If this is really the origin of the continuing use of military metaphors to
describe argumentation, dialectic, interpersonal conflict, etc., it is very
interesting to me. I've been reading these postings on Abelard as they arrive,
but now am motivated to go look at the originals - which of Abelard's writings
are you sharing with us, Bill? And what is the judgment of others on whether
this is the origin of the military metaphors?
Dale Hample
Bill East wrote:
> Peripateticus Palatinus (6)
>
> His language is distinctively military. For example, on moving his school
> to Corbeil he describes it as castrum Corbolii. Castrum, usually found in
> classical Latin in the plural, castra, is a military camp. He does not call
> the town an oppidum or an urbs. The purpose of setting up this camp is to
> embarrass William 'through more frequent assaults (assultus) in
> disputation.' Assultus means an attack, an assault; it had never before
> been used to describe an academic encounter.
>
> On returning to Paris and finding his post at the cathedral school occupied
> by an intruder, Abelard says, 'I took my school outside the city to Mont Ste
> Geneviève, and set up camp there in order to lay siege to my usurper'
> (extra civitatem in monte S. Genovefæ scholarum nostrarum castra posui,
> quasi eum obsessurus, qui locum occupaverat nostrum). William is said to
> have hurried back to the city, 'apparently to deliver from my siege the
> soldier whom he had abandoned' (quasi militem suum, quem deseruerat, ab
> obsidione nostra liberaturus). Abelard goes on, 'The bouts of argument
> (conflictus disputationum) which followed William's return to the city
> between my pupils and him and his followers, and the successes in these wars
> which fortune gave my people (et quos fortuna eventus in his bellis dederit
> nostris), myself among them, are facts which you have long known.' And he
> concludes his account of this campaign with the words of Ajax from Ovid's
> Metamorphoses :
> . . . si quæritis hujus
> Fortunam pugnæ, non sum superatus ab illo.
>
> 'If you ask the result of this battle, I was not defeated by him.'
>
> The disputation became the characteristic mode of intellectual enquiry in
> the Middle Ages, and remained the characteristic mode of intellectual
> enquiry in universities until quite modern times. In the Divinity School at
> Oxford two pulpits still stand facing each other across the room. Until the
> nineteenth century you would earn your degree by arguing with your opponent,
> maintaining or attacking a thesis, until the moderator was satisfied that
> you had proved your skill at argument.
>
> This mode of intellectual discourse seems to be something new in Abelard.
> It was not the classical mode; although Plato expressed his teaching in
> dialogue form, the dialogues are a bloodless affair; nobody ever disagrees
> with Socrates. Nor was it the Benedictine mode; Boso came to Anselm to
> learn, not to argue. It was not the mode that Abelard's teachers were used
> to; William of Champeaux was most put out when Abelard answered back. It
> may be that this new mode of discourse, the academic disputation, owes
> something to Abelard's upbringing at the hands of his remarkable father.
>
> * * * * *
> Oriens.
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