The idea seems to modern science reasonable enough.  Science has to deal, for example, with scores of chemical energies which it knows little about except that they always seem to be constant to the same conditions; but every one knows that in the particular relation of mind to matter the battle is as furious as ever.  The soul has always refused to live in peace with the body.  The angels, too, were always in rebellion.  They insisted on personality, and the devils even more obstinately than the angels.  The dispute was—­and is—­far from trifling.  Mind would rather ignore matter altogether.  In the thirteenth century mind did, indeed, admit that matter was something,—­which it quite refuses to admit in the twentieth,—­but treated it as a nuisance to be abated.  To the pure in spirit one argued in vain that spirit must compromise; that nature compromised; that God compromised; that man himself was nothing but a somewhat clumsy compromise.  No argument served.  Mind insisted on absolute despotism.  Schoolmen as well as mystics would not believe that matter was what it seemed,—­if, indeed, it existed;—­unsubstantial, shifty, shadowy; changing with incredible swiftness into dust, gas, flame; vanishing in mysterious lines of force into space beyond hope of recovery; whirled about in eternity and infinity by that mind, form, energy, or thought which guides and rules and tyrannizes and is the universe.  The Church wanted to be pure spirit; she regarded matter with antipathy as something foul, to be held at arms’ length lest it should stain and corrupt the soul; the most she would willingly admit was that mind and matter might travel side by side, like a doubleheaded comet, on parallel lines that never met, with a preestablished harmony that existed only in the prime motor.

Thomas and his master Albert were almost alone in imposing on the Church the compromise so necessary for its equilibrium.  The balance of matter against mind was the same necessity in the Church Intellectual as the balance of thrusts in the arch of the Gothic cathedral.  Nowhere did Thomas show his architectural obstinacy quite so plainly as in thus taking matter under his protection.  Nothing would induce him to compromise with the angels.  He insisted on keeping man wholly apart, as a complex of energies in which matter shared equally with mind.  The Church must rest firmly on both.  The angels differed from other beings below them’ precisely because they were immaterial and impersonal.  Such rigid logic outraged the spiritual Church.

Perhaps Thomas’s sudden death in 1274 alone saved him from the fate of Abelard, but it did not save his doctrine.  Two years afterwards, in 1276, the French and English churches combined to condemn it.  Etienne Tempier, Bishop of Paris, presided over the French Synod; Robert Kilwardeby, of the Dominican Order, Archbishop of Canterbury, presided over the Council at Oxford.  The synods were composed of schoolmen as well as churchmen, and seem to have been