Page:Illustrations of the history of medieval thought and learning.djvu/169

Rh of dwelling upon the adumbrations of Christian truth which he found in Plato. Plato, he says, conceived of God as of an artificer who planned and ordered everything before he made it: in this wise he considers the pattern-forms, which he calls the ideas, in the divine mind; and these afterwards Providence, as after the fashion of a consummate workman, carried into effect. Such a suggestion (Abailard does not mean it as an explanation, for the truth, he avers, surpasses human understanding) may help to make us guess at the relation between the Father and the Son, and that of the Holy Spirit to both. In the same way our theologian took the doctrine of the universal Soul, the anima mundi, as a convincing proof of his favourite position that intimations of the divirie mysteries were vouchsafed to the Greek philosophers. He seeks to shew that it can be reconciled with the Christian faith in the holy Spirit; but he does not presume to identify the two ideas. The doctrine by itself, he says, is a dark saying veiled in a figure; taken literally it would be the height of absurdity: Christianity, he seems to infer, has supplied the means of solving the enigma and bringing it into harmony with the perfect truth. Abailard's prudence was however not followed by every one; and William of Conches, the uncompromising Platonist, who, as we have seen, appears to have borrowed a good deal from a somewhat perfunctory study of Abailard, decided without hesitation that the Holy Ghost and the universal Soul were convertible terms,