into numberless questions and subdivide these again, at the same time binding them all together to form one well-ordered whole, and directing them all to the final end of man. In like manner the mediæval architects, discarding the use of all gorgeous colouring, elaborate the bare stone into countless pinnacles and mullions and clusters, all of them composing together one great building, and all of them pointing to Heaven. And just as in after ages a Fénélon could call Gothic architecture a barbarous invention of the Arabs; so there have been learned men who have looked upon Scholasticism as subtle trifling. But it is noteworthy that in our own day Scholasticism and Gothic architecture have again come into honour. As the German poet Geibel says:—
“Great works they wrought, fair fanes they raised, wherein the mighty sleep, While we, a race of pigmies, about their tombs now creep.”
This flourishing period of Scholasticism opens with the great names of Alexander of Hales (Doctor irrefragabilis) and Blessed Albert the Great. The former was an Englishman, but taught theology in the University of Paris. He composed the first, and at the same time, the largest Summa Theologica, which was partly drawn from his earlier commentary on the Lombard, and to which his disciples, after his death, probably made additions from the same source. It is remarkable for breadth, originality, depth, and sublimity. If it yields the palm to the Summa of St. Thomas, still St. Thomas doubtless had it before him in composing his own work. But Alexander’s chief influence was exercised on the Franciscan Order which he joined in 1225. To this day he is the type of the genuine Franciscan school, for his disciple, St. Bonaventure, wrote, no Summa, while the Scotist school was critical rather than constructive. His works deserve greater attention than they have received. He died about 1245. St. Bonaventure, the “Seraphic Doctor,” (1221–1274) did not actually sit under Alexander, but is nevertheless his true heir and follower. His mystical spirit unfitted him for subtle analysis, but in originality he surpassed St. Thomas himself. He wrote only one great work, a Commentary on the Sentences, but his powers are seen at their best in his Breviloquium,
