Handbook of the History of Logic: - Fordham University Faculty

34 John Marenbon
it is certainly open to wonder whether the many threads in Eriugena’s discussion
really link together into an entirely coherent theory [for a hyper-critical, and often
ill-judged approach, see Marenbon, 1981, 72-87; Marenbon, 1980 (written later)],
a charitable interpretation reveals a powerful line of thought, given a certain set
of assumptions, especially about the immanence of universals.
In one sense, Eriugena followed an approach to logic that had been pioneered
by Alcuin, who looked back to Augustine and Boethius — one which centred
around the ten Categories and their use as a way of defining the relations between
God and created things. But he developed it to a degree and in a direction
that their work would not have led anyone to anticipate. As Abelard and Gilbert
of Poitiers would do, nearly three hundred years later, he used ideas stemming
from Aristotle’s Categories to construct a metaphysics. But whereas the twelfthcentury
writers developed their metaphysical views within Boethius’s Aristotelian
approach to Aristotelian logic, Eriugena, whose knowledge of Boethius’s logic was
slight, elaborated his metaphysics under the predominant influence of the Greek
Christian Neoplatonic texts he had translated. An intellectual temperament that
valued both paradox and systematic coherence, and did not find them incompatible,
led him to take this enterprise to an impressive if sometimes bewildering
extreme. His may be perhaps the one example of a ‘Platonic logic’ [Erismann,
2007] in the Middle Ages.
3.3 The Gloss Traditions
([Marenbon, 1981, 116-38; Marenbon, 1997a; Marenbon, 2000b])
As seen above, Eriugena seems to have taught logic using Book IV of Martianus
as his text-book, and his teaching is recorded, at least partially, in glosses. In
the years after Eriugena, there is a Gloss Tradition to Martianus. The concept of
a ‘Gloss Tradition’ needs explanation. Many manuscripts from the ninth to the
eleventh centuries have extensive annotations in the margins and between their
lines. Sometimes text and annotations have been copied together; sometimes the
annotations have been added — and in some cases apparently at different stages.
It is rare that the glosses in any one manuscript are exactly the same as those in
another, but it is often possible to distinguish one or more than one tradition of
glosses to a particular work, most of which occur in fairly similar form in a whole
group of manuscripts, although each individual manuscript will have its peculiar
glosses and omissions.
Besides the glosses to Book IV of Martianus, there are two other important early
medieval logical gloss traditions — on the most popular of all the logical texts at
this period, the Ten Categories and also on the Isagoge. The other core logical
texts available — the Categories in Boethius’s translation and On Interpretation
did not generate Gloss Traditions, but isolated glosses in individual manuscripts
provide valuable evidence about logical ideas and study.
A certain counter-balance to the anonymity of glossed manuscripts is provided
by the fact that they can often be localized to a particular monastery. Careful