OCCAM'S RAZOR

William of Occam (Ockham) (1285-1349) is the second Englishman so far (after Roger Bacon), whom we are encountering in the ongoing chronological procession of major philosophers (soon to be followed by a third one, John Wycliffe). He is also one of the most important scholastics, although not as well-known as St. Thomas Aquinas. He was also a Franciscan monk in the tradition of Duns Scotus, by whose teachings he was much influenced, but with whom he still had serious differences. He studied theology at Oxford, but supposedly never completed his undergraduate master’s course, although later he would become known as Doctor Invincibilis, perhaps, for taking on Pope John XXII himself, whom he had accused of heresy. The contention with the Pope was over the Franciscan concept of poverty, which Occam upheld, but the Pope dismissed, as well as over a host of other issues. Excommunicated by the Pope, and exiled, he was promptly rehabilitated ten years after his death by Pope Innocent VI.

Bertrand Russell gives a marked prominence to Occam in his History of Western Philosophy. In his overall assessment of Occam’s place in the history of philosophy, he agrees with Ernest Addison Moody (a notable American philosopher-medievalist, 1903-1975, cited opus, The Logic of William of Occam [1935], revised in 1965), in the following remark:

“There is a tendency in writers on history of philosophy to interpret men in the light of their successors, but this is generally a mistake. Occam has been regarded as bringing about the breakdown of scholasticism, as a precursor of Dèscartes, or Kant, or whoever may be the particular commentator’s favorite among modern philosophers. According to Moody, with whom I agree, all this is a mistake. Occam, he holds, was mainly concerned to restore a pure Aristotle, freed from Augustinian and Arabic influences. This has also been, to a considerable extent, the aim of St. Thomas, but the Franciscans, as we have seen, had continued to follow Augustine much more closely than he did. The interpretation of Occam by modern historians, according to Moody, has been vitiated by the desire to find a gradual transition from scholastic to modern philosophy; this has caused people to read modern doctrines into him, when in fact he is only interpreting Aristotle.”

Occam’s most famous (relatively speaking, of course, as very few people outside the circle interested in the medieval philosophy know anything about him, anyway!) logico-philosophical accomplishment is known as Occam’s razor. In its most common form it states that the explanation of any phenomenon should take the fewest number of simplest assumptions, and those assumptions which are not absolutely necessary are to be eliminated. In Latin, this general principle reads: entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem. Ironically, it is not contained in this form in any of Occam’s known works, where we find this idea stated slightly differently: Frustra fit per plura quod potest fieri per pauciora. (It is in error to do with more what can be done with fewer.) It is probably within the framework of this logical connection that Occam rejects all ontological and other proofs of God’s existence, unity, or infinity. In fact, he rejects all natural theology as such, stating that even perfect reason cannot satisfy faith, which is always superior to reason, even when it is irrational. As we can see in the logical outcome of Occam’s razor, if faith is sufficient in all matters of theology, reason here becomes superfluous, irrelevant, and, therefore, illegitimate, and must be dismissed altogether.

And finally, in Occam’s nominalistic logic we see another important application of his razor, as he rejects the view of universals as some sort of entity thought by the mind:

“But what in the soul is this thing which is a sign? It must be said that with regard to this, there are various opinions. For, some say that it is nothing but a certain fiction, produced by the soul. Others say that it is a certain quality existing subjectively in the soul, distinct from the act of understanding. Others say that it is the act of understanding. And in favor of these it has to be said: what can be explained on fewer principles is explained needlessly by more. Everything, however, that is explained by positing something distinct from the act of understanding, can be explained without positing such a distinct thing, for to stand for something and to signify something can belong just as well to the act of understanding, as to this fictive entity. Ergo, one ought not to posit anything else beyond the act of understanding.”

In my personal view, Occam’s razor is one of the most interesting and intellectually challenging tools that philosophy has acquired from anyone throughout all history. The razor has proved itself capable of producing great scientific and philosophical breakthroughs, as well as becoming an impediment to progress, but such is the fate of every tool, including the very best: they can be well used or badly abused at people’s will, and their application for the better or for the worse has nothing to do with the intrinsic value of the tool itself. It must be admitted, though, that all inventors of useful tools are to be honored in their own right, and this case is no exception. William of Occam wasn’t just one of the scholastic philosophers (in which capacity he has been obscured by Thomas Aquinas’s shadow), but the original creator of a valuable philosophical tool, for which achievement his major role in the history of philosophy cannot be too much overstated.

 

DUNS THE DUNCE

It is a sad memory for another Irishman on our list, John Duns Scotus (1266-1308), whose name Duns was turned into the unflattering epithet “dunce” after King Henry the Eighth’s repudiation of the Pope and of all Catholicism with that.

Duns Scotus was a Franciscan friar, one of the three great Franciscan philosophers, counting Roger Bacon and William Occam (you will find him in my next entry, to be posted tomorrow), besides him. By contrast, Albertus Magnus and Thomas Aquinas were Dominicans. There existed a certain enmity between these two orders: the Dominicans were considered more orthodox, while the Franciscans, refusing to accept their authority, were seen as straying off the conventional course. This does not mean that the Franciscans were perched on the verge of heresy. Curiously enough, their bitter rivalry with the Dominicans caused Pope Sixtus IV, in the fifteenth century, to write a constitution threatening both sides with excommunication should they keep accusing each other of heresy. The case in point was the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception, originally formulated in the eleventh century, but immediately rejected by Church authorities, including Doctor Angelicus-- St. Thomas himself. This doctrine was, however, brought back to prominence by none other than Duns Scotus, and by virtue of his sharply refined argument was established as an optional Church practice. (It was going to become an official dogma of the Church only in 1854, precisely because of the stated Dominican opposition to it.)

From all said above, it is clear that Duns Scotus was poising himself against the authority of Aquinas. This was possible by appealing to the authority of Augustine, which Duns was doing very skillfully. Thus, in his philosophy, the effective ratio of Plato versus Aristotle in the philosophical concoction of the Middle Ages Christian theology was pushed back from Thomistic Aristotle back to Augustinian Plato.

But this was not all that happened as a result of Duns’ efforts. Without actually trying to dislodge Aquinas from his lofty position within the Catholic Church, Duns discovered numerous chinks in his armor, and set on to correct those mistakes. His grudge was against giving too much credit to reason and philosophy, thus leaving too little room for revelation and supernatural illumination. It may be true that Thomas Aquinas is vulnerable because of such obvious mistakes (after all, every philosopher presenting a theory of his own is necessarily guilty of multiple errors, which, after all said and done, completely undermine his construction and turn his theory into a pathetic pile of junk), but at least what he was trying to do was to reconcile these two apparent opposites: reason and revelation; philosophy and theology standing behind them. By his too thorough an effort to push philosophy out of theology, Duns Scotus antagonized philosophy at a time when it had too little clout in its standing against the Church. With the advent of the Renaissance, however, the tables were turned, and a triumphant philosophy pushed back and trivialized theology among all educated minds. Was it worth it, then, we may ask, to repair small parts, while losing the big whole?

The name of Duns, now spelled as dunce, became a nickname for a mentally challenged person, because of Duns Scotus’s alleged obscurity and obtuseness. On the other hand, he is known as Doctor Subtilis among the Catholics for his sharp thorough mind and a genius for the subtleties of extremely difficult, specialized philosophical subject matter. In many ways he epitomizes scholasticism at its peak. But among those truly obscure, abstruse subjects, which have made him, and Catholic Scholasticism as a whole, the butt of many irreverent jokes, there is at least one subject, which is at the same time lively, instructive, and useful in the modern philosophical discourse. It is the “principle of individuation,” that is what determines non-identity of things, and in addressing this question Duns Scotus particularly excelled. Here is how Bertrand Russell describes his contribution:

“Duns Scotus held that, since there is no difference between being and essence, the principle of individuation must be form, not matter. This principle was one of the important problems of the scholastic philosophy. In various forms it has remained a problem to the present day. We may state the problems as follows.

“Among the properties of individual things, some are essential, others accidental. The question now arises: given two individual things belonging to the same species, do they always differ in essence, or is it possible for the essence to be exactly the same in both? Saint Thomas holds the latter view on material substances, the former on the immaterial ones. Duns Scotus holds that there are always differences of essence between two different individual things. The view of St. Thomas depends on the theory that pure matter consists of undifferentiated parts, which are distinguished solely by difference of position in space. Duns Scotus holds that if things are distinct, they must be distinguished by some qualitative difference. This view is nearer to Platonism than that of St. Thomas.”

Russell says further that in modernizing this problem, as we get rid of the concept of substance altogether, Scotus is more up to par than Aquinas, although the serious difficulty in connection with space and time is still unresolved. In my view, it is possible to overcomplicate the philosophical problem of individuation, to bring it even to the point of absurdity, like Zeno Eleaticus has done with his logical puzzles, but in view of the recent cloning experiments becoming a trend-setting development, the principle of individuation ought to be posited in ethical terms, rather than in any other non-ethical philosophical terms, and only the position of Duns Scotus, which unequivocally separates even seemingly identical entities, can sustain the principle of individuation through the cloning controversy. It is essential to see two clones, or two identical twins as distinct not only mentally or immaterially, as St. Thomas would allow it, but as physically distinct as well, where only a categorical qualitative physical distinction will do, thus awarding the whole argument to Duns Scotus.

FATHER OF THE ITALIAN LANGUAGE

Dante Alighieri (1265-1321). Also see my entry The Greatest Italian… Nationalist in the Sonnets section. The title of this entry should be self-explanatory. This is how Dante is known in his native Italy.

***

There is an interesting question, particularly easy to come to the mind of a Russian Intelligent: How much can a literary genius be called a philosopher, perhaps not in that strictly professional sense, in which their lofty breed understands their common trade, but in the general sense of philosophizing for wisdom’s sake, raising good questions about good and evil, right and wrong, Warum? (to be or not to be?), and such.

In the pursuit of an adequate answer we can always point to Shakespeare and Goethe, Pushkin and Lermontov, Ibsen and Dostoyevsky, all of whom are genuine philosophizers. (On the other hand, Plato and Kierkegaard, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, although also masters of the literary expression, are deliberately philosophy-oriented, whereas with the former set, their intellectuality is an offshoot of the belles-lettres.)

There is, however, a serious distinction between two types of philosophizing literati: those who are original thinkers, and those who are derivative thinkers. This distinction is necessary, when we come to measure up one of the greatest colossi of world literature: Dante Alighieri.

It is well known that his Commedia is saturated with philosophical content. Even his romantic confession, Vita Nuova, has an infusion of philosophizing. On the other hand, his works Convivio and De Monarchia are deliberately philosophical exercises, the former dealing with a broad range of philosophical issues, the latter, primarily with the questions of political philosophy. Bertrand Russell judges Dante’s philosophy as hopelessly derivative and even backward.---

“Although as a poet he was a great innovator, as a thinker he was somewhat behind the times. His book De Monarchia is Ghibelline in outlook, and would have been more timely a hundred years earlier. He regards Emperor and Pope as independent, and both divinely appointed. Dante’s thought is interesting, not only in itself, but as that of a layman; but it was not influential, and was hopelessly out of date.”

In his thinking, Dante was deeply influenced by Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas (plus by Boethius, Albertus Magnus, and via Neo-Platonism by Plato). The first two were the safest combination to be influenced by, as the teachings of Aquinas, and his endorsement of “Aristotelity” had been whole-heartedly sanctioned by the Catholic Church, with Aquinas hot on the short waiting list for canonization at the time. One could say that Dante was betting on the right horse, but on second thought, this sounds too rude.

In fact, I am earnestly curious why this literary revolutionary, this titan of original creative thinking, could be so pitiably reduced to a derivative philosophy and second-hand theology, why in his philosophical writings he never dared to break the molds, like he had so brilliantly done in his fiction?

My answer is contained in the well-known historical designation of the millennium that was soon to come to a close, with the advent of the Renaissance, namely, the Dark Ages. I believe that in Dante’s time there was so much daring already in the mere interest in philosophy that the dividing line between the original and the derivative was virtually non-existent. Let us not forget that even the greatest European philosophers of the Middle Ages were mostly derivative, only occasionally exhibiting flashes of originality; that even Thomas Aquinas was himself demonstrably derivative from Aristotle, his only claim to originality being his clever adaptation of Aristotle’s ideas to the official Christian theology, pre-approved by the Church.

In this climate of stigmatized originality, and even innocent philosophizing perfunctorily synonymous with heresy, Dante’s dangerous interest in philosophy must be seen as highly commendable on its own merit. A precocious child prodigy, even the young Mozart, in this sense, is always mostly derivative, at the dawn of his life of genius. Dante represents the newborn child Renaissance, and thence his natural limitations. Let us keep in mind that Shakespeare and Goethe, Pushkin and Lermontov, Ibsen and Dostoyevsky, all mentioned above, all belonged to an entirely different era, where, all contemporary flaws, sores, and ailments notwithstanding, philosophical thinking was no longer punishable with an everlasting hellfire.

THE BEAST BEARING MAN TO PERFECTION

Meister Eckhart may sound like a Wagnerian creation, but he was a real man, admittedly made less real by an admixture of intense mysticism into his philosophical contemplation, which easily brought him into an unpleasant conflict with the Church, with very serious charges of heresy brought against him at the end of his life. (He died before the verdict was pronounced, and what actually happened then, is forever shrouded in mystery.)

***

Meister Eckhart, or Eckhart von Hochheim (1260-1327), was a highly unorthodox (ergo, original!) German philosopher- theologian, but, above all, a great mystic. The anonymous, posthumously published Theologia Germanica, unequivocally attributed to him, was to exercise a tremendous influence on Martin Luther, who called it the greatest book after the Bible and after St. Augustine. An incomplete set of his famous sermons has reached us as well, testifying to his intellectual and literary talents. Envisaging Luther, his sermons are in simple, but beautiful German, whereas his professional writings are in the customary Latin.

Meister Eckhart’s mystical metaphysics, (such as his attribution of fertility to God, his distinction between Gott and Gottheit, etc.) is characteristically difficult to fathom; his proverbial dicta, on the other hand, are a pleasure to read (“God is at home; it is us who are out on a walk; The eye with which I see God is the same eye with which God sees me; The more we have, the less we own; The price of not acting is much higher than the cost of making a mistake; The knower and the known are one; God and I are one, in knowledge,” etc.). At a later time I intend to delve into Meister Eckhart’s mysteries in a thorough manner, because there are some things there which are of considerable interest to me. But now is not that time.

It is very curious and revealing of the academic psychology of the Middle Ages, that even Eckhart’s good-wishers, while admiring his works, were opposed to their publication on the grounds that, while they should benefit the most astute and discerning readers, they would do too much harm to the majority, who would be unable to understand, and likely to misinterpret them to a dangerous extent.

Among later philosophers (we have already mentioned Luther) Schopenhauer must have had a high level of appreciation for Eckhart, which he expressed in the following excerpt from his magnum opus:

“If we turn from the forms produced by external circumstances, and go to the root of things, we’ll find that Sakyamuni (the Buddha) and Meister Eckhart ! teach the same thing; only that the former dared to express his ideas plainly and positively, whereas Eckhart is obliged to clothe them in the garment of the Christian myth, and to adapt his expressions thereto.” (Schopenhauer’s Die Welt, Vol. II, Ch. XLVIII.)

In his essay Schopenhauer as an Educator, Nietzsche says the following:

“The Schopenhauerian man voluntarily takes upon himself the suffering involved in being truthful, and this suffering serves to destroy his own willfulness and to prepare that complete overturning and conversion of his being, which it is the real meaning of life to lead up to. All that exists that can be denied deserves to be denied; and being truthful means to believe in an existence that cannot be denied, and which is itself true and without falsehood. That is why the truthful man feels that the meaning of his activity is metaphysical, explicable through the laws of another and higher life, and in the profoundest sense affirmative: however much all that he does may appear to be destructive of the laws of this life and a crime against them. So it is that all his acts must become an uninterrupted suffering, but he knows what Meister Eckhart also knows: ‘The beast that bears you fastest to perfection is suffering.’” (Nietzsche’s Schopenhauer as Educator.)

…The reader must have noticed that I have put this last phrase in the title of this entry. It definitely rings a bell for the Russian ‘inner’ ear, and for this reason alone (another good reason is Eckhart’s religious mysticism, which Russia has written a whole large library about), Meister Eckhart ought to have been a kindred spirit for those Russians who are able to appreciate him, and their number is many. (Unfortunately, for reasons of religious incompatibility, the Russians became familiar with Eckhart--- and then, rather cursorily--- only in the later part of the nineteenth century.)

HOMO SCHOLASTICUS

Homo Scholasticus is my jocular designation for St. Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274), finally, the sole subject of this entry. Not that he was the only scholastic in the age of scholasticism, of course, but he was by far the most important scholastic, the crowning epitome of scholasticism as such, and also, unquestionably, one of the most authoritative thinkers of all time.

***

Virtually every history of philosophy places Thomas Aquinas among the preeminent philosophical figures of all time. W. T. Jones gives him several chapters, on a par with Plato and Aristotle. Bertrand Russell has a single chapter on him, but it is just as lengthy as his chapters on Hobbes, Dèscartes, and Spinoza. By such standards I might have put him in the Magnificent Shadows section, allotting him a number of entries, but I am doing no such thing, and that for a very good reason. While St. Thomas Aquinas has been undeniably one of the most influential thinkers in history, he is hardly a major philosopher of an interest comparable to the giants of Western philosophy.

The reasons for his extraordinary authority are easy to see. Comparing his biography to the biographies of other Christian thinkers, including the Saints of the Church, in the Catholic Encyclopedia, we find that this one reads like a genuine hagiography, putting him almost on a par with St. Paul the Apostle and the Saints of the Bible’s New Testament. Already during his life, his virtually supernatural prestige was growing with a certain promise of speedy canonization after his death (which, indeed, followed after the shortest allowable wait of just forty-nine years, in 1323. (For comparison, it took St. Augustine 873 postmortem years to reach the same status.) In 1368, Saint Thomas’s teaching was endorsed by Pope Urban V as the infallible dogma of the Catholic Church. (Pope Urban V: “The teaching of Blessed Thomas is the true and Catholic doctrine.”) For comparison, no similar endorsement has ever been given to any other Doctor of the Church. Ironically it was Martin Luther who endorsed St. Augustine (but by no means as powerfully), in his 1569 Tischreden: “Augustine was the ablest and purest of all the doctors.” Needless to say that by this denigration of Thomas and elevation of Augustine, Luther was disparaging his enemy the Catholic Church, while building up for his supporters a parallel Protestant authority,-- St. Augustine. {Luther’s elevation of Augustinian theology has produced, among several unhappy effects, the Protestant belief, lasting into the twenty-first century, but in a slightly modified form, in the perdition of the “unbaptized” (that is, of all those who do not know Jesus), which the Roman Catholic Church had long abandoned.}

Urban V’s sanction was repeated and reinforced in 1879 by Pope Leo XIII, who pontificated, ex cathedra, that in all Catholic educational institutions teaching philosophy, the doctrines of St. Thomas Aquinas had to be taught as the only right ones.

With such an exceptional imprimatur, no wonder that St. Thomas has long become, and remains, the most important philosopher in history, in the eyes of the Roman Catholic Church’s 1.13 billion Faithful around the world. (For the sake of fairness, I must remind the reader that the Catholic system of education has not suffered much as a result of such imprimaturs. It is still one of the best in the world, beating the American system of Multiple Choice into silly pulp, at that!)

Yet we can scarcely call St. Thomas a first-rate philosopher for several reasons. On the one hand, he is too closely conjoined to Aristotelian philosophy to amount to much on his own. Then, rather than engaging in an open-minded philosophical inquiry, all he does is he adapts his “findings” to a fixed set of pre-ordained conclusions. And these conclusions are not even his own unique discoveries, but the official ordinances of the ruling power, which is the Roman Catholic Church. Thus St. Thomas shows himself, rather, as a clever promoter of the Church’s doctrine than as an honest thinker with any claim to intellectual independence.

With all due respect, aside from adapting Aristotle’s theories to the needs of the Church, his philosophy is wholly reducible to the following homiletic poem of his composition:

Pange, lingua, gloriosi

Corporis mysterium,

Sanguinisque pretiosi,

Quem in mundi pretium

Fructus ventris generosi

Rex effudit gentium.

Wherever he finds himself capable of supporting the Catholic dogma with Aristotle’s rational authority, he does it very capably. Wherever, however, he finds this impossible, he immediately appeals to the authority of revelation, where he does not have to prove anything. This renders his job conveniently uncomplicated, and invariably rewarding; but, to his credit, even those things that are demonstrably too easy to do, he does them with an undeniable intellectual flair and with greatness. Thus, some aspects of his saintly, demiurgic reputation are actually well deserved.

Generally speaking, I do not wish to disparage St. Thomas’s legacy in any way by an unwanted impression of veiled sarcasm. He was objectively a great man, and his enormous prominence within the framework of Western civilization makes him, honoris causa, a figure of unconditionally lofty stature. But his personal philosophical greatness is incommensurate with his world-historical cultural significance, to the point that I feel no compulsion or interest in analyzing the details of his philosophy or of his theology, which stance of mine needs to be mentioned and explained, which I hope I have done with sufficient clarity.

But before I am done with this entry, I would like to bring the reader back to the concluding paragraphs of the earlier entry on Saint Augustine (City Of God) and continue quoting our old friend W. T. Jones, in his Conclusion to The Medieval Mind, which is Part II of his History of Western Philosophy. This time, he is comparing St. Thomas to St. Augustine:

"Although Thomas, as compared with Augustine, was much more humane, most of us are a long way from feeling at home with his thought. He certainly wanted to allow a measure of significance to this world and its affairs, but most people will feel that he failed to reconcile God’s infinity with man’s value. And what if by some feat of logical synthesis, he succeeded? Even so, for both Thomas and Augustine, man’s best and truest end still lies beyond this life; the world is still a great teleological structure, which gets its meaning from where it is going, rather than from what it is and does, and the final sanction for all conduct, and the ultimate criterion for all knowledge is not the concurrence of human reasons, but an authoritative text and a divine institution.

What makes Augustine and Thomas, and all other medieval thinkers, so fundamentally alike, despite their differences, is the sacramental outlook, which they shared. What makes us differ so markedly from them is that we have largely lost this outlook, and that we share the basically secular point of view of the Greeks. When we say that medieval men looked on this world as a sacrament, we mean, first, that they conceived this world to be but the visible sign of an invisible reality. And, secondly, that they conceived this world to be a sacrifice which they freely and gratefully dedicated to the all-good, all-true Giver.

That this sacramental view was a block to progress can hardly be denied. And that, in losing it, we have rid ourselves of a liability-- ignorance, superstition, intolerance-- seems equally obvious to many. What is not so obvious is that we have also lost something of value. If the sacramental outlook of the Middle Ages had issued here and there in what a modern clinician would describe as an acute psychopathology, in others it resulted in a serenity and confidence, in a sense of purpose, of meaningfulness, and of fulfillment, which the clinician must admire and look for in vain, among his contemporaries."

I hope that the reader is by now acquainted with the concluding paragraphs of my entry City Of God, and with my concluding remarks for that entry. What remains to be repeated here is that my main objection to Augustinianism and Thomism and the whole outlook of the Medieval mind is its ugly disconnect from the reality of the sacramental authority, the Church, to which they all appealed. An incredible hypocrisy took root in the Christian mind as a result, and the emerging Renaissance struck at the heart of that hypocrisy, with the unfortunate result of undermining the authority of God in this world as well, and perhaps, for all time. Here is where I see the greatest failure of Medieval European philosophy and theology, and both St. Augustine and St. Thomas, as the foremost representatives of it, take a large share in the blame for being too much preoccupied with matters of comparatively little consequence, while keeping a blind eye on the greatest problem that mattered more than all the rest of them put together.

DOCTOR MIRABILIS

{Why Roger Bacon?--Easy!--In the nineteenth century he was proclaimed the first experimental scientist of the modern era--- a distinction to reckon with. His legend was rather overblown, but that should not be our reason to cut him down beneath his actual size, and the fact that he was a towering historical figure cannot be diminished by exaggerated claims of superstardom.

In fact, he was indeed a bona fide scientist. He was also a passionate critic of the special brand of “cultural illiteracy” of his age, which consisted in linguistic deficiency of the Biblical and Aristotelian scholars who all knew Latin, of course, but only a tiny handful could understand the Greek of Plato and Aristotle and of the New Testament, or the Hebrew and Aramaic of the Bible, or the Arabic of Avicenna and Averroes, for that matter, which was inevitably leading to gross mistranslations, misinterpretations, and other grotesque deficiencies of his contemporary scholarship, all of which he was eager to expose, for which he had proper credentials, being fluent in several languages.

He was equally appalled by the scientific illiteracy of most churchmen and tried to encourage the inclusion of science in educational curricula. In matters theological, he suggested paying less attention to miniscule, unimportant details, which had been the predominant bones of contention before and in his time, and more attention to a serious study of the Bible, envisaging in this view the revolutionary theological reorientation of the Reformation. Generally speaking, he was never trying to set up science in opposition to religion, as some of his “hagiographers” would claim, but explicitly promoted the need to incorporate philosophy and science into the super-discipline of theology, which he never intended to disparage, but always considered to be paramount.

…Why Roger Bacon?--Ask no more.}

***

Proceeding from teacher to student, from Albertus to Thomas would have been the most natural transition, except that a foreign body has inserted itself into the normal course, by virtue of formal chronology. There is a span of thirty-two years between those two, and now a third party born after one, but before the other is calling for an intermission in the Scholastic saga, so that it can be heard in procedural order. I have called him a foreign body because, whereas there is a continuity and similarity between the said Scholastics, this new subject of ours shows a distinctly different frame of mind from any regular thinker’s, in the emerging Thomistic tradition.

Doctor Mirabilis, such was the nickname of the Englishman Roger Bacon, never to be confused with his latter-day countryman Francis Bacon, whom we shall visit in a later entry. Roger Bacon (1212-1292) was particularly famous for the reverential legend, which grew around his name in the nineteenth century, not unlike the story of Doctor Albertus Magnus and the Philosopher’s Stone, which credits him with being an empirical genius, a modern-type scientist several centuries ahead of his time, who ceaselessly struggled to promote scientific experimentation against the forces of darkness, which vowed to stop scientific progress, in the name of religion. There is a lot of truth in this legend, as Roger Bacon was, indeed, a scientific and philosophical genius, keen on experimentation, and in some of his experiments coming close to presaging Newton and other scientists of modern history. The legend, however, does him a disservice by overstating his wild unorthodoxy and anti-scholastic combativeness, as well as understating the Church’s receptivity to scientific progress, which was definitely much greater than the way in which it has been caricatured.

This is why a more balanced view of Roger Bacon and his empiricist emphasis has been bound to emerge. Bacon’s powerful positives must not be diminished by jumping into the opposite extreme of calling him a standard thinker of his time. In many ways he was ahead, and, very importantly, he was not a scholastic in the sense prevailing to describe those times. But he was not an uncompromising rebel either. It is true that on several occasions he was censured for his views, and even imprisoned, but never for lengthy periods of time, and he was never harshly persecuted either. That he managed not to cross the line of martyrdom is a testimony both to his own prudence and also to the fact that the Church of that time was not as bigoted as customarily portrayed and almost universally believed.

SINE QUO AQUINAS NON

[The jocular title of this entry playing on sine qua non, is however serious, in making the point that without St. Albertus Magnus’s meticulous groundwork, St. Thomas Aquinas would have had to start from scratch, and might not have achieved everything that he did building on the foundation already laid by his teacher. I had some initial doubts about including Albertus here as a separate entry, but I don’t have them anymore.]

Albertus Magnus (1193-1280) is not normally listed among major philosophers, which may be objectively true, but historically unfair to the man by whose efforts the Latin translations of Aristotle from Averroes’s Arabic became organized, systematized, and made ready for Christian consumption. Albertus was also the principal teacher and mentor of Thomas Aquinas, eventually disappearing in Aquinas’s shadow, yet not to be forgotten by those who wish to set the record straight. This record ought to remind us that it was not St. Thomas Aquinas, but his German-born teacher St. Albertus, who was, historically, the very first Christian Scholastic philosopher in the Aristotelian fashion. (Roscelin was the first Scholastic per se as the founder of nominalism, but he was not familiar with Aristotle.)

To his considerable credit, he was not a religious bigot, but he strove to reconcile science and religion in a fair manner (using the modern analogy of trying to reconcile creationism with evolution, the reader might get a good appreciation of this mission impossible). There is also a curious legend about him, which gets a renewed freshness against the new background of the Potteriana, asserting that it was none other than he, who had discovered the Philosopher’s Stone; but, for all intents and purposes, it is best that it remain with Nicholas Flamel and his friend Albus Dumbledore in the enchanted land of classic fiction.

THE MUSLIM WHO BROUGHT ARISTOTLE TO CHRISTENDOM

Having opened the door to the Islamic repository of Aristotelianism with Avicenna, I have no choice but to let the illustrious Averroes (1126-1198) slip through it as well. In fact, it was Averroes, and not Avicenna, who succeeded in bringing the writings of Aristotle to the Christian world, at that point in love with Plato, but generally unfamiliar with Plato’s great successor.

Averroes was yet another prodigious Islamic polymath, like Avicenna, but his greatest service to humanity was his titanic effort of translating all extant Aristotelian works (except Politics) into Arabic, and writing a large body of commentary on them. It was by virtue of Averroes’s remarkable labor having been reverently translated into Latin, that Christianity was able to familiarize itself with Aristotle, and having found in him a kindred scholastic spirit, it loved what it had discovered.

As for Averroes himself, he quickly became an immensely influential philosophical figure inside Christian Europe, much more influential, in fact, than he intellectually deserved. For, he was hardly a major original thinker, but rather, a brilliant commentator on Aristotle’s works, for which reason his European followers, calling themselves Averroists, were able to take enormous liberties with his comments, and their infamous Doctrine of double truth, discussed in the Philosophy section (The Shocking Revelation Of Double Truth), although often ascribed to Averroes, has nothing to do with him, but everything to do with his nonchalant followers. The only authentic part of it is the separation of philosophy and religion as two distinct ways of approaching truth, but, as he insisted explicitly, there was always only one truth, not two, or more. (I have a different take on how many truths there are, expressed in several entries like The Truth Of All Creation, but my disagreement with the “monoverists” is totally beside the point in the present context.)

Summarizing now this short but important entry, the by now familiar standard question “Why Averroes?” is answered not so much by quoting Averroes’ personal philosophical accomplishments, as by citing his huge world-historical significance in influencing the course of Western Civilization.

SEVENTY-THREE YEARS LATER

Another solemn anniversary. June 22^nd marks the tragic day in 1941 when a terrible war was unleashed on Russia by Nazi Germany… Each year the numbers of those who lived through those terrible events grow less and less, and by now the numbers of the children of the soldiers of that war, like myself and my wife, has also started to dwindle.

But the remembrance must be kept alive for as long as there is a national memory. The remembrance of the nation’s history, which constitutes the national identity of those who remember…

Memories like this hurt, and hurt they must. But they also make people better, much better. Their fire purifies the individuals and the nation.

God bless all those who remember.

THE HAPLESS FATHER OF THE LIMBO

Pierre Abelard (1079-1142) was a truly brilliant man, but a very unpleasant one at that, always looking for trouble and always finding it. The story of how he seduced the niece of the canon of Notre Dame, refusing to marry her openly, as this would have killed his promising ecclesiastical career, and how the good canon hired a bunch of thugs to have him castrated for such treachery, is far better known than the highly credible opinion that the ensuing romantic correspondence between the seduced girl, now a nun, Heloise, and her terminally disabled lover, must all have been Abelard’s own rather pathetic fake, in which Heloise herself had no part.

His is a genuinely tragic story, but one cannot help seeing that most of that tragedy was of his own doing, as he seemed to be an expert at making enemies and a total failure at friendships, even though at the height of his fame he was unquestionably the most popular man in France, and even in disgrace, living like a hermit in a wilderness, students and curious tourists flocked to his abode in swarms, so that even by the end of his life his popularity had never quite subsided. For the record, three future Popes and several heads of state found themselves among his appreciative students, which is in itself astonishing, considering the scandalous way of life he was known to have led.

He was accused of being a dangerous heretic in all his philosophical and theological views, even forced, as a penance, to burn his own manuscripts, but the irony of it was that it was not the content of his doctrines, but his offensive attitude and pugnacious style, which caused him all his problems. And, quite contrary to his style, the substance of his original writings was sometimes so highly esteemed that it would become the Church’s doctrinal position, like it happened to his doctrine of the Limbo, which effectively amended the repugnantly unpalatable Augustinian doctrine of the damnation of the unbaptized babies. In Abelard’s view there was a place in hell called Limbus Infantium, where such unfortunate babies would not suffer for the sin of the adults, except for being removed from the joy of dwelling in the presence of their Creator and God. This novel doctrine subsequently received the approval of Pope Innocent III, and, later still, St. Thomas Aquinas ipse enthusiastically developed Abelard’s original idea further, by distinguishing between two kinds of eternal joy: natural, experienced by unbaptized babies and righteous pagans, and supernatural, which the unbaptized babies and righteous adults who knew not Christ through no fault of theirs, were, alas, not privy to.

With regard to other aspects of Abelard’s philosophy, they were also stunningly ripe for being accepted by the Roman Catholic Church. Christian scholasticism was just about to blossom under Aristotle’s almighty philosophical aegis, but, ironically, the Western world had almost no knowledge of him at the time (it would be arriving soon enough, but not yet, in Abelard’s time). But the lingering problem of the Platonic universals, and its sister problem of reconciling Christian faith with reason were intensely discussed, in fact, they would appear to have become an obsession of the Church at the expense of practically everything else. And thus in the absence of Aristotle’s upcoming reassurance, Christian thinkers were desperately trying to solve it all by themselves. Abelard seems to have been the most imaginative and successful among them… in this respect.

In its bare essence, Abelard promotes the view that universals are mainly words, and that universality is not an ontological feature of the world, but a semantic feature of linguistics. This makes him, in philosophical jargon, not a realist, but a nominalist. Things that resemble each other, he says, do not turn “resemblance” into a thing, but such resemblances do give rise to abstract universals. But, on the other hand, he is far from rejecting realism wholesale. Platonic ideas are not fiction, but they indeed exist in God’s mind, as patterns for His creation. In other words, they are real, being God’s original concepts.

Should the reader have noticed a significant similarity here with Avicenna’s views on the same subject, this does not mean that either of the two borrowed anything from the other. Avicenna is known to have been all too familiar with Aristotle’s works, and was undoubtedly under their influence, writing on this subject. The fact that Abelard’s view is so close to his and Aristotle’s indicates how ready medieval thought was at that time to embrace Aristotle as the guiding philosophical light of Christian Scholasticism, and how evocative Abelard’s genius was of the Geist of the time in Its monumental journey through the dialectics of history.

THE FIRST SCHOLASTIC

We know very little about Roscelin (1050-1125), but from what we know, he was not a very nice man, and not a very great philosopher, although both philosophy and theology appear on his historical résumé. His sensible, but rather primitive plunge into tritheism over the question of the Trinity (he looked at the Three Persons in One as three Angels, and considered the avoidance of speaking about the Three Gods a matter of linguistic propriety, rather than of substance) is noteworthy, especially remembering the Trinity of Andrei Rublev, which practically coincides with Roscelin’s vision. Ironically, speedily accused of a major heresy, he just as speedily recanted and was forgiven, after which he went back to his sheep, but in a slightly more discreet fashion.

Roscelin is also notable for being the teacher of Pierre Abelard (see my next entry), but his biggest claim to fame is his recognition by consensus as the first Scholastic philosopher, for which reason alone he deserves a separate, albeit necessarily short, entry.

 

THE GREATEST OBJECT OF THOUGHT

St. Anselm (1033-1109) was a French cleric who eventually became the Archbishop of Canterbury, was exiled, but returned to his post two years before his death. The fact that he was canonized indicates that his views are considered acceptable by the Catholic Church, and although he is known as a philosopher and a Doctor of the Church, and all his biographers stress his originality as a thinker, his philosophy is generally of little interest, even at its most original, where he is basically building a bridge between Augustine and Aquinas. But one aspect of it is of such importance that, by virtue of it alone, he requires a separate entry here. This aspect is his historically famous ontological argument for the existence of God, expounded in his treatise The Proslogion (1078). Although this is a rather lengthy exercise, I see nothing better than letting Anselm present it now in his own words:

“Be it mine to look up to thy light, even from afar, even from the depths. Teach me to seek thee, and reveal thyself to me, when I seek thee,--- for I cannot seek thee, except thou teach me, nor find thee, except thou reveal thyself. Let me seek thee in longing. Let me long for thee in seeking. Let me find thee in love, and love thee in finding. Lord, I acknowledge and I thank thee that thou hast created me in this thine image in order that I may be mindful of thee, conceive of thee, and love thee; but that image has been so consumed and wasted away by vices and obscured by the smoke of wrong-doing that it cannot achieve that for which it was made except thou renew it and create it anew. I do not endeavor, O Lord, to penetrate thy sublimity for in no wise do I compare my understanding with that; but I long to understand in some degree thy truth which my heart believes and loves. For, I do not seek to understand so that I may believe, but I believe in order to understand. For this also I understand, that unless I believed, I should not understand.

And so, Lord, do thou who giveth understanding to faith, give me so far as thou knowest it to be profitable to understand that thou art as we believe, and that thou art that which we believe. And, indeed, we believe that thou art a being than which nothing greater can be conceived. Or is there no such nature, since the fool hath said in his heart, there is no God? (Psalms 14:1). But at any rate this very fool, when he hears of this being of which I speak-- a being than which nothing greater can be conceived-- understands what he hears, and what he understands is in his understanding; although he does not understand it to exist. For, it is one thing for an object to be in the understanding, and another thing to understand that the object exists. When a painter first conceives of what he will afterwards perform, he has it in his understanding, but he does not yet understand it to be, because he has not yet performed it. But after he has made the painting, he both has it in his understanding, and he understands that it exists, because he has made it.

Hence even the fool is convinced that something exists in the understanding, at least, than which nothing greater can be conceived. For, when he hears of this, he understands it. And whatever is understood, exists in understanding. And, assuredly, that, than which nothing greater can be conceived, cannot exist in the understanding alone: then it can be conceived to exist in reality; which is greater.

Therefore, if that than which nothing greater can be conceived exists in the understanding alone, the very being than which nothing greater can be conceived is one than which nothing greater can be conceived. But obviously this is impossible. Hence there can be no doubt that there exists a being than which nothing greater can be conceived, and it exists both in the understanding and in reality.

And it assuredly exists so truly, that it cannot be conceived not to exist. For, it is possible to conceive of a being which cannot be conceived not to exist; and this is greater than one which can be conceived not to exist. Hence, if that, than which nothing greater can be conceived, can be conceived not to exist, it is not that than which nothing greater can be conceived. But this is an irreconcilable contradiction. There is then so truly a being than which nothing greater can be conceived to exist that it can’t be conceived not to exist, and this being thou art, O Lord, our God…

I thank thee, gracious Lord, because what I formerly believed by thy bounty, I now so understand by thine illumination, that if I were unwilling to believe that thou dost exist, I should not be able to understand this to be true.”

…This long and tedious passage is, however, exceptionally interesting, both because it presents us with the famous ontological argument from the horse’s mouth, and as it offers an in-depth glance into the mind of a Christian theologian of the first magnitude, half-way between the Augustinian theology and medieval scholasticism. It must be said that the argument itself was rejected by the theologians of his time, as much as later by Thomas Aquinas, and later still by a long list of theologians, all of whom were only too happy to follow St. Thomas’ line. But the fate of this argument was much kinder among the philosophers, who, apparently, admire people who speak nonsense with logical consistency, like it was with Zeno Eleaticus and with quite a few others. Dèscartes was in essentially the same vein as St. Anselm, with his own ontological cogito ergo sum. Leibniz tried to improve it with the possibility clause. Kant gave it legitimacy by venturing to refute it once and for all, in which he did not succeed, as the argument reappeared very much alive in Hegel, and later in F. H. Bradley’s dictum “What may be and must be, is.” (Quoted from Russell.)

My personal attitude towards all attempts to prove faith by reason has been expressed on a number of such occasions, and in general. Needless to say, I have no sympathy for St. Anselm’s ontological argument, but nor do I want to ignore it altogether. In fact, the argument itself is a seminal event in the history of philosophy (to a much greater extent than in the context of theology), and, as such, it demands our serious and focused attention, which, I hope, I have amply given it in this entry.

BEHOLD RENAISSANCE MAN 1000.

All along I made a conscious decision to forgo non-Western philosophy in this and other sections. It is not only because Western culture by itself is already a handful, but, having had some experience with non-Western philosophy, I have come to realize that it is virtually impossible, and even counterproductive, in the sense of often being misleading, to judge a foreign culture from the outside. (I am assuming here, albeit not without some reservations, that Western culture is native culture to the scions of Western Civilization.) Even if one has caught bits and pieces from it, little knowledge in this case can be worse than none. (Mind you, we are not talking about general erudition, but about a real in-depth understanding of the subject matter, which, I insist, requires much more than an ambitious course of learning about the soil, in which you have sprung no roots.)

There are, however, a few exceptions to this general rule. The subject of the present entry is Avicenna [Abu Sina] (980-1037), the great Uzbek-born Persian prodigy-polymath, who combined in his person a veritable encyclopedia of learning, which he himself literally composed… He was an outstanding physician, whose legendary skills would by themselves secure his historical fame; he was a mathematician, an astronomer, a physicist, a chemist, a geologist, a logician, a paleontologist, a psychologist, a poet, and a teacher, and he excelled in everything he put himself to doing. But above all, he was a preeminent philosopher, educated in the Western tradition of Plato and Aristotle; and at the time when Europe, despite a few rare occasional sparks, was immersed in total intellectual darkness, he was a genuine torchbearer of Western philosophy, and, as such, his place in the history of Western philosophy, and surely among the entries of this section, is well deserved and unassailable.

His philosophical outlook is closer to Aristotle than to Plato. He can be rightfully called a precursor of the Christian scholastics of Europe, although his influence on them was not as strong as that of another eminent Islamic thinker Averroes, whom we shall be speaking of in a later entry. His writings are primarily in Arabic (the predominant language of science in that age), but some are also in Persian. He became very popular in Europe, particularly as a physician extraordinaire, but also as an excellent philosopher, due to the numerous translations of his works into Latin.

Preoccupied with the problem of the universals, he invented the formula repeated after him by Averroes and Albertus Magnus: “Thought brings about the generality in forms.” This formula strives and partly succeeds in reconciling Plato’s theory of forms with Aristotle’s teachings, or rather, reconciles two Aristotelian views on this subject: pro-Plato and contra-Plato. Here is how Bertrand Russell comments upon it:

“From this formula it might be supposed that he did not believe in universals apart from thought. However, this would be an unduly simple view. Genera [universals] are, he says, at once before things, in things, and after things. They are before things in God’s understanding. (God decides, for instance, to create cats. This requires that He should have the idea of cat, which is thus anterior to particular cats.) Genera are in things in natural objects. (When cats have been created, ‘felinity’ is in each of them.) They are after things in our thoughts. (When we have seen many cats, we notice their likeness to each other, and arrive at the general idea cat.) This view is obviously intended to reconcile different theories.”

The main problem of this theory, as far as I am concerned, is in the concept of anteriority as applied to the timeless Deity. (To make this point clearer, it is enough to remember the world-famous question about anteriority: Which came first, the chicken or the egg?) Otherwise, the transition from immanence to posteriority is smooth and flawless. But, with anteriority effectively missing, it is no longer as complete and logically convincing as in the original flawed version.

Other aspects of Avicenna’s philosophy are less interesting to me than this particular formula, and now the long-expected question must surely come up: Why Avicenna? The answer is threefold. Here is a foreigner more native to Western philosophy than his contemporaries who are her natives. Here is also a prominent stepping stone toward the next stage of her historical development, namely, the Aristotelian scholasticism, which although usually depicted as some pathetic throwback was still a step forward in her dialectical and spiritual experience. And, thirdly, the name of Avicenna has acquired such fame within the context of our Western Civilization that omitting it here would have constituted a lapse of unspeakable shame.

JOHN IRISH THE IRISH-BORN. PART II.

…Having thus established Erigena’s bona fides in more than one way, let us touch upon his life and thought, as both are of great interest to the history of philosophy, and also to me personally.

He was born in Ireland between 810 and 815, but later emigrated to the Continent in a wave of emigrations, caused by a series of barbarian Scandinavian invasions that did nothing good for the cause of culture except for returning it from the no longer wild west closer to its original home eastward. In 845 he was accepted at the court of Charles the Bald, whose own possessions including Paris were being ravaged by the Normans.

Erigena’s authority as a classical scholar with an invaluable knowledge of Greek had been well established by the time he traveled to France. Getting into theological trouble all the time, due to his independent mind and a highly unorthodox preference for honest philosophy and reason over dogmatic theology and religious revelation, he, however, was extremely lucky not to be branded a heretic in his lifetime, thanks to his great scholarly reputation, and the royal protection of his benefactor. Only well after his death would his writings be condemned, and even burned as heretical, guaranteeing him a virtual oblivion, but, luckily, not an everlasting one, as the fortuitous rediscovery of his manuscripts in Oxford in 1681 brought him back to life and established him ever since as a foremost thinker of all time. The end of his life is clouded in total obscurity. Most sources give 877 as the year of his death, without any ground, except for the fact that his royal benefactor died in that year. There is a legend that after Charles the Bald died, he left for England, where Alfred the Great bestowed more honors on the old man, for which (or, perhaps, for something else) Erigena’s students at Oxford stabbed him to death with their styli. This is, however, only a legend, and there is no factual or circumstantial substantiation for it whatsoever.

Erigena’s first theological work (which has been irrevocably destroyed, but its gist is known) was devoted to the subject of the Eucharist, and it was instantly controversial and potentially blasphemous. We know of the later disagreement between the Roman Catholics and the Protestants, concerning transubstantiation versus consubstantiation, both, however, entailing substantiation, that is, the transformation of bread and water, in the course of the sacrament, into the body and blood of Christ. Erigena dismissed this transformation out of hand. His view, closely resembling that of modern Baptists, is that the Eucharist is a purely symbolic rite, in which no substantiation ever takes place. Erigena never suffered the consequences of his heresy, but its later proponents such as, say, Berengar of Tours did. Most ironically, as part of his forced penance Berengar was required to publicly burn… that selfsame Erigena’s treatise!

In his treatise On Divine Predestination Erigena defended free will and couldn’t resist the daring challenge of defending philosophy and reason against their ecclesiastical repudiation. He contended that philosophy is not inferior, but sometimes even superior to revelation, in the sense that both reason and revelation are bona fide sources of truth, and are not supposed to come in conflict with each other, but if they should, this would not be the reason’s fault, but there must have been something wrong with the revelation. An amazing boldness in a very dangerous time for it!

His attitude toward hell is no less heretical. For Erigena, hell is not a place, but a condition for purification, and eventually, after such purification, all God’s Creation, including the demons, was to join God in good harmony. Once again, one must marvel how such liberties on his part did not bring Erigena into some very serious harm, but this odd fact remains, that he thus went through his whole life, ever ranting and raving, yet emerging unscathed at the end.

Another outstanding fact of Erigena’s intellectual accomplishments was his already mentioned translation from Greek into Latin of the Neo-Platonic works of Pseudo-Dionysius. (See the previous entry.) On having receiving the translation, Pope St. Nicholas I the Great was offended only by the fact that his permission for this translation had not been sought in the first place, but he refrained from any negative comments on the controversial treatment of theology in it, and he even expressed an admiration, based on the opinion of his Greek scholars, for the superlative quality of Erigena’s translation and exhibited scholarship.

Erigena’s magnum opus, as I have already said, was his work De Divisione Naturae (Periphyseon), where he divides the whole of nature into four classes: [1] what creates and is not created (God); [2] what creates and is created (the Platonic ideas which subsist in God); [3] what is created and does not create (all things in space and time); and [4] what neither creates nor is created (God again, but this time teleological rather than the first cause). Thus, everything comes from God, and through Logos returns to Him. It is easy to see the connection with Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit here, although the influence of the one on the other can hardly be ascertained. Establishing such connections of influence we may convincingly argue that Erigena has borrowed the first three classes of being from Aristotle (whom he however criticizes, preferring Plato to him), and the fourth class from Pseudo-Dionysius, who teaches the return of all being into God.

Aside from the four classes of being, there is also a realm of non-being, which includes all physical things which do not belong to the intelligible world, but also sin (!), which are not parts of the divine pattern. This teaching is also greatly suspect, which means that any powerful ill-wisher could easily accuse Erigena of a large number of heresies, but one of the reasons why this had not happened must have been the mentioned Biblical authority of Dionysius, which may, most of the time, have been Erigena’s powerful shield against such trouble, and, most probably, his chief motivation for drafting Dionysius under his banner, in the first place.

A remarkable life, a remarkable personal luck, and a wonderful fortune for posterity to have the knowledge of this man and his work restored to us, proving that even the darkest ages of our cultural history have not been altogether pitch dark.

JOHN IRISH THE IRISH-BORN. PART I.

The jocular title of this entry is by no means a joke for its own sake. John Scotus Erigena (810-877) does mean exactly what the title says. All Scots were originally Irish, as my Braveheart entry (to be posted later) elucidates. As for the word Erigena, it is easy to figure out, as soon as we remember that Eire is the name of Ireland on every Irish stamp, and genus refers to birth, making the whole mean Irish-born.

Although by the time of his birth Erigena belongs to the Darkest Ages of Europe, he is clearly out of place among his contemporaries, belonging instead on the pages of the world history of philosophy, where he is perhaps the only representative of his generation and of that age as a whole.

The fact that this unique place of honor has been captured by an Irishman, rather than by any other son of medieval Europe, is not in the least surprising, as Ireland at that time happened to be the sole repository of Western culture, which historical fact is covered in my Sonnets entry under the title Erin Go Bragh. (Another “to be posted later” item, but the reader’s curiosity having hopefully been aroused, I suggest that the reader do some independent research on this matter.)

Erigena was, indeed, an important and valuable philosopher, as evidenced by the fact that Bertrand Russell allots him a separate personal chapter (John the Scot), preceded by a comparable chapter on St. Augustine, and followed by one on Thomas Aquinas. With regard to his overall world-historical importance, we can quote this passage in Schopenhauer’s Parerga, where he, Erigena, shares a very distinguished company:

"On the whole, one may be surprised that even in the seventeenth century pantheism did not gain a complete victory over theism, for the most original, finest and thorough European expositions of it (none of them, of course, bear comparison with the Upanishads of the Vedas) came to light at that period, namely, through Bruno, Malebranche, Spinoza and Scotus Erigena (!). After Scotus Erigena had been lost and forgotten for many centuries, he was again discovered at Oxford and, in 1681, thus four years after Spinoza’s death, his work first saw the light in print. This seems to prove that the insight of individuals cannot make itself felt, so long as the spirit of the age is not ripe to receive it. On the other hand, in our own day (which is 1851), pantheism, although represented only in Schelling’s eclectic and confused revival thereof, has become the dominant mode of thought of scholars, and even of educated people. This is because Kant had preceded it with his overthrow of theistic dogmatism, and had cleared the way for it, whereby the spirit of the age was ready for it, just as a ploughed field is ready for the seed."

In his Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks, Nietzsche, too, places Erigena in a highly distinguished company, showing his esteem of the Irishman by the mere mention of him in that context:

"Probably the most sublime part of Greek thought and its expression in words is lost to us; a fate which will not surprise the man who recalls the misfortunes of Scotus Erigena or Pascal, and who considers that even in this enlightened century the first edition of Schopenhauer’s The World As Will And Representation was turned into wastepaper."

Analyzing Erigena’s masterpiece De Divisione Naturae, some modern scholars have seen in it a prototype of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit. One may argue about the extent of Erigena’s influence on Hegel, and it is even possible that Erigena’s fourfold cycle is only coincidental to Hegel’s spiral, but the fact itself that we might be talking about the similarities of these two thinkers, one of them belonging to the philosophical cream of the crop, and that a distance of one millennium separates them  (favoring the Irishman!), speaks for itself...

To be continued tomorrow…

THE CLEVEREST FORGER FROM AUTHORITY

[Dionysius the Areopagite was an Athenian of the first century, converted by St. Paul (Acts 17:34), who is known to all Christendom as St. Denis. There is also an unknown author, of circa 500 AD, who used to be for centuries identified as the said saint, whose works The Celestial Hierarchy, Mystical Theology, Divine Names, and others, had an immense influence on medieval thought (St Thomas Aquinas cited “Dionysius” more than 1700 times!), no doubt because of such authoritative cover of the brilliant impostor, who might, otherwise, have been quickly accused of heresy, and summarily dismissed... Sic venit gloria ecclesiastica! Today the clever forger has been exposed as one, but his identity still remains unknown, as he has received the “negative” of name of Pseudo-Dionysius in the annals of history and philosophy.]

“So Paul departed from among them. Howbeit certain men clave unto him, and believed: among which was Dionysius the Areopagite, and a woman named Damaris, and others with them.” (Acts 17:33-34.)

What better authority could a sixth-century thinker assume for his writings in the midst of the dark ages of philosophy than the authority of an obscure Pauline convert, mentioned by name in the Holy Scriptures? A better-known cover name would have been too easy to expose at the time, but the obscurity of Dionysius in the Bible complicated the exposure and given his impeccable credentials as a bona fide follower of Apostle Paul, the author could and did get away with much of what would otherwise have been sternly disallowed. And so he did.

Pseudo-Dionysius was an unmistakable Neo-Platonist, writing in Greek. His work The Mystical Theology imitates the familiar form of the pre-Socratics, but tries to reconcile the essence of Greek philosophy with the outward teachings of Christianity, in the sense that he is eager to adapt Christianity to Neo-Platonism, rather than the other way around. Here is the opening paragraph of his Mystical Theology:

Supernal Triad (notice how he addresses the Trinity in unmistakably Pythagorean, mystical terms!), Deity above all essence, knowledge and goodness; Guide of Christians to Divine Wisdom; direct our path to the ultimate summit of your mystical knowledge, most incomprehensible, most luminous, and most exalted,--- where the pure, absolute, and immutable mysteries of theology are veiled in the dazzling obscurity of the secret Silence, outshining all brilliance with the intensity of their Darkness, and surcharging our blinded intellects with the utterly impalpable and invisible fairness of glories surpassing all beauties.

There are many subtle heresies in Pseudo-Dionysian teachings, some of them quite overt, such as the idea of a virtually pantheistic Henosis as opposed to the more acceptable doctrine of the Christian Theosis. It is thus almost inconceivable how the unimpeachable authority of a totally obscure, once-mentioned Paul’s Biblical follower was able to so thoroughly confound the otherwise razor-sharp acute theological sensibilities of all those distinguished Christian leaders of the Church, who were either incapable, or, more likely, deliberately reluctant to expose the glaring heresy of one of their most revered original saints, which, had they done so, would probably have exposed not the Saint himself, but the brilliant fraud hiding behind his name.

The Pseudo-Dionysian teachings were particularly popularized throughout the Catholic Christian Church in the ninth century, being translated from the original Greek by a certain John Scotus Erigena who must have taken the greatest pleasure from that translation, finding the author’s views so close to his heart. Now is the right time to introduce the great Irishman in our very next entry.

A CLOSET PAGAN OR A CHRISTIAN SAINT?

[A brief biographical outline.--- Boethius was born in Rome to an old noble family, distinguished in high public service. His father was a consul. He himself became one as well, and so did his two sons, both in his rather short lifetime. During the Arian heresy struggle, Theodoric the Great, in whose service Boethius was, and being himself an Arian, arrested Boethius on suspicion of plotting against him on the side of the Orthodox (in this case, anti-Arian) Christian ruler of the Byzantine Empire Justin I. (Knowing Boethius, clearly, theology had next to nothing to do with it: the matter was predominantly political! Yet, subsequently the Catholic Church made Boethius into a Christian martyr dying in defense of Christian Orthodoxy, granting him Sainthood.) The hapless Boethius was summarily executed on Theodoric’s order, having just finished his philosophical masterpiece Consolatio Philosophiae, written in prison.]

Anicius Manlius Severinus Boethius (480-526) was not a major philosopher, but he was still a philosopher, and, even more importantly, one who, for a variety of reasons, unquestionably deserves our attention.

The very first sentence of this entry (namely, the title) may sound somewhat strange, but it is not as strange as it sounds. The era of the Christian Church’s intellectual dominance--- from the fourth century AD up to the Renaissance--- was not very kind to philosophy, suspecting every independent thinker of heresy and of relapse into pagan practices and thinking patterns, and, therefore, only theological orthodoxy (which in early times walked an awfully thin line bordering on heresy from all sides) and Church-approved Christian apologetics were the order of the day. We have already chronologically ignored several Church Fathers and Doctors who cannot be called philosophers by any stretch of imagination, and at best will perhaps be considered for inclusion in our Religion section during the next round of major revisions.

But with Boethius everything is clear: he is a bona fide philosopher, and for the following reasons, among others:

(1) He is a passionate advocate of Greek philosophy, who translated several works by Aristotle and Porphyry (and pledged to translate many more) and wrote commentaries on Porphyry and Cicero, which is already indicative of his contribution to philosophy, but is by no means the full extent of that contribution.

(2) He wrote several important treatises on logic, which were to influence the work of several generations of schoolmen. Overall, most of the Aristotelian logic, and certain other elements of his philosophy, became familiar to the schoolmen down to the beginning of the twelfth century through the works of Boethius.

(3) His magnum opus Consolatio Philosophiae is a purely philosophical work, which caused Bertrand Russell to make the following glowing comment about him:

“Boethius is a singular figure. Throughout the Middle Ages he was read and admired, regarded always as a devout Christian, and treated almost as if he had been one of the Fathers. Yet, his Consolatio Philosophiae written in 524 (526?), while he was awaiting execution, is purely Platonic; it does not prove that he was not a Christian” (although some critics have alleged his devotion to paganism in this case, considering that the name of Jesus Christ is never mentioned, nor is the Church. In the Catholic Encyclopedia this fact is duly acknowledged, but it is argued that this is to be expected, as such is the nature of the theme: Philosophy has come to console the fallen Boethius), “but it does show that pagan philosophy had a much stronger hold on him than Christian theology. [Consolatio] is an alternation of verse and prose: Boethius in his own person speaks in prose, while Philosophy answers in verse. There is a certain resemblance to Dante, who was, no doubt, influenced by him in the Vita Nuova.” (!)

“The Consolatio, which Gibbon rightly calls a golden volume, begins by the statement that Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle are the true philosophers; but Stoics, Epicureans (miser Epicure!), and the rest, are usurpers, whom the profane multitude mistook for friends of philosophy. Boethius says he obeyed the Pythagorean command to “follow God” (not the Christian command!). Happiness, which is the same as blessedness, is the good, not pleasure. Friendship is a “most sacred thing.” (…Isn’t this one of the things Epicurus said?) There is much morality, which agrees closely with Stoic doctrine, and is in fact largely taken from Seneca. (And yet earlier he pontificates against the Stoics!) There is a summary, in verse, of the beginning of the Timaeus. (Bearing in mind that it is Philosophia who speaks in verse, she is thus representing and validating Plato as the spirit of philosophy.) This is followed by a lot of purely Platonic metaphysics. Imperfection, we are told, is a lack, implying the existence of a perfect pattern. He adopts the privative theory of evil. He then passes on to a pantheism, which should have shocked Christians, but for some reason did not. Blessedness and God, he says, are both the chiefest good, and are therefore identical. Men are made happy by obtaining divinity. They who obtain divinity become gods. Wherefore every one that is happy is a god, but by nature there is only one God, but there may be many by participation… The sum, origin and cause of all which is sought after, is rightly thought to be goodness; the substance of God consists in nothing else but goodness. Can God do evil? No. Therefore evil is nothing, since God can do everything. (Can God sleep? No? Then, sleep is nothing, etc. A very poor argument in a serious philosophical matter, one must say.) Virtuous men are always powerful, and bad men always weak; for both desire the good, but only the virtuous get it… The wicked are more unfortunate if they escape punishment than if they suffer it. (Note that this cannot be said of punishment in hell.) “In wise men there is no place for hatred.”

The tone of the book is more like that of Plato than that of Plotinus. There is no trace of the superstition or morbidness of the age, no obsession with sin, or excessive straining after the unattainable. There is perfect philosophical calm, so much that had the book been written in prosperity it might almost have been called smug. Written when it was, in prison, under sentence of death, it is as admirable as the last moments of the Platonic Socrates.”

Russell is clearly a great admirer of Boethius, which he explicitly summarizes in the following passage:

“It may be that [Boethius’] freedom from superstition was not so exceptional in Roman aristocratic families as elsewhere; but its combination with great learning and zeal for the public good was unique in that age... During the two centuries before his time and the ten centuries after it, I cannot think of any European man of learning so free from superstition and fanaticism. Nor are his merits merely negative; his survey is lofty and disinterested and sublime. He would have been remarkable in any age; in the age in which he lived he is utterly amazing.”

The fact that Boethius was indeed an authentic philosopher is proven by the controversy over his legacy. It is argued by some, on the basis of his philosophical writings, that he was a closet pagan, and not a genuine Christian. Only a true philosopher can raise in others such an objection to his Christian credentials! But it is also argued that he died a martyr for the Christian cause at the hands of the Arian heretic Theodoric. It was the latter argument that led to his canonization by the Catholic Church as Saint Severinus Boethius.

And finally the reader may already be aware of my personal emotional partiality to Dante’s famous phrase “Nessun maggior dolore che ricordarsi del tempo felice nella miseria.” It is remarkable that this phrase has apparently been derivative in Dante from the following phrase in Boethius:

“Nam in Omni adversitate fortunae infelicissimum genus est infortunii, fuisse felicem.” (Consolatio, ii, 4.)

Such a remarkable derivation may not be much, in so far as the history of philosophy is concerned, but to me it means a great deal and makes my choice of Boethius for writing a separate entry, which is this one, both formally necessitated honoris causa, and personally significant as well.