meaning which we now should draw. Yet Christianity was an authoritatively revealed religion, and the letter of that revelation was Holy Scripture, to wit, the gradually formed canon of the Old and New Testaments. If the reasoning or conclusions which resulted in the Nicene Creed were not just what Scripture would seem to suggest, at all events they had to be and were confirmed by Scripture, interpreted, to be sure, under the stress of controversy and the influence of all that had gone into the intellectual natures of the Greek and Latin Fathers. And the patristic faculty of doctrinal exposition, that is, of reasoning constructively along the lines of Scriptural interpretation, was marvellous. Such a writing as Augustine's Anti-Pelagian De spiritu et littera is a striking example.
Moreover, the Faith, which is to say, the Scriptures rightly interpreted, contained the sum of knowledge needful for salvation, and indeed everything that men should seek to know. Therefore there was no question possessing valid claim upon human curiosity which the Scriptures, through their interpreters, might not be called upon to answer. For example, Augustine feels obliged to solve through Scriptural interpretation and inference such an apparently obscure question as that of the different degrees of knowledge of God possessed by demons and angels.[1] Indeed, many an unanswerable question had beset the ways by which Augustine himself and other doctors had reached their spiritual harbourage in Catholic Christianity. They sought to confirm from Scripture their solutions of their own doubts. At all events, from Scripture they were obliged to answer other questioners seeking instruction or needing refutation.[2]
Thirdly, it is too well known to require more than a mere reminder, that dogmatic treatises commonly were controversial or polemic, directed as might be against pagans or Jews, or Gnostics or Manicheans, or against Arians or
- ↑ Civ. Dei, ix. 21, 22; cf. Civ. Dei, xvi. 6-9.
- ↑ Civ. Dei, book xii., affords a discussion of such questions, e.g. why was man created when he was, and not before or afterwards. All these matters entered into the discussions of the mediaeval philosophers, Thomas Aquinas, for example.Besides these dogmatic treatises, in which Scriptural texts were called upon at least for confirmation, the Fathers, Greek and Latin, composed an enormous mass of Biblical commentary, chiefly allegorical, following the chapter and verse of the canonical writings.
