Gilbert of Poitiers

Born: Poitiers after 1085, Died: Poitiers 1154. According to Gilson, Gilbert was the greatest metaphysician of the twelfth century. He was a profound thinker, original and coherent, famous in his time for the complexity and boldness of his philosophical theology. He provoked both violent disapproval and great enthusiasm. Brought to trial for heresy in 1148, he came out of it without being condemned; rather, his thought had a considerable number of followers in the so-called Porretan School. Through his followers, he exercised a significant influence on the theology of the second half of the twelfth century. In his mature thinking, he went far beyond what he had learned during his apprenticeship: at Chartres, philosophy of a Platonic stamp based on the Timaeus and on the Consolation of Philosophy and Opuscula sacra of Boethius; at Laon, theology founded on Biblical exegesis and the Fathers. In his Commentary on Boethius’ Opuscula sacra, his fundamental work, he developed a profoundly innovative “rational” theology and an autonomous and broadly coherent philosophical reflection. It combines the Platonic doctrine of the preeminence of form with a keen sense of the primacy of the concrete and the singular. It consists of, principally, an ontology, a philosophy of language, and an epistemology, all closely interconnected. Only the principles (God, prime matter, ideas) are simple, and only in God is being everything that he is. Created entities, by contrast, receive their being from something other than themselves (from God) and they are composed of an ordered aggregation of forms. Forms are always inherent in a substrate. Common natures do not exist; everything, compounds and forms, is singular: the humanity of every man is similar to but different from that of any other man. But not everything that is singular is an individual – only concrete entities and the compounds of forms that constitute the complete form of every concrete entity are individuals: their individuality consists in the fact that, if they are considered as wholes, they are dissimilar from any other compound thing. Universals are collections of singular forms gathered together by the intellect on the basis of the resemblance that is found between the singular entities. When we speack about natural objects, a name signifies a concrete entity and one of its properties or forms; the subject of the proposition represents the concrete entity, and the predicate represents a form inherent in it. The language of the philosophy of nature reflects what it investigates: the compound constitution of creation. It lends its own terms and its own formal structures to the other two speculative sciences, mathematics and theology. The correct understanding of a text is attained when, by distinguishing the appropriate discipline to which it belongs, the interpreter gathers, beneath the surface of the words the “meaning in the author’s mind.”