THE EPIStEMOLOGY AND PSYCHOLOGY OF FAItH IN ROBErt KILWArDBY AND HIS CONtEMPOrArIES* David PICHÉ Abstract Robert Kilwardby (ca. 1215-1279) was an important figure of the intellectual and ecclesiastical life of the thirteenth century. But we know almost nothing of his doctrine of religious faith. In this article I intend to fill this gap. I study the answers that Kilwardby brings to crucial questions which pertain to the epistemology and the psychology of religious faith: What is the subject of faith? Where does faith come from and what kind of certainty does it enjoy? What are the foundation and the object of faith? To better appreciate the specifics of Kilwardby’s positions, I compare them with the parallel doctrines of Albert the Great, Bonaventure, Richard Fishacre, and Thomas Aquinas. Introduction Medievalists know all too well Robert Kilwardby (ca. 1215-1279) the logician and Master of Arts, who taught at Paris from 1237 to 1245. They know equally well Kilwardby Bishop of Canterbury, who in that function instigated the doctrinal condemnation promulgated at Oxford March 18 1277. That censorship owes part of its renown to the fact that among the thirty articles prohibited in teaching fea- tured the thesis of the simplicity of the substantial form, which most scholars attribute to Thomas Aquinas.1 But what do we know of the * This article was translated from the French by Samuel Dishaw. I wish to thank the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) for the financial support granted to the research which led to this article. I am also grateful to the anony- mous reviewers for their helpful comments. 1 On several important aspects of Kilwardby’s philosophy, see H. LAGERlUND – P. THOM (eds.), A Companion to the Philosophy of Robert Kilwardby, Leiden 2013. For a Recherches de Théologie et Philosophie médiévales 84(1), 1-35. doi: 10.2143/RTPM.84.1.3212074 © 2017 by Recherches de Théologie et Philosophie médiévales. All rights reserved. 2 D. PICHÉ philosophy of religious faith developed by this notorious Master of Arts who later became a Dominican theologian and powerful clergy- man? Just about nothing.2 I would like to fill this gap in our knowledge of Kilwardby’s thought. And I will do so by studying the answers he provides to three questions crucial for whoever, whether today or in the Middle Ages, is interested in the epistemology and psychology of religious faith: (1) In which faculty does the virtue of faith reside, the intellect or the will? In other words: what is the subject (subiectum) of the virtue of faith? (2) Where does the virtue of faith come from, and what kind of certainty attends the act of assent that proceeds from it? (3) On what is the act of faith founded, and what does it bear on? In other words: on what object (obiectum) does the act of faith rest, and which object is its end (terminus)? In order to properly make salient the positions which Kilwardby adopts in response to these questions in his Questions on the Third Book of the Sentences,3 I will compare them to those found in the summary of Kilwardby’s life and work, see J. F. SIlVA, “Robert Kilwardby,” in: Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/robert-kilwardby/). For a rein- terpretation of Kilwardby’s doctrinal condemnation, which casts doubt on the common view that it took aim at Aquinas’s thesis of the unity of the substantial form, see J. F. SIlVA, Robert Kilwardby on the Human Soul: Plurality of Forms and Censorship in the Thirteenth Century, Leiden / Boston 2012, pp. 259-274. 2 One can read short discussions on some aspects of Kilwardby’s doctrine of faith in the following books: I. BIFFI, Figure medievali della teologia, v. I, Milano 1992, pp. 323- 330; J. C. WItt, “Acquired Faith and Mair’s Theological Project,” in: J. T. SlOtEMAKER – J. C. WItt (eds.), A Companion to the Theology of John Mair, Leiden / Boston 2015, pp. 49-50. To my knowledge, there exists only one study that entirely focuses on the topic of religious faith in Kilwardby, namely L.-B. GUIllON, “Structure et genèse de la foi, d’après Robert Kilwardby,” in: Revue thomiste 55,3 (1955), pp. 629-636. This is a very short and partial study written before the publication of the critical edition of the Ques- tions on the Third Book of the Sentences, upon which my own study is based: RObERt KIlwARDbY, Quaestiones in librum tertium Sententiarum, Teil 2: Tugendlehre, Herausgege- ben von G. LEIbOlD, München 1985. The analysis of faith as a theological virtue occupies the first nine questions of that volume, but only the first five (pp. 1-21) are relevant with respect to the philosophical issues that interest me in this study. It is worth noting that the famous De ortu scientiarum contains nothing on the subject of religious faith. 3 These Questions were in all likelihood written shortly after 1256 on the basis of Kil- wardby’s teaching on Peter Lombard’s Sentences, which took place in Oxford from 1254 to 1256. See SIlVA, Robert Kilwardby on the Human Soul, pp. 2 and 6. For the status quaestionis on Kilwardby’s Quaestiones on the Sentences, see G. LEIbOlD, “Robert Kilwardby’s Com- mentary on the Sentences of Peter Lombard,” in: Ph. W. ROsEMANN (ed.), Mediaeval Com- mentaries on the Sentences of Peter Lombard, vol. 2, Leiden / Boston 2010, pp. 175-225. tHE EPIStEMOLOGY AND PSYCHOLOGY OF FAItH IN kILWArDBY 3 Commentaries on the Sentences of some of his contemporaries and immediate predecessors4: the Dominicans Richard Fishacre (ca. 1245), Albert the Great (ca. 1241-1244; completed in 1249), and Thomas Aquinas (1252-1256),5 as well as the Franciscan Bonaventure (1250- 1252).6 1. The psychology of religious faith: intellect and will From the outset it is important to recall that, in the Christian tradition marked by Peter Lombard’s Sentences, faith is defined as a virtue — one of the three theological virtues along with hope and charity: following the common conception, faith is the graciously infused habit which renders its possessor apt to promptly assent to divinely revealed truths which bear on realities that transcend the 4 For the salient features of the bio-bibliographies of these authors, I refer the reader to “Appendix C. Biographies of medieval authors,” in: R. PAsNAU – C. VAN DYKE (eds.), The Cambridge History of Medieval Philosophy, v. II, Cambridge 2010, pp. 833-1062. So as to keep the present study at a reasonable length, I will restrict myself to the Commentar- ies on the Sentences put forth by these thinkers, thus deliberately setting aside the Summae of this period. Another study which, so far as I know, has yet to be undertaken, would have to focus on the psychological and epistemological dimensions of faith as these are dealt with in the Summae written in the first half of the 13th century (namely Philip the Chancellor’s Summa de bono, William of Auxerre’s Summa aurea, the Summa Fratris Alexandri composed by Franciscans on the basis of Alexander of Hales’s teaching, and Albert the Great’s Summa de creaturis). 5 Thomas Aquinas’s psychology and epistemology of faith has been studied on several occasions. Those that stand out, in my opinion, are: J. R. BRENt, The Epistemic Status of Christian Beliefs in Thomas Aquinas, Ph.D. diss., Saint Louis University 2008; M.-D. CHENU, “La psychologie de la foi dans la théologie du XIIIe siècle. Genèse de la doctrine de saint Thomas, Sum. Th., IIa IIae, q. 2, a.1,” in: Études d’histoire littéraire et doctrinale du XIIIe siècle, II, Paris 1932, pp. 163-191; J. I. JENKINs, Knowledge and Faith in Thomas Aquinas, Cambridge 1997; B. NIEDERbACHER, “The Relation of Reason to Faith,” in: B. DAVIEs – E. StUMp (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Aquinas, Oxford 2012, pp. 337-347. Since Aquinas’s doctrine of faith is much more widely known and available than the doctrines of the other authors I have chosen to focus on, the reader will not be surprised if I spend less time commenting on his views. In no way does that constitute a negative judgement on my part on the quality of Aquinas’s thought on the subject of faith; quite to the contrary, it is undoubtedly, alongside Bonaventure’s, the finest and most profound theory of that time. 6 The Franciscan Alexander of Hales wrote, between 1223 and 1227, the Glossa in quatuor libros Sententiarum Petri Lombardi (t. III, In librum tertium, Quaracchi 1954), but the doctrine it contains is rather thin, belongs to a previous generation of thinkers than those I focus on, and does not add, ultimately, anything substantial to the ideas one can discover in these thinkers. For these reasons, I leave this Glossa aside. 4 D. PICHÉ faculties of sight and understanding. This characterisation of faith as infused virtue belongs to the theological legacy inherited by Kil- wardby and the intellectuals of his time. Doctrinal divergences thus appear when time comes to specify in which faculty of the mind the virtue of faith is to be found. On this point, Kilwardby clearly claims that it is in the affective or volitional part of the mind (affectus), not in its cognitive part (aspectus).7 Kilwardby conceives of the human soul as a substance composed of three essentially distinct substantial forms (vegetative, sensitive, and intellective). The intellective or rational form of the human soul — also called “mind” (mens) — contains in itself many powers or faculties that are not truly distinct from one another; these are rather functions of the soul distinguished by the object that perfects them: the cognitive function of the soul, which comprises memory and intelligence, aims