realism. The party division may therefore be dated from the close of the ninth century. Remigius was a far more important person than Heric. At Rheims, and afterwards at Paris, he was unrivalled as a teacher of grammar, dialectic, and music; and the rapidly advancing greatness of the Paris school, assisted by the reputation not only of the teacher but of such of his pupils as Odo, the second abbat of Cluny and the creator of its fame, would naturally tend to fix the principles of Remigius in an age which had no mind for independent thought. Thus, with apparently the single exception of the learned centre of Saint Gall, realism held everywhere an undisputed reign. Gerbert, whose dialectical activity is represented for us by a debate in which he took part before Otto the Third, and by a slight treatise in which he pursued a little further one of the points raised on that occasion, was hardly at all in sympathy with the subjective aims of metaphysics; although probably his literary interest and his energy as a teacher were the means of restoring to the use of the schools some of the materials for logical study which had fallen into neglect in the century before him. Otherwise his practical temper was satisfied to accept the tradition as he found it. It was not until thought was again turned to religious questions, and doctrine subjected to the test of reason, that the opposition was revived.
The principles of the realist combined readily with a Christian idealism: he relied upon the safe foundation of authority—the various elements of the church tradition, the Bible, the fathers, the canons of councils, and the decretals of popes; and treated logic as its useful but docile handmaid.[1] The nominalist on the contrary, though he might not wish to overthrow the ancient and respectable fabric of authority, reduced its importance
- ↑ 'Quae tamen artis humanae peritia,' says saint Peter Damiani, Opuse. xxxvi. 5, 'si quando tractandis sacris eloquiis adhibetur,non debet ius magisterii sibimet arroganter arripere, sed velut ancilla dominae quodam familiatus obsequio subservire, ne si praecedit oberret.
