Initiation Into Philosophy From the Fifth Century to the Thirteenth byFaguet, Émile
Philosophy is only an Interpreter of Dogma.
When it is Declared Contrary to Dogma by the Authority of Religion,
it is a Heresy.
Orthodox and Heterodox Interpretations.
Some Independent Philosophers.
DOGMA.--After the invasion of the barbarians, philosophy, like
literature, sought refuge in monasteries and in the schools which prelates
instituted and maintained near them. But the Church does not permit the
free search for truth. The truth has been established by the Fathers of the
Church and fixed by the Councils. Thenceforth the philosophic life, so to
speak, which had never been interrupted, assumed a fresh character. Within
the Church it sheltered--I will not say disguised--itself under the
interpretation of dogma; it became a sort of respectful auxiliary of
theology, and was accordingly called the "handmaid of theology," ancilla
theologiae When emancipated, when departing from dogma, it is a
"heresy," and all the great heresies are nothing else than schools of
philosophy, which is why heresies must come into a history of
philosophy. And at last, but only towards the close of the Middle Ages, lay
thought without disturbing itself about dogma and no longer thinking about
its interpretation, created philosophic doctrines exactly as the
philosophers of antiquity invented them apart from religion, to which they
were either hostile or indifferent.
SCHOLASTICISM: SCOTUS ERIGENA.--The orthodox philosophy of the
Middle Ages was the scholastic. Scholasticism consisted in amassing and in
making known scientific facts and matters of knowledge of which it was
useful for a well-bred man not to be ignorant and for this purpose
encyclopaedias were constructed; on the other hand, it consisted not
precisely in the reconciliation of faith with reason, not precisely and far
less in the submission of faith to the criticism of reason, but in making
faith sensible to reason, as had been the office of the Fathers of the
Church, more especially St. Augustine.
Scotus Erigena, a Scotsman attached to the Palatine Academy of Charles the
Bald, lived in the eleventh century. He was extremely learned. His
philosophy was Platonic, or rather the bent of his mind was Platonic. God
is the absolute Being; He is unnamable, since any name is a delimitation of
the being; He is absolutely and infinitely. As the creator of all
and uncreated, He is the cause per se; as the goal to which all
things tend, He is the supreme end. The human soul is of impenetrable
essence like God Himself; accordingly, it is God in us. We have fallen
through the body and, whilst in the flesh, we can, by virtue and more
especially by the virtue of penitence, raise ourselves to the height of the
angels. The world is the continuous creation of God. It must not be said
that God created the world, but that He creates it; for if He ceased from
sustaining it, the world would no longer exist. God is perpetual creation
and perpetual attraction. He draws all beings to Himself, and in the end He
will have them all in Himself. There is predestination to perfection in
everything.
These theories, some of which, as has been seen, go beyond dogma and form
at least the beginning of heresy, are all impregnated with Platonism,
especially with Neoplatonism, and lead to the supposition that Scotus
Erigena possessed very wide Greek learning.
ARABIAN SCIENCE.--A great literary and philosophical fact in the
eighth century was the invasion of the Arabs. Mahometans successively
invaded Syria, Persia, Africa, and Spain, forming a crescent, the two
points of which touched the two extremities of Europe. Inquisitive and
sagacious pupils of the Greeks in Africa and Asia, they founded everywhere
brilliant universities which rapidly acquired renown (Bagdad, Bassorah,
Cordova, Granada, Seville, Murcia) and brought to Europe a new quota of
science; for instance, all the works of Aristotle, of which Western Europe
possessed practically nothing. Students greedy for knowledge came to learn
from them in Spain; for instance, Gerbert, who developed into a man of
great learning, who taught at Rheims and became Pope. Individually the
Arabs were often great philosophers, and at least the names must be
mentioned of Avicenna (a Neoplatonist of the tenth century) and Averroes
(an Aristotelian of the twelfth century who betrayed tendencies towards
admitting the eternity of nature, and its evolution through its own
initiative during the course of time). Their doctrines were propagated,
and the ancient books which they made known became widely diffused. From
them dates the sway of Aristotle throughout the middle ages.
ST. ANSELM.--St. Anselm, in the eleventh century, a Savoyard, who
was long Abbot of Bec in Normandy and died Archbishop of Canterbury, is one
of the most illustrious doctors of philosophy in the service of theology
that ever lived. "A new St. Augustine" (as he has been called), he starts
from faith to arrive at faith after it has been rendered sensible to
reason. Like St. Augustine he says: "I believe in order to understand"
(well persuaded that if I never believed I should never understand), and he
adds what had been in the thought of St. Augustine: "I understand in order
to believe." St. Anselm proved the existence of God by the most abstract
arguments. For example, "It is necessary to have a cause, one or multiple;
one is God; multiple, it can be derived from one single cause, and that one
cause is God; it can be a particular cause in each thing caused; but then
it is necessary to suppose a personal force which must itself have a cause
and thus we work back to a common cause, that is to say to a single one."
He proved God again by the proof which has remained famous under the name
of the argument of St. Anselm: To conceive God is to prove that He is; the
conception of God is proof of His existence; for every idea has its object;
above all, an idea which has infinity for object takes for granted the
existence of infinity; for all being finite here below, what would give the
idea of infinity to the human mind? Therefore, if the human brain has the
idea of infinity it is because of the existence of infinity. The argument
is perhaps open to difference of opinion, but as proof of a singular vigour
of mind on the part of its author, it is indisputable.
Highly intellectual also is his explanation of the necessity of
redemption. Cur Deus Homo? (the title of one of his works) asked
St. Anselm. Because sin in relation to an infinite God is an infinite
crime. Man, finite and limited in capacity, could therefore never expiate
it. Then what could God do to avenge His honour and to have satisfaction
rendered to Him? He could only make Himself man without ceasing to be God,
in order that as man He should offer to God a reparation to which as God He
would give the character of infinitude. It was therefore absolutely
necessary that at a given moment man should become God, which could only be
done upon the condition that God made Himself man.
REALISTS; NOMINALISTS; CONCEPTUALISTS.--It was in the time of
St. Anselm that there arose the celebrated philosophic quarrel between the
"realists, nominalists, and conceptualists." It is here essential to employ
these technical terms or else not to allude to the dispute at all, because
the strife is above all a war of words. The realists (of whom St. Anselm
was one), said: "The ideas (idea of virtue, idea of sin, idea of greatness,
idea of littleness) are realities; they exist, in a spiritual manner of
course, but they really exist; they are: there is a virtue, a sin, a
greatness, a littleness, a reason, etc. (and this was an exact reminiscence
of the ideas of Plato). It is indeed only the idea, the general, the
universal, which is real, and the particular has only the appearance of
reality. Men do not exist, the individual man does not exist; what exists
is 'man' in general, and individual men are only the appearance of--the
coloured reflections of--the universal man." The nominalists (Roscelin the
Canon of Compiègne, for instance) answered: "No; the general ideas, the
universals as you say, are only names, are only words, emissions of the
voice, labels, if you like, which we place on such and such categories of
facts observed by us; there is no greatness; there are a certain number of
great things, and when we think of them we inscribe this word 'greatness'
on the general idea which we conceive. 'Man' does not exist; there are men
and the word humanity is only a word which to us represents a collective
idea."
Why did the realists cling so to their universals, held to be realities and
the sole realities? For many reasons. If the individual alone be real,
there are not three Persons in the Godhead, there are three Gods and the
unity of God is not real, it is only a word, and God is not real, He is
only an utterance of the voice. If the individual is not real, the Church
is not real; she does not exist, there only exist Christians who possess
freedom of thought and of faith. Now the Church is real and it is not only
desirable that she should be real, but even that she alone should possess
reality and that the individuals constituting her should exist by her and
not by themselves. (This is precisely the doctrine with regard to society
now current among certain philosophers: society exists independently of its
members; it has laws of its own independently of its members; it is a
reality on its own basis; and its members are by it, not it by them, and
therefore they should obey it; M. Durckheim is a "realist.")
ABELARD of Nantes, pupil of the nominalist, William of Champeaux,
learned man, artist, man of letters, an incomparable orator, tried to
effect a conciliation. He said: "The universal is not a reality, certainly;
but it is something more than a simple word; it is a conception of the
mind, which is something more than an utterance of the voice. As conception
of the mind, in fact, it lives with a life which goes beyond the
individual, because it can be common to several individuals to many
individuals, and because in fact it is common to them. The general idea
that I have and which I have communicated to my hearers, and which returns
to me from my hearers, is more than a word since it is a link between my
hearers and myself, and an atmosphere in which I and my hearers live. Is
the Church only to be a word? God forbid that I should say so. She is a
bond between all Christians; she is a general idea common to them all, so
that in her each individual feels himself several, feels himself many;
although it is true that were she not believed in by anyone she would be
nothing." At bottom he was a nominalist, but more subtle, also more
profound and more precise, having a better grasp of what William of
Champeaux had desired to say. He shared in his condemnation.
Apart from the great dispute, his ideas were singularly broad and
bold. Half knowing, half guessing at ancient philosophy, he held it in high
esteem; he found there, because he delighted in finding there, all the
Christian ideas: the one God, the Trinity, the Incarnation, the imputation
of the merits of the saints, original sin; and he found less of a gulf
between ancient philosophy and Christianity than between the Old and the
New Testament (this is because the only Christianity known to Abelard, not
the primitive but that constituted in the fourth century, was profoundly
impregnated with Hellenism). He believed the Holy Ghost to have revealed
Himself to the wise men of antiquity as well as to the Jews and the
Christians, and that virtuous pagans may have been saved. The moral
philosophy of Abelard is very elevated and pure. Our acts proceed from
God; for it is impossible that they should not; but He permits us the
faculty of disobedience "in order that virtue may exist," to which it
tends; for if the tendency to evil did not exist, there would be no
possibility of effort against evil, and if no efforts, then no virtue; God,
who cannot be virtuous since He cannot be tempted by evil, can be virtuous
in man, which is why He leaves him the tendency to evil for him to triumph
over it and be virtuous so that virtue may exist; even if He were Himself
to lead us into temptation, the tendency would still be the same; He would
only lead us into it to give us the opportunity for struggle and victory,
and therefore in order that virtue might exist; the possibility of sin is
the condition of virtue, and in consequence, even in the admission of this
possibility and above all by its admission, God is virtuous.
The bad deed, furthermore, is not the most considerable from the point of
view of guilt; as merit or demerit the intention is worth as much as the
deed and he is criminal who has had the intention to be so (which is
clearly according to the Gospel).
HUGO DE SAINT-VICTOR; RICHARD.--Abelard possessed perhaps the
broadest and greatest mind of the whole of the Middle Ages. After these
famous names must be mentioned Hugo de Saint-Victor, a somewhat obscure
mystic of German origin; and the not less mystical Richard, who, thoroughly
persuaded that God is not attained by reason but by feeling, taught
exaltation to Him by detachment from self and by six degrees: renunciation,
elevation, impulsion, precipitation, ecstasy, and absorption.
