A reading of the holy gospel according to Matthew. Jesus told his disciples this parable. The reign of god is like the case of the owner of an estate who went out at dawn to hire workmen for his vineyard. After reaching an agreement, that's a bilateral contract, you know. After reaching an agreement with them for the usual daily wage, he sent them out into his vineyard.
He came out about midmorning and saw other men standing around the marketplace without work. They were unemployed. And so the man, the owner of the estate, said to them, you too go along into my vineyard, and I will pay you whatever is fair. At that, they went away went into the vineyard. Later on, the man came out again around noon and midafternoon midafternoon and did the same thing.
Finally, going out in late afternoon, he found still others standing around unemployed. Even to these, he said, why have you been standing here all the day idle? And they said, no man has hired us. And he said, you go into my vineyard also. When evening came, the day work day was over, the owner of the vineyard said to his foreman, call all the workmen and give them their pay, but begin with the last group first and end with the first.
When those hired late in the afternoon came up, each received a full day's pay. And when the first group appeared, they supposed that they would get more, notice that bilateral contract. Yet they received each man the same daily wage. Thereupon, they complained to the owner. This last group did only an hour's work, but you have put them on the same basis as us who have worked a full day in the scorching heat.
The owner of the vineyard said to him, my friend, I do you know injustice. You agreed bilateral contract. You agreed on the usual wage, did you not? Then take your pay and go home. I intend to give this man who was hired last the same pay as you.
I am free to do as I please with my money, am I not? Or are you envious because I am generous? Now this is our lord speaking. This is not part of the parable. Thus, the last shall be first and the first shall be last.
And this is the word of the lord. The name of the father and of the son and of the holy spirit. Amen. And this word of the lord has caused a lot of trouble, and it certainly is mighty inviting to speak about it, especially these days when a very serious writer can can speak of the priests of South America that there are many priests down there who think more of the redistribution of wealth than they do of god almighty. But I wanna speak about my namesake, Bernard.
A most a most fascinating figure. He belongs to what people sometimes call the dark ages, which is of course an absurd term because nobody these terms dark ages, middle ages, they are meaningless. Somebody wrote them down and we know who it was. He lived from about October to November. The main thing is he lived mostly in the first half of the twelfth century.
Now it's in the twelfth century that you have the Dominicans, the Franciscans, orders, that that idea of the mendicant order beginning. Then in the thirteenth century, you have men like Aquinas and Bonaventure. Now the this is all tied together. It's an it it is a fantastic story. If only people would go back and read it.
You talk about turmoil in the church. You talk about confusion among the faithful. Well, go to Saint Bernard's life. We had several popes. There were heresies.
There put that into religious order. Then then a tremendous thing was happening in Paris. Remember, Bernard is is from Clairvaux, which is just in the South it's not it's in the Southern part of France, not too far from from Paris. I think it's around Dijon. But, anyway, something fantastic was happening around Paris that had been going on for almost a century, and that is there was an infiltration of Aristotelian philosophy.
Aristotle was known, remember, only but only two little works of his logic had been known all down the centuries. The Western world never lost track of his two little treatises on logic. But now something else was happening. Texts had come in via North Africa through Spain. Now here you have another big thing.
Here you had in Spain Mohammedans, Jews, and I suppose we call them Spaniards. And these people had managed to to to, satisfy the situation in a way that they were living in in relative peace with one another and a very productive peace. And if you've been to Spain, you know the you can see influence of the Mohammedans all around to the Muslims. Now the Greek Aristotle had come into Spain through translations from the Arabic through Hebrew and then into Latin, And that stuff had filtered over the Pyrenees into Northern Europe and mostly into the University of Paris, and this is at the beginning of the twelfth century. Now Saint Bernard's on the scene.
Now here you had a a new intellectual element coming in. You had what seemed to be an overweening intellectualism, an overweening and exaggerated reliance upon reason, upon human knowledge as opposed to some kind of revelation or enlightenment or what have you. Because you see men like Bernard were were settled in Augustinian philosophy and theology, I should say. Steeped in it. He was the undisputed master.
And so having and notice, here you had somebody who who was a pagan Greek coming in through Mohammedans and through Jews, coming into the Western world and infiltrating and poisoning the atmosphere. That's the way they looked at it. And one of the greatest poisoners was Eloise's great lover, Abelard, because this is the period of Abelard. Now Abelard was not a great sheikh as far as being a huge intellectual or something. He became famous only relatively recently when he became the great hero of the liberals.
But that but we have to realize that Abelard played an important role in the origins of the University of Paris. Now that brings us something else into this picture because who went to the University of Paris? The Jesuits Loyola and his friends, Dominic and his friends, and Francis and his friends. They all took their start from the University of Paris. And so now at the beginning of the twelfth century, you have the beginnings of the University of Paris which are they're clouded in uncertainty and confusion.
We it it grew out of a cathedral school. You might say a a parochial school. That we know of. And one of the prime movers of that was this man, Abelard. Eloise didn't play too much of a force in that.
Her role was a little different. But Abelard was a genius in some ways. He was a scathing light, and he was imbued with this new thoughtage we would call it, which which men like Bernard and above all like Bernard felt was the destruction of truth and above all of god's law and of god's truth. Because Bernard thought that that all this rationalization and intellectualization, that that was not necessary. Remember, Bernard is an antecedent of Bonaventure.
Bonaventure got a lot of his stuff from Saint Bernard. They emphasized love and the will, and I don't want to exaggerate that, but this is true that they did that, and Bernard certainly did. And they rested their case, I mean, men like Bernard, and he spoke for the orthodox, the conservative, the god fearing part of the picture. Whereas Bernard whereas Abelard, he was from the wrong side of the tracks. And above all, he was extremely arrogant.
He had a brilliant mind. He was a flash in the pan, but he he was certainly arrogant. He would take on anybody, and he took them on. And in reply to the objection that he was unorthodox, as we would say, he put together a famous book called Sic Et Non, Yes and No, in which he simply put down the opinions of the great theologians, the internationally known theologians, you know. And on one side, he put them he put down the opinions of those who agreed, and on the opposite side, he put down equally respected theologians who disagree, the yeses and the nos.
Well, that didn't go down well with men like Saint Bernard, you know. That was a little bit confusing. So that I can't exaggerate the vitality, the the dynamism of this period. This is the twelfth century, and this is the century that Chesterton and many others say was the greatest century in western culture, the twelfth, not the thirteenth. But it's it's it's immense.
And the the and the core, and think of this, was in the University of Paris in many, many ways, ways, not entirely, but in many ways. And the and the consequences of the intellectual development of Western Europe came out of that. It is the oldest university that we know of. So that its importance, it can't be can't be downgraded. Now at the same time that you have this this tremendous antagonistic, contra controversial, embittered, and bitter controversies, you have in Paris, you have other areas where there is still more confusion because even this is a little later, when you had the so called Aristotelians coming in from from Spain across the Pyrenees through translations of the from the Arabic or the Hebrew, men like Moses Maimonides and the Varouese.
In addition to that, you see, at the time of Aquinas in the thirteenth century, you have direct translations from the Greek coming in from Sicily and coming up through Italy. So then that added another factor to this embattled area around the by this time, a flourishing University of Paris. And I've read some of the original documents out of this where they where these debates did not were not confined merely to words. They often ended up in physical combat and calling in the embalmers and the undertakers. It was a nice friendly discussion.
So Saint Bernard is called the doctor the doctor maleficlus, the honey voiced doctor, and his influence is tremendous. He emphasized, you see, what what we call mysticism. And I don't know what mysticism means, so I can't tell you. But he emphasized a a direct approach to god. Let's put it that way.
The effusion of the heart as we say. Well, these these are words. What do we mean when we say the effusions of the heart? All I know about the heart is that it's a muscle. What do we mean when we say this?
We mean something. Remember. But what do we mean? Because this this attitude of what we can say is is the is the approach of to god through the will, through love, has always been in a certain opposition, I mean opposition, to the approach to God, to the intellect, and the reason. And you have it all the way down through Pascal, the heart has reasons that the mind knows not of, all the way down to the present time when we have such, in some instances, so much activity in what we call the charismatic movement.
This is all of one picture, but the one point I want to make this morning is this. I know this is a lot of malarkey to most of you, but it's great for me. The thing is they if you want a confused state of the church, don't look at the present. Go back there. There's nothing now that could begin to match it.
Now here's the here's the bottom line. The church survived. The church survived and got stronger. It just happens possibly that it is god's church. In the name of the father, the son, the holy spirit.
Amen.