Note 64 — Chapter IV

Dr. Campbell in his “Strictures on the Ecclesiastical History of Ireland,” observes that “this great man was degraded by Pope Zachary on conviction of being a mathematician.” But perhaps the most remarkable reproduction of this oft-told tale occurs in Dr. Enfield’s translation of Brucker’s “History of Philosophy,” which I give verbatim, as only to be paralleled in the “Art of Pluck.” “Boniface,” he says, “the patron of ignorance and barbarism, summoned Polydore Virgil, bishop of Salisbury, to the Court of Inquisition for maintaining the existence of the antipodes.” (Vol. i, p. 363.) Would it be believed that a writer who is engaged in bewailing the ignorance of monkish philosophers should commit himself to a statement which confuses St. Feargil, or Virgil, bishop of Saltzburg, in the eighth century, with Polydore Vergil, archdeacon of Bath (for he was never bishop of Salisbury at all), in the fifteenth? And then the Inquisition! To make it complete he should have identified Virgil with the Latin poet, and convicted him of the Albigensian heresy. Yet these are the writers who find no terms contemptuous enough in which to speak of mediæval ignorance. “Among the scholastics,” writes Dr. Enfield, in the very next sentence, “we find surprising proofs of weakness and ignorance.” The scholastics, could they speak, might find something to retort on their accusers.