Page:Illustrations of the history of medieval thought and learning.djvu/108

90 should look with approval upon an art in which they were usually outmatched by their opponents. Arch- bishop Lanfranc, a learned man and a good lawyer, was greatest in the practical affairs of the state: in dialectical warfare he shewed but poorly. He vanquished Berengar by transparent sophisms. Logic in his hands was an imperfect instrument which he had not fully learned to use. The difference between this controversy and that which was provoked by Roscelin towards the close of the century is worth noticing. Whereas & Berengar seems to have been led by moral doubts in reference to the miracle of the Lord's supper, to investigate minutely its claims to belief and thus to open the whole question of the meaning of authority, while the dialectical form in which his polemic was cast was the last stage in his intellectual process; in Roscelin’s case the order was reversed. The conclusion of the one was the starting-point of the other. By the sheer honesty and consistency of his logic Roscelin came to dispute the accepted dogma of the holy Trinity. He refused to exempt any fact from the jurisdiction of reason, and fearlessly applied his nominalistic principles to the supreme problem. If in God, he argued, the three Persons are one thing and not three things, then the Father and the holy Ghost must have been incarnate with the Son: if on the contrary they are three things each by itself severally, as three angels or three souls, yet so as in will and power they be altogether one, then, did usage permit, we ought to speak of three Gods. The terms of the dilemma are those