Renaissance Aristotelianism OSKAR KRISTELLER, PAUL Greek, Roman and Byzantine Studies; Summer 1965; 6, 2; Proquest Pg
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Renaissance Aristotelianism OSKAR KRISTELLER, PAUL Greek, Roman and Byzantine Studies; Summer 1965; 6, 2; ProQuest pg. 157 Renaissance Aristotelianism Paul Oskar Kristeller HEN we try to understand the historical significance of W Renaissance Aristotelianism, we have to face very great difficulties. The number of its representatives and the variety of their views seems to defy any common description, and this situation is further complicated by the persistent attack to which the school was subjected from different quarters. Moreover, the Aristotel ians were in many ways influenced by ideas and methods that origin ated outside their own tradition, and on the other hand, most of the avowed opponents of Aristotelianism were more deeply influenced by it than they knew. We must add that Renaissance Aristotelianism has been neglected by most historians and is still unexplored in many of its sectors. Humanism and Platonism have long been considered peculiar to the Renaissance period, and their mediaeval antecedents have but recently received some scholarly attention. Aristotelianism, on the other hand, is so clearly a heritage and continuation of the mediaeval period that most scholars concerned with the Renaissance have tended to treat it as an unimportant residue of the preceding age and have uncritically repeated the charges made against it by its Renaissance opponents, whereas most students of mediaeval philos ophy have focused their attention on the twelfth and thirteenth centuries and have tended to sacrifice the supposedly decadent scholasticism of the following centuries to the scorn of its enemies. Thus Renaissance Aristotelianism is a historical phenomenon which we are just beginning to understand in its proper significance.1 The intrinsic importance and historical influence of Aristotle are such an obvious fact that we may be surprised to learn that during the later centuries of classical antiquity his authority and influence were 1 B. Nardi, Sigieri di Brabante nel pensiero del Rinascimento italiano (Rome 1945); Saggi sull'Aristotelismo Padovano dal secolo XIV al XVI (Florence 1958); John H. Randall Jr, The School of Padua and the Emergence of Modern Science (Padua 1961); The Career of Philosophy (New York 1962) 65-88, 284-307; see also P. O. Kristeller, Renaissance Thought (New York 1961); Renaissance Thought II (New York 1965). 157 158 RENAISSANCE ARISTOTELIANISM rather limited and certainly inferior to that of Plato or the Stoics. His major philosophical writings had a limited circulation, and where as his school flourished down to the second century A.D., when his commentator Alexander of Aphrodisias was active, his teachings did not receive much detailed attention outside the precincts of this school. Aristotle's work was studied much more closely after the third century in the Neoplatonic school, which advocated a synthesis of Plato and Aristotle and produced a large number of substantial commentaries on Aristotle's works. Yet the ancient Roman writers knew comparatively little about Aristotle, and only some of his logical works were translated into Latin by Boethius and thus were known to Western readers during the early Middle Ages. In the Byzantine East, Aristotle was known and studied through the medi aeval centuries, but his authority never surpassed that of Plato, nor was the study of his thought ever separated from the study of classical Greek poetry and literature. It was only among the mediaeval Arabic thinkers that Aristotle emerged as the chief philosophical authority. When the Arabs began to translate many writings of Greek antiquity, they completely omitted the fields of theology, history, poetry and literary prose and concentrated only on philosophy and on the sciences, especially medicine, mathematics and astronomy, as well as astrology, alchemy and the other occult sciences. To the Arabs, the writings of Aristotle recommended themselves for several reasons: Aristotle's authority had been established by the Neoplatonic school and its commentators, with which the Arabs became most directly acquainted; Aristotle was admired by Galen, the chief medical authority; finally, the corpus of Aristotle's works represented as it were a complete encyclopaedia of the philosophical and some scientific disciplines, rich in content, solid in presentation and systematic in its arrangement, and hence very suitable for instruction and exposition. Thus Arabic philosophy developed largely on the basis of Aristotle, with a certain amount of admixture from Neoplatonism, and the two most influential Arabic philosophers of the Middle Ages, Avicenna in the eleventh and Averroes in the twelfth century, were also the leading mediaeval commentators on the writings of Aristotle. Mediaeval Western thought and learning up to the eleventh century was of a rather elementary and encyclopaedic character and centered PAUL OSKAR KRIST ELLER 159 around the so-called seven liberal arts,2 which included some ele mentary logic but none of the other philosophical disciplines. The rise of scholasticism after the middle of the eleventh century involved a steady increase and expansion of philosophical and scientific interests, which were nourished at first by Plato's Timaeus,3 by the works of Augustine and by other ancient Latin sources, but which gradually developed in different directions, a development that came to a climax during the thirteenth century. The study of logic prevailed over that of grammar as the basis of all advanced learning, and instruction in the schools began to focus on two chief forms of ex pression which also produced the two chief types of mediaeval learned literature: the lectura, that is the reading and interpretation in class of a standard text book, which produced the commentary; and the disputatio, the public debate of a proposed thesis on the basis of closely reasoned arguments pro and con, which produced the quaestio and the collections of questions such as the summae. Furthermore, new institutions of higher learning, the universities, offered instruction not only in the seven arts, but in the additional, more advanced and more specialized disciplines of theology, jurisprudence, medicine and philosophy. Finally, a large body of philosophical and scientific writings were translated into Latin from Arabic and Greek that greatly surpassed in quantity and substance anything in those fields that had been available to Roman antiquity or to the Early Middle Ages.4 In the philosophical disciplines, the writings of Aristotle and of his Arabic commentators were by far the most important body of material included in these new translations, and it is not at all sur prising that they should have been adopted, after some initial resistance, as the chief textbooks of philosophical instruction at the 2 The seven liberal arts were grammar, rhetoric, dialectic, arithmetic, geometry, astronomy and music. For the history of the scheme, see Kristeller, Renaissance Thought II 172-174. 8 A large part of this work was known to the Middle Ages through the translation and commentary of Chalcidius. See Timaeus a Calcidio translatus commentarioque instructus, ed. J. H. Waszink (London and Leyden 1962). , M. Stein schneider, Die europaeischen Uebersetzungen aus dem Arabischen bis Mitte des 17. Jahrhunderts (Graz 1956); J. T. Muckle, "Greek Works Translated Directly into Latin before 1350," Mediaeval Studies 4 (1942) 33-42; 5 (1943) 102-114; A. Pelzer in M. de Wulf, Histoire de fa philosophie medievafe6 I (Lou vain 1934) 64-80; II (1936) 25-58; Aristoteies Latinus, Codices, ed. G. Lacombe and others, 2 vols. (Rome 1939 and Cambridge 1955) and Supple menta Alura, ed. L. Minio-Paluello (Bruges and Paris 1961). 7-G.R.B.S. 160 RENAISSANCE ARISTOTELIANISM universities of the thirteenth century.5 The prevalence of Aristotelian ism over Augustinianism during that period was closely related to this institutional fact, that is, to the adoption of Aristotle's works as text , ; books in the courses on logic and natural philosophy, in ethics and metaphysics. This fact is still reflected in our names for some of the philosophical and scientific disciplines which are called after the titles of Aristotelian writings, such as physics and metaphysics, ethics, politics and economics. This institutional background accounts also for some of the characteristic features which distinguished the Aristotelian tradition during the following centuries. Since the writings of Aristotle and of his commentators were the prescribed textbooks in the philosophical disciplines, teachers and students would derive from them a common terminology, a number of common basic conceptions, and an even greater number of regularly discussed problems. The school tradition of the lectura and the disputatio also produced a special type of formalized reasoning and of accumulated arguments that is known as the scholastic method, a method that was not peculiar to Aristotelian philosophy, but had its counterparts in other branches of mediaeval learning such as theology or juris prudence. Finally, since Aristotle is ambiguous or inconsistent or silent on many important philosophical issues, and since already his Greek and Arabic commentators had disagreed on the proper inter pretation of many important passages, the Aristotelian philosophy of the thirteenth century and of the following centuries is by no means uniform, but represents a great variety of opinions on a great variety of special issues. Students of mediaeval and Renaissance philosophy tried for a long time to keep the complicated historical facts under control and to classify the Aristotelian philosophers according to their allegiance to certain commentators or according to their stand on a few major issues; hence we read a good deal about Thomism, Scotism and Occamism, A verroism and Alexandrism. 6 Yet a closer reading of individual authors shows that the variety of views and issues is much greater than one might expect from most secondary accounts, that hardly any thinker gave his undivided allegiance to a single com mentator, and that the alignments tend to shift a good deal when we 6 F. van Steenberghen, Aristote en Occident (Louvain 1946); Aristotle in the West (Louvain 1955). 6 F.