The fame of Abelard's teaching was probably a considerable factor in the establishment of the reputation of Paris as an intellectual centre. We shall see later how its fame was consolidated by the school of St Victor and by Peter the Lombard and others. To the contemporaries of Abelard, however, it did not as yet seem inevitable that Paris should become the intellectual centre of France and Europe. London, we remember, despite its wealth and population, and its importance as the administrative, financial, judicial and social capital, never had a student population in the middle ages, if we except the young lawyers of the Inns of Court in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. In the first half of the twelfth century, in similar wise, the intellectual life of France was centred at a dozen or more cathedral cities. Among these pride of place must be given to Chartres, which for more than fifty years had a succession of masters of unrivalled celebrity, and which preserved far into the following century its own tradition of teaching and culture in a rapidly changing world.
Chartres, a small cathedral city some fifty miles south-west of Paris, had first risen to fame, as we have seen, under its bishop Fulbert, the pupil of Gerbert of Aurillac, and himself later the master of Berengar, but during the latter half of the eleventh century it had been no more distinguished than a dozen rivals. Chartres continued, however, to preserve more purely than others its literary, humanistic tradition, and this was developed, with a corresponding attention to philosophy, by a series of eminent masters. The training in letters led on to a course of dialectic which, while abreast of the latest additions to the Aristotelian corpus, was based on Boethius and on the Platonic Timaeus and such other indications of Platonic and Neoplatonic tradition as were available.
Though never, it would seem, a resident at Chartres, the Englishman Adelard of Bath is usually reckoned along with the School of Chartres in the early decades of the century. A restless traveller, who made contacts with Arabic and Greek science and thought both in south Italy and the eastern Mediterranean, he was, as we shall see in a later chapter, a significant figure in the history of medieval mathematics and natural science. He was also, in his treatise De eadem et diver so, a champion of the use of reasoning and dialectic in theology. In the matter of universals, which for him bordered on metaphysics, he aimed at combining Plato and Aristotle. Universals, i.e., genera and species, were immanent in the individual things, which were cognisable by the senses, and from which the genera could be abstracted by the mind; these latter existed as ideas in the mind of God.
Of the Chartrain masters, the first of the new school was Bernard, master at Chartres by c. 1 1 19 and chancellor by 1 124, dying perhaps by 1 1 26. No complete work of his has as yet been discovered and published, but John of Salisbury has left more than one description of his doctrines and methods of teaching. Among these is the famous and oft-quoted simile (not, in fact, original to Bernard) of the moderns as dwarfs who can see further than the giants, the ancients, on whose shoulders they are perched. There is also a vivid and attractive account of his manner of literary teaching, with its evening memory-exercise, reading and prayer, and its morning repetition and composition. John quotes his list of the six keys of learning: humbleness of heart, love of inquiry, a peaceful life, silent meditation, poverty and exile from home, and remarks that he was the most finished Platonist of the age. As a Platonist Bernard distinguished between the Ideas, which are eternal, and the Forms, reflections of the ideas, created by nature with the things which they specify. It was he who originated the phrase 'native forms' (formae nativae).
Bernard was succeeded as chancellor of Chartres by the teacher who, after Abelard, must be ranked as the most eminent thinker of the century and who, as an ecclesiastic, was considered by no less a judge than John of Salisbury, his erstwhile pupil, worthy of a full-length comparison with St Bernard. Gilbert de Ia Porree is, indeed, an example of a type recurring throughout the ages, of an eminent man who to his contemporaries appears among the very greatest of an epoch, nulli secundus, but who fails in the judgment of posterity, either through want of genius or through some lack of central humanity, to remain a man of all time, and who consequently
becomes a figure of merely historical interest. Perhaps, in the eighteenth century, Voltaire and Hume may be similarly instanced as contrasting with Burke and Johnson. Born c. 1080, Gilbert was a pupil of Bernard of Chartres, and succeeded him as chancellor by 1 126. By 1 141 he was in Paris, where he taught, among others, John of Salisbury, becoming in 1 142 bishop of Poi tiers; he died a year after St Bernard in 1 154. He is best known to history as the object of an onslaught by the abbot of Clairvaux, who wished for a condemnation of his teaching on the Trinity, and as such he is the 'obscure opponent' of the saint in Matthew Arnold's sonnet. In the later middle ages he was celebrated as the reputed author of the Liber sex principiorum, a thorough study of the six predicaments or categories left unexamined by Aristotle (i.e., action, passion, place, time, position and habit). The book became a classic, was commented upon by Albert the Great and others, and remained a text-book till the end of the Middle Ages, when it attained the distinction not only of print but of translation into Ciceronian Latin. The attribution to Gilbert, however, first explicitly noted in Albert's day and accepted without question till our own, has been convincingly refuted in recent years. Gilbert de Ia Porree is remarkable both as an expounder and as a practitioner of the early scholastic method, and as an original metaphysician. In both capacities he draws freely upon Boethius, upon whom he wrote a detailed commentary, and from whom he drew the distinction between the two meanings of substance, 'that which is' and 'that which makes a thing what it is'. Following his master, Bernard, he took something from both Aristotle and Plato. Like Plato a strong realist, he distinguished between the exemplary, unchanging Idea, and the created Form which gave its nature to individual things, but in the process of knowing he followed the Aristotelian theory of abstraction. His conflict with St Bernard arose from an application of his metaphysical doctrines to the Trinity. While allowing, with the constant tradition of the Fathers and the Church, that God was an entirely 'simple' Being, he nevertheless held that the three Persons were one God only by reason of the 'form' of divinity common to all, while on the other hand, just as 'humanity' is not the individual man, though it constitutes him as such, so the divine essence, though constituting each Person God, is not itself God. It was in opposition to this that Bernard made his celebrated declaration: 'Let it be written with iron upon adamant, let it be carved upon flint, that the divine essence, form, nature, goodness, wisdom, virtue and power are each truly God' (Migne, PL clxxxv 590).
We are not here concerned with the theological implications of the 122
controversy, nor with the personal charges that each party made against the other. Quite apart from these, the incident is of interest as yet one more example of uncertainty of method in the dialectical explanation of theological truth. The account given of Gilbert's position in the last paragraph might convey the impression that the trouble arose merely on account of his transference to theology of his Platonic doctrine of ideas and his Boethian doctrine of subsistence. This, however, would seem to do less than justice to the intellectual stature of the bishop of Poitiers. A better explanation might be that Gilbert, like Abelard, and perhaps also like Berengar and Roscelin before him, failed to distinguish between logic and metaphysics, and also between physical and transcendental reality. On this view he would have held, in a way common to the logicians of his day but hard for us to appreciate, that words and logical predicates and categories had their exact counterparts in extra-mental reality. They were in this way extreme realists, as Duns Scotus was to be, later, in a somewhat different fashion. They did not distinguish between a real, and a merely logical, distinction or relationship. If the mind could consider God only by separating his goodness from his justice, his nature from the three persons, then these were, in fact, separate in some way. To dialecticians with this point of view the formulas of the faith, though sincerely held, seemed dialectically inadequate. Neither they, nor the theologians, had as yet reached the point of clearly delimiting truth accessible to the unaided human reason, and truth surpassing the grasp of the reason and attainable only by faith or the divinely illuminated intellect, and of realizing that formulae applicable to the former would be useless when applied to the latter kind of knowledge. Bernard, sincere in his action and right in his essential judgement as a theologian, failed to see that Gilbert was involved in what to him was a very real intellectual problem. Gilbert, for his part, while genuinely anxious to preserve orthodoxy, was unwilling to abandon a dialectical technique which was clearly causing trouble to those not adept in it, yet which seemed to him to be valid and indeed essential to any rational discussion of the subject.
Returning a little in chronological order, we may note two other distinguished Chartrains. William of Conches (c. 1080-c. 1 154) was a pupil of Bernard of Chartres and the tutor of the young prince, later Henry II of England; he also had John of Salisbury for a time amongst his disciples. He was an extreme Platonist, and his early identification of the Holy Spirit with the world-soul was attacked by William of St Thierry and retracted. This academic trend towards pantheism, which had no counterpart in the theology of the persons
concerned, was continued by Bernard Silvestris, or Bernard of Tours (who is not to be confused with the chancellor of Chartres from 1 156 and the bishop of Quimper (1 159-67)). He went far towards becoming a complete philosophical pantheist, holding that everything in the world derived its origin from a world-soul, an emanation of the divine reason. Such views, though in many ways a consequence of trends at Chartres, were not typical of the School, which continued to exist as a focus of fine letters and natural science for more than a century after the death of Gilbert de Ia Porree.
Among the luminaries of the School of Chartres at this time may fitly be included the most accomplished scholar and stylist of his age, who for subsequent centuries has seemed to embody the literary and philosophic culture which we find so copiously displayed in his writings: the Englishman, John of Salisbury. John of Salisbury is one of those men who, by a happy disposition of circumstances, both represent and describe for us the higher mental life of an age. He is the Erasmus, the Johnson of the twelfth century. The friend or acquaintance of almost all the celebrated men of north-western Europe at an epoch when men of genius abounded, and when the society of the literate was more extensive in space and more homogeneous in spirit than ever before or since, he was a keen observer, a watchful but not a malevolent critic, and the master of a clear and idiomatic style perfectly adapted to the revelation of a sane, sincere, cautious and somewhat sophisticated mind.
Born at Old Sarum c. 1 1 15, he received his first schooling from a
parish priest and then spent twelve years in France, frequenting doctor and sage. Abelard, Robert of Melun, William of Conches, Thierry of Chartres, Robert Pullen and Gilbert de Ia Porree, with many others, were among his masters, and his rich and manifold correspondence shows him to have been on easy or friendly relations with many of the great ecclesiastics, cardinals, bishops and abbots, of his time. From 1 148 he was a frequent visitor to the papal court, and was present at the council of Rheims in 1 148 when the teaching of Gilbert de Ia Porree was impugned, but not condemned. Already in 1 147 he had become chaplain and secretary, with a testimonial from St Bernard, to Archbishop Theobald of Canterbury, and thence forward most of the archbishop's correspondence was in fact his work and often his design. It was of these years, when Theobald had around him at Canterbury a group of canonists, theologians and men of letters, that Stubbs wrote so eloquently, and to this group the name even of university has been applied - perhaps that of a medieval All Souls College would be nearer the mark. Always persona grata with 124
the Roman Curia, and the intimate friend of the English pope, Hadrian IV, it was John who at Benevento obtained the papal grant of Ireland to Henry II, but he mysteriously fell under the king's displeasure: probably Henry thought that he was too much the friend of Rome, and John retired somewhat from his public activities. This gave him time for writing, and these years saw the completion of his two most considerable works, the Policraticus, on the faults and foibles of those in high life, and the Metalogicon, a treatise on Aristotelian logic, ranging widely over contemporary trends and personalities in the schools, and John's own experiences. These books were both finished about 1 159 and dedicated and despatched in that year to the author's friend and late colleague, Thomas Becket, then serving as chancellor with his master at the siege of Toulouse. On Theobald's death John continued at Canterbury in the entourage of archbishop Thomas; he was one of those sent to receive the pallium from the pope, and he went into exile ahead of Thomas in 1 163 or 1 1 64. To this exile, mainly spent with his friend Pierre de Celie, abbot of Rheims, belongs his third important work, the Historia pontifical is. Throughout the six following years his letters are one of the most valuable sources for the history of the struggle between archbishop and king. John consistently supported the archbishop, though his very different mind and character kept him from sharing to the full either the impetuosities or the heroic self-sacrifice of his master. He was present at the interview between the knights and the archbishop in his hall at Canterbury on 29 December 1 1 70, and remarked characteristically that the archbishop was the only one of the party who seemed to wish to die for the sake of dying. He probably fled just before the murder in the cathedral, but from the first moment afterwards devoted his energies to vindicating for his friend the titles of martyr and saint. In 1 1 76 he was elected bishop of Chartres, largely on account of his close ties with St Thomas, and spent the last four years of his life in diocesan administration, dying in 1 180. There is a certain fittingness in this official association with Chartres and its rising cathedral of one who stands in the history of thought as an anima naturaliter Carnotensis.
John of Salisbury first received serious attention from two distinguished scholars, R. L. Poole and C. C. ]. Webb, who gave us, in addition to articles and summaries, a biography and elaborate editions of some of his works; more recently the Historia pontificalis and the letters have been re-edited in Nelson's (now Oxford) Medieval Texts. His works, though written in a Latin style unsurpassed in purity and flexibility by any writer of the century, and though
reflecting on every page the cool, urbane and critical outlook and fine discrimination of their author, do not make easy reading. This is in part because, like all free compositions of the Middle Ages, they are very discursive and without sequence of topic and crescendo of interest, partly because the world to which they introduce us is so unlike our own, and the outlook more alien to us than the simpler, more emotional and puritanical outlook of St Bernard, and partly because they deal in so many places with the technicalities of an outmoded phase of philosophical training. They are, nevertheless, a mine of information on personalities and doctrines. The Policraticus, or Statesman's Guide, nominally a criticism of the pursuits of courtiers, develops into a treatise of political thought, the first of its kind in medieval England, in which the character and duties of the ideal prince are set out and contrasted with the behaviour of a tyrant. The Metalogicon is a defence of logic, particularly of the formal discipline of Aristotle, without which all argument and all philosophy is clumsy, amateurish and vain, but John, though a believer in sound technical training, deplored an absorption in arid and superficial disputes, and the prostitution of dialectic for monetary gain. Here and elsewhere he attacks a type of clerk, and their representative Cornificius, hitherto unidentified, who study for purely utilitarian ends. The Historia pontijicalis, which has survived incomplete in a single manuscript, was intended to be a continuation of a chronicle based on Sigebert of Gembloux, which took the history of the Church down to the Council of Rheims. John at that time was in attendance at the papal Curia; and his history carries the story down to 1 152, shortly before the death of Eugenius III. It is full of vivid character sketches, scenes drawn from the life in the midst of great events, and shrewd judgements. Nothing, perhaps, shows better the finished product of the humane literary education of the twelfth century than his description of the rival champions at Rheims, Bernard of Clairvaux, the saintly reformer, and Gilbert de Ia Porree, the learned and revered master and bishop.
Both were exceptionally learned and extremely eloquent, though their interests differed. The abbot, as his writings show, was a preacher of such excellence that I would think no one since St Gregory the Great could bear comparison with him. He commanded a singularly attractive style, and his acquaintance with the Scriptures was such that he could expound everything he had to say most happily in the words of the prophets or the apostles. He had indeed made the Scriptures all his own so fully that he could scarcely talk or preach or write letters without using their language. I cannot recall reading anyone who more