Chapter XXXVI: Twelfth-Century Scholasticism (2)

Quite to avoid the term is not possible, inasmuch as the conception certainly includes what is mysterious because unknowable through reason. For it includes a sense of the supreme, a sense of God, who is too great for human reason to comprehend, and therefore a mystery. And it includes a yearning toward God, the desire of Him, and the feeling of love. The last is also mysterious, in that it has not exclusive part with reason, but springs as well from feeling. Yet the essence or nature of this spirit of piety which we would analyse, consists in consciousness of the reality of the object of its yearning or devotion. Not altogether through induction or deduction, but with an irrational immediacy of conviction, it feels and knows its object. In place of the knowledge which is mediated through rational processes, is substituted a conviction upheld by yearning, love’s conviction indeed, of the reality and presence of that which is all the greater and more worthy because it baffles reason. And the final goal attainable by this mystic love is, even as the goal of other love, union with the Beloved.

The mystic spirit is an essential part of all piety or religion, which relates always and forever to the rationally unknown, and therefore mysterious. Without a consciousness of mystery, there can be neither piety nor religion. Nor can there be piety without some devotion to God, nor the deepest and most ardent forms of piety, without fervent love of God. This devotion and this love supply strength of conviction, creating a realness of communion with the divine, and an assurance of the soul’s rest and peace therein. But that the intellect has part, Hugo abundantly demonstrates. One must have perceptions, and thought’s severest wrestlings--_cogitatio_ and _meditatio_--before reaching that first stage of wide and sure intelligence, which relates to the creature world, and affords a broad basis of assurance, whence at last the soul shall spring to God. Intellectual perceptions and rational knowledge, and all the mind’s puttings together of its data in inductions and deductions and constructions, form a basis for contemplation, and yield material upon which the emotional side of human nature may exercise itself in yearning and devotion. Herein the constructive imagination works; which is intellectual faculty illuminated and impelled by the emotions.

This spirit actualizes itself in the power and scope of its resultant conviction, by which it makes real to itself the qualities, attributes, and actions of its object, God, and the nature of man’s relationship or union with the divine. In its final energy, when only partly conscious of its intellectual inductions, it discards syllogisms, quite dissatisfied with their devious and hesitating approach. Instead, by the power of love, it springs directly to its God. Nevertheless the soul which feels the inadequacy of reason even to voice the soul’s desires, will seek means of expression wherein reason still will play a submerged part. The soul is seeking to express what is not altogether expressible in direct and rational statement. It seeks adumbrations, partial unveilings of its sentiments, which shall perhaps make up in warmth of colour what they lack in definiteness of line. In fine, it seeks symbols. Such symbolism must be large and elastic, in order to shadow forth the soul’s relations with the Infinite; it must also be capable of carrying passion, that it may satisfy the soul’s craving to give voice to its great love.

In Greek thought as well as in the Hellenizing Judaism of a Philo, symbolism, or more specifically speaking, allegorical interpretation, was obviously apologetic, seeking to cloud in naturalistic interpretations the doings of the rather over-human gods of Greece.[495] But it sprang also from the unresting need of man to find expression for that sense of things which will not fit definite statement. This was the need which became creative, and of necessity fancifully creative, with Plato. Though he would have nothing to do with falsifying apologetics, all the more he felt the need of allegories, to suggest what his dialectic could not formulate. In the early times of the Church militant of Christ, allegorical interpretation was exploited to defend the Faith; in the later patristic period, the Faith had so far triumphed, that allegory as a sword of defence and attack might be sheathed, or just allowed to glitter now and then half-drawn. But piety’s other need, with increasing energy, compelled the use of symbols and articulate allegory to express the directly inexpressible. Thereafter through the Middle Ages, while the use of allegory as a defence against the Gentiles slumbered, so much more the other need of it, and the sense of the universal symbolism of material things, filled the minds of men; and in age-long answer to this need, allegory, symbolism, became part of the very spirit of the mediaeval time.

Thus it became the universal vehicle of pious expression: it may be said almost to have co-extended with all mediaeval piety. It was ardently loving, as with St. Bernard; it might be filled with scarlet passion, as with Mechthild of Magdeburg; or it might be used in the self-conscious, and yet inspired vision-pictures of Hildegard of Bingen. And indeed with almost any mediaeval man or woman, it might keep talking, as a way of speech, obtrusively, conventionally, _ad nauseam_. For indeed in treatise after treatise even of the better men, allegory seems on the one hand to become very foolish and perverse, banal, intolerably talking on and on beyond the point; or again we sense its mechanism, hear the creaking of its jaws, while no living voice emerges,--and we suspect that the mystery of life, if it may not be compassed by direct statement, also lies deeper than allegorical conventions.

Hugo’s great _De sacramentis_ showed the equipoise of intellectual and pietistic interests in him, and the Platonic quality of his mind’s sure sense of the reality of the supersensual.[496] Other treatises of his show his yearning piety, and the Augustinian quality of his soul, “made toward thee, and unquiet till it rests in thee.” The _De arca Noe morali_,[497] that is to say, the Ark of Noah viewed in its moral significance, is charming in its spiritual refinement, and interesting in its catholic intellectual reflections. The Prologue presents a situation:

“As I was sitting once among the brethren, and they were asking
questions, and I replying, and many matters had been cited and
adduced, it came about that all of us at once began to marvel
vehemently at the unstableness and disquiet of the human heart; and we
began to sigh. Then they pleaded with me that I would show them the
cause of such whirlings of thought in the human heart; and they
besought me to set forth by what art or exercise of discipline this
evil might be removed. I indeed wished to satisfy my brethren, so far
as God might aid me, and untie the knot of their questions, both by
authority and by argument. I knew it would please them most if I
should compose my matter to read to them at table.

“It was my plan to show first whence arise such violent changes in
man’s heart, and then how the mind may be led to keep itself in stable
peace. And although I had no doubt that this is the proper work of
grace, rather than of human labour, nevertheless I know that God
wishes us to co-operate. Besides it is well to know the magnitude of
our weakness and the mode of its repairing, since so much the deeper
will be our gratitude.

“The first man was so created, that if he had not sinned, he would
always have beheld in present contemplation his Creator’s face, and by
always seeing Him, would have loved Him always, and, by loving, would
always have clung close to Him, and by clinging to Him who was
eternal, would have possessed life without end. Evidently the one true
good of man was perfect knowledge of his Creator. But he was driven
from the face of the Lord, since for his sin he was struck with the
blindness of ignorance, and passed from that intimate light of
contemplation; and he inclined his mind to earthly desires, as he
began to forget the sweetness of the divine. Thus he was made a
wanderer and fugitive over the earth. A wanderer indeed, because of
disordered concupiscence; and a fugitive, through guilty conscience,
which feels every man’s hand against it. For every temptation will
overcome the man who has lost God’s aid.

“So man’s heart which had been kept secure by divine love, and one by
loving one, afterwards began to flow here and there through earthly
desires. For the mind which knows not to love its true good, is never
stable and never rests. Hence restlessness, and ceaseless labour, and
disquiet, until the man turns and adheres to Him. The sick heart
wavers and quivers; the cause of its disease is love of the world; the
remedy, the love of God.”

Hugo’s object is to give rest to the restless heart, by directing its love to God. One still bears in mind his three plains of knowledge, forming perhaps the three stages of ascent, at the top of which is found the knowledge that turns to divine contemplation and love. There may be a direct and simple love of God for simple souls; but for the man of mind, knowledge precedes love.

“In two ways God dwells in the human heart, to wit, through knowledge
and through love; yet the dwelling is one, since every one who knows
Him, loves, and no one can love without knowing. Knowledge through
cognition of the Faith erects the structure; love through virtue,
paints the edifice with colour.”[498]

Then make a habitation for God in thy heart. This is the great matter, and indeed all: for this, Scripture exists, and the world was made, and God became flesh, through His humility making man sublime. The Ark of Noah is the type of this spiritual edifice, as it is also the type of the Church.

The piety and allegory of this work rise as from a basis of knowledge. The allegory indeed is drawn out and out, until it seems to become sheer circumlocution. This was the mediaeval way, and Hugo’s too, alas! We will not follow further in this treatise, nor take up his _De arca Noe mystica_,[499] which carries out into still further detail the symbolism of the Ark, and applies it to the Church and the people of God. Hugo has also left a colloquy between man and his soul on the true love, which lies in spiritual meditation.[500] But it is clear that the reaches of Hugo’s yearning are still grounded in intellectual considerations, though these may be no longer present in the mind of him whose consciousness is transformed to love.

One may discern the same progression, from painful thought to surer contemplation, and thence to the heart’s devoted communion, in him whom we have called the Thor and Loki of the Church. No twelfth-century soul loved God more zealously than St. Bernard. He was not strong in abstract reasoning. His mind needed the compulsion of the passions to move it to sublime conclusions. Commonly he is dubbed a mystic. But his piety and love of God poise themselves on a basis of consideration before springing to soar on other wings. In his _De consideratione_,[501] Bernard explains that word in the sense given by Hugo to _meditatio_, while he uses _contemplatio_ very much as Hugo does. It applies to things that have become certain to the mind, while “_consideratio_ is busy investigating. In this sense _contemplatio_ may be defined as the true and certain intuition of the mind (_intuitus animi_) regarding anything, or the sure apprehension of the true: while _consideratio_ is thought intently searching, or the mind’s endeavour to track out the true.”[502]

_Contemplatio_, even though it forget itself in ecstasy, must be based on prior consideration; then it may take wings of its own, or rather (with orthodox Hugo and Bernard) wings of grace, and fly to the bosom of its God. This flight is the immediacy of conviction and the ecstasy which follows. One may even perceive the thinking going on during the soul’s outpour of love. For the mind still supports the soul’s ardour with reasonings, original or borrowed, as appears in the second sermon of that long series preached by Bernard on Canticles to his own spiritual _élite_ of Clairvaux.[503] The saintly orator is yearning, yearning for Christ Himself; he will have naught of Moses or Isaiah; nor does he desire dreams, or care for angels’ visits: _ipse, ipse me osculetur_, cries his soul in the words of Canticles--let _Him_ kiss me. The phrasing seems symbolical; but the yearning is direct, and at least rhetorically overmastering. The emotion is justified by its reasons. They lie in the personality of Christ and Bernard’s love of Him, rising from all his knowledge of Him, even from his experience of Jesus’ whisperings to the soul. He knows how vastly Jesus surpasses the human prophets who prefigured or foretold Him: _ipsos longe superat Jesus meus_--the word _meus_ is love’s very articulation. The orator cries: “Listen! Let the kissing mouth be the Word assuming flesh; and the mouth kissed be the flesh which is assumed; then the kiss which is consummated between them is the _persona_ compacted of the two, to wit, the mediator of God and men, the man Christ Jesus.”

This identical allegory goes back to Origen’s _Commentary on Canticles_. Bernard has kindled it with an intimate love of Jesus, which is not Origen’s. But the thought explains and justifies Bernard’s desire to be kissed by the kiss of His mouth, and so to be infolded in the divine love which “gave His only-begotten Son,” and also became flesh. _Os osculans_ signifies the Incarnation: one realizes the emotional power which that saving thought would take through such a metaphor. At the end of his sermon, Bernard sums up the conclusion, so that his hearers may carry it away:

“It is plain that this holy kiss was a grace needed by the world, to
give faith to the weak, and satisfy the desire of the perfect. The
kiss itself is none other than the mediator of God and men, the man
Christ Jesus, who with the Father and the Holy Spirit lives and reigns
God, _per omnia saecula saeculorum_, Amen.”

III

There is small propriety in speaking of these men of the first half of the twelfth century as Platonists or Aristotelians; nor is there great interest in trying to find in Plato or Aristotle or Plotinus the specific origin of any of their thoughts. They were apt to draw on the source nearest and most convenient; and one must remember that their immediate philosophic antecedents were not the distinct systems of Plato and Aristotle and Plotinus, but rather the late pagan eras of eclecticism, followed by that strongly motived syntheticism of the Church Fathers which selected whatever might accord with their Christian scheme. So Abaelard must not be called an Aristotelian. Neither he nor his contemporaries knew what an Aristotelian was, and when they called Abaelard _Peripateticus_, they meant one skilled in the logic which was derived from the simpler treatises of Aristotle’s _Organon_. Nor will we call Hugo a Platonist, in spite of his fine affinities with Plato; for many of Hugo’s thoughts, his classification of the sciences for example, pointed back to Aristotle.

Abaelard, Hugo, St. Bernard suggest the triangulation of the epoch’s intellectual interests. Peter Lombard, somewhat their junior, presents its compend of accepted and partly digested theology. He took his method from Abaelard, and drew whole chapters of his work from Hugo; but his great source, which was also theirs, was Augustine. The Lombard was, and was to be, a representative man; for his _Sentences_ brought together the ultimate problems which exercised the minds of the men of his time and after.

The early and central decades of the twelfth century offer other persons who may serve to round out our general notion of the character of the intellectual interests which occupied the period before the rediscovery of Aristotle, that is, of the substantial Aristotelian encyclopaedia of knowledge. Among such Adelard of Bath (England) was somewhat older than Abaelard. His keen pursuit of knowledge made him one of its early pilgrims to Spain and Greece. He compiled a book of _Quaestiones naturales_, and another called _De eodem et diverso_,[504] in which he struggled with the problem of universals, and with palpable problems of psychology. His cosmology shows a genial culling from the _Timaeus_ fragment of Plato, and such other bits of Greek philosophy as he had access to.

Adelard was influenced by the views of men who taught or studied at Chartres. Bernard of Chartres, the first of the great Chartrian teachers of the early twelfth century,[505] wrote on Porphyry, and after his death was called by John of Salisbury _perfectissimus inter Platonicos saeculi nostri_. He was one of those extreme realists whose teachings might bear pantheistic fruit in his disciples; he had also a Platonistic imagination, leading him to see in Nature a living organism. Bernard’s younger brother, Thierry, also called of Chartres, extended his range of studies, and compiled numerous works on natural knowledge, indicating his wide reading and receptive nature. His realism brought him very close to pantheism, which indeed flowered poetically in his admirer or pupil, Bernard Silvestris of Tours.

If we should analyze the contents of the latter’s _De mundi universitate_, it might be necessary to affirm that the author was a dualistic thinker, in that he recognized two first principles, God and matter; and also that he was a pantheist, because of the way in which he sees in God the source of Nature: “This mind (_nous_) of the supreme God is soul (_intellectus_), and from its divinity Nature is born.”[506] One should not, however, drive the heterogeneous thoughts of these twelfth-century people to their opposite conclusions. A moderate degree of historical insight should prevent our interpreting their gleanings from the past by formulas of our own greater knowledge. Doubtless their books--Hugo’s as well as Thierry’s and Bernard Silvester’s--have enough of contradiction if we will probe for it with a spirit not their own. But if we will see with their eyes and perceive with their feelings, we shall find ourselves resting with each of them in some unity of personal temperament; and _that_, rather than any half-borrowed thought, is Hugo or Thierry or Bernard Silvestris. Silvester’s book, _De mundi universitate, sive Megacosmus et microcosmus_, is a half poem, like Boëthius’s _De consolatione_ and a number of mediaeval productions to which there has been occasion to allude. It is fruitless to dissect such a composite of prose and verse. In it Natura speaks to Nous, and then Nous to Natura; the four elements come into play, and nine hierarchies of angels; the stars in their firmaments, and the genesis of things on earth; Physics and her daughters, Theorica and Practica, and all the figures of Greek mythology. An analysis of such a book will turn it to nonsense, and destroy the breath of that twelfth-century temperament which loved to gather driftwood from the wreckage of the ancient world of thought. Thus perhaps they expected to draw to themselves, even from the pagan flotsam, some congenial explanation of the universe and man.

A far more acute thinker was Gilbert de la Porrée,[507] who taught at Chartres for a number of years, before advancing upon Paris in 1141. He next became Bishop of Poictiers, and died in 1154. Like Abaelard, he was primarily a logician, and occupied himself with the problem of universals, taking a position not so different from Abaelard’s. Like Abaelard also, Gilbert was brought to task before a council, in which St Bernard sought to be the guiding, _scilicet_, condemning spirit. But the condemnation was confined to certain sentences, which when cut from their context and presented in distorting isolation, the author willingly sacrificed to the flames. He refused, some time afterwards, to discuss his views privately with the Abbot of Clairvaux, saying that the latter was too inexpert a theologian to understand them. Gilbert’s most famous work, _De sex principiis_, attempted to complete the last six of Aristotle’s ten _Categories_, which the philosopher had treated cursorily; it was almost to rival the work of the Stagirite in authority, for instance, with Albertus Magnus, who wrote a Commentary upon it in the same spirit with which he commented on the logical treatises of the _Organon_.

In the same year with Gilbert (1154) died a man of different mental tendencies, William of Conches,[508] who likewise had been a pupil of Bernard of Chartres. He was for a time the tutor of Henry Plantagenet. William was interested in natural knowledge, and something of a humanist. He made a Commentary on the _Timaeus_, and wrote various works on the philosophy of Nature, in which he wavered around an atomistic explanation of the world, yet held fast to the Biblical Creation, to save his orthodoxy. He also pursued the study of medicine, which was a specialty at Chartres; through the treatises of Constantinus Africanus[509] he had some knowledge of the pathological theories of Galen and Hippocrates. For his interest in physical knowledge, he may be regarded as a precursor of Roger Bacon. On the other hand, he was a humanist in his strife against those “Cornificiani” who would know no more Latin than was needful;[510] and he compiled from the pagan moralists a sort of _Summa_. It is called, in fact, a _Summa moralium philosophorum_ (an interesting title, connecting it with the Christian _Summae sententiarum_).[511] It treats the virtues under the head of _de honesto_; and under that of _de utile_, reviews the other good things of mind, body, and estate. It also discusses whether there may be a conflict between the _honestum_ and the _utile_.

These men of the first half of the twelfth century lived before the new revealing of the Aristotelian philosophy and natural knowledge coming at the century’s close. Their muster is finally completed by two younger men, the one an Englishman and the other a Lowlander. The youthful years of both synchronize with the old age of the men of whom we have been speaking. For John of Salisbury was born not far from the year 1115, and died in 1180; and Alanus de Insulis (Lille) was probably born in 1128, and lived to the beginning of the next century. They are spiritually connected with the older men because they were taught by them, and because they had small share in the coming encyclopaedic knowledge. But they close the group: John of Salisbury closing it by virtue of his critical estimate of its achievement; Alanus by virtue of his final rehandling of the body of intellectual data at its disposal, to which he may have made some slight addition. Abaelard knew and used the simpler treatises of the Aristotelian _Organon_ of logic. He had not studied the _Analytics_ and the _Topics_, and of course was unacquainted with the body of Aristotle’s philosophy outside of logic. John of Salisbury and Alanus know the entire _Organon_; but neither one nor the other knows the rest of Aristotle, which Alexander of Hales was the first to make large use of.

John of Salisbury, Little John, Johannes Parvus, as he was called, was the best classical scholar of his time.[512] His was an acute and active intellect, which never tired of hearing and weighing the views of other men. He was, moreover, a man of large experience, travelling much, and listening to all the teachers prominent in his youth. Also he was active in affairs, being at one time secretary to Thibaut, Archbishop of Canterbury, and then the intimate of Becket, of Henry II., and Pope Adrian IV.! A finished scholar, who knew not one thing, but whatever might be known, and was enlightened by the training of the world, Little John critically estimates the learning and philosophy of the men he learns from. Having always an independent point of view he makes acute remarks upon it all, and admirable contributions to the sum of current thought. But chiefly he seems to us as one who looks with even eye upon whatsoever comes within his vision. He knows the weaknesses of men and the limitations of branches of discipline; knows, for instance, that dialectic is sterile by itself, but efficient as an aid to other disciplines. So, as to logic, John keeps his own point of view, and is always reasonable and practical.[513] Likewise, with open mind, he considers what there may be in the alleged science of the Mathematicians, _i.e._ diviners and astrologers. He uses such phrases as “_probabilia quidem sunt haec ... sed tamen_ the venom lies under the honey!” For this science sets a fatal necessity on things, and would even intrude into the knowledge of the future reserved for God’s majesty. And as John considers the order of events to come, and the diviner’s art, _cornua succrescunt_--the horns of more than one dilemma grow.[514]

John knew more than any man of the ancient philosophies.[515] For himself, of course he loved knowledge; yet he would not dissever it from its value in the art of living. “Wisdom indeed is a fountain, from which pour forth the streams which water the whole earth; they fill not alone the garden of delights of the divine page, but flow on to the Gentiles, and do not altogether fail even the Ethiopians.... It is certain that the faithful and wise reader, who from love keeps learning’s watch, escapes vice and draws near to life.”[516] Philosophy is the _moderatrix omnium_ (a favourite phrase with John); the true philosopher, as Plato says, is a lover of God: and so _philosophia_ is _amor divinitatis_. Its precept is to love God with all our strength, and our neighbour as ourselves: “He who by philosophizing has reached _charitas_, has attained philosophy’s true end.”[517] John goes on to show how deeply they err who think philosophy is but a thing of words and arguments: many of those who multiply words, by so doing burden the mind. Virtue inseparably accompanies wisdom; this is John’s sum of the matter. Clearly he is not always, or commonly, wrestling with ultimate metaphysical problems; he busies himself, acutely but not metaphysically, with the wisdom of life. He too can use the language of piety and contemplation. In the sixth chapter of his _De septem septenis_ (The seven Sevens) he gives the seven grades of contemplation--_meditatio_, _soliloquium_, _circumspectio_, _ascensio_, _revelatio_, _emissio_, _inspiratio_.[518] He presents the matter succinctly, thus perhaps giving clarity to current pietistic phraseology.

Alanus de Insulis was a man of renown in his life-time, and after his death won the title of Doctor Universalis. Although the fame of scholar, philosopher, theologian, poet, may have uplifted him during his years of strength, he died a monk at Citeaux, in the year 1202. Fame came justly to him, for he was learned in the antique literature, and a gifted Latin poet, while as thinker and theologian he made skilful and catholic use of his thorough knowledge of whatever the first half of the twelfth century had achieved in thought and system. Elsewhere he has been considered as a poet;[519] here we merely observe his position and accomplishment in matters of salvation and philosophy.[520]

Alanus possessed imagination, language, and a faculty of acute exposition. His sentences, especially his definitions, are pithy, suggestive, and vivid. He projected much thought as well as fantasy into his poem, _Anticlaudianus_, and his _cantafable_, _De planctu naturae_. He showed himself a man of might, and insight too, in his _Contra haereticos_. His suggestive pithiness of diction lends interest to his encyclopaedia of definitions, _Distinctiones dictionum theologicalium_; and his keen power of reasoning succinctly from axiomatic premises is evinced in his _De arte fidei catholicae_.

The intellectual activities of Alanus fell in the latter decades of the twelfth century, when mediaeval thought seemed for the moment to be mending its nets, and preparing for a further cast in the new waters of Aristotelianism. Alanus is busy with what has already been won; he is unconscious of the new greater knowledge, which was preparing its revelations. He is not even a man of the transition from the lesser to the greater intellectual estate; but is rather a final compendium of the lesser. Himself no epoch-making reasoner, he uses the achievements of Abaelard and Hugo, of Gilbert de la Porrée and William of Conches, and others. Neither do his works unify and systematize the results of his studies. He is rather a re-phraser. Yet his refashioning is not a mere thing of words; it proceeds with the vitalizing power of the man’s plastic and creative temperament. One may speak of him as keen and acquisitive intellectually, and creative through his temperament.

Alanus shows a catholic receptivity for all the mingled strains of thought, Platonic, Aristotelian, Neo-Platonic and Pythagorean, which fed the labours of his predecessors. He has studied the older sources, the _Timaeus_ fragment, also Apuleius and Boëthius of course. His chief blunder is his misconception of Aristotle as a logician and confuser of words (_verborum turbator_)--a phrase, perhaps, consciously used with poetic license. For he has made use of much that came originally from the Stagirite. Within his range of opportunity, Alanus was a universal reader, and his writings discover traces of the men of importance from Pseudo-Dionysius and Eriugena down to John of Salisbury and Gundissalinus.

These remarks may take the place of any specific presentation of Alanus’s work in logic, of his view of universals, of his notions of physics, of nature, of matter and form, of man’s mind and body, and of the Triune Godhead.[521] In his cosmology, however, we may note his imaginatively original employment of the conception or personification of Nature. God is the Creator, and Nature is His creature, and His vice-regent or vicarious maker, working the generation and decay of things material and changeable.[522] This thought, imaginatively treated, makes a good part of the poetry of the _De planctu_ and the _Anticlaudianus_. The conception with him is full of charming fantasy, and we look back through Bernardus Silvestris and other writers to Plato’s divine fooling in the _Timaeus_, not as the specific, but generic, origin of such imaginative views of the contents and generation of the world. Such imaginings were as fantasy to science, when compared with the solid and comprehensive consideration of the material world which was to come a few years after Alanus’s death through the encyclopaedic Aristotelian knowledge presented in the works of Alexander of Hales and Albertus Magnus.