So the Lombard’s first two Books consider res in the descending order of their excellence; the third considers the Incarnation, which, if not itself a sacrament, and the chief and sum of all sacraments, is the source of those of the New Law, considered in the fourth Book. The scheme is single and orderly; the difficulty will be in actually arranging the various topics within it. Endeavouring to do so, the Lombard in Book I. puts together the doctrine of the Trinity, the three Persons composing it, and their attributes and qualities. Book II. considers in order, the Angels, and very briefly, the work of the Six Days down to the creation of man; then the Christian doctrina as to man is presented: his creation and its reasons; the creation of his anima; the creation of woman; the condition of man and woman before the Fall; their sin; next free-will and grace. Book III. treats of the Incarnation, in all the aspects in which it may be known, and of the nature of Christ, His saving merit, and the grace which was in Him; also of the virtues of faith, hope, and charity, the seven gifts of the Spirit, and the existence of them all in Christ. Book IV. considers the Sacraments of the New Law: Baptism, Confirmation, the Eucharist, penance, extreme unction, ordination to holy orders, marriage. It concludes with setting forth the Resurrection and the Last Judgment.

The first chapters of Genesis were the ultimate source of the Lombard’s actual arrangement. And the Summa will follow the same order of treatment. One may perceive how naturally the adoption of this order came to Christian theologians by glancing over Augustine’s De Genesi ad litteram.[445] This Commentary was partially constructive, and not simply exegetical; and afforded a cadre, or frame, of topical ordering, which could readily be filled out with the contents of the Sentences or even of the Summa: God, in His unity and trinity, the Creation, man especially, his fall, the Incarnation as the saving means of his restoration, and then the Sacraments, and the final Judgment unto heaven and hell. One may say that this was the natural and proper order of presenting the contents of the Christian sacra doctrina.

So the great Summa theologiae of Thomas Aquinas adopts the same order which the Lombard had followed. The Pars prima begins with defining sacra doctrina.[446] It then proceeds to consider God—whether He exists; then treats of His simplicitas and perfectio; next of His attributes; His bonitas, infinitas, immutabilitas, aeternitas, unitas; then of our knowledge of Him; then of His knowledge, and therein of truth and falsity; thereupon are considered the divine will, love, justice, and pity; the divine providence and predestination; the divine power and beatitude.

All this pertains to the unitas of the divine essence; and now Thomas passes on to the Trinitas personarum, or the more distinctive portions of Christian theology. He treats of the processio and relationes of the divinae Personae, and then of themselves—Father, Son, Holy Spirit, and then of their essential relationship and properties. Next he discusses the missio of the divine Persons, and the relations between God and His Creation. First comes the consideration of the principle of creation, the processio creaturarum a Deo, and of the nature of created things, with some discussion of evil, whether it be a thing.

Among created beings, Thomas treats first of angels, and at great length; then of the physical creation, in its order—the work of the six days, but with no great detail. Then man, created of spiritual and corporeal substance—his complex nature is to be analysed and fathomed to its depths. Thomas discusses the union of the anima ad corpus; then the powers of the anima, in generali and in speciali—the intellectual faculties, the appetites, the will and its freedom of choice; how the anima knows—the full Aristotelian theory of cognition is given. Next, more specifically as to the creation of the soul and body of the first man, and the nature of the image and similitude of God within him; then as to man’s condition and faculties while in a state of innocence; also as to Paradise.

This closes the treatment of the creatio et distinctio rerum; and Thomas passes to their gubernatio, and the problem of how God conserves and moves the corporeal and spiritual; then concerning the action of one creature on another, and how the angels are ranged in hierarchies, and although purely spiritual beings, minister to men and guard them; then concerning the action of corporeal things, concerning fate, and the action of men upon men.

Here ends Pars prima. The first section of the second part (Prima secundae) begins. In a short Prologue Thomas says:

Hereupon Thomas takes up in order: the ultimate end of man; the nature of man’s beatitude, and wherein it consists, and how it may be attained; then voluntary and involuntary acts, and the nature and action of will; then fruition, intention, election, deliberation, consent, and actions good and bad, flowing from the will; then the passions; concupiscence and pleasure, sadness, hope and despair, fear, anger; next habits (habitus) and the virtues, intellectual, cardinal, theological; the gifts of the Spirit, and the beatitudes; the vices, and sin, and penalty. Thereupon it becomes proper to consider the external causes (principia) of acts: “The external cause (principium) moving toward good is God; who instructs us through law, and aids us through grace. Therefore we must speak, first of law, then of grace.” So Thomas discusses: the essentia of law, and the different kinds of law—lex aeterna, lex naturalis, lex humana—their effect and validity; then the precepts of the Old Law (of the Old Testament); then as to the law of the Gospel and the need of grace; and lastly, concerning grace and human merit.

The Secunda secundae (the second division of the second part) opens with a Prologue, in which the author says that, having considered generally the virtues and vices, and other things pertaining to the matter of ethics, it is needful to consider these same matters more particularly, each in turn; “for general moral statements (sermones morales universales) are less useful, inasmuch as actions are always in particularibus.” A more special statement of moral rules may proceed in two ways: the one from the side of the moral material, discussing this or that virtue or vice; the other considers what applies to special orders (speciales status) of men, for instance prelates and the lower clergy, or men devoted to the active or contemplative religious life. “We shall, therefore, consider specially, first what applies to all conditions of men, and then what applies to certain orders (determinatos status).” Thomas adds that it will be best to consider in each case the virtue and corresponding gift, and the opposing vice, together; also that “virtues are reducible to seven, the three theological,[447] and the four cardinal virtues. Of the intellectual virtues, one is Prudence, which is numbered with the cardinal virtues; but ars does not pertain to morals, which relate to what is to be done, while ars is the correct faculty of making things (recta ratio factibilium).[448] The other three intellectual virtues, sapientia, intellectus, et scientia, bear the names of certain gifts of the Holy Spirit, and are considered with them. Moral virtues are all reducible to the cardinal virtues; and therefore, in considering each cardinal virtue, all the virtues related to it are considered, and the opposite vices.”

This classification of the virtues seems anything but clear. And perhaps the weakest feature of the Summa is this scarcely successful ordering, or combination, of the Aristotelian virtues with those more germane to the Christian scheme. However this may be, the author of the Summa proceeds to consider in order: fides, and the gifts (dona) of intellectus and scientia which correspond to the virtue faith; next the opposing vices: infidelitas, haeresis, apostasia, blasphemia, and caecitas mentis (spiritual blindness). Next in order come the virtue spes, and the corresponding gift of the Spirit, timor, and the opposing vices of desperatio and praesumptio.[449] Next, caritas, with its dilectio, its gaudium, its pax, its misericordia, its beneficentia and eleemosyna, and its correctio fraterna; then the opposite vices, odium, acedia, invidia, discordia, contentio, schisma, bellum, rixa, seditio, scandalum. Next the donum sapientiae, and its opposite, stultitia; next, prudentia, and its correspondent gift, consilium; and its connected vices, imprudentia, negligentia, and its evil semblances, dolus and fraus.

Says Thomas: Consequenter post prudentiam considerandum est de Justitia. Whereupon follows a juristic treatment of jus, justitia, judicium, restitutio, acceptio personarum; then homicide and other crimes recognized by law. Then come the virtues, connected with justitia, to wit, religio, and its acts, devotio, oratio, adoratio, sacrificium, oblatio, decimae, votum, juramentum; then the vices opposed to religio: superstitio, idolatria, tentatio Dei, perjurium, sacrilegium, simonia. Next is considered the virtue of pietas; then observantia, with its parts, i.e. dulia (service), obedientia, and its opposite, inobedientia. Next, gratia (thanks) or gratitudo, and its opposite, ingratitudo; next, vindicatio (punishment); next, veritas, with its opposites, hypocrisis, jactantia (boasting), and ironia; next, amicitia, with the vices of adulatio and litigium. Next, the virtue of liberalitas, and its vices, avaritia and prodigalitas; next, epieikeia (aequitas). Finally, closing this discussion of all that is connected with Justitia, Thomas speaks of its corresponding gift of the Spirit, pietas.

Now comes the third cardinal virtue, Fortitudo—under which martyrium is the type of virtuous act; intimiditas and audacia are the two vices. Then the parts of Fortitudo, to wit, magnanimitas, magnificentia, patientia, perseverantia, and the obvious opposing vices. Next, the fourth cardinal virtue, Temperantia, its obvious opposing vices, and its parts, to wit, verecundia, honestas, abstinentia, sobrietas, castitas, clementia, modestia, humilitas, and the various appropriate acts and opposing vices related to these special virtues.

So far,[450] Thomas has been considering the virtues proper for all men; and now he comes to those specially pertaining to certain kinds of men, according to their gifts of grace, their modes of life, or the diversity of their offices, or stations. Of the special virtues related to gifts of grace, the first is prophetia, next raptus (vision), then gratia linguarum, and gratia miraculorum. After this, the vita activa and contemplativa, with their appropriate virtues, are considered. And then Thomas proceeds to speak De officiis et statibus hominum, and their respective virtues.

Here ends the Secunda secundae, and Pars tertia opens with this Prologue:

This Prologue indicates sufficiently the order of topics in the Pars tertia of the Summa, through Quaestio xc., at which point the hand of the Angelic Doctor was folded to eternal rest. He was then considering penance, the fourth in his order of Sacraments. All that he had to say as to the person, and attributes, and acts and passion of Christ had been written; and he had considered the Sacraments of baptism, confirmation, and the eucharist; he was occupied with poenitentia; and still other sacraments remained, as well as his final treatment of the matters which lie beyond the grave. So he left his work unfinished, and, in spite of many efforts, unfinishable by any of his pupils or successors.[451]

II

Inasmuch as the matter of their thoughts was transmitted to the men of the Middle Ages, and was not drawn from their own observation or constructive reasoning, the fundamental intellectual endeavour for mediaeval men was to apprehend and make their own, and re-express. Their intellectual progress followed this process of appropriation, and falls into three stages—learning, organically appropriating, and re-expressing with added elements of thought. Logically, and generally in time, these three stages were successive. Yet, of course, they overlapped, and may be observed progressing simultaneously. Thus, for example, what was known of Aristotle at the beginning of the twelfth century was slight compared with the knowledge of his philosophy that was opened to western Europe in the latter part of the twelfth and the beginning of the thirteenth. And while, by the middle of the twelfth century, the elements of Aristotle’s logic had been thoroughly appropriated, the substantial Aristotelian philosophy had still to be learned and mastered, before it could be reformulated and re-expressed as part of mediaeval thought.

Looking solely to the outer form, the three stages of mediaeval thought are exemplified in the Scriptural Commentary of the later Carolingian time, in the twelfth-century Books of Sentences, and at last in the more organic Summa theologiae. With this significant evolution and change of outer form, proceeded the more substantial evolution consisting in learning, appropriating, and re-expressing the inherited material. In both cases, these three stages were necessitated by the greatness of the transmitted matter; for the intellectual energies of the mediaeval period were fully occupied with mastering the data proffered so pressingly, with presenting and re-presenting this superabundant material, and recasting it in new forms of statement, which were also expressions, or realizations, of the mediaeval genius. So the mediaeval product may be regarded as given by the past, and by the same token necessitated and controlled. But, on the other hand, each stage of intellectual progress rendered possible the next one.

The first stage of learning is represented by the Carolingian period, which we have considered. It was then that the patristic material was extracted from the writings of the Fathers, and rearranged and reapplied, to meet the needs of the time. The mastery of this material had scarcely made such vital progress as to enable the men of the ninth and tenth and eleventh centuries to re-express it largely in terms of their own thinking. In the ninth century, Eriugena affords an extraordinary exception with his drastic restatement of what he had drawn from Pseudo-Dionysius and others; and at the end comes Anselm, whose genius is metaphysically constructive. But Anselm touches the coming time; and the springs of Eriugena’s genius are hidden from us.

As for the antique thought during these Carolingian centuries, Eriugena dealt in his masterful way with what he knew of it through patristic and semi-patristic channels. But let us rather seek it in the curriculum of the Trivium and Quadrivium. What progress Gerbert made in the Quadrivium, that is, in the various branches of mathematics which he taught, has been noted, and to what extent his example was followed by his pupil Fulbert, at the cathedral school of Chartres.[452] The courses of the Trivium—grammar, rhetoric, logic—demand our closer attention; for they were the key of the situation. We must keep in mind that we are approaching mediaeval thought from the side of the innate human need of intellectual expression—the impulse to know and the need to formulate one’s conceptions and express them consistently. For mediaeval men the first indispensable means to this end was grammar, including rhetoric, and the next was logic or dialectic. The Latin language contained the sum of knowledge transmitted to the Middle Ages. And it had to be learned. This was true even in Italy and Spain and France, where each year the current ways of Romance speech were departing more definitely from the parent stock; it was more patently true in the countries of Teutonic speech. Centuries before, the Roman youth had studied grammar that they might speak and write correctly. Now it was necessary to study Latin grammar, to wit, the true forms and literary usages of the Latin tongue, in order to acquire any branch of knowledge whatsoever, and express one’s corresponding thoughts. And men would not at first distinguish sharply between the mediating value of the learned tongue and the learning which it held.[453]

Thus grammar, the study of the Latin language, represented the first stage of knowledge for mediaeval men. This was to remain true through all the mediaeval centuries; since all youths who became scholars had to learn the language before they could study what was contained in it alone. One may also say, and yet not speak fantastically, that grammar, the study of the correct use of the language itself, corresponded spiritually with the main intellectual labour of the Carolingian period. Alcuin’s attention is commonly fixed upon the significance of language, Latin of course. And the labours of his pupil Rabanus, and the latter’s pupil Walafrid, are as it were devoted to the grammar of learning. That is to say, they read and endeavour to understand the works of the Fathers; they compare and collate, and make volumes of extracts, which they arrange for the most part as Scripture commentaries; commentaries, that is, upon the significance of the canonical writings which were the substance of all wisdom, but needed much explication. Such works were the very grammar of knowledge, being devoted to the exposition of the meaning of the Scriptures and the vast burden of patristic thought. A like purpose was evinced in the efforts of the great emperor himself to re-establish schools of grammar, in order that the Scriptures might be more correctly understood, and the expositions of the holy Fathers. In fine, just as knowledge of the Latin tongue was the end and aim of grammar, so a correct understanding of what was contained in Latin books was the aim of the intellectual labours of this period. It all represented the first stage in the mediaeval acquisition of knowledge, or in the presentation or expression of the same; and thus the first stage in the mediaeval endeavour to realize the human impulse to know.

The next course of the Trivium was logic; and likewise its study will represent truly the second stage in the mediaeval realization of the human impulse to know, to wit, the second stage in the appropriation and expression of the knowledge transmitted from the past. We have spoken at some length of the logical studies of Gerbert, and his endeavours to adjust his thinking and classify the branches of knowledge by means of formal logic.[454] Those discussions of his which seem somewhat puerile to us, were essential to his endeavours to formulate what he had learned, and present it as rational and ordered knowledge. Logic is properly the stage succeeding grammar in the formulation of rational knowledge. At least it was for men of Gerbert’s time, and the following centuries. Rightly enough they looked on logic as a scientia sermotionalis, which on one side touched sheer linguistics, and on the other, had for its field the further processes of reason. Thus Hugo of St. Victor, Abaelard’s very great contemporary, says:

The close connection between grammar and logic is evident. Logic treats of language used in rational expression, as well as of the reasoning processes carried on in language. Its elementary chapters teach a rational use of language, whereby men may reach a more deeply consistent expression of their thoughts than is gained from grammar. Yet grammar also is logic, and based on logical principles. All this is exemplified in the logical treatises composing the Aristotelian Organon, which the Middle Ages used. First comes Porphyry’s Isagoge, which clearly is bound up in language. Likewise Aristotle’s Categories treat of the rational and consistent use of language, or of what may be stated in language. Next it is obvious that the De interpretatione treats of language used to express thought, its generic function. The more advanced treatises of the Organon, the Prior and Posterior Analytics, the Topics, and Sophistical Elenchi, treat directly and elaborately of the reasoning processes themselves. So one perceives the grammatical affinities of the simpler treatises in the Organon. The more advanced ones seem to stand to them as oratorical rhetoric stands to elementary grammar. For the Analytics, Topics, and Sophistical Elenchi are a kind of eristic, training the student to use the processes of thought and their expression in order to attain an end, commonly argumentative. The prior treatises have taught the elements, as it were the orthography and etymology of the rational expression of thought in language; the latter (even as syntax and rhetoric), train the student in the use of these elements. And one observes a nice historical fitness in the fact that only the simpler treatises of the Organon were in common use in the early Middle Ages, since they alone were necessary to the first stage in the appropriation of the substance of patristic and antique thought. The full Organon was rediscovered, and retaken into use in the middle or latter part of the twelfth century, when men had progressed to a more organic appropriation of the patristic material and what they knew of the antique philosophy.

Thus in mediaeval education, and in the successive order of appropriating the patristic and the antique, logic stood on grammar’s shoulders. It was grammar’s rationalized stage, and treated language as the means of expressing thought consistently and validly; that is, so as not to contravene the necessities of that whereof it was the vehicle. And since language thus treated was in accord with rational thought, it would accord with the realities to which thought corresponds; and might be taken as expressing them. This last reflection introduces metaphysics.

And properly. For the three stages in the mediaeval appropriation and expression of knowledge were grammar, logic, metaphysics. Logic has to do with the processes of thought; with the positing of premises and the drawing of the conclusion. It does not necessarily consider whether the contents of its premises represent realities. This is matter for ontology, metaphysics. Now mediaeval metaphysics, which were those of Greek philosophy, were extremely pre-Kantian, in assuming a correspondence between the necessities or conclusions of thought and the supreme realities, God and the Universe. Nor did mediaeval logic doubt that its processes could elucidate and express the veritable natures of things. So mediaeval logic readily wandered into the province of metaphysics, and ignored the line between the two.

Yet there is little metaphysics in the Organon; none in its simpler treatises. So there was none in the elementary logical instruction of the schools before the twelfth century at least.[456] One may always distinguish between logic and metaphysics; and it is to our purpose to do so here. For as we have taken logic to represent the second stage in the mediaeval appropriation of knowledge, so metaphysics, poised in turn on logic’s shoulders, is very representative of the third stage, to wit, the stage of systematic and organic re-expression of the ancient matter, with elements added by the great schoolmen.

Metaphysics was very properly the final stage. The grammatical represented an elementary learning of what the past had transmitted; the logical a further retrying of the matter, an attempt to understand and express it, formulate parts of it anew, with deeper consistency of expression. Then follows the attempt for final and universal consistency: final inasmuch as thought penetrates to the nature of things and expresses realities and the relationships of realities; and universal, in that it seeks to order and systematize all its concepts, and bring them to unity in a Summa—a perfected scheme of rational presentation of God and His creation. This will be, largely speaking, the final endeavour of the mediaeval man to ease his mind, and realize his impulse to know and express himself with uttermost consistency.

So for mediaeval men, metaphysics stood on logic’s shoulders and represented the final completion of their thought, in a universal system and scheme of God and man and things.[457] But the first part of this proposition had not been true with Greek philosophy. Metaphysics is properly occupied with being, in its ultimate essence and relationships; with the consistent putting together of things, to wit, the presentation or expression of them so as not to disagree with any of the data recognized as pertinent. The thinker considers profoundly, seeking to penetrate the ultimate reality and relationships of things, through which a universal whole is constituted. This makes ontology, metaphysics—the science of being, of causes, and so the science of the first Cause, God. Aristotle called this the “first” philosophy, because lying at the base of all branches of knowledge, and depending on nothing beyond itself. Some time after his death, the Peripatetics and then the Neo-Platonists called this first science by the name of Metaphysics, “after” or “beyond” physics, if one will, perhaps because of the actual order of treatment in the schools.

The term Metaphysics is vague enough; either “first” philosophy or “ontology” is preferable. Yet as to Greek philosophy the term has apt historical suggestiveness. For it did come after physics in time, and was in fact evoked by the imperfect method and consequent contradictions of the earlier philosophies. From the beginning, Greek philosophy drove straight at the cause or origin of things—surely the central problem of metaphysics. Thales and the other Ionians began with rational, though crude, hypotheses as to the sources of the universe. These were first attempts to reach a consistent expression of its origin and nature. Each succeeding philosopher considered further, from the vantage-ground of the recognized inconsistencies or inadequacies in the theories of his predecessors. He was thus led on to consider more profoundly the essential relationships of things, the very truth of their relationships, and on and on into the problem of their being. For the verity of relations must be according to the verity of being of the things related. The world about us consists in relationships, of antecedents and sequences, of cause and effect; and our thought of it is made up of consistencies or contradictions, which last we struggle to eliminate, or to transform to consistencies.

These early philosophers looked only to the Aristotelian material cause for the origin and cause of things; yet reflection plunged them deeper into a consideration of the nature of being and relationships. The other causes were evoked by Anaxagoras and then by Plato, and by them were led into the arena of debate; and philosophers discussed the efficient and final cause as well as the material. Such discussions are recognized by Plato, and finally by Aristotle as relating to the first principles of cognition and being, and so as constituting metaphysics. The constant search for a deeper consistency of explanation had led on and on through a manifold consideration of those palpable relationships which make up the visible world; it had disclosed the series of necessary assumptions required by those visible relationships; and thus the search for causality and origins, and essential relationships, became one and the same—metaphysics.

Metaphysics was not ineptly called so, since it had in time come after the cruder physical hypotheses. But such was not the order of mediaeval intellectual progress. The Middle Ages passed through no preliminary course of physical hypotheses, explanatory of the universe. Not physics, but logic (introduced by grammar) led up to the final construction—or rather adoption and reconstruction—of ultimate hypotheses as to God and man, led up to the all-ordering and all-compassing Theologia. Metalogics, rather than Metaphysics, would be the proper name for these final expressions or actualizations of the mediaeval impulse to know.

CHAPTER XXXVI

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.

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: