Page:Catholic Encyclopedia, volume 6.djvu/629

 GILBERT

555

GILBERT

tioned, his most important writings are the "History of the Viceroys of Ireland" (1865), "Calendar of the Ancient Records of Dublin" (7 vols., 1889-98); "History of the Irish Confederation and the War in Ireland, 1641-9" (7 vols., 1882-91); "Jacobite Narra- tive of the War in Ireland, 1688-91" (1892). Celtic scholars are indebted to him for the photographic reproductions of the celebrated ancient Irish MSS., for the establishment of the Todd lectureship in Celtic, and also for editions of "Leabhar na h-Uidhre" and "Leabhar Breac."

Life by Kosa Mui.holi.and Gilbert (London, IDO')); Falkiner in Die. Nat. Biog.

A. A. MacErlean.

Gilbert de la Porree (Gilbertus Pouhetanus), Bishop of Poitiers, philosopher, theologian and gen- eral scholar; b. at Poitiers in 1076; d. in 1154; studied under Hilary in Poitiers, under Bernard of Chartres at the famous school there, and finally under Anselm at Laon, where he probably first met Peter Abelard. Re- turning later to Chartres, he taught philosophy and the arts there for about fifteen years, receiving a can- onry and holding at intervals the office of chancellor of the school. He was present at the Council of Sens (1141), at which Abelard was censured. The follow- ing year we find him teaching in Paris, with John of Salisbury among his pupils; but only for a brief space, for in 1142 he became Bishop of Chartres. His high character for learning and ecclesiastical zeal seems to have won for him the universal respect and veneration of his contemporaries. But his teaching regarding the Blessed Trinity involved him in trouble for a time. Two of his own archdeacons, alarmed at its novelty, reported it to Eugene III, and induced St. Bernard to oppose Gilbert's doctrines in the pope's pre.sence at the Councils of Paris (1147) and Reims (1148). The dis- pute ended amicably without any very definite issue. Gilbert died universally regretted in the year 1154.

He lived and taught durmg the critical epoch when the great scholastic synthesis, both in philosophy and in theology, was just beginning to take shape. The principles, methods, and doctrmes of purely rational research were being extended from philosophy to the- ology and applied — often rashly, as with Abelard — to the elucidation of revealed truth. Aristotle's philos- ophy was finding its way through Moorish and Jewish channels into the Christian schools of Europe, gradu- ally to supplant Platonic influences there, and the dis- cussion of the great central problem of the validity of knowledge — the controversy on the Universals, as it was then called — was waxing warm and vehement. Gilbert's place among his contemporaries was a lead- ing and honoured one; while his philosophical writ- ings secured for him a fame that long survived him. In his " Liber Sex Principiorum " he explained the la.st six categories of Aristotle, the latter having treated expres.sly only the first four. The work immediately took its place as a scholastic textbook, side by side with the "Isagoge" and the "Categories", and was studied and expounded for three centuries in the me- dieval .schools. His " Commentary on the Four Books of Boethius", especially on the two "De Trinitate", contain those applications of his doctrine on the Uni- versals which for a time brought his orthodoxy under suspicion.

Gilbert's attitude on the controverted question of the Universals has been very variously interpreted: as ontologistic realism (Prantl), empiric realism (Clerval, Zigliara). moderate realism ill-defined (de Wulf, Turner). 'The latter is, perhaps, nearest to the truth. Gilbert's doctrine, like that of Abelard, is an attempt, though only partially successful, to repudi- ate the extreme realism of the epoch, with its panthe- istic tendencies. The universal concept (of the genus or class) has corresponding to it in the world of sense a number of similar singular objects. This similarity is, however, explained by Gilbert in a way that brings

it quite near identity. The created essence (lorma na- tim, clSos) of the individual member of a class is a copy of the Divine exemplar, " singularia in singulari- bus, sed in omnibus universalis" (John of Salisbury, Metal., II, xvii). He means that the forma na- tiva is not really (numerically) one and the same in omnibus, but only conceptually, i. e. by the considera- tion of the mind ; so much is fairly evident from an- other reference of his to " universalia . . qu£e ab ipsis individuis humana ratio quodammodo ab- strahit" (P. L., LXIV, 1374). Yet there are grounds for supposing that he attributed to the jormii niitiva, as it is in the individual, the universality of the logical concept. In the actual individual he distinguishes between the common or class essence which he calls subsistentia, e. g. "humanity" or "human nature" in the abstract, and that which makes it an existing in- dividual and which he calls substantin. e. g. "Plato". This process of objectifying and dividing off the ab-

GlLBERT DE LA PoRRJCE AND PuPILS

XII Century MS., Valenciennes Library

stract from the concrete, in the individual, he carried so far as to allege that in it "universality" was a dis- tinct subsistentia, different from "singularity", and that the "unity" of the individual was a subsistentia distinct from the individual which it made "one". He thus mistook mental distinctions for real ; and he carried his error into theology. Between God and His Divinity, the Father and His Paternity, the Son and His Sonship, the Holy Ghost and His Procession, the Divine Persons and the Divine Nature, he saw a dis- tinction which is really due to our human way of grasping reality — as a concrete embodying an ab- stract, a singular containing a universal, an essence determined by an existence — but which Gilbert, with his Platonizing tendency to model the ontological upon the logical, conceived to be due to a division and plu- rality in the Godhead Itself. This was an excessive reaction against the Pantheism which would submerge all the real distinctions of things in an identity with one indivisible Divine existence.