The image of man in medieval Christian philosophy

Enter through the narrow gate, because

that the gate is wide and the way is long,

leading to destruction, and many follow them;

for strait is the gate and narrow is the way,

leading to life, and few find them

(Gospel of Matthew)

The Middle Ages represents a long period in the development of history Western Europe from the collapse of the Roman Empire (5th century) to the Renaissance (15th century). Ancient slavery is replaced by the emergence of a feudal system, and Greco-Roman culture is replaced by a feudal culture, the core of which was Christianity. The role of Christianity is quite great: it has become the spiritual connecting link of all medieval Europe. At the same time, Christianity formulated ideas different from antiquity: the recognition of one God, the creator of all things, the Trinity; incarnation; equality of people before God; priority of the spiritual over the physical; the finitude of earthly existence - “this world” and the inevitability of the kingdom of heaven. All philosophy in this period was theocentric; the reality that determines everything that exists was God. God is both an object of knowledge and highest value.

When people think about God,

which I cannot comprehend,

what they really think

about ourselves, not about Him

(Augustine)

The most prominent “father of the church” and the greatest philosopher of mature patristics was Aurelius Augustine (4th century), nicknamed Blessed, distinguished by his particular severity towards dissent, for which he received the nickname “the heretic’s hammer.” God is the highest good and the cause of good, since everything exists thanks to God. At the same time problematic his theodicy. On the one side,

If God is all-good (does only good), then why is there so much evil? If God is omnipotent, then why doesn’t he destroy evil in an instant and make people happy? Either he is not all-good, or he is not all-powerful!

The descendants of Adam (for example, Cain) gave birth to evil, which is not absolute, it is only a lack of goodness, a lack of immortality, says Augustine. The desire to compensate for this absolute lack gives rise to pathetic attempts to prolong life, to change fate through unrighteous deeds. Evil arises where something is not done according to the commandments (the Bible, Genesis), it is pride, lust, passions aimed at temporary things. Augustine thus understands evil as the absence of good in people. Moreover, good is not in the power of man, for it is not accomplished without God's grace. Man is capable of creating only evil on his own.

It takes a strong will to search divine grace and truth. The predominance of will and feelings over reason predetermined the superiority of faith over knowledge.

After Augustine, until the Renaissance (about a thousand years), Platonism existed in its Christianized form Augustinianism . Religion is the conservation of stereotypes, because the dogmatist, without knowing it, becomes not just a victim, but an instrument of manipulation. Manipulation is a method of domination through spiritual influence on people through programming their behavior using certain doses of fear and pleasure. Fear is, of course, poison, but in small doses it is useful.

Theology is an intellectual procedure,

designed to strengthen faith

Augustine defined the basic principles of theology. Among them:

Creationism or the principle of creation says that everything was created by God from nothing, and everything created, created, strives for insignificance and destruction. Man was created in two ways: the body was made from the dust of the earth, and God “breathed” the soul into the body, reviving it.

Providentialism or the principle of divine providence: God tirelessly and continuously rules the world, everything is already predetermined and predetermined. The fate of man is written in the language of heaven.

Personalism. This principle requires the recognition of man as an indivisible personality, who has reason and free will and is created in the image and likeness of God, due to which he is the “crown of creation.” Although a person is considered as a unity of soul and body, priority is given to the soul and it is with it that the personality is identified. The body is considered as a prison of the soul, a vessel of sin, and hence the constant struggle within a person of good and evil, spirit and flesh, mind and sensuality.

Principle of revelation means that all the necessary truths for man have already been given in divine revelation and recorded in Scripture.

Thanks to these principles, much is revealed to us in the knowledge of man and society, in their essence and historical originality. It is proposed to consider the problem of free will in the interpretation of Augustine and Thomas Aquinas.

"Forensic Thinking" medieval man made its expansion beyond the earthly world. God, the Creator, was understood as the Judge. Moreover, if at the first stages of the Middle Ages He was endowed with the traits of balanced, stern inflexibility and paternal condescension, then at the end of this era he was already a merciless and vengeful Lord. Why? Philosophers of the late Middle Ages explained the extraordinary increase in the preaching of fear of the formidable Deity by the deep socio-psychological and religious crisis of the transition period.

God's Judgment had a dual character, for one, private, trial took place when someone died, the other. Universal, must take place at the end of the history of the human race. Naturally, this aroused great interest among philosophers in understanding the meaning of history.

The most difficult problem, sometimes incomprehensible to modern consciousness, was the problem of historical time.

Medieval man lived, as it were, outside of time, in a constant sense of eternity. He willingly endured the daily routine, noticing only the change of day and seasons. He did not need time, because it, earthly and vain, distracted him from work, which in itself was only a delay before the main event - God's Judgment.

Theologians argued for the linear flow of historical time. In the concept of sacred history (from the Latin sacer - sacred, associated with religious rites), time flows from the act of Creation through the passion of Christ to the end of the world and the Second Coming. In accordance with this scheme, they were built in the 13th century. and concepts of earthly history (for example, Vincent of Beauvais).

Philosophers tried to solve the problem of historical time and eternity. But this problem was not simple, because, like all medieval consciousness, it was also characterized by a certain dualism: the expectation of the end of history and at the same time the recognition of its eternity. On the one hand, there is an eschatological attitude (from the Greek eschatos - last, final), that is, the expectation of the end of the world, on the other hand, history was presented as a reflection of supra-temporal, supra-historical “sacred events”: “Christ was born once and cannot be born again.”

A great contribution to the development of this problem was made by Augustine the Blessed, who is often called one of the first philosophers of history. He tried to explain such categories of time as past, present and future. In his opinion, only the present is valid, the past is connected with human memory, and the future lies in hope. Everything is united once and for all in God as Absolute Eternity. This understanding of the absolute eternity of God and the real variability of the material and human world became the basis of the Christian medieval worldview for a long time.

Augustine deals with the “fate of humanity,” guided, however, by biblical historiography, which claims that what was predicted by the prophets for many centuries is coming true in established deadlines. Hence the conviction that history, even with the uniqueness of all its events, is fundamentally predictable, and, therefore, filled with meaning. The basis of this meaningfulness lies in Divine Providence, Divine care of humanity. Everything that needs to happen serves the fulfillment of the original Divine plan:

punishing people for original sin; testing their ability to resist human evil and testing their will to good; atonement for original sin; calling the best part of humanity to build a sacred community of the righteous; the separation of the righteous from the sinners and the final reward to each according to his deserts. In accordance with the objectives of this plan, history is divided into six periods (eons). Augustine, as a rule, refrains from talking about the temporal duration of each of the periods and considers all biblical eschatological periods to be purely symbolic.

In contrast to his Christian predecessors and medieval followers, Augustine is more interested not in chronology, but in the logic of history, which was the subject of his main work, “De civitafe Dei” (“On the City of God”). The book is about a global community of people, a community that is not political, but ideological, spiritual.

5. Thomas Aquinas - systematizer of medieval scholasticism

One of the most prominent representatives of mature scholasticism, the monk Thomas Aquinas (1225/26-1274), a student of the famous theologian, philosopher and naturalist Albertus Magnus (1193-1280), like his teacher, tried to substantiate the basic principles of Christian theology, relying on the teachings of Aristotle . At the same time, the latter was transformed in such a way that it did not conflict with the dogmas of the creation of the world from nothing and with the doctrine of the God-manhood of Jesus Christ.

For Thomas, the highest principle is being. By being, Thomas understands the Christian God who created the world, as it is narrated in the Old Testament. Distinguishing being and essence, Thomas does not contrast them, but on the contrary, (following Aristotle) emphasizes them common root. Entities, or substances, according to Thomas, have independent existence, in contrast to accidents (properties, qualities), which exist only thanks to substances. From here the difference between substantial and accidental forms is derived. A substantial form imparts simple existence to every thing, and therefore, when it appears, we say that something has arisen, and when it disappears, we say that something has collapsed. Accidental form is the source of certain qualities, not the existence of things. Distinguishing, following Aristotle, actual and potential states, Thomas considers being as the first of the actual states. In every thing, Thomas believes, there is as much being as there is actuality in it. On this basis, he distinguishes four levels of the existence of things depending on their degree of relevance.

1. At the lowest level of being, form, according to Thomas, constitutes only the external determination of a thing (causa formalis); this includes inorganic elements and minerals.

2. At the next stage, form appears as the final cause (causa finalis) of a thing, which therefore has an internal purposiveness, called by Aristotle the “vegetative soul,” as if forming the body from the inside. Such, according to Aristotle (and accordingly Thomas), are plants.

3. The third level is animals, here the form is the efficient cause (causa efficient), therefore the existence has within itself not only a goal, but also the beginning of activity, movement. At all three levels, form is transformed into matter in different ways, organizing and animating it.

4. At the last, fourth, stage, form no longer appears as the organizing principle of matter, but in itself, independently of matter (forma per se, forma separata). It is spirit, or mind, the rational soul, the highest of created beings. Not connected with matter, the human soul does not perish with the death of the body.

Of course, there is some logic in the model built by Thomas Aquinas, but in my opinion, his views were limited by the knowledge that humanity possessed in the 13th century. For example, I am inclined to believe that there is no fundamental difference between plants and animals, at least based on knowledge of biology. Of course, there is some kind of line between them, but it is very arbitrary. There are plants that lead a very active motor lifestyle. There are known plants that instantly curl into a bud with one touch. Conversely, there are animals that are very sedentary. In this aspect, the principle of motion as an efficient cause is violated.

It has been proven by genetics (by the way, there was a period when genetics was considered a pseudoscience) that both plants and animals are built from the same building material - organics, and both consist of cells (why not put the cell on the first stage? Probably , because nothing was known about her at that time), both have a genetic code, DNA. Based on these data, there are all the prerequisites for combining plants and animals into one class, and, in fact, so that subsequently there are no contradictions, all living things. But if you go even deeper, the living cell itself consists of organic elements, which themselves consist of atoms. Why not go down to such depth of recursion? At some time, this solution would have been simply ideal, when it was believed that the atom was an indivisible particle. However, knowledge in the field of nuclear physics indicates that the atom is not the smallest indivisible particle - it consists of even smaller particles, which at one time were called elementary, because it was believed that there was nowhere to go further. Time has passed. Science has become aware of a fairly large number of elementary particles; Then they asked the question: are elementary particles themselves really elementary? It turned out that no: there are even smaller “hyperelementary particles”. Now no one can guarantee that even more “elementary” particles will not be discovered someday. Maybe the recursion depth is eternal? Therefore, I believe that you should not stop at any specific level and designate it as the basic one. I would divide everything that exists into the following three classes:

1. Emptiness (not matter).

2. Matter (not emptiness).

3. Spirit, if it exists.

Quite recently it would have been possible to add a field here (electromagnetic, gravitational, etc.), but now it is already known that the field consists of those “elementary” particles that follow the elementary ones in terms of nesting.

Let's return to the fourth stage of classification of the existence of things. Thomas calls the rational soul “self-existent.” In contrast, the sensory souls of animals are not self-existent, and therefore they do not have actions specific to the rational soul, carried out only by the soul itself, separately from the body - thinking and excitement; all animal actions, like many human actions (except for thinking and acts of will), are carried out with the help of the body. Therefore, the souls of animals perish along with the body, while the human soul is immortal, it is the most noble thing in created nature.

Following Aristotle, Thomas considers reason as the highest among human abilities, seeing in the will itself, first of all, its rational definition, which he considers the ability to distinguish between good and evil. Like Aristotle, Thomas sees in the will practical reason, that is, reason aimed at action, and not at knowledge, guiding our actions, our life behavior, and not a theoretical attitude, not contemplation.

In Thomas's world, the truly existing are individuals. This unique personalism constitutes the specificity of both Thomist ontology and medieval natural science, the subject of which is the action of individual “hidden essences,” souls, spirits, and forces. Beginning with God, who is a pure act of being, and ending with the smallest of created entities, each being has a relative independence, which decreases as it moves down, that is, as the relevance of the existence of beings located on the hierarchical ladder decreases.

The teachings of Thomas enjoyed great influence in the Middle Ages, and the Roman Church officially recognized it. This teaching is revived in the 20th century under the name of neo-Thomism - one of the most significant movements in Western Catholic philosophy.

Conclusion

Having analyzed the main provisions of the philosophy of the Middle Ages, we can say that medieval philosophy as a whole is theocentric: all the basic concepts of medieval thinking are correlated with God and are defined through him. For all the complexity of medieval culture, it had serious shortcomings: people who knew the four rules of arithmetic were rare, because if someone knew how to divide, then he was simply considered the most educated person. This dislike, contempt for mathematics, and even arithmetic, for others natural sciences - characteristic feature throughout medieval life.

Man in medieval philosophy lost his former greatness and primary importance. The problems of human existence faded into the background. “Man is the measure of all things”, “man is the highest value” - such judgments are not characteristic of medieval philosophy. Moreover, such judgments are disgusting to her. Man sacrifices himself to the Absolute, therefore, he is not an absolute, he is nothing. Man is a slave; only by giving himself to the service of God does he gain meaning. This meaning is beyond natural life, but in the religious and spiritual sphere. The hierarchy of values is changing. Where ancient philosophy spoke about the rights and freedom of the individual, about the independence of the thinker, medieval philosophy reflects more on the duties of a Christian, humility and social inequality, consecrated by the church.

In medieval philosophy, theocentrism replaced the cosmocentrism of antiquity. It is closely related to theology. The main question of philosophy becomes the problem of the relationship between faith and reason. At the same time, faith must be rationally justified. Scholasticism became a kind of theological reaction against science and philosophy. Philosophy has been defined as the handmaiden of theology.

Medieval scholasticism was based on two more important principles emanating from the theological worldview. The main principle of ontology was the principle of creationism (or creation). And the main principle of epistemology became the principle of revelation. Both principles are closely related and presuppose the existence of one personal God.

Thus, while Greek philosophy, as we have seen, relied on polytheism (polytheism), medieval philosophy relied on monotheism (monotheism). By the way, for ancient philosophy, issues of religion were not paramount at all. In medieval philosophy they came to the fore. While Greek philosophy, with all the differences in its teachings, had a generally naturalistic character (a single whole that includes all that exists, including man, is nature); then medieval philosophy acquired a religious character (the only being is God).

From the very beginning, medieval philosophy developed in two directions: patristics and scholasticism.

Patristics is the earliest direction. Supporters of patristics were mainly engaged in criticism of the heretical teachings of the Christian Church and its apologetics (defense against distortions of the teaching). The ideologists of this direction received the definition of “church fathers,” and therefore the direction itself began to be called patristics. Many thinkers belonged to this movement, among them the most influential were Origen and Augustine.

Scholasticism is a later direction of medieval philosophy, it was formed in the 12th-13th centuries. Its main problem, as they said, was the problem of the relationship between faith and reason. Its main representatives were P. Abelard, F. Aquinas, F. Assisi.

Early Christian philosophy was exclusively built on the teachings of Augustine, and subsequent scholasticism remained entirely faithful to the Augustinian tradition. Thomas Aquinas synthesizes the Augustinian teaching with the teaching of Aristotle.

At the heart of medieval ideas about man were religious (theocentric) concepts in their essence that God is the beginning of all things. He created the world, man, determined the norms human behavior. However, the first people (Adam and Eve) sinned before God, violated his prohibition, wanted to become equal with him and determine for themselves what good and evil are. This is the original sin of humanity, which Christ partially atoned for, but which must also be atoned for by every person through repentance and godly behavior. As a result, life is perceived by the medieval consciousness as a path of redemption, a means of restoring lost harmony with God. The ideal of a person is an ascetic monk who despises everything earthly and completely devotes himself to serving God.

According to medieval Christian ideas, man is the image and likeness of God. The theology of image and likeness, viewed through the prism of the dogmas of creation, fall, incarnation, atonement and resurrection, has become the cornerstone of Christian anthropology. Within the framework of Christian anthropology, a focus on the polarization of opposites (soul and body, divine and created, spiritual and material) is fixed. This installation combined with an attitude towards the reconciliation of these opposites, designed to harmonize the created world.

One of the most important themes of medieval anthropological philosophy was the question of the relationship between soul and body. When considering the problem of the relationship between soul and body, medieval thinkers could not help but take into account different approaches to it, developed by ancient philosophers, primarily Plato and Aristotle. The range of possible positions was largely determined by the choice between the Platonic thesis about the soul as a self-sufficient spiritual substance and the Aristotelian thesis about the soul as the fulfillment, or form, of the body. If the first thesis made it easier to prove the immortality of the soul, but made it difficult to explain its connection with the body, then the second demonstrated the spiritual-physical integrity of man, but made it difficult to justify the autonomy and immortality of the soul.

Representatives of early scholasticism, based on the views of Plato, did not recognize the soul as a form of the body. They were more interested in the problem of the substantial difference between the spiritual and the physical than in the problem of the union of soul and body in man. Some authors (for example, Hugh of Saint-Victor) believed that the soul, temporarily burdened with a body, is “the best part of a person, or rather the person himself” and therefore represents a truly personal principle in a person. However, in the 13th century, at the time of the Aristotelian “renaissance,” along with the growing interest in the problem of physicality, the state of affairs changed noticeably. Many thinkers were aware that the soul, while not being completely dependent on the body, at the same time is not independent of it. It is no coincidence that they were busy searching for a compromise between the interpretation of the mental soul as a spiritual substance and the interpretation of the soul as a form of the body. The status of the thinking soul became the subject of controversy between the Thomists, who supported the position of Thomas Aquinas (1225 or 1227-1274) about the thinking soul as an incomposite and the only substantial form in man, and the Augustinians, who defended the thesis of the presence of several substantial forms in man. If the possibility of a rational justification for many anthropological positions did not evoke among the scholastics of the 13th century. special doubts, then in the scholasticism of the 14th century. (for example, in Occam's school) even the recognition of the soul as the form of the body was considered the prerogative of faith, not reason.

Another key problem of medieval philosophical anthropology was the problem of self-knowledge and self-awareness, which since the time of Socrates has attracted the close attention of Western European thinkers. During the period under review, the discussion of this problem was initiated by Augustine (354-430). Augustine, despite the arguments of skeptics, did not doubt the cognitive and existential reality of the personal principle, and therefore the truth that determines this reality. He used the certainty of inner experience as a prerequisite for finding in the human mind the image of the Trinity (i.e., God, one in three persons, or hypostases: God the father, God the son and God the holy spirit). Thus, Augustine largely anticipated the so-called. ontological proof of the existence of God, later developed in particular by Descartes.

Augustine is the founder of the so-called. “Christian Socratism”, based on the priority of introspection over knowledge of the external world. In early scholasticism (especially in the 12th century) it was characterized by an in-depth study of anthropological and ethical issues. The introduction of the dichotomy of internal and external into the sphere of anthropology resulted in the demarcation of the concepts of internal and outer man, and in the sphere of ethics - an aggravation of the dilemma between the spiritual greatness accessible to man, which consists in the moral and religious transformation of the individual, and insignificance, manifested in slavish dependence on the body and bodily goods. Considering knowledge of the essence and highest purpose of the human soul to be much more valuable and necessary than much knowledge about the external world, the authors of the 12th century. They sought, through renunciation of worldly vanity, to delve into the study of conscience as an arena of struggle between good and evil, between moral duty and vicious inclinations.

During the period of mature scholasticism, the problem of self-knowledge and self-awareness also occupied one of the main places in the hierarchy of research interests of medieval theologians and philosophers. Some thinkers (Bonaventure) considered the human soul in its relation to the eternal divine “model”, others (such as Thomas Aquinas) determined adequate knowledge of the soul by a gradual ascent from the particular to the general or from effect to cause, others (Vital of Four, Duns Scotus and others) emphasized the intuitive evidence of introspection and the infallibility of inner feeling.

The significant difference in the approaches of Thomists and Augustinians to the problem of the relationship between faith and reason determined the divide between Thomistic intellectualism, based on the position that “reason exceeds the will,” and Augustinian voluntarism, based on the fact that the will is autonomous in relation to reason and can neglect it recommendations. According to the Augustinians, the will embodies the utmost intensity of spiritual life, therefore the awareness of volitional acts and free will is an “experience of the self” and affects the deep layers of the human personality.

Great value During the period under review, there was also the question of the relationship between free will, predestination and grace. After a fierce ideological struggle between the Pelagians, who sought to emphasize the intrinsic value of human moral merits and the morally justified and predictable proportionality of retribution, and Augustine, convinced that God crowns human merits as “his gifts” and guards the inscrutability of the path of calling, justification and glorification of the righteous, the chosen "before the creation of the world", Augustine's doctrine of the primacy of predestination and grace over free will was recognized as orthodox. However, the opposition between the official Augustinian and heretical Pelagian positions can be traced throughout the entire history of medieval Western thought. In addition, the problem of human free will was considered in the context of the problem of theodicy (justification of God). Responsibility for the evil committed in the world created by the “absolutely good” God was placed on man, who was free to choose between good and evil.

Thus, in medieval philosophy the theocentric understanding of man prevails, the essence of which is that the origin, nature, purpose and entire life of man are predetermined by God. In accordance with this fundamental attitude, shared by the overwhelming majority of authors, all anthropological problems were considered in direct connection with theological principles. The main question of the entire Western medieval philosophy of man can be considered the question of the relationship between soul and body, which later became one of the core issues in philosophical anthropology (the problem of psychophysical parallelism).

Introduction 3
1. The problem of man in medieval philosophy 4
2. Anthropological concept of St. Augustine 6
3. Concept of Thomas Aquinas 12
4. Meister Eckhart's concept 15
Conclusion 20
References 21

Introduction

This work is devoted to the consideration of human philosophy in the Middle Ages.
The Middle Ages is a whole millennium, the beginnings and ends of which have specific outlines historical events: fall of Rome (476) and fall of Byzantium (1453).
Medieval thinking, including philosophical thinking, had a number of distinctive features. Perhaps the main one is theocentrism. Everything is ultimately determined by God. Medieval thinking was also distinguished by psychological self-absorption. Psychological self-absorption manifested itself primarily in the enormous role, as it was believed, of purification and sincerity for the spiritual salvation of a person. The typological features of medieval thinking definitely include historicism, conditioned by the Christian idea of the uniqueness of events, their singularity, caused by the uniqueness of the fact of the phenomenon. The ultimate reality for medieval man was God, the closest - his Word.
The purpose of this work is to study the philosophy of man in the Middle Ages.
Work structure – this work consists of an introduction, four chapters, a conclusion and a list of references.

1. The problem of man in medieval philosophy

For the medieval consciousness, the whole meaning of human life was in three words: live, die and be judged. No matter what social and material heights a person reaches, he will appear naked before God. Therefore, one must not worry about the vanity of this world, but about the salvation of the soul. The medieval man believed that throughout his life evidence accumulated against him - sins that he committed and for which he did not confess or repent. Confession requires a duality so characteristic of the Middle Ages - a person acted simultaneously in two roles: in the role of the accused, for he was responsible for his deeds, and in the role of the accuser, since he himself had to analyze his behavior in the face of the representative of God - the confessor. The personality received its completeness only when a final assessment was given of the individual’s life and what he had done throughout it.
The “judicial thinking” of medieval man expanded beyond the boundaries of the earthly world. God, the Creator, was understood as the Judge. Moreover, if at the first stages of the Middle Ages He was endowed with the traits of balanced, stern inflexibility and paternal condescension, then at the end of this era he was already a merciless and vengeful Lord. Why? Philosophers of the late Middle Ages explained the extraordinary increase in the preaching of fear of the formidable Deity by the deep socio-psychological and religious crisis of the transition period.
God's Judgment had a dual character, for one, private, judgment took place when someone died, the other. Universal, must take place at the end of the history of the human race. Naturally, this aroused great interest among philosophers in understanding the meaning of history.
The most difficult problem, sometimes incomprehensible to modern consciousness, was the problem of historical time.
Medieval man lived, as it were, outside of time, in a constant sense of eternity. He willingly endured the daily routine, noticing only the change of day and seasons. He did not need time, because it, earthly and vain, distracted him from work, which in itself was only a delay before the main event - God's Judgment.
Theologians argued for the linear flow of historical time. In the concept of sacred history (from the Latin sacer - sacred, associated with religious rites), time flows from the act of Creation through the passion of Christ to the end of the world and the Second Coming. In accordance with this scheme, they were built in the 13th century. and concepts of earthly history (for example, Vincent of Beauvais).