Medieval Philosophy

by Peter S. Adamson

For Augustine, our ability to attain truth relies on the presence within our souls of the Truth that is Christ. This so-called “illuminationist” model of knowledge continued to be popular among medievals. But it received competition when Aristotle’s more empiricist approach became known. The stage was set for an epistemological showdown, which unfolded in the thirteenth century.

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.

between the influence of Boethius and that of Aristotle. Until a more complete set of Aristotelian works became available in the twelfth century, the medievals had access only to the logical writings that had been translated into Latin and commented upon by Boethius.

The Marriage of Mercury and Philology, written by Martianus Capella.5 It depicted the seven liberal arts disciplines as bridesmaids in attendance at an allegorical wedding, much as Boethius personified our favorite discipline as Lady Philosophy in the Consolation. Martianus’ work was very popular in the early Middle Ages, and it was only one of several texts to bring the liberal arts to the attention of men like Alcuin. The curriculum appeared as early as the first century bc, when the Roman scholar Marcus Varro composed a (now

lost) work on the disciplines covering the seven liberal arts plus medicine and architecture.

He is not just telling us where words come from: he is teaching us what they mean and about the things for which they stand. As he says himself, one of the tasks he is undertaking is the “differentiation” of things, by noting the features that distinguish one thing from another, as, for example, cruelty distinguishes the tyrant from the king (§I.31). All of this is reminiscent of far older philosophical works, for instance Plato, who told a similar story about etymology and its significance in his Cratylus, and whose dialogue the Sophist explored the idea that understanding something means finding its distinguishing features.

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

Alcuin’s Platonist outlook was a good match for Theodulf’s critique of image worship. After all, we use our senses to view images, and from a Platonist point of view sensation is vastly inferior to the powers of the mind.

Most other atheists you meet will give more conventional reasons for their disbelief. They may say that modern science has managed to account for all the features of the world formerly inexplicable without reference to a wise Creator. In light of this, we no longer have good evidence for the existence of God, or any supernatural being. Or they may invoke the notorious “problem of evil.”2 The

God worshipped in the Abrahamic religions is meant to be all-powerful, all-good, and all-knowing. How then can the world be so full of suffering and evil? Why would He allow this, since He is clearly in a position to put a stop to it and, being good, would certainly want to do so? The standard response from the theist is the “free will defense.” God allows suffering and evil because He must do so, if He is to give freedom to His creatures. In giving us meaningful freedom of choice, He must give us the chance to do wrong; but doing wrong means doing evil, and causing suffering. In the Christian tradition, especially since Augustine, the origins of sin were traced back as far as the first humans. The original sin of Adam and Eve has been passed down to all their descendants, and the human condition is one of congenital weakness. As Oscar Wilde put it, we can resist anything except temptation. In particular, we can resist God’s mercy, literally embodied when He became a human and sacrificed Himself for us. This act of sacrifice has held out a promise of rescue from the state of sin. 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.

A moment’s reflection of our own shows why this problem is so, well, problematic. Augustine insisted, on the one hand, that sin is the result of free will. All human sin, beginning with the original sin of Adam and Eve, is a perverted use of the freedom God has given us. This is why it is just that God should punish us for our misdeeds. On the other hand, Augustine insisted too that, born into sin as we are, none of us can avoid doing evil without God’s help. To say otherwise would be to fall into the position of the rival theologian Pelagius, which Augustine attacked ferociously in the mature phase of his career. Given the weight of Augustine’s authority, medievals standardly took the Pelagian view to be heretical. So, for them it was a basic ground rule that humans need grace from God in order to be good. It is up to God, not us, whether any of us will receive that gift. But in that case, it looks as if God is like a man standing at the edge of a lake who sees a group of drowning people who cannot swim. He has plenty of life preservers on hand, but throws them only to a select few, letting the others sink to their doom. Surely we would not praise this man for saving the lucky ones, but rather accuse him of heartlessness for ignoring others he could have helped. In the same way, one might say to Augustine and the medievals who followed his lead that their God is not merciful at all. He arbitrarily and unjustly lets some of His creatures go to eternal torment when He

could have given them salvation. Furthermore, on this Augustinian picture humans in the state of sin turn out to lack meaningful free will. If we aren’t able to be good without God’s help, then any freedom we have seems to be useless, nothing more than the ability to decide which sins to commit. These were bullets that one ninth-century medieval thinker was ready and willing to bite. He was a monk named Gottschalk, and his signature doctrine was “double predestination.” The idea is a simple one: God has decided in His inscrutable wisdom which of us will be saved and which condemned. This decision was made already before any of us were born, and there is no court of appeal. It’s an uncompromising view, but one that looks pretty reasonable within the Augustinian framework I’ve just sketched. After all, if my salvation requires God’s intervention, and if He decides not to intervene, then He has effectively decided that I will be damned. From this point of view, Gottschalk was simply drawing the obvious conclusion of Augustine’s teaching. Indeed, he was able to quote from the works of Augustine in support of his own position.

Both of them worried that anyone convinced by Gottschalk would lose all motivation for being good. After all, if God has already decided I’m going to hell, then there’s nothing I can do about

it, and I may as well have some fun first. Even better if God has placed me among the elect, since I’m sure to keep my place no matter how many sins I commit.

What was needed was a more convincing account, one that would preserve the teaching of Augustine while also preserving human freedom.

If we want to be good Augustinians, we must posit an asymmetry between goodness and sin.5 In our fallen state, we are capable of sinning but incapable of being good—for that, we need the help of God’s grace. The Pelagians violated this rule by placing both good and evil within the scope of human power, and thus leaving insufficient room for grace. Gottschalk strayed too far in the other direction, by effectively making God the author of both goodness and sin, in that both are predestined. Neither of these views preserved asymmetry. Hincmar, Hrabanus, and Eriugena all saw this point, and explained why good and evil are different: God predestines the redemption of those He elects to receive effective grace, but He does not predestine the damnation of sinners.

One mistake Eriugena claims to find in Gottschalk is a confusion between God’s foreknowing that I will do something, and His predestining that I will do it (§2.2, 5.1, 11.7). As Boethius had already argued in late antiquity, knowing that something is going to happen doesn’t mean causing that thing to happen. Thus, God can foreknow sin without predestining it.

Yet Eriugena does offer arguments as well as quotations. He complains that, in addition to that fundamental confusion between God’s knowing a thing and causing it to happen, Gottschalk has ascribed a double predestination to a God who is purely one. It’s an early sign of his Neoplatonic leanings that Eriugena hammers relentlessly on this point (as at §2.6, 3.5). Gottschalk’s position would require that God exercises two distinct and contrary kinds of predestination over His creation, and this is inconsistent with God’s simplicity. Instead, everything that God does proceeds from one essence.

Eriugena has a good answer, in that his argument turns on the kind of causation exercised by simple things (§3.2). On Gottschalk’s theory, God would be the cause of two contrary things, predestining both salvation and damnation.

This gives us another reason why we cannot imagine God exercising two opposite kinds of causation. He would have to use both in His timeless eternity, so that we would have a simple cause doing two contrary things simultaneously. And this is clearly absurd.

Another problem with double predestination, according to Eriugena, is that it fails to preserve divine justice. If God is to issue commands to us and justly punish us when we fail to obey, then He must give us freedom rather than predetermining us to sin

God must get some of the credit for helping us to be saved, but none of the blame when we sin and are damned.

Divine grace is, as Eriugena puts it, “cooperative” (§8.9). Without it a person who is freely choosing to do good would be unable to succeed. Let’s go back to our analogy of the swimmers. Before, I gave the impression that the swimmers were drowning through no fault of their own. But that is not how Eriugena sees things. Rather, God would be like someone on shore who has generously offered to save everyone in the water. Some of the swimmers are ignoring this and in fact making every effort to drown themselves, eagerly weighing themselves down so that they will sink. Clearly there is no obligation to save these fools against their will. Meanwhile others are doing their best to stay afloat, and gratefully accept the offer of assistance. If they get help from the man on shore, their own efforts will enable them to avoid drowning. Analogously, it is just for God to punish those who freely sin, while both free choice and grace are involved in salvation. To this extent Eriugena was basically following the line already suggested by Gottschalk’s other opponents, Hincmar and Hrabanus Maurus. Eriugena does indulge his distinctively “philosophical” style and pushes hard on points like God’s utter unity. But it’s really only as he develops his argument that he goes beyond what Hincmar could accept. In another premonition of his Neoplatonic leanings, Eriugena brings up the late antique idea that evil is privation or non-being (§10.2–3). This notion was already pioneered by Plotinus, an...

set up a just order of laws governing the universe, under which sinners fall short of the salvation that God actively offers to others who seek His help.

The teacher proposes dividing all things in terms of two criteria: whether or not they create and whether or not they are created. This yields four types of thing: creating but not created, both creating and created, not creating but created, and neither creating nor created (441b). The student, apparently having already attended some classes we missed, is quick to understand what the first three types would mean. The

first type is what creates, but is not created; pretty obviously this is God. The third, opposite type is also easy. That which does not create but is created will be the familiar non-divine things in the world around us. The student is immediately able to provide the less obvious identification of the second type, that which is created but also creates. This applies to what Eriugena calls “primordial causes,” which play roughly the role of the Forms in the Platonic tradition, or divine ideas in ancient authors from Philo of Alexandria to Augustine (whom Eriugena cites as an authority, 446a).

It would not be a stretch to see Eriugena as understanding the whole process of creation through the lens of the Christian doctrine of the Incarnation. According to that doctrine, the Son is eternally begotten by the Father, and then becomes present in the created world by being incarnated as Jesus Christ. Eriugena understands all of creation to follow this sort of two-step procedure. First, things are created within God Himself by being grasped in his Wisdom or Word, the second person of the Trinity. Then they manifest in, or as Eriugena also puts it, “descend” into, the created world itself (678d). Eriugena is even willing to say that God is in a sense creating Himself within or as the world. Here he is, as so often, taking inspiration from the Pseudo-Dionysius, who had spoken of “theophany,” literally, “God’s showing Himself” or “appearing” to us in the things He has created (446d).

The student has to ask the teacher to explain what sort of nature might be neither creating nor created (442a). So far, all three of the divisions of nature have turned out to be, in some sense, identical with God: the creating Father, the created and creating Son or primordial causes, and the created manifestation that is the world. The same is true of the fourth division. For Eriugena, all created things are designed and destined to return to their divine source.2 Of course God remains a creator, but if we think about Him as the final cause or goal for the things He has created, then we are not thinking of Him in this way. He is not source, but destination, not starting point, but finishing line.

At a more theological level, the Christian story of humankind’s fall and redemption fits perfectly into the Platonist pattern of procession and return. Having fallen away from God through sin, human nature is renewed and made whole again. For Eriugena this means that we will ultimately be gathered back into the divine primordial causes. This is a rather daring version of the Christian narrative of sin and redemption, since it seems to imply

that everything will ultimately just become identical with God.

He understands the world, now and at the end of time, to be both separate from God and the same as Him, since created beings are simply an expression of what God is. Despite the access we have to God through the created world that is His manifestation, Eriugena believes that God in Himself remains utterly beyond our grasp.

We would not, for instance, call God “essence” but rather “superessential,” not call Him “wise” but rather “beyond wise,” not “loving” but “more than loving” (462a–b, 521d). What Eriugena likes about this is that it combines the virtues of positive and negative theology. The surface grammar of a statement like “God is super-good” is positive. It seems to offer a description of God, assigning to Him the attribute of super-goodness, whatever that might mean. But as soon as we start to think about what that would in fact mean, we see that the force of the prefix “super-” is negative.

Eriugena refuses to take no for an answer, and urges us to place God beyond the reach of language entirely, whether that language is positive or negative.

Centuries later, Augustine too made much ado about nothing. In his dialogue On the

Teacher he raised the problem that if words are signs that refer to things, then we apparently need something for the word “nothing” to refer to; but that clearly makes no sense, since the word “nothing” refers to, well, nothing.3

Aren’t we now saying that the things around us were in fact created from something, namely the primordial causes? Well, yes (664a). So the only possible conclusion is that the phrase “creation from nothing” applies to the way the primordial causes themselves are produced by and within God. The word “nothing” simply indicates that God is beyond all being or, as Dionysius would say, “super-essential.” God Himself is the nothingness from which all things come, an unknowable nothingness or “darkness” that transcends even the things He creates within Himself (681a; as we’ll see later in this volume, this Dionysian theme will be taken up by authors like Meister Eckhart and the author of the Cloud of Unknowing).6 This account of unknowable darkness sheds further light on the division of four kinds of nature at the beginning of the Periphyseon. As the first creating and uncreated nature, God the Father is utterly transcendent, an unknowable source of the things He fashions within Himself in an act of “begetting.” What is begotten within Him is the Word,

which contains within it the causes of created things. So this Word is the second nature, both created and creating. Yet the second nature is still transcendent, because it lies beyond the created and not-creating third nature of the physical universe we see around us. Our language and thought are at home only with this third nature, with physical reality.

Under the influence of this Pseudo-Augustine, he argues that the physical objects we see around us are mere collections of accidental features, like qualities and quantities, which have been joined to the first category of substance. Yet substance itself lies beyond the things we can see and touch (489c–d). It is simple, whereas bodies are composites of these accidental features. And in fact, even though things around us have qualities and quantities—like Zeppo’s handsome features and his

being a certain height—the categories of quality and quantity themselves are also beyond physical things, invisible principles that have visible effects (493a). All this is fully consistent with Eriugena’s metaphysical scheme, which makes the physical universe a mere manifestation or visible appearance of invisible, intelligible principles.

One of the characteristic scholarly activities of the medieval period was commentary on earlier texts.

Another anonymous gloss adds the negative perspective of Eriugena’s theology, stating that since the divine being is beyond our comprehension, it is, rather paradoxically, a kind of non-being.

They are also paving the way for a long-running medieval argument over the general features of things, usually called “universals.” Eriugena and his colleagues seem to

think that a nature found in many things, like human, giraffe, or even being is not just something real, but something divine, a cause for all the things that partake of it. One author of the time compared the relation between the species human and individual humans to the relation between the roots of a tree and its branches. John Marenbon, one of the few scholars to work with these glosses, has coined the term “hyper-realism” for this idea that a general nature is not just real but expresses its reality in the individuals that partake of it. Hyper-realism is, in effect, the logical version of Eriugena’s core metaphysical teaching that God’s transcendent being is made manifest in created things.

But most will, broadly, agree with Lanfranc: reason plays a vital role in Christian doctrine, but there are bounds beyond which reason cannot go. Philosophy should thus accept a subordinate role to Scripture, comparable to the relationship between a handmaiden and her mistress—a famous analogy devised by the author we turn to next.

God may be so powerful that He can even do impossible things. He might, for instance, be able to create a round square, to make one plus one equal three, or make me both bald and not bald (a 50 percent improvement over the current situation). A different, opposing option would be to

say that there are some things which are indeed possible, but which God cannot do.

Here Damian is setting down an initial point of great philosophical interest: there are some things which do not happen, but remain possible nonetheless.

There are no “do-overs”: what is done is done. For this reason, ancient and medieval thinkers, beginning with Aristotle, were attracted to the notion that the past is necessary.

Now we can see more clearly what is at stake in Peter Damian’s letter on divine omnipotence. If God can restore a woman’s virginity, then He can undo the past. So the past is not necessary after all.