History of Western Philosophy - Bertrand Russell [248]
The twelfth century, in this as in other matters, prepares the way for the thirteenth, to which the greatest names belong. The earlier men have, however, the interest of pioneers. There is a new intellectual confidence, and, in spite of the respect for Aristotle, a free and vigorous exercise of reason wherever dogma has not made speculation too dangerous. The defects of the scholastic method are those that inevitably result from laying stress on 'dialectic'. These defects are: indifference to facts and science, belief in reasoning in matters which only observation can decide, and an undue emphasis on verbal distinctions and subtleties. These defects we had occasion to mention in connection with Plato, but in the scholastics they exist in a much more extreme form.
The first philosopher who can be regarded as strictly a scholastic is Roscelin. Not very much is known about him. He was born at Compiègne about 1050, and taught at Loches, in Brittany, where Abélard was his pupil. He was accused of heresy at a council at Rheims in 1092, and recanted for fear of being stoned to death by ecclesiastics with a taste for lynching. He fled to England, but there he was rash enough to attack St Anselm. This time he fled to Rome, where he was reconciled to the Church. He disappears from history about 1120; the date of his death is purely conjectural.
Nothing remains of Roscelin's writings except a letter to Abélard on the Trinity. In this letter he belittles Abélard and makes merry over his castration. Ueberweg, who seldom displays emotion, is led to observe that he can't have been a very nice man. Apart from this letter, Roscelin's views are chiefly known through the controversial writings of Anselm and Abélard. According to Anselm, he said that universals are mere flatus vocis, 'breath of the voice'. If this is to be taken literally, it means that a universal is a physical occurrence, that, namely, which takes place when we pronounce a word. It is hardly to be supposed, however, that Roscelin maintained anything so foolish. Anselm says that, according to Roscelin, man is not a unity, but only a common name; this view Anselm, like a good Platonist, attributes to Roscelin's only conceding reality to what is sensible. He seems to have held, generally, that a whole which has parts has no reality of its own, but is a mere word; the reality is in the parts. This view should have led him, and perhaps did lead him, to an extreme atomism. In any case, it led him into trouble about the Trinity. He considered that the Three Persons are three distinct substances, and that only usage stands in the way of our saying that there are Three Gods. The alternative, which he does not accept, is, according to him, to say that not only the Son, but the Father and the Holy Ghost, were incarnate. All this speculation, in so far as it was heretical, he recanted at Rheims in 1092. It is impossible to know exactly what he thought about universals, but at any rate it is plain that he was some sort of nominalist.
His pupil Abélard (or Abailard) was much abler and much more distinguished. He was born near Nantes in 1079, was a pupil of William of Champeaux (a realist) in Paris, and then a teacher in the Paris cathedral school, where he combated William's views and compelled him to modify them. After a period devoted to the study of theology under Anselm of Laon (not the archbishop), he returned to Paris in 1113, and acquired extraor dinary popularity as a teacher. It was at this time that he became the lover of Héloïse, niece of Canon Fulbert. The canon had him castrated, and he and Héloïse had to retire from the world, he into a monastery at St Denis, she into a nunnery at Argenteuil. Their famous correspondence is said, by a learned German named Schmeidler, to have been entirely composed by Abélard as a literary fiction. I am not competent to judge as to the correctness of this theory, but nothing in Abélard's character makes it impossible. He was always vain, disputatious, and contemptuous; after his misfortune