1. The Basic Philosophical Ideas in the period of Patristics.

2. Scholasticism in Western Europe.

3. Argumentation on the Universals. The Nominalists and

Realists.   

The Middle Ages cover a long stretch of the history of Europe from the fall of the Roman Empire to the Renaissance –more than a whole millennium. In the early Middle Ages, Christian dogmas evolved along with the formation of the European states after the collapse of the Roman Empire (Y-th century A.D.), while the later Middle Ages (beginning with the XI-th century) are associated with the spreading of feudalism, which used Christianity as its ideological basis, clarifying and deepening the details of this worldview in accordance with its own demands.

The idealist orientation of most mediaeval philosophical systems was prompted by the dogmas of Christianity, of which the most important were the dogma of the personal form of one God the Creator, which rejected out of hand the atomistic doctrines of antiquity (this dogma was primarily worked out by St. Augustine); and the dogma of the creation of the world by God out of nothing; this last dogma erected an insurmountable barrier between the ideal world of God the Creator and the material world of earthly life, it asserted the latter’s derivative origin from the ideal will of the Supreme Being and, moreover, it also assumed the limitedness of the world in time (the beginning and the end of the world).

Subject to these harsh dictates of religion supported by state authority, philosophy was declared to be the maidservant of theology (St. Pietro Damiani’s formula) expected to use the power of the rational apparatus to confirm the dogmas of Christianity. This philosophy came to be known as scholasticism (fr. L. scholasticus "learned", fr. Gk. schole "school"). All truth was believed to have been given in the biblical texts, so it was necessary to apply a system of correctly constructed syllogisms to actualize that truth by deriving the entire fullness of logical consequences. Naturally, scholasticism relied in this respect on the heritage of antiquity, particularly on Aristotle’s formal logic. Since the biblical texts and the symbols of faith were mystical or allegoric in character, their unambiguous interpretation demanded sophisticated logic, a kind of scholastic rationalism, which treated, for example, the dogma of the Trinity, i.e. of the three hypostases of the one God, as a model of logical prob­lems. The content of scholastic debates had no serious impact on philosophy, but in terms of the technique of reasoning scholasticism proved very useful for the development of logic.

There are 4 main ideas of Christianian worldview which expose the very essence of the concepts of God, of man and the world in Mediaeval philosophers’ speculations:

1. The Idea of the Trinity or believing God as the Creator, Savior and Holy Spirit. God is Havens’ Father who created subsequently the world and man. The latter was the sort of perfection as God created him similar to himself, but man fell away from God because of his primordial transgression.

God is the Savior Christ who is in the same time both the son of God and the Human son, who takes off the burden of the primordial sin from Human. He manifests in himself both Devine and human character. God Father and God Son are linked by the Holy Spirit. He also links them both with Human.

2. The Idea of Free Choice between Good and Evil. According to Christian dogmas the world is divided into 3 realms: the Devine- Heavens, the earthly one and the Devil’s – the hell. On the Earth man makes his choice and comes at last either to God or to Devil. (They accepted this though Christianity suggested absoluteness of Good and relativeness of Evil).

3. The idea of afterdeath recompense and Devine Mercy. In Christianity we have additionally the idea of Devine grace and absolution. The most attractive expression of such absolution is the act of crucifixion of The Christ, who liberated mankind from the primordial sin. In Christianity an important role got the idea and practice of penance (repentence) when man opens his feelings and consciousness to God and then gets salvation. The idea of repentence is a sort of the bridge between God and man. The one who forgives is approaching the Christ. From this follows the deepest Christian principle of non-resistance to evil.

4. The idea of Apocalypses (from Greek revelation) of human history, it shows the history of mankind not as a cycle, but as a line, which got its beginning and end, that in its turn is the transmission into some other being.

The main peculiarities of the Mediaeval Philosophy:

1. Theocentricism, meaning that any problem in philosophy including the problem of man is solved via God.

2. Theodicy solves the contradiction between the idea of God as Absolute Good and the existence of Evil in the world.

3. Providentialism (from Greek “foresight”) means that everything is developing according to God’s purport and is supposed to achieve it at last.

4 Personalism, meaning that God is the Absolute Personality and derivative from him is the personality of man, who is able to cognize God only through deep and mystic communication of personalities, by means of prayer, confession and penance. Man should not justify himself to anybody but God. Only God knows all his deeds, thoughts and actions and is responsible to judge him.

5. Revelationism, meaning that God is the ultimate truth, the knowledge of which is contained in the Bible, so everybody should learn this Devine knowledge.

 The history of the Mediaeval philosophy can be divided into 3 periods: Patristics with Apologetics, Early Scholasticism and the Late Scholasticism. These periods are closely connected with the ways of philosophizing of religious philosophers. During the whole period it was the interpretation and commentaries of Holy Scripture.

As the whole truth is contained in the Bible, everybody should learn this Devine knowledge. But this knowledge was symbolic, mysterious and figurative, so the aim of philosophers was to interpret, explicate, clear out the Holy Writ. This process had three stages:

1. When etymological analysis was attempted;

2. When conceptual analysis was attempted;

3. When the text of Holy Writ became the base for the further development of philosophical ideas by religious philosophers themselves.

In the history of Mankind there is no any exact line which divides it into different parts. New ideas are usually born within the actual philosophical systems; they are being developed and then become profound. In the West philosophy admiration of nature had been changed into admiration of spirit.

The main problems investigated in the Mediaeval period are as following:

1) The nature of the universals. During the whole Mediaeval period there was a hot discussion between realism and nominalism attempting to solve this problem.

2) Correlation of will and consciousness.

3) The problem of free will, the choice between good and evil.

4) Correlation of soul and body (Origen: man is spirit, which is given by God and directed to good and truth; soul is of dual nature: high and low (passions); body manifests nature. So evil comes from abuse (breach) of freedom. The Mediaeval asceticism was not to restrain the nature (body) but to bring up flesh to bendl it to the spiritual grounds.

5) Correlation of nature and blessings.

6) Correlation of faith, consciousness and will.

Christianity did not appear from nowhere. It absorbed the providing ideas of local well-developed religions of that time.

Judaism adopted the notion of the resurrection of the body. This passed, chiefly through the writings of Paul, into orthodox Christianity. Of Persia it consequently, absorbed the idea of the soul, which could survive the body. The two ideas were not so easily reconciled.

Philosophical influences on Judaism were most apparent in the writings of Philo of Alexandria (b. c. 25 BC). He anticipated some later Neo-Platonist motifs, and pioneered the allegorical method. He was thus able to show that the teachings of the Hebrew Bible were consonant with philosophy as he understood it. Faithfulness to the Law could accompany an exalted sense of the transcendent. Also somewhat in the spirit of Platonism was his postulation of a Logos to serve as the agent of God and to substitute for the more Platonic term Nous. The Logos is where the Forms are, first in their eternal manner as thoughts of God and second as existing objectively in the created order. For Philo rejected the notion that the world is eternal on scriptural grounds. There are quite a number of original ideas in Philo. Probably the two most important are as follows.

First, he held that we can know God directly by mystical intuition as well as by reasoning from the world. But in knowing God directly we do not know his essence but only his existence. This distinction was later vital in Christian writings: he held, moreover, that God in his own nature is unnamable, ineffable and ungraspable. In this he differed from the Aristotelian and Platonic traditions.

Second, he modified Aristotle’s cosmological argument to establish a Prime Changer or Mover, so that it started from the existence of the cosmos rather than its containing motion or change.

Philo was a key figure, since his pioneering synthesis between biblical religion and Greek philosophy cleared the way for later syntheses in which the three faiths of Judaism, Christianity and Islam expressed their theologies. His worldview was a liberal one, but he appealed also, deeply, to religious experience (and gave an interesting account of prophetic knowledge as a variety over and above other forms of knowledge in the Greek tradition). Christianity became increasingly dependent on Greek philosophy.

Christianity combined faith as in the mysteries, with an uncompromising attitude to the official praxeology. It also had in its Catholic version a unified organization, even if there were plenty of heresies embodied in various movements moving like a flotilla alongside the main fleet.

In rising to the challenge of alternative philosophies Christianity itself had to become philosophical even in refuting or rejecting philosophy. As Aristotle said, there is no avoiding philosophy, since the question of whether one should philosophize or not is itself a philosophical question. So Christianity had a double incentive to create an intellectual worldview, in which biblical revelation was seen in the light of Hellenistic philosophy

Compared to the Hellenistic universe, the Christian cosmos was highly dramatic. Its major myth centered on Christ, of course, but the very importance of Christ’s mission on earth dictated that Christians heavily emphasized the fall of humankind through the transgression of the protohumans Adam and Eve. But also, though hope of a more immediate coming of Christ had faded by the second century AD, there was vividly in the Christian imagination the picture of the end of history, with the Second Coming of Christ and the judgment of the human race. The heart of orthodox belief as it came to be formulated: this was the doctrine of the Trinity, pivotal in the scheme of Christian faith. This was, interestingly, formulated through the use, primarily, of Greek philosophical terminology, followed by Latin rough equivalents.

Christianity had a problem to solve and a value to express, both religious. The problem arose from Christ’s saving work and the practice of Christians in worshiping him. Because of the Jewish heritage, with its strict emphasis upon monotheism, it was inconsistent for Christians to worship Christ without recognizing him as God. Indeed it would have been idolatrous. Similar remarks apply also to the Holy Spirit who played a developing role in Christian worship. In brief, Christ and the Holy Spirit had to be seen as fully divine. But if the three, Father, Son and Holy Spirit are each divine, does this not mean that Christianity is a tritheism, that is to say, a form of polytheism? Christians could affirm with a clear conscience that God is both three and one. This way the suggestion of idolatry and polytheism is removed.

The other side of the religious importance of the Trinity is that the notion of three loving Beings embracing one another in the most intimate and mutually pervasive fashion came to be the central symbol of Christian love. The Trinity was the highest expression of divine love, to be imitated by the Christian.

Augustine would have had a firm place in history if only for his pioneering autobiographical work, The Confessions. He lived at a time (354—430) of division between the old world and the emerging Christian civilization which would survive the collapse of the imperial system. He played, of course, a notable role in systematizing the thought of Christendom, since he wrote on psychology, the Trinity, ethics, the philosophy of history, and so on. The voluminousness and system of his writings gave him immense later prestige and influence.

He saw the human being as created out of a fusion of soul and body. Though he was attracted for a time to the notion that the soul preceded the body, he was insistent on its created character. It differed from God, despite its immortality and immateriality, in being changeable. It was thus affected by sin and repentance, and was in general affected by the body, in being stimulated by bodily perceptions into sensual knowledge. The union of soul and body is a model of the hypostatic union of Christ’s own divine and human natures. Moreover, though the soul is contaminated by the fall, it still bears, distorted, the image of the divine. Essentially, moreover, it strives for the highest good, namely beatitude, which involves the contemplative life in communion with the Divine Being. In all this Augustine was able to make use, adapted, of the Neo-Platonic heritage.

His own experience seems to explane Augustine’s views on sin and grace. Our freedom consists in the way in which God through his grace may draw us to the good. Humans, moreover, inherit the propensity to sin from Adam. We are incapable of goodness except through God’s overcoming of this original sin. It follows that whether we are saved or not depends not at all upon us but simply on the grace of the Divine Being. In turn it is inexplicable why God saves one person not another. Moreover, God knows in advance whom he will and whom he will not save. Thus Augustine was a prime pioneer of the doctrine of predestination.

But Augustine was eager to escape the conclusion that God brings about evil. And he certainly did not want to propound a separate source of evil. He resolved these matters chiefly by a theory, borrowed from Neo-Platonism, that evil is mere absence of good. Naturally, the further you are from the central Light the more imperfection: this is not to be avoided. So God as creator naturally has to bring into being that which is less perfect than himself. Also, humans, in choosing evil, are free, though they are not under the direct influence in so acting of the grace of God.

Individual good and evil, though, need to be seen in the wider context of society, and Augustine made a major contribution to thinking about Church and State in his The City of God. In contrasting the Heavenly city with the earthly one he was using ideal and indeed eschatological ideas; until we see the final judgment of God it is not possible to identify the two cities, except of course for the guidance of the Bible itself. But he did accede to the notion that the State should be subservient to the Church, in so far as the latter was an admittedly imperfect embodiment of the heavenly city

In his account of the relation between God and the created world, Augustine follows a generally Neo-Platonic path. He postulates seminal reasons which bring things into being in due time, so that they follow natural laws or processes. This conception of a relatively independent nature in no way inhibits God from acting from time to time through miraculous means, though the greater miracle is the world itself, with all its signs of beauty. These beauties point to the invisible handiwork of the Divine Being. He is more interested in this practical message than in offering some kind of proof of God’s existence. Indeed, though God leaves in the world pointers to himself, he is utterly transcendent, and according to Augustine is best known through ignorance. The Church is not a perfect organism: it is not indeed to be identified with the heavenly city. It contains sinners and people who are more or less penitent. But it is the extended body of the sacramental Christ. The synthesis, which he created between the revelatory and the philosophical ideas was as successful as any in the history of the Church. Yet of course he left many loose ends and pungent questions, above all those concerning free will and predestination.

John Scotus Eriugena produced a highly original synthesis between Neo-Platonist and Christian ideas.

For him nature means everything - the total universe including God, and not just nature as we might conceive of it. There is a fourfold division of nature into (1) nature which creates and is not created; (2) nature which both creates and is created; (3) nature which does not create but is created; and (4) nature which neither creates nor is created. The first of these, obviously enough, is God. From God emanates the rest of the universe, or the rest of nature, to use Eriugena’s terminology. In the end the whole of the created realm returns to God. There is in Eriugena’s vision a nice rhythm of symmetry. With regard to God, John Scotus adopted both the negative and the affirmative way.

Since God is necessary to the existence of creatures, they are nothing apart from him. But though this is an intimate relation, it is the human being that provides an extra-special link between the natural world and the creator, since he is made in God’s image. Human beings can attain, through God’s grace, deification. Others will be suitably purged before the whole of nature returns to God in the end. John Scotus is then a universalist of a sort, though the elite will have in the end greater glory than the rest.

Altogether John Scotus built a highly integrated intellectual system. It could look, however, as though he was a pantheist and he did not maintain a wide enough gulf between God and creatures. For such reasons his major work was condemned three and a half centuries after his death, by Pope Honorius III, who ordered the book to be burned. Though it was without a lasting influence in the Christian tradition, it was powerful.

Anselm of Canterbury lived from 1033 to 1109, and at the age of 60 became Archbishop of Canterbury. In theology he was chiefly known for his explication of the doctrine of Christ's atonement for the sin of human beings. He also developed two arguments for God's existence which have attracted a lot of attention. All these arguments are preliminaries in the exercise of constructing a natural theology, which was most successfully accomplished by Thomas Aquinas. Moreover, the growth of the universities and the new awareness of philosophical traditions favored the distinction, made by among others Albertus Magnus (1208-80), who was Aquinas’ mentor, between philosophy and theology. This gave theologians some leeway in dealing with the Church, and provided an arena, namely philosophy, for some freedom of thought.

Thomas Aquinas and the new synthesis. The very wide range of his writings, from large works such as the “Summa theologica” and the “Summa contra gentiles”, through a large corpus of commentarial works, mainly on Aristotle, to smaller writings such as “On Being and Essence” and “On Truth”, testifies to his wide and systematic thought. The power of his argumentation and synthesis is highly impressive, and it is no surprise that his works, even if viewed with early suspicions, would come to enter into mainstream Catholic theology and intellectual life. Though his use of Aristotle was thought of in his day as being both innovative and controversial, it must also be recognized that what he came to create was not a baptized Aristotle, but a new and original crossing between Christian dogma and tradition on the one hand and Greek philosophy, chiefly Aristotelian, though not exclusively so, on the other. Hence Thomism itself came to be the new Christian philosophy.

Thomas’ whole scheme is an ingenious interlocking system, and we may begin by considering his view of the material reality. Following Aristotle he analyzes the world as consisting of substances in which forms are embedded in matter. For Aquinas saw the universe as a hierarchy. There are inorganic substances, vegetables, non-rational animals, up to the rational animals, that are human beings. At the summit of the hierarchy is the Divine Being - which is pure act or activity, is infinite, and whose existence and essence coincide.

Knowledge of all this hierarchy of beings can be got from reason, from doing philosophy. Obviously on the other hand, there are truths which are relevant to the highest human well-being and which cannot be proved simply on the basis of rational argument, such as the doctrine of the Trinity. Such truths have to be derived from revelation. Aquinas both elaborates and uses his famous theory of analogy and its types. On the basis of the analysis and observation of things in our cosmic environment we argue to the existence of God. From there, using analogy, we develop outwards our knowledge of the nature of God. All this, of course, gives the five proofs or ways which he recognizes and lays out a crucial role in his whole system.

Because God’s essence and existence coincide, the argument should be valid for God, but not for us, since we do not have inner knowledge of his essence. We cannot then get to God from the end of essence, but have to begin from the world of existent things available to our senses.

1. The first of the ways to the existence of God has to do with motion or change. Change, according to the Aristotelian analysis, involves the reduction of a thing from potency to act. But this requires an agent already in act. Since an infinite series is impossible, it follows that there must be a first unmoved mover, and, as Aquinas says, “All understand this to be God”. This argument was used for, among others, Maimonides and Albertus.

2. The second way was used by Avicenna and Albertus, again among others. It begins from the notion of the efficient cause. A thing cannot be the cause of itself, since to be a cause it would have to exist, and so it would have to exist before it did. Again, by excluding the chain of infinite length, we come to a first efficient cause. Again Aquinas claims that by this all men would understand God.

3. The third way, which many consider the most essential of all the proofs, begins with the idea of contingency. Some things come into being and perish, and in this way they show that they are contingent — that is, they can either exist or not. But we need to explain why it is that contingent beings do exist. Ultimately they must owe their being to the existence of a Necessary Being — some being which cannot be.

These three arguments are usually categorized by modern commentators as being three versions of the cosmological argument.

4. The fourth argument is from degrees of perfection and has a Platonic origin. Despite this, if seems to contain the same principle as the foregoing arguments. It begins with the thought that where there are degrees of goodness, beauty or truth there must be a supreme exemplar. But further, contingent beings do not contain their goodness or truth in and from themselves. They must derive their perfections from the - supreme example of perfection. And this is taken by all human beings to refer to God.

5. The fifth way usually referred to as a version of the ideological argument or argument from design, notes that inorganic objects operate always or very often for an end. But they cannot do so on their own account, for they do not possess knowledge or intentions. There must be an intelligent being by whom all natural things are directed to an end. And this people speak of as God.

These somewhat abstract conclusions are used by Thomas to add to our metaphysical knowledge of God. For instance, God must be bodiless, for every embodied substance is in potentiality. But God as necessary being is pure act. God must be simple, for which reason his essence and existence are identical. For if you could separate out his existence then he would owe his existence to another. But this is impossible, because he is First Cause.

Thomas’ doctrine of creation goes a good deal beyond Aristotle. It is already apparent that, though built upon such abstract foundations, his concept of God is much richer. God is not just an unmoved mover (or better: unchanged changer), moving other beings magnetically as final cause. He actually creates out of nothing. Though Aquinas holds philosophically that God might have created an everlasting world - the world being like a violin melody which God has always been playing - and so we have to go to revealed doctrine for the belief in the temporal finitude of the cosmos, he does believe in creation out of nothing. The reasoning is powerful. God cannot have had to use some material. That would either be part of himself, which is impossible (since God is a spiritual not a material being), nor could anything exist independently of the First Cause. So God creates out of nothing, and that nothing is not some sort of miasmic material. Next, we have to ask why God creates. It cannot be because he needs anything, being a perfect being. And being perfect he must have acted freely, without necessity. He created because of his goodness and goodness is diffusive of itself. It spills over, so to speak. The world, then, is intrinsically good, though it is limited by its unavoidable finitude.

Strictly according to Aquinas, evil is not a being, but an absence of what ought to be there. God could not be said to have created such absences, for absences are not things which you can or cannot create. Of course in willing a physical universe God does will that cosmos. And because he prizes freedom, himself being perfectly free as part of (or identical with) his goodness, he permits sin. But in this he does not strictly speaking will sin. By such arguments, in which in part Aquinas follows Augustine, Aquinas seeks to avoid the consequences of adopting the doctrine of the creation of the world out of nothing.

Aquinas’ psychology is an adapted version of that of Aristotle. The soul is the form of the body, but the rational soul, because it is capable of knowing all bodies, it is not pinned down to a special material type. It is not like the eye which is pinned down to the perception of colors. It does not depend intrinsically on a particular bodily organ. So it is a spiritual entity and so immortal, incorruptible. Moreover, human beings have a natural desire to go on existing and this natural desire would be in vain if we were not immortal, and would not have been implanted in us by the Creator. Naturally, in all this Aquinas takes a stance against the Averroist doctrine of non-personal immortality. Each soul for him is distinct.

All this is relevant to Aquinas’ moral theory. He follows Aristotle in eudaemonism — that is in interpreting ethics in the context of agents’ pursuit of happiness. But he makes a huge change to Aristotle. For the highest happiness according to Thomas is not the imperfect happiness of this temporal world, but the vision of the divine essence: the beatific vision. This has three consequences. First, Aquinas produces an otherworldly blessing. Aristotle’s emphasis is shifted from here to there, from earth to heaven. Indeed, first, all you can have this side of the grave is a foretaste of the beatific vision; second, it makes Thomas’ God a good deal more glorious than that of Aristotle; third, it makes the highest good depend on divine grace. It also gives a differing slant on the idea of God as final cause, magnetically drawing forth the directions of the cosmos. God as final cause attracts creatures back to himself. This is much more than Aristotle’s God ever does.

The whole vision of Aquinas is a hierarchical one, but it is not unnatural that he should integrate into his vision of creation the notion of the State as a natural human institution ruled by a monarch, and indirectly subordinate to the Church, which is concerned with a higher end than the common good of citizens as naturalistically conceived.

The majesty of his system, the division of all knowledge into scientific, philosophical and religious with the primacy of the latter, prestige of Aristotle, the clarity of his exposition gave him a pre-eminent position,.

Aquinas had accomplished the remarkable worldview-construction. He gave the most impressive and coherent form to Christian philosophy of the period.

In fact the synthesis which he evolved injected ideas and layers of reality (for example, the vision of the divine essence) into the Aristotelian framework, thereby effecting vast changes upon it. Aquinas’ Aristotle had undergone changes which went well beyond a kind of parallelism: rather, Aquinas had effected a merger between Christian doctrine and the Peripatetic philosophy. This made him, of course, into a highly original figure. In 1323 he was canonized as a saint and his doctrine was accepted as the official version of Catholic Church .

In Latin medieval thought there are, apart from Aquinas, two other towering figures - namely Duns Scotus and William of Ockham.

Duns Scotus (1265/6—1308) was born near Edinburgh and studied at Paris and Oxford. He was an original thinker who created a synthesis different from, but comparable to, that created by Aquinas. But he was less close to Aristotle, was more Platonist, owed more to Avicenna.

In his opinion the primary object of the intellect is being. The task of the metaphysician is to explore this concept. He also considered that being must be thought of as a term which can apply equally to transcendent reality, namely God, and the contents of the material world. He did not think there was a difference in the meaning of being as between the two.

Scotus was particularly interested in those categories which he called “disjunct” — such as finite or infinite, contingent or necessary. They figured in his supposed proofs of God’s existence. Indeed, he considered such metaphysical arguments to be probative, as opposed to arguments drawn from the physical world.

William of Ockham (1285-1349), born in Surrey not far from London, was perhaps the most radical and original of the medieval philosophers and theologians. He studied at Oxford, but before receiving his licence as a professor, he was summoned to the Papal court at Avignon to face charges of heresy and the like. Later he migrated to Bavaria, where he received the protection of King Ludwig. He died in Munich of the Black Death (it is surmised). The latter scourge carried away many leading European intellectuals of the time.

The radicalism of his views came from his sweeping challenge to realism and the whole Aristotelian scheme of essences. Scientific generalizations about the world are to be confirmed on the basis of empirical observations, that is by intuitive cognitions of individual instances. They are at best hypothetical, since they depend on the prior assumption of the uniformity of nature.

From his empiricist perspective it follows that theology is not a science. Science should be based on what is evidently known: this would be something which is a necessary truth or which is known by immediate experience. Neither of these requirements can be met in regard to matters of faith. He made the highly important observation that the articles of faith are by no means evident to infidels and pagans, who are no less intelligent than Christians.

Ockham’s influence spread in Oxford and Paris, since his critical views offered an exciting alternative to traditional metaphysical approaches. His empiricism offered avenues for the critique of Aristotle and helped prepare the way for later scientific developments.

Probably the most important contribution of the Ockhamist stream of thought to the ongoing development of thought, including science, was its skepticism towards Aristotle. The grip of his physics upon the medieval imagination was slackened somewhat, and so the way was prepared for the scientific revolutions of the Renaissance and beyond.