latter included all purely mental work, which more and more tended
to concentrate itself upon religion and confine itself to the clergy. In
this way it came to be considered an utter disgrace for any man engaged
in mental work to take any part in the institutions of civil life, and
particularly to marry. He might indeed enter into illicit relations, and
rear a family of "nephews" and "nieces," without losing prestige; but to
marry was to commit suicide. Such was the condition of things in the
days of Abelard.

But while Platonism, with its real universals, was celebrating its
ascetic, unearthly triumphs in the West, Aristotelianism, which
maintains that the individual is the real, was making its way in the
East. Banished as heresy beyond the limits of the Catholic Church, in
the fifth and sixth centuries, in the persons of Nestorius and others,
it took refuge in Syria, where it flourished for many years in the
schools of Edessa and Nisibis, the foremost of the time. From these it
found its way among the Arabs, and even to the illiterate Muhammad, who
gave it (1) theoretic theological expression in the cxii. surah of the
Koran: "He is One God, God the Eternal; He neither begets nor is
begotten; and to Him there is no peer," in which both the fundamental
dogmas of Christianity are denied, and that too on the ground of
revelation; (2) practical expression, by forbidding asceticism and
monasticism, and encouraging a robust, though somewhat coarse, natural
life. Islam, indeed, was an attempt to rehabilitate the human.

In Abelard's time Arab Aristotelianism, with its consequences for
thought and life, was filtering into Europe and forcing Christian
thinkers to defend the bases of their faith. Since these, so far as
defensible at all, depended upon the Platonic doctrine of universals,
and this could be maintained only by dialectic, this science became
extremely popular,--indeed, almost the rage. Little of the real
Aristotle was at that time known in the West; but in Porphyry's
Introduction to Aristotle's Logic was a famous passage, in which all the
difficulties with regard to universals were stated without being solved.
Over this the intellectual battles of the first age of Scholasticism
were fought. The more clerical and mystic thinkers, like Anselm and
Bernard, of course sided with Plato; but the more worldly, robust
thinkers inclined to accept Aristotle, not seeing that his doctrine is
fatal to the Trinity.

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