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~~ Giving itself latitude and leisure to take any premise or inquiry to its furthest associative conclusion.
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Friday, April 29, 2011

Why the dark age looks dark?


Every once in a while I grumble about the division of philosophy into "eras." I am one who errs on the side of regarding philosophers as contemporaries. I don't disregard history, "influence," "development," and so on, but I tend to believe Heidegger and Ockham and Plotinus and Sankhara would be able to understand each other (enough to have real arguments). Of course, this "understanding" must overcome all sorts of obstacles and can only occur now (unless there really is a Limbo somewhere, like Dante and Santayana envisioned, in which all these wise folk are forever discoursing) in the work of their descendants, i.e., you and me. This is one reason why scholarship remains pertinent to philosophy.

One of the worst symptoms of this chronological apartheid is the invention of the Dark Ages and other tremendous gaps in the standard histories. For the sake of the argument I'll just stay with the usual narrative that starts things up in Greece, because at least here we can say confidently that there is cultural continuity, whereas the influence of Chinese or Indian thinking on the west is more difficult to demonstrate. These standard accounts usually begin with Thales or someone, move fairly quickly to Socrates and Plato and Aristotle, then gloss over everyone till we get to St Paul with some hurried words about "schools" of Stoics and Epicureans and Skeptics. After Paul we again make haste to our quick date with St Augustine, after which, nodding to Boethius, we step into our time-machine and, mating our mixaphors, pole-vault over more than a millennium to Bacon and then Descartes. We may glance downward while in flight and see someone, usually St Thomas Aquinas, doing something-or-other and maybe William of Ockham shaking his head. Once on the ground again we go down the line, Rationalism (Descartes, Leibniz, Spinoza), Empiricism (Locke, Hume), Idealism (Berekley), the Transcendental move (Kant), and so on to Hegel and his various inversions (Marx, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche) and Frege before we split again into Continental (Husserl, Heidegger and so on via deconstruction) and Analytic (Russell, Wittgenstein, Quine and so on via modal logic).

I realize that my account of this travesty is itself a travesty. I know that a good teacher of history can convey a sense of how complex and tangled these chains are. I recognize that not all centuries are equally interesting to any other, and thus that there is some justification for compression. Moreover, to complain about gaps, especially in "survey" courses and the like, is to be a pedantic bore. You may thus skip if you wish the upcoming list, which is a partial enumeration of significant names of those left out of just one of the gaps. This is the one from about the 6th century to the 11th. I was inspired to make this list one day while reading John Deely's Four Ages of Understanding, where he writes that
The closest thing to a truly dark period in the so-called dark ages runs from the execution of Boethius in 524 down to the eleventh century work of Anselm, Abelard, and Peter Lombard. During this time what was left of ancient Roman educational structures in the western Empire crumbled to dust, and the nascent monastery and clerical schools took time to gestate a new educational blooming.
Deely is one of the most scrupulous of scholars when it comes to attending to continuity of tradition, and I think he is right that beginning with Anselm we really can trace a more or less continuous conversation down to the present day. Continuity is only one of my interests, though. Looking at the stream of European philosophy/theology and its immediate tributaries, it's painfully clear that a great deal is omitted even from a history that attends to scholasticism, if it breaks off with Boethius and picks up with Anselm. (In the passage immediately following, Deely acknowledges three of these names (Ps.-Dionysus, Alcuin, and Erigena), and elsewhere makes use of Priscian.)

Boethius
Pseudo-Dionysus (5th-6th c.)
Leontius of Byzantium (5th-6th c.)
Cassiodorus Senator (6th c.)
Gregory I ("the Great") (6th c)
Isidore of Seville (6th c.)
Priscian Caesariensis (6th c.)
Ildefonsus of Toledo (7th c.)
John Climacus (7th c.)
Isaac the Syrian (7th c.)
Stephen of Alexandria (7th c.)
Maximus Confessor (7th c.)
John Damascene (7th c.)
The Venerable Bede (7th-8th c.)
Alcuin of York (8th c.)
Simeon Kayyara (8th c.)
Photios of Constantinople (9th c.)
John Scotus Eriugena (9th c.)
Ishaq al-Kindi (9th c.)
David al-Mukkamas (9th-10th c.)
Zakariya al-Razi (10th c.)
Abu Nasr al-Farabi (10th c.)
Saadia Gaon (10th c.)
Muhammad ibn Hazm (10th c.)
Symeon the New Theologian (10th c.)
Anselm of Canterbury

Most of these figures are at least nominal Christians (quite a few are saints). A few are Islamic of Jewish thinkers (I have actually omitted a great number of figures, especially of the Jewish Savoraim and Geonim), but I take it as uncontroversial that their traditions fed into the main stream of the western philosophical tradition whose history is at issue here. I am leaving aside the other question of the legitimacy of the narrative that centers around "the [Christian] west". (This post was originally inspired by one by Tim Morton on al-Razi.) These names are of varying degrees of obscurity, but I take it that at least Maximus, Erigena, and al-Farabi ought to be common knowledge.

One of the issues that arises in considering a list like this is that many of the thinkers included are more typically considered jurists, scholars, grammarians, educators, and above all exegetes and theologians. The question arises then: to what extent is the invention of "the dark ages," at least in histories of western philosophy, a function of the (anachronistic?) separation of philosophy and religion? For even the tensions and polemics between these are are not, in the Middle Ages, framed in the same way as the modern distinction which puts them in separate university departments where they can safely ignore each other. To fight like al-Ghazali and ibn Rushd, you have to be up close and personal.

7 comments:

  1. Greetings sir. I have been getting a large number of hits coming from this blog for some time, and thought I would pay a visit.

    >>we step into our time-machine and, mating our mixaphors, pole-vault over more than a millennium to Bacon and then Descartes.

    Any student of medieval thought will recognise this as a travesty. On the other hand, I am wholly opposed to the modern sort of relativism which has every century the equal of every other. After the fall of Rome, and after the thought of Boethius and Augustine, we really have very little until Anselm. Even his period is rather thin until we get to the thirteenth century.

    >>to what extent is the invention of "the dark ages," at least in histories of western philosophy, a function of the (anachronistic?) separation of philosophy and religion?

    The term as used now means roughly the period from the fall of Rome in the West, to the Carolingian renaissance. There is no doubt that this period was very, very dark. (although we owe it to the monasteries of both the West and Eastern empires that any of the ancient learning was preserved at all).

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  2. Edward, welcome aboard, and thank you. Glad yo are getting some well-deserved traffic from hereabouts.

    You write,
    I am wholly opposed to the modern sort of relativism which has every century the equal of every other.

    Yes, while I tend to err on this side, it is in the interests of a genuine catholicity. It is important to make special efforts to not ignore parts of the past precisely because the present looms so large that it easily sets the agenda for thought simply by default.

    The term ["dark age"] as used now means roughly the period from the fall of Rome in the West, to the Carolingian renaissance. There is no doubt that this period was very, very dark.

    The Carolingian renaissance would cut the period I list above roughly in half. But even pushing things to Anselm, I don't mean to dispute that this was a hard time for the life of the mind (among other things!) My contention would be (1) that writing off any number of centuries as dark leads us to ignore some rather bright lights (however isolated and however far apart geographically or culturally), and (2) that there is always a measure of ideology, to use what may be the wrong word, in such evaluations. I don't say this makes the evaluations completely off-base. As far as I know Isaac the Syrian had no (direct) impact upon western theology for centuries thereafter, & there is obviously a difference between the halakhic work of the Geonim and the speculations of alKindi or the visions of St. Symeon. And certainly many of my figures come from the eastern empire which stayed standing (or beyond). But my post was intending to provoke, and I'm honored that you rose to the occasion.

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  3. Yes, that is exactly why we need scholars and scholarship - to preserve and to recognize what has been accomplished. Otherwise, everything is lost.

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  4. It's also why it is important for scholars themselves to remember what their task is, and why minutiae is always to be seen in the context of a vision. When I think about Boethius laboring to (almost single-handedly) preserve the ancient heritage, I am sometimes nearly moved to tears. But this is of course because I believe the ancient tradition was about something real. I certainly believe such things as (relatively) dark ages can occur -- sometimes I worry we are on the brink of one again. It will perhaps be different this time -- a deluge of trivia and "information" instead of barbarians; but superstition is still superstition.

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  5. I just found this http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OhARNW4l13g mentioned on another site, which is tangentially related, and seems useful.

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  6. I hate to comment so late here, but I think that part of the problem is that we Westerners have inherited a bias that regards the Christian West/Latin Catholicism as the heart of Christian civilization and ignores the Christian East/Greek and Syriac and Coptic Christianity, forgetting that such figures (who are many of those on your list here) even existed. Along with Byzantium and Syria, Mesopotamia was a major center of thought (including Jewish and Muslim thought) that Westerners today are inclined to forget. Perhaps this is because the late medieval/Rennaisance/Modern success story that begins roughly with Anselm, as you note, has made it seem as if things began anew with Latin thought, as if Greek thought had simply withered away by the time of Boethius, if not earlier.

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  7. Stephen,

    You write:

    "we Westerners have inherited a bias that regards the Christian West/Latin Catholicism as the heart of Christian civilization and ignores the Christian East/Greek and Syriac and Coptic Christianity, forgetting that such figures ...even existed.

    I wonder whether these & other excluded figures were excluded at the time, or whether this is a symptom of our later construal of history. I'm fairly sure that no one in Germany had heard of Isaac the Syrian, for instance, but the very existence of Erigena seems to indicate that there must have been roads by which learning made its way westward. In any case, even if we stipulate that the west "went dark" roughly between Augustine and Alcuin, and even if we are restricting ourselves to the tradition of philosophy which descends to us via Descartes, I take it that it still makes sense to be familiar with those streams of thought which later influenced us; thus we ought to know (e.g.) the roots of Islamic philosophy, which by any just standard was developed in dialogue with the Christianity of the eastern empire.

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