Front matter
THE MEnToR PHILOSOPHERS
y MT463 75C
THE MEDIEVAL PHILOSOPHERS
THE AGE OF
won a ene f RS SRS NSS er enna BASIC WRITINGS OF: St. Augustine Boethius:Abelard:St. Bernard:-St.Thomas
Aquinas:Duns Scotus:-William of Ockham: and others @@ Selected, with Introduction and Commentary, by Anne Fremantle
Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2023 with funding from Kahle/Austin Foundation https://archive.org/details/medievalphilosop0000will
LIBRARY
THE NATURE OF MAN,
OF BEING, OF GOD
AE in one volume, is the wisdom of the most spiritually harmonious age that Western man has known.
In this age of belief, the period from the fifth to-the fifteenth centuries, when religion and social institutions were closely related, philosophers discussed the nature of God, of Being, and of Man, with an intensity not known before or since.
In this remarkable book, Anne Fremantle, religious scholar and author, presents selections from the basic writings of such dominant philosophers of the medieval period as St. Augustine, St. Thomas Aquinas, Boethius, Erigena, Anselm, Abelard, Bonaventura, and Averroés, with an interpretation of their work woven throughout the texts.
ANNE FREMANTLE, an associate editor of Commonweal, an editor of the Catholic Book Club, an associate professor at Fordham University, an editor-onloan to the United Nations during the General Assembly, is also the author of numerous books, reviews, and articles, including "The Papal Encyclicals in Their Historical Context"
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The Mentor Philosophers
THE AGE OF
BEIRIER The Medieval Philosophers
SELECTED, WITH INTRODUCTION AND INTERPRETIVE COMMENTARY
ANNE FREMANTLE
A MENTOR BOOK
Published by The New American Library
CopyYRIcHT, 1954, By ANNE FREMANTLE All rights reserved
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A clothbound edition of The Age of Belief is published by Houghton Mifflin Company
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For A. J. who will never read it \ '
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Acknowledgments This book could never have existed but for the very great kindness of the following publishers who allowed me to include the vital parts—some large, some small, but all essential. I wish to thank each and every one of them: George Allen & Unwin, Ltd., D. AppletonCentury-Crofts, Inc., Benziger Brothers, Inc., Burns,
Oates & Washbourne, Ltd., Cima Publishing Company, Columbia University Press, The Franciscan Institute,
Harvard University Press, Longmans, Green & Company, Inc., The Macmillan Company, Marquette University Press, John Murray, Ltd., Open Court Publishing Company, Random House, Henry Regnery
Company, Peter Reilly Company, Sheed & Ward, Inc., The University of Minnesota Press, and University of Pennsylvania Press.
I would like especially to thank Father Ivan Illich, Alistair Crombie, Esq., of All Souls, Oxford, and Mr.
James John of the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, for vetting my manuscript, and for many valuable suggestions; also Etienne Gilson, for a few encouraging words at our only meeting, and for everything he has ever written, and Dr. Theodor von Mommsen for the kind loan of books.
Contents Introduction
WHAT IS PHILOSOPHY?
ST. AUGUSTINE
BOETHIUS
JOHN SCOTUS ERIGENA
ST. ANSELM
ABELARD AND ST. BERNARD
THE ARABS
ST. BONAVENTURA
ST. THOMAS AQUINAS
DUNS SCOTUS
WILLIAM OF OCKHAM
Bitte he dea Ss =
CONCLUSION
Recommended Further Reading
Index of Names
bala :
To oe ee he ee » "
> How charming is divine philosophy Not harsh and crabbéd as dull folks suppose But musical as is Apollo's lute And a perpetual feast of nectared sweets.
—Comus,
JOHN MILTON
Introduction
"WE ARE LIKE DWARFS SEATED ON THE SHOULDERS OF GIANTS;
we see more things than the ancients and things more distant, but this is due neither to the sharpness of our own sight, nor to the greatness of our own stature, but because we are raised and borne aloft on that giant mass."
So, in the twelfth century of our era, wrote Bernard of Chartres. This "giant mass" of "famous men and our fathers that begot us" is important to us not genetically and emotionally only. We get from our remote ancestors not just our faces and our frowns, the curve of an eyebrow and the trick of a likeness, but also all our history and our literature, our declarations of independence and our famous slogans. We get, too, our ideas and the very ways in which we think, together with the words we use to think with. Indeed "we have nothing that we are not given," nothing that has not been handed down and used again and again.
And the "giant mass" is made up of specific individuals.
"Man" generically—if we admit that "man" exists apart from men, and one of the reasons for reading this book is to discover if we will admit "man" so to exist—has been defined by the "ancients" as "a rational animal capable of laughter." "Man," we know, invented the wheel, the pulley, the arch, the internal combustion engine, the airplane. He discovered electricity and split the atom. Yet who or what was this "man"? Very, very few men have invented or discovered anything; most men, through all the ages, and still today, are dwarfs who couldn't even figure how to set an egg up straight or how to light a fire by rubbing sticks together, unless borne aloft on the shoulders of the giants.
Now, between the "ancients" and ourselves, between the "slory that was Greece and the grandeur that was Rome"— the remote origin of all Western man—and the invention of gunpowder, we are apt to see with our mind's eye a dark, dismal patch, a sort of dull and dirty chunk of some ten centuries, wedged between the shining days of the golden Greeks, who "invented" everything (even flying, if we take the mythical
Daedalus and Icarus seriously, even atoms, vitamins, and the way the planets circle the sun), and the brilliant galaxy of light given out jointly by those twin luminaries, the Renaissance and the Reformation.
These Dark Ages, which roughly cover all of time between
Ts x
THE AGE OF BELIEF
the Fall of Rome to the barbarians in the fifth century and the fall of Byzantium (or Constantinople, or New Rome) to the Turks in the fifteenth, have also been called the Ages of Faith, or, lumped together, the Age of Belief. They are often further subdivided into the Dark Ages, from the fifth to the tenth century, and the Middle Ages, from the tenth to the fifteenth.
We in America are particularly apt to regard this Age of Belief as a long way off, since our own history bears so little physical relation to them. We do not, as Europeans do, worship in the very same buildings, buy and sell in the same markets, count our money in the same countinghouses or exchanges, stay in the same hotels or inns, or live in the same houses as these medieval ancestors of ours. But we still ask the same questions, and each of us, as he or she matures, passes through at least some of the same stages of the long intellectual process that is called civilization. We cannot fail to meet the same problems as did our forefathers, and learning their answers may help us to act upon them as intelligently as they did, and may even, perhaps, teach us to avoid making always the same mistakes. And, as we become increasingly aware of our own spiritual bankruptcy, we may look back with a certain appreciation—and even with a certain nostalgia—to those spiritually solvent centuries, to that Age of Belief, which a French poet, Paul Verlaine, called "énorme et délicat."
In this book, the Age of Belief is regarded in terms of its philosophy; that is to say, in terms of the questions asked and the answers given to the fundamental problems that the human intellect asks in each generation about the nature of being, the nature of man, the relationship of man to being—his own and that of others. The questions will be pure philosophical ones and the people studied, philosophers. Sometimes the ideas will sound religious, because of the terms in which they are stated, but they will not be religious, nor political, nor historical, nor economic, nor scientific. But they will be metaphysical, for Western European philosophy during those thousand years was based on Plato and Aristotle, two Greek metaphysicians
(meta, beyond, physics, what is discernible).
Plato (427-347 B.C.) introduced the art of thinking in concepts: he invented ideas, which he raised to a separate existence as metaphysical realities. His famous Dialogues, which are more read today than ever before, insisted on some basic premises, of which one was that: "all that is in the world is as it is because it is best so, and it is only really conceived when it is referred to the good as its final object."
Aristotle (384-322 B.C.) was a pupil of Plato, and became
= INTRODUCTION
xi the tutor of Alexander the Great (356-323 B.C.), of Macedon, one of the greatest conquerors the world has ever known. Aristotle preferred the deductive to the inductive method of reasoning (from things instead of toward things). He was an experimentalist instead of relying on intuitionalism. For Plato's self-moved mover of the universe, he substituted the unmoved mover. For Aristotle, the power and the act were parts of the metaphysical evolution, governed and perfected by formal, efficient and final causes.
All the ideas current during the whole of the Age of Belief stem from these two philosophers. Gilbert and Sullivan once wrote that every boy that is born alive is either a little liberal, or else a little conservative. For a thousand years of European history, everybody who thought at all was either a Platonist or an Aristotelian. St. Augustine, the first and one of the greatest of Christian philosophers, emerges as the greatest of the Platonists, and St. Thomas Aquinas, writing some eight hundred years later than St. Augustine, claims as his chief achievement to have brought the whole of Aristotle's thought within the orbit of the Christian faith.
But neither St. Augustine, nor St. Thomas, nor any other medieval philosopher, was content just to accept what Plato or Aristotle (or anyone else) had said. The essence of philosophy is that it must be fresh; it can never come out of a can; every philosopher has to ask the old questions anew and to produce fresh answers. Thus each new philosopher builds a new story onto the house he has inherited, the house that we all inhabit, the house of human wisdom.
For the purposes of this book, I have taken one of the most important questions raised by Aristotle in his Categories, that which the whole Middle Ages called the question of Universals
(greenness, wetness, brightness, etc.), and have traced its history down the thousand years of the Age of Belief. I have given a clear statement of the problem first, as briefly written down by Porphyry who wrote in Greek, the language of Aristotle.
Next, I have shown what Boethius thought of this problem, writing when Greek was falling out of fashion, and even Latin was threatened by the barbarian Goths, Vandals and Huns. I have shown the problem as argued by "realists" and "nominalists,'—realists being people who thought Universals really existed, and nominalists being people who thought they were only names, until at last William of Ockham finally dismissed
Universals as only signs. The problem of Universals is very close to the problem of being, the whole idea of essence and
xii
THE AGE OF BELIEF
of existence. We think this as keen as Kierkegaard and modern as Maritain, but it was wrestled with by Augustine and again by Aquinas. Augustine also had much to say about how we apprehend ideas, and where we find them, and his idea of memory crops up again and again in various forms. Also prominent is his idea of the relationship of time and of eternity
—of the nunc fluens, the now flowing, of the one, and the tota simul, the absolute simultaneity, of the other (which he got from Plato via Plotinus).
Porphyry, Augustine, and Boethius form, as it were, the classical beginnings of Christian philosophy, with John Scotus
Erigena making a bridge between them and such "new men" as Anselm, who has been called the second Augustine. The opposition raised its head with Roscelin and Abelard, and a whole new alignment of the problem of the relationship between reason and revelation came in with the Arab (Mohammedan) philosophers, and particularly with Averroés.
Etienne Gilson, the greatest medieval historian alive (and perhaps the greatest who has ever lived) wrote a whole brilliant book on the two kinds of medieval philosophers; those who believed that "since God has spoken to us it is no longer necessary for us to think," and the others who believed that "the divine law required man to seek God by the rational methods of philosophy" because it is man's first duty to use his
God-given reason. These two types, the successors of Tertullian and those of St. Augustine, are both illustrated here.
The relationship between man's freedom and man's fate, between free-will and God's foreknowledge, was another of the questions that everyone struggled with during the Age of Belief and one that G. E. Moore, for example, has wrestled with in our time. St. Bernard had much that is worthwhile to say about that, as had St. Thomas Aquinas. St. Bonaventura and Duns Scotus both discussed at great length the possibility of the existence of a first principle, yet were as different in their approach and argument as it is possible for two men to be.
The questions and answers of these medieval men still constantly influence thinkers of today. I have tried to show in every case how the positions taken in the Age of Belief were followed by philosophers whose names are familiar; Kant,
Hume and Hegel, Russell, Whitehead and Dewey. But the main purpose of this book is as a source book, with the emphasis on the original texts, many of which have not been hitherto available in translation, or are only available in a very few specialized libraries.