The discussion on the character of Boethius: Platonic or Christian philosopher?

The impetus given to speculative thought by the existence of a court interested in intellectual activities petered out with the beginning of the tenth century. The invasions destroyed a good deal of the economic presuppositions on which centres of learning had to rely, and interrupted their lines of communication. There is good reason for the name of the ‘Dark Age’ given to the decades which followed the end of Carolingian civilization. While the importance and influence of the French monarchy was reduced by the rise of feudal principalities, and remained so during this period, after 950 the Ottoman dynasty were capable of re-establishing monarchical power in Germany and of reviving literary activities as the true heirs of Charlemagne. Under their rule Latin writing in prose and verse was cultivated in those Saxon lands where Christianity had been introduced only a few generations earlier. But their court never reached such importance as a forum where speculative questions were debated as had distinguished the circle of scholars round Charlemagne and his grandson. Single centres in West and Central Europe kept up a certain continuity of philosophical learning. In some monasteries and cathedrals the libraries, collected under the impulse of the Carolingian revival, were preserved, and so the tradition of study, linked to the keeping and copying of manuscripts, remained alive. Some of these books, handed on from antiquity, raised disturbing questions about the relationship of rational thought to Christian revelation in the mind of the monk or canon who read them.

Soul and the material world

Soul is, of Plotinus' three hypostases, the most wide-ranging and various in its activities. At the top of its range it lives on the highest level, in the world of Intellect, and with Intellect can rise in self-transcendence to union with the One. At the bottom, it is responsible for the formation of bodies in the visible world. But, however widely Soul may range, Plotinus never allows the distinction between it and Intellect to disappear (though it may in some passages become a little blurred), and he preserves its distinctive Platonic function of being the intermediary between the worlds of intellect and sense-perception, the immediate cause of the latter, and the representative in it of the former. Its proper and most characteristic activity is discursive thinking, reasoning from premises to conclusions; but it possesses the whole range of lower forms of consciousness, with the external activities appropriate to them; and it can and should, and, it seems, while it remains universal always does, rise above its reasoning to share Intellect's life of immediate intuitive thought. The initiative in this self-transcendence, as always in Plotinus, comes from above. It is Intellect which, by illuminating Soul, raises it to its own level. The relationship between the three hypostases in Plotinus is one of hierarchical distinction in unity. They are not cut off from each other. The One and Intellect are always present to Soul and acting on it, and this eternal presence and action is the most important thing which we (who are Soul) discover in philosophical reflection.

Porphyry's philosophical career

Most of the features of Neoplatonism that we have been sketching are evident in the work of Porphyry. So it will avoid repetition to give him more attention than might otherwise have seemed due to him. Porphyry was born in about 232, the year when Plotinus started to study philosophy at Alexandria. His parents were well-to-do Syrians, and he spent most of his boyhood, so far as we know, in the busy Phoenician city of Tyre. Even if he did not travel he had ample opportunity there to make the far from superficial acquaintance with the mystery cults and magical practices of the Middle East and beyond which his writings were to show. He probably knew several languages by the time he came to the West; he continued to read widely; and it was not a conventional compliment that Simplicius paid when he called him the most learned of philosophers. Three later stages of his career have left their mark on his philosophy, his attendance at Longinus' lectures, his friendship with Plotinus and a period away from Plotinus in Sicily.

Like other young foreigners of means but a little older than most, it would seem, Porphyry continued his education at Athens. Here the dominant influence was that of Longinus (who died in 272). The old-fashioned taste of the famous critic no doubt had some part in the clarity of Porphyry's style which was soon contrasted with Plotinus' indirectness. But this ‘living library and walking museum’, as Eunapius called him, lectured on philosophy too; and we have the testimony of both to their friendship.

The part of Porphyry's description of Plotinus at Rome which is most interesting to a historian of philosophy is of course his account of his master's method of teaching and writing, of his knowledge and use of previous philosophers and his relations with the philosophers of his own time. About all this Porphyry tells us a good deal which is helpful to our understanding of the Enneads. The lectures of Plotinus were not the formal, carefully arranged, set speeches developing a theme along lines fixed by established tradition which were customary in the philosophical schools of his time. The procedure in his school was informal, some said disorderly. Plotinus was a systematic and dogmatic philosopher, who had no doubt that he knew the right answers to the great philosophical questions which he treated: but he was not the sort of systematizer and dogmatist who cannot tolerate queries, objections and interruptions. He had a Socratic belief in the value of discussion, and once a discussion had started in his school it had to go on to the end, till the difficulties raised had been properly solved, however long it took. A story which Porphyry tells gives an excellent idea of the spirit in which Plotinus met queries and objections. A man called Thaumasius came into the school one day when Plotinus was arguing with Porphyry about the relationship between soul and body (the argument lasted three days) and demanded a set lecture suitable for writing down; he could not, he said, stand Porphyry's questions and answers. But Plotinus said ‘If we do not solve the difficulties which Porphyry raises in his questions we shall be able to say absolutely nothing suitable for writing down’.

The Peripatetic School from Theophrastus to Andronicus and Boethus

The development of the Peripatos down to the time of Strato exhibits two main aspects. First, philosophic-speculative interest is largely replaced by interest in all kinds of special and empirical knowledge, this knowledge no longer to serve as foundation for something higher, but terminal. Secondly, to the extent that philosophic interest is preserved at all, it often finds its satisfaction in non-theological, naturalistic, or even materialistic doctrines. For us only the latter aspect is important, as Plotinus' interest in empirical sciences is minimal.

Clearchus still seems to have refused to follow Aristotle's denial of the substantial character of the soul and presented him in a dialogue as having become convinced by what we should today call a telepathic experiment, that the soul can leave its body and return to it. He, then, would represent Aristotle's original Platonism.

As to Theophrastus, his so-called metaphysical fragment clearly proves that he retained Aristotle's speculative and theological interests. There is particularly no trace that he ever envisioned first philosophy to be anything but theology. The whole fragment is, from our point of view, remarkable mainly for three reasons. First, it shows to what extent Theophrastus connected the problems of Aristotle's Metaphysics with problems of the Two-opposite-principles system, including the derivation of everything from these principles and including the relation between these principles and evil. Secondly, it shows to what extent Theophrastus takes for granted that fundamentally all reality is divided into the spheres of the intelligible and the sensible, the former either including, or consisting of, mathematicals. Thirdly, it shows to what extent Theophrastus takes it for granted that knowledge of first principles will be of a particular type, non-discursive and described best as a kind of touching, so that one can be ignorant of these principles but not mistaken about them.

The impact of the Berengarian controversy

Anselm of Canterbury (1033–1109) in his literary work opened a new and highly individual chapter in the great controversy about the relationship of reason and belief. Before he became Primate of England in 1093 he had lived, studied and taught as a Benedictine in the Norman abbey of Bec, in contact with the spiritual and intellectual movements which at this time had their centre in the French-speaking countries of Western Europe. He had come from Aosta in the south-east corner of ancient Burgundy near the Lombard border. From his mother's side he was related to an important family of dynasts ruling in these parts. As a young man he was attracted by the revival of learning in France, like the Lombard Lanfranc before him, who in the fifties was prior of the newly founded monastery of Bec and had established there a school of some renown. Anselm joined him, first as a secular student and in 1060 as a monk. At this moment Lanfranc was deeply involved in the controversy with Berengar; he had attended the council of Rome, where the teaching of the famous master of Tours was condemned. When Anselm joined the monastic community this had been the great event of the previous year. Lanfranc himself was considered a pioneer in the revival of dialectical studies, and he was certainly anxious to strike the right balance between loyalty to the authority of biblical and ecclesiastical tradition and interest in a technically correct argument. Anselm remained in intimate contact with him for three years and became his successor as prior and head of the school, when Lanfranc left Bec on his appointment as abbot of St Stephens in Caen.

The sources of Augustine's reflection on human conduct, as of much of his thought, are the teaching of the Scriptures and the Church, and of Greek, particularly of Neoplatonic, philosophy. Sometimes, as we have noted, these two are in tension; in the present case, however, they blend completely in his mind. Indeed, it was here that he was above all impressed with the convergence he detected between Platonic and Christian teaching. His readiness to adopt other aspects of Platonic modes of thought, for instance in his discussion of soul and body, can in part be accounted for by this conviction of the similarity of their ethical bearings to those of Christian teaching. Tensions which can sometimes be detected between his Christian belief and his adopted philosophical concepts and language, tensions of the kind we have encountered, for instance, in his account of man as a soul using a body, are here totally absent.

Blessedness, as we have seen, was, for Augustine, the aim of philosophy. The wisdom which philosophy strove to attain would fill and satisfy all the deepest human needs and longings. Augustine was very ready to read back into Plato his own interpretation of what this love of wisdom consists in: Plato, he says, identified the supreme good, in the enjoyment of which man finds blessedness, with God. “And therefore he [Plato] thought that to be a philosopher is to be a lover of God.’ Affirmations of this kind pave the way for an almost wholesale adoption of Platonic notions, especially in the sphere of ethics.

Life and writings

What is known of Marius Victorinus' life is contained in the short notice given by St Jerome in his De viris illustribus and in the better known remarks made by St Augustine in the course of the narrative of his own conversion. African by birth and a rhetorician by profession, he taught in Rome under the Emperor Constantius. His fame as a rhetorician is attested not only by Augustine, but also by the statue which was erected to him in the Forum of Trajan in his lifetime, probably in the early fifties of the fourth century. An inscription of the late fourth century shows that it survived in Rome for at least two generations. He had written grammatical, rhetorical and logical treatises, commentaries on Cicero and Aristotle. He had also translated ‘books of the Platonists’, as Augustine called them, and some of Aristotle's logical treatises and, very probably, Porphyry's Isagoge ‘In extreme old age’, as Jerome tells us, he became a Christian. This must have been soon after the erection of his statue in Rome, in the early or mid fifties, at any rate before 357 or 358, when the flow of his Christian theological writings begins.

Victorinus was closely associated with the senatorial aristocracy which became the last stronghold of Roman paganism. Augustine's celebrated narrative of Victorinus' conversion to Christianity allows us to glimpse something of the force of the social and cultural links which had held the distinguished rhetorician allied to the traditions of his class. To break them required the strength of mind which Augustine's story stresses and which served Augustine as a model for his own conversion. Augustine had already read Victorinus' translations of Neoplatonic literature when his Milanese friend, Simplicianus, who had known Victorinus well, told him the story of his conversion.

The two chief—or even the sole—objects of interest to philosophy are God and the human soul. This was Augustine's view in his earliest works; and, ironically, the furthest departure from this view, that which owes most to philosophical inspiration, occurs in his long commentary on the book of Genesis, written some fifteen or twenty years later. It is here that he gives freest rein to the discussion of questions concerning nature other than human or divine. Nevertheless, physical nature never assumed the central place in Augustine's interests which the world of man and God held in them. The problems which interested Augustine most in this field were those which were forced upon his attention by the scriptural teaching. We shall confine our attention to three of them : the order of nature as related to God, natural function and development in the physical world, and time, all arising for Augustine from the doctrine of creation.

Two related thoughts form the kernel of Augustine's reflection on the physical world. These are that God created the world of nature and has ordered it, in the words of the Book of Wisdom often quoted by Augustine, ‘by measure and number and weight’ (xi. 20); and that this order in the world allows man to see the world as God's handiwork. The orderliness in which God created the world was universal and all-pervasive, except for such disturbances as were set up in it by sin or its effects. But this universal order, Augustine thought, was only apparent to men partially.

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.