by Ulf Wolf
He then combined this Platonic philosophy with the Christian concept of a personal God who created the world and predestined its course, and with the doctrine of humanity’s fall, requiring divine intervention through incarnation in Christ.
Augustine also attempted to gain a rational understanding of the relation between divine predestination and human freedom—which, of course, constitutes an inherent contradiction—and of the existence of evil in a world created by a perfect and all-powerful God.
He never really achieved his goal, and late in life Augustine arrived at a rather pessimistic view about original sin, grace, and predestination: the ultimate fates of humans, he decided, are predetermined by God in the sense that some people are granted divine grace to enter heaven and others are not, and human actions and choices cannot explain the fates of individuals.
Augustine conceived of history as a dramatic struggle between the good in humanity, as expressed in loyalty to the “City of God,” or community of saints, and the evil in humanity, as embodied in the earthly city with its material values. This led to his rather pessimistic view of human life, which asserted that happiness is impossible in the world of the living, where even with good fortune, which is rare, awareness of approaching death would mar any tendency toward satisfaction.
He further believed that without the religious virtues of faith, hope, and charity, which require divine grace to be attained, a person cannot develop the natural virtues of courage, justice, temperance, and wisdom.
Pessimistic or not, these views held sway throughout the Middle Ages and became even more important during the Reformation of the 16th century when it inspired the doctrine of predestination put forth by Protestant theologian John Calvin.
Other Medieval Philosophers
Saint Augustine was so influential, that one can only map a few major contributors to Western thought in the centuries following his death in 430 CE.
One such contributor, however, was the 6th-century Roman statesman Boethius who revived interest in Greek and Roman philosophy, particularly in Aristotle’s logic and metaphysics.
Another contributor was the 9th century Irish monk John Erigena, who developed a pantheistic interpretation of Christianity, identifying the divine Trinity with the One, Logos, and World Soul of Neoplatonism and maintained that both faith and reason are necessary to achieve the ecstatic union with God.
Perhaps even more significant to the eventual rising of a new Western philosophy was the early 11th-century Muslim philosopher Avicenna. His work modified the Aristotelian metaphysics by introducing a distinction between essence (the fundamental qualities that make a thing what it is—the tree-ness of a tree, for example) and existence (being, or living reality). He also demonstrated how it is possible to combine the biblical view of God with Aristotle’s philosophical system.
Scholasticism
As a result of the now increasing contact between different parts of the Western world and the general reawakening of cultural interests that later culminated in the Renaissance, the 11th century began to see a revival of philosophical thought.
The works of Plato, Aristotle, and other Greek thinkers were translated by Arab scholars and brought to the attention of Muslim, Jewish, and Christian philosophers in Western Europe who then interpreted and clarified these writings in an effort to reconcile philosophy with religious faith and to provide rational grounds for their religious beliefs. Their labors established the foundations of Scholasticism.
Scholastic thought, however, was less interested in discovering new facts and principles than in logically demonstrating the truth of existing beliefs, a concern that—while not unearthing new thought—did lead to important developments in logic as well as theology.
Saint Anselm
Saint Anselm of Canterbury, for one, adopted Saint Augustine’s view of a complementary relation between faith and reason and attempted to combine Platonism with Christian theology.
Supporting the Platonic theory of Ideas, Anselm argued in favor of separate existences of universals, or common properties of things—the properties Avicenna had called the essences that established logical realism—the view that universals and other ideas exist independently of our awareness of them, which went on to be one of the most hotly disputed issues of medieval philosophy.
Roscelin
The contrary view, known as nominalism, was formulated by the Scholastic philosopher Roscelin, who maintained that only individual, solid objects exist and that the universals, whether called essences, forms, or ideas, under which particular things are classified, constitute mere sounds or names, rather than intangible but actual substances.
But when went on to argue that the Trinity must consist of three separate beings, his views were deemed heretical and he was forced to recant in 1092.
Peter Abelard
The 12th century French Scholastic theologian Peter Abelard, whose tragic love affair with Heloise is one of the most memorable romantic stories in medieval history, proposed a compromise between realism and nominalism known as conceptualism.
According to Abelard’s view, universals exist in particular things as properties and outside of things as concepts in the mind. Abelard maintained that revealed religion—religion based on divine revelation, or the word of God—must be justified by reason.
Averroes
The Spanish-Arab jurist and physician Averroes, with his lucid commentary on the works of Aristotle, made Aristotelian science and philosophy a powerful influence on medieval thought.
As a result, he earned himself the title “the Commentator” among the many Scholastics who came to regard Aristotle as “the Philosopher.”
Averroes mainly strived to overcome the contradictions between Aristotelian philosophy and revealed religion by distinguishing between two separate systems of truth, a scientific body of truths based on reason and a religious body of truths based on revelation.
However, his view that reason takes precedence over religion led to his exile in 1195.
Even so, Averroes’s so-called double-truth doctrine was to influence many a Muslim, Jewish, and Christian philosopher; it was rejected, however, by many others, and became another hotly debated issue in medieval philosophy.
Maimonides
The Jewish rabbi and physician Moses Maimonides—one of the most noted figures in Judaic thought—followed his contemporary Averroes in attempting to unite Aristotelian science with religion but he rejected the view that both of the two conflicting systems of ideas could be true.
In his late 12th century Guide for the Perplexed, Maimonides attempted to provide a rational explanation of Judaic doctrine and defended religious beliefs (such as the belief in the creation of the world) that conflicted with Aristotelian science only when he was convinced that decisive evidence was lacking on either side.
Heretics and Saints
While Abelard, Averroes, and Maimonides were each accused of blasphemy because their views conflicted with religious beliefs of the time, the 13th century did see a string of philosophers who would later become declared saints by the church.
The Italian Scholastic philosopher Saint Bonaventure, for one, combined Platonic and Aristotelian principles and introduced the concept of substantial form, or nonmaterial substance, to account for the immortality of the soul.
Bonaventure’s views leaned toward pantheistic mysticism in making the aim of philosophy the ecstatic union with God—mirroring the goals of Plotinus.
The 13th-century German Scholastic philosopher Saint Albertus Magnus was the first Christian philosopher to endorse and interpret the entire system of Aristotelian thought.
He studied and admired the writings of both the Muslim and Jewish Aristotelians and wrote commentaries on Aristotle in which he attempted to reconcile Aristotle’s thought with Christian teachings. He also took a great interest in the natural science of his day.
The 13th-century English monk Roger Bacon, one of the first Scholastics to take an interest in experimental science, realized that a
great deal remained to be learned about nature. He criticized the deductive method of his contemporaries and their reliance on past authority, and called for a new method of inquiry based on controlled observation.
He approached the world by looking afresh rather than attempting to reconcile existing thought systems.
Aquinas
However, most other medieval philosophers pale in comparison to Saint Thomas Aquinas. He was an Italian Dominican monk who studied under Albertus Magnus in Germany.
Aquinas reconciled Aristotelian science with Augustinian theology into a comprehensive system of thought that was to become the authoritative philosophy of the Roman Catholic Church.
He wrote on nearly every known subject in philosophy and science, and his two major works, Summa Theologica and Summa Contra Gentiles, in which he presents a persuasive and systematic structure of ideas, still constitute a powerful influence on Western thought.
His writings reflect the renewed interest in reason, nature, and worldly happiness of his contemporaries as well as his own interest in religious faith and concern about salvation.
One of Aquinas’ most influential studies dealt with the properties of God, where he determined such attributes as omnipotence, omniscience, eternity, and benevolence.
He also surmised a new relationship between faith and reason, arguing against the Averroists view that the truths of faith and the truths of reason cannot conflict. Rather, Aquinas proposed, faith and reason apply to different realms.
Thus he held that the truths of natural science and philosophy are discovered by reasoning from observed facts and experience, whereas the tenets of revealed religion, such as the doctrine of the Trinity, the creation of the world, and other articles of Christian dogma, are all—though not inconsistent with reason, he claimed—beyond rational comprehension, and must be accepted on faith.
Aquinas’ metaphysics, theory of knowledge, ethics, and politics were derived mainly from Aristotle, but he also incorporated the Augustinian virtues of faith, hope, and charity and the goal of eternal salvation through grace with Aristotle’s views on ethics (and its goal of worldly happiness).
Medieval Philosophy After Aquinas
Of course, Aquinas was not without his subsequent critics, and the most important of those were the 13th-century Scottish theologian John Duns Scotus and 14th-century English Scholastic William of Ockham.
Duns Scotus developed an intricate and highly technical system of logic and metaphysics, but due to the fanaticism of his followers, ironically, the name Duns later became a symbol of stupidity in the English word dunce.
Scotus outright rejected the attempt of Aquinas to reconcile rational philosophy with revealed religion. He held, through his modified version of Averroes’ double-truth doctrine, that all religious beliefs are matters of faith, except for the belief in the existence of God, which he regarded as logically provable.
Against the view of Aquinas that God acts in accordance with his rational nature, Scotus argued that the divine will appeared prior, and ranks senior to the divine intellect and so creates, rather than follows, the laws of nature and morality. By this reasoning he implied a different notion of free will than that of Aquinas.
On the issue of universals, Scotus rationalized a new compromise between realism and nominalism where he accounted for the difference between individual objects and the forms that these objects exemplify as a logical rather than a real distinction.
William of Ockham was very critical of the Scholastic belief in intangible, invisible things such as forms, essences, and universals. He agreed with Roscelin and held that such abstract entities were nothing more than references of words to other words rather than to actual things.
His now famous rule, still known as Ockham’s Razor—which said that one should not assume the existence of more things than are logically necessary—became a fundamental principle of modern science and philosophy.
The 15th and 16th-century revival of scientific interest in nature was accompanied by a tendency toward pantheistic mysticism—that is, the notion that God exists in all things.
The Roman Catholic prelate Nicholas of Cusa anticipated the work of the Polish astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus in his suggestion that the Earth moved around the Sun, thus displacing humanity from the center of the universe. He also conceived of the universe as infinite and identical with God.
The Italian philosopher Giordano Bruno, who similarly identified the universe with God, developed the philosophical implications of the Copernican theory. Bruno’s philosophy influenced subsequent intellectual forces that led to the rise of modern science and to the Reformation.
He was burned at the stake for his efforts.
Modern Philosophy
When we talk of “modern” philosophy, we mean to distinguish a new historic era both from antiquity and from the intervening Middle Ages.
Many things had occurred in the intellectual, religious, political, and social life of Europe to steer the 16th- and 17th-century thinkers in genuinely new directions.
There were the explorations of the world; the Protestant Reformation, with its emphasis on individual faith rather than blind acceptance of dogma. There was the rise of a new commercial urban society (the birth of the middle class), and there was the habit of the Renaissance to develop new ideas in just about all areas of culture.
All of this kindled the development of a new philosophical worldview.
The New View
The medieval view of the world as a hierarchical order of beings created and governed by God was slowly but surely supplanted by the mechanistic image of the world, and the universe, as a vast machine the parts of which move in accordance with strict physical laws (rather than by the whim of God), and in effect blindly: without purpose or will.
In this new view of the universe, science steadily gained prominence over spirituality, and the surrounding physical world that we observe and live in would receive as much, if not more, attention than the world (if any) yet to come.
This new philosophy no longer saw human life as preparation for salvation to come, but rather as the agency through which to satisfy natural desires.
Political institutions and ethical principles ceased to be regarded as reflections of divine command and instead came to be seen as practical devices created by humans, again to gain happiness in this world rather than the next.
To this new philosophy, the human mind itself seemed an inexhaustible reality on a par with the physical reality of matter and modern philosophers now had the task of defining more clearly the essence of mind and of matter, and of reasoning and the relation between the two.
Individuals ought no longer to blindly swallow existing dogma, but ought to look and see for themselves, they believed. And rather than read (and blindly believe) the Bible, they should study the “book of Nature,” and in every case search for the truth with their own reason.
Ever since the 16th century, modern philosophy has been an ongoing interaction between systems of thought founded on a belief in human thought as the ultimate reality and the systems based on a mechanistic, materialistic interpretation of the universe.
Spirit versus matter.
Mechanism and Materialism
In this new philosophical climate, postulates and intuition took a back seat and experience and reason assumed the sole standards of truth.
The first great spokesman for this new breed of philosophy was Francis Bacon (1561-1626), who denounced reliance on authority and verbal argument and criticized Aristotelian logic as useless when it came to seeking and discovering new laws.
Bacon demanded (and developed) a new scientific method based on careful observation and experiment leading to reasoned generalization of the observed (truths), and he was the first to formulate rules for this new method of drawing conclusions, now known as inductive inference.
Although Bacon beat him to it, the work of Italian physicist and astronomer Galileo (1564-1642) was of even greater importance in the de
velopment of this new, scientific, worldview.
Galileo surmised that the best way to formulate, and record scientific experiments and conclusions was to apply the properties and discipline of mathematics when setting down such laws.
He accomplished this by, in essence, creating the science of mechanics, which applied the principles of geometry to the motions of bodies.
So successful was Galileo in applying mechanics to discover and formulate reliable and useful laws of nature, that not only he, but others to follow as well, surmised that nature must, in fact, be designed in accordance with these mechanical laws.
These great 16th- and 17th-century changes engendered two intellectual crises that were to profoundly affect Western civilization. The first was that the decline of Aristotelian science called into question the methods and foundations of his principles, especially since they failed to explain new observations in astronomy.
The second crisis was that science now brought a new attitude toward religion that undermined religious authority and (finally) gave agnostic and atheistic ideas a chance to be heard.
Descartes
René Descartes (1596-1650), a French mathematician, physicist, and philosopher attempted to resolve both crises.
He followed Bacon and Galileo in criticizing existing methods and beliefs, but whereas Bacon had argued for an inductive method based on observed facts, Descartes—a mathematician above all else—made mathematics the model for all science.
Descartes advocated the truth as demonstrated and contained in the “clear and distinct ideas” of reason itself. The advance toward true and full knowledge, he maintained, was only to be made in a progression from one such truth to another, as in mathematical reasoning.