Encyclopedia of Sacred Theology; Its Principles;

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: 4. Usage in the Period of the Reformation With the decline of Greek culture the use of eyKvicioii TraLSeta in its pregnant sense fell away. In the scholastic and ecclesiastical use of the word, which formed itself under Western influence, the original conception of the e7/cwcXw TraiSeta was expressed by Trivium et Quadrivium; and the later conception of ra eeo ypdppara either by litterae pro- fanae or artes liberales. We read nothing of Encyclopedia in the Middle Ages. In ordinary conversation, even in that of the " clergy," the word was lost, and only after the rise of Humanism in the sixteenth century does it appear again; and then according to the interpretation of Quintilian, as the circle of sciences. Thus Elyot writes, in 1536: " Whiche of some is called the worlde of science, of others the circle of doctrine, whiche is in one word of Greke: Encyclopaedia." (Tlie Gouvernor, quoted in the Encyclopedia Britannica, under the word Encycl.) Evidently the use of the word by the Greeks is here not inquired into; the sense of the word is indicated by the sound; and in the wake of Quintilian, Elyot also does not understand the weXo? to be the circle of citizens, but the circle of sciences, ? the orbis doctrinae. This cleared the way for a new transition of meaning. In the latter part of the sixteenth and beginning of the seventeenth century the name Encyclopedia passed from the world of science to the book in which this "world of science" was contained. The naive assumption that the knowledge of the several sciences was already as good as complete easily accounts for the several efforts that were made during the Middle Ages to embody in one single volume the collective knowledge with which they were satisfied and for which they were grateful. This sort of book was given the...