The Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri (13 inch ebook reader .txt) 📕

jealousy and suspicion; he has no fear of the result of any investigation; he hates nothing, hardly heresy; loves nothing, unless perhaps naked, abstract truth. In his serene confidence that alf must end in good, he moves the most startling and even perilous questions, as if they were the most indifferent, the very Being of God. God must be revealed by syllogistic process. Himself inwardly conscious of the absolute harmony of his own intellectual and moral being, he places sin not so much in the will as in the understanding. The perfection of man is the perfection of his intelligence. He examines with the same perfect self-command, it might almost be said apathy, the converse as well as the proof of the most vital religious truths. He is nearly as consummate a sceptic, almost atheist, as he is a divine and theologian. Secure, as it should seem, in impenetrable armor, he has not only no apprehension, but seems not to suppose the possibility of danger; he has nothing of the boastfulness of self-confidence, but, in calm assurance of victory, gives every advantage to his adversary. On both sides of every question he casts the argument into one of his clear, distinct syllogisms, and calmly places himself as Arbiter, and passes judgment in one or a series of still more unanswerable syllogisms. He has assigned its unassailable province to Church authority, to tradition or the Fathers, faith and works; but beyond, within the proper sphere of philosophy, he asserts full freedom. There is no Father, even St. Augustine, who may not be examined by the fearless intellect.”

↩

Gratian was a Franciscan friar, and teacher in the school of the convent of St. Felix in Bologna. He wrote the Decretum Gratiani, or “Concord of the Discordant Canons,” in which he brought into agreement the laws of the courts secular and ecclesiastical. ↩

Peter Lombard, the “Master of Sentences,” so called from his Libri Sententiarum. In the dedication of this work to the Church he says that he wishes “to contribute, like the poor widow, his mite to the treasury of the Lord.” The following account of him and his doctrines is from Milman, History of Latin Christianity, VIII 238:⁠—

“Peter the Lombard was born near Novara, the native place of Lanfranc and of Anselm. He was Bishop of Paris in 1159. His famous Book of the Sentences was intended to be, and became to a great extent, the Manual of the Schools. Peter knew not, or disdainfully threw aside, the philosophical cultivation of his day. He adhered rigidly to all which passed for Scripture, and was the authorized interpretation of the Scripture, to all which had become the creed in the traditions, and law in the decretals, of the Church. He seems to have no apprehension of doubt in his stern dogmatism; he will not recognize any of the difficulties suggested by philosophy; he cannot, or will not, perceive the weak points of his own system. He has the great merit that, opposed as he was to the prevailing Platonism, throughout the Sentences the ethical principle predominates; his excellence is perspicuity, simplicity, definiteness of moral purpose. His distinctions are endless, subtle, idle; but he wrote from conflicting authorities to reconcile writers at war with each other, at war with themselves. Their quarrels had been wrought to intentional or unintentional antagonism in the ‘Sic et Non’ of Abelard. That philosopher, whether Pyrrhonist or more than Pyrrhonist, had left them all in the confusion of strife; he had set Fathers against Fathers, each Father against himself, the Church against the Church, tradition against tradition, law against law. The Lombard announced himself and was accepted as the mediator, the final arbiter in this endless litigation; he would sternly fix the positive, proscribe the negative or sceptical view in all these questions. The litigation might still go on, but within the limits which he had rigidly established; he had determined those ultimate results against which there was no appeal. The mode of proof might be interminably con tested in the schools; the conclusion was already irrefragably fixed. On the sacramental system Peter the Lombard is loftily, severely hierarchical. Yet he is moderate on the power of the keys; he holds only a declaratory power of binding and loosing⁠—of showing how the souls of men were to be bound and loosed.”

Peter Lombard was born at the beginning of the twelfth century, when the Novarese territory, his birthplace, was a part of Lombardy, and hence his name. He studied at the University of Paris, under Abelard; was afterwards made Professor of Theology in the University, and then Bishop of Paris. He died in 1164. ↩

Solomon, whose Song of Songs breathes such impassioned love. ↩

To know if he were saved or not, a grave question having been raised upon that point by theologians. ↩

Dionysius the Areopagite, who was converted by St. Paul. Acts 17:34:⁠—

“Howbeit, certain men clave unto him, and believed; among the which was Dionysius the Areopagite.”

A book attributed to him, on the “Celestial Hierarchy,” was translated into Latin by Johannes Erigena, and became in the Middle Ages the textbook of angelic lore. “The author of those extraordinary treatises,” says Milman, History of Latin Christianity, VIII 189, “which, from their obscure and doubtful parentage, now perhaps hardly maintain their fame for imaginative richness, for the occasional beauty of their language, and their deep piety⁠—those treatises which, widely popular in the West, almost created the angel-worship of the popular creed, and were also the parents of Mystic Theology and of the higher Scholasticism⁠—this Poet-Theologian was a Greek. The writings which bear the venerable name of Dionysius the Areopagite, the proselyte of St. Paul, first appear under a suspicious and suspected form, as authorities cited by the heterodox Severians in a conference at Constantinople. The orthodox stood aghast: how was it that writings of the holy