Note 172 — Chapter IX · CHRISTENDOM IN THE MIDDLE AGES

Such reasonings obviously tend to implicate theology; and Roscelin was either led or helped by his Nominalist training to deny either explicitly or implicitly the unity of the Trinity, arguing in effect that, as only individuals are real existences, the actuality of the persons of the Trinity involves their disunity.172 The thesis, of course, evoked a storm, the English Archbishop Anselm and others producing indignant answers. Of Roscelin’s writing only one letter is extant; and even Anselm, in criticizing his alleged doctrine, admits having gathered it only from his opponents, whose language suggests perversion.173 But if the testimony of his pupil Abailard be truthful,174 he was at best a confused reasoner; and in his theology he got no further than tritheism, then called ditheism.175 Thus, though “Nominalism, by denying any objective reality to general notions, led the way directly to the testimony of the senses and the conclusions of experience,”176 it did so on lines fatally subordinate to the theology it sought to correct. Roscelin’s thesis logically led to the denial not only of trinity-in-unity but of the Incarnation and transubstantiation; yet neither he nor his opponents seem to have thought even of the last consequence, he having in fact no consciously heretical intention. Commanded to recant by the Council of Soissons in 1092, he did so, and resumed his teaching as before; whereafter he was ordered to leave France. Coming to England, he showed himself so little of a rebel to the papacy as to contend strongly for priestly celibacy, arguing that all sons of priests and all born out of wedlock should alike be excluded from clerical office. Expelled from England in turn for these views, by a clergy still anti-celibate, he returned to Paris, to revive the old philosophic issue, until general hostility drove him to Aquitaine, where he spent his closing years in peace.177