FREE BOOKS

Author's List




PREV.   NEXT  
|<   5   6   7   8   9   10   11   12   13   14   15   16   17   18   19   20   21   22   23   24   25   26   27   28   29  
30   31   32   33   34   35   36   37   38   39   40   41   42   43   44   45   46   47   48   49   50   51   52   53   54   >>   >|  
led religion. Abelard was one of the most enthusiastic and daring of these Mediaeval thinkers, and it is not surprising that he should have found himself at issue not only with the duller type of theologians but with his philosophical peers themselves. He was an intellectual force of the first magnitude and a master of dialectic; he was also an egotist through and through, and a man of strong passions. He would and did use his logical faculty and his mastery of dialectic to justify his own desires, whether these were for carnal satisfaction or the maintenance of an original intellectual concept. It was precisely this danger that aroused the fears of the "rigourists" and in the light of succeeding events in the domain of intellectualism it is impossible to deny that there was some justification for their gloomy apprehensions. In St. Thomas Aquinas this intellectualizing process marked its highest point and beyond there was no margin of safety. He himself did not overstep the verge of danger, but after him this limit was overpassed. The perfect balance between mind and spirit was achieved by Hugh of St. Victor, but afterwards the severance began and on the one side was the unwholesome hyper-spiritualization of the Rhenish mystics, on the other the false intellectualism of Descartes, Kant and the entire modern school of materialistic philosophy. It was the clear prevision of this inevitable issue that made of St. Bernard not only an implacable opponent of Abelard but of the whole system of Scholasticism as well. For a time he was victorious. Abelard was silenced and the mysticism of the Victorines triumphed, only to be superseded fifty years later when the two great orders, Dominican and Franciscan, produced their triumphant protagonists of intellectualism, Alelander Halesand Albertus Magnus, and finally the greatest pure intellect of all time, St. Thomas Aquinas. St. Bernard, St. Francis of Assisi, the Victorines, maintained that after all, as Henri Bergson was to say, seven hundred years later, "the mind of man by its very nature is incapable of apprehending reality," and that therefore faith is better than reason. Lord Bacon came to the same conclusion when he wrote "Let men please themselves as they will in admiring and almost adoring the human kind, this is certain; that, as an uneven mirrour distorts the rays of objects according to its own figure and section, so the mind ... cannot be trusted." And Hugh of St. Vict
PREV.   NEXT  
|<   5   6   7   8   9   10   11   12   13   14   15   16   17   18   19   20   21   22   23   24   25   26   27   28   29  
30   31   32   33   34   35   36   37   38   39   40   41   42   43   44   45   46   47   48   49   50   51   52   53   54   >>   >|  



Top keywords:
Abelard
 

intellectualism

 

intellectual

 
Victorines
 

dialectic

 

Bernard

 

Thomas

 

danger

 

Aquinas

 

produced


triumphant

 
Franciscan
 

Halesand

 
Magnus
 
finally
 

Albertus

 

Dominican

 

Alelander

 

protagonists

 

silenced


implacable

 

opponent

 

system

 

inevitable

 

philosophy

 
prevision
 

Scholasticism

 

superseded

 

triumphed

 

mysticism


victorious

 

greatest

 
orders
 

incapable

 

adoring

 

admiring

 

uneven

 

mirrour

 

trusted

 

section


figure
 
distorts
 

objects

 

conclusion

 

hundred

 
nature
 

Bergson

 
intellect
 
Francis
 

Assisi