The 12th Century (C)

(Originally written July 29, 2006 in Book 5)

Roscelin recanted the heresy at Rheims then fled to England. While in England he attacked Anselm, then fled to Rome.

Roscelin's writings are all lost except for a letter to Abelard on the Trinity. Roscelin mocks Abelard in the letter.

Ueberweg describes Roscelin as not a very nice man.

Roscelin's teachings are known through the writings of Abelard and Anselm.

Anselm states that Roscelin believed universals are "breath of voice" or that they physically occur when we speak them. Russell contends that Roscelin would not have believed something so foolish. Anselm states that Roscelin also believed man is not a unity, but a collection under a common name. Anselm stated that Roscelin believed reality is what is sensible. Roscelin believed (according to Anselm) that a whole is merely a word, but reality rests in the parts of a whole. He was led by this view to extreme atomism and troubles in dealing with the Trinity.

He held that the Godhead was three distinct substances and thus there are three Gods. He stated this because if they are one substance then all three had been incarnate in Jesus Christ. He couldn't accept that. But this is what he recanted in Rheims.

Abelard was Roselyn's pupil. He was born near Nantes in 1079. He first studied under the realist William of Champeaux in Paris. He taught at the Paris cathedral school where he argued against William's realism and compelled his former teacher to change his views. He left Paris to study theology under Anselm of Leon then returned to Paris in 1113. Upon returning he became widely popular as a teacher and became the lover of Heloïse, niece of Canon Fulbert. Canon Fulbert castrated him and he joined the monastery at St. Denis.

Abelard was vain, disputatious and tempts. After being castrated he was angry and humiliated. (Linehan - what a shock!)

He was condemned for an unorthodox book on the Trinity in 1121.

He then became the abbot of Saint Gildas in Brittany for four years. He hated it because he saw the monks as uncivilized.

In 1141 he was again condemned at the insistence of St. Bernard. He retired to Cluny and died in 1142.

Abelard's most famous book is "Yes and No". It is a dialectical argument for and against many theses. It did not however produce any conclusions.

Abelard held that, apart from Scriptures, dialectic is the sole road to truth.

He considered logic to be the chief science.

He is best known for logic and theory of knowledge.

Universals - "what can be predicated of many different things" (Russell, 430).

Abelard held that we do not predicate a thing, but only a word. He was a nomalist in this sense.

He fought realism.

He regards Platonic Ideas as the pattern of creation in the mind of God.

St. Bernard charged him without fully understanding Abelard's teachings. The heresies Bernard charged him with are:
1) Treating the Trinity like an Arian
2) Treating grace like a Pelagian
3) Treating the Person of Christ like a Nestorian
4) Being a heathen by making Plato to be a Christian
5) Destroying Christianity by maintaining that God can be understood through reason alone.

In all reality it was his hostile disposition towards clergy that caused his heretical label and not his teachings.

Abelard was more dialectical than any others at his time.

1) The school of Chartres was a humanistic movement
2) Abelard of Bath translated Euclid due to a renaissance of mathematical learning
3) There was a strong mystical movement headed by St. Bernard.

St. Bernard was not an intellectualist, but was extremely influential.

1) His father was a knight in the first Crusade
2) He was a Cistercian monk
3) He was the abbot at Clairvaux
4) He was influential in ecclesiastical politics
5) He fought antipopes
6) he combatted heresy in Northern Italy and Southern France
7) He brought philosophers down with the weight of orthodoxy
8) He set into motion the second Crusade

"Although a politician and a bigot, he was a man of genuinely religious temperament" (Russel, 439).

Bernard's reverence of the Papacy increased the power of the Pope.