in the literature which glorified the love of man and woman, but in which the lover-knight so often ends a hermit, and the convent at last receives his sinful mistress. On the other hand, reason, with its practical and speculative knowledge, is sterile when unmixed with piety and love. This is the sum of Bonaventura's fervid arguments, and is as clearly, if more quietly, recognized by Aquinas, with whom fides without caritas is informis, formless, very far indeed from its true actuality or realization.
Thus, for the full realization of man's highest good in everlasting salvation, the two complementary phases of the human spirit had to act and function in concord. Together they must realize themselves in such catholic expression as should exclude only the froward or evil elements, non-elements rather, of man's nature. Both represent ultimate mediaeval interests and desires; and perhaps deep down and very intimately, even inscrutably, they may be one, even as they clearly are complementary phases of the human soul. Yet with certain natures who perhaps fail to hold the balance between them, the two phases seem to draw apart, or, at least, to evince themselves in distinct expression, and indeed in all men they are usually distinguishable.
Generally speaking, the conception of man's divinely mediated salvation, and of the elements of human being which might be carried on, and realized in a state of ever-lasting beatitude, prescribed the range of ultimate intellectual interests for the Middle Ages. The same had been despotically true of the patristic period. Augustine would know God and the soul; Ambrose expressed equally emphatic views upon the vanity of all knowledge that did not contribute to an understanding of the Christian Faith. This view was held with temperamental and barbarizing narrowness by Gregory the Great. It was admitted, as of course, throughout the Carolingian period, although humanistically-minded men played with the pagan literature. Nor was it seriously disputed in the eleventh or twelfth century, when men began to delight in dialectic, and some cared for pagan literature; nor yet in the thirteenth when an increasing number were asking many things from philosophy and natural knowledge, which had but distant bearing on the
