Medieval
Philosophy. It’s not a topic that excites many hearts and minds. As a teacher
of this subject at university level, the reasons for this are not too difficult
to discern. On the one hand, the apparent identity of ‘modern’ philosophy as
the abandonment of reliance on mythological ways of thinking in place of reason
and rationality leads students to the belief that ‘modern’ philosophy has
somehow left the medieval behind. Let’s face it–‘medieval’ is hardly an
adjective applied with a positive sense to most things. On the other hand,
Medieval Philosophy is simply a difficult topic. Most of us know very little
about the medieval period, without specialised study. Even those whose identity
remains connected to the Church (whose control over the European medieval world
was nearly complete) rarely know much useful history of the Church, let alone
the relations between history, theology and philosophy in that period.

      Unfortunately,
textbooks and introductions to philosophy in the medieval period are, perhaps
unsurprisingly, generally written by philosophers. Historians of philosophy
often seem to think that reason and rationality are post-medieval developments
(and therefore of that they themselves are beyond the problematic identity of
pre-Enlightenment philosophy). This is problematic. A corollary of this
difficulty is a resistance within analytical philosophy to the inter-relation
of the subject matter of ‘other’ disciplines to the subject matter and practise
of philosophy itself. History of philosophy and history of ideas have
problematic inter-relations with each other and with more traditional
historical enterprises–this is no new story. Yet, in the story of medieval
philosophy as it emerges from the pages of analytical philosophy’s apparent
identity, this becomes a particularly challenging limitation.

Rationality
and reason are not anti-religious, nor is religion devoid of rationality and
reason: in each case, what we should rather speak of is presuppositional logic.
For modern philosophers, the need to believe that we have overcome the mythical
presuppositions of our forbearers is pervasive. A colleague of mine recently
expressed a belief that, to be a philosopher, one must necessarily hold a
position of atheism. Yet, while the disbelief in a god or gods may be a
pervasive set of beliefs amongst philosophers in the western tradition in the ‘modern’
or ‘post-modern’ world, there is no necessary reason to abandon a theistic
position to engage in rationality. Logic does not demand it, despite prolific
protestations to the contrary. Despite the positioning of ‘myth’ as the
antithesis of ‘reason’, wishing does not make it so. ‘Myth’ is merely a label
given to presupposition set x, whereas ‘reason’ is also a label for a
presupposition set (y).

There
are, indeed, differences between these two sets of presuppositions (where they
can adequately be differentiated at all). Yet, y grew out of x;
they are genetically related. This is not to say that they are therefore
metaphysically identical, but merely to point out that there may be aspects of
the philosophical genome that have not yet been mapped. The chief mistake of ‘modern’
philosophy’s construction of an identity for itself has been to make the
mistake of seeing these differences as qualitative differences of kind,
rather than quantitative differences of content. The inability
conclusively to ‘prove’ the presuppositional basis of modern philosophy is,
qualitatively, as problematic as the inability conclusively to ‘prove’ the
existence of a god.

      The
challenge of this for the study of medieval philosophy is that philosophy in
the medieval period participates in y and x, holding that, for x,
y is a necessary precursor, while modern philosophers’ typical positions
hold that y and x are mutually exclusive. Therefore, the study of
medieval philosophy by modern (especially analytical) philosophy is laced with
attempts by scholars to lift out the traces of reason from amidst the dross of
faith. The corollary of this is, as mentioned, that the inter-relations of the
history of the Church in the medieval period–factions, orders, temporal
powers, inter- and intra-cultural competition, etc.–are not generally
perceived to be of great relevance to our understanding of philosophy in this
period, any more than analytical philosophy perceives inter-relations with
culture to be an important aspect of its own understanding of itself.

      Aristotle’s
Children is a book whose emphasis runs counter to this trend. I suppose it
is no surprise that it is not by a philosopher, nor, apparently, written with
philosophers chiefly in mind. Suffused with a sense of wonder at the amazing
developments of the twelfth century after the ‘re-discovery’ in the ‘west’ of
the bulk of the Aristotelian corpus, Rubenstein weaves together basic
introductions to aspects of medieval thinking, Aristotelian philosophy, and the
cultural and historical developments that made it possible for Europe to begin an
emergence from the ‘dark ages’.

As
a philosopher, teacher of philosophy, and student of history, I found this book
to be alternatively marvellous and woefully problematic. On the one hand,
Rubenstein’s approach to weaving the stories of individual philosophers against
their own personal and their culture’s histories is highly laudable. For the
first time, for instance, I understood things about Abelard’s story that had
escaped me in my previous researches. The factionalism that pervaded the
medieval church, the manner in which the manuscripts of Moorish Spain were
translated, copied and disseminated, the development of the medieval university
of Paris–the list goes on–all of these are treated in such a way that,
particularly for students coming fresh to the subject, the relevance of
philosophy to culture is brought out in a startling and memorable way.

      On
the other hand, Rubenstein’s grasp on and understanding of some of the
philosophy he treats is more remote. I would never give his chapter on
Aristotle and Plato to any student of ancient or medieval philosophy, for it
participates too readily in the typical analytical philosophy framework of the
understanding of the development of Greek philosophy, and adverts to a brand of
historical structuralism that is, while perhaps useful as a heuristic device,
problematic if extended. He (pp. 49-50) tries to develop a notion of the
succession of Platonic and Aristotelian epochs or eras: ‘In Aristotelian
epochs, economic growth, political expansion, and cultural optimism color the
intellectual atmosphere. People feel connected to each other and to the natural
world. Confident that they can direct their emotions instead of being dominated
by them, they are generally comfortable with their humanity€¦’, etc. On the
other hand, ‘Platonic eras€¦are filled with discomfort and longing. The source
of this discomfort is a sense of contradiction dramatized by personal and
social conflicts that seem all but unresolvable. Society is fractured,
its potential integrity disrupted by violent strife, and this brokenness is
mirrored in the souls of individuals’, etc. Thankfully, this model is not
employed anywhere else in the book. Even without the silly assignment of these
competing ‘eras’ to Aristotle and Plato, the exceptions to this sort of banding
of history abound to the extent that their explanatory value is of no account.

Part
of the reason Rubenstein feels able to engage in the sharp distinction between
Aristotle and Plato as he does (and therefore of their ‘epochs’) is that his
picture of Plato is skewed by neoplatonism. Throughout the book, when Plato’s
metaphysics are mentioned, it is actually the neoplatonic hybrid of
Aristotelian and Platonic elements that is in view. Rubenstein does not appear
to recognise this point, but the importance for distinguishing how these
Classical and Late Antique philosophical systems interacted with the highly
hybridized metaphysical system of the emerging Christian Church is paramount
for any attempt to decipher the development of either Christian theology of the
medieval period or of philosophy as it develops into the modern world. That
work is not done well here.

Thankfully,
the layout of this book lends itself to the sort of use that I both suggest and
plan to execute in future medieval philosophy classes: ignore chapters 1€“2,
read chapters 3€“7 along side more traditional introductions to medieval
philosophy (such as John Marenbon’s two-volume Early and Later Medieval
Philosophy, London and New York: Routledge, 1988, 1987) and medieval texts
themselves (my recommendation for a collection is A. Hyman and J.J. Walsh, Philosophy
in the Middle Ages: The Christian, Islamicm and Jewish Traditions,
Indianapolis and Cambridge: Hackett, 2nd edn 1973), while ignoring anything
that is said about Plato, except as one can see this as the function of
Plato’s texts in some medieval contexts.

The
27-page eighth chapter is, by way of conclusion to the book, a virtually
independent essay on the relations between the modern, medieval and ancient.
Following the more scientific emphasis of his final chapter (on Ockham), it
outlines how he sees the outcome of the flowering of Aristotelian thought in
the late medieval Church, tracing developments of these ideas in the
Reformations and the Renaissance: ‘One can imagine this as a sort of
intellectual nuclear fission. Bombarded by its early modern opponents, Aristotelianism
implodes, generating a coldly objectivist science and a passionately
subjectivist religion’ (p. 289). This is, perhaps, overly-simplistic. Yet, in
the attention that this book has given to a period that is rejected from most
cultural histories as virtually irrelevant to the world in which we now find
ourselves, Rubenstein has earned the right to make such suggestions, and his
readers–at whatever level they approach this book–would do well to pay
attention and think about the complexity that underlies this apparently simple
statement.

By
way of a parting shot, I should express a general uneasiness with the degree to
which the ‘Muslims’ of the book’s sub-title are brought into the story
primarily as keepers of the Aristotelian flam. As with his characterisations of
Aristotelian and Platonic philosophies, I think Rubenstein, in bringing his
unique perspective to this field, has followed too closely the lines of that
field’s already-existing self-definition. Rubenstein does, it is true, give
attention to the influence that the texts of Avicenna and Averroes had on some
Christian thinkers, but the story that is told in this book is really the story
of Christianity.

In
the concluding pages of the book, Rubenstein notes that, ‘As this book goes to
press, the president of the United States, a believing Christian closely allied
with other believers of other faiths, has committed his nation to war against
an Iraqi regime that he has repeatedly defined, in Augustinian religious terms,
as "evil"’ (p. 292), and states that ‘global economic and military
power [is] concentrating at an unprecedented rate in the hands of a few
powerful elites,’ and suggests that, ‘both faith and reason tend to become
tools in the hands of raw, self-aggrandizing power’ (p. 298).

I
would like to suggest that part of the structure that has allowed these old
west vs. east/Christian vs. Muslim notions to be brought into play so
powerfully by rhetoricians on both sides of this apparent divide in the
twenty-first-century world is the origination of these stories in the histories
of both religions and of the cultures that have been under their influence for
the past two millennia. The continuing bit-part billing for Islamic
philosophers in the Late Antique and Medieval periods–as much as the history
of Christianity sanitised of its eastern origins and non-standard identity for
its first several centuries–are areas that need renewed attention. It will not
end the war in Iraq, or convince combatants to forego hijacking
airplanes, but it may lay the foundations for our children and grandchildren to
feel the shame of our misunderstandings (and take power away from those who
would use these stories to manipulate us). Rubenstein missed a trick here, but
opens the door for future approaches to this subject that expand their
perspective to accommodate a new way of seeing the histories of Christian and
Islamic philosophies of the Middle Ages.

©2004
Brook Pearson

Brook W.R. Pearson, Ph.D., Senior Lecturer in
Greco-Roman Philosophy & Culture, School of Humanities and Cultural
Studies, University of Surrey Roehampton, London, author of Corresponding
Sense: Paul, Dialectic, and Gadamer (Brill Academic Publishers, 2001).

Categories: Religion, Philosophical