Medieval Philosophy

by Peter S. Adamson

But it is vital for Damian’s wider aim, which is to ensure that God is capable of offering redemption to humankind, that is, restoring their moral perfection. At stake here is nothing less than the possibility of the narrative of Christianity itself. To Damian, this would be a matter of considerably greater importance than clarifying our ideas

about possibility and necessity. In this respect, his letter is of a piece with his other activities, such as fighting for the purity of the Church and acting as a spokesman for the virtues of eremitic monasticism. Virginity stands for the spiritual purity that he was striving for throughout his career, and its restoration stands for the cleansing of sin through divine grace.10

Still anxious not to curtail God’s power, Damian seeks refuge in the traditional thought that evil is non-being or nothingness, as Eriugena had done in his treatise on predestination (see above, Chapter 3). Thus, even if we say that God is unable to do sin, there is literally nothing—no positive reality—that lies beyond the scope of God’s power.

He would not make Rome both exist and not exist in the past. Rather, He would replace its past existence with its

past non-existence. There’s nothing impossible about that, unless of course we think that the past is necessary and unalterable. Here another interpretation presents itself.12 Damian follows Boethius’ lead in holding that God is eternal in the strongest sense of not being subject to time at all (§17, 618c). This means that, even if Rome’s existence is necessary from our point of view, because it lies in our past, it may not be necessary from God’s point of view. He stands outside of time, surveying all things at once. For Him, then, the past is no more necessary than the future.

We can expand on this interpretation in light of a distinction that Damian makes between two kinds of necessity,

which we might call absolute and subsequent necessity.14 Something is absolutely necessary if it intrinsically cannot be otherwise. For instance, it is absolutely necessary that one plus one is two. By contrast, some things are necessary only on a certain assumption (§7, 603a). For instance, if we assume that you will finish reading this chapter, it necessarily follows from this that you will have read the chapter’s last sentence. But your having read that sentence would not become absolutely necessary: it would remain the case that you could have refrained from reading it.

God’s timeless eternity remains relevant here, in that His relationship to past, present, and future events is always the same (unlike our case, where the future is open and the past and present closed).

Behind that argument lurks a fundamental presupposition. Things in the created world can only be rightly understood in light of their purposes. To some extent, this was old news. Ever since Aristotle, nature had usually been understood in a teleological way.

We might assume that truth is a pretty straightforward notion: a sentence is true if what it says matches the way that things are. Anselm would agree with that, but he would insist that affirmative sentences also need to be understood as serving some purpose. They are, as it were, trying to do something. Their goal is to describe the world, or as Anselm puts it, “to signify that what is, is” (On Truth §1). So the truth of an assertion is an example of what Anselm calls rectitudo, meaning “correctness,” or if you prefer to stick closer to the Latin word, “rectitude.” In light of this, Anselm feels free to apply the concept of truth much more widely than we would today. If truth is the same thing as correctness or rectitude (§2, 11), it can turn up wherever rectitude is at stake. And for Anselm, that’s just about everywhere. A right action is a “true action” (§5). God, being purely good and the source of all other good, is the ultimate example of something that is as it ought to be, so Anselm concludes that He is nothing other than Truth itself (§10). Moreover, we can apply this concept of truth or rectitude to the human will. Since we can will what we ought to, as when we love God, or fail to do this, as when we sin, the will can be “true” or “false.” In other words, it can have or lack rectitude.

Here Anselm is raising the question we just discussed in Chapter 6, as to whether there is anything that God cannot do. His answer is yes: God cannot will evil.7 He can only will one thing, namely the good. But this does not make Him any less free. In fact, God’s inability to choose anything but goodness makes him more free than a creature who can choose between good and evil (§1). This may sound perplexing, but it is easier to understand in light of Anselm’s earlier definition of the will. Remember that the will is not just a power to choose, but has a purpose.8 This purpose is, as Anselm puts it, to “preserve rectitude for its own sake,” and freedom is nothing more nor less than the ability to do this. In other words, the reason we have a will is so that we

can persevere in willing goodness or justice because they are good and just, rather than to win some reward or avoid some punishment (§3). Obviously being unable to sin, like God and the good angels, does not inhibit the ability to persevere in goodness. To the contrary, it ensures that the will is always used in the way it was meant to be used. In other words, an incapacity for sin actually guarantees freedom.

In the same way, even in their fallen state humans have the power to preserve rectitude for its own sake. In other

words, they do have free will. It’s just that they can’t use this power in the way it was meant to be used, at least not without God’s help. But that isn’t to say that humans can’t use free will at all. We are willing freely with every choice we make, including our sinful choices. Why, though, does sinning count as a use of free will at all, if the purpose of the will is to preserve rectitude? Well, because you can use a power without using it rightly.

This is what the will to sin has in common with the will to preserve rectitude. Neither is coerced by any outside force. Whether the choice is good or bad, the choice is only free if it is determined by the person who is exercising their will to choose.

But that’s no problem, because no one else is responsible for giving God this single motivation, as He would have been responsible for giving such a motivation to the angels. Since God’s goodness comes entirely from within, there is no hint of coercion in His choice, and He remains fully self-determined and free. With all due respect to Eriugena, I have to say that this is an unprecedentedly sophisticated and clear-minded attempt to make sense of Augustine’s position on freedom. With a deft series of distinctions and definitions, Anselm has secured everything an Augustinian might want. There is the needed asymmetry between acting rightly and wrongly, in that we are unable to be good without grace but able to be evil through our own power. Yet we also remain free with respect to these choices. We can also see exactly how God remains perfectly free even without being able to do certain things that even His creatures can do (like sin, for example). These victories do not come without costs, though. In particular, we might balk at defining an apparently basic idea like freedom with the rather complicated formula “power to preserve rectitude for its own sake.” But Anselm was a master at deriving powerful conclusions from such verbal formulas, as we’re about to see with the case of the formula “that than which nothing greater can be conceived.”

The formula at the center of the ontological argument describes God as “that than which nothing greater can be conceived.” From this formula, Anselm wants to infer not just that God exists and indeed necessarily exists, but also that He is good, powerful, just, eternal, and so on.

It observes that there must be some cause for the goodness we find in the things around us (Monologion §1). Although goodness manifests itself in different ways, goodness itself should have the same meaning in each case. Otherwise we would have no unified idea of goodness, only a welter of different ideas that are misleadingly expressed by the same word. We need, therefore, to suppose that there is a cause of goodness, which is the source of this shared nature that we find in all good things.4 As the cause of all goodness, this source will itself be good, indeed the most good and great of all things, namely God. Is this a persuasive argument? It is no worse than a prominent consideration in favor of the theory of Forms in Plato’s dialogues, the so-called “one over many” argument. Yet Plato concluded from it that there is an abstract Form of goodness, which seems rather different from establishing the Christian God.

As Anselm will later point out in his replies to Gaunilo’s criticism, this is a subtle but crucial difference. The ontological argument would not work if we just said that God is greater than anything else (Replies §5). We need to say that God is that than which nothing greater exists or indeed could exist: “that than which nothing greater can be conceived.” This leaves room for Anselm to admit that God outstrips our understanding. If He were the greatest thing we can conceive, then obviously we would be in a position to conceive of Him. But if He is that than which nothing greater can be conceived, He may to some extent lie beyond our grasp. Still, we grasp Him to some extent, just as we must to some extent grasp anything when we call it “ineffable” or “inconceivable” (Replies §9). Suppose I say “Five trillion is an inconceivably large number.” Even as I tell you that you can’t conceive of this number, I am telling you something about it, namely that it lies beyond your comprehension.

Now Anselm sets out to show the Fool that his atheistic position makes no sense. It is contradictory to suppose that God doesn’t exist in reality, but only in the mind, if we understand God as that than which nothing greater can be conceived. This is because, if God existed only in the mind, it would be easy to conceive of things better than Him. Notably, we could conceive of Him as existing in reality and not just in the mind. As Anselm puts the point, “if that than which a greater cannot be thought exists in the mind alone, this same that than which a greater cannot be thought is that than which a greater can be thought; but this is obviously impossible” (§2). This is the same sort of reasoning used later in the Proslogion to prove that God is, for instance, eternal. It belongs to the very nature of that than

which a greater cannot be thought to be eternal, because if it were not eternal, we could think of something better: we need just think of something that is eternal. In the same way, it is implied by the formula that the thing in question must exist, because if it didn’t exist, we could conceive of something better than it. The Fool must therefore admit that God exists, on pain of contradicting himself. Like Mr T, Gaunilo pitied the Fool, and argued on his behalf that Anselm’s argument fails. He devised a number of objections, including his famous island analogy (On Behalf of the Fool §6). Consider, says Gaunilo, an island than which no better island can be conceived. If we supposed that this island didn’t exist in reality, we would fall into the same contradiction, because a non-existing island clearly isn’t one than which no better island can be conceived. Therefore, such an island in fact exists. Gaunilo’s objection is a powerful one. If you can use a pattern of reasoning to prove something false, then you know there is something wrong with that pattern of reasoning.

How might Anselm respond? We don’t have to guess, because we actually have Anselm’s reply to Gaunilo’s criticisms, a very helpful document for understanding how Anselm thought his proof was supposed to work in the first

place.6 Obviously, to meet the objection he has to show that it makes a difference that we are being asked to think about an island, as opposed to God. The difference is that existence belongs to the very nature of that than which nothing greater can be conceived, whereas existence cannot belong to the very nature of an island. As the American military proved when they were testing atom bombs in the Pacific Ocean, an island is the sort of thing that can go out of existence. So if we find ourselves entertaining the idea of an island that can’t possibly fail to exist, then we are entertaining something that makes no sense. By contrast, that than which nothing greater can be conceived is going to be something whose very nature guarantees its real existence. Anselm had already made this point in the Proslogion (§3).7 That than which nothing greater can be conceived is not merely something that exists, it is something that must exist. It exists necessarily, because it cannot even be conceived as not existing. I think this is a good response to the island objection. But the proof has been subject to many other criticisms. Apart from the island objection, the most well-known response is probably the one made by Kant, who argued that Anselm was wrong to take existence as a property on a par with features like justice, goodness, or eternity.8 Existence is not just one more property that I can think of a thing as having. This is why it struck an absurd note at the beginning of this ...

of something, I am conceiving of it as having a range of properties. Its existence is simply the realization or instantiation in the world of something that has those properties. Whether this same objection can so plausibly be applied to the idea of necessary existence, though, seems to me to be an open question. Even if existence is not a (great-making) property like justice or eternity, the trait of existing necessarily might be. But I think we don’t need to deny that existence, or necessary existence, is a property in order to defeat Anselm’s argument. If the way I’ve set it out does capture Anselm’s line of reasoning accurately, then it has a more fundamental flaw. For me to say that necessary existence is included in the very nature of a thing is not yet to assert that the thing exists. Rather, it is to say that if the thing did exist, then it would by its very nature exist necessarily. This seems not only right, but a genuine insight on Anselm’s part, and one strikingly parallel to what Avicenna had been doing just a few years previously. Anselm realized that if God is to be that than which nothing greater can be conceived, He would be the sort of thing that cannot fail to...

than everything make it clear that it also subsists in itself” (On Be...

Philosophers call such shared features “universals,” because they belong universally to all the members of a class: thus humanity belongs to all humans. But what exactly is this shared humanity? On the one hand, it seems to play an important role in the world and in our understanding of things. When we know, for instance, that all humans are rational, it seems that we are understanding something not just about you, me, Groucho, or Zeppo, but about humanity itself. What we are understanding is that the possession of humanity implies the possession of rationality. On the other hand, the idea of a universal thing that actually exists out in the world is a rather odd one. In our everyday experience, we never encounter abstract humanity or animality.

The difficulty of accounting for the shared features of things is called the problem of universals. Perhaps the most famous attempt to answer the problem is also the earliest attempt: Plato’s theory of Forms. This theory was apparently intended to explain common characteristics like humanity or largeness by postulating a single, overarching Form or paradigm, humanity-itself or largeness-itself. And readers have traditionally understood Plato’s Forms as universals. This may not be quite right, though. Aristotle points out that although a Platonic Form does play the role of a universal by accounting for shared membership in a kind of thing, it also seems to be just another kind of particular, albeit a perfect, unchanging, and paradigmatic particular.1 In fact it was Aristotle himself who really started talk of “universals” in philosophy. Unfortunately, he left it rather unclear what sort of metaphysical status we should assign to a universal like humanity or animality. For this reason, ancient commentators on Aristotle already engaged in detailed discussions of the problem of universals, discussions that were passed on to the medievals thanks to the translations and commentaries of Boethius. For Boethius and his medieval heirs, the starting point for discussion of this problem was the beginning of Porphyry’s widely read Introduction to Aristotelian logic.2 In a few sentences that rank as one of the most enticing but unsatisfying passages in the history of philosophy, Porphyr...

commentators and their medieval readers, and they had still further reasons of their own to take the problem seriously. Unlike most philosophers nowadays, they followed Aristotle’s lead in believing that knowledge in the strict and proper sense—the kind of knowledge involved in scientific understanding—is universal in scope.3 So, for them, answering Porphyry’s questions was an urgent task in the study of knowledge, or epistemology, as well as in philosophy of language.

We encounter such features in particulars, and then “abstract” or isolate them through a mental process, something Boethius compares to isolating the line that forms the edge of a body

While this goes well beyond the intriguing list of questions posed by Porphyry, Boethius says less than one might want about the humanity that is in Groucho and also in Harpo. Is humanity one and the same thing in both of them? Or is it that we have Groucho’s humanity, which is

one thing, and Harpo’s humanity, which is something else, but these two humanities are similar to one another? If we take the first alternative, we are committed to something that really exists out in the world and is universal. If we take the second alternative, then true universality occurs only in the mind of someone who abstracts and isolates humanity as a general concept. An analogy might help here. The first option would be like your watching the Marx Brothers movie Duck Soup on television while I am watching it in a cinema. One and the same movie is being viewed in two places at the same time. The second option would be like two actual bowls of duck soup made according to the same recipe. They taste exactly alike, but were made from different sets of ingredients and are two distinct meals. (Vegetarians may want to vary the example slightly, using the Marx Brothers movie Animal Crackers.) In the twelfth century, philosophers working in France split over the correct understanding of universals, and more or less along the lines I’ve just indicated. Some thinkers, whom we can call “realists,” believed that humanity is something real that exists in the world. It is present, or instantiated, every time that a human exists. Others found this impossible to accept, and insisted that everything that really exists is something particular. Historians refer to this camp as the “nominalists.”

We find grammatical commentaries close to Roscelin’s approach saying that words have always been introduced to signify some particular substance. Only afterwards do they come to signify other, similar things.6 Someone somewhere would have first used the word “human” and meant by it one particular human. Perhaps it was Adam referring with surprise and delight to Eve, who had just been produced from one of his ribs, and thereafter, as a matter of convention this same word “human” was applied to anything else that seemed to be similar to the first thing that bore the name of human. This does seem to head in the direction of Abelard’s later, nominalist view.

There is a family resemblance between this proposal by William of Champeaux and the “hyper-realism” of the earlier Eriugena and his followers. They believed that every substance is

an expression of a single, archetypal substance, much as all things are ultimately an expression of the transcendent reality that is God. William’s theory was not quite that Platonist, in that it did not assert the existence of some paradigmatic humanity separate from all individual humans. In a way, this was its chief flaw. If humanity in itself is not separate from humans, and if it is one and the same in all humans, then all humans turn out to be numerically identical with each other insofar as they are humans. In other words, Groucho, Chico, and Harpo are all actually one human being. This, at least, is the objection pressed against William by Abelard (§31–3). To point to the accidental features of things, as William did, is no help. For such accidental features depend on the individual substances to which they belong (§39). Conceptually speaking, Harpo must first exist as a human substance, and only then have such additional features as harp-playing and skirt-chasing. But insofar as he is just a human substance, Harpo will be the same substance as Chico and Groucho. A further problem is that if one and the same substance, namely universal humanity, is the substance of both Harpo and Groucho, then it will have contrary properties (§29). Humanity will be both mute and wisecracking, both harp-playing and non-harp-playing. Even the Marx Brothers’ movies never involved anything quite that absurd. Despite his name, William of Champeaux did not respond to this attack by wash...

human explains my being rational and alive. So how could it be nothing at all? Abelard responds with an example (§92). Suppose a slave of ancient Rome is beaten because he refuses to go to the forum. His refusing to go is a status, and it explains something, namely why he was beaten. But we are surely not tempted to say that his refusing to go to the forum is actually a thing in its own right. Rather, the man who refuses, and is beaten for it, is a thing. His refusing to go is just a status, one that he lives to regret. This leaves the way clear for Abelard to give his own, positive account of the universal, which is that it is nothing more, or less, than a word. Universality is like the tense of a verb, an unavoidable aspect of our language that does not correspond to anything out in the world. Rather, we produce universality through a mental process of extracting some ...

Modern-day scholars have called this approach “vocalism,” alluding to Roscelin’s insistence that dialectic deals with words and not things. With this, Roscelin paved the way for Abelard’s nominalism. Roscelin’s vocalism was not offered as a solution to the problem of universals, but as the key to interpreting the works of logic that were being studied with such intensity at this time. For Roscelin, Porphyry’s Introduction and Aristotle’s Categories were about words, not things. This reading of the texts was anticipated already in antiquity, when it was suggested as a way of defusing potential conflict between Plato and Aristotle. If Aristotle was only talking about words in his logical writings, not making any claims about things, then it was no problem that he acknowledged only everyday physical objects as “substances” and made no mention of the transcendent objects recognized in Platonism.5 After all, our words refer in the first instance to physical things, not to gods, immaterial souls, or forms. Still, even if Roscelin was not espousing nominalism, his proposal could naturally lead to a position like Abelard’s. Universal species and genera play a major role in the logical treatises of Porphyry and Aristotle. So if those treatises really are only about words and not things, it stands to reason that species and genera are nothing but words, as Abelard claimed.

Indeed, it would be fair to say that Abelard actually discovered the idea of a proposition, more or less as it is used in philosophy today.

Abelard makes another leap forward when it comes to the question of negating a proposition. For Boethius, the negation of the proposition “A giraffe is in the kitchen cooking dinner” would be “A giraffe is not in the kitchen cooking dinner.” Which looks reasonable enough, and not just because giraffes are notoriously bad cooks. But it has a disadvantage. In stating this denial I seem to be saying something about a certain giraffe, namely that she is not cooking dinner. But what if I wanted to deny the proposition without talking about any giraffe at all? Abelard gives

us the tools to do so, by saying that there are in fact two ways to negate a proposition. In addition to saying “A giraffe is not in the kitchen cooking dinner,” I could say “It is not the case that a giraffe is in the kitchen cooking dinner.” In the latter case, I am not implying that there is a giraffe who might be getting dinner ready if she weren’t so lazy. Abelard calls the first kind of negation “separative,” because it just denies that a predicate is connected to a subject. The second kind is called “destructive,” because what is being denied is the whole proposition rather than the attachment of the predicate to the subject.

Actions by themselves, then, are neither good nor bad. So we need to look somewhere else to find right and wrong. An obvious place would be the desires and motivations that bring people to perform their actions.

Plausible though this may seem at first blush, it is problematic to say that motives and desires are the proper objects of moral judgment. After all, can you really be blamed for having wicked desires, the sort of motivations that Abelard calls a “bad will”? Perhaps you are powerfully tempted by opportunities to overeat, betray your friends, and cast aspersions on the Marx Brothers. But we wouldn’t and shouldn’t judge you harshly just for having these desires, so long as you manage to resist them. 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. Hence we admire those who struggle against their own bad wills and prevail more than we admire those who have no bad will in the first place (§22). Indeed, you might wonder whether someone who is lucky enough to have a good will is admirable at all. If you are simply the sort of person who gets a kick out of helping old ladies across the street and volunteering for charities, and never feels the compunction to do anything wrong, then are you morally outstanding or just fortunate? Abelard is putting his finger on a deep philosophical puzzle here, one that is often framed in terms of a contrast between Aristotle and Immanuel Kant. Aristotle was convinced that virtuous people take pleasure in doing virtuous things and have a strong desire to do so, in part because they have the habit of acting well, and people enjoy whatever is customary for them. Kant instead is going to insist that people should act out of moral duty if their actions are to count as morally good. If they happen to enjoy virtue, that’s fine, but it has nothing to do with morality. Abelard is an important forerunner of Kant in this controversy. In fact he seems to be suggesting an even more radical view than Kant’s, namely that you must have bad desires and resist them if you are to b...

a fight, so that victorious over themselves through the virtue of moderation they might obtain a crown” (§5). Though he doesn’t quite come out and say so, it seems that for him, the most admirable people would be the ones who have the worst desires, while managing to prevail in the struggle against those desires.3 While this aspect of Abelard’s moral theory is, to say the least, open to dispute, he has an almost irresistible argument against the idea that desires and motivat...

Perhaps, then, we could say something slightly different, namely that the sin consists in enjoying a wrongful action.

So now we seem to be stuck. If morality isn’t a matter of which action you perform, nor a matter of what motivations lead you to act the way you do, nor a matter of taking pleasure in wrongdoing, then where do the wickedness of sin and righteousness of virtue reside? Abelard’s answer is that they lie in consenting to a desire, in other words, in forming an intention to act in a certain way.

In light of this observation, we can now see that there are four stages involved in any action, whether sinful, virtuous, or morally neutral. First, we have a desire or “will” that motivates us to perform the action. We do not necessarily have any control over whether or not we have a certain desire; we may simply find that we have it. What we can control is whether or not we “consent” to a desire, as opposed to resisting it. Giving consent, then, is a second stage, which consists in forming an intention to act on the desire in question. Then, the action itself is a further, third stage. Just as the desire does not guarantee consent, so consent to the desire does not guarantee acting on it. Something might prevent the action from occurring, as when Harpo’s poverty stops him from performing an act of charity. Fourth and finally, if one does succeed in performing the action, there will come the results of acting, which could include taking pleasure in sin. 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.

He thinks that sinful intentions are the ones that show “contempt for God” (§113) by consenting to desires that God wants us to

resist. Conversely, good intentions are the ones that would please God (§230), though we don’t hear much about these, because Abelard’s Ethics breaks off just after the start of the second book, which was planned to cover goodness.

Abelard is right to claim common ground with non-Christian thinkers. His ethical theory is similar to that of the Stoics. They also thought that human action involves giving consent to a motivating “impression” that one ought to do something. Abelard is especially close to Roman Stoics like Epictetus, who likewise argued that the morally decisive thing is the exercise of one’s power of choice, or prohairesis.

We are to imagine a poverty-stricken woman who takes her child into her bed to keep him warm, and tragically smothers him in her sleep. Here the desire and the intention to kill the baby are very much absent; yet she might be told by a priest to do penance for what has happened (§79). Why is this? For purely pragmatic reasons, says Abelard. We want to discourage other women from doing the same thing, so we make a lesson of the woman even though she is morally innocent. This is a good answer, I think, and it can be generalized. The reason we spend so much time evaluating, punishing, and praising actions is just that they are our only guides to finding out what intentions people had, even if they may be imperfect guides. Actions are public and observable, whereas intentions are not, so we must look to the things people do to find out what they chose to do. But strictly speaking, we judge them on their choices, not on their actions as such. It’s also worth emphasizing that, even if actions are in themselves morally neutral on Abelard’s theory, that doesn’t mean that they are morally neutral in every respect. Rather, they become good or bad precisely by stemming from good or bad intentions.