Page:Illustrations of the history of medieval thought and learning.djvu/176

158 is impotent of itself to teach it us. Nevertheless Gilbert's exposition of his views is contained in one of the subtlest and most elaborate contributions to theological metaphysics that the middle ages have as yet given forth; and his opinions and Abailard's produced a similar effect upon their less inquisitive contemporaries. They appeared to render unmeaning that phraseology concerning divine things which had taken so deep a root in the pious consciousness of Christendom: this language, it would be inferred, could be possessed of but a partial and temporary truth, which to ordinary minds might seem not far removed from falsehood.

Gilbert's real difficulty, however, concerned the Trinity. The being of God, he held, is absolute: we can predicate nothing of it; not even substance, as we ordinarily understand the term, for substance is what it is by virtue of its properties and accidents, and God has no properties and accidents: he is simple being. It is incorrect therefore to say that his substance, divinity, is God; we can only speak of the substance by virtue of which he is God. It is evident that this thesis of an absolute Unity logically carried out, is of such a nature as to exclude the existence within it of a Trinity. The three Persons must be something external and non-essential: in the substance by which they are God, in nature, they are one; but as regards the substance or form which they are, they are three in number, three in genus, three distinct and individual beings; the three Persons, as such, could not be said to be one God. Gilbert thus hardly escaped the paradox of tritheism: and yet it is impossible to doubt that the heresy was one of expression, not of fact. The contradictions that make his study so con-