A BEGINNER'S HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY VOLUME II CHAPTER I THE CAUSES OF THE DECAY OF THE CIVILIZATION OF THE MIDDLE AGES The Periods of the History of Philosophy. Ancient Philosophy (625 B.C.-476 A.D.)-1100 years. Mediæval Philosophy (476 A.D.-1453 a.D) — 1000 years. Modern Philosophy (1453 A.D.-the present time) 460 years. The Divisions of the History of Modern Philosophy. 1. The Renaissance (1453-1690) - from the end of the Middle Ages to the publication of Locke's Essay on the Human Understanding. 2. The Enlightenment (1690-1781) - from Locke's Essay to the publication of Kant's Critique of Pure Reason. 3. The Period of German Philosophy (1781-1831) -from Kant's Critique to the death of Hegel. 4. The Period of Nineteenth-Century Philosophy – from the death of Hegel to the present time. Such divisions of history are more than mere matters of convenience. They indicate great changes in the mental attitude of society. The only danger in making them comes in neglecting to think of history as an organic growth. As a matter of fact, each period grows out of its predecessor. The Causes of the Decay of the Civilization of the Middle Ages. The social structure of the mediaval time weakened and broke apart, in the first place because of certain inherent defects in its organism; in the second place because of some remarkable discoveries, inventions, and historical changes. We may call these (a) the internal causes and (b) the external causes of the fall of the civilization of the Middle Ages. (a) The Internal Causes were inherent weaknesses in mediæval intellectual life, and alone would have been sufficient to bring mediæval society to an end. (1) The intellectual method of the Middle Ages was self-destructive. Of course in every age the common people reason only deductively from their tradi tions and established prejudices. Among the mediaval people the provincial conservatism of such traditional deductions was not offset by fresh ideas which had been inductively and experimentally arrived at by the intellectual classes. The mediæval intellectual class, the Schoolmen of the Church, and the people employed the same method of reasoning-deduction. The people reasoned from church dogma and their popular superstitions as premises; the Schoolmen had in addition the logic of Aristotle. Whatever the premises of a society may be, if its method of thinking is wholly deductive, the result is stultifying. In the early part of the Middle Ages the deductive method in the hands of the Schoolmen had a certain value, for by it they were able to penetrate and clarify dogma. It was a means to an end. After the time of St. Thomas Aquinas the inevi table took place-deductive reasoning became an end in itself.1 (2) The standard of truth in the Middle Ages became a double standard, and this in itself will bring any civilization to an end. Ostensibly there was only one standard by which the truth or falsity of things could be judged — infallible dogma; but actually from the beginning there were two standards reason (as expressed by the logic of Aristotle) and dogma. At the beginning dogma had unquestioned supremacy as the criterion for all thinking, since rational thinking was used only to explain dogma. But to use logic to clarify dogma, to employ the philosophy of Aristotle to supplement the Bible, to defend faith by argument, amounted in effect to supporting revelation by reason. It was a defense of the infallible and the revealed by the fallible and the secular. It called the infallible into question and offered excuses for what was supposedly beyond suspicion. The Schoolmen themselves saw this weakness and tried to strengthen the authority of dogma by insisting that the highest dogma, like the Trinity, are incapable of rational proof.2 But having gone thus far they had to go farther and in the most conservative Order of the Church the position was taken that all dogma occupy a 1 It was studied for its own sake. This naturally degenerated into word-splitting and quibbling, into the commenting upon the texts of this master and that, into arid verbal discussions. The religious orders frittered away their time on verbal questions of trifling importance. The lifetime of such intellectual employment is always self-limited. 2 The close contact of Christian and Arabian civilizations naturally brought to the front the question of the relation of natural and revealed religion. To the Arabian revealed religions were preliminary to a rational natural religion; to the Christian the opposite was true. St. Thomas was here reacting against the spread of contemporary Arabian philosophy. sphere superior to the reason. Thus arose the doctrine of the twofold truth-two alien realms each with its own standard. A thing may be true from the point of dogma that is not true from the point of view of reason, and vice versa. When reason, thus alienated from revelation, got the support of empirical investigation, the mediæval order was at an end. (3) The development of Mysticism in the Middle Ages was a powerful factor that led to its dissolution. There is, of course, an element of mysticism in the doctrine of the Church from St. Augustine onwards, and in the Early Period of the Middle Ages mysticism had no independence. But mysticism is essentially the direct communion with God on the part of the individual. The intermediary offices of the Church are contradictory to the spirit of mysticism. It is not surprising, therefore, to find in the last period of scholasticism numerous independent mystics as representatives of the tendency of individualistic religion, which was to result in the Protestantism of Renaissance.2 1 No one knows who was the author of this formula. It was not a cowardly subterfuge, although in later times it often was used to protect scientific theories from persecution. In the Middle Ages and Renaissance it usually expressed merely the mental discord which the urgent claims of science brought into the religious mind. It appeared in the materialistic controversy of the nineteenth century, and was derisively called "double book-keeping." 2 The Protestant Reformation was only the late expression of a spir itual unrest which had been growing since the Crusades. This mystic demand for a personal religion got early support in the neo-Platonism in the doctrines of Augustine and Erigina. It appeared in the persecuted sects, in the Flagellants, and in the attempted reforms within the Church. In the Renaissance it took two forms: in naturalism in Italy, which had short life; in the Reformation of Luther. When the German Reformation defeated its own ends, mysticism still survived. German mysticism was born in the lower Rhine district, and was presented first in theory by Meister Eckhart (1250-1327), in poetry by Suso (1300-1365), "the Minnesinger of God's love," and in sermon by Tauler (1290-1361). With Tauler it took practical form and culminated in the |