A provocative and fertile idea!
2.2 Philosophy versus Metaphysics in the Twelfth Century (Part 1)
The historical significance of Victorine philosophy is not only its genius for integrating ethics with metaphysics.Their recovery of Hellenistic wisdom practices (or, if one prefers, their preservation of Christian monasticism) might have occurred in any century. What is at stake at Saint Victor is the timing of such interventions. Simultaneous with Chenu’s “metaphysical awakening,” the School of Saint Victor sketched a different possibility, an alternative construction of philosophy as metaphysics, and hence an alternative rendering of what metaphysics could be. Aristotelian scholasticism is not the only legitimate configuration of metaphysics, let alone the only authentic style of philosophy. As Theo Kobusch has argued in an important essay, at least three distinct metaphysical projects endured from classical antiquity to early modernity. Each tradition has its own founding texts, its own internal logic, and its own claim to legitimacy.
(1) Aristotelian ontology begins with Alexander of Aphrodisias’s commentaries on the Metaphysics. Contra Hadot, ancient philosophy already converted metaphysics into a theoretical discourse separable from lived experience well before medieval Christianity. This metaphysics constructs a universal ontology that grounds beings in their necessity, linking a theory of science (the most general beings) with a theology of first principles (the highest beings). Most medieval schools participated in this first type of metaphysics, from Aquinas to Suarez.
(2) Platonic henology pursues the radical interpretations of Plato’s Parmenides by Plotinus, Proclus, and Ps.-Dionysius. For them, Aristotle’s first error was to elevate Being above Unity. All theoretical knowledge is ultimately secondary, since the intellect must pass beyond cosmology and ontology to become one with the One. Consequently, this metaphysics of the One becomes a metaphysics of the subject, and progress in philosophy dissolves the distinction between the individual knower and the universally known. Meister Eckhart, Marsilio Ficino, and German Idealism inherit this second type.
(3) Christian mystagogy is a third alternative built upon new readings of the Song of Songs by Origen of Alexandria and Gregory of Nyssa. Unlike the first and second types, this is an affective metaphysics that prioritizes the practical transformation of the self’s desires by the beauty of the Good. The identity of the knower survives the encounter with the divine, and the faculties of love and desire exceed knowledge and intellect in the last instance. Since aesthetics belongs within ethics, this tradition tends to experiment with literary forms and reject sharp divisions between theology and philosophy. Bernard of Clairvaux, William of St.Thierry, and Richard of Saint Victor belong to this type.
Historically speaking, medieval metaphysics has not always started with being, but also unity or goodness. Three different transcendentals yield three sciences with different priorities and perhaps incommensurable goals; all possess equally ancient and sophisticated exegetical traditions. Not all three styles flourished in the medieval schools and other ancestors of the modern academy, however. The centuries of success enjoyed by the first type in the university has encouraged some historians to decertify the second and third altogether. If Aristotelian ontology were the only legitimate type, then the tremendous renaissance of the other two types in the 12th century would be—as Chenu’s metaphor suggests—incomplete or transitory. Ludger Honnefelder, for example, states that since “metaphysics” first began with ancient Aristotelian commentaries, the return to Aristotle’s ontology in medieval schools counts as the “second beginning of metaphysics” or the “re-founding of metaphysics” tout court. If there is only one type of metaphysics, the science of beings, then there is no metaphysics in the 12th century. As if born prematurely, the century would hold little value for medieval philosophy. But as Kobusch shows, other varieties of metaphysics flourished in the same period. Unlike the first type, the second and third refuse the separation of theory and practice, embrace contemplative exercises, and thrive outside of universities.
—David Albertson, "Philosophy and Metaphysics in the School of Saint Victor: From Achard to Godfrey" in A Companion to the Abbey of Saint Victor in Paris (2018), pp. 357–359. Image: Abbey of St. Victor, 1655.
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