ὁ γὰρ ἄλλα μὲν ἀγορεύων τρόπος, ἕτερα δὲ ὧν λέγει σημαίνων, ἐπωνύμως 'Aλλŋyopia kadeîral.—HERACLIDES PONTICUS, Allegg. Homer.

Ἦν ὅτε ἤκμαζε τὰ ἡμέτερα καὶ καλῶς εἶχεν, ἡνίκα τὸ μὲν περιττὸν τοῦτο καὶ κατεγλωττισμένον τῆς θεολογίας καὶ ἔντεχνον οὐδὲ παρόδον εἶχεν εἰς τὰς Oeías avλás.-GREG. NAZ. Orat. xxi.

"Melius est dubitare de occultis, quam litigare de incertis."—Aug. De Gen. ad lit. c. v.

'Philosophia tua te vexat."-LUTHER to MELANCHTHON.

"That which by right exposition buildeth up Christian faith, being misconstrued, breedeth error; between true and false construction the difference reason must show."-HOOKER, Eccl. Pol. iii. § 8.

"Theologia haec Scholastica, quanta quanta est, magis Ethnica quam Christiana est, non ex S. Literis hausta, sed ex Aristotelis Metaphysica consuta et conflata; quae multo plus habet rixarum philosophicarum quam Christianae pietatis."-GROTIUS, De studiis instituendis (1645), P. 240.

...

"Deliver me . . . from unhealthy enquiries and interminable disputes."-PRAYER OF BISHOP ANDREWES.

"The plague of the Church for above a thousand years has been the enlarging our creed, and making more fundamentals than God ever made."-BAXTER.

"L'ignorance vaut beaucoup mieux que cette fausse science qui fait que l'on s'imagine savoir ce qu'on ne sait pas."-ARNAULD, Logique de Port Royal.

"Eine Spekulation auf dürrer Heide, eine Dialektik ohne das erforderliche Materiale der Kenntniss, ein Formalismus ohne Fülle des Inhaltes und ohne Freiheit der Bewegungen."-KLAUSEN, Hermen. p. 190.

LECTURE V.

SCHOLASTIC EXEGESIS.

"Guard that which is committed unto thee, turning away from... the antitheses of the knowledge which is falsely so called; which some professing have missed the mark concerning the faith."-1 TIM. vi. 20.

GREGORY THE GREAT died in the year 604. With him the age of theological originality ceased for five centuries; and for four centuries more the study of the Bible was fettered by narrow restrictions, and misdirected in unprofitable efforts. We approach the subject of mediaeval exegesis with every desire to judge it in the kindliest spirit; but we are compelled to say that during the Dark Ages, from the seventh to the twelfth century, and during the scholastic epoch, from the twelfth to the sixteenth, there are but a few of the many who toiled in this field who added a single essential principle, or furnished a single original contribution to the explanation of the Word of God. During these nine centuries we find very little except the "glimmerings and decays" of patristic exposition. Much of the learning which still continued to exist was devoted to something which was meant for exegesis, yet not one writer in hundreds showed any true conception of

1 The word axolaσTIKòs is first found in a letter of Theophrastus, ap. Diog. Laert. v. 20; Scholasticus in Petronius. In the 'AoTeia of the PseudoHierocles it is surrounded with grotesque associations. But it is perhaps simplest to derive the word "scholasticism" from the schools of Charlemagne. See Hauréau, Philos. Scholastique, i. 7; Brucker, Hist. Phil. iii. 710. In Art. 13 the Schoolmen are called "the School Authors." On the connection between Patristic and Scholastic systems, see Ueberweg, Hist. of Philos. i. 262.

what exegesis really implies. Sometimes, indeed, they repeat correct principles borrowed from Jerome and Augustine, but in practice they abandon these principles as soon as they are enunciated, and give us folio volumes of dogma, morality, and system, which profess to be based on Scripture, but have for the most part no real connection with the passages to which they are attached.1

The Papal system had established a secure despotism over the minds of men. The sources of all Christian truth were supposed to be furnished by Scripture and tradition; and the Church-by which was mainly meant the Pope-was held to be the infallible interpreter of both. In the seventh century the whole fabric of society still reeled with the terrible and continuous shocks which it had received from the storms of barbarian invasion, when Goths, Vandals, Sarmatians, Gepidae, Alani, Heruli, Huns, Suevi, Saxons, and Burgundians, had poured themselves upon the West. Learning naturally perished in the storm. "Woe to our days," exclaimed Gregory of Tours, "for the study of letters has perished from us." 2 When Didier, Archbishop of Vienne, tried to reintroduce the teaching of grammar, Gregory the Great, the most fertile and eloquent moralist of his dreary age, in words which irresistibly remind us of what Jack Cade says to Lord Saye and Sele in Shakespeare's Henry VI., wrote to him, "I can scarcely mention without shame that your Fraternity explains grammar to certain persons. What a deadly and heinous fault!"3 Fortunatus († 609), though a leading poet

1 Homiletics have been to an incredible extent the Phylloxera Vastatrix of exegesis, and preachers with their habit of thrusting into texts an endless variety of commonplaces which have no connexion with them, have become privileged misinterpreters. They have ploughed with the unequally-yoked ox and ass of science and sermon-making, and made texts an excuse for saying this or that as it pleased them, with no thought of the real meaning of words.

2 Greg. Tur. Hist. Franc. Prooem. Compare Lupus, Ep. 36 (Migne, vol. cxix.). King Alfred did not know one monk south of the Thames who could translate the Breviary.

3 "Sine verecundia memorare non possumus fraternitatem tuam Grammaticam quibusdam exponere! .. Quam grave nefandumque!" Greg. M. Epp. xi. 54. So Jack Cade in Henry VI. pt. ii. act iv. sc. 7: "Thou hast most traitorously corrupted the youth of the realm in erecting a grammar-school," We must, however, bear in mind that Gregory regarded the end of the

&c.

Work of Charlemagne.

247

of the age, confesses not only that he had never read Plato or Aristotle, but not even Hilary, Ambrose, or Augustine. 'Many," wrote Ambrose Antpert in his comment on the Apocalypse, "say that this is no time to discuss Scripture." The eighth century was the most ignorant, the darkest, the most barbarous, that France had ever seen.1 There was everywhere confusion and chaos, national, social, and political. The energies of men were absorbed in the attempt to found a new order upon the crumbling ruins of ancient civilisation.

Charlemagne, having seen that schools and learning still existed in Italy, wished to revive them in his own kingdom, and about 787 wrote to the Bishops the circular letter which Ampère calls "la charte constituante de la pensée moderne." Then it was that the teaching of the Trivium and the Quadrivium began. As there was no diffusion of knowledge, all education became ecclesiastical, all piety monastic in type. There was a monotonous and absolute ascendency of sacerdotal authority. And how could there be anything but an everdeepening misinterpretation of Scripture when so few Christian interpreters possessed even a smattering of Hebrew; when Greek was but little known; when men went to Scripture, not to seek truth, but to find their own dogmas; when, in spite of a nominal idolatry for the sacred writings, men turned them into plastic enigmas; when the interpreter world as being "in actual progress," and thought that the light of eternity was already piercing the gloom of time. Dialog. iv. 41. Gregory, in his thirty-five books of Moralia ("ein schweres, ein unausdehnliches Buch ") thinks it "unworthy to bind the heavenly utterances by the rules of Donatus." He says, "Primum quidem fundamenta Historiae ponimus; deinde per significatorem typicam in arcem fidei fabricam mentis erigimus ; ad extremum quoque per moralitatis gratiam quasi superducto aedificium colore vestimus." Ep. ad Leandrum.

1 Hist. Lit. de France, ii. For the facts mentioned in the foregoing paragraphs see Hauréau, Hist. de la Philos. Scholastique, i. 1-16. Hallam, Middle Ages, iii. 418. Bouquet, Rer. Gallic. Script. vol. v. Even Alcuin grew up to disparage as "polluting" the study of Virgil. Vita (Migue); Maitland, Dark Ages, p. 179.

2 The three arts of grammar, dialectics, and rhetoric, and the four sciences of arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy. See J. Bass Mullinger, The Schools of Charles the Great (1877). Brucker, iii. 957. Hauréau (i. 21) attributes the classification to Martianus Capella, but it is as old as Augustine (De Ordine, 13). See J. Gow, Short Hist. of Greek Mathematics, p. 72 (1884). Léon Maitre, Les Écoles de l'occident; Monnier, Alcuin et son influence. Manset, Art. Logic. Rudimenta, p. 28.