Albert received the title of Magnus from his contemporaries before his death. He was also known as Doctor Universalis (Universal Doctor). Although his philosophical influence has been felt mainly through the writing of his long-time student Thomas Aquinas, he was a powerful philosopher in his own right. At the request of his Dominican brethren, he was asked to provide an explanation of the new interpretation of Aristotle that had emerged from Jewish and Arabic sources in Spain. His explanation ran to some thirty-nine volumes. During a lecture in 1278, Albert's memory suddenly failed and the strength of his mind rapidly deteriorated. According to Butler's Lives of the Saints, he died peacefully and without illness, sitting in his chair, surrounded by his brethren in his home town of Cologne.
St. Thomas Aquinas, the most influential philosopher and theologian of the Christian West, was known as Doctor Angelicus (Angelic Doctor). There is a doubtless apocryphal story that when he was at the Sorbonne in Paris, Thomas was asked for his views on the nature of the Sacrament in the Christian Mass. Apparently, Thomas was sunk in prayer and contemplation for an unusually long time before writing down his opinion on the matter. When he had finished, he reportedly threw down his thesis at the foot of a crucifix and buried himself once more in prayer. The other Dominican friars reported that Christ descended from the cross, picked up the scroll, read it, and said, “Thomas, thou hast written well concerning the Sacrament of My Body.” At which point, Thomas was miraculously borne up into mid-air.
Now, this was no mean miracle, as Thomas was not a small man. He was, in G. K. Chesterton's words, “a huge bull of a man, fat and slow and quiet.” Large chunks had to be sawn out of dining tables so that Thomas could sit and eat with his brethren. Because he was so big and quiet, Thomas was called “the dumb ox” by his fellow students in Paris. Albert the Great retorted, “You call him a dumb ox; I tell you that the dumb ox will bellow so loud that his bellowing will fill the world.” And Thomas certainly bellowed. He wrote over eight million words, two million on the Bible, one million on Aristotle and the rest devoted to university teaching and compendia for use by students of theology. As Timothy McDermott points out, “The largest of these works read like an internet encyclopaedia,” with articles like Web pages with links to other topics and articles to be read in parallel.
Given the volume of Thomas's writing, it is pointless trying to offer a summary. It is often said that Thomas's achievement is a synthesis of Aristotle and Christianity. But what does this mean? Let's go back to Averroës and his separation of philosophy and theology or the realms of reason and faith. Thomas rejects this separation, arguing that although theology begins from the revealed truths of faith, it proceeds to its conclusions using reason. If reason without faith is empty, then faith without reason is blind.
Thomas always argues against the separation of the natural and the spiritual and in favour of their continuity. In this way, the empirical Aristotle-influenced activity of philosophy and natural science need not be seen as heretical or atheistic, but as a path to God.
This continuity of the natural and the spiritual can be seen in Thomas's conception of the human being situated amphibiously at the juncture of these two realms. We are a composite of soul and body, but the soul is not some immaterial substance located in our brain or beneath our left nipple. On the contrary, and here Thomas follows Aristotle, the soul is the form of the body. The soul is that which individuates each of us and animates this indistinct lump of matter that I am (and as we have already said, Thomas was quite a large lump of matter). Wittgenstein unwittingly adopts this position when he writes that “the human body is the best picture of the human soul.”
On 6 December 1273 during Mass in Naples, something devastating happened to Thomas that some commentators see as a mystical experience and others see as a cerebral stroke. Either way, Thomas was afterwards unwilling or unable to write and the massive labour of the Summa Theolo-giae was suspended at Part 3, Question 90, Article 4.
In response to the protestations of his secretary, Reginald of Piperno, that he should complete the work, Thomas answered,
Reginald, I cannot … in comparison with what I have seen in prayer all that I have written seems to me as if it were straw.
Admittedly, it is an awful lot of straw. Despite his transformation, he was summoned by the pope to attend the Council of Lyons. On the way, it seems that he was injured by the bough of a tree and died at the age of forty-nine, twenty-five miles from his birthplace in Roccasecca, halfway between Rome and Naples. On his deathbed, Thomas dictated a brief commentary on Solomon's Song of Songs, which sadly has not survived.
Doctor Seraphicus (Seraphic Doctor) was to the Franciscans what Aquinas was to the Dominicans. Bonaventure and Aquinas were both recognized as Regent Masters of the University of Paris on the same day in 1257. (Incidentally, the present pope, Benedict XVI, wrote his “Habilitation,” or second doctoral thesis, on Bonaventure.) Like Thomas, Bonaventure was highly critical of Averroism, a tendency which he thought would lead to the separation of the worlds of faith and reason and would ultimately culminate in atheism. But unlike Thomas, Bonaventure was much more suspicious of the rationalism of Aristotle and much closer to Augustine and Neoplatonism in arguing that the emanations of the divine had to be experienced at all levels of reality. In 1273, Pope Gregory X made Bonaventure into a cardinal and soon afterwards they travelled to the Second Council of Lyons. In the midst of Council activities, Bonaventure died suddenly at the age of fifty-seven. Some say that he was poisoned.
Llull was a great Majorcan polymath and author of 290 works, written in Catalan, Latin and Arabic. He is famous for his ars magna or great art, what Leibniz later baptized an ars combinatoria or combinatory art. The purpose of this art was to show that the entirety of human knowledge was derivable from the logical combination of several basic concepts. He also invented machines for this purpose, which some have seen as the first computers, making Llull the father of computer science. However, the purpose of these logic machines was highly specific: the conversion of infidel Muslims to the truth of Christianity by the use of logic and reason. Llull's entire life was spent in a battle with Islam. He went on numerous missions to North Africa to convert Muslims and fought the Islamic-influenced Averroism at the University of Paris when he taught there.
There is a widely told, but probably fallacious, story that he was stoned to death during one of his missions to Tunis. Brucker recounts that Llull was captured, tortured and expelled from Tunis and escaped with his life only through the intercession of Genoese traders.
Although he was never canonized, he received the title of a Blessed and is known as Doctor Illuminatus (the Most Enlightened Doctor). However, Schopenhauer tells the characteristically misogynistic story that Llull was converted to Christianity in the following terms: Llull was from a wealthy, aristocratic family and as a young man he led a life of hedonism and dissipation. However, one day Llull was finally admitted to the bedroom of a woman he had long been wooing. When she opened her dress, she showed him her breast eaten away with cancer. “From that moment,” Schopenhauer continues, “as if he had looked into hell, he was converted; leaving the court of the King of Majorca, he went into the wilderness to do penance.”
As we have seen, Aquinas, Bonaventure and Ramon Llull were united in their hostility to Averroism and its separation of philosophy and theology or reason and faith. Siger was the most radical, charismatic and influential of the Paris Averroists. His main philosophical concern was establishing the truth of what the ancient philosophers wrote, especially Aristotle. If the latter was at odds with the teaching of the Church, as he often was, then so much the worse for the Church. In this view, Aquinas's proposed marriage between Aristotle and Christianity was doomed to end in divorce. Needless to say, the Church was not too pleased and Siger was forced to flee Paris for the safety of Orvieto in Italy, where the pontifical curia generously allowed him to stay and even provided him with a secretary. Sadly, his secretary went mad and stabbed Siger to death.
Very little can be said with certainty about the life and death of John the Scot. The name “Duns” might refer to the present village of Duns in Berwickshire in southern Scotland, but even that is not certain. He was known as Doctor Subtilis (Subtle Doctor) and the undoubted difficulty of his work has led to widely differing evaluations of its importance. Some see nothing but hair-splitting in his voluminous arguments pro and con with objections, replies and endless debates with unnamed contemporaries. Indeed, followers of John the Scot were known as “Duns men,” from where we get the notion of the “dunce” or stupid fellow who believes himself subtle.
However, other philosophers see John the Scot in very different terms. The great American philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce called him “the profoundest metaphysician that ever lived” and Heidegger wrote his doctoral thesis on John the Scot's theory of meaning, which was important for the development of Heidegger's early views on the question of being.
John the Scot famously developed the notion of “haecceity” as a way of giving expression to the uniqueness or the indivisible “thisness” of a person. His own uniqueness was cut short prematurely at a Franciscan study house in Cologne. There is a horrifying story that John the Scot was buried alive. Apparently, he had fallen into a coma, was believed dead, and was buried. However, when his tomb was reopened, his body was found outside its coffin and his hands were bloody from his unsuccessful attempts to escape.
The most influential philosopher of the fourteenth century was a native of Ockham, a small village in Surrey. Disputative, abrasive and polemical, with a predilection for empirical evidence and logical analysis as a way of cutting through nonsense, William of Ockham is often seen as a precursor to modern philosophers such as the logical positivists.
Although Ockham never uses the term, his name is associated with “Ockham's razor.” This is best understood as a principle of parsimony, where nothing should be assumed as necessary unless it is given in experience, established by reasoning or required by faith. Ockham famously writes, “It is useless to do with more what can be done with fewer.”
His polemics against what he saw as the errors of previous philosophers like Aquinas and Duns Scotus got him into trouble and he was charged with heresy by John Lutterell, former Chancellor of Oxford. Ockham travelled to Avignon in 1324, at that time the seat of the papacy, where he was detained for four years although no agreement could be reached as to whether or not he was a heretic.
Fearing the worst, Ockham fled Avignon with some fellow Franciscans and eventually found sanctuary in Munich thanks to the holy Roman emperor, Ludwig of Bavaria. Charged with apostasy and excommunicated, Ockham spent the remainder of his life in Munich writing polemical tracts against the papal pretentions to political power. Ockham argued that the pope should limit himself to theological issues, “lest he should turn the law of the Gospels into a law of slavery.”
Ockham was a victim of the Black Death that ravaged the fourteenth century and brought about an intellectual and cultural decline that lasted for a century.