Aristotle's Left the Building

This week, I've been watching a DVD course on philosophy and religion in the Middle Ages. It probably couldn't compete with the evening news on a drama quotient, but I found it entertaining. The course explored how various thinkers from Saint Augustine to William of Ockham incorporated or repudiated, as the case might be, ideas of Plato and Aristotle in their own writings on religion.

At this point you may be thinking, "That's what you do for entertainment?" It may not be to your taste, but think of it this way: there were no commercials, no preening actors, and no mentions of Super-Pacs, dark money, or dubious efforts to make America more secure during the entire twelve hours of viewing. You had to concentrate to keep up with the arguments involved, but it beat propaganda disguised as news or a dumb conversation you might overhear at Starbucks by a country mile.

Of course, the Middle Ages had its share of politics and foolishness, and the conversation on faith and reason took place against a backdrop of wars, power struggles, and other calamities. The views of various Church leaders played a part in some of those events, but this course focused on intellectual, not political, history. I personally am not a fan of institutions, the Church included, and generally distrust them, but the discussion of faith and reason on a purely intellectual level was very engrossing.

Some of the arguments left me scratching my head, though. Anselm, for example, apparently thought that saying there was something "than which something greater cannot be thought" was enough to prove the existence of God. I kept trying to figure out how that works and was never quite convinced. The argument seems to be missing something.

William of Ockham helped put the kibosh on the latter medieval tradition based on Aristotle, and I agree with the lecturer that in some ways that was too bad. Many medieval religious thinkers seemed to care very much about their arguments being rational and coherent and their religious ideas squaring with reason. We could use more of that respect for clear and systematic thinking today, in all realms of life.

Most entertaining to me was the discussion of the development of universities from the cathedral schools in the thirteenth century. Newly available translations of Aristotle in Latin seemed to set practically everyone on their ear, with Arts faculty members (who were basically teaching prep courses to younger students) going crazy for Aristotle, while the more senior Theology faculty tried to reign them in. The University of Paris was the epicenter of the conflict, which resembled the first coming of Elvis, or a food fight of beatniks versus squares.

Aristotle was the champion of definitions, categories, and arguments and of a theory of knowledge based on what our senses tell us about the world. The early Church fathers were heavily influenced by Plato, whose theory of the transcendent Forms dovetailed nicely with a mystical, spiritual realm inhabited by God and the angels. Aristotle taught that universal forms exist as concepts in our minds but that there is no "Form" of a horse, tree, turnip, or planet hanging out in the ether, existing as a blueprint. There are only particular horses, trees, turnips, or planets. He didn't say there was no Supreme Being, but he called his the Prime Mover.

Aristotle was down-to-earth on many things, and that appeals to me. I could picture those Arts masters looking around and rejoicing in the revealed beauty of a world of individual apples, turnips, stars, and horses, and their elders shaking their fists and yelling about Mysteries of the Faith. It all came to a head with the Condemnation of 1277, the Church's attempt to ban people from teaching aspects of Aristotle that it considered problematic. Good luck with that.

Although William of Ockham did, apparently on purely philosophical grounds, later pull the rug out from under the thinking of a lot of Aristotelians, he was no shrinking violet either. He declared the Pope heretical (on an unrelated matter) and got himself excommunicated. (The Pope apparently threatened to annihilate an entire town in Flanders if it didn't give Ockham up to church authorities.)

But that's straying into politics. For me, the beauty of this course was in the consideration of ideas for their own sake and in the image of generations of thinkers trying to hold their beliefs up to a standard of rational thought, undeterred by the fact that the great philosophers they struggled to emulate had never even heard of Christianity. The course was entitled Reason and Faith: Philosophy in the Middle Ages, and it was taught by Professor Thomas Williams. It is one of the Great Courses on Philosophy & Intellectual History of The Teaching Company.

Cogito Ergo Sum, and Then Some

Does a novel about philosophy sound like fun? To me it does, and that's what made me first pick up a copy of Jostein Gaarder's Sophie's World years ago. It took me about a month to read it back then. I recently picked it up again and have been reading a little bit of it each day. I was curious to revisit the book in the light of my more recent studies in philosophy to see how it would strike me this time. It's as much fun as I remember, but I still find it's best taken in small doses. Long passages of the book consist of lectures on the great Western philosophers given by a professor to a 15-year-old girl. While entertaining, it's still a lot to digest.

The structure of the story is ingenious. A young woman begins getting mysterious notes from an unknown person asking her questions like "Who are you?" and "Where does the world come from?" The notes are followed by letters expounding on those questions and explaining what the great thinkers of each age have made of them. The notes and letters turn out to be the products of a professor named Alberto Knox, who has unaccountably taken an interest in Sophie's philosophical education.

At the same time, Sophie begins getting cards addressed to another 15-year-old girl named Hilde, whose father, stationed with a UN battalion in Lebanon, has for some strange reason decided to send his communications to his own daughter through Sophie. The philosophical quandaries addressed by everyone from Plato to Freud take on a life of their own as Sophie and Alberto slowly come to grips with the problems of their own existence and the nature of their own reality.

A talking dog, storybook characters met in the woods, a magic mirror, and questions about free will, God, parallel existences, and just whose story it is anyway are all mixed up in this adventure. It wouldn't work as well as it does if the author didn't have such a good sense of humor and the ability to carry off a lot of philosophizing with a light and easy touch.

One thing that's always amazed me about philosophy is the way any given philosophical stance can come across as absolutely convincing on its own terms -- until you read the next philosopher, who refutes the argument you just bought and makes just as convincing a case for his own point of view. Gaarder plays with this cumulative nature of philosophy, having Sophie fall in with the arguments of each new thinker Alberto introduces her to until the next one in line neatly overturns his predecessor. Sophie and Alberto's conversations are not unlike Socratic dialogues, although Sophie, a pretty sharp thinker herself, sometimes anticipates the weaknesses in arguments and is always willing to express her own spirited viewpoint.

One good thing about waiting so long to re-read a book like this is that you forget exactly how it ends. I remember the finale has a twist and a flourish, but I don't remember what form that takes, so I'm looking forward to the last chapter. Right now, I've got a little over a hundred pages (a sixth of the book) to go. I don't anticipate ever writing a novel about the history of philosophy, but if I did, I would hope it's as lively as this one.

Lacking in Latin

What's really on my mind is the book I finished last night, The Name of the Rose. This is the second time I've read it, but the first time was years ago -- it must have been '83 or '84, since I had already read the book when the film came out in 1986.

The introduction says that many people initially advised author Umberto Eco to drastically reduce the first 100 pages, which contain an elaborate back story purporting to explain the "discovery" of the manuscript of Adso of Melk. Adso is the story's narrator; a novice when the main action occurs, he is the assistant to William of Baskerville, a monk who has been sent to an Italian abbey on a diplomatic mission. Eco kept these pages in, saying that navigating them is an initiation that lets the reader understand the rest of the book.

The story takes place in the 14th century amid the swirl of intrigue surrounding the Catholic Church, the Pope, and the Holy Roman Emperor and features long theological debates, descriptions of monastic life, passages in Latin and, in short, all varieties of the erudite minutiae Eco is famous for. It's also a compelling murder mystery and a very human drama. And there's a labyrinth! At the heart of the story is the abbey's library, which has been cunningly designed to conceal a great mystery.

I was not a librarian the first time I read this book, but I am now, so I'm coming at the library angle with personal experience. We haven't found many bodies in the library I work in (maybe we're not looking hard enough), but the abbey library generates corpses on a regular basis. It all centers on a missing book. In my library, we frequently have missing books, and desperate people, but the books are usually in someone's office underneath a pile of papers, and that's the end of the story.

The abbey presents an interesting model of knowledge management in that the whole idea is to keep the library's contents safe from potential users. The librarian decides when and if a requested book will be retrieved, based on his evaluation of its contents. This library gives closed stacks a whole new meaning, since the catalog is a riddle, the layout is a labyrinth, and the rooms contain many surprises (not all of them pleasant) in addition to an "amazing" collection of books.

William of Baskerville has a different idea of what a library should be. He wants books to be read and discussed and does not think anyone -- librarian, abbot, or pope -- should hamper the pursuit of knowledge. He has a humanistic faith in learning and philosophy, but his faith is crushed by the events of the novel. Young Adso, who is very traditional in his thinking and sometimes scandalized by William's irreverence, is the one who really learns something worth knowing. To me, he -- and not the learned theologians -- actually has the last word.

I remembered from my first reading the incident that causes Adso so much agitation, but I didn't remember how beautifully it's described. Adso's encounter with the peasant girl in the kitchen only lasts a few pages, but in a way it's the high point of the novel. Adso is immediately sorry about breaking his monastic vow and confesses at the first opportunity. William advises him to avoid feeling too bad about it.

Even more significant than the event itself is the lasting impact it has on Adso. He speaks the next day of looking at the world with different, more knowing eyes. "The truth is that I 'saw' the girl, I saw her in the branches of the bare tree that stirred lightly . . . I saw her in the eyes of the heifers that came out of the barn, and I heard her in the bleating of the sheep that crossed my erratic path. It was as if all creation spoke to me of her . . ."

Adso's awareness of the beauty of life has come to him through the auspices of a young girl in a union totally unsanctioned by the laws of the Church. It's an unexpected act of grace that makes all the difference for Adso. In spite of the ugliness of later events and the ruin that even William's philosophy can do nothing to prevent, this experience gives Adso a different kind of wisdom. His openness to this gift seems to me to be the real answer to the brutality and insanity of the times.

I know that the meaning of the book's title is an open question and that the author meant it to be that way. There is apparently an allusion to a possible meaning in the novel's final words, which are in Latin. My Latin is very basic, so it may be that that drove me to look for a clearer answer somewhere else. I thought I found it on page 314, where Adso, thinking of the girl, observes that "the humblest rose becomes a gloss of our terrestrial progress." For me, the name of the rose is the particular way the universe has of reaching out and grabbing each person by the neck. However, this may be the fault of my rudimentary Latin.