One cannot stop to explain why Aristotle himself would have been first to forbid the teaching of what was called by his name in the Middle Ages; but you are bound to remember that this period between 1140 and 1200 was that of Transition architecture and art. One must go to Noyon, Soissons, and Laon to study the Church that trampled on the schools; one must recall how the peasants of Normandy and the Chartrain were crusading for the Virgin in 1145, and building her fleches at Chartres and Saint-Pierre-sur-Dives while Bernard was condemning Gilbert at Rheims in 1148; we must go to the poets to see what they all meant by it; but the sum is an emotion—clear and strong as love and much clearer than logic—whose charm lies in its unstable balance. The Transition is the equilibrium between the love of God—which is faith—and the logic of God—which is reason; between the round arch and the pointed. One may not be sure which pleases most, but one need not be harsh toward people who think that the moment of balance is exquisite. The last and highest moment is seen at Chartres, where, in 1200, the charm depends on the constant doubt whether emotion or science is uppermost. At Amiens, doubt ceases; emotion is trained in school; Thomas Aquinas reigns.
Bernard of Clairvaux and Thomas of Aquino were both artists,—very great artists, if the Church pleases,—and one need not decide which was the greater; but between them is a region of pure emotion—of poetry and art—which is more interesting than either. In every age man has been apt to dream uneasily, rolling from side to side, beating against imaginary bars, unless, tired out, he has sunk into indifference or scepticism. Religious minds prefer scepticism. The true saint is a profound sceptic; a total disbeliever in human reason, who has more than once joined hands on this ground with some who were at best sinners. Bernard was a total disbeliever in scholasticism; so was Voltaire. Bernard brought the society of his time to share his scepticism, but could give the society no other intellectual amusement to relieve its restlessness. His crusade failed; his ascetic enthusiasm faded; God came no nearer. If there was in all France, between 1140 and 1200, a more typical Englishman of the future Church of England type than John of Salisbury, he has left no trace; and John wrote a description of his time which makes a picturesque contrast with the picture painted by Abelard, his old master, of the century at its beginning. John weighed Abelard and the schools against Bernard and the cloister, and coolly concluded that the way to truth led rather through Citeaux, which brought him to Chartres as Bishop in 1176, and to a mild scepticism in faith. "I prefer to doubt," he said, "rather than rashly define what is hidden." The battle with the schools had then resulted only in creating three kinds of sceptics:—the disbelievers in human reason; the passive agnostics; and the sceptics proper, who would have been atheists had they dared. The first class was represented by the School of Saint-Victor; the second by John of Salisbury himself; the third, by a class of schoolmen whom he called Cornificii, as though they made a practice of inventing horns of dilemma on which to fix their opponents; as, for example, they asked whether a pig which was led to market was led by the man or the cord. One asks instantly: What cord?—whether Grace, for instance, or Free Will?
Bishop John used the science he had learned in the school only to reach the conclusion that, if philosophy were a science at all, its best practical use was to teach charity—love. Even the early, superficial debates of the schools, in 1100-50, had so exhausted the subject that the most intelligent men saw how little was to be gained by pursuing further those lines of thought. The twelfth century had already reached the point where the seventeenth century stood when Descartes renewed the attempt to give a solid, philosophical basis for deism by his celebrated "Cogito, ergo sum." Although that ultimate fact seemed new to Europe when Descartes revived it as the starting-point of his demonstration, it was as old and familiar as Saint Augustine to the twelfth century, and as little conclusive as any other assumption of the Ego or the Non-Ego. The schools argued, according to their tastes, from unity to multiplicity, or from multiplicity to unity; but what they wanted was to connect the two. They tried realism and found that it led to pantheism. They tried nominalism and found that it ended in materialism. They attempted a compromise in conceptualism which begged the whole question. Then they lay down, exhausted. In the seventeenth century the same violent struggle broke out again, and wrung from Pascal the famous outcry of despair in which the French language rose, perhaps for the last time, to the grand style of the twelfth century. To the twelfth century it belongs; to the century of faith and simplicity; not to the mathematical certainties of Descartes and Leibnitz and Newton, or to the mathematical abstractions of Spinoza. Descartes had proclaimed his famous conceptual proof of God: "I am conscious of myself, and must exist; I am conscious of God and He must exist." Pascal wearily replied that it was not God he doubted, but logic. He was tortured by the impossibility of rejecting man's reason by reason; unconsciously sceptical, he forced himself to disbelieve in himself rather than admit a doubt of God. Man had tried to prove God, and had failed: "The metaphysical proofs of God are so remote (eloignees) from the reasoning of men, and so contradictory (impliquees, far-fetched) that they make little impression; and even if they served to convince some people, it would only be during the instant that they see the demonstration; an hour afterwards they fear to have deceived themselves." Moreover, this kind of proof could lead only to a speculative knowledge, and to know God only in that way was not to know Him at all. The only way to reach God was to deny the value of reason, and to deny reason was scepticism:—
En voyant l'aveuglement et la misere de l'homme et ces contrarietes etonnantes qui se decouvrent dans sa nature, et regardant tout l'univers muet, et l'homme sans lumiere, abandonne a lui-meme et comme egare dans ce recoin de l'umvers, sans savoir qui l'y a mis, ce qu'il y est venu faire, ce qu'il deviendra en mourant, j'entre en effroi comme un homme qu'on aurait porte endormi dans une ile deserte et effroyable, et qui s'eveillerait sans connaitre ou il est et sans avoir aucun moyen d'en sortir. Et sur cela j'admire comment on n'entre pas en desespoir d'un si miserable etat. Je vois d'autres personnes aupres de moi de semblable nature, et je leur demande s'ils sont mieux instruits que moi, et ils me disent que non Et sur cela, ces miserables egares, ayant regarde autour d'eux, et ayant vu quelques objets plaisants, s'y sont donnes et s'y sont attaches Pour moi je n'ai pu m'y arreter ni me reposer dans la societe de ces personnes, en tout semblables a moi, miserables comme moi, impuissants comme moi. Je vois qu'ils ne m'aideraient pas a mourir, je mourrai seul, il faut donc faire comme si j'etais seul or, si j'etais seul, je ne batirais pas des maisons, je ne m'embarrasserais point dans des occupations tumultuaires, je ne chercherais l'estime de personne, mais je tacherais settlement a decouvrir la verite.
Ainsi, considerant combien il y a d'apparence qu'il y a autre chose que ce que je vois, j'ai recherche si ce Dieu dont tout le monde parle n'aurait pas laisse quelques marques de lui. Je regarde de toutes parts et ne vois partout qu' obscuritd. La nature ne m'offre rien que ne soit matiere de doute et d'inquietude. Si je n'y voyais rien qui marquat une divinite, je me determinerais a n'en rien croire. Si je voyais partout les marques d'un Createur, je me reposerais en paix dans la foi. Mais voyant trop pour nier, et trop peu pour m'assurer, je suis dans un etat a plaindre, et ou j'ai souhaite cent fois que si un Dieu soutient la nature, elle le marquat sans Equivoque; et que, si les marques qu'elle en donne sont trompeuses, elle les supprimat tout a fait; qu'elle dit tout ou rien, afin que je visse quel parti je dois suivre.
When I see the blindness and misery of man and the astonishing contradictions revealed in his nature, and observe the whole universe mute, and man without light, abandoned to himself, as though lost in this corner of the universe, without knowing who put him here, or what he has come here to do, or what will become of him in dying, I feel fear like a man who has been carried when asleep into a desert and fearful island, and has waked without knowing where he is and without having means of rescue. And thereupon I wonder how man escapes despair at so miserable an estate. I see others about me, like myself, and I ask them if they are better informed than I, and they tell me no. And then these wretched wanderers, after looking about them and seeing some pleasant object, have given themselves up and attached themselves to it. As for me I cannot stop there, or rest in the company of these persons, wholly like myself, miserable like me, impotent like me. I see that they would not help me to die, I shall die alone, I must then act as though alone, but if I were alone I should not build houses, I should not fret myself with bustling occupations, I should seek the esteem of no one, but I should try only to discover the truth.
So, considering how much appearance there is that something exists other than what I see I have sought whether this God of Whom every one talks may not have left some marks of Himself. I search everywhere, and see only obscurity everywhere. Nature offers me nothing but matter of possible doubt and disquiet. If I saw there nothing to mark a divinity, I should make up my mind to believe nothing of it. If I saw everywhere the marks of a Creator, I should rest in peace in faith. But seeing too much to deny, and too little to affirm, I am in a pitiable state, where I have an hundred times wishes that, if a God supports nature, she would show it without equivocation; and that, if the marks she gives are deceptive, she would suppress them wholly; that she say all of nothing, that I may see my path.
This is the true Prometheus lyric, but when put back in its place it refuses to rest at Port-Royal which has a right to nothing but precision; it has but one real home—the Abbaye-de-Saint-Victor. The mind that recoils from itself can only commit a sort of ecstatic suicide; it must absorb itself in God; and in the bankruptcy of twelfth-century science the Western Christian seemed actually on the point of attainment; he, like Pascal, touched God behind the veil of scepticism.
The schools had already proved one or two points which need never have been discussed again. In essence, religion was love; in no case was it logic. Reason can reach nothing except through the senses; God, by essence, cannot be reached through the senses; if He is to be known at all, He must be known by contact of spirit with spirit, essence with essence; directly; by emotion; by ecstasy; by absorption of our existence in His; by substitution of his spirit for ours. The world had no need to wait five hundred years longer in order to hear this same result reaffirmed by Pascal. Saint Francis of Assisi had affirmed it loudly enough, even if the voice of Saint Bernard had been less powerful than it was. The Virgin had asserted it in tones more gentle, but any one may still see how convincing, who stops a moment to feel the emotion that lifted her wonderful Chartres spire up to God.
The Virgin, indeed, made all easy, for it was little enough she cared for reason or logic. She cared for her baby, a simple matter, which any woman could do and understand. That, and the grace of God, had made her Queen of Heaven. The Trinity had its source in her,— totius Trinitatis nobile Triclinium,—and she was maternity. She was also poetry and art. In the bankruptcy of reason, she alone was real.