Gilbert de la Porrée

Gilbert de la Porrée (French: [ʒilbɛʁ də la pɔʁe]; after 1085 – 4 September 1154), also known as Gilbert of Poitiers, Gilbertus Porretanus or Pictaviensis, was a scholastic logician and theologian and Bishop of Poitiers.

Life

He was born in Poitiers, and completed his first studies there. He was then educated under Bernard of Chartres at Chartres, where he was schooled in the differences between the teachings of Aristotle and Plato, and later under Anselm of Laon and Ralph of Laon at Laon, where he studied the Scriptures. After his education, he returned to Poitiers, where it is believed he taught. Subsequently he then returned to Chartres to teach logic and theology and succeeded Bernard of Chartres as Chancellor from 1126 to 1140. He is also known to have lectured in Paris. From a passage from the text, Dialogue with Ratius and Everard, by the Cistercian Everard, it would appear that Gilbert was more popular in Paris than in Chartres. Everard writes that he was the fourth to attend Gilbert's lectures in Chartres and the three hundredth to attend in Paris. One of those attending Gilbert's lectures in Paris, in 1141, was John of Salisbury, who was greatly influenced by them. John would later become chancellor of Chartres and also wrote about Gilbert saying: He taught grammar and theology, and would whip a student who made a grammatical error. If he believed a student was wasting time in class, he would suggest he take up bread making, and last when he lectured he used philosophers, orators and as well as poets to help interpret.

In the 1140s Gilbert published his Commentary on Boethius's, Opuscula Sacra. Although intended as an explanation of what Boethius meant, it interpreted the Holy Trinity in such a way as went against the teachings of the church. In 1142, Gilbert became Bishop of Poitiers, and within the same year two archdeacons, Arnaud and Calon, denounced him for his ideas on the Trinity. It was also in 1142 when Gilbert's teaching post in Chartres was taken over. By 1147, in Paris, Peter Lombard attacked Gilbert for his trinitarian doctrine. In 1148, Saint Bernard of Clairvaux, known as the great detector of heresies, brought Gilbert to trial. Saint Bernard had previously had reasons to believe Gilbert was a heretic because when Abelard was tried and condemned, the school of Chartres, where Gilbert was chancellor at that moment, supported Abelard. Pope Eugene III presided over the trial, during which Gilbert and Bernard were asked to cite and explain specific biblical texts. Bernard, lacking Gilbert's experience of the technique of the schools, was not able to condemn him. It was nevertheless decided to require Gilbert to reformulate parts of his book.

Gilbert died in 1154. He was buried at the Église Saint-Hilaire-le-Grand in Poitiers.

Works

Authentic works

• Commentaria in Boethii opuscula sacra, edited by Nikolaus M. Häring, Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1966.
• The Psalms Commentary of Gilbert of Poitiers, edited by T. Gross-Diaz. Leiden: Brill, 1996.

Spurious works

• Hermes Trismegistus, De sex rerum principiis, edited by P. Lucentini and M. Delp, Corpus Christianorum Continuatio Mediaevalis (CCCM 142), Turnhot: Brepols, 2006.

Gilbert is almost the only logician of the 12th century who is quoted by the greater scholastics of the succeeding age. The Liber sex principiorum, attributed to him, but in fact the work of an anonymous author, was regarded with a reverence almost equal to that paid to Aristotle, and furnished matter for numerous commentators, amongst them Albertus Magnus. Owing to the fame of this work, he is mentioned by Dante as the Magister sex principiorum. The treatise itself is a discussion of the Aristotelian categories, specially of the six subordinate modes. The author distinguishes in the ten categories two classes, one essential, the other derivative. Essential or inhering (formae inhaerentes) in the objects themselves are only substance, quantity, quality and relation in the stricter sense of that term. The remaining six, when, where, action, passion, position and habit, are relative and subordinate (formae assistantes). This suggestion has some interest, but is of no great value, either in logic or in the theory of knowledge. More important in the history of scholasticism are the theological consequences to which Gilbert's realism led him.

In the commentary on Boethius' treatise De Trinitate he proceeds from the metaphysical notion that pure or abstract being is prior in nature to that which is. This pure being is God, and must be distinguished from the triune God as known to us. God is incomprehensible, and the categories cannot be applied to determine his existence. In God there is no distinction or difference, whereas in all substances or things there is duality, arising from the element of matter. Between pure being and substances stand the ideas or forms, which subsist, though they are not substances. These forms, when materialized, are called formae substantiales or formae nativae; they are the essences of things, and in themselves have no relation to the accidents of things. Things are temporal, the ideas perpetual, God eternal. The pure form of existence, that by which God is God, must be distinguished from the three persons who are God by participation in this form. The form or essence is one, the persons or substances three. This distinction clearly goes against the church's tenet of divine simplicity. It was this distinction between Deitas or Divinitas and Deus that led to the condemnation of Gilbert's doctrine.

From the 1913 Catholic Encyclopedia

Gilbert de la Porrée — (Gilbertus Porretanus)

Bishop of Poitiers, philosopher, theologian and general 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. Returning later to Chartres, he taught philosophy and the arts there for about fifteen years, receiving a canonry 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 following 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 presence at the Councils of Paris (1147) and Reims (1148). The dispute ended amicably without any very definite issue. Gilbert died universally regretted in the year 1154.

He lived and taught during the critical epoch when the great scholastic synthesis, both in and in theology, was just beginning to take shape. The principles, methods, and doctrines of purely rational research were being extended from philosophy to theology and applied - often rashly, as with Abelard - to the elucidation of revealed truth. Aristotle's philosophy was finding its way through Moorish and Jewish channels into the Christian schools of Europe, gradually to supplant Platonic influences there, and the discussion 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 leading and honoured one; while his philosophical writings secured for him a fame that long survived him. In his "Liber Sex Principiorum" he explained the last six categories of Aristotle, the latter having treated expressly 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 medieval schools. His "Commentary on the Four Books of Boethius", especially on the two "De Trinitate", contain those applications of his doctrine on the Universals 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 ontological 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 repudiate the extreme realism of the epoch, with its pantheistic 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 away that brings it quite near identity. The created essence (forma nativa, eidos) of the individual member of a class is a copy of the Divine exemplar, "singularis in singularibus, sed in omnibus universalis" (John of Salisbury, Metal., II, xvii). He means that the forma nativa is not really (numerically) one and the same in omnibus, but only conceptually, i.e. by the consideration of the mind; so much is fairly evident from another reference of his to "universalia... quae ab ipsis individuis humana ratio quodammodo abstrahit" (P.L., LXIV, 1374). Yet there are grounds for supposing that he attributed to the forma nativa, 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 individual and which he calls substantia e.g. "Plato". This process of objectifying and dividing off the abstract from the concrete, in the individual, he carried so far as to allege that in it "universality" was a distinct 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 distinction which is really due to our human way of grasping reality as a concrete embodying an abstract, 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 plurality 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.

Gilbert's "Liber Sex Principiorum" and his "Commentary on Boethius" are in P.L., CLXXXIV and LXIV. He also left numerous commentaries on various books of the Old and New Testaments. A philosophical work called "Liber de Causis", sometimes attributed to him, is in reality an abridged Latin translation, through the Arabic, of the "Elevatio Theologica" of Proclus, a Greek Neo-Platonist of the fifth century.

BERTHAUD, Gilbert de la Porree (Paris, 1892); CLERVAL, Les Ecoles de Chartres au moyen age (Paris, 1905); POOLE, Illustrations of the History of Medieval Thought (London, 1884); DE WULF, Histoire de la philosophie medievale (Louvain and Paris, 1895); TURNER, History of Philosophy (Boston, 1903).

Further reading

• F.C. Copleston, A History of Medieval Philosophy (New York: Harper and Row, 1972).
• L.M. de Rijk, Semantics and metaphysics in Gilbert of Poitiers. A chapter of twelfth century Platonism Vivarium, 26, 1988, pp. 73–113 and 27, 1989, pp. 1–35 (Contains the English translation of some passages of the Commentaries on Boethius).
• T. Gross-Diaz, The Psalms Commentary of Gilbert of Poitiers, Leiden: Brill, 1996.
• E. Jeauneau, Rethinking The School of Chartres, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2009.
• J. Jolivet and A. de Libera (eds.), Gilbert de Poitiers et ses contemporains, Naples, Bibliopolis, 1987.
• O. Lewry, The Liber sex principiourm, a supposedly Porretanean work. A study in ascription. In: Jean Jolivet, and Alain de Libera (eds. ), Gilbert de Poitiers et ses contemporains. Aux origines de la "Logica Modernorum"., Naples: Bibliopolis, 1987, pp. 251–278.
• J. Marenbon "Gilbert of Poitiers", J.J.E. Gracia and T.B. Noone (eds.), A Companion to Philosophy in the Middle Ages, Malden MA: Blackwell, 2003.
• J. Marenbon, Early Medieval Philosophy, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1983.
• A. Berthaud, Gilbert de la Porrée, évêque de Poitiers, et sa philosophie 1070–1154 (Poitiers, 1892).
• N.M. Häring, "The Case of Gilbert de la Porrée, Bishop of Poitiers, 1142–1154," Medieval Studies 13 (1951), pp. 1–40.
• Nikolas Häring (1966). Gilbert of Poitiers: The Commentaries on Boethius. Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies. pp. 4–13. ISBN 978-0-88844-013-6.

External links

• Compendium logicae Porretanum
• Christopher J. Martin The Compendium Logicae Porretanum: A Survey of Philosophical Logic from the School of Gilbert of Poitiers
• Lauge Nielsen, On the Doctrine of Logic and Language of Gilbert Porreta and his Followers