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the stream divides
[ 79 ]
the human soul. In contrast to Alexander’s notion that the active intellect is
equivalent to Aristotle’s prime mover, he identified the active intellect with the
essential self, of which he wrote, “So just as the animal and what it is to be an
animal are distinct, and what it is to be an animal is derived from the soul of the
animal, so also the I and what it is to be me are distinct. What it is to be me is,
then, derived from the soul, yet from this not in its totality . . . [but] from the
productive intellect alone.” In this passage, Themistius, in effect, introduced in
the context of Aristotle’s account of the soul a distinction that originated in Plato,
and would become very important from John Locke to our own times, between
the human organism that one is and one’s essential self.
5
In addition to his thesis that people are their active intellects, Themistius
originated a distinction between the potential and the passive intellects that
would later be adopted by Aquinas and other Scholastics because it provides a
way of reconciling Aristotle’s views with the Christian Neoplatonism that
Augustine passed down to the Latin West. The substance of this distinction is
that the possible or potential intellect is seen as joined to the active intellect as
matter to form and that collectively they form a rational soul that is immortal.
By contrast, the passive intellect involves those reasoning processes that are
related to the emotions, imagination, temporal reasoning, and memory, which
are associated with the body and “perish” at death. In Themistius’s view, this
passive intellect is equivalent to the corporeal soul that Plato posited in the
Timaeus as the mediator between the rational soul and the body.
However, by connecting the potential intellect to the active intellect and keep-
ing the passive intellect separate and related to the body and emotions, Themis-
tius raised an issue that would prove to be problematic for later Christians, such
as Aquinas—whether there is one or many active intellects (or active/potential
intellect unities). Themistius suggested that there is only one active intellect but
left the issue unresolved.
6
Returning to the Latin West, after a period of intellectual decline follow-
ing Boethius’s death,
philosophical thought was revived again when John
Scotus Eriugena (810?-877?) introduced the Greek Christian Neoplatonist
tradition, especially as it had been developed by Gregory of Nyssa and the
pseudo-Dionysius. Eriugena soon became a controversial figure among Chris-
tian theologians, and in the thirteenth century his views were condemned by
the Western church. Even so, much of the text of his main work, On the Divi-
sions of Nature (Periphyseon), continued to be read as an anonymous gloss to his
Latin translations of the pseudo-Dionysius. Eriugena thereby influenced both
the development of Western mysticism and even thirteenth-century Scholas-
tics, for whom the pseudo-Dionysius remained an authority.
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