IV MEDIEVAL PHILOSOPHY

IV

MEDIEVAL PHILOSOPHY

During the decline of Greco-Roman civilization, Western philosophers turned their attention from the scientific investigation of nature and the search for worldly happiness to the problem of salvation in another and better world. By the 3rd century ad, Christianity had spread to the more educated classes of the Roman Empire. The religious teachings of the Gospels were combined by the Fathers of the Church with many of the philosophical concepts of the Greek and Roman schools. Of particular importance were the First Council of Nicaea in 325 and the Council of Ephesus in 431, which drew upon metaphysical ideas of Aristotle and Plotinus to establish important Christian doctrines about the divinity of Jesus and the nature of the Trinity.

A

Augustinian Philosophy

Saint Augustine

Saint Augustine, born in what is now Souk-Ahras, Algeria, in ad 354, brought a systematic method of philosophy to Christian theology. Augustine taught rhetoric in the ancient cities of Carthage, Rome, and Milan before his Christian baptism in 387. His discussions of the knowledge of truth and of the existence of God drew from the Bible and from the philosophers of ancient Greece. A vigorous advocate of Roman Catholicism, Augustine developed many of his doctrines while attempting to resolve theological conflicts with Donatism and Pelagianism, two heretical Christian movements.

The process of reconciling the Greek emphasis on reason with the emphasis on religious emotion in the teachings of Christ and the apostles found eloquent expression in the writings of Saint Augustine during the late 4th and early 5th centuries. He developed a system of thought that, through subsequent amendments and elaborations, eventually became the authoritative doctrine of Christianity. Largely as a result of his influence, Christian thought was Platonic in spirit until the 13th century, when Aristotelian philosophy became dominant. Augustine argued that religious faith and philosophical understanding are complementary rather than opposed and that one must “believe in order to understand and understand in order to believe.” Like the Neoplatonists, he considered the soul a higher form of existence than the body and taught that knowledge consists in the contemplation of Platonic ideas as abstract notions apart from sensory experience and anything physical or material.

The Platonic philosophy was combined with the Christian concept of a personal God who created the world and predestined (determined in advance) its course, and with the doctrine of the fall of humanity, requiring the divine incarnation in Christ. Augustine attempted to provide rational understanding of the relation between divine predestination and human freedom, the existence of evil in a world created by a perfect and all-powerful God, and the nature of the Trinity. Late in his life Augustine came to a pessimistic view about original sin, grace, and predestination: the ultimate fates of humans, he decided, are predetermined by God in the sense that some people are granted divine grace to enter heaven and others are not, and human actions and choices cannot explain the fates of individuals. This view was influential throughout the Middle Ages and became even more important during the Reformation of the 16th century when it inspired the doctrine of predestination put forth by Protestant theologian John Calvin.

Augustine conceived of history as a dramatic struggle between the good in humanity, as expressed in loyalty to the “city of God,” or community of saints, and the evil in humanity, as embodied in the earthly city with its material values. His view of human life was pessimistic, asserting that happiness is impossible in the world of the living, where even with good fortune, which is rare, awareness of approaching death would mar any tendency toward satisfaction. He believed further that without the religious virtues of faith, hope, and charity, which require divine grace to be attained, a person cannot develop the natural virtues of courage, justice, temperance, and wisdom. His analyses of time, memory, and inner religious experience have been a source of inspiration for metaphysical and mystical thought.

The only major contribution to Western philosophy in the three centuries following the death of Augustine in ad 430 was made by the 6th-century Roman statesman Boethius, who revived interest in Greek and Roman philosophy, particularly Aristotle’s logic and metaphysics. In the 9th century the Irish monk John Erigena developed a pantheistic interpretation of Christianity, identifying the divine Trinity with the One, Logos, and World Soul of Neoplatonism and maintaining that both faith and reason are necessary to achieve the ecstatic union with God.

Even more significant for the development of Western philosophy was the early 11th-century Muslim philosopher Avicenna. His work modifying Aristotelian metaphysics introduced a distinction important to later philosophy between essence (the fundamental qualities that make a thing what it is—the treeness of a tree, for example) and existence (being, or living reality). He also demonstrated how it is possible to combine the biblical view of God with Aristotle’s philosophical system. Avicenna’s writings on logic, mathematics, physics, and medicine remained influential for centuries.

B

Scholasticism

Abelard and Héloïse

The 12th-century scholar Peter Abelard was one of the most famous theologians and philosophers of his time. In 1117 he began tutoring Héloïse, the niece of a French cleric. Abelard and Héloïse soon became secret lovers, but were forced to separate after being discovered by Héloïse’s uncle. The two lovers retired to monasteries, and although they kept in touch by writing, they did not see each other again.

In the 11th century a revival of philosophical thought began as a result of the increasing contact between different parts of the Western world and the general reawakening of cultural interests that culminated in the Renaissance. The works of Plato, Aristotle, and other Greek thinkers were translated by Arab scholars and brought to the attention of philosophers in Western Europe. Muslim, Jewish, and Christian philosophers interpreted and clarified these writings in an effort to reconcile philosophy with religious faith and to provide rational grounds for their religious beliefs. Their labors established the foundations of Scholasticism.

Scholastic thought was less interested in discovering new facts and principles than in demonstrating the truth of existing beliefs. Its method was therefore dialectical (based upon logical argument), and its intense concern with the logic of argument led to important developments in logic as well as theology. The Scholastic philosopher Saint Anselm of Canterbury adopted Augustine’s view of the complementary relation between faith and reason and combined Platonism with Christian theology. Supporting the Platonic theory of Ideas, Anselm argued in favor of the separate existence of universals, or common properties of things—the properties Avicenna had called essences. He thus established the position of logical realism—an assertion that universals and other ideas exist independently of our awareness of them—on one of the most vigorously disputed issues of medieval philosophy.

The contrary view, known as nominalism, was formulated by the Scholastic philosopher Roscelin, who maintained that only individual, solid objects exist and that the universals, forms, and ideas, under which particular things are classified, constitute mere sounds or names, rather than intangible substances. When he argued that the Trinity must consist of three separate beings, his views were deemed heretical and he was forced to recant in 1092. The French Scholastic theologian Peter Abelard, whose tragic love affair with Héloïse in the 12th century is one of the most memorable romantic stories in medieval history, proposed a compromise between realism and nominalism known as conceptualism, according to which universals exist in particular things as properties and outside of things as concepts in the mind. Abelard maintained that revealed religion—religion based on divine revelation, or the word of God—must be justified by reason. He developed an ethics based on personal conscience that anticipated Protestant thought.

The Spanish-Arab jurist and physician Averroës, the most noted Muslim philosopher of the Middle Ages, made Aristotelian science and philosophy a powerful influence on medieval thought with his lucid and scholarly commentaries on the works of Aristotle. He earned himself the title “the Commentator” among the many Scholastics who came to regard Aristotle as “the Philosopher.” Averroës attempted to overcome the contradictions between Aristotelian philosophy and revealed religion by distinguishing between two separate systems of truth, a scientific body of truths based on reason and a religious body of truths based on revelation. His view that reason takes precedence over religion led to his exile in 1195. Averroës’s so-called double-truth doctrine influenced many Muslim, Jewish, and Christian philosophers; it was rejected, however, by many others, and became an important issue in medieval philosophy.

The Jewish rabbi and physician Moses Maimonides, one of the greatest figures in Judaic thought, followed his contemporary Averroës in uniting Aristotelian science with religion but rejected the view that both of two conflicting systems of ideas can be true. In his Guide for the Perplexed (1190?) Maimonides attempted to provide a rational explanation of Judaic doctrine and defended religious beliefs (such as the belief in the creation of the world) that conflicted with Aristotelian science only when he was convinced that decisive evidence was lacking on either side.

Abelard, Averroës, and Maimonides were each accused of blasphemy because their views conflicted with religious beliefs of the time. The 13th century, however, saw a series of philosophers who would come to be worshiped as saints. The Italian Scholastic philosopher Saint Bonaventure combined Platonic and Aristotelian principles and introduced the concept of substantial form, or nonmaterial substance, to account for the immortality of the soul. Bonaventure’s view tended toward pantheistic mysticism in making the aim of philosophy the ecstatic union with God.

Averroës

This painting of the Arab philosopher Averroës appears in a series of paintings by Italian painter Andrea da Firenze in the church of Santa Maria Novella in Florence, Italy. The commentaries of Averroës on the philosophy of Aristotle had enormous influence on Christian and Jewish thinkers in Europe during the Middle Ages.

The 13th-century German Scholastic philosopher Saint Albertus Magnus was the first Christian philosopher to endorse and interpret the entire system of Aristotelian thought. He studied and admired the writings of the Muslim and Jewish Aristotelians and wrote commentaries on Aristotle in which he attempted to reconcile Aristotle’s thought with Christian teachings. He also took a great interest in the natural science of his day. The 13th-century English monk Roger Bacon, one of the first Scholastics to take an interest in experimental science, realized that a great deal remained to be learned about nature. He criticized the deductive method of his contemporaries and their reliance on past authority, and called for a new method of inquiry based on controlled observation (see Deduction).

Roger Bacon

English philosopher and scientist Roger Bacon was a major advocate of experimental science during the 13th century. Bacon was condemned and imprisoned for his beliefs.

The most important medieval philosopher was Saint Thomas Aquinas, a Dominican monk who was born in Italy in 1225 and later studied under Albertus Magnus in Germany. Aquinas combined Aristotelian science and Augustinian theology into a comprehensive system of thought that later became the authoritative philosophy of the Roman Catholic Church. He wrote on every known subject in philosophy and science, and his major works, Summa Theologica and Summa Contra Gentiles, in which he presents a persuasive and systematic structure of ideas, still constitute a powerful influence on Western thought. His writings reflect the renewed interest of his time in reason, nature, and worldly happiness, together with its religious faith and concern for salvation.

Saint Thomas Aquinas

During the 13th century, Saint Thomas Aquinas sought to reconcile Aristotelian philosophy with Augustinian theology. Aquinas employed both reason and faith in the study of metaphysics, moral philosophy, and religion. While Aquinas accepted the existence of God on faith, he offered five proofs of God’s existence to support such a belief.

Aquinas made many important investigations into the philosophy of religion, including an extremely influential study of the attributes of God, such as omnipotence, omniscience, eternity, and benevolence. He also provided a new account of the relationship between faith and reason, arguing against the Averroists that the truths of faith and the truths of reason cannot conflict but rather apply to different realms. The truths of natural science and philosophy are discovered by reasoning from facts of experience, whereas the tenets of revealed religion, the doctrine of the Trinity, the creation of the world, and other articles of Christian dogma are beyond rational comprehension, although not inconsistent with reason, and must be accepted on faith. The metaphysics, theory of knowledge, ethics, and politics of Aquinas were derived mainly from Aristotle, but he added the Augustinian virtues of faith, hope, and charity and the goal of eternal salvation through grace to Aristotle’s naturalistic ethics with its goal of worldly happiness.

C

Medieval Philosophy After Aquinas

The most important critics of Thomistic philosophy (adherence to the theories of Aquinas) were the 13th-century Scottish theologian John Duns Scotus and 14th-century English Scholastic William of Ockham. Duns Scotus developed a subtle and highly technical system of logic and metaphysics, but because of the fanaticism of his followers the name Duns later ironically became a symbol of stupidity in the English word dunce. Scotus rejected the attempt of Aquinas to reconcile rational philosophy with revealed religion. He maintained, in a modified version of the double-truth doctrine of Averroës, that all religious beliefs are matters of faith, except for the belief in the existence of God, which he regarded as logically provable. Against the view of Aquinas that God acts in accordance with his rational nature, Scotus argued that the divine will is prior to the divine intellect and creates, rather than follows, the laws of nature and morality, thus implying a stronger notion of free will than that of Aquinas. On the issue of universals, Scotus developed a new compromise between realism and nominalism, accounting for the difference between individual objects and the forms that these objects exemplify as a logical rather than a real distinction.

William of Ockham formulated the most radically nominalistic criticism of the Scholastic belief in intangible, invisible things such as forms, essences, and universals. He maintained that such abstract entities are merely references of words to other words rather than to actual things. His famous rule, known as Ockham’s razor—which said that one should not assume the existence of more things than are logically necessary—became a fundamental principle of modern science and philosophy.

In the 15th and 16th centuries a revival of scientific interest in nature was accompanied by a tendency toward pantheistic mysticism—that is, finding God in all things. The Roman Catholic prelate Nicholas of Cusa anticipated the work of the Polish astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus in his suggestion that the Earth moved around the Sun, thus displacing humanity from the center of the universe; he also conceived of the universe as infinite and identical with God. The Italian philosopher Giordano Bruno, who similarly identified the universe with God, developed the philosophical implications of the Copernican theory. Bruno’s philosophy influenced subsequent intellectual forces that led to the rise of modern science and to the Reformation.