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

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.

Top 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.

• Borrowing from Avicenna and Averroes

  The volume shows Latin Christians learning Aristotle partly through Muslim and Jewish commentators, adopting some of their distinctions and rejecting others, such as the single intellect for all mankind. The lesson is discernment: a tradition can receive truth from outsiders without surrendering its own first principles.

• Bonaventure is not a failed Thomas

  Copleston resists ranking every medieval thinker by distance from Aquinas. He presents Bonaventure's Augustinian illumination and his journey of the mind to God as a distinct and coherent vision, and he treats Scotus's disagreements with Thomas as serious philosophy. Students learn to judge a thinker by his own aims before comparing him with others.

• Condemnation and the limits of inquiry

  The bishop of Paris in 1277 condemned a list of propositions, some of them close to Thomist teaching. Copleston reports the event soberly and lets students see a real tension between protecting doctrine and protecting the freedom of masters to argue. The episode asks what authority owes to inquiry and what inquiry owes to authority.

• Scotus and the primacy of the will

  In the closing chapters Copleston shows Scotus giving the will, divine and human, a larger place than Aquinas did, and allowing that some moral precepts depend on God's free choice. Students can trace how a change in emphasis about God's nature alters an account of morality and of the natural order.

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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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.