Jocelin of Soissons

Jocelin of Soissons^[1] (died 24 October 1152) was a French theologian, a philosophical opponent of Abelard. He became bishop of Soissons, and is known also as a composer (commonly as Goslenus Suessionensis, or Magister Goslenus, episcopus Suessionensis), with two pieces in the Codex Calixtinus. He was teaching at the Paris cathedral school in the early 1110s.^[2]

Bishop

He began work on the present Soissons Cathedral; it only took shape in the 1190s.^[3]

Abbot Suger addressed his history of Louis the Fat to him.^[4] In the papal politics of the late 1120s and 1130s, Suger counted Jocelin, at Soissons from 1126, as a supporter of Pope Innocent II against antipope Anacletus II, along with other bishops of northern France.^[5][6]

As bishop he founded Longpont Abbey^[7] in 1131, a Cistercian monastery supported by Bernard of Clairvaux;^[8] Bernard was a correspondent.^[9][10] He favoured the Knights Templars, having participated in the Council of Troyes that gave them full standing.^[11] He was present at the 1146 Council of Arras, a probable occasion for the planning of the Second Crusade.^[12]

Works

The De generibus et speciebus has been attributed to him.^[13] Now scholars call its author Pseudo-Joscelin.^[14] It may be by a student of his.^[2] The Metalogicus of John of Salisbury attributed to him the view that universals exist only in the collection, not the individuals.^[15][16][17]

References

• Annales de la vie de Joscelin de Vierzi in Achille Luchaire, Quatrièmes mélanges d'histoire du moyen age, Paris: Alcan, 1905.
• Desmond Paul Henry, Medieval Mereology, Amsterdam: B. R. Grüner., 1991.
• Pseudo-Joscelin, Treatise on Genera and Species, edited and translated with an introduction by Peter King, Oxford Studies in Medieval Philosophy, 2, 2015, pp. 104–210.

Notes