High Claims
Medieval Thought from St. Augustine to Ockham.
By Gordon Leff.. (Penguin Books, 3s. 6d.) FOR most people, other than historians, if the Middle Ages still live at all, it is because of their thought. Writers such as Maritain and Berdyaev have familiarised the idea that the thirteenth cen- tury was the highest point in the development of European culture. The great Thomist synthesis, with its superb reconciliation of faith and reason, has (they argue) never been surpassed, and little that has happened since is more than a relapse into 'the mortal ennui of triumphant civilisation.' It is a beguiling thesis; but how does it square with the facts?
The first question, probably, most people will ask about Mr. Leff's able book is whether it bears out the high claims made on behalf of medieval thought. On the whole, unfortunately, he evades an answer. He is competent, trim, businesslike, clear, compendious, industrious. But he deliber- ately limits himself to an 'historical' approach, seeking `to place mediaeval ideas, not to pass judgment upon them.' No doubt it is true that we can only 'assess a thinker justly when we have considered his circumstances'; but it seems to me that the line Mr. Leff has followed may all too easily result in our taking mediaeval thinkers at their own estimation, and this will be misleading if it makes us think that their views were more important than in fact they were. The limitations of mediaeval thought—how far, for example, it was influential in a largely illiterate society, and how far it ignored the facts (notably the economic facts) of a vigorous social life—must also be taken into account. There is, in other words, a cleavage between mediaeval ideas, as reflected in philo- sophy, and medittval reality, as seen (for example) in the harsh life of the Italian city-states, which is itself an essential conditioning factor.
Mr. Leff equates mediaeval thought with medieval philosophy (and, indeed, even more narrowly with mediaeval Christian. philosophy) and writes what is, in fact, an introductory text- book which compares well with the much-used French compilation of Braner and Gilson. But does an essentially clerical philosophy exhaust the content of mediaeval thought? The thought-world of the laity, high and low, was in many ways pagan and magical, interacting but not identical with the diluted stream of Christian philosophy handed down through the schools. It is expressed in epics like Beowulf or the Nibelungenlied. Was this not perhaps more influential than the rarefied ' speculation of scholasticism? At any rate the question is worth asking. What influence, for example, was exerted, even on other scholars, by that solitary enigmatical ninth-century figure John Scot Erigena, to whom Mr. Leff devotes a whole section of ten pages? What standards, in short, are we to apply? Was not the famoui Dialogue of the Exchequer as significant an example of medieval thought in one of its branches as the sentences of Peter Lombard?
When Mr. Leff tells us that the 'dependence of reasoning upon the dictates of faith is central to the whole of medieval thinking,' we must there- fore reply this is only true of the parts to which he limits himself. They loom large, because writ- ing and copying were the preserve of the clergy who perpetuated their own traditions; but it is doubtful whether they were even as Influential as are philosophical discussions on the Third Pro- gramme today. What is significant, and what Mr. Leff's survey well brings out, is the fluidity and instability of mediaeval philosophy. The depen- dence of reasoning on faith, as Mr. Leff says, was never an 'easy relationship,' and what is character- istic of the period is not uniformity but diversity of concepts. 'A state of equilibrium' was only reached 'for a fleeting passage of time with St. Thomas Aquinas's system; and St. Thomas him- self was the calm before the storm, which engulfed the later thirteenth and the fourteenth centuries.' `One of the most common fallacies about the thirteenth century,' Mr. Leff adds, 'has been to regard it as the age of Thomism.' So the Middle Ages were less like the glowing romantic picture that has been painted of them, and more like reality as we know it, after all. Mr. Leff may not answer the ultimate questions but he brings us nearer to the historical facts.
GEOFFREY BARRACLOUGH
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