Let us now--with this preparation--resume our discussion on totality in the Middle Ages. Individualism and personalism is here a topic of capital interest to our study.
On first view, that topic may seem to present very serious problems and considerable ambiguity. But we shall soon see how the problematic and the ambiguous dissolve in a most striking way.
We have recently considered the extreme universality of medieval standards and a forceful trend towards unity. There was an almost fabulous capacity of fitting everything into the same roomy framework. Scholasticism is not the least eloquent example here. Thomas Aquinas and Averroes were certainly strong antagonists. But that does not prevent them from entering the same great system of thought.
One explanation of this extraordinary universality and roominess, however, is just the following: there exists a strange impersonalism in medieval philosophy. Of course, that does not sound too promising for the prospects of the individual, does it? But notice, also, our adjective strange in front of the word impersonalism. Of what does the strangeness consist?
A certain anonymity seems to have been the unwritten law of scholastic philosophy. In fact, this is a characteristic of the Middle Ages by and large. For instance, autobiographical disclosures of the secret depth of personal life experiences are practically unknown. Here you may of course throw up the cases of Augustine and Abelard. But they are sensational exceptions in medieval literature. The great rule is the strictly impersonal (anonymous).
What connection can there be between this and the genuinely naive? For, in fact, the only thing the child loves is the personal. The only thing he understands at all is the personal.
Well, here too we must make an appropriate distinction: there is more than one kind of impersonalism. There is more than one kind of personalism also. Moreover, the "child" about whom we are speaking, in connection with the Middle Ages--and in connection with totality in its supreme flowering--that is the Christian child. Naiveté here implies a certain self-deletion. Such self-deletion was still fairly common to the Middle Ages. It has to do with a wonderful ability in medieval man, the ability to incorporate oneself into a larger entity--falling into line and subserving the purposes of the entire social frame--to forget oneself in the others! If we may ever speak about an alterocentric type of impersonalism, then this is it.
Here one striking feature should be noticed. Medieval philosophy has its own original conception of the way Truth is acquired and built up: to reveal Truth is a gigantic affair of co-operation. Truth is too enormous and too universal a phenomenon to be acquired by individuals first and foremost. It is conceived as a vast edifice built up gradually and co-operatively. If any participant in this gigantic task of co-operation should manifest a spirit of exaggerated and misunderstood individualism or independence, he is useless in the great Corporation of Truth-seeking.
And now please decide for yourself: is it a spirit of narrow-minded, egoistic isolation or a spirit of generosity and active fellowship that manifests itself in this idea, "The truth and the knowledge that expresses it, is not considered--by the Middle Ages--as the personal property of him who finds it. It is a great common patrimony, which passes from one generation to the other."
We should think that this is the genuine co-operativeness of the enthusiastic child! Or should we say, of a mother, wonderfully endowed with the strongest generic feelings. There is, in this, a humble consciousness of the sacred efforts of innumerable predecessors. Thanks to their conscientious and faithful endeavour, the stock was made a little larger every day--and a little more perfect every day. Indeed, that ought to be a very sound and a very noble means of human progress. Roger Bacon describes it thus:
For always the followers added something to the works of their predecessors. Many things they corrected, and still more things they changed, as that clearly appears through Aristotle, who extensively discussed all the statements of preceding authors. Further, Avicenna and Averroes, in their turn, corrected several of his statements.[1]
What could be more descriptive of the conscientious, self-forgetting labour of medieval scholars? Right in the midst of a restless urge to change and correct all the time, there is an admirable modesty and docility. No place is left for a desire to outshine the others, or to bask in the sunbeams reflected back from a world of spectators (a world of "fans"). The individual investigator in the Middle Ages had to be satisfied with living and dying in obscurity. He is an anonymous number in the great multitude that counts.
But is there not in this, you might ask, a sad lack of personalism, a lack which must be highly detrimental to any fresh unfolding of the truly human?
Well, if by personalism one insists on meaning the tendency to throw one's own person into relief on every possible occasion, then we can hardly believe that this constitutes any serious loss. We would dare to characterize it as a dubious modern form of personalism. It is probably not a feature which has meant any enviable increase of human totality in the intellectual world of Occidental culture since the days of the Middle Ages.
Or do we mean by personalism the spirit of negation? Yes, there is a conspicuous lack of that, as well, in scholastic philosophy. In fact, what a striking contrast to what was to take place in modern times! Obviously philosophers of a very different mood were destined here to enter upon the scene. For frankly, where is now the childlike eagerness to contribute one's little part, we mean that great medieval eagerness to continue building on the foundation laid by one's honourable predecessors? The student of modern philosophy has, on the contrary, been obliged to accustom himself to a very opposite trait as an almost self-evident and inevitable one: every new god on the throne of wisdom starts his reign by simply tearing down every possible trace of an earlier philosophical foundation. His primary concern is obviously to find place for his own quite original and entirely independent theories. His irreverent greeting to his predecessors seems to be something like the colloquial French saying, "Get out of there so I can do it." If this is personalism in the modern sense, then medieval philosophy may have been fortunate not to have known it.
The method of the medieval thinker, it is true, may appear considerably less exciting or captivating. In fact, it is a very slow and very inconspicuous method. But, in return, it gives witness that this humble builder had the calm, confident feeling, at the bottom of his heart, of building for eternity, and for the common benefit of a whole world.
And, by the way, where is the sensible spectator who turns his curious eyes towards the theatre of speculative thinking if he is anxious to find just exciting sensations? Speculative philosophy has never and nowhere been a gold mine for fascinating studies in the strange reactions of internal human life. The historian who is heading for the fascinating examples of psychological intimacy in medieval life, should look for that in the mystics rather than in the representatives of speculative thought.
Nevertheless, just in that thought, we shall, in our next chapter, focus our attention on some most convincing features of the individual and the personal in the Middle Ages. But, first of all, we have found it necessary to connect the idea of the individual with the idea of the meaningful. What then, makes this connection inevitable?
As we go forward through the history of totality in human life, we shall ever realize this more clearly: a confident belief in the reality of the human value of the particular (or the individual)--as an essential value besides the general--makes for totality in the deepest sense. Conversely, a belief in the reality of the general (here also called the species)--as the only and exclusive value--makes for disruption of the most radical and the most hopeless type.
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