Philosophy-RAG-demo/transcriptions/HoP 197 - Charles in Charge - The Carolingian Renaissance.txt

 Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of King's College London and the LMU in Munich. Online at www.historyoffilosophy.net. Today's episode, Charles in Charge, the Carolingian Renaissance. Suppose a man writes one podcast per week, excepting four weeks of summer, when he is on break. During the writing of each podcast, he consumes three cups of coffee, and each cup contains 250 milliliters of water. If an Olympic-sized swimming pool contains 2.5 million liters of water, how many years of podcasting will it take the man to drink a swimming pool's worth of coffee? Ah yes, the word problem. Mortal enemy of nearly every schoolchild, though somehow I always rather liked them when I was doing math as a kid. Whether you like them or loathe them, they go back a long way. Some of the earliest examples can be found in a text written by a man who has a strong claim to be the first significant medieval philosopher, Alquin. He is most famous for his association with Charles the Great, usually known in English by the badly pronounced French version of that name, Charlemagne. Alquin has been called Charles's Minister of Religious Affairs. He took a hand in formulating decrees issued in Charles's name, tutored Charles himself in philosophy, and promoted learning in Charles's vast kingdom, expressing the fond hope that Charles's court at Aachen might become a new Athens. The sort of learning Alquin wanted to promote with the benevolent support of Charles was embodied by the liberal arts. These weren't arts that voted for left-wing politicians, not least because there was no opportunity to vote when Charles was in charge. Rather, the liberal arts were a curriculum of seven disciplines divided into two groups of three and four. The first three arts, or trivium, included grammar, rhetoric, and dialectic. The remaining four, or quadrivium, were mathematical in nature and comprised arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy. This is where the word problems come in. Alquin's little book Propositiones ad aquendos iuvenes, or Problems to Sharpen the Minds of the Young, is a collection of mathematical puzzles. Some demand calculation, for instance by asking the reader to multiply and add fractions of numbers of animals. Some are more like logic puzzles. For instance, if two men marry each other's mothers, and both couples have sons, how will these sons be related to one another? Answer at the end of this episode. Alquin's interest in the liberal arts is an example of something we tend to underestimate, the continuity between late ancient and medieval culture. We see this in the political sphere, with Charlemagne dealing with the still-existing Eastern Roman or Byzantine Empire. We see it in law, with Roman legal codes exercising influence on medieval legal codes. We see it in religion, with theological debates fought by Augustine and his contemporaries still much on the minds of medieval churchmen. And we see it in philosophy too. Alongside Aristotle, the most dominant philosophical authorities in the medieval centuries were two Latin Christians of the late ancient world, Augustine and Boethius. In fact, for early medieval philosophy we can hardly distinguish between the influence of Boethius and that of Aristotle. Until a more complete set of Aristotelian works became available in the 12th century, the medieval's had access only to the logical writings that had been translated into Latin and commented upon by Boethius. Other works by Boethius, his Consolation of Philosophy and series of short treatises on Christian theology, alongside the writings of Augustine, provided medievals with further indirect access to ancient thought. Then there were the more obscure Latin works that I looked at in episode 117 just before veering off to tackle philosophy in the Islamic world, which brings us back to the liberal arts. Back then I mentioned a Latin work called The Marriage of Mercury and Philology, written by Marcianus Capella. It depicted the seven liberal arts disciplines as bridesmaids in attendance at an allegorical wedding, much as Boethius personified our favorite discipline as Lady Philosophy in the Consolation. Marcianus' work was very popular in the early Middle Ages, and it was only one of several texts to bring the liberal arts to the attention of men like Alquin. In fact, the curriculum appeared as early as the first century BC when the Roman scholar Marcus Varro composed a now-lost work on the disciplines, covering the seven liberal arts plus medicine and architecture. In its medieval form as a sequence of seven disciplines, it turns up not only in Marcianus, but also in Augustine, who was in turn drawing on late ancient Platonist sources. Boethius is worth mentioning again here, since he was not only the key source for dialectic, or logic, but also wrote a text on music. And then there was another author of late antiquity who I haven't mentioned yet, but who was an absolutely crucial source of knowledge for medieval scholars. His name was Isidore of Seville, and his much-read work was entitled Etymologies. As Isidore's name tells us, he lived in Seville, where he was in fact bishop. This was in the late 6th and early 7th century, at which point the Western Roman Empire was like a man who has lost all his James Brown records, defunct. Isidore's Spain was ruled by the Visigoths, though around the time of his birth they were forced to contend with Byzantine attempts to recapture the Iberian Peninsula. Despite this, intellectually speaking Isidore still inhabits late antiquity. The impressive range of texts he uses as sources in his Etymologies includes the great Latin writers. He is especially fond of Virgil, Cicero, and Lucan, but cites a host of other ancient authors too, such as Ovid, Horace, and even our old Epicurean friend Lucretius. Such pagan figures weren't entirely unknown to Isidore's medieval heirs. In fact, there were medieval commentaries, not only on the pagan Marcianus, but also on works by Virgil, Ovid, Lucan, and Horace. But the medieval's more usually relied on Isidore himself as a conduit for much ancient knowledge and culture. From this point of view, his Etymologies could hardly have been more useful. Divided into 20 books, it begins by covering the liberal arts, before going on to the Christian religious sciences, cosmology and natural science, and finally activities like agriculture, war, shipbuilding, and food preparation. True to its name, Isidore's Etymologies is structured around words. It will typically explain the meaning or supposed derivation of each term he discusses. He even gives us a brief account of how things get their names. There may be some underlying rationale, as with the word rex meaning king, which comes from rectae agendum, or acting correctly. Alternatively, it may be a reference to the origin of a thing. The word for human being, homo, reflects the belief that humans came from the earth, homus. And no, the name of the popular chickpea-based spread homus does not come from this Latin word, though Isidore would probably think it does. He's in fact given to rather fanciful and even far-fetched etymologies. This may be because he is less interested in actually finding the right derivation than in helping us remember the meaning. Sometimes though, he does get the etymology right, for instance with the words history and philosophy. He correctly tells us that the former comes from the Greek historein, meaning to observe, and that philosophy means love of wisdom. In a rare lapse, he fails to deal with the phrase without any gaps, so I'll do it for him. The origin of the word gap is hereditary, it's in our genes. While Isidore's etymologies can't exactly be described as a work of philosophy, there is quite a bit of philosophy in it. He goes through the basics of logic echoing the ancient approach to this subject by summarizing Porphyry's Isagoge, followed by Aristotle's logical works. While going over these, he quotes the saying that when writing on interpretation, Aristotle dipped his pen in his mind. This remark would later be repeated by Charlemagne himself in the midst of a dialogue about logic with Alquin. To some extent, we can also see Isidore's whole project as a philosophical or scientific one. He is not just telling us where words come from, he is teaching us what they mean, and about the things for which they stand. As he says himself, one of the tasks he is undertaking is the differentiation of things, by telling us the features that distinguish one thing from another. It is for example cruelty that distinguishes the tyrant from the king. All of this is reminiscent of far older philosophical works, for example Plato, who told a similar story about etymology and its significance in his Cratylus, and whose dialogue the Sophist explored the idea that understanding something means finding its distinguishing features. Another figure of the very late ancient world who loomed large in the early medieval age was Gregory the Great. He was a contemporary of Isidore's, in fact a friend of Isidore's older brother, and pope from the years 590-604. For Alquin and other Carolingian era thinkers, Gregory was a major authority in theology and ethics. His most significant work is a massive commentary on the Book of Job, though other works survive too, notably a set of dialogues on miraculous events. His approach to the Bible emphasized allegorical readings. Rather ironically, given that this kind of interpretation was pioneered by the Jewish writer Philo of Alexandria, Gregory claimed that allegory distinguishes the true Christian approach to the Old Testament from the overly literal understanding of the Jews. As for ethics, Gregory aspired to live his life in accordance with the monastic ideal. At one point, we looked at the so-called desert fathers like Evagrius who joined their Christian piety to a radical asceticism. Such radical withdrawal from the world is in the background here, but a more relevant influence on Gregory would have been Benedict, who lived in Italy in the first half of the 6th century. Benedict composed a rule, or set of instructions, for the monks under his supervision, which helped to shape Gregory's idea of the perfect religious life. All these ancient figures helped shape the philosophy and worldview of the outstanding intellectual during the reign of Charlemagne, Alquin. For instance, Alquin's view of ethics was deeply shaped by the monastic tradition, as we can see from the many surviving letters he wrote to fellow clergymen, giving advice on best practice in monasteries and the personal quest for virtue. He also owed something more basic to Gregory the Great, namely the fact that he was a Christian at all. Well, that's a bit of an exaggeration, but Gregory did play a significant role in the Christianization of Alquin's home island of Britain. He sent a mission to convert the pagans there to the true faith in the year 596, a major event in the spread of the new faith in the British Isles. With conversion came the establishment of monasteries, the center of learning in Anglo-Saxon Britain at this time, just as on the continent. Alquin himself came from Northumbria, where he was able to study at one of the most significant libraries of the time, at the monastery in York. He could also benefit from another illustrious predecessor, a fellow scholar of Northumbria whose name you will certainly know if you've ever read anything about early British history, Bede. He is known mostly for his work as a historian, and Alquin in fact wrote a history of York in poetic form that makes extensive use of Bede and praises him in fairly extravagant terms, but both men were the sort of all-round scholars the liberal arts curriculum was meant to produce. They contributed not just to history, but also theology and mathematics, and tried their hand at poetry too, the main outlet for their skill in the art of rhetoric, since monks were hardly given frequent opportunities to make public speeches or argue court cases. All this activity was part and parcel of a religious vocation. For instance, both men used their competence in mathematics to write about the correct calculation of the calendar, which had such important religious implications that major political disputes could arise over the correct date of Easter. Because of Alquin's link to the glamorous and historically pivotal court of Charlemagne, it's easy to overlook the importance of his British background for his profile as a scholar. But in fact, Alquin did not spend that much of his life at the Frankish court. He probably joined Charles only in 786, when he was already an accomplished scholar in his mid-40s, and he thereafter returned to England for three years before returning to court. But even if Alquin's scholarly personality was Northumbrian, the highlights of his scholarly output came through his association with Charles. In stark contrast to the disappointing political leadership back home, Charles was an awe-inspiring monarch who took a genuine interest in religious and intellectual issues. A treatise by Alquin on rhetoric takes the form of a dialogue between himself and his king, and Alquin went so far as to call Charles, a philosopher steeped in liberal studies, enjoying a wisdom given to him by God. Here we catch a glimpse of a still-emerging ideology that is going to occupy our attention in the coming episodes—the idea that God appoints secular kings to rule. An interesting example is a set of decrees written in Northumbria in 786, quite likely with Alquin's involvement. These emphasize the dire sin involved in regicide, pointing out that it means killing the Lord's anointed. Alquin's devotion to Charles is also shown by the fact that he compares him to the biblical Solomon in a short work he wrote about the soul. Elsewhere, he compares him to King David. And there's a hint of Alquin's commitment to the ideal of kingship in his account of the soul itself. Alquin proceeds on the principle that it is natural for humans to love God, and that this love is the same as our love for the good. Since it is the rational part of the soul that loves God, this aspect of the soul is its best part, and must rule over the body and the rest of the soul, as if from a throne of royal power. This wasn't mere flattery on Alquin's part. The parallel between reason and a just ruler goes back to Plato's Republic. And though Alquin couldn't have read the Republic, his broadly Platonist allegiances are as clear as his allegiance to Charles. He even speaks of our mind as being trapped in our body as in a prison, another image that can be found in Plato. Alquin's studies in York would have acquainted him with a number of late ancient authors with a broadly Platonic outlook. Not least among them was Augustine, whom Alquin cites by name in this little treatise on the soul. In fact, he mentions having read a work by Augustine while in England, which he is now unable to get hold of in Francia. Among Alquin's borrowings from Augustine is the idea that the powers of the soul form an image of the Trinity, with the three divine persons corresponding to understanding, will, and memory. With his wide learning, Alquin was useful to Charles as a tutor and court intellectual, and also as a proponent of the theology espoused by the Frankish court. Charles saw himself not just as a secular ruler, but as an authority in religious matters, and involved himself in a variety of religious disputes. One such dispute concerned the veneration of images, icons of Jesus and the saints. This religious practice had been forbidden in the Byzantine realm by imperial edict earlier in the 8th century, and more recently rehabilitated. Any bead had pronounced on the issue, urging a middle path between veneration of icons and the no-tolerance policy of the Byzantine iconoclasts. Visual images may be used in worship, but not worship themselves. Now in Alquin's day, a fellow scholar at the Frankish court named Theodulf criticized the resurgence of full-blown veneration of icons in Byzantium. I mention all this for several reasons. First, it gives us a foretaste of a controversy we'll be looking at later on when we discuss Byzantine philosophy. Second, it's a nice example of the interconnected world inhabited by men like Alquin. The Frankish elite had dealings and arguments, both political and theological, with the far-away court in Constantinople. Indeed, Charles engaged in diplomatic relations with the even further-flung court of the Muslim caliph in Baghdad. Third, theological disputes like this relate to our philosophical concerns more closely than you might think. Alquin's Platonist outlook was a good match for Theodulf's critique of image worship. After all, we use our senses to view images, and from a Platonist point of view, sensation is vastly inferior to the powers of the mind. The point is made by Alquin himself in a letter to his student Fredegisus, when he extols the mind's understanding above the power of eyesight. Alquin got more directly involved in another theological controversy, over a new doctrine that was being propounded by some Christians in Visigothic Spain—adoptionism. It was a new entry in the long list of attempts to explain how Christ could have been both God and human. The adoptionists proposed that Christ was fully God's Son insofar as He was divine, but only adopted by God as a Son insofar as they share in His human nature. If this strikes you as a pretty good suggestion, then you haven't been studying your liberal arts. Alquin wrote attacks on adoptionism and also outlined the controversy for a high-born woman — it's not entirely clear who — in a letter to her that survives today. In it, he remarks that the woman's training in dialectic will help her understand that Christ as a human cannot have been God in name only, as the adoptionists claim. On the other hand, he elsewhere says that the adoptionists went astray by being too confident in the application of reason to the nature, or rather natures, of Christ. A true understanding of this matter lies beyond our capacity for rational understanding, and, as Alquin puts it, where reason fails, their faith becomes necessary. If these arguments remind you of the controversies that raged among earlier Christian theologians, then you have been studying your history of philosophy. Along with his focus on the liberal arts, the Platonist flavor of his philosophy, the monastic flavor of his ethics, and his reading list — so heavily dominated by Augustine, Boethius, Isidore, and Gregory, among others — this can seem to make Alquin as much a figure of late antiquity as of the Middle Ages. But that appearance is largely deceiving. It's been estimated that as much as 94% of Latin literature was lost in the wake of the fall of the Roman Empire. Without the copyists and scholars of the Carolingian period, it would have been more like 100%. They did much to save authors like Cicero, Isidore, Boethius, and Virgil from oblivion, but they lived in an age where knowledge of these authors had become very rare and was possible only because of the labors of scholars working in religious institutions. It was a very different world from the one inhabited by even late ancient Christian thinkers like Boethius. Another crucial difference between Alquin and Boethius is that Alquin had no knowledge of Greek. He was thus restricted to working solely with the materials preserved in the Latin texts that had survived from late antiquity. In this, Alquin was typical of his time, and of early medieval philosophy in general. But in the history of philosophy, every rule has an exception. In this case, the exception came from Ireland, and his name was John Scodas Eriugena. We'll begin to look at his life and work next time. But before I leave you, I owe you the solutions to a couple of puzzles. First, the one about two men who marry each other's mothers and have sons with them. In this case, each of the sons is both the nephew and the uncle of the other. Then there was the question about the podcaster who is trying to drink a swimming pool's worth of coffee. According to the figures I gave you, the podcaster will drink 36 liters of coffee each year. At this rate, drinking his way through a volume of 2.5 million liters will take him approximately 644,444 years. Coincidentally, this is the same length of time projected for covering the entire history of philosophy without any gaps.