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Updated: June 23, 2025
It was the former of these gifts that made him, in literal truth, the centre of learned and learning Christendom, the idol of several thousand eager scholars. Nor, finally, were these thousands the "horde of barbarians" that jealous Master Roscelin called them. It has been estimated that a pope, nineteen cardinals, and more than fifty bishops and archbishops were at one time among his pupils.
Then arose such men as Erigena, Roscelin, Bérenger, Lanfranc, Anselm, Bernard, and others, all more or less orthodox, but inquiring and intellectual. It was within the walls of the cloister that the awakening began and the first impulse was given to learning and philosophy.
Now Roscelin advanced the doctrine, that, if the three persons in the Trinity were one thing, it would follow that the Father and the Holy Ghost must have entered into the flesh together with the Son; and as he believed that only individuals exist in reality, it would follow that the three persons of the Godhead are three substances, in fact three Gods.
Augustine especially, in the true spirit of Platonism, abhorred doctrines which made the existence of God depend upon our own abstractions. To him there was a reality in love, in friendship, in justice, in beauty; and he repelled scepticism as to their eternal existence, as life repels death. Roscelin took away the platform from whose lofty heights Socrates and Plato would survey the universe.
And yet with Anselm and Roscelin the Scholastic age began. They were the founders of the Realists and the Nominalists, those two schools which divided the Church in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, and which will probably go on together, under different names, as long as men shall believe and doubt. But this subject, on which I have only entered, must be deferred to the next lecture.
No one of mark opposed the Realism which had now become one of the accepted philosophical opinions of the age, until Roscelin, in the latter part of the eleventh century, denied that universals have a real existence.
As a result, the personality of man, and with it the immortality of the soul, disappeared, and even the personality of God threatened to lose itself in the universe which He had created. These tendencies will be clear from a short account of the chief schoolmen or writers on Scholastic Philosophy. The first great names are those of Roscelin and Anselm of Canterbury.
Hence their terrible antagonism even to philosophical doctrines which conflicted with the orthodox belief, on which, as they thought, the salvation of mankind rested. But Anselm did not rest with combating the Nominalism of Roscelin.
Roscelin, a theologian by accident, was answered by Anselm who was primarily a theologian, and a dialectician by accident. If Roscelin was the founder of Nominalism Anselm identified Realism with the doctrine of the Church. But Anselm's Realism is not the result of independent thought. In his methods he has been rightly styled the "last of the Fathers."
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