A History of Western Philosophy

by Bertrand Russell

  There are three ways of knowing God: by reason, by revelation, and by intuition of things previously known only by revelation. Of the third way, however, he says almost nothing. A writer inclined to mysticism would have said more of it than of either of the others, but Aquinas’s temperament is ratiocinative rather than mystical.

  The Greek Church is blamed for denying the double procession of the Holy Ghost and the supremacy of the Pope. We are warned that, although Christ was conceived of the Holy Ghost, we must not suppose that He was the son of the Holy Ghost according to the flesh.

  The sacraments are valid even when dispensed by wicked ministers. This was an important point in Church doctrine. Very many priests lived in mortal sin, and pious people feared that such priests could not administer the sacraments. This was awkward; no one could know if he was really married, or if he had received valid absolution. It led to heresy and schism, since the puritanically minded sought to establish a separate priesthood of more impeccable virtue. The Church, in consequence, was obliged to assert with great emphasis that sin in a priest did not incapacitate him for the performance of his functions.

  One of the last questions discussed is the resurrection of the body. Here, as elsewhere, Aquinas states very fairly the arguments that have been brought against orthodox position. One of these, at first sight, offers great difficulties. What is to happen, asks the Saint, to a man who never, throughout his life, ate anything but human flesh, and whose parents did likewise? It would seem unfair to his victims that they should be deprived of their bodies at the last day as a consequence of his greed; yet, if not, what will be left to make up his body? I am happy to say that this difficulty, which might at first sight seem insuperable, is triumphantly met. The identity of the body, Saint Thomas points out, is not dependent on the persistence of the same material particles; during life, by the processes of eating and digesting, the matter composing the body undergoes perpetual change. The cannibal may, therefore, receive the same body at the resurrection, even if it is not composed of the same matter as was in his body when he died. With this comforting thought we may end our abstract of the Summa contra Gentiles.

  In its general outlines, the philosophy of Aquinas agrees with that of Aristotle, and will be accepted or rejected by a reader in the measure in which he accepts or rejects the philosophy of the Stagyrite. The originality of Aquinas is shown in his adaptation of Aristotle to Christian dogma, with a minimum of alteration. In his day he was considered a bold innovator; even after his death many of his doctrines were condemned by the universities of Paris and Oxford. He was even more remarkable for systematizing than for originality. Even if every one of his doctrines were mistaken, the Summa would remain an imposing intellectual edifice. When he wishes to refute some doctrine, he states it first, often with great force, and almost always with an attempt at fairness. The sharpness and clarity with which he distinguishes arguments derived from reason and arguments derived from revelation are admirable. He knows Aristotle well, and understands him thoroughly, which cannot be said of any earlier Catholic philosopher.

  These merits, however, seem scarcely sufficient to justify his immense reputation. The appeal to reason is, in a sense, insincere, since the conclusion to be reached is fixed in advance. Take, for example, the indissolubility of marriage. This is advocated on the ground that the father is useful in the education of the children, (a) because he is more rational than the mother, (b) because, being stronger, he is better able to inflict physical punishment. A modern educator might retort (a) that there is no reason to suppose men in general more rational than women, (b) that the sort of punishment that requires great physical strength is not desirable in education. He might go on to point out that fathers, in the modern world, have scarcely any part in education. But no follower of Saint Thomas would, on that account, cease to believe in lifelong monogamy, because the real grounds of belief are not those which are alleged.

  Or take again the arguments professing to prove the existence of God. All of these, except the one from teleology in lifeless things, depend upon the supposed impossibility of a series having no first term. Every mathematician knows that there is no such impossibility; the series of negative integers ending with minus one is an instance to the contrary. But here again no Catholic is likely to abandon belief in God even if he becomes convinced that Saint Thomas’s arguments are bad; he will invent other arguments, or take refuge in revelation.

  The contentions that God’s essence and existence are one and the same, that God is His own goodness, His own power, and so on, suggest a confusion, found in Plato, but supposed to have been avoided by Aristotle, between the manner of being of particulars and the manner of being of universals. God’s essence is, one must suppose, of the nature of universals, while His existence is not. It is not easy to state this difficulty satisfactorily, since it occurs within a logic that can no longer be accepted. But it points clearly to some kind of syntactical confusion, without which much of the argumentation about God would lose its plausibility.

  There is little of the true philosophic spirit in Aquinas. He does not, like the Platonic Socrates, set out to follow wherever the argument may lead. He is not engaged in an inquiry, the result of which it is impossible to know in advance. Before he begins to philosophize, he already knows the truth; it is declared in the Catholic faith. If he can find apparently rational arguments for some parts of the faith, so much the better; if he cannot, he need only fall back on revelation. The finding of arguments for a conclusion given in advance is not philosophy, but special pleading. I cannot, therefore, feel that he deserves to be put on a level with the best philosophers either of Greece or of modern times.

  CHAPTER XIV

  Franciscan Schoolmen

  FRANCISCANS, on the whole, were less impeccably orthodox than Dominicans. Between the two orders there was keen rivalry, and the Franciscans were not inclined to accept the authority of Saint Thomas. The three most important of Franciscan philosophers were Roger Bacon, Duns Scotus, and William of Occam. Saint Bonaventura and Matthew of Aquasparta also call for notice.

  Roger Bacon (ca. 1214-ca. 1294) was not greatly admired in his own day, but in modern times has been praised far beyond his deserts. He was not so much a philosopher, in the narrow sense, as a man of universal learning with a passion for mathematics and science. Science, in his day, was mixed up with alchemy, and thought to be mixed up with black magic; Bacon was constantly getting into trouble through being suspected of heresy and magic. In 1257, Saint Bonaventura, the General of the Franciscan order, placed him under surveillance in Paris, and forbade him to publish. Nevertheless, while this prohibition was still in force, the papal legate in England, Guy de Foulques, commanded him, contrary orders notwithstanding, to write out his philosophy for the benefit of the Pope. He therefore produced in a very short time three books, Opus Majus, Opus Minus, and Opus Tertium. These seem to have produced a good impression, and in 1268 he was allowed to return to Oxford, from which he had been removed to a sort of imprisonment in Paris. However, nothing could teach him caution. He made a practice of contemptuous criticism of all the most learned of his contemporaries; in particular, he maintained that the translators from Greek and Arabic were grossly incompetent. In 1271, he wrote a book called Compendium Studii Philosophiae, in which he attacked clerical ignorance. This did nothing to add to his popularity among his colleagues, and in 1278 his books were condemned by the General of the order, and he was put in prison for fourteen years. In 1292 he was liberated, but died not long afterwards.

  He was encyclopædic in his learning, but not systematic. Unlike most philosophers of the time, he valued experiment highly, and illustrated its importance by the theory of the rainbow. He wrote well on geography; Columbus read this part of his work, and was influenced by it. He was a good mathematician; he quotes the sixth and ninth books of Euclid. He treated of perspective, following Arabic sources. Logic he thought a useless study; alchemy, on the other hand, he valued enough to write on it.
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  To give an idea of his scope and method, I will summarize some parts of the Opus Majus.

  There are, he says, four causes of ignorance: First, the example of frail and unsuitable authority. (The work being written for the Pope, he is careful to say that this does not include the Church.) Second, the influence of custom. Third, the opinion of the unlearned crowd. (This, one gathers, includes all his contemporaries except himself.) Fourth, the concealment of one’s ignorance in a display of apparent wisdom. From these four plagues, of which the fourth is the worst, spring all human evils.

  In supporting an opinion, it is a mistake to argue from the wisdom of our ancestors, or from custom, or from common belief. In support of his view he quotes Seneca, Cicero, Avicenna, Averroes, Adelard of Bath, Saint Jerome, and Saint John Chrysostom. These authorities, he seems to think, suffice to prove that one should not respect authority.

  His respect for Aristotle is great, but not unbounded. “Only Aristotle, together with his followers, has been called philosopher in the judgement of all wise men.” Like almost all his contemporaries, he uses the designation “The Philosopher” when he speaks of Aristotle, but even the Stagyrite, we are told, did not come to the limit of human wisdom. After him, Avicenna was “the prince and leader of philosophy,” though he did not fully understand the rainbow, because he did not recognize its final cause, which, according to Genesis, is the dissipation of aqueous vapour. (Nevertheless, when Bacon comes to treat of the rainbow, he quotes Avicenna with great admiration.) Every now and then he says something that has a flavour of orthodoxy, such as that the only perfect wisdom is in the Scriptures, as explained by canon law and philosophy. But he sounds more sincere when he says that there is no objection to getting knowledge from the heathen; in addition to Avicenna and Averroes, he quotes Alfarabi* very often, and Albumazar† and others from time to time. Albumazar is quoted to prove that mathematics was known before the Flood and by Noah and his sons; this, I suppose, is a sample of what we may learn from infidels. Bacon praises mathematics as the sole (unrevealed) source of certitude, and as needed for astronomy and astrology.

  Bacon follows Averroes in holding that the active intellect is a substance separated from the soul in essence. He quotes various eminent divines, among them Grosseteste, bishop of Lincoln, as also supporting this opinion, which is contrary to that of Saint Thomas. Apparently contrary passages in Aristotle, he says, are due to mistranslation. He does not quote Plato at first hand, but at second hand through Cicero, or at third hand through the Arabs on Porphyry. Not that he has much respect for Porphyry, whose doctrine on universals he calls “childish.”

  In modern times Bacon has been praised because he valued experiment, as a source of knowledge, more than argument. Certainly his interests and his way of dealing with subjects are very different from those of the typical scholastics. His encyclopædic tendencies are like those of the Arabic writers, who evidently influenced him more profoundly than they did most other Christian philosophers. They, like him, were interested in science, and believed in magic and astrology, whereas Christians thought magic wicked and astrology a delusion. He is astonishing because he differs so widely from other medieval Christian philosophers, but he had little influence in his own time, and was not, to my mind, so scientific as is sometimes thought. English writers used to say that he invented gunpowder, but this, of course, is untrue.

  Saint Bonaventura (1221-1274), who, as General of the Franciscan order, forbade Bacon to publish, was a man of a totally different kind. He belonged to the tradition of Saint Anselm, whose ontological argument he upheld. He saw in the new Aristotelianism a fundamental opposition to Christianity. He believed in Platonic ideas, which, however, only God knows perfectly. In his writings Augustine is quoted constantly, but one finds no quotations from Arabs, and few from pagan antiquity.

  Matthew of Aquasparta (ca. 1235-1302) was a follower of Bonaventura, but less untouched by the new philosophy. He was a Franciscan, and became a cardinal; he opposed Saint Thomas from an Augustinian point of view. But to him Aristotle has become “The Philosopher”; he is quoted constantly. Avicenna is frequently mentioned; Saint Anselm is quoted with respect, as is the pseudo-Dionysius; but the chief authority is Saint Augustine We must, he says, find a middle way between Plato and Aristotle. Plato’s ideas are “utterly erroneous”; they establish wisdom, but not knowledge. On the other hand, Aristotle is also wrong; he establishes knowledge, but not wisdom. Our knowledge—so it is concluded—is caused by both lower and higher things, by external objects and ideal reasons.

  Duns Scotus (ca. 1270-1308) carried on the Franciscan controversy with Aquinas. He was born in Scotland or Ulster, became a Franciscan at Oxford, and spent his later years at Paris. Against Saint Thomas, he defended the Immaculate Conception, and in this the University of Paris, and ultimately the whole Catholic Church, agreed with him. He is Augustinian, but in a less extreme form than Bonaventura, or even Matthew of Aquasparta; his differences from Saint Thomas, like theirs, come of a larger admixture of Platonism (via Augustine) in his philosophy.

  He discusses, for example, the question “Whether any sure and pure truth can be known naturally by the understanding of the wayfarer without the special illumination of the uncreated light?” And he argues that it cannot. He supports this view, in his opening argument, solely by quotations from Saint Augustine; the only difficulty he finds is Romans I, 20: “The invisible things of God, understood by means of those things that have been made, are clearly comprehended from the creation of the world.”

  Duns Scotus was a moderate realist. He believed in free will, and had leanings towards Pelagianism. He held that being is no different from essence. He was mainly interested in evidence, i.e., the kinds of things that can be known without proof. Of these there are three kinds: (1) principles known by themselves, (2) things known by experience, (3) our own actions. But without divine illumination we can know nothing.

  Most Franciscans followed Duns Scotus rather than Aquinas.

  Duns Scotus held that, since there is no difference between being and essence, the “principle of individuation”—i.e., that which makes one thing not identical with another—must be form, not matter. The “principle of individuation” was one of the important problems of the scholastic philosophy. In various forms, it has remained a problem to the present day. Without reference to any particular author, we may perhaps state the problem as follows.

  Among the properties of individual things, some are essential, others accidental; the accidental properties of a thing are those it can lose without losing its identity—such as wearing a hat, if you are a man. The question now arises: given two individual things belonging to the same species, do they always differ in essence, or is it possible for the essence to be exactly the same in both? Saint Thomas holds the latter view as regards material substances, the former as regards those that are immaterial. Duns Scotus holds that there are always differences of essence between two different individual things. The view of Saint Thomas depends upon the theory that pure matter consists of undifferentiated parts, which are distinguished solely by difference of position in space. Thus a person, consisting of mind and body, may differ physically from another person solely by the spatial position of his body. (This might happen with identical twins, theoretically.) Duns Scotus, on the other hand, holds that if things are distinct, they must be distinguished by some qualitative difference. This view, clearly, is nearer to Platonism than is that of Saint Thomas.

  Various stages have to be traversed before we can state this problem in modern terms. The first step, which was taken by Leibniz, was to get rid of the distinction between essential and accidental properties, which, like many that the scholastics took over from Aristotle, turns out to be unreal as soon as we attempt to state it carefully. We thus have, instead of “essence,” “all the propositions that are true of the thing in question.” (In general, however, spatial and temporal position would still be excluded.) Leibniz contends that it is impossible for
two things to be exactly alike in this sense; this is his principle of the “identity of indiscernibles.” This principle was criticized by physicists, who maintained that two particles of matter might differ solely as regards position in space and time—a view which has been rendered more difficult by relativity, which reduces space and time to relations.

  A further step is required in modernizing the problem, and that is, to get rid of the conception of “substance.” When this is done, a “thing” has to be a bundle of qualities, since there is no longer any kernel of pure “thinghood.” It would seem to follow that, if “substance” is rejected, we must take a view more akin to that of Scotus than to that of Aquinas. This, however, involves much difficulty in connection with space and time. I have treated the question as I see it, under the heading “Proper Names,” in my Inquiry into Meaning and Truth.

  William of Occam is, after Saint Thomas, the most important schoolman. The circumstances of his life are very imperfectly known. He was born probably between 1290 and 1300; he died on April 10, but whether in 1349 or 1350 is uncertain. (The Black Death was raging in 1349, so that this is perhaps the more probable year.) Most people say he was born at Ockham in Surrey, but Delisle Burns prefers Ockham in Yorkshire. He was at Oxford, and then at Paris, where he was first the pupil and afterwards the rival of Duns Scopus. He was involved in the quarrel of the Franciscan order with Pope John XXII on the subject of poverty. The Pope had persecuted the Spirituals, with the support of Michael Cesena, General of the order. But there had been an arrangement by which property left to the friars was given by them to the Pope, who allowed them the benefit of it without the sin of ownership. This was ended by John XXII, who said they should accept outright ownership. At this a majority of the order, headed by Michael of Cesena, rebelled. Occam, who had been summoned to Avignon by the Pope to answer charges of heresy as to transubstantiation. sided with Michael of Cesena, as did another important man, Marsiglio of Padua. All three were excommunicated in 1328, but escaped from Avignon, and took refuge with the Emperor Louis. Louis was one of the two claimants to the Empire; he was the one favoured by Germany, but the other was favoured by the Pope. The Pope excommunicated Louis, who appealed against him to a General Council. The Pope himself was accused of heresy.