The History of Philosophy, page 18
Others, speculating on the name ‘Saccas’, which suggests that Ammonius had an Indian origin, say that he might have been a second-generation Indian immigrant to Alexandria, and had retained elements of the philosophical tradition of his forebears’ homeland. This chimes with Porphyry’s report that Plotinus had once desired to visit Persia and India in the hope of learning from their philosophers, but was unable to carry out his plan.
A fifth-century CE account of Ammonius says that his chief tenet was that Plato and Aristotle were in full agreement with each other. Given that his most famous pupils – Plotinus, Origen the Pagan (so called to distinguish him from the Christian Origen) and Longinus – thought of themselves as Platonists in their respective ways, it is plausible that Ammonius had succeeded in persuading them that Plato was right and that Aristotle had not diverged from him. Origen and Longinus were orthodox in their commitment to ‘Middle Platonism’ – that stage in Platonistic thought after the Academy abandoned the scepticism of the ‘New Academy’ and modified Plato’s doctrines with elements of Aristotelianism and Stoicism (thus Middle Platonism occupies the period between the beginning of the first century BCE and Plotinus). But Plotinus did not accompany them along that path; he gave a highly original new direction to the Platonic tradition, and it is this that bears the name ‘Neoplatonism’.
In noting that the occasion and a large part of the platform for Plotinus’ views is Plato’s thought as modified by Aristotelian and Stoic criticism and by a rejection of materialism, one should add – for a clearer understanding of the development especially of later Neoplatonism – the influence also of certain mystical ideas from cults such as Orphism, and from Judaism, which had come to be more widely known following the translation of a collection of Hebrew scriptures into demotic or koine Greek in the text known as the Septuagint (because it is said to have had seventy translators; septuaginta is Latin for ‘seventy’). All these factors together contributed to a climate in which Neoplatonism found an increasingly receptive audience.
As so often happens with important developments in intellectual history, the founder of a tradition of ideas had gifted successors who added to, adapted or extended it in several directions. In the case of Neoplatonism the chief successors to Plotinus were Porphyry (233–305 CE), Iamblichus (245–325 CE) and Proclus (412–85 CE). Porphyry has already been mentioned as the compiler of Plotinus’ Enneads; he wrote a commentary on Euclid and a number of other works. Whereas he shared with Plotinus the view that rational enquiry is the route to understanding the divine nature of reality, Iamblichus and Proclus are credited with taking Neoplatonism in mystical directions, making of it a religious philosophy in which theurgy – the practice of magical rituals to summon deities or to secure their aid – plays a key part. Given that Proclus was head of the Academy in the fifth century CE, one can see how far Plato’s doctrines had been taken in the centuries since he lived.
The doctrines of Neoplatonism are elaborate. From the fundamental metaphysical principle of ‘the One’ or ‘the First’ the universe unfolds into existence in stages in an eternal flow, each stage the ground or principle of the next. Of the ‘One’ or ‘First’ nothing can be said other than it is a unity and it is absolutely fundamental, for it is ‘beyond Being’ or prior to it. The first activity of the One is consciousness or mind, nous. Nous is the second ultimate ground of being, after the One. The self-reflexive understanding that nous has of its source, the One, produces dualities such as change and rest, greater and smaller, identity and difference; and it produces number, ideas, the Forms and the soul.
The soul gazes upon the Forms and is affected by them – is ‘informed’ by them – in such a way that in consequence it produces images of the Forms in time and space. These spatio-temporal images of the Forms are the physical things that furnish the world. Thus reality is the output of mind or consciousness; Neoplatonism is a species of idealism, the metaphysical view that the ultimate stuff of the universe is mental. For Neoplatonists, soul and the nature it produces are on two different levels of a hierarchy, soul on the higher plane and matter on the lower plane. But matter is still an emanation of nous, and therefore partakes of the divine. It is passive, it is the lowest level of reality, it is the terminus of the chain of activities flowing from the One, a penumbra or fringe on the outer limits of existence.
Matter is invoked by Plotinus as the explanation of evil. How can there be anything evil in a universe that flows entirely from the One, the Good? Yet evil manifestly and tragically exists; so, how does it arise? Matter cannot itself be the cause of evil because it is passive, inert, with no powers of its own. Plotinus’ ingenious answer is to say that when beings further up the chain of existence, in particular human beings, concentrate on material things below them instead of the higher things above them, evil results. He regarded people as essentially good but corruptible, and that this is the means of their corruption. His view proved controversial among later Neoplatonists; Proclus devoted a whole treatise to refuting him on this point, arguing that human souls are capable of evil on their own account, a view consistent with the Christian doctrine that people are born sinful because of Adam’s Fall. Christian moral theology invoked the idea that the deity gave humankind free will and that this is the source of evil; but the problem for believers in a good God is not quite made to go away by this, for it does not explain such ‘natural evils’ as the suffering produced by cancer, tsunamis, earthquakes, and the like. Indeed ‘the problem of evil’ is one of the most persuasive of the anti-theist arguments, answerable only by conceding that if there are any deities, they are not wholly good, or not wholly powerful, or both.
The ethics of Neoplatonism constitutes a major source of disagreement between its adherents and Christians. Because humans emanate from the One as the source of all being, Neoplatonism says, humans are themselves divine or partake of the divine, and the purpose of a life of virtue is to revert to unity with the One. The shortest route to reabsorption into the One is (as one would expect a philosopher to say) the philosophical life devoted to understanding the nature of reality and living in accordance with that understanding. This is par excellence the life of the mind, abjuring things of the body. So far, this rejection of things worldly is consistent with the strenuous version of early Christianity that saw so many of its votaries going to the desert to escape temptation, even in certain cases adopting the extremes of self-castration or living permanently atop a pillar. But the Christian claim that salvation had been achieved for humanity by a one-off self-sacrifice of God in human guise was rejected by Neoplatonists outright; in one version of the Christian view, all you need for salvation is to believe that claim, a very cut-price offer indeed in comparison to the Neoplatonistic view of the universe.
The later transformation of Neoplatonism into a religious practice involving theurgy was in large part a response to the nature of late antiquity – the period of the demise of the Roman Empire in the West, the rise of Christianity and its vigorous and prolonged assault on ‘paganism’ including destruction of the literature and art of the preceding thousand years, the existence of many other sects and movements, the hordes of holy men, mystics and magicians who swarmed that darkening world in competition with each other – which meant that, for the purposes of attracting followers, pledges of salvation and the aid of the gods had to be made.fn6 Philosophical examination of ideas had a hard time competing with bald assertions, claims, miracles and promises, the more fanciful the better; a familiar story. For a time philosophy all but vanished in the swamps of religious claims and practices. Later Neoplatonism followed down that path.
Nevertheless Neoplatonic ideas proved extraordinarily influential even in this morass, not least perhaps because the morass was itself in part made by them, and most effectively by Proclus. Augustine in Western Christendom, and such figures as Basil and the two ‘Fathers’ named Gregory in Eastern Christendom, were influenced by Neoplatonist ideas, as was the theology developed in later medieval times by Aquinas and others. When the Arab conquest began in the seventh century CE, the regions of Eastern Christendom where Greek philosophy still survived, chiefly Syria and Mediterranean Egypt, immediately influenced thinking in the expanding Islamic world. In the Renaissance rediscovery of Greek philosophy, Neoplatonism was what Plato meant to the greatly influential Marsilio Ficino and through him to the culture of the day; and its later theurgic elements fed the flames of interest in magic, Hermeticism, the Cabala and other mystical movements in the sixteenth century CE in lands that the Reformation had made Protestant and where, therefore, religious authority was insufficiently strong to keep the explosion of such interest down.fn7 In all forms of idealism in modern and contemporary philosophy, traces of Neoplatonism remain.
Neoplatonism is not the only example of a philosophy that was transformed over time into a religion – the same happened to Buddhism, Jainism and Confucianism, which are strictly not religions because they lack a god or gods, though more popular versions of Buddhism have become submerged beneath layers of supernaturalism of various kinds. Two elements in human nature, the propensity to superstition and the hunger for simple stories to provide a framework for some sort of understanding of the universe and one’s place in it, are powerful in explaining how this happens.
Part II
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MEDIEVAL AND RENAISSANCE PHILOSOPHY
In line with what is said in the Introduction about this being a history of philosophy and not of theology, and in light of the fact that much of what was debated in medieval times was the latter rather than the former, this section concentrates on those aspects of medieval thought that are most philosophically significant in themselves and in their influence.
The chief reason for the almost wholesale subordination of philosophy to theology in the medieval period is that after the abolition of the School of Athens – the Platonic Academy – by the Emperor Justinian in 529 CE, and his proscription of the teaching of ‘pagan’ philosophy, intellectual activity fell under the authority of the Church, and as time went by it became increasingly risky to diverge from doctrinal orthodoxy. Doing so could and too often did attract the severest of sanctions: the death penalty.
Even when speculation devoted itself wholly and only to philosophical matters there was no guarantee of safety. If one’s views had, or seemed to have, implications that cast doubt on matters of theology, or on what the currently winning side in doctrinal struggles considered orthodox, the risks were equally severe. As one would expect, this had a chilling effect on enquiry.
The problem is that the concept of deity – of a ‘god’ or ‘gods’ – is exceedingly ill-defined. Indeed a good deal of theology argues that it cannot be defined, or if defined (as, say, ‘the sum of all perfections’ or as the plenitude of some such state as ‘goodness’ or ‘love’) then it cannot be understood; it ‘passes all comprehension’. To one kind of sceptical viewer this makes the vastness of the literature of theology incomprehensible: how can so much be said about what nothing can be said about? But to a different kind of sceptical viewer the intrinsic unclarities and perhaps ineffabilities of the concept, into which traditional religious notions of deity rapidly mutate on inspection, actually explain the vastness of that literature: from this single point of unclarity, attended with so much hope, anxiety, fervour and tradition – not a little of it literally of murderous importance to its votaries – you would expect volcanic amounts of debate and disagreement to erupt.
Participants in theological debates of course deployed philosophical ideas, and in their applications of them at times made significant philosophical (and not just theological) contributions. Moreover they had to address central philosophical problems – time, free will, the idea of what is good – from their theological perspective. How can there be evil in the world if it was created by a good god? How can there be time if god is eternal or even outside time? If god can foresee the future, being omniscient, can there be such a thing as free will in humanity? It is these aspects of the thought of medieval times – where philosophy arises from, or impinges upon, theological thought – that I now survey.
It is well to recall that later philosophers almost always knew the work, the ideas, the theories, of at least some of the philosophers who came before them. They built on predecessors’ ideas, or rejected them, or enriched or circumvented them with new insights; but whichever of these they did, their work is related to a continuing conversation. It is also good to be conscious of the distances of time that elapsed between the figures discussed here and indeed everywhere in this book. Augustine lived seven hundred years after Aristotle; Anselm lived six hundred years after Augustine; Aquinas lived two hundred years after Anselm. So 1,500 years separated Aquinas from Aristotle whose work, a substantial part of it newly rediscovered shortly before Aquinas’ time, was of such great importance to him. In those great gaps of time hundreds of other thinkers and writers, and thousands of teachers and students, discussed and interpreted the ideas of the major philosophers. So the outstanding names mentioned in these pages are literally that: outstanding – projecting like high mountain peaks above an extensive range of hills.
Two things help to make sense of the history of medieval philosophy: the respective influences of Plato and Aristotle, and the methods of philosophical and theological debate developed in the high medieval period of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.
Augustine, like the various early Christian theologians known as the ‘Church Fathers’, was influenced by Plato, largely through the medium of Neoplatonism but also through the late dialogue Timaeus which Christian commentators found congenial as offering a cosmology interpretable in ways consistent with scripture. Aristotle was for centuries little known except through translations of some of his writings on logic, for example those made by Boethius. Or rather, it would be more accurate to say that Aristotle was little known in European Christendom, but his works were still known among Syrian Christians, which is why, in the course of the first three centuries after the Arab conquest of the Middle East, an assimilation of his philosophy into Islamic intellectual culture was able to occur. A number of Aristotle’s works were translated into Arabic, and in due course two great commentators on Aristotle appeared: Avicenna (Ibn Sina, 980–1037 CE) and Averroes (Ibn Rushd, 1126–98 CE). One could add the Jewish thinker Moses Maimonides (1135–1204 CE), like Averroes born in Cordoba in Spain, as a commentator on Aristotle likewise, and therefore as a contributor to the intellectual stir that prompted an upsurge of interest in Aristotle in European Christendom in the twelfth century CE.
As a result of this interest translations into Latin of forgotten major works of Aristotle began to appear in considerable numbers in the twelfth century, especially during its second half: the Ethics, Politics, Physics and Metaphysics among them. The commentaries of Avicenna and Averroes were also translated, and those by the latter proved particularly influential in some quarters. This created a difficulty: Averroes’ reading of Aristotle was such that it conflicted with important aspects of Christian doctrine, not least about the creation of the world and the nature of the soul. Heated discussions arose on the question whether Christians could and indeed should be heeding a pagan philosopher. For much of the first half of the thirteenth century it was a question whether study of Aristotle would be banned by the Church. In 1231 a commission was appointed by Pope Gregory IX to examine the matter. Under Siger of Brabant at the University of Paris there were enthusiastic pro-Aristotelians and Averroists. On the other side were those who agreed with Bonaventure, head of the Franciscans, who argued that Aristotle’s views were incompatible with Christianity and who therefore favoured Plato.
The dispute was resolved by Thomas Aquinas (1225–74 CE), who saw a way to render his own enthusiasm for Aristotle consistent with Church dogma. He argued that the Averroist interpretation of Aristotle was wrong, and provided his own interpretation in its place. By his magisterial writings he made Aristotelianism the official philosophy of the Church. Known as ‘Thomism’ after Aquinas’ name, it is still the official philosophy of the Roman Catholic Church.
The second point concerns method. In the first half of the twelfth century a bishop of Paris and professor at its university, Peter Lombard, edited a compilation of biblical and exegetical texts called The Book of Sentences. It instantly became a textbook for students of theology; attending lectures on it was a requirement for a bachelor’s degree, and anyone wishing to progress to a master’s degree in theology had to write a commentary on it. This remained the case until the fifteenth century, and both the compilation and its centrality to the curriculum shaped the nature of theological and philosophical debate throughout that time.
Alongside the Sentences there developed a tradition of learning by means of disputation, a question-and-answer dialectic which constituted both a method of teaching and a method of examination. A version of it called quodlibetical disputation (‘quodlibet’ means, in effect, ‘whatever pleases’) involved a scholar accepting the challenge of answering any question posed to him in a public forum. Quodlibetical writings were those that addressed the widely debated standard questions – including controversial and problematic ones – that scholars and lay persons alike were interested in.
A final introductory point: for the sake of organization, and adhering rather closely to the usual historical classifications, I take the medieval period as starting at the turn of the fifth century CE and culminating in the early fourteenth century, and the modern period as commencing in the late sixteenth century CE, labelling the period in between – the early fourteenth to the late sixteenth century – the ‘Renaissance’. Some historians of culture regard the Renaissance, under the label of the ‘northern Renaissance’, as persisting into the seventeenth century.
