446 DOCTRINE CONCERNING GOD. DAVID OF DINANTO. The former was so called from his birthplace in the diocese of Chartres. In the beginning of the thirteenth century, he taught at Paris. After gaining a high reputation by his lectures on dialectics, he passed over to theology, and now created a great sensation by many of the opinions he advanced; among which may be mentioned, in particular, the following: "As no man can be saved without believing in the sufferings and resurrection of Christ, so neither can he be saved without believing that he himself is a member of Christ." This, he maintained, was a necessary article of faith. Such an assertion might no doubt have been called forth by the reaction of the Christian mind, and particularly of the mystic element in it, against the churchly, theocratical point of view,-by a tendency that placed the immediate reference of the religious consciousness to Christ in opposition to its dependence on the church. Now we cannot fail to remark, it is true, in Almaric also, the antagonism of a subjectivity carried to excess against the objectivity of the church catholicism; but at bottom of it lies, not a theistic, but a pantheistic view of the world; and only in connection with this latter, can that which he meant be understood, in the sense in which he meant it. Taken in an isolated manner by itself, this proposition was susceptible of various interpretations; and, accordingly, when it was for the first time publicly advanced, it was only by virtue of the church instinct that men suspected the anti-Christian element in it, without understanding its true significance in the connection of that teacher's ideas. The Parisian university, in 1204, condemned the doctrines of Almaric, and expelled him from the professorial chair. He appealed to pope Innocent the Third, who confirmed, however, that decision. Upon this, he returned, in 1207, to Paris, and offered the recantation that had been prescribed to him; soon after which he died. It was not known, however, that he had left any school behind him. By his disciple, David of Dinanto, these doctrines were propagated, and carried to a still further length. David exerted an influence also by his writings, in which he expounded them. We recognize here the principles of that monism, the sources of which have been pointed out; the doctrine of one being, lying at the ground of all, which being can be known only in its manifold forms of manifestation; the whole universe only a manifestation of the divine essence. David of Dinanto1 defined God as the principium materiale omnium rerum. He distinguished three principles; the first indivisible principle, matter, the substratum of the corporeal world; the first Moreover, the propositions ascribed to Almaric, as they are cited by Martinus Polonus in his Supputationes to Marianus Scotus, hint at the same: Ideas, quae sunt in mente divina, creare et creari,—the doctrine that, as all things proceeded from God, so all will return back to him again; that God is known only in his Theophanies; that, without the first sin, the separation of sexes would not have taken place; that Christ, after his resurrection, belonged no longer to any particular sex. The historian who cites these dogmas, says himself, too; Qui omnes errores inveniuntur in libro, qui intitulatur peri physeon. 1 Vide Albert. M. Summa theol. Pars. i, Tractat. iv. Quaest. 20. Membr. ii, ed. Lugd. t. xvii, f. 76, and Thomas Aquinas in Sentent. lib. ii, Distinct. 17. Quaest. i, Artic. i, ed. Venet. t. x, p. 235. DOCTRINE CONCERNING GOD. THE SECT OF THE HOLY GHOST. 447 indivisible out of which proceeds the soul; namely, spirit (nus); the first indivisible in the eternal substances (ideas) namely, God. Between these three, he affirmed, there can be no distinction; else we must suppose a still higher essence, from which all these three were derived, and of which they partake after different manners. No other supposition remains, then, than that these three are altogether identical, -different designations of the one divine essence, according to different relations of the same to the corporeal, the spiritual, and the ideal worlds. Thomas Aquinas makes a difference between the doctrine of Almaric and that of David of Dinanto. The school of the former, he said, considered God as the principium formale of all things; the second, taught that God is the materia prima. According to this latter doctrine, they might consider all nature as the body of God, God as the one subject in all. Nothing else has any true being; all things else are mere accidents, under which God, to whom alone being is to be attributed, veils himself, accidentia sine subjecto. The church doctrine of the Lord's supper they explained as a symbolical clothing of this truth. The consecrating priest, they supposed, did not here first produce the body of Christ, the body of God, but he only denoted that which, without any act of his, was already present, and brought it, by his words, to the consciousness of the community.3 Taking this ground, they could say every true Christian must be conscious of the fact, that God has become man in him, even as he became man in Christ; and it is now evident, also, that the doctrine. of Almaric which we first cited should be understood as taken in connection with these ideas. Although an abstract speculative system was not calculated, especially at this time, to spread among the laity, yet through the element of mysticism, which itself was hidden under a Christian guise, it was attempted, and that not without success, to diffuse these doctrines even among laymen. Books were composed for this purpose in the French language. Pantheism, with all the practical consequences that flow from it, was more boldly and abruptly expressed than perhaps the original founders of this school had intended. That distinction of the three ages which had attached itself to the doctrine of the Trinity, and which we noticed in the doctrines of the abbot Joachim, was employed by this sect also, after their own Albertus cites the argumentation in David of Dinanto as follows: Quaero, si nus et materia prima differunt an non? Si differunt, sub aliquo communi, a quo illa differentia egreditur, differunt et illud commune per differentias formabile est in utrumque. Quod autem unum formabile est in plures, materia est vel ad minus principium materiale. Si ergo dicatur una materia esse materiae primae et nois, aut differunt aut non. Si differunt, oportet, quod sub aliquo communi, a quo differentiae il lae exeunt, differant, et sequitur ex hoc, quod illud commune genus sit ad illa. Ex hoc videtur relinqui, quod Deus et nois et materia prima idem sunt secundum id, quod sunt, quia quaecunque sunt et nulla differentia differunt, eadem sunt. *Summa Pars i. Quaest. iii, artic. viii. From the Acta of a Parisian council of the year 1210, which have been publish. ed by Martene and Durand in the Thesaurus novus anecdotorum, t. iv, f. 163: Deus visibilibus erat indutus instrumentis, quibus videri poterat a creaturis et accidentibus corrumpi poterat extrinsecis. Ante verborum prolationem visibilibus panis accidentibus subesse corpus Christi. Id. quod ibi fuerat prius formis visibilibus, prolatione verborum subesse ostenditur. 448 DOCTRINE CONCERNING GOD. THE SECT OF THE HOLY GHOST. - the incarna peculiar manner. As the predominant revelation of God the Father, in the Old Testament, was followed by the revelation of the Son, by which the forms of worship under the legal dispensation were done away; so now the age of the Holy Ghost was at hand, tion of the Holy Ghost in entire humanity, the being of God under the form of the Holy Ghost after an equal measure in all the faithful; that is, the dependence of the religious consciousness upon any one individual as a person in whom God is incarnate, would cease, and the consciousness of all alike, that God exists in them, has in them assumed human nature, would come in place of it. The sacraments, under which the Son of God had been worshipped, would then be done away; religion would be made wholly independent of ceremonies, of everything positive. The members of this sect are the ones in whom the incarnation of the Holy Ghost has begun, the forerunners of the above-described period of the Holy Spirit. Several other opinions are charged upon members of this sect, which certainly accord with their general mode of thinking; as, for example, that God had spoken in Ovid as well as in Augustin; that the only heaven and the only hell are in the present life; that those who possess the true knowledge no longer need faith or hope; they have attained already to the true resurrection, the true paradise, the real heaven;2 that he who lives in mortal sin, has hell in himself, but it was much the same thing as having a rotten tooth in the mouth.3 These people opposed the worship of saints as a species of idolatry. They called the ruling church Babylon; the pope, antichrist. It is said, also, that many of them were carried along by pantheistic mysticism, by the tendency to a onesided inwardness, into a sort of ethical adiaphorism, which sanctioned the worst excesses. The maxim, that a man's condition depended, not so much on outward works as on inward disposition, on love; as on the fact of his being conscious of having God within him, is said to have been pushed by many even to such consequences as the above. William of Aria, a goldsmith, stood forth as a preacher among this sect. He announced the coming of judgments on a corrupt church, and the evolution of the new period of the Holy Ghost that was now near at hand. In the year 1210, this sect was discovered; several clergymen and laymen, who refused to recant, were burnt at the stake. Bernard a priest, carried his pantheistic delusion to such a length as to declare, that, so far as he had being, they could not burn him, for, so far as he existed, he was God himself. One of the pernicious consequences of such phenomena was, that men were led by occasion of them, to look upon every freer movement of the religious spirit with a more suspicious eye. With the writings of David of Dinanto, all theological works in the French language were burnt and forbidden. Caesar. Heisterbach, 1. c. v, 22. In the report in Martene and Durand: Spiritus sanctus in iis incarnatus iis omnia revelabat, et haec revelatio nihil aliud erat quam mortuorum resurrectio. Inde semetipsos jam resuscitatos asserebant, fidem et spem ab eorum cordibus excludebant, se soli scientiae mentientes subjacere, — with which also agrees the report of Caesarius. 3 The account given by Caesarius of Heisterbach. INFLUENCE OF AVERRHOES. 449 This pantheistic monism was now attacked by the most distinguished scholastic theologians. Albertus Magnus maintained, in opposition to it, that God is not the material nor the essential but the causative being of all existence; and the causative as the efficient, formal, and final cause, the efficient, formative principle, and the end of all existence; the original type to which all existence must be traced, according to which everything has been formed, and which everything is appointed to represent; as in truth, the original type has an existence of itself, independent of the things that are formed after it, and in order to represent it. Thomas Aquinas expresses himself after a similar manner: God is the esse omnium effective et exemplariter, but not per essentiam. As we have an example here, showing that the foreign elements of the neo-Platonic monism, which the speculative theology of this century strove to blend into one whole with the Christian faith, would resist all such attempts, and prove rebellious to this faith itself, so we have another example of a like incongruity in the ideas of the Aristotelian philosophy, adopted by this theology as absolute truths of reason, with which the truths of faith could not be at variance. There arose a view of the Aristotelian doctrines, growing out of the doctrines of the Arabian philosopher Averrhoës, which threatened to dissolve this league between philosophy and faith, and which, if consistently car, ried out, would also like the doctrine of Almaric, that started from a neo-Platonic principle-necessarily pass over into a pantheistic mode of thinking. It was affirmed that the thinking reason is in all men identically the same, that there is but one intelligence in all. Those who set forth this as a doctrine of Aristotle, and- what in their opinion was the same thing—a doctrine that resulted with neces sity from the fundamental position of bare rational knowledge or of philosophy, were well aware of the consequences- irreconcilable with the Christian faith and the doctrines of the church-which flowed from such an assertion, and represented themselves, at least, as being very far from adopting these consequences. But this subjection to the authority of faith, expressed in connection with this acknowledged opposition between reason and faith, was of such a nature as could not fail to awaken suspicions respecting the honesty of their professions, or at least respecting the seriousness and liveliness of their religious interest; as, for example, when one occupying this ground asserted: "By my reason, I conclude, with necessity, that mind is numerically but one, but, by my faith, I firmly maintain the contrary;"2 when he expressed himself with regard to the Christian position, which was incapable of being reconciled with the above proposition, in the cold and indifferent way: "The Latins do not admit this, according to their principles, because, perhaps, their law stands in contradiction with it ;" where Thomas Aquinas, who cites this language,3 justly takes offence, 'Sicut paradigma, a quo fiunt, et ad quod formantur, et ad quod finiuntur, cum tamen intrinsecum sit extra facta formata et finita existens et nihil sit de esse eorum. 2 Per rationem concludo de necessitate, quod intellectus est unus numero, firmiter tamen teneo oppositum per fidem. In his Opusc. ix, De unitate intellectus 450 DOCTRINE CONCERNING GOD. ABELARD. that one who pretended to be a Christian, could thus speak of Christianity, as the law of a strange religion; could designate the doctrines of faith as positiones catholicorum. It is obvious to remark how mischievous would be the spread of a doctrine so hostile to the funda mental grounds of Christian conviction; how pernicious this disguised schism between subjective conviction and the doctrines of the church, this homage, altogether hypocritical, or at any rate not springing from the lively feeling of an inner necessity, to the authority of the church, must prove, when such views found currency, as they already began to do even among laymen. These doctrines, then, Thomas Aquinas felt himself called upon to combat, not only in his general work concerning the whole body of the doctrines of faith, but also in a small treatise, which he composed expressly on this subject. He was not satisfied with appealing to the consequences hostile to the Christian faith which must flow from such opinions,-to the fact, that thereby the doctrines of personal immortality, and of a final retribution, would be annihilated,- but while he strongly protested against that pretended opposition between the truths of faith and the truths of philosophy, he endeavored to show, also, that this doctrine was contrary to reason and by no means a genuine doctrine of Aristotle. The doctrine concerning the divine attributes gained rich accessions by the labors of these theologians. Several new investigations were evoked by Abelard. One of the charges brought against him was, that he had denied the essential omnipresence of God. Walter of Mauretania, mentioned on a former page, thought that he had heard an opinion of this sort uttered by Abelard himself. Also, Hugo a St. Victore speaks5 of certain sophists, who maintained that God was omnipresent only in virtue of his power, but not in virtue of his essence; since otherwise, God would be affected by the impurity in the world. According to this statement, Abelard, like the Socinians in later times, supposed a being of God without the world, in the sense of limitation, so that this "without" should be understood as spatial, and, separating from one another the essence of God and his acts, reduced his omnipresence simply to the fact that God's agency extends to everything in the world. But if we consult Abelard's own explanations of the matter, we see plainly that he was very far from contra Averroistas in vol. xix of the Venetian edition. See the Life of Thomas Aquinas, already referred to, c. iv. A knight, who was called upon to do penance for his crimes, gave for his reply, that if Peter obtained salvation, he also was sure of it, for there was but one and the same spirit in himself and in Peter. See in lib. ii, Sentent. Dist. 17. Quaest. li, artic. i. He says, in opposition to that statement: Cum autem de necessitate concludi non possit nisi verum necessarium, cujus oppositum est falsum et impossibile, sequitur secundum ejus dictum, quod fides sit de falso et impossibili, quod etiam Deus His words addressed to Abelard, in D'Archery, Spicilegia, t. iii, f. 525: Praeterea notificate mihi, si adhuc creditis, quod Deus essentialiter non sit in mundo vel alibi. Quod, si bene memini audivi vos fateri, quando novissime invicem contulimus de quibusdam sententiis. From which very words it is quite evident that he might easily have misunderstood Abelard. 5 In his Summa Tractat. i, c. iv. 6 Quidam calumniatores veritatis dicunt, Deum per potentiam et non per essentiam ubique esse. |