ief in the doctrine of
the Trinity.

No one of mark opposed the Realism which had now become one of the
accepted philosophical opinions of the age, until Roscelin, in the
latter part of the eleventh century, denied that universals have a real
existence. It was Plato's doctrine that universals have an independent
existence apart from individual objects, and that they exist before the
latter (_universalia_ ANTE _rem_,--the thought _before_ the thing);
while Aristotle maintained that universals, though possessing a real
existence, exist only in individual objects (_universalia_ IN _re_,
--the thought _in_ the thing). Nominalism is the doctrine that
individuals only have real existence (_universalia_ POST _rem_,--the
thought _after_ the thing).

It is not probable that this profound question about universals would
have excited much interest among the intellectual monks of the eleventh
century, had it not been applied to theological subjects, in which
chiefly they were absorbed. Now Roscelin advanced the doctrine, that, if
the three persons in the Trinity were one thing, it would follow that
the Father and the Holy Ghost must have entered into the flesh together
with the Son; and as he believed that only individuals exist in reality,
it would follow that the three persons of the Godhead are three
substances, in fact three Gods. Thus Nominalism logically led to an
assault on the received doctrine of the Trinity--the central point in
the theology of the Church. This was heresy. The foundations of
Christian belief were attacked, and no one in that age was strong enough
to come to the rescue but Anselm, then Abbot of Bec.

His great service to the cause of Christian theology, and therefore to
the Church universal, was his exposition of the logical results of the
Nominalism of Roscelin,--to whom universals, or ideas, were merely
creations of the mind, or conventional phrases, having no real
existence. Hence such things as love, friendship, beauty, justice, were
only conceptions. Plato and Augustine maintained that they are eternal
verities, not to be explained by definitions, appealing to
consciousness, in the firm belief in which the soul sustains itself;
that there can be no certain knowledge without a recognition of these;
that from these only sound deductions of moral truth can be drawn; that
without a firm belief in these eternal certitudes there can be no repose
and no lofty faith. These ideas are independent of us. They