Michael Harrington

Apparently alone among medieval Christians, Eriugena argues that all life is immortal. He relies on Plato’s Timaeus as his primary source for this claim, but he modifies the argument of the Timaeus considerably. He turns Plato’s cosmic soul into the genus of life, thereby taking a treatise that originally dealt with cosmology and using it to explore the ontological significance of definition. All species that fall under the genus of life must be immortal, because a mortal species would contradict the genus. No later medieval author would take up Eriugena’s arguments explicitly, although Aquinas comes close. The two thirteenth-century thinkers to address universal immortality seriously—Aquinas and Bonaventure—argue against it, but they are more faithful than Eriugena himself to a literal reading of the Timaeus.

François Jullien is a master of repetition. Over his more than thirty books, he introduces a carefully defined set of concepts--such as “blandness” and “efficacy”--and then pairs them, opposes them, and sets them in different contexts, returning to them repeatedly without ever saying quite the same thing. One can imagine an introduction to Jullien’s work that traces each of his concepts through its development from book to book, noting explicit and implicit connections to the traditional Chinese thought that gave rise to it. In François Jullien’s Unexceptional Thought, Arne De Boever takes a different tack. As he puts it in his introduction: “I focus on certain books and topics that stood out to me within Jullien’s...

Erwin Panofsky developed the postulate of clarification to explain the mental habit common to Gothic architecture and Western medieval scholasticism, but the postulate is equally applicable to the commentary tradition of Song-dynasty China. The commentary on the Book of Changes authored by Cheng Yi (1033–1107) provides a good example of how the Confucians of the Song dynasty took their concern for clarity to a recognizably medieval extreme. By looking at how Cheng Yi understands and foregrounds the clarity of the Book of Changes, we can begin to see both what was medieval about Song-dynasty China and why the medieval method continues to be viable for interpreters of the Book of Changes.

The Neoplatonic philosopher Proclus disagrees with his predecessor Plotinus on the degree to which human souls can liken themselves to the paradigms, the intellectual formal causes of the sensible world. Plotinus claims that a part of the soul is itself an intellect and not just a likeness of an intellect, while Proclus denies that the soul can ever be more than a likeness of intellect. ;This explicit conflict between Proclus and Plotinus repeats itself implicitly in the work of the author who called himself Dionysius the Areopagite after the convert of St. Paul mentioned in the Acts of the Apostles, and Dionysius' first commentator, an anonymous scholiast assumed by many to be John of Scythopolis. Dionysius follows Proclus on the question of how the human soul likens itself to intellect. Human souls and angelic intellects all receive their likeness to this divine intellect as a gift given to them at their own level of thought . The divine intellect is light ; what the human souls and angelic intellects receive is a gift of light . ;The first commentator on Dionysius subverts Dionysius' denial of paradigmatic knowledge to human souls and angelic intellects, probably without realizing it. This commentator had access, if not to a complete copy of Plotinus' Enneads, at least to a set of extensive quotations from various treatises of Plotinus. Not only does he quote Plotinus extensively in his commentary, but his own comments on Dionysius reflect the Plotinian account of how human souls liken themselves to the demiurgic intellect. Dionysius' commentator posits the paradigms both as the intellectual side of God and as the substrate of every intellectual being, which for him includes both human souls and angelic intellects. In the work of this first commentator on Dionysius, we see a tension between the Plotinian and Proclan approaches to human knowledge of the divine intellect which prefigures later treatments of the tension in the medieval reception of Dionysius and Augustine

The Song and Ming dynasty Confucians make frequent use of what would today be identified as a slippery slope argument. The Book of Changes and its early commentaries provide both the language and the rationale for this argument, inasmuch as the Confucians regard these texts as a method for identifying tiny problems that will one day threaten the state. While today the slippery slope argument is often criticized for promoting an unreasoned resistance to change, a close look at its use by Confucians reveals that they largely avoid this criticism, using the argument in a reasoned way to target not change, but excess.

The medieval fascination with the mysterious language of Dionysius the Areopagite is nowhere more evident than in the thirteenth-century textbook edition of his treatise on liturgical rites. Dionysius employed unfamiliar Greek to describe people, actions, and texts that would have been perfectly familiar to his readers. The Latin translation used in the thirteenth-century textbook strives to preserve this unfamiliarity, but commentaries are introduced between its lines and paragraphs, disrupting its ability to bewilder and surprise. These commentaries make the Dionysian text less mysterious, while also slightly altering its meaning. In the hands of the commentators, Dionysius becomes less interested in the aesthetic mystery of the liturgy, and more interested in credal orthodoxy. To read text and commentary together is to confront seven hundred years of competing voices speaking on the nature and purpose of the Christian church.

The luminaries of late thirteenth-century Europe took great interest in the mysterious fifth-century author known as Dionysius the Areopagite. They typically read Dionysius not in the original Greek, but in a Latin edition prepared sometime in the middle of the thirteenth century. This edition, which appeared first in Paris and later circulated all over Western Europe, was no mere translation. In addition to the famous translation made by Eriugena in the ninth century, it contained translations of scholia on the Dionysian texts made by Anastasius the Librarian, alternative readings provided by Anastasius and other Latin readers, as well as excerpts from Eriugena's own theological masterwork, the Periphyseon. University scholars such as Albert the Great and Thomas Aquinas thus learned Dionysian mystical theology not only from his text, but from the seven-hundred year interpretive tradition that literally surrounded it on the page.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Clement of AlexandriaL. Michael HarringtonEric Osborn. Clement of Alexandria. Cambridge-New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Pp. xviii + 324. Cloth, $85.00.With Clement of Alexandria, Eric Osborn returns to the subject of his 1957 book, The Philosophy of Clement of Alexandria, but its style and themes more closely resemble his more recent studies of second-century Christian thinkers: Tertullian, First Theologian of the West (Cambridge, 1997) and Irenaeus of Lyons (Cambridge, 2001). Osborn's Clement, Tertullian, and Irenaeus are bound together by more than the century in which they happened to live. They share an optimism—a confidence that the world is finally comprehensible—and an argumentative theology, developed in response to the Gnostics, who, Osborn says in his book on Irenaeus, "were strong on picture and myth but weak on argument" (xiii).Osborn's approach to Clement is, as he describes it, analytic or problematic, meaning that "we simply ask what problems forced Clement to write and where he found Christian teaching in need of elucidation" (xii-xiii). Three problems concern Clement: (1) "how can the narrative of the kerygma (what God does) be translated into a metaphysic (who God is)?"; (2) "how two distinct beings, father and son, constitute one God"; and (3) "an answer had to be found for those who divided faith and knowledge." Each problem is addressed by means of a theme—divine economy for the first, reciprocity for the second, and salvation by faith for the third—and each of the book's three major parts devotes itself to one of these themes.Having laid out this systematic division, Osborn generally follows the logic of Clement's own thought rather than an imposed structure, developing his argument by careful collation and paraphrase. As a result, by the end of the book, the reader will feel thoroughly and effortlessly initiated in Clement's major works: the Protrepticus, the Paedagogus, and the Stromateis. The book thus serves as a thorough introduction to Clement, without aiming so low that it is of no interest to the scholar.Osborn's central argument unfolds from his observation that "Clement, more than any other early Christian writer, knew and enjoyed Greek philosophy and literature" (2). Clement defends the rationality shared between Christians and Greeks against the irrationalists of his time: the theosophers, or Gnostics (215). Osborn, in turn, defends Clement against the irrationalists of our own time, represented in his book by Wolfhart Pannenberg. The "divine irrational freedom" praised by Pannenberg is replaced in Osborn's Irenaeus and Clement by "universal wisdom" (47). The universality of wisdom allows great and dispassionate natures to reach the truth—whether they are Christians or Greeks—though each is like one limb of the truth, severed from the rest. Convinced that Christ will reunite these disiecta membra, "Clement converses with them and joins their broken lights" (104).In footnotes and parenthetical references throughout the book, Osborn argues against the approaches to Clement in doxography and Discourse Power theory, precisely because they are unable to treat him as a philosopher (79). The doxographer can show Clement's dependence on earlier philosophers, but is unable to see how he differs from them (xii). The Discourse Power theorist can see that Clement's system differs from the Gnostic system, but is able to explain the difference only as a competition between two social structures, without seeing that only one of them aspires to logical coherence (215).This dismissal of doxography and Discourse Power theory may strike the reader as too thoroughgoing, especially if we distinguish, as Osborn himself does in his book on Tertullian, philosophy as "a matter of system and speculation" from philosophy as "a matter of argument" (198). Clement's optimism depends on his confidence in system and speculation, in so far as they can be defended by argument. But if argument can defend two different systems equally well, then we may wonder why Clement chooses the system he does. Here the doxographer, who can show the provenance of his thought, becomes essential, as does the Discourse Power theorist, who can set Clement's choice of system in the context of the contemporary social fabric that inevitably affects even the...