The Flourishing of Romance and the Rise of Allegory | Page 9

masterpieces in prose as the hymn-writers (who were very
commonly themselves Scholastics) produced in verse. With the
exception of Abelard, whose interest is rather biographical than strictly
literary, and perhaps Anselm, the heroes of mediæval dialectic, the
Doctors Subtle and Invincible, Irrefragable and Angelic, have left
nothing which even on the widest interpretation of pure literature can
be included within it, or even any names that figure in any but the least
select of literary histories. Yet they cannot but receive some notice here
in a history, however condensed, of the literature of the period of their
chief flourishing. This is not because of their philosophical importance,

although at last, after much bandying of not always well-informed
argument, that importance is pretty generally allowed by the competent.
It has, fortunately, ceased to be fashionable to regard the dispute about
Universals as proper only to amuse childhood or beguile dotage, and
the quarrels of Scotists and Thomists as mere reductions of barren
logomachy to the flatly absurd. Still, this importance, though real,
though great, is not directly literary. The claim which makes it
impossible to pass them over here is that excellently put in the two
passages from Condorcet and Hamilton which John Stuart Mill (not
often a scholastically minded philosopher) set in the forefront of his
Logic, that, in the Scottish philosopher's words, "it is to the schoolmen
that the vulgar languages are indebted for what precision and analytical
subtlety they possess;" and that, as the Frenchman, going still further,
but hardly exaggerating, lays it down, "logic, ethics, and metaphysics
itself owe to Scholasticism a precision unknown to the ancients
themselves."
[Footnote 11: I should feel even more diffidence than I do feel in
approaching this proverbially thorny subject if it were not that many
years ago, before I was called off to other matters, I paid considerable
attention to it. And I am informed by experts that though the later
(chiefly German) Histories of Philosophy, by Ueberweg, Erdmann,
Windelband, &c., may be consulted with advantage, and though some
monographs may be added, there are still no better guides than Hauréau,
De la Philosophie Scolastique (revised edition) and Prantl, Geschichte
der Logik im Abendlande, who were our masters five-and-twenty years
ago. The last-named book in especial may be recommended with
absolute confidence to any one who experiences the famous desire for
"something craggy to break his mind upon."]
[Sidenote: Its influence on phrase and method.]
There can be no reasonable or well-informed denial of the fact of this:
and the reason of it is not hard to understand. That constant usage, the
effect of which has been noted in theological verse, had the same effect
in philosophico-theological prose. Latin is before all things a precise
language, and the one qualification which it lacked in classical times

for philosophic use, the presence of a full and exact terminology, was
supplied in the Middle Ages by the fearless barbarism (as pedants call
it) which made it possible and easy first to fashion such words as
aseitas and quodlibetalis, and then, after, as it were, lodging a
specification of their meaning, to use them ever afterwards as current
coin. All the peculiarities which ignorance or sciolism used to ridicule
or reproach in the Scholastics--their wiredrawnness, their lingering over
special points of verbal wrangling, their neglect of plain fact in
comparison with endless and unbridled dialectic--all these things did no
harm but much positive good from the point of view which we are now
taking. When a man defended theses against lynx-eyed opponents or
expounded them before perhaps more lynx-eyed pupils, according to
rules familiar to all, it was necessary for him, if he were to avoid
certain and immediate discomfiture, to be precise in his terms and exact
in his use of them. That it was possible to be childishly as well as
barbarously scholastic nobody would deny, and the famous sarcasms of
the Epistolæ Obscurorum Virorum, two centuries after our time, had
been anticipated long before by satirists. But even the logical fribble,
even the logical jargonist, was bound to be exact. Now exactness was
the very thing which languages, mostly young in actual age, and in all
cases what we may call uneducated, unpractised in literary exercises,
wanted most of all. And it was impossible that they should have better
teachers in it than the few famous, and even than most of the numerous
unknown or almost unknown, philosophers of the Scholastic period.
[Sidenote: The great Scholastics.]
It has been said that of those most famous almost all belong specially to
this our period. Before it there is, till its very latest eve, hardly one
except John Scotus Erigena; after it none, except Occam, of the very
greatest. But during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries there is scarcely
a decade without its illustration.