Introduction to Medieval Philosophy, Part 2

Late Antiquity

Boethius and Dionysius

(Part 1 here)

In the true philosophic spirit, our primary focus should not be historical, biographical, or cultural issues, but the rei veritas, the truth of the matter. As St. Thomas put it, “Who said something is of less importance than what he said, and its truth or falsehood.” The soul, as form of the body, is incidentally subject to time and place, but in itself, as an intellectual substance, the soul transcends time and place. The mind is no prisoner of age or race or sex or state. The thoughts of Plato, of Bonaventure, of Pascal, of Newman, are as contemporary to us as our own thoughts, and what they say to us stands or falls according to how well it mirrors reality, not how it flatters our taste or follows fashion.

All this being so, it is also important and valuable to know something about the context within which a philosopher has worked, the kind of world he was born into, the setting of his activity, the influences that surrounded him and impinged upon him. It’s difficult to get a clear picture of all this, for the realm of particular details is boundless and bottomless. Massive histories of the Middle Ages have been written and will continue to be written, for it is an age of extraordinary richness. My intention here is simply to provide a bird’s eye view of medieval philosophy—the rough “periods” into which it can be divided, and its main sources or inspirations.

It is notoriously difficult to divide history into periods—so difficult that you routinely find historians saying “all divisions are arbitrary,” which is going a bit too far. The truth of the matter is, divisions are useful fictions that can have more or less basis in known facts. I call them “fictions” because nobody ever wakes up and says: “Today (or this year or this decade), I know that a new period is starting in history.” There are always gradual transitions combined with sudden shifts or eruptions, with the result that change in history is more like a subtle gray scale with occasional blotches, or the change in light from dawn to dusk with the occasional shooting star, than a series of neat compartments. History is more like a lava flow with layer on top of layer, or (to shift metaphors) a huge quilt made up of thousands of little pieces. The closer you look, the more you see your convenient generalizations evaporate.

Still, when all is said and done, there are large discernible periods that can be defined in terms of shattering events, powerful personalities, the demise of old patterns of thought or behavior and the emergence of new ones. As much as I would like to take into account the political, economic, and military history of Europe, I will focus on intellectual developments, but you should bear in mind that these never take place in a vacuum.