r Pantheism a
Determinism which destroyed all sense of responsibility. On the other
hand, the followers of Ortlieb of Strassburg, about the same period,
advocated an extreme asceticism based on a dualistic or Manichean view
of the world; and they combined with this error an extreme
rationalism, teaching that the historical Christ was a mere man; that
the Gospel history has only a symbolical truth; that the soul only,
without the body, is immortal; and that the Pope and his priests are
servants of Satan.

The problem for the Church was how to encourage the warm love and
faith of the mystics without giving the rein to these mischievous
errors. The twelfth and thirteenth centuries produced several famous
writers, who attempted to combine scholasticism and Mysticism.[222]
The leaders in this attempt were Bernard,[223] Hugo and Richard of St.
Victor, Bonaventura, Albertus Magnus, and (later) Gerson. Their works
are not of great value as contributions to religious philosophy, for
the Schoolmen were too much afraid of their authorities--Catholic
tradition and Aristotle--to probe difficulties to the bottom; and the
mystics, who, by making the renewed life of the soul their
starting-point, were more independent, were debarred, by their
ignorance of Greek, from a first-hand knowledge of their intellectual
ancestors. But in the history of Mysticism they hold an important
place.[224] Speculation being for them restricted within the limits of
Church-dogma, they were obliged to be more psychological and less
metaphysical than Dionysius or Erigena. The Victorines insist often on
self-knowledge as the way to the knowledge of God and on
self-purification as more important than philosophy. "The way to
ascend to God," says Hugo, "is to descend into oneself.[225]" "The
ascent is through self above self," says Richard; we are to rise on
stepping-stones of our dead selves to higher things. "Let him that
thirsts to see God clean his mirror, let him make his own spirit
bright," says Richard again. The Victorines do not disparage reason,
which is the organ by which mankind in general apprehend the things of
God; but they regard ecstatic contemplation as a supra-rational state
or faculty, which can only be reached _per mentis excessum_, and in
which the naked truth is seen, no longer in a glass darkly.[226]

This highest state, in which "Reason dies in giving birth to Ecstasy,
as Rachel died in giving birth to Benjamin," is not on the high roa