Introduction to Medieval Philosophy, Part 1

Basic Orientation: The Major Questions

I once taught a course on medieval philosophy that began with St. Augustine and ended with John Duns Scotus. Ambitious, to be sure, but no more so than what many university “survey courses” stipulate; indeed, some of them are so foolish as to try to cover the period from Boethius to Descartes, and some, even more foolish, skip from Aristotle to Descartes.

I decided to focus on five figures whose greatness and influence no one could possibly dispute:

• St. Augustine of Hippo (354–430), the Doctor of Grace

• St. Anselm of Canterbury (1033–1109), the Father of Scholasticism

• St. Bonaventure (1221–1274), the Seraphic Doctor

• St. Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274), the Angelic Doctor or Common Doctor

• Bd. John Duns Scotus (1265–1308), the Subtle Doctor or Marian Doctor

It is my plan, here at Tradition & Sanity, to share with you a miniature version of this course, in which we will get to know these figures and their important contributions better. I shall do so in six relatively short parts.

Medieval philosophy was amazingly diverse and colorful. You find, of course, much attention paid to metaphysics, to abstruse questions of being and essence, substance and accident, the transcendental attributes of being, and so on. You also find sharp, detailed analysis of ethics, including tough cases in medicine, law, and economics. You have thorough systems of logic which vie with, and in many cases surpass, the symbolic logic developed in the twentieth century. A discipline called speculative grammar raised searching questions about language and linguistics.

More surprisingly, at least to modern people who have not been trained in medieval history, we find throughout the Middle Ages a fascination with nature, the natural sciences, and empirical data, and in the later period a flourishing of experimentation in physics, chemistry, biology, and their subdisciplines.

For example, Robert Grosseteste, a great bishop in England, was not only a superb linguist in Latin, Greek, and Hebrew, but also a renowned scientist with discoveries in optics to his credit, and a penchant for mathematical theorems. Roger Bacon (ca. 1214–ca. 1292), a cranky Franciscan usually in trouble with the authorities, undertook a massive project of organizing natural-empirical knowledge, predating by centuries the more famous Bacon of England, Sir Francis Bacon. John Buridan of Paris was investigating projectile motion well before Galileo Galilei was dropping lead balls from the Tower of Pisa. In fact, most of the theories that modern figures like Leibniz and Newton get credit for were already being discussed in rudimentary form in the late scholastic period, which gave birth to what is usually called “early modern philosophy.”

The eminent historian Etienne Gilson caused a major stir in academic circles of the early twentieth century when he published his first great monograph, a book on Descartes, in which he showed that nearly every idea that people considered original in Descartes had been stolen, sometimes verbatim, from the late scholastics whom Descartes studied either with the Jesuits at La Flêche or on his own.

There was more, too, going on in the Middle Ages: philosophy of history, philosophy of poetics and of the beautiful, music theory, grand symbolic liturgical dramas in which ethics, theology, romance, and music combined forces. There was legal theory and the formulation of international law; development of medicine, medical ethics, anatomy, zoology, botany. The first stirrings of modern economics date from the thirteenth century. And all this was going on not only among the Christians but, to varying degrees, among the Jews and the Muslims, too, who made their own contributions. As far as the arts and sciences are concerned, the Middle Ages were a period of incredible fertility of thought and culture, breathtaking diversity of interest, and an unparalleled depth of analysis and synthesis.

N.B. Paid-up subscribers of this Substack will now have access to full articles right here. Pelican+ remains my main base, and I encourage you to try it out (coupon here) as it offers many good things that have no equivalents at Substack; but you now have two ways to obtain access to the thrice-weekly posts at Tradition & Sanity.