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In pride, in ambition, and in executive ability the Normans bore a closer resemblance to the old heroic Romans than did the Saxons. The next archbishop after Lanfranc was Anselm, appointed by William Rufus. Anselm was a great scholar, the profoundest of the early Schoolmen; a man of meditative habits, who it was presumed would not interfere with royal encroachments.
Education had brought many of them to discern, in the Church's teachings, an anachronistic medley of myths and legends, of theories of schoolmen and theologians, of surviving pagan superstitions which could not be translated into life. They saw, in Christianity, only the adulterations of the centuries.
It is a very important axiom of the schoolmen in this case that, a posse ad esse non valet consequentia, you can draw no inference from the possibility of a thing to its reality, but that, in the reverse order, ab esse ad posse, the inference is inevitable: if it is, or if it ever has been then of necessity it can be.
Victor; the second by John of Salisbury himself; the third, by a class of schoolmen whom he called Cornificii, as though they made a practice of inventing horns of dilemma on which to fix their opponents; as, for example, they asked whether a pig which was led to market was led by the man or the cord. One asks instantly: What cord? Whether Grace, for instance, or Free Will?
This type of literary scholarship has been too much overlooked, and, as I said before, too exclusive an attention has been given to the thirteenth-century schoolmen, who are neither from a literary nor from a philosophical point of view as representative of mediaeval scholars, and philosophically they are often really unmediaeval, for the general quality of mediaeval thought is its Platonism: the Aristotelian logic was indeed known to the Middle Ages through Boethius, but the other Aristotelian works were not known till towards the middle of the thirteenth century.
In the religious literature, moreover, as reshaped by the schoolmen of the time, his rôle is even more prominent than that of Marduk. As a water-god, and more particularly as the god to whom the largest body of water known to the Babylonians was sacred, Ea was regarded as the source and giver of wisdom.
On these mediaeval university professors the schoolmen Lord Bacon long ago pronounced a judgment that may well stand to-day. Our civilization and the human mind, critical and uncritical, as we now find it in our western world, is a direct and uninterrupted outgrowth of the civilization and thought of the later Middle Ages.
'Real, 'virtual, 'entity, 'nonentity, 'equivocation, 'objective, 'subjective, with many more unknown to classical Latin, but now almost necessities to us, were first coined by the Schoolmen; and, passing over from them into the speech of others more or less interested in their speculations, have gradually filtered through the successive strata of society, till now some of them have reached to quite the lowest.
As a result, the personality of man, and with it the immortality of the soul, disappeared, and even the personality of God threatened to lose itself in the universe which He had created. These tendencies will be clear from a short account of the chief schoolmen or writers on Scholastic Philosophy. The first great names are those of Roscelin and Anselm of Canterbury.
Too many thoroughly well-meaning men and women in the America of to-day glibly repeat and accept much as medieval schoolmen repeated and accepted authorized dogma in their day various assumptions and speculations by Marx and others which by the lapse of time and by actual experiment have been shown to possess not one shred of value.
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