Reassertion of previous views.
But this done, William becomes his old self again in the remainder of the Dragmaticon. In the rôle of the philosopher he argues at length with the duke whether Plato’s five circles of the sky and division of spirits into kalodaemones and kakodaemones is in agreement with the Christian Faith. Later on, when the duke cites Bede against him in regard to some astronomical point, he replies that in a pure matter of faith he would feel obliged to accept Bede’s authority, but that on a point of philosophy he feels perfectly at liberty to disagree with him. This declaration of scientific independence from patristic authority became a locus classicus cited with approval by several writers of the next century. Presently to our surprise we find William boldly inquiring at what time of year the six days of creation occurred. He also indulges as before in somewhat bitter reflections upon the learned world of his day.
No denial of science.
William, therefore, has had to withdraw some theological opinions for which he could not show authority in Scripture, and some other opinions wherein he disregarded the literal meaning of the Bible. But except that he has to agree to the miraculous account of the creation of the first woman, he does not seem to have altered his views concerning nature and philosophy, nor to have given up in any way his scientific attitude or his astrological theories. The theologians have forced him to conform in respect to theology, but his retraction in that field takes the form of a second edition of his treatise and a reaffirmation of his astronomical and philosophical views. As Hauréau well says, “He always believes in science, he still defends in the name of science, in the accents, and by the method of the scholar, everything in his former writings that has not been condemned in the name of the Faith.... So it is no denial of philosophy that has been won by the outcries of William of St. Thierry and Walter of St. Victor;[155] those attacks have resulted in merely intimidating the theologian.”[156]
William’s future influence.
Such attacks, moreover, had little or no success in lessening William’s ultimate future influence. How utterly they failed to intimidate astrologers may be inferred from the much greater lengths to which William’s contemporary, Bernard Silvester, went without apparently getting into any trouble, and from the half-hearted arguments against the art of John of Salisbury a little later in the century. As Doctor Poole has already pointed out, even the Philosophia, which William of St. Thierry censured and which William of Conches himself modified, survived in its original and unexpurgated version “to be printed in three several editions as the production of the venerable Bede, of saint Anselm’s friend, William of Hirschau, and of Honorius of Autun; the taint of heresy plainly cannot have been long perceptible to medieval librarians.”[157] Also the revised edition, or Dragmaticon, “enjoyed a remarkable popularity, and a wide diffusion attested by a multitude of manuscripts at Vienna, Munich, Paris, Oxford, and other places.”[158] We shall find William’s book much used and cited by the learned writers of the following century, and a number of copies of it are listed in the fifteenth century catalogue of the library of St. Augustine’s Abbey, Canterbury. If then from the contemporary and passing world of talk William retired disgusted and discomfited to the shelter of ducal patronage, in the enduring world of thought and letters he carved for himself a lasting niche by his comparative intellectual courage, originality, and thoroughness.
[119] On William of Conches see, besides HL XXI, 455 et seq. and DNB, Antoine Charma, Guillaume de Conches, Paris, 1857; B. Hauréau, in his Singularités historiques et littéraires, Paris, 1861; H. F. Reuter, Geschichte der religiösen Aufklärung im Mittelalter, II (1877) pp. 6-10; R. L. Poole, Illustrations of the History of Medieval Thought, 1884, pp. 124-31, 338-63, (or, 1920, pp. 106-12, 293-310) and “The Masters of the Schools at Paris and Chartres in John of Salisbury’s Time,” EHR, 35 (1920) pp. 321-42. For editions and MSS of the original version and revision of William’s chief philosophical treatise see Appendix I at the close of this chapter. For his other works see my subsequent foot-notes.
[120] Metalogicus II, 10.
[121] Metalogicus, I, 24.
[122] Haskins, Norman Institutions, 1918, p. 130. Haskins, Ibid., p. 205, has found no authority for Geoffrey’s absence on crusade in 1147, so that it need not be taken into account in dating the Dragmaticon.