One cannot stop to explain why Aristotle himself would have been first to forbid the teaching of what was called by his name in the Middle Ages; but you are bound to remember that this period between 1140 and 1200 was that of Transition architecture and art.  One must go to Noyon, Soissons, and Laon to study the Church that trampled on the schools; one must recall how the peasants of Normandy and the Chartrain were crusading for the Virgin in 1145, and building her fleches at Chartres and Saint-Pierre-sur-Dives while Bernard was condemning Gilbert at Rheims in 1148; we must go to the poets to see what they all meant by it; but the sum is an emotion—­clear and strong as love and much clearer than logic—­whose charm lies in its unstable balance.  The Transition is the equilibrium between the love of God—­which is faith—­and the logic of God—­which is reason; between the round arch and the pointed.  One may not be sure which pleases most, but one need not be harsh toward people who think that the moment of balance is exquisite.  The last and highest moment is seen at Chartres, where, in 1200, the charm depends on the constant doubt whether emotion or science is uppermost.  At Amiens, doubt ceases; emotion is trained in school; Thomas Aquinas reigns.

Bernard of Clairvaux and Thomas of Aquino were both artists,—­very great artists, if the Church pleases,—­and one need not decide which was the greater; but between them is a region of pure emotion—­of poetry and art—­which is more interesting than either.  In every age man has been apt to dream uneasily, rolling from side to side, beating against imaginary bars, unless, tired out, he has sunk into indifference or scepticism.  Religious minds prefer scepticism.  The true saint is a profound sceptic; a total disbeliever in human reason, who has more than once joined hands on this ground with some who were at best sinners.  Bernard was a total disbeliever in scholasticism; so was Voltaire.  Bernard brought the society of his time to share his scepticism, but could give the society no other intellectual amusement to relieve its restlessness.  His crusade failed; his ascetic enthusiasm faded; God came no nearer.  If there was in all France, between 1140 and 1200, a more typical Englishman of the future Church of England type than John of Salisbury, he has left no trace; and John wrote a description of his time which makes a picturesque contrast with the picture painted by Abelard, his old master, of the century at its beginning.  John weighed Abelard and the schools against Bernard and the cloister, and coolly concluded that the way to truth led rather through Citeaux, which brought him to Chartres as Bishop in 1176, and to a mild scepticism in faith.  “I prefer to doubt,” he said, “rather than rashly define what is hidden.”  The battle with the schools had then resulted only in creating three kinds of sceptics:—­the disbelievers in human reason; the passive agnostics; and the sceptics proper, who