General Introduction

The historian cannot help dividing his material into "periods," nicely defined in the Oxford Dictionary as “distinguishable portions of history.” To be distinguishable, each of these portions has to have a certain unity; and if the historian wishes to verify this unity instead of merely presupposing it, he must needs try to discover intrinsic analogies between such overtly disparate phenomena as the arts, literature, philosophy, social and political currents, religious movements, etc. This effort, laudable and even indispensable in itself, has led to a pursuit of "parallels" the hazards of which are only too obvious. No man can master more than one fairly limited field; every man has to rely on incomplete and often secondary information whenever he ventures ultra crepidam. Few men can resist the temptation of either ignoring or slightly deflecting such lines as refuse to run parallel, and even a genuine parallelism does not make us really happy if we cannot imagine how it came about. Small wonder, then, that another diffident attempt at correlating Gothic architecture and Scholasticism Note 1 is bound to be looked upon with suspicion by both historians of art and historians of philosophy.

Yet, setting aside for the moment all intrinsic analogies, there exists between Gothic architecture and Scholasticism a palpable and hardly accidental concurrence in the purely factual domain of time and place—a concurrence so inescapable that the historians of mediaeval philosophy, uninfluenced by ulterior considerations, have been led to periodize their material in precisely the same way as do the art historians theirs.