CLASSICAL ANTIQUITY, MIDDLE AGES 77 



sands and even tens of thousands of students attending at one time. True, 

 both mass education and self-government had their dangers; reactionary 

 intellectual movements, equally with earnest strivings after knowledge, 

 might, and in fact did at times, gain the mastery at the medixval universi- 

 ties, just as, indeed, later liberal and reactionary aims alternately dominated 

 university research and instruction. 



Scholastic doctrine 

 The science taught in mediaeval schools and universities — scholastics, as 

 it was called — was governed, as already mentioned, by ecclesiastical doc- 

 trine. The intellectual movements which were set on foot independently 

 thereof and which were consequently persecuted as heretical were not 

 founded, as they generally are nowadays, on natural science, but took 

 their stand on purely speculative ground. The question which had been de- 

 bated ever since the days of the Church Fathers of the relation of reason to 

 faith, or, in other words, the right of the individual to criticize Church 

 doctrine, was answered in the first place by the universities along fairly 

 liberal lines, in spite of protests from the Church, but in the thir- 

 teenth century a religious reaction set in, evoked by the struggle against 

 heresy and represented by the orders of mendicant friars founded for the ex- 

 press purpose of combating the heretical movement; finally these orders 

 succeeded in usurping the control of university education, at least of theo- 

 logical instruction, which was thus compelled to adapt itself to ecclesiastico- 

 political aims. This occurred, strangely enough, just at the time when a 

 closer knowledge of Aristotle began to be disseminated in the universities, 

 based on the Greek original and not merely on the Arabic translations of 

 his writings. But the High-Church theologians who now held sway in the 

 universities soon began to realize what a splendid ally they had in the Aris- 

 totelean philosophy, which they had originally mistrusted as mere heathen 

 delusion. Aristotle's conception of the earth as the centre of the universe 

 and yet as the home of all imperfection in contrast to the perfect heaven 

 might very well be adapted to the Church's doctrine of sin and salvation. 

 His strictly formalistic cosmic system and mode of thought, with its domi- 

 nating intelligence and its denial of any material causality, was, like his 

 conservative and authoritative view of hum^n life, well suited to form a 

 scientific basis for the hierarchical aims of the papal power. And if his writ- 

 ings did not agree in every detail with the revealed Word, the inconsistencies 

 made apparent thereby could be explained away by reference to the author's 

 paganism and ignorance of the way of salvation. Thus was created in the 

 thirteenth century, mainly on the initiative of the greatest thinker of the 

 Catholic Church, the canonized Thomas Aquinas, the curious and, in its way, 

 fully elaborated system of thought which that Church has ever since then, 

 held to be the only true one. According to this system, existence is divided 



