The History of Philosophy, page 20
Boethius’ Consolation of Philosophy is a work of great literary merit, taking the form of a dialogue, in a mixture of prose and verse, between Boethius awaiting death in prison and Philosophy in the figure of a woman. He is in despair at the sudden and terrible stroke of ill-fortune he has suffered; she offers him consolation – but not in the form of sympathy. Rather, she reminds him that his happiness lies elsewhere than in the chances and changes of worldly luck. Boethius complains that his fate shows that the good suffer while the wicked prosper, and Philosophy says that she will show him that this is not true.
She begins, as much of the philosophical tradition does, by distinguishing between worldly goods such as riches and status, and the true goods of virtue and love. These latter Boethius has not lost. So even though he has lost wealth and power, he has not lost what brings real happiness. She then argues that happiness and goodness are the same thing, so the wicked, in not being good, are of necessity unhappy. And finally she argues that everything that happens is the result of God’s providence, and that apparent suffering and unhappiness in fact serve a higher purpose which might not be apparent at the time of suffering.
At this point Boethius thinks that he catches Philosophy out. Ah, he says; so if everything unfolds to the good through God’s providence, it means that everything happens of necessity; so there is no free will. Philosophy gives much the same answer as above – that God is outside time and therefore the future and the past are all together present to him.
Commentators on Boethius remark on the fact that he has pagan Philosophy consoling a Christian: how, they ask, can a Christian accept this? Some answer that Boethius was demonstrating the insufficiency of Philosophy to provide a consolation as satisfying as Christianity does – which means that the Consolation of Philosophy is an elaborate work of irony. But to think this is rather a stretch; the views Philosophy offers chime well with views for which Boethius argues elsewhere.
Moreover Boethius’ successors in medieval thought did not interpret him as an ironist. Along with Aristotle and Augustine he is a dominating figure in that tradition; for centuries his writings were a standard source for the study of logic, but the Consolation outstripped even those works in importance and influence. It was read, admired, translated and imitated right up to the eighteenth century.
ANSELM (1033–1109)
Archbishop Anselm of Canterbury was not an Englishman but the son of an aristocratic family at Aosta in Italy. As a teenager he tried to become a monk, but his father would not allow it. After his father’s death he led an itinerant life, travelling through Italy and France, until at the age of twenty-seven he decided to give up his worldly inheritance and take the tonsure, choosing to join the Benedictine order at the Abbey of Bec in France.fn3 He became its abbot, and in his time there made it one of the leading schools of Europe, attracting students from many countries.
After the Normans conquered England in 1066 the Abbey of Bec was endowed with lands in the new domains, so Anselm crossed the English Channel to visit them. He was nominated as successor to Archbishop Lanfranc of Canterbury, but at first was denied that position by William II (William Rufus), who wanted the revenues of Canterbury for himself. Only when Rufus thought he was on his deathbed and asked Anselm to give him the last rites was Anselm allowed to take up the archbishopric. This occurred during a period of turmoil in the Church, which at the time had two popes in competition with each other.
William survived both his illness and his satisfaction at having Anselm as Archbishop of Canterbury. The two men were in frequent conflict, and the quarrels continued between Anselm and Rufus’s successor, Henry I. The victory – after two periods of exile and other controversies – in the end went to Anselm, who was able to secure the independence of the Church from the Crown, and the supremacy of Canterbury over York, the quarrel between the two archbishoprics having been a considerable source of angry dispute for much of his period in office.
Throughout his busy and tumultuous public life Anselm managed to find time to think and write. Most of his work was in intricately dense theology, but with much dense and intricate philosophy alongside. The reputation of Scholasticism – the ‘philosophy of the Schools’, a generic name for medieval philosophy – as consisting in logic-chopping and minute distinctions, is not undeserved, and finds exemplification in Anselm. For example: in connection with words that can function as either nouns or adjectives, he asks whether they refer to a substance or a quality. To solve the problem he distinguished between signification and appellation – something rather like ‘denoting’ and ‘describing’ respectively – and said a term like ‘red’ signifies one thing, namely redness, but applies to many things: red balls, red noses, red flags. Moreover – and this is a nice point – although ‘red’ signifies redness, it does not ‘appellate’ or exemplify redness; for ‘redness’ is not itself red, any more than ‘being a man’ is a man.
Another example is his argument that truth has always existed – an important point for theological purposes. It goes as follows. Suppose that truth has not always existed. Then before truth came into existence, it was true that there was no truth. But that means there was truth before there was truth, which is a contradiction. So the supposition ‘that truth has not always existed’ is false.
Anselm is best remembered now for his arguments concerning the existence of God, which one finds in the Monologion and the De Veritate, but chiefly in Chapter 2 of the Proslogion. The principal argument, which seeks to prove God’s existence from the mere thought of God, goes as follows. The concept of God is the concept of the greatest thing there is, something which is so great that nothing greater than it can be conceived. The concept of this greatest thing is, obviously, in one’s mind; one is conceiving of it. But if the greatest thing were only in one’s mind, one could indeed conceive something greater than it, namely, a greatest thing that actually exists in reality. Therefore the greatest possible thing – God – must really exist.
This argument has been known as the ‘ontological argument’ since Immanuel Kant’s criticism of it in the eighteenth century. Kant’s objection is that the argument makes existing a property on a par with any other property, whereas it is not a property but a condition of something’s being able to have properties. The argument says that ‘really existing’ is a property that makes something ‘greater’ than something that ‘exists only in the mind’. But consider: suppose there is a table in my room whose surface is brown and which stands a metre high. (The phrase ‘there is’ is another way of saying ‘there exists’.) Now, I can paint the table a different colour, or I can chop some centimetres off its legs, and the table would still exist; but could I change the existence of the table into non-existence, leaving the colour or height of the table unchanged? Obviously not: how can a non-existent table have any colour or height? Anselm assumed that for the greatest conceivable thing to be the greatest conceivable thing, it must have the property of existing as an essential greatness; but Kant’s argument says that to have any of the properties that putatively make it great, it must – so to speak – ‘already’ exist, so existence is not a property, essential or otherwise.
In any case, to say that something does not exist might be – if the thing does exist – to speak falsely, but it is not to contradict oneself. The ontological argument seeks to treat a denial of the existence of God as a contradiction, on the grounds that existence is an essential part of his nature. But to claim this is wholly a matter of definition; Anselm relies on a traditional conception of God as having all positive attributes (and no negative ones) in superlative degree; but that is purely stipulative.
Anselm distinguishes between ‘existing in thought’ and ‘existing in reality’, but does not carry the distinction through to the difference between something’s having a property in thought and having a property in reality. This by itself is fatal to the argument. Moreover a critic might ask: what motivates saying that existing in reality is ‘greater’ than existing in thought? What does ‘greater’ mean here – does it mean better? Why should one automatically assume that being real is ‘better’ than merely being thought of? Is murder, for example, better for happening in reality than only being thought of?
What is regarded by some as the most effective argument against Anselm was provided by his contemporary Gaunilo of Marmoutiers, another Benedictine monk. It is known as the ‘Lost Island’ argument. Instead of ‘the greatest thing that can be conceived’ Gaunilo suggested we think of ‘the greatest island that can be thought of’. This is a perfectly meaningful phrase; we understand it; so the greatest conceivable island exists in our minds. But Anselm’s argument tells us that the greatest conceivable island which exists in reality would be greater than one that exists only in the mind. Therefore there must be a greatest conceivable island. Gaunilo took this to reveal the absurdity of Anselm’s argument.
Scholars still debate Anselm’s argument, and there are some philosophers today, among them Alvin Plantinga, who try to formulate versions of it that will unequivocally work. Interestingly, arguments for the existence of a deity are never what lead people to theistic beliefs: at best they are post facto justifications or rationales for what almost always is a commitment that arises from other sources.
ABELARD (1079–1142)
Peter Abelard is known outside the history of philosophy for his famous and tragic love affair with Héloïse. He was a clever, handsome and charismatic man, and as a teacher at the University of Paris was a celebrity among its students, who had flocked to hear him from all parts of Europe, so far did his fame extend. It came to his attention that one of the secular canons of Notre-Dame, named Fulbert, had a remarkable young niece lodging with him, brilliant, learned and beautiful. This was Héloïse d’Argenteuil. Abelard arranged to take lodgings with Fulbert also, and offered himself as her tutor.
Inevitably the two began an affair; she fell pregnant, and gave birth to a son they named Astrolabe in honour of the scientific instrument. Although Abelard and Héloïse married secretly, the furious Fulbert was not placated; he hired men to attack Abelard and castrate him. When he recovered from this trauma, after a period as a monk in retirement, Abelard returned to teaching and writing at a monastic school associated with the Abbey of Saint-Denis. Héloïse was cloistered as a nun at Argenteuil, from where she wrote Abelard poignant love letters saying she would rather love him than God, and wishing that she was in bed with him. His replies, alas, are stuffy and pompous, telling her to behave herself as a good nun. They were reunited in the end; Héloïse founded a nunnery called the Paraclete and Abelard became its abbot.
Abelard is a philosophically significant figure for a number of reasons, but not least among them is that he had a founding role in the form and manner of high Scholasticism – the logical, systematic approach to philosophical and theological questions, and the intermingling of the two. This is illustrated by his book Sic et Non, ‘Yes and No’, in which he places contradictory texts of scripture side by side, and states rules for reconciling the texts, one principal rule being that of taking care to identify equivocations. The technique is designed to promote a logical approach to dealing with problematic questions. As the insistence on logic suggests, he was instrumental, with Albertus Magnus and others, in promoting the influence of the newly rediscovered Aristotle, whose works had not long since begun appearing in Latin in greater numbers, and some of which Abelard knew.
Abelard is regarded as a leading figure among nominalists, both because he rejected the realism about universals associated with Plato and because he offered an account of universals as names, not things – names we apply to things that are similar, such as this individual rose and that individual rose, both of which accordingly we call ‘rose’, or which have similar properties, such as the red of this rose and the red of that, which for convenience we refer to as ‘redness’. But there is no redness in the world apart from the red in each individual red thing, so ‘redness’ is simply a name, nomen.
The basic idea underlying Abelard’s nominalism is that everything that exists is individual and particular. Although he regarded individuals as composites of form and matter, he was Aristotelian in regarding the form as immanent to the matter, that is, as individual to it and inseparable from it. It follows that the form ‘informing’ a given quantum of matter cannot be in more than one lump of matter at a time. Such a view implies that relations – ‘before’, ‘to the left of’, ‘father of’ – exist only because the related individuals exist.
For Abelard, logic and semantics are the basis of philosophy. If we understand how words signify things, and how they combine in sentences which, when declarative, denote dicta or propositions (a ‘proposition’ is the ‘what is said’ by an assertion; he recognized that not all sentences assert propositions; other sentences constitute questions, or commands, or expressions of wishes, and so on), then we can better understand the logical structure of arguments. For example, he showed that a conditional sentence of the form ‘if p then q’, where p and q are dicta or propositions, is not about the truth or otherwise of ‘p’ or of ‘q’ taken independently, but about the relationship between ‘p’ and ‘q’.
Although Abelard was influenced by Aristotle he did not know all of Aristotle’s works, and therefore some of his independently developed views are very unAristotelian. For example, he did not think that perception consists in having an eidolon, image, of an object entering one’s mind and ‘forming’ it into a replica of the object. Instead he had a view more similar to the ‘naive realist’s’ belief that we look out of our eyes as if through windows, and thereby get an initial apprehension of the object which imagination supplies with details and clarifications, thus achieving an understanding of what it is.
In a partial and superficial way Abelard’s theory of perception prefigures Kant’s views, and so do his views about ethics; for he says, as Kant later did, that the question whether an act is right or wrong is wholly settled by reference to the intention of the actor. If an actor’s intentions are shaped by his love of God and his desire to obey him, his acts are good; otherwise they are wrong. This makes the outcome of the act irrelevant to judging its moral worth, even if, contrary to the actor’s aim, it causes harm or evil. It is an immediate corollary of this view that the will must be free, otherwise we cannot be praised or blamed for what we intend. In A Dialogue between a Philosopher, a Jew and a Christian the Philosopher, a Stoic, argues that happiness is attainable in this life by the successful pursuit of virtue; Abelard has the Christian claim that final happiness is attainable only in the afterlife.
AQUINAS (1225–1274)
By a considerable margin St Thomas Aquinas, as he is known in religious circles, is the greatest philosopher as well as theologian of the medieval period. His combination of theology and philosophy survives today as ‘Thomism’, still taught in Catholic universities and colleges as the official philosophy of the faith.
A scion of an aristocratic family of Aquino in the region of Italy now known as Lazio, Aquinas was educated at the Benedictine abbey school of Monte Cassino, and then at the University of Naples. His family wished him to join the grand, genteel and centuries-old Benedictine order, as befitted his birth; but while a student at Naples he fell under the influence of a recruiter for the recently formed Dominicans, a mendicant preaching order founded to oppose heresy and fiercely committed to forging the intellectual tools to do so (very like the Jesuits more than three centuries later, who were set up to fight the Protestant Reformation of the sixteenth century). The Dominicans’ reputation as hunters of heresy and heretics earned them the threatening as well as punning nickname of ‘the hounds of God’: Domini canes.
Aquinas’ family did everything they could to dissuade him from joining the new order, which from their point of view seemed to be a collection of hippies and street fighters with its poverty, lack of history, zealotry and engagement in struggles with Albigensians and Manicheans. They went so far as to kidnap Aquinas, holding him prisoner in their family castles; his brothers even smuggled a prostitute into his room to seduce him from his religious fervour. Legend has it that he drove her away with a red-hot fire-iron, and was rewarded that night by a visit from two angels, an event which strengthened his resolve.
He was finally allowed to leave, and made his way to Paris to study at its university. He enrolled as a pupil of Albertus Magnus, and became so attached to him that when, later, Albertus was sent to inaugurate a new studium at Cologne, he accompanied him and soon afterwards began his teaching career there. Among his fellow-students and colleagues Aquinas was known as ‘the dumb ox’, mainly because he was a man of few words, but also because he was big and burly. Albertus said to them, ‘You name him “the dumb ox”, but his teaching will one day be a bellow heard throughout the world.’
Aquinas might have been a man of few words in the spoken sense, but he made up for it in the very many volumes of his writings. At Cologne he wrote commentaries on books of the Old Testament and an enormously detailed study of Peter Lombard’s Sentences. Recalled to Paris to serve as regent master in theology for the Dominicans he set to work to defend the mendicant orders, which as his family’s attitude demonstrates were controversial; the other notable new such order was the Franciscan, founded by St Francis of Assisi. The Franciscan and Dominican orders quickly became rivals, often bitter ones.
In his first stint as regent master in Paris Aquinas wrote a book on truth, commentaries on Boethius and a collection of quodlibetical responses to questions in theology put to him by his students and others. By the end of his time there he was working on one of his most famous books, the Summa Contra Gentiles.
