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V
THE STREAM DIVIDES
From the end of the Patristic Period to the beginning of the Renaissance, European
philosophy divides naturally into two phases: the Early Middle Ages, roughly
the sixth through twelfth centuries; and the High Middle Ages, the thirteenth
and fourteenth. During the first of these two phases, European philosophers
were preoccupied with harmonizing Platonism and Christian revelation. The
problem of universals, how a hierarchy of Ideas can be the basis of reality and
how the human mind can come to know these Ideas from particulars, were
dominant concerns. The metaphysics of personal identity, except in connection
with the question of how to individuate one human being from another, was
not. The study of psychology was reduced to the investigation of the categories
of mystical experience.
During this time, there were few Latin philosophers who could read Greek
and there were few Latin translations of important Greek philosophical works.1
Eventually, the Latin world would regain access to Greek philosophy. Begin-
ning in the second half of the eleventh century and culminating in the thirteenth,
a large corpus of work was translated from Arabic and Greek into Latin. This
newly translated material, which included some Neoplatonic authors such as
Proclus, but most importantly nearly all of Aristotle, did not become widely
available until
the thirteenth century. Its appearance ushered in the High Middle
Ages. This first wave of new translations of Greek philosophy, which focused on
Aristotle, was followed in the Renaissance by a second wave, which provided the
first Latin translations of many of Plato’s works, as well as original translations
of other Neoplatonic, Gnostic, and hermetic works.
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