An Introduction to Medieval Philosophy E-Book

Joseph W. Koterski

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 470

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2011

Beschreibung

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

Leseprobe

Contents

Preface

Introduction

NOTES

1 FAITH AND REASON

1 FIDES QUAERENS INTELLECTUM

2 SCIENTIA AND SAPIENTIA

3 PHILOSOPHY AND THEOLOGY

4 OVERVIEW

NOTES

2 GOD

1 THE IMMANENCE AND TRANSCENDENCE OF GOD

2 ARGUMENTS FOR THE EXISTENCE OF GOD

3 THE DIVINE ATTRIBUTES

4 OVERVIEW

NOTES

3 THE DIVINE IDEAS

1 THE BACKGROUND

2 PATRISTIC ADAPTATIONS OF THE PLATONIC DOCTRINE OF IDEAS

3 DIONYSIUS AND ERIUGENA

4 BONAVENTURE AND AQUINAS

5 OVERVIEW

NOTES

4 THE PROBLEM OF UNIVERSALS

1 THE RANGE OF THE QUESTION

2 REALISTS AND NOMINALISTS

3 THE SOURCE TEXTS: PLATO, ARISTOTLE, PORPHYRY, BOETHIUS

4 LATE SCHOLASTICISM

5 OVERVIEW

NOTES

5 THE TRANSCENDENTALS

1 MEDIEVAL REALISM

2 THE PHILOSOPHICAL ROOTS OF THE CONCEPT “TRANSCENDENTAL”

3 TRANSCENDENTAL UNITY, TRUTH, AND GOODNESS

4 THE CONVERTIBILITY OF THE TRANSCENDENTALS

5 TRANSCENDENTAL BONUM AND THE PROBLEM OF EVIL

NOTES

6 COSMOS AND NATURE

1 THE PTOLEMAIC UNIVERSE

2 TRANSMISSION OF THE MODEL

3 NATURE AND FREEDOM

4 NATURE AS A SOURCE FOR ETHICS

5 THE TRANSFORMATION OF ANCIENT SOURCES IN THE MEDIEVAL DEVELOPMENT OF NATURAL LAW THEORY

NOTES

7 SOUL

1 THE GREEK BACKGROUND

2 AUGUSTINE’S ADAPTATIONS OF THE PLATONIC POSITION

3 THE CONCEPT OF SOUL IN SCHOLASTIC THOUGHT

4 OVERVIEW

NOTES

8 CONCLUSION

Glossary

Historical Figures

References

Index of Names

Index of Terms

This edition first published 2009

© 2009 Joseph W. Koterski, S.J.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Koterski, Joseph W.

An introduction to medieval philosophy: basic concepts / Joseph W. Koterski.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-1-4051-0677-1 (hardcover: alk. paper) – ISBN 978-1-4051-0678-8

(pbk. : alk. paper)

1. Philosophy, Medieval. I. Title.

B721.K68 2009

189–dc22

2008018528

PREFACE

There is a long list of individuals to whom I owe thanks for their assistance with the composition of this book. It was Professor Greg Reichberg who first suggested the project, and I am grateful to him for placing me in touch with the wonderfully patient staff at Blackwell, especially Jeff Dean with his constant and gentle encouragements to finish, and to Sarah Dancy for her help in the editorial process. Let me also express my deep appreciation to two anonymous referees for Blackwell, and two anonymous Jesuits who read the manuscript on behalf of the New York Provincial of the Society of Jesus. The helpful comments that all four of these individuals provided were invaluable.

My colleagues at Fordham over the years have been of great assistance and encouragement, in particular Prof. Susanna Barsella, Fr. W. Norris Clarke, S.J., Fr. John J. Conley, S.J., Fr. Christopher Cullen, S.J., Fr. Brian Davies, O.P., His Eminence Cardinal Avery Dulles, S.J., Prof. Gyula Klima, Fr. Joseph Lienhard, S.J., the late Fr. Gerald McCool, S.J., Prof. Dana Miller, Fr. Louis Pascoe, S.J., Prof. Giorgio Pini, and Prof. Daryl Tress, with each of whom I have discussed one or another of the ideas that have come into this volume. I owe a debt of gratitude to friends and colleagues elsewhere, including Prof. Ed Peters, Sr. Thomas Augustine, O.P., and Prof. Wayne Storey. I am also grateful to my students over the years, students whose questions and conversations have often helped me to clarify my ideas. In particular, let me record my debt of gratitude to a number of current or recent graduate students here at Fordham who have commented on various portions of this book: Prof. James Jacobs, Prof. Siobhan Nash-Marshall as well as Paul Kucharski, Brendan Palla, and Br. Charles-Benoît Reche, C.F.R. And let me not leave out offering my thanks as well to the other members of the Philosophy Department and to my brother Jesuits in the Fordham Jesuit community for their support over the years.

Joseph W. Koterski, S.J.

INTRODUCTION

The period of European history that we call the Middle Ages was profoundly religious. But our appreciation of that aspect of medieval culture should not obscure our awareness of the vibrancy of its philosophical currents. For its intellectual heritage, the era of the Middle Ages was deeply indebted to the literature and learning of the ancient world as to the traditions of reason and revelation that came from nascent Christianity and its roots in Judaism.

This volume is intended as an introduction to medieval philosophy. For a comprehensive approach to the subject, a good history of medieval philosophy will also be indispensable reading, but this book is not intended to be that history. Rather, it is intended to offer an overview of philosophy in the Middle Ages by considering the range of positions and arguments that were taken on a select set of philosophical problems by various figures in the world of Latin Christianity from the patristic age until the dawn of the Renaissance. While mindful of the rich history of Islamic and Jewish thought in the Middle Ages as well as that of Byzantine Christianity, this study is principally concerned with the Latin-speaking authors of Christian Europe. While a good case could be made for putting the start of the Middle Ages at some point after authority of the Roman Empire definitively broke down in the West, considerations of medieval philosophy have to begin somewhat earlier, given the vast influence of Augustine of Hippo throughout the period. Likewise, there are legitimate disputes about the proper demarcation point between the Middle Ages and the Renaissance that it would be more important to debate if this book aimed to recount the history of medieval philosophy chronologically.

But in order to fill what seems to be a lacuna within the literature, this volume will not be organized historically by a review of the leading philosophers and theologians, but rather will proceed by considering a select number of themes that are treated again and again in the course of the medieval period without trying to be encyclopedic. The hope here is to provide readers with little or no previous experience of this period of philosophy with a suitable preparation for their further study. If it is necessary to err in one direction or the other, this study will err on the side of presenting more rather than less of the theological context of the period in an effort to make the context for medieval philosophy more readily intelligible.

The goal of this volume is thus to provide an introduction to medieval philosophy by presenting a certain number of fundamental concepts within their historical context. There has been need, of course, to choose from among the many issues that medieval philosophers treated a representative set of topics without any pretense of providing a comprehensive survey.1 To make the sampling as representative and helpful as possible, I have concentrated on certain problems that persistently fascinated medieval philosophers and I have tried to give special attention to some of the assumptions that were operative during the period, especially when those assumptions are not our typical assumptions. Typically, they had an earth-centered view of the cosmos, for instance, rather than our current understanding of the planet earth as orbiting a central star, the Sun, which is but one of millions of stars within the Milky Way galaxy, which in turn is just one galaxy among countless others. In a sense, the project here includes giving attention not just to those topics that contemporary philosophers think of as philosophical problems, but also to the background assumptions that one needs to know in order to read texts in medieval philosophy well. This will mean paying attention to the way in which medieval thinkers posed the problems on which they worked and the framework within which they thought. Doing so can help to bring into focus a period of philosophy that seems very distant from our own and yet one that in many ways is decisive for the subsequent history of philosophy.

There are many fine books on the history of medieval philosophy, both general histories2 and specialized studies of various kinds, including critical editions and translations, intellectual biographies, books and articles on individual thinkers and schools of thought, and countless studies on specific philosophical problems. To organize an introduction to medieval philosophy around certain basic concepts in historical context is quite different from structuring such a work directly as a history. While attention to the places and dates and figures always remains an indispensable component, the focus here is not just on recounting the routes of transmission or outlining the paths of influence or on contextualizing the great individuals of a given period, but on making appropriate philosophical use of these and similar perspectives by discussing in somewhat greater detail a select number of the topics and problems addressed by medieval thinkers that have proven to be of abiding interest. To help with understanding the chronological relationships of one individual to another, I have also included within this volume an appendix on Historical Figures, with their dates.

Care and precision in the use of language must always be an aim of philosophers, and so a part of this study will be the identification and explanation of the specific terms that have been used to express these concepts. Our concern here is not just a matter of studying the history of a given term’s usage, but of trying to appreciate the concepts that these terms were used to express, the better to philosophize along with the medieval thinkers who used them. The meaning of words, including technical terms, can change significantly over time, and at any one moment a given term can have a range of meanings.

The very notion of a concept and the philosophical problem of understanding how the words in any given language are able to carry the meanings that they are intended to signify were frequently the subject of philosophical reflection in the medieval period. While this topic is not among those chosen for separate treatment in this book, perhaps a short account of it will be helpful here for introducing the topics that have been chosen for more detailed consideration. In the parlance of medieval philosophy, a word can be used univocally (with precisely the same meaning), equivocally (with different meanings), or analogously (with meanings that are different in certain respects but in some identifiable respects the same). The sameness of meaning involved in univocal usage is crucial to the project of proving or demonstrating anything in a rigorous way. A valid syllogism, for instance, needs to have three and only three terms, each used with precisely the same meaning twice within the syllogism; by contrast, an equivocal use of any one term within a syllogism would render the reasoning immediately invalid because it would break the connection that the syllogism is trying to establish. But because terms used in philosophical and theological treatises are often used analogously, careful scrutiny of the range of meanings given for any particular term can help us to understand the contours of a given concept as well as to understand more deeply the arguments and the positions that medieval philosophers offered on the problems related to these concepts.

Each of the chapters below will explore the set of terms and concepts used for the analysis of various problems. In addition, the book contains a glossary at the end, for the sake of having easy access to a succinct account of these important terms and concepts. Because the class of objects and relationships to which a given term refers can be easier to know in some cases than in others, the precise reference of some concepts or ideas will be easier to identify in these cases than in some others, and this will affect the effort to grasp the essence of some reality in an appropriately defined and delimited concept. The concepts in question are no less important when the terms are being used somewhat flexibly over different but related spheres of inquiry.

Consider, for example, the perennial philosophical quest to understand the realities that are intended by such common terms as “person” and “matter” (to be discussed in greater detail below in the chapter on the concept of the soul). At one level, it might seem relatively easy to gain agreement about the set of entities intended by “person,” and yet there remain problems aplenty – not just the contemporary moral problems associated with ascertaining the proper definition of the term and the corresponding inclusion or exclusion of such groups as the unborn, the senile, and the mentally defective, but also the theological problems about God and the angels that were of tremendous interest in the Middle Ages. Grasping the personal character of God and the angels can help to make us mindful that the concept designated by the term “person” must have a different definition from, say, “rational animal” and that it has a broader reference than to just the set of human beings. In fact, it was a set of theological problems pertaining to the Christian doctrine of the Trinity of Divine Persons and the two natures of Christ that prompted considerable philosophical creativity in this area. The philosophical distinctions needed for generating an appropriate definition for “person” then allowed some further progress on the theological problems.3

The concept of matter is equally complicated. Presumably a suitable account of matter would somehow have to take stock of everything in the physical universe. In our own day, we would need to consider things like the notion of extension and the distinction between matter and mass that have been so important to recent science. Within medieval philosophy, one of the crucial aspects to consider is the idea of something’s ability to receive form and to experience changes of structure and appearance. When undertaking a study of certain basic concepts of medieval philosophy, the crucial factor is not that the same term was always used by all the philosophers of the period, or that the same term always had a univocal meaning during this era. Rather, the important thing is to appreciate the conceptual continuity in the problem being discussed by appreciating the analogous use of a given term. With regard to the question about the medieval understanding of matter, this concept is recurrently a part of philosophical discussions about change and continuity and about the inner constitution of things. Matter was often understood as the substrate that remains the same during a change, whether this is a change in the dominant organizational principle of an entity or some alteration of its quality or its quantity or its relationships to other things. This concept came to play an important role in discussions about individuation (how different entities of the same type are distinct from one another); it also entered into the investigation about how one whole order of beings (the physical) can be distinguished from another whole order (the immaterial or spiritual). Despite the obvious differences of focus from one discussion to the next, the recurrent use of the same term in their reflections on these questions gives evidence of a common concept that we need to understand in order to enter into medieval philosophy. We will see that sometimes one school of thought stretched the usage of a given term beyond its usual range. The Franciscans who wrote in the tradition of Augustine, for instance, often spoke about “spiritual matter” in ways that seemed almost unintelligible to Dominicans in the Aristotelian tradition.

In its aim to serve as an introduction to medieval philosophy, this study has required the selection of a certain number of concepts while subordinating others and entirely skipping over still others with regret. We begin with the pair of concepts that probably sums up the entire period of medieval philosophy better than any other – faith and reason. After examining the range of meanings associated with fides and with ratio, the chapter takes up several related pairs of terms that are crucial for seeing the complexity of faith and reason in the Middle Ages, including scientia (“science,” “demonstrative knowledge”) and sapientia (“wisdom”) as well as the notions of philosophy and theology considered as disciplines.

Given the vast amount of thinking about God that occurred within medieval philosophy, it seemed only right to devote part of this book to the concept of God and to provide special consideration for such questions as proofs for the existence of God, the problems involved in trying to knowing the essence of something infinite within the finite categories of human thought, and the relationship of the creator to the creation. While we might be inclined to reserve some of these topics for theology rather than philosophy, it would give a false portrait of medieval philosophy to think that the philosophers of that period did their work without these ideas in the background, any more than philosophers today could do their work without the background picture that included such notions as evolution, galaxies, and theory of relativity.

Medieval thinking about the relation between God and the cosmos involves an extremely creative medieval development of a central aspect of Plato’s philosophy. His solution for the metaphysical problem of differentiating the kinds of things and the epistemological problem of knowing these kinds involves his famous theory of the Ideas or Forms. For medieval thinkers, the Platonic doctrine of the Ideas becomes a doctrine of the Divine Ideas within the mind of God, considered as the exemplary causes for all created beings. This doctrine helped to provide an understanding of why the various kinds of creatures have the natures they do and how these creatures are related to God.

In medieval reflection on how we human beings know the natures of anything and on how we are to explain the common structures of individuals that belong to the same kind, the concept of a “universal” was crucial. The medieval problem of how best to understand universals emerged from their study of Aristotle’s logical works and proved one of the most fruitful inquiries of the entire period. This book devotes a chapter to the range of opinions and arguments that characterized various schools of thought on this problem. It also devotes a chapter to the related topic of the transcendentals. These are the properties of being as being that cross over all the categories of beings – properties such as unity, truth, goodness, beauty, and being itself. Jan Aertsen, a distinguished historian of medieval philosophy in our own day, has called the doctrine of the transcendentals the defining trait of medieval thought,4 not only for the pervasive attention to these concepts but also for the creative medieval development of certain notions that first arose in antiquity, e.g., in Plato’s concentration on the Good or Plotinus’ focus on the One.

The final two chapters of this volume treat yet other fruitful problem areas that came within the ken of medieval philosophers. Operating as they did within the religious conviction that everything that the omnibenevolent Creator made was good, they asked questions about the goodness of the world and the goodness of human beings. Because the world-picture they used differed considerably from the models prevalent today, it is crucial to understand their fundamental assumptions in regard to the cosmos as a whole as well as their understanding of nature as an internal principle for the operations and activities typical of things according to their kind. Within the chapter devoted to this area of thought there is also a section on human goodness and the idea of a natural moral law. Cosmology and nature might seem to be entirely separate from ethics, but for medieval philosophers and theologians, discussions of ethics made sense only in relation to the God who made these creatures in his own image. While some theorists preferred to articulate morality purely in terms of the will of God, others saw creation as a source for knowledge of the divine will and developed an ethical theory about the role of reason in discerning the pathways to happiness and virtue by reflecting on our natural inclinations in light of our end as human beings. Seeing how medieval philosophers thought about morality may well help to understand the subject more deeply and thereby to develop our own positions in some better way.

The final topic chosen for consideration in this volume concentrates on the concept of the soul. As has been the case in the other topics discussed, there are considerable differences of opinion in the medieval period over what a soul is and how it operates. But there is also a common concept here that is crucial for understanding medieval philosophy, a notion that has not only religious roots but also roots in ancient Greek philosophy. The medieval developments of this idea that we will consider in this chapter provide a helpful way to deepen the notion of nature discussed in the previous chapter, especially in examining the considerations offered by those scholastic philosophers who took the idea of soul as the substantial form for living beings and posed their own questions about topics such as immortality and the nature of knowledge.

The articulation of these concepts in their medieval locations necessarily involves a certain lumping together and a certain splitting. It will be necessary to group together many thinkers from across the centuries so as to bring out what they held in common and sometimes what they seem merely to have assumed without demonstrating. There will also be a need to spell out the differences among them as well as to explore some of the ways in which the medieval concepts are different from our modern views. Admittedly, some of the figures covered in this book might not even have considered themselves philosophers, or at least not primarily philosophers – we will see this to be the case with Bonaventure, for instance – and yet they employed the resources of philosophy very skillfully when doing their theological work and other scholarly endeavors, and they remain of great philosophical interest to us today. It is my hope that this volume will be of assistance in appreciating their labors.

NOTES

1 A wonderful new volume in this respect is Brown (2007).

2 The following items may be of special interest: Gilson (1955), Armstrong (1967), Sirat (1985), Kretzmann (1988), and Marenbon (2003b).

3 See Koterski (2004).

4 See Aertsen (1996), pp. 19–23.

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 rather than material in nature, he was troubled by the corruptibility inherent in all the images of God that he had ever considered. He did not feel that he could offer his faith to a supreme being who was not incorruptible.15 Likewise, he felt perplexed by the reality of evil in the world. He could not reconcile the claim of an all-good God who was the creator of everything in the universe with the reality of pain, suffering, and wickedness until he came to understand the privative character of evil and the genuine freedom possible in human choices. Release from this set of stumbling-blocks on the road to faith came with the philosophical insight that evil is not a being in its own right but the absence of the goodness that ought to be present in a given being. Finally, deeper understanding about the causal connectedness of the material cosmos and about the root of free choice in the spiritual nature of the will allowed Augustine to rid himself of worries about astrological fatalism and to repudiate the superstitions of Manicheism to which he had been attracted. Yet in Augustine’s own judgment, none of these philosophical clarifications enabled him to make an act of faith in the God of the Bible. The resolution of these problems only cleared away what were intellectual roadblocks for him. He tells us that faith came to him as an impulse of grace while he wrestled with the demands of chastity that conversion would require.16

Precisely because Augustine was an adult convert to the Christian faith, the issue of unbelief has a deeply personal dimension for him. Making a commitment meant a drastic change in his life. Most medieval philosophers, by contrast, grew up within a culture already Christian, and so the question of unbelief tended to have a rather different cast for them. In his Proslogion, for instance, Anselm makes his opening gambit a line from Psalm 13(14) “The fool says in his heart, ‘There is no God.’” The connotations of the word “fool” here could cause his point to be misunderstood. Although the sentence in question clearly implies a warning about the misconduct that one might be tempted to justify on the basis of denying God’s existence, there is nothing of condescension or contempt in Anselm’s use of the term “fool” within his philosophical treatment of the question about the existence of God. Quite the opposite: Anselm’s argument (discussed in its own right in the chapter below on God) uses for its starting point the case of a person who denies the existence of God in order to show the need for sound reasoning about this most important of topics. That Anselm takes very seriously what the “fool” has to say is evident from the sustained treatment that he gives to the position. In fact, most editors of the Proslogion have respected Anselm’s own wish that future editions of his work always contain as a companion piece an extensive set of objections to his arguments by Gaunilo, a monk of the Marmoutier, “on behalf of the fool,”17 as well as Anselm’s judicious replies to these objections.

As R. W. Southern argues in his intellectual biography of Anselm,18 what Anselm accomplishes here is not only the give-and-take of good argument but also a new use for philosophical reasoning. In preceding centuries philosophical reason had often been instrumental for progress in clarifying the exposition of Christian faith, especially by drawing distinctions, making analogies, or providing explanations of the paradoxes involved in beliefs such as the unity of persons in the Trinity or the unity of human and divine natures in Christ. But now philosophical reason is being used for examining faith itself. Anselm does so by considering the topic of unbelief. It would not just be a matter of asking what someone of this faith should believe on specific questions, but of asking philosophical questions about belief itself. It is not Anselm’s position that reason can decide what the content of faith should be, but simply that good reasoning can provide a special kind of security for faith. What is believed on the basis of faith need not be thought to be destroyed when submitted to natural reason. Rather, there is a complementarity. Belief grounded on divine authority will tend to come first in the order of time. But faith is being taken as an acceptance of something not yet clearly seen in all respects and it ought to lead toward understanding as its fulfillment.19

The style of philosophizing most often at work in the first half of the Middle Ages was often more meditative than dialectical. It tended to be done by bishops and monks and commentators on Scripture. In the later periods of medieval philosophy it more often bears the marks of the classroom. There are advantages and disadvantages that come with philosophizing within an institutional setting like the university, including a tendency that arises from professional specialization to set faith and reason on different but complementary tracks, if not to make them actually opposed to one another. These aspects of the relation of faith and reason can be considered by reflecting on the relations between wisdom and understanding and between theology and philosophy.

2 SCIENTIA AND SAPIENTIA

Histories of philosophy that pass quickly over medieval thought as predominantly theological and insufficiently philosophical risk missing not only the richness of medieval philosophizing but also the relative novelty of theology as a distinct academic discipline that formally emerged in the scholastic era. For all of the spiritual writing done during the Middle Ages, there was no separate discipline called theology for much of that period. If anything, authors preferred to speak of the philosophia Christi (“the philosophy of Christ”). Many of the works that we might be inclined to see as theological tended to take the form of moral exhortations or reflections on the Scriptures.20 Even the term “theology,” for instance, is a somewhat alien term for Augustine. In the City of God, he contrasts the philosophia Christi with the three spheres of pagan “theology” identified by the Roman philosopher Varro: (1) civil theology, which was focused on the cultic activities of various civic and ethnic groups; (2) mythical theology, which contains the myths about the gods found in the likes of Homer and Hesiod; and (3) natural theology, which considers the arguments of philosophers for the existence and nature of the gods.21 The philosophical arguments typical of natural theology provided material that could find a place within Christian thought, but Augustine takes it as unlikely that they will have as much prominence among adherents of revealed wisdom as they did for pagan philosophers. Such arguments at best, he thinks, might be helpful in an auxiliary way to support and elucidate the Scriptures.

For the long period of Augustinian dominance within medieval thought, there is greater attention given to the themes of sapientia (“wisdom”) and scientia (“science”) than to reflection on theology and philosophy as distinct disciplines.22 It may prove helpful here to consider the place that a thinker like Augustine accorded to divine wisdom in ordering our thoughts about the structure of reality, and then to turn to the type of differences that he envisioned to stand between wisdom and science. Many of the distinctions that he employed on this question persisted long into the scholastic period.

While Augustine wrote no metaphysics in the formal Aristotelian sense of a treatise on being, his works nevertheless contain a metaphysics that is a scripturally informed version of Neoplatonism. At the peak of the hierarchy is God the Creator. The middle range is the sphere of angelic spirits and souls, including the human mind. At the base is the vast world of bodies, lowest in the hierarchy but still good precisely because created by God who is good.23 To each of these three levels corresponds a ratio, a principle that accounts for the structure of the being and its intelligibility.24 At the level of the elements, for instance, there are the “seed-principles” (rationes seminales) that God planted in the created world and that direct the development of material bodies. Within the mind of God, Augustine locates the divine ideas (rationes aeternae, “eternal reasons”) that are his version of the Platonic Forms; these are the prototypes for everything that God creates.25 As thoughts in the mind of God, they are unchangeable, necessary, and eternal, the exemplary causes of all creatures. In between the lowest and highest levels of reality is the sphere of angelic intelligences and spiritual souls, including the ratio hominis, the human rational soul.26 The possession of a rational soul not only accounts for the distinctive human essence and for the intelligibility of human nature, but also makes human minds capable of understanding other things above and below them within the hierarchy. By virtue of its intermediate position, human reason is able to consider material creatures through the ratio inferior (“lower reason” or “reason directed to lower things”) as well as to contemplate the eternal reasons through the ratio superior (“higher reason” or “reason directed to higher things”).27

Higher and lower reason have different ends or goals.28 The goal of higher reason is the wisdom (sapientia) achievable through contemplation, while the goal of lower reason is the knowledge of things in the changeable world of time (scientia). This sort of knowledge is more restricted than sapientia and subject to error, but extremely valuable in the practical order.29 Augustine believes wisdom to be constituted by knowledge of the eternal and immutable truths in the mind of God:

Action, by which we use temporal things well, differs from contemplation of eternal things; and the latter is reckoned to wisdom [sapientia], the former to knowledge [scientia]. … When a discourse relates to [temporal] things, I hold it to be a discourse belonging to knowledge [scientia], and to be distinguished from a discourse belonging to wisdom, to which those things belong which neither have been nor shall be, but are; and on account of that eternity which they are, are said to have been, and to be, and to be about to be, without any changeableness of times. … And they abide, but not as if fixed in some place as are bodies; but as intelligible things in incorporeal nature, they are so at hand to the glance of the mind, as things visible or tangible in place are to the sense of the body. … If this is the right distinction between wisdom and knowledge, that the intellectual cognizance of eternal things belongs to wisdom, but the rational cognizance of temporal things to knowledge, it is not difficult to judge which is to be preferred.30

For Augustine, the divine ideas play a crucial role in human knowledge. Human minds need to be in accord with the eternal ideas in order to know any necessary truths. Scientia is a methodical knowledge about the truth of things in this world and their mundane causes, whereas sapientia is a knowledge of Truth itself. For this reason, the contemplative life is higher than the active life. Although Augustine sometimes warns against allowing excessive curiosity about worldly concerns,31 lest one be distracted from higher things and thereby fail to establish the right order of loves in one’s life, he clearly holds scientia in high regard. The superiority of sapientia to scientia comes from the greater importance of a goal than the means to that goal.

In the distinctions that Augustine articulates here one can discern the influence of his respect for revelation as more certain and more insightful than anything that could ever be attained by natural reason. Charles Norris Cochrane argues that the wisdom accessible through the Scriptures seemed to Augustine to offer a way to escape from “the insoluble riddles of classicism” about the identity of the supreme good in a universe conceived to be endless. This new source of wisdom pointed the way to a new synthesis, a vision of the final order and goal toward which change and history are directed.32 Augustine’s subordination of reason to faith and of scientia to sapientia thus does not mean a repudiation of reason in favor of impulse or emotion, but a route by which one could hope actually to reach the certitude about the meaning of life that classical reason always desired but could never seem to achieve. The approach of fides quaerens intellectum does place faith as prior to reason. But rather than treating them as antithetical, it sees a deeper understanding of reality as one of the fruits that faith will provide.

In the sapiential books of the Old Testament33 medieval exegetes in the tradition of Augustine found considerable support for this position.34 The Wisdom of Solomon is frequency cited in this regard, and especially the passage (7: 17f) in which Solomon, who is taken as the epitome of a wise king, testifies to his fellow rulers that wisdom (sapientia) had come to him as a grace from above, and with it learning (doctrina) and understanding (scientia) in the various disciplines, practical and speculative. Yet it was not simply in isolated passages that medieval thought found a connection between sapientia and scientia. Medieval exegesis found this relationship to be pervasive, especially because of the complementary roles played by faith and reason in what they considered to be the most crucial aspect of proper biblical interpretation, namely, ascertaining the four senses of scripture.35

The Scriptures were understood to have four “senses” or levels of meaning. At the heart of this approach to interpretation is a distinction between the literal level and the three spiritual levels. Contrary to what the term might lead one to expect, the “literal level” does not mean that everything in the Scriptures is to be read as if a simple historical account. The literal level includes not only straightforward narrative but metaphor and simile and a variety of other rhetorical devices too. The sensus ad litteram consists of whatever is intended by the human author, whether the authorial intention is historical (such as the Gospel narratives about Jesus’ life or the record of Israel’s exile in Egypt and wanderings in the desert), figures of speech (such as the use of metaphor in Psalm 18: 2, “The Lord is my rock”), or even wisdom stories and tales such as Job and Jonah. The three spiritual senses – the “allegorical” (perhaps better called the “typological”), the “moral,” and the “anagogical” – are designated as “spiritual” because of their source. They are said to come from the Holy Spirit, but they can only be properly discerned within the text once its literal sense is understood. The medieval exegete is thus concerned to apply reason (ratio) and learning (scientia) to the text in order to discover the wisdom (sapientia) awaiting there in the spiritual levels of meaning that were implanted by the divine author.

While most medieval interpreters employed the discernment of these various levels of meaning in the Scriptures creatively but cautiously, there were some whose practice has given allegory a bad name through the excessively imaginative connections they made. But the more disciplined masters of the art used it responsibly and by the later portion of the Middle Ages the method could even be applied to non-biblical texts. Dante’s famous letter to Can Grande della Scala, for instance, explains that the Commedia employs a four-level structure of meaning, like that found in the Bible.36