God spoke through Ovid (a curious choice!), as well as through St. Augustine.  They denied the resurrection of the body, and the traditional eschatology, saying that “he who has the knowledge of God in himself has paradise within him.”  They insisted on a progressive historical revelation—­the reign of the Father began with Abraham, that of the Son with Christ, that of the Spirit with themselves.  They despised sacraments, believing that the Spirit works without means.  They taught that he who lives in love can do no wrong, and were suspected, probably truly, of the licentious conduct which naturally follows from such a doctrine.  This antinomianism is no part of true Mysticism; but it is often found in conjunction with mystical speculation among the half-educated.  It is the vulgar perversion of Plotinus’ doctrine that matter is nothing, and that the highest part of our nature can take no stain.[221] We find evidence of immorality practised “in nomine caritatis” among the Gnostics and Manicheans of the first centuries, and these heresies never really became extinct.  The sects of the “Free Spirit,” who flourished later in the thirteenth century, had an even worse reputation than the Amalricians.  They combined with their Pantheism a Determinism which destroyed all sense of responsibility.  On the other hand, the followers of Ortlieb of Strassburg, about the same period, advocated an extreme asceticism based on a dualistic or Manichean view of the world; and they combined with this error an extreme rationalism, teaching that the historical Christ was a mere man; that the Gospel history has only a symbolical truth; that the soul only, without the body, is immortal; and that the Pope and his priests are servants of Satan.

The problem for the Church was how to encourage the warm love and faith of the mystics without giving the rein to these mischievous errors.  The twelfth and thirteenth centuries produced several famous writers, who attempted to combine scholasticism and Mysticism.[222] The leaders in this attempt were Bernard,[223] Hugo and Richard of St. Victor, Bonaventura, Albertus Magnus, and (later) Gerson.  Their works are not of great value as contributions to religious philosophy, for the Schoolmen were too much afraid of their authorities—­Catholic tradition and Aristotle—­to probe difficulties to the bottom; and the mystics, who, by making the renewed life of the soul their starting-point, were more independent, were debarred, by their ignorance of Greek, from a first-hand knowledge of their intellectual ancestors.  But in the history of Mysticism they hold an important place.[224] Speculation being for them restricted within the limits of Church-dogma, they were obliged to be more psychological and less metaphysical than Dionysius or Erigena.  The Victorines insist often on self-knowledge as the way to the knowledge of God and on self-purification as more important than philosophy.  “The way to ascend to God,” says Hugo, “is to descend into oneself.[225]”