Page:Illustrations of the history of medieval thought and learning.djvu/168

150 Platonisers in the early ages of the church: to his own generation, however, there was something new, striking, even alarming, in the manner in which he stated it. He seemed to efface the distinction between faith and unfaith, and to treat Christian doctrine almost as a species of philosophy. Yet, even had he done so, he would only have been formulating a proposition which after all was part of the tacit, unacknowledged creed of students of philosophy. Among them the dignity of Plato the Theologian was certainly not allowed to suffer by comparison with the Bible. It was not merely that he furnished (by whatever crooked process of evolution) the materials for the accredited system of metaphysics: the accident that the middle ages as yet knew him only through the Timaeus, made him also specially the authority in cosmology and theosophy. The trinity that was discovered there took the place for speculative purposes of the Trinity of the Christian church. The Father and the Son became the ideal unities of Power and Wisdom, and there was a strong temptation to identify the Holy Ghost with the universal Soul. Abailard indeed never went this length, although he was charged with the identification at the council of Sens: for himself, he consistently distinguished the Third Person as Goodness or Love. But he liked to illustrate the prime doctrine by every possible analogy and was specially fond