Richard FitzRalph: Commentator of the Sentences

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RICHARD FITZRALPH COMMENTATOR OF THE SENTENCES

RICHARD FITZRALPH COMMENTATOR OF THE SENTENCES A Study in Theological Orthodoxy by .-/ GORDON LEFF

MANCHESTER UNIVERSITY PRESS

© 1963,

GORDON LEFF

Published by the University of Manchester at THE UNIVERSITY PRESS

316-324 Oxford Road, Manchester, 13

Printed in Great Britain by Butler & Tanner Ltd, Frome and London

CONTENTS

PAGE

..

PREFACE

Vil

I. INTRODUCTION

I I9

II. THE DIVINE NATURE

25

(1) Essence (2) Omnipotence (3) Future Contingents

32

39

51

III. THE MIND AND ITS FACULTIES

( 1) (2)

(3)

The mind as a trinity . The Intellect and the relation of its knowledge to species and the active intellect

52 56

(a) External or sensory knowledge . (b) Inner knowledge

66 82

The will and its relation to the intellect .

90

IV. THE ORDER OF CREATION (1) Infinity and eternity (2) Relation (3) Creation

(a) Spiritual beings. ( b) The physical world V. FREE WILL, GRACE AND PREDESTINATION.

( 1)

Original sin (2) Grace and merit . (3) Predestination CONCLUSION APPENDIX APPENDIX

I. The Manuscript Sources II. The suggested order of questions

INDEX

V

.

IIO

.

III

.

116

.

121

.

124

.

128

.

138

. . .

142 157 168

. . . .

173 176 194 199

PREFACE THIS study of Richard FitzRalph' s thought continues the examina­ tion of the conflict between the traditionalists and the radicals during the first half of the fourteenth century begun in Bradwardine and the Pelagians and Gregory of Rimini. While individually Fitz­ Ralph was as different from them as they were from one another, they each arrived at comparable doctrinal positions on the main issues of the day; and these were largely treated in the new context given them by Ockham and his followers. This overall community of interest, despite the great degree of individual diversity, both in their outlook and methods, seems to me the most cogent answer to those who have questioned my treatment of the subject. I make no claim that it is more than an interpretation which must stand or fall by subsequent research; but in the meantime I regard it as a working hypothesis which, I suggest, has received added support from the present book. The writing of it has been handicapped to a considerable extent by the unsatisfactoriness of the extant manuscripts, which provide the only sources. They have frequently defied all efforts at eluci­ dation, and I can only apologize for the shortcomings which have resulted. At the same time, I must express the deepest obligation to Fr. Aubrey Gwynn, S.J., for making what has been achieved pos­ sible. I owe him not only invaluable advice, and information on the extant manuscripts without which they may never have been fully located; but he also placed at my disposal all his notes and photostats (including those of the key Paris text) thereby saving me untold time and difficulties. It was also through his good offices that the Director of the National Library of Ireland, Dr. R. J. Hayes, kindly loaned me microfilms of manuscripts from the Biblioteca Apostolica, Rome, the Bibliotheque Nationale, Paris, and the Bibliotheque Municipale, Troyes; to Dr. Hayes and the libraries concerned I offer my thanks. I also gratefully acknow­ ledge the help of Professor M. D. Knowles for once again reading my typescript as well as for his unfailing support. Finally I thank the Leverhulme Trust for a two year research grant for work Vll

Vlll

PREFACE

abroad; Manchester University for its consistent financial aid; the Dean and Chapter of Worcester Cathedral for the loan of MS. Q.71; the Librarian of Oriel College, Mr. J. W. Gough, for allowing, and Dr. R. Hunt, of the Bodleian Library, for facilit­ ating, the loan of Oriel College MS. 15; the John Rylands Library, Manchester, for accepting the custody of both, as well as for the many kindnesses of its staff; Miss M. Norquoy for typing my manuscript; and the Secretary and staff of the Manchester Uni­ versity Press for their help with a particularly obdurate text. G. L. Manchester, 12th May 1963

CHAPTER I

INTRODUCTION RICHARD F1TzRALPH is one of the few fourteenth-century thinkers who have no need of introduction. The main stages of his career have been illumined by Father A. Gwynn in excep­ tional detail for a man of that epoch. 1 Normally it is the thinker who survives through some scarcely-read treatise, while the man and his activities remain a fleeting and insubstantial shadow. With FitzRalph the converse is true. It is the man and his ways that we know best and his thinking-at least in its more refined and spec­ ulative reaches-which has remained elusive. It is here that our knowledge of him still awaits completion; and more particularly of his early speculative thinking contained in his Commentary on the Sentences. This is the subject of the present study. The main details of FitzRalph's life are already sufficiently well documented to need no more than a cursory recapitulation. He was born c. 1300 at Dundalk; he entered Oxford c. 1315 and was a fellow of Balliol in the years before 1325 when he resigned to study theology. He became master of theology in 1331, 2 but had already found a patron in Bishop Grandisson of Exeter, one of the outstanding ecclesiastical champions of learning during the earlier fourteenth century. FitzRalph spent 1329-30 in Paris as tutor to Grandisson's nephew; and by 1331 was in receipt of a pension from the Bishop. Henceforth he rose rapidly. In the following year he was made chancellor of Oxford, a position which he occu­ pied until 1334. In 1335, following a visit to Avignon, perhaps on behalf of the university, FitzRalph received his first ecclesiastical 1

The authority on FitzRalph's life and career is Fr. A. Gwynn S.J. For what follows see his series of articles in Studies, XXII (1933), 389 ff, 589 ff.; XXIII (1934), 395 ff.; XXIV (1935), 25 ff.; 558 ff.; XXV (1936), 81 ff; XXVI (1937), 50 ff. Also 'The sermon-diary of Richard FitzRalph', Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy, XLIV (1937), 1-57; and The English Austin Friars in the time of Wyclif (Oxford, 1940), ff. 66-75, 79-95. 2 A. B. Emden, A Bio raphical Re ister of tlze University of Oxford to A.D. 1500 g g (Oxford 1957-9 ), vol. II, 692-4. I

2

RICHARD FITZRALPH

appointment: Dean ofLichfield made by papal provision through the influence jointly of Grandisson and Bradwardine. 1 FitzRalph had by this time become associated with that other great patron of learning, Richard de Bury, bishop of Durham, of whose circle Bradwardine-who had been a fellow of Balliol at the same tjn1e as FitzRalph-was a member. FitzRalph thus enjoyed the support of both these influential men. He remained dean of Lichfield until 1346 when he was provided to his greatest appointment as arch­ bishop of Armagh, which he remained until his death in 1360. It is of interest that he chose to be consecrated in his new office by Grandisson at Exeter Cathedral in 1347. FitzRalph was one of the most formative influences upon English ecclesiastical life during the fourteenth century. Not only was he an outstanding bishop in the reforming tradition of Grosseteste and Grandisson; he com­ bined in an eminent degree the roles of litigant, moralist and theologian; and he fulfilled them with equal effect at the papal court of Avignon, in England and Ireland. Altogether he visited Avignon four times, residing there for a total of something like twelve years. His longest sojourn was the seven years he spent from 1337 to 1344, when he represented the chapter of Lichfield in a lawsuit against the Archbishop of Canterbury; and although his journeys were all of an official nature, once at Avignon he par­ ticipated in wider matters, making it the occasion for some of his most notable achievements. Outstanding among them was his Summa de questionibus Armenoriun, the major part of which was written probably 1340-4 during his third visit to Avignon. It seems likely that the last three books-on God's future knowledge and free will-were written in the aftermath of the renewed con­ den1nations at Paris University c. 1349-50. 2 It is above all as a controversialist that the influence of Fitz­ Ralph's thought has been greatest and it is for this that he is best known. His strong sense of moral rectitude was matched by the 1

Calendar of Papal Letters, (Ed. W. Bliss, London, 1895) II, 365, 524. The dedication is to Clement VI who had been strenuous in his warnings to the University against the departure from scripture and the writings of the sancti. For a discussion of these condemnations see the author's Gregory of Rimini (Manchester, 1961 ), pp. 14-17. 2

INTRODUCTION

3

vigour and forthrightness with which he asserted it; and in the greatest of all his disputes, with the mendicant orders, he did so not only by the more immediate vehicle of sermons but also through developing the doctrine of lordship and property in his De pauperie salvatoris (c. 1350-6). It formed the starting point for Wyclif 's teachings on dominion and grace a generation later. 1 His concern with these problems became more pronounced as his career proceeded; and they are the aspects of his thinking which have received most attention. The farther back in time we go to his earlier, predominantly theological, thinking the less we know, so that when we reach his Con1mentary on the Sentences, written probably c. 1327 before his departure for Paris, surpris­ ingly little has yet been brought to light. It stands apart from the rest of his work, in being the product of his scholastic period, which must have ended shortly after its completion and his promotion to high office in the university and the church. Thus with the possible exception of the last three books of his Armenian Questions his Commentary is the only monument that we have to FitzRalph the schoolman and abstract thinker. It is in this light that he will be considered here. As we have discussed in Appendix I FitzRalph's Commentary is preserved only in seven more or less complete manuscript copies. Of these, six date fron1 the fourteenth century, three giving the author as '(h)ybernicus'. This was the name by which FitzRalph was called before he became Archbishop of Armagh when he became commonly known as 'Annachanus'. Moreover, one of these three manuscripts is described as having been copied from a version at Paris; since it is dated 1360 it seems highly probable that at least four of these manuscripts were extant in the lifetime of FitzRalph. While this number constitutes a good average for a Commentary on the Sentences of this period it does not of itself entitle us to infer that FitzRalph' s theology was particularly in­ fluential; not only is there no ascertainable correlation between numbers and influence, as for instance in the case of Gregory of Rimini for whose Commentary there is a total of twenty-six ex­ tant manuscripts; but in FitzRalph' s case this could as well have 1

See A. Gwynn , English Austin Friars at the time of Wyclljf, Ioc. cit.

4

RICHARD FITZRALPH

been due to his prominence as an ecclesiastic. Indeed prima facie there is little in his Con1mentary to support any such assumption of influence. If it is distinguished at all it is for its conventional orthodoxy; it evinces neither the radicalism of the Ockhamists nor the over-extreme traditionalism of Bradwardine nor yet the attempt to reconcile their divergent emphases which is to be found in Gregory of Rimini. To these three differing standpoints FitzRalph-and therein lies the interest-brings a fourth: that of traditional Augustinianism derived largely from Henry of Ghent; it was an Augustinianism which, in its reactions against the determinism of Aristotelian causality, put renewed emphasis upon God's freedom and the contingent nature of creation. In this it shared in the general intellectual re-orientation which followed the series of condemnations at Paris and Oxford in the 1270s. As I have discussed elsewhere, 1 the most striking change which came over scholasticis1n in the later thirteenth and earlier fourteenth centuries was the reversal-indeed disavowal-of the attempt to find a meeting place between the divine and the created. Instead, attention was directed to their disparateness and the impossibility of attaining to knowledge of one by means of the other. This was to circumscribe the scope of both reason and faith: to restrict the one to naturally ascertainable experience and to treat the other as the exclusive prerequisite of revealed truth; each became thereby inaccessible to the other. The realm of one not merely ended where that of the other began but they were separated by the in­ superable barrier which divided the natural from the super­ natural. On the one hand there was the created world, of its nature contingent and corruptible; on the other was God, the sole necessary being, and the source of all other being. By what means could His actions or His ways be subject in their infinite freedom to the calculations of His creatures? How could the latter in their finiteness aspire to knowledge of the infinite or seek to transcend the world of the material and contingent to that which was im­ material and necessary? 1

Bradwardine and the Pelagians (Can1bridge, 1957), Gregory of Rimini, 'The changing pattern of thought in the earlier fourteenth century' (in Bulletin of John Rylands Library, vol. 43, March 1961, pp. 354-72).

INTRODUCTION

5

Now it was the acceptance of these limitations which formed the starting point for the majority of late thirteenth- and earlier fourteenth-century thinkers. Unlike many of their predecessors they did not regard these limitations as a problem susceptible of resolution but rather as inherent in the very order of existence. Far from seeking to overcome it they made it their governing assumption. Wherever else fourteenth-century thinkers diverged they were largely united in their refusal to make human know­ ledge the foundation of knowledge of God, or belief in God the guide to human knowledge. For that reason their outlook en­ tailed a radical severence from that of the previous epoch. It amounted to nothing less than the renunciation of a natural theology, a common terrain where the truths of revelation could inform and be reinforced by natural reason. Each had to with­ draw to its own boundaries and as an inevitable result scholaticism underwent transformation. I have adverted elsewhere to the consequences; here it is enough to mention briefly the main attitudes to which they gave rise, for it is in this context that FitzRalph's thought must be seen. Firstly, at one extreme, there were Ockham and his followers who, often with an audacity that bordered on the irreverent, pressed the division between faith and reason to its li1nits and even beyond. So far as faith was concerned they introduced a new ele­ ment in their frequent invocation of God's absolute power (potentia absoluta). This provided the means for asserting the untramelled freedom of God's will, if need be at the expense of what He had ordained by His potentia ordinata. Since God by His potentia absoluta was uncommitted to any preordained course of action, He could, if He so willed, override what He had decreed by His potentia ordinata. It is becoming apparent that even here, however, there were at least two interpretations of the ramifications of God's absolute power. The Ockhamists seemed to regard it as an essentially hypothetical state which served to underline the in­ herent contingency of God's actions and with it of the workings of creation. They appeared to operate it on the assumption that God expressed Himself to His creatures through His will, and since His will was infinitely free in its workings, it passed all man's

6

RICHARD FITZRALPH

attempts to reduce it, or Him, to order. In itself this was an essen­ tially Christian revulsion against the Aristotelian and Arabian tendencies to subject God's way to a series of inexorable oper­ ations; in common with the majority of thinkers of their epoch the Ockhamists sought to free God from human calculations. But it was the extre1nes to which they took His indeterminacy that marked them off; for they in effect refused to consider God except as He willed; and, since His will in its freedom was unconfined by any laws of man's devising, God in effect became rmknowable and indefinable, beyond the fact that He was omnipotent. Ac­ cordingly, in His absolute power there was nothing to say that He could not mislead or condone sin, or annihilate grace, or love the sinner more than the just man, to say nothing of His ability to supersede the workings of nature.When viewed in this light God became not merely unknowable but indefinable to the point where His traditional attributes of goodness, mercy, justice, wis­ dom dissolved into omnipotence; what God could do supplanted what He was. The consequences of this attitude have been dis­ cussed elsewhere; 1 their impact upon contemporary orthodoxy can be judged from the condemnations of the views of Ockham at Avignon in 1326, and of those of Nicholas d'Autrecourt and John de Mirecourt at Paris in 1346 and 1347, as well as the in­ creasing concern voiced by the Pope and the University author­ ities at the prevalence of these doctrines at Paris.2 They gave rise also to the fury of Bradwardine' s De Causa Dei, which openly branded the Ockhamists as the New Pelagians for their teachings on grace and freewill. In theological terms it seems undeniable that the Ockhamists overstepped the traditional limits by so emphasizing the contin­ gent nature of revealed truth that the entire order of grace, merit, free will, and with it the accepted definition of God's attributes could be reversed. In the hands of thinkers like Robert Holcot and Adam ofWoodham sheer fascination with the paradoxes open to God in His absolute power seemed to overcome other con1 2

See note I, p. 4 Op. cit., and H. Denitle and A. Chatelain, Clzartularitmi Universitatis Parisiensis (Paris, 1891), II, nos. 1042, 1124, 1125.

INTRODUCTION

7

siderations. Even if we need not brand them as sceptics, in their denial of an ascertainable order to God's actions, the effect was to forfeit any standards of judgement for God's nature and, by im­ plication, that of His creatures. As such it could not but undermine traditional Christian conceptions. At the natural level there was a corresponding limitation on what could be known. On the one hand only the individual given in experience was susceptible of verification and so of natural certainty. On the other, in common with all creation, it was con­ tingent; hence the knowledge which derived from it offered no means of attaining to universal and necessary laws. Accordingly while only that which existed outside the mind-the individual n1an or chair or tree-was actual, the ways in which we inter­ preted it were essentially the work of the mind. Thus our cate­ gories and concepts, essences and universals, far from expressing a higher order of reality, were evidence only of the mind's opera­ tions. There was thus no means of passing beyond the flux of con­ tingent individual beings, which constituted the source of natural knowledge, to the truths which were founded on faith. From both ends, then, the Ockhamists undermined the founda­ tions of a natural theology, leaving revealed truth to faith and confining natural knowledge to practical experience. It was the rigour with which they asserted this division, however, rather than the division in itself, which distinguished them. This can be seen in the second type of contemporary attitude which was ex­ pressed by Gregory of Rimini (c. 1300-58) . 1 He, too, accepted the same twofold limitation on the applicability of both natural knowledge and revealed truth. Like the Ockhamists he n1ade revelation the exclusive province of faith, inaccessible to any but believers; the purpose of theology was to clarify its propositions for those who already accepted them. At the same time, in com­ mon with the Ockhamists, Gregory recognized that faith referred to only one contingent dispensation possible to God in His abso­ lute power; while this in no way led him to try to undermine God's ordinances by juxtaposing what God could do to what He had actually done-in the manner of the Ockhamists-he was 1

See Gregory of Rimini.

8

RICHARD FITZRALPH

also prepared to make provision for the possibility of an alter­ native. But with this difference. The Ockhamists in their insistence upon the contingent nature of all creation extended this to the very concepts used to describe God; they denied not that He was good or wise or just or merciful, but emphasized that these terms were from us, not from Him. In themselves, therefore, they could provide no certain understanding of God's nature, for we were in no position to define their meaning except in contingent terms : what we understood by goodness or mercy offered no certainty that they meant the same for God. Accordingly beyond saying that God was necessary and free we could not go. For Gregory, on the contrary, God could indisputably act differently from how He had ordained and He was not restricted to any single course of action, since all that He did was contingent. But this did not render God unknowable or put His attributes beyond our pur­ view; God's nature remained constant and so did His actions. He was by definition good; and this was as apparent in His supersession of secondary causes as in His acceptance of them. In the words of Anselm He would not be God who sinned or lied; 1 the very notion of God's omnipotence precluded Him fro1n com­ mitting such deeds just as it precluded Him from being mortal. Thus, for Gregory, God's nature remained constant; His p otentia absoluta applied not to changes in His own nature but in creation; they underlined the contingency inherent in it whether in the pos­ sible supersession of its physical laws or of those governing grace and the supernatural virtues : but this did not entail another order of values, so that what was evil or unjust by one would have been good or just by the other. Herein lay Gregory's great difference from the Ockhamists. It can also be seen in the allowance which Gregory made for intelligible as opposed to sensory knowledge : whereas the latter governed all natural phenomena and derived, as the Ockhamists held, from experience of individuals, the former resided in the mind independently of the senses. It provided the concepts by which we were able to recognize non-sensory qualities like good­ ness and justice; although these did not enable us to establish God's 1

See Gregory of Rimini, 99 ff.

9

INTRO D U CTION

existence-that was the preserve of faith-it was the means by which we could attain to necessary truths. Thus even though con­ tingency reigned in both God's actions and in creation there re­ mained a constant order of values which was inviolable. Thirdly, there was the outlook associated with Thomas Brad­ wardine (c. 1300-49) and to be found in his De Causa Dei. 1 In essence it was an extreme reaction against the radicalism of the Ockhamists-above all, as we have ren1arked, their views on the supernatural virtues and free will.2 Its very extremism put it by itself beyond the emulation of most men; and in the present state of our knowledge of the fourteenth century it stands, except for Wyclif, alone and without significant influence. Bradwardine in his revulsion against the indeterminacy attributed to God's actions and the autonomy which was thus afforded to free will, assigned all power to God and virtually none to man. He conceived God's will as being precisely determined; while whatever He willed He willed freely, His decision, once made, was inexorable. Moreover the operation of God's will allowed no scope for the play of secondary causes, and in every action by the latter God's will was the first and most immediate cause. Bradwardine also shared in the contemporary reaction against intermediaries between God and His creatures and above all in any attempt to define God's actions in natural terms.Where he diverged from the majority of the thinkers of this epoch was in substituting a divine determinism for a divine contingency, so that the overriding consideration be­ came not one of the inherent uncertainty of the created order, but of its inexorable subjection to God's ineluctable will. In that sense we can say that Bradwardine owed nothing to his age save the extremism with which he sought to combat its own extre1nists; his determinism was designed to counter the indeterminacy of the Ockhamists; and the two outlooks met only in their common refusal to find a meeting point between the claims of faith and reason. If the Ockhamist tended to put faith beyond reason's pur­ view Bradwardine subjected reason to the demands of a faith albeit unorthodox in important respects; natural theology was as little possible for one as for the other. 1

See Bradwardine and the Pelagians. B

2

Ibid.

IO

RICHARD FITZRALPH

This, then, was the context in which we must regard Fitz­ Ralph's thought as introducing a further variant upon the outlooks already mentioned. It is distinguished from each of them in in1portant respects : from the Ockhamists in its entirely different con­ ception of the import of God's potentia absoluta ; far from con­ stituting a different order by which to judge the nature of God's actions-and by implication God-it signified merely (as with Gregory of Rimini) God's ability to supersede the present dispen­ sation. FitzRalph, like Gregory of Rimini, held that God by definition possessed in an infinite degree the full range of perfec­ tions ; he also invoked Anselm and Augustine to show that God's omnipotence entailed His inability to sin or deceive just as it precluded Him from dying. From the point of view of natural experience FitzRalph' s divergence from Ockham and his fol­ lowers was equally n1arked; for he adhered, as we shall show, to an essentially Augustinian epistemology in which verification and the primacy of individual experience played no part and the universal concept expressed an independent order of reality. There was nothing, then, to provide any affinity between the out­ looks of the Ockhamists and FitzRalph; their only point of con­ tact lay in the common issues-primarily those over God's omni­ potence, free will and future contingents-which they each treated. With Gregory of Rimini the dissimilarity was of a different order, as it was ,vith Bradwardine. Both FitzRalph and Gregory were essentially of the Augustinian tradition in their notions of God, man, the supernatural virtues and the validity of non-sensory knowledge; each eschewed the Ockhamist tendency to stress God's omnipotence at the expense of His nature such that He could infringe His attributes of goodness, mercy, justice, wisdom as traditionally understood; neither was prepared to permit God's potentia absoluta to conflict with the tenets of faith: man was con­ ceived in sin and could never gain God's grace by merit or be justified ex puris naturalibus. It was not that they denied that God in His absolute power could permit such metamorphoses ; it was rather that such suppositions were germane neither to God as God nor man in his present state. Similarly neither thinker was pre­ p ared to make the limitations of natural knowledge the occasion

INTRODUCTION

II

for nullifying all n1ental concepts; they both recognized the valid­ ity of extra- or non-sensory knowledge inhering in the soul. Above all, they shared in the same awareness of the contingent nature of all that is created; both invoked God's po ten ti a absoluta as evidence of God's infinite freedom to have ordered things differently, as for example in creating an infinite or eternal world or in His doing directly what He does through secondary causes. They both diver­ ged from the Ockhamists in refusing to apply two different orders of values to God's two different kinds of willing: goodness, sin, infirmity, grace remained such whatever their circumstances, for God remains God. Within this common framework the dissimilarities were real. Gregory of Rimini, as a thinker, was completely of his time; he showed a preoccupation with the problems engendered by the gulf between natural knowledge and revealed truth, above all in his awareness of the contingency of the created order which led him to many of the same solutions and devices as Ockham. In par­ ticular he displayed a like rigour towards the verification of con­ clusions and treated knowledge ofthe external world as exclusively by means of the individual, with the universal a mental figment. In the same way he never ceased to stress the contingency of the world and went farther than Ockham, and indeed most of his contemporaries, in postulating the possibility of infinity and eter­ nity in beings other than God. 1 Like Ockham he emphasized repeatedly God's ability to supersede all secondary causes, includ­ ing the supernatural virtues; and he rejected on much the san1e ground Duns Scotus' s formal distinction and the attempt to apply it to God. Perhaps more than any other thinker of his epoch Gregory insisted upon the exclusiveness of theology and faith and the impossibility of arriving at a knowledge of God save by first accepting His existence and nature as a matter of belie£ In these ways and many others Gregory took the problems of his own age as his starting point; and his acceptance of those of its concepts which were germane to his own traditionalism make his outlook one of the outstanding landmarks of the earlier fourteenth century. FitzRalph on the other hand was a traditionalist of a considerably 1

Gregory of Rimini, pp.

1 2off.

12

RI CHARD FIT Z RALPH

less searching and original kind. It is not unfair to say that his main characteristic was his almost conventional Augustinianism, which he pursued with an almost equally unconventional moder­ ation. If Gregory of Rimini' s Augustinianism consisted in the transposition of the basic tenets of St. Augustine into fourteenth­ century terms, FitzRalph' s lay in the application of thirteenth­ century Augustinianism to fourteenth-century problems; that is to say the order between them was reversed. Gregory was, as we have stressed, p ar excellence a fourteenth-century thinker who sought to reinterpret the concepts of his o,vn day in the light of Augustinian principles: he worked forward, as it were, to the latter from the former, accepting its methods and many of its emphases to do so. FitzRalph, however, evinced little of that participation in, or perhaps more correctly permeation by, con­ temporary thinking; whilst he accepted its topics like God's omnipotence, future contingents, changes in the order of being and so on, they do not appear to have presented him with the same problems; he tended to remain outside them, viewing them al­ most exclusively from their formal aspect. The effect is to render much of his discussion superficial and, within the context of the time, unreal; for he presented a solution ready-made from the past to questions which had arisen subsequently in the then present. Where Gregory of Rinrini made the present his point of departure and the past his goal FitzRalph adopted the past - for both. His thinking lacks that authenticity which distinguishes Gregory's; and ultimately it was the inability of FitzRalph to penetrate to the heart of contemporary issues, to grasp the full range of implications and to devise solutions to meet them, which makes his Commentary on the Sentences so inferior to that of Gregory of Rimini and so generally unsatisfactory. It stamps his thinking as essentially derivative and frequently perfunctory. With almost every question which he treated there are glaring gaps of definition and explanation; the sequence of argument is often tenuous, and the work as a whole suffers from a looseness and vagueness which in a number of instances 1nake it hard, if not impossible, to reach any positive conclusions about FitzRalph' s . mearung.

INTRODUCTION

13

At the same time it should be stressed that FitzRalph was still under 30 years old when he composed his Commentary. It is therefore a work of immaturity which, judged by the highest standards of a St. Thomas or a Duns Scotus or an Ockham, must be found wanting in grasp and originality. It was, moreover, written before the full impact of Ockhamism had become clear ; and while, in his discussion of God and His foreknowledge, Fitz­ Ralph already showed himself conversant with the doctrines of the Ockhamists and sought to combat them, it is not to be ex­ pected that he could yet have fully appreciated their import. Nevertheless these remain serious defects and it would be idle to minimize their effect upon FitzRalph's Commentary; it is less a novel and fruitful contribution to the contemporary debate, than recourse to already prepared positions. This is at once its strength and its weakness; for while it provides little that can be regarded as of intrinsic interest in se, it bears important testimony to the contemporary intellecual climate; and it is in this sense, as a wit­ ness to the problems of the age, that FitzRalph's Sentences are to be valued. They constitute another reply to the radicalism of the Ockhamists, one which neither damned their entire works, as with Bradwardine's De Causa Dei, nor which, like Gregory of Rimini's Sentences, attempted to reconstruct an alternative tradi­ tional outlook from many of the same elements which com­ prised Ockhamism. Rather, FitzRalph upheld the already exist­ ing Augustinianism as formulated above all by Henry of Ghent in his Quodlibeta, and largely confined himself to directing its tenets to the main problems raised by the Ockhamists. In consequence it is less in the answers that FitzRalph gave than in his consideration of the questions at all that the interest of his Commentary lies. It is therefore perhaps not surprising that the most immediate impression gained from FitzRalph's Commentary is one of re­ moteness from the important contemporary issues. In almost every case this is due to the predominantly pre-Scotist terms in which his thinking was framed, as we can see if we consider its main facets. In the first place, FitzRalph adhered so firmly to the Augustinian concept of God as supremely free that this in itself was the guarantee of man's freedom. The renewed emphasis upon

14

RICHARD FITZRALPH

God's will as the source of His actions, as opposed to assigning the guiding role to His intellect as with St. Thomas, was one which FitzRalph shared with the overwhelming majority of post-1277 thinkers. Henry of Ghent and Duns Scotus had been among the first to reassert its primacy in relation to all that lay outside Him. In doing so they were reaffirming one of the basic notions of Augustinianism; but it was Duns who pressed this freedom to mean indeterminacy. He reintroduced the concept of God's potentia absoluta, applying it to God's ability to dispense with supernatural habits in accepting a man's actions as meritorious and just. This was subsequently taken up by the Ockhamists and given the interpretation which we have already discussed. Now for FitzRalph the pre-Scotist conception of God's will sufficed; although he extensively employed God's potentia absoluta he never treated it as a solvent of the present dispensation. Least of all did he employ it to free man from his dependence upon the supernatural virtues in any act of merit or for justification. While he displayed an essentially genial attitude towards free will he always treated it in terms of its theologically defined limitations. Accordingly in his view it sufficed to emphasize God's will as the source of all contin­ gency to safeguard the freedom of free will's actions, including future contingents. As a result, where many of his contemporaries saw a genuine conflict between God's eternal forewilling-freely though it took place-and free will's future free actions, FitzRalph, together with Gregory of Rimini, saw its resolution in God's will. They did so, however, differently; and in FitzRalph's case it is difficult to avoid a feeling of unreality in the easy way in which he put the two parts together, through his reliance upon authority. He appeared content to state the solution rather than to reach it through a precise examination of the problem's import. It is here that his thinking contrasts so strongly with Gregory of Rimini's. In the second place, we may say that at the centre ofFitzRalph's Commentary is the nature of the mind and its faculties. Here more clearly than anywhere else the full extent of FitzRalph's Augustin­ ianism is apparent. It shows the influence of the Avicennan inter­ pretation of the intellect which was taken over by the thirteenth century Augustinians and finally forn1ulated by Henry of Ghent.

INTRODUCTION

15

In FitzRalph's case three main aspects are ,vorthy of note. Firstly, FitzRalph accepted fully the Augustinian conception of the nund as a trinity of intellect, will and memory; not only did he refuse to regard them as identical-one of the hallmarks of Ockhamism in its tendency to eliminate superfluous categories-but he con­ sidered the activities of each in relation to the others. This led him to attend almost exclusively to the psychology of the mind rather than to what it knows: knowing came before knowledge. Here he was especially beholden to Henry of Ghent; and at a time when it was precisely knowledge as such which was among the main-if it was not the main-issues. FitzRalph, however, scarcely concerned hin1self with its scope or validity or its relation, if any, to faith; and in this sense he may be said scarcely to have had an epistemo­ logy. Second, there were the elements which went to make up the act of cognition; on this matter FitzRalph relied wholly upon Henry of Ghent and his Augustinian antecedents. He distinguished between the image, or species, in the mind on the one hand and its illumination on the other. Owing to the mind's impairment through original sin it was no longer able to seize its object im­ mediately or independently of external aid; it required the com­ bined i1npulsion from a species, by which it became aware of the object to be known, and illumination, by which it was enabled to know. The species itself was engendered by the object, and illu­ mination was through the active intellect winch is God. This en­ tire process was completely Augustinian, as was manifested not least in the great lengths to which FitzRalph went in asserting the independence of the active intellect from the human intellect. Thirdly, FitzRalph duly distinguished between sensory and in­ telligible knowledge; he did so without the incisiveness of Gregory of Rimini and with at times a tantalizing ambiguity. In essence, however, he followed Henry of Ghent in distinguishing between the mind's capacity to know directly in man's original state of innocence before the fall and his subsequent dependence upon abstraction for what he knows. Where this made him rely upon a species for knowledge of objects which exist outside the mind, for inner knowledge this can gradually come about through a progressive increase in the illumination fro1n the active intellect

16

RICHARD FITZRALPH

until finally an awareness of necessary truths was attained. This can never lead to a knowledge of God, as indeed no knowledge can; but it constituted a higher order of awareness. As these different aspects stand they add little or nothing to the disputes by which FitzRalph was surrounded ; and FitzRalph made no attempt to carry them farther and to relate them to the dis­ cussions of his contemporaries : he merely restated them. Much the same holds for his treatment of free will which forms the third main topic of his Commentary. Here, too, FitzRalph took up his position on traditional Augustinian ground in assign­ ing the will primacy over the intellect; it is both the nobler faculty as the agent of beatitude and the active one, as the source of freedom; although it is determined in certain of its actions-as in the beatific vision where it must love what is presented to it -it is not compelled to act upon what it knows. FitzRalph was especially concerned to emphasize the freedom of the will whether of the elect or of the damned. Only God can increase or diminish the quantity of grace which a man enjoys, but this in turn depends upon the latter's own actions. Similarly, although the award of reprobation, as of salvation, lies alone with God's will, it rests with man to refuse to accept God's love and so to be damned. FitzRalph, in common with Duns Scotus especially, evinced a more indulgent attitude towards the capacities of the human will than St. Augustine had, placing particular emphasis upon its role in increasing, diminishing or rejecting God's grace. Once again, his concern was not with the resources of free will on its own account, above all not in opposition to the claims of merit, which constituted the Ockhamists' main interest; it was rather to stress the degree to which free will was active in its own destiny. Finally, there was a range of questions extending from the nature of angels to the order of creation-movement, infinity, eternity and so on. Here FitzRalph was at his n1ost uncertain, for the import of these questions was of only recent standing; it lay in once again pointing to the contingency of the present dispensation such that none of its elements could be taken as immutable or as independent qualities immanent in that which existed. As we have already mentioned, the world could conceivably be eternal or

INTRODUCTION

17

infinite; so could beings or the parts of a continuum; move­ ment was not a self-subsistent category but the product of that which moved; and the same applied to number and relation and similar concepts. Much of this reflected the impetus which Ock­ hamism had given to the rejection of universals in its insistence upon the importance of verification. At the same time it echoed the Augustinian conviction in the freedom of God's will. The combined effect was something like a transformed view of the universe. The fixed and constant order of Aristotle's cosmology, which had constituted the main framework for the workings of the universe, was displaced by one of indeterminacy; certainty was transferred from the macrocosm to the individuals which composed it. The latter alone afforded the actuality which made possible ever-more precise investigation, whereas the universe as a whole lost its definitiveness. Accordingly we see among Fitz­ Ralph's contemporaries-Ockhamists, Gregory of Rimini and Bradwardine alike-a growing attention to questions of physics and mechanics and their treatment in more rigorous and scientific terms. For the traditional Augustinian like FitzRalph, however, there was thus something of a dichotomy: unlike Gregory of Rimini who made provision for a distinction between the sensory and the intelligible, thereby confining the rejection of general concepts to the former, FitzRalph was faced with need to recon­ cile creation's contingency with preservation of the world of essences; hence while he felt able to admit the possibility of in­ finity and eternity in created beings, as facets of the universal indeterminacy which reigned, he lacked assurance over more specific matters which raised questions of the nature of being. Thus we find that in the more traditional problems such as the in­ tensification and remission of forms, which had always been especially closely connected with grace, FitzRalph was on firmer ground; and again with relation, for which there were accepted solutions. When, however, it came to ascertaining the nature of movement or the way in which angels and spiritual beings occu­ pied space FitzRalph evaded commitn1ent. His treatment of what we may call cosmological matters in general is among the most unsatisfactory parts of his Lectura : it is of interest primarily

18

RI CHARD FITZRALPH

in showing the importance which these topics had come to be regarded. Both as a conservative and as a thinker FitzRalph was ill-equipped to grapple with innovations. FitzRalph' s Commentary on the Sentences, then, is noteworthy in two main respects. In the first place it preserved the line of thirteenth-century Augustinianism in a predominantly pre­ Scotist form. Strongly influenced by the doctrines of Henry of Ghent, it was in all essentials a reaffirmation of the basic tenets of Augustinian teaching as they concerned God's freedom, intel­ lectual illumination, the soul and the nature of free will. Coming .as it did in the wake of the revulsion against Aristotle's deter­ minisn1 it shared the prevailing emphases upon contingency in both the actions of God's will and free will. But beyond this FitzRalph sho,ved virtually no affinity with the innovations or methods of his contemporaries. In this sense his thinking lay as much as-if not more than-Bradwardine' s outside the main cur­ rents of the earlier fourteenth century; he remained content to restate the traditional positions where Bradwardine, in his ardour, went beyond them. In the second place, however, FitzRalph's Commentary, for all its conservatism, is a witness for its time. Its topics and its structure were those of its age; as such they mirrored its preoccupations. FitzRalph, no n1ore than his contemporaries, was prepared to extend reason into the realms of faith; he accepted .as given such truths as the existence of God and made no attempt to demonstrate them. In keeping with the prevailing practice his Commentary was comparatively brief comprising little more than two dozen questions and averaging something over I 50 folios. Its concentration upon those issues germane to the time gives FitzRalph' s Sentences a place in its intellectual life; it enables them to be treated as a further contribution to the debate and as another viewpoint to be considered. It shows that the traditional outlook had not been completely swept away by the flood-tide of Ockhamism and that in one instance at least resistance to it could still take a pre-Scotist form. If this does not of itself make Fitz­ Ralph's thought memorable, or give it the stature of Gregory of Rimini's, it yet ensures it a place in the intellectual history of its own day.

CHAPTER II

THE D IVINE NATURE

more than any other question, the attitude towards God became the supreme test of orthodoxy in the earlier fourteenth century. As a growing number of thinkers of that epoch is exam­ ined it becomes increasingly apparent that their positions were largely governed by the way in which they conceived God. This resolved itself prin�arily into division between those who, like Ockham and his followers, in default of any natural evidence, emphasized His omnipotence and those who, like Gregory of Rimini and Bradwardine, affirmed the full range of His tradi­ tional attributes-goodness, mercy, wisdom and so on. By the first approach, as I have discussed elsewhere, 1 God's nature came to be subsumed under His omnipotence so that whatever He willed was ipso facto good; it led to extravagances of paradox which stopped at nothing in asserting God's power to do as He willed. Not only did it threaten the entire moral fabric of grace and free will-giving rise to Bradwardine's charge of Pelagianism against its advocates; it also virtually denuded God of any quality save omnipotence. In the name of His power He could do any­ thing, including sin and lie, no matter that to do so infringed His goodness as traditionally understood : the absence of any con­ stantly defined divine attributes led to the absence of any set order of divine conduct. His nature dissolved into the actions by which it manifested itself among His creatures; and since the latter were only contingent, lacking any final criterion of truth or justifica­ tion, so our knowledge of God was likewise uncertain. We could not ascribe any constant order of qualities or operations to Him; we could only acknowledge His power to do as He willed. For it was in the effects of His willing that we alone had contact with hi1n at the natural level. In contrast were those who refused to make God's omnipo­ tence the sole source of man's knowledge of Him. While, as with P ERHAP S

1

See the author's Gregory of Rimini, and Bradwardine and the Pelagians. 19

20

RICHARD FITZRALPH

Gregory of Rimini, 1 this did not preclude the invocation of God's omnipotence, it did mean limits to its application. On the one hand God could transform the whole of creation, in that He was not bound to follow the workings of secondary causes; but on the other, He could not deny His own nature. Thus He could, accord­ ing to Gregory, dispense with a created habit of charity2 and yet still reward a man or enable, say, two beings to occupy the same place at once; 3 for these only affected what in the first place had been the contingent effects of His willing and so could always have been differently ordained. What, by this view, God could not do was to impair His own nature; hence He could not be or sin or act other than as the su,nmum bonu,n, for as God He was by defini­ tion good, wise, merciful, the source of all truth and knowledge and justice. As Anselm said, He would not be God who lied or acted other than as summum bonum. 4 Accordingly, we are presented with a new context to the earlier fourteenth-century discussions on God and His attributes. It was no longer to prove the existence of a supreme being whose qualities and therefore range of actions were accepted without demur, nor to enumerate them by reference to the divine names; !ts purpose was rather to disengage God from the flux of creation so that some constant qualities could be ascribed to Him. All the thinkers of the era shared this common preoccupation. Where they diverged was over the degree to which God could be mean­ ingfully defined in terms, which as the expression of contingent creatures, could never themselves be more than contingent. Accordingly for the Ockhamists5 the very terms goodness, wisdom and so on begged the question of their meaning for God; such knowledge was not within our reach: hence we could not prescribe them. All that we could say was that as creator and supreme being God was by definition good; and all that He willed was ipso facto good. But what that goodness or wisdom or mercy was, lay with Him; we could only accept His willing as its own 1

2

Gregory of Rimin i, especially chapters III, IV, and V.

3 Ibid., pp. 126 ff. Ibid., pp. 1 8 8 ff. 4 Ibid., p. 102. 5 For what follows see Bradwardine and the Pelagians, especially Part II.

THE D IVINE NAT URE

21

justification. To the traditionalists, to delimit God's necessary being from the contingency of His creatures entailed the re­ assertion of revealed truth. God's nature was, as it were, outside the arena of rational demonstration. It must be accepted as an article of faith, a basic assumption rather than a problem for solu­ tion. Such, according to their different ways, was the burden of both Bradwardine' s and Gregory of Rimini' s defence of God's traditional qualities; and we find the same attitude adopted by FitzRalph. He evinced a like concern with them to establish the in­ violability of God's nature; as with them, he did so by purely theological means through affirming the authority of scripture and tradition. So far as knowledge of God was concerned FitzRalph does not attempt to prove His existence; on the contrary he goes out of his way, in common with many fourteenth-century thinkers, to show the untenability of Anselm's ontological argument in par­ ticular. This is the only part of his Commentary where he dis­ cusses the possibility of proving God's existence. FitzRalph' s main ground for rejecting Anselm's contention, that to have an idea in the mind of a being than whom no greater can be imagined was to know God, was the commonly accepted one. Merely to arrive at such a concept in the mind, he replied, provides no guarantee that the being which it describes exists outside it in re, any more than the mental image of a golden mountain or the chimera entails their actual existence.When the fool in the psalm says in his heart that 'there is no God', the term God does not imply that He understands it as a being than whom no greater can be imagined and hence that he has an image of God in his mind. 1 Any common term which refers to a being that cannot exist in re, always makes the particular affirmative proposition of which it is the subject false. That is to say a proposition is false which has for 1

Sed certe non sequitur audiens hanc vocem, id quo magis cogitari non potest, intelligit quod [ ms. quid] audit, ergo illud quo n1aius cogitari nequid est in intellectu suo, sicut non sequitur audiens hanc vocem, alius deus omnipotens preter deum nostrum, intelligit quod audit (I, q.16, a. I, 120 va) . All references to Paris MS. I have purposely simplified the spellings ; in particular I have adopted t for c wherever interchangeable.

22

RICHARD FITZRALPH

its subject a term-such as a golden mountain or the chimera­ which does not refer to a true singular object.1 A particular, and the proposition denoting it, are only true if they signify some­ thing in re. 2 Accordingly nothing can be proved from hearing the proposition that a being exists in the mind than which no greater can be imagined. It could only be true transumptive-if its existence were accepted by the intellect in the first place; but this is to as­ sume what has to be proved. 3 Moreover the existence and non­ existence of another omnipotent God could be imagined; and if He were to exist, and His existence believed, to imagine His non­ existence would be contradictory; for the concept of an onmi­ potent God precludes His non-existence. 4 Accordingly the con­ cept of God in the mind cannot guarantee His existence outside it. Only when taken in its negative sense can the notion of a being than whom none greater can be conceived be allowed, just be­ cause it then carries no implication of a real being. 5 It refers to 1

Pro quo est notandum quod quandocunque est aliquis terminus communis. significans aliquid esse, quod esse non potest in re, semper facit propositionem particularem affirmativam falsam in qua iste terminus est subiectum, cum ista propositio sit una particularis que nullam singularem veram habet; et per con­ sequens est falsa, sicut ista : mons aureus est in intellectu, vel chymera est in intellectu et similes. Unde quelibet talis particularis aflirmativa est falsa, quia non habet aliqua1n singularen1 veram (ibid., 120 va-vb). 2 Unde ad hoc quod talis particularis sit vera opportet quod solum significat aliquid existens in re, quia aliter ipsa affirmativa propositio erit implicativa falsi (ibid., 120 vb). 3 Sed tamen esset vera secundum modum loquendi auctorum, scilicet secundum unam significationem transsumptivam, ubi ipsa acciperetur pro una alia propositione, scilicet pro ista propositione, intellectus ymaginatur illud quod si esset, esset