Medieval Philosophy

by Peter S. Adamson

as reason, as she enjoys an intimate, inexpressible encounter with the divine.

Hadewijch also speaks of what she calls “unfaith,” a kind of exquisite despair in which one is overcome by love, yet convinced that it is unrequited (Letter 8). Like the knight suffering in silence while his lady is blissfully unaware, the soul can only wait for God to take some notice of it.

Reason serves as the initial guide; then love takes the soul into the bridal chamber; but once there the soul can only await her lover in hope. What Hadewijch is describing has much in common with Neoplatonic theories of knowledge, especially those of a Christian variety, which tended to depict God coming to the soul rather than the soul ascending under its own power. Hadewijch also has a metaphysical theory to back up this theory of knowledge. She believes that our souls were created eternally in God as divine exemplars and that mystical vision (or part of it) is coming to behold one’s true, original self.11

Besides, the valorization of the physical is built into standard Christian theology thanks to the doctrines of the Incarnation and the Eucharist. For precisely this reason, as feminist readers of Mechthild have pointed out, she gives a central place to the Eucharist in her thought. In the thirteenth century this tendency may have been congenial to the interests of the Church, given worries about the Cathar heresy which blossomed in southern France. Since the twelfth century the Cathars had been promoting a kind of renewed Manicheanism, which disdained the body and even denied that Christ had become fully incarnate as a human. In such a context it was actually in line with the values of the Church when the Beguine mystics gave their bodies a positive role

to play in spiritual life.

This is the theological side of Hadewijch’s “courtly love” theme of resignation and unfaith: as the lover suffers in her wait for the beloved, she is vividly aware that she deserves nothing better (Letter 8). Mechthild similarly returns again and again to the idea of estrangement or abandonment (verworfenheit). For her the greatest form of minne is the one that abandons all expectation that the beloved will arrive, the “love that lets go of love” (§2.23). This is the frame of mind that leads Mechthild to say, not once but twice, that she would “as soon die of love” (§2.2, 2.4). In a characteristic paradox, Mechthild finds a kind of joy in this very despair. At the end of a lengthy dialogue between the soul as bride and God, who remains aloof from her, she captures the thought in a rhyming couplet: “The deeper I sink, the sweeter I drink” (§4.12).

But if scholastic philosophy teaches us anything, it’s that we should question stark oppositions and seek to draw our distinctions more finely.

But Kilwardby thinks it is useful to take the four-cause theory of Aristotle’s natural philosophy and apply it to syllogistic arguments. The efficient cause of a syllogism is the person who forms it, while its final cause or purpose is, of course, to produce knowledge. Kilwardby also thinks of syllogisms as having material and formal causes.5 Basically, the matter of a syllogism is the terms that appear in the premises, while the form is the way that the terms are arranged.

Instead, both motion and time should be thought of as “successive” entities that exist precisely by coming into being and elapsing. Time relates to successive motion as its quantity, much as spatial extention is a quantity for bodies, with the significant difference that spatial quantity remains fixed, while temporal quantity is “transient” (§18). So if there is any mind-independent or “subjective” aspect of time, it is

not the quantitative measure of motions out in the world. Instead, it would be our own measurements of time which render it “determinate” by dividing it into minutes and hours (§77). But even this is not presented as a way of saving Augustine’s position. Instead, Kilwardby uses the point to explain Aristotle’s claim that we know time by counting or “marking off” a motion (Physics 219a).

If it’s matter that “individuates” things in this way—something that Kilwardby believed for at least part of his career—then spiritual things too must have matter. Otherwise, how could your soul and mine be distinct individuals?

He thinks of matter as having the potential or power to take on all these forms, from the most general form of substance down to the most specific form of rationality, which is distinctive of humans.12 So you have not just one but many forms: one that makes you a substance, another that makes you a physical body, another that makes you a living being, another that makes you an animal, and finally the form that makes you a human.

Theologically, Kilwardby worries that if there is only a simple rational soul in a human, then the human that was Christ could not in fact have been the incarnation of God, but only an immaterial, divine spirit with a loose connection to a body. In holding that our soul consists of a plurality of forms or powers, Kilwardby flirts with a danger we noted when looking at Olivi. If this theory is correct, then won’t the unity of my person be compromised? My rational soul will be associated with the lower parts of my being, but it will be a distinct entity that floats free of the rest. To avoid this Kilwardby cites Augustine: the soul joins to the body in order to fulfill its desire for knowledge about all things.14 And unlike a giraffe who dreams of rolling around the rink, the soul can achieve its desire, thanks to what Kilwardby calls its “unibility,” that is, its innate tendency to form a unity with the body.15 But why does the soul need to be united to the body in order to have knowledge? Because Kilwardby is enough of an Aristotelian to think that most of our intellectual understanding depends upon the experience of the senses. In the contest between Augustinian theories of illumination and Aristotelian ideas of empirical science he predictably takes a conciliatory, middle position. Knowledge of some things, like mathematical truths, the soul, and God Himself, is implanted within the soul from birth. But for everything else we need to explore the world using sensation, a ...

things would not need to be physically present in the right place, suitably illuminated, and so on if we are to see them (§78). His idea is instead that when the image of a sense object is present in the organ, the soul can “assimilate” itself to that image. It does so by actively making a further image for itself, an image of the image in the sense organ.

But Kilwardy insists that in grasping a suitably exact likeness of a thing, I am in fact perceiving that very thing (§103). And perhaps he’s right about this. If you were looking at a photograph of your mother, you probably wouldn’t hesitate to say that you were seeing, or looking at, your mother.

He had been arguing against people with the far more reasonable, yet still in his view false, view that humans have numerous forms: the single form that is the soul, plus some more forms that belong to the body.

But isn’t this exactly his position?

He was as committed as his critic Roger Bacon to the centrality of experience in natural philosophy. All our knowledge is grounded in sensation and one can reach the

universal truths envisioned in Aristotelian philosophy only on the strength of individual observations.

Albert follows him by outlining two ways of thinking about the soul (58; see also 12). On the one hand, there is Aristotle’s idea that the soul is the form of the body, in the sense that it is the body’s act or perfection (46). On the other hand, there is the soul considered as a substance in its own right which can even survive bodily death. As observed a generation earlier by John Blund (Chapter 24), these two perspectives belong respectively to the physicist and the metaphysician (36). In physics or natural philosophy we grasp the soul through the activities it manifests in the body. In metaphysics we understand soul as it is in itself, rather than approaching it through its effects. The

contrast is borrowed most immediately from Avicenna, but echoes a long-standing Platonist approach to human nature according to which our true selves are immaterial and immortal, even if they have acquired an intimate relationship with corruptible bodies.

In particular, he resists the idea that the soul has only a casual or accidental relation to the body. To avoid this he rejects Plato’s theory that the soul already existed before birth and emphasizes the soul’s essential tendency or “inclination” to join a body. This, in fact, is what distinguishes the human soul from an angel, which has no such inclination (56).

The soul does have potentialities and powers, and needs the body to exercise many of these. But we should not confuse

potentiality with materiality.12 So while it’s true that all things other than God have powers which they may or may not use, this does not mean that the soul or angels have matter. In fact, Albert will even admit that insofar as the soul is conceived as a form, it remains incomplete without its body. For, as a form, it is nothing but a source of bodily activities, like nutrition or sensation. It does need the body as an instrument to carry out those activities and realize its potential, and when the body dies, the opportunity to do this is lost (104). Yet the soul survives because it is a substance in its own right. Its activities are destroyed, while it lives on, like a blacksmith who can survive the destruction of his anvil and hammer. By demoting the lower functions of soul to mere activities realized in a body, Albert can avoid embracing a notion we’ve found in Olivi and Kilwardby, namely that there is a plurality of forms in every single human. Like Aquinas after him, Albert instead insists that the soul is a single substance and act (104).

His new view was that the lower part of the human soul emerges from the matter provided by a pregnant mother, with form coming from the

father, just as in other animal species. Yet the power of intellect still needs to be given to the human directly by God. So you got your sense faculties and your ability to digest food from your parents along with your eye color, but you got your mind from God. Despite this double origin, Albert continues to insist that the soul is a single form and not a collection of forms enabling us to perform different activities.

This is a pattern of thinking that arises repeatedly in Albert: a single cause can give rise to many different effects by using various recipients as intermediaries.

When he comes to explain how a simple God could give rise to such a bewilderingly complex world, he suggests that God’s effect is nothing other than simple being, which is diversified by the essences of the things God creates.

Aristotle thought they were on the right track, because a single cause

would remain inert, having nothing to act upon. In fact, even two principles wouldn’t be enough, since they would cancel each other out. In late antiquity, though, all philosophers accepted that the universe derives from one cause, with the pagan Neoplatonists identifying this cause as the One or Good and the Jews and Christians, of course, seeing the God of their Scriptures as the almighty Creator of all things. Still, like an offer of marriage from a Montague to a Capulet, the proposal continued to cause trouble. Philosophers worried less that a single cause would remain entirely inactive, as Aristotle claimed, and more that such a cause could only have one effect. The Neoplatonic First Principle and the Judeo-Christian God were claimed to be perfectly simple, and how can a perfectly simple thing generate a multiplicity? Only indirectly, claimed the Neoplatonists. Their One would produce only one effect, which would form a link in a causal chain stretching down all the way to our physical realm. We might expect thinkers of the Abrahamic faiths to abandon this scheme in favor of direct creation of each thing by God. Many thinkers of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam did precisely that. But those with a greater commitment to the Hellenic heritage adhered to the rule “from one thing only one thing can come,” in Latin ab uno non nisi unum. It’s a motto that became notorious in both the Arabic and Latin spheres. In the Islamic world the theologian al-Ghazālī attacked Avicenna ...

Neoplatonic ideas reached him from a variety of authoritative sources, which presented a united front endorsing the “from one only one” motto and its corollary that God uses intermediaries to fashion the universe. For starters there was Avicenna. We’ve seen him exerting influence in the Latin sphere starting in the twelfth century, especially regarding the soul. But Albert drew more deeply on Avicenna than others had done, as we can see from his exposition of Aristotle’s Metaphysics, which refers constantly to Avicenna.2 Then, there was that favorite source of Eriugena’s, the Pseudo-Dionysius. Albert commented on his works in lectures that were recorded by Thomas Aquinas, who would go on to write his own commentary on Dionysius’ Divine Names. Since Dionysius was covertly drawing on the ideas of the late ancient Platonist Proclus, this too helped push Albert in a Neoplatonic direction. Finally, there was an even more indirect route through which Proclus was smuggled into Latin Christendom: the Book of Causes (Liber de causis). It is a partial translation of Proclus’ elegant and axiomatic presentation of Neoplatonist philosophy in his Elements of Theology. The Latin Book of Causes was based on an Arabic paraphrase translation produced in the ninth century. It acquired considerable authority because it was thought to be a work of Aristotle himself. This is basically what Albert believed, though he saw it as an excerpt of a work by Aristotle. Albert thought the excerpting was ...

his distinction between essence and existence. According to this Avicennan teaching, the nature or essence of each created thing leaves open whether or not that thing exists. This is why such things need causes in the first place. They are insufficient to account for their own existence and need help from some external influence if they are to be brought into being. By contrast, God’s essence guarantees, or even is identical to, His own existence.5 This is what it means to say that God exists necessarily, whereas all other things exist contingently: in itself, each of them could have failed to exist, and exists only because of the chain of causes that goes back to God. Albert is broadly happy with this picture, but is more reluctant than Avicenna to say that existence is bestowed by God only indirectly.6 He would like to say that when God creates being, He is creating the being of all things. But how to secure this while still obeying the maxim “from one only one”? The answer is simple: the being produced by God is in itself one but becomes complex and diversified precisely when it joins to the essences of created things, as Avicenna described. In a further borrowing from his Neoplatonic sources, Albert compares God to a flowing fountain or shining light, with being as a single stream or irradiation which is received by many things. The Neoplatonists and Avicenna held that God produces an intellect and uses it as an intermediary to create other things, but Albert doesn’t w...

else, he seizes on the word used in the Latin translation, which is intelligentia. This not need mean a cosmic “intellect.” It could just mean an intellectual concept, an idea. This is precisely what it does mean, according to Albert: the Book of Causes is telling us that the first conce...

As Avicenna said, God has being through His very essence, so it stands to reason that being must be His sole effect. Being is then received by everything that derives from Him, which, of course, means everything other than God Himself. For this reason Albert insists that, among the transcendentals, being is the most primary. Goodness, unity, and truth always come along with being; as we saw before, they are “extensionally identical.” But this is only because we can add more specific notions to that of being, like the fact that a certain being is “undivided,” which is all we mean when we say that something is “one.”

Like shadows which dim the reception of a brilliant light, other causal factors besides God are needed to explain the particular and limited form of being that turns up in each created thing. Here Albert’s metaphysics makes contact with the natural philosophical themes we looked at in Chapter 34. Each giraffe comes from its mother and father through a process whose details are known best to the giraffes themselves, and there is also a role for the heavenly bodies. But none of these lesser causes accounts for the sheer being of any created thing.

Harder to distinguish are the remits of theology and metaphysics, since the latter discipline does

investigate how being and the other transcendentals flow forth from the divine first principle. Everything we’ve been discussing in this chapter so far would count as metaphysics, from Albert’s point of view, not as theology. The difference is that theology is supposed to orient the practitioner to love and enjoy God as opposed to just understanding Him as a cause.

What exactly is added to this when we behold Him in the afterlife? Albert’s answer is to take seriously the idea that the knowledge of God available to the blessed is a kind of vision, one whose functioning is comparable to normal eyesight.11 For Albert, when we see something, we do so by receiving a “species” from the viewed object. So here he agrees with the sort of view put forward by his nemesis Roger Bacon,

Yet Albert also wants to preserve Augustine’s claim that God’s infinity transcends our mind. Characteristically, he makes use of an Aristotelian distinction, in this case the one between knowing that something is the case and what something is. The blessed will see that God is before them but not attain a full understanding of what God is in His essence.

We do not receive forms as direct emanations from God, or for that matter from a celestial intellect, as Avicenna claimed. Yet, as Bonaventure suggested, neither is abstraction of ideas from sensation sufficient. We need the light of divine truth to strengthen our minds if we are to achieve the scientific understanding to which Albert dedicated his life.

Where the philosopher begins with things in the created world and proceeds to God, the theologian goes the other way around. But the difference is more than direction of travel. The philosopher moves along the lower road of natural reason. He must base himself on what he can glean from the senses, since all natural reasoning must have recourse to experience of the physical world.

The “light of reason” is derived from God, but is given to us automatically when we are created as humans. For the most part, no further assistance is needed. The human intellect is itself active and can “illuminate” the images it derives from the senses so as to understand them. It is only when we try to understand such supernatural mysteries as the Trinity that an additional light must be added

Aquinas takes this to indicate that the philosopher can indeed know God, but only indirectly. Natural reason approaches God as the cause of created things (Q1 a2 resp), rather than grasping Him in Himself, as we hope to do in the afterlife. The philosopher cannot offer demonstrations that divulge God’s essence, if only because things are demonstrated on the basis of their causes, and God has no cause.

Nonetheless, philosophy can offer several services to religion (Q2 a3

resp.). It can help the Christian to refute false criticisms of religious doctrine, the task known as “apologetics.” And it can offer a deeper understanding of something accepted on the basis of faith. It should be underlined that this does not mean proving the articles of faith. These are believed on a voluntary basis thanks to another, supernatural “light” infused within us by God during this life, which is what Aquinas understands faith to be

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.

In general we always understand what something is in light of its causes, but God has no cause; He can be

grasped only by reasoning to Him from His effects

Theology is a science in the Aristotelian sense. That is, it offers demonstrative proofs based on unshakable first principles. The difference between theology and other sciences is that the theologian’s principles are not discoverable by unaided human reason. How, then, can theology be a science at all? In answer, Aquinas reminds us of a teaching found in Aristotle’s Posterior Analytics: one science can take over as principles things established in another science. The study of optics might require the principle that parallel lines never meet, which is shown in the higher science of geometry. Likewise, the human science of theology takes its principle from a higher science, namely the self-understanding of God Himself and the understanding that the blessed have of Him in the afterlife

Faith is belief that one embraces on the basis of authority, or by a sheer act of will, or just because one was brought up in a religious family. It is, in other words, the

sort of belief that involves the absence of rational justification.