It was chaos, and fermentation within the chaos the slow and rough but powerful and productive fermentation of unruly life.

In ideas, events, and persons there was a blending of the strongest contrasts: manners were rude and even savage, yet souls were filled with lofty and tender aspirations; the authority of religious creeds at one time was on the point of extinction, yet at another shone forth gloriously in opposition to the arrogance and brutality of mundane passions; ignorance was profound, and yet here and there, in the very heart of the mental darkness, gleamed bright centres of movement and intellectual labor.

It was the period when Abelard, anticipating freedom of thought and of instruction, drew together upon Mount St.Genevieve thousands of hearers anxious to follow him in the study of the great problems of Nature and of the destiny of man and the world.

And far away from this throng, in the solitude of the abbey of Bee, St.Anselm was offering to his monks a Christian and philosophical demonstration of the existence of God--"faith seeking understanding" (fides quoerens intellectuan), as he himself used to say.

It was the period, too, when, distressed at the licentiousness which was spreading throughout the Church as well as lay society, two illustrious monks, St.
Bernard and St.Norbert, not only went preaching everywhere reformation of morals, but labored at and succeeded in establishing for monastic life a system of strict discipline and severe austerity.