Abelard was a new type of man in Paris of the 12th century. We can see the difference in the generational divide that separates him from his father. Abelard's father was a knight and Abelard a man of letters, a shift he describes as a move from Mars to Minerva, from military arms to verbal dispute and debate. I was so carried away by my love of learning, he writes, that I renounced the glory of a soldier's life, made over my inheritance and rights of the eldest son to my brothers, and withdrew from the court of Mars in order to kneel at the feet of Minerva. I preferred the weapons of dialectic to all the other teachings of philosophy, and, armed with these, I chose the conflicts of disputation instead of the trophies of war. Within the world of awakening letters, sometimes referred to as the Renaissance of the 12th century, Abelard is a young Turk up against the theological establishment, especially the great eminent of Anselm of Laon. I approached this old man, he brags, who owed his reputation more to long practice than to intellect or memory. Anyone who knocked at his door to seek an answer to some question went away more uncertain than he came. Anselm could win the admiration of an audience, but he was useless when put to the question. This put to the question takes us in the direction of Abelard's great irritating intervention in the history of philosophy and bespeaks the shift from theology to philosophy, from belief to logic. Which is synonymous with the rise of the university. What was most offensive to Abelard's rivals, as well as to ecclesiastical authority, right up to the Pope, is that Abelard turns the dialectics, the modes of reasoning of the pagan philosophers, upon the tenets of theology. This is the meaning of the passage where he states, One day it happened that after a session of Sentences we students were joking among ourselves, when someone rounded on me and asked what I thought of the reading of the Holy Scriptures, when I had hitherto studied only philosophy. I replied that concentration on such reading was most beneficial for the salvation of the soul, but that I found it most surprising that for educated men the writings or glosses of the Fathers themselves were not sufficient for interpreting their commentaries without further instruction. This session of Sentences refers to the mode of teaching, according to what was known as the Lectio Divina, an exposition, verse by verse, according to the writings of the church Fathers. Which produces glosses, an understanding of the letter, the sense, and the deeper meaning, or Sentence, of Holy Scripture. Abelard, on the other hand, wants to read the Bible without commentary. He wants immediate contact with the text. He is a close reader and what today would be considered a new critic or a deconstructionist. A prime example of Abelard's confrontation of an ancient theological problem head on without authority can be found in his treatment of the core theological issue of the relationship of the three of the Trinity to the one of the Trinity in logical terms. Now it happened, he writes, that I first applied myself to lecturing on the basis of our faith by analogy with human reason, and composed a theological treatise On the Unity and Trinity of God for the use of my students who were asking for human and logical reasons on this subject, and demanded something more intelligible rather than mere words. In fact they said that words were useless if the intelligence could not follow them, that nothing could be believed unless it was first understood, and that it was absurd for anyone to preach to others what neither he nor those he taught could grasp with understanding. Abelard wants to introduce reason into faith. And he ends up, finally, by inserting the question of the Trinity into the ancient debate, revived in the late 11th century by Roscelin of Compiegne, concerning the status of universal linguistic terms. That is, the question of whether common nouns refer to ideas which actually exist somewhere, are real, and to which all particular references refer. Let's say that the idea or ideal of a table exists, of which all the tables we encounter with our senses are degraded images. Or, on the other hand, whether a common noun like table is simply a verbal term, a name, a sort of composite picture of all the particular tables to which it might refer. In the first instance, a philosophy known as realism, words are connected in some organic way to the things they designate. In the second, known as nominalism, they are more detached and signify more powerfully in relation to each other than to the things to which they refer. Abelard caused an enormous stir when he turned such a tool of linguistic and philosophical analysis upon the core theological issue of the Trinity. He maintained that the difference between Father, Son and Holy Spirit was either substantial, that is to say real, or it was accidental. If the difference is substantial, that is real, then the one of the Trinity cannot be three. If the difference between the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit is accidental, that is merely verbal, then they cannot be one. Put another way, there would be no place in which their unity might reside. Abelard's solution to this problem was to posit a third term between these two possibilities. The three persons of the Trinity in here, he maintained, as an idea in the mind, an intellectio, on the model of the way that abstract nouns signify both the existence of an ideal substance and the division of that substance into particular objects in material reality.
