After the encyclopaedist of the middle ages come, naturally, their philosophers.  They were numerous; and some of them have remained illustrious.  Several of them, at the date of their lives and labors, have already been met with and remarked upon in this history, such as Gerbert of Aurillac, who became Pope Sylvester II., St. Anselm, Abelard, St. Bernard, Robert of Sorbon, founder of the Sorbonne, and St. Thomas Aquinas.

[Illustration:  St. Thomas Aquinas and Abelard——­140]

To these names, known to every enlightened man, might be added many others less familiar to the public, but belonging to men who held a high place in the philosophical contests of their times, such as John Scot Erigena, Berenger, Roscelin, William of Champeaux, Gilbert of La Poree, &c.  The questions which always have taken and always will take a passionate hold of men’s minds in respect of God, the universe, and man, in respect of our origin, our nature, and our destiny, were raised and discussed, from the eleventh to the fifteenth century, if not with so much brilliancy, at any rate with as much boldness and earnest thought, as at any other period.  The middle ages had, in France, their spiritualists, their materialists, their pantheists, their rationalists, their mystics, and their sceptics, not very clear or refined in their notions, but such as lacked neither profundity in their general view of the questions, nor ingenious subtilty in their argumentative process.  We do not care to give in this place any exposition or estimate of their doctrines; we shall simply point out what there was original and characteristic in their fashion of philosophizing, and wherein their mental condition differed essentially from that which was engendered and propagated, in the sixteenth century, by the resuscitation of Greek and Roman antiquity.

It is the constant idea of the philosophers and theologians of that period to affirm and to demonstrate the agreement between Christian faith and reason.  They consider themselves placed between two fixed points, faith in the Christian truths inculcated from the very first or formally revealed by God to man, and reason, which is the faculty given to man to enable him to recognize the truth.  “Faith,” wrote Hildebert, Archbishop of Tours, in the eleventh century, “is not contrary to reason, but it is above reason.  If, like the philosophers, one willeth not to believe anything but what reason comprehends, faith, in this case, hath no merit.  The merit is in believing that which, without being contrary to reason, is above it. . . .  Faith is certainty in respect of things which fall not under the perceptions of the body; it is below knowledge, for to believe is less than to know; and it is above opinion, for to believe is more than to imagine.”  “I do not seek to understand in order to believe,” says St. Anselm; “I believe in order to understand. . . .  Authority requires faith in order to prepare man for reason.”  But “authority,”