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.

Current scholars generally behave as though the medieval traditions of mysticism and philosophy in the Latin West have nothing to do with each other; in large part, this appears to be the result of the common perception that mysticism has as its ultimate goal an ecstatic, selfless union with the divine that intellectual pursuits such as philosophy inhibit rather than support. There are, however, at least two central problems with this assumption.

First, mysticism in the Middle Ages – even just within the Christian tradition – was not a uniform movement with a single goal: it took different forms in different parts of Europe, and those forms changed substantially from the eleventh to the fifteenth century, particularly with the increased emphasis on personal piety and the feminization of religious imagery that emerges in the later centuries. The belief that mysticism entails the rejection or abandonment of reason in order to merge with the divine, for instance, represents only one strain of the medieval tradition. Although this view is explicitly advocated in the Christian West by such influential figures as Meister Eckhart and Marguerite Porete, the prevalent identification of the allegorical figure of Wisdom with Christ provides the grounds for equally prominent figures such as Hildegard of Bingen, Richard of St. Victor, and Henry Suso to claim that mystical union with God is actually aided by reason.

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.