Medieval Philosophy (A History of Philosophy) by Peter Adamson

Author:Peter Adamson [Adamson, Peter]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: OUP Oxford
Published: 2019-09-26T00:00:00+00:00

47

Here Comes the Son

The Trinity and the Eucharist

Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass contains a scene in which Alice, in discussion with the White Queen, says that she can’t believe impossible things. The Queen responds, “I daresay you haven’t had much practice. When I was your age, I always did it for half-an-hour a day. Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.” From which you might infer that the White Queen would have felt quite at home in the Middle Ages, and not just because she was royalty. Medieval philosophy is notoriously intertwined with Christian theology, and some Christian doctrines may seem to involve embracing the impossible. In modern times, philosophers have sometimes taken this to be a great virtue. The nineteenth-century Danish thinker Søren Kierkegaard put the notion of the “absurd” at the center of Christianity, arguing that we should not and indeed cannot rationally accept the idea of God’s incarnation as a human. It can be believed only by faith.

The medievals were far more inclined to think that reason goes hand in hand with faith. By this stage I’ve hopefully managed to disabuse you of any notion that medieval thinkers spent all their time thinking of nothing but faith, ignoring the deliverances of natural reason. For that matter, when they did think about theology, they often took a highly rationalist approach. Now, though, we’re going to look at issues that posed a particularly stern test for that approach. We won’t live up to the example set by the White Queen; I for my part have already had breakfast, and we will be trying to wrap our minds around only two apparently impossible beliefs. These are the Trinity, the doctrine that God is one and simple, yet three Persons, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, and the Eucharist, the doctrine that bread and wine can turn into the body and blood of Christ.1 However hard these things may be to believe, medieval thinkers insisted that they are not in fact impossible. Thomas Aquinas, Henry of Ghent, Duns Scotus, and others pushed reasoning to its limits in order to show that the Trinity and Eucharist are indeed possible and even to a large extent rationally comprehensible. This led them to investigate topics of more general interest like philosophy of mind, the metaphysical status of relations, and the connection between substances and their properties.

Of course, Christian thinkers had already been using philosophy to grapple with these matters for a long time. We saw that in the eleventh century a bitter dispute erupted in which Lanfranc of Bec attacked Berengar of Tours for holding that the Eucharist is merely symbolic in character, and that in the twelfth century Abelard and others convinced themselves that pagan philosophers like Plato had intuitively grasped the Trinity (Chapters 5 and 14). These discussions lived on in the memory of later medieval thinkers. Aquinas, for instance, refers to Berengar’s position as a heresy (ST 3 Q75 a1). But when it came to the Trinity, they took their cue above all from an even earlier author: Augustine.

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