The question as to the relative reality of one pole or the other becomes
moot in the Hellenistic period. Aristoteleanism was generally absorbed into
the Middle Platonist systems, which identified the hierarchy of abstraction with
the cosmology of emanations from the highest universal to the lowest particu-
lar. In the Neoplatonism of late antiquity, the reality status of the bottom
sensory realm was so low that it was barely regarded as having any being at
all. Plotinus formulated a new level at the top of the hierarchy, above the high-
est Form of the Middle Platonists, transcending intellect and being. This was
the first philosophical Greek mysticism in the sense of Buddhist radical ineffa-
bility; but the mystical ground was still the fount from which emanate the
Forms. Universals continued to be regarded as the closest approach to the
religious peak, the opposite of the Buddhist view of universals as the source
of worldly illusion.
Here we see how important Christianity is in changing the direction of
Western philosophy. The challenge to Neoplatonism mounted by Christianity
tended to break the identification of universals with reality, opening the way
to the nominalism-realism debate. We see a first flurry at the end of the pagan
era, when Christian thinkers emphasized the concrete reality of the material
world and Jesus’ incarnation, and rejected the purely intellectual conception
of salvation in pagan Neoplatonism. Aristoteleanism, which in its original form
provided at least a moderate opposition to the dominance of Platonic univer-
sals, was revived, and questions of the relative standing of universals and
particulars was raised, first by Alexander of Aphrodisias (ca. 200 c.e.), then
most influentially in Boethius’s textbook (about 510).
With the collapse of literate culture at the end of the Roman Empire, the
Neoplatonic amalgamation of Plato and Aristotle sweeps over Christian phi-
losophy. The reviving waves of learning in the Christian Middle Ages reopened
the tensions. The first debates we hear about in the Carolingian period were
disputes between mild nominalism and extreme realism of universals. Again
after a decline in external conditions, when intellectual life came alive after
1000, the wandering debaters (Lanfranc, Berengar, Roscelin, the immediate
predecessors of Anselm and Abelard) established their turf on the question of
nominalism and universals; these debates culminated with Abelard, who pro-
posed a compromise doctrine (“conceptualism”) giving a more complex ver-
sion of the epistemological process of formulating abstractions.
Then Christian philosophy switches gears. The nominalism-realism debate
was the field warming up; now the level of abstraction was pushed upward to
more elaborate metaphysical systems. Since these mostly built on Neoplatonic
materials, universals became predominant again for three generations, and
nominalism dropped out. This had nothing to do with the external pressures
of Christian doctrine. Some nominalists got into heresy trouble for interpreting
Sequence and Branch in the Social Production of Ideas^ •^827