Introduction to Philosophy Pages

(Under Construction)

Medieval philosophy is radically difficult to classify. When is the medieval period? Some time between antiquity and modernity? Where did it take place? Intellectual centers were declining and being invented anew, some were in “pagan” lands, some in the Islamic world, and some in Jewish and Christian lands. Were these different centers all to be considered producing one medieval period? Thus, this introduction will make gross summations and sacrifice detail to the aim of an initial characterization. The first grand sweep of a declaration will be that medieval philosophy was one half influenced by Plato and Platonists and the other half by Aristotle and Aristotelians. The intellectual synthesis of these two schools necessarily distorted “pure” Platonic and Aristotelian arguments, especially as they were conformed to a monotheistic conceptual framework, but it also yielded a remarkably complex world of thought. Medieval philosophy is primarily religious thought, but in talking about religion through this history, few topics are left unaltered.

Thinkers I particularly Admire from Late Antiquity through the Middle Ages:

St. Augustine: ( 354-430 CE)
Saint Augustine of Hippo’s life is itself a work of art, recorded in critical detail by his own hand in his Confessions: his autobiographical exploration of his anxiety-ridden conversions (broadly including the conversion from infancy to adulthood, educationally from a reluctant student to a scholar, intellectually to philosophy and theology, and spiritually and religiously he converts from skepticism to Manichaeism and to Christianity). His biography accounts for some of his intellectual influence: his Greek and Roman education, his Manichaeism, his exposure to skepticism and Neoplatonism, and his Christian exposure and study. More specifically, we can argue that Augustine was firmly intellectually formed by the conjunction of Neoplatonism (through Plotinus, likely through Porphyry and Victorinus), with rhetoric (through Virgil and Cicero), with Christian thought (through his mother, Saint Ambrose, and the Scriptures), to which we can conclude that he as much embodies the merger of pagan Neoplatonism with Christian thought.

St. Aquinas wrote of him: “Whenever Augustine, who was saturated with the teachings of the Platonists, found in their writings anything consistent with the faith, he adopted it; and whatever he found contrary to the faith, he amended.” These Platonic currents in his thought can be seen throughout his works. Notable examples in his work On Free Choice of the Will include the stylistic form of the work as a dialogue and his methodological and pedagogical relation he demonstrates to his student Evodius. Further, in its content, the Greek influence can be seen in his relation of faith and reason wherein the former is required as a foundation but the latter is of the utmost importance. Augustine, like Plato, privileged non-dogmatic reason; Plato and Augustine both held that the highest truth was a grasp on the form of the good, only diverging insofar as Augustine’s interpretation of the good is either God. While the forms, as either the Good itself or God, may be universal, knowable truths, this does not mean we have perfect knowledge of them.

Pseudo-Dionysius: (ca. 471-512/518 CE)
We do not know his real name, this Christian faithful one, the Pseudo-Dionysius, who wrote about the power of names. We believe that this Neo-Platonist believer wrote from Syria sometime between 471-512/518 C.E. He adopted the name of Dion (the) Areopagite in place of his own; Dion, or Dionysius was the distinguished convert of St. Paul from the Acts 22:17 ff. Perhaps the nameless one wants us to know nothing else about him that any truthful biography could offer. Instead of his birth date and parent’s names, we read his history through his philosophy; through the pseudonym we will deduce a biography where fragments and negations are more truthful than a narrative could ever be.

Pseudo-Dionysius wrote a number of works including Letters, which are predominately exegeses of his thought and moral advice and four surviving treatises: The Celestial Hierarchy, which delineates the ranks of angels, the Ecclesiastical Hierarchy, which delineates the ranks of religious figures. The Divine Names, which undertakes a study of the intelligible names applied to God (i.e., Goodness, Wisdom, Yearning). The Mystical Theology, which philosophical promotes one to abandon the sensible and intelligible in order to experience a union with God. Then there are the two questioned treatises, the Theological Representations (Outlines of Divinity), which was said to be on the trinity and incarnation, and the Symbolic Theology, which reputedly analyzed the sensible names representing God (i.e. Rock, Right Hand).

Pseudo-Dionysius’ work had a great influence, even when his identity and authority began to be questioned and challenged and even after he was declared blasphemous. I consider the most impressive of his works to be The Divine Names in which he radicalizes a method to balance denial and affirmation of our knowledge of God in reaction to our tenuous claims to knowing God. How can we know what exceeds all that we can conceive? Surely, we can know His emanations, what proceeds from Him, and therefore we can talk about these things, His creations, in order to talk about Him as their creator, but, these things are not properly God and our knowledge of them cannot apply to Him properly. Thus, every name of God we affirm, we must also negate. This means that we must stutter the names of God: He is Good and He is not Good.

St. Anselm: (1033-1109 CE)
Anselm was enthroned as Archbishop of Canterbury in 1093, approximately fifteen years after writing his most famous work the Proslogion, which contains his ontological proof for the existence of God. The Proslogion seeks a single line of argumentation that will first prove (1) that God exists, (2) will then prove that all other things depend upon Him, and finally (3) prove that all the things that we have been told to think about God’s attributes by the religious tradition make sense in regard to Him. In this way faith may gain understanding through the use of reason to support what we are taught by faith. The essence of his ontological proof is that everyone can understand the statement “something-than-which-nothing-greater-can-be-thought,” this is the definition he gives for God, and in understanding it we must believe it to be true, thus believing in his existence.

St. Aquinas: (1225-1274 CE)
Pope Leo XIII in 1879 declared Aquinas’ philosophy to be the true Catholic philosophy. Whereas Augustine built upon Plato’s theories, Aquinas used Aristotle for his foundation. A major difference, however, between Aquinas and the Greeks, was his support of a division between philosophy and religion. He argued that philosophy was based on reason, whereas religion was based on truths of revelation and held by faith. (Note that John Paul II discussed this reconciliation as a contemporary concern in his encyclical “Faith and Reason”).

Aquinas’ project predominately endeavors to systematize the ideas in the works of the Church fathers and work out a consistent theology. Nonetheless, he incorporates numerous new interests and pieces of knowledge into religion as he reconciles the Christian notions of God with Greek philosophy. He argues that truth can be known both by reason and by faith; thus, reason is a tool for faith.

Aquinas held that the nature of humanity is essentially what Aristotle’s De Anima argues: one is a natural being with natural functions and has natural ends, yet, he adds that each is also a child of God and thus has a supplemental end: loyalty and obedience to God.

Aquinas held that the nature of God is also both like and more than what Aristotle had argued; that He is the supreme: pure actuality, pure intelligence, and a being whose perfection inspires the universe’s movement, yet adds that God is also creative providence, loving father, and exacting ruler.

“...do you think there is anything more excellent than a rational and wise mind?

[Evodius:] Nothing, I think, except God.

[Augustine:] This is my opinion too. But though we accept this with the strongest faith, understanding it is a very difficult matter”

--St. Augustine,

On Free Choice of the Will

Thursday, August 30, 2012

Introduction to Medieval Philosophy