Work record

A History of Philosophy, Vol. II: Augustine to Scotus

Frederick Copleston

Also known as: Copleston Volume 2 · History of Philosophy Volume 2 · Copleston Medieval Philosophy

1950 · Postwar Contemporary · Philosophy · English

Copyrightedlow medical relevanceFive-minute digest

Abstract

Written: 1950 (Continuum edition 2003 as Medieval Philosophy)
Setting: Fourth to early fourteenth century; The Roman world, Carolingian Europe, the Islamic world and the universities of Paris and Oxford
Author: Frederick Copleston
Country: United Kingdom
Language: English
Genre: History of philosophy
Form: Volume II of A History of Philosophy (nine volumes, 1946–1975; eleven in the Continuum edition)
Recommended: Grades 11–12 (Abstract only; US copyright. College-level survey; assign single chapters.)

Background. Copleston planned one volume on the Middle Ages but found the material too large, so this book of 1950 runs from the Fathers to the death of Scotus in 1308 and leaves later scholasticism for its successor. It opens by defending the claim that medieval thinkers practised philosophy distinct from theology.

Scope. Augustine dominates the early chapters, followed by Pseudo-Dionysius, Boethius, the Carolingian scholars and Eriugena. The twelfth century brings the debate over universals, Anselm, Chartres and the Victorines. Chapters on al-Farabi, Avicenna, al-Ghazali, Averroes and Maimonides explain how a complete Aristotle reached Latin readers. The thirteenth century is told through Grosseteste, Bonaventure, Albert, a long block on Aquinas, Siger of Brabant and the condemnation of 1277, and finally Scotus.

Argument. Rather than presenting one scholastic system, Copleston shows rival answers to shared questions: whether truth is known by illumination or abstraction, whether the world's beginning can be proved, and how words apply to God.

Vantage. A Jesuit schooled in Thomism, he admires Aquinas's balance yet gives the Franciscan tradition a serious and sympathetic hearing.

Classroom. Upper-school students reading the Confessions, the Proslogion or the Summa can take the relevant chapter as a guide. The library holds no text because the volume is in copyright; the Continuum reprint of 2003 is titled Medieval Philosophy.

Key figures

Frederick Copleston: Heythrop Jesuit writing the medieval volume of his series
Augustine of Hippo: Bishop whose illumination theory frames the volume
Anselm of Canterbury: Archbishop and author of the Proslogion proof
Avicenna and Averroes: Islamic commentators on Aristotle read in Latin Paris
Bonaventure: Franciscan master of the Augustinian synthesis
Thomas Aquinas: Dominican whose Aristotelian synthesis gets ten chapters
John Duns Scotus: Franciscan of univocal being and the primacy of will

Summary

Frederick Copleston published Augustine to Scotus in 1950 as the second volume of his A History of Philosophy. His preface admits a change of plan: he had meant to treat the whole of medieval thought in a single book, but the material outgrew it, so this volume halts at Duns Scotus and the turn of the fourteenth century, leaving Ockham, the late scholastics and the Renaissance for Volume III (1953). The introductory chapter takes up a question that still divided historians in the 1940s: was there a medieval philosophy at all, or only theology wearing borrowed Greek dress? Copleston argues that the medieval masters did distinguish rational argument from revealed doctrine, that their thought was far from uniform, and that it moved through real stages of growth, synthesis and criticism. The rest of the book is in effect his evidence. The first stage is the inheritance from late antiquity. After a chapter on the Greek and Latin Fathers, six chapters on Augustine lay out his road from scepticism to faith, his doctrine of divine illumination, the seminal reasons in creation, his ethic of rightly ordered love and the two cities. Pseudo-Dionysius supplies the negative way of speaking about God, and Boethius, Cassiodorus and Isidore pass on logic, definitions and encyclopedic learning. The Carolingian schools and the bold Neoplatonic system of John Scotus Eriugena follow. The eleventh and twelfth centuries bring the quarrel over universals, Anselm's arguments for God in the Monologion and Proslogion, the humanist teachers of Chartres and the mystical theologians of St Victor. Copleston then turns east and south, to al-Farabi, Avicenna, al-Ghazali and Averroes, to Avicebron and Maimonides, and to the translators whose Latin versions put the whole of Aristotle before Western masters for the first time. The thirteenth-century chapters form the centre of gravity. Copleston follows the new universities through William of Auvergne, Robert Grosseteste and Alexander of Hales, gives five chapters to Bonaventure's Augustinian synthesis and one to Albert the Great, and then ten to Thomas Aquinas, from the distinction between essence and existence through the Five Ways, analogy, the soul as form of the body, knowledge by abstraction, natural law and political authority. The controversies after Thomas's death, Siger of Brabant and the Paris condemnation of 1277 lead to the Franciscans, to Giles of Rome and Henry of Ghent, and to six chapters on Scotus, whose univocal concept of being, formal distinction and emphasis on the divine will Copleston reads as both a culmination of the thirteenth century and a hint of the critical mood to come. Copleston was a Jesuit trained in Thomism, and his closing estimates sometimes show it, notably in his sympathy for Aquinas's handling of Aristotle. Yet he gives Bonaventure and Scotus long, careful hearings on their own terms, and he insists that the period cannot be reduced to a single system. Because the book is in copyright, the library offers this record and links for buying it, not the text.

Plot or Argument

Was there a medieval philosophy?
The introduction defends the reality and variety of medieval philosophy against the view that it was only theology, and sketches the periods into which the volume divides it.
Fathers, Augustine and the transmitters
A survey of patristic attitudes to Greek thought, six chapters on Augustine (knowledge and illumination, God, creation and seminal reasons, morality and love, the state and the two cities), then Pseudo-Dionysius and the negative way, and Boethius, Cassiodorus and Isidore as channels of ancient learning.
Carolingian schools and Eriugena
Alcuin and the palace school, and two chapters on John Scotus Eriugena's De divisione naturae, with its fourfold division of nature and its debts to the Greek Fathers.
Universals, Anselm, Chartres and St Victor
Roscelin, William of Champeaux and Abelard on what general terms name; Anselm's proofs and Gaunilo's reply; the Platonism of Chartres; Hugh and Richard of St Victor; and the Cathar dualists and pantheists such as Amalric of Bène and David of Dinant.
The Arabic, Jewish and translated Aristotle
Al-Farabi, Avicenna, al-Ghazali and Averroes; Avicebron and Maimonides; and the twelfth- and thirteenth-century translations that made Aristotle's natural philosophy and metaphysics available in Latin, together with early Parisian restrictions on teaching it.
Universities and the early thirteenth-century masters
William of Auvergne, Robert Grosseteste's metaphysics of light, and Alexander of Hales, followed by five chapters on Bonaventure's illumination, proofs, exemplarism and journey of the mind to God, and a chapter on Albert the Great.
Ten chapters on Aquinas
Philosophy and theology; essence and existence; the Five Ways; analogical knowledge of God; creation and the eternity of the world; the soul as form of the body; abstraction; moral and natural law; and political theory.
Controversy, 1277 and Duns Scotus
Opposition to Thomist positions, Siger of Brabant and Latin Averroism, the condemnation of 1277, Franciscan thinkers including Roger Bacon, Giles of Rome and Henry of Ghent, six chapters on Scotus, and a concluding review.

Characters

Frederick Copleston, author and expositor
Jesuit lecturer at Heythrop who wrote this volume after the war and frames it as a defence of medieval philosophy as genuine philosophy.
Augustine of Hippo, principal subject
North African bishop whose doctrines of illumination, ordered love and the two cities set the agenda for the following eight centuries.
John Scotus Eriugena, subject
Ninth-century Irish scholar at the Carolingian court whose Neoplatonic system Copleston treats as daring and hard to square with orthodoxy.
Anselm of Canterbury, subject
Benedictine archbishop whose Proslogion argument, and Gaunilo's objection to it, receive a careful reconstruction.
Avicenna and Averroes, subjects
Islamic philosophers whose readings of Aristotle shaped Latin debate on being, the intellect and the eternity of the world.
Bonaventure, subject
Franciscan master and minister general whose Augustinian synthesis Copleston defends as a coherent philosophy, not a failed Thomism.
Thomas Aquinas, principal subject
Dominican master whose use of Aristotle within Christian theology occupies the largest single block of the book.
Siger of Brabant, subject
Paris arts master associated with Latin Averroism and the conflicts leading to the 1277 condemnation.
John Duns Scotus, subject
Franciscan whose univocity of being and stress on the divine will close the volume and open the way to its sequel.

Lessons

Reason inside a community of faith
Copleston argues that medieval thinkers did real philosophy even though they wrote as believers, because they distinguished what can be argued from premises open to any reasoner from what is accepted on revelation. Students can test that claim against Anselm's prayerful Proslogion and Aquinas's Five Ways and decide where each draws the line.
- Does writing a proof as a prayer, as Anselm does, make it less of an argument?
- Which of Aquinas's conclusions about God does Copleston say reason alone can reach, and which does it not?
- Can a person committed to a creed still follow an argument wherever it leads?
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Bonaventure is not a failed Thomas
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- What is lost if historians judge every scholastic by how close he comes to Thomas?
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Condemnation and the limits of inquiry
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Context

Leo XIII's encyclical Aeterni Patris (1879) had placed Aquinas at the centre of Catholic philosophical education, and the editions and studies of Maurice De Wulf, Martin Grabmann and Étienne Gilson in the following decades had recovered the variety of medieval thought. Copleston wrote with that scholarship at hand and with an English-speaking audience in mind, many of whom had been taught that nothing of philosophical note happened between Plotinus and Descartes.

Composition

The volume was prepared at Heythrop College, then the Jesuit house of studies in Oxfordshire, in the years just after the Second World War, and published in London by Burns Oates and Washbourne in 1950. Its length forced a split of the medieval material, so Volume III, Ockham to Suárez, followed in 1953. Image Books later issued it in America in two paperback parts, and Continuum reissued it whole in 2003 as Medieval Philosophy.

Reception

The book became a standard companion for seminary and university courses in medieval thought. Readers praised its patient handling of difficult arguments and its even-handed treatment of the Franciscan school; later specialists, drawing on fuller critical editions, have revised many details, especially on Scotus and on the condemnations, and have given more room to logic and to lesser-known masters than a survey of this size could.

Faith / Religion Science / Knowledge Virtue Ethics Justice Law Education Saints

Comparisons

Confessions
Copleston's first Augustine chapter reconstructs the route from Manichaeism and Academic scepticism to faith that Augustine himself narrates in the Confessions, but reorganizes it as a theory of knowledge.
City of God
The chapter on Augustine and the state condenses the two loves and two cities of the City of God into a philosophy of history and politics.
The Consolation of Philosophy
Boethius appears here mainly as translator of Aristotle's logic and definer of terms such as person and eternity; the Consolation shows the same mind at work on providence and fortune.
Proslogion
Students can check Copleston's restatement of the Proslogion argument and Gaunilo's island objection against Anselm's short treatise itself.
The Canon of Medicine, Book I
Copleston treats Avicenna as a metaphysician of essence and necessary being; the Canon shows the same author as the physician whose medicine was taught in Latin schools for centuries.
Metaphysics
Much of the thirteenth-century story is the reception of this text, read through Avicenna and Averroes and then reinterpreted by Albert, Thomas and Scotus.
Summa Theologica
The ten Aquinas chapters lean heavily on the Summa; reading the Five Ways in Part I, question 2, beside Copleston's chapter shows how much a historian must compress.
The Age of Faith
Durant narrates the same centuries for general readers, with more economic and artistic history and a more sceptical voice; Copleston stays with arguments and gives far more space to Bonaventure and Scotus.

Quotes

For Students

A reading companion for classical Christian high school students. See the student guide.

Reading Guide

Watch for

Copleston's opening argument that the Middle Ages had a philosophy of their own. Keep a list of places later in the book that he could cite as evidence.
The thread of divine illumination from Augustine through Bonaventure, and the point where Aquinas replaces it with abstraction from sense experience.
Each time a Muslim or Jewish thinker appears, note which Latin master answers him and whether the answer is agreement, correction or rejection.
The real distinction between essence and existence in the Aquinas chapters, which Copleston treats as the hinge of Thomas's metaphysics.
The tone of the last chapters on Scotus. Ask whether Copleston presents him as completing the thirteenth century or as preparing its criticism.

Key terms and names

Divine illumination: Augustine's and Bonaventure's teaching that the mind grasps necessary and eternal truths only by a light from God shining on the intellect.
Problem of universals: The eleventh- and twelfth-century debate over whether words like 'man' name a real common nature, a mere word, or a concept with a foundation in things.
Essence and existence: In Aquinas, the distinction between what a creature is and the act by which it is; only in God are the two identical.
Analogy: Aquinas's account of how terms like 'good' or 'wise' apply to God and creatures neither in exactly the same sense nor in wholly different senses.
Latin Averroism: The label for Paris arts masters, such as Siger of Brabant, who taught Aristotle as read by Averroes, including the single intellect, even where it clashed with doctrine.
Univocity of being: Scotus's claim that 'being' has one minimal meaning common to God and creatures, which he thought necessary for any natural knowledge of God.

Seminar Questions

Comprehension What reasons does Copleston give in his introduction for calling medieval thought philosophy and not only theology?
Comprehension How do Roscelin, William of Champeaux and Abelard differ on what a general term like 'man' refers to?
Interpretation Why does Copleston think Bonaventure's illumination theory and Aquinas's theory of abstraction reflect different estimates of what nature can do on its own?
Interpretation According to Copleston, what made the Averroist doctrine of a single intellect for all mankind so dangerous for a Christian account of the person?
Interpretation How does Scotus's univocal concept of being change the way we may reason about God, compared with Aquinas's analogy?
Big Question If a Muslim philosopher gives the best argument for a truth Christians hold, should a Christian school teach it under his name?
Big Question Should a bishop ever condemn a philosophical proposition, as Stephen Tempier did in 1277?

Faith Connections

Romans 1:19–20 (Scripture)
Aquinas and Bonaventure both cite Paul's claim that God's invisible attributes are seen through created things, yet Copleston shows them drawing different arguments from it, causal proofs in one case and an ascent of the mind in the other.
Exodus 3:14 (Scripture)
The divine name 'I am who am' is the scriptural anchor for Aquinas's view, expounded by Copleston, that in God essence and existence are identical.
Augustine, De Trinitate (Church Fathers)
Augustine's search for images of the Trinity in memory, understanding and will lies behind the inward ascent that Copleston traces through Anselm and Bonaventure.
Maimonides, Guide for the Perplexed (Great Conversation)
Copleston's chapter on Jewish philosophy shows Maimonides wrestling with the same question as Aquinas, whether reason can prove the world had a beginning, and Thomas reading him with respect.

Logic and Rhetoric

Central argument: Copleston argues that medieval philosophy was a real and varied tradition: it inherited Augustine, absorbed Aristotle through Arabic and Jewish mediators, reached distinct syntheses in Bonaventure, Aquinas and Scotus, and contained within itself the critical seeds that the fourteenth century would grow.

Rhetorical device: structured exposition followed by a separate estimate. In the Aquinas chapters Copleston restates the Five Ways in Thomas's own order and vocabulary and only afterward discusses objections and what the arguments do and do not claim to prove.

Debate: Resolved: Bonaventure was right that philosophy cut off from theology goes astray.

Writing Prompts

Essay: Explain, following Copleston, why Aquinas held that reason cannot prove the world had a beginning while Bonaventure held that it can, and argue which position better respects both faith and reason.

Comparison with Proslogion: Read Proslogion chapters 2 to 4 and Copleston's chapter on Anselm. Identify one step in Anselm's argument that Copleston makes clearer and one nuance of Anselm's prayerful setting that a summary cannot keep.

Medical Lens

This is a history of metaphysics and theology, not of medicine, but it maps the intellectual frame inside which medieval medicine was taught. Avicenna the metaphysician was also the author of the Canon, and the Aristotelian account of the soul as the form of a living body, which Copleston expounds at length for Aquinas, governed how medieval physicians and theologians related mental faculties to bodily organs. Readings of individual thinkers' health or temperament are absent from the book and should not be invented.

Ancient Medicine Physicians Doctors Mind Body

Chapter on Islamic philosophy, Avicenna section
Copleston's account of Avicenna's metaphysics and psychology, including the agent intellect; useful background for a reader of the Canon who wants to see the physician's philosophy of the soul.
Ancient Medicine Physicians Doctors
Aquinas chapters, on the soul as form of the body
Exposition of Aquinas's rejection of a plurality of souls and his view that the intellectual soul is the single form of the human body, the medieval background to later mind-body debates.
Mind Body
Chapter on Grosseteste; chapter on Franciscan thinkers, Roger Bacon section
Grosseteste's metaphysics of light and interest in optics, and Roger Bacon's appeal to experience and mathematics, presented as signs of a medieval natural-scientific temper.
Ancient Medicine

Creative Prompts

Dialogue
Write a disputation in the scholastic form, with objections, a 'sed contra', a reply and answers to objections, on whether the world could have existed from eternity, giving Bonaventure the objections and Aquinas the reply as Copleston presents them.
Classroom
Divide the class among the eight thinkers in the cast list. Each student prepares a one-minute statement of how his thinker answers the question 'How does the mind come to know truth?', drawn from Copleston's chapter, and the class arranges the answers on a timeline from Augustine's illumination to Aquinas's abstraction.
Essay
Using Copleston's chapters on the translations and on Latin Averroism, explain why the arrival of the complete Aristotle was both a gift and a crisis for the University of Paris, and judge how well the masters handled it.
Fiction
Tell the story of a young Paris student in 1277 who hears that some theses of his favourite master have been condemned. Keep the theology accurate to Copleston's account of the condemnation.