Gilbert of Poitiers

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Gilbert de la Porrée

Gilbert von Poitiers or Gilbert de la Porrée , also Gilbert Porreta , Gilbertus Porretanus (* ~ 1080; † 1155 ), was a French scholastic philosopher and theologian . He became Bishop of Poitiers in 1142 .

Life

The pupil of Bernhard of Chartres , Anselm of Laon and Radulf of Laon was a teacher in Poitiers , Chartres and Paris and commented a. a. the Boethius .

He was a representative of realism in the universal dispute . Gilbert is probably the first to distinguish between individuality (based on the partial dissimilarity of the peculiarity of a being with others) and singularity (belonging to all beings, which in this respect conform ). Gilbert was u. a. attacked by Bernhard von Clairvaux because of his linguistic distinction between God and deity and charged at the Council of Reims in 1148. Otto von Freising describes his process in detail.

Gilbert was a lamp of his time. For his friends and students, the Bishop of Poitiers excelled all contemporaries in all sciences and deserved a more illustrious name than even Plato . For his admirers, Gilbert was the equal thou of wisdom and even seemed to flow from him, as it were, 'the source of philosophy'.

id quod - id quo

Its main achievement is the distinction between id quod and id quo .

Literally translated, the two expressions mean: "that which is" and "that by which it is". Their connection becomes immediately clear when we consider the reference to the opposite pole (in brackets): “id quod est (eo quo est)” and “id, quo est (id quod est)” The quod is thus through the quo and that quo is that whereby the quod is. The origin of this way of speaking lies in Platonism, where in a true sense the individual is through the idea.

Applied theologically, however, the pair of categories quod / quo has lost all platonic taste. That is why we are allowed to translate it freely and further as “who” and “what”. Id quod est in theology always means a who, a person; id quo est means a nature, a circumstance, a way of being, in short: a what. Every who is in the way of some what, and a what is not actually itself, but as a way of being of a who.

This terminology does two things:

First, as different concepts conceivable with one another and mixed up, it links two expressions (nature and person) which the old church (with a certain arbitrariness and randomness) created as dogmatic basic categories by means of different names of an originally single concept (concrete substance), without bringing them into an understandable relationship to one another.

Second, Gilbert's achievement surpasses all previous attempts to relate nature and person to the fact that he spreads the concrete substance as such into a pair of concepts. How was it before? Every understanding of the two basic Christian dogmas (Trinity and Incarnation) meant a loss of either concreteness or substantiality. The Trinity could be understood either as the one substance with three (accidental) relations (Augustine) or as the (general) nature in three concrete realizations (Cappadocians). And Boethius unashamedly compares the unity of the person of Christ in two natures with the unity of a choir; for him the difference between nature and person is that between something general and something particular.

If one wanted to distinguish and contrast the words nature and person in an understandable way, then only either the substance could be contrasted with an accident or the specific one with the concrete substance. Both ways of thinking are of course not applicable to dogmas (they knew that even then!). If one added as a matter of course that there were no accidents in God and that Christ's humanity was also concrete, this clarification was not made harmoniously, but by force from the outside and took away all the intelligibility that the scheme had promised. So one found oneself in hopeless bottlenecks which, before Gilbert's distinction , belief but not thought could get over.

It alone does not, of course, give any answer to the question of how the different persons in the Trinity and the different natures in the God-man relate to one another. But Gilbert, and until now he alone, has a conceptual scheme in the middle of his thinking that can be applied to both dogmas in the same way, without which these further questions cannot be answered in a balanced way, but in which they are, of course, very different developments of one Structure, firmly connected.

In order to enable a rapprochement in the Catholic / Orthodox dialogue on the question of divine energies , recourse to Gilbert was found helpful in 1964; the "New Porretanism" designed at the time has now been published on the Internet.

literature

Web links

Works
Wikisource: Gislebertus Porretanus  - Sources and full texts (Latin)
Secondary literature
predecessor Office successor
Grimoard Bishop of Poitiers
1142 - 1155 ? 		Calo
personal data
SURNAME Gilbert of Poitiers
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Gilbert Porreta; Gilbertus Porretanus; Gilbert de la Porrée
BRIEF DESCRIPTION scholastic philosopher and theologian
DATE OF BIRTH around 1080
DATE OF DEATH 1155