Adolf Harnack · 16 of 20

Introduction

Among the young uncivilised peoples, all ecclesiastical institutions occupied a still more prominent place than had been given them even by the development of the Church in the Roman Empire. The philosophical and theological capital of antiquity, already handed down in part in compendia, was propagated in new abridgements (Isidore of Seville, Bede, Rabanus, etc.). John Scotus the unique excepted, no one was now able to probe that intellectual world to its ultimate ideas and perceptions, and make it part of their own spiritual experience. To the historian of civilisation everything in the epoch is interesting; in the Carlovingian age, the foundations were laid for the developments of the Middle Ages; but to the historian of dogma, if we are to consider not the appropriation of familiar material, but the advance of evolution, that period does not offer much.

The Carlovingian epoch was a great, and in many respects an unsuccessful, essay at a renaissance of antiquity. It was not the product of the slow natural evolution of the Germano-Roman peoples, but Charlemagne and his circle sought to gain by storm a higher culture for the Frankish Empire, by a frequently forced return to antiquity, or by the establishment in their midst of Byzantine culture. Antiquity was still a living thing in Constantinople. Springer has shown, in dealing with the history of art, that the Carlovingian school is to be regarded as the after-bloom of ancient, and not as the beginning of mediæval, art; and this applies also to theological and philosophical efforts. The Carlovingian period marks the epoch-making beginnings in the history of institutions; in the history of spiritual 1ife it is an appendix to that of the ancient world. Therefore the history of dogma in the Middle Ages begins, strictly speaking, with the age of Clugny. It is also useless to discuss, in connection with this branch of study, the so-called popular forms of German Christianity found in poetical and prose fragments. For, firstly, their popular character is very limited; secondly, popular Christianity has hardly exercised any influence at all on institutions, not to speak of dogma. He who wished to reach a higher theological culture, read Augustine and Gregory, Gregory and Augustine, and he felt himself to be merely a disciple in relation to these and the other Latin Fathers, having still to learn the lessons delivered to him.

At that time many of the clergy were undoubtedly keenly desirous of culture; to see this we have only to look at the manuscripts preserved from the eighth and ninth centuries. Nor must we overlook the fact that a small number of scholars went further than those belonging to the period A.D. 450-650, that they advanced beyond Isidore and Gregory to Augustine himself, saw through the emasculation of religion and its perversion into a ceremonial service and belief in miracle, and returned to the spiritual teaching of Augustine. But the lofty figure of the African Bishop set bounds to any further advance. The best looked up to him, but none saw past him, not even Alcuin and Agobard, though the latter has also studied Tertullian. It is very attractive to study, in connection with Church history, the energetic efforts of the Carlovingian Augustinians, to observe their attempts, following but surpassing the great Emperor, to purify the traditional form of religion, and to narrow the range of a stupid awe of the mysteries and of a half-heathen superstition. But it would merely lead to confusion in the history of dogma if we were to try to examine these attempts.

The transactions and determining events important to the history of dogma in our epoch divide into the following groups. 1. Controversies as to Byzantine and Roman Christology contrasted with that of Augustine and the West, and between the Gregorian system of doctrine and Augustine’s theory of predestination. 2. Disputes shared in by Rome against the East regarding the filioque, and against Rome and the East about images. 3. The development of the practice and theory of the Mass and of penance.