Christian Belief and Thought
The transformation of Western theology, and the development of a distinctively medieval interpretation, coincides with the rise in the early twelfth century of the cathedral schools, from which the new universities were to grow.
Early medieval theology, which had been dominated by the monastic ethos, had been derivative and highly conservative. The great need had been to consolidate. Thinking men were convinced that all the great questions surrounding the Christian religion had been answered by the Fathers of the Church, and it was only the inadequate powers of contemporary scholars which retarded comprehension. There was a total reliance on authority, and a great mistrust of the exercise of reason.Then, in the late eleventh century, six hundred years after the magisterial contribution of Augustine, men began with remarkable suddenness to ask fundamental questions about the faith: why should men believe in God? How could God be One and yet threefold? Why was God made man? This outbreak of theological speculation is one of the main strands of the intellectual and artistic Renaissance of the twelfth century, and resulted from the vastly increased confidence of a society newly freed from external pressure and enjoying an economic miracle, whose basic principles were nevertheless questioned by Jews within and by Muslims beyond its frontiers. It was a sign of security and of maturity that Christian thinkers were now eager to meet the challenge of other faiths not merely by the recitation of biblical and patristic texts, but by rational argument. Anselm, considered today by many to be the medieval theologian most relevant to the modem world, offered rational proof, without recourse to any authority, of the existence of God and the necessity for God’s incarnation. Faith provided him with the insights which allowed him to construct this proof, yet he believed that it could not be controverted intellectually by those who lacked faith.
Revealed truth, indeed, dictated certain parameters within which logical discussion must be conducted, and to traverse these boundaries invited condemnation by the common consensus of Latin Christian thinkers, which was visited on Peter Abelard in his lifetime. Abelard’s influence, however, was profound. He emphasised the role of the human Jesus, sent to be an exemplar and friend to mankind, thus humanising the image of Christ in majesty, the dreadful Judge of the Last Day, which dominated early medieval theology. He stressed the relationship of the individual with his creator, which should be based on love tinged with awe, rather than on terror of a vengeful God. Individual intention for him was all important, for it was on this, rather than on the consequences of any act, that judgement was passed by a God far more percipient than the tribal deity of the early Middle Ages intent only on receiving his judicial due. Above all, in his relationship with Helo’ise and more especially in the correspondence resulting from their separation, Abelard rejected the monastic theology of the past and asserted that salvation was not restricted to the celibate inmates of the cloister, but was open to men and women in a wide variety of Christian vocations which were consonant with the will of God.
Early medieval thinkers had accepted that the Bible presented to mankind the divine plan for the organisation of society, and that it was the inadequacy of fallen man that prevented its realisation. Such was the self-confidence of the theologians of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries that they believed that the power of reason, with which man alone in creation was endowed, could compensate for the ravages of sin. The experience of their own age, which was confirmed by the observations of human society contained in those works of the ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle newly rediscovered in the West through contact with Islam, indicated that the idealised lifestyle of the earliest Christian community was unattainable by the generality of mankind.
Rather than simply accept the shortcomings of contemporary Christians, the new generation of rational theologians, whose endeavours culminated in the magisterial synthesis of Thomas Aquinas (d. 1274), embarked upon a detailed analysis of the Divine Law and presented a series of subtle distinctions. Private property, profit and the waging of war, all condemned by the Bible, were discovered to be justified in certain circumstances, which corresponded closely to the current practice of western Europe. The biblical account of the apostolic community was now seen as an historical description of the Church at an early stage of its development, rather than as the divinely ordained exemplar of Christian life for all time. A dramatic official endorsement of this view came when in 1323 Pope John XXII, in the face of radical Franciscan criticism of ecclesiastical wealth, condemned as heretical belief in the absolute poverty of Christ and the apostles. Aquinas and his contemporaries expressed a sublime certainty in the worth of western society, in which natural man, in accordance with God’s grace and by his own endeavours, was fulfilling the divine plan for the world.Earlier theologians, following Augustine, had differentiated sharply between grace and nature. For Aquinas grace perfected nature. The natural condition of man was not one of degradation resulting from his fall. God did not merely tolerate human society as a consequence of sin, but willed that man should develop according to his natural inclinations, which God had instituted. Aquinas saw the main characteristic of God as intelligence and reason. Man, created in the image of God, was endowed with reason, clouded but not obliterated by the fall, and was therefore capable of comprehending, albeit imperfectly, objective and eternal truths. Intellect rather than will provided the pathway towards the ultimate contemplation of God, whose existence could be demonstrated not merely by direct revelation, but by human reason.
The existence of God was certainly not contrary to human reason; rather it was the only explanation available to human reason for existence itself.This theological certainty and self-confidence in the destiny of mankind was rapidly eroded in the fourteenth century. Western Europe lost its sense of direction as economic conditions worsened, plague became endemic, expansion ground to a halt and the twin universal authorities of Empire and Papacy were successively humbled. The optimism of Aquinas now seemed misplaced, and Thomism, although it was resurrected in the sixteenth century as the intellectual orthodoxy of the Roman Catholic Church, found few enthusiastic followers in the later Middle Ages, whose theology was fideistic rather than rational. William of Ockham (d. 1349), despite excommunication for his antipapal political writings in support of the Emperor Lewis of Bavaria, was the most influential theologian of this period, for his nominalism reflected the uncertainty of the age. He denied the capacity of man’s mind to comprehend concepts beyond the experience of the senses. God could not be reduced to a glorified likeness of human rationality. In contemporary Europe it appeared obvious that the world was subject to evil and that man was limited. God by definition was infinitely powerful, and the only explanation of current events was that God was subject to no laws and acted merely at his pleasure. Things which men generally agreed were just could be unjust if God so willed it. God could not be approached by reason, and conformity with the Divine Law became an exercise in uncomprehending obedience. There was a return to the dread of a terrifying and arbitrary deity which had been felt in the earlier Middle Ages, and a wedge was once more driven between theology and philosophy, which in the days of optimism had apparently been reconciled.
Closely allied with theological enquiry was the vital task of translating the Divine Law revealed by God in the Bible into a code of legislation by which Christian society might be governed.
The corpus of canon law of the Western Church represented a monumental jurisdictional achievement. In the twelfth century the divergent penitential codes of Christianised tribal societies and the contradictory rulings of church councils and bishops were first tentatively reconciled, in a private compilation by the Bolognese monk Gratian, the Concordance of Discordant Canons (1140), into a universal system based on the authority of Rome. Subsequent popes, by their rulings on individual cases submitted to them, created a comprehensive body of international law, codified in the Corpus luris Canonici of1234 and continu-ally analysed in the voluminous writings of learned commentators. Canon law has often been regarded as the primary instrument of the extension of papal ‘political’ power, but the relationship between Church and State was far from being the sole concern of the canonists. Papal decisions of the late twelfth century, for example, humanised the Christian law of marriage and created a code for the implementation of poor relief. The papal court, moreover, never intervened directly in any case; it acted only upon appeal, made either in order to obtain clarification of a difficult legal point, or against the ruling of an inferior court. The influence of the Papacy throughout western Europe was greatly increased by the activities of the various central courts at Rome and of judges-delegate in the provinces, but papal justice became firmly entrenched because the popes offered a superior legal product, for which numerous clerks and laymen were willing to travel and to pay.