ABSTRACT
Stoic thought was “everywhere and nowhere in the Middle Ages” (Ebbesen 2004: 125). Sten Ebbesen’s insightful comment aptly frames the challenges and opportunities that await the scholar who seeks to ferret out the influence of Stoic philosophy for medieval thinkers. While on the one hand texts of various classical authors were readily available to the learned medieval reader, the term “Stoicism” or “Stoic” had little genuine meaning, at least not in the sense it has for us today. Pagan authors were just that: authors whose texts were studied and read for their content, not for their placement within a philosophical tradition whose contours distinguished it from other traditions, such as Socratic, Platonic, Aristotelian, Epicurean. For this reason, the type of investigation we pursue here offers both promise and difficulty. There is no lack of scholarly evidence to show that Stoic sources and texts permeated
medieval culture. Gérard Verbeke (1983) has noted the prevalence of Stoic themes for medieval philosophy. Michel Spanneut (1973) has studied the textual sources available to thinkers from antiquity to modernity. Sten Ebbesen (2004) has investigated the Stoic influence in the domain of logic. Bonnie Kent (1995) has suggested the role of Stoic categories for Franciscan thinkers. In short, the prevalence of Stoic authors and source texts during the Middle Ages is not a topic for scholarly dispute. What remains unexplored, however, is the type of role that the inherited Stoic influences
played for medieval thinkers, particularly those thirteenth-century scholars who sought to understand the new texts of Aristotle, specifically his Nicomachean Ethics. In what follows, I propose that Stoic thought influenced the interpretative context for textual reception and was therefore intimately involved in the project of making Aristotle “available to the Latins.” In other words, rather than tracing a particular Stoic author (such as Seneca) or investigating how a particular medieval thinker used Stoic themes, I am interested here in exploring how an already present Stoic understanding of moral wisdom (inherited from the twelfth century) played a critical role in the reception, interpretation and integration of Aristotle’s (rather different) notion of practical wisdom, phronêsis. I pursue this investigation according to two distinct yet related interpretive trajectories.
The first relates to an early confusion between prudens and sapiens, both Latin terms that signify the wise person, yet not precisely in the same way. Their confusion led to a specific reading of Aristotle’s ethica vetus that translated the term for a person of practical wisdom
(phronimos) as sapiens (the sage) rather than prudens (the person of practical wisdom). Together, these two elements of confusion and translation set the stage for a second trajectory – a more sustained investigation into the influence of Stoic philosophy on one strain of medieval reflection on the nature of a practical science (Aristotle’s purpose in the Ethics) and on the person of practical wisdom (Aristotle’s phronimos). This fuller exploration completes this study with a turn to three thirteenth-century figures: William of Auxerre, Albert the Great and Thomas Aquinas. In each case, we consider (1) how the given thinker understood the nature of practical science and moral wisdom, (2) how he sifted through the inherited textual data, and finally (3) how he made sense of Aristotle. Through this study I hope to show first, how present Stoic influence was; second, how influential the Stoic assumptions were; and third, how the medievals arrived at a clearer understanding of Aristotle thanks to the inherited (and perhaps unnoticed) Stoic tradition.
