Anselm (1033–1109): Life and Position in Mediæval Philosophy. Anselm lived during the monastic revival which had begun in the tenth century. He was in fact the last of the monastic teachers, for during his declining years occurred the first of the Crusades, and the epoch following him witnessed the transference of learning from the monasteries to the universities. He was born of a noble family in Aosta, Lombardy, and entered in early life the monastery of Bec. Here he succeeded Lanfranc as abbot, and again he succeeded Lanfranc in the archbishopric of Canterbury. He was a man of genuine piety, of speculative bent, and of unswerving faith in the dogma of the church. As primate of England he resisted with much sagacity the encroachments of the secular power. His Cur Deus Homo was a treatise on the doctrine of the redemption and atonement, and was one of the most important books of the Middle Ages.
Anselm brought about a great change in theological teaching. Berengar of Tours had but recently made an attack upon the doctrine of the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist, and was the immediate cause of the “storm and stress” period of scholasticism that followed. Anselm’s teacher and predecessor, Lanfranc, had defended the doctrine. The doctrine had not yet beensettled, and each side claimed the basis of authority. Anselm was therefore a witness of the first attempt to apply philosophy to dogma, and he was the first to use dialectics with the serious purpose of defending dogma. From this time on, dialectics was no longer an intellectual diversion. He, the last of the monastic teachers, was the first to employ dialectics with the new purpose of instructing the believer. His entire life was animated by the desire to add knowledge to faith by the means of philosophy.
Anselm’s scholasticism therefore circulates about the Patristic theology as a centre; and his spirit and method is so similar to that of Augustine and the Apologists, that he has been justly called “the second Augustine” and “the last of the Fathers.” Beside the safe and traditionally centralized teaching of Anselm, the imaginative pantheism of Erigena seems like a body that had been loosened from its natural place and was floating away beyond control. Both Erigena and Anselm were inspired by the Platonism that until the year 1200 dominated the Middle Ages. That is, both were realists. The realism of Erigena, however, expressed in full the mystic element of Platonism. It destroyed all grades of reality below God, and made unnecessary the church and its offices. Erigena was an extreme realist; Anselm was consistent with the attitude of the church in being a moderate realist. The credo ut intelligam (faith as the basis of intellectual belief) was the anchor which saved him and became the safeguard of all future orthodox scholastics. The world to Anselm is a hierarchy of universal reals, such as the sacraments, the church, and the Trinity. To such dogmas of the church he applied philosophy, not because they needed support, butin order to make them clear by analysis. Philosophy shall only clarify dogma.
Anselm’s Arguments for the Existence of God. The so-called “Anselmic Arguments for the Existence of God” are the best known parts of Anselm’s teaching, and in the eyes of the churchman place his theodicy in the “status of a finished science.” To get their cogency we must remember the underlying thought of mediæval realism; the more universal a thing is, the more real it is—the more it exists and the more perfect it is. (See p. [352].) In his Monologium he developed the so-called cosmological argument: A single perfect and universal being must be assumed as the cause of all lesser beings. God’s essence must involve his existence. Every other being can be thought as coming into existence from some external cause, while God alone exists from the necessity of his own nature. In his Proslogium he elaborated his more famous ontological argument: Man has the idea of a perfect being; Perfection involves among other qualities that of existence, otherwise we could think of a more perfect being or one who did possess existence; Therefore God exists.
Roscellinus (d. 1100 about): Life and Teaching. Roscellinus, a canon of Compiègne, was the first scholastic to attempt to modify dogma by the dialectic,—not that there had not occurred throughout the history of the church many theological controversies. Before this time such controversies had on the whole arisen over doctrines that had not yet become dogma. The particular object of the attack of Roscellinus was the dogma of the Trinity, and the base of his attack was none other than philosophy. Roscellinus completely failed in getting the church to modify this particular doctrine,but he succeeded in a larger way than he could have imagined. He brought out into distinctness the issue between reason and revelation. The fundamental question thereafter was as to the rights of the human reason and the rights of divine revelation. Roscellinus supplied a powerful shock to faith and awakened the schools to the consequences of questions which had seemed before to be merely logical problems.
Roscellinus was a nominalist, and it was from the point of view of nominalism that he attempted to change the dogma of the Trinity. He made a life-long defense of the doctrine that the Godhead was three different substances, agreeing only in certain qualities. This is tritheism and not a Trinity. But this was only the most striking example of his application of the general principle of nominalism. In general, universals are only names and have an existence only in the human mind. Universalia post rem. Individuals alone exist. The groups formed out of many individuals by addition, or the parts of an individual formed by division, are mental affairs and have no reality. Roscellinus was opposed by Anselm, condemned by the church, and obliged to recant. He fled to England, returned to France, and again preached his doctrine.
Storm and Stress. After the issue was brought to a head by the nominalism of Roscellinus, the twelfth century was torn in battle over the reality of general ideas. The realists, on the one hand, tried to grade universals and to show how universals are related to particulars—all of which Anselm had left to faith. How do universals, such as the persons in the Trinity, the church, the sacraments, exist in one universal God? Grotesque explanations were offered, like the imaginative work ofBernard of Chartres and the symbolic number theory of his brother, Theodoric. William of Champeaux, a teacher of Abelard, almost reduced realism to a pantheism. Nothing exists but the universal; all individuals are accidental modifications of the universal. Pantheism was so inherent in the blood of realism that it was always appearing here and there.
Such pantheistic deductions by the realists brought out nominalism in opposition, in spite of the repression of nominalism by the authorities of the church. The nominalists sought protection and authority under the name of Aristotle, for his conceptualist doctrine was not known at this time. The few writings of Aristotle then known were very imperfectly interpreted. One of the most ironical situations in the history of the Middle Ages is that, up to the Period of Classic Scholasticism, Plato was the authority of the orthodox and Aristotle of the heterodox.
The Life of Abelard (1079–1142). Abelard had both Roscellinus and William of Champeaux as teachers. He quarreled with them both and set up a rival school of his own. He taught in various places and was, with some interruptions, in Paris from 1108 to 1136. The university did not exist until a generation after him, but he was its true founder, for he inaugurated the movement out of which the early universities sprang. His method was transferred from philosophy to theology and thence to all studies. It was a didactic method of drawing conclusions after an empirical enumeration of the pros and cons. Abelard was acquainted with no Greek writings except in Latin translations. His great talent as a teacher and his keen French intellect, that was impatient of all restraint, made him, however, themost brilliant of the schoolmen. Two synods condemned his teaching. Probably his modern popular reputation rests upon his unfortunate love-relations with Heloise.
Abelard’s Conceptualism. Universals exist in the Particulars. Abelard formed the storm-centre of the strife over the technical relations between particulars and universals. His position has been misunderstood because he, the pupil and opponent both of Roscellinus and of William of Champeaux, fought each with the weapons of the other. He was repelled from pantheism, which appears to him to be the logic of realism, and he recoiled equally from the sensualistic outcome of nominalism. Universals are the indispensable forms of knowledge, and they must therefore have some existence in the nature of the things which we know. This existence consists of the similarity of the essential characteristic of things. This likeness is not a numerical identity, but a unity which makes our knowledge of the particular things possible. This likeness or similarity between things is the same as the types created by God. Thus the universal has no independent objective existence, and on the other hand it is not a mere word out of all relation to things. The universals exist in three ways: (1) they exist before the things only as Ideas in the mind of God; (2) they coexist with the things as the essential likenesses of things; (3) they exist after the things in the human mind, when it has knowledge of things. Abelard developed his theory only polemically and never worked it out systematically. On the technical side of this question the preceding lines of thought come into an unsystematic unity. His theory was accepted by the Arabian philosophers and is practically that of Aquinas and Duns Scotus. With Abelard theproblem was not solved indeed, but it came to a preliminary stop in this statement—universals have an equal significance, ante rem in the mind of God, in re in nature, post rem in human knowledge.