Cosmology, Noetic and Psychology

From the consideration of a writing which might have been Aristotelian but could equally well have been Academic, we now pass to doctrines undoubtedly belonging to Aristotle. We concentrate mainly on those which seem to have been particularly controversial between pre-Plotinian Platonists and Aristotelians and single out six concerning: psychology, cosmology, noetic, cosmogony, ideas, and matter, and add a few words on his ethics and some special points.

Though probably not from the beginning, Aristotle denied the substantial character of the soul and, therefore, any pre- or post-existence of it, any kind of incarnation or reincarnation (transmigration). He also objected to any kind of astral psychology, i.e. to any doctrine teaching either the existence of a cosmic soul or the animation of celestial bodies. To those who did the latter he mockingly replied that the fate of a soul causing the rotatory motion of a celestial body by being present in it reminded him of the fate of Ixion. How, then, did he explain these motions? We find three answers in his writings; whether they are consistent will be left undecided. First, we find the notion that the circular movement of the celestial bodies is caused by their attraction to a being (or, if there were several independent motions, to beings) described by him as a changeless changer (or changeless changers), this circular movement being the way in which they could satisfy their attraction. Secondly, he attributed the circular motion to the nature of the body of which they consist, viz. ether, whose natural (physical) motion is circular, just as the natural motion of other elements is upwards and downwards. His third explanation, that the celestial bodies should be considered as animated, seems strangely out of tune with his criticism of Plato on this very score.

Sense-knowledge, as Augustine always insists, is, like all knowledge, a work of the soul, not of the bodily organs; it is a work ‘of the soul by means of the body’. All his more sustained discussions of this type of knowledge are attempts to make comprehensible the way in which the mind uses the bodily organs of sense in obtaining knowledge from sense-experience. His treatment of sensation (sentire) is therefore in line with his view of man as a soul using a body, and the analogy of the craftsman using his tools is the model on which it is constructed. Thus he begins the long discussion of this topic in his De quantitate animae with the following definition: ‘sensation consists in the mind's awareness of the body's experience’. A necessary condition of sensation, according to this definition, is the encounter between the bodily sense-organ and the object perceived; but sensation is more than this physical encounter on which it depends, and involves the mind's awareness. The definition assimilates sensation to the category of passio or, more precisely, to an awareness by the mind of what the body ‘suffers’. Augustine deals at length with the difficulties of treating sensation in these terms. What, he asks, do the eyes ‘suffer’ in seeing something? Evodius, his interlocutor in the dialogue, invokes the analogy of feeling pain and emotions: what the eyes suffer when seeing is sight itself, just as a sick man suffers sickness or a rejoicing man joy.

Frankish criticism of Byzantine theories of sacred art

Up till now we have surveyed the type of literature which formed a link between the legacy of late antiquity and the new civilization of the West. We must admit that important representatives of the Carolingian revival of letters were mainly concerned with continuing this compilatory work by shaping the traditional lore of learning into textbooks for monastic and cathedral schools. But the question remains, whether such activities represented the whole intellectual achievement of the period. It has been shown in an earlier chapter by P. Sheldon-Williams that John Eriugena brought about a genuine renewal of Greek speculation in the ninth century, and there is no doubt that by this achievement he established himself as the first in the great sequence of medieval thinkers. His teaching and writing took place during the years 845–70, that means at a time when Carolingian society, in which institutions of learning had formed a vital element, dissolved under the impact of barbaric invasions and internal disintegration. This chronological paradox could perhaps be explained by Hegel's saying about the owl of Minerva, whose flight starts at dusk. But by doing so we should accept the assumption of a theory of history according to which the earlier stages of a civilization produce all the tendencies and impulses which finally find their expression in the conceptual language of philosophy. The course of the ninth century does not offer a genuine proof of the deductions of this idealistic system, nor would its author have sought such confirmation within this period. But nevertheless we can trace preparatory movements of thought since the time of Charlemagne, which made the work of the philosopher at his grandson's court possible.

Approaches to the study of Islamic philosophy

It appears premature, at the present time, to embark on a history of Islamic philosophy in the Middle Ages. Too many of the basic facts are still unknown. New texts are constantly being discovered. Not all the manuscripts known are available in critical editions, or indeed published at all. Very few commentaries of any standing exist and scarcely any monographs on essential topics. Very few texts—apart from those translated centuries ago into medieval Latin—can be read in translation. It would be of some use, it is true, to survey the information available at present, to list the main facts which have been established beyond doubt and to show where future work should start and which are the most urgent tasks. But this would scarcely agree with the purpose of the present publication. It seems to be more appropriate to discuss the essence of what the Muslims called ‘philosophy’ (falsafa), to explain how, on one side, it depends on Greek thought as taught in the philosophical schools in the later centuries of the Roman Empire, and how on the other side it answers the needs and questions of a new and different world—whose inhabitants speak a different language, Arabic, and adhere neither to the religion of classical Greece nor to Christianity which had taken its place, but follow a Hebraic religion of a new type, Islam. I shall, therefore, confine myself to a minimum of indispensable general facts, so as to concentrate mainly on giving a fuller picture of one outstanding early Muslim philosopher, al-Fārābī, with a view to trying to indicate how and why philosophy never succeeded in reaching in the Islamic world the position which it had maintained in the ancient world for more than a thousand years.

Life and writings: political philosophy

We know next to nothing about al-Fārābī's personal life. He preferred to be remembered by his work alone. He did not write an apologia pro vita sua, as Plato had done in antiquity and al-Rāzī among the Muslims and al-Ghazzālī after him, who described his own conversion to mysticism. Nor did he compose an autobiography for the use of a close pupil, like Avicenna, nor did any of his intimates record significant details of his life, as Porphyry had done in the case of his master Plotinus. The salient facts we have are these: al-Fārābī spent the greater part of his life in the capital of the Abbāsid caliphate, Baghdād, where he had come from his birthplace in a Turkish district of Transoxania; during his later years he stayed at the court of a minor Shi'ite ruler in Aleppo. He is supposed to have died as an old man a.d. 950.

Many of al-Fārābī's writings survived and were studied in the East until recent times. He wrote numerous elementary introductions to philosophical topics—like the later Greek treatises composed for beginners (τοις εισαγομενοις). Since he did not address a sophisticated audience which had been imbued with Greek philosophy for centuries, these treatises became more popular than we would be inclined to expect. He also wrote many monographs on special questions, as for instance on the One and the Intellect, on dreams and on various kinds of political associations, such works, apparently, being meant as preliminaries for more comprehensive studies. In addition, he composed commentaries on Aristotle's lecture courses in which he followed the late Greek way of interpreting Aristotle—which he knew from translations—without a gap.

Origen was born about 184–5 at Alexandria, probably of Christian parents (Porphyry and Eusebius contradict one another on this point). When he was nearly seventeen his father was martyred in the persecution of Severus in 202/3, and the event left a deep mark on Origen's mind. He always writes with an impassioned sense of belonging to a church called to fearless martyrdom and resistance to all compromise with the world which ever threatens it at least as much by the infiltration of merely nominal belief as by external attack and persecution. With this attitude there goes a strongly world-denying strain of personal detachment and ascetic self-discipline, symbolized in the story, told by Eusebius from hearsay and possibly true, that in the zeal of youth Origen took literally Matt. xix. 12 and castrated himself. He lived on the minimum of food and sleep, and took seriously the gospel counsel of poverty.

For a time he studied Greek philosophy in the lecture room of Ammonius Saccas, with whom Plotinus was later to study for eleven years. Ammonius is a mysterious figure. All we know of him probably comes directly or indirectly from Porphyry who describes in his life of Plotinus how Ammonius' esoteric teaching fired Plotinus with a (typically Neopythagorean) desire to investigate the antique wisdom of Persian and Indian sages. But it is a forlorn and foolish undertaking to attempt a reconstruction of Ammonius' metaphysical doctrines by looking for synoptic elements common to Origen and Plotinus. It is impossible to determine what, if anything, Origen really drew from Ammonius. What is certain is that Origen possessed an exhaustive comprehension of the debates of the Greek schools and that to his contemporaries he stood out as an intellectual prodigy.

Antiochus and other Platonists of the first century B.C.

Speusippus, Xenocrates, Polemo, and Crates were the successive heads of the Academy. It seems that the successor of Crates, Arcesilaus (fourth/third century), completely changed its character, teaching a kind of non-dogmatic, Socratic, in some sense of the word, sceptical Platonism. This sceptical phase (it continued under Carneades and Philo of Larissa, first century B.C.) seems to have exercised very little influence on later Platonists. A return to dogmatism, from which Platonists from then on never deviated, was initiated by Philo's successor, Antiochus of Ascalon (b. c. 130-120, d. c. 68 B.C.), one of Cicero's teachers. Convinced that the Stoic philosophy was essentially derived from the Old Academy, that Aristotle, in at least one phase of his activity, was a Platonist, and that the Peripatos (which, according to him, originated only after the death of Speusippus), though it modified particularly Plato's ethics, was essentially identical with the Academy, Antiochus incorporated many of their teachings in his own system; and this eclecticism, according to many scholars, paved the way for the Neoplatonic one. But it does not seem that he had any use for the Platonic Two-opposite-principles doctrine. In other words, his return to the Academy did not mean that he returned to all of its teachings.

Where did he stand on the theory of ideas? Speusippus, in some way Xenocrates, and Aristotle had at a certain moment of their careers abandoned it. But Antiochus blames Aristotle for having ‘weakened’ it, and indeed seems to have adopted it. But he did so with considerable modifications. First of all, as he denied any radical difference between intelligence and the senses (despite 30—1 with its assertion that only mens is rerum index, because only mens can perceive ideas; see Lucullus 30: mens ipsa sensus), obviously ideas could not retain their paramount importance3 nor their transcendent status despite the fact that their knowledge was still considered the prerogative of intelligence.

The history of Christian philosophy begins not with a Christian but with a Jew, Philo of Alexandria, elder contemporary of St Paul. He was born probably about 25 B.C. and was dead by a.d. 50. Unyielding in meticulous observance of the Mosaic law as the infallibly revealed will of God not only for the chosen people but also for Gentile proselytes (for whose edification some of his writing is directed), Philo is also fully hellenized, presenting a very Greek face to the world. Hebrew he knew imperfectly if at all. His Bible is the Greek Old Testament, in which the Pentateuch towers in authority above the rest; and his belief that the Septuagint translation was divinely inspired relieved him of any need or responsibility to refer to the original text.

Judaism had come into violent conflict with ‘Hellenism’ at the time of the Maccabean struggle which saved Israel from the destruction of its distinctiveness. Monotheistic Jews could never accept a syncretism which identified Yahweh with Zeus. Yet neither could they turn their back on Hellenism and devote themselves to their private pieties in a mood of nationalistic particularism. For Judaism was a missionary religion, and the ancient prophetic vision of Israel's call to be a light to lighten the Gentiles precluded isolationism, even if this had been a practical possibility, which it was not. The Jews were dispersed through the Mediterranean world. Their language and culture became Greek through and through, and well-to-do Jewish parents (like Philo's) provided their sons with a liberal education under Greek tutors.

Introduction

Born in Constantinople c. 580, Maximus was thirty when Stephen of Byzantium became director of studies at the Imperial Academy and taught, among other things, the philosophies of Plato and Aristotle; but whether he was educated there or at the Patriarchal Academy, he would have found already established the curriculum which Stephen inherited; for since the time of Leontius an Aristotelian renaissance had been underway, and the two philosophies were taught side by side. Leontius himself shows the effects of this programme, and they are to be seen again in Maximus.

Maximus, however, was closer in temperament to the Cappadocians and the ps.-Dionysius, and his achievement was to present doctrines that were basically theirs in terms of the Aristotelian logic which was more congenial to the intellectual temper of the time, and which, by rationalizing without rejecting their mysticism, rendered it less susceptible to misinterpretation. The universe of Maximus is that of the ps.-Dionysius with a place found in it for the anthropology of St Gregory of Nyssa. The rigid formularies of the one are quickened by the historicism and dynamism of the other, a synthesis made possible by the critical examination to which the philosophers who preceded them had subjected the Aristotelian theories of time and eternity, motion and rest.

It is still a triadic universe, but the triad upon which it is constructed is no longer defined in the Plotinian and Procline terms of monê—proodos—epistrophê, but as Being, Power, and Act (ουσια—δυναμις—ενεργεια). This terminology may be described as Porphyrian, since Porphyry is the first known to have referred to this triad, but Maximus is the first to explain it fully.

General

The significance of some doctrines of Posidonius and of Seneca for the development of Neoplatonism has been indicated. But these doctrines concern only details, and the problem remains to what extent Stoicism at large contributed to Neoplatonism.

The Stoic system can be interpreted in two ways. We see in it either a ‘mundanization’ and a materialization of the divine, or, on the contrary, a divinization and spiritualization of matter. Nothing exhibits this ambiguity better than the relation between determinism (heimarmenê) and providence (pronoia) in the Stoic system. Strict determinism seems to leave no place for providence in any genuine sense of the word. But the Stoa tried to identify the two. The same ambiguity is exhibited in one of the central concepts of the Stoa, the spermatic ratio (pattern). The adjective has materialistic connotations, the noun spiritualistic ones. The strict immanentism of the Stoa can be taken to assert either the divine character of the cosmos or the strictly mundane character of the divine.

Like all monistic and deterministic systems which at the same time profess some kind of prescriptive ethics, Stoicism must try to find some place for freedom of the will (mostly, the formula will be accepted that we are free, because we can do whatever we want, but determined, because we must want what we want), some meaningful discrimination between good and evil, some possibility of distinguishing between ‘is’ and ‘ought’. Whether any of this can be done is doubtful..

St Basil of Caesarea (c. 330–79)

The Cappadocians inherited the Alexandrian Gnosis through Origen, though each departed from the position of their master, St Basil most of all. He was more interested in the moral and pastoral than in the philosophical implications of the Faith, distrusted allegory, and clung to the literal interpretation of Scripture, to which the pagan learning was to supply rational corroboration as required rather than combine with it to form a synthesis. Therefore, as was to be the case with the Aristotelian Christians, he made greater use of the physics of the pagans than of their metaphysics, and in his Homilies on the Hexaëmeron, intended as a scientific defence of the Mosaic account of creation, he drew chiefly on the current cosmology, meteorology, botany, astronomy and natural history.

As a consequence, the Christian theory of creation assumed certain pagan features, of which the most important were the implied identification of the Platonic Demiurge with Yahweh, the Aristotelian division of the universe into the supralunar and sublunar spheres, and the notion of a universal harmony (συμπαθεια): ‘Although the totality of the universe is composed of dissimilar parts, he binds it together by an indissoluble law of friendship into one communion and harmony, so that even the parts that from the positions they occupy seem most distant from one another are yet shown to be united by the universal sumpatheia.’

Nature is the work of God, who created her in time, or rather created time in the process of creating her. Matter is a part of creation, for if it were uncreated God would have been dependent upon it for bringing his plan to fruition; and if matter were independent of God there would not be that reciprocity between agent and patient which is everywhere apparent.

What we are trying to do in this volume is to provide a wide-ranging and fairly detailed survey of the philosophy of the period when thought in the Mediterranean lands, and later in Europe north of the Alps, took forms which deeply influenced our literature, art, social behaviour and institutions at least down to the seventeenth century and, to some extent and in some quarters, to the present day. We set out to show how Greek philosophy reached its latest, and perhaps most influential, phase, that which modern historians of ancient philosophy call Neoplatonism; and how this was taken over and adapted in various ways to suit their own purposes by Jews, Christians and Moslems. Whatever the relationship of this late Platonism to the real thought of Plato may have been (here Merlan has some interesting suggestions in the first chapter of his section), it is certain that it is this, rather than the Platonism of the dialogues as understood by modern scholars, which we encounter whenever there is a question of Platonic influence on art, literature, theology or philosophy before the nineteenth century, and sometimes even later. It, and its various theological transformations, therefore seem worth studying, and in recent years they have been vigorously studied. There is a great deal going on, in particular, in the fields of Neoplatonic and patristic studies: so much, in fact, that inevitably agood deal in this volume will be out of date by the time it is published. But it still seems worth while attempting a comprehensive survey, because much of the scholarly material is rather inaccessible except to specialists in the various fields, and also because the study of this period, lying as it does across the frontiers of so many disciplines, has suffered rather more than most from academic compartmentalization.

Plotinus begins a new period in the history of Greek philosophy, but his achievement cannot be described as either a revival or a revolution. As Part 1 has shown, Platonism in the second and early third centuries A.D. was very much alive, and by no means merely stereotyped and superficial: and the thought of Plotinus in many ways continues along lines laid down by his predecessors. But he was an original philosophical genius, the only philosopher in the history of later Greek thought who can be ranked with Plato and Aristotle, and was impelled by a personal mystical experience of a kind and quality unique in Greek philosophical religion. So the result of his critical rethinking of the long and complex tradition which he inherited was a really original philosophy with far greater coherence and vitality than Middle Platonism, and one which had a wide and deep influence on later European thought.

We have only one reliable source of information about the life of Plotinus. It is the Life of his master which Porphyry, his disciple and editor, wrote in the year 301, more than thirty years after he had parted from Plotinus, and prefixed to his edition, the Enneads. This is generally recognized as a work of quite unusual quality, with no parallel among ancient philosophical or literary biographies, and giving a great deal of authentic information. It tells us, however, very little about the early life of Plotinus for the simple reason that Plotinus himself told his disciples next to nothing.

John of Scythopolis

No attempt is here made to intervene in the apparently interminable debate as to who the ps.-Dionysius was and when he lived, though this must have been later than the Cappadocians, some of whose notions he developed, and before 528, the latest possible date for the first historical reference to his writings. Obviously he had both Christian and Platonist sympathies, though it is difficult to assess their relative weight. It is probably safe to say that he was a Christian philosopher who presented his beliefs in terms of the contemporary Neoplatonism both because it had a strong appeal for him and because these beliefs could best be defended by turning the arguments of what he considered the most satisfactory of the rival philosophies against itself.

In this, his position was not unlike that of St Gregory of Nyssa: but the Neoplatonism of Gregory was that of Plotinus while the Neoplatonism of the ps.-Dionysius was that of Proclus. The trend from the one to the other was a deviation in the direction contrary to Christianism, and the ambiguities of the ps.-Dionysius are the symptoms of a tension between Christianism and Platonism that was nearing breaking point. This was felt at once. No sooner had the Corpus Dionysianum been made public than commentators leapt to the task of defending not only its genuineness, but also its orthodoxy. In the first half of the sixth century commentaries were written by John and George of Scythopolis, by St Maximus in the seventh, by Germanus I, Patriarch of Constantinople in the eighth, and by other anonymous commentators who belong to these three centuries.

The last Roman and the medieval tradition of logical studies

When we try to draw a borderline between antiquity and Middle Ages, in order to define the point where the history of medieval philosophy begins, the work of Boethius comes immediately to our mind. The last Roman and the first schoolman, the two titles with which he is normally introduced, express in their combination clearly his position between the two periods. His link with the Middle Ages is obviously very strong. Translations of two treatises from Aristotle's Organon, his introductions for the beginners and his commentaries and monographs for the advanced student of logic, have deeply influenced the course of medieval thought. In this development the gradual absorption of the Boethian legacy remained an important aspect up to and including the rise of early Scholasticism in the twelfth century. Through all the centuries of the Middle Ages De consolatione philosophiae, the Roman senator's final account with life, was a standard book, stimulating discussions among scholars, and a source of spiritual strength in critical situations. Hundreds of manuscripts, originating from the eighth to the fifteenth century, prove the importance of the Boethian corpus of writings in the libraries of Western and Central Europe.

But the history of his influence in the medieval world shows clearly that the Roman interpreter of Aristotle was not himself a part of it, but rather an intellectual force radiating from a distance. In life and thought Boethius still belonged to Christian antiquity. There is no doubt that he and his contemporaries felt the possibility of the end approaching and certainly such foreboding had a stimulating influence on their studies and literary activities.