These intellectual and inquiring monks, as far back as the ninth century speculated on the great subjects of Christian faith with singular boldness, considering the general ignorance which veiled Europe in melancholy darkness.  Some of them were logically led “to a secret mutiny and insurrection” against the doctrines which were universally received.  This insurrection of human intelligence gave great alarm to the orthodox leaders of the Church; and to suppress it the Church raised up conservative dialecticians as acute and able as those who strove for emancipation.  At first they used the weapons of natural reason, but afterwards employed the logic and method of Aristotle, as translated into Latin from the Arabic, to assist them in their intellectual combats.  Gradually the movement centred in the scholastic philosophy, as a bulwark to Catholic theology.  But this was nearly a hundred years after the time of Anselm, who himself was not enslaved by the technicalities of a complicated system of dialectics.

Naturally the first subject which was suggested to the minds of inquiring monks was the being and attributes of God.  He was the beginning and end of their meditations.  It was to meditate upon God that the Oriental recluse sought the deserts of Asia Minor and Egypt.  Like the Eastern monk of the fourth century, he sought to know the essence and nature of the Deity he worshipped.  There arose before his mind the great doctrines of the trinity, the incarnation, and redemption.  Closely connected with these were predestination and grace, and then “fixed fate, free-will, foreknowledge absolute.”  On these mysteries he could not help meditating; and with meditation came speculation on unfathomable subjects pertaining to God and his relations with man, to the nature of sin and its penalty, to the freedom of the will, and eternal decrees.

The monk became first a theologian and then a philosopher, whether of the school of Plato or of Aristotle he did not know.  He began to speculate on questions which had agitated the Grecian schools,—­ the origin of evil and of matter; whether the world was created or uncreated; whether there is a distinction between things visible and invisible; whether we derive our knowledge from sensation or reflection; whether the soul is necessarily immortal; how free-will is to be reconciled with God’s eternal decrees, or what the Greeks called Fate; whether ideas are eternal, or are the creation of our own minds.  These, and other more subtile questions—­like the nature of angels—­began to agitate the convent in the ninth century.