Philosophy-RAG-demo/transcriptions/HoP 377 - One Way or Another - Northern Scholasticism.txt

 Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of the Philosophy Department at King's College London and the LMU in Munich, online at historyofphilosophy.net. Today's episode, One Way or Another, Northern Scholasticism. A friend of mine has a theory about why so many philosophy departments are riven by factional dispute. The less money is available, the more people fight over it. Many is the university whose great thinkers have gone to war over a hiring procedure, or just the catering budget. Sometimes admittedly the conflicts are more high-minded. Governments may split along ideological lines, like that between the so-called continental and analytic approaches, or between historians of ideas and colleagues who think that worthwhile philosophy started being produced at around the same time as color televisions. And as those continental types would say, plus-a-change, plus-a-menschus. For you analytic philosophers out there, this means the more things change, the more they stay the same. Because as it turns out, rivalries between university philosophers are as old as philosophy at universities. Already in the 13th century, academia was enlivened by antagonism between the arts and theology faculties, and between secular masters and mendicant friars. And of course, universities were one of the most important contexts for the competition between scholastics and humanists in the 15th and 16th centuries. We've already discussed that quite a bit, but mostly from the humanist side of the debate. So for the sake of balanced coverage, let's hear from some defenders of the scholastic method. They spoke up in favor of the much derided proliferation of technical terms and distinctions. For the scholastics, such devices made philosophy more accurate and rigorous. As modern-day intellectual historian Ann Moss has explained, they worried that the humanist refusal to use such specialist vocabulary signaled a lamentable disregard of disciplines of inquiry that provided efficiently signposted roots to the language of the mind. A command of these tools distinguished experts from amateurs, and theology was no business for amateurs, even amateurs who had learned excellent Hebrew, Greek, and Latin. The scholastic Johann Seitz wrote that there are important reasons for subjecting theological language to rules from which one must not depart. If you do not observe them, the irregular form of speech may lead to heresy. Seitz was involved in a paradigmatic conflict between the two camps when he sided with the scholastic Konrad Wimpina against the humanist Martin Polich. Where Polich praised the power of fine speech, especially poetry, Seitz and Wimpina insisted that poetic discourse needed to be eliminated from discussion of serious theological matter. You can see what was at stake here if you contrast the approaches of, say, Duns Scotus and Nicholas of Cusa. The classic scholastic method of a man like Scotus was to draw fine distinctions and use language in a very exact, even artificially regimented fashion, whereas theologians with a more humanist bent, like Cuzanas, would be more open to the use of metaphor and imagery. Now we should be careful not to overdraw this contrast. Even in the debate just mentioned, Polich was careful to show his acquaintance with scholastic methods, while Wimpina had produced such humanist works as a guide to good letter writing. More generally, university masters rarely argued that the cultivation of good Latin skills was a waste of time. While they might object to such daring projects as Erasmus' New Edition of the New Testament, their conflicts with humanists more usually had to do with the same matters of non-principle that tend to concern academics nowadays. Admittedly, they did not have to deal with the most common dispute in modern-day academia, whose job is it to clean the microwave, but other debates look familiar. Which area should be covered by that newly vacated chair? Who in particular should be hired for it? Were colleagues stealing students by teaching more popular subjects? Just as today's specialists in logic might grouse about another faculty member's well-received class on philosophy and film, so the 15th century logic specialists were annoyed when students flocked to courses on poetry. But the scholastics could not expend too much energy on their hostility towards the poetry-loving humanists because they needed it to express their hostility towards each other. The defining confrontation among university philosophers in the 15th century has come to be known by the German word Wegestreit. As any continental philosopher could tell you, this means battle of methods or ways. It pitted two groups of schoolmen against one another, those who followed the via antiqua, or old way, and those who adopted the via moderna, or modern way. As the name suggests, this contrast was to some extent a chronological one. The adherents of the via antiqua looked back to thinkers of the 13th century, especially Albert the Great, Thomas Aquinas, and Duns Scotus, while the upholders of the via moderna took up the teachings of such 14th century thinkers as William of Ockham, John Buridan, and Marcellus of Ingin. But behind this lay a more fundamental philosophical disagreement. For all their differences, the authorities of the via antiqua were realists, while the via moderna was more or less synonymous with nominalism. Time then for a reminder of what was at stake in the clash between realism and nominalism. Most centrally, the disagreement concerned the problem of universals. For old times' sake, meaning no offense to the via moderna, let's take the example we often used when discussing this in the series on medieval philosophy. The four Marx brothers are all humans, and would thus seem to share some common nature, namely humanity. Nominalists accepted that humanity is indeed something, well, real outside the mind. The biggest advantage of this is that there is something in objective reality for us to grasp when we, say, define human as rational animal. The nominalists rejected this. For them, it was absurd that anything common or universal exists outside the mind. Such general natures are only concepts, names, or terms, which is why this group came to be called nominalists or terminists. Outside the mind, there are only the Marx brothers, no fifth thing that they all share in common. It may seem strange that so much tension would arise over this apparently rather technical issue, but it was a question that was connected to other debates. Generally speaking, the nominalists of the via moderna tended to place severe limits on the capacities of human reason, whereas the realists of the via antiqua tended to think in line with their position on universals that the structure of the mind was a good guide to the structure of reality. So, to take another philosophical example, nominalists tended to doubt that we can use reason to understand the decisions made by God in creating the world, or laying obligations on his creatures. Thus another feature of the via moderna was a devotion to divine voluntarism, basically that both nature and morality are entirely dependent on the arbitrary will of God. Against this, the realists of the via antiqua wanted to stress that natural reason could support and confirm most if not all of the teachings of Christian theology. Great authorities such as Aquinas had showed precisely how to do this. For example, one could use the Aristotelian theory of relations as a way of explaining the doctrine of the Holy Trinity, a strategy that would be undermined by the anomalous claim that relations lack objective reality. There was also a political dimension to the debate. The via moderna steered well clear of the teachings of dangerous, even condemned figures from around the turn of the 15th century, notably John Wycliffe and Jan Hus, both of whom had been realists. But upholders of the via antiqua could play this game too, by pointing out that Occam too had seen his teachings banned by the Church in 1339. Since Occam was a key figure in the intellectual lineage of the via moderna, its proponents had to answer this charge, which they did by pointing out, rightly, that Occam got in trouble for criticizing the papacy, not because of the technical details of his nominalism. In any case, the compatibility of the two ways with the teachings of the Church was always central to the Wegischreit. It was in these terms, for example, that nominalists responded to a ban on their approach handed down by the French king, Louis XI, in 1474. According to the terms of this decree, books of the via moderna were confiscated, while the works of realist authorities like Aquinas and Scotus became required reading. In their defense, the nominalists insisted that their approach was more in conformity with the faith, exactly the reverse of the rationale given in favor of the ban, which declared realism more reliable from a Christian point of view. An observer at the time remarked, the nominalists and the realists are warring in a ridiculous fashion as gladiators. As that event shows, the Wegischreit was an issue at Paris, but certainly not only at Paris. It was pervasive in the universities of Central and Eastern Europe, many of which were newly founded during the Renaissance. These include Basel in 1459, Ingolstadt also in 1459, Freiburg in 1460, and Tübingen in 1476. Northern universities were good places to get really upset about the choice between nominalism and realism, because they focused so much on the arts subjects and theology, offering very little teaching on medicine and law, which were far more important down in Italy. Thus, for example, the first public anatomical demonstration done in Heidelberg was only in 1574. Arts and theology faculties were often dominated by adherents of one or the other via. Heidelberg was a home for the Via Moderna, since the great nominalist Marsilius of Ingen had been rector there. This approach was then exported to newly founded schools like the University at Freiburg. By contrast, Cologne was so dominated by the Via Antikor that in 1425 the German prince-electors had to write to the city to ask that the university teach the Via Moderna. Here they were thinking precisely of the recent example of the condemned Hussites who had given realism a bad name. All of this, of course, had a great impact on the experience of students. At universities where both methods were taught, they were formally required to pick sides, leading to a healthy rivalry reminiscent of today's fraternity culture. The faculty at Ingolstadt actually split in two so that teachers of the two approaches didn't have to work together. In Heidelberg, one realist professor went around with bodyguards out of fear of what the nominalist students might do to him. No detail was too trivial to feature in the Wegeschreit. The two camps even differed when it came to grammar, for example with the Via Antikor, preferring to place a dative object after a verb and the Via Moderna before the verb, so that if you were a realist and wanted to praise the main course at dinner by saying ''this pleases me'' you would say ''plaket mihi'' while a nominalist would say ''mihi plaket''. More substantively, the Via Antikor and Via Moderna used different textbooks and offered contrasting interpretations of Aristotle, whose works were, of course, still the basis of the curriculum. This didn't necessarily mean, though, that each side was ignorant of what the other was doing. They needed to study one another's ideas, if only for the sake of mutual refutation. Then too, student finalists might be examined by masters from both camps so that they were forced to gain at least some acquaintance with the views of their opponents. To get more of a sense of what they might be learning, let's look at two universities, Erfurt and Krakow. Erfurt was an important center for the Via Moderna, where the masters produced commentaries and textbooks drawing heavily on 14th century nominalism. Two names particularly worth knowing are Bartolomeus of Usingen and Jodokos Tsutfater, not least because they would both teach the young Martin Luther. In keeping with the Via Moderna's emphasis on the limitations of human reason, they distinguished between the teachings one could find in Aristotle and the true doctrines of the Church that could be learned only from Revelation. For example, Bartolomeus forgave Aristotle for supposing that the soul emerges from the material of the body rather than being created by God separately and out of nothing. After all, Aristotelian philosophy is entirely dependent on observations of nature, and we don't see natural things just popping into existence with no material basis. From the point of view of natural philosophy, the soul can be seen as an imminent form that is everywhere throughout the body, something these nominalists expressed by saying that even a body part of an animal, like a leg or hand, is also an animal because it is ensouled. But this is, they said, only the connotative meaning of the soul, here using a technical term from Ockham, which in this case means that the soul is being grasped insofar as it relates to something else, namely the body. In itself, the soul is a separate substance that can survive without the body. Natural philosophy was also flourishing further east in Krakow, where a university was founded already in 1364. Krakow tended to follow the lead of the University of Prague, with both institutions then shifting from nominalism to realism. One significant idea that took hold in Krakow was the impetus theory of motion, according to which bodies can continue moving without being helped along by an external mover. This meant that they could dispense with the idea of intellects moving the heavenly spheres, as postulated by Aristotle. It wasn't a new idea, but one taken over from the earlier anomalist John Buridan. Still it's worth mentioning, because this revision of Aristotelian cosmology took place at an institution which, between 1491 and 1495, would be home to a student who would go on to propose more far-reaching revisions to that same cosmology, Copernicus. So these examples begin to hint at the way 15th century university culture helped prepare the way for the intellectual and religious upheavals of the 16th century. But I'd like to dive more deeply into the ideas of another scholastic, who will help us understand the context in which Luther's Reformation took place. I have in mind Gabriel Biel. He was appointed professor of theology at Tübingen in 1484. Prior to that, he had trained at both Cologne and Erfurt, meaning that he learned both the via antiqua and via moderna. But it was an idea associated with the nominalism of the via moderna that became central to his thought. Since we're talking about scholasticism, this idea is of course framed as a distinction between two Latin phrases, namely potentia ordinata and potentia absoluta, meaning ordained power and absolute power. God's absolute power is his ability to bring about absolutely any state of affairs, so long as it is not logically contradictory. He can create any world he wants, or many worlds, or no world at all. He could bring into existence speaking giraffes, people who could survive with their head cut off, fire that freezes water instead of boiling it, even an analytic philosopher who speaks foreign languages. But of course the world we live in has different rules. With the exception of the occasional miracle, God has chosen to exercise his influence within these rules, and this is called ordained power. He has freely and without constraint decided to maintain certain regularities, which is why giraffes, headless people, and fire all behave in ways we can predict and study scientifically. But the fact that things could in principle have been otherwise constitutes a significant alteration to the Aristotelian conception of science. For Aristotle, the goal of the scientist was to find immutable and necessary truths about the nature of things, by discovering, for example, why fire burns things, or why giraffes cannot talk. In the voluntarist way of thinking, which came to the fore in the nominalist tradition followed by bille, science turns out to be the study of something that is not necessary, even though it is regular and well ordered. The scientist is discovering the world system that God chose, or ordained, when he could just as easily have chosen differently. A particularly important application of this idea comes in bille's moral theory. Like all theologians of the period, he is concerned to abide by Augustine's teaching that humans can be absolved of sin and merit entry to paradise only through the freely given gift of grace. This means avoiding Pelagianism, the position attacked by Augustine and later on seen as heretical, according to which humans can merit salvation through independent effort. Bille comes pretty close to taking that dangerous position by teaching that God is obligated to give grace to anyone who deserves it. Thus, the classic study of his thought by Heiko Obermann goes so far as to say that bille's doctrine of justification is essentially Pelagian, and Obermann ought to know, since his middle name was Augustinus. However, as he also points out, bille's position is more complicated than this. Within the framework of absolute power, God is under no obligation to help us, no matter how much we strive to earn his help. After all, within this framework, God is under no obligation whatsoever. The only factor to consider is his untrammeled will. However, God has mercifully ordained that grace will be given to anyone who makes a genuine effort, or as bille famously puts it, does what is in them, by devoting themselves to the love of God and hatred of sin. If God is obligated to give such grace to people, it is only because he has placed that obligation on himself. Thus one might say that in principle Augustine was right, because grace does not need to be offered at all, and also because even under God's ordained rule we cannot be saved without grace. But in practice, Pelagius was right, because God has decided that whoever merits that grace will definitely receive it. To put this another way, it is not within our own power to be saved, but it is in our power to get God to save us. The voluntarism of the nominalists could often seem unsettling, or even terrifying, with our eternal fate and the nature of morality itself left entirely up to God's inscrutable will. But bille presents the most reassuring possible version of this doctrine. If you really do your best, he tells his readers and parishioners, you'll be fine. As for the more abstract worry that morality would be arbitrary, it is true for bille that God is above the moral law. His absolute power can decree anything to be good or bad. But bille also thinks that God's wisdom is applied in ordaining morality as we know it. Thus we can, through independent rational reflection, come to understand quite a bit about the ordained moral order. Bille even defines sin in terms of violating reason, because he assumes that going against reason must be equivalent to going against God. On the same grounds, bille thinks that someone who is untouched by the message of the gospel – for instance, a person captured as a child by Muslims and prevented from learning about Christ – can rationally reflect and strive towards genuine goodness. This is enough to count as doing what is in them, so they will be rewarded with grace. As bille's treatment of these issues shows, the questions at the heart of the Protestant Reformation were already being discussed intensely and with great refinement in the 15th century. The clash between the Church and the Reform movement was not just a new, more disruptive Wegestreit, it also carried on debates that had been involved in the original Wegestreit over such issues as the scope and nature of divine power, and the scope and nature of human reason. More generally, it has been remarked that, if there had been no universities, there would have been no Reformation. Some of the central figures of the movement taught at them, including Luther himself, who was a professor of biblical studies in Wittenberg. Lectures were a powerful way to communicate the Lutheran message. A visitor to Wittenberg saw about 400 students in attendance in his class, with even more going along to the lectures of Luther's fellow reformer, Langton. Such students then disseminated the teachings in their career as scholars and churchmen. So in both philosophical and institutional terms, scholastic philosophy set the stage for the Reformation, no less than did humanism. And now that the stage has been set, it's time to usher on our leading man. So hold on to your hats, especially if your hat is a papal tiara, because here comes Martin Luther, next time on The History of Philosophy without any gaps.