Against the Long Prejudice
The second volume opens carrying a polemical burden the modern reader barely notices. When it first appeared, the educated consensus still divided European philosophy into two free periods, ancient and modern, separated by a captivity: a medieval interval in which reason, chained by ecclesiastical authority, was compelled to the useless study of theology until a thinker like Descartes broke the fetters. Copleston states the picture in order to dismantle it. Much of what Francis Bacon and Descartes charged against the Scholastics, he argues, was aimed at the decadent late Schoolmen who worshipped the letter, and could not legitimately be turned on the great figures; and the historians who inherited the charge condemned the period unseen, mistaking its rich variety for an arid playing with words. His sharpest exhibit is Hegel, whose dialectical scheme ought to have demanded that medieval philosophy contribute something, but who filed Roger Bacon under “Mystics,” dismissed him in a sentence about gunpowder and telescopes, and drew his information from Tennemann and Brucker rather than the sources. The introduction dates the corrective precisely — the labor of scholars since about 1880, Baeumker and Grabmann and De Wulf, the Franciscan editors at Quaracchi, the studies of Gilson who showed how much Cartesianism itself owed to the schools it disowned. The volume’s very structure, a continuous run from Augustine to Scotus, is the argument the introduction announces: this millennium can be read with a synoptic eye, its currents and stages and high lights visible, because they are there.
Augustine: The Interior Turn
The first great figure receives a close philosophical exposition, handled as argument rather than devotion. Copleston tracks the Neoplatonic inheritance — evil as privation, the soul’s ascent toward immutable Beauty — into Augustine’s decisive relocation of the search. Truth is not gathered from the changeable, contingent objects of sense but recovered within, where the mind finds necessary and eternal truths it could neither have produced nor learned from bodies. Illumination stands in for abstraction; the interior teacher enlightens the soul from within; memory becomes a metaphysical faculty; and the examined inward life becomes the West’s primary philosophical scene, gathered in the prayer Copleston makes central, noverim me, noverim Te — that I might know myself, that I might know Thee. Copleston is careful about the motive: Augustine turns inward not from an academic interest in psychology but because it is the soul’s relation to God that concerns him, so that even his celebrated Si fallor, sum — the certainty wrung from the very possibility of error, anticipating Descartes by twelve centuries — serves an ascent rather than a system. For this library the chapter is genealogically load-bearing: the introspective tradition that reaches through the Cartesian meditation to the consulting room’s examined life is Augustinian in shape, and Copleston lays the foundation stones in order.
Transmission and Recovery: The Road to the Cathedral Century
The long middle of the volume refuses the caricature of a blank interval by showing how much thinking filled it. Boethius transmits a stock of Aristotelian logic and vocabulary that will occupy the schools for centuries; the problem of universals is set going by a few lines of Porphyry and Boethius and worked through Roscelin’s nominalism, William of Champeaux, and the decisive dialectic of Abelard; Anselm frames the proofs of the Monologium and the single compressed argument of the Proslogium. Then comes the event that reorganizes everything — the recovery of the full Aristotle through the Arabic and Jewish philosophers and the twelfth- and thirteenth-century translations. Copleston gives Alfarabi, Avicenna, and Averroes serious, source-grounded treatment as philosophers in their own right rather than mere conduits, and does the same for Avicebron and Maimonides, before tracing how the translated corpus provoked both synthesis and alarm, down to the condemnations and the Latin Averroism of Siger of Brabant. The chapter’s lesson is the series’ continuity thesis in miniature: the thirteenth-century summit was not a sunrise out of darkness but the harvest of a long, traceable importation of texts and problems.
Aquinas at the Summit
The reception opens into the thirteenth century, and after Bonaventure — expounded with evident affection as the Augustinian counter-voice, the philosopher of the Christian life wary of an unbaptized Aristotle — Aquinas occupies the summit chapters. Copleston builds the architecture in order: potency and act, the real distinction of essence and existence, God reached not by Anselm’s a priori route but by the five ways from motion, causation, contingency, gradation, and finality, with the argument from contingency named the fundamental one; God arrived at as ipsum esse subsistens, existence itself, named by analogy where negation runs out. The psychology is where the volume’s concerns converge: one substantial form in man, the soul subsistent and immaterial yet the very form of its body, against both a materialism that would dissolve it and an Averroistic monopsychism that would pool all human intellects into one — the active and passive intellects, Copleston insists Aquinas holds, are not numerically the same in all men. This is the series’ declared Thomist standpoint at maximum visibility, and Copleston’s candor keeps it usable. He devotes an entire chapter to the non-Aristotelian elements and latent tensions in the synthesis and to the opposition Thomist novelties aroused in their own day, so that the reader always knows where sympathy lies and the exposition stays close enough to the texts that disagreement has something exact to disagree with.
Scotus and the Gathering Strain
The volume closes with Duns Scotus, the Doctor Subtilis, whom Copleston is at pains to rescue from the condescension of historians who praised Hume for criticisms the late medievals had already made. Three moves mark the strain Scotus places on the Thomist edifice: the univocal concept of being, common to God and creature, where Aquinas had insisted on analogy; the formal distinction, a subtlety operating between the inseparable formalitates of one thing; and the primacy of the will over the intellect, for which Scotus gives his own reasons. Copleston notes, too, the honest limits Scotus draws around demonstration — the soul’s immortality, he holds, is not strictly demonstrable by reason — a caution that quietly reopens ground Aquinas had claimed for proof. The arrangement embodies the continuity thesis to the end: nothing here is a museum piece, each position generating the next problem, the univocity and voluntarism of Scotus already leaning toward the questions the following volume’s nominalists will press. The concluding review returns to the framing question — is there a Christian philosophy, and how should the Thomist synthesis be regarded — and leaves it open rather than settled.
Read beside Hegel’s impatient pages on Scholasticism and Kenny’s brisker modern survey, this volume is the shelf’s patient middle witness: the account that takes the medieval millennium at its own intellectual word and preserves its psychology of inwardness for direct comparison with the modern volumes.