Little has changed except the vocabulary and the method.

The schools knew that their society hung for life on the demonstration that God, the ultimate universal, was a reality, out of which all other universal truths or realities sprang.

Truth was a real thing, outside of human experience.

The schools of Paris talked and thought of nothing else.

John of Salisbury, who attended Abelard's lectures about 1136, and became Bishop of Chartres in 1176, seems to have been more surprised than we need be at the intensity of the emotion.