PETER OF TARANTAISE ON THE ETERNITY OF THE WORLD

This brief question by Peter of Tarantaise, later pope Innocent V, is evidence of the fact that positions on the eternity of the world were still at this time independent of one's membership in an Order. Although this question cannot be dated with certainty, Peter was a contemporary of Bonaventure and Aquinas as a theological student at Paris in the mid- 1250s, although his regency was about a decade later. In any case, the question is much closer in tone, style, and content to those of the earlier part of the century than to those of the late 1260s and 1270s. Even though Peter was a Dominican and a friend of Thomas Aquinas, his position on the eternity of the world was much closer to that of Bonaventure. But Peter was not a first class intellect, and his thought was more seriously vitiated by equivocations of key terms than was usual. He insisted that creation from nothing necessarily entailed a temporal beginning, and he hopelessly confused the concepts of simple eternity with infinite temporal extension. The arguments quod sic in this question are drawn primarily from Avicenna and Aristotle. The arguments ad oppositum repeat many of those we have encountered earlier in the century, and the arguments of Bonaventure, and Algazel's argument (probably derived from Bonaven- ture's Sentences commentary) that an infinitely old world would entail the present existence of an actually infinite number of departed human souls, which is impossible, also appears. The Response itself is brief and does little more than paraphrase Lombard's Sentences 2, d. 1. But the replies to the individual arguments are of some interest. Most of the arguments drawn from Aristotle are rebutted by Maimonides's distinction between natural processes and creation. To the old argument, drawn from Augustine and Boethius, that God's going from non-creator to creator implies a change in him, Peter says that the new relation is caused by the change of only one of the terms, namely the creature. And finally he picks up a very interesting aspect of Grosseteste's thought on divine potency, although his expression of it is fraught with inconsisten• cies. In his reply to the assertion that God preceded the world either by nature or by duration, Peter replies that he does so in both respects, but by the duration of eternity, not of time. "Nevertheless," he says, "the before and after is not founded totally in eternity, because eternity would then have the 'now9 of time if both were founded in the same duration. But the priority is founded in eternity with respect to time which was 62 PETER OF TARANTAISE going to be." And in his reply to the argument concerning God's potency to create, he makes a twofold distinction of "the act of divine potency: one intrinsic and immutable, such as will and knowledge, and to this his act is always conjoined; the other extrinsic, such as creation, and to this it is not." Certainly his own thought was thoroughly vitiated by his inability to conceive of eternity in a non-temporal sense, but he was not alone in this failing. The only known MS of Peter's De eternitate mundi was Tours, Biblio• thèque municipale MS 704, which was listed by P. Glorieux, Répertoire, I, p. 111. This codex was a casualty of World War II, having been burned in 1940. However, D. O. Lottin had previously made photo• graphic copies. The Rev. Dom. Hildebrand Bascour has made these photographs available to Omar Argerami, and it is upon them that our edition is based. The orthography of this codex is highly idiosyncratic, but in accordance with our principles we have maintained it in the edition.