Page:Vactican as a World Power.djvu/171

 AND ARNOLD OF BRESCIA 157

dwelt in the region of everlasting interrogation. At the Synod of Sens, which met (1141) during the year preceding Abelard's death, the born saint and the born logician clashed headlong. It was one kind of man against another kind of man. The thinker was van- quished by the genius of the believer, and perhaps also by the weighti- est of the arguments he advanced: how are you to know the truth, when you do not possess the true spirit and that spirit does not possess you? He concluded by saying: "What you affirm proceeds, accord- ing to your own teaching, entirely from you and your human nature. It is your opinion merely opinion, and merely yours. How shall it, how dare it, become the opinion of those who possess the spirit that you do not possess?" Abelard was unable to ward off the onslaught of the Abbot. Indeed he seemed almost like a puzzled boy. The two made their peace, but their spirits confront each other in battle throughout history because there was truth and strength in both. When the heritage of the erring philosopher was bequeathed to them, the teachers of the Church knew (as their peers have always known) how to separate the wheat from the chaff and how to use that wheat. Thomas Aquinas, the greatest among them, was the unflinching an* tagonist of heresy, but to Rome we owe the honest dictum that error also helps the discovery of truth, and that all who set the mind in morion earn the gratitude of the philosopher.

In addition to Roger II and Abelard, it was the second's pupil, Arnold of Brescia, who caused Bernard and the Popes of his time the greatest concern. This Lombard canon was a symptom of impending change, taking a leading part in what was then a debate between the present and the past. But the retrospective time-spirit which im- pelled some to take a mere inventory of tradition which they were content to catalogue, and spurred others on to revive the traditions of antiquity be it that of the self-governing city-state, of the Roman republic, or of the Empire drove Arnold, the morally rigorous suc- cessor to the Pataria, into conflict with both the historical development of the Church and the contemporary state of his time. Bernard, too, attacked the Curia and the self-centred prelates of the age, and heaped scorn on the luxury of Cluny its menus, its table manners, and its modes of travel. But Arnold's preaching was more than criticism and reform. It was revolution. Like Tertullian the Montanist, he

158