 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, Philosophers Anonymous – The Roots of Scholasticism If the rise of social media has taught us anything, it's that cutting-edge communication technologies are valued for one reason above all others – we can use them to tell other people about our cats. Things were no different when the very latest in communication technology was pen, ink and parchment. So it was that in the early Middle Ages, a scholar at the Abbey of Reichenau wrote a poem about his cat, Pangur. Here it is, in the translation of no less a fellow poet than W.H. Auden. Pangur, white Pangur, how happy we are! Alone together, scholar and cat, Each has his own work to do daily. For you it is hunting, for me study. Your shining eye watches the wall, My feeble eye is fixed on a book. You rejoice when your claws entrap a mouse, I rejoice when my mind fathoms a problem. Pleased with his own art, neither hinders the other. Thus we live ever without tedium and envy. The charm of the poem is undeniable with the evident affection of this medieval monk for his faithful feline companion. It's made more touching by the fact that the poem is not in Latin, but in Old Irish. The author was an Irishman living far from home in Germany. More poignant still, I think, is the fact that we know the cat's name, but not that of the poet. In both respects, he was a typical representative of early medieval culture. There were many Irish scholars living on the European mainland in this period, enriching its culture with their expertise in classical languages and the liberal arts, as well as the occasional cat poem. We've already met the greatest of these Irishmen, John Scodas Eriugena, and we'll be meeting more in this episode. But even more typical is his anonymity. It's sometimes jokingly remarked by experts in medieval philosophy, who are of course famous for their sense of humor, that the most prolific philosopher of the age was named anonymous. We have hundreds of manuscripts with philosophical texts written by unnamed authors who are unsurprisingly usually given short shrift by historians, and you can't really blame them. After all, there are many obscure figures from these centuries whose names we do know, and who are likewise waiting to be rescued from oblivion. We'll be meeting some of them in this episode too. One of the characteristic scholarly activities of the medieval period was commentary on earlier texts. Many surviving manuscripts are adorned by anonymous comments or glosses. These were written in the margins or just above the words of the main text so that one is literally invited to read between the lines. This was no act of vandalism, as it would be if you wrote in a library book today. To the contrary, we find that manuscripts were sometimes produced with glosses specifically in mind, with deliberately wide margins around the main text to leave room for them. Experts can tell a lot about these manuscripts by studying the handwriting used in them. For instance, even when a text is in Latin, telltale abbreviations and features of the script used may show that the scholar who copied it out was from Ireland. Which brings us back to the contribution of Irish scholars in the Carolingian period. We know the names of many such scholars, in part thanks to a list of names written in a 9th century manuscript. Ironically, the man who recorded them is himself anonymous, while many of the Irishmen he mentions are to us nothing more than names. Yet in their day they were renowned scholars. They are being listed here as the leading exegetes of earlier works by classical authors like Horace and Ovid, and earlier medieval authors like Bede. Other manuscripts show us that, exceptional though he may have been, Ariugina was far from alone. His knowledge of Greek was remarkable, but not unique among Irishmen working in France in the late 9th century. His countryman Martin was active at this time in the city of Lyon, and I do mean active. There are at least 20 manuscripts with his handwriting in them, one of which is a glossary and grammar book for learning Greek. Two other Irish scribes, both anonymous, were close to Ariugina. In fact one of them has even been thought to be Ariugina himself. More likely, though less romantic, is the explanation that they are two unknown students of his. The scribes are known to today's scholars simply as I-1 and I-2. These Irish eyes smiled on the philosophical ideas of their teacher. They revised and added glosses to the Paraphysion, possibly under the guidance of Ariugina himself, and made notes on other manuscripts including Boethius's treatise on music. In one manuscript, the distinctive ideas of Ariugina are used to interpret the Bible. There's nothing here to suggest that Ariugina's colleagues were outstanding philosophers in their own right, but it does show that he was not operating in a vacuum. To the contrary, what we have here is a little group of like-minded scholars gathered around one outstanding figure who are collectively trying to understand and expound the Bible and texts of classical antiquity. Further anonymous scholars from about this time applied Ariugina's ideas to other philosophical works. One was On the Ten Categories, itself an anonymous work, but popular in the earlier medieval period because it was thought to be by Augustine. In a gloss to one manuscript of this work, a scholar is trying to explain a passage which speaks of being as the most general genus. The idea here is a simple but important one. Given that you are listening to a philosophy podcast, you are, I think I can assume, a human being like me. So we are members of the same species, the human species. But we are also animals, just like Hiawatha the giraffe. Aristotle called this higher level grouping a genus. The genus of animal includes humans, giraffes, and all the other animal species. We can go further though. Animals fall under a higher genus of living things, which includes plants. Living things then fall under the still higher genus of bodies, which embraces not only animals and plants but also things like rocks. If we keep going like this, will we eventually get to a most general genus, a group that includes absolutely everything? According to this text and the Glossator, the answer is yes. Everything there is, is a being. Reasonable enough, you might think. After all, can you think of anything that isn't a being? My nonexistent sister doesn't count. It's when the anonymous commentator connects these logical ideas to theology that his affection for Eriugino starts to show. Following the sort of Platonist line found in the Paraphysion, the anonymous author explains that this highest genus, being, is to be identified with God himself. All created being, from rocks to plants to animals to humans, are derived from this single divine being. Another anonymous gloss adds the negative perspective of Eriugino's theology, stating that since the divine being is beyond our comprehension, it is rather paradoxically a kind of non-being. With these glosses, our unknown scholars are not just showing us that Eriugino's ideas had some impact among his contemporaries. They are also paving the way for a long-running argument over the general features of things, usually called universals. Eriugino and his colleagues seem to think that a nature found in many things, like human, giraffe, or even being, is not just something real, but something divine, a cause for all the things that partake of it. One author of the time compared the relation between the species human and individual humans to the relation between the roots of a tree and its branches. John Maronbon, friend of the podcast and one of the few scholars to work with these glosses, has called this view hyper-realism, the idea that a general nature is not just real, but expresses its reality in the individuals that partake of it. This is, in effect, the logical version of Eriugino's core metaphysical teaching that God's transcendent being is made manifest in created things. If you were to ask one of these unnamed scholars what they thought they were doing when they meticulously studied and annotated their logical textbooks, they would unhesitatingly reply, dialectic. Entrined as one of the liberal arts, dialectic offered considerable scope for exploring philosophical issues. In the first instance, it would mean doing logic. But as we have just seen, fairly innocuous logical texts could provoke forays into metaphysics and theology. So just imagine what might happen when the texts being glossed weren't so innocuous. This was the case with the marriage of philology and mercury of Marciones Capella, whose frankly pagan contents were tolerated by early medieval readers eager to learn from it. It was simply too useful a text to be ignored, providing, as it did, a detailed discussion of all seven liberal arts. Back in the time of Charlemagne, Alquin had described these arts as the columns that support the temple of Christian wisdom. Now, in the time of Charlemagne's grandson Charles the Bald, Ariugina was only one of several scholars writing glosses on the work. You won't be surprised to hear that an important set of glosses on Marciones, produced even before Ariugina's, is by our mysterious new friend, Anonymous. This unnamed scholar's comments were a major source for a further set of glosses by a philosopher whose name we do know, Remigius of Auxerre. It's usually assumed that these explanatory comments were added to Marciones's allegory as an aid to teaching, as I suggested with Ariugina's glosses. But there may have been more to it than that. A closer look shows that the commentators struggle with apparent contradictions between Marciones and other authoritative texts. Never mind the paganism, Marciones doesn't even agree with the standard astronomical picture bequeathed from the ancients. He makes Mars and Venus orbit around the Sun rather than the Earth. The glosses also discuss discrepancies between Marciones and Boethius on technical points concerning the musical scales. With their glosses, our commentators are trying to reconcile their key sources for two of the liberal arts, astronomy and music. This suggests a more advanced enterprise than classroom teaching, even if other manuscripts like the Greek-Latin glossary I mentioned earlier were obviously produced for a pedagogical context. With all this careful exegesis devoted to authoritative texts produced within teaching contexts and by collaborative groups of scholars, we're seeing the emergence of something that historians usually call scholasticism. The word comes from schola, the Latin for school, and for good reason. Before the arrival of the universities around the year 1200, philosophy was normally done in the context of the schools that were scattered throughout medieval Europe in England, France, Switzerland, Germany and Italy. They were sometimes supported by secular authorities, as when the courts of Charlemagne and Charles de Bald facilitated the scholarship of Alquin, Ariugina and their less celebrated collaborators. More often, they were instruments of the church, based at religious houses, parish churches and cathedrals. That last setting was particularly important. Cathedral schools, a kind of forerunner of the medieval universities, would provide the context for a flowering of scholasticism in the 12th century, the age of thinkers like Peter Abelard and John of Salisbury, who are frequently seen as pioneers of scholasticism. But 12th century scholasticism did not come from nowhere. The intellectual values of the 9th century scholars we've just been discussing were not so different from those of an Anselm or an Abelard. They all saw antique literature as a storehouse of wisdom, which needed to be preserved and explained through copying and commentary. This applied especially to Christian authorities like Augustine Boethius and Isidore of Seville, but pagan authors like Plato, Aristotle and Marciones were also valued. The classical works were not followed out of blind devotion, but precisely because they were taken to represent the greatest achievements of human reason. It's worth remembering here that in the 9th century, it was actually feasible to master the sum total of existing human wisdom. So much had been lost in the disruptions of late antiquity and the early medieval period that a committed scholar with access to a well-stocked library could work their way through all the important texts on theology and the liberal arts. This remained a rare attainment to be sure. The schools that proliferated from the 9th to the 11th centuries were not primarily intended to turn out fully rounded intellectuals. Their purpose was more modest and more practical. In an age where nearly the entire population was illiterate, where were the functionaries of the secular government and church going to come from? The next generation of officials, secretaries and clergymen would be trained to read and write at the schools under the banner of the first liberal art, grammar. The very word comes from the Greek for letters and the basic purpose of grammatical training was indeed to impart the gift of literacy. As the schools became more numerous and as competition intensified between masters trying to attract students, the schoolmen became ever more specialized and ever more likely to engage in technical disputes over dialectic and theology. It would be nice to say that there was simply a smooth gradual increase in school activities from the 9th century down to the blossoming of full-blown scholasticism in the 12th century, but as usual things are a bit more complicated. I realized this when I sat down to make a list of the philosophers I wanted to cover in these episodes on the early medieval period. I had several thinkers from the 9th century and quite a few from the 11th and 12th, but couldn't think of a single one for the 10th century. This was to some extent the result of ignorance on my part, but I'm not entirely to blame. The 10th century was a period of considerable disruption, with more Viking raids and the new threat posed by the Magyars. Moving along the Danube River from Hungary, they invaded Bavaria, which is where I live, but I'm glad to report that the Hungarians I've met here have been very nice. By the year 937, the Magyars had visited destruction on wide swaths of Germany and moved into France. Finally, they were defeated by Otto, king of Germany, in 955. This period of instability contrasts sharply to what was going on in the Islamic world at the same time. The Muslim conquests had previously spread the new religion over a vast territory from Spain to the Indus River. Even more land fell into Muslim hands in the 10th century as they wrested control of Sicily, Sardinia, and Corsica away from the Christians and even made incursions into mainland France and Italy. And if you look back at the timeline on the podcast website, you'll see that this period was a high point for philosophy in the Islamic world, bookended by the later life of Al-Farabi and the early life of Avicenna. Meanwhile, what was going on in Christian Europe philosophically speaking? Not a great deal, to be honest, but more than is commonly thought. Take Abbo of Fleury, for instance. He was brought to the abbey there when very young and returned as a master after further training in Paris and Rheim. Abbo wrote on logic and astronomy, contributing to the study of the calendar as Bede and Alquin had done a few generations ago. Also like Alquin, Abbo was committed to the monastic ethic and urged discipline upon the younger monks under his care. This led to his undoing when he was killed by his own brethren when he tried to break up a fight among some monks at a monastery he was visiting. That happened in the year 1004, only one year after the death of a man who was perhaps the most outstanding scholar of the 10th century, Gerbert of Oriac. He eventually became pope and in this role was known as Sylvester II. Gerbert or Sylvester thus makes up to some extent for all those anonymous philosophers I mentioned having had two names. He had particular interests in mathematics and natural science, pioneering the use of the abacus for doing arithmetic and building his own astronomical instruments. Most of the scholars I've mentioned in this episode came from, or at least worked in, France. But as I say, there were schools springing up all over Europe. A particularly interesting one was at the Abbey of Saint-Gaulle in Switzerland. Here there was even a female teacher of Greek by the name of Hedwig. She was the niece of Otto, the German king who defeated the Magyars. Saint-Gaulle could also boast of another well-rounded expert in the liberal arts, Notka, who was nicknamed La Bayo, or the Lip, because of his protruding lower lip. Notka La Bayo helped the young men who came to study Latin with him by producing German translations of the core text of the liberal arts curriculum, like Marcianus's Marriage of Philology and Mercury, Gregory the Great's Moralia, and Boethius's Latin versions of Aristotle's Logic. In fact, Notka interspersed the German version with the Latin original, much like the facing page translations used nowadays. So far I've been giving the impression that any well-educated person in these centuries would have had unalloyed respect and admiration towards the sort of text Notka was making available in German, but in fact that is not the case. Though no one would have had a bad word to say about the classical church fathers, there were plenty of critics who thought that pagan literature was dangerous, especially for the minds of young Christians. Ariugina was chastised for occupying himself with Marcianus rather than Augustine. When Gerbert of Ariac was being considered for an archbishopric, an opponent to his candidacy remarked, Even the anonymous poets were getting in on the act. One of them took time out from petting his cat to ask what good it could possibly do for Christians to read the pagan Marcianus Capella. Yet perhaps the most famous remark about the dangers of the liberal arts was uttered by a specialist in those very arts. His name was Landfrank of Beck, praised upon his death as a man who would have been admired by Aristotle for his skill in dialectic and by Cicero for his mastery of rhetoric. Landfrank drew on a deep knowledge of the liberal arts in commenting on the morality of Gregory the Great and wrote now-lost philosophical works. Yet when he was embroiled in a notorious theological controversy with a scholar named Berengar, Landfrank said to his opponent, Like scholasticism itself, their dispute had its roots in the 9th century. Back then, a monk named Ratramnus had written an explanation of the Eucharist for Charles the Bald, in which he explained that the bread and wine used in communion are symbolic in nature. Now in the 11th century, Berengar took up a similar view, arguing that the bread and wine are Christ's flesh and blood only figuratively. Landfrank disagreed fervently concerning the theological point. For him, only the appearance and flavor of bread and wine remain, but really they have been transformed into the flesh and blood born of the Virgin. More interesting for the history of philosophy is Landfrank's disagreement with Berengar's whole approach to the issue. It was simply inappropriate to use reason to understand this mysterious and miraculous transformation. Rather, one should follow authoritative doctrine and only then apply reason to defend and understand the Eucharist more deeply. Like many medieval debates to come, the clash between Landfrank and Berengar was about the scope and place of reason in theology as much as it was about the theological issue at hand. Various thinkers will take various views on this methodological question in the centuries to come, but most will broadly agree with Landfrank. Reason plays a vital role in Christian doctrine, but there are bounds beyond which reason cannot go. Philosophy should thus accept a subordinate role to scripture, comparable to the relationship between a handmaiden and her mistress. This famous analogy was devised by an author we'll be looking at next time as we turn to a philosophical problem so crucial that you have probably been wondering why I haven't mentioned it yet. If a woman loses her virginity, can God make her a virgin again? Join me next time to find out the answer, here on The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps.