The Age of Belief

The Medieval Philosophers

Anne Jackson Freemantle

• Publisher: Barakaldo Books
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781839743627
• Topic: Philosophie
• Subtopic: Histoire et théorie de la philosophie

During the thousand-year span of the Middle Ages, philosophers discussed the eternal questions of mankind within the most unified society known to Western culture, linked by a single religious faith which encompassed all European life. Inside this framework, scholars drew upon Greek thought and Christian revelation, exploring the nature of being, the problem of fate versus free will, and various views of ultimate reality. This perceptive book by a noted author and critic traces the great arguments of Medieval philosophy through the writings of major thinkers like St. Augustine, St. Thomas Aquinas, Boethius and Abelard.

CHAPTER I—What Is Philosophy?

WHAT IS PHILOSOPHY? THE LITERAL MEANING IS EASY enough, for the English word stems from two Greek ones, philo, love, and sophia, wisdom. So philosophy is the love of wisdom, and a philosopher is a lover of wisdom. But wisdom is not an absolute; there is always more wisdom than any one person, or than all people together, can absorb. And, as Pythagoras, who lived in Greece in the sixth century before our era and was the first to call himself a philosopher, pointed out, since wisdom belongs only to God, a philosopher is a lover, not a possessor, of wisdom; boy seeks girl rather than gets girl. And the wisdom philosophy seeks above all things is the knowledge of being; what being is, and what is nonbeing; and, if there is any real difference between them, what that difference is.

All knowledge, all wisdom, is relative—relative to truth,—and the dictionaries, which define philosophy as the love of wisdom leading to the search for it, further explain that philosophy is the knowledge of general principles—that is, of what makes Tommy, and you and me and everyone and everything, tick. Philosophy is thus the knowledge of elements, causes and laws, as they explain facts and existences. But it is concerned primarily with being, with what really is, and the various types of philosophy vary in the positions they take up with regard to this problem of being. Some of the best known types of philosophy (in alphabetical order) are: association, critical, dogmatic, empirical, existential, inductive, metaphysical, mystical, positivistic, practical, speculative and transcendental.

According to Plato (427-347 B.C.), the first characteristic of the philosopher is that he must be prepared to follow the answers wherever the argument goes, and Plato’s great pupil, Aristotle (384-322 B.C.), who was probably the greatest philosopher who has ever lived, added: “Dear is Plato, but dearer still the truth.” St. Augustine, too (A.D. 354-430), said, some seven hundred years after Aristotle: “Truth, wherever it may be found, must be avidly accepted.”

The distinction between philosophy and science, which also is a search after knowledge, is, basically, the distinction between a point of view stemming from the general and one stemming from the particular. Science deals with some particular portion or aspect of reality arbitrarily abstracted from the whole by the human mind. Philosophy is concerned with the whole problem of what being is, of whether the universe is caused or is self-explanatory, and with the totality of phenomena, in so far as they contribute to explain such fundamental problems.

There are obviously factors and events involving changes from one type or state of existence to another; science certainly considers such to be within its province. But when such changes involve a change from pure nonexistence to mere existence, this obviously falls outside the province of science, which assumes existence but does not claim to be competent before questions involving its nature or its modes. The scientist, while admitting he is incompetent, may still deny that the philosopher is competent. But he cannot deny the possibility of philosophical knowledge without assuming its existence, for by and of itself science has no way of concluding such knowledge is impossible, nor even of proving that it does or does not exist.

Philosophy goes back to legendary times, and it was probably a Greek, Dionysius of Halicarnassus, who defined history itself as “philosophy teaching by examples.” Western philosophy, that is, European as distinct from oriental, began with Thales, a Greek (640-546 B.C.) whom Dante included in his carefully selected list of influential philosophers, headed by Aristotle, “the master of those who know.” Greek philosophy, which culminated in Plato and Aristotle, is the basis of all later philosophy, for the Greeks asked all the great questions, and suggested most of the possible answers. After the Christian era began, St. Paul, speaking from the Areopagus in Athens (the hill of the god Ares), was the first to relate (around A.D. 40) the tenets of Christianity to the concepts of Greek philosophy. Later St. John, in the first chapter of his Gospel, laid the bases of Christian philosophy with his definition of Jesus Christ: “In the beginning was the Word...and the world was made by Him...and without Him was not anything made that was made.”

But if Christianity early took cognizance of philosophy, the reverse was not true. The “sort of sickness,” the “Jewish contagion,” that the emperors feared would spread, and sought by persecution to stem, was not taken seriously by the Roman philosophers, who saw the Christians as either Jewish sectarians or oriental cultists. The rationalist historian William Lecky, in his History of European Morals, published in 1869, wrote:

[That the greatest religious change in the history of mankind should have taken place under the eyes of a brilliant galaxy of philosophers and historians, who were profoundly conscious of the decomposition around them, that all of these writers should have utterly failed to predict the issue of the movement they were observing, and that, during the space of three centuries, they should have treated as simply contemptible an agency which all men must now admit to have been, for good or for evil, the most powerful moral lever that has ever been applied to the affairs of man, are facts well worthy of meditation in every period of religious transition.]

FROM THE START, CHRISTIANITY COMPLICATED THE problems of philosophy, as it complicated the life of the philosopher, and it has continued to do so. In the London Times in 1928 a competent reviewer calmly asserted that Christianity was a good thing, and philosophy was a very good thing, but that Christian philosophy was a monstrous contradiction in terms. It is easy to see how the contradiction seems to arise. The Christian believes that not only does he search for wisdom, but wisdom also searches for him, and with more immediate success. God is not only that than which nothing greater can be imagined, but a person who, while declaring Himself to be wholly unimaginable, has yet revealed Himself and given Himself to man. There is a vast difference between arriving at a possible God at the extreme limit of man’s reason, or as the First Cause of nature, and starting from a present God who gives Himself into man’s heart. The process which may arrive at the former is philosophy; the study of the latter is called theology, and the response to its implications is religion.

In the first centuries of the Christian era, the Christians fought shy of the philosophers, either cold-shouldering them through fear of being worsted in argument—for the early Christians were apt to be simple, unintellectual characters—or from fear of being corrupted by pagan polytheistic and pantheistic ideas, because the oneness and the distinctness of God (that He is very different from all that is not God) were concepts which no Christian might compromise. Yet, even in the first centuries, there were a few Christians who wrote down arguments to be used against pagan philosophers and these included admitting all the basic truths that are common to all philosophies, such as, for example, that a thing cannot be and not be at the same time. By the time the Roman Empire became Christian, under the first Christian Emperor, Constantine the Great (A.D. 272-337), there was already a beginning of Christian philosophy. Christian philosophy is an intellectual inquiry into the nature of being, which accepts as a premise the possible existence of a Power outside man that is both the object and the instigator of man’s search; or, as Christ put it, that He is Himself “the Way, the Truth and the Life.”

The Greek philosophers finally civilized their Roman conquerors, and produced Cicero, the most completely civilized and cultured of the Romans, and Seneca, a pale copy of Socrates. In the second century A.D., Greek was the literary language in Rome (as French was in Moscow in the nineteenth century) but thereafter Greek gradually regressed, both as language and literature. Latin became the official language not only in Rome, but even in Constantinople, and soon the great Greek philosophers were only referred to and commented on, and after a time they came to be almost forgotten, and the manuscripts of their works got lost, or destroyed, when the cities and libraries where they were kept were destroyed. Thus, gradually the findings of Greek philosophy, the truths it had established, became handed on only by hearsay, or “as the Greeks say,” and later still they had all to be puzzled out again.

While the unwieldy Roman Empire was falling apart, and a succession of generals was able more or less successfully to stem the flow of invading barbarians and to hold all or part of the huge Empire together, the silver ages of Latin culture produced a twilight struggle of pagans who could only repeat, at third hand and in translation, what their great philosophers had said, and of Christians not yet philosophically articulate. Such arguments as took place between Octavius and Cæcilius in Marcus Minucius Felix’s Octavius, or between Symmachus (345-410) and the Spaniard Prudentius (348-410) can hardly be dignified with the name of philosophy, yet in them the outlines of the later Christian positions can already be traced.

The Octavius describes friends walking on the seashore near Ostia; one of these friends is an angry pagan who attacks the nasty Christians: Octavius defends them: “The bees have only one king, the flocks only one head, the herds only one leader. Can you believe that in heaven the supreme power is divided and that the entire majesty of that true, divine Authority is broken up? It is obvious that God, the Father of all, has neither beginning nor end; He who gives existence to all has given Himself eternal life; before the worlds were created He was a world in Himself. Whatsoever things there are He calls into being by His word, arranges them by His wisdom and perfects them by His might. He is invisible, for He is too bright for us to look upon. He is impalpable, for He is too pure for us to touch. He is incomprehensible, for He is beyond our ken—infinite, immense, and His real greatness is known to Himself alone. Our mind is too limited to understand Him, therefore we can only form a just estimate of Him by calling Him ‘inestimable.’ Frankly, I will state that in my opinion the man who thinks that he knows the greatness of God, depreciates it; he who does not desire to depreciate it, is ignorant of it. Nor need you seek a name for God: God is His name. Names are only necessary where a large number of persons have to be distinguished individually by special marks and designations: for God, who is alone, the name God is all sufficient.” All the other walkers, at this argument’s end (and it goes on to book-length) declare themselves convinced, indeed converted. Obviously here are excellent apologetics. But here also is the beginning of a feeling for philosophical argument: an attempt to approach the opponent not with doctrinal bludgeons, but with metaphysical rapiers.

Prudentius’ poem is very long. It is lovely poetry, just on the edge of decadence, like a medlar or a perfect avocado pear; but the argument is largely childish. Only just sometimes does the Christian rise to the same dignified heights as the objective and gentlemanly pagan, Symmachus.

From apostolic times on, there were two fairly well defined Christian positions: the deliberately, and aggressively, anti-intellectual, whose supporters argued that since God has spoken to us it is no longer necessary for us to think, and a more orthodox, but minority, position that whatever is true or good is ours. The leader of the anti-intellectuals was Tertullian (?-?230), followed later by St. Jerome (?340-420) who once, in a vision, had been scolded for (being a “Ciceronian rather than a Christian.” It had rankled, and he thereafter rejected philosophy as the fruit of human pride, and even censured Origen (?185-?254), one of the greatest Christian theologians and apologists, for having used secular and even pagan doctrines in the interpretation of Scripture. Yet St. Jerome was one of the few really great Greek scholars of his age, and his translation of the Hebrew and Greek Scriptures into Latin (which is called the Vulgate) is still used today. Throughout the Middle Ages, these two positions were upheld, and both by many saints—Saints Peter Damian and Bernard of Clairvaux, for example, were on Tertullian’s side, Saints Bonaventura and Thomas Aquinas on the highbrow side, which in the early ages had been upheld by such Christian writers as Manlius Theodoras, and Claudianus Mamertus, and above all by St. Augustine (354-430). St. Augustine was greatly influenced by two pagan philosophers, who both wrote in Greek. It was through the two Neo-Platonists, Plotinus (205-270) and Porphyry (?232-304), that St. Augustine became the inheritor and transmitter of Greek philosophical thought. Though it is likely that St. Augustine himself was not a Greek scholar, he mentions and comments on these two Greek Neo-Platonist philosophers with approval, and bases many of his positions on theirs.

Porphyry was born at Tyr in 232 or 233 A.D., and at the age of thirty he attached himself to Plotinus, who was teaching in Rome, and from then on devoted himself to disseminating Plotinus’ ideas, and to helping him correct and distribute his writings. In 270 Porphyry succeeded Plotinus, published his master’s collected works and wrote his life. He also wrote a violent pamphlet in fifteen volumes against the Christians. But his importance as a philosopher stems from his commentaries on Aristotle’s Categories, and above all, from his Isagoge. This little treatise, later translated and commented on by Boethius, is the medium by which Aristotle’s ideas were assimilated into Western thought as early as the fifth century, and it is thanks to Porphyry, to St. Augustine whom he influenced and to Boethius, who translated him, that Christian thought is related to, and was nourished by, Greek philosophy. The Isagoge is a study of the five denominations, or predicables: genus, species, difference, property and accident, which are basic to Aristotle. But what Porphyry added of his own was a positing, brief, but admirably clear, of the problem of Universals, that was to become the most famous and perplexing problem for the whole of the Middle Ages. It is a problem that is clearly central to any philosophy, and is still battled today to and fro between positivists, idealists, existentialists and neo-Thomists, as it was battled for the thousand years from Porphyry to Aquinas between realists and nominalists.

This problem of Universals is: does whiteness, or fatness, or roundness, or anything that can be predicated of a number of things, really exist separately, apart from white things or fat things or round things? Or are the whiteness, the fatness, the roundness only in the things that are white and fat and round? Or are they only in our mind? Is whiteness merely a mental idea given us by all the white things we have ever known, and fatness the sum of all the fat things, and roundness the glomerate impression of all the round things we have perceived? If your reply is that whiteness exists, quite separately and substantially, then philosophically you are a realist; if you believe whiteness is only the mind’s idea of the sum of things that are white, then in philosophy you are called a nominalist.

Here is Porphyry’s statement, a brief and slim introduction to a tempestuous controversy that is not yet, and perhaps by its nature cannot be, resolved:

[Since it is necessary, Chrysaorios, in order to understand Aristotle’s doctrine of Categories, to know what is genus, what difference, what species, what property and what accident, and that this knowledge is necessary also in order to make definitions, and, in general, for everything concerned with division and demonstration, whose theory is very useful, I will run over them briefly, and, as a sort of introduction, I will try to run over what the ancient philosophers said about them, while avoiding too abstruse enquiries and keeping even the simple ones within bounds. First of all, as to what concerns genus and species, the question is to know if they are realities subsisting in themselves, or are merely si...

Table of contents

• Title page
• Table of Contents
• THE NATURE OF MAN, OF BEING, OF GOD
• DEDICATION
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• CHAPTER I-What Is Philosophy?
• CHAPTER II-St. Augustine
• CHAPTER III-Boethius
• CHAPTER IV-John Scotus Erigena
• CHAPTER V-St. Anselm
• CHAPTER VI-Abelard and St. Bernard
• CHAPTER VII-The Arabs
• CHAPTER VIII-St. Bonaventura
• CHAPTER IX-St. Thomas Aquinas
• CHAPTER X-Duns Scotus
• CHAPTER XI-William of Ockham
• CHAPTER XII - Conclusion
• RECOMMENDED FURTHER READING