Medieval Philosophy - Authority; Reinterpretation and Context Changes To Circumvent IT

Authority; Reinterpretation and Context Changes To Circumvent It

Medieval philosophers wanted authority to be absolute, but faced a problem that the authorities might not be in agreement with more recently gained knowledge, or their own point of view. A formal characteristic found in medieval philosophical texts is the citation of authoritative texts, e.g., the Bible or Aristotle. A way to forge agreements with and among authorities was a reinterpretation of them. This was a way to bring an author's view into conversation, and to be in agreement with contemporary discussions. For example, Maimonides argues that, just as a boy reared on an island without women would have difficulty imagining how children might be conceived and born, Aristotle might have had an experience too limited to allow him to develop any other accounts of the origin of things. In addition to reinterpretation, medieval interpreters might also take a given citation out of context. For example, Aquinas cites Augustine out of context to claim that theology is a “science” analogous to the Aristotelian science of “Posterior Analytics”, by failing to note that Augustine uses the term “science” in a much older and less technical way. Alan of Lille supports the empiricist Pauline claim that the “invisible things of God are known through the visible things that are made”, but with a different context, whereby the kind of knowledge in question is the “knowledge” of faith, not of the world. Likewise, Aquinas cites and supports the categorization of sin in terms of Gregory the Great's scheme of the seven deadly sins, but he subordinates Gregory's classification to his own way of organizing notions of sin. This change of contexts to make a point is not necessarily done in bad faith; their strategies for harmonizing authorities discordant with each other and with their own views may be part of a hermeneutic whose basic assumption is that these authorities are all seeking and attempting to express part of a single Truth, so it is not a distortion of an authoritative source to put its views in a new context when new concepts and knowledge demands this be done. Silano points out that many of the tensions and even outright contradictions between authoritative sources would have disappeared had the compilers, commentators, and masters determining a question placed those authoritative claims in their historical/cultural context rather than simply set them against each other, and that they might not have done so because this would deprive these sources of their normative status, making it contingent as a judicial decision, interpreted in terms of its historical/cultural context, is no longer binding. Silano wanted the task of the 12th and 13th centuries in the Latin West to be the establishment of absolute authorities, which would bound all discussion and dissention, rather than knocking them down through arguments of relativism.