Cathédrale de Chartres; Civilization, Medieval; Mont-Saint-Michel (Abbey : France)
atheists had they dared. The first class was represented by the
School of Saint-Victor; the second by John of Salisbury himself; the
third, by a class of schoolmen whom he called Cornificii, as though
they made a practice of inventing horns of dilemma on which to fix
their opponents; as, for example, they asked whether a pig which was
led to market was led by the man or the cord. One asks instantly:
What cord?--whether Grace, for instance, or Free Will?
Bishop John used the science he had learned in the school only to
reach the conclusion that, if philosophy were a science at all, its
best practical use was to teach charity--love. Even the early,
superficial debates of the schools, in 1100-50, had so exhausted the
subject that the most intelligent men saw how little was to be
gained by pursuing further those lines of thought. The twelfth
century had already reached the point where the seventeenth century
stood when Descartes renewed the attempt to give a solid,
philosophical basis for deism by his celebrated "Cogito, ergo sum."
Although that ultimate fact seemed new to Europe when Descartes
revived it as the starting-point of his demonstration, it was as old
and familiar as Saint Augustine to the twelfth century, and as
little conclusive as any other assumption of the Ego or the Non-Ego.
The schools argued, according to their tastes, from unity to
multiplicity, or from multiplicity to unity; but what they wanted
was to connect the two. They tried realism and found that it led to
pantheism. They tried nominalism and found that it ended in
materialism. They attempted a compromise in conceptualism which
begged the whole question. Then they lay down, exhausted. In the
seventeenth century the same violent struggle broke out again, and
wrung from Pascal the famous outcry of despair in which the French
language rose, perhaps for the last time, to the grand style of the
twelfth century. To the twelfth century it belongs; to the century
of faith and simplicity; not to the mathematical certainties of
Descartes and Leibnitz and Newton, or to the mathematical
abstractions of Spinoza. Descartes had proclaimed his famous
conceptual proof of God: "I am conscious of myself, and must exist;
I am conscious of God and He must exist." Pascal wearily replied
that it was not God he doubted, but logic. He was tortured by the
impossibility of rejecting man's reason by reason; unconsciously
sceptical, he forced himself to disbelieve in himself rather than
admit a doubt of God. Man had tried to prove God, and had failed:
"The metaphysical proofs of God are so remote (eloignees) from the
reasoning of men, and so contradictory (impliquees, far-fetched)
that they make little impression; and even if they served to
convince some people, it would only be during the instant that they
see the demonstration; an hour afterwards they fear to have deceived
themselves." Moreover, this kind of proof could lead only to a
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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