CHAPTER TEN

CONCLUSION

THE CONDEMNATION OF 1277. On March 7, 1277 bishop Tempier condemned 219 propositions, ranging over a large number of topics, imposing severe penalties on anyone who maintained them or even heard them.1 Many of these were directed against the alleged 'Averroists' in the faculty of arts; a number seem clearly to have been directed against Aquinas;2 and others against masters who have not yet been identified.3 Much has been written about this condemnation, but there is still much we do not understand. It appears however that there was a good deal of misrepresentation of various masters' views, either through malice or stupidity. Although the preface to

"Ne igitur incauta locutio simplices pertrahat in errorem, nos tam doctorum sacre scripture, quam aliorum prudentium virorum communicato consilio distincte talia et similia fieri prohibemus, et ea totaliter condempnamus, excommunicantes omnes illos, qui errores vel aliquem ex illis dogmatizaverint, aut deffendere seu sustinere presumpserint quoquomodo, necnon et auditores, nisi infra vij dies nobis vel cancellario Parisiensi duxerint revelandum, nichilominus processuri contra eos pro qualitate culpe ad penas alias, prout jus dictaverit, infligendas," Chartularium Universitatis Parisiensis, ed. H. Denifle and E. Châtelain I (Paris, 1889), # 473, p. 543. I use the numbering of this edition in what follows.

2 See the doctoral dissertation of Henry F. Nardone, St. Thomas Aquinas and the Condemnation of 1277 (Washington, D.C., 1963). The Catholic University of America Philosophical Studies No. 209, especially pp. 102-15. 3 The most thorough study of the condemnation, which identifies the source of ma• ny of the condemned propositions, is Roland Hissette, Enquête sur les 219 articles condamnés à Paris le 7 mars 1277 (Louvain/Paris, 1977). Philosophes Médiévaux 22.

4 In a personal communication to me, Prof. Joseph Goering has suggested that we make a mistake in considering "the condemnations to have been aimed at the actual teaching of real masters. My reading of the condemnation (as a canonico/theological document) is that it is conciously prescinding from naming names and, as far as possible, from implying that anyone is actually teaching these things. The presupposition is that no one would do such a thing, and if they did, they would do it accidentally and unwittingly. It is like a warning, not like an (academic) polemic against colleagues. We tend to read it as a theological disputation rather than as a disciplinary document establishing authoritative boundaries within which the masters are free to manoeuvre at will. Thus one should be surprised to find in the 'condemnations' the actual words or teachings of a Master. And one should not think that the bishops have 'twisted' or misrepresented the teachings of specific masters—they are only saying what would be false should anyone actually say it." I am not convinced that he is right, but I think that this point of view deserves serious consideration. CONCLUSION 193 the list of condemned propositions asserts that certain masters were teaching a doctrine of the double truth, and a marginal note in one manuscript identifies these masters as Boethius of Dacia and Siger of Brabant, no one has ever discovered a text that teaches such a doctrine, and it is the consensus of modern scholarship that no one ever did.5 It has also been established that no one ever taught the beginninglessness of the world as truth.6 But what of the doctrine of the uniqueness of the possible intellect? This is a much more complicated matter, and some texts do indeed seem to teach it. In fact a total of twenty-four condemned propositions concern the human soul, and an additional four (numbers 40, 120, 145, 154) are concerned with the nature, status, and competence of philosophy. No fewer than eight propositions concern the uniqueness and/or eternity of the intellect (numbers 27, 31, 32, 96, 109, 121, 125, 193). This is a quintessentially Averroistic view, it is clearly heretical, and it was maintained by several masters whose works we have. But the condemnation takes no account of the sense in which it was being maintained: as the truth simpliciter; as the proper understanding of Aristotle; as the necessary conclusion of philosophy restricted to the realm of nature; or as a more probable of two undemonstrable positions. As I read the texts, that it was the truth in an absolute sense was maintained by no one, although each of the other senses is maintained by one or more of the masters in arts. Although Averroes was uppermost in the minds of those behind the condemnation, the relation of the condemnation to the tradition of Latin thought on the soul during the thirteenth century is quite complicated, and at least some doctrines of the majority of the masters we have investigated would be heretical by its terms. The concentration of the condemnation on combatting Averroes led its authors to insist that the soul is the substantial form of the body and to condemn the position that the soul-body relationship was essentially operational (numbers 7, 13, 14, 118, 119, 123). This was indeed Averroes's doctrine. He taught that the form that distinguishes one individual from another is the vegetative-sensitive soul, the seat of the speculative intellect; and that this soul is united operationally to the unique intellect, which is in potency to the phantasms provided by each sensitive soul. But the dualism of most of the pre-Thomist thinkers led them also to claim that the body, as body, had a form or soul distinct from the one created and infused by God. Indeed, this was the basis of both Kilwardby's and Pecham's objections to the doctrine of the unity of substantial form, since

See Richard C. Dales, "The Origins of the Doctrine of the Double Truth," Viator 15 (1984), 169-79, and the bibliography cited there.

Richard C. Dales, Medieval Discussions of the Eternity of the World (Leiden, 1990), pp. 140-55.