The scholastics are concerned with achieving clarity; consequently they readily make us of abstract terms, and they never hesitate to forge now words, the profanae vocum novitates which St. Bernard, for his part, avoids. Not that he refuses to use the usual philosophical terminology which through Boethius had come down from Aristotle: on occasion he will use forma, materia, causa efficiens or esse matierale; he does not recoil from the concepts current in the schools, as for example that of satisfactio. But, for him, this terminology is never more than a vocabulary for emergency use and it does not supplant the biblical period.
leclercq, the love of learning, p.200
