CHAPTER XXXVI
TWELFTH-CENTURY SCHOLASTICISM
I. The Problem of Universals: Abaelard.
II. The Mystic Strain: Hugo and Bernard.
III. The Later Decades: Bernard Silvestris; Gilbert de la Porrée;
William of Conches; John of Salisbury, and Alanus of Lille.
I
From the somewhat elaborate general considerations which have occupied the last two chapters, we turn to the representative manifestations of mediaeval thought in the twelfth century. These belong in part to the second or “logical,” and in part to the third or “meta-logical,” stage of the mediaeval mind. The first or “grammatical” stage was represented by the Carolingian period; and in reviewing the mental aspects of the eleventh century, we entered upon the second stage, that of logic, or dialectic, to use the more specific mediaeval term. Toward the close of the tenth century Gerbert was found strenuously occupying himself with logic, and using it as a means of ordering the branches of knowledge. At the end of the eleventh, Anselm has not only considered certain logical problems, but has vaulted over into constructive metaphysical theology. Looking back over Anselm’s work, from the vantage-ground of the twelfth century’s further reflections, one may be conscious of a certain genial youthfulness in his reliance upon single arguments, noble and beautiful soarings of the spirit, which however pay little regard to the firmness of the premises from which they spring, and still less to a number of cognate and pertinent considerations, which the twelfth century was to analyze.
Anselm’s thoughts perhaps overleaped logic. At all events he appears only occasionally absorbed with its formal problems. Yet he lived in a time of dawning logical controversy. Roscellin was even then blowing up the problem of universals, a problem occasioned by the entering of mediaeval thought upon the “logical” stage of its appropriation of the patristic and antique.
The problem of universals, or general ideas, from the standpoint of logic, lies at the basis of consistent thinking. It reverts to the time when Aristotle’s assertion of the pre-eminently real existence of individuals broke away from the Platonic doctrine of Ideas. For the early mediaeval philosophers, it took its rise in a famous passage in Porphyry’s Introduction to the Categories, the concluding sentence of which, as translated into Latin by Boëthius, puts the question thus: “Mox de generibus et speciebus illud quidem sive subsistant sive in nudis intellectibus posita sint, sive subsistentia corporalia sint an incorporalia, et utrum separata a sensibilibus an in sensibilibus posita et circa haec consistentia, dicere recusabo.” “Next as to genera and species, do they actually exist or are they merely in thought; are they corporeal or incorporeal existences; are they separate from sensible things or only in and of them?—I refuse to answer,” says Porphyry; “it is a very lofty business, unsuited to an elementary work.”
Thus, in three pairs of crude alternatives, the question came over to the early Middle Ages. The men of the Carolingian period took one position or another, without sensing its difficulties, or observing how it lay athwart the path of knowledge. Students were not as yet attempting such a dynamic appropriation of the ancient material as would evoke this veritable problem of cognition. Even Gerbert at the close of the tenth century was still so busy with the outer forms and figments of logic that he had no time to enter on those ulterior problems where logic links itself to metaphysics. One Roscellin, living and teaching apparently at Besançon in the latter part of the eleventh century, seems to have been the first to attack the currently accepted “realism” with some sense of the matter’s thorny intricacies. With his own “nominalistic” position we are acquainted only through his adversaries, who imputed to him views which a thoughtful person could hardly have entertained—that universals were merely words and breath (flatus vocis). Roscellin seems at all events to have been a man strongly held by the reality of individuals, and one who found it difficult to ascribe a sufficient intellectual actuality to the general idea as distinguished from the perception of things and the demands of the concepts of their individual existences. His logical difficulties impelled him to theological heresy. The unity in the Trinity became an impossibility; he could only conceive of three beings, just as he might think of three angels; and he would have spoken of three Gods had usage not forbidden it, says St. Anselm.[458] As it was, he said enough to draw on him the condemnation of a Council held at Soissons in 1092, before which he quailed and recanted. For the remainder of his life he so constrained the expression of his thoughts as to ensure his safety.
One may say that Plato’s theory of ideas was a metaphysical presentation of the universe, sounding in conceptions of reality. But for the Middle Ages, the problem whether genera and species exist when abstracted from their particulars, sprang from logical controversy. It was a problem of cognition, cognizance, understanding: how should one understand and analyze the contents of a statement, e.g. Socrates is a man. Moreover, it was a fundamental and universal problem of cognition; for it was not merely occupied, like all mental processes, with bringing data to consistent formulation, but pertained to those processes themselves by which any and all data are stated or formulated. It touched every formulation of truth, asking, in fine, how are we to think our statements? The philosophers of the eleventh and twelfth centuries, however, did not view this problem as one pertaining to the mind’s processes, and as having to do solely with the understanding of the contents of a statement. Rather, even as Plato had done, they approached it as if it were a problem of modes of existence; and for this very reason it had pushed Roscellin into theological error.
The discussion was to pass through various stages; and each stage may seem to us to represent the point reached by the thinker in his analysis of his conscious meaning in stating a proposition. Moreover, each solution may be valid for him who gives it, because of its correspondence to the meaning of his utterances so far as he has analyzed them. But mediaeval men could not take it in this way. Their intellectual task lay in appropriating, and in their own way re-expressing, all that had come to them from an authoritative past. The problem of universals had been stated by a great authority, who put it as pertaining to the objective reality of genera and species. How then might mediaeval men take it otherwise, especially when at all events it pertained in all verity to their endeavour to grasp and re-express the contents of transmitted truth? It became for a while the crucial problem, the answer to which might indicate the thinker’s general intellectual attitude. Far from keeping to logic, to the organon or instrumental part of the mediaeval endeavour to know, it wound itself through metaphysics and theology. Obviously the thinker’s answer to the problem would bear relation to his thoughts upon the transcendent reality of spiritual essences.