Plotinus and Platonic Idealism (Lawhead pp. 102-106): Immediately after Plato, his school, the Academy, was run by more or less Pythagorean Platonists who held the forms of material things to be fundamentally mathematical, and the sensible world to be structured mathematically. But rather quickly the school passed into the hands of Skeptics, who emphasized the Socratic element in Plato’s thought, and apparently did not think that Plato had ever managed to thoroughly refute Socratic objections to the possibility of knowledge. Eventually there was a reaction to this and the Middle Platonists returned to Plato’s original thought, and held to the real possibility of knowledge. These fellows had turned the world of Forms, which seems to have been originally conceived as standing outside of minds, into a mind, for they could not conceive how a Form should exist if not in a mind or else in material, spatial sensibles. It is probably best to think of a form henceforth as a thought, a thinking of whatever it is that the Form is of. But also bear in mind that a mind was not viewed as anything more than a Form. A mind is a process of thinking, and since it is non-spatial, if the thinking ceases there is nothing more going on (no inactive matter remains to resume activity later), and so the mind ceases to be. However hard it is to conceive a process or functioning without some thing independent of the functioning which functions, that is their intent. (Note the resemblance to Aristotle’s notion of Substantial Form here.)

            Now one might, as a Middle Platonist, view the world as consisting of the world of Forms = Mind itself, the individual minds of men and other spirits which think or contemplate the Forms, and material things which participate in the Forms. The influence of Parmenides, who seemed to have received Plato’s approval in his dialogue named after the man, led to an extension of this list of real things, with the addition of something above the Mind, something which was not mixed with non-being in the way that Mind was. The idea was that this thing is pure being, and in no way is not (as Parmenides said reality had to be), is the ultimately real thing, and that the Mind with the Forms in it had the being of this highest reality mixed with non-being, inasmuch as the Form of each thing is other than the Form of something else, and so is not the Form of that other thing. The problem was to make out just what it is to be “more real,” and to say how this highest reality was the source of lower realities.

            Plotinus solved this problem by positing that everything that is is not only mind, and Form, but that it is all the same mind, so that everything is, in the end, identical with the one. The lower beings arise from the One (through “emanation” in Plotinus’s metaphor) when the One becomes aware of itself. The primal split into multiple different (and so partly negative) beings is the split into the subject that thinks and the object of thought. In reality, I guess, all there is is the thinking, and to view it as subject or object is just to look at the process of thinking from different angles. By the way, the One is aware of, or thinks, itself in a funny way that does not result in its bifurcation (as does everything else that is self-aware, one supposes), but this thought is not intellectual, not in terms of the Forms, but is a bare, immediate awareness of self. The One then sees itself as Good, so that the Form of the Good arises (it just is the thought of the Good), and Mind arises, contemplating the Form of the Good, and all the various ways in which a thing can be (partially) good. In effect, it is looking at aspects of its own thought of the good, and each aspect is another Form.

            In this way the Intellect arises below the One, and is distinguished from the one because its intellectual activity consists in an immediate and eternal awareness of the Forms, not in an immediate awareness of itself. It is aware of itself only as Good, as One, etc., that is, through the Forms. Somehow this manner of thinking cannot identify itself, or be aware of, the higher manner of thinking of the One, and so it is other than the one, though really it is just the one thinking of itself. In the next stage soul arises, for there is also a way of thinking which cannot grasp the Form all at once, eternally, but must grasp it through activity in time, that is, as one grasps mathematical Forms through proofs (which take time to execute and present). Moreover, such beings can only be themselves through activity in time (one is oneself by contemplating the Form of oneself, i.e. through self-awareness, and these beings must receive the thought of their own Form stretched out in time, as it were). So such Forms become gradually what they are through development, that is, they have a life history.

            Some of these souls are such rudimentary thoughts of the world of Forms that they can only contemplate a single Form, and these are material Forms, Aristotle’s substantial forms of sensibles. Matter is the bare possibility of there being one or another sort of thing. The bottom of the scale of being is mere space, the stuff of which material things are made, divided up into geometrical shapes. The Forms involved here are involved somehow in everything else, and are the least that can be contemplated by anything. No more slender being is possible.

            The best way to understand this, I think, is in terms of multiple personalities. That is, a person is sometimes aware of certain facets of what he has done, and sometimes of others, and to some extent his mood determines what he is aware of. So a person may not be able to recall any of her good thoughts about a friend while she is angry with her, and recall what it is that is nice about her friend only after she cools down. If this sort of isolation of some of the things we know from others by our mood is pushed to an extreme, we can get multiple personalities that are (some of them at least) unaware entirely of what is done when the other personalities are running the show. By a kind of selective attention to oneself, a limited awareness only of certain aspects of one’s feelings, beliefs and the like, one actually splits up (nearly) into several persons. It is that sort of thing that happens here. The things that are lower on the scale of being are really just the One as it is aware of itself in some very limited way. We are little splintered pieces of mind, then. Not that our final bliss consists in merging with the One. Rather, we must remain our individual selves, and we would not if we re-entered the One. (Consider the fear the multiple personalities might have of a cure being effected. They would see the re-integration of personality as their own deaths.) What we do to attain bliss is to become aware of our connection to Mind and the Forms (we can think all the Forms, if only one by one, so we can become aware of the whole), and see how we figure in the universe, which is a perfect expression, in finite terms, of the perfect Goodness that is the One.

            This view of things is an Idealism, that is, Plotinus thinks that only minds really exist, and that material things are rudimentary minds. So the world comes to be through a mental process, through the mind thinking itself. We shall find this brand of materialism resurrected in 19th-century Germany, most notably in Hegel, but it goes underground with the arrival of Christianity at power, for, of course, it is heresy to claim that individual men and the material world are in the end all identical to God. (Nonetheless, Plotinus had a strong influence on Christian mystical thought, and mystical thinkers throughout the Middle Ages were often suspected of the heresy just described.) We shall see some Christian forms of Idealism, keeping God and the other minds utterly distinct from one another, in Berkeley and Leibniz in the 18th century.

            Idealism’s chief motivation is the fact that it solves the problems posed by the skeptics. To exist at all is to be a mind, therefore to be thought, and so we can be aware of reality immediately. Moreover, Plotinian idealism makes us all one mind, and that is why all the different minds can agree on reality. They are all looking at the same thing, the One, and they can look at it because they are it. Nothing is outside oneself (one’s mind), so all the natures of things are in us already, and we don’t have to worry, as Aristotle and other people must, about how the natures of things can get into our minds, or how representations of those natures can give us genuine knowledge of reality. The roots of idealism are always to be found in epistemology and the problems in accounting for knowledge.

            Plotinus takes it that the contemplation of the One is the end of human life, though this contemplation cannot be intellectual since the One does not conform to the Forms, but stands above them. To have this vision of the One, though, a person has to strengthen his intellect first, through a thorough knowledge of the Forms, and this means he must learn about eternal things, i.e. mathematics, and then rise to a contemplation of the Form of the Good itself, and then, after separating the soul from the body as much as one can through proper ethical behavior and a moderate asceticism, turn one’s souls to a contemplation of the one, which is a sort of meditative trance, it seems, in which no discursive thought occurs, and all awareness of the temporal world is temporarily lost.

            There is no such thing as evil according to Plotinus. Evil is always a mere absence of what ought to be there, and in the end it is scarcely even that, but rather one only sees evil as long as he takes a partial view of things, thinking only of himself and not how he fits into the whole. From the view of God, or of one who has attained the vision of God, there is no evil in the world. This view of evil as unreal and arising from lack of connection to the whole is typically idealist.

            Later Neo-Platonism, after Plotinus, dabbled a good deal in magic and such stuff in its more popularized forms. The idea was that all things communicate with one another more or less directly through the One, and so one could bypass physical law to accomplish an end through sympathetic magic. Sympathetic magic acts out ahead of time the thing desired, making sure that those who are to bring it about are somehow made present at the pre-enactment. Thus one might act out the shooting of a deer, and do so on a trail where deer are known to run, thus assuring success in the hunt. It is much older than philosophy, of course, but here philosophy provides a justification for the practice. This later popular Neo-Platonism ultimately lies behind most of the “ancient traditions of magic” and the like that one runs into today in things like astrology and magic, though, of course, today’s versions are much elaborated and developed over the intervening centuries.

            Questions: Just how does Neo-Platonism relate to Platonism? Which of its doctrines are borrowed rather from Aristotle, Stoicism, or some other philosophical movement? How does Neo-Platonism compare to Christianity? Would Christian Neo-Platonism be a possibility? What might such a philosophy look like?

            Do you find Idealism plausible? What fundamental arguments might you develop in favor of it?

            Early Christian Thought and St. Augustine: Christianity at first saw itself opposed to philosophy. Philosophy was perceived as a traditional institution providing answers to the big questions of life: How to react to and view the world at large, what ethical principles to follow, what the good life is, even how to come into a proper relation to God. Christianity was in the same line of business, and hence the opposition to its competitor. However, one can also view philosophy as a method for arriving at important truths, the method of rational inquiry. Here, too, Christianity saw itself in opposition to philosophy, since it supposed the authority for its beliefs to rest on scripture and revelation, rather than reason. A third element also played into the opposition, since most of the traditional schools of philosophy tried to support the traditional polytheistic religion of Greece and Rome. This became much more the case, in reaction to an oriental “superstition,” as time went on and Christianity spread and gained influence. The philosophers of the later Pagan schools wrote polemics against Christianity, and the Christians returned the favor. Much of the problem here arose from the fact the Christianity was opposed to the Pagan culture, that is, to the whole body of Greek and Roman literature and art, which, of course, rotated around the traditional religion. For an educated man to become a Christian was for him to abandon his education.

            Indeed, it was argued that philosophy was the source of the heresies that seemed continually to arise within the Church, for philosophy led to speculation and reliance on one’s own reason, and so to deviation from correct authority as one set aside or reinterpreted scripture. Philosophy was also seen by Christians as elitist, and upper class and establishment, as well as corrupt (claiming that the clever are saved rather than the virtuous). Christian dogma gradually solidified in a set of verbal formulae to be accepted by all the faithful, and this provided part of the solution, for now a philosophically minded Christian could be careful to maintain the Creed in all his thinking, using it as a touchstone of correctness, and be assured that he was within legal bounds. The Christian philosopher, after the work of Origen in the early third century, was defined by his recognition of the authority of the Creed.

            In the end, Christianity was forced to accept philosophy in order to become a majority faith. It needed intellectuals and educated persons as leaders, and it could not go on forever cultivating the image of the virtuous yahoo as the only true Christian if it was to appeal to the upper and middle classes. Also, there was a need to establish the faith as intellectually defensible, and one had to do philosophy to answer opponents among the philosophers. Apparent contradictions and absurdities in the faith had to be resolved, opponents’ arguments had to be answered, and arguments needed to be developed against opposing views, indeed, one could even try to develop a consistent and ordered system of philosophical doctrines that would cover a part of the Christian world view, filling in with revelation only where reason found its limits and failed. All this was work for a philosopher. Eventually Christianity adopted a reformed Platonism as its own philosophy (with an admixture of Stoic doctrines, especially in ethics), reconciling itself to a prestigious pre-Christian school and providing a way to preserve contact with the old culture among its educated members. Mythology survived as a fund of good stories and poetic examples, and was even taken to embody some important truths, including hints of the saving truth of Christianity smuggled in by God. (It also survived as an ineliminable part of the literary culture that defined the bureaucratic classes of Ancient society.) Philosophy became the preparation for the Evangelists, which brought the Pagans as far as they could go under the impulse of their own reason, to the point where they could accept the Good News of the Christian dispensation.

            Here is an example of the sort of thing a Christian philosopher could do [see Lawhead, p. 143]: Boethius (480–524 A.D., he lived in Italy after the fall of the Empire), in his Consolation of Philosophy, raises the following difficulty: It seems that men must have free will if they are to be justly punished or rewarded by God (and that they are justly punished and rewarded is an article of faith). It also seems that God is omniscient (also an article of faith). And so he has foreknowledge of human actions, even though these actions are free. But how can both these things be true? Surely if we act freely, no one can predict what we will do! The apparent contradiction is resolved when Boethius points out that even though a human being can only know the future by finding the causes of future events in the present state of affairs, so that whatever a human being can know will happen must already have been rendered inevitable by the way things are at present, God can know the future in another way. God is eternal, unlike human beings, and this means that God is simultaneously present at all times (just as he is present entirely in every place). So God now sees what you will do tomorrow not because he sees that it is inevitable that you do it given the present state of affairs, but because for Him tomorrow and now are the same time. (The notion of eternity is found in Plotinus and applied to God by him. It does not, of course, have any clear proof in scripture.) Thus God’s foreknowledge no more renders your action unfree than does my present observation of you performing the action. Here a philosophical doctrine is used in a clever (probably valid) way to answer a philosophical objection to Christian doctrine. (The doctrine of God’s eternity has become part of orthodox Christian thought, of course, as has a good deal else that began as philosophy, especially as Platonist philosophy.)

            On faith and reason: St. Augustine held that it was reasonable to have faith, given historical evidence in support of the inspiration of the scriptures. But that did not mean a philosopher could demonstrate the truth of the faith philosophically. As a Platonist, he thought one can really know only eternal truths, and some of the truths of the faith are historical and not eternal, for instance, Christ’s incarnation, death, and resurrection. (An eleventh-century follower of Augustine, St. Anselm, tried to show that these historical events had to happen, so that one could know that they would, given God’s nature and the nature of creatures. But these attempts quickly came to be viewed as failures.) Of course, inasmuch as we were called to believe these truths on the basis of an authority, philosophy could not defend them, for philosophy can never advance authority as a ground for belief, any more than mathematics can. Nor is it the job of philosophy, taken strictly, to show which authorities are trustworthy, since, again, that is a historical question, to be settled from experience, not by pure reason.

            Nonetheless, philosophy could be pursued by a good Christian, for it is obtained from the Logos that contains the Forms, which is Christ. To use one’s reason to find the truth is to seek God, who is Truth. This is so even according to scripture, which says that Christ is “the Truth and the Way,” that is, the way to the truth, as Augustine read it. (Again, Augustine argued that Christ is God, the Truth, as God reveals himself to men, and philosophy is one of the ways in which God reveals Himself. (Christ as Logos was identified with the Neoplatonic Logos that contains the Forms within it as early as ca. 150 A.D. by Justin Martyr.) In fact, Augustine even held that the beatific vision (i.e. the vision which makes one blessed or happy) of God, which the saints enjoy in heaven, and that men enjoy to a lesser extent even here on earth in mystical experience, is something that is produced by one’s reason, which gazes on or intuits God non-discursively. (Reason is the only faculty by which man can be acquainted with what is immaterial, and God is immaterial—the idea comes from Plotinus and the Platonists.) Actually, the intellectual vision, whether of the Forms or of God Himself, is more a matter of being lit up by God than of grasping God. The soul is passive in all of this, and receives the action of God, the “uncreated light,” or “illumination” of God. The doctrine that we know necessary natural and mathematical truths through such illumination is one hallmark of the Augustinian tradition in the Middle Ages.

            Augustine gave special emphasis to the notion that some sort of purification is necessary before we can employ our reason aright. The virtues purify us, but for Augustine the virtues included faith, hope in God, and the love of God. (Add these three theological virtues to the other natural virtues, that is, justice, self-control, wisdom, and courage.) Now faith is especially necessary for arriving at the truth because man’s nature was corrupted by Adam’s sin (the nature itself, which is shared by Adam and ourselves, and not just Adam), and so we no longer think as well as we would if our nature were whole and unaffected. Faith arises only if we have the natural virtues to a sufficient degree that we are willing to believe there is a God, and are not committed to denying this so we can live in vice. Since we don’t think straight in our corrupted state, we need an authority to lay out the main outlines of the truths that it is necessary for us to know for the sake of our happiness and salvation, and so we have the scriptures and the living faith of the Church to aid us. (It is like knowing what mathematical theorems are true and then going on to prove them, rather than being faced with the much harder task of discovering the theorems themselves from scratch.) Nonetheless, it is best to replace faith with reasoned proof wherever this is possible (for instance, it is good to prove God’s existence and his goodness). Eventually it is good to employ reason in the direct vision of God face to face, and learning as much philosophy as one can, including philosophical proofs of the part of faith that can be proven, strengthens one for this vision. (Sometimes Augustine speaks of replacing faith with reason, and sometimes, more diplomatically, he speaks of supplementing it with reason.) Note how much of this attempted reconciliation of Christianity and Philosophy is lost, if one gives up the Neoplatonic elements in Augustine’s thought, denying the theory of Forms and the intellectual nature of the beatific vision.

            On evil: Augustine was suspicious of the Neo-Platonic view that evil is only a lack of something good, and that we seem to experience evil only because we take a partial view of things (though he does sometimes say this). He points out that evil is real enough, even if we only think there is an evil, because even then the distress arising from the illusion is an evil. In the end all evil arises from the actions of one or another free agent, some person with free will. Now Augustine held that all free actions were caused, but caused by the agent alone. God could foresee the evil actions that men would commit, and so he predestined men to heaven or hell, depending on whether he decided to show mercy, or to impose punishment. Augustine never saw anything wrong with a world in which people are justly punished for their sins, indeed, he saw this as a good feature in the world, for unpunished sins would be a bad thing. It is true that it involves suffering, but the best paintings will have some dark places that contribute to the beauty of the whole, and the best world will similarly have suffering that contributes to its goodness in one way or another. God is not responsible for our evil actions except insofar as he withholds his grace from the sinner, for He can cause a person to do good, indeed, God’s grace is, in the end, responsible for every good action inasmuch as the good action arises naturally from the good human nature that God created. Evil actions arise from the corruption of this good nature, which destroys our free will and makes us incapable of avoiding sin, or the misuse of freedom of will. Our fallen state (that is, our corrupt nature), due to Adam’s sin, makes it impossible for us to avoid sin simply of our own volition, so that God’s special grace is needed for the fallen to act well. But our inclination to sin is a just punishment for Adam’s sin, and so no complaint can be raised about it, and it is not unjust to punish our sins. Later theologians usually held that God predestines salvation alone, and only fails to predestine salvation in the case of a person who goes to hell, but Augustine himself seems to have held to a “double” predestination. Augustine held that the agent is entirely responsible for his act even if it is inevitable given God’s failure to intervene with his grace, for it arises out of the agent’s own nature. God only stands back and watches, and that does not make Him responsible. (Note how this squares with the Stoic account of free will and responsibility.) Moreover, God has no obligation to intervene. It is a good thing to be merciful, and God can be merciful (that is, he has the authority to be merciful—not just anyone has the authority to show mercy when justice, that is, our moral duty, has been violated, for although the Emperor or some magistrate may have the authority to set aside a just sentence, an everyday citizen , for instance, does not.) But though it is a good thing, it is not a duty God has. (It is a duty we have, since we have sinned, and can, in all justice, only expect forgiveness if we grant forgiveness where we have the authority to do so, that is, when others have sinned against us. But God has never sinned, and so has no duty to forgive others. A duty, after all, is part of justice, and mercy sets aside justice. God has a duty to punish sinners, which he has the authority to ignore if he wishes.) So we are justly punished and rewarded for our acts. The same line is taken by modern Calvinists (Calvinism was, to a considerable degree, a “back to Augustine” movement). It should be noted that Augustine’s views on freedom and grace represent a determined attempt to exposit St. Paul’s epistles, in particular, Romans.

            Alternative lines on the problem of evil [this is not discussed in Lawhead] were taken by some people in the East, notably Irenaeus and Origen, about 200 years before Augustine. These fellows (who were at the university in Alexandria, in Egypt) argued that God, in order to provide free will to men, so that they can be really responsible for their own actions, must make them in the beginning without knowledge of good and evil, innocent, like children. In this way they can gradually learn what evil and good are, and turn to the good in the end, and be entirely responsible for their own characters (self-discipline and correct beliefs about the good) once they have matured. They are not made good, in which case their goodness would be due to God, but become good through their own efforts, thus sharing in creation. Thus the fall in the garden of Eden was inevitable, as a child’s errors are, given the inexperience of Adam, and leads to growth, and in the end, to a completely free choice of the good. This produces a much better world and a nobler kind of creature than we would have if men were created good and wise at the outset. Some commentators take it that Augustine, since he makes it out that the angels were perfect when first created, as was Adam, leaves the fall as a result of a finite creature’s inability to maintain even an initial perfection. They can note in their favor that Augustine holds that the Saints who go to heaven will be able to avoid falling a second time into sin only because of God’s special grace, not because of the efforts of their own, finite natures.

            But Augustine is actually closer to these Eastern thinkers than might at first be supposed. His view seems to be that even if Adam was perfect in his nature, so that his intelligence was not darkened by sin, and so forth, he was still inexperienced. So it was quite unlikely that he would continue without sin without God’s special grace. So why didn’t God give his special grace and help? Because Adam’s free will, his rational autonomy, would have been undermined if God had pressed this help on him unbidden. The point of creating people is to introduce something into the world that is responsible for, that chooses, its own goodness, insofar as that is possible. A thing with that sort of nature would be the noblest thing that God could create, and it would be wrong for God to rob that creature of its autonomy simply because there is a risk involved, the risk that it will choose to sin. In fact, Adam and Satan chose to sin because, in their pride (pride was the root of all sin for Augustine) they did not recognize the need for God’s help. Now that the effects of that pridefulness have been revealed, we will perhaps be willing to ask for God’s help, and then he will provide it, but only then, for otherwise he would violate our autonomy.

            Even if we accept all this, though, there are difficulties in Augustine’s view. Perhaps the greatest is this: Augustine assumes that since our natures are corrupted by Adam’s sin, we now lack free will, and cannot avoid acting sinfully out of our own natures. Nonetheless we are responsible for our actions, since they do arise from what we are. Augustine insists that we must take responsibility for what we are, even if what we are was initially formed by our corrupt social order, or even our corrupt nature. Now it might be objected that we are not responsible for our actions unless we have free will. A fellow named Pelagius from Britain held to exactly this view, and Augustine argued strongly against Pelagius, getting him and his heresy condemned at several Church Councils. Those who hold to Pelagian views are especially horrified by Augustine’s contention that unbaptized infants go to hell, quite deservedly, due to original sin. A Pelagian would hold that our natures are not corrupted by original sin in such a way that we lose freedom of will, though he might admit that a tendency to sin, which can be resisted, is present due to our corrupted nature and/or the corrupt society in which our characters are first formed. Human nature, however, which is defined by free will, remains intact. Later thinkers sometimes point out that the decision to accept God’s grace was at least a decision that must be free, or else salvation does not rest in our own choice. But Augustine seems to have argued that even here God’s grace was needed to help us accept God’s grace. His idea seems to be that sin is addictive, and God has to help us overcome the addiction enough so that we can choose to accept his help to overcome it entirely, and that this intrusion of grace does not unjustly undermine our freedom to choose, but rather sustains it. Once given the freedom to choose, we might still choose the addiction, of course.

            Augustine was strongly opposed to Origen’s conviction that people go through repeated incarnations, gradually learning as they go. This is good Plato, and it explains why we might justly be punished for the ancient sin of Adam (we participated in the sinfulness of these ancient times, corrupting our own characters as Adam corrupted his), and it avoids the necessity of holding that our very natures are now corrupted so that we lack free will. But Augustine, in common with unphilosophical Christians and Scripture, sees the whole drama of salvation played out in this single life of seventy or so years. He also disagreed with Origen over the issue of universal salvation. Origen held that God was so skillful and wise that he would eventually be able to bring everyone to salvation, even the Devil himself, and Augustine disagreed, holding, again with Scripture and the unphilosophical, that some people would never give up their prideful refusal to accept God’s aid, and so be eternally condemned to Hell. Indeed, Augustine imagined, in the usual way, that one had only a finite amount of time to accept God’s offer of help. After our death it is too late. Origen thought you had an indefinite number of lives to get around to doing it, and so could be much more hopeful about any given individual’s prospects of salvation. (In all of this, note well that Augustine does not think that God is required by justice to offer grace at all, and so whatever His terms might be on that offer, we have no complaint coming.)

            Christian ethics was strongly influenced by Augustine’s doctrine of the fall of man. Augustine saw the natural virtues, when possessed in the absence of the theological virtues to be nothing but “splendid vices.” Here he is taking his lead from Plotinus, who argued that the virtues changed their character in a man as he makes spiritual progress. To take the easiest example, self-control shifts from a matter of the sort of temperance that enables one to stay in good shape, and pursue his aims effectively, the self-control of the good soldier or businessman, to something higher, say an indifference to pleasure due to one’s vision of the Forms. Of course, such a virtue would shift its character as it came into the service of other and higher aims. That is part of Augustine’s point. Justice from the love of man is a vice, in a way, because it involves the love of creatures for their own sakes when only God should be loved for His own sake. It is a splendid vice, far better than injustice arising from particular love of particular men and hatred of others. But still, one should love men because they are God’s, not for their own sake. So only justice arising from charity is unqualifiedly a virtue. (Charity is the love of God, and consequently also love of His creation.) One can see how all the Pagan virtues would end up being re-defined in the Christian context. It is also to be noted that this is a supernatural ethics which rejects mere natural ethics, rooted in natural aims and virtues and the like (as in Aristotle, say), as inadequate, given the supernatural source of human beings. A good person must be oriented toward God as the highest good, not to natural aims.

            Augustine’s views on the state: There is a question how it is that the rule of the state is legitimate, is to be recognized as legitimate authority by any rational man. Augustine’s answer is that it is not legitimate. Every state is a collection of robbers (the upper, ruling classes) exploiting the poor (the lower classes). It is best to obey the state, but that is only because it is most prudent to have the robbery that goes on continually in this world well organized by a powerful central government. That way they will be careful to restrict themselves to such robbery as does not actually kill their victim or make him unable to produce further wealth that they can rob from him later. If there are a lot of little bands of robbers about, not centrally organized, then the poor honest man is hit repeatedly from all sides at once, and is likely to be killed or have his ability to produce utterly destroyed (if, for instance, they take even the grain he needs for seed next year).

            This Cynic view of government was not continued in later thinkers. There was an attempt to show that God had somehow lent his authority to rule to the government when it was legitimate. This notion of legitimate authority rooted in God’s authority is a new one with Christians, though there is some background for it in the thought of the Stoics. Of course, the rulers have to rule for the good of those ruled to be legitimate, and it was even held that the consent of the ruled to their rule was required.

            Questions: Augustine put together his thinking from a lot of Pagan sources as well as Scripture. What Pagan sources might be useful to shape a Christian philosophy that he did not draw on? Might the Skeptics (whom Augustine argued explicitly against) work better than Plato for Christian epistemology? Notice the parallel between the Christian view of the Trinity (the Father, the Son (Logos) and the Holy Spirit) and the ‘trinity’ of the Neoplatonists (The One, the Mind (sometimes called Logos), and the Soul). How close is the parallel? Could the Neoplatonist doctrine have influenced the development of the Christian doctrine by influencing how Christians read scripture? Is there any hint in Genesis of a Platonic picture of the origin of the world, with the Forms in the second person of the Trinity directing the Father in the application of his creative power?

            Note the problem concerning freedom of will and moral responsibility in Augustine. Does Augustine or Pelagius appeal more strongly to you? Can you say why? Augustine seems to suggest that we can be responsible for who or what we are and our actions arising from this, even if we did not freely choose to be that. Is that right? (Don’t think of a criminal brought up in horrible conditions, but rather of yourself, brought up in rather favorable conditions to virtue. Are you responsible for your character even though you did not choose to form it in this way? Can we praise you for the character you got from your genes and your environment, or should we only praise, say, your parents for your character?) What if we were to say that one must actually reject what one is, and actively try to change, before he ceases to be responsible for what he is? Would a good God have made a world in which some people are condemned to Hell forever? Is there more to goodness than justice and mercy granted to those who ask for it?

            A very practical problem in connection with faith and reason is the interpretation of Scripture. If one is a Fundamentalist (that is, one holds that all Scripture is inspired and is to be understood literally) there may be little room for philosophical elaboration of the Christian world view, and many problems with accepting Scripture (apparent contradictions, for instance) may seem irresolvable. So perhaps we must allow that Scripture is sometimes not meant literally (that non-literal readings are intended might be signaled in Scripture by manifest absurdities that present themselves if it is taken literally), or that Scripture is not inspired in all respects (perhaps the ‘science’ in scripture should be ignored, and only the spiritual and ethical meanings should be regarded as inspired). The Ancient Christians followed out all these suggestions in various ways. What rules would you propose for limiting the interpretation of Scripture to preserve the Faith from those who would find just anything in Scripture? Would we have to depend on an authoritative tradition of interpretation, here? Could a Creed, laying out the fundamentals from which we must not vary, be of use?

            Medieval Notions about God: God was conceived in the Middle Ages, following the Bible, as a person, with will, intellect and purpose. He was also conceived as having the following characteristics:

            (1) He is identical with Truth. The idea begins with St. Augustine, and is rooted in Platonism. A proof of God's existence was spun out of this by Augustine, like so: There is always something that is true (at least this, that there will be something true, is true), and things that are eternally and necessarily true (like the theorems of geometry), and for these to be true they must refer to some eternal and unchanging reality. But this can only be the Forms, in the mind of God. Emphasis on this Platonic proof of God's existence is an earmark of Augustinianism. The more careful Augustinians held that God is Truth not in the sense that he actually is the truth that is in a proposition, but in the sense that he is that by which all propositions are true, the cause of all truth, and that He is Truth Itself, the Form of Truth (which is truth in the same sense that the truth of a sentence is).

            The picture of God as Truth has one leg in Plato, but the other is in the transcendent God of the Old Testament Hebrews. Augustine argued that nobler things always act on less noble things, and are not acted upon by them. Thus we are active, not passive, in sensation, interpreting the images our souls view in the sense organs in light of the Forms which we recollect, and judging by the unchallengeable standard of our soul's good the goodness of material things. But we ourselves are judged by the standards that God embodies, in particular by the standard of the Truth, to which our opinions are obliged to conform. So God=Truth is something nobler than we are, just as we are nobler than the physical world.

             Aristotelians took God to be Truth only metaphorically, because of His containing the "exemplary Forms" of things, to which he looked when he created the world. These exemplary Forms are standards by which the things created in accord with them are to be measured, so that the closer the horse comes to matching its exemplary form the better a horse it is, and the more real it is in the sense that it has actualized more of its potential being. But things do not depend on their exemplary forms to exist, or to be what they are (except insofar as they depend on God's looking to the exemplary Forms in his creation), but only on their substantial forms, with which they are identical.

            (2) God is the first cause of all things. This arises from Aristotle's writings, and, among Aristotelians such as Thomas Aquinas, it forms a counter-weight to the Augustinian God-as-Truth line. The idea is that there must be a cause for whatever exists, but that cause also exists (the cause is simultaneous with what it causes in medieval thought), and needs a cause, and so on, but it can't go on this way indefinitely. So there must be a first cause that does not need a cause for its existence, which necessarily exists and doesn't need to be produced. That is God, who contains the reason for his existence somehow within His own nature. St. Anselm tried to back this up by proving that God exists in a mathematical fashion, working from the notion of God as that than which no greater can be thought, but this "ontological argument" was justifiably rejected in later thinkers.

            (3) God creates things, that is, brings about the existence of things (created things are "creatures," and only God is uncreated). Creation is not governed in any way by natural laws, and is incomprehensible to men (Augustinians pointed out that creation falls under no Forms, and, indeed, that God Himself falls under no Form, since he is prior to forms). We know creation occurs because it must occur if any non-necessary things are to exist, and because scripture tells us it occurs, but it is impossible to understand its nature. God created the world freely, nothing forced him to do it, nor does the world necessarily "emanate" or evolve from God, as the neo-Platonists held. Creatures are entirely distinct from God.

            (4) God is Goodness, Being, Justice, etc. That is, he is identical with these things. So He is good not by having goodness, as creatures have goodness, but by being goodness. This means his goodness is unlimited and perfect. The notion is Neoplatonic, and does not sit entirely comfortably with the notion that God creates rather than emanates the world. One would like to say that my goodness is God's goodness partially expressed in me, but that can't be said if the doctrine of creation is true. My goodness is an expression of God's goodness in part, but it is only similar to it, not the same identical goodness that is God's. This is Aquinas's view, which became fairly standard. By it God is nothing like creatures because he possesses the properties he possesses in a different way than creatures, though the properties are similar. Thus we can know that God is good, and know that it is the sort of goodness we have that is at issue, but we cannot really understand the way in which he is good, since our minds understand only having properties, not being them. So we understand God "analogically," that is, we understand that He is like creatures in a certain way, but also unlike them radically enough so that we cannot grasp His real nature as we can a creature's. In the later Middle Ages some thinkers took a more Hebraic view of the thing, holding that God was not so much good Himself as the standard and source of all goodness. As the standard of goodness, it is impossible that God should be judged good or bad by some independent notion of the good. Rather, as Ockham observes, whatever God is or commands, is necessarily good. So if God had commanded that people steal or murder, those actions would, ipso facto, be good. (Of course, he has commanded that we not do these things, so these actions are bad, but Ockham is not suggesting that God is capable of evil, but only that his incapacity for evil is not a matter of his living up to some external standard, but a matter of his being the standard.)

            (5) God is pure act and pure being. That is, there is nothing the least bit unreal about God, nothing that God is not, or that he is only potentially. This makes God very unlike Aristotelian natural substantial forms. Earlier thinkers tend to see all reality as coexisting in God, making him a mysterious totality of all that could possibly be real, along Neo-Platonic lines. Later thinker, such as Ockham, held that this amounted to nothing more than God's being the cause of all things, and so containing them all "virtually," in the way that a power contains what it produces. The picturesque qualities of the Neo-Platonic view are lost here, and God's being pure act comes to nothing more than his being omnipotent.

            (6) God cannot will evil, even though He is free and omnipotent. The reason is that the "ability" to will evil is no real ability at all, but only a lack of ability, a failure of being. (So argued St. Anselm.) God can do whatever is real. God is free not only from outside interference, but also from any possibility of some lack or failure entering into his actions, from error or incomplete accomplishment of his aims. Ockham, as usual, reinterpreted this, suggesting that whatever God wills is ipso facto good (point (4) above), and his inability to do evil is not due to his living up to any kind of standard.

            (7) God is perfectly blessed. His life is the perfect life that all creatures desire to know for themselves. That is one reason why knowledge of and friendship with God is so important for us, it enables us to participate in the perfect life.

            (8) God bears no "real relation" to any creature, rather the reality or characteristics that underlie every relation between God and His creatures are entirely located in the creature. This is because God is not capable of suffering any action or change from any source.

            (9) God is a trinity. We know this by revelation, and we know that there are relations within God, namely production and procession, which establish three "persons," the Father, Son and Spirit. We cannot know what these relations are in themselves, so we understand them in analogical terms, as like the relation among creatures whereby one creature produces another. Some attributes of God are communicable, that is, they belong to all three persons. For instance, God's will is communicable. Other relations and attributes are incommunicable, as production is, which belongs to the Father, and being produced, which belongs to the Son, having two natures (that of man and that of God), which belongs to the Son, and proceeding from the Son and the Father, which belongs to the Holy Spirit. The establishment of separate persons is roughly due to whatever makes some properties incommunicable. This is not unlike a modern scientist saying that certain relations between quarks, say, which can be described formally in mathematical models, cannot be conceived by us as they really are. As long as we can argue to such relations from observation, it is fair to give a purely formal description of them that does not reveal their real nature. For a Christian, of course, revelation can stand in for observation.

            (10) God is a perfect unity. That is, he has no parts, and his different powers and other qualities are all of them identical to God, rather than merely belonging to him but being really distinct from him. This traces back to the one God of the Old Testament, but also to Neo–Platonic thought, which insists that the coherence and unity of the universe shows that the ultimate reality behind it is entirely free of any multiplicity at all.

            (11) God is infinite. That is, God is in no way limited in any positive quality that he has, so that he is good without limit, powerful without limit, knowledgeable without limit, and so on. From this it follows that God is without a cause, and that there is no second God, who would, if He existed, necessarily limit the power of the first.

            (12) God is eternal. That is, God’s life is not something that experiences the passage of time. Rather God experiences all times at one and the same time. God is unchanging, even if, from the temporal point of view of a human being, God may seem to be doing one thing at one time, and another later. This in part follows from God’s unity, which would be broken up if he had temporal parts. God exists at all times, but all at once, not successively, so that God’s “now” is stationary and all encompassing, and not a moving now. Similarly, God is everywhere, and entirely in each place, though this location is treated by some thinkers as a matter of his power being evidenced everywhere. (After all, God is a spirit, and a spirit’s location is due to the presence of its power, not, absurdly, due to the location of the matter making up the spirit!)

            Questions: How much of the philosophical notion of God developed here is to be found in the Bible, and how much of it comes from, for instance, Plato? Some elements may have precursors, as it were, in the Bible, so that God is very powerful in the Bible, but is God really said to be strictly omnipotent, so that He can do whatever it is not self-contradictory to do? Is God eternal in the Bible, or only without beginning? And so on.

            How can we leave open a personal relationship with God sufficient to make sense of salvation, within this philosophical conception of Him? How does the economy of salvation, i.e. Jesus = the Son’s sacrifice for our sins, fit into this picture of God? Not only the Platonic picture of God, but the Platonic picture of a kind of religious experience of God, a union with God through Reason, was conveyed over into Christianity. Any Scriptural basis for this? Mysticism is the search for religious experience of God, and the conviction that this experience, friendship with God, as it were, is somehow the purpose for which we were intended—is mysticism Christian at all? What would be required to convert it from a Neoplatonic to a Christian mysticism?

            Say we reject Platonism, and adopted Aristotelian views. Could we reasonably retain anything like the conception of God laid out above? How well does the conception fit into other philosophical points of view? Is Christianity, given the development of this conception of God, wedded to Platonism? Would a return to the Biblical concept of God, uninterpreted in Neoplatonic terms, be a necessary move to adapt Christianity to another philosophical point of view?

            Universals and Knowledge: [See Lawhead, pp. 152-155] Boëthius began the discussion of universals. Commenting on an introduction to Aristotle's logic, he held that the substantial form of a thing must be in the thing, so that the man's humanity is actually in the man—if he loses his humanity, that is, ceases to be a man, he will cease to exist, and a man comes to exist when humanity actually comes to be in him, at conception. (This is not meant to suggest that a man is there before he comes to be, and that humanity comes to be in an individual already present, as it were, but not yet existing. Nor is it meant to suggest, for a genuine Aristotelian, that the humanity is somehow there beforehand, and comes to possess the characteristic of existence, or existence as this man.) Thus, following Aristotle as he understood him, Boëthius makes the substantial form of the man an essential part of him, but at the same time he takes it to be something universal, that is, something found simultaneously in each and every man. As Aristotle had argued, such a substantial form must actually be part of the man, and in him, not merely related to him from without, for otherwise it would not be essential to him, and the man must have his humanity in him if knowing his humanity is to give us knowledge of him and if his humanity is to affect him and constitute his nature. Thus, it seems that it will not do to say that the man has the same humanity as someone else, any more than a table could have the same legs as another table. Again, humanity cannot be like an edition of a book, so that it consists of a lot of little humanities that are parts, as it were, of the edition, each one in a single man, for the entirety of humanity is in me, else I would only be partly a man, say, animal but not rational, and only a part of humanity would be in me. But all men have something in common, nonetheless, and it would seem to be their humanity. Boëthius was a Platonist, of course, and so he no doubt thought the problem was to be resolved by admitting that what men had in common was the separated Form of Man, standing outside of all individual men. The substantial form of each man would then be particular to him alone, but would be the substantial form of a man only because it imitated the Form. (This reconciliation of Plato and Aristotle, which is really more a patchwork than a resolution of the issues involved, was commonplace in late Antiquity.) But he offered an Aristotelian solution to the problem in his commentary, since it was on an Aristotelian text, and suggested that what each man had in common with the others was a certain likeness in form, not the substantial form itself.

            The discussion of extreme realism and nominalism in Lawhead, pp. 167-8, is fine as it stands, and should be consulted here. One thing to note, though, is that nominalism (that is, the view of Roscelin), attempted to make the connection between the utterance (the mere ejection of breath, the noise made) and the particulars meant by it (individual men, say), without assuming that there was anything other than mere convention that established the connection to these objects (people) and not those (perhaps, donkeys). The problem here is that there seems to be “natural kinds,” that is, there really is something in common to human beings that leads us to call them all human beings, and whatever that is, donkeys don’t have it. Surely this thing really in common among human beings is the universal, humanity!? Abelard, however, thought this view absurd, even while he agreed with the extreme nominalists that the only universals were words, which were universal in virtue of signifying more than one thing. (Abelard, by the way, does not identify a word as a mere ejection of breath, with Roscelin, but thinks of it as a an ejection of breath with certain phonological properties, and with a meaning arising from agreement among the speakers of the language.)

            Abelard’s position is not laid out as clearly as it could be in Lawhead. He criticized views similar to those that Boëthius rejected as follows: Some hold that there is such a thing as a single universal humanity, from which individual men are constituted by the addition of various accidents, for instance, a certain place and time, various special attributes such as being female or having a beard, and so on. (Lawhead mentions Scotus Eriugena as one such person.) But the individual is not the same as his accidents (even if he is “individuated” by them), for he can lose these and survive. He is the same as his substantial form, for if he loses this he must cease to be. So if we take an individual to be somehow derived from the universal, then Socrates is his humanity, not any accident, just as Plato is his humanity, and so Plato is Socrates, since their humanity is the same reality! This is absurd, so the theory must be false. We cannot start out with universals and add a bunch of accidents (more universals) and hope to produce individuals in this way. In fact, all along we assume that we have differentiated the individuals somehow before we add any accidents, for that is the only way we can pick out group the accidents of Socrates together as his and the accidents of Plato as Plato's. If one only adds accidents to humanity, without grouping them with particular men, all one gets is a more specific sort of humanity, not a man.

            Abelard criticized the opposite approach as well, the attempt to make universals out of individuals. We could talk about the set of all men, but is that the universal humanity? If one says that being a man is just belonging to the set, a set of things assigned as human beings by convention alone, as Roscelin would have it, then how do we decide if one is a member of the set? We can't make a list of all the men and then stick to our list, since new men are being born all the time. How do we decide when to add something to the list? It certainly isn't by checking to see if he is on the list already, but it is done by seeing if he is a man, so being a man is not simply a matter of being on the list. In fact, we know when something belongs to the set of men by knowing if it is a man, and we don't know it is a man by seeing if it is in that set. The correct view, Abelard thought, would neither attempt to reduce universals to individuals, nor vice versa. It would recognize that all that actually exists are individuals (the characteristic Aristotelian view), but that once we have referred to or named an individuals we need to do more to actually say something. (Actually we need more even to refer to the individual, since in practice one must identify the individual’s underlying substantial nature, that it is a human being, say, to pick it out of its background.) We need to say or predicate something of the individual or individuals we have picked out to talk about, and what we say of them, say, that-they-are-men, is intrinsically universal, but it is not a real thing to be referred to or named. It cannot be named, but only said of something that is named.

            Abelard complained that the likeness between the substantial forms of different men, that Boethius refers to, is just the universal humanity come back again, since, after all, it is simply in virtue of humanity that the substantial forms are alike. He denies that there is any real thing, a "likeness in respect of humanity," shared by all men, and denies in general that there is any real universal at all to be found in the world. Only particulars are to be found in reality. The only universals are linguistic expressions, which are universal in virtue of being truly predicable of many particulars. A universal is strictly a predicate expression, which is not a name for something, but rather corresponds to a ‘status’, as Abelard calls it. A status can be expressed as follows: That - he - is - a - man. This is true of many things, but is not the name of any reality. ‘Man’ may be a name of many things, but only because it is true of many things that they are all men, not because there is any real thing the many men share with one another, nor because we have made up a mere list of things that we agreed to call ‘human beings’. In terms of theories of language, this means that predication is not reducible to reference of some sort, reference to some real thing that is part of the thing having the property predicated of it (the property being a real universal since the same property belongs to many things). On the other hand, reference to a real thing is not reducible to description or predication. That is, one cannot treat the real particular as merely a very complicated property, for it is necessarily only one thing, and any set of properties could in principle belong to several things. So to predicate something of a particular is not to mention two things, but only one, the particular, then to say that some status is true of it.

            This approach to universals is best described as ‘moderate realism’. It is realism since it does not say that the universality of predicate expressions has no basis in reality at all, as though the similarity of men were made up by us. All men are similar in this, that they are men. On the other hand it is moderate, since it does not take the extreme position of making the universal a real thing. An equally good case could be constructed for calling it moderate nominalism. Lawhead also calls it conceptualism, but Abelard seems to have made words universals, and provides us with very little talk of concepts, of all that, as Lawhead notes, he speaks of abstraction from particulars leading to our intellectual grasp of a status. This was the dominant view after Abelard.

            From Avicenna, a Moslem thinker and commentator on Aristotle discussed by Lawhead on pp. 161-162, a new version of moderate realism entered Europe, and it was the general position that this new version was consistent with Abelard, but made better Aristotle. It is probably best to reserve the term ‘conceptualism’ for this new view. (The reason it made better Aristotle was that it worked in Aristotle’s account of knowledge, which Abelard was unaware of, since he did not have the relevant works of Aristotle available to him.) The position, according to Thomas Aquinas's reading of it (see Lawhead, pp. 186-187), went like this: The only realities or things to be found in the world are particulars, and concepts in the mind (Aquinas doesn’t approach things in terms of words, usually). What Abelard had failed to note was that the concept has the same nature as the thing it is a concept of, in the sense in which two particulars, say two donkeys, may have the same nature. A nature can reproduce itself not only in another particular, which will then be of the same species as its parent, but also in the mind, given the right preparation. But it is produced without matter in the mind, so the nature of donkey, say, will appear in the biologist's mind, which will not thereby have an actual donkey in it. Now the concept is universal, because it is by nature suited to be thought or predicated of many things (this echoes Abelard's definition of a universal word), not because it is in many things. So the nature of man can exist in actuality, i.e. in a man, or in the mind. It can also be treated in a third way, ‘absolutely’. When viewed in this way it is considered only insofar as it is the nature of man, without reference to whether it exists actually or only as a concept. So, absolutely considered, man is rational. All actual men are actually rational, and all concepts of man include rationality within the concept, or conceive a man as rational. The rationality is the same both in the concept and in the man, and so we can know what a man is, his nature, because we can be directly acquainted with it, since we are directly acquainted with the concept in our mind. The chief advantage of this view seems to be its answer to skepticism. It holds that we are directly acquainted with the real natures of things, and so leaves no room for the skeptic to argue that we know only the reports of our senses, which in no way tell us what the real natures of things are.

            Aquinas conceived the concept in the mind as an action of the mind, the act of grasping or mentally perceiving the nature of which it is a concept. This action shares in the nature of the thing conceived because it is necessarily caused in the mind by the thing conceived, and, if it is to count as a genuine mental awareness of the nature, the mind has to, in this action, be actually joined to the thing conceived. The mind becomes what it conceives, since it can have an immediate awareness only of itself. If it only had a representation of the thing conceived, then the question could be raised whether the representation had been incorrectly interpreted by the mind (as sensory representations sometimes are), or whether it might not have been produced by something other than what it represents (like a pictorial representation of a unicorn).

            Questions: Note a hallmark of the developing medieval method in philosophy here, the consideration of metaphysical questions from the standpoint of language and the nature of linguistic meaning. Does Abelard’s analysis of the metaphysical dispute between Aristotle and Plato seem to throw light on it for you? Is the dispute really one about how language works, mistakenly projected onto the world in such a way as to lead to strange metaphysical doctrines? How much of Aristotle’s metaphysics remains after this linguistic reorientation? (Abelard is fundamentally an Aristotelian.)

            What characteristics of medieval thought might be responsible for this linguistic reorientation of philosophy? In particular, what about the fact that most mediaeval philosophers are also theologians, with a strong interest in linguistic matters, since they have to concern themselves with meaning of various kinds and the interpretation of scripture all the time. Also note that this is a post-classical age, which means that they learned their philosophy from the classical books in the canon, not from their own reflections, and they had precious few books, which they read and disputed over with great care, in an attempt to recapture the real intentions of the great Ancient scholars who wrote them. If Aristotle was a biologist-philosopher, Plato a mathematician-philosopher, Plotinus a psychologist-philosopher, the Atomists physicist, mechanic-philosophers, the Skeptics physician-philosophers, well, then, the mediaeval thinkers were philologist-philosophers (as well as theologian-philosophers, of course).

            The Soul and Immortality in 13th-Century Aristotelianism: It is customary to classify 13^th century Christian philosophers in terms of their ideas concerning the soul. There were two traditions, both inherited from Antiquity. One depended ultimately on Plato, and came to the Medieval thinkers via the Neoplatonists and Augustine. The other originated in Aristotle, and came to the fore with the reintroduction of Aristotle’s works into the West in the 12^th and 13^th centuries, and in particular with the commentaries of Averroës, which seemed to take Aristotle farther than Christian orthodoxy would allow.

            The Augustinian tradition held the soul to be a substantial entity, in principle independent of the body. The soul was the ruler of the body, and typically said to use the body. The soul is the person, and the body is just something we happen to have available for our use. Aristotle considered the soul to be the form of the body, and so, it would seem, metaphysically dependent on the body, so that it cannot exist without it. A person is not the soul, but the composite of body and soul, the ensouled (= animate) body. The Augustinian tradition had difficulty accounting for the relation between the soul, the body, and the person, since the connections here do not seem as accidental as the Augustinian account would make them. (It might also have had theological difficulties with the resurrection of the body and related doctrines, but no one seems to have made much of this at the time.) The Aristotelian position had difficulties accounting for the immortality of the soul. Following the arguments of Plato and Aristotle, 13^th century thinkers tried to arrive at a decision here by considering how it is that one knows. If we can understand how knowledge of the real world occurs, that should tell us whether the soul is connected with a Platonic realm of forms, in which it can live, as it were, without the body, or can only know through sensory experience, and so depends on the body even for its most characteristic and independent function, theoretical thought.

            Averroës, taking the Aristotelian line (Lawhead, pp. 163-164), held that the human soul is not capable of understanding or reasoning without the use of the imagination (sensible images summoned up by memory). (The material on the intellect and the soul following here is not treated in Lawhead.) Thus it cannot think (or do anything else) without a body, and so it cannot exist without a body, as Plato claimed it could. Plato thought the soul could view the Forms without a body, that is, think, but Averroës thought this notion had been refuted by Aristotle. Indeed, he argued that the form could only get into the individual human soul by ceasing to be universal, and so could be found only in some single, immaterial, spirit common to all things in the natural world, the Intellect. Thus the only way the soul can be made out to be immortal is if we want to say that the Intellect (located in the sphere of the Moon—this is a Neo-Platonic notion, originally), which causes the imagination produce its images in the highly organized way that constitutes human “thinking,” is the same as the individual man (as a Neo-Platonist would say). But this intellect has none of the individual characteristics of the man, of course, no memory of the man's life, no emotions, and so on. In effect, having a concept of the nature of a thing is a matter of our imagination becoming attuned to the concept of that thing in the Intellect common to all intelligent beings. Thus the “cogitative power,” which is associated with the imagination, is found in individual men, but not intellect. This Intellect is immortal and eternal, but is not, it seems, a man. So one is never directly aware of a concept, but only of the imagination's conformity to the concept. We are like radio receivers, if you will, that can, by appropriate experience, tune in to the wave length of one or another Form in the Intellect that governs the thinking of us all. Averroës was accused of holding that we are immortal, but merge with God, of which we are merely parts, after death, but he seems never to have advanced such a view. Rather, he held that we are individual cogitative beings, and thus different from animals, which are not capable of cogitation, that we are not by nature immortal, but that God may, of course, render us immortal after resurrection by a miraculous act if He chooses to.

            The Augustinians, for instance, St. Bonaventure in the twelfth and early thirteenth century, thought that the soul could exist without a body, as Plato did, and that it was therefore by nature immortal. The possible intellect (which Averroës places in the universal Intellect) is found in the individual soul, but the agent intellect is not. The agent intellect produces the conception of a nature in the possible intellect, that is, it places the nature to be conceived in the possible intellect. The agent intellect is not the individual soul, of course, nor an angel of some sort (as Averroës conceives it), but God Himself, in the person of Jesus Christ, illuminating the individual intellect in accord with Augustine's theory. (Note that God is active and human beings passive here, for God is nobler than human beings.) Moreover, the possible intellect enjoys a direct and non-discursive view of the Forms it knows without assistance from images or processes of reasoning of any sort, a notion that Averroës denied.

            The Christian Aristotelians of the thirteenth century, notably, Thomas Aquinas, took a yet different view of the matter. They rejected the Platonic theory of forms, and so Augustinian illumination, and insisted that we make our own concepts from experience of the world, as it were, and that God enters into the picture only insofar as he created us with the natural power to do this. So they held that both the possible and the agent intellect are in the individual human soul, so that the human soul has the ability to abstract a concept of a real nature working from sensory images collected in the imagination. (See Lawhead, p. 171–172) The soul does this by a "created light" (as opposed to the uncreated light of the Augustinian tradition) that illumines the sensory images. Thus the soul places the natures of things in itself once it receives sufficient experience. On this view, as on the Augustinian one, the individual soul is immortal, since it has an activity that does not depend on the body, but in addition a human being is treated as a self-contained unity, not dependent on outside factors to carry out its essential functions, and that seems intuitively the way it ought to be.

            This view, it should be noted, allows that men can know the natural world without in any way taking account of God (though they can deduce God's existence), or revelation. It gives a charter to the philosophical sciences to proceed on their own, without reference to theology, a charter of which the Augustinian conservative were rather suspicious. Their suspicion arose in part from the association of such liberalism (and Aristotelianism in general) with Averroës. Averroës held that there could be conclusions correctly arrived at in philosophical reasoning which contradicted theological conclusions based on revealed scripture (for him, the Q’uran). In such cases we should accept scripture, but interpret it, allegorically if necessary, to bring it into line with philosophical reason. This was a Neo-Platonic notion, rooted in the conviction that God's nature was somehow expressed in the natural world, that God was the soul of the world, as it were, rather than transcending the world as its creator. On that view, there can be no reason to doubt natural reason, which, in its consideration of the Forms, is only considering God Himself in various aspects. On the contrary, the "Latin Averroists," Christian Aristotelians who took Averroës as the most authoritative commentator on Aristotle, allowed that philosophy, done rightly, might disagree with scripture, inasmuch as it must fail to take God's miraculous interventions into account, but in such cases scripture must (often at least) be allowed precedence, and the literal truth of what it says must be accepted, although it was the theologians' job, not the scientists', to resolve such cases. (Lawhead’s account of the views of the Latin Averroists on page 163–164 follows older scholarship, and is inaccurate.) The scientist simply announces the results of his science, even though some of those results are to be set aside by the Theologians and God's supernatural activity. (For example, the philosopher might believe, in accord with natural reason, that the world has no beginning, or that the soul is mortal, but both conclusions might also be rightly set aside in view of revelation, which informs us that God has miraculously brought about the soul's immortality and provided a first, non-natural, cause for the world.) Now many Christians were suspicious of this. They saw the attempt to free philosophy and science to pursue their own courses independently of theology as a trick, a device to free a heretical philosopher from any requirement to agree with the faith in his teaching or writing. Wherever he disagreed, the fellow simply points out that theology says different, but here is how philosophy works it out, and his readers know how to take it, namely that philosophy is in fact right, but the philosopher has to be diplomatic to keep out of the hands of the Inquisition. Thomas Aquinas took the view that natural reason could not in fact conflict with revelation, although it could draw a blank on some topics in which revelation told us exactly what was going on. So, one could not prove by natural reason that the world had no beginning, or that the soul was mortal, though one could not, perhaps, prove the contrary either. Even in the case of miracles, natural reason informs us of God's existence, and so of the possibility of miracles, and, taking this possibility into account, it cannot assert any of its conclusions except with the provision, "at least it is so if no miracle occurs."

            Some further remarks on Aquinas vs. Augustinian conservatives such as Robert Grosseteste. The Augustinians saw the intellectual soul as something distinct from the animal soul (which is responsible for sensation and purposive movement), and the animal soul as distinct from the vegetable soul (responsible for growth and reproduction), and the vegetable soul as distinct from the forms of the various sorts of matter making up the body. In effect, the higher forms came to an already existing set-up, so the intellectual soul enters the functioning animal body, and adds a new dimension to the activities of the already established animal. Thus the intellectual soul turns the activities of the body into expressions of an intellect, a rational will, and the like. The intellectual soul can exist without the body, on its own. It is like the pilot of a ship, who directs the ship's movements, and makes it something efficient and intelligent, but he is not the same thing as the ship, and can leave it behind and carry on his own life elsewhere if he chooses. (Descartes, as we shall see, assumes this Augustinian view in his famous “Cartesian Dualism.”) Thomas, a typical Aristotelian, disagreed. He insisted that the soul of a person is the form of the body as well as the intellect, so that the one soul simply performed a number of functions, some lower and some higher, some immaterial (such as reflection on an already abstracted nature) and some material (such as digestion). Thus, although the soul can survive the death of the body by radically curtailing its activities, continuing only those that are immaterial, it is not then fully functional, and can only attain its full reality again, and its ultimate aim of a human life, once the person is resurrected and has a body once more. Note the Aristotelian conception of the soul (and forms in general) as a kind of ongoing activity actually occurring in nature. If the activity is once fully interrupted, the substantial form is destroyed, but as long as it continues, in however reduced a manner, the substantial form remains alive. The human soul is able to survive the death of its body because it has some activities that don't need a body.

            Ockham and Terminism: William of Ockham, an English philosopher, introduced new criticisms of the views on universals proposed by Aquinas, Scotus and others, and established a new school of thought called ‘terminism.’ (See Lawhead, pp. 188–194) The school was strongly nominalist, holding that the only universals were names predicable of many things, though, somewhat after the manner of Abelard, Ockham also held that it was a fact independent of anything we might think about it that, for instance, Plato and Aristotle were of the same species, and that this species could be defined as “rational animal.” In Ockham's view, it was a mistake to imagine that a nature was shared by the concept and the thing of which it was a concept. In what possible sense could my concept of a man be a man? We can only imagine that something not an individual man, but responsible for the man's being a man, was simultaneously both in the intellect and in the particular man. And that is how these fellows speak: They say that the same thing absolutely considered is both in the man and in the mind. But that is absurd, one thing is in the man, and a second in the mind. If they are the same, it is only because they are similar. And it does not explain how they can be similar to say they are the same, Absolutely Considered. Similarity is not a form of identity, identity considered in this way or that. There are two things, and considering them in this way or that will never make one thing of the two. Similarity is a real relation between two things (and similarly in species is a different real relation than similarity in some accidental quality such as height), but it is not grounded by anything real shared between the two.

            What then is the connection between the concept and the nature? Well, the concept is similar to the nature, and more similar to the nature it is of than is any other concept. Thus, similarity grounds a kind of natural meaning, not rooted in convention, that attaches to concepts, and underlies the conventional meanings of words, which gain their meaning by being hooked up to concepts. The concept of a given nature is as similar to it as it is because it is caused by the nature in question, and so there is some sense in saying that it is a matter of the nature reproducing itself in the soul, though, strictly, this is a metaphorical way of speaking. What it does is to produce a concept similar to itself in the soul. This represents an abandonment of Aristotle's view that knowledge involves a direct apprehension of the nature of a thing. Apprehension of the nature is through a concept, though, perhaps, it could be held that one directly apprehends certain characteristics of the nature, given that the concept is similar to the nature in some respects. (Something like this is Locke's view.) The question how the concept can be similar to a nature, given that it is not just the nature itself under another guise, was to plague Ockham's philosophical descendants, the Empiricists (beginning with Berkeley and Hume), throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

            In any case, concepts are essentially linguistic for Ockham—they are names in the universal language of thought that we all share. They signify real natures and individuals, but naturally, not conventionally. Ockham calls concepts ‘mental words,’ and holds that we think in a kind of mental language. We all have the same language of concepts, since we can all conceive cows, for instance, even if you speak German and I speak English. We can agree on how cows work because our concepts are independent of our spoken languages, and indeed, the meaning of words in English and German is obtained only by matching them up with the concepts they stand in for. Why do we all have the same concepts? That is not so clear, perhaps it is because our minds are all constructed alike and so react in the same way upon encountering a cow, producing a concept as like a cow as it can be. Ockham certainly does not seem to want to say our concepts are innate, as we shall see Descartes doing. They are gained from experience. The root sort of knowing, from which all other knowing arises, is intuitive or sensory cognition of the individual, and it is from this cognition of the individual that general concepts take their rise.

            Now this all raised some hostility from the theologians, though a sort of alliance of Terminism and Averroism, a kind of Leftist Aristotelianism, arose and maintained itself, especially in England and Italy, but even for a while in Paris, despite the attempts of the conservative theologians to root it out. In the end the theologians could not show these views heretical (though in the view of the theologians this was only because these contumacious fellows refused to draw the conclusions that clearly followed from their positions). Terminism is the root of Empiricism as we shall encounter it in England. From this time on there is a split between English and Continental thought which never completely heals again, and has proven enormously fruitful as each side is repeatedly forced to modify its views under fire from the other.

            The 13^th-century refutation of skepticism had been overthrown by the terminists, and it was not immediately so clear to many that Ockham's refutations of skepticism worked. Thus you get some terminists who defend skepticism (though Ockham did not), which further horrified the authorities. The line was to suggest that God, if he wished, could attach any sort of natural action to the substantial form of a thing. The acts of a thing are not identical to its nature, and so God can attach any acts he wants to the nature of a thing without destroying its nature. Thus, even if a direct view of the nature of a thing were possible, as it is not, this would not enable one to know how such a thing would behave, if we did not also have a view of God’s (arbitrary) assignment of causal properties to that nature. Thus, one must be skeptical about natural science, for we know the causal powers of things only by observation, not by the examination of the reality that lies behind those powers. (It should be emphasized that this skepticism was advanced by some of the followers of Ockham, but not by Ockham himself or the mainstream of Ockhamist thought. Nor does it seem a necessary consequence of Ockham’s views. Ockham held that we could know that things do have regular causal powers, and with this knowledge, we can then discover their causal powers, which belong to them necessarily in the order of nature, but only contingently by God’s disposition of the order of nature, through observation. (Note here that Lawhead’s criticism of Ockham on p. 207 misfires. Ockham held, like modern scientists, that there are necessary causal relations in nature, he just held that these relationships were established in God’s creation of the world, and could have been otherwise had God created otherwise. Moreover, modern scientists do not hold that there are logically necessary relationships in nature, but distinguish logical from natural necessity, somewhat as Ockham did, holding that the naturally necessary causal connection could, logically speaking, have been otherwise. That is why, according to both Ockham and modern scientists, it can only be established through observation, and never through mere deduction.)

            The emphasis on God's absolute power revealed in this skeptical line of argument was extended, even by Ockham himself, beyond the realm of natural law. Ockham argued that God was not ruled or judged by ethical principles, but, rather, ethical standards were rooted in God's decisions and God's absolute power. That is, nothing is above God, and nothing is able to judge God, as it were, and so ethical standards of judgment must derive from God, rather than applying to and justifying God’s actions. Thus, if God had decided that theft was permissible or obligatory (which he hasn’t), then it would be so (as, perhaps, in the case of the Israelites leaving Egypt, when God commanded them to take with them the goods of the Egyptians, though this might have been, instead of theft, a matter of claiming just compensation for the oppression the Israelites had suffered). In general, the later Middle Ages emphasizes God's absolute transcendence of the world, and his absolute power, His Will over his Intellect, as Lawhead puts it.

            One minor inaccuracy in Lawhead: Page 196, at the end of the section on mysticism: the German Theology is anonymous, not by Meister Eckhart, though it seems undeniable the author was strongly influenced by Eckhart.

            Further questions: Is Ockham right? Is there a language of thought that we all share? What arguments might support this view? What of the skepticism that Ockham’s thought engendered? Does it really undermine Christianity, as Lawhead and many Catholic thinkers seem to have suggested? Ockham’s views on the absolute power of God, and the notion that God’s commands constitute morality rather than arising from a just conception of it, have been taken by Protestants (Luther was strongly influenced by Ockham) to be a return to a Scriptural view of God, as is apparent in Paul’s Letter to the Romans, Job, and so on. On this view, Thomas’s picture of God is, to a great extent, a product of Greek philosophy. This is a rational God, designed as a place for Plato’s world of Forms, and even if many commentators thought they found such a God in Scripture, they were wrong. What do you think of this?