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Idealism in Medieval Philosophy: the Case Ofjohannes Scottus Eriugena

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Idealism in Medieval Philosophy: the Case Ofjohannes Scottus Eriugena Medieval Philosophy and Theology 8 (1999), 53-82. Printed in the United States of America. r Copyright © 2000 Cambridge University Press 1057-0608 Idealism in Medieval Philosophy: The Case ofJohannes Scottus Eriugena DERMOT MORAN University College Dublin In this article I wish to re-examine the vexed issue of the possibility of ideal­ ism in ancient and medieval philosophy with particular reference to the case. of Johannes Scottus Eriugena (c. 800-c. 877), the Irish Neoplatonic Chris­ tian philosopher- Both Bernard Williams and Myles Burnyeat have argued that idealism never emerged (and for Burnyeat, could not have emerged) as a genuine philosophical position in antiquity, a claim that has had wide currency in recent years, and now constitutes something of an orthodoxy.! Richard Sorabji (instancing Gregory of Nyssa) and Werner Beierwaltes (citing Proclus and Eriugena), and E)j6lfur !qalar Emilsson (discussing Plotinus), on the other hand, have all argued that idealism is to be found in the Neoplatonic tradition, a tradition neglected by Burnyeat.2 Similarly, in a Earlier versions of this paper have been read at the University of Connecticut at Storrs (1992), Columbia University (1992), The XX World Congress of Philoso­ phy in Moscow (1993), the Thomas Institut, Cologne (1997), the Ruhr-Universitat Bochum (1997), and at the University of Notre Dame (1999). I am grateful for the comments of members of the seminars in these institutions, especially Stephen Brown, Andreas Speer, Theo Kobusch, Philip Quinn, Stephen Gersh, and Ernan McMullin. 1. Myles Burnyeat, "Idealism and Greek Philosophy: What Descartes Saw and Berkeley Missed," Philosophical Review 91 (1982): 3-40, repro in Godfrey Vesey, ed., Idealism-Past and Present (Cambridge: Cambridge U .P., 1982), pp. 19-50. Hereafter this essay will be cited in the version printed in Vesey, ed. 2. Richard Sorabji, "Gregory of Nyssa: The Origins of Idealism," in Time, Creation and Continuum. Theories in Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages (London: Duckworth, 1983), pp. 287-96; Werner Beierwaltes, Denken des Einen. Studien zur neuplatonischen Philosophie and ihrer Wirkungsgeschichte (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1985). See also Beierwaltes, "Die Wiederentdeckung des Eriugena im Deutschen Idealismus," in Platonismus und Idealismus (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1972), pp. 188-201, and his "Zur Wirkungsgeschichte Eriugenas im Deutschen Idealismus und I danach. Eine kurze, unsystematische Nachlese," in Eriugena. Grundziige seines Denkens (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1994), pp. 313-330. EY.i6lfur ~alar Emilsson, "Cognition and its Object," in Lloyd P. Gerson, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Plotinus (Cambridge: Cambridge U.P., 1996), pp. 217-49, esp. pp. 245-49. But see, Lloyd P. Gerson, Plotinus (London: Routledge, 1994), p. 227, n.3, who maintains that Plotinus is not an idealiSt. 53 ... 54 DERMOT MORAN IDEALISM IN MEDIEVAL PHILOSOPHY 55 1989. study, I.argue~ not o~ly that idealism was a genuine possibility in late and in this sense, intellection precedes being. The result is a system far c~assIcal. and m medIeval phIlos.ophy, but that that the ninth-century Carolin­ removed from the supposed realism of the ancients. gIan phIlos?pher Johannes E~lUg~na ~resents a striking example of an ex­ tremely radIcal, almost fantastICal, Ideahsm.3 Of course, the whole discussion ?epends. e~tirely o~ what is meant by 'idealism'. Burnyeat uses Berkeley's MYLES BURNYEAT'S OBJECTION ImmaterIalIsm as hIS standard for idealism, and it is this decision,col1pled with his failure to acknowledge the legacy of German idealism which pre­ vents him from seeing the classical and medieval roots of id~alism more In his influential article, first published in 1982 in Philosophical Review, Myles broadly understood. Burnyeat has argued that Contrary to Burnyeat, I wish to argue that an idealism based on a developed concept of subjectivity and a thinking through of the implica­ Idealism, whether we mean by that Berkeley's own doctrine that esse est tions of divine immateriality was not only possible in the Middle Ages but percipi or a more vaguely conceived thesis to the effect that everything found actual and sophisticated expression in Johannes Scottus Eriugena. is in some substantial sense mental or spiritual, is one of the very few Eriugena's extreme intellectualist immaterialism differs from modern major philosophical positions which did not receive its first formulation idealism in that it is motivated not so much by epistemological consideration in antiquity. (Vesey, p. 19) of sceptical arguments concerning the existence of the external world, but by theological consideration of the consequences of the doctrine of divine In support of this claim Burnyeat cites Bernard Williams's survey article creation. How is the relation of creation to creator to be understood? reviewing the Greek contribution to philosophy, which likewise asserts that Burnyeat charges that the Greek (including the Neoplatonic) concept of idealism, understood as "the monism of mind, which holds that nothing creation always involved an imposition of form on matter (Vesey, p. 31), ultimately exists except minds and their experiences" was not found in the whereas it seems to me that one of the most obvious concerns of the Greek ancient world.5 For Burnyeat, all dassical Greek philosophy was primarily Patristic writers was to articulate a concept of creation which avoided the realist: the Greeks had an unquestioned, "in built assumption of realism" form/matter paradigm. These Greek authors developed a new paradigm­ (Vesey, p. 33). With the possible exception of Gorgias, all ancient Greek creation as self-expression or self-manifestation, creation as theophany. Simi­ philosophers supposedly agreed that larly, as we shall see, Eriugena, who mediates this Greek Christian tradition in the Latin West, understands divine creation as a kind of self-creation [t]here is a reality of some sort confronting us; we are in touch with itself understood as a kind of eternal self-intellection or self-thinking. God'~ something, even if this something, reality, is not at all what we think it first act is His self-constitution as manifest being, an act which coincides to be. Greek philosophy does not know the problem of proving in a with the overflowing or outgoing of the divine nature in the creation of all general way the existence of an external world. That problem is a modern invention. (Vesey, pp. 32-33) things. God's self-expression is also His self-manifestation in the world of causes and effects, and this is understood by Eriugena to be a necessary part In particular Burnyeat rejects the view that Platonism is an idealism, of the divine unfolding. In the tradition of Eriugena, as later in Eckhart's and he maintains that George Berkeley was both anachronistic and "utterly Parisian Lectures, being understood as form is the product of a kind of mistaken" when, in his late work Siris §311 (1744), he interpreted Plato, on self-consciousness or self-reflection. The very nature of reality is ap­ the strength of a passage in Theaetetus 160b, as an idealist who denied, in proached through the paradigm of reflexive self-consciousness, often ex­ Berkeley'S own words, "an absolute actual existence of sensible or corporeal presse~ i~ te~ms of .the. inne~ relations between the Persons of the Trinity, things" (Vesey, pp. 19-20).6 Burnyeat agues against Berkeley that Plato is and thIS IS .dIrectly mime WIth the German Idealist tradition, specifically ~egel. 4 ThIS Neoplatonic Christian idealism expressly emphasises the para­ dIgm of self-knowing or self-awareness as the founding, thetic, cosmic act. God's self-understanding is the prime mover in the creation of the universe 5. Bernard Williams, "Philosophy," in M. I. Finley, ed., The Legacy of Greece. A , New Appraisal (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981), pp. 204-5. Burnyeat acknowledges Williams's influence, Vesey, p. 19, n.!. 3. Dermot Moran, The Philosophy ofJohn Scottus Enugena. A Study of Idealism in 6. For a discussion of Berkeley's Sins in relation to Plotinus, see N. Baladi, the MzddleAges (Cambridge: Cambridge U.P., 1989). "Plotin et Berkeley: Temoignage de la Sins," Revue Internationale de Philosophie 91 4. See B.eierwaltes, "Das Problem des absoluten SelbstbewuBtseins beiJohan­ (1970): 338-47, and "Plotin et l'immathialisme de Berkeley: Temoignage de la nes Scotus Ern~gena," in Beierwaltes, ed., Platonismus in der Philosophie des Mittelalters Sins," in Atti del Convegno internazionale suI tema Plotino e il Neoplatonismo in Oriente e (Darmstadt: Wlssenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1969), pp. 484-516. in Occidente (Rome: Ateneo Press 1974), pp. 597-604. -----,--- ; 56 DERMOT MORAN IDEALISM IN MEDIEVAL PHILOSOPHY 57 not presenting his own views in the passage but is merely offering a reductio (B274).7 Kant dismissed Berkeley's immaterialism as a subjective or dogmatic ad absurdum of the view that perception is knowledge. idealism which inevitably resulted from attempting to understand space Burnyeat's article, though provocative and richly suggestive, is prob­ and time as things in themselves.8 In place of subjective idealism (which lematic in many ways. In particular, his frame of reference is limited and his is really a kind of naIve realism) Kant offered his critical or transcendental conclusion is overstated. Part of Burnyeat' s problem is that he assumes that idealism. Kant then is, to a certain extent, agreeing with Burnyeat in seeing realist and idealist are oppositional terms. While Burnyeat is undoubtedly the essence of this kind of idealism as connected with the conception of correct that the ancients, by and large, were realists in the sense that they spatial properties as belonging to things as they are in themselves. But did not repudiate the existence of external things, nevertheless, their pecu­ Kant's transcendental idealism is a corrective to this view, and sees spatial liar kind of realism is not necessarily opposed to idealism, if by idealism we properties as belonging to things as they appear.
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