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The 12th century in philosophy – The Sententiaries

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The twelfth century is a century of ardent and varied thought, tumultuous and confused too: on the one hand a need for systematization and unity which gives birth to these kinds of theological encyclopedias which are the books of the Sentences– , on the other hand, a great curiosity of mind which translates in certain circles into a return to ancient humanism and a new attention to the sciences of the quadrivium. Let us add that Antiquity is gradually being revealed through translations of hitherto unknown authors and that libraries are being enriched.

It seems that we can disentangle four main directions of mind, which manifest themselves in different environments: the theologians authors of Sentences which bring together and unify the Christian tradition.; the Platonists of the Chartres school, who are true humanists; the mystics of the cloister of Saint-Victor; finally a pantheist and naturalist movement which does not go without worrying spiritual power. But there are also the independents who allow themselves to be placed in any category, especially Abelard, whose intelligence, complex and sensitive, reflects all the passions of his time.

The twelfth century was the era of these great theological encyclopedias, where attempts were made to “bring together in a single body”, as Ives of Chartres said, everything relating to Christian life, discipline, faith and morals. There is no philosophical concern in all this, but the practical necessity, for Christianity to keep its spiritual unity, of bringing together so much scattered data: canons, decrees and decretals, opinions of the Fathers, rules of practical morality and religious life, all this often appearing contradictory and yet it was a question of unifying. The needs to which these productions correspond are of the same order as those to which our codes correspond, a practical and legal need much more than a philosophical one. The work we undertake is therefore of a philological and critical order: Bemold de Constance indicates, at each point, the apparently contradictory authorities, and, like Vincent de Lérins in the past, gives rules for reconciling or choosing between them. Ives of Chartres (died in 1116) gives, in his Decretum in seventeen books, a mirror (speculum) of the doctrines of the faith and the rules of morals. Later, Raoul Ardent’s Speculum universale (1) will be like a history of the Christian man, where we find, alongside specifically Christian teaching, everything that could remain of the humanist morality of Antiquity: before the revelation of salvation through Christ, the author explains the fundamental moral concepts of good and virtue (book I); before expounding the faith and the sacraments (books VII and VIII), he develops human thoughts on virtue and vice (book VI); before dealing with theological virtues, he speaks of cardinal virtues: juxtaposition of Christian truths and a humanist morality that he naively tries to integrate into the faith; does he find, for example, the ancient classification of sciences (transmitted by Isidore or Bede) into theoretical, ethical, logical, to which is added mechanics, he hastens to piously note that these four sciences are four remedies against the four defects resulting from original sin, ignorance, injustice, error, bodily weakness.

This codification of Christianity gave rise to a series of works that can be followed throughout the twelfth century: the Questions or Sentences of Anselme de Laon (died in 1117), the Sentences of Guillaume de Champeaux (1070- 1121), those of Robert Pullus (died in 1150), Robert de Melun (died in 1167), and especially those of Pierre the Lombard, the Master of Sentences (died in 1164), who, soon after his death, were already used of explanatory texts to Peter the Eater (died in 1176) and to Pierre de Poitiers (died in 1205); their study was to be in the following century the foundation of all theological teaching.

The Sic et non of Abelard, who was one of the masters of Lombard, belongs to the same literary genre, since, on each of the points of the Christian faith, it brings together the opinions of the Fathers by grouping them into two classes, those who say the yes, and those who say no. Abelard certainly did not want to draw any skeptical conclusions, but only “to provoke readers to exert themselves more in the search for truth and to make them more subtle through this search” (2); and he also began by giving rules to reconcile opinions.

These works naturally presuppose, as we see, rational work without which any codification is impossible: basically, nothing but authority; but to establish the meanings and value of an authority, reasoned discussion; on each of the paragraphs of which the distinctions or chapters of his book are composed, Pierre Lombard opposes texts to texts, the pro and the contra, and he chooses, not by quotations, but in discussion. Thus the so-called scholastic method is established, a dialectical method which is made to judge or test opinions, not to invent: the subtle mind is not that which discovers a new truth, but rather that which grasps a concordance or a contradiction between opinions; the only possible intellectual method in a domain where the truth is considered as already given.

Another important point is the distribution of materials in the work of Abelard and Lombard; the substructure is the story of the Christian drama: we successively study God and the Trinity, creation, the angels, man and original sin, the incarnation and redemption, the sacraments and eschatology. There is a sort of schema of the universe which has gradually imposed itself, which will now dominate and which we will find in many philosophers, long after the Middle Ages have expired. First the painting of the hierarchy of realities: God, angels and man; then the drama itself: original sin, redemption and the return to God of the elect, a double theme which includes many variations, but whose limit variations, in a way, are a Platonism in the manner of Scotus Erigena which makes a movement of descent and return towards God an eternal necessity, and the orthodoxy of a Lombard or a Saint Thomas, who place at the beginning of each act of the drama a completely free and contingent initiative.

References

(1) Fixed by Grabmann at the beginning of the century, this work actually dates from the end (cf. B. Geyer, Radulphus Ardens, Theol Quartelschrift, 1911, and M. T. d’ALVERNY, “L’obit de Raoul Ardent”, Archives cThist doctr, 1940-1942).
(2) Mïgne, Latin Patrology, CLXXVIII, p. 1349 a.

Source: Émile Bréhier(1951). Histoire de la philosophie, Presses Universitaires de France. Translation and adaptation by © 2024 Nicolae Sfetcu

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