unreasonable.

The fall of Rome

The medieval period traditionally dates from the end of the classical period (that is, the fall of the Western Roman Empire in the fifth century) and continues to the beginning of the Renaissance in the fourteenth century. Philosophy during this time was essentially driven by a need to address problems arising from theology, and to integrate classical ideas and Christian doctrine.

Here is a recipe for producing medieval philosophy: Combine classical pagan philosophy, mainly Greek but also in its Roman versions, with the new Christian religion. Season with a variety of flavorings from the Jewish and Islamic intellectual heritages. Stir and simmer for 1300 years or more, until done. Paul Vincent Spade

The ‘classical pagan philosophy’ referred to is Aristotle and, to a lesser degree, Neoplatonism, a mystical version of Plato’s ideas filtered through the later writings of Plotinus and Porphyry. There was a lack of familiarity with Greek after the fall of Rome, and so these classical texts were known only second-hand in Latin translation. The sole work of Plato that was known at all was the first part of the Timaeus. Aristotle’s works, in translation at least, were more plentiful and their rediscovery in the twelfth century created the conditions for the greatest flowering of medieval thought.

The medieval philosophers were interested in all areas of philosophy, but special mention must be made of the philosophy of religion which took its familiar form in the medieval period. The nature of God, the problem of evil, the conflict between foreknowledge and free will, the relation of faith to reason – all received their fullest treatment during this period. But it would be misleading to confuse philosophy and theology. The Middle Ages also saw a flourishing of logic and metaphysics (particularly the problem of universals and the principle of individuation) and the first stirrings of experimental science.

Augustine

Augustine of Hippo bridges the transition between the classical and the medieval periods, and his synthesis of Jewish, Christian and Greek ideas became a dominant influence for a thousand years of Western thought. He was simultaneously a man of great intellectual ability and a product of his time. Born in 354 in modern Algeria to a Christian family, he enjoyed a colourful youth which he later recorded in his Confessions. As a young man he moved to Carthage where he indulged his sensual urges, famously praying: Make me chaste and continent, but not yet. His education consisted of classical authors, and it was reading Cicero at the age of nineteen that inspired his love of philosophy. He later taught rhetoric in Milan where he encountered Neoplatonic texts. In 386 he heard a childlike voice chanting ‘tolle, lege’ — pick up and read. He reached for his copy of St Paul’s Epistles and read Romans xiii. The experience was life-changing. Baptised the following year, Augustine returned to Africa and lived out his life as Bishop of Hippo, engaging in the controversies of the medieval church.

Augustine
St Augustine in his study by Botticelli

The Neoplatonism of Plotinus gave Augustine a framework for intellectual analysis of Christian doctrine and scripture, and it was this synthesis that came to provide the backdrop to so much medieval philosophy. It is difficult to overstate the influence of his achievement, even into the modern era. Perhaps the most important work of twentieth-century philosophy, Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations, opens with a discussion of a passage from Augustine’s Confessions.

Besides the Confessions, Augustine is best known for his work The City of God which contains a fully developed theology and raises some interesting philosophical questions.

The City of God was written after the sack of Rome in 410. There were suggestions that this disaster was a punishment for rejecting the old Roman gods in favour of Christianity: the pagan gods, it was said, had abandoned the city. Augustine offers a different narrative, a linear and predestined history from the creation of the world through to the second coming of Christ. The pagan gods are not gods but demons (daimones) who live between heaven and earth bringing mischief to mortals – in a later era, these demons would become Milton’s fallen angels. The true God gave mankind the freedom to live at peace, but the events in the garden of Eden led to a great schism. Two ‘cities’ now exist in the world: the City of Man, a place of the flesh, of self-love and sin; and the City of God, a place of the spirit and love of God. Since the Fall, these two ‘cities’ are commingled on earth but they will become separate at the end of time when the events of Revelation will play out: at the final destruction of the world, the City of God will be Heaven and the City of Man will be Hell for all eternity. Until then, good Christians are like pilgrims in a foreign land waiting to return home and the sack of Rome, like all earthly disasters, was a predestined act of divine justice.

The title alone betrays Augustine’s classical background in the use of ‘City’ rather than the biblical ‘Kingdom’. The dualism is Platonic in origin, and was easily imposed upon the Christian narrative: Cain and Abel are the human embodiments of this dichotomy, Babylon and Jerusalem the emblematic cities, and so on. Augustine was clearly stating the priority of the Church over the state, a struggle that was to dominate the whole medieval period (and continue well beyond it). But this tidy rhetorical framework brought with it some curious philosophical problems which Augustine was compelled to address.

The first of these is the notion of physical resurrection. The model, of course, is the resurrection of Jesus Christ but many thinkers have demanded a more detailed account of this difficult notion. Augustine confidently asserts that everyone receives a perfect and mature version of their body: the old will be made young, those who died as infants will be resurrected as adults, all blemishes will be removed and amputations restored. Fat people will receive bodies that allow for a more positive self-image. Even the hair and nails that were cut during a person’s life will return to them, only not as hair or nails. Augustine also mentions the popular thought-experiment of the cannibal: if a man has eaten human flesh, to whom does the digested flesh belong? The answer is: to the victim. But the cannibal will no doubt have lost matter as a result of his hunger, so that will be restored to balance the loss. Later philosophers, including Thomas Aquinas, would return to this question.

Secondly, Augustine takes time to justify the idea of eternal physical torture for the damned. He acknowledges the scientific problem of physical bodies being consumed by fire, but cites the salamander and Mount Etna as examples of physical endurance. Besides, the soul is immortal and can also feel pain enabling God to continue his torture eternally. The ethical issue here is also dealt with: in human society punishment can be disproportionate (years in prison for a brief act of violence) and the afterlife is no different. To the modern mind, of course, such a scheme is morally unsettling. But Augustine goes further than merely justifying eternal torment: much of The City of God is designed to show how difficult it is to avoid.

The world in which Augustine lived was unstable and often dangerous. The Roman Empire was in its death throes: Rome had been sacked by the Visigoths in 410, and twenty years later when Augustine died, the Vandals were literally at the gates of Hippo. In such a world, the problem of evil was particularly urgent: how could a powerful and loving God allow such suffering? Augustine’s theodicy insists upon God’s goodness and instead defines evil not as a part of creation, but as a corruption due to the free choices of mankind. The will of man is evil because of original sin.

The issue of original sin occupied much of Augustine’s later life, most notably in his struggle against Pelagius. Pelagius had claimed that people can act freely and virtuously by reason of their own moral will (now the more or less orthodox position). Augustine’s view was more pessimistic. Since the corruption of Adam in the Garden of Eden, all humans have inherited this original sin and, as a result, our will is corrupt and therefore unable to choose virtuously. We all deserve damnation and the unbaptised (including infants) justly go to hell. This is predestined. But by the grace of God a few – the ‘elect’ – get to heaven: not because they are good, but because God is merciful. Only through this act of grace can people be saved. Universal damnation reveals the justice of God, salvation for the few His mercy. In such a scheme it is difficult to see a role or reason for choice, but Augustine nevertheless insists that we are free to choose the virtuous path. This tension between the determinism of original sin and the need for freedom of choice was never entirely resolved by Augustine.

Augustine wrote widely on a number of philosophical issues, including expounding a subjective theory of time in The City of God that anticipated Kant’s, and offering a theory of the ‘Just War’ that was the foundation for Thomas Aquinas’ later formulation. His influence can be felt throughout the whole medieval period in philosophy.

Interestingly, Augustine’s works reveal a significant shift in outlook from his youth to his old age. As a young man he enjoyed the optimistic, late-classical belief that rationality can insulate a person from the adversity that surrounds them. By the end of his life, he had adopted a much more pessimistic belief in a corrupt and impotent humanity. The sometimes dark and morally troubling aspects of this late picture prompted Bertrand Russell to comment, at the end of his discussion of Augustine:

It is strange that the last men of intellectual eminence before the dark ages were concerned, not with saving civilization or expelling the barbarians or reforming the abuses of the administration, but with preaching the merit of virginity and the damnation of unbaptized infants.

Boethius

The last great classical philosopher, Anicius Manlius Severinus Boethius, was born around the same time that the last Roman Emperor was deposed. Boethius was a well-educated and successful civil servant, acting as senator and consul in the Italian kingdom of the Ostrogoths. To a degree, his importance to medieval philosophy lies in his translations and commentaries: as a rare Greek speaker, he helped disseminate to the Latin West the logical works of Aristotle and Neoplatonist authors like Porphyry. He also applied the lessons of logic to various theological disputes current at the time, particularly about the nature of Christ, God and the Trinity. At the height of his power, he was suspected of treason by King Theodoric, imprisoned and brutally executed. During his year-long imprisonment he wrote what would become one of the most important works of the medieval period, the Consolation of Philosophy.

Although born a Christian, it is to pagan philosophy that Boethius turned in the hour of his suffering. The Consolation is a dialogue between the author and a female personification of Philosophy, and the ideas it explores are drawn mostly from classical and Neoplatonic authors. Lady Philosophy teaches the fallen statesman detachment from worldly concerns like wealth and power: true happiness instead depends upon virtue and wisdom. Fortune is fickle, and a person’s situation can change without warning. All that happens is due to divine providence – a Platonic commonplace which raises a common theological question: how can people be truly free if God knows what they will do? Boethius’ answer is a complex discussion of God’s relation to time. The Consolation also functions as a theodicy explaining how evil can exist in the world, by developing Augustine’s assertion that evil and suffering are, in fact, illusory.

Boethius
Philosophy instructing Boethius

The Consolation of Philosophy became enormously popular: it was perhaps the most widely copied work of secular literature in Europe for almost a thousand years, and was translated by (among others) King Alfred, Geoffrey Chaucer and Queen Elizabeth I. It was also the last work of philosophy to emerge from the classical world.

After the fall of Rome in the fifth century, the church struggled to maintain a centralised authority. The extent to which it succeeded made possible the later revival of civilisation and philosophical thought. But in these tumultuous and superstitious times, philosophy as an activity suffered, and church scholars became obsessed with matters of doctrine and theological heresy. Scripture became more important than reason, and philosophy became the maidservant of theology (ancilla theologiae). In 529, only a few years after the execution of Boethius, the Eastern Emperor Justinian I closed all the pagan schools of philosophy in Athens.

Sources

« »