Chapter 5
Institutions and literary forms
In the Middle Ages just as today, philosophers were not disembodied intellects (much as some of them wanted, or want, to be). They had to do their work in a concrete setting, within or outside an institution, and support themselves, either as professional scholars and teachers or in some other way. And their thinking has been preserved only in so far as it has been given concrete existence in literary texts in a variety of forms, some of which give an idea of the type of teaching and discussion behind them.
Philosophy outside and inside institutions
Institutionally, the history of Latin Christian philosophy is strikingly different from that of the other three traditions, because so much of the best work took place in—and, especially after 1200, was shaped by—institutions dedicated to teaching and learning.
The contrast is not an absolute one. There was, sporadically, some type of Imperial institution of higher education at Constantinople. It was presumably where the mysterious Stephanus, from the School of Alexandria, taught at the beginning of the 7th century. In the mid-9th century, the Assistant Emperor Bardas established a school at the Magnaura Palace there, but it seems not to have lasted long. A school was set up in the 11th century for Psellos, who was given the title ‘Consul of the Philosophers’, but after the condemnation of his pupil and successor, Italos, the Patriarchate was increasingly responsible for a higher education which had little room for philosophy. Many of the important Byzantine philosophers were monks—Maximus, John of Damascus, Gregory Palamas—or court politicians who became monks, such as Photius (tonsured and promoted to be Patriarch of Constantinople in just five days) and Psellus.
In Islamic lands, the focus of teaching and learning was never institutional: rather, it was on the relationship between teacher and pupil. When a student had properly studied a text under a master, he received an izāl, or licence, which allowed him, in his turn, to teach it. Great store was placed, as the example of al-Fārābī has already shown, on being able to trace a chain of teachers back to the author of the text in question himself. Where the instruction took place mattered for little.
No institutions existed specially for studying philosophy (either kalām or falsafa). Al-Kindī was a nobleman, able to support his own and others’ work. Avicenna, like al- Ṭūsī two centuries later, led a stormy life, swayed by the fortunes of the rulers who were his patrons. Avicenna was a physician, no less celebrated as a medical author than as a philosopher (and many of his early readers were also physicians); al-Ṭūsī was famous as an astronomer, and ended his life as a vizier. Al-Ghazālī was a distinguished teacher of law, until he renounced worldly fortune. Averroes was a doctor, as well as a renowned lawyer, whose legal writing continued to be studied in the lands of Islam, where his philosophy was forgotten; he wrote his Aristotelian commentaries at night, while in the daytime he served as chief judge.
Islam was not, however, without higher educational institutions. Madrasas, intended for the teaching of law, could be set up by benefactors, and their numbers expanded from the late 12th century. This was also the period when not only did the distinction between falsafa and kalām begin to disappear but also what had previously been seen as ‘foreign sciences’ started to be placed along with more specifically Islamic subjects under the heading of ‘rational sciences’, which came to be thought of as part of a broad Muslim education. The study of this broad curriculum was certainly associated with madrasas and their teachers, although it is difficult to be sure about exactly where the teaching of any particular subject was conducted.
Among the Jews too there were no official institutions for philosophy. Family wealth seems to have supported Gersonides, and Maimonides, too, until his merchant brother was drowned and he had to support himself as a physician to the Cairo court. Many of the outstanding Jewish philosophers were also central figures in the Jewish life of their times. Maimonides was the chief of the Egyptian Jewish community and their greatest expert on Jewish law; Saadia was the head (Gaon) of the Talmudic Academy; Crescas the leader of the Spanish Jews; Isaac Abrabanel an influential figure in court, who tried, unsuccessfully, to use his wealth and prestige to dissuade King Ferdinand from banishing the Jews.
The universities and other settings for Latin philosophy
The earliest philosophers in the Latin tradition, Alcuin and Eriugena, were each closely associated with the Carolingian court, but as teachers at a palace school. They also had close connections with monasteries, and it was in schools established in the great monasteries, and then also in cathedral schools, that philosophy was studied in the 10th and 11th centuries. Cathedral schools seemed each to have had just one main Master, who was able, like Abelard’s teacher, William of Champeaux, to draw pupils from far off if he became celebrated. But, early in the 12th century, the authorities at Notre-Dame in Paris decided that they would allow any qualified teacher, who paid for a licence, to set up a school. As a result, Paris became the intellectual capital of the Latin world, with Masters competing for pupils and developing their own ideas, as they attacked those of their neighbouring rivals.
Universities specializing in law (Bologna) or medicine (Salerno) already existed in southern Europe, but it was only around 1200 that the medieval universities which would be especially important for philosophy came into existence: in Paris from a formalization of the existing schools, in Oxford from almost nothing. From the mid-14th century, universities on the Paris–Oxford model began to be founded all over Europe. Among the first were Prague (1347–78), Krakow (1364), Vienna (1365), and Heidelberg (1386); 15th-century foundations included St Andrew’s, Louvain, Tübingen, and Alcalá.
The distinction in the logical and theological schools in Paris became institutionalized into a structure of faculties, followed with some variations in all the universities north of the Alps. The Arts Faculty, by far the largest, was where students began (at around the age of fourteen). Most did not even finish the full seven-year course. But after becoming a Master of Arts, students who wished could go on to study in one of the higher faculties—medicine, law, or (by far the most important for philosophy) theology. Logic was studied intently in the Arts Faculty, but from the mid-13th century the arts curriculum covered not just Aristotle’s logic, but the whole range of his works, newly translated (with Avicenna and Averroes as the favoured guides). The theology course, which lasted for between fourteen and sixteen years, had just two textbooks, the Bible and the Sentences of Peter the Lombard, which acted like a checklist of the whole range of difficult and controversial issues in Christian doctrine.
The universities were institutions under the ultimate control of the Church, and two of their higher faculties (theology and canon law) were explicitly devoted to Christian doctrine. Very quickly, the Dominicans, Franciscans, and other mendicant orders dominated the theology faculties. These orders, which grew up at much the same time as the universities themselves, offered a life which was monastic but not shut away from the world. In practice, they made it possible for bright boys, whatever their background, to be educated to a high level and, for the most able of them, they paid the expenses of the lengthy theology course. At the end of the course, the student became a Master, but there was a limited number of magisterial chairs, and so, after a couple of years, the Dominican and Franciscan Masters had to stand aside for the next confrere in line.
Although these mendicant Masters had been highly trained in logic and Aristotelian philosophy, it was in their own houses of study, not in the faculties of Arts. Many of those who taught in the Arts Faculty would have been young men spending the two years for which they were required to teach in order to complete their course. But there were others, such as Buridan, who dedicated themselves to teaching in the Arts Faculty. There all the disciplines were based on evidence available irrespective of religious belief and natural reasoning, and the greatest authority, around whose texts the course was structured, was a pagan from the ancient, pre-Christian world.
This arrangement might seem to represent a challenge to the authority of Christian teaching, but in fact was sanctioned, even enforced, by the Church authorities. True, when the whole range of Aristotle’s works, including those on natural science and the Metaphysics, began to be read in the early 13th century, the Church authorities in Paris tried to stop Arts Masters teaching them. But the prohibitions were ineffective, and it was quickly accepted that the Arts course would be based around the whole Aristotelian corpus. There remained, however, questions about the degree of allegiance Arts Masters should show to Aristotelianism, especially as interpreted in the commentaries by writers from Islam.
In 1277, Étienne Tempier, Bishop of Paris, issued a list of 219 prohibited propositions. Some of the prohibitions were clearly directed at Arts Masters like Siger of Brabant and Boethius of Dacia, whose attempts to develop Aristotelianism in its own terms were caricatured and condemned. But they were not Tempier’s only target, since he also prohibited various positions in theology, especially those judged to compromise the freedom of God and his particular providence for humans, and—as a later, aborted process of condemnation indicates—Aquinas’ Aristotelianism was also in his sights.
A culture of commentaries
One common feature distinguishes how philosophy was studied and written about in all four traditions from modern and contemporary practice. Medieval philosophizing centred around commentary, a method inherited from the late ancient Platonic schools, but widespread generally in the medieval monotheistic cultures (consider the practice of Biblical and Quranic commentary) and beyond (Confucianism, for instance, is a commentary tradition).
Aristotle’s works, of course, were much commented on, throughout the Byzantine and Latin traditions, and in the first two centuries of falsafa (see Figure 6); Plato’s much more rarely (the Timaeus in the pre-1200 Latin tradition, Averroes on an epitome of the Republic); Platonic writings more often (Boethius’ Consolation of Philosophy, the Book of Causes, Proclus’ Elements of Theology in the Latin traditions). It was not just ancient texts which were the subject of commentaries. The Hebrew-writing Jewish philosophers usually commented on Averroes’ paraphrases of Aristotle rather than Aristotle himself, and on texts by, for example, Maimonides, al-Ghazālī, Ibn Ṭufayl, and Averroes (see Figure 7). In the Arabic tradition, there was always a tendency for new encyclopaedic works, based on earlier ones, and for commentaries themselves, to receive commentaries. Aristotle’s own texts dropped almost completely out of the picture, although Avicenna’s works continued to receive direct commentaries, alongside the commentaries written on work deriving (ultimately) from them.
6. The paraphrase of Aristotle’s Categories misattributed to Augustine was one of the earliest logical texts to receive commentary, as here in the margins of a 9th-century manuscript.
7. Aristotle with Averroes’ commentaries and Gersonides’ super-commentaries, all in Latin translation, from a mid-16th-century edition.
In the Latin tradition, a 12th-century work (though heavily based on Augustine), the Sentences of Peter the Lombard, was commented on by hundreds of theologians, from Alexander of Hales in the 13th century to Martin Luther in the 16th century. And, from the 16th century, Aquinas’ Summa Theologiae received regular commentaries, and Scotists commented on their founder’s Sentences commentary.
Commentaries varied enormously in their methods and aims. Some were designed mainly to help with understanding a difficult authoritative text, either by explaining each sentence and its contribution to the argument (for example, the literal element in the commentaries on Aristotle in the Latin tradition in the 12th and 13th centuries) or through paraphrase (one of the forms used by al-Fārābī and Averroes). Some discuss the interpretation of the text passage by passage, exploring the philosophical difficulties and putting forward new problems and theories, suggested by, but not actually found in the original work. Many late ancient commentaries were in this form, which Boethius followed in his second commentary on On Interpretation, Abelard in his logical commentaries and al-Fārābī and Averroes in their long commentaries. Avicenna’s encyclopaedic presentations of his own rethinking of Aristotelian doctrine are to some extent paraphrase commentaries, although loose ones. Albert the Great imitated this form.
Commentary on some texts (Plato’s Timaeus and Boethius’ Consolation of Philosophy in the 12th century, for instance) called at times for allegorical exegesis, like that used for sacred texts. The relation of commentator to text was often one of reverence (as with Averroes and Latin Arts Masters towards Aristotle)—though this did not in fact exclude original thinking. But it could be antagonistic, as with al-Rāzī’s commentary on Pointers or in the case of Albalag, who deliberately chose to comment on al-Ghazālī’s Intentions, though he disliked both the Avicennian philosophy it summarized and, even more, al-Ghazālī’s wider, anti-philosophical aims. A more historical approach to a text, in terms of its author’s aims and sources, was rare, but is carried through with remarkable perspicacity by Aquinas in his commentary on the Book of Causes.
The quaestio
Many Latin commentaries from 1250 onwards owe their freedom to raise new ideas to their use of the quaestio form, a feature of most Aristotle and Sentence commentaries (with Albert and Aquinas on Aristotle as important exceptions), even if they also include a literal element. (Interestingly, a form similar to the quaestio began to be used in Arabic philosophy at much the same time—for instance, in the work of al-Rāzī.) Although aspects of the quaestio are found in Aristotle and Boethius, the form seems to have been devised principally as a way of capturing the give and take of discussion in university lectures—particularly evident in the disputations which were held on special days, but also a feature of how authoritative texts were taught.
A quaestio has as its subject a ‘yes’ or ‘no’ question: for instance, ‘Does God exist?’ It takes the following basic form:
Although this form could be used for fairly straightforward exegesis, as it often was in Arts Faculty Aristotle commentaries (here the arguments in (1) will be obvious misreadings of the text, and the body (3) will expound Aristotle’s point), it also offered great opportunities to develop new ideas, using the arguments in (1) to test out objections and bring in a range of authorities beyond the text actually being commented upon. In the case of Sentence commentaries, indeed, Peter the Lombard’s text was usually left far behind, as theologians used one of the points it raised to discuss the burning philosophical issues of the time, and the body (3) was often expanded into an independent philosophical essay, with its own divisions and subdivisions.
Summas and treatises
In all four traditions, there was also a tendency for thinkers to try to bring together in a single work their understanding of the whole of philosophy or theology. In Arabic philosophy, the tradition of philosophical encyclopaedias developed out of Avicenna’s way of commenting on Aristotle, while the theological summas had a long tradition in kalām. John of Damascus’s On the Orthodox Faith, translated into Latin, was one of the models for the theological summas popular in the 13th century. The best known of them all, Aquinas’ Summa Theologiae, was an attempt to bring university-level discussion to a broader range of students at Dominican houses of study, although it turned out to be not just a summary of views its author had developed elsewhere, but his fullest discussion of some fields, such as ethics. Among Jewish authors—from Ibn Daud in The Exalted Faith and Maimonides in his Guide of the Perplexed to Gersonides’ Wars of the Lord and the monumental Light of the Lord by Crescas—there was a tradition of writing a lengthy philosophical and theological treatise which aimed to cover all the problems the author thought most important.
Of course, shorter forms of philosophical writing were also used, and treatises were written about individual issues, sometimes as part of a controversy, sometimes as letters to a real or fictitious correspondent. Many of al-Kindī’s works take the form of letters; Ibn Bājja wrote a letter on conjunction with the Intellect, Eriugena wrote on predestination in order to attack the views of his contemporary, Gottschalk, and Maimonides wrote to defend his views about the resurrection of the dead. In the Latin universities there were disputations, written up in quaestio form, both on particular areas (the soul, power, evil) and so-called disputations de quolibet (‘about anything’), where a student was free to raise any problem of philosophical or theological interest.
Dialogues and other literary forms
Even where medieval philosophers do not base their writings directly on their teaching, they usually aim to put their ideas in a straightforward, if sometimes complex, way, without rhetoric or the use of a literary form which deliberately raises problems of interpretation: they are more like Aristotle, Kant, and today’s analytic philosophers than Plato, Kierkegaard, or Heidegger. But there are exceptions.
Versification was used in both Arabic and Latin as a way of making material easier to learn by heart, and sometimes literary form was used more adventurously. Ibn Ṭufayl expresses his thought in the form of a philosophical novel, taking the names of his characters from one of Avicenna’s ventures into explaining philosophical ideas in allegorical form. Maimonides warns readers of his Guide that he has deliberately obscured some of his ideas. Boethius’ much read Consolation is an elaborate literary construction, in prose and verse. In 12th-century Latin Europe, philosophical poems and prose and verse works (such as Bernard Silvestris’ Cosmographia, loosely based on the Timaeus) were popular, and Dante’s Divine Comedy is not just a great poem but also an original and powerful work of philosophy.
Dialogue form was a popular vehicle for philosophy in Byzantium—where it could imitate Plato or take a satirical turn with Lucian as a model—and, even more, in the early Latin tradition. There the dialogue was often didactic: Alcuin, for example, presented himself as a teacher with Charlemagne himself as his pupil; Eriugena’s Periphyseon presents the give and take of discussion between a Master and his alumnus; and Anselm makes his dialogues into models of sensitive instruction in philosophical method (while his Proslogion is a dialogue between himself and God).
In the 15th century, under the influence of humanism, the form again became popular—in the works of Nicholas of Cusa, for example, or Lorenzo Valla’s Ciceronian dialogue On Pleasure. Some dialogues explored the differences between religions. In his Kuzari, Judah Halevi (c.1075–1141) has a philosopher, a Christian, and a Muslim present their beliefs briefly, although most of the work is occupied by a Jewish sage, who offers a more convincing view. Halevi’s Latin contemporary, Peter Abelard, is less eager to champion his own religion in his Collationes, where a philosopher discourses with a Jew (who gives a remarkably Abelardian version of his faith) and a Christian, with whom he finds much to agree about the highest good. The Dialogue of the Gentile and the Three Sages by Ramon Llull is even more open. When the Gentile of the title has heard expositions of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam from each of the sages, he is ready to tell them which has convinced him, but they stop him, fearing that knowledge of his verdict might put an end to their own continuing conversations.