Page:Illustrations of the history of medieval thought and learning.djvu/175

Rh with the unbounded authority that belonged to one who was ranked with Cicero among the chief of Latin philosophers. Gilbert's general mode of approaching his subject suggests to a great extent, consciously or unconsciously, that of John Scotus. He seeks to unite theology and philosophy, and he arrives at a similar result. Although he has not the affirmative and negative antithesis which forms so characteristic an element in the Scot's system, he is not the less precise in excluding the nature of God from the domain of human enquiry. God is to him, on the one hand, the supreme abstraction, of which we can predicate nothing; on the other, he is the fulness of all being, which sums up and unites that which in the universe exists only in division and variety. The dominant idea, however, in Gilbert's mind is plainly the former. He undertook to prove, just as Abailard had done, that the highest truths of theology stand apart from and above the comprehension of our understanding, can only be hinted at by analogies and figures of speech. Yet in fact he started from a precisely opposite principle to Abailard's, since he held that in theology faith precedes reason, reason