given here also by Augustine, yet everything was incomplete which he transmitted to the Church. But the Church as an institution and training-school required the sacraments above all, and in its adherence to Augustine it was precisely his sacramental doctrine, and the conception connected therewith of gradual justification, of which it laid hold. We shall have to show how the Church developed this down to the sixteenth century, how it idealised itself in the sacraments, and fashioned them into being its peculiar agencies. In the third place, we have to pursue a line which is marked for us by the names of Augustine and Aristotle-fides and ratio, auctoritas and ratio intelligentia and ratio. To investigate this thoroughly would be to write the history of mediæval science in general. Here, therefore, we have only to examine it, in so far as there were developed in it the same manifold fashioning of theological thought, and those fundamental views which passed into the formulas, and at the same time into the contents of the doctrinal creations, of the sixteenth century, and which ultimately almost put an end to dogma in the original sense of the term. But we have also to include under the heading "Augustine and Aristotle" the opposition between the doctrine of the enslaved will and free grace and that of free will and merit. The latter shattered Augustinianism within Catholicism.

We cannot trace any dogma regarding the Church in the Middle Ages until the end of the thirteenth century, but this is only because the Church was the foundation and the latent co-efficient of all spiritual and theological movement.1 Our account has to make this significance of the Church explicit, and in doing so to examine the growth of papal power; for in the sixteenth century the claim of the Pope was in dispute. On this point the Western Church was split up. But further, Augustine had given a central place to the question of the personal position of the Christian, confusing it, however, by uncertain references to the Church and to the medicinal effect of

1 The opposition to a sacerdotal Church which existed at all times, and was already strong in the thirteenth century, left no lasting traces down to the fourteenth. In this century movements began on the soil of Catholicism which led to new forms of the conception of the Church and compelled it to fix definitively its own.

the means of grace. And the mediæval movement, in proportion as the Church and the sacraments came to the front without any diminution of the longing for an independent faith,1 was led to the question of personal assurance. On this point alsojustification—the Western Church was rent asunder. Thus an account of the history of dogma in the Middle Ages will only be complete if it can show how the questions as to the power of the Church (of the Pope, the importance of the Mass and sacraments) and justification came to the front, and how in these questions the old dogma, not indeed outwardly, but really, perished. In Tridentine Catholicism it now became completely, along with its new portions, a body of law; in Protestantism it was still retained only in as far as it showed itself, when compared with the Divine Word, to express the Gospel, to form a bond with the historical past, or to serve as the basis of personal assurance of salvation.

There can be no doubt about the division into periods. After an introduction on Western Christianity and Theology before Augustine, Augustinianism falls to be described. Then we have to discuss the epochs of (1) the Semipelagian controversies and Gregory I.; (2) the Carlovingian Renaissance; (3) the period of Clugny and Bernard (the eleventh and twelfth centuries); and (4) the period of the mendicant orders, as also of the so-called Reformers before the Reformation, i.e., of revived Augustinianism (thirteenth and fifteenth centuries). The Middle Ages only reached their climax after the beginning of the thirteenth century and, having grown spiritually equal to the material received from the ancient Church, then developed all individual energies and conceptions. But then at once began the crises which led to the

1 In the Middle Ages every advance in the development of the authority and power of the Church was accompanied by the growing impression that the Church was corrupt. This impression led to the suspicion that it had become Babylon, and to despair of its improvement.

2 On this most important point the schism went beyond Augustine; for in the Middle Ages, as regards the ground and assurance of faith, Augustine of the Confessions and doctrine of predestination was played off against Augustine the apologist of the Catholic Church. Luther, however, abandoned both alike, and followed a view which can be shown to exist in Augustine and in the Middle Ages at most in a hidden undercurrent.

Renaissance and Humanism, to the Reformation, Socinianism and Tridentine Catholicism. It is, therefore, impossible to delimit two periods within the thirteenth to the fifteenth century; for Scholasticism and Mysticism, the development of the authoritative, Nominalist, dogmatics, and the attempts to form new doctrines, are all interwoven. Reformation and Counter-re

formation have a common root.

CHAPTER II.

WESTERN CHRISTIANITY AND WESTERN THEOLOGIANS

BEFORE AUGUSTINE.

THE distinctive character of Western Christianity has been frequently referred to in our earlier volumes. We may now, before taking up Augustine and the Church influenced by him, appropriately review and describe the Christianity into which he entered, and on which he conferred an extraordinarily prolonged existence and new vital energies by the peculiar form and training to which he subjected it. It was the Roman Church that transmitted Christianity to the Middle Ages. But it might almost be named the Augustinian-Gregorian1 with as much justice as that of the Augsburg Confession is called the Lutheran.

The

If, however, we ascend the history of the Latin Church to as near its origin as we can, we find ourselves confronted by a man in whom the character and the future of this Church were already announced, viz., Tertullian. Tertullian and Augustine are the Fathers of the Latin Church in so eminent a sense that, measured by them, the East possessed no Church Fathers at all. only one to rival them, Origen, exerted his influence in a more limited sphere. Eminently ecclesiastical as his activity was, his Christianity was not really ecclesiastical, but esoteric. His development and the import of his personal life were almost without significance for the mass; he continued to live in his books and among theologians. But with Tertullian and Augus

1 After Gregory I.

2 Möhler says very justly, from the Catholic standpoint (Patrologie, p. 737): “We are often surprised for a moment, and forget that in Tertullian we have before us a writer of the beginning of the third century, we feel so much at home in reading the language, often very familiar to us, in which he discusses difficult questions concerning dogmatics, morals, or even the ritual of the Church."

tine it was different. It is true that only a fraction of Tertullian's teaching was retained, that he was tolerated by posterity only in Cyprian's reduced version, and that Augustine became more and more a source of uneasiness to, and was secretly opposed by, his Church. Yet both passed into the history of the Western Catholic Church with their personality, with the characteristics of their Christian thought and feeling. The frictions and unresolved dissonances, in which they wore themselves out, were transmitted to the future as well as the concords they sounded, and the problems, which they could not master in their own inner experience, became the themes of world-historical spiritual conflicts. We can exhibit the superiority of Western to Eastern Christianity at many points; we can even state a whole series of causes for this superiority; but one of the most outstanding is the fact that while the East was influenced by a commonplace succession of theologians and monks, the West was moulded by Tertullian and Augustine.

Roman Christianity, still (c. 180) essentially Greek in form, but already with important features of its own,2 had won the Great African to its service.3 It had already transmitted to him Latin translations of Biblical books; but on this foundation Tertullian laboured, creating both thought and language, because he was able thoroughly to assimilate the new faith, and to express his whole individuality in it.4

In doing so he adopted all the elements which tradition offered him. First, as a Christian Churchman, he took up the old enthusiastic and rigorous, as well as the new anti-heretical, faith. He sought to represent both, and in his sovereign law to verify the strict lex of the ancient disciplina, founded on eschato

1 Ultimately men were content, indeed, with preserving the inconsistencies, treating them as problems of the schools, and ceasing to attempt to solve them; for time makes even self-contradictions tolerable, and indeed to some extent hallows them.

2 See the 1 Ep. of Clement, also the tractate on The Players, and the testimonies of Ignatius, Dionysius of Corinth and others as to the old Roman Church.

3 De praescr. 36: “Si Italiæ adjaces habes Romam, unde nobis auctoritas quoque praesto est."

4 On Church Latin, see Koffmane's work, which contains much that is valuable, Gesch. des Kirchenlateins, 1879-1881.