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fore, not perfect, and our conception would not then be what it is, that of the most perfect being. He proves the incarnation of man, from the conditions through which alone sinful humanity can be saved. For the fall of man is, as disobedience to God, a crime of infinite guilt, and, as such, can neither be forgiven, without some interposition, nor punished according to its deserts; for forgiveness without punishment would be unjust, and deserved punishment would be the destruction of man. The former is incompatible with divine justice: the latter would frustrate the purpose of creation. There is but one way out of the difficulty, guilt must be atoned for; satisfaction must be made to God. Salvation is only possible through satisfaction. But this atoning action, paying our infinite debt, must itself be an infinite merit, of which sinful humanity is incapable. In place of humanity, a sinless being must suffer and outweigh the guilt of sin. Satisfaction is possible only through a substitutional suffering. Here God himself alone can take the place of humanity, for he alone is sinless; and, therefore, substitutional suffering requires the incarnation of God. This incarnation must not be subject to the conditions through which original sin is transmitted; it can take place, therefore, only through supernatural birth; is possible only in the son of the Virgin Mary, in the person Jesus, who sacrificed himself for humanity, and through this sacrificial death earned infinite merit, a merit which God cannot put to the account of Jesus himself, but only to that of those for whom the God-man made himself an offering. This merit which God puts to the account of the race is the forgiveness of sins, or the salvation of humanity. Now the debt is all paid. Salvation is accomplished through the incarnation of God. The incarnation results from the necessity of substitution, and this from the satisfaction which humanity owes in consequence of original sin. Heirship now steps in the place of original sin; original sin works on in nature; heirship in the Church as the kingdom of grace. Thus, the proofs of Anselm lead

us to the central point of the doctrine of Augustine. Justly can we call this first orthodox scholastic the second Augustine.

IV. THE COURSE OF DEVELOPMENT OF SCHOLASTICISM.

1. Realism and Nominalism.-Anselm's arguments rest upon a presupposition which, indeed, lies at the bottom of the whole doctrine of the Church, but was first consciously accepted here, where the attempt was made to give a logical and demonstrative proof of dogmas. The two turning-points of the Augustinian doctrine of faith and the theology of Anselm are original sin and salvation: in Adam man fell, in Christ he is saved. If these facts have no universal truth, or, what is the same, if these universal determinations have no actual (real) being, faith is without foundation. Faith rests, therefore, on the logical presupposition that humanity as species or idea in truth exists, and constitutes the nature of man. What is true of this species must be true of all species (ideas), of all universals. If they are not realities, it is to be feared that the facts of faith are either manifestly unreal or incapable of proof. The Church itself exists by virtue of its idea its reality rests on its universality. Even Augustine based its authority on its catholicity, its necessary, on its universal, validity. As the Platonic state exists in the idea of justice, independently of particulars, so the Christian Church exists in the idea of the unity of faith. And that is why the comparison of the two is so just and appropriate, as Bauer and Zeller have very significantly shown.

From this fundamental, and, to the Church, natural, view, the proposition now follows in which scholasticism recognizes its principle, universalia sunt realia. Species are the truly real. It is characteristic enough that the first scholastic proof of the existence of God was the ontological argument of Anselm.

The realism of the Middle Ages was based on the reality. of universals, the first fundamental trend of scholasti

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cism; and it evoked its opposite. The problem of scholasticism authorized also the claims of the natural understanding, but to this, single things appear as the real objects; species, on the other hand, as mere concepts and abstractions, which we make and denote by words. The natural understanding, accordingly, regards universalia not as realia, but "vocalia " or "nomina." On the unreality of universals rests the nominalism of the Middle Ages, the second fundamental trend of scholasticism, the first expression of which followed close upon the heels of realism. These opposing views were formulated in a controversy between Roscelin and William of Champeaux, near the end of the eleventh century.

The range of the nominalistic mode of thought can be easily determined. We know by means of presentations and concepts, judgments and propositions. If concepts neither have, nor apprehend, reality, there is no knowledge of the real, and, since the objects of faith are the truly real, no knowledge of faith. When, therefore, nominalism, in the spirit of scholasticism, affirmed the reality of the objects of faith, it was at the same time compelled, contrary to the fundamental principle of scholasticism, to deny the knowledge of them. As soon as this mode of thought prevailed, the bond between knowledge and faith, which constituted the certainty of the theology of the Middle Ages, was severed: the union of faith and knowledge. From this vantage-ground we can survey the course of the development of scholasticism. In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, realism prevailed; in the fourteenth, the nominalistic mode of thought became more and more general; and this led to the downfall of scholasticism, and formed the transition to a new philosophy, independent of faith. Thus, the two fundamental tendencies of scholasticism, each in its greatest predominance, coincide with the two periods which we have distinguished in the ecclesiastical age of the world. Realism corresponds to the period of the ecclesiastical rule of the world and centralization; nominalism to that of its nascent destruction and decentralization.

Such a course of development has lately been denied ; and, on the other hand, an attempt has been made to limit the point of dispute between realism and nominalism to their first encounter, when Roscelin explained universals as "flatus vocis." If any one wishes to restrict the term nominalism to Roscelin's unsuccessful contradiction of realism, he may choose another name for the later and victorious line of thought, in like manner opposed to it. The matter itself, the well-known contrast between the two scholastic periods, which we have just explained, remains unchanged. And just as little is accomplished by the objection that the progress of scholasticism consisted only in growth in breadth, only in the increased importation of its materials for doctrine, in other words, in the increasing knowledge of the doctrine of Aristotle. The materials of culture which the Middle Ages received from the ancient world were the scantiest. Of the philosophy of Aristotle, which ruled scholasticism in its zenith, so some have claimed, — only an unimportant fragment of the logic was at first known, the doctrine of the proposition and the categories, and this only in a translation of Boethius, with an introduction by Porphyry. Not till the twelfth century was the whole organon of Aristotle known, and his real philosophy, his metaphysics, physics, psychology, etc., not till the following, and these through Latin translations, made first from the Hebrew and Arabic, later from the Greek, until at last the study of the ancients in their own language was again renewed. This creeping away into the leading-strings of Aristotle signifies nothing more than the increasing secularization of scholastic theology, from which the separation between faith and knowledge, and the victory of the nominalistic doctrine of knowledge, at last necessarily resulted.

2. The Platonic and Aristotelian Realism. During the period when the ecclesiastical rule of the world was unbroken, the accepted fundamental principle of scholastic theology was, that species or ideas have reality; that this reality is

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either completely independent of individual things, or their active, indwelling principle, either "ante rem" or "in re.” This is not the place to enter into all the possible modifications and intermediate distinctions of those two conceptions. The scholasticism of the twelfth century was untiring in such distinctions. The two norm-giving conceptions were prefigured in Greek philosophy, the first in Plato, the second in Aristotle. Both affirmed the reality of ideas, but Plato regarded them as that which truly exists independently of phenomena, while with Aristotle they were the truly efficient force in things. With Plato, their reality was the world of ideas with Aristotle, nature. We have already shown how the second conception necessarily results from the first. Platonic realism prevailed in the scholastic theology of the twelfth century, the Aristotelian during the thirteenth. Thus, in the ecclesiastical philosophy of the Middle Ages, three trends of thought can be distinguished, which, generally speaking, coincide with the centuries, the realisticPlatonic in the twelfth, the realistic-Aristotelian in the thirteenth, and the nominalistic in the two following. Abelard (1142) formed the transition between the Platonic and Aristotelian scholasticism; John Duns Scotus (+1308) between the realistic and nominalistic.

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We have already referred to that significant affinity, which, in spite of the fundamentally different ages in which they were developed, and of their fundamentally different conceptions of the world, exists between the Platonic mode of thought of antiquity and the ecclesiastical conceptions of the Middle Ages, between the Platonic state and the Romish Church. In both, the universal prevails unconditionally over the particular; the whole is before the parts, and the idea is the only real power, completely independent of individuals. It is not, therefore, surprising that, under the absolute rule of the Church of the Middle Ages, a Platonic scholasticism was developed, and that the period during which this scholasticism prevailed coincided with the period of the Crusades;

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