 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, The Shadow Knows – Albert the Great's Metaphysics. Do you believe that all things in the universe, in their bewildering, seemingly infinite variety, derive from only one single cause? If so, you're in good company. It might just be the very oldest idea in the history of philosophy. It emerged in Mediterranean culture with the Presocratics, who proposed that all things arise out of some fundamental constituent, perhaps air, water, or, as Anaximander proposed, the indefinite. And as we're seeing in the episodes on philosophy in India, at around the same time, the authors of the Upanishads were tracing all things to the single reality that is Brahman. Yet objections to the idea are almost as antique as the idea itself. As Aristotle pointed out, some Presocratics preferred to introduce two or more causal principles. Think of Empedocles's love and strife, or the atomists' infinite indestructible particles. Aristotle thought they were on the right track, because a single cause would remain inert, having nothing to act upon. In fact, even two principles wouldn't be enough, since they would cancel each other out. But as Ferris Bueller discovered, it's not so easy to avoid a single principle. In late antiquity, all philosophers accepted that the universe derives from one cause, with the pagan Neoplatonists identifying this cause as the One, or Good, and the Jews and Christians of course seeing the God of their scriptures as the almighty creator of all things. Still, like an offer of marriage from a Montague to a Capulet, the proposal continued to cause trouble. Philosophers worried less that a single cause would remain entirely inactive, as Aristotle claimed, and more that such a cause could only have one effect. The Neoplatonic first principle and the Judeo-Christian God were claimed to be perfectly simple, and how can a perfectly simple thing generate a multiplicity? Only indirectly, claimed the Neoplatonists, their One would produce only one effect, which would form a link in a causal chain stretching down all the way to our physical realm. We might expect thinkers of the Abrahamic faiths to abandon this scheme in favor of one where God simply creates each thing directly. Indeed, many thinkers of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam said precisely that. But those with a greater commitment to the Hellenic heritage adhered to the motto, From one thing, only one thing can come. In Latin, ab uno non nisi unum. It's a motto that became notorious in both the Arabic and Latin spheres. In the Islamic world, the theologian Al-Ghazali attacked Avicenna for his adherence to the from one only one rule, making this one of the central polemics of his incoherence of the philosophers. And in Paris, the rule appeared on the list of banned propositions in the condemnation of 1277. Yet it struck some philosophers as intuitively plausible or even obvious. One of them was Albert the Great. In the previous episode, we saw that his commitment to Aristotelian natural philosophy was unprecedented in the medieval era. When it came to his metaphysics, he was equally committed to ideas from the Neoplatonic tradition. It would even, I think, be fair to say that Albert is the most Neoplatonically inclined medieval thinker we've met since Eriugena all the way back in the 9th century. And no wonder, because Neoplatonic theories reached him from a variety of authoritative sources. These sources seemed to confirm one another, presenting a united front endorsing the from one only one motto, and its corollary that God uses intermediaries to fashion the universe. For starters, there was Avicenna. His works had been exerting influence in the Latin sphere since the 12th century, especially regarding the soul. But Albert drew more deeply on Avicenna than others had done, something we can see from his exposition of Aristotle's metaphysics, which refers constantly to Avicenna. Then there was that favorite source of Eriugena's, the Pseudo-Dionysius. Albert commented on his works in lectures that were recorded by none other than Thomas Aquinas, who would later write his own commentary on Dionysius's Divine Names. Since Dionysius was covertly drawing on the ideas of the late ancient Platonist Proclus, this too helped push Albert in a Neoplatonic direction. Finally, there was an even more indirect route through which Proclus was smuggled into Latin Christendom, the Book of Causes. This is a partial translation of Proclus's elegant and axiomatic presentation of Neoplatonist philosophy based on an Arabic translation produced in the 9th century. It acquired considerable authority because it was thought to be a work of Aristotle himself. This is basically what Albert believed, though he saw it as an excerpt of a work by Aristotle's. Albert thought that the excerpting was done by a Jewish author called David, probably meaning the translator Ibn Dawud. True to its name, the Book of Causes recognizes a multiplicity of causal principles. But true to the Neoplatonic tradition that spawned it, the work arranges these principles in a chain that descends from a highest, single, and simple cause. Like Plotinus, Proclus called it the One. The work of reconciling this teaching with Abrahamic belief already began in the Arabic translation which speaks of the first cause as Creator, or simply God. This Creator is first of all the cause of being, which is followed by intellect, soul, and the world accessible to sense perception. These subsequent principles serve as intermediaries, each of them passing on the Creator's causal influence to the next level down, like a cosmic version of Pass the Parcel. In keeping with the from one only one rule, the being that is created immediately by God is said to be one and simple, and to take on diversity only because it assumes the form of intellect. All of this chimed well with Avicenna. He too had made an intellect, the first effect of God, and let it be an intermediary between God and the rest of creation. And Avicenna gave Albert another piece for his metaphysical puzzle, the distinction between existence and essence. According to this Avicenna teaching, the nature, or essence, of each created thing leaves it as an open question whether or not that thing exists. This is why such things need causes in the first place. They are insufficient to account for their own existence, and need help from some external influence if they are to be brought into being. By contrast, God's essence guarantees, or even is identical to, his existence. This is what it means to say that God exists necessarily, whereas all other things exist contingently. Each of them could intrinsically have failed to exist, and exist only because of the chain of causes that goes back to God. Albert is broadly happy with this picture, but he's more reluctant than Avicenna to say that existence is bestowed by God only indirectly. Instead, he would like to say that when God creates being, he is creating the being of all things. But how can he say this while still obeying the maxim, from one only one? Simple. He admits that the being produced by God is in itself one, but becomes complex and diversified precisely when it joins to the essences of created things, as Avicenna described. In a further borrowing from his Neoplatonic sources, he compares God to a flowing fountain or shining light with being as a single stream or irradiation which is received by many things. He has a bit of a problem with these sources too though. Neoplatonists and Avicenna too said that God produces an intellect and uses it as an intermediary to create other things. Albert doesn't want to separate God from creation in this way, so he resorts to a cunning bit of exegesis. His commentary on the Book of Causes finds a way to agree with its claim that intellect comes from God before anything else. The word used in the Latin translation for intellect is intelligentsia, but this doesn't need to mean an intellect, it could also mean an intellectual concept, an idea. This is precisely what it does mean according to Albert. The Book of Causes is telling us that the first concept produced by God is being, and it is a concept that applies to all things. With this move, Albert has managed to bring teachings of late antiquity, heavily filtered through Arabic transmission, into line with an idea of his own time, the transcendentals. As we saw in episode 228, the Scholastics in the 13th century had developed a theory according to which some concepts, such as being, truth, goodness, and unity, apply to all things. Albert's story explains why this should be so. As Avicenna said, God has being through his very essence, so it stands to reason that being must be his one effect. Being is thus received by everything that derives from him, which of course means everything other than God himself. For this reason, Albert insists that among the transcendentals, being is the most primary. Goodness, unity, and truth do always come along with being, but this is only because we can add more specific notions to that of being, like the fact that a certain being is undivided, which is what we mean when we say that something is one. The essences of created things play a similar role. When a giraffe comes to be, its essence restricts or contracts being into the act of existence appropriate to being a giraffe. And here, Albert does think that intermediaries are needed to explain how being is received in such a limited and diminished way, with all due respect to giraffes, needless to say. Like shadows which dim the reception of a brilliant light, other causal factors besides God are needed to explain the very specific and limited form of being that turns up in each created thing. We saw last time what those causal factors might be. Each giraffe comes from its mother and father through a material process whose details are known best to the giraffes themselves, and there is also a role for the heavenly bodies. But none of these lesser causes accounts for the sheer being of any created thing. When excited and appreciative zoo visitors exclaim, Thank God there are giraffes, Albert would say they are getting things just right. All of this gives us a new perspective on his work in zoology and the other physical sciences. Like earlier medievals with an interest in nature, Albert would have seen science as a way to appreciate God's handiwork and generosity. Every animal, plant, and stone is a reflection or vestige of God's being, however humble. This doesn't mean though that the natural philosopher has to meditate on God even as he dissects a plant or repels down a cliff to learn about the breeding habits of eagles. In fact, there's even a sense in which this would be inappropriate. As Albert puts it in one striking passage, When I am discussing natural things, God's miracles are nothing to me. It is another science that undertakes to grasp things insofar as they are related to God, theology. Harder to distinguish other remits of theology and metaphysics, since the latter discipline does investigate how being and the other transcendentals flow forth from the divine first principle. Everything we've been discussing in this episode so far would count as metaphysics from Albert's point of view, not as theology. The difference is that theology is supposed to orient the practitioner to love and enjoy God as opposed to just understanding Him as a cause. Thus Albert says that for all the scientific insight Aristotle offered us when it comes to the created world, he does not give us what we need to achieve salvation. When we do theology, we approach even the created universe with a different and more exalted approach, one that aims at beatitude rather than worldly understanding. Ultimately, and I do mean ultimately, the beatitude towards which theology strives is available only in the afterlife. After their bodily death, those who achieve salvation will get to see God face to face, as it says in the Bible. Each of us is a mere shadowy image of God's light, but once beatified, as they used to say on the radio in the 1940s, the shadow knows. It was a matter of considerable controversy how exactly to understand this knowledge though. As with the from one only one principle, church condemnation was brought to bear on the issue. In 1241, William of Auvergne, in his capacity as the Bishop of Paris, required theologians to admit that the blessed souls see nothing less than God in His very essence or substance. Anyone who denied this would be subject to excommunication. When it came to the beatific vision, William was not willing to settle for second best. But it's one thing to say this, and another to explain how it could be so. On the one hand, various respected authors could be found saying that God exceeds our grasp even in paradise. These included Augustine, whose authority was as unimpeachable as a man with a lethal fruit allergy. On the other hand, we've been seeing throughout this episode that even in this life, anyone who has read some Aristotle and the Book of Causes can attain at least an incomplete understanding of God. What exactly is added to this when we behold Him in the afterlife? Albert addresses these tensions by taking seriously the idea that the knowledge of God available to the blessed is a kind of vision, and carefully comparing this vision to the one involved in normal eyesight. For Albert, when we see something, we do so by receiving a species from the viewed object. Here he turns out to agree with the sort of view put forward by his nemesis Roger Bacon, which was rejected by Peter Olivey and Robert Kilwardby. Especially for Olivey, eyesight cannot take place by virtue of an image or species, because then we would be perceiving a representation of something, rather than the thing itself. For Albert though, we perceive the thing through the representation when it arrives in the eye. But this is not how things work when we see God. Albert wrote about the issue throughout his career, beginning early on in the years just after William of Auvin's 1241 Condonation. To avoid the banned doctrine, and to make sense of the idea that we do see God face to face, Albert admitted that there is no species involved in seeing God. There is no representation that would serve as an intermediary between the soul and God, because here no representation is needed. Albert quotes Bernard of Clavot on this point, Instead, we are talking here about a direct confrontation between the soul and God's face, which means, as William insisted, the divine essence itself. Yet, Albert also wants to preserve Augustine's claim that God's infinity transcends our mind. Characteristically, he makes use of an Aristotelian distinction, in this case the one between knowing that something is the case and what something is. The blessed will see that God is before them, but not attain a full understanding of what God is in His essence. Elements of Albert's solution will reappear in the treatment of the beatific vision we find in Albert's student, Thomas Aquinas. In particular, both of them speak of a so-called light of glory, which God infuses into the Here, we may think of the tradition of explaining human knowledge by appealing to divine illumination. Though this is associated more with figures like Grossetest and Bonaventure than with Albert, he does also make a place for illumination in his epistemology. We do not receive forms as direct emanations from God, or for that matter from a celestial intellect, as Avicenna claimed. But as Bonaventure suggested, abstraction of ideas from sensation is not enough. We need the light of divine truth to strengthen our minds if we are to achieve the scientific understanding to which Albert dedicated his life. The light of glory in heaven strengthens us further, allowing for a knowledge of God that would be impossible in this earthly life. Aquinas too explains the beatific vision in terms of a light of glory, but draws on other philosophical resources to explain it, including some taken from the Arabic tradition. And something similar happens with his portrayal of theology itself. He agrees with Albert that it is a science, but finds a new way to integrate the theologian's endeavor into the Aristotelian hierarchy of knowledge. We'll look at this theme soon as we finally begin to tackle the thought of Aquinas, the most famous medieval philosopher. But next time, as a kind of transition, we'll be looking at another issue dealt with by both Albert and Aquinas, as well as several other 13th century thinkers. As so often with Albert, it would be Avicenna who provided a crucial spur to reflection with his teaching on self-awareness. And even Avicenna's Flying Man would know not to miss my interview with Therese Corry on this subject in the next installment of The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps. Thank you.