Chapter Four: Walking in Heaven
What christianity is all about
In the West, there has been a well-known legend of beauty for thousands of years: once upon a time, in the Burleigh Wall outside Jerusalem, there lived a beautiful virgin mary. She had been promised to a carpenter named Joseph. However, before he could enjoy the night of candlelight in the cave, Joseph discovered that Maria was already pregnant with Rokko. This thunderbolt made him feel deeply humiliated, and in a fit of rage, he planned to terminate the marriage contract. Late one night, while he was tossing and turning and unable to sleep, the messenger of God suddenly sneaked into his dream and appeared to him and said, "Joseph, don't worry! It would have been nice to marry Mary, for her pregnancy was given by the Holy Spirit. She's going to have a son, and you're going to name him Jesus. He grew up to save his people from their sins. After saying that, he faded away. Joseph woke up, obeyed the angel's command, became acquainted with Mary, and gave birth to Jesus Christ. The mother of Jesus is the Virgin Mary whom Christians worship. When Jesus grew up, he wandered around, performing miracles, healing and saving people, restoring the blind, the lame, and the resurrection of the dead. Later, when the preacher John baptized him on the banks of the Jordan River, he began to receive apostle preaching, teaching people to endure suffering, proclaiming the gospel of the kingdom of heaven, which was deeply loved by the people and angered the rulers of the Roman Empire. Once, when he and 12 of his disciples went to Jerusalem, they were betrayed by the disciple Judas, and the Roman governor crucified him on the cross for the crime of being king of the Jews. It happened to be Friday, and the 12 disciples plus Jesus were exactly 13. So to this day, Westerners still see Friday as an ominous day, 13 as an unlucky number, and if Friday happens to coincide with the 13th, it is simply a "Black Friday"; western hospitals and hotels will never have room 13 and bed 13. The cross became a symbol of Christianity. Jesus suddenly rose again three days after his death and appeared to his disciples many times, saying that God had given him all the power in heaven and earth, and that they would mobilize all the nations of the world to be his disciples and accept his teachings. Then he ascended to heaven and left a prophecy on his parting days: Before the "end of the world" comes, God will perform the "last judgment," when He will once again descend to the mortal world and administer a judgment on all the living and the dead, and the good will be allowed to ascend to the heaven of eternal blessing, and the wicked will be reduced to the dark hell. This is the story that the Christian classic Bible tells us about a passage that has been recited through the ages. Several of the world's major religions have legends of deifying their founder, Buddhism has Shakyamuni, Islam has Muhammad, and Christianity has Jesus. Due to various reasons, such as the passage of time, it is impossible to examine when and by whom the Bible was born, and it is even more difficult to judge whether Jesus really has his own person and whether Christianity was founded by Himself. But it is known with certainty that Christianity evolved from Hebrew Judaism. The Hebrews, also known as the Jews, were originally an ancient nomadic people. In distant antiquity, they lived in limbo, drifting around, chasing aquatic plants and grazing their cattle. Most of their survival depends on the time and place and cannot stand on their own, and they wander around and are ostracized. The Jews once settled in Palestine and established the State of Israel and the State of Judah, but they were soon destroyed by other peoples, and they had to leave their homeland and fall into the ends of the world. Over the millennia, it has experienced several historic migrations and diaspora, suffered long-term exiles and persecutions, and endured many national massacres that shocked the world (the most recent of which was the act of Hitler's Germany in World War II). It was not until the 1940s that the descendants of Jews scattered around the world finally realized their nation's unforgettable dream of restoration in a small part of Palestine (today's Israel). The Jews are truly a weak and humiliated people who have endured vicissitudes, and the calamities they have suffered are probably unparalleled among the peoples of the world. One wonders, "What is the power that makes a people, who has long been scattered all over the world, pass on the ancient dream of restoring its homeland for thousands of years, and finally make it a reality?" We can see another example of the opposite: the Gypsies, who wandered the earth like the Jews, were always content with the drifting life of the caravan and never did anything. There is no doubt that a tenacious self-esteem supports the spirit of the Jewish people, and this self-esteem comes from their solipsistic belief, and the spiritual pillar of this faith is the enduring Judaism. The difficult situation of life made the ancient Jews deeply feel that human beings were small and powerless, and the awareness that human nature has its own limits was imprinted in their hearts. They vaguely feel that the happiness of the individual and the fate of the nation are not in their own hands at all, and that manipulated between the palms of God, man can only survive by the blessings of heaven. This psychology of faith that pins hope on God forms the early Judaism, worshipping Jehovah the Lord God. By the 6th century B.C., the Jews had developed Judaism from polytheism to monotheism, calling Jehovah the "one true God" believing that he had created the heavens and the earth, and deliberately designating the Jewish nation as a "chosen people", superior to all other peoples, and eventually saved and ascended to heaven.
It was the self-identifying consciousness of God's "chosen people" that became the spiritual pillar that had long underpinned Jewish life. In 6 AD, the Roman Emperor Octavian brought the Jewish and Samaria of Palestine under the jurisdiction of the Provinces of Syria, and the Jewish state finally collapsed. The Jews continued to revolt against Roman rule, but they were brutally suppressed and were therefore in a state of extreme pain and despair. Reality could not find a way out, so they went into their hearts and searched for a spiritual solution to liberation, and so religious activity became very active. They fantasize about a superworldly savior who will do justice, punish the oppressors, and save the victims. At that time, some factions of Judaism were popular, believing in the prophecies of the Jewish prophets: there will be a messianic messiah named the Messiah who will descend to earth and establish God's "thousand-year kingdom" and carry out the last judgment on the fallen world of the Roman Empire, and all the kings, lords, generals, and rich men of the earth will be thrown into hell and destroyed, and the suffering believers will ascend to heaven for eternal life. When people replaced the Messiah with Jesus, Christianity was born. It was originally a sect of Judaism, embracing the Old Testament in Hebrew. The Bible, worshiping the Messiah as God. Later, some brainy people began to use some popular Greco-Roman philosophy to transform the teachings of Judaism. For example, a mystic named Philo enriched his doctrine with the fatalism of the Stoic school and the mystic ideas of Neo-Pythagoreanism and Neoplatonism, mystified Heraclitus's "Logos", and made certain theoretical sortings and explanations of Judaism, providing ideological conditions for the emergence of Christianity. Later, some people wrote the New Testament in Greek. The Bible" regards Jesus as God. At this time, Christianity officially appeared. The covenant refers to the covenant between God and man, and Christians regard the New Testament as a covenant that Jesus re-entered into with man after his incarnation and enshrine it as his own scripture, while at the same time defining the Jewish Bible as the Old Testament. The New Testament gave birth to Christianity from Judaism. Early Christianity, which originated among the peoples, reflected the will of the oppressed nations and the oppressed classes, had a tendency to be hostile to the Roman ruling class, to despise the rich and powerful, to sympathize with the lower classes, and it preached the ideas of equality and fraternity at the same time. This tendency of thought made it invisible to the ruling class, and for more than 300 years since its introduction to Rome, it has been classified as illegal, persecuted and banned repeatedly. Later, a large number of social elites joined Christianity, and they gradually gained the leadership of Christianity, transforming scattered unorganized missionary activities into organized ecclesiastical activities. Ideologically, they also began to constantly eliminate dogmas that reflected the wishes of the oppressed, to insert content in favor of the rulers, and to vigorously preach the need to endure suffering in the example of Jesus, to be gentle and obedient to the master, to be willing to obey the king and the existing system, not to resist evil, and to be obedient to it. Thus, Christianity degenerated from the original religion of the poor and slaves into a national religion manipulated by the rich and powerful and represented and influential at all levels of society, making it available to many conditions for use by the Roman authorities. By the beginning of the 4th century AD, the Christian movement had formed a powerful social force, and the Roman rulers finally found that they could use it and turn pure faith activities into an important means of governing the country. This change in political tactics is largely based on a fundamental change in the nature of Christianity: the religion of the early days that gave spiritual comfort to the lower classes in the face of tyranny and calamity has degenerated into a spiritual anesthetic that exhorts people to settle for the status quo, to keep their duties, and to accept themselves, which is what Marx called "spiritual opium." The ambitious Roman Emperor Constantine was the first to recognize this, and said in a decisive way: the adoption of Christianity is the best way to make himself an authoritarian emperor of the Roman world, rather than using violent bullets, it is better to give the masses a mental anesthesia. In 313 AD, Constantine issued the "Edict of Milan", which affirmed the legitimate status of Christianity and ended more than 300 years of hatred of Christianity in the Roman Empire. In 325 AD, he presided over the Council of Nicene, the first Christian assembly of the all-Roman Empire, and adopted a unified common creed that christianity believed only in one Lord and one God. In 392 AD, the Roman Emperor Theodosius issued an edict abolishing the legal status of all religions other than Christianity and establishing Christianity as the state religion of Rome. A few years later, the Old Testament and the New Testament were successively designated as authentic scriptures and became the supreme authority on Christianity (the two combined into today's Bible). Soon, a strict hierarchy based on hierarchy was established, as well as a papal system with the Bishop of Rome as the sole head of the Church. In this way, Christianity finally evolved from the religion of the people to an official ideology combined with political power.
II. "Because of absurdity, I believe"
For the Greeks and Romans, especially the intellectuals, who were heavily influenced by Greek culture, Christianity was, after all, a foreign faith, and it seemed difficult to succeed in gaining people's trust without making a strong theoretical sermon. On the other hand, after the introduction of Christianity to Rome, it basically did not establish a rigorous system of thought, and the Bible, as the highest classic, was only a legendary work that recorded holy relics, and there was no theoretical explanation. Therefore, many scholars and clergy inside and outside the church have made different annotations and criticisms of this new doctrine according to their own understandings, and the opinions are divergent and inconsistent, and it is impossible to achieve ideological unity, which is not conducive to the further promotion and indoctrination of Christianity as the state religion. These two situations have made the need for Christianity to establish its own system of thought increasingly urgent. In this way, paternalism was born. The so-called "godfathers" are some authoritative figures within the church, who not only spare no effort to promote the Christian faith, but also devote themselves to collating and compiling Christian literature, formulating doctrine, and striving to theorize and systematize it. The fathers made full use of the idealistic and mystical philosophies of Greco-Rome to process the basic tenets of the Bible and formulate a set of interrelated doctrines: [1] Monotheism says: God is the only God and savior, and only faith in one God is the only true faith. (2) The Trinity says: God has a triple "divine personality" of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, and all three belong to the "essence" of the one God, just as a trident, though sharp in three heads, belongs to the same entity. (3) God's creation says: God created man and the whole world from nothingness. The first day created heaven and earth; the second day created the air; the third day created plants and separated the land and the sea; the fourth day created the sun, the moon, and the stars; the fifth day created reptiles and birds; the sixth day created beasts and men; the seventh day God stopped working because of tiredness and went to rest, which is the origin of the Sunday that people all over the world are happy to enjoy today. (4) Original Sin says: Adam and Eve, the first ancestors of mankind, violated God's prohibition and were tempted by the serpent to steal the forbidden fruit in the paradise of heaven (the Garden of Eden), committed a crime, and were punished with human suffering. Since then, the children and grandchildren of mankind have carried the sins created by their ancestors, carrying the original sinful nature. (5) Salvation says: Mankind, burdened by original sin, cannot escape God's punishment in all lifetimes, and all suffering in the world is a bad retribution for man's own sins. Man cannot save himself, but can only count on God to send a savior to teach people to believe in God to endure all kinds of suffering in reality, and to practice abstinence and asceticism to atone for sins, and to be saved and ascended to heaven after death, otherwise they will be punished by God and sent to eighteen levels of hell, and there will never be a day to emerge. (6) The apocalypse says: Faith is higher than reason, and human knowledge and reason must absolutely be subordinated to faith, because faith comes entirely from God's revelation, and all truth comes from this "revelation", and the Bible is its record, the pillar and foundation of faith, and the basis and criterion of all words and deeds. The early fathers resorted more to faith and to the devaluing of the role of reason, and its important representative, Tertullian (160-222 AD), said a rather representative sentence: "It is precisely because of absurdity that I believe." "That seemed ridiculous to us, but there was a big market at the time.
Later church fathers paid more attention to theoretical preaching, and they used the various idealistic philosophies popular in Rome, especially Neoplatonism, to make theoretical interpretations of Christian doctrine, trying to reconcile Greek reason, Roman ethics and Hebrew faith to give Christianity a stronger persuasiveness. The most successful attempt to harness this idea was St. Augustine, bishop of Hippo. Augustine, 354–430 AD). He is the most famous representative of the philosophy of the Church fathers, and is revered by the Church as "Saint" and "Saint of God", and his name has been preceded by the title of "Holy": Saint · Augustine. However, do not think that this saint was born as a pure and angelic figure, but in fact he was a wandering skeleton, a prodigal son with deep sins, who was cultivated because of the discovery of conscience. Augustine was born in Tagist, northern Africa, the son of a rough-tempered businessman and pagan father, but a gentle and kind Christian mother. As a child, Augustine was fascinated by literature and by the age of 10 was fluent in Latin and Greek. He is also a mischievous wanderer. Once, just because he was playing with it and not wanting to eat, he and his friends climbed up the neighbor's fruit tree and stole the pears. After the age of 10, he left home to study Latin literature in matera. At that time, the city was in a state of decay, and Augustine, who was only 15 years old, was infected with the vice of looking for flowers and willows, visiting kiln prostitutes, and living in extreme debauchery. At the age of 17, he lived with a young girl and gave birth to a son. Later, his mother asked him to marry another girl, and he had to endure the pain of separation from his mistress. Because his fiancée was young and could not be married within two years, he could not bear the loneliness and hooked up with another lover. At the age of 19, Augustine suddenly developed a strong interest in Manichaeism. Manichaeism attaches particular importance to the belief that the duality of good and evil in life is never reconciled. The young Augustine was extremely perceptive, often troubled by the opposition of the soul and the body, good and evil, so he immediately agreed with Manichaeism and immediately converted to it. At the age of 33, he traveled to Rome, the capital of the Roman Empire, for the first time, and founded the Academy of Rhetoric for his own fame and fortune. Rome was full of Christian atmosphere at the time, and its rituals and poetry particularly fascinated Augustine. The following year, in Milan he met the famous bishop St. Ambrose, who gave him a quote from jesus in the Bible: "If you have lost your soul, what good will it do you even if you have gained the whole world?" This statement seemed like five thunderbolts, causing Augustine to be transformed into another person in an instant. He reflected deeply on the first half of his life, ashamed of his indulgent and promiscuous life, and decided to change his life. He broke away from Manichaeism and was baptized into Christianity. Then he dismissed his mistress and stopped marrying, until the end of the old teacher was single. He returned to his hometown, immersed himself in the work of the church, and soon became a bishop. At the same time, he immersed himself in books and lectures, leaving behind dozens of philosophical, theological, ethical, and sermon collections, the most notable of which were confessions, the City of God, and On Free Will. The Confessions is Augustine's recollection and reflection on the first half of his life. In the book, he opens his heart to God, bravely repents of his mistakes, relentlessly dissects his own soul, and digs deep into the flaws of human nature. Through his own experience of inner interaction with God, he showed how to use his sins and will to find God's grace. Here, he always felt the smallness of man, and at the same time reflected the tallness of God.
Such an autobiography of the soul that dares to face the self and mercilessly lash out at the ugliness of human nature does have a deafening effect, not only popular, but also far-reaching, confession seems to have become a literary genre, and there are still many imitators until modern times, the most successful of which is Rousseau of France and Tolstoy of Russia. Proceeding from the psychology of self-repentance, a strong sense of guilt drove Augustine to argue for the origin of original sin. He lashed out at the Welsh priest Beracky's theory of infernal sin and endorsed the doctrine of original sin. He even suspected that he had committed crimes in his infancy, and that gluttony and jealousy were among them, not to mention how much evil he would commit in the long journey of life. He felt at every moment that there were two wills within him, one loyal to the spirit and one obedient to the flesh, and they were tearing at his soul at all times. When he suddenly realized that he must follow his spirit in pursuit of God, he attributed this to his natural will for good, and it was this indomitable primal spirit that led him out of the bondage of the flesh and the world to the path of union with God. He admitted that human beings are too weak to know the truth by reason alone. But he also affirmed that man is superior to animals in that he can know his own existence, because he has a soul and reason, and man can discover and know the truth through God's revelation. Augustine thus understood that his task was to reconcile old knowledge with new beliefs, so that they were interdependent. An important question that Augustine's theological theory must answer is the question of the origin of time and the world. According to the Bible's Book of Genesis, God created everything in the universe out of thin air. In Greek philosophy, however, nothing cannot be born. Even though God is absolutely omnipotent and can create the world from nothingness, people still can't stop asking: What was God doing before he created the heavens and the earth? In other words, did time exist before the world appeared? This is a problem that human reason is bound to encounter. Some wise people have muttered in secret, "Before the creation of the world, God was spying on the mysterious man-made hell for those who were good." Augustine disagreed with this superficial tongue-in-cheek, explaining that God is eternal and that it does not exist in the realm of time at all. Time for man begins after the formation of heaven and earth; but God has always existed, and for him, there is no past or future, he is always in the eternal present. This view is indeed incomprehensible to human reason, but it leads Augustine to assert that only the "present" is real, that the past is only the memory of the present, and that the future is the expectation of the present. This subjective theory of time had a profound influence on later philosophies, especially the philosophy of Descartes in the 17th century. In The City of God, Augustine expounded the Christian view of history, pioneering the philosophy of history (i.e., the idea that history has a clearly discernible pattern). After recounting the allegory of Genesis from a philosophical point of view, Augustine proposed the distinction between the "city of God" and the "city on earth." Since the birth of man, God has created two different cities: the City of God and the City of Man. The two cities coincided before the Final Judgment, after which they were separated from each other. At that time, those chosen by God to be saved will ascend into the city of God, the kingdom of bliss, whose souls will be reunited with their own flesh and live eternally happy lives with God; and those who have been abandoned by God will be resurrected, but they will be sent down to the sinful kingdom of the city on earth, where they will be punished with the devil. The gates of the City of God are open only to devout and good believers, and the wicked and adulterous are never allowed to step further, and the Christian Church, as the representative of the City of God on earth, has the privilege of issuing a pass to enter the kingdom of heaven, so people must be absolutely obedient to the Church. This theory proved to be a powerful theological weapon for promoting the system of ecclesiastical rule. As the greatest representative of paternalism, Augustine synthesized the achievements of all the church fathers' thoughts, especially the great achievements of Platonic and Neoplatonic doctrines, and was able to integrate the Hebrew faith into the belief system of life through his own deep experience of religion in his heart, coupled with his understanding of Greek philosophy. Therefore, his thinking is not entirely a theoretical expression of the papal system of thought, and his philosophy is inferior to that of later scholastic philosophies in terms of clarity and logic. However, when people read his writings, they will find that he has a rich and complex mind, and that he has pursued God's mental path in the process of constantly dissecting himself and deeply reflecting on the fate of mankind. Later, medieval scholastic philosophers built the theoretical system of scholastic philosophy on the basis of the ideas provided by Augustine. Of course, in their theological magnum opus, people can no longer find Augustine's heartfelt sincerity, his courageous self-lashing and his reckless pursuit of goodness, but only scheming and calculating, and cumbersome arguments that quote scriptures and abuse logic.
III. The Song of God
Since the Establishment of Christianity as the state religion in the Roman Empire, Christianity has soon become the official ideology of integration with secular regimes, fueled by patristic philosophy, and the Church has monopolized the privilege of selling theology. In 76 AD, the Western Roman Empire collapsed completely under the combined blows of the invasion of the Northern Germanic barbarians, slave revolts and internal power struggles, and European society entered a new era of feudalism. History usually refers to the period of about 1,000 years from this time to the beginning of the Renaissance in the 14th century as the "Middle Ages". In 529, shortly after Justinian the Great ascended to the throne, he ordered the closure of the Academy of Athens, founded by Plato himself and having lasted for more than 900 years. With the collapse of the last fortress of this old Greek tradition, the "Dark Middle Ages" followed. The patristic philosophy, set against the backdrop of the Bible and Hebrew culture and in the form of Greek and Roman thought, forms a hybrid theological-philosophical framework in which faith and reason are indistinguishable. This situation played a great role in promoting christianity throughout the Roman Empire and forming a solipsistic unified world. However, the development of the productive forces has brought about the popularization of education and culture, many colleges and schools attached to the church or independent have been established, and the popularization of education and culture has improved people's ability to distinguish, and the simple blind obscurantist belief has gradually become unconvincing. At the same time, the division of the Eastern and Western Roman Empires caused the division of the Church, forming two different Churches in the East and West centered on Constantinople and Rome, competing for orthodoxy with each other, giving rise to two opposing sects of Greek Orthodoxy and Roman Catholicism, resulting in serious ideological differences. Thus, all kinds of "heresies" who are dissatisfied with orthodox Christian doctrine also take the opportunity to flourish, more or less shaking the monopoly position of theology. Under such historical conditions, in order to achieve the goal of controlling the Orthodox Church, forcing the Muslims of the East to convert, and achieving Catholic domination of the world, the ambitious Roman Catholic Church urgently needs to strengthen theological education in the schools, and in particular, to establish a special philosophy that is fully consistent with Christian doctrine. It is in this historical context that scholastic philosophy came to the stage of thought. The formation of scholastic philosophy was greatly aided by the cultural regurgitation of the Arabs. Just as Christianity was descending into a chaotic infighting, the Arabs of the East began to rise. The late Prophet Muhammad founded Islam, ending long-standing feuds and strife among Arabs and gradually expanding his power outward. At the same time, their culture has also developed by leaps and bounds, mathematics, astronomy, medicine, chemistry and other fields are far ahead of Europe, architecture, art, handicrafts have also reached the point of pure fire, fascinating, as the basic symbol of modern mathematics, Arabic numerals, is a major contribution to their culture. Islamic civilization continued to flow into Europe along trade routes, stimulating the development of Western thought. Curiously, it was through the Arabs that the Romans knew Aristotle! Early theologians and fathers knew only to quote plato and Neoplatonic scriptures, and turned a blind eye to Aristotle and other thinkers, and over time Aristotle, the philosophical master who represented the highest achievement of Greek philosophy, seemed to be obliterated and disappeared in Europe. Until the 12th century, the only Latin translations of Greek philosophical works used in Europe were Aristotle's Categories, Explanations, and Plato's Timeo. On the contrary, the Arabs learned about Greek philosophy from the Syrians, while the Syrians saw only Aristotle and ignored Plato. Thus, in the Muslim world, Greek philosophy is equivalent to Aristotle. In the 11th and 12th centuries, Aristotle's philosophy was imported into Europe with the spread of Arab culture, and this phenomenon of ideological regurgitation was tantamount to the "export to domestic sales" of a culture.
For a time, the scholastic philosophers who were illiterate in Baoshan seemed to have found a new continent, and they were extremely excited, and they were ecstatic to find that many of the ideas of this Great Greek philosopher, and even his logical methods, were the ready-made intellectual materials and theoretical tools needed to build the scholastic edifice. At first, the Church, fearing that the Greek rational spirit embodied in Aristotle's philosophy might endanger the doctrine of theology, forbade the study of him, and even Aquinas, the most authoritative scholastic philosopher of the time, was severely condemned by the Church. Later, the church finally realized the value of the availability, and only then did it turn against its original intention and affirm the important position of Aristotle. Thus, Aristotle, who had been sleeping for thousands of years, was finally excavated and enshrined in the shrine of Christian thought, becoming an authority comparable to the Bible, so that scholasticism was finally formed. The name "Scholastic philosophy" comes from the "scholasticism" of the church, that is, the monastery and the schools they set up. It was produced between the 9th and 10th centuries, spread widely in the 11th and 12th centuries, reached its peak in the 13th century, and then gradually declined. Scholastic philosophy is a development based on the philosophy of the previous godfathers, and it is covered with traces of the matrix from which it was born, but it differs in many ways. The philosophy of the church fathers attempts to reconcile faith and reason, and theology and philosophy are often difficult to distinguish, so that the fathers are both theologians and philosophers, one and the same; however, scholasticism tries to separate faith from reason, and although most thinkers still play both the roles of theologian and philosopher, their writings have been completely divided, so that theology belongs to "revelation" and philosophy to "reason". Scholastic philosophy focuses on philosophy on how man can understand the universe and life through his own knowledge; in theology, it strives to develop man's ability to perceive beyond reason, and to discuss how man can receive revelation from heaven and comprehend information from the other shore. The biggest difference between the philosophy of the church fathers and the philosophy of the scholastics is that the purpose of the former is out of the need for apologetics, because at that time Christianity had just been introduced to the Roman Empire, the foothold was unstable, there were many enemies inside and outside who wanted to destroy it, and the church fathers had to stand up and defend and resist it; but by the time of scholasticism, Christianity had become an orthodox ideology without opponents, and all the scholars needed to do was to establish a more perfect ideological system for it, to make it as tight and compact as possible, and to make it leak-free. Thus, scholasticism is more systematic, theoretical, and philosophical than patristic philosophy, with a greater emphasis on philosophical logical argumentation, in a word, it is a philosophy that argues for Christian doctrine. This property gives it the following characteristics naturally:1. Treat God and the Bible as objects of academic study and theoretical proof. Paternalism also has this tendency, but scholastic philosophy is more focused on making philosophical arguments. This makes it reject scientific research on the natural world with all its might, and it is not concerned with the acquisition of practical knowledge. The most debated question by medieval philosophers seems so ridiculous today. What if a 5-year-old asks the question, "How many angels can stand on the tip of a needle?" "Do the roses of heaven have any thorns?" "How old and tall was Adam when he was created?" Most people laugh it off and praise him for his imagination. However, these questions were raised by the monks and scholars who had read the scriptures and had inky stomachs, and they also engaged in too long and fierce debates. This cannot but feel sad and helpless. This usually occurs in societies where there is a high degree of unity of thought and where people generally feel that their imaginations are depleted. Of course, scholastic philosophers have also discussed some very meaningful questions of principle. For example, the general and individual questions they raise are a philosophical question that has not yet been solved. ２． In the study and argumentation of problems, they often disregard reality, reject practical experience and experimental knowledge, and are keen to cite scriptures, blindly worship authority, and regard certain words and ideas in the Bible, Platonism and Aristotle doctrine as inviolable principles, even absolute truths, and dare not cross the thunder pool half a step. One day, a student told his teacher that he had found black spots in the sun, and his teacher solemnly admonished him: "I have read through Aristotle many times, and he has never spoken of what you have seen, so I can assert that what you are talking about does not exist in the sun, but only in your eyes!" ”３． The one-sided use of formal logic and argumentation is regarded as the main method of research and argumentation. When expounding problems, scholastic philosophers often first list a large number of conceptual definitions, quote a large number of authoritative views, express both positive and negative aspects at the same time, and then use a series of syllogisms to inference and conceptual analysis, refute negative opinions, and thus draw self-righteous conclusions. Thus, scholastic philosophy eventually became the poster child for formalism and cumbersome argumentation, and "trivial philosophy" was synonymous with it. Of course, it should also be noted that this rigorous logical training also cultivates people's theoretical speculation ability, and when people apply this ability in turn to reflect on scholastic philosophy, it becomes a powerful weapon to disintegrate scholastic philosophy itself. This was again something that the scholastic philosophers of the heyday had not anticipated. The earliest exponent of scholastic philosophy was St. Anselm. Anselm, 1033-1109 AD).
Known as the "last godfather and the first scholastic philosopher", the Italian, who served as archbishop of Canterbury in England, advocated faith and then understood, devoted his life to arguing for the existence of God, and finally realized something after a long period of effort. In his book, he tells people that on the morning of July 3, 1087, he had just finished a fine breakfast and was about to leave the table when God suddenly put a thought in his mind, and suddenly he was enlightened. This idea is his "ontological proof" of the existence of God: "The most perfect idea exists not only in the mind, but also in reality (the great premise), and everyone has the idea of God in his mind, which is absolutely perfect, and can no longer conceive of more perfect ideas and substances than it (small premises), so that God exists both in the mind and in reality." Antheron's proof is a bit more cumbersome than the simplified form described above, but that's the basic meaning. Isn't it a child's play for us to think of what can be conceived as a basis for existence? At the time, however, this seemed to have taken for granted, for faith in the Emperor prevailed throughout the cultural context, as to today we acquiesce to basic generalities such as "substance" and "force" in physics, which, though not proven in any way, have become a self-evident, unquestionable universal human consensus. There is an unquestionable authority behind Anselm's proof: The Bible says that a man who believes in his heart that there is no God must be a fool, because he does not know that god himself has proved the existence of God, but paradoxically denies the existence of God. Antheron is famous for this "proof of ontology". However, even in his time of great popularity, there were some theologians who did not think much of him, and thomas Thomas, the backbone of scholastic philosophy. St. Aquinas Thomas Aquinas, 1225-1274 A.D.), was even more dismissive of him, reducing his theories to nothing. Compared with the colorful and uninhibited life of godfather Augustine, Aquinas's dull and uneventful life was simply lackluster. He was born into a family of earldoms in Italy. Entering school at the age of 5, by the age of 14 was already quite familiar with Aristotle's philosophy. At the age of 15 he studied at the University of Naples, soon joined the Order of Dominica, and went to Cologne to study philosophy and theology with the famous Aristotle expert Alebertus, receiving his doctorate in 1257. A few years later, he returned to teach at the University of Paris, where he debated with many people of different denominations, winning many battles and making the most of the limelight. He later returned to work at the University of Naples. He died young at the age of 49 and was canonized by the Church as "Dr. Angel". After looking at Augustine's romantic and flashy life, and looking back at Aquinas's pure scholarly career, one cannot wonder why Augustine's writings are always so talented and enthusiastic, while Aquinas's books leave people with the impression of being so logical and rigid. Augustine is immersed in the lights and greenery, while the soul is constantly experiencing endless inner conflicts and troubles, and his pursuit and grasp of God is completely out of the deep experience of life and the deep confusion of self-impotence, so his works show us his living soul, the soul that is bloody in endless self-analysis. On the contrary, Aqui was strict and rigid in nature, well-educated since childhood, lived a prosaic scholarly career, was mentally impartial, did not see any confusion and strife, and his belief in God came not so much from the inner demand of the soul to find a home, but from the needs of reason. Therefore, we cannot expect him to reveal his heart to us, to show his enthusiasm, only to see a hard chain of logic, a wall of bloodless and fleshless thought. The system is large, well-organized, logically rigorous, and thoughtful, and these requirements for the masters of scholastic philosophy were initially fulfilled by Aquinas when others could not yet touch the way to enter the Olympias. At the age of 39, he completed the important book The Pagan Rebuttal Compendium, and a few years later published the Theological Compendium, which the Church designated as a classic.
Aquinas was only 49 years old when he died, and in his short life he left behind dozens of books of various kinds for future generations. The philosophical inspiration of Augustine and the Fathers was mainly derived from Neoplatonism, while Aquinas's ideas were based on the philosophy of Aristotle. Aristotle argued that natural philosophy and theology were not contradictory but interdependent, and he used this to distinguish between philosophy and theology. Philosophy is from fact to God, and what it proves is not classical doctrine, not something superorganic, but the knowledge of things and the truth of reason, it is the use of reason through experience to serve God, or the handmaiden of theology. Theology, on the other hand, is the reverse process from God to fact, which gives people the truth of the apocalypse, which is a matter of faith. Faith belongs to the realm of will, which commands that one must accept faith. Philosophical and scientific certainty comes from human reason and is error-prone; theological subject matter is beyond human reason, and if reason is used to prove faith, it will inevitably damage faith. Of course, there are many differences between philosophy and theology, but the basic purpose of the two is exactly the same, that is, to persuade people to accept the truth revealed by God, so as to achieve eternal happiness. In short, the two are both distinct and interrelated, but theology is higher than philosophy. This distinction of Thomas undoubtedly sowed the seeds of a split between philosophy and theology in thought, and laid the groundwork for some later philosophers to oppose philosophy and theology, excluding theology from philosophy, and finally laying the foundation for philosophy to return to the secular world, and laying the groundwork for the final decline of scholastic philosophy. This historical consequence is probably not the result of the flowers and trees that Aquinas himself deliberately planted. The existence of God is the theoretical cornerstone of whether Christianity can be established, and if the existence of God is denied, then the entire edifice of Christian faith will collapse without being defeated and disintegrate on its own. Therefore, proving the existence of God has been one of the basic tasks of theologians and scholastic philosophers throughout the ages. Anselm's "ontological proof" was also all the rage. However, the idea of God as the "limit of the mind" is too subjective to be relied upon, and it is besieged by many priests and scholars. Aquinas, witnessing this embarrassment, was determined to find a different path. He forcefully refuted the popular "self-evident" and "ontological proofs", and according to Aristotle's doctrine, he proposed 5 weighty proofs: (1) Dynamic cause proof: Just as a bell must be made by someone, the movement of all things in the world must have a maker and promoter, which is what Aristotle called the "first mover", that is, God is also. (2) Causality proves that every result in the world has a cause, and these causes themselves are the result of other causes, and so on, must be traced back to an original cause, that is, the first cause that is not the result of any other cause, that is, God. (3) Proof of necessity: Any individual thing is nothing but an accidental, possible existence, a cat and a dog may be dispensable, Zhang San Li Si may appear or may not appear; however, the whole world must have an absolute existence, otherwise nothing can appear and exist. Absolute existence can only be God. (4) The Supreme Good proves that all things in nature are not equal in degree of superiority or inferiority, forming a ladder from low to high, and the degree of perfection is gradually increased, and there must be an absolutely perfect person at the apex of the ladder, which is the God of the highest good. (5) Teleological proof: There is a phenomenon of adaptation and coordination in nature, and all things are interrelated and interdependent. Fish have fins and tails to swim; dogs want to gnaw on bones, so they grow hard teeth; and because cats love to eat mice, rats have to obediently reproduce on the ground. It's not a coincidence, it's a ingenious design; everything has its own purpose, and the whole universe has a great maker of overall purpose, which is the Almighty God. Later generations generally call the first three proofs cosmological proofs, and the last two proofs teleological proofs. Such proofs are obviously more theoretical and convincing than "ontological proofs", although they are inevitably subjectivist and fiduciary things, and they are also full of loopholes in logic. The proof of causality, for example, contains a self-contradictory logical error: since it is assumed that each cause has its own cause, it cannot be admitted at the same time that there is a cause without a cause (i.e., the first cause). Aquinas's proof was made using Aristotle's metaphysical methods, so that some of Aristotle's mistakes also appeared in him. Nevertheless, these proofs, like Anselm's ontological proofs, had an extremely profound impact on both scholastic philosophy and theology. In addition to the above doctrines, Aquinas made important expositions on the creation of God, the immortality of the soul, epistemology, metaphysics, and socio-political theory. Adapting to the growing influence of rationalism and the rise of dual truths (i.e., doctrines that recognize both theological truth and rational truth) in the field of thought and culture at that time, he made full use of the Aristotle doctrines and methods that had flowed back from Arab culture to use a more ingenious set of methods to prove that faith was higher than reason, that theology was higher than philosophy, and that philosophy must act as a handmaiden of theology and a belief in the service of theology, thus clearing the foundation for his own theological idealism. On this foundation, he established a vast and complex philosophical system, which combined the development of scholastic philosophy over the centuries, completed its systematic and theoretical work, and pushed the medieval scholastic philosophy to the peak. Aquinas thus joined Augustine as the two pillars of Christian philosophy. People often refer to Aquinas's vast system of thought as Thomism, because he is also known as Thomas. Although in the beginning Thomism was also criticized by the Church for highlighting reason and even distinguishing between philosophy and theology, it was soon recognized and became the official doctrine of the Church of Rome, and his doctrine was thus approved as a canon, taught in all the colleges belonging to the Church of Rome. It was not until 1879 that the Pope again issued a decree recognizing Tomakisism as the only true philosophy of the Catholic Church and crowning Aquinas "King of Scholastic philosophy and theology". Historically, the only thing in which a philosophical doctrine has enjoyed such authority and holds such a position in its official form is Marxism, except for Thomism. This historical phenomenon is indeed worth pondering.
IV. The Century's Dispute Between Nominalism and Realism
In the long Middle Ages, scholastic philosophy, as an official doctrine, monopolized the pulpits of all schools and excluded the possibility of the legitimate existence of other philosophical doctrines, but it was not a monolithic unified sect in itself. As soon as scholastic philosophy was born, two opposing ideological tendencies appeared within it at the same time, and this was a great philosophical polemic that lasted for centuries: the ideological struggle between nominalism and realism. The central theme of the debate between the two schools is the relationship between "general" and "individual" or "universal" and "exceptional". "Individual" refers to individual things: a cat eating a mouse, a chair with a broken leg, or a beautiful xishi who is shy of the moon, all of which are "individuals". "General" means the common nature or form of the same kind of things, Xi Shi, Sable Cicada, Wang Zhaojun and Zhang San, Li Si, Wang Wu are all human beings, and "human" is a "general". Similarly, "cats" and "chairs" are also "average". So, what is the relationship between the general and the individual? Who comes first and who comes after? Who decides who? What is the relationship between "Ren" and "Zhang San"? First there are Zhang San Li Si and so on, then there are "people", or the opposite? Without specific people such as Zhang San, Li Si, does "people" still exist? The first to notice the problem of the relationship between the general and the individual were the Greek philosophers. Plato's theory of ideas regards the general as the real existence that precedes the individual, that is, affirms the general reality, and thus becomes the progenitor of realism. Aristotle criticized Plato's view that the individual does not depend on the general but exists independently; but he also expresses the idea that form (i.e., the general) is more fundamental than matter (concrete and individual), and that form determines matter. This ambiguous attitude lays the groundwork for the debate between nominalism and realism. In the 3rd century A.D., a scholar named Pophillips, in annotating Aristotle's Treatise on Categories, posed three interesting conundrums: (1) Were species and genera (i.e., universals) separately existing, or merely the product of intellectual abstraction of man? (2) If they exist independently, are they tangible or intangible? (3) Are they separated from the perceptible (i.e., concrete things), or are they in them and consistent with them? These are in fact questions of general and individual relations, and Pophilli has a unique vision to bring them up from the contradictions left by Aristotle. But after the question was asked, he was helpless and refused to answer. And it's no wonder he was, because these questions were so unfathomable that not only did they overwhelm him, but wasn't even Aristotle powerless? And until the 20th century, there were still many philosophers who struggled with them, but they were always confused and lost. Maybe this is really an eternal philosophical topic. In the 6th century, Boethius (480-525) took over Pophilly's tips and tried to answer his questions. He concluded that the individual is a real existence, and generally the universality of things hidden in the individual is also present in the human mind, and the concept (that is, thought) is the abstract understanding of the universal phase of things, and its authenticity depends on whether it conforms to things. This view had a certain influence on the emergence of nominalism in the future. More than three hundred years later, Erigena (815-877), in elaborating on his own system of theological idealism, adopted Plato's doctrine, viewing ideas as the prototype of all things and things as the realization of ideas. This affirmed the existence of universals and set a precedent for later realism. The early exponent of realism was Anselm, known for his "ontological proofs." His proof inherently contains the basic idea of realism: generally the basis of the individual, the individual thing has no truth; the higher the universality, the greater the abstraction of the thing, the more real it is, and God is the most universal idea, so he is the most real. In other words, the general "man" is more real than Zhang San Li Si, without Zhang San Li Si, there is Wang Wu Chen Liu, and other "people"; even if there is no "man", there is still heaven and earth and all things, so God exists forever. The absurdity of this view is obvious, but because it can be used as a tool to prove God, it is endorsed and supported by the Church as orthodox. History refers to this statement as "extreme realism." Still, there were many people who were not convinced, and Roscelin (1050-1112) was the first good man to dare to stand up to authority. Risking his life, he swung open the ring and engaged in a mortal struggle with Bishop Anselm. In response to Anselm's extreme realism, he treated him as a human being, and repaid it with extreme nominalism. Only individual and concrete things have objective reality, are real beings, just as there are only some flesh-and-blood people like Anselm and Roselin, without any empty people as "kinds". The general "class" or universal is nothing more than some artificial signs, words, and names, a series of sounds or vibrating air, and nothing else. It can be seen that Rotherine is firmly denying general objective reality. If he had stopped at this point and stopped trying to get straight to the nest of Christian thought, his fate might have been better. However, this outspoken and good man just went on a rampage along his own lines of thought, and casually took the Doctrine of the Trinity of God and the Doctrine of Original Sin to whip him. He said: The God of the Trinity is just a name, and nothing really corresponds to it; if God is the Trinity, then there can only be three Gods, but people don't say so, so there can be no Trinity God at all; and if the "Three" are the same entity, then in the same person it will be embodied in the same person at the same time as father, son and soul, is this not a great wilderness? He also lashed out at the original sin theory, pointing out that the universal original sin of mankind is untrue, and if sinful, it is only the work of individuals. This extreme remark was immediately denounced as heretical by the local church, and in order to escape persecution, Rosselling was forced to sneak out of France and flee to England, where he disappeared and disappeared, and only a letter to Abelard survived. This Abelard was a student of Rotherine, and he had also been trained by William of Champo, an extreme realist. The talented Abelard taught at a parisian school and was a reputable teacher and debater. Unexpectedly, this vulgar gentleman actually fell in love with his female student. This romantic and beautiful teacher-student relationship soon became stormy. The girl's uncle, in order to hinder them, deliberately inflicted a brutal castration on Abelard. A pair of infatuated Mandarin ducks were eventually beaten by sticks, and the disheartened Abelard had to devote himself to research and writing, and the girl later became the abbot of a convent. However, Abelard's fighting spirit has not been weakened by this incident in the slightest, and he cannot indulge in the stage of life, but also must rush forward and charge on the ideological front. He first refuted the extreme realism of his teacher William, but disagreed with the extreme nominalism of another gentleman, Rosselling. He seems to understand that with extremes to extremes, like the tip of a needle to Mai Mang, only if both sides are defeated and both are doomed, and only a middle way can escape the dead end. This middle way is his "conceptual theory". This conceptual theory affirms Rothering's ideas about the reality of individual things, the non-reality of the general universal, but does not agree with his reduction of the universal to mere signs and sounds. Abelard insisted that universality, although a noun, has a certain meaning and contains a certain content, because it reflects the similarity between individual things, and it is precisely according to the similarity between things that people abstract out concepts that reflect these properties. For example, Socrates and Confucius, although they are far apart from each other and are in different eras, they both have the attributes of people with upright feet and rational thinking, and it is based on these attributes that people form the concept of "man". However, Abelard pointed out in particular that the similarity or commonality of things is a completely individualized thing in every individual thing, just as Confucius was a Chinese sage and Socrates was a Greek prophet, so that although the general concept is based on the similarity of individual things, objectively there is no generality that corresponds to the general in our thinking. So in the final analysis, conceptualism still does not get rid of the limitations of nominalism, but manifests itself as a more moderate nominalism. However, Abelard did not escape the persecution of the Church because of this gentle attitude, and the Christian Church regarded all doctrines and ideas that contradicted orthodoxy as heresy, and cruel persecution was never soft. Abelard, like his teacher Rotherine, was declared a heretic by the Church, exiled to a remote monastery, and eventually died in a foreign land, and his writings were also burned. However, the fire can burn books, but can not destroy the mind, the idea of conceptualism strikes at orthodoxy, promotes further differentiation within scholastic philosophy, stimulates the emergence of late nominalism, and even in the 1930s, the American philosopher Lewis still adopted a conceptual approach to solve his pragmatic theoretical problems. The development of thought sometimes seems to follow the logic that one extreme idea forces out another that is in direct opposition to it, and the two are at odds, and someone tries to dissolve the opposites and reconcile them, and this compromise sometimes means a deepening of understanding. Over time, and because of the influence of nominalism, Anselm's platonic extreme realism became more and more unworkable, and orthodoxy felt that new arguments were necessary to gain a foothold. Thus arises Aquinas's mild realism. Aquinas affirmed general reality, but he was not as absolute as Anselm, and he divided the general into three different ways of being: (1) the general existence in individual things as the form or essence of things. Any tangible object is a combination of form and matter, in which matter is the potential, and form determines the essence of things; and form (generally) is as an independent physical form or "hidden matter" in individual things, rather than organically combined with materials. This is clearly an Aristotle concept. (2) Generally as an abstract concept corresponding to individual things, it appears after things and exists in the human intellect. This is consistent with conceptualism. (3) Generally as the prototype of God's idea of creating all things in the world, it exists in God's intellect and before it is created. This is undoubtedly a reproduction of Plato's theory of ideas. Obviously, Aquinas's view combines Plato's conceptualism, Aristotle's formalism, and Abelard's conceptualism, and under the premise of acknowledging that the general precedes, is higher than, and is independent of the individual, it also affirms certain connections between the general and the individual, washing away Anselm's excessive realism and appearing more moderate, so it is called "moderate realism". Moreover, Aquinas further argues that, in general as a rational abstraction, the universal is always acquired after the existing knowledge, but as far as it is a latent thing, the individual must exist in the subliminal universal, and therefore the universal exists before the special (individual). So, in chronological order, incomplete, potential, more universal things are first, such as animals appearing before man; on the other hand, from the order of perfection and natural intention, perfect is first than imperfect, and the less universal is higher than high, such as man over animals. This shows that although he insisted on the principle that ideas are the prototypes of concrete things, he also examined the relationship between types and the relationship between universal and special from the aspect of the emergence and differentiation of types, connected and compared the process of the generation of things with the process of human cognition, and revealed the deeper meaning of the categories of general and individual, which is of great significance in the history of philosophy. In the 13th century, when Thomism was in full swing, the natural sciences began to rise. Although truly systematic experimental science is still in its infancy, it is still mixed with fantasy superstitions such as witchcraft and alchemy in the Middle Ages. But as soon as this new thing broke through, it posed a challenge to orthodox scholastic philosophy, trying to break through the shackles and grow smoothly. Late nominalism, wrapped in science as a powerful intellectual tool, together with many other "heretical" doctrines, violently attacked the orthodox theoretical basis of scholastic philosophy, realism. The Englishman Rogier Roger Bacon (1214-1294) was a learned and trendy thinker who had done a great deal of experimental scientific research at Oxford University in England and the University of Paris in France, and despised Thomism very much. He said bluntly that Aquinas did not understand Greek at all, could not read Aristotle's original works directly, but could become the authority of Aristotle, is it not strange? Moreover, the translated text is not very reliable, and it is inevitable that the argument and deduction based on this will not add to the fallacy. In order to acquire new knowledge, one cannot rely on authority, but must resort to experimentation, and one must be tested by experimentation. According to this principle, he pointed out that only the objects of experience (i.e., individual things) are real, that the general and universal are nothing more than similarities between individual things; that God creates only individual people, and that nature does not produce "ordinary horses", but produces many other horses. Bacon paid a heavy price for his thoughts and statements, first exiled to France and then imprisoned for 13 years. Bacon's fellow Englishman, Duns Scott (J· Duns Scotus,1266-1308) was born in Scotland, and as a young man, he entered Oxford University, a bastion of ideas with innovative ideas and anti-orthodox tendencies, and joined the French Order. Like Bacon, Scott attached great importance to the role of mathematics and the problems of natural science, and he became the main spokesman for late nominalism, representing the French Order and the Dominican Order, led by Aquinas, in a long and fierce debate, focusing on the questions of nominalism and realism. He argued that it generally exists only in the human intellect. Individual things themselves have both personality and commonality, and personality and commonality are different among individual things, but this distinction is not a difference between two entities, but only a formal difference, and it is precisely because of this formal difference that people may make general propositions. Scott wrote a lot, but unfortunately he died young, in his early 40s. Fortunately, he taught a well-known student, inherited and developed his ideas. The student was William W. Thompson. William Occam (1300-1349). Born in south London, O'Conn first attended Oxford University and then the University of Paris, became a student of Scott and joined the French Order, joining radical colleagues in the resolute opposition to clerical supremacy and clashing with the Pope. He was arrested in 1324, and the following year his views were declared heretical and severely punished by excommunication. A few years later he escaped from prison and fled to Germany, supporting the German Emperor against the Papacy. One day he said solemnly to the Kaiser: "Please protect me with your sword, and I will protect you with a pen!" In Germany, he published many articles directly attacking the Holy See, and was therefore constantly cursed by the Holy See. Aucom is the last stalwart of nominalism. From the standpoint of the natural sciences, he held that only individual, individual and special things can exist, and that universals or generals, etc., are only abstract universal concepts, which exist only in the human mind, are a sign and a name, which at best represent only thought and not objective existence. These claims simply inherit the tradition of nominalism without much innovation, and it is not these that make Aucom famous in the history of philosophy, but his sharp thought "razor". Based on the position of nominalism, O'Conn argues that only the individual and the concrete things that we can verify with our senses are there, and therefore there is no need to add many useless abstract concepts on top of the vast world of individualization; in the process of human thinking, the principles of economy and economy must be followed: if too many principles are abused in the case of things can be explained with only a few principles, that is, time is wasted; if it is not necessary, do not add substance. This "economic principle of thinking" is what people talk about as "Aucon's razor". With this sharp razor in their hands, O'Conn and his disciples not only shaved off the many tedious and boring conceptual garbage of theologians, but also cut open the chest of scholastic philosophy and pounded its theoretical foundation, the home of realism. He went further than Scott, both against Anselm and against Aquinas, arguing that God could not be known through sensory experience, that even reason could not prove god's existence, and that one could only rely on faith to believe in God and his various attributes (such as the Trinity, the immortality of the soul, etc.). Thanks to the opening of this razor, Ocon's philosophy was all the rage, and in the 14th century, a powerful Ocon school emerged, which widely disseminated nominalist thought, and its empiricist approach caused people to doubt traditional beliefs and contempt for theology, promoted the development of science and materialism, and disintegrated the ideological edifice of scholastic philosophy, while "Aucon's Razor" has been passed down to this day, and continues to play the ideological function of cutting down complexity and criticizing dogma in the hands of Anglo-American empiricists. The controversy between nominalism and realism arose during the maturation and heyday of scholastic philosophy, and it was a more philosophical struggle rarely seen in the Middle Ages. The question of the relationship between the general and the individual, which is involved in this controversy, is a fundamental problem in philosophy, and it cannot be said to this day that it has been solved, just as one cannot say that the ontological problem has long been solved. If the above arguments were confined to purely philosophical spheres, the problem would be much simpler. But in fact, the question of whether nominal or nominal is fundamental to Christianity, that is, the basis for the idea of whether God exists or not, thus becomes a question of confrontation between orthodoxy and heresy. As seen, nominalists, like other heretical thinkers, are not only pursued and intercepted by orthodoxies in theory, but also subjected to human internment and exile. Ideological debates evolve into political oppression, which is often the case in the historical age of theocracy. Judging from historical development, nominalism has a tendency to innovate, and it is precisely under its continuous blows that realism is shrinking its territory day by day. From the perspective of scholastic philosophy, the dispute between nominalism and reality is only an infighting in the same philosophical system, and the result of the two tigers fighting each other is that both sides lose, which eventually leads to the decline of scholastic philosophy. Of course, between the remnants of scholastic philosophy, two towering trees of thought have grown, namely, modern empiricism and rationalism, the former breaking ground from the ruins of nominalism, and the latter rising from the ashes of realism.