And in France, too, the writer of the second part of the Roman de la Rose has earned the title of “le Voltaire du moyen age.”
But on the other side of the Pyrenees the echo of this new spirit was but very faint.
Shut in between the rock of Gibraltar and by these same Pyrenees sits Our Lady of the Rocks, Faith ... alone; for heresies (Calvinism being the great exception) are, Teresa came to see, but the turning away of the frailer sisters, Hope and Charity, from the petrifying stare of their Gorgon but most beautiful sister.
But in those days, though as stern, she was a plainer Faith. It was not till after the Council of Trent that she developed the repellent beauty of a great picture: the tortured conversion of St. Ignatius de Loyóla, the Greco-esque visions of Santa Teresa de Jesùs, the gloating grinning crowd in the Zocodover of Toledo lit up by the flames of an auto-da-fé into one of the goblin visions of Goya, were still but tiny seeds, broadcast and sleeping. Catholicism had not yet lost the monumental austerity of the primitive Church; its blazon was still the Tree of the Fall and the Redemption springing from Peter’s rock.
But, all the time, the doctrine of Transubstantiation, woven by the “angelic doctor” round the Sacrifice of the Mass, was slowly, surely coming to its own, and Jehovah was turning into the Lord God of the Host.
CHAPTER V
1
Dr. Sinclair and the children, Guy, Rory, and, of course, Arnold, were to spend Christmas at Plasencia.