In St. Thomas Aquinas this intellectualizing process
marked its highest point and beyond there was no margin of safety.
He himself did not overstep the verge of danger, but after him this
limit was overpassed. The perfect balance between mind and spirit
was achieved by Hugh of St. Victor, but afterwards the severance
began and on the one side was the unwholesome hyper-spiritualization
of the Rhenish mystics, on the other the false intellectualism of
Descartes, Kant and the entire modern school of materialistic
philosophy. It was the clear prevision of this inevitable issue
that made of St. Bernard not only an implacable opponent of Abelard
but of the whole system of Scholasticism as well. For a time he was
victorious. Abelard was silenced and the mysticism of the
Victorines triumphed, only to be superseded fifty years later when
the two great orders, Dominican and Franciscan, produced their
triumphant protagonists of intellectualism, Alelander Halesand
Albertus Magnus, and finally the greatest pure intellect of all
time, St. Thomas Aquinas. St. Bernard, St. Francis of Assisi, the
Victorines, maintained that after all, as Henri Bergson was to say,
seven hundred years later, "the mind of man by its very nature is
incapable of apprehending reality," and that therefore faith is
better than reason.
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