The Cambridge History of Medieval Philosophy comprises over fifty specially commissioned essays by experts on the philosophy of this period. Starting in the late eighth century, with the renewal of learning some centuries after the fall of the Roman Empire, a sequence of chapters takes the reader through developments in many and varied fields, including logic and language, natural philosophy, ethics, metaphysics, and theology. Close attention is paid to the context of medieval philosophy, with discussions of the rise of the universities and developments in the cultural and linguistic spheres. A striking feature is the continuous coverage of Islamic, Jewish, and Christian material. There are useful biographies of the philosophers, and a comprehensive bibliography. The volumes illuminate a rich and remarkable period in the history of philosophy and will be the authoritative source on medieval philosophy for the next generation of scholars and students alike.

THE NICENE CREED

THOMAS WILLIAMS

The Nicene Creed was adopted by the First Council of Nicaea (325) and revised by the First Council of Constantinople (381). Its original Greek text was in the first-person plural – “We believe” – reflecting the Creed’s role as a statement of the essential faith of the Church. The most familiar Latin text, however, is in the first-person singular, recited by the priest alone at a time when the people no longer participated vocally in the Eucharistic liturgy. A strictly literal translation of the Latin text is given below.

For medieval Christians, the Nicene Creed held a unique status as a touchstone of orthodoxy. As the statement of ecumenical councils held by the undivided Church, it was (and remains) preeminently authoritative. There was nothing comparable in medieval Judaism and Islam, which had no authoritative mechanism or centralized hierarchy for determining the boundaries of correct belief.

When James of Venice translated the Posterior Analytics from Greek into Latin, in the second quarter of the twelfth century, European philosophy got one of the great shocks of its long history. John of Salisbury famously remarked that “it has nearly as many obstacles as it has chapters, if indeed there are not more obstacles than chapters” (Metalogicon IV.6). Latin philosophers had taken themselves to have a grip on Aristotle’s logic, but what they were discovering in the twelfth century was that their grasp extended only to what would be called the Old Logic, the ars vetus, leaving untouched the New Logic of the Topics, the Sophistical Refutations and, most importantly, the Prior and Posterior Analytics. Moreover, as the Latin philosophical canon swelled in the later twelfth century to include not just the full Aristotelian corpus but also the riches of Arabic philosophy, European authors realized just what a central role the Posterior Analytics in particular played in all this work. Although we now tend to focus on the recovery of Aristotle’s natural philosophy, metaphysics, and ethics, it is arguably the Posterior Analytics – not the Ethics, the Metaphysics, the Physics, or the De anima – that had the most pervasive influence on scholastic thought. For it is here that Aristotle sets out the methodological principles that are to be followed in the pursuit of systematic, scientific knowledge: what the Latin tradition would call scientia. Inasmuch as scholastic philosophers take the goal of all their inquiries to be the achievement of such scientia, the strictures of the Posterior Analytics had an influence on virtually every area of scholastic thought, from theology (see Chapter 50) to metaphysics (Chapter 44), and from grammar (Chapter 15) to optics (Chapter 24).

The first unquestionably big idea in the history of philosophy was the idea of form. The idea of course belonged to Plato, and was then domesticated at the hands of Aristotle, who paired form with matter as the two chief principles of his metaphysics and natural philosophy. In the medieval period, it was Aristotle’s conception of form and matter that generally dominated. This was true for both the Islamic and the Christian tradition, once the entire Aristotelian corpus became available. For this reason, although there is much to say about the fate of Platonic Forms in medieval thought, the present chapter will focus on the Aristotelian tradition.

Aristotelian commentators have been puzzled by form and matter for as long as there have been Aristotelian commentators. Indeed, it would not be too much to say that these are topics about which Aristotelians have never formed a very clear conception, and that their failure to do so was the principal reason why Aristotelianism ceased to be a flourishing research program from the seventeenth century onward. For those who aspire to a modern revival of Aristotelianism, the concepts of form and matter can easily take on the aspect of a kind of Holy Grail, such that if only we could get these ideas clearly in focus, we could see our way forward on any number of philosophical fronts, such as the union of mind and body, the coherence and endurance of substances, the nature of causality, and so on. The historical record, however, suggests that this hope is a snare and a delusion, insofar as there has never been any such thing as the theory of form and matter. Although medieval philosophers of all kinds used this terminology incessantly, it had no more of a fixed meaning than does the ubiquitous contemporary philosophical talk of “properties.”