A similar fortune attended the attempt of the French canon Rousselin (Roscellinus), also in the twelfth century, to rationalize the doctrine of the Trinity. Proceeding logically as a "Nominalist," denying the reality of abstractions, he argued that if the Three Persons were one thing it was only a nominal thing. His heresy, however, admittedly ended in simple tritheism; and after he, like Berengar, had on pressure recanted, his subsequent withdrawal of his recantation did not revive excitement. Not till the sixteenth century did Unitarianism begin to assert itself against Trinitarianism, and Deism against both. There was indeed a great development of general rationalism in philosophy in the twelfth century, especially in France, as represented by Abailard; and even in the eleventh the argument of Anselm to prove the existence of God shows that very radical scepticism had indirectly made itself heard; but no philosophic movement affected the teachings and practices of the Church as such. As for the kind of rationalism which denied the immortality of the soul, though it seems to have been somewhat common in Florence early in the twelfth century, it never took such propagandist form as to bring on it the assault of the papacy; and the occasional philosophic affirmation of the eternity of matter met the same immunity. It is remarkable that, despite the denunciation of all the truths of ancient science by the Church, the doctrine of the roundness of the earth was still affirmed in the eighth century by an Irish priest of Bavaria named Vergilius, who was duly denounced for his heresy by St. Boniface, and deposed by the pope, but afterwards reinstated and finally sainted. How the doctrine fared in detail does not appear, but the knowledge persisted; and though in the fourteenth century Nicolaus of Autricuria was compelled to recount his teaching of the atomistic theory, in the fifteenth his namesake of Cusa taught with impunity the rotation of the earth on its axis, being despite that made a cardinal; while the Italian poet Pulci with equal impunity affirmed the existence of an Antipodes. Nicolaus of Cusa even put forth the old pagan doctrine of the infinity of the physical universe--the beginning of modern pantheistic and atheistic philosophy.