Page:Illustrations of the history of medieval thought and learning.djvu/170

152 and was only induced to withdraw the opinion by a threat and a reminder of Abailard's fate.

Thus, with whatever limitations and reserves on the part of professed theologians, there was a general tendency among scholars to take the motive of their theology from philosophy. Christianity was put into a Neo-Platonic setting; and if the result was in some ways fantastic, it was not the less a distinct gain, in an age when everything tended towards a coarse materialism, to have a philosophy which should bring into relief those spiritual and ideal elements of Christianity which have in all times been in danger of suppression under the weight of an organised dogmatic system. It was that characteristic of the Creator so emphatically seized in the Timaeus, namely his essential goodness, which was adopted as paramount by the Platonists of the twelfth century, as it had been by John Scotus in the ninth. The thought passed into current theology and could not fail of influence as a counterweight to those dark theories of the divine government which lingered on, partly believed, never entirely disowned, from the predestinarianism of Augustin. Augustin has indeed