Initiation into Philosophy Part 3

CHAPTER I

FROM THE FIFTH CENTURY TO THE THIRTEENTH

Philosophy is only an Interpreter of Dogma.

When it is Declared Contrary to Dogma by the Authority of Religion, it is a Heresy.

Orthodox and Heterodox Interpretations.

Some Independent Philosophers.

DOGMA.--After the invasion of the barbarians, philosophy, like literature, sought refuge in monasteries and in the schools which prelates inst.i.tuted and maintained near them. But the Church does not permit the free search for truth. The truth has been established by the Fathers of the Church and fixed by the Councils. Thenceforth the philosophic life, so to speak, which had never been interrupted, a.s.sumed a fresh character. Within the Church it sheltered--I will not say disguised--itself under the interpretation of dogma; it became a sort of respectful auxiliary of theology, and was accordingly called the "handmaid of theology," _ancilla theologiae_. When emanc.i.p.ated, when departing from dogma, it is a "heresy," and all the great heresies are nothing else than schools of philosophy, which is why heresies must come into a history of philosophy. And at last, but only towards the close of the Middle Ages, lay thought without disturbing itself about dogma and no longer thinking about its interpretation, created philosophic doctrines exactly as the philosophers of antiquity invented them apart from religion, to which they were either hostile or indifferent.

SCHOLASTICISM: SCOTUS ERIGENA.--The orthodox philosophy of the Middle Ages was the scholastic. Scholasticism consisted in ama.s.sing and in making known scientific facts and matters of knowledge of which it was useful for a well-bred man not to be ignorant and for this purpose encyclopaedias were constructed; on the other hand, it consisted not precisely in the reconciliation of faith with reason, not precisely and far less in the submission of faith to the criticism of reason, but in making faith sensible to reason, as had been the office of the Fathers of the Church, more especially St. Augustine.

Scotus Erigena, a Scotsman attached to the Palatine Academy of Charles the Bald, lived in the eleventh century. He was extremely learned. His philosophy was Platonic, or rather the bent of his mind was Platonic. G.o.d is the absolute Being; He is unnamable, since any name is a delimitation of the being; He _is_ absolutely and infinitely. As the creator of all and uncreated, He is the cause _per se_; as the goal to which all things tend, He is the supreme end. The human soul is of impenetrable essence like G.o.d Himself; accordingly, it is G.o.d in us. We have fallen through the body and, whilst in the flesh, we can, by virtue and more especially by the virtue of penitence, raise ourselves to the height of the angels. The world is the continuous creation of G.o.d. It must not be said that G.o.d created the world, but that He creates it; for if He ceased from sustaining it, the world would no longer exist. G.o.d is perpetual creation and perpetual attraction. He draws all beings to Himself, and in the end He will have them all in Himself. There is predestination to perfection in everything.

These theories, some of which, as has been seen, go beyond dogma and form at least the beginning of heresy, are all impregnated with Platonism, especially with Neoplatonism, and lead to the supposition that Scotus Erigena possessed very wide Greek learning.

ARABIAN SCIENCE.--A great literary and philosophical fact in the eighth century was the invasion of the Arabs. Mahometans successively invaded Syria, Persia, Africa, and Spain, forming a crescent, the two points of which touched the two extremities of Europe. Inquisitive and sagacious pupils of the Greeks in Africa and Asia, they founded everywhere brilliant universities which rapidly acquired renown (Bagdad, Ba.s.sorah, Cordova, Granada, Seville, Murcia) and brought to Europe a new quota of science; for instance, all the works of Aristotle, of which Western Europe possessed practically nothing. Students greedy for knowledge came to learn from them in Spain; for instance, Gerbert, who developed into a man of great learning, who taught at Rheims and became Pope. Individually the Arabs were often great philosophers, and at least the names must be mentioned of Avicenna (a Neoplatonist of the tenth century) and Averroes (an Aristotelian of the twelfth century who betrayed tendencies towards admitting the eternity of nature, and its evolution through its own initiative during the course of time). Their doctrines were propagated, and the ancient books which they made known became widely diffused. From them dates the sway of Aristotle throughout the middle ages.

ST. ANSELM.--St. Anselm, in the eleventh century, a Savoyard, who was long Abbot of Bec in Normandy and died Archbishop of Canterbury, is one of the most ill.u.s.trious doctors of philosophy in the service of theology that ever lived. "A new St. Augustine" (as he has been called), he starts from faith to arrive at faith after it has been rendered sensible to reason. Like St. Augustine he says: "I believe in order to understand"

(well persuaded that if I never believed I should never understand), and he adds what had been in the thought of St. Augustine: "I understand in order to believe." St. Anselm proved the existence of G.o.d by the most abstract arguments. For example, "It is necessary to have a cause, one or multiple; one is G.o.d; multiple, it can be derived from one single cause, and that one cause is G.o.d; it can be a particular cause in each thing caused; but then it is necessary to suppose a personal force which must itself have a cause and thus we work back to a common cause, that is to say to a single one."

He proved G.o.d again by the proof which has remained famous under the name of the argument of St. Anselm: To conceive G.o.d is to prove that He is; the conception of G.o.d is proof of His existence; for every idea has its object; above all, an idea which has infinity for object takes for granted the existence of infinity; for all being finite here below, what would give the idea of infinity to the human mind? Therefore, if the human brain has the idea of infinity it is because of the existence of infinity. The argument is perhaps open to difference of opinion, but as proof of a singular vigour of mind on the part of its author, it is indisputable.

Highly intellectual also is his explanation of the necessity of redemption. _Cur Deus h.o.m.o?_ (the t.i.tle of one of his works) asked St. Anselm. Because sin in relation to an infinite G.o.d is an infinite crime. Man, finite and limited in capacity, could therefore never expiate it. Then what could G.o.d do to avenge His honour and to have satisfaction rendered to Him? He could only make Himself man without ceasing to be G.o.d, in order that as man He should offer to G.o.d a reparation to which as G.o.d He would give the character of infinitude. It was therefore absolutely necessary that at a given moment man should become G.o.d, which could only be done upon the condition that G.o.d made Himself man.

REALISTS; NOMINALISTS; CONCEPTUALISTS.--It was in the time of St. Anselm that there arose the celebrated philosophic quarrel between the "realists, nominalists, and conceptualists." It is here essential to employ these technical terms or else not to allude to the dispute at all, because the strife is above all a war of words. The realists (of whom St. Anselm was one), said: "The ideas (idea of virtue, idea of sin, idea of greatness, idea of littleness) are realities; they exist, in a spiritual manner of course, but they really exist; they are: there is a virtue, a sin, a greatness, a littleness, a reason, etc. (and this was an exact reminiscence of the ideas of Plato). It is indeed only the idea, the general, the universal, which is real, and the particular has only the appearance of reality. Men do not exist, the individual man does not exist; what exists is 'man' in general, and individual men are only the appearance of--the coloured reflections of--the universal man." The nominalists (Roscelin the Canon of Compiegne, for instance) answered: "No; the general ideas, the universals as you say, are only names, are only words, emissions of the voice, labels, if you like, which we place on such and such categories of facts observed by us; there is no greatness; there are a certain number of great things, and when we think of them we inscribe this word 'greatness'

on the general idea which we conceive. 'Man' does not exist; there are men and the word humanity is only a word which to us represents a collective idea."

Why did the realists cling so to their universals, held to be realities and the sole realities? For many reasons. If the individual alone be real, there are not three Persons in the G.o.dhead, there are three G.o.ds and the unity of G.o.d is not real, it is only a word, and G.o.d is not real, He is only an utterance of the voice. If the individual is not real, the Church is not real; she does not exist, there only exist Christians who possess freedom of thought and of faith. Now the Church is real and it is not only desirable that she should be real, but even that she alone should possess reality and that the individuals const.i.tuting her should exist by her and not by themselves. (This is precisely the doctrine with regard to society now current among certain philosophers: society exists independently of its members; it has laws of its own independently of its members; it is a reality on its own basis; and its members are by it, not it by them, and therefore they should obey it; M. Durckheim is a "realist.")

ABELARD of Nantes, pupil of the nominalist, William of Champeaux, learned man, artist, man of letters, an incomparable orator, tried to effect a conciliation. He said: "The universal is not a reality, certainly; but it is something more than a simple word; it is a conception of the mind, which is something more than an utterance of the voice. As conception of the mind, in fact, it lives with a life which goes beyond the individual, because it can be common to several individuals to many individuals, and because in fact it is common to them. The general idea that I have and which I have communicated to my hearers, and which returns to me from my hearers, is more than a word since it is a link between my hearers and myself, and an atmosphere in which I and my hearers live. Is the Church only to be a word? G.o.d forbid that I should say so. She is a bond between all Christians; she is a general idea common to them all, so that in her each individual feels himself several, feels himself many; although it is true that were she not believed in by anyone she would be nothing." At bottom he was a nominalist, but more subtle, also more profound and more precise, having a better grasp of what William of Champeaux had desired to say. He shared in his condemnation.

Apart from the great dispute, his ideas were singularly broad and bold. Half knowing, half guessing at ancient philosophy, he held it in high esteem; he found there, because he delighted in finding there, all the Christian ideas: the one G.o.d, the Trinity, the Incarnation, the imputation of the merits of the saints, original sin; and he found less of a gulf between ancient philosophy and Christianity than between the Old and the New Testament (this is because the only Christianity known to Abelard, not the primitive but that const.i.tuted in the fourth century, was profoundly impregnated with h.e.l.lenism). He believed the Holy Ghost to have revealed Himself to the wise men of antiquity as well as to the Jews and the Christians, and that virtuous pagans may have been saved. The moral philosophy of Abelard is very elevated and pure. Our acts proceed from G.o.d; for it is impossible that they should not; but He permits us the faculty of disobedience "in order that virtue may exist," to which it tends; for if the tendency to evil did not exist, there would be no possibility of effort against evil, and if no efforts, then no virtue; G.o.d, who cannot be virtuous since He cannot be tempted by evil, can be virtuous in man, which is why He leaves him the tendency to evil for him to triumph over it and be virtuous so that virtue may exist; even if He were Himself to lead us into temptation, the tendency would still be the same; He would only lead us into it to give us the opportunity for struggle and victory, and therefore in order that virtue might exist; the possibility of sin is the condition of virtue, and in consequence, even in the admission of this possibility and above all by its admission, G.o.d is virtuous.

The bad deed, furthermore, is not the most considerable from the point of view of guilt; as merit or demerit the intention is worth as much as the deed and he is criminal who has had the intention to be so (which is clearly according to the Gospel).

HUGO DE SAINT-VICTOR; RICHARD.--Abelard possessed perhaps the broadest and greatest mind of the whole of the Middle Ages. After these famous names must be mentioned Hugo de Saint-Victor, a somewhat obscure mystic of German origin; and the not less mystical Richard, who, thoroughly persuaded that G.o.d is not attained by reason but by feeling, taught exaltation to Him by detachment from self and by six degrees: renunciation, elevation, impulsion, precipitation, ecstasy, and absorption.

CHAPTER II

THE THIRTEENTH CENTURY

Influence of Aristotle His Adoption by the Church.

Religious Philosophy of St. Thomas Aquinas.

ARISTOTLE AND THE CHURCH.--From the thirteenth century, Aristotle, completely known and translated into Latin, was adopted by the Church and became in some sort its lay vicar. He was regarded, and I think rightly, as of all the Greek thinkers the least dangerous to her and as the one to whom could be left all the scientific instruction whilst she reserved to herself all the religious teaching. Aristotle, in fact, "defended her from Plato,"

in whom were always found some germs of adoration of this world, or some tendencies in this direction, in whom was also found a certain polytheism much disguised, or rather much purified, but actual and dangerous; therefore, from the moment when it became necessary to select, Aristotle was tolerated and finally invested with office.

ST. THOMAS AQUINAS.--As Aristotelian theologians must be cited William of Auvergne, Vincent of Beauvais, Albertus Magnus; but the sovereign name of this period of the history of philosophy is St. Thomas Aquinas. St. Thomas Aquinas wrote several small works but, surpa.s.sing them all, the _Summa_ (encyclopaedia) which bears his name. In general philosophy St. Thomas Aquinas is an Aristotelian, bending but not distorting the ideas of Aristotle to Christian conceptions. Like Aristotle, he demonstrated G.o.d by the existence of motion and the necessity of a first motive power; he further demonstrated it by the contingent, relative, and imperfect character of all here below: "There is in things more or less goodness, more or less truth." But we only affirm the more or less of a thing by comparing it with something absolute and as it approaches more or less to this absolute; there is therefore an absolute being, namely G.o.d--and this argument appeared to him better than that of St. Anselm, which he refuted.

HIS CONCEPTION OF NATURE.--He showed the whole of nature as a great hierarchy, proceeding from the least perfect and the most shapeless to the most complete and determinate; from another aspect, as separated into two great kingdoms, that of necessity (mineral, vegetable, animal), and that of grace (humanity). He displayed it willed by G.o.d, projected by G.o.d, created by G.o.d; governed by G.o.d according to antecedent and consequent wills, that is, by general wills (G.o.d desires man to be saved) and by particular wills (G.o.d wishes the sinner to be punished), and the union of the general wills is the creation, and the result of all the particular wills is Providence. Nature and man with it are the work not only of the power but of the goodness of G.o.d, and it is by love that He created us and we must render Him love for love, which is involuntarily done by Nature herself in her obedience to His laws, and which we must do voluntarily by obedience to His commandments.

THE SOUL.--Our soul is immaterial and more complete than that of animals, for St. Thomas does not formally deny that animals have souls; the instinct of animals is the sensitive soul according to Aristotle, which is capable of four faculties: sensibility, imagination, memory, and estimation, that is elementary intelligence: "The bird picks up straw, not because it gratifies her feelings [not by a movement of sensibility], but because it serves to make her nest. It is therefore necessary that an animal should perceive those intuitions which do not come within the scope of the senses. It is by opinion or estimation that it perceives these intuitions, these distant ends." We, mankind, possess a soul which is sensibility, imagination, memory, and reason. Reason is the faculty not only of having ideas, but of establis.h.i.+ng connections and chains of connection between the ideas and of conceiving general ideas. Reason pauses before reaching G.o.d because the idea of G.o.d precisely is the only one which cannot be brought to the mind by the interrelation of ideas, for G.o.d surpa.s.ses all ideas; the idea of G.o.d is given by faith, which can be subsequently helped by reason, for the latter can work to make faith perceptible to reason.

Our soul is full of pa.s.sions, divisible into two great categories, the pa.s.sions of desire and those of anger. The pa.s.sions of desire are rapid or violent movements towards some object which seems to us a good; the pa.s.sions of anger are movements of revolt against something which opposes our movement towards a good. The common root of all the pa.s.sions is love, for it is obvious that from it are derived the pa.s.sions of desire; and as for the pa.s.sions of wrath they would not exist if we had no love of anything, in which case our desire not coming into collision would not turn into revolt against the obstacle. We are free to do good or evil, to master our evil pa.s.sions and to follow those of which reason approves. Here reappears the objection of the knowledge G.o.d must have beforehand of our actions: if G.o.d foresees our actions we are not free; if free, we act contrary to his previsions, then He is not all-powerful. St. Thomas makes answer thus: "There is not prevision, there is vision, because we are in time whereas G.o.d is in eternity. He sees at one glance and instantaneously all the past, present, and future. Therefore, He does not foresee but see, and this vision does not hinder human freedom any more than being seen acting prevents one from acting. Because G.o.d knows our deeds after they are done, no one can plead that that prevents our full liberty to do them; if He knew them before it is the same as knowing them after, because for Him past, present, and future are all the same moment." This appears subtle but is not, for it only amounts to the statement that in speaking of G.o.d time must not be mentioned, for G.o.d is as much outside time as outside s.p.a.ce.

THE MORAL SYSTEM OF ST. THOMAS.--The very detailed and circ.u.mstantial moral system of St. Thomas may thus be summarized: there is in conscience, first, an intellectual act which is the distinction between good and evil; secondly, an act of will which leads us to the good. This power for good urges the practice of virtue. There are human virtues, well known to the ancient philosophers, temperance, courage, wisdom, justice, which lead to happiness on earth; there are divine virtues, inspired in man by G.o.d, which are faith, hope, and charity, and they lead to eternal happiness. We practise the virtues, when we are well-disposed, because we are free; but our liberty and our will do not suffice; it is necessary for G.o.d to help us, and that is "grace."

FAITH AND REASON.--On the question of the relation of reason to faith, St. Thomas Aquinas recognizes, or rather proclaims, that reason will never demonstrate faith, that the revealed truths, the Trinity, original sin, grace, etc., are above reason and infinitely exceed it. How, then, can one believe? By will, aided by the grace of G.o.d. Then henceforth must no appeal be made to reason? Yes, indeed! Reason serves to refute the errors of the adversaries of the faith, and by this refutation to confirm itself in belief. The famous _Credo ut intelligam_--I believe in order to understand--is therefore true. Comprehension is only possible on condition of belief; but subsequently comprehension helps to believe, if not more, at least with a greater precision and in a more abundant light. St. Thomas Aquinas here is in exactly the position which Pascal seems to have taken up: Believe and you will understand; understand and you will believe more exactly. Therefore an act of will: "I wish to believe"--a grace of G.o.d fortifying this will: faith exists--studies and reasoning: faith is the clearer.

ST. BONAVENTURA; RAYMOND LULLE.--Beside these men of the highest brain-power there are found in the thirteenth century mystics, that is, poets and eccentrics, both by the way most interesting. It was St.

Bonaventura who, being persuaded, almost like an Alexandrine, that one rises to G.o.d by synthetic feeling and not by series of arguments, and that one journeys towards Him by successive states of the soul each more pure and more pa.s.sionate--wrote _The Journey of the Soul to G.o.d_, which is, so to speak, a manual of mysticism. Learned as he was, whilst pursuing his own purpose, he digressed in agreeable and instructive fas.h.i.+on into the realms of real knowledge.

Widely different from him, Raymond Lulle or de Lulle, an unbridled schoolman, in his _Ars magna_ invented a reasoning machine, a.n.a.logous to an arithmetical machine, in which ideas were automatically deduced from one another as the figures inscribe themselves on a counter. As often happens, the excess of the method was its own criticism, and an enemy of scholasticism could not have more ingeniously demonstrated that it was a kind of mechanism. Raymond de Lulle was at once a learned man and a well-informed and most enquiring naturalist for whom Arabian science held no secrets. With that he was poet, troubadour, orator, as well as very eccentric and attractive. He was beloved and persecuted in his lifetime, and long after his death still found enthusiastic disciples.

BACON.--Contemporaneously lived the man whom it is generally the custom to regard as the distant precursor of experimental science, Roger Bacon (who must not be confused with Francis Bacon, another learned man who lived much nearer to our own time). Roger Bacon, a Franciscan friar, occupied himself almost exclusively with physical and natural science. He pa.s.sed the greater portion of his life in prison by reason of alleged sorcery and, more especially, perhaps, because he had denounced the evil lives of his brethren. He had at least a presentiment of almost all modern inventions: gunpowder, magnifying gla.s.s, telescope, air-pump; he was distinctly an inventor in optics. In philosophy, properly speaking, he denounced what was hollow and empty in scholasticism, detesting that preference should be given to "the straw of words rather than to the grain of fact," and proclaiming that reasoning "is good to conclude but not to establish." Without discovering the law of progress, as has too often been alleged, he arrived at the conclusion that antiquity being the youth of the world, the moderns are the adults, which only meant that it would be at our school that the ancients would learn were they to return to earth and that we ought not to believe blindly in the ancients; and this was an insurrection against the principle of authority and against the idolatry of Aristotle. He preached the direct study of nature, observation, and experiment with the subsequent application of deduction, and especially of mathematical deduction, to experiment and observation. With all that, he believed in astrology; for those who are in advance of their time none the less belong to it: but he was a very great man.

CHAPTER III

THE FOURTEENTH AND FIFTEENTH CENTURIES

Decadence of Scholasticism. Forebodings of the Coming Era. Great Moralists. The Kabbala. Sorcery.

DECADENCE OF SCHOLASTICISM.--The fourteenth century dated the decadence of scholasticism, but saw little new. "Realism" was generally abandoned, and the field was swept by "nominalism," which was the theory that ideas only have existence in the brains which conceive them. Thus Durand de Saint-Pourcain remains famous for having said, "To exist is to be individually," which at that epoch was very audacious. William of Ockham repeated the phrase with emphasis; there is nothing real except the individual. That went so far as to cast suspicion on all metaphysics, and somewhat on theology. In fact, _although a devout believer_, Ockham rejected theology, implored the Church not to be learned, because her science proved nothing, and to content herself with faith: "Science belongs to G.o.d, faith to men." But, or rather in addition, if the ministers of G.o.d were no longer imposing because of their ambitious science, it was necessary for them to regain their sway over souls by other and better means. It was inc.u.mbent on them to be saintly, to revert to the purity, the simplicity, and the divine childishness of the primitive Church; and here he was virtually a forerunner of the Reformation.

Ockham was indeed one of the auxiliaries of Philip the Fair in his struggle with the Holy See, suffered excommunication, and sought refuge with the Duke of Bavaria, the foe of the Pope.

BURIDAN: THE LIBERTY OF INDIFFERENCE.--Realists and nominalists continued their mutual strife, sometimes physically even, until the middle of the fifteenth century. But nominalism always gained ground, having among other celebrated champions, Peter d'Ailly and Buridan; the one succeeded in becoming Chancellor of the University of Paris, the other in becoming its Rector. Buridan has remained famous through his death and his donkey, both alike legendary. According to a ballad by Villon, Buridan having been too tenderly loved by Joan of Navarre, wife of Philip the Fair, was by his order "thrown in a sack into the Seine." By comparison of dates, the fact seems impossible. According to tradition, either in order to show the freedom of indifference, or that animals are mere machines, Buridan declared that an a.s.s with two baskets full of corn placed one on each side of him and at equal distance from him, would never decide from which he should feed and would die of starvation. Nothing of the kind is to be found in his works, but he may have said so in a lecture and his pupils remembering it have handed it down as a proverb.

PETER D'AILLY; GERSON.--Peter d'Ailly, a highly important ecclesiastic, head of the College of Navarre, chevalier of the University of Paris, Cardinal, a leader in the discussions at the Councils at Pisa and Constance, a drastic reformer of the morals and customs of the Church, did not evince any marked originality as a philosopher, but maintained the already known doctrines of nominalism with extraordinary dialectical skill.

Among his pupils he numbered Gerson, who was also Chancellor of the University of Paris, another highly zealous and energetic reformer, a more avowed enemy of scholasticism and mysticism, of exaggerated austerity and astrology, eminently modern in the best sense of the word, whose political and religious enemies are his t.i.tle of respect. He was the author of many small books devoted to the popularization of science, religion, and morality. To him was long attributed the _Imitation of Jesus Christ_, which on the whole bears no resemblance to his writings, but which he might very well have written in old age in his retreat in the peaceful silence of the Celestines of Lyons.