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the stream divides
[ 87 ]
no one else owns any part of it.”
8
He claimed that “the soul that remains after the death
of man, is not the soul that lives in the man when he is born; the latter is a mere
faculty, while that which has a separate existence after death, is a reality.”
9
He says that this
latter soul is what is called “spirit.” What he meant by these dark sayings is a matter of
dispute, but they would leave their mark. No less a Jewish philosopher than Spinoza
would pick up this thread from Maimonides and try to weave it into his own more
modern account of human nature.
The Twelfth-Century Renaissance
In the Latin West during the twelfth century, there was a sudden burst of intel-
lectual activity in which individualism and humanism came to the fore. So far as
philosophy is concerned, these innovations were due in large measure to the
energizing influence of Abelard, the last important philosopher to be unaffected
by the translation into Latin of Aristotle’s works and the Arab commentaries.
Due in part to Abelard’s great influence as a teacher, the cathedral schools, which
previously had been the main centers of European education, gave place to uni-
versities. These then provided a context in which all areas of learning could
flourish and scholars as a group began to confront the same key texts. Chief
among these, initially, was the Sentences of Peter Lombard (c.1100-1160), which
is an edited collection of quotations, primarily from Scripture and the church
fathers, organized by topic (e.g., God, evil, death).
Later, in the thirteenth century, both Aristotle and his commentators were
adopted as core components of university curricula. This resulted in a more sci-
entific approach to natural philosophy due to Aristotle’s this-worldly, empirical
emphasis. This more scientific approach, as we have seen, centrally involved the
reinterpretation of nature in terms of the Aristotelian notions of matter and
form, a reinterpretation that severely challenged earlier conceptions of human
nature, which tended to be Platonic. At the same time, philosophy became more
responsive to its own concerns, rather than simply to those of theology.
In the eleventh and twelfth centuries, several writers independently of one
another took an interest in autobiography. The first of these, Otloh of St. Emmeram
(1010?-1070?), wrote
On His Temptations and Writings, in which he surveyed his
own life and works. Seemingly motivated to write about himself by his inner dis-
tress, he gave lucid descriptions of his dreams and hallucinations, as well as of his
chronic depression and recurrent bouts
of religious skepticism. He wrote, for
instance, that “for a long time I found myself tormented by a compulsion to doubt
altogether the reliability of Holy Scripture and even the existence of God himself.”
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