claimed a real existence apart from the wills of successive generations of individual and variable men; she taught that Man had fallen not only in many or all individual cases, but as a kind having a real existence, and again that in the Mass there is change of hypostasis-while then realism was essential to the Faith, yet if forms pre-exist ("ante rem") then the acts of God must be predetermined-" fatis" non "avolsa voluntas"; or if forms are only "in re" God must be form, living in each and every act and thing, which is Pantheism ("materia omnium Deus"): an impersonal conception and a dissolution of dogma which the Church must and did abhor. "Pessimus error"-there is the abyss, cried Albert, avoiding it by dialectical juggles. Erigena, the bril- liant prophet and protestant of the first period of
1 As St Anselm put it, "Participatione speciei plures homines sunt unus homo." Out of humanity individual men proceed.
- Vid. p. 32, note.
- Erigena, "the miracle of the Holy Ghost"; a figure of
almost mythical grandeur, arising in the far west, full of new learning, of lyric enthusiasm, and heroic courage. He did not protest, with St Columba, against the Papacy only; he pro- tested against authority, and he protested against mighty ignorance; neither of which should withstand the persuasion of right reason. "Ratio immutabilis...quæ...nullius auctori- tatis adstipulatione roborari indiget." His works were pro- scribed and burned. 3-2
