II Medieval Philosophy

The Middle Ages were the period from the fall of the Roman Empire in the 5th century to the dawn of the Renaissance in the 15th. So Medieval philosophy begins with St.Augustine, who incorporated Plato's philosophy (which he got mostly from the writings of Plotinus) into the growing young religion of Christianity.

This was a fine beginning, but then the Dark Ages befell Europe. From about 500 to about 1000 trade declined and cities shrank, law and order broke down and people lived at a bare subsistence level. In such conditions philosophy does not flourish. And yet during that awful time some of the writings of the ancient Greeks and Romans were preserved-by the only bastions of European civilization in those benighted times, the Christian monasteries. In the 11th century trade revived, cities grew again, and universities emerged. And philosophy surfaced once more in the writings and teachings of such churchmen as St. Anslem of Canterbury and the Frenchman Peter Abelard. And then came the incomparable Italian philosopher-theologian St. Thomas Aquinas, who assimilated into Christianity the philosophy of Aristotle (which, ironically, had been preserved by such non-Christian thinkers as Averroes, Avicenna, and Maimonides) and thereby built a theological system of thought which stands even today as the intellectual foundation of Catholicism.

But toward the end of the Medieval period some thinkers began to reject St. Thomas' overwhelmingly rational system. William of Ockham and Duns Scotus argued that God's Will superceded His Reason and that, to learn about God's Creation, we must observe rather than cogitate. This recognition of the importance of observation ultimately opened the way for the observational, experimental science of Copernicus and Galileo, and thereby ushered in the Renaissance.