No More Learning

the Mosaic cosmogony and are attached to dates of Israelitic his tory, Augustine constructs his history of the world. In this process he combines a depreciatory estimate of the Roman world with slight understanding of the essential nature of the Grecian. The decisive point in this development is for him, also, the appearance of the Saviour, by which not only the redemption of those chosen by grace is brought to completion, but also their separation from the children of the world. With this begins the last world-period, whose end will be the Judgment : then after the stress of conflict shall enter the Sab bath, the peace of the Lord — but peace only for the elect ; for those not predestined to salvation will then be completely separated from the saints, and entirely given over to the pain of their unhappiness.
However spiritually sublime (though never without attendant physical imagery) the conception of happiness and pain here pre sented, — and this sublimity is especially noteworthy in the thought erfunhappiness as a weakening of Being, due to the lack of divioe causality, — the dualism of the Good and the Evil is yet unmistak ably, for Augustine, the final issue of the world's history. The man assailed by so many powerful motives of thought has not overcome the Manichwism of his youthful belief; he has taken it up into Christian doctrine. Among the Manichaeans the antithesis of good and evil is held to be original and indelible : with Augustine this antithesis is regarded as one that has come into being, and yet as one that is ineradicable. The omnipotent, omniscient, supremely benevolent God has created a world which is divided forever into his own realm and that of Satan.
7. Among the complicated problems and ideas of universal his torical importance which Augustinianism contains, there is still one to be brought forward. It lies in the conception of blessedness itself in which all motives of his thought cross. Egr^strongly as Augus tine recognised in the will the inmost motive energy of human nature, deeply as he penetrated the striving after happiness as the impelling motive of all psychical functions, he yet remained firmly convinced that the satisfaction of all this stress and urging is to he found only in beholding divine truth. Tiie highest good is God : but God is the truth, and one enjoys truth by beholding it and resting in its contemplation. All urging of the will is but the path to this peace in which it ceases! The last task of the will is to be silent in the gracious workingof divine revelation, — to remain quiet when the vision of truth, produced from above, comes over it.
Here are united in common opposition to individualism of will. the Christian idea of the absolute causality of God, and the contem- plative mysticism of the Neo-Platonists. . From both sides, the same
Cmap. 1, $ 23. ] Controversy over Universal*. 287
tendency is at work to briny about the conception of man's sanctifk cation as a working of God in him, as a becoming filled and illumined by the highest truth, as a will-less contemplation of the one, infinite^* Being. Augustine, indeed, worked out forcibly the practical conse quences which the working of grace should have in the earthly life, — purification of the disposition and strictness in the conduct of life, — and just in this is shown the comprehensive breadth of his personal nature and his spiritual vision. He develops the vigorous eneryv of his own combative nature into an ethical doctrine, which, for w>.
nf jife^sets man in the midst of the world-hatt. le, h«>tw(>p" (tq^d and Evil aa a brave fighter for the heavenly kingdom. But the highest
moved from the asceticism of . Neo-Platonism with its gflftpaaM
reirard which beckons this fighter for God is yet, for Augustine, not the restless activity of the will, but the rest of contemplation. For ike temporal uje, Augustine demands the full and never-resting exertion of the struggling and acting soul ; for eternity he offers the prospect of the peace of becoming absorbed in divine truth. He naflLed designates the state of the blessed as the highest of the virtue^, as love ' (charitas), but in the eternal blessedness where tha IBlUUtnce oi the world and of the sinful will is no longer to be over come, where love has no longer any want that must be satisfied. there this love is no longer anything other than a God-intoxicated contemplation.
In this duality, also, of the Augustinian ethics, old and new lie! r\
dose together. With the tense energy of will which is demanded 1 ! •** A*oaii for the earthly life, and with the transfer of the ethical judgment
so as to make it apply to the inner disposition, the modern man \I o^cu^Jt appears ; but in the conception of the highest goal of life the ancient <v^<\_>. ideal of intellectual contemplation retains the victory.
Here lies in Augustine's doctrine itself a contradiction with the individualism of the will, here at a decisive point an Aristotelian,
yeo-Platonlc
anfolds itself in the formation of the problems of the Middle Ages.
element maintains itself, and this internal opposition
5 23. The Controversy over Universal*
Johannes Sareiberieniis, Mttalogicut, II. cap. 17 f.
J. H. Lowe, Dtr Kampf xieuchen Xominalitmut und Bealismui im Mittel- etttr. $tin Urtprung und Kin Verlauf (Prague, 1870).
The schooling in formal logic which the peoples that entered upon the scientific movement at the beginning of the Middle Ages
' la hi» tyitem the three ChrUtian virtueg, faith, hope, and love, are placed
j*9
aaofallEita* practical aud dianoiHk- virtues ul lireelc rtluc*'
288 Mediceoal Philosophy : First Period. [Part III
were obliged to undergo, developed in connection with the question as to the logical and metaphysical significance of genera and specie's (universalia) . But it would be a grave mistake to suppose that this
question had only the didactic value of serving as a subject for mental drill, in connection with which the rules of conceptional thought, division, judgment, and inference, were impressed for cen turies upon ever new and increasing throngs of scholars. On the contrary, the tenacity with which the science of the Middle Ages — and it is significant that this occurred independently in the Orient as well as in the Occident —. held fast to the elaboration of this problem in endless discussions, is rather in itselt a proof that in this question a very real and very difficult problem lies before us.
In tact, when Scholasticism, in its timorous beginnings, made the passage in Porphyry's Introduction ' to the Categories of Aristotle which formulated this problem, the starting-point of its own first attempts at thought, it hit with instinctive sagacity upon precisely the same problem which had formed the centre of interest during the great period of Greek philosophy. After Socrates had assigned to science the task of thinking the world in conceptions, the ques tion how the class-concepts, or generic concejrtions, are related jo~~ reality, became, for the first time, a chief motive of philosophy. It produced the Platonic doctrine 1)? Ideas and the Aristotelian logic ; and if the latter had as its essential content (cf. § 12) the doctrine of the forms in which the particular is dependent upon the uni versal, it is easy to understand that even from so scanty remains and fragments of this doctrine as were at the service of the earliest
Middle Ages, the same problem must arise with all its power for the new race also. And it is likewise easy to understand that the old enigmatic question worked upon the naive minds of the Middle Ages, untrained in thought, in a manner similar to that in which it worked upon the Greeks. In fact, the delight in logical dispute, as this developed after the eleventh century at the schools of Paris, finds its counterpart as a social phenomenon only in the debates of the philosophers at Athens, and in these latter, too, as numerous anecdotes prove, the question as to the reality of universals, which was connected with the doctrine of Ideas, played a leading part.
Nevertheless the problem was renewed under conditions that were essentially less favourable. When this question emerged for the Greeks, they possessed a wealth of proper scientific experience
". 1 The formulation of the problem in the translation of Bogthius is as follows : . . de generibus et speciebus — sive subsislant sive in svlis nudis intelleetibui pasita sint, sive subsistentia corporalia an incorporalia, et utrum separata a
sensibilibus an in sensibilibut posita et circa hax consistentia. . . . "
Chap. 1, § 23. ] Controversy over Universals : Scotus Eriyena. 289
and a store of real information and knowledge, which, if not always, yet for the most part and on the whole, prevented them from mak ing their discussion solely a game with the abstractions of formal logic. But mediaeval science, especially in its beginnings, lacked just this counterpoise, and on this account was obliged to move so long in a circle with the attempt to construct its metaphysics out of purely logical considerations.
That the Middle Ages," in their turn, engaged and persisted so pertinaciously in this controversy which had previously been waged principally between Plato and the Cynics, and afterward between the Academy, the Lyceum, and the Stoa, was not due solely to the fact that in consequence of the defective character of their tradi tions the thinkers of the Middle Ages knew as good as nothing of those earlier debates ; it had yet a deeper ground. ,The feeling of the peculiar, intrinsic worth of personality, which had gained so powerful expression in Christianity and especially in the Augustin- lan doctrine, found the liveliest echo and the strongest sympathy among precisely those tribes which were called to become the new bearers of civilisation ; and in the hearts of these same peoples ■urged also the youthful delight in richly coloured reality, in the living, particular appearance. But with the Church doctrine they received a philosophy which, with the measured calm of Greek thought, conceived the essential nature of things to ^'p "' »"iver«al connections, a metaphysics which identified the stages of logical unTTBTgalHy with intensities of Being of varying worths. In this t*T an inconsistency which covertly asserted^ itself, even in A"ugus- tinianism, and became a constant stimulus for philosophical reflec-
1. The question as to the individual's ground of Being or exis tence, from which mediaeval thought never became free, was the more natural for it just at its beginning in proportion as the Neo- Platonic metaphysics still maintained itself under the veil of a Christian mysticism. Nothing could be more adapted to call out the contradiction of a natural individualism than the high degree of consistency with which scolus Eriyena carried through the funda mental thoughts of the Xeo- Platonic Realism. Perhaps no philoso pner has expressed more clearly and frankly than he the final consequences of the metaphysics which, from the standpoint of the Socratic-Platonic principle that the truth, and therefore also Being, is to b* sought in the universal, identifies the stages of universality with those of the intensity and priority of Being. The universal
(the class-concept or logical genus) appears here as the essential and original reality, which produces from itself and contains within UselJ
'290 Mediaeval Philosophy : First Period. [Pabt IIL
the particular (the species and ultimately the individual). The universals are, therefore, not only substances {res; hence the name " Realism"), but, as contrasted with the corporeal individual things, they are the more primitive, the producing and determining sub stances ; they are the more Real substances, and they are the more Real in proportion as they are the more universal. In tins conception,
'therefore, the logical relations of concepts immediately become metaphysical relations ; formal arrangement contains real signifi cance. Logical subordination becomes changed into a production and inclusion of the particular by the general ; logical partition and determination become transformed into a causal process by means of which the universal takes on form and unfolds itself in the particular.
The pyramid of concepts, thus raised to a metaphysical signifi cance, culminates in the concept of the deity as the most universal. But the last product of abstraction, the absolutely universal, is that wbich has no determinations (cf. p. 250). Hence this doctrine becomes identical with the old " negative theology," according to which we can predicate of God only what he is not ; ' and yet here, too, this highest Being is designated, quite in accord with the thought of Plotinus, as the "uncreated, but self-creating Nature. " For this most universal Being produces out of itself all things; these, therefore, contain nothing else than its manifestations, and are related to it as particular specimens or instances are to the class ; they are in it and exist only as its modes of appearance. The result of these presuppositions is thus a logical pantheism : all things of the world are " theophanies " ; the world is God developed into the particular, proceeding out of himself to take on a definite form (deus explicitus). (Jrid^arid th» world ai-p on^i The same_
". Nature" (<ftuo-tt) is, as creative unity, God, and as created plurality, the world.
The process of unfolding (egressus) proceeds in the graded scale of logical universality. Out of God comes at first the intelligible world as "the Nature which is created and itself creates," the realm of universals, of Ideas which (as vol in the sense of Plotinus) form the working forces in the sensuous world of phenomena. The Ideas are built up as a heavenly hierarchy according to their various grades of universality, and therefore also of intensity of Being, and in connection with this thought Christian Mysticism constructs a
1 In carrying out this Philonic thought (cf. p. 237) the Church Fathers had already . employed a course of thought which proceeds by successive abstraction to the concept of God as the undetermined. Cf. , e. g. , Clement Alex. Strom. V. 11(689).
Cmaf. 1, § 23. ] Controversy over Universalt : Scotus Erigena. 291
doctrine of angels after a Neo-Platonic pattern. But in every case beneath the mythical covering the important thought is really mctive, that real dependence consists in logical dependence; the logical consequence, by which the particular follows from the general, is spuriously substituted for the causal relation.
Hence, then, even in the world of the senses, it is only the uni versal that is properly active and efficient : corporeal things, as a whole, form the " Nature which is created and does not itself create. " ' In this world the individual thing is not as such active ; it is rather active according to the proportion of universal attri butes which attain manifestation in it. The individual thing of sense, accordingly, possesses the least force of Being, the weakest and completely dependent species of reality: the Neo-Platonic Idealism is maintained by Scotus Erigena in full.
To the stages of unfolding corresponds in a reverse order the return of all things into God (regressus), the resolution of the world Of individual funus inlu the eternal primitive Being, the dei- •• B :. of flip wurTd So thought, as tin' tinal goul i all genera tion and change, as the extinction of all that is particular, God is designated as " the Nature which neither is created nor creates " : it is the ideal of motionless unity, of absolute rest at the end of the world-process. All theophanies are destined to return into the unity of the divine All-Being, — that unity which knows no dis tinctions. Thus, even in the final destiny of things, the superior reality of the universal, which swallows up all that is particular, preserves itself.
2. As in antiquity (cf. § 11, 5), so here, in consequence of the effort to assure truth and reality to universals, the peculiar thought of a graded scale of Being appears. Some things (universals), is the doctrine, are more than others (particulars). " Being" is looked upon as, like other qualities, capable of comparison, of increase and diminution ; it belongs to some things more than to others. So it became the custom to think that the concept of Being {esse, existere) has a relation to that which is (essentia), and a relation of different degrees of intensity, just as other marks and qualities are related to the objects in which they are formed. As a thing possesses more or less extension, force, permanence, so it has alan more nr Ipks " BBB5 " ; a"rf »« '* fan iwn! r» nr lrtaftgther qualities, SO it can receive or lose that of Being. This line of thought, peculiar to
Realism, must be kept in mind to understand a great number of the
1 It need only be briefly mentioned thmt this "division of Nature" obviously recall* the Aristotelian distinction of the unmoved mover, the moved mover, and that which neither moves nor is moved. Cf. f 18, 6.
<y
292 Mediaeval Philosophy : First Period. [Part III.
metaphysical theories of the Middle Ages. It explains, in the first place, the most important doctrine which Realism produced, the ontological argument for the existence of God which Anselm of Can terbury brought forward.
The more universality, the more Reality. From this it follows that if God is the most universal being, he is also the most Real ; if he is the absolutely universal being, he is also the absolutely Real being, ens realissimum. He has, therefore, according to the concep tion of him, not only the comparatively greatest Reality, but also absolute Reality ; that is, a Reality than which a greater and higher cannot be thought.
But through the whole development which this line of thought had already taken in antiquity, we find that the worth-predicate of
perfection was inseparably iused with the conception of Being. ThB~3egrees ot ±5emg are those ot perfection ; the more anything the more perfect and, vice versa, the more perfect anything
the more it. 1 The conception of the highest Being there fore, also that of an absolute perfection that of a perfection such that cannot be thought higher and greater: ens perfect issimum.
In accordance with these presuppositions, Anselm perfectly correct in his conclusion that, from the mere conception of God as most perfect and most real Being, must be possible to infer his existence. But to do this he attempts various modes of proof. In his Monologium he follows the old cosmological argument that because there Being at all, highest and absolute Being must be assumed from which all else that exists has its Being, and which itself exists only from itself, according to its own essential nature
Whereas every individual existent entity can be also thought as non-existent, and therefore owes the realitjr of its essence not to itself, but to another (the Absolute), the most perfect Being can be thought only as being or existent, and exists accordingly only by virtue of the necessity of its own nature. God's essence
(and only God's) involves his existence. The nerve of this argu ment thus ultimately the Eleatic basal thought, tortv tlvai, Being
and cannot be thought otherwise than as being or existing. Anselm, however, involved this same thought in peculiar com plication, while he intended to simplify and render independent in itself. In the Proslogium he entered upon the ontological argu
ment, properly so called, which maintains that without any reference to the Being of other things, the mere conception of the most per-
A principle which lies at the basis of Augustine's theodicy, in so far as with both the existent held to be to ipso good, and the evil, on the contrary, as not truly existent.
(aseUas).
is
is
1
is,
is, it,
it
it
;
it a
is
it
it
a
is
is,
is,
it is,
Chat. 1, J 23. ] Controversy over Universalis : Anselm. 293
feet Being involves its Reality. Inasmuch as this conception is thought, it possesses psychical reality : the most perfect being is as a content in consciousness (esse in intellectu). But if it existed only as a content in consciousness, and not also in metaphysical reality (esse etiam in re), a still more perfect being could evidently be thought, which should possess not only psychical, but also meta physical reality ; and thus the former would not be the most perfect being possible. It belongs, accordingly, to the conception of the most perfect being (quo majus cogitari non potest) that it possesses not only reality in thought, but also absolute reality.
It is obvious that Anselm in this formulation was not fortunate in his shift, and that what hovered before him attained in this proof but a very awkward expression. For it takes little acuteness to see that Anselm proved only that if God is thought (as most perfect being), he must be thought also necessarily as being or existent, and cannot be thought as non-existent. But the ontologi- cal argument of the Proslogium did not show even in the remotest degree that God, i. e. that a most perfect being, must be thought. The necessity for this stood fast for Anselm personally, not only because of the conviction of his faith, but also by the cosmological argumentation of the Monoiogium. When he believed that he could dispense with this presupposition and with the help of the mere conception of God arrive at the proof of his existence, he exemplified in typical manner the fundamental idea of Realism, which ascribed to conceptions without any regard to their genesis and basis in the human mind, the character of truth, i. e. of Reality. It was on this ground alone that he could attempt to reason from the psychical to the metaphysical reality of the concep tion of God.
The polemic of Qaunilo, therefore, in a certain respect hit the vulnerable point. He argued that according to the methods of Anselm, in quite the same manner the reality of any idea whatever, e. g. that of an island, if the mark of perfection were only included within might be proved. For the most perfect island, were not really in existence, would evidently be surpassed in perfection by the real island, which should possess the same other marks the former would be inferior to the latter in the attribute of Being. But instead of showing in his rejoinder, as might have been ex pected, that the conception of perfect island completely unnec essary arbitrary fiction, or that this conception contains an inner contradiction, while the conception of the most real being neces- «ary and not contradictory, Anselm expatiates further upon his argument, that the most perfect being in the intellect, must
*■• also in re.
if
is
it
is
if
a
is a
it ;
it,
294 Mediaeval Philosophy : First Period. [Part III.
However slight the cogency of this attempted proof remains for him who does not, as Anselm does without acknowledging regard the conception of an absolute Being as a necessity of thought, the ontological argument yet valuable as the characteristic feature of
'mediaeval Kealism, of which forms the most consistent expression^ fior_tiie thought that the highest being owes its reality only to its'
own essential nature, and that thereforethis reality must be capable of being proved from its conception alone, the natural conclusion of a doctrine which traces the Being of things of perception back to
participation conceptions, and again within the conceptions themselves sets up graded scale of reality, employing the degree of universality as the standard.
~3. When now the question arose as to the kind of reality which belongs to universals, and as to their relation to the individual things known to the senses, mediaeval Kealism found itself involved in difficulties quite similar to those which had faced the Platonic Realism. The thought of second, higher, immaterial world, which at that former period had to be born, was now indeed received as a complete and almost self-evident doctrine, and the religiously dis posed thinking could be only sympathetic in its attitude toward the Neo-Platonic conception of the Ideas as contents of the divine mind. Following the pattern of the Platonic Timeeus, whose mythical mode of presentation was favourable to this conception, Bernard Chartres sketched an imaginative cosmogonic work of fantastic grotesqueness, and we find with his brother Theodoric, attempts, sug gested by the same source, to construct symbolism of numbers, which undertook not only, as was done in other instances, to develop the dogma of the Trinity, but also to develop further fundamental metaphysical conceptions out of the elements of unity, likeness, and unlikeness. 1
In addition to this question concerning the archetypal reality of the Ideas in the mind of God, the question also, what significance
to be conceded to them in the created world. Extreme Realism, as had been maintained at the outset by William of Champeaux, taught the full substantiality of the class-concept in this world also the universal present in all its individuals as the undivided essence, everywhere identical with itself. The . class accordingly appears as the unitary gni-. gf/1T1^p| and t>)e gpppif«> marks of the indi- virlualsbelonging to appear as the accidents of this substancgr- Ifwas Abelard's objection that according to this theory mutually contradictory accidents would have to be ascribed to the same sub-
Cf. the extracts in Haureau, HUt. d. ph. sc. , 396 ff.
of
1
1.
a
I.
is it
in a
;
is it
a
is
is
a
is it
it,
Chap. 1, § 23. ] Controvert*/ over Universale : Realism. 295
stance, which first forced the defender of Realism to give up this extreme position and restrict himself to the defence of the proposi tion, that the class exists in the individuals, individualiter ;' i. e. that its universal, identical essence clothes itself in each particular example in a particular substantial Form. This view was in touch with the conception of the Neo-Platonists, which had been main tained by Boethius and Augustine and also occasionally mentioned in the literature of the intervening period, and its exposition moves readily in the Aristotelian terminology, according to which the universal appears as the more indeterminate possibility which realises itself in individuals by means of their peculiar Forms. The conception is then no longer substance in the proper sense, but the common substratum which takes on different forms in individ
ual instances.
Walter of Mortagne sought to remove the difficulty in another
war, by designating the individualising of the classes or genera to species, and of the species to individual things, as the entering of the substratum into different states {status), and yet regarding these states as realiter specialising determinations of the universal.
In both these lines of thought, however, Realism was only with difficulty held back from a final consequence which at the first lay in nowise within the purpose of its orthodox supporters. The re lation of the universal to the particular might be regarded as the self-realising of the substratum into individual Forms, or as its specialisation into individual states, — in either case one came ulti mately in the ascending line of abstract conceptions to the idea of the ens generalissimum, whose self-realisations, or whose modified states, formed in descending line the genera, species, and individuals, Le. to the doctrine that in all phenomena of the world only the one divine substance is to be seen. Pantheixm inhered in the hlnnd, of
Realism by reason of its Neo^l'latonic descent and was always "mating its appearance here and there; and opponents like Abelard
did not fail to cast this consequence in the face of Realism.
Meanwhile realistic pantheism did not come to lie expressly maintained in this period; on the other hand. Realism in its theory
of universals found an instrument for establishing some of the fundamental dogmas, and therefore rejoiced in the approbation of the Church. The assumption of a substantial reality of the logi cal genera not only seemed to make possible a rational exposi tion of the doctrine of the Trinity, but also, as was shown by Anselm and Odo (Odardus) of Cambrey, proved to tie a fit phil
1 For the reading " liulirTerenUT. " cf. Lowe, op. cit. , 49 fl. , and CI. Baumkvr, Ank. J. Oesch. d. Ph. , X. 2u7.
-jf ,^^^» v
<y^ c/ X v^
/•^K f
& ^r o^
• /' "^i.
*! **
»* i
tP
' ^^
K. *$\j> vX^jr
jt*
V
What are they, then ? It could be read in Marcianus Capella that a universal was the comprehension of many particularities by one name {nomen), by the same word {vox); but a word, Boethius had defined as a "motion of the air produced by the tongue. " With this all elements of the thesis nf extreme Nominalism were given : universals are nothing but collactua naaw, common ^""'cnatii""" for different things, sounds {flatus vocis), which serve as signs for a multipl'c'ty °f substances or their accidents.
In what degree the thus formulated Nominalism, which in this extreme form must have ignored even the real occasions for such collective names, was actually propounded and defended during that period * can no longer be determined. ' But the metaphysics of indi vidualism which corresponds to such a theory of knowledge meets us clearly and firmly with the claim that only individual things are to be"regarded as substances, as truly real. This was doubtless most sharply expressed by Jtiosceilinus, when he presented it in a two^ fold aspect : as the comprehension of many individuals under the same name is only a human designation, so, too, the distinguishing of parts in individual substances is only an analysis for human thought and communication ;4 the truly real is the individual thintr, and that alone.
1 Ct. t. S. Barach, Zur Geschichte des Nominalismus vor Boscellin (Vienna,
1866).
1 It is certain that this did not as yet occur in the beginnings of Nominalism
296 Mediaeval Philosophy : First Period. [Part IIL
osophical basis for the doctrines of inherited sin and vicarious satisfaction.
4. On the same grounds, we find at first the reverse lot befalling Nominalism, which during this period remained more repressed and stifled. Its beginnings l were harmless enough. It grew out of the fragments of Aristotelian logic, in particular out of the treatise De
In this the individual things of experience were desig- nated as the true "first" substances, and here the logico-grammatical rnle Was propounded that " substance " could not be predicate in a judgment : res non predicatur. Since now the logical significance of universals is essentially that of affording the predicates in the judgment, (and in the syllogism), it seemed to follow — this the commentary Super Porphyrium had already taught — that univer sals could not be substances.
Categories.
(with Eric of Auxerre, with the author of the commentary Super Porphyrium, etc. ), for with these writers we find at the same time the expression of Boethius that genus is substantiate similitudo ex diversis speciebus in cogitatione collecta.
* John of Salisbury says (Policr. VII. 12 ; cf. Metal. II. 17) that this opinion vanished again with its author Roscellinus.
1 The example of the house and its wall, which, according to Abelard (Otirr. lurd. 471). he employed in this connection, was certainly the most unfortunate that could be thought of. How inferior such considerations are to the begin nings of Greek thought I
Chak 1, § 23. ] Controversy over Universale : Nominalism. 297
The individual, however, is that which is given in the world of sensible reality ; hence for this metaphysics, knowledge consists only in the experience of the senses. That this sensualism appeared in the train of Nominalism, that there were men who allowed their thinking to go on entirely in corporeal images, we are assured, not only by Anselm, but also by Abelard : but who these men were and how they carried out tin ir theory we do not learn.
This doctrine became momentous through its application to theo logical questions by Berengar of Tours and Roscellinus. The one contested, in the doctrine of the Sacrament, the possibility of the transmutation of the substance while the former accidents were retained ; the second reached the consequence that the three persons of the divine Trinity were to be looked upon as three different substances, agreeing only in certain qualities and workings (tri-
theism).
5. In the literary development of these antitheses Realism passed
eurrentas riatonic, Nominalism as Aristotelian. The latter desig nation was evidently much more distorted than the former, but when we consider the defective nature of the transmitted material, we can understand that the mediating tendencies which thrust themselves in between Realism and Nominalism introduced them selves with the endeavour to harmonise the two great thinkers of antiquity. Of such attempts, two are chiefly worthy of mention : from the party of Realism the so-called Indifferentism, from that of Nominalism the doctrine of Abelard.
As soon as Realism abandoned the doctrine of the separate existence of the concepts (the Platonic xuptoyuk) and supported only the " universalia in re,'' the tendency asserted itself to con ceive of the different stages of universality as the real states of one and the same" substratum. One and the same absolute reality is, in its different status," animate being, man, Greek, Socrates. As the substratum of these states the moderate Realists regarded the uni
versal, and ultimately the ens reulissimum; it was therefore a significant concession to Nominalism when others made the indi vidual the supporter of these states. The truly existent, these latter thinkers conceded, is the individual thing, but the individual thing supports within itself as essential determinations of its own nature certain qualities and groups of qualities which it has in common with others. This real similarity (consimilitutlo) is the indifferent ("not different") element in all these individuals, and thus the genus is present in its species, the species in its indi
vidual examples, indifferenter. Adelard of Bath appears as the chief supporter of this line of thought, yet it must have had a
ja
298 Mediceval Philosophy : First Period. [Part IIL
wider extension, perhaps with a somewhat stronger nominalistic accent. 1
6. But it was Abelard ! with his all-sided activity who formed the vigorous centre in the controversy over universals. The pupil and at the same time the opponent both of Roscellinus and of William of Champeaux, he fought Nominalism and Realism each by means of the other, and since he takes the weapons of his polemic now from the one side now from the other, it could not fail to result that his position should be interpreted and judged oppo sitely. " And yet the outlines of this position are clear and dis tinct before us. In his polemic against all kinds of Realism, the thought that the logical consequence of Realism is pantheism returns so frequently and energetically that we must see in not merely convenient weapon for use in the ecclesiastical
then prevailing, but rather the expression of^njndividualistic con- viction easy to understand in tWcase^ojLa^firsQoality sn pmp/rgiSF. in, self-conscious, and proudly self-reliant. But this individuality had at the same time its inmost essence in clear, sharp, intellectual activity, in genuine French rationality. Hence its no less powerful opposition against the sensualistic tendencies of Nominalism.
Universals, Abelard teaches, cannot be things, but just as little can they be mere words. The word (vox) as complex of sounds, indeed something singular can acquire universal meaning only
mediately, by becoming predicate (sermo) . Such an employment of word for predicate possible only through conceptional thought (concepttis) which, by comparing the contents of percep tion, gains that which by its nature adapted to become a predicate
(quod de pluribus ncUum est prcedicari) The universal then the conceptual predicate (Sermonism), or the concept itself (VonceptHaP~
But if the universal as such gains its existence first in thought and judgment, and in the predicate which possible only by this means, and exists only there, not therefore entirely without relations to absolute reality. Universals could not be the indispensable forms of all knowledge, as they in fact actually are,
there were not something in the nature of things which we
According to the statements in the treatise De Generibus et Speciebus and the communications of Abelard in his gloss on Isagoge. It seems, too, that Wil liam of Champeaux inclined toward Indifferentism at the last.
Cf. S. M. Deutsch, Peter Abaelard, ein kritischer Theolog. ties zirolften Jahrhunderts (Leips. 1883).
Thus Hitter makes him a Realist Haureau, Nominalist.
Cf. Arist. De Interpr. 17 39.
It seems that Abelard at different imcs emphasised sometimes the one
alternative, sometimes the other, and perhaps his school also developed differ ently in accordance with these two lines of thought.
conditions
ism). '
t
5**11
if
is
7, a
is
a
;
; it
a
it is
. *
is
is
a ,
a
is
a
a
it,
Chai\ 1, § 23. ] Controversy over Universals . • Abelard. 299
apprehend and predicate in these universals. This something is the likeness or similarity (conformitas) of the essential characteristics
of individual substances. 1 Not as numerical or substantial
but as a multiplicity with like qualities, does the
exist in Nature, and it becomes a unitary concept which makes predication possible, only when it has been apprehended and con ceived by human thought. Even Abelard, however, explains this likeness of character in a multiplicity of individuals upon the hypothesis that God created the world according to archetypes which he carried in his mind (noys). Thus, according to his view, the universals exist firstly, before the things, as conceptus mentis in God ; secondly, in the things, as likeness of the essential characteristics of individuals; thirdly, after things, in the human understandings: its concepts and predicates acquired by comparative thought.
Thus, in Abelard r. lm difWont linw nf Hiniipht of the t/jme, beconje_uiiii£il. But he had developed the individual elements of this theory incidentally, partly in connection with his polemic, and perhaps, also, at different times with varying emphasis on this or that element : a systematic solution of the whole problem he never gave. As regards the real question at issue he had advanced so far that it was essentially his theory that became the ruling doctrine in the formula accepted by the Arabian philosophers (Avicenna), "mi- versalia ante multiplicitatem, in midtiplieitate et post muUiplicitatem ; " to universals belongs equally a significance ante rem as regards the divine mind, fa re as regards Nature, and post rem as regards human knowjeilge! And since Thomas and Duns Scotus in the main agreed in this view, the problem of universals, which, to be sure, has not yet been solved,' came to a preliminary rest, to come again into the foreground when Nominalism was revived (cf. § 27).
1 Others, who in the main had the same thought, e. g. Gilbert de la Porree, aided themselves with the Aristotelian distinction between first and second rebalances, or between substance and subsistence ; yet Gilbert uses the latter terms in a changed meaning as compared with their use by Abelard.
* Even if the problem as to the universals be restricted, according to the mode of Scholasticism, to the reality of the class-concepts, the problem has gone through essentially new phases in its further development, and cannot be regarded as finally solved by the position taken by science to-day. Behind this, however, rises the more general and more difficult question, what metaphysical significance belongs to those universal determinations, in a knowledge of which all explanatory science practically consists. Cf. H. Lotze, Logik (1-eips. 1874), «f . 111-321. [Eng. tr. ed. by B. Bosanquet, Oxford and X. Y. 1888. ]
To the investigators of to-day, therefore, who would throw the controversy orrr universals to the lumber pile of past theories, or treat it as a long-outgrown children's disease, so long as they do not know how to state with complete certainty and clearness in what consists the metaphysical " reality and efficiency of that which we call a lam nf Snture, we must still cry, mutato nomine de te
'•i'. u/. t narrata. " Of. , also, O. I^ibraann, Zur Analyii* der Wirklithkeit (2d ed. . Strassburg, 1880), 813 ff. , 471 ff. , and Qedanken und Thafachen (1 Heft, Mraasburg, 1882;, 89 ff.
identity, universal
300 Mediaeval Philosophy : First Period. [Part ILL
7. But Abelard has a still greater significance than that due to this central position in the controversy over universals, for he mani
fested in his own person, and expressed in typical form, the attitude which the dialectic, unfolding in connection with that controversy, occupied in the mental and spiritual life of that time. He is, so far as it was possible within the limits of the ideas of his time, the spokesman of free science, the prophet of the newly awakened im pulse toward real and independent knowledge. Abelard (and with him Gilbert) is first of all a rationalist ; thought is for him the norm of truth. Dialectic has the task of distinguishing between true and false. He may, indeed, subject himself to revelation preserved in tradition, but, he says, we believe divine revelation only because it is reasonable. Hence dialectic has, in his case, no longer really the task which Anselm, following Augustine, prescribed ot making" the content of faith comprehensible for Jhjs jnteUect^ he demands
for it also the critical right of deciding in doubtful cases according to its own rules. Thus, in the treatise "Sic et Non," he set the views of the Church Fathers over against each other to their recip rocal disintegration dialectically, in order to find at last what worthy of belief only in what capable of proof. So, too, in his Dialogus, the cognising reason appears as judge over the various religions, and while Abelard regards Christianity as the ideal con summation of the history of religions, there are expressions in his works in which he reduces the content of Christianity to the origi nal moral law, which was re-established by Jesus in its purity. From this standpoint, too, Abelard was the first to win once more a free, unbiassed view for the interpretation of antiquity. Little as he knew of them, he was an admirer of the Greeks he sees in their philosophers Christs before Christianity, and regarding men like Socrates and Plato as inspired, he asks (reversing the thought of the Church Fathers, cf. p. 223, note whether religious tradi tion may not perhaps have been partly created by these philoso phers. Christianity regarded by him as the philosophy of the Greeks made democratic. " "
Abelard, like almost all the Enlighteners of the Middle Ages,5 was an obedient son of the Church. But this fact were to put us in error as to the significance of his personality in the line just mentioned, — a significance rather for the history of religion and civilisation than as producing something philosophically new, — would be sufficient to take into account the attacks which he met.
Cf. the evidence for what follows in Reuter, Oesch. der Aufklarung ira tt. -A. , 183 ft. ,,.
A. Harnack, Dogmengeschichte, III. 322.
2
1 I.
it
is
if
5)
is
;
it.
'
is
Chap. 1, f 24. ] Dualism of Body and Soul. 301
In fact, his controversy with Bernard of Glairvaux is the conflict of knowledge with faith, of reason with authority, of science with the Church. And if Abelard lacked ultimately the weight and staying power of personality to prevail in such a contest,1 it will be remem bered, on the other hand, that a science such as the twelfth century i-ould offer — even aside from the external power to which the Church at that time had attained — must have been inferior to the mighty inward strength of faith, even if it had not been supported by so great and high a personality. For that bold postulate, so full of the future, that only unprejudiced scientific insight should deter mine faith, — what means did it then possess for its fulfilment ? Its only means were the hollow rules of dialectic ; and the content which this science had to exhibit, it owed just to that tradition against which it rebelled with its intellectualistic criticism. This science lacked the material strength to carry out the part to which
she felt herself called ; but she set herself a problem which, while she herself was not able to solve has never again vanished from the memory of European peoples.
We hear, indeed, of the disturbing practices of those who would have everything treated only "scientifically ";* complaints multiply after the time of Anselm over the growing rationalism of the Zeitgeist, over the evil men who will believe only what they can comprehend and prove, over the Sophists who, with impudent dexterity, know how to dispute pro el contra, over the " deniers," who from ration alists are said to have become materialists and nihilists — but not even the names of the men who answer to this description have been preserved, to say nothing of their doctrines. And just this lack in proper material of its own was the reason that the dialectic
movement, whose prince was Abelard, in spite of all its zeal and all its acuteness, ran out and became exhausted without direct and immediate results.
24. The Dualism of Body and Soul.
On these grounds explicable that in the twelfth and, in part. even in the eleventh century, we find the feeling of the unfruitful- ness of dialectic as widely extended as the feverish impulse to attain through to true knowledge. tendency that indicates disillusion manifested in this period by the side of the ardent desire for knowledge. Discontented with the subtilties of dialectic,
which, even in men like Anselm. had laid itself under obligation to
Ct Th. Zlegler, AbatlanTi Ethica, In Strat$hurg. Ahh. *. Philot. (Freiburg, lt*4),p. Ml.
•• Pwri pkilntophi "
••
is
it
§
A
it is
;
it,
302 Mediaeval Philosophy : Firtt Period. [Part III.
place the ultimate mysteries of faith upon a rational basis, some plunged from unfruitful theory into practical life, " in das Rauschen der Zeit, ins Rollen der Begebenheit," — into the rush of time, the rolling of events, — others plunged into a revelry in supra-rational Mysticism ; others, finally, into diligent work in empirical research. All the opposites, into which an intellectual activity that is predom inantly logical can pass over, develop by the side of dialectic^ and take their position against it in a more or less firmly concluded league, ■— Practice, Mysticism, and Empiricism.
There resulted from this at first a peculiarly distorted relation to scientific tradition. Aristotle was known only as the father of formal logic and master of dialectic, and in consequence of this igno rance was regarded as the hero of the purely intellectual mode of considering the world. Plato, on ihe contrary, was known partly as the creator of the doctrine of Ideas (unwittingly falsified in accordance with Neo-Platonic processes), partly, by virtue of the preservation of the Timasus, as the founder of a philosophy of Nature whose fundamental teleological character found the live-
, liest assent in religious thought. Hence when Gerbert, as a counter- poise against the pride of dialectic in which he himself had at first sjr made some not very successful attempts, commended the study of Nature, to which he had been stimulated by the example of the Arabians, and which corresponded to his own vigorous practical
bent toward active life, he could count on approval for this en deavour onto among men who, like him, were working toward an extension of raaterial information, and who, in aid of this, were appropriating tire results of ancient researches. Thus the return to antiquity makes hare its first appearance as the source of material knowledge in opposition to the Aristotelian dialectic, — a first weak
V*became the seat of the Platonism that was intimately associated with the study of Nature. Here worked the brothers Theodoric and Bernard of Chartres ; from this school William of Conches received his tendency. In their writings the powerful stimulus of classical antiquity unites with the interest of an active and vigorous
1 The cloister Monte Cassino in Italy formed one of the main seats of this movement. Here (about 1060) the monk Constantinus Africanus worked, who, as is known to have been the case also with the I'latonist Adelard of Bath, gathered his learning on his journeys in the Orient, and was especially active in the translation of medical treatises by Hippocrates and Galen. The effects of the activity in this cloister are shown not only in literature, but also in the
» dr ^
If r '
^ Xj*
jr . Jf
^ Renaissance whichjiatlf humanistic, halt naturalistic, aims to gain ~y J^ ahving content of knowledge. ' Gerbert's disciple, Fulbert (died
\ ^ ^^ 1029), opened the school of Chartres, which, in the following period,
\r. ^>
v i*5^ or
A\js>»^ «*',
founding of the famous school of Salerno in the middle of the twelfth century.