Philosophy-RAG-demo/transcriptions/HoP 213 - On the Shoulders of Giants - Philosophy at Chartres.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 www.historyoffilosophy.net. Today's episode, On the Shoulders of Giants, Philosophy at Schacht. Teachers have always evaluated their students, and nowadays, the students are invited to return the favor. I've taught in the United States, England, and Germany. In all these places, I have had to distribute forms at the end of each semester so my students could anonymously voice their opinion of the quality of my teaching. It's a useful exercise, even if it reflects the modern-day tendency to think of students simply as paying customers who need to be happy with the level of service they're getting. Another sign of the same tendency is the availability of websites where you can rate your professor, even saying whether the teacher in question is hot. Happily this doesn't yet exist in Germany, so I have been spared having to face statistical evidence as to whether or not I am heiss. Reflecting on one's instructors is not only a modern-day activity though. The greatest teacher evaluation in history is surely Plato's Dialogues, which explore the character and techniques of Plato's teacher, Socrates, more deeply than any paperwork or website could hope to do. As a bonus, we learn from Alcibiades' speech in Plato's Symposium that Socrates was most definitely hot. The medievals too like to comment on their instructors. For a forerunner of today's negative evaluations, just think of Peter Abelard's scathing remarks about his teachers, Anselm of Leon, and William of Champo. And for a glowing report from the same period, we can turn to John of Salisbury. He's going to be appearing routinely in the coming episodes, since he is a richly informative source for the intellectual scene in the 12th century and wrote a major treatise on political philosophy, the Polycraticus, as well as a defense of the logical arts, the Metalogicon. In the Metalogicon, John praises the effective pedagogical techniques of Bernard of Chartres. From what he said, I think Bernard's teaching would pass muster even with the discerning students of today. John mentions Bernard's sensitivity to the needs of his pupils, his focus on the essentials of the teaching curriculum, and his encouragement of dialogue in class. Bernard was surprisingly lenient with students caught plagiarizing from classical sources when they were supposed to be writing original prose in a classical style. Another of Bernard's gifts as a teacher was that he could come up with vivid imagery to make a point. An example is his famous remark that we are like dwarves on the shoulders of giants. If we see farther than our predecessors could, it is because we are adding modestly to their mighty achievements. Among the giants on whose shoulder Bernard of Chartres liked to perch was that master of the teacher evaluation, Plato. Bernard's philosophy was shot through with Platonism, and especially with ideas from the one dialogue known to the early medievalists, the Timaeus. The late ancient philosopher Calcidius produced a Latin translation and commentary on this dialogue which became the primary conduit for Plato into the medieval world. Bernard continued an ongoing tradition of adding marginal glosses to the Timaeus, which explained the text for his students and showed how Plato's depiction of a divine cosmic craftsman could be reconciled with Christianity. An anonymous set of surviving glosses on the Timaeus has, plausibly, been ascribed to Bernard of Chartres. At the very least, these glosses reflect Bernard's approach to the text, which was so influential that he effectively rendered Calcidius's commentary obsolete. We can see this just by counting surviving manuscripts. There are almost 50 manuscripts of the Latin Timaeus on its own from the 12th century, a huge increase from the handful we have from the 11th century. Yet the number of copies of Calcidius's commentary falls precipitously. His popularity would recover only in the Renaissance. So it's for good reason that John of Salisbury honors Bernard of Chartres with the title Most Accomplished of the Platonists of Our Time. A trickier question is whether we should honor Bernard with being the founder of a philosophical movement, a group of like-minded thinkers whom we can call a school of Chartres. Many scholars have been happy to credit him with this achievement, in large part thanks to the testimony of John of Salisbury. John was not a student of Bernard himself, but he did learn from Bernard's students. These included two major philosophers of the 12th century, Gilbert of Poitiers, significant enough that he's going to be getting his own episode, and William of Crench, who, as we're going to see in this episode, carried on Bernard's example by engaging creatively with the Timaeus. John also studied with Thierry of Chartres, the greatest Frenchman named Thierry, until a certain striker came along to play for Arsenal. Thierry of Chartres is sometimes thought to have been Bernard's brother, and he taught another commentator named Clarenbald of Arras. We can also throw into the mix another Platonist philosopher of the 12th century, Bernard Silvestris, who is not to be confused with Bernard of Chartres. Together, all these thinkers represent a formidable group. If, that is, they were a group. A skeptical note was sounded decades ago by the medievalist Richard Southern. He was confronting a romantic conception indelibly linked to the surviving Western façade of the Chartres Cathedral. In carvings on this façade dating from the 12th century, we see representations of the liberal arts along with a group of pagan philosophers. If you look on the website for this episode, you'll see a picture of the carving of Pythagoras. It seems almost too good to be true, a representation of all that the school of Chartres held dear, executed in stone just when this school was at the height of its powers. And Southern argued that it is, indeed, too good to be true. He pointed out how little evidence there is that all these men, apart from Bernard of Chartres himself, actually taught at Chartres for any significant period of time. In fact, the more important location for teaching at this time was Paris. In the case of Chartres, for instance, the most we can say is that he may have divided his time between Paris and Chartres. Bernard Silvestris dedicated a major treatise called the Cosmographia to Chartres, but his own teaching was carried out at Tours. A lot of ink has been spilled over this issue of geography. The real question for the historian of philosophy, though, is not where the figures of the so-called school of Chartres were active, but whether they actually shared a distinctive intellectual program. To some extent, the answer is yes. If we think about these figures I've named, Bernard and Thierry of Chartres, William of Conch, Gilbert of Poitiers, Clarenbelle of Arras, Bernard of Silvestris, and John of Salisbury, we can say that they all had expertise in the liberal arts and an interest in classical literary and philosophical texts, but so did lots of other thinkers of the 12th century. Certainly, most can be identified as Platonists, but the Timaeus-centered Platonist project of Bernard of Chartres and others doesn't really find an echo in Gilbert, and John of Salisbury was opposed to Platonism. His admiration for Bernard notwithstanding, he gently mocked Bernard's hope of reconciling the teachings of Plato and Aristotle. If these two great men couldn't even agree when they were alive, John said, there isn't much hope of getting them to agree now that they're dead. Despite this lack of one single location or body of doctrines, there remains a kind of family resemblance among the so-called Chartresians. It wasn't just an affection for Plato that was passed from Bernard of Chartres to a whole generation of scholars, but a certain sort of literary taste and style of reading. These figures inevitably call to mind the later humanists of the Renaissance, given their close attention to the Latin text of favorite classical authors. At this time, figures like William of Champo and Avelard had placed the logical and metaphysical questions that could arise in dialectic at the center of the liberal arts. By contrast, the Chartresians celebrated the arts of grammar and rhetoric. As John of Salisbury makes clear, Bernard of Chartres was an inspiring teacher who encouraged attention to and love for the classics. Thierry of Chartres commented on Cicero's works on rhetoric, and Bernard of Silvestris commented on Virgil, while William of Conch loved to quote Horace. In keeping with their intense study of secular literature, the Chartresians often wrote in a self-consciously literary style. Admittedly, Avelard did write poetry too, but his philosophy is mostly set out in rigorous, argumentative texts that prefigure 13th century scholasticism. By contrast, when the Chartresians weren't writing commentaries and glosses on classical texts, they were trying to compose classics of their own, using poetic or dialogue form. Another trademark literary technique came into play when they were reading rather than writing. They often used the word integumentum, meaning a covering or cloak, to express the way the surface meaning of a text may conceal its true significance. With this technique, frankly pagan material could be redeemed for use in a Christian context. In his commentary on Virgil, Bernard of Silvestris explains the seduction of Venus by Vulcan as a symbolic representation of the corruption of the mind by lust. A similar message is taught by the encounter between Aeneas and Dido. Virgil shows Dido perishing in flame after Aeneas leaves her to show the way that sinful lusts burn away to mere embers once the soul resists them. The same strategy could be used to save Plato from himself, as it were. Confronted with a passage of the Timaeus, which seems to say that souls exist in the stars before coming into the body, William of Conch remarked that Plato was offering nothing heretical but the most profound philosophy sheltered in the covering of the words. Plato meant only that different souls are influenced by the different stars during our earthly life, not that souls really existed previously in the heavens. The Schatrians reserve their boldest such maneuver for another problematic idea in Plato, the so-called world soul. In the Timaeus, it is said that the divine craftsman not only gives souls to individual humans, but also grants a soul to the entire universe. The cosmos is a single living organism, a visible god that constitutes the greatest image of the intelligible realm. This is problematic from a Christian point of view. It is difficult, for instance, to see how the soul of the whole universe could fall and be redeemed by Christ. Among the Schatrians, it was William of Conch who engaged with this problem most seriously. His initial solution was one that had been suggested, but never wholeheartedly embraced, by Peter Abelard. Plato's talk of the world soul is an integumentum for the Holy Spirit, the third person of the Trinity. As his career went on, though, William expressed uncertainty on this point, and no wonder. There were obvious objections to his proposal. For instance, Plato clearly says that the divine craftsman creates the soul of the cosmos, whereas the Holy Spirit is of course uncreated. In glosses he wrote on the Timaeus, William was willing to go only this far, Some say the world soul is the Holy Spirit, which we now neither deny nor affirm. Bernard Silvestris was not quite so shy. He was happy to affirm that the pagan philosophers were simply expressing the ideas of Christian theology in different terms. Where Christians speak of the divine Son, the philosophers say intellect, and where Christians talk of a Holy Spirit, the philosophers say world soul. Though this is often thought of as a distinctively Schatrian position, it was in fact never taught by the one thinker we know to have been based primarily at Schacht, the earlier Bernard. He never proposed identifying Plato's cosmic soul with a divine person. In general, Bernard was careful not to let Platonic metaphysics infringe on the unchallenged transcendence of God. We can see this from his handling of the Platonic forms or ideas. Bernard was wholeheartedly committed to this theory, but he stopped short of the traditional identification of the transcendent forms with God's wisdom and the second person of the Trinity. Because the forms are created, they must be inferior, or posterior, to God himself, something Bernard expressed by saying that while the forms are eternal, they are not co-eternal with the Holy Trinity. Bernard's explanation of these eternal forms could hardly be more characteristic. It displays his grammatical approach to the issue and his flair for vivid metaphor. Taking the example of the color white, he compared the noun whiteness to a virgin, the verb is white is like a virgin lying on a bed, waiting to be defiled. Finally, the adjective white is like the same woman after having lost her virginity. His point was that whiteness in itself is pure and untouched by matter. It is a separate form, graspable only by the mind. By contrast, the whiteness we see in white bodies around us is mixed together with matter and so available to sense perception. Bernard coined the phrase forma nativae, or inborn forms, for the images of transcendent ideas that appear in material bodies. The resulting picture of the world is true to the one we find in Plato's Timaeus. Bernard's divine creator is distinct from the intelligible forms, and fashions the physical cosmos by putting imminent images of those forms into matter. Though other Chartrians likewise took inspiration from the Timaeus, they did not always apply its ideas in the same way. Thierry of Chartres and his student, Klarembald, also appropriated Platonic ideas in their theology. But rather than distinguishing God from the forms, they actually identified God with one form in particular, the form of being. This is an idea they could find in Boethius, and as we'll be seeing, it will have a powerful echo later on in Aquinas. Thierry of Chartres also offered a memorable, if not particularly illuminating, suggestion for how to conceive of the Trinity. He compared the three persons in one God to the fact that one times one times one equals one. He meant this to represent not just the way that unity can be preserved, even as multiplicity is introduced, but also the equality of the persons to one another. Again, the Chartres training in the liberal arts is showing here, with Thierry applying arithmetic to theology, much as Bernard of Chartres had used grammar in his metaphysics. But reflection on the Timaeus was bound to lead to interest in another area of philosophy not represented among the liberal arts, the study of nature. Plato's dialogue does speak of a divine craftsman, and of forms, but it is above all a description of the physical universe. The Chartresians followed suit. An outstanding example is a treatise by William of Conch, to which he gave the rather surprising title Dragmaticon. To the modern ear, the title calls to mind nothing so much as a cross-dressing transformer. Medieval readers would have found it an odd choice too. But by naming his treatise Dragmaticon, William was following a vogue for Greek-style titles, like Hugh of St. Victor's pedagogical bestseller Didascalicon. In this case, William was apparently alluding to the dramatic presentation of the Dragmaticon. It takes the form of a dialogue between a philosopher and Geoffrey Plantagenet, who was at that time the Duke of Normandy. William served as tutor to Geoffrey's sons, one of whom would go on to become King Henry II of England. The Dragmaticon thus echoes a long-standing ideal of scholarship in aristocratic surroundings. Like Alquin teaching Charlemagne, William offers tutelage to the Duke and his family. This traditional setting for philosophy, already challenged by the activity at cathedral schools and monasteries, is about to be largely supplanted by the rise of the medieval university. William's fictionalized lessons with the Duke prove, if proof were needed, that card-carrying Platonists could take a deep interest in the natural world. William adheres to the standard Platonist goal of using the intellect rather than the senses, but this is no bar to pursuing philosophy of nature, since he thinks that the fundamental principles of physical things are invisible. For instance, the four elements, fire, air, water, and earth, can never be found in nature in their pure forms. We grasp them by abstracting from the bodies we see around us. Like Plato in the Timaeus, William also thinks that the elements consist of invisibly small particles, indivisible atoms. Throughout the Dragonmaticon, the character of the Duke is often the mouthpiece for authorities who apparently disagree with William's teaching. So here, when the topic of atomism comes up, the Duke points out that Boethius speaks of matter as infinitely divisible, and not as consisting of indivisible atoms. To this, William's philosopher character responds, not very persuasively, that the atoms are indeed infinite, but only in the sense that we cannot grasp their multitude with our limited minds. In any case, William insists upon his right to overturn accepted teaching if he sees fit. One mustn't run roughshod over the teaching of the Church Fathers, or more recent authorities like Bede, when issues of theology and morality are at stake, but the philosophy of nature is different. William thinks that in physics, only probable explanations can be provided, and when he finds his own account more probable than that of the Fathers, he is not afraid to say so. A notable example comes when he rejects the traditional idea that there is water in the heavens. This rather strange notion is based on a line in the book of Genesis, where God is said to have placed the sky amidst the waters so as to divide them apart. But for William, water has its natural place between earth and air. It cannot be found up in the celestial realm, which is fiery in nature. His naturalist approach is also on display when he interprets the biblical statement that Eve was fashioned from a rib, taken from Adam's side. In an earlier treatise called Philosophy of the World, which William used as a basis for the Dragomatacon, he had argued that both Adam and Eve were made from muddy earth. When creating Adam, God had used material with a perfect balance of elemental properties. Eve is said to be taken from Adam's side because she was instead made from mud lying nearby, which was not so ideal in its proportions. This typifies the Chartrean approach to textual interpretation. William treats Adam's rib as an integumentum for a true scientific explanation. He corrects the surface meaning of the text in light of his conviction that all bodies are made of the four elements. And I reckon he's right. If you want to make human bodily tissue out of ribs, you first have to make the ribs out of the four elements, and then preferably coat them in barbecue sauce. The Dragomatacon is full of similarly naturalist proposals, devoted to explaining everything from the fact that our fingers are more swollen when we wake up in the morning, to the legend that the Prophet Muhammad's tomb floats in mid-air. Adam suspects it is a kind of magic trick involving magnets. In some cases, he tries to explain supposed phenomena that are in fact spurious, for instance why babies born early and in the seventh month of pregnancy sometimes survive, even though premature babies born in the eighth month always die. In general, his ideas about female sexuality make for alarming reading. He believes that pleasure in sex is needed to conceive, which is why prostitutes rarely get pregnant. To the Duke's objection that rape victims do conceive, William's philosopher responds that although the victim may not be rationally consenting to the sex act, she takes carnal pleasure in it nonetheless. Obviously, this is not William of Conch at his best, and in general, no modern day scientist is going to be impressed by his theories. Still, William does represent a remarkable feature of 12th century thought, a blossoming of exploration devoted to the physical universe. And it's only natural that you should join me again next time to see how other authors like Bernard Silvestris and Alain Avlille applied their literary and scientific imaginations to understanding the created world. Here on The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps.