Philosophy in the Carolingian Empire

8/9/2019 Philosophy in the Carolingian Empire

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Philosophy in the Carolingian Empire

Outside the Roman Empire the world was transformed beyond recogni-tion. The life of the prophet Muhammad came to an end in 633, and within

ten years of his death the religion of Islam had spread by conquest from its

native Arabia throughout the neighbouring Persian Empire and the

Roman provinces of Syria, Palestine, and Egypt. In 698 the Muslims

captured Carthage, and ten years later they were masters of all North

Africa. In 711 they crossed the Straits of Gibraltar, easily defeated the Gothic

Christians, and Xooded through Spain. Their advance into northern

Europe was halted only in 732, when they were defeated at Poitiers by

the Frankish leader Charles Martel.

Charles Martels grandson Charlemagne, who became king of the

Franks in 768, drove the Muslims back to the Pyrenees, but did no more

than nibble at their Spanish dominions. To the east, however, he con-

quered Lombardy, Bavaria, and Saxony, and had his son proclaimed king of

Italy. When Pope Leo III was driven out of Rome by a revolution, Charle-

magne restored him to his see. In gratitude the Pope crowned him as

Roman emperor in St Peters on Christmas Day 800a date which, if not

the most memorable in history, is at least the easiest to remember. Thus

began the Holy Roman Empire, which at Charlemagnes death in 814

included almost all the Christian inhabitants of continental western

Europe.

Charlemagne was anxious to improve standards of education and cul-

ture in his dominions, and he collected scholars from various parts of

Europe to form a Palatine School at his capital, Aachen. One of the most

distinguished of these was Alcuin of York, who took a keen interest in

AristotlesCategories. The logic textbook which he wrote, Dialectica, takes the

form of a dialogue in which the pupil Charlemagne asks questions and the

teacher Alcuin gives answers. Alcuin retired in the last years of his life to

run a small school in the abbey of St Martin of Tours, of which he later

became abbot. He spent his time, he told the emperor, dispensing to thispupils the honey of Scripture, the wine of classical literature, and the

apples of grammar. To a privileged few he displayed the treasures of

astronomyCharlemagnes favourite hobby.

When philosophy revived between the ninth and eleventh centuries, it

did so not within the old Roman Empire of Byzantium, but in the Frankish

P H I L O S O P H Y A N D F A I T H

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Empire of Charlemagnes successors and in the Abbasid court of Muslim

Baghdad. The leading philosophers of the revival were, in the West, John

the Scot, and in the East, Ibn Sina (Avicenna).

John was born in Ireland in the Wrst decades of the ninth century. He is not

to be mistaken for the more famous John Duns Scotus, who Xourished in the

fourteenth century. It is undoubtedly confusing that there are two medieval

philosophers with the name John the Scot. What makes it doubly confusing

is that one of them was an Irishman, and the other was for all practical

purposes an Englishman. The ninth-century philosopher, for the avoidance

of doubt, gave himself the surname Eriugena, which means Son of Erin.

By 851 Eriugena had migrated from Ireland to the court of Charles the

Bald, the grandson of Charlemagne. This was probably at Compiegne,

which Charles thought of renaming Carlopolis, on the model of Constan-

tinople. Charles was a lover of things Greek, and the astonishingly learned

Eriugena, who had mastered Greek (no one knows where), won his favour

and wrote him Xattering poems in that language. He taught liberal arts at

the court for a while, but his interests began to turn towards philosophy.

Once, commenting on a text on the borderline between grammar and

logic, he wrote no one enters heaven except through philosophy.9

Eriugena Wrst engaged in philosophy in 851 when invited by Hincmar,

the archbishop of Reims, to write a refutation of the ideas of a learned and

pessimistic monk, Gottschalk. Gottschalk had taken up the problem of

predestination where Augustine had left oV. He was reported to have

deduced from the texts of Augustine something that was generally there

left implicit, namely that predestination aVected sinners as well as saints. It

was, he taught, not only the blessed in heaven whose ultimate fate had

been predestined, the damned also had been predestined to hell before they

were ever conceived. This doctrine of double predestination seemed to

Archbishop Hincmar to be heretical. At the very least, like the monks of

Augustines time, he regarded it as a doctrine inimical to good monastic

discipline: sinners might conclude that, since their fate had been sealed

long ago, there was no point in giving up sinning. Hence his invitation toEriugena to put Gottschalk down (PL 125. 845).

Whether or not Gottschalk had been accurately reported, Eriugenas

refutation of his alleged heresy was, from Hincmars point of view, worse

9 See J. J. OMeara, Eriugena(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), chs. 1 and 2.


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than the disease. Eriugenas arguments were weak, and in attacking the

predestination of the damned, he emasculated the predestination of the

blessed. There could not be a double predestination, he said, because God

was simple and undivided; and there was no such thing as predestination

because God was eternal. The Wrst argument is unconvincing because if a

double predestination threatens Gods simplicity, so too does the distinc-

tion between predestination and foreknowledge, which was the favoured

solution of Gottschalks opponents. The second argument does not pro-

vide the desired incentive to the sinner to repent, because whatever

temporal qualiWcation we give to the divine determining of our fate, it is

certainly, on the Augustinian view, independent of any choice of ours

(CCCM 50. 12).

The Frankish kingdom was torn by doctrinal strife, and both Gottschalk

and Eriugena found themselves condemned by Church councils. The

Council of Quierzy in 853the third of a seriesdeWned, against

Gottschalk, that while God predestined the blessed to heaven, he did

not predestine others to sin: he merely left them in the human mass of

perdition and predestined only their punishment, not their guilt. The

condemnation of Eriugena, at Valence in 855, aYrmed that there was

indeed a predestination of the impious to death no less than a predestin-

ation of the elect to life. The diVerence was this: that in the election

of those to be saved the mercy of God preceded all merit, whereas in

the damnation of those who were to perish evil desert preceded just

judgement. The Council fathers were not above vulgar abuse, saying

that Eriugena had deWled the purity of the faith with nauseating Irish

porridge.

Despite his condemnation, Eriugena remained in favour with Charles

the Bald and was commissioned by him in 858 to translate into Latin three

treatises of Dionysius the Areopagite: theDivine Names, theCelestial Hierarchy,

and theEcclesiastical Hierarchy. He found the Neoplatonic ideas of Dionysius

congenial and went on to construct his own system on somewhat similar

lines, in a work of Wve volumes called On Natureor, to give it its Greektitle,Periphyseon.

There are, according to Eriugena, four great divisions of nature: nature

creating and uncreated, nature created and creating, nature created and

uncreating, and nature uncreating and uncreated (1. 1). The Wrst such

nature is God. The second is the intellectual world of Platonic ideas, which


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creates the third nature, the world of material objects. The fourth is God

again, conceived not as creator but as the end to which things return.

Eriugena tells us that the most important distinction within nature is

that between the things that are and the things that are not. It is discon-

certing to be told that God is among the things that are not; however,

Eriugena does not mean that there is no God, but rather that God does not

Wt into any of Aristotles ten categories of being (2. 15). God is above being,

and what he is doing is something better than existing. One name that we

can give to the ineVable and incomprehensible brilliance of the divine

goodness is Nothing.10

Eriugenas third division, the material world, is the easiest to compre-

hend (3. 3). Like Philoponus, he believes that heaven and earth are made

out of the same elements; there is no special quintessence for the heavenly

bodies. The cosmos, he tells us, consists of three spheres: the earth in the

centre, next to it the sphere of the sun (which is roughly 45,000 miles

away), and outermost the sphere of the moon and the stars (roughly 90,000

miles away). While Eriugena thinks that the sun revolves around the

world, he takes some steps towards a heliocentric system: Jupiter, Mars,

Venus, and Mercury, he believed, were planets of the sun, revolving

around it.

Where do human beings Wt into Eriugenas fourfold scheme? They seem

to straddle the second and third division. As animals, we belong in the

third division, and yet we transcend the other animals. We can say with

equal propriety that man is an animal and that he is not an animal. He

shares reason, mind, and interior sense with the celestial essences, but he

shares his Xesh, his outward self, with other animals. Man was created twice

over: once from the earth, with the animals, but once with the intellectual

creatures of the second division of nature. Does this mean that we have two

souls? No, each of us has a single, undivided, soul: wholly life, wholly mind,

wholly reason, wholly memory. This soul creates the body, acting as the

agent of God, who does not himself create anything mortal. Even when

soul and body are separated at death, the soul continues to govern thebody scattered throughout the elements (4. 8).

As the creator of the body, the soul belongs to that division of nature

which is both created and creative. This second division consists of what

10 Eriugenas theology is discussed at greater length in Ch. 9 below.


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Eriugena calls the primordial causes of things, which he identiWes with the

Platonic Ideas (2. 2). These were pre-formed by God the Father in his

eternal Word. The Idea of Man is that in accordance with which man is

made in the image of God. But that image is deformed in fallen humans.

Had God not foreseen that Adam would fall, humans would not have been

divided into male and female; they would have propagated as angels do.

Their bodies would have been celestial and would have lacked metabolism.

After the resurrection, our bodies will resume their sexless and ethereal

form. When the world Wnally ends, place and time will disappear, and all

creatures will Wnd salvation in the nature that is uncreated and uncreating.

Eriugena was one of the most original and imaginative thinkers of the

Middle Ages and built the ideas of his Greek sources into a system that was

uniquely his own. Reading him is not easy, but his text can cast a fascinat-

ing spell on the reader. He has a fanatical love of paradox: whenever he

writes a sentence he can hardly bear not to follow it with its contradictory.

He often displays great subtlety and ingenuity in showing that the two

apparent contradictions can be interpreted in such a way as to reconcile

them. But sometimes his wayward intellect leads him into sheer nonsense,

as when he writes In unity itself all numbers are at once together, and no

number precedes or follows another, since all are one (3. 66).

Though Eriugena constantly quotes the Bible, his system is closer to

pagan Neoplatonism than to traditional Christian thought, and it is unsur-

prising thatOn Naturewas eventually condemned by ecclesiastical authority.

In 1225 Pope Honorius III ordered all surviving copies of the work to be sent

to Rome to be burned. But legend was kind to his memory. The story was

often told of Charles the Bald asking him, over dinner, what separates a Scot

from a sot, and being given the answer only this table. And at one time the

University of Oxford implausibly venerated him as its founder.11

Muslim and Jewish PhilosophersThe Christian Eriugena was a much less important precursor of Western

medieval philosophy than a series of Muslim thinkers in the countries that

are now Iraq and Iran. Besides being signiWcant philosophers in their own

11 See OMeara, Eriugena, 21416.


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Philosophy in the Carolingian Empire

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