquisition and use, and we now pass to the duties which attached to it in respect of its exchange. As we indicated above, the right to exchange one's goods for the goods or the money of another person was, according to the scholastics, one of the necessary corollaries of the right of private property.
They have accepted declarations with regard to the absolute dependence of the scholastics on authority, their almost divine worship of Aristotle, their utter readiness to accept authoritative assertions provided they came with the stamp of a mighty name, and then their complete lack of attention to observation and above all to experiment.
He had more sense of history than his contemporaries, and he was instinctively eclectic. He believed he could learn something from each of his great predecessors. We see him reaching back to cull a notion from Plato or from Aristotle; he even found something of use in the scholastics.
Luther, in not yielding further to those influences, remained a German. Philosophy, then, engrossed him, and allowed him but little time for other things. And in studying this, he sought to grapple with the highest problems of the human understanding. These problems occupied also the labours of the later Scholastics, however faulty were the forms in which they clothed their ideas.
No one kind of true fossil can be proved to be older or younger than another intrinsically and necessarily, and the methods of reasoning by which this idea has been supported in the past are little else than a burlesque on modern scientific methods, and are a belated survival from the methods of the scholastics of the Middle Ages. Not by any means that all rock deposits are of the same age.
The Scholastics, the mediaeval writers of every school, except a few of that Manichean brood of sects, admitted the necessity of almsgiving. They looked on it from a moral point of view as a high virtue, and from an economic standpoint as a correlative to their individualistic ideas on private property. The one without the other would be unjust.
Thus it seemed to the sophists, the scholastics, the alchemists, the cabalists, the talmudists; and thus it seems to our own scientific science, and to our art for the sake of art. "But art, science! You repudiate art and science; that is, you repudiate that by which mankind lives!"
Like most theological terms they cut themselves loose from their necessary setting, which, in this case, is human nature and society. When the necessary critical work has been done, what is left of the stately theology reared by Church Fathers, councils and scholastics? Apparently only a mellowed religion with a universalistic outlook and a strong ethical trend.
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