III. The Anthropology of the Middle Ages
356; Otten, Manual of the History of Dogmas, pp. 357–386; Sheldon, History of Christian Doctrine, I, pp. 222–243; Shedd, History of Doctrine, II, pp. 26–110; Fisher, History of Christian Doctrine, pp.
176–198; McGiffert, A History of Christian Thought, II, pp. 71–143.
III. The Anthropology of the Middle Ages 1. THE VIEWS OF GREGORY THE GREAT. Gregory the Great, born at Rome about 540 A. D., was a diligent student of Augustine,
Jerome, and Ambrose. His religious disposition prompted him to renounce the world, and after the death of his father he devoted his wealth to good works, and particularly to the building of cloisters for the promotion of the purely contemplative life. Unanimously elected
Pope in 590, he accepted the position only with great hesitation.
Though not an original thinker, he became an author of great repute and did much to disseminate sound doctrine. Next to Augustine he was the most influential authority in the Church. In fact, Augustine was understood in the early Middle Ages, only as interpreted by Gregory. For that reason the history of doctrine in the Middle Ages must begin with him.
The Augustinianism of Gregory was somewhat attenuated. He explains the entrance of sin into the world by the weakness of man.
The first sin of Adam was a free act, in which he surrendered his love to God and became subject to spiritual blindness and spiritual death.
Through the sin of the first man all men became sinners and as such subject to condemnation. This sounds rather Augustinian, but Gregory did not carry these ideas through consistently. He regarded sin as a weakness or disease rather than as guilt, and taught that man had not lost the freedom but only the goodness of the will. At the same time he stressed the fact that without grace there can be no salvation nor any human merits. The work of redemption is begun by the grace of God. Prevenient grace causes man to will the good, and subsequent grace enables him to do it. The change of man is begun in
baptism, which works faith and cancels the guilt of past sins. The will is renewed and the heart is filled with the love of God, and thus man is enabled to merit something with God.
Gregory retained the doctrine of predestination only in a modified form. While he speaks of the irresistibility of grace, and of predestination as the secret counsel of God respecting the certain and definite number of the elect, this is after all only a predestination based on foreknowledge. God appoints a certain definite number unto salvation, since He knows that they will accept the Gospel. But no one can be certain of his own election or of that of any other person.
THE
GOTTSCHALKIAN
CONTROVERSY.
Augustine had occasionally spoken of a double predestination, and Isodore of Seville still wrote of it as being twofold. But many of the Augustinians in the seventh, eighth, and ninth centuries lost sight of this double character of predestination, and interpreted it as Gregory had done. Then came Gottschalk. who found rest and peace for his soul only in the Augustinian doctrine of election, and contended earnestly for a double predestination, that is, a predestination of the lost as well as of the saved. He was careful, however, to limit the divine efficiency to the redemptive line and the production of holiness, and to regard sin merely as the object of a permissive decree which neverthless rendered it certain. He explicitly rejected the idea of a predestination based on foreknowledge, since this makes the divine decree dependent on the acts of man. Prescience merely accompanies predestination and attests the justice of it.
He met a great deal of unwarranted opposition. His opponents did not understand him and lodged against him the familiar accusation that his teachings made God the author of sin, His doctrine was condemned at Mayence in 848 A. D., and the following year he himself was scourged and condemned to life-long imprisonment. A debate ensued, in which several influential theologians, such as Prudentius, Ratramnus, Remigius, and others, defended the doctrine
of a double predestination as Augustinian, while especially Rabanus and Hincmar of Rheims assailed it. But this controversy proved to be after all little more than a debate about words. Both the defenders and the assailents were at heart Semi-Augustinians. They expressed the same idea in different ways. The former spoke with Augustine of a double predestination, but based reprobation on foreknowledge, while the latter applied the term "predestination" only to the election to life, and also based reprobation on prescience. Both subscribed to the idea of sacramental grace, and feared that the strict theory of predestination would rob the sacraments of their spiritual value and make them mere forms.
The decisions of the Councils of Chiersy and Valence were altogether in harmony with these views, the former reproducing the views of the assailants, and the latter those of the defenders. The statement of the Council of Valence reads as follows: "We confess a predestination of the elect to life, and a predestination of the wicked to death; but that, in the election of those who are saved, the mercy of God precedes good merit, and in the condemnation of those who will perish, evil merit precedes the righteous judgment of God. But that in predestination God has determined only those things which He
Himself would do, either from gratuitous mercy or in righteous judgment … But that in the wicked He foreknew the wickedness because it comes from them; and does not predestinate it, because it does not come from Him." Quoted by Seeberg, History of Doctrine,
II, p. 33. These Councils met in 853.
3. THE CONTRIBUTION OF ANSELM
There was one great thinker during the Middle Ages who not only reproduced the Augustinian anthropology, but also made a positive contribution to it, namely, Anselm of Canterbury. a. His Doctrine of Sin. He emphasizes the doctrine of original sin, but stresses the fact that the term "original" does not refer to the origin of the human race, but to that of the individual in the present
condition of things. In his opinion original sin may also be called peccatum naturale (natural sin), though it does not belong to human nature as such, but represents a condition into which it has come since creation. By the fall man became guilty and polluted, and both guilt and pollution are passed on from father to child. All sin, original as well as actual, constitutes guilt.
Since sin presupposes the exercise of free will, he raises the question, how sin can be ascribed to children, and why infants should be baptized for its remission. He finds the explanation in the fact that human nature apostatized after creation. Like Augustine he regards every child as an individualized part of that general human nature which Adam possessed, so that it has actually sinned in Adam and is therefore also guilty and polluted. If Adam had not fallen, human nature would not have apostatized, and a holy nature would have passed from father to son. In the present state of affairs, however, a sinful nature is propagated. Original sin therefore has its origin in a sin of nature, while later actual sin is altogether individual in character.
Anselm raises the question, whether the sins of the immediate ancestors are imputed to posterity as well as the sin of the first father. And his answer is negative, because these sins were not committed by the common nature in Adam. The sin of Adam was unique; there never was a second like it, because it was the transgression of an individual who included within himself the whole of humanity. This is undoubtedly a weak point in the system of Anselm, since all the following sins are committed by the same human nature, though individualized, and because it does not answer the question, why only the first sin of Adam is imputed to his posterity, and not his later sins. He further calls attention to the fact that in Adam the guilt of nature, that is, original sin, rests upon the guilt of the individual, while in his posterity the guilt of the individual rests upon the guilt of nature. In the person of Adam the whole human race was tried. At this point he approaches the later covenant idea.
b. His Doctrine of the Freedom of the Will. Anselm also discusses the problem of the freedom of the will and makes some valuable suggestions. He declares the popular definition of freedom as the power of sinning or not sinning, or as the possibilitas utriusque partis, to be inadequate. It does not hold with reference to the holy angels. They have perfect moral freedom, and yet are not able to sin.
He holds that the will which, of itself and without external compulsion, is so strongly determined to the right as to be unable to desert the path of rectitude, is freer than the will which is so feebly determined to the right as to be able to depart from the way of righteousness. But if this is so, the question arises, whether we can call the apostasy of the angels and of our first parents a free act. To this Anselm replies that the act of our first parents was certainly an act of spontaneity, of pure self-will, but not an act of genuine freedom. They sinned, not because of their freedom, but in spite of it. by virtue of the possibilitas peccandi (the possibility of sinning). The power to do otherwise than they were doing added nothing to their freedom, because they were voluntarily holy without it. He distinguishes between true freedom and the voluntary faculty itself.
The former was lost, but the latter was not. The true end and destination of the will is not to choose either good or evil, but to choose the good. The voluntary faculty was intended by the Creator to will the right and nothing else. Its true freedom consists in its selfdetermination to holiness. This means the rejection of the idea that freedom is caprice, and that the will was created with the liberty of indifference. It is by creation shut up to the choice of but one object, namely, holiness. But the acceptance of this end must be a selfdetermination, and not a compulsion from without. The power to choose the wrong, when given for the purpose of probation, subtracts from the perfection of real freedom, because it exposes to the hazards of an illegitimate choice.
4. PECULIARITIES OF ROMAN CATHOLIC ANTHROPOLOGY. The
Roman Catholic Church clearly harbored two tendencies, the one Semi-Augustinian and the other Semi-Pelagian, of which the latter gradually gained the upper hand. We cannot follow the discussions
of all the Scholastics here, and therefore merely state the characteristic teachings that gradually emerged.
The view gradually prevailed that original righteousness was not a natural but a supernatural endowment of man. Man, it was held, naturally consists of flesh and spirit, and from these diverse or contrary propensities there arises a conflict (concupiscence), which often makes right action difficult. To offset the disadvantages of this original languor of nature, God added to man a certain remarkable gift, namely, original righteousness, which served as a check to keep the inferior part of man in proper subjection to the superior, and the superior to God. This original righteousness was a supernatural gift, a donum superadditum, something added to the nature of man, who was created without positive righteousness, but also without positive unrighteousness.
With the entrance of sin into the world man lost this original righteousness. This means that the apostasy of man did not involve the loss of any natural endowment of man, but only the loss of a supernatural gift, which was foreign to the essential nature of man.
Original righteousness was lost and man lapsed bark into the condition of an unrestrained conflict between flesh and spirit. The supremacy of the higher over the lower element in his nature was fatally weakened. Man was brought back to the neutral condition, in which he was neither sinful nor holy, but from the very constitution of his nature subject to a conflict between the flesh and the spirit.
Since Adam, the head of the human race, was constituted the representative of all his descendants, they all sinned in him and come into the world burdened with original sin. While the Scholastics differ very much as to the nature of original sin, the prevailing opinion is that it is not something positive, but rather the absence of something that ought to be present, particularly the privation of original justice, though some add a positive element, namely, an inclination to evil. By original justice some understand that original righteousness that was super-added to man, and others
in addition to this also what is called the justitia naturalis. This sin is universal and is voluntary as derived from the first parent. It should not be identified with concupiscence, with the evil desires and lusts that are present in man, for these are not sin in the proper sense of the word.
Roman Catholics reject the idea of man's spiritual impotence and his utter dependence on the grace of God for renewal. They adopt the theory of synergism in regeneration, that is, that man co-operates with God in the spiritual renewal of the soul. He prepares and disposes himself for the grace of justification, which is said to consist in infused righteousness. In the days of the Reformation the monergism of the Reformers was opposed by the Roman Catholic
Church with greater vehemence than any other doctrine.
Questions for Further Study: Why did the Church hesitate to accept strict Augustinianism? In what direction did the Church move at first, and what view gradually gained the upper hand? How did the views of Gregory the Great differ from those of Augustine? Did
Gottschalk hold that God predestinated the reprobate to commit sin?
What practical interests were thought to be endangered by his teaching? In what respect was Anselm's conception of original sin defective. Did he give an adequate explanation of the transmission of sin? How did his conception of the freedom of the will differ from that of Pelagius? What different views of original sin were current among the Scholastics? Do Roman Catholics believe that the fall of man affected the constitutional nature of man? How do they define original sin? How does it differ from concupiscence? Do they ascribe freedom to the will after the fall? In what sense?
Literature: Moxon, The Doctrine of Sin, pp. 142–165; Otten, Manual of the History of Dogmas, II, pp. 129–170; Welch, Anselm and His
Work; Seeberg, History of Doctrine, II, pp. 21–23, 30–33, 114–118, and so on, cf. Index; Neander, History of Christian Dogmas, II, pp.
508–512; Sheldon, History of Christian Doctrine, I, pp. 343–356; Thomasius, Dogmengeschichte, II, pp. 115–121, 125–142; Shedd,