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anyone spoil you through philosophy and vain deceit, after the tradition of men, after the rudiments of the world, and not after Christ.”92
See also chapter 8, §1, page 531: “Very erudite people have already observed that as soon as the philosophers or the learned pagans adopted Christianity and introduced their doctrines and manner of teaching into the church, the quarrels of the schools, of which Saint Paul had warned, increased. Most of the heresies emerged from these, for the same learned men brought their previously held opinions into the church and wanted to judge of the articles of faith according to the rules and modes to which each was accustomed.” And §2, pages 534ff.:
When, however, the old books of the pagan philosophers fell into the hands of the clerics, especially the monks, then Scholastic Theology broke loose, doing more harm than good. It seems to me as if the good monks and priests who first laid their hands on these books were driven by great curiosity and at first made a big secret out of it. They also wanted to be seen to be able to speak and chatter of other things than holy Scripture and the Fathers or the legends and saints’ histories, which is what they almost exclusively fed the laity, both high and low. Their action would have been Christian and good if they had burned the recovered pagan books immediately, rather than using them… . For unfortunately it seems that they learned to grasp the meaning of God’s word with the help of these arts. They acted like someone who wants to furnish a palace according to the example of some random old farmhouse. And if one compares the dignity of holy Scripture with worldly wisdom, then they have mixed gold with copper and lead, pure wine with murky water, by beginning to measure and examine articles of faith according to the standards of philosophy. Then they wanted to know how to talk about God, Christ, the holy sacraments according to the praedicamenta and the predicabilia, then substance, accident, quality, quantity, act, potential, moral cause, abstract, concrete, and other such terms, far more nit-picking than those the pagan philosophers had ever produced, and with invented barbaric expressions that had to be applied to the mysteries of faith, which then had to be examined and weighed according to them. Among other countless terms and their distinction were otherness, thisness, identity, individuation, whatness, supposite, whereness, voluntariness, eminently,
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formally, entitatively, concomitantly, radically, intentionally, primary and secondary, numeric, precise, reduplicative, and many other similar ones… . And since this art has taken over almost the entire clerical estate, it was no longer possible to subdue it. Instead it became as necessary as some others, for once one had gone beyond God’s word it was necessary to disprove the errors which developed from this with equal subtlety. This developed in the manner described in the learned proverb concerning the northeasterly wind, which they call Caecius, which tends to produce great waves it cannot disperse… . And so scholastic theology became a system which nobody could ever finish learning. On the contrary, the quarrels increased to such an extent and arguments were conducted with so much deceit that it was almost impossible to distinguish any longer the true and well-founded opinion or at least rarely possible to form a definite conclusion about it.
See also the additions to chapter 7, §2, page 299:
Johann Gerhard in his Theological Method,93 final chapter, makes the following comment on the Scholastics: the blessed Luther took the well-founded and salutary decision to ban Scholastic theology, which he called ignorance of the truth and inane fallacy, from our schools, and where one tried to re-introduce it, it was as if one wanted to have acorns instead of bread as food. For, he said, the Scholastics had confused philosophy and theology concerning the principles of disputation. Hence Erasmus compared Scholastic theology, especially as it was practiced at the Sorbonne in Paris, to the centaurs, who according to the poets were half human and half horse.94
Thus you will not be surprised that in chapter 3, §61, I reject that term eminenter, which the Scholastics use in discussing the divine attributes, because you see that the illustrious Seckendorff in the passages cited above reckoned this, too, among the barbaric terms and distinctions.
§52. In chapter 4, §§35ff. I believe I showed through genuine arguments that it is possible, without damaging Christian religion, to use a fiction concerning something that God has revealed to us as being different. And
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in order that the argument not be conducted in vain, I defined in §38 what I meant by a fiction, namely, the first part of a hypothetical proposition which neither affirms nor denies anything, but which only infers the second part as a consequence from this fiction. This description is appropriate for the incident that gave rise to this controversy. When the illustrious Pufendorf was about to publish his work on natural law, he assumed that one had to abstract from the state of innocence and, when arguing with a pagan, assume the present state of man. On this basis, that is, the hypothesis of the pagan who knows no other state, the pagan must be persuaded of the truth of the natural precepts, however he conceives the origin of humanity. But this is nothing else than to infer a necessary connection between the second part—that is, the precepts of natural law—and the first part of the hypothetical proposition, which the pagan considers true, but the doctor of natural law neither affirms nor denies. The argument that among others is usually advanced against Pufendorf’s doctrine is that a Christian must not invent anything. I could not contradict this opinion any more strongly than by showing that a fiction defined in that sense is not contrary to religion and, moreover, differs from a lie, which I define in book 2, chapter 7. Yet, if someone refused to be satisfied by my argument, I would ask him, before he picks a fight with me, to propose his own definition of a fiction and to show that I have not defined it correctly. If he uses the term fiction in another sense than I do and refuses to explain his meaning of the term by offering an unambiguous description, nobody can blame me if I abstain from a struggle that would be inglorious, like that of blindfolded gladiators who make the audience laugh but are useless at finding the truth, which should be the purpose of all disputation. He may tell me that hypothetical propositions could not be used against him; for example, that in the trite inference “if an ass flies, he has feathers,” the logician does not pretend that the ass flies or has feathers, but only shows the consequence, by which one follows from the other. He may repeat this a hundred times, but I will still uphold my definition of a fiction until he has supplied me with another and better one. Indeed, thinking further on this matter, I can see no way how anybody can deny that in this proposition the prior part if an ass flies is a fiction, unless it is that the term fiction was not expressly used here. Yet the principles of determining
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equally strong arguments show clearly that it is one and the same whether you say, “If an ass flies, he has feathers,” or you explain your intention thus: “Imagine that an ass flies, then he will have feathers”; just as, again, it does not matter whether you say: “Imagine a person; no matter by what means he has been set in this world, he is nevertheless a social being,” or: “If a person is placed in this world, no matter by what means this comes about, he is nevertheless a social being.” The arguments that are derived from the definitions of things are normally apodictic, and the description I have provided of the fiction shows that it is not contrary to religion, even if we invent something that has been revealed to be otherwise in Scripture or invent whatever pleases us. It is clear from this that it is a gross violation of the rules of learned debate to accept my definition of the term fiction but at the same time criticize the use of fictions and hypothetical propositions, which I used only for the sake of explanation, wishing to show that the reason for the difference is that nothing was to be invented in an argument if the contrary has been revealed by Scripture. For nowhere have I used an argument from analogy, against which otherwise the proof of a disparity would carry a lot of weight. Thus I do not infer that if the fiction “if an ass flies” is valid, then it must also be all right to come up with the fiction that man has been placed in this world, by whatever means, or that
