A Beginner's History of Philosophy, Vol. 1: Ancient and Mediæval Philosophy

by Herbert Ernest Cushman

The General Character of the Early Period. It is no accident that these five hundred years of the Middle Ages were spiritualistic. Both the political disturbances and the intellectual inheritance from the Hellenic-Roman period made the period such. The troubles during the long death agony of the Roman empire had deprived the people of their interest in this world. The world of kingdoms and material things presented no ideals; and the age would have been pessimistic had not the Church through Augustine presented a heavenly ideal and the means to win that ideal. Both what the material world had taken away from man and what the spiritual seemed to offer him, made the age an age of faith. The principle of inner spirituality was moved to a central position. All things pointed to the supernatural and the transcendent. Men dwelt upon the nature of God, the number and rank of the angels, the salvation of the soul. In this, as in the Transitional Period following, little was known of Aristotle except some fragments of his logic; and little was known of Plato except in the form of neo-Platonism. But in this period (before the year 1000) the pupil was instructed in both Aristotle and Plato, and held them both together without controversy. Mysticism had little independence of church doctrine, as appears in the case of Erigena, the consequences of whose doctrine were not at first seen. The monastery became the fundamentalsocial organization and the central social force. Organized ascetic life permitted an absorbing contemplation of heaven. Prayer superseded thought; faith prescribed knowledge. The intellectual world was dominated by neo-Platonic idealism, and the all-important topic in men’s minds was that of God’s grace. Augustine stood at the beginning of the period and organized its conception of grace for it. Erigena stood near the end and stated the neo-Platonism of the period in extreme form, presenting the issue for the scholasticism of the many years to come. The presentation of the doctrine of these two men will therefore be the philosophical exemplification of the attitude of the time.

MEDIÆVAL GEOGRAPHY. THE COSMAS MAP, A. D. 547

From J. Keane’s Evolution of Geography

(Cosmas was an Egyptian monk who had once been a merchant and traveler. He did not use the records of his own travels to supplement the Greek and Roman plans, but he laid down as a fact that the earth is flat. Then he piously adduced evidence from the Scriptures to support his view. The maps drawn by Cosmas are the earliest Christian maps that have survived. Their crudeness, compared with the maps of the Romans and Arabs, reveals the low state of knowledge among the Christians.)

The Historical Position of Augustine. The Middle Ages were inaugurated by a mind of the highest order,—Augustine.[49] If one were to select the most influential figures in the history of philosophy, Augustine might be chosen to stand with Plato, Aristotle, Spinoza, and Kant.“In some respects Augustine stands nearer to us than Hegel and Schopenhauer.”[50] For the church, but no less for the period, it was a fortunate circumstance that Augustine should have lived just as antiquity was closing and the mediæval period beginning. Through him the various influences of the past were gathered up and presented in a scientific statement for the Middle Ages. “The history of piety and of dogma in the West was so thoroughly dominated by Augustine from the beginning of the fifth century to the era of the Reformation,that we must take this whole time as forming one period.”[51]

In his relation to antiquity Augustine drew especially upon the fundamental teachings of St. Paul, the neo-Platonists, and the Patristics for the presentation of his own doctrine. He was familiar with a great number of the doctrines of antiquity, and was the medium of their transmission to the Middle Ages. He does not seem to have known the system of Aristotle, but the importance which he attached to the dialectic in the explanation of the Scriptures contributed a good deal to the use of the logic of Aristotle by the scholastics of the Middle Ages. He had some knowledge of the Pythagoreans, the Stoics, and the Epicureans through the writings of Cicero. But the most important philosophical influence uponAugustine was the neo-Platonic teaching of Plotinus and Porphyry. Neo-Platonism, the Pauline theology, and the Patristic are the large factors in the doctrine of Augustine.

In his relation to the Middle Ages, what in brief was the position of Augustine?By means of neo-Platonism and a discriminating psychological analysis he transformed the previous belief in God as a judge into a belief in the personal relations between God and man. That is to say, he carried out monotheism spiritually, and in doing this the influence of neo-Platonism is very strong in him. Augustine made one of the centres of his teaching the living relation of the soul to God. He took religion out of the sphere of cosmological science, where it had been placed by Origen and the Gnostics, and made it personal. Furthermore, he offered with this new ideal a plan of salvation; for Augustine made it his task to show (1) what God is, and (2) what the salvation of the soul requires. Whereas before Augustine the only dogmatic scheme had presented the place and function of Christ in salvation, Augustine was interested in the place of man in salvation. Thus he elaborated monotheism into spiritual monotheism and delineated the inward processes of the Christian life, i. e. of sin and grace. This important advance made by Augustine must be attributed to the influence of philosophy—neo-Platonism—upon him.

But it must not be supposed that the total teaching of Augustine and the total influence of his thought is contained in this single change in Christian piety, as we have stated it. The various Pagan and Christian elements, as they lie in his system, have little coherence; and Augustine does not settle the rival claims betweenthem. As the mediæval period advanced, what in his teaching had been a mere incoherence became in the hands of others positive discord. He gave the church impulses of the highest spiritual quality, but he left no well-organized capital. These impulses toward spiritual piety have never been lost, but the profusion of ideas and views in Augustine, unharmonized by himself, were also a permanent bequest to posterity that produced both vital movements and violent controversies. The legal and moral party of the church resisted his teaching at the beginning, and in the sixth century, under the influence of Gregory the Great, toned down Augustine’s teaching in the direction of a conception of the church as a juristic organization.

Augustine was thus the beginner of a new line of development by his incorporation of neo-Platonism into Christian doctrine and by his use of the dialectic to present, defend, and develop the doctrine of the church. Although the years of his life fall in antiquity, although he is the collector of all the threads of the neo-Platonic and Christian religions, he belongs in the Middle Ages as the teacher of the Middle Ages. His doctrine acted as an authoritative spiritual guide for the new German peoples. They took up the problems of antiquity from the new point of view of individual spirituality, and created out of them the philosophy of the future. But philosophically Augustine was far in advance of his age, and in the intellectually torpid times that followed him little philosophical development could be expected. Not until after Charlemagne does philosophical development springing from Augustine appear. Later Luther and the Reformation reverted to him, and our modern philosophy is founded on the principle which he made central in his conception of piety.