10.7 — Faith and Reason in the Medieval Centuries

Roughly a thousand years, and one question underneath all of it: if revelation tells you something and reason tells you something else, which wins?

And it is not a dead question. It is the same question as 5.11 and 6.13 — what do you do when an authority you accept says something you cannot verify.

Augustine

354 to 430 CE, North African, and the bridge between the ancient world and everything after.

His Confessions is the first real autobiography in the Western tradition — a book about his own inner life, addressed to God, including the parts that do not flatter him.

Two things from him that shaped everything after.

The interior turn. He locates the important questions inside. Do not go outward; return within yourself. In the inward man dwells truth. The self becomes a subject of investigation rather than a given, and that is a new thing in the West.

And the problem of the will. His most acute observation, and it is honest: he wanted to change and could not. Give me chastity — but not yet. He describes commanding his own hand, which obeys instantly, and commanding his own will, which does not.

A mind that cannot make itself do what it has decided to do is the phenomenon he could not explain and would not deny, and every subsequent account of weakness of will is working on his problem.

And his answer — that the will is divided and can only be healed by grace — is theological, and the observation stands without it.

His time on memory is also extraordinary. Whole books of the Confessions on what memory is, how it works, and how strange it is that he can search for a forgotten name and know when he has found it, which requires having known it all along.

The problem, stated

By the eleventh century the question is sharp, and it is sharpened by a specific event: the recovery of Aristotle.

Aristotle's works had been largely lost in Latin Europe. They were preserved and developed in the Islamic world — by Al-Kindi, Al-Farabi, Ibn Sina (Avicenna), and above all Ibn Rushd (Averroes), whose commentaries were so thorough he was known in Europe simply as "the Commentator."

They came back into Europe in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries through translation, mostly from Arabic, mostly via Spain.

And they were a problem. Aristotle's system was comprehensive, powerful, and in several places flatly contradicted Christian doctrine — he held the world to be eternal rather than created, and his account of the soul does not obviously permit personal immortality.

So: here is the most impressive intellectual system anybody has seen, and it disagrees with your religion.

The same problem arose in the Islamic world first, where Al-Ghazali wrote a powerful attack on the philosophers, and Ibn Rushd replied. And it arose in Jewish thought, where Maimonides wrote the Guide for the Perplexed precisely for readers caught between the two.

Three traditions, one problem, at roughly the same time.

Aquinas

Thomas Aquinas, 1225 to 1274, produced the most influential answer, and it is a compatibility argument.

His position: reason and revelation cannot conflict, because both come from the same source. Where they appear to conflict, either the reasoning is faulty or the interpretation of scripture is.

And he divides the territory. Some things reason can establish on its own — that God exists, that the soul is immortal. Some things reason cannot reach and revelation supplies — the Trinity, the incarnation. Reason does not contradict these; it simply cannot get there.

Which permits philosophy to operate freely in its own domain, and that is the move's practical effect and the reason it mattered.

His Summa Theologiae is organised in a format worth knowing. Each question is posed; then the objections to his own position are stated first, at full strength; then an authority on the other side; then his answer; then a reply to each objection.

The same purvapaksha discipline as India (9.3), arrived at independently, and for the same reason: an argument that has not faced the best objection has not been made.

The five ways

His arguments for the existence of God, and they are worth knowing because they are constantly misrepresented.

Motion: things move, and are moved by something else; this cannot regress infinitely; therefore a first mover.

Causation: the same argument with efficient causes.

Contingency: things exist that might not have; if everything were like that, at some point nothing would have existed and nothing could have begun; therefore something necessary.

Degrees: things are more or less good, and this implies a maximum.

And design: things without intelligence act towards ends, which requires a director.

The common misreading is that the first two mean "everything has a cause, so God caused the universe" — which invites the obvious reply "then what caused God?"

That is not what Aquinas says. His claim is about a hierarchy of dependence at any moment, not a chain going back in time — and he explicitly says philosophy cannot establish that the universe had a beginning. The argument is that a series of things each depending on something else requires something not so dependent, now.

Whether it works is another matter, and the fourth and fifth are weak. The fifth is the design argument and it was answered by Darwin (Volume V).

Two others worth having

Anselm's ontological argument, eleventh century, and it is the strangest argument in philosophy.

God is that than which nothing greater can be conceived. If such a being existed only in the mind, then a greater being — one that also existed in reality — could be conceived. Therefore it must exist in reality.

Almost nobody finds this convincing and almost nobody can say cleanly what is wrong with it. A monk named Gaunilo replied immediately with a perfect island, defined as the greatest conceivable island, which by the same reasoning must exist. Kant's later objection (10.9) is that existence is not a property, which is the standard answer and is still argued about.

And Ockham's razor. William of Ockham, fourteenth century: entities should not be multiplied beyond necessity.

Not "the simplest explanation is true" — the actual claim is narrower and better. Do not add components to your explanation that are not doing work.

It is a methodological principle rather than a truth about the world, and it is one of the most useful things ever formulated.

Why the medieval period matters

Because two things were built in it that everything since depends on.

The universities. Bologna, Paris, Oxford, Cambridge — founded in this period, with the structure that still exists: faculties, degrees, formal disputation, a curriculum.

And the technique of formal disputation itself. The requirement to state and answer objections, to distinguish senses of a term, and to argue from stated premises. It is dry and it produced people who could think precisely, and the scientific revolution came out of the institutions it built rather than from nowhere.

The honest assessment

Two things.

The period is not the intellectual desert its reputation suggests, and the reputation is largely a piece of Renaissance and Enlightenment marketing — those movements had an interest in describing what came before them as dark.

And the constraint was real. A system in which conclusions are fixed in advance and the work is finding arguments for them has a ceiling, and everybody in it knew where the ceiling was. The people who moved past it did so by finding a domain where the constraint did not apply — which is what the study of nature turned out to be.

What to carry from this page

Augustine's problem is your problem: you can command your hand and it obeys, and command your will and it does not. Every account of why is still incomplete.

Aquinas's format — state the objections first, at full strength, then answer them — is the correct format for anything you actually want to be right about.

Ockham's razor is about not adding components that do no work, not about preferring simple stories.

And the shape of the whole period is worth recognising: an authority you accept says something reason cannot reach. Aquinas's answer — divide the territory and let each operate where it can — is still the most workable one available, and 15.1 applies it to science and spirit.

Next: 10.8 — a man sitting alone by a stove decides to doubt everything, and modern philosophy starts.