A much less public dispute, but of great philosophical interest, took place in the early 860s, between Ratramnus, a monk of Corbie (d. c. 868) and an anonymous monk of Sainte-Germer de Fly, who seems to have been presenting the doctrines of his (otherwise unknown) Irish master, Macarius. The only record of the controversy is in the Liber de anima that Ratramnus wrote for his former abbot, Odo, who had become Bishop of Beauvais - a work which itself survives only in a seventeenth-century copy (Ratramnus of Corbie 1952; cf. Delhaye 1950; Marenbon 1981:67-70). The discussion arises from a passage in Augustine’s De quantitate animae, at the back of which stand the Neoplatonic doctrines of Soul as an hypostasis - the lowest level of reality - and of the World Soul. Augustine asks whether all souls are one, or are individuals’ souls entirely separate, or are they both one and many. Macarius apparently took this third answer as Augustine’s own view, but, at least as presented by Ratramnus, the issues discussed are not to do with the soul as such, but rather with the status of universals. Ratramnus believes (almost certainly wrongly, but he would not have known the Neoplatonic background) that, when Augustine talks of a single soul, he is merely referring to soul as a species. Basing himself on passages in Boethius that go against a realist view of universals, Ratramnus argues that species do not have any subsistence, but exist merely in the mind. Indeed, he insists (1952, 29:9-23, cited by Erismann 2010) that properly speaking the only things that are substances are those we can see and can point to with our finger. Macarius’ position is, by contrast, a type of realism - and it has recently been very convincingly seen as an inchoate version of a view that is found in his fellow Irishman Eriugena and remains important, perhaps central, to thinking about universals until the time of William of Champeaux: immanent realism (Erismann 2010:334-343). Immanent realists hold that the same universal substance is present in each member of a species, and that the individual members are differentiated from one another only by accidents: in substance, therefore - just as Macarius seems to have claimed - all souls are one soul.
World History
