Medieval Philosophy

A Multicultural Reader

Bruce Foltz

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781472580399
• eBook ISBN: 9781472580429
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: European Medieval History

Medieval Philosophy: A Multicultural Reader comprises a comparative, multicultural reading of the four main traditions of the medieval period with extensive sections on Greek-Byzantine, Latin, Jewish, and Islamic traditions. The book also includes an initial 'Predecessors' section, presenting readings (with introductions) from figures of antiquity upon whom all four traditions have drawn. Representative readings from each of the four great traditions are presented chronologically in four different tracks, along with engaging and accessible introductions to the traditions themselves, as well as each individual thinker-all selected and presented by noted scholars within each respective tradition. This groundbreaking collection:
-Offers readings from early thinkers that contextualize the medieval traditions.
-Presents, for the first time, extensive readings from the Byzantine Christian tradition that has wielded an important cultural influence from Russia and the Balkans to the Middle East and Northern Africa.
-Chooses and interprets texts that are integrally important within each of these four traditions–living traditions that continue to shape values and beliefs today–rather than seen from an external point of view, such as that of a later school of philosophy.
-Juxtaposes extensive readings from poetic and mystical elements within these traditions alongside the usual, often more analytical readings.
-Features a timeline of the entire period, a map indicating the locations associated with philosophers included in this volume, an annotated guide to further reading on each of these traditions, and an index of names and of subjects that appear in the volume. Given its relevance for approaching the medieval world on its own terms, as well as for understanding the foundations of our own world, the volume is intended not only as an academic textbook and reference work, but as a readable and informative guide for the general reader who wishes to understand these great philosophical and religious traditions that continue to influence our world today-or perhaps to simply glean the wisdom from these enduring texts. This is a culturally inclusive title, which seeks to provide the reader with a rich, varied and comprehensive insight into the entirety of the medieval philosophical world.

Part 1

Ancient philosophy as a spiritual tradition: Predecessors of medieval philosophy

Eric D. Perl

Medieval philosophy, in all four of the traditions represented in this volume, emerges directly from ancient Greek and Roman philosophy and is largely continuous with it. Ancient philosophy, while often critical of mythology and popular religion, did not as a rule repudiate the idea of divinity but rather sought to reinterpret and purify it. Thales, the first of the pre-Socratic philosophers, is reported to have said that “all things are full of Gods,”¹ and this is a leitmotif for much of classical philosophy. And philosophy for the ancients was rarely, if ever, a merely theoretical or academic pursuit in the modern sense. It was rather a way of life different from that of most people, an abandonment of the common human pursuit of wealth, pleasure, power, and prestige to seek, instead, wisdom. Whether in its Platonic, Aristotelian, or Stoic form (and even among the Epicureans and Skeptics, who are not included here because they had little influence on medieval philosophy), philosophy as the love of wisdom entailed not simply scholarly study and discursive reasoning but also a spiritual discipline of interiority, attentiveness to self, control and transformation of one’s thoughts, feelings, and desires, leading the philosopher’s soul from the merely human to the divine.

Plato’s thought is a philosophy of the soul from beginning to end. His so-called theory of forms is not the postulation of abstract entities floating mysteriously in another world. Forms, rather, are the intelligible characters that sensible things have and display, and in virtue of which these things are what they are and so exist at all. Hence, forms are the truth and being, the intelligible reality—what Plato calls the ousia—of things. The soul can apprehend forms, or reality, through the mediation of the senses, as they appear, in association with these or those sensible things; or it can apprehend forms intellectually, “themselves by themselves,” as unitary, unchanging intelligible characters. In that the reality of things is timeless, changeless form, knowable by intellect rather than perceptible by the senses, it is, as Plato so often says, divine, and the pure intellect that knows this reality, and orders the cosmos according to it, is what Plato calls God.

Hence, the ascent of the soul to the forms is not a passage from one world, one set of objects, to another. It is rather a cognitive, spiritual ascent, an ascent from mere sense-perception to intellectual contemplation as the soul’s mode of cognitive operation. And since intelligible reality itself cannot come into us from outside, by way of the senses, this ascent is also an inward turn, a discovery of divine reality within the soul, as a higher dimension of what we ourselves truly are. To attain to intellectual contemplation is thus to become as divine as possible for a human being. This calls for a “turning around” of the whole soul, a reorientation or conversion not of thought alone but of our desire, our love, from the pleasures of the senses to the intellectual delight of the soul’s union with divine, intelligible reality. The ascent to divinity therefore entails an ascetic purification of the soul from passions such as greed, lust, and fear. True virtue consists in such purification, and this is what Plato means by philosophy or the love of wisdom.

Aristotle’s Metaphysics opens with the words, “All men, by nature, desire to know,”² and for Aristotle philosophy is the quest for knowledge which is the fulfillment of human nature. Although his hylomorphic metaphysics is often regarded as a repudiation of Platonic transcendence, this is in fact a profound misunderstanding. For Aristotle, too, changeable, sensible things have intelligible forms, and reality in the primary sense is neither matter nor the composite of form and matter but form alone. (Here as in Plato, the term “reality” translates ousia, more commonly but misleadingly translated as “substance.”) Form is actuality, completion, or fulfillment, the unifying wholeness that makes a thing actually what it is rather than merely what it is made out of, and as such the form of anything is its end or good. Thus, Aristotle refers to form in general, the form in anything, as “divine and good and desirable,”³ and observes that “all things by nature have something divine in them.”⁴ Aristotle further argues that the entire universe depends on a first principle, an unmoved mover or God, who is eternal, changeless, pure actuality with no matter, and as such is intellect itself, the act of thinking which thinks and thus is one with intelligible reality. The intellectual grasp of or union with this divine principle is the end and fulfillment of man’s quest for knowledge. While all lesser faculties of the human soul are inseparable from the body, the intellect in us, as that which is capable of possessing and so being one with immaterial, intelligible reality, is separable, impassible, immortal, and divine. This, Aristotle insists, is what we most truly are, and the life according to it, the life of intellectual contemplation, is our highest happiness and our share in divinity, making ourselves immortal as far as possible for humans.

The Stoic philosophy, which spread widely through the Greco-Roman world in the Hellenistic and early imperial ages, rejects Platonic and Aristotelian transcendence, insisting that only the corporeal is real. But this corporeal world involves both a passive and an active principle. The latter is reason (logos) itself, conceived as a subtle breath (pneuma) or fire permeating all things, and is also identified both as nature and as God. For the Stoics, then, God is reason itself, present throughout all things, and the entire world in every detail is governed by divine providence. Consequently, all that is exterior to ourselves, everything that happens in the world, is determined by fate (another name for reason, nature, God, or providence) and is therefore indifferent to us as regards moral value and happiness. Happiness, which is identical with virtue, depends exclusively on what is interior to oneself. The goal is to bring our inner thoughts, feelings, and judgments into accord with divine reason or nature so that we recognize all that happens as the working of divine providence for the good of the cosmos as a whole. Thus, we will be neither irrationally troubled nor irrationally elated by what happens to us from without, for example, wealth or poverty, health or sickness, pleasure or pain, and even death itself. This condition of apatheia, which may be variously translated as “unaffectedness,” “detachment,” or “freedom from passions,” is at once virtue, wisdom, and happiness and consists ultimately in the identification of oneself with reason, the divine logos or God within each of us.

Beginning with Plotinus, the philosophical world of late antiquity was dominated by the form of Platonic thought today called Neoplatonism, which is the fullest flowering of classical philosophy as a whole. For Plotinus, as for Plato, the sensible cosmos, filled with and animated by soul, is a beautiful image of eternal, intelligible reality, or the forms. These are the content of, and thus one with, pure, divine intellect. But since the duality-in-unity of intellect and intelligible reality involves complexity, it cannot be the supreme first principle. All that in any way, whether sensible or intelligible, depends on and in that sense at once comes from and turns to a higher first principle, the One or Good. This first principle, or God in the supreme sense, is beyond being and intellect and hence is absolutely ineffable and unknowable because, precisely as the source of all that is, it is itself neither any being nor the whole of being. As the principle by which all things exist, the One is present throughout all things and is itself not any thing, and is thus at once infinitely immanent and infinitely transcendent to all that is.

Soul, intellect, and the One are not merely a series of metaphysical entities located “above” the sensible world. Rather, they are found within the self as higher levels of the self. Soul is both the animating principle of the cosmos and what we, as rational beings, truly are; intellect is both the intelligible paradigm of the cosmos and the highest level of consciousness, and the One, as the principle at once of being and of intellect, is both the source of all reality and the inmost center of the self. Thus, in Plotinus we find a perfect union of metaphysics and spirituality. The soul must turn inward, away from outward, sensible things, first to itself and then more deeply inward and upward to intellect and intelligible reality, and then still further inward and upward to the One beyond being and intellect. Here Stoic interiority is taken up into Platonic spirituality. Perfect virtue, for Plotinus as for the Stoics, is apatheia, but we must make the contemplative ascent beyond Stoic virtue to intellectual vision and then above even intellectual vision to the union beyond being which is at once the self in its purity and the One or God.

In the thought of Proclus, the chief representative of later Athenian Neoplatonism, we find the last major apologia for traditional Hellenic philosophy and religion, and it is largely in its Procline form that Neoplatonism was transmitted into medieval philosophy. Unity, which is the same as goodness, is the principle of all being, and the many Gods are “henads,” the unique unities or goodnesses in which beings participate. Thus, echoing the words of Thales a thousand years before, Proclus argues that “all things are filled with Gods,”⁵ from the highest level of intelligible being down to the very matter of sensible things. Hence, we may and must ascend to the divine not by intellectual contemplation alone but by theurgy, ritual practices involving invocations and the use of material things that possess “symbols,” that is, real presences, of divine powers. The goal, by means of virtue, ascesis, contemplation, theurgic ritual, and self-unification, is to lead the soul beyond thought and being to sheer unity alone.

Chapter 1

Plato (427–347 BCE)

Plato (427–347 BCE) is probably the single most important figure in the whole of Western philosophy. Born to an aristocratic family in Athens, he spent most of his life there, apart from sojourns in the Greek cities of southern Italy and Sicily. In Athens, he founded the Academy, a community of men and women pursuing intellectual studies and living the philosophic life.

Plato’s work consists of a body of dialogues addressing, in an integrated, holistic way, what are later distinguished as areas of philosophy such as metaphysics, ethics, philosophical psychology, theory of knowledge, logic, philosophical theology, spirituality, political theory, and cosmology. In response to the cultural tendencies of his time, in particular the relativism, skepticism, and nihilism that he associates with the Sophists, he shows that there can be true being, knowledge, or value only if the world reflects and shares in a higher reality, consisting of “forms” or “ideas,” which are intelligible, incorporeal, timeless, and, in a word, divine. Hence, the intellect in us is our share in divinity, and the human soul is immortal just to the extent that it makes the cognitive, ethical, and spiritual ascent from the relativity of sense-based opinion to the intellectual knowledge of and union with divine reality.

Phaedrus (246a–248d)

SOCRATES: To describe what the soul actually is would require a very long account, altogether a task for a god in every way; but to say what it is like is humanly possible and takes less time. So let us do the second in our speech. Let us then liken the soul to the natural union of a team of winged horses and their charioteer. The gods have horses and charioteers that are themselves all good and come from good (246b) stock besides, while everyone else has a mixture. To begin with, our driver is in charge of a pair of horses; second, one of his horses is beautiful and good and from stock of the same sort, while the other is the opposite and has the opposite sort of bloodline. This means that chariot driving in our case is inevitably a painfully difficult business.

And now I should try to tell you why living things are said to include both mortal and immortal beings. All soul looks after all that lacks a soul, (246c) and patrols all of heaven, taking different shapes at different times. So long as its wings are in perfect condition it flies high, and the entire universe is its dominion; but a soul that sheds its wings wanders until it lights on something solid, where it settles and takes on an earthly body, which then, owing to the power of this soul, seems to move itself. The whole combination of soul and body is called a living thing, or animal, and has the designation “mortal” as well. Such a combination cannot be immortal, not on any reasonable account. In fact, it is pure fiction, based neither on (246d) observation nor on adequate reasoning, that a god is an immortal living thing which has a body and a soul, and that these are bound together by nature for all time—but of course we must let this be as it may please the gods, and speak accordingly.

Let us turn to what causes the shedding of the wings, what makes them fall away from a soul. It is something of this sort: By their nature, wings have the power to lift up heavy things and raise them aloft where the gods all dwell, and so, more than anything that pertains to the body, they are akin to the divine, which has beauty, wisdom, goodness, and (246e) everything of that sort. These nourish the soul’s wings, which grow best in their presence; but foulness and ugliness make the wings shrink and disappear.

Now Zeus, the great commander in heaven, drives his winged chariot first in the procession, looking after everything and putting all things in order. Following him is an army of gods and spirits arranged in eleven (247a) sections. Hestia is the only one who remains at the home of the gods; all the rest of the twelve are lined up in formation, each god in command of the unit to which he is assigned. Inside heaven are many wonderful places from which to look and many aisles which the blessed gods take up and back, each seeing to his own work, while anyone who is able and wishes to do so follows along, since jealousy has no place in the gods’ chorus. When they go to feast at the banquet, they have a steep climb to the high (247b) tier at the rim of heaven; on this slope the gods’ chariots move easily, since they are balanced and well under control, but the other chariots barely make it. The heaviness of the bad horse drags its charioteer toward the earth and weighs him down if he has failed to train it well, and this causes the most extreme toil and struggle that a soul will face. But when the souls we call immortals reach the top, they move outward and take their stand on the high ridge of heaven, where its circular motion carries (247c) them around as they stand while they gaze upon what is outside heaven.

The place above heaven—none of our earthly poets has ever sung or ever will sing its praises enough! Still, this is the way it is—risky as it may be, you see, I must attempt to speak the truth, especially since the truth is my subject. What is in this place is without color and without shape and without solidity, really real reality, the subject of all true knowledge, visible only to intelligence, the soul’s steersman. Now a god’s (247d) thought is nourished by intelligence and pure knowledge, as is the thought of any soul that is concerned to take in what is appropriate to it, and so it is delighted at last to be seeing that which is and watching what is true, feeding on all this and feeling wonderful, until the circular motion brings it around to where it started. On the way around it has a view of justice itself; it has a view of self-control; it has a view of knowledge—not the knowledge that is close to change, that becomes different as it knows the different things which we consider real down here. No, it is the knowledge (247e) of that which really is. And when the soul has seen all the things that really are and feasted on them, it sinks back inside heaven and goes home. On its arrival, the charioteer stables the horses by the manger, throws in ambrosia, and gives them nectar to drink besides.

(248a) “Now that is the life of the gods. As for the other souls, one that follows a god most closely, making itself most like that god, raises the head of its charioteer up to the place outside and is carried around in the circular motion with the others. Although distracted by the horses, this soul does have a view of the things that are, just barely. Another soul rises at one time and falls at another, and because its horses pull it violently in different directions, it sees some and misses others. The remaining souls are all eagerly straining to keep up, but are unable to rise; they are carried around below the surface, trampling and striking one another as each tries to get (248b) ahead of the others. The result is terribly noisy, very sweaty, and disorderly. Many souls are crippled by the incompetence of the drivers, and many wings break much of their plumage. After so much trouble, they all leave without having seen that which is, uninitiated; and when they have gone, they will depend on the food of opinion.

The reason there is so much eagerness to see the plain where truth (248c) stands is that this pasture has the grass that is the right food for the best part of the soul, and it is the nature of the wings that lifts up the soul to be nourished by it. Besides, the law of destiny is this: if any soul becomes a companion to a god and catches sight of any true thing, it will be unharmed until the next circuit; and if it is able to do this every time, it will always be safe. If, on the other hand, it does not see anything true because it could not keep up, and by some accident takes on a burden of forgetfulness and wrongdoing, then it is weighed down, sheds its wings (248d), and falls to earth.”

Timaeus (27d–31b)

TIMAEUS: As I see it, then, we must begin by making the following distinction: What is that which always is and has no becoming, and what is that which (28a) becomes but never is? The former is grasped by intellection, which involves a reasoned account. It is unchanging. The latter is grasped by opinion, which involves unreasoning sense perception. It comes to be and passes away, but never really is. Now everything that comes to be must of necessity come to be by the agency of some cause, for it is impossible for anything to come to be without a cause. So whenever the craftsman looks at what is always changeless and, using a thing of that kind as his pattern, reproduces its form and character, then, of necessity, all that he so (28b) completes is beautiful. But were he to look at a thing that has come to be and use as his pattern something that has been begotten, his work will lack beauty.

Now as to the whole universe or world order [kosmos]—let’s just call it by whatever name is most acceptable in a given context—there is a question we need to consider first. This is the sort of question one should begin with in inquiring into any subject. Has it always existed? Was there no origin from which it came to be? Or did it come to be and take its start from some origin? It has come to be. For it is both visible and tangible and it has a body—and all things of that kind are perceptible. And, as we (28c) have shown, perceptible things are grasped by opinion, which involves sense perception. As such, they are things that come to be, things that are begotten. Further, we maintain that, necessarily, that which comes to be must come to be by the agency of some cause. Now to find the maker and father of this universe [to pan] is hard enough, and even if I succeeded, to declare him to everyone is impossible. And so we must go back and raise this question about the universe: Which of the two patterns did the maker use when he fashioned it? Was...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Contents 
• Foreword
• Contributors
• Introduction
• Part 1: Ancient philosophy as a spiritual tradition: Predecessors of medieval philosophy
• Part 2: The Greek Christian Tradition
• Part 3: The Latin Christian Tradition
• Part 4: The Jewish Tradition
• Part 5: The Islamic Tradition
• Timeline
• Map
• Index
• Imprint