From Aristotle to Descartes without stopping

- St. Augustine?

I dreamt about Augustine of Hippo last night. It was odd - he didn't look like I expected him to (he looked like David Bowie! :) and he kept trying over and over to explain to me his idea of privatio boni. When I was in college, my philosophy teacher detested Augustine in particular and had little respect for medieval theology (and Aquinas) either. I think I've absorbed that stance without critical reflection.

But I've just read a Gresham College lecture by Keith Ward in which he disagrees with this idea, and I thought what he had to say was pretty interesting. Here's a bit from just the beginning of it .....

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The Medieval Synthesis

Professor Keith Ward

The pupil and successor of Plato in Athens was Aristotle (384 - 322), who founded his own philosophical school, the Lyceum. The philosophy of Aristotle dominated the later medieval period in Europe, and was influential on both Islam and Christianity.

Generally speaking, philosophy in the Middle Ages was very much the handmaid of theology. This is so to such an extent that when I took my philosophy degree, no philosopher was mentioned who lived in medieval times, and the history of philosophy went straight from Aristotle to Descartes.

This was a very misleading view of the history of ideas, and depends upon a much more recent opinion that philosophy and theology are wholly distinct from and even opposed to one another. The reason for this is, I suppose, that theology is seen as a confessional discipline. It defends the beliefs of a Church or religious organisation, and so is primarily apologetic. Philosophy, however, is by nature critical of all creeds and organisations, and it may issue arguments in defence of atheism as well as in defence of religious views.

That view may now be held quite widely, but it is not the only possible view, and it is not the one I myself hold .....

It is very wide of the mark to suggest that Anselm and Aquinas were forced to toe some Catholic line, and just used philosophy to back up a set of acceptable beliefs. There is no reason to doubt that they found in the philosophy of Aristotle a compelling metaphysical system, which seemed to lead naturally to Christian belief in a creator God, whose revelation in Christ confirmed and amplified a generally Aristotelian metaphysics ....

Theologians like Aquinas make any claim that Christian faith is blind, unquestioning or irrational, absurd. If anything, the Thomist articulation of Christian faith is too rationalistic and too systematic to capture the diversity and mystery of Christian beliefs. What it is based upon is the postulate that the whole cosmos is the creation of a supremely intelligible and rational God, that humans being made in the image of God can follow the workings of the divine mind, at least to a great extent, and so that the cosmos can be understood by the application of reason .... late medieval Christian philosophy laid the foundation for the widespread modern scientific belief that the universe can be understood by human reason, and that it is an obligation to understand the cosmos, as a rational system, as fully as possible. Whatever that is, it is not a blind and non-rational faith.

Moreover, Aquinas was not a slave to a dogmatic and repressive Church. On the contrary, his works were among those condemned by the Bishop of Paris in 1277, Aristotle was considered by some to be a dangerously unorthodox, even possibly materialist, writer, whose views were incompatible with Christianity. It was not long, however, before Aquinas was to become the intellectual touch-stone of Catholic orthodoxy. All religion, like all human thought, contains anti-intellectual and repressive tendencies. But in Catholicism rationalism triumphed, and with it a strong belief in the capacity of human reason to work out or at least to provide the basis of fundamental beliefs about the nature of the cosmos and how humans should act in it .....

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