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* Follower of Kindi; d. 950.
€ Astronomer, 805-885.
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Christian philosophers, but he had little influence in his own time, and was not, to my mind, so scientific as is sometimes thought. English writers used to say that he invented gunpowder, but this, of course, is untrue.
Saint Bonaventura ( 1221-1274), who, as General of the Franciscan order, forbade Bacon to publish, was a man of a totally different kind. He belonged to the tradition of Saint Anselm, whose ontological argument he upheld. He saw in the new Aristotelianism a fundamental opposition to Christianity. He believed in Platonic ideas, which, however, only God knows perfectly. In his writings Augustine is quoted constantly, but one finds no quotations from Arabs, and few from pagan antiquity.
Matthew of Aquasparta (ca. 1235-1302)was a follower of Bonaventura, but less untouched by the new philosophy. He was a Franciscan, and became a cardinal; he opposed Saint Thomas from an Augustinian point of view. But to him Aristotle has become “The Philosopher”; he is quoted constantly. Avicenna is frequently mentioned; Saint Anselm is quoted with respect, as is the pseudo-Dionysius; but the chief authority is Saint Augustine. We must, he says, find a middle way between Plato and Aristotle. Plato’s ideas are “utterly erroneous”; they establish wisdom, but not knowledge. On the other hand, Aristotle is also wrong; he establishes knowledge, but not wisdom. Our knowledge–so it is concluded–is caused by both lower and higher things, by external objects and ideal reasons.
Duns Scotus (ca. 1270-1308) carried on the Franciscan controversy with Aquinas. He was born in Scotland or Ulster, became a Franciscan at Oxford, and spent his later years at Paris. Against Saint Thomas, he defended the Immaculate Conception, and in this the University of Paris, and ultimately the whole Catholic Church, agreed with him. He is Augustinian, but in a less extreme form than Bonaventura, or even Matthew of Aquasparta; his differences from Saint Thomas, like theirs, come of a larger admixture of Platonism (via Augustine) in his philosophy.
He discusses, for example, the question “Whether any sure and pure truth can be known naturally by the understanding of the wayfarer without the special illumination of the uncreated light?” And he argues that it cannot. He supports this view, in his opening argument, solely by quotations from Saint Augustine; the only difficulty he
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finds is Romans I, 20: “The invisible things of God, understood by means of those things that have been made, are clearly comprehended from the creation of the world.”
Duns Scotus was a moderate realist. He believed in free will, and had leanings towards Pelagianism. He held that being is no different from essence. He was mainly interested in evidence, i.e., the kinds of things that can be known without proof. Of these there are three kinds: (1) principles known by themselves, (2) things known by experience, (3) our own actions. But without divine illumination we can know nothing.
Most Franciscans followed Duns Scotus rather than Aquinas.
Duns Scotus held that, since there is no difference between being and essence, the “principle of individuation”–i.e., that which makes one thing not identical with another–must be form, not matter. The “principle of individuation” was one of the important problems of the scholastic philosophy. In various forms, it has remained a problem to the present day. Without reference to any particular author, we may perhaps state the problem as follows.
Among the properties of individual things, some are essential, others accidental; the accidental properties of a thing are those it can lose without losing its identity–such as wearing a hat, if you are a man. The question now arises: given two individual things belonging to the same species, do they always differ in essence, or is it possible for the essence to be exactly the same in both? Saint Thomas holds the latter view as regards material substances, the former as regards those that are immaterial. Duns Scotus holds that there are always differences of essence between two different individual things. The view of Saint Thomas depends upon the theory that pure matter consists of undifferentiated parts, which are distinguished solely by difference of position in space. Thus a person, consisting of mind and body, may differ physically from another person solely by the spatial position of his body. (This might happen with identical twins, theoretically.) Duns Scotus, on the other hand, holds that if things are distinct, they must be distinguished by some qualitative difference. This view, clearly, is nearer to Platonism than is that of Saint Thomas.
Various stages have to be traversed before we can state this problem in modern terms. The first step, which was taken by Leibniz, was to get rid of the distinction between essential and accidental
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properties, which, like many that the scholastics took over from Aristotle, turns out to be unreal as soon as we attempt to state it carefully. We thus have, instead of “essence,” “all the propositions that are true of the thing in question.” (In general, however, spatial and temporal position would still be excluded.) Leibniz contends that it is impossible for two things to be exactly alike in this sense; this is his principle of the “identity of indiscernibles.” This principle was criticized by physicists, who maintained that two particles of matter might differ solely as regards position in space and time–a view which has been rendered more difficult by relativity, which reduces space and time to relations.
A further step is required in modernizing the problem, and that is, to get rid of the conception of “substance.” When this is done, a “thing” has to be a bundle of qualities, since there is no longer any kernel of pure “thinghood.” It would seem to follow that, if “substance” is rejected, we must take a view more akin to that of Scotus than to that of Aquinas. This, however, involves much difficulty in connection with space and time. I have treated the question as I see it, under the heading “Proper Names,” in my Inquiry into Meaning and Truth.
William of Occam is, after Saint Thomas, the most important schoolman. The circumstances of his life are very imperfectly known. He was born probably between 1290 and 1300; he died on April 10, but whether in 1349 or 1350 is uncertain. (The Black Death was raging in 1349, so that this is perhaps the more probable year.) Most people say he was born at Ockham in Surrey, but Delisle Burns prefers Ockham in Yorkshire. He was at Oxford, and then at Paris, where he was first the pupil and afterwards the rival of Duns Scotus. He was involved in the quarrel of the Franciscan order with Pope John XXII on the subject of poverty. The Pope had persecuted the Spirituals, with the support of Michael Cesena, General of the order. But there had been an arrangement by which property left to the friars was given by them to the Pope, who allowed them the benefit of it without the sin of ownership. This was ended by John XXII, who said they should accept outright ownership. At this a majority of the order, headed by Michael of Cesena, rebelled. Occam, who had been summoned to Avignon by the Pope to answer charges of heresy as to transubstantiation, sided with Michael of Cesena, as did another
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important man, Marsiglio of Padua. All three were excommunicated in 1328, but escaped from Avignon, and took refuge with the Emperor Louis. Louis was one of the two claimants to the Empire; he was the one favoured by Germany, but the other was favoured by the Pope. The Pope excommunicated Louis, who appealed against him to a General Council. The Pope himself was accused of heresy.
It is said that Occam, on meeting the Emperor, said: “Do you defend me with the sword, and I will defend you with the pen.” At any rate, he and Marsiglio of Padua settled in Munich, under the protection of the Emperor, and there wrote political treatises of considerable importance. What happened to Occam after the Emperor’s death in 1338 is uncertain. Some say he was reconciled to the Church, but this seems to be false.
The Empire was no longer what it had been in the Hohenstaufen era; and the papacy, though its pretensions had grown continually greater, did not command the same reverence as formerly. Boniface VIII had moved it to Avignon at the beginning of the fourteenth century, and the Pope had become a political subordinate of the king of France. The Empire had sunk even more; it could no longer claim even the most shadowy kind of universal dominion, because of the strength of France and England; on the other hand, the Pope, by subservience to the king of France, also weakened his claim to universality in temporal matters. Thus the conflict between Pope and Emperor was really a conflict between France and Germany. England, under Edward III, was at war with France, and therefore in alliance with Germany; this caused England, also, to be antipapal. The Pope’s enemies demanded a General Council–the only ecclesiastical authority which could be regarded as superior to the Pope.
The character of the opposition to the Pope changed at this time. Instead of being merely in favour of the Emperor, it acquired a democratic tone, particularly in matters of Church government. This gave it a new strength, which ultimately led to the Reformation.
Dante ( 1265-1321), though as a poet he was a great innovator, was, as a thinker, somewhat behind the times. His book De
