unsatisfactorily harmonised by himself, produced great friction, living movements, and, finally, violent controversies.

6. As at the beginning of the history of the Latin Church Cyprian followed Tertullian, and stamped the character of ancient Latin Christianity, so Gregory the Great succeeded Augustine, and gave expression to the medieval character of Latin Christianity, a form which, under Augustinian formulas, often differs in whole and in details from Augustine. Dogma remains almost throughout, in the Middle Ages, the complex of Trinitarian and Christological doctrines which was handed down with the Symbol. But, besides this, an immense series of theological conceptions, of church regulations and statutes, already possessed a quasi-dogmatic authority. Yet, in acute cases, he could alone be expelled as a heretic who could be convicted of disbelieving one of the twelve articles of the Symbol, or of sharing in the doctrines of heretics already rejected, i.e., of Pelagians, Donatists, etc. Thus it remained up to the time of the Reformation, although the doctrines of the Church-the Pope, and the sacraments, the ecclesiastical sacrament of penance, and the doctrine of transubstantiation-claimed almost dogmatic authority, though only by being artificially connected with the Symbol.

7. The consolidation of the ecclesiastical and dogmatic system into a legal order, in harmony with the genius of Western Christianity, was almost rendered perfect by the political history of the Church in the period of the tribal migrations. The Germans who entered the circle of the Church, and partly became fused with the Latins, partly, but under the leadership of Rome, remained independent, received Christianity in its. ecclesiastical form, as something absolutely complete. Therefore, setting aside the Chauvinistic contention that the Germans were predisposed to Christianity, no independent theological movement took place for centuries on purely German soil. German Christianity existed in the Middle Ages in the sense that there was a Jewish, Greek, or Latin form. Even if the

1 Seeberg, (Dogmengesch. des Mittelalters, p. 3), has repeated it.

No

2 Even the influence, which some have very recently sought to demonstrate, of German character on the formation of a few medieval theologumena is at least doubt

Germans may have attempted to make themselves more thoroughly familiar with Latin Christianity, as eg., the Slavs did with the Greek-we may recall the old Saxon harmony of the Gospels, etc.-1 yet there was a complete absence of any independence in consciously appropriating it, up to the settlement of the Begging orders in Germany, properly speaking, indeed, up to the Reformation. Complaints of Papal oppressions, or of external ceremonies, cannot be introduced into this question. The complainers were themselves Roman Christians, and the never-failing sectaries paid homage, not to a "German" Christianity, but to a form of Church which was also imported. If up to the thirteenth century there existed in Germany no independent theology or science, still less was there any movement in the history of dogma.2 But as soon as Germans, in Germany and England, took up an independent part in the inner movement of the Church, they prepared the way, supported indeed by Augustine, for the Reformation. The case was different on Roman territory. We need not, of course, look at Italy, for the land of the Popes steadily maintained its characteristic indifference to all theology as theology. Apocalyptic, socialistic, and revolutionary movements were not wanting; Hippocrates and Justinian were studied; but the ideals of thinkers seldom interested Italians, and they hardly ever troubled themselves about a dogma, if it was nothing more. Spain, also, very soon passed out of the intellectual movement, into which, besides, it had never thrown any energy. For eight centuries it was set the immense practical task of protecting Christendom from Islam: in this war it transformed the law of the Catholic religion into a military discipline. The Spanish history of dogma has been a blank since the days of Bishop Elipandus.

ful (against Cremer). Die Wurzeln des Anselm'schen Satisfactions-begriffs in the Theol. Stud. u. Kritik., 1880, p. 7 ff., 1893, p. 316 ff., and Seeberg, 1.c. p. 123. Fuller details in I., ch. 7, Sect. 4.

1 It was to the advantage, here and there, of simple piety that it had not co-operated in the construction of the Church.

2 Nitzsch, Deutsche Gesch., II., p. 15:"(Up to the middle of the eleventh century) the task of administering property was more important to the German Church than the political and dogmatic debates of the neighbouring French hierarchy." See also Döllinger Akad. Vorträge, vol. II., Lecture 1, at beginning.

it

Thus France alone remains. In so far as the Middle Ages, down to the thirteenth century, possessed any dogmatic history, was to a very large extent Frankish or French.1 Gaul had been the land of culture among Latin countries as early as the fourth and fifth centuries. 'Mid the storms of the tribal migrations, culture maintained its ground longest in Southern Gaul, and after a short epoch of barbarism, during which civilisation seemed to have died out everywhere on the Continent, and England appeared to have obtained the leadership, France under the Carlovingians—of course, France allied with Rome through Boniface-came again to the front. There it remained, but with its centre of gravity in the North, between the Seine and the Rhine. Paris was for centuries only second to Rome, as formerly Alexandria and Carthage had been.2 The imperial crown passed to the Germans; the real ruler of the world sat at Rome; but the "studium "-in every sense of the termbelonged to the French. Strictly speaking, even in France, there was no history of dogma in the Middle Ages. If the Reformation had not taken place, we would have been as little aware of any mediæval history of dogma in the West as in the East; for the theological and ecclesiastical movements of the Middle Ages, which by no means professed to be new dogmatic efforts, only claim to be received into the history of dogma because they ended in the dogmas of Trent on the one hand, and in the symbols of the Reformed Churches and Socinian Rationalism on the other. The whole of the Middle Ages presents itself in the sphere of dogmatic history as a transition period, the period when the Church was fixing its relationship to Augustine, and the numerous impulses originated by him. This period lasted so long, (1) because centuries had to elapse before Augustine found disciples worthy of him, and men were in a position even to understand the chain of ecclesiastical and theological edicts

1 See the correct opinion of Jordanus of Osnabrück (about 1285) that the Romans had received the sacerdotium, the Germans the imperium, the French the studium (Lorenz, Geschichtsquellen, 2 ed., vol. II., p. 296).

2 See on the importance of North-Eastern France, Sohm in the Ztschr. d. Savigny-Stiftung. German Division I., p 3 ff., and Schrörs, Hinkmar, p. 3 f. On Rome and Paris see Reuter, Gesch. d. Aufkl. I., p. 181.

handed down from antiquity; (2) because the Roman genius of the Western Church and the Augustinian spirit were in part illassorted, and it was therefore a huge task to harmonise them; and (3) because at the time when complete power had been gained for the independent study of Church doctrine and Augustine, a new authority, in many respects more congenial to the spirit of the Church, appeared on the scene, viz., Augustine's powerful rival,1 Aristotle. The Roman genius, the superstition which, descending from the closing period of antiquity, was strengthened in barbarous times, Augustine, and Aristotlethese are the four powers which contended for their interpretation of the gospel in the history of dogma in the Middle Ages.

8. The Middle Ages experienced no dogmatic decisions like those of Nicæa or Chalcedon. After the condemnation of Pelagians and Semipelagians, Monothelites, and Adoptians, the dogmatic circle was closed. The actions in the Carlovingian age against images, and against Ratramnus and Gottschalk were really of slight importance, and in the fights with later heretics, so many of whom disturbed the medieval Church, old weapons were used, new ones being in fact unnecessary. The task of the historian of dogma is here, therefore, very difficult. In order to know what he ought to describe, to be as just to ancient dogma in its continued influence as to the new quasi-dogmatic Christianity in whose midst men lived, he must fix his eyes on the beginning, Augustine, and the close, the sixteenth century. Nothing belongs to the history of dogma which does not serve to explain this final stage, and even then only on its dogmatic side, and this again may be portrayed only in so far as it prepared the way for the framing of new doctrines, or the official revision of the ancient dogmas.

If my view is right, there are three lines to which we have to turn our attention. In the first place we must examine the history of piety, in so far as new tendencies were formed in it, based on, or existing side by side with Augustinianism; for the piety which was determined by other influences led also to the 1 The derisive title of Augustine-" Aristoteles Pœnorum "'—was prophetic. He got this name from Julian of Eclanum, Aug. Op. imperf., III., 199.

construction of other dogmatic formulas. But the history of piety in the Middle Ages is the history of monachism.1 We may therefore conjecture that if monachism really passed through a history in the Middle Ages, and not merely endless repetitions, it cannot be indifferent for the history of dogma. As a matter of fact, it will be shown that Bernard and Francis were also doctrinal Fathers. We may here point at once to the fact that Augustine, at least apparently, reveals a hiatus in his theology as dominated by piety; he was able to say little concerning the work of Christ in connection with his system of doctrine, and his impassioned love of God was not clearly connected in theory with the impression made by Christ's death, or with Christ's "work." What a transformation, what an access of fervour, Augustinianism had to experience, when impassioned love to the Eternal and Holy One found its object in the Crucified, when it invested with heavenly glory, and referred to the sinful soul, all traits of the beaten, wounded, and dying One, when it began to reflect on the infinite "merits" of its Saviour, because the most profound of thoughts had dawned upon it, that the suffering of the innocent was salvation in history! Dogma could not remain unaffected by what it now found to contemplate and experience in the "crucified" Saviour of Bernard, the "poor" Saviour of Francis.2 We may say briefly that, by the agency of the medieval religious virtuosi and theologians, the close connection between God, the "work" of Christ, and salvation was ultimately restored in the Tridentine and ancient Lutheran dogma. The Greek Church had maintained and still maintains it; but Augustine had loosened it, because his great task was to show what God is, and what salvation the soul requires.

In the second place, we have to take the doctrine of the Sacraments into consideration; for great as were the impulses

1 See Ritschl, Gesch. des Pietismus, vol. I., p. 7 ff., and my Vortrag über das Monchthum, 3 ed.

2 Bernard prepared the way for transforming the Neoplatonic exercitium of the contemplation of the All and the Deity into methodical reflection on the sufferings of Christ. Gilbert says: "Dilectus meus, inquit sponsa, candidus et rubicundus. In hoc nobis et candet veritas et rubet caritas."