Philosophy-RAG-demo/transcriptions/HoP 288 - Men in Black - The German Dominicans.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. You can find mine at www.historyofphilosophy.net. Today's episode, Men in Black, the German Dominicans. Nowadays when you meet a man dressed in black, you might guess that you are confronted with an undertaker, a chimney sweep, or a goth. But in the 14th century, when it was about 700 years too early to meet a modern-day goth, and about 700 years too late to meet the original version, the men in black were the Dominicans, whose distinctive black cloaks distinguished them from members of other orders, such as the grey-clad Franciscans. Hence the answer to a question I used to ponder when I lived in London, where does the name of Blackfriars Bridge come from? It is named after a Dominican monastery that stood nearby. The Franciscans likewise established Greyfriars in London, which hosted several philosophers who have featured in our history, Occam, Wodham, and Chatton, were all there at the same time. Among Dominicans, the more important city, philosophically speaking, was Cologne. The order had established itself there in 1248, and from this center, the Dominicans became a dominant force in the intellectual life of Germany. Like a goth with a weakness for show tunes, the story of the Dominicans in this period combines a cliché with a surprise twist. The cliché is the story of medieval philosophy, as you might have thought of it before listening to this podcast series. This version of the story has a single dominant figure, Thomas Aquinas, and he was indeed influential among 14th century Dominicans. The order affirmed Aquinas' special authority in 1313, and ten years later he was canonized. Enthusiasm for Thomistic teachings is evident in an author like Jean Piccardie, a Dominican who studied at Paris in 1305-7. He defends Aquinas' views on several controversial questions, including the theory of the will. Where he upholds Thomistic intellectualism against Henry of Ghent's voluntarism. And regarding the unity of form and substance. Like Aquinas, Piccardie thinks that the forms of the material constituents that make up a substance are only virtually present in that substance. Thus, the earth and water that make up a corpse were not yet actual constituents of the body before death. Piccardie unflinchingly accepts the Thomistic conclusion, whereas most contemporary thinkers thought it absurd. And there was considerable pressure on Dominicans like Piccardie to follow Aquinas' teachings. Failure to do so could cause controversy, with Durand of Saint-Pausin in particular being criticized on this score. The surprise twist is that, pressure notwithstanding, some of the most interesting Dominican thinkers in this period were not particularly, and certainly not exclusively, Thomistic. Our story, in fact, has its real starting point with the first notable member of the order to work at Cologne, Albert the Great. Albert made great use of ideas from late ancient Platonists, like the Pseudo-Dionysius and Proclus, the latter mostly by way of the Arabic-Latin version of Proclus called the Book of Causes. These same authors were important for Aquinas too, but we find a more wholehearted appropriation of Platonism amongst a group of Dominicans who worked in Germany. Because of the connection to Cologne, scholars have sometimes spoken of Rhineland mysticism. I'm going to speak more cautiously of the German Dominicans, without of course suggesting that all the figures who fall under this heading adopted a single body of teachings. Only one of these Dominicans can plausibly be described as famous, and we just covered him in the previous installment, Meister Eckhart. But it's worth having a broader look at the movement to put Eckhart himself in context and to demonstrate the diversity of philosophy in the 14th century. The German Dominicans offer a striking contrast to the logical and empiricist orientation of scholastics like John Buridan. Not for them the abstemious, clean-shaven metaphysics of nominalism. The Dominicans could instead be described as ultra-realists who hold that created things, including the human soul, have their true being and divinity. When Eckhart put forward that idea, he was drawing on his slightly earlier Dominican colleague Dietrich of Freiberg. A treatise by Dietrich called On the Intellect and the Intelligible embraces the classically Neoplatonic idea that God's creation of things is an overflowing of divine superabundance. Like Eckhart, he uses the image of boiling water to express this idea of a cause giving forth its effects from within its own nature. For Dietrich, as for the pagan Platonists, the first thing to emerge from God is the intellect. He envisions a whole procession of intellects associated with the heavenly spheres, closely following Avicenna on the mechanism of this eminative process. As Dietrich goes on to explain the relationship between intellect and being, we see him aligning himself with fully-fledged Neoplatonism rather than the platonically-tinged Aristotelianism of Aquinas. For Aquinas, God is primarily a cause of existence, and creation is the association of existence with essences, itself an idea taken from Avicenna. Working years before the canonization of his Dominican colleague, Dietrich feels free to reject Aquinas' teaching, denying that there is any cogent distinction between essence and existence. For him, being is not a neutral kind of existence that belongs to a given thing, but rather the essential being of that thing. Thus, for a horse, to be means being a horse, whereas for a human it means being a human. Of course, the distinction between essence and existence was controversial, and Dietrich was not the only one to deny it. More unusual is his attempt to seek a foundation for metaphysics in the intellect itself. He advances the idea of being at the level of conception. For the nominalists, that phrase might evoke an attenuated merely mental phenomenon that may or may not correspond to the way things really are. As they never tired of pointing out, we mentally grasp things under universal concepts, even though in reality all things are particular. But as I say, Dietrich is no nominalist. For him, the intellect contains, as he puts it, a likeness of the whole of being as being, and holds in its compass the universe of beings. The intellect does not abstract intelligible being from sensory experiences, but establishes and constitutes the essences through its own activity. To underscore the way that this activity is internally active, and not passively caused by an experience of things, Dietrich offers a creative etymology of the word intelegere, meaning to understand. It comes from legere, to read, and intus, internal. All this applies in the first instance to the cosmic intellects that emerge from God, but it also goes for our own human intellects. Again in stark contrast to Aquinas, Dietrich does not see the human mind as a mere power or faculty of the soul, it is rather the cause and very essence of soul, even though it is nothing at all until it becomes identical with its intelligible objects. For this heady account of the intellect and its role in both the cosmos and our lives, Dietrich depends on a wide range of authors, among them Proclus. Thanks to William of Moerbeke's translation of Proclus's Elements of Theology, it was known that the Book of Causes was in fact derived from this treatise by a late ancient pagan. This seems not to have bothered Dietrich much. Still less did it trouble the next Dominican we need to discuss, Bertold of Mosburg. The successor of Eckhart as Dominican lector at Cologne, Bertold wrote a massive and highly learned commentary on Proclus's Elements. It represents something of a high-water mark for the medieval reception of Proclus, reminiscent of an earlier wave of enthusiasm for his writings that crested in the Byzantine Empire in the 11th century. We'll be looking at that in a podcast sometime next year. Bertold is careful to say that Proclus's approach to theology is that of a philosopher working with the resources of natural reasoning, rather than that of a theologian who benefits from revelation. But having given this caveat, he goes on to praise Proclus as the greatest of the followers of Plato. Proclus alone unveils the true Platonic teachings so often covered in the cloak of figurative language. Bertold's project can be seen, on the one hand, as a revival of the sort of effusive Platonism that has rarely been seen since the days of Ariugina back in the 9th century. A looser comparison might be drawn to the members of the school of Schacht in the 12th century, looser because they were inspired more by Plato's Timaeus than by pagan Neoplatonism. Yet Bertold also responds to current events. He is wrestling with the controversy around, and eventual condemnation of, the teachings of Meister Eckhart. Bertold's metaphysics thus takes inspiration from both ancient sources and his immediate predecessor at Cologne. Like Dietrich, who was a strong influence on Bertold's commentary, Bertold envisions the intelligible realm as the domain of true being. This evokes Ariugina's claim that all things are first of all made by God in the so-called divine primordial causes, a version of Platonic forms that equates the forms with ideas in God's mind. Yet it is also reminiscent of Eckhart's notion that things have their true being in God, so that the just person is in a sense identical with the justice of God, and the soul's ground is the same as the divine ground. Bertold also seems to see a connection between the negative theology of Proclus and Pseudo-Dionysius on the one hand, and on the other hand, the mystical teachings of his fellow Dominican Eckhart. Repeating a classic ploy of Dionysius and Ariugina, and anticipating a classic ploy of DC Comics, Bertold makes use of the prefix super. He coins the idea of super sapiencia, or transcendent wisdom, as a label for the highest insight that grasps the ultimate reality of things in God. What could be more Eckhartian than to identify the world of the intellect as the seat of being and then to push on further in an effort to grasp God's transcendent negativity, uniting with the exalted nothingness that is, as Bertold puts it, beyond the mind? Well, probably nothing could be more Eckhartian, but that isn't going to stop two more Dominicans from trying. John Towler and Henry Souzo were contemporaries, and both carried on aspects of Meister Eckhart's intellectual mission, notably by writing in German, rather than the Latin used by Dietrich and Bertold. With Henry Souzo, the connection with Eckhart is clear, enough so that his contemporaries did not fail to notice it. Souzo defied authority by defending Eckhart from his accusers, even though those accusers included the Pope. Probably as a result, Souzo was demoted from his position as Dominican lector. In an autobiographical work, he speaks of having been unjustly accused of heretical of senities. We can see why by turning to his most famous treatise, The Small Book of Truth, which explains explicitly mentions several of Eckhart's condemned theses in order to explain and justify them. The Eckhartian themes, and even language, begin at the very outset, as Souzo explains that the soul can achieve blessedness and truth only through inner Gelazenheit. This distinctive word, borrowed from Eckhart, means, as Souzo explains later, that one must stop paying attention to one's own self, ceasing to have any will distinct from God's. Though Souzo's book is indeed small, it manages to become something like greatest hits album of medieval mysticism. One chapter begins by relating a vision and then offering explanatory commentary, a structure reminiscent of the writings of Hildegard of Bingen. Like Marguerite Porret, Souzo also composes his work in the form of a dialogue between himself, cast as a questioning beginner in wisdom, and an allegorical figure, in this case eternal truth. Later on, another character appears, the Nameless Wild One. He seems to be a stand-in for those who would take a heretical message from Eckhart's writings, as if Eckhart's own warnings that he may be easily misunderstood have been given concrete form. By introducing this character, Souzo is able to distinguish a true from a false, or disorderly, interpretation of Gelazenheit. As we know, the contemporary reception of Eckhart's ideas was contentious and complex. In Souzo's literary version, the debate is resolved more quickly. The Wild Ones complaints are easily answered and thus silenced. Speaking of silence, the negative theology we have seen in other German Dominicans is found here in Souzo as well, as is a balance between such negativity and a more positive understanding according to which God is pure mind. Souzo explicitly cites Dionysius for the idea that God is non-being and eternal nothing. He adds though that we must describe God somehow, and for this purpose should call him living being rationality. Souzo is also careful to work in material from figures like Bernard of Clervaux, though better to show that Eckhart's apparently daring doctrines are in fact fully in agreement with the authorities of the Church. His small book of truth has a unique place in the generation after Eckhart because of its all but explicit defence of Eckhart's legacy. Still, Souzo was not the only Dominican thinking along these lines, as we can see from the career of John Towler. We have a number of his sermons, which like Eckhart's were written in German and respond to a daily reading from the Bible. Despite the pastoral nature of these works, Towler locates himself in the intellectual tradition we've just been discussing. In one sermon, he quotes Albert the Great, Dietrich of Freiburg and Eckhart, and for good measure cites Proclus, whom he would have known through the work of Beethold. Like Beethold, Towler is especially inspired by the idea that our grasp of God is mystical in the sense that it transcends intellect or rationality and involves an inexpressible union with divine nothingness. On the basis of the manuscript tradition of Eckhart's own vernacular works, it has been argued that the Church managed to prevent his ideas from being disseminated amongst a lay audience. But Souzo and Towler would have spread his ideas among just such an audience, in part through the spiritual guidance they offered to women. Both men ministered to female convents attached to the Dominican order. Towler corresponded with fellow German mystic Margarete Ebner and was connected to Henry of Nödlingen, who was responsible for the translation of Mächterl der Magdeburg into Middle High German that I mentioned when discussing her. We have fairly extensive evidence of Souzo's mentoring of Elsbert Stagl, whom he called his spiritual daughter. Souzo speaks admiringly of her enthusiasm for a life of asceticism, which is a major theme for both authors. In a typical passage, Towler allegorizes the flight of Mary and Joseph as representing the soul's attempt to flee from the desires of the flesh. Of course, the combination of philosophical mysticism and asceticism is nothing new. But in the German Dominicans, it finds a new and distinctive intellectual justification. Alain de Libera, a leading historian of medieval philosophy in general, and German mysticism in particular, remarks that their most central doctrine is this. In its very core, or ground, the soul is unchanging and even uncreated and divine, forever identical with its source in God. This explains the asceticism. Concern with the things of this world simply prevents your realization of your deepest identity. It explains the epistemology. The soul's task is to rise to the level of intellect and then further to the nothingness that is God's and its own ground. It even explains their enthusiasm for the Neoplatonic sources that already inspired Albert the Great. In Proclus, they could find the idea that there is an image of the true One, the divine first principle, within each of us, the so-called One of the Soul. That idea is taken up in one way or another by all of our Dominicans, in Towler's case as an improvement on Thomas Aquinas's more Aristotelian attempt to locate the image of God in each human by pointing to a trinity of powers within the soul. While the German Dominicans recall the earlier medieval Neoplatonism of Ariugina and above all Albert the Great, they also seemed to point forward. Towler in particular would be rather influential in the coming centuries. His writings found approval with Martin Luther, thanks to which Towler had an afterlife among Protestant readers. The others fell into obscurity more quickly, with some exceptions. The major Renaissance thinker Nicholas of Cusa had cautious admiration for Bertaud of Mosbewg. In a more general sense though, these Dominicans undermine an assumption we might otherwise have had about late medieval philosophy in the way it contrasts to Renaissance philosophy. The prominence of scholastics like Scotus, Ockham, and Buridan makes it easy to think that pagan Platonism had faded utterly as an intellectual force until it was rediscovered by Renaissance figures such as Nicholas of Cusa or Marsilio Ficino. In fact, Neoplatonism was like God's creative power according to Dietrich and Eckhart, a powerful force constantly boiling under the surface, ever ready to express itself. Soon we'll be moving on to look at another vernacular tradition of the 14th century. Several hundred episodes into the series, we'll finally have a chance to look at writings that were originally composed in English. That will take us firmly outside of the scholastic world we've been inhabiting for many episodes now, albeit with one foot in the vernacular world in the case of figures like Eckhart, Suso, and Towler. Before we take that step though, I want to take a look at a couple of issues that recur in many scholastic writings. First we'll be considering a topic that was of special interest to Dietrich Freiberg. I don't want to ruin the suspense by divulging the theme of the episode, but I'll give you a hint. While you're listening to it, you may well have a seraphic smile on your face. That's next time here on the History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps.