extreme profligacy are often found in close proximity. The fugitive from the insurgent passions of his own being, seeking to overcome the temptations of the flesh by severe macerations and scourgings, has only too often found his voluntary existence of self-discipline intolerable without the relief of an occasional wild debauch or has found that in his savage attempt to subdue the senses he has come to take a sensual delight in self-torture and that he is falling into the lowest depths of bestiality. The very fervour of religious zeal in the Middle Ages is a token of the fierceness of the passionate fires that tortured men’s hearts. It was always doubtful what outlet these fires would find. Would they glorify God in the martyrdom of the lower nature or would they rage untamed, flames solely of desire, destroying the soul? Was it a pure religious passion or a depraved sensual passion that, when the Albigensian Crusade was being preached in Germany, drove women who could not take the cross to run naked through the streets in ecstasy? Which was it that was really evidenced by the practices of the Flagellants, who at one time obtained considerable influence in different parts of Europe? They were simply doing in public what the monk did in seclusion and in the perfect odour of sanctity. The idea of bringing the soul nearer to God by the wounding of the sinful flesh had the Church’s fullest sanction. Yet the Flagellants were eventually declared heretics. Why? Because it became plain after a time that the motive of some of those who joined the sect was unholy—not a desire to seek salvation, but only a perverted lust. Secondly, because alike the genuine and the false devotee were moved in the excess of their strange enthusiasm to build upon it a theory of the efficacy of flagellation which made it the only means to salvation, a sacrament, indeed the essential sacrament.

In yet another way the unregenerate part of man’s nature might breed heresy. The lust not perhaps of the flesh so much as of the eye and the pride of life led men to take a delight in pleasure, in the sensuous pagan world, that was not a wholly hallowed delight. Such superabundant joy in life was apt to produce over-confidence in the individual’s powers unaided by religion, leading to presumption and disobedience. The phenomenon of such rebelliousness in the later Middle Ages is sometimes forgotten. Yet the legends of the blossoming pastoral staff and of the Holy Grail pictured also the Venusberg and the garden of Kundry’s flower-maidens. In remembering the figures of the anchorite and the knight-errant one must not lose sight of the troubadour and the courtesan. Eloquent of the movement of revolt is the famous passage in ‘Aucassin et Nicolette’ in which Aucassin, threatened with the pains of hell if he persists in his love for the mysterious southern maid, exclaims that in that case to hell he will go.

For none go to Paradise but I’ll tell you who. Your old priests and your old cripples, and the halt and maimed, who are down on their knees day and night, before altars and in old crypts; these also that wear mangy old cloaks, or go in rags and tatters, shivering and shoeless and showing their sores, and who die of hunger and want and misery. Such are they who go to Paradise; and what have I to do with them? Hell is the place for me. For to Hell go the fine churchmen, and the fine knights, killed in the tourney or in some grand war, the brave soldiers and the gallant gentlemen. With them will I go. There go also the fair gracious ladies who have lovers two or three beside their lord. There go the gold and silver, the sables and the ermines. There go the harpers and the minstrels and the kings of the earth. With them will I go, so I have Nicolette my most sweet friend with me.[2]

Comparable with the fearless scepticism of this romance is the outspoken unorthodoxy produced by the intellectual ferment of the twelfth century. That epoch which saw the new movement of monastic reform which gave birth to the order of Grammont, of the Carthusians and the Cistercians, is most notable in the history of the universities—of Paris, Oxford, Bologna. From one to another, from the feet of one learned doctor and teacher to another, flocked wandering scholars athirst for pure knowledge which, if it had a theological bias and a religious garb, nevertheless inevitably tended to produce a spirit of rationalism, to substitute freedom for discipline, the individual consciousness for authority. The philosophy of the day—the Scholastic Philosophy—sprang from the concentration of the thought of theologians trained in logic on the question of the relation between the individual unit and the universal, the εἴδος: for if the Middle Ages knew little of Plato they were conversant with his doctrine of ideas. The scholastic philosophers are remarkable for their great erudition within the limitation of contemporary knowledge: but still more for the extreme acuteness and subtlety which came from their dialectical training. Such subtlety might at times be no better than verbal juggling; but it always indicated alertness of mind. Such intellectual nimbleness was generally at the service of the Church, to elucidate doctrine, uphold and defend the Catholic faith. On the other hand, the curious mind, even when starting with the most innocent, most orthodox intent, was sometimes beguiled into surmises and speculations of a dangerous nature. Logic, if untrammelled, has a way of leading to untraditional conclusions. When this happened it was possible to escape from an awkward dilemma by submitting that philosophy was one thing, theology another, and that there could be two truths, in the two different planes, subsisting together though mutually contradictory. But this convenient compromise was obviously only a pious subterfuge and grotesquely illogical. Unfortunately both of the two principal schools of thought were prone to lead to error. Realism, which found reality in the universal substance, subordinating the individual to humanity and humanity to the Godhead, logically led to Pantheism; while Nominalism, finding reality solely in each disjointed unit, if applied to theology, left no choice except between Unitarianism and Tritheism. In the year 1092 a nominalist philosopher Roscellinus was condemned at Soissons for teaching Tritheism and denying the Trinity. Another nominalist, Berengar of Tours, skilfully dissected the doctrine of Transubstantiation, which had grown up in its grossest form during the Dark Ages and was first really developed in an answer to Berengar by Anselm of Bec. There was a greater than either Roscellinus or Berengar, who was neither a nominalist nor a realist, but a conceptualist, the greatest of all the wandering scholars of his time, gifted with extraordinary vividness of personality and brilliance of intellect. Abelard’s love story in the world of actual fact is as wonderful as that of Aucassin in the world of romance. His teaching has the same note of freedom and fearlessness as that which sounds so clear in the old French story. There was nothing very alarming in his doctrines; his conclusions were generally orthodox enough. It was the methods by which he arrived at those conclusions that aroused the fear and the wrath of his adversaries. For he put Christian dogma to the touchstone of reason, accepting it because it was reasonable, not following reason just as far as it was Christian. To St. Bernard, Abelard appeared as a virulent plague-spot, a second Arius. But there were coming other heresies of a more disturbing nature, for the source of whose influence if not inspiration we