Naturally the Church, and especially its official theologists, took an instinctive attitude of defence whenever a question on this subject was asked, and were thrown into a flutter of irritation whenever an answer was suggested.  No man likes to have his intelligence or good faith questioned, especially if he has doubts about it himself.  The distinguishing essence of the Holy Ghost, as a theological substance, was its mystery.  That this mystery should be touched at all was annoying to every one who knew the dangers that lurked behind the veil, but that it should be freely handled before audiences of laymen by persons of doubtful character was impossible.  Such license must end in discrediting the whole Trinity under pretence of making it intelligible.

Precisely this license was what Abelard took, and on it he chose to insist.  He said nothing heretical; he treated the Holy Ghost with almost exaggerated respect, as though other churchmen did not quite appreciate its merits; but he would not let it alone, and the Church dreaded every moment lest, with his enormous influence in the schools, he should raise a new storm by his notorious indiscretion.  Yet so long as he merely lectured, he was not molested; only when he began to publish his theology did the Church interfere.  Then a council held at Soissons in 1121 abruptly condemned his book in block, without reading it, without specifying its errors, and without hearing his defence; obliged him to throw the manuscript into the fire with his own hands, and finally shut him up in a monastery.

He had invited the jurisdiction by taking orders, but even the Church was shocked by the summary nature of the judgment, which seems to have been quite irregular.  In fact, the Church has never known what it was that the council condemned.  The latest great work on the Trinity, by the Jesuit Father de Regnon, suggests that Abelard’s fault was in applying to the Trinity his theory of concepts.

“Yes!” he says; “the mystery is explained; the key of conceptualism has opened the tabernacle, and Saint Bernard was right in saying that, thanks to Abelard, every one can penetrate it and contemplate it at his ease; ‘even the graceless, even the uncircumcised.’  Yes! the Trinity is explained, but after the manner of the Sabellians.  For to identify the Persons in the terms of human concepts is, in the same stroke, to destroy their ‘subsistances propres.’”

Although the Saviour seems to have felt no compunctions about identifying the persons of the Trinity in the terms of human concepts, it is clear that tourists and heretics had best leave the Church to deal with its “subsistances propres,” and with its own members, in its own way.  In sum, the Church preferred to stand firm on the Roman arch, and the architects seem now inclined to think it was right; that scholastic science and the pointed arch proved to be failures.  In the twelfth century the world may have been rough, but it was not stupid.  The