The Character of his Speculations.

21

Intelligence, the Son may be called the Intelligence of Intelligence, the Thought of Thought: Franck says, the absolute Subject, though, as it appears to us, it would be more correct in this particular point of view to say the absolute Object. In completing his philosophical Triad, Anselm seems to us to fall into a difficulty which more or less affects all attempts to construct, by the mere aid of reason, the great mystery of the Trinity. Without his wellfounded belief in the creed of the church, and his too sanguine belief that he could account for it à priori, we can hardly suppose that he would have proceeded beyond the Creative Spirit, and the Idea. He completes the scheme, however, by asserting that the Love of the Supreme Being for the Supreme Being coexists with it and proceeds from it. It proceeds from Father and Son, but cannot be called Son, because it proceeds from the Son in the same sense as from the Father. The mode in which it proceeds may be described as breathing, spirare, whence spiritus.

We believe that every part of this theory may be met with in other writers, but we select it as showing in a striking form the object and character of Anselm's speculation: his Faith in search of Understanding. On the side of philosophy, the temptation to support theory by fact or authority is so strong that we cannot wonder that any speculator, who has thought on the existence of a divine plurality in unity, should be anxious to identify his scheme with the revealed mystery of the Trinity: a process which transfers its position, to use Anselm's language, from the mind to reality, from an existence in intellectu to an existence in re. A theologian, on the other hand, can exercise the philosophical faculty in no other way than by finding the universal truths which correspond with his received symbols, and his independence in the choice of abstract principles may be easily compensated by boldness in explaining them into religious dogmas. Transferring the standard of Christianity from the Catholic creeds, to the common religious faith of reformed communities, Schleiermacher, in our own time, founded his Glaubenslehre on the principle that to explain what it has found as a given rule of faith was the only proper province of doctrinal theology. In our own country a general disinclination to the study of philosophy, and a national earnestness in behalf of religion, have induced modern divines to abstain from too curious inquiries, and to content themselves with appealing to the fountains of their belief: the Bible, or the consent of the Church, according to their different classes of opinion. We have no call to decide between the courses of mere assent and subtle inquiry; but, certainly, the tendencies of modern orthodoxy are diametrically opposed to those of Anselm, and of the schoolmen who followed him; and at first sight the

faith which shrank from no inquiry seems as if it were stronger and more undoubting than the prudent caution of the present day: but at the same time we must not forget that abstinence from contest is often a proof of humility and not of doubt, of a sense of the unworthiness of the champion, not a scruple as to the goodness of the cause.

"It is," as Franck justly observes, "the ennobling feature of the scholastic philosophy, that it every where starts from the essential relationship of Faith and Knowledge, and attempts to set out their connexion as necessary. In fact there are found in the scholastic philosophy purer speculation and profounder thought, than is within the power of those, who reject that modification of doctrinal theology as a product of barbarism and corruption."

But there is another side of the question, and here again our author is right:

"Since, nevertheless, in the scholastic system philosophy did not attain to free and substantive existence, but was degraded into the handmaid of theology, there never was produced between the two a thorough interpenetration and harmony, but their relation remained an external and formal one."

There is still one department of Anselm's studies which deserves notice from its amusing simplicity. It is difficult to say whether the absence of all community of interest with mankind, or our irremediable ignorance of the whole question, would be the more satisfactory reason for leaving the history and fortunes of the fallen angels in the obscurity in which we find it. It is not, perhaps, surprising that an intellect which is accustomed to poise itself on the giddiest heights of philosophy should be tempted to try its nerve and skill on the slippery tracks which coast the abyss of Manichean Dualism. Why Satan fell is a form in which many profound questions may be put, with respect to free will, justice, and foreknowledge: but it is strange to find a philosopher earnestly engaged in systematising and explaining all the whimsical mythology of the Middle Age Pandemonium. It appears that before the fall of the angels, all were alike capable of falling; but those who were found faithful have received as a reward all the goodness which Satan and his followers lost; and this combined with their own original virtue has rendered them henceforth incapable of sin: nor can the fallen angels be redeemed; for the only means of redemption in the Divine economy, is the union of God in one individual personality with a being of the species to be redeemed; and this is impossible, because every angelic being forms a sepa rate species, instead of descending like the human race from a common stock. Nor is he less at home in the statistics of Tar

The Norman Conquest.

23

tarus. Of the actual number of fallen spirits, we believe no exact account is given; but whatever it may be, it occasioned a void in Heaven, which must be filled from the race of man, as it was for this very end that the Earth was created; and so great is the number required, that in proving that the benefits of the redemption were not confined to men then alive, Anselm argues from their insufficiency, even if every one had been saved, to complete the appointed muster-roll of Heaven. To understand how wide and permanent an effect such theories as these exercised on the belief of the world, we have only to refer to the great work of Milton, who found in them the mythology he required, and through whom they have even in the present day retained a strong hold on the popular imagination.

In studies such as this, combined with unusually rigorous asceticism of life, Anselm lived for thirty-three years in retirement: as Monk, Prior, and after the death of Herluin in 1078, as Abbot of Bec. In the mean time changes had taken place in the world, which could not be indifferent to the most devoted recluse. The Norman dominion had been introduced and firmly established in England, and probably Anselm may have thought less of the conqueror's usurpation and cruel tyranny, than of the triumph which the Church achieved over the wavering allegiance of the distant islanders. True to its ancient policy of supporting the orthodox invader against the schismatical or doubtful owner of the soil, Rome instigated and approved of the Norman conquest, as it had long before aided the Franks against the Gauls, and maintained the metropolitan authority of Canterbury over the national independence of St. David's. The Abbot of Bec must also have felt a personal interest in the promotion of his friend and predecessor Lanfranc to the primacy of England on the deprivation of the Saxon Archbishop Stigand. During a visit to him Anselm gained the friendship of the Conqueror, who sent for him to Rouen, in 1087, when he was in his last illness.

Even greater importance must have been attached by so faithful an adherent of the church to the desperate struggle, which commencing about the year 1070 lasted so long between the pope Gregory the Seventh and the emperor Henry. While the power and great capacity of the Conqueror enabled him to confer, without risk to himself, new powers and immunities on the Norman prelates, whom he used to reach his Saxon enemies in the cloister or the confessional which he could not himself enter, the claims of the church to rule the world were fully developed, and in great part made good in Germany and Italy. The right of the pope to confirm and depose sovereigns was, perhaps, too violent and irritating a pretension to have been in the end, under

any circumstances, established. The real point at issue was the power of granting investiture to prelates, and receiving homage from them. That the sacred robe, and pastoral ring and staff, should be transmitted to a prelate by the successor of St. Peter; and that the sacred hands, which were to touch the divine elements daily, should be unpolluted by the contact of lay hands in the act of rendering homage; were principles so congenial to the sentiments of the time, that it seems almost strange that they should have been counterbalanced by the danger, great as it was, of maintaining, in every kingdom, a powerful body of men, who taking no oath of fealty, would be considered as owing no allegiance to the crown. It is scarcely possible that the abstract inconvenience of a divided sovereignty should have presented itself as clearly to the rulers of the eleventh century, as it may to theorists and observers in our own day. There may be many inconsistent institutions in a state, while its polity still remains undeveloped by time; and perhaps there is even now no single constitution, which might not by the occurrence of some unprecedented circumstances be practically brought to a dead lock. In those times, when laws and rights were still in a rough process of formation, kings and prelates struggled according to their strength on points on which they came in collision, with a general understanding, "that they should get who have the power, and they should keep who can." But of the two parties, it seems to us probable that the priesthood knew the real nature of the contest best, and were more unselfishly conscientious. We are as little inclined to sympathize with those partisans of Catholicism, who lament the final defeat of the Church, as with the fantastic zeal of the grave historians of the last century for the legitimate rights of such lovers of law and justice as William the Conqueror and his son William Rufus. We think it well that the Church should have resisted the State, and well that the State should have triumphed at last. On one side were the vigour, the productive vitality, and the self-centring nationality of the northern tribes : but on the other was religion and traditional civilization, still tending to retain the European nations in the unity of the Roman empire. There was then no distinction of country for learned men. The Milanese Lanfranc, the Piedmontese Anselm, became successively Norman abbots and English primates, without any feeling of alienation on the part of the Norman prelates and nobles. They had amongst themselves a strong bond of union in the use of the Latin language, which in other respects was perhaps one of the greatest boons which the Church, by preserving it through ages of darkness, conferred on modern civilization. In its idioms it was no longer the language of Cicero or Livy, but it had neces

The Policy of the Roman Church.

25 sarily retained so much of its former character, that those who used it could not possibly be barbarians. If it had been the language of the Norman laity, it would soon have resumed in some shape the martial energy of ancient Rome. In the hands of learned ecclesiastics it became, what it had never been in its golden days, a language of 'abstractions and minute philosophical distinctions, till its metaphysical vocabulary became so copious that it has since served the greater part of Europe for the organ of reasoning; and even the modern philosophical German, with all its boasted originality and pliability, is filled with servile and awkward translations from the technical Latin of the schoolmen. As mere agents of civilization, and men conscious of intellectual superiority, we can, putting ourselves as far as may be into their position, see no reason why the ecclesiastics of the middle ages should have felt themselves in the wrong in maintaining the independence or even the supremacy of their order.

And there was another agency at work in the same direction, which is in all ages far more powerful than respect for learning or love of civilization. The World had become an antithesis to the Church, and it was by denying the world, by celibacy, fasting, monastic discipline, that men strove to attain religious excellence. The belief that the end of the world was approaching, which had become familiar during the troubles of the tenth century, would naturally tend to make men indifferent to the establishment of temporal rights and institutions. The laity fully shared in the respect of the monastic orders for asceticism. It might not be their vocation, or it might be too hard for them: but that it was in itself the best, no one disputed. Not to make the world religious, but to sever the religious remnant and leave the world to itself, was the acknowledged object of Christianity. The jealousy of kings or nobles would take the same form; they would complain of the ambition and worldliness of popes, and wish them to resume the poverty of St. Peter. And when Hildebrand reformed the papal court, and suffered in his own person all the privations which they recommended, in the result of his humility and selfdenial truly they had their reward. He taught them what many statesmen have still to learn, that a priesthood excluded from worldly interests will devote itself to the subjection of the world. A consistent reasoner, and vigorous leader, he held no half measures between God and Mammon. He was willing to reform the clergy to the utmost extent that zeal could demand; but when reformed, they were not to be left the subjects of the unreformed and irreligious laity. Let men beware how they concentrate the ambition of the clergy on the aggrandizement of their order: right or wrong the people will always most reverence a priesthood who