ФИЛОСОФИЯ СРЕДНЕВЕКОВАЯ ЗАПАДНОЕВРОПЕЙСКАЯ

Medieval Philosophy in Western Europe

Philosophy of the West European feudal society which developed from the fall of the Roman Empire (5th century) to the emergence of the early forms of capitalist society (14th–15th centuries). The collapse of antique slave society was attended by a decline of philosophy. The antique philosophical heritage was lost and was unknown to West European scholars until the latter half of the 12th century.

Religion was the dominant ideology—the Muslim in the Near East, Arabia, and the Arab-speaking countries, and two varieties of Christianity (Roman Catholicism and Greek Orthodoxy) in Europe. The school and education fell into the hands of the church, whose dogmas formed the basis of all notions about nature, the world, and man. The development of lay and clerical schools, and the establishment of the first universities in the mid-12th century (in Italy, England, Bohemia, and France) prompted philosophers to devise philosophical explanations, even justifications, for the religious dogmas. For a number of centuries, philosophy was thus the "handmaiden of theology".

This is the role it played in the hands of the apologists, the champions of Christianity against heathens, and then in the writings of the "Fathers of the Church". The most prominent of these, St. Augustine (354–430), introduced Neo-Platonism into the system of Christian philosophical doctrines. Eastern Neo-Platonists, such as Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite (5th century), were another Western source of Neo-Platonic influence adapted to the needs of the Christian ideology. Johannes Scotus Erigena, was prominent in formulating medieval philosophy.

In elucidating religious dogma, the medieval philosophers had to tackle the complex problems concerning the relation of the individual to the general, and the reality of the general. According to the way these problems were solved, scholasticism developed several points of views, the most prominent of which were the antagonistic doctrines of realism (see Realism, Medieval) and of nominalism. In the 12th century, Pierre Abelard opposed the extremism of both these schools of thought.

From the mid-12th century onward, the main writings of Aristotle were translated into Latin. The church received them with hostility at first, but soon the Aristotelian doctrines were recognised as the philosophical foundation of Christianity. The scholastics became interpreters and protagonists of Aristotle. They adapted Aristotelian ideas to their own religious and philosophical concepts, turned outworn aspects of the Aristotelian doctrine into dogma (e.g., the geocentric system, the principles of Aristotelian physics) and rejected all search for the new in science.

The chief protagonists of scholasticism in the 13th century were St. Albert the Great, Thomas Aquinas and John Duns Scotus. Thomas Aquinas was cannonised by the church which declared his teaching its official philosophical doctrine (see Neo-Thomism) in the latter half of the 19th century. A prominent contemporary of the three 13th century scholastics was Roger Bacon, who objected to the social basis of feudal society.

The development in the 13th century of medieval towns, the arts and crafts, commerce and trade routes, and the contacts with the East extended by the crusades, stimulated a certain uplift of philosophy, particularly of nominalism, whose most prominent protagonists were William of Occam and his followers of the Parisian school of Occamism. The ideological struggle proceeded not only within scholasticism. Opposed to the latter was mysticism, which placed the authority of the church and its doctrines beneath the testimony of man's senses and subjective consciousness.

In the spiritual life of feudal society, mysticism was often a form of opposition to the official and obligatory religion: the personal attitude of the believer to God grew into criticism of, and even struggle against, the feudal ideology and the feudal social system. But there was also a reactionary wing of mystics, such as Bernard of Clairvaux and Bonaventure. A strong anti-scholastic movement emerged in the 13th century, fructified by the teaching of Averroes on the mortality of man's soul and of a reason common to all. These notions were courageously developed in the University of Paris by Siger of Brabant, a fighter against scholasticism, who was assassinated in 1282.

The Dominican and Franciscan orders were founded in the early 12th century to fight against heresies, anti-clericalism, and the new philosophical ideas. In the 12th century, the scholars of these two orders carried out the project of Pope Gregory IX, "correcting" the teaching of Aristotle to suit the Catholic ideology.

Despite the relative uplift of medieval philosophy in the 13th century, the results of its more than one thousand years of development were meagre both for philosophy and for science, because even the great thinkers were less concerned with the truth than with ways and means of justifying religion; the clerical regime of medieval society fettered the initiative and thought of those who were audacious enough to go beyond its hidebound framework. It was not until the appearance of the new, capitalist mode of production and the new appreciation of the practical and theoretical tasks of science that the thinking of the foremost men of Western Europe was gradually freed from the bonds of medieval philosophy.