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Medieval Philosophy |
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Medieval philosophy reviews ourselves and our place among other things from a different standpoint from our own. It is significant to us for three reasons. First, it represents the roots of Western philosophy. Second, the standpoint is constructed with the aid of abstract reasoning, which is something that demands our respect and invites our engagement. Third, it may be argued that it catches insights which may be valuable to us today.
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The medieval period, in Europe and the Muslim world, may be thought of as beginning with the breakup of the Roman Empire and ending with the emergence of Modern science in the 17th Century: though there is the contested period of the Renaissance to be noted. Indicative dates as far as Philosophy is concerned would then be those of Augustine's conversion to Christianity in 387 and the publication of Francis Bacon's Advancement of Learning in 1605. Now seen as the most significant philosopher of the period, Thomas Aquinas () was the first of a tradition of thinking and arguing known as Scholasticism, looked back on by mid-20th Century philosophers with enormous respect, especially for their writings on logic, metaphysics and the mind. Duns Scotus () and William of Ockham () were also outstanding figures.
Medieval philosophers worked within a framework which understood human beings and their world as the work of a Creator. They took this belief as common ground for the traditions they were drawing on - Platonic, Christian, Muslim and Judaic. For both Augustine and the Scholastics a good God had created human beings, and provided for them a world which answered their needs.
It might be assumed that this would give medieval philosophers a unified and distinctive 'philosophy of the environment' but in fact this is not to be found. Augustine at the beginning of the period argued that human sin (the 'Fall from grace', as depicted in the Genesis story of Eve eating an apple which the creator had forbidden) had infected the whole of creation. The only way of getting away from the utterly corrupted created world was for a human being to claim through their freely willed choice the redemption provided by the life and death of Christ. He argued that this was a step which very few human beings would succeed in making, and for the rest of creation there could be no hope at all. There was no ground here for arguing that animals or plants or lakes or mountains, or the physical earth as a whole, were to be 'respected', still less 'cared for': all were utterly ruined and valueless.
It is true that Aquinas took a less desolate view. There were, according to him, two domains, the natural and the Supernatural. He believed that the natural world was not so corrupt that it could not be transformed through the work of the Creator - through the operation of 'Grace' - into something of enormous value, but even untouched by 'Grace' it had a certain positive value as, after all, the Creator's original work. Aquinas argued that it had its own laws which endowed it with order, and he allowed the propriety of human beings studying those laws - laying the foundations, it has been argued, for the eventual emergence of empirical science. This was no challenge however to the view that the natural world was there for the sake of humanity [quote].
Boethius () had emphasised much earlier on the period that the earth was spatially minute in comparison with the entirety of creation, and that earthly time scales too were entirely insubstantial within the context of eternity. (Kenny citing Boethius, MP, p.21)
The same effect of playing down the significance of the earth and its creatures was supported by the hierarchical conception of creation expressed in the grading of 'souls' sketched by Aristotle but pomposified, as only the medievals knew how, into a piece of elaborate and overwhelming sculpture. Aristotle had articulated common observation by recording that some things in nature (like boulders) had no power of initiating movement and no power of growth. Others had the power of development - plants - but still couldn't themselves move themselves. Animals underwent development and could move as well. Human possessed in addition to these animal powers the capacity for sophisticated thought. For Aquinas this was understood as the possession by different orders of thing of different souls. A plant had a vegetative soul, animal a sensitive soul in addition, a human being, besides a vegetative and a sensitve soul possessed a rational soul as well, reflecting the Aristotelian observation that human beings developed, and moved, and thought.
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If the earth and animals and plants were of small importance, human beings, according to most Medieval philosophers, once born existed for ever. (Exceptions: argued that human beings were truly mortal).
For Augustine, for example, the great majority of human beings would be passing after death into an eternity of torture, and the rest would enjoy the bliss of heaven.
This too might have played a part in drawing concern away from the earth and its future.
When they come to consider guidance on behaviour explicitly it is their positioning in eternity which drives their thinking. As the Greeks had done, the medievals agreed that whatever their differences everybody aimed at being happy; and their ethical thinking was directed at saying how this was to be achieved.
Where Plato had said it lay in contemplation of the Good, to which sustained philosophical reflection gave access, Augustine took it from his reading of the Bible that it was rather contemplation of God: and was only to be achieved (if at all) in the life to come.
Aquinas agreed, and understood the biblical commandments as God's answer (in part) to the question If I seek the true happiness of contemplating the divine, how must I behave?
The other part was that we must do as our reason directs. God-given, reason was thought of as a kind of searchlight, illuminating a safe path ahead.
The writings of the medievals on 'reason', 'contemplation' and 'understanding' can only be understood properly in the light of their 'hylomorphic' metaphysics. Taking their cue from Aristotle, they conceived of a thing like a horse for example as 'prime matter' under a certain 'form'. Its form, they took it, was what made it a thing of a particular sort - a horse. (This contrasted with the corpuscularian metaphysics which displaced hylomorphism at the birth of Modern science, and which understood a thing to be a collection of small material particles.)
Entertaining a thought about a thing - eg a horse - was a matter of sharing the form of the thing thought about, and since a thing's form was what made it the kind of thing that it was, thinking about a horse involved in some sense becoming a horse. The significance of thinking was of a different order from what it is today therefore. Thinking of God - contemplating God - involved in some sense sharing in what it was to be God, in God's being.
This consequence of the hylomorphic theory was outrageous to some, because blasphemous, and it may be argued stimulated the development of an alternative account of thinking. Under the representational theory, which eventually achieved consensus in early Modernity, thinking merely involves the thinker in entertaiting in his or her mind a stand-in for the object, not the object itself.
With medieval hylomorphism, it has been argued, went a certain assumed intimacy between a person and their surroundings which Modernity has lost. If thought involves in whatever sense the thinker becoming for a time the same kind of thing as whatever is being thought about there is not that alienation between subject and the world which flows from the idea of thinking as the manipluation of representations.semm established once you think pf thinking as dealing not with things but with their mental representations.
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Does this mean that medieval thought allows for the untramelled exploitation of the earth, on the grounds that it is there solely for human benefit? Or is there an argument that since God created the earth for human beings they are bound to respect and care for it? Both positions are defended within the Christian tradition.
The human being is thought of as a soul linked to a body. Hylomorphism gives people to think they share in the 'being' of other people, and other things: a sense of 'sharing' that is lost when the Moderns come to think of themselves as dealing in their consciousness only with representations of things.
Aquinas thinks of the human being as essentially a rational creature, but the sense of 'rational' is as an entity equipped with something like a searchlight, a source of illumination which picks out truths. (Later it became thought of as a calculator.) ...[more]
[ethics]
The biblical tradition which medieval philosophers draw on presents God as issuing principles of conduct which creatures have an obligation to obey because of their creaturely status. [Controversy flourished over whether these rules were gratuitous fiats or themselves guided in some way.] Medieval philosophers, committed to the assumption that ancient Greek philosophy was but biblical truth set out a little differently, placed the biblical commandment theory within an ancient-Greek framework. Yes, God's laws were there, but they were there as an expression of God's rationality . Human beings, through the exercise of their (admittedly imperfect) rationality, would naturally arrive the same precepts.
How can we think of rationality as yielding the biblical commandments - summarised, in the way that Aquinas endorses, as Love God and Love thy neighbour as thyself ? Aquinas thinks of them as precepts which if followed will bring the human being to fulfillment.
What is fulfilment - true happiness - for the human being? Aquinas agrees with Aristotle - with a modification. Aristotle had said (Ethics, Book 10) that human happiness was to be found in the excercise of human reason - in 'philosophical contemplation', as it is usually put. Aquinas amended this to say that the 'contemplation' that yielded true human happiness was contemplation of the supernatural being of God . The biblical commandments were the guidance that emerged (as it were) when the divine reason applied itself to the question: how is true happiness for the human being best pursued? (see Kenny, p.266)
This swift gloss places a good deal of weight on 'contemplation', and on 'reason', and you could argue that there is sleight of hand going on, because both notions have been involved in signicant shifts of meaning. Reason today is thought of as a logical calculator: it is the power to discern connections between propositions and so able to say one follows, or doesn't follow, from the other. But reason for Augustine and Aquinas is more like a searchlight, a light which picks out truths in the gloom.
Doesn't this perhaps amount to the same thing? Ie why not say that reason the calulator picks out the truth (if it is one) that p follows from p and q?
The difference is this. Reason as calculator is the power to identify identities between propositions. It spots that p is the same as the p in p and q. Reason as searchlight spots truths directly.
Reason as calculator is a richer concept than reason as searchlight in the sense that it embodies an explanation of what is involved in reason identifying truths.
Both concepts support the question: how then does reason work? How does it come about that the searchlight picks out truths? How does it come about that the logical calculator identifies two logical elements as 'the same'?
And the answers are: the searchlight has been devised and given us by God for that very purpose, and: the logical calculator has been built somehow, maybe by God, into the human mind/brain.
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Augustine sponsors the biblical picture of human beings created for an immortality that is lost to many through sin. The loss of the body, if only temporary, is accounted a punishment (whereas for Platonic thought sloughing off the body is a precondition of bliss.) (Kenny, MP, p.8.) For Augustine the intended life of the human being was one in which eating was always and only for the sake of maintaining the body, sex was directed solely to procreation, and passion directed nothing. Augustine sponsors the notion that the fall precipitates a divorce between a world that is damned and a part of humanity who might be saved. (Orthodox doctrine is different) (Sherrard, 1976, p.15). The natural world is viewed by Augustine 'with opprobrium' (Sherrard, p. 15) Aquinas takes a different line, asserting that physical reality - 'nature' in an Aristotelian sense according to Sherrard - while imperfect comprises a domain of its own, its operations subject to its own laws, significantly independent of the different order of the supernatural. It is argued that thus Aquinas creates conceptual and moral space for empirical science. (Sherrard, p.16)
God is thought of as issuing principles of conduct which creatures have an obligation to obey because of their creaturely status. Controversy flourished over whether these rules are gratuitous fiats or themselves guided in some way. Aquinas is often said to place the commandments of God as the source of morality but Kenny argues that he gives greater emphasis to the Aristotelian concept of virtue. (Kenny, p.265)
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The universe is more like a skyscraper than the limitless three-dimensional space dotted with bodies which is our idea of the 'universe' today.
The human being, their living together, and the world they belong to are all of them conceived of hierarchically. Augustine's conception for example involves God, as a single supreme being, an order of spiritual beings - angels - inferior to God but superior in status to human beings, and inferior to human beings an animal creation. (Kenny, MP, p.8.)
Our environment owes its features (eg the shape of a flower, or the behaviour of an animal) to God's wanting to teach us or remind us of things. 'Understanding' them is a matter of realizing what they mean. Understanding how things interact mechanically remains an entirely secondary concern.
When physical change is considered, teleological conceptions are relied on.
Reason is a searchlight, not a calculator.
bud 250 words
Expand on these points > 500 words.
Expositions of individual thinkers: 500 words. 250 for Aquinas, 250 for Augustine and the others.
Remember Lyn White. Pace those who look back to the pre-scientific era for a more caring attitude to the environment, Lyn White argues that the Christianity that dominated the medieval period was witness to an exploitation of natural resources that apeared to sense no constraints.
St Francis inspired a monastic order, but the inspiration appears to be a way of life and not doctrine: says Patrick.
Augustine
The first great philosopher of the Christianised world (Constantine made Christianty the State religion in nnnn) was Augustine (baptised 387 AD, died 430 (Kenny, MP, p.3.)).
Augustine (was writing as the Roman Empire was failing, attacked from without, and fragmenting within. (Constantine (AD 306-37) moved the capital to Byzantium in xxx Grant p.19), a move which registered the morphing of the Roman into the Byzantium empire.
Augustine's picture of the world and the place of the human being in it he inherited chiefly from Platonic thought, but in his writings he draws also on Christian and related religious conceptions and beliefs (Kenny, MP, p.1.) The was a confluence in his writing of Christian and Jewish thought, flowing both of them into the heavier spate of Platonism.
St Augustine sponsors a conception of reason that is distinctive of the medieval thought: the idea that it is like a searchlight. 'Reason promises to make God appear as clearly to his mind as the sun does to his eyes'. (Kenny, MP, p.3.) Still there in the not-completely-Modern Descartes, it is replaced in the Modern world by reason as a device for the analysis and manipulation of mental items called ideas or, later, concepts.
thought, as available to him through its Holy books,
A distinction was made between the immediate locale of human beings, the earth, which was thought of as a kind of ground floor of an immense building, the heavens and etc etc.
[cosmology of early Christian thought]
Augustine took from Aristotle ?? his understanding of the human beings and animals and plants round about them. What anticipated Aquinas?
Narrative: human beings were created, lived in earth for a bit, died, purgatory, resurrection, bliss - for some. [What was there of this in St Augustine?
Aquinas
Aquinas took as far as it would go (not very far, imho!) the idea started by Augustine, that the truth about important matters must lie in a combination of Ancient philosophy and the teachings of Christianity.
Thomist conception of the Human Being: formed matter / body and soul.
It is argued that the realtionship between human being and envronment was radically more intimate for those living within the hylomorphic framework in virtue of the fact that they thought of themselves as sharing the form of a thing understood rather than entertaining a representative of it. Scholastic thinkers coming after Aquinas however seemed to embrace a representative view of perception at any rate.
Maimonides
God watches over the detail of individual human beings' lives, so as to ensure that what happens to them answers to what they deserve: but this doesn't apply to other animals, nor to plants. What happens to them is 'due to pure chance' (Kenny's translation, MP, p52)
(This is an example of the firm line drawn between human beings and animals + plants. Humans are alone in having rational souls, according to Aquinas. And this is there in Aristotle. While Aristotle wrote extensively about animals moreover, the only great medieval thinker who emulated him in this regard was Albert the Great (early 13th Century). (Kenny, MP, p.60) )
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Augustine makes a distinction between nature and grace; Aquinas between the natural and the supernatural worlds. Aquinas aided the process of desanctification which marked the end of the medieval world in virtue of the fact that his distinction allowed the study of nature and its laws. (Sherrard p.15ff)
Ethics
Aquinas believed that human beings could achieve happiness only through understanding and contemplating God. (Kenny, MP, p.266)
It is this that gives the virtues their nature and point (Kenny, MP, p.266)
Natural law as inbult tendency...:
"Human legislators ... use their reason to devise laws for the general good of particular states. But the world as a whole is rules by the reason of God. The eternal plan of providential government, which exists in God as ruler of the universe, is a law in the true sense. It is a natural law, inborn in all ratural creatures in the form of a natural tendency to pursue the behaviour and goals appropriate to them...The natural law is simply the sharing, by rational creatures, in the eternal law of God. It obliges us to love God and to love our neighbour as ourselves. It is by the application of this principle that we reach specific moral rules to govern action in areas such as homicide, sexual relations, and private property. (Kenny, MP, p.267)
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Aristotle teaches (in the tenth book of his Ethics) that "human happiness is to be found in philosophical contemplation... " Aquinas modifies this thesis: philosophical contemplation is a human activity, and the deepest human happiness is to be found rather in sharing 'the superhuman activities of the divine'. Human beings are equipped, says Aquinas, not with any 'natural capacity for supreme happiness' but with free will :' by which they can turn to God, who alone can make them happy.' (Kenny, MP, p.266)
The nature and point of each of the virtues is to be seen in the light of this overarching goal of human existence
The first great philosopher of the medieval period is Augustine, writing as the Ancient World, in the form of the Roman Empire, was in the throws of fragmentation.
The themes of medieval philsophy that are of significance to environmental concerns are:
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