The labyrinthum Capella quoted in the title (from a Prudentius of Troyes epistle)
represents the allegory of the studium of the liberal arts and the looking for
knowledge in the early middle age. This is a capital problem in the early
Christianity and, in general, for all the western world, concerning the
relationship between faith and science. I studied the evolution of this subject
from its birth to Carolingian age, focusing on the most relevant figures, for the
western Europe, such Saint Augustine (De doctrina christiana), Martianus
Capella (De Nuptiis Philologiae et Mercurii) and Iohannes Scotus Eriugena
(Annotationes in Marcianum). Clearly it emerges that there were two opposite
ways about this relatioship. According to the first, the human being is capable of
get a knowledge about God thanks to its own reason and logical thought
processes (by the analysis of the nature as a Speculum Dei); on the other way,
only the faith and the grace could give the man the possibility to perceive God,
and the Bible is the only book men need to know.
From late antiquity to Iohannes Scotus times, a few christian and pagan authors
fall into line with first position (the neoplatonic one): Saint Augustine (first part
of his life, then he retracted some of his views), Martianus, Calcidius and
Macrobius. Other philosophers were not neoplatonic bat believed in the power
of the studium: Boethius, Cassiodorus, Isidorus of Seville, Hrabanus Maurus
and Lupus of Ferriéres.
In order to get an idea of this conception, I finally focused the research on
Iohannes Scotus Eriugena's Annotationes in Marcianum. I commented
Eriugena's work phrase by phrase trying to catch the sense of his words, the
reference, philosophical influences, to trace antecedents and its clouts to later
middle age and Chartres school.
In this scholastic text Eriugena comments the Capella's work and poses again
the question of the studium to his students. Iohannes was a magister in schola
Palatina during the time of Carl the Bald, he knew Saint Augustine works, and
he knew Boethius, Calcidius, Macrobius, Isidorus and Cassiodorus ones too. He
translated Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite and Maximus the Confessor. He
had a neoplatonic view of Christianity and tried to harmonize the impossibility
to know God to man's intellectual capability to get a glimpse of God through the
study of the nature. According to this point of view, Eriugena's comment of
Martianus Capella was no more a secondary work. It gets more and more
importance to understand his research and his mystic, and to understand and
really grasp the inner sense of his chief work Periphyseon.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:unibo.it/oai:amsdottorato.cib.unibo.it:1136 |
| Date | 01 July 2008 |
| Creators | Rossini, Stefano <1975> |
| Contributors | Savigni, Raffaele |
| Publisher | Alma Mater Studiorum - Università di Bologna |
| Source Sets | Università di Bologna |
| Language | Italian |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Doctoral Thesis, PeerReviewed |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Rights | info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess |
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