heaven where our Lord can be seen face to face.”  Both the great scholastic, Anselm of Canterbury, and Bernard of Clairvaux, were of the same opinion.  “They shall aspire not to the earthly, but to the heavenly Jerusalem, and travel there not with their feet, but with the desire of their hearts.”  And “They seek God in external objects, neglecting to look into their hearts, in whose innermost depths dwells the divine.”  And yet those same men, who even then seemed to have outgrown biblical religiosity, were under the spell of the all-absorbing idea of the age.  Bernard solved the contradiction in the following way:  “It is not because His power has grown less that the Lord calls us feeble worms to protect His own; His word is deed, and He could send more than twelve legions of angels to do His bidding; but because it is the will of the Lord your God to save you from perdition, He gives you an opportunity to serve Him.”  In these words a significant change of the fundamental idea can already be traced.  Peter of Cluny worked for the Crusades, and Bernard, one of the most influential and venerable personalities of the Middle Ages, a man before whose word the popes bowed down, journeyed through the whole of France, inciting all hearts to fanatical enthusiasm.  Whoever heard him preach forsook his worldly possessions and took the cross, clamouring for Peter himself to lead all Christendom.  “Countless numbers flocked to his banner, towns and castles stood forsaken and there was hardly one man to seven women.  The wives were made widows during the lifetime of their husbands.”  Thus Bernard wrote to the Pope, travelling through Germany, healing the sick by his mere presence, and preaching to the people in a tongue no one could understand.  But the personality of this physically delicate man, whose body was only kept alive by his spirit, touched all hearts.  The prudent Emperor, Conrad, resisted for a long time, and would have nothing to do with such an aimless enterprise.  But Bernard’s first sermon in the cathedral at Speyer, on Christmas Day, moved him to tears.  Bernard left the pulpit and pinned the cross on the shoulder of the kneeling emperor.  By this symbolical act the metaphysical spirit of the time, of which the Church had obtained control for her own purposes, visibly became master of political common-sense.

The Crusades were one of the great movements matured by the newly-awakened metaphysical yearning.  The same spirit in another, profounder, way, manifested itself in the efforts of religious reform which were being made here and there.  “The appearance and spread of heresy has always been the gauge by which the religious life of the individual must be measured,” says Buettner very pertinently in his preface to his edition of Eckhart.  For the first time since the days of Christ true religious feeling was again quickening the hearts of men; the ecclesiastical dogma, which until then had represented absolute truth, no longer satisfied their need.