Medieval Discussions Of The Eternity Of The World

In the first work Boethius offers a purely philosophical discussion of man's highest good and, in the course of doing this, presents the life of the philosopher as the highest kind of life. In the second treatise, he considers in detail an issue which was much contested by Christian thinkers of his day: Can philosophical reasoning prove that the world began to be? Or does it rather show that the world is eternal, i.e. that it did not begin to be? In the third he offers a highly naturalistic explanation of dreams. Only within carefully defined limits will he acknowledge that dreams can give us any kind of knowledge of future events.

This volume makes available to scholars the texts, with critical apparatus, of a series of medieval works on the eternity of the world, extending from the 1220s to about 1315. Most of these are published here for the first time, and they present a wide range of views on one of the major issues of scholastic thought.

This volume examines the changing perceptions of time in the transition from the medieval debate to early modern philosophy. Some of the foremost contemporary experts try to weave the various strands of the topic into a methodological and doctrinal whole. The book consists of 21 studies (19 in English, 2 in French) subdivided into five main sections, entitled respectively The Late Antique Legacy, The Scholastic Debate, Late Scholasticism, Time and Medicine, Early Modern Philosophy. Themes discussed include the reception of Aristotle’s doctrine of time, the Augustinian and Neoplatonic heritage, the concepts of divine eternity and angelic duration, and the particular role attributed to time in medieval and early modern medicine. This collection of studies aims at offering a comprehensive historico-doctrinal analysis of one of the most fascinating topics in western intellectual history.

It is commonly assumed that the creation story of Genesis and its chronology were the only narratives openly available in medieval and early modern Europe and that the discovery of geological time in the eighteenth century came as a momentous breakthrough that shook the faith in the historical accuracy of the Bible. Historians of science, mainstream geologists, and Young Earth creationists alike all share the assumption that the notion of an ancient Earth was highly heterodox in the pre-modern era. The old age of the world is regarded as the offspring of a secularized science. In this book, Ivano Dal Prete radically revises the commonplace history of deep time in Western culture. He argues that the chronology of the Bible always coexisted with alternative approaches that placed the origin of the Earth into a far, undetermined (or even eternal) past. From the late Middle Ages, these notions spread freely not only in universities and among the learned, but even in popular works of meteorology, geology, literature, and art that made them easily accessible to a vernacular and scientifically illiterate public. Religious authorities did not regard these notions as particularly problematic, let alone heretical. Neither the authors nor their numerous readers thought that holding such views was incompatible with their Christian faith. While the appeal of theories centered on the biblical Flood and on a young Earth gained popularity over the course of the seventeenth century, their more secular alternatives remained vital and debated. Enlightenment thinkers, however, created a myth of a Christian tradition that uniformly rejected the antiquity of the world, as opposed to a new secular science ready to welcome it. Largely unchallenged for almost three centuries, that account solidified over time into a still dominant truism. Based on a wealth of mostly unexplored sources, On the Edge of Eternity offers an original and nuanced account of the history of deep time that illuminates the relationship between the history of science and Christianity in the medieval and early modern periods, with lasting implications for Western society.

In Medieval Theories of Divine Providence 1250-1350 Mikko Posti presents a historical and philosophical study of the doctrine of divine providence in 13th- and 14th-century Latin philosophical theology.

"The translation of Aristotle's philosophical works into Latin in the late twelfth and thirteenth centuries produced a crisis for Christian thinkers insofar as the Aristotelian writing seemed to offer demonstrative proof that the world has always existed without a beginning at some point finitely distant in the past. The present volume offers the reader three different responses to the Aristotelian doctrine of the eternity of the world: the radical Aristotelian views of Siger of Brabant contrasted with those of St. Thomas Aquinas and St. Bonaventure. The latter two both held creation in time, though Aquinas believed that the question could only be decided on the basis of revelation, while Bonaventure argued that creation in time could be proved by reason."--