Page:Illustrations of the history of medieval thought and learning.djvu/148

130 Our principal witness is Abailard himself, and it would be too much to expect impartiality from one who suffered as he felt unjustly. The charge against him was that he had imported his nominalism into the domain of theology. Since the time when Roscelin first opened the discussion, the mystery of the Trinity had offered dangerous attractions to the students of logic. Abailard tells us that the accusation was the same as an earlier council at Soissons had brought home to Roscelin: namely that he taught the existence of three Gods. If such were the charge it were easy enough for Abailard to answer it. Roscelin had but now reproached him with precisely the opposite view; and no language can be clearer or more precise than that of his extant works (and a there is nothing to lead us to suppose that he changed his opinions in any material point), in which he declares the substantial unity, the singleness, of the divine nature: where, he says, there is only a substance entirely one and individual, there is no plurality of things. His real difficulty was to reconcile this absolute being with the tripersonal nature of God: and Otto of Freising is probably right in asserting that the charge against him was that, nimis attenuans, Abailard effaced the discrimination of the three Persons, which the church held to be not mere names but distinct things with separate properties; in other words that he held, as Roscelin had already insinuated, the proscribed tenet of Sabellianism, that the three Persons are the three aspects by which God reveals himself to us, Power, Wisdom, and Love (or Goodness).

There is no doubt that the description is- partially just. Abailard confesses that the attempt to prove the diversity coexistent with the unity, is one that baffles human reasoning. Philosophical terms are not merely inadequate to the expression of the supreme truth; they are inapplicable to it. We are forced to use words in a