Intellectual Backgrounds

Anselm

Even in the eleventh century, Augustine and Aristotle were the dominant Christian theologian and philosopher, respectively. Anselm followed in their traditions of rationalism within faith, or after attending to the primacy of faith. Anselm says so much about knowing God, "For I believe this too, that unless I believed, I should not understand" (Copleston, 156).

Anselm practiced the application of dialectic to the data of theology, taking a then popular form of argument to an interesting extreme, since dialectical arguments care more for their procedure and their appeals to the ancients than for the accuracy of their eventual knowledge--it is as if by proving something without logical contradiciton the thing becomes true, later seen in his ontological proof for God. This is evident in Anselm's Aristotelian views. “The judgment or proposition states what actually exists or denies what does not exist, the thing signified being the cause of the truth, the truth itself residing in the judgment (correspondence-theory)”(164).

Anselm came from his Augustinian and Aristotelian traditions and carved out a new dominant intellectual landscape. Then the nature of thought and cognition were situated in the middle ages between the antithetical views of realism (the universals, universalia, are real, realia) and nominalism (the universals are mere names, nomina). In this way Anselm was against the "modern dialecticians" and nominalist thinkers and firmly on the side of realism (Jaspers, 111).

Anslem's focused realism in arguing for God led to Scholasticism, the dominant intellectual movement among philosophers and theologians, of which Anselm is sometimes considered the movement's beginning. The Scholastic movement preferred “judgment over facts” and “authority before reason” (Turner). Philosophy had, before Anselm, been more diversion than discipline. As Aristotle became more and more important to the church leaders, philosophy became less and less of a mere theological tool (note that I am not positing a causal link here).

“In Anselm are found that recognition of the relation of reason to revealed truth, and that attempt to elaborate a rational system of faith, which form the special characteristics of scholastic thought” (Turner). He is working from faith, trying to make faith clear to reason…Logic was still being used with philosophy, as any tool for thinking might be, but faith was considered more mysterious than logic could process. Plato, Aristotle and Augustine were still important, but Scholasticism with its logic was becoming the prememinent tool of the philosophers, more so even than appeal to the ancients (Marenbon).

Henry of Ghent

Henry of Ghent, for instance, was strongly influenced by Augustinian and Aristotelian thought. More accurately, he combined a Platonist metaphysics with Aristotelian epistemology (Marrone).

Scholasticism was in full flower by Henry of Ghent’s time, and he is also considered a scholastic philosopher. There were other intellectual forces at work, though (Cobban).

Jacques Le Goff argues in his Intellectuals in the Middle Ages that the commercial and urban revolution of the twelfth through fifteenth centuries made possible as a craft and career the ‘medieval intellectual.’ Market practices and guild structure of artisan workers helped town schools develop alongside ecclesiastical schools. Scholarship became a potential career. Students fees and the sale of a person’s thoughts became a way of making a living (Courtenay).

Though influenced by Augustine and Aristotle, Henry was neither Augustinian or Aristotelian (Copleston, 465). Henry accepts the Augustinian doctrine of divine illumination so he rejects Aristotle’s ideas being formed by reflection on sense experience (466). He also denies the Platonic doctrine of innatism and reminiscence (466). He even displays some Ockhamist tendencies in that he has no principle of individuation because a thing is individual by the very fact that it exists (467).

This is a more Platonic tradition of Christianity than Aristotelian and Augustinian, a metaphysic of essences, not a concrete metaphysics (473). Eventually this would be read as a simplification technique, as in nominalism and skepticism, that would affect even Ockham. Henry can then be seen not merely as a part of the Scholastic movement, but even as an intermediary between the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries (474).

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