Medieval Philosophy

by Peter S. Adamson

This makes most sense if we take Abelard to be thinking that intentions have to tick two boxes in order to be good. Firstly, the person involved must believe that what they are intending is right; secondly, the intention must in fact actually be right, that is, actually be what God would want (§109). Thus, his advice for those who would avoid sin is to do whatever you sincerely believe is right. In order to do genuine good, though, your belief will need to be correct.

She sees her former self as illustrating the paradox that someone can do wrong precisely because of a motivation that is itself good, namely love. Elsewhere in her letters, she uses her current situation to illustrate the flip side of the same paradox: in her soul, she still yearns for Abelard, even though her outward comportment is chaste. Where Abelard insisted that good actions become good because of their good intentions, Heloise insisted that an innocent soul is compatible with exterior sin, while a tormented soul may lead an outwardly blameless life.

The pagans of antiquity by and large saw history as irrelevant to a philosophical understanding of the world. Whether you were a Platonist who saw physical things as mere images of eternal Forms, an Aristotelian who believed that the celestial bodies are moved everlastingly by a divine intellect, or an Epicurean who thought that all things result from random atomic interactions, you were offering an account of the universe’s permanent state.

Diehard Aristotelian philosophers who were adherents of Judaism and Islam were still able to preserve a “the more things change, the more they stay the same” attitude. They

could, and did, explain prophecy as a naturally occurring interaction between immaterial principles and unusually gifted humans. The possibility of such interaction is always present and its mechanism is rationally comprehensible. It is just that it only occurs when circumstances are especially favorable. But for medieval Christians this sort of compromise was not really available. For them the universe was a stage upon which is played the drama of humankind’s fall and redemption.

The philosophical implications were far-reaching. For medieval Christian thinkers God intervenes in, and even enters into, the world in a way that is not necessary but contingent on His will. History teaches us when and how this has occurred, so these thinkers were bound to take history very seriously. No medieval thinker took it more seriously than Hugh of Saint Victor. For him the correct understanding of history was foundational for all knowledge, or at least all

knowledge worth having.2 It was the most basic of three approaches he described for interpreting Scripture. When taking up the Bible, one must first understand it as what we would call a “literal” record of real events. This is what Hugh calls an “historical” interpretation. One should not stop there, though. A second approach discerns a further symbolic meaning behind historical events, a type of exegesis Hugh calls “allegorical.” Finally, there is what he calls “tropological” interpretation, which means taking an ethical message from the text. Hugh applies all three kinds of approach to the same scriptural material, for instance in a treatise he wrote on Noah’s Ark. On the one hand, the ark was a real boat. Hugh describes it in bewildering detail, to the point that it seems clear he was envisioning an intricate diagram, even though no such diagram is found in the existing manuscripts of his treatise. He dwells on descriptions found in the Bible, for instance concerning the dimensions of the boat, and adds details of his own, like little side compartments to allow seals and otters to swim into the sea and then return to the ark. The ark’s structure is then mined for its symbolic significance, as when Hugh says that the ark had two exits, a door and a window, which represent the soul’s ability to engage in practical action or to look upwards in contemplation.3 Finally, the story of the ark teaches us a moral lesson: the flood waters that covered the earth represent the wor...

Hugh’s most famous remark befits this versatility, and his attention to the educational needs of the students at the abbey. He wrote in his Didascalicon: “learn everything; you will see afterwards that nothing is superfluous” (§VI.3).

As Platonists of various religious persuasions had been teaching for centuries, we are divided between two natures, immaterial souls attached to physical bodies. Philosophy must address itself to both aspects. For Hugh our incorporeal aspect is served by theoretical philosophy, which culminates in contemplation and pure understanding, whereas practical philosophy teaches us how to engage with the bodily realm and to attain virtue (§I.5, I.7, II.1, V.6).

By memorizing, we internalize what we have read, beginning to reshape the soul itself by conforming it to that which we seek to know.

reading. Next, the educational process continues to another stage, which Hugh calls meditatio. An obvious translation here would be “meditation”; a better one might be “rumination.” Hugh describes it as a kind of undirected procedure of pondering over what one has read and memorized (III.10). He seems to see it almost as a kind of reward for the hard work one has put into reading and memorization, speaking of the delight of the ruminative process. Finally, after memoria and meditatio comes moralia, which means putting one’s insights into practice ethically. In another of Hugh’s beloved parallels, and in this case a fairly plausible one, the three stages of learning are said to correspond to his three approaches to Scripture. History is analogous to memoria, the more open-ended search for allegorical interpretation is analogous to meditatio, and the “tropological” discovery of ethical lessons in Scripture is of course analogous to moralia.

When we achieve understanding and virtue, we are acquiring something that we lacked at birth. But we are also recovering something that was lost by human nature through sin.

The Christian trappings of the view are not merely incidental. If the paradigms were not identical with the divine Son, Hugh could not equate growth in understanding with the path towards redemption.

Plotinus and like-minded pagans would readily have agreed that philosophy is nothing more or less than, as Hugh puts it, “the pursuit of…that wisdom which is the sole primordial idea or pattern of things” (§I.4).

But Porphyry’s student Iamblichus, and later Neoplatonists like Proclus, held that pagan religious and magical practices could enable one to make contact with divinity through bodily things.15 Probably none of them would appreciate the comparison, but Hugh of Saint Victor is in this respect more like Iamblichus and Proclus than like Plotinus and Porphyry. Where the Neoplatonists spoke of theurgy, Hugh speaks of “sacraments.”

This is the occasion for another of Hugh’s many slighting references to “the philosophers.” With their expertise in dialectic, they remain at the level of words, which are mere representations of human concepts, whereas things that have actually existed in history are representations of divine ideas.

It’s common to say that this contemplative aspect of Victorine thought exemplifies a widespread feature of

the twelfth century: “interiorization.” It was a period when thinkers urged us to turn our gaze inward in search of divinity, and to reshape the inner self that we find there so that it reflects God’s image more truly. We’ve just seen Hugh understanding Noah’s Ark in this way. Abelard’s idea that moral goodness lies in the soul’s intentions, and not outward actions, is another example. This observation is illuminating to a degree, but, like any historical generalization, should be qualified with a few caveats. For one thing, it was not really all that new. Rather, Hugh and Richard of Saint Victor were laying particular emphasis on long-standing contemplative themes in the Augustinian, monastic, and Platonist traditions. For another thing, these Victorine heroes of interiority also laid great emphasis on the beauty of nature. Contemplation can be directed outwards, as well as inwards.

Antique Christians were convinced that they could find evidence for God’s Trinitarian nature in the Bible. Augustine’s On the Trinity devotes several books to the scriptural basis of the doctrine, which is, of course, central to Christian theology. But as Augustine goes on to show in his On the Trinity, the conceptual tools of philosophy can help us see how it is possible for one and the same substance to be three Persons.1 The core of the Trinitarian dogma is the claim that the three divine Persons differ from one another, while being the same God. But what does this mean? A first thought might be that each thing is the same as itself, and different from any other thing. This makes the Trinitarian doctrine look problematic. But further reflection will show that there are many ways of being the same or different. The Marx Brothers were four things, so not the same as each other in every respect; yet they were the same in respect of being human. Really, the problem of universals is just the difficulty of how things are able to share this sort of “sameness.” Then there is the problem of sameness over time. Am I the same as the boy who first watched those Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup commercials? That boy was different in

many ways: more hair, less interest in philosophy. Or what about a thing and its parts? Is a peanut butter cup the same as its peanut butter center plus its chocolate coating? It may seem so, but consider that if so, anything that loses a part would cease to be the same thing. Do I really make a peanut butter cup no longer the same thing by taking a bite out of it, or make myself no longer the same thing by trimming the little hair I still have? Clearly, then, consideration of the Trinity can lead directly to fundamental issues in metaphysics. The same is true for epistemology. While Christians did invoke passages in the Bible to support the Trinitarian doctrine, they were also tempted to think that human reasoning can establish God’s triune nature without any help from revelation. Anselm already made a case for this in his Monologion. In the twelfth century a number of thinkers went so far as to say that pagan philosophers had reached an understanding of God’s Trinity even before the time of Christ. On the other hand, medieval thinkers frequently hasten to remind us that God lies beyond the grasp of reason. This might seem to apply especially to the mysterious, even paradoxical notion that He is somehow three despite being one, and even simple. The Trinity duly became a kind of litmus test for how far medievals thought that reason can take us in understanding God.

Bernard and his brethren were convinced that a rigorous, spiritual life could even provoke a direct vision of the divine, a mystical

approach that contrasted sharply with the argument-based approach of the schoolmen.

Following the account of names he found in classical works on grammar, Roscelin assumed that if the divine Persons have three different names, they must be not one, but three “things.” Abelard attacked this assumption, turning against Roscelin his own strategy of distinguishing the level of words from the level of things. The Persons cannot be different things, as Roscelin claimed. That would be to fall into the heresy of tritheism: a belief in three gods

rather than one. Rather, Abelard argued, the Persons differ in respect of their properties, like the Father’s power as opposed to the Son’s wisdom. Hence the accusation Bernard leveled at Abelard that he failed to acknowledge the equality of the Persons.

Though Bernard of Clairvaux probably wouldn’t care to admit it, Richard’s account is not all that dissimilar to Abelard’s, with the three types of existence in Richard essentially playing the role Abelard assigned to the special properties of the Persons. The Victorines also shared Abelard’s fundamental aim of using unaided reason to explain this theological doctrine. This is why Hugh of Saint Victor,

like Abelard, was inclined to admit that the pre-Christian philosophers had intimations of the Trinity. In particular, the medievals turned to the one Platonic dialogue known to them, the Timaeus. There we find Plato describing a divine creator who looks to a kind of cosmic blueprint, the Forms, which could be seen as playing the role of the second person of the Trinity, or God’s wisdom. Plato’s creator furthermore fashions a force of life within the cosmos, a soul of the entire universe. For Abelard this so-called “world soul” was analogous to the third Person of the Trinity, the Holy Spirit. Still, despite accusations to the contrary, neither Abelard nor his closest followers in fact went so far as to say that Plato had fully understood the Trinity.10 The members of the so-called “school of Chartres” would not be quite so cautious.

As figures like William of Champeaux and Abelard were focusing on the logical and metaphysical questions that could arise in dialectic, the Chartrians celebrated the arts of grammar and rhetoric.

Another trademark literary technique came into play when they were reading, rather than writing. They often used the word integumentum, meaning a “covering” or “cloak,” to express the way the surface meaning of a text may conceal its true significance.8 With this technique, frankly pagan material could be redeemed for use in a Christian context. In his commentary on Virgil, Bernard Silvestris explains the seduction of Venus by Vulcan as a symbolic representation of the corruption of the mind by lust. A similar message is taught by the encounter between Aeneas and Dido. Virgil shows Dido perishing in flame after Aeneas leaves her, in order to show how sinful lusts burn away to mere embers once the soul resists them.

Bernard Silvestris was not quite so shy. For him, the pagan philosophers were simply expressing the ideas of Christian theology in different terms. Where Christians speak of the divine Son, the philosophers say “intellect”; where Christians talk of a Holy Spirit, the philosophers say “World Soul.”11 Though this is often thought of as a distinctively “Chartrian” position, it was in fact never taught by the one thinker we know to have been based primarily at Chartres: the earlier Bernard. He never proposed identifying Plato’s cosmic soul with a divine Person. In general, Bernard of Chartres was careful not to let Platonic metaphysics infringe on the unchallenged transcendence of God. We can see this from his handling of the Platonic “Forms” or “Ideas.”12 Bernard was wholeheartedly committed to this theory, but stopped short of the traditional identification of the transcendent Forms with God’s Wisdom and the second Person of the Trinity. Because the Forms are created, they must be inferior or posterior to God Himself, something Bernard expressed by saying that while the Forms are eternal, they are not co-eternal with the Holy Trinity.

Taking the example of the color white, he compared the noun “whiteness (albedo)” to a virgin. The verb “is white (albet)” is like a virgin lying on a bed, waiting to be defiled. Finally, the adjective “white (album)” is like the same woman after having lost her virginity (Metalogicon §3.2). His point was that whiteness in itself is pure and untouched by matter. It

is a separate Form, graspable only by the mind. By contrast, the whiteness we see in white bodies around us is mixed together with matter, and so available to sense perception. Bernard coined the phrase formae nativae, or “inborn forms,” for the images of transcendent Ideas that appear in material bodies. The resulting picture of the world is true to the one we find in Plato’s Timaeus. Bernard’s divine Creator is distinct from the intelligible Forms, and fashions the physical cosmos by putting immanent images of those Forms into matter.

Thierry of Chartres also offered a memorable, if not particularly illuminating suggestion for how to conceive of the Trinity. He compared the three Persons in one God to the fact that 1 ×1 × 1 = 1. He meant this to represent not just the way that unity can be preserved even as multiplicity is introduced, but also the equality of the Persons to one another. Again, the Chartrians’ training in the liberal arts is showing here, with Thierry applying arithmetic to theology, much as Bernard of Chartres had used grammar in his metaphysics.

Nature is a further revelation of God’s providential will, so it behooves the thoughtful Christian to study it, by undertaking what we would call “science,” and what the medievals (and for that matter people in the seventeenth century) called “natural philosophy.”

The discover-it-yourself attitude of Adelard and other twelfth-century thinkers went together with another attitude liable to strike us as genuinely “scientific”: a preference for explanations in terms of the regularities of nature rather than miracles.

But it’s really with figures like Adelard of Bath that we see an impatience with simplistic appeals to God’s will. As he puts it, “there is nothing in nature that lacks a reason (ratio).”

They agree in their account of Nature’s

function: she helps to perpetuate the cosmic order by reproducing forms in matter, something Alan compares to the production of coins from unformed metal.

If nature is a book, she is not like a technical treatise, but like an allegory or fable. She needs careful interpretation if she is to be read rightly as the work of God’s providence.

Hence the universe is a compromise between the designing intention of Mind and Matter’s recalcitrance.

This is the flip side of the problem of universals, where the challenge was accounting for the humanity that belongs to Groucho, Harpo, Chico, and Zeppo. Now we’re asking, not how it is that they all belong to the same species, but how it is that they come to be four separate members of that species. We can also pose the question in this way: how or why is humanity divided into Groucho, Harpo, me, and my brother, the way that the genus animal is divided into many species, like human, giraffe, and elephant? Ancient and medieval philosophers did pose the question like that, and added that particulars cannot be further divided in the same way. This is why the particular members of a species are called “individuals,” and why the difficulty of accounting for the whole phenomenon is called the problem of individuation.

This line of thought may push us in the direction of solutions suggested, though not fully worked out, by Porphyry and Boethius, the two ancient authors who exerted the most influence on medieval discussions of the problem.1 Both of them hinted at what we might call an “accidentalist” theory of individuation. By this I mean the idea that the accidental features of a thing make it the individual that it is. The idea of an “accident” is standard Aristotelian fare. It just means any feature that belongs to a thing, but not in virtue of the thing’s species membership, so that it can survive as the kind of thing it is even if the feature is lost.2 Thus Groucho’s cigar-smoking is accidental to him, because he remains a human when he’s not smoking a cigar, or even if he quits smoking cigars entirely. By contrast, his being alive is essential, not accidental, since he can no longer exist as a human without being alive. Now, we’ve already seen that an accident like cigar-smoking is not up to the job of individuating, since other humans also smoke cigars. But what if we took all the accidental features together? There may be other cigar-smokers, and other game show hosts, but there aren’t likely to be any other cigar-smoking game show hosts who are named Marx, wear round glasses, and get mentioned posthumously in philosophy books. Indeed, it seems quite plausible to think that no individual possibly could share all the features of another individual. This is what Porphyry must have ...

anything else.”3 Boethius knew this passage well—as we’ve seen, he commented on Porphyry’s introductory logical work twice—and sometimes spoke as if he agreed with the idea.

Despite the popularity of the accidentalist theory in the early medieval period and the weight of authority that supported it, Gilbert had good reasons to be skeptical. Just to restate the basic idea, the accidentalist realizes that nothing can be individuated by essential features, since these are shared by all other members of the same species. Groucho is rational, but so are Harpo, my brother, and every other human that ever has existed or will exist. Instead, we should look to accidental features. Groucho has accidents also found in other humans, but it could never happen that some other human has all the same accidents. Alternatively, we can point to an accident of Groucho’s that nothing else could have, such as his place. One problem with this account might not bother us so much today, but would be seen as deeply troubling in a medieval context: incorporeal things like God and angels have no place. Indeed, God has no accidents at all. Yet incorporeal things can be individuals. So the accidentalist account is at best incomplete. We’ll have to come up with a

separate way to individuate immaterial beings. Another difficulty is that accidents are usually possessed only temporarily. Indeed, we said that accidental features are precisely the features that a thing can lose while surviving as the thing it is. How can Groucho be the individual that he is because of his place, given that he can move around? How can he be individuated by a whole set of features that includes cigar-smoking and wisecracking, when he can give up cigars and imitate Harpo’s vow of silence? If you think about this, you begin to suspect that the accidentalist strategy gets things backward. Substances like humans, giraffes, trees, and rocks do not depend on their accidents in order to be the substances that they are. To the contrary: Groucho’s accident of cigar-smoking can only exist thanks to Groucho, because this accident is, as Aristotelians would say, “predicated” of him. This is just as true of place as it is true of any other accident. For Aristotle and his followers, something’s “place” is, strictly speaking, the boundary of whatever is containing it, for instance the limit of the air surrounding Groucho. If Groucho were to vanish, this boundary would vanish too, and in this sense, it is dependent on him. So how can it do the job of individuating Groucho?

At the root of all these difficulties is a fundamental confusion.5 The accidentalist account is plausible because we do in fact use accidents to tell things apart. We tell Groucho apart from Harpo by noticing that he is, for example, the one with the cigar, not the one with the blond wig. But that doesn’t mean that accidents really account for the distinctness between things. How could they, if accidents depend on those very things? This would be like saying that the Marx Brothers movies are funny because people laugh at them. It’s true that these two things go together: funny movies do provoke laughter, and we can tell that a movie is funny from the fact that people laugh at it. But it’s because the movies are funny that people laugh, not the other way around. In the same way, it may be true that we only find particular accidents, and unique collections of accidents, in individual substances. This is why we can use accidents to tell substances apart. But that is a matter of epistemology, not metaphysics. Or to put it another way, accidents show us that things are individual, but they don’t explain why things are individual.

He contrasts “what something is (id quod est)” with “that by which it is what it is (id quo est).” Groucho is a human, but is what he is though humanity. The same distinction can be made for accidental features: a cigar-smoker is what he is by virtue of cigar-smoking. Effectively, this just boils down to the distinction between a thing and the features that characterize it. Next, Gilbert says that only a substance, and not its characterizing features, can be individual. Groucho is an individual, but his humanity, his cigar-smoking, and his wisecracking are not. Instead, they are what Gilbert calls “dividuals.” By this he means that these features can be found elsewhere too: cigar-smoking is “divided” among Groucho, Fidel Castro, and all the other cigar-smokers. Now here comes the clever part. As Boethius taught us, Groucho’s cigar-smoking is not to be confused with Fidel Castro’s. Nor do Groucho and Harpo have the same humanity. Rather, humanity appears twice in them, and four times if you add Chico and Zeppo too. In each of the Marx brothers, in each of the Adamson brothers, in every human, there is a humanity which belongs only to that individual human, while also being “similar” or “conforming” to other instances of humanity. It is the fact that humanity can be exemplified over and over like this that leads Gilbert to deny that one single instance of humanity can be called an “individual.” An individual is, as we would expect, something non-repeatable. Nonetheless, the ...

Gilbert actually treats the essential and accidental features of a thing as being on a par, at least as far as individuation goes.8 All of them are possessed as singular features, and serve as parts of the total form that guarantees individuality. Also, unlike his predecessors and contemporaries, Gilbert does not confuse the question of what makes something individual with the question of how we know something is individual. He sees clearly that accidents merely show us that one individual is distinct from another, without making it be distinct (non facit, sed probat).9

According to Gilbert, it is the total form that individuates, and it includes all the properties the thing has over its whole existence. As an added bonus, Gilbert now has a nice story to tell about that other, more celebrated difficulty, the problem of universals. We arrive at a universal by noticing the similarity between singular characteristics, for example the four instances of humanity in the four Marx Brothers. But, Gilbert insists, everything that really exists is singular. Universal humanity, freed from connection to any individual human, is only a conceptual construct. Still, it guides our thought in a useful and accurate way, since each human really does possess his or her own singular humanity. On this score Gilbert is fairly close to Abelard’s nominalism. We can also guess what he might say to the obvious complaint that he is just helping himself to the idea that Groucho’s humanity, cigar-smoking, and so on are “singular.” Is he assuming too much here? After all, what we wanted to explain in the first place is how it comes to be that there are single things in the world, and not just universal things. To this Gilbert can reply that there are no universal things: nothing can exist without being singular. If Groucho is a cigar-smoking human, then his cigar-smoking and humanity must be real. So they must be singular.

The whole time, he had his eye on related theological issues.10 His theory enables him to say very clearly what it means for God to be simple. Whereas all other individuals have total forms made up of many characterizing features, God is what He is through a single, simple form called “divinity.”

A particularly interesting author from this camp was the fabulously named Manegold of Lautenbach. He lived through the highpoint of the Investiture Contest and wrote in favor of the claims of Pope Gregory VII, arguing that the Church can rightly depose an earthly ruler who fails to live up to the necessary moral standards (§38), whereas papal authority is not invalidated by moral failures in the man who holds the office (notice that he here adheres to Augustine’s anti-Donatist position). For his pains Manegold was imprisoned by Henry IV.