MEDIEVAL PHILOSOPHY IN CONTEXT

What was it like to do philosophy in the Middle Ages? I will try to answer that question by looking at relevant sociopolitical and economic circumstances, specific institutional settings for practicing philosophy, and several competing or cooperating intellectual currents. At the end of the chapter, I will say something about the place of authority in medieval thought, the philosophical sources available to medieval thinkers at different points in the period, and the literary genres into which they put their own ideas.

Briefly, the story runs as follows. What we know as medieval philosophy emerged in the late Roman Empire from a surprisingly complete mutual accommodation of Christian belief and classical thought. It then passed through centuries of dormancy in the West, while at the same time it began afresh in the Islamic world. In the eleventh and twelfth centuries philosophy reemerged in a new Europe, in altered formand against resistance. Then, both augmented and challenged by the work of Islamic and Jewish thinkers, it enjoyed in the thirteenth century a golden age of systematic analysis and speculation corresponding to a new degree of rationalization in politics and society. And finally? The significance of fourteenth-century thought remains contested, despite substantial recent scholarship demonstrating its brilliance. As my narrative ends, therefore, readers will need to move from context to content, acquainting themselves in succeeding chapters with the ideas and arguments on which their own assessment of medieval philosophy, not just the fourteenth century, must depend.

Before beginning, we should notice an obvious but important fact. Medieval thinkers did not know that they were medieval. The expression “Middle Age” (Latin medium aevum; thence medievalis, “medieval”) was first used to designate the period between the “ancient” and “modern” worlds in the seventeenth century. In later historical writing and popular consciousness a radical opposition is often posited between the Middle Ages (or “Dark Ages”) and the initial phase of the modern era called, since the nineteenth century, the Renaissance. As we shall see, even the least philosophical of medieval centuries were not wholly benighted, and the relations between medieval and Renaissance thought are a good deal more complex than is suggested by depictions of the latter as a revolutionary enlightenment.

Emergence of Medieval Philosophy in the Late Roman Empire

The emergence of medieval philosophy looks surprising not only from a “reason alone” view of philosophy but also in light of a polemic of opposition between Christianity and philosophy dating back to St. Paul’s disparagement of “the wisdom of the world” (specifically, the wisdom sought by Greeks) and his warning against “philosophy and empty deceit” (1 Corinthians 1:20–24, Colossians 2:8). It was an incompatibility that the early north African apologist Tertullian (c. 160–c. 230) celebrated as absolute. His taunting question “What has Athens to do with Jerusalem?” was a challenge to the cognitive commitments of his  philosophically minded contemporaries (On Prescription Against Heretics 7 [428] 8–10). If today we think of philosophy as requiring complete insulation from the engagements of religious belief, we can imagine ourselves as displaying the same attitude in reverse.

But historically speaking,Tertullian’s conception of a dividing line between religion and philosophy was oddmanout. Indeed, when Paul himself was actually confronted with philosophers at the hill of the Areopagus in Athens, he took a conciliatory line, noting agreement between his own preaching and the verses of a Stoic poet (Acts 17:28). In the ancient Mediterranean world, philosophy did not consist of arcane reflection on the nature of what can be known or the value of what must be done, abstracted from the day-to-day business of living in society. It called instead for the engagement of the whole person in striving to know truth and to do good. For philosophers themselves it amounted to an all-absorbing way of life.1 Indeed, by the second and third centuries ce, philosophy, as practiced by Stoics, Platonists, and Epicureans, and Christianity, as professed among educated Greek and Roman converts, were beginning to look very much alike. Philosophy had come, in E. R. Dodds’s words, “increasingly to mean the quest for God.”2 In such a world, it was easy for a person like Justin (d. 163/67), searching among the philosophers for an answer to the riddle of life, to end up a Christian, and ultimately a martyr.

As an apologist for his faith he continued to wear the philosopher’s distinctive garb and advertised Christianity as philosophy in the fullest sense of the word (Dialogue with Trypho 8 [411] 198b). There was, to be sure, a literature of controversy pitting Christian against pagan thinker, but the sometimes bitter tone of this writing was partly due to the fact that the antagonists were fighting over common intellectual ground. The third-century Christian writers and teachers Clement of Alexandria and his pupil, Origen, and their pagan counterparts Plotinus and his disciple, Porphyry, spoke the same philosophical language, drew from the single conceptual reservoir of emergent Neoplatonism, and even traveled in the same circles.3

Medieval philosophy was born in precisely this intellectual setting. Not by coincidence, these were also the circumstances under which Christianity came to be the official religion of the Roman Empire. It is indeed only a slight exaggeration to characterize the legal conversion initiated in the early fourth century by the emperor Constantine as an epiphenomenon arising out of this more general cultural milieu. The way had already been prepared by the spread of Jewish communities and their religion throughout the Mediterranean, with a corresponding Hellenization of Jewish thought from acquaintance with Greek philosophical ideas. By the third century a common currency of learned discourse flourished among the elite –pagan, Jewish, and Christian. Constantine’s contribution was simply to make the Christian variant of this discourse the dominant one, eventually oppressively so, from the fourth century on.

But the conceptual apparatus, intellectual inclinations, and interpretative tools that were used in the course of this process were neither specifically Christian nor very new. In other words, the conversion simply ensured that the philosophizing of Christian thinking previously underway should continue apace and come to typify the culture of learning in late Rome. It likewise inaugurated the first of three phases in the career of medieval philosophy.

The style of thinking characteristic of this phase is exemplified in Augustine, the Latin rhetorician turned Christian philosopher and later bishop of Hippo in north Africa until his death in 430. Persuaded, as he later explained in his Confessions, by Cicero’s “exhortation to philosophy” that he must forsake his life of vanity and promiscuity and devote himself to the internal quest demanded by the love of wisdom, he set out on a path leading by way of knowledge “upwards [away] from earthly delights” to God (Confessions III 4 [59]). Here, a crucial direction-setting role fell to “some books of the Platonists translated from Greek into Latin,” almost certainly works of the Neoplatonists Plotinus and possibly Porphyry. These writings led Augustine to the conviction that the universe emerged from and inevitably tended back toward a unique principle of good that is itself God, a reality shining above, yet still within, each of us as the eternal light of truth (VII 9–10).4 In Augustine’s eyes, the further step from Neoplatonism to Christianity was natural, almost inevitable. “Now that I had read the books of the Platonists and had been set by them toward the search for a truth that is incorporeal . . .

I seized greedily upon the adorable writing of Your Spirit, and especially upon the apostle Paul” (VII 20–21). From this point of view, Paul’s words to the Athenians at the Areopagus were plainly an exhortation to continue in their chosen way of life to the perfection of truth and right behavior laid bare in Christianity (VII 9, referring to Acts 17:28). The philosopher’s pursuit of wisdom was therefore not just compatible with Christian teaching. It was received, raised sublime, and rendered fully realizable through God’s revelation and grace in Christ.

Christian intellectuals of Augustine’s day thus had no doubt that they were following the philosopher’s way. Accordingly, they incorporated as much as they could of the classical philosophical heritage, both habits of mind and conceptual content, into their patterns of discourse and way of life. Stoicism and Neoplatonism, the Antique schools that appeared most supportive of previous Christian intellectual and practical commitments, were taken over virtually intact into Christian speculative and moral schemes. For example, Augustine’s mentor, the learned and socially eminent bishop Ambrose of Milan, followed Cicero’s On Duties in writing his guide to the considerable secular as well as religious duties of a bishop.

Augustine himself explored the psychological and theological implications of Neoplatonic theories of emanation in his treatise The Trinity. And in one of the most prominent indicators of Christian aspiration to inherit the mantle of Graeco-Roman higher studies, he labored during the last fifteen years of his life to produce in his masterpiece, The City of God, proof that Christianity could compete on equal terms with the best that pagan erudition had to offer.5

The immediate stimulus for Augustine’s historical and transhistorical account of the human condition in The City of God was the accusation that abandonment of the old gods of paganism was responsible for the sack of Rome by the Visigoths in 410. When Augustine died, the Vandals were at the gates of Hippo. From the early fifth century the western parts of the empire – modern Italy and Libya to the Atlantic – were increasingly brought under military control of barbarian, largely Germanic, armies, those groups of soldiers and their families referred to in textbooks as tribes. Such Teutonic interlopers
established their political preeminence in what Romans taught them to call kingdoms. Their overlordship did not, however, drastically reduce the influence of Roman elites or diminish the importance of Latin culture and Latin learning among the ruling classes. In the early sixth-century Ostrogothic kingdom of Italy, for example, Latin high culture shone as brilliantly as at any point since Cicero.

In this setting, official patronage of philosophical studies led to an emphasis on the purely speculative or theoretical that went beyond Augustine and Ambrose. The prominent senator Boethius, Roman consul and adviser to the Ostrogothic king Theodoric, undertook a complete translation of and commentary on the works of Plato and Aristotle, in the hope of bringing Latin philosophical discourse to a level of sophistication hitherto found only in Greek. His execution in 525 on charges of treason prevented him from advancing beyond the logical works making up Aristotle’s Organon. Besides these exegetical writings, however, Boethius also left behind a brilliant epitome of Greek wisdom, The Consolation of Philosophy, and a few short treatises in which he applied philosophical analysis to questions of theology.

This body of work established a lexicon of Latin equivalents for Greek terms and concepts upon which medieval philosophy would draw for another thousand years. Cassiodorus, a Roman of even higher social standing and similarly adviser at the Ostrogothic court, managed a less technically prodigious but perhaps equally influential feat. His Institutes of Divine and Secular Letters offers a syllabus for Christian education in which the canon of rhetorical and philosophical classics continued to play a major role.

In the Greek-speaking orbit of the eastern Roman Empire, it was the otherworldly character of late Antique philosophy which came to the fore in the late fifth and sixth centuries. The Elements of Theology, written by the Neoplatonist Proclus, head of the Academy founded by Plato in Athens, is an important example. Among Christians, the same mystical tendency, perhaps intensified by contact with the angelology of Hellenized Jewish literature on contemplating the divine, appears in a series of short treatises on subjects such as the divine names and the celestial hierarchy written in Syria or Palestine. Authored by someone plainly beguiled by Proclus’s ideas, these works circulated under the name of Dionysius, mentioned in Acts 17:34 as one of those ancient pagans Paul confronted at the Areopagus who was converted by the apostle’s words. Under so august an imprimatur, the works of Pseudo-Dionysius rose to a position of great prominence in subsequent Christian traditions of Neoplatonizing mystical theory and practice.6

The early centuries following the conversion of the Roman Empire thus witnessed the maturation of a current of Christian speculation in great part continuous with late Antique patterns of thought that either preceded the conversion or were evident after it outside Christian circles. Consequently, this first phase of medieval philosophy responded to some of the concerns of philosophy as practiced today.We can plot it along a historical trajectory connecting the philosophy of classical Greece with that of the modern world.

The situation changed dramatically from the late sixth century on. After Boethius and Cassiodorus, educated discourse in the western part of the empire became less hospitable to the kind of reflection involved in Augustine’s vision of Christian life as the successful completion of the philosopher’s quest for wisdom. Glimpses of the earlier tradition are found in Spain, politically subject at the time to kingdoms of the Germanic Visigoths. Work continued there in the Latin encyclopedic tradition, into which much of Greek speculation had been poured in the centuries of Rome’s greatness.

Most renowned in our period are the Etymologies of Isidore, bishop of Seville. Elsewhere in the West, attention was devoted increasingly only to narrative, affective, and practical ends. Even writing on solely religious subjects became less theological, in the sense of being less engaged in the systematic examination and exploration of doctrines, and more devotional and inspirational. In the eastern part of the empire, the Emperor Justinian is commonly assumed to have closed the schools of philosophy in Athens in 529. If there actually was such a closure (the argument has been made that pagan philosophers continued to attract students in Athens after Justinian), it should not be thought of as delivering the deathblow to Graeco-Roman philosophical thought.7 Already here, too, “philosophy” even in Christian form, as promoted from Justin to Boethius, was hardly at the center
of learned attention any longer.

Monastic Discipline and Scholarship

This brings us to the second part of our story, which runs to the middle of the eleventh century and focuses on theWest. From the end of the sixth century the western half of the Mediterranean world suffered a series of profound economic and demographic shocks, which drew it further and further away, commercially, politically and, finally, culturally, from the still vital centers of Roman empire and economy in the Greek-speaking East.8

What followed was not the extinction of the classical Latin learning that had nourished the first phase of medieval philosophy, but a narrowing of focus and a redirecting of interest. Already since the fifth century in Gaul, the sixth in Italy, public schools of Latinity and literature had disappeared. Prominent Romans, and Germans who aspired to eminence, learned their letters in the home, perhaps with a private tutor. These were the individuals who carried on what was to remain of literate discourse, as the politics and economy of empire withered away. It was among Christian bishops and in the households or familiae of dependents and advisers gathered around them where such learning occasionally rose above an elementary level. Increasingly, however, the tools did not include what previous generations had called philosophy, nor even, among the three fundamental linguistic arts known as the trivium, logic or dialectica. What was learned at home was simply grammar, which included familiarity with the classics of Latin prose and poetry, and the rudiments of rhetoric or style. The products composed in the episcopal foyers of higher culture were primarily sermons, accounts of miracles, and history.9

Thus began what I have called a period of dormancy for medieval philosophy.With one startling exception, there is little in these centuries we today would identify as “philosophical,” and perhaps more importantly, not much that Augustine or Boethius would have called philosophy either. Instead, the inspiration and vehicle for learning and literacy lay with a new culture of Latin monasticism. When abstract speculative and analytic thought emerged again in the late eleventh century, however, it emerged in the monastic milieu, which therefore deserves our attention.

By tradition, the origins of Christian monasticism are traced to the heroic founders Antony and Pachomius in early fourth-century Egypt. Some of the desert communities of ascetics that sprang up from these beginnings interacted significantly with the center of Hellenistic learning in Alexandria. Guided by the ideal of Christian philosophy epitomized by Origen, they situated the monk’s quest for holiness along the path of the philosopher’s pursuit of wisdom.10

But those currents most influential for early western developments followed another course. Here Antony’s search for inner peace and indifference to the world through passionate combat with the demons of temptation and despair provided the model for ascetic discipline. It was a mission at once more practical than speculative and more routinizing than developmental.

In the early fifth century this way of life was introduced into the western Mediterranean on the islands of Lerins, off what is now southern France, and in Marseilles. These areas rapidly became training grounds for monastic discipline in the Latinate West, schools of monastic practice and springboards for proselytism into Roman territory to the north and west. They were not, however, schools for letters. As with the contemporary episcopal centers of late Antique erudition, entry into these communities required a minimal foundation in grammar and rhetoric, but the goal here was not to advance Christian scholarship or shape learned Christian sensibilities. Their program thus mirrored even less Augustine’s idea of the search for wisdom. The aim was to acquire the habits of the monastic heroes and beat down the desires of the flesh. Besides the Bible, the literature most relevant to the monastic curriculum consisted of saints’ lives and homely accounts of monastic virtue, the most famous of which were circulated in various collections as the Apophthegmata patrum or Sayings of the Desert Fathers.11

It is in this light that we must view the invocation of Psalm 34:12 in the Rule of Benedict, written in mid-sixth-century Italy and normative within western monasticism from the ninth century on. There God calls out to his human handiwork: “Who is the man that will have life, and desires to see good days?” The expected response is to “[lay] aside [one’s] own will [so as to] take up the all-powerful and righteous arms of obedience to fight under the true King, the Lord Jesus Christ” ([362] 43).

The quest for goodness, already for several centuries defined as the Christian equivalent of the philosopher’s way of life, is now interpreted to mean withdrawal behind claustral walls in assumption of a discipline of communal prayer and personal submission to one’s abbot. For those willing to follow a directive of this sort, classical figures like Socrates and Plato, or, still closer to home, Augustine and Boethius, no longer provide appropriate exemplars. Ruder, more heroic models step forth, greatest of all the fourth-century Gallo-Roman hermit, Martin of Tours. Tellingly, his lessons for living were transmitted not by means of dialogue, confession, or meditation, but rather in the life of a saint.12

Not that the Latin monastic milieu was entirely hostile to more speculative sorts of learning. A tradition of active scholarship originated in Ireland, which had been converted to Christianity in the fifth century, just as Roman military authority was being displaced in the rest of western Europe by Germanic warbands. Here, where the Graeco-Roman social order had never taken root, there arose a Christian learning that depended on the grammatical and rhetorical minimum of the Antique syllabus but which, unlike on the continent, where letters survived in the homes of the elite, was generated entirely within the monastic milieu in which it was applied.

By the mid-seventh century this Latin-Irish hybrid of personal mortification and the discipline of Roman letters had been transplanted via missionary activity to northern England. There a cluster of monastic foundations nurtured an efflorescence of literacy in which some of Augustine’s intellectual vision reappears. The double monastery of Wearmouth and Jarrow yielded the finest fruit of this culture in the prolific writer and virtual type of central medieval monastic scholar, Bede (d. 735). Besides composing biblical commentaries, Bede was, so to speak, an expert on time: he wrote both a history of the English church and a treatise on the esoteric calculations involved in determining the date of Easter.

On the basis of eighth-century English monastic learning, along with a likely infusion from the apparently still uninterrupted cultivation of late Latin higher studies in northern Spain, a remarkable if relatively brief cultural phenomenon arose on the European continent in the protective shadow of a dynasty of expansionist Frankish kings, Charlemagne and his immediate successors.13 In the writings of Carolingian scholars during the late eighth and first three-quarters of the ninth century there breaks to the surface a taste for speculation and inquiry, and an application of the nearly forgotten art of logic.

For the first time in the West since the fifth century, theological controversy about specific doctrines engaged the curiosity of intellectuals eager to reason about their faith. The philosophical giant among them, and a sometimes alarming figure for later thinkers to deal with, was John Scottus Eriugena (d. c. 877). Born in Ireland (hence “Eriugena”), he knew Greek and read and translated Pseudo-Dionysius. John’s access to the Platonizing mystical tradition provided some of the elements for his Periphyseon, a daring speculativevision of “natures” coming from and returning to God.

Yet the exceptional erudition of the Carolingian period was just that, an exception – in Eriugena’s case a stunning one. Western monastic culture of the central Middle Ages fostered a learning inclined toward ascesis, capable of producing marvelous choreographies of chant, prayer, and liturgy but hardly works of speculative import.14 We must wait another two centuries for significant philosophizing in the West. Elsewhere the situation was very different.

Islam

In 622 the Arab prophet Muhammed fled from his native city of Mecca to the more welcoming Medina, where he began in earnest his ultimately successful mission of bringing to the whole of the Arabian peninsula what he presented as God’s final revelation to humankind. Here, at the opposite extremity of the Roman world from Ireland, so important about the same time for the medieval West, there arose in a whirlwind a movement, both religious and profoundly social, that within a century would sweep up much of what remained of the politically integrated parts of the Roman Empire, along with its even more ancient imperial rival, Persia. By the 720s the military and political domain of Islam stretched from Spain in the west through northern Africa, Palestine, Syria, and Arabia, to the Tigris and Euphrates valley, Persia, and the frontiers of India in the east. A core of the eastern Roman Empire was preserved in Greece, the Balkans, and Asia Minor. This was what nowadays is called the Byzantine Empire, centered on Constantinople. However, the bulk of the lands in which the Christian version of Hellenized learning still retained some vitality fell under a new dispensation.

It is important to note that despite its expansionism and its insistence on absolute submission among believers to the new rule of faith embodied in the Qur’an, the conquering Muslim political elite was not intolerant of either the peoples or the cultures over which it established hegemony. In Syria, for example, late Antique philosophy, as exemplified in the Hellenized Jews of Alexandria, Origen, Porphyry, and even the more mystical Proclus and Pseudo-Dionysius, continued to be promoted among a learned stratum at the top of the dominated society. By the late ninth century this type of literate discourse had established a beachhead within Arabic intellectual circles. Al-Kindi, a sometime resident of the city of the caliphs at Baghdad, is commonly venerated as the father of Arab philosophy, both for his own writings and for the work he encouraged in others. For the next two hundred years, the central period of monasticism in the West, it was preeminently in the Islamic world that the intellectual quest for wisdom persisted and advanced. Here we may place a beginning of the third major phase in the history of medieval philosophy.

Already, with al-Kindi, Muslim interest in Greek philosophy displayed a particular fascination with the works of Aristotle. In this it paralleled a direction Boethius had taken three centuries before, which undoubtedly facilitated the reception of Arabic thought in the West when Boethius’s work itself was revived around the end of the eleventh century. But the rapidity with which the Islamic world developed a mastery of the whole Greek heritage and began to chart a path of its own is astounding. The great Persian polymath Ibn Sina (Avicenna, d. 1037) produced the most impressive speculative synthesis since the early Neoplatonists. In its influence on critics and defenders alike, both in Islam and in the West, Ibn Sina’s thought easily bears comparison with that of Kant or Hegel in modern times.

In Spain, site of an emirate opposed to Baghdad since the mid-eighth century and then home of the caliphate of C´ ordoba from 929, a separate flowering of the same extraordinary culture began only slightly later. Here the dynamism of Jewish communities ensured that learned Jews would play a prominent role. The strongly Neoplatonizing Fountain of Life, written in Arabic by the eleventh-century Jewish poet Solomon Ibn Gabirol (Avicebron), was influential among Muslims and also, in Latin translation, in later Christian circles to the north. By the twelfth century the focus had narrowed even more sharply on Aristotle than before, and the interpretative sophistication applied to his works by Spanish intellectuals had taken a qualitative step beyond all earlier treatments.

 Moses Maimonides, a Jew born and educated in Cordoba but active for many years as a physician in Cairo, pointed the way with his Guide for the Perplexed, written, like Gabirol’s work, in Arabic. In Ibn Rushd (Averroes), a contemporary Cordovan physician and lawyer who ended his days in Marrakesh in 1198, Muslim scholarship produced a monumental series of commentaries on Aristotle’s writings that provided a focus for some of the most important philosophical debates of the following centuries. Later Christian thinkers, for example, would find enunciated in Averroes the challenging ideal of a purely philosophical way of life superior to the way of religious faith.

Taken in its entirety, the evolution of speculative thought in the Muslim world marked a considerable enrichment of the philosophical heritage of late Antiquity. And Arabic achievements in mathematics and natural philosophy, especially astronomy, laid the foundations for later medieval science in theWest and ultimately set the stage for the Scientific Revolution of the seventeenth century.

The Rise of the West and the Reemergence of Philosophy

By the year 1050 the western European territories of the old Latin world had absorbed, Christianized, and politically acculturated Germanic lands all the way to Scandinavia, as well as Slavic regions in central Europe. The West now projected a more formidable presence on the global stage. Here, in the homeland of the monastic learning of Bede and the magnificent Benedictine abbeys of the central Middle Ages, philosophy reawakened. The first stirrings were independent of developments in Islam. We may thus speak of two separate beginnings of the third phase of our story, one in Islam with al-Kindi and his successors, another in Europe with Anselm and Abelard. In the sometimes turbulent confluence of these two currents of thought we shall find some of the major achievements of high-medieval philosophy.

The roots of the western social transformation reach back at least to the tenth century in what would become an economic revolution across medieval Europe. By a combination of technological innovations (including the wheeled plough, horseshoes, and the horse collar) and a reconfiguring of the social structure that was tied to the spread of feudalism and the increased power of feudal lordships, northeastern Europe evolved between 900 and 1100 from a sparsely populated rural landscape of virtually subsistence agriculture to a more complex topography of surplus production, rapidly rising population, emergent towns (or even small cities), and the beginnings of significant markets and commerce.15

It was this fundamental transformation, from a backward to a dynamic society, that explains the rise of the West in late medieval and early modern times. Internal signs of the new order can be seen in the reinvigoration of royal monarchies in France and England, the appearance of self-governing urban communes in Italy, and reform in the ecclesiastical hierarchy of the church, evidenced in a push toward clerical celibacy and greater independence from secular control. Externally, the change announced itself in a more aggressive posture toward Latin Europe’s neighbors. The Reconquista –the military expansion of northern Christian principalities into the central and eventually southern heartlands of Muslim Spain – was well underway by mid-eleventh century. In 1054 an increasingly self-assured and uncompromising papacy in Rome excommunicated the patriarch of Constantinople. The schism with Eastern Orthodoxy remains to this day. Most famously, in 1095 there began the first of those massive, and for two hundred years periodic, invasions of western soldiers of fortune and salvation into the Mediterranean east, the Crusades.

The importance of all this for European, indeed for world history, can scarcely be exaggerated. Here lies the origin of what is seen today as western global hegemony, the desirability, inevitability, durability, or even reality of which is hotly debated but which nevertheless seems to haunt the collective consciousness as a sort of pan-ethnic nightmare or dream-come-true.

With regard to philosophy, these events meant the birth of a society in which the learned were free to turn their efforts to analysis and speculation for their own sake, and eventually to that use of pure reason on which philosophy prides itself today. Symptoms of the new habits of mind, and of a type of literate culture entirely different from any of those described before, first appeared within the very institutions of scholarly activity and literary production most characteristic of western Europe in the central Middle Ages: the monasteries. These had not only been at the vanguard of the preaching, religious devotions, and historical writing of our second medieval period, but had also provided the pedagogical foundation for it. As indicated above, that foundation included grammar and rhetoric but generally not the other linguistic art of Antiquity, logic. Beginning in the eleventh century, some of the most learned monks started to search among the logical texts of Aristotle and Boethius, which were conserved in their libraries, for something they felt was missing from their education.

A powerful voice promoting the fascination with logic was heard at one of the centers for ecclesiastical and spiritual reform, the abbey of Bec in the duchy of Normandy. There the Italian prior Lanfranc, who had previously composed a commentary on the epistles of St.Paul in which he analyzed their logical as well as rhetorical and grammatical structure,16 took up the challenge to apply the tools of dialectic to matters of religious doctrine currently in dispute. In the controversy and exchange of treatises between Lanfranc and Berengar of Tours over the nature of the Eucharist, the art of logic assumed a place of prominence in the discourse of the literate elite for the first time in Latin western Europe since the Carolingian period. By the end of the eleventh century even more persuasive advocates had begun to be heard, such as the embattled early nominalist, Roscelin, and Anselm of Aosta, who was Lanfranc’s successor as prior at Bec and eventually also as the second Norman archbishop of Canterbury.

Medieval speculation achieved a new clarity and rigor in Anselm’s writings. The most famous of these among philosophers, the Proslogion, sets forth what can be read as a reason-based proof of God. It provided the historical foundation for what later became known as the “ontological argument.” The Proslogion was originally entitled “Faith Seeking Understanding.” Here, in a meditation fully grounded in the Benedictine monastic tradition, reappear the lineaments of Augustine’s ideal of a Christian intellectual quest for wisdom. Describing himself as “one who strives to raise his mind to the contemplation of God and seeks to understand what he believes,” Anselm insisted, not only that the use of reason did not undermine faith, but that it was in fact fully appropriate to it. “I am not,” he said, “trying, O Lord, to penetrate thy loftiness . . . but I desire in some measure to understand thy truth.” His celebrated characterization of the project he was engaged in is this: “I do not seek to understand in order to believe, but I believe in order to understand” (Proslogion, preface and ch. 1).17

This new model for intellectual endeavor revived a form of discourse long absent from the West. It also altered the character of that discourse. With its exceptional emphasis on logic, it infused the erudition of the high Middle Ages with a deeply analytic hue. In his dialogues on such subjects as truth, free will, and the fall of the Devil, even the devout contemplative Anselm can sound more like a late thirteenth-century university master than like the rhetorically molded Augustine. The bent for logic took hold in the late eleventh-and early twelfth-century West at a breathtaking pace. By 1100 it had found a champion at Paris in the person of Peter Abelard, whose brilliance outshone all contemporaries and pointed toward the first significant advances in logical theory since the late Antique Stoics. Twelfth-century thinkers were indeed so much aware of what they were adding to the heritage of Aristotle and Boethius, especially in propositional logic and the theory of terms, that they coined a phrase for the dialectic of their own day, the logica modernorum or “logic of the moderns.”18

Such a desire to apply the tools of reason, honed by dialectic, extended to every area of learning. The first signs of the new habits of thought in Berengar and Lanfranc had appeared in discussion of an important but limited theological subject, the sacrament of the Eucharist.With Abelard in the early twelfth century the methodical study of religious belief took flight. Now the full panoply of rational speculation and logical analysis was turned toward understanding the whole range of Christian faith and practice. The result was a virtual reinvention of theology as systematic and in places highly abstract discourse, a marked departure from the memorative and associative meditative habits of the monastic past.

Abelard spoke for a new sensibility when he defended his pathbreaking efforts in theology. He explained that he was responding to “students who were asking for human and logical reasons on this subject, and demand[ing] something intelligible rather than [the] mere words” they were fed in the traditional sacred learning of their day (Abelard, Historia calamitatum [152] 78).

The same thirst for reasoned understanding was felt with regard to human conduct and the external world. Abelard’s Ethics presents an intentions-based explication of moral accountability that commands respect to this day on its philosophical merits. And where previously a minimal natural philosophy centered on astronomy and the calendar had sufficed, along with the rich symbolic interpretations of biblical and literary exegesis, learned minds of the twelfth century began to demand causal explanations of processes and careful categorizing of the properties and types of things. Echoing Abelard on religious thought, Adelard of Bath, an Englishman who led the drive toward new methods of inquiry about externalities, insisted that God had endowed humankind with reason just so that we could ferret out the rules under which the created world operated. Far from undermining a fundamental confidence that God was ultimately responsible for all that was and all that happened, such an understanding revealed the extraordinary providence of a Divinity who chose to work through regular but mediating causation.19

Indeed, the growing tendency among twelfth-century thinkers to view the cosmos as a rationally ordered structure, amenable to investigation and analysis by the rational mind, has prompted some historians to describe this period as a time of the “Discovery of Nature.”20 There can be no doubt that “natura” and its Greek equivalent, “physis,” were increasingly used by Latin scholars both to describe the external world and to indicate the regularities upon which its workings depended.

A convenient way to conceptualize this ordered harmony was readily available in Neoplatonic cosmological texts preserved in monastic libraries. Indeed, the prototype itself could be used: the single work of Plato that had been translated into Latin in the late Empire, his Timaeus. The popularity in France of treatises in natural philosophy built upon a Platonizing metaphysics and vision of the universe has encouraged historians to propose that there was a specific School of Chartres, an episcopally supervised center of learning where key writers of such works were to have studied and taught and from which their views were disseminated throughout the Latin West. Though it is no longer fashionable to think of Chartres as the physical location of a school of this sort, a Platonic worldview did shape most approaches to nature in western Europe in the twelfth century.21

A similar inclination also made Latin intellectuals receptive to the vigorous traditions in natural philosophy and mathematics in Islamic territories to the south and east: Spain, southern Italy, and Sicily. The cultivated medical and philosophical circles of Toledo, Cordoba, Valencia, and Seville, where Hebrew, Arabic, and Latin met in a truly multivalent scholarly environment, drew individuals like Adelard from England and Gerard of Cremona from Italy, who steeped themselves in Jewish and Muslim learning and began to translate texts into Latin: firstly the speculative riches from this part of the world and eventually works from the classical Greek and Hellenistic eastern Mediterranean. Southern Italy was also a locus of intense activity, particularly at the centers of medical learning in and around Salerno, where texts were composed that transmitted much of Greek and Islamic natural philosophy to the West.

So radical a shift in educated attitudes and interests, and so massive an infusion of learning from foreign sources, could hardly avoid provoking opposition. At stake was nothing less than the fate of two divergent if not necessarily opposing cultural forms. On the one hand stood the old liturgical, devotional, and meditative routine of the monasteries; on the other, the new thirst for speculation and analysis applied to everything in mind and the world. For some of those committed in spirit to the older rhythms of Latin monastic culture, the relation of Abelard’s style of theology to genuine Christian faith was much like the relation of Athens to Jerusalem in the eyes of Tertullian.

Prominent among such cultural conservatives was the influential religious reformer and preacher, Bernard of Clairvaux. Spurred on by traditional teachers of sacred studies, he managed the condemnation of some of Abelard’s doctrines in 1140 at the ecclesiastical Council of Sens, the second to be called against the great logician become theologian. In a letter to Pope Innocent II, composed for the occasion, Bernard pilloried the pedagogical methods of such a man who, he said, would “[put] forward philosophers with great praise and so [affront] the teachers of the Church, and [prefer] their imaginations and novelties to the doctrine and faith of the Catholic Fathers.” Making clear that it was Abelard’s method as much as the substance of what he said that brought offense, Bernard alluded to Abelard’s own justification, sure that his antagonist’s words would stand as their own condemnation: “I thought it unfitting that the grounds of the faith should be handed over to human reasonings for discussion, when, as is agreed, it rests on such a sure and firm foundation” (Letter 189 [23] 89; emphasis added).

Yet for all Bernard’s prominence as an institutional reformer and spokesperson for a newly triumphant ecclesiastical hierarchy, his call for a united stand against the novel learning was doomed to failure.22 The enthusiasm for speculative wisdom and an analytical approach to interpretation was too powerful to be suppressed. Already, before Bernard, institutions were developing which nurtured and disseminated the new ways among an ever-widening cohort of logicians and speculative thinkers – indeed, philosophers in both the late Antique and modern senses of the word.

By the end of the eleventh century circles of erudition again gathered around prominent bishops, as in the latter centuries of the western Roman Empire, but in an original form.We now find what can legitimately be called cathedral schools, with masters paid by the bishop and students drawn from beyond the resident clergy. A scattering of these schools across France and England became known for intellectual specialties: religious teaching at Laon, grammar and dialectic at Paris, rhetoric at Orleans, Arabic and Greek natural philosophy at Hereford. It was to such educational hotspots that bright minds like Abelard were drawn, and, as in his case, it was in such places that they often began their own teaching careers. At times an individual with a reputation like Abelard’s would even offer instruction without seeking formal ecclesiastical sanction, taking on students who paid for their lessons in a sort of private school.

In centers of higher education like these, from cathedral schools to monastic and ad hoc private gatherings of students, the whole Antique curriculum was revived, not just grammar and rhetoric, but also of course logic, third of the arts of the trivium, and now the four mathematical arts or quadrivium as well: arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and music. Given the burgeoning interest in natural philosophy, indeed in philosophy of any sort, broadly conceived, it comes as no surprise that the educational program at a few of these locales expanded beyond anything offered in late Rome. We begin to see places where inquiry into nearly every area of thought or practice was formally promoted.

At the heart of it all stood logic, now the paradigm for investigation and summary in all fields. Starting with the reading and literal exposition in the classroom of the fundamental texts in a subject, a formal system of question and answer arose, whereby students could both exercise their logical skills in debate and put the words of the authorities under the lens of critical analysis, advancing toward greater comprehensiveness, increasing consistency of exposition, and enhanced clarity of understanding. This classroom method of analysis, debate, and resolution quickly became standard throughout the emerging schools. The major disciplines of high medieval learning started to take shape, crystallizing around the seed of newly composed and soon universally adopted textbooks that were structured as collections of debating points touching on all significant aspects of the subject field.23 In theology there was the Parisian Peter Lombard’s Sentences of the mid-twelfth century, in canon law the scarcely earlier Decretum of Master Gratian of Bologna, and in logic the numerous commentaries, summaries, and collections of questions associated with various academic factions, particularly at the metropolis of learning in Paris.

Notes

1. See the compelling recent statement of the case by P. Hadot [406]. There is also his Philosophy as a Way of Life [407].
2. E. R. Dodds [402] 92.
3. See ibid. 105–8 and P. Brown [66] 90–93.
4. See P. Brown [66] 94–95 on these Platonists and how they influenced Augustine.
5. See ibid. 299–307.
6. Proclus, Elements of Theology [381]. Pseudo-Dionysius, The Complete Works [78].
7. See A. Cameron [395] and H. J. Blumenthal [393].
8. See recent work on culture in W. A. Goffart [404] and P. Amory [392], and on economy by way of archaeology, in R. Hodges and D. Whitehouse [409].
9. Still the best introduction to this culture of late-Roman, early medieval Europe is P. Rich´e [421] 139–210 and 266–90.
10. On this, see O. Chadwick [397].
11. On this culture of early western monasticism, see again P. Rich´e [421] 100–22 and 290–303.
12. See the perennial favorite among medieval Christian readers, The Life of St. Martin by the learned Roman stylist, Sulpicius Severus [427]. On Martin as paradigm for a type of Christian prominence, see P. Brown [394] 106–27.
13. W. Levison [414].
14. As R. W. Southern has observed, by the eleventh century the reality of the Benedictine life for monks at the most prestigious of monastic communities, Cluny, was almost entirely absorbed in the routine of common celebration of services in the choir ([425] 160–64). Still the best description of the intellectual and spiritual inclinations of this monastic culture is by J. Leclercq [413]. For a more recent take on the same subject, see M. Carruthers [396]. See also J. Coleman [399]. All of the latter, however, draw heavily on developments after 1100.
15. For an introduction, see L. White Jr.’s classic Medieval Technology and Social Change [431].
16. R. W. Southern [146] 33–35, 40–41.
17. For Anselm’s defense of the employment of reason in theological matters as a way of achieving an “understanding” that is “midway between faith and direct vision,” see his letter to Pope Urban II at [138] I (II) 39–41, translated in part by G. Schufreider [144] 240–41.
18. See for a start, L. M. de Rijk [471] and G. Nuchelmans [468].
19. Adelard of Bath, Quaestiones naturales 1 and 4; trans. R. C. Dales [401] 39–40.
20. M.-D. Chenu [507] 4–18.
21. See R.W. Southern’s definitive contribution to the debate in [426] 61–85.
22. Despite his opposition to the new rationalism, Bernard’s own writings represent a considerable reorientation of monastic thought toward Augustinian aspirations to wisdom. The presence of these more “philosophical” rhythms in Latin monastic speculation from the twelfth century on is what makes modern studies of western monastic learning – for example, the three mentioned above at the end of note 14 – typically more reliable guides to high than to central medieval monastic sensibilities.
23. See B. Lawn [412] 10–13.
24. See R. I. Moore [420].
25. See selections from the canons of the council in E. Peters [23] 173–78.
26. R. I. Moore [419].
27. See S. P. Marrone [200].
28. A. de Libera [415].

By Steve P. Marrone in "The Cambridge Companion to Medieval Philosophy", edited by A.S. McGrade, Cambridge University Press, UK, 2003, excerpts pp- 10-28. Digitalized, adapted and illustrated to be posted by Leopoldo Costa.