Medieval philosophy: Augustine, Aquinas, Ockham
Faith and Reason: The tension in medieval philosophy.
The insights of natural knowledge were derived from the natural cognitive powers of the intellect and senses, and the insights of supernatural knowledge derived from divine revelation.
Generally it can be said that whereas philosophy embodied rational arguments based on premises derivable from naturally occurring powers of thought and the logical working out of those premises (particularly from the philosophers of the ancient world, especially Aristotle)
Theological arguments were based on divine Christian premises derived from God-in particular from the Bible and the opinions of the Church Fathers.
It is characteristic of the dominant intellectual framework of the scholars of the universities of the medieval period scholasticism- to reconcile the demands of rational philosophy and the demands of theological faith.
Reason in scholasticism was often used as a tool for supporting and deepening the understanding of what was already believed to be true as a matter of religious faith.
The source of medieval theological doctrine was the Bible and the Church Fathers; the problem presented to medieval thinkers was how to reconcile beliefs from these sources with the beliefs and logical arguments derived from Plato and Aristotle, and the attempts of Arabic and Jewish thinkers from the tenth century to the twelfth century to combine Plato and Aristotle.
Throughout the medieval period, ancient philosophy was a source of authority which toward the end of the period was used to oppose new arguments in philosophy and science.
St Augustine adopted, but profoundly modified, Platonism in the service of Christianity, to which he converted in AD 386 at the age of thirty-two.
By the end of the medieval period both Christianity and Aristotelianism, as the authoritative storehouses of correct opinions, were being replaced by a different vision of intellectual and moral advancement in the light of new philosophical and scientific ideas.
Apart from the thinkers discussed, among other important figures are Abelard (1079-1142), St. Anselm (1033-1109), St Bonaventure (1221-74) and Duns Scotus (c.1266-1308). Augustine, Aquinas and Ockham were chosen as representative of different important aspects of the period; they might be said to embody respectively medieval philosophy's inception, its consolidation, and the beginning of its dissolution.
Their views on the place of reason and faith can roughly be summarized as follows: Augustine there is no fundamental distinction because reason depends on divine help to grasp eternal truths; Aquinas there is a distinction on the basis of the natural and the divine but the two are complementary and to a degree overlapping; Ockham reason and faith are distinct and have no overlap.
Saint Augustine of Hippo (354-430 AD)
Augustine was born in Thagaste and died in Hippo, both places in North Africa. Intellectually he straddles the gap between the philosophers of ancient Greece and those of medieval Christian. He lived through the decline of the Roman Empire, which led to the Dark Ages. At the age of seventeen he became a student of the University of Carthage where he became a teacher of rhetoric and, while there, lived a life of extravagant pleasure-including sexual pleasure-which was to contrast starkly with his later monkish life. He was converted to Christianity in AD 386, and was baptized the following year. He was then determined to enter the Church and renounced worldly pleasures. He eventually became Bishop of Hippo in AD 396. He never left North Africa for the last thirty-nine years of his life.
The character of Augustine's thought is distinctly religious, rather than purely philosophical; the discussion of certain philosophical problems is not that of the disinterested academic, but has the overriding purpose of identifying the path to the attainment of blessedness or beatitude.
The overall religious purpose is twofold: first, to show how we can become closer to God; secondly, to emphasize the importance of God by showing how everything is closely dependent on God.
A problem of particular concern to Augustine is how we come to know the universal necessary eternal truths described by Plato and the Neoplatonists.
He points to a range of things we clearly know to be true, which the sceptic cannot possibly deny. (a) We know the law of non-contradiction, whereby if something is true, it cannot also be the case at the same time that the opposite is true. (b) I know that I exist. "If I err, I exist" ("Si faIlor, sum"). This anticipates Descartes' cogito; but it is not used in the same way; Augustine is not concerned to use it to prove the existence of the external world. (c) Appearances cannot in themselves be false; I know infallibly what my subjective experiences are, how things appear to me: my "seemings". I can know infallibly what seems to be the case; it is my judgment, which goes beyond what seems to be the case, which introduces the possibility of falsehoods. (d) We clearly, even from the sceptic's point of view, have the capacity to doubt; so we know at least one truth: there is doubting. (e) We obviously know with certainty mathematical and geometrical truths. (f) We do not just know abs tract principles, we also know real existences. We know that we exist, that we are alive, and that we understand these facts. Augustine points out that even if our experience is really a dream, we nevertheless still know we were alive. We are also conscious that we will certain things.
The problem arises of how eternal truths and our knowledge of eternal truths are to be accounted for. Augustine agrees with Plato that, just as transient truths are accounted for by the mutable objects of the sensible world, so universal necessary eternal truths are accounted for by their being truths about eternal and immutable real objects.
Such objects immaterial impersonal essences-referred to by Plato as Forms, are identified by Augustine as ideas in the eternal, immutable mind of God-they are the content of the divine mind.
Such necessary truths are available to us in the areas of mathematics and geometry, but they are also possible in moral and aesthetic judgments.
The divine ideas provide perfect objects for the concepts of number and geometrical forms; they also provide objective standards for moral judgments concerning good and evil, and aesthetic judgments concerning what is, or is not, beautiful.
The problem remains of how such eternal truths are accessible to the non-eternal human mind.
The human mind, in seeking eternal truths, is seeking something beyond, and superior to, the mutable and temporal mind, and to know such truths we need help.
Such help emanates from God in the form of "divine illumination"; and as an illuminator God is present in us as He is present in all things.
All knowledge in Augustine is seen as a form of seeing. Just as the senses see independent objects when they are illuminated by the sun, so reason or intellect "sees" eternal truths when illuminated by the divine light.
God does not directly infuse our minds with the absolute concepts which constitute eternal truths, rather such concepts are latent in the mind as copies of the archetypes in God's mind; divine illumination enables us to see intellectually which are the eternal and necessary truths that are latent in our souls, and so to recognize them as eternal and necessary.
Knowledge of eternal truths is granted by a combination of natural human reason and supernatural divine illumination. To benefit from such illumination we have to turn towards God. This precludes the possibility of making a distinction between natural reason and divine faith, for both are always needed and mixed in the search for knowledge.
Saint Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274 AD)
Thomas Aquinas was born of a noble family at Roccasecca, Italy. From the age of five he began studying at the Benedictine abbey of Monte Cassino. In 1239 he went on to the University of Naples, where he studied the seven liberal arts of grammar, logic, rhetoric, arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy; while at Naples he entered the Dominican Order.
His entry into this Order, with its emphasis on poverty and evangelism, was opposed by his family to such an extent that he felt the need to escape to Paris; but while on the road to Paris, he was abducted by his elder brother and locked up in the family castle at Monte San Giovanni.
He was later held prisoner in Roccasecca for over a year. His family was unable either to strip him literally of his Dominican robes, or to persuade him to renounce the Order. While he was imprisoned his brothers sent him a seductress; but he drove her from the room with a burning brand, and the event merely reinforced his commitment to chastity.
Eventually his family relented and he returned to the Dominican Order, first at the University of Paris in 1248, then at Cologne under Albert the Great. During this time he became deeply versed in the works of Aristotle.
After his death the teaching of Aquinas and Thomism formed the official doctrine of the Dominicans, and this was adopted by some other Orders, but it was in general relatively neglected by the Catholic Church. However, in the nineteenth century Aquinas was commended by Pope Pius IX as the premier figure of Catholic philosophy and theology.
Aquinas' thought owes a great deal to Aristotle, and he attempts to reconcile the central tenets of Aristotelian philosophy with Christian dogma; these attempts deal with issues like the nature of God, our means to salvation, and our understanding of the nature of creation.
Aquinas' thought begins with the presupposition that the universe is, at least partly, intelligible to finite human intellects: the structures and laws of the universe can be understood.
Whereas our natural cognition works "from below" to know God through His effects as the creator of the world, divine revelation-supernatural cognition-works "from above" to know God as cause. Thus faith (fides) and scientific knowledge (scientia) are sharply distinguished not by object, but by method.
Within theology we can make a distinction between supernatural and natural theology: respectively, truths revealed about God and other elements of Christian doctrine which depend on divine revelation (grace, which derives from the Latin gratia, meaning favor), and those that can be known through natural powers of cognition.
So the totality of truths grasped by the human mind has three parts. (A) That which is believed only in virtue of divine illumination or revelation. (B) That which is believed by divine revelation and is known by being provable by natural cognition. (C) That which is known by natural cognition.
The intellect forms concepts-universal ideas-of things by abstracting general ideas from sense-experience; the intellect thinks of the nature of those things and how they are connected to other things by understanding those general concepts.
Real things are real substances and are always compounded of two elements.
(a) Essence (essentia, quidditas, natura). This is "whatness"; viewed epistemologically through a definition it tells us what a thing is. (b) Existence (esse, which is a form of the Latin verb "to be"; but esse is also used as a noun). This is the fact that a thing is.
The terms above in (a) and (b) roughly correlate with the following.
(a') potential (potentia, potency); (b') actuality (actus, act).
Essence and existence are never found in separation; nothing simply is, a thing always is a determinate kind of thing; to be is to be a "so-and-so" ; to be is always a determinate way of being.
The relation between essence and existence, and between potency and actuality, applies to any substance whatsoever.
The analysis of material things introduces another pair of terms,
(i) form (morphe) ; (ii) matter (hyle).
Three-level hierarchy of being.
(1) Corporeal substances. These are matter an d form; they are perishable and finite.; (2) Incorporeal limited substances. These are pure form-spiritual entities, which although imperishable are finite. (3) Incorporeal unlimited substance. This is pure act; all aspects of the positive essence receive existence (esse).
Universals are general concepts or categories with which we talk about the world and with which we classify particulars into kinds or sorts.
He rejects the full realism of Plato, whereby universals exist as real entities in a world of intelligible Forms independently of the world of sensible things.
He also rejects conventionalism, whereby universal concepts are mere arbitrary, subjective mental constructs, for which the most that can perhaps be said is that they are made for our convenience.
Aquinas compromises: universals are objective in being real, extramental and immutable, but they exist in instances of individual kinds of things and cannot exist apart from those instances.
The world divides itself into kinds, so to speak; the kinds are real and there to be discovered, and are independent of our subjective mental classifications.
Knowledge of the forms, through real definitions, is derived from sensory experience and the intellectual faculty of abstracting general concepts from the resembling essential nature of instances of individuals of the same sort. Thus although universals do not exist as separate entities, they are objective in reflecting the extra mental common defining real natures of individuals.
William Ockham (1285-1349 AD)
William of Ockham was born in the village of Ockham outside Guildford near London. Of his early life nothing definite is known. We know that he was ordained subdeacon in 1306. He became a student at the University of Oxford around 1309 and soon a member of the Franciscan Order.
The chief problem was still to reconcile Aristotle and Christianity.
A sharp distinction is found in Ockham's thought between reason and faith. The truths of theology are based on revelation and are a matter of faith, and they are neither provable nor refutable by any process of natural cognition in secular philosophy.
Theology retreats to a domain of truths about which natural reason can have nothing to say.
Ockham rejected outright the idea that there was a common nature existing in the many individuals we call by a common name. No universal exists outside the mind; everything in the world is singular.
Universals are not things but signs, single signs representing many things. There are natural signs and conventional signs: natural signs are the thoughts in our minds, and conventional signs are the words which we coin to express these thoughts.
Ockham’s view of universals is often called nominalism; but in his system it is not only names, but concepts, which are universal.
The problem of universals centers on the problem of the relationship between the universality of concepts and our apparently encountering as independent objects only particulars.
Ockham objects to the idea of some literally common nature shared by all and only individuals of the same kind; if this common nature is singular and indivisible, then it cannot be shared by many individuals, and if the common nature is many, then each instance of the many must be singular and itself individual and cannot be shared in common between various individuals.
For Ockham, universality is a property primarily of thoughts, secondarily of language which expresses thoughts, and not of entities or natures distinct from the individual characteristic s of things in the world.
Ockham's view is roughly equivalent to saying that universals are concepts, along with the commitment that the being of the concepts is as mental states.
Nominalism holds that the only thing strictly in common between individuals falling under a universal name is that they all fall under that name.
The question arises as to why we apply the same universal name to many individuals. By maintaining that there are no literally common real essences graspable by the intellect, but only individuals apprehended by the senses between which we perceive similarities in the individuating characteristics, and it is from these albeit objective but nevertheless contingent similarities that we derive the meanings of universal terms and their range of application to a determinate class of individuals.
Thus the connotation or meaning of a universal term such as "humanity" is whatever characteristics we perceive as similar between all those individuals whereby we classify them as human. This list of characteristics defines "humanity" and gives us criteria for deciding whether any given individual should be included under that heading.
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