In the great age of Aquinas, scholasticism had undertaken to answer all questions of faith by reason and logic, but reason had proved incapable of explaining God and the universe, and the effort faded, leaving only a hard shell of argument by logic, practiced, as Petrarch said in disgust, by “hoary-headed children.” When they begin to “spew forth syllogisms,” he advised taking flight. Gerson, like others of
