Part II – The rediscovery of classical knowledge, Scholasticism and the High Middle Ages

Background: Cairns, Chapter 23

• So who was this Aristotle guy anyway?
• Studied under Plato for twenty years, until Plato’s death

• Tutor of Alexander the great.  Had an encyclopedic knowledge and interest in everything Wrote on subjects ranging from aesthetics to zoology.  First formulated the rules of logic.
• The Question of Universals - “Aristotle, however, finds the universal in particular things, and called it the essence of things, while Plato finds that the universal exists apart from particular things, and is related to them as their prototype or exemplar. For Aristotle, therefore, philosophic method implies the ascent from the study of particular phenomena to the knowledge of essences, while for Plato philosophic method means the descent from knowledge of universal ideas to a contemplation of particular imitations of those ideas. In a certain sense, Aristotle's method is both inductive and deductive while Plato's is essentially deductive from a priori principles (Jori, 2003).” [From Wikipedia]
• Aristotle also discussed the nature of Causality.  He separated causes into the “Material Cause”, (the parts that form the whole – for instance, a block of marble is the Formal cause of a statue).  The “Efficient” Cause is the agent(s) that create the whole – the sculptor of a statue.  The “Final” cause is why the thing exists – what its purpose is – for instance, the statue is to meant as a monument to a general.
• Plato believed that we can only know (truly) what is in our own minds. We can hold opinions about the world that our senses convey to us, but only the world of ideas is something that we can truly comprehend.  Aristotle disagreed; for him Plato’s “forms” were transformed into “formal causes”, which are the blueprints implicit in material things. For instance by studying oak trees, you can find an intelligible order in sensible world, and come to the knowledge of “oakness”.
• Monasticism and the preservation of knowledge
• Monasticism’s roots – St. Antony and the Egyptian Monastics
• Benedict of Nursia – Wrote the Rule of St. Benedict in the 6^th Century.  Followers of his rule became known as the Benedictines in later centuries, although he did not found the order.
• The Cistercians – Founded by Robert of Molesme in 1098 at Citreaux.  Devoted to a strict interpretation of the Rule of St. Benedict.
• The Dominicans – Founded by St. Dominic in 1204 to combat heresy.  Mendicant order (as opposed to a settled order like the Benedictines or Cistercians).
• The Northern route of knowledge – The Irish Monastics
• Patrick and the evangelization of Ireland
• Columcille and Columbanus
• Johannes Scotus Eriugena (815-877) – An Irish monk who occupied a position in the French court. Introduced Neoplatonism into Christian thought.
• The Western route
• The Umayyad conquest of Spain – In 622, Muhammad began his Hegira. From that point on, the boundaries of the Muslim world (Dar al Islam) were pushed ever outward, culminating its northern boundary with the invasion of the Iberian Peninsula in 711.  The Umayyad conquest of Europe was decisively stopped at the Battle of Tours in 732 when Charles Martel (founder of the Carolingian dynasty) defeated General Al-Gafiqui.  From then began the slow reconquista of Iberia, finally ending with the reconquest of Grenada in 1492. But for the intervening seven and a half centuries, Christian Western Europe lived side by side with an advanced Muslim culture that had preserved many of the greatest Greek works.
• At the start of the ninth century, the Muslim Caliph al-Ma’mun (it is said) had a dream in which Aristotle appeared. As a result, he sent envoys to Constantinople and to the ends of his empire to find Greek manuscripts and to establish a center in Baghdad for the study and translation of Greek works.
• Averroes – Ibn Rushid (1126-1198) wrote a number of treatises on subjects ranging from Medicine to Philosophy. For our purposes he’s important as the author of a number of commentaries on Aristotle, where he particularly wrote from the point of view that philosophy and religion (in his case Islam) were not at odds and could be reconciled.
• Maimonides – Moses Maimonides (1135-1204), a Cordoban Jew, also wrote a book reconciling Aristotelian philosophy with the Torah.
• The development of the University
• The Seven Liberal Arts
• This was the period of the formation of the seven liberal arts, the trivium and the quadrivium.
• Trivium: Grammar, Rhetoric and Dialectic (Logic)
• Quadrivium: Arithmetic, Music, Geometry, Astronomy
• Bologna – Founded in 1088, notable for teaching Civil Law and Canon Law
• The University of Paris – Grew up around the Cathedral of Notre Dame in Paris. Organized in the second half of the 12^th century.  Became known as a center of Theological teaching.
• Oxford – Sprung up in the last part of the 11^th century.  The expulsion of foreigners from the University of Paris in 1167 resulted in many English scholars returning from France and settling in Oxford.
• Scholasticism and the Nature of Knowledge
• Following Augustine’s lead, the scholastics tried to synthesize the Church and their culture into a single cohesive whole.  Their goal was a single body of knowledge, a single theology, and a single philosophy that tied together classical knowledge with the Bible and the traditions of the Church.  This would define the nature of their culture. They wanted to rationalize theology.  A goal was to try to organize revelation by the systematic principles of Aristotelian logic.
• Anselm and Realism - 
• Anselm (1033-1109) was educated at the Benedictine monastery at Bec in Normandy, and remained there until he was made Archbishop of Canterbury in 1093.  
• His major idea of the relationship of reason to faith was summed up in the statement (credo ut intelligam) – I believe in order that I may know.  Faith has to come first and be primary to form a foundation for knowledge. Anselm was representative of the viewpoint of Plato, which is called realism.  In this view universals (ideas, like goodness) exist apart from and before the particular things (good deeds) that are merely reflections of that ultimate reality.
• Anselm wrote two great works of apologetics, using Aristotelian logic. In the Monologion he argued an inductive argument (called the cosmological argument) for the existence of God stating that since we enjoy good things on earth, that they must be reflections of one supreme good. This thinking (which can also be found in Plato and Aristotle) was later picked up and refined by Aquinus. In the Proslogion he uses a deductive argument (called the ontological argument) for the existence of God by writing that since everyone can imagine a perfect supreme being, then there must be such a being since such a being lacking existence would be neither perfect nor supreme.
• Anselm also introduced what can be referred to as the economic theory of the work of Christ in salvation. He disagreed with earlier theologians that Christ had “tricked” the devil and freed us from his power. Instead, he developed the approach that the problem lies entirely between God and man. Since we owe a debt to God through our sin, and we cannot repay that debt, that only God (through Christ’s sacrifice) could repay that debt and satisfy His justice.  This position was rejected by Abelard as being unfair and too legalistic, which led to his position of Christ as being (more or less) of primary use as an example of how our life should be lived.
• Abelard, Aquinas and Conceptualism (Moderate Realism)
• Peter Abelard (1079-1142) is possibly better known now for his ill-fated romance with one of his students, Heloise, than for his theological and philosophical work.
• Abelard began the synthesis of the Aristotelian position on the question of universals with Christianity.  He took the position now known as Moderate Realism (or Conceptualism).  He believed that reality first existed in the mind of God, and that in the here and now that it exists in particular individuals and things, and then finally in man’s mind.  To Abelard, universals, while not real in and of themselves, have a linguistic and intellectual reality that derives from their participation in particulars.
• Abelard was a great believer in the use of reason in finding truth.  He believed that doubt would lead to inquiry, and then inquiry to truth through the use of reason.  His major work was called Sic Et Non (Yes and No), which showed contradictory statements on different topics from the Church Fathers, hoping that his logical method could lead to the resolution of this seeming contradiction.  Abelard believed that Authority, while essential, is by itself insufficient to an understanding of dogma; reason must understand dogma by analogies from the material world
• Moderate Realism was then taken up by Albertus Magnus (Albert the Great, 1193-1280) who was a German theologian teaching first at the University of Cologne, then at the University of Paris. He is probably best known now, as the teacher of his greatest student, Thomas Aquinas.
• Thomas Aquinas was a son of a noble family in Italy, whose mother was the sister of Frederick Barbarossa (the Holy Roman Emperor). He became a Dominican monk and studied at the monastery of Monte Cassino, at the University of Naples, at the University of Cologne, and finally at the University of Paris.

• Thomas Aquinas fully developed the moderate realist position in his great work Summa Theologiae.  The book is arranged as a series of questions organized into three major sections.  In dealing with each question he provides the question, as series of objections to the conclusion, and then the actual argument.
• In trying to reconcile Aristotle’s philosophy with faith, he agreed with Aristotle that forms exist both in the particular elements, and in the mind of person that studies them.  He also contended that the forms exist in the mind of God. He makes the following statements:
• The natural desire of the soul is to understand the essence of something.
• The existence of something and its essence are separate. That is you can conceive of things that have no existence in reality.  The exception to this is God, who is “simple” or for whom essence and existence are one and the same.
• All statements about God are either analogical or metaphorical.  You can’t say man is “good” in the same way God is good, but can only say that he imitates God’s goodness in some way.
• God is the “first cause, himself uncaused” of all things.  He is thus pure actuality without potentiality.
• Aquinas contended that truth is known both through reason and through faith. Supernatural revelation is conveyed to us through scripture and the traditions of the Church.  Natural revelation is the truth available to all people through their human nature, i.e. through reason and the use of the senses.
• Aquinas believed that at the core there were only three truths that could not be proved through reason and must be accepted by revelation: the creation of the Universe, the nature of the Trinity, and Jesus’ role in salvation. Beyond that, all other truths (including the existence of God, and His attributes) can be worked out through a set of deductive arguments by reason alone.
• Augustine had taken the position that because of fall that we are born to a world of suffering and that all joy in this world is fleeting.  Our real and lasting hope for happiness and joy is in heaven.  Aquinas took the Aristotelian position that in this world that we have the opportunity for joy and happiness, the most lasting of which is the joy of using our reason to learn and understand.
• William of Ockham and Nominalism
• After Aquinas separated the realms of nature and revelation in principle, others began to develop that concept.  Aquinas insisted that there is an intelligible “natural law” which reason can grasp.
• The position that developed from this approach is called nominalism, which holds that abstract concepts (Universals) have no independent existence, but are only labels or names that we place on things. In this sense, what we know (or can learn from our senses) is separated from what we believe since abstract concepts like good or evil are only labels that we place on things, and have no separate existence.
• An early proponent of nominalism was William of Ockham (1288-1348) who applied what is now known as “Occam’s razor” to the problem of Universals. He denied the existence of any entity (such as a Universal) that is not required for explanation of a topic.  He gave a simple explanation of this rule that stated if you find a room in disarray and an ill-trained dog in the room, that you need not assume that a thief broke in and wrecked the room in order to explain its condition.
• Ockham was followed in this by Roger Bacon who argued that Christians should distance themselves from these abstract concepts and return to the knowledge gained by our senses and by knowledge of the scriptures and the ancient languages in which they were written.  He is thus the father of both modern experimental science and of modern textual criticism.
• However as the realms of faith and reason became more separated it led to a distancing of the natural from the supernatural. It also led to a new interest in man since man’s reason was assigned a more important place.  This led inevitably to the “first cause only” approach of the enlightenment deists, and thus eventually to the atheism of Voltaire and the French revolution.

	Realism	Conceptualism	Nominalism
Relation of faith and reason	I believe in order that I may know	I know in order that I may believe	I believe – separated from I know
Proponents	Anselm	Aquinas and Abelard	William of Ockham
Works	Proslogion, Monologion	Summa Theologiae
Modern Proponents	Many Evangelicals	Roman Catholic Church	Enlightenment Scholars

Questions:

• How important is knowledge of the world to a Christian?
• How important is reason and knowledge to faith?  Which comes first and why?
• Can you convince someone of Christianity’s claims by logical argument? What is the place of apologetics in the Church?
• Is truth objective or subjective?  Does truth exist apart from what we think about it? Is truth simply a shared concept that many people agree on, or does it have an objective reality?

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