A History of Western Philosophy

by Bertrand Russell

  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 extraordinary 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 he was also angry and humiliated. Héloïse’s letters are much more devoted than his, and one can imagine him composing them as a balm to his wounded pride.

  Even in his retirement, he still had great success as a teacher; the young liked his cleverness, his dialectical skill, and his irreverence towards their other teachers. Older men felt the correlative dislike of him, and in 1121 he was condemned at Soissons for an unorthodox book on the Trinity. Having made due submission, he became abbot of Saint Gildas in Brittany, where he found the monks savage boors. After four miserable years in this exile, he returned to comparative civilization. His further history is obscure, except that he continued to teach with great success, according to the testimony of John of Salisbury. In 1141, at the instance of Saint Bernard, he was again condemned, this time at Sens. He retired to Cluny, and died the next year.

  Abélard’s most famous book, composed in 1121-22, is Sic et Non, “Yes and No.” Here he gives dialectical arguments for and against a great variety of theses, often without attempting to arrive at a conclusion; clearly he likes the disputation itself, and considers it useful as sharpening the wits. The book had a considerable effect in waking people from their dogmatic slumbers. Abélard’s view, that (apart from Scripture) dialectic is the sole road to truth, while no empiricist can accept it, had, at the time, a valuable effect as a solvent of prejudices and an encouragement to the fearless use of the intellect. Nothing outside the Scriptures, he said, is infallible; even Apostles and Fathers may err.

  His valuation of logic was, from a modern point of view, excessive. He considered it pre-eminently the Christian science, and made play with its derivation from “Logos.” “In the beginning was the Logos,” says Saint John’s Gospel, and this, he thought, proves the dignity of Logic.

  His chief importance is in logic and theory of knowledge. His philosophy is a critical analysis, largely linguistic. As for universals, i e., what can be predicated of many different things, he holds that we do not predicate a thing, but a word. In this sense he is a nominalist. But as against Roscelin he points out that a “flatus vocis” is a thing; it is not the word as a physical occurrence that we predicate, but the word as meaning. Here he appeals to Aristotle. Things, he says, resemble each other, and these resemblances give rise to universals. But the point of resemblance between two similar things is not itself a thing; this is the mistake of realism. He says some things that are even more hostile to realism, for example, that general concepts are not based in the nature of things, but are confused images of many things. Nevertheless he does not wholly refuse a place to Platonic ideas: they exist in the divine mind as patterns for creation; they are, in fact, God’s concepts.

  All this, whether right or wrong, is certainly very able. The most modern discussions of the problem of universals have not got much further.

  Saint Bernard, whose saintliness did not suffice to make him intelligent, * failed to understand Abélard, and brought unjust accusations against him. He asserted that Abélard treats the Trinity like an Arian, grace like a Pelagian, and the Person of Christ like a Nestorian; that he proves himself a heathen in sweating to prove Plato a Christian; and further, that he destroys the merit of the Christian faith by maintaining that God can be completely understood by human reason. In fact, Abélard never maintained this last, and always left a large province to faith, although, like Saint Anselm, he thought that the Trinity could be rationally demonstrated without the help of revelation. It is true that, at one time, he identified the Holy Ghost with the Platonic Soul of the World, but he abandoned this view as soon as its heretical character was pointed out to him. Probably it was more his combativeness than his doctrines that caused him to be accused of heresy, for his habit of criticizing pundits made him violently unpopular with all influential persons.

  Most of the learned men of the time were less devoted to dialectic than Abélard was. There was, especially in the School of Chartres, a humanistic movement, which admired antiquity, and followed Plato and Boethius. There was a renewed interest in mathematics: Adelard of Bath went to Spain early in the twelfth century, and in consequence translated Euclid.

  As opposed to the dry scholastic method, there was a strong mystical movement, of which Saint Bernard was the leader. His father was a knight who died in the first Crusade. He himself was a Cistercian monk, and in 1115 became abbot of the newly-founded abbey of Clairvaux. He was very influential in ecclesiastical politics—turning the scales against antipopes, combating heresy in Northern Italy and Southern France, bringing the weight of orthodoxy to bear on adventurous philosophers, and preaching the second Crusade. In attacking philosophers he was usually successful; but after the collapse of his Crusade he failed to secure the conviction of Gilbert de la Porrée, who agreed with Boethius more than seemed right to the saintly heresy-hunter. Although a politician and a bigot, he was a man of genuinely religious temperament, and his Latin hymns have great beauty.* Among those influenced by him, mysticism became increasingly dominant, till it passed into something like heresy in Joachim of Flora (d. 1202). The influence of this man, however, belongs to a later time. Saint Bernard and his followers sought religious truth, not in reasoning, but in subjective experience and contemplation. Abélard and Bernard are perhaps equally one-sided.

  Bernard, as a religious mystic, deplored the absorption of the papacy in worldly concerns, and disliked the temporal power. Although he preached the Crusade, he did not seem to understand that a war requires organization, and cannot be conducted by religious enthusiasm alone. He complains that “the law of Justinia
n, not the law of the Lord” absorbs men’s attention. He is shocked when the Pope defends his domain by military force. The function of the Pope is spiritual, and he should not attempt actual government. This point of view, however, is combined with unbounded reverence for the Pope, whom he calls “prince of bishops, heir of the apostles, of the primacy of Abel, the governance of Noah, the patriarchate of Abraham, the order of Melchizedek, the dignity of Aaron, the authority of Moses, in judgeship Samuel, in power Peter, in unction Christ.” The net result of Saint Bernard’s activities was, of course, a great increase of the power of the Pope in secular affairs.

  John of Salisbury, though not an important thinker, is valuable for our knowledge of his times, of which he wrote a gossipy account. He was secretary to three archbishops of Canterbury, one of whom was Decket; he was a friend of Hadrian IV; at the end of his life he was bishop of Chartres, where he died in 1180. In matters outside the faith, he was a man of sceptical temper; he called himself an Academic (in the sense in which Saint Augustine uses this term). His respect for kings was limited: “an illiterate king is a crowned ass.” He revered Saint Bernard, but was well aware that his attempt to reconcile Plato and Aristotle must be a failure. He admired Abélard, but laughed at his theory of universals, and at Roscelin’s equally. He thought logic a good introduction to learning, but in itself bloodless and sterile. Aristotle, he says, can be improved on, even in logic; respect for ancient authors should not hamper the critical exercise of reason. Plato is still to him the “prince of all philosophers.” He knows personally most of the learned men of his time, and takes a friendly part in scholastic debates. On revisiting one school of philosophy after thirty years, he smiles to find them still discussing the same problems. The atmosphere of the society that he frequents is very like that of Oxford Common Rooms thirty years ago. Towards the end of his life, the cathedral schools gave place to universities, and universities, at least in England, have had a remarkable continuity from that day to this.

  During the twelfth century, translators gradually increased the number of Greek books available to Western students. There were three main sources of such translations: Constantinople, Palermo, and Toledo. Of these Toledo was the most important, but the translations coming from there were often from the Arabic, not direct from the Greek. In the second quarter of the twelfth century, Archbishop Raymond of Toledo instituted a college of translators, whose work was very fruitful. In 1128, James of Venice translated Aristotle’s Analytics, Topics, and Sophistici Elenchi; the Posterior Analytics were found difficult by Western philosophers. Henry Aristippus of Catania (d. 1162) translated the Phaedo and Meno, but his translations had no immediate effect. Partial as was the knowledge of Greek philosophy in the twelfth century, learned men were aware that much of it remained to be discovered by the West, and a certain eagerness arose to acquire a fuller knowledge of antiquity. The yoke of orthodoxy was not so severe as is sometimes supposed; a man could always write his book, and then, if necessary, withdraw its heretical portions after full public discussion. Most of the philosophers of the time were French, and France was important to the Church as a make-weight against the Empire. Whatever theological heresies might occur among them, learned clerics were almost all politically orthodox; this made the peculiar wickedness of Arnold of Brescia, who was an exception to the rule. The whole of early scholasticism may be viewed, politically, as an offshoot of the Church’s struggle for power.

  CHAPTER XII

  The Thirteenth Century

  IN the thirteenth century the Middle Ages reached a culmination. The synthesis which had been gradually built up since the fall of Rome became as complete as it was capable of being. The fourteenth century brought a dissolution of institutions and philosophies; the fifteenth brought the beginning of those that we still regard as modern. The great men of the thirteenth century were very great: Innocent III, Saint Francis, Frederick II, and Thomas Aquinas are, in their different ways, supreme representatives of their respective types. There were also great achievements not so definitely associated with great names: the Gothic cathedrals of France, the romantic literature of Charlemagne, Arthur, and the Niebelungen, the beginnings of constitutional government in Magna Carta and the House of Commons. The matter that concerns us most directly is the scholastic philosophy, especially as set forth by Aquinas; but I shall leave this for the next chapter, and attempt, first, to give an outline of the events that did most to form the mental atmosphere of the age.

  The central figure at the beginning of the century is Pope Innocent III (1198-1216), a shrewd politician, a man of infinite vigour, a firm believer in the most extreme claims of the papacy, but not endowed with Christian humility. At his consecration, he preached from the text: “See, I have this day set thee over the nations and over the kingdoms, to pluck up and to break down, to destroy and to overthrow, to build and to plant.” He called himself “king of kings, lord of lords, a priest for ever and ever according to the order of Melchizedek.” In enforcing this view of himself, he took advantage of every favourable circumstance. In Sicily, which had been conquered by the Emperor Henry VI (d. 1197), who had married Constance, heiress of the Norman kings, the new king was Frederick, only three years old at the time of Innocent’s accession. The kingdom was turbulent, and Constance needed the Pope’s help. She made him guardian of the infant Frederick, and secured his recognition of her son’s rights in Sicily by acknowledging papal superiority. Portugal and Aragon made similar acknowledgements. In England, King John, after vehement resistance, was compelled to yield his kingdom to Innocent and receive it back as a papal fief.

  To some degree, the Venetians got the better of him in the matter of the fourth Crusade. The soldiers of the Cross were to embark at Venice, but there were difficulties in procuring enough ships. No one had enough except the Venetians, and they maintained (for purely commercial reasons) that it would be much better to conquer Constantinople than Jerusalem—in any case, it would be a useful stepping-stone, and the Eastern Empire had never been very friendly to Crusaders. It was found necessary to give way to Venice; Constantinople was captured, and a Latin Emperor established. At first Innocent was annoyed; but he reflected that it might now be possible to re-unite the Eastern and Western Churches. (This hope proved vain.) Except in this instance, I do not know of anybody who ever in any degree got the better of Innocent III. He ordered the great Crusade against the Albigenses, which rooted out heresy, happiness, prosperity, and culture from southern France. He deposed Raymond, Count of Toulouse, for lukewarmness about the Crusade, and secured most of the region of the Albigenses for its leader, Simon de Montfort, father of the father of Parliament. He quarrelled with the Emperor Otto, and called upon the Germans to depose him. They did so, and at his suggestion elected Frederick II, now just of age, in his stead. But for his support of Frederick he exacted a terrific price in promises—which, however, Frederick was determined to break as soon as possible.

  Innocent III was the first great Pope in whom there was no element of sanctity. The reform of the Church made the hierarchy feel secure as to its moral prestige, and therefore convinced that it need no longer trouble to be holy. The power motive, from his time on, more and more exclusively dominated the papacy, and produced opposition from some religious men even in his day. He codified the canon law so as to increase the power of the Curia; Walther von der Vogelweide called this code “the blackest book that hell ever gave.” Although the papacy still had resounding victories to win, the manner of its subsequent decline might already have been foreseen.

  Frederick II, who had been the ward of Innocent III, went to Germany in 1212, and by the Pope’s help was elected to replace Otto. Innocent did not live to see what a formidable antagonist he had raised up against the papacy.

  Frederick—one of the most remarkable rulers known to history—had passed his childhood and youth in difficult and adverse circumstances. His father Henry VI (son of Barbarossa) had defeated the Normans of Sicily, and married Constance, heiress to the
kingdom. He established a German garrison, which was hated by the Sicilians; but he died in 1197, when Frederick was three years old. Constance thereupon turned against the Germans, and tried to govern without them by the help of the Pope. The Germans were resentful, and Otto tried to conquer Sicily; this was the cause of his quarrel with the Pope. Palermo, where Frederick passed his childhood, was subject to other troubles. There were Muslim revolts; the Pisans and Genoese fought each other and every one else for possession of the island; the important people in Sicily were constantly changing sides, according as one party or the other offered the higher price for treachery. Culturally, however, Sicily had great advantages. Muslim, Byzantine, Italian, and German civilization met and mingled there as nowhere else. Greek and Arabic were still living languages in Sicily. Frederick learnt to speak six languages fluently, and in all six he was witty. He was at home in Arabian philosophy, and had friendly relations with Mohammedans, which scandalized pious Christians. He was a Hohenstaufen, and in Germany could count as a German. But in culture and sentiment he was Italian, with a tincture of Byzantine and Arab. His contemporaries gazed upon him with astonishment gradually turning into horror; they called him “wonder of the world and marvellous innovator.” While still alive, he was the subject of myths. He was said to be the author of a book De Tribus Impostoribus—the three impostors were Moses, Christ, and Mahomet. This book, which never existed, was attributed, successively, to many enemies of the Church, the last of whom was Spinoza.