At the time of Boethius' death, pagan Greek philosophy had not entirely ended: the schools of Athens and Alexandria were still active.
In the last century, the leader of the School of Athens was the diligent and learned Proclus, who was said to be able to produce lectures and 700 lines of philosophical prose every day.
Proclus wrote commentaries on several dialogues of Plato and an encyclopedic work on Plotinus. Elements of his theology serve even in modern times as a convenient compendium for Neoplatonism.
Proclus' system was based on Plotinus' trinity of oneness, mind and soul, but he developed Plotinus' ideas through the multiplication of the triads and a general theory of their operation.
There is a development process in each triplet. From the original element of the Trinity arises a new element which shares its nature but which is nevertheless separate from it. This new element is both present in its origin, continues beyond it, and returns to it. The development law of
governs the massive proliferation of triad and . Starting from the original one, there are some divine units (gods).
The Henad people jointly created the world of the soul, which is divided into the realms of existence, life and thought. In the next lower world, the world of spirits, Proclus provided a home for the traditional gods of the pagan pantheon.
The visible world we live in is the work of these divine souls who are blessed to guide it.
For Proclus, human beings straddle the three worlds of soul, heart and one. As a union with our animal bodies, the human soul expresses itself in Eros, focusing on earthly beauty.
But it also has an immortal, ethereal body made of light. It therefore goes beyond the love of beauty to the pursuit of truth, a pursuit that brings it into contact with the ideal reality of the spiritual world.
But it has a higher power than thought, and it unites it to the only one through mystical ecstasy.
The theory of the Triad has some similarities with the Christian doctrine of the Trinity, but in fact Proclus, although a believer in many superstitions, was strongly hostile to Christianity.
In fact, he is said to have written eighteen separate refutations of the Christian doctrine of creation. Despite this, many of his ideas entered the mainstream of Christian thought through indirect channels. Boethius himself often used his work, even if not acknowledged.
A contemporary Christian Neoplatonist produced a series of treatises inspired by Proclus as the works of Dionysius, an assistant to St. Paul in Athens. Another channel through which Proclus's ideas penetrated medieval philosophy was a book known as the Dictionary of Caussis, circulated under the name Aristotle. Even Thomas Aquinas, who knew the book was not true, had great respect for it.
In fifth-century Alexandria, where there was a powerful Christian bishop, pagan philosophy was more mystical than in Athens. Hypatia, a female Neoplatonic mathematician and astronomer, stood out in the world of men's philosophy just as Sappho stood out in the world of men's poetry.
While Augustine was writing The City of the Gods of Hippopotamus, Hypatia was torn to pieces by a fanatical Christian mob in Alexandria (AD 415).
The most important philosopher of the last days of the Alexandrian school was Ammonius, a contemporary of Boethius. As a teacher he was more able than a writer, and he owes his fame to his two most famous students, Simplicius and Philoponus.
Both philosophers lived during the reign of the emperor Justinian, who succeeded the Purple Dynasty in 527, two or three years after Boethius' execution.
Justinian is the most famous Byzantine emperor, known as a conqueror and lawgiver.His generals conquered much of the former Western European empire and unified it for a time under the rule of Constantinople.
His jurists collected all existing imperial decrees and regulations and rationalized them into a single code, appended with a summary of legal commentaries. The Civil Code enacted during his reign governed most European countries until modern times.
However, Justinian's reign was not as conducive to philosophy as it was to jurisprudence. The School of Athens continued Proclus's anti-Christian neo-Platus tradition, which made it unpopular in the empire.
Simplicius was one of the last scholars to decorate the school. He devoted a great deal of knowledge to writing commentaries on Aristotle, and he was anxious to make his teachings consistent with the ideas of Plato as interpreted in late antiquity.
Descendants of scholars are in debt, for in the course of this enterprise he drew extensively on the ancestors of his predecessors, and are the source of many of the fragments we have survived of them.
In 529 AD, Justinian closed the school while Simplicius was still working there. In Gibbon's words, his decree "imposed a permanent silence upon the schools of Athens, and excited the grief and anger of the few remaining adherents of Greek science and superstition."
Philoponus also survived under Justinian, but for different reasons. Simplicius was a pagan philosopher from Athens, while Philoponus was a Christian philosopher from Alexandria. Simplicius was Aristotle's most ardent admirer in antiquity, and Philoponus his harshest critic.
Where previous philosophers either ignored Aristotle (like the Epicureans and Stoics) or interpreted him (like the Neoplatonists), Philoponus knew him well and attacked him head on.
As a Christian, Philoponus rejected the doctrine of the eternity of the world and overturned the arguments of Aristotle and Proclus that the world had no beginning.
He attacked Aristotle's entire physics, rejecting the theory of natural motions and natural positions, denying that the heavenly bodies were governed by physical principles different from those obtained below.
It was consistent with his Christian piety to overthrow the world of the sun, moon and stars as something supernatural and different from the God of the earth on which his fellow humans lived.
Philoponus wrote a treatise on Christian doctrine and a commentary on Aristotle. They were not welcomed by the Orthodox, who believed that his treatment of the doctrine of the Trinity justified his belief in three gods.
What is surprising is that he embraced the Platonic belief that the human soul exists before conception; even more surprising is that this belief of his did not seem to bother his Christian brethren.
But like many previous Alexandrian Christians, he was a single person, believing that there was only one single nature in the incarnation of Christ, not two natures, human and divine, as the Council of Chalcedon had demonstrated. He was summoned to Constantinople by the emperor to defend his view of the Incarnation, but did not answer the summons.
Philoponus lived several years longer than Justinian, but was condemned after his death for his heretical teachings on the Trinity. He was the last outstanding philosopher of the ancient world, and philosophy went into hibernation for two centuries after his death.
Between 600 and 800 the former Roman Empire shrank to only Greece, the Balkans, and parts of Asia Minor. Intellectual talents were chiefly spent in theological controversies.
The Unitarian Church to which John Philoponos belonged was excluded from the Eucharist by the Orthodox, who believed that Christ was not one but two in nature, human and divine.
In the seventh century, emperors and patriarchs attempted to reunite Christian communities, agreeing that even though Christ had two natures, he had only one will; or, even though he had two wills, one human and one divine, the two were united in one willing activity, one reality, or energy.
Any such concessions were strongly resisted by a retired imperial governor named Maximus, who wrote extensively against "monocratism," the doctrine of a single will.
The next century's theological debate was over the worship of images or icons. One can expect that iconoclastic arguments will make interesting contributions to semiotics, that is, to the philosophical theory of signs. But from a brief survey of the literature, this hope seems futile.
Successor of Charlemagne's empire and Abbasid's court in Muslim Baghdad . The main philosophers of the revival movement were John the Scotsman in the West and Ibn Sina (Avicenna) in the East.
John was born in Ireland in the first decades of the 9th century. He is not to be mistaken for the more famous John Duns Scotus, who died in the 14th century.
There is no doubt that there were two medieval philosophers named John of Scots, which is confusing. To make matters even more confusing, one of them is Irish while the other is actually British.
The ninth-century philosopher, to avoid suspicion, gave himself the name Eregina, meaning son of Irene.
By 851, Eriugina had migrated from Ireland to the court of Charlemagne's grandson, Charles the Bald. Charles wanted to rename Kalepolis after the model of Constantinople. Charles loved Greek and the astonishingly learned Eleuthena, who mastered Greek (no one knows where), won his favor and wrote him many poems in this language.
He taught liberal arts at court for some time, but his interests began to turn to philosophy. Once, commenting on an article on the boundaries of grammar and logic, he wrote: "No one enters heaven except through philosophy."
In 851 AD, at the invitation of Archbishop Sinkma of Reims, Eliugina First wrote an article refuting the thoughts of the learned and pessimistic monk Gottschalk.
Gottschalk has solved the problem of Augustin leaving his destination. He reportedly deduced from Augustine's text something generally implicit about sinners and saints who prey on their fate.
He taught that not only was the final fate of God in heaven predestined, but that the damned were doomed to hell even before they were conceived.
To Archbishop Hincmar this doctrine of double predestination seemed heretical, at least, as did the monks of Augustine's time, who considered it a doctrine inimical to good monastic discipline: sinners might conclude that since their fate had been sealed long ago, there was no point in giving up sin.
Therefore, he invited Eliugina to put down Gottschalk.
Regardless of whether Gottschalk was accurately reported, from Hinkma's perspective, Eliugina's rebuttal of his supposedly heretical claims was worse than disease.
Eliugina's argument is weak, and in attacking the destination of the damned, he undermines the destination of the blessed. There can be no double destiny, he said, because God is simple and indivisible; there is no such thing as destiny, because God is eternal.
The first argument is not persuasive because if double predestination threatens God's simplicity, then so is the distinction between predestination and foreknowledge, a favorite solution of Gottschalk's opponents.
The second argument does not provide an ideal motive for sinners' repentance, since whatever temporal qualification we attribute to God's determination of our destiny is, according to Augustine, of course independent of any choice on our part.
Although Eriugina often quoted Scripture, his system was closer to pagan Neoplatonism than to traditional Christian thought, and it is not surprising that the Nature was ultimately condemned by ecclesiastical authorities.
1 In 2225, Pope Honorius III ordered all existing copies of the work to be sent to Rome to be burned.
But the legend remembers him well.The story is often told of Bald Charles asking him what Scotch and alcoholic eggs were at dinner, and the answer he got was "Only this table." At one time, Oxford University incredibly revered him as its founder.
References:
"History of Western Philosophy"
"Ancient Greek Philosophy" Miao Litian
"Greek and Roman Philosophy" edited by David Sedley
"A Brief History of Greek Philosophy"
