An Introduction to Medieval Philosophy

Basic Concepts

Joseph W. Koterski

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN: 9781405106788, 9781405106771
• eBook ISBN: 9781444360677
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

By exploring the philosophical character of some of the greatest medieval thinkers, An Introduction to Medieval Philosophy provides a rich overview of philosophy in the world of Latin Christianity.

• Explores the deeply philosophical character of such medieval thinkers as Augustine, Boethius, Eriugena, Anselm, Aquinas, Bonaventure, Scotus, and Ockham
• Reviews the central features of the epistemological and metaphysical problem of universals
• Shows how medieval authors adapted philosophical ideas from antiquity to apply to their religious commitments
• Takes a broad philosophical approach of the medieval era by,taking account of classical metaphysics, general culture, and religious themes

1

FAITH AND REASON

For medieval philosophers, faith and reason were both regarded as possible sources for genuine wisdom and knowledge. The contributions that each of them could make to the understanding of reality were regarded as different but complementary. Both played important roles in the eventual emergence of philosophy and theology as formal academic disciplines. Although philosophy and theology were recognized as distinct from one another in their goals and methods, the subject-matter proper to each of them had a certain overlap with the other. One could thus legitimately pursue such things as the truth about God, the nature of the world, the demands of morality, and many other topics from both perspectives.

This chapter will employ three interrelated pairs of terms in its effort to provide an overview of the medieval intellectual landscape in this sphere: faith and reason, wisdom and science, theology and philosophy. As with the other concepts treated in this book, there were differences of opinion among the various schools of thought as well as among the individuals within a given school on how best to make the necessary distinctions and how best to group things together. Further, there were significant shifts of opinion over the course of time, especially once the texts of Aristotle were rediscovered. But the fundamental orientation provided by these important pairs of ideas provides much that is crucial for understanding medieval philosophy.

We begin with the consideration of fides and ratio (“faith” and “reason”). The classic phrase fides quaerens intellectum (“faith seeking understanding”) can readily serve as a kind of motto for the whole medieval period, for it indicates not only the correlation of faith and reason, but also the relative priority of faith for medieval thinkers. In the second portion of the chapter we take up the relation of scientia and sapientia (“science” and “wisdom”) as distinct ways in which to identify and pursue the goals of intellectual activity. From its origins in Greece, philosophy (a term that means “love of wisdom” in Greek) has had a sapiential orientation, and philosophers have continually worked at distinguishing knowledge that is well grounded by an understanding of the causes of things (in Greek episteme, in Latin scientia) from mere opinion (in Greek doxa, in Latin sententia). The idea of scientia continued to animate philosophical thinking throughout the entire Middle Ages, but the scholastic period of medieval philosophy in particular was marked by a new effort to identify and employ rigorous standards for what is to count as scientific knowledge. The third section will treat philosophia and theologia in tandem by considering the formal disciplines designated by these terms as they emerged with the rise of university culture in the high Middle Ages.

1 FIDES QUAERENS INTELLECTUM

For philosophers throughout the Middle Ages, faith (fides) and reason (ratio) were usually regarded as allies rather than adversaries. The voices of fideists like Tertullian with his pervasive skepticism about the usefulness of philosophy to the faith (“What has Athens to do with Jerusalem?”¹) are relatively rare. Rare too are medieval thinkers who are skeptical about faith as a source of knowledge – at least until after the translation of various texts of Greek philosophy into Latin in the thirteenth century. One then begins to find figures like Siger of Brabant and Boethius of Dacia, who read Aristotle as offering access to knowledge that was not just independent of Christianity, but to be preferred where the two were in contradiction. Much more common throughout the period was the sentiment expressed in the pair of phrases that shaped Augustine’s attitude on this point: credo ut intellegam (“I believe so that I may understand”) and intelligo ut credam (“I understand so that I may believe”). We see the confluence of these ideas in Anselm’s formulation fides quaerens intellectum (“faith seeking understanding”). In this first part of the chapter we will consider the meaning of the terms faith and reason, certain decisions made early on within Christianity’s history about the importance of making use of philosophy rather than ignoring or even scorning such pagan learning, and some representative treatments of belief and unbelief by medieval philosophers.

The term fides clearly has a range of meanings across the medieval period. It includes trust and belief (especially belief in God), specific acts of giving one’s assent to something or someone, the habitual state of having trust and belief, the body of beliefs held by believers, the grace of a divine light that illumines the mind about certain truths, and the gift of God by which one is able and ready to give God one’s assent, love, and trust. In reading any medieval philosophical text on faith, it will always be helpful to ask which senses of “faith” are operative.

Similarly, the term ratio has a range of meanings that include a reason or a cause, a line of reasoning, and an act of discursive reasoning, but also the mind in general and the faculty or power by which one thinks and knows. The term can equally designate the basic mental capacity or the use of that capacity. Often ratio is used to refer specifically to thinking through an issue discursively (that is, in step-by-step fashion), and in this usage it stands in contrast to intellectus, which is the term that tends to be used in the sense of intellectual insight or intuition, that is, the grasp of some point without any apparent mental process. Once one has mastered an art or a science, such as geometry, or plumbing, or astronomy, one has an understanding of these bodies of knowledge and can use that knowledge on any number of questions without having to rethink the process by which the knowledge was acquired. To know something “by reason” can also refer to an explicitly philosophical use of the mind (e.g., by logical reasoning), and then by extension it can also refer to the body of truths known by the use of our intellectual powers without the light of any special divine grace. The range of meanings possible for these terms should make us alert to the complexity of the subject and hence the variety of opinions on it that one encounters during the medieval period.

In standard Latin usage fides primarily designates “good faith.” By delivering whatever one promised, one shows fidelity and is worthy of trust. Readiness to believe (credere) someone is fides in the derived sense. One can use these terms to describe a single occasion or an ongoing relationship like a friendship, which presupposes mutual fidelity. The Scriptures recount numerous dramatic cases of the making, keeping, and breaking of promises,² and even God is said to be one who keeps faith by fulfilling promises – not in the sense that God was ever in debt to human beings, but in the sense that God is always faithful to his people by his fidelity to his own nature.

Formal declarations of faith came to have special prominence in Christian liturgical practice, especially in the baptismal promises that were an important part of the sacramental rites of initiation for new Christians, and also in the community’s worship of God at each Sunday Eucharist.³ Not all religions, of course, have required an explicit profession of faith in this sense (that is, a creed). The pagan religions of ancient Rome, for example, concentrated on the precise execution of rituals, without apparent regard for what one personally believed.⁴ Even religions like Judaism that did expect faith in God and that had a strong sense of the divine deeds that created and preserved Israel as God’s “chosen people” did not demand the profession of a creed. The religion of Judaism centered upon the performance of certain actions required by torah.⁵ But Christian religious practice from early on also demanded the profession of a creed, that is, an explicit statement of faith in God as deeply involved in human history and at the same time as beyond the sensible order, eternal and transcendent.

From the point of view of ancient philosophy, Christian claims about a God who is always unseen and yet who commissioned his only Son to take on human nature and to redeem humanity by his suffering, death, and resurrection involved a leap of faith far beyond what could be empirically shown or logically proven. Where Greek philosophy had reacted to the mythological presentation of deities as charming but often willful personalities and had progressively come to see God more and more as an impersonal force,⁶ even the most philosophical presentations of Christian doctrine always insisted on the personal nature of God. The stories of God’s creation of the world, the choice of Israel as God’s people and its divine guidance through history, and then the incarnation and mission of Christ as the ultimate fulfillment of God’s promises were central to Christian evangelizing. But concurrently with the presentation of these stories about God’s interventions into history, apologists⁷ for the Christian faith from the beginning saw the need to include a philosophical dimension in their work to distinguish it from the mythic religions of antiquity.⁸ These apologists employed philosophical demonstrations to show that this religion included not just claims to truth about certain historical facts but also claims of universal validity that are accessible to anyone (e.g., that there necessarily has to be a supreme being). In part, they introduced these philosophical distinctions to make clear what Christian belief did and did not entail (e.g., that Christianity held Christ to be a divine person who came to assume a human nature, not some hybrid being inferior to God and yet superior to human beings). In part, they brought philosophical definitions to bear, the more clearly to outline the paradoxes entailed in Christian belief (e.g., that Christian belief in the Trinity of divine persons is not a polytheism with three gods but a monotheism in which each of the three divine persons within the unity of God should be defined as a subsistent relation with the other persons).⁹

Accordingly, philosophically inclined Christian apologists in the early centuries struggled with the problem of how best to articulate Christianity’s beliefs in lands and cultures outside those of their origination (Palestine and Judaism). What could be explained in categories recognizable to Jews, such as the fulfillment of promises recorded in the Hebrew prophets, had to be explained to Gentiles in terms intelligible for them, yet without compromising the particularities of the new Christian faith. In particular, there were profound questions about whether their explanations and defenses of their religion ought to employ philosophical terminology at all. To do so risked inadvertently altering the truths that were disclosed by revelation in the very effort to render them more intelligible to other cultures. Restating these truths in the more universal fashion demanded by the canons of philosophical reason (whether the specific philosophical approach being used was Platonic or Aristotelian, Stoic or Neoplatonic) could somehow distort the particularity of the historical claims about God’s interventions into history. But the alternative to embracing some philosophical approach presumably meant confining the presentation of this religion to the form of narrative and story. The advantage of that approach would have been to keep the focus on the events of the history of Israel and the events of the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus. But such an approach risked allowing the claims being made by the Christian story simply to appear on a par with those of other religions that conveyed their messages by stories and myths. Recourse to the philosophical forms of reasoning that were so highly developed in Hellenistic civilization reflected a certain confidence about being able to express adequately what the Christian religion meant in these new forms. The apologists also wanted to show that sound reasoning could disclose by means of reasoning the cogency of at least some portions of what they had been given to know by faith.¹⁰ Later generations of Christian thinkers took philosophy to be useful for generating the precise definitions and distinctions that were needed to articulate and defend the biblical faith against what were judged to be false interpretations.

A classic example of this somewhat reluctant admission of the need for a resort to philosophical terms to explain and preserve biblical beliefs occurs in the creed that was adopted at the Council of Nicaea in 325 and then slightly modified in 381 at the Council of Constantinople. Despite a strong desire to use only biblical words in this account of Christian faith, the Council ultimately chose to include within this creed one non-biblical phrase of philosophical provenance (the assertion that the Son of God is “of the same substance” as the Father – in Greek homoousios, in Latin consubstantialis) in order to protect biblical faith about the divine nature of the second member of the Trinity from those interpretations of biblical passages about Christ that would have been at variance with their understanding of the tradition on this question.

Christian thinkers, almost without exception, embraced some use of philosophical approaches within their theological work, both as appropriate for the purposes of evangelization and apologetics and as helpful for the technical articulation of religious doctrines. But they also frequently voiced their sense of the need to be vigilant against trading away any of what they considered to be the non-negotiable elements of revelation and tradition for what might seem more philosophically attractive but might unwittingly threaten to alter what had been received as the deposit of faith. Much could thus be adopted directly from pagan philosophers, but there was also reason to reject certain otherwise attractive philosophical ideas in the interests of religious orthodoxy, and to be ready to adapt other concepts in significant ways that might have surprised their originators. The early scripture-scholar Origen is an interesting case in point. Origen had founded a catechetical school at Alexandria, where he combined scriptural exegesis and research on the Christian interpretation of the Old Testament with the training of teachers in Christian doctrine. In his more speculative writings, Origen explored the appropriation of certain ideas drawn from what is now called “Middle Platonism.”¹¹ His effort to explain the Trinity as a hierarchy of principles descending from “the One” (God the Father) to the Logos (the Divine Word) to the Pneuma (the Holy Spirit) along the general lines taken by his slightly younger contemporary Plotinus were ultimately judged unsuccessful by Christian evaluation. His use of these philosophical notions appeared to place the members of the Divine Trinity in an order of subordination rather than to preserve their equality with one another. But even in its failure, his effort serves as evidence of the general willingness of theologians to think philosophically and as a lesson in the need to reflect on whether any given philosophical perspective could be adopted straightforwardly or only with certain adaptations. Only a handful of theologians, often arguing from texts such as 1 Corinthians 2: 1–5, where St Paul insists that he relies on no human wisdom when preaching the wisdom of Christ, tried to resist any use of philosophical ideas or methods at all.

One particularly important instance of the theological adaptation of a philosophical notion (discussed at greater length below in the chapter on divine ideas) is the transformation of the Platonic theory of Ideas or Forms.¹² During the patristic period we find the relocation of the Ideas from the place in a separate world that Plato had envisioned for them in the Timaeus: Christian Platonists think of these Ideas as residing in the mind of God. This doctrine had sustained importance as a crucial philosophical component of the medieval understanding of creation. The philosophical fruitfulness of the concept of divine ideas extends very broadly, especially for philosophical theories of morality.

Christian thinkers thus tended to use philosophical approaches to various questions with considerable enthusiasm, but they generally resisted the inclination to start thinking of Christianity as wholly or even primarily a new philosophy among others. It is vital to keep in mind here that many ancient philosophies were seen not merely as dispassionate bodies of knowledge but as holistic ways of living, and often as ascetical disciplines.¹³ In its self-understanding, Christianity shared this sense of offering a way of life, but it did not regard itself as something that could be known by reason alone independently of revelation. Even in asserting the fundamental harmony of faith and reason, Christian theorists resisted the notion that one could ever reduce the truths of the Christian faith to a set of conclusions attainable through reasoning about human experience.

What began to be worked out regarding the relations between faith and reason within the patristic era developed further during the Middle Ages. The philosophers of this period did not tend to pose questions about, say, the relations between science and religion with the assumption of their incompatibility that is sometimes found today, but with the conviction that faith was a higher source than reason.¹⁴ The philosophers of the period did deal frequently with questions of unbelief and with difficulties in belief. In Augustine’s account of a preliminary stage of his conversion, for instance, he records his difficulties with three interrelated problems that constituted intellectual impediments that he needed to resolve before he could give his free assent to faith. Until he learned from the Neoplatonists that God must be understood as spiritual ra...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Preface
• Introduction
• 1: FAITH AND REASON
• 2: GOD
• 3: THE DIVINE IDEAS
• 4: THE PROBLEM OF UNIVERSALS
• 5: THE TRANSCENDENTALS
• 6: COSMOS AND NATURE
• 7: SOUL
• 8: CONCLUSION
• Glossary
• Historical Figures
• References
• Index of Names
• Index of Terms