Errores Philosophorum

There’s a famous passage in Betrand Russell’s History of Philosophy in which he declares that Thomas Aquinas was not a real philosopher, since the Catholic Church dictated to him in advance all the answers. What he did was not philosophy but special pleading. To anyone who’s even slightly familiar with medieval thought this statement is laughably ignorant, given the fierce centuries-spanning debates over crucial logical, psychological, physical and metaphysical issues that preoccupied the greatest minds between Augustine and Descartes and which prepared the ground (I mean this in both good and bad ways) for the developments of Renaissance and Enlightenment philosophy, in which Aquinas was only one (albeit an important) participant. I can only conclude that Russell had read very little Aquinas and practically nothing of other medieval thinkers.

On the other hand, the charge is also frequently leveled, especially by many Eastern Orthodox and Protestant Christians of a certain intellectual disposition, that the Latin West gave entirely too much ground to philosophy, doing an enormous amount of damage to theology especially in the time between Augustine and Descartes by using concepts, arguments, and methods derived from philosophy and applying them to divine matters, corrupting the purity of Revelation and Tradition with essentially pagan interpolations. Evoking the famous phrase of Pascal, they accuse medieval (and later) Catholicism of worshipping the God of the Philosophers, forgetting or abandoning the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.

I find this charge just as uncompelling. It’s been said that when you’re attacked by two opposite extremes on two contradictory grounds, chances are you’re in a pretty good middle position.

I once read a fascinating little book called Errores Philosophorum, by Giles of Rome, an monk and bishop of the Augustinian Order of Hermits who died in the second decade of the fourteenth century. In it he examines the writings of the pagan, Islamic, and Jewish philosophers who were most influential in the Western intellectual climate of his day, and points out the places in their respective works in which each teaches or argues for positions incompatible with Christian doctrine. It’s full of interesting bits; my favorite chapter was the one on the Islamic thinker Alkindi, who tried to use physics to explain the the efficacy of astrology and “the magical arts” (artibus magicis). For Giles, as for any good Christian, astrology and magic are rank superstitions and any attempt to argue on their behalf will be a philosophical error.

The pertinent statement to which I wish to draw the reader’s attention, however, is in the chapter on Aristotle. Giles says, Quoniam uno inconvenienti dato multa sequuntur, ex uno malo fundmento protulit Philosophus multos errores, that is, “Because from one erroneous foundation many falsities follow, from one bad principle the Philosopher has advanced many errors.”

This one fundamental error of Aristotle’s, according to Giles, is the principle that nothing new comes into being without a preceding motion, from which follows the denial of creation, the assertion of the eternity of the world, and other things contrary to Christian teaching. But for my purposes there are two interesting things about the opening sentence just quoted. The first is that it’s also the opening sentence of Thomas Aquinas’ De Ente et Essentia, a metaphysical work building on Aristotelian principles but very unAristotelian in its arguments and conclusions (and, by the way, the content of which is in no way provided by Catholic dogma and with which many theologians disagreed). The second is that the statement, “From one erroneous foundation” etc., at the head of a chapter critiquing various philosophical errors of Aristotle, is taken from Aristotle (Physics I, 195a11) himself!

These facts illustrate the real attitude of the medieval scholastics toward philosophy, which was neither too credulous and open to deleterious influence, nor excessively critical and unwilling to accept a good idea where one could be found. Where a medieval thinker thought an idea, whether coming from a pagan, Muslim, or Jew, had reason on his side, he would accept it and incorporate it into his own scheme of thought. Where he thought a non-Christian philosopher was wrong, especially where the thinker argued for something contrary to Christian doctrine or something which implied such, the Christian would argue against him. But as often as not the Christian would not refute the infidel using the Bible, the pope, or some other Christian authority, but using the principles of the infidel philosophers themselves! I know firsthand of many, many cases where scholastics argue that Aristotle or whoever was wrong about such-and-such given Aristotle’s own principles, and where he came to a conclusion incompatible with Christianity, this is not simply because he lacked the True Faith, but also and especially because he had failed as a philosopher to discover the best arguments available to reason on the subject.

To use an image they themselves loved to reproduce, the medievals saw themselves as the Jews during the Exodus, who as they were leaving Egypt for the promised land despoiled the Egyptians of the riches owed to them for their generations of servitude (i.e. they claimed reparations). The riches of Truth for them came from God, and properly belonged to those who were God’s friends and faithful servants. If the pagans and infidels had come into possession some truth on their own, it belonged with just as much right to Christianity as well, and so Christians would appropriate good reasons and good arguments wherever they found them.

Of course in order to have such an attitude they had to have a profound confidence in the harmony of faith and reason, an assurance that truth could never be in conflict with truth. If Christianity were true and if the mind had the capacity to discover philosophical truth on its own, then as long as both were functioning properly in their own spheres, they could only complement each other, and not conflict. An apparent discordance was to be resolved by striving to find better theories, more encompassing explanations, deeper understanding, rather than by a retreat into either rationalism or fideism, the two opposed alternatives of the modern world.

N.B. This post is another recycle, very lightly edited. Although it's only a few years old, I'm surprised again at how overblown the style seems to me. Maybe I still sound like that and I just don't notice!

Philosophical Comics

People who get to know me in person occasionally express shock or surprise when they learn about my occasionally lowbrow taste in pop culture, since I like cartoons , bad movies ,and all sorts of comics. I'm not entirely sure why this should be so. In my less charitable moods I'm tempted to think it's because some people use movies etc. as their primary source of intellectual stimulation, and so are snobby about the trash, whereas for me they are for amusement and relaxation, and I get my thinking material, er, elsewhere. I'm much more careful when choosing novels, since they're generally much more of a time commitment, though even here I do enjoy occasional light reading. I will admit, however, to being very picky indeed about music and poetry.

Anyway, it's always a delight when my lowbrow tastes overlap with my highbrow ones, to the confusion of phrenologists everywhere, and I was very excited to find out about Logicomix: An Epic Search For Truth, a fascinating and skillful comic book about the life of Bertrand Russell, and the quest for the foundations of logic and mathematics by Frege, Cantor, Russell, Whitehead, Wittgenstein, Gödel, and the rest. The art is good, the storytelling is good, the philosophy is all silly modernism but well portrayed and fascinating. I rate it five out of five formalities.

Beyond Being

We have remarked that Being, which for Plato is at times at least less than the Good or One, must be understood as finite Being. That this is the general classical view is stated by a number of modern commentators, not all of whom are prepared, however, to see what it implies for Plato and Plotinus. Fr Seeney, for example, rightly quotes with approval the remark of Fr Owens that 'Perfect Being for the Greeks meant limitation and finitude,' without at the same time admitting that to place the One beyond Being means for Plotinus simply to place it beyond finitude, to make it intrinsically infinite. Similarly Gilson regards the One beyond Being as a non-existent One. For these interpreters questions about the finitude of Being in the classical sense of the word do not arise. But here we may be merely playing with words. The question before us is not whether Plotinus said that the One is 'beyond Being,' but what he meant by saying this. And in view of the general Greek use of 'Being' to mean 'finite Being,' the prima facie meaning of the phrase 'beyond Being' should be 'infinite Being.'

-- John Rist, Plotinus: The Road to Reality, 24-25.

The relevance of this passage to Orthodox-Catholic dialogue should be obvious to the attentive reader! This is a point I have made in debate more than once, to little avail, I'm afraid.