Page:Illustrations of the history of medieval thought and learning.djvu/141

Rh some of whom he perhaps might meet as fellow-scholars in the lecture-room at Laon. But it was one thing to form a resolution, another to have the courage or the humility to carry it out; and as a matter of fact Abailard's impatience of authority soon reasserted itself. He sat at the feet of a master whom he felt to be his inferior, and he despised him. Anselm's language, he says, was wonderful, but its sense was contemptible and void of reason. He kindled a fire not to give light but to fill the house with smoke. Truly the genius of the two men lay in exactly opposite directions. Anselm was an erudite theologian, great in the case-law of the fathers, believing what was written and daring not to add to it. Reason, which to Abailard was the highest gift of man and there fore of the widest applicability, Anselm could treat as impotent in theology, just because it was a human faculty; as such, the things of God were beyond its competence. It is evident that the spirit in which Abailard approached the study was precisely the spirit which would be likely to lead to suspicion and danger in the twelfth century.

His disgust with the barren fig-tree whose delusive attraction had enticed him into visiting Laon, very soon sq. became too strong for him to be able to continue his studies there. He ridiculed the notion that one could not teach theology without a master, that is, without having gone through a course of instruction under a master; and he provoked a challenge to put forth a specimen of his own skill. His fellow-students warned him against the temerity, but he would not be restrained. He gave an exposition of Ezekiel which, he tells us, so delighted his hearers that those who first came only from curiosity were joined in the subsequent lectures by a press of diligent students. Anselm was very wroth: his disciples Alberic of Rheims and Lotulf the Lombard, urged upon him the duty of