Early Medieval Philosophy: Emerging from the Dark Ages

Sources

Eriugena’s Greek-Latin-Christian Synthesis. The years 500–1066, sometimes called the Dark Ages, were indeed something of a desert for western European culture. In fact, F. C. Copleston has noted that there was only one major western philosopher between 500 and 1090: John Scottus Eriugena (circa 810–circa 877). Eriugena derived his Neoplatonism not only from Latin sources, such as Augustine, but also through his translations of Greek sources, such as Pseudo-Dionysius and Maximus Confessor. Thus, he discovered the Neoplatonic doctrines of Pro-clus, whereas earlier western scholars had been exposed mainly to the Neoplatonic ideas of Plotinus that they found in Augustine. Eriugena’s most important work, Periphyseon (About Nature, circa 864–866), is an original synthesis of these Latin and Greek sources, in which he created a complete philosophical system to describe the nature of the universe. Eriugena divided Nature (by which he meant all reality, including God and his creatures) into four aspects: that which creates and is not created (God to creator); that which is created but which also creates (the primordial causes, which emanate from God); that which is created and does not create (material universe that flows from the primordial causes, including man); and that which is neither created nor creates (God as the End of the cosmic process, when God will be all in all). This synthetic vision depicts the emergence of all things in their diversity and their dynamic return from multiplicity to unity as the world is actively refashioned in the officina (workshop) of human life. That is, as the workshop of nature, human creativity is the place for the recuperation and re-visioning of nature. Human thought and work re-create nature, but it does not create the world from scratch. Furthermore, Eriugena divided Being into “that which is” and “that which is not,” exhibiting a vision of nature at once in change and at rest. The language of Eriugena’s system is indebted not only to the positive and negative theologies of Pseudo-Dionysius and Maximus the Confessor but also to Categories of Aris totle. Indeed, Eriugena’s synthetic reason and acute rational analysis are his greatest assets as a philosopher. He gives reason its rightful place in the interpretation of all myth, story, and belief—asserting the capacity of reason, to figure out the ambiguities of difficult texts, the possible meanings of myths and oracles, and the human meaningfulness of religious mystery, and thus restoring reason to the central place it was accorded in Greek philosophy. Eriugena’s writings were read into the thirteenth century, but after Amaury of Bene and David of Dinant used them in arguments for their pantheistic theologies, the theologians of Paris convinced Pope Honorius II to condemn Eriugena’s Periphyseon as heretical in 1225, and many copies oiPeriph-yseon were burned. Nonetheless, Eriugena found congenial readers in Meister Eckhart (circa 1260 – 1328) and Nicholas of Cusa (1401–1464), and his writings were rediscovered by the German Idealists during the first part of the nineteenth century.

Anselm’s Proof of God. Anselm of Bee and Canterbury (1033–1109) took up traditional Latin sources, especially Augustine and Boethius, and developed them to their logical conclusions. He is well known among modern students of philosophy for his so-called ontological argument for the existence of God (that is, an argument based on the meaning of the word God). In fact, he was the first western scholar to attempt such a proof. In his Monologion (Monologue, 1076) he gave many reasons for the existence of God, but the monks at the monastery of Bee in Normandy asked him for one comprehensive proof instead. He obliged them with the ontological argument in Proslogion (An Address to the Mind of God, 1077–1078), in which he answers the fool in Psalms 14 and 53 who “hath said in his heart, There is no God.” Writing as a theologian and one who firmly believed according to Christian faith, Anselm exercised the task of faith seeking understanding. Addressing God, he stated, “I desire to understand in some measure thy truth, which my heart already believes. … And indeed I do believe it, for unless I believe I shall not understand.” Thus, Anselm was not trying to provide a simple-minded proof of God’s existence by “reason alone”; rather, he was seeking to draw out the implications of his existing religious belief by using his reason to make it explicit that the meaning of the word God includes the fact of God’s existence. In other words, the first premise of the at—the meaning of the word God—is, provided by faith; the further steps of the argument are provided by reason. When reason is carefully applied to the definition of God, the word exhibits implications not found in everyday language usage. Technically, Anselm’s argument is an indirect or “reduction to absurdity” proof. It proceeds as follows: first, state a premise that contains truth (in this case God is “that than which nothing greater can be thought”); second, assume for the sake of argument that such a being does not exist; third, if from this assumption the argument ends in a logical contradiction, then it follows that the first premise is true.

The Structure of Anselm’s Argument. Paul Vincent Spade has provided a succinct account of the logical structure of Anselm’s argument that can be paraphrased as follows: (1) By God we mean “that than which nothing greater can be thought” (a premise known to be true by faith). (2) Assume for the sake of argument that “that than which nothing greater can be thought” does not exist in reality. (3) Nevertheless, it can be thought of as existing in reality. (This premise is obviously true, since most people—at Anselm’s time, virtually all people—think of God as existing in reality.) (4) Now, “that than which nothing greater can be thought” is greater if it really exists than if it does not (Anselm takes it as self-evident that it is “greater”—that is, better—to exist in reality than just to be a figment of someone’s imagination). Hence, (5) from premises (3) and (4), it is possible to think of something greater than “that than which nothing greater can be thought.” Since (5) is self-contradictory, the supposition made in premise (2) is false; so by reduction to absurdity, (6) “that than which nothing greater can be thought”—that is, God—must exist. As Spade notes, “The premises of this argument are (1), (3), and (4). (3) seems innocuous enough, and (1) is simply a definition that does express a unique property of, even if it does not exhaust, what we normally mean by ’God.’ The real work of the argument is done by step (4).” Anselm’s argument has often been used with a different “ontological argument” that was put forth by the seventeenth-century French philosopher Rene Descartes and by others.

Gaunilo’s Response. A monk, Gaunilo of Marmoutier, was the first to attack Anselm’s proof, writing a “Reply on Behalf of the Fool.” Gaunilo, of course, believed in the existence of God as much as Anselm did; but he did not think that Anselm’s argument was adequate to prove what it purported to establish. Gaunilo had two main objections to Anselm’s proof. First, he argued, the proof rested on the notion that one could have an adequate idea of the nature of God in one’s mind; but God, as an infinite and totally perfect being, transcends any conception that human beings can have of him. Second, Gaunilo said, if Anselm’s reasoning was valid in the case of God, it would also apply in other cases: for example, if one thought about the most beautiful island that one could conceive, one had to assert that such an island must exist. There would be no need to go out and look for it; the mere idea of it would be sufficient to establish its reality. But such a claim would obviously be absurd. Therefore, if the ontological argument is not valid in the case of the most beautiful island, it is not valid in the case of God, either.

Anselm’s Rejoinder. Anselm replied that Gaunilo was mistaken on both counts. First, the ontological argument does not require human beings to possess an adequate conception of God; all it requires is an understanding of the phrase “that than which nothing greater can be thought,” and such an understanding is within the grasp even of the fool. Second, the reasoning involved in the argument does not apply to islands or any other finite thing but only to God.

The School of Chartres. All the great cathedrals in Christian Europe had schools associated with them, but none approached Chartres in its twelfth-century revival of classical learning in a curriculum that focused on the language arts and mathematics. All the great thinkers associated with this school—Gilbert of Poitiers, William of Conches, Thierry of Chartres, and John of Salisbury—were indebted to Bernard of Chartres (circa 1060–1124), who in the years 1114–1124 was first head and then chancellor of the school. Bernard taught his students to revere the ancient authors. According to John of Salisbury, “Bernard of Chartres used to compare us to dwarfs perched on the shoulders of giants. He pointed out that we see more and farther than our predecessors, not because we have keener vision or greater height, but because we are lifted aloft on their gigantic stature.”

The Lectio philosophorum. The major achievement of the School of Chartres was its teaching on the lectio philosophorum (the reading of philosophy). Bernard of Chartres and his colleagues perfected a new methodology of close, careful reading of difficult philosophical and grammatical texts that combined the older form of glossing on a text with that of careful commentary. Glosses (explanatory notes written in the margins or between lines of a text) were usually brief, unsystematic notes related to grammar and word origins and did not concern the larger significance of the work. Bernard taught his students to write commentaries that considered the overall meaning of the work while also considering details and specific points. According to John of Salisbury, Bernard said there were three kinds of intellectuals: one flies, ignoring the specifics; one crawls and is unable to grasp higher meanings; and one takes the middle way, walking, and is capable of taking into account both specific details and overall meanings. Bernard’s method takes the middle way.

Commenting on the Ancients. The books available to Bernard and the students were the same Latin texts that had been available in western Europe for three hundred years. The main texts studied at Chartres were works by the Roman grammarian Priscian, Macrobius’s The Dream of Scipio, Porphyry’s Isagoge, Boethius’s philosophical and theological writings, and a part of the Timaeus of Plato. The chief example of Bernard’s method is his Glosae superPlatonem (Glosses on Plato, written circa 1100–1115), a commentary on the Timaeus for which Bernard and his colleagues relied to some extent on a commentary by the fourth-century Christian scholar Calcidius. In his Christian interpretation of Plato, Bernard established a hierarchy in which God was the creator of both the primordial matter from which all corporal beings and things derive and the Ideas, the essences of beings or things (ideals or universals) that according to Plato are separate from and more real than specific beings or things. Like Plato (and unlike Aristotle) Bernard held that Ideas are eternal and completely separate from the changing and corruptible things of concrete existence. He also maintained that the Ideas are separate from God. Though they come from him, they are not identical with him. Furthermore, to explain how concrete beings and objects are formed in imitation of Ideas if the two principles are completely separate, Bernard introduced the idea of the “native form” which mediated between Ideas and the concrete by entering into primordial matter to beget the material world. Overall, by means of its commentary on the Timaeus and related subject matter, the school introduced Plato to western European philosophers of the later Middle Ages.

Poet-Philosophers. One major feature of philosophy in both the Carolingian era and in the period 1066-1200 is the fact that major philosophers such as Eriugena, members of the School of Chartres, and Peter Abelard were not only logicians and philosophers but also poets. That is, the aim of the grammatical expert, the logician, and the philosopher was to combine eloquence with wisdom and to find pure linguistic expression in the poetic word. This combination did not continue after 1200. The necessity of producing bureaucrats led to a much more utilitarian demand for logical and mathematical competence. The pursuit of literary culture in the arts was sacrificed in the curriculum at the University of Paris though literary studies were still included at Toulouse.

Sources

Werner Beierwaltes, Eriugena (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1994).

Mary Brennan, A Guide to Eriugenian Studies (1930–1987), Vestigia 5 (Freibourg, Switzerland: Editions universitaires / Paris: Editions du mann, 1994).

Frederick C. Copleston, A History of Philosophy, volume 2, parts 1 and 2: Mediaeval Philosophy (Westminster, Md.: Newman Press, 1950).

Copleston, Mediaeval Philosophy (London: Methuen, 1952).

Peter Dronke, ed., A History of Twelfth-Century Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988).

Charles Hartshorne, Anselm’s Discovery (La Salle, 111.: Open Court, 1965).

Paul Henry, The De grammatico of St. Anselm (Notre Dame, Ind.: Notre Dame University Press, 1964).

Henry, The Logic of St. Anselm (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967).

Edouard Jeauneau, Etudes Eriugeniennes (Paris: Etudes Augustiniennes, 1987).

Jeauneau, ”Lectio philosophorum,” Recherches sur LEcole de Chartres (Amsterdam: Hakkert, 1973).

John Marenbon, Early Medieval Philosophy (London: Routledge, 1983).

Dermot Moran, The Philosophy of John Scottus Eriugena: a Study of Idealism in the Middle Ages (Cambridge & New York: Cambridge University dge, 1983).

John J. O’Meara, Eriugena (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988).

Alvin Plantinga, “A Valid Ontological Argument?” in The Ontological Argument, edited by Plantinga (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1965), pp. 160-171.

R. W. Southern, Saint Anselm: A Portrait in a Landscape (Cambridge & New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990).

Paul Vincent Spade, “Medieval Philosophy,” in The Oxford History of Western Philosophy, edited by Anthony Kenny (Oxford & New York: Oxford University Press, 1990).