Handbook of the History of Logic: - Fordham University Faculty

26 John Marenbon
gin shortly after his lifetime; and to look at John’s probably earlier glosses on
Martianus Capella’s logic, as well as his masterpiece, the Periphyseon.
Macarius the Irishman and Ratramnus of Corbie on Universals ([Delhaye, 1950;
Erismann, Forthcoming-A])
An interesting discussion about logic from the time of Eriugena survives in an unusual
setting. In the early 860s [Bouhot, 1976, 59], Ratramnus of Corbie addressed
his Book on the Soul (Liber de anima) to Bishop Odo of Beauvais [Ratramnus,
1952]. The indexRatramnus of Corbie!Book on the Soul Book is directed against
an anonymous monk of Saint-Germer de Fly, with whom Ratramnus had been
in correspondence, and who claims to be expounding the ideas of his master, an
otherwise unknown Irishman named Macarius. Their difference was over the understanding
of a passage in Augustine’s On the Quantity of the Soul (xxxii, 69),
where the question is raised, but not resolved, of whether human souls are all
one, are many or are one and many. Macarius and his pupil (it is impossible to
disentangle their contributions), and even more decidedly Ratramnus, make the
issue a logical one: what is the nature of universals?
Macarius’s position has been described as Platonic realism [Delhaye, 1950, 19-
37] and as ‘hyper-Realism’ [Marenbon, 1981, 69]. In fact, it seems to be a rather
crude and incompletely worked out example of what Christophe Erismann has
labelled ‘immanent realism’ and traced back to Porphyry and the Greek Fathers
and through to the twelfth century [Erismann, 2007; Forthcoming-B]. He holds
that ‘every human being is one human being through substance and every soul
is one soul through substance’ [Ratramnus of Corbie, 1952, 27:20-2, 29:25-6 and
elsewhere]. As Ratramnus reports, he says that ‘the human soul is a species, and
from this species particular souls descend, which are also contained by it so that
they can exist; for which reason if the species does not exist, nor can that into
which it is distributed exist’ [Ratramnus of Corbie, 1952, 130:20-3]. He looks to
a passage from Boethius’s Theological Treatises [V, 3; Boethius, 2000, 216:213-
217:220], where genera and species are said ‘just to exist’ (subsistunt tantum) and
individuals ‘not only to exist but also to exist as subjects (substant); genera and
species, Boethius goes on, do not need accidents in order to exist. To Macarius
and his pupil, this passage asserts the primacy of genera and species. Although
the idea is not explicitly worked out in what Ratramnus’s comments preserve,
Macarius seems to have held that particular members of a species are individuated
by attaching accidents to the species, which is one and the same in them all.
Ratramnus thinks that, so far from particulars deriving their existence from
species and genera, the basic constituents of the universe are particulars. His
opponent has entirely misinterpreted Boethius. Just like genera and species, particulars
(which he calls, oddly, propria) do not require accidents in order to exist:
rather, they make it possible for the accidents themselves to exist, by being subjects
for them. [Ratramnus of Corbie, 1952, 86:5-10] Particulars alone exist as
subjects, whereas the genera and species just ‘subsist’; and Ratramnus, giving an
interpretation of Boethius’s discussion of universals in the first commentary to the