Until the time of Henry III, the Milanese had usually been content to follow their archbishop. But the Patarine movement, mentioned in an earlier chapter, changed this: the archbishop sided with the nobility, while a powerful popular movement opposed him and
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* There was an antipope throughout most of this time. At the death of Hadrian IV, the two claimants, Alexander III and Victor IV, had a tug-ofwar for the papal mantle. Victor IV (who was the antipope), having failed to snatch the mantle, obtained from his partisans a substitute which he had had prepared, but in his haste he put it on inside-out.
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them. Some beginnings of democracy resulted, and a constitution arose under which the rulers of the city were elected by the citizens. In various northern cities, but especially in Bologna, there was a learned class of lay lawyers, well versed in Roman law; moreover the rich laity, from the twelfth century onwards, were much better educated than the feudal nobility north of the Alps. Although they sided with the Pope against the Emperor, the rich commercial cities were not ecclesiastical in their outlook. In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, many of them adopted heresies of a Puritan sort, like the merchants of England and Holland after the Reformation. Later, they tended to be free-thinkers, paying lip-service to the Church, but destitute of all real piety. Dante is the last of the old type, Boccaccio the first of the new.
THE CRUSADES
The Crusades need not concern us as wars, but they have a certain importance in relation to culture. It was natural for the papacy to take the lead in the initiating of a Crusade, since the object was (at least ostensibly) religious; thus the power of the popes was increased by the war propaganda and by the religious zeal that was excited. Another important effect was the massacre of large numbers of Jews; those who were not massacred were often despoiled of their property and forcibly baptized. There were large-scale murders of Jews in Germany at the time of the first Crusade, and in England, at the time of the third Crusade, on the accession of Richard CÅ“ur de Lion. York, where the first Christian Emperor had begun his reign, was, aptly enough, the scene of one of the most appalling mass-atrocities against Jews. The Jews, before the Crusades, had almost a monopoly of the trade in Eastern goods throughout Europe; after the Crusades, as a result of the persecution of Jews, this trade was largely in Christian hands.
Another and very different effect of the Crusades was to stimulate literary intercourse with Constantinople. During the twelfth and early thirteenth centuries, many translations from Greek into Latin were made as a result of this intercourse. There had always been much trade with Constantinople, especially by Venetians; but Italia
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traders did not trouble themselves with Greek classics, any more than English or American traders in Shanghai troubled themselves with the classics of China. (European knowledge of Chinese classics was derived mainly from missionaries.)
THE GROWTH OF SCHOLASTICISM
Scholasticism, in its narrower sense, begins early in the twelfth century. As a philosophic school, it has certain definite characteristics. First, it is confined within the limits of what appears to the writer to be orthodoxy; if his views are condemned by a council, he is usually willing to retract. This is not to be attributed entirely to cowardice; it is analogous to the submission of a judge to the decision of a Court of Appeal. Second, within the limits of orthodoxy, Aristotle, who gradually became more fully known during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, is increasingly accepted as the supreme authority; Plato no longer holds the first place. Third, there is a great belief in “dialectic” and in syllogistic reasoning; the general temper of the scholastics is minute and disputatious rather than mystical. Fourth, the question of universals is brought to the fore by the discovery that Aristotle and Plato do not agree about it; it would be a mistake to suppose, however, that universals are the main concern of the philosophers of this period.
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
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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 Saint 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
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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,
