Often has it been said that a Gothic cathedral is the _Summa_ translated into stone, logical, ordered, interlinked, leaving nothing to chance, a sound skeleton on a sound base, so securely balanced that great windows could be opened on the sky, like flashes of intuitive genius lifting the soul to the infinite. Many were the points by which St. Thomas touched Gothic art in its heyday. He was a student in Cologne when its mighty cathedral was begun. He was in Paris during the years when the transept of Notre Dame was building, and the Sainte-Chapelle and St. Denis' abbatial. By blood he was related to St. Louis, and often was his guest at table, where talk must have turned on that keen interest of the hour--the making of Gothic churches.[77] He was to die (1274) in Cistercian Fossanuova, the first Gothic monument of Italy. And his great work, like many a cathedral, was left unfinished. Never was aspiration toward the infinite more passionate than in that scholastic disputing, commune-winning, cathedral-building, crusading age. The absorbing interest for old and young, for bishop and layman, for king and poor student, was to know God, to know their own souls, to learn how to make life more worthy of God. "In the entire length of France," wrote the archbishop of Sens to the pope, in 1140, "in towns and even in villages, in the schools and outside them, all, even simple people and children, are disputing on the Holy Trinity." Paris became the center of the seething new interest in theology and philosophy. In 1109 Guillaume de Champeaux opened a school of logic on the slopes of St. Geneviève's hill (where to this day reigns Paris University), and soon all Christendom frequented it.[78] His pupil, and later his opponent, was Abélard, brilliant, restless knight-errant of dialectics, whom the modern orthodox student finds to be a forerunner of the new method of biblical criticism rather than a rationalist. In the abbey of St. Victor, whose free classes were founded by Guillaume de Champeaux when harried by Abélard, there gathered a group of mystic scholars and poets: Hugues de St. Victor, the Augustine of his day (d. 1141), whose work on the sacraments was an interlinked system of theology. Lucid in intellect, tender in sentiment, was this friend of St. Bernard, whom Dante places in Paradise with St. Anselm and St. Bonaventure (_Par._, xii: 30); and Hugues' disciple, Richard de St. Victor (d. 1173), ranked in Paradise as the companion of the Venerable Bede and St. Isidore of Seville, "Richard, who in contemplation was more than man" (_Par._, x: 132); and Adam de St. Victor, one of the best poets of the XII century, whose sequences and rimed proses fill the liturgy. Another pupil of the learned Hugues was Pierre Lombard, who died bishop of Paris in 1160; his _Book of Sentences_ became a textbook in European universities for centuries to come.