Happiness, Contemplative Life, and the tria genera hominum in Twelfth-Century Philosophy: Peter Abelard and John of Salisbury

Abstract

As Christians, all twelfth-century Latin thinkers identified true happiness with the happiness God promises in the afterlife. This happiness was believed to be entirely spiritual, consisting in the endless vision of God. Nevertheless, along with this beatitudo in patria we also find in some twelfth-century authors the idea of a beatitudo in via as the philosophical life. This life can be characterized either as completely contemplative and solitary, or as one that remains partially attached to material circumstances and (political) action in society. Within this broad framework, this paper emphasizes three points: a. the ascetic and almost purely contemplative character of the ideal of the philosophical life as we find it in twelfth-century authors like Peter Abelard and John of Salisbury; b. the role played by philosophers in some twelfth-century triads of human types; c. the fact that, in spite of the monastic touch which often color them, many theses held by twelfth-century defenders of the philosophical life are common to those later university masters who were once called ‘Averroists’ or ‘radical Aristotelians’. The first section of this article provides an outline of the substantial discussion about true happiness as beatific vision as is found in Peter Abelard’s Collationes or Dialogus inter philosophum, iudaeum et christianum. The following sections present some twelfth-century triads of genera hominum, in which the ideal of the philosophical life plays a significant role. These triads are extracted from the following texts: Moralium dogma philosophorum, William of Conches’s Glosae super Macrobium, the Florilegium morale oxoniense, John of Salisbury’s Policraticus, Bernard of Clairvaux’s De consideratione, Hugues of Saint Victor’s De sacramentis.