Pius Guilelmus

Guilelmus de Alnwick, Quaestiones de esse intelligibili, q.6 (ed. Ledoux 161):

"Therefore it seems to me that, although the one so opining [i.e. Scotus] says in many places that creatures according to their eternal intelligible being are produced by God, and that the divine intellect by understanding a creature institutes it in intelligible being, nevertheless his arguments in many places show the opposite, and therefore I think that if he had held a special question about this he would have spoken carefully; for in this matter he was speaking according to the common opinion, which then was running in the mouth of men saying that creatures had no being from themselves, and therefore also according to intelligible being they are produced from another, and this indeed I have experienced in him, that by following the common opinion of the ones speaking he was accustomed with them to say that creatures according to their eternal intelligible being are produced by God. But now by more diligently inquiring after the truth the contrary is completely clear to me. So also the Solemn Doctor, Master Henry of Ghent, said many things in determining some questions which then did not pertain to his principal intention, and this indeed according to the common opinion of others, of which nevertheless he said the opposite afterwards when he held a special question over the matter, and so I save each doctor from contradiction. So also Aristotle said many things according to the common opinion of the philosophers, of which nevertheless he said the opposite when he determined about them specially from intention."

Comments: Not much in the way of argument here, but the passage does contain some precious historical information. Prior to reading this I had thought that Scotus' opinion was a novelty (if you recall, Scotus posits the production of the quiddities of creatures by the divine intellect in a series of four instants of nature) but Alnwick describes it as the common opinion. Probably the common opinion didn't involve instants of nature; just that the divine intellect or divine essence in some manner generates the essences of creatures. Both Alnwick and Peter Thomae argue against this opinion of Scotus/common opinion, although without attacking the use of instants of nature, while the rest of the Scotistae in the 14th century up to Maestrius et al. follow Scotus. Both Alnwick and Peter Thomae in the end remained without any influence (although they have quite convinced me). It is an interesting  that Alnwick, and probably other scholastics as well, were aware of contradictions in the thought of the great masters (even Thomas changed his mind on the verbum, as Auriol pointed out), but still try to harmonize them anyway. Well, sort of. In some of the questions in this work Alnwick exploits Scotus' contradictions by using the arguments from his Parisian period in the Reportatio and Quodlibet against the Oxford positions expressed in the Ordinatio.

Smithy Update

I am back from my "sprachurlaub" excursion to Munich and Italy, and while I probably did more on the "urlaub" side of things I did pick up a little German. So things should pick up around here. I hear Michael has  finished a draft of his dissertation, so he may step up with a few posts as well.

Thomism as Protestantism?

As a post a while back made clear, I recently read Joseph Owens' An interpretation of existence. One thing that struck me forcefully at a number of places throughout the book was the peculiar and familiar character of some of his statements. Consider the following passage:

. . . But the genetic leap to judgment as a distinct synthesizing cognition that apprehends an existential synthesizing in the thing appears for the first time in Aquinas. It ushers in a profoundly new metaphysical starting point. Nor is there any evidence that it was understood or appreciated by his successors. The distinction between simple apprehension and judgment did become a commonplace in Scholastic tradition. But the logical background of the distinction proved too dominant to allow the metaphysical import of the Thomistic texts to make itself felt. . . . The Thomistic insight that the judgment itself was the original knowledge of the existential synthesis eluded the attention of the later Scholastic thinkers. The notion that the intellectual activity of synthesizing was itself the knowing of existence escaped them. In Kant's penetrating scrutiny, however, the notion that a synthesis underlies conceptual knowledge reappears . . .

There seems to me something uncannily like what the Protestants like to say about St Paul here. Substitute "Paul" for "Aquinas", "Scripture" for "Thomistic texts," "Scholastic tradition" for "Christian tradition," and what do we get? Paul says something which everyone forgot about or misinterpreted for centuries until Luther rediscovered its true meaning, enabling him to discard all previous Christian tradition at his whim and thereby making it unnecessary for Protestants to even become familiar with the contents of that tradition. (By the way, Owens is by no means the only Thomist who talks like this. I recall both Gilson and Maritain saying very similar things.)

And this is just what many (most?) Thomists do! Like Protestants, they read their sacred texts in isolation from both the historical context of the texts themselves and from the way that the later tradition read them. Thomists tend not to read other scholastics, or not much. Instead they read Thomas in the context of contemporary philosophical and theological thought--like Protestants!--and, lacking the proper context and really appreciating Thomas for his "relevance" to our own concerns rather than for his own sake, they (first subtly, then increasingly drastically) distort Thomas' thought itself, all the while maintaining its supremacy--like Protestants!

The other thing that struck me in Owens' book was this: several times he mentions Heidegger's suggestion in the latter's Introduction to Metaphysics that "being", however interpreted, holds "the spiritual destiny of the West." Owens uses the phrase with approval and makes Heidegger's question his own epigraph. Now here's the funny thing: I was recently also reading Heidegger's book and it stuck me that the very same Protestantlike element pervades Heidegger's own thought! Just replace "Paul" or "Aquinas" with "the Greeks" and take as our texts the Presocratics, and make the tradition the tradition of all Western philosophy, and don't we have almost the exact same claim, namely that the "true meaning" of the original insights were almost immediately forgotten and abandoned by every successor, who mouthed the relevant words under a devastating and ruinous interpretation, until a lone genius prophet rediscovered the Gospel for himself and brought it back to the world? Isn't Heidegger just Luthor redux?

Coincidence? Or is this where the Thomists learned to talk like this? Or am I nuts?

One might in fairness note that many many philosophers have made similar gestures ever since Descartes, though not usually as radically as Heidegger. But if so this may simply reinforce my long-standing suspicion that modern philosophy is in large part simply the rationalistic flip-side of Protestant thinking.