Three Doctors and a Razor: Medieval English Philosophers

A Subcast episode looking at four of the most influential philosophers working in England during the Middle Ages: Anselm of Canterbury, Roger Bacon, John Duns Scotus, and William of Ockham.

Transcript

Hello and welcome to the Classic English Literature Subcast.  Today, rhyme does not get its reason here.  No, today we shall take a break from poetry and I will spend a little time riding one of my hobby horses.

I’m a bit of a philosophy buff.  I teach a course introducing high school students to philosophy through literature and today I hope you will indulge me a bit as I introduce you to four of the major philosophers of the English Middle Ages. Admittedly, one of them wasn’t born in England and they all wrote in Latin, so I’m playing fast and loose with this podcast’s brief.  And I know, philosophical writing is not very often considered “literature” in the way we think of it on this podcast (and, if I’m being honest, much philosophy isn’t even good writing – if you’ve ever dipped into Hegel or Derrida or Butler you know that many philosophers are dreadful stylists).  But they do often have some cracking ideas, so I figured we’d talk about those, and maybe how they affect our understanding of the creative literature we usually study.

This will really be just a “greatest hits” kind of podcast.  I’ve neither the space nor inclination to do a full work-up of each of these thinkers' life and work.  We’ll confine our discussion to their major contribution to medieval thought.

When average people think about philosophy in the medieval world (if they do at all, which is doubtful), they probably envision some benighted culture, swathed in superstitious ignorance, stultifying theology, and cackling alchemists.  But this is really not true at all – this stereotype of a backward Europe is really the product of later generations of scientists and artists trying to big themselves up by putting down what came before.  Yes, a good deal of medieval philosophy was focused on questions of theology, but that by no means precluded their explorations into what we now call science and nature and epistemology (the study of knowing).  I think you’ll be surprised.  After all, it was a Catholic priest, Father Georges LeMaitre, who invented the Big Bang theory in 1932.  

St. Anselm of Canterbury

I feel obliged to start with St. Anselm of Canterbury, though I suppose I could be accused of stretching the definition of “English” philosopher by including one born in Upper Burgundy.  But he did much work in England, and since he is such an overwhelmingly important figure, I’m willing to withstand the accusations.

He’s an 11th century Benedictine cleric, theologian, and philosopher.  He became Archbishop of Canterbury in 1093, died in 1109, was canonized in 1494, and made a Doctor of the Church (he sometimes sports the sobriquet “the Scholastic Doctor”) in 1720.  A very accomplished posthumous career.

Incidentally, he is called the Scholastic Doctor because he is widely regarded as the founder of Scholasticism, the dominant philosophical school of the day.  Seeking to unite Aristotelian philosophy with Catholic theology, it focused on empiricism (that is, on experience-based fact gathering and logical reasoning) rather than on simple divine revelation.  Observation and reasoning seem so obvious to us today in a secular, post-religious society as a basis for true knowledge, but to argue that what you saw before your very eyes was as valid as what was divinely revealed was an epistemological earthquake in the Middle Ages.  We spoke of this a bit in Podcast episode 12 on the Wife of Bath.

Anselm is now most famous for his “Ontological Argument for the Existence of God” from the Proslogion of 1078.  Here’s how it goes:

[Even a] fool, when he hears of … a being than which nothing greater can be conceived … understands what he hears, and what he understands is in his understanding.… And assuredly that, than which nothing greater can be conceived, cannot exist in the understanding alone. For suppose it exists in the understanding alone: then it can be conceived to exist in reality; which is greater.… Therefore, if that, than which nothing greater can be conceived, exists in the understanding alone, the very being, than which nothing greater can be conceived, is one, than which a greater can be conceived. But obviously this is impossible. Hence, there is no doubt that there exists a being, than which nothing greater can be conceived, and it exists both in the understanding and in reality.

You get that?  Good.  Let’s move on.

No, I’m kidding.  That’s a dense bit of text.  Here’s the ballpark:  If we define God as the greatest being that can possibly be conceived, then we have to admit that God exists at least as an idea in the mind.  But a being that exists in the mind and in reality would be a greater being than one that exists in the mind alone.  Haha!  We just conceived of a being that’s greater than the idea-only God, so this being must be the greatest possible being and therefore God exists.  Mike drop.  Now that you all believe in God, go forth and sin no more.

Well, obviously, no one was ever convinced to live a life of pious devotion because someone whipped a bit of deductive reasoning at them.   We call it the ontological proof for the existence of God, but the name is kind of misleading – Anselm did not conceive of his argument as a proselytizing tool. He wasn't trying to logically prove that God existed to convince atheists and agnostics.  Rather, he was trying to explain how God is self-evident – how God is an empirical certainty and religious faith a rational proposition.  So this shows that medieval people were not mere sheeple, blindly believing and doing what they were told as modern enlightened culture might have us believe.  No, there was a strong current of rigid logical disputation that puts the lie to the image of an unreflective retrograde civilization. Theological titan Thomas Aquinas disputed Anselm's conclusion and others were concerned about the idea of essentially defining God into existence. But French philosophy giant Rene Descartes would rely on a similar kind of ontological argument, with some reservations, to ground his metaphysics in the 17th century and thereby inaugurate what many consider the first modern philosophy.

Roger Bacon

A quite modern trust in empiricism is the calling card of our next medieval English philosopher: Roger Bacon, sometimes called Doctor Mirabilis, the Wonderful Doctor.  He was a Franciscan born in Somerset somewhere around 1219, give or take a Tuesday.  At university, he lectured on grammar, logic, arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and music, while advocating for the inclusion of what we would now call science (he called it natural philosophy) in the medieval curriculum.

Y’ever come across someone so intelligent and accomplished that, instead of being inspired, you just want to chuck it all in, eat a case of Twinkies and watch “Dance Moms” on repeat?  Yeah.

Bacon was particularly concerned about observable errors, apparent contradictions in our knowledge.  As such, he strongly advocated for Aristotelian empiricism – that notion we mentioned earlier wherein you observe phenomena, gather facts, and reason to verifiable conclusions, rather than rely on appeals to authority to validate knowledge.  He says: 

“Reasoning draws a conclusion, but does not make the conclusion certain, unless the mind discovers it by the path of experience. . . For if any man who never saw fire proved by satisfactory arguments that fire burns, his hearer's mind would never be satisfied, nor would he avoid the fire until he put his hand in it that he might learn by experiment what argument taught. . . Argument is conclusive, but it does not remove doubt, so that the mind may rest in the sure knowledge of the truth, unless it finds it by the method of experiment.”

This applied to our study of the Holy Scriptures, too.  He believed that the Church needed to devote much greater attention to a systematic study of the Bible – and that it must do so in the Bible’s original languages so that it can avoid errors brought about by the vicissitudes of translation.  Many today believe that medievals thought of the Bible as 100% historical and factual – in fact, the way many modern evangelical fundamentalists understand the Bible: literally, quite literally.  Such a notion would be absolutely foreign to any thinking Christian before about 150 years ago.  Medievals recognized the Bible as a rich compendium of texts, from different authors, eras, and lands, comprising various literary genres, from myth to poetry to history to satire to prophecy.  Bacon’s systematizing urge subjected Holy Scripture to the same exegetical rigor that any system of thought requires.

There are some who feel that Bacon’s reputation as the Middle Ages’ ur-empiricist may be a bit overstated.  I guess there is some evidence that some of his experiments with optics, light, and color may never have been conducted, only described.  Oh, well.  It’s the thought that counts.  And he was instrumental in the development of spectacles and the camera obscura.  So cheers, Rog, for the glasses that let me read you.

Duns Scotus

Now we come to the Subtle Doctor: John Duns Scotus, another Franciscan born about 1266 just over the border in Scotland, as his name indicates.  This fella is one of the medieval period’s real heavy hitters, up there with the Italian giants St. Bonaventure and St. Thomas Aquinas.  Scotus developed what would come to be called natural theology and its an early attempt (though he certainly would not say so) to secularize knowledge, to establish knowledge on a solid basis without recourse to divine revelation.  Not that he didn’t believe in divine revelation!  He was a good Catholic boy, but he thought that we could establish the existence and nature of God under our own power.  His move begins simply: he reasons from effect to cause (what philosophers call the argument quia): if creation and creatures exist, a creator must exist.  Now, Scotus will give a rather complex argument for God’s existence that I won’t go into here, but if you’re ever plagued by midnight insomnia, just look up his argument.  Your mind will spiral into unconsciousness.

One of his key points is called the “univocity of being.”  Oooh, that does sound interesting, doesn’t it?  He takes up an argument against Aquinas, among others, who say that the words we use to describe God cannot mean the same things they do when we use them to describe humans.  So, when we say “God is good” and “Maria is good,” the two “goods” are not identical.  Maria is good only analogously to God’s goodness.  Scotus says no – good is good.  The only difference is that God’s goodness is infinite, while Maria’s is finite – but it’s the same goodness.  What this amounts to eventually for Scotus is that human beings can positively know and understand God’s being because we share that same being.  

Duns Scotus is also responsible for two more key philosophical concepts.  One is called “haeccity,” which is a Latin compound used to identify the particular property or determination that makes a thing that specific thing.  Haeccity is what makes the chair that you’re sitting in that particular individual, unique chair.  

Any of you ever seen that movie “You, Me, and Dupree” with Owen Wilson from, like, the mid-2000s?  Dupree, Wilson’s character, is telling his friend Carl, played by Matt Dillon, not to forget all that is unique about himself, all that he brings to the table: “You’ve got that Carlness, that little twinkle in your eye that says they're never going to beat you.”  Yeah, Carlness.  That’s haeccity, my man.  They can’t lay a glove on you.  It’s a thing’s “thisness.”  Right on.

The other concept is “the formal distinction,” by which Scotus logically distinguishes between what exists in reality (that is, independently of the human mind) and what exists in the mind alone, like concepts.  A version of this notion will be developed far more complexly in the 18th century by Immanuel Kant and others, but in the 14th century, William of Ockham had a few interesting ideas about the issue himself. 

William of Ockham

Alas, poor William, he doesn’t get a cool doctor nickname.  He kept running afoul of the medieval Church so he never got a handle like Doctor Mirabilis.  But he’s a really influential guy and I think he deserves a nickname:  how about Doctor Ock?  Doc Ock?  No?  OK, send your better suggestions on the back of a $20 bill.

William is another Franciscan (they’re a pretty clever order, those Franciscans, huh?) and he was born about 1287 and Duns Scotus was a big influence on him.  He sought to reform Scholasticism, to free it from the tangled webs of parsed logic that had begun to stifle it.  He denied some Thomist doctrines as well as papal infallibility (angering infallible popes), and he declared a necessity for the separation of church and state (angering despotic popes).

We can see Scotus’ influence in Ockham’s famous doctrine of ontological parsimony – generally known as Ockham’s Razor.  The doctrine is generally summarized as "Entities must not be multiplied beyond necessity": Entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem.  Except he never said that. 

I always find it rather disappointing to discover that famous quotations were never quoted.  Machiavelli never said, “The ends justify the means”;Gandhi never said, “Be the change you wish to see in the world”; Bogart never said, “Play it again, Sam”; Freud never said, “Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar,” and neither did President Clinton, come to that.

No, what Ockham said was: “nothing ought to be posited without a reason given, unless it is self-evident (literally, known through itself) or known by experience or proved by the authority of Sacred Scripture.”  Has this anything to do with his razor?  Difficult to tell, but we know he said it, and that surely counts for something.

What we call Ockham’s Razor is the general principle that the simplest answer or solution is usually the best.  Cut away, as with a razor, any hypotheses or conditions or predicates that are not absolutely necessary to arrive at a conclusion.  I occasionally hear the adage, “When you hear hoofbeats, think horses not zebras.”  Or, KISS: Keep It Simple, Stupid.  These are, of course, vulgar simplifications of his principle of ontological parsimony, but I think they suffice for our purposes.

Ockham’s Razor manifests itself in Ockham’s fideism: he believes that God is the only necessary being – that everything else is contingent (which means that everything else depends on something else for its existence).  A simple cut between necessity and contingency.  Elegant.  It also informs his conception of metaphysical nominalism . . . 

Boy, philosophical jargon just thrills, doesn’t it?  There’s a beauty and an excitement in that language that just sets one’s soul a-tingle . . . .

Metaphysical nominalism merely means that there is no such thing as universals, like Plato’s eternal forms.  There’s no ideal “tree” out there in the ether.  There are only specific, individual trees with their own unique tree-ness.  Nominalism, which comes from the Latin for name, says that such big abstract universals are only names, that they don’t really exist outside the mind.  Now, some say that Ochkam was not really a full-on nominalist because he did believe that such abstractions could exist in the brain as concepts, so some scholars want to call him a conceptualist rather than a nominalist.  Doesn’t matter to us.  What matters is that his thinking influenced many of the writers we’ve studied together, notably Chaucer and the Gawain Poet.  Ockham also had a powerful effect on the meditations of Julian of Norwich, a religious recluse who will feature prominently in an upcoming episode.

Till that time, I hope you all stay fit and well.  Thank you so much for your time.  I really appreciate it.  Send me your thoughts at classicenglishliterature@gmail.com.  I’d love to have you follow the podcast on instagram, facebook, and twitter.  If you have a minute, please leave a positive review so that the show’s profile rises and more folks can listen in.  If you value the show and would like to help keep it going, please click the “Support the Show” button.

Thanks for all you do.  Good luck everybody!