Lecture 22, eternal wisdom, learning and theology. The prayer is from Al-Soon of York, who lived in the 8th century from England, but served for most of his life on the continent of Europe. And we'll use these words for Al-Soon as we begin this lecture, let us pray. Eternal light shot into our hearts, eternal goodness, deliver us from evil, eternal power, be our support, eternal wisdom, scatter the darkness of our ignorance. Eternal pity have mercy upon us, that with all our heart, and mind, and soul, and strength, we may seek your face and be brought by your infinite mercy to your holy presence through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen. We're now into the second 500 years of the history of Christianity, and we have looked at a number of themes related to that long period. We're not going to spend as much time on it as we did first 500 years or as we will the third 500 years. But we need to examine some of the imported topics of this second 500 years, and we've looked at the spread of the gospel into different parts of Europe and into Asia, and the progress of the gospel in Africa during that time. But in this lecture I'd like to focus on learning and theology, and you'll soon be aware when I start talking about people like Boetheus and pseudo-diadicious and John Scotus-Aragina, that were not in the great day of theology. We're not in a period of Augustins and Ambrosus and Jerome's and Chrysostums, but these people that we're going to talk about today do have some significance and importance, and we need to understand what is going on in the area of learning and theology in a period that most people, many people refer to as the dark ages. But look first at learning, and then at theology, although these two things really flow together in the middle ages, there's no difference. All learning had to do with theology and all theology had to do with learning at that time, but for the sake of convenience I'll divide it into these two points. Scholars, first of all great scholars, men of learning, and then secondly great theologians. The first of the great scholars of this period was a man who lived in the late fifth and early sixth century. His name was Boetheus. Boetheus came from a prominent Roman family, but by the time Boetheus lived, Rome had fallen, so Rome was no longer the city that it was earlier. It was ruled by astrographic kings, barbarian kings, but these kings often made use of people from Rome, from the prominent families of Rome in their service, and Boetheus was one of the leaders of the state under theodoric, the astrographic king. Something happened to him, we're not sure of all the circumstances, but he fell out of favor with that king and was put into prison. He wrote a number of books, both before he was put into prison, and while he was in prison and his fame rests upon those books, particularly one that he wrote while he was in prison called the Consolation of Philosophy. Most people have never heard of that book today, but for centuries the Consolation of Philosophy was great text for people to read in school. To read in Latin in school, and to become at home in the Consolation, as it was generally called, was to become at home in the medieval Latin world. What Boetheus set out to do in the Consolation of Philosophy was to try to examine the misfortune that had fallen upon him and to come to some resolution of that misfortune. He had been a good man, he was doing what was right, and now all this trouble had come upon him. Interestingly, he tries to do that without reference to God or the afterlife. People have puzzled over this because Boetheus was a professed Christian, and now he writes about trouble purely from the standpoint of philosophy, and tries to find some consolation in philosophy itself. Here is a Boethean fig being consoled by philosophy. I remember when I went to Princeton Seminary to do my doctoral studies, I had two seminars, the first semester I was there, just two classes, and all our work focused on those two classes. One class was on Boetheus, and I was rather dismayed that I had never heard of Boetheus, and I was going to spend the whole semester studying Boetheus. Well, we did that, I spent a whole semester studying Boetheus and wrote a long paper on a famous sentence from the Consolation of Philosophy in which Boetheus said virtue is its own reward. That was really my semester's word to try to analyze that sentence. Well, that's what Boetheus said out to do to see if he could buy simple rational processes, philosophical reflections, come up with some view in which he could be consoled by philosophy. Why he did not bring in God, I'm not sure. Perhaps he felt that if he could write it this way, it could be of a help to people who were not believers in God, or perhaps it was some other reason, but he wrote the book, the Consolation of Philosophy, and as a result of that book and some others, Boetheus became a major channel through which Aristotle and the Greek philosophers were brought into the Middle Ages. There were only a few of these, and without Boetheus and a few others, the more ancient learning, particularly of Aristotle, would have been lost to the Christian West. That's very important because we'll see later that Aristotle, the rediscovery of Aristotle, or the preservation and rediscovery of Aristotle, was essential for the development of the scholastic method which is so important for the study of medieval theology. Well, I hate to leave Boetheus because I spent all that time studying him, and I could keep talking about him, but in a survey course the most he can get is five minutes. Another famous man of the time was Isador of Seville. He wrote a book of synopses, origins, or etymologies. The book of synopses became the theological text of the Middle Ages until the 12th century. You have the book of synopses from Isador, and later from Peter Lombard, the book of synopses, and then later we'll get to Thomas Aquinas, so there's a kind of progression of theological text here beginning with Isador. The book of synopses is simply his way of trying to do a systematic theology, to collect ideas from Augustine and the church fathers, and put them together in some systematic way. The origins, or etymologies, is Isador's expansion of his writing to include secular learning. So the importance of Isador is that in one man we get theology and just about everything else. You might say he wrote both a systematic theology, and inside the origins, or etymologies, became the principal source of knowledge of antiquity for the Middle Ages. So from these two people, Beletheus and Isador, Beletheus from Rome, and Isador from Seville, and what we now call Spain, you have two important educators and scholars who try to capture something of the learning of the past, put it into written form, and preserve it for the future. The third scholar is quite different. His name, or at least we usually call him, Dionysius the Ariapagite, although today he is known as Dionysius the Sudo Ariapagite. It's a rather odd name, you might think, for a scholar. The reason he is called Dionysius the Ariapagite is the name that he uses in his writings. And Dionysius, as you know, is the man that Paul met in Acts chapter 17, Paul met this Dionysius in Athens, according to tradition, Dionysius was the first bishop of Athens. And when this book, these writings from Dionysius the Ariapagite appeared, a people for a long time thought that they were actually written by Paul's convert, who traditionally was viewed as the first pastor or bishop of the church in Athens. It was much later that scholars did textual criticism on this writing and discovered that this could not have been written by a first century Greek at all. It was probably written by someone from Syria in about the fifth or sixth century. So Dionysius the Ariapagite became known now as Dionysius the Sudo for faults, Ariapagite. In Dionysius we have a blend of Christian and Neoplatonic ideas. The great deal of philosophy from the Neoplatonic school comes into a certain expression of Christianity through the writings of Dionysius. Let me try to summarize his significance in two ways. One is that Dionysius stresses very much the negative way to God. That is what we really don't know. Theologians often talk about what we do know about God, but Dionysius spends his time talking about what we don't know about God. That is called apophatic or negative theology. Now the Orthodox mainstream you might say maintain the abiding mystery of God, Augustine and the others never said that we could completely understand God or that we could exhaust the meaning of God. But the Orthodox mainstream felt that there was true revelation, true knowledge, and that what we did know we did know truly, but we did not know God exhaustively by any means. I think that would be a way to summarize what I would call the Orthodox mainstream. But Dionysius stresses more beside our lack of knowledge, our ignorance, the darkness and his negative theology then becomes a very important factor both in the east and in the west. Charles Williams in the descent of the doves says that the theology of Dionysius soars into the great darkness lit faintly by the very phrases it rejects. Seems to me that's a very nice sentence in which Williams tries to summarize what it seems to be to read Dionysius. After all he's writing a book and he keeps on writing the book so continually rejects the knowledge that he talks about but there is some faint lighting of his understanding through the very phrases that he rejects. The importance of Dionysius was to fall from mystics everywhere, east and west who will come later to mysticism, the mystics draw heavily from Dionysius because mysticism will move away from a rational approach to theology, to a personal encounter, to an experience. And secondly the influence of Dionysius is particularly prevalent in the east and the eastern churches, the eastern Orthodox church, and other eastern churches will draw upon Dionysius for mystery. The eastern Orthodox church as we'll see later always thinks that the western church is too rational. We're always trying to explain things, understand things, write books of systematic theology and it doesn't matter whether we're Catholic or Protestant in the west that's what we're up to according to the eastern church and the eastern church drawing heavily on Dionysius very much goes in the way of mystery. The negative way to go. The second point under Dionysius has to do with his celestial and ecclesiastical hierarchy. Actually the word hierarchy was probably invented by Dionysius because he wrote these two works, one about a celestial hierarchy in which he arranges the hierarchy. Arranges the angels into three orders of three each. So quite a long book about the angels in which there are nine quarters of angels, three main orders with three angels, types of angels in each of those orders. Here is a pseudo Dionysian pig contemplating the nine orders of angels. What Dionysius does in this celestial hierarchy is a kind of a neoplatonic ordering or theory of the great chain of being. The neoplatonic philosophy had a way of looking at God at the top and people at the bottom and all kinds of intermediary stages or beings or steps between God and people and the angels form that ladder in Dionysian theology. A hierarchy of spiritual creatures rank a fun rank up and down the ladder of heaven. John Calvin occasionally refers to Dionysius in his institute. He doesn't really think much of him. He said if you read that man's book, that is Dionysius's celestial hierarchy, you would think that he had fallen down from heaven and recounted not what he had learned but what he had seen with his own eyes because Dionysius is so precise and exact in the way that he creates these orders of the angels. It is rather curious that someone who could emphasize so much a negative view of God could know so much about the angels. I think Calvin points that out but the influence of this book was very important because Dionysius linked it to a second book which was on the ecclesiastical hierarchy. In the middle ages it was often viewed that things on earth would reflect or mirror things in heaven. So if in heaven you have a well-graded celestial hierarchy, so on earth it must follow that there would be that same well-graded ecclesiastical hierarchy with Pope and Cardinals and Archbishop and Bishops and so on down the line. So in the eyes of the Bishops and other church authorities it did not harm his cause one bit that he wrote after the celestial hierarchy, the ecclesiastical hierarchy in which he traced parallels between the celestial hierarchy and the church on earth. The church on earth was already moving in this direction as we've seen but this was another step in the evolution of the Roman Catholic church with its very great stress on hierarchy. Dionysius is an important figure in the development of that so are some of the popes that we will look at later. Now as we have been thinking about learning we've looked at Boetheus, Isador, people through whom the learning of the past was preserved and passed on to the middle ages. We've looked at Dionysius, a kind of creative theologian whose influence we've talked about and his name will come up again. There were two great movements of education or learning in this second 500 year period of Christianity. One is Celtic Christianity and we looked at that last time as we studied St. Patrick and the influence of the Celtic church in Ireland and from Ireland. That had its heyday in the 6th and 7th centuries and celebrated in the recent book by Thomas K. Hill how the Irish saved civilization and certainly tells that story lively and interesting style. There was another movement this time on the continent and we call it the Carolingian Renaissance and it had its heyday in the 8th and 9th centuries. The Carolingian reform, Carolingian simply means the reign kingdom of Charlemagne, the Holy Roman Emperor who was crowned in the year 800. Charlemagne, although he was not a great scholar himself, anything but a great scholar, had appreciation for learning and tried to create in his capital at Aachen a center for study and learning and was able to do that. In the Carolingian Renaissance we have a true shaft of light within the relative cultural darkness of the early Middle Ages. One of the great teachers in Aachen was an Englishman. We know from our last lecture that people from England were going to the continent now, people from Ireland were in order to teach and to evangelize and to bring the gospel and learning to areas where it had never gone or where it had been lost. Alcyn of York was a scholar and a Benedictine monk and head of Charlemagne's palace school in the court at Aachen. It was a very important school and Alcyn was a very important teacher because people from all over the continent came to that school and they were taught by Alcyn. By Alcyn and the other scholars there and then they went out to head monastic and cathedral schools in other parts of Europe. We haven't really yet come to the universities but these are the beginnings of the university movement, the monastic school, the school in the monastery. And then the cathedral school, the school in a major cathedral, the next step will be a university like the Sorbonne or Oxford or Milan. Scholars in these schools and particularly at Aachen studied and wrote, we don't have evidence of great books coming out of these schools. But they are copying the books of antiquity, the texts that we see coming out of Aachen, the scribes of Alcyn arrived at a very beautiful and effective text by which they copied the Bible and copied books. This is a page from a Carolingian manuscript and some people consider it, one of the most beautiful and written texts that has ever been invented.
Well so much for general learning, let's focus now more specifically on theology and on a couple of very great debates that took place during this time. Before we look at those two great debates, I'll mention John Scotus, Eregina, theologian in the 9th century, John Scotus, John the Scott, which meant of course that he was an Irishman because that was where the word was originally used. He was a scholar who liked Alcyn before him, taught in Carolingian Europe and impressive scholar with exceptional knowledge of Greek and he attempted somewhat like Dionysius, a reconciliation of neo-pletonic philosophy with Christian ideas. John Scotus, Eregina, always seemed to walk on the very edge of things, very close to pantheism at times, maybe even falling over into pantheism from time to time. But more importantly, there was the Lord's Supper debate in the 9th century and we have two theologians here, both associated with the celebrated monastery of Corby, one of the most important Carolingian theological schools. One is Rad-Berdus and the other is Rat-Tramdus. It's very hard to keep these two straight so try to find some way in order to remember the difference between Rad-Berdus and Rat-Tramdus. They debated the Lord's Supper, the nature of the body of Christ in the Lord's Supper. What does it mean when we say, this is my body as Christ said, what do we actually partake of in the Lord's Supper? Of course that's going to be a huge debate later in the Reformation period, but we have the first important theological debate on this topic in the 9th century between Rad-Berdus and Rat-Tramdus. Rad-Berdus held what we call real presents, or you could call it the Catholic doctrine. That is that the wine and the bread are actually transformed into the body and blood of Christ, no longer wine and bread but now body and blood. And Rat-Tramdus answered Rad-Berdus. He held what we could call the spiritual presents and sounds very much more like the reformed doctrine of Swingley or even Calvin than anything else that we can identify it with. The view of Rat-Tramdus was condemned by the church in 1050, so the church considered these two views. This point is not fixed in stone as to how the Lord's Supper is to be viewed, but by 1050 the church had taken a stand for what we call the Catholic view. And Transubsanciation was then fixed as dogma by the Lateran Council in 1215. So by the time you come to 1215 if you're a Catholic it's necessary that you believe that you protect the actual body of Christ, physical body of Christ in the Lord's Supper. The other debate I'd like to talk about, spend a little time on, is the predestination debate that takes place during the time of God's chalk and florists of Leon. But to do that, let's go back and think about what has happened to the doctrine of grace or to the doctrine of predestination so we can put those two things together since the time of Augustine. We saw that in the fallagian controversy Augustine rescued the biblical view of grace from obscurity or neglect and brought it back to center stage in his theology. But what has happened to grace since Augustine? Council of Orange met in 529 and teamed up with a view which some people think is totally true to Augustine. If something is almost true to Augustine, you can look at Paul Rulley and Kurt Alain quotations from those two scholars in the syllabus to see two different ideas about what actually happened at the Council of Orange. I think I would tend to identify the Council of Orange as almost Augustine, but not quite. The irresistible grace is omitted although certainly the Council of Orange makes a strong statement that prevenient grace is necessary. Reprobation is not included in the statement of the Council of Orange. Some people think it's not included in Augustine either, but the implications of Augustine's teaching seemed to me to clearly lead in that direction. So, after Augustine there was the struggle with the semi-pologians, John Cassian and the others who we call the semi-pologians. Even during Augustine's own lifetime as an old man, he was fighting that battle. He had fought the battle with the pelagians and then he fought the battle with the semi-pologians. And then the Council of Orange came along and seemed to place the church very much on the side of Augustine in this debate. But the semi-pologianism of John Cassian as expressed in his writing the conferences, more and more began to influence and undermine Augustineanism and the decree of the Council of Orange so that by the time we come to the Middle Ages, the period I'm talking about now, pure Augustinianism is very scarce, practically unknown in the church. One man who did stand for, what Augustine stood for, was a man whose name was Scotch Chalk. He was the son of a Saxon Count. It's not the last time that a Saxon will raise his voice in defense of this doctrine. Scotch Chalk was a Benedictine monk. He was a scholar. He had studied under retramedus at Corby. But mainly he read Augustine, and by reading Augustine, not commentaries on Augustine, or not the writings of the semi-pologians, but Augustine himself, he began to absorb the teaching of St. Augustine. He was very much honored in the church, but very little followed by the church in this point of his theology. And so Scotch Chalk wrote sentences like this, God, prior to the creation of the world, unchangeably predestined all his elect to eternal life. And all of the rejected who shall be condemned to eternal death for their evil deeds on judgment day according to his justice and as they deserve. That's a fairly well thought through sentence and balanced in different ways, but it's certainly double predestination. The idea, the words double predestination, come first from Isador of Seville, who apparently also held that view. And the teaching of double predestination is a logical inference from a customs teaching, and certainly present in Scotch Chalk. Flores of Lyon was a defender of God's Chalk. He wrote none of the elect can perish because of the hard disk and impenitence of their hearts. None of the reprobate can be saved, and both God's Chalk and Flores spoke of the fact that the chosen or predestined heaven, others to hell, though not to sin, neither one wanted to say that God predestined people to sin, they sin because of their own choice. But you certainly have double predestination, irresistible grace, limited atonement in the writings of these two theologians in the Middle Ages. Well, that kind of teaching fell like a bombshell on Carolingian Europe, and the church was not about to countenance that God's Chalk was defraught, and not only defraught, but severely beaten, and not only that, but put into prison where he spent the last 20 years of his life. And he continued to study and to write, but his writings were little known and little used until the time of the Reformation when people began to rediscover this medieval Augustinian. Interestingly, he was also a religious poet of high order, don't always find a theologian like God's Chalk who is also able to write sensitive and beautiful poetry. Well, let's think a moment about this issue and how it comes up in church history, the difference between fallagianism and Augustinianism and the different views in the tween. You might characterize it this way. Fallagius would say to a new convert, congratulations, you did it. You have cleaned up your life, you have become a Christian, you have done what was required of you. Augustin, meeting a new convert, would say, thank God you've been saved by grace. And others, and this is particularly true of the Middle Ages, the period we're studying now, others try to get in between the two and say something like this to the new convert. Thank God and congratulations. This was a cooperative effort, praise is due all around. That's what I call percentage theology and the Middle Ages struggle with exactly how to set the percentage, how much does God do and how much must we do, but almost everybody except for a few exceptions like God's Chalk and Flores of Lyon, later Thomas Bradwardine and Wickliffe and Tuss and then of course into the Reformation where you have many on the other side, but almost everybody in this period viewed that salvation was some sort of cooperative effort between God and us. Seems to me that Pelagianism is the persistent heresy, there may be more than one persistent heresy in Church history, but Pelagianism certainly is one of those. We have in this outline kind of way of looking at the whole flow of Church history, grace on one side it works on the other and as you go through that outline we'll see how the doctrines of grace and the Old Testament were lost and came into the works of Phariseism. Then the doctrines of grace recovered in the New Testament but then fell away into Pelagianism, brought back to its biblical foundation in Augustine, but then in the period we're talking about semi-Polagianism and leading up to scholasticism, we moved back to the work side, the Reformation takes us back to the great side. Rationalism in the post-Reformation period certainly goes in the opposite direction, the revivals of Whitfield and Edwards, the first great awakening, emphasize grace again and then liberalism moves back to the side of works. So to think of Church history you can take that one doctrine and see how it has been treated in different epics of the Church's history, grace withers, the flower fades, but the word of our God will stand forever.