Medieval Philosophy

An Historical and Philosophical Introduction

John Marenbon

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2006
• ISBN:
  9781134461820
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: European Medieval History
• Index: History

This new introduction replaces Marenbon's best-selling editions Early Medieval Philosophy (1983) and Later Medieval Philosophy (1987) to present a single authoritative and comprehensive study of the period. It gives a lucid and engaging account of the history of philosophy in the Middle Ages, discussing the main writers and ideas, the social and intellectual contexts, and the important concepts used in medieval philosophy.

Medieval Philosophy gives a chronological account which:

• treats all four main traditions of philosophy that stem from the Greek heritage of late antiquity: Greek Christian philosophy, Latin philosophy, Arabic philosophy and Jewish philosophy
• provides a series of 'study' sections for close attention to arguments and shorter 'interludes' that point to the wider questions of the intellectual context
• combines philosophical analysis with historical background
• includes a helpful detailed guide to further reading and an extensive bibliography

All students of medieval philosophy, medieval history, theology or religion will find this necessary reading.

1
INTRODUCTION

The aim of this book is to provide a history of medieval philosophy which will serve as an introduction to the subject. A history: there are many different histories of medieval philosophy that have been written, and will be written. My history will not make them redundant, but it has its own special aim and so its particular emphases. It advances a view of both what medieval (Western)¹ philosophy is, and what should be involved in studying the history of philosophy, that is both broader and bolder than what is usually expected.

Traditionally, historians of medieval (Western) philosophy have begun either with the earliest Christian thinkers, in the second and third centuries, or with Augustine (b. c. 354) and Boethius (b. c. 475–7), or with Alcuin at the end of the eighth century. They have ended either by about 1350, with the generation after Ockham, or have added some account of the later fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, or concluded with the ‘Silver Age’ of scholasticism in the Iberian peninsula, going up to Suárez (d. 1617), but omitting ‘Renaissance’ philosophers such as Ficino (1433–99). Geographically historians of medieval philosophy have had to range wider than their colleagues working on the ancient or early modern periods, since the major thirteenth-century thinkers are greatly influenced by Islamic philosophers and by Jewish thinkers living in Islamic lands. In most cases, however, this non-Christian philosophy is treated just in so far as it is a source for Latin thinkers such as Aquinas and Duns Scotus, except by writers who are offering histories of specifically Islamic, Jewish or Byzantine philosophy.

My broader conception of medieval philosophy rests on a story – one of the most fascinating of the narratives that can be told about philosophy and its past. Centuries after the era of Plato (c. 429–347 BC) and Aristotle (384–322 BC), which is often regarded as the age of ancient philosophy, there flourished in the Hellenized world of the Roman Empire a school of philosophy now called ‘Neoplatonism’ – its exponents would have thought of themselves, rather, as Platonists or, more simply, as philosophers. Its founder was Plotinus (c. 205–270) and it lasted at least until the time of Olympiodorus (d. after 565). Despite their allegiance to Plato, the Neoplatonists believed in the unity of true philosophy. It was a harmony, primarily, of Plato and Aristotle, whose texts featured as prominently in their curriculum as Plato’s. It also incorporated elements from other schools, especially the Stoics, whose thinking the Neoplatonists disparaged and yet, in ethics above all, absorbed. The Neoplatonists were pagans; indeed, Neoplatonic philosophy had become, by the sixth century, the last refuge of paganism in a Christian society. But they had an incalculable influence on thought within the three religious traditions – Christianity, Islam and Judaism – which, over the next millennium and longer, would dominate Europe, North Africa, the Near and Middle East. Both Greek and Latin Christian writers were so affected by Neoplatonic thinking that one would find it hard to disentangle even the doctrine of Christianity, as understood in the Middle Ages, from it. In the lands of Islam, Muslims, Jews and Christians benefited from the translation into Arabic of much of what had been studied in the last of the ancient Neoplatonic schools at Alexandria.

Four traditions of philosophy, then – Byzantine, Christian ‘Latin’ (mainly written in Latin, but also in the European vernaculars), Islamic and Jewish – all can be said, in a certain sense, to begin from late ancient Neoplatonism. And all four traditions belong to cultures dominated by a monotheistic, revealed religion, different in each case (except for Latin and Greek Christianity), but closely related. The importance of this common starting point and context remains, despite the fact that each tradition has elements and strands that derive more directly from its own particular culture and religious traditions – most obviously, the aspects of philosophizing most closely connected with the particular religions, but also, for instance, the extra presence of Stoicism in Latin thought thanks to the writings of Cicero and Seneca. These elements and strands, linked in various ways to the common tradition, should not be excluded from the story, even though they tend to make it less neat and unified. Their centripetal tendency is counter-balanced by another factor linking the traditions together: the direct relationships between the four traditions as they evolved. In the Islamic world, the traditions of Christian, Islamic and Jewish philosophy were closely intertwined, whilst philosophy written in Arabic, both Islamic and Jewish, had an enormous influence through translations on Latin Christian thought in the later Middle Ages. Earlier, Latin thinkers had looked to Byzantine thought, whilst in the fourteenth-century Latin scholasticism would affect philosophers both in Byzantium and in the Jewish communities in Latin Europe.

Is it history, though, or rather a fiction to conceive medieval philosophy in terms of the tradition of Neoplatonism? Most accounts of medieval philosophy in the Latin, Islamic, Jewish and Byzantine traditions present it as, centrally, a development of Aristotelian thought. For, as they point out, the greatest philosophers writing in Arabic – Avicenna, Averroes and Maimonides – all thought of themselves as Aristotelians, and in the Latin West the university curriculum from c. 1250 onwards was structured around the texts of Aristotle, whose eminence was such that he was called simply ‘the Philosopher’. These observations are true, but Aristotle’s works were part of the Neoplatonic curriculum and it was for this reason that they were transmitted and translated. There is, however, an important twist in this story. The Neoplatonists had a particular place for Aristotelian thinking within their system, in which it was subordinated to the profounder truths about the intelligible world discovered through Platonic metaphysics; medieval readers, who studied in translation the texts themselves of Aristotle transmitted by the tradition, had no need to follow the Neoplatonic approach; in some cases they were not even aware of it. Neoplatonic ways of thinking could, therefore, be changed, challenged or even undone from within. Medieval philosophy can be seen, then, as the story of a complex tradition founded in Neoplatonism, but not simply as a continuation or development of Neoplatonism itself. This qualification is underlined by the fact that not just Aristotelianism, but other strands of pre-Neoplatonic Greek philosophy – some of Plato’s own work, Stoic ideas, traces of Epicurean and Sceptical thinking – survived in a few texts available in the Middle Ages and exercised some influence.

The large geographical range of this Introduction is clear from what has been said, and the chronological scope seems as though it must be so broad as to rule out ‘medieval’ from the title altogether. Must not the starting point be at least as early as the Greek pagan world of the third century AD, but with long glances cast back to the Hellenistic Period and the time of Plato and Aristotle, six centuries before? As to its ending, if the Byzantine tradition comes to a close as this distinctive civilization declines following the fall of Constantinople to the Turks in 1453, in many ways, the most thorough and ruthless treatment of many of the problems formulated by the Neoplatonists, and discussed through the intervening centuries, was given by Leibniz (1646–1716), and Descartes (1596–1650), despite his devotion to the new, seventeenth-century science also looks back, through Suárez and Aquinas, to this tradition. Spinoza (1632–77) can be seen as belonging to the line of Jewish philosophy running back to Maimonides, and although one strand in the Islamic tradition – the best known among historians of philosophy – hardly survived beyond the twelfth century, others lasted well into what, from the European point of view, are modern times.

The periodization of the history of philosophy I wish to champion (it is not the only plausible one, but a good case can be made for it) is, indeed, one in which the whole epoch from c. 200 until c. 1700 is seen as a unit, a genuine long Middle Ages. In this book, I follow this periodization, but I do not, for practical reasons, follow it through to its conclusion. In an introductory survey (Chapter 2), I discuss ancient Neoplatonism and its Aristotelian cargo, as well as the earliest Christian and Jewish contacts with the Greek philosophical tradition. But, since there exist fine general works on this period of late ancient philosophy, I do not try to give the same degree of detail here as in the following sections. The book stops, abruptly, at the year 1400. That date for an ending is entirely arbitrary, the result of extrinsic factors, such as word-limits, deadlines and readers’ expectations about the period covered by an introduction to medieval philosophy. Some histories of medieval philosophy include within their scope just the elements in fifteenth- to seventeenth-century philosophy which they consider to be continuations of the medieval tradition, in especial the Iberian ‘Silver Ages’ scholastics, such as Fonseca and Suárez. This strategy fits into a conception of medieval philosophy, very different from mine, as fundamentally a tradition of Christian philosophy, characterized, if not defined, by the thinking of Augustine, Anselm, Aquinas and Scotus. From my perspective, such a selection of supposedly medieval elements in the period from 1400 onwards would be arbitrary and diseducative. The present book, despite its length, should really be considered as the first volume of a two-volume introduction to the long period of philosophy from 200 to 1700: less, then, of an attempt – if and when it is completed – to write another history of medieval philosophy than to replace the idea of medieval philosophy with a more illuminating periodization for the material.

Within the very broad chronological and geographical range I have outlined, which material am I to count as philosophy? There is no convenient medieval definition of ‘philosophy’ which a historian can adopt. Either the word has too wide a meaning, covering every sort of intellectual discipline, or it is, in one way at least, too narrow, ruling out any theorizing which relies on revealed premisses (and so most of the work of Aquinas, Scotus and Ockham, for example). A modern criterion of what counts as philosophy needs to be used – a move which does not go against my attempt to give an account that is historical as well as philosophical, so long as the texts and passages so selected are each traced back to their wider contexts, which will often fall outside philosophy. But which modern criterion? Philosophers who work on medieval thought tend to select just those texts and passages which deal with problems close to ones that concern contemporary analytical philosophers. I prefer to use a wider understanding of ‘philosophy’, according to which the word covers whatever is considered by professional philosophers today.

That, in general terms, is what I set out to do in the following pages. I shall now explain more practically how their contents are arranged, and so how this book may best be used.

The order of the chapters and their sub-sections is, roughly, chronological; in particular, the different traditions – Greek, Latin, Islamic, Jewish – are treated together, as they each develop over time. There are two sorts of material in addition to the main sections which make up each chapter: ‘Interludes’ and ‘Studies’. The interludes are very short discussions aimed mainly to give context to the main narrative, and to introduce details which, though not central, might be illuminating or stimulate useful reflection. They lead away from the concentrated analysis of positions and arguments to wider questions in intellectual and cultural history. The object of the studies (which are confined to the Latin tradition, simply because it is at present my own main field of expertise) is, by contrast, to give a more detailed and rigorous analysis of the arguments of some texts or groups of texts than is usually found in a general history of philosophy. They are mostly devoted to very well known texts (such as Boethius’s Consolation, Anselm’s Proslogion and Aquinas’s De unitate intellectus) and theories (Abelard on universals, Aquinas on the existence of God, Scotus on possibility). These obvious choices are deliberate: students coming fresh to medieval philosophy will wish to learn about these texts and problems – and, in any case, their celebrity is based on their intrinsic interest. In a few instances, however, for the sake of added breadth, less well-known texts and positions are chosen. In all cases, however, English translations of the material, or at least large parts of it, are available.

A number of themes (themselves intertwined) link together groups of the studies, and/or tie them to discussions in the main sections of the book: time and eternity; the problem of prescience, the problem of predestination; possibility and necessity; universals; the existence of God; (see Index) intellectual knowledge; the good for humans; the eternity of the world.

The Guide to further reading and material is a very important part of the book. First, it gives, not merely details (keyed to the Bibliography) of primary texts and translations (including what is available freely on the web), but a discussion of the secondary literature which, where appropriate, explains and comments on the different interpretations and approaches. Although I hope that my book is more than an annotated bibliography, any single author writing about the vast range of subject-matter I include, and who is forced to compress even major authors into sections of a few thousand words, must consider a main function of his book as that of a gateway to the thought, research and scholarship of his many colleagues. Second, this Guide fills some of the very many gaps I have to leave in the main text. Without turning large parts of my chapters into lists, I cannot even name many of the interesting, though secondary, thinkers of the period; without reducing my account of every philosopher to an outline, I cannot look at all the aspects of their work. The references in the Guide should help to fill some of these gaps.

Although I have described a methodology, I have deliberately refrained from discussing methodological issues at length here or trying to justify my position. The Guide gives details of some of the issues and tendencies. I hope that from working through this book itself the reader will finish up by being, though probably not convinced by the virtues of the approach I have followed, in a good position to see the problems in writing such a history as well as the philosophical opportunities it offers.

1 The whole tradition which stems from the Greek Neoplatonic schools (and, ultimately, from Plato and Aristotle) – in its Christian Latin and Greek, Islamic Arabic and Persian, and Jewish Arabic and Hebrew versions – can be called ‘Western’, so long as this word is understood in a very broad sense, as marking a distinction between Europe, North Africa, the Near and Middle East, from such places as India, China, Japan and sub-Saharan Africa. The philosophies of these regions form distinct traditions, which will not be discussed here, despite their enormous intrinsic interest.

2
THE ANCIENT TRADITIONS IN MEDIEVAL PHILOSOPHY

The story of philosophy from before 500 to around 1400, among Christians, Muslims and Jews, revolves around the heritage of ancient thinking. Revealed religious doctrines have their impact, and there is much re-thinking and many original developments. Yet the tradition of Greek philosophy from antiquity, in its many re-appropriations and transformations, is a central thread.

Which ancient Greek philosophy? The dominant philosophical school in the years from c. 200–c. 600 was Neoplatonism, and it had a pervasive influence on the Middle Ages: on philosophers writing in Arabic, by means of a translation movement that made much of its curriculum available to them; on the Latin tradition, through figures such as Augustine and Boethius; and on the Greek tradition, both directly and through some of the Church Fathers. An introduction to the Neoplatonic School and its doctrines is therefore the main business of this chapter. But, as explained in the Introduction, Neoplatonism brought with it a cargo of Aristotelian writing, and texts were also available from some of the other schools of ancient philosophy that preceded the Neoplatonists. After a quick look at how philosophy was conceived and studied in ancient Rome, this chapter sketches some important Aristotelian themes, and then considers what of Plato himself and of the Hellenistic schools of philosophy was transmitted to the Middle Ages, before turning to the Neoplatonists and the late ancient Jewish and Christian thinkers who took up Neoplatonism or earlier forms of Platonist thought.

1 What was ancient philosophy?

The language of philosophy in the Roman Empire was Greek. A few educated Romans wrote philosophy in Latin – most notably Lucretius, Cicero and Seneca (Chapter 2, section 8), but even their work belonged to a Greek tradition, and Marcus Aurelius (121–80 AD), the philosopher who was also Roman Emperor, used Greek for his Meditations. So did Plotinus, although he lived and worked in Rome. Marcus Aurelius, Cicero and Seneca were wealthy, public figures and philosophers merely in their spare time. Most of the outstanding philosophers of antiquity and late antiquity, however, were, as Socrates, Plato and Aristotle had been, professional teachers of philosophy, although their pupils in some cases consisted of a circle of adult followers, and some rich families had their own, household philosopher. Schools of philosophy were in some cases institutions established at public expense (for example, Marcus Aurelius set up chairs of Stoic, Platonic, Epicurean and Aristotelian philosophy in Athens in 176 AD); some were supported by private endowments, whilst others were attached closely to a particular master and did not survive him. Philosophy was considered a type of higher education, to be studied only after a course in what the Romans called the ‘liberal arts’, predominantly grammar and rhetoric, with perhaps some mathematics, music and astronomy.

In one way, these ancient philosophical schools were very different from most medieval or modern schools or universities. As the terms of Marcus Aurelius’s endowment indicate, a school was not a place where someone studied simply philosophy, but rather a particular tradition of philosophy, such as Stoicism or Platonism. Each tradition had its authoritative texts and characteristic doctrines, although these doctrines were less fixed among the Platonists and Aristotelians than among the Stoics and Epicureans. The reason why philosophical schools were schools in the sense of sects is related to a more general way in which the concept of philosophy in the ancient world differs from what the modern philosophical reader might expect. In antiquity, philosophy was not one academic subject among others: it was a way of life. Each of the main philosophical schools claimed to provide a route to leading the happy life, but they differed both in their understanding of what happiness consisted in (Wisdom? Virtue? Freedom from pain?), and how to reach it. The promises of a philosophical school were, then, more akin to those of a religion than those of an academic discipline, and they tended to be similarly exclusive. As a way of life, philosophy was at once more all-absorbing for those engaged in it professionally (the schools were communities, and in the case of the Epicureans, isolated ones), yet it had a more popular appeal than now: rich men kept their household philosopher or attended the lessons of a Plotinus, not so as to satisfy their curiosity, but in order to live better lives. The contrast between ancient philosophy as a way of life and philosophy in later centuries is not, however, absolute. And, in the Middle Ages, at certain moments, for certain thinkers, philosophy – as distinct from theology, and in spite of the institutional structures – did seem to offer, as it had done to the ancients, a way of life

2 Some Aristotelian themes

Almost the whole of Aristotle’s work was brought, within the Neoplatonic tradition, to medieval thinkers. Some of the concepts and arguments found there will be presented in the course of the following chapters, when a particular medieval discussion uses them. This section aims just to indicate the range and shape of Aristotle’s thought, and to look at five areas of it which are especially important to all four of the medieval traditions: his logic, his theory of scientific method, the aims of his Metaphysics and his ideas about the human soul and its ways of knowing.

The texts of Aristotle which survive, probably collected from the lectures he gave, are encyclopaedic in their scope. Aristotle was a keen natural scientist, fascinated by botany, zoology and human biology, as well as by meteorological phenomena and fundamental physical laws. His urge to collect and classify extended to the study of politics where, in addition to a theoretical treatise, he made a large collection of the constitutions of Greek city-states. He also wrote on rhetoric and poetics, combining technical analysis with ethical and psychological concerns. For philosophers his central works are the logic – the so-called organon, including his treatment of scientific method; his study of the soul; the Metaphysics (all discussed below); and the Physics, On Generation and Corruption and the Nicomachean Ethics.

Logic

Aristotle was the first person to formulate an explicit theory of correct reasoning: so he boasted himself (Sophistical Refutations 183b34–36). He was able to learn from the exploration of forms of argument in...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Preface
• Methods of Reference
• Abbreviations
• 1: Introduction
• 2: The Ancient Traditions in Medieval Philosophy
• 3: Old Traditions and New Beginnings
• 4: Traditions Apart
• 5: Latin Philosophy in the Twelfth Century
• 6: Philosophy in Twelfth-Century Islam
• 7: Philosophy in Paris and Oxford, 1200–77
• 8: Philosophy in the Universities, 1280–1400
• 9: Philosophy Outside the Universities, 1200–1400
• 10: Not an Epilogue: ‘Medieval’ Philosophy, 1400–1700
• Guide to Further Reading and Material
• Bibliography