nent; in the latter days
of Alcuin, the decline of English learning began in consequence of the
internal dissensions of the kings, and the early ravages of the
Northmen. Just at the same time the Continent was gaining peace and
organisation under Charles. Alcuin carried the learning which would
have perished in England into France and Germany, where it was
maintained whilst England relapsed into the state of ignorance from
which it was delivered by Alfred. Alcuin was rather a man of learning
and action than of genius and contemplation like Bede, but his power of
organisation and of teaching was great, and his services {170} to
religion and literature in Europe, based indeed on the foundation of
Bede, were more widely extended and in themselves inestimable." [1]

[Sidenote: John Scotus.]

Side by side with the career of Alcuin, of which much is known, may be
placed that of another scholar who was at least equally influential,
but of whose life little is known. John the Scot, whose thought
exercised a profound influence on the ages after his death, was one of
the Irish scholars whom the famous schools of that island produced as
late as the ninth century. He became attached to the court of Charles
the Bald, as Alcuin had been to that of Charles the Great. He became
like Alcuin a prominent defender of the faith, being invited by
Hincmar, Archbishop of Rheims, to answer the monk Gottschalk's
exaggerated doctrine of predestination, which went much farther than S.
Augustine, and might be described as Calvinist before Calvin; but his
arguments were also considered unsound, and his opinions were condemned
in later synods. The argument that, evil being the negation of good,
God could not know it, for with Him to know is to cause, was certainly
weak if not formally heretical, and his subtleties seemed to the
theologians of his time to be merely ineptitudes. He was also, it is
at least probable, engaged in the controversy on the doctrine of the
Holy Eucharist which began about this time, originating in the treatise
of Paschasius Radbertus, _de Sacramento Corporis et Sanguinis Christi_.
In 1050 a treatise bearing John the Scot's name was condemned; but it
seems that this was really written by Ratramnus of Corbie. The view of
Radbert was that which was {171} afterwards formalised into
Transubstantiation. The view attributed to John was a clear denial of
any materialising doctrine of the Sacrament. Later writers say that