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The Medieval Historiography of John Marenbon

Mark Joseph T. Calano, Ph.D.Ateneo de Manila University

Introduction

Medieval philosophy is a tradition in the history of Western philosophy. The question ‘What is medieval

philosophy?’ can elicit many answers and it depends on our framework in understanding medieval thinkers and traditions. The plurality of frameworks in medieval philosophy are not rooted in a misinterpretation of thinkers and traditions, but of differing conceptions of what constitute philosophy. Because we use ‘medieval philosophy’ to refer to many things, it is cannot be denied that there are many assumptions and conceptions about this tradition of philosophy and historiography. This implies that we should be sensitive when reading books about medieval philosophy and history of the authors’ assumptions and frameworks to understand their claims, ideas, and postulates. Among contemporary authors who wrote about medieval philosophy and history is John Marenbon. The paper aims to present and distinguish his approach and methodology in three parts. I begin by explaining what he means by ‘history’ and then by ‘philosophy’ when are in the phrase ‘history of philosophy’, and then by ‘medieval’ in the term ‘medieval philosophy’. Finally, I expose how he applies this methodology to his rendition of the history of medieval philosophy.1 The paper aims to understand and present his methodology and ‘medieval philosophy’ by reading his works; it is not, however, a comprehensive analysis of his entire corpus. The paper is limited to presenting and articulating his historiography.

1J. Marenbon, “Paper for discussion at Cornell Medieval Philosophy Workshop 2005,” in http://www.trin.cam.ac.uk/show.php?dowid=197 (accessed date: December 27, 2013). This paper plays a very important role in the construction of this article in terms of its outline, content, and sources. It is to John Marenbon, therefore, and to his thoughts on Medieval Philosophy and Historiography that I attribute this article.

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In Search for a Method

In an article entitled, ‘Doxology and the History of Philosophy’, Calvin Normore creates a distinction between what he calls a ‘doxology’ and a ‘history of philosophy’.2 According to him, if we are engaged with a medieval text by analyzing its arguments, then we are doing doxology; thus, most histories of philosophy produced by and for students of philosophy are doxology. History of philosophy involves a narration of how and why thinkers wrote what they did. In this sense, the interests of a historian are different from those of the doxologist, who are concerned only with arguments. If we write about the arguments of a medieval philosopher, then we are doxologists; whereas if we intellectualize history, then we are historians of philosophy. Normore’s distinction is useful in my project, of trying to explain Marenbon’s history of medieval philosophy; I am, however, initially raising two points. The first point I wish to make is about the distinction that Normore makes between the work of historians and of doxologists. The way I look at it, the work of historians is much more varied, and is less sharply differentiated from that of doxologists. Indeed, the historians of philosophy work with exactly the same field of concern as the doxologists. Both ask similar questions about the same material. There exists a dependency between these fields; the historians may need the philosophical understanding and the doxologists need to understand the history of those arguments. Nevertheless, there is a fundamental difference in the aim of the doxologists and the historians. While the doxologist philosophizes and appropriates the thinking of philosophers, the historian tells a story about and reconstructs the past; the difference in the aims of these scholars. The second point I want to raise in Normore’s view concerns how it fails to apply to existing histories of medieval philosophy. There is a tradition of writing histories of medieval philosophy that started with Barthélemy Hauréau;3 but I need to raise the question

2C.G. Normore,‘Doxology and the History of Philosophy’, Canadian Journal of Philosophy, (1990) suppl. vol. 16, 203-226. 3B. Hauréau, Histoire de la philosophie scolastique (Paris; Durand et Pedone Lauriel, Hauréau, 1872).

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after Normore’s distinction: “Are they doxologists or historians of philosophy?” It is difficult to give an answer; as it seems there are many schools as there are histories of medieval philosophy. Maybe they are both; this is discernible, for example, in the works of Fernand van Steenberghen and David Knowles, who followed the Neoscholastic approach in medieval philosophy.4 The Neoscholastic approach is not a trend in historical thinking; it is a philosophical movement that reacts to the 19th century hostility to the Roman Catholic Church. To achieve their aim, the neoscholastics need to show that their arguments are based on rationality and not from revelation. Marenbon renames this project and labels it as separationalism. Separationalism is the approach that distinguishes philosophy from theology.5 They assert that, from the time of Aquinas, medieval thinkers recognized a distinction between philosophy and theology. Thomas Aquinas and John Duns Scotus are philosophers, but they are theologians too; and their philosophy is as significant as their theology. Fernand van Steenberghen thinks, for example, that we can separate philosophy from theology in medieval texts because the medieval thinkers are aware of the distinction. The Separationists think that we have to select and arrange medieval texts. ‘To select’ means to identify which texts are philosophical and ‘to arrange’ means to present these selected philosophical texts systemically.7 Separationists understand each philosophical system as a synthesis. They understand medieval philosophical frameworks in terms of Platonism and Aristotelianism, and explain how these frameworks were used during the 13th and 14th century.

4F. van Steenberghen, Aristotle in the West : the origins of Latin Aristotelianism. L. Johnston (trans.) (Louvain: Nauwelaerts, 1955); idem, La philosophie au XIIIe siècle (Louvain; Publications Universitaires (Philosophes médiévaux 9), 1966). D. Knowles, The Evolution of Medieval Thought, 2nd ed, D.E. Luscombe and C.N.L. Brooke (eds.) (London and New York; Longmans, 1987). 5See J. Marion, “On the Distinction between Philosophy and Theology,” in Budhi: A Journal of Culture and Ideas (2009). 6See F. van Steenberghen, The Philosophical Movement in the Thirteenth Century, J.J. Gaine (trans.) (London: Nelson, 1955). M. de Wulf, Scholasticism Old and New, an Introduction to Scholastic Philosophy Medieval and Modern. P. Coffey (trans.) (London: Longmans Gree, 1910); Idem, History of Medieval Philosophy. Ernest Messenger (trans). (New York: Dover, 1952); Idem, Introduction to Scholastic Philosophy. P. Coffy (trans.) (New York: Dover Publications Company, 1956). See also J. Inglis, “From Maurice de Wulf to General Academic Acceptance” in Spheres of Philosophical Inquiry and the Historiography of Medieval Philosophy (Leiden, Netherlands: Brill, 1998), 168-192. 7J. Marenbon, Later Medieval Philosophy (1150-1350) (London and New York: Routledge, 1993), 84.

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Separationists agree that medieval philosophy is original; in doing so, they distinguish between borrowed heterogeneous collections and those synthesized elements. Both doxology and history are also found in the work of Etienne Gilson.8 Gilson bases his histories on the idea of ‘Christian Philosophy’; Gilson defines it: “Thus I call Christian, every philosophy which, although keeping the two orders formally distinct, nevertheless considers the Christian revelation as an indispensable auxiliary to reason.”9 Like the Separationists, Gilson looks at Aquinas’ thought as both the summit and perfection of medieval philosophy. Gilson formulates his Christian philosophy in accordance with Bonaventure, who rejected Aristotelianism for a philosophy that focuses on the centrality of Christ.10 Nevertheless, he sees Aquinas as a unique Christian philosopher, one who synthesizes what he believes as a Christian with what he knows as an Aristotelian to develop a system.11 Gilson believes in the centrality of Christ in these Christian thinkers and how their works move around Him. Like the separationists, Gilson and his school selects materials to discuss medieval philosophy and to focus on philosophical instead of theological works. The selection is, however, different from the separationist as it is a wider selection considering the omission of purely theological topics. Recognizing the influence of Christian revelation on reason, there is no attempt to limit scholarship to arguments based on reason alone. For instance, Gilson explains medieval thought in terms of systems and syntheses as the separationists, the syntheses he discusses are wider ranging and the elements of ancient systems are subsumed into a Christian worldview. Thus, proponents of this tradition select and arrange their sources based on their understanding of philosophy--a subject radically changed by the coming of Christ. A different understanding of medieval philosophy is arrived in histories based on methods different from Separationalism and/ 8See J. Inglis, “Etienne Gilson and the Historiography of Medieval Philosophy” in Spheres of Philosophical Inquiry and the Historiography of Medieval Philosophy, 193-214. 9E. Gilson, “The Concept of Christian Philosophy,” in Spirit of Mediæval Philosophy, A.H.C. Downes (trans.) New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1949), 37; emphasis mine. See also Idem, History of Christian Philosophy in the Middle Ages (London; Sheed and Ward, 1955). 10See E. Gilson, The Christian Philosophy of St. Bonaventure. I. Trethowan and F. Sheed (trans.) (New York”: St. Anthony Guild, 1938). 11Marenbon, Later Medieval Philosophy, 85.

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or Christian Philosophy.12 In the Introduction to Cambridge History of Later Medieval Philosophy, we can read the aims of the analytical philosophers, and it is worth reproducing here in whole:

By combining the highest standards of medieval scholarship with a respect for the insights and interests of contemporary philosophers, particularly those working in the analytic tradition, we hope to have presented medieval philosophy in a way that will help to end the era during which it has been studied in a philosophical ghetto, with many of the major students of medieval philosophy unfamiliar or unsymphathetic with twentieth-century philosophical developments, and with most contemporary work in philosophy carried out in total ignorance of the achievements of the medieval on the same topics. It is one of our aims to help make the activity of contemporary philosophy intellectually continuous with medieval philosophy to the extent to which it already is so with ancient philosophy.13

As the above quote suggests, proponents of the ‘modern analytical’ approach in the Middle Ages focus on philosophical problems which they share with medieval thinkers. They translate medieval texts using contemporary terms and analyze them with the same rigor as they would a contemporary philosopher. They are selective with their texts because they only choose excerpts with arguments that are of interest to them. Although they are aware of the text’s theological context, they do not consider it relevant. Their aim is to understand what they consider is of philosophical value to their work. The ‘analytic’ approach to medieval philosophy selects medieval works for interesting philosophical passages and extracts these, where necessary, from their theological context. The aim is to present the arguments of medieval philosophers, especially on concerns shared by contemporary scholars, and to critically examine them. Understanding a philosophical argument involves the ability to explain its claims and to identify its distinction; this includes the ability to understand counter-arguments. Thus, proponents of the modern analytical approach differ from both separationists and advocates of Christian philosophy in their view of philosophy as a subject concerned with logical and linguistic analysis.

12Ibid., 86-87. 13N. Kretzman, A. Kenny, and J. Pinborg, The Cambridge History of Later Medieval History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 2.

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These three schools do not tell us that pure doxology is impossible. It tells us that the study of a thinker or perhaps even a school in a doxological manner prevails. In writing about the Medieval Ages, narratives provide an over-arching framework. Doxologists provide us with a narrative to fit our analyzes. Marenbon does not approach medieval thought as a doxologist, nor does he shape a historical narrative along philosophical convictions; but, why abandon the doxologico-historical model used by most historians of medieval philosophy?14 Is Marenbon more ideological than concerned with historical truth? Some histories of medieval philosophy misunderstand historical truth, and the cause is their ideology--the desire to write a history that justifies their philosophy. But many of these histories are rigorous and observe standards, and even those whose ideology were obtrusive are also scholars beyond reproach. Because they are ideological, doxologico-historical accounts share strengths and weaknesses for different reader. For philosophers, this history provides them with the historical

14Marenbon mentions three historians of medieval philosophy who broke away from the doxologico-historical mould. They are figures who deserve to be known among English-speaking scholars and students of medieval philosophy. They are Kurt Flasch, Alain de Libera, and Ruedi Imbach. Kurt Flasch begins Das Philosophische Denken im Mittelalter with an explanation of how an historical understanding of medieval thought is relevant to us. He presents his task, not as “justifying the factual content of the philosophy of the Middle Ages, but of understanding this factual content from its historical context and thereby problematizing our concept of ‘factual content’ and ‘justification’.” Flasch looks for the relevance of medieval thought “not meta-historically, in elements of direct continuity, but rather in the analysis of the conditions according to which the theories of that period were formed, preserved and abandoned” [K. Flasch, Das philosophische Denken im Mittelalter. Von Augustin zu Machiavelli (Stuttgart, Reclam, 1986), 16.] He shows concern for explaining the material, institutional and cultural context of medieval philosophy, and for placing philosophers within the framework of problems that they faced. Flasch challenges the accepted chronological bounds of medieval philosophy by thinkers such as Leonardo Bruni and Nicholas of Cusa, and Macchiavelli and Luther. Flasch’s History is centered on the Latin world, with Arabic and Jewish philosophy treated briefly to explain its effect on Christian thought [K. Flasch, Einführung in die Philosophie des Mittelalters (Darmstadt; Wissenschafltliche Buchgesellschaft, 1987), ch. 8.] By contrast, Alain de Libera’s La philosophie medieval discusses all four traditions of medieval philosophy--Islamic, Jewish, and Greek and Latin Christian. In his preface, he writes that his manner of writing history is non-clerical (laïque): that is, “it takes as its subject the whole variety of religious and philosophical rationalities and gives none of them a specially privileged position. It presupposes neither that there is one ideal form of philosophy, nor that there is one ideal state of medieval society, nor that the Middle Ages was an ideal period in human history” [A. De Libera, La philosophie medieval (Paris; Presses universitaires de France 1993), 15]. In this comment, De Libera orientates his course between the narrow denominationalism of Neoscholasticism on the one side, and the narrow secularism. Ruedi Imbach shows how the history of medieval philosophy can, and should, be widened in another way too. Most historians confine their accounts of Latin philosophy from the 12th to the 15th centuries to those who taught in the schools and then the universities. Imbach shows the importance of the laity to philosophy. [R. Imbach, Laien in der Philosophie des Mittelalters : Hinweise undAnregungen zu einem vernachlässigten Thema (Amsterdam: Grüner, 1989); Idem, Dante, la philosophie et les laics (Fribourg, éditions universitaires (Vestigia 21), 1996).]

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narrative needed to place and justify a doxological interest in medieval philosophy. The disadvantage is in this very condition. Even if the doxologico-historical approach is useful to philosophers, it prevents further study because it hinders them from rethinking the preconceptions and limits of their own activity. For historians, the doxologico-historical approach allows them to include philosophy in their account of the Medieval Ages. It is an irony to call this an advantage because many historians suspect philosophy. For readers, the advantage of the doxologico-historical approach is on its ability to fit medieval philosophy into a dogmatic scheme. But the question whether this advantage is a drawback must be raised: Is the approach succeessful in engendering an enthusiasm for medieval history and philosophy? Marenbon’s medieval philosophy and historiography differs by being written for a different reader. It is intended for philosophers who want to question the preconceptions behind their own philosophical practice, for historians who are not afraid to engage philosophy within their historical understanding, and for other readers who prefer curiosity to dogmatism.15 Medieval philosophy is presented as if there is a normative way to studying it, and as if it could be justified by historical investigation. Separationists refer, for example, to 13th century distinctions between philosophy and theology to justify their delimitation of their subject. In the like manner, the proponents of Christian philosophy are equally apt to adduce historical evidence. 15What follows is the list of sources in J. Marenbon, Medieval Philosophy: An Historical and Philosophical Introduction (Routledge: London, 2007), 352-353. For historiographical surveys, see J. Inglis, Spheres of Philosophical Inquiry and the Historiography of Medieval Philosophy and R. Imbach and A. Maierù, Gli studi di filosofia medieval fra Otto e Novecento: contributo a un bilancio storiografico (Rome: Edizioni di storia e letteratura, 1991). Of the other histories on the Latin tradition, F. Copleston, A History of Philosophy II and III (Tunbridge Wells: Burns and Oates, 1950 & 1953) is comprehensive in his coverage especially of the period from Ockham to Suárez; D. Knowles, The Evolution of Medieval Thought is an improved example of an Aquinas-centered brand of history; E. Gilson, A History of Christian Philosophy in the Middle Ages is based on his conception of ‘Christian philosophy’. These books might sound outdated, although P. Vignaux, Philosophy in the Middles Ages (London: Burns and Oates, 1959) remains contemporary and is particularly sophisticated in its discussion of the interface between theological and philosophical concerns. N. Kretzmann, A. Kenny, and J. Pinborg, The Cambridge History of Later Medieval is a manifesto for approaching medieval philosophy from the perspective of contemporary analytical thought. The medieval volume of The Routledge History of Philosophy III—Medieval Philosophy, J. Marenbon (ed.) (London: Routledge, 1998) is chronologically arranged, with chapters by specialists offering a range of different approaches. D. Luscombe, Medieval Thought (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997) is a good historical overview of the whole Latin field. By contrast, The Cambridge Companion to Medieval Philosophy, A.S. McGrade (ed.) (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003) gives the authors of the individual thematic chapters the chance to look quite closely at a selected range of topics. A. Kenny, Medieval Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005) is a historical survey: although his scope is somewhat restricted, Kenny is always lucid and brings out clearly the questions in medieval philosophy which interest contemporary philosophers.

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However, none of the available approaches to medieval philosophy can simply be supported by an appeal to historical evidence. Most of the medieval thinkers are theologians and their writings are predominantly theological; while some of their works do develop arguments based on rational experience (and not at all on revelation), but these works are part of their theological argument. This means that its aims and presuppositions are theological, and can never be philosophical. On the one hand, if the historians of philosophy limit themselves to philosophical texts to make their work historically justifiable, then they must understand philosophy. Philosophy, as intended by medieval writers when they contrast it with theology, embraces all the branches of knowledge based on reasoning. It includes what we call positive sciences; and the scientific parts are considered inextricable from those philosophical parts. On the other hand, if historians of philosophy write about what medieval scholars considered to be philosophy, then they will not produce a history of philosophy. But if they separate medieval philosophy from medieval science, then the work loses its historical basis, because they are making a distinction not thought about by medieval thinkers. The fact that none of the aforementioned schools can be justified on purely historical grounds does not mean that none is justifiable. Arguments can be advanced in favor of each of the three traditions: “but they are arguments based, not on historical evidence about medieval attitudes to philosophy, but on different conceptions on what philosophy should be.” It is in relation to this understanding that we discuss Marenbon’s distinct contribution to Medieval historiography and philosophy.

Marenbon’s Historical Analysis Marenbon’s ‘historical analysis’ shares its methods with the contemporary analysts, but gives weight to historical considerations that they, with the proponents of separationalism and Christian philosophy, recognized but largely disregarded. This new approach bridges the distance between our interests and assumptions and the writings of medieval scholars. It tries to explain the ideas of medieval thinkers by presenting them in terms accessible to us and by relating them to our problems. But historical analysis also looks

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into the presuppositions and aims of medieval thinkers, the scope of their investigations, the methods they used, and the different texts they read. It is only by answering these historical questions that we begin to understand medieval thought. Historical analysis imposes two special restrictions on its proponents. The first prohibits them from making anachronistic assumptions about the identity of the problems. Many of the areas discussed by medieval arts masters and theologians still interest us today. Modern analysts assume that medieval texts discuss the same problems which engage contemporary philosophers. They begin their investigation by noticing that problems in medieval writings concern a similar set of problems we tackle. But only by examining do the historical analysts discover what were the questions which medieval thinkers posed. Only then are they able to decide whether the questions are in any sense the same as those that we ask today. The second restriction of the historical analysts concerns the scope of their investigations. Historical analysis is not suited to writing the comprehensive histories of medieval philosophy favored by separationists, proponents of Christian philosophy, and modern analysts. The authors of this history chose what material constitutes medieval philosophy and, in doing so, they chose between being unhistorical and allowing their choice to be decided by their own conception of philosophy. The historical analysts avoid this problem if they restrict themselves to a specific topic; to justify this choice, they argue that the topic that once interested medieval thinkers and still interest us. The next part of the paper is a bird’s eye view application of historical analysis to medieval philosophy.16

In Medieval Latin, philosophia referred to a wide range of meanings, but among them two senses were the most common. It could be used as a general term to refer to all types of learning. A ‘division of philosophy’ meant a complete scheme of the branches of knowledge, including grammar, rhetoric, mathematics, music, the natural sciences and theology; as well as areas that were philosophical in the contemporary sense, such as logic, ethics and metaphysics. Obviously, this was too wide for the historian to follow: it would turn the history of medieval philosophy into a very general medieval intellectual history. Alternatively, philosophia

16Marenbon, Later Medieval Philosophy, 88.

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could also mean specifically learning that is not based on revelation. In this sense, the label would apply to the works that engages the philosophers of ancient Greece and Rome and, by extension, to writings explaining Aristotelian texts, and even to texts written by theologians according to natural reasoning, and to the exclusion of revelation. In this sense, the problem is much more than terminological. It is not just that philosophia designated the subject which the contemporary historian of medieval philosophy would want to treat: no such subject was delimited according to the medieval view of things. Nor is the difficulty confined to the Christian and Latin area. Although, in Islam, there was a distinct tradition that was called ‘philosophy’, much speculation of a philosophical kind also took place within the context of theology; while Medieval Jewish thinkers drew from Islamic thinking.17 Contemporary philosophy as an academic discipline is articulated according to ‘standard branches’, such as epistemology, metaphysics, psychology, ethics and politics. But many medieval thinkers did not develop their ideas as contributions to one or another of these disciplines; the interpretation of medieval writings according to the standard branches of philosophy was a Neoscholastic strategy, not a reflection of how people thought in the Middle Ages. But, this problem is not difficult to resolve, because it need not be anachronistic and contrary to rigorous historical method to impose a contemporary understanding on medieval texts. Historians can start from interests which we share, because they are writing about the past for us. These interests guide how they select their materials and focus their attention, and they may use a contemporary understanding of philosophy to identify medieval texts and to shape their narrative. To that extent, they are imposing a contemporary understanding on their material, and they may be acting no differently from the doxologists (and the doxologico-historians). But there is more. As historians, they cannot ignore the connections which existed between the texts that interests them, and those which does not. While contemporary interests determine where attention is concentrated, they must not be allowed to restrict consideration to those areas.

17See J. Inglis, Spheres of Philosophical Inquiry and the Historiography of Medieval Philosophy.

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Marenbon’s historical approach commits us to contextualization. And, although he speaks of the relationship between texts to write an honest and satisfying historical narrative, the need for contextualization goes farther and further. Patterns of belief and activity, institutional and social structures, political and economic events cannot be excluded from histories of medieval philosophy. The historical approach leaves open the option of choosing as a guide for selection and emphasis any conception of philosophy that seems coherent and interesting to us. So, what is Marenbon’s understanding of philosophy? The answer is obvious: philosophy as it is conceived by analytical philosophers in the philosophy departments of universities in the English-speaking world. But there is a broader idea of philosophy, which includes but goes beyond this rather specialized one; they see it as the search for ultimate truths about what sorts of things exist, what human beings are and what is their place in the universe, what we can know and how we should live; ultimate truths which, on this conception, cannot be discovered merely by scientific investigation. The method of philosophy is reasoned argument in the broadest sense, as contrasted with dogmatic assertion, empirical gathering of facts or purely imaginative exploration. But they are accommodating to the fluidity of these boundaries, the uncertain borders between philosophy and theology, natural science and literature. There are four convincing reasons for following Marenbon’s understanding of philosophy. First, it makes any work more interesting and accessible to readers who do not have a background in philosophy. Second, the width of this understanding makes contextualization less awkward, because it embraces more of the material among which there are strong internal and external connections. Third, it avoids making a prejudgement about where the richest seams of medieval philosophy are to be found--in the highly-structured, logically sophisticated discussions which bear a close relation to contemporary analytical philosophy. Fourth, an important contrast has been drawn, especially by Pierre Hadot between how philosophy in the ancient world was a way of living but afterwards became a specialized discipline. Hadot places medieval philosophy together with modern philosophy in this respect, but his decision is open to discussion.18

18P. Hadot, Qu’est-ce que la philosophie antique? (Paris; Gallimard, 1995).

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What period of philosophy is considered as medieval? The label ‘medieval’ was originally used pejoratively, and while the understanding of the Middle Ages was the invention of Renaissance humanists, the idea of a medieval period in philosophy was due rather to Protestant scholars, who misinterpreted scholasticism a corruption of the Catholic Church. Under their influence, among historians from the 18th century to the early 20th, it became customary to distinguish the period from the late 8th or 9th century until the coming of humanism and religious reform in the early 16th century as medieval. This period remained the core of what histories of philosophy consider the Middle Ages. But this is relative; Gilson, for example, with his emphasis on medieval philosophy as Christian philosophy, begins with the Church Fathers in the 2nd century AD. It is hard to dispense with Augustine and Boethius. Others have noticed that there are 16th and 17th century writers such as Suárez (1548-1617) and John of St Thomas (1589-1644) and, whose work appears to be in the tradition of 13th and 14th century thought and have included them as medieval philosophers. The geographical scope of histories of medieval philosophy is simply also unexpected. Most histories of other periods of philosophy restrict themselves to a narrow area of the globe: ancient philosophy is confined to the Hellenized world, 17th and 18th century philosophy to Continental Europe, twentieth-century philosophy for the rest of the world. They are, as it is obvious, histories of ‘Western’ philosophy. By contrast, almost every history of medieval philosophy includes a discussion of the Islamic and Jewish philosophers who lived in places as oriental as Iran and Iraq, because 13th and 14th century thinkers working in Paris or Oxford were influenced by works that had been written in the Islamic world from the 9th to the 12th century. This appearance of geographic and cultural breadth is a little deceptive, however, since the treatment of Jewish and Islamic philosophy rarely goes far beyond what is needed to explain the positions and differences of the Latin and Christian writers. Lambertus de Rijk puts forward an argument for why historians of medieval philosophy should follow the customary periodization.19 All attempts to discover intrinsic principles of periodization, which would separate what is medieval from what is ancient or early modern, can be shown to fail. Periodization is, 19See L.M. de Rijk, La philosophie au Moyen Age (Leiden; Brill, 1985).

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therefore, just a matter of the convenient division of labor. And so medievalists should stick to what they are expected and have been trained to do. Yet there is a drawback to adopting de Rijks’s position. If history is a matter of making a choice of texts to shape a narrative, then periodization will help to determine what stories can and cannot be told, and it would be foolish to let the division of labor to rule out the most thought-provoking of them. If periodization is a matter of choice, then is there not a case for proceeding in the opposite direction, and shaping a possible narrative to be one of the factors in setting period and geographic boundaries? Marenbon provides a history of medieval philosophy. By ‘a history’, he means that “there are many different histories of medieval philosophy that have been written, and will be written.”20 However, he makes it clear that his account of medieval philosophy is not redundant as it has its own special aim and so its particular emphases. It promotes an understanding of medieval philosophy and history that is broader and bolder. Broader and bolder because traditionally historians of medieval (Western) philosophy have begun either with the earliest Christian thinkers, in the second and third centuries, or with Augustine (b. c. 354) and Boethius (b. c. 475-7), or with Alcuin at the end of the 8th century and have ended either by about 1350, with the generation after Ockham, or have added some account of the later 14th and 15th centuries, or concluded with the ‘Silver Age’ of scholasticism in the Iberian peninsula, going up to Suárez (d.1617), but omitting Renaissance philosophers such as Ficino (1433-99). Geographically, historians of medieval philosophy do not only have to widen their horizon by working with the ancient or early modern period, since later medieval philosophy is greatly influenced by Islamic philosophers and by Jewish thinkers living in Islamic lands. These Islamic and Jewish thinkers cannot be studied only as a source and sequel to Latin thinkers. Whereas most accounts of medieval philosophy is presented as a development of Aristotelian thought, Marenbon grounds his conception of medieval philosophy in Neoplatonism. This is a different stand and his explanation is worth reproducing here in whole. He writes:

20Marenbon, Medieval Philosophy, 1

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Four traditions of philosophy, then—Byzantine, Christian ‘Latin’ (mainly written in Latin, but also in the European vernaculars), Islamic and Jewish—all can be said, in a certain sense, to begin from late ancient Neoplatonism. And all four traditions belong to cultures dominated by a monotheistic, revealed religion, different in each case (except for Latin and Greek Christianity), but closely related. The importance of this common starting point and context remains, despite the fact that each tradition has elements and strands that derive more directly from its own particular culture and religious traditions—most obviously, the aspects of philosophizing most closely connected with the particular religions, but also, for instance, the extra presence of Stoicism in Latin thought thanks to the writings of Cicero and Seneca. These elements and strands, linked in various ways to the common tradition, should not be excluded from the story, even though they tend to make it less neat and unified. Their centripetal tendency is counter-balanced by another factor linking the traditions together: the direct relationships between the four traditions as they evolved. In the Islamic world, the traditions of Christian, Islamic and Jewish philosophy were closely intertwined, whilst philosophy written in Arabic, both Islamic an Jewish, had an enormous influences through translations on Latin Christian thought in the later Middle Ages. Earlier, Latin thinkers had looked to Byzantine thought, whilst in the fourteenth-century Latin scholasticism would affect philosophers both in Byzantium and in the Jewish communities in Latin Europe.21

Marenbon agrees that the philosophers writing in Arabic—Avicenna, Averroes and Maimonides—all thought of themselves as Aristotelians, and in the Latin West the university curriculum from c.1250 onwards was structured around the texts of Aristotle. However, Marenbon affirms this and argues that Aristotle’s works were part of the Neoplatonic curriculum and it was for this reason that they were transmitted and translated. Marenbon adds a twist to this claim. He writes:

The Neoplatonists had a particular place for Aristotelian thinking within their system, in which it was subordinated to the profounder truths about the intelligible world discovered through Platonic metaphysics; medieval readers, who studied in translations the texts themselves of Aristotle transmitted by the tradition, had no need to follow the Neoplatonic approach; in some cases they were not even aware of it. Neoplatonic ways of thinking could, therefore, be changed, challenged or even undone from within. Medieval philosophy can be

21Ibid., 2

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seen, then, as the story of a complex tradition founded in Neoplatonism, but not simply as a continuation or development of Neoplatonism itself.22

Marenbon’s broad geographical range and chronological scope seems to question the term ‘medieval’. Its starting point does not just refer to the Greek pagan world of the third century AD, but to the Hellenistic Period and the time of Plato and Aristotle. The periodization of the history of philosophy that Marenbon proposes is from c.200 until c.1700. He warns us that “[s]ome histories of medieval philosophy include within their scope just the elements in fifteenth- to seventeenth-century philosophy which they consider to be continuations of the medieval tradition,”23 may fit into his historiography. What does Marenbon considers to be philosophical? He argues that there is “no convenient medieval definition of ‘philosophy’ which a historian can adopt.”24 Further, he explains: “Either the word has too wide a meaning, covering every sort of intellectual discipline, or it is, in one way at least, too narrow, ruling out any theorizing which relies on revealed premises.”25 So, Marenbon uses a contemporary criterion to determine what counts as philosophy. But, which criterion? He explains:

Philosophers who work on medieval thought tend to select just those texts and passages which deal with problems close to ones that concern contemporary analytical philosophers. I prefer to use a wider understanding of ‘philosophy’, according to which the word covers whatever is considered by professional philosophers today.26

A Vision of Medieval Philosophy

Marenbon speaks of four traditions in medieval philosophy. Its four sub-traditions are ‘Arab’ philosophy—which took place in Islamic lands and was written usually in Arabic; ‘Jewish’ philosophy—the work of Jews in Islamic and Christian countries, written in Arabic or Hebrew; ‘Latin’ philosophy—produced in the countries of Christian Europe where Latin was the language of higher learning

22Ibid., 323Ibid., 4.24Ibid. 25Ibid. 26Ibid., 5.

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and usually written in Latin; and ‘Byzantine’ philosophy—written in Greek in the Christian empire of Byzantium. Different historians and thinkers of the medieval age have different conceptions about these philosophies and their origins and ends.27 And it is with these that I wish to end this paper. Medieval Arab philosophy begins with the first philosophical writings in Arabic in the 9th century and ends with the death of Ibn Rushd (Averroes) in 1198, after which growing religious intolerance permitted the practice of philosophy as it had been known. Medieval Jewish philosophy begins in Islam, with which it is closely connected. It went on to flourish also in the Jewish colonies of Christian Europe until its decline in the 15th century. Philosophy in the medieval Latin West begins in the late 8th century, at the court of Charlemagne. The tradition has no clear chronological end point and its final centuries coincide in time with the development of ‘Renaissance philosophy’. 15th and 16th century universities continued to produce philosophical work firmly in the medieval tradition, and in later 16th and early 17th century Spain there was a flowering of philosophy which is distinctively medieval in its sources and concerns. In Byzantium, it is hard to place any but an arbitrary boundary between late ancient Neoplatonism and medieval Greek philosophy. The tradition was brought to a clear end, however, when Constantinople fell to the Turks in 1453. Why speak, then, of four traditions and a seemingly single distinct tradition of medieval philosophy? Marenbon argues that the four traditions are interlinked closely that, while their differences are important, they are best understood as a whole.28 He enumerates four features common to all the four different traditions. First, all these different traditions use a common heritage of ancient Greek

27On Islamic philosophy see O. Leaman and S.H. Nasr, The Routledge History of Islamic Philosophy (London and New York: Routledge, 1996). P. Adamson and R.C. Taylor, The Cambridge Companion to Arabic Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005). A. Badawi, Histoire de la philosophie en Islam (Paris: Vrin,1972). H. Cordin, Histoire de la philosophie islamique (Paris: Gallimard, 1986). For medieval Jewish philosophy see C. Sirat, A History of Jewish Philosophy in the Middle Ages (Cambridge and Paris: Cambridge University Press and Éditions de la Maison des Sciences de l’Homme, 1985). History of Jewish Philosophy D.H. Frank and O. Leaman (eds.) (London: Routledge, 1997). Cambridge Companion to Medieval Jewish Philosophy Frank and Leaman (eds.) (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). T.M. Rudavsky, Time Matters, Time, Creation and Cosmology in Medieval Jewish Philosophy (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2000). For Byzantine philosophy see B. Tatakis, Byzantine Philosophy, N. Moutfakis (trans.) (Indianapolis and Cambridge: Hackett, 2003). 28J. Marenbon, “Introduction,” in Routledge History of Philosophy Volume III: Medieval Philosophy, J. Marenbon (ed.) (London and New York: Routledge, 1998), 2.

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philosophy, especially those that practiced in the Neoplatonic schools of late antiquity, although with a greater emphasis on the complete works, rather than the logic, of Aristotle. Second, in their development, the four different traditions are interconnected. Medieval Jewish philosophers were deeply influenced by the Arab thinkers they read, and translations of Arabic writing transformed the study of philosophy in the Latin West from the late twelfth century onwards. The Byzantine tradition was less open, although there were some translations from Latin into Greek late in the Middle Ages. Third, all four traditions belong to cultures dominated by a monotheistic, revealed religion: Islam, Judaism, or Christianity. Although the relations between religious doctrine and philosophical speculation varied both from one tradition to another, and at different periods within each tradition, the question posed and constraints exercised by revelation were in all three religions and exercised a profound influence on the philosophical work produced within their ambit. It is the third feature—the tradition’s close connection with revealed religion—which explains a final, extrinsic character which applies to the medieval tradition of philosophy: its comparative neglect. An estimation of the Middle Ages among us is indicated in a textbook designed to introduce students both to philosophy as it is practiced today, and to the history of philosophy. The editor explains that:

For a very long period—roughly from the fourth to the seventeenth centuries AD—thought in the West was dominated by Christianity. This does not mean that there was no philosophy; far from it; but much of it served theology or at least (except in such cases as logic) it was constrained by theological considerations.29

Medieval philosophy is, apparently in consequence, eliminated from the book completely, except for a fleeting reference to Aquinas. The historical section jumps from the Greeks to Descartes without further comment. The historiography of medieval philosophy can be seen as a series of reactions and counter-reactions to the dismissive approach 29A.C. Grayling (ed.), Philosophy: a Guide through the Subject (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 3.

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to the area illustrated here in a contemporary and extreme form, but widespread in many variations.30 The earliest historians of medieval philosophy, in the 19th century were willing to concede the principle on which the dismissive approach, adopted by those who would ignore medieval philosophy altogether, was founded.31 The dominance of Christianity and its influence on the thought of philosophers was a grave defect in medieval philosophy; but not so grave that the period was without interest. Cousin, for instance, argued that in the Middle Ages ecclesiastical authority was absolute and medieval philosophy was used “in the service of faith, under the aegis of religious authority: it moved within a circle that was not of its own devising, but had been imposed on it by an authority other than its own.”32 Yet philosophy retained its own nature, and Cousin believed that even medieval scholasticism took the four forms he found in each epoch of philosophy: idealism, sensualism, skepticism, and mysticism. The approach produced results than its apologetic tone would seem to promise, aided perhaps by Cousin’s belief in a clear development of philosophy from antiquity to his own day. From the late nineteenth century until nearly the present, most work on medieval philosophy has been carried out from a very different point of view. Historians committed to orthodox Catholicism were quick to build on a long tradition of medieval scholarship within the Church and take up the new interest in medieval philosophy. Understandably, however, they were opposed to the approach followed by Cousin and other ‘rationalist’ historians. Yet they did not counter it by arguing that the influence of revealed religion on medieval philosophy was not cramping, but beneficial. Rather, they insisted that the medieval thinkers recognized a distinction between philosophy and theology. It is the job of the historian of medieval philosophy to isolate and explain these philosophical systems. Part of the stimulus behind this approach may well have been provided by the problem which many 30`On the historiography of medieval philosophy, see also Marenbon, Later Medieval Philosophy, 83-84; Marenbon, “Introduction,” 3 & 9; F. van Steenberghen, Aristotle in the West and, Imbach and Maierù, Gli studi di filosofia medieval fra Otto e Novecento. 31See V. Cousin, Cours de l’histoire de la philosophie modern. 3 volumes (Paris: Didier, 1847). B. Hauréau, De la philosophie scolastique. 2 volumes (Paris: Pagnerre, 1850); idem, Histoire de la philosophie scolastique. 3 volumes (Paris: Durand et Pedone-Lauriel, 1872-1880). 32V. Cousin, Cours der Philosophie par M.V. Cousin: introduction á l’histoire de la philosophie (Paris: Didier, 1828), 28. As quoted in Marenbon, “Introduction,” 3.

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Catholic thinkers and churchmen in the late 19th and earlier 20th century believed modern philosophical movements posed for them. They saw most contemporary philosophy as hostile to the claims of religion and hoped to find in medieval thinkers a system which could be set against the current schools of thought. For this purpose, it was essential that, although scholastic philosophy should be fully compatible with Christian doctrine and lead naturally towards it, it should also be recognized as a fully independent philosophy, separable from revealed doctrine and able to compete on equal terms with other schools of thought. The advantage of this approach is that it brought an interest to medieval thinkers which was neither condescending nor merely antiquarian. Its disadvantage is that the distinction between philosophy and theology in the Middle Ages was neither clear-cut nor undisputed not unchanging, and that the modern scholastic philosophy elaborated on the basis of medieval models is intellectually feeble.

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