bear it out. For it will hardly be pretended by anyone who has had an opportunity to venerate the mortal remains of St. Clare, that "her body is intact and the shape of her face absolutely preserved." 32 In point of fact the mummy-like skeleton of the Saint enshrined in the crypt of S. Chiara at Assisi affords us only the very haziest idea of what St. Clare looked like in the days of her flesh. Assuredly it has nothing or next to nothing in common with the pen picture of St. Clare which an early chronicler has left us. "Her face was oval," he says, "her forehead spacious, her complexion brilliant and hair very fair. A celestial smile played in her eyes and around her mouth; her nose was well proportioned and slightly aquiline; of good stature, she was rather inclined to stoutness but not to excess."

We may take it for granted I suppose that St. Clare was never painted in her lifetime. The oldest known picture of her extant is preserved at S. Chiara at Assisi, and hangs in the Chapel dedicated to Clare's younger sister St. Agnes. According to its own inscription this picture dates from 1283, that is about thirty years after the death of St. Clare. It is a full-length figure painted on wood and is mainly in two colors-red and black. Tradition tells us that it is the work of Cimabue. However that may be, the original painting has been retouched not a little and seems somewhat stiff and expressionless.33 Although the picture is in no way remarkable for beauty yet it has the appearance of being a faithful record;

32 See Cath. Ency. IV, 6, St. Clare. And here are the words of one who was present when the Saint's coffin was opened in 1850. "To our pious disappointment, the sweet virgin Saint was not found entire. The skull was perfect, but lay at one side, as if the coffin had been too short, and detached from the bones of the neck. The chest had fallen in and I could not discover many rib bones. On her breast was a laurel branch and a crown of flowers." From a letter of Canon Chadwick of Ushaw to the Poor Clares at Scorton (Eng.), quoted in The Princess of Poverty (1900), p. 197.

23 See Franciscan Legends in Italian Art (1905), p. 191. It is a matter of regret that Miss Salter has told us so little about the early pictures of St. Clare. Indeed the monograph of the Saint has never received any but the most cursory treatment.

it is clearly an attempt at individual portraiture no mere stereotype of a conventional saint. Even if it does not embody the actual features of St. Clare, this ancient picture is the only painting known to us which can lay any claim to be considered a portrait. In it the Saint is portrayed as a tall, middle-aged woman with a thin, worn face; she wears a heavy brown habit and mantle with a black veil, her waist is girt with a thick cord, her feet are bare and she holds a four fold cross in her left hand. The figure of St. Clare is enhanced by a series of small scenes from her Legend painted on either side. Commencing with the lowest panel on the left side they are as follows: (1) St. Clare receives the palm branch from the Bishop of Assisi on Palm Sunday 1212; (2) St. Francis and the friars at the Porziuncola advance to meet her on the night of her flight from her father's house; (3) St. Francis cuts off her hair before the altar; (4) her parents seek to force her to return home. Then, beginning with the highest one on the right side, they continue thus: (5) St. Clare is joined by her sister Agnes; (6) she blesses some loaves at the command of the Pope; (7) death of the Saint; (8) translation of her remains from San Damiano to San Giorgio in Assisi.

It may be well that this ancient picture of St. Clare is an immagine commemorativa, painted perhaps from memory under the direction of those who had known her during her lifetime. In any event it is of the utmost value as showing the concept of her formed by a contemporary or almost contemporary painter. And if the likeness was satisfactory to Clare's contemporaries it ought surely to be so to anybody else; still it must be owned that it falls sadly short of our idea of Clare and seems most unsatisfying beside the more charming concepts of later painters of the Sienese and Umbrian schools. But that is another question which, be it ever so interesting, may not be dwelt on here.

FR. PASCHAL ROBINSON, O. F. M.

ST. THOMAS OF AQUIN.

Scholastic philosophy is the effort of human reason to think out the truths of nature in conformity with the truth which Revelation has put within our reach. Let us deal, for a moment, with fundamentals, so that later on finer and more subtle matters of definition may be more intelligible. Christians from the beginning were convinced that both in the Old Testament and in the New Dispensation, God has taught mankind various truths which are to be believed on His authority. This body of truth is called revelation, or revealed truth. It is contained in the Bible; for Catholics, it is contained also in the authoritative teaching of the Church in matters of Faith and morals. Besides truth of this kind, there is truth which the human mind itself discovers, the truths of science and of philosophy, in a word, natural truth. These two kinds of truth are the terms of an age-long problem, and it is important to understand them clearly: on the one side revealed truth, revelation, faith, theology; on the other, science, reason, philosophy. Many solutions of the problem are possible and every possible solution has been tried at one time or another.

First, it is possible to deny one term of the problem, and assert that there is no revealed truth, that there is no revelation, that all truth is the truth of reason, that so-called divine truth is man-made and man-given. This is Rationalism, and it was, in effect, adopted by the early Gnostic heretics, who put their own philosophy above the authority of the Church and of the Gospels, though they claimed that that philosophy had come to them by secret transmission as the hidden doctrine of Christ. That is the solution (if solution it may be called, for it really evades the problem as stated) of theological skepticism in every

age.

Secondly, it is possible, in practice, at least, to deny the other term of the problem, and say that only revealed truth avails,

that it is enough for any Christian to believe, that reasoning will not save his soul, that it will more probably lead him away from God and spiritual truth. This is obscurantist mysticism of the extreme type, and one may doubt whether any sane Christian ever held it, though extravagant statements are to be found which would, literally, bear that interpretation.

Thirdly, most popular of all solutions and most common, I think, among modern philosophers, is to keep the two kinds of truth entirely apart. "Keep your theology out of your philosophy" is the advice we constantly receive. Believe what your Church teaches you, take the Bible, or the lessons of the Sunday-School, or the doctrine that is preached to you from the pulpit, and if you act up to that belief, you are a consistent Christian. But when you study science and philosophy, do so without any regard to what you believe. This policy, if one may so style it, was formulated in medieval times by the Arabian philosophers who justified their attitude towards the Korân and towards philosophy by the principle that "What is true in philosophy may be false in theology, and vice versa."

A fourth solution is that the two kinds of truth must agree, that there cannot be any contradiction between Faith and Reason, between revealed truth and natural truth. This conviction was in the minds of the earliest Christian thinkers. To justify it in regard to pagan philosophy, the only philosophy they knew of, they had recourse to a theory which was ingenious. They said that the same Wisdom of God which had inspired the Scriptures in a supernatural way had inspired the pagan philosophers, especially Plato, in a natural way, so that, in the designs of Providence Plato was a precursor of Christ in things natural, as John the Baptist was in things spiritual. The same thought recommended itself to St. Augustine. But, after him that peculiar phase of the principle disappeared, though the principle itself remained: that reason and revelation must agree. It was out of this that Scholasticism sprang. Scholasticism, then, was inspired in all its efforts by the one purpose, to show the accord that exists between the two orders of truth, between Faith and Reason.

The circumstances amid which Scholasticism arose further determined its understanding of this purpose. The ninth and tenth centuries were busy with the task of arranging and classifying the heritage of the past. They did this by means of logic, or dialectic. That was the only portion of philosophy to which they gave any attention. When, therefore, the eleventh and the following centuries took up the task of showing the harmony of faith and reason they used the means at hand, the dialectic which had been developed in the schools. To show by dialectical reasoning the agreement of natural with supernatural truth was then the programme, so to speak, of the Scholastics. Besides, events which it would too long to describe here, had put Aristotle in the place of Plato, and the character of the times was such that Aristotle responded to their intellectual needs better than Plato would have done. Another trait, therefore, of later Scholasticism, is the adoption of the Aristotelian point of view, an adoption which was almost universal and almost entirely exclusive of the Platonic view.

Of the philosophers whom we have studied so far, Gerbert was a conservator of the past, a teacher content with putting order and meaning into what the past had bequeathed. John the Scot, St. Anselm and Abelard mark different stages in the progress of the Scholastic idea. St. Thomas of Aquin comes at a time when that idea is fully developed, and to him is due the final formulation of it in adequate terminology.

John the Scot taught that theology and philosophy agree to the extent of being one and the same science. He saw no distinction between them; because all true knowledge, even in philosophy, is a matter of divine illumination. We speak of genius as "God-given": he considered that all knowledge is from God, and that without the Light that God sheds on the mind, man would grope in eternal darkness, incapable of seeing anything. Thus John the Scot may be said to have elevated philosophy to the rank of theology.

Abelard did the very opposite of this. He identified the two sciences, but in the opposite direction, by, apparently, at least, bringing theology down to the level of philosophy. He seemed