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The accusation that nominalism, consistently carried out, must lead to the deification of things, was no slander on the part of Anselm; it lies in the nature of the case. What he did not see, was the fact that the last consequences of realism must lead to the opposite extreme, to acosmism or Pantheism. Anselm himself does not go so far, nor, as it appears, does his pupil Odon, bishop of Cambray, who is said to have attacked the nominalist Raimbert of Lille, in his Liber de complexionibiis and his Tractatus de re et ente. A letter of the Bishop Hermann of Tournay, written in the twelfth century, in speaking of this strife, says that Raimbert read dialectics to his scholars "juxta quosdam modernos in voce " Odo (Odoardius) on the contrary, " more Boethii antiquorum- que in re. " The realistically inclined Hildebert of Lavardin, Bishop of Mans and later Archbishop of Tours, approaches nearer to Pantheism, as well in his poetry as in the Tractat-us theologicus which is ascribed to him. prev next |