Early Medieval Philosophy (480-1150): An Introduction (review)

4u6 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 23:3 JULY t985 John Marenbon. Early Medieval Philosophy (48o-115o): An Introduction. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1983. Pp. ix + 19o. $18.95, cloth. The question that motivates this book is "how early medieval thinkers first came to engage in philosophy" (vii). Sometimes Marenbon's answer seems to be that it is to be attributed to Christianity or theology (vii-viii); sometimes that it is to be attributed to logic (2o); and sometimes both (47). If it is both, what exactly is the proportion of each and how, if at all, did they interact? In certain passages, Marenbon seems to suggest that the two influences contributed in parallel and not jointly: "... those thinkers who wished to discuss abstract questions, rather than scientific ones, turned to the philosophical issues raised by logical texts, and discussed by the ancient commentators , or to the philosophical passages in theological texts such as Boethius's Opuscula sacra" (89; see also 93, 95). Although Marenbon often describes events that point to the interconnection of logic and theology he does not focus his discussion on this point. Thus, his narrative, in many ways excellent, fails at the deepest level. I shall return to this and related matters later. Marenbon divides his book into three parts: The antique heritage; the beginnings of medieval philosophy; and t lOO-115o. Much of the first part contains valuable information about how much ancient philosophy medieval philosophers knew and why it was so little. The relative importance of Plato, Neoplatonism, and Aristotle is discussed in the first three chapters of this part. The fourth chapter is devoted solely to Boethius. Marenbon's emphasis on Boethius is quite right, I think, though Boethius is better seen, not, as he traditionally is, as the last Roman, but as the first Latin medieval philosopher. (Augustine is the last great ancient philosopher of the Latin world.) Taking Boethius in this way corrects the oddity of beginning medieval philosophy , as Marenbon does, with Cassiodorus, to whom he devotes one paragraph. After discussing Alcuin and his influence, Marenbon devotes considerable attention to John Scotus Eriugena, developments in logic during the tenth century, and Anselm of Canterbury. The third part concentrates on the great professional teachers of the first half of the twelfth century. It consists of five chapters, of which the middle three, chapters 11-13, are the most instructive. Chapter t 1 discusses the efforts of William of Conches, Bernard Silvestris, and others to reconcile Christian cosmological views with pagan views. Chapter 12 discusses advances in logic, which Marenbon claims proceeded largely independently of theology. Chapter 13 discusses theology, with Gilbert of Poitiers given pride of place. Marenbon's separation of cosmology, logic, and theology is symptomatic of one of the two major flaws in this book: a confusion about the relations between theology, philosophy and logic. "Philosophy" is ambiguous. In one sense, philosophy means cosmology, as Greek and medieval thinkers understood it. This explains why Platonism in the early middle ages and Aristotelianism in the later middle ages was both a threat and a challenge to Christian philosophy. Platonic and Aristotelian cosmologies, being incompatible with Christianity, were perceived as threats by those who saw no possibility of reconstructing them. In contrast, those who saw them as reconstructable, William of Conches, Bernard Silvestris, and John of Salisbury in the early middle ages, BOOK REVIEWS 427 Thomas Aquinas and William Ockham later, saw them as challenges. In another sense, philosophy is equivalent to the analysis of our most general or most central concepts. In this sense, philosophy is a kind of applied logic. Thus philosophical advances often proceed pari passu with advances in logic. But philosophy is always philosophy---of. Philosophy needs a subject matter: philosophy of science, philosophy of psychology, philosophy of art, etc. The characteristic subject matter for medieval philosophers was theology: that is, propositions about God or things in relation to God. As philosophers, medieval thinkers developed logic to use in reasoning about theological propositions. If this view of the age is taken, then all sorts of apparent oddities disappear. For example, Marenbon says, "In a work like the Periphyseon, dedicated to proposing a metaphysical, theological system, it is...