Many theologians have found fault with this treatment of the subject, which seemed open to every objection that had been made to Abelard, Gilbert de la Poree, or a thousand other logicians.  They commonly asked why Thomas stopped the Deity’s self-realizations at love, or inside the triangle, since these realizations were real, not symbolic, and the square was at least as real as any other combination of line.  Thomas replied that knowledge and will—­the Verb and the Holy Ghost—­were alone essential.  The reply did not suit every one, even among doctors, but since Saint Thomas rested on this simple assertion, it is no concern of ours to argue the theology.  Only as art, one can afford to say that the form is more architectural than religious; it would surely have been suspicious to Saint Bernard.  Mystery there was none, and logic little.  The concept of the Holy Ghost was childlike; for a pupil of Aristotle it was inadmissible, since it led to nothing and helped no step toward the universe.

Admitting, if necessary, the criticism, Thomas need not admit the blame, if blame there were.  Every theologian was obliged to stop the pursuit of logic by force, before it dragged him into paganism and pantheism.  Theology begins with the universal,—­God,—­who must be a reality, not a symbol; but it is forced to limit the process of God’s realizations somewhere, or the priest soon becomes a worshipper of God in sticks and stones.  Theologists had commonly chosen, from time immemorial, to stop at the Trinity; within the triangle they were wholly realist; but they could not admit that God went on to realize Himself in the square and circle, or that the third member of the Trinity contained multiplicity, because the Trinity was a restless weight on the Church piers, which, like the central tower, constantly tended to fall, and needed to be lightened.  Thomas gave it the lightest form possible, and there fixed it.

Then came his great tour-de-force, the vaulting of his broad nave; and, if ignorance is allowed an opinion, even a lost soul may admire the grand simplicity of Thomas’s scheme.  He swept away the horizontal lines altogether, leaving them barely as a part of decoration.  The whole weight of his arches fell, as in the latest Gothic, where the eye sees nothing to break the sheer spring of the nervures, from the rosette on the keystone a hundred feet above down to the church floor.  In Thomas’s creation nothing intervened between God and his world; secondary causes become ornaments; only two forces, God and man, stood in the Church.

The chapter of Creation is so serious, and Thomas’s creation, like every other, is open to so much debate, that no student can allow another to explain it; and certainly no man whatever, either saint or sceptic, can ever yet have understood Creation aright unless divinely inspired; but whatever Thomas’s theory was as he meant it, he seems to be understood as holding that every created individual—­ animal, vegetable, or mineral—­was a special, divine act.  Whatever has form is created, and whatever is created takes form directly from the will of God, which is also his act.  The intermediate universals—­the secondary causes—­vanish as causes; they are, at most, sequences or relations; all merge in one universal act of will; instantaneous, infinite, eternal.