BY THOMAS DAVIDSON

Pierre, the eldest son of Bérenger and Lucie (Abélard?) was born at
Palais, near Nantes and the frontier of Brittany, in 1079. His knightly
father, having in his youth been a student, was anxious to give his
family, and especially his favorite Pierre, a liberal education. The boy
was accordingly sent to school, under a teacher who at that time was
making his mark in the world,--Roscellin, the reputed father of
Nominalism. As the whole import and tragedy of his life may be traced
back to this man's teaching, and the relation which it bore to the
thought of the time, we must pause to consider these.

[Illustration: Abélard]

In the early centuries of our era, the two fundamental articles of the
Gentile-Christian creed, the Trinity and the Incarnation, neither of
them Jewish, were formulated in terms of Platonic philosophy, of which
the distinctive tenet is, that the real and eternal is the universal,
not the individual. On this assumption it was possible to say that the
same real substance could exist in three, or indeed in any number of
persons. In the case of God, the dogma-builders were careful to say,
essence is one with existence, and therefore in Him the individuals are
as real as the universal. Platonism, having lent the formula for the
Trinity, became the favorite philosophy of many of the Church fathers,
and so introduced into Christian thought and life the Platonic dualism,
that sharp distinction between the temporal and the eternal which
belittles the practical life and glorifies the contemplative.

This distinction, as aggravated by Neo-Platonism, further affected