Kenny Anthony. Medieval Philosophy: A New History of Western Philosophy. Volume 2
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In the fourth book Boethi us asks Lady Philosophy to answer the ques-
tion ‘Why do the wicked prosper?’ The universe, he agrees, is governed by
an ideal ruler, God; but it looks like a house in which the worthless vessels
are well looked after while the precious ones are left to grow Wlthy.
Philosophy draws arguments from Plato’s Gorgias to show that the prosper-
ity of the wicked is only apparent. The will to do evil is itself a misfortune,
and success in doing so is a worse disaster. Worse still is to go unpunished
for one’s misdeeds. While a good man can aspire to divinity, a bad man
turns into a beast: avarice makes you a wolf, quarrelsomeness makes you a
dog, cheating a fox, anger a lion, fear a deer, sloth an ass, and lust a pig.
All things are ruled by God’s providence: does this mean that everything
happens by fate? Lady Philosophy makes a distinction. Providence is the
divine reason that binds all things together, while fate is what organizes the
motions of things scattered in place and time; the complicated arrange-
ments of fate proceed from the simplicity of providence. We can see only
the apparent disorder of the operation of fate; if we could see the overall
scheme as designed by providence, we would realize that whatever happens
happens justly, and whatever is, is right.
Throughout the W rst four books Lady Philosophy has had much to say
about Lady Luck. The Wfth book addresses the question ‘In a world
governed by divine providence, can there be any such thing as luck or
chance?’ There cannot be purely random chance, if philo sophy is to be
believed; but human choice is something diVerent from chance. Free
choice, however, even if not random, is diYcult to reconcile with the
existence of a God who foresees everything that is to happen. ‘If God
foresees all and cannot in any way be mistaken, then that must necessarily
happen which in his providence he foresees will be.’ The reply oVered is
that God is outside time, and so it is a mistake to speak of providence as
involving foreknowledge at all. This subtle but mysterious answer was to be
much studied and developed in later ages.5
It is to be hoped that Boethius found consolation in his philosophical
writing, because he was brutally tortured, a cord being fastened round his
head and tightened until his eyes started from their sockets. He was Wnally
executed by being beaten with clubs. Many Christians regarded him as a
martyr, and some churches venerated him as St Severinus. The humanist
5 Boethius’ argument is analysed in detail in Ch. 9 below.
PHILOSOPHY AND FAITH
22
Lorenzo Valla in the Wfteenth century called him ‘the last of the Romans,
the Wrst of the scholastics’, and Gibbon says that he was ‘the last of the
Romans whom Cato or Tully could have acknowledged for their country-
man’.
Boethius was not only the last philosopher of the old Latin philosophical
tradition: his Consolation can be read as an anthology of all that he valued in
classical Greek philosophy. It was perhaps as a compliment to the pagan
thinkers from whom he had learnt that he eliminated from his philosoph-
ical testament any Christian element. Even the treatment of the relation
between divine foreknowledge and human freedom, so inXuential during
the Christian centuries, is couched within the framework of the Stoic
discussion of the relation between providence and fate.
The Greek Philosophy of Late Antiquity
Pagan Greek philosophy, however, had not quite come to an end at the time
when Boethius met his death: the schools of Athens and Alexandria were
still active. The head of the Athens school in the previous century had been
the industrious and erudite Proclus, who was said to have been capable of
producing, each working day, Wve lectures and 700 lines of philosophical
prose. Proclus wrote commentaries on several of Plato’s dialogues and an
encyclopedic work on Plotinus’ Enneads. His Elements of Theology has served,
even in modern times, as a convenient compendium of Neoplatonism.
Proclus’ system is based on Plotinus’ trinity of One, Mind, and Soul, but
he develops Plotinus’ ideas by a multiplication of triads, and a general
theory of their operation (ET 25–39). Within each triad there is a develop-
mental process. From the originating element of the triad there emerges a
new element which shares its nature but which yet diVers from it. This
new element both resides in its origin, proceeds beyond it, and returns back
towards it. This law of development governs a massive proliferation of
triads. From the initial One there proceed a number of divine Units
(henads) (ET 113–65). The Henads, collectively, beget the world of Mind,
which is divided into the spheres of Being, Life, and Thought. In the next,
lower, world, that of Soul, Proclus provides a habitation for the traditional
gods of the pagan pantheon. The visible world we live in is the work of
these divine souls, which guide it providentially.
PHILOSOPHY AND FAITH
23
The pagan philosopher Hypatia, beset by a Christian mob, takes refuge at an altar, in this
Victorian painting by C. W. Mitche ll.
Human beings, for Proclus, straddle the three worlds of Soul, Mind, and
One (ET 190–7). As united to our animal body, the human soul expresses
itself in Eros, focused on earthly beauty. But it has also an imperishable,
ethereal body made out of light. Thus it passes beyond love of beauty in
search of Truth, a pursuit that brings it into contact with the ideal realities
of the world of Mind. But it has a faculty higher than that of thought, and
that brings it, by mystical ecstasy, into union with the One.
The theory of triads bears some resemblance to the Christian doctrine of
the Trinity, but in fact Proclus, though a devotee of many superstitions,
was bitterly hostile to Christianity. He was, indeed, reputed to have written
eighteen separate refutations of the Christian doctrine of creation. None-
theless, many of his ideas entered the mainstream of Christian thought by
indirect routes. Boethius himself made frequent, if unacknowledged, use of
his work. A contemporary Christian Neoplatonist wrote a series of treatises
inspired by Proclus, passing them oV as the work of Dionysius the Areo-
pagite, who was an associate of St Paul in Athens (Acts 17). Another
channel by which Proclus’ ideas Xowed into medieval philosophy was a
book known as the Liber de Causis, which circulated under the name of
Aristotle. Even Thomas Aquinas, who was aware that the book was not
authentic, treated it with great respect.
In Wfth-century Alexandria, where there was a powerful Christian
patriarch, it was more diYcult than in Athens for pagan philosophy to
Xourish. Hypatia, a female Neoplatonist mathematician and astronomer,
stands out in a man’s world of philosophy in the same way as Sappho stands
out in a man’s world of poetry. While Augustine was writing The City of God
in Hippo, Hypatia was torn to pieces in Alexandria by a fanatical Christian
mob (ad 415).6 The most important philosopher of the school of Alexandria
in its last days was Ammonius, an elder contemporary of Boeth ius. He was
more eVective as a teacher than a writer, and owes his fame to the
distinction of his two most famous pupils, Simplicius and Philoponus.
Both these philosophers lived in the reign of the emperor Justinian, who
succeeded to the purple in 527, two or three years after the execution of
Boethius. Justinian was the most celebrated of the Byzantine emperors,
renowned both as a conqueror and as a legislator. His generals conquered
6 Sadly, very little is known of Hypatia. Charles Kingsley made the most of what there is in
his novel Hypatia (1853).
PHILOSOPHY AND FAITH
25
large portions of the former Western Empire and united them for a while
under the rule of Constantinople. His jurists collected and rationalized into
a single code all the extant imperial edicts and statutes, and appended a
digest of legal commentaries. The Code of Civil Law that was handed down
in the course of his reign inXuenced most European countries until
modern times.
Justinian’s reign was not, however, as favourable to philosophy as it was
to jurisprudence. The school of Athens continued the anti-Christian
Neoplatonic tradition of Proclus, which brought it into imperial disfavour.
Simplicius was one of the last group of scholars to adorn the school. He
devoted great eVort and erudition to the writing of commentaries on
Aristotle, whose teachings he was anxious to reconcile with the thought
of Plato as interpreted in late antiquity. Scholars of later generations are in
his debt because in the course of this enterprise he quoted exten sively from
his predecessors as far back as the Presocratics, and is our source for many
of their surviving fragments. Simplicius was still working there when, in
the year 529, Justinian closed down the school because of its anti-Christian
tendency. His edict, in the words of Gibbon, ‘imposed a perpetual silence
on the schools of Athens and excited the grief and indignation of the
few remaining votaries of Grecian science and superstition’ (Decline and Fall,
ch. 40).
Philoponus, too, suVered under Justinian, but for diVerent reasons.
While Simplicius was a pagan philosopher based in Athens, Philoponus
was a Christian philo sopher based in Alexandria. While Simplicius was
the most ardent admirer of Aristotle in antiquity, Philoponus was his
severest critic. Whereas previous philosophers had either ignored
Aristotle (like the Epicureans and Stoics) or interpreted him irenically
(like the Neoplatonists), Philoponus knew him very well and attacked
him head-on.
As a Christian, Philoponus rejected the doctrine of the eternity of the
world, and demolished the arguments of Aristotle and Proclus to the e Vect
that the world had no beginning. He carried his attack throughout the
whole of Aristotle’s physics, rejecting the theories of natural motion and
natural place, and denying that the heavenly bodies were governed by
physical principles diVerent from those obtaining here below.7 It was
7 Philoponus’ physics is discussed in detail in Ch. 5 below.
PHILOSOPHY AND FAITH
26
congenial to his 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 diVerent from that of the earth on which his human
creatures live.
Philoponus wrote treatises on Christian doctrine as well as commen-
taries on Aristotle. They were not well received by the orthodox, who
thought his treatment of the doctrine of the Trinity laid him open to the
charge of believing in three Gods. Surprisingly, he accepted the Platonic
belief in the existence of human souls prior to conception; even more
surprisingly, this belief of his does not seem to have troubled his Christian
brethren. But like many previous Alexandrian Christians, he was a mono-
physite, believing that in the incarnate Christ there was only a single
nature, not, as deWned by the Council of Chalcedon, two natures,
This mosaic from S. Vitale in Ravenna shows the Emperor Justinian and his court.
PHILOSOPHY AND FAITH
27
human and divine. He was summoned to Constantinople by the emperor
to defend his views on the Incarnation, but failed to answer the summons .
Philoponus outlived Justinian by a few years, but was condemned after his
death for his heretical teaching about the Trinity. He was the last sign-
iWcant philosopher of the ancient world, and after his death philosophy
went into hibernation for two centuries.
Between 600 and 800 the former Roman Empire shrank to little more
than Greece, the Balkans, and part of Asia Minor. Intellectual talent was
expended mainly on theological disputation. The monophysite church to
which John Philoponus belonged had been excluded from communion by
the orthodox, who believed that Christ had not just one, but two, natures,
human and divine. During the seventh century attempts were made by
emperors and patriarchs to reunite the Christia n communions by agreeing
that even if Christ had two natures, nonetheless he had only one will; or
that even if he had two wills, one human and one divine, these two were
united in a single activity of willing, a single actuality, or energeia. Any
concession of this kind was strongly resisted by a retired imperial oYcer
called Maximus, who wrote copiously against ‘monothelitism’, the doc-
trine of the single will.
Maximus (known as ‘the Confessor’) succeeded in having the doctrines
of the single will and the single actuality condemned at a council in Rome
in 649, later endorsed in Constantinople in 681. Christ’s human will and
the divine will were always in perfect agreement, but they were two
separate entities. In persuading the guardians of orthodoxy of this teaching,
Maximus was obliged to investigate in detail the concepts of will and
actuality. The English word ‘will’ and its equivalents and their cognates in
Greek (thelesis/thelema) and Latin (voluntas) can refer to a faculty (as in ‘Human
beings have free will, animals do not’), a disposition of the will (e.g. a
willingness to be martyred), an act (e.g. ‘I will’ in a marriage ceremony), or
an object willed (as in ‘Thy will be done’). Maximus analysed these
concepts ca refully and with a degree of originality: but he was not so
original as to deserve to be credited, as some have done, with being the
inventor of the concept of the will tout court (PG 90).8
8 The great theological debate of the succeeding century concerned the worship of images or
icons. It might have been expected that the iconoclastic controversy would have thrown up
interesting contributions to semiotics, the philosophical theory of signs. But this hope appears,
from a brief survey of the literature, to be vain.
PHILOSOPHY AND FAITH
28
Philosophy in the Carolingian Empire
Outside the Roman Empire the world was transformed beyond recogni-
tion. The life of the prophet Muhammad came to an end in 633, and within
ten years of his death 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 Xooded through Spain. 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 did no more
than nibble at their Spanish dominions. To the east, however, he con-
quered Lombardy, Bavaria, and Saxony, and had his son proclaimed king of
Italy. When Pope Leo III was driven out of Rome by a revolution, Charle-
magne restored him to his see. In gratitude the Pope crowned him as
Roman emperor in St Peter’s on Christmas Day 800—a date which, if not
the most memorable in history, is at least the easiest to remember. Thus
began the Holy Roman Empire, which at Charlemagne’s death in 814
included almost all the Christian inhabitants of continental western
Europe.
Charlemagne was anxious to improve standards of education and cul-
ture in his dominions, and he collected scholars from various parts of
Europe to form a ‘Palatine School’ at his capital, Aachen. One of the most
distinguished of these was Alcuin of York, who took a keen interest in
Aristotle’s Categories. The logic textbook which he wrote, Dialectica, takes the
form of a dialogue in which the pupil Charlemagne asks questions and the
teacher Alcuin gives answers. Alcuin retired in the last years of his life to
run a small school in the abbey of St Martin of Tours, of which he later
became abbot. He spent his time, he told the emperor, dispensing to this
pupils the honey of Scripture, the wine of classical literature, and the
apples of grammar. To a privileged few he displayed the treasures of
astronomy—Charlemagne’s favourite hobby.
When philosophy revived between the ninth and eleventh centuries, it
did so not within the old Roman Empire of Byzantium, but in the Frankish
PHILOSOPHY AND FAITH
29
Empire of Charlemagne’s successors and in the Abbasid court of Muslim
Baghdad. The leading philosophers of the revival were, in the West, John
the Scot, and in the East, Ibn Sina (Avicenna).
John was born in Ireland in the Wrst decades of the ninth century. He is not
to be mistaken for the more famous John Duns Scotus, who Xourished in the
fourteenth century. It is undoubtedly confusing that there are two medieval
philosophers with the name John the Scot. What makes it doubly confusing
is that one of them was an Irishman, and the other was for all practical
purposes an Englishman. The ninth-century philosopher, for the avoidance
of doubt, gave himself the surname Eriugena, which means Son of Erin.
By 851 Eriugena had migrated from Ireland to the court of Charles the
Bald, the grandson of Charlemagne. This was probably at Compie
`
gne,
which Charles thought of ren aming Carlopolis, on the model of Constan-
tinople. Charles was a lover of things Greek, and the astonishingly learned
Eriugena, who had mastered Greek (no one knows where), won his favour
and wrote him Xattering poems in that language. He taught liberal arts at
the court for a while, but his interests began to turn towards philosophy.
Once, commenting on a text on the borderline between grammar and
logic, he wrote ‘no one enters heaven except through philosophy’.9
Eriugena W rst engaged in philosophy in 851 when invited by Hincmar,
the archbishop of Reims, to write a refutation of the ideas of a learned and
pessimistic monk, Gottschalk. Gottschalk had taken up the problem of
predestination where Augustine had left oV. He was reported to have
deduced from the texts of Augustine something that was generally there
left implicit, namely that predestination aVected sinners as well as saints. It
was, he taught, not only the blessed in heaven whose ultimate fate had
been predestined, the damned also had been predestined to hell before they
were ever conceived. This doctrine of double predestination seemed to
Archbishop Hincmar to be heretical. At the very least, like the monks of
Augustine’s time, he regarded it as a doctrine inimical to good monastic
discipline: sinners might conclude that, since their fate had been sealed
long ago, there was no point in giving up sinning. Hence his invitation to
Eriugena to put Gottschalk down (PL 125. 84–5).
Whether or not Gottschalk had been accurately reported, Eriugena’s
refutation of his alleged heresy was, from Hincmar’s point of view, worse
9 See J. J. O’Meara, Eriugena (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), chs. 1 and 2.
PHILOSOPHY AND FAITH
30
than the disease. Eriugena’s arguments were weak, and in attacking the
predestination of the damned, he emasculated the predestination of the
blessed. There could not be a double predestination, he said, because God
was simple and undivided; and there was no such thing as predestination
because God was eternal. The Wrst argument is unconvincing because if a
double predestination threatens God’s simplicity, so too does the distinc-
tion between predestination and foreknowledge, which was the favoured
solution of Gottschalk’s opponents. The second argument does not pro-
vide the desired incentive to the sinner to repent, because whatever
temporal qualiWcation we give to the divine determining of our fate, it is
certainly, on the Augustinian view, independent of any choice of ours
(CCCM 50. 12).
The Frankish kingdom was torn by doctrinal strife, and both Gottschalk
and Eriugena found themselves condemned by Church councils. The
Council of Quierzy in 853—the third of a series—deWned, against
Gottschalk, that while God predestined the blessed to heaven, he did
not predestine others to sin: he merely left them in the human mass of
perdition and predestined only their punishment, not their guilt. The
condemnation of Eriugena, at Valence in 855, aYrmed that there was
indeed a predestination of the impious to death no less than a predestin-
ation of the elect to life. The diVerence was this: that in the election
of those to be saved the mercy of God preceded all merit, whereas in
the damnation of those who were to perish evil desert preceded just
judgement. The Council fathers were not above vulgar abuse, saying
that Eriugena had deWled the purity of the faith with nauseating Irish
porridge.
Despite his condemnation, Eriugena remained in favour with Charles
the Bald and was commissioned by him in 858 to translate into Latin three
treatises of Dionysius the Areopagite: the Divine Names, the Celestial Hierarchy,
and the Ecclesiastical Hierarchy. He found the Neoplatonic ideas of Dionysius
congenial and went on to construct his own system on somewhat similar
lines, in a work of Wve volumes called On Nature—or, to give it its Greek
title, Periphyseon.
There are, according to Eriugena, four great divisions of nature: nature
creating and uncreated, nature created and creating, nature created and
uncreating, and nature uncreating and uncreated (1. 1). The Wrst such
nature is God. The second is the intellectual world of Platonic ideas, which
PHILOSOPHY AND FAITH
31