Page:Illustrations of the history of medieval thought and learning.djvu/178

160 religion as jealous as, from his habitual meekness, he was in some measure credulous; so that he held in abhorrence those who trusted in the wisdom of this world and were too much attached to human reasonings, and if anything alien from the Christian faith were said to him in reference to them, he readily gave ear to it. In other words Bernard's constitutional distrust of the unaided human intellect conspired with a jealousy of those who had the power of turning it to account, to incline him to believe any talk discreditable to their Christian reputation.

Perhaps the verdict of history has hardly acquiesced in so injurious a view of his conduct: perhaps it was the very single-mindedness of his trust in spiritual things that made him recoil from any attempt to introduce into that sphere the reasons and questions of the world. They were tainted by their source, and to bring them into alliance with the spiritual was to pollute the faith and, as it were, to seek to unite Christ and Belial. But had Bernard's aim been realised, there could have been no more room for the rational development of the human mind, unless, were it possible, as an independent existence having no contact with its spiritual functions. Happily there was no excuse for the forcing into being of a premature secularism, a tendency as destructive of the intellectual powers as Bernard's spiritual absolutism. For he had no metaphysical theory of the unknowableness of the highest truths: on the contrary, they were the most certain, the only certain, knowledge. He had no wish to draw distinctions between the province of the spiritual and the intellectual, and leave the latter free within its own domain: he simply demanded its suppression; and against this blind claim on behalf of authority the better feeling of the age rebelled.

Bishop Otto illustrates Bernard's nervous susceptibility to the danger of human speculation by the instance of his treatment of Abailard: thus he explains the motive that prompted the trial of Gilbert of La Porrée. He sets the two cases in skilful and artistic juxtaposition.