The Latin word scholastica comes from the Greek σχολαστικός (“school”, “scholarly”) and in modern historical and philosophical science serves as a designation for a set of speculative—philosophical (“dialectical”) and theological—methods of reasoning that became dominant in Western European (Latin) culture in the Middle Ages (11th–14th centuries).
There are two main aspects of the meaning of this term: negative and positive. The first (scholasticism as “school philosophy” or “school theology”) stems from numerous texts of writers of the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, who sought to see and separate in the past everything “living” and “dead”, “eternally new” and “long outdated”, i.e. ultimately “Antiquity” and “medieval barbarism” (barbarism in thought and barbarism in speech), and through the rejection of lifeless and useless – “scholastic” – definitions to turn to the culture of the living and active word.
Another aspect of the meaning of this term (scholasticism – “school philosophy” or “school theology”) is directly connected with the activities of medieval schools and, beginning in the 13th century, medieval universities.
The main subject of study was the “seven liberal arts” (septem artes liberales), the canon of which had been firmly established since the time of late Antiquity: “trivia” (Latin trivium, literally “three-way”) – grammar, rhetoric and dialectic – and “quadrivium” (Latin quadrivium, literally “four-way”) – arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, music. The sciences of the “quadrivium” in the early Middle Ages, as a rule, were not successful and were developed extremely poorly.
Subordination of thought to the authority of dogma, in accordance with the formulation of Peter Damian (11th century) “philosophy is the handmaiden of theology” (philosophia ancilla theologiae; see Peter Damian. On Divine Omnipotence, 5), is the basic principle of the entire medieval philosophical and theological orthodox culture. At the same time, for scholasticism as a whole, the nature of the relationship between reason and faith was thought to be unusually rational and subject to universal systematicity. It was assumed that any knowledge – about created things and about God – can be knowledge in two respects: either supernatural knowledge, acquired through divine revelation, or, on the contrary, natural knowledge, acquired by the human mind in tireless search. The norm of the first knowledge is contained in the texts of Scripture accompanied by authoritative patristic commentaries, the norm of the second – in the texts of the ancient philosophical tradition – Plato and especially Aristotle, surrounded by authoritative commentaries of late antique and Arabic thinkers. Quite characteristic of “high scholasticism” is the naming of Aristotle simply as a Philosopher (Philosophiae). From the point of view of medieval scholasticism, the truth in all its fullness is already potentially given in both sets of texts; in order to reveal the truth, to bring it from a state of potential to an actual one, it is necessary first of all to properly interpret the text and then deduce the entire set of consequences embedded in the text with the help of adequately constructed inferences. It can be said that scholasticism is primarily philosophy in the form of interpretation of texts – Scripture and Tradition (theological and philosophical). In this sense, it represents a contrast, on the one hand, with the philosophy of the modern era, with its constant striving to discover the truth through the analysis of empirical data, and on the other, with mysticism, with its tireless attraction to discern the truth in ecstatic contemplation. In texts that were rightfully considered authoritative, scholasticism found not only answers to certain questions, but also questions that remained unanswered, difficulties that called for new and intense activity of the mind. The awareness of the impossibility of resolving all questions by reference to authority alone substantiated the possibility and necessity of scholastic discipline.
From ancient philosophy, scholasticism inherited the conviction that the world is fundamentally rational and therefore rational knowledge of the world is possible and achievable. Knowledge of things means, first of all, knowledge of their essence, their essential characteristics; these characteristics determine the “type”, “form” of each thing, and they also allow the thing to be brought under a general concept. The essence of a thing is completely accessible to knowledge, since the essence and the concept have the same structure; they differ only in their location: essences exist in things, concepts – in the mind of man. Although Aristotle, along with the “secondary essences” (genera and species) also speaks of “primary essences”, denoting specific, sensually perceived things, however, in Aristotelian metaphysics, a rationally comprehensible essence – an analogue of a general concept – is usually understood as something intelligible, which is not in itself an object of sensory perception. Aristotle’s doctrine of essence becomes the core of scholastic doctrines. However, in the process of their construction, a rethinking of Aristotelian metaphysics occurs; a number of moments present in it in an implicit form come to the fore. This was due to new tasks that medieval theologians had to solve: to express the Christian teaching about God, the world and man with the help of conceptual and rational means. Relying on the well-known words of the biblical text: “God said to Moses: I am He that is” (Ex. 3: 14), medieval theologians identified Being with God. In the mind of a Christian, there is nothing higher than God, and since it is known from the Holy Scripture that God “is He that is”, then the conclusion is drawn from this that the absolutely first principle is being. Therefore, Being occupies a central place in the doctrines of Christian theologians; all medieval theology and philosophy turn out to be nothing more than a doctrine of being in the literal sense of the word.
For the first time within the Christian cultural tradition, the formal-logical (“scholastic”) method for examining ontological-theological issues was applied by a man whose work and fate to a very significant extent belonged to the Ancient Era – the minister of the Ostrogothic king Theodoric, translator, theologian, poet, “the last Roman” – Boethius. Anicius Manlius Torquatus Severinus
Boethius (c. 480 – 524) came from the rich and influential senatorial family of Anicii. At the court of Theodoric, the Ostrogothic military leader who seized power in the former western part of the Roman Empire (493), Boethius very quickly achieved recognition: in 510 he was appointed consul; in 522 the king appointed Boethius to the highest state post – “Master of All Services” (Magister officiorum). At this time, anti-Gothic opposition was emerging in the Roman Senate. In Italy, there were many supporters of the Byzantine emperor who did not recognize the rule of the barbarian king, who was also an Arian, i.e. an adherent of a heretical faith. While defending the senate from accusations by royal informants, Boethius himself was soon suspected of treason: on charges of correspondence with the court of the Byzantine emperor, Boethius was arrested, sent to prison and, after brutal torture, executed in 524.
According to legend, while in prison, awaiting execution, Boethius wrote his famous work, On the Consolation of Philosophy (Book 5), in which poetry alternates with prose, and philosophical themes are replaced by theological intuitions. The book begins with the author’s poetic description of the misfortunes that have befallen him and an appeal to the “inexorable fate,” which had once been kind to Boethius but had now turned away from him. Then, in the prose part, Boethius tells of the appearance of Philosophy, who possesses a power not characteristic of the muses, who can only weep and grieve with the prisoner in his dungeon. Following her appearance, Philosophy addresses the prisoner with a consoling speech, where she answers one by one the questions that at that moment caused the author anxiety and painful bewilderment: how should one relate to the vicissitudes of fate, to the gifts of fickle Fortune? What is man’s true happiness, what is his highest good? How can man preserve his spiritual freedom and independence in a world where necessity reigns? What is the relationship between divine predestination, free will and fate? The highest good (summum bonum) for man is God, says Philosophy, and not some “private goods” – health, wealth, etc. God is bliss – in accordance with the definition: “Bliss is a perfect state, which is a union of all goods” (Boethius. Consolation of Philosophy, III, 2). From this it follows that people can be blessed only by becoming partakers of God. According to Boethius, people’s mistake is that, constantly striving for their everyday well-being, they, as a rule, do not pay attention to the real hidden source of all pleasure and, chasing only the phantom of happiness, know nothing about the real good. Like Augustine, Boethius believes that the highest good is to be sought not in external things, but in the soul of man; for man is the image of God, and this image is hidden in his immortal soul. In pursuing external goods, man, first of all, neglects himself, i.e., his immortal soul, and thereby, humiliating himself, neglects his Creator. It is necessary to understand, says Philosophy, that the perfect good is one and indivisible: for man there is no true prosperity without real power, power without deserved respect, respect without lasting glory, glory without bright joy, etc. Good appears to us either in its entirety, or does not appear at all. The highest good – the only and unchanging one – is, according to Philosophy, only God – omnipotent, omniscient and, as a consequence, not knowing evil and not creating evil (III, 12). Here a new question arises: if God is bliss, omniscience and omnipotence, how in that case should we explain all the misfortunes that happen on earth, and the sad fate of Boethius, in particular? Philosophy, in order to answer this question, suggests starting with clarification: what should we understand by chance, chance? We most often call by chance everything that”whose rational arrangement is unknown to us” and, as a result, causes us to bewilder. If we look at things more closely, we will discover that there is nothing accidental in the Universe, since everything that happens and occurs with people (and not only with people) has rational grounds. The diversity of “meanings” of existing things (rationes) is a temporary implementation of the diversity of eternal divine plans, which exist self-identically and indivisibly in the unity of the good divine intellect (Intelligentia). God as the creator of the universe in this sense is similar to an artist-craftsman who has in advance in his mind a finished image-model, or “idea”, of the work he is creating. This image, i.e. the original fullness of all the reasons for the existence of all things (in the past, future and present), united forever in the thinking of God, is divine providence (Latin: Providentia). Everything that God originally planned inevitably comes to pass: the world as it is exactly coincides with the divine ideal order. The difference here is that the divine ideal order is all at once, eternally, in the indivisible unity of divine thought, while the worldly (world) order unfolds gradually in time and space. The structure of the universe from the point of view of the eternal and perfect intellect is providence; in relation to the created things of the materialized world, it is “fatum”, destiny (Latin fatum – “fate”, “foreshadowing”, “predestination”). The destinies of people are different, but in the simplicity of providence they are all connected together by one common destiny. It is impossible to avoid one’s fate, Boethius believes – a person can only get rid of the “evil” turns of fate, all sorts of vicissitudes of “fortune”. Boethius suggests comparing man’s dependence on these vicissitudes with the ratio of the speed of rotation of a point on the outer surface (rim) of a wheel and its distance from the center: the larger the radius of the wheel, the farther it is from the center, the more unstable and restless its position in space. The same is true of fate. The center of fate and of all existence is God, motionless, one, self-identical, eternal; one should become like God in everything, “be closer to the center” of fate – both one’s own and the entire universe – and fate will stop deceiving and changing, life will calm down in striving for good.the original fullness of all the reasons for the existence of all things (past, future and present), united forever in the thought of God, is divine providence (Latin: Providentia). Everything that God originally planned inevitably comes to pass: the world as it is exactly coincides with the divine ideal order. The difference here is that the divine ideal order is all at once, eternally, in the indivisible unity of divine thought, while the worldly (world) order unfolds gradually in time and space. The structure of the universe from the point of view of the eternal and perfect intellect is providence; in relation to the created things of the materialized world, it is “fatum”, destiny (Latin: fatum – “fate”, “foreshadowing”, “predestination”). The destinies of people are different, but in the simplicity of providence they are all connected together by one common destiny. It is impossible to avoid one’s fate, Boethius believes – a person can only get rid of the “evil” turns of fate, all sorts of vicissitudes of “fortune”. Boethius suggests comparing a person’s dependence on these vicissitudes with the ratio of the speed of rotation of a point on the outer surface (rim) of a wheel and its distance to the center: the larger the radius of the wheel, the further it is from the center, the more unstable and restless its position in space. The same is true of fate. The center of fate and all existence is God, motionless, one, self-identical, eternal; one should become like God in everything, “be closer to the center” of fate – both one’s own and the entire universe – and fate will stop deceiving and changing, life will calm down in striving for good.the original fullness of all the reasons for the existence of all things (past, future and present), united forever in the thought of God, is divine providence (Latin: Providentia). Everything that God originally planned inevitably comes to pass: the world as it is exactly coincides with the divine ideal order. The difference here is that the divine ideal order is all at once, eternally, in the indivisible unity of divine thought, while the worldly (world) order unfolds gradually in time and space. The structure of the universe from the point of view of the eternal and perfect intellect is providence; in relation to the created things of the materialized world, it is “fatum”, destiny (Latin: fatum – “fate”, “foreshadowing”, “predestination”). The destinies of people are different, but in the simplicity of providence they are all connected together by one common destiny. It is impossible to avoid one’s fate, Boethius believes – a person can only get rid of the “evil” turns of fate, all sorts of vicissitudes of “fortune”. Boethius suggests comparing a person’s dependence on these vicissitudes with the ratio of the speed of rotation of a point on the outer surface (rim) of a wheel and its distance to the center: the larger the radius of the wheel, the further it is from the center, the more unstable and restless its position in space. The same is true with fate. The center of fate and all existence is God, motionless, one, self-identical, eternal; one should become like God in everything, “be closer to the center” of fate – both one’s own and the entire universe – and fate will stop deceiving and changing, life will calm down in striving for good.eternal; one should become like God in everything, “be closer to the center” of one’s destiny – both one’s own and that of the entire universe – and destiny will stop deceiving and changing, life will calm down in striving for good.eternal; one should become like God in everything, “be closer to the center” of one’s destiny – both one’s own and that of the entire universe – and destiny will stop deceiving and changing, life will calm down in striving for good.
At the beginning of Book II of his work, Boethius draws the famous allegory of the “wheel of fortune”. All natural beings naturally strive for what nature has prepared for them; man must and can strive for the same thing – the realization of his own existence, but he does this with the participation of the will. Will is a synonym for freedom. The question arises: how does the will agree with divine providence, which warns everything in advance and does not allow room for chance in the Universe? The fact is, Boethius answers, that the will is voluntary (free) only because man has the ability to know and choose anything with the help of reason. The more reasonable a person is, the freer he is. God has perfect and immutable knowledge, therefore he is absolutely free; the soul of man is free only relatively – exactly to the extent that it conforms to God, i.e., to the divine intellect. God certainly foresees all our actions, performed in the past, present and future, including “arbitrary” and seemingly purely “accidental” actions. God foresees free, “arbitrary” actions as precisely “arbitrary” (but not “accidental”); the fact that these actions are foreseeable and foreseeable does not make them necessary and unfree. God is eternal, and eternity, according to a definition that has become classic, is “the perfect possession at once of the entire plenitude of infinite life” (V, 6). God constantly lives in one present. The world is entirely found in the Mind of God and is co-present in it as if in the unity of “always already” “just now” events that have happened – those that happened in the past, those that are happening now or those that are about to happen in the future. Everything that God sees, he sees “now” (“from the point of view of eternity”), Boethius asserts; in relation to the temporal perspective of created being, God’s knowledge of things appears to be eternally anticipatory, occurring “in advance”, i.e., in the strict sense of the word, it is foreknowledge and foresight. In accordance with the division of types of natural necessity, dating back to Antiquity (Aristotle), into unconditional, or “simple”, necessity (“man dies, since he is necessarily mortal”), and conditional, “hypothetical” (“if the sun rises, then it necessarily does not set”), human choice and will, according to Boethius, with unconditional necessity remain free – at every time of the existence of this world, and at the same time, in eternity, warned with “hypothetical” necessity by the fact of divine foreknowledge.
In his earlier works — on theology, dialectics, and the quadrivial disciplines (arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, music) — the future founder of scholasticism appears, on the one hand, as a transmitter of ancient scientific traditions and, at the same time, as a completely independent and original philosopher. Of his works on dialectics (logic), the following stand out first and foremost: a translation of and two commentaries on the text of Porphyry of Tyre’s Introduction to Aristotle’s Categories — the so-called “Small” (2 books) and “Large” (5 books); a translation, together with his own accompanying commentary, of Aristotle’s Categories (4 books); a translation and two commentaries on Aristotle’s On Interpretation (also “Large,” 6 books, and “Small,” 2 books). a commentary on Cicero’s Topics (6 books) and four treatises: Introduction to Categorical Syllogisms, On the Hypothetical Syllogism, On Topical Differences (3 books), On Division. Works on the quadrivial disciplines include: Instruction in Arithmetic (2 books) (a Latin translation of the popular late Antiquity work of the Pythagorean Nicomachus of Gerasa, Introduction to Arithmetic, 2nd century AD) and Instruction in Music (5 books) (a translation of the opinions of various Greek authors, primarily Nicomachus and his famous contemporary, the Alexandrian astronomer and mathematician Claudius Ptolemy).
According to Boethius, philosophy as a generic concept is divided into theoretical (speculativa) and practical (activa) philosophy. The types of practical philosophy are ethics, politics and economics. The types of theoretical philosophy are divided according to the subjects it studies. Boethius divides these subjects into three categories: intellectible (intellectibilia), intelligible (intelligibilia) and natural (naturalia). According to Boethius, intellectible entities include “that which, being self-identical, always abides in the Deity (divinitas), and is comprehended not by means of the senses, but only by the mind (mens) and intellect” (Boethius. A Short Commentary on Porphyry // Patrologiae cursus completus. Series Latina, vol. 64, col. 16), i.e. God, incorporeal angels and rational disembodied souls. The type of theoretical philosophy that investigates these objects is called “theology.” The study of intelligible entities—the highest causes, the highest spheres of the universe, and human souls, which were originally intelligible beings but subsequently, after the fall into the body, passed into a much lower state—is the subject of a type of philosophy (the second in order), the name of which is not given by Boethius. The third type of theoretical philosophy is called by Boethius “physiology” (physiologia), i.e., literally, “natural philosophy”; this type of philosophy studies the nature and properties of physical bodies. The four disciplines of the “quadrivium” are characterized in the texts of Boethius as follows: arithmetic is the science of the multitude in itself (multitudo per se); music is the science of the multitude in relation to another (multitudo ad aliquid); geometry is the science of a fixed quantity (magnitudo immobilis); astronomy is the science of a moving quantity (magnitudo mobilis). Boethius has doubts about the status of logic (dialectics): “Some,” he writes, “assert that logic is a part of philosophy, while others say that it is not a part, but only an instrument (ferramentum) and a kind of means (supellex)” (Boethius. Great Commentary on Porphyry // Patrologiae cursus completus. Series Latina, vol. 64, col. 17). A scrupulous review of the arguments of both sides convinces Boethius that both judgments are correct, since nothing prevents logic from being both a part of philosophical science and its instrument, just as the hand in the human body is both a part and its immediate instrument. For Boethius, dialectic, or logic (he made no distinction between these names), is the ability to reason correctly and draw conclusions. In this sense, the subject of logical discipline is the forms and elements of logical reasoning – syllogisms, premises and terms (subject, predicate), that is, firstly, words that actually denote something, and, secondly, statements made up of similar words that contain either some kind of assertion (of the properties of being of an existing thing) or some kind of negation.
Two circumstances connected with the work of Severinus Boethius allow us to rightfully call him the founder of future scholastic philosophy: 1) the combination of dialectical (i.e. formal-logical) methods of reasoning and specifically Christian theological themes (the Trinitarian question) produced by him in his theological works; 2) the formulation of the problem of determining the essential properties of the existence of universal concepts (universals).
The problematic of the status of the existence of universal concepts, which later became the basic principle of the entire scholastic philosophical tradition, was first presented in great detail by Boethius in the course of his analysis of the formal-logical properties of the so-called “five sounds” or “things” (voces, res), the most general characteristics of concepts (the so-called postpraedicamenta): “genus” (genus, for example, “animal”), “species” (species, “man”), “specific difference” (specifica differentia, “rationality”), “proper feature” (proprium, “bipedality”) and “adventitious feature” (accidens, “snub nose”, “blue eyes”).
The discussion was prompted by questions first posed (but left unanswered) by Porphyry of Tyre in his famous Introduction to Aristotle’s Categories: 1) Do genera and species of things exist independently or only in thought? 2) If they exist independently, are they bodies or incorporeal things? 3) Do they have a separate being in the latter case or do they exist only in corporeal things? According to the later formulation of Thomas Aquinas, universals can have a threefold existence: ante rem (“before the thing”, i.e. in the Divine Intellect), in re (“in the thing”) and post rem (“after the thing”, i.e. in the human mind). Subsequently, in accordance with how various representatives of medieval scholasticism sought to answer these questions in their own way, three main directions of scholastic thought were formed: realism (Latin res, “thing”), nominalism (Latin nomen, “name”) and conceptualism (Latin conceptus, “concept”).
Nominalism asserts that genera and types of things exist only in thought; realism recognizes the content of universal concepts as existing independently (substantially); from the point of view of conceptualism, the very concepts of types and genera of things exist only in the mind, but at the same time in reality something corresponds to them, which, however, in itself is neither a substance nor an accident (feature, property). Each of the listed directions was subdivided into two varieties: “radical” realism (dating back to Plato) believed that only the meanings of universal concepts exist really, substantially, independently (Anselm of Canterbury, William of Champeaux, Peter Lombard, Bonaventure and, in general, most of the medieval scholastics); “moderate” realism (oriented towards Aristotle) asserted that the meanings of universal concepts, existing really, do not exist independently, but are forms of individual things (Thomas Aquinas); “Radical” nominalism believed that the concepts of genus and species of things have no meaning at all (John Roscellinus); “moderate” nominalism claimed that these concepts are the names of individual things (William of Ockham); accordingly, two varieties of medieval conceptualism were distinguished: one of its varieties was oriented toward realism (Duns Scotus), the second was inclined toward nominalism (Peter Abelard). As for the philosophical views of the founder of all these disputes – Boethius, in some of his works he appears as a “moderate” realist (“Great Commentary on Porphyry”), and in other works as a “radical” realist (“On the Consolation of Philosophy”).
After the death of Boethius, a general decline of cultural traditions occurred in the territory of the former Western Roman Empire, which continued until the time of the so-called “Carolingian Renaissance” (9th century).
The most important figure in the philosophy of this “renaissance” was John Scotus Eriugena (c. 810 – after 877). We know little about the life of the philosopher. Eriugena was born in Ireland and studied in a monastery. The nickname Eriugena translated from Latin literally means “born in Ireland”. Fleeing from the Norman conquests, Eriugena left for France in the 1830s, where no later than 847 he became an important person at the court of the French king. After the death of his patron in 877, he moved to England, where, according to legend, he died a martyr’s death at the hands of his own students.
In the philosophical teaching of Eriugena, the influence of Platonism is most noticeable, which he adopted through the Western (Augustine) and Eastern (Origen, Gregory of Nyssa, Ps. Dionysius the Areopagite, Maximus the Confessor) tradition. He translated individual works of Gregory of Nyssa, Ps. Dionysius and Maximus into Latin. His main works are “On Divine Predestination”, “Commentary on the “Celestial Hierarchy” of St. Dionysius”, “Homily on the Prologue to the Gospel of John” and the famous treatise “On Natures”, which from the 12th century also received the title “On the Division of Nature” (5 books). Eriugena’s teaching on divine predestination was twice officially condemned; all of the Irish theologian’s later philosophical views were also subsequently, in the 13th century. — condemned — mainly because of their frequent distortion and simplification in the texts of the Parisian theologian Amalric of Vienna (d. 1207). According to the views of Eriugena, there is harmony between faith and reason, between free judgment and the testimony of authority: “True philosophy is true religion, just as true religion is true philosophy” (Eriugena. On Divine Predestination, I, 3). Since both reason and Holy Scripture flow together from divine wisdom, there is not and cannot be, in essence, anything in religion that is inconsistent with reason. Human reason, degraded to sin, has lost the ability to directly and clearly contemplate the truth, therefore the assimilation of the mysteries that are mysteriously spoken of in Scripture necessarily requires many different efforts from the mind. The goal of all philosophical studies is the search for the ultimate meaning of Divine Revelation contained in Holy Scripture, the text of which always serves as an indication of where the truth is hidden, but never gives it in its pure, established form.
In his earliest work, On Divine Predestination (851), Eriugena, basing himself on the Platonic intuition of the unequal meaning of the categories of everything “temporal” and “eternal” (borrowed from Augustine and Boethius), tries to prove that there truly is neither Divine predestination nor Divine foreknowledge. It is meaningless to speak of “the future” or “the past” in relation to God, since God is always in the present. Therefore, God is not capable of preceding created things either in time or in space, and, as a consequence, He is not capable of either predicting or foreseeing the fate of individual things. In the texts of Scripture, the characteristics of God in terms of “anticipation,” “warning,” and “anticipation” of various events are used exclusively metaphorically, i.e., in an improper sense. All errors arise from a false, “incorrect” interpretation of these statements, i.e., in those cases where these concepts are used in their proper sense – by analogy with the world of things that are temporary, and not eternal. Eriugena finds two main reasons for such a false interpretation: 1) despite the fact that everything temporary is necessarily excluded by eternity, nevertheless a semblance of eternity – albeit small – exists in the world of created things, since everything temporary “flows” from eternity, i.e., the eternal God who creates the universe; 2) in reasoning about the Deity, i.e., about eternity as such, a part of temporary, non-eternal being – man – takes part, thereby inevitably attributing to the Deity attributes that are not characteristic of Him.
In his main work, On the Division of Nature (862-866), Eriugena treats questions of knowledge of God in the context of the doctrine of the universal nature of things (Latin: natura), which unites everything that exists (being) and everything that is not such (non-being). Being is that which can be either perceived by the senses or realized by the mind. There are four varieties of it: 1) “creative and uncreated nature” (natura non creata creans): God as the cause of everything that exists; 2) “creative and created nature” (natura creata creans): divine ideas, eternally created by God in the act of divine knowledge; 3) “created and non-creative nature” (natura creata nec creans): the world as a manifestation of divine ideas and of God himself; and 4) “nature uncreated and uncreating” (natura non creata nec creans): God as the ultimate fullness of being, to which, as to the highest perfection, everything that exists is directed. The extreme two elements of the division designate the Creator as either the beginning or the end of everything that exists; the middle two elements are creation, the realized integrity of being. Eriugena attributes to the varieties of non-being: 1) that which is hidden from the senses and intentions of the mind due to the superiority of its unique nature: God and the ideas of things, comprehensible only accidentally (i.e., not in an essential way); 2) the relativity of the being of everything “descending” and “ascending” (“greater-lesser”) in relation to existing things belonging to some hierarchy; 3) that which is only “in potential”, i.e. is the non-being of what is to be realized; 4) things subject to birth and decay, i.e. the entire world in process of formation; 5) the discrepancy, i.e. the non-existence, of man’s own essence – the image of God, which occurred as a result of the fall. God is above any definitions, and everything that is asserted about Him (and generally said) can be denied for Him with much greater grounds.
One of the most important points of Eriugena’s teaching is his assertion that not only can man, due to his limitations, fail to attain knowledge of God, but the eternal God himself does not know himself, since he is infinite, and therefore boundless, and therefore indefinable. In the process of creation, God appears successively as “the beginning, the middle, and the end” (On the Division of Nature, I, 11). There is nothing outside of God. Everything is God, and God is everything. The creation of everything that exists is a divine “theophany” (Greek Θεοφάνια — “Epiphany”), i.e., an instantaneous manifestation of the essence of the eternal Deity, incomprehensible in its simplicity. The act of creation of the universe is simultaneously an act of divine self-knowledge. God knows himself in the Son-Logos, i.e., thereby in the act of creation of truly existing ideas; In this act God himself receives his being in accordance with the principle: “The knowledge of what exists is what [itself] exists.” The “superstantiality” of God (Latin superessentialitas), which exceeds being and non-being, is, according to Eriugena, the “beginning” from which everything that exists was created. Ideas are the first moment of the divine “theophany” and the original causes (causae primordiales) of all being.
The doctrine of the created nature of divine ideas distinguishes Eriugena from many other Christian thinkers of the Middle Ages. Ideas, i.e., the patterns of everything that exists created in Logos from the beginning, are nevertheless not co-eternal with the Creator, since only the Creator is beginningless. The development of ideas into a multiplicity of individuals is carried out according to the hierarchical order – from the general to the particular. Ideas give birth to genera, then subordinate genera, species and individual essences (substances). This birth of multiplicity from unity is the action of the third Divine Hypostasis – the Holy Spirit. Accordingly, every created thing is determined by the following form-creating triad: essence, which corresponds to the Father; active virtue, which corresponds to the Son; and action, which corresponds to the Holy Spirit. Following Ps. Dionysius, Eriugena likens God to the spiritual, intelligible Light. The manifestation of God in divine ideas is the highest light, which shines, gradually growing dim and diminishing, in every created thing. The multitude of “theophanies” that form the Universe are divided into three worlds: 1) absolutely immaterial substances, such as angels; 2) corporeal and visible substances; 3) and man, the connecting link between the first and the second. In the series of all beings, from the highest to the lowest, God is present – as taking part in them (participatio): “Participation is the acceptance not of any part, but of divine realizations and the distribution of gifts from above downwards from the highest order through the intermediate steps to the lower” (On the Division of Nature, III, 3). “In everything that exists, there is something,” says Eriugena, “and this is He Himself.” Created from nothing, that is, from the nothing of their own existence, things are created simultaneously from that Nothing which is “super-being” / “super-essence”, that is, God.
Man, according to the teaching of Eriugena, is at the center of the entire universe; he is “a certain intellectual concept, eternally created in the divine mind.” Human nature is simple and indivisible in all people. In it, as in the image of God, all “concepts” about everything are initially concentrated. Among the most important “concepts” are, first of all, the categories of “quality” and “quantity.” The mixture of original concepts forms matter: “Visible matter, associated with form,” writes Eriugena, “is nothing other than the totality of certain accidents” (On the Division of Nature, I, 34). In other words, the corporeal is born from the incorporeal (ex rebus incorporalibus corpora nascitur), or, more precisely, “through the coitus of the intelligible (ex intelligibilium coitu)” (On the Division of Nature, III, 14). The stable and substantial basis of all that exists is the intelligible invisible essence from which everything else flows and which is the immediate result of the act of creation of being. As a result of man’s fall into original sin, this connection between the sensory and the ideal – both in man himself and in the entire universe – disintegrates and disappears.
Accordingly, the meaning of human life, and indeed the essence of the entire world process, lies primarily in the return of man and the world to their original pure state of perfect spirituality (conversio in purum spiritum), in the restoration (Greek: ποκατάστασις) by all things of their co-natural, God-like nature. Christ is the example and likeness of this restoration: the history of the world must end with the universal divine enlightenment of humanity by the light of the second appearance of Christ and the spiritualization of everything material. Several main stages in the return of the created world, in the person of humanity, “from non-existent non-existence to being” are distinguished: 1) the death of man; 2) the resurrection of bodies; 3) the union of the bodies of individuals with their pure souls, which occurs in an ascending manner: the body is reborn into life (Latin motus vitalis, “vital movement”), life is resolved into feeling (sensus), feeling turns into reason (ratio), reason becomes a thinking spirit (animus-intellectus); 4) “deification” (Latin deificatio – i.e. “deification”), in which all souls, as well as bodies, will ultimately unite with the mysterious essence of God and the world; nature will be permeated with God, as air is permeated with light; and this will be the end of the great return, “for God will become all in all, when nothing remains but God (erit enim Deus omnia in omnibus, quando nihil erit nisi solus Deus)” (On the Division of Nature, V, 8).
In the 11th century, there lived and worked an outstanding representative of early medieval thought, Anselm of Canterbury (c. 1033 – 1109), who said: “I do not seek to understand in order to believe, but I believe in order to understand (neque enim quaero intelligere ut credam, sed credo, ut intelligam)” (Anselm of Canterbury. Proslogium, 1. Translated by S. S. Averintsev). Anselm was born in Aosta, on the border with Piedmont (Northern Italy). At the age of 15, he tried to become a monk, but his father prevented him from doing so. After the death of his mother, Anselm left his father’s home and set off on a long journey through the lands of Burgundy, France and Normandy. Here he finally found refuge in the monastery of Bec (1060), which was then headed by Lanfranc. It was in Bec that he wrote his main works: “On the Literate” (between 1080 and 1085); “Monologues” (“Speech to himself about the meaning of faith”) (1076); “Proslogium” (“Address to the listener about the meaning of faith”) (1077-1078); “On Truth” (between 1080 and 1085); “On Freedom of Choice” (then) and “On the Fall of the Devil” (between 1085 and 1090). In 1093, Anselm was appointed Archbishop of Canterbury. Anselm died in 1109, having earned the nickname “Doctor magnificus”, i.e. “Wonderful Doctor” from his descendants.
According to Anselm, man has two sources of knowledge: faith and reason. For a Christian, knowledge begins with affirmation in faith: the facts and truths he wants to understand are given to him in Revelation. Not to understand in order to believe, but to believe in order to understand, is necessary for a believing Christian. Between blind, unconscious faith and direct vision of God there is an intermediary link: “understanding of faith”, which is achieved with the help of reason. Reason is far from always able to comprehend the content of faith, Anselm asserts; nevertheless, it is able to contribute greatly to the justification of faith in the Creator as a fact of ordinary, everyday existence. Hence, its most important task is to search for real (effective) evidence in favor of the real existence of God. Anselm gives four such evidences in his works. In three of them, he discusses God through a detailed examination of the existence of created things. His reasoning is based on two premises: 1) all creatures differ from each other in the degree to which they possess some kind of perfection; 2) things that are endowed with perfection to some degree receive their relative perfections from perfection as such, i.e., from God. For example, every thing is some kind of good. We strive for things because they are some kind of good for us. But not one of the things possesses the fullness of perfect good: the degree of their goodness – both for us and for these things – constantly differs. They are good because they participate – some more, some less – in the amazing Goodness as such, i.e., in the cause of all goods, relative and partial. Good in itself is the primary Essence and Being, surpassing as such everything that exists separately; this primary identity of essence and being, Anselm asserts, is what we usually call God.
In the so-called “ontological” proof, the most famous of all, Anselm has a different task, namely to show that the concept of being is completely real, although implicitly contained in the proper characteristic of the self-existent substance – “God”. Anselm begins this proof with the definition: God “is that than which nothing greater can be conceived (esse aliquid quo nihil majus cogitari possit)” (Proslogium, 2). Everyone, even “the fool who has said in his heart: there is no God” (Ps. 13:1; 52:1), is able to understand the meaning of this expression, and therefore it exists in his understanding. The second premise of Anselm’s argument lies in the distinction between the concepts of “being in the mind” (esse in intellectu) and “being outside the mind” (esse in re). “Thus, when a painter plans what he is going to do, he has something in his mind; But he does not think of what he has not yet done as something that is. But when he has written everything down, he already has in his mind what he has done, and he thinks of it as something that is. So even the aforementioned madman is forced to admit that at least in the mind there is something than which nothing greater can be conceived; for when he hears these words, he understands them, and what is understood is in the mind. But that than which nothing greater can be conceived, Anselm continues, cannot possibly have being in the mind alone. For if it has being in the mind alone, it can be thought that it also has being in fact; and this is already more than having being in the mind alone. So if that than which nothing greater can be conceived has being in the mind alone, then that very thing than which nothing greater can be conceived is at the same time that than which something greater can be conceived; which obviously cannot be. Therefore, beyond any doubt, something than which nothing greater can be conceived exists both in reason and in fact” (Proslogium, 2. Trans. S. S. Averintsev).
Anselm’s entire argument is based on the following principles: 1) the concept of God is granted by faith; 2) the existence of something in reason already signifies its true existence; 3) the existence in thought of the concept of God logically requires the assertion that He exists in reality. The entire abstract dialectic unfolding here goes from faith to reason and returns to its starting point, concluding that what is offered by faith immediately becomes intelligible.
Some later thinkers (Bonaventure, Descartes, Hegel) shared these premises of Anselm, others (Thomas Aquinas, Kant) rejected them. Even in Anselm’s lifetime there was a strong and knowledgeable opponent, the monk Gaunilon of Marmoutiers, who wrote “A Book in Defense of a Madman against Anselm.” He objected that one cannot rely on the idea of existence in thought to deduce from it existence outside thought. Indeed, existence as an object of thought does not mean true existence – it is simply an imaginary being. Gaunilon admits that this proof helps us understand that there is a God, but the premise proposed as the starting point will never allow us to be convinced that God really exists.
Anselm was one of the most prominent supporters of medieval radical realism, which believed that the meaning of universal concepts – genus and species (“animal”, “man”) – are the essences of individual things that exist substantially (i.e. literally “separately”, “independently”). Anyone who cannot understand, Anselm addressed his contemporaries, how several individuals make up the concept of one “man” will never understand how one Deity can be at once one in three Persons. Representatives of the so-called Chartres School (at the Cathedral of Chartres), founded in 990 by Fulbert of Chartres (d. 1028), a student of Gerbert of Reims and teacher of Berengarius of Tours, who received the honorary nickname “Socrates” during his lifetime for his passion for dialectics and classical authors, made a great contribution to the development of the concept of realism in the 12th century. Among the most important representatives of the Chartres school were: Bernard of Chartres (chancellor of the school from 1119 to 1124; died between 1126 and 1130); his younger brother Thierry (Theodoric of Brittany, nicknamed by his contemporaries the Most Learned Researcher and the Donkey for his endurance in academic work) (chancellor of the school from 1141; died between 1150 and 1155); William of Conches (died c. 1154); Gilbert of Porretta (chancellor of the school from 1126 to 1141; died in 1154); Bernard Sylvester (d. after 1167) and partly John of Salisbury (c. 1120–1180), who also studied with Peter Abelard.
According to Bernard of Chartres, only God, ideas (universals) and matter are truly real. Ideas are the first entities after God. Compound substances (created things) are not truly real, only their elements, i.e. matter and ideas, are real. The love of the classical authors of Fulbert, the founder of the school, was fully transmitted to Bernard, who, according to tradition, claimed: “We are dwarfs sitting on the shoulders of giants. We see more things and things more distant than the ancients saw, not because of the sharpness of our own sight or our own height, but because the ancients raise us to their enormous height.” In the works of Bernard’s brother, Thierry (Heptateuchon, literally “Seven Books”, 1135-1141), Guillaume of Conches (“On the Philosophy of the World”, 1120-1130) and Bernard Sylvester (“On the Totality of the World, or Megacosm and Microcosm”, 1143-1148) the problems of natural philosophy are presented in the most detailed manner. In order to understand the content of the text of Scripture about the creation of the universe, Thierry asserted, theology requires familiarity with the sciences of arithmetic, music, geometry and astronomy (i.e. “quadrivium”). To rise mentally to the beginning of number – one – means to rise from created things to their Creator.
All things, Thierry reminds us, exist only through the Creator, and therefore God is the “form of existence” (forma essendi) of things. Thierry, drawing on the thought of Augustine, interprets God the Father as unity (uni-tas), since the single unit is the beginning of number and the source of the successive numerical series; God the Son as “equality”, “since one cannot give birth to anything except equality with this same unit”; and God the Holy Spirit as such a “consent” between “unity” and “equality”, in which the multiplication of the divine essence becomes impossible (one multiplied by itself is equal to one). It is precisely because “unity is the first and unique being of all things (cum autem unitas omnium rerum primum et unicum esse sit),” and God, according to Thierry, is the “primary and unique unity,” that the only “form of existence of all individual things” is God, who, however, is in no way exhausted or countable either by numbers or by things.
Thierry describes the creation of the universe as a sequential unfolding of mathematical sets, i.e., “composite” unities, from an absolutely simple divine primordial unity. In the face of the primordial unity, matter first necessarily arises as pure “mirror” receptivity. It is permeated with reflections of the eternal divine simplicity, and thus the unity in it appears both multiplied and divided. Subsequently, matter is stratified into four elements (earth, water, air, fire), which, interacting with each other, “reify” the natural diversity of mathematical forms. Thierry was the first to use Aristotle’s works on syllogistic (apodeictic, dialectic, and sophistic) in teaching: “First Analytics”, “Topics”, and “On Sophistic Refutations”. Among his other “innovations” we should also mention two theories that belonged in the past to Aurelius Augustine and the Neoplatonic philosopher John the Grammarian (Philoponus) (c. 490 – 570), and which received the widest application one or two centuries after Thierry: 1) Augustine’s doctrine of the “seed, generative meanings” of things (rationes seminales), i.e. certain principles embedded by God in created things, which in a “condensed form” contain all the wealth of possibilities, or potentials, of their subsequent development; 2) Philoponus’s doctrine of the presence in existing things of a certain driving force (impetus projecti), which makes it possible to explain the continuity of the movement of a body to which an initial impulse was previously communicated from outside.
Like other representatives of the Chartres school, Guillaume of Conches based his philosophical judgments on the fact that ancient (primarily Platonic) philosophy – as a “true teaching about manifest and unmanifest being” – does not, if correctly interpreted, contradict the Christian faith. Identifying Platonic ideas with the eternal prototypes of all things contained in the divine Reason (Logos), Guillaume further asserts that by means of the World Soul (anima mundi) (borrowed from Plato’s “Timaeus”) all these prototypes are realized in the created temporal world as “innate forms” (formae nativae) inherent in things, forming the intelligible structure of the universe. The world soul is identified by Guillaume with the life-giving Holy Spirit (Gen. 1:2) and, as the principle of life of all created beings and the perfect harmony of the world, animates the entire body of the entire cosmos; the entire world thus represents an animated being, containing internally the image of the Creator – His omnipotence (God the Father), wisdom (God the Son) and ineffable goodness (God the Holy Spirit).
According to Bernard Sylvester (or Bernard of Tours), the creation of the universe occurred due to the intervention of the Spirit of Divine Providence in the life of eternally existing Nature and the introduction by Him of order and order into the primary matter of the material world, which had previously (i.e. before the act of creation) been in a chaotic state.
Undoubtedly, the greatest philosopher-theologian and dialectician of the “early scholasticism” was Peter Abelard (1079-1142). Abelard’s main works are: “Introduction to Theology” (1113); “Logic for Beginners” (1114); “Glosses to Porphyry” (3 books) and to Aristotle’s “Categories”; “Dialectics” (5 books) (1118-1134); “Christian Theology” (1122-1125); “Yes and No” (at the same time); “Ethics, or Know Thyself” (between 1135 and 1139); “Apology against Bernard”, “Dialogue between a Philosopher, a Jew and a Christian” (1141-1142) and the famous autobiography “The History of My Misfortunes” (1132-1136).
Contrary to the opinion of Augustine (in the work “On the Predestination of the Saints”, 5) and Anselm of Canterbury, according to which one must first believe in the truth of Revelation in order to then, if possible, try to reach its rational comprehension, Abelard declares that only an adequate understanding of the dogma makes faith possible, since “one cannot believe in what has not been previously understood by us.” Accordingly, the principle of Abelard’s theology was not “I believe in order to understand” (credo ut intelligam), but “I understand in order to believe” (intelligo ut credam). Based on the assertion made in the Prologue to “Yea and Nay”, according to which “doubt leads us to inquiry, and inquiry leads us to truth”, Abelard believes that “faith not enlightened by reason is unworthy of man”, and therefore a necessary condition of any true faith is a preliminary inquiry by reason into its content. Abelard begins his speculative construction of the doctrine of the Divine Trinity with the assumption that God can be the “highest and most perfect Good” only if He is simultaneously omnipotent, omniwise and omnibenevolent. These three moments of the single divine essence, respectively, manifest themselves in the Persons of the Trinity: in God the Father (“omnipotence”), in God the Son (“wisdom”) and in God the Holy Spirit (“goodness”). The relationship of the indicated Hypostases in the divine Trinity is similar, according to Abelard, to the relationship that exists between the metal from which the seal is made, the mold into which this metal is cast, and, accordingly, the imprinting seal as a thing consisting of the first two elements. At the same time, the internal harmony of the perfect Good is expressed in the fact that God can do what He knows and wants, and wants what He knows and can, etc.
God can therefore neither know nor wish to do evil, and for Him, from among the infinite possibilities, only the best is revealed at each moment. From here follows the observation noted by Abelard’s critic, Bernard of Clairvaux— the principle of divine subordination as applied to the consubstantial God the Creator: if Abelard ascribes absolute omnipotence (omnipotentia) to the Father, then the Son possesses only a part of the Father’s power (aliqua potentia) (insofar as wisdom is the power to consistently distinguish everything true and false), while the Holy Spirit does not contain any power at all (nulla potentia) (since the concept of goodness does not at all presuppose its presence). Another objection of Bernard of Clairvaux to Abelard concerned the fact that, in the former’s opinion, his philosophy imposes considerable limitations on the omnipotence of God. In his letter to Pope Innocent II (d. 1143), which was sent after the condemnation of Sais, Bernard, among other “improper” statements of Abelard, also points out that the omnipotence of God, according to Abelard, is identical to His actual deeds. These words indeed accurately reflect Abelard’s views on the nature of divine omnipotence: “Therefore, however long I may reflect, considering that God alone is able to do what is fitting for Him to do, and that it is not fitting for Him to do what He leaves undone, I truly come to the opinion that God is able to do only what He does whenever He does it, although with this opinion of ours no one or only a few agree” (Peter Abelard, Introduction to Theology, III, 5). What is “fit” (convenit) for God to do, says Abelard, is exclusively that which is worthy and best. Consequently, since God always does only what is best, God’s omnipotence is limited by what He does. For Bernard, this means only one thing: a denial of the principle of divine omnipotence, since the whole argument is based on the idea of limiting the nature of the eternal Creator God to the sphere of what the human mind can understand: thus, the boundaries of human understanding turn out to be the boundaries of God’s omnipotence. Within the framework of his ethical conception, Abelard relies on the concept of natural moral law, an idea of which (even if vague) is possessed by all people – regardless of their upbringing or religion. Abelard here proceeds from the distinction between vice (vitium), sin (peccatum) and bad deed (actio mala). Vice is a tendency to what should not be done, i.e., the desire not to do what should be done under all circumstances, and intemperance in not doing what should not be done. From Abelard’s point of view, vice is not sin, but only a tendency to sin, with which we can constantly struggle and which we have the ability to overcome. Sin does not consist in the inclination of the will, since acting badly may be, among other things, our natural (innate) ability; sin consists exclusively in not abstaining from what should not be done, i.e., in agreement with the latter, in non-resistance to evil. Sin, therefore, is the internal intention (intentio) of man, which goes against his own conscience and arises as a result of disregard for the will of the Creator.A bad deed, being an external manifestation of sin, is only a consequence of the evil intention that has been realized and does not add anything to it. Hence, according to Abelard, the absolution of a person’s sins is impossible without the personal repentance of the sinner and in the absence of personal piety in the priest who absolves the sins.
As a dialectician, Peter Abelard became famous primarily for his criticism of the radical realism (Guillaume of Champeaux), which had become traditional by that time, and for creating the first version of medieval conceptualism, having significantly corrected and clarified the meaning of the very problematic of the status of the existence of universal concepts. In particular, Abelard adds a fourth to Porphyry’s three questions, thereby revealing a new aspect of the complex relationship between grammar, logic and metaphysics: does a universal have any meaning if it does not refer to anything in reality, especially if we are talking about things that once existed but no longer exist? Abelard’s “Glosses” (i.e. short commentaries) to Porphyry from the work “Logic for Beginners” are partly his own record of numerous disagreements and disputes with his former teacher, Guillaume of Champeaux.Guillaume’s own position is that any universal (for example, “man”, “animal”, “rose”) is understood by him as a substance (Latin substantia, res – “single essence”, “single thing”), i.e. as a thing with independent existence. A universal is something numerically unified and at the same time common to many things. All individual things belonging to a certain genus and species have one universal essence, while individual differences, by means of which all individuals differ from each other in different ways, are something random (accidental), i.e. everything that can be associated with a given thing now, but at the same time be absent under other circumstances. For example, for Socrates and Plato, the universal is the essence (one) – “man”, which makes each of them individually a man. They differ solely accidentally, for example, in their position in place-space or in their physique and facial features (Socrates had a snub nose, Plato had broad shoulders). The idea that the form and essence of a thing is an independent substance is fundamental to the position of radical realism, since it substantiates the independence of the form of things from the concepts of the mind and human language: if the essence were not a substance, it would not be “real,” Guillaume reminds us. In criticizing Guillaume’s positions, Abelard puts forward two arguments. Firstly, according to physical discipline, nothing can be in two places at the same time. However, if Socrates and Plato are one and the same substance, since they have a single universal essence, then it turns out that one and the same objective essence is capable of being simultaneously in Athens (Plato) and outside the city limits (Socrates), which is, of course, impossible. This is also impossible due to the subtleties of the ontological connections between the concept of genus and the specific definitions subordinate to it. Since dogs and people are animals, Guillaume asserts, they possess a single, identical essence for all, i.e., “animality.” But people are rational, says Abelard, and dogs and other creatures (donkeys, monkeys, etc.) are irrational, and then it turns out that one and the same substance (for example, a man and a donkey) can simultaneously be, according to Guillaume, both rational and irrational – which again contains an obvious contradiction. As species, all people and other creatures are related to each other as two completely different opposites: some are rational, others are irrational; however, by genus, these objects are identical. If, however, the genus, according to Guillaume, is a “numerically” common universal for all singularities, and the latter are necessarily substances, then it turns out, for example, that the generic substance of the existing “animality” in relation to man as a species would be rational, and in relation to a horse or a donkey, it would be irrational, i.e., it would thus possess a whole set of contradictory properties.
Such errors, says Abelard, arise, as a rule, because of attributing characteristics of existing things to universals. Abelard clarifies the very concept of a “thing”: a thing is what is designated by a singular term (“Socrates,” “this stone,” etc.). A singular term cannot be something in the meaning of a universal “predicate” in judgments about things, i.e., according to Abelard, one cannot say: “Man is Socrates.” In exactly the same way, says Abelard, a thing cannot be an essential characteristic of the diversity of material substances: each thing is only what it is. A general concept that performs the function of a predicate (according to Abelard, a “concept,” Latin conceptus, i.e. literally, the diversity of properties in things “seized” by the intellect during the operation of abstraction) does not indicate a thing, but rather its inherent “state” (status). The ontological status of the universal “man”, corresponding to the general concept, is different from that of Socrates, Peter Abelard, and any specific person designated by a singular term; “man” is not something different from an individual man and as real as man himself (the “status” of a thing is not a substance), but it is a mode of existence of an individual substance. Since for universals, as a set of common nouns (Latin sermo), the element of meaning, according to Abelard, is not the set of things, but the “identity” (“similarity”) of their states, they have meaning even in those cases when the substances to which they correspond either never existed, or no longer exist and never will: thus, for example, the name “rose” remains “a designation based on thought” even then “when not a single rose for which this name is common” exists; since otherwise the proposition “there are no roses” could not arise (Peter Abelard. Logic for Beginners, 67). Abelard thus contrasts nominalism and realism with his own conceptualist approach to solving the problem of universals, which, unlike nominalism (John Roscellinus), does not deny that general concepts correspond to something in reality, but does not recognize, unlike realism (Guillaume de Champeaux), that universals exist in the same meaning as substances (individual things), i.e., have the same ontological status as them.
According to Abelard, distinct knowledge is achieved only through sensory intuition, the only faculty that enables us to grasp the singular. General notions, i.e., “concepts” – “animal,” “tree,” “man” – also correspond to intuition, only a vague one. From a cognitive point of view, a universal is only a “fictitious image” constructed by the intellect on the basis of an analysis of the existence of individuals in the same “state.” Abstract notions, such as “humanity,” have no corresponding reality; they form the basis of opinion, not knowledge, which ultimately always relies on sensory intuition. In this matter, Abelard’s position was partly close to the views of the nominalists.
From the point of view of the main representative of the Saint-Victor school in the 12th century – Hugo of Saint-Victor(c. 1096-1141); major works are Didaskalion, literally “Instructions for Learning” (7 books); “On the Mysteries of the Christian Faith”, both before 1125; “Commentary on the Celestial Hierarchy” of St. Dionysius, c. 1125; “A Brief Exposition of Philosophy for Dindim”; “On Contemplation and Its Types”; “On the Method of Speaking and Reflecting”; “On the Vanity of the World”; “On the Soul”; “On the Unity of Body and Spirit”; “One Hundred Sermons”, etc.), the entire body of human knowledge is encompassed by philosophy. Philosophy is a means: 1) for man to restore the integrity of his nature, lost in the Fall; 2) for repairing the damage caused by sin. Therefore, Hugo argues, people need two kinds of wisdom (sapientia): understanding (intelligentia) and knowledge as such (scientia). Two main functions of understanding are distinguished: 1) comprehension of what is necessary for the healing of the mind, presented in the totality of the “theoretical arts” that guide the mind in its tireless search for truth; 2) comprehension of what is necessary for the healing of the will, expressed in the totality of the “practical arts”, the purpose of which is to guide the human will in the implementation of virtuous actions. The only function of knowledge, expressed in the diversity of the “mechanical arts”, is the clarification of the principles of human activity that ensures the vital needs of people. Separately located are the “logical arts”, which consider the methods of judgment and inference, without which knowledge of other “arts” is impossible. The study of philosophy should begin with logic, “because it studies the nature of words and concepts, without which no treatise on philosophy can receive a rational explanation” (Hugo of Saint Victor. Didascalion, I, 11). In “A Brief Exposition of Philosophy for Dindymus” Hugo connects the division of philosophy with the need to counteract the three vices that human nature has as a result of the fall: “ignorance of good, desire for evil, and the weakness inherent in mortals.” According to the text of the Didascalion, philosophy is divided into four main areas and twenty-one disciplines: 1) “theory”: theology, mathematics (arithmetic, music, geometry, astronomy), physics; 2) “practice”: ethics (setting out the rules of monastic life), economics (telling about the principles of property and family) and politics (the focus of which is public life); 3) “mechanics”: cloth making, production of weapons and tools, trade, agriculture, hunting, medicine, theater; 4) “logic”: grammar and theory of proof (divided into the theory of necessary proof, probable proof (studied by dialectic and rhetoric) and sophistic proof). This division represents a scheme of the unity of philosophical knowledge, i.e. a consistent systematization of everything without which human knowledge will be incomplete and will not be able to serve to complement human nature.
The flourishing of medieval scholasticism in the 13th-14th centuries was largely facilitated by three circumstances: 1) The emergence of new educational centers in Europe – medieval universities (Latin universitas – “unification”, “corporation”). 2) The emergence and widespread dissemination in the 13th century of two new monastic (“mendicant”) orders, established in relative independence from the local church priestly hierarchy and setting the goal of their missionary activities as the preaching of the truth of Christian doctrine – not only from parish pulpits, but also, first of all, university ones: the Franciscan (another name – the Order of the Minor Friars, or “Minorites”, from the Latin minor – “lesser”), founded in 1209 by St. Francis of Assisi (Giovanni Bernardone, 1181/1182 – 1226), and the Dominican (another name – the Order of Preaching Friars), created in 1216 by St. Dominic (Dominic de Guzman, c. 1170–1221). Almost all the major scholastic theologians of the 13th and 14th centuries, who taught at various times in the most famous universities, belonged to one or another of the above-mentioned orders – the Franciscan (Bonaventure, Duns Scotus, William of Ockham), or the Dominican (Albert the Great, Thomas Aquinas). 3) The emergence of a specifically new attitude towards ancient (pagan) philosophical science, which occurred as a result of the need for representatives of the new monastic orders to preach the truths of Revelation to the laity who came from different parts of the world to the theological centres of Paris, Oxford, Cologne, etc., and because of the accompanying discovery of a taste for studying physics and metaphysics in the spirit of ancient scientific and philosophical traditions as a result of a new reception (through the mediation of Arabic intellectual culture) in relation to the work and legacy of Aristotle.
It should be noted here that the “Aristotelian Renaissance” in the Christian West was preceded by an “Aristotelian Renaissance” in the Muslim East, represented primarily by the names of two outstanding medieval Arab thinkers – Abu Ali al-Husayn ibn Abdullah Ibn Sina (Latin: Avicenna, Avicenna) (980-1037) and Abu al-Walid Muhammad ibn Ahmed Ibn Rushd (Latin: Averroes, Averroes) (1126-1198), and one Jewish one – Moses ben Maimon (Latin: Maimonides, Maimonides) (1135-1204). The Arabs became acquainted with the works of Aristotle from ancient Syriac transcriptions of the original text in Greek; in the same way, the first translations of Aristotle’s works on metaphysics and “natural philosophy” into Latin were carried out not from Greek, but from Arabic, or, through Arabic, from Hebrew and Castilian (the exceptions in the 12th century were Jacob of Venice and Henry Aristippus (d. 1162), who translated directly from ancient Greek). The largest center for the translation of classical authors (as well as medieval Arabic) in the mid-12th – early 13th centuries was located in Toledo. Another translation center was in Naples and in Palermo (Sicily) at the court of Emperor Frederick II Hohenstaufen. The combined efforts of several generations of translators were able to translate into Latin in the shortest possible time all the most important works on metaphysics and natural sciences by Aristotle, Avicenna, etc., including the famous work On Causes, where the creation of the world was considered as a chain of successive emanations from a perfect Origin (in the order of “Mind” — “Soul” — “Nature” — material being), falsely attributed to Aristotle, but in fact being the text of an Arabic compilation from the work of the Neoplatonist Proclus, The Fundamentals of Theology. The most significant translator of Greek authors from the original language was in the 13th century. Flemish scholar Willem of Moerbeke (c. 1215 – after 1284), who translated not only the works of Aristotle, but also the texts of other outstanding ancient philosophers and scientists: Archimedes, Heron of Alexandria, Hippocrates, Galen, Alexander of Aphrodisias, Proclus, Themistius, John the Grammarian, Ptolemy, Ammonius of Alexandria and Simplicius.
The widest dissemination and profound assimilation in the 13th century of the metaphysical principles of the newly relevant philosophical dogmatics of Aristotle (adopted from the Arabs) led to the division of scholastic philosophy into two competing trends: reformed Augustinianism (Bonaventure, etc.) and Christian Aristotelianism (Albert the Great, Thomas Aquinas and their numerous followers). Both trends diverged in their solutions to many important problems, and first of all, on the question of the relationship between faith and reason, the logic of proof and supersensible intuition, philosophical knowledge and extra-mundane detachment.
Augustinism presupposes the possibility for each person to directly see the entire set of divine plans (eternal ideas): even in this existence, full of difficulties, fallen into the abyss of sin and unhappy in suffering, the human mind is capable of feeling and foreseeing everywhere and in everything the power of the presence of the supreme God. The soul, performing any cognitive act, for example, the perception of sensory, material things, simultaneously sees two sides of the existence of individual substances: firstly, the bodily outlines of the perceived sensory thing, and, secondly, the intelligible model invariably peeping through them. The senses give a person only a vague, indistinct image of a material substance and therefore are neither a reliable support, nor even more so a primary source of clear, reliable knowledge. Without the participation of God, i.e. divine “enlightenment” (Latin illuminatio — “illumination”, “enlightenment”), which allows us to contemplate with the “inner eye” the supersensible model eternally existing in the divine intellect, it is impossible, according to the followers of Augustine, to achieve an adequate understanding of created being. Medieval Aristotelianism, on the contrary, sees the starting point and source of all knowledge in sensory perception. According to Thomas Aquinas, the intellect does not provide man with direct knowledge of intelligible ideas. The soul, being an autonomous spiritual substance, does not exist separately from the body, being in this earthly existence a form of essential / essential determinacy of a single substance, i.e. a rational mortal being; this is the difference between the human soul and other spiritual substances — angels. As a form of the material body, the soul is not capable, according to Thomas, of directly comprehending the unchanging, the eternal, i.e., the divine being. It is able to attain reliable knowledge of any being only with the help of the sense organs, i.e., by means of the rational extraction of an intelligible model from the different data of sensory perceptions.
The inclusion of Aristotelianism in the structure of medieval Christian theology in the 13th century was greatly facilitated by the fact that Aristotelian logic was widely studied in numerous faculties of the “arts”. At the same time, for a full perception of Aristotle’s physics and metaphysics, it was extremely important to remove, as far as possible, the discrepancy between such important elements of the Stagirite’s philosophy as the thesis on the eternity of the universe or the mortality of the individual soul, and the leading principles of Christian dogmatics. Even more important was the fact that Aristotle’s works introduced not simply an alternative integrity of all sorts of ideas, but contained a completely special understanding of truth, i.e., a new value system that contradicted the Christian one and was based on the laws of natural reason and the natural experience of individual people. The church, of course, could not recognize a norm of truth that was completely different from religious revelation; it was also impossible to completely reject a heritage that was miraculously received and not without benefit; The only way out of this situation would be to re-construct the logic of the ancient sage’s reasoning in accordance with the traditional system of theological assessments.
The most outstanding representative of medieval Christian Aristotelianism was Thomas Aquinas (1224/1225-1274; “Doctor angelicus”, “Angelical Doctor”). Thomas was born in the castle of Roccasecca near the town of Aquino near Naples. He came from a noble family of counts. Having received his initial education in the Benedictine Abbey of Monte Cassino, in 1239 he left for Naples, where he entered the faculty of “liberal arts” of the famous “secular” university and graduated in 1243. Here, in Naples, in 1244, he entered the monastic Dominican order, in the fall of 1245 he left for Paris, where he studied for some time at the theological faculty of the University of Paris under the guidance of Albert the Great. In 1248 Thomas left Paris and went with Albert to Cologne, where he remained until the summer holidays of 1252. After this, he decided to return to Paris (1253), where later, in 1256, he was confirmed as a teacher in the theological faculty and remained here until he received his master’s degree in 1259. Following this, he left Paris and went to Italy for several years, where he taught at various universities. Returning to Paris at the beginning of 1269, Thomas resumed his teaching at the university. He left Paris again in 1272 and taught in Naples during 1273. In 1274, at the invitation of Pope Gregory X, Thomas went to the Council of Lyons, but fell ill on the way and died unexpectedly. His main works are: “Commentary on the Four Books of Sentences of Peter Lombard” (1254-1256); “Summa Against the Pagans” (1261-1264); “Summa Theologica” (parts one and two, 1265-1268; part three, 1272-1273 (unfinished); commentaries on Boethius’s books “On the Trinity” and “On the Weeks” (before 1261); “Commentary on the book “On the Divine Names” of St. Dionysius” (before 1268); “Commentary on the “Book of Causes”” (after 1270); “questions” (quaestiones disputatae): “On Truth” (1256-1259), “On Power” (1259-1268), “On the Soul” (1269-1270), “On Evil” (1270-1271); treatises: “On Being and Essence” (c. 1256), “On the Unity of the Intellect against the Averroists” (c. 1270), “On the Mixture of Elements” (1270-1271), “On the Eternity of the World against the Grumblers” (1271), etc.
Theology and philosophy, according to Thomas, are sciences in the Aristotelian sense, i.e., some systems of knowledge based on first principles, from which all necessary conclusions are derived by means of syllogistic reasoning. Theology and philosophy are independent sciences, since the principles of theology and the principles of reason do not depend on each other. Some of the truths of divine Revelation have a supra-rational character (dogmas of the Trinity, original sin, etc.), others are rationally comprehensible (the existence of God, the immortality of the soul, etc.).
The first truths are the content of the “theology of Revelation” (or “sacred doctrine”, Latin sacra doctrina), the second – of “natural theology”, the highest of the series of speculative philosophical sciences. Revealed, super-rational knowledge of things and “natural” knowledge, i.e. natural, according to Thomas, cannot contradict each other, since both are true. The immediate goal and task of theological science consists in the systematic exposition and most detailed interpretation of the truths of divine Revelation; in order to make the testimonies and provisions of faith “intelligible” and convincing to everyone, theology can, according to Thomas, resort to the services of philosophy. From the point of view of achieving the main goal of Christian doctrine, i.e. the salvation of man, philosophy, Thomas asserts, is the “handmaiden of theology”. By asserting that reason and human knowledge of things can directly contribute to the salvation of the individual soul, Thomas, contrary to the negative assessment of human abilities as a naturally mortal and sinful being that was established in the theological culture of the Middle Ages, does not belittle the possibility of rational knowledge, but on the contrary, finds the best application and ultimate justification for it.
In the Thomistic doctrine, as in the preceding scholasticism, God is identified with Being, but in this case the concept of “being” is radically rethought in Thomas. Before him, the fundamental concept by means of which theologians tried to comprehend the idea of divine Being was the concept of “essence” (Latin: essentia). Beginning in ancient times, as the essence of a thing, i.e., the essential/essential determination of being, that which corresponds to a noun was usually distinguished; disagreement was only caused by one point: whether this being is a generic or an individual substance. On the contrary, Thomas chooses the ability of things to exist as the highest characteristic of the being of the totality of all created substances, i.e., that which in reality does not correspond to a noun, but to a verb, namely, a word with the characteristic meaning of “to be” (Latin: esse). Thomas borrowed this doctrine of the distinguishability of “essence” and “existence” from Avicenna. At the same time, he also agreed with the objection that was later proposed by another outstanding medieval Arabic thinker, Averroes, who claimed that the being of an existing thing is not an accident: “The existence (esse) of a thing,” Thomas writes, “although it is something other than its essence, should not be understood as something added to it, like an accident” (Summa Theologica, I, question 50, paragraph 2, response to the third objection). From the point of view of Averroes, this was a decisive argument against the legitimacy of the very distinction between essence and existence. However, Thomas draws a conclusion from this premise that significantly diverges from Averroes’s conclusion. Indeed, if we take the difference between form and matter as the initial opposition in the concept of “thing”, as Aristotle does, and understand the thing as the result of their combination, i.e. as an essence together with accidental features, then in a thing there can only be that which coincides either with matter, or with form, or with an accident.
If being does not coincide with the essence of a thing, i.e. does not proceed from matter, form, or their combination, then there remains only one possibility: to attribute it to the thing as its accident (i.e., a random property). But for the scholastics of the Latin West, being is not an accident of a thing. According to the most famous Augustinian of the 13th century, Henry of Ghent, “before the creation of a thing there is no essence that could receive existence.” How does Thomas Aquinas resolve this problem? Thomas identifies the primary ontological characteristics of things in such a way that things that possess them would be related to each other, either as coexistent or as arising from one another as a result of some change. The main characteristics are introduced in pairs: potentiality – act, matter – form, substance – accident, etc., by means of opposition, revealing the content of each of the two characteristics. The initial distinction is set by the opposition “potentiality – act”. This distinction, like most other conceptual schemes of Thomistic ontology, goes back to Aristotle, but in the concept of Thomas it acquires a new meaning. The concepts of “entelechy” and “energy” (in Latin transcription – actus, “act”) were introduced by Aristotle in order to explain the fact of “movement”, i.e. “variability”, as applied to the existence of individual natural substances. “Entelechy” is a state achieved by a thing in the course of its consistent acquisition in “energy” of all the essential characteristics intended for it by nature – and first of all those that it must possess in order to be classified as a certain genus and species (universals).
Aristotle’s distinction between potency and act (‘entelechy’) was closely connected with another important opposition in Aristotelian metaphysics, namely, the opposition between matter and form. Matter and potency are, strictly speaking, two different terms used by Aristotle to denote the same thing. Form is not only a spatial or physical quantity, but primarily an ontological characteristic of a thing. According to Aristotle’s logic, only that which has form can have being. The actual givenness of a substance (existence) and the characteristic determinacy of its being (as a determinate something) are inseparable from one another. Therefore, for Aristotle, the transition from potency to act is the transition from that which has neither form nor being to things that exist due to the presence of form. If being is inseparable from form, then the cause of a thing’s being will coincide with the cause that determines the presence of a determinate form in it. In this case, “to be” and “to be something” turn out to be identical to each other. Thomas Aquinas, in contrast, singles out the act of the realization of being, indicated by the copular verb “to be,” as the key moment of the structure of things. “To be” (being) is a characteristic that belongs to all created things, despite the difference in their forms. The act of being is primary both in relation to form and in relation to individual substance. At the same time, considered in itself, it has nothing in common with the essences of finite things, for which their own being is always limited by a certain essential characteristic, the so-called “whatness” (Latin quidditas): for created things, “to exist” always means “to be something definite.”
Thus, the use of the concept of the “act of being” allowed Thomas Aquinas, firstly, to express what comes to the essence of each thing at the moment of its creation, namely, the being communicated to it by the Creator, who is the cause of all existence, and, secondly, to substantiate the radical difference between pure infinite Being and the being of finite things, limited by one form or another. According to Thomas, God is the act of being, by which all things receive existence, i.e., become things of which it can be said that they are. In God there is no something to which existence can be attributed, Thomas maintains; his own being is what God is. Such a being lies outside all possible representation. We can establish that God is, but we cannot know that he is, since there is no “what” in him; and since all our experience concerns things that have existence, we cannot conceive of being as such, not relating to anything: “Therefore we can prove the truth of the statement ‘God is,’ but in this single case we cannot know the meaning of the verb ‘is'” (Summa Theologica, I, question 3, paragraph 4, reply to the second objection). Man has access only to knowledge of created things, which are not simple, but composite, i.e., composed of both essence and existence. The verb ‘is’, when applied to a single substance, indicates a finite being (existence), limited by form (essence). In contrast to things, the being of God is infinite; not being limited by any definition, it is beyond any possible representation and is completely inexpressible.
The Platonic-Augustinian concept of the human soul as a spiritual substance independent of the body, possessing the ability to directly contemplate eternal uncreated truths (i.e. divine ideas) in the light of divine “enlightenment” (Latin illuminatio), Thomas replaces with the concept of the soul as a form of the body, which goes back to Aristotle. The soul, united with the body, does not have the ability to directly discern God and the divine plans contained in it virtually, and not really, – the eternal ideas (identified by Thomas with universalia ante res, i.e. literally “pre-substantial universalia”); At the same time, for it there always exists a path of rational comprehension, which for its part is the result of the joint activity of the senses and the intellect: “By the law of his nature, man comes to the intelligible through the sensory, for all our knowledge takes its source in sensory perceptions” (Summa Theologica, I, question 1, paragraph 9. Translated by S. S. Averintsev). The influence of the substantial forms of individual things (universalia in re – “substantial universals”) leads to the formation in the soul of their sensory images-likenesses, from which the natural intellect abstracts the totality of the essential characteristics of material things in the form of general concepts – universals (universalia post res – “post-substantial universals”). In its cognitive activity, the intellect is guided by the first principles that constitute the beginnings of all knowledge, for example, logical laws. These principles virtually pre-exist in the soul, but are finally formed by the intellect only in the process of cognition of sensory things. Since the human mind has no adequate conception of the divine essence identical with existence, a direct proof of the existence of God, which would rely on an analysis of the concept of the most perfect Being contained in the intellect (the “ontological argument” of Anselm of Canterbury), is impossible. However, indirect proofs based on an examination of creatures are possible. Thomas Aquinas formulates five such proofs (Latin: quinque viae, “five ways” or “five proofs”): 1) ex motu, “from movement”; 2) ex ratione efficientis, “from the efficient cause”; 3) ex contingente et necessario, “from necessity and non-necessity”; 4) ex gradibus perfectionis, “from degrees of perfection”; and 5) ex gubernatione rerum, “from the divine guidance of things.”
In the first proof, Thomas proceeds from things that “move” (are displaced, change qualitatively and quantitatively, arise, are destroyed), i.e. thereby strive for the realization of a multitude of diverse potentialities, to the existence of an “eternal motionless Prime Mover,” devoid of any materiality and potentiality; in the second, from the existence of an order or hierarchy of active causes to the existence of a first cause, never conditioned by anything; in the third, from the existence of things capable of acquiring being and losing it (not necessarily existing), to the existence of an absolutely necessary Being; in the fourth, from the existence of degrees of perfection in finite things to the existence of a being that is the cause of all limited perfections; and in the fifth, from final causality in material things to the existence of Reason, responsible for order and well-being in the world. The general line of reasoning here is this: the existence of existing things and of such essential characteristics of them as motion, relative perfection, etc., presupposes that there are causes which determine the existence of both things and the properties inherent in them; the series of causes which generate things and the properties of things must necessarily be limited, since otherwise nothing could ever actually happen; consequently, Thomas concludes, the existence of created things presupposes the existence of some eternal and infinite First Cause, which is, according to the word of Scripture, the omnipotent and unknowable God.
The being of created incorporeal things (primarily angels and the human intellect, i.e. the rational part of the soul) is something considerably more complex and unstable in comparison with the inexplicable divine simplicity of truly existing being, due to the difference between their essence and existence; as for material substances, they are characterized by a double composition: of matter in conjunction with form, and of being combined with “whatness,” i.e. again, essence and existence. In man, the immortal and incorporeal essence—the thinking soul—simultaneously performs the function of form in relation to the mortal body: it imparts existence to the concrete body (“animates” it), having received it previously from God—the pure “activity of being” (Latin actus essendi). Each thing, according to Thomas, has a single form of its being, which determines the entire set of its generic and specific characteristics, i.e. the “whatness” of the substance: “One thing has one substantial being. But substantial being is communicated by a substantial form. Consequently, one thing has only one substantial form” (Summa Theologica, I, question 76, paragraph 4. Translated by S. S. Averintsev). The individual difference of identical things in appearance is determined by the first matter, which Thomas uses as the principle of individuation.
The principle of the real distinction between essence and existence, defended by Thomas, allowed him to abandon the assumption of a plurality of substantial forms in relation to the existence of individual material substances. Thomas’s predecessors, as well as many of his contemporaries (including Bonaventure) did not agree with the doctrine
Aristotle’s idea of the presence of only one substantial form in a single physical thing (from which followed the assertion about the soul as the substantial form of the body), since it was easy to assume from here that with the death of the body the soul would also be destroyed, for form cannot exist without the matter of the whole, of which it is the form (the so-called principle of hylomorphism). In order not to fall into a contradiction, these philosophers were forced to assume that the soul, like the body, is an independent substance consisting of its own form and incorporeal (spiritual) matter, which, accordingly, continues to exist after the disintegration and death of the short-lived mortal nature. As a result of this, it turned out that man, like any thing, since many forms are simultaneously present in it, loses its specific unity, because it turns out to consist of several independent (material) substances. The view of the “act of being” as an “action” and not an “entity” that creates both a single thing and the form of an individual substance allows, according to Thomas, to properly resolve this problem. After the death of the body, the soul remains a substance, but not a physical substance consisting of form and spiritual matter, but an immaterial substance consisting of essence and existence (like angels), and, as a result, does not cease to exist. The uniqueness of the substantial form in man, as in every created substance, explains the unity inherent in each of them.
The crisis that broke out in the 1270s on the general wave of fascination with the physics and metaphysics of Aristotle, which later received the name “Averroist”, was simultaneously a crisis of the entire scholastic medieval culture, since it affected all its main theoretical premises, and first of all the main scholastic postulate, which affirmed the harmony between faith and reason, the truth of Revelation and human rationality. The main representatives of the so-called “Parisian Averroism” in the 13th century. (on behalf of Averroes, the greatest interpreter of Aristotle in the Muslim East, whose texts appeared in Paris no earlier than the 1230s) were two teachers from the faculty of “arts” – Siger of Brabant (c. 1235 / 1240 – between 1281 and 1284; main works: commentaries on the third book of Aristotle’s work “On the Soul”, 1268 / 1269, on “Physics” (books I-IV and VIII) and “Metaphysics” (books II-VII) of Aristotle, 1272 / 1273, as well as treatises “On the Eternity of the World”, “On the Rational Soul”, “On the Necessity and Chance of Causes”, “On the Impossible”, etc., written mainly in 1271 – 1274) and Boethius of Dacia (d. 1284; major works: commentaries on Aristotle’s Topics, Physics, On Generation and Corruption, as well as treatises: On the Means of Designation, 1268-1272, On the Supreme Good, or On the Life of a Philosopher, On Dreams, or On Foreknowledge Obtained in Dreams, and On the Eternity of the World, c. 1270). Among the numerous representatives of “Averroism” who lived in the 14th century, the names of Jean of Gendin (d. 1328) and Marsilius of Padua (d. c. 1342) stand out first and foremost.
The “Averroist crisis” arose from the triple overlap of several aggravated contradictions in the structure of the University of Paris in the mid-13th century: between monasticism and the priesthood (church hierarchs and representatives of monastic orders); between Aristotelians and Augustinians; between philosophers and theologians (teachers of the theological faculty and the faculty of “arts”). Two theses were specifically “Averroist” in the teachings of both masters: 1) on the self-sufficiency of philosophical studies for finding happiness in man’s everyday earthly existence; 2) on the unity of the “potential” intellect in all rational individual substances, i.e. people: the bliss accessible to man on earth lies in unity with the “active” intellect; The rational soul is not connected with the human body by its very being, but only through the action (“act”) performed by it. The teachings of the “Averroists” were subsequently condemned twice: 1) in 1270 (13 theses), in particular, that “the intellect of all people is one in number and is one and the same”; “the will of man desires and makes a choice on the basis of necessity”; “everything that happens in this world is subject to the law of the heavenly bodies”; “the world is eternal”; “God does not know individual things”; “God does not know anything other than Himself”; “human actions are not directed by divine Providence”; 2) in 1277 (219 theses, of which not many can be called specifically “Averroist”), in particular, that “the coming resurrection should not be recognized by a philosopher, since it is impossible to investigate by reason”; “only philosophers are wise in the world”; “there is no better state than the occupation with philosophy”; “chastity in itself is not a virtue”; “total abstinence from carnal deeds is harmful to virtue and the human race”; “the Christian law contains fables and errors, like all other religions”; “the Christian law is an obstacle to science”; “happiness is in this, and not in another life”, and also that “the one First Cause necessarily produces only one thing and that which is directly related to it”, and, as a consequence, “God is not capable of instantly and completely freely producing a multitude of different things”, etc. In the Prologue to the “Condemnation” of 1277, the text of which was compiled by the Parisian bishop Etienne Tempier (d. 1279) on behalf of Pope John XXI (formerly the famous logician Peter of Spain, d. 1277), the theory of “double truth” (duplex veritas) is formulated for the first time, directly addressed to the “Averroists” (not found in the surviving texts of Boethius and Siger): “Indeed, they say that some things are true according to philosophy, but they are not so according to the Catholic faith, as if there were two opposite truths, as if the truth of Holy Scripture could be refuted by the truth of the texts of the pagans, cursed by God himself.” Subsequently, this theory was reduced to a lapidary “symbol of faith” of the “Averroist” philosophers, formulated by their most formidable opponent at the end of the 13th – beginning of the 14th centuries., the renowned logician, mystic, missionary, and religious writer Raymond Lull (c. 1232/1235 – d. c. 1316): “I believe that faith is true, and I understand that it is not true (credo fidem esse veram, et intelligo quod non est vera).”
The Parisian condemnation of 1277 gave rise to a whole series of extremely significant, initially implicit, critical (philosophical) and dogmatic (theological) mutual influences and distinctions at the turn of the 13th and 14th centuries, which became evidence of the crisis of medieval scholastic thought, on the one hand, and the birth of new paths to examining the problems of the world and God, on the other. The affirmation of the principle of the absolute omnipotence of God the Creator, proclaimed in the theses (or, more precisely, “counter-theses”) of the “List” (Latin: Syllabus) of Etienne Tempier, thereby assumed the meaninglessness of any studies of “natural theology” in essence, i.e. judgments about God by analogy with the realized status of the being of created things, and brought to the forefront the doctrine of the division of super-rational divinity (unpredictable and incomprehensible) and the “natural” naturalness of being (calculable by reason and expressed in a general concept), that is, on the one hand, the “theology of Revelation” and a set of separate “natural” disciplines (logic, physics, biology, psychology, etc.).
A new view of the relationship between faith and reason, God and the world, the miracle of salvation and human sophistication was formulated in late scholasticism in the philosophical teachings of two Franciscan theologians – John Duns Scotus (1265/1266-1308; “Doctor subtilis”, “Subtle Doctor”; main works: “Commentary on the “Four Books of Sentences” of Peter Lombard, or “Oxford Work”; “Parisian Communications (reportata)”; “Questions on Aristotle’s Book “On the Soul””; Quaestiones quodlibetales, “Questions on Free Topics”; treatise “On the First Principle”; “Subtlest Questions on Aristotle’s “Metaphysics” and others) and William of Ockham (c. 1285-1347; “Venerabilis” inceptor», «Venerable Beginner»; major works: «Commentary on the «Four Books of Sentences» of Peter Lombard», 1317-1322; «Code of the Whole Logic», 1319/1320 — not earlier than the beginning. 1340s; «Commentary on the «Physics» of Aristotle», 1321-1323; «Treatise on Predestination and God’s Foreknowledge of Future Unnecessary Events», before 1323; Quodlibeta (i.e. «Questions on Free Topics»), before 1323; «The Work of Ninety Days», c. 1331; «Dialogue between Teacher and Student», 1334-1338; «Breviloquium», 1342; “On Imperial and Papal Authority”, ca. 1347, etc.).
According to Duns Scotus, the first natural object of the mind, and therefore the subject of philosophical science, is not the form of a material substance, as Thomas Aquinas believed, and not God as the Supreme Being, as, for example, Henry of Ghent believed, but “being as such” (Latin ens qua ens), since it is precisely this object that the human mind is capable of, on the one hand, adequately and primarily comprehending (the essence of God is incomprehensible) and, on the other hand, through its comprehension, gradually discerning the essence of any created things – material and not such (the soul, incorporeal angels, etc.).
Duns Scotus regards the human mind as one of the faculties of the cognitive soul, to which any other faculty can be brought into correspondence, for example, visual perception: everything that a person sees before him, he sees insofar as it has a certain color, or, in other words, insofar as any color is an adequate object of the faculty of seeing with the eyes, it allows the soul to distinguish all bodies possessing this characteristic, while colorless entities remain indistinguishable for sight. What color is in relation to visual perception, “being as such” represents for our faculty of seeing with the mind: everything that is being is intelligible, and everything that is not so is incomprehensible to our mind. At the same time, Duns Scotus believes, the human mind can know about being only what it abstracts from the totality of sensory data: it does not have access to direct knowledge of “being in general”, without any additional determinations (just as the eye is not able to catch “color as such”); he is only capable of cognizing a certain being that belongs to a multitude of individual finite things together with the essential and accidental characteristics inherent in them by nature.
Thus, the fundamental point in Scotus’ philosophy is the doctrine of the “univocation” of being (existence) (Latin univocatio – “uniqueness”). This doctrine assumes that, in accordance with the definition of the first object of the human mind, every thing can be known by virtue of the fact that it is existing – both God and created things. Philosophy begins with the abstract concept of “being”, equally applicable to both the Creator and the creations, and proceeds from it proves the existence of God as an infinite being, since it is precisely the characteristic of infinity that, according to Scotus, is the closest property of the one and omnipotent God. Unlike finite things, the existence of which is accidental, or, more precisely, is not necessary (since they can exist or exist), and derivative, i.e., thereby conditioned by a higher cause, infinite being has a necessary existence (it cannot not exist), it is causeless and serves as the First Principle of the existence of all finite things. According to Scotus, only individual things exist in reality (substantially); forms and essences (whatnesses) also exist, but not in reality, but exclusively in the form of objects of the divine Mind. He calls these essences the “natures” (Latin: natura) of created things, which as such are neither individual nor, on the other hand, universal, but precede the existence of both the general and the individual. Thus, for example, Duns Scotus reasons, if the essence (nature) of some horse were individual, then there would be only this one horse; and if the essence were universal, then there would be no horses at all, since one cannot derive the individual from the general and, conversely, the general from the individual.
The existence of individual things is possible due to the addition of a special feature to the “whatness” “nature” of things — “thisness” (Latin haecceitas), which transforms a given thing into precisely “this” substance and unlike any other. “Thisness,” being an addition to “whatness,” as it were “compresses” it; the essence (form, “nature”) of a substance for this reason loses its divisibility. In conjunction with “thisness,” “whatness,” according to Scotus, ceases to be inherent in a specific set of individuals of a separate genus and species and turns into a proper characteristic of a given specific individual substance. “Thisness” is added to the “general nature” of things not as an additional feature to those already present; a thing does not consist of “thisness” and “nature” as a whole of two parts. The addition of “thisness” means a change in the mode of existence of the “general nature” (essence, form, idea) of an individual substance: it receives real existence. “Thisness” is the “act of being” that transforms the form of a substance into the unique characteristic of a separate individual. The beginning that makes something an individual “should not be understood as a new form, but rather as the final realization of the form” (Oxford Essay, I, section 3, part 1, question 6, paragraph 12).
Duns Scotus radically reconsiders the relationship between the general and the individual. In his teaching, individuals are endowed with a more perfect being than genera and species. Individuality, according to Scotus, is equivalent to the highest and final perfection with which a thing is endowed, receiving existence in the act of divine creation. Only by being an individual does a thing become truly existing. Abstraction in the process of cognition of identical essences, or “natures” that characterize individuals of a certain species and genus, from the individual features of these things is accompanied by the transformation of these “natures” into universals (general concepts).
The definition of the status of being of universal concepts as designating something that has actually been realized (i.e., the “nature” of a single substance), but is not a substance, allows us to consider this teaching as a variant of medieval conceptualism. Duns Scotus’s theory of knowledge is characterized by a sharp opposition between intuitive and abstract methods of comprehension. The object of intuitive cognition is the individual, perceived as existing, while the object of abstract cognition is the general, i.e., the “nature” of a single thing. Only the first type of cognition provides the opportunity for direct interaction with something that actually exists — with “being as such.” By its nature, the human intellect has the ability for intuitive comprehension, but in its everyday, “present” state it is limited to the sphere of abstract knowledge. That is why, Duns Scotus asserts, the only kind of unique being that we, people, comprehend directly is the sensory being of individual things. God creates the world by creating individuals. The act of creation of an individual cannot be carried out by divine Reason in accordance with the rigid order of universal concepts: the unique “this” is not subject in its own being to any established stereotypes. Only the free will of the infinite God is capable of creating the unique “thisness” of a single substance. “The will commands the mind,” writes Duns Scotus (Oxford Essay, IV, section 6, question 11, paragraph 4); “the meaning of their difference is that the mind is moved by a certain object by natural necessity, but the will moves itself freely” (Quaestiones quodlibetales, question 16, paragraph 6).
In the act of creation, the will of the Creator makes a choice from an infinite number of compatible possibilities of future realizations of the “common natures” of individual substances. These “natures” in the divine Intellect, i.e. the eternal identity of perfect divine plans, or ideas, differ from each other not really (like the existing things of the created world, which exist in the form of different substances), but purely formally (Latin distinctio formalis – “formal difference”), i.e. from the standpoint of the formal definition of the status of being of the “common nature” realized in material reality. In exactly the same way, will and reason, perfect attributes (omnipotence, goodness, foresight, etc.) and Persons of the divine Trinity are “formally different” in God; with regard to created things, these are primarily will and reason as the two fundamental faculties of the individual soul, as well as the “whatness” and “thisness” of material substances. Since the will of the Creator, Duns Scotus believes, is absolutely free, the choice He makes of compatible possibilities as properties of individual things is completely random, or, more precisely, “not necessary.” The omnipotence of God has no limits: “Everything that does not contain an obvious contradiction is possible for the omnipotence of God”; “therefore I affirm that God can make one and the same body placed in many places, just as He can create two bodies in the same place; and if there were no other reason for this than that the arguments to the contrary could be refuted, it should not be considered impossible for God, for God can do many things which we cannot understand” (Paris Communications, section 10, question 3, paragraph 13-14. Translated by G. G. Mayorov). God, who arbitrarily creates the visible world, just like all His primary attributes – absolute omnipotence, infinity, etc. (“formally” different, but at the same time identical in essence), are incomprehensible to a mortal human being – this is precisely, according to Scotus, the limitation and poverty of theoretical wisdom (i.e., “natural theology”). The most complete knowledge of the essence of God the Creator (“God is Love”) is attainable not by reason, but by the practice of faith, which anticipates reason in knowledge and in thinking, and constitutes the content of the highest practical wisdom (i.e., thereby the “theology of Revelation”).
With regard to the status of the being of universal concepts, Duns Scotus believed that if species and genera of things were only products of our thinking mind, not related to the being of individual substances, then there would be no difference between “natural theology,” which studies “being,” and the formal-logical discipline whose object is concepts. Moreover, “all knowledge would be simply logic (omnis scientia esset logica).” To avoid this conclusion, Scotus insisted on the indifference of “whatness” to the ontological characteristics of universality and individuality, but in fact assumed the presence of both in it. It turned out, according to Scotus, that the concepts of genus and species are a product of the intellect, but at the same time essentially connected with the being of individual things.
A completely different point of view on the nature of concepts and their relation to being was held by the nominalist William of Ockham, for whom any positive knowledge was first and foremost logic. The subordinate nature of metaphysical research in relation to logic and logical problems in general was expressed in Ockham’s definition of the famous principle – the so-called “Ockham’s razor”: “Entities should not be multiplied without necessity (Entia non sunt multiplicanda sine necessitate)”, or, in other words: “Plurality should not be admitted without necessity (Pluralitas non est ponenda sine necessitate)”. For Ockham, Christian philosophy is such that the God of Revelation cannot be in the proper sense the subject of its study, since God is absolutely free and completely incomprehensible, while the connection between God and the world is neither obvious nor provable. Natural reason, according to Ockham, cannot prove that God is omnipotent, nor that He is one, nor that He is the eternal Creator of the universe; all such facts are a matter of faith alone, and reason is capable only of proving the inconsistency of alternative judgments: without faith, human reason, according to Ockham, remains in ignorance of its Creator. The cognition of created things by reason in no way contributes to the understanding of the properties of the existence of the eternal Essence of the life-giving God, since God is absolutely not connected with any thing besides Him, or, more precisely, He is connected with things by means of free divine will, which deliberately rejects the unconditional order of necessary causes. Anything can follow anything if God wishes something to happen, i.e., to occur freely. In this sense, the only sphere of human knowledge is the experience of constantly occurring individual things, since natural reason is capable of discerning the logic of the origin of all things and events only at the moments of their arbitrary occurrence. If Duns Scotus believed that the will of God the Creator is free only in choosing compatible possibilities (i.e. ideas) of individual substances, then, according to Ockham, God is so free that in the act of creation He is not limited by anything, not even by the objects of His Mind. Ockham denies the existence of universals in the divine Intellect and, accordingly, rejects their significance as proper characteristics of individual things.
All “ideas”, according to Ockham, are essentially individual things themselves, produced by God in an act of free creativity, not conditioned by anything. There are no ideas of species (“animal”, “man”), there are only ideas of individual things (“this animal” or “this man”), since the latter, in the proper sense, constitute the reality of the material world of created being. An individual thing cannot be known with the help of general concepts; it is an object of contemplation in sensory experience, always limited, but claiming immediacy and reliability. Intuitive knowledge precedes abstract. Concepts are formed in the mind of the cognizing subject on the basis of sensory perception of things. Universals (characteristics of the genus and type of things) are, according to Ockham, certain “signs” in our mind, which as such are not universal, but individual entities. The main concepts of Ockham’s logic are the categories of “designation” (Latin: significatio) and “substitution” (Latin: suppositio). “Designation” is the case when a certain sign either directly indicates or indirectly refers to the existence of something different from itself. Designating terms can be either natural or mental (representations, images of individual things), or conventional or linguistic (words and verbal expressions). Natural signs always precede conventional (linguistic) signs.
The use of the expression “mental sign” allowed Ockham to depart from the concept of the radical nominalism of Roscelin of Compiègne, who believed that the concepts of genus and species are only the sound, or meaningless echo (flatus vocis), of the words of colloquial or natural language. Ockham, on the contrary, insisted that the evidence of language is insufficient to explain the origin of general concepts, since the meanings of these concepts are not reducible to words, either written or spoken. These terms are ideas about things that are beyond the mind, both divine and human. The “naturalness” of universal concepts is expressed in the fact that they have the ability to mean the same thing under all circumstances: for example, laughter, which is a sign of joy, or a groan, which is a sign of pain, is natural. The general significance of these ideas lies not in their being, but in their signifying function. A natural sign is a kind of “invention” or “fiction” of the mind (Latin: fictum), that is, in other words, a unique quality located in the mind and endowed by nature with the ability to designate something.
Ockham distinguishes among natural signs the so-called “intentions” of the human mind (Latin intentio – “attention”, “direction”) – primary and secondary. The primary “intention” is a concept (a mental image of a substance), naturally adapted to serve as a substitute for a thing (in the mind), which, according to Ockham, is not a sign. Secondary “intentions” are concepts denoting primary ones. The theory of “sup-positions” (i.e. logical “substitutions” of concepts) was supposed to explain, according to Ockham’s teaching, the validity of using general concepts in the sphere of natural language simultaneously with the denial of the fact of the real existence of universals. Ockham distinguishes three types of “suppositions”: material (suppositio materialis), personal (suppositio personalis) and simple (suppositio simplex). Only a personal “supposition” designates, “substituting” for a real thing in the intellect, i.e. for something singular. In the case of a personal “supposition” the linguistic term designates real things, since it substitutes for a mental term which designates all things in a natural way. Thus, for example, in the sentence “man is an animal” the linguistic term “man” refers to a mental term which naturally refers to or refers to people who are outside the mind. In the other two “substitutions” the natural term (universal) does not designate anything. For example, in the statement “man is a noun” the linguistic term “man” does not designate a specific person, but designates only the noun “man”, i.e. it refers to itself as a conventional term – this is a case of material “supposition”. In a simple “substitution” the conventional term is, as a rule, substituted for a concept in the human intellect, and not for a specific substance. The natural language term “man” in the statement “man is a species”, according to Ockham, does not mean any general (universal) essence of man; it “replaces” the species concept “man”, which is present only in the mind of the cognizing subject. The absence of the general in individual things excludes the real existence of relations between things, as well as any universal patterns. Since knowledge of the universe is formed on the basis of vague (meaningless) universal concepts, then the attainment of truth in the matter of knowing God and the world, the purpose of the existence of individual things and the fate of man, according to Ockham, is impossible, and progress towards it – by means of reason – is beyond our power.
In the nominalism of Ockham (as well as his immediate followers – Nicholas of Autrecourt, c. 1300 – after 1350; Jean of Mirecourt, 1310/1315 – after 1347; Jean Buridan, c. 1295 – c. 1358; Nicolas Oresme (c. 1323 / 1325 – 1382, etc.) the fundamental premise of scholastic philosophy was refuted – the conviction of the rational structure of the created universe, of the existence of the original eternal harmony of word and thing, thought and being. The ontology of the world and the logic of being began to differ from now on consistently: only the one and at the same time inexpressible in the concept “this” is endowed with independent existence, while the semantic definitions of individual substances, i.e. the concepts of genus and species, are declared in nominalism to be “fiction reason.” Since the material characteristics of being are no longer connected with the semantic content of words of natural language, the scholastic study of being, based on the analysis of words and meanings, becomes pointless and empty. The victory of moderate nominalism (Ockhamism) in the 14th century marks the end of medieval scholastic philosophy.
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