Tipos de Generadores

St. Anselm (centre), terra-cotta altarpiece by Luca della Robbia; in the Museo Diocesano, Empoli, Italy. Alinari/Art Resource, New York

called “superreal” and “supergood.” Creation is the pro- cess of division whereby the many derive from the One. The One descends into the manifold of creation and reveals himself in it. By the reverse process, the multiplic- ity of creatures will return to their unitary source at the end of time, when everything will be absorbed in God.

If there was any philosophical-theological thinker of importance during the Middle Ages who remained untouched by the spirit of Pseudo-Dionysius, it was the 11th-century Benedictine monk Anselm of Canterbury, a highly cultivated Franco-Italian thinker, who is consid- ered the first philosopher of Scholasticism. For years Anselm was prior and abbot of the abbey Le Bec in Normandy; he then became, somewhat violently, the arch- bishop of Canterbury. In Anselm’s entire work there is not

a single quotation from Pseudo-Dionysius; not even the name is mentioned. Consequently, Anselm’s thinking, thus freed from the corrective embodied in Pseudo- Dionysius’s negative theology, displayed a practically unlimited confidence in the power of human reason to illuminate even the mysteries of Christian faith; he thus frequently approached a kind of rationalism—the view that reason is the ultimate source or test of human knowl- edge. He did not shrink from the attempt to demonstrate, on compelling rational grounds, that salvation (for exam- ple) through God incarnate was philosophically necessary. To be sure, a theologian such as Anselm certainly would never have subscribed to the extreme thesis that nothing exists that is beyond the power of human reason to com- prehend: the two famous phrases, coined by him and expressing again, in a grandiose formulation, the principle of Boethius, “faith seeking to be understood” and “I believe in order to understand,” clearly proclaim his faith in the mysteries of revelation as comprising the very basis of all reasoning. Nevertheless, in the case of Anselm, the very peculiar conjunction of faith and reason was accom- plished not so much through any clear intellectual coordination as through the religious energy and saintli- ness of an unusual personality. It was accomplished, so to speak, rather as an act of violence, which could not possi- bly last. The conjunction was bound to break up, with the emphasis falling either on some kind of rationalism or on a hazardous irrationalization of faith.

That this split did actually happen can be read to some extent in the fate of the “Anselmic argument,” which the Enlightenment philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) was to reject as the “ontological proof of God”—though he connected it not with the name of Anselm but with that of René Descartes (1596–1650), the earliest modern philosopher. It is, in fact, significant that Descartes, in his

proof of the existence of God, imagined that he was saying the same thing as Anselm, and that, on the other hand, Anselm would scarcely have recognized his own argument had he encountered it in the context of Descartes’s

Discours de la méthode (1637; Discourse on Method), which

claims to be “pure” philosophy based upon an explicit sev- erance from the concept of God held by faith. But given Anselm’s merely theoretical starting point, that severance was not only to be expected; it was almost inevitable.

But, also within the framework of medieval Scholasticism, a dispute was always brewing between the dialecticians, who emphasized or overemphasized rea- son, and those who stressed the suprarational purity of faith. Berengar of Tours (c. 999–1088), an 11th-century logician, metaphysician, and theologian, who was fond of surprising formulations, maintained the preeminence of thinking over any authority, holding in particular that the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist was logically impossible. His contemporary the Italian hermit-monk and cardinal Peter Damian (1007–72), however—who was apparently the first to use the ill-famed characterization of philosophy as the “handmaiden of theology”—replied that if God’s omnipotence acts against the principle of contradiction, then so much the worse for the science of logic. Quite analogous to the foregoing controversy, though on a much higher intellectual level, was the bitter dispute that took place almost one century later between a Cistercian reformer, Bernard of Clairvaux (1090–1153), and a logician and theologian, Peter Abelard (1079–1142). Bernard, a vigorous and ambivalent personality, was in the first place a man of religious practice and mystical contemplation, who, at the end of his dramatic life, char- acterized his odyssey as that of anima quaerens Verbum, “a soul in search of the Word.” Although he by no means rejected philosophy on principle, he looked with deep

suspicion upon the primarily logical approach to the- ology espoused by Abelard. “This man,” said Bernard, “presumes to be able to comprehend by human reason the entirety of God.”

Logic was at that time, as a matter of fact, the main battleground of all Scholastic disputations. “Of all philos- ophy, logic most appealed to me,” said Abelard, who by “logic” understood primarily a discipline not unlike cer- tain present-day approaches, the “critical analysis of thought on the basis of linguistic expression.” From this viewpoint (of linguistic logic), Abelard also discussed with penetrating sharpness the nature of universals. (A univer- sal is a quality or property that each individual member of a class of things must possess if the same general word is to apply to all the things in that class. Redness, for example, is a universal possessed by all red objects.) The “problem of universals” is the question of whether universals are concepts, verbal expressions, or a special kind of entity that exists independently, outside space and time. As is well known, it has been asserted that the problem of uni- versals was the principal, or even the only, subject of concern in medieval Scholasticism—a charge that is mis- leading, although the problem did greatly occupy philosophers from the time of Boethius. Their main con- cern from the beginning was the whole of reality and existence.

The advance of medieval thought to a highly creative level was foreshadowed, in those very same years before Peter Abelard died, by Hugh of Saint-Victor (1096–1141), an Augustinian monk of German descent, when he wrote

De sacramentis Christianae fidei (“On the Sacraments of the

Christian Faith”), the first book in the Middle Ages that could rightly be called a summa, or comprehensive treatise; in its introduction, in fact, the term itself is used as mean- ing a comprehensive view of all that exists (brevis quaedam

summa omnium). To be sure, its author stands wholly in the

tradition of Augustine and Pseudo-Dionysius; yet he is also the first medieval theologian to proclaim an explicit openness toward the natural world. Knowledge of reality is, in his understanding, the prerequisite for contempla- tion; each of the seven liberal arts aims “to restore God’s image in us.” “Learn everything,” he urged; “later you will see that nothing is superfluous.”

It was on this basic that the university—which was not the least of the achievements of medieval Scholasticism— was to take shape. And it was the University of Paris, in particular, that for some centuries was to be the most rep- resentative university of the West. Although there are usually a variety of reasons and causes for such a develop- ment, in this case the importance of the university—unlike that of Bologna and also of Oxford—lay mainly in the fact that it was founded in the most radical way upon those branches of knowledge that are “universal” by their very nature: upon theology and philosophy. It is, thus, remark- able, though not altogether surprising, that there seems to have existed not a single summa of the Middle Ages that did not, in some way or other, derive from the University of Paris.

Strangely enough, the classical theological-philosophical textbook used in the following centuries at the universi- ties of the West was not the first summa, composed by Hugh of Saint-Victor, but was instead a work by Peter Lombard (c. 1100–60), a theologian who probably attended Abelard’s lectures and who became magister at the cathe- dral school of Notre-Dame and, two decades later, bishop of Paris. Lombard’s famous Four Books of Sentences, which, though written one or two decades later than Hugh’s

summa, belonged to an earlier historical species, contained

about 1,000 texts from the works of Augustine, which comprise nearly four-fifths of the whole. Much more

important than the book itself, however, were the nearly 250 commentaries on it, by which—into the 16th cen- tury—every master of theology had to begin his career as a teacher. In view of this wide usage, it is not astonishing that Lombard’s book underwent some transformations, at the hands, for instance, of its most ingenious commenta- tor, Aquinas, but also (and even more so) at the hands of John Duns Scotus (c. 1266–1308) in his Opus Oxoniense, which, in spite of being a work of extremely personal cast, was outwardly framed as a commentary on the “Master of Sentences.”

The remainder of this chapter will discuss in detail the lives and work of the most important philosophers and theologians of the early medieval period.