Kenny Anthony. Medieval Philosophy: A New History of Western Philosophy. Volume 2

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Alexandria

Jerusalem

Edessa

Ephesus

Chalcedon

Constantinople

Duns

Oxford

London

Canterbury

Deventer

Louvain

Cologne

Soissons

Aachen

Bec

Paris

Sens

Poitiers

Munich

Constance

Basel

Lyons

Avignon

Milan

Padua

Ravenna

Florence

Rome

Fossanuova

Naples

Cordoba

Marrakesh

Hippo

Carthage

500 miles

0 400 800 km

The world of medieval philosophy

INTRODUCTION

ost histories of philosophy, in this age of specialization, are the work

of many hands, by specialists working in diVerent Welds and periods.

In inviting me to write, single-handed, a history of philosophy from the

earliest times to the present day, Oxford University Press gave expression to

the belief that there is still something to be gained by presenting the

development of philosophy from a single viewpoint, linking ancient,

medieval, early modern, and contemporary philosophy into a single nar-

rative concerned with connected themes. This is the second of four

volumes. The Wrst volume covered the early centuries of philosophy in

classical Greece and Rome. This volume takes up the narrative from the

conversion of St Augustine and continues the story up to the humanist

Renaissance.

There are two quite diVerent reasons why readers may wish to study the

history of philosophy. They may be mainly interested in philosophy, or

they may be mainly interested in history. We may study the great dead

philosophers in order to seek illumination upon themes of present-day

philosophical inquiry. Or we may wish to understand the people and

societies of the past, and read their philosophy to grasp the conceptual

climate in which they thought and acted. We may read the philosophers of

other ages to help to resolve philosophical problems of abiding concern, or

to enter more fully into the intellectual world of a bygone era.

I am by profession a philosopher, not a historian, but I believe that

the history of philosophy is of great importance to the study of philoso-

phy itself. It is an illusion to believe that the current state of philosophy

represents the highest point of philosophical endeavour yet reached. These

volumes are written with the purpose of showing that in many respects the

philosophy of the great dead philosophers has not dated, and that one may

gain philosophical illumination today by a careful reading of the great

works that we have been privileged to inherit.

I attempt in these volumes to be both a philosophical historian and a

historical philosopher. Multi-authored histories are sometimes structured

chronologically and sometimes structured thematically. I try to combine

both approaches, oV ering in each volume Wrst a chronological survey, and

then a thematic treatment of particular philosophical topics of abiding

importance. The reader whose primary interest is historical will focus on

the chronological survey, referring where necessary to the thematic

sections for ampliWcation. The reader who is more concerned with the

philosophical issues will concentrate rather on the thematic sections of the

volumes, referring back to the chronological surveys to place particular

issues in context.

The audience at which these volumes are primarily aimed is at the level

of second- or third-year undergraduate study. However, many of those

interested in the history of philosophy are enrolled in courses that are not

primarily philosophical. Accordingly I endeavour not to assume a familiar-

ity with contemporary philosophical techniques or terminology. I aim also

to write in a manner clear and light-hearted enough for the history to be

enjoyed by those who read it not for curricular purposes but for their own

enlightenment and entertainment.

Not so long ago, in many universities, courses in the history of philoso-

phy went straight from Aristotle to Descartes, leaping over late antiquity

and the Middle Ages. There was a widespread belief in academic circles that

medieval philosophy was not worth studying. This belief was not usually

based on any close acquaintance with the relevant texts: it was more likely

to be an unexamined inheritance of religious or humanist prejudice.

There were, however, many genuine obstacles that made medieval

philosophy less accessible than the philosophy of any other age. We may

identify four signiW cant barriers that have to be surmounted if one is to

come to grips with the thought of the philosophers of the Middle Ages: the

linguistic, the professional, the confessional, and the parochial.

Most of the philosophy of the high Middle Ages is written in Latin which

even those well trained in classical Latin Wnd very diYcult to comprehen d.

Even Thomas Aquinas presents initial diYculties to a reader brought up on

Livy and Cicero, and Aquinas is a model of simple lucidity by comparison

with most of his colleagu es and successors. It is only in recent years that

translations into English of medieval writers have become widely available,

and the task of translation is not a trivial one. Scholastic Latin is full of

technical neologisms which are hard to render into other languages

without cumbrous paraphrase. It is true that many of these neologisms,

transliterated, survive into modern languages, and often into everyday use

INTRODUCTION

xii

(e.g. ‘intelligence’, ‘evidence’, ‘voluntary’, ‘supposition’). But the modern

use is never an exact equivalent of the scholastic use, and often diVers from

it widely. ‘Subjective’ and ‘objective’, for instance, are two terms that have

virtually reversed their meanings since medieval times.

This Wrst, linguistic, problem is closely connected with the second

problem of professionalism. The study of philosophy was more profession-

alized during the Middle Ages than at any other time before the present—

hence the term ‘scholastic’. Philosophy was largely the province of tight

university communities sharing a common curriculum, a common patri-

mony of texts, and a common arsenal of technical terms. Most of the

works that have come down to us are, in one way or another, the product

of university lectures, exercises, or debates, and those who produced them

could expect in their hearers or readers a familiarity with a complicated

jargon and an ability to pick up erudite allusion. There was hardly any

philosophy written for the general reader. Those who wrote or read it were

overwhelmingly male, clerical, and celibate. An appendix to The Cambridge

History of Later Medieval Philosophy gives brief biographies of the sixty-six most

signiWcant Wgures in medieval thought. None of them are women, and

only two are laymen.

The third problem, again, is related to the second. Because the best-

known medieval philosophers were members of the Catholic Church, their

philosophy has often been regarded as a branch of theology or apologetics.

This is unfair: they were all aware of the distinction between philosophical

argument and dogmatic evangelism. But it is true that, since most of them

concluded their academic career in the faculty of divinity, much of their

best philosophical work is actually contained in their theological works,

and it takes some experience to locate it.

Moreover, many of the most signiWcant thinkers were members of

religious orders, who have often been possessive of their heritage. There

have been long periods when it seemed that all and only Dominicans

studied St Thomas, and all and only Franciscans studied Bonaventure and

Scotus. (Some scholastics were hardly studied because they belonged to no

order. John Wyclif, for instance, had as his spiritual heirs only the rather

small class consisting of secular clergy who had got into trouble with the

Church.) After Pope Leo XIII gave Aquinas special status as a Catholic

theologian, his works were studied by many who had no connection with

the Dominican order. But this elevation only reinforced the view of secular

INTRODUCTION

xiii

philosophers that he was essentially an ecclesiastical spokesman. Moreover,

within the realm of Catholic scholarship it fostered the view that only

Aquinas was worth taking seriously as a philosopher. The gradual aban-

donment of some of his teaching in the later Middle Ages was seen as a key

factor in the decline of the Church that led to the Reformation. A

philosophical debate between Scotus and Ockham, from this perspective,

was like a wrestling match between two men standing on the edge of a cliV

from which they were both about to fall to their doom.

One eVect of the professionalism and confessionalism of scholastic

philosophy is that, by comparison with earlier and later writers, medieval

philosophers appear as rather anonymous Wgures. It is not just that in some

cases we have very little external information about their lives: it is that

their own writings betray comparatively little of their own personalities.

They produce few original monographs; most of their eVort goes into

commenting on, and continuing, the work of their predecessors in their

order or in the Church. The whole ediWce of scholasticism is like a

medieval cathedral: the creation of many diVerent craftsmen who, how-

ever individually gifted, took little pains to identify which parts of the

overall structure were their own unaided work. Often it is only in the

spontaneous disputations called ‘quodlibets’ that we feel we can come close

to a living individual in action.

This generalization, of course, applies only to the high Middle Ages

under the dominance of scholasticism. In the pre-scholastic period we

meet philosophers who are highly colourful personalities, not constructed

out of any template. Augustine, Abelard, and even Anselm are closer to the

romantic paradigm of the philosopher as a solitary genius than they are to

any ideal of a humble operative adding his stone to the communal cairn.

A history of Western philosophy in the Middle Ages must include a

treatment of philosophers who are not ‘Western’ in any modern sense,

because the intellectual frontiers of medieval Latin Europe were, fortu-

nately, porous to inXuences from the Muslim world and the minorities

living within it. Latin versions of the philosophical writings of Avicenna

and Averroes had no less inXuence on the great scholastics than the works

of their Christian predecessors. Accordingly, this volume contains some

account of Muslim and Jewish philo sophy, but only to the extent that

these philosophies entered into the mainstream of Western thinking, not

in proportion to their own intrin sic philosophical value.

INTRODUCTION

xiv

My own training in philosophy began at the Gregorian University in

Rome, which, in the 1950s, still aimed to teach philo sophy ad mentem Sancti

Thomae in accordance with the instructions of recent popes. I was grateful to

two of my professors there, Fr. Bernard Lonergan and Fr. Frederick

Copleston, for teaching me that St Thomas’ own writings were much

more worth reading than popular Thomists’ textbooks, and that St

Thomas was not the only medieval thinker who deserved attentive study.

After studying at the Gregorian I did graduate work in philo sophy at

Oxford in the heyday of ordinary language philosophy. I found this much

more congenial than Roman scholasticism, but I was fortunate to meet

Professor Peter Geach and Fr. Herbert McCabe OP, who showed me that

many of the problems exercising philosophers in the analytic tradition at

that time were very similar to those studied, often with no less sophistica-

tion, by medieval philosophers and logicians.

In many ways, indeed, the keen interest in the logical analysis of

ordinary language which was characteristic of Oxford in the latter part of

the twentieth century brought it closer to medieval methods and concerns

than any other era of post-Renaissance philosophy. But this was still not

widely appreciated. William Kneale, for instance, an Oxford professor of

logic who wrote a well-informed and sympathetic survey of medieval logic,

had this to say about the development of medieval philosophy between

1200 and 1400:

We shall not try to decide here whether the result justiWed the great intellectual

eVort that produced it. Perhaps the systems of St Thomas Aquinas and John Duns

the Scot deserve only the reluctant admiration we give to the pyramids of Egypt

and the palace of Versailles. And it may be that the thousands of young men who

wrestled with subtle abstractions at the medieval universities would have been

better employed in the literary studies which were then thought Wt only for

grammar schools.1

It was, in fact, in the area of logic that it was Wrst appreciated that the

study of medieval texts had much to oVer. Medieval logicians had ad-

dressed questions that had fallen into oblivion after the Renaissance, and

many of their insights had to be rediscovered during the twentieth-century

rebirth of logic. The Cambridge History of Later Medieval Philosophy brought this to

the attention of a wide public, and inaugurated a new phase in the

1 The Development of Logic (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1962), 226.

INTRODUCTION

reception of medieval philosophy in the general, secular, academic world.

The vigour of the revival can be measured by the number of excellent

articles on medieval philosophy to be found in the recent Routledge Encyclo-

pedia of Philosophy.

In the last decades of the twentieth century the person most responsible

for the growth of interest in medieval philosophy in the English-speaking

world was the principal editor of the Cambridge History, Norman Kretzmann.

In conjunction with his fellow editor, Jan Pinborg, he brought together the

work that was being done in several countries of continental Europe and

introduced it to a wider audience in the United States and the United

Kingdom. His own teaching in the Sage School at Cornell University bred

up a brilliant group of younger scholars who in recent years have published

widely and well on many topics of medieval philosophy. Paradoxically, one

eVect of the new medieval interest was a downgrading of Thomas Aquinas.

In the Cambridge History, for example, his index entry is not as long as the

entry for soph ismata. Kretzmann came to realize and remedy this defect, and

spent the last years of his life writing two magisterial books on St Thomas’

Summa contra Gentiles.

Aquinas, in my view, retains the right to be classed as the greatest

philosopher of the high Middle Ages. But he is an outstanding peak in a

mountain range that has several other resplendent summits. Medieval

philosophy is above all a continuum, and when one reads an individual

philosopher, whether Abelard, Aquinas, or Ockham, one is taking a

sounding of an ongoing process. And one soon learns that between every

two major peaks there are minor ones that are not negligible: between

Aquinas and Scotus, for instance, stands Henry of Ghent, and between

Scotus and Ockham stands Henry of Harclay.

A historian of the ancient world can read, without too great exhaustion ,

the entire surviving corpus of philosophical writing. A comparable feat

would be well beyond the powers of even the mos t conscientious historian

of medieval philosophy. Augustine, Abelard, and the great scholastics were

such copious writers that it takes decades to master the entire output of

even a single one of them. Consequently, anyone who undertakes a

volume such as the present must be heavily dependent on secondary

sources, even if only for drawing attention to the best way to take

soundings of the primary sources. I here acknowledge my own debt to

the writers listed in my bibliography, from my teacher Fr. Copleston

INTRODUCTION

xvi

(whose history of philosophy still bears comparison with many works

written since) to the most recent monographs written by colleagues and

pupils of Norman Kretzmann. My debt to others is particularly heavy in

the area of Islamic philosophy, since I do not know Arabic. In the course of

writing this I had cause to regret deeply that it is only in Latin that I can

read the work of Avicenna, whose genius, and whose inXuence, I have

come to realize ever more.

I am particularly indebted to Dr John Marenbon and Professor Robert

Pasnau, who made many helpful suggestions for the improvement of an

earlier draft of this volume, and who saved me from many errors.

INTRODUCTION

xvii

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Philosophy and Faith:

Augustine to Maimonides

n the Wrst volume of this history we traced the development of

philosophy in the ancient world up to the conversion of St Augustine

at the end of the fourth century of our era. The life of Augustine marks an

epoch in the history of ideas. In his early life he imbibed from several

sources philosophical ideas of various traditions, but especially the Platonic

tradition, whether in the sceptical version of the New Academy or in the

metaphysical version of Neoplatonism. After his conversion to Christianity

he developed, in a number of massive treatises, a synthesis of Jewish, Greek,

and Christian ideas that was to provide the backdrop for the next millen-

nium of Western philosophical thought.

From a philosophical point of view, the most fertile period of August-

ine’s life was the period just before and just after his baptism as a Christian

at Easter 387. Between his conversion and his baptism he spent several

months in private preparation with friends and members of his family at

Cassiciacum, a country villa north of Milan. This period produced a

number of works that resemble verbatim transcripts of live discussions,

notably the Contra Academicos, which seeks to sift the true from the false in

scepticism.

Augustine also invented a new art-form to which he gave the name

‘Soliloquies’. He wrote a dialogue with himself in which the two characters

are named Augustine and Reason. Reason asks Augustine what he wishes

to know. ‘I want to know God and the soul,’ Augustine replies. ‘Nothing

more?’ ‘Nothing at all’ (S 1. 2. 7).