Gilson paragraph

Perhaps it will not be out of place here to dissipate a misconception recently become current and likely to become more so with the general growth of interest in mediaeval philosophy. The Middle Ages that first appeared over the historical horizon was the Middle Ages of the romantics, a stirring, picturesque and brightly coloured world where saints and sinners jostled familiarly in the crowd, a world which expressed its deepest aspirations in architecture, sculpture and poetry. And that, too, is the Middle Ages of symbolism, where realities dissolved into the mystical meanings with which they were charged by artists and thinkers, so that the book of nature became a sort of Bible with things for words. Bestiaries, Mirrors of the World, stained glass, cathedral porches, each in its own way expressed a symbolic universe in which things, taken in their very essences, are merely so many expressions of God. But by a very natural reaction the study of the classical systems of the thirteenth century led historians to oppose to this poetical vision of the mediaeval world, the scientific and rational conception that presented itself in the writings of Robert Grosseteste, Roger Bacon and St. Thomas Aquinas. And this was entirely justifiable, in this sense at least, that from the thirteenth century onwards the universe of science begins to interpose between ourselves and the symbolic universe of the early Middle Ages; but it would be wrong to suppose that it suppressed it or even tended to suppress it. What really then took place was this: first, things, instead of being nothing more than symbols, became concrete beings which, above and beyond their own proper nature, were still charged with symbolic significances; and then, next the analogy of the world to God, instead of being expressed only on the place of imagery and feeling, was now formulated in precise laws and definite metaphysical conceptions. God in fact penetrated more deeply into nature as the depths of nature became better known. For a Bonaventure, for instance, there is no joy like the joy of contemplation of God as mirrored in the analogical structure of beings; and even the more sober mind of St. Thomas expresses, nevertheless, the same philosophy of nature when he reduces the efficacy of second causes to nothing but an analogical participation in the diving efficiency. Physical causality is to the act of creation what beings are to Being, and time to eternity. Thus, under whatever aspect we consider it, there exists in reality but one mediaeval vision of the world, whether it expresses itself now in words of art or now in defined philosophical concepts: that, namely, which St. Augustine drew with a master-hand in his De Trinitate, and which is directly referable to the words of the Book of Wisdom (xi. 21): omnia in mensura, et numero, et pondere disposuisti.

-- Etienne Gilson, The Spirit of Mediaeval Philosophy