PART IL and offers of the unver stes in in CHAP. I. altogether to cancel this passage. In the first place it is certain that both Oxford and Cambridge were represented partial at the council of Pisa'; and when the deputation from of the dee ine Oxford was passing through Paris, it was addressed by Gerson, then chancellor of the university of Paris, and complimented on the spirited interest in the welfare of the Church, which the body it represented had displayed at so important a juncture. At Constance, where the suppression of Wyclifism, as that heresy had reappeared in the movement led by John Huss, occupied a prominent place in the deliberations of the council, Cambridge was represented by its chancellor and other delegates, and Oxford by some of her most distinguished sons'. Both universities, again, were addressed by the university of Paris with a view to concerted action at the council of Basel'; and the fact that neither would seem to have so far responded to the invitation as to send delegates, is satisfactorily accounted for by the comparatively languid interest which the whole country, on the eve of political disturbance at home, appears to have taken in the lengthened proceedings of that council. That the suppression of Lollardism acted as a check upon free thought at the universities is probable enough, but it is far from supplying an adequate explanation of the 'torpor' and languor' to which Huber refers, and which undoubtedly prevailed. Between heresy of the most uncompromising character and complete subserviency to mere tradition, there was yet an interval that afforded sufficient scope for vigorous speculation and active organic developement; of this the position occupied by the university of Paris during the earlier part of the fifteenth century is incontestible evidence. The centre of intellectual activity had again been shifted; and during that period Paris was again what she had been in the 1 Labbo and Cossart, x1 2221; Wood-Guteh, 544, 545. Ecce quid præclara universitas Oxoniensis, unde sibi meruit congratulari, pridem ad hoc Concilium petendum determinavit se et misit in Franciam, scio qui præsens interfui dum proponeretur hæc conclusio,' Propositio facta a J, Gersonio ex parte 3 Cooper, Annals, 1 158, MS. Lambethiani, No. 447, fo. 143 (quoted by Cooper). days of Albertus and Aquinas. Never, declares Crevier, had CHAP IIL she been consulted and listened to with greater deference; never had she taken so conspicuous a part in the decision of affairs of such importance; while the names of Nicholas de Clamangis, Pierre d'Ailli, and Jean Gerson might vie with any that had yet adorned her academic annals'. It was the era of the great councils; and had the views advocated by the two last-named illustrious scholars of the College of Navarre obtained a permanent triumph over papal obstinacy, it is not improbable that the fierce convulsion of the sixteenth century might have been anticipated by more moderate measures in the fifteenth. A reformed and educated clergy, and the admitted right of synods œcumenical to overrule the authority of the pope himself, might have floated the Romish system over the two fatal rocks on which, in Germany and in England, it went to pieces. Of Gerson himself it has been truly said that he does more than almost any other man to link the thoughts of different periods together';' for, though essentially a repre-dia sentative of medieval thought, he presents a union of some of its most dissimilar phases and tendencies. The nominalist and yet the mystic; full of contempt for the fine spun cob webs' that occupied the ingenuity of the schools, full of reverence for Dionysius, 'the holy and the divine;' intent on reformation in the Church, yet consenting to the death of the noblest reformer of the age; ever yearning for peace, and yet ever foremost in the controversial fight,-he adds to the anomalies of a transitional period the features of an individual eclecticism. It is foreign to our purpose to enter here upon any discussion of the views which find expression in the 1 Crevier, 111 3. Similarly, of a somewhat earlier period in England, Mr Froude ob serves, If the Black Prince had lived, or if Richard 11 had inherited the temper of the Plantasenets, the cerlesi ctical system would have been spare 1 the misfortune of a longer reprieve. Its worst abuses would then have termiunted, and the refor tuation of doctrine in the 16th centary would have been left to fight its independent way unsupporte 1 by the * Prof. Maurice, Mudra Phila PART II. Bois and AP. II. De Triplici Theologia or in the De Monte Contemplationis; but in two of Gerson's shorter and comparatively unknown De treatises, the De Modis Significandi, and the De Concordia Maria. Metaphysicæ cum Logica, we have a valuable exposition of the state of metaphysical science at Paris at this period, and an incontrovertible proof of the progress which that science had made since the time of Abelard. In the fifty propositions into which each of these treatises is divided, the nominalistic conclusions are stated with a conciseness and clearness that far exceed what is to be found in any other writer of the century; it may not indeed be easy to shew any appreciable advance upon the views arrived at by Occam; but it is certainly a noticeable fact that those views are here reiterated with emphasis by one who had filled the office of chancellor in the same university that had seen the writings stration of the Oxford Franciscan given to the flames. It is to be noted also, as perhaps the most significant feature, that the alysies nominalistic doctrines are here identified with the real mean ing of Aristotle, while the positions of the realists, from Amalricus down to John Huss, are exhibited as instances of philosophic error'. The distinction to be observed between metaphysics and logic, on which Occam had insisted, is also asserted with even yet greater distinctness. It belongs to the metaphysician alone, says Gerson, to investigate the essences of things; the logician does not define the thing, but simply the notion; his object being, in more modern phraseology, to produce distinctness in concepts, which are the things of logic.' The theory to which the realists had adhered with such tenacity, that in some yet to be discovered treatise of the Stagyrite would be found the necessary exposition of the functions of logic as concerned with the definition. of things themselves', is here given to the winds; and the position taken up by Occam with reference to theology is sanctioned by the greatest authority of the fifteenth century. PART I Such then was the harvest which scholasticism finally reaped CHAP. in the fields of philosophy! After the toil of centuries it had at last succeeded in bringing back to view the original text of the great master, which the vagaries of medieval speculation had well-nigh obliterated'. But it is not the nominalist only that appears in these pages; the mystic and the theologian are also discernible. The grand old mediaval conception of theology, as the science of sciences, struggles for expression. Theology or rather ontology, in Gerson's view, is not necessarily a terra incognita for the intellect because not amenable to the reasonings which belong to the province of the dialectician. 'Even,' he G says, 'as the sculptor reveals the statue in the block' (a simile borrowed from his favorite Dionysius) 'not by what he brings in but by what he removes,' even so the divine nature is to be apprehended by the man, only as he ceases to be the logician and soars beyond the region of the Categories! Of the disputes of the theologians Gerson appears absolutely weary; affirming that it were better controversy should cease altogether than that discords like those which he had witnessed should continue to scandalise alike the faithful and the infidel. The date of the composition of these two treatises ex 1 A recent critic however sees in Gerson's treatise something more than a mere restoration of Aristotelian thought. The metaphysical philosophy of the Middle Ages, with its dominating controversy Letween realism and nominalism, that is, between metaphysie mixed with ontology and metaphysic pure, is n painful working back to the point of view which Aristotle occupie 1, and A rediscovery of his meaning. at the same time it was a reprodues tion of his meaning in a new and original moubi, so that the form was simpler and clearer, and the contra dictions which Aristotle's system contain 1, m its combination of ontology with metaphysie, were brought to View. This was a great step in adrance, although no one as yet aruso capable of introducing a principle of solution for these contradictions, *Cie Dionysius docet farves in TAP. I. plains their tone and invests them with additional interest PART IT. Gerson at this time was no longer chancellor of Paris. The noblest act of a far from ignoble career had made the duke of Burgundy his mortal foe. In 1418 he fled from the city in which it is no exaggeration to say, that he had 'for a time ruled like a king. He first took refuge in Bavaria, and finally found a home in a monastery of Celestines at Lyons, of which his brother was prior. It was here that on the eve of the Nativity, in 1426, he summed up the foregoing 'conclusions.' The medieval student loved to bring some cherished labour to its close at that sacred season of the year; and Gerson, as towards the end of life he thus enunciated his philosophical belief, glanced forward to a time, for him then very near, when these paths of thought and specu lation, which now crossed each other with bewildering complexity or vanished from the mental eye in widely opposed directions, should be found harmonious and concentric; when he should discern the true reconciliation, not merely of metaphysic and logic, but of all knowledge, and see no longer as through a glass darkly. Creation of The intercourse between Paris and the English universities appears to have died out about the time of Gerson's chancellorship, and we have failed to discover any evidence that his speculations served in any way to stimulate the progress of philosophic thought in England throughout the century. Over both countries the storm of war burst with peculiar severity: and when the fierce feuds of the Armage nacs and the Burgundians, the struggle between the two nations, and the Wars of the Roses were over, the supremacy of Paris as the chief seat of European learning was also at Baim that Prof. Maurice, Modern Philosophy, p. 49. Concordia metaphysics cum theologin fiet, si consideretur ens simpliciter vel ens purum, vel ons universaliter perfectum, quod est Deus. Aut si consideretur generalis ratio objectalis entis. Seenndun spectat ad metaphysicam: primum proprie nd theologiam, in qua Deus est subjectum. Est autem theologia duplex, scilicet vim et patrim. Theologin vin respicit ens primum ut creditum cum suis attributivis non excludendo intelligentiam de multis. Theologia antem patrim respicit ens primum ut facialiter visum et objec talitur in seipso, non in speculo vel nigmate. Gratias ipsi qui aperuit hane concordiam hominibus bonæ voluntatis. Opera, iv 829, 830. |