Miss Buddha (93 page)

Scholastic thought, however, was less
interested in discovering new facts and principles than in
logically demonstrating the truth of existing beliefs, a concern
that—while not unearthing new thought—did lead to important
developments in logic as well as theology.

Saint Anselm

Saint Anselm of Canterbury, for one, adopted
Saint Augustine’s view of a complementary relation between faith
and reason and attempted to combine Platonism with Christian
theology.

Supporting the Platonic theory of Ideas,
Anselm argued in favor of separate existences of universals, or
common properties of things—the properties Avicenna had called the
essences that established logical realism—the view that universals
and other ideas exist independently of our awareness of them, which
went on to be one of the most hotly disputed issues of medieval
philosophy.

Roscelin

The contrary view, known as nominalism, was
formulated by the Scholastic philosopher Roscelin, who maintained
that only individual, solid objects exist and that the universals,
whether called essences, forms, or ideas, under which particular
things are classified, constitute mere sounds or names, rather than
intangible but actual substances.

But when went on to argue that the Trinity
must consist of three separate beings, his views were deemed
heretical and he was forced to recant in 1092.

Peter Abelard

The
12
^th
century French Scholastic theologian Peter Abelard, whose
tragic love affair with Heloise is one of the most memorable
romantic stories in medieval history, proposed a compromise between
realism and nominalism known as conceptualism.

According to Abelard’s view, universals
exist in particular things as properties and outside of things as
concepts in the mind. Abelard maintained that revealed
religion—religion based on divine revelation, or the word of
God—must be justified by reason.

Averroes

The Spanish-Arab jurist and physician
Averroes, with his lucid commentary on the works of Aristotle, made
Aristotelian science and philosophy a powerful influence on
medieval thought.

As a result, he earned himself the title
“the Commentator” among the many Scholastics who came to regard
Aristotle as “the Philosopher.”

Averroes mainly strived to overcome the
contradictions between Aristotelian philosophy and revealed
religion by distinguishing between two separate systems of truth, a
scientific body of truths based on reason and a religious body of
truths based on revelation.

However, his view that reason takes
precedence over religion led to his exile in 1195.

Even so, Averroes’s so-called double-truth
doctrine was to influence many a Muslim, Jewish, and Christian
philosopher; it was rejected, however, by many others, and became
another hotly debated issue in medieval philosophy.

Maimonides

The Jewish rabbi and physician Moses
Maimonides—one of the most noted figures in Judaic thought—followed
his contemporary Averroes in attempting to unite Aristotelian
science with religion but he rejected the view that both of the two
conflicting systems of ideas could be true.

In his late
12
^th
century
Guide for the
Perplexed
, Maimonides attempted to provide
a rational explanation of Judaic doctrine and defended religious
beliefs (such as the belief in the creation of the world) that
conflicted with Aristotelian science only when he was convinced
that decisive evidence was lacking on either side.

Heretics and Saints

While Abelard, Averroes,
and Maimonides were each accused of blasphemy because their views
conflicted with religious beliefs of the time, the
13
^th
century did see a string of philosophers who would later
become declared saints by the church.

The Italian Scholastic philosopher Saint
Bonaventure, for one, combined Platonic and Aristotelian principles
and introduced the concept of substantial form, or nonmaterial
substance, to account for the immortality of the soul.

Bonaventure’s views leaned toward
pantheistic mysticism in making the aim of philosophy the ecstatic
union with God—mirroring the goals of Plotinus.

The
13
^th
-century German Scholastic philosopher Saint Albertus Magnus
was the first Christian philosopher to endorse and interpret the
entire system of Aristotelian thought.

He studied and admired the writings of both
the Muslim and Jewish Aristotelians and wrote commentaries on
Aristotle in which he attempted to reconcile Aristotle’s thought
with Christian teachings. He also took a great interest in the
natural science of his day.

The
13
^th
-century English monk Roger Bacon, one of the first
Scholastics to take an interest in experimental science, realized
that a great deal remained to be learned about nature. He
criticized the deductive method of his contemporaries and their
reliance on past authority, and called for a new method of inquiry
based on controlled observation.

He approached the world by looking afresh
rather than attempting to reconcile existing thought systems.

Aquinas

However, most other medieval philosophers
pale in comparison to Saint Thomas Aquinas. He was an Italian
Dominican monk who studied under Albertus Magnus in Germany.

Aquinas reconciled Aristotelian science with
Augustinian theology into a comprehensive system of thought that
was to become the authoritative philosophy of the Roman Catholic
Church.

He wrote on nearly every
known subject in philosophy and science, and his two major
works,
Summa Theologica
and
Summa Contra
Gentiles
, in which he presents a persuasive
and systematic structure of ideas, still constitute a powerful
influence on Western thought.

His writings reflect the renewed interest in
reason, nature, and worldly happiness of his contemporaries as well
as his own interest in religious faith and concern about
salvation.

One of Aquinas’ most influential studies
dealt with the properties of God, where he determined such
attributes as omnipotence, omniscience, eternity, and
benevolence.

He also surmised a new relationship between
faith and reason, arguing against the Averroists view that the
truths of faith and the truths of reason cannot conflict. Rather,
Aquinas proposed, faith and reason apply to different realms.

Thus he held that the truths of natural
science and philosophy are discovered by reasoning from observed
facts and experience, whereas the tenets of revealed religion, such
as the doctrine of the Trinity, the creation of the world, and
other articles of Christian dogma, are all—though not inconsistent
with reason, he claimed—beyond rational comprehension, and must be
accepted on faith.

Aquinas’ metaphysics, theory of knowledge,
ethics, and politics were derived mainly from Aristotle, but he
also incorporated the Augustinian virtues of faith, hope, and
charity and the goal of eternal salvation through grace with
Aristotle’s views on ethics (and its goal of worldly
happiness).

Medieval Philosophy After Aquinas

Of course, Aquinas was not
without his subsequent critics, and the most important of those
were the 13
^th
-century Scottish theologian John Duns Scotus and 14th-century
English Scholastic William of Ockham.

Duns Scotus developed an intricate and
highly technical system of logic and metaphysics, but due to the
fanaticism of his followers, ironically, the name Duns later became
a symbol of stupidity in the English word dunce.

Scotus outright rejected the attempt of
Aquinas to reconcile rational philosophy with revealed religion. He
held, through his modified version of Averroes’ double-truth
doctrine, that all religious beliefs are matters of faith, except
for the belief in the existence of God, which he regarded as
logically provable.

Against the view of Aquinas that God acts in
accordance with his rational nature, Scotus argued that the divine
will appeared prior, and ranks senior to the divine intellect and
so creates, rather than follows, the laws of nature and morality.
By this reasoning he implied a different notion of free will than
that of Aquinas.

On the issue of universals, Scotus
rationalized a new compromise between realism and nominalism where
he accounted for the difference between individual objects and the
forms that these objects exemplify as a logical rather than a real
distinction.

William of Ockham was very critical of the
Scholastic belief in intangible, invisible things such as forms,
essences, and universals. He agreed with Roscelin and held that
such abstract entities were nothing more than references of words
to other words rather than to actual things.

His now famous rule, still
known as
Ockham’s Razor
—which said that one should not assume the existence of more
things than are logically necessary—became a fundamental principle
of modern science and philosophy.

The
15
^th
and
16
^th
-century revival of scientific interest in nature was
accompanied by a tendency toward pantheistic mysticism—that is, the
notion that God exists in all things.

The Roman Catholic prelate Nicholas of Cusa
anticipated the work of the Polish astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus
in his suggestion that the Earth moved around the Sun, thus
displacing humanity from the center of the universe. He also
conceived of the universe as infinite and identical with God.

The Italian philosopher Giordano Bruno, who
similarly identified the universe with God, developed the
philosophical implications of the Copernican theory. Bruno’s
philosophy influenced subsequent intellectual forces that led to
the rise of modern science and to the Reformation.

He was burned at the stake for his
efforts.

Modern Philosophy

When we talk of “modern” philosophy, we mean
to distinguish a new historic era both from antiquity and from the
intervening Middle Ages.

Many things had occurred in
the intellectual, religious, political, and social life of Europe
to steer the 16
^th
- and
17
^th
-century thinkers in genuinely new directions.

There were the explorations of the world;
the Protestant Reformation, with its emphasis on individual faith
rather than blind acceptance of dogma. There was the rise of a new
commercial urban society (the birth of the middle class), and there
was the habit of the Renaissance to develop new ideas in just about
all areas of culture.

All of this kindled the development of a new
philosophical worldview.

The New View

The medieval view of the world as a
hierarchical order of beings created and governed by God was slowly
but surely supplanted by the mechanistic image of the world, and
the universe, as a vast machine the parts of which move in
accordance with strict physical laws (rather than by the whim of
God), and in effect blindly: without purpose or will.

In this new view of the universe, science
steadily gained prominence over spirituality, and the surrounding
physical world that we observe and live in would receive as much,
if not more, attention than the world (if any) yet to come.

This new philosophy no longer saw human life
as preparation for salvation to come, but rather as the agency
through which to satisfy natural desires.

Political institutions and ethical
principles ceased to be regarded as reflections of divine command
and instead came to be seen as practical devices created by humans,
again to gain happiness in this world rather than the next.

To this new philosophy, the human mind
itself seemed an inexhaustible reality on a par with the physical
reality of matter and modern philosophers now had the task of
defining more clearly the essence of mind and of matter, and of
reasoning and the relation between the two.

Individuals ought no longer to blindly
swallow existing dogma, but ought to look and see for themselves,
they believed. And rather than read (and blindly believe) the
Bible, they should study the “book of Nature,” and in every case
search for the truth with their own reason.

Ever since the
16
^th
century, modern philosophy has been an ongoing interaction
between systems of thought founded on a belief in human thought as
the ultimate reality and the systems based on a mechanistic,
materialistic interpretation of the universe.

Spirit versus matter.

Mechanism and Materialism

In this new philosophical climate, postulates
and intuition took a back seat and experience and reason assumed
the sole standards of truth.

The first great spokesman for this new breed
of philosophy was Francis Bacon (1561-1626), who denounced reliance
on authority and verbal argument and criticized Aristotelian logic
as useless when it came to seeking and discovering new laws.

Bacon demanded (and developed) a new
scientific method based on careful observation and experiment
leading to reasoned generalization of the observed (truths), and he
was the first to formulate rules for this new method of drawing
conclusions, now known as inductive inference.