Kenny Anthony. An Illustrated Brief History of Western Philosophy
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in their orbits not because they have souls, but because God gave them the
appropriate impetus when he created them. The theory of impetus did away with
the mixture of physics and psychology in Aristotle’s astronomy. It made possible
a unified theory of dynamics which was a great improvement on Aristotle’s, and
it was not surpassed until the introduction of the theory of inertia in the age of
Galileo and Newton.
Philoponus rejected Aristotle’s thesis that the heavenly bodies were made out
of a non-terrestrial element, the imperishable quintessence. This rejection was
necessary if the impetus theory was to be extended to the heavens as well as to
the earth. But it was also congenial to Christian piety to demolish the notion that
the world of the sun and moon and stars was something supernatural, standing in
a relation to God different from that of the earth on which his human creatures
lived.
Philoponus was indeed a theologian as well as a philosopher, and wrote, in
later life, a number of treatises on Christian doctrine. Unfortunately, his treat-
ment of the Trinity laid him open to charges of tritheism (the belief that there are
three Gods) and his treatment of the Incarnation explicitly defended the mono-
physite heresy (the denial that Christ had two natures). When summoned to
Constantinople by Justinian to defend his views on the Incarnation, Philoponus
failed to appear; and when after his death his teaching on the Trinity was exam-
ined by the ecclesiastical authorities it was condemned as heretical. Consequently,
his influence on Christian thinking was minimal. But his influence was felt outside
the bounds of the old Roman Empire; and it was there, in the centuries between
Justinian and William the Conqueror, that the most significant philosophers are
to be found.
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VII
EARLY MEDIEVAL
PHILOSOPHY
John the Scot
For two centuries after the death of Philoponus there is nothing for the historian
of philosophy to record. During that period, however, two events altered beyond
recognition the world which had fostered classical and patristic philosophy. The
first was the spread of Islam; the second was the emergence of the Holy Roman
Empire.
Within ten years of the death of the Prophet Muhammad in 633 the religion of
Islam had spread by conquest from its native Arabia throughout the neighbouring
Persian Empire and the Roman provinces of Syria, Palestine, and Egypt. In 698
the Muslims captured Carthage, and ten years later they were masters of all North
Africa. In 711 they crossed the Straits of Gibraltar, easily defeated the Gothic
Christians, and flooded through Spain. By 717 their empire stretched from the
Atlantic to the Great Wall of China. Their advance into Northern Europe was
halted only in 732, when they were defeated at Poitiers by the Frankish leader
Charles Martel.
Charles Martel’s grandson, Charlemagne, who became king of the Franks in
768, drove the Muslims back to the Pyrenees, but he did no more than nibble at
their Spanish dominions. His military and political ambitions for France were
more concerned with its Eastern frontier. He conquered Lombardy, Bavaria, and
Saxony and had his son proclaimed king of Italy. After rescuing Pope Leo III
from a revolution in Rome, he had himself crowned Roman Emperor in St
Peter’s on Christmas Day 800. When Charlemagne died in 814 almost all the
Christian inhabitants of continental Western Europe were united under his rule.
Formidable as a general, and ruthless when provoked, he had a high ideal of his
vocation as ruler of Christendom, and one of his favourite books was The City of
God. He was anxious to revive the study of letters, and brought scholars from all
over Europe to join the learned Alcuin of York in a school, based at Aachen,
whose members, though mainly concerned with other disciplines, sometimes
displayed an amateur interest in philosophy.
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It was at the court of Charles’s grandson, Charles the Bald, that we find the most
significant Western philosopher of the ninth century, John the Scot. John was born
not in Charles’s dominions, but in Ireland, and for the avoidance of doubt he added
to his name ‘Scottus’ the surname ‘Eriugena’, which means Son of Erin. He first
engaged in philosophy in 852 when invited by the Archbishop of Rheims to write
a treatise to prove heretical the ideas of a learned and pessimistic monk, Gottschalk.
Gottschalk’s alleged offence was to have maintained that there was a double divine
predestination, one of the saints to heaven, and one of the damned to hell; a
doctrine which he claimed, reasonably enough, to have found implicit in Augustine.
Archbishop Hincmar, like the monks of Augustine’s time, thought this a doctrine
inimical to good discipline; hence his invitation to Eriugena.
Figure 16 John Scotus Eriugena (right) disputing with a Greek abbot Theodore.
(Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS Latin 6734 f 3r)
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Eriugena’s refutation (On Predestination) was, from Hincmar’s point of view,
a remedy worse than the disease. In the first place, his arguments against Gottschalk
were silly: there could not be a double predestination, because God was simple
and undivided, and there was no such thing as predestination because God was
eternal. Secondly, he tried to draw the sting out of the destiny of the damned by
maintaining that there was no physical hell; the wicked want to flee from God to
Unbeing, and God punishes them only by preventing their annihilation. The fire
of judgement spoken of in the Gospels is common to both good and bad; the
difference between them is that the blessed turn into ether and the damned into
air. Gottschalk and Eriugena both found themselves condemned by Church Coun-
cils, one at Quiersy in 853, the other at Valence in 855.
Despite this, Charles the Bald commissioned Eriugena to translate into Latin
the works of Dionysius the Areopagite. These were four treatises, Neo-Platonic in
content and probably written in the sixth century, which were wrongly believed
to be the work of an Athenian convert of the Apostle Paul. Eriugena, whose
knowledge of Greek indicates the high level of Irish culture in the ninth century,
went to work with a will, and produced a commentary as well as translation.
These tasks whetted his appetite to produce his own system, which he did in
the five books of his Periphyseon, or On Nature. Nature is divided into four:
nature creating and uncreated; nature created and creating; nature created and
uncreating; and nature uncreated and uncreating. The first, obviously enough, is
God. The second, nature created and creating, is the world of intellect, the home
of the Platonic Ideas, which are created in God the Son. This second nature
creates the third, nature created and uncreating; that is the everyday world of the
things we can see and feel in space and time, such as animals, plants, and rocks.
The fourth, nature uncreated and uncreating, is once again the uncreated God,
conceived now not as the creator but as the ultimate end to which all things
return.
Eriugena’s language about God is highly agnostic. God cannot be described
in human language; he does not fit into any of Aristotle’s ten categories. God
therefore is beyond all being, and so it is more correct to say that He does not
exist than that He exists. Eriugena tries to save himself from sheer atheism by
saying that what God is doing is something better than existing. What the Bible
says of God, he says, is not to be taken literally; but in every verse there are
innumerable meanings, like the colours in a peacock’s tail.
It is not easy to see where human beings fit into Eriugena’s fourfold scheme.
They seem to straddle uneasily between the second and the third. Our animal
bodies seem clearly to belong with the third; but they are created by our souls,
which have more affinity with the objects in the second. And at one point
Eriugena seems to suggest that the entire human being has its home in the
second: ‘Man is a certain intellectual notion, eternally made in the divine mind’.
He must be thinking of the Idea of Man; systematically, in Platonic style, he
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insists that species are more real than their members, universals more real than
individuals. When the world ends, place and time will disappear, and all creatures
will find salvation in the nature that is uncreated and uncreating.
Despite the influence of Greek sources, Eriugena’s ideas are often original and
imaginative; but his teaching is obviously difficult to reconcile with Christian
orthodoxy, and it is unsurprising that On Nature was repeatedly condemned.
Three and a half centuries after its publication a Pope ordered, ineffectively, that
all copies of it should be burnt.
Alkindi and Avicenna
Paradoxically, the Christian Eriugena was a much less important precursor of
Western medieval philosophy than a series of Muslim thinkers in the countries
that are now Iraq and Iran. Besides being significant philosophers in their own
right, these Muslims provided the route through which much Greek learning was
made available to the Latin West.
In the fourth century a group of Syrian Christians had made a serious study
of Greek philosophy and medicine. Towards the end of the fifth century the
Emperor Zeno closed their school as heretical and they moved to Persia. After
the Islamic conquest of Persia and Syria, they were taken under the patronage of
the enlightened Caliphs of Baghdad in the era of the Arabian Nights. Between
750 and 900 these Syrians translated Aristotle into Arabic, and made available
to the Muslim world the scientific and medical works of Euclid, Archimedes,
Hippocrates, and Galen. At the same time, mathematical and astronomical works
were imported from India and ‘Arabic’ numerals were adopted.
Arabic thinkers were quick to exploit the patrimony of Greek learning. Alkindi,
a contemporary of Eriugena’s, wrote a commentary on Aristotle’s De Anima.
He offered a remarkable interpretation of the baffling passage in which Aristotle
speaks of the two minds, a mind to make things and a mind to become things.
The making mind, he said, was a single super-human intelligence; this operated
upon individual passive intelligences (the minds ‘to become’) in order to produce
human thought. Alfarabi, who died in Baghdad in 950, followed this interpreta-
tion; as a member of the sect of Sufis he gave it a mystical flavour.
The most significant Muslim philosopher of the time was Ibn Sina or Avicenna
(980–1037). Born near Bokhara, he was a precocious student who mastered logic,
mathematics, physics, medicine and metaphysics in his teens, and published an
encyclopedia of these disciplines when he was twenty. His medical skill was unrivalled
and much in demand: he spent the latter part of his life as court physician to the
ruler of Isfahan. He wrote a few works in Persian and many in Arabic; over one
hundred have survived, in the original or in Latin translations. His Canon of
Medicine, which adds his own observations to a careful assembly of Greek and
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Arabic clinical material, was used by practitioners in Europe until the seventeenth
century. It was through Avicenna that they learnt the theory of the four humours,
or bodily fluids (blood, phlegm, choler, and black bile) which were supposed to
determine people’s health and character, making them sanguine, phlegmatic,
choleric, or melancholic as the case might be.
Avicenna’s metaphysical system was based on Aristotle’s, but he modified it
in ways which were highly significant for later Aristotelianism. He took over the
doctrine of matter and form and elaborated it in his own manner: any bodily
entity consisted of matter under a substantial form, which made it a body (a ‘form
of corporeality’). All bodily creatures belonged to particular species, but any such
creature, e.g. a dog, had not just one but many substantial forms, such as animality,
which made it an animal, and caninity, which made it a dog.
Since souls, for an Aristotelian, are forms, a human being, on this theory, has
three souls: a vegetative soul (responsible for nutrition, growth, and reproduction),
an animal soul (responsible for movement and perception), and a rational soul
(responsible for intellectual thought). None of the souls exist prior to the body,
but while the two inferior souls are mortal, the superior one is immortal and survives
death in a condition either of bliss or of frustration, in accordance with the life it
has led. Following Alfarabi’s interpretation of Aristotle, he distinguished between
two intellectual faculties: the receptive human intellect which absorbs information
received through the senses, and a single superhuman active intellect which com-
municates to humans the ability to grasp universal concepts and principles.
The active intellect plays a central role in Avicenna’s system: it not only illumin-
ates the human soul, but is the cause of its existence. The matter and the varied
forms of the world are emanations of the active intellect, which is itself the last
member of a series of intellectual emanations of the unchanging and eternal First
Cause, namely God.
In describing the unique nature of God, Avicenna introduces a celebrated
distinction, that between essence and existence. This arises out of his account of
universal terms such as ‘horse’. In the material world, there are only individual horses;
the term ‘horse’, however, can be applied to many different individuals. Different
from both of these is the essence horseness, which in itself is neither one nor many,
and is neutral between the existence and non-existence of any actual horses.
Whatever kind of creature we take, we will find nothing in its essence which
will account for the existence of things of that kind. Not even the fullest invest-
igation into what kind of thing something is will show that it exists. If we find,
then, things of a certain kind existing, we must look for an external cause which
added existence to essence. There may be a series of such causes, but it cannot go
on for ever. The series must come to an end with an entity whose essence does
account for its existence, something whose existence is derived from nothing
outside itself, but is entailed by its essence. Such a being is called by Avicenna a
necessary existent: and of course only God fills the bill. It is God who gives
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existence to the essences of all other beings. Since God’s existence depends upon
nothing but his essence, his existence is eternal; and since God is eternal, Avicenna
concluded, so is the world which emanates from him.
Avicenna was a sincere Muslim, and he was careful to reconcile his philosoph-
ical scheme with the teaching and commands of the Prophet, which he regarded
as a unique enlightenment from the Active Intellect. Just as Greek philosophy
operated within the context of the Homeric poems, and the stage is set for Jewish
and Christian philosophy by the Old and New Testaments, so Muslim philosophy
takes as its backdrop the Koran. But Avicenna’s interpretations of the sacred book
were taken by conservatives to be unorthodox, and his influence was to be greater
among Christians than among Muslims.
The Feudal System
At the time of Avicenna’s death great changes were taking place in Christendom.
Charlemagne’s unification of Europe did not last long, and few of his successors
as Holy Roman Emperors were able to exercise effective rule outside the bounds
of Germany. They occupied, however, the highest point of an elaborate pyramidal
social and political structure, the feudal system. Throughout Europe, smaller or
larger manors were ruled by local lords with their own courts and soldiers, who
pledged their allegiance to greater lords, promising, in return for their protection,
military and financial support. These greater lords in turn were the subordinates,
or vassals, of kings. While the feudal system, for much of the time, preserved the
peace in a fragmented Europe, warfare often broke out over contested issues of
vassalage. When the Norman William the Conqueror invaded England in 1066,
he justified his conquest on the grounds that the last Saxon king, Harold, had
sworn allegiance to him and then broken his oath by assuming the crown of
England.
While local land ownership and the personal engagement of vassal to overlord
were the foundations of secular society, the organization of the Church was be-
coming more centralized. True, the abbeys in which monks lived in community
were great landowners, and abbots and bishops were powerful feudal lords; but as
the eleventh century progressed, they were brought to an ever greater degree
under the control of the Holy See in Rome. A line of unedifying and ineffective
Popes in the tenth and early eleventh century gave way to a series of reformers,
who sought to eradicate the ignorance, intemperance and corruption of many of
the clergy, and to end clerical concubinage by enforcing a rule of celibacy. Chief
among the reformers was Pope Gregory VII, whose high view of the Papal calling
brought him into conflict with the equally energetic German Emperor, Henry IV.
According to almost all medieval thinkers, Church and State were each, inde-
pendently, of divine origin, and neither institution derived its authority from the
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other. Despite the great variety of institutions at lower levels – feudal lordships
and monarchies in the State, bishoprics, abbeys, and religious orders in the Church
– each institution acknowledged a universal head: the Holy Roman Emperor and
the Pope. The purposes of the two institutions were distinct: the State was to
provide for the security and well-being of citizens in this world, the Church to
minister to the spiritual needs of believers on their journey towards heaven. The
jurisdictions, therefore, were in principle complementary rather than competing.
But there were many areas where in fact they overlapped and could conflict.
The quarrel between Gregory and Henry concerned the nomination and con-
firmation of bishops. This was obviously the concern of the Church, since a bishopric
was a spiritual office; but bishops were often also substantial landowners with a
feudal following, and lay rulers often took a keen interest in their appointment.
Disregarding a Papal prohibition, the Emperor Henry IV personally appointed
bishops in Germany; Pope Gregory, who claimed the power to depose all princes,
excommunicated him, that is to say, banned him from participation in the activities
of the Church. This had the effect of absolving the Emperor’s vassals from their
allegiance, and to restore it, he had to abase himself before the Pope in the snow
at Canossa.
Saint Anselm
In England too, under William the Conqueror’s successors relations between
Church and State were often strained; and the quarrels between Pope and King
played an important part in the life of the most important philosopher of the
eleventh century, St Anselm of Canterbury. Anselm, who was born just before
Avicenna’s death, resembled him as a philosopher in several ways, but began from
a very different starting point. An Italian by birth, he studied the works of
Augustine at the Norman abbey of Bec, under Lanfranc, who later became William
the Conqueror’s Archbishop of Canterbury. As a monk, prior, and finally Abbot
of Bec, Anselm wrote a series of brief philosophical and meditative works. In On
the Grammarian he reflected on the interface between grammar and logic, and
the relationships between signifiers and signified; he explored, for instance, the
contrast between a noun and an adjective, and the contrast between a substance
and a quality, and wrote on the relationship between the two contrasts. In his
soliloquy Monologion he offered a number of arguments for the existence of God,
including one which goes as follows. Everything which exists exists through
something or other. But not everything can exist through something else; there-
fore there must be something which exists through itself. This argument would
have interested Avicenna, but Anselm did not find it wholly satisfactory, and in a
meditation addressed to God entitled Proslogion he offered a different argument,
which was the one that made him famous in the history of philosophy.
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Anselm addresses God thus:
We believe that thou art a being than which nothing greater can be conceived. Or is
there no such nature, since the fool hath said in his heart, there is no God? (Psalm
14: 1) But at any rate, this very fool, when he hears of this being of which I speak
– a being than which nothing greater can be conceived – understands what he hears,
and what he understands is in his understanding; although he does not understand
it to exist. For, it is one thing for an object to be in the understanding, and another
to understand that the object exists. . . . Even the fool is convinced that something
exists in the understanding, at least, than which nothing greater can be conceived.
For, when he hears of this, he understands it. And whatever is understood, exists in
the understanding. And assuredly that, than which nothing greater can be conceived,
cannot exist in the understanding alone. For, suppose it exists in the understanding
alone: then it can be conceived to exist in reality; which is greater.
Therefore, if that, than which nothing greater can be conceived, exists in the
understanding alone, the very being than which nothing greater can be conceived is
one than which a greater can be conceived. But obviously this is impossible. Hence
there is no doubt that there exists a being than which nothing greater can be
conceived, and it exists both in the understanding and in reality.
Whereas Avicenna was the first to say that God’s essence entailed his existence,
Anselm claims that the very concept of God shows that he exists. If we know what
we mean when we talk about God, then we automatically know there is a God;
if you deny his existence you do not know what you are talking about.
Is Anselm’s argument valid? The answer has been debated from his day to ours.
A neighbouring monk, Gaunilo, said that one could prove by the same route that
the most fabulously beautiful island must exist, otherwise one would be able to
imagine one more fabulously beautiful. Anselm replied that the cases were differ-
ent, because even the most beautiful imaginable island could be conceived not to
exist, since we can imagine it going out of existence, whereas God cannot in that
way be conceived not to exist.
It is important to note that Anselm is not saying that God is the greatest
conceivable thing. Indeed, he expressly says that God is not conceivable; he is
greater than anything that can be conceived. On the face of it, there is nothing
self-contradictory in saying that that than which no greater can be conceived is
itself too great for conception. I can say that my copy of the Proslogion is some-
thing than which nothing larger will fit into my pocket. That is true, but it does
not mean that my copy of the Proslogion will itself fit into my pocket; in fact it is
far too big to do so.
The real difficulty for Anselm is in explaining how something which cannot be
conceived can be in the understanding at all. To be sure, we understand each of
the words in the phrase ‘that than which no greater can be conceived’. But is this
enough to ensure that we grasp what the whole phrase means? If so, then it seems
that we can indeed conceive God, even though of course we have no exhaustive
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understanding of him. If not, then we have no guarantee that that than which no
greater can be conceived exists even in the intellect, or that ‘that than which
no greater can be conceived’ expresses an intelligible thought. Philosophers in the
twentieth century have discussed the expression ‘The least natural number not
nameable in fewer than twenty-two syllables’. This sounds a readily intelligible
designation of a number – until the paradox dawns on us that the expression itself
names the number in twenty-one syllables. However, even philosophers who have
agreed with each other that Anselm’s proof is invalid have rarely agreed what is
wrong with it, and whenever it appears finally refuted, someone revives it in a
new guise.
Equally original and influential was Anselm’s attempt, in his book Cur Deus
Homo, to give a reasoned justification for the Christian doctrine of the incarna-
tion. The title of the book means ‘Why did God become man?’ Anselm’s answer
turns on the principle that justice demands that where there is an offence, there
must be satisfaction. Satisfaction must be made by an offender, and it must be a
recompense which is equal and opposite to the offence. The magnitude of an
offence is judged by the importance of the person offended; the magnitude of
satisfaction is judged by the importance of the person making the recompense. So
Adam’s sin was an infinite offence, since it was an offence against God; but any
satisfaction that mere human beings can make is only finite, since it is made by
finite creatures. It is impossible, therefore, for the human race, unaided, to make
up for Adam’s sin. Satisfaction can only be adequate if it is made by one who is
human (and therefore an heir of Adam) and one who is divine (and can therefore
make infinite recompense). Hence, the incarnation of God is necessary if original
sin is to be wiped out and the human race is to be redeemed.
Anselm’s theory influenced theologians until long after the Reformation; but
his notion of satisfaction was also incorporated into some philosophical theories
of the justification of punishment.
By the time he wrote Cur Deus Homo Anselm had succeeded Lanfranc as
Archbishop of Canterbury. His last years were much occupied with the quarrels
over jurisdiction between king William II and Pope Urban II, which in some
ways recapitulated that between Gregory VII and Henry IV a few years before.
Anselm died in Canterbury in 1109 and is buried in the Cathedral there.
Abelard and Héloïse
Peter Abelard was just thirty years old when Anselm died. Born into a knightly
family in Brittany in 1079, he was educated at Tours and went to Paris in about
1100 to join the school attached to the Cathedral of Notre Dame, run by William
of Champeaux. Falling out with his teacher, he went to Melun to found a school
of his own, and later set up a rival school in Paris on Mont Ste Geneviève. From
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