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CABALA. This was originally a Jewish religious movement, rejecting Greek philosophy and its Muslim and Jewish versions, and characterized by the understanding of creation and revelation as symbolic of the divine. It emerged first in southern Europe, specifically Provence (second half of the 12th century) and then Spain (early 13th century), focusing on Jewish theosophical texts believed to contain esoteric wisdom on the world and humankind’s place in it. Although the original Jewish movement rejected philosophy, some Christian thinkers found insights in the Cabala that influenced their philosophic views. Thus, Christian Cabala emerged in the 15th century, through exponents such as Marsilio Ficino (1433–1499) and Giovanni Pico della Mirandola (1463–1494) in Florence, and continued through later centuries. In Cabala, the Deity is viewed as both hidden and revealed. The hidden aspect is called Ein-Sof (Godhead), while the revealed aspect is described as 10 Sefirot (potencies or emanations). These Sefirot indicate either divine powers of the revealed aspect of the Deity or instruments employed by the divine power in the creation and governance of the world. The Sefirot are represented in the form of a tree or human:
Intelligence (Binah) Wisdom (Hokhmah)
Power (Gevurah) or Stern Judgment (Din) Love (Hesed)
Beauty (Tiferet) or Compassion (Rahmanin)
Majesty (Hod) Eternity (Nezah)
Foundation (Yesod)
Kingdom (Malkhut)
The earliest cabalistic work is the Sefer Bahi [Book of Clarity], written in Hebrew. It presents a theosophical view of the Sefirot with some ancient Gnostic influences. Though attributed to the ancient author Rabbi Nehunyah ben ha-kanah, the surviving document is from the second half of the 12th century. The first work in Cabala whose author is known is a commentary on Sefer Yetzira, by Rabbi Isaac Saggi Nehor (Isaac the Blind). This work, as well as that of Rabbi Isaac’s followers, shows an important development: The tradition of Sefer Bahi had been combined with Neoplatonic thought. Cabala grew considerably in the 13th century and a number of different cabalistic schools, with different approaches and emphases, emerged. The Zohar or Book of Splendor is the most important work in Cabala, and the circle around it—including Rabbi Moses de Leon (the author of all sections of the Zohar except the Raya Mehemna and Tikkunei ha-Zohar), Rabbi Joseph Gikatilla, Rabbi Joseph of Hamadan, and the anonymous author of the last section of the Zohar—is the most noteworthy. In the Zohar there is powerful sexual imagery concerning the Godhead itself, as well as an emphasis on the influence of human beings on the divine, both in good and evil ways. Through devotion in prayer and through fulfillment of commandments, human beings, who are made in the image of God and originated from the Godhead, can be active participants in the unification of the divine forces and in the restoration of creation as a servant of God. The Zohar combines Jewish tradition with non-Jewish influences in a comprehensive, cabalistic view.
In the second half of the 13th century, what is known as “prophetic” or “ecstatic” Cabala emerged in Spain, Greece, and Italy; its main purpose was the attainment of ecstatic experiences and its main exponent was Rabbi Abraham ben Samuel Abulafia. There was also a Byzantine cabalistic movement, which flourished in the middle of the 14th century. After the Middle Ages, Cabala continued to flourish in the Renaissance in the Jewish tradition through figures such as Isaac Luria, whose approach begot a movement called Lurianic Cabala, and Abraham Cohen Herrera (the most philosophical of the cabalistic writers), as well as in the Christian tradition. Cabala thus was incorporated along with other medieval and ancient sources into new theological and philosophical outlooks.
CALIPHATE. Derived from the term “caliph,” the successor of Muhammad (d. 632) as the leader of Islam, the Caliphate is the government of the caliph. The capital of the Eastern Caliphate, dominated by the ’Abassid dynasty which came to power in 750, started at Damascus and was then moved to Baghdad in 762 by the second ’Abassid caliph, al-Mansur. At this point, Islamic power stretched from the Atlantic to Central Asia and the Indus Valley. A rival Western Caliphate was set up in the eighth century at Cordoba, Spain, by the Umayyads, who were overthrown in the east by the ’Abassids. Cordoba was the capital of the Western Caliphate, which in 732 extended westward as far as central France. Cordoba became arguably the richest cultural center in medieval Islam, and was the principal filter of classical learning to western Europe in the 12th century. Some of the greatest medieval thinkers, such as Averroes and Maimonides, lived at Cordoba. Despite political rivalries between Eastern and Western Caliphates, there was considerable cultural exchange and unity among them. See also ISLAM.
CANONS REGULAR. See ORDERS (RELIGIOUS).
CAPREOLUS, JOHN (ca. 1380–1444). Named “The Prince of Thomists” by Renaissance followers of St. Thomas Aquinas, this Dominican was born in Rouergue in the southern region of France. He began as a bachelor of theology at Paris in 1407 and became a master in 1411. His most famous work is his Defensiones theologiae divi Thomae Aquinatis [Defenses of the Theology of the Well-Respected Thomas Aquinas]. Capreolus, following the general outline of Peter Lombard’s Sentences, organized 190 questions treated by Thomas Aquinas in his Summa and Sentences commentary into a solid defense of Thomas’s teachings against the challenges of various 14th-century opponents. Those who disagreed with Thomas on these issues were mostly Franciscan authors: William of Ware, John Duns Scotus, Peter Aureoli, and Adam Wodeham. Added to this list are the Dominican Durandus of St. Pourçain, the secular priest John of Ripa, and the Carmelites Gerard of Bologna and Guido Terrena. Often the objections Capreolus considers do not come directly from each of these authors but from the reports of Peter Aureoli, whose Scriptum he uses as a sourcebook.
CARMELITES. See ORDERS (RELIGIOUS).
CARTHUSIANS. See ORDERS (RELIGIOUS).
CATEGORIES. The logical works of Aristotle are set up to cover terms, combinations of terms that are put into affirmative or negative statements or propositions, and combinations of propositions that are organized in such a way that they effectively express an argument. The first of his treatises, that dealing with terms, is in a work called the Categories or the Predicaments. In this work, Aristotle indicates that terms point to the real world and speak about it in ways that might be divided into 10 classes. The main class is what he calls substances, that is, realities that can stand on their own: men, trees, stones, and so forth. These substances have also certain qualities and they exist in different sizes and quantities, and are located at different places at different times, and maybe with one another. So Aristotle discovers that we can speak about realities as substances and their color, size, location, and so on in a manner that he classifies as the 10 categories: substance, quality, quantity, relation, place, time, and so on. The medieval philosophers and theologians used this classification in discussing their various philosophical and theological issues, and even debated about whether or not each of the 10 categories expresses 10 different kinds of reality or not.
CHARITY. See VIRTUES.
CICERO, MARCUS TULLIUS (106–43 B.C.E.). This Roman writer and public figure played some role in the transmission of Greek thought, especially Stoicism and the Platonism of the Academy, to the medieval world. Though not an original thinker, in his works (principally orations, rhetorical pieces, philosophical dialogues, and letters) he expressed the main doctrines of the different Greek philosophical schools in beautiful Latin prose, of which he is considered the master. Later writers, who used and reacted to Greek thought in various ways and did not have access to Greek sources, often relied on Cicero, and were influenced by his style. Cicero was also the first to give certain Latin terms (e.g., essentia, qualitas, materia—essence, quality, and matter, respectively) a philosophical meaning that continued in the tradition. It was Cicero’s Hortensius that first implanted in Augustine, the most influential of the Latin Fathers of the Church, the love of philosophy. Moreover, Cicero, still the principal source on the development of skepticism in the academy originated by Plato, provides the background to St. Augustine’s Contra Academicos, the saint’s criticism of skepticism. Though medieval Latin thinkers did not have much access to Plato’s own works, they did have some translations, among which there is a fragment of Plato’s Timaeus translated by Cicero. They also learned basic views of Plato in works such as Cicero’s Tusculan Disputations, which contains an account of Plato’s influential view of the immortality of the soul. After the Middle Ages, when in the Renaissance the classics of antiquity became the chief source of intellectual life, Cicero received much attention, primarily as a master of Latin prose.
CISTERCIANS. See ORDERS (RELIGIOUS).
CLAREMBALD OF ARRAS (ca. 1115–ca. 1187). A teacher of the liberal arts and later head of the school at Laon, this commentator on Boethius’s theological treatises was a student of Thierry of Chartres and Hugh of Saint-Victor at Paris in the late 1130s. His chief philosophical work links him to the school of Chartres. He wrote an introductory letter to Thierry of Chartres’s De sex dierum operibus [On the Works of the Six Days of Creation] and a Tractatulus (Short Treatise on Genesis). In the introductory letter, Clarembald asks to be recognized for the effort he made in his Tractatulus to reconcile the many views of the philosophers with the Christian truth so that the word of Scripture might receive strength and protection even from its adversaries.
Clarembald’s earlier commentaries on Boethius’s De Trinitate [On the Trinity] and De hebdomadibus [How Created Things Can Be Called Good Even Though They Are Not Substantially Good] already made many of the philosophic points he develops in the Tractatulus: his theory of the categories (De Trinitate 4, 1–46), the distinction between dialectical, demonstrative, and sophistical syllogisms (De hebdomadibus 1, 1–2), and his interpretation of Boethius’s different levels of abstraction (De Trinitate 2, 17–19). On theological issues, he was a strong critic of Peter Abelard and Gilbert of Poitiers.
COMMENTARY ON THE SENTENCES. Peter Lombard collected a four-volume manual of theological questions that became very popular in the Middle Ages. It was called the Sentences, since it provided the sentences or logically ordered opinions of the Fathers of the Church regarding each issue discussed in this work. The secular master, Alexander of Hales, used the Sentences of Peter Lombard as a textbook to complement the Bible, especially when difficult doctrinal questions were being considered. Richard Fishacre, a Dominican, initiated Alexander’s practice later at Oxford. Many university masters and students of theology wrote commentaries on Lombard’s work. At times, these commentaries were works that simply assimilated the long tradition of teaching that came down from the Fathers; later, they became very independent works that showed the originality and mastery of the theologians who wrote the commentaries.
CONDEMNATIONS OF 1277. One of the most dramatic events connected with philosophy and theology in the Middle Ages was the condemnation at Paris of 219 propositions by Bishop Étienne Tempier in 1277. As part of the background to this event, one must realize that in the early part of the century, there had been Church decrees in 1210 and 1215 against the teaching of Aristotle’s natural philosophy and Metaphysics at Paris. The same policy was restated by Pope Gregory IX in 1231, at least until a committee headed by William of Auxerre could examine the works of Aristotle and “purge them of every suspicion of error.” Since William died in the same year, the committee never undertook its task. No actions were taken over the next decade, and after Gregory IX’s death in 1241, the decrees seemed to have been ignored. In 1255, when new statutes of the university were promulgated, requirements for students in the Arts Faculty to have attended a specific number of lectures on each of the known works of Aristotle were mandated. Some of the difficulties that had been anticipated by the earlier decrees were indicated to be real in 1270, when Bishop Tempier condemned 13 errors related to Aristotle’s teachings: the eternity of the world, his denial of divine providence or God’s involvement with the world, the unicity of the intellectual soul, and his implied denial of freedom of the will.
The threat of excommunication for those who knowingly taught these errors seems to have had little effect on those who taught them in the Arts Faculty, since Bishop Tempier was asked by Pope John XXI (Peter of Spain) in 1277 to investigate the situation. Bishop Tempier set up a commission of 16 theologians, the most well known of whom was Henry of Ghent, to study the teachings of the Arts Faculty. The result, going beyond the papal mandate, was the gathering of 219 propositions from the writings of those in the Arts Faculty that seemed to teach errors. The original collection of items did not have any order to them and were judged by some other theologians at Paris—for example, Godfrey of Fontaines—to be statements that were at times vague and that even seemingly contradicted one another. Along with this list of condemned propositions, movements were afoot to bring personal processes against Thomas Aquinas himself and also against his student, Giles of Rome. In fact, Giles was the subject of a personal investigation and he was prevented from becoming a master of the Sentences at Paris. Only through a papal directive was he appointed master years later, in 1284.
The action under Bishop Tempier’s authority seems to have had a twofold aim: to put an end to the establishment of an independent, self-determining, Aristotelian philosophical movement; and to slow down the development of a more Aristotelian-influenced Christian theology. In Quodlibet XII, q. 5, disputed in 1296 or 1297, Godfrey of Fontaines, often a critic of Aquinas’s positions, asks whether Tempier’s successor as Bishop of Paris sins if he fails to correct certain articles (namely, those associated with Thomas Aquinas) condemned by his predecessor. Godfrey argues that certain condemnations should be corrected, since many of the articles concern matters that are no danger to faith or morals and are open to different opinions. He states, “One article, for instance, condemns as error the position that God could not multiply many individuals in the same species without matter. Another following upon this, declares it erroneous that God could not make many angels in the same species, since they do not have matter. Yet to hold the condemned positions as opinions seems justified, since they are among the positions that have been held orally and in writing by many Catholic teachers.” Godfrey continues on, stating a number of other condemned propositions that he associates with Aquinas. In his argument Godfrey concludes, “For, through the things found in his teaching the teachings of almost all the other doctors are corrected, and they are restored and made more tasty. So, if this teaching of brother Thomas is withdrawn from their midst, those who study will find little taste in the teachings of the others [whose taste he has restored].” Godfrey’s argument did not have the desired effect. The condemned propositions associated with Thomas Aquinas were only rescinded after his canonization. Nor were the propositions themselves rescinded, but rather the propositions as taught by Brother Thomas were no longer censured. See also APPENDIX B.
CORRECTORIA. The medieval Latin term correctorium or correctory (plural: correctoria) generally refers to a 13th- or 14th-century critical revision of the Bible (Latin Vulgate), even though revisions of Latin biblical texts were also produced earlier (e.g., by Alcuin and Theodulf in the late eighth century, by Stephen Harding in 1109, and by Nicholas Maniacoria in the 12th century). In the 13th century, the University of Paris adopted a text based on Alcuin’s revision and various correctoria of it were produced, such as the correctory of Saint-Jacques (mid-13th century), the Correctorium Sorbonnicum, and those of Hugh of Saint-Cher, William de la Mare, and Gerard de Huy. Most correctoria were scholarly masterpieces, considering the Vulgate manuscript tradition, the ancient translations of the Greek Septuagint version (Vetus Latina), as well as Hebrew, Greek, and Aramaic originals. The term Correctorium also was extended to cover works that critics produced to correct the teachings of certain authors. The Franciscan William de la Mare wrote a Correctorium “Quare” [Correctory Beginning with the Word “Why”] to challenge the doctrines of Thomas Aquinas. On their part, some of Aquinas’s Dominican followers, such as John of Paris, responded with corrections of the correctors. John gave his work the title Correctorium corruptorii “Circa” [Correctory of the Distorting Treatise That Begins with the Words “In Regard To”].
COSTA BEN LUCA (864–953). Also known as Constabulus or Constabulinus, this Christian philosopher born in Baalbek, Syria, was known in the East primarily as a translator of Aristotle’s works into Arabic. In the West he was known chiefly through a work attributed to him, De differentia animae et spiritus [On the Difference between Soul and Spirit]. In this work, a compilation of Plato, Aristotle, Theophrastus, and Galen, the author maintains, following Galen, that the spirit is not incorporeal and higher than the soul, but rather a very subtle matter within the human body. Spirit is “the proximate cause of life”; soul is “the more remote or great cause.” The work was translated into Latin from the Arabic before 1143 by John of Spain, and was influential in medieval Latin thought. When the arts curriculum was reorganized at the University of Paris in 1255, it became a required text.
CRESCAS, HASDAI (ca. 1340–ca. 1411). Born in Barcelona, Crescas lived during a time when Jews suffered persecution in Spain. He lost his only son at an anti-Jewish riot in 1391, where thousands of Jews were murdered. Crescas dedicated himself to the reconstruction of Jewish life in Spain. He assumed important posts, such as advisor to the Aragonese monarchs, rabbi of Saragossa, and was recognized by the throne as the judge of the Jews of Aragon. Through the influence of Aristotle, Averroes (his chief medieval commentator), and others such as Moses Maimonides and Gersonides, Aristotelianism elicited strong reactions in Jewish circles, including rejections against philosophy altogether as well as new philosophical alternatives within Judaism. Crescas criticized Aristotelianism and developed a philosophy of his own within a Jewish framework. In The Book of the Refutation of the Principles of the Christians he also criticized central Christian tenets, such as the Trinity, transubstantiation, and original sin, as being irrational.
Maimonides was the first to attempt to establish a set of authoritative Jewish beliefs. Crescas followed him in this attempt, against those who saw the commandments of the Torah as the only binding core of Judaism. He presented a new version of these beliefs in his chief work, Light of the Lord or Adonai (completed in 1410), where he draws expertly from the biblical-rabbinic tradition, Jewish and Islamic philosophy, and even Cabala and late medieval Christian thought. This work includes a developed philosophy of nature. Crescas rejected important theses of Aristotle’s physics, a domain upon which much of Aristotle’s vision of reality is built, such as his concepts of time and space, his denial of actual infinity, and the vacuum. Crescas proposed new influential understandings. He viewed time and space as infinite quantities, the latter as an infinite vacuum and the former as infinite duration. Both exist independently of physical objects: space is identified with three-dimensionality and time is in the mind. Thus, the universe is conceived as containing an infinite number of worlds. This fits into the anti-Aristotelian movement in physics of the 14th century that lead to Isaac Newton and other modern pioneers. His work has affinities to that of Nicole Oresme (1325–1382). Crescas’s theory of space, however, seems wholly his own.
Crescas’s critique of Aristotelian physics is a rejection of the basis of Aristotle’s proofs for the existence of God, in particular Aristotle’s premise that an infinite regress of causes is impossible. Crescas rather proves the existence of God on the basis of necessity and contingency, as Avicenna had done: Contingent things ultimately depend on something that is necessary on its own account, namely God. Crescas’s conception of the universe influences his view of human beings, including their freedom and purpose. As every event in the universe is necessitated by prior causes, ultimately by God, the human will is also determined. The will, a conjunction of appetitive and imaginative faculties, is free not in the sense that it is uncaused, but in the sense that it can choose between possibilities. As knowledge and belief are not voluntary in Crescas’s sense of the term, God rewards and punishes more on account of human feelings than beliefs. Love and fear of God are the keys to happiness and immortality more than intellectual speculation or dogma. Crescas’s ideas were influential in the development of modern science, as well as in the work of later philosophers, such as Giordano Bruno, Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, and Baruch Spinoza.