Studies in Medieval Philosophy, Science, and Logic: Collected Papers 1933–1969

By Ernest A. Moody

Students of medieval thought have long been stimulated by the work of Ernest A. Moody. That intellectual debt should be increased by this volume, which brings together the significant shorter studies and essays he wrote in the period 1933 - 1969. The collection should be particularly useful to the medievalist who finds it difficult to see where the detailed monographic research of the past half-century is leading. An initial lengthy study, on William of Auvergne and his treatise De anima, has not hitherto appeared in print. Five of the essays deal with late medieval physics and its relation to the mechanics of Galileo; others bear on medieval logic and philosophy of language, with reference to contemporary treatments of those subjects; and several studies are concerned with the historical and philosophical significance of Ockham, Buridan, and the via moderna of the fourteenth century. In his Introduction Moody discusses the development of his interests in medieval thoughts and offers some critical reflections on the essays. This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press's mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1975.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of California Press
• Release date: Nov 10, 2023
• ISBN: 9780520312272

Ernest A. Moody

Ernest A. Moody was Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, Los Angeles.

Book preview

STUDIES IN MEDIEVAL PHILOSOPHY,

SCIENCE AND LOGIC

Published under the auspices of the

CENTER FOR MEDIEVAL AND RENAISSANCE STUDIES

University of California, Los Angeles

Publications of the

CENTER FOR MEDIEVAL AND RENAISSANCE STUDIES, UCLA

1. Jeffrey Burton Russell: Dissent and Reform in the Early Middle Ages

2. C. D. O’Malley: Leonardo’s Legacy

3. Richard H. Rouse: Serial Bibliographies for Medieval Studies

4. Speros Vryonis, Jr.: The Decline of Medieval Hellenism in Asia Minor and the Process of Islamization from the Eleventh through the Fifteenth Century

5. Stanley Chodorow: Christian Political Theory and Church Politics in the Mid-Twelfth Century

6. Joseph J. Duggan: The Song of Roland

7. Ernest A. Moody: Studies in Medieval Philosophy, Science, and Logic

Studies in Medieval Philosophy,

Science, and Logic

Collected Papers 1933-1969

ERNEST A. MOODY

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS

BERKELEY LOS ANGELES LONDON

University of California Press

Berkeley and Los Angeles, California

University of California Press, Ltd.

London, England

ISBN: O-52O-O2668-3

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 73-91661

Copyright © 1975 by The Regents of the University of California

Printed in the United States of America

Contents

Contents

Foreword

Preface

William of Auvergne and His Treatise De Anima

John Buridan on the Habitability of the Earth

Ockham, Buridan, and Nicholas of Autrecourt

Ockham and Aegidius of Rome

Laws of Motion in Medieval Physics

Galileo and Avempace

Empiricism and Metaphysics in Medieval Philosophy501

The Age of Analysis*

A Quodlibetal Question of Robert Holkot, O. P. on the Problem of the Objects of Knowledge and of Belief 529

Buridan and a Dilemma of Nominalism

The Medieval Contribution to Logic

Galileo and His Precursors

William of Ockham

Jean Buridan

Foreword

Ernest Moody is not only a profound scholar and a lively companion: he is a totally independent spirit, capable of charting his own course toward new adventures as few of us are. During the financial boom and crash of the ’20s and early ’30s he worked on Wall Street until the Great Depression persuaded him to abandon the service of Mammon for the consolation of philosophy. Having become sufficiently consoled to achieve a professorship at Columbia University, he resigned his chair and spent the better part of a decade operating an isolated cattle ranch in Texas, some sixty-five miles from the Mexican border. Once a week he drove to town to get the mail, buy supplies, and have a beer with the boys in the local saloon. But the ranch house had a library that collected no dust, and at last he was ready for another change, and crossed Jordan to the Canaan of Southern California.

His changes of life-style, and the diversity of the sorts of people with whom he has lived and worked, may help to explain the comprehensiveness of his learning. No American medievalist has done more, both by editing difficult texts and by their interpretation, to expand our understanding of late medieval logic. But his Truth and Consequence in Medieval Logic—written during his Texan period— which won the Haskins Medal is unique: it translates the discursive logical Latin of the fourteenth century into the formulaic expression of twentieth-century symbolic logic. It is accessible to only a trace element in the guild of medievalists, but has immensely increased respect for the prowess of medieval logicians among their present-day successors. Moreover, Ernest Moody has fused his probings of logic with remarkable work in the history of medieval mathematical mechanics. Who else combines so successfully the history of logic with that of science in this period?

Foreword

More important is his capacity for synthesis and new insights. His work is fundamental to our undemanding of the way in which the thinkers of Frankish lands assimilated, evaluated, and built upon the great mass of Greek and Arabic philosophy that came into Latin from the eleventh century onward. His masterly essay Empiricism and Metaphysics in Medieval Philosophy, reprinted in this volume, is revolutionary for intellectual history. In Moody’s words, if the later fourteenth century has seemed to the historians of philosophy an age of decline, to the historians of science and logic it has seemed an age of rebirth and advance. … For better or worse, it gave a new character and direction to all later philosophy, of which we have not yet seen the end.

To gather Ernest Moody’s scattered articles, and one major unpublished piece, into a single volume, is a great service to international scholarship for which the University of California Press should be thanked.

Lynn White, jr.

Preface

The essays gathered together in this volume were written over a period of thirty-seven years, embracing the whole span of my career as a scholar and teacher. The first study, on William of Auvergne, was written in 1933 as a thesis for the Master of Arts degree at Columbia University. Although it has been on deposit in the Columbia Library for the past four decades, it has not hitherto appeared in print. The last of the essays, on Jean Buridan, was written for The Dictionary of Scientific Biography and appeared in the year of my retirement from active academic life at UCLA in 1969. The essays are ordered chronologically so that they provide, along with the books I wrote during those years, a fairly complete record of the development of my interests in the fields covered.

The preparation of this volume has given me occasion to reread the studies contained in it and to reflect not only on their content and on the circumstances under which they were written but also on the remarkable flowering of medieval studies that took place during the period in which I was working in the field. Although medieval art and vernacular literature had some devotees in the early years of this century, it was not until after the First World War that the study of medieval thought in the areas of philosophy, science, and legal and political theory began to come into its own. My four years as an undergraduate at Williams College, from 1920 to 1924, came before this revival of medieval studies, and though I majored in philosophy and studied its history as then taught, the twelve centuries between Augustine and Galileo were dismissed as unworthy of serious attention. It was not until 1932, eight years after my graduation from Williams, that I decided to pursue a life of scholarship and enrolled as a graduate student in philosophy at Columbia University. By then it had become possible to engage in research in medieval philosophy in a few universities such as Harvard and Columbia, and I made the personal decision to specialize in this field.

Several circumstances influenced my decision to concentrate on medieval philosophy. One was the fact that I had acquired competence in Latin as a student at Trinity School in New York, at a time when four years of high school Latin were required for college entrance. It made sense to choose a field in which I could utilize this skill, which was no longer commonplace. Another factor was the presence at Columbia of a young assistant professor, Richard McKeon, who was competent to guide research in this area. Although his own doctoral research, completed in 1928, had been on Spinoza, he had studied medieval philosophy with Etienne Gilson at Paris and was one of a handful of American scholars acquainted with the subject. At Columbia there were also sufficient library resources for such research, matched only by those of Harvard. Finally, it was apparent that the medieval field offered ample opportunity for original research, with many first-rate thinkers whose works had scarcely been studied by any modern scholars. The rebirth of medieval studies, especially in philosophy and science, had begun only a few years before, and mostly in Europe. In America the pioneer works of Charles H. Haskins, Medieval Science and The Renaissance of the Tvoelth Century, were published in 1927, while the first volume of Lynn Thorndike’s History of Magic and Experimental Science appeared in 1929. The Medieval Academy of America had been organized at Harvard in 1925, and shortly after, in Toronto, the Institute of Medieval Studies, sponsored by Etienne Gilson and St. Michael’s College, was started. It was a good time to get in on the ground floor.

The first essay in this volume, on William of Auvergne and his treatise De anima, was my initial venture into the field of medieval philosophy, carried out during the academic year 1932—1933 and submitted as a thesis for the M. A. degree that I received in 1933. In rereading the study I am conscious of the somewhat limited background from which I worked at that time. The scholarly material then available was nearly all of nineteenth-century vintage done in France and Germany, and my own critical standards reflected the ways in which philosophical problems had been formulated and discussed by American philosophers of the first two decades of this century. Nevertheless, I am not ashamed of this first work of mine, even though, if writing it today, I would use other forms of expression and do more to relate the material to its historical and philosophical contexts. In comparing my study with the third volume of A. Masnovo’s Da Guglielmo d? Auvergne a S. Tommaso d’Aquino, published in 1945, which deals primarily with the same material as my essay, I am pleased to find that his analysis is in rather close accord with that of my study.

Although I had originally intended to continue with William of Auvergne for my doctoral dissertation, I became interested in William of Ockham and decided to switch my research to him. What attracted me to Ockham, in the first instance, was the bad publicity given to him by the Thomists and particularly by Gilson, who portrayed him as a diabolical genius who tore down the beautiful edifice of scholastic philosophy and theology erected by Saint Thomas Aquinas. Since it was natural for me to side with the underdog, I felt the urge to find out what Ockham had to say. In the academic year 1933-1934 I worked on this project with McKeon’s help, after which he left Columbia to go to Chicago. But by the end of 1934 I had completed my book, The Logic of William of Ockham, and was fortunate enough to find a publisher, F. J. Sheed, who brought it out in the autumn of 1935. In those days publication was required for the award of the Ph.D., so it was not until 1936 that I received the degree.

The first stage of my plan for an academic career was thus completed, but the next step, of finding a position in a university, was not easily accomplished in those years of the Great Depression. Like William of Ockham, I was in danger of becoming a venerable inceptor, waiting for a license to teach. My book on Ockham received many favorable reviews, including one by Gerald B. Phelan, president of the Institute of Medieval Studies at Toronto. He urged me to come there and held out the promise of finding a place for me in the Institute if I would do so. I made several visits in the autumn of 1936 and took part in Gilson’s seminar. But I did not wish to move to Toronto, and decided to wait my time at home while pursuing further research in the medieval field. The fourteenth century fascinated me, and when I came across the studies of late medieval physics which had been done just before the First World War by Pierre Duhem, I sent for photostats of the writings of Jean Buridan, including most of those extant in early editions as well as some writings found only in manuscript Preface versions. With the help of Capelli’s manual and of Steffens’ facsimiles, I taught myself to read the medieval scripts and devoted most of 1938 to preparation of an editio princeps of Buridan’s Quaestiones super libros Aristotelis De cáelo et mundo. This was published by the Mediaeval Academy of America in 1942. Meanwhile I wrote the article John Buridan on the Habitability of the Earth which appears as the second essay in this volume (reprinted, by permission, from ‘Speculum,’ XVI [1941], 415). It contained my edited text of one of Buridan’s Questions, on an interesting problem of geology, with an analysis of its content.

In 1939 I received an appointment as Lecturer in Philosophy at Columbia University, and was asked to give two courses for graduate students. I offered courses and seminars in areas of medieval philosophy and on Aristotle and Saint Augustine. After a four year interruption during the Second World War, I returned to Columbia as Associate in Philosophy, later becoming Associate Professor. My most productive years commenced at this time, stimulated by contacts with colleagues, students, and other scholars of the area. At Columbia Paul Kristeller and I worked together on several projects, including a joint seminar on manuscript reading and editing. One of our students was Thomas Merton, who later gained fame as a poet, writer, and Trappist monk. In the areas of contemporary logic and philosophy of science I had common interests with Ernest Nagel, who gave me the benefit of his knowledge and critical acumen. A meeting ground for scholars in the New York area concerned with historical studies in philosophy and science was the Renaissance Seminar sponsored by J. H. Randall, Jr. This group met each month at Columbia, where research papers were read and discussed. Being pressed to make a contribution to the group, I worked up the material in my study, Galileo and Avempace: The Mechanics of the Leaning Tower Experiment, which appears as the sixth essay in this volume (reprinted, by permission, from the Journal of History of Ideas, XII, 2 [April 1951], 163-193; XII, 3 [June 1951], 375-422).

Early in 1946 I made the acquaintance of Philotheus Beehner, O.F.M., who had organized the Franciscan Institute at St. Bonaventure College. He was eager to enlist my aid in promoting the study of William of Ockham and asked me to write something for publication in Franciscan Studies, which he edited. The result was the third essay of this volume, Ockham, Buridan and Nicholas of Autrecourt (reprinted, by permission, from Franciscan Studies, 7, 2 [June 1947], 113-146). The fourth essay, Ockham and Aegidius of Rome (reprinted, by permission, from Franciscan Studies, 9, 4 [December 1949], 417-442), was also written at Boehner’s request for a special issue of Franciscan Studies devoted to Ockham, whose death in 1349 was being commemorated in 1949. At that time Boehner also persuaded me to undertake the task of preparing a critical edition of Ockham’s commentary on Porphyry’s Praedicabilia, as a contribution to the projected edition of Ockham’s philosophical works which was being sponsored by the Franciscan Institute. I worked on this task for some years, completing it just before Boehner’s untimely death in 1955. Because of his death, publication was delayed for ten years, when the edition finally appeared as a Franciscan Institute publication.

The essay on Ockham, Buridan and Nicholas of Autrecourt was one of my better efforts, from the point of view of construction and literary merit. On receiving it, Father Boehner said that it read like a detective story. It did however contain two errors that should be brought to the reader’s attention. In presenting the view of Bernard of Arezzo concerning intuitive cognition, as quoted by Nicholas of Autrecourt, I stated that this was Ockham’s doctrine and that Bernard of Arezzo should be regarded as a defender of Ockham. But I would now have to modify this because of Bernard’s statement that Clear intuitive cognition is that by which we judge a thing to exist, whether it exists or does not exist. This does not correspond accurately to Ockham’s position, according to which a clear intuitive cognition is that by which we can evidently know that a thing exists, if it exists, or that it does not exist, if it does not exist. Whether Bernard’s statement was a slip, and not actually intended to differ from Ockham’s view, cannot be known with certainty; but the difference, as it stands, is important. To what extent this may affect my assumption that Bernard was a leader or member of a pro-Ockham faction in the university, attacked by Nicholas of Autrecourt, is uncertain. But it does make it harder to establish a clear cut division between defenders and critics of Ockham on the basis of the letters of Nicholas of Autrecourt. However, the part of my essay dealing with the content of the decree of 1340, concerning the question of literal interpretation of texts, seems to me perfectly sound. The second error in my study, of less significance, consists in my use of a statement taken from the 1497 edition of Holkot’s works as testimony to Ockham’s position that a real science is of propositions whose terms stand for things that exist independently. The printed edition of Holkot, in actuality, ascribed to Ockham a position that belonged to Walter of Chatton, so that my use of this quotation was inappropriate. I discovered this mistake in 1962, when I studied a manuscript of Holkot dealing with the problem of the objects of knowledge and wrote the article that appears as the ninth essay in this volume. I would still defend the main thesis of my 1946 study, that the decree of 1340 was not directed against the teachings of Ockham, as well as the general treatment I gave of Ockham’s empiricism and the rationalism of Nicholas of Autrecourt, in relation to the issue of skepticism.

The remaining essays written while I was at Columbia, numbered four to six in this volume, represent research in medieval physics and its relation to Galileo and seventeenth century science. The article on Ockham and Aegidius of Rome used material uncovered in this research, but it was mainly intended to show that Ockham’s attack on those who treated quantity as a real accident distinct from substance was not directed against Saint Thomas as most historians had supposed, but was aimed specifically at Giles of Rome. The article Laws of Motion in Medieval Physics (reprinted, by permission, from The Scientific Monthly, 72 [January 1951], 18-23) summarized the main contributions of the fourteenth century to the science of mechanics. Most of my effort in the area of medieval physics, however, was given over to the writing of the long study on Galileo and Avempace. This study contains some controversial views on the relationship between Platonism and Aristotelianism in the development of early modern science, and in particular it challenges the contentions of Alexandre Koyré and of Ernst Cassirer on this issue. The views I expressed in this study have in turn been questioned by others, notably by the late Anneliese Maier in her book, 7/wischen Philosophie und Mechanik (Rome 1958). I am not ready to make any retractions, however.

My last two years at Columbia, from 1949 to 1951, were largely given over to work on two books. One of these, The Medieval Science of Weights (Scientia de ponderibus), grew out of a project I set up for students in the seminar on manuscript reading and editing which Kristeller and I gave as a joint project. I used a manuscript of the De ratione ponderis of Jordanus de Nemore as material for transcription by our students. They managed to get the first book done, and this was enough to get me started on the task of editing all the known medieval treatises on statics from the available manuscript sources. After constituting the texts and providing English translations and introductions for each treatise, I then added detailed commentaries in which the content of each work was analyzed in its scientific and mathematical aspect. When I had finished I showed the manuscript to my friend Marshall Clagett, who was then at the University of Wisconsin, and he asked if he might join me as a collaborator by contributing similar texts, translations, and commentaries for works on the subject by Thabit ibn Qurra and by Blasius of Parma. I had known Clagett since 1940, when I had been a member of his examining committee for the doctorate in history. I was happy to have him as coauthor of the book and also to have him arrange for its publication by the University of Wisconsin Press as the first of their series of Publications in Medieval Science. This book seems to have established a literary form for works of this sort, which has been followed in the books dealing with medieval science written since then by Clagett and his able pupils, as well as by one of my Columbia students who contributed a volume to the Wisconsin series. The one effort, which put a strain on my modest training in physics and mathematics, was sufficient for me, especially since I had let myself get involved in another project which put its own strain on my very modest training in mathematical logic.

There had been established at Amsterdam, Holland, under international sponsorship, a project for publishing studies in logic and the foundations of mathematics, with L. E. J. Brouwer, E. W. Beth, and A. Heyting as general editors. The publishers of the series asked me to contribute a volume on medieval logic, and this I agreed to do. The result was my book, Truth and Consequence in Medieval Logic, which was published in 1953 and well received. What I attempted to do in this book was to give an interpretation, in formulations that would be intelligible to a modern logician, of the medieval theories of truth conditions and of logical consequence. I used symbolic devices, in the modern manner, to give clear and economical representation of the rules stated in word language by the medieval logicians, and I sought to organize the materials in a systematic form such as would be used today. I found interesting analogies between medieval and contemporary problems and formulations, as well as notable differences. The book earned me the Haskins Medal of the Mediaeval Academy of America in 1956, and occasioned the presentation to me, in that same year, of the Nicholas Murray Butler Medal (in silver) which Columbia University awarded for the most distinguished contribution to philosophy made by one of its own graduates during the previous year.

Both of these books were published after I had given up my career as a teacher, and had moved to a ranch in Texas to try out the life of a farmer and cattleman. This life lasted for seven years, from 1951 to 1958, and was interrupted only by a return to Columbia as visiting ¡professor in the autumn of 1954, and by a similar visit in the spring of 1957 to the University of California at Los Angeles. It was during this visit to UCLA that I composed the seventh essay of this volume, Empiricism and Metaphysics in Medieval Philosophy (reprinted, by permission, from The Philosophical Review, LX VII, 2 [April 1958], 145-163), for delivery at a regional conference on philosophy held at the university.

While visiting UCLA I accepted an invitation to join its faculty on a permanent basis, and, after winding up my ranch operation in Texas, I moved to Los Angeles in the summer of 1958. One of the attractions of UCLA, at the time, was the presence of Rudolf Carnap in the philosophy department. This tended to make it an important center for studies in logic and philosophy of language, bringing many distinguished men in these fields to the department as visiting professors and guest lecturers. In this way, during the ensuing years, I was able to exchange ideas concerning medieval work in this area with such men as I. M. Bocheński, Peter Geach, and the late A. N. Prior.

With my interest in logic so well nourished, I focused much of my research on the work of the later medieval logicians, and gave particular attention to medieval attempts to resolve problems in the philosophy of language such as are matters of lively controversy today. The ninth and tenth essays in the present volume deal with two such topics. The one entitled A Quodlibetal Question of Robert Holkot, O. P. on the Problem of the Objects of Knowledge and of Belief (reprinted, by permission, from Speculum, XXXIX [1964], 53), was built around a text of Holkot which I edited from a single manuscript version that was in my possession. This had value in resolving a few historical questions concerning Holkot and his contemporaries, but the main focus of the study was on the philosophical problem of the type of entity constituting that which we may be said to know, or to believe. Holkot’s extremely nominalistic answer to this problem intrigued me. The other paper, Buridan and a Dilemma of Nominalism, was written in 1962 as a contribution to The Harry A. Wolfson Jubilee Volume (reprinted, by permission, from the American Academy for Jewish Research), and published at Jerusalem in 1965. It presents Buridan’s method of analyzing statements of indirect discourse involving such verbs as ‘knows,’ ‘believes,’ ‘promises,’ and the like—a problem, first treated in modern times by Frege in his well known essay Ueber Sinn und Bedeutung, that had come to be a lively topic of controversy among such contemporary logicians as Carnap, Quine, and Church. Buridan’s method of dealing with the problem within the framework of a nominalist ontology seemed to me quite interesting in relation to these discussions. I received helpful comments on both of these essays from W. V. Quine, to whose writings they made reference. The eleventh of the essays in this volume, The Medieval Contribution to Logic, was written at the request of the editors of Studium Generale, (Jahrg. 19, Heft 8 [Heidelberg, 1966], pp. 443-452). It was a sketch of the development of medieval logic in its historical aspect and in terms of its original contributions.

At the time I joined the UCLA faculty there was no more than the usual interest in medieval culture within the modern language departments and in the departments of history and art. But this was destined to change within a very short time, due primarily to the appearance on our campus of Lynn White, jr., who came the same year I did. His own specialty was medieval technology, but he sparked interest in all things medieval and organized our scattered personnel and resources in this field into a cohesive group which later became the UCLA Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies. The twelfth essay of this volume, Galileo and his Precursors, was delivered as a paper at a Conference sponsored by the Center to celebrate the four hundredth anniversary of the birth of Galileo. It may be read as something of a postscript to Galileo and Avempace, in that it offers my considered response to the much debated question of the degree to which seventeenth-century mechanics had its origins in the late medieval period.

The eighth essay of this volume, The Age of Analysis (reprinted from Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Assocation , XXXVII [October 1941], 53-67), was my presidential address delivered at the annual meeting of the Pacific Division of the American Philosophical Association. It is not primarily concerned with medieval thought, but with the state of academic philosophy in America and Europe as of the year 1963. But in discussing this subject I could not resist drawing analogies with the medieval age of analysis that occurred in the fourteenth century, and in this sense the essay is appropriately included in the present volume. It could indeed serve as a postscript to Empiricism and Metaphysics in Medieval Philosophy, which sought to establish a perspective on the historical significance of the evolution of philosophy and theology in the Middle Ages. This perspective is also conveyed, indirectly, in the final two essays of this volume, William of Ockham (reprinted with permission of the Publisher from the Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Paul Edwards, ed., 8: 306-317. Copyright ©1967 by MacMillan, Inc.) and Jean Buridan (copyright © 1970 American Council of Learned Societies. Reprinted with permission of Charles Scribner’s Sons from Volume II of the Dictionary of Scientific Biography). While these articles are primarily devoted to giving a factual account of the lives and achievements of the thinkers dealt with, they present aspects of fourteenth-century philosophy which opened the way to modern conceptions of science and to political and social values that have been distinctive of the modern era.

There can be many different motivations impelling a scholar to investigate the thought of a past age. In the case of medieval culture, there have been those whose, main concern was to portray the less attractive side of that age, with its superstitions, cruelties, and ignorance. Others have been attracted to it as an age of faith, and even as a culture to which we should return in a restoration of religious values that the modern age has lost. My own interest in the period has not been of this sort, and in the case of medieval philosophy I have had scant sympathy for the advocates of a return to Saint Thomas and the alleged golden age of scholasticism. Rather, I have been concerned with the way in which some of our most cherished modern ideas, institutions, and values had their origins in the medieval period.

As my essay on Jean Buridan suggests, the fourteenth century gave birth to an idea of science and of its appropriate aim and method, which has been distinctive of western culture in modern times. In Empiricism and Metaphysics in Medieval Philosophy I sought to show that the preemption of the domain of speculative metaphysics by a religion based on faith had much to do with this development. Other great creations of the medieval period, formative of our modern culture, were the universities as institutions independent of political and finally of ecclesiastical control, and the concepts of common law and of constitutional government, whose medieval origins have been studied by other scholars in recent years. My studies of medieval thought have been concerned, throughout, with the ancestry of ideas, institutions, and values that we cherish as achievements of modern civilization. Although the Renaissance enthusiasm for classical antiquity led to the labeling of the intervening centuries as the media aetas or middle age, the intellectual leaders of European culture in the twelfth, thirteenth and fourteenth centuries spoke of themselves as moderni, who had made progress over the heritage of the ancients. My work has been largely devoted to finding those aspects of medieval thought that justify this characterization.

I wish to express my gratitude to the University of California Press and its staff in Los Angeles, and to the UCLA Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, for making possible the publication of these collected papers, and to the publishers who have kindly given their permission to reprint the essays that originally appeared in their publications. I also want to express my appreciation to Lynn White, jr., who first suggested that I put together this volume of collected papers, for his part in bringing the project to fruition.

E. A. M.

Camarillo, California

William of Auvergne and His

Treatise De Anima

1. Introduction

1

William of Auvergne, Bishop of Paris from 1228 until his death in 1249, is of interest to us chiefly because he was one of the first Christian philosophers to have had access to practically the whole body of philosophical literature on which the scholasticism of the thirteenth century was nourished. Despite this fact, the references to him appearing in the extant thirteenth century literature fail, with few exceptions,¹ to make any mention of his philosophical doctrines. To his contemporaries and successors, he was primarily a Bishop, well known for his eloquence and ready wit,² and universally respected as a conscientious and thoroughly honest servant of the Church.

As is so often the case with mediaeval philosophers, few facts about William’s life are to be found. The date of his birth is unknown, but it was probably prior to 1190, since in 1225 he was teaching theology at the University of Paris, a privilege not ordinarily accorded to those less than thirty-five years of age. His birthplace was Aurillac in Auvergne, if we may give credence to a note placed at the end of a thirteenth century manuscript, which reads: Magister Guillelmus de Arvernia, oriundus de Auriliaco…³

Etienne de Bourbon⁴ tells a story about William of Auvergne as a child, which, if true, indicates that William was of poor family. It was said that when he was a child he was one day begging in the street, when a woman offered him alms on condition that he would promise never to become a Bishop. The child, perhaps sensing his destiny, declined the offering.

No indications can be found concerning William’s activities prior to the year 1223, when in an official document he is mentioned as a canon of Notre Dame.⁵ Again in 1224 and in 1225, two bulls of Pope Honorius III mention William (magistro W. L’Auvernatz, canonici Parisiensi) in connection with the appointment of clerics to investigate conditions in certain monastic establishments that were apparently in need of reform.⁶ From this evidence it may be inferred that William had already made some name for himself as a man of ability, since otherwise he would scarcely have been singled out by the Pope for these commissions.

On October 20th, 1227, Bartholomaeus, Bishop of Paris, died. Canon law provided that the selection of a successor, subject of course to Papal approval, belonged to the Chapter of Notre Dame, with the provision that if the Chapter failed to agree with practical unanimity, the right of appointment would revert to the Holy See.

The events which led up to William’s appointment to the Bishopric of Paris are recounted in detail in the bull of Pope Gregory IX, dated April 10th, 1228.⁷ It appears that the Chapter first named a certain cantor, Nicholas, but with a considerable minority dissenting. It was William of Auvergne who then stated that the election was not valid, and who threatened to appeal the matter to the Holy See. Thereupon Nicholas asked to be excused from the honour that had just been conferred on him. The majority faction of the Canons, however, not wishing the choice to be taken away from them, voted again and proclaimed the Dean of the Cathedral Bishop, announcing their choice to the public and even singing a Te Deum to celebrate it. William was obdurate, and appealed to Rome. The result was his own appointment to the office by Gregory IX.

William’s manifold interests and duties as Bishop of Paris have been pictured, with as much completeness as is warranted by the scattered sources available, by Valois. As Bishop he was secular as well as ecclesiastical power, acting as judge, magistrate, diplomat, and official head of the University. Numerous documents authorizing the foundation of new parish churches, and of new monasteries and religious foundations, bear witness to William’s conscientious, and even vigorous, fulfillment of his duties.⁸

Letters addressed to William by the Pope reveal the importance of the Bishop’s office from the standpoint of political and diplomatic activities.⁹ In 1231, for example, William was commanded to act as Papal representative in the peace negotiations between France and England; in 1229 the Pope requested him to send troops to aid him in a war with Frederick II—a request to which the Parisian Bishop responded by sending money instead; in 1246 he was appointed receiver in bankruptcy of the Church of Cologne. There is also a most reproachful letter addressed by Gregory IX to William in 1238, complaining that the Bishop of Paris had failed to defend the rights of immunity of the Chapter of Notre Dame against incursions by officers of the King—St. Louis.¹⁰

An affair in which William of Auvergne played a prominent part was the condemnation of the Talmud.¹¹ In 1238 a converted Jew, named Nicholas, drew up a list of thirty-five heretical and anti-Christian doctrines contained in the Talmud, and showed them to Pope Gregory IX. Under date of June 9th, 1239, Gregory wrote to William of Auvergne asking his advice as to what measures should be taken. William, who had no high opinion of the gens Hebraeorum, advised strong action.¹² The result was a Papal bull, issued through William of Auvergne as representative of the Holy See, and sent to all the civil and ecclesiastical authorities. It ordered them to enter all the synagogues on the first Saturday in Lent, 1240, and to confiscate the Jewish sacred books. After this had been done, amidst a great outcry from the Jews, an official investigation by the royal power jointly with the leading ecclesiastical authorities of Paris was made into the content of the Jewish books, resulting, in June 1242, in a public burning of the Talmud.

It was almost at the beginning of William’s tenure of office that the famous strike of the masters and students at the University took place.13 It seems that in February, 1229, the students became somewhat riotous in the course of celebrating the Carnival, so that on the complaint of some citizens whose property had been damaged, the Queenregent Blanche of Castile sent soldiers to disperse the offenders. In the skirmish there was some bloodshed, and the masters and students, enraged at this invasion of their rights of immunity, called on William of Auvergne to obtain redress from the royal authority. When William failed to accomplish anything, the students, feeling that the Bishop was not protecting their interests with due care and energy, suspended all classes and left Paris for neighboring cities.14

It was apparently at this time that William gave a chair in theology to the Dominicans, to help fill the gap caused by the absence of the secular Masters.15 In any case, the striking Masters appealed to the Pope, who then wrote to William, severely rebuking him and ordering him to re-instate the striking clerics.16 The Pope also appointed a commission of two Bishops and an Archdeacon to judge the dispute, in a bull dated Nov. 24th, 1229, and the following May wrote to Blanche of Castile exhorting her to receive kindly the returning Masters.17 Thus the Masters returned to Paris in triumph, with the affair taken out of William’s hands. Two points of interest may be mentioned in connection with these events. For one thing, the success of the appeal of the striking Masters to the Pope signalizes the strength of the movement which later culminated in the complete independence of the University from control by the Bishop of Paris. Secondly, if it is true that it was during this strike that the Dominicans were first allowed to teach theology at the University, it becomes easier to understand the antipathy which reigned for some fifty years between the secular Masters and the Mendicants.

In 1235 William called the Masters of the University together to discuss the legality of one cleric holding a plurality of benefices,¹⁸ a practice which he strongly opposed, and against which he wrote a special tract.¹⁹ Again in January, 1241, he convoked the Masters in order to condemn ten heretical propositions, which were proscribed by a proclamation signed by William and the Chancellor Odo.²⁰ As a matter of fact, the authority of making such condemnations belonged to the Bishop alone, but it was not long before the University began to assume this function in its own right, due in part, very likely, to William’s habit of always convoking the Masters as a preliminary to the promulgation of condemnations.

Two letters from the Pope, dated June 4, 1238, and Feb. 13, 1245 respectively, reflect the struggle which was going on at this time in connection with the granting of the licentiate. The first, addressed by Gregory IX to the Prior of the Abbey of St. Victor, asks the latter to compose the differences between the Masters and William of Auvergne on the question of granting the licentiate. The second, from Innocent IV to the Masters and Scholars, confirms the agreement made between them and the Bishop and Chancellor on this question.²¹

William of Auvergne died in 1249, probably on March 30th, and was buried in the Abbey of St. Victor.²² He was apparently well beloved in his own time, since even the difficult Roger Bacon speaks of him as Bishop William of Paris, of happy memory,²³ while Etienne de Bourbon testifies to his wit and to his eloquence as a preacher.²⁴

In a passage in the De Universo William breaks his habitual silence with regard to himself enough to afford a little glimpse into his youth, recalling the other-worldly and essentially Platonic, or Neo-Platonic inspiration which guided him in his studies, before he learned that illumination from above cannot be claimed, but only received as a free gift of grace.

Hence it is, that in the time of my youth I thought that the acquisition of the splendour of prophecy, and of great illumination, was easy; for the reason that our souls are, as it were, in contact with both worlds (scil. the spiritual and the corporeal). And so it seemed to me that it was easy to purify our souls from the pollution of sin, easy to break the bonds, or chains, by which our souls are held down and, as it were, imprisoned. … For I believed that by a little abstinence, and by turning my soul away from the cares and pleasures that held it captive and which pressed it down into the inferior world of sensible things, my soul would be freed from its obscurity and darkness, and that, through contrary habits those chains and bonds would be broken and consumed; and thus my soul, in freedom, would escape and be able by its own power to break through to the higher realm of light. Now, however, I have learned by long study of divine things, that human souls cannot be purified from the pollution of vice and sin except through virtue and by the grace of the Creator.²⁵

2

More than twenty treatises of varying length are generally recognized as authentic works of William of Auvergne.²⁶ The more important of these formed parts of an encyclopedic undertaking to which William refers as his Magisterium divinale sive sapientiale. While the encyclopedic tradition has a long history, William’s undertaking was neither a vast scrap-book like the Etymology of Isidore of Seville, nor a text-book of authorities like the Lombard’s Sentences, nor a Summa Theologica composed of Quaestiones. Its aim was to cover the whole field of theology and metaphysics, with relevant questions in physics, logic, morals, and law, by means of original treatises which, while embodying great learning, would enlighten and convince the reader through their own rational discussion as much as by the appeal to authority.

The Magisterium divinale was apparently intended to consist of seven parts. William nowhere gives a list of its contents, but Valois has been able to reconstruct the plan and order of the work on the basis of references to its different parts found here and there in William’s writings. These seven divisions are as follows:²⁷²⁷

I. De Trinitate. Discusses natural theology and the first principles.

II. De Universo, I, I—II. Discusses the sensible or corporeal world.

III. De Universo, 1, 111. The relation of God and creatures.

IV. De Universo, ll, I—111. The non-corporeal world of angels.

V. De Fide et legibus. On faith and the old and new law.

VI. De Sacramentisi In eight parts, one on the Sacraments in general, and seven on the Sacraments themselves.

VII. Summa de Vitiis et Virtutibus. In six parts, as follows:

(1) De Virtutibus.

(2) Demoribus.

(3) De Vitiis et Peccatis.

(4) De Temptationibus et Resistentibus.

(5) De Meritis.

(6) De Retributionibus Sanctorum.

In addition to these works, William’s published writings include a De Causis seu Cur Deus Homo, a work on prayer called De rhetorica divina, a treatise De collatione et singularitate beneficiorum, a supple-

Nat., ment to the work on the Sacraments entitled De Poenitentia novus tractatus, and his treatise on the soul, De anima. There are approximately ten other tracts existing in manuscript which appear to be authentic writings of William of Auvergne, as well as some 530 sermons in manuscript at the Sorbonne, the Bibliothèque Nationale, and at Arras. 28

One other treatise which is included among the published works of William of Auvergne, and which is referred to as his own in his other treatises, is the De immortalitate animae. This has been shown to be an almost word for word copy of a treatise of the same title ascribed to Domenicus Gundissalinus.²⁹ It is difficult to account for such obvious plagiarism on the part of the Bishop of Paris, though there are several points that should be taken into consideration. First of all, it is possible that the ascription of this treatise to Gundissalinus is mistaken, and that it is a genuine work of William of Auvergne.30 In the second place, it is possible that William may have seen a copy of such a work by Gundissalinus in his youth, and in later life have thought that the notes he had taken on it were not a copy, but an original treatise merely inspired by that of Gundissalinus. It is, however, hard to explain the fact that William in no place mentions Gundissalinus’ name, though his writings indicate that he was acquainted with the translations, and probably with the original works, of the Archdeacon of Toledo. Finally, it is possible that there did at one time exist an original treatise by William on the immortality of the soul, which was mixed up by some early copyist with Gundissalinus’ treatise, so that the latter wok, instead of the former, was incorporated in the copy of William’s writings.

As concerns the date of William’s literary activities, there have been widely variant opinions. Baumgartner31 ascribed an early date to the De Universo, holding it to have been written soon after 1213, on the ground that reference is made to the Albigensian heresy as if it were still a danger to be combatted, and for the further reason that William made no use of the form of the disputed question that was employed by Alexander of Hales during the fourth decade of the century. Jourdain, on the other hand, placed William’s writings around 1240, because of the comprehensive acquaintance with Aristotle indicated in his writings.³² 32

A more recent study33 34 of the material evidence has shown that Chapter 7 of the second division of the first part of the De Universo must have been written between 1231 and 1236, since specific reference is there made to military events which took place in Morocco in 1231, and to a conjunction of planets in Libra, elsewhere mentioned as due to take place in September 1236, as a forthcoming event which was arousing widespread fear. Though this evidence does not prove that the entire De Universo was written between 1231 and 1236, it may be concuded that the major portion of the work, i.e., from Part I, II, chapter 7 on, was written later than 1231, and possibly, as Jourdain thought, not completed until 1240 or thereabouts.

The fact that William, writing at approximately the same time as Alexander of Hales, failed to employ the form of the disputed question, may perhaps be explained by the fact that the form of the Quaestio was developed in connection with class-room work at the University, whereas William wrote his De Universo when he was doing no teaching. Furthermore, the Quaestio disputata developed as a method of expounding and discussing theological questions, through the citation and reconciliation of authorities. William, however, proposed in the De Universo (and in most of his other writings) to prove his statements not by appeal to authorities, but by reason alone.³⁵

The order in which William’s treatises were written is rather difficult to determine accurately, since bilateral cross-references abound, and indicate that parts of many of the tracts were written contemporaneously. That the De anima was written after the De Universo, if indeed it was not the last treatise from William’s pen, can be pretty well demonstrated from internal evidence. Whereas the treatise on the soul is not mentioned in the De Universo until the very end,³⁶ numerous references to the various parts of the Magisterium divinale are to be found in the De Anima. In Chapter V, Part 8 of the latter treatise William says:

as you likewise heard in the treatise preceding this one, where you listened to Plato’s error, who thought that they (souls) were created in the bodies of the stars, and thence descended, or were sent by the creator, to earthly bodies. … And concerning this you heard much in the second treatise of the first part of the Magisterium divinale.³⁷

The reference is explicitly to De Universo, I, II, 13, in which William gives a detailed account of the Platonic theory of the pre-existence of souls. From this evidence we may consider it probable that the De anima was written during the latter part of the fourth decade of the century—i.e., between 1235 and 1240, or possibly even later.³⁸ Thus the major part of William’s philosophical work was done contemporaneously with that of Alexander of Hales, and the rapidity with which thirteenth century Scholasticism developed from William of Auvergne to its highly integrated expression in Bonaventura and Aquinas appears all the more striking.

3

William of Auvergne’s writings abound in references to the great philosophers of antiquity, and to the Arab and Jewish thinkers whose works had been translated into Latin during the twelfth century. While it is evident that the fundamentals of William’s philosophy were derived mainly from the tradition of St. Augustin and of Boethius,³⁹ which had dominated twelfth century Scholasticism in such writers as Hugo and Richard of St. Victor, and Alan of Lille, he devotes the major part of his philosophical treatises to the task of criticizing, and assimilating as far as possible to the Christian tradition, the new terms, theories, and arguments found in Aristotle, in the Arab commentators, and in Avencebrol.⁴⁰ In performing this task he apparently found very little help in the works of his scholastic predecessors, to whom he scarcely refers. Gundissalinus is not mentioned, perhaps because William thought of him only as a translator; in any case, William is more critical of the emanationist tendencies of the Arab and Jewish literature than the Archdeacon of Toledo had been.

The Liber de causis, which had been translated into Latin by Gerard of Cremona between 1167 and 1187, is utilized by William, though not explicitly mentioned. The description of the position of the soul as on the horizon of eternity, a phrase first adopted from the Liber de causis by Alan of Lille, recurs constantly in William’s writings.41 The Fons vitae of Avencebrol, which like the Liber de causis exerted a remarkable influence on 13th century scholasticism as a whole, influenced William’s metaphysics and epistemology profoundly; in fact William thought that Avencebrol’s theory of the divine will was an expression of the Christian doctrine of the Logos, and he concluded that the author of the Fons vitae must have been a Christian.42

Avicenna and Averroes are frequently cited by William, the frequent references to the former indicating a fairly close acquaintance with Avicenna’s Sufficientiae. Averroes, who is mentioned less often and without explicit reference to the titles of his treatises or commentaries, commands William’s respect to a high degree.43

There can be little doubt that William had at his disposal translations of the more important Aristotelian works. According to Jourdain, who made a careful comparison of the Aristotelian quotations in William’s writings with the Greco-Latin and Arab-Latin texts of the translations, the Bishop of Paris used a Greco-Latin version of the Metaphysics, De anima, and Physics, though of the Physics he had, according to Jourdain, the Arab-Latin version as well.⁴⁴ In addition, William knew the entire Organon, the De Cáelo et Mundo, the De Generatione et Corruptione, the Meteors, De animalibus, De somno et vigiliis, and at least a part of the Nicomachean Ethics. Whether or not William knew the commentaries of Themistius and of Alexander of Aphrodisias at first-hand, is uncertain, since his few references to them may have been based on the discussions of their views contained in Averroes.⁴⁵

William’s attitude toward Aristotle, as well as toward Avicenna, Averroes, and Plato, is remarkably free from prejudice, considering the fact that only a few years earlier the philosophical works of Aristotle and the commentaries on them had been proscribed. On the other hand, to judge from William’s own words, many of the Parisian students and masters went to the extreme of accepting the views of Aristotle as if they were revealed truth.⁴⁶ William maintains the via media between these extremes, and deals with Aristotle respectfully, but with independence of judgment.⁴⁷

As concerns the relationship, in William’s approach, between faith and philosophy, William avers that he is not seeking to construct a philosophy independently of the light afforded by the Christian tradition, but rather to set forth Christian truth, and to destroy all that contradicts it, by the way of proofs and reason. Thus he does not distinguish in any clear cut manner between the subject matter of theology and that of philosophy, though he does recognize the difference in method between theology, which argues from scriptural and canonical authority, and philosophy whose arguments are based on natural reason. His faith in the power of reason is almost unlimited, and though he nowhere states explicitly that all the doctrines of William of Auvergne revelation are susceptible of proof, his viewpoint as a whole stands closer to the rationalistic tradition of Anselm than to the later Scholasticism, with respect to the distinction between faith and reason. This type of rationalism is of the Fides quaerens intellectum variety; reason without faith is like a ship without a pilot, but given faith to show the way, reason can follow it to the truth by its own method.⁴⁸

The general historical position occupied by William will become more evident as we study his psychological doctrines, and his manner of interpreting the writings of Aristotle and of the Arab commentators. Certain difficulties, which can only be overcome through a close comparative textual study of William’s writings and those of his predecessors and contemporaries, arise from the fact that doctrines, terms, and arguments used by William without specific reference to their historical sources, might have come to him directly from Augustin, Boethius, Avicenna, etc., or they might equally well have been derived from such secondary sources as Gundissalinus, Alfred of Sereschel, and from the twelfth century schoolmen of Chartres and Paris.

Another question of historical interest is that of the relation between William of Auvergne and his immediate predecessors and contemporaries, such as William of Auxerre, Bartholomaeus Anglicus, Philipp of Greve, or Alexander Neckham. Only when editions of the writings of these minor figures of the early thirteenth century become available, and when further historical studies have been made of this relatively obscure period, can such an investigation with regard to William of Auvergne be carried out to a profitable extent.

Such studies as have been made of this period, however, appear to justify the assertion⁴⁹ that William of Auvergne was the first of the great thirteenth century philosophers, and perhaps the first to appreciate

the possibility of approaching natural theology, metaphysics, and psychology from a purely philosophical point of view. In the Proemium to the De Universo, after distinguishing between knowledge by faith and authority, knowledge by illumination and prophetic insight, and knowledge by natural reason, he states that his purpose is to approach his subject matter from the standpoint of reason alone. Within natural knowledge itself he makes the distinction between the First Philosophy and the sciences, as follows:

Knowledge of the universe may be interpreted in two ways, of which one is the philosophy composed of the aggregation of all the philosophic sciences; and in this way the universe (is viewed as) the aggregate of all the things which exist, and their totality is nothing other than the collection of all these same things. … But according to the other point of view, knowledge of the universe is knowledge of it by the mode in which it is universal, that is, knowledge of the things which exist, but according to this mode—vid., insofar as it constitutes a universe. And this I will state, and number; and will follow up by a careful inquiry according to the methods of proof, and by expositions through which you will acquire certitude of these things, if God wills.50

Such a point of view appears to represent a considerable advance from the treatment accorded to philosophical problems by such immediate fore-runners as William of Auxerre and Philipp of Greve. Although William of Auxerre, in his commentary on the Anticlaudianus of Alan of Lille, made use of Aristotle’s Metaphysics and of Averroes, his major work, the Summa aurea, was theological and in the orthodox tradition. Even more immune from the new philosophical influences was the Summa theologica of Roland of Cremona, a contemporary of William of Auvergne.51

The Summa de bono of Philipp of Grève, chancellor of the University of Paris from 1218 to 1236, shows a more comprehensive acquaintance with the new Arab and Aristotelian literature than any other writings by a Parisian Master prior to the time of William of Auvergne’s literary activities.52 Numerous citations and references to Aristotle appear in this work, and use is made of the Physics, De cáelo et mundo, De generatione et corruptione, Metaphysics, De anima, De animalibus, and Ethics.⁵³ Averroes is mentioned frequently as the Commentator, and