Why have we made this excursion into modern times? Simply in order to throw into relief the relatively admirable totality still present in the spirit of the Middle Ages. But to be quite fair we must then also admit openly some tendencies of increasing impact towards a Platonic dualism even right in the core of the medieval Church. The plain truth of the matter is that fundamentally disruptive anthropological doctrines were about to penetrate the Christian congregation. At times the dualism here entering upon the scene becomes a feature so dominating that one might soon be tempted to lose sight completely of the original trends in favour of totality. Nevertheless that totality does remain as an invincible force, a secretly operative element, under the surface, all through medieval times.
Its action is particularly noticeable in the honourable status maintained by the human body in medieval views on man. This is a fact which the historians of ideas do not always seem to realize fully. But it is one of the most remarkable facts. The bodily reality of the human being is both recognized and quite highly respected, not only by the medieval Church, but also by essential circles of medieval philosophy.
Not only the great Dominican Thomas, but also the honourable Franciscans Bonaventura and Duns Scotus--equally famous for their erudition and for their piety--are seen to hold the human body in high esteem. And of course quite non-philosophical members of the medieval Church show the same attitude here. Gilson even ventures to mention Francis of Assisi among the men of the Middle Ages who "cherished matter, respected their body, elevated its dignity, never wishing to separate its destiny from that of their soul".[1]
We do admit that there must have been some natural temptation for the first Christian philosophers to consider Platonism, rather than Aristotelianism, as the philosophy best adapted to their highly spiritual outlook on life and on the world. For philosophers have constantly been confused here, mistaking spiritualism for spirituality. So, although Plato need not have a jot more of spirituality than Aristotle has, he decidedly has a lot more spiritualism, and, with idealist philosophers, one may note a very common tendency to evaluate that latter element very highly.
So we, in a way, understand Gilson's puzzled question:
How is it that after following the Platonic tradition for so long, Christian philosophers gradually yielded to the growing influence of Aristotle?
Well, let us point out one very good, but not commonly realized reason why Aristotle gradually won a position as the leading philosophical authority in the Church of the Middle Ages: his philosophy was infinitely closer than Plato's to the views of totality prevailing in the anthropology of fundamental Christian beliefs. And it is not impossible, of course, that a certain regulating influence on the part of original revelation has been permitted to guide Christian philosophy "from within", as it were.
On the other hand, more often than not, that "infallible interior guide" may appear astonishingly deficient in the development of a Christian philosophy in the Middle Ages. True, Aristotle did possess a vision of psychophysical unity in man which was almost a prodigy in his philosophical environment, but we are very much afraid that the actual influence, in the Middle Ages, of that part of his philosophical teachings may easily be exaggerated by historians.
However, the fact remains, Aristotelian philosophy did, by and by, get the upper hand. And that fact, in itself, was bound to result in a growing tendency to define the soul as nothing but the form of the body. But it is no use trying to slur over one essential fact: the belief in a congenital immortality of the human soul is also growing stronger and stronger from century to century in the medieval Church. That belief could not be made to harmonize with the truly monistic part of Aristotelian philosophy.
We should not forget that Plato had had great followers in the world of philosophy in the first centuries of the Christian era. Plotinus, we might almost venture to say, is more Platonic than Plato himself. Where would you ever expect to find a more outspokenly dualistic message than in the Enneads? That applies to the dualism of mind and matter, and also to the radical dualism of good and evil. What is a human soul?
That the soul is akin to the diviner and eternal nature is made clear by the facts that she has been proven to be incorporeal, has neither form nor colour, and is intangible... Let us take then a soul--not one sunk in the body which has laid hold of irrational desires and emotions and received into herself other passions, but one which has sloughed these off and has as little commerce as possible with the body. Such a one shows clearly that evil is a foreign accretion on the soul, and that in the purified soul everything that is best, wisdom and every other virtue, inheres and is native. (Enneads, IV, 14, 4a)
And what makes this soul dirty and evil?
The vicious soul is not outside of matter and is not wholly herself... for she is mingled with the body which is material... Her vision is hindered both by her affections, and by being darkened by matter and inclined toward matter, and in general by looking not toward existence but toward generation. And of transition and generation the nature of matter is the source, a nature so evil that the soul which even looks toward it, is filled with evil. For since matter is wholly without part in the good and is the privation thereof, and pure lack, it makes like to itself anything whatsoever that touches it. (Ibid., I, 8, 4, 470)
Here, then, we have a heathen dualism in the Western World not perceptibly weakened by two centuries of intense Christianity. Its choice among values in human life is not very much in favour of the concrete:
The most abstract thoughts are of things in every respect pure of the corporeal.. There is, for instance, no residuum of flesh or of matter of any sort in the abstractions of a circle, a triangle, a line, or a point. The soul then, when at such work, must of necessity abstract herself from the body. It follows that she herself cannot be body... Virtue, then, must belong to the eternal and abiding, as do geometrical entities. But if it belongs to the eternal and abiding, it is not corporeal. (Ibid., IV, 7, 8)
We have cited at random some of the influential sentences of Plotinus which were to keep ringing in the ears of the generations of the Middle Ages.
The main idea in it all, left to work its way into the minds of the multitudes, was this one: there is in man a separable divine element which has had no beginning, and will have no end. That is the immortal human soul.
At the same time, it is true, there is the remaining influence of very opposite teaching, for instance the famous passage found in Enchiridion patristicum:
For God has called flesh itself to be resurrected. To the flesh he promises eternal life. To announce the good news of salvation actually implies announcing it to the flesh also. For what is man if not an intelligent being consisting of a soul and a body? Is the soul by itself man? No, but the soul of man. Would the body be called man? No, but it is called the body of man. If then neither of these is by itself man, but that which is made up of the two together is called man, and God has called man to life and resurrection, he has called not a part, but a whole, which is the soul and the body.[2]
The linguistic expression of the Christian hope contained in this passage, may not be entirely free from a certain dualism. We shall return to that later on. But the fundamental idea is one of psychophysical unity and the most admirable totality. Gilson, too, has been struck by the same fact. What surprises him most, however, is that such a passage is found "even as early as at the end of the second or at the beginning of the third century". Here we cannot entirely agree with his formulation. From our sad experience, we feel more reason to be astonished that such a passage still occurs as late as that!
For already during the first centuries of the Christian era something very strange and very decisive happened: a new idea--we mean new in the sense that it had been entirely unknown to Judaism, as well as to the Gospel--began to develop in Christendom: "A human soul cannot die." This idea of a natural immortality was obviously introduced into Christianity from pagan philosophy. Our main concern in this book, regarding that curious mixture of Christianity and paganism, is limited to the philosophical problems it brought about. Those problems presented themselves immediately in all their tremendous force. And they did not grow less tremendous as the centuries of the Middle Ages passed. Why not? The reason is simple enough: in order to get rid of the problem, only one measure would do. That is: a resolute giving up of the idea of innate immortality. But that idea was never given up. On the contrary, the medieval Church canonized it and made it the foundation for some of its strongest dogmas. We mean "strong" for the consolidation of the power of the Church over the minds of the multitude. We mean "power" in the political sense. That is a very egocentric sense. But that is also outside the scope of our present discussion.
Let us keep this point, however: the Platonic idea of immortality was not abandoned during the passing centuries of the Middle Ages. So the problem it had introduced into Christian thinking could not so easily let go its grip on the minds of medieval thinkers either.
As far as we can see, the main change here in the course of those centuries is the following: philosophical speculations within the framework of the Christian Church become gradually stronger. With the increasingly conscious intellectual fixation of the problems, those problems themselves become increasingly conscious, increasingly painful, and simply crying for some kind of intellectual solution. That is what characterizes the new attitude towards these things in the last centuries of the Middle Ages. Such a development towards pure speculation was bound to be in favour of Platonic viewpoints.
The idea Plato had established with axiomatic cocksureness in his Phaidon was this: an unbroken continuation of life is something the human soul possesses quite naturally and automatically. That idea, of course, is not an easy one for the Church fathers to appropriate. It is too foreign to their proper Christian patrimony. By and by, however, they accept the word "immortality". Some of them even star using it to describe a quality inherent in the human soul. But just to know what they really mean--how much of actual dualist vision they put into their expressions--is a problem which has to be dealt with quite carefully. We have tried to do that in our investigations on patristic anthropology.
But let it be noted as a general historical fact: the Fathers of the Church during the very first centuries are far from anxious to espouse ideas of Platonic immortality. Personally they are not at all, as a rule, consciously troubled by such ideas. Accordingly, they are not consciously troubled by the philosophical problems involved in them either. That consciousness of a painful problem--for the Christian theologian as well as for the Christian philosopher--is a phenomenon springing up only by and by. In fact, it springs up only in connection with an increasingly conscious belief in "natural human immortality".
However, that belief is seen to spread at an accelerating pace, as century by century rolls over the Christian Church.
By the way, non-Christian philosophers seem doomed to wrestle with the same invincible enemy. Avicenna, in his mighty efforts to reconcile Aristotle with Mohammed, actually returns to the problem of reconciling Aristotle with Plato. He "solves" the problem by considering the soul from two different points of view. A person you happen to meet, may, also, be considered from two different points of view, says Avicenna. He may be a worker, but first of all he is a man. He is a man by his essence, and a worker by his function. Something similar applies to the soul. "In itself", or according to its essence, it is a substance. According to its function, however, it serves as a form for the human body.
Through this trick, both Aristotle and Plato should be fairly well satisfied. In other words: the soul certainly has the task of animating the human body. Certainly, also, that body dies. But still there is no actual reason to fear that the soul should be bound to die at the same time. What does the death of the body really mean, then? It only means that the soul has finished exerting "its special functions".
No wonder that even many Christian thinkers, in similar distress, found some temporary consolation in this ingenious attempt, on the part of a Mohammedan, to solve a painful problem. They, too, were obviously aching to have Plato's celestial immortality and Aristotle's unity of body and soul at the same time. Avicenna's eclectism seemed to furnish that palatable synthesis.
Albertus Magnus has eloquently expressed the intense willingness of Christian philosophy to accept this desperate attempt at reconciling the irreconcilable.
Animam considerando secundum se, consentiemus Platoni; considerando autem eam secundum formam animationis, quam dat corpori, consentiemus Aristoteli. (Considering the soul in itself, we will agree with Plato; but considering it according to the form of animation which it gives to the body, we will agree with Aristotle.)[3]
But how one can actually agree with those two philosophers at the same time is of course only a new problem. If we accept the solution of considering the soul as a form given to the living body, how on earth can we still manage that fabulous trick of pure abstraction which consists in considering the soul "in itself"!
Thomas Aquinas was no man of easy compromises. But he, too, was a man of the late Middle Ages. That is a time when the doctrine of the natural immortality of the human soul had already been firmly and sacredly established by the Christian Church. And Thomas was no iconoclastic destroyer of consecrated dogmas. So how could he think it his task to cut away violently the doctrine of natural immortality? On the contrary, he believes in that doctrine, just as good Christians during centuries before him, and during centuries after him, have believed in it.
So he really has no advantages whatsoever over his colleagues in the realms of human philosophy. He is not exempted from the problem. He sees only one possibility: to face it. He faces it more seriously and more inexorably than Avicenna. And he, too, is an Aristotelian. He fully believes in the oneness of the human being. However, with that truly Christian belief in human oneness on one hand, and a truly non-Christian belief in natural immortality on the other hand, how could he ever hope, in spite of the superior acuteness of his mind, to arrive at a true solution of the problem? How can there be any true solution, where there is no true problem? The "enigma" of a union between body and soul is an artificial problem. It bases itself on postulates which, themselves, have no foundation whatsoever--namely the dualism of the substances and the immortality of the soul. The more truly intelligent a thinker is, the more unable he will be to find the "true solution" of an entirely spurious problem.
Notes: