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the stream divides
[ 91 ]
another, tended not to portray their different points of view or perspectives.
Crétien did portray this and so was forced to find new principles of unity for his
narratives. This was the beginning of a problem that would become acute in our own
times as various kinds of narrators—novelists and historians, for instance— began to
lose confidence in their ability to impose unity on diverse events and points of view
without distorting what actually happened.
15
Also in the twelfth century, a medically inspired approach to psychology
arose, which would eventually displace the Augustinian/Platonic framework.
William of Saint Thierry (c. 1085-1148), in The Nature of Body and Soul, written
in the 1130s, was among the prime movers of this approach. Although his mod-
els were crude, he tried to explain human mentality scientifically, based on the
interaction among material systems in the body. This approach then grew
throughout the Middle Ages, spurred on by the later appearance of the works of
Arab medical philosophers, such as Avicenna. By the beginning of the modern
era, such physical-system perspectives had become the dominant approach.
The twelfth century also witnessed the revival and popularization of ideals of
friendship and love that were inspired originally by Cicero’s On Friendship
and
then given a Christian twist by Augustine, in the Confessions. In their twelfth-
century versions, two ideas in particular gave rise to these ideals. One was that
the essence of friendship is the development of a common mind. The other was
that the basis for the common mind that two friends share is participation in the
love of Christ. Augustine, perhaps under the influence of Cicero, had given
expression to the first of these ideas in writing of a friend who had recently died
that it is “well said that a friend is half one’s own soul” and that “I felt that my
soul and his had been but one soul in two bodies, and I shrank from life with
loathing because I could not bear to be only half alive.”
16
Religious contextualizing aside, it is clear that a new ideal of romantic love had
emerged. What made it new was that it portrayed love as an affair of the heart at the
core of which is service to the beloved. In Europe, before this time, love, especially
between husband and wife, tended to be thought of as a practical arrangement. While
there may have been no precedent for the new ideal, either in pagan or Christian
sources, there is a source: twelfth-century troubadours, especially William of
Poitiers, who expressed in his love poems that the lover’s happiness is dependent on
that of the beloved and that service to the beloved is an important component of a
meaningful life.
17
On a more metaphysical plane, interesting insight into individuality can be seen
in Honorius Augustodunensis’ grappling with Eriugena’s views. A Benedictine
monk, Honorius was active from about 1100 to 1135. As we have seen, although
Eriugena gave lip service to a spiritualized resurrection, he was not much
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