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Victorines triumphed, only to be superseded fifty years later when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