The Discoverer of the Formalities

No one agrees about the origin of Scotus' formal distinction. Some say it is Bonaventure, others Henry of Ghent's intentional distinction, others put in the Franciscan thought after Bonaventure such as Olivi and Peter de Trabibus. One could also posit Aquinas as an origin, namely his discussion of rationes in his so-called Quaestio de attributis in  his Scriptum on the Sentences, itself influenced by Bonaventure. Finally, Bonetus in the 1340's famously attributes the origin to Aristotle.

Now we have a new contender:

While poking about in various manuscripts of Petrus Thomae's Quaestiones de modis distinctionum, I came across the following comment in the margin of question 7.

Hoc argumentum solvit egidius in de esse et essentia q. octava qui fuit inventor formalitatum (Munich, Bsb, Clm 26838, f. 34r, al. man.).

[For the Latin impaired: "Giles, who was the discoverer of the formalities, refutes this argument in his work on being and essence, question 8,"]

This is an annotation of the following argument:

Confirmatur, ista enim attributa sive formalitates ut distinctae, vel sunt aliquid et res vel nihil. Si sunt aliquid et res, propositum. Si nihil, ergo formalitates sunt nihileitates.

[It is confirmed, for those attributes or formalities as they are distinct are either something and a thing or nothing. If they are something and a thing, we have what we are trying to prove. If nothing, therefore the formalities are nothingnesses]. 

Egidius of course is Giles of Rome, who, depending on the decade, is either beloved or despised by Thomists. Thus we have a (quasi?) Thomist to add to the origin story of the formal distinction, which becomes less of a characteristically Scotist position but a tool made use of by a variety of scholastic thinkers.

Errores Philosophorum

There’s a famous passage in Betrand Russell’s History of Philosophy in which he declares that Thomas Aquinas was not a real philosopher, since the Catholic Church dictated to him in advance all the answers. What he did was not philosophy but special pleading. To anyone who’s even slightly familiar with medieval thought this statement is laughably ignorant, given the fierce centuries-spanning debates over crucial logical, psychological, physical and metaphysical issues that preoccupied the greatest minds between Augustine and Descartes and which prepared the ground (I mean this in both good and bad ways) for the developments of Renaissance and Enlightenment philosophy, in which Aquinas was only one (albeit an important) participant. I can only conclude that Russell had read very little Aquinas and practically nothing of other medieval thinkers.

On the other hand, the charge is also frequently leveled, especially by many Eastern Orthodox and Protestant Christians of a certain intellectual disposition, that the Latin West gave entirely too much ground to philosophy, doing an enormous amount of damage to theology especially in the time between Augustine and Descartes by using concepts, arguments, and methods derived from philosophy and applying them to divine matters, corrupting the purity of Revelation and Tradition with essentially pagan interpolations. Evoking the famous phrase of Pascal, they accuse medieval (and later) Catholicism of worshipping the God of the Philosophers, forgetting or abandoning the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.

I find this charge just as uncompelling. It’s been said that when you’re attacked by two opposite extremes on two contradictory grounds, chances are you’re in a pretty good middle position.

I once read a fascinating little book called Errores Philosophorum, by Giles of Rome, an monk and bishop of the Augustinian Order of Hermits who died in the second decade of the fourteenth century. In it he examines the writings of the pagan, Islamic, and Jewish philosophers who were most influential in the Western intellectual climate of his day, and points out the places in their respective works in which each teaches or argues for positions incompatible with Christian doctrine. It’s full of interesting bits; my favorite chapter was the one on the Islamic thinker Alkindi, who tried to use physics to explain the the efficacy of astrology and “the magical arts” (artibus magicis). For Giles, as for any good Christian, astrology and magic are rank superstitions and any attempt to argue on their behalf will be a philosophical error.

The pertinent statement to which I wish to draw the reader’s attention, however, is in the chapter on Aristotle. Giles says, Quoniam uno inconvenienti dato multa sequuntur, ex uno malo fundmento protulit Philosophus multos errores, that is, “Because from one erroneous foundation many falsities follow, from one bad principle the Philosopher has advanced many errors.”

This one fundamental error of Aristotle’s, according to Giles, is the principle that nothing new comes into being without a preceding motion, from which follows the denial of creation, the assertion of the eternity of the world, and other things contrary to Christian teaching. But for my purposes there are two interesting things about the opening sentence just quoted. The first is that it’s also the opening sentence of Thomas Aquinas’ De Ente et Essentia, a metaphysical work building on Aristotelian principles but very unAristotelian in its arguments and conclusions (and, by the way, the content of which is in no way provided by Catholic dogma and with which many theologians disagreed). The second is that the statement, “From one erroneous foundation” etc., at the head of a chapter critiquing various philosophical errors of Aristotle, is taken from Aristotle (Physics I, 195a11) himself!

These facts illustrate the real attitude of the medieval scholastics toward philosophy, which was neither too credulous and open to deleterious influence, nor excessively critical and unwilling to accept a good idea where one could be found. Where a medieval thinker thought an idea, whether coming from a pagan, Muslim, or Jew, had reason on his side, he would accept it and incorporate it into his own scheme of thought. Where he thought a non-Christian philosopher was wrong, especially where the thinker argued for something contrary to Christian doctrine or something which implied such, the Christian would argue against him. But as often as not the Christian would not refute the infidel using the Bible, the pope, or some other Christian authority, but using the principles of the infidel philosophers themselves! I know firsthand of many, many cases where scholastics argue that Aristotle or whoever was wrong about such-and-such given Aristotle’s own principles, and where he came to a conclusion incompatible with Christianity, this is not simply because he lacked the True Faith, but also and especially because he had failed as a philosopher to discover the best arguments available to reason on the subject.

To use an image they themselves loved to reproduce, the medievals saw themselves as the Jews during the Exodus, who as they were leaving Egypt for the promised land despoiled the Egyptians of the riches owed to them for their generations of servitude (i.e. they claimed reparations). The riches of Truth for them came from God, and properly belonged to those who were God’s friends and faithful servants. If the pagans and infidels had come into possession some truth on their own, it belonged with just as much right to Christianity as well, and so Christians would appropriate good reasons and good arguments wherever they found them.

Of course in order to have such an attitude they had to have a profound confidence in the harmony of faith and reason, an assurance that truth could never be in conflict with truth. If Christianity were true and if the mind had the capacity to discover philosophical truth on its own, then as long as both were functioning properly in their own spheres, they could only complement each other, and not conflict. An apparent discordance was to be resolved by striving to find better theories, more encompassing explanations, deeper understanding, rather than by a retreat into either rationalism or fideism, the two opposed alternatives of the modern world.

N.B. This post is another recycle, very lightly edited. Although it's only a few years old, I'm surprised again at how overblown the style seems to me. Maybe I still sound like that and I just don't notice!

Giles of Rome on the Real Distinction

Aegidius Romanus, Theoremata de esse et essentia (transl. M. Murray, p.61-62):

Theorem 12: "Everything that exists, except the First Being, is not its own existence, but it has an essence really distinct from existence and by reason of the former it is a being and by reason of the latter it is an existant."

[...]

"We ought to note, nevertheless, that some objects can be separated actually; others only in thought. Therefore, in the way in which we find objects separated in that way they are distinct from each other. If, therefore, they are separated only in thought then they are rationally distinct; if they are really separated, they are really distinct. And although there is some doubt whether those objects which are really distinct are also really separable, there cannot be a doubt that those which are really separate are really distinct. If, indeed, an essence were always joined to an existence, it would always possess an existence and it would never be able not to exist. Therefore, because sensible natures are able not to exist or because they are not always joined to existence, because they begin to exist sometime, we can say that they are in potency to existence and that they have no essence really distinct from existence."

There we have it, Giles of Romes' famous or, if your name is Cunningham, infamous separability criterion added to the real distinction. This set of theorems was Giles' first examination of the topic, save perhaps for his Sentences. Henry reacted to this treatise, which prompted a series of quodlibetal debates between the two. Giles eventually wrote a series of disputed questions about essence and existence, attacking Henry and clarifying his own position. This debate seems to have been heavily influential for the way in which later scholastics interpreted the formal distinction, although the only real literature on this is from thomist scholars, who have notorious blindspots. The separability criterion was certainly incorporated by Scotus and his early followers, and probably became standard among other schools as well. The first question of Peter Thomae's QQ. de modis distinctionis is about it, for example. Comparing this with Thomas of Sutton's version of the real distinction, which is obtains between anything distinct prior to the operation of the intellect, one could note that neither are explicitly found in the writings of Aquinas himself, but have been filled in by his later students (which has provided fodder for plenty of modern thomists, who, forgetting that thomism was not always as dominant as it was from the period 1879-1965, generally attack both for their alleged weak adherence to thomistic doctrine). It would be an interesting study to see if other theologians advanced similar views in the 1280's and on, and to see if the version of Thomas of Sutton might be the Oxford real distinction while that of Giles the Parisian real distinction. But that I will leave to the Thomists.

Here is another quote, from the introduction, p.ix:

"A clear thread runs from Duns Scotus, through William of Ockham to Suarez in the explanation of the distinction between essence and existence. There has been, on the part of these men, a violent reaction to the real distinction between essence and existence, as proposed by St. Thomas. This opposition is based on their rejection of essence and existence as real physical entities which, so they thought, would be required in the real distinction of St. Thomas. In other word, for these men the real distinction is only valid if applied to physical entities which are separable. Such, of course, is not the doctrine of St. Thomas; nevertheless these men have rejected the real distinction for this reason. Why historically this particular doctrine of physical entities was involved in the Thomistic real distinction is not, at the present time, so clear as historians of philosophy would like. It does seem, however, that Giles of Rome is at least partly responsible for this identification of the real distinction with physical entities."