. As the Roman Empire was crumbling in Gaul, so too was the classical tradition of both pagan and Christian Greek and Latin learning. The age of the Latin fathers ended effectively with the death of Augustine of Hippo in North Africa in 430, and the heritage of classical thought was summed up and passed on to the western Middle Ages largely in the philosophical and theological works of “the last Roman,” Boethius, who was executed at the Pavian court of King Theodoric in 524. It was not until the Carolingian period, and especially the era of intellectual contacts with Muslim and Jewish Arabic scholars in southern Europe, that more classical texts, particularly by Greek authors, became available.
Traditionally, Latin Europe from the 6th to the 9th century is thought of as barren of philosophy and theology, but as Romanitas was being replaced by Christianitas in the Gaul of the 5th century, there are sporadic signs of continuing literary and philosophical learning in a world otherwise fraught with a lack of intellectual activity. Thus Sidonius Apollinaris (ca. 432-ca. 485), bishop of Clermont-Ferrand, kept alive the humanist arts of letter writing and historical narrative. Philosophically important for this period is the exchange between Faustus of Riez in Provence (d. ca. 495) and Claudianus Mamertus of Vienne (d. ca. 474) on the locality and materiality of the soul. Merovingian culture continued to evince love for traditional classical culture, especially among Romano-Gallic aristocrats and the bishops who were related to them. The Council of Vaison (529), besides reforming church liturgy, played an important role in this conservation by prescribing the teaching of Latin to ensure the education in arts (philosophy in a broad sense) and in theology of future clerics.
The establishment of monasteries at Annegray, Luxeuil, and Fontaines by the Irish peregrinus Columbanus (fl. 600) and the Benedictine Rule, introduced into France from Italy at the end of the 7th century, both created a new emphasis in studies. Secular classical learning was downgraded in favor of exegetical studies of the Bible and the organization of the liturgy. Especially illustrative of this period is the dispute between Pope Gregory the Great (ca. 540–604) and Desiderius (Didier) of Vienne (fl. 596–601) on the love for and merits of pagan classical, particularly Greek, literature, grammar, and rhetoric. Gregory set the stage for medieval intellectual life by claiming that the liberal arts and what we today would call philosophical methodology are indispensable for the correct interpretation of the written Word of God but that they should be used for that purpose alone. Elements of the classical tradition were, however, preserved in the works of men like Gregory of Tours (d. 594) and Venantius Fortunatus (540–600), who died as bishop of Poitiers.
It must be noted, too, that the role of women in the preservation of classical education in Merovingian Gaul was not insignificant. Regrettably, few sources have survived. An indicative example, though, is a letter from Caesaria, abbess of the convent at Arles, to King Clotar I’s wife, Radegund, who was establishing a house at Poitiers. Caesaria enjoins Radegund to allow no nun to enter who does not learn the liberal arts.
The contribution of Merovingian culture to the history of philosophy was basically that of preserving the scholarship of the ancients. Carolingian scholars and philosophers were generally intent on the classification of what is and can be known about the world. The foundation for intellectual life in the Carolingian era was laid by Alcuin of York (ca. 735–804), who had been invited by Charlemagne to become the head of his palace school at Aix-la-Chapelle. Here, Alcuin revitalized teaching in the Trivium by writing textbooks like De grammatica (which has a Boethian introduction entitled “De vera philosophia”), De rhetorica et virtutibus, and De dialectica; he was also intent on giving rules for the correct transcription of manuscripts. As abbot of Tours for the last eight years of his life, he was especially interested in building up the library and in developing the Liberal Arts with a view to exegetical studies of the Scriptures, which were to provide sapientia, or true philosophy.
The early 9th century witnessed some philosophical discussion of Aristotle’s methodology, as well as discussion of the relation between grammar and ontology; of the perennial question of the exact status of the soul; and even, in the realm of political theory, of the duties of princes. But without doubt the greatest philosophical impact was made by the gift of the Greek text of the works of Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite (the Corpus areopagiticum) from the Byzantine emperor Michael the Stammerer to Louis the Pious in 827. Charles the Bald (r. 840–77) can be seen as France’s first great patron of philosophy, for in 860 it was he who asked Johannes Scottus Eriugena (d. 877) to translate this collection of Neoplatonic works into Latin. Perhaps most noteworthy in Pseudo-Dionysius’s work is the idea that evil qua evil is nonexistent; evil must be regarded merely as a lack of goodness, and it can therefore be described only in negative terms. On the other hand, God as Essence par excellence can never be adequately described in nonessential language. In this way, the foundation was laid down for the reception of ideas of learned ignorance that played an important role especially in medieval philosophical and theological mysticism, such as that of the Victorines in the 12th century and the Parisian Lullists of the late 14th. Thus, Greek Christian texts by Pseudo-Dionysius and later by Maximus the Confessor, Gregory of Nyssa, and perhaps Epiphanius of Salamis (Cyprus) entered into Latin European thought, strongly influencing such later thinkers as Bonaventure, Thomas Aquinas, and Nicholas of Cusa. The influence of Eriugena’s work has not yet been fully traced, but it is safe to say that it had a wide circulation especially through florilegia and glosses in manuscripts of his text. A nexus seems to have been the school of Auxerre, with scholars like Heiric (841ca. 876) and Remigius (ca. 841-ca. 908). Remigius also wrote many commentaries on grammar (Donatus, Priscian, Eutyches, Phokas), on style (Bede), and on the arts in general (Martianus Capella). Though not very innovative, they did serve to keep alive in France and the rest of northern Europe the tradition of the Liberal Arts on which philosophy must build.
Philosophy in 10th- and early 11th-century France was limited. There is some teaching of logic, mathematics, and astronomy and discussion of the problem of how reason is to be used, notably by Gerbert of Aurillac at Reims (ca. 945–1003), who may have had access to Arabic learning through his studies in the Catalan monastery of Ripoll. But it is not until the middle of the 11th century that philosophy in France receives new impulses, especially from debates on the relationship of logic and grammar to theology and biblical exegesis, such as that between Berengar of Tours (ca. 1010–1088) and Lanfranc of Bec (ca. 1005–1089) on the interpretation of the wording of the eucharist. The stage was being set for the development of the scholastic method of solving intellectual problems that is the hallmark of medieval philosophy.
The scholastic method, the central method of medieval philosophy, is a technique of teaching and interpreting texts by using a system of distinctions, definitions, and disputation deriving from the logic of Aristotle and Boethius. In the 11th and 12th centuries, this narrow basis was broadened to include other authors, and later the scholastic method developed a terministic and semantic logic that made its work in discovering meaning ever more subtle. Many of the important developments of the scholastic method took place in France. Thus, Anselm of Bec (1033–1109), who hailed from Aosta in northern Italy, can be called the “father of scholasticism” on the basis of the treatises he wrote at the Benedictine monastery of Bec in Normandy on how grammar and logic should be used to study the Scriptures.
Three important elements of the scholastic method are the textual commentary, the quaestio (or disputatio), and the harmonization of authoritative texts. Hugh of Saint-Victor’s (ca. 1096–1141) Didascalicon defined the commentary as a combination of lectio (reading) and meditatio (understanding). Peter Abélard (1079–1142), working in Paris, helped calibrate the scholastic method by the structure of his famous Sic et non, in which arguments for and against theological and philosophical statements are systematized. The great standard-bearers of the value of the quaestio in scholarship are the masters of the so-called school of Chartres. Gilbert of Poitiers (ca. 1075/80–1154) and Clarembald of Arras (ca. 1110-after 1170) stressed how important it was that the quaestio be structured in terms of statement and contradiction. The masters of Chartres used their method especially in the interpretation of Platonic texts, notably Plato’s Timaeus and Boethius’s De consolatione Philosophiae. Peter Lombard (ca.1100–1160), at Paris, wrote the standard harmonization of theological and philosophical knowledge, Quattuor libri sententiarum, whose influence as the official textbook of theology in the Middle Ages can hardly be exaggerated.
One of the most sustained developers and applicators of scholasticism is Thomas Aquinas (ca. 1224–1274), who taught at Paris in 1256–59 and again after 1269. His Summa theologica, the second part of which he wrote at Paris, is a model of medieval methodology. Medieval philosophers themselves had the highest regard for Henry of Ghent (ca. 1217–1293), a secular master of theology at Paris from 1276; his practice of philosophy, too, is a good example of scholastic method.
Even if philosophical discussions were generally structured along the lines of the scholastic method, there was speculation on the borderlines between philosophy and theology on the one hand and cosmology and mysticism on the other. A literary style was employed that was far removed from the clear distinctions of the quaestio. An example of poetic cosmology is Bernard Silvestris’s (fl. 1147–77) Cosmographia. This work has been rightly called an epic poem. In it, Silvestris made a brilliant synthesis of Chartrian understanding of the Platonism of the Timaeus, Calcidius, Macrobius, Martianus Capella, and Boethius. The Cosmographia combines 12th-century knowledge of science and medicine—often derived from Arabic sources—with Platonism to form a veritable encyclopedia in literary style.
A scholastic who practiced the scholastic method but also tried his hand at literary style when writing on mystical topics is Bonaventure (ca. 1217–1274), who taught at Paris in 1248–55. His Itinerarium mentis in Deum shows how philosophy functions in the ascent of the soul from the visible world to the unificatory mystical experience where scholastic distinctiones and quaestiones are no longer necessary or possible. Here, the text does not impart information or provide analysis but becomes itself part of the process toward illumination.
The basic presupposition of the scholastic method is that knowledge can be acquired only on the basis of the interpretation of authoritative texts. The late 13th and 14th centuries saw a shift to the critical examination of how words have meaning, how they function in propositions and in wider contexts, and what their relations are to the external world. Important French names in these discussions are Lambert of Auxerre (fl. 1250) and the Parisian masters Jean Buridan (ca. 1295-after 1358) and Marsilius of Inghen (d. 1396). Not all philosophers in France during the Middle Ages used the scholastic method. Through the influence of the Catalan thinker Ramon Lull (ca. 1232–1316), a way of doing philosophy entered into France and especially Paris in the 14th century that leads into the mystical and even alchemical aspects of Renaissance thought.
Debate and discussion are the life’s blood of philosophy, and the liveliness of philosophers in medieval France can be illustrated by mentioning three controversies: the debate between Anselm of Bec and Gaunilo, a Benedictine monk of Marmoutier (d. 1083), on proving the existence of God; the acrimonious interchange between Peter Abélard and William of Champeaux (ca. 1070–1121) on the status of universal terms; and the attack of Nicholas of Autrecourt (ca. 1300-after 1350) on Aristotelian scholasticism.
Anselm wrote two works that on philosophical grounds argue for the existence of God. In the Monologion (1076), he uses traditional Platonic and Aristotelian arguments to prove the existence of a single supreme nature that is self-sufficient and causes all other things to be. All this is couched in an analysis of the way that language works and constantly employs metaphors, examples, and models derived from Augustine. This makes for a complicated and difficult argument. So, in the Proslogion (1077–78) he sets out to find a single, self-evident argument to demonstrate God’s existence and to describe a number of his attributes. Anselm begins from the definition of the word “God” as “that than which no greater can be thought.” Using only this definition, he demonstrates that it entails God’s existence both in the mind of the person who thinks on God’s existence and in the real world. In the history of philosophy, this argument is called the “ontological proof’ of God’s existence. Although the monk Gaunilo did not deny the existence of God in replying to Anselm, he felt that Anselm’s proof was philosophically unsound on the grounds that it appears to confuse conventional language (voces) and logic with the real world. For Anselm, however, real language (verbum) is the structure itself of the created world and serves as the connecting link between the human being who contemplates God and God’s answer to his prayer for the enlightenment of his intellect to show that God really exists. This debate can be closely examined today because Anselm instructed manuscript copyists always to add Gaunilo’s objections and his own replies to them as appendices to the Proslogion.
The bitter controversy between Peter Abélard and William of Champeaux concerned the problem of the status of “universals,” terms or concepts like “man” or “animal.” William holds the view that genera and species exist ontologically in a real world beyond sense experience; his position can be described as an extreme sort of Platonist realism. Abélard makes a careful distinction between thought and language on the one hand and reality on the other. Genera and species exist as concepts in the mind but they also signify the same real things that particular concepts represent. Insofar as they are words, they are corporeal and sensible; but insofar as they are able to signify many individual things, they are incorporeal, for sense experience does not show them to us. Aristotle is correct when he says that universals exist in sensible things as their forms, but at the same time Plato is also right to believe that universals exist independently of the sensible world when they are abstracted from it by the mind that thinks about the empirical world or as they exist in the Divine Mind. Abélard also asks whether universals continue to have meaning if the individual things that they signify stop existing. His answer is that indeed they have meaning in the mind, because it makes sense to say that something that has existed no longer exists.
These views of Abélard’s became especially controversial when he began applying them to theological doctrines, such as that of the Trinity. For example, an analysis of the the word “God” in Abélard’s terms as a universal concept signifying the three individual divine persons but itself not existing in the real world, could easily lead to the heresy of tritheism or alternatively to the idea of the three persons as mere modes of the single God. Small wonder, then, that Abélard was several times condemned at church councils: at Soissons in 1121, and especially through the efforts of Bernard of Clairvaux and William of Saint-Thierry again at Sens in 1140. The issues that Abélard raised were of great importance because they helped set the stage for later discussions on the status of language and meaning. Besides, Abélard’s way of reasoning and the style of his writing contributed in an important way to the development of the scholastic method, especially to its ahistorical character.
A third philosophical debate that moved the minds of many theologians and philosophers in medieval Paris centered on the Parisian master Nicholas of Autrecourt. Nicholas seems to have been regarded by the university as the leader of a group of philosophers who questioned the authority of Aristotle in philosophical matters. Nicholas held that Aristotle was mistaken about the principle of causation, on which rests the entire system of scholastic theology. According to Nicholas, certitude in scientific demonstration depends only on the principle of contradiction. It is the application of this principle that makes syllogisms viable, and syllogisms are the building blocks of science. Now, the premises of syllogisms are derived from sense experience, but sense experience tells us nothing about substances, only about appearances. Thus syllogisms—and science—can tell us nothing about either substances or about any causal connections between them. Only analytic propositions make sense, and for this reason it is obvious that any traditional proof, whether cosmological or physico-teleological, for the existence of God does not stand up to scrutiny.
Nicholas’s philosophy put the ax to the very roots of scholasticism, and his contemporaries fully understood this. In 1346, under Pope Clement VI, his teachings were condemned and his degrees revoked, and he was forced to recant his doctrines; a year later, he had to burn his writings at the University of Paris. He then fled to Germany but later was appointed dean of the cathedral of Metz. Nicholas’s ideas, however, were not lost: toward the end of the 14th century, much of his analysis of propositions found its way into the writings of nominalist and realist theologians alike. He was more or less rehabilitated by Pierre d’Ailly (1350–1420), who had studied at Paris and himself debated vehemently against causal connections with regard to future contingent truths.
Armstrong, A.H., ed. The Cambridge History of Later Greek and Early Medieval Philosophy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970.
Kretzmann, Norman, Anthony Kenny, and Jan Pinborg, eds. The Cambridge History of Later Medieval Philosophy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982.
Schmitt, Charles B., Quentin Skinner, and Eckhard Kessler, eds. The Cambridge History of Renaissance Philosophy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988.
Dronke, Peter, ed. A History of Twelfth-Century Western Philosophy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988.
Katz, Joseph, and Rudolph H.Weingartner. Philosophy in the West: Readings in Ancient and Medieval, with new translations by John Wellmuth and John Wilkinson. New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1965.
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