In the Forest of the Text

This post may be the most pedantic, obscure, and boring of all posts on this blog of arcana. Here I will ruminate upon a problem that has been perplexing me of late, as I draw near to completing my edition of Petrus Thomae’s Questiones de esse intelligibili. This is the matter of orthography of medieval texts. There are two schools, or extremes, on this issue, someone has taken every position in between them. On the one side we have the what me might call the purists, or perhaps their relativists; these scholars think that one should only edit a text that actually circulated, and do reproduce one manuscript exactly. One the other side we have the realist, or Platonic, school, which holds that we should repair the faulty manuscripts that have come down to us by comparing the readings they contain to those of other manuscripts. Of course, they are attempting to recreate the ideal form of the text, which is supposed to be that of the author. My own views, such as they are, are in the middle. I find medieval spellings (and general chaos) aesthetically pleasing comforting in an odd way, and the “standardized” or “classicized” or “modernized” editions come off as antiseptic, and too-clean for my taste. Not to mention, anti-medieval. The cold dead hands of the humanists refuse to stay in their Ciceronian coffins. With this in mind, observe the following quote from Rega Wood’s edition of Richard Rufus’ Physics-commentary (a highly controversial edition whose attribution to Richard Rufus is contested by all scholars of medieval Physics-commentaries).

Richard Rufus of Cornwall, In Physicam Aristotelis, ed. Wood, 76:

In the critical text itself, we do not reproduce the abbreviations, the punctuation, the capitalization, or the spelling. To do otherwise would be to make the edition inaccessible to modern students of philosophy and useful only to trained medievalists. Medieval spelling practice is never uniform and often unclear. So if we followed scribal practice, we might spell the same word differently on the same page, noting in the apparatus cases where the abbreviation employed made it imposible to determine what spelling was intended. Like manuscript abbreviation, capitalization, and punctuation, medieval spelling reflects scribal, rather than authorial, decisions. Retaining manuscript spelling would make it difficult for philosophers equipped with an ordinary Latin dictionary to get through the text; modernizing it makes the text accessible to people with minimal competence in Latin.

Now most of this is fair enough. It would be impossible to reproduce most of what she mentions, as no two manuscripts ever agree on such things. Such and edition would be unintelligible to everyone, medievalists included. I also take offense at the jab at medievalists. Sadly, we are mighty among historians, but to philosophers we are mere nichileitates. One might mention that medievalists are just about the only ones actually interested in medieval philosophy. But I digress. Wood’s comment that such phenomena represent scribal, not authorial, intention is difficult to swallow. After all, all medieval authors wrote in ... (wait for it...) medieval latin. And in the case of Thomas Aquinas we have autograph material, which does not follow classical orthography. The Leonine commission is currently re-editing all their previous editions and preserving the original spelling. But all Wood may mean is that the individual spelling on a particular folio (say, “ydea” followed two lines later by “idea”) is not the result of authorial intention. Fine. Let’s move on to the final remark. Wood thinks that the manuscript spelling would make it hard for philosophers with an ordinary latin dictionary to get through the text, while modernizing (that word again!) the text means that minimally competent people will be able to read it. I have two responses to this.

1. Is it really that hard? Does ydea/idea, preterea/praeterea, ydemptice/identice, nichil/nihil really cause hardship? The only areas it might be tricky are when you have words that could be adverbs or adjectives: “obiective” could be either “obiective” or “obiectivae”. But context surely could be your guide (otherwise, I suggest attendence at one of the yearly academic conferences devoted to the theme of “Text and Context: Interdisciplinary Textual Communities”).

2. Why should it be accessible to people who are only minimally competent at latin? I would think that someone who was actually interested in reading philosophy in latin would not remain minimally competent for long. And someone who did not care enough to polish their latin would probably just be mining the text for something to run through the logic machine. Furthermore, I for one would not want to read an article about a medieval argument by an author minimally competent at latin; what guarantee would there be that they had the argument right? So, in the end, I think editions, like philosophy, should offer a healthy amount of forbidding gloom to the casual wanderer; enough to tantalize with half-guessed wealth, but not given freely from the street corner.

Symposium

Instead of dutifully reading Ockham today I've been reading the Symposium and Allan Bloom's commentary. I confess that whenever I read Plato I feel that he is both the most beautiful and most profound of philosophers and become tempted to just keep reading him and ignore all his footnoters.

I remember vividly the first time I read the Symposium, at fifteen or sixteen, in the old Jowett translation in the Britannica Great Books set. It certainly made more of an impression on me than any of the other Plato I read around the same. I'll never forget my initial impression at the speech of Aristophanes, which I didn't understand was supposed to be funny and found simply absurd and ludicrous and a bit grotesque.

And too I remember vividly the second time I read it, a few years later as a college freshman. For many years at St John's College there had been a tradition of making the Symposium seminar an actual symposium, with everyone drinking and talking. Federal funding regulations had made this wise and beneficent custom impracticable for a program in which Plato comes in the first year when nearly all the participants were underage, and by the time I got there the practice had been "officially" discontinued. Unofficially, however, most people got plenty drunk beforehand and a few intrepid souls snuck their wine into class in things like Snapple bottles. I stayed totally sober - I was very careful not to drink for the first two years of college - and participated in the discussion and watched in amazement as various usually dour or carefree or vice-hardened classmates began to pour their hearts out, some even weeping, as we all wondered together about love and beauty and transcendence and being fundamentally incomplete.

Perhaps part of the reason that Plato has such attractions for me is (in addition to his astonishing excellence) merely personal, in that I read so much of him as a freshman, which was such a formative period and has so many intense associations. For instance, I can't read the Phaedrus without thinking of another seminar, after which I met up with my girlfriend who had just had her own (at St John's all the seminars in the College happen at the same time, from 8-10 PM on Monday and Thursday nights; it's almost like a community liturgy around which all other time is structured). We were talking and she mentioned how proud she was that we had kept the black horses of our souls in check so well, which was ironic, for I had partly spent my seminar worrying that my own black horse might be champing at the bit more than I could handle.

Anyway. I read a great deal besides my studies in scholastic philosophy and theology, but since the blog is explicitly centered around these, it's always hard to tell what place if any other matter have here. "What's this tripe?" I can hear my vast crowd of frothing readers protest. "We came here for the good stuff, and he's trying to pass off his nostalgia instead of thinking like a man!" Fair enough. Back to the trenches tomorrow.

June is Ockham Month at The Smithy

My mentor and dissertation director Timothy Noone used to say that you can't know if you're a Scotist until you've grappled seriously with Ockham. I haven't read much Ockham since the graduate course I took on him some years ago, and it seems to me it's time to brush up. I'll be doing a little of that grappling this month.

People who don't read either frequently talk as though Scotus leads directly to Ockham: univocity and voluntarism to nominalism, the division of faith and reason, rebellion against the Church, and then Protestantism! Ergo Scotus is bad, Q.E.D.

Now this is a little like saying that Plato is bad because he leads to Nietzsche, insofar as without Plato there couldn't have been a tradition of Western metaphysics for Nietzsche to undermine. More seriously, it's like blaming Husserl for Heidegger, since Heidegger's thought is "phenomenological" and couldn't have arisen without Husserl, even though Husserl quite accurately described Heidegger as his "antipodes".

Ockham is Scotus' antipodes. Both British, both Franciscan, both post-Thomist pre-"decadence" scholastic system-builders who were responsible for much of the direction of philosophy and theology for at least the next century, still they don't have much in common. Seriously.

By the way, speaking of both Scotus and Ockham, recently I've heard more than one philosopher say - in a way that suggests that the opinion is pretty uncontroversial - that David Hume is the greatest philosopher ever to come out of the British Isles. That's pretty rich.

Anyhow, this month I'll be reading Ockham's first Quodlibet and commenting on it here. It has twenty questions, so - given that I probably won't post every day but probably can most days - that should be about right for June. Meanwhile perhaps Faber or Br Guzman will vary it up a bit. After that it's back to Scotus, but if Ockham turns out to be popular (to the limited extent possible!) there are seven Quodlibets, each with around twenty questions, which altogether present a pretty good mosaic of Ockham's thought, so I would definitely consider doing another Ockham month in the future.

The first post in the series will come tomorrow.

Blog Changes

We (obviously) haven't put a lot of work into the aesthetics of The Smithy, preferring to focus on the ideas instead, and having no design sense anyway. But in an attempt to make the blog a little less ugly I've changed the fonts, and to make it a little easier on the eyes I've increased the font size. These and all elements are subject to change on reconsideration.

Fragment

Going through my private manuscript hoard again, and I've discovered another snippet from the writings of Ioannis de Ultima Thule, this time taken from his Commentarium in librum rubrum occidensmerci, long thought to be utterly lost. Only the beginning of a single question is preserved in the codex I've examined, and it begins Quartum, quaeritur utrum unus anulus habeat aliquantulus esse? Et videtur quod non . . . I translate the fragment below:

Whether the One Ring has any kind of being? And it seems not:

For the One Ring neither exists now, nor did it exist at any time in the past, for it is legendary [fabulosus]. But whatever exists at no time has no being, ergo etc.

On the contrary: whatever is the object of knowledge exists, for of nothing nothing is known. But of the One Ring many things are known, for instance, the names of its possessors: Sauron, Isildur, Smeagol, Bilbo, Frodo. Ergo, etc.

Again, we may indicate the Ring's exemplary cause, namely elvish lore [doctrina Eldaliae seu Larum antiquorum]; its efficient cause, namely the Dark Lord [Dominus ater seu anularius magnus]; its formal cause, namely roundness [figura orbis]; its material cause, namely gold [aurum]; and its final cause, as its own inscription said:

Unus anulus omnes regere, unus anulus eos comperire,
Unus anulus omnes redigere et in caligini eos devincire.*

But where the cause is posited insofar as it is a cause, the effect is also posited. Ergo, etc.

*The verse, of course, famously concludes in terra Mordor [indcl. n.] ubi tenebrae latunt.

It remains to be seen whether any more fragments, or even the whole work, might surface at some future date when the world's libraries are better catalogued.

Roger Bacon, Alchemist.

How else to explain the following, from Blackwell's A Companion to Philosophy in the Middle Ages, page 2: "Among the first scholastics of note were Roger Bacon (b.1214/20; d. ca. 1492) . . ."? The book's proper entry on Roger Bacon states, on page 616, that Bacon died about 1292. However the entry's first sentence is "The basic facts of Bacon's chronology are still in dispute."

Current hypothesis: Bacon found the philosopher's stone, faked his own death in 1292, lived another 200 years or so being awesome, then was lost at sea in the search for a western route to India and Cathay. Probably still living in Atlantis.

Or else the first date was a typo. Right? Right?

Does Aquinas confuse Person and Nature?

Summer. That time of the year when the Energetic graduate student throws off his bonds of seminar papers and teaching and is finally free to show the world just how dumb the Latins are, especially that moron Thomas Aquinas who makes so many foolish errors, led on, no doubt, by that fount of lies, Augustine.

While I was in Europe they were busy:

http://energeticprocession.com/2009/07/16/saint-cyril-on-divine-simplicity/#more-586

http://wellofquestions.wordpress.com/2009/04/14/aquinas-conflating-person-and-essence-in-god-redux/

http://www.nicenetruth.com/home/2009/05/problem-quotes-in-aquinas-listed-for-discussion.html

The basic problem seems to be that Aquinas actually says that a person is the same as the essence. Therefore he confuses them, and there is only one person.

The feature of Aquinas' position that our brethren in Christ fail to admit is that Aquinas also thinks that the persons are really distinct from each other. So we have an identity between person and essence and a distinction of the realiter variety between the persons. Sadly, Aquinas does not tell us what a real distinction is. It could be between two discrete things, but it can also obtain within one thing, such as the human person where body and soul are really distinct. This latter example seems to suggest that there is some notion of separability involved, which clearly cannot be the case between the Trinitarian persons, although we are looking at a real distinction within a single object. The real distinction results from the fact that persons are constituted by relations, and some feature of the generic character of a predicamental relation still remains, even in divinis, namely opposition and distinction. It is this opposition of relations towards each other that provides the real distinction between persons, which Aquinas even characterizes as things in their own right (of course, one would think that one fundamenta of the relation would be the divine essence, so properly the relation should be really distinguishing the person from the essence; but I am sure I fail to understand how Thomistic relations work...the Thomists will have to correct me on this. There is also the Scotist argument that real products cannot come from powers that are not themselves distinct).

To actually attempt to answer the argument regarding identification, however, one must consider Aquinas' notion of rationes in God. Basically, in nearly Scotist fashion, Aquinas thinks that if God and features in divinis such as personal properties, relations, attributes could be defined, none of them would be included in the definition of any other nor could they be predicated of each other. That things in God cannot be defined is apparent because definition entails the assigning of genus and species, which are related as potency and act. But, God has no potency-act composition. That we should treat something that cannot be defined as if it could is not so scandalous as it sounds, as Aquinas thinks that the categories themselves cannot be defined, although we assign a ratio to them and act as if they are (they are the ultimate genera, after all, and defining them would entail an infinite regress). So all these divine elements are really identical, but differ by ratione, that is none fall into the definition of the other. To take my defense of Thomas in a scotist line, I would add that the fact that they do not fall into the definition of the other is not due to the operation of an intellect, but is prior to such activity. So I do not think that Aquinas confuses person and nature because these retain distinct rationes which cannot be predicated of each other while being really identical.

I trust some real Thomists will come to my defense here, as these are precisely the issues which I think Aquinas is deficient and Scotus is brilliantly not.

I have appended some texts to shed some light on the notion of rationes, and may update this discussion later.

De potentia, q. 8 a. 2 ad 3

Ad tertium dicendum, quod licet relatio non addat supra essentiam aliquam rem, sed solum rationem, tamen relatio est aliqua res, sicut etiam bonitas est aliqua res in Deo, licet non differat ab essentia nisi ratione; et similiter est de sapientia. Et ideo sicut ea quae pertinent ad bonitatem vel sapientiam, realiter Deo conveniunt, ut intelligere et alia huiusmodi, ita etiam id quod est proprium realis relationis, scilicet opponi et distingui, realiter in divinis invenitur.

Scriptum, I d. 33 q. 1 a. 1 ad 3 (ed. Mandonnet, 767): “Sciendum est autem, quod ‘ratio’ sumitur dupliciter: quandoque enim ratio dicitur id quod est in ratiocinante, scilicet ipse actus rationis, vel potentia quae est ratio; quandoque autem ratio est nomen intentionis, sive secundum quod significat definitionem rei, prout ratio est definitio, sive prout ratio dicitur argumentatio.”

Scriptum, I d. 33 q. 1 a. 1 ad 3 (ed. Mandonnet, 767): “Dico igitur, quod cum dicitur quod est alia ratio paternitatis et essentiae in divinis, non accipitur ratio secundum quod est in ratiocinante tantum, sed secundum quod est nomen intentionis, et significat definitionem rei: quamvis enim in divinis non possit esse definitio, nec genus nec differentia nec compositio; tamen si intelligatur ibi aliquid definiri, alia erit definitio paternitatis, et alia definitio essentiae. In omnibus autem intentionibus hoc communiter verum est, quod intentiones ipsae non sunt in rebus sed in anima tantum, sed habent aliquid in re respondens, scilicet naturam, cui intellectus huiusmodi intentiones attribuit... et ita etiam ipsa ratio quam dicimus aliam et aliam in divinis, non est in re; sed in ratione est aliquid respondens ei, et est in re [sed...re: sed est in re aliquid respondens ei in = Parma ed.] quo fundatur, scilicet veritas illius rei cui talis intentio attribuitur: est enim in Deo unde possunt rationes diversae ibi convenire.”

Super Sent., lib. 1 d. 27 q. 1 a. 1 ad 3

Ad tertium dicendum, quod sicut attributa essentialia non sunt plures res, ita nec proprietates uni personae convenientes; sed sunt una res, quae est illa persona; sed tamen quia relatio manet in divinis etiam secundum communem rationem generis, manet etiam relationis distinctio, inquantum est relatio; et ideo potest dici quod sunt plures relationes, et una relatio de alia non praedicatur. Non sic autem est in essentialibus, quae non manent ibi secundum communem rationem generis; unde non distinguuntur secundum rationem alicujus communis, cujus ratio in Deo sit, si tamen accipiatur commune reale, ut significatur nomine primae impositionis; si vero accipiatur commune rationis, quod significatur nomine secundae impositionis, sic commune est omnibus quod sint attributa; et ideo quia dividunt unum commune rationis, secundum hoc non praedicantur de invicem. Non enim dicimus quod hoc attributum sit illud attributum; sed quod est aliud attributum ab illo. Sed quia non dividunt unum commune reale, ideo ratione divinae simplicitatis secundum quodcumque nomen primae impositionis de se invicem praedicantur, ut dicatur: haec res est illa res; vel etiam propriis nominibus, ut: sapientia est bonitas