John Marenbon

Pagans and Philosophers: The Problem of Paganism from Augustine to Leibniz

Preface ix A Note on References and Citations xi Introduction: The Problem of Paganism 1 Part I: The Problem Takes Shape Chapter 1 Prelude: Before Augustine 19 Chapter 2 Augustine 23 Chapter 3 Boethius 42 Part II: From Alcuin to Langland Chapter 4 The Early Middle Ages and the Christianization of Europe 57 Chapter 5 Abelard 73 Chapter 6 John of Salisbury and the Encyclopaedic Tradition 95 Chapter 7 Arabi, Mongolia and Beyond: Contemporary Pagans in the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Centuries 109 Chapter 8 Aristotelian Wisdom: Unity, Rejection or Relativism 127 Chapter 9 University Theologians on Pagan Virtue and Salvation 160 Chapter 10 Dante and Boccaccio 188 Chapter 11 Langland and Chaucer 214 Part III: The Continuity of the Problem of Paganism, 1400-1700 Chapter 12 Pagan Knowledge, 1400-1700 235 Chapter 13 Pagan Virtue, 1400-1700 263 Chapter 14 The Salvation of Pagans, 1400-1700 281 Epilogue: Leibniz and China 301 General Conclusion 304 Bibliography 307 Index 339

Abelard,ens and unity

Although Abelard arrived at a view ofens nearer to Aristotles than his sources would suggest, unlike thirteenth-century thinkers he did not work out a view of transcendentals in terms ofens, its attributes and their convertibility. He did, however, regard unity (though not goodness or truth) as an attribute of every thing. At first, Abelard suggested that unity, being inseparable, could not be an accident according to Porphyrys definition (‘that which can come and leave a subject without the subject being corrupted’): either it is some type of form not classified by Porphyry, or not a form at all. In his later logical work, Abelard argued differently. Unity, he said, is an accidental form, but Porphyrys definition of an accident must be understood ‘negatively’, not as asserting something about what could happen in reality (since the form of unity could never leave its subject) but rather something about an absence of connection: were it,per impossible, to occur, the loss by a subject of its form of unity would not lead to the loss of its specific or generic status.

Relations and the Historiography of Medieval Philosophy

ion, Relation, and Induction, 61–119. The section on the Middle Ages, which includes some discussion of Greek patristic and Arabic theories, is at 86–112. British Journal for the History of Philosophy, 2016 Vol. 24, No. 3, 387–404, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09608788.2016.1178102

Relativism in the Long Middle Ages: Crossing the ethical border with Paganism

Christians in the Long Middle Ages (ca. 200–ca. 1700 ce) in Western Europe often thought about paganism, especially that of the ancient Greeks and Romans, such as Aristotle and Virgil, who provided the foundations of their intellectual culture, but also contemporary pagans (that is to say, people who were neither Christians, Jews, nor Muslims), such as the Lithuanians, Mongols, and, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the “Indians,” both of America and of India itself, the Japanese, and the Chinese. This article will set out and explore one of the surprising features of these discussions, their use of relativistic approaches, which few would associate with medieval thought. With regard to pagan knowledge, in particular, that of the ancient pagans, some writers develop a strictly relativistic approach, which becomes one of the most important (and often hardly noticed) features of medieval intellectual life. With regard to the question of the virtues of pagans (both ancient and contemporary), the approach is also relativistic, but in more subtle and looser ways.

Ernest Renan and Averroism: The Story of a Misinterpretation

My essay sets Ernest Renan’s famous study of Averroism, Averroes et l’averroisme (first edition 1851) into the context of its author’s intellectual development. It shows how it can be seen in some respects as the precursor to his best-selling Vie de Jesus, because of its awareness to the importance of myth in intellectual history: myth not just around the founding figures of religions, but also in connection with the scientific texts which, by constituting an orthodoxy, obstruct scientific progress. Renan’s view emerges as a complex one, which holds in tension both the human spirit’s fecundity in fostering myth and misinterpretation, and the philologists’ scientific expertise in demythologizing and in correcting error. The concluding section examines how recent scholarship has cast aside the whole notion of Latin Averroism but, by doing so, risks missing the links captured by Renan between philosophy and wider intellectual life in the Middle Ages and early modern period.