william t. costello, sj - The School of Literature, Communication, and ...

THE FRAMEWORK OF SCHOLASTICISM 31
(i) "The Protestant Church is the true Church of Christ"; (2)
"There is no external and infallible judge in matters of faith";
and (3) "Faith cannot exist without charity, without which, how-
ever, Faith is the adequate cause of justification." The Vice-
Chancellor replied to the Jesuits that he had no power from His
Majesty to give leave for a disputation, "... which might give
them occasion of stay, and cause a meeting of the students . . ."
But the wily Jesuits would not be put off. That night "they writ
divers copies of the questions, and fastened them to boughs, and
the next morning as they went to take boat for Wisbich, they
threw them over Magdalen College walls . . ." The upshot was
that at the King's coming to Cambridge the three questions, so
curiously proposed, were disputed before him.
Such was the disputation, a strictly stylized and technical exercise,
which grew out of the dialectical character of medieval scholasticism.
So natural was it to the age, that it had found its way
into literature under the medieval form of the imaginatio, or
imaginary disputation, 74 which might be described as a Platonic
dialogue reduced to scholastic forms. The terms and practices of
the disputation crop up again and again in Elizabethan litera-
ture, as, for example, in Greene's The Honorable History of Friar
Bacon and Friar Bungay. In Scene 9, Bungay, crestfallen, has just
admitted that he is no match for Vandermast. Friar Bacon enters:
All hail to this royal company,
That sit to hear and see this strange dispute!
Bungay, how stand'st thou as a man amaz'd?
What, hath the German acted more than thou?
VANDERMAST: What art thou that question' 'st thus? 75
Much of John Heywood's The Spider and the Fly (1562) is scho-
lastic disputation. As for Shakespeare, the gravediggers' scene in
Hamlet, V, i, is an expert literary adaptation of a scholastic prevarication,
as is Touchstonian logic in As You Like It.
THE DECLAMATION
However dominant the disputation among scholastic exercises,
there is a third exercise which was not dialectical, the declamation.
Like the lecture and the disputation, the declamation was
either public or private, held either in the university schools or
in the colleges. The private declamation is the progenitor of the
weekly essay now read to the supervisor
in his rooms at both
Cambridge and Oxford.