The men who first became impressed with the importance of this problem, gave extreme answers to it, sometimes crassly denying the real existence of universals, but more often hailing them as antecedent and all-permeating realities. If Roscellinus took the former position, a pupil of his, William of Champeaux, held the extreme opposite view, when both he and the twelfth century were still young. One may, however, bear in mind that as the views of the older nominalist are reported only by his enemies, so our knowledge of William’s lucubrations comes mainly from the exacerbated pen of Peter Abaelard.
William held apparently “that the same thing, in its totality and at the same time, existed in its single individuals, among which there was no essential difference, but merely a variety of accidents.”[459] Abaelard appears to have performed a reductio ad absurdum upon this view that the total genus exists in each individual. He pointed out that in such case the total genus homo would at the same time exist in Socrates and also in Plato, when one of them might be in Rome and the other in Athens. “At this William changed his opinion,” continues Abaelard, “and taught that the genus existed in each individual not essentialiter but indifferenter or [as some texts read] individualiter.” Which seems to mean that William no longer held that the total genus existed in each individual actually, but “indistinguishably,” or “individually.”
And the students flocked away with Abaelard, he also says; and William fled the lecture chair. William and Peter; shall we say of them arcades ambo? This would be but a harmless depreciation of Abaelard, in the face of the universal and correct tradition as to his epoch-making intellectual progressiveness. Indeed it might be well to let the phrase sound in our ears, just for the reminder’s sake, that Abaelard was, like William, a man of logic, although far more expert both in manipulating the dialectic processes and in applying them to theology.
Before endeavouring briefly to reconstruct the intellectual qualities of Abaelard from his writings, let us see how the famous open letter to a friend, in giving an apologetic story of the writer’s life, discloses the fatalities of his character. This Historia calamitatum suarum makes it plain enough why the crises of his life were all of them catastrophes—even leaving out of view his liaison with Heloïse and its penalty. A fatal impulse to annoy seems to drive him from fate to fate; the old word of Heraclitus ἦθος ἀνθρώπῳ δαίμων (character is a man’s genius) was so patently true of him. Much that he said was to receive orthodox approval after his time. Quite true. It has often been remarked, that the heresy of one age is the accepted doctrine of the next, even within the Church. But would the heretic have been persona grata to the later time? Perhaps not. Peter Abaelard at all events would have led others and himself a life of thorns in the thirteenth century, or the fourteenth had he been born again, when some of his methods and opinions had become accepted commonplace. Did he have an eye for logical and human truth more piercing than his twelfth-century fellows? Apparently. Was his need to speak out his truth so much the more imperative than theirs? Possibly. At all events, he was certainly possessed with an inordinate impulsion to undo his rivals. He sits down before their fortress walls by night, and when they see him there, they know not whether they look on friend or foe—in this auditor. They will find out soon enough. He studied dialectic under William of Champeaux at Paris, as all men were to know. He got what William had to teach, and moved on, to lecture in Melun and elsewhere. Then he returned and sat at William’s feet awhile to learn rhetoric, as he announced. But quickly he rose up, and assailed his master’s doctrine of universals, and overthrew him, as we have seen. The victim’s friends made Abaelard’s eristically won lecturer’s seat a prickly one. He left Paris for a while, and then returned and taught on Mount St. Geneviève, outside the city.
Up to this time he had not been known to study theology. But in 1113, at the age of thirty-four, he went to Laon to listen to a famous theologian named Anselm, who himself had studied at Bec under a greater Anselm. Says Abaelard in his Historia calamitatum: “So I came to this old man, whose repute was a tradition, rather than merited by talent or learning. Any one who brought his uncertainties to him, went away more uncertain still! He was a marvel in the eyes of his hearers, but a nobody before a questioner. He had a wonderful wordflow, but the sense was contemptible and the reasoning abject.” Well, I didn’t listen to him long, Abaelard intimates; but began to absent myself from his lectures, and was brought to task by his auditors, to whom jokingly I said, I, too, could lecture on Scripture; and I was taken up. Nothing loath, the next day I lectured to them on the passage they had chosen from Ezekiel’s obscure prophecies. So, all unprepared, and trusting in my genius, I began to lecture, at first to sparse audiences, but they quickly grew. Such is the substance of Abaelard’s own account, and he goes on to tell how “the old man aforesaid was violently moved with envy,” and shortly Abaelard had to take his lecturings elsewhere. He returned to Paris, and we have the episode of Heloïse, for whom, as his life went on, he evinced a devoted affection.[460]
Now he is monk in the abbey of St. Denis; and there again he lectures, and takes up certain themes against Roscellinus, whom he seems to resurrect from the quiet of old age to make a target of. This old man, too, hits back, and other vicious people blow up a cloud of envy, until the gifted lecturer finds himself an accused before the Council of Soissons, and his book condemned. Untaught by the burning of his book, Abaelard returns to his convent, and proceeds to unearth statements of the Venerable Bede showing that Dionysius the Areopagite who heard Paul preach, was not the St. Denis who became patron saint of France, and founder of the great abbey which even now was sheltering a certain Abaelard, and drawing power and revenue from the fame of its reputed almost apostolic founder. Its abbot and monks did not care to have the abbey walls undermined by truth, and Abaelard was hunted forth from among them.
It was after this that he made for himself a lonely refuge, which he named the Paraclete, not far from Troyes, and thither again his pupils followed him in swarms, and built their huts around him in the wilderness. But still mightier foes—or their phantoms—rise against this hunted head. The Historia seems to allude to St. Norbert and to St. Bernard. Whatever the storm was, it was escaped by flight to a remote Breton convent which—still for his sins!—had chosen Abaelard its abbot. There in due course they tried to murder him, and again he fled, this time back to his congenial sphere, the schools of Paris, where he lectured, now at the summit of fame, to enthusiastic multitudes of students. Some years pass, and then the pious jackal, William of St. Thierry, rouses his lion Bernard to contend with Abaelard and crush him, not with dialectic, at the Council of Sens in 1141. In a year he died, a broken man, in Cluny’s shelter. The conflict had not been of his seeking. Perhaps, had he been less vain, he might have avoided it. When it was upon him, the unhappy athlete of the schools found himself a pigmy matched against the giant of Clairvaux—the Thor and Loki of the Church! Whether or not the unequal battle raises Abaelard in our esteem, its outcome commends him to our pity; and all our sympathy stays with him to the last days of a life that was, as if physically, crushed. This accumulation of sad fortune bears witness enough to the character of the man on whose neck it did not fall by accident. Now let us try to reconstruct him intellectually.
We have heretofore observed the genius and noted the somewhat swaddling dialectic categories of a certain eager intellect bearing the name of Gerbert.[461] Abaelard’s mental processes have advanced beyond such logical stammerings. He and his time are in the fulness of youth, and feel the strength and joyful assurance of an intellectual progress, to be brought about by a new-found proficiency in dialectic. In the first half of the twelfth century, the intellectual genius of the time—and Abaelard was its quintessence—knew itself advancing by this means in truth. A like intellectual consciousness had rejoiced the disputants in Plato’s academy, under the inspiration of that beautiful reasoner’s exquisite dialectic. The one time, like the other, was justified in its confidence. For in such epochs, language, reasoning, and knowledge advance with equal step; thought clears up with linguistic and logical analysis; it becomes clear and illuminated because more distinctly conscious of the character of its processes, and the nature of statement. There is thus a veritable progress, at least in the methodology of truth.
In Abaelard’s time men had already studied grammar, the grammar of the Latin tongue, and the quasi-grammar of rearrangement and first painful learning of the knowledge which it held. They had studied logic too, its simpler elements, those which consist mainly in a further clearing up of the meanings of language. Some men—Anselm of Canterbury—had already made sudden flights beyond grammar, and out of logic’s pale. And the labour of logical and organic appropriation, with some reconstruction of the ancient material, was to go on in this first half of the twelfth century, when Hugo of St. Victor lived as well as Abaelard. Progress by means of dialectic controversy, and first attempts at systematic construction, mark this period intellectually. Abaelard lived and moved and had his being in dialectic. The further interest of Theology was lent him by the spirit of his time. Through the medium of the one he reasoned analytically; and in the province of the other he applied his reasoning constructively, using patristic materials and the fragments of Greek philosophy scattered through them. Thus Abaelard, a true man of the twelfth century, passes on through logic to theology or metaphysics.
For the completeness of his logical knowledge he lived and worked twenty or thirty years too soon. He was unacquainted with the more elaborate logical treatises of Aristotle, to wit, the Prior and Posterior Analytics, the Topics, and Sophistical Elenchi. The sources of his own treatises upon Dialectic are Porphyry’s Introduction, Aristotle’s Categories and De interpretatione, and certain treatises of Boëthius.[462] A first result of the elementary and quasi-grammatical character of the sources of logic upon which he drew, is that the connection between logic and grammar is very plain with him. Note, for example, this paragraph of his, the substance of which is drawn from Aristotle’s Categories: