Problem Of Paganism Research Articles

John Marenbon: Pagans and philosophers. The problem of paganism from Augustine to Leibniz

Is divine assistance, grace, necessary for knowing God? Can anybody develop virtues? Is salvation open to everybody – or only for Christians? Marenbon sets forth in this book the answers given to these three questions, which are labeled as “The Problem of Paganism”, a coinage, he claims, of his own. He does not aim with this study to resolve them. In fact, Marenbon apparently doesn’t think that they still pose a problem, even though he avows his personal interest in the subject and recognizes...

John Marenbon, Pagans and Philosophers: The Problem of Paganism from Augustine to Leibniz

Is divine assistance, grace, necessary for knowing God? Can anybody develop virtues? Is salvation open to everybody – or only for Christians? Marenbon sets forth in this book the answers given to these three questions, which are labeled as “The Problem of Paganism”, a coinage, he claims, of his own. He does not aim with this study to resolve them. In fact, Marenbon apparently doesn’t think that they still pose a problem, even though he avows his personal interest in the subject and recognizes...

John Marenbon, Pagans and Philosophers. The Problem of Paganism from Augustine to Leibniz

John Marenbon, Pagans and Philosophers. The Problem of Paganism from Augustine to Leibniz

Pagans and Philosophers: The Problem of Paganism from Augustine to Leibniz by John Marenbon

<i>Pagans and Philosophers: The Problem of Paganism from Augustine to Leibniz</i> by John Marenbon

Pagans and Philosophers: The Problem of Paganism from Augustine to Leibniz, by John Marenbon

Everyone, these days, wants their century to be a long one, but, even so, for many scholars it may come as something of a surprise to find that in John Marenbon’s new book, the Middle Ages stretches from Augustine in the fifth century to Leibniz in the seventeenth. The ‘Long Middle Ages’, he claims, is a heuristic device to prevent historians ‘taking for granted that there is a fundamental division of periods around 1500 or at any other time ’; but it is also a device designed to reveal a very long tradition of debate about the category of the pagan in Western Christian thought. There are three central planks of this debate: virtue, knowledge and salvation; and in each case the initial question is simple enough. The term pagan is used by Christians to refer not to Jews or Muslims but to Greek and Roman polytheists, or to other less easily categorisable groups such as Buddhists or native Americans. So, within a Christian perspective, can a pagan be virtuous—is it possible to be good without the goodness of Christianity? Can a pagan have true knowledge or wisdom—that is, should philosophical reasoning and the authority of ancient Wissenschaft find a place in Christian learning? Should—the final, burning question—a pagan be justly punished in hell everlastingly for not accepting Christ, especially if he lived before the revelation of the Gospels or in a place where the Gospels had not reached?

Pagans and philosophers: the problem of paganism from Augustine to Leibniz

Preface ix A Note on References and Citations xi Introduction: The Problem of Paganism 1 Part I: The Problem Takes Shape Chapter 1 Prelude: Before Augustine 19 Chapter 2 Augustine 23 Chapter 3 Boethius 42 Part II: From Alcuin to Langland Chapter 4 The Early Middle Ages and the Christianization of Europe 57 Chapter 5 Abelard 73 Chapter 6 John of Salisbury and the Encyclopaedic Tradition 95 Chapter 7 Arabi, Mongolia and Beyond: Contemporary Pagans in the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Centuries 109 Chapter 8 Aristotelian Wisdom: Unity, Rejection or Relativism 127 Chapter 9 University Theologians on Pagan Virtue and Salvation 160 Chapter 10 Dante and Boccaccio 188 Chapter 11 Langland and Chaucer 214 Part III: The Continuity of the Problem of Paganism, 1400-1700 Chapter 12 Pagan Knowledge, 1400-1700 235 Chapter 13 Pagan Virtue, 1400-1700 263 Chapter 14 The Salvation of Pagans, 1400-1700 281 Epilogue: Leibniz and China 301 General Conclusion 304 Bibliography 307 Index 339

Boethius and the Problem of Paganism

Problem of paganism is my name for the set of questions raised for medieval thinkers and writers, and discussed by some of them (Abelard, Dante, and Langland are eminent examples), by the fact that many people-especially philosophers-from antiquity were, they believed, monotheists, wise and virtuous and yet pagans. In this paper, I argue that Boethius, though a Christian, was himself too much part of the world of classical antiquity to pose the problem of paganism, but that his Consolation of Philosophy was an essential element in the way medieval writers saw and resolved this problem. In particular, because it was a text by an author known to be Christian which discusses philosophy without any explicitly Christian references, it opened up the way to treating texts by ancient pagan philosophers as containing hidden Christian doctrine.