Anselm’s proof is one of the monuments of Western philosophy, provok-
ing controversy immediately and at intervals ever since. Its fertility comes
from the way it succinctly poses boundary issues of the field: the nature of
rational criteria, of self-reference and contradiction, of the border between the
transcendental and the humanly accessible. How was this metaphysical peak
reached so early in the medieval Christian network? This was no situation of
conceptual naiveté; the networks were relatively new but built on the accumu-
lated concepts of Greek philosophy. The reality of universals was an issue
transmitted from late antiquity by the attempt of Boethius to synthesize Plato
and Aristotle.^4 The relatively shallow networks at the time of renewed intel-
lectual life after 1000 set up fairly simple, intense lines of conflict, as a result
of which the anti-rationalists within theology allowed the rationalist position
to come out in full purity.
The chain of followers of Lanfranc, Anselm, and Roscelin, as well as the
anti-philosophical conservatives, soon produced a more complex lineup of
conflicts. This thickening of the network shifted the focus toward the nature
of concepts and of argument itself. The self-consciousness of the network
manifests itself in the person who is most thoroughly connected among its
factions. Peter Abelard, a knight-errant of dialectic, wandered from group to
group challenging the masters. Abelard is linked with Anselm at second re-
move, and directly with at least three secondary figures and a host of minor
figures of his time. In this vortex Abelard rejected both realism and nominal-
ism, innovating an epistemology focusing on the process of abstraction itself,
breaking new ground in logic and theory of meaning. The sharpening of logical
concepts was the second great monument of medieval creativity.
Abelard’s most powerful opponent, Saint Bernard of Clairvaux, was the
greatest of the anti-philosophers, building in opposition to the dialecticians a
mysticism of devotion. The two men were rival organizers of the social struc-
tures taking shape at this time. Abelard was the foremost of the new breed,
the professional teachers now proliferating in northern France; his technical
interests were those of a group which was gradually becoming self-conscious
as an occupational guild that would soon form the university. Bernard was the
charismatic leader of monastic reform, whose Cistercian order was exploding
with hundreds of new foundations (Figure 9.2). Bernard’s energy came from
the possibilities of power within burgeoning social organizations and move-
ments. He preached the Crusade as the church became the vehicle for the
military coordination of Christendom; at home he attempted to stamp out
divisions within the church, persecuting Abelard and his like for heresy. Noth-
ing epitomizes the situation better than Bernard descending on Paris in 1139
to preach the danger of mere learning and to bring back converts from the
schools to the Cistercian citadels on the frontiers (Ferruolo, 1985: 47).466 •^ Intellectual Communities: Western Paths