JOHN DUNS SCOTUS

John Duns Scotus was an influential Franciscan realist philosopher and scholastic theologian.There is perhaps no other great medieval thinker whose life is as little known as that of Duns Scotus. He apparently spent 13 years (1288–1301) at the University of Oxford preparing for inception as master of theology. There is no record of where he took the eight years of preliminary philosophical training (four for a bachelor’s and four for the master’s degrees) required to enter such a program.

After studying theology for almost four years, John Duns was ordained priest at St. Andrew’s Church in Northampton on March 17, 1291. In view of the mini-mum age requirements for the priesthood, this suggests that Duns Scotus must have been born no later than March 1266. 

YEARS AT THE UNIVERSITY OF PARIS 

When the turn came for the English province to provide a talented candidate for the Franciscan chair of theology at the more prestigious University of Paris, Duns Scotus was appointed. One reportation of his Paris lectures indicates that he began commenting on the Sentences there in the autumn of 1302 and continued to June 1303. Before the term ended, however, the university was affected by the long-smouldering feud between King Philip IV and Pope Boniface VIII. The issue was taxation of church property to support the king’s wars with England. When Boniface excommunicated him, the monarch retaliated by calling for a general church council to depose the pope. He won over the French clergy and the university. On June 24, 1303, a great antipapal demonstration took place. 

Friars paraded in the Paris streets.On the following day royal commissioners examined each member of the Franciscan house to determine whether he was with or against the king. Some 70 friars, mostly French, sided with Philip, while the rest (some 80 odd) remained loyal to the pope, among them Duns Scotus and Master Gonsalvus Hispanus. As a result of his harassment and imprisonment by the king’s minister, however, Boniface died in October and was succeeded by Pope Benedict XI. In the interests of peace, Benedict lifted the ban against the university in April 1304, and shortly after-ward the king facilitated the return of students.Where Duns Scotus spent the exile is unclear. Possibly his Cambridge lectures stem from this period, although they may have been given during the academic year of 1301–02 before coming to Paris. 

At any rate, Duns Scotus was back before the summer of 1304, for he was the bachelor respondent in the disputatio in aula (“public disputation”) when his predecessor, Giles of Ligny, was promoted to master. On November 18 of that same year, Gonsalvus, who had been elected minister general of the Franciscan order at the Pentecost chapter, or meeting, assigned Duns Scotus as Giles’s successor.The period following Duns Scotus’s inception as master in 1305 was one of great literary activity. Aided by a staff of associates and secretaries, he set to work to complete his Ordinatio begun at Oxford, using not only the Oxford and Cambridge lectures but also those of Paris. A search of manuscripts reveals a magisterial dispute Duns Scotus conducted with the Dominican master, Guillaume Pierre Godin, against the thesis that matter is the principle of individuation (the metaphysical principle that makes an individual thing different from other things of the same species). 

Duns Scotus did conduct one solemn quodlibetal disputation, so called because the master accepted questions on any topic (de quodlibet) and from any bachelor or master present (a quodlibet). The 21 questions Duns Scotus treated were later revised, enlarged, and organized under two main topics, God and creatures.The short but important Tractatus de primo principio, a compendium of what reason can prove about God, draws heavily upon the Ordinatio. The remaining authentic works seem to represent questions discussed privately for the benefit of the Franciscan student philosophers or theo-logians. They include, in addition to the Collationes (from both Oxford and Paris), the Quaestiones in Metaphysicam Aristotelis and a series of logical questions occasioned by the Neoplatonist Porphyry’s Isagoge and Aristotle’s De praedicamentis, De interpretatione, and De sophisticis elenchis.

FINAL PERIOD AT COLOGNE 

In 1307 Duns Scotus was appointed professor at Cologne. Some have suggested that Gonsalvus sent him to Cologne for his own safety. Although Duns Scotus’s brilliant defense of the Immaculate Conception marked the turning point in the history of the doctrine, it was immediately challenged by secular and Dominican colleagues. When the question arose in a solemn quodlibetal disputation, the secular master Jean de Pouilly, for example, declared the Scotist thesis not only improbable but even heretical. At a time when Philip IV had initiated heresy trials against the wealthy Knights Templars, Pouilly’s words have an ominous ring. There seems to have been something hasty about Duns Scotus’s departure in any case. Duns Scotus lectured at Cologne until his death. His body at present lies in the nave of the Franciscan church near the Cologne cathedral, and in many places he is venerated as blessed.

Despite their imperfect form, Duns Scotus’s works were widely circulated. His claim that universal concepts are based on a “common nature” in individuals was one of the central issues in the 14th-century controversy between Realists and Nominalists concerning the question of whether general types are figments of the mind or are real.

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SAINT THOMAS AQUINAS

St. Thomas Aquinas was an Italian Dominican theologian and the foremost medieval Scholasticist. His doctrinal system and the explanations and developments made by his followers are known as Thomism. He is nevertheless recognized by the Roman Catholic Church as its foremost Western philosopher and theologian.

EARLY YEARS

Thomas was born to parents who were in possession of a modest feudal domain on a boundary constantly disputed by the emperor and the pope. Thomas was placed in the monastery of Monte Cassino near his home as an oblate (i.e., offered as a prospective monk) when he was still a young boy; his family doubtless hoped that he would someday become abbot to their advantage. In 1239, after nine years in this sanctuary of spiritual and cultural life, young Thomas was forced to return to his family when the emperor expelled the monks because they were too obedient to the pope. He was then sent to the University of Naples, recently founded by the emperor, where he first encountered the scientific and philosophical works that were being translated from the Greek and the Arabic.

In this setting Thomas decided to join the Friars Preachers, or Dominicans, a new religious order founded 30 years earlier, which departed from the traditional paternalistic form of government for monks to the more democratic form of the mendicant friars (i.e., religious orders whose corporate as well as personal poverty made it necessary for them to beg alms) and from the monastic life of prayer and manual labour to a more active life of preaching and teaching. A dramatic episode marked the full significance of his decision. His parents had him abducted on the road to Paris, where his shrewd superiors had immediately assigned him so that he would be out of the reach of his family but also so that he could pursue his studies in the most prestigious and tur-bulent university of the time.

STUDIES IN PARIS 

Thomas held out stubbornly against his family despite a year of captivity. He was finally liberated and in the autumn of 1245 went to Paris to the convent of Saint-Jacques, the great university centre of the Dominicans; there he studied under Albertus Magnus, a tremendous scholar with a wide range of intellectual interests.

When Thomas Aquinas arrived at the University of Paris, the influx of Arabian-Aristotelian science was arousing a sharp reaction among believers; and several times the church authorities tried to block the naturalism and rationalism that were emanating from this philosophy and, according to many ecclesiastics, seducing the younger generations. Thomas did not fear these new ideas, but, like Albertus Magnus (and Roger Bacon, also lecturing at Paris), he studied the works of Aristotle and eventually lectured publicly on them.

During the summer of 1248, Aquinas left Paris with Albertus, who was to assume direction of the new faculty established by the Dominicans at the convent in Cologne. He remained there until 1252, when he returned to Paris to prepare for the degree of master of theology. After taking his bachelor’s degree, he received the licentia docendi (“license to teach”) at the beginning of 1256 and shortly afterward finished the training necessary for the title and privileges of master. Thus, in the year 1256 he began teaching theology in one of the two Dominican schools incorporated in the University of Paris. 

LATER YEARS 

In 1259 Thomas was appointed theological adviser and lecturer to the papal Curia, then the centre of Western humanism. He returned to Italy, where he spent two years at Anagni at the end of the reign of Alexander IV and four years at Orvieto with Urban IV. From 1265 to 1267 he taught at the convent of Santa Sabina in Rome and then, at the request of Clement IV, went to the papal Curia in Viterbo. Suddenly, in November 1268, he was sent to Paris, where he became involved in a sharp doctrinal polemic that had just been triggered off.The works of Averroës, the outstanding representative of Arabic philosophy in Spain, who was known as the great commentator and interpreter of Aristotle, were just becoming known to the Parisian masters. 

Averroës asserted that the structure of religious knowledge was entirely heterogeneous to rational knowledge: two truths—one of faith, the other of reason—can, in the final analysis, be contradictory. This dualism was denied by Muslim orthodoxy and was still less acceptable to Christians. With the appearance of Siger of Brabant, however, and from 1266 on, the quality of Averroës’s exegesis and the wholly rational bent of his thought began to attract disciples in the faculty of arts at the University of Paris. Thomas Aquinas rose in protest against his colleagues; nevertheless, the parties retained a mutual esteem.

In the course of this dispute, the very method of theology was called into question. According to Aquinas, reason is able to operate within faith and yet according to its own laws. The mystery of God is expressed and incarnate in human language; it is thus able to become the object of an active, conscious, and organized elaboration in which the rules and structures of rational activity are integrated in the light of faith. In the Aristotelian sense of the word, then (although not in the modern sense), theology is a “science”; it is knowledge that is rationally derived from propositions that are accepted as certain because they are revealed by God. The theologian accepts authority and faith as his starting point and then proceeds to conclusions using reason; the philosopher, on the other hand, relies solely on the natural light of reason. Thomas was the first to view theology expressly in this way or at least to present it systematically, and in doing so he raised a storm of opposition in various quarters.

The logic of Aquinas’s position regarding faith and reason required that the fundamental consistency of the realities of nature be recognized. A physis (“nature”) has necessary laws; recognition of this fact permits the construction of a science according to a logos (“rational structure”). Thomas thus avoided the temptation to sacralize the forces of nature through a naïve recourse to the miraculous or the Providence of God. For him, a whole “supernatural” world that cast its shadow over things and men, in Romanesque art as in social customs, had blurred men’s imaginations. Nature, discovered in its profane reality, should assume its proper religious value and lead to God by more rational ways, yet not simply as a shadow of the supernatural. 

This understanding is exemplified in the way that Francis of Assisi admired the birds, the plants, and the Sun.Although he was an Aristotelian, Thomas was certain that he could defend himself against a heterodox interpretation of “the Philosopher,” as Aristotle was known. Thomas held that human liberty could be defended as a rational thesis while admitting that determinations are found in nature. In his theology of Providence, he taught a continuous creation, in which the dependence of the created on the creative wisdom guarantees the reality of the order of nature. God moves sovereignly all that he creates, but the supreme government that he exercises over the universe is conformed to the laws of a creative Providence that wills each being to act according to its proper nature. This autonomy finds its highest realization in the rational creature: humans are literally self-moving in their intellectual, volitional, and physical existence. Their freedom, far from being destroyed by their relationship to God, finds its foundation in this very relationship.

In January 1274 Thomas was personally summoned by Gregory X to the second Council of Lyons, which was an attempt to repair the schism between the Latin and Greek churches. On his way he was stricken by illness; he stopped at the Cistercian abbey of Fossanova, where he died on March 7.

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SHINRAN

Shinran was a Buddhist teacher recognized as the founder of the Jōdo Shinshū (True Pure Land School), which advocates that faith, recitation of the name of the buddha Amida (Amitabha), and birth in the paradise of the Pure Land. For centuries Jōdo Shinshū has been one of the largest schools of Buddhism in Japan. During his lifetime Shinran was an insignificant figure, but in modern times he has been recognized as an eminent and sophisticated religious thinker.

The details of Shinran’s life are sketchy because few historical sources about him have survived. The most important of these, a hagiography (saint’s life) known pop-ularly as the Godenshō (“The Biography”), was written in 1295 by his great-grandson Kakunyo (1270–1351). Other works that offer insights into his life are Shinran’s own religious writings and the letters of his wife, Eshin Ni (1182–1268?), which were discovered in 1921.According to the Godenshō, Shinran was inducted into the Buddhist priesthood at age nine by Jien (1155–1225), an abbot of the Tendai school of Buddhist thought. 

Shinran’s entry into the order may have been the result of the declining fortunes of his extended family, who belonged to the low-level aristocratic Hino clan, or of the death of his parents. He served for 20 years at the Tendai monastery on Mt. Hiei, northeast of Kyōto, as a dōsō (“hall priest”), performing Pure Land Buddhist rituals and practices. In 1201 he left Mt. Hiei and secluded himself for 100 days in the Rokkaku Temple in Kyōto. During this retreat he had a dream in which Prince Shōtoku (574–622), the semilegendary promulgator of Buddhism in Japan, revealed that the bodhisattva Kannon would become Shinran’s conjugal partner for life and would lead him to the Pure Land paradise at death. Inspired by this vision, Shinran abandoned monastic life at Mt. Hiei and became a disciple of Hōnen (1133–1212), the renowned master of Pure Land Buddhism.

Subsequently, Shinran married and had children, thereby departing from Buddhism’s ancient tradition of clerical celibacy.As a fervent follower of Hōnen, Shinran adopted his teaching of the “exclusive nembutsu” (senju nembutsu): invoking the name of Amida Buddha is the sole practice assuring enlightenment in the Pure Land. Hōnen’s religious movement provoked controversy and was censured by several powerful temples, including the Tendai monastery on Mt. Hiei and the Kōfuku Temple in Nara. In 1207 the ruling authorities suppressed the movement, resulting in Shinran’s banishment to the remote province of Echigo.

It was about this time that he married Eshin Ni and began a family. During his banishment and subsequent 20-year residency in the Kantō region (the vicinity of present-day Tokyo), Shinran deepened his religious ideas and actively propagated Pure Land teachings. He attracted an enthusi-astic following of his own as a peripatetic preacher, emulating perhaps the itinerant priests of the Zenkō Temple, whose sacred Amida icon Shinran revered. During this period he also compiled an early draft of his magnum opus, Kyōgyōshinshō (“Teaching, Practice, Faith, and Attainment”), a collection of scriptural quotations on Pure Land teachings interspersed with Shinran’s interpretations or comments.In the early 1230s Shinran left the Kantō region and returned to Kyōto, where he spent the last three decades of his long life. 

His many followers remained in contact with him through letters and visits and offered monetary gifts to sustain him in old age. Shinran dedicated considerable time in this period to writing. In addition to completing the Kyōgyōshinshō, he composed doctrinal treatises, commentaries, religious tracts, hymns of praise (wasan), and other works, both to confirm his own understanding of Pure Land Buddhism and to convey his views to others.In the last decade of his life, Shinran endured a particularly agonizing estrangement from his son Zenran (died 1292). 

Zenran had become embroiled in a dispute with Shinran’s followers in the Kantō region over provocative beliefs and behaviour, such as the assertion by some of license to commit wrongdoings. To counter them, Zenran made extravagant claims that Shinran had secretly imparted authority to him. Only by disowning him was Shinran able to quell the confusion among his followers and to reassure them of his true teachings.

According to the Godenshō, Shinran died in Kyōto at the age of 90. On his deathbed he chanted the nembutsu steadfastly, and at his side were his youngest daughter, Kakushin Ni (1224–83), and several other followers. After his cremation, Shinran’s ashes were interred in eastern Kyōto. In 1272 they were moved to a nearby site where a memorial chapel was constructed, which would be the precursor of the Hongan Temple, the headquarters of the Shinshū school.

In premodern times the Jodo Shinshū regarded Shinran as an earthly incarnation of the buddha Amida, appearing in the world to spread the Pure Land teachings. Such a characterization was common in medieval Buddhism and congruent with Shinran’s own veneration of Hōnen as an incarnation of Amida. The Hongan Temple preserved and promoted this image, especially during the Shinshū’s emergence as Japan’s largest and most powerful religious movement under the leadership of Shinran’s descendant Rennyo (1415–99). 

In modern times, however, Shinran has been depicted in a more humanistic fashion, as a visionary thinker and as the archetypal religious seeker.

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IBN AL-ARABI

Ibn al-‘Arabī was a celebrated Muslim mystic-philosopher who gave the esoteric, mystical dimension of Islamic thought its first full-fledged philosophic expression. His major works are the monumental Al-Futūh.āt al-Makkiyyah (“The Meccan Revelations”) and Fus.ū.s al-h.ikam (1229; “

TheBezels of Wisdom”).Ibn al-Arabī was born in the southeast of Spain, a man of pure Arab blood whose ancestry went back to the prominent Arabian tribe of T.ā’ī. It was in Sevilla (Seville), then an outstanding centre of Islamic culture and learning, that he received his early education. He stayed there for 30 years, studying traditional Islamic sciences; he studied with a number of mystic masters who found in him a young man of marked spiritual inclination and unusually keen intelligence. During those years he travelled a great deal and visited various cities of Spain and North Africa in search of masters of the Sufi (mystical) Path who had achieved great spiritual progress and thus renown.

It was during one of these trips that Ibn al-Arabī had a dramatic encounter with the great Aristotelian philosopher Ibn Rushd (Averroës; 1126–98) in the city of Córdoba. Averroës, a close friend of the boy’s father, had asked that the interview be arranged because he had heard of the extraordinary nature of the young, still beardless lad. After the early exchange of only a few words, it is said, the mystical depth of the boy so overwhelmed the old philosopher that he became pale and, dumbfounded, began trembling.

In 1198, while in Murcia, Ibn al-Arabī had a vision in which he felt he had been ordered to leave Spain and set out for the East. Thus began his pilgrimage to the Orient, from which he never was to return to his homeland.The first notable place he visited on this journey was Mecca (1201), where he “received a divine commandment” to begin his major work Al-Futūh.āt al-Makkiyyah, which was to be completed much later in Damascus. In 560 chapters, it is a work of tremendous size, a personal encyclopaedia extending over all the esoteric sciences in Islam as Ibn al-Arabī understood and had experienced them, together with valuable information about his own inner life.

It was also in Mecca that Ibn al-Arabī became acquainted with a young girl of great beauty who, as a living embodiment of the eternal sophia (wisdom), was to play in his life a role much like that which Beatrice played for Dante. Her memories were eternalized by Ibn al-Arabī in a collection of love poems (Tarjumān al-ashwāq; “The Interpreter of Desires”), upon which he himself composed a mystical commentary. 

His daring “pantheistic” expressions drew down on him the wrath of Muslim orthodoxy, some of whom prohibited the reading of his works at the same time that others were elevating him to the rank of the prophets and saints.After Mecca, Ibn al-Arabī visited Egypt (also in 1201) and then Anatolia, where, in Qonya, he met S.adr al-Dīn al-Qūnawī, who was to become his most important fol-lower and successor in the East. From Qonya he went on to Baghdad and Aleppo (modern H.alab, Syria). By the time his long pilgrimage had come to an end at Damascus (1223), his fame had spread all over the Islamic world. Venerated as the greatest spiritual master, he spent the rest of his life in Damascus in peaceful contemplation, teaching, and writing. 

It was during his Damascus days that one of the most important works in mystical philosophy in Islam, Fus.ū.s al-h.ikam, was composed in 1229, about 10 years before his death. Consisting only of 27 chapters, the book is incomparably smaller than Al-Futūh.āt al-Makkiyyah, but its importance as an expression of Ibn al-Arabī’s mystical thought in its most mature form cannot be overemphasized.

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MOSES MAIMONIDES

Moses Maimonides was a Jewish philosopher, jurist, and physician and the foremost intellectual figure of medieval Judaism. His first major work, begun at age 23and completed 10 years later, was a commentary on the Mishna, the collected Jewish oral laws. A monumental code of Jewish law followed in Hebrew, The Guide for the Perplexed in Arabic, and numerous other works, many of major importance. His contributions in religion, philosophy, and medicine have influenced Jewish and non-Jewish scholars alike.

LIFE 

Maimonides was born into a distinguished family in Córdoba (Cordova), Spain. The young Moses studied with his learned father, Maimon, and other masters and at an early age astonished his teachers by his remarkable depth and versatility. Before Moses reached his 13th birthday, his peaceful world was suddenly disturbed by the ravages of war and persecution.As part of Islamic Spain, Córdoba had accorded its citizens full religious freedom. But now the Islamic Mediterranean world was shaken by a revolutionary and fanatical Islamic sect, the Almohads (Arabic: al-Muwah.h.idūn, “the Unitarians”), who captured Córdoba in 1148, leaving the Jewish community faced with the grim alternative of submitting to Islam or leaving the city. 

The Maimons temporized by practicing their Judaism in the privacy of their homes, while disguising their ways in public as far as possible to appear like Muslims. They remained in Córdoba for some 11 years, and Maimonides continued his education in Judaic studies as well as in the scientific disciplines in vogue at the time.When the double life proved too irksome to maintain in Córdoba, the Maimon family finally left the city about 1159 to settle in Fez, Morocco. Although it was also under Almohad rule, Fez was presumably more promising than Córdoba because there the Maimons would be strangers, and their disguise would be more likely to go undetected. Moses continued his studies in his favourite subjects, rabbinics and Greek philosophy, and added medicine to them. Fez proved to be no more than a short respite, how-ever. 

In 1165 Rabbi Judah ibn Shoshan, with whom Moses had studied, was arrested as a practicing Jew and was found guilty and then executed. This was a sign to the Maimon family to move again, this time to Palestine, which was in a depressed economic state and could not offer them the basis of a livelihood. After a few months they moved again, now to Egypt, settling in Fostat, near Cairo. There Jews were free to practice their faith openly, though any Jew who had once submitted to Islam courted death if he relapsed to Judaism. Moses himself was once accused of being a renegade Muslim, but he was able to prove that he had never really adopted the faith of Islam and so was exonerated.

Though Egypt was a haven from harassment and persecution, Moses was soon assailed by personal problems. His father died shortly after the family’s arrival in Egypt. His younger brother, David, a prosperous jewelry merchant on whom Moses leaned for support, died in a shipwreck, taking the entire family fortune with him, and Moses was left as the sole support of his family. He could not turn to the rabbinate because in those days the rabbinate was conceived of as a public service that did not offer its practitioners any remuneration. 

Pressed by economic necessity, Moses took advantage of his medical studies and became a practicing physician. His fame as a physician spread rapidly, and he soon became the court physician to the sultan Saladin, the famous Muslim military leader, and to his son al-Afd.al. He also continued a private practice and lectured before his fellow physicians at the state hospital. At the same time he became the leading member of the Jewish community, teaching in public and helping his people with various per-sonal and communal problems.

Maimonides married late in life and was the father of a son, Abraham, who was to make his mark in his own right in the world of Jewish scholarship.

WORKS

The writings of Maimonides were numerous and varied. His earliest work, composed in Arabic at the age of 16, was the Millot ha-Higgayon (“Treatise on Logical Termi­ nology”), a study of various technical terms that were employed in logic and metaphysics. Another of his early works, also in Arabic, was the Essay on the Calendar (Hebrew title: Ma’amar ha‘ibur).The first of Maimonides’ major works, begun at the age of 23, was his commentary on the Mishna, Kitāb al-Sirāj, also written in Arabic. 

The Mishna is a compendium of decisions in Jewish law that dates from earliest times to the 3rd century. Maimonides’ commentary clarified individual words and phrases, frequently citing relevant information in archaeology, theology, or science. Possibly the work’s most striking feature is a series of introductory essays dealing with general philosophic issues touched on in the Mishna. One of these essays summarizes the teachings of Judaism in a creed of Thirteen Articles of Faith.He completed the commentary on the Mishna at the age of 33, after which he began his magnum opus, the code of Jewish law, on which he also laboured for 10 years. 

Bearing the name of Mishne Torah (“The Torah Reviewed”) and written in a lucid Hebrew style, the code offers a brilliant systematization of all Jewish law and doctrine. He wrote two other works in Jewish law of lesser scope: the Sefer ha-mitzwot (Book of Precepts), a digest of law for the less sophisticated reader, written in Arabic; and the Hilkhot ha-Yerushalmi (“Laws of Jerusalem”), a digest of the laws in the Palestinian Talmud, written in Hebrew.

His next major work, which he began in 1176 and on which he laboured for 15 years, was his classic in religious philosophy, the Dalālat al-h.āh.irīn (The Guide for the Perplexed), later known under its Hebrew title as the Moreh nevukhim. A plea for what he called a more rational philosophy of Judaism, it constituted a major contribution to the accommodation between science, philosophy, and religion. It was written in Arabic and sent as a private communication to his favourite disciple, Joseph ibn Aknin. The work was translated into Hebrew in Maimonides’ lifetime and later into Latin and most European languages. It has exerted a marked influence on the history of religious thought.

Maimonides complained often that the pressures of his many duties robbed him of peace and undermined his health. He died in 1204 and was buried in Tiberias, in the Holy Land, where his grave continues to be a shrine drawing a constant stream of pious pilgrims.

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