new schools, while masters and students who studied the quadrivium generally did so
outside of the classroom.
Scholars looked to logic to clarify what they knew and lead them to further
knowledge. That God existed, nearly everyone believed. But a scholar like Anselm of
Bec (whom we met above, p. 174, as the archbishop of Canterbury) was not
satisfied by belief alone. Anselm’s faith, as he put it, “sought understanding.” He
emptied his mind of all concepts except that of God; then, using the tools of logic, he
proved God’s very existence in his Monologion. In Paris a bit later, Peter Abelard
declared that “nothing can be believed unless it is first understood.” He drew together
conflicting authoritative texts on 158 key subjects in his Sic et non (Yes and No),
including “That God is one and the contrary” and “That it is permitted to kill men
and the contrary.” Leaving the propositions unresolved, Abelard urged his students to
discover the reasons behind the disagreements and find ways to reconcile them. Soon
Peter Lombard (c.1100–1160) adopted Abelard’s method of juxtaposing opposing
positions, but he supplied his own reasoned resolutions as well. His Sententiae was
perhaps the most successful theology textbook of the entire Middle Ages.
One key logical issue for twelfth-century scholars involved the question of
“universals”: whether a universal—something that can be said of many—is real or
simply a linguistic or mental entity. Abelard argued that “things either individually or
collectively cannot be called universal, i.e., said to be predicated of many.” He was
maintaining a position later called “nominalist.”^10 The other view was the “realist”
position, which claimed that things “predicated of many” were universal and real. For
example, when we look at diverse individuals of one kind, say Luna and Sole, we say
of each of them that they are members of the same species: cat. Realists argued that
“cat” was real. Nominalists thought it a mere word.
Later in the twelfth century, scholars found precise tools in the works of Aristotle
to resolve this and other logical questions. During Abelard’s lifetime, very little of
Aristotle’s work was available in Europe because it had not been translated from
Greek into Latin. By the end of the century, however, that lack had been filled by
translators who traveled to Islamic or formerly Islamic cities—Toledo in Spain,
Palermo in Sicily—where Aristotle had already been translated into Arabic and
carefully commented on by Islamic scholars such as Ibn Sina (Avicenna; see p. 126
above) (980–1037) and Ibn Rushd (Averroes) (1126–1198). By the thirteenth
century, Aristotle had become the primary philosopher for the scholastics (the
scholars of medieval European universities).
The lofty subjects of the schools had down-to-earth, practical consequences in
