Magic and natural science.
Evidently then Abelard believes both in the existence of demons and of occult virtues in nature by which marvels may be worked. Magic avails itself both of demonic and natural forces. The demons are more thoroughly acquainted with the secrets of nature than are men. But this does not prove that scientific research is necessarily diabolical or that anyone devoting himself to investigation of nature is giving himself over to demons. The inevitable conclusion is rather that if men will practice the same long experimentation and will exercise the same “subtle ingenuity” as the demons have, there is nothing to prevent them, too, from becoming at last thoroughly acquainted with the natural powers of things. Also magic, since it avails itself of natural forces, is akin to natural science, while natural science may hope some day to rival both the knowledge of the demons and the marvels of magic. Abelard does not go on to draw any of these conclusions, but other medieval writers were to do so before very long.
Hugh of St. Victor.
Upon Hugh of St. Victor Vincent of Beauvais in the century following looked back as “illustrious in religion and knowledge of literature” and as “second to no one of his time in skill in the seven liberal arts.”[9] Hugh was Abelard’s younger contemporary, born almost twenty years later in Saxony in 1096 but dying a year before Abelard in 1141. His uncle, the bishop of Halberstadt, had preceded him at Paris as a student under William of Champeaux. When Hugh, as an Augustinian canon, reached the monastery of St. Victor at Paris, William had ceased to teach and become a bishop. Hugh was himself chosen head of the school in 1133. He is famous as a mystic, but also composed exegetical and dogmatic works, and is noted for his classification of the sciences. Edward Myers well observes in this connection: “Historians of philosophy are now coming to see that it betrays a lack of psychological imagination to be unable to figure the subjective coexistence of Aristotelian dialectics with mysticism of the Victorine or Bernardine type—and even their compenetration. Speculative thought was not, and could not be, isolated from religious life lived with such intensity as it was in the middle ages, when that speculative thought was active everywhere, in every profession, in every degree of the social scale.”[10] Later, in the case of St. Hildegard of Bingen, we shall meet an even more striking combination of mysticism and natural science.
Character of the Didascalicon.
Of Hugh’s writings we shall be chiefly concerned with the Didascalicon, or Eruditio didascalica,[11] a brief work whose six books occupy some seventy columns in Migne’s Patrologia. It is especially devoted, as its first chapter clearly states, to instructing the student what to read and how to read. On the whole, especially for its early twelfth century date, it is a clear, systematic, and sensible treatise, which shows that medieval men were wider readers than has often been supposed and that they had some sound ideas on how to study. In order to have a basis for systematic study, Hugh describes and classifies the various arts and sciences, mechanical and liberal, theoretical and practical. He is possibly influenced in his definitions and derivations by Isidore’s Etymologies, although he seldom if ever acknowledges the debt, whereas he cites Boethius a number of times, but at least his classification and arrangement of material are quite different from Isidore’s. In this description and classification, and indeed throughout the treatise, Hugh seems to display no little originality of thought and arrangement—once he tells us of his own methods of study[12]—although his facts and details are mostly familiar ones from ancient authors and although he of course embodies generally accepted notions such as the trivium and quadrivium.
Meaning of physica.
To the four subjects of the quadrivium he adds physica or physiologia,[13] which he says “considers and investigates the causes of things in their effects and their effects in their causes.” He quotes from Vergil’s Georgics, (II, 479-)
“Whence earthquakes come, what force disturbs the deep,
Virtues of herbs, the minds and wraths of brutes,