Part IV, Chapter XLVI, 1

OF DARKNESS FROM VAIN PHILOSOPHY AND FABULOUS TRADITIONS

By philosophy I mean “knowledge acquired by reasoning from the way a thing is generated to its properties, or from its properties to a possible way of generating it, in order to produce, as far as matter and human power allow, the effects human life requires.” Thus a geometer reasons from the construction of figures to discover many of their properties, and from those properties to discover new ways to construct them, in order to measure land and water and serve countless other purposes. So an astronomer studies the rising, setting, and movement of the sun and stars in different regions of the heavens, and discovers the causes of day and night and the seasons of the year, thereby keeping account of time. The same holds for other sciences.

From this definition it is plain that the original knowledge called experience, in which prudence consists, is not to be counted a part of philosophy. Experience is not acquired by reasoning but belongs to brute beasts as well as man; it is only a memory of past sequences of events, in which the omission of the smallest circumstance can change the outcome and defeat even the most prudent expectation. Correct reasoning, by contrast, produces only general, eternal, immutable truth.

Nor should we give the name of philosophy to false conclusions: anyone who reasons correctly with words he understands can never conclude an error.

Nor Supernatural Revelation

Nor should we give it to what anyone knows by supernatural revelation, since that is not acquired by reasoning.

Nor should we give it to what is obtained by reasoning from the authority of books, since that is not reasoning from cause to effect or effect to cause; it is not knowledge but faith.

Because the faculty of reasoning follows upon the use of speech, some general truths must have been discovered through reasoning almost as long ago as language itself. The indigenous peoples of America have some sound moral maxims; they also have enough arithmetic to add and divide numbers that are not too large. Yet that does not make them philosophers. Just as small quantities of grain and grapes grew scattered through fields and woods before people knew their value, used them as food, or planted them separately in fields and vineyards—when they ate acorns and drank water—so there have been various true, general, and useful reflections from the beginning, growing naturally from human reason. At first, however, these were few. People lived by crude experience, without method: there was no sowing and cultivating knowledge separately from the weeds and wild growth of error and conjecture. The cause was their lack of leisure amid the work of securing life's necessities and defending themselves against their neighbors; until great Common-wealths arose, it could not be otherwise. Leisure is the mother of philosophy; the Common-wealth is the mother of peace and leisure. Philosophy was first studied where great, flourishing cities first appeared. The gymnosophists of India, the magi of Persia, and the priests of Chaldea and Egypt are reckoned the earliest philosophers, and their countries were the earliest kingdoms. Philosophy had not yet arisen among the Greeks and the other peoples of the West, whose Common-wealths—perhaps no larger than Lucca or Geneva—never had peace except when they feared each other equally, or leisure to observe anything but each other. At length, when war united many smaller Greek cities into fewer, larger ones, Seven Men from different parts of Greece began to win a reputation for wisdom: some through moral and political sayings, others through the astronomy and geometry learned from the Chaldeans and Egyptians. Yet we hear of no schools of philosophy at this point.

After the Athenians had defeated the Persian armies and gained dominion of the sea and thus of all the islands and maritime cities of the Archipelago, in Asia as well as Europe, they grew wealthy. Those without employment at home or abroad had little to do except, as St. Luke says (Acts 17.21.), “tell and hear news,” or discuss philosophy publicly with the city's young people. Each master chose a place for the purpose: Plato, certain public walks called Academia after one Academus; Aristotle, the walk at the temple of Pan called Lycaeum; others, the Stoa, or covered walk where merchants' goods were landed; still others, other places. There they passed their leisure teaching or disputing their opinions; some spoke wherever they could gather the city's youth to listen. Carneades did the same at Rome while serving as ambassador, prompting Cato to advise the Senate to send him away quickly lest he corrupt the morals of the young men who delighted in hearing him say what they thought were fine things.

Hence the place where any of them taught and disputed was called Schola, which in their language means leisure; and their disputes were called Diatribae, or passing the time. Some philosophers also took the names of their sects from their schools: followers of Plato's doctrine were called Academics; followers of Aristotle, Peripatetics, after the walk where he taught; and Zeno's pupils, Stoics, after the Stoa. It is as though we named men after Moorfields, St. Paul's Church, and the Exchange because they often meet there to prattle and idle.

Nevertheless, this custom appealed to people so strongly that it spread in time throughout Europe and most of Africa, with schools publicly established and maintained for lectures and disputations in almost every Common-wealth.

There were schools among the Jews, too, in ancient times, both before and after our Savior; but these were schools of their Law. Although called synagogues, meaning congregations of the people, they were no different in nature from public schools, only in name, since every Sabbath the Law was read, expounded, and debated there. They existed not only in Jerusalem but in every Gentile city inhabited by Jews. There was such a school at Damascus, which Paul entered to persecute; there were others at Antioch, Iconium, and Thessalonica, which he entered to dispute. Such too was the synagogue of the Libertines, Cyrenians, Alexandrians, Cilicians, and those of Asia: the school of Libertines and of Jews who were strangers in Jerusalem. Members of this school disputed with Saint Stephen.

But what benefit have these schools brought? What science has been acquired today through their readings and disputes? For geometry, the mother of all natural science, we owe nothing to the schools. Plato, the best philosopher among the Greeks, forbade entry to his school to anyone without some prior knowledge of geometry. Many studied that science to humanity's great advantage; yet we hear nothing of their schools, and there was no sect of geometers, nor were they then called philosophers. The natural philosophy of the schools was a dream rather than a science, expressed in senseless, meaningless language. That cannot be avoided by those who would teach philosophy without first gaining substantial knowledge of geometry: nature works by motion, whose ways and degrees cannot be known without understanding the proportions and properties of lines and figures. Their moral philosophy is merely a description of their own Passions. For the rule of conduct without civil government is the Law of Nature, and within it, the civil law determines what is honorable or dishonorable, just or unjust, and, generally, good or evil. They instead make their own likes and dislikes the rules of good and bad. Amid such diversity of taste, nothing is generally agreed upon; everyone does whatever seems good in his own eyes, so far as he dares, to the ruin of the Common-wealth. Their logic, which ought to be a method of reasoning, consists only of snares laid with words and devices for perplexing those who try to question them. In short, there is nothing so absurd that some ancient philosopher has not upheld it, as Cicero—himself one of them—says. And I believe that scarcely anything in natural philosophy can be more absurd than what is now called Aristotle's Metaphysics; anything more hostile to government than much of what he says in his Politics; or anything more ignorant than a large part of his Ethics.

The Jewish school was originally a school of the Law of Moses, who commanded (Deut. 31.10.) that at the end of every seventh year, at the Feast of Tabernacles, it be read to all the people, so that they might hear and learn it. The reading of the Law every Sabbath, practiced after the Captivity, ought therefore to have had no purpose beyond acquainting the people with the commandments they were to obey and explaining to them the writings of the prophets. But our Savior's many rebukes show plainly that they corrupted the text of the Law with false commentaries and vain traditions. They understood the prophets so poorly that they acknowledged neither Christ nor the works he performed, of which the prophets had prophesied. Through lectures and disputes in their synagogues, then, they turned the doctrine of their Law into a fantastic sort of philosophy about the incomprehensible nature of God and spirits. They compounded it from the vain philosophy and theology of the Greeks, mixed with their own imaginings drawn from the darker passages of Scripture, those easiest to twist to their purpose, and from the fabulous traditions of their ancestors.

What is now called a university is a union of many public schools in one town or city, incorporated under a single government. Its chief schools were established for the three professions: the Roman religion, Roman law, and medicine. Philosophy has a place there only as handmaid to the Roman religion; and since only Aristotle's authority is accepted there, its study is not properly philosophy, whose nature does not depend on authors, but Aristotelity. Geometry had no place there at all until very recently, since it serves nothing but uncompromising truth. Anyone who attained any proficiency in it through his own native ingenuity was commonly thought a magician and his art diabolical.

Now, coming to the particular tenets of vain philosophy passed from the universities into the Church, partly from Aristotle and partly from blindness of understanding, I shall consider their principles first. There is a certain First Philosophy on which all other philosophy ought to depend. It consists chiefly in setting correct limits on the meanings of the most universal terms or names, limits that prevent ambiguity and equivocation in reasoning and are commonly called definitions. Such are the definitions of body, time, place, matter, form, essence, subject, substance, accident, power, act, finite, infinite, quantity, quality, motion, action, passion, and many other terms needed to explain our conceptions of the nature and generation of bodies. Explaining—that is, settling the meanings of—these and similar terms is commonly called metaphysics in the schools, because it is part of Aristotle's philosophy bearing that title. But his title has another meaning: it signifies “books written or placed after his natural philosophy.” The schools, however, take the title to mean books of supernatural philosophy, for the word metaphysics permits both meanings. Indeed, most of what is written there is so far beyond the possibility of comprehension, and so contrary to natural reason, that anyone who thinks it means anything must think it supernatural.

From these metaphysics, mingled with Scripture to make school divinity, we are told there are certain essences in the world separated from bodies, called abstract essences and substantial forms. Interpreting this jargon requires more than ordinary attention here, and I ask pardon of those unused to this sort of discourse for addressing myself to those who are. The world—I do not mean merely the earth, whose lovers are called worldly men, but the universe, the entire mass of everything that exists—is corporeal: it is body, with the dimensions of magnitude, namely length, breadth, and depth. Every part of a body is likewise body and has the same dimensions; consequently every part of the universe is body, and what is not body is no part of the universe. Since the universe is all, what is no part of it is nothing, and consequently nowhere. It does not follow that spirits are nothing: they have dimensions and are therefore truly bodies, although ordinary speech reserves that name for bodies that can be seen or touched, those with some degree of opacity. Yet people call spirits incorporeal, a more honorable name that may therefore be more piously attributed to God himself. In his case, we consider not which attribute best expresses his nature, which is incomprehensible, but which best expresses our desire to honor him.

Of Darkness from Vain Philosophy and Fabulous Traditions

Philosophy means “knowledge gained by reasoning from the way something is produced to its properties, or from its properties to a possible way of producing it, so that we can produce the effects human life requires, as far as materials and human power allow.” Thus a geometer reasons from the construction of figures to discover many of their properties, and from those properties to discover new ways to construct them. This lets people measure land and water, among countless other uses. In the same way, an astronomer studies how the sun and stars rise, set, and move in different parts of the heavens. He then discovers the causes of day and night and the changing seasons, enabling him to keep track of time. The same applies to other sciences.

This definition clearly excludes the original kind of knowledge called experience, which makes up prudence. We do not gain it by reasoning. Animals have it as well as humans. It is only a memory of how events followed one another in the past. Leave out the smallest circumstance that changes the outcome, and even the most prudent person's expectation fails. Correct reasoning, by contrast, produces only general, eternal, unchanging truths.

We also cannot call false conclusions philosophy. Anyone who reasons correctly with words he understands can never reach a false conclusion.

Nor Is Supernatural Revelation Philosophy

Nor should we call anything known through supernatural revelation philosophy, since reasoning did not produce it.

Nor should we call it philosophy when someone reasons from the authority of books. That does not reason from cause to effect or from effect to cause. It is faith, not knowledge.

Because reasoning depends on speech, people must have discovered some general truths by reasoning almost as soon as they had language. The indigenous people of America have some sound moral sayings. They also know a little arithmetic and can add and divide numbers that are not too large. But that does not make them philosophers. Small amounts of grain and grapevines grew scattered through fields and woods before people knew their value, ate their produce, or planted separate grainfields and vineyards. At that time they ate acorns and drank water. Similarly, from the beginning there have been various true, general, useful insights, growing naturally from human reason. At first, though, there were only a few. People relied on rough experience. They had no method: they did not sow or cultivate knowledge separately from the weeds and common plants of error and guesswork. They lacked leisure because they had to find life's necessities and defend themselves from their neighbors. Things could not change until great Commonwealths were established. Leisure is the mother of philosophy, while a Commonwealth is the mother of peace and leisure. Philosophy was first studied where there were great, flourishing cities. The Gymnosophists of India, the Magi of Persia, and the priests of Chaldea and Egypt are counted the earliest philosophers; those countries were the oldest kingdoms. Philosophy had not yet arisen among the Greeks and other western peoples. Their Commonwealths, perhaps no larger than Lucca or Geneva, had peace only when their fears of one another were equal. They had no leisure to observe anything but one another. Eventually war united many of the smaller Greek cities into fewer and larger ones. Then Seven Men from different parts of Greece gained reputations for wisdom. Some were known for moral and political sayings, others for the learning of the Chaldeans and Egyptians: astronomy and geometry. Still, we hear of no schools of philosophy at that point.

After defeating the Persian armies, the Athenians gained control of the sea, and with it all the islands and coastal cities of the Archipelago in both Asia and Europe. They became wealthy. People with no work at home or abroad had little to do except, as St. Luke says (Acts 17.21.), spend their time “telling and hearing news,” or publicly discuss philosophy with the city's young people. Each teacher chose a place to do this. Plato used public walks called Academia, named after Academus. Aristotle used the walk at the temple of Pan called Lycaeum. Others used the Stoa, a covered walkway where merchants' goods were unloaded. Still others met elsewhere, spending their leisure teaching or debating their opinions. Some gathered young people wherever they could find an audience. Carneades did this in Rome while serving as an ambassador. Cato therefore advised the Senate to send him away quickly, fearing that the young men who enjoyed what they thought was his fine talk would have their morals corrupted.

As a result, the place where a teacher taught and debated was called schola, which means leisure in their language. Their discussions were called diatribae, meaning passing the time. Philosophers also took the names of some of their groups from their meeting places. Followers of Plato's teaching were called Academics. Followers of Aristotle were called Peripatetics, after the walk where he taught. Followers of Zeno were called Stoics, after the Stoa. It would be like naming people after More-fields, Pauls-Church, or the Exchange just because they often meet there to chatter and idle.

Nevertheless, people liked this custom so much that it spread in time throughout Europe and most of Africa. Public schools for lectures and debates were established and supported in almost every Commonwealth.

The Jews also had schools, both before and after our Savior's time, but they were schools of their Law. They were called synagogues, meaning congregations of the people. Yet the Law was read, explained, and debated in them every Sabbath. They therefore differed from public schools only in name, not in nature. They existed not just in Jerusalem but in every Gentile city where Jews lived. There was one such school at Damascus, which Paul entered to persecute people. He entered others at Antioch, Iconium, and Thessalonica to debate. Another was the synagogue of the Libertines, Cyrenians, Alexandrians, Cilicians, and people from Asia. This was the school of the Libertines and of Jews visiting Jerusalem from elsewhere. Its members debated with Saint Stephen.

But what use have those schools been? What science today has been gained from their lectures and debates? We do not owe geometry, the mother of all natural science, to them. Plato, the best Greek philosopher, barred people from his school unless they already knew some geometry. Many people studied that science to humanity's great benefit, but there is no mention of their schools. There was no sect of geometers, and at that time they were not called philosophers. The natural philosophy of those schools was more a dream than a science, expressed in senseless, meaningless language. Anyone who tries to teach philosophy without first learning a great deal of geometry cannot avoid that. Nature works by motion, and we cannot know the ways and degrees of motion without knowing the proportions and properties of lines and figures. Their moral philosophy merely describes their own Passions. Without civil government the rule of conduct is the Law of Nature; within civil government it is civil law. This determines what is honorable and dishonorable, just and unjust, and generally good and evil. The philosophers, instead, base the rules of good and bad on their own likes and dislikes. Since tastes differ so greatly, nothing wins general agreement, and everyone does whatever seems right to him as far as he dares, undermining the Commonwealth. Their logic, which ought to be a method of reasoning, consists only of traps made of words and tricks for confusing anyone who tries to question them. In short, as Cicero, himself one of the old philosophers, says, there is nothing so absurd that some of them have not defended it. I believe almost nothing in natural philosophy could be more absurd than what is now called Aristotle's Metaphysics, nothing more hostile to government than much of his Politics, and nothing more ignorant than a large part of his Ethics.

The Jewish school was originally a school for the Law of Moses. Moses commanded (Deut. 31.10.) that at the end of every seventh year, during the Feast of the Tabernacles, the Law be read to all the people so they could hear and learn it. The reading of the Law every Sabbath, a practice followed after the Captivity, should therefore have had only one purpose: to acquaint people with the commandments they had to obey and to explain the prophets' writings to them. But our Savior's many rebukes make clear that their false commentaries and empty traditions corrupted the text of the Law. They understood the prophets so poorly that they recognized neither Christ nor the works he did, although the prophets had foretold them. Their lectures and debates in the synagogues thus turned the teaching of their Law into an imaginary kind of philosophy about the incomprehensible nature of God and spirits. They made it from the Greeks' vain philosophy and theology, mixed with their own ideas drawn from the more obscure Scriptural passages that were easiest to twist to their purposes, and from their ancestors' fabulous traditions.

What is now called a university is a collection of many public schools in one town or city, joined into one organization under one governing body. Its chief schools were established for three professions: the Roman religion, Roman law, and medicine. Philosophy has a place there only as a servant to the Roman religion. Since Aristotle alone is treated as an authority there, that study is not really philosophy, which does not depend on authors, but Aristotelianism. Until very recently geometry had no place there at all, since it serves nothing but strict truth. Anyone whose natural talent brought him to a high level in geometry was commonly thought to be a magician practicing a diabolical art.

I will now turn to specific doctrines of vain philosophy. They passed to the universities, and from there into the Church, partly from Aristotle and partly from lack of understanding. I will consider their basic principles first. There is a first philosophy on which all other philosophy ought to depend. Its chief task is to set the correct boundaries for the meanings of the most general terms or names. These boundaries, commonly called definitions, prevent ambiguity and double meanings in reasoning. Examples include definitions of body, time, place, matter, form, essence, subject, substance, accident, power, act, finite, infinite, quantity, quality, motion, action, and passion. Many more are needed to explain our ideas about the nature and production of bodies. The explanation, or fixing of the meanings, of these terms is commonly called metaphysics in the Schools, after a work of Aristotle with that title. But the title has another meaning there: “books written or placed after his natural philosophy.” The Schools take the books to be about supernatural philosophy, since the word metaphysics allows both meanings. Indeed, most of what those books say is so impossible to understand, and so opposed to natural reason, that anyone who thinks it has any meaning must think it supernatural.

From this metaphysics, mixed with Scripture to produce scholastic theology, we are told that some essences in the world exist apart from bodies. They call them abstract essences and substantial forms. Explaining this jargon calls for more than ordinary attention here. I also ask readers unfamiliar with such discussion to excuse my addressing those who are familiar with it. The world—I do not mean just the Earth, which gives lovers of earthly things the name worldly, but the universe, the entire mass of everything that exists—is corporeal, meaning it is body. It has length, width, and depth. Every part of a body is also a body and has these dimensions. Consequently every part of the universe is a body, and anything that is not a body is not part of the universe. Since the universe is everything, what is no part of it is nothing, and is nowhere. This does not mean that spirits are nothing. They have dimensions and therefore really are bodies, though in ordinary speech the word body applies only to things we can see or touch, that is, things with some opacity. But people call spirits incorporeal, a more honorable name that can therefore be applied more reverently to God himself. In speaking of him, we do not consider which attribute best describes his incomprehensible nature, but which best expresses our wish to honor him.