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

by Herbert Ernest Cushman

The Authority of the Church according to Augustine. With the fall of ancient Rome, the church was hard pressed, for the young peoples who came into the church were Arian and the only German Catholic nation was the Franks. Augustine was a man of vigor, but he seemed to lack the peculiar power of forcing the church to adopt as dogma the truths for which he stood. He always submitted himself absolutely to the tradition of the church, and yet in a general way he accomplished two things for the church at large: (1) He established tradition as the authority and law of the church; (2) He offered the church a scientifically constructed plan of salvation.

There now appears in Augustine’s teaching the second centre around which the masses of his thought group themselves. This is his conception of the church in its authority and law. Here is the principle of universality—and historical universality—and it runs counter to the principle of spiritual individualism which his psychological analysis had built up. Augustine is just as vigorous a champion of the idea of the church as the means to salvation as he is champion of the individualcertainty of truth. The two antithetical propositions lie together in his mind. As a pietist, he was an individualist; as a priest, he was a loyal subject to dogma. We have discussed his teaching as it centred about man; now the discussion centres about God as represented by His church. In practical life the will of man is important, but in the eternal life the central influence is the grace of God. Between the will of man and the grace of God there is a chasm. This is felt the more by Augustine, and the necessity of a God-centred doctrine seems the greater, when he beholds the contrast between the perfectness of God and the evil world of men. Evil now appears to him as a great stream flowing through the world. Humanity is by nature void of God. Theoretically man is free, but in the actual world he is chained to his senses and to sin. Adam, the first man, alone could have possessed freedom; but Adam in his freedom sinned, and his sin was that of the whole human race. Sin is therefore original to all men now living, and no man personally deserves salvation, however meritorious his conduct. Moreover, as the result of Adam’s sin, all men would be damned were it not for the grace of God. The God-man by death brought power to replenish empty humanity with divine love. Divine love is the beginning, middle, and end of salvation. Out of this love God has sent His Son and founded His church. Universal man died, and only universal man can save. Belief in Christ is the only means of salvation, yet belief in Christ comes only by God’s grace, and divine grace is not conditioned on human worthiness. Thus it is only by grace even now that man is saved; and no injustice would be done to men were all damned. On the other hand, divinejustice demands that some men at least should be excluded from salvation in order that the punishment for Adam’s sin be permanently maintained. The choice of the favored ones depends entirely upon the unsearchable decree of God. These are elected as monuments of His loving grace, while the others are elected to be damned as monuments of His justice. The apparent calamity to the majority of mankind only shows the goodness of God the more. For, in the first place, evil is not positive like the good. It is only negative and primitive—the absence of the good. The condemnation of the wicked is therefore no defect in this theocratic system. In the second place, the wicked only receive justice, for the salvation of only a few is a gratuitous act of love, which testifies to God’s mercy. But, after all, it is the integrity of the whole spiritual imperial government of God that is the important thing to consider. The King is law and goodness, and all His subjects are testimonies of His magnificent power.

The Dark Ages (476–800). The traditional estimate of the Middle Ages as altogether “dark” has been revised by modern scholars. The period now called the Dark Ages has been restricted to the three hundred years between the fall of old Rome (476) and the founding of the empire by Charlemagne (800). Moreover, it is now thought that even in that period the intellectual conditions were better in Italy than north of the Alps. In northern Italy the lay teacher seems always to have existed; and education never to have fallen entirely into the hands of the monastery as it did in northern Europe between 800 and 1000. After 800 the content of education north and south of the Alps seems to have been different. Everywhere, to be sure,education was comprised by the “seven liberal arts,” but the emphasis in the two regions was different. North of the Alps the dialectic was made important, and theology and logic flourished. In Italy the emphasis was upon grammar and rhetoric, and “literary Paganism” was always kept alive. Thus, when the revival came in 1200, it appeared in the form of theological controversy north of the Alps, while in Italy in the form of legal science. The analysis in the summary of the Middle Ages given above (see p. [330]) applies more truthfully to the northern countries than to Italy. At the same time it is more pertinent to the history of thought, for in these northern regions, especially at Paris, mediæval philosophy was developed.

Nevertheless, it is easy for the modern scholar to go too far in trying to play fair with the Middle Ages. The first three centuries of this time were a Dark Age everywhere in Europe. Wave after wave of barbarian invasion swept over the land. It is not so much a matter of surprise that four hundred years lie between the first two philosophers,—but the matter of surprise is that there were any philosophical fruits whatever. In this respect the year 529 is significant—significant both in pointing backward to ancient culture and also in pointing forward to the feeble effort to retain some of that culture. In 529 Justinian abolished the philosophical Schools at Athens; in 529 also, St. Benedict founded his monastic school at Monte Cassino (near Naples). These two events stand for the death of antiquity and the birth of mediæval life. In this beginning of the monastic movement by St. Benedict in western Europe was lodged, as it turned out, the hope of education for the mediæval man. During the twohundred years between the year 800 and the year 1000 mediæval education was entirely in the hands of the monks.

The Revival of Charlemagne (800–900). The darkness of the Early Period of the Middle Ages is broken by the somewhat abortive renaissance of Charlemagne. Connected with this revival is the name of John Scotus Erigena (810–880). Note that during these five hundred years there are only two notable philosophers, Augustine and Erigena. Note that a span of four hundred years lies between them. Also note that the first philosopher, Augustine, was a Roman and the second, Erigena, was an Irishman. Thereby hangs a tale. During all those long centuries of the Dark Ages after Augustine and until Charlemagne, the light of science shone scarcely in northwestern Europe. In the whole western hemisphere there were only three places where learning prospered: one was in the far east, among the Arabians; another was at Constantinople; the third was in the far west, in Britain. Thus it was from Britain that Charlemagne had to call his educators, Alcuin and Clement, to promote learning among the Franks; and it was from Britain, too, that his successor, Charles the Bald, called the Irishman, Erigena, for the same purpose. During the renaissance of the great Charles and his successors, Irish scholars could be found in every monastery and cathedral in the empire. The teaching was soon called the “Irish learning.” Still it must be said in qualification that the renaissance at the court of Charlemagne was a rather childish attempt to unite antiquity with theology. Excepting in the case of Scotus Erigena, the revival was very feeble. It consisted of a new effort to understand Augustine, to master thesimplest rules of logic, and to think out dogma by means of Hellenism. The period from 800 to 1000 is called the Benedictine Age, because learning was entirely in the hands of the Benedictine monks. From the impulse given by the Irish scholars many celebrated monastic and cathedral schools originated, like those of Tours, Fulda, Rheims, Chartres, and the school at Paris. From the many monastic schools emerge the names of Alcuin of York, Rhabanus Maurus of Fulda, and Gerbert at Rheims. But among these scholars the only one of philosophical importance is John Scotus Erigena.

John Scotus Erigena (810–880): Life and Teaching. When his contemporaries were only lisping at philosophy and his immediate successors were absorbed in disconnected problems, Erigena worked out a connected system. Like Augustine, Erigena stood far in advance of his age. He was not only the one great thinker of the revival of Charlemagne, but he was one of the most remarkable personalities of the Middle Ages. Born in Ireland, he had the benefit of an education in the schools of that centre of learning, which he could not have obtained on the continent of Europe. In 853 he was called by Charles the Bald to carry on the work begun by Alcuin under Charlemagne. Three centuries after his death the church condemned him as a heretic (1209) on account of his writings on predestination and transubstantiation. His learning was so great that he has been called “the Origen of the North.” He read Greek, and this was a rare accomplishment in those days, for even Alcuin scarcely knew the Greek alphabet. His most notable original work is De Divisione Naturae, which was neo-Platonism in Christian dress. His most influential work was his translation of the pseudo-Dionysius,the Areopagite. It proved, in fact, to be one of the most influential books of this period, and was instrumental on account of its large circulation in propagating neo-Platonism in the Middle Ages.

Erigena was neither a scholastic nor a dialectical theologian. He neither assailed nor defended church doctrine. He calmly pushed neo-Platonism to the borders of pantheism. He was an Irishman with a Greek mind, a neo-Platonist under the veil of a Christian mystic. No churchman ever expressed neo-Platonism so frankly. The writings from which Erigena got his doctrine are called the Pseudo-Dionysius writings because the authorship was falsely attributed to a companion of St. Paul, Dionysius the Areopagite. They were, however, probably written in the fifth century, for they are essentially neo-Platonic and border on pantheism. Erigena translated them at the request of Charles the Bald, and their appearance produced great astonishment in Europe (858–860). Erigena’s own work, De Divisione Naturae, is an extreme pantheistic statement of the doctrine in the Pseudo-Dionysius. Briefly stated Erigena’s teaching is as follows. God is an incomprehensible being and can be described only in negative terms (negative theology). (See chapter on Philo.) God is the same as Being or Nature, and He unfolds Himself as a fourfold series. These are: God, the world in God, the world outside God, God after the world has returned to Him. God contains in Himself through the Logos all the primordial types of things formed before creation. Creation is the logical unfolding of particulars from the universal. Immortality consists in the particulars again becoming universal. In the types of things God is creating Himself, and theyare graded from God down to concrete objects. But all will finally return to God, and Erigena thought he found analogies of this return everywhere in nature.

The Greek Principle which Erigena formulated for the Middle Ages. These details of the teaching of Erigena are unimportant except as they throw light upon that Greek underlying principle which he formulated for the Middle Ages. The Real is the Universal. The more universal a thing is, the more real and therefore the more perfect it is. If we have an idea of a universal, that universal has existence because it is universal. The idea of God is universal, therefore God exists. The idea of the world is a universal, but not so universal as the idea of God, and therefore not so surely existent. But the idea of the world has more reality than the idea of a tree. Mediæval philosophy becomes from this time on a logical theism. In the case of Erigena it is a logical pantheism. The world is a logical mosaic. Real dependence is logical dependence, and what we in modern times call the causes and effects between natural objects are regarded by the Middle Ages as sufficiently explained if put in logical arrangement. This is the core of mediæval thinking, and the student will fail to understand the civilization of the Middle Ages unless he grasps this central principle.

But this realizing of the logical universal is Greek and betrays the fundamentally Greek character of mediæval civilization. The objective spiritual church has merely taken the place of objective nature. Mediæval history is a conflict between Greek universalism and the Christian conception of the individual. In Erigena the Greek element appeared in overwhelming dominance. Erigena is a smaller Augustine—Augustineuncontrolled by great masses of thought and uninspired by practical ideals of building up the church. Erigena is a “belated Gnostic.” Why was it that his neo-Platonic pantheism did not overcome entirely the individualistic element in Christian dogma? Why, on the contrary, did it bring out far-reaching issues of conflict when a century later the significance of his teaching was understood? Because inherently and fundamentally in the nature of the German peoples, as appearing in their customs and laws, was the conviction of the rights of the individual personality. In the teaching of the Christian fathers the element of the spiritual personality found a deep echo in the German nature. The German could tolerate and did actually live under the later church doctrine of a moderate realism; but the measured calm of the Greek pantheistic conception of Erigena deprived the German of all his inherited ideals. Thus when intellectual activity was aroused a century later, the conflict became hot over the issue in Erigena’s doctrine. Erigena was the forerunner of the scholastics. It was he who tossed the apple of discord among the thinkers of the Middle Ages.

The Last Century of the Early Period (900–1000). The century following Erigena was one of demoralization. All learning declined with the renewed invasions from the north, east, and west. The empire of Charlemagne was broken up and the Papacy temporarily disappeared. There is a persistent tradition that the Christians at this time believed the end of the world to be near. This has been proved to be a legend, but back of it lies the truth that there was a fresh rise of piety which lasted until 1300. With this movement we enter upon the next period of the Middle Ages.