Abelard was born in 1079 in the small village of Le Pallet, about 10 miles from Nantes in the Duchy of Brittany. Baptized Peter, he received the name Abelard only as an adult, perhaps as something of a jest that referred to his large size and girth. His father, Berengar, was a knight and a landholder, and although it cannot be determined whether his family was of Breton origin, Berengar was probably a minor Breton noble, perhaps a castellan or a knight who guarded the castle of Le Pallet in exchange for a small landholding. Rather than accept his inheritance as the eldest son, Abelard rejected the privileges and military glory that his heritage might have brought him and did not become a knight, but instead pursued his intellectual interests as a cleric. For young Abelard, the path to fame was through learning, and he describes himself as using the arms of dialectical reasoning, rather than the conflict of warfare, to gain trophies.
Le Pallet was near the boundary with Anjou; as such, it was not too far from the towns in the Loire valley where a tradition of learning and
Composition of Latin poetry flourished. In Abelard’s day, schools taught a curriculum that consisted of the trivium (grammar, dialectic, and rhetoric) and the quadrivium (arithmetic, music, geometry, and astronomy). The trivium was dominated by dialectic, a discipline that stressed the science of discourse, commonly thought of as logic. In the first half of the twelfth century, the study of logic was based on the first two treatises of Aristotle’s work Organon, called Categories and Interpretation, and Porphyry’s Isagoge, along with a commentary by Boethius. Most of the Organon, which was important to the development of medieval theology known as scholasticism, was unknown in Western Europe during Abelard’s day. Although he would not be the first to do so, Abelard’s goal was to fuse human logic with Christian revelation to understand Christ as the logos, the ultimate logical truth. He believed that through logical discourse directed toward the most logical of religions, all humankind would embrace Christianity.
Determined to pursue the study of dialectic, Abelard left his small village while in his teens. By the 1090s, Abelard was in Loches, where he studied with one of the foremost masters of logic of the time, Roscelin of Compiegne (ca. 1050-ca. 1125). Because there is only one letter to Abelard that can be positively attributed to Roscelin, most of what historians know about Roscelin’s thought comes to us indirectly, from what others wrote about him. Roscelin was involved in a controversy with another leading intellectual of his day, Anselm of Canterbury, that mirrored to some extent the intense dispute between Abelard and Bernard of Clairvaux some years later. Anselm attacked Roscelin for his Trinitarian theology, which attempted to apply logic and grammar to understanding the Trinity. Based on what others wrote about his thought, it seems that Roscelin held that universals were mere words with no reality and that when we speak of the Trinity as one nature in three persons—that is, as a universal—we speak out of habit of thought. Therefore, the single unity of the divine trinity has no reality because universals have no reality beyond words. To Anselm and others, even if Roscelin’s ideas could not be proven explicitly heretical, his methods were. Anselm wrote a refutation of Roscelin in 1092, after which Roscelin went to England and then perhaps to Rome. By 1098, Anselm had provided a revised version of the refutation to Pope Urban II, claiming that it was heresy to use logic as a tool of theology and that dialecticians who believed universal substances were only words should be silenced. Roscelin’s ideas about understanding ancient texts as words, not as things, influenced Abelard’s own thought, although, later in his life, Abelard wrote contemptuously of Roscelin’s logic and theology. Perhaps because Abelard disagreed with Roscelin’s interpretation of universals, or perhaps because Roscelin wrote a contemptuous letter (his only surviving work) to Abelard mocking his castration, Abelard does not acknowledge that he studied under Roscelin; he fails to mention Roscelin at all in his Historia calamitatum.
What Are Universals, and Why Do They Matter?
Although the problem of universals was not addressed solely by medieval philosophers, the question of universals drew sophisticated and extended debates in the Middle Ages at a level of intellectual rigor not equaled since that time. Universals are signs common to several things or natures signified by a common term. For instance, think about two red balls. Redness of the red balls is a universal term because it signifies a repeatable entity with certain natures or characteristics predictably found in all red balls. Nominalism holds that all universals are mere names, not realities, and that only particular entities or events have reality. Realism, on the other hand, holds that universals have reality. The problem of universals arose from the third-century neo-Platonist philosopher Porphyry. Porphyry wrote a work called the I sagoge, an introduction to Aristotle's Categories in which he asks, are universals independent of the mind or are they conceptions of the mind? Furthermore, if universals are independent of the mind, are they corporeal or incorporeal? If they are incorporeal, do they exist separate from physical things or within them? To use the example of the red balls, is the redness something that exists independent of the mind, and, if so, is redness a tangible entity or does it exist within the ball?
In the Middle Ages, difficulties arose when the problem of universals was applied to understanding of the Trinity. Based on what others wrote about his thought, Roscelin subscribed to a nominalist view, holding that mere habit of speech prevented us from describing the Trinity as three entities or three substances. If the three substances were truly one entity, we also would have to believe that the Father and the Holy Spirit had become incarnate with the Son.
Abelard wrote a commentary on Porphyry in which he asked whether universals were things (res, in Latin) or words (verba). It seems that Abelard tried to seek a middle position between nominalism—like that of Roscelin—and realism—like that of William of Champeaux—holding that both particular objects and universal concepts are real.
World History
