The impact of the Berengarian controversy

Anselm of Canterbury (1033–1109) in his literary work opened a new and highly individual chapter in the great controversy about the relationship of reason and belief. Before he became Primate of England in 1093 he had lived, studied and taught as a Benedictine in the Norman abbey of Bec, in contact with the spiritual and intellectual movements which at this time had their centre in the French-speaking countries of Western Europe. He had come from Aosta in the south-east corner of ancient Burgundy near the Lombard border. From his mother's side he was related to an important family of dynasts ruling in these parts. As a young man he was attracted by the revival of learning in France, like the Lombard Lanfranc before him, who in the fifties was prior of the newly founded monastery of Bec and had established there a school of some renown. Anselm joined him, first as a secular student and in 1060 as a monk. At this moment Lanfranc was deeply involved in the controversy with Berengar; he had attended the council of Rome, where the teaching of the famous master of Tours was condemned. When Anselm joined the monastic community this had been the great event of the previous year. Lanfranc himself was considered a pioneer in the revival of dialectical studies, and he was certainly anxious to strike the right balance between loyalty to the authority of biblical and ecclesiastical tradition and interest in a technically correct argument. Anselm remained in intimate contact with him for three years and became his successor as prior and head of the school, when Lanfranc left Bec on his appointment as abbot of St Stephens in Caen.

The sources of Augustine's reflection on human conduct, as of much of his thought, are the teaching of the Scriptures and the Church, and of Greek, particularly of Neoplatonic, philosophy. Sometimes, as we have noted, these two are in tension; in the present case, however, they blend completely in his mind. Indeed, it was here that he was above all impressed with the convergence he detected between Platonic and Christian teaching. His readiness to adopt other aspects of Platonic modes of thought, for instance in his discussion of soul and body, can in part be accounted for by this conviction of the similarity of their ethical bearings to those of Christian teaching. Tensions which can sometimes be detected between his Christian belief and his adopted philosophical concepts and language, tensions of the kind we have encountered, for instance, in his account of man as a soul using a body, are here totally absent.

Blessedness, as we have seen, was, for Augustine, the aim of philosophy. The wisdom which philosophy strove to attain would fill and satisfy all the deepest human needs and longings. Augustine was very ready to read back into Plato his own interpretation of what this love of wisdom consists in: Plato, he says, identified the supreme good, in the enjoyment of which man finds blessedness, with God. “And therefore he [Plato] thought that to be a philosopher is to be a lover of God.’ Affirmations of this kind pave the way for an almost wholesale adoption of Platonic notions, especially in the sphere of ethics.

Life and writings

What is known of Marius Victorinus' life is contained in the short notice given by St Jerome in his De viris illustribus and in the better known remarks made by St Augustine in the course of the narrative of his own conversion. African by birth and a rhetorician by profession, he taught in Rome under the Emperor Constantius. His fame as a rhetorician is attested not only by Augustine, but also by the statue which was erected to him in the Forum of Trajan in his lifetime, probably in the early fifties of the fourth century. An inscription of the late fourth century shows that it survived in Rome for at least two generations. He had written grammatical, rhetorical and logical treatises, commentaries on Cicero and Aristotle. He had also translated ‘books of the Platonists’, as Augustine called them, and some of Aristotle's logical treatises and, very probably, Porphyry's Isagoge ‘In extreme old age’, as Jerome tells us, he became a Christian. This must have been soon after the erection of his statue in Rome, in the early or mid fifties, at any rate before 357 or 358, when the flow of his Christian theological writings begins.

Victorinus was closely associated with the senatorial aristocracy which became the last stronghold of Roman paganism. Augustine's celebrated narrative of Victorinus' conversion to Christianity allows us to glimpse something of the force of the social and cultural links which had held the distinguished rhetorician allied to the traditions of his class. To break them required the strength of mind which Augustine's story stresses and which served Augustine as a model for his own conversion. Augustine had already read Victorinus' translations of Neoplatonic literature when his Milanese friend, Simplicianus, who had known Victorinus well, told him the story of his conversion.

The two chief—or even the sole—objects of interest to philosophy are God and the human soul. This was Augustine's view in his earliest works; and, ironically, the furthest departure from this view, that which owes most to philosophical inspiration, occurs in his long commentary on the book of Genesis, written some fifteen or twenty years later. It is here that he gives freest rein to the discussion of questions concerning nature other than human or divine. Nevertheless, physical nature never assumed the central place in Augustine's interests which the world of man and God held in them. The problems which interested Augustine most in this field were those which were forced upon his attention by the scriptural teaching. We shall confine our attention to three of them : the order of nature as related to God, natural function and development in the physical world, and time, all arising for Augustine from the doctrine of creation.

Two related thoughts form the kernel of Augustine's reflection on the physical world. These are that God created the world of nature and has ordered it, in the words of the Book of Wisdom often quoted by Augustine, ‘by measure and number and weight’ (xi. 20); and that this order in the world allows man to see the world as God's handiwork. The orderliness in which God created the world was universal and all-pervasive, except for such disturbances as were set up in it by sin or its effects. But this universal order, Augustine thought, was only apparent to men partially.

Cosmology, Noetic and Psychology

From the consideration of a writing which might have been Aristotelian but could equally well have been Academic, we now pass to doctrines undoubtedly belonging to Aristotle. We concentrate mainly on those which seem to have been particularly controversial between pre-Plotinian Platonists and Aristotelians and single out six concerning: psychology, cosmology, noetic, cosmogony, ideas, and matter, and add a few words on his ethics and some special points.

Though probably not from the beginning, Aristotle denied the substantial character of the soul and, therefore, any pre- or post-existence of it, any kind of incarnation or reincarnation (transmigration). He also objected to any kind of astral psychology, i.e. to any doctrine teaching either the existence of a cosmic soul or the animation of celestial bodies. To those who did the latter he mockingly replied that the fate of a soul causing the rotatory motion of a celestial body by being present in it reminded him of the fate of Ixion. How, then, did he explain these motions? We find three answers in his writings; whether they are consistent will be left undecided. First, we find the notion that the circular movement of the celestial bodies is caused by their attraction to a being (or, if there were several independent motions, to beings) described by him as a changeless changer (or changeless changers), this circular movement being the way in which they could satisfy their attraction. Secondly, he attributed the circular motion to the nature of the body of which they consist, viz. ether, whose natural (physical) motion is circular, just as the natural motion of other elements is upwards and downwards. His third explanation, that the celestial bodies should be considered as animated, seems strangely out of tune with his criticism of Plato on this very score.

Sense-knowledge, as Augustine always insists, is, like all knowledge, a work of the soul, not of the bodily organs; it is a work ‘of the soul by means of the body’. All his more sustained discussions of this type of knowledge are attempts to make comprehensible the way in which the mind uses the bodily organs of sense in obtaining knowledge from sense-experience. His treatment of sensation (sentire) is therefore in line with his view of man as a soul using a body, and the analogy of the craftsman using his tools is the model on which it is constructed. Thus he begins the long discussion of this topic in his De quantitate animae with the following definition: ‘sensation consists in the mind's awareness of the body's experience’. A necessary condition of sensation, according to this definition, is the encounter between the bodily sense-organ and the object perceived; but sensation is more than this physical encounter on which it depends, and involves the mind's awareness. The definition assimilates sensation to the category of passio or, more precisely, to an awareness by the mind of what the body ‘suffers’. Augustine deals at length with the difficulties of treating sensation in these terms. What, he asks, do the eyes ‘suffer’ in seeing something? Evodius, his interlocutor in the dialogue, invokes the analogy of feeling pain and emotions: what the eyes suffer when seeing is sight itself, just as a sick man suffers sickness or a rejoicing man joy.

Frankish criticism of Byzantine theories of sacred art

Up till now we have surveyed the type of literature which formed a link between the legacy of late antiquity and the new civilization of the West. We must admit that important representatives of the Carolingian revival of letters were mainly concerned with continuing this compilatory work by shaping the traditional lore of learning into textbooks for monastic and cathedral schools. But the question remains, whether such activities represented the whole intellectual achievement of the period. It has been shown in an earlier chapter by P. Sheldon-Williams that John Eriugena brought about a genuine renewal of Greek speculation in the ninth century, and there is no doubt that by this achievement he established himself as the first in the great sequence of medieval thinkers. His teaching and writing took place during the years 845–70, that means at a time when Carolingian society, in which institutions of learning had formed a vital element, dissolved under the impact of barbaric invasions and internal disintegration. This chronological paradox could perhaps be explained by Hegel's saying about the owl of Minerva, whose flight starts at dusk. But by doing so we should accept the assumption of a theory of history according to which the earlier stages of a civilization produce all the tendencies and impulses which finally find their expression in the conceptual language of philosophy. The course of the ninth century does not offer a genuine proof of the deductions of this idealistic system, nor would its author have sought such confirmation within this period. But nevertheless we can trace preparatory movements of thought since the time of Charlemagne, which made the work of the philosopher at his grandson's court possible.

Approaches to the study of Islamic philosophy

It appears premature, at the present time, to embark on a history of Islamic philosophy in the Middle Ages. Too many of the basic facts are still unknown. New texts are constantly being discovered. Not all the manuscripts known are available in critical editions, or indeed published at all. Very few commentaries of any standing exist and scarcely any monographs on essential topics. Very few texts—apart from those translated centuries ago into medieval Latin—can be read in translation. It would be of some use, it is true, to survey the information available at present, to list the main facts which have been established beyond doubt and to show where future work should start and which are the most urgent tasks. But this would scarcely agree with the purpose of the present publication. It seems to be more appropriate to discuss the essence of what the Muslims called ‘philosophy’ (falsafa), to explain how, on one side, it depends on Greek thought as taught in the philosophical schools in the later centuries of the Roman Empire, and how on the other side it answers the needs and questions of a new and different world—whose inhabitants speak a different language, Arabic, and adhere neither to the religion of classical Greece nor to Christianity which had taken its place, but follow a Hebraic religion of a new type, Islam. I shall, therefore, confine myself to a minimum of indispensable general facts, so as to concentrate mainly on giving a fuller picture of one outstanding early Muslim philosopher, al-Fārābī, with a view to trying to indicate how and why philosophy never succeeded in reaching in the Islamic world the position which it had maintained in the ancient world for more than a thousand years.

Life and writings: political philosophy

We know next to nothing about al-Fārābī's personal life. He preferred to be remembered by his work alone. He did not write an apologia pro vita sua, as Plato had done in antiquity and al-Rāzī among the Muslims and al-Ghazzālī after him, who described his own conversion to mysticism. Nor did he compose an autobiography for the use of a close pupil, like Avicenna, nor did any of his intimates record significant details of his life, as Porphyry had done in the case of his master Plotinus. The salient facts we have are these: al-Fārābī spent the greater part of his life in the capital of the Abbāsid caliphate, Baghdād, where he had come from his birthplace in a Turkish district of Transoxania; during his later years he stayed at the court of a minor Shi'ite ruler in Aleppo. He is supposed to have died as an old man a.d. 950.

Many of al-Fārābī's writings survived and were studied in the East until recent times. He wrote numerous elementary introductions to philosophical topics—like the later Greek treatises composed for beginners (τοις εισαγομενοις). Since he did not address a sophisticated audience which had been imbued with Greek philosophy for centuries, these treatises became more popular than we would be inclined to expect. He also wrote many monographs on special questions, as for instance on the One and the Intellect, on dreams and on various kinds of political associations, such works, apparently, being meant as preliminaries for more comprehensive studies. In addition, he composed commentaries on Aristotle's lecture courses in which he followed the late Greek way of interpreting Aristotle—which he knew from translations—without a gap.

Origen was born about 184–5 at Alexandria, probably of Christian parents (Porphyry and Eusebius contradict one another on this point). When he was nearly seventeen his father was martyred in the persecution of Severus in 202/3, and the event left a deep mark on Origen's mind. He always writes with an impassioned sense of belonging to a church called to fearless martyrdom and resistance to all compromise with the world which ever threatens it at least as much by the infiltration of merely nominal belief as by external attack and persecution. With this attitude there goes a strongly world-denying strain of personal detachment and ascetic self-discipline, symbolized in the story, told by Eusebius from hearsay and possibly true, that in the zeal of youth Origen took literally Matt. xix. 12 and castrated himself. He lived on the minimum of food and sleep, and took seriously the gospel counsel of poverty.

For a time he studied Greek philosophy in the lecture room of Ammonius Saccas, with whom Plotinus was later to study for eleven years. Ammonius is a mysterious figure. All we know of him probably comes directly or indirectly from Porphyry who describes in his life of Plotinus how Ammonius' esoteric teaching fired Plotinus with a (typically Neopythagorean) desire to investigate the antique wisdom of Persian and Indian sages. But it is a forlorn and foolish undertaking to attempt a reconstruction of Ammonius' metaphysical doctrines by looking for synoptic elements common to Origen and Plotinus. It is impossible to determine what, if anything, Origen really drew from Ammonius. What is certain is that Origen possessed an exhaustive comprehension of the debates of the Greek schools and that to his contemporaries he stood out as an intellectual prodigy.

Antiochus and other Platonists of the first century B.C.

Speusippus, Xenocrates, Polemo, and Crates were the successive heads of the Academy. It seems that the successor of Crates, Arcesilaus (fourth/third century), completely changed its character, teaching a kind of non-dogmatic, Socratic, in some sense of the word, sceptical Platonism. This sceptical phase (it continued under Carneades and Philo of Larissa, first century B.C.) seems to have exercised very little influence on later Platonists. A return to dogmatism, from which Platonists from then on never deviated, was initiated by Philo's successor, Antiochus of Ascalon (b. c. 130-120, d. c. 68 B.C.), one of Cicero's teachers. Convinced that the Stoic philosophy was essentially derived from the Old Academy, that Aristotle, in at least one phase of his activity, was a Platonist, and that the Peripatos (which, according to him, originated only after the death of Speusippus), though it modified particularly Plato's ethics, was essentially identical with the Academy, Antiochus incorporated many of their teachings in his own system; and this eclecticism, according to many scholars, paved the way for the Neoplatonic one. But it does not seem that he had any use for the Platonic Two-opposite-principles doctrine. In other words, his return to the Academy did not mean that he returned to all of its teachings.

Where did he stand on the theory of ideas? Speusippus, in some way Xenocrates, and Aristotle had at a certain moment of their careers abandoned it. But Antiochus blames Aristotle for having ‘weakened’ it, and indeed seems to have adopted it. But he did so with considerable modifications. First of all, as he denied any radical difference between intelligence and the senses (despite 30—1 with its assertion that only mens is rerum index, because only mens can perceive ideas; see Lucullus 30: mens ipsa sensus), obviously ideas could not retain their paramount importance3 nor their transcendent status despite the fact that their knowledge was still considered the prerogative of intelligence.

The history of Christian philosophy begins not with a Christian but with a Jew, Philo of Alexandria, elder contemporary of St Paul. He was born probably about 25 B.C. and was dead by a.d. 50. Unyielding in meticulous observance of the Mosaic law as the infallibly revealed will of God not only for the chosen people but also for Gentile proselytes (for whose edification some of his writing is directed), Philo is also fully hellenized, presenting a very Greek face to the world. Hebrew he knew imperfectly if at all. His Bible is the Greek Old Testament, in which the Pentateuch towers in authority above the rest; and his belief that the Septuagint translation was divinely inspired relieved him of any need or responsibility to refer to the original text.

Judaism had come into violent conflict with ‘Hellenism’ at the time of the Maccabean struggle which saved Israel from the destruction of its distinctiveness. Monotheistic Jews could never accept a syncretism which identified Yahweh with Zeus. Yet neither could they turn their back on Hellenism and devote themselves to their private pieties in a mood of nationalistic particularism. For Judaism was a missionary religion, and the ancient prophetic vision of Israel's call to be a light to lighten the Gentiles precluded isolationism, even if this had been a practical possibility, which it was not. The Jews were dispersed through the Mediterranean world. Their language and culture became Greek through and through, and well-to-do Jewish parents (like Philo's) provided their sons with a liberal education under Greek tutors.

Introduction

Born in Constantinople c. 580, Maximus was thirty when Stephen of Byzantium became director of studies at the Imperial Academy and taught, among other things, the philosophies of Plato and Aristotle; but whether he was educated there or at the Patriarchal Academy, he would have found already established the curriculum which Stephen inherited; for since the time of Leontius an Aristotelian renaissance had been underway, and the two philosophies were taught side by side. Leontius himself shows the effects of this programme, and they are to be seen again in Maximus.

Maximus, however, was closer in temperament to the Cappadocians and the ps.-Dionysius, and his achievement was to present doctrines that were basically theirs in terms of the Aristotelian logic which was more congenial to the intellectual temper of the time, and which, by rationalizing without rejecting their mysticism, rendered it less susceptible to misinterpretation. The universe of Maximus is that of the ps.-Dionysius with a place found in it for the anthropology of St Gregory of Nyssa. The rigid formularies of the one are quickened by the historicism and dynamism of the other, a synthesis made possible by the critical examination to which the philosophers who preceded them had subjected the Aristotelian theories of time and eternity, motion and rest.

It is still a triadic universe, but the triad upon which it is constructed is no longer defined in the Plotinian and Procline terms of monê—proodos—epistrophê, but as Being, Power, and Act (ουσια—δυναμις—ενεργεια). This terminology may be described as Porphyrian, since Porphyry is the first known to have referred to this triad, but Maximus is the first to explain it fully.

General

The significance of some doctrines of Posidonius and of Seneca for the development of Neoplatonism has been indicated. But these doctrines concern only details, and the problem remains to what extent Stoicism at large contributed to Neoplatonism.

The Stoic system can be interpreted in two ways. We see in it either a ‘mundanization’ and a materialization of the divine, or, on the contrary, a divinization and spiritualization of matter. Nothing exhibits this ambiguity better than the relation between determinism (heimarmenê) and providence (pronoia) in the Stoic system. Strict determinism seems to leave no place for providence in any genuine sense of the word. But the Stoa tried to identify the two. The same ambiguity is exhibited in one of the central concepts of the Stoa, the spermatic ratio (pattern). The adjective has materialistic connotations, the noun spiritualistic ones. The strict immanentism of the Stoa can be taken to assert either the divine character of the cosmos or the strictly mundane character of the divine.

Like all monistic and deterministic systems which at the same time profess some kind of prescriptive ethics, Stoicism must try to find some place for freedom of the will (mostly, the formula will be accepted that we are free, because we can do whatever we want, but determined, because we must want what we want), some meaningful discrimination between good and evil, some possibility of distinguishing between ‘is’ and ‘ought’. Whether any of this can be done is doubtful..

St Basil of Caesarea (c. 330–79)

The Cappadocians inherited the Alexandrian Gnosis through Origen, though each departed from the position of their master, St Basil most of all. He was more interested in the moral and pastoral than in the philosophical implications of the Faith, distrusted allegory, and clung to the literal interpretation of Scripture, to which the pagan learning was to supply rational corroboration as required rather than combine with it to form a synthesis. Therefore, as was to be the case with the Aristotelian Christians, he made greater use of the physics of the pagans than of their metaphysics, and in his Homilies on the Hexaëmeron, intended as a scientific defence of the Mosaic account of creation, he drew chiefly on the current cosmology, meteorology, botany, astronomy and natural history.

As a consequence, the Christian theory of creation assumed certain pagan features, of which the most important were the implied identification of the Platonic Demiurge with Yahweh, the Aristotelian division of the universe into the supralunar and sublunar spheres, and the notion of a universal harmony (συμπαθεια): ‘Although the totality of the universe is composed of dissimilar parts, he binds it together by an indissoluble law of friendship into one communion and harmony, so that even the parts that from the positions they occupy seem most distant from one another are yet shown to be united by the universal sumpatheia.’

Nature is the work of God, who created her in time, or rather created time in the process of creating her. Matter is a part of creation, for if it were uncreated God would have been dependent upon it for bringing his plan to fruition; and if matter were independent of God there would not be that reciprocity between agent and patient which is everywhere apparent.