The indestructibility of freethought, meanwhile, was being proved even in the philosophic schools, under all their conformities to faith. Already in the ninth century we have seen Scotus Erigena putting the faith in jeopardy by his philosophic defence of it. Another thinker, Roscelin (or Roussellin: fl. 1090), is interesting as having made a critical approach to freethought in religion by way of abstract philosophy. With him definitely begins the long academic debate between the Nominalists and Realists so called. In an undefined way, it had existed as early as the ninth century,169 the ground being the Christian adoption of Plato’s doctrine of ideas—that individual objects are instances or images of an ideal universal, which is a real existence, and prior to the individual thing: “universalia ante rem.” To that proposition Aristotle had opposed the doctrine that the universal is immanent in the thing—“universalia in re”—the latter alone being matter of knowledge;170 and in the Middle Ages those who called Aristotle master carried his negation of Plato to the extent of insisting that the “universal” or “abstract,” or the “form” or “species,” is a mere subjective creation, a name, having no real existence. This, the Nominalist position—mistakenly ascribed to Aristotle171—was ultimately expressed in the formula, “universalia post rem.”
Such reasonings obviously tend to implicate theology; and Roscelin was either led or helped by his Nominalist training to deny either explicitly or implicitly the unity of the Trinity, arguing in effect that, as only individuals are real existences, the actuality of the persons of the Trinity involves their disunity.172 The thesis, of course, evoked a storm, the English Archbishop Anselm and others producing indignant answers. Of Roscelin’s writing only one letter is extant; and even Anselm, in criticizing his alleged doctrine, admits having gathered it only from his opponents, whose language suggests perversion.173 But if the testimony of his pupil Abailard be truthful,174 he was at best a confused reasoner; and in his theology he got no further than tritheism, then called ditheism.175 Thus, though “Nominalism, by denying any objective reality to general notions, led the way directly to the testimony of the senses and the conclusions of experience,”176 it did so on lines fatally subordinate to the theology it sought to correct. Roscelin’s thesis logically led to the denial not only of trinity-in-unity but of the Incarnation and transubstantiation; yet neither he nor his opponents seem to have thought even of the last consequence, he having in fact no consciously heretical intention. Commanded to recant by the Council of Soissons in 1092, he did so, and resumed his teaching as before; whereafter he was ordered to leave France. Coming to England, he showed himself so little of a rebel to the papacy as to contend strongly for priestly celibacy, arguing that all sons of priests and all born out of wedlock should alike be excluded from clerical office. Expelled from England in turn for these views, by a clergy still anti-celibate, he returned to Paris, to revive the old philosophic issue, until general hostility drove him to Aquitaine, where he spent his closing years in peace.177
Such handling of the cause of Nominalism gave an obvious advantage to Realism. That has been justly described by one clerical scholar as “Philosophy held in subordination to Church-Authority”;178 and another has avowed that “the spirit of Realism was essentially the spirit of dogmatism, the disposition to pronounce that truth was already known,” while “Nominalism was essentially the spirit of progress, of inquiry, of criticism.”179 But even a critical philosophy may be made to capitulate to authority, as even à priori metaphysic may be to a certain extent turned against it. Realism had been markedly heretical in the hands of John Scotus; and in a later age the Realist John Huss was condemned to death—perhaps on political grounds, but not without signs of sectarian hate—by a majority of Nominalists at the Council of Constance. Everything depended on the force of the individual thinker and the degree of restraint put upon him by the authoritarian environment.180 The world has even seen the spectacle of a professed indifferentist justifying the massacre of St. Bartholomew; and the Platonist Marsilio Ficino vilified Savonarola, basely enough, after his execution, adjusting a pantheistic Christianity to the needs of the political situation in Medicean Florence. Valid freethinking is a matter of thoroughness and rectitude, not of mere theoretic assents.
Tried by that test, the Nominalism of the medieval schools was no very potent emancipator of the human spirit, no very clear herald of freedom or new concrete truth. A doctrine which was so far adjusted to authority as to affirm the unquestionable existence of three deities, Father, Son, and Spirit, and merely disputed the not more supra-rational theorem of their unity, yielded to the rival philosophy a superiority in the kind of credit it sought for itself. Nominalism was thus “driven to the shade of the schools,” where it was “regarded entirely in a logical point of view, and by no means in its actual philosophic importance as a speculation concerning the grounds of human knowledge.”181 For Roscelin himself the question was one of dialectics, not of faith, and he made no practical rationalists. The popular heresies bit rather deeper into life.182
It is doubtless true of the Paulicians that “there was no principle of development in their creed: it reflected no genuine freedom of thought” (Poole, Illustrations, p. 95); but the same thing, as we have seen, is clearly true of scholasticism itself. It may indeed be urged that “the contest between Ratramn and Paschase on the doctrine of the Eucharist; of Lanfranc with Berengar on the same subject; of Anselm with Roscelin on the nature of Universals; the complaints of Bernard against the dialectical theology of Abelard; are all illustrations of the collision between Reason and Authority ... varied forms of rationalism—the pure exertions of the mind within itself ... against the constringent force of the Spiritual government” (Hampden, Bampton Lectures on The Scholastic Philosophy, 3rd ed. p. 37; cp. Hardwick, Church History: Middle Age, p. 203); but none of the scholastics ever professed to set Authority aside. None dared. John Scotus indeed affirmed the identity of true religion with true philosophy, without professing to subordinate the latter; but the most eminent of the later scholastics affirmed such a subordination. “The vassalage of philosophy consisted in the fact that an impassable limit was fixed for the freedom of philosophizing in the dogmas of the Church” (Ueberweg, i, 357); and some of the chief dogmas were not allowed to be philosophically discussed; though, “with its territory thus limited, philosophy was indeed allowed by theology a freedom which was rarely and only by exception infringed upon” (ib. Cp. Milman, Latin Christianity, 4th ed. ix, 151). “The suspicion of originality was fatal to the reputation of the scholastic divine” (Hampden, pp. 46–47). The popular heresy, indeed, lacked the intellectual stimulus that came to the schools from the philosophy of Averroës; but it was the hardier movement of the two.
Already in the eleventh century, however, the simple fact of the production of a new argument for the existence of God by Anselm, Archbishop of Canterbury, is a proof that, apart from the published disputes, a measure of doubt on the fundamental issue had arisen in the schools. It is urged183 that, though the argumentation of Anselm seems alien to the thought of his time, there is no proof that the idea of proving the existence of God was in any way pressed on him from the outside. It is, however, inconceivable that such an argument should be framed if no one had raised a doubt. And as a matter of fact the question was discussed in the schools, Anselm’s treatise being a reproduction of his teaching. The monks of Bec, where he taught, urged him to write a treatise wherein nothing should be proved by mere authority, but all by necessity of reason or evidence of truth, and with an eye to objections of all sorts.184 In the preface to his Cur Deus Homo, again, he says that his first book is an answer to the objections of infidels who reject Christianity as irrational.185 Further, the nature of part of Anselm’s theistic argument and the very able but friendly reply of Gaunilo (a Count of Montigni, who entered a convent near Tours, 1044–1083) show that the subject was within the range of private discussion. Anselm substantially follows St. Augustine;186 and men cannot have read the ancient books which so often spoke of atheism without confronting the atheistic idea. It is not to be supposed that Gaunilo was an unbeliever; but his argumentation is that of a man who had pondered the problem.187
Despite the ostensibly rationalistic nature of his argument, however, Anselm stipulated for absolute submission of the intellect to the creed of the Church;188 so that the original subtitle of his Proslogium, Fides quaerens intellectum, in no way admits rational tests. In the next century we meet with new evidence of sporadic unbelief, and new attempts to deal with it on the philosophic side. John of Salisbury (1120–1180) tells of having heard many discourse on physics “otherwise than faith may hold”;189 and the same vivacious scholar put in his list of “things about which a wise man may doubt, so ... that the doubt extend not to the multitude,” some “things which are reverently to be inquired about God himself.”190 Giraldus Cambrensis (1147–1223), whose abundant and credulous gossip throws so much light on the inner life of the Church and the laity in his age, tells that the learned Simon of Tournay “thought not soundly on the articles of the faith,” saying privately, to his intimates, things that he dared not utter publicly, till one day, in a passion, he cried out, “Almighty God! how long shall this superstitious sect of Christians and this upstart invention endure?”; whereupon during the night he lost the power of speech, and remained helpless till his death.191 Other ecclesiastical chroniclers represent Simon as deriding alike Jesus, Moses, and Mahomet—an ascription to him of the “three impostors” formula.192 Again, Giraldus tells how an unnamed priest, reproved by another for careless celebration of the mass, angrily asked whether his rebuker really believed in transubstantiation, in the incarnation, in the Virgin Birth, and in resurrection; adding that it was all carried on by hypocrites, and assuredly invented by cunning ancients to hold men in terror and restraint. And Giraldus comments that inter nos there are many who so think in secret.193 As his own picture of the Church exhibits a gross and almost universal rapacity pervading it from the highest clergy to the lowest, the statement is entirely credible.194 Yet again, in the Romance of the Holy Grail, mention is twice made of clerical doubters on the doctrine of the Trinity;195 and on that side, in the crusading period, both the monotheistic doctrine of Islam and the Arab philosophy of Averroës were likely to set up a certain amount of skepticism. In the twelfth century, accordingly, we have Nicolas of Amiens producing his tractate De articulis (or arte) catholicæ fidei in the hope of convincing by his arguments men “who disdain to believe the prophecies and the gospel.”196
To meet such skepticism too was one of the undertakings of the renowned Abailard (1079–1142), himself persecuted as a heretic for the arguments with which he sought to guard against unbelief. Of the details of his early life it concerns us here to note only that he studied under Roscelin, and swerved somewhat in philosophy from his master’s theoretic Nominalism, which he partly modified on Aristotelian lines, though knowing little of Aristotle.197 After his retirement from the world to the cloister, he was induced to resume philosophic teaching; and his pupils, like those of Anselm, begged their master to give them rational arguments on the main points of the faith.198 He accordingly rashly prepared a treatise, De Unitate et Trinitate divina, in which he proceeded “by analogies of human reason,” avowing that the difficulties were great.199 Thereupon envious rivals, of whom he had made many by his arrogance as well as by his fame, set up against him a heresy hunt; and for the rest of his life he figured as a dangerous person. While, however, he took up the relatively advanced position that reason must prepare the way for faith, since otherwise faith has no certitude,200 he was in the main dependent on the authority either of second-hand Aristotle201 or of the Scriptures, though he partly set aside that of the Fathers.202 When St. Bernard accused him of Arianism and of heathenism he was expressing personal ill-will rather than criticizing. Abailard himself complained that many heresies were current in his time203; and as a matter of fact “more intrepid views than his were promulgated without risk by a multitude of less conspicuous masters.”204 For instance, Bernard Sylvester (of Chartres), in his cosmology, treated theological considerations with open disrespect205; and William of Conches, who held a similar tone on physics,206 taught, until threatened with punishment, that the Holy Ghost and the Universal Soul were convertible terms.207 This remarkably rational theologian further rejected the literal interpretation of the creation of Eve; in science he adopted the Demokritean doctrine of atoms; and in New Testament matters he revived the old rationalistic heresy that the three Persons of the Trinity are simply three aspects of the divine personality—power, wisdom, and will—which doctrine he was duly forced to retract. It is clear from his works that he lived in an atmosphere of controversy, and had to fight all along with the pious irrationalists who, “because they know not the forces of nature, in order that they may have all men comrades in their ignorance, suffer not that others should search out anything, and would have us believe like rustics and ask no reason.” “If they perceive any man to be making search, they at once cry out that he is a heretic.” The history of a thousand years of struggle between reason and religion is told in those sentences.
As to William’s doctrines and writings see Poole, pp. 124–30, 346–59. His authorship of one treatise is only latterly cleared up. In the work which under the title of Elementa Philosophiae is falsely ascribed to Bede, and under the title De Philosophia Mundi to Honorius of Autun (see Poole, pp. 340–42, 347 sq.), but which is really the production of William of Conches, there occurs the passage: “What is more pitiable than to say that a thing is, because God is able to do it, and not to show any reason why it is so; just as if God did everything that he is able to do! You talk like one who says that God is able to make a calf out of a log. But did he ever do it? Either, then, show a reason why a thing is so, or a purpose wherefore it is so, or else cease to declare it so.” Migne, Patrolog. Latin. xc, 1139. It is thus an exaggeration to say of Abailard, as does Cousin, that “il mit de côté la vieille école d’Anselme de Laon, qui exposait sans expliquer, et fonda ce qu’on appelle aujourd’hui le rationalisme” (Ouvr. inédits d’Abélard, 1836, intr. p. ii).
Abailard was not more explicit on concrete issues than this contemporary—who survived him, and studied his writings. If, indeed, as is said, he wrote that “a doctrine is believed not because God has said it, but because we are convinced by reason that it is so,”208 he went as far on one line as any theologian of his time; but his main service to freethought seems to have lain in the great stimulus he gave to the practice of reasoning on all topics.209 His enemy, St. Bernard, on the contrary, gave an “immense impulse to the growth of a genuinely superstitious spirit among the Latin clergy.”210
Dr. Rashdall pronounces Abailard “incomparably the greatest intellect of the Middle Ages; one of the great minds which mark a period in the world’s intellectual history”; and adds that “Abailard (a Christian thinker to the very heart’s core, however irredeemable (sic) the selfishness and overweening vanity of his youth) was at the same time the representative of the principle of free though reverent inquiry in matters of religion and individual loyalty to truth.” (The Universities of Europe in the Middle Ages, 1895, i, 56–57.) If the praise given be intended to exalt Abailard above John Scotus, it seems excessive.
On a survey of Abailard’s theological teachings, a modern reader is apt to see the spirit of moral reason most clearly in one set forth in his commentary on the Epistle to the Romans, to the effect that Jesus was not incarnate to redeem men from damnation, but solely to instruct them by precept and example, and that he suffered and died only to show his charity towards men. The thesis was implicit if not explicit in the teaching of Pelagius; and for both men it meant the effort to purify their creed from the barbaric taint of the principle of sacrifice. In our own day, revived by such theologians as the English Maurice, it seems likely to gain ground, as an accommodation to the embarrassed moral sense of educated believers. But it is heresy if heresy ever was, besides being a blow at the heart of Catholic sacerdotalism; and Abailard on condemnation retracted it as he did his other Pelagian errors. Retractation, however, is publication; and to have been sentenced to retract such teaching in the twelfth century is to leave on posterity an impression of moral originality perhaps as important as the fame of a metaphysician. In any case, it is a careful judge who thus finally estimates him: “When he is often designated as the rationalist among the schoolmen, he deserves the title not only on account of the doctrine of the Trinity, which approaches Sabellianism in spite of all his polemics against it, and not only on account of his critical attempts, but also on account of his ethics, in which he actually completely agrees in the principal point with many modern rationalists.”211 And it is latterly his singular fate to be valued at once by many sympathetic Catholics, who hold him finally vindicated alike in life and doctrine, and by many freethinkers.
How far the stir set up in Europe by his personal magnetism and his personal record may have made for rational culture, it is impossible to estimate; but some consequence there must have been. John of Salisbury was one of Abailard’s disciples and admirers; and, as we saw, he not only noted skepticism in others but indicated an infusion of it in his own mind—enough to earn for him from a modern historian the praise of being a sincere skeptic, as against those false skeptics who put forward universal doubt as a stalking horse for their mysticism.212 But he was certainly not a universal skeptic213; and his denunciation of doubt as to the goodness and power of God214 sounds orthodox enough. What he gained from Abailard was a concern for earnest dialectic.
The worst side of scholasticism at all times was that it was more often than not a mere logical expatiation in vacuo; this partly for sheer lack of real knowledge. John of Salisbury probably did not do injustice to the habit of verbiage it developed215; and the pupils of Abailard seem to have expressed themselves strongly to him concerning the wordy emptiness of most of what passed current as philosophic discourse; speaking of the teachers as blind leaders of the blind.216 One version of the legend against Simon of Tournay is to the effect that, after demonstrating by the most skilful arguments the truth of the doctrine of the Trinity, he went on to say, when enraptured listeners besought him to dictate his address so that it might be preserved, that if he had been evilly minded he could refute the doctrine by yet better arguments.217 Heresy apart, this species of dialectical insincerity infected the whole life of the schools, even the higher spirits going about their work with a certain amount of mere logical ceremony.