Thierry of Chartres

Thierry von Chartres (Latin Theodoricus Carnotensis ; * around 1085, † around 1155) was a Platonic philosopher .

Life

Thierry taught at the Cathedral School of Chartres in 1121 , then in Paris, where John of Salisbury was his pupil, from 1142 back in Chartres. He was previously considered the brother of the famous scholar Bernhard von Chartres , but according to current research, this assumption is based on a confusion. Thierry was a leading representative of the School of Chartres , a philosophical direction that tied in natural philosophy and cosmology to the Platonic tradition, especially to Plato's dialogue Timaeus . Thierry was one of the first Western scholars to advocate the use of Arabic literature . The assessment of his work as pantheistic by Jean-Barthélemy Hauréau in the 19th century is based on misunderstandings.

Works

Heptateuchon

Thierry wrote a book on the seven liberal arts , the Heptateuchon . To do this, he evaluated a total of 45 ancient and medieval writings. He sorted the summaries according to the individual subjects of the Trivium and Quadrivium . For the section on dialectics, he translated large parts of Aristotle's Organon into Latin, the scientific language of the time. This was the first time that a larger group of medieval scholars became acquainted with Aristotelian logic.

De sex dierum operibus

In his platonic commentary on the six days of Genesis , De sex dierum operibus , Thierry teaches that God is the supreme idea by which all other ideas are created. God as the Father is the effective cause, as the Son and Wisdom he is the formal cause and as the Holy Spirit he is the final cause of the world. Thierry equated the world soul with the Holy Spirit and the spirit of God hovering over the waters from the creation account. It forms the matter as a design principle through the germinal forces applied in the elements. But the theory of forms is not the focus. Rather, the ordered cosmos arises by itself in a mechanical way.

In the beginning God created matter with heaven and earth. Based on Plato's Timaeus , Thierry recognized the four elements still mixed with one another: fire, water, air and earth. The lightest element, fire, rises on the first day of creation and creates the circular movement of the celestial shell. On the second day the fire warms the air and the water; the vapors form the firmament . The land emerges from the evaporation of the water; thus plant life becomes possible on the third day. On the fourth day, the compression of the water creates the stars, the daily rotation of which generates warmth of life ( calor vitalis , a term from the Stoic natural philosophy). On the fifth day the fish emerge. Finally, the heaviest element, the earth, warms up, so that land animals arise there, to which Thierry, interestingly, also includes humans. From the natural qualities of the elements, especially from their relative gravity, which in turn is derived from their kinetic energy , the entire further development of the cosmos and the earth results, which was only initiated by the divine creation. Behind this is an atomistic and mechanistic method of investigation, even if it is still undeveloped, at the same time forward-looking , which leaves Aristotle's theory of forms behind, which sometimes hindered rather than promoted empirical research.

In the sense of the Platonic tradition, Thierry also interpreted the trinitarian structure of God. The number one brings out all numbers. Every multiplicity and thus otherness presupposes unity. Everything created is determined by change and thus by being different. But then it presupposes unity. In this unity lies the origin to which everything can be traced back: the one , God. Everything that is created is a unit, but it only exists through participation in the absolute One. The one multiplied by itself results in one. God creates equality with himself and out of himself. The participation of everything created in this equality exists insofar as objects are identical to one another due to their common form. These ideal forms are in the divine spirit (wisdom). The Holy Spirit connects the one with wisdom as equality.

literature

• Peter Dronke: Thierry of Chartres. In: Ders .: A History of Twelfth-Century Western Philosophy , Cambridge 1988, pp. 358–385
• Tilman Evers: The truth of all being. Thierry von Chartres and the Platonism of the 12th century , in: Ders .: Logos und Sophia. The King's Portal and the School of Chartres , Kiel 2011, ISBN 978-3-86935-053-0 , pp. 48–86
• Detlef Metz:  Thierry von Chartres. In: Biographisch-Bibliographisches Kirchenlexikon (BBKL). Volume 11, Bautz, Herzberg 1996, ISBN 3-88309-064-6 , Sp. 1162-1165.
• Andreas Speer : Discovered nature. Investigations into attempts to justify a "scientia naturalis" in the 12th century , Leiden 1995, ISBN 90-04-10345-7 , pp. 222-288
• Anneliese Stollenwerk: The Genesis Commentary by Thierry of Chartres and the Commentaries ascribed to Thierry of Chartres on Boethius' De Trinitateʾ . Dissertation Cologne 1971

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Kurt Flasch: The philosophical thinking in the Middle Ages. 2nd edition Stuttgart 2000, p. 261 f. ISBN 978-3-15-018103-4 .