Medieval Philosophy

by Peter S. Adamson

The number of extant works by unidentified authors is so large that you could produce a creditable history of medieval scholasticism by discussing nothing but anonymous manuscripts (a “history of philosophy without any names,” if you will).

Furthermore, the medieval discussions did not simply presuppose the truth of Christian belief. Philosophers frequently offered arguments that were explicitly designed to be convincing even for a hypothetical atheist or non-Christian reader.

Perhaps the most common and pernicious prejudice about medieval philosophy is that it was really all theology, that these thinkers talked of nothing but God and other recondite questions of faith.

As early as the Carolingian period, we find examples of philosophical debate being conducted for its own sake, without any explicit comment on what the debate might all mean for our understanding of God or the state of our souls.

The first three arts, or “trivium” (literally, the “three ways”), included grammar, rhetoric, and dialectic or logic. The remaining four, or “quadrivium” (the “four ways”), were the mathematical arts of arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy.

Here we catch a glimpse of a still emerging ideology that is going to stay with us throughout the medieval period: the idea that God appoints secular kings to rule.

Among Alcuin’s borrowings from Augustine is the idea that the powers of the soul form an image of the Trinity, with the three divine Persons corresponding to understanding, will, and memory

It’s been estimated that as much as 94 percent of Latin literature was lost in the wake of the fall of the Roman Empire.

But, according to Augustine, we were not thereby restored to the even more original sinlessness of Adam and Eve through Christ. Rather, humans have retained a tendency towards evil, and only a further gift of divine grace can give us the strength to be good. We cannot, in other words, merit salvation on our own power, but need God’s help in order to be saved.

Whatever your religious beliefs or lack thereof, your understanding of free will has been indirectly shaped by centuries’ worth of reflection on this thorny theological problem.

For this purpose Hincmar turned to the sharpest mind of the time, which belonged to John Scotus Eriugena. He hailed from Ireland, being one of numerous scholars who found their way from there to mainland Europe in the Carolingian period, presumably fleeing from Viking raids. In fact, both “Scotus” and “Eriugena” mean “someone from Ireland,” so his name rather redundantly means “John Irishman Irishman.”

It’s sometimes jokingly remarked by experts in medieval philosophy—who are of course famous for their sense of humor—that the most prolific philosopher of the age was “Anonymous.”

Here Damian is setting down an initial point of great philosophical interest: there are some things which do not happen, but remain possible nonetheless. That may seem obvious. Right now you are reading this book, but could quite easily be doing something else (though I wouldn’t recommend it).

Yet Anselm also points the way towards a major feature of philosophy in the twelfth and thirteenth century: a reliance on reason, rather than revelation and authority.

No one is free to will something if they are compelled or coerced into willing it. Even the threat of guaranteed punishment can count as coercion. This is why Anselm insists that Satan could not have known the awful fate that would befall him if he defied God.

In fact you can even ground apophatic theology in the logic of great-making properties. If it is better to be beyond the grasp of human language and thought than to be graspable by humankind, then God, being maximally good, must be ineffable.

In fact, Abelard goes so far as to say that it is more admirable to avoid sin when temptation is powerful. It’s easy to avoid wrongdoing when you have no urge to do wrong, the difficult thing is resisting sins you would very much like to commit.

Abelard’s theory, then, amounts to the claim that morality has to do only with the second stage of consent. Good and bad lie with the intentions we form, not the desires we have, the actions we perform, or the pleasure we take in them.

Religion put the history into the history of philosophy. The pagans of antiquity by and large saw history as irrelevant to a philosophical understanding of the world.

For this same reason, Hugh is also quick to criticize those who pursue knowledge uselessly. He complains that in his day, there are “many who study but few who are wise”

The problem is that in being a Trinity, God is in some sense not identical with Himself, despite being numerically one. That is, when we count how many Gods there are, we had better come up with the answer “only one.” And yet God the Father is not wholly identical with God the Son.

But the problem was admitted to be a real one, and under the pontificate of Gregory VII (which lasted from 1073 to 1085 ad), the Investiture Contest was like an inexpertly poured beer: it came rapidly to a head.

In the end, John suggests, it’s probably best just to pray for God to deal with the tyrant rather than taking matters into one’s own hands

But like Manegold of Lautenbach, John thinks that moral failure can undermine a secular ruler’s legitimacy, whereas this is never the case with a pope.

The judgment that in Christ the human person was nothing has been called “Christological nihilism,” which I mention mostly in case any readers are in a religious heavy metal band and looking for a good album title.

Aquinas tells us that to be beautiful is to be good in a certain way. Beauty is the tendency of goodness to be pleasing. So beauty would relate to goodness much as goodness relates to being.

In this tradition, beauty was defined in terms of symmetry and order, which were in turn seen as manifestations of divine reality in the physical realm.

Philosophers were also open to the idea that beauty is, if not superficial or “skin-deep,” then at least characteristically bodily in nature. They were, after all, devoted to a religion based on the incarnation of the divine in a human body.

The members of mendicant orders, sometimes called “friars,” posed a challenge to the established Church. Their devotion to a life of humility and poverty served as an unspoken (and sometimes spoken) rebuke to the wealth of bishops and the worldly entanglements of popes. A clash was inevitable.

One objection lobbed at the mendicants was that they were ironically committing the sin of pride, flaunting their poverty with a quite literally “holier than thou” attitude. Appropriately for a mendicant, Bonaventure begs to differ.

Several times Aquinas cites what may be his very favorite line from the Bible: “the invisible things of Him are clearly known from the creation of the world, being understood by the things that are made” (Romans 1:20).

A final task for philosophy is establishing what Aquinas calls the “preambles” of faith, things that pave the way for religion but are accessible to natural reason. Among these none is more central than the very existence of God.

In a set of famous arguments, often called the “five ways,” Aquinas describes five routes to establishing that God does in fact exist (ST Q2 a3 resp). These are some of the most thoroughly discussed arguments in the history of philosophy, and if all that discussion has shown anything, it is that the arguments need a lot of help if they are to be made watertight and convincing.

One area where Aquinas’ theory has surprising implications is the development of the human embryo. Given that the Catholic Church is well known for insisting that a fully human life begins at conception, it’s intriguing to find that the Church’s most canonical thinker doesn’t think anything of the sort. Instead, Aquinas believes that the presence of a rational soul requires the presence of organs that can carry out its functions. Since this is lacking at early stages of fetal development, only the lower nutritive or plant-like functions are present at first.

If the soul is not accidentally related to body as a pilot is related to a ship, but is the substantial form of that body, responsible for even such humble and obviously physical processes like digestion, how could it possibly still exist in a disembodied state? Aquinas comes dangerously close to denying that it can do so. He thinks the soul’s condition after death is unnatural to it and that the soul will be unable to exercise many of its powers in that condition.

Likewise, the fourteenth-century English thinker Robert Holcot allowed that Socrates was saved and given eternal life. These posthumous tributes show how difficult some medievals found it to accept that Christians had a monopoly on virtue. But from a theological point of view, this was rather inconvenient.

Augustine’s view on this matter was a strict one: though pagans may on occasion seem virtuous, their virtue is in fact false. For their actions, no matter how admirable they may seem, are not directed towards the true goodness of the Christian God.

John of Salisbury, himself quite a booster of ancient culture, qualified his praise of Socrates and other ancient philosophers with the remark “All reason fails without faith; only those who worship Christ are wise.”

We’ve seen how medieval proponents of the “illumination” theory argued, again following Augustine, that God must be somehow involved every time a human achieves genuine understanding. Likewise, on the ethical front, divine help was needed if humans were to be capable of genuine goodness.

What could Aquinas say to a pagan, or atheist, who says they are happy to settle for a life of natural virtue? Simply that they cannot hope to be truly happy that way. We are born with not only a disposition to acquire earthly virtue but also a natural yearning that can be satisfied fully only by the supreme good which is God.

The theologians, it would seem, were presenting a united front against provocative philosophical ideas. Their apparent goal was to rein in the arts faculty, where heretical doctrines were at best being openly discussed in front of the young students, and at worst actually being endorsed on the authority of Aristotle.

Of course, grammar had been part of the trivium before the rise of the universities, even since antiquity. But conceptions of grammar became more ambitious in the thirteenth century. This was, as usual, because of Aristotle.

Looking for a romantic gift for that special someone? I highly recommend that you do not get them a copy of the twelfth-century treatise On Love by Andreas Capellanus, because your intended sweetheart is going to have misgivings about your liaison once he or she reads the first page. Here Andreas explains what love is, namely “a certain innate suffering caused by seeing, and thinking too much about, the shapeliness of someone of the opposite sex.”

Somewhat more poetic, though a little more encouraging, is the definition of love found in the Romance of the Rose. “Love is a mental illness afflicting two persons of opposite sex…it comes upon people through a burning desire, born of disordered perception, to embrace and to kiss and to seek carnal gratification”

The Lover is no more impressed by this second more long-winded appearance from Reason than he was by the first. When she names Socrates as a paradigm of rationality, he responds, “I would not give three chickpeas for Socrates”

The Lover remains unmoved, albeit without indicating how many chickpeas he would or wouldn’t give for Plato.

Henry condemns the pursuit of the liberal arts or other rational sciences for their own sake as mere “curiosity” but commends the use of philosophy towards a higher goal. This goal is, of course, God, who is ultimately pursued in practical sciences like ethics because He is the highest good (81, 111, 120), and also in theoretical sciences like natural philosophy or metaphysics because He is the ultimate cause of all things.

In applying this psychological analysis Aquinas and Henry need to steer between two heresies, Arianism and Sabellianism. Arius held that God is three substances and not only one, while Sabellius denied real plurality among the Persons

Conceptually speaking, there must in some sense be a Father and Son “before” the Father can be related to the Son, just as I can’t be taller than you unless you and I both first exist (and even then, given my modest stature, it’s rather unlikely).

Even granted that there are a variety of ways for God to make the world, isn’t He required to choose the best of those ways? After all, He is perfectly good and benevolent. So, when God considered whether to create lions, He presumably had to consider whether a world with lions is better than a world without lions.