A Companion to James of Viterbo

Brill’s Companions to the

Christian Tradition
A Series of Handbooks and Reference Works on the
Intellectual and Religious Life of Europe, 500–1800

Edited by

Christopher M. Bellitto (Kean University)

volume 81

The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/bcct

A Companion to James of Viterbo

Edited by

Antoine Côté
Martin Pickavé

leiden | boston
Cover illustration: James of Viterbo, Quaestiones de divinis praedicamentis, Naples, Biblioteca Nazionale
Vittorio Emanuele iii, Ms. vii C 4, fol. 1r. James of Viterbo lecturing. (Photo courtesy of the Biblioteca
­Nazionale Vittorio Emanuele iii, Naples, Italy)

The Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available online at http://catalog.loc.gov

lc record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2018006320

Typeface for the Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic scripts: “Brill”. See and download: brill.com/brill-typeface.

issn 1871-6377
isbn 978-90-04-24326-2 (hardback)
isbn 978-90-04-36188-1 (e-book)

Copyright 2018 by Koninklijke Brill nv, Leiden, The Netherlands.

Koninklijke Brill nv incorporates the imprints Brill, Brill Hes & De Graaf, Brill Nijhoff, Brill Rodopi,
Brill Sense and Hotei Publishing.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system,
or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise,
without prior written permission from the publisher.
Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use is granted by Koninklijke Brill nv provided
that the appropriate fees are paid directly to The Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive,
Suite 910, Danvers, ma 01923, usa. Fees are subject to change.

This book is printed on acid-free paper and produced in a sustainable manner.

Contents

Acknowledgements vii
Notes on Contributors viii

Introduction 1
Antoine Côté and Martin Pickavé

1 The Life and Works of James of Viterbo 11

Eric L. Saak

2 James of Viterbo on Metaphysics 33

Mark D. Gossiaux

3 James of Viterbo on Divine Ideas and the Divine Cognition of

Creatures 70
Antoine Côté

4 James of Viterbo on the Ontological Status of Real Relations 97

Mark Henninger

5 James of Viterbo’s Philosophy of Nature 127

Martin Pickavé and Antoine Côté

6 James of Viterbo’s Innatist Theory of Cognition 168

Jean-Luc Solère

7 Intellect and Intellectual Cognition According to James of

Viterbo 218
Jean-Luc Solère

8 James of Viterbo on the Will 249

Stephen D. Dumont

9 James of Viterbo’s Ethics 306

Thomas Osborne

De regimine Christiano and the Franco-Papal Crisis of

10 
1296–1303 331
R.W. Dyson
vi Contents

Appendix 1: The Authorship of the Quaestiones septem de Verbo

Attributed to James of Viterbo 357
Stephen D. Dumont

Appendix 2: The So-called Abbreviatio in i Sententiarum Aegidii Romani

of James of Viterbo: A New Hypothesis 376
Gianpiero Tavolaro

Bibliography 393
Index of Names and Subjects 422
Index of Manuscripts 434
Acknowledgements

We wish to acknowledge the support of the Social Sciences and Humanities

Research Council of Canada for funding a workshop held at the University
of Ottawa in 2014, which brought together most of the contributors to this
volume and provided the necessary impetus and direction for the successful
completion of the project. We are also grateful to the Faculty of Arts and the
Department of Philosophy at the University of Ottawa, as well as to the Depart-
ment of Philosophy at the University of Toronto for their financial support on
that occasion. Thanks are due as well to Christian-Simon Ferlatte for his help
before, during, and after the workshop.
We would also like to extend our thanks to the series editor Christopher
Bellitto for accepting our project in his series, and to the anonymous reader for
helpful remarks and suggestions. We are also extremely grateful to Ivo Romein
of Brill for his editorial assistance at all stages of the project.
Finally, we would like to express our gratitude to Ian Drummond for his in-
valuable help in preparing the final manuscript for production.

Antoine Côté
Martin Pickavé
Notes on Contributors

Antoine Côté
is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Ottawa (Canada).

Stephen D. Dumont
is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Notre Dame (usa).

R.W. Dyson
is a former Lecturer in Politics at Durham University (uk).

Mark D. Gossiaux
is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Loyola University, New Orleans (usa).

Mark Henninger
is Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at Georgetown University (usa).

Thomas Osborne
is Professor of Philosophy at the University of St. Thomas, Houston (usa).

Martin Pickavé
is Professor of Philosophy and Medieval Studies at the University of Toronto
(Canada).

Eric L. Saak
is Professor of History at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis
(usa).

Jean-Luc Solère
is Professor of Philosophy at Boston College (usa).

Gianpiero Tavolaro
is Professor of Theology at the Pontificia Facoltà Teologica dell’Italia Meridi-
onale in Naples (Italy).
Introduction
Antoine Côté and Martin Pickavé

James of Viterbo was a master of theology at the University of Paris in the last
decade of the 13th century. He was a contemporary of Godfrey of Fontaines,
Giles of Rome, and Henry of Ghent, and was, like them, a major player in the
philosophical and theological debates that were raging in this extremely fruit-
ful period. Even though he did not have the same influence on subsequent
thinkers as his more celebrated colleagues, James developed highly original
theories in areas as diverse as cognitive psychology, metaphysics, ethics, and
political philosophy. However, despite his originality, despite the importance
of his role in shaping the philosophical debates of his day, and despite the fact
that due to the efforts of Eelcko Ypma and others we now possess the majority
of James’s works in modern editions, there exists no single work that p ­ rovides
an in-depth survey of James’s philosophical thought or an assessment of its
importance.1 This is a serious gap, as James’s importance in later medieval
­philosophy is now more and more recognized and his teachings are the focus
of a growing attention.
The aim of the present volume is to fill this gap in the scholarship. The vol-
ume consists of ten chapters covering the main areas of James’s philosophy
(his metaphysics, theory of cognition, natural philosophy, ethics, and p ­ olitical
thought) as well as key themes within it (his doctrines of the will, divine ideas
and possibles, relations, and innatism). It also features two appendices, each
dealing more directly with a specific work of James, or in one case, a work that
was falsely attributed to James.
The volume opens with Erik Saak’s chapter on James’s life and works. Saak
charts James’s development from his student days in his hometown of Vit-
erbo  to his rise as regent master of theology at the University of Paris, and
from thence to senior church official as archbishop of Naples in the 1300s. Saak

1 The exception is Fidel Casado’s survey article. See “El pensamiento filosófico del Beato
­Santiago de Viterbo,” La Ciudad de Dios 163 (1951): 437–54; 164 (1952): 301–31; 165 (1953):
103–44, 283–302, 491–500. Since this publication predates the new critical editions of James’s
work and has been superseded by recent scholarship, its usefulness is very limited. A r­ ecent
volume edited by Pasquale Giustiniani and Gianpiero Tavolaro focuses more on James’s
background and historical setting than on his philosophical and theological doctrines. See
Giacomo da Viterbo al tempo di Bonifacio viii: Studi per il vii centenario della morte in onore
di S.E. Rev.ma Mons. Lorenzo Chiarinelli vescovo emerito di Viterbo, (eds.) Pasquale Giustiniani
and Gianpiero Tavolaro (Rome, 2011).

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���8 | doi 10.1163/9789004361881_002

2 Côté and Pickavé

examines James’s development against the backdrop of the social, politi-

cal, and economic transformations occurring in Italy and France in the late
13th century. He notes that although most of James’s philosophical oeuvre is
devoted to the same kind of technical and abstract discussions one finds in
the works of his contemporaries, James was by no means, as Saak puts it, “an
ivory tower intellectual” removed from the debates of his time. The De regi-
mine Christiano is evidence enough for this, but even James’s Quodlibeta echo
the political controversies of his day, and on these James takes significant
­stances. One clear instance is found in his first Quodlibet, question 17, which
asks whether the pope can absolve a usurer who has not made restitution, but
which James uses as an occasion to broach the more general question of the
pope’s right to intervene in secular matters. Saak notes that James bases his
affirmative answer to the question on positions that are developed in fuller
detail in the De ­regimine Christiano. This leads him to question the 1302 dating
of the De regimine ­favored by Dyson, among others—one of the arguments for
this late dating being that the composition of the De regimine was occasioned
by the controversy between Boniface viii and Philip iv, which came to a head
in the early 1300s, much later than when James disputed his first Quodlibet.
Chapter 2 is devoted to James’s metaphysics. Mark D. Gossiaux, a noted spe-
cialist in 13th-century metaphysics and the author of several works on various
aspects of James’s philosophical thought, carefully explores James’s contribu-
tion to five key issues: the nature of metaphysics, the analogy of being, the re-
lationship between essence and existence, the distinction between substance
and accidents, and the problem of individuation, taking care in each case to
pick out what is unique to James’s view and to indicate how he differs from
his contemporaries. On the nature of metaphysics, Gossiaux shows that while
James follows the mainstream Avicennian view of metaphysics as ontology,
that is, as a science concerned with being qua being, and in ruling out that God
is the primary subject of metaphysics, he also believes that God is included in
the subject of metaphysics, a view which sets him apart from Aquinas and Giles
of Rome. Turning to analogy, Gossiaux notes that while James makes extensive
use of Simplicius, James’s central claim that being is predicated by a­ ttribution
is the view defended by Averroes. Accordingly, James grants that the con-
cept of being is not a simple one, but refrains from saying, as Henry of Ghent
did, that it is entirely devoid of unity; it is rather “simply many” and one in a
“qualified sense.” Gossiaux devotes close attention to spelling out the details
of James’s understanding of the essence-existence distinction (whether they
are really distinct or not) and showing how it differs from the views advocated
by Aquinas, Giles, and Henry. James’s own approach to the issue is to try to ar-
ticulate a solution that accommodates the partial truth found in each. Thus,
Introduction 3

distinguishing between the primary and secondary meanings of concepts,

James defends the view that taken in its primary meaning esse is the same as es-
sence, whereas taken in its secondary meaning it is distinct from essence. The
resulting doctrine, however, is hardly one that follows the general consensus
as James’s theory betrays an essentialist understanding of esse that puts him
clearly at odds with Thomas Aquinas and Giles of Rome. In the final section
of his chapter, Gossiaux reconstructs James’s account of the individuation of
both material and immaterial substances. As Gossiaux demonstrates, James’s
­thinking on this issue is guided by a distinction between singularity and indi-
viduality. Since an individual is understood to be an actual existing compound
of substance and accidents, the individuality of such an individual is due not
to only one principle of individuation, but to several. This allows James to
adopt a position that incorporates different insights from the rival positions
he criticizes.
The next chapter, by Antoine Côté, is devoted to James’s theory of divine
ideas and possibles and offers a particularly clear example of James’s general
tendency to always try to find a middle way that accommodates the best of
opposing theories, though Côté raises questions about how successful James’s
accommodation ultimately is. On the one hand, James follows the mainstream
of the medieval tradition in holding that divine ideas are nothing other than
the divine essence; on the other hand, he believes that God cannot truly cog-
nize creatures without cognizing them as other, and this means that creatures
qua cognized by God must in some respect be distinct from the divine essence.
In trying to articulate the particular sort of distinctness cognized creatures are
supposed to enjoy, James draws inspiration from various sources, but espe-
cially from Henry of Ghent. However, his understanding of divine ideas and
possibles differs from Henry’s on several important points, and not necessar-
ily to James’s advantage. The chapter concludes with an examination of the
(unanimously negative) reception of James’s theory at the hands of Godfrey of
­Fontaines, Bernard of Auvergne, and William of Alnwick.
Chapter 4 is another chapter dedicated to metaphysical themes. It deals
with James’s theory of relations, in particular his views regarding their onto-
logical status, and is the work of Mark Henninger, perhaps the foremost expert
on medieval theories of relation. The metaphysics of relations plays a spe-
cial role in James’s thought, as can already be gathered from the fact that he
dedicates five lengthy questions of his Quaestiones de divinis praedicamentis
(=qdp; questions 11 to 15) to the matter, which together comprise almost three
­hundred pages in the critical edition. According to Henninger, James, like many
13th-century scholastics, was a foundationist; he believed that a relation is re-
ally identical with its foundation, and hence that it is also ­mind-independent,
4 Côté and Pickavé

since the foundations of relations are real things in extra-mental e­ xistence. But
like many 13th-century foundationists, James denied that relations are strictly
reducible to their foundations. Henninger explores both James’s ­various ar-
guments in favor of the mind-independence of relations, and his arguments
in support of the view that a relation is, as James puts it, “a real mode of be-
ing,” that is, a real feature ontologically identical with its foundation, but
nonetheless not reducible to it. After examining James’s theory, as set out in
qdp, ­question 11, and comparing it with those of other major ­figures in the
13th century, Henninger concludes that James is best described as a “­modest
realist” when it comes to relations, that is, someone who is equally opposed
to the conceptualist view that relations are mere beings of reason, and to the
“­hyper-realist” view, according to which relations are ontologically distinct
from their foundations. Among the major scholastics of the late 13th century,
Henry of Ghent is the one to whose theory of relations and their ontological
status James comes closest.
The editors team up in Chapter 5 to examine James’s natural philosophy.
According to the medieval philosophers, the object of natural philosophy is
change and the features of reality that make change possible or relate to it in
an essential way. The chapter is organized in three sections, focusing first on
form and matter as the inner principles of change, time, and place as the fea-
tures of at least some kinds of change, and, finally, on James’s depiction of the
main varieties of change, namely, qualitative, quantitative, and substantial, as
well as his concept of “absolute action.” The authors devote special attention
in the first section to James’s innovative theory of matter. James’s analysis leads
him to postulate alongside “bare” matter the existence of “incomplete forms,”
which are both active (but not actual) principles and the “beginnings” (­exordia)
of the full-fledged forms that are the terminus of change. Acknowledging the
Augustinian inspiration of the doctrine, James explicitly calls these active
principles “seminal reasons.” He is aware, of course, of the more obvious objec-
tions the doctrine faces; in particular, the objection that the preexistence of
all forms in the guise of seminal reasons makes real change impossible. James,
­however, denies that this consequence follows from his own understanding of
the theory. After discussing the more noteworthy features of James’s account
of time and place, the chapter goes on to examine James’s characterization
of the main sorts of change. Here the authors highlight James’s tendency to
“modalize” change, that is, to view forms in potency (whether qualitative or
substantial) and those same forms in actuality as only modally distinct. This
tendency is of course of a piece with the doctrine of seminal reasons; it is also
of a piece with his conception of “formal self-motion,” a form’s “inner drive”
to completion, which turns out to be the most important causal factor in the
explanation of qualitative and substantial change.
Introduction 5

Turning to psychology, the next two chapters (Chapters 6 and 7) focus on

what is surely one of the most enduringly fascinating aspects of James’s phi-
losophy: his theory of knowledge, and the innatist premises that underwrite it.
These two chapters are the work of Jean-Luc Solère, the author of an important
body of work on medieval theories of cognition that makes him ideally quali-
fied to explain and assess the originality and importance of James’s cognitive
theory.
The first of these two chapters focuses on James’s original version of in-
natism. In the first section, Solère works out the basic tenets that underpin
James’s cognitive psychology. He notes that James wants to provide an account
of cognition that assigns the principal active role to the mind while retain-
ing as much as possible of Aristotle’s account, which emphasizes the soul’s
passivity in perception and cognition. James’s solution, which owes a lot to
Simplicius but also, as Solère decisively establishes, to Philoponus, is to en-
dow the soul with sets of innate predispositions, called “aptitudes” or idonei-
tates, which James describes as “incomplete actualities” of particular forms.
These aptitudes are more than the general capacity any human mind has for
knowledge, but less than the full-blown possession of a particular form. James
holds that these predispositions move themselves formally but not efficiently
to complete actuality, but that their unfolding as full-blown forms requires
­“stimulation” or “triggering” by material objects. In the second section, Solère
turns to a closer characterization of James’s innatism, noting that it extends
not only to the activity of the intellect but to sensory perception as well; he also
seeks to highlight the most significant parallels between James’s innatism and
that of other authors. While there are superficial similarities with the views of
Plato and Augustine, James is closest in inspiration and in point of detail to the
Neoplatonists Boethius, Simplicius, and Philoponus. His views also display no-
table structural similarities with the more famous and much later forms of in-
natism advocated by the likes of Descartes and Leibniz. The last section seeks
to situate James’s theory of predispositions in the context of his times, compar-
ing it with Aquinas’s theory of innate habitus, as well as with the innatism of
Richard Fishacre and Thomas of York.
The second of Solère’s two chapters is devoted to three issues pertaining
to the nature and “parts” of the intellective soul and its mode of operation:
the distinction of the intellective soul’s faculties, the existence and nature of
intelligible species, and the knowledge of substance. On the first issue, James
sides with Aquinas in holding that there is a real distinction between the
soul and its faculties. However, by interpreting faculties in terms of general
abilities or propensities (ideoneitates), as opposed to particular propensities
for particular kinds of objects, he recasts the distinction between different
psychological faculties in a completely new way. This should not surprise us,
6 Côté and Pickavé

since it is entirely in line with his innatism. This reconceptualization of fac-

ulties as general i­deoneitates also allows James to reject the traditional dis-
tinction between the so-called “agent intellect” and “possible intellect.” In his
examination of James’s discussion of intelligible species, devices many of his
contemporaries consider necessary for intellectual cognition to occur, Solère
notes that while James is critical of the arguments marshalled in favor of intel-
ligible species by the theory’s supporters, he does not want to dispense with
them altogether. Since a species is a form of an external thing relative to a
cognitive power, and the soul does possess such forms in the guise of idoneit-
ates, it follows that it does have species, in that sense of the term. In the last
section of the chapter, Solère examines James’s solution to the problem of our
knowledge of substance, that is, the problem of knowing how the intellect
can know a thing’s substance, if knowledge of reality is channeled through
phantasms, and phantasms convey information pertaining only to a thing’s
accidental features. James’s a­ nswer, Solère shows, follows directly from his in-
natist premises.
Chapter 8 is devoted to another central theme in James’s philosophical
thought and indeed one of paramount importance in post-1277 medieval
philosophy: the will. Stephen Dumont, the chapter’s author, notes that James
held more disputations on free will than on any other single topic. While still
a student at Paris, he had witnessed firsthand the polarized and public debate
between the great masters on the issue. On one side was Henry of Ghent, who
repeatedly attacked Thomas Aquinas’s teaching as deterministic and devel-
oped a strong “voluntarist” conception of the will as a self-moving power. At
the other extreme was Godfrey of Fontaines, who forcefully rejected Henry’s
idea of a self-moving will as a violation of the most fundamental principles of
Aristotelian philosophy. Dumont examines James’s theory of the will in detail,
focusing on James’s inaugural Quodlibet, question 7, and paying particular at-
tention to his explicit location of it in relation to Aquinas, Henry, and Godfrey.
Of particular interest is James’s own account of the will’s self-motion, which
again makes use of the notion of idoneitates. This shows once more how James
employs his innovative understanding of natural processes in his psychology.
Dumont also explores a little noticed but extensive (not to mention scath-
ing) response to James’s new theory by Godfrey himself, who now diagnoses
within it a further, even deeper conflict with Aristotle. The chapter concludes
that James’s theory of free will is certainly a voluntarism, but one moderated
from the radical v­ ersion advanced by Henry. In the end, James goes to some
lengths to accommodate his theory to Aquinas in ways that Henry would have
­certainly rejected. This assessment seems to be confirmed by James’s han-
dling of a set of related issues, such as Anselm’s doctrine of the two affections,
the c­ oncept of sine qua non causality, and the location of the moral virtues.
Introduction 7

­ ltimately, James’s treatment can be fairly seen as a culmination of the entire

U
13th-century Parisian debate on the will just before a new theory arrived with
John Duns Scotus.
With the next chapter the volume turns to yet another area in which James’s
original turn of mind comes fully to the fore: his ethical theory. Thomas O ­ sborne
considers three aspects of James’s moral teachings: his doctrine of self-love as
the basis of all acquired virtue, his theory of the virtues in general, both ac-
quired and infused, and his doctrine that legal justice and acquired friendship
are the forms of the acquired virtues. The most controversial of these three
doctrines is undoubtedly the first, as James, in opposition to the common view
held by Aquinas, Giles of Rome, and Godfrey of Fontaines, defends the thesis
that all acquired virtue including natural love of God is ultimately based on
self-love. Osborne argues that James’s theory of self-love must be understood
against the backdrop of his Neoplatonic understanding of love as unity and in
light of his interpretation of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics 9.8, which is very
close to that of Siger of Brabant. Osborne then turns to James’s theory of the vir-
tues, explicating James’s contention that the cardinal virtues can be a­ cquired
or infused and his understanding of the connection of the virtues and their
subject, ­highlighting the ways in which James differs from his contemporaries
in these matters. In the last section of the chapter, Osborne focuses on James’s
doctrine of legal ­justice and friendship as the forms of the acquired virtues.
Although James borrows significant elements of his teachings on the virtues
from Henry and Aquinas, his views “set him apart from his contemporaries and
predecessors.”
The final chapter is dedicated to James’s political philosophy. It is authored
by Robert Dyson, one of the leading specialists in medieval political philoso-
phy and the editor of James’s De regimine Christiano, the Augustinian Hermit’s
magnum opus in the area of political thought, to the discussion of which the
chapter is devoted. At the outset, Dyson signals his disagreement with Henri-
Xavier Arquillière’s influential assessment of the De regimine as the “first sys-
tematic exposition of the conception of the Church.” Although the first and
shorter of the two parts of the De regimine is indeed dedicated to ecclesiology,
Dyson argues that the real import of the work lies in the political doctrine that
is presented in the second part, the central thrust of which is to assert the sov-
ereignty of the pope in both the spiritual and temporal realms. Dyson dates
the De regimine to 1302, that is, at the height of the conflict between Boniface
viii—to whom the De regimine is dedicated—and King Philip iv of France,
and believes that the work’s significance is best understood in that context.
­Accordingly, the first section of the chapter is devoted to a review of the main
episodes of the controversy, from its origins in a tax dispute in 1296, to the prom-
ulgation of the bull Ausculta fili, in 1301. Then, after briefly examining the style
8 Côté and Pickavé

and literary character of the De regimine, Dyson turns his attention to its cen-
tral argument, which pertains to the question of the boundary between priest-
ly power and secular power. Of special importance, as Dyson underscores, is
the distinction James draws between two sorts of royal power, the royal power
over temporal things and the royal power over spiritual things. The first power
is that wielded by kings; the second is that possessed by priests insofar as they
judge sinners. James, in other words, does not believe that royal power is con-
fined to secular rulers. As Dyson argues, this has the effect of offsetting the ob-
jection (later articulated by Marsilius of Padua in the Defensor pacis) that since
the priestly power is limited to the spiritual realm it has no application to tem-
poral matters. By making the priestly power a royal power, James ensures that
this is not the case. And since James also believes that the spiritual jurisdiction
is superior to the temporal one, this means that the spiritual ruler’s judgements
take precedence over those of the temporal ­ruler in temporal matters, at least
to the extent that sin and salvation are at stake. Given that the pope stands su-
preme in the realm of spiritual power and that all human actions, in principle,
can involve sin, the pope’s jurisdiction ­extends de jure to all human actions.
Dyson denies that James’s views are particularly original here—they largely
echo those suggested in Innocent iii’s bull Novit of 1204, and those deployed by
Giles in his De ecclesiastica potestate—but he does laud the sophistication and
subtlety of James’s execution of his hierocratic program.
Two smaller contributions have been appended to the volume, each dealing
with a specific work. The first appendix is Stephen Dumont’s piece on the at-
tribution of the Quaestiones septem de Verbo. These Quaestiones had long been
considered an authentic work of James of Viterbo, largely on the strength of
stylistic considerations and because they had been copied alongside three of
James’s four Quodlibeta in the only manuscript in which they were thought
to be extant, namely Bologna, Biblioteca Comunale dell’Archiginnasio A 971.
However, as Dumont conclusively demonstrates, the Quaestiones de ­Verbo are
not the work of James at all, but rather that of his younger confrère in the Au-
gustinian order, Henry of Friemar. The first important step towards ­establishing
this fact lies in pointing out, as Dumont is the first to do, that the Quaestiones
de Verbo are extant in another manuscript, namely, Toulouse Bibliothèque
d’Étude et du Patrimoine 739, where they are attributed to one Master Henry of
the Augustinians. Dumont shows that the Henry in question is none other than
Henry of Friemar, who had been regent Master in Paris for the Augustinians in
the first decade of the 14th century. That Friemar is the author of the Quaestio-
nes de Verbo is shown by an examination of catalogues of his works compiled
by later members of the order that list the ­Quaestiones de Verbo, and by doctri-
nal parallels between the Quaestiones de Verbo and Friemar’s Quodlibet.
Introduction 9

The second appendix, by Gianpiero Tavolaro, presents a suggestive new

hypothesis regarding the dating, nature, and purpose of one of James’s most
­enigmatic works, his so-called Abbreviatio in i Sententiarum Aegidii Romani,
found in a single autograph manuscript, Naples, Biblioteca Nazionale, vii C
52. Scholars who have studied this work, the title of which was added in the
15th century, know that it is not, in fact, an abridgement of Giles’s commen-
tary: the solutions presented in it are either those of Giles or those of Thomas
Aquinas—and ­indeed James often prefers the latter to the positions advocated
by his confrère. Because James does not defend his own personal views in the
­Abbreviatio, it has been generally assumed by scholars that it was compiled
by James for the purposes of teaching, either at the time of his lectorate in
Viterbo, in 1283–85, or at the time of his later lectorate in Naples, in 1300–02.
But Tavolaro shows that there are problems with these datings. After a care-
ful study of the stylistic characteristics of the Abbreviatio, the nature of the
genre to which it b­ elongs, and the particular way James uses the passages he
cites, he concludes that the A­ bbreviatio consists of the notes used by James to
lecture on the Sentences in Paris between 1287 and 1288. According to Tavolaro,
we should therefore rather refer to the work as James’s Lectura super primum
librum Sententiarum.
As this overview makes clear, the contributions in this volume deal primar-
ily with James of Viterbo’s philosophical teachings, including his natural theol-
ogy. This is not to say that James did not also make valuable contributions to
theology proper. He did.2 However our objective in preparing this volume was
to provide the first comprehensive assessment of James’s philosophy, not his
theology. One of the outcomes of our undertaking is a reassessment of James’s
role in late 13th-century thought. James should be regarded as one of the major
philosophical voices in the period between Thomas Aquinas and John Duns
Scotus. He not only developed his philosophical views in constant exchange
with his contemporaries, as the reception of his positions demonstrates, but he
was also considered a force to be reckoned with by his contemporaries. That
their reactions were often critical can be explained by the truly innovative and

2 For an older survey of James’s theological teaching see David Gutiérrez, De B. Iacobi Viter-
biensis O.E.S.A. vita, operibus et doctrina theologica (Rome, 1939); idem, “De doctrina theo-
logica Beati  Jacobi de Viterbo,” Analecta Augustiniana 16 (1937–1938): 432–66 and 523–52.
His  ­Trinitarian theology has recently been discussed in Russell L. Friedman, I­ ntellectual
­Traditions at the Medieval University: The Use of Philosophical Psychology in Trinitar-
ian Theology among the Franciscans and Dominicans, 1250–1350 (Leiden, 2013), 352–55.
The  ­bibliography  at the end of the present volume includes many works dedicated to
­theological topics.
10 Côté and Pickavé

somewhat radical nature of his views, especially his theory of ideoneitates and
its application to natural philosophy and psychology. Moreover, his version of
innatism, to give just one example, makes James one of the most important
and most systematic defenders of innatism in the history of philosophy.
We hope that by making his philosophy more widely accessible the present
volume will encourage further research not just into James of Viterbo, but also
into wider aspects of late 13th-century thought. James, for instance, is a good
example of how the Greek commentators on Aristotle, especially ­Simplicius,
newly translated from the Greek into Latin by William of Moerbeke, became
increasingly important for later medieval Latin Aristotelianism. Moreover,
with Christopher Schabel’s edition of James’s three Ordinary Questions on
the will underway, we are coming closer to having all of James’s major works
available in modern critical editions;3 some of his texts have now also been
­translated into modern languages. This too will help to make James’s thought
better known to everyone interested in medieval thought.

3 That is, if James’s biblical commentaries and other works ascribed to him in older ­biographies
are really lost. The most extensive still unpublished work of James are his sermons. For a list
of James’s works see David Gutiérrez, De B. Iacobi Viterbiensis O.E.S.A. vita, operibus et doctrina
theologica.
 chapter 1

The Life and Works of James of Viterbo

Eric L. Saak

1.1 Introduction

In the aftermath of the religious-political conflicts that pitted Pope Boniface

viii against King Philip iv of France, Pope Clement v felt a strategic move
was called for and resettled the papacy in Avignon in 1309. The archbishop of
Naples, the Augustinian Hermit James of Viterbo, had died the previous year,
not having lived to see the onset of what Petrarch would call the “Babylonian
Captivity” of the church. The bells of the cathedral, which James had done so
much to further, had barely stopped pealing their requiem when they were
called to begin yet again. In 1309 Charles ii the king of Naples also died, to be
succeeded by his son Robert of Anjou, who continued his father’s patronage of
the Augustinians and would be a major player in the ongoing battles between
pope and emperor that marked, as much as the soon-to-hit Great Northern
Famine and Black Death, the onset of the “late Middle Ages,” which only in
retrospect have been seen as a period of decline, leading to the rupture of
Europe, the crumbling of Christendom and the onset of modernity.1 As a near-
contemporary of Dante (1265–1321), James was perhaps spared the worst of it
all, though, to be sure, he lived through his share of turmoil. In 1278 James left
his hometown of Viterbo and arrived in the Paris of Philip iii, who had suc-
ceeded his saintly father Louis ix eight year earlier. Paris’s shining lights, the
Dominican Thomas Aquinas and the Franciscan Bonaventure, had recently
expired when James settled in the Augustinian cloister, and Bishop Stephen
Tempier had just condemned 219 propositions. From 1278 to his death, James’s
primary context was to be these two cities, Paris and Naples, which were inti-
mately linked—politically, economically, culturally, and intellectually—­after
Philip’s brother Charles of Anjou, with papal sanction and invitation, had
established himself in 1268 as King Charles i of the regno, putting an end to
­Hohenstaufen suzerainty.2 Little did James know what he was getting himself

1 Eric L. Saak, High Way to Heaven: The Augustinian Platform Between Reform and Reformation,
1292–1524 (Leiden, 2002), 16–28.
2 Jean Dunbabin, Charles i of Anjou: Power, Kingship and State-Making in Thirteenth-Century
Europe (London, 1998).

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���8 | doi 10.1163/9789004361881_003

12 Saak

into when he left for Paris. He was to become a theologian, though he is best
known today as a philosopher, particularly as a political philosopher and the
author of the treatise De regimine Christiano, which has been called the first
treatise on the church as such, composed in the midst of bitter papal-princely
conflict.3 Yet as controversialist, as archbishop and church administrator, as
theologian, and as philosopher, James was first and foremost an Augustinian
Hermit, a son of Augustine.

1.2 Viterbo

James Capocci was born in Viterbo around 1255.4 Situated fifty miles north of
Rome on the Via Cassia, the city of Viterbo was technically part of the Papal
States, though in 1255 it had only recently returned to the Guelf party after a
Ghibelline rebellion resulting from ongoing conflict between the Gatti and di
Vico families, which enabled Emperor Frederick ii to win Viterbo for his cause
in 1240.5 Rose of Viterbo, soon to be the city’s patron saint, called on Viterbo to
return to papal obedience, preaching reform, for which she is venerated there
to this day.6 From this point on, Viterbo would be a distinctly papal city, becom-
ing the residence of Pope Alexander iv from 1257 until his death in 1261.7 The
commune of Viterbo enlarged the episcopal palace for Alexander’s residence,
and continued to do so for Urban iv (1261–64) and Clement iv (1264–68), com-
plete with frescoes depicting the close relationship between the papacy and the
commune with its heraldic images of the lion and palm tree.8 Popes Gregory x,

3 Henri-Xavier Arquillière, Le plus ancien traité de l’Église: Jacques de Viterbe, “De regimine
christiano” (1301–1302); Étude des sources et édition critique (Paris, 1926). The text has been
re-edited, with an English translation, by R.W. Dyson: James of Viterbo, De regimine Chris-
tiano: A Critical Edition and Translation (Leiden, 2009).
4 The family name “Capocci” was a later attribution that was first used in the sixteenth century
by Maurizio Terzo da Parma (d. 1581); see Ugo Mariani, Scrittori politici Agostiniani del sec.
xiv (Florence, 1927), 65; X.P.D. Duijnstee, ’s Pausen Primaat in de latere Middeleeuwen en de
Aegidiaansche School (Hilversum, 1935), vol. 1, 122.
5 Cesare Pinzi, Storia della città di Viterbo, vol. 2 (Rome, 1889), 37–105.
6 See Gabriella Santini, La festa di Santa Rosa a Viterbo: Uno sguardo antropologico (Rome,
2012); Darleen Pryds, Women of the Streets: Early Franciscan Women and the Mendicant Voca-
tion (St. Bonaventure, ny, 2010), 21–32.
7 In addition to Pinzi, Storia della città di Viterbo, as cited in note 5 above, see also Gianluca di
Prospero, Viterbo, custode segreta: Papa Alessandro iv, le sacre reliquie e i Templari (Orvieto,
2011).
8 Gary M. Radke, “Medieval Frescoes in the Papal Palaces of Viterbo and Orvieto,” Gesta 23
(1984): 27–38.
The Life and Works of James of Viterbo 13

John xxi, Nicolas iii, and Martin iv were all elected in Viterbo, extending the
papal presence to 1281, and Popes Clement iv and Hadrian v (1276) are buried
there.9 James grew up in a city that could legitimately be called the “city of
the popes.”10 Moreover, the popes in Viterbo courted scholars, with William of
­Moerbeke serving as chaplain to Pope Urban iv, who also expressed interest
in the works of Roger Bacon. David Lindberg went so far as to argue that “the
papal court in Viterbo, in part fortuitously and in part through the activity of
William of Moerbeke, served as a ‘center’ for the transmission of optical litera-
ture in the 1260s and 1270s.”11
Yet papal presence, imperial conflict, and scholarly erudition were not
the only influences on Viterbo in the 13th century. Italian society in general
had changed in the course of the 11th and 12th centuries. This shift was more
widespread than can be summarized in the changing images of Christ from
Christus triumphans to Christus patiens.12 Communal relations, marriage, eco-
nomics, and philanthropy were all affected by “the expansion of the charitable
impulse, which displayed extraordinary concern for the spiritual well-being
of the Christian community,”13 providing the social context for James’s later
treatments of the love of God and love of self.14 In Viterbo’s communal statutes
of 1251, the city began by affirming its dedication to defending the Catholic
faith,15 a faith that also manifested itself in the city’s spirituality, which was
challenged in 1251 by a popular crusading movement known as the pastores,

9 Arthur L. Frothingham, Jr., “Notes on Roman Artists of the Middle Ages, iii: Two Tombs of
the Popes at Viterbo by Vassallectus and Petrus Oderisi,” The American Journal of Archae-
ology and of the History of the Fine Arts 7 (1891): 38–53.
10 Sandro Bassetti, I Templari a Viterbo (Orvieto, 2013), 13.
11 David C. Lindberg, “Lines of Influence in Thirteenth Century Optics: Bacon, Witelo and
Pecham,” Speculum 46 (1971): 67, as cited by Radke, “Medieval Frescoes,” 35–36. For the
most recent study, see Klaus Bergdolt, Das Auge und die Theologie: Naturwissenschaften
und “Perspectiva” an der päpstlichen Kurie in Viterbo (ca. 1260–1285) (Paderborn, 2007).
12 Richard W. Southern, The Making of the Middle Ages (New Haven and London, 1953); Carl
Richstaetter, Christusfrömmigkeit in ihrer historischen Entfaltung: Ein quellenmässiger
Beitrag zur Geschichte des Gebets und des mystischen Innenlebens der Kirche (Cologne,
1949); Giles Constable, “The Ideal of the Imitation of Christ,” in Three Studies in Medieval
Religious and Social Thought (Cambridge, 1995), 143–248.
13 Marvin B. Becker, Medieval Italy: Constraints and Creativity (Bloomington, in, 1981), 43.
14 Thomas M. Osborne, Love of Self and Love of God in Thirteenth-Century Ethics (Notre
Dame, in, 2005).
15 Statutum Viterbii, s. 1, c. 1, in Cronache e statuti della città di Viterbo, (ed.) Ignazio Ciampi
(Florence, 1872), 451: “Statuimus quod potestas vel consules teneantur et debeant fidem
catholicam in omnibus defensare. Et si quis noluerit fidem catholicam profiteri et eam
vivere recusaverit, potestatis arbitrio puniatur.”
14 Saak

which became anticlerical and violent.16 Moreover, in 1269 Viterbo was rat-
tled by an earthquake, which resulted in apocalyptic speculations. Odo of
Châteauroux preached to calm them by explaining to his audience in Viterbo
that rather than a sign of the last times, the earthquake was more probably
simply a sign of God’s wrath,17 a wrath that perhaps in this light and context led
the young James to enter the Augustinian cloister. Viterbo was, in any case, a
city in turmoil, a religious city, a scholarly city, and a papal city, and it had been
so throughout James’s youth. Young children are impressionable and influ-
enced by their surroundings beyond their immediate family, and when James
left home to enter the religious life he was still an adolescent, most likely only
fourteen or fifteen years old, just slightly younger perhaps than S­ hakespeare’s
Romeo. Yet unlike his fictional Veronese contemporary, the teenager James
Capocci became an Augustinian Hermit.18
The Order of Hermits of St. Augustine (oesa) was still a new religious order
when James took his vows. At that time it had not yet achieved its own reli-
gious identity and was still a rather inchoate gathering of various eremitical
groups that the “Viterban” pope Alexander iv had brought together in 1256.
Even its name was still in flux, and varied considerably.19 What order James
thought he was joining thus must remain vague, since it was only after his ten-
ure that it became a fixture of late medieval intellectual, cultural, and religious
life, a status to which James himself was to contribute. It was a local religious
house that James entered, one having some connection to Augustine and the
eremitical life. The Augustinian cloister and its Church of the Holy Trinity in
Viterbo, located in the north of the city, had been dedicated by Pope Alexander
iv in 1258, though it had its origins in the mid-13th-century monastic commu-
nity of Mons Rosarius, situated a few miles outside the city walls.20 It was here

16 Jussi Hanska, “Catastrophe Sermons and Apocalyptic Expectations: Eudes de Château-

roux and the Earthquake of 1269 in Viterbo,” in The Last Judgement in Medieval Preaching,
(eds.) Thom Mertens et al. (Turnhout, 2013), 117–34, esp. 131.
17 Ibid.
18 The information for James’s early life is essentially non-existent. Gutiérrez asserted: “Nihil
certo scimus de primis vitae annis, neque de nomine parentum.” See David Gutiérrez, “De
vita et scriptis beati Jacobi de Viterbio,” Analecta Augustiniana 16 (1937–1938): 216. Recent
scholars have concurred: Eric L. Saak, “James of Viterbo,” in The Oxford Guide to the His-
torical Reception of Augustine, (eds.) Karla Pollmann et al. (Oxford, 2013), vol. 3, 1201–03;
Antoine Côté, “James of Viterbo,” in Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (2014), http://
plato.stanford.edu/entries/james-viterbo/ (last accessed 13 March 2014).
19 Eric L. Saak, “In Search of Origins: The Foundation(s) of the oesa,” Analecta Augustiniana
75 (2012): 5–24.
20 Thomas de Herrera, Alphabetum Augustinianum (Madrid, 1644), 514; Ugo Mariani, “De
conventu nostri ordinis Viterbiensis,” Analecta Augustiniana 11 (1925): 227–29; Gutierrez,
The Life and Works of James of Viterbo 15

that James took his vows, most likely sometime between 1270 and 1272, and it
was in Viterbo where he also would have received his early education.21
Upon entering the oesa, James would have been handed over to the master
of novices for basic instruction in the Augustinian way of life.22 In 1326 the
prior general of the Order, William of Cremona, extended this initial period of
close supervision and guidance until the young friars reached the age of twen-
ty, for, as William put it, the inadequate education of young friars had led to
“the confusion of our religion.”23 To help young friars learn the required chants
of the divine office, the general chapter of the Order decreed at its meeting
in Padua in 1315 that every province was to have two studia in cantu,24 where

“De vita,” 216–24; Eelcko Ypma, “Recherches sur la carrière scolaire de Jacques de Viterbe,”
Augustiniana 24 (1974): 247–48.
21 Gutierrez, “De vita,” 216, places James’s entry into the order “circa annum 1272,” whereas
Ypma, “Recherches sur la carrière scolaire,” 248, claimed this occurred “probablement
vers 1270.” Ypma’s dating is followed by Paolo Vian in the most recent overview of James’s
life and works; see Paolo Vian, “Giacomo da Viterbo: Vita e opere; Una rassegna biblio-
grafica,” in Giacomo da Viterbo al tempo di Bonifacio viii: Studi per il vii centenario della
morte in onore di S.E. Rev.ma Mons. Lorenzo Chiarinelli vescovo emerito di Viterbo, (eds.)
Pasquale Giustiniani and Gianpiero Tavolaro (Rome, 2011), 17.
22 Constitutiones Ratisbonenses, c. 17, l. 111, in Las primitivas Constituciones de los Agostinos,
(ed.) Ignacio Aramburu Cendoya (Valladolid, 1966), 59: “Prior praeponat Novitiis unum
ex Fratribus Magistrum, doctum et honestum virum, approbatum et nostri Ordinis prae-
cipuum zelatorem, qui eos ante omnia doceat pure, ac discrete et frequenter confiteri;
caste et sine proprio vivere. Instruat eos de Regula, de Constitutionibus, de Officio, de
cantu, de moribus, de signis, et aliis observantiis Ordinis.”
23 William of Cremona, Litterae Prioris Generalis Fr. Guillelmi de Cremona, ed. in: Analecta
Augustiniana 4 (1911): 31: “Item cum mala enutritio noviciorum et juvenum una extiterit
de causis confusionis nostre religionis, ideo mandamus per obedientiam districte omni-
bus fratribus et singulis prioribus quod curam solicitam gerant non tantum de receptione
noviciorum quantum de bona et honesta enutritione ipsorum, quia sanctius esset non
recipere quam receptorum curam negligare. Insuper volumus et mandamus quod fratres
juvenes completo anno noviciatus et facta professione tradantur a suo priore alicui de
antiquioribus et honestioribus fratribus sui conventus in curam, cui fratri teneantur ipsi
juvenes obedire sicut novitii magistro suo, ita quod sine ipsius licentia et voluntate nec
discursus aliquos audeant facere, nec conversationem aliquam specialem intra locum
vel extra habere. In qua et sub qua laudabili discipline regula et reverentie subiectione
priores teneantur manutenere juvenes sui conventus quousque annum vicesimum etatis
attingerint.”
24 General Chapter of Padua, 1315: Antiquiores quae extant definitiones capitulorum generali-
um ordinis: xiii. Capitulum Generale Paduanum [an. 1315], (ed.) Eustasio Esteban, Analec-
ta Augustiniana 3 (1909–10): 177: “Item diffinimus et ordinamus quod quelibet provincia
habeat duo studia in cantu, ad que mittantur fratres ydonei ad cantandum.” Cf. General
16 Saak

James may have received his first formal instruction upon taking his final vows
after his year of probation. In any case, the studia in cantu were designated as
studia particularia, among which we also find schools for grammar, logic, and
philosophy, though a student had to have acquired a sufficient knowledge of
the divine office before being allowed to continue with further study in these
three basic disciplines.25 A good foundation in the grammar and pronuncia-
tion of Latin was required before one could begin to study logic or philosophy.
Indeed, grammar was seen as foundational.26 After having acquired a sufficient

Chapter at Florence, 1326: Antiquiores quae extant definitiones capitulorum generalium

ordinis: xvii. Capitulum Generale Florentinum [an. 1326], (ed.) Eustasio Esteban, Analecta
Augustiniana 4 (1911–12): 8: “Item precipimus singulis vicariis et diffinitoribus capitulo-
rum provincialium quod solicite debeant ordinare quod in quolibet conventu sue provin-
cie sit unus frater qui in cantu sit sufficienter instructus, et si qui fratres clerici fuerint in
illo conventu infra xxv annos etatis, qui nesciant convenienter cantare, cogantur qualibet
die intrare semel ad locum deputatum sibi, ubi qui ordinatus fuerit ad eos instruendos,
doceat et instruat illos qui cantum ignorant. Qui fideliter et continue illos docuerit, salt-
em per vj menses in anno, provisionem annualem habeat duplicatam. Si quis autem frater
cantum ignorans non intraverit qualibet die semel ad locum ubi instruatur in cantu et
se qualibet die non exposuerit humiliter discipline ad cantum, illa die manducet solum
panem et aquam.”
25 Constitutiones Ratisbonenses, c. 36, l. 363, (ed.) Cendoya, 116: “Provincialis vero et Defini-
tores scholas logicales et grammaticales, in quibus rudes scholares de Provincia studeant,
in provincialibus capitulis ordinent et per eos ordinatus numerus Studentium ponantur,
in quo nullus nisi aptus studio numeretur.” Cf. Constitutiones Ratisbonenses, c. 36, ll. 329
and 341, (ed.) Cendoya, 110, 113. See also General Chapter at Florence, 1326, (ed.) Este-
ban, 6: “[D]iffinimus et mandamus quod in qualibet provincia nostri ordinis ordinentur
duo loca … in quorum uno sit studium naturalis philosophie et in alio studium loyce. …
Volumus nichilominus quod lectores in huiusmodi particularibus studiis legant per to-
tum annum assidue.” General Chapter at Siena, 1338: Antiquiores quae extant definitiones
capitulorum generalium ordinis: xxi. Capitulum Generale Senense an. 1338, (ed.) Eustasio
Esteban, Analecta Augustiniana 4 (1911–12): 178: “[V]olumus quod quelibet provincia nos-
tri ordinis saltim unum studium provinciale teneat in quo unus lector sufficiens per pro-
vinciale capitulum deputetur, qui bene continuet lectiones.”
26 See General Chapter at Siena, 1295: Antiquiores quae extant definitiones capitulorum gen-
eralium ordinis: vi. Capitulum Generale de Senis [an. 1295], (ed.) Eustasio Esteban, Ana-
lecta Augustiniana 2 (1907–08): 369: “Diffinimus quod nullus frater mittatur ad aliquod
studium in quacumque facultate, nisi sciat distincte legere totum officium, tam diurnum
quam nocturnum.” Cf. General Chapter at Venice, 1332: Antiquiores quae extant definitio-
nes capitulorum generalium ordinis: xix. Capitulum Generale Venetum an. 1332, (ed.) Eusta-
sio Esteban, Analecta Augustiniana 4 (1911–12): 110: “Item diffinimus quod nullus mittatur
ad studium loycale vel generale, nisi sciat bene grammaticam, et distincte loqui latine.”
The Life and Works of James of Viterbo 17

knowledge of Latin, the young Augustinian scholar could begin studying logic
and natural philosophy at one of the particular schools of his province. The
general chapter at Florence (1326) recommended that every province set aside
two locations for schools, one of which would teach logic and the other natu-
ral philosophy. The lector of philosophy was to go through Aristotle’s natural
philosophy within three years; the logic teacher also had three years to lecture
on the entire logic. However, if two separate locations could not be found, one
was sufficient, providing the studium had two lectors, one for philosophy and
one for logic.27 This three-year course in logic and natural philosophy provided
the requisite education before a brother could be sent to a studium generale. In
other words, before an Augustinian could begin studying at a university, he had
to spend three years in a provincial school studying Aristotle. Though these
stipulations date from at least twenty years after James entered the Order in
Viterbo, we can assume that they already existed in some inchoate form in
James’s youth, and that he had been educated in Aristotle’s logic and natural
philosophy, and had achieved a sufficient knowledge of grammar and the abil-
ity to sing the divine office. He would have been examined in these subjects
before being sent to Paris to continue his studies.28 By this time, 1278, James
was now twenty-three years old. He had been formed morally, religiously, and
spiritually, as well as intellectually, in his hometown and in its Augustinian
cloister. He was ready for Paris.

Jordan of Quedlinburg, Opus Dan (Sermones de sanctis), sermo 270 “De scolastibus” ­(Paris,
1521), f. 434v: “Primo ergo doceantur regulae Grammaticae … quae sunt scientiarum om-
nium fundamenta, assumantur materiae ad versificandum, et sic de aliis. Non debent
statim transire ad Dialecticam et antequam etiam fundentur in dialectica, quidam volare
volunt ad subtiles et difficiles quaestiones naturales. Icarus dum elatus iuvenili aetate fer-
tur in coelum volando fluctibus marinis immergitur. Et dum se in artibus elevant, cadunt.”
The Opus Dan was composed between 1365 and Jordan’s death in 1380.
27 General Chapter at Florence, 1326, (ed.) Esteban, 6: “Item volentes utilitati ordinis dili-
genter intendere quantum possumus quoad studia, diffinimus et mandamus quod in
qualibet provincia nostri ordinis ordinentur duo loca, si ad hoc sint ibi duo apta, in quo-
rum uno sit studium naturalis philosophie et in alio studium loyce, ita ut lector qui leget
philosophiam teneatur infra triennium naturalem philosophiam perficere; lector vero qui
leget loycam similiter teneatur per triennium perficere totam loycam. … Si vero aliqua sit
provincia in qua non sit duo loca que ad huiusmodi studia sint apta, saltem ordinetur ibi
unus locus ubi sint duo lectores, quorum unus per triennium legat naturalem philoso-
phiam, alter vero loycam sicut superius est dictum.”
28 Saak, High Way to Heaven, 254; 381–82.
18 Saak

1.3 Paris

While the Viterbo of James’s youth had been a papal city, the Paris to which he
came in 1278 was a distinctly royal one. The progeny of Louis viii and Blanche
of Castille were still making their mark. There was a growing campaign for
­Louis ix’s canonization; Charles of Anjou, Louis’s younger brother and uncle
to the reigning monarch Philip iii, strove to go beyond the divine rule of kings
with the royal healing touch to proclaim the Capetians themselves a holy lin-
eage. Charles had established himself as king of Naples and Sicily, and while
France had ongoing conflicts with England, Charles set his sights even higher
in his attempts to persuade Philip to proclaim himself emperor.29 Philip re-
sisted, but the French monarchy was in any case at its height of power and
influence, and Philip knew kingship was a lesson to be learned. Thus he had
commissioned the Augustinian Giles of Rome to compose a “handbook” on
kingship for his son, the future Philip iv. Giles was completing his De regimine
principum, which was to become the most widely circulated “mirror for princ-
es” in the Middle Ages, at the time that his younger confrère from Viterbo ar-
rived in Paris to begin the studies that would lead to his qualification for the
lectorate.
When James began his studies in Paris, the Augustinian studium generale
was not yet affiliated with the University of Paris. This would come about only
in 1285 when Giles of Rome became the first Augustinian to be appointed to a
chair at the University. Exactly what James would have studied is necessarily
vague, given that stipulations for the course of study leading to the lectorate
date from the period after James’s first tenure in Paris.30 It is, however, most
likely that James would have heard lectures on Aristotle’s logic, his Physics,
Metaphysics, Politics, and Ethics, on Lombard’s Sentences, and on a good deal
of the Bible as well.31 After five years of diligent work, James then would have
been ready to sit for the examination in logic, philosophy, and theology that
was a prerequisite for becoming a lector, a non-university degree that allowed
the scholar to teach in any studium generale within the Order not associated
with a university.32 James made the grade.
Yet as a new lector, James was not ready to continue immediately with stud-
ies leading toward the bachelor’s and then the master’s of theology; he first

29 Jean Dunbabin, The French in the Kingdom of Sicily, 1266–1305 (Cambridge, 2011), 189–98.
30 See Saak, High Way to Heaven, 253–56.
31 Ibid.
32 For the course of study James most likely would have followed, in addition to my High
Way to Heaven cited above, see also Ypma, “Recherches sur la carrière scolaire,” 247–54.
The Life and Works of James of Viterbo 19

had to spend time teaching in his home province.33 Thus, at the age of twenty-
eight, James returned to Viterbo in 1283 to teach as a novus lector in his order’s
studium, and to assume administrative duties for his order. From 1283 to 1285,
together with Giles of Rome, James served his province as an official represen-
tative (definitor) at the provincial and general chapters.34 It is also possible that
during his teaching in Viterbo, James composed his Abbreviatio in i Senten-
tiarum Aegidii Romani in preparation for his lectures there. Gianpiero Tavola-
ro, however, has recently presented arguments for the conclusion that the
­Abbreviatio is actually James’s lectures on the Sentences and should be dated to
1287–1288.35 In any case, James would most likely have lectured on the Sen-
tences to his students in Viterbo before he returned to Paris, and his Abbreviatio
may very well give some indication of his teaching in Viterbo, even if it is in fact
to be identified as his Parisian lectures on the Sentences.
When James returned to Paris in 1285 to continue his studies for the Bach-
elor of Theology and then Master of Theology, he could do so under the official
guidance of Giles of Rome, who had just been appointed to the oesa’s first
chair in theology at Paris, thus providing the connection between the Augus-
tinian studium at Paris and the University of Paris. James now heard lectures
on the Bible and on the Sentences, and he himself lectured on the Sentences be-
fore finally being promoted to the degree of Master of Theology in 1292, assum-
ing the leadership of the Augustinian studium in Paris as magister regens upon
Giles of Rome’s departure to assume the responsibilities of prior general of the
Order.36 Aside from his Abbreviatio, there is no extant Sentences ­commentary

33 Saak, High Way to Heaven, 375–77; Ypma, “Recherches sur la carrière scolaire,” 254; Vian,
“Giacomo da Viterbo,” 19.
34 Gutierrez, “De vita,” 217.
35 Eelcko Ypma, “Recherches sur la productivité littéraire de Jacques de Viterbe jusqu’à 1300,”
Augustiniana 25 (1975): 244–49; Pasquale Giustiniani, “Il problema delle idee in Dio sec-
ondo Giacomo da Viterbo oesa, con edizione della distinzione 36 dell’Abbreviato in i
Sententiarum Aegidii Romani,” Analecta Augustiniana 42 (1979): 288–342; id., “Giacomo
de Viterbo nel clima di transizione culturale dal xiii al xiv secolo,” in Giacomo da ­Viterbo
al tempo di Bonifacio viii, 29–30; Gianpiero Tavolaro, “Scientia, potentia e voluntas Dei
nella Lectura super primum Sententiarum di Giacomo da Viterbo” (Ph.D. Dissertation,
Università di Salerno and École Pratique des Hautes Études, Paris, 2016), 62–104; see also
Tavolaro’s contribution in this volume. While it was common in the later Middle Ages
to read the Sentences secundum alium, it would be very notable indeed were James’s Ab-
breviatio to be identified with his lectures on the Sentences as an ordinatio, though it may
very well represent a reportatio.
36 For the course of studies leading to the Master of Theology, see Eelcko Ypma, La formation
des professeurs chez les Ermites de Saint-Augustin de 1256 à 1354 (Paris, 1956); and Venicio
Marcolino, “Der Augustinertheologe an der Universität Paris,” in Gregor von Rimini: Werk
20 Saak

ascribed to James, but we can get a good indication of the theology which James
was taught from Giles’s lectures on the Sentences. Giles’s lectures on all four
books of the Sentences date to around or shortly after 1270, and are available
to us in his Reportatio.37 Giles revised his lectures on book 1 of the ­Sentences
into his Ordinatio, dated to c.1271–73, with the Ordinatio of book 2 only com-
ing later, dated c.1309.38 Giles had forged a new road for the Augustinians in
defining theology as “affective knowledge” (scientia affectiva), as distinct from
the general Dominican view of theology as “speculative knowledge” (scientia
speculativa) and the Franciscan view of it as “practical knowledge” (scientia
practica).39 This was a position James defended in his third Quodlibet, arguing,
very similarly to Giles, that theology cannot be said to be speculative or practi-
cal knowledge as such, though theology certainly includes both, but rather,
because the end of theology is the love of God, it is most properly defined as
affective knowledge.40 This is not to say that James simply followed Giles in
all respects,41 but it does indicate that he was doing theology in keeping with

und Wirkung bis zur Reformation, (ed.) Heiko A. Oberman (Berlin, 1981), 127–94. The dat-
ing of James inception as magister is somewhat problematic. Ypma placed it in 1293, but
Wippel has demonstrated that Godfrey of Fontaines cited James’s first Quodlibet in his
own Quodlibet viii, which has been dated to 1291; see John F. Wippel, “The Dating of
James of Viterbo’s Quodlibet i and Godfrey of Fontaines’s Quodlibet viii,” Augustiniana
24 (1974): 348–86. Wippel offers three possible resolutions to this problem, advocating as
most likely that Godfrey’s Quodlibet viii should be redated to the fall of the academic year
1292–1293, placing James’s inception earlier in that year; see ibid., 383, 386 and cf. Wip-
pel, The Metaphysical Thought of Godfrey of Fontaines: A Study in Late Thirteenth-Century
Philosophy (Washington, dc, 1981), xi–xxix. Vian, “Giacomo da Viterbo,” 19, gives 1293 as
the date; cf. Giustiniani, “Giacomo de Viterbo nel clima di transizione culturale dal xiii
al xiv secolo,” 36–48.
37 Giles of Rome, Reportatio lecturae super libros i–iv Sententiarum, Reportatio monacen-
sis, Excerpta Godefridi de Fontibus, (ed.) Concetta Luna, Aegidii Romani Opera Omnia 3.2
(Florence, 2003).
38 The Ordinatio of book 3 of Giles’s commentary is spurious; see Concetta Luna, “La Reporta-
tio della lettura di Egidio Romano sul libro iii delle Sentenze e il problema dell’autenticità
dell’Ordinatio,” Documenti e studi sulla tradizione filosofica medievale 1 (1990), 113–225; 2
(1991): 75–146.
39 Saak, High Way to Heaven, 356–68.
40 Quodl. iii, q. 1, 27, ll. 595–96: “Unde patet quod haec scientia, scilicet theologia, conve-
nienter et proprie dicitur affectiva.” James’s four Quodlibeta have been edited by Eelcko
Ypma (Würzburg, 1968–1975).
41 See, for example, Osborne, Love of Self and Love of God, 153–70. I think however that it
is going too far to claim, as Osborne does, that James “shows no reverence for Giles’s
thought” (ibid., 154).
The Life and Works of James of Viterbo 21

the positions of Giles, which became normative for the oesa at the general
chapter of Florence in 1287.42 Thus, James, like Giles, evidences an emphasis
on love, creation, original sin, and grace, with a priority given to the will with
respect to the intellect, in the context of the Augustinian pastoral endeavor.43
While the high and late medieval scholastics have received much attention
with respect to their intellectual positions and arguments, much less focus has
been given to the practical role of the Parisian intellectuals within their society.
Albert the Great, Bonaventure, Thomas Aquinas, as well as Giles of Rome and
James, were great intellects, but they viewed themselves first and foremost as
theologians within church and society, both of which were in a state of turmoil
in the 13th and 14th centuries. Paris was not an ivory tower of pure intellectual
speculation. As Ian Wei has noted,

… there were significant changes in the relationship between the mas-

ters of theology at Paris and the king of France, with the king consult-
ing the theologians and seeking to use their authority to legitimize his
policy. … Increasingly the university and its theologians maintained their
high standing through association with the French monarchy and its po-
litical institutions. … Their status also depended on their fulfilment of
a pastoral function, training men to be preachers, setting out a general
framework within which souls could be saved, providing specific advice
on fundamental aspects of ordinary life, and fully accepting their respon-
sibility for the wider reception of their teaching.44

42 General Chapter of Florence, 1287: Antiquiores quae extant definitiones capitulorum

g­ eneralium ordinis: iii. Capitulum Generale de Florentia [an. 1287], (ed.) Eustasio Esteban,
Analecta Augustiniana 2 (1907–08): 275: “Quia venerabilis magister nostri fratris Egidii
doctrina mundum universum illustrat, diffinimus et mandamus inviolabiliter observari,
ut opiniones, positiones et sententias scriptas et scribendas predicti magistri nostri,
omnes ordinis nostri lectores et studentes recipiant eisdem prebentes assensum et eius
doctrine omni qua poterunt sollicitudine, ut et ipsi illuminati alios illuminare possint,
sint seduli defensores.”
43 We still do not have a thorough, in-depth study of Giles’s theology, nor of James’s, and
consequently no thorough comparison of the two, each of which would make a major
contribution to our understanding of late 13th-century theology in general, and Augustin-
ian theology in particular. For Giles, see Francesco Del Punta, Silvia Donati and Concetta
Luna, “Egidio Romano,” in Dizionario biografico degli Italiani, vol. 42 (Rome, 1993), 319;
Eric L. Saak, “Giles of Rome,” in The Oxford Guide to the Historical Reception of Augustine,
vol. 2, 1047–49.
44 Ian Wei, Intellectual Culture in Medieval Paris: Theologians and the University c. 1100–1330
(Cambridge, 2012), 412–13.
22 Saak

In the 14th century and into the 15th, “all of this was now called into question,”45
which is not to say that while James was in Paris there was the harmony of
a posited, abstracted, and ahistorical status quo. James became the magister
regens of the Augustinian studium in Paris in the midst of controversy. Pope
Nicholas iv died in the same year, 1292, and there followed a papal vacancy un-
til the Franciscan hermit and holy man Peter Marrone was elected as Celestine
v in 1294 only to resign, which paved the way for the election of Boniface viii.
England and France had been continuously engaged in military conflicts, even
before the official outbreak of the Hundred Years War, leading Philip iv, the
king of France, to seek new revenues by taxing the clergy, which provided the
catalytic event that led to the papal-princely conflict that would continue for
the rest of the Middle Ages. There was ongoing tension between the seculars
and the regulars at Paris, a conflict that had brought Thomas Aquinas back
to Paris for his second term, and that had in 1290 seen Giles working together
with Cardinal Benedict Gaetani, the future Pope Boniface viii, to make clear
in no uncertain terms Pope Nicholas’s position that the papacy was completely
behind the mendicant theologians at Paris, to the point that “before the R ­ oman
curia abolished the privileges of the mendicants, it would bring the University
of Paris to its knees.”46
Such support was certainly needed, and not just for the mendicants, in
light of the increasing anti-intellectual and anti-clerical court culture. This is
represented most clearly by Jean de Meun’s Romance of the Rose, completed
by 1278.47 As Wei has argued, Jean’s work “was in many respects a summa or
­encyclopedia of university learning,” though one that “represented a profound
challenge to conceptions of knowledge and authority that were articulated by
university scholars, especially the masters of theology.”48 It was perhaps with
such controversy in mind that James argued in question 23 of his fourth Quod-
libet that the causes of foolishness are varied, so that even if a wise father des-
perately wants to have wise sons it is not always the case that such is the result,
since foolishness and wisdom are not simply products of nature; in other

45 Ibid., 413.
46 Heinrich Finke, Aus den Tagen Bonifaz viii: Funde und Forschungen (Münster, 1902),
Quellen, vi–vii: “Unde dominus Benedictus vocans magistrum Johannem de Murro et
magistrum Egidium precepit eis, quod predictum magistrum Hinricum ab officio lectio-
nis suspenderent. Quod factum fuit … dixit dominus Benedictus: Vos magistri Parisienses,
stultam fecistis et facitis doctrinam scientie vestre, turbantes orbem terrarum, quod nullo
modo faceretis, si sciretis statum universalis ecclesie. Sedetis in cathedris et putatis, quod
vestris rationibus regatur Christus. … Vere dico vobis: antequam curia Romana a dictis
fratribus hoc privilegium ammoveret, potius studium Parisiense confunderet.”
47 See Wei, Intellectual Culture in Medieval Paris, 357–74.
48 Ibid., 363.
The Life and Works of James of Viterbo 23

words, wise men can produce fools,49 which in the Parisian context of the later
13th century cannot have been a purely theoretical discussion. Yet for Jean, the
mendicants, and the celibate clergy as such, were simply so against nature, for

… those who will not use their styluses, through which mortals may live
forever, to write on those fair and precious tablets that were not prepared
by nature in order to be left idle, but were lent instead so that all might
write on them and so that all of us, men and women, might live, … may
all these be excommunicated and condemned to hell.50

Such an attack necessitated a response, and though James did not directly ad-
dress such anticlericalism, he did forcefully argue in question 24 of his second
Quodlibet that the religion of the clergy is more perfect than the religion of the
laity because it is more closely directed to the human end, which is the con-
templation of God and the eventual beatific vision, though he admitted that
certain laity could be more perfect in their religion than certain of the clergy in
theirs; there could be dissolute clergy.51 James and his fellow scholastics were
no more removed from the world around them than are university professors
today, even though we often treat them as abstracted cerebrums preserved sus-
pended in the ether of their texts, and even as we today still have pangs of con-
science regarding our relevance in our rapidly changing and conflicted world.
Our high- and late-medieval forebears were in the same position. Scholarship,
research, and speculation are rarely pure, even if seemingly arcane, and even if

49 Quodl. iv, q. 23, 82, ll. 79–83: “Ex his igitur et similibus forte posset probabiliter videri sa-
pientes illos, qui studio vehementer intendunt, stultos filios generare. Verius tamen esse
videtur quod in talibus non posset accipi regula uniformis, propter multam diversitatem
provenientem in generatione quandoque ex parte agentis, quandoque ex parte materiae,
quandoque ex parte utriusque.”
50 Jean de Meun, Romance of the Rose, trans. Frances Horgan (Oxford, 1994), “The Sermon of
Genius,” 303.
51 Quodl. iii, q. 24, 237, ll. 142–55: “Et ideo quaelibet religio clericorum institui et ordinari
videtur ad contemplationem, aut ad illam actionem quae ex contemplationis perfectione
procedit, ut docere et praedicare; et hoc vel actu vel aptitudine. Propter quod simpliciter
et absolute religio clericorum perfectior est quam religio laicorum … si consideretur per-
fectio secundum actum quae magis respicit personam, sic aliquis existens in religione
laicorum potest adaequari in perfectione alicui existenti in religione clericorum, immo
etiam potest ipsum excedere in perfectione, sicut et aliquis saecularis potest hoc modo
esse perfectior aliquo religioso.” On the term religio, see Saak, High Way to Heaven, 710–35,
and the introduction to my Catechesis in the Later Middle Ages i: The Exposition of the
Lord’s Prayer of Jordan of Quedlinburg, oesa (d. 1380)—Introduction, Text, and Translation
(Leiden, 2015).
24 Saak

to a large extent we spend most of our time talking to and writing for our small
group of colleagues.
Yet in this context of conflict and controversy one of the most impressive
aspects of James’s literary production at Paris is his wide-ranging interests.52
Though his De anima coeli, his Expositio primae philosophiae vel commentarius
in libros Metaphysicae, and his scriptural commentaries on Matthew, Luke,
and the Pauline epistles are no longer extant, and while his sermons remain
unresearched,53 his authenticated extant works reveal not only the breadth of
his intellect, but also that of late 13th-century Paris. Ypma has done the most
thorough and extensive investigation to date of James’s literary production.
Ypma dates the De anima coeli and the Expositio primae philosophiae to the
period of James’s time as bacchelarius formatus but before his promotion to
magister (1287–1292/3), whereas the Quodlibeta, the Quaestiones de divinis pre-
dicamentis, and the Quaestiones de habitu were products of James time as the
magister regens in the Augustinian studium at Paris (1292–1300).54 In his quod-
libetal disputations, James treated such themes as creation,55 beatitude,56 the
angels,57 the human soul,58 love,59 usury,60 penance,61 the Eucharist,62 the
Trinity,63 the will,64 the intellect,65 sin,66 and the virtues,67 as well as more

52 James was certainly not unique in this respect. His own interests reflect as well those of
Paris in the late 13th century. The Augustinian Prosper of Reggio Emilia has left an impor-
tant insight into the climate of Paris in his Sentences commentary (ms. Bibliotheca Apos-
tolica Vaticana, Vat. Lat. 1086), which includes forty-six questions on the prologue alone
as a compendium of questions discussed at Paris; see Saak, High Way to Heaven, 383–84.
53 See Mariani, Scrittori, 98.
54 Ypma, “Recherches sur la productivité littéraire,” 282; cf. Vian, “Giacomo da Viterbo,” 18–26.
The Quaestiones de Verbo, which Ypma dated to 1293, have been shown by Stephen ­Dumont
in his appendix to this volume to be the work of the Augustinian Henry of Friemar.
55 Quodl. i, q. 4; Quodl. iii, qq. 11–12; Quodl. iv, qq. 1, 5–12.
56 Quodl. i, q. 8.
57 Quodl. i, q. 10; Quodl. ii, q. 11; Quodl. iii, q. 18.
58 Quodl. i, qq. 11–14, Quodl. ii, q. 14.
59 Quodl. ii, qq. 9, 18–20.
60 Quodl. i, qq. 17, 20.
61 Quodl. ii, q. 23.
62 Quodl. iii, qq. 17, 26.
63 Quodl. iii, qq. 6–10; Quodl. iv, qq. 2–3.
64 Quodl. iii, qq. 4–5.
65 Quodl. i, qq. 12–14; Quodl. ii, qq. 6, 15–16; Quodl. iv, qq. 24–26.
66 Quodl. iii, q. 19; Quodl. iv, qq. 18–19, 27.
67 Quodl. ii, q. 17; Quodl. iii, qq. 20–21; Quodl. iv, q. 29. The above list is by no means compre-
hensive or analytical, but is simply intended to show the range of topics with which James
dealt.
The Life and Works of James of Viterbo 25

strictly philosophical issues, such as how accidents are present in forms to

greater or lesser degrees and whether they are so with respect to existence
(esse) or essence (essentia).68 Yet the practical bent of his quodlibetal dispu-
tations is clear when, for example, James addresses the question of which is
the greater sin, murder or perjury, and answers, on the basis of Augustine and
Gratian, that while it might seem that murder is the greater sin, strictly speak-
ing (simpliciter et absolute loquendo) perjury is, since it is a sin directly against
God;69 or when he treats usury, which was a much discussed question at the
time when the merchant economy necessitated spiritual, moral, and theologi-
cal answers.70 James was no ivory-tower academic.
Perhaps the most topical theme James dealt with in his Parisian disputa-
tions was that concerning princely and papal power. In question 17 of his first
Quodlibet, James treats the question of whether the pope can absolve someone
of usury without restitution having been made.71 He used this occasion to dis-
cuss papal jurisdiction in temporalibus, and argued that although some claim
that the pope has jurisdiction only over that which concerns the spirit (potes-
tas spiritualis), others argue that the pope possesses both spiritual and tempo-
ral power, which is the opinion that James considers to seem more rational.72
The reason for this, he asserts, is that “spiritual power is superior to temporal
power not only with respect to dignity, but also with respect to causality.”73
Thus, spiritual power establishes and judges temporal power, an argument
James made with reference to Dionysius, Gratian, and Hugh of St. Victor.74 The
argument is further supported with respect to the respective ends of the tem-
poral and spiritual powers. While both powers have as their end the happiness

68 Quodl. ii, q. 3. On this topic see Mark Gossiaux’s contribution in the present volume.
69 Quodl. iv, q. 27, 98–99.
70 See Wei, Intellectual Culture in Medieval Paris, 293–355. James, like many of his contem-
poraries, tried to steer a middle course, though he comes down more harshly than some
of his contemporaries on usurers and those benefiting from usury. See Quodl. i, q. 20, 222,
ll. 37–42: “Ut enim supra dictum est, non solum facientes, sed etiam consentientes, rei
sunt et obligantur ad poenam. Quia vero in talibus non est facile iudicare, quantum fue-
rit aliquis reus criminis consentiendo, ideo semper est via tutior eligenda in restitutione
procuranda et facienda. Si tamen principalis restitueret plene, liberantur alii; hoc excepto
quod, si partem lucri perceperunt, debent restituere principali.” On the problems that
arose from the new money economy, see still Lester K. Little, Religious Poverty and the
Profit Economy in Medieval Europe (London, 1978).
71 Quodl. i, q. 17, 207–15.
72 Ibid., 208, l. 48: “Et haec secunda opinio rationabilior esse videtur.”
73 Ibid., 208, ll. 48–50: “Cuius ratio est, quia spiritualis potestas temporali superior est, non
solum dignitate, sed etiam causalitate.”
74 Ibid., 208–09, ll. 50–84.
26 Saak

(felicitas) of the multitude, which consists in living a life of virtue, the temporal
power’s end concerns only natural virtue, whereas the spiritual power’s end is
eternal blessedness. Therefore, spiritual power is superior to temporal power.75
Consequently, the ruler of the spiritual power, namely, the pope, is superior to
the temporal ruler with respect to dignity and causality, and therefore is to rule
over the temporal, or secular, power.76 The pope in fact possesses both pow-
ers, the temporal and the spiritual, though the former he delegates to secular
princes.77 Thus, argues James, the pope can indeed absolve a usurer without
restitution having been made if he, the pope, has “reasonable cause.”78 In short,
James based his answer on positions regarding papal supremacy that he would
later develop at length in his De regimine Christiano, already in 1294,79 before

75 Ibid., 210, ll. 89–99: “Finis autem, quam intendere debet tam saecularis quam spiritualis
potestas, est bonum multitudinis, quod principaliter consistit in hoc, quod est vivere se-
cundum virtutem. In operatione namque virtutis consistit felicitas, quae est perfectum
et finale bonum. Differenter tamen intendit bonum multitudinis potestas saecularis et
spiritualis. Saecularis enim potestas intendit bonum multitudinis, ad quod pervenire po-
test virtute naturae, et illa quae ad hoc bonum adminiculantur. Potestas autem spiritualis
intendit bonum multitudinis supernaturale, scilicet aeternam beatitudinem, et in ipsam
dirigit. Finis autem supernaturalis potior est, et principalior, quocumque alio fine.”
76 Ibid., 210, ll. 100–04: “Et quia hoc supernaturale bonum consequimur virtute et operatione
Christi, qui nos in hanc gloriam introduxit, ideo eius vicarius est simpliciter superior, non
solum dignitate, sed causalitate. Sicut enim ars superior praecipit inferiori qualiter debet
operari, sic et spiritualis potestas imperat saeculari.”
77 Ibid., 211, ll. 145–46: “Habet itaque papa utramque potestatem, sed temporalem et eius
executionem tradit principibus saecularibus.”
78 Ibid., 215, ll. 246–49: “[E]t tunc absolute dicendum est, quod papa potest huiusmodi usu-
ras relaxare vel donare usurario, et sic absolvere ipsum, absque hoc quod eas restituat illis
a quibus accepit. Non tamen debet huiusmodi relaxationem facere, nisi ex rationabili
causa.”
79 Ypma dates the first disputation to 1293–94, which would place it shortly before or just
after the death of Pope Nicholas iv, that is, before the election of Celestine v and then
Boniface viii—in other words, before the outbreak of the conflict between Boniface
and King Philip iv of France. For a discussion of this question, and its relationship to
James’s ­position in De regimine, see Matthew S. Kempshall, The Common Good in Late
Medieval Political Thought (Oxford, 1999), 272–82; Helmut G. Walther, “Aegidius Roma-
nus und Jakob von Viterbo—Oder: Was vermag Aristoteles, was Augustinus nicht kann?”
in Politische Reflexion in der Welt des späten Mittelalters/Political Thought in the Age of
Scholasticism: Essays in Honour of Jürgen Miethke, (ed.) Martin Kaufhold (Leiden, 2004),
151–69; and Antoine Côté, “Le Quodlibet i, question 17 de Jacques de Viterbe: Introduction,
traduction et notes,” Augustiniana 62 (2012): 45–76. Côté, ibid., 60–61, argues that James
tempered his position in De regimine.
The Life and Works of James of Viterbo 27

the most vicious outbreak of the conflict between Philip iv and Boniface viii.
The question that must be asked therefore is: how much later?
De regimine Christiano has traditionally been dated to c.1302, occasioned
by the papal-princely controversy. While there are good reasons for doing
so, there are no sufficient reasons for not viewing James’s work as a product
of his time in Paris, that is, before 1300, when he left for Naples. Dyson’s as-
sertion that James’s De regimine Christiano is his “only venture into political
analysis”80 cannot be substantiated, which calls into question as well Dyson’s
claim that the work “was produced at the height of the crisis that was to bring
the pontificate of Boniface viii to its dramatic end.”81 A date of 1301 or 1302
would therefore seem most natural and fitting, especially given the possible
influence of Giles of Rome’s De ecclesiastica potestate on James’s De regimine.82
The evidence for this, however, is minimal at best, and the parallels between
the two works can be read either way, namely, that James was influenced by
Giles, or that Giles was influenced by James. There is nothing in James’s De
regimine that conclusively ties it to 1301/1302, unless we simply assume that this
was the context. Dyson has edited and translated both works, and dates Giles’s
De ecclesiastica potestate possibly between February and August 1302,83 where-
as he dates James’s De regimine to “the early spring and summer of 1302.”84 If
this were the case, it would be highly unlikely that either treatise influenced the
other, and impossible that James “had a copy or draft of” Giles’s De ecclesias-
tica potestate “before him as he worked.”85 James we know was involved in the
debates over papal power and its relationship to temporal lordship already in
the mid-1290s. In the preface of his work, which he dedicated to Boniface viii,
James refers to himself as “Brother James of Viterbo, of the Order of Hermits of
Saint Augustine, professor in the faculty of theology, though unworthy.”86 The
question here is what is the context of James’s self-reference as theologie fac-
ultatis professor? He is clearly associating himself with a university. But which

80 Dyson, James of Viterbo, xvi.

81 Ibid.
82 Ibid., xxi–xxii.
83 R.W. Dyson, Giles of Rome’s On Ecclesiastical Power: A Medieval Theory of World Govern-
ment (New York, 2004), xx. Dyson is here citing Richard Scholz, who suggested that De
ecclesiastica potestate “might have been written between February and August 1302, or
possibly somewhat earlier,” as the note for his own statement that the treatise seems “to
have been written in haste and with little or no revision.”
84 Dyson, James of Viterbo, xviii.
85 Dyson, James of Viterbo, xxi; cf. Aurelio Rizzacasa, “L’agostinismo di Giacomo da Viterbo e
di Egidio Romano,” in Giacomo da Viterbo al tempo di Bonifacio viii, 81–106.
86 De regimine Christiano, prologus, (ed.) Dyson, 2–3.
28 Saak

university? In 1300 James was sent to Naples, where he assumed the position of
regent master (magister regens) of his order’s studium generale. The University
of Naples did not have an established faculty of theology, even though, as Jean
Dunbabin has noted, “Charles of Anjou treated the Dominican studium in the
city as though it was part of the university.”87
When James was in Naples, he was simply magister regens of the Augustin-
ian studium, which, even if the studium is treated as part of the university, was
not the same position at all as being a “professor in the faculty of theology.”88
Technically speaking, there was no such faculty in Naples. Moreover, without
giving a designation of place, the simple assertion of being a professor in the
faculty of theology lends itself to the understanding that he was a professor in
the faculty of theology, which could only have been at Paris. While such a ref-
erence is inconclusive, it does persuasively suggest that Paris was the context
for James’s work, which he dedicated and sent to Boniface, as a member of the
­faculty of theology at Paris, a faculty that Boniface viii had called upon for ex-
pert opinions, and whose alumnus Giles of Rome, who after 1294 was archbish-
op of Bourges, had provided Boniface with the theological and legal rationale

87 Dunbabin, The French in the Kingdom of Sicily, 217. Dunbabin goes on to claim that “by
1302, Naples had an established theology faculty” (ibid., 218), without, however, citing any
evidence or literature. Rashdall claimed that “[a]ll faculties were nominally included in
the new university: but it appears that theology was (as usual in Italy) taught only by friars,
and that no promotions in theology took place by virtue of the Imperial Bull” (Hastings
Rashdall, The Universities of Europe in the Middle Ages, [eds.] F.M. Powicke and A.B. Emden
[Oxford, 1936], vol. 2, 24). Weisheipl noted that when Thomas Aquinas was at Naples
(1272–73), his “lectures were paid for by the king. It leads us to believe that Thomas was
the official teacher of theology in the Neapolitan ‘university’ founded by Frederick ii. …
Later, during the years 1302–06, when three masters taught theology, a Dominican, a
­Franciscan, and an Augustinian, King Charles ii disbursed annually 150 ounces of gold
to the three religious houses … for instruction given in their respective houses as uni-
versity lectures” (James Weisheipl, Friar Thomas d’Aquino: His Life, Thought and Works
[Washington, dc, 1974], 299). Darleen Pryds notes that “the university of Naples was not a
corporation of scholars. Rather, it was a strictly hierarchical institution controlled by the
sovereign” (Darleen Pryds, “Studia as Royal Offices: Mediterranean Universities of Medi-
eval Europe,” in Universities and Schooling in Medieval Society, [eds.] William J. Courtenay
and Jürgen Miethke [Leiden, 2000], 88). There was no institutionalized faculty of theology
at Naples, and thus James’s reference to himself as theologie facultatis professor could not
refer to Naples; it must therefore be a reference to Paris.
88 In his letter appointing James to the archbishopric of Benevento, Boniface viii referred
to James as ordinis fratrum Heremitarum professorem in sacerdotio constitutum, not as a
professor in the faculty of theology: Arch. Vat. Reg. an. viii, f. 210v, as cited by Mariani,
Scrittori, 75, n. 1.
The Life and Works of James of Viterbo 29

for the legitimacy of his papacy after Celestine’s abdication in his De renuncia-
tione papae of 1297. A date of 1298 or 1299 for James’s De regimine Christiano
therefore is most consistent with the context and in many ways makes the en-
tire history of the conflict’s scholarly and literary production a bit more under-
standable. James provided indeed what Arquillière called the “first treatise on
the Church,”89 which then provided Giles with a basis for presenting a more
refined and specific argument, hastily written as it may have been, which Boni-
face then used for his own Unam sanctam, and the catalyst for the princely re-
sponse in John of Paris’s De potestate regia et papali, a direct response to James,
and so perhaps to Giles as well.90 John of Paris’s work went hand in hand with
James’s; papal power and its relation to princely power were being debated and
discussed in Paris in the mid- and later 1290s, yielding James’s De regimine, and
then Giles’s De ecclesiastica potestate once the conflict became critical, before
John then wrote his own response. While there is no definitive evidence, there
is no reason to place James’s De regimine in the context of 1302, and there is very
suggestive evidence to date it to the later 1290s, while James was still in Paris,
before he left the faculty, as had Thomas Aquinas, and took up the position, as
had Thomas, of leading his order’s studium in Naples, providing the University
of Naples, which did not have a faculty of theology, with theologians at its dis-
posal. James’s De regimine Christiano was a product of his time in Paris as much
as were his Quodlibeta and Quaestiones.91 But then he left for Naples.

1.4 Naples

Travelling from Paris to Naples in the later 13th and early 14th centuries took,
with luck, about a month, though in some cases with urgent need, it could be
done in a couple of weeks; with a large retinue, the journey could last for up
to seven weeks. It was, however, a well-trodden path, and fairly safe thanks to
Charles of Anjou.92 Even if in the aftermath of the Ninth Crusade relations be-
tween Paris and Naples cooled somewhat, when James left Paris for Naples he
was making a journey that was an established route for armies, political agents,
ambassadors, and trade. This was, after all, the age of Charles ii.93 There was

89 Arquillière, Le plus ancien traité de l’Église.

90 See Kempshall, The Common Good, 282–92.
91 For a defense of dating De regimine christiano to the year 1302 see R.W. Dyson’s contribu-
tion to this volume.
92 Dunbabin, The French in the Kingdom of Sicily, 31–35.
93 See Émile G. Léonard, Les Angevins de Naples (Paris, 1954), 173–207; idem, L’état angevin:
Pouvoir, culture et société entre xiiie et xiv siècle (Rome, 1998); Valeria Sorge, “Napoli al
30 Saak

also an emerging cultural exchange, which even preceded the Angevin take-
over of Naples, for, according to Ronald Witt, “by the second quarter of the
thirteenth century interest in composing in Provençal was general in northern
Italy and along the western coast of the peninsula down to Naples, and Italy
had displaced Francia as the center of Provençal culture.”94 As well, the An-
gevins were patrons of the church. Charles ii, notes Caroline Bruzelius, was
“the greatest Angevin patron of religious architecture and perhaps one of the
most conspicuous church-building kings of the Middle Ages.”95 This was the
Naples that would become home to James for the rest of his life.
In 1299, James had been appointed as definitor of the Roman province of the
oesa for the meeting of the general chapter in Naples the following year. He
made an impression. The prior general, Augustine of Tarano, before the assem-
bled chapter, asserted that there were brothers from the province of France who
had been brought up by the Order and placed in positions of honor who had
defended and excused brothers who were of a vicious and irreligious character,
thus sullying the Order’s religion. Whereupon James stood and apologized if
he had done anything or said anything to the detriment of the Order and if so,
he was most prepared to make amends. The humility and reverence of this re-
sponse stupefied all, and seemed to have calmed the prior general.96 Henry of
Friemar, who told this story, was present himself at the time, and James’s repu-
tation for humility and reverence continued thereafter. Jordan of Quedlinburg
(also called Jordan of Saxony) repeats this story in his Liber Vitasfratrum (1358),
claiming James as a man of great knowledge and fame,97 as did Philipp Elssius
in his Economiasticon Augustinianum of 1654,98 and David Gutierrez in 1939.99
Such was the man who came to Naples and was to remain as the magister
regens of the Order’s studium in the city, having been nominated and appoint-
ed to the post of principle lector (primus lector) at the general chapter.100

tempo di Giacomo da Viterbo: Profili storico-filosofici,” in Giacomo da Viterbo al tempo di

Bonifacio viii, 173–84.
94 Ronald G. Witt, The Two Latin Cultures and the Foundation of Renaissance Humanism in
Medieval Italy (Cambridge, 2012), 355.
95 Caroline Bruzelius, The Stones of Naples: Church Building in Angevin Italy, 1266–1343 (New
Haven and London, 2004), 5.
96 Henry of Friemar, Tractatus de origine et progressu ordinis fratrum heremitarum et vero ac
proprio titulo eiusdem, c. 5, (ed.) Rudolph Arbesmann, Augustiniana 6 (1956): 116–17.
97 Jordan of Quedlinburg, Liber Vitasfratrum, lib. 2, c. 4, (eds.) Rudolph Arbesmann and Win-
fried Hümpfner (New York, 1943), 96–97, ll. 153–87.
98 Philipp Elssius, Encomiasticon Augustinianum (Brussels, 1654), 310–11.
99 Gutierrez, “De vita,” 219–20.
100 Ibid., 219.
The Life and Works of James of Viterbo 31

As the principal lector, James was well prepared for this task: he was to
lecture on theology, primarily the Bible and the Sentences. His lost scriptural
commentaries on Matthew, Luke, and the Pauline Epistles could date from this
period, as could other spurious works that were attributed to him, were they
genuine, such as the Summa de articulis fidei, and Concordantiae psalmorum ad
Carolum ii Siciliae et Jerusalem regem, as well as his genuine Summa de pecca-
torum distinctione and sermons.101 In other words, there is still much research
to be done on James and his work.102 In any case, James was well provided
for in his order’s cloister in Naples. On the occasion of the general chapter at
Naples, “Charles ii gave the friars a relic of the head of Saint Luke in a silver
reliquary and promised an income of 30 once a year for the studium.”103 San
Agostino’s was a vast complex: “There were two cloisters, one large and one
small, eight small dormitories, a library, archive, and other practical structures
that served the needs of the community, the faculty, and the students. But to-
day almost nothing remains of all this.”104
On 3 September 1302, Pope Boniface viii appointed James as archbishop of
Benevento. James, however, was not to be there for long. Two months later, on
12 December 1302, James was appointed by Boniface, at Charles ii’s request, as
archbishop of Naples.105 He did so knowing James as an eminent man of schol-
arship, yet one who was also humble and honest, of outstanding character, ma-
ture, one who was spiritually insightful and prudent with respect to temporal
administration, one who possessed many divine gifts.106 James was at the time
forty-seven years old. He was in his prime. For the next six years James would

101 Mariani, Scrittori, 97–99. Mariani identified two manuscripts containing a Summa de
peccatorum distinctione: Biblioteca Nazionale di Napoli, cod. vii G. 101 and Biblioteca di
Montecassino, cod. 743, both of which ascribe the work to James. Ypma does not mention
these works, and neither does Zumkeller; see Adolar Zumkeller, Manuskripte von Werken
der Autoren des Augustiner-Eremitenordens in mitteleuropäischen Bibliotheken (Würzburg,
1966), 212–14, nn. 440–44. They could though certainly date from his Parisian tenure as
well. See also Dominico Ambrasi, “La Summa de peccatorum distinctione del B. Giacomo
da Viterbo dal ms. vii G 101 della Biblioteca Nazionale di Napoli,” Asprenas 6 (1959): 47–78,
189–218, and 288–308, which includes an edition of the text (189–218).
102 For the best overview of James and his work, and the bibliography thereof, see Côté,
“James of Viterbo,’’ and Vian, “Giacomo da Viterbo.”
103 Bruzelius, The Stones of Naples, 26.
104 Ibid.
105 For Boniface’s bull appointing James to the archbishopric of Naples, and Boniface’s letter
to Charles, see Mariani, Scrittori, 76–79, n. 1.
106 Arch. Vat. Reg. an. viii, f. 210v, as quoted by Mariani, Scrittori, 75–76, n. 1: “… quem
eminenti litterarum scientia predictum, virum quoque vite preclare, conversationis hu-
millime, morum honestate decorum, discretionis et consilii maturitate conspicuum, in
32 Saak

dedicate himself to the completion of his church, the cathedral in Naples, the
construction of which had begun under his predecessor Filippo Minutolo, un-
der the careful patronage of James’s sovereign, Charles ii. As Bruzelius notes:
“In the reconfiguration of Naples as a major European capital during the reign
of Charles ii, the cathedral was to play an important role in shaping a historical
past that embraced both the traditions of the apostolic foundation and Con-
stantinian patronage.”107 James worked long and hard to make it all possible,
securing financing from the crown and from the pope,108 the two powers that
had shaped James’s life and work from his early days in Viterbo.
James lost a valued patron with the death of Pope Boniface viii on 3 Octo-
ber 1303. Despite James’s and Giles’s best efforts, Boniface had been “defaced”
at Anagni, an event that James’s king viewed as “a most horrid scandal to the
Christian faith and a bewilderment to all.”109 The Angevins were the papal vic-
ars after all. But with the passing of Boniface, an age was passing as well, as the
medieval papal monarchy went into its twilight; or perhaps an age was just
beginning, the birth pangs of Renaissance Europe. James embodied them both
in so many ways. He outlived Boniface, but not for long, a mere five years. He
is remembered as a philosopher, a political theorist, and a papal publicist. Yet
this humble man, who was indeed all of these, was also the counterpart of his
sovereign Charles ii: he was the builder of the church—philosophically, politi-
cally, theologically, administratively, and religiously—and he was an outstand-
ing and exemplary son of Augustine, a hermit friar, whose Order was on the
verge of coming into its own, exerting a still incompletely charted influence on
late-medieval Europe. Yet James is still largely unknown to us today. More work
on the sources is needed to determine the authenticity of many of the works
ascribed to him. Until we have a comprehensive and reliable catalogue of his
genuine works, and until we take the authenticated works into consideration
as a whole, James speaks to us only in staggered utterances, at least in compari-
son to all he had to say. Even the genuine works have not received the attention
they merit, nor has James himself.110 He deserves better, and so do we for our
understanding of late-13th and early-14th century Europe.

spiritualibus providum et in temporalibus circumspectum, ac aliis virtutum donis divini-

tus tibi traditis multipliciter insignatum novimus.”
107 Bruzelius, The Stones of Naples, 130.
108 Ibid., 82–83; Mariani, Scrittori, 81–82, n. 5.
109 As cited by T.S.R. Boase, Boniface viii (London, 1933), 356.
110 See, however, the most extensive treatments to date: Giustiniani and Tavolaro (eds.), Gia-
como da Viterbo al tempo di Bonifacio viii, and the present volume.
 chapter 2

James of Viterbo on Metaphysics

Mark D. Gossiaux

2.1 Introduction

Over the course of his career as a Master in the faculty of theology at the Uni-
versity of Paris, James of Viterbo developed a highly personal and creative
metaphysics. One finds evidence of this not only in his Quodlibetal Questions,
where he is often called upon to deal with the hot issues of his day, but also in
his Quaestiones de divinis praedicamentis. In this latter work James presents
detailed analyses of the nature of the various Aristotelian categories and their
application to God. In the present chapter we shall examine James’s thinking
on five issues: the nature of metaphysics, the analogy of being, the relation-
ship between essence and existence, the distinction between substance and
accidents, and the problem of individuation.1 In reconstructing James’s meta-
physical positions, some effort will be made to compare his thinking to that
of other leading figures of his day such as Giles of Rome, Henry of Ghent, and
Godfrey of Fontaines.

2.2 The Nature of Metaphysics

Medieval philosophers derived their understanding of the science of meta-

physics from Aristotle. As is well known, however, Aristotle’s teaching on the
nature of metaphysics is notoriously ambiguous. In the Metaphysics, he sets
forth at least two different conceptions of this science: an ontological one, in
which there is envisioned a general inquiry into being as being; and a theo-
logical one, in which one investigates what is separable and immovable,
i.e., a determinate kind of being, namely, immaterial being. Aristotle thus ap-
pears to think of metaphysics as both a universal science and a particular science.

1 The nature of relations is the topic of a separate chapter in this volume. See Mark Hen-
ninger’s contribution on “The Ontological Status of Real Relations.”

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���8 | doi 10.1163/9789004361881_004

34 Gossiaux

It is evident that he identified these two conceptions in a single science, but his
grounds for doing so are by no means clear.2
The ambiguities in Aristotle’s texts gave rise to disputes among medieval
philosophers about what is the subject of metaphysics.3 An example well
known to thinkers of James’s day was the disagreement between Avicenna and
Averroes. Avicenna argues in the opening chapters of his Metaphysics that God
cannot be the subject of metaphysics, since no science proves the existence of
its proper subject, and the task of proving God’s existence falls to metaphysics.
Thus, Avicenna maintains that the subject of metaphysics is being as being.4
Averroes sharply rejects this position, since he holds that God’s existence is
demonstrated only in physics. According to Averroes, once the natural philoso-
pher has shown that there is another kind of being besides material being, he
leaves the inquiry into the immaterial to a more noble science, namely, the
science that studies being as being. For Averroes, therefore, metaphysics has as
its subject immaterial being.5
Medieval Latin thinkers usually prefer to side with Avicenna rather than
Averroes on this issue. Thus, the standard position among James’s contem-
poraries was that the subject of metaphysics is being as being. Nevertheless,
there was considerable disagreement concerning the place of God in meta-
physics. Is the notion of being as being broad enough to include divine being?
Should God be regarded as falling under the subject of metaphysics in some
way? How exactly is metaphysics related to theology? Moreover, if one defends
an ontological conception of metaphysics, one must explain how metaphysics
can be regarded as a single science. Aristotle had taught that every science is
concerned with a determinate class of objects.6 How then is it possible for one
science to study all beings?
James of Viterbo makes some important remarks about the nature of meta-
physics in Quodlibet iii, questions 1 and 2. In question 1, the question is put
to James whether the science of theology is simply speculative or simply

2 For Aristotle’s description of metaphysics as the science of being as being, see Metaphysics
4.1 (1003a21–31); for metaphysics as theology, see 6.1 (1026a10–22); and for Aristotle’s identifi-
cation of these two conceptions in single science, see 6.1 (1026a27–32).
3 The classic study of this controversy remains Albert Zimmermann, Ontologie oder
Metaphysik? Die Diskussion über den Gegenstand der Metaphysik im 13. und 14. Jahrhundert,
2nd ed. (Leuven, 1998).
4 Avicenna, Liber de philosophia prima sive scientia divina, tract. 1, cc. 1–2, (ed.) Simone van
Riet, vol. 1 (Leuven, 1977), 4–13.
5 Averroes, In Phys., lib. 1, com. 83, in Aristotelis opera cum Averrois commentariis, vol. 4 (Venice,
1562; repr. Frankfurt a. M., 1962), f. 47r–v; ibid., lib. 2, com. 22, f. 57r.
6 Aristotle, Posterior Analytics 1.28 (87a39–b3).
James of Viterbo on Metaphysics 35

practical. In his reply, he explains how the sciences may be divided in accor-
dance with Aristotle’s teaching on the four causes. With respect to their effi-
cient cause, one can distinguish between those sciences that are discovered by
human beings and a science that is inspired by God. The former comprise the
philosophical sciences, which need only the natural light of the intellect; the
latter is the science of theology, which proceeds in the light of faith. With re-
spect to their final cause, a distinction arises between the speculative sciences,
which seek knowledge for its own sake, and the practical sciences, which seek
knowledge for the sake of activity. This distinction, based upon the ends or
goals of the two kinds of science, gives rise to a further distinction in their
subject matters. The practical sciences are concerned with things that result
from human activity. This includes the moral sciences (e.g., ethics, economics,
and politics), as well as the science of production. By contrast, the speculative
sciences are concerned with what is independent of human activity. Following
the division handed down by Aristotle, James distinguishes three speculative
sciences: physics, which studies things which are in motion but cannot exist
apart from matter; mathematics, which treats of things which are immobile
but inseparable from matter; and metaphysics or divine science, which studies
objects that are immobile and separable from matter.7
In this text James has assigned a place to metaphysics among the specula-
tive sciences. It is concerned with objects that are immobile and are to some
degree separate from matter. James has not yet specified whether the objects
studied by the metaphysician are such that they are never found in matter,
or merely such that they are sometimes found in matter and sometimes not.
In other words, he leaves open the question whether metaphysics has as its
subject what is positively immaterial (e.g., God and separate substances), or
merely what is negatively immaterial (i.e., those things whose existence is not
restricted to matter).
Later in this same question James introduces some important clarifications.
He observes that metaphysics and theology are primarily (principaliter) con-
cerned with God, though in different ways. Metaphysics studies God not as

7 Quodl. iii, q. 1, 12–13, ll. 143–73, esp. ll. 149–53: “Penes materiam ponitur distinctio a Philoso-
pho, in vi Metaphysicae, ubi dicit quod quaedam scientia est circa mobilia et inseperabilia,
ut physica; quaedam vero circa immobilia et inseperabilia, ut mathematica; quaedam vero
circa immobilia et seperabilia ut mechanica sive dynamica [lege: metaphysica et divina];
quam quidem distinctionem tangit Boetius in libro De Trinitate.” James’s four Quodlibeta and
parts of his Quaestiones de divinis praedicamentis (=qdp) have been edited by Eelcko Ypma
(Würzburg, 1968–1975 [Quodlibeta]; and Rome, 1983–1986 [qdp, qq. 1–17]; editions of further
questions of the qdp have appeared in Augustiniana).
36 Gossiaux

its subject, but as that which is first (principale) among those things which
are included under its subject, or which have a relation or order (attributio)
to its subject, which is being (ens). For metaphysics treats of God as he is the
most perfect instance of being (ut est ens quoddam perfectissimum), or as he
is a cause or principle of being, or in both of these ways. However, it studies
being (ens) as its subject. Theology, on the other hand, considers about God
as its subject; it studies being in general inasmuch as being has some relation
to God. Consequently, theology is divine science and studies God more excel-
lently and more primarily than does metaphysics, since the latter treats of God
in relation to being in general, while theology considers being in general ac-
cording to its relation to God.8
James makes similar remarks in Quaestiones de divinis praedicamentis, ques-
tion 1. There he notes that God falls under the consideration of metaphysics
both as he is a being (ens), and as he is a principle of being, but in a more
primary way as he is a principle of being. For inasmuch as he is a being, God
can be apprehended by us only imperfectly. Thus, some say that the subject of
metaphysics is created being (ens creatum), although in a certain way it can
be said that it is being absolutely (ens absolute). Still, James adds, one part of
­being is the principle of the other.9
One can reconstruct James’s views concerning the unity of metaphysics
from his remarks in Quodlibet iii, question 2. In this text he defends the posi-
tion that the science of theology enjoys the greatest degree of unity (maxime
una) among all the sciences possessed by human beings. But this claim im-
mediately leads to a problem. For James also holds that theology, which has

8 Quodl. iii, q. 1, 19–20, ll. 362–74: “Metaphysica enim considerat principaliter de Deo non sicut
de subiecto, sed de eo quod est principale inter ea quae comprehenduntur sub subiecto, vel
quae habent attributionem ad subiectum, quod est ens. Considerat enim de ipso ut est ens
quoddam perfectissimum vel ut est causa vel principium entis, vel utroque modo; de ente
vero considerat sicut de subiecto. Theologia autem considerat principaliter de Deo sicut de
subiecto; de ente vero universaliter considerat secundum attributionem ad subiectum, quod
est Deus. Et ideo multo excellentius et principalius theologia dicitur esse divina et de Deo
quam metaphysica, cum metaphysica consideret de Deo secundum relationem ad commune
quod est ens, theologia vero econtra consideret de communi quod est ens secundum relatio-
nem ad Deum.”
9 qdp, q. 1, 32, ll. 854–60: “Ad illud vero quod obicitur in contrarium, dicendum quod Meta-
physicus considerat de Deo utroque modo, scilicet ut ens est, et ut principium entis est; sed
principalius in quantum principium entis est. Nam ut ens est, non potest a nobis apprehendi,
nisi valde imperfecte. Unde et aliqui dicunt quod subiectum Metaphysicae est ens creatum,
quamvis aliquo modo dici posset quod ens absolute. Tamen una pars entis est principium
alterius.”
James of Viterbo on Metaphysics 37

God as its subject, considers about all things. How then can a science that is
maximally one study all things? To this James replies that the commonness
of theology is not repugnant to its unity, but rather follows upon it. For just as
God is maximally one, and yet is maximally common by virtue of his causal-
ity, since all things are ordered to him as to a first cause, so too the science of
theology is one because of its subject, and also maximally common because all
other things are ordered to that subject.10
James nuances this response by enumerating the various senses in which
one might speak of a science as common. First, a science might be regarded as
common because it transmits its mode of knowing to the other sciences; it is
in this way that logic is a common science. In a second way, a science might be
common because it includes and contains all the other sciences as a genus. In a
third way, a science is said to be common because it considers about all things
according to a common ratio. It is in this way that metaphysics is a common
science, since it treats of all things according to one common ratio, namely, be-
ing (ens); hence its subject is being as being. Finally, a science is common when
it studies something that is simply one (unum simpliciter), to which all other
things are ordered as to an end. This is the way in which theology is a common
science. According to James, theology considers about all things, not according
to their proper and particular rationes, in the manner of the particular human
sciences, nor according to a common ratio, as metaphysics does, but according
to an order to one thing absolutely, namely, God.11
James observes that someone might object that metaphysics also considers
about all things through their order to God. James concedes this point, but
he notes that metaphysics does not do so in the same way as theology. Meta-
physics considers about all things through an attribution to God, not as to its
subject, but as to that which is primary (principale) among the things which
are contained under its subject or which have an order to its subject. For in any
science the consideration of what is less primary is always for the sake of the

10 Quodl. iii, q. 2, 41, ll. 144–52: “Communitas quae est in hac scientia non repugnat eius
maximae unitati, sed consequitur ipsam. Sicut enim Deus est maxime unus, et tamen est
maxime communis secundum causalitatem, quia omnia ei attribuuntur ut causae pri-
mae, et ista eius communitas non repugnat eius maximae unitati, sed consequitur ipsam,
sic scientia theologica est maxime una propter maximam unitatem subiecti sui, et tamen
est maxime communis, quia illi subiecto attribuuntur alia omnia, et sic de omnibus con-
siderat secundum quamdam attributionem ad illud.”
11 Ibid., 42, ll. 157–78, esp. ll. 164–67: “Tertio dicitur scientia communis quae considerat de
omnibus secundum communem rationem. Et sic metaphysica est scientia communis
quae de omnibus considerat secundum communem rationem, quae est ens; unde et ens
in quantum ens dicitur subiectum eius.”
38 Gossiaux

consideration of what is more primary. Thus, in natural science the consider-

ation of the elements and inanimate things is for the sake of animate things,
and the consideration of all of these is ordered to the consideration of man. By
contrast, theology considers about all things by their attribution to God as to
its subject.12
In sum, James has distinguished three sciences which are concerned with
the whole of being. Logic studies the whole of being because it considers about
common intentions which are applicable to all beings, such as “definition,”
“statement,” “syllogism,” and the like. Metaphysics studies the whole of being,
because it considers about the parts of being according to one common ratio,
namely, the notion of being. Theology is concerned with all things, since it
considers about all the parts of being according to an attribution to God, who
is maximally one in himself, but maximally common in his causality.13
From these texts it is evident that James defends an ontological conception
of metaphysics. The subject of metaphysics is being as being. It is not to be
confused with theology, which has God as its subject. However, James does
appear to hold that the being that is the subject of metaphysics also includes
divine being. In this respect he differs from Thomas Aquinas, who sharply ex-
cludes God from the subject of metaphysics.14 James also parts company with
his confrère Giles of Rome, who maintains that God is a subject of metaphys-
ics in a qualified sense.15 Although metaphysics studies the whole of being,

12 Ibid., 43, ll. 187–97: “Non eodem modo principaliter considerat de Deo metaphysica et
theologia. Ergo [metaphysica] considerat de omnibus per attributionem ad Deum non
sicut ad subiectum eius, sed sicut ad id quod est principale inter ea quae continentur sub
subiecto ipsius, vel quae habent ordinem ad ipsum. In qualibet enim scientia id quod est
minus principale consideratur propter id quod est magis principale, ut in scientia naturali
consideratio elementorum et inanimatorum omnium est propter considerationem ani-
matorum, et ipsorum omnium consideratio propter considerationem hominis. Theologia
vero considerat de omnibus per attributionem ad Deum sicut ad id quod est subiectum
eius.”
13 Ibid., 43, ll. 206–14, esp. ll. 209–11: “Metaphysica autem considerat de toto ente, quia con-
siderat de omnibus partibus entis secundum unam communem rationem tantum, scili-
cet secundum rationem entis.”
14 For this in Thomas Aquinas, see his Super Boetium De Trinitate, q. 5, a. 4, ed. Leonina
­Opera omnia 50 (Rome, 1992), 151–56. For a thorough presentation of Aquinas’s views on
this topic, see John F. Wippel, The Metaphysical Thought of Thomas Aquinas: From Finite
Being to Uncreated Being (Washington, dc, 2000), 11–22.
15 Although Giles acknowledges that the subject of metaphysics in the absolute sense is
being qua being, he regards substance and God as subjects of metaphysics in a qualified
sense. This is because the notion of being (ratio entitatis) is realized more perfectly in
substance than in accidents, and in God more perfectly than in creatures. Hence Giles
James of Viterbo on Metaphysics 39

its universal scope does not prevent it from remaining a single science. Being
(ens) serves as the formality under which the metaphysician studies all things.
Still, one might wonder how exactly being is common to all things. What
kind of unity must the notion of being possess if it is to ground the science of
metaphysics? To see how James resolves this problem, one must consider his
views on the analogy of being.

2.3 The Analogy of Being

James discusses the analogy of being in Quodlibet i, question 1, where he is

asked whether being (ens) can be grasped by us in one simple concept. He
begins his response with the observation that, while philosophers speak in
different ways about the meaning of being, all agree about its commonness.
­Being is common to everything of which it is said, not equivocally or univocal-
ly, but in a middle way, namely, analogically.16 James then proceeds to explain
how these three forms of commonness differ. He notes that things which have
something in common must agree in some respect. Sometimes this agreement
(convenientia) is in name alone (in nomine solum), and from this there arises
equivocity. For example, the word “pen” may be predicated both of a writing
instrument and of an enclosure for holding animals. In this case, two objects
are given the same name, although the meaning associated with this name is
wholly different. These two pens are “chance equivocals” (aequivoca a casu),
for there is no basis in reality for their sharing the same name.
At other times, however, the agreement among things is not only in name
but also in reality (non solum in nomine, sed etiam in re). James distinguishes
two ways in which this might occur. In the first way, things possess an essen-
tial agreement of similarity and conformity (convenientia essentialis similitu-
dinis et conformitatis). An agreement of this kind gives rise to univocity, and
it is in this way that a universal, such as a genus or species, is common to its

seems to regard God as one of several subjects of metaphysics. For Giles’s articulations
of this view, see his Quaestiones metaphysicales, lib. 1, q. 8 (Venice, 1501; repr. Frankfurt a.
M., 1966), f. 4r–v; In i Sententiarum, prol., princ. 1, q. 1 (Venice, 1521; repr. Frankfurt a. M.,
1968), f. 2r. For recent discussions of Giles, see Zimmermann, Ontologie oder Metaphysik,
177–84; Jean-François Courtine, Suarez et le système de la métaphysique (Paris, 1990), 108–
30; ­Giorgio Pini, “Ex defectu intellectualis luminis: Giles of Rome on the Role and Limits of
Metaphysics,” Quaestio 5 (2005): 205–19.
16 Quodl. i, q. 1, 5–6, ll. 24–30. For a helpful discussion of this question, see Francis Ruello,
“L’analogie de l’être selon Jacques de Viterbe, Quodlibet 1, Quaestio 1,” Augustiniana 20
(1970): 145–80.
40 Gossiaux

particulars. Because of the essential similarity of Socrates and Plato, our intel-
lect is able to grasp them under a single ratio. Thus, something is predicated
univocally when it remains the same in name and definition. In a second way,
however, things are common not because they share an essential likeness, but
rather because they have an agreement of attribution (convenientia attributio-
nis). From an agreement of this kind there arises analogy, and it is this kind of
commonness that one finds in being. According to James, analogous names are
predicated according to an order of priority and posteriority. They are said first
and foremost (primo et principaliter) of one, and of others insofar as they have
an order or relation to this first instance. Unlike univocal names, an analo-
gous term signifies an actual plurality; however, it does not signify this plurality
equally and primarily, as in the manner of equivocals. Consequently, analogy
occupies a middle ground between pure equivocity and univocity, agreeing
with each in some respects yet differing in others.17
Having made these distinctions, however, James immediately sounds a cau-
tionary note. It is in an improper sense that one speaks of being as analogous;
according to its strict meaning, analogy is the same as proportion (proportio).
Drawing upon Simplicius, James gives as an example the term “principle”
(principium), which is predicated analogously (i.e., by proportion) of unity,
a spring, and the heart: just as unity is the principle of number, so the heart
is a principle of the limbs of the body, and a spring the principle of a brook.
Strictly speaking, analogy is a proportionality, i.e., a similarity in the respective
ways in which pairs of terms are related to each other. Since being is common
not by proportion, but rather by attribution, James notes that it is improper to
describe being as analogous. Nevertheless, because the language of analogy
is widespread in discussions of being, James will bow to common usage and
speak of being as analogous.18

17 Quodl. i, q. 1, 6, ll. 31–57, esp. ll. 42–57: “Nam plura quae conveniunt secundum rem, vel
­habent convenientiam essentialem similitudinis et conformitatis. … Vel habent conve-
nientiam attributionis, et ex hac convenientia sumitur communitas analogiae; qualis
communitas est in ente. Quod autem sic est commune, et si de pluribus dicatur, tamen
secundum prius et posterius de uno, scilicet primo et principaliter, de aliis autem secun-
dum quod habent attributionem ad illud secundum aliquem modum alicuius habitudi-
nis. Unde et licet significet illa plura in actu, in quo differt ab univoco, non tamen aeque
principaliter, in quo differt a pure aequivoco. Propter quod etiam et medium dicitur inter
pure aequivocum et univocum, conveniens quantum ad aliquid cum utroque, et quan-
tum ad aliquid ab utroque differens.”
18 Ibid., 6–7, ll. 58–71: “Est tamen considerandum quod, cum dicitur quod ens est com-
mune communitate analogiae, non proprie accipitur nomen analogiae. Analogia enim
secundum proprietatem vocabuli idem est quod proportio. Unde quando aliquod nomen
James of Viterbo on Metaphysics 41

That predication by attribution is not a form of analogy in the strict sense

is also stressed by James in Quaestiones de divinis praedicamentis, question 18.
In this text, he distinguishes three ways in which something can be predicat-
ed: (1) univocally, as the name “animal” is said of man and horse; (2) equivo-
cally, as the name “dog” is said of a heavenly body and a barking thing; and
(3) metaphorically (translative), as when the devil is called a serpent because
of his snares. Once again making reference to Simplicius, James notes that one
should not conflate what is said by metaphor with what is predicated equivo-
cally, for there are two kinds of equivocal term. Some are equivocal by chance
(a casu), such as the name “Alexander” when it is predicated of Alexander of
Paris and Alexander of Macedon. This is an example of equivocity in the strict
sense, since there is nothing that connects these individuals so that they should
have the same name. A second kind of equivocal term results from intention
(ab intellectu). This in turn may be subdivided into three classes. Some terms
are equivocal: (i) according to a likeness (secundum similitudinem), as the term
“animal” is said of both a painted animal and a real animal; (ii) according to a
proportion (secundum proportionem), as the name “principle” is said of unity,
point, heart, and axiom (i.e., because unity is to number as point is to line, one
may predicate “principle” of both unity and point, etc.); or (iii) according to
attribution (secundum attributionem), i.e., by reference to something primary,
which occurs either from one agent (ab uno agente), as in the Aristotelian ex-
ample of “medical,” or to one end (ad unum), as in the example of “healthy,” or
in one subject (in uno), as is the case with substance and accidents (for being
is predicated of accidents because they are present in substance). James again
comments that predication secundum attributionem is commonly called anal-
ogy, but this is improper, since analogy is the same as proportion.19

dicitur de pluribus secundum proportionem, illud dicitur proprie commune sicut ana-
logum, sicut hoc nomen principium dicitur de unitate et fonte et corde secundum analo-
giam, id est secundum proportionem, sicut dicit Simplicius in Praedicamentis. Quia sicut
se habet unitas ad numeros, sic cor ad membra et fons ad rivulos; et ideo, sicut unitas
dicitur principium numerorum, sic cor membrorum et fons rivulorum. Ens autem non
hoc modo est commune, et ideo improprie dicitur analogum. Magis autem proprie dici-
tur commune secundum attributionem. Sed quia communiter usitatur nomen analogiae
in ente, ideo, quamvis improprie, dictum est ens esse analogum; loquendum est enim ut
plures.”
19 qdp, q. 18, (ed.) Eelcko Ypma, in Augustinana 38 (1988): 67–98, esp. 84, ll. 380–98: “­Circa
quod sciendum quod, quantum ad praesens, tripliciter dicitur aliquid de aliquo, vel
univoce ut animal de homine et equo, vel aequivoce ut canis de coelesti et latrabili, et
translative sicut diabolus dicitur draco propter insidias. Dici enim translative non est dici
aequivoce, ut dicit Simplicius. Aequivoca autem quaedam dicuntur a casu, quaedam ab
42 Gossiaux

Although James cites Simplicius as a source for his understanding of anal-

ogy, one notices that there are subtle differences between the two thinkers. In
his commentary on Aristotle’s Categories, Simplicius distinguishes four types
of equivocals by intention (ab intellectu): those that are equivocal by likeness
(secundum similitudinem), by analogy (secundum analogiam), from one thing
(ab aliquo), and to one end (ad unum finem).20 Unlike James, Simplicius never
uses the term “attribution” (attributio) to describe a type of equivocal predica-
tion. Nor does Simplicius speak of things named equivocally because they are
“in one subject.” Consequently, although James agrees with Simplicius about
the precise definition of analogy, it would seem that he is not the only source
of James’s understanding of the way being is predicated.
As is well known, the claim that “being” is predicated by attribution (se-
cundum attributionem) is precisely the view advanced by Averroes in his com-
mentary on Aristotle’s Metaphysics IV.2. Although “being” (ens) is said in many
ways, Averroes notes, it is not equivocal; rather, it belongs to the class of names
which are predicated of things that are attributed to one and the same thing.
Sometimes a term is said of many things because they are ordered to one end;
at other times a term is said of many things as they are ordered to one efficient
cause; and sometimes a term is predicated of many things as they are ordered
to one subject.21 According to Averroes, “being” (ens) is predicated of many
things because they are ordered to the primary instance of being—namely,
substance—not as to an efficient or final cause, but as to their subject.22 It is

intellectu; a casu ut Alexander Paris et Alexander Macedo, quando non habetur respectus
aliquis in impositione nominis in uno ad aliud. Ab intellectu tripliciter, vel secundum
similitudinem ut animal dicitur de animali picto et vero, vel secundum proportionem ut
principium de unitate et puncto, corde, dignitate; et hoc dicitur proprie analogia, quia
­sicut se habet hoc ad hoc, ita illud ad illud [vel] secundum attributionem, vel ab uno
agente ut medicinale, vel quia ad unum ut sanitas, vel quia in uno, ut accidentia ad sub-
stantiam. In primo multa dicuntur medicinalia per attributionem ad veritatem medici-
nae, quae est sicut agens; in secundo multa dicuntur sana per attributionem ad sanitatem
quae est in animali, et habet se ut finis. Et hoc consuevit dici analogia, sed improprie
secundum vocabulum. Analogia enim idem est quod proportio.”
20 For Simplicius’s discussion, see (in Moerbeke’s Latin translation) Commentaire sur les
Catégories d’Aristote: Traduction de Guillaume de Moerbeke, vol. 1, (ed.) Adriaan Pattin
(Leuven, 1971), 42–43, ll. 62–87. For the Greek original, see Simplicius, In Aristotelis Cat-
egorias commentarium, (ed.) Karl Kalbfleisch, Commentaria in Aristotelem Graeca 8
(­Berlin, 1907), 31–32, ll. 22–10.
21 Averroes, In Met., lib. 4, com. 2, in Aristotelis opera cum Averrois commentariis, vol. 8
(Venice, 1562; repr. Frankfurt a. M., 1962), f. 65rE–vH.
22 Ibid., f. 65vI: “Et similiter hoc nomen ens, licet dicatur multis modis, tamen in omnibus
dicitur ens, quia attribuitur primo enti substantiae. Et istae attributiones in vnoquoque
James of Viterbo on Metaphysics 43

evident, therefore, that one should also include Averroes as a source for James’s
understanding of the analogy of being.
Be this as it may, one might still wonder whether that which is signified by
the term “being” can be grasped by us in one simple concept. In Quodlibet i,
question 1, James explains that a simple concept can be formed by the intel-
lect only of something that is actually one and indivisible (such as a point,
or the essence of a separate substance), or of something that is actually one
but potentially many (e.g., a universal, or an integral whole). However, being
(ens) cannot be grasped by us as actually one and indivisible, since there is
multitude and diversity among beings. Nor is being actually one and poten-
tially many, since things conceived in this manner have either an agreement
(convenientia) of likeness and conformity with each other, or they constitute
something per se one. However, neither of these conditions pertains to being.
Individual beings share an agreement not of likeness and conformity, but of at-
tribution, since “being” is predicated analogously. Nor do the totality of beings
constitute something per se one, for substance and accidents, into which being
immediately descends, do not constitute a whole that is per se one. Therefore,
since being is grasped by us as an actual multitude (sicut plura in actu), we
cannot apprehend being by one simple concept. Since the term “being” (ens)
signifies in act that about which it is said, it follows too that being cannot be a
genus, for a genus contains and signifies the species under it not actually, but
potentially. Moreover, the differences that divide a genus are outside the ratio
of that genus, but the differences that divide being are not outside the ratio of
being. Therefore, James concludes, since “being” is predicated by attribution, it
cannot be grasped by us in one simple concept; rather, our concepts of being
are simply many (simpliciter plures). However, because these many concepts
constitute an order, one may speak of a single analogous concept of being.
Thus, the concept of being is one only in a qualified sense; the unity that it
possesses is a unity of order.23
The rudiments of James’s theory of analogy are also found in Quaestiones
de divinis praedicamentis, question 1. In the course of explaining how “­being”

eorum sunt diuersae. Praedicamenta enim attribuuntur substantiae, non quia est agens
aut finis eorum, sed quia constituuntur per illam, et subiectum est eorum.”
23 Quodl. i, q. 1, 13–14, ll. 267–300, esp. ll. 295–300: “Quare manifestum est quod de ente, et
universaliter de quocumque analogo secundum quod analogum est, non potest formari
unus simplex conceptus, sed formantur conceptus simpliciter plures. Qui tamen possunt
dici unus secundum ordinem quemdam, eo quod ens et quodlibet analogum in quantum
tale dicitur de his qui sub ipso sunt secundum attributionem alicuius habitudinis, ut dic-
tum est.”
44 Gossiaux

can be predicated in common of God and creatures, James distinguishes three

kinds of commonness (communitas). The first is the commonness of one
thing (communitas unius rei), which is exemplified by the way the divine es-
sence is common to the three persons of the Trinity. Here one and the same
essence is really identical in each of the Trinitarian persons. A second kind of
­commonness is the commonness of one ratio. This is the way in which univer­
sals are common to particulars. A universal, such as a genus or species, is one
in its intelligible content (secundum rationem), but not in reality (secundum
rem). In other words, a single generic nature is instantiated in many species,
just as a single specific nature is instantiated in many individuals. To any uni-
versal there corresponds a single concept, which is derived from the confor-
mity and similarity of many diverse things. The unity found in the concept is
directly proportional to the degree of similarity and conformity in the things
that it represents. Thus, there is greater unity in the species than in the genus.
Nevertheless, there is one concept for each, corresponding to all the things
that are contained under them. A third kind of commonness is that of attri-
bution (communitas attributionis). This is a commonness not of one thing,
but of one ratio, not simply, but in a qualified sense. It is in this way, James
notes, that b­ eing is common to God and creatures and to substance and ac-
cidents. For of being there is not one concept, but many. The concept of being
as it is ­predicated of substance is distinct from that said of accidents. However,
it is not wholly other, for being is said of the former in itself (secundum se), and
of the latter insofar as they have an order to this first instance. Thus “being”
is predicated properly and absolutely of substance, and of accidents insofar
as they have a relation to substance. Similarly, “being” is said of God properly
and primarily; it is predicated of creatures insofar as they have an order and
relation to God as their cause. The concept of being, therefore, is one only in a
qualified sense, namely, by attribution.24

24 qdp, q. 1, 24–25, ll. 637–80, esp. ll. 649–80: “Tertia est communitas attributionis, quae qui-
dem non est unius rei, nec unius rationis simpliciter, sed aliquo modo. Et haec est com-
munitas entis respectu Dei et creaturae, et respectu substantiae et accidentis. Non enim
entis est simpliciter unus conceptus, sicut animalis, sed plures. Alius enim est conceptus
entis ut dicitur de substantia, alius ut dicitur de accidente; non tamen omnino alius, sed
est unius in ordine ad aliud. … Unde nomen entis hoc modo commune est, et similiter
ratio, scilicet per attributionem. Nam uni convenit principaliter et absolute; alii vero con-
venit prout intelligitur in ordine ad illud, et ideo minus principaliter. … Sic ergo dicendum
quod ens analogice dicitur. Nam alia est ratio entis in Deo, alia in creaturis, non solum
alia res, quod convenit etiam in universalis communitate, sed ratio entis Deo proprie et
principaliter convenit, et ratio suae entitatis est vera et propria et principalis. Creaturae
James of Viterbo on Metaphysics 45

In this same text, James distinguishes two levels at which the analogy of
being arises. When “being” is taken in the widest sense (ens communissime),
it is analogous to God and creatures; this is the being that is the subject of
metaphysics. When “being” is viewed in a more restricted sense, it is analogous
to substance and accidents; this is the level of created being. Being as it is com-
mon to substance and accidents cannot be predicated of God, although God is
the cause of such being.25
In sum, James regards the unity of being as consisting in a unity of order.
He agrees with Aristotle that being is said in many ways; that is, the notion of
being is not the same in substance and in the various kinds of accidents, nor is
it the same in God and the various kinds of creature. However, because these
various senses of being are united in a network of causal relations (the poste-
rior are ordered to the prior), one can say, in a qualified sense, that there is a
single concept of being.
The theory of the analogy of being was the standard one in James’s day.
Giles  of Rome and Henry of Ghent both agreed that being is predicated by
attribution: it is said of secondary instances inasmuch as they have a causal
relation to a primary instance.26 However, Henry differs from James on the is-
sue of whether it is fitting to speak of a single notion of being. Although both
­thinkers agree that being is grasped by us in many concepts, Henry made the
additional claim that the unity of the notion of being is the result of a psycho­
logical error. According to Henry, those who speak of a single concept of ­being
conflate two very similar concepts, namely, the concept of ­negatively undeter-
mined ­being, which is proper to God, and the concept of privatively undeter­
mined being, which is proper to creatures. A correct understanding (rectus
i­ ntellectus) would keep these two notions distinct.27 By contrast, James does

vero convenit ratio entitatis in ordine ad ipsum; et ideo deficienter et minus proprie ei
ratio entitatis convenit. Unde est haec communitas cuiusdam ordinis et attributionis.”
25 qdp, q. 1, 26, ll. 695–701.
26 For Giles of Rome, see his Quaestiones metaphysicales, lib. 4, qq. 3–4, ff. 22v–23r; Quaestio-
nes de esse et essentia, q. 1 (Venice, 1503; repr. Frankfurt a. M., 1968), ff. 2r–3v. For Henry of
Ghent, see his discussion in Summa quaestionum ordinariarum, a. 21, q. 2, (ed.) J. Badius
(Paris, 1520; repr. St. Bonaventure, ny, 1953), ff. 123v–25v.
27 Henry of Ghent, Summa, a. 21, q. 2, f. 125rS: “Per hunc ergo modum esse interminatum per
abnegationem convenit Deo, et per privationem creaturae. Et quia interminatio per abne-
gationem et per privationem propinquae sunt, quia ambae tollunt determinationem: una
tamen secundum actum, alia secundum actum simul et potentiam, ideo non potentes
distinguere inter huiusmodi diversa pro eodem concipiunt. … Natura enim est intellectus
non potentis distinguere ea quae propinqua sunt, concipere ipsa ut unum, quae tamen in
rei veritate non faciunt unum conceptum. Et ideo est error in illius conceptu.” For discus-
sion of Henry’s theory of analogy, see Jos Decorte, “Henry of Ghent on Analogy: Critical
46 Gossiaux

not think that the unity of the notion of being is merely apparent, since the
many different ways in which being is realized constitute a unity of order.
­According to James, the notion of being is simply many (simpliciter plures) and
one in a qualified sense (secundum quid).

2.4 Essence and Existence

The relationship between essence and existence (esse) was a subject of great
dispute among philosophers of the late 13th century.28 At the center of the
controversy was the question of how best to preserve the Christian d­ octrine
of creation. It was generally agreed that essence and existence are identical in
God, but distinct in some way in creatures. Concerning the precise nature of
this distinction, however, there was considerable disagreement. Giles of Rome
opted for a real distinction, which he understood as a distinction between
two things (inter rem et rem).29 Giles’s theory was sharply attacked by Henry
of Ghent, and the two carried on a lively (and often acerbic) debate during
the 1280s. Henry argued for an intentional distinction, which he described as a
distinction between intentions, that is, two constitutive notes of one and the

­ eflections on Jean Paulus’ Interpretation,” in Henry of Ghent: Proceedings of the Interna-

R
tional Colloquium on the Occasion of the 700th Anniversary of his Death (1293), (ed.) Willy
Vanhamel (Leuven, 1996), 71–105; Stephen Dumont, “Henry of Ghent and Duns Scotus,” in
The Routledge History of Philosophy iii: Medieval Philosophy, (ed.) John Marenbon (London,
1998), 291–328; Martin Pickavé, “Henry of Ghent on Metaphysics,” in A Companion to
Henry of Ghent, (ed.) Gordon Wilson (Leiden, 2011), 162–66.
28 For a general overview of this problem, see John F. Wippel, “Essence and Existence,” in
The Cambridge History of Later Medieval Philosophy, (eds.) Norman Kretzmann, Anthony
Kenny, and Jan Pinborg (Cambridge, 1982), 385–410. For more detailed treatments of the
discussion in the late 13th century, see Ruedi Imbach, “Averroistische Stellungnahmen
zur Diskussion über das Verhältnis von esse und essentia,” in Studi sul xiv secolo in me-
moria di Anneliese Maier, (eds.) Alfonso Maierù and Agostino Paravicini Bagliani (Rome,
1981), 299–339; John F. Wippel, “The Relationship Between Essence and Existence in Late-
Thirteenth Century Thought: Giles of Rome, Henry of Ghent, Godfrey of Fontaines, and
James of Viterbo,” in Philosophies of Existence: Ancient and Medieval, (ed.) Parviz More-
wedge (New York, 1982), 131–64; Catherine König-Pralong, Avènement de l’aristotélisme en
terre chrétienne (Paris, 2005), 35–127.
29 For Giles’s systematic treatment of the real distinction see his Theoremata de esse et es-
sentia, (ed.) Edgar Hocedez (Leuven, 1930), and his very influential Quaestiones de esse et
essentia, qq. 9–13, ff. 17v–35v. See also Giorgio Pini, “Being and Creation in Giles of Rome,”
in Nach der Verurteilung von 1277: Philosophie und Theologie an der Universität von Paris im
letzten Viertel des 13. Jahrhunderts, (eds.) Jan A. Aertsen et al. (Berlin and New York, 2001),
390–409.
James of Viterbo on Metaphysics 47

same essence, in which the concept of the one intention excludes the con-
cept of the other without thereby disturbing the real identity of the thing con-
ceived.30 An alternative to the theories of Giles and Henry was developed by
Godfrey of Fontaines. Rejecting both the real and the intentional distinctions,
Godfrey regarded the distinction between essence and existence as merely
conceptual (secundum rationem). According to his view, essence and existence
are one and the same thing, but differ in their modes of signifying.31
James of Viterbo provides an outstanding window through which to view
this debate. In Quodlibet i, question 4, he is asked whether the doctrine of
creation can be preserved if essence and esse do not really differ in creatures.
In developing his own position on this issue, James attempts to preserve and
synthesize what he considers true in the opposed positions of his contempo-
raries.32 He begins his reply by clearly staking out the position he will defend:
if essence and esse in no way really differ in creatures, then the doctrine of cre-
ation cannot be preserved; however, if they do not differ really in the way that
some doctors (quidam doctores) maintain, still creation can be preserved. In
other words, James concedes that the doctrine of creation requires one to hold
that essence and esse really differ; however, he does not think that one needs
to construe this distinction in the way that others often do.33

30 Henry of Ghent, Quodl. v, q. 6, (ed.) J. Badius (Paris, 1518; repr. Leuven, 1961), f. 161vN: “Cum
enim, ut dictum est, diversitas intentionum non potest esse nisi inter illa quae uniuntur in
eodem secundum rem: ita quod conceptus unius penitus excludit conceptum alterius, et
econverso … vel ita quod aliquid quod est in conceptu unius excluditur extra illud quod
est in conceptu alterius.” For more on Henry, see Martin Pickavé, “Henry of Ghent on In-
dividuation, Essence, and Being,” in A Companion to Henry of Ghent, (ed.) Gordon Wilson
(Leiden, 2011), 189–201.
31 Godfrey’s most important discussions of essence and existence are found in his Quodl. ii,
q. 2, in Les quatres premiers Quodlibets, (eds.) Maurice De Wulf and Augustin Pelzer, Les
Philosophes Belges 2 (Louvain, 1904), 53–68; and Quodl. iii, q. 1, (eds.) De Wulf and Pelzer,
156–77. On Godfrey’s teaching, see John F. Wippel, The Metaphysical Thought of Godfrey
of Fontaines (Washington, dc, 1981), 39–99.
32 I present a more complete analysis of James’s teaching in “James of Viterbo on the Rela-
tionship between Essence and Existence,” Augustiniana 49 (1999): 73–107. For an applica-
tion of James’s theory to the problem of the possibles, see my “James of Viterbo and the
Late Thirteenth-Century Debate Concerning the Reality of the Possibles,” Recherches de
théologie et philosophie médiévales 74 (2007): 483–522.
33 Quodl. i, q. 4, 43, ll. 14–18: “Ad istam quaestionem sine praeiudicio, immo cum debita
reverentia cuiuscumque opinionis, videtur mihi esse dicendum quod, si nullo modo differ-
rent realiter esssentia et esse in creaturis, non posset salvari creatio. Si tamen non differrent
realiter illo modo quo doctores quidam ponunt ea differre, posset nihilominus salvari
creatio.”
48 Gossiaux

James begins his analysis by explaining the meaning of the terms “essence”
and “esse.” By “essence” he has in mind any predicamental reality (res praedica-
mentalis) taken in itself and as distinct from others. As being in the unqualified
sense (ens simpliciter) is substance, so too when “essence” is said simply and
absolutely it refers to a thing (res) belonging to the category of substance. In
other words, it is the whole and complete nature of a thing. The term “esse,”
James notes, can be taken in three ways. Understood as a noun (nominaliter),
it means the same as essence. In a second way, “esse” can be understood as a
verb (verbaliter), inasmuch as it signifies the act of being (actus essendi). In
this sense, “esse” means the same as “to exist” (existere), and it signifies the
actual existence of a thing. In a third way, “esse” can be taken as a verb, not as
signifying existence, but rather the inherence of a predicate in a subject. In
this sense, “esse” functions as the logical copula, and it signifies the truth of
a proposition. In this text, James tells us, he will construe “esse” in the second
sense as the act of being. The issue thus becomes one of determining whether
creation requires a real distinction between a substantial essence and its act
of being.34
James goes on to present a thorough review of the main theories of his day.
He conjectures that the contemporary debate among theologians concerning
essence and esse has its origins in a dispute among philosophers concerning
the meaning of “being” (ens). This is reasonable, he thinks, since “esse” and
“ens” have the same meaning.35 According to James, the philosophers have spo-
ken about being (ens) in two different ways. On one side, Aristotle and Aver-
roes held that “being” signifies the essence of that of which it is said, so that a
thing is a being through its own essence (per suam essentiam).36 On the other
side, Avicenna maintained that “being” signifies an intention or disposition

34 Ibid., 44–45, ll. 28–85.

35 Ibid., 46, ll. 92–96: “Sicut de ente fuit diversus modus loquendi apud philosophos, sic et
de esse apud doctores modernos. Fortassis autem diversitas loquendi de ente origo fuit
et occasio diversimode loquendi de esse; et rationabiliter. Nam ens et esse idem viden-
tur importare, sicut legere et legens.” Cf. qdp, q. 1, 6, ll. 148–50: “Nam esse et ens idem
significare videntur, quia scilicet utrumque dicit actum existendi. Unde sicut esse idem
significat quod existere, sic ens idem quod existens.”
36 Quodl. i, q. 4, 46, ll. 98–101: “Aristoteles enim, in iv Metaphysicae, dicit quod ens significat
essentiam omnis eius de quo dicitur, ita quod unumquodque est et dicitur ens per suam
essentiam. Cui et eius commentator Averroes assentit declarans hoc necessario esse di-
cendum.” Here James has in mind Aristotle’s remark (1003b25–30) that “one man,” “man,”
and “existent man” all mean one and the same thing. For Averroes’s comment on this text,
see In Met., lib. 4, com. 3, ff. 66v–67r.
James of Viterbo on Metaphysics 49

superadded to an essence, such that a thing is a being not through its own es-
sence, but by means of an accident added to it (per aliquid superadditum).37
Similarly, theologians have spoken in various ways about esse. Some, draw-
ing inspiration from Aristotle and Averroes, claim that “esse” does not denote
a reality (res) other than essence. If essence and esse seem to differ in some
way, it is only in the order of reason (secundum rationem). Thus, according to
this first group of thinkers, the distinction between essence and existence is
merely conceptual.38 Other thinkers follow in the footsteps of Avicenna by
maintaining that esse denotes something superadded to essence. They dis-
agree, however, about what exactly is added by esse. Some hold that esse adds
a thing (res) to essence. According to this view, although an essence denotes
a certain actuality, this is not sufficient to ensure its actual existence. Thus in
order for an essence to exist, an additional actuality, namely, esse actuale, must
be added to it. Although it is added to an essence, one should not regard esse
as a predicamental accident; it pertains instead to the category of substance.
Esse is neither form, nor matter, nor something composed of matter and form,
but rather a certain superadded act by which the composite itself and every-
thing in it exists. One recognizes this theory, which conceives of esse as a thing
distinct from essence, to be a version of the real distinction defended by Giles
of Rome.39 A third group of thinkers, however, reject the claim that esse is a
res distinct from essence. According to their view, what esse adds to essence
is not something absolute, but rather a relation to God in the order of effi-
cient causality. Thus, esse differs from essence not really but only intentionally,

37 Quodl. i, q. 4, 46, ll. 102–07: “Avicenna vero dixit quod ens significat intentionem seu dis-
positionem superadditam illi de quo dicitur, ita quod unumquodque dicitur ens non per
essentiam suam, sed per aliquid superadditum, sicut res aliqua dicitur alba vel nigra per
aliquid superadditum, quod est accidens illi rei. Unde posuit quod ens dicit accidens sive
accidentalem dispositionem in eo de quo praedicatur.” James’s understanding of Avicen-
na is shaped by the famous rebuke addressed to him by Averroes at In Met., lib. 4, com.
2, f. 67r: “Avicenna autem peccauit multum in hoc, quod existimauit, quod vnum et ens
significant dispositiones additas essentiae rei.” Cf. qdp, q. 1, 5–6, ll. 128–34.
38 Quodl. i, q. 4, 46, ll. 108–11.
39 Ibid., 46, ll. 112–20: “Alii vero dicunt quod esse dicit rem aliam ab essentia. Nam, ut di-
cunt, licet essentia sit actualitas quaedam, ista tamen actualitas non sufficit ad hoc ut
res dicatur actu existere, sed oportet quod superaddatur ei quaedam alia actualitas; et
hoc vocatur esse actuale. Quod quidem non est accidens tamquam ad genus accidentis
pertinens, magis autem pertinet ad praedicamentum substantiae. Non tamen est forma
neque materia neque compositum ex his, sed est actus quidam superadditus per quem
compositum ipsum et omnia quae sunt in composito dicuntur existere. Et ita est res alia
ab essentia.”
50 Gossiaux

a distinction that is less than real but more than logical. As a source for this
theory James cites Robert Grosseteste, though he notes that later thinkers—
most likely he has in mind Henry of Ghent—have added some refinements to
it.40 With this James has distinguished the three main positions of his contem-
poraries on the essence-existence relation. Those who defend a merely logical
distinction draw their inspiration from Aristotle’s teaching on the nature of
being (ens), while those who prefer a real or an intentional distinction follow
more the lead of Avicenna.
Turning now to presenting his own view, James attempts to salvage the par-
tial truth that he finds in these three positions. He takes as his starting point the
following quote from Anselm: “Just as light (lux), to shine (lucere), and shining
(lucens) are related to each other, so too are essence (essentia), to be (esse),
and being (ens), i.e., existing (existens) or subsisting (subsistens).”41 James takes
Anselm to mean that essentia and esse are related to each other as an abstract
term to a concrete one. Consequently, in order to determine the kind of dis-
tinction that obtains between a created essence and its existence, one must see
how the significations of abstract and concrete terms differ.42 James observes
that a concrete term always signifies more than an abstract term, since the lat-
ter signifies only a form, while the former signifies both form and its subject.
Sometimes a concrete term signifies really more (plura secundum rem) than an
abstract term, as in the case of creatures, where form and its subject are really
distinct. At other times, the concrete signifies only conceptually more (plura

40 Ibid., 46–47, ll. 121–32: “Alii vero ponunt quod esse non dicit aliam rem ab essentia, ta-
men differt ab essentia intentione; quod quidem est differre minus quam re et plus quam
ratione. Nam, ut dicunt, esse dicit essentiam cum respectu ad agens; essentia autem cum
huiusmodi respectu non videtur dicere aliam rem a se ipsa sine huiusmodi respectu, sed
dicit aliam intentionem. Hunc autem modum dicendi videtur aliqualiter tangere Lin-
colniensis circa principium, ii Posteriorum. … Sed alii posteriores hunc modum dicendi
magis expresserunt et declaraverunt, et ad ipsum aliqua addiderunt.” For the text of Gros-
seteste, see his Commentarius in Posteriorum Analyticorum libros, lib. 2, c. 1, (ed.) Pietro
Rossi (Florence, 1981), 291–92.
41 Anselm, Monologion, c. 6, (ed.) F.S. Schmitt, Opera omnia 1 (Edinburgh, 1946), 20, ll. 15–16:
“Quemadmodum enim sese habent ad invicem lux et lucere et lucens, sic sunt ad se invi-
cem essentia et esse et ens, hoc est existens sive subsistens.”
42 Quodl. i, q. 4, 47, ll. 138–48: “Propter quod sciendum quod, sicut dicit Anselmus, Monolo-
gion 6 capitulo: ‘Sicut se habent ad invicem lux, lucere et lucens, sic sunt ad se invicem
essentia, esse et ens, hoc est existens sive subsistens.’ Per quam expositionem apparet
quod loquitur de esse existentiae actualis. Lux autem et lucere se habent ad invicem, sicut
concretum et abstractum. … Quare similiter esse et essentia se habent ad invicem sicut
concretum et abstractum; et ideo, sicut differt concretum a suo abstracto, sic differt esse
ab essentia.”
James of Viterbo on Metaphysics 51

secundum rationem) than the abstract. This is the case with God, in whom
form and subject are distinct only according to our mode of understanding.43
Moreover, while a concrete term signifies both form and subject, it does not
do so equally. First and foremost it signifies form, and only secondarily the
subject of that form. James supports this claim by appealing to the teaching
of Averroes and Anselm on denominative names. The latter are terms that de-
rive their name from another term, but differ from it in their ending. Some ex-
amples would be “white” (album), which is derived from “whiteness” (albedo),
and “literate” (grammaticus), which is derived from “literacy” (grammatica).
For Averroes a denominative name signifies both a subject and an accident,
but it signifies the accident primarily and the subject secondarily. For Anselm
such names signify an accident per se and a subject per aliud. James adds that
by “subject” one means not merely substance, but also everything which is
joined to an accident. Accordingly, when a concrete term is taken in its prima-
ry meaning, it signifies the same as an abstract term. In its secondary meaning,
however, a concrete term differs from an abstract term. In God such a differ-
ence is merely logical; in creatures it is real.44
Since “essence” and “esse” are related as the abstract to the concrete, James
reasons that when “esse” is taken in its primary meaning, it is the same as “es-
sence.” However, when one considers the secondary meaning of “esse,” one
sees that “esse” differs from “essence.” This difference is merely logical in the

43 Ibid., 47–48, ll. 150–58: “Ad quod videtur esse dicendum quod semper concretum plura
significat quam abstractum. Nam abstractum significat solum formam; concretum vero
significat formam et subiectum. Sed quandoque concretum significat plura secundum
rem quam abstractum, ut in creaturis, ubi non est idem forma et subiectum formae, nec
habens et quod habetur. Quandoque vero significat plura tantum secundum rationem, ut
in Deo, in quo idem est habens et quod habetur, et in quo non est aliud forma et subiec-
tum formae, nisi secundum modum intelligendi.”
44 Ibid., 48, ll. 158–70: “Licet autem concretum significet subiectum et formam, non tamen
aeque principaliter; sed primo et principaliter formam, ex consequenti autem subiectum.
Unde dicit Commentator, in v Metaphysicae, quod nomen denominativum, quod idem
est quod concretum, significat subiectum et accidens, sed accidens primo, subiectum
autem secundario. Et Anselmus dicit, in libro De Grammatico, quod nomen denominati-
vum significat accidens per se et subiectum per aliud. Et licet per subiectum intelligatur
substantia specialiter, tamen in nomine subiecti etiam includitur omne id cui accidens
est coniunctum. Et secundum hoc dicendum quod abstractum et concretum, quantum
ad principale significatum, idem significant et idem sunt; quantum vero ad id quod con-
cretum significat secundario, differt ab abstracto. In creaturis quidem non solum ratione
sed re; in Deo autem solum ratione.” For the reference to Averroes, see Averroes, In Met.,
lib. 5, com. 14, f. 117r. For Anselm, see De grammatico, (ed.) Schmitt, Opera Omnia 1, 156–57
and 159–61.
52 Gossiaux

case of God; in creatures the difference is real. According to James, “esse” in a

creature signifies primarily its essence, and secondarily everything which must
be joined to the essence if it is to exist actually. What James has in mind here
are all of the accidents that must accompany a substantial essence if it is to
possess actual existence. In a very qualified sense, therefore, James defends a
real distinction between the essence of a creature and its existence.45
Although James defends a theory of real distinction, his understanding of
this is quite different from the theories of Thomas Aquinas and Giles of Rome.
What James intends is a composition, not of essence and existential act, but
one that remains within the order of essence. According to James, every exist-
ing creature must have within itself some form of metaphysical composition.
No created essence can exist in act by itself and in isolation (solitaria), but it
is always joined to another essence with which it enters into real composition.
Thus, an accident exists only as joined to a substance, and a substance exists
only as it is joined to an accident. In James’s view, this is the same composition
that Boethius had in mind when he spoke of a distinction between esse and id
quod est. James understands the Boethian esse to mean essence, and id quod est
to mean ens. Since James himself identifies esse and ens, he takes the Boethian
distinction to be the same as his own distinction between essence and esse.
And since id quod est is said to be the supposit, he concludes that just as nature
differs from supposit, so essence differs from esse.46
In formulating this theory, James thinks that he has found a way to preserve
what is true in the teachings of Aristotle and Avicenna on being. Since he re-
gards “ens” and “esse” as concrete terms, James finds truth in Aristotle’s claim
that anything is a being through its own essence, since “being” in its primary
meaning is the same as essence. However, there is also truth in Avicenna’s
claim that a thing is a being through something superadded to it, since “being”
in its secondary meaning signifies everything that must be added to an essence
if it is to exist actually.47
In a similar way, James thinks that he is able to preserve the partial truth
found in the three main positions of his day on essence and existence. The

45 Quodl. i, q. 4, 48, ll. 173–79: “Cum igitur, ut ex dictis patet, essentia et esse se habeant sicut
abstractum et concretum, quantum ad principale significatum idem sunt, quantum vero
ad secundarium, in Deo quidem differunt solum secundum rationem, in creaturis autem
differunt etiam secundum rem, ita quod esse significat principaliter ipsam essentiam; ex
consequenti autem omne quod essentiae coniunctum est et sine quo essentia non inveni-
tur nec inveniri potest in actu. Et hoc in creaturis est aliud secundum rem ab essentia.”
46 Ibid., 48–49, ll. 180–98.
47 Ibid., 52–53, ll. 320–42.
James of Viterbo on Metaphysics 53

thesis of the logical distinction, defended by Godfrey, is true if one keeps in

mind the primary meaning of “esse.” However, in its failure to take into ac-
count the secondary meaning of “esse,” it becomes problematic.48 With re-
spect to Giles’s theory of the real distinction, James finds it reasonable, though
he has some qualms about Giles’s way of expounding it. That esse is a certain
actuality superadded to an essence—which is neither matter, nor form, nor
a compound of the two, nor an accident—he finds doubtful, since no argu-
ment compels one to hold this, nor can any authority be found to support this
claim. Nevertheless, out of respect for Giles, James does not reject it as false or
impossible.49 Finally, James also finds some truth in Henry’s theory. Although
James does not appear to have accepted Henry’s claim that there is an inten-
tional distinction that is somehow intermediate between the logical and real
distinctions, he does agree with Henry in affirming that “esse” in its secondary
meaning adds to essence a relation to God as to an efficient cause. However,
“esse” denotes much more than this, since it also includes all the individuating
accidents that are needed for actual existence. Thus, what Henry says is true,
but it does not give a sufficient account of the matter.50
In sum, James defends a compromise position. When “esse” is viewed in its
primary meaning, the distinction between the essence of the creature and its
existence is only conceptual; however, when “esse” is viewed in its secondary
meaning, the distinction is real. In a highly qualified sense, therefore, one may
speak of James as an advocate of the real distinction. According to James, the
doctrine of creation requires a real distinction between essence and esse, since
in all creatures there is found a composition of act and potency. However, he
does not think that this requires one to follow Giles by positing esse as a de-
terminate actuality superadded to essence. In order to preserve the composi-
tion of act and potency in creatures, it is sufficient to appeal to a distinction
between substance and accidents. For in everything that is composed it is
necessary that one element be primary and perfect, and the others secondary
and imperfect. That which is primary and perfect has the character of an act,
while what is secondary and imperfect has the character of a potency, since it
depends upon another. In a creature it is the substantial essence that has the
character of an act; simply and absolutely speaking, accidents have the char-
acter of a potency, since they are secondary and imperfect and depend upon
substance as on a cause of their being.51

48 Ibid., 54, ll. 363–67.

49 Ibid., 54, ll. 368–84.
50 Ibid., 54–56, ll. 385–427.
51 Ibid., 57–58, ll. 486–500.
54 Gossiaux

2.5 The Metaphysics of Substance and Accidents

In considering James’s views on the analogy of being, we saw that he distin-

guishes two different levels on which analogy occurs. When “being” is viewed
in its widest generality, it is predicated analogously of God and creatures;
when it is taken in a more restricted sense, it is predicated analogously of sub-
stance and accidents. One might refer to the former as “theological analogy,”
as it serves to explain how names drawn from creatures may be predicated of
God, and the latter as “predicamental analogy,” since it explains how “being” is
predicated in different ways of the Aristotelian categories.
James offers a brief analysis of predicamental analogy in Quodlibet iii, ques-
tion 3. In this text he identifies four ways in which something might be called a
being (ens). In the first way, being might belong to something simply and abso-
lutely (esse simpliciter). This is the manner in which a substance has being. But
in a second way, being might belong to something not simply, but in a qualified
sense (esse aliquid), insofar as it has an attribution to substance. Here James
has in mind absolute accidents. In a third way, something might be called a
being not because it has being in either of these two senses, but rather because
it is attributed to something having being simply or in a qualified sense as a
relation or circumstance of it. This is how all relative accidents enjoy being.
Fourthly, something might be said to be a being in none of these ways, but
rather because it is attributed negatively (remotive) to something having being.
It is in this way that privations and negations are called beings.52
In this text, James affirms a distinction between substance and accidents.
The former enjoys being in an unqualified sense; the latter are beings only
by an attribution to substance. Moreover, within the accidental order, James
draws a distinction between absolute accidents, which denote some positive
feature of a substance when it is viewed in itself, and relative accidents, which
denote relations or circumstances of that substance. For a more complete

52 Quodl. iii, q. 3, 49, ll. 91–106: “Nam quatuor modis dicitur aliquid ens. Uno modo quia ei
convenit esse simpliciter et sine attributione ad aliud. Et hoc modo substantia dicitur ens.
Alio modo quia ei convenit esse non tamen simpliciter, sed esse ad aliud [lege: aliquid] et
per attributionem ad aliud. Et hoc modo quodlibet accidens absolute dicitur ens. … Tertio
modo dicitur aliquid ens non quia dicat esse simpliciter nec etiam esse aliquid, sed solum
quia attribuitur alicui habenti esse simpliciter vel aliquid tamquam eius habitudo sive
circumstantia. Et hoc modo dicuntur entia omnia illa quae dicunt respectum vel habitu-
dinem. Quarto modo dicitur aliquid ens, non quia dicat esse simpliciter, nec esse aliquid,
nec quia habeat attributionem aliquam positive ad aliquid cui convenit esse, sed dicitur
ens quia remotive attribuitur alicui habenti esse. Et hoc modo privationes et negationes
dicuntur entia.”
James of Viterbo on Metaphysics 55

enumeration of the various kinds of accidents, it is helpful to turn to James’s

texts on the categories.53
James discusses the nature of the categories in Quaestiones de divinis prae-
dicamentis, question 6. Before presenting his own view, however, he criticizes
two positions defended by his contemporaries. The first view, maintained by
Henry of Ghent, introduces a distinction between the res praedicamenti and
the ratio praedicamenti, and then claims that a category is constituted from
these two elements, as if from a material principle and a formal principle. By a
res praedicamenti is meant a quiddity differing from its being; the modus prae-
dicamenti refers to the mode of being by which something is said to belong to
a category. According to this view, a category denotes a thing (res) distinct from
its being with a determinate mode of being.54
James finds fault with this theory for two reasons. First, one should not say
that a category itself is a thing; rather, a category is a thing as it is conceived by
the intellect and signified in language.55 Second, James rejects the claim that
categories could be constituted or composed of a quiddity (res praedicamenti)
and a mode of being (ratio praedicamenti). For a thing (res) and a mode do not
enter into composition. Moreover, a ratio praedicamenti is a quasi-definition
and explanatory description (intellectus explicitus) of the category itself. While
a definition has parts, they do not make a composition with the thing being de-
fined. So too the ratio praedicamenti describes the category and helps to make
it known, but it does not make a composition with it.56

53 For an extended analysis of James’s theory of the categories, see my “James of Viterbo on
the Nature and Division of the Categories,” Quaestiones Disputatae 4 (2014): 167–90.
54 qdp, q. 6, 161, ll. 486–96: “Circa quod sciendum quod quidam distinguunt rem praedica-
menti et rationem praedicamenti; ex quibus duobus dicunt constitui praedicamentum,
quasi ex materiali et formali. Res autem praedicamenti est quidditas differens a suo esse,
sicut homo est res praedicamenti. Ratio vero praedicamenti est modus essendi secundum
quem aliquid dicitur esse in praedicamento. Et secundum hoc distinguuntur praedica-
menta, scilicet secundum huiusmodi rationes vel modos essendi. Et sic secundum istos
praedicamentum est aliquid constitutum, et compositum ex quidditate ab esse distante
et determinato aliquo modo essendi. Unde dicit rem distantem ab esse cum determinato
modo essendi.” For this in Henry of Ghent, see Summa quaestionum ordinariarum, a. 32,
q. 5, (ed.) Raymond Macken, Opera Omnia 27 (Leuven, 1991), 79–81; Quodl. v, q. 2, (ed.)
Badius, f. 154r–v. For helpful discussion of Henry’s theory, see Mark G. Henninger, Rela-
tions: Medieval Theories 1250–1325 (Oxford, 1989), 48–52; Giorgio Pini, Categories and Logic
in Duns Scotus (Leiden, 2002), 144–46; Pickavé, “Henry of Ghent on Individuation, Es-
sence, and Being,” 201–04.
55 qdp, q. 6, 161–62, ll. 497–506.
56 Ibid., 162, ll. 507–18: “Secundo vero, quia res et modus non faciunt compositionem, li-
cet modus possit dicere aliquem compositionem. Modus enim praedicamenti est ratio
56 Gossiaux

A second theory maintains that a category is a primary, irreducible mode of

being, since categories are that into which being immediately descends. This
appears to be the view of Giles of Rome. James rejects it, since it implies that
categories are things.57
James’s own view on the categories draws heavily upon Simplicius. A cat-
egory is not a thing, nor a mere word, but rather a thing together with the ex-
pression (dictio) that signifies it; it is a signifying expression (dictio significati-
va) precisely as significative. In a broad sense (generaliter), a category is a word
or signifying concept as such, which is predicated or able to be predicated of
something. Understood more strictly (proprie), the categories are those predi-
cates that are most universal (maxime universalia), namely, the most general
predicates (generalissima) to which all others can be reduced.58 Accordingly,

praedicamenti. Ratio autem praedicamenti est quasi definitio et intellectus explicitus

ipsius praedicamenti. … Sicut ergo definitio ipsa composita est, non tamen facit compo-
sitionem cum definito, sed est explicatio quaedam definiti, sic modus praedicamenti vel
ratio se habet ad praedicamentum.”
57 Ibid., 163, ll. 530–33: “Quidam dicunt quod praedicamentum est modus essendi princi-
palis, non reductus in alium modum quia praedicamenta sunt in quae immediate de-
scendit ens. Hoc non est bene dictum, quia sic praedicamentum esset ipsa res.” Cf. Giles
of Rome, De mensura angelorum, q. 4 (Venice, 1503; repr. Frankfurt a. M., 1968), f. 46vab:
“Propter quod sciendum quod praedicamenta sunt illa in quae immediate descendit ens
sine differentia media. Praedicamenta igitur ex modis essendi oportet sumi et ex modis
essendi principalibus: quia si non diceret praedicamentum quemdam modum princi-
palem, sed diceret modum essendi reductum, tunc in illud praedicamentum non imme-
diate descenderet ens, sed descenderet ens in tale praedicamentum mediante illo modo
essendi in quod reduceretur praedicamentum illud. Si igitur praedicamenta sunt partes
entis, oportet quod dicant quosdam modos essendi. Rursus, si praedicamenta sunt illa
in quae immediate descendit ens, oportet quod dicant modos essendi principales non
reductos in alios.”
58 qdp, q. 6, 163–64, ll. 534–83, esp. ll. 534–63: “Et ideo aliter dicendum de praedicamento, si-
cut dicit Simplicius, in Praedicamentis, quod praedicamentum non est res ipsa secundum
se, sed est res cum dictione significante ipsam, vel dictio significativa secundum quod
significativa. … Sic igitur praedicamentum dicitur generaliter omnis dictio vel concep-
tio significativa secundum quod significativa, praedicata vel nata praedicari de aliquo. …
Proprie autem dicitur praedicamentum, si sit universale et de pluribus dictum, sicut idem
Simplicius dicit. Sic enim sumitur hic, secundum quod de pluribus dicitur. Nam praedica-
mentum dicitur, secundum ipsum, tamquam de subiecto dictum. Subicitur autem quod
particulare; praedicatur autem quod universale est. … Et secundum hoc quanto aliqua
sunt magis universalia, tanto magis proprie dicuntur praedicamenta. Et ideo, licet quodli-
bet universale possit dici praedicamentum, tamen specialiter illa quae sunt maxime uni-
versalia, scilicet generalissima ad quae omnia reducuntur, dicuntur praedicamenta.” For
this in Simplicius, see his Commentaire sur les Catégories, vol. 1, 14.
James of Viterbo on Metaphysics 57

the categories are not species of being (for being is not a genus); rather they
enumerate the various ways in which being can be said.59 Since James regards
language and the structure of reality as isomorphic, he understands the cat-
egories to provide a classification of the most universal predicates and of the
primary genera of real beings.
James undertakes a derivation of the ten categories in Quaestiones de divinis
praedicamentis, question 7. There he follows the lead of Boethius, and divides
them into two classes. In so doing, he parts company with Simplicius and Giles
of Rome, who prefer a division into three classes.60 According to James, the
division of the categories into two classes can be carried out in two ways. The
first involves a division into substance and accidents. James notes that every-
thing that is predicated of something signifies either being in itself (ens per
se), or being in another (ens in alio). While the former indicates substance, the
latter is not precisely equivalent to accident. For “being in another” extends
more widely than “accident,” since every accident is in another, although not
everything which is in another is an accident. Here James has in mind divine
relations, which are in the persons of the Trinity, yet are not accidents. Conse-
quently, what is in another is an accident if and only if it depends upon that
other. Thus, James concludes that the definition of accident (ratio accidentis),
insofar as it signifies a first intention, is being in another with dependence in
being (esse in alio cum dependentia essendi).61
James also points out another way of arriving at the distinction between sub-
stance and accidents, which involves a more direct appeal to diversity in their

59 Cf. qdp, q. 7, 193, ll. 202–04: “Ens enim, sicut dictum est, non est genus, nec etiam totum ad
praedicamenta. Et ideo praedicamenta non dicuntur proprie nec partes nec species entis,
sed magis significata entis.”
60 Simplicius divides the ten categories into three groups, namely, existences (existentiae),
potencies (potentiae), and acts (actus). See his Commentaire sur les Catégories, vol. 1, 90–
91. Giles of Rome presents a detailed analysis of the categories in De mensura angelorum,
q. 4, ff. 44r–50v, where he explains that a category denotes either a thing (res), or an order
(ordo), or a thing and order (res et ordo). According to Giles, those categories that indicate
things are substance, quantity, and quality. Relation denotes merely an order, while the
remaining six categories signify the various ways in which one thing may be ordered to
another.
61 qdp, q. 7, 201–02, ll. 396–429, esp. ll. 414–21: “Omne quod praedicatur, vel significat ens
per se et sic substantia, vel in alio et sic omnia alia a substantia. Et non dico accidens. Hoc
enim quod dico ‘in alio’ potest accipi generalius quam secundum quod convenit acci-
denti. Licet enim omne accidens sit in alio, non tamen omne quod est in alio est accidens.
Nam relationes divinae sunt in Personis, et tamen non sunt accidentia. Unde, ex hoc quod
est esse in alio, non habet aliquid quod sit accidens nisi addatur aliud sic esse in alio, ut
dependens ab alio.”
58 Gossiaux

respective modes of predication. A category, he notes, is something said of a

subject. Since the ultimate subject of predication is first substance, one may
distinguish the various categories by their relations to first substance. Some-
times a predicate determines the quiddity and essence of first substance, either
in part or in whole. In that case, the predicate belongs to the category of sub-
stance. Other categories, however, do not determine the essences of first sub-
stances, but rather accompany them. These are accidents, although James
notes that the notion of “not determining” is wider in extension than that of
accident. Once again, relation in God does not determine the essence of any
divine person, and so it is not an accident in God; instead, it merely indicates a
distinctive property of that person.62
Having shown how the categories can be divided into substance and acci-
dents, James next introduces a second and, in his view, better way of dividing
the categories, which also has its origins in Boethius. According to this second
division, some categories denote a thing (res), while others signify the circum-
stances of a thing (circumstantiae rei). Categories that denote a thing signify
something of the being (esse) of a thing, that is, they tell us something about an
object considered purely in itself. For example, one might say of Socrates that
he is a man, or white, or large. Predicates of this kind belong to the “absolute”
categories, as they do not relate their subject to something else. By contrast,
categories that denote the circumstances of a thing do not tell us about the
being of a thing in itself, but only as that thing is compared to another. Hence
these categories assign something extrinsic to their subject.63

62 Ibid., 202–03, ll. 430–62: “Possumus autem et aliter rationem huius divisionis assignare.
… Praedicamentum enim est quod de aliquo subiecto dicitur. Nam a prima substantia
nulla est praedicatio. Illud ergo quod subicitur praedicamentis est prima substantia a qua
nulla est praedicatio. … Praedicamenta ergo diversimode comparantur ad primam sub-
stantiam quae subicitur omnibus. Et secundum hanc diversam comparationem accipitur
ratio huius divisionis. Nam quaedam praedicamenta determinant quidditatem primae
substantiae et essentiam, vel partem vel totum. Et hoc pertinet ad praedicamentum sub-
stantiae. Quaedam autem non determinant sed concomitantur essentiam. Et haec dicun-
tur accidentia: licet non determinare sit in plus quam accidens proprie sumptum. Nam
etiam relatio in divinis non determinat essentiam cuiuscumque Personae, sed solum pro-
prietatem distinctivam.”
63 Ibid., 204, ll. 469–79. “Alius vero modus dicendi est, quia entia quaedam dicunt rem,
quaedam vero circumstantias rei. … Illa dicuntur significare rem quae significant aliquid
quo illud, de quo fit praedicatio, dicitur esse, sicut Sor dicitur homo qua humanitate est
homo. Et similiter albus et magnus. Et haec sunt tria praedicamenta quae sunt praedica-
menta absoluta. Illa vero dicunt circumstantias rei quae significant aliquid quo res non
dicitur esse, nec demonstratur per huiusmodi praedicationem aliquid esse, illud de quo
fit huiusmodi praedicatio, sed solum ad aliud comparari. Ideo dicitur extrinsecus aliquid
James of Viterbo on Metaphysics 59

Developing this second division in more detail, James notes that those pred-
icates that denote a thing may signify a subsisting thing (res subsistens), that is,
something which is said to be in an unqualified sense (esse simpliciter). In this
case the predicate belongs to the category of substance. However, a predicate
that denotes a thing might signify merely an inhering thing (res inhaerens),
that is, something by which a thing has being in a qualified sense (esse aliquid).
This may occur because the predicate is a measure of that subject, or because
it informs or disposes the subject in some way. In the case of the former, the
predicate belongs to the category of quantity; in the case of the latter, it de-
notes a quality. Consequently, James distinguishes three categories that signify
a thing (res), namely, substance, quantity, and quality.64
The remaining seven categories denote circumstances of a thing. They in-
dicate various ways in which a substance is related to others. The category of
relation denotes a reference (habitudo) in the general and unqualified sense,
while other categories predicate particular or determinate references. Thus
the categories of where (ubi) and when (quando) indicate a reference of one
thing to another with respect to a limit or a boundary; action and passion sig-
nify references with respect to causal influence; possession (habitus) denotes
a reference in accordance with some attachment and conjunction; and posi-
tion (situs) signifies a reference with an ordering and disposition. These seven
categories are not things (res) in their own right, but rather modes of a thing.65
From a survey of these texts it is evident that James regards substance as
being in the simple and absolute sense: it is a thing that possesses being by
virtue of itself. By contrast, accidents enjoy being by virtue of the fact that they
inhere in and depend upon substance. Within the accidental order, James dis-
tinguishes between absolute accidents (such as quantity and quality), which
are things that have being by inhering in substance, and relative accidents,
which are not things in their own right but mere modes of substance or abso-
lute accidents. James summarizes his teaching very succinctly in Quaestiones

assignare: et ideo dicunt circumstantias rei.” Cf. Boethius, De Trinitate, c. 4, in De consola-

tione philosophiae et opuscula theologica, (ed.) Claudio Moreschini (Munich and Leipzig,
2005), 173–77.
64 qdp, q. 7, 205, ll. 491–500. “Si enim dicit rem, vel dicit rem subsistentem vel per se exis-
tentem, vel inhaerentem. Si primo modo, sic est substantia. Si secundo modo, vel inhae-
ret sicut mensura subsistentis, sic quantitas, vel disponens et informans, et sic qualitas.
Dicitur autem praedicamentum substantiae subsistere, quia est ratio subsistendi primae
substantiae. Vel aliter. Quia ea quae dicunt rem, vel dicunt aliquid quo res de qua dicitur
absolute dicitur esse, sic substantia, vel quo non dicitur esse, sed esse aliquid; et hoc du-
pliciter, vel mensuratum vel informatum sive dispositum.”
65 Ibid., 208–09, ll. 574–602.
60 Gossiaux

de divinis praedicamentis, question 8. There he identifies five differences be-

tween substance and accidents: (1) substance is being in the full and complete
sense (ens perfectum), while an accident is incomplete in its being (ens im-
perfectum); (2) substance is being absolutely (ens absolutum), while accidents
are dependent in their being (ens dependens); (3) substance is primary being
(ens primum), while accidents are being in a secondary and posterior manner
(ens secundarium et posterius); (4) substance is a cause of other things (ens
causativum aliorum), while an accident is something caused (quid causatum);
and (5) substance is being simply and without addition (ens simpliciter et sine
additione), while an accident is a being in a qualifed sense, with addition and
attribution to another (ens secundum quid et cum additione et attributione ad
aliud). Because of the incompleteness and the weakness of its being, an acci-
dent requires substance as a cause of its existence and its conservation.66

2.6 The Problem of Individuation

The “problem of individuation” involves a cluster of questions that exercised

the ingenuity of many medieval thinkers.67 The core issue concerns the nature
of individuality: what does it mean for something to be an individual? Often
the problem is framed as that of explaining how it is possible for one and the
same species to be divided into individuals. Moreover, since an individual can-
not be divided into parts of the same kind (in other words, it does not admit di-
vision into subjective parts), and is distinct from others of the same kind, there
is also a need to explain the numerical unity and the numerical distinction of
individuals. Unfortunately, James did not leave behind a detailed account of
individuation, but one can reconstruct the outlines of his position from the
various remarks that he makes in several texts.
James’s first discussion of individuation is found in Quodlibet i, question
21. There he is asked whether, if the soul at the resurrection were to reassume
other ashes, a man would be numerically the same as he was previously. This
question leads him to examine the cause of numerical unity in material things.

66 qdp, q. 8, 240–43, ll. 364–441.

67 For an overview of late-medieval discussions of individuation, see Peter King, “The Prob-
lem of Individuation in the Middle Ages,” Theoria 66 (2000): 159–84; Jorge J.E. Gracia (ed.),
Individuation in Scholasticism: The Later Middle Ages and the Counter-Reformation 1150–
1650 (Albany, ny, 1994); Martin Pickavé, “The Controversy over the Principle of Individu-
ation in Quodlibeta (1277–ca. 1320): A Forest Map,” in Theological Quodlibeta in the Middle
Ages: The Fourteenth Century, (ed.) Christopher Schabel (Leiden, 2007), 17–79.
James of Viterbo on Metaphysics 61

James observes that in common usage the terms “one in number” and “indi-
vidual” are thought to be synonymous. However, if one carefully considers the
definitions of these terms, insofar as they have been handed down by more
ancient writers (ab antiquioribus), one discovers that what makes something
an individual is not the same as what makes it one in number, although every-
thing that is individual is one in number. In the present text, however, James
indicates that he will take the cause of numerical unity to be the same as the
cause of individuation.68
James then proceeds to review four theories that have been advanced to ex-
plain numerical unity in material things. One theory holds that it is the agent
that is the cause of numerical unity, on the grounds that the cause of a thing’s
entity should also be the cause of its unity. A second theory maintains that it
is the accidents existing in the composite that are the cause of its numerical
unity. Among these, quantity plays the chief role, inasmuch as it belongs to
quantity to be “this” (hoc) and an individual. A third theory identifies the cause
as matter, either simply and absolutely, or as it is subject to indeterminate di-
mensions. A fourth theory locates the cause of numerical unity in substantial
form. Each of these theories is thought to be problematic in some respects,
and so James proposes his own view, in which he attempts to preserve what
he considers to be well said by others. He thinks it is reasonable to hold that
form as well as matter are the primary causes of numerical unity in composite
substances, though in different ways. Quantity also contributes in some way
to numerical unity, while other accidents indicate numerical unity but do not
cause it.69
James explains his position by distinguishing two senses in which some-
thing can be said to be numerically one. In the first sense, something is nu-
merically one by reason of singularity only, that is, because it is a “this.” In the
second sense, something is numerically one by reason of perfection and total-
ity, such that it is not only a “this” but also something whole and complete in a
species.70 James observes that when numerical unity is understood in terms of
singularity, it is not form which functions as its cause, but matter. Since matter
is a receptacle for everything else and is not received in another, it is a “this” by
itself and a cause of the singularity of other things. James concedes, however,
that dimensive quantity also contributes to this kind of numerical unity. For

68 Quodl. i, q. 21, 223, ll. 13–24.

69 Ibid., 223–26, ll. 25–106.
70 Ibid., 227, ll. 132–35: “Unum enim numero dupliciter dicitur. Uno modo ratione singulari-
tatis tantum, ut quia est hoc et singulare. Alio modo ratione perfectionis et totalitatis, ut
quia non solum est hoc, sed est aliquod totum et perfectum in aliqua specie.”
62 Gossiaux

just as quantity has its own special and proper mode of division and indivision,
so too it has a special and proper mode of unity. It was on account of this that
Aristotle taught that one sense in which something is said to be one is because
it is continuous; the more truly continuous an object is, the more truly it is one.
However, the unity that a thing has in virtue of being continuous pertains to
numerical unity, and especially to that by reason of singularity, the cause of
which is matter. For just as among accidents quantity most of all follows upon
matter, so the unity which properly belongs to quantity follows upon the unity
which belongs to matter and to the composite by reason of matter. Therefore,
when numerical unity is understood in terms of singularity, one should dis-
tinguish between two kinds of unity in material things: (1) a substantial unity
which is due to matter; and (2) an accidental unity the cause of which is dimen-
sive quantity. According to James, (1) is more fundamental (principalior) than
(2). And so matter is the cause of the numerical unity of quantity, inasmuch
as quantity is received in matter, while quantity is the cause of the numeri-
cal unity of matter, inasmuch as matter is distended by quantity. In this way
James finds reasonable the claim made by some that matter as it is subject to
indeterminate dimensions is the cause of individuation or numerical unity.71
On the other hand, when numerical unity is understood in terms of perfection
and totality, it is form, not matter, that is the cause of numerical unity, for any
perfection and act that a material composite possesses is due to its form.72
In sum, James has argued that the individuation of material substances is
caused primarily by their substantial principles. Matter accounts for the singu-
larity of a material object, while quantity contributes in an accidental manner
by distending matter and rendering it continuous. Substantial form is also a
cause of individuation insofar as it confers actuality and perfection in being.
Although the individuation of accidents is not explicitly discussed in this text,
James does lay down a principle that could be used for its solution, namely,
that what is received in another is individuated by that other. Thus it would
appear that it is the subject which accounts for the singularity of an accident.

71 Ibid., 227–28, ll. 136–65, esp ll. 154–59: “Et sic in rebus materialibus, ad unitatem nu-
meralem quae attenditur ratione singularitatis, concurrit duplex unitas. Una quidem
substantialis vel essentialis, cuius materia est causa. Alia vero accidentalis, cuius causa
est quantitas dimensiva. Sed prima est principalior secunda. Ex quo etiam videtur se-
qui, quod et materia sit causa unitatis numeralis ipsi quantitati, in quantum recipitur in
materia, sicut et alia quae sunt in composito. Et econverso quantitas sit causa unitatis
numeralis ipsi materiae, in quantum distenditur per quantitatem.” For Aristotle’s account
of the different senses of unity, see Metaphysics 5.6 and 10.1.
72 Quodl. i, q. 21, 228, ll. 170–75.
James of Viterbo on Metaphysics 63

In Quaestiones de divinis praedicamentis, question 14, James makes some

brief remarks about individuation while discussing the nature of a supposit.
According to James, there are three requirements for a supposit. The first is that
it must exist really and actually; in this way a supposit is distinguished from
what possesses merely being in the mind, such as a universal. Since e­ verything
that exists actually and extra-mentally is singular, it follows that a supposit must
be a singular. However, James cautions that not every singular is a supposit, for
“singular” is predicated of a single form, such as this humanity (haec humani-
tas) or this whiteness (haec albedo), but neither of these is a supposit.73
A second requirement for a supposit is that it must be a compound of sub-
stance and accidents. This implies that a supposit is not merely something sin-
gular, but an individual. James clarifies this by distinguishing two meanings for
the term “individual.” First, it could refer to something that is singular (for ex-
ample, “this whiteness”), and this is what is usually meant in discussions of the
cause of individuation. But in a second meaning, “individual” signifies a whole
that can be conformed to no other thing. In this sense what is merely singular
is not necessarily individual, for what is singular can be similar to and con-
formed to others; for example, this whiteness can be similar to another white-
ness. But an individual as such must be totally dissimilar to all other things.
Thus, it must be characterized not by a single form, but rather by an aggregate
of features. The aggregate as a whole can be found only in a single instance;
viewed as a totality it cannot be similar to or conformed to another, although
some of its features may be common to other things.74
However, individuals are not merely dissimilar, but are also numerically dis-
tinct. James notes that some think that the numerical distinction of individu-
als requires substance-accident composition, for they regard accidents as the
cause of the numerical distinction of substances. Thus, if Socrates and Plato
did not possess distinct accidents, they would not differ numerically. James
rejects this, for the diversity of accidents in two individuals is itself caused
by a diversity in substance. Accidents therefore are not a cause of numerical

73 qdp, q. 14, 177–78, ll. 298–315.

74 Ibid., 178–80, ll. 316–55, esp. ll. 343–55: “Individuum enim uno modo sumitur pro singulari.
Et sic haec albedo dicitur individuum; et sic solet sumi, cum quaeritur quae est causa
individuationis. Alio modo dicitur individuum quod secundum se totum nulli alii potest
esse conforme. Illud enim quod singulare est, potest esse alii simile et conforme, ut haec
albedo alii albedini. Et ideo ita est singulare quod non individuum. Sed illud quod non
est per omnia conforme alii, hoc est individuum. Hoc autem non est unum solum, sed est
collectio multorum. Nam, si accipis unam formam tantum, illa est conformis alii, vel actu
vel natura; actu ut homo, natura ut sol; et ideo est universale. Sed individuum debet esse
non conforme, nec actu nec natura; et ideo multa oportet ipsum colligere.”
64 Gossiaux

diversity, but rather a sign of it. The numerical distinction of two individu-
als requires that all the features of the one individual be numerically different
from those of the other.75
The distinction between singularity and individuality is found again in
Quodlibet ii, question 1. There James presents and criticizes the view of some
of his contemporaries that among accidents only quantity is able to exist with-
out a subject. These thinkers maintain that what exists in act must be a “this”
and an individual. They go on to argue that if something requires another for
its individuality, then it cannot exist without that other. But all accidents other
than quantity are individuated by their subject; consequently, they cannot ex-
ist independently of their subject. Quantity does not require a subject for its
individuation; it is by itself a “this” and an individual. Thus quantity can exist
miraculously without its subject. In support of their claim that quantity is self-
individuating, these thinkers point to two characteristics of quantity: first, it
is something designated both temporally and locally, while other things are
designated through quantity; and second, it is divisible (partibile) and capable
of being multiplied (plurificabile), while other things are multiplied through
quantity.76
In James’s view, however, the claim that quantity is individuated by itself
and not by its subject is dubious. Indeed, when one considers the meaning of
the term “individual,” one sees that quantity is no more self-individuating than
other accidents are. According to James, philosophers have distinguished two
ways in which something can be an individual: (1) as a singular thing, such as
this humanity (haec humanitas) or this whiteness (haec albedo); or (2) as a
whole that can be conformed to no other thing. When individuality is under-
stood in this second way, it adds something to the singular, for what is singular
could be conformed to another; for example, this whiteness could be similar to
that whiteness. However, an individual in its totality must be completely dis-
similar to all other things. It consists not in a single form, but in a collection of
many forms, which can be found together only in a single instance.77

75 Ibid., 181, ll. 383–87: “Et sic de ratione individui est et diversitas numeralis et dissimilitudo,
tamen diversimode, quia omnia quae sunt in uno individuo, sunt alia numero ab his quae
sunt in alio. Non omnia tamen sunt dissimilia, nisi simul accepta.”
76 Quodl. ii, q. 1, 14–15, ll. 325–61.
77 Ibid., 15–16, ll. 362–75: “Sed hoc dictum, scilicet quod quantitas se ipsa individuetur et non
per subiectum, videtur dubitabile et in se et in suis rationibus. In se quidem dubitabile
est, quia non videtur magis competere individuatio quantitati quam ceteris accidenti-
bus. Quod sic patet. Individuum enim dupliciter solet accipi a philosophis, quantum ad
propositum pertinet. Uno enim modo sumitur individuum pro singulari; et sic dicitur
quod haec humanitas et haec albedo est individua. Alio modo dicitur individuum quod
James of Viterbo on Metaphysics 65

James goes on to note that in neither of these two ways of understanding

the individual is quantity individuated by itself. Not in the first way, for what is
singular is either (i) not able to be received in another (and then it is individual
and singular by itself), or (ii) it is receivable in another (and then it is individu-
ated by that in which it is received). Since quantity, like all accidents, is able to
be received in another, it is individual and singular through that in which it is
received, and not by itself. Moreover, when individuality is understood in the
second way, quantity is not of itself an individual, since it is a single form and
not a collection of many.78
James also finds doubtful the reasons brought forward by others to s­ upport
the claim that quantity is self-individuating. First, quantity is not of itself
something designated (and hence singular), since it is receivable in another
and thus owes its singularity to that in which it is received. Secondly, one
should not conflate divisibility and plurification with individuation. Although
quantity of itself possesses divisibility, individuation belongs to it by means of
the subject in which it is received. Therefore, James concludes, all accidents
are individuated by their subject.79
In the texts that we have considered, James’s concern has been with mate-
rial substances. However, the individuation of immaterial substances (such as
angels) was an important issue for James’s contemporaries. Indeed, for those
who maintained that individuation occurs through matter, it was not easy to

secundum se totum nulli alii potest esse conforme; et sic sumptum individuum addit
supra singulare. Illud enim quod est singulare, potest esse alii conforme, ut haec albedo
huic albedini. Illud autem quod hoc secundo modo dicitur individuum, non potest esse
alii per omnia conforme. Unde individuum hoc modo sumptum non est aliqua res una et
simplex, sed est multarum formarum collectio.”
78 Ibid., 16, ll. 379–88: “Sed neutro modo accipiendo individuum, quantitas individuatur se
ipsa. Accipiendo enim individuum primo modo, scilicet pro singulari, quantitas non indi-
viduatur se ipsa, quia illud quod dicitur singulare, vel non est receptibile in alio, et tale se
ipso est individuum et singulare, vel est in alio receptibile et tale individuatur per illud in
quo recipitur. Cum ergo quantitas sit in alio receptibilis, sicut et cetera accidentia, videtur
quod sit individuum et singulare per illud in quo recipitur et non se ipsa. Similiter, acci-
piendo individuum secundo modo, quantitas non est se ipsa individuum, nec aliqua una
forma, cum tale individuum sit plurium formarum collectio.”
79 Ibid., 16, ll. 389–403. One should note that in rejecting the claim that quantity is self-­
individuating, James is attacking a position favored by his confrère Giles of Rome. See
Giles of Rome, Quodl. i, q. 11 (Louvain, 1646; repr. Frankfurt a. M., 1966), ff. 23b–25a. For a
recent discussion of Giles, see Pickavé, “The Controversy over the Principle of Individu­
ation,” 35–43; idem, “Metaphysics,” in A Companion to Giles of Rome, (eds.) Charles F.
Briggs and Peter S. Eardley (Leiden, 2016), 133–39.
66 Gossiaux

explain how God could multiply angels within a species.80 James briefly dis-
cusses this problem in Quodlibet ii, question 4. There he asserts that God could
create a plurality of angels within the same species. Their numerical distinc-
tion would be efficiently caused by God, formally caused by their respective
substantial natures, and in a consequent manner (consequenter) be due to
their respective accidents. Thus, two angels would differ numerically merely
by their forms. The difference in their respective accidents would be a conse-
quence of their numerical distinction rather than a cause of it.81
In Quodlibet iii, question 16, James is asked whether there could be two
matters essentially distinct. In his determination of this question, James con-
cedes that matter viewed purely in itself has the same nature (ratio) wher-
ever it is found (namely, it is substance in potency). However, he distinguishes
two ways in which two matters can be described as essentially distinct. The
first is in virtue of the forms by which they are perfected. One could say that
the matter of a donkey is essentially different from the matter of a dog, be-
cause the substantial forms of these two animals are essentially different. In
a second way, two matters differ essentially when they share the same nature
­(ratio definitiva) but refer to two different things. To illustrate this, James gives
the example of two whitenesses existing in two bodies. Although these two
whitenesses share the same ratio, they differ really and essentially, because the
one whiteness is a thing (res) distinct from the other. Similarly, the substantial
forms (or the matter) of two individuals of the same species could be said to
differ essentially, because they refer to different things. In this case, the two
forms (and the two matters) differ numerically simply by themselves, not by
some other principle.82

80 Thomas Aquinas famously rejected the claim that there could exist many angels within
the same species. This view was condemned by Bishop Stephen Tempier in 1277. For a
helpful study of this controversy, see Giorgio Pini, “The Individuation of Angels from
­Bonaventure to Duns Scotus,” in A Companion to Angels in Medieval Philosophy, (ed.) To-
bias Hoffmann (Leiden, 2012), 79–115.
81 Quodl. ii, q. 4, 53, ll. 64–67: “Et hoc utique tenendum est, quod per potentiam Dei facientis
etiam in separatis possunt esse et fieri plura individua eiusdem speciei, quorum differ-
entia numeralis ex agente quidem esset effective, ex ipsis autem naturis substantialibus
formaliter, ex accidentibus consequenter.”
82 Quodl. iii, q. 16, 204–05, ll. 73–115, esp. ll. 87–115: “Alio modo dicuntur differre essentialiter
quae habent quidem eandem rationem definitivam, dicunt tamen aliam et aliam rem.
Sic autem duae albedines in duobus corporibus existentes, licet habeant eandem ratio-
nem definitivam, tamen realiter et essentialiter differunt, quia una earum est diversa res
ab alia. Similiter et formae substantiales duorum lapidum eiusdem speciei differunt es-
sentialiter hoc modo, quia sunt diversae res. … Si vero accipiatur differentia essentialis
secundo modo, non est inconveniens dicere quod duae materiae differant essentialiter, ut
James of Viterbo on Metaphysics 67

But then James takes note of an interesting objection. Someone might argue
that the matter (or the form) of one individual differs essentially from the mat-
ter (or the form) of another individual not per se but per aliud; for as Boethius
teaches, it is diversity of accidents that causes numerical diversity. Thus, two
matters (or two forms) differ not by themselves, but rather by the accidents
which are in them. Thus, many thinkers say that the substantial forms of two
individuals of the same species differ because they are received in diverse parts
of matter in such a way that matter is the cause of the multiplication and diver-
sity of such forms. But matter is divided by reason of quantity, and so quantity
is ultimately responsible for the multiplication of substantial forms within the
same species.83
Responding to this objection, James acknowledges that many adopt the
view that matter and form are diversified and multiplied because of a diversity
of accidents. However, James thinks that one should hold the converse: acci-
dents are diversified because of the diversity of matter and form. For as sub-
stance is a cause of accidents, so diversity in substance is a cause of diversity
of accidents. Thus, accidents are not a cause of numerical diversity, but rather
a sign of it. This is so not merely with respect to substances that belong to dif-
ferent species, but also with respect to substances that differ only numerically.
Two individuals thus differ numerically primarily (principaliter) and causally
by their respective matter and forms (i.e., the matter as well as the forms of the
two individuals are diverse).84 Moreover, the diversity of matter and form in
individuals of the same species has no intrinsic cause other than the matter
and forms themselves. Nevertheless, James identifies an extrinsic cause for this
diversity, namely, the agent that produced them in being.85

materia Sortis et materia Platonis essentialiter differunt, quia dicunt aliam et aliam rem,
sicut et earum formae.”
83 Ibid., 206, ll. 116–27.
84 Ibid., 206, ll. 128–43: “Ad hoc autem est dicendum quod, licet plures dicant materiam et
formam diversificari et plurificari propter diversitatem accidentium, et maxime quanti-
tatis, tamen, si diligenter quis velit attendere, videtur econverso esse dicendum, videlicet
quod accidentia diversificantur ex diversitate materiae et formae. Nam sicut substantia
est causa accidentis, et non econverso, sic diversitas in substantia est causa diversitatis
­accidentium, et non econverso. Tamen diversitas accidentium est signum diversitatis
substantiarum vel materiae et formae. Et hoc verum est non solum in his quae specie
differunt, sed etiam in his quae differunt numero … ita quod duo individua differunt nu-
mero principaliter et causaliter per materiam et formam, ut quia eorum est diversa mate-
ria et diversa forma.”
85 Ibid., 207, ll. 150–54: “Et licet huius diversitatis non sit alia causa intrinseca, tamen aliq-
uid extrinsecum est causa diversitatis materiae et formae in diversis compositis, sive
68 Gossiaux

James returns to the topic of the individuation of angels in Quodlibet iii,

question 18. There he notes that some thinkers deny that there could be a
plurality of angels within the same species, since they believe that the mul-
tiplicity of individuals within a species occurs through matter, but angels are
immaterial beings. Once again, James finds this unpersuasive, for numerical
distinction can also result from the agent, and from the substantial forms of
individuals. Thus, if God were to produce many angels of the same species,
their numerical distinction would be caused effectively (effective) by God, but
formally (formaliter) by their substantial natures such that their natures or
forms would differ merely by themselves. In this case too, the difference in
their accidents would not be a cause of their numerical diversity, but merely
a sign of it.86
From a survey of these texts we can draw some conclusions about James’s
understanding of individuation. The individuation of material substances
is explained by their substantial principles. James rejects the claim that ac-
cidents could serve as the principle of individuation. Quantity is not self-­
individuating, but like all accidents, it is individuated by the substance in
which it inheres. Angels are individuated by their substantial natures; hence
there could exist a plurality of angels within a single species. For both material
and immaterial substances, James holds that God causes their individuation,
since he produces them in being.
Central to James’s thinking is a distinction between singularity and individ-
uality. Singularity is a necessary but not sufficient condition for individuality.
The singular is an instance of a universal; it is capable of being similar to others
(for example, this cat and that cat, this whiteness and that whiteness, etc.). By
contrast, individuals are dissimilar to each other. An individual is an actually
existing compound of substance and accidents. The numerical distinction of
individuals is due to the diversity of their substantial principles. These sub-
stantial principles in turn are diverse simply by themselves, because, under the
influence of divine causality, they constitute distinct supposits. For James, the

specie sive numero differentibus, videlicet agens quod producit ea diversa in actu vel in
effectu.”
86 Quodl. iii, q. 18, 237–38, ll. 19–33, esp. ll. 27–33: “Unde si Deus produceret plures ange-
los eiusdem speciei, differentia numeralis illorum angelorum effective quidem esset ex
agente, scilicet Deo; formaliter autem esset ex ipsis naturis ipsorum substantialibus, ita
quod ipsae naturae seu formae ipsorum se ipsis differrent. … Differrent autem etiam per
accidentia sua tamquam per signa diversitatis.”
James of Viterbo on Metaphysics 69

“principle of individuation” is not one principle but several, corresponding to

the principles necessary for a thing to actually exist.87

87 James’s understanding of individuation bears some similarities to that of Roger Marston.

Like James, Roger correlates the causes of individuation with the causes of existence. See
Roger Marston, Quodl. i, q. 3, (eds.) Girard Etzkorn and Ignatius Brady (Grottaferrata,
1994), 13, ll. 24–26: “Nam individuatio est a generante vel dante esse ut ab efficiente, a ma-
teria ut occasionem praebente, a forma vero ut formaliter constituente.” Cf. idem, Quodl.
ii, q. 30, (eds.) Etzkorn and Brady, 297, ll. 26–28: “Efficienter autem est individuatio ab
agente creante vel generante, et formaliter ab ipsis principiis individui.”
 chapter 3

James of Viterbo on Divine Ideas and the Divine

Cognition of Creatures

Antoine Côté

3.1 Introduction

The doctrine of divine ideas has always played a central role in the theologi-
cal worldview of thinkers in the Middle Ages since Augustine’s appropriation
of Plato’s theory of ideas and his “relocation” of Platonic ideas in the divine
­intellect.1 Christian authors have generally shared the belief that God as an
­intelligent, provident agent required models or archetypes after which to
fashion the world and the creatures that inhabit it. But divine ideas for late
­medieval thinkers were much more than merely archetypes of creatures.
­Because ideas were located in the divine intellect, it was natural to discuss
them in connection with the problem of knowledge. Further, because it was
typically held by the scholastics that God’s power to create is not exhausted by
­creation—in other words, there are ideas of more things than are created—
they were also led to discuss divine ideas in relation to the concept of possibil-
ity, and this prompted them to raise often deep questions about the nature and
ultimate source of what is possible. Finally, since divine ideas are the ideas of
creatures before creation, the scholastics were inevitably led to reflect on the
status of creatures ante creationem: are they mental beings no different from
God’s essence? Are they identical with the real essence of creatures, or do they
have a being all of their own, and if so, how should that being best be char-
acterized? Thus, for a late scholastic theologian, the topic of divine ideas had
repercussions that went far beyond the question of creation, extending into
areas as diverse as the theory of cognition, the metaphysics of modality, and
ontology.
James of Viterbo is a case in point. Although the volume of James’s writings
devoted to divine ideas is relatively modest—a fact due in part to the shortness
of his tenure as a master of theology at Paris and to the fact that some impor-
tant sources, such as his commentary on the Sentences and a commentary on

1 See Augustine, De diuersis quaestionibus octoginta tribus, q. 46, (ed.) Almut Mutzenbecher,
Corpus Christianorum Series Latina (=ccsl) 44A (Turnhout, 1975), 72, ll. 53–58.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���8 | doi 10.1163/9789004361881_005

James of Viterbo on Divine Ideas Cognition of Creatures 71

the Metaphysics,2 are no longer extant—the subject was clearly an important

one in his eyes, and he discussed it in his two major works—namely, the Quod-
libetal Questions, and the Quaestiones de divinis praedicamentis3—touching
on its theological, epistemological, metaphysical, and ontological dimensions.
James was especially interested, however, in clarifying the question of the on-
tological status of creatures ante creationem, and he was concerned to do so
in a way that would safeguard the temporality of creation. His fundamental
intuition was that the object of God’s cognition when he cognizes creatures is a
sui generis entity that is to be identified neither with God’s essence nor with the
real properties of creatures. Although his theory was, as we will see, indebted to
Henry of Ghent’s, James was critical of Henry’s solution on a number of points.
My examination of James’s theory of divine ideas will be divided into three
parts. In section 3.2, I will provide a general account of James’s doctrine that
draws from both of the above-mentioned works. In section 3.3, I will turn to
James’s relation to Henry of Ghent. I shall argue that despite superficial simi-
larities, there are significant areas of disagreement between the two authors.
In section 3.4, I will look at the criticisms directed at James’s theory by Godfrey
of Fontaines, Bernard of Auvergne, and William of Alnwick. While all three
authors reject his doctrine, they offer insightful analyses and criticisms that
are particularly useful in helping the historian appreciate both the originality
and the limitations of James’s doctrine.

3.2 James of Viterbo on God’s Cognition of Creatures

James holds that creatures preexist in God’s essence and in God’s knowl-
edge.4 Ideas refer to creatures as they preexist in God’s knowledge.5 God as an

2 About these two works, see Eelcko Ypma, “Recherches sur la productivité littéraire de Jacques
de Viterbe jusqu’à 1300,” Augustiniana 25 (1975): 223–82, esp. 225–30 for the commentary on
the Metaphysics, and 230–43 for the commentary on the Sentences.
3 James’s four Quodlibeta and parts of his Quaestiones de divinis praedicamentis (=qdp) have
been edited by Eelcko Ypma (Würzburg, 1968–1975 [Quodlibeta]; and Rome, 1983–1986 [qdp,
qq. 1–17]; editions of further questions of the qdp have appeared in Augustiniana). Lengthy
sections of James’s so-called Abbreviatio in i Sententiarum Aegidii Romani also deal with
the topic of divine ideas. But since this work is made up almost entirely of quotations from
Thomas Aquinas and Giles of Rome, I will not be taking it into account in this chapter. For
a new hypothesis regarding the dating, genre, and purpose of the Abbreviatio, see Gianpiero
Tavolaro’s appendix in this volume.
4 qdp, q. 4, 98–99, ll. 270–89, and Quodl. i, q. 5, 62, ll. 25–26.
5 For an overview of James’s theory of ideas, see Jaroslav Beneš, “Valor ‘Possibilium’ apud
S. Thomam, Henricum Gandavensem, B. Iacobum de Viterbio,” Divus Thomas (Piacenza)
72 Côté

i­ntelligent agent requires models after which to fashion the world, and ideas
are what an agent imitates in making a thing.6 James sides with the dominant
view within scholasticism in believing that divine ideas are nothing other than
the divine essence itself insofar as it is cognized by God as imitable by crea-
tures.7 Each idea represents a specific, limited imitation of divine perfection.8
Because James believes—once again in line with his contemporaries—that
God cognizes himself as imitable in an infinite number of ways, it follows
that God’s ideas, which exhaust the ways in which he can be imitated, are also
infinite.9
James expresses the fact that God cognizes creatures by cognizing him-
self, by saying that God’s essence is the object of God’s own act of cognition.10
However, James believes that God cannot truly be said to cognize creatures in
knowing his own essence unless he also knows them qua distinct from himself.
And he thinks that God could not do this if creatures so known were not to
some degree really distinct from God’s essence. His reasoning is as follows: for
God to properly know creatures is for him to know himself as their cause or as
a power capable of producing them; but given that nothing is a cause of itself,
if God knows himself as cause, he must know himself as a cause of something
else, and so must know something else, i.e. the creature, qua other.11 But if this
is the case, then it follows that in a sense (aliquo modo) there are not one but

30 (1927): 349–55; Pasquale Giustiniani, “Il problema delle idee in Dio secondo Giacomo da
Viterbo, oesa, con edizione della distinzione 36 dell’Abbreviatio in i Sententiarum Aegidii
Romani,” Analecta Augustiniana 42 (1979): 297–307; Heinrich Rüssmann, Zur ­Ideenlehre
der Hochscholastik: Unter besonderer Berücksichtigung des Heinrich von Gent, Gottfried
von Fontaines und Jakob von Viterbo (Würzburg, 1938); and, more recently, the insightful
articles by John F. Wippel, “The Reality of Nonexisting Possibles According to Thomas
Aquinas, Henry of Ghent, and Godfrey of Fontaines,” The Review of Metaphysics 34 (1981):
729–58, and Mark D. Gossiaux, “James of Viterbo and the Late Thirteenth-­Century Debate
Concerning the Reality of the Possibles,” Recherches de théologie et ­philosophie médiévales
74 (2007): 483–522.
6 Quodl. iii, q. 15, 197, l. 68: “[C]um idea dicatur forma ad cuius imitationem fit aliquid.”
7 Quodl. i, q. 5, 64, ll. 85–88; l. 108; qdp, q. 2, 50, l. 464 (apparatus criticus).
8 qdp, q. 4, 100, ll. 311–12; q. 10, 286, ll. 487–89.
9 Quodl. i, q. 2, 29, ll. 449–56. Of course, the fact that God’s perfections can be imitated in an
infinite number of ways does not mean that the ideas exhaust God’s perfections, for God
has perfections that are inimitable (ibid.).
10 Quodl. i, q. 5, 64, l. 92.
11 Quodl. i, q. 5, 64, ll. 93–95: “Et secundum hoc dicendum quod in cognitione, qua Deus
cognoscit creaturas per suam essentiam ut causa est, ipsa essentia et est obiectum cogni-
tum et est ratio cognoscendi effectum, scilicet creaturam. Semper autem id quod est ratio
cognoscendi sicut causa, exigit aliquid aliud cognitum; cuius ratio est quia, sicut nihil est
James of Viterbo on Divine Ideas Cognition of Creatures 73

two cognized objects in God’s cognition of creatures: the divine essence itself
cognized by God as imitable in particular ways, ideas properly so called, which
James calls the principal object or the ratio cognoscendi of God’s knowledge of
creatures; and the creatures as cognized beings, ideata or exemplata, which he
calls the secondary objects.12 As James sees things, God cannot be a ground of
cognition qua cause without there being something distinct from him that he
cognizes.13
Given that the divine idea is “the divine essence itself cognized by God as
imitable by other things,”14 it follows that the “being” of the idea must be none
other than the being of the divine essence itself.15 But what about the being of
the creature insofar as it is other than the divine essence, that is, the being
of the creature as ideatum or exemplatum? Obviously, it must be something,
James reasons, for what is absolutely nothing cannot be thought.16 But what
exactly is it? James’s answer is that the creature in its cognized being in the
divine intellect is a thing (res) that is distinct from God’s essence:

Thus, if God cognizes creatures through his essence insofar as it is a

cause, then it is necessary to posit something other than the divine es-
sence as the cognized object. But that can only be a creature; therefore, a
creature, before it actually exists, is a certain thing as cognized object and
also insofar as it is other than and distinct from God.17

James hastens to add, however, that the creature as exemplatum is not a thing
in the absolute sense (simpliciter), but only in a qualified sense (cum determi-
natione), where something is a thing in the absolute sense if it actually exists
and is a thing in a qualified or restricted sense if it is cognized or if it is possible.
At the beginning of his solution, he writes:

causa sui ipsius, sic nihil est ratio cognoscendi seipsum sicut causa.” See also ibid., 65, ll.
99–102.
12 Quodl. i, q. 5, 68–69, ll. 231–33.
13 Quodl. i, q. 5, 64, ll. 92–93: “Semper autem id quod est ratio cognoscendi sicut causa, exigit
aliquid aliud cognitum.”
14 Quodl. i, q. 5, 64, l. 86.
15 Quodl. i, q. 5, 64, ll. 90–92; qdp, q. 15, 254, ll. 1201–07.
16 Quodl. i, q. 5, 64, l. 68: “[N]am quod nullo modo est et omnino nihil est, non intelligitur.”
17 Quodl. i, q. 5, 65, ll. 99–102: “Si igitur Deus cognoscit creaturas per suam essentiam ut
causa est, oportet ponere aliquid aliud a divina essentia esse obiectum cognitum. Hoc
autem non est nisi creatura. Quare creatura, antequam sit in effectu, est res aliqua ut
obiectum cognitum, etiam ut est a Deo alia et distincta.”
74 Côté

And it seems that it should be said that a creature or an essence before

it is in actuality is a certain thing, not absolutely but with qualification,
namely as a cognized object.18

Further on, he concludes:

And therefore, just as it is said that creatures are true things before actual
existence, that is, in a qualified sense as cognized object[s], so too they
can be called true things, that is, in a qualified sense, insofar as they are
possible. Indeed, if they were not possible, they would not be cognized.19

Before looking at what James means by “being a thing in a qualified sense,” one
important terminological point is in order. James first tells us that creatures
are real in the qualified sense qua cognized objects; he then states that they are
real both as cognized and as possible. But it is not clear whether he means that
possible being and cognized object are the same “thing” or that they are dis-
tinct, and, if they are distinct, what the relation between them is.
To get some idea of the sort of precision one might hope to get from James
on this issue, one can turn to a slightly later author, John Duns Scotus. In book
2 of his Ordinatio, Scotus gives a clear answer to the above questions in the
context of a discussion on the relation between possible being and cognized
being in God’s intellect. Scotus asserts that while cognized being and possible
being “accompany each other”—by which he means presumably that no being
is cognized by God that is not possible, and vice versa—they are nonetheless
“formally distinct,” with cognized being acting as a foundation for possible be-
ing. The reason for the claim that they are distinct is that cognized being, for
Scotus, is being in actuality, albeit in a relative sense (secundum quid), where-
as possible being is held to be devoid of any true being, even in the relative
sense.20 What Scotus is telling us, then, is that cognized being and possible

18 Quodl. i, q. 5, 63, ll. 59–61: “Et videtur esse dicendum quod creatura vel essentia creaturae
antequam sit in actu, est res aliqua non simpliciter sed cum determinatione, scilicet ut
obiectum cognitum.”
19 Quodl. i, q. 5, 65, ll. 120–23: “Et ideo, sicut dicitur quod creaturae antequam sint actu sunt
verae res, cum hac determinatione scilicet ut obiectum cognitum, sic possunt dici verae
res, cum hac determinatione scilicet ut possibiles, non quidem potentia creaturae sed
potentia divina.”
20 John Duns Scotus, Ordinatio ii, d. 1, q. 2, n. 93, ed. Vaticana, Opera Omnia 7 (Vatican City,
1973), 49: “Concedo enim quod omne creabile prius erat possibile ex parte sui, sed ista pos-
sibilitas vel potentialitas non fundatur in aliquo esse simpliciter sed in esse cognito (ita
quod esse cognitum concomitatur potentialitas ad esse simpliciter), licet formaliter esse
James of Viterbo on Divine Ideas Cognition of Creatures 75

being are co-occurrent, but not on par ontologically speaking, since cognized
being is more basic than possible being.
What about James? It is safe to assume that James held, as did Scotus, that
God does not cognize anything that is not a possible (i.e., that there is no esse
cognitum that is not an esse possibile), and conversely that there is no possible
that is not cognized by God. What about the relation obtaining between pos-
sible being and cognized object? James does not address this question explic-
itly and so, not surprisingly, one does not find a clear-cut answer to it. But if the
last passage quoted above is anything to go by, his position seems to be that
esse possibile is the more basic of the two. For James writes that “if [creatures]
were not possible, they would not be cognized.” This statement certainly seems
to suggest that a creature’s being possible is a condition for its being cognized.
It echoes a claim James made a few lines earlier in Quodlibet i, question 5, to
the effect that for something to be a cognized object it is sufficient (sufficit)
that it be possible.21 Of course, the fact that James believed that being possible
is “sufficient” for being cognized does not mean that he could not also have
believed that being cognized was sufficient for being possible. While this can-
not be ruled out, the fact remains that James does not articulate this possibil-
ity, whereas he explicitly states that being cognized is conditioned by being
possible.
To be possible or to be a “cognized object” is thus to be in the qualified sense
according to James. And to be in the qualified sense is truly to be. Although
possibilia are not real in the sense in which singular existents are,22 they are
emphatically not mere “beings of reason” (entia rationis) or ficta; for a fictum,

cognitum non sit esse possibile, quia ‘esse cognitum’ est esse in actu secundum quid, esse
autem possibile, est esse in potentia ad esse simpliciter, et non in actu. Nec t­ amen ‘esse
in potentia’ est esse simpliciter, sed est fallacia secundum quid et simpliciter: sicut nec
‘futurum esse’ est esse simpliciter, nec ‘esse praeteritum’ est esse simpliciter; s­ icut enim
‘praeteriisse in esse simpliciter’ non infert esse simpliciter, sic nec ‘futurum esse’ infert
esse simpliciter; igitur multo magis nec ‘posse esse simpliciter’ infert esse ­simpliciter,
quia ‘posse esse’ videtur esse remotius ab esse simpliciter quam ‘fore.’” For discussion of
this passage, see Ludger Honnefelder, Scientia transcendens: Die formale Bestimmung der
Seiendheit und Realität in der Metaphysik des Mittelalters und der Neuzeit (Duns Scotus,
Suárez, Wolff, Kant, Peirce) (Hamburg, 1990), 153.
21 Quodl. i, q. 5, 65, ll. 123–24: “Est autem ulterius considerandum quod, ad hoc quod aliquid
sit obiectum cognitum, non requiritur ipsius existentia actualis, sed sufficit quod res sit
possibilis.”
22 This follows from the fact that possible beings (or cognized objects) are different from
actual existents. See Quodl. i, q. 5, 65, ll. 113–14.
76 Côté

James tells us, has no foundation at all in reality,23 whereas “being possible is a
real state of affairs.”24 James illustrates the sui generis nature of possibilia with
the help of an analogy drawn from his doctrine of seminal reasons. He tells us
that creatures as cognized by God are possible in a way that is analogous to the
way in which forms are possible in the potency of matter.25 Such forms truly
are “in” the potency, and they are “something”; the kind of being they have lies
halfway “between actual being and absolute non-being.”26
To elucidate these claims, James draws on the authority of Averroes. Aver-
roes had claimed in his commentary on the Metaphysics that a thing’s “con-
version (translatio) from potency to act does not grant manyness (multitudo)
[to that thing], but rather perfection in being.”27 Averroes, in other words, was
underscoring the fact that it is the same thing that is in potency at one time
and in actuality at another. James wants to apply this principle to creatures in
divine cognition and in effectu. Since according to him “creatures before being
actualized must be certain things insofar as they are possible in God’s power,”
and since, following the principle just stated, “conversion from potency to act
does not bestow manyness, but rather perfection in being,” it follows that there
are not more things after creation, just more perfect things. This is a striking
claim to make, one that invites the objection that if creation does not add to
the inventory of things, then there is a real sense in which creatures are not
created in time at all.
James raises five objections against the theory we have just sketched. Three
of these are in fact variations of the same charge that creatures qua cognized
are not distinct from God’s essence; the two remaining ones center on the
threat that James’s theory poses to the temporality of creation.
According to the first objection, what does not exist cannot be other than
and distinct from anything else, and cannot therefore constitute the termi-
nus of a relation.28 James rejects both claims. True enough, before creation a

23 Quodl. i, q. 5, 66, l. 154; qdp, q. 15, 212–13, ll. 178–85. James’s most detailed discussion of
entia rationis is found in qdp, q. 11, where the question under discussion is whether rela-
tions are beings of reason.
24 qdp, q. 15, 253, ll. 1192–93.
25 Quodl. i, q. 5, 65–66, ll. 126–36.
26 Quodl. ii, q. 5, 65, ll. 213–14.
27 Averroes, In Met. 8, com. 15, in Aristotelis opera cum Averrois commentariis, vol. 8 (Venice,
1562; repr. Frankfurt a. M., 1962), f. 224rAB.
28 To understand the relevance of this objection, it is important to realize that while James
had perhaps not made the point explicitly, it follows from his theory that divine ideas are
relational beings—i.e., they are ideas of something—and given that they are also eternal,
that of which they are the ideas must be eternal as well.
James of Viterbo on Divine Ideas Cognition of Creatures 77

­creature does not exist in effect, but it does exist qua possible. Given that di-
vine ideas are just that—namely divine—and hence related only in a “rational”
way to creatures, it matters not a whit (non refert), James contends, whether
the creatures they are related to are actualized “in the flesh,” so to speak, or
whether they subsist only as possibles. The upshot is that possibilia constitute
a sufficient basis for otherness. The ideas can therefore be eternally related to
something distinct from God.29
The second objection is drawn from that most authoritative of authors on
matters of divine ideas, Augustine. In his Literal Commentary on the Book of
Genesis, Augustine explicitly denies that God sees creatures “outside of him-
self” (non praeter se ipsum uidens).30 But if that is the case, is it not impossible
for creatures to be distinct from God?—the assumption here being that noth-
ing that is not distinct from God can be seen outside of God. James thinks
not, and to explain why, he appeals to his doctrine of the divine ­essence qua
cause as a ground of cognition (ratio cognoscendi). As we saw above, the di-
vine essence is, according to James, the ground of cognition of creatures.
­Because God cognizes through himself, he does not cognize creatures “beyond
himself.” However, from the point of view of the cognized object, God does
­cognize something “outside of himself,” namely, “the creature as distinct from
himself.”31
The third objection raises a potentially fatal flaw against James’s position,
one to which we shall have occasion to return when we examine James’s crit-
ics. It makes the simple point that if creatures are truly things (verae res) even
before their full-fledged existence, then they must be coeternal with God,
which would be a heretical claim. Of course, James thinks he has a ready-made
answer to this: creatures, as cognized objects, are not existents at all, and so
they are not coeternal in a problematic sense. Rather, they possess being only
in a qualified sense: “Nothing is coeternal with God in the simple or absolute
sense, but only qualifiedly, namely, as possible in God’s power and as cognized
by him.” In this sense “nothing prevents creatures from being eternal.”32
A similar worry seems to motivate the fourth objection. The objection draws
its force from Augustine’s contention that “God does not cognize things that
are to be produced (fienda) otherwise than [as he cognizes] things that are

29 Quodl. i, q. 5, 68, ll. 197–210.

30 Augustine, De Genesi ad litteram, lib. 5, n. 15, (ed.) Joseph Zycha, Corpus Scriptorum Eccle-
siasticorum Latinorum 28 (Vienna, 1894), 158, l. 13; cf. James of Viterbo, Quodl. i, q. 5, 68, l.
213: “… non extra se novit.”
31 Quodl. i, q. 5, 68–69, ll. 211–35.
32 Quodl. i, q. 5, 69, ll. 236–44.
78 Côté

produced (facta) .”33 Assuming one accepts the equation of “thing to be pro-
duced” with “essence,” and “thing that is produced” with “actual being,” then,
so the arguments runs, given that “the essences of things must be posited for
eternity” (since God cognizes them eternally), so too must “actual beings” be
“posited for eternity” (since God does not cognize actual being differently than
he cognizes essences). Leaving aside the fact that James rejects the equation of
“things that are to be produced” with essences, the gist of James’s reply is that
while it is true that God eternally cognizes creatures that exist for a finite time,
it does not follow that God’s cognizing them in this fashion entails that they
exist eternally, for eternity is a measure of God’s cognition of things, not of the
things cognized.34
The fifth objection states that an object can be cognized only in virtue of
something that is in the cognizer. If a creature is cognized by God’s intellect,
it must be in virtue of something that is in God’s intellect, and so the creature
cannot be distinct from God.35 To respond to this objection James appeals to
the distinction between the ground of cognition (ratio cognoscendi) and the
cognized thing (res cognita). When it is said that the thing taken according to
cognized being is no different from the cognizer, this is true from the point of
view of the ground of cognition, for “the ground of cognition, however we look
upon it, is not something outside of God nor is it anything essentially distinct
from him.”36 However, it is not true of the thing considered qua cognized by
God, for this is “something other than and distinct from God.”37
The five objections we have just sketched raise genuine difficulties for
James’s solution, but James is confident that he has adequately responded to
them. His critics, as we will see in section 3.4, beg to differ.
So far, our account of James’s theory of divine ideas has focused on the
­traditional understanding, derived from Augustine, of divine ideas as the “spe-
cies and forms of things.”38 But James holds that there are many more ideas

33 James attributes the quote to book 5 of Augustine’s Literal Commentary on Genesis, but
it comes closest to a passage found in De Trinitate, lib. 15, c. 13, (eds.) W.J. Mountain and
F. Glorie, ccsl 50 (Turnhout, 1968), 495, l. 31.
34 Quodl. i, q. 5, 69–70, ll. 245–79.
35 Quodl. i, q. 5, 70, ll. 282–87. See also Quodl. iii, q. 15, 200, ll. 157–64.
36 Quodl. i, q. 5, 71, ll. 310–11: “Sed ratio cognoscendi, quocumque modo sumatur, non est
aliquid extra Deum nec ab ipso essentialiter distincta.”
37 Quodl. i, q. 5, 71, ll. 308–09: “Unde cum creatura dicitur esse, secundum quod a Deo cog-
nita, etiam antequam sit actu, ipsa creatura cognita est aliquid aliud et distinctum a Deo.”
38 Quodl. iii, q. 15, 195, l. 17: “[I]dea est idem quod forma vel species.” See also Quodl. i, q. 13,
183–84, ll. 23–84. A clear illustration of the fact that James primarily associates ideas with
species is qdp, q. 4, 100, ll. 312–14. On the “correct,” i.e., Augustinian, understanding of
James of Viterbo on Divine Ideas Cognition of Creatures 79

than ideas of species and forms; there are also ideas, and hence corresponding
possibilia or obiecta cognita, of (a) individuals, (b) genera and the categories,
(c) true counterfactuals, and (d) essences and actual existents. Let us look at
each case in turn.
(a) It is nothing unusual for a scholastic author to claim that God’s knowl-
edge of creation extends to particulars; it is less common to claim that there
are distinctive ideas of particulars. Henry of Ghent and Godfrey of Fontaines,
two of James’s most important interlocutors in matters of metaphysics, both
deny it.39 James on the other hand states that “Socrates, insofar as he is intel-
ligible, is eternal,”40 and this is possible only if Socrates is something insofar
as he is cognized (aliquid ut cognitum). But given that “being cognized” and
“being possible” are just other words for exemplatum, and that an exemplatum
is the effect of an idea,41 it follows that there will be an idea corresponding to
Socrates, and, by extension, ideas of all individuals.
(b) Another class of possible beings are the categories and genera, or as
James puts it, “generic or categorial things (res).”42 James dismisses the view
that the ability to form the concept of a genus is somehow unworthy of God
on the ground that the genus is indistinct.43 Since the indistinctness is of the
genus itself and not of God’s knowledge of it, James sees nothing wrong with
saying that God cognizes genera. More generally, God possesses the ideas of
all categories. Here again, James’s position is at odds with that of Henry and
Godfrey.44

­Platonic ideas, see Quodl. i, q. 12, 175–76, ll. 628–34. Cf. Augustine, De diuersis quaestioni-
bus octoginta tribus, q. 46, (ed.) Mutzenbecher, 71, ll. 21–22: “Ideas igitur latine possumus
uel formas uel species dicere.”
39 For Henry of Ghent, see his Quodl. vii, q. 1, (ed.) Gordon A. Wilson, Opera Omnia 11 (Leu-
ven, 1991), 18, l. 31, as well as Theo Kobusch, “Heinrich von Gent und die neuplatonische
Ideenlehre,” in Néoplatonisme et philosophie médiévale, (ed.) Linos Benakis (Turnhout,
1997), 205–09, and Rüssmann’s commentary in Zur Ideenlehre der Hochscholastik, 61–64.
For Godfrey of Fontaines, see his Quodl. iv, q. 1, in Les quatres premiers Quodlibets, (eds.)
Maurice De Wulf and Augustin Pelzer, Les Philosophes Belges 2 (Louvain, 1904), 231–32,
with John Wippel’s commentary in The Metaphysical Thought of Godfrey of Fontaines:
A Study in Late Thirteenth-Century Philosophy (Washington, dc, 1981), 125–28.
40 Quodl. i, q. 5, 69, ll. 267–68: “Et similiter Sortes ut intelligibilis est, semper est.”
41 Quodl. iii, q. 15, 198, l. 103.
42 Quodl. i, q. 5, 66, ll. 137–38: “Ex hoc etiam potest ulterius concludi quod antequam crea-
turae essent in effectu, erant res generis vel praedicamenti.”
43 Quodl. i, q. 5, 66, ll. 142–48.
44 “Forma generis non habet propriam ideam” writes Henry in Quodl. vii, q. 1, (ed.) Wilson,
11, l. 85, a view to which Godfrey also subscribes. See Godfrey of Fontaines, Quodl. iv, q. 1,
(eds.) De Wulf and Pelzer, 231: “… videtur quod nec generum nec differentiarum sit idea.”
80 Côté

(c) James also considers that counterfactual propositions could not be true
unless they were made true by corresponding possibles. Since the situation
of propositions is analogous to that of names, let us start with names. James
subscribes to Aristotle’s “semiotic triangle,” according to which a name signi-
fies an existing thing by means of a concept. But a thing need not exist for it
to be truly understood, so long as it is possible.45 Although I may with equal
ease entertain the concepts “man” and “chimaera,” only “man” is a bona fide
concept; what makes it such is the fact that man is a possible—and remem-
ber, for James, “possible being is a real condition” (esse possibile est conditio
realis)—whereas a chimaera is not.46 It is thus the existence with qualification
of certain types of possibilia that makes proper nouns and concepts of species
bona fide names and concepts, respectively.47
The same holds true, mutatis mutandis, of propositions, both necessary and
contingent.48 Take the proposition “A triangle has three angles.” In a world
in which triangles exist, the present-tense proposition “A triangle has three
angles” will always be true—true without qualification, James adds, since the
proposition asserts something true of any existing triangle. But before the ex-
istence of triangles, or in a world in which there are no triangles,49 the proposi-
tion would still be true with qualification, because triangles would be possible.
Things are slightly different in the case of a contingent proposition such as
“Socrates is sitting.” Since in fact Socrates is not always sitting, the proposition
will not be true without qualification at all times at which Socrates exists; but
it will be true with qualification, inasmuch as Socrates’s sitting is possible.50
In general, all counterfactual propositions are “made true” (verificandae) by a
corresponding possible.

45 Quodl. i, q. 5, 67, ll. 171–74: “[L]icet nomen significet rem mediante conceptione intel-
lectus, ad hoc autem quod res intelligatur, sufficit quod sit possibilis, tamen simpliciter
prolatum magis refertur ad rem ut est actu, quam ut est potentia.”
46 qdp, q. 20, (ed.) Eelcko Ypma, in Augustiana 42 (1992): 351–78, at 377, l. 689.
47 Godfrey, Henry, and James are all concerned by the problem of defining appropriate truth
conditions for meaningful (but possibly non-denoting) concepts, such as “Socrates” or
“human,” and (in the medieval view) contradictory or impossible concepts, such as “goat-
stag” or “chimaera.” See Godfrey of Fontaines, Quodl. iv, q. 2, (eds.) De Wulf and Pelzer,
239. For Henry of Ghent, see for instance Summa quaestionum ordinariarum, art. 24, q. 3,
(ed.) J. Badius (Paris, 1520), f. 138vO.
48 Quodl. i, q. 5, 67, ll. 179–92.
49 James is a constructivist about mathematical objects; see qdp, q. 23, (ed.) Eelcko Ypma, in
Augustiniana 46 (1996): 147–76, at 152, l. 138. Thus “before the existence of triangles” can
mean simply “before someone forms the concept” or “before someone draws a triangle.”
50 Quodl. i, q. 5, 67, ll. 188–90: “Unde haec propositio ‘homo sedet’ etiam antequam sedeat,
vera est, cum determinatione scilicet ut possibilis et apud intellectum.”
James of Viterbo on Divine Ideas Cognition of Creatures 81

One conclusion that follows from this, but which is not explicitly drawn
by James, is that there will be different kinds of possibles for necessary and
contingent propositions. In the case of a necessary proposition, one possibile
corresponding to each species of triangle is presumably all that is needed to
ground all necessary truths about that species. Likewise, the existence with
qualification in the divine intellect of the possibile Socrates will be sufficient
to ground all necessary truths about Socrates. But it would not be sufficient
to ground all contingent truths about Socrates. A contingent truth asserted of
Socrates at a time at which it happened not to be true would be made intelli-
gible by the corresponding possibile. There would need to be as many possibilia
as there are contingent truths that could be asserted of a particular individual.
In view of what we know about James’s exuberant ontology of idoneitates and
seminal reasons, there is no reason to suppose that he would have been both-
ered by this particular consequence of his theory.
(d) Finally, given that certain possibles are actualized by creation while oth-
ers are not, that difference must also be reflected in God’s cognition. However,
caution must be exercised here: the difference between an unactualized pos-
sible and an actualized one is not the difference between a thing qua essence
and that thing qua existing. James believes that only actually existing things
possess essence and existence. God must therefore eternally cognize both the
essence and the existence of all future existents.51 This means that the essence
and the existence of things both correspond to “something that exists as pos-
sible in God’s power.”52 Because God knows both essence and existence eter-
nally, there is no “innovation” in God’s knowledge, and no difference in the
way God relates to essences and to actual being (since he relates to both from
the point of view of eternity). However, and crucially, it does not follow from
the fact that God knows creatures eternally as having a particular essence or as
existing that creatures have essence and existence eternally. As James explains,
“eternity measures God’s cognition, not the actual existence of creatures.”53

51 Quodl. i, q. 5, 69, ll. 251–52: “Sicut essentia creaturae est ab aeterno ut cognita a Deo, sic et
esse actuale ipsius.” On James’s understanding of the being-essence distinction, see John
F. Wippel, “James of Viterbo on the Essence-Existence Relationship (Quodlibet 1, q. 4),
and Godfrey of Fontaines on the Relationship between Nature and Supposit (Quodlibet
7,  q. 5) ,” in Sprache und Erkenntnis im Mittelalter, (ed.) Wolfgang Kluxen (Berlin, 1981),
777–87, and Mark D. Gossiaux, “James of Viterbo on the Relationship between Essence
and ­Existence,” Augustiniana 49 (1999): 73–107, as well as Gossiaux’s contribution to this
volume.
52 Quodl. i, q. 5, 69, ll. 260–61: “Quia quodlibet horum [sc. essentia creaturae et esse ipsius],
antequam sit in actu, est aliquid ut possibile in Dei potentia.”
53 Quodl. i, q. 5, 69, ll. 253–54.
82 Côté

This is an important point which we will need to bear in mind when we turn
to James’s critics.

3.3 James and Henry of Ghent

To anyone familiar with Henry of Ghent’s writings on divine ideas, James’s dis-
cussions of the same topic are bound to create an impression of déjà vu.54 The
solution delineated in James’s Quodlibet i, question 5 bears a strong resem-
blance to the one we find in Henry’s Quodlibet ix, question 2 (1286). For start-
ers, Henry considers it necessary, in order to account for God’s knowledge of
creatures, to distinguish between two objects of knowledge: the primary object
and the secondary object. The primary object is the divine essence itself and
“nothing other than the divine essence.” The secondary object is distinct from
God; it is the creature cognized as other. It is necessary to posit a secondary ob-
ject, Henry explains, “for if the cognized object were in no way other than him,
then God would be most unwise.”55 Henry actually sets out the distinction in a
lot more detail than James. He holds that the secondary object is itself suscep-
tible to being cognized in two ways. For God can know any creature according
to the being it has in God, which being is identical with God’s, but God can
also know a creature according to the being that creature has in itself, which is
other than God’s. As an illustration of this further distinction, Henry uses the

54 For Henry’s doctrine of ideas, see Jean Paulus, Henri de Gand: Essai sur les tendances de sa
métaphysique (Paris, 1938), esp. 82–103; José Gómez Caffarena, Ser participado y ser subsis-
tente en la metafísica de Enrique de Gante (Rome, 1959), chap. 1, esp. 31–33; Wippel, “The
Reality of Nonexisting Possibles”; Pasquale Porro, “Possibilità ed esse essentiae in Enrico
di Gand,” in Henry of Ghent: Proceedings of the International Colloquium on the Occasion
of the 700th Anniversary of His Death (1293), (ed.) Willy Vanhamel (Leuven, 1996), 211–53;
Gossiaux, “James of Viterbo and the Late Thirteenth-Century Debate.” For a short account
of Henry’s doctrine of ideas and its relation to the Neoplatonic theory of the threefold
distinction of the universal, see Kobusch, “Heinrich von Gent und die neuplatonische
Ideenlehre,” 197–208. The question of Henry’s influence on James has been studied by
Beneš, “Valor ‘possibilium,’” 333–55, Paulus, Henri de Gand, 126–27, and more recently by
Gossiaux. Beneš (“Valor ‘possibilium,’” 354) believed Henry’s influence was massive, but
that James had misunderstood Henry’s theory. Paulus (Henri de Gand, 127) believed that
James rejected Henry’s synthesis. Gossiaux agrees, arguing that James’s theory is closest
to Godfrey’s; see Gossiaux, “James of Viterbo and the Late Thirteenth-Century Debate,”
514–22.
55 Henry of Ghent, Quodl. ix, q. 2, (ed.) Raymond Macken, Opera Omnia 13 (Leuven, 1983),
27, ll. 42–43: “Si enim nullo modo aliud a se esset obiectum cognitum ab ipso, tunc esset
insipientissimus.”
James of Viterbo on Divine Ideas Cognition of Creatures 83

example of a picture of Hercules as a means of knowing Hercules: I may be

said in some sense to know Hercules insofar as I know the picture of Hercules,
which is a “certain thing” (res quaedam); but I cannot truly be said to know
Hercules through the picture unless I “know the picture under the concept by
which it is a picture,” that is, as a depiction of Hercules. Likewise, God could
not truly be said to cognize creatures as others if he did not cognize ideas inso-
far as they are related to things distinct from himself.56
In addition to defending a distinction between the primary and secondary
objects of the intellect, Henry also holds that the divine essence, insofar as it is
the ground of God’s cognition of [things] other than himself—in other words,
the divine essence as primary object—is just the essence’s imitability by other
things. And the different ways in which the divine essence is imitable by other
things Henry holds to correspond to the different divine ideas. Further, using
language that we also find in James, Henry calls the relation that obtains be-
tween God and creatures qua “secondarily cognized objects” a relation of ex-
emplary cause to its “exemplated” objects. In fact, James uses this language in a
passage in Quodlibet i, question 5, in what appears to be an acknowledgement
of his indebtedness to Henry. Immediately after stating his own view that a
given creature before creation “is a true thing as cognized object and also as
other and distinct from God,” he writes that this view is sufficiently close to
“what is claimed by some, [namely] that creatures, before effective existence,
are true things as exemplated.”57 Following the custom of his time, James does
not name the authors he has in mind, but the statement that “­creatures  …
are true things as exemplated,” if not Henry’s exact words, is very close to
them, and certainly expresses Henry’s views as set out in his Quodlibet ix,
question 2.
Finally, Henry holds that God’s knowledge is the exemplary cause of things
“[such] that they may be something by themselves through [their] essence.”58
Through his ideas, God cognizes both those things that he will create and those
that he can but will not create; and he is said to cognize them “in the quiddi-
tative being they have through their essence, which [essence] is constituted
through divine knowledge.”59 But by constituting creatures in their essence

56 Henry of Ghent, Quodl. ix, q. 2, (ed.) Macken, 27–28, ll. 49–65.

57 Quodl. i, q. 5, 65, ll. 103–04: “Et hoc satis redit in idem cum eo, quod ab aliquibus dicitur:
quod creaturae, antequam sint in effectu, sunt verae res ut exemplatae.”
58 Henry of Ghent, Quodl. ix, q. 2, (ed.) Macken, 34, ll. 15–16: “[T]alis scientia de rebus ex
parte Dei est causa exemplaris rerum ut sint ad se aliquid per essentiam.”
59 Henry of Ghent, Quodl. ix, q. 2, (ed.) Macken, 34, ll. 21–22: “… in esse suo quidditativo
quod sunt per suam essentiam per divinam scientiam constitutam.”
84 Côté

through his act of cognition God also confers upon them the status of true
things. This is what Henry explains with the help of the famous distinction he
draws between two senses of the concept res: res a reor-reris, and res a ratitu-
dine.60 In the first sense, res is that most general concept which applies just as
well to a vacuous concept, such as “chimaera” or “goat-stag,” as to a true thing
(res vera), which Henry describes as “the nature and essence of something, ei-
ther of something uncreated or of something created having an idea in the di-
vine mind and capable of existing outside of it.”61 In the second sense, as res a
ratitudine, it applies only to true things, that is, to existing things or to essences
of things that are capable of existing by virtue of the fact that they correspond
to ideas in God. This is very close, at least prima facie, to what James says about
possibles. Recall that for James a possible is a true thing (vera res), unlike a
chimaera, which is a pure being of reason; and he thinks that in its capacity as
a true thing it can be made to exist by God’s power.
Still, despite these similarities between Henry and James, there are impor-
tant disagreements between them. We know that James disagreed with Henry
on the existence of ideas of singulars and genera. I will now suggest that there is
another more fundamental disagreement between them, namely their notions
of possibility. Let us start with Henry. Henry takes seriously Avicenna’s state-
ment in his Metaphysics that “it is necessary that everything that starts to exist
be possible in itself before it exists.”62 But Henry does not think that a ­creature’s
being possible in itself undermines God’s causal sovereignty over possibles.
In order to show how creatures can be said to be possible in themselves and
yet wholly dependent upon God, Henry draws a distinction between two ways
of considering both God’s active potency with respect to creatures and the

60 The classic expositions of this famous doctrine are found in Henry of Ghent, Quodl. v, q. 2,
(ed.) J. Badius (Paris, 1518), f. 154rD; Summa quaestionum ordinariarum, art. 24, q. 3, (ed.)
Badius, f. 138vO; and art. 21, q. 4, f. 127rO. For a discussion directly relevant to the topic of
the present article, see Porro, “Possibilità,” esp. 227–35, and Wippel, “The Reality of Non-
existing Possibles,” 745–46.
61 Henry of Ghent, Quodl. v, q. 2, (ed.) Badius, f. 154rD: “[N]atura et essentia alicuius vel rei
increatae vel creatae habentis ideam in mente divina et natae existere extra.”
62 Avicenna, Liber de philosophia prima sive scientia divina (=Metaphysica), tract. 4, c. 2, (ed.)
Simone van Riet (Louvain and Leiden, 1977), 208, ll. 52–53 (my emphasis). The passage
is quoted by Henry of Ghent, Quodl. vi, q. 3, (ed.) Gordon A. Wilson, Opera Omnia 10
(Leuven, 1987), 43–44, ll. 60–61. For a clear presentation and insightful discussion of this
important doctrine, see Porro, “Possibilità,” 222–26. On the metaphysics of possibility in
the Middle Ages generally, see the useful entry by Ludger Honnefelder, “Possibilien. I.
Mittelalter,” in Historisches Wörterbuch der Philosophie, (eds.) Joachim Ritter and Karlfried
Gründer, vol. 7 (Basel, 1989), 1126–35.
James of Viterbo on Divine Ideas Cognition of Creatures 85

­passive potency of creatures with respect to God. Each can be considered sub-
jectively and objectively. To consider God’s active potency subjectively is to
consider it in itself; to consider it objectively is to look at God’s active potency
in relation to a particular object. Likewise, to consider the passive potency of
creatures subjectively is to regard it “in itself”; to consider it objectively is to
consider it from the point of view of God, who is able to act upon it.
Henry believes that something cannot have objective potency unless it first
has subjective potency, and he holds that creatures could not have either ob-
jective or subjective passive potency if God did not first enjoy active potency
secundum se. Accordingly, he distinguishes a total of four sequentially ordered
respectus: (1) God’s active potency secundum se; (2) the passive potency of crea-
tures secundum se; (3) the passive potency of creatures with respect to God;
and (4) God’s active potency with respect to creatures. The priority of 2 and
3 over 4 indicates that an agent cannot act on an object unless the object has
per se potency. The priority of 1 over 2, 3, and 4 expresses the fact that the per
se power of creatures is dependent on God. Now, for Henry, another word for
a creature’s passive potency secundum se is the term “possible.” Applying this
model to creatures as possibles yields the conclusion that God cannot act on
creatures unless creatures are per se possible, even though they derive their
per se possibility from God. To put matters differently: although possibles are
constituted by God, there is something in a possible that is proper to it. Henry
makes that very point in his Quodlibet ix, question 2, where he writes that a
possible “is not so diminished that it is not something in itself by its essence
that is capable, through God’s efficient causality, of also existing outside the
divine intellect beyond cognized being in being of existence, which is real and
perfect being;”63 and again in Quodlibet x, question 8, where he explains that
“according to the common way of speaking, essence in each and every thing is
that which belongs to it by reason of its nature in itself.”64
Turning now to James of Viterbo, we see that in his discussion of possibles in
Quodlibet ii, question 10, he makes a distinction that is very similar to Henry’s
distinction between subjective and objective potencies. The potency (poten-
tia) in virtue of which a natural thing is possible, he explains, is twofold: it can

63 Henry of Ghent, Quodl. ix, q. 2, (ed.) Macken, 31, ll. 48–52: “Ista autem non sunt sic
diminuta respectu entis quod Deus est, et existentia in esse cognito, quin in illo esse sint
aliquid ad se per essentiam, quod natum est, Deo efficiente, etiam existere extra divinum
intellectum praeter esse cognitum, in esse existentiae quod est esse verum et perfectum.”
64 Henry of Ghent, Quodl. x, q. 8, (ed.) Raymond Macken, Opera Omnia 14 (Leuven, 1981),
201, ll. 85–87: “Est autem id quod est essentia in unaquaque re communiter loquendo id
quod ei convenit ratione naturae suae secundum se.”
86 Côté

be either the potency that lies in the thing itself (equivalent to what Henry
would call subjective potency) or the potency that resides in an external agent
(equivalent to Henry’s active potency). Thus air can become fire because of
the “subjective” potency of the air, which is able to take on the form of fire; but
air also becomes fire because of the “objective” potency present in an agent
(actual fire), which is able to “educe” the form of fire in the air.65 What about
nonexistent creatures? James’s surprising answer is that while nonexistent
creatures do enjoy potency in the second sense, they do not have potency in
the first sense:

In another way something is said to be possible only by the potency that

is in another, not through the potency that is in it. Thus, a creature before
its existence was possible by the potency of God, but not by its own po-
tency, since it did not yet exist.66

There is thus no per se, subjective, or intrinsic possibility of creatures accord-

ing to James of Viterbo, and in this respect James is clearly at odds with Henry.
But then, it is not clear that the possibles as James understands them have the
robustness they would seem to require to qualify as real, even qualifiedly real,
and to be distinct from God.67 For how can something which is nothing per
se be other than God in that sense of otherness that James seems to need? As
we will see, readers of James were quick to spot this weakness in his doctrine.

3.4 James and His Critics

James’s doctrine of divine ideas has had its share of critics through the ages,
some very harsh.68 In the last section of this paper, I want to briefly c­ onsider

65 James’s distinction between two senses of potency is the same as Godfrey’s. See Godfrey
of Fontaines, Quodl. viii, q. 3, (ed.) Jean Hoffmans, Les Philosophes Belges 4 (Louvain,
1924), 38–40, but also in Quodl. ii, q. 2, (eds.) De Wulf and Pelzer, 63–65, as well as Wippel,
The Metaphysical Thought, 16–18; 78–79.
66 Quodl. ii, q. 10, 127, ll. 177–80: “Alio modo dicitur aliquid possibile solum per potentiam
quae est in alio, non autem per potentiam quae sit in ipso; sicut creatura antequam esset,
erat possibilis per potentiam Dei, non autem per potentiam sui, cum nondum haberet
esse.”
67 As Ludger Honnefelder suggests, it is reasonable to assume—as Henry does and James
does not—that a nonexistent creature can only enter into a real relation with God if it is
“something in itself.” See Honnefelder, Scientia transcendens, 33.
68 Beneš’s assessment is a case in point: “Generaliter potest dici, quod, in quantum ex ­allato
textu potest iudicari, B. Iacobus de Viterbio in suis explicationibus videtur esse nimis
James of Viterbo on Divine Ideas Cognition of Creatures 87

the critical assessments of three late medieval authors, the secular master
Godfrey of Fontaines, the Dominican Bernard of Auvergne, and the Francis-
can William of Alnwick, whose discussions of James are particularly useful in
helping the historian identify what is both distinctive and problematic about
James’s views.69

3.4.1 Godfrey of Fontaines

Godfrey discusses and refutes James’s theory of ideas at the very end of his
Quodlibet viii, question 3, a question entitled “Whether a rational creature be-
fore actual existence is capable of receiving grace or any accident,” and largely
devoted to a critique of Henry of Ghent’s esse essentiae. As both Godfrey’s
Quodlibet viii and James’s Quodlibet i appear to have been conducted in the
same Lenten session of 1293, Godfrey’s text represents an immediate reaction
to James’s views by a major thinker at the University of Paris in the immediate
aftermath of Henry of Ghent’s regency.70 There is a marked difference in the
manner in which each reacts to the other’s work: While Godfrey is unreserved-
ly critical of many of James’s metaphysical positions, James appears to be more
receptive to Godfrey’s, at least when it comes to God’s cognition of creatures
and the status of possibles.71 One important point of convergence between

d­ iffusus, ita ut fiat minus clarus. Videtur—si de tanto viro aliquid iudicium proferre
­licet—in comparatione cum Henrico de Gandavo—aliquatenus superficialis esse in as-
signandis rationibus metaphysicis” (Beneš, “Valor ‘possibilium,’” 354). But Paulus, Henri
de Gand, 127, thinks Beneš misinterprets James.
69 I have examined the views of all three authors in my “Bernard of Auvergne on James of
Viterbo’s Doctrine of Possibles: With a Critical Edition of Bernard’s Reprobatio of James’s
Quodlibet 1, question 5,” Augustiniana 66 (2016): 151–84.
70 Godfrey’s regency in the faculty of theology extends from the mid-1280s to 1298 or 1299,
with a brief reappearance in 1303–04 (see Wippel, The Metaphysical Thought, xix); James
was active in the same faculty, from no later than 1293 to no later than 1300. Henry had
been master of theology from no later than 1276 until 1292 (see Paulus, Henri de Gand,
xiv–xvi). John Wippel was the first to establish that James’s Quodl. i, q. 5 was indeed the
text referred to and cited by Godfrey of Fontaines in his Quodl. viii, q. 3 in “The Dating of
James of Viterbo’s Quodlibet i and Godfrey of Fontaines’ Quodlibet viii,” Augustiniana 24
(1974): 348–86.
71 See Gossiaux’s extensive discussion of the textual similarities between both authors in
“James of Viterbo and the Late Thirteenth-Century Debate,” 516–22. It is worth point-
ing out, however, that there are some cases where Godfrey cites James but interprets his
words in a way that is clearly at odds with James’s position. One example is provided by
Quodl. i, q. 5, 65, ll. 113–16: “Est autem ulterius considerandum quod, ad hoc quod aliq-
uid sit obiectum cognitum, non requiritur ipsius existentia actualis, sed sufficit quod res
sit possibilis. Sic enim cognosci potest per illud in quo et per quod dicitur possibilis.”
This passage is quoted almost verbatim by Godfrey of Fontaines in Quodl. viii, q. 3, (ed.)
88 Côté

them is that they both hold that creatures are possible only insofar as God can
produce them—Godfrey calls this “extrinsic potency,” as we will see shortly—
and in no way on account of anything they are “in themselves,” independently
of their relation to God. Godfrey writes:

Sometimes they have being only virtually in their extrinsic principles …,

as in the potency of God who, in a certain way, is virtually everything and
virtually embraces all things, being capable by his power of producing
everything.72

Another point is the fact that James is sometimes given to using the language
of act and potency, favored by Godfrey, to describe the difference between
creatures existing in reality and in the divine intellect.73
Nevertheless, James differs from Godfrey on one very fundamental point,
namely the status of the obiectum cognitum, or exemplatum or esse possibile.
James holds that it is really distinct from God’s essence, whereas Godfrey
­emphatically and repeatedly denies that it is distinct, and focuses most of his
attention on this crucial point. Godfrey considers the distinction he attributes
to Aristotle between “diminished being” (i.e., the being something has in the

Hoffmans, 48. But whereas Godfrey’s aim in the passage in which he quotes James is to
show that it is not necessary to suppose that creatures before their existence have “ali-
quod esse realiter secundum se,” James’s objective is to establish the very opposite thesis,
namely that creatures before creation are res verae and that they are distinct from God.
On Godfrey’s critical stance toward James, see the famous Tabula discordantium edited
by Jean Hoffmans, “La Table des divergences et innovations doctrinales de Godefroid de
Fontaines,” Revue néoscolastique de philosophie 36 (1934): 412–36. This is the work of an
anonymous late-medieval admirer of Godfrey which provides a brief summary of every
question in Quodlibeta v to xiii, naming the contemporary theologians that the author
of the table believed Godfrey was arguing against. One of the authors who he claimed
was most often in the sights of Godfrey is none other than James of Viterbo. Now, as John
Wippel has shown (see “The Dating of James of Viterbo’s Quodlibet i”), our anonymous
author is not always a trustworthy guide as to who Godfrey’s actual targets were. Still,
there was much in James’s philosophy that Godfrey took issue with, as is clear from Wip-
pel’s The Metaphysical Thought.
72 Godfrey of Fontaines, Quodl. iv, q. 2, (eds.) De Wulf and Pelzer, 238: “Quandoque autem
haec habent esse solum virtualiter in suis principiis extrinsecis, non ingredientibus es-
sentiam ipsorum, ut in potentia Dei qui ratione suae infinitae perfectionis quodammodo
est omnia in virtute, et omnia quodammodo virtualiter in se habet, omnia sua virtute in
esse producere potens.” See also Godfrey of Fontaines, Quodl. ii, q. 2, (eds.) De Wulf and
Pelzer, 64, as well as Quodl. viii, q. 3, (ed.) Hoffmans, 39.
73 Quodl. i, q. 4, 61, ll. 598–623; Quodl. i, q. 5, 69, ll. 245–68.
James of Viterbo on Divine Ideas Cognition of Creatures 89

intellect) and real being as exhaustive.74 He sees no need to add a third kind
of being—call it esse essentiae or esse possibile—that would stand halfway be-
tween cognized being and actual existents. What he does believe is that one
and the same real being can be “divided into” actual being and potential be-
ing, which just means that a given existing thing can be considered from two
points of view.75 A thing is said to have actual being when it exists outside of
its causes; that same thing is said to possess potential being insofar as its cause
is able to produce it. Godfrey distinguishes two causes of change: an extrin-
sic cause, God, and an intrinsic cause, matter. After creation, a natural being
that does not yet exist possesses potential being in its material cause; before
­creation, creatures possess potential being in their extrinsic cause, namely
­God, and something has potential being in God only insofar as God is able to
confer actual existence on it.76 Thus, what James claims is a true thing (vera
res) with qualification, distinct both from God’s essence and real existents,
namely, esse possibile, Godfrey sees as distinct only in potency from the being
displayed by existents, and really identical with the essence of God.77
The disagreement could not be starker. By contending that there is a real, al-
beit qualified, distinction between possible beings in God’s intellect and God’s
essence, James, in Godfrey’s eyes, is demonstrating that he has misunderstood
the true meaning of the act-potency distinction. In his refutation of James’s
arguments in Quodlibet i, question 5, which occupies the last twenty-five lines
of Quodlibet viii, question 3 in the Philosophes Belges edition, the phrases

74 Godfrey of Fontaines, Quodl. viii, q. 3, (ed.) Hoffmans, 34: “Cum ergo duplex sit esse:
quoddam diminutum, quod dicitur esse cognitum, quo res est tantum apud animam per
suam cognitionem, quod nihil aliud est quam rei cognitio; quoddam reale quo res est
aliquod ens verum praeter esse cognitum.” About the term diminutum—the correct Latin
translation of the erroneous Arabic translation of the Greek loipon in Aristotle’s Meta-
physics 6.3 (1028a1)—see Armand Maurer’s classic note “Ens Diminutum: a Note on Its
Origin and Meaning,” Mediaeval Studies 12 (1950): 216–22. For a more recent and more
complete account of the fate of ens diminutum, especially at the hands of Duns Scotus,
see Honnefelder, Scientia transcendens, 31–45. I note here that whereas for both Godfrey
of Fontaines (e.g., in Quodl. viii, q. 3, [ed.] Hoffmans, 38; cf. Wippel, The Metaphysical
Thought, 16, n. 28) and Henry of Ghent (in Quodl. ix, q. 2, [ed.] Macken, 31, l. 54) ens
diminutum refers to any content of the mind, James of Viterbo explicitly restricts it to the
relation that is signified by the copula in the proposition. See qdp, q. 11, 45, ll. 1010–15.
75 Godfrey of Fontaines, Quodl. ii, q. 2, 61, (eds.) De Wulf and Pelzer; Quodl. viii, q. 3, (ed.)
Hoffmans, 40–41.
76 See note 72 above.
77 Godfrey of Fontaines, Quodl. viii, q. 3, (ed.) Hoffmans, 47: “Unde quiditas creaturae sic in-
tellecta non differt realiter a Deo cognoscente nec a quocumque alio, quia nec est aliquod
realiter nisi ipsa cognitio cognoscentis.”
90 Côté

s­ olum in potentia and nisi in potentia—as in, for example, “non est aliquid aliud
a Deo nisi in potentia”—occur no less than eleven times. The repetitiveness of
the last lines could be a result of the haste with which Godfrey wrote the sec-
tion dealing with James, which reads like an afterthought in a question that is
otherwise entirely devoted to Henry of Ghent. But it could also be a reflection
of Godfrey’s irritation at James for having failed to grasp what Godfrey consid-
ered a fundamental metaphysical principle.
It is interesting to note that one finds the same criticism (and the same
repetitiveness) in Godfrey’s marginal glosses to his copy of James’s Quodli-
bet i, question 5, found in ms. Paris BnF lat. 15350, one of the many manu-
scripts that belonged to Godfrey’s so-called “philosophical library.”78 Although
many of these annotations are hard to make out, written as they are in God-
frey’s notoriously difficult cursive hand, one recurrent phrase is readily de-
cipherable, namely in potentia, non in actu.79 In the following table, I have
reproduced the different occurrences of this phrase or phrases like it oppo-
site the passages of James’s Quodlibet i, question 5 next to which they occur
in the manuscript, using asterisks in place of the signes de renvoi used by
Godfrey.

… et causa est accipiuntur ut aliae* et dis- *uerum est in potentia, non in

tinctae a Deo. Potentia enim et causa dicunt actu. F. 302rb
respectum. Quodl. i, q. 5, 63, ll. 37–38.
Et primo quidem modo intelligere creaturas, *uerum est in actu, sed non in
est intelligere eas ut non distinguuntur* ab potentia. F. 302rb
ipso. Quodl. i, q. 5, 63, ll. 43–44.
immo hoc modo Deum intelligere creaturas *uerum est tamen ut sunt in
non est aliud quam ipsum intelligere suas deo imitabiles. F. 302rb
perfectiones.* Quodl. i, q. 5, 63, ll. 44–45.
Secundo autem modo intelligere ipsas, est *uerum est in potentia. F. 302rb
intelligere eas ut sunt aliae et distinctae ab
ipso.* Et hoc est proprie intelligere creaturas.
Quodl. i, q. 5, 63, ll. 46–47.

78 See J.J. Duin’s classic “La bibliothèque philosophique de Godefroid de Fontaines,” Estudios
Lulianos 3 (1959): 22–36, 137–60.
79 Regarding the idiosyncrasies of Godfrey’s cursive hand, see Andrea Aiello and Robert
Wielockx, Goffredo di Fontaines, aspirante baccelliere sentenziario: Le autografe “Notule
de scientia theologie” e la cronologia del ms. Paris BnF lat. 16297, Corpus Christianorum.
­Autographa Medii Aevi 6 (Turnhout, 2008).
James of Viterbo on Divine Ideas Cognition of Creatures 91

Si uero accipiatur creatura ut est a Deo Cum antequam sit in effectu

distincta, sic habet difficultatem quaestio non sit realiter et in actu dis-
proposita utrum essentia creature uel crea- tincta sed in potentia, uidetur
tura … Quodl. i, q. 5, 63, ll. 53–54. non habere difficultatem.
F. 302rb
… ut est a Deo distincta. Quodl. i, q. 5, 63, ll. In potentia, sed non in actu.
54–55. F. 302rb
Videtur quod res antequam sit in actu et Ista distinctio non ualet quia
in sua natura sunt in Dei scientia ; et hoc uidetur debet dici quod sunt a
dupliciter, uidelicet et ut non aliae ab ipso, deo distincte in potentia non in
et etiam ut sunt ab ipso distinctae. Quodl. i, actu. F. 302rb
q. 5, 64, ll. 63–65.
Ergo Deus cognoscit creaturas antequam *uerum est <in> potentia.
sint et ut sunt ab ipso aliae et distinctae.* F. 302va
Quodl. i, q. 5, 64, ll. 65–66.
Semper autem id quod est ratio cognoscendi Non in actu sed in potentia …
sicut causa exigit aliquid aliud cognitum. F. 302va
Quodl. i, q. 5, 64, ll. 92–93.

In summary, then, despite agreement on some issues, Godfrey rejects James’s

distinction wholesale.

3.4.2 Bernard of Auvergne

Bernard of Auvergne was a Dominican of the early 14th century who wrote,
among many other works, a series of Reprobationes, i.e., Refutations, targeting
the first two Quodlibeta of James of Viterbo.80 Almost nothing is known about
Bernard’s career; in particular, nothing is known about when he wrote his Rep-
robationes. One thing we do know is that he was named prior of the convent
of Saint-Jacques in 1303. If we accept the suggestion of Mandonnet mentioned
by Adriaan Pattin81 that Bernard’s election as prior put an end to his university
career, it would follow that Bernard’s Reprobationes were written sometime

80 See Adriaan Pattin, “La structure de l’être fini selon Bernard d’Auvergne op (après 1307),”
Tijdschrift voor Filosofie 24 (1962): 668–737. Bernard’s critique of James’s theory of seminal
reasons has been examined by Mary Phelps, “The Theory of Seminal Reasons in James of
Viterbo,” Augustiniana 30 (1980): 271–83. For a critical edition of Bernard’s reprobatio
of James’s Quodl. i, q. 5, see Côté, “Bernard of Auvergne on James of Viterbo’s Doctrine
of Possibles.”
81 Pattin, “La structure de l’être fini,” 669.
92 Côté

­between 1294 and 1303. This would make his Reprobationes a very early witness
to the reception of James’s views in Paris.
If the cornerstone of James’s theory of divine cognition of creatures is the
belief in two sorts of real beings—actual existents and possible or cognized
beings—then Bernard follows Godfrey in rejecting this distinction wholesale.
Bernard thinks that by inferring something’s existence from the mere fact
that it can be thought, James is guilty of the secundum quid and simpliciter
fallacy.82 As Bernard sees things, something can be a cognized object (obiec-
tum cognitum) without having a proper reality. Bernard agrees that it requires
some reality, but that reality is just that of its cause, that is, of the cognizing
agent. An effect that is still in its cause, as is the case with creatures in the
divine intellect, “does not possess a reality of its own, but only the reality of
its cause.”83 Thus Bernard concurs with James’s assertion that what is abso-
lutely nothing, i.e., has no reality, cannot be thought, if by “being absolutely
nothing” one means lacking either proper reality or the reality of its cause.
But having the reality of its cause is sufficient for it not to count as “absolutely
nothing.”
Although Bernard’s arguments are quite different from Godfrey’s, many of
them echo Godfrey’s sentiment that James needlessly postulates a distinc-
tion between two classes of real being, namely, actual being and cognized or
possible being, where the simpler and more economical act-potency distinc-
tion would suffice. Thus, to James’s contention that creatures in God’s power
are distinct from God, Bernard urges that the correct answer is that they are
distinct in potency, not in act.84 Bernard makes a similar point in response to
James’s apparent belief that in order to sensibly talk of God’s being related to
a particular species of creatures, say the species horse, before creation, that
species must be endowed with a sui generis reality, namely, cognized or pos-
sible being. In fact, before God created horses, Bernard replies, there was no
actual relation of God to horses, only a potential one. It is this potential rela-
tion that God cognizes eternally: “For these statements are not contradictory,

82 Bernard of Auvergne, Reprobatio primi Quodlibet Iacobi de Viterbio. Reprobatio quinte

questionis, nn. 6, 7, 13, 15, 23, (ed.) Côté.
83 Bernard of Auvergne, Reprobatio primi Quodlibet Iacobi de Viterbio. Reprobatio quinte
questionis, n. 7, (ed.) Côté: “[A]liquid potest esse obiectum cognitum absque hoc quod
habeat aliquam propriam realitatem …; quia ad ipsum intelligendum sufficit perfecta
cognitio cause; effectus autem quod est in causa non habet propriam realitatem adhuc,
sed solum realitatem cause, ex qua non potest concludi aliqua propria realitas in effectu.”
84 Bernard of Auvergne, Reprobatio primi Quodlibet Iacobi de Viterbio. Reprobatio quinte
questionis, n. 5, (ed.) Côté.
James of Viterbo on Divine Ideas Cognition of Creatures 93

namely that the intellect cognizes in actuality what is not in actuality but only
in potency.”85
Bernard also thinks that James fails to satisfactorily address objections to his
theory, in particular the fourth objection to the effect that if we are to say that
essences are eternal because God cognizes them eternally, then we will also
have to say that actually existing creatures are eternal since God cognizes them
eternally. Bernard agrees with James that eternity is a measure of God’s knowl-
edge, not of things. But he points out that if James is to claim that quiddities
are eternal because they are cognized eternally, then he will have no choice
but to say that the thing cognized will be eternal as well—presumably because
the cognized object must “be” for as long as God cognizes it, namely eternally.
Thus, Bernard thinks James’s theory commits him to the heretical thesis that
creatures are coeternal with God.86

3.4.3 William of Alnwick

Our third author, William of Alnwick, writing around 1316–17, was even less
impressed than Godfrey and Bernard were with James’s theory that creatures
as cognized by God are distinct from God’s essence and enjoy a distinctive
kind of being in God’s intellect. William sees James as belonging to a group of
­authors—two other notable ones being Henry of Ghent and Duns S­ cotus—
who were guilty of reifying the contents of the divine intellect.87 William
mounts a formidable assault against James’s theory in question 8 of his monu-
mental Quodlibet, attacking it from various angles. Like Godfrey and Bernard
before him, William argues that the postulation of a different class of real be-
ings, namely, possibles or cognized objects, is unnecessary for the purpose of

85 Bernard of Auvergne, Reprobatio primi Quodlibet Iacobi de Viterbio. Reprobatio quinte

questionis, n. 9, (ed.) Côté: “Vnde antequam equus esset, deus ut causa in potentia ref-
erebatur ad eum, et non actu, et ideo nulla relatio actualis erat equi ad deum, sed poten-
tialis que fundari potest in ente in potentia eo modo quo est in potentia; istam tamen
relationem in potentia deus intellexit actu ab eterno, ita quod actu intellexit extrema
istius relationis, non quod actu essent, sed quod actu intellecta essent. Hec enim non
contradicunt, scilicet quod intellectus actu intelligat id quod actu non est, sed in potentia
solum.”
86 Bernard of Auvergne, Reprobatio primi Quodlibet Iacobi de Viterbio. Reprobatio quinte
questionis, n. 26, (ed.) Côté: “Si autem uerum esset quod dicit quod quiditates sunt eterne
quia a deo cognoscuntur ab eterno, oporteret quod sicut cognitio diuina mensuraretur
eternitate, ita et res cognita que ab eterno esset, et sicut quiditates rerum, ita et existentie,
quod dicendum non est.”
87 For discussion see Otto Wanke, Die Kritik Wilhelms von Alnwick an der Ideenlehre des
­Johannes Duns Skotus (Bonn, 1965).
94 Côté

accounting for God’s knowledge of creatures. Agreeing with Bernard, William

also contends that James’s theory commits him to the conclusion that crea-
tures are eternal. But William’s critique is more radical than either Bernard’s
or Godfrey’s. For as William sees things, James’s theory is not just unnecessary,
it is incoherent. William shows this with the help of the metaphysical prin-
ciple that all effects of God’s productive power must preexist in God. Accord-
ing to James, creatures as cognized objects or possible beings—which have
only “virtual being” as William puts it, since they do not yet exist in actu—are
distinct from God’s essence, and so, William reasons, are effects of God. But
then, by the metaphysical commonplace that all effects of God’s productive
power must preexist in him, the creatures qua possible will have to preexist in
God as possible, and these possibles in turn will have to preexist in the form of
possibles, and so on ad infinitum.88
William also attacks James’s theory at one of its most vulnerable points: its
concept of possibility. As we saw in the preceding section, James denies that a
creature before its existence is possible in virtue of its own “potency,” asserting
with Godfrey that it is possible only through the extrinsic “potency” of God.
This is exactly what William of Alnwick believes as well. William appeals to the
authority of Anselm’s De casu diaboli, chapter 12 to argue that the world—An-
selm’s example—before its existence is not possible by virtue of its own power,
but by the power of an agent extrinsic to it. The world is possible in its cause;
hence, William concludes, it is not distinct from its cause.89
Of course James would want to say that the world as cognized by God is
distinct from God’s essence; William’s point is that he can’t. His argument is
as follows: if creatures are distinct from God according to their esse possibile,
this will be either by virtue of their intrinsic potency or by virtue of the ac-
tive potency of their cause. But James rules out the first possibility, since he
repeatedly states that creatures before existence are true things in a qualified
way (cum determinatione), that is, as possible “not by the potency of creatures,
but by the potency of God.” Hence, for a creature to be by virtue of its own
intrinsic potency would be for it to be unqualifiedly (sine ista determinatione).

88 William of Alnwick, Quodl. q. 8, in Quaestiones disputatae de esse intelligibili et de quodli-

bet [sic], (ed.) Athanasius Ledoux (Florence, 1937), 459–60: “Si ergo esse virtuale effectus
quod habet in sua causa non sit esse causae, sed distinctum a causa, illud esse virtuale
effectus causatur ab eius causa. Sed omne causatum et productum a causa aliqua prius
naturaliter et originaliter habet in ea esse virtuale ut in sua causa antequam producatur;
ergo creatura prius habet esse virtuale in sua causa antequam habeat esse virtuale in sua
causa, et sic idem praecederet se ipsum in infinitum.”
89 William of Alnwick, Quodl. q. 8, (ed.) Ledoux, 464.
James of Viterbo on Divine Ideas Cognition of Creatures 95

However, James denies that creatures qua possible are beings unqualifiedly.
But then the resulting position is untenable, William argues, for to say (a)
that creatures before their existence are distinct from God qua possible, and
(b) that they are possible solely by virtue of God’s potency, amounts to saying
both that they are distinct and that they are not distinct.90 William appears
to be saying that by denying that anything is intrinsically possible, James is
depriving possibles of the minimal robustness they need in order to be really
other than God, even in a qualified sense. What William is hinting at is that
James’s own concepts, developed for the purpose of establishing that creatures
possess “real being” before bona fide existence, are not up to the task of secur-
ing the desired conclusion.

3.5 Conclusion

James of Viterbo’s doctrine of possible or cognized being is his most original

contribution to the cluster of problems centered on the question of divine
ideas. His position is that creatures exist in the divine intellect as divine ideas
that are really identical with the divine essence, and as cognized beings or
possibles that are distinct from the divine essence. While his doctrine owes
much to Henry of Ghent, a fact that James tacitly acknowledges, it differs from
Henry’s account in two important ways. First, there are ideas of more sorts of
things for James than for Henry; and second, while Henry believes that essenc-
es are possible in themselves as well as being possible in relation to God, James
holds that possibles are such only in relation to divine power. This, I have sug-
gested, points to a real problem in James, for if there is no such thing as intrin-
sic possibility, how can possibles be robust enough to sustain a real relation

90 William of Alnwick, Quodl. q. 8, (ed.) Ledoux, 460–61: “[S]i creaturae, antequam sint in
actu, secundum suum esse possibile sint distinctae a Deo sive a Dei potentia, aut ergo per
potentiam intrinsecam ipsius creaturae aut per solam potentiam activam causantis. Non
primo modo, quia iste Doctor scribit in eadem quaestione et frequenter replicat, ut prius
ipsum recitavi, quod creaturae, antequam sint in actu, sunt verae res cum hac determi-
natione: ut possibiles, non quidem potentia creaturae, sed potentia divina. Si enim, crea-
tura, antequam sit in actu, sit possibilis potentia sibi intrinseca, tunc, antequam fuerit
in actu, esset vera res sine ista determinatione: ut obiectum cognitum, cuius oppositum
dicit. Restat ergo, ut creatura, antequam sit in actu, sit possibilis per solam potentiam
causantis, et per consequens suum esse possibile ab aeterno fuit distinctum realiter a
potentia creativa Dei. Unde iste Doctor dicens quod creaturae, antequam essent in actu,
ut possibiles, distinguuntur a Deo et tamen quod non sunt possibiles potentia creaturae,
sed potentia divina, ut mihi videtur, dicit opposita.”
96 Côté

of difference with the divine essence? As we saw, this was in fact the tenor
of one of William of Alnwick’s objections to James’s theory. This objection, in
addition to those of Godfrey of Fontaines and Bernard of Auvergne relating to
the “unparsimonious” nature of James’s doctrine of possible or cognized being,
points to real difficulties in James’s doctrine. In the end, despite the originality
of some of his insights and the ingenuity of his arguments, James seems not to
have been entirely successful in his attempt to articulate a coherent doctrine
of divine ideas.
 chapter 4

James of Viterbo on the Ontological Status of

Real Relations

Mark Henninger

4.1 Introduction

In a recent article on contemporary theories of relations,1 John Heil distin-

guishes various positions concerning the ontological status of relations that
have been taken through the centuries. With the requisite demurrals about any
type of taxonomy, the following schema is useful:

(1) Flat-out anti-realism: there are no relations; beliefs of the form “a bears R
to b” are false.
(2) Projectivism: relations are creatures of reason, purely mental compari-
sons “projected” onto the experienced world.
(3) Constrained projectivism: relations are creatures of reason, mental com-
parisons constrained by non-relational features of the world.
(4) Reductionism: relations are [completely] identifiable with non-relational
features of objects.
(5) Supervenience: relations exist, but are somehow “dependent on and de-
termined by” the relata and their monadic properties.
(6) Modest realism: truthmakers for relational predications are relational fea-
tures of the world.
(7) Hyper-realism: relations are ontologically fundamental; the world in-
cludes, in addition to objects and their (“monadic”) properties, relations.2

In order for this taxonomy to be useful for investigating James of Viterbo’s

teaching on the ontological status of relations, it is helpful to provide some
background to the medieval scholastic approach to relations. I first present
certain “framing aspects,” assumed notions that the scholastics commonly

1 John Heil, “Relations,” in The Routledge Companion to Metaphysics, (eds.) Robin Le Poidevin
et al. (London, 2009), 310–21.
2 Ibid., 312.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���8 | doi 10.1163/9789004361881_006

98 Henninger

shared in their approach to this question. The most fundamental of these is

well known: their general approach is from within the long Aristotelian tradi-
tion of a substance-attribute ontology of particulars. This had the important
consequence of ruling out conceiving of relations as polyadic properties, and
it certainly ruled out conceiving of them as polyadic properties that are uni-
versals. When the scholastic thinkers of the 13th and 14th centuries considered
real relations, they thought of them as particular relational properties, that is,
accidents, belonging to individual particulars, that is, primary substances.
This fundamental presupposition, strange to us today, must be grasped if
we are to have access to their thinking on this topic. They conceived of real
relations as relational properties, accidents inhering in substances, and these
“categorial relations” were conceived of as founded upon other non-relational
accidents. They can be called “founded relational properties.” The relation of
similarity is a central example. While we would conceive of one symmetrical
relation of color similarity obtaining between two pieces of white chalk, a and
b, they, with their all-encompassing Aristotelian conceptual framework, con-
ceived of it differently: if there are two really distinct substances, there must be
two really distinct accidents. The Persian thinker Ibn Sīnā (Avicenna) makes
the point in his discussion of relations: “Therefore in no way may you think
that one accident is in two subjects.”3 If there are two substances, a and b, say
two white stones, there is an accident, a property of whiteness c inhering in a,
and a numerically distinct property of whiteness d inhering in b. A and b are
similar with respect to color; hence there is a relational property R of similarity
in a toward b, and R is founded upon the accident, the quality of whiteness c
inhering in a. A numerically distinct relational property R′ inheres in b toward
a and is founded upon d. These relational properties are accidents to be sure,
but they are sui generis accidents, in some respects different from the so-called
absolute accidents, as accidents in the categories of quality and quantity, mo-
nadic properties such as being white and being two metres tall. The relational
properties are dependent in three ways: first, unlike substances and like all
accidents, they do not exist on their own, but only in a subject; secondly, they
are founded upon other accidents, and so are dependent upon these other ac-
cidents; and thirdly, unlike an absolute accident, a relational property is also
dependent upon another object really distinct from the subject in which it in-
heres. The subject of a relation and the object “toward which” it is related were
often called the “extremes” of the relation.

3 Avicenna, Liber de philosophia prima sive scientia divina, tract. 3, c. 10, (ed.) Simone van Riet
(Leuven and Leiden, 1977), 177, l. 93: “Igitur nullo modo putes quod unum accidens sit in
duobus subiectis.”
James of Viterbo on the Ontological Status of Real Relations 99

Duns Scotus is representative of the tradition when he sets out three sever-
ally necessary and jointly sufficient conditions for a real relation:

According to common opinion, a real relation requires only the following

three [conditions]: first, a real foundation, which of course is in a thing
and in extra-mental reality; second, also that the extremes be real and re-
ally distinct; third, also that that relation in extra-mental reality be in the
extremes without of course any consideration of the intellect or without
the operation of a power extrinsic [to the extremes].4

Thomas Aquinas concurs.5 He holds that a relation R of a to b is real only if (i)

a and b are really distinct extra-mental things and (ii) there is a real foundation
in a for its relation to b. These two conditions were more or less agreed upon
by all in the debate.
These thinkers were in the main realists when it came to relations, but they
debated at length in what sense relations exist. With typical scholastic sharp-
ness, they formulated this question as follows: is a real relation distinct from its
foundation or is it identical with, or even reducible to, its foundation?

4.2 Foundationism

Any position that maintains the identity of the relational property and the
foundation I label “foundationism.” As with most common positions in me-
dieval philosophy, there are many flavors of foundationism. They all, however,
share the view that in accounting for the ontology of real relations there is no
need to posit any entity beyond the foundations of the relation. This is the me-
dieval version of the foundationism that is today found in some contemporary
discussions. Keith Campbell writes: “According to foundationism, for all rela-
tional facts there are corresponding foundational facts, and in every case, the

4 John Duns Scotus, Quodlibet, q. 6, n. 33, (ed.) Luke Wadding, Opera omnia 12 (Lyon, 1639),
166: “Si enim, secundum communem sententiam, relatio realis non requirat nisi ista tria: pri-
mum, fundamentum reale, quod scilicet sit in re et ex natura rei; secundum, et extrema realia
et realiter distincta; tertium, et quod ipsa ex natura rei insit extremis, absque scilicet omni
consideratione intellectus, vel absque operatione potentiae extrinsece, et ista tria conveni-
unt aequalitati in divinis, aeque sicut cuicumque aequalitati in entibus, vel magis, ut patet de
se, in articulis praemissis sequitur quod haec aequalitas erit relatio realis.”
5 Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologiae (=st) i, q. 13, a. 7, corp.; Scriptum super Sent., l. 1, d. 26, q. 2,
a. 1, corp.; d. 30, q. 1, a. 3, ad 3; d. 33, q. 1, a. 1, corp. and ad 4.
100 Henninger

relational facts call for no ontology beyond that involved in the foundational
facts themselves.”6
Another “framing aspect” of their discussion originates from a text of Aris-
totle that played a key role in debates on relations. The text is from book 5 of
the Physics: “Nor is there motion in respect of relation; for it may happen that
when one correlative changes, the other, although this does not itself change,
may be true or not true, so that in these cases the motion is accidental.”7 Rela-
tional changes are dependent upon other more fundamental changes, either
in the substance or in its absolute accidents; there is no “merely relational
change” without a more fundamental change in the world; and “the world,” for
the scholastics, means the world of substances and accidents.
Hence if you were a foundationist, this text was just what you needed to
deflate the positions of your profligate hyper-realist opponents who held that
a real relation is an entity “over and above,” i.e., really distinct from, its foun-
dation. You could start with the widely held principle regarding accidental
change that,

(T1) something changes (accidentally) only if there is a change in it, if by

‘in’ is meant inherence,

and then claim that in this text Aristotle teaches regarding foundations and
relations that,

(T2) a comes to be or ceases to be really related to b through some change

of the foundation that is or is in a and/or of the foundation that is or is
in b,

and you would conclude that,

(T3) if the foundation that is or is in a changes, then there is a change of

a; but if only the foundation that is or is in b changes, there is no change
of a, for there is no change in a.

For example, a and b are rocks, a white and b black; a is not similar to b with
respect to color. B is painted white and a now is similar to b with respect to
color, but a is not changed in any way. That is, by (T2), a could begin to be re-
ally related to b with no change in a, but only in b. But then, by (T3), a does

6 Keith Campbell, Abstract Particulars (Oxford, 1990), 101.

7 Physics 5.2 (225b11–13).
James of Viterbo on the Ontological Status of Real Relations 101

not change, for (T1) there is no change in a. A acquires no really distinct entity.
This view of relational change goes hand in hand with foundationism with
regard to these types of founded relations, and it was held rather widely by
the scholastics with regard to these relational properties. As Campbell writes,
“Foundationism is committed to the slogan, ‘No relational differences without
qualitative differences’ or ‘There are no merely relational differences.’”8
Foundationism was the opinion common among many scholastics in the
13th century, but when the particular theories are compared in a fine-grained
way, differences emerge. For although they held in common the thesis that a
real relation is really identical with its foundation, they held opposing views
concerning the precise ontological status of these relational properties, and
this because although they are identical with their foundations, they are not
simply reducible to their foundations without remainder.
David Armstrong in Truth and Truthmakers writes:

I mean by calling a relation internal that, given just the terms of the rela-
tion, the relation between them is necessitated. … And although the mat-
ter requires further discussion at a later point, I suggest it is an attractive
ontological hypothesis that such a relation is no addition of being. Given
just the terms, we are given the ontology of the situation. The relation is
not something over and above its terms (which is not to say that the rela-
tion does not hold, not to say that it does not exist).9

I believe that the different views of the medieval foundationists arose over
how to formulate the insight behind Armstrong’s last sentence. In terms of
the ontology of the situation, there is nothing to be posited over and above the
foundations. Yet a relation is not completely reducible to its foundation. Hence
the scholastics who were foundationists did not adopt (4) Reductionism, the
view that relations are (completely) identifiable with non-relational features
of objects. Rather, they adopted a realist position somewhere in the murky
area of (5) and (6). How each of the scholastics accounts for this last depends
on the ontological resources and distinctions in his particular philosophy that
can be brought to bear on the question. This can be shown, however briefly
and inadequately here, by the example of two foundationists of the 13th cen-
tury, Thomas Aquinas and Henry of Ghent. Each dealt with this challenge in
different ways and this can be clarified by seeing the different third necessary

8 Campbell, Abstract Particulars, 113.

9 David Armstrong, Truth and Truthmakers (Cambridge, 2004), 9.
102 Henninger

condition for a real relational property that each added to the two necessary
conditions mentioned earlier.
For Aquinas, the three necessary and jointly sufficient conditions are the
following: a is really related to b if and only if: (i) a and b are really distinct ex-
tra-mental things; (ii) there is a real foundation in a for its relational property
to b; and (iii) there exists a relational property R identical with its foundation,
but differing by a real aspect (ratio) from that foundation. And for Henry of
Ghent, a is really related to b if and only if: (i) a and b are really distinct extra-
mental things; (ii) there is a real foundation in a for its relational property to
b; and (iii) there exists a relational property R, a mode (modus) of being, really
identical with its foundation, but differing intentionally from it. Henry of Ghent
pulls from his metaphysical toolbox a form of his intentional distinction to aid
him here.
For both thinkers, a relational property is identical with its foundation,
“which is not to say that it does not exist.” When Aquinas says that a relational
property, though identical with its foundation, differs from it by ratio, he is
asserting that a relational property is a real intelligible aspect (ratio) of the
extra-mental world. And when Henry of Ghent says that a relational property
is a mode of its foundation that differs intentionally from it, he means that a
relational property is a way in which a exists in the extra-mental world. For
both, the ratio or modus of a relation is not some further thing or res beyond
the foundation, but is an intelligible aspect of the world. To say that a and b are
white is one thing; to say that a and b are similar is another. But Aquinas and
Henry do not want to account for this by positing some further entity in the
world besides a and b.
Of course, to really understand their theories of relation, we would have to
investigate what for Aquinas the key term ratio means in this context, and for
Henry what is meant by modus, as well as by his intentional distinction, and
for each, what minimal reality is to be accorded to the ratio and mode.10 But
here one need only note that all foundationists, such as Aquinas and Henry,
and Henry of Harclay in the 14th century, rightly saw part of their interesting
yet difficult task as accounting for the specifically relational character of a rela-
tion, once they commit to identifying a relation with its foundation.
Foundationism in its various forms was the common opinion in the late
13th and early 14th centuries. Here I would like to characterize it as the broad
via media, a large tent, allowing for a wide variety of ways to reconcile the

10 I have addressed these issues elsewhere; see Mark Henninger, Relations: Medieval Theories
1250–1325 (Oxford, 1989), 13–58.
James of Viterbo on the Ontological Status of Real Relations 103

r­ elational character of a relation and its identity with the foundation. It turns
out that James of Viterbo is a foundationist. James sees himself as following a
middle way, and indeed, in terms of Heil’s taxonomy, he subscribes to a form
of modest realism (6). Hence, on the one hand, he does not completely reduce
the ontological status of a real relation to its foundations (4), nor even further,
does he adopt flat-out anti-realism or a form of projectivism (1–3); nor on the
other hand is he a hyper-realist, reifying relations in some way, making them
really distinct from their foundations (7).
It should be noted that these more extreme positions were in fact adopted
by medieval thinkers. Duns Scotus was a hyper-realist, while Peter Auriol ad-
opted a constrained projectivism, taking relations to be concepts, a form of
anti-realism. Neither identifies the relation with the foundation, and hence
neither is a foundationist. Their respective positions can be formulated by pre-
senting for each the third condition (which spells out the ontological status
of the relation), boldly contrasting with that of the foundationists. For Sco-
tus, (iii) there exists an extra-mental thing (res), a relational property, inher-
ing in a that is really distinct from its foundation; and when this relational
property is gained or lost, it brings about—pace Aristotle—a real change in
a. Scotus believes that real categorial relations are res relativae, “relational
things” that change the relata. If white a and black b are posited, and b be-
comes white, b’s quality changes certainly, and a real relation R of similari-
ty is also posited in b. And for Scotus, though there is no qualitative change
in a, a is changed by taking on a real relation R′, a res relativa, an entity re-
ally other than and distinct from its foundation, the whiteness in a. Hence,
he disagrees with (T3): If the foundation that is or is in a changes, then there
is a change of a; but if only the foundation that is or is in b changes, there is
no change of a, for there is no change in a. No, for Scotus, there is a change
of a for there is a change in a, since a acquires a res relativa, a real relation,
an inhering accident really distinct from the foundation. He is clearly not a
foundationist. Auriol, on the other hand, a conceptualist, has as his third con-
dition (iii) that there exist an apprehension (of mind or sense) connecting a
and b.11
These two positions are important to keep in mind if we are to understand
James’s own position. For as he begins to lay out his thoughts on the onto-
logical status of relations, he consciously sees himself as adopting a via media,
navigating between conceptualism and hyper-realism.

11 For more details on Scotus’s and Auriol’s views, see Henninger, Relations, 68–97 and
150–73.
104 Henninger

4.3 James of Viterbo

James’s views on the ontological status of real relations are laid out in his
Quaestiones de divinis praedicamentis, from his time as master of theology in
the Augustinian studium at the University of Paris, probably shortly after 1293.
He discussed these “ordinary questions” while teaching his confrères in the
studium, and according to Ypma they are not a reportatio, but a carefully edited
determination by James, in which he investigates the ways in which terms of
the various categories can and cannot be predicated of God. He treats of rela-
tions in questions 11 through 15, comprising almost 275 pages in the critical
edition of Ypma.12 They are in order: (11) whether a relation is a real being or
only according to reason; (12) whether in God there are properly any real rela-
tions; (13) whether in God there are real relations only according to origin; (14)
whether real relations in God bring about a distinction of persons; and (15)
whether any relations according to reason can truly be said of God.
For our purposes, the most important question is the first, where he asks
the basic philosophical question: whether a real relation is a real being or
only a being of reason. But it is clear that the reason he asks this first ques-
tion is ultimately to engage the mystery of the Trinity of persons. He himself
puts this first question on relation in context, saying of his procedure in the
Quaestiones de divinis praedicamentis that after determining certain questions
treating God as a being and as one, and then treating the first three catego-
ries, namely, substance, quantity, and quality, as they pertain to God, he now
intends to treat how relation is found in God; so he must first examine the na-
ture of relation itself. This is important, since when treating the distinction of
divine persons, relations were commonly held to really exist in the Godhead.
It is therefore necessary to determine clearly the ontological status of relation
so as not to derogate divine simplicity on the one hand nor the distinction of
the persons of the Trinity on the other. James holds that if there were not these
theological stakes involved, if there were no divine relations, he and his con-
temporaries would not be treating the nature of relations in such an extensive
way.13

12 Quaestiones de divinis praedicamentis (=qdp), qq. 11–15, (ed.) Eelcko Ypma (Rome, 1986),
1–276. For older treatments of James’s account of relations see Eelcko Ypma, “La relation
est-elle un étre réel ou seulement un être de raison, d’après Jacques de Viterbe,” in Lectio-
num varietates: Hommage à Paul Vignaux (1904–1987), (eds.) Jean Jolivet et al. (Paris, 1991),
155–62, and Rolf Schönberger, Relation als Vergleich: Die Relationstheorie des Johannes
Buridan im Kontext seines Denkens und der Scholastik (Leiden, 1994), 132–42.
13 qdp, q. 11, 12, ll. 287–305.
James of Viterbo on the Ontological Status of Real Relations 105

He understands this first foundational question (question 11) in terms of a

contrast between realist and anti-realist theories. As he says, “the question is to
be understood as whether a relation is some being in reality existing without
the operation of the intellect, or does it exist only by the operation of the intel-
lect, as second intentions are usually said to exist.”14 He says that he will pro-
ceed first by examining the opinions of others, especially his contemporaries,
and this will be done briefly, since he is more interested in truth and only in
what will help him find the truth about relations.15 Only after this review does
he give his own considered opinion, trying to save what is true in the opposing
positions.16 He reviews first arguments for the anti-realist position, that a real
relation does not exist extra-mentally, and then those for a hyper-realist posi-
tion, that a real relation is a thing really distinct from its foundation. In forging
his own opinion, he denies key elements of those opposing positions. Against
the anti-realist, he denies that a real relation has no extra-mental existence,
and against the strong realist, he denies that a real relation is an entity really
distinct from its foundation.
When presenting the anti-realist position, James relies on Simplicius’s ac-
count in his commentary on Aristotle’s Categories, where the “Stoics” are said
to hold a conceptualist view of relations. In James’s view, the Stoics believed
that a relation “is not anything in reality, nor any real being existing beyond
that to which the relation is attributed, but is only a certain judgement of the
intellect comparing one thing with another.”17 He gives a good example, again
found in Simplicius:

If two things are said to be equal, that which is equal is nothing beyond
the quantity that is in each of those things that are said to be equal. These
two quantified things preexisted before the relation or condition. For
such a relation (or the condition which is implied by a relation) will be
nothing other than a certain judgement of ours comparing those things
with each other.18

14 qdp, q. 11, 13–14, ll. 323–26: “Est enim intellectus: Utrum relatio sit aliquod ens in rerum
natura praeter operationem intellectus, vel non sit, nisi per operationem intellectus, sicut
de intentionibus secundis dici solet.”
15 qdp, q. 11, 14, ll. 329–36.
16 qdp, q. 11, 21, ll. 486–89.
17 qdp, q. 11, 15, ll. 346–49: “… qui dixerunt relationem non esse hypostasim, id est non esse
aliquid in rerum natura, neque aliquod ens reale praeter illud cui relatio attribuitur, sed
solum esse quoddam iudicium intellectus comparantis unam rem ad aliam.”
18 qdp, q. 11, 15, ll. 351–56: “Si aliqua duo dicantur aequalia, hoc quod est aequale nihil est
praeter quantitatem quae est in utroque eorum quae dicuntur aequalia. Quae duo quanta
106 Henninger

Here the relation is identified with an occurrent act of judgement. This posi-
tion is clearly a form of projectivism, according to Heil’s taxonomy. A is white
and b is white; if they are judged or said to be similar, this is from us, our judg-
ing, pronouncing them similar. If there were no minds and no perceivers, there
would be white things, but no similarity.
James brings forward other arguments for the anti-realist position that were
common at the time. For example, a standard objection to a strongly realist
view of relation is that it leads to an infinite regress.19 This could be stated as
follows. Take two white things a and b. On a strongly realist position such as
the one assumed here, there inheres in a a real relation R of similarity to b, and
R is really distinct from a. But since R is really distinct from a, R is also really
related to a. But then there must be a real relation R′ of distinction, which is
really distinct from but inhering in R, the original real relation of similarity.
But then R′ is really distinct from R, and so really related to R, and so one must
posit another real relation R″ in R′ to R, and so on ad infinitum. This charge of
an infinite regress against a realist view of relations was used extensively in the
medieval period; it is also found in the classical modern period and was used
by the absolute idealist F.H. Bradley against any reality for relations. But in its
form here, it is only telling against a form of realism that posits a real relation
as really distinct from its foundation. In fact, it is one of the cogent arguments
that moves James to a form of realism that does not make a relation a thing re-
ally distinct from its foundation.
As James concludes his review of arguments for the anti-realist side, he re-
marks: “But if it [a real relation] is a thing, this is because of its foundation, and
the relation is the same thing as the foundation.”20 In other words, another
position, ontologically close to the one he has just discussed, is to admit that
a relation is extra-mental, but is completely reducible to its foundation, (4) in
Heil’s taxonomy. A is a white thing and b is a white thing and the similarity of
a to b is completely reduced to a’s whiteness, and the relation of similarity of b
to a is completely reducible to b’s whiteness.
How James’s position differs from this becomes clear if we briefly exam-
ine the arguments for the strongly realist position on the ontological status of
relations. He divides this position into two parts: “This opinion states that a

prae-existunt ante relationem vel habitudinem. Huiusmodi enim relatio vel habitudo
quae importatur per relationem, nihil erit aliud nisi quoddam nostrum iudicium com-
parantium ea quae a se ipsis sunt.”
19 qdp, q. 11, 17, ll. 406–08.
20 qdp, q. 11, 19, ll. 441–42: “Si autem sit res, hoc est ratione fundamenti, et est eadem res cum
fundamento.”
James of Viterbo on the Ontological Status of Real Relations 107

relation is a real being, and that it is a thing other than its foundation.”21 Saving
the truth he finds in this position, James agrees that a relation is a real being,
but denies that it is really distinct from its foundation. He gives three argu-
ments that a relation is a real extra-mental being, and though they are stated
here for the strongly realist position, he later explicitly adopts them as his own
arguments for the extra-mental reality of relations. The first argument is based
solely on the authority of Aristotle who, James claims, distinguishes real being
from conceptual being, and then divides real being into the ten categories, one
of which is relation. This short and frequently repeated argument from Aris-
totle’s authority is a constant thorn in the side of those arguing for any type of
anti-realism.22
The second is of more interest to us. James argues that the perfection of the
universe consists not just in the perfection of each individual thing, but also
in one thing having an order or relation to another. But this can be so only if
order and relation among things is a real feature of the extra-mental universe
and not mind-dependent.23 This is key to understanding James’s doctrine that
a real relation is an extra-mental reality, but not a “thing” existing in the same
way as a substance, quantity, or quality, such as whiteness. The first two theses
of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus are helpful in this context: “1
The world is all that is the case; 1.1 The world is the totality of facts, not of
things.”24 If one were to describe the whole world, it would not be enough to
catalogue everything in it (however one chose to describe those things). One
would also have to say how they are related, and this last is not another item
in the world of the same type as the things in the world. I think this is part of
what Wittgenstein is declaring in his statement that “the world is the totality
of facts, not things,” and is the intuition of James of Viterbo, and other medi-
eval thinkers, when they present the argument about the order of the universe.
Furthermore, the relations that each thing has to other things is not dependent
upon the mind. These relations are real, not mind-dependent, but it is difficult
to describe their precise ontological status.
Before James, Avicenna and Thomas Aquinas had also used arguments
based on relational features of the universe, and Duns Scotus does so after him.
Scotus writes in his Ordinatio:

21 qdp, q. 11, 19, ll. 445–46: “Haec vero dicit quod relatio est ens reale, et quod est alia res a
suo fundamento.”
22 qdp, q. 11, 19–20, ll. 447–52.
23 qdp, q. 11, 20, ll. 453–57; cf. 11, ll. 279–82.
24 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, (trans.) David Pears and Brian
­McGuinness (London, 2001), 5.
108 Henninger

According to Aristotle, in book 12 of the Metaphysics, the unity of the uni-

verse is in the order of the parts to each other and to the first [mover], as
the unity of an army is in the order of the parts of the army among them-
selves and to the leader; and from this, against those denying a relation to
be a thing besides the act of the intellect, there can be spoken the saying
of the Philosopher, in book 12 of the Metaphysics, that those who so speak
“make the substance of the universe to be disjointed.”25

The intuition is that the order of the universe, its relationality, is mind-
independent.
This realist view of relation is also evident in James’s third argument. What
is true of a thing, whether or not the thing is thought of, is real; this is the case
with relation. He gives examples taken from Avicenna:

For, as he says, we know that in fact this one is a father and that one is a son,
whether or not this is being understood, and also that plants, by a natu-
ral appetite (which does not involve cognition) seek nutrition, whether
anyone thinks this or not, and that the heavens are above and the earth
below, whether someone thinks this or not. And so it can be said in many
other cases.26

I think these last two arguments go a long way in establishing the extra-mental
reality of relations, but that is only the first step; for this strongly realist posi-
tion that James is presenting holds that a real relation is really distinct from its
foundation. James does not spend much time on this second part, and offers
only one argument based on Aristotle:

25 John Duns Scotus, Ordinatio ii, d. 1, qq. 4–5, n. 224, ed. Vaticana, Opera omnia 7 (Vati-
can City, 1973), 111–12: “Primum probatur faciliter, quia secundum Aristotelem xii Meta-
physicae unitas universi est in ordine partium ad se invicem et ad primum, sicut unitas
­exercitus est in ordine partium exercitus inter se et ad ducem; et ex hoc, contra negantes
relationem esse rem extra actum intellectus, potest dici verbum Philosophi xii Metaphy-
sicae, quod tales qui sic dicunt, ‘inconnexam faciunt universi substantiam.’”
26 qdp, q. 11, 20, ll. 461–66: “Nam, ut ait, scimus quod iste est pater et iste est filius, sive intel-
ligatur sive non; et etiam quod plantae naturali appetitu, qui est sine cognitione, desider-
ant nutrimentum, sive hoc quis intelligat sive non, et quod coelum est superius et terra
inferius, sive quis intelligat sive non. Et similiter in multis aliis dici potest.” See Avicenna,
Liber de philosophia prima, tract. 3, c. 10, (ed.) Van Riet, 178–79, ll. 5–15.
James of Viterbo on the Ontological Status of Real Relations 109

Since being is divided immediately into the ten categories, so the same
reasoning seems applicable to all categories, with respect to their really
differing one from another. So if quantity differs as a thing from the sub-
stance in which it exists, by the same reasoning relation differs as a thing
from substance or quantity or anything else on which it is founded. And
if the latter does not differ, neither does the former.27

For the conclusion that a real relation is really distinct from its foundation, I
much prefer a principal argument of Scotus, in which he shows himself to be
clearly not a foundationist. It is directed against the main foundationist thesis,
that a real relation and its foundation are identical:

(i) If a is identical with b, then it is contradictory that a exist but not b.

(ii) In many cases of a relation R and its foundation F, it is not contra-
dictory that F exist and not R.
(iii) Therefore, in many cases of a relation R and its foundation F, R is
not identical with F.28

And if R is not identical with F, it is really distinct from F, and it is a res relativa,
a relative thing distinct from F. Scotus argues for the major premise by claim-
ing that it seems contrary to the principle of contradiction that what are one
and the same (the antecedent of (i)) both really exist and do not really exist
at the same time (the consequent of (i)). If contradictories are said of b­ eings,
one can immediately conclude to some diversity. Premise (ii) is proven by a
number of examples:

For if this white thing exists and no other white thing exists, this white
thing is without [a relation of color] similarity; but if another white thing
comes to exist, there is [the relation of color] similarity in this white

27 qdp, q. 11, 20–21, ll. 467–73: “Cum enim ens immediate divisum sit in decem praedica-
menta, et ideo eadem ratio videtur esse de omnibus praedicamentis, quantum ad hoc
quod est differre realiter unum ab alio. Unde, si quantitas differt re a substantia in qua est,
pari ratione relatio a substantia vel a quantitate vel ab alio in quo fundatur, differt re; vel
si haec non differt, nec illa.”
28 See John Duns Scotus, Ordinatio ii, d. 1, qq. 4–5, n. 200, ed. Vaticana, 101–02: “Contra is-
tam opinionem arguo primo sic: nihil est idem realiter alicui, sine quo potest esse reali-
ter absque contradictione; sed multae sunt relationes sine quibus fundamenta possunt
esse absque contradictione; ergo multae sunt relationes quae non sunt realiter idem cum
fundamento.”
110 Henninger

thing [i.e., the former]. Therefore, it is possible that this [former] white
thing be without similarity and with similarity.29

For many foundationists in the early 14th century, this was an argument that
had to be refuted.

4.4 James of Viterbo’s Own Position

Having set out the two extreme positions on this question, an anti-realist con-
ceptualism and a hyper-realism, James clearly locates his own position in rela-
tion to them:

Similarly we can say in the case at hand that we ought not to attribute to a
relation more entity than is appropriate to it, nor less than is appropriate.
And so those who say that a relation is not a thing other than its founda-
tion and that it is not a real being, as far as what appears from their words,
do not attribute to it what it ought to have. But those who say that a rela-
tion is a real being, and also that it is a thing other than its foundation,
as also the things in the other absolute categories, as far as what appears
from their words, attribute to it more than it ought to have. It seems, then,
that a middle way ought to be taken, namely, that a relation is a real being
but is not a thing other than its foundation.30

In explicating his position, he argues first that a real relation is a real being,
i.e., not mind-dependent, and then tackles the harder problem of showing
how a relation, while being identical with its foundation, is not simply reduc-
ible to that foundation. This is again the problem of formulating the insight of

29 Ordinatio ii, d. 1, qq. 4–5, n. 205, ed. Vaticana, 104: “Si enim hoc album sit et illud album
non sit, hoc album est sine similitudine,—et si aliud album fiat, in hoc albo est similitudo;
potest igitur esse sine isto et cum isto.”
30 qdp, q. 11, 22–23, ll. 504–15: “Similiter possumus dicere in proposito quod non debemus
attribuere relationi plus de entitate quam sibi conveniat, nec minus quam ei conveniat.
Qui ergo dicit quod relatio non est alia res a suo fundamento nec est ens reale, quantum
in superficie verborum apparet, non attribuit ei quod debet habere. Qui vero dicit quod
relatio est ens reale, et quod etiam est alia res a suo fundamento, sicut et alia praedica-
menta absoluta, quantum in verbis apparet, attribuit ei plus quam habere debeat. Videtur
ergo accipienda esse via media, scilicet quod relatio est ens reale, et tamen non est alia res
a suo fundamento.”
James of Viterbo on the Ontological Status of Real Relations 111

Armstrong: “The relation is not something over and above its terms (which is
not to say that the relation does not hold, not to say that it does not exist).”31
Let us first look at James’s arguments for the simple mind-independent
status of a real relation. He endorses the three arguments we have examined
already, claiming that they in themselves are enough proof on their own: (i) Ar-
istotle’s distinction between real being and mental being and his identification
of categorial being as real being; (ii) the order of the universe as a whole; and
(iii) the intuition of the mind-independent status of the relations of individual
things to each other, as, for example, that the earth is below the sky and the sky
above the earth being mind-independent facts.32 He proceeds by claiming that
this mind-independent status of real relations can be further established, and
this in three ways: from certain “conditions in things,” from the mathematical
sciences, and from truthmaking.
With regard to the first, by “conditions in things” he has in mind four: connec-
tion, distinction, operation, and composition. Each of these conditions char-
acterizes extra-mental things irrespective of any mental operation on our part,
and each of them involves an extra-mental thing being related in various ways.
It is basically the same intuition as before regarding the mind-­independent
fact of the sky being above the earth. So here, it is a mind-­independent fact
that a is connected to b, that a is distinct from b, that a operates on b, and that
a and b form a composition. All this is rather abstract, and so a few examples
will help. With regard to connection (connexio) or, as he also calls it, bond (col-
ligatio), he says:

For everything in the universe of things is connected: some things are

prior, some are posterior, some are more perfect, some less perfect, one
influences another, while one desires another, one is in harmony with
another, and in many other ways there is found in entities a connection
and a bond.33

I think this intuition was blindingly obvious to James and many others. Things
are ordered as prior and posterior, not just temporally but also “by nature,” i.e.,
by dependence. It was part of the scholastic conceptual framework derived

31 Armstrong, Truth and Truthmakers, 9.

32 qdp, q. 11, 23, ll. 525–26.
33 qdp, q. 11, 23–24, ll. 532–37: “Omnia enim quae in universitate rerum connexa sunt, dum
quaedam sunt priora, quaedam posteriora, quaedam perfectiora, quaedam imperfectio-
ra, dum unum in aliud influit, dum unum aliud appetit, dum unum alii conformatur, et
pluribus aliis modis, accipitur in entibus connexio et colligatio.”
112 Henninger

from Aristotle that there is an ontological priority and posteriority based on

dependence: a is ontologically prior to b and b is ontologically posterior to a
just in case b is dependent on a for its existence and a is not dependent on b
for its existence. More fundamentally, however, Aristotle’s worldview and that
of the scholastics is pervaded by the idea of an extra-mental order, whether
this be the cosmos of the ancient Greek philosophers or the universe of the
medievals. This is reflected in the central place in these debates of the argu-
ment from the unity of the universe, and here the extra-mental status of all
these “conditions” of connection “in things,” as James repeats over and over.
And so, for most of the scholastics, as for James, the most difficult problem was
not whether relations had extra-mental reality, but what type of reality was to
be accorded them.
Another condition that is in mind-independent reality is operation, i.e.,
causal activity, which entails a relation between the agent and the recipient
of the action. Here he argues not only for a real relation that follows upon the
action, but one that precedes the action. He quotes Simplicius:

Nor does a power, operation, making, or motion bring about anything

in another, nor is something received from another, unless there already
existed a condition of one toward the other, making the doer and patient
mutually apt for each other, so that the one is able to act and the other is
able to be acted upon.34

James, following Simplicius, is thinking of dispositional properties for acting

and for being acted upon, as fire has the dispositional property of burning
something even when it is not burning something, and paper has the disposi-
tional property to be burned even when it is not being burned. In such dispo-
sitional properties, James sees mind-independent relations, for his scholastic
mind sees the natural world as filled with things possessing powers for acting
and being acted upon; these are all “conditions in things.” Hence, not only do
the occurrent actions of a on b imply that a and b are really related, but also the
dispositional properties of a and b imply that they are really related.
Finally, with regard to the “condition” of composition, James gives the ex-
ample of the composition of a mixture out of the elements: “Diverse things are

34 qdp, q. 11, 25, ll. 564–69: “Unde dicit Simplicius in Praedicamentis: ‘Neque virtus neque op-
eratio neque factio neque motus faciunt utique aliquid in alterum, neque patietur aliquid
ab altero, si non praecesserit ipsius ad aliquid aliqualiter se habentis habitudo coaptans
per convenientiam faciens patienti, ut hoc quidem possit facere, hoc autem possit pati.’”
See Commentaire sur les Catégories d’Aristote: Traduction de Guillaume de Moerbeke, vol. 1,
(ed.) Adriaan Pattin (Leuven, 1971), 214, ll. 54–58.
James of Viterbo on the Ontological Status of Real Relations 113

not apt for constituting one thing [as elements constitute a mixture], unless
there is some condition of the composing elements.”35 As before, I believe he is
talking about dispositional properties. Whatever elements go into making up
the mixture of blood and flesh, they must in some way be related as apt or ap-
propriate to each other for forming the mixture, while other elements do not
have this relation of aptness to each other. James concludes: “These four [con-
ditions] are real, and for this reason the condition [i.e., real relation] without
which they cannot exist also [is real].”36
The second way he proves the mind-independent status of relations is
through a consideration of the mathematical sciences. These sciences, which
include mathematics, geometry, music, and astrology, treat countless compari-
sons of numbers, sizes, lines, and proportions, such as those involved in music
or in the various distances, larger or smaller, among the planets and stars. They
are real sciences, that is, they treat of extra-mental things and their various
relations to each other. Hence, James claims, the relations are real, for oth-
erwise all these sciences would be deceitful and worthless.37 This is another
old argument, going back to Simplicius: if all relations were mind-dependent
our mathematical knowledge would be radically subjective. Scotus had agreed,
and claims, as James does here, that mathematical proofs demonstrate that
real extra-mental subjects possess real extra-mental properties, i.e., real math-
ematical relations.38
James’s third way can be illumined through the notion of truthmaking.
Armstrong writes:

The idea of a truthmaker for a particular truth, then, is just some exis-
tent, some portion of reality, in virtue of which that truth is true. … To
demand truthmakers for particular truths is to accept a realist theory for
these truths. There is something that exists in reality, independent of the
proposition in question, which makes the truth true.39

So James, a realist when it comes to truth, argues that when one says “a is simi-
lar to b,” there must be a truthmaker in extra-mental reality. Its precise onto-
logical status at this point is yet to be determined in James’s treatise, but that it

35 qdp, q. 11, 26, ll. 575–76: “Diversa vero non conveniunt ad constitutionem unius, nisi se-
cundum aliquam habitudinem componentium.”
36 qdp, q. 11, 26, ll. 579–80: “Haec autem quatuor realia sunt. Quare et habitudo sine qua haec
non sunt.”
37 qdp, q. 11, 26–27; ll. 581–92.
38 John Duns Scotus, Ordinatio ii, d. 1, qq. 4–5, n. 227, ed. Vaticana, 112–13.
39 Armstrong, Truth and Truthmakers, 5.
114 Henninger

must be extra-mental and not mind-dependent is evident to him. With regard

to the proposition “a is similar to b,” he says:

The foundation [of the truth of the proposition] is the similarity of the
existents outside the soul. … If, therefore, a relation is only an intention
[of the mind] or a judgement of reason, if nothing corresponds to it in
extra-mental reality, it [i.e., the intention or judgement] will be vain
and false. And so if it [the intention or judgement] is true, it is neces-
sary that there be something in reality corresponding to it, namely a real
condition.40

I think that in general these are quite good arguments, and show that James
is solidly in the mainstream when it comes to the extra-mental reality of rela-
tions. As he says in concluding this part, “from these it is evident that a relation
is some real being in extra-mental reality, leaving aside the operation of the
soul.”41 He is familiar with many of the stock arguments for this position, but
I am impressed by the clarity and concision of his formulations of these argu-
ments. His intuitions are robustly realist, as shown in his argument about the
mind-independent status of the relations of individual things to each other,
such as that the earth is below the sky, which are clearly mind-independent
facts; Bertrand Russell, who argued against the idealists of his day, would be
pleased. So also James’s arguing from various “conditions” which are “in things,”
such as the evident facts of the connection, distinction, operation, and com-
position of many objects of sense. And in the final argument from truthmak-
ers he wears his realist commitments on his sleeve, making them the explicit
basis of his argument; in a real sense, all his arguments presuppose this realist,
truthmaking basis.
Having shown that a relation in some sense exists in extra-mental reality, he
takes up the task of determining its precise ontological status:

Now it is to be made clear how a relation is related to its foundation,

namely whether it is the same thing or another thing. And this is more

40 qdp, q. 11, 27, ll. 593–603: “Tertio, patet idem ex comparatione rationis ad res. Intentio
enim vel conceptus rationis dicitur verus vel falsus per comparationem ad res extra. Unde
oportet quod, si conceptus debeat esse verus, aliquid respondeat et in re … et est funda-
mentum similitudo existentium extra animam. Si ergo relatio solum sit intentio et iudi-
cium rationis, si non respondet ei aliquid in re, vanus et falsus est. Si ergo sit verus, oportet
quod aliquid ei respondeat in re, scilicet realis habitudo.”
41 qdp, q. 11, 28, ll. 622–23.
James of Viterbo on the Ontological Status of Real Relations 115

difficult. For that it is real almost everyone concedes, even those who
seem to say the opposite, and that it is not just a being of reason. But
whether it is a thing other than its foundation, about this there is doubt-
ing among many. And here a diversity of ways of speaking introduces
itself, as mentioned above.42

I believe this last point is important, since those who adopted a broad realist
middle way—namely, (5) and (6) in Heil’s taxonomy—did in fact adopt vari-
ous ways of formulating their positions. And this is where the difficulty lies:
how to talk about the extra-mental fact that a is similar to b without introduc-
ing into your ontology another entity of the same ontological type as a and b.
As a matter of fact, each thinker, of whatever stripe, used the resources
already existing in his ontology when formulating his theory of relation. For
example, Aquinas explicates his theory in terms of being and ratio, Henry of
Ghent in terms of modes of being; John Duns Scotus sees relations as “relative
things,” while Henry of Harclay takes them to be extra-mental “conditions”;
William of Ockham approaches the question through his theory of relative
terms as connotative, while Peter Auriol see relations as concepts.43
What of James of Viterbo? In beginning to treat the precise ontological sta-
tus of relation he states his own position with murky concision: “It is to be
declared that properly and simply speaking it is not a thing other than its foun-
dation; however, in another way and less properly it is a thing other [than its
foundation].”44 How is a real relation identical and not identical with its foun-
dation? This is precisely the task of a foundationist like James, and his answer
is really the philosophical heart of the treatise. In arguing for the foundationist
thesis that a relation is not a thing other than its foundation, he organizes his
thinking around three key ideas, each derived from an authority:

First, from the weakness of [a relation’s] entity, and this argument is tak-
en from what the Philosopher says. Second, from a comparison of rela-
tion to the other categories, particularly those of the absolutes, and this

42 qdp, q. 11, 28, ll. 624–31: “Nunc declarandum est quomodo se habet relatio ad suum fun-
damentum, scilicet an sit eadem res aut alia. Et hoc est difficilius. Nam quod sit aliquid
reale omnes fere concedunt, etiam qui aliquando videntur dicere oppositum, et quod non
sit ens rationis tantum. Sed an sit alia res a suo fundamento, de hoc est dubitatio apud
plures. Quod insinuat diversitas modi dicendi, ut supra dictum est.”
43 Henninger, Relations, Table of Contents.
44 qdp, q. 11, 28, ll. 632–34: “Est autem declarandum quod, proprie et simpliciter loquendo
non est alia res a suo fundamento; aliquo tamen modo et minus proprie est alia res.”
116 Henninger

argument is taken from what John of Damascus says. Third, from the way
of predicating appropriate to a relation, and this argument is taken from
what Boethius says.45

The first is based on Aristotle’s remark, often cited in medieval debates about
relation, that of all the categories, a relation has the “weakest” or “minimal” be-
ing. As the Philosopher had written in Metaphysics 14.1,

The relative is least of all things a real thing or substance, and is posterior
to quality and quantity. … A sign that the relative is least of all a substance
and a real thing is the fact that it alone has no proper generation or de-
struction or movement, as in quantity there is increase and diminution,
in quality alteration, in place locomotion, in substance simple generation
and destruction. The relative has no proper change, for, without chang-
ing, a thing will be now greater and now less or equal if that with which it
is compared has changed in quantity.46

This passage was often used as an authority for the foundationist thesis that
a real relation is not other than its foundation, and consequently a thing can
become really related with no change in it, but only in its term. What is strik-
ing about James is that he does not simply cite this as an authority, but uses
the authoritative text to develop his own novel argument. As he says: “Let us
see why the category of relation is said to have weaker being than all the other
categories.”47 In other words, he attempts to explain why relation has such a
minimal being, and in the course of his explanation he clarifies its ontological
status.
He claims that a relation is said to be weak or minimal because it exists
halfway between being and non-being. He explains that what is at play here is
categorial being and so formal being: substantial forms and accidental forms
confer being on a subject, but in different ways. The more intrinsic the form,
the greater the being that is conferred by the form:

45 qdp, q. 11, 28, ll. 635–43: “Primum autem, scilicet, quod non sit alia res a re supra quam
fundatur, patet tripliciter: [1] Primo, ex debilitate suae entitatis; et sumitur haec ratio ex
dictis Philosophi. [2] Secundo, ex comparatione ipsius ad res aliorum praedicamento-
rum, maxime absolutorum; et sumitur haec ratio ex dictis Damasceni. [3] Tertio, ex modo
praedicandi qui sibi convenit; et sumitur haec ratio ex dictis Boethii.”
46 Metaphysics 14.1 (1088a23–35).
47 qdp, q. 11, 29, ll. 663–64: “Videamus igitur quare ad aliquid dicitur habere debilius esse
ceteris praedicamentis.”
James of Viterbo on the Ontological Status of Real Relations 117

The more something is intrinsic to a thing, the more the thing is said to
be through it. And so because substance is maximally intrinsic to a thing,
so through it the thing maximally exists. The thing exists less through ac-
cidents, since they are not so intrinsic to the thing. And among accidents,
the more intrinsic they are, the more being is conferred.48

Regarding relation he claims,

What is toward another [i.e., a relation] is minimally intrinsic, since its

being is to be toward another. Indeed, in a certain sense it is extrinsic,
since it is said to be toward what is outside and toward another. And
therefore it has minimal being among the categories.49

He then likens a relation to a negation or privation, for “a negation removes

this from this or another from another, while a relation refers this to this or an-
other to another.”50 His point is that negations and privations on the one hand,
and relations on the other, both involve some rapport between two entities,
and the entities have different ontological statuses. He says: “Therefore from
[examining] negation, something can be clarified regarding relation.”51 The
reason he gives for this procedure is that when one is clarifying the ontological
status of a categorial reality, it is not possible to directly examine the matter at
hand a priori, but one must be led to it indirectly through guiding examples.52
James points out that “negation” can be taken in two broad ways: (i) a nega-
tion involved with propositions (composita), which is in the intellect; and (ii)
a simple negation, which is in extra-mental reality. This latter is of two types:
(a) simple negation (again), and (b) a negation within a determinate subject,
which is called “privation.” An example of (a) would be the fact that there is
not a large stone in my office; an example of (b) would be the fact that Stevie
Wonder is blind. Both of these types of negation concern extra-mental reality,

48 qdp, q. 11, 30, ll. 672–76: “Ideo quanto magis aliquid intraneum rei, magis dicitur aliquid
esse per illud. Ideo quia substantia est maxime intrinseca in re, ideo per illam maxime res
est; minus autem per accidentia, cum non sint ita intrinseca, et inter ipsa accidentia quae
magis sunt intrinseca, magis pertinent ad esse.”
49 qdp, q. 11, 30, ll. 677–79: “Ad aliquid autem est minime intrinsece; ex quo eius esse est ad
aliud esse; immo quodam modo extrinsece, quia ad extra dicitur et ad aliud. Et ideo min-
ime ens inter praedicamenta.”
50 qdp, q. 11, 30, ll. 681–83: “Et quia appropinquat negationem multo, negatio removet hoc ab
hoc vel aliud ad alio; relatio refert hoc ad hoc vel aliud ad aliud.”
51 qdp, q. 11, 30, l. 684: “Ex ipsa igitur negatione potest declarari aliquid de relatione.”
52 qdp, q. 11, 31, ll. 685–86.
118 Henninger

and the trick is to call them “real” without reifying them. So, by stating that
Stevie Wonder is blind or that there is not a large stone in my office, you assert
something about the extra-mental world. As James writes:

Someone is said really to be blind, even setting aside any intellect, and
there really is a negation of a stone. And so a negation (which is not a
proposition), whether it be a simple negation or a privation of some
subject, is said to be a real being.53

He clarifies this by stating that a negation or privation “is said to be a being

by attribution because it is the negation of being, not because it has some es-
sence; and it is said [to be] real because it pertains to the thing without the
soul being involved.”54 He is referring to what is often called the analogy of at-
tribution, where some property of the principal analogate is attributed to the
secondary analogate because of some real or imagined connection between
them. So health belongs to a living body primarily, but to medicine, climate,
or vacation only by attribution. Here, being is said primarily of what has its
own proper essence, while it is said of, say, privations by attribution, since it is
a privation of sight in the eye. Thus, James concludes regarding negations and
privations: “A negation therefore is a real being, but it does not posit a thing or
an essence other than that of which it is said.”55
This last is the takeaway from his discussion on negation, and he uses it to
make his point that a relation is not a thing distinct from its foundation. He
believes the example of negation and privation amply shows “that something
can be said to be a real being without implying that it has its own essence or is
a thing other than that in which it is, unless ‘thing’ and ‘essence’ are meant in
a greatly improper way.”56
He illustrates this main point with an example other than a negation or
privation:

53 qdp, q. 11, 32, ll. 712–15: “Unde aliquis realiter dicitur caecus, etiam circumscripto intel-
lectu; et realiter est negatio lapidis. Negatio ergo quae non est oratio, sive sit negatio sim-
pliciter, sive privatio alicuius subiecti, dicitur ens reale.”
54 qdp, q. 11, 32, ll. 716–18: “Sed dicitur ens per attributionem quia est negatio entis, non quia
habeat essentiam aliquam; et dicitur reale, quia sine anima convenit rei.”
55 qdp, q. 11, 32, ll. 719–20: “Negatio igitur est ens reale, nec tamen dicit aliam rem vel essen-
tiam ab eo quod dicitur.”
56 qdp, q. 11, 32, ll. 724–26: “Sed ad hoc servit simile, quod potest dici aliquod ens reale, nec
tamen dicit essentiam vel rem aliam ab eo in quo est, nisi valde improprie sumatur res vel
essentia.”
James of Viterbo on the Ontological Status of Real Relations 119

Something similar is evident regarding healthiness in urine, which really

pertains to urine, for naturally urine is a sign of health. But the healthi-
ness in urine is not a thing other than the substance and color and the
other absolute accidents of urine.57

Take for example our annual checkups, when a urine sample is requested.
The numbers in the lab report indicate proportions of various chemicals that,
when all is well, are a sign of good health. But whether or not a doctor ever
interprets them, the various proportions of, say, potassium per liquid unit are
a sign of good health. They are not, however, anything over and above the ele-
ments compared. As James says, the health in the urine, the fact that it signifies
good health, is not a thing other than the substance of the urine or the color
or any other absolute accident of the urine. Nevertheless, the state of affairs
of the proportions being what they are (and so signifying good health) is not
mind-dependent.
One way of understanding this is to think of states of affairs or facts, which
are not mind-dependent. They are not “things,” and James does not want to
reify them. They have a different ontological status from the things that make
them up; so also with simple negations, privations, and real relations. Recall
then, that he is trying to explicate Aristotle’s dictum that a relation has mini-
mal being, and he contends that it is midway between being and non-being.
The example of negation and privation has enabled him to do this: relations,
like privations, are real and extra-mental, but they do not have their own es-
sence, and are not things in their own right, but they are beings by attribution.
A relation is not some thing really distinct from its foundation.
He also establishes this conclusion by his second argument, based on pas-
sages from John of Damascus. This argument is important for illuminating how
James chooses to formulate the ontological status of a relation: “For a relation
is compared to the other categories on which it is founded as their mode.” John
of Damascus, talking of the distinction of persons in the Trinity uses this lan-
guage, as James notes: “Everything the Father has the Son has also, ‘except non-
generation, which does not signify a difference of substance or of dignity, but a
mode of existence.’”58 James comments:

57 qdp, q. 11, 33, ll. 727–30: “Cuius etiam simile patet de sanitate in urina, quae realiter con-
venit urinae. Nam naturaliter urina signum est sanitatis, tamen non est in urina sanitas
quae sit alia res a substantia et colore et accidentibus absolutis urinae.”
58 qdp, q. 11, 33, ll. 733–38: “Relatio enim comparatur ad alia praedicamenta, in quibus fun-
datur sicut modus eorum. Quod per Damascenum patet qui, loquens de divinis Personis, i
libro capitulo 9, dicit quod omnia quae habet Pater, habet Filius ‘praeter ingenerationem,
120 Henninger

Therefore, a relation is a certain real mode of being of that thing in which

it is founded. But a mode of being of a thing does not really differ such
that it implies another essence or thing. And so a relation does not imply
any thing distinct from the foundation.59

What is meant by saying that a relation is a real mode of being? James points
out that “mode” can be taken in two distinct ways. Examples of the first way
would be the mode of substance as “being through itself,” and the mode of an
accident as “being in another.” James says that such a mode specifies the type
of entity the thing has, as “being in another” does for an accident. In that sense,
it almost defines the thing’s way of being and is not incidental to it. Concerning
the second way of taking “mode,” James writes:

In another way, a mode of a thing does not specify an entity, but is more
outside the formal notion of the thing, as if it were incidental to the
thing. And in this way, a relation is said to be a mode of a thing of another
category.60

To clarify, he offers the example of the passiones entis, the “passions of being,”
which also are modes of being. The passions of being that he is referring to are
the transcendental attributes of being, namely, one, true, and good. Any being,
insofar as it is a being, is one, true, and good: it has a certain unity, it is intel-
ligible, and it is desirable. James says that these modes of being do not specify
the entity of that of which they are, as, for example, the mode of being of a
substance as “being through itself.” Rather, they fall outside the ratio, or formal
notion, of that entity and so are more incidental to it. Using this example of
transcendental attributes, James asserts:

But such as these are not things other than that of which they are said,
and yet they are real modes. And so similarly with relation, and indeed

quae non significat substantiae differentiam neque dignitatem, sed modum existentiae.’”
See John of Damascus, De fide orthodoxa, lib. 1, c. 8, (ed.) Eligius Buytaert (St. Bonaven-
ture, ny, 1955), 35, ll. 135–36.
59 qdp, q. 11, 33, ll. 744–47: “Est igitur relatio modus quidam essendi realis illius rei in qua
fundatur. Modus autem essendi rei non differt a re, ita quod dicat aliam essentiam vel
rem. Igitur relatio non dicit aliam rem a fundamento.”
60 qdp, q. 11, 34, ll. 767–69: “Alio modo modus rei non dicitur specificans entitatem, sed ma-
gis est praeter rationem rei et quasi accidens rei. Et hoc modo relatio dicitur modus es-
sendi rei alterius praedicamenti.”
James of Viterbo on the Ontological Status of Real Relations 121

many of those modes [i.e., transcendental attributes] which are passions

of being imply a relation.61

So, being able to be the object of desire or appetite, i.e., being good, and be-
ing able to be known, i.e., being true, are modes of all really existing entities,
but those transcendental attributes or modes are not things distinct from the
things of which they are said, but they still are real modes of the thing. And
just as the things are not mind-dependent, so also the modes are not mind-
dependent. That a thing is good does not depend on any mind, and that a
thing is knowable does not depend on any mind (that it is actually known does
depend on a mind, but not that it is knowable, and so true in this transcen-
dental sense). Hence, this second argument from John of Damascus leads to
the main conclusion: “Therefore from this it can be understood how a rela-
tion is something real, and yet it is not a thing other than that in which it is
founded.”62 I think this example of transcendental attributes is helpful, and
this second argument from John of Damascus presents the same ontology as
the first argument from Aristotle. What this second argument contributes is the
­terminology that will define James’s position: a real relation is a real mode of
being.
James’s third way of arguing for this same conclusion is taken from ways of
predication. For the various categories, claims James, are known and distin-
guished through their various modes of predication. He takes his starting point
from a passage of Boethius that often appears in debates about relations:

Have I now made clear the difference between the kinds of predication?
For some indicate, as it were, a thing, while others indicate, as it were,
the circumstances of a thing. Those that are predicated in the first way
point to a thing as being something, but the others do not point to a thing
as being something, but rather in some way attach something external
to it.63

61 qdp, q. 11, 35, ll. 777–80: “Non tamen huiusmodi dicunt aliam rem ab ea de qua dicuntur,
et tamen sunt modi reales. Simile est de relatione, immo multi illorum modorum qui sunt
passiones entis important relationem.”
62 qdp, q. 11, 35, ll. 786–87: “Ex hoc igitur potest intelligi quomodo relatio est aliquid reale, et
tamen non est alia res ab ea in qua fundatur.”
63 Boethius, De Trinitate, c. 4, in De consolatione philosophiae et opuscula theologica, (ed.)
Claudio Moreschini (Munich and Leipzig, 2005), 177: “Iamne patet quae sit differentia
praedicationum? Quod aliae quidem quasi rem monstrant, aliae vero quasi circumstan-
tias rei; quodque illa quae ita predicantur, ut esse aliquid rem ostendant, illa vero ut non
esse, sed potius extrinsecus aliquid quodam modo affigant.”
122 Henninger

According to Boethius and James, the various ways of predicating are indica-
tive of a difference in ontology: the predication of the first three categories
indicates a thing, i.e., a substance, or an accident of quantity or of quality, but
the last categories, including that of relation, do not indicate a thing, but only
the circumstances of a thing. Because of this, James comments,

[i]t [i.e., a real relation] does not add anything to the thing of which it is
said. And it is significant that Boethius says, “[the relation] by itself [does
not add anything],” because something is added by reason of something
else, i.e., by reason of [a change in] its foundation.64

Here he is emphasizing the foundationist thesis that relational changes are

dependent upon more fundamental changes, either in the substance or in its
absolute accidents; there is no “merely relational change” without some more
fundamental change in the world, namely a change of substance or absolute
accidents. James concludes this argument from modes of predication: “And
so because the mode of being ought to conform to the mode of predicating, a
relation does not imply a thing or essence, but only a mode of [being] toward
another; but nevertheless, the mode is real.”65 Armstrong seems to be channel-
ling James when he insists that “[t]he relation is not something over and above
its terms (which is not to say that the relation does not hold, not to say that it
does not exist).”66
James’s overall conclusion from these three arguments, based on the writ-
ings of Aristotle, Simplicius, and Boethius, is the following: “And so it is evident
from these [arguments] that a relation does not imply a thing or essence other
than its foundation. And from this it follows that it does not make a composi-
tion with its foundation.”67 This last conclusion, of course, is important for the
doctrine of the Trinity. If relations are to be involved with the real distinction
of divine persons, then whatever else relations do, they ought not to involve
any composition and so endanger divine simplicity. The doctrine of relations
as real modes of existence that, though real, are not things and so do not cause

64 qdp, q. 11, 36, ll. 806–08: “Non ergo addit aliquid rei de qua dicitur. Et signanter dicit ‘se-
cundum se,’ quia ratione alterius, scilicet sui fundamenti, addit.”
65 qdp, q. 11, 36, ll. 809–11: “Quia igitur modus essendi conformis esse debet modo praedi-
candi, relatio non dicit rem vel essentiam, sed solum modum ad aliud se habendi; qui
tamen modus realis est.”
66 Armstrong, Truth and Truthmakers, 9.
67 qdp, q. 11, 37, ll. 835–37: “Patet igitur ex his quod relatio non dicit aliam rem vel essen-
tiam a suo fundamento. Et hinc est quod dicitur non facere compositionem cum suo
fundamento.”
James of Viterbo on the Ontological Status of Real Relations 123

composition, is just the sort of ontology that James needs to apply the category
of relation to the doctrine of the Trinity in the succeeding chapters on relation
in the Quaestiones de divinis praedicamentis.
James brings up a further question: someone might ask whether a relation
and its foundation are to count as one or as two. As Simplicius had said, the
equal seems to be something other than the thing of a certain quantity. James
replies that while they are not two things, they are two “somethings” (aliqua),
since one is a thing and the other is a mode of a thing or a circumstance, as the
subject of a negation is one thing and the negation is another, as an eye and
its blindness are two, but not two entities.68 I think James is good here in deal-
ing with the difficulty of formulating a clear position if one holds, as so many
did, that a relation is real but not a thing on the model of an absolute monadic
property in the category of quantity or quality. A real relation is not to be re-
duced simpliciter, completely, to its foundation; James is not a reductionist,
as in Heil’s taxonomy, holding that relations are completely identifiable with
non-relational features of objects. Rather, a real relation and its foundation do
not enjoy the same ontological status.

4.5 Against Conceptualism

Having argued at length that a real relation is not a thing other than its founda-
tion, James is keen to avoid the other extreme. As he notes, “although a rela-
tion ought not to be said to be a thing other than its foundation, it should not
on account of this be said to be a being of reason only, but rather a real mode
of being.”69 In this question, James takes this other extreme quite seriously,
namely, the position that a relation is merely a being of reason, a concept. In
fact, he, or perhaps his students, present twenty-nine arguments for that posi-
tion, and James painstakingly answers them all.
I do not know whether James and his pupils had anyone specific in mind, but
a good representative is the Franciscan Peter Auriol (c.1280–1322) who, active a
generation after James of Viterbo, held precisely this position, and he is one of
the first to break radically with the Aristotelian realist tradition on relations. In
terms of Heil’s taxonomy, he holds position (3), constrained projectivism. He
argues that a real relation could not be extra-mental, since he conceives of a
relation as obtaining between the relata, a sort of “interval” between them, not

68 qdp, q. 11, 37–38, ll. 838–46.

69 qdp, q. 11, 39, ll. 872–73: “Et licet relatio non debeat dici res alia a fundamento, non propter
hoc debet dici ratio tantum, sed modus essendi realis.”
124 Henninger

as founded in one and being “toward” the other. He no longer conceives of a re-
lation as an accident in one thing and somehow “toward” another. Remarkably,
in the year 1316, Peter maintains that there is not one relation in white a and
another co-relation in white b, but just one simple relation holding between
them. And since there is no room in an Aristotelian ontology of substance and
attribute for such a strange “in between” entity, Auriol argues that relations are
creatures of our mental life.70
James’s response is good and very clear, since he grasps that the heart of the
issue is how one conceives of a real relation. He points out that some hold that
there are two ways of conceiving a relation:

In one way it is a certain interval between the things ordered or the things
related, and in this way there is one [relation] in many. … In another way
it is in the very things related, and so there are many [relations] in the
many things related.71

The second option is clearly that of the tradition: if there are two white stones
a and b, they are similar with respect to color. Hence there is a relational prop-
erty R of similarity in a toward b, and a second co-relation R′ in b toward a.
Each relation is conceived of as an Aristotelian accident existing in a subject.
But the first way conceives of a relation as one thing “hovering” between the
two relata; it is not inhering in either of them. Understood this way, it is no
wonder, in a scholastic world in which anything extra-mental is either a sub-
stance or accident, that the relation would have no extra-mental reality and
end up being entirely mind-dependent.
James clearly and unequivocally follows the tradition here, insisting that a
relation is an accident and that, for example, in the two white stones there are
two different relations, R and R′. And he claims that “a relation is in its founda-
tion as in a subject, not giving being, but [only] referring.” This last is important
for allowing real relations the role of distinguishing divine persons without
“giving any being,” which would cause composition and thus derogate divine
simplicity.72

70 See Henninger, Relations, 150–73.

71 qdp, q. 11, 49, ll. 1105–11: “Quidam autem sic distinguunt quod relatio potest dupliciter
considerari: Uno modo ut est quoddam intervallum inter ordinata vel relata; et hoc modo
est una in pluribus. … Alio modo ut est in ipsis relatis; et sic sunt plures in pluribus relatis.”
72 qdp, q. 11, 49, ll. 1112–25.
James of Viterbo on the Ontological Status of Real Relations 125

4.6 Conclusion

James of Viterbo’s theory of relations is to be located in Heil’s taxonomy at (6),

Modest Realism: the position that truthmakers for relational predications are
relational features of the world. These features he calls real modes of existing.
James holds that relations really exist extra-mentally, but they are not of the
same ontological status as absolute monadic properties such as qualities and
quantities. In this he is part of the broad, sensible middle way held by a num-
ber of his distinguished contemporaries, such as Thomas Aquinas, Henry of
Ghent, Henry of Harclay, and William of Alnwick, each of whom had his own
terminology for formulating the way in which a relation is not anything over
and above the relata, but still has its own peculiar extra-mental ontological
status.
James’s theory of relations, I believe, has some close resemblances to that
of Henry of Ghent. The Solemn Doctor had a highly articulated theory of the
categories, but for our purposes we need only note that he reserves talk of res
exclusively to the first three categories of substance, quantity, and quality.
There are no further types of res, but only modi, ways in which these three
types of things can exist. For this division, Henry employs the same citations
of Boethius that we have seen in James’s treatise, and like James, Henry holds
that there is change only in these first three categories. Furthermore, they both
hold that a real relation and its foundation have differing ontologically sta-
tuses, the foundation being a thing and the relation a mode.73
But there is a closer, more telling resemblance. As noted earlier, for Henry of
Ghent a is really related to b if and only if: (i) a and b are really distinct extra-
mental things; (ii) there is a real foundation in a for its relational property to
b; and (iii) there exists a relational property R, a mode (modus) of being, really
identical with its foundation, but differing intentionally from it. We cannot
dwell here on Henry of Ghent’s views on the intentional distinction and its
various types, but it should be noted that it is neither a real distinction of res,
really separable extra-mental things, nor a purely rational or mental distinc-
tion. In one formulation of this distinction, he writes: “With those that are re-
ally identical in the same [thing], sometimes diverse concepts are formed such
that neither of them in its concept includes the other, as there are concepts
of diverse differences that are present together in the same [thing], as in man

73 On Henry’s account of relations see Henninger, Relations, chap. 3 and Jos Decorte, “Giles
of Rome and Henry of Ghent on the Reality of a Real Relation,” Documenti e studi sulla
tradizione filosofica medievale 7 (1996): 183–211.
126 Henninger

there are rational, sensible, [and] vegetable insofar as they are differences.”74
Hence, Henry’s criterion for an intentional distinction is the following: If a and
b are really the same, and the concept of a does not include that of b, nor vice
versa, then a and b, though really identical, are intentionally distinct. So it is for
the relational property of similarity and its whiteness: whiteness is not part of
the “concept,” i.e., essential definition, of similarity, nor vice versa. Recall that
when explicating his sense of “mode,” James holds that it is “outside the formal
notion of the thing [of which it is a mode], as if it were incidental to the thing.
And in this way, a relation is said to be a mode of a thing of another category.”75
In sum, James of Viterbo does, like Henry of Ghent, talk of real relations as
modes, contrasting them with their foundations as things, and he distinguishes
modes from things in a way very much like Henry of Ghent’s intentional dis-
tinction. But, as we have seen, he is his own man in developing numerous
well-formulated arguments and salient examples when explicating his own
position.

74 For the sake of clarity, I have restricted my remarks to Henry’s major intentional distinc-
tion. Henry of Ghent, Quodl. v, q. 6, (ed.) J. Badius (Paris, 1518; repr. Louvain, 1961), f. 161rL:
“Sed in eis quae intentione differunt sunt gradus secundum differentiam maiorem et
­minorem. De eis enim quae sunt idem re in eodem, aliquando sic formantur conceptus
diversi, ut neutrum eorum in suo conceptu alterum includat, ut sunt conceptus diversa-
rum differentiarum quae concurrunt in eodem, sicut sunt in homine rationale, sensibile,
vegetabile, inquantum differentiae sunt.” For more detail on Henry’s intentional distinc-
tion see Martin Pickavé, “Henry of Ghent on Individuation, Essence, and Being,” in A
Companion to Henry of Ghent, (ed.) Gordon A. Wilson (Leiden, 2011), 181–209, esp. 205–08,
and the literature mentioned there.
75 qdp, q. 11, 34, ll. 767–69: “Alio modo modus rei non dicitur specificans entitatem, sed
magis est praeter rationem rei et quasi accidens rei. Et hoc modo relatio dicitur modus
essendi rei alterius praedicamenti.”
 chapter 5

James of Viterbo’s Philosophy of Nature

Martin Pickavé and Antoine Côté

5.1 Introduction

Following Aristotle’s account of scientia as it is laid out in the Posterior An-

alytics, medieval philosophers and theologians have a fairly rigorous under-
standing of the subject matter of the various parts of philosophy. According to
their understanding, physica or natural philosophy considers change (motus)
or “changeable being” (ens mobile) as its primary subject matter and every-
thing else only insofar as it relates to change, either because it is a principle of
change, a property of change, or a type of change. The structure of the present
chapter will follow this approach. In section 5.2 we give a general account of
James’s doctrine of matter and form, the two main principles of change. In
­section 5.3 we examine his doctrine of “seminal reasons” with which James
thinks matter is endowed. Section 5.4 is devoted to a discussion of James’s
views on the nature of time and place, which are relevant features of at least
some types of change. Section 5.5 provides a presentation of the different types
of change distinguished by James.
Matter and form and the other topics discussed here are of course not only
the object of the natural philosopher. As James himself points out, the meta-
physician too deals with matter and form, albeit from a different angle. Whereas
the natural philosopher treats matter primarily as the subject of change, the
metaphysician considers it insofar as it is some sort of potential substance.1
However, as we will see, it is difficult, if not impossible, to always distinguish
these different angles in James’s works. We will thus deal with some of the
key issues of James’s natural philosophy in a more general way and we will
be less concerned with transgressing what the medieval thinkers would have
considered the boundaries of scientia naturalis.

1 Quodl. iv, q. 5, 29, ll. 31–32: “Nam physicus considerat de ipsa ut est subiectum transmutatio-
nis, metaphysicus autem ut est substantia quaedam in potentia.” Please note that throughout
this chapter we do not necessarily respect the punctuation of the Latin texts we use. James’s
four Quodlibeta and parts of his Quaestiones de divinis praedicamentis (=qdp) have been
edited by Eelcko Ypma (Würzburg, 1968–1975 [Quodlibeta]; and Rome, 1983–1986 [qdp, qq.
1–17]; editions of further questions of the qdp have appeared in Augustiniana).

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���8 | doi 10.1163/9789004361881_007

128 Pickavé and Côté

5.2 Matter and Form

Like his contemporaries, James of Viterbo maintains that the material objects
with which we are directly acquainted in ordinary life are hylomorphic com-
pounds, that is, objects composed of matter and form. His extant works do not
present us with an argument for hylomorphism, but we can safely assume that
James believes, like his contemporaries—and Aristotle, whom they follow in
this respect—that hylomorphism follows from the fact that our everyday ob-
jects undergo, and come about through, change. Now in every case of change
there is something in which the change takes place and something else intrin-
sic to the changed object making the result of the change different from its
starting point.2 These two intrinsic principles of change are matter and form,
whereas the efficient cause bringing about the change is merely an extrinsic
principle of change.3
Hylomorphism raises many questions. The most fundamental question has
to do with the ontological status of matter, an issue that was highly contentious
in later medieval philosophy. For if in a hylomorphic compound, such as an
ordinary material substance, matter is to play the role of a robust ontological
principle, then matter should be granted an independent ontological status.
Yet too robust an understanding of matter may lead to worries about the unity
of the form-matter composite. If, however, matter qua matter is nothing oth-
er than pure potentiality, as some medieval philosophers hold,4 then matter
barely seems to be anything at all, let alone something that can exist without a
form. Like many of his contemporaries, James addresses the nature of matter
in a question about whether God could make matter without form (Quodli-
bet iv, question 1). James’s response is a good point of entry into his concep-
tion of hylomorphic composition, because it leads him to clarify some of the
roles matter and form are supposed to play. Although he claims that both main
opinions on this issue, namely the opinion of those who deny the possibility
of God creating matter without form and the opinion of those who affirm this

2 Although James does not explicitly argue for hylomorphism, he nevertheless notes that it
is the task of the natural philosopher to prove the existence of (prime) matter. However, he
does not actually provide such a proof himself. See Quodl. iv, q. 5, 28–29.
3 For a good introduction into how hylomorphism and the understanding of change are con-
nected for medieval philosophers see Jeffrey E. Brower, Aquinas’s Ontology of the Material
World: Change, Hylomorphism, and Material Objects (Oxford, 2014), 57–129.
4 This is, for instance, Thomas Aquinas’s view. For a detailed discussion see John F. Wippel, The
Metaphysical Thought of Thomas Aquinas: From Finite Being to Uncreated Being (Washington,
dc, 2000), 312–27.
James of Viterbo’s Philosophy of Nature 129

possibility, can reasonably (rationabiliter) be defended,5 he seems to side with

the latter. In particular, none of the reasons for why a form is required to give
existence to matter strikes him as ultimately conclusive. True enough, substan-
tial forms are that which in the normal course of nature gives matter its actual
being. But nothing rules out that God, the highest form, can do this without
created forms inhering in matter.6 Note that this does not mean that God could
make it be the case that a chunk of matter has a color, say green, without the
corresponding form, or bring about that this chunk of matter is now a stone,
without the appropriate substantial form. This is impossible because a stone is
just that: a chunk of matter in which a substantial form inheres; and a colored
object is just that: an object informed by a quality. Nevertheless, this does not
exclude that God could give actual existence to matter, even if the result would
obviously not be anything that falls under any of the classes of perceptible
material objects.7
Matter and form are related, and it is important to understand what this
entails. Clearly, nothing in the nature of matter qua matter requires it to be
informed by a substantial form. In James’s words: “Matter does not have from
form that it is matter.”8 Otherwise matter would not be really distinct from
form and a real part of a material substance.9 Forms make it the case that this
chunk of matter is a stone or a fire or some other thing. Forms are principles
and causes not of matter, but of the composite of matter and form, the mate-
rial substance.10 Nevertheless, matter has a natural “aptitude to receive a form
and an ability to become part of a composite” (aptitudo suscipiendi formam

5 Quodl. iv, q. 1, 6, ll. 142–43: “Et ideo neutri opinioni videtur esse temere praeiudicandum.
Sed utraque, secundum diversas considerationes, potest rationabiliter sustineri.”
6 Ibid., 3, ll. 68–72.
7 Ibid., 4–5, ll. 102–08: “Attendendum est etiam quod, sicut Deus non potest dare materiae
esse secundum quid sine forma accidentali quae dat tale esse, ut non potest dare mate-
riae esse album sine albedine, sic non potest dare materiae esse simpliciter, quod est a
forma substantiali, sine ipsa forma substantiali, ut non potest dare materiae esse lapidem
sine forma lapidis …, tamen potest dare materiae esse simpliciter faciendo eam subsistere
secundum se.”
8 Ibid., 5, ll. 126–27: “Non enim materia habet a forma quod sit materia, sed habet hoc a Deo
ipsam materiam producente.”
9 See Quodl. i, q. 6, 77. For the kind of parts matter and form are, see also Quodl. iv, q. 4,
15, ll. 39–30: “… ut patet in materia et forma, quae sunt re diversa et idem subiecto, quia
constituunt unum suppositum, in quo tamen non distinguuntur secundum situm.” Form
and matter are not spatially distinguished parts as, say, the parts of a table are.
10 See Quodl. iv, q. 1, 5, ll. 127–30: “A forma vero habet quod sit lapis vel ignis vel aliquid hui-
usmodi. Unde, proprie loquendo, forma non dat speciem materiae sed composito. Nec
dicitur causa formalis materiae sed compositi.”
130 Pickavé and Côté

et habilitas qua nata est fieri pars compositi). This twofold aptitude or ability,
which even God cannot separate from matter according to James, would still
remain in it even if matter were sometimes to exist without full-fledged forms,
just as the accidents’ ability to inhere in a subject remains a necessary property
of accidents even in the Eucharist, where God conserves accidents in existence
without the underlying substance.11 However, because of matter’s natural ap-
titude for forms it is also true to say that matter normally cannot be without
a form and thus that matter depends in this sense on form “as on something
that perfects and informs [it]” (sicut a perficiente et informante).12 As a result,
composites of matter and form will enjoy a special and intimate type of unity.
What conclusion can we draw from this characterization of matter? Does
the relative independence of matter mean that matter in itself has some sort of
actuality? James seems to deny this. For him, all philosophers and the authori-
ties of the church agree that matter has two basic properties: that it is (a) pure
potency (pura potentia) and that (b) it is the ultimate subject or “endpoint”
(terminus) of all things having actuality and form.13 In the order of beings, mat-
ter is even lower than accidents, since accidents have at least some actuality,
although they depend for their existence on something else. But strictly speak-
ing, James distinguishes between two ways of looking at the hierarchy of be-
ings. In terms of perfection and nobility (quantum ad perfectionem et nobilita-
tem), matter is indeed at the very bottom of the scale because it lacks any sort
of actuality, but in terms of the mode of existing (modus existendi) or mode of
being (modus essendi) matter occupies a higher rank, since everything else in
the realm of material beings either is matter or inheres in it.14 In sum, James’s
understanding of matter implies that there is a difference between actuality
and mode of being. Although matter has no degree of actuality it is clearly not
nothing.15 We will return to this important point shortly.

11 Ibid., ll. 114–20: “Nam quantumcumque Deus faceret materiam sine forma, non tamen
posset a materia tolli aptitudo suscipiendi formam et habilitas qua nata est fieri pars
compositi. Hoc enim semper consequitur naturam materiae. Unde non potest removeri
a materia manente natura ipsius, sicut quando accidens conservatur a Deo in esse sine
subiecto, non tollitur ab accidente aptitudo inhaerendi subiecto, quae omnino insepara-
bilis est a natura ipsius accidentis.”
12 Ibid., 6, ll. 151.
13 Quodl. i, q. 2, 30, ll. 480–83: “Ex his autem et pluribus aliis, quae colligi possent de materia
dicta a sanctis et a philosophis, duo videntur attribui materiae, scilicet quod ipsa est pura
potentia, et quod ipsa, cum sit sine actu et specie, est terminus omnium habentium ac-
tum et speciem.”
14 Ibid., 34–35.
15 See also Quodl. iv, q. 1, 3, where James speaks of the imperfectio suae entitatis referring to
the being (entitas) of matter. However imperfect, such an entitas is clearly not nothing.
James of Viterbo’s Philosophy of Nature 131

Let us go back to matter’s relationship to form. Clearly this relationship re-

quires further examination. Is it truly the case that being in potency towards
form is part of the essence of matter as the talk of the two natural aptitudes
towards form suggests, which not even God can remove from matter? And is
matter’s aptitude for form a brute fact or something that has to be accounted
for? With respect to the second question, James seems to believe the latter.
The first thing to notice is that matter is only related to form, because it lacks
form. Matter is related to form insofar as it is something that is able to receive
form, but “nothing is capable of receiving something else unless it lacks that
very thing.”16 A lack by itself, however, is not enough to bring about the relevant
relationship. It is merely a necessary condition. To make this clear James points
to the example of a stone: “A stone lacks the sense of sight, but it is not there-
fore said to be related to the sense of sight.” Therefore, something further is re-
quired in addition to the lack, namely an “aptitude” (aptitudo) or “propensity”
(idoneitas) in matter, that is, something positive in matter capable of ground-
ing the relevant relationship.17
That a stone is not related to the sense of sight and thus does not strive to
see is presumably due to the stone’s nature. And since the stone’s nature is due
more to its substantial form than to its matter, the lack of such a hypothetical
aptitude must be explicable in terms of the stone’s form. If an object’s substan-
tial form explains why it is not apt to take on certain forms, it can presumably
also explain why it is apt to take on other forms. Applied to the question re-
garding the origin of matter’s aptitude for form, this line of thought leads to the
conclusion that matter owes its aptitude for form to some other form it pos-
sesses.18 But James also mentions a possible alternative explanation: maybe
the aptitude of matter comes from the qualities that are present in a given
chunk of matter, as for instance the dryness in this piece of matter makes this
chunk of matter more prone to the reception of the form of fire.19 Ultimately
James rejects both attempts to explain the source of matter’s relation to forms

16 Quodl. ii, q. 5, 68, ll. 317–21: “Est considerandum ulterius quod iste respectus non conse-
quitur materiam, nisi quia caret forma. Materia enim respicit formam, quia est receptiva
ipsius. … Nihil autem est receptivum alicuius, nisi in quantum caret illo.”
17 Ibid., 69, ll. 326–32: “Sed adhuc est considerandum ulterius, quod ex hoc solum quod aliq-
uid caret aliquo, non dicitur esse in potentia ad illud. Lapis enim caret visu; nec tamen
dicitur esse in potentia ad visum. Ad hoc ergo quod aliquid dicatur esse in potentia ad
aliquid, non sufficit sola carentia illius, sed cum carentia requiritur aptitudo et idoneitas
ad illud. Et secundum hoc materia non solum ex hoc quod caret forma, sed ulterius ex eo
quod est habilis ad eius receptionem, dicitur esse in potentia ad illam.”
18 See ibid., ll. 346ff.
19 Ibid., ll. 341–45.
132 Pickavé and Côté

as insufficient. They no doubt explain in some sense how matter is related to

form, but do not do so in a way that is entirely satisfactory.20 Unfortunately,
he doesn’t explicitly say why this is so, but it is easy to see what the problem
is. A form inhering in matter may explain how matter now has an aptitude for
another form, but it hardly explains why matter has a general aptitude for form
and not just this or that form. Nor does the alternative account via qualities of
matter help much, because matter actually has these qualities only in virtue
of a substantial form inhering in it. For accidents are ontologically dependent
on the substances in which they inhere, and matter by itself is no fully actual
substance.
Yet both attempts to account for matter’s relationship towards form also
contain something true. According to James, they are both correct insofar as
the relationship of matter towards forms has to be explained ultimately in
terms of forms inhering in matter. In his view, matter has an aptitude for forms
and their reception because it possesses these forms in itself in potential be-
ing, a state which James also describes, using terminology derived from the
Latin translation of Simplicius’s commentary on Aristotle’s Categories, as a
propensity (idoneitas), a beginning (exordium) or a preparation (praeparatio)
of form.21 Matter’s relatedness towards forms is thus strictly speaking a relat-
edness towards forms in actual being, a connection that is grounded in these
forms preexisting in matter in potential being. James summarizes this idea in
the following way:

Since therefore the same form in reality (eadem forma secundum rem)
has a twofold mode of being, namely, sometimes it exists in potency and
sometimes in actuality, the form as it is in potency is the beginning and
inchoation of the form to be produced in actuality; just as the imperfect
existence of the same thing is said to be the beginning and inchoation of
its perfect existence, because something exists first in imperfect being
and later in perfect being.22

20 Ibid., 70, ll. 378–81: “Non enim solum ex hoc materia dicitur habilis ad formam, quia sit
disposita per debita accidentia et quia subest alicui formae habenti ordinem ad formam
inducendam. Sed oportet aliquid aliud ponere in materia, per quod dicitur habilis et apta
ad formam.”
21 Ibid., ll. 381–82; 82, ll. 776–82. For Simplicius, see Commentaire sur les Catégories d’Aristote:
Traduction de Guillaume de Moerbeke, vol. 2, (eds.) Adriaan Pattin et al. (Leuven and
Leiden, 1975), 332–46.
22 Quodl. ii, q. 5, 71, ll. 398–403.
James of Viterbo’s Philosophy of Nature 133

Matter is related to forms because it contains those forms in potential being.

Now at least in principle, a chunk of matter can take on all sorts of actual sub-
stantial and accidental forms, so that each chunk of matter would have to con-
tain a large, possibly even an infinite number of forms in their inchoate states.
This would not pose much of a problem if potency were nothing other than
matter viewed as a bare capacity to receive the form. But clearly for James a
form in potential being is something more robust, since it is a positive thing
that is required in the first place to ground the ability to receive forms. As is
clear from the passage quoted above, James holds that the form in potential
being is “the same form in reality” (eadem forma secundum rem) as the form
in actual being.23 This belief is rooted in an important metaphysical principle
that James finds in Averroes, which states that the transition from potency to
act in the arena of natural change does not result in an increase in the number
of beings.24 This being the case, it looks as if James cannot avoid admitting
an unpleasant multiplication of forms in potential being.25 James is aware of
this issue and he tries to downplay its consequences. He points out that actu-
ality (actus) is what separates and distinguishes things, so forms existing in
potential being are not distinct qua being in potency; rather, they are “as if one
form and one thing” (quasi una forma et una res), although they are distinct

23 See also ibid., 74, ll. 514–15: “Esse in potentia medium est inter esse actu et non esse
omnino.”
24 See ibid. 72, ll. 442–51 for a statement and elucidation of the principle. See Averroes, In
viii Metaph., com. 15, in Aristotelis opera cum Averrois commentariis, vol. 8 (Venice, 1562–
1574; repr. Frankfurt a. M., 1962), f. 224rA. See also qdp, q. 6, 155, ll. 329–32; q. 22, 304, ll.
129–30; and Quodl. i, q. 5, 66, ll. 129–30.
25 This is in fact one of the major criticisms directed at James by the anonymous author
of the questions on Averroes’s De substantia orbis contained in ms. Florence, Biblioteca
­Nazionale Centrale, Conv. Soppr. I.3.6, f. 97va, to wit: “Amplius, sequetur quod infinite res
de genere substantie et de aliis generibus erunt simul in eadem portione materie. Hoc vide-
tur impossibile, ideo etc. Consequentiam ostendo, nam figurata hac portione materie ver-
um est dicere secundum intentionem philosophorum quod infinite substantie secundum
numerum possunt ex illa portione materie generari et tamen omnium istarum formarum
realitas preexistit in tota materia ita quod quelibet istarum ponit in numerum contra ma-
teriam; dico in numerum, quia res distincte a materia etiam ponunt in numerum inter se,
quia res diverse adinvicem et distincte. Sequitur igitur quod infinita distincta et diversa
erunt simul in eadem portione materie, immo plura quam infinita, quoniam omnia quon-
dam corrupta in hac portione materie realiter et distincte sunt in materia ista et simul
et ista sunt infinita.” A similar criticism is found in Olivi, though Olivi doesn’t talk about
diversities “greater than infinity.” See his Quaestiones in secundum librum Sententiarum,
q. 31, (ed.) Bernard Jansen (Quaracchi, 1922), 525.
134 Pickavé and Côté

insofar as they are related to different actualities.26 Whether we find this line
of reasoning convincing depends on how we take the expression “as if” (quasi).
If actual existence makes things actually distinct, potential being still seems
to entail a somewhat real—albeit potential—distinctness of potential beings.
As we can see, on James’s understanding of matter, matter is in some sense
“pregnant” with forms. Since James’s main motivation for introducing such
inchoate forms was his analysis of matter’s potency towards forms, someone
might object that his explanation is beside the point. For all he has really ex-
plained, if anything, is that matter receives through these inchoate forms in
potential being a further potency towards forms in actual being. What about
the more fundamental potency of matter towards these inchoate forms? Or to
put it differently: we may think that being inclined towards the reception of
forms is an essential property of matter. However, the inclination towards form
in actual being that matter possesses in virtue of inchoate forms seems to be
an acquired property of matter. Isn’t there also a more basic property of matter
in virtue of which it is inclined to receive the inchoate forms?
James responds to this concern by agreeing that there are in matter two
potencies towards form. One of them is indeed acquired and is “something
added” (aliquid superadditum) to matter, and thus it does not belong to ­matter
according to its own nature. This is the potency that matter acquires from
­inchoate forms.27 The natural potency of matter, on the other hand, is just that,
a bare potency towards forms, not a propensity (idoneitas). James does not say
much about it, apart from insisting that it should be thought of as a ­differentia,
not the essence of matter. For the fact that we think of matter mostly in terms
of its potency towards forms stems from the way we know matter, but it does
not indicate anything about the essence of matter. At most, the potency to-
wards forms is a necessary property of matter itself.28 That James is not more
interested in this bare potency can in our view be explained by the fact that it

26 Quodl. ii, q. 5, 86–87, ll. 911–22: “Unde, cum formae praeexistant in materia non actu sed
potentia, non dicuntur habere distinctionem in ea secundum quod potentia sunt; sed
secundum relationem ad diversos actus dicuntur diversae potentiae. Et sic dicendum est
quod omnes formae sunt simul in materia secundum esse potentiale. … Cum potentia
dicat indistinctionem et ordinem ad actum, in quantum potentia dicit indistinctionem,
sic formae in potentia habent unitatem et sunt quasi una forma et una res et una poten-
tia.” See also ibid., 84, ll. 845: “… esse in potentia est esse indistincte. Actus enim est qui
distinguit.”
27 Ibid., 81–82.
28 Ibid., 67, ll. 282–83.
James of Viterbo’s Philosophy of Nature 135

plays no role in the explanation of natural processes, as we will see shortly.29

The possession of this more fundamental potency is a consequence of the fact
that matter taken by itself is a pure imperfection and thus at least perfectible.30
However, if the added potency that matter has with respect to forms in actual
being is nothing that matter has from its own essence, then it has to come from
somewhere else. For James, it ultimately comes from God, who in creating mat-
ter endows it immediately with such a potency by creating—or impressing—
the “beginnings of forms” in it.31 But this is just another way of saying that our
natural world is such that matter always comes with inchoate forms. The close
link between matter and forms in potency or “beginnings of forms” therefore
also explains in what sense God, according to James, cannot separate the “apti-
tude to receive a form and an ability to become part of a composite” from mat-
ter, even as God is able to create matter without a form in actuality.

5.3 “Seminal Reasons”

James of Viterbo’s teaching that matter is endowed with “beginnings of forms”

(inchoationes or exordia formarum), “forms in potency” (formae in potentia),
and “preparations of forms” (praeparationes formarum)—he uses all these ex-
pressions synonymously—will no doubt remind readers of what other philos-
ophers and theologians in the 13th and 14th centuries called “seminal reasons”
(rationes seminales). In Quodlibet ii, question 5, James himself draws this con-
nection and he contrasts his own account of the “forms in potency” as “seminal
reasons” with that of others. The notion of seminal reasons is often consid-
ered an Augustinian legacy, since Augustine used the notion, which he bor-
rows from Stoic physics, in his Literal Commentary on Genesis, from where it
became popular in later medieval authors.32 But it would be wrong to dismiss

29 This is also implied in the following statement: “Nuda enim essentia materiae nullius
transmutationis naturalis potest esse subiectum” (ibid., 84, ll. 843–44). See also Quodl. iii,
q. 16, 216, l. 410.
30 Quodl. ii, q. 5, 81.
31 Ibid., 82, ll. 774–77: “Ab illo ergo agente ortum habet haec potentia, quod ipsam materiam
in esse produxit. Hoc autem agens est Deus qui producendo materiam indidit ei potentias
huiusmodi; quae sunt formarum praeparationes et exordia.” See also Quodl. iv, q. 4, 23, ll.
255–57.
32 Even though the doctrine of seminal reasons had been famously rejected by Aquinas (see
Quaestiones disputatae de veritate, q. 11, aa. 1–3, about which more below) and subjected
to scathing criticism by Peter John Olivi (see Quaestiones in secundum librum Sententia-
rum, q. 31, (ed.) Jansen, 508–70), it enjoyed support from a variety of important masters
136 Pickavé and Côté

the assumption of seminal reasons merely as a form of “Augustinianism.” For

James’s texts clearly show that he thinks that most philosophical authorities,
including Aristotle, Averroes, Simplicius, and Augustine, agree that matter’s
potency towards forms is due to the existence of inchoate forms or seminal
reasons.33 Although it would also be interesting to study James’s innovative
exegesis of Aristotle and Averroes in this respect, we will limit ourselves to the
philosophical motivation for his view.
In the previous section, we have already encountered one reason why James
posits inchoate forms or seminal reasons in matter: for without them we can-
not account for matter’s aptitude for forms or hylomorphic composition. But
this is not the only reason. Another important philosophical motive seems to
stem from the analysis of natural processes. James points to this explicitly:

For unless it is posited that a form preexists in the aforementioned way, it

seems to follow with necessity that in the process of generation the form
is induced from the outside, as those say who posit a giver of forms. And
so the form would have being through an act of creation.34

To understand James’s concern, take the standard picture in which a natural

agent acts on matter to produce a new material thing out of it, be it a new ac-
cident in a material substance or a new material substance. The terminus of
such a process is a new composite of matter and form. It is clear where the

throughout the 13th century, notably by Franciscan authors such as Bonaventure and later
Franciscans such as Vital du Four and Roger Marston, but also, though in a somewhat dif-
ferent form, by none other than Albert the Great. On the latter, see Bruno Nardi, “La dot-
trina d’Alberto Magno sull’ ‘inchoatio formae,’” in idem, Studi di filosofia medievale (Rome,
1960), 69–102. Unless noted otherwise, all references to Aquinas’s texts are to the Leonine
edition of his works (Rome, 1882–).
33 The key source for understanding James’s theory of innate aptitudes and seminal forms
is arguably Simplicius’s commentary on Aristotle’s Categories, in particular those sections
of it dealing with quality. This fact didn’t escape the attention of the perceptive anony-
mous arts master mentioned in note 25 above. He writes (f. 97rb): “[I]ste fundat suam po-
sitionem in quibusdam dictis Simplicii in Predicamentis in secunda specie qualitatis que
est naturalis potentia, etc.” For a brief discussion of some of this arts master’s criticisms of
James, see Mary Phelps, “The Theory of Seminal Reasons in James of Viterbo,” Augustini-
ana 30 (1980): 271–83, at 280–83. About the importance of Simplicius for understanding
James’s theory, see also Antoine Côté, “Simplicius and James of Viterbo on Propensities,”
Vivarium 47 (2009), 24–53.
34 Quodl. ii, q. 5, 75, ll. 545–48. In this question, James presents a total of five reasons for
positing inchoate or preexisting forms (see 72–76, ll. 444–569). The one that we discuss
here is the fifth reason.
James of Viterbo’s Philosophy of Nature 137

matter of this composite comes from: it is the matter that underlies the whole
process. The problem is the origin of the form.
It seems as if the form cannot come from the external agent. It doesn’t come
from the agent in the sense that the agent gives its form to the composite it
brings about. For the agent doesn’t lose its form in the exercise of its efficient
causality. (That it sometimes happens that, say, a heat source, like a hot stove,
cools when it heats something else is not due to its role as an agent, but rather
to the fact that in this scenario it is also a patient;35 for what is heated and what
does the heating affect each other if they are, as in this case, in close spatial
proximity.) Nor can the form of the agent inhere in the resulting composite,
since one and the same form cannot inhere in two separate chunks of mat-
ter. Moreover, James considers it equally impossible that forms simply migrate
from the agent to the composite.36 He doesn’t tell us why this is impossible, but
the impossibility of the scenario is commonly considered to follow from the
nature of accidents, and it is a view to which all medieval philosophers seem
to be committed.37 Accidents depend on the subjects in which they inhere; it
is from their subjects that accidents have their existence and numerical iden-
tity. So there is no way that one and the same accident could migrate from one
subject into another.
Still, maybe there are other ways how the new form can come from the
agent and the outside; for after all, this seems to be the most reasonable as-
sumption. For James, this is equally mistaken. For if, as we have just seen, it
is not the agent’s form that is transferred from the agent to the patient, that
is, the new composite, then it must be a new form. So either the agent pro-
duces this form from nothing, in which case the agent would be engaged in an
act of creation of which it is incapable; or the agent produces this new form
from its own essence, which is equally unacceptable. For the latter would re-
quire the agent to move itself from potentiality to actuality, because now the
agent would undertake an activity all by itself before it transmits this new form
to the composite.38 According to James, this leaves us with only two further

35 Quodl. iii, q. 14, 189, ll. 47–50.

36 Ibid., 191, ll. 86–87.
37 Thomas Aquinas, for instance, endorses this principle in Quaestiones disputatae de veri-
tate, q. 11, a. 1, arg. 6, and Summa contra Gentiles, lib. 3, c. 69.
38 Quodl. iii, q. 14, 191, ll. 81–84: “Item forma de subiecto in subiectum migraret vel immit-
teret aliquid quod non est actu in ipso agente. Hoc autem vel produceretur de nihilo;
quod est contra tertiam suppositionem [i.e., that no natural agent acts by the mode of
creation], vel produceretur de substantia vel essentia ipsius agenti, quod est contra quar-
tam suppositionem [i.e., that nothing changes itself by moving itself from potentiality to
actuality].”
138 Pickavé and Côté

options: either the forms are created by God or they already “preexist in mat-
ter” in potential and imperfect being. The former option, which was adopted
by those who posit a “giver of forms” (dator formarum), would entail that in
every natural process God creates a new form. But this jeopardizes the dis-
tinction between natural and supernatural processes, because God now has to
intervene in every instance of natural change. Therefore, the only alternative is
for forms to come from inside the matter from which the composite is gener-
ated. On this picture, the role of the natural agent is not to act “by producing
something new in matter, but by drawing forth into actuality what was there in
potency.”39
As cogent as this line of reasoning may seem, its conclusion may strike us as
somewhat premature. Isn’t there another option? Why jump to the conclusion
that forms preexist in matter? Why can new forms not come about in matter
via a process which the scholastics commonly call “eduction”? Most of James’s
contemporaries agree with him that forms of natural objects are not literally
transmitted into the composite from the outside; instead, what happens ac-
cording to them is that the forms are “educed from the potency of matter”; and
this does not seem to commit them to James’s version of preexistent forms.40
James addresses this objection in the following passage:

Neither is it enough to say that the form does not have existence from
nothing, because it comes about through a change of matter (per trans-
mutationem materiae). For this change of matter can in one way be
­understood to stand for the change of matter itself (pro motu ipsius ma-
teriae) in accordance with the accidents, which are dispositions towards
the form. But since these accidents are outside of the essence of the form,
one cannot say that because of their existence in matter the form does
not come about from nothing. In another way, the change of matter can
be understood to stand for the introduction of the form itself. But since
this change is the form itself in accordance with the fact that it succeeds

39 Quodl. ii, q. 5, 85, ll. 883–85: “Naturale agens non agit producendo aliquid de novo in ma-
teria, sed solum extrahendo quod erat in potentia in actum.”
40 See, for instance, Thomas Aquinas, Summa contra Gentiles, lib. 3, c. 69: “Non enim hoc
modo dicitur corpus calidum calefacere quod idem numero calor qui est in calefaciente
corpore transeat ad corpus calefactum, sed quia virtute caloris qui est in corpore calefaci-
ente alius calor numero fit actu in corpore calefacto qui prius erat in eo in potentia. Agens
enim naturale non est transducens propriam formam in alterum subiectum, sed reducens
subiectum quod patitur de potentia in actum.”
James of Viterbo’s Philosophy of Nature 139

another form, the same doubt returns and we ask for what we assumed
in the beginning.41

According to the traditional picture, an agent “educes” a form from the po-
tency of matter with the help of accidental qualities (heat etc.) that prepare
the matter for the form and induce a change in matter. James denies that this
process can really lead to a new form in matter. Following his underlying as-
sumption, this would be possible only if there were an intimate connection
between those accidents and the form they are supposed to educe. Since, how-
ever, the accidental qualities are by their nature “outside” the essence of the
form, they cannot bring the form about. Thus, if we want to hold on to the idea
that eduction is the way to arrive at a new form, then one “cannot say that …
the form does not come about from nothing,” for it obviously does not come
about through the accidents; and it has to come from somewhere if it is not
presumed to preexist in matter. If, however, we understand by the change of
matter through which the new form comes into existence in matter, the in-
duction of the form itself, then we are simply begging the question, since we
haven’t explained where the form comes from. And the idea of a succession of
forms won’t help either, because it too is silent on the question of origin, and
in this sense “the same doubt returns.”
Note that James does not reject the idea that forms are “educed from the po-
tency of matter.” Quite the contrary, he thinks that only on his account can we
actually understand “what it is for some form to be educed from the potency
of matter and for others not to be educed.” Only if a form preexists in matter in
potency can it subsequently be educed. Forms that do not preexist in this way,
such as the human soul, cannot be educed but have to be infused into the body
by God through an act of creation.42

41 Quodl. ii, q. 5, 75–76, ll. 555–63: “Nec item sufficit dicere quod forma non habet esse ex
nihilo, quia fit per transmutationem materiae. Nam transmutatio materiae uno modo po-
test accipi pro motu ipsius materiae secundum accidentia, quae sunt dispositiones ad
formam. Sed cum haec accidentia omnino sint extra essentiam formae, propter ipsorum
existentiam in materia, non poterit dici quod forma non fit ex nihilo. Alio autem modo
potest accipi transmutatio pro introductione ipsius formae; sed cum talis transmutatio sit
ipsa forma secundum quod succedit alii formae, redit eadem dubitatio, et petitur quod in
principio.”
42 Ibid., 77, ll. 592–97: “Ex dictis autem potest accipi quid est formam aliquam educi vel
non educi de potentia materiae. Illa enim forma dicitur educi de potentia materiae,
quae praeexistit in ea in potentia. Illa vero forma dicitur non educi de potentia materiae,
quae non praeexistit in ea in potentia. Sicut patet in anima humana quae ut commu-
niter ponitur de potentia materiae non educitur, sed a Deo per creationem producitur et
140 Pickavé and Côté

If on James’s account of preexisting forms the natural agent does nothing

more than to “draw forth into actuality” a form that was already in matter in
potency, then this raises the question of how this drawing forth is supposed
to work. How does the external agent “extract” into actuality what was there
in potency? According to James, eduction occurs when two conditions are in
place: (1) when the agent is in contact with the patient, either in immediate
contact or mediated by something else, and (2) when there is a suitable “order”
between the agent and the patient, namely, when the agent is in actuality what
the patient is in potency.43 If these conditions obtain, the presence of an agent
will, together with the preexisting form in matter, lead to the production of a
natural effect. Of course, one may wonder why the mere presence of the agent
should suffice for the effect to follow from the form. The answer lies in the
fact that James conceives of seminal reasons not only as “beginnings” of forms,
but also as active principles, naturally inclining towards their completion.44
Inclination, James tells us, is an action that follows upon a formal principle,
whether that formal principle exists in act or in potency.45 Thus a heavy object
is inclined to move downwards as a result of its possessing the form of gravity
in actuality, and will so move provided there is no obstacle. Seminal reasons,
which are forms in potency, are likewise inclined to actualization; their actu-
alization consists in the potential forms “unfolding” into full-fledged forms in
actuality. Unlike the heavy object, which will move only in the absence of an
obstacle, what the seminal reason requires in order to move to actuality is the
presence of an appropriate external agent.46 Let this suffice for now. We will
come back to the causal role of external natural agents at the beginning of
section 5.5.

c­ orpori infunditur.” The view that eduction requires the preexistence of forms in matter is
­mentioned—and rejected—by Aquinas in Scriptum super Sent., lib. 2, d. 18, q. 1, a. 2, corp.
For Aquinas’s criticism, see below, 142–44.
43 Quodl. iii, q. 14, 193, ll. 141–43: “Hoc est igitur primum quod requiritur ad actionem et
passionem, convenientia scilicet activi et passivi qualis dicta est. Secundum vero est con-
tactus. Oportet enim quod agens tangat passum vel immediate vel mediate.” Regarding
the convenientia involved, James explains (ibid., 191, ll. 104–05): “Et quia convenientia im-
portat ordinem quemdam, ideo dici solet quod inter agens et patiens oportet esse ordo.”
44 Quodl. ii, q. 5, 64, ll. 180–82. See also Quodl. iii, q. 10, 148, ll. 91–94.
45 Quodl. iv, q. 4, 19, ll. 143–45.
46 See Quodl. iv, q. 4, 22, ll. 228–31, where James likens the action of the external agent to
the removing of an obstacle (removens prohibens). This model is applied to the case of the
will: The “obstacle” is the absence of a willed object; the presence of such an object con-
stitutes the removal of the obstacle Quodl. i, q. 7, 110, l. 1053.
James of Viterbo’s Philosophy of Nature 141

But one may think it odd to describe change as the production of a form. For
strictly speaking, the result of a natural process is not the form, but a new com-
posite: animals bring about the existence of new animals, not animal souls;
hot items make other items hot, they don’t produce forms of heat. But note
that nothing in James’s account forces us to think that natural processes aim at
only bringing about forms. Quite the contrary: since the form already exists in
matter, the form isn’t the effect for James. The effect is the actual existence of a
composite, which previously existed only in potency. In some sense, the com-
posite produced by a natural process already preexists, insofar as both its mat-
ter and its form preexist. So the product of the process is the actually existing
composite, which comes about without the addition of a new thing and only
by the external agent actualizing that which preexisted in potency. In James’s
words:

Whence therefore it is concluded that the form itself preexists in matter

according to its essence, not, mind you, in act, but in potency; and it is
extracted in generation from potency to act. In this way is better estab-
lished the truth of the fact that it is not the form that comes to be, but the
composite. Because the whole composite preexists, it is the whole com-
posite that comes to be; this happens not because a new thing is added,
but because that same whole thing comes to be in act that preexisted in
potency.47

The notion of “order” that James uses in explaining the relationship between
the natural agent and the form that gets actualized also does other work for
him. For there is not only an order between the agent and the patient in the
production of natural processes, there is also an order between the various pre-
existent forms the agent can “draw forward” from the potency of matter. While
it is true that innumerable forms preexist in each portion of matter, it does
not follow that just anything can immediately come about in actuality. This
is because the forms in matter preexist there according to a certain order.48

47 Quodl. ii, q. 5, 76, ll. 570–76: “Ex his ergo concluditur quod forma ipsa secundum suam es-
sentiam praeexistit in materia, non quidem in actu sed in potentia; et in generatione per
agens extrahitur de potentia ad actum; secundum quem modum potest magis verificari
quod non fit forma, sed compositum. Quia enim totum compositum praeexistit, totum
fieri dicitur; non quia nova res addatur, sed quia id idem et totum fit in actu, quod preex-
istebat in potentia.” See also Quodl. iii, q. 5, 86, ll. 137–39.
48 Quodl. ii, q. 5, 87, ll. 938–40: “Licet omnes formae materiales simul existant in materia
secundum esse potentiale, tamen in huiusmodi formis est ordo.”
142 Pickavé and Côté

On the one hand, forms are ordered “according to their degree of perfection”
(secundum gradum perfectionis); the form that is the nutritive soul, for in-
stance, is more perfect than the form of the body, and can thus only be educed
after the other has been educed. On the other hand, even among forms that do
not vary in degrees of perfection there is an order in which they can be actual-
ized one after the other.49
As radical as James’s account of seminal reasons may sound, he himself
thinks that he is merely adopting a middle ground between two truly radical
views, and indeed he thinks that in occupying this middle ground he has Aris-
totle on his side. As he explains:

One has to understand that the forms, before they are in matter in actual-
ity, are there in potency. And this is the view of Aristotle, which is in the
middle between two other views, of which one posits the hiddenness of
forms (latitatio formarum) and the other the creation of forms. For ac-
cording to Aristotle forms are not induced in matter from the outside by
creation, but they preexist in matter—not however in actuality, as those
say who posit latent forms, but in potency. This is in the middle between
being in actuality and absolute not being.50

What are the two “other views” James is referring to here? The phrase “­latitatio
formarum” (“hiddenness of forms”) is an allusion to the view commonly attrib-
uted to Anaxagoras by the medievals. It holds that the forms of things preexist
in actuality in the potency of matter, but are merely “lying low”—to use Law-
rence Dewan’s apt phrase.51 The “creation of forms” view is simply the position
we have mentioned earlier that the form has to be created since the natural
agent cannot produce it. Medieval authors consider Avicenna, with his notion
of a dator formarum, as an exponent of this second view. It is between these
two “extremes” that James wants to position himself. In so doing, of course, he
is employing a rhetorical strategy widely used by medieval authors. Yet, James’s
“moderate” view is noteworthy, as it evokes very similar sounding statements in
Thomas Aquinas’s works. A brief look at Aquinas here will help us set James’s
position in sharper relief.
There are at least four central texts in Aquinas’s oeuv re where he contrasts the
idea that all forms of natural beings already exist in actuality in matter—so, the

49 Ibid., 87, ll. 931–54.

50 Ibid., 65, ll. 208–14.
51 Lawrence Dewan, Form and Being: Studies in Thomistic Metaphysics (Washington, dc,
2006), 123, n. 90.
James of Viterbo’s Philosophy of Nature 143

“hiddenness of forms” view—with the idea that all forms come from outside,
from a “giver of forms.”52 In these texts, Aquinas also relates these three rival
views to Plato, Avicenna, and Aristotle. Moreover, Aquinas notes that there is a
connection between the views authors tend to hold regarding the provenance
of natural forms and their views regarding the provenance of knowledge and
virtue. Those willing to subscribe to the idea that all forms already exist in
matter in actuality will also subscribe to the idea that knowledge and virtues
are innate in the soul and only need to be set free by the removal of external
impediments. Likewise, those who believe that forms come into matter from
the outside also hold that knowledge and virtue come completely from the
outside. For our purposes, it is irrelevant whether this is an adequate a­ ccount
of Plato and Avicenna’s views. What matters here is how Aquinas frames
­Aristotle’s view, to which he himself subscribes. Here is how Aquinas states his
position in the Disputed Questions on Truth. After showing what is wrong with
the “extrinsecist” and the “intrinsecist” views, he writes:

And therefore, according to the teaching of Aristotle, one ought to hold

the middle position on all the aforementioned issues. For forms of natu-
ral things preexist in matter, not in actuality, as some say, but only in po-
tency, from which they are reduced into actuality; not only through the
first cause, as the other opinion holds.53

Is James’s position then just another version, albeit expressed in slightly dif-
ferent language, of Aquinas’s? Nothing could be farther from the truth. This
can be seen easily if we go back to James’s understanding of eduction of forms
from the potency of matter and the role he sees in this process for inchoate
forms in potential being. As we saw earlier, for eduction to be possible, forms
must, according to James, preexist “incompletely” and “inchoately” as forma-
tive powers in matter, requiring only to be prompted by the appropriate exter-
nal agent in order to unfold into complete actuality. The problem with views
like this is, according to Aquinas, that they require the form itself in its incho-
ative state to be the agent of its own transition from potency to act.54 While
Aquinas grants that complex agents can in a certain sense be self-movers

52 Summa theologiae i–ii, q. 63, a. 1; Quaestiones disputatae de veritate, q. 10, a. 6; ibid., q. 11,
a. 1; Quaestiones disputatae de anima, q. 15.
53 Quaestiones disputatae de veritate, q. 11, a. 1 corp.
54 We are following Aquinas’s discussion in Scriptum super Sent., lib. 2, d. 18, q. 1, a. 2 corp.
For more on Aquinas’s rejection of “inchoate forms,” see Fabrizio Amerini, Aquinas on the
Beginning and End of Human Life (Cambridge, MA, 2013), 24–28.
144 Pickavé and Côté

(e.g., when a human organism gets better, one part, the heart, heals the other
parts), he denies that this can be the case with simple forms, which are, ex
h­ ypothesi, what seminal reasons are supposed to be. Invoking Averroes’s com-
mentary on the Physics, Aquinas is adamant that in the case of local motion,
and, more to the point, of alteration, the mover and the thing moved must be
different. If this is so, then to the extent that it makes sense to talk of forms as
preexisting in matter at all, they cannot preexist in the guise of active principles,
of which matter must be entirely devoid. Indeed, Aquinas’s position is that the
potency of matter is purely passive (pure passiva);55 to the extent that it takes
on a form, it can do so only under the action of an external agent. But this does
not mean that matter is devoid of a positive role in generation. Quite the con-
trary: it contributes to generation by virtue of its capacity (habilitas) to receive
forms. It is this capacity that for Aquinas is properly called the “inchoation
of form.”56
Contrast this view with James’s own “middle” position. Recall that for James
the incomplete or aptitudinal form is the same thing as the full-fledged form
in complete actuality: forms are, so to speak, “already there.”57 Recall too that
James’s seminal reasons are “active principles” naturally inclined towards their
perfection and thus formal self-movers—the very two things Aquinas denies
they are. Clearly, James’s moderate view is a far cry from Aquinas’s; so much
so, in fact, that one may legitimately wonder just how different it is from the
“hiddenness” theory he claims to distinguish it from. James actually acknowl-
edges that his solution resembles the hiddenness theory “in some sense” (ali-
quo modo).58 However, as we have already seen, he believes that it differs from
it in one crucial respect that is worth repeating:

For forms according to Aristotle are not induced from the outside through
creation; rather they preexist in matter, though not in actuality, as those

55 Scriptum super Sent., lib. 2, d. 18, q. 1, a. 2 corp., (ed.) Pierre Mandonnet (Paris, 1929), 452:
“Hoc autem verum non videtur: quia quamvis formae educantur de potentia materiae, illa
tamen potentia materiae non est activa, sed passiva tantum.”
56 Ibid., 453: “Nec tamen sequitur, si in materia est potentia passiva tantum, quod non sit
generatio naturalis: quia materia coadjuvat ad generationem non agendo, sed inquantum
est habilis ad recipiendum talem actionem: quae etiam habilitas appetitus materiae dici-
tur, et inchoatio formae.”
57 As we will see in the next section, James views the distinction between the aptitude and
the actualized form as a modal one.
58 James’s anonymous critic from the arts faculty of the University of Paris concurs. See ms.
Florence, Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale, Conv. Soppr. I.3.6, f. 97rb.
James of Viterbo’s Philosophy of Nature 145

who posit the hiddenness (latitatio) have claimed, but in potency, which
is between being in actuality and complete non-being.59

At first blush, such a response hardly seems satisfactory. Are seminal reasons
not in actuality by virtue of the fact that they are forms?60 James denies that
this is the case. Being, he likes to remind us, has two differentiae: actuality and
potency.61 It does not follow, therefore, because seminal reasons exist, that
they must exist in actuality.62 This of course poses a problem, for as we saw
above, James holds that it is “actuality that distinguishes.”63 But in that case
how can one intelligibly talk of many forms or even of a form existing in po-
tency? James’s answer, to which we have already alluded, is as follows:

[A]lthough that form in potency in one way is a different thing from mat-
ter, nevertheless in another way, it may be said to be the same thing as
matter, for to be in potency is to be indistinctly; for it is actuality that
distinguishes. Hence form, inasmuch as it is in actuality, is numerically
distinct from matter, for they are the two principles of the composite.
By contrast, form in potency is in a certain way distinct from matter, in-
asmuch as it refers to a thing other than it; but in a certain way, it is not
numerically distinct, because of its potential mode of being, on account
of which it comes together and coincides with matter.64

59 Quodl. ii, q. 5, 65, ll. 211–14: “Formae enim secundum Aristotelem non inducuntur ab extra
per creationem, sed praeexistunt in materia, non quidem actu, sicut dixerunt ponentes
latitationem, sed potentia; quod est esse medium inter esse actu et omnino non esse.”
60 This is in fact one of Peter John Olivi’s objections to seminal reasons. See Quaestiones in
secundum librum Sententiarum, q. 31, (ed.) Jansen, 518: “[E]rgo si essentia formae est in
materia, necessario erit eius actus … ergo impossibile est esse essentiae formae in materia
sine esse actuali.”
61 See qdp, q. 15, 228, l. 566; qdp, q. 22, 317, ll. 510–12, and Quodl. ii, q. 5, 83, l. 79.
62 James is not perfectly consistent on this score. In Quodl. i, q. 12 (173, l. 541), he refers to
the propensities (idoneitates) and aptitudes—the psychological equivalents of seminal
reasons—as “incomplete actualities.”
63 See above, 133–34.
64 Quodl. ii, q. 5, 84, ll. 844–51: “Et haec forma in potentia, licet sit alia res a materia uno
modo tamen, potest dici alio modo eadem res cum materia, quia in potentia est esse
indistincte. Actus enim est qui distinguit. Unde forma, ut est in actu, ponit in numerum
cum materia, quia sunt duo principia compositi. Forma vero in potentia quodammodo
ponit in numero cum materia, in quantum dicit aliam rem ab ipsa, quodammodo autem
non ponit in numerum cum ea, propter modum essendi potentialem, propter quem con-
venit cum materia et cum ipsa coincidit.”
146 Pickavé and Côté

Only full-fledged forms, then, are numerically distinct from matter; forms in
potency are identical with it. However, this doesn’t mean that they are not also
“in some sense” numerically distinct from matter: they are, insofar as they refer
to distinct things—presumably the full-fledged forms. The question here, of
course, is whether this kind of numerical distinctness is sufficiently robust to
underwrite the sorts of claims James wants to make about forms in potency, for
instance that they are “beginnings” (exordia) of actualized forms, and that they
are active principles; for surely it is not open to James to respond that seminal
reasons are self-movers insofar as they refer to the actualized forms or compos-
ites, since these are the termini of motion, not its beginning. Granted, to those
who would object that James’s theory implied that seminal forms are distinct
in a robust sense from “bare” matter, James could rightly retort that he had
made no such robust distinction, since the distinction exists only “in a certain
way.” On the other hand, James’s theory clearly requires there to be a bona fide
plurality of distinct forms in potency; otherwise it is hard to see how he could
claim that the difference between seminal reasons and actualized forms is a
modal one, or how he could claim that his position aligns with Averroes’s as-
sertion that “increase in perfection does not mean increase in number.” James
seems to be in a quandary here. While he might have been careful not to assert
the existence of a hard distinction between bare matter and seminal reasons,
his theory appears to commit him to more than the attenuated distinction he
explicitly subscribes to.

5.4 Time and Place

a Time
If natural philosophy is primarily concerned with change, it also has to deal
with time. Change is either fast or slow, so time seems to be an essential prop-
erty of change (passio motus). To be more precise, James calls time an intrinsic
measure of change (mensura motus intrinseca) similarly to the way quantita-
tive dimensions of an object, say, a piece of wood, are an intrinsic measure of
the extended object.65 Admittedly, it is somewhat arbitrary whether we judge
a given piece of wood to be large or small, and there will also be some arbitrari-
ness as to whether to call a given change rapid or slow, but as the quantitative
dimension of the wood, so the temporal extendedness of the change seems to
be an ­objective feature of the world. And this makes perfect sense if natural
philosophy is to be a scientia realis as opposed to a scientia rationalis. For if

65 Quodl. iii, q. 12, 171, ll. 135–44.

James of Viterbo’s Philosophy of Nature 147

time is intrinsic to change and turned out to be unreal, in the sense of not be-
ing an objective feature of the world, then the status of natural philosophy as a
scientia realis would become utterly problematic.
James discusses the reality of time explicitly in question 12 of his third Quod-
libet, where he asks whether time is something in rerum natura. But there are
other questions in his Quodlibeta in which he alludes to his understanding
of the reality of time. Discussions of the reality of time are often conducted
against the backdrop of the opposing views of Augustine and Aristotle on this
matter. According to Augustine’s classic account, time is something mind-­
dependent; according to Aristotle, time is mind-independent. For James, how-
ever, both accounts more or less boil down to the same thing. In Quodlibet ii,
question 1, for instance, he writes:

It has to be said that time is a property of change (passio motus), because

it is a distension of change (distensio motus) according to Augustine in
book xi of the Confessions; or it is the number of change according to
Aristotle in book iv of the Physics, or according to others it is the delay
(mora) of change; and these definitions (notificationes) aim at the same
thing.66

To understand how these definitions are similar and how time is something
real, we need to focus on the idea that time is an intrinsic measure of change,
similarly to the way that the quantitative dimension of a piece of wood is an
intrinsic measure of the wood. There are of course two important differences
between the two cases. Although wood cannot be without a quantitative di-
mension, it does not belong to the substance of wood in the same way as time,
the distension of change, belongs to change. James says that the quantitative
dimension of the wood is “superadded” to the substance of wood, but the “dis-
tension of change, which is time, does not add anything above change, but a
certain real mode of being (modus quidam essendi realis).”67 In one sense this

66 Quodl. ii, q. 1, 13, 13, ll. 288–91. See Aristotle, Phys. 4.11 (219b1–2) and Augustine, Confessions
XI.26.33. In Quodl. i, q. 9, James ascribes the definition of time as a distentio motus to Sim-
plicius rather than to Augustine (134, l. 218). The definition of time as mora motus (rerum
mutabilium) is common among medieval authors, but of unclear origin. Albert the Great
attributes it (falsely) to Priscian, see, e.g., Summa theologiae sive de mirabili ­scientia Dei,
lib. 1, tract. 5, q. 23, c. 3, (eds.) Dionysius Siedler et al., Opera omnia 34.1 (Münster, 1978), 136,
ll. 9–10: “Adhuc Priscianus dicit quod ‘tempus est mora motus mutabilium rerum.’”
67 Quodl. iii, q. 12, 171, ll. 146–47: “Distensio autem motus, quae tempus dicitur, non addit
rem aliquam supra motum, sed modum quemdam essendi realem, ut alibi declaratum
est.” See also Quodl. iii, q. 5, 83, ll. 29–30. In Quodl. ii, q. 1, 13, he highlights the close
148 Pickavé and Côté

just means that time is essential to change in a way that spatial extension is not
for material objects. Maybe he has in mind the fact that the spatial dimensions
of a material object come about by means of an accidental quantity, whereas
time is something more intimate to change. As he says elsewhere, “wherev-
er there is change, there is time.”68 The second difference between the two
cases is that the quantitative dimension of the piece of wood is “permanent
and complete at once” (permanens et tota simul), whereas the distension of
change is successive. This is the reason why time is in the soul since, according
to James, there are no successive beings outside the soul.69
It is important to distinguish the question regarding the reality of change
from the question regarding the reality of time. James does not deny that
change (motus) is an extra-mental reality, but he adds a qualification:

Although change, according to its essence and insofar as it is change,

is outside the soul, and similarly the parts of change insofar as they are
change are essentially outside the soul, nevertheless change as extended
and the distension of change exist only in the presence of the soul, and
the parts of change, insofar as they are parts of an extended change ac-
cording to continuous quantity, exist only in the presence of the soul.70

It is not clear what James means by “change according to its essence,” since
he does not present us here with a definition of change from which it would
become clear that change itself is something extra-mental.71 Maybe he just

connection between change and time by arguing that the one cannot be without the
other, not even by divine power.
68 Quodl. i, q. 9, 133, ll. 192–93: “[U]bique est motus, ibi est tempus.”
69 Quodl. iii, q. 12, 171–72, ll. 149–54: “Adhuc est et alia differentia quae ad propositum fac-
it. Nam dimensio ligni est permanens et tota simul, et ideo est actu extra animam. Sed
distensio motus est successiva et non simul tota, quia motus in successione habet esse,
immo ipsa continua successio motus est eius distensio quae tempus dicitur. Et quia est
successiva, ideo non est actu extra animam, sed solum apud animam quae actu consid-
erat quod actu non est in re.”
70 Ibid., 172, ll. 165–70: “Licet igitur motus, secundum suam essentiam et ut motus est, sit
extra animam, et similiter partes motus ut sunt motus essentialiter sunt extra animam, ta-
men motus ut distensus vel distensio motus est apud animam tantum, et partes motus, ut
partes sunt moti distensi secundum continuam quantitatem, sunt apud animam solum.
Et ita tempus, quod est distensio motus, est apud animam solum.”
71 Since all change is a change towards a new form, James may here have in mind the idea
that change is, in a certain sense, an “incomplete form as ordered to its completion” (for-
ma incompleta in ordine ad complementum) or, which he considers to mean the same, the
“form in the state of becoming” (forma ut in fieri) (Quodl. ii, q. 1, 20, ll. 513–14; Quodl. ii,
James of Viterbo’s Philosophy of Nature 149

thinks that change is clearly something extra-mental, since the parts of change,
i.e., each of the stages of a process of change, obviously exist—at least at one
­moment—outside the soul. And if “change according to its essence” is real
in this sense, then natural philosophy, as a science dealing with change, is a
­scientia realis. But change as extended—and that is usually what we think of
when we think of the entire process of change from its beginning to the end—
exists as a whole only because of the presence of souls. This conclusion is
grounded in James’s presentism, i.e., the belief that only the present is real out-
side the soul. If only the present really exists outside the soul, then something
comprising a past (that no longer exists), a present (that exists right now), and
a future (that does not yet exist) can exist only in our soul.72
To better appreciate what James is after, look at the following argument in a
quodlibetal question discussed by Peter John Olivi. For Olivi, our senses prove
clearly that change exists in reality outside the mind. But if change exists out-
side the mind, so must duration of change. But since time is nothing else than
duration of change, time too must then exist outside the mind.73 James’s re-
mark in the passage above is a challenge to Olivi’s second premise, i.e., that if
change exists outside the mind, so does duration. For not all aspects of change
exist outside the mind.
But even if change as extended exists only in the soul, this does not mean
that change is not really extended. In other words, the extension of motion is
not just a mental figment. Why not? Because the extension of change as ap-
prehended by the mind corresponds to successive moments of change outside
of it. In other words, my locomotive change from place a to place b exists as ex-
tended only in the mind, but it is not unreal, because it corresponds to the suc-
cessive changes I undergo and these are really in the world in each instant.74
And by perceiving these moments of change as continuous, we grasp them as
part of one extended change.
This also now lets us see in what sense time is real. Since time is nothing
other than the distension of change, it belongs to the change as it exists in the

q. 3, 38, l. 165). Another, related reason for saying that change by itself is not extended
may have to do with the fact that some changes, i.e., substantial change or generation, do
happen in an instant. In the most general terms, a change (motus) is for James a “transfer
from potency to act” (translatio de potentia ad actum); see Quodl. iii, q. 117, 235, ll. 518–19.
72 Quodl. iii, q. 12, 172, ll. 157–64.
73 Peter John Olivi, Quodlibet i, q. 3, (ed.) Stefano Defraia (Grottaferrata, 2002), 12: “Qui enim
negat motum esse in rebus extra animam, negat sensum. … Sed motus non potest esse
extra, quin eius duratio sit extra cum ipso et in ipso. Tempus autem est idem quod duratio
motus. Ergo vere tempus est extra, sicut et motus.”
74 Quodl. iii, q. 12, 172–73, ll. 174–83.
150 Pickavé and Côté

soul and is thus mind-dependent. But since extended change is not a figment
but is grounded in extra-mental reality, it follows that time too is not an illu-
sion, but is equally grounded in some extra-mental feature.
If we take James’s view on board we can understand how time is a disten-
sion of change, but we have not yet seen what warrants his assertion that this
account of time is identical to the Aristotelian definition of time as the number
of change. To put the point bluntly, on the “distension account” of time, time
comes across as a continuous quantity, but calling time a number of change
means making time into a discrete quantity, and discrete and continuous
quantities are two different kinds of quantity. James responds to this objection
by pointing out that although time is continuous, we do not apprehend time as
one continuous quantity in the same way we perceive the continuous quantity
of the dimensions of a material object. We do not perceive it immediately as
one, but always as something that has parts, because we apprehend the succes-
sive moments of time by distinct acts of the soul.75 And in these distinct acts of
the soul we don’t perceive the parts of time as continuous, but as discrete units,
and this, for James, explains why we apprehend time per modum numeri. We
now understand why James sees no big difference between what he takes to be
Augustine’s definition of time and Aristotle’s. Augustine’s account of time, ac-
cording to which time is the distension change, is the more general of the two,
whereas Aristotle’s, according to which time is a number of change, defines
time by the way in which it is apprehended by the soul.76
Note that the fact that time is an intrinsic measure of change does not pre-
clude that time can also be employed as an extrinsic measure of motion. This
happens when we use “one time,” for instance, the time of the motion of the
heavenly bodies, to measure “from the outside,” as it were, the motion of other
processes, for example, how long it takes for this tree to grow or how long it
takes to write this chapter. But this does not take away from the idea that time
is primarily an intrinsic feature of change.77 In fact, because the use of time as

75 Ibid., 174, ll. 226–33: “Distensio, sive quantitas continua, potest apprehendi vel ut unum
vel ut habet partes, ut supra dictum est. Distensio autem motus, quae est quantitas eius
continua, non apprehenditur ab anima ut unum, sed ut habet partes; quarum una est
prior, alia posterior, eo quod talis distensio est successiva. Distensio ergo motus appre-
henditur quia partes eius sibi succedentes apprehenduntur diversis actibus animae.”
76 Note that strictly speaking time, for Augustine, is called a distentio animi (Confessions
XI.26.33). By referring instead to a distensio motus James turns Augustine’s teaching into
something more compatible with Aristotle.
77 See Quodl. i, q. 9, 134–35. On this text see also Pasquale Porro, “Ex adiacentia temporis: Egi-
dio Romano e la categoria ‘quando,’” Documenti e studi sulla tradizione filosofica medievale
2 (1991): 147–81, esp. 178–80.
James of Viterbo’s Philosophy of Nature 151

an extrinsic measure is so common in our lives, James distinguishes between a

proper time and a common time. The proper time is time as intrinsic measure
of motion, the common time is the extrinsic measure of other motions.78
What does all this tell us about time as a property of change (passio motus)?
As we have seen, change “according to its essence” is outside the soul and not
extended, but James contends that time expresses a “certain real mode of be-
ing” of change as opposed to an entity added to it. We take all this to mean that
although it is not part of the essence of change to be extended, extension or
distension of change (and thus time) is a necessary property of at least some
kinds of change. But change cannot have this real property in the absence of
souls in which the nature of time is complete. However, the fact that it is a real
property of change warrants that time should fall under the consideration of
the natural philosopher.

b Place (locus) and Position (situs)

For 13th-century scholastics, the fundamental ontological spatial category is
not space or extension, but rather place (locus), which they took to be a mind-
independent feature of reality. James is no exception. Strictly speaking, an ob-
ject’s place is the inner surface of the body containing it. But every place is
the place of a body. To express this dual nature of place, James uses language
introduced by his confrère Giles of Rome, who describes the surface of the
containing body as such as belonging to place materially, while the fact that it
contains another body belongs to it formally.79
Ever sensitive to the ontological implications of the concepts he discusses,
James asks whether place could exist without a subject existing in it. Since his
examination of this question, in Quodlibet ii, question 1, comes after a discus-
sion of the ontology of geometric quantities (lines, surfaces, and volumes), and
since his answer to the problem of place depends in part on his answer to the
ontology of quantities, we will quickly say a few words about these.

78 Quodl. iii, q. 12, 177–78.

79 Quodl. ii, q. 1, 12, ll. 256–59: “[L]ocus, secundum quod est quantitas, est superficies corpo-
ris ambientis vel continentis aliud corpus. Sed esse superficiem convenit loco materiali-
ter. Ambire autem et continere convenit loco formaliter et secundum quod locus est.” See
also qdp, q. 18, 82, ll. 335–40, where he expands on what formally belongs to place. For the
Aristotelian background of James’s definition of place see Aristotle, Physics 4.4 (212a2–6).
On the medieval doctrine of place in general, see Edward Grant, “The Medieval Doctrine
of Place: Some Fundamental Problems and Solutions,” in Studi sul xiv secolo in memoria
di Anneliese Maier, (eds.) Alfonso Maierú and Agostino Paravicini Bagliani (Rome, 1981):
57–79. On the doctrine of place in Giles, see Cecilia Trifogli, “La dottrina del luogo in
Egidio Romano,” Medioevo 14 (1988): 275–90.
152 Pickavé and Côté

At one level, the ontology of geometric quantities might appear to pose no

particular difficulty. After all, lines, surfaces, and volumes denominate “things”
(dicunt rem) and have some being (esse aliquod), and thus they can be made by
divine power to exist separately from any substance.80 Problems arise when one
asks whether any of these quantities could exist independently of some of the
others, for instance whether a line could exist without points, a s­ urface without
a line, or a volume without a surface; or conversely, whether a surface could ex-
ist without a volume, a line without a surface, or a point without a line. James
is confident that the answer to the first set of questions is no.81 However, he re-
minds the reader that “the Platonists,” who postulated that everything that can
be thought separately exists separately and noted that a point can be thought
without a line, a line without a surface, and a surface without a volume, con-
cluded that each of those three quantities must exist separately. Although
James makes a point of saying that he finds Platonism unacceptable—which
must mean that he does not believe that geometric quantities exist as separate
entities, though he does not say this outright—it does not seem to him impos-
sible for geometric quantities to exist separately, at least by divine power.82
What now of place? The answer to the question of whether place can exist
without a “subject” depends on how place is understood. If it is taken in the
material sense, that is, with reference to the surface of the containing body, the
answer is the same, mutatis mutandis, as in the case of geometric quantities,
namely, that it is possible by divine power for there to be a containing body
without anything in it. Not so, however, if place is taken formally. For taken
formally and according to what place truly and essentially is, place, as a con-
tainer, stands in the same relation of dependence to quantity as the properties
of quantity (passiones quanti), like big or small, do. Those properties are es-
sentially relational and cannot be detached from their foundation; they cannot
be severed from quantity, even by divine power.83 The same is true of formal

80 Quodl. ii, q. 1, 11, l. 219–21.

81 James only shows that line segments can’t exist without points. Terminative points are the
end points of the line segment; James takes it as evident that the segment would not be
that segment without its end points. Continuative points are the points that give subin-
tervals of the line its continuous nature; to destroy this would be to destroy the continuity
of the line. Quodl. ii, q. 1, 11, ll. 233–37.
82 Quodl. ii, q. 1, 12, ll. 245–54.
83 Ibid., 12, ll. 267–72: “Videtur enim locus, quantum ad id quod formaliter dicit, ita pertinere
ad quantitatem, sicut illa quae sunt passiones quanti, ut sunt magnum et parvum et alia
huiusmodi. Haec autem essentialiter quidem sunt relationes. Tamen quia dicunt relatio-
nem determinate in quantitate, ideo et ipsa solent dici quantitatem significare. Non quia
sunt quantitates essentialiter, sed quia sunt passiones vel proprietates quantitatis.”
James of Viterbo’s Philosophy of Nature 153

place, which cannot be detached from the kind of thing that it contains, i.e.,
extended bodies. Hence it follows that there cannot truly be an empty place.
Another important spatial category, closely related to place, is ­position (­situs
or positio). James’s most detailed discussion of position occurs in Q ­ uodlibet ii,
question 13, in the context of a question devoted to whether a resurrected body
can occupy the same place as a natural one (to have position in this case means
the same thing as to occupy a particular place). James assumes that it can, be-
cause he thinks that this is what happens in the case of the miracle of Christ
­appearing to his disciples “through closed doors.” Since Christ is assumed to
­traverse all points from one side of the door to the other, this means that two
spatially extended quantities (Christ’s body and the door) will occupy the same
place at the same time over part of the trajectory.84 The challenge for a scholas-
tic theologian such as James is to provide an account of place that is sufficiently
broad to accommodate both natural phenomena and miraculous occurrences
such as Christ’s appearing through closed doors. James’s solution is to view
position as an effect or natural operation of “spatial” continuous quantity. A
particular extended thing will tend to occupy a place in a way that will exclude
the compresence of other spatially extended objects in that same place. James
views this “positioning,” i.e., occupying a certain location to the exclusion of
anything else, as a natural operation of the extended substance. In the natu-
ral course of things, all spatially extended quantities will perform this natural
operation and hence occupy places that will perforce be different by reason
of their impenetrability. But since God can suspend the natural ­operation of
any natural agent, he can preserve a substance’s quantity while suspending its
position. And since it is position that explains the mutual impenetrability of
spatially extended substances, it follows that it is possible by divine power for
two spatially extended substances to occupy the same place.85

5.5 Types of Change

It is not possible to talk about James of Viterbo’s understanding of change (mo-

tus) without going back to his account of seminal reasons in matter. James is

84 Quodl. ii, q. 13, 151, ll. 29–31.

85 Ibid., 154, ll. 139–44: “Sed virtute divina hoc fieri potest, quia Deus potest suspendere op-
erationes proprias a rebus, manentibus ipsis rebus; et similiter potest proprietates rerum
ab eis tollere vel suspendere. Unde potest, manente quantitate, auferre ab ea proprieta-
tem hanc, quae est positio. Et tunc poterit quantitas illa simul esse cum alia quantitate,
positione ablata, quae prohibebat huiusmodi simultatem.” James discusses positio also in
qdp, q. 19.
154 Pickavé and Côté

aware that accounts of seminal reasons are often criticized by his contempo-
raries because they seem to make natural processes impossible to understand.
But as we saw, for him, seminal reasons, i.e., inchoate forms that are active
principles of change, are actually necessary for there to be natural change in
the first place. Thomas Aquinas famously objected to accounts of seminal
­reasons on the grounds that they reduce all proximate efficient causes to ac-
cidental causes, since all efficient causes then do is remove impediments,
which ­conceal the forms preexisting in matter and impede their transition
into ­actuality.86 A hot object no longer truly causes the heat in the object in
its v­ icinity. All that happens is that the first object takes away the impediment
that blocked the second object’s self-heating. James does not explicitly reply
to this kind of objection, but it is not difficult to imagine what he would say.
It might be true that in some cases the external agent is indeed nothing more
than an accidental cause, as for instance in the case of the heavy object’s down-
ward motion once the impediment has been removed, or in the case of acts of
the intellect or of the will. But it is not true that the external agent is an acci-
dental cause in all sorts of natural processes. In some cases where the form of
the thing to be produced does not yet exist in actuality in matter, the external
agent is not just a remover of obstacles but a real co-cause of the actuality of
the form and hence is more than just accidental causation. The crucial thing
to note here is that James considers both the external agent and the inchoate
forms to be principles of the very same change, though in different ways.87
It is important to emphasize again that the case of natural change is some-
what different from the case of the intellect and will, where in fact the exter-
nal agent, the object, has a more limited causal role. There are good reasons
for James to make a distinction here, as can be gathered from the following
­passage, in which he talks about why he thinks cognition is not a merely pas-
sive process:

When the soul is said to be potentially like the objects, some assume
the existence of a purely passive potency, in the way in which a mirror
is called a potency with respect to the images in it and matter a potency
with respect to the forms. But this doesn’t seem reasonable. For accord-
ing to this way it cannot be preserved how the actual movement and
information of the soul, according to which the soul is said to actually
­conform to things either by cognizing them or by desiring them, can be

86 See, for instance, Quaestiones disputatae de veritate, q. 11, a. 1.

87 Quodl. ii, q. 5, 90, ll. 1024–26: “Unde inchoativum formae cooperatur agenti extrinseco,
dum inclinat ad illum eundem actum ad quem agens extrinsecum transmutat.”
James of Viterbo’s Philosophy of Nature 155

called an act and operation of the soul and how it can be called a vital act
and one that remains in the agent, as will become clearer in the question
on the agent intellect. And therefore it seems necessary to say that, when
the soul is said to be potentially like the objects, such a potency is not
entirely passive, but is some kind of incomplete actuality and is some sort
of beginning and preparation with respect to a further act.88

The point of positing innate incomplete actualities in the soul is to explain

how the activities of the soul can be ascribed to the soul itself, how they can
be called acts or operations of the soul. But the case of natural processes is
different. We do not ascribe the heating of water to the water, but to the stove.
So it is not surprising that in the latter case James says that the agent acts “by
way of changing” (transmutando).89 And corresponding to this distinction is a
more robust understanding of natural efficient causes, one in which external
efficient causes and inchoate forms cooperate.90 For if this were not the case, it
would be difficult to understand why James insists that God, the one who gave
everything its nature, endowed external natural agents with the power to act
on others and to bring about a transmutation.91 It is hard to imagine that James
would highlight this point so often if all external natural agents do is remove
impediments.

88 Quodl. i, q. 7, 92, ll. 410–20.

89 See the text in note 88 above and Quodl. ii, q. 5, 90, ll. 1012–15: “Et tale principium opor-
tet ponere in eductione formarum de potentia ad actum, praeter illud principium quod
dicitur inchoativum formae. Licet enim illud inchoativum formae inclinet materiam ad
hoc ut fiat in actu, non tamen sufficit illa inclinatio sine agente extrinseco extrahente per
transmutationem illud quod est in potentia ad actum.”
90 It is true that James sometimes compares the action of an external agent to the removal
of an external obstacle. But while this is true, for instance, in the case of the will (see
Quodl. i, q. 7, 110, l. 1053), it is not so for external agents in other processes in the natural
world. In Quodl. iv, q. 4, for instance, James says that a natural agent acts transmutando
vel prohibens removendo. In some cases, it merely takes away an impediment, as in the
case of ­elemental motion, but in others it “changes” (transmutat) its object. In any case,
he calls the external agent one of the three principia motiva that can be found “in what-
ever natural process” (in quolibet motu naturali) (22–23, ll. 244–60; see also the text in note
109 below). It would be strange for him to use this language if he wanted to downplay the
causal role of natural agents.
91 Quodl. ii, q. 5, 89, ll. 1015–19: “Hanc autem transmutationem efficit agens extrinsecum ex
virtute sibi tributa a conditore et institutore omnium naturarum, qui ex superabundanti
sua bonitate sicut perfectionem essendi rebus communicavit sic et eis dedit virtutem
agendi in alia, non creando, sed transmutando.”
156 Pickavé and Côté

But let us now move on to James’s account of the different types of change.
Change (motus), in general, is a “transfer from potency to act.”92 Like his con-
temporaries, he recognizes three fundamental types of change in nature:
qualitative, quantitative, and local motion. As was the case with other scho-
lastics, he did not view substantial change, or generation, as a bona fide case
of change, for generation occurs in an instant, and James, in line with his con-
temporaries, believed that change must take place in time. Nevertheless, it will
be crucial for us to consider James’s remarks about substantial change. First,
because there is an intimate connection between substantial and bona fide
change, as James makes clear in Quodlibet iv, question 6.93 For even if the “in-
duction” of substantial form in matter does not take place in time, it presup-
poses changes that do. Second, and more importantly, because at one level
of analysis, substantial change for James is a kind of qualitative change.94 We
will start out by briefly presenting James’s views on quantitative change, be-
fore turning our attention to qualitative and substantial change, leaving aside
his comments on local motion, about which he has little of import to say. We
end this section with some remarks on self-motion or self-change. This is not
another fundamental type of change on par with the three aforementioned
ones. But James’s view on natural change seems to presuppose that the chang-
es natural objects undergo involve a certain degree of self-motion, and the is-
sue of whether there can be genuine self-movers was hotly debated during his
lifetime.

a Quantitative Change
James’s most interesting comments on quantitative change—such as aug-
mentation and rarefaction—bear on the distinction between determinate and
indeterminate quantities (or dimensions), which originates in Averroes’s De
substantia orbis.95 As used by James and his contemporaries, the distinction
corresponds roughly to the difference between the actual measurable size of
a material substance and the capacity of matter to take on actual size. The
determinate size may change, but the indeterminate dimensions are a persis-
tent, unchanging property of matter. The distinction was commonly mobilized

92 Quodl. iii, q. 17, 235, ll. 518–19.

93 Quodl. iv, q. 6, 31, ll. 59–62.
94 Quodl. ii, q. 5, 79, ll. 687–94.
95 A very useful presentation and discussion of the distinction is found in Arthur Hyman,
Averroes’ De substantia orbis: Critical Edition of the Hebrew Text with English Translation
and Commentary (Cambridge, MA, and Jerusalem, 1986), 29–35.
James of Viterbo’s Philosophy of Nature 157

by the scholastics in the context of discussions on the Eucharist.96 One well-

known philosophical problem the doctrine of the Eucharist raised was how
the accidents of the consecrated bread and wine could change, as plainly they
could, if there was no persistent substrate to support that change, as Aristote-
lian physics asserted there must be. According to one influential solution—
that of Aquinas and Giles of Rome—it was quantity itself that served as such
a substrate; not determinate quantity, of course, since it was subject to change,
but rather indeterminate quantity. Yet this solution in turn led to questions
about the nature of the difference between the two sorts of quantity: for inde-
terminate dimension to serve as a substrate for qualitative changes did it not
have to differ in some robust sense from determinate dimension? One author
who answered this question in the affirmative was Giles of Rome, who argued
that when two things are such that when one is corrupted the other remains,
then the two cannot be identical. But since by stipulation indeterminate quan-
tity is what remains once the determinate quantity is corrupted (which it does
if it undergoes any change), then the two quantities could not be identical.97
Needless to say, the matter was much discussed and not everybody agreed with
Giles. James’s view on this matter can be found in his Quodlibet iii, question
17, in which he asks whether increase in size can be upheld in the Eucharist if
determinate and indeterminate dimensions do not differ. James answers that
it is “the same (eadem) dimensional quantity that is called determinate and
indeterminate, but in different ways.”98 One would expect, on the strength of
this assertion, that when James turns later on in the Quodlibet to answering
the question of how the two quantities differ, he would deny that they do. But
he doesn’t! He states that the two quantities are really different. But he im-
mediately adds the crucial qualification that they are different, not in the way

96 For a recent discussion of the philosophical implications of late-medieval debates about

the Eucharist, see Marilyn McCord Adams, Some Later Medieval Theories of the Eucharist:
Thomas Aquinas, Giles of Rome, Duns Scotus, and William Ockham (Oxford, 2010). For a de-
tailed examination of the bearing of Averroes’s doctrine of the two quantities on late 13th-
century discussions of the Eucharist, see Edith D. Sylla, “Godfrey of Fontaines on Motion
with Respect to Quantity of the Eucharist,” in Studi sul xiv secolo in memoria di Anneliese
Maier, (eds.) Alfonso Maierù and Agostino Paravicini Bagliani (Rome, 1981), 105–41, as
well as chapter 2 (“Das Problem der quantitas materie”) of Anneliese Maier’s Die Vorläufer
Galileis im 14. Jahrhundert: Studien zur Naturphilosophie der Spätscholastik (Rome, 1949),
26–52, on which Sylla’s article relies heavily.
97 See Giles of Rome, Theoremata de corpore Christi, prop. 44 (Venice, 1502), f. 111rb. See also
Silvia Donati and Cecilia Trifogli, “Natural Philosophy,” in A Companion to Giles of Rome,
(eds.) Charles F. Briggs and Peter S. Eardley (Leiden, 2016), 73–113, esp. 82–84.
98 Quodl. iii, q. 17, 225, ll. 226–27.
158 Pickavé and Côté

two different forms are diverse, but rather in the way in which “a form taken
according to diverse degrees is really different from itself.”99
Now such a position invites an obvious objection, namely that if James is
right, then the same thing will both be the subject and the terminus of change,
in direct contradiction of Aristotle’s assertion in Physics 5.1 (224b1–2) that they
must be different. James in fact formulates this very objection in the last stages
of the question:

Still a doubt remains. For if quantity is the substrate of motion, given that
it is also the terminus of motion, the same thing will be the subject and
the terminus of motion, which is impossible.100

To this he responds that,

… in the aforesaid argument the same thing is the subject and the termi-
nus of motion, but not in the same way. Motion is a transfer from potency
to act. And the immediate foundation of this transfer is the thing itself
which is the form and is sometimes in potency, sometimes in act. Hence
the proximate foundation of motion is the thing itself that is a form. But
the endpoints are potency and act, which do not have diverse realities
but are diverse real modes of the same thing. In this way, the same form
is subjected successively to these two modes of real being and hence to
motion, which involves succession and an ordering of those modes with
respect to the same real thing, namely the form.101

James, then, acknowledges the problem, but appears willing to bite the bullet:
the termini are identical with the substrate. But he then adds that they are also
modally distinct from it, and clearly thinks that such a distinction is sufficient
to obviate the difficulty. This is a highly unorthodox solution to say the least,

99 Ibid., 227, ll. 290–93.

100 Ibid., 235, ll. 514–16: “Sed ad hoc remanet dubitatio. Nam si quantitas est subiectum
motus, cum ipsa sit terminus motus, idem erit subiectum et terminus motus; quod est
impossibile.”
101 Ibid., ll. 518–26: “Respondendum est quod in praedicto argumento idem est subiectum et
terminus motus, sed non eodem modo. Motus enim est translatio de potentia ad actum.
Et haec translatio immediate fundatur in ipsa re quae est forma; quae quidem quandoque
est in potentia, quandoque in actu. Unde fundamentum proximum motus est res ipsa
quae est forma. Termini vero sunt potentia et actus, qui non habent diversas res sed di-
versos modos reales eiusdem rei, ita quod eadem forma subicitur successive his duobus
modis essendi realis, et per consequens motui, quae importat successionem et ordinem
horum modorum circa idem secundum rem, scilicet secundum formam.”
James of Viterbo’s Philosophy of Nature 159

amounting to no less than a repudiation of a central tenet of Aristotle’s theory

of change. Nor did it go unchallenged. Godfrey of Fontaines, for one, briefly
expounded and rejected James’s position in his Quodlibet xi, question 3.102 As
Godfrey saw the matter, in order to say that some thing has changed, say quali-
tatively, it was not enough to observe that one quality was different from an-
other, say a paler and a darker hue of red; that difference had to be subtended
by a substrate that persisted unchanged through the alteration. And for that to
be the case, the substrate had to be really (realiter) different from the qualities.
But this will be impossible on James’s understanding of change. For take white
according to its essence, and whiter and less white as modes of white. Clearly
these are essentially identical to white. James’s explanation thus fails, on God-
frey’s view, to explain how the variation in the intensity of the color constitutes
a bona fide instance of change.103

b Qualitative and Substantial Change

A useful way of gaining a foothold in James’s conception of qualitative and
substantial change is through the lens of Aristotle’s distinction between four
“species” of quality in Categories 8, which James, as we know, interprets in the
light of Simplicius’s commentary thereto. To recall, the first species of quality,
according to Aristotle, are stable dispositions such as habits (hexeis) like the
virtues and knowledge, and fleeting dispositions (diatheseis) such as health
and illness. The second species refers to the “natural capacities” (dunameis
phusikai) in virtue of which some people are called good at a sport or an art. It
is this species of quality that plays such an important role in James’s philoso-
phy of nature, and indeed his philosophy tout court, since cognitive, volitional,
and sensitive aptitudes in the soul, on the one hand, and seminal reasons on
the other, both fall under the second species of quality. The third species refers
to the sensible qualities of things, colors, hot and cold, sweetness and bitter-
ness, for instance, while the fourth refers to shapes and figures.

102 Edith Sylla has pointed out (see “Godfrey of Fontaines on Motion with Respect to Quan-
tity of the Eucharist,” 139–41) that it is not possible on the basis of the outline of the
doctrine Godfrey critiques in Quodl. xi, q. 3 to conclude beyond all doubt that James is
the ­author of that doctrine. Still, the two doctrines are sufficiently close that Godfrey’s
­critique also applies to James’s position.
103 Godfrey of Fontaines, Quodl. xi, q. 3, (ed.) Jean Hoffmans (Louvain, 1932), 19: “Sed quia,
ut alibi tactum est, videtur quod impossibile est sic fieri talium mutationem, quia tamen
subiectum motus et terminus realiter differre oportet, album autem secundum essentiam
et magis album non differunt realiter, non potest dici quod fiat variatio secundum minus
album et magis album quin fiat variatio secundum ipsam essentiam albedinis, cum magis
album et minus album non sunt nisi id ipsum essentialiter quod album.” See also Quodl.
xiv, q. 5, (ed.) Hoffmans, 416.
160 Pickavé and Côté

Where does qualitative change fit in this scheme? Qualitative change is

what the scholastics called “alteration” (alteratio). A qualitative form is said
to be altered when it becomes more or less intense. According to James of Vit-
erbo, only qualities taken in the third sense are subject to alteration. Although
Aristotle’s list suggests that each sort of quality must be rigidly assigned to one
and only one of the four kinds of species, this is not what James believed—
another radical departure from Aristotle for which some of his critics would
take him to task. He believed that the same quality could be assigned to more
than one species, depending on the aspect (ratio) one wants to emphasize.
For instance, a quality—say, heat or color—insofar as it perfects a particular
substance, falls under the first species, but insofar as it causes a change (say, in
the eye) or is itself caused to change (e.g., by exposure to light), belongs to the
third species of quality.104
Matters are somewhat different when it comes to substantial change. This
stands to reason, one might think, since substantial change concerns substan-
tial forms, and these belong to the category of substance, so Aristotle’s doctrine
of quality should not even apply to them. James, however, disagrees. While he
acknowledges that a substantial form pertains to the category of substance
in one important sense—the sense in which a substantial form primarily sig-
nifies “a certain real thing”—he also holds that the substantial form can be
viewed as belonging to the category of quality if we think of it as a certain kind
of mode.105 But why would one want to think of a substantial form as a mode?
As we saw above in section 5.2, James endorses Averroes’s assertion that sub-
stantial generation results in an increase of perfection, not an increase in the
number of entities; and James describes this increase of perfection as a transi-
tion from potency to act. Since this account implies that the same thing is pres-
ent at the terminus a quo and the terminus ad quem of change, it makes sense
to think of that change as a “modal” change undergone by the same underlying

104 qdp, q. 10, 277, ll. 241–43: “Nam secundum quod perficit vel disponit subiectum, sic
est in prima specie; secundum autem quod infert sensui passionem vel infertur a
­passione, sic pertinet ad tertiam. Et tamen eadem res est, licet simpliciter loquendo
diversas res dicant hae species.” It is worth noting here that while James does say that
quality can be subsumed under two different species, he is not claiming that a qualita-
tive form in two distinct states of change—e.g., some color before and after exposure
to light has caused it to fade—belongs to different species of quality: all degrees of al-
teration that accrue to a qualitative form accrue to it insofar as it belongs to the third
species.
105 James believes that nothing in principle prevents one and the same thing from falling
under different categories. See qdp, qq. 16 & 17, 287, ll. 215–16.
James of Viterbo’s Philosophy of Nature 161

form—much as in the case of quantity.106 Moreover, since the form in its in-
choative stages is what James calls an aptitude or idoneitas, and we know that
he locates these in the second species of quality, while he locates actualized
qualities in the first (or third), it would also make sense for him to want to de-
scribe this modal change as a move from the second species to the first species,
which is precisely what he does in the following passage:

It must be said that the substantial form according to the reality it signi-
fies is in the category of substance, but according to a certain mode it is in
the category of quality. Hence substantial differentiae, which are derived
from the form as from their principle, are called substantial qualities.
Therefore in the same way in which a substantial form can pertain to the
category of quality, it must be said that a substantial form considered as
an aptitude or as being in potency belongs to the second species of qual-
ity; but considered as a being in act, it pertains more to the first species.107

Of particular interest to medieval philosophers were instances of gradual

change, such as the change the object undergoes when it changes from cold
to hot (or vice versa). These gradual changes are not restricted to qualities of
corporeal objects, but also occur with respect to incorporeal qualities. Take
the growth of knowledge occurring in the learner or the growth of modera-
tion in someone who learns how to be moderate. Changes of this type also
raise the question why some forms, for instance substantial forms, do not ad-
mit of degrees and gradual change. James says surprisingly little about gradual
changes, considering the debate about the “intension and remission of form” is
about to gain speed during his time at the University of Paris. However, James
is clear that gradual change is not just a matter of the degree of the form’s be-
ing, i.e., the degree to which a form exists in matter. In other words, the degree
of a form and thus also the change in degree do not fundamentally depend

106 As James writes in Quodl. iii, q. 17, 235, ll. 518–20: “Motus enim est translatio de potentia
ad actum. Et haec translatio immediate fundatur in ipsa re quae est forma; quae quidem
quandoque est in potentia, quandoque in actu.”
107 Quodl. ii, q. 5, 79, ll. 687–94: “Ad hoc autem dicendum est quod forma substantialis quan-
tum ad rem quam dicit est in praedicamento substantiae; quantum vero ad quemdam
modum, est in praedicamento qualitatis. Unde et differentiae substantiales, quae princi-
paliter sumuntur a forma, dicuntur qualitates quaedam substantiales. Eo igitur modo quo
forma substantialis ad praedicamentum qualitatis pertinere potest, dicendum est quod
forma substantialis, considerata ut in aptitudine vel in potentia, pertinet ad secundam
speciem qualitatis; considerata vero ut in actu, pertinet magis ad primam.” See also qdp,
q. 12, 82, ll. 409–14; Quodl. i, q. 7, 94, ll. 486–92; Quodl. iii, q. 5, 85, ll. 82–83.
162 Pickavé and Côté

on the d­ egree to which the subject participates in the form. He thus rejects
the view—“a solemn opinion” (una solemnis opinio)—that was defended by,
among ­others, Giles of Rome, his predecessor.108 Instead, James holds the op-
posite position, namely, that the forms themselves have degrees. Any change
in degree of a form is thus a change of the degree of the form itself. Accounting
for the d­ egrees in terms of participation and being of the form gets the onto-
logical priorities wrong. Form does not exist for the sake of matter, but rather
vice versa. In a sense, what the opponents claim is true: subjects participate
in forms according to degrees. But this is because they themselves take up de-
grees, and by doing so, their underlying subjects also participate in degrees.109
James’s own position seems to be very close to that of Henry of Ghent.110

c Self-motion
As we have now seen on more than one occasion, James holds that the incom-
plete or inchoate forms with which matter is endowed have an active role in
generation and other types of changes. In fact, an incomplete form is one of
the main causal agents of its own transition from incompleteness to complete-
ness. Here is a typical passage in which James describes the causal contribu-
tion of incomplete forms:

And so in every natural production or generation there comes together

a threefold active principle, namely, the beginning of the form as some-
thing inclining (inclinans), the external agent as something which

108 Quodl. ii, q. 3, 35, ll. 65–68: “Est igitur una opinio quorumdam dicentium quod nulla
forma secundum se et secundum essentiam suscipit magis et minus, sed solum secun-
dum participationem subiecti, ut quia participatur a subiecto secundum magis et minus.”
Ibid., 36, ll. 107–08: “Hoc [lege Haec ?] est igitur una solemnis opinio de susceptione magis
et minus in formis.”
109 Quodl. ii, q. 3, 38, ll. 152–60: “Comparatio enim formae ad materiam est, quod ipsa materia
est propter formam, non econverso forma propter materiam. … Et sic non dicitur forma
ideo suscipere magis et minus, quia participatur secundum magis et minus a subiecto,
sed potius econverso, quia forma secundum se habet magis et minus, ideo participatur se-
cundum magis et minus a subiecto.” Ibid., 39, ll. 195–200: “Ex tribus ergo rationibus dictis
videtur quod primo et principaliter forma suscipiat magis et minus secundum se. Quod
autem consequenter et secundario suscipiat magis et minus secundum participationem
subiecti ex hoc ostenditur. Nam licet forma secundum se habeat magis et minus, hoc ta-
men non convenit sibi, nisi in subiecto, quia nec esse habet naturaliter nisi in subiecto.”
110 For Henr  y’s v  iews on this issue see Jea n-Luc Solère, “Les deg rés de for me selon Henr i de Gand
(Quodl. iv, q. 15),” in Henry of Ghent and the Transformation of Scholastic Thought: Studies in
Memory of Jos Decorte, (eds.) Guy Guldentops and Carlos Steel (Leuven, 2003), 127–55.
James of Viterbo’s Philosophy of Nature 163

changes (transmutans), and the divine agent as something that operates

foremost in both of them.111

However, attributing such an active role to incomplete forms seems to lead to

problems. Does this not mean then that forms are self-movers, something phi-
losophers generally agree is impossible, at least in the case of non-composites
such as forms? James is aware of this objection and addresses it explicitly. The
impossibility of self-motion seems to follow from the nature of motion. For
what moves does so insofar as it is in actuality, and what is moved is such that
it is in potency to being moved. But for something to genuinely move itself,
it would need to be both in act and in potency at the same time and in the
same respect, which is impossible. For this reason, Aristotle says that “every-
thing that is moved is moved by something else” (omne quod movetur ab alio
movetur).112 Those objects, such as animals, which appear to be self-moving do
so only because they exhibit a certain complexity and plurality of parts, so that
one part moves the other and through the other part the entire object.
In his response, James mentions various attempts to defend the possibil-
ity of genuine self-motion. Some contemporaries, for instance, agree that self-
motion is impossible, but restrict this claim to the realm of material objects.
­According to them immaterial objects behave differently.113 Others maintain
that there is a way in which the same thing can be in actuality and potency in
the same respect, as long as it is not so in the same way (eodem modo). For these
authors—James must have Henry of Ghent in mind—the self-­moving object is
not formally (formaliter) in actuality with respect to the change, but virtually
(virtualiter); whereas it is formally in potency to being moved.114 James finds
both attempts wanting. The first fails, because it seems ad hoc. Note that the
impossibility of self-motion seems to derive from the definition of change as
the transition from potency to actuality. Potency and actuality are properties
of being and not only of corporeal being. It is thus not clear how there can be
exceptions for non-corporeal objects.115 The problem with the second is that
the virtual possession of something does not really help to explain how the

111 Quodl. ii, q. 5, 89–90, ll. 1019–22. See also Quodl. iv, q. 4, 22, ll. 244–48.
112 See Quodl. i, q. 7, 88, ll. 296–310 and Aristotle, Physics 7.1 (241b24).
113 Quodl. i, q. 7, 89, ll. 327–28: “Licet enim in rebus corporeis verum sit, tamen in incorporeis
nihil prohibet aliquid esse sui ipsius motivum.”
114 Ibid., 90, ll. 346–55.
115 Ibid., 89–90, ll. 341–45: “Cum enim actus et potentia consequantur ens in quantum ens,
distinctio ipsorum extendit se ad omnia entia sive corporea sive incorporea, ita quod sive
sit aliquid incorporeum sive corporeum, non potest simul et secundum idem esse in po-
tentia et in actu; et per consequens nec etiam sui ipsius motivum.”
164 Pickavé and Côté

object could be a self-mover. According to a widespread medieval belief, the

sun is supposed to be virtually hot (for it can heat other ­objects), but not hot
itself. But if virtual possession of a property is not the cause of the formal pos-
session of the same property, as in the case of the sun, then virtual possession
of a property is of little help in explaining how something can move itself to
have something that it did not previously have in actuality.116
To see how for James incomplete forms can be self-movers of a kind, we
have to distinguish two ways in which a change may occur. On the one hand
there is the change that follows upon an efficient cause that possesses a com-
plete form. Think of a hot object heating something else which was previously
in potency to be heated. This is an instance of moving something efficiently
(efficienter). James agrees that for this sort of change, self-motion is impossible,
as Aristotle’s arguments show.117 For one and the same thing cannot be both
active and passive with respect to the same thing at the same time. However,
this is not the only way in which changes occur. Take the example of a heavy
object falling down. The downward motion is a result of the object’s heavi-
ness. It is not caused by a proximate efficient cause, although the object itself
has an efficient cause and the downward motion may have been enabled by
some other efficient cause that led to the removal of an impediment. Yet, it
would be wrong to say that any of these efficient causes is the efficient cause of
the downward motion. For James, this is an instance of moving something for-
mally (formaliter).118 And he leaves no doubt that an incomplete form’s change
towards completion is an instance of this formal motion.
Now this second way in which change occurs is a kind of self-motion,
for it follows immediately and naturally from the incomplete form. More
­importantly, Aristotle’s arguments against the possibility of self-motion do
not ­apply to this sort of change.119 There is thus no good reason to deny here

116 Ibid., 89–90, ll. 356–64.

117 Ibid., 95, ll. 517–24: “Circa quod sciendum quod duplex est motio. Una quidem quae sequi-
tur causam efficientem habens formam completam, sicut calefactio sequitur calefacien-
tem. … Prima igitur motio semper est ab alio in aliud. Ideo secundum hanc nihil movetur
a se.” For this distinction see also Quodl. iv, q. 4, 19.
118 Quodl. i, q. 7, 95, ll. 520–22: “Alia vero quae sequitur aliquid habens formam incompletam,
necdum habentem ultimam perfectionem, ut moveri deorsum sequitur formam gravita-
tis vel habens huiusmodi formam.”
119 Ibid., 100, ll. 687–89: “Sic igitur apparet quod ponendo aliquid moveri ex se modo iam
declarato, nullum sequitur inconveniens aut repugnans dictis ab Aristotele, si diligenter
considerentur.”
James of Viterbo’s Philosophy of Nature 165

that s­ omething is moved by itself (ex se).120 But James weighs his words care-
fully: instead of saying that an incomplete form moves itself, he urges that one
should rather say that “it acts of itself or moves by itself” (sed debet dici quod
agit a se et movetur ex se).121
James goes to some length to describe the change arising from incomplete
forms. Most notably, he calls this change an “absolute action” (actio absoluta).
He borrows the notion of absolute action (poiêsis apolutos) from Simplicius,
who had introduced it in his discussion of action and passion in his commen-
tary on Aristotle’s Categories.122 At issue there was the question of whether
all actions required a corresponding passion. Simplicius argues at length that
they didn’t. Although all actions proceed from an agent, not all actions termi-
nate in a recipient distinct from the agent, and hence not all actions have cor-
responding passions. Actions that proceed from an agent without terminating
in a distinct thing were called immanent or absolute actions; those that do
terminate in a thing are what James would call “transmutative” or transeunt
actions, actions involving some thing A acting on, or doing something to, some
thing B. The main point of Simplicius’s analysis is that absolute actions no less
than transeunt ones are both genuine actions:

An absolute action is truly said to be an action, and action is a genus that

is common to both types of action, namely, to absolute actions, which Ar-
istotle is more in the habit of calling “operations” and transeunt actions,
which he prefers to call “actions,” notwithstanding the fact that true ac-
tion is said of both as their common genus.123

120 Ibid., 95, ll. 520–26: “Secunda vero est ab eodem in idem. Ideo secundum hanc dicitur
aliquid moveri ex se.”
121 Quodl. iii, q. 4, 67, ll. 336–37; Quodl. i, q. 7, 95, ll. 526–28. Note that James does sometimes
talk about forms as “moving themselves,” e.g., in Quodl. iv. q. 4, 19, ll. 141–42, but this is a
mere façon de parler.
122 See Simplicius, Commentaire sur les Catégories d’Aristote, vol. 2, (ed.) Pattin, 405–57. James
offers a detailed paraphrase of Simplicius’s main argument in qdp, questions 16 and 17.
He invokes absolute action again in Quodl. i, q. 7, 97, and discusses it one last time in
greater detail in Quodl. iii, q. 4. For discussion of this Quodlibet and of absolute action and
related concepts, see Dumont’s chapter in this volume.
123 qdp, qq. 16 & 17, 300, ll. 490–94: “Unde actio absoluta vere dicitur actio, et actio est genus
commune ad utramque, scilicet ad absolutas, quae magis solent dici operationes ab Ar-
istotele, et transeuntes, quas ipse magis vocat actiones, non quin vera actio ut commune
genus utriusque dicatur.”
166 Pickavé and Côté

The significance of Simplicius’s analysis and conclusions, which James unre-

servedly endorses, stems from the fact that philosophers have tended to focus
their attention on transeunt actions in their analysis of change and to think
of all forms of causation in terms derived from the analysis of t­ranseunt ac-
tions.124 Even philosophers who acknowledge that there are immanent a­ ctions
in ­nature are usually at a loss when it comes to describing them in c­ ausal terms,
since they see no other way of doing so other than in terms of self-motion (i.e.,
A acts on A), an idea that is widely viewed as incoherent. James however r­ ejects
this altogether. While he agrees that it is correct to describe a thing undergo-
ing absolute action as being moved, he denies that it is correct to describe it
as moving itself in the way of an efficient cause (efficienter), since its motion is
not the transitive motion of transmutation (the motion involved in substantial
generation or qualitative change), but rather the absolute, intransitive ­motion
of inclination. Most of those who talk of things as moving themselves are
unwittingly applying the syntax appropriate for the description of transitive
­actions to intransitive ones; a mistake that is somewhat understandable, since
the transitive motion of transmutation is, as James points out, “better known
to us” (notior nobis).125

5.6 Conclusion

There is no doubt that James of Viterbo is a highly original thinker. His sig-
nature doctrine in the area of philosophy of nature is his theory of seminal
reasons, an old theory into which he tries to breathe new life by extending
Simplicius’s analysis of quality to the preexisting substantial and qualitative
forms supposed to exist in prime matter. As we saw, this theory is motivated
by what James saw as the failure of rival accounts to explain how new forms
get produced in nature. As James sees things, the main rival—the “­eductionist”
­theory—simply begs the question: since everybody agrees that no ­substance
can transfer its own form to its effect, the new form has to either preexist in
matter (which is James’s point), or be created, an option no natural philoso-
pher wanted to contemplate. In fact, “eductionism” only properly works on the
assumption of preexisting forms.

124 James has an explanation for why this is so. It is because transeunt actions are “better
known,” i.e., are a more easily observable feature of experience. See Quodl. iii, q. 4, 67–68,
ll. 338–42.
125 Quodl. iii, q. 4, 67–68, ll. 338–47. For more on how animals and human beings move them-
selves and how efficient and formal changes are involved in their movement see Quodl. iv,
q. 4, 23–25.
James of Viterbo’s Philosophy of Nature 167

Part of the originality of James’s position lies in how he conceives the preex-
istence of forms and how he understands them to differ from full-blown, actual
forms. His solution is to view preexisting forms as “potential beings” that differ
only modally from their actual counterparts. This is an intriguing and sugges-
tive position, but it also raises a number of problems, to which James does not
always provide satisfactory answers. Another aspect worth emphasizing is that
the theory of preexisting forms is not only relevant in natural philosophy, but
also has implications for cognitive psychology and the philosophy of action.
For preexisting forms do not exist only in matter, but also in souls. James’s nat-
ural philosophy is thus intimately connected to these other areas of his teach-
ing. It is important to see these connections to appreciate the truly systematic
dimension of James’s thought.
His theory of seminal reasons leads James to provide a new account of natu-
ral processes, where the preexisting forms play an important causal role—at
the expense, one might think, of external efficient causes. In this respect, the
idea of formal motion is another of his noteworthy doctrines. James might not
be happy at being characterized in this way, for he doesn’t necessarily seem to
see himself as an innovator. Rather, his writings often give the impression that
he thinks his account is the only way to make sense of our traditional under-
standing, as for example in the case of the eduction of forms.
Be this as it may, James’s contemporaries obviously considered James’s
teaching novel and radical, and they subjected it to fierce criticism.126 Better
familiarity with his teachings—to which this chapter is meant to contribute—
will hopefully allow us to arrive at a better picture of James’s reception.

126 Apart from the anonymous commentator on Averroes’s De substantia orbis and Godfrey
of Fontaines, we should mention two more critics of James’s natural philosophy (from the
beginning and the middle of the 14th century): Bernard of Auvergne, who wrote a work
entitled Impugnationes contra Jacobum de Viterbio; and Alphonsus Vargas of Toledo, who
discusses James critically in his commentary on Aristotle’s De anima (Venice, 1566). For a
discussion of Bernard’s criticism of James’s seminal reasons, see Phelps, “The Theory of
Seminal Reasons,” 278–80.
 chapter 6

James of Viterbo’s Innatist Theory of Cognition

Jean-Luc Solère

6.1 Introduction

Contrary to an all too common prejudice, there were some interesting innatist
cognition theories that saw the light of day during the centuries between Plato
and Descartes. James of Viterbo’s is one of them. In the context of the sup-
posed dominance of Aristotelian empiricism, James believed that our mind is
natively equipped with what we could call a priori schemes of cognition. It is
well worth examining his reasons for thinking that this is the case. The chapter
is divided into three sections. I start by presenting the core notions that un-
dergird James’s doctrine of cognition. I then spell out the innatist implications
of those notions in James’s theory of cognition. In the last section I attempt to
situate James’s innatist theory of cognition in the context of his time.

6.2 The Core Notions

6.2.1 James’s Basic Tenets

Active in the 1280s and 1290s—that is, roughly between Thomas Aquinas and
John Duns Scotus—James of Viterbo belongs to a generation that was preoc-
cupied by the passivity that the standard Aristotelian account ascribes to the
mind with regard to material objects. This view, it seemed to some, debases the
nobility of the soul and puts at risk the freedom of the will. In reaction, they
appeal to Augustinian ideas to highlight the human mind’s essentially active
role in cognition.1 James, for his part, does not simply dismiss Aristotle’s views,
but tries to incorporate them into his theory, contrary to Peter of John Olivi,
for instance. However, he deems their genuine meaning inscrutable, as the

1 On this see Jean-Luc Solère, “Durand of Saint-Pourçain’s Cognition Theory: Its Fundamental
Principles,” in Medieval Perspectives on Aristotle’s De Anima, (eds.) Russell L. Friedman and
Jean-Michel Counet (Leuven and Louvain-la-Neuve, 2013), 185–248; more generally on the
history of this question regarding sensory knowledge, see José Filipe Silva and Mikko Yrjön-
suuri (eds.), Active Perception in the History of Philosophy: From Plato to Modern Philosophy
(Dordrecht, 2014).

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���8 | doi 10.1163/9789004361881_008

James of Viterbo’s Innatist Theory of Cognition 169

many divergent interpretations they have received suggest. As a consequence,

James is content to show that his theory is not incompatible with the letter of
­Aristotle’s theses.2 Nevertheless, he clearly commends what he calls the doc-
trine of Augustine and Boethius,3 and in line with this general orientation he
draws a picture in which external material things do not act on the mind, not
even by proxy, and are consequently not efficient causes of our cognition, not
even partially.
However, though James often refers to Augustine, he does not always defer to
him. Contrary to many self-proclaimed followers of Augustine, James does not
overplay the theme of the impossibility of the body acting on the soul.4 In fact,
this question seems not to worry him much. Moreover, because of his concern
for the autonomy of human cognition, James criticizes the ­Augustinian theory
of illumination. Can we reach truth by the light of our own reason, without a
superadded light? If the question is about natural knowledge—truths that are
within our province—then, he says, we do not need any illumination i­nfused
by God.5 All things in nature act by immanent principles (principia eis i­ndita
naturaliter) that are sufficient for them to perform their proper operation
(God’s general assistance or concourse notwithstanding). The same concern
motivates James’s main argument against theories that posit that the agent
­intellect is outside our soul, identifying it for instance with God. For James,
God endows creatures with the power of being genuine causes—in this in-
stance, genuine causes of their cognitive acts.
What about the typical Augustinian argument that when several people
understand the same truth, this truth cannot reside in any of their individual
minds but must be in some place that is above them and in which they all con-
template it? James answers that an identical knowledge obtains in different
minds because these minds are all made after the same model—they are in
the image and resemblance of God. James contends that this is how Augustine
must be interpreted when he says that we all see the common truth in the im-
mutable Truth that God is. Thus, James is also content with showing merely
that his theory does not contradict the letter of Augustine’s statements, rather
than developing a full-fledged Augustinian epistemology.

2 Quodl. i, q. 12, 169–70, ll. 427–39. See also Quodl. i, q. 7, 90, ll. 365–69. James’s four Quodlibeta
have been edited by Eelcko Ypma (Würzburg, 1968–1975).
3 See Quodl. i, q. 12, 165, ll. 267–68; 167, ll. 363–64; cf. 172, ll. 529–33.
4 On this theme, see Solère, “Durand of Saint-Pourçain’s Cognition Theory” and “Sine qua
non Causality and the Context of Durand’s Early Theory of Cognition,” in Durand of Saint-­
Pourçain and His Sentences Commentary: Historical, Philosophical and Theological Issues,
(eds.) Andreas Speer et al. (Leuven, 2014), 185–227.
5 Quodl. iv, q. 26, 96–97, ll. 48–64.
170 Solère

Nevertheless, as we just saw, James says he gets the underpinnings of his

cognition theory from another author who is no less Neoplatonist than Augus-
tine, if not more: Boethius, supplemented with Simplicius and Philoponus.6
Let us begin with Boethius, whose very clear, albeit short, characterization of
the Neoplatonist theory of knowledge is referred to by James.7 The core idea is
encapsulated in a few lines from book 5 of the Consolation of Philosophy:

[E]verything which is known is grasped not according to its own power

but rather according to the capability of those who know it … since every
judgement is the act of one judging, it must be that each performs his
task not from some other’s power but from his own.8

Then, opposing the Stoics, who thought that cognition simply results from the
soul’s being imprinted with external things, Boethius puts his argument into
verse:

But if the mind, with the strength of its proper motions,

Nothing unfolds,
But merely passive lies
Subject to other bodies’ marks,
And like a mirror but reflects
The empty images of things,
Whence then this all-discerning common concept’s strength
In the minds of men?
What power singulars perceives,
Or what power all things known divides?…
This is an efficient cause
Far more powerful
Than that which, as matter does,
Passively receives impressed marks.9

For James too, ascribing a purely passive function to the mind, as in both the
Stoic conception and the Aristotelian blank-slate model, does not fit with what

6 James follows Philoponus at length in Quodl. i, q. 12.

7 Quodl. i, q. 12, 166, ll. 309–13.
8 Boethius, De consolatione philosophiae, lib. 5, c. 4, nn. 25, 39, (ed.) Claudio Moreschini, 2nd
ed. (Munich and Leipzig, 2005), 149, ll. 72–75; 150–51, ll. 114–16; The Consolation of Philosophy,
trans. S.J. Tester (Cambridge, ma, 1973), 411–13.
9 Ibid., lib. 5, m. 4, (ed.) Moreschini, 151–52; trans. Tester, 415 (modified). Summarized by James
in Quodl. i, q. 12, 166, ll. 313–18.
James of Viterbo’s Innatist Theory of Cognition 171

we observe of the mind’s operations. To know is to do something, not just to

have something done to oneself. An act of cognition is an action and operation
of the soul, that is to say, an operation in which the soul is an agent, the active
subject of a process. More specifically, operations of cognitive faculties share
two important characteristics with the operations of the will: they are “vital”
and “immanent,” as was often emphasized in James’s day.10

(1) Vital operations, such as those found in living beings, are operations that
come from an intrinsic active principle.11 This is what distinguishes living
beings from non-living ones. Both kinds of being have certain processes
in common, such as local motion, but those of animals qua living beings
are spontaneous: they move from “inside,” so to speak. Likewise, the soul
is the active principle of its own cognitive acts,12 including perceptions,
and one may say that these acts “come more from the soul than from the
objects.”13
(2) “Immanent operations,”14 unlike “transeunt actions,” do not act on an
external object; rather, they produce something that remains within the
agent, such as a sensory representation or a concept. Accordingly, imma-
nent actions perfect the agent itself, not an external effect.

Thus, these operations are operations of the soul, not of their objects. In per-
ception as in intellectual cognition, the mind is active; indeed, it is the agent
of its cognitive operations. This is the basic idea that James lays as the corner-
stone of his theory.

10 Cf. Henry of Ghent, Quodl. xi, q. 5, (ed.) J. Badius (Paris, 1518; repr. Leuven, 1961), f. 451vA:
“[V]isio, et universaliter sensatio, actio est viventis secundum quod est vivens, quae est
operatio, non motus neque alteratio, nisi extendendo nomen alterationis, ut dicitur se-
cundo De anima [417b12–16].” Ibid., f. 451rT: “Actiones autem vitales quae sunt sensatio
et intellectio non sunt mutationes aut motus, sed sunt proprie operationes sensus et in-
tellectus et habent rationem actionis manentis in agente.” See also ibid., ad 3 and 4, f.
452rH–I, and Summa quaestionum ordinariarum, art. 39, q. 1, (ed.) Gordon Wilson, Opera
Omnia 28 (Leuven, 1994), 173.
11 Quodl. i, q. 12, 165, ll. 286–301.
12 Ibid., 174, ll. 596–99: “Attentione autem dignum est ne forte intelligere et videre non sint
pati et informari solum. Sed habent quamdam intrinsecus excitatam operationem.”
13 Ibid., 166, ll. 307–09: “Habet ergo se anima respectu huiusmodi actionum non pure pas-
sive, sed active; et magis sunt ab ipsa anima quam obiectis.” Ibid., 166, ll. 317–18: “[A]nima
se habet respectu ipsarum sicut efficiens et agens.”
14 Ibid., 166, ll. 319–25.
172 Solère

However, the operations of the mind, whether perceptions or conceptual-

izations, are aroused by something external, and their content is determined
by the nature of what arouses them. Ultimately, we have to learn from exter-
nal things, for otherwise we would perceive whatever we want and be right
in whatever we believe. Consequently, there must be an irreducible element
of passivity in our knowledge; as James points out, whenever there is change
(mutatio), there is affection (passio).15 But an advening cognitive operation is
a change in the mind that performs this operation. Therefore, this mind is af-
fected, and if it is a human mind, it is affected by its object, with the result that
it is in some way passive with respect to this object.16
How exactly objects affect the mind, we shall see further on.17 For now, a
pressing question lurks: how is it possible for the same power (that of the mind)
to be simultaneously passive and active?18 The main obstacle on James’s way
is the Aristotelian objection against self-change: “Everything that is changed is
changed by another.”19 Something that is in a state of potentiality in a certain
respect must be actualized by something else that already is in actuality in that
respect. If something changed itself, it would be both in potentiality and in ac-
tuality at the same time and in the same respect, which clearly is impossible.20
Still, animals can move themselves, as we have just noted, but this is because
one part moves the others. They are not in both actuality and potentiality in
the same respect. Therefore, their self-motion does not belie the fundamental
principle of change; on the contrary, it confirms it. Accordingly, Aquinas ar-
gues that in cognition the soul too can be both moved and moving, given the
distinction among its faculties. For instance, in the process of abstraction the
agent intellect is active and the possible intellect passive, as their names indi-
cate.21 But James cannot accept this solution, since as we will see elsewhere, he
rejects any division of the soul into distinct parts; in particular, he rejects any
distinction between agent intellect and possible intellect.22
Another possible answer—that of Henry of Ghent—is that it is not univer­
sally true that nothing can move itself. That is, it is true of corporeal substances,

15 Quodl. iv, q. 25, 92, l. 17.

16 Ibid., 92, l. 24.
17 See below, section 6.2.4.
18 Quodl. i, q. 12, 166, ll. 326–29.
19 Aristotle, Physics 8.1, 241b24. Cf. James, Quodl. iv, q. 4.
20 Quodl. i, q. 7, 88, ll. 297–304.
21 See Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologiae (=st) i, q. 79, a. 4, ad 4, 268b. Unless noted oth-
erwise, all references to Aquinas’s texts are to the Leonine edition of his works (Rome,
1882ff.). Cf. James, Quodl. i, q. 7, 89, ll. 314–20.
22 Quodl. i, q. 7, 89, ll. 321–24. See also chapter 7 in this volume.
James of Viterbo’s Innatist Theory of Cognition 173

but not of incorporeal ones.23 But this limitation of the Aristotelian axiom is
forcefully rejected by those who maintain, as Godfrey of Fontaines does, that
the potency-act division cuts across the totality of being, so that even incorpo-
real beings are subject to the rule that they cannot be in both states at the same
time in the same respect.24 But just directly opposing Godfrey’s claim would
not much advance the discussion. How then can the same power be both ac-
tive and passive? In fact, the problem is exactly the same as for the will, which,
as James shows in Quodlibet i, question 7, has to change and be changed; that
is, it must be both active and passive. The only difference is that, whereas the
motion of the will is free, that of the intellect is not.25 Thus, it is in Quodlibet i,
question 7 that James provides a general solution, which he applies to cogni-
tion in question 12.

6.2.2 The Concept of Predisposition

James’s solution26 draws heavily on Simplicius’s explanation in his commen-
tary on the Categories of the second of the four kinds of quality that Aristotle
identifies, namely, “natural capacity” (dunamis phusikē).27 In order to avoid
any confusion with the more general sense of “capacity” or “potentiality,” what
Aristotle calls “natural capacity” should be renamed idoneitas—that is, “apti-
tude” or “predisposition,” as when one says that an untrained person has a re-
markable aptitude or predisposition to singing.28 As natural, a predisposition

23 Quodl. i, q. 7, 89, ll. 325–40. See Roland J. Teske, “Henry of Ghent’s Rejection of the Prin-
ciple: Omne quod movetur ab alio movetur,” in Henry of Ghent: Proceedings of the Interna-
tional Colloquium on the Occasion of the 700th Anniversary of His Death (1293), (ed.) Willy
Vanhamel (Leuven, 1996), 279–308.
24 See John Wippel, “Godfrey of Fontaines and the Act-Potency Axiom,” Journal of the His-
tory of Philosophy 11 (1973): 299–317.
25 See Antoine Côté, “Simplicius and James of Viterbo on Propensities,” Vivarium 47 (2009):
31–41, and Stephen Dumont’s chapter in this volume.
26 Quodl. i, q. 7, 91, ll. 380ff.
27 Categories 8b14–16. For a presentation of the ins and outs of the chapter on qualities, and
its use by James, see Côté, “Simplicius and James of Viterbo on Propensities.” See also Ilse-
traut Hadot, “Aspects de la théorie de perception chez les néoplatoniciens,” Documenti e
studi sulla tradizione filosofica medievale 8 (1997): 33–36.
28 Like Porphyry, Simplicius uses the word epitēdeiotēs; see Porphyry, In Aristotelis Categori-
as expositio per interrogationem et responsionem, (ed.) Adolf Busse, Commentaria in Aris-
totelem Graeca (=cag) 4.1 (Berlin, 1887), 129, ll. 19–23; Simplicius, In Aristotelis Categorias,
(ed.) Karl Kalbfleish, cag 8 (Berlin, 1907), 242, ll. 5ff. William of Moerbeke translates it as
idoneitas (Commentaire sur les Catégories d’Aristote: Traduction de Guillaume de Moerbeke,
[ed.] Adriaan Pattin [Louvain and Paris, 1971]), and this is the word that James uses. Bar-
rie Fleet’s translation of Simplicius (On Aristotle’s Categories 7–8 [London and Ithaca, ny,
174 Solère

is to be contrasted with the acquired ability that results from learning (e.g., the
art of the trained singer). But it is also to be contrasted with the basic capacity
which all members of a species have by nature (e.g., all humans normally are
able to sing, albeit very badly). As Simplicius puts it, pure potentiality “is present
in more or less everything.”29 A predisposition is a step closer to the ­possession
of a form.30 Indeed, Simplicius defines it as “a foreshadowing of the form”
(­proemphasis tou eidous),31 “a starting point on the way to fulfillment,” “a sort
of advance payment from the actualization,” “a sort of previous warming of the
wick before the heat of the flame,” and a “partial participation in the form,”32
whereas pure potentiality is mere privation of the form.33 In other words,
an aptitude consists in the incomplete actuality of a form,34 a ­preparatory

2002], 101ff.) translates epitēdeiotēs as “propensity,” which is adopted by Côté, “Simplicius

and James of Viterbo on Propensities,” for Moerbeke’s and James’s idoneitas. While “pro-
pensity” fits well the practical inclinations (to virtue for instance), which are also includ-
ed in the notion of epitēdeiotēs, it is, in my view, less felicitous regarding cognition, with
which we are here concerned. In his translation of Porphyry’s Isagoge Boethius renders
epitēdeiotēs (a natural capacity, which however is not a specific difference) as aptitudo; cf.
Porphyry, Isagoge, (ed.) Adolf Busse, cag 4.1 (Berlin, 1887), 12; Boethius, In Isagogen Por-
phyrii, lib. 4, c. 14, (eds.) Georg Schepps and Samuel Brandt (Vienna, 1906), 272. Moreover,
the word aptitudo has in some circles a technical signification that is akin to that of Sim-
plicius’s epitēdeiotēs/idoneitas (see below, note 35). Finally, Giles of Rome uses the word
idoneitas (without reference to Simplicius) in a way that is best translated as “­aptitude” or
“predisposition,” when he says for instance that the agent intellect perfects the possible
intellect and gives it the idoneitas to receive other perfections, namely, intelligible spe-
cies; see Giles of Rome, Quodl. vi, q. 24 (Louvain, 1646), 433a–b. See also Antoine Côté’s
Introduction to Jacques de Viterbe: L’âme, l’intellect et la volonté (Paris, 2010), 9, n. 3.
29 Fleet’s translation, On Aristotle’s Categories 7–8, 104.
30 James of Viterbo, Quodl. i, q. 12, 166, ll. 332–34 “[P]otentia naturalis, considerata secun-
dum exordium et praeparationem quamdam respectu actus ulterioris. Unde dicitur apti-
tudo et idoneitas naturalis ad completum actum.”
31 Simplicius, In Aristotelis Categorias, (ed.) Kalbfleisch, 246, l. 18; trans. Fleet, 106.
32 Ibid., 248, ll. 32–35; trans. Fleet, 108.
33 Ibid., 246, ll. 16–18; trans. Fleet, 106. Cf. 225, ll. 1–5; trans. Fleet, 83–84: the epitēdeiotēs re-
sults from the potential (to dunamei), as for instance in a child the predisposition to read;
a superior stage is the perfection (teleiotēs) of this predisposition, as when the child has
learned the letters of the alphabet and is closer to knowing how to read.
34 This definition might look like the famous Aristotelian definition of motion: an incom-
plete actuality too, the actualization of that which still is in potentiality without totally
being in potentiality. However, a predisposition is not a process; it is a state that is prelimi-
nary to a change that leads to full actuality. Also, see James’s reflections, Quodl. i, q. 7, 94,
ll. 483–92.
James of Viterbo’s Innatist Theory of Cognition 175

stage to the complete actuality and perfect possession of that form.35 Accord-
ing to Simplicius, this transitional state is necessary because of a sort of law
of continuity: one cannot immediately pass from the privation of a form to
the complete realization of this form, but there must be intermediaries that
­connect the two extremes.36
James follows suit and contends that the initial capacity, or state of poten-
tiality, of the soul with respect to knowledge of external things is not passive
potentiality, but rather an “incomplete actuality,” a “beginning and starting
point and preparation” of the subsequent actual cognition, and therefore

35 Albert the Great’s closely related doctrine of seminal reasons and inchoative forms leads
him to offer the following definition of “aptitude”: “Aptitudo autem dicit habitus et formae
confusam inchoationem quod non convenit materiae secundum esse materiae, sed potius
per hoc quod aliquid accidit ipsi de esse formae quod est in ipsa” (Albert the Great, Meta-
physica, [ed.] Bernhard Geyer, Opera Omnia 16 [Münster, 1960], 324; quoted by Hélène
Merle, “Aptum natum esse: Aptitudo naturalis,” Archivum latinitatis medii aevi / Bulletin Du
Cange 43 [1981–82], 135). James himself regards his idoneitates as the equivalent of “semi-
nal reasons” in the soul (see note 87 below). Let us also remark that for Avicenna (Liber
de anima, lib. 4, [ed.] Simone van Riet [Leuven and Leiden, 1972], 191) aptitudo designates
a kind of perfection inasmuch as it refers to a potency that is preferentially inclined to
one of the two contrary acts it is capable of. Thus, Roger Marston comments, the notion
of aptitude adds to the idea of potency that of a disposition. See Roger Marston, Quaes-
tiones disputatae de anima, q. 5, (ed.) PP. Collegii S. Bonaventurae (Quaracchi, 1932), 317
(quoted by Merle, 132 and 133): “[U]nde aptitudo super potentiam addit dispositionem.”
While different from Simplicius’s thesis, it does bear some resemblance to it inasmuch
as it posits an intermediary degree between pure potentiality and actuality. All this gives
additional reason, I believe, to translate James’s idoneitas as “aptitude” or “predisposition.”
Note however that aptitudo, for some other authors, means on the contrary something
less than potentiality, or at least proximate potency; they say, for instance, that a blind
person has the aptitude (qua human being) to see but not the power to see, or that a child
has the aptitude to procreate but not the power to procreate (see the citations of Roger
Bacon, Duns Scotus, John Sackville, Thomas of Sutton provided by Merle, 135, 137, 138). For
others, aptitudo is simply equivalent to potentia (e.g., Alexander of Alexandria, quoted by
Merle, 138). In his translation of Alexander of Aphrodisias’s De fato, William of Moerbeke
translates paraskeuē (preparation, disposition) as aptitudo (quoted by Merle, 137).
36 Simplicius, In Aristotelis Categorias, (ed.) Kalbfleisch, 248, ll. 26–33, trans. Fleet, 108:
“Broadly speaking, it is the general characteristic found in all things that reach comple-
tion in any way at all. For there is nothing at all that moves from incompleteness to com-
pleteness without the presence of some intermediary capacity which brings the defective
to fulfilment while deriving completion from what is most complete. It bridges the gap
between the extremities and points the way from deficiency to betterment; it produces a
predisposition and a starting point on the way to fulfillment; it receives a sort of advanced
payment from the actualisation.” Cf. James of Viterbo, Quodl. i, q. 7, 92, ll. 420–36.
176 Solère

a predisposition to that act.37 Importantly, we should not imagine that predis-

positions themselves pass into actuality. Rather, they are that by which their
subject passes into actuality. James specifies that this process is not similar to
that of motion, in which the imperfect form that is present during the change is
of the same species as the perfect form that obtains at the end of the change.38
For example, the inchoative warmth that is in water that we are heating up is
specifically the same as the heat that obtains when the water boils. By contrast,
the achieved act of cognition that takes place when we know something is
of a different species from the imperfect act that is the predisposition to this
knowledge. After all, it makes good sense that the predisposition to being a
good singer is not the same thing as actual singing, or even the acquired skill
of singing. They are different species of quality, James says: the habitus or mas-
tery of the art of singing would belong to the first kind of quality, according to
Aristotle’s classification in the Categories, whereas the predisposition belongs
to the second kind, as we have seen. Actual singing would be the actualization
of this habitus, not of the predisposition directly. So a predisposition does not
become an act of cognition by actualization, but only leads to this actualiza-
tion.39 Nevertheless, James adds, there is an affinity or similitude between the
predisposition and the corresponding act.40 The former is, in an imperfect way,
what the latter is in perfection.41
At any rate, the payoff that James expects from the notion of idoneitas is
that predispositions in the soul are supposed to make the soul able to move to-
wards actuality by itself.42 They do not need to be acted upon by another agent
because they are not pure potentiality. It is on precisely this point that James
diverges from Philoponus, to whom he otherwise owes much.43 According to

37 Quodl. i, q. 7, 92, ll. 418–20.

38 Ibid., 94, ll. 483–90.
39 See section 7.3.1 in the following chapter in this volume, at note 66.
40 Quodl. i, q. 7, 94, ll. 490–92.
41 In this light, it appears that more often than not James expresses himself carelessly, or too
briefly, when he says that a predisposition is “reduced to complete actuality” (for instance
Quodl. i, q. 12, 173, ll. 545–46), or that the full-fledged form “perfects” the predisposition
(for instance Quodl. i, q. 7, 94, ll. 489–90, and Quodl. i, q. 13, 187, ll. 135–36). It is more exact
to say that the complete act represents the perfection of that which the predisposition
announces and orients towards, or to say that, prompted by a predisposition, the cogniz-
ing subject moves toward actualization and is perfected by the complete cognitive act. Cf.
Quodl. i, q. 12, 177, ll. 678–79: “[C]ognoscens movet se ad actualem notitiam, secundum
illam habitualem.”
42 Simplicius, In Aristotelis Categorias, (ed.) Kalbfleisch, 249, ll. 16–17; trans. Fleet, 109.
43 Quodl. i, q. 12, 161, ll. 139–49.
James of Viterbo’s Innatist Theory of Cognition 177

Philoponus, passing from potentiality to actuality always requires actualiza-

tion by another being that is already in actuality.44 This is as true of cognition
as it is of the generation of natural beings. Therefore, for Philoponus the agent
intellect is, in the first place, the intellect that leads another intellect from po-
tentiality to actuality. Such is the intellect of a teacher with respect to the intel-
lect of a student, for instance. James reckons this opinion is not “adequate.”45
Philoponus himself says that the relation between the teacher and the learner
is the same as that between a physician and a patient. But as the adage “natura
sanat, medicus adiuvat” (“nature does the healing, the physician only helps”)
expresses it, the physician is only an auxiliary cause of healing, not its princi-
pal cause. Therefore, besides the intellect of the teacher, we must posit in the
learner something active, which already is in actuality and will contribute as
a principal cause to the intellect of the learner being in actuality.46 With the
concept of predisposition, then, James thinks he can maintain that cognitive
operations are actions of the knower. Whether operations of the senses or of
the intellect, they are not engendered by the cognized objects, but are sponta-
neous actualizations due to an aptitude in the cognizer.47
It is worth noting that a similar possibility of self-actualization is not foreign
to Aristotelianism. A trained singer who is not singing at the moment has not
lost her skill, and is in a state of actuality compared to a person who still has to
learn to sing. Nevertheless, she is in a lesser degree of actuality than when she
does sing. Consequently, Aristotle posits a distinction between first actuality
and second actuality, that is, between a power that is fully formed, a skill that
is completely acquired and mastered but is not presently being put to use, and
the actual exercise of that power.48 The point is that, although first actuality
is in potentiality with respect to second actuality, the passing from the one to
the other is, according to Aristotle himself, immediate and spontaneous; that
is, it is independent of any external cause. It does not, as in the case of passing
from pure potentiality to first actuality, require the action of another agent,
such as the teacher who taught the singer how to sing. The trained singer who
for now is not using her art can actualize it instantaneously and just by herself.
Thus, the relation between Aristotle’s first and second actuality is the same as

44 Ibid., 161, ll. 143–44.

45 Ibid., 162, ll. 160–65.
46 Ibid., 162, ll. 165–71.
47 Ibid., 167, ll. 344–51. Cf. ibid., 174–75, ll. 596–98: “Attentione autem dignum est ne forte
intelligere et videre non sint pati et informari solum. Sed habent quamdam intrinsecus
excitatam operationem.”
48 De anima 2.5, 417a22–29.
178 Solère

the ­relation between James’s predispositions and their operations. However,

James’s predispositions are not states of first actuality, but states that precede
the first actuality of a capacity. The fact that they are in “incomplete actuality”
makes it possible, James thinks, for them to bring themselves to full actuality.

6.2.3 Moving Oneself “Formally”

Another way to put the same idea is the following: that which, being in “incom-
plete actuality,” passes by itself (movetur ex se) into complete actuality, does
so not in an “efficient” way, but in a “formal” way (non quidem efficienter, sed
formaliter).49 Indeed, these two kinds of change (motus) are fundamentally
different.50 An efficient cause must have a completely actualized form before-
hand, and the change it induces consists in the actualization of this form in
the patient, which only has the potentiality to receive this form. On the other
hand, the second type of change happens when an incomplete form seeks its
completion. In the framework of Aristotelian physics, the paradigm for the lat-
ter kind of change is “natural” motion such as the falling of a body. This motion
does not result from the action of something else (another body, according to
the Newtonian law of attraction), but only from the spontaneous tendency of
this body to return to its “natural place.” It is because of its own form that the
body moves.51 Its nature is incomplete with respect to being in the place where
it belongs and tends by itself towards fulfillment. For something to follow this
tendency of its form is for it to move itself, but by way of formal action, not
efficient action.
Following this lead, James avoids the impossibility of something being its
own cause. When something moves itself formaliter, it is both in potential-
ity and in actuality, but this is not impossible because it is not potential and
actual in the same way. It is in incomplete actuality and is in potentiality for
completion.52 On the other hand, the Aristotelian axiom is unrestrictedly true
of change by way of efficient causality: nothing can modify itself as an efficient
cause, or be both potential and actual in one and the same respect.53 What is
less hot does not have a predisposition to become hotter, but only the passive

49 Quodl. i, q. 12, 167, ll. 335–36. See also Stephen Dumont’s chapter in this volume.
50 Quodl. i, q. 7, 95, ll. 517–40.
51 See for instance Thomas Aquinas, Sentencia libri de anima, lib. 2, cap. 5, 88, ll. 107–12,
about why fire moves upward: “Ex unaquaque autem forma sequitur aliqua inclinatio, et
ex inclinatione operatio; sicut ex forma naturali ignis, sequitur inclinatio ad locum qui
est sursum, secundum quam ignis dicitur levis; et ex hac inclinatione sequitur operatio,
scilicet motus qui est sursum.”
52 Quodl. iii, q. 4, 74, ll. 522–29. Cf. Quodl. i, q. 7, 99, ll. 664–70.
53 Cf. Quodl. i, q. 7, 99, ll. 656–64.
James of Viterbo’s Innatist Theory of Cognition 179

potentiality. In this case, the incomplete form does not move spontaneously
towards greater perfection; the passing from incompleteness to completion is
due to an efficient cause, which is extrinsic.
These two kinds of change—formal and efficient—can be mapped onto the
two kinds of action we encountered earlier, namely, immanent and transeunt
action. The second kind of change is always from one thing to another because
cause and effect are necessarily distinct, whereas the first kind remains within
the agent, whose incomplete actuality induces by itself complete actuality. Of
course, that which moves itself by way of formal causality obviously has an ef-
ficient cause of its existence. This cause produced the form, and consequently
all that follows from the form, including the self-motion towards completion.
So while the mind and the will move themselves formaliter, they are moved by
God efficienter.54
As with the distinction between first and second actuality, James was not
the only thinker to use the resources of the Aristotelian physics of natural mo-
tion to obviate the Aristotelian ban on self-actualization. A similar strategy was
to have recourse to the distinction between essential and accidental potency,
based on Physics 8.4 (255a30–b23) and Averroes’s commentary.55 For some-
thing that is in essential potentiality to a form to have that form actualized in it,
Averroes explains, it has to be acted upon by an external agent. An accidental
potentiality, by contrast, is such that it is merely accidental for it not to be actu-
alized. As Peter John Olivi explains, this occurs when some condition “without
which its actualization does not obtain” is not fulfilled.56 If the condition is

54 Quodl. i, q. 7, 98, ll. 617–28. Cf. Aristotle, De anima 2.5, 417b16–17. See also Quodl. iii, q.
4, 73, ll. 500–10 on how to interpret Proclus’s thesis that incorporeal beings move them-
selves. Cf. Elementatio theologica, prop. 17, (ed.) Helmut Boese (Leuven, 1987), 12: “[O]mne
se ipsum movens primo ad se ipsum est conversum.” Proclus, James says, does not take
self-motion as a process of efficient change, but as a process in which the subject moves
itself as an end, a final term, and thus reverts to itself: “Accipit enim movere se non modo
transmutationis, secundum quem nihil se movet educendo se de potentia ad actum, sed
illo modo quo finis dicitur movere, scilicet secundum rationem termini. Nam se ipsum
movere secundum intentionem Procli est ad se ipsum converti. Hoc autem est sibi ipsi
conformari et esse terminum sui ipsius. Et hoc modo cum intellectus intelligit se, vel cum
voluntas vult se, dicitur movere se.”
55 Averroes, In libros Physicorum commentaria, lib. 8, c. 4, in Aristotelis opera cum Averrois
commentariis, vol. 4 (Venice, 1562; repr. Frankfurt a. M., 1962), f. 168va.
56 Peter John Olivi, Quaestiones in secundum librum Sententiarum, q. 57, (ed.) Bernard Jan-
sen, vol. 2 (Quaracchi, 1924), 347: “[E]sse vero in potentia accidentali seu per accidens non
sumitur ab eo nisi in potentiis activis quae per accidens dicuntur esse in potentia, propter
defectum scilicet alicuius sine quo non possunt exire in actum.”
180 Solère

met, the thing that is in accidental potentiality will reach full actuality by itself
without an external agent. The example given by Aristotle is air that comes
from water (which occurs during the cyclical transformation of the elements)
but is prevented from moving upwards as its nature demands.57 When the wa-
ter becomes air, its lightness is actualized, but it may happen that this volume
of air is trapped in a container underwater and is thus prevented from moving
towards its “natural place.” Its lightness is still in potentiality with respect to
the full actualization that would occur if it were above water. But this being in
potentiality is only accidental. This means that a new form does not have to be
actualized in it by an agent, contrary to cases of essential potentiality (such as
wood being burned by fire). The form is already present, and it spontaneously
and immediately starts to be actualized in upward motion when the obstacle
is removed, that is, when the air is released from the container. It is in the na-
ture of air to move upwards, and it does not need to be acted upon or to act on
something else in order to achieve its entelecheia.
James’s solution is in fact very close to this approach to self-actualization,
which is found in Olivi and others. Nevertheless, James adds, we may say that
the subject moves itself by way of efficient action if we take “efficient” in a
broad sense, as for instance when we say that a substance is in some way the
efficient cause of its propria, as these inseparable properties necessarily flow
from its essence.58 Similarly, cognition flows from what is by nature contained
in the soul, namely, its predispositions. Moreover, in his discussion of the will,
James adds that that which moves itself formaliter can move something else
efficienter, and by the same token can move itself “efficienter by accident.” For
instance, a falling body moves the air by slicing through it. Similarly, the will,
when it determines itself, moves other potencies efficienter. To that extent,
the self-mover can be said to move itself “efficienter by accident.” By slicing

57 See Aristotle, Physics 8.4, 255b8–11, trans. R.P. Hardie and R.K. Gaye, in The Complete Works
of Aristotle, (ed.) Jonathan Barnes (Princeton, 1995), vol. 1, 427 (modified): “[W]hat is light
is generated from what is heavy, for instance air from water: the light is first potentially,
and then is in effect light [primary actuality], and it will at once realize its proper ac-
tivity [i.e., moving upwards, its secondary actuality] unless something prevents it.” Ibid.,
255b17–24, trans. Hardie and Gaye, 427: “As we have said, a thing may be potentially light
or heavy in more ways than one. Thus not only when a thing is water is it in a sense poten-
tially light, but when it has become air it may be still potentially light; for it may be that
through some hindrance it does not occupy an upper position, whereas, if what hinders it
is removed, it realizes its activity and continues to rise higher. The process whereby what
is of a certain quality changes to a condition of actuality is similar: thus the exercise of
knowledge follows at once upon the possession of it unless something prevents it.”
58 Quodl. i, q. 7, 96, ll. 545–53.
James of Viterbo’s Innatist Theory of Cognition 181

through the air, the falling body makes possible the actualization of its form
of heaviness; similarly, the will could not actualize its propensity if it did not
move the intellect efficienter.59 I assume that the formal action of the intellect
likewise entails an efficient action on the will (we realize we don’t know about
X, and as a consequence we want to know more), which in return bolsters
the cognitive act, with the result that the intellect moves itself “efficienter by
accident.”
Let us note, however, that self-motion by way of formal change is not an
action properly speaking, because an action in the strict sense is a transeunt
action, that is, it consists in one thing acting on something else and entails
a passion in the latter. This does not occur in the actualization of predispo-
sitions. Therefore, in this process the mind is not properly either active or
­passive.60 Yet self-motion can be called an “absolute action” and an “absolute
passion” since Aristotle (Metaphysics 9.8, 1049b5–10, 1050a30–51b2) grants this
qualifier to immanent actions, as opposed to transeunt actions. An immanent
action or passion is not relative to another being; therefore it is absolute in the
etymological sense of the term, that is, not tied to something else. Such ac-
tions are called “operations.” Thus, the incomplete form that initiates a motion
towards completion can be said to be active in the sense of “absolute action”
or “operation.” Inasmuch as this form is perfected by the subsequent motion,
it can also be said to be passive in the sense of “absolute passion.”61 But this
kind of action is not in every respect absolute. A cognitive operation, by which
the soul conforms itself to external things, is a relation between the knower
and the thing known, and a relation requires at least two terms. Therefore, a
cognitive act is not an “absolute action” in the strongest sense, as “shining” (lu-
cere) is, since the latter does not have any external endpoint. Contrary to the
verb “to shine,” which is intransitive, the verb “to know” requires an object at
which it terminates.62 Only the coming-to-be of the cognitive act is an absolute
action.

6.2.4 Being Moved by Inclination

But if the mind can change itself formaliter thanks to its predispositions, and
reach actuality, what is the role of the object of cognition? Where does the pas-
sivity that must be acknowledged in the soul lie? James’s answer, which may be

59 Ibid., 98, ll. 633–49.

60 Ibid., 97, ll. 586–91.
61 Ibid., 97, ll. 592–601.
62 Ibid., 97, ll. 602–13. For more on “absolute action” see Stephen Dumont’s chapter in this
volume.
182 Solère

borrowed from Henry of Ghent,63 is that the soul is affected by its objects, but
only “by inclination” or “by excitation.”64 This kind of change does not require
an action of the agent on a patient, but only presupposes the two following
conditions:

(1) The mover must be conjoined with the thing moved.

(2) The mover must be in actuality with respect to some feature that corre-
sponds to a feature that the thing moved is ordered to having in actuality.
In other words, this feature must correspond to a predisposition of the
thing moved.65

These two conditions look identical to the conditions that are required for
any kind of change, including changes that happen by efficient causality: the
mover and the moved have to “touch” each other, and the mover has to be in
actuality in a certain respect while the patient is in potentiality in that same
respect. So what is the specificity of change by inclination? The difference is
that efficient causation requires that the cause act on the patient to actualize
it, but this additional stipulation is absent from the kind of causation James is
here considering. Besides the actuality with respect to a certain feature (con-
dition 2), the mere correlated presence of the cause is required (condition 1).
Conjunction means only to be, metaphorically, in “contact” with each other or
to be present to each other, but not necessarily to act on one another.
How is it possible that a cause not do anything to or in the patient? Well, this
is what is peculiar to the mind, given that it has “predispositions”: the object
has only to come into the presence of the mind to trigger an actualization of
the mind, but need not act on it. Given that the mind is conjoined with the
sensory organs due to the union of the soul and the body, material things are
present to the sensory faculties through their action (via sensible species) on

63 See Henry of Ghent, Quodl. xi, q. 5, f. 451rS: “Est enim quaedam alteratio sensitivi prin-
cipaliter in ipso organo sentiendi quae est per speciem sensibilis receptam in illo per
medium a sensibili extra. Est autem alia alteratio sensitivi principaliter in ipsa vi sensi-
tiva, quae in ipsa est inclinatio quaedam ad actum operationis suae eliciendum; et est
specie dicta agente in virtute sensibilis extra, et hoc est ex parte sensus. Ex parte autem
intellectus nostri, est ab ipso intelligibili universali quod seipso est praesens intellectui
in phantasmate actione intellectus agentis, propter quod seipso inclinat intellectum non
mediante specie, quam solummodo ponimus in sensu, quia sensibile in seipso non potest
esse praesens intra, ut inclinando sensum ducat in ipsum in actum. Et est haec inclinatio
intellectus initium habitus cognitivi.”
64 Quodl. i, q. 12, 173–74, ll. 563–67.
65 Ibid., 172, ll. 505–08.
James of Viterbo’s Innatist Theory of Cognition 183

the sensory organs, and to the intellect through sensory representations; they
have in actuality features that match the “predispositions” that are contained
in the soul. Thus, the mind is merely prompted or inclined by the presence of
material things to modify itself and perform cognitive acts on the basis of a
predisposition to being in actuality the feature that the object has in actuality
and that matches the predisposition.66 More precisely, material things “excite”
or “incline” the sense faculties to actualize by themselves a sensory representa-
tion or phantasm67 (more on that soon); and, as we shall see elsewhere, this
sensory representation in its turn “excites” or “inclines” the intellect to actual-
ize, by itself, a concept.68
Again, James’s solution is on this point similar to other ideas that were float-
ed around the same time, in particular, the causa sine qua non solution argued
against by Godfrey of Fontaines around 1292–94 and later taken up by Durand
of Saint-Pourçain.69 A sine qua non cause is not simply, as in ordinary language,
a cause that is necessary; it is specifically a cause that does not exercise any
action on the effect in question. Its role is limited to removing an obstacle to
the self-actualization of an accidental potentiality; thus, it does act, but only
on the impediment. The production of the effect, properly speaking, falls to
the subject that is in accidental potency. There is no input from the sine qua
non cause. As soon as the impediment is removed, the accidental potentiality
alone exercises its power, as a spring that has been compressed uncoils. Now,
even when no adverse agent positively thwarts the actualization of an acciden-
tal potentiality, the mere absence of a required condition prevents that actual-
ization. For example, singing presupposes a desire or a motivation to do so, and
a trained singer who has none at present does not sing. The role of sine qua non
causes is to remove negative impediments as well as positive impediments,

66 Ibid., 174–75, ll. 596–99; 175, ll. 613–17; 177, ll. 663–66. Nevertheless, James does say in
Quodl. ii, q. 6 that the intelligible object is an “efficient cause” of our cognition (99, l. 96;
100, ll. 108–09) and that the intellect cooperates with the object to cause a cognitive act
(104, ll. 237–40). However, in Quodl. i, q. 14 (194, ll. 49–52), he explains that the objects
contribute something (aliquid efficiunt) to the cognitive act just by arousing the intellect.
So his notion of efficient causality in this context is quite broad, to the point of including
causes that do not act on the effect. Moreover, the object he talks about in Quodl. ii, q. 6
is an intelligible content rather than some external, material thing. Finally, the question
in Quodl. ii, q. 6 is about the beatific vision, and in that case it is true that the object, God,
efficiently acts on the intellect of the blessed, because it is not a cognition that is naturally
accessible to us. See section 7.3.2 in chapter 7 in this volume.
67 Quodl. i, q. 12, 172, ll. 512–14 and 518–19.
68 Ibid., 172, ll. 503–04. See section 7.2.3 in chapter 7 in this volume.
69 See Solère, “Sine Qua Non Causality,” 195–209.
184 Solère

that is, to remedy an absence. Such is the role of the object in cognition. We do
not sense or think if there nothing to be sensed or thought. The presentation
of a thing to the mind removes this impediment; it provides some content to
be sensed or thought. However, the object does not have to act on the facul-
ties, but merely gives them an occasion to carry out their operation and reach
full actuality. Thus, James’s theory shares the central idea of the causa sine qua
non theory, namely, the spontaneity of cognitive acts. For the latter theory,
this occurs when some condition is fulfilled; the contribution of the object is
to fulfill this condition. For James, the object prompts (“inclines” or “excites”)
our faculties to produce an operation. On the side of the subject, to follow
this “inclination” is to act not as an efficient cause (efficienter), but formally
(formaliter),70 that is to say, inasmuch as a form that is incomplete tends toward
completion.
Thus, material things are causes of our cognition inasmuch as they “excite”
the mind and make possible its self-actualization. To this extent, it is correct
to say that the mind is passive with respect to external things.71 As we have
already seen,72 whenever there is change (mutatio), there is affection (passio).
An advening cognitive operation is a change in the mind, due to an affection
(by “excitation”) from an object. But, James adds, one should be careful to note
that this modification of the mind by its objects is not, as Aristotle says,73 an
alteration that imposes a change from a disposition to the contrary disposi-
tion (the general process that we find in physical alterations such as heating,
and which may lead to the corruption of the subject that is affected). Rather,
it is an alteration that leads to the perfecting of the subject.74 Moreover, as
far as the intellect is concerned, one should specify under what conditions its
object affects it. James is clear that it is not insofar as the object exists outside
the soul in matter that it affects the intellect, for in this condition it cannot be
conjoined with the intellect, which is immaterial.75 Nor is it insofar as the ob-
ject is abstracted from matter and material circumstances, for in this condition
the object (its intelligible content) is the endpoint (terminus) of the operation
of the intellect.76 It is only insofar as the object is contained in the sensory

70 Quodl. iii, q. 4, 74, ll. 522–29.

71 Quodl. iv, q. 25, 92, l. 24.
72 Above, section 6.2.1, at note 15.
73 Aristotle, De anima 2.5, 417b2–16.
74 Quodl. iv, q. 25, 93, ll. 29–32.
75 Ibid., 93, ll. 33–39.
76 Ibid., 93, ll. 40–50.
James of Viterbo’s Innatist Theory of Cognition 185

representations which excite the intellect that this object can be said to affect
the intellect.77
However, since an end can be said metaphorically to move something, one
can say that the object of our cognition moves our mind as an endpoint (per
modum termini) of the act by which the mind conforms itself to a thing (the
truth of a piece of knowledge consists in this conformity).78 It is in this sense
that Augustine writes: “Evidently, one must hold that all things that we know
co-engender in us their cognition. In effect, both the knower and the known
bring forth cognition.”79 This passage from On the Trinity is a favorite quote of
those who believe that things actively contribute to our knowledge of them.80
But according to James’s reinterpretation it means only that things contribute
to knowledge in a certain way—specifically, to the extent that they are its end-
points. Augustine says that cognition is “engendered” by the cognized object
because the former is a similitude of the latter. In reality, it is truly engendered
by the knower alone, because (1) the actual cognition (notitia actualis) results
by immanent action from concepts already possessed, which are incomplete
similitudes of things, and (2) the knower passes by itself to actual cognition,
that is, to actualizing complete similitudes of things. More precisely, the mind
moves itself in the direction of the eternal ideas, from which are derived both
things and the predispositions impressed in our minds.81
Naturally, one might object that if James is right, external things are not the
real causes of cognition, since they are only a sort of occasional cause, and
therefore are not the standard of our knowledge, a conclusion that would give
rise to subjectivism and skepticism. James answers that the main cause of our
knowledge is that which principally causes our mind to know. But our mind is
principally moved by (1) God, by way of efficient causality, since he created the
mind, and (2) our mind itself, by way of formal action.82 As for the charge of
skepticism, this would be the result if material things were the main source of

77 Ibid., 93, ll. 51–54. On the relation between intellect and phantasms, see section 7.2.4 in
chapter 7 in this volume.
78 Quodl. i, q. 12, 177, ll. 666–67.
79 Augustine, De Trinitate, lib. 9, c. 12, n. 18, (eds.) W.J. Mountain and F. Glorie, Corpus Chris-
tianorum Series Latina 50 (Turnhout, 1968), 309, ll. 29–31: “[L]iquido tenendum est quod
omnis res quamcumque cognoscimus, congenerat in nobis notitiam sui; ab utroque enim
notitia paritur, et a cognoscente et a cognito.”
80 See John Duns Scotus, Lectura in librum primum Sententiarum, d. 3, pars 3, q. 2, n. 320, ed.
Vaticana, Opera Omnia 16 (Vatican City, 1960), 352.
81 Quodl. i, q. 12, 177, ll. 663–85.
82 Ibid., 175, ll. 616–17: “Et ideo, causa scientiae principaliter in nobis est Deus et ipsa anima.
Res autem sensibiles sunt causa, non principaliter, sed aliquo modo.”
186 Solère

our knowledge since they are always changing, and so could cause only a mu-
table, shaky knowledge. Plato was right to try to ground scientific knowledge
on immutable, intelligible beings like the ideas. But he was wrong to look for
these ideas elsewhere than in God. Augustine put Plato’s theory straight, and
as he often repeats, we know all things in the light of the first Truth and in
the eternal reasons. Again reinterpreting Augustine, James takes this to mean
that we cognize by our innate “predispositions,” which are derived from God’s
ideas. Aristotle too can be interpreted in this sense when he calls the agent
intellect “a habitus which is a sort of light.”83 Our intellectual power itself is in
effect a “habitual knowledge” (habitualis notitia) which is always present in the
soul and is the light by which we discern intelligible contents.84 Hence, James’s
Meno moment: someone who is guided by skillful questions can discover ra-
tional truths by himself.85

6.3 Innatist Implications

6.3.1 The Adumbrated Slate

If predispositions are the conditions of possibility for any cognitive act what-
soever—given that, in accordance with Simplicius’s law of continuity, full
actuality cannot obtain from purely undetermined potency—we obviously
must conclude, under pain of an infinite regress, that they are innate.86 For
if we say that they are acquired by previous operations, these operations will
themselves need to be grounded in predispositions, which in their turn will
have to be explained, and so on ad infinitum. For the same reason, they can-
not be learned from others, because understanding what an instructor teaches,
even just the rudiments of a science, requires such predispositions. Therefore,
predispositions must be originally present in all minds. This means that God
­creates ­human souls with these aptitudes. James compares them to the “semi-
nal reasons” which God, at the beginning of time, implanted in matter and
from which all material beings originate.87 Similarly, all mental events arise
from these seeds that are implanted in souls.

83 Aristotle, De anima 3.5, 430a15.

84 Quodl. i, q. 12, 176, ll. 635–46.
85 Ibid., 176–77, ll. 659–62.
86 On the terminology used by James, see Côté, Introduction to Jacques de Viterbe: L’âme,
l’intellect et la volonté, 18, n. 4.
87 Quodl. i, q. 7, 92, ll. 436–38: “Et haec sunt semina scientiarum et virtutem quae in no-
bis esse dicuntur, ipsae videlicet idoneitates et aptitudines quas habemus ad scientias
James of Viterbo’s Innatist Theory of Cognition 187

On this count, James radically departs from the many other theories of the
time that defend the spontaneity of cognitive acts. Authors such as William of
Auvergne, John Pecham, Roger Marston, and many others, believe, like James,
that external things are only occasional causes of cognition, while the mind is
the sole efficient cause.88 However, they generally say that the soul produces in
itself the appropriate cognitive content. They ascribe to the mind the power
to generate these contents when it is aware of a modification in the sensory
organs (a sensation is then engendered), or of certain sensory representations
(an act of understanding is then engendered). However, they do not explain
the mechanism by which the mind is able to bring about a specific content that
corresponds to a particular bodily modification or a given phantasm. The mind
just knows how to modify itself in such a way that it somehow becomes the
likeness of the state of affairs to be known. More convincingly, James thinks
that the mind is natively equipped with the blueprints it has to follow to con-
form itself to various states of affairs.
Consequently, James firmly opposes the Aristotelian view that the soul is
like a “blank slate” (tabula rasa).89 Or rather, he follows John Philoponus’s Neo-
platonic interpretation of Aristotle. At first sight, Philoponus admits, there is a
difference between Plato and Aristotle:

And Plato too, just like Aristotle, says that forms are present in the ratio-
nal soul potentially, not actually. But Plato says they are present in the
second sense of “potentially” [i.e., first actuality], present in the way in
which theorems are present in a sleeping geometer, when for the ready
use of these theorems all he needs is something to remove this impedi-
ment. Aristotle, in contrast, says they are present in the first sense of “po-
tentially,” inasmuch as the intellect is by nature able to receive them, but

et virtutes.” James addresses this topic in Quodl. ii, q. 5; see chapter 5 in this volume,
and Côté, “Simplicius and James of Viterbo on Propensities,” 46–52. As noted by Merle,
“Aptum natum esse,” 128, Clarembaud of Arras in the 12th century had already identified
“natural aptitudes” (naturales aptitudines) with seminal reasons; see his Tractatulus super
Genesim, par. 27, in Nikolaus M. Häring, Life and Works of Clarembald of Arras (Toronto,
1965), 238.
88 John Pecham, In I Sent., d. 3, q. 6, and Quodlibet Florentinum, q. 3, in Tractatus de anima,
(ed.) Gaudenzio Melani (Florence, 1948), 135, 147. Cf. Peter of Trabes, In ii Sent., d. 24, q.
4, (ed.) Ephrem Longpré, in Studi Francescani 8 (1922): 278: “[I]ntelligere non est speciem
suscipere sed eam agere ad obiecti praesentiam in se vel in sua specie in memoria re-
tenta.” On William of Auvergne and Roger Marston, see below notes 159 and 174.
89 Quodl. i, q. 12, 170, ll. 459–69. Cf. Aristotle, De anima 3.4, 429b33–430a1.
188 Solère

does not yet possess dispositional knowledge (habitus), and takes in the
forms, as it appears, from things which are perceived.90

In other words, there are according to Philoponus two senses of “potentiality”:

suitability (idoneitas) and disposition (habitus).91 Aristotle seems to believe
that intelligible forms are potentially in the soul in the sense that the soul is
suitable for receiving them, whereas Plato thinks that they are potentially in
the soul in the sense of being present as habitus.
However, Philoponus contends that one should not take at face value Ar-
istotle’s comparison of the soul with a blank slate, since Aristotle repeatedly
says that the intellect is “separate and immortal,” and this would be impossible
if the intellect were just like a blank slate. How can we reconcile the two the-
ses? Philoponus submits that we must carefully distinguish between different
degrees of both suitability and disposition, according to their remoteness or
closeness to complete actuality. Human semen is suitable for eventually pro-
ducing a geometer, but a young human who is ready to learn has a suitability
that is much closer to the goal. A drunk geometer who is sleeping off his wine
has even more the disposition to do geometry, but less than an awake and so-
ber geometer who just happens to be thinking of something other than geom-
etry. This gives the following scale:

Potentiality1: semen
Suitability
Potentiality2: human being still to be trained
Potentiality3: trained but sleeping geometer
Disposition
Potentiality4: awake geometer who is not doing
geometry

Philoponus’s point is that “the geometer who is asleep or drunk, because he is

held down by sleep or intoxication, resembles the man who does not have the

90 John Philoponus, Commentaire sur le De Anima d’Aristote, traduction de Guillaume de Mo-

erbeke, c. 4 (ad 429a27), (ed.) Gerard Verbeke (Louvain and Paris, 1966), 14; trans. William
Charlton, Philoponus: On Aristotle on the Intellect (de Anima 3.4–8) (London and Ithaca,
ny, 1991), 39.
91 Philoponus, Commentaire sur le De Anima, 37–38, ll. 81–84; trans. Charlton, 57. Note that
since idoneitas designates for Philoponus a lower degree of potentiality than habitus, he
does not take the word in the same sense as Simplicius, nor as James, who follows Simpli-
cius on that count.
James of Viterbo’s Innatist Theory of Cognition 189

disposition (habitus) at all.” That is to say, potentiality3 resembles potentiality2

more than it resembles potentiality4. Now, the status of the soul at birth is that
of potentiality3. According to Plato, it has all the intelligible forms as predispo-
sitions; instruction consists not in introducing these forms into the intellect,
but in bringing them to light, just as the rising sun does not give existence to
colors but only reveals them. But because the soul is in such a state of intoxi-
cation and sleep, due to its relationship to the body, it seems to be devoid of
dispositions and is merely in potentiality2 for learning. This is why Aristotle is
entitled to compare it to a blank slate, as if it were in the potentiality of suit-
ability. But because Aristotle believes that the intellectual soul is immortal, he
actually means, Philoponus maintains, that it is in a potentiality of disposition,
potentiality3. In the same vein, James concedes that one may say that the soul
is like a blank slate before it intellectually knows something in effect; neverthe-
less, with regard to its native incomplete actuality, the soul is all things in ac-
tuality even before any intellectual act.92 If his position seems close to Plato’s,
James says, that is nothing to be worried about, since Augustine testifies that
Plato’s doctrine is the best of all philosophies, close as it is to Christianity.93
Nevertheless, James also warns us that his theory should not be confused with
Plato’s doctrine of reminiscence (and here James may be parting from Philo-
ponus as well).94 The soul does not preexist the body, and therefore it does not
first have actual knowledge that it later forgets when it is united with the body.
James does assume that, when the soul is created, natural predispositions to
knowledge (scientia) are co-created in it, but their actuality is incomplete and
so they are not tantamount to the preexisting knowledge in the Platonic soul.
Its cognitions are not full-fledged yet buried in forgetfulness; rather, they are
embryonic and in want of development.

6.3.2 Predispositions and Actual Thought

Figuring out the exact status of James’s predispositions—in between pure ca-
pacities and actuality—is a delicate task. A comparison with the two foremost
proponents of innateness in early modern times, Descartes and Leibniz, might
be useful.
In Descartes, the term “idea” means “whatever is immediately perceived by
the mind,” “everything which is in our mind when we conceive something,”
“the form of any given thought, immediate perception of which makes me

92 Quodl. i, q. 12, 170, ll. 465–67: “… omnia in actu antequam intelligat.”

93 Ibid., 171, ll. 473–80.
94 Ibid., 171, ll. 481–97.
190 Solère

aware of the thought.”95 Moreover, “thought” means “everything that is within

us in such a way that we are immediately aware of it.”96 So there is no thought
we are unaware of, and therefore no idea we are unaware of either. An idea is
an occurrent modification of the attribute of thought of an immaterial sub-
stance, exactly as a certain shape is an occurrent modification of the attribute
of extension of a material substance. There are no latent modifications: a mod-
ification is either actual or not. It may be possible for a circular piece of wax to
become square, but while it is circular, squareness is nowhere to be found. Sim-
ilarly, an idea is an occurrent thought: an idea that is not actual is not an idea
at all. Accordingly—and contrary to an established line of interpretation—we
should not conceive of innate ideas as pieces of furniture that are sitting in a
dark room waiting for the beam of consciousness to illuminate them, but rath-
er as inborn specific capacities to produce specific thoughts. Descartes gives
support to this reading when he responds to Hobbes:

[W]hen we say that an idea is innate in us, we do not mean that it is al-
ways noticed by us (illam nobis semper observari). This would mean that
no idea was innate. We simply mean that we have within ourselves the
faculty of summoning up the idea (facultas eliciendi).97

In an extended sense, however, it is possible to say that an innate idea such as

the idea of God has been imprinted by God himself on all human minds (even
though most people are unaware of it). But Descartes adds: “Everyone has
within himself an implicit idea of God, that is to say, an aptitude to perceive it
explicitly.”98 More generally, Descartes elsewhere writes, when we speak of an
innate trait of temperament or an innate disease, we do not mean that fetuses
have this trait or disease while they are in the womb; we just mean that “they
are born with a certain faculty or tendency to contract them.”99
Whether or not this is the correct interpretation of Descartes’s concep-
tion, it is at any rate the path that Leibniz chooses to follow when he defends
against Locke the possibility of innate ideas. Just after his famous comparison

95 Oeuvres de Descartes, (eds.) Charles Adam and Paul Tannery, rev. Pierre Costabel and Ber-
nard Rochot (Paris, 1996) (= at), vol. 7, 181; trans. John Cottingham et al., The Philosophical
Writings of Descartes (Cambridge, 1985) (=csm), vol. 2, 127; at 7, 160 (csm 2, 113); at 3, 393
(csm 3, 185).
96 at 7, 160 (csm 2, 113).
97 at 7, 189 (csm 2, 132; modified).
98 at 4, 187–88 (csm 3, 248; my emphasis).
99 Descartes, Comments on a Certain Broadsheet, at 8-B, 358 (csm 1, 304).
James of Viterbo’s Innatist Theory of Cognition 191

of innate ideas with veins within a block of marble, he adds: “This is how ideas
and truths are innate in us: as inclinations, dispositions, habits (habitudes), or
natural potentialities (virtualités), and not as actions.”100 Innate ideas are not
innate thoughts. Thoughts are actions of the mind, while the innate ideas are
“des habitudes ou des dispositions” or “des aptitudes,” which are in us even if
we do not think of them.101 Dispositions, Leibniz argues, are not reducible to
the mere capacity or faculty of knowing, as Locke maintains. To possess some-
thing we do not use is not the same as simply having the possibility of acquir-
ing this thing; otherwise, we should say that we only possess the things we are
actually employing, not the things that are in our drawers and closets.
Strikingly, Leibniz uses the same vocabulary as James to explain what in-
nate ideas are: dispositions (predispositions for James), aptitudes, inclinations,
natural habits, etc. The scholastic background helps in the understanding of
Leibniz’s text; conversely, Leibniz’s discussion with Locke helps one, I think,
to understand the status of James’s idoneitates. I do not mean to suggest that
Leibniz read James; rather, the same exigencies make them both turn to the
same concepts. By “idoneitates,” James does not mean only what is meant by
the French “dispositions,” but behind the French “habitudes” one should surely
read the Latin “habitus,” and this is exactly how James depicts his idoneitates.
In effect, because predispositions are connatural to the soul, they are perma-
nently in it. As a consequence, they are habitus—not acquired habitus, admit-
tedly, but “innate habitus” (naturaliter inditus).102

6.3.3 Innate Sensory Knowledge?

Surprising as it may be, James extends innatism beyond conceptual knowledge,
down to sensory perceptions.103 The general scheme of excitation by external
things and actualization of predispositions we have seen earlier (section 6.1.4)
does apply to this level.104 The sensibles modify a sense organ, which is im-
mediately conjoined with a sense faculty. The modification made in the organ
is similar to a “predisposition” in the sense faculty. Because of this, the sense
faculty is prompted to actualize, by itself, a sensory cognition. James contends

100 G.W.F. Leibniz, Nouveaux essais sur l’entendement humain, in Die philosophischen Schrift-
en, (ed.) C.I. Gerhardt, vol. 5 (Berlin, 1882; repr. Hildesheim, 2008), 45.
101 Of course, for Leibniz as for James, the mind would not activate its innate conceptions if
it were not prompted to do so by sensory affections.
102 Quodl. i, q. 7, 94, ll. 479–82; see also Quodl. i, q. 11, 156, ll. 118–25. These predispositions are
shared by all minds. But, James adds, they are readier to act in some minds than others
(Quodl. i, q. 7, 93, ll. 464–66); this accounts for the differences in quickness among minds.
103 In fact, Descartes does so too, as we will see below.
104 Quodl. i, q. 12, 172, ll. 512–14, 518–19.
192 Solère

that this is exactly what Augustine means when he says—in two famous pas-
sages often quoted by those who deny that sensible species are passively im-
printed in the soul by external things—that the sensory faculty forms in itself
an image that corresponds to the excitation of the organ by material things.105
However, James draws much more on Boethius than on Augustine, which
was not typical in his day. Interestingly too, he here diverges from Philoponus,
who supports innatism only with respect to intellectual knowledge. James’s
source is again the fourth poem in book 5 of the Consolation of Philosophy:

This [the power of the mind] is an efficient cause

Far more powerful
Than that which, as matter does,
Passively receives impressed marks.
Yet there precedes,
To stir and move the powers of the mind,
A passion in the living body,
As when light strikes the eyes,
Or a cry in the ears resounds.
Then the mind’s power, excited,
Calls upon these forms it holds within
To similar motions,
Applies them to the marks received from without
And joins these images
To the forms hidden within.106

This is not just poetic license, since Boethius seems to confirm in the next
prose section that the affection of the sense organs by material things “stirs up
(excitet) the forms previously lying at rest within [sc. the mind].”107 The quali-
ties of material things affect the sense organs, and this constitutes a passion
that precedes the activity of the mind. But this passion is not a passion of the

105 Augustine, De musica, lib. 6, c. 5, n. 10, (ed.) Martin Jacobsson (Stockholm, 2002), 28, and
De Genesi ad litteram, c. 16, (ed.) Joseph Zycha, Corpus Scriptorum Ecclesiasticorum Lati-
norum 28 (Vienna, 1894), 402, ll. 5–15.
106 Boethius, De consolatione philosophiae, lib. 5, m. 4, ll. 26–40, (ed.) Moreschini, 152; trans.
Tester, 415 (modified). Quoted by James at Quodl. i, q. 12, 173, ll. 535–39.
107 Ibid., lib. 5, c. 5, n. 1, (ed.) Moreschini, 152 (trans. Tester, 417, modified): “[I]n perceiving
corporeal things, although the qualities presented from without affect the organs of
the senses, and although the activity of the active mind is preceded by the passion of the
body, which calls forth (provocet) upon itself the action of the mind and stirs up the forms
previously lying at rest within [sc. the mind]. … [T]he mind is not imprinted by that pas-
sion, but of its own power judges (iudicat) that passion.”
James of Viterbo’s Innatist Theory of Cognition 193

mind, but only of the body. It thus does not yet constitute a perception, but
merely provokes or calls forth (i.e., does not cause) a cognitive action of the
mind (a “judgement” on the passion of the body), which is carried out solely by
the power of the mind.
Thus, Boethius seems to have a thoroughly innatist theory of perception,
according to which sensations are mental events that consist in the activa-
tion of inborn mental forms at the occasion of a material modification of the
sense organs. At least, this is how James reads Boethius. And by “forms hid-
den within,” he explains, Boethius means precisely the idoneitates that James
is discussing.108
Is this reading plausible? A quick look at the positions held by some of the
late-antique Neoplatonists109 will convince us that this may be, in effect, what
Boethius wants to say. In the first place, Porphyry does declare that (1) the soul
contains the formal reasons of all things, and (2) if these formal reasons are
called forth by an affection of a sense organ, the soul has a sensation, with the
consequence that “no sensations come from the outside”; on the other hand,
if the soul directly looks into itself at the occasion of an image, it has an intel-
lection.110 James surely did not know this text, but there is an echo of it in
Nemesius of Emesa, whose On the Nature of Man might have been accessible
to James.111 Nemesius reports that according to Porphyry the soul contains all

108 Quodl. i, q. 12, 173, ll. 540–41.

109 Cf. Hadot, “Aspects de la théorie de perception chez les néoplatoniciens,” 37–55; Richard
Sorabji, The Philosophy of the Commentators (London and Ithaca, ny, 2005), vol. 1, 33–43.
110 Porphyry, Sentences, c. 16, (eds.) Luc Brisson et al. (Paris, 2005), vol. 1, 314–16, trans. John
Dillon, ibid., vol. 2, 799 (modified): “The soul contains the formal reasons (logoi) of all
things, but it acts in accordance with them (energei kat’autous) either by being called
forth (ekkaloumenē) by something else (hup’allou) to take them in hand (eis prokheirēsin),
or through redirecting itself (epistrephousa) towards them inwardly. If it is called forth
by something else in the direction of external objects, the soul produces (apodidōsin)
the sensations. If it has penetrated in itself towards the intellect, it finds itself among
intellections. Thus, no sensation comes from the outside (oute aisthesis exōthen), and no
intellection either. … In the same way that sensations do not occur for the living being
without affection (ouk aneu pathous) of the sense-organs, likewise intellections do not oc-
cur without the imagination, so that the following similitude obtains: in the same way the
imprint (tupos) accompanies (parakolouthēma) the living being in the sensing, likewise
the image, in the soul, follows (hepomenon) the intellection.” Note that Boethius’s provo-
cet in De consolatione philosophiae, lib. 5, c. 5 quoted above probably parallels Porphyry’s
ekkaloumenē.
111 Nemesius’s De natura hominis is falsely ascribed to Gregory of Nyssa in the translation of
Burgundio of Pisa. Despite the echo I suggest, I have not seen any direct reference to this
work in James’s Quodlibeta.
194 Solère

things, and that nothing is the (efficient) cause of seeing other than the soul
itself.112
Similarly, (Pseudo-)Simplicius says that the sensory faculty is “aroused from
within” when its organ is externally affected. The external thing acts by its form
on the organ, and in a way the faculty receives this formal activity. But the
faculty is not whitened or heated (for example), but is simply prompted to de-
velop its own cognitive activity according to the forms of whiteness or heat
that it already has, while the organ becomes something sensible, but not sen-
sitive.113 More precisely, the external thing imprints the organ with a form,114
and the soul then takes from its own inbred stock of forms (logoi: concepts or
formal reasons) the appropriate form that matches the form in the organ—for
instance, that of whiteness—and “projects” it in such a way that we have the

112 Nemesius, De natura hominis: Traduction de Burgundio de Pise, (eds.) Gérard Verbeke and
J.R. Moncho (Leiden, 1975), 75–76: “Porphyrius autem in libro De sensu neque conum (id
est pineam) neque idolum neque aliud quid ait causam esse videndi, sed animam ipsam
potientem visibilibus cognoscere se ipsam esse visibilia in eo quod anima continet omnia
quae sunt.”
113 (Pseudo-)Simplicius, In libros Aristotelis De anima commentaria, lib. 2, c. 5, (ed.) Michael
Hayduck, cag 11 (Berlin, 1882), 119, ll. 3–5, trans. Carlos Steel and J.P. Urmson in (Pseudo-)
Simplicius, On Aristotle’s “On the Soul” 2.5–12 (London and Ithaca, ny, 1997), 146: “For the
sensitive, being the lowest form of cognitive life, is … moved by external things, not as
inanimate things are, but being aroused from within, in order that the activity may also
be vital, and also it is dependent on the affection which primarily comes into the sense-
organ by external causation, even though aroused from within.” Ibid., lib. 2, c. 6, (ed.)
Hayduck, 125, ll. 21–23, trans. Steel and Urmson, 154: “[I]n being actual, it [i.e. the sense
faculty] stands still at the form (eidos) of the sensible object, not as being affected—for it
does not become white or hot—but in activity, not acting like efficient causes, but in judg-
ment and cognition.” Ibid., 166, l. 38–167, l. 9, trans. Steel and Urmson, 207: “The sense [the
sensory faculty] is affected by being aroused to its proper activity while the sense organ is
primarily affected. …[T]he composite thing [sc. the thing outside, matter and form] also
is active according to its form (eidos), and the sense receives the formal activity (eidētikē
energeia), not by being determined, e.g. being whitened or sounding or being sweetened
or being heated, nor being so affected, but as being cognitively active … it [i.e., the sense]
is said to be affected because, when the sense organ receives the activity from outside, it
is then itself aroused. For even if the body grows hot, the reception of the form does not
consist in becoming hot but in cognitive activity according to the form of heat, since as
being heated, the organ becomes something sensible, but not sensitive.”
114 In De anima, lib. 2, c. 6, (ed.) Hayduck, 166, ll. 17–19, trans. Steel and Urmson, 206: “It <the
sense> is consequently said to be receptive of forms and to be affected by what has color
or flavor or sound because its organ needs to be affected by these, having received an
appearance of the forms in them.”
James of Viterbo’s Innatist Theory of Cognition 195

perception of this particular property.115 The soul becomes “like” the perceived
objects, as Aristotle says, but not in a passive way. On the contrary, in a thor-
oughly active way the soul brings about in itself the similitude of the form that
affects an organ.116
Remarkably—given that he did not know (Pseudo-)Simplicius’s commen-
tary on the De anima—this is how James interprets the sparse indications in
the short passage of Boethius that he quotes.117 A double actuality obtains: that

115 In De anima, lib. 2, c. 5, (ed.) Hayduck, 126, ll. 3–16; trans. Steel and Urmson, 155: “This form
is not imposed like a seal on wax (which is not proper to life) … but it is projected from
within by the concept (logos) of sensible objects which is preconceived in the soul. … The
concept is one, but not according to the contracted unity in individual things, but as fit-
ting each of them in an appropriate way according to the formal unity (hē eidētikē) which
encompasses all individuals causally. For the soul perceives all particular white things
according to that one concept; for that which judges is the soul through the appropriate
contact of that which is known, and it is appropriate because the soul has in its substance
a preconception of the same property [that is perceived]. Therefore, the soul becomes
like its sensible objects not by receiving something from them but through being active
in accordance with the concept appropriate to them.” Cf. Priscian of Lydia, Metaphrasis
in Theophrastum, (ed.) Ingram Bywater, Supplementum Aristotelicum 1.2 (Berlin, 1906),
3, ll. 2–6, trans. Pamela Huby, On Theophrastus on Sense-Perception (London and Ithaca,
ny, 1997), 10 (modified): “It is necessary therefore for a logos of this kind to have been
projected if there is going to be perception; but it is projected as aroused and in relation
to the appropriate living form [i.e., form of the sensed object, which is in the irrational
soul], and by collaboration with the latter, as fitted to the likeness of the external form.”
Ibid., ll. 8–11, trans. Huby, 10: “So, then, the soul has the form of the perceived object by
the projecting of its logos, but not as receiving from it some shape or impression as from
a seal. For the awareness and the activity are from within and are connected with life. The
logos, then, is within the soul and of its substance <ousiōdēs>.”
116 In this consists the krisis (or the “judgement” that Boethius speaks of in the passage of
Consolatio, lib. 5, pr. 5 quoted earlier, note 106), that is, the “discernment” or “discrimina-
tion” accompanied by “awareness” that characterizes sensing as opposed to the mere pas-
sivity of the organs. By the summoning of an inner form, the mind identifies the nature
of that which has affected the organ in such and such a way. Thus, on the model of: “this
is green, not blue or yellow” (but in a preverbal way), we notice a property in a thing by
picking up its distinctive character. For our Neoplatonists, perception involves conceptual
activity. About the notion of krisis already involving for Aristotle an activity of the mind,
see Theodor Ebert, “Aristotle on What Is Done in Perceiving,” Zeitschrift für philosophische
Forschung 37 (1983): 181–98.
117 Quodl. i, q. 12, 173, ll. 540–62. Let us note, however, that independently of the innatism that
characterizes James, the idea that perception is not reducible to the modification of the
organ is expressed by Henry of Ghent, among many others. See Henry of Ghent, Quodl.
ii, q. 6, (ed.) Robert Wielockx, Opera Omnia 6 (Leuven, 1983), 31: “[Q]uamvis obiectum
per speciem suam agit imprimendo se organo, ex hoc tamen non vidit et audit homo
196 Solère

of the organ affected by the object, and that at which the sensory faculty ar-
rives from its own predisposition. The actuality of the organ is the form that is
imprinted by the external thing and is like an image of that thing. The actual-
ity of the soul’s faculty is the corresponding innate form (idoneitas, for James)
that has been awakened and completely actualized. This form is a similitude
of the form of the object in the organ. Because they are, so to speak, perfectly
superimposable, Boethius says that the mind “applies” the forms from within
“to the marks received from without,” and compounds or conjoins these im-
ages with the forms in the soul. Due to the conjunction of the faculty and the
organ, and to the similitude between the image of the object in the organ and
the form aroused in the faculty, there seems to be only one alteration and one
sensation. As a result of this blending, one sometimes names the alteration
of the organ “sensation” because this alteration is more obvious; in fact, how-
ever, only the change of the faculty is a sensation properly speaking. Not only
does Aristotle indulge in this approximation, but Augustine too, or so James
claims,118 sometimes calls “vision” the impression made by the object in the
eye, without distinguishing it from the operation of the faculty, which is less
apparent. Thus, the rigor of expression and the unambiguous innatism that
James adopts, together with the source to which he refers (Boethius), make
him much more a Neoplatonist than an Augustinian.

6.3.4 A Web of Predispositions

The faculties of sensibility (including the internal senses, with memory and
imagination) and of intellect are themselves “predispositions.” Sensibility is a
predisposition to grasp sensibles, and the intellect is a predisposition to grasp
what is intelligible.119 They are the most general aptitudes, but within each of

nisi vis visiva vel auditiva ad percipiendum obiectum per motum speciei se convertat ad
obiectum, secundum quod dicit Philosophus in libro De sensu et sensato: ‘Superlatum ad
oculos lumen non sentient, si accidit illos esse vehementer intendentes vel timentes vel
audientes multum strepitum.’” See also William of Auvergne, De anima, c. 5, pars 6, in
Opera omnia (Paris, 1674), vol. 2, suppl., 121: “Amplius, non fuit dubitatum usque ad tem-
pora ista quin actus videndi in duobus consistat, vel saltem illa ad hoc ut sit <corr. ex sic>
requirat, videlicet impressionem sive receptionem passionis quae fit in oculo visibili, et
cognitionem sive judicationem per quam cognoscitur res ipsa visibilis, et judicatur de ea
qualis coloris aut figurae sit; judicatio autem hujusmodi neque in oculo est neque oculi;
non enim judicat oculus de coloribus, neque dijudicat inter eos.”
118 James refers to the clause “ipsa forma quae ab eodem [sc. corpore] imprimitur sensui,
quae visio vocatur,” in Augustine, De Trinitate, lib. 11 (rather than lib. 12, as the text in
Ypma’s edition indicates), c. 2, (eds.) Mountain and Glorie, 335, ll. 18–19. James might be
following the exegesis of this passage in Henry of Ghent, Quodl. xi, q. 5, f. 451rX–Z.
119 Quodl. i, q. 7, 93, ll. 446–47.
James of Viterbo’s Innatist Theory of Cognition 197

them are contained, according to a logical order, predispositions of increas-

ingly narrow scope, as required by the different types of object with which
we come to be acquainted.120 Sensibility immediately ramifies into the more
specialized aptitudes of the different senses, external and internal, which are
each assigned a specific task; for instance, sight is specialized in detecting col-
ors, touch in detecting softness and hardness, and memory in grasping past
representations. Next, each sense contains further predispositions that are
specialized for dealing with the different objects that fall within the scope of
this sense; for instance, a predisposition of sight for seeing a particular color.
The mind moves across this natural order of predispositions, from the more
general to the more particular. Once completely actualized at the level of the
more general aptitudes, the mind can access the next level, the completeness
of which is still in potentiality.121
Where does the diversification of predispositions end? Do we need as many
predispositions as there are hues of a certain color? Is there a one-to-one corre-
spondence between predispositions and all the possible objects of the intellect
too? These questions cannot be answered: James specifies that the number of
predispositions we have is unknowable to us in this life, and is known only by
God, who created each soul with all these aptitudes.122 As regards the intellect,

120 James refers to Anselm of Canterbury, whose distinction among the instrument, the ap-
titude of the instrument, and the use of the instrument applies, he says, not only to the
will but also to the senses and to the intellect; see Quodl. i, q. 7, 86, ll. 213–21. As for the
will, Anselm distinguishes among: (1) the will as general instrumental faculty (instrumen-
tum); (2) the will as having certain “affections”—the affectio commodi and the affectio
iustitiae—which James gives as equivalent to aptitudines; and (3) the will as actually used.
James explains that will in sense 1 is what he calls a general idoneitas, will in sense 2 is
what he calls special idoneitates, and will in sense 3 is simply a particular volition. As for
knowledge, the instrument is the cognitive power itself, which can be considered as a
sort of general aptitude (the power of becoming all things, as Aristotle says). The apti-
tudes, properly speaking, of the instrument are more specialized potencies, rooted in the
general aptitude, and using the instrument is, of course, the act of a potency. So just as
the will modifies itself by its affections (the affectio iustitiae and the affectio commodi),
the intellect and the senses modify themselves by their aptitudes or predispositions. For
more on James’s adoption of Anselm’s affections see Stephen Dumont’s chapter.
121 Quodl. i, q. 7, 100, ll. 706–10: “Ex hoc autem quod movet se secundum illas, efficitur magis
idonea ut se moveat secundum affectiones posteriores, propter naturalem ordinem qui
est in ipsis affectionibus. Hoc itaque modo facta in actu quantum ad aliquid, facit se in
actu quantum ad aliud.”
122 Ibid., 93, ll. 449–63. Note that according to Priscian, the different particular whitenesses
are perceived thanks to a single innate form of white; see Priscian, Metaphrasis in Theo-
phrastum, (ed.) Bywater, 3, ll. 1–2.
198 Solère

however, James seems to hint that there is a special predisposition for each
intelligible content. This does not necessarily mean that differentiation and
specialization go down to the level of individuality (for instance a rhombus
with these angles, versus a rhombus with other angles); nor does it entail that
we have an actual infinity of predispositions, since nothing tells us that we
are created capable of knowing an infinite number of things.123 We might just
have a very large number of predispositions, so large that we cannot know how
many we have.
Moreover, even having a very large number of predispositions might be un-
necessary. Here again, a comparison with Descartes is useful. At the beginning
of the Fifth Meditation, Descartes writes that he apperceives in himself “count-
less” particular truths about shapes, number, motion, and the like, as if he were
recalling them rather than learning them. Shortly after, he repeats that he finds
in himself “countless” ideas that he has not fabricated, which have “their own
true and immutable natures,” and cannot have entered his mind through the
senses.124 On the other hand, he states elsewhere that there are “very few” of
what he calls the “primitive notions”: the most general ideas (“being, number,
duration, etc.”), the idea of extension (“which entails the notions of shape and
motion”), the idea of thought, and the idea of the union of the soul and the
body. Descartes says of these primitive notions that they “are as it were the
pattern on the basis of which we form all our other conceptions.”125 Therefore,
the idea of a triangle, which in the Fifth Meditation is presented as an innate
idea, is nonetheless derived from the primitive notions of extension and shape
(limit of extension) when they are modalized in a certain way. As these primi-
tive notions can be modalized in innumerable other ways, we can form count-
less ideas of other geometrical figures, which can also be called innate because
they are derived from an inborn stock.126 Regarding sensations, Descartes goes
so far as to say in the Comments on a Certain Broadsheet that even ideas such as
pains, colors, sounds, and the like are innate.127 The soul, somehow prompted

123 In fact, for James there is at least one being we are not naturally capable of knowing,
namely, God. Consequently, there is no innate predisposition to know God, contrary to
Descartes’s thesis. See Quodl. i, q. 7, 104, ll. 242–44: “Non enim in intellectu creato est ha-
bilitas naturaliter indita ad intelligendum divinam essentiam secundum se. Ideo indiget
habilitate supernaturaliter infusa.”
124 at 7, 64–65 (csm 2, 44–45).
125 Descartes, Letter to Princess Elisabeth, 21 May 1643, at 3, 665 (csm 3, 218).
126 Cf. Leibniz, Nouveaux essais, lib. 1, c. 1, 74: “[T]outes les vérités qu’on peut tirer des con-
naissances innées primitives se peuvent encore appeler innées, parce que l’esprit peut les
tirer de son propre fonds.”
127 at 8-B, 359 (csm 1, 304).
James of Viterbo’s Innatist Theory of Cognition 199

by the motions and figures that material things produce in the organs of our
body, does not represent them as they are, but as qualia that have nothing in
common with these motions and figures (as the latter are properties of exten-
sion), except the law-like manner in which they are correlated with them. Con-
sequently, the soul must, at the occasion of modifications of extension in the
body, make from its own substance the sensory ideas. These ideas are therefore
called innate because they are produced by the soul itself. This conclusion is in
line with the view defended above that innate ideas are not full-fledged ideas
that are pre-contained in the mind and are waiting to be illuminated by the
beam of consciousness, but rather schemas that enable us to form complete
mental events (conceptions or perceptions) when so required. As a result, even
though sensory representations such as color perceptions are innate, Descartes
does not have to suppose that we have as many innate particular ideas as all
the particular color perceptions we can have. It is enough that we are by nature
able to combine certain fundamental schemas or aptitudes.
James does not seem to have given as much thought as Descartes to this
question, but we see that he was not committed in principle to the thesis that
one predisposition is required for the perception of this nuance of white and
another for the perception of that nuance, and one for the conception of a
rhombus with these angles and another for the conception of a rhombus with
different angles. He was probably committed, however, to the thesis that we
need one predisposition to think of a rhombus and another one to think of a
pentagon, still another to think of a hexagon, and so on, rather than viewing
“rhombus,” “pentagon,” “hexagon,” and so on, as different ways of limiting the
fundamental idea of extension, as Descartes does.128

6.4 James in Context

No doubt, James’s position was unusual in his day, given the predominance
of the Aristotelian-empiricist model. However, it was not totally unheard of.
True, very few authors share James’s full-blown innatism, as we shall see. But in
fact, most medieval authors, if not all, accept some innateness in our psychic
­apparatus. This is particularly important to them with respect to practical cog-
nition, since they endorse the view that natural law is natively inscribed in our

128 The most prominent contemporary defender of innatism, Jerry Fodor, thinks that the
composition of a small number of innate concepts or principles would not account for
experimental data. He maintains that a large stock of these is required before any experi-
ence. See Côté, “Introduction,” in Jacques de Viterbe: L’âme, l’intellect et la volonté, 21, n. 1.
200 Solère

minds and that the fundamental principles of ethics are always and by nature
accessible to us, even though they are ignored more often than not. A similar
requirement applies to theoretical cognition too.

6.4.1 Thomas Aquinas and the Notion of Innate Habitus

As Thomas Aquinas points out, we need an absolute starting point for our
acquisition of knowledge, under pain of an infinite regress. Demonstrations
must depend on principles that are self-evident and non-demonstrable.129
Thus, even an Aristotelian-minded author such as Aquinas admits that logical
axioms (dignitates) and the most general and primitive notions such as the
notions of being or oneness are innate.130 He too compares them to seminal
reasons in which all the possible conclusions we can draw are contained in po-
tentiality.131 These foundational cognitions are not known by a special faculty,

129 Thomas Aquinas, Super Boetium de Trinitate, q. 6, a. 4, 170, ll. 96–111. See also Scriptum
super Sent., lib. 2, d. 24, q. 2, a. 3, (ed.) Pierre Mandonnet (Paris, 1929), 610; and Expo-
sitio libri Posteriorum, lib. 2, c. 20, 243b–44a, ll. 63–69: “[I]mpossibile est enim aliquid
addiscere nisi <ex> praeexistenti cognitione, sicut etiam supra circa demonstrationem
diximus. Immediata autem principia ideo ex praeexistenti cognitione addiscere non pos-
sumus, quia praeexistens cognitio est certior, cum sit causa certitudinis his quae per eam
innotescunt.”
130 Quaestiones disputatae de veritate, q. 11, a. 1, corp., 350b–51a, ll. 258–79: “[D]icendum est
de scientiae acquisitione quod praeexistunt in nobis quaedam scientiarum semina, scili-
cet primae conceptiones intellectus quae statim lumine intellectus agentis cognoscuntur
per species a sensibilibus abstractas, sive sint complexa sicut dignitates, sive incomplexa
sicut ratio entis et unius et huiusmodi quae statim intellectus apprehendit; in istis autem
principiis universalibus omnia sequentia includuntur, sicut in quibusdam rationibus
seminalibus: quando ergo ex istis universalibus cognitionibus mens educitur ut actu
cognoscat particularia quae prius in universali et quasi in potentia cognoscebantur, tunc
aliquis dicitur scientiam acquirere.” See also Quaestiones disputatae de virtutibus, q. un.,
a. 8, corp., in Quaestiones disputatae, vol. 2, (eds.) P. Bazzi et al. (Turin and Rome, 1965),
727b–28a. All demonstrations of all sciences depend on indemonstrable and self-evident
logical principles, and all concepts and definitions of all sciences depend on the irreduc-
ible and therefore intuitively cognized concept of being or its transcendental equivalents;
see Super Boetium de Trinitate, q. 6, a. 4, corp., 170, ll. 112–22.
131 Quaestiones disputatae de veritate, q. 11, a. 1, corp., 350b–51a, ll. 258–79; and a. 3, corp., 359a,
ll. 242–48; Quodlibet viii, q. 2, a. 2, corp., 58, ll. 46–50. See also Quaestiones disputatae de
veritate, q. 10, a. 6, corp., 313a, ll. 213–23: “Et sic etiam in lumine intellectus agentis nobis est
quodammodo originaliter omnis scientia indita mediantibus universalibus conceptioni-
bus, quae statim lumine intellectus agentis cognoscuntur, per quas sicut per universalia
principia iudicamus de aliis et ea praecognoscimus in ipsis, ut secundum hoc etiam illa
opinio veritatem habeat quae ponit nos ea quae addiscimus, ante in notitia habuisse.”
James of Viterbo’s Innatist Theory of Cognition 201

but, thanks to “the light of the agent intellect,”132 by the intellect itself. More
precisely, they are known through a habitus of the intellect, called the “intel-
lection of the principles,”133 which is caused by the agent intellect and is re-
ceived in the possible intellect.134 Moreover, Aquinas calls this intellection of
the principles an “innate habitus” or a “natural habitus”135—and as we saw, this

132 Scriptum super Sent., prol., q. 1, a. 3, qc. 2, ad 3, (ed.) Pierre Mandonnet (Paris, 1929), 14;
Scriptum super Sent., lib. 2, d. 3, q. 1, a. 6, ad 2, (ed.) Mandonnet, 105–06; d. 24, q. 2, a. 3,
corp., (ed.) Mandonnet, 610.
133 st i, q. 79, a. 12, corp., 279b–80a: “Prima autem principia speculabilium nobis naturali-
ter indita, non pertinent ad aliquam specialem potentiam; sed ad quendam specialem
habitum, qui dicitur intellectus principiorum.” Scriptum super Sent., lib. 3, d. 35, q. 2, a. 2,
qc. 1, corp., (ed.) Marie-Fabien Moos (Paris, 1933), 1198: “Unde si aliqua sunt quae statim
sine discursu rationis apprehendantur, horum non dicitur esse ratio, sed intellectus; sicut
principia prima, quae quisque statim probat audita. Primo ergo modo intellectus potentia
est; sed hoc modo accipiendo, habitus principiorum dicitur.” Aquinas rejects the identifi-
cation of the intellectus principiorum with the agent intellect itself, in contrast with some
of his predecessors who proposed this on the basis of some declarations of Aristotle; cf.
the anonymous Questiones in libros de anima, in Ein anonymer Aristoteleskommentar des
xiii. Jahrhunderts, (ed.) Joachim Vennebusch (Paderborn, 1963), 296. According to Aqui-
nas, if the agent intellect itself is called by Aristotle a habitus it is inasmuch as habitus is
contrasted with privation and potentiality and connotes actuality, as any form or nature
does. Since the agent intellect is opposed to the possible intellect, which is in potentiality,
it can be called habitus, exactly as light is also named habitus because it renders the col-
ors actual. See Aquinas, Sentencia libri de anima, lib. 3, c. 4, 219a, ll. 26–42: “Dicendum est
ergo, quod habitus, sic accipitur secundum quod philosophus frequenter consuevit nomi-
nare omnem formam et naturam habitum, prout habitus distinguitur contra privationem
et potentiam, ut sic per hoc quod nominat eum habitum distinguat eum ab intellectu
possibili, qui est potentia. Unde dicit quod est habitus, ut lumen, quod quodammodo
facit colores existentes in potentia, esse actu colores.” Cf. Giles of Rome, Quodl. vi, q. 24,
433a–b. It is not a habitus in a strict sense, that is to say, a quality that belongs to the first
species in the category of quality; see Aquinas, Summa contra Gentiles (=scg), lib. 2, c. 78,
494a, ll. 1–14.
134 st i–ii, q. 53, a. 1, corp., 337b. In their turn, these fundamental cognitions are to the agent
intellect, for the expansion of our knowledge, what tools are to an artisan; see Quaestiones
disputatae de veritate, q. 11, a. 3, corp., 359a, ll. 236–41. As they are directly caused by the
agent intellect, they are available to all human beings and can never be misconstrued or
lost. On the contrary, subordinated knowledge is acquired by discursive reason (abstrac-
tion by the agent intellect, formation of propositions and syllogism), and is exposed to
error and to forgetting; see again st i–ii, q. 53, a. 1, corp.
135 Scriptum super Sent., lib. 2, d. 24, q. 1, a. 1, ad 3, (ed.) Mandonnet, 591; q. 2, a. 3, corp. and ad 5,
610–11; Scriptum super Sent., lib. 3, d. 23, q. 3, a. 2, ad 1, (ed.) Moos, 748; Quaestiones dispu-
tatae de veritate, q. 16, a. 1, corp., 504b, ll. 220–45; st i, q. 79, a. 12, corp., 279b; st i–ii, q. 51,
a. 1, corp., 325a–b.
202 Solère

is exactly how James names his idoneitates. Aquinas and James thus concur
to the extent that both acknowledge in the mind certain inbuilt aptitudes for
cognitive operations.
The notion of innate habitus sounds like an oxymoron if we are thinking of
the usual account of habitus as habits (for instance, virtues) that are formed by
repeatedly performing an act. But this is not the most fundamental meaning
of the term habitus. Let us look at Aquinas’s explanations of this notion to see
why. By the same token, we will discover what the difference is between what
he recognizes to be innate and what James does—beyond the obvious fact that
Aquinas limits innate knowledge to a few axioms and concepts, while James,
as we saw, accepts a very large number of innate cognitive predispositions.
In the first place, why call this ability to grasp the first principles a habitus?
One might think it is because the intellect “has” these principles at its dispos-
al, given that the noun habitus is often understood as deriving from the verb
­habere (“to have”). Aquinas acknowledges that this is one of the senses of the
term. In this sense of “possession,” a habitus is either one of the postpraedica-
menta—that is, properties that are found in all or several of the ten categories
of being—or, in case there is a sort of action of the possessor of the habitus,
it falls into the category of “having.” However, Aquinas continues, the noun
habitus also refers to the verb se habere (“to be disposed,” in a broad sense)136
towards a thing, and this thing can be either oneself, that is, the possessor of
the habitus, or another thing (se habere in seipso, vel ad aliquid aliud). In the
latter sense, a habitus belongs to the category of quality, since a disposition is
grounded in a quality.137 Now, it is the sense of “being disposed” rather than the
sense of “possession” that applies to the innate knowledge of first principles.138

136 I specify “in a broad sense” in order to avoid confusion with dispositio (diathesis) in the
narrow sense of what can be easily changed (e.g., health), as opposed to habitus (hexis)
(e.g., virtue or science), which are stable; see Aristotle, Categories 8, 8b27–9a13. In the
broad sense, disposition is the genus of habitus (cf. Aristotle, Metaphysics 5.20, 1002b10–
11); in the narrow sense, it is a species opposed to the species of habitus with respect to
stability (st i–ii, q. 49, a. 2, ad 3, 311b). In other passages, Aquinas confirms that the habi-
tus of the first principles can never be lost. See his Scriptum super Sent., lib. 2, d. 24, q. 2, a.
3, ad 5, 611. See also st i–ii, q. 53, a. 1, corp., 337b: “Unde si aliquis habitus sit in intellectu
possibili immediate ab intellectu agente causatus, talis habitus est incorruptibilis et per
se et per accidens. Huiusmodi autem sunt habitus primorum principiorum, tam specula-
bilium quam practicorum, qui nulla oblivione vel deceptione corrumpi possunt.”
137 st i–ii, q. 49, a. 1, corp., 309a–b. Cf. Aristotle, Metaphysics 5.20, 1002b4–14. Note that Giles
of Rome too says that in a broad sense a habitus is a disposition to an act; see Giles of
Rome, Quodl. ii, q. 23, 110b.
138 st i–ii, q. 49, a. 1, corp., 309a–b.
James of Viterbo’s Innatist Theory of Cognition 203

The intellectus principiorum is a habitus because it is a natural disposition of

the intellect to grasp and recognize immediately the self-evidence of the first
principles. The intellect “has” this ability, if you will,139 but here “to have” does
not entail the idea of possession by acquisition, as in the case of acquiring a
virtuous habit. Rather, this cognitive habitus is immediately at hand; the in-
tellect does not have to acquire by repetition the truth of the first principles.
Thus, there is nothing self-contradictory in the notion of innate habitus, and to
this extent James does not innovate when he uses this expression.
However, Aquinas’s “habitus” is a translation of Aristotle’s “hexis,”140 and
a hexis belongs to the first species of the category of quality,141 whereas Sim-
plicius’s and James’s epitēdeiotēs/idoneitas belongs, as we saw, to the second
species and are translations of Aristotle’s “natural dunameis.” Aquinas is well
aware that Simplicius (in the Latin translation) gives the name idoneitates to
aptitudes that are not yet perfected and are only at an early stage of the devel-
opment of their potentiality, such as the rudiments of a science or of a virtue.
But for Aquinas, only the aptitudes that are fully developed and consist in the
possession of a form, such as a complete knowledge or a perfect virtue, are
habitus.142 Thus, Aquinas would not call any of the natural, incomplete predis-
positions that James has in view a habitus.
Furthermore, according to Aquinas, the development of our potentiality for
knowing the truth of first principles requires content derived from sensible
experience. In other words, our intellect cannot reach the habitus of the princi-
ples by itself. All the “first conceptions,” whether they are non-complex, primi-
tive notions or logical axioms, are known by species that are abstracted from
empirical objects.143 They are immediately recognized as true, but the agent
intellect still needs sense data to operate on.
As for primitive notions, Aquinas is not very explicit about how this works,
but we may suppose that, contrary to specific notions, which require a long
and complicated process of abstraction, the intellect gets at very general no-
tions (such as being) right away because it has the natural disposition to do so
as soon as an object is presented to it. In fact, we cannot understand anything

139 Cf. Simplicius, In Categorias, (ed.) Kalbfleisch, 164, ll. 17–18, trans. Fleet, 18: “[T]he soul has
the state (hexis) and condition (diathesis) just as the body has the cloak.”
140 See st i–ii, q. 49, a. 2, ad 3, 311b.
141 Aristotle, Categories 8, 8b26–27.
142 st i–ii, q. 49, a. 2, ad 3, 311b.
143 See Quaestiones disputatae de veritate, q. 11, a. 1, corp., 350b, ll. 267–72: “[P]rimae concep-
tiones intellectus quae statim lumine intellectus agentis cognoscuntur per species a sen-
sibilibus abstractas, sive sint complexa sicut dignitates, sive incomplexa sicut ratio entis
et unius et huiusmodi quae statim intellectus apprehendit.”
204 Solère

if it is not first grasped as a being (ens); thus, being is the natural and first ob-
ject of our intellect.144 This means that it is innate to recognize immediately
any object of our understanding as, first of all, some kind of being, whereas
it is not innate to recognize a dolphin as a mammal rather than as a fish. Our
intellect does not have to work up the notion of being from previous less gen-
eral notions, as when we painstakingly elaborate the notion of mammal by
climbing up the Porphyrian tree from lower branches. Rather, the agent in-
tellect produces the notion of being directly, even though it is the most gen-
eral notion, and since this notion is not reducible to any other concept it is
understood through itself alone. What is innate is the specific aptitude of the
intellect to immediately abstract this species and form this conception. Never-
theless, because our soul is an embodied substantial form, this happens only if
an empirical object is presented to us, since it is in the nature of our intellect
to be acquainted only with this type of being, and our acquaintance with it
is necessarily through the intermediary of the senses.145 Since the intelligible
species that brings about the notion of being is extracted from experience,
the content of this notion is contingent on what we are naturally equipped to
know, namely, material beings.
As for the first principles that are propositional—that is, the logical axioms
—Aquinas makes clear that the realization of their self-evident truth presup-
poses the actual cognition of the terms included in these propositions.146 For

144 st i, q. 5, a. 2, corp., 58a: “Primo autem in conceptione intellectus est ens: quia secun-
dum hoc unumquodque cognoscibile est, inquantum est actu. … Unde ens est proprium
obiectum intellectus; et sic est primum intelligibile sicut sonus est primum audibile.”
scg, lib. 2, c. 83, 523a, ll. 26–34: “Intellectus igitur cum sit una vis, est eius unum naturale
obiectum, cuius per se et naturaliter cognitionem habet. Hoc autem oportet esse id sub
quo comprehenduntur omnia ab intellectu cognita: sicut sub colore comprehenduntur
omnes colores, qui sunt per se visibiles. Quod non est aliud quam ens. Naturaliter igitur
intellectus noster cognoscit ens, et ea quae sunt per se entis inquantum huiusmodi.” Cf.
In Metaphysicam Aristotelis, lib. 4, c. 6, n. 605, (ed.) M.-R. Cathala (Turin, 1935), 202.
145 scg, lib. 2, c. 83, 523a, ll. 42–44: “Sed ipsorum principiorum cognitio in nobis ex sensibili-
bus causatur.” st i, q. 87, a. 3, ad 1, 361b: “Nec primum obiectum intellectus nostri secun-
dum praesentem statum est quodlibet ens et verum, sed ens et verum consideratum in
rebus materialibus, ex quibus in cognitionem omnium aliorum devenit.” See also ibid.,
q. 12, a. 4, corp., 120b–21a ; and q. 84, a. 7, corp., 325a–b.
146 Sentencia libri de anima, lib. 3, c. 4, 219a, ll. 29–32: “[I]ntellectus, qui est habitus principio-
rum, praesupponit aliqua iam intellecta in actu: scilicet terminos principiorum, per quo-
rum intelligentiam cognoscimus principia.” Quaestiones disputatae de veritate, q. 1, a. 12
corp., 35b, ll. 39–40: “Prima principia, quae cognoscimus dum terminos cognoscimus.”
In fact, all logical axioms, for instance the principle of non-contradiction, are ultimately
founded on the cognition of the primitive notion of being; see scg, lib. 2, c. 83, 523a, ll.
James of Viterbo’s Innatist Theory of Cognition 205

instance, as soon as we understand what parts and wholes are, it is immediately

evident that the whole is bigger than any of its parts. However, we cannot un-
derstand what parts and wholes are if we are not first acquainted with empiri-
cal tokens from which we can abstract these notions.147 Once we have acquired
these materials, so to speak, we intuit what the relation between them is, but
the occasion and the content of this innate cognition must be empirically pro-
vided. What is innate is the understanding that a whole is bigger than a part
of the whole; what is not innate but acquired from the senses, and therefore
from external objects, is the notion of whole and the notion of part. Admittedly,
because the disposition to understand the part-whole relation is innate, this
habitus can be called natural, as we have seen. But in fact, according to Aqui-
nas, there is in us no disposition to operations148 that is solely due to our na-
ture (contrary to angels for instance, who do have an intellectual cognition that
is due exclusively to their own nature, that is, to the innate intelligible species
with which they are endowed). In human beings, every natural habitus towards
an operation must be complemented by an extrinsic principle (such as empiri-
cal information, in the case at hand).149
Thus, it is clear that, besides the sheer number of cognitive predispositions
that James allows and the fact that they extend far beyond mere logical axioms

34–36: “[I]n qua cognitione [sc. rationis entis] fundatur primorum principiorum notitia,
ut non esse simul affirmare et negare, et alia huiusmodi.” Furthermore, as any proposi-
tion the predicate of which is included in the concept of the subject is immediately self-
evident, and as the notion of being is analytically contained in the concept of any thing
whatsoever, any proposition that has being (or a transcendental equivalent) for its predi-
cate is immediately self-evident; see Expositio libri Posteriorum, lib. 1, c. 5, 25a, ll. 116–27.
147 See Expositio libri Posteriorum, lib. 2, c. 20, 245b, ll. 206–13; 246b, ll. 281–87. This abstrac-
tion is of course the role of the agent intellect (246a, ll. 223–35). That is why the agent
intellect cannot be identified as the habitus principiorum (cf. note 133 above); rather, it is a
condition for this habitus. See Quaestiones disputatae de anima, q. 5, corp., 43b, ll. 250–60:
“Quidam vero crediderunt intellectum agentem non esse aliud quam habitum principi-
orum indemonstrabilium in nobis. Sed hoc esse non potest, quia etiam ipsa principia
indemonstrabilia cognoscimus abstrahendo a singularibus, ut docet Philosophus in fine
Posteriorum. Unde oportet praeexistere intellectum agentem habitui principiorum sicut
causam ipsius; quia vero principia comparantur ad intellectum agentem ut instrumenta
quaedam eius, quia per ea, facit alia intelligibilia actu.”
148 Note, however, that this is not true of dispositions to forms and conditions.
149 Scriptum super Sent., lib. 3, d. 23, q. 3, a. 2, ad 1, (ed.) Moos, 748: “Naturalis autem habitus,
sicut intellectus principiorum, indiget ut cognitio determinetur per sensum.” Ibid., ad 2:
“[H]abitus principiorum dicitur acquiri per sensum quantum ad distinctionem principi-
orum, non quantum ad lumen quo principia cognoscuntur.” See also Super Boetium de
Trinitate, q. 6, a. 4, corp., 170b, ll. 123–35.
206 Solère

and very general notions, his very conception of innate cognition is quite dif-
ferent from Aquinas’s. For James (as for Leibniz), sensory experience may be
a necessary condition for the inbuilt schemes to be activated, but it does not
supply the content (to be abstracted) of these schemes. Instead, the intelligible
content is pre-contained in the idoneitates.

6.4.2 Giles of Rome’s Empiricism

Are there varieties of medieval innatism more akin to James’s theory? There
are, but let us first dismiss the erroneous claim that the way was paved for
James by Giles of Rome. First, Giles does not think that the agent intellect is the
“habitus of principles.”150 In fact, in his Expositio super libros de anima, Giles
sticks to Aquinas’s view and maintains the exact opposite: our knowledge of
the first principles is called “innate” not because they are pre-contained in
the intellect, but because we immediately recognize their truth thanks to the
light of the agent intellect.151 Second, Giles does not see the agent intellect as
“a quasi-Avicennian storehouse of pre-empirical knowledge and rules of un-
derstanding, conceived as complete potential knowledge,” and does not hold
a “dispositional innatism” which James of Viterbo then radicalizes.152 When
Giles says that the agent intellect contains intelligible species “virtually,” he
opposes this to containing them “potentially” and means simply that the agent
intellect is the virtus by which the species are abstracted from the phantasms

150 Contrary to the contention of Leen Spruit, “Species Intelligibilis”: From Perception to
Knowledge (Leiden, 1994–1995), vol. 1, 195; cf. ibid., vol. 2, 379. See rather Valeria Sorge,
“L’astrazione nella gnoseologia di Egidio Romano,” Rivista di filosofia neo-scolastica 72
(1980): 670–73.
151 Giles of Rome, Expositio super libros de anima (Venice, 1500), f. 69rb–va: “[O]portet quod
ipsa principia recipiant actualitatem per lumen intellectus agentis, et fiant intelligibilia
per tale lumen. Idem est ergo quod aliqua principia dicuntur nobis naturaliter cognita.
Non quod intellectus in sui primordio habeat in se aliquid naturaliter scriptum, vel ha-
beat habitum principiorum naturaliter innatum; sed quia ad cognitionem principiorum
non indigemus persuasione vel ratione, sed statim principiis assentimus; … quia solum
lumen intellectus agentis sufficit ad cognitionem principiorum, cum illud lumen sit no-
bis naturaliter inditum, dicuntur quodammodo nobis principia naturaliter nota. Cum
ergo quaeritur utrum intellectus agens sit ille intellectus qui est habitus principiorum,
patet quod non; immo, intellectus qui est habitus principiorum praesupponit intellectum
agentem cum comparetur ad ipsum tanquam effectus ad causam.” Cf. Spruit, “Species In-
telligibilis,” vol. 1, 195, n. 94.
152 Respectively Zdzisław Kuksewicz, “Criticisms of Aristotelian Psychology and the Augus-
tinian-Aristotelian Synthesis,” in The Cambridge History of Later Medieval Philosophy,
(eds.) Norman Kretzmann et al. (Cambridge, 1982), 623; and Spruit, “Species Intelligibilis,”
vol. 1, 195, n. 95 (see however ibid., vol. 2, 379, n. 125).
James of Viterbo’s Innatist Theory of Cognition 207

and actualized in the possible intellect. Giles discusses Aristotle’s statement

that the intellect is the “form of forms.”153 He asks which of the two intellects
Aristotle is talking about, and concludes that, because of the substantial unity
of the soul, both the agent intellect and the possible intellect are the form of
all forms, but in different ways: the agent intellect inasmuch as it makes all
forms intelligible, the possible intellect inasmuch as it becomes these forms.154
In his commentary on the Liber de causis, where he considers to what extent
the human mind is an intelligible being when it possesses no intelligible con-
tent, Giles’s view is identical: the human mind is by nature virtually among
the intelligibles because it innately has an agent intellect by virtue of which it
acquires actual knowledge.155
Nothing here prefigures James’s content-based innatism. On the contrary,
Giles upholds the Aristotelian principle that, unlike pure (i.e., angelic) intelli-
gences, all our cognitive contents come from outside, that is to say, from things
that are not us.156 On the other hand, Giles writes in his Quodlibet v, ques-

153 Aristotle, De anima 3.8, 432a1–2.

154 Giles of Rome, Expositio super libros de anima, f. 74va–b: “Intellectus agens est omnes spe-
cies intelligibiles virtualiter in agendo, quia ipse est omnia facere. Sed intellectus possibi-
lis est omnes species intelligibiles potentialiter in suscipiendo, quia ipse est omnia fieri.
… Sic in eadem substantia animae radicantur intellectus possibilis et intellectus agens ita
quod per intellectum possibilem anima suscipit omnes species intelligibiles, et est omnes
species tales fieri, sed per intellectum agentem irradiat super fantasmata et est omnes
species facere. Uterque ergo intellectus potest dici species specierum, quia uterque intel-
lectus est quodammodo omnes species, aliter tamen et aliter.”
155 Giles of Rome, Opus super authorem de causis (Venice, 1550), f. 63vI: “Anima ergo humana
… est tamen virtualiter actu in genere intelligibilium, quia in se habet intellectum agen-
tem innatum per quem est omnia intelligibilia facere … ita quod ante acquisitionem
scientiae, in genere intelligibilium ratione intellectus agentis est virtualiter tamen, post
scientiam vero acquisitam et post species intelligibiles receptas in intellectu possibili est
actu in genere intelligibilium, non solum virtualiter propter intellectum agentem, sed eti-
am formaliter per receptionem specierum.” Cf. Antoine Côté, “La critique de la doctrine
de l’abstraction de Jacques de Viterbe,” Medioevo 38 (2013): 253–54.
156 Giles of Rome, Expositio super libros de anima, f. 67va: “[Intellectus noster] fit in actu re-
cipiendo species a fantasmatibus, et recipiendo species aliorum; et quia intelligit se et
alia ut fit in actu per species aliorum, ergo intelligit se et alia per species aliorum.” Ibid.,
65va: “[Q]uia intellectus in ipsa essentia animae fundatur, ideo dicit [Aristoteles] ani-
mam quantum ad partem intellectivam locum esse specierum. Et subdit quod huiusmodi
species intelligibiles quarum dicit esse locus anima non est locus earum in actu, sed in
potentia, quia quantum est de se non habet illas species innatas.” Opus super authorem
de causis, f. 37rF: “Intellectus ergo nostri non sunt pleni formis, sed nascuntur sicut tabula
rasa in qua nihil est pictum, et a phantasmatibus in virtute luminis intellectus agentis
continuae recipiunt novas species sive novas formas intelligibiles; sed intelligentiae sunt
208 Solère

tion 21 that the faculty of imagination does not send intelligible species to the
possible intellect, but rather, thanks to the agent intellect, causes the possible
intellect, which is in itself in potentiality to being informed by a form, to be
informed by it in actuality.157 As a result, one can say that in a certain way the
intelligible species already was in the possible intellect and is educed from its
passive potentiality. But Giles immediately specifies that nothing of this spe-
cies is in the intellect before it is educed, just as nothing of a form exists in
matter before it is brought about there. Giles’s remark is just an application of
the principle that causation does not consist in a migration of a form from the
agent to the patient, but in the actualization of a potentiality in the patient.

6.4.3 Innateness in Philip the Chancellor and Some Anonymous Authors

Rather than looking towards James’s immediate predecessor in the Augustin-
ian order, we should turn to other thinkers, who do maintain that, although
the intellect needs a sensory occasion to actualize its habitus, it does not have
to be provided with content of empirical origin, since it natively possesses
in itself all the intelligible species. In fact, perhaps because of the influence
of the Liber de causis—which, being impregnated with Neoplatonic meta-
physics, asserts that all intelligences are by nature replete with forms158—a
number of authors towards the middle of the 13th century concede to hu-
man minds, just as much as to angelic minds, the possibility of innate cog-
nition.159 Philip the Chancellor, who wrote his Summa de bono in the 1220s

plenae formis, quia non intelligunt per species acquisitas sed per innatas.” Ibid., f. 83rN:
“Nam intelligentiae intelligunt per species innatas et sunt plenae formis. Intellectus vero
noster intelligit per species a rebus acceptas et nascitur sicut tabula rasa.”
157 Giles of Rome, Quodlibet v, q. 21, 331a.
158 Liber de causis, prop. 9 (or 10 according to an alternate numbering), (eds.) Pierre Magnard
et al. (Paris, 1990), 56: “Omnis intelligentia plena est formis.”
159 I do not count William of Auvergne among these authors. True, innate habitus play a cru-
cial role in his epistemology; see Ernest A. Moody, “William of Auvergne and His Treatise
De Anima,” in idem, Studies in Medieval Philosophy, Science, and Logic (Berkeley, 1975),
59–82; Steven P. Marrone, William of Auvergne and Robert Grosseteste: New Ideas of Truth
in the Early Thirteenth Century (Princeton, 1983), 117–20; Jean-Baptiste Brenet, “Introduc-
tion,” in Guillaume d’Auvergne, De l’âme (vii, 1–9) (Paris, 1998), 28–31 and 54–64. However,
they seem to be limited, at least in the present human condition, to first notions and
principles. As for other concepts, William seems to say that they are produced by the gen-
erative resources of the intellect rather than being the actualization of innate blueprints.
See William of Auvergne, De anima, c. 5, pars 7, 122: “[M]anifestum est quod intellectum
nostrum, vel habitum, vel dispositionem qui solertia dicitur potentem esse formare apud
semetipsum vel in semetipso formas intelligibiles. … Quare manifestum est apud nos et
in nobis intellectum esse non solum materialem receptibilem formarum intelligibilium,
James of Viterbo’s Innatist Theory of Cognition 209

and 1230s, says that whereas the human agent intellect abstracts species from
phantasms when it turns toward inferior beings, it can have another type of
operation by which it understands thanks to innate forms.160 Similarly, around
1235 the anonymous author of a set of lectures on the Ethica vetus and the
Ethica nova speaks of an innate habitus of cognition in the human agent
intellect.161
However, all of this is only a theoretical possibility and describes the func-
tioning of the human mind in the uncorrupted state of pure nature, as created
by God paradigmatically in Adam. Since then, however, the ravages of sin have
damaged human souls so much that in our present condition our understand-
ing no longer works that way. We now have to turn to painstaking empirical
learning to grope our way towards truth. How much of the initial innate cogni-
tion is left and to what extent we can use it are two different questions which
can be answered in different ways. The anonymous commentator on the De
anima (c.1260) edited by Vennebusch is a maximalist regarding the first issue
and a minimalist regarding the second, resulting in a paradoxical position apt-
ly described by Leen Spruit as “inoperative innatism.”162 This author believes
that the intellect still possesses intelligible models (exemplaria) of all things,
and would have access to them if it existed separate from the body; but given
that it is now obfuscated by the body’s “mass of flesh,” it has to abstract species
from the phantasms (as opposed to discovering them in itself on the occasion

sed etiam effectivum et generativum earum apud semetipsum, vel in semetipso, hoc dicit
unus ex egregiis Christianorum gentis theologis. Ego vero dedi tibi exemplum super hoc
in aranea quae ex concussione unius fili telae suae seu retiaculi, imaginatur casum mus-
cae, et praedam, sive escam, sibi esse illam. Quaero igitur a contradictore unde tot formae
in imaginatione araneae, quarum una est forma muscae, alia forma casus ipsius, alia for-
ma praedae vel escae? Musca enim non impressit nisi motum sive concussionem factam
in tela ipsius. Unde igitur impressae sunt, et unde veniunt in imaginationem araneae, nisi
ab virtute imaginativa ipsius, sive arte quam creator indidit animae ipsius araneae?”
160 Philip the Chancellor, Summa de bono, (ed.) Niklaus Wicki (Berne, 1985), 85, ll. 81–93;
quoted by René-Antoine Gauthier, “Le cours sur l’Ethica nova d’un maître ès arts de Paris,”
Archives d’histoire doctrinale et littéraire du Moyen Âge 42 (1975): 86.
161 In Ethicam veterem, in Odon Lottin, Psychologie et morale aux XIIe et XIIIe siècles, vol. 1
(Louvain and Gembloux, 1942), 513; quoted in Gauthier, “Le cours sur l’Ethica nova,” 88:
“Quidam enim est habitus qui innascitur cum anima humana; uerbi gracia humana an-
ima secundum partem quae uocatur agens habet cognitionem rerum in summa et ista
cognitio siue habitus innascitur cum ipsa anima.” In Ethicam novam, in Gauthier, “Le
cours sur l’Ethica nova,” 116: “[N]otandum quod duplex est cognitio: est enim quedam
cognitio sine fantasmata et est quedam cognitio mediante fantasmata.”
162 Spruit, “Species intelligibilis,” vol. 1, 150.
210 Solère

of sense experience).163 Thus, we have a great number of innate concepts, but

except for the first principles, we cannot use them—which is a strange and
unfortunate situation. Our intellect is not a blank slate; rather, it is filled with
information, though it is unreadable because it is kept in the dark. Of course,
this is not at all the view of James, who maintains that innate intrinsic habitus
are operative in our present state.
According to Philip the Chancellor, on the other hand, a number of innate
forms are still at our disposal. However, they make possible only a confused
view of things. Philip follows the lead of Boethius, who writes that the human
mind originally saw in God all things simultaneously as a whole and each of
them separately (pariter summam et singula); but after the soul was enclosed
in the body it lost distinct knowledge of individual things and has kept only a
“summary” knowledge, that is to say, a general and indistinct knowledge (Sum-
mamque tenet singula perdens).164 So, as Philip explains, the innate forms in
our agent intellect are not the forms of things as they are, that is, existing as
individuals.165 Likewise, for the anonymous commentator on the Ethica vetus
and the Ethica nova, innate forms offer an indistinct and summary knowl-
edge, which has to be completed with sensory information in order to become

163 Questiones in tres libros de anima, q. 63, (ed.) Vennebusch, 275: “[L]icet enim per
[exemplaria] sibi concreata quo ad statum sue separacionis semper intelligit quando se
super exemplaria convertit et approximat ad res quarum sunt … quia tamen ut coniunctus
est corpori, per huiusmodi exemplaria nec intelligit nec cognoscit, sed solum per species
rerum abstractas a fantasmatibus per irradiacionem luminis intellectus agentis ipsas in
se recipiendo … et sic, licet secundum quod habet esse in corpore, habet exemplaria sibi
concreata … intellectus in nobis est quasi tabula tota depicta existens in tenebris, unde
quo ad cognicionem per huiusmodi exemplaria mole carnis oppressa obnubilatur.” See
also ibid., q. 67, (ed.) Vennebusch, 300: “[P]ropter quod non habet [intellectus possibilis]
aliquem habitum intra, per quod movetur ad recepcionem specierum sub esse completo,
sed requirit aliquod agens extra, quod non est habitus anime, abstrahens species intel-
ligibilium et reponens in intellectu possibili. Et propterea, licet quoquo modo habitus
primorum principiorum essent nobis innati, non sufficerent ad movendum intellectum
ad recipiendum complementum specierum in actu.”
164 Boethius, De consolatione philosophiae, lib. 5, m. 3, ll. 20–24, (ed.) Moreschini, 146.
165 Philip the Chancellor, Summa de bono, (ed.) Wicki, 85, ll. 88–89: “[N]on sunt formae sin-
gularium rerum secundum quod sunt singulae.” Perhaps it is this position or a similar
one that Bonaventure has in view when he reports (before 1252, when he was writing his
commentary on book 2 of the Sentences) that some people believe that our agent intel-
lect has an innate knowledge of universals, without which it could not abstract from the
phantasms and actualize the possible intellect; see Bonaventure, In ii Sent., d. 24, pars 1,
a. 2, q. 4, (ed.) PP. Collegii a S. Bonaventura, Opera Omnia 2 (Quaracchi, 1885), 568a.
James of Viterbo’s Innatist Theory of Cognition 211

distinct knowledge in the possible intellect.166 Thus, this view too is unlike that
of James, who, as we have seen, does not limit the idoneitates to general concep-
tions or universals that have to be individualized by sensory representations.
James’s brand of innatism, as Antoine Côté notes,167 also differs from that
of an anonymous master of arts who, in his lectures on De anima (c.1245–50),
states that the agent intellect, which is not separate from individual human
souls and not even really distinct from the possible intellect, contains in ac-
tuality all the intelligible species that it imprints on the possible intellect.168
James’s predispositions, in contrast, are, as we have seen, not in full actuality.

6.4.4 Innatism in Richard Fishacre and Thomas of York

We get closer to James’s doctrine with the Dominican Richard Fishacre. In
his commentary on the Sentences (written between 1241 and 1245), Fishacre
­explains that we have two faculties of memory.169 One is the memory of the
“possible intellect,” which is memory in the ordinary sense, and preserves
knowledge that we have acquired from outside. The other is the “memory of
the agent intellect in us,” which is a purely intellectual memory and is a “habi-
tus of all intelligible forms,” or at least it is so for angelic intellects and for Adam
before the Fall; Fishacre holds that in our present condition our minds still
contain a number of forms.170 The soul alone might have direct epistemic ac-
cess to these forms, that is, without sensory experience. However, as in the
authors we have just looked at, the fact that the soul is joined to a body, to-
gether with the clouding entailed by original sin, limits the availability of these

166 In Ethicam veterem, in Lottin, Psychologie et morale, vol. 1, 526, n. 2: “[S]ine dubio intel-
lectus agens habet cognitionem rerum in summa et non habet cognitionem singulorum.
Vnde dicimus quod habitus sunt in ipso innati secundum quod habet cognitionem rerum
in summa. Set habitus sunt acquisiti, quia ipse non habet cognitionem singularium, hoc
est singulorum.” In Ethicam novam, in Gauthier, “Le cours sur l’Ethica nova,” 102: “Illa enim
pars speculatiui intellectus que est superior semper est recta, et illa pars uocatur intel-
lectus agens, qui habet cognitionem omnium rerum in summa et indistincte; vnde dicit
Boetius: ‘Summam retinet singula perdit’; et in cognitione huiusmodi intellectus non po-
test esse error.” Ibid., 103: “Est enim quedam cognitio que est partis superioris intellectus
speculatiui, et ista cognitio indistincta est. … Est autem alia cognitio que est circa intel-
lectum possibilem, et ista cognitio potest esse recta et non recta.”
167 Côté, “Simplicius and James of Viterbo on Propensities,” 37.
168 Lectura in librum De anima a quodam discipulo reportata, (ed.) René-Antoine Gauthier
(Grottaferrata, 1985), 473, ll. 395–96 and 475, ll. 450–51.
169 Richard Fishacre, In I Sent., d. 3, in R. James Long, “The Problem of the Soul in Richard
Fishacre’s Commentary on the Sentences” (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Toronto,
1968), *30.
170 Ibid., *31: “[A]nima a creatione sua habet forte in se multas species rerum.”
212 Solère

forms and diverts our attention towards external bodies. Nonetheless, the in-
nate forms can be activated according to Fishacre, and the way he explains it
resembles James’s view. In our present state, he says, a sensible species must
be imprinted on the sense organ by an external thing and reach the seat of the
inner senses (the “heart”), in order for the mind to discover the intelligible spe-
cies that it already contains.171 Thus, the innate concepts are not condemned to
inoperability, and are not limited to offering a general and confused knowledge
that needs to be supplemented by sensory information. Rather, sensory infor-
mation is the occasion on which these concepts are activated. This mechanism
of intellectual cognition is the same as the one that James proposes.
Moreover, it seems that for Fishacre, as for James, the same applies to per-
ception itself.172 He makes clear that the sensible species do not go any fur-
ther than the organs and do not replicate themselves in the mind. Instead, the
mind of its own accord conforms itself to the species received in the organs;
this constitutes the perceptual act.173 For example, if the form of whiteness
is imprinted in the eyes and in the physical organ of the faculty of imagina-
tion, the mind makes itself have the same form and thus perceives whiteness.
True, this does not per se entail that the mind has an innate form of white-
ness; as noted earlier, authors who hold that material things do not act on the
soul do not necessarily endorse this consequence. For instance, Roger Marston
thinks that the soul has the power to produce (not to retrieve) in itself a mental
species that matches the bodily species.174 Fishacre, however, compares the

171 Ibid.: “Unde si sine corpore esset, actu eas perciperet, nisi culpa eam obscuraret. Cum
ergo species sensibiles veniunt ad cor, excitatur anima per has ad intuendum species in-
telligibiles in se ipsa; et sic prius est ipsam inspicere se habentem speciem alicuius rei
quam intelligere rem ipsam.”
172 Cf. José Filipe Silva, “Medieval Theories of Active Perception: An Overview,” in Active Per-
ception in the History of Philosophy, 125.
173 Richard Fishacre, In I Sent., d. 3, (ed.) Long, *24: “Cum verbum quo se loquitur res exterior
mihi, scilicet species rei, pervenerit ad intimum sentiens, non procedat ulterius ut intret
gignendo se in mentem. Sed, ut dicit Augustinus, anima miris modis et mira quadam
velocitate efficit in se simile ei quod est in organo intimo, hoc est assimulat se ille speciei
susceptae et conformat, ut lux aquae cui contiguatur.” Fishacre here quotes what is in
fact a pseudo-Augustinian text, the De spiritu et anima, c. 25, (ed.) Jacques-Paul Migne,
Patrologia Latina 40 (Paris, 1865), col. 798.
174 Cf. Roger Marston, Quaestiones disputatae de anima, q. 8, in Quaestiones disputatae de
emanatione aeterna, de statu naturae lapsae et de anima, (ed.) PP. Collegii S. Bonaven-
turae (Quaracchi, 1932), 396: “[S]ensitiva facit in se speciem, quae tamen aliqualiter est
ab extra.” Ibid., 397: “[P]otentia sensitiva, talem immutationem advertens, moveat se
contra corporis passiones applicando et conformando se ipsis, et haec est species prima
facta in potentia sensitiva.” Ibid., 401: “Ad octavum dicendum quod anima, in se formando
James of Viterbo’s Innatist Theory of Cognition 213

perception to the actualization by an artisan of one among the infinite number

of shapes that a piece of wood pre-contains.175 He concludes this comparison
by stating: “Thus, there are by nature in the soul an infinity of similitudes of
things, but we give actual attention to only one of them at a time and not to the
others.”176
Thus, we find in Fishacre some ideas that definitely pave the way for James.
However, Fishacre’s indications are sparse and not systematized. The Fran-
ciscan Thomas of York177 offers a much more elaborate innatist doctrine,
and unquestionably it is this which James’s own theory most resembles. Ac-
cording to Thomas, essences come down from God in a hierarchical way: the
quiddities of material things proceed from the divine ideas, but before they
are implanted in matter they have to be inserted into what he calls “the in-
tellective nature,” simply because this intellective nature is more noble than
matter and therefore must receive the forms before it. The order of priority
is thus the following: ideas in God, species in the intellective nature, forms
in material things.178 Even though our soul is likely to be created after many
material things (unless Thomas thinks that all souls were created at the be-
ginning of time), it is created with the whole stock of forms, inasmuch as
it partakes in the intellectual nature. As Thomas puts it, the forms that are
found in matter are “concreated” with the soul; this is supposed to be con-
firmed by proposition 10 of the Liber de causis and by Augustine.179 Thus,

speciem, ­proprie loquendo non agit in se ipsam, sed conformando se speciei in organo ex-
istenti … facit similitudinem in se ipsa, ad quam quidem actionem consequitur quaedam
passio sicut effectus eius, veluti si cera conformaret se sigillo, ageret simpliciter cera, ad
quam quidem actionem consequeretur quaedam passiva impressio in eadem.” Emphasis
added.
175 Richard Fishacre, In I Sent., d. 3, (ed.) Long, *25: “Quod autem dico animam miris modis
assimulare se rei extra visae vel eius similitudini in intimo organo, sic intelligo: sicut ato-
mus habet in se infinitas figuras, vel lignum aliquod; sed sentire eas est ab actu actificis;
et tunc cum una sentitur, est ipsum lignum imago alicuius extra ad cuius similitudinem
nitebatur artifex, nec est ipsum lignum compositius, cum iam una figura est ita in actu,
quam prius.”
176 Ibid., *25: “Sic in anima naturaliter infinitae sunt similitudines rerum, et tamen unam
earum intuemur actualiter sine alia.”
177 Incepted as master of theology at Oxford in 1253, lecturer with the Oxford Franciscans
until 1256, and at the Cambridge convent in 1256–57.
178 Thomas of York, Sapientiale, lib. 6, c. 28, in John P.E. Scully, “Reality and Truth in Thomas
of York” (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Toronto, 1960), vol. 2, 424. The question tackled
is whether truth is in the things or rather in the intellect.
179 Ibid.: “Dico igitur tibi secundum sententiam Augustini et Platonis quod triplex est esse
rei, videlicet in mente divina, in intellectuali natura, in propria existentia; … omnes
214 Solère

our intellect contains all the forms of knowable things before any experience.
How else, Thomas asks, could our soul potentially be all things, as Aristotle
indicates?180
But if this is true, why do we not know all things immediately? The reason,
Thomas answers—in the same way as all the authors we have previously sur-
veyed, including James himself, it seems181—is the corruption of our soul. If
our soul were in its natural condition, it would immediately know everything,
with no need for the senses and the imagination.182 But in our present state,
the species lie hidden in the recesses of the soul. They are held in the “reposito-
ry of memory” (thesaurus memoriae) as habitus.183 They are actualized—that

f­ormae, quae exprimentur in materia, prius naturaliter sunt concreatae in intelligentia

sive anima, quoniam natura pares sint, sicut dicit Augustinus, De libero arbitrio, libro ii [c.
11, n. 32]. Et hoc est consonum propositioni, De causis, quae dicit quod omnis intelligentia
plena est formis. Hoc esse verum manifestat sermo Augustini, quem dicit, De quantitate
animae [lib. 1, c. 20, n. 34], quod anima secum attulit omnes artes, per artes intelligens
formas sive species rerum quam habemus in anima.” On the Proclus-based Liber de causis,
see note 147 above.
180 Ibid., 427: “Quomodo enim aliter esset quodammodo omnia, secundum quod vult Aristo-
teles, iii De Anima capitulo <8> [321b20–23]?”
181 James of Viterbo, Quodl. i, q. 14, 196, ll. 99–100: “[D]um anima coniuncta est corpori cor-
ruptibili, nihil potest actu cognoscere, nisi a fantasmatibus excitata.” Cf. John Philoponus,
In Aristotelis libros De anima commentaria, (ed.) Michael Hayduck, cag 15 (Berlin, 1897),
4, l. 30–5, l. 4.
182 Thomas of York, Sapientiale, lib. 6, c. 29, (ed.) Scully, 447: “[S]i intellectus possibilis esset
in complemento sui, et nihil esset ei possibile quod non haberet in actu, non indigeret
aliqua abstractione vel formatione universalis per abstractionem. Nunc autem quoniam
non est in suo actu completo, nec apprehendit speciem, ut est in sua talitate prima, ne-
cesse est ut proportionetur secundum conditiones materiales adhuc ut eam apprehen-
dat, et ideo indiget adjutorio sensus et imaginationis. Verbi gratia communem rationem
speciei non speculatur anima nisi prius speculatis aut imaginatis singularibus in quibus
est illa ratio.”
183 Ibid., c. 28, 434–35: “[Species] non est actio intelligentiae solum, quia antequam artifex
sive anima exercet actionem intelligentiae, habet artem in secretis ejus. Quiescente igi-
tur et dormiente homine, non actu considerante mente, habet in se artem; quare ars in
mente prior est omni actione intelligentiae. Igitur in potentia intelligentiae quaerenda
est ars. Et nisi sic esset, quomodo actualis alicujus consideratio esset inventio nisi prius
haberetur in habitu quod per actionem intelligentiae postea est expressum in actu ? …
Praeterea, numquid non habet memoria thesaurum specierum etiam praeter omnem
intelligentiam? Quomodo naturaliter oriretur visio cogitationis de visione scientiae?
Immo planum est secundum Augustinum quod posito per impossibile quod memoria
numquam gigneret intelligentiam, adhuc haberet ars sive species esse aliquo modo in
James of Viterbo’s Innatist Theory of Cognition 215

is, expressed in the intellect—only when an external cause, or rather occasion,

requires it.184
Thomas attempts to show that on this count Augustine and Aristotle
agree.185 When Augustine says that the visio cogitationis comes out of the visio
scientiae, he means by visio scientiae knowledge that is in habitu, and by visio
cogitationis the same knowledge actualized. The difference between Augus-
tine and Aristotle lies in the way they explain the transition from native habi-
tus (or the first actuality of the faculty, for Aristotle) to full actuality. Aristotle
says that this happens because of a species that comes from an external thing;
consequently, this species has the status of an efficient and formal cause.186
For Augustine on the other hand, as for Plato, the intellect is not a blank slate,
at least not in the sense of being naturally devoid of species. It is a slate on
which species are natively inscribed. Since they are originally present only as
habitus, one may say the intellect is empty of actualized species.187 Therefore,
for Plato and Augustine, the external object is not an efficient cause of cog-
nition, but merely an occasion,188 or an “exciting” condition,189 since no new
form is introduced into the soul. A species that was possessed as an innate hab-
itus by the intellect is expressed in actuality.190 Thomas is well aware that the

ipsa.” Ibid., 435: “Dico iterum quod omnes species scientiales seu disciplinales sunt ha-
bitualiter in hoc lumine seu radicaliter et quodammodo efficienter.”
184 Ibid., 427–28: “Nunc autem depravata ipsa, latent istae species in secretis ejus, secundum
quod vult Augustinus, De immortalitate animae [lib. 1, c. 4, n. 6], et sunt habitualiter in
thesauris memoriae nisi per causam vel occasionem exprimatur in intelligentia et sic fi-
ant actu.”
185 Ibid., 428. Cf. Augustine, De Trinitate, lib. 15, c. 12, n. 22, (eds.) Mountain and Glorie,
­493–94, ll. 87–98; and Aristotle, De anima 2.5, 417b16–28.
186 Ibid., 429. Cf. Aristotle, De anima 2.5, 417b20: “That which actualizes is outside [the
soul].”
187 Ibid., 428: “[N]am intellectus etiam possibilis secundum ipsos non est sicut tabula nuda,
hoc est penitus a speciebus denudata, sed retinens eas in esse habituali, denudata autem
ab esse eorum actuali.”
188 Cf. ibid., c. 29, (ed.) Scully, 441: “Quod autem ipse Augustinus dicit speciem rei extra esse
praesentem respectu speciei intra, hoc est intelligendum ut sit parens, non tanquam cau-
sa, sed velut occasio.”
189 Ibid., 448: “Secundum Augustinum et Platonem nulla nova species, quae sit omnino nova,
animae imprimitur, sed per commonefactionem sive excitationem seu occasionem spe-
cies, quae prius fuit in potentia, jam sit in actu per splendorem intellectus agentis.” For
Aristotle, on the other hand, the species is “omnino ab extra” (ibid.).
190 Ibid., c. 28, (ed.) Scully, 429: “Augustinus vero et Plato necesse habuerunt ponere quod
species extra non est causa sed occasio, quia nulla nova species inducitur, sed tantum id
quod fuit in habitu actu exprimitur.” Augustine’s argument in De immortalitate, Thomas
216 Solère

implication might be that learning is in fact remembering, and he notes that

Augustine seems to say so in several passages.191 But the word “reminiscence”
may in fact mean the extraction, or expression in actuality, in the intellect of
what was natively in immediate potentiality in the memory; it need not mean
the reactivation of previous actual knowledge.192 In other words, we are not
obliged to suppose that the soul existed and had knowledge in actuality before
it was united with the body.
Thomas of York’s use of the notion of habitus as the most ready potenti-
ality, his reduction of the role of external things to “exciting” causes, and his
explaining away of the Aristotelian “blank slate” comparison are strikingly
similar to James’s account. Thus it appears that James’s theory, although rather
uncommon in the Middle Ages, was not without precedent.193 On the other
hand, there are significant differences between Thomas and James. James does

points out, is that if a species that comes from material things were a cause of what is in
the soul, what is temporal would be a cause of what is eternal (since in the intellect are
the eternal truths).
191 See in particular Augustine, De immortalitate animae, lib. 1, c. 4, n. 6, (ed.) Wolfgang Hor-
mann (Vienna, 1986), 107; also in Soliloquium, lib. 2, c. 20, n. 4, (ed.) Wolfgang Hormann
(Vienna, 1986), 95, Augustine seems to admit the reminiscence theory. But in the Retrac-
tationes, lib. 1, c. 8, n. 2, (ed.) Almut Mutzenbecher (Turnhout, 1984), 22, ll. 10–25, he ex-
plicitly disowns it. See also De Trinitate, lib. 12, c. 15, n. 24, (eds.) Mountain and Glorie,
377–79.
192 Thomas of York, Sapientiale, lib. 6, c. 28, (ed.) Scully, 429.
193 It is not clear, though, whether Thomas of York applies the same principle to percep-
tion itself, but we have seen that Fishacre did. Faustino Prezioso, “L’attività del soggetto
pensante nella gnoseologia di Matteo d’Acquasparta e di Ruggero Marston,” Antonianum
25 (1950): 268–70, identifies Thomas of York as the representative of the first innatist
position described by Matthew of Acquasparta in his Quaestiones de cognitione, q. 3, in
Quaestiones disputatae de fide et cognitione, (ed.) PP. Collegii S. Bonaventurae (Quaracchi,
1957), 257–59. I do not read in Thomas a specific limitation of innate contents in human
minds to, as Matthew reports, a “state of confusion” (ibid., 258, l. 15) and mere universality
in want of determination (ibid., 259, ll. 9–12), which is different from the question of the
non-immediate availability of the innate contents. The term confusio does not appear to
be in the text edited by Scully. On the contrary, in opposition to Aristotle, who, because he
conceives of the possible intellect as an undetermined potentiality, must give to external
forms the role of efficient and formal causes of our acts of understanding (Sapientiale, lib.
6, c. 28, [ed.] Scully, 429), Thomas seems to say that the innate species are distinct from
each other. See ibid., 428: “Et cum diversificati sint in hac radice, propterea necesse fuit
eos diversificari in his quae sunt post radicem.” Of course, this does not prevent these
innate species from being universals in the sense of being predicated of a plurality; see
ibid., c. 29, 448. On the other hand, we have seen Philip the Chancellor and some other
authors endorse this view of a “summary” and confused knowledge (section 6.4.3. above).
James of Viterbo’s Innatist Theory of Cognition 217

not appeal to the Neoplatonic apparatus of procession to justify the presence

of forms in intellective natures before they reach matter. In addition, he uses
different Neoplatonic sources such as Boethius, but above all the then-recent
translations of Simplicius and Philoponus, which had not been available to
Thomas of York.194 With all these elements, James created a theory that can be
considered original in the history of philosophy.

But if Prezioso is right, then James’s originality stands out all the more, as Côté concludes
(Introduction in Jacques de Viterbe: L’âme, l’intellect et la volonté, 57–58).
194 On James as an avid reader of William of Moerbeke’s translations, see Louis-Jacques Ba-
taillon, “Quelques utilisateurs des textes rares de Moerbeke (Philopon, tria Opuscula)
et particulièrement Jacques de Viterbe,” in Guillaume de Moerbeke: Recueil d’études à
l’occasion du 700e anniversaire de sa mort (1286), (eds.) Jozef Brams and Willy Vanhamel
(Leuven, 1989), 107–12.
 chapter 7

Intellect and Intellectual Cognition According to

James of Viterbo

Jean-Luc Solère

7.1 Introduction

The great contemporaries of James of Viterbo were Henry of Ghent, Giles of

Rome, and Godfrey of Fontaines. Besides the question of passivity and innate-
ness discussed in the previous chapter, their main discussions (as far as cog-
nition theory is concerned) revolve around some difficulties in the standard
Aristotelian account as it is presented by, for instance, Thomas Aquinas. The
issues are the following: (1) the distinction between faculties within the soul,
especially between the agent intellect and the passive intellect; (2) the nature
of abstraction, that is, the operation of the intellect on sensory representations
in order to obtain some actual intelligible content; (3) the result of that opera-
tion, namely the existence and status of the “intelligible species” in the intel-
lect; and (4) the possibility of knowing the essences of substances by way of
accidental forms. To all these questions James brings original answers which
are grounded on his innatist position. The chapter has three main sections.
James’s views on the nature of the soul, the intellect, and the abstractive pro-
cess will be discussed in section 7.2. His understanding of intelligible species
will be the focus of section 7.3, while section 7.4 will be devoted to the question
of the knowledge of substances.

7.2 Soul and Intellect

The first of the topics that were up for debate in James’s day is the mutual rela-
tions among the different cognitive faculties and their relation to their onto-
logical subject, the soul.

7.2.1 The Distinction between the Soul and Its Faculties

Faculties are generally described as parts of the soul, but what exactly should
be understood by the word “part”? If it is taken literally, there seems to be a risk
of introducing into the soul a composition that would jeopardize its unity and

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���8 | doi 10.1163/9789004361881_009

Intellect and Intellectual Cognition 219

immortality. But if it is not taken literally, what does it mean? It might be that
the soul can be defined by certain essential characteristics that do not include
cognitive powers, and that these powers are somehow added to the bare core
of the soul. But in that case, what is the ontological status of such additions?
How do they relate to the soul itself?
We have seen in the previous chapter not only that, for James, the cognitive
faculties contain an indefinite number of innate aptitudes to perceive or con-
ceptualize specific objects, but also that they themselves are predispositions
of the soul, namely, that they are its most general idoneitates.1 Does this mean
that they really differ from the soul, that is, that they are not directly contained
within its essence? To answer this question, let us first clarify it. It is obvious
that as operations the idoneitates are distinct from the very essence of the
soul, for they express some actuality or perfection which is added to the soul’s
essence: it does not belong to the essence of the soul to cognize this or that
particular thing or nature. The question is whether as powers—that is, qua
being in potentiality—the faculties are superadded to the essence of the soul.
James first mentions Henry of Ghent’s view, according to which they are not
superadded.2 For Henry, faculties are in reality contained within the essence of
the soul, and their plurality corresponds to different relational aspects of the
soul, that is, different real relations of the soul to different objects. But James
declares that he “understands better”3 another position, which is that of Aqui-
nas and Giles of Rome. According to this position, faculties are not directly in-
cluded in the essence of the soul, because they add to it “something absolute”
(rem absolutam), namely, “a certain quality” which is the proximate principle
of the operations of the soul, while the remote and fundamental principle is
the soul itself, which acts through the faculties. In effect, Aquinas argues as fol-
lows.4 The soul is by definition in actuality; therefore, if the very essence of the

1 See section 6.2.2 in the previous chapter.

2 Quodl. ii, q. 14, 159, ll. 42–44. James’s four Quodlibeta have been edited by Eelcko Ypma
(Würzburg, 1968–1975). Cf. Henry of Ghent, Quodl. iii, q. 14, (ed.) J. Badius (Paris, 1518; repr.
Leuven, 1961), ff. 66r–71r.
3 Quodl. ii, q. 14, 159, l. 50.
4 Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologiae (=st) i, q. 77 a. 1, 236–37. Unless noted otherwise, all
references to Aquinas’s texts are to the Leonine edition of his works (Rome, 1882–). See also
Quaestiones disputatae de anima, qq. 11–12, 95–112. Cf. Giles of Rome, In i Sent., d. 3, pars
2, princ. 3, q. 1, a. 2 (Venice, 1521), ff. 27v–28r and Quodl. iii, q. 10 (Leuven, 1646), 157a–58a;
Carey J. Leonard, “A Thirteenth Century Notion of the Agent Intellect: Giles of Rome,” New
Scholasticism 37 (1963): 328–31; Alessandro Conti, “Intelletto ed astrazione nella teoria della
conoscenza di Egidio Romano,” Bullettino dell’Istituto Storico Italiano per il Medio Evo e Ar-
chivio Muratoriano 95 (1989): 146–47.
220 Solère

soul were the immediate principle of all its operations, all its operations would
always be actual—that is to say, permanently carried out—which is obviously
not true of cognitive functions. It follows that there must be some proximate
principles of the operations that are distinct from the soul’s essence; these are
the various faculties of the soul, which alternately are at rest (in first actual-
ity) or operating (in second actuality).5 Aquinas and Giles, however, have some
difficulty in specifying the exact ontological status of the faculties. Since these
powers are not part of the essence of the soul, they are like accidents; more
specifically, they are qualities.6 Still, they are not accidental to the soul; rather,
they are like propria because they are “caused by the essential principles of the
species.”7 Be that as it may, James approves the solid reasons brought by those
who support this view,8 but proposes two arguments of his own.
His first argument9 relies on Simplicius’s law of continuity: saltus non datur,
therefore there must be a smooth transition between the less perfect and the
more perfect. This is true of material beings: between the elements and living
substances, there are inanimate mixtures, among which there also is an in-
creasing order of complexity; next, there are also degrees of perfection among
living substances, up to human nature. Likewise, between the bare essence of
the soul and the final perfection of an operation, there must be intermedi-
ates. As we know, Simplicius calls these intermediaries which pave the way for
the ultimate actualization idoneitates.10 This is why the mental faculties are
for James the most general predispositions of the soul (natural powers, quali-
ties of the second species). This is also why he endorses Aquinas’s position,
though for a reason that is not exactly Aquinas’s. Faculties are not reducible
to the essence of the soul because they are the necessary intermediaries be-
tween this essence and its perfecting acts, and are the proximate principles of
its operations.
The second argument11 refers to a previous question about seminal rea-
sons.12 There, James laid the foundations of the theory of seminal reasons by
showing that when a form is actualized by a process of generation, it is not

5 See also Aquinas, Quaestio disputata de spiritualibus creaturis, a. 11, sed contra 4, 117b;
Quaestiones disputatae de veritate, q. 10, a. 1, corp., 296b, ll. 109–10.
6 st i, q. 77, a. 1, ad 5, 237b; Quaestio disputata de spiritualibus creaturis, a. 11, corp., 119b–20a,
ll. 258–90; Quaestiones disputatae de anima, qq. 12–13, 105–22.
7 st i, q. 77, a. 1, ad 5, 237b; q. 77, a. 6, corp., 245b–46a.
8 Quodl. ii, q. 14, 159, ll. 50–51.
9 Ibid., 159–60, ll. 54–84.
10 See section 6.2.2 in the previous chapter.
11 Quodl. ii, q. 14, 160–61, ll. 85–101.
12 Quodl. ii, q. 5. See also chapter 5 in this volume.
Intellect and Intellectual Cognition 221

just because matter had the potentiality to receive the form; the form must
have preexisted (at a lower level of existence) in the matter. States of potenti-
ality and of actuality are modes or dispositions of the same entity.13 The very
same form successively has two different modes of existence: in potentiality
in matter, and then in actuality. Likewise, a mental operation, such as an act
of intellectual cognition, and the power it comes from (the intellect), are the
same ­entity, successively in potentiality and in actuality. But as we just saw,
operations are really distinct from the essence of the soul. Therefore, since op-
erations and the powers they come from are in fact the same thing, the powers
are in the same way distinct from the essence of the soul.14
Of course, maintaining a real distinction between the soul and its faculties
makes perfect sense within the framework of James’s innatist theory: predis-
positions, including the faculties, are entities (imperfect forms) in the soul, but
are not the soul itself. One should not worry that this could result in a frag-
mentation of the soul, James argues. The soul remains one and simple because
all these faculties are in it as in a unique subject, which is the principle from
which they all proceed.15

7.2.2 Memory and Intelligence (and Will)

The number and order of the senses, both external and internal, was—with
notable exceptions—relatively undisputed in James’s time, and James does
not appear to stray from the mainstream. But the number and order of the
intellective functions was another topic up for constant debate. One reason for
this was the difficulty in harmonizing the two major sources of Aristotle and
Augustine in their respective structuring of the intellective capacities.
Augustine’s authoritative analysis of the image of the divine Trinity in the
soul imposes a tripartition of the higher functions of the soul into intelligence
(intelligentia, in Augustine’s terminology, rather than the Aristotelian intellec-
tus), memory, and will.16 From an Aristotelian perspective, however, memory

13 Quodl. ii, q. 5, 71–77, ll. 396–605.

14 James takes pains to specify that since the two arguments he has just given rely on the
notions of imperfection and perfection, they are valid only for powers of the soul that are
perfected by their act, namely, cognitive (sensitive and intellectual) powers and appeti-
tive powers. How the vegetative powers of the soul are distinct from the essence of the
soul requires a different demonstration; see Quodl. ii, q. 14, 161, ll. 98–106.
15 Quodl. ii, q. 14, 162, ll. 127–31.
16 Quodl. ii, q. 15, 163, ll. 20–24. This is true, James explains, if we contrast the superior level
of the soul, called the “intellective part” (or also mens, mind), with its sensitive and veg-
etative powers; in this case, the will has to be included in the intellective part. But from
another point of view, memory and intelligence, which are cognitive functions, can be
222 Solère

and intelligence are not distinct from each other. Powers, Aquinas argues, are
different if and only if their primary objects are different;17 but it seems that
intelligence and memory cognize the same objects (for instance, Pythagoras’s
theorem is one and the same theorem whether I understand it for the first time
or I remember it). Of course, we are here talking about intellective memory, to
be distinguished from the power of memory in the sensitive part, which stores
past perceptions, and from what is simply the persistence of a sensation in a
sense faculty after the sensed object has disappeared. Memory can be defined
most generally as the power that preserves some content when the power that
brought about this content has ceased to act.18 This is what allows us to speak
of intellective memory, inasmuch as intellectual cognitions must be preserved
somewhere while we are not thinking of them.
Interestingly, while James endorses Aquinas’s real distinction between the
soul and its faculties (which was generally rejected by Augustinian-minded
authors),19 he takes pains to defend the Trinitarian structuring of the facul-
ties. Against Aquinas, he maintains that intelligence, by which we have occur-
rent intellectual knowledge, and intellectual memory, by which we keep this
knowledge, must be distinguished from each other.20 But how? James reviews
three possible ways to draw this distinction.21

(1) Memory and intelligence are in fact one and the same power, namely,
the intellective power as opposed to the will, which is an appetitive pow-
er. Memory is that intellective power insofar as it preserves some content;
intelligence is that power insofar as it actually understands something.

opposed to the will, which is not a cognitive function; in that case, only the former con-
stitute the intellective part.
17 Cf. Thomas Aquinas, Sentencia libri de anima lib. 3, c. 8, 240b, ll. 124–25; st i, q. 79, a. 7,
corp., 272a–73b. See also Giles of Rome, In ii Sent., d. 24, pars 1, q. 2, a. 2 (Venice, 1581),
258b.
18 Quodl. ii, q. 15, 164, ll. 30–42.
19 Cf. pseudo-Augustine’s De spiritu et anima, (ed.) Jacques-Paul Migne, Patrologia Latina 40
(Paris, 1865), cols. 788–89: “[S]ecundum sui operis officium [anima] variis nuncupatur no-
minibus. Dicitur namque anima, dum vegetat; spiritus, dum contemplatur; sensus, dum
sentit; animus, dum sapit; dum intelligit, mens; dum discernit, ratio; dum recordatur,
­memoria; dum consentit, voluntas. Ista tamen non differunt in substantia quemadmo-
dum in nominibus, quoniam omnia ista una anima est, proprietates quidem diverse, sed
essentia una.” Aquinas quotes this passage and rejects its view in Quaestiones disputatae
de anima, q. 12, 105, ll. 11–19; 110, ll. 227–39.
20 Quodl. ii, q. 15, 166, ll. 101–03. Cf. Aquinas, st i, q. 79, a. 7, corp., 272a–73b.
21 Quodl. ii, q. 15, 165–66, ll. 76–100.
Intellect and Intellectual Cognition 223

(2) Memory is a power that can generate two operations, namely, under-
standing (intelligere) and willing. So memory is both an intellective and
a volitional power, and when one or the other act (intellection or will) is
not occurring, their habitus remain in the memory.
(3) Memory, intelligence, and will refer to one and the same essence of
the soul, but in different respects. Memory is the essence of the soul inso-
far as it is in potentiality to the operations of understanding and willing;
intelligence is the essence of the soul insofar as it has an intellection in
actuality; and will is the essence of the soul insofar as it has volition in
actuality.

James does not say which of these three solutions is best. He only declares
that the second and the third are more in keeping with the Trinitarian model,
which structures the soul in such a way that memory is the root of the ­other
two powers. However, it is clear that James must reject the third solution, since
he posits a real distinction between the soul and its faculties. Therefore, only
the second solution can really be acceptable to him. In fact, it perfectly fits his
whole system. The idoneitates must be kept somewhere, and it is only natu-
ral to call memory the function of the soul that is in charge of this storage.
(Of course, for James the intellective memory does not preserve acquired in-
telligible species and habitus, but, in line with his innatism, predispositions;
these can be considered as equivalent to habitus and even intelligible spe-
cies, though not in a very accurate sense in the latter case as James admits.22)
By the same token, memory becomes the base of the whole ­architecture
of mental functions and operations. Since it contains all the predisposi-
tions, when one of these predispositions self-actualizes it yields an opera-
tion of intelligence or an operation of will (since there are predispositions to
volitions too).
Nevertheless, intelligence and intellectual memory are not distinct qua
powers. For Aquinas’s objection must be conceded: since they have the same
objects, they cannot be two different powers. However, as James remarks, a
power and its operation (the relation between which solutions 2 and 3 tend to
reduce to the relation between memory and intelligence) have the same ob-
ject but nevertheless are somehow distinct. There is thus room for differences
other than between one power and another.23

22 Ibid., 164, ll. 50–53. See section 7.3.1 below.

23 Ibid., 167, ll. 136–40.
224 Solère

7.2.3 Agent Intellect and Possible Intellect

On the other hand, James follows John Philoponus in rejecting one distinc-
tion between powers that was widely endorsed, namely, Aristotle’s distinction
between “possible intellect” and “agent intellect.”24 Or rather, he reduces it to
an aspectual difference. Before making this move, he offers a long exposition
of the different interpretations of Aristotle’s scant hints in book 3 of De anima.
The key issue is the status of the agent intellect: is it something that is above
our soul, or is it a faculty of our soul? If the latter, is it really distinct from the
possible intellect? The transcendence of the agent intellect—identified either
with God himself, or with a subordinate entity, as Alexander of Aphrodisias,
Avicenna, and Averroes maintain—is quickly eliminated.25 James focuses on
the opinions of Themistius and Philoponus26 before turning to the views of
his contemporaries. Those of Thomas Aquinas and/or Godfrey of Fontaines
are especially scrutinized.27 For them, agent intellect and possible intellect
are two really distinct (that is to say, distinct by a real distinction) cognitive
capacities within each individual soul. They argue that it is necessary to per-
form an operation of abstraction on the sensory representations (phantasms)
because the latter cannot directly act on the “possible intellect” and deposit in
it an intelligible content.28 Their rationale for this is that the intellect that is
in ­potentiality for knowing things must be “moved” (modified) by something
that is i­ ntelligible in actuality. But material things and the perceptual informa-
tion we first get about them are only potentially intelligible. In addition, the

24 See Antoine Côté, “La critique de la doctrine de l’abstraction de Jacques de Viterbe,”

Medioevo 38 (2013): 235–62. According to Côté (237, n. 6), James’s quodlibetal question is
the first to challenge this distinction.
25 Quodl. i, q. 12, 158–59, ll. 47–85. See Quodl. iv, q. 24, 82–91 for a detailed refutation of the
Averroistic thesis of the unicity of the possible intellect.
26 Quodl. i, q. 12, 159–62, ll. 86–171.
27 Godfrey’s theory is unmistakably under scrutiny because of the distinctive example of
milk in his Quodl. v, q. 10, (eds.) Maurice De Wulf and Jules Hoffmans (Louvain, 1914), 37.
Cf. James’s Quodl. i, q. 12, 163, ll. 204–15. But see also Giles of Rome, In ii Sent., d. 24, pars
1, q. 2, a. 42, 263a–66a, and Leonard, “A Thirteenth Century Notion of the Agent Intellect,”
333–41. On Godfrey’s theory, see John F. Wippel, “The Role of the Phantasm in Godfrey of
Fontaines’ Theory of Intellection,” in L’homme et son univers au Moyen Âge, (ed.) Christian
Wenin (Louvain-la-Neuve, 1986), 573–82.
28 See James’s presentation of their thesis in Quodl. i, q. 12, 162–63, ll. 172–222, and Quodl. ii,
q. 16, 169–70, ll. 49–70. See also Giles of Rome, In i Sent., d. 26, princ. 2, q. 1, f. 140va. On
the question of abstraction, see Aurélien Robert, “L’universalité réduite au discours: Sur
quelques théories franciscaines de l’abstraction à la fin du xiiie siècle,” Documenti e studi
sulla tradizione filosofica medievale 18 (2007): 363–93.
Intellect and Intellectual Cognition 225

­phantasms are too material to act on the purely immaterial intellect. There-
fore, something must be in charge of making the content of sensory represen-
tations intelligible in actuality and thus able to be imprinted in the intellect.
The possible intellect cannot play this role, precisely because it is potential re-
garding this intelligible content. As a consequence, it must be something else:
a power that is in actuality, and not merely conceptually distinct from the pos-
sible intellect, since the same thing cannot be in potentiality and in actuality
at the same time and in the same respect. Therefore, a distinct agent intellect
must carry out the function of stripping the phantasms of their material indi-
viduating features, which results in the actualizing of their actual intelligible
content in the possible intellect.
James disagrees both with this conception of the abstractive function of the
agent intellect, and with the conclusion that the agent intellect has to be a re-
ally distinct power of the soul. He objects in the following way.
First, if the rationale for positing an agent intellect is that the phantasms
cannot by themselves modify the passive intellect because they are still
“material”29 while the latter is immaterial, then one should also posit an agent
sense faculty, because the sensible species, which are still more material than
phantasms, could not modify the sensory faculties by themselves. Yet Aquinas
and Godfrey do not endorse the existence of an agent sense. One might object
that sensible faculties, which are each associated with an organ, are more ma-
terial than the possible intellect, which is not connected to anything bodily.
But because they are parts of the soul, James answers, they transcend the sen-
sible species that are issued by material things. So if it is admitted that the
sensible species can affect the senses, then by the same token it should not be
considered problematic for the phantasms to affect the possible intellect.30
Second, if the above-mentioned picture were correct, then knowing the es-
sence of things would be impossible. An external substance is sensible through
its accidental forms. Therefore, only accidental features are conveyed by the
phantasms, which merely synthesize sensory information. But then how could
the agent intellect extract from phantasms any information about the essences
of things?31

29 In the sense that (1) they depend on an organ (namely, a certain region of the brain), and
(2) they represent sensible objects with individual features that are linked with matter.
30 Quodl. i, q. 12, 164, ll. 231–41. James’s argument is an ad hominem objection, since he does
not believe that sensible species directly affect the senses, or that the phantasms, even
if they are enhanced, affect the intellect. On this objection, see Côté, “La critique de la
doctrine de l’abstraction,” 239, n. 10.
31 Quodl. i, q. 12, 164, ll. 247–55. See section 7.4 below.
226 Solère

Third, if the agent intellect were a distinct natural power of the soul, it
would serve in the soul’s acquisition of knowledge even when the soul is sepa-
rated from the body (that is, after death). But the sole function of the allegedly
distinct agent intellect is to make the phantasms intelligible. However, when
the soul is separated from the body, it is not presented with phantasms. Hence
the agent intellect would be useless in the state of separation; but nature (or
rather God) does nothing in vain.32
For all these reasons, James holds that agent intellect and possible intel-
lect are in reality one and the same power of the soul under two aspects, and
he is happy to point out that this conforms to the teaching of Augustine and
­Boethius.33 Thanks to its idoneitates, the mind is the formal principle of its own
actions, and to that extent it is able to be an agent for itself. The intellectual
faculty with its predispositions, insofar as it is susceptible to being further per-
fected by its own acts, is called “possible intellect”; insofar as it changes itself
by itself—not efficiently, but formally34—so that these acts obtain, it is called
“agent intellect.”

7.2.4 Intellect and Phantasms

There is a great advantage to James’s theory, which he is also happy to empha-
size. In all rival accounts, what exactly the intellect is supposed to do to the
phantasms in order to get some intelligible content remains rather mysteri-
ous, especially in light of the second objection mentioned above (more about
this in section 7.4 below). “Extraction” and “actualization” seem not to be apt
descriptions unless sensory representations include this intelligible content,
at least in a merely potential state; but they cannot include it, given that they
bundle up only accidental features. There are many alternative descriptions
of what the agent intellect is supposed to do—enhancement, transformation,

32 Ibid., 164, ll. 256–62. Cf. Giles of Rome, Quodl. ii, q. 22. For Giles, the agent intellect, in
this life, illuminates not only the phantasms but also the possible intellect. Consequently,
he is able to reply that in the state of separation of the soul, the agent intellect still illu-
minates the possible intellect. It is therefore not Giles’s theory that is here under attack,
but more likely that of Aquinas, who says that the agent intellect does not act directly
on the possible intellect, but rather on the phantasms, which consequently actualize
the possible intellect when the latter pays attention to them due to its union with the
body. See ­Aquinas, Quaestiones disputatae de anima, q. 18, ad 11, 159b, ll. 451–58. James
holds the opposite interpretation of Aristotle. See James of Viterbo, Quodl. i, q. 12, 178, ll.
­717–18: “Aristoteles non ponit intellectum agentem agere in fantasmata, sed in intellec-
tum possibilem.”
33 Quodl. i, q. 12, 165, ll. 268–72. Cf. Quodl. ii, q. 16, 169, ll. 31–44.
34 See section 6.2.3 in the previous chapter.
Intellect and Intellectual Cognition 227

illumination, purification, filtration35—but none of them is entirely satisfac-

tory. James objects that a created agent (such as the agent intellect would be)
never acts by introducing a form into the patient; rather, a created agent always
draws out (educit) from the patient a form that was latent in it.36 But since
the phantasms are material, no immaterial form can be drawn from them; in
other words, nothing in them can be actualized that could affect the possible
intellect.37 Even if an agent intellect could imprint something like a form in
them in order to make them intelligible, this form would itself become ma-
terial, since that which is received is received according to the nature of the
receiver.38 More generally, James believes that nothing that is of an inferior
nature can be naturally elevated to a higher level, and consequently the agent
intellect could not give or do anything to the phantasms that would bestow on
them actual intelligibility.39 Finally, a created immaterial agent cannot directly
actualize a form in a material patient, but has to act through the intermediary
of local motion, which obviously is not the case as regards phantasms.40 Thus,
there does not seem to be any way in which sensory representations could be
worked upon by the agent intellect such that they could present intelligible
content to the potential intellect.
James easily avoids this difficulty by cutting the Gordian knot: for him, the
intellect does not have to act on sensory representations at all. Of course, the
intellect would not actualize a conceptual predisposition without appropriate
sensory representations. The relation between phantasms and intellect is no-
mological: we conceptualize only that for which we have empirical materials.41
But concept formation occurs because the intellect actualizes itself (through
an immanent action) according to a certain innate predisposition that corre-
sponds to given sensory representations. Aristotle himself says that the agent
intellect acts not on phantasms but on the possible intellect.42 This remains
true when agent intellect and possible intellect are conflated in one and the

35 Cf. Godfrey of Fontaines, Quodl. v, q. 10, (eds.) De Wulf and Hoffmans, 37; Giles of Rome,
Quodl. v, q. 21, 329b–30a; James of Viterbo, Quodl. ii, q. 16, 171–72, ll. 94–125.
36 Cf. Quodl. iii, q. 14, 190, ll. 61–62. On the Averroistic origin of this thesis, see Côté, “La
critique de la doctrine de l’abstraction,” 256, n. 50.
37 Quodl. ii, q. 16, 173, ll. 170–75.
38 Ibid., 173, ll. 162–69.
39 Ibid., 172–73, ll. 155–61.
40 Ibid., 172, ll. 148–54.
41 Quodl. i, q. 13, 190, ll. 260–61: “[I]n statu huius vitae, … nihil sine fantasmate intelligit
anima.” Quodl. i, q. 14, 196, ll. 99–100: “[D]um anima coniuncta est corpori corruptibili,
nihil potest actu cognoscere, nisi a fantasmatibus excitata.”
42 See above, note 32.
228 Solère

same faculty. The intellect is not agent by reason of acting on phantasms and
conferring on them the power to affect the possible intellect (it does not), but
because it acts on itself.43
Conversely, phantasms do not exercise any real action on the intellect. Just
as external things only “incline” or “excite” the sensory faculties,44 so sensory
representations only “excite” the intellect, and an exciting cause need not be in
actuality exactly what its effect is potentially, nor need it be “nobler” than this
effect.45 It suffices (1) that there be a natural order of subordination between
the modifier and the modified, (2) that the modifier have in actuality some
trait which is related to that which the modified can become in actuality, and
(3) that they happen to be conjoined or present to each other. In other words, if
A is in potentiality with respect to property P, B does not have to have P in order
to be the exciting cause of A. In the case at hand, this means that a phantasm
does not have to carry, in actuality or in potentiality, the intelligible content in
order to prompt the intellect to think of this intelligible content. For an excita-
tion, it suffices that B have in actuality a property Q, which has some relation
with property P. In other words, B does not have to be formally identical to A,
either actually or potentially. Now, even if the faculty of sensory representation
(phantasia) is inferior to the intellect, it is part of the same soul. Therefore, it
is conjoined to the intellect, it is subordinated to the intellect, and finally, the
phantasms that it contains have in actuality features that, even though they
are accidental, are suitable for prompting the actualization of innate concepts.
For instance, sensory representations that feature specific shapes are apt to
prompt the actualization of the concept of biped. These phantasms can stir
the intellect without acting on it, and therefore do not have to undergo any
special enhancement by an agent intellect.
Thus, phantasms do not act on the intellect, nor does the intellect act on
phantasms; nonetheless, James contends that his theory does not render
meaningless the very idea of abstraction of conceptual knowledge from sen-
sory representations.46 He claims that he rejects only the types of abstraction
that require some work to be done on the phantasms. But the intellect does ab-
stract away from phantasms to the extent that when aroused by them it moves

43 Quodl. i, q. 12, 168, ll. 376–78; Quodl. ii, q. 16, 170, ll. 71–84.
44 See section 6.2.4 in the previous chapter.
45 Quodl. i, q. 12, 171–72, ll. 502–14; Quodl. i, q. 13, 190, ll. 244–50.
46 Côté, “La critique de la doctrine de l’abstraction,” 236, n. 4, points out that James exam-
ines another sense of “abstraction” (namely, the logical sense, when we consider one
thing apart from another) in Quaestiones de divinis praedicametis, q. 15, (ed.) Eelcko Ypma
(Rome, 1986).
Intellect and Intellectual Cognition 229

to another level of knowledge, namely, abstract cognition, which is better and

more general than the knowledge that phantasms can provide, since sensible
cognition is limited to knowing accidents and individuals, whereas the intel-
lect knows universals and substances.47

7.3 The Problem of the Intelligible Species

Henry of Ghent and Godfrey of Fontaines—with somewhat opposite

c­ oncerns—started an onslaught on the notion of intelligible species that even-
tually resulted in the total elimination of the idea in some fourteenth-century
epistemologies, such as those of Durand of Saint-Pourçain and William of
­Ockham. Many other authors resisted this shift, though. In this controversy
James adopts an original position.
In the sense that is here relevant, a species is nothing other than the form—
whether accidental or substantial—of an external thing, as considered with re-
spect to a cognitive power.48 In the standard Aristotelian theory, species have to
be received in cognitive powers for two reasons: first, to actualize these powers,
which on their own are in mere potentiality; and second, to provide them with
some content by which they can relate to and cognize external things.49 Species
can carry out the first function because they are forms—forms being precisely
principles of actuality. And since they are the forms of the things to be cognized,
they ensure by their second function that these things are known as they are.
In accordance with Aristotle’s formula, the same form becomes the common
actuality of the known object and the knower. Thanks to the species, the known
object is said to be in the knower through its likeness (similitudo). So the noun
species, James explains, refers to a certain form which actualizes a c­ ognitive
capacity and makes it “conform to the things” (rebus assimilatur).50 This form
inheres in the mind and perfects it. Thus, sensible species (i.e., a­ ccidental
forms of external things), after modifying the material medium b­ etween us and
the external things, inform our sensory faculties (i.e., are perceived), and are
­combined in sensory representations of the external things. The agent intel-
lect is then supposed to somehow actualize in these ­sensory representations
their intelligible content, that is, the substantial forms of the external things,

47 Quodl. i, q. 12, 178, ll. 694–99.

48 Quodl. i, q. 13, 184, ll. 43–52.
49 See Giorgio Pini, “Il dibattito sulle specie intelligibili alla fine del tredicesimo secolo,”
Medioevo 29 (2004): 273–74.
50 Quodl. i, q. 13, 184, ll. 44–52.
230 Solère

which become intelligible species received in the possible intellect, actualizing

it and causing intellectual cognitions of the essences of the external things.

7.3.1 Godfrey of Fontaines, Giles of Rome, and James of Viterbo

Godfrey of Fontaines attacks the second part of this construction, namely, the
necessity of assuming intelligible species. First of all, even if intelligible species
were imprinted in the possible intellect, there would still be a further stage—a
superior state of actuality—to reach, namely, an act of intellectual cognition,
with respect to which the intellect informed by a species would still be in po-
tentiality. But the intellect could not make itself reach this further actuality,
because this would be a violation of the axiom according to which no thing
that is in potentiality to some state can self-actualize into this state.51 So only
the intelligible object, which (with the help of the agent intellect) is already
in actuality what the possible intellect is in potentiality, can lead the possible
intellect to full actuality. But if so, it can do this directly, that is, without the
intermediary of an imprinted intelligible species.52
Second, there is no need for an intrinsic formal principle in this type of ac-
tion as there is need for one in a physical, transeunt action.53 As an instance
of the latter, heat is the formal principle in fire by which fire can carry out
the action of warming something up. On the other hand, an act of intellectual
cognition is a perfection (an actualization of a potency) that is caused in the

51 Godfrey of Fontaines, Quodl. ix, q. 19, (ed.) Jean Hoffmans (Louvain, 1924), 273: “[E]tiam
si fieret [species intelligibilis] in virtute illius [sc. intellectus possibilis], intellectus non
posset in seipso efficere actionem intelligendi, quia secundum quod in pluribus locis est
probatum intellectus factus aliquo modo in actu, tamen per hoc non potest seipsum re-
ducere in actum ulteriorem ad quem remanet in potentia, huiusmodi prima actualitate
posita quia unum et idem secundum rem non potest reducere se ipsum de potentia ad
actum.” Cf. Godfrey of Fontaines, Quodl. i, qq. 7, 9, 18, 19, 22, and 23, (eds.) Maurice De
Wulf and Auguste Pelzer (Louvain, 1904); Quodl. x, q. 12, (ed.) Jean Hoffmans (Louvain,
1931), 359 and 361.
52 In other words, Godfrey does not think that an impressed intelligible species is a sort of
instrument by which the possible intellect is prepared for having an occurrent thought.
On the contrary, insisting on the necessity for a preparation and on the instrumental role
of impressed intelligible species is part of the defense of them by, for instance, Giles of
Rome.
53 Cf. the preliminary argument that Godfrey reports in favor of species in Quodl. ix, q. 19,
(ed.) Hoffmans, 271: “Et sicut forma, secundum quam provenit actio tendens in rem ex-
teriorem, est similitudo obiecti actionis, ut calor calefacientis est similitudo calefacti, si-
militer forma secundum quam provenit actio manens in agente est similitudo obiecti;
unde similitudo visibilis est secundum quam visus videt et similitudo rei intellectae, quae
dicitur species rei intelligibilis, est forma secundum quam intellectus intelligit.”
Intellect and Intellectual Cognition 231

possible intellect and that stays in it. In this process, the possible intellect re-
mains purely passive because its nature is to be a receptive potentiality, and it
does not in its turn act on something else. Therefore, we need not posit in it an
intelligible species that would play the role of formal principle of its action. It
is enough that the possible intellect has the natural capacity to be actualized
by an extrinsic formal principle, namely, the cognized object made intelligible
by the agent intellect.54
Moreover, if a subject is in potentiality to a state S, only S and nothing else
obtains in this subject as a result of the action of an appropriate agent. But the
state to which the possible intellect is in potentiality is an act of intellection. So
when the appropriate agent, namely, the cognized object, carries out its action,
only an act of intellection is actualized in the possible intellect, and nothing
else—in particular, no intelligible species that is something other than the act
of intellection itself.55
In sum, according to Godfrey, an intelligible content (a phantasm made in-
telligible in actuality by the agent intellect) extrinsically acts on the possible
intellect and directly causes in it an act of intellectual cognition.56 No intelligi-
ble species has to be received in it before the act of cognition itself.57 However,

54 Godfrey of Fontaines, Quodl. ix, q. 19, (ed.) Hoffmans, 273: “[S]i intelligere non est actio
quae fiat ab intellectu [delevi: non solum] sic quod transeat in exteriorem materiam, sed
est quaedam perfectio intellectum informans et virtute intellectus agentis ab obiecto in
intellectu possibili causata et in intellectu possibili recepta, non oportet ad hoc quod in-
telligere habeat esse in intellectu possibili ponere aliquam formam et speciem actualem,
sed solum naturam receptivam et possibilem.” Cf. Thomas Aquinas, Summa contra Gen-
tiles, lib. 1, c. 53, 150b, l. 15–151a, l. 3: “Haec autem intentio intellecta, cum sit quasi termi-
nus intelligibilis operationis, est aliud a specie intelligibili quae facit intellectum in actu,
quam oportet considerari ut intelligibilis operationis principium.”
55 Godfrey of Fontaines, Quodl. ix, q. 19, (ed.) Hoffmans, 273–74: “[N]ihil fit in intellectu pos-
sibile nisi ipsa intellectio, quia illud ad quod aliquid per se est in potentia, per se etiam
habet esse in ipso ab agente proportionali et non aliud. Cum ergo virtus apprehensiva se-
cundum quod huiusmodi per se sit solum in potentia ad ipsum actum cognoscendi vel ad
ipsam cognitionem, in ipsa ab agente non fit aliquid per se nisi hoc.” Ibid., 274–75: “[I]psa
[sc. potentia apprehensiva intellectus possibilis] autem in quantum huiusmodi non est
in potentia nisi ad apprehensionem; ergo nec ad aliud [i.e., aliud quam apprehensionem,
scilicet, actum intelligendi] per se immutatur.”
56 Godfrey of Fontaines, Quodl. ix, q. 19, (ed.) Hoffmans, 275: “Sed nihil potest fieri in ipsa
potentia ante ipsum actum intelligendi. Sic ergo videtur dicendum quod non fit in eo nisi
ipsa intellectio, sive actus intelligendi per se et immediate.”
57 Note that for Godfrey the same applies to sensation: intentional species may be needed
in the medium and in the sensory organs in order to modify them appropriately, but
what the sensible object modifies in the sensory faculty is just the latter’s potentiality of
232 Solère

this act of cognition is a perfection that is added to the possible intellect and
resides in it. But informing, actualizing, and perfecting is what a form or spe-
cies does. A cognitive act is the form that the possible intellect takes when it is
actualized by an intelligible content, and by this form it is made similar to the
thing cognized. Therefore, one can call the the act of cognition itself an intel-
ligible species, if one wishes to,58 but it is not an impressed intelligible species
in the sense intended by previous theories. Thus, James summarizes Godfrey’s
position when he writes that some people say that an intelligible species is
nothing other than the intellect’s very act or operation of knowing, and that
this operation is caused, without any mediation, by a phantasm and the agent
intellect.59
But, James continues—most likely here thinking of Giles of Rome’s con-
tribution to the debate—others argue that there are four reasons why a spe-
cies that is a principle of the cognitive act and is distinct from it is absolutely
required:60

1. Representation: The act of cognition is caused by the object, but the ob-
ject has to be present to the intellect if the object is to act on it. However,
it cannot be directly present itself. Therefore, there must be something

s­ ensing; thus, what the sensible object causes in the faculty is just the sensation itself; see
Godfrey of Fontaines, Quodl. ix, q. 19, (ed.) Hoffmans, 274. In other words, no sensible spe-
cies needs to be imprinted in the sensory faculty before the sensation occurs; rather, the
sensation itself is a resulting species that perfects the faculty. Godfrey cites Augustine’s
trinitarian schema of perception, which posits, besides the visible body and the faculty of
sight, only the act of seeing (visio) itself; see Augustine, De Trinitate, lib. 11, c. 2, n. 2, (eds.)
W.J. Mountain and F. Glorie, Corpus Christianorum Series Latina 50 (Turnhout, 1968),
334, ll. 1–9.
58 Godfrey of Fontaines, Quodl. ix, q. 19, (ed.) Hoffmans, 275: “[I]ntellectus possibilis
­reducitur de potentia in actum secundum actum qui dicitur intelligere sic quod ipsum
­intelligere et nihil aliud virtute intellectus agentis movente obiecto fit in ipso intellectu
possibili ut perfectione secunda ipsum perficiens et informans et ipsi ut perfectio eius
secunda et accidentalis inhaerens. Et quia huiusmodi condiciones conveniunt formae et
speciei, ipsum intelligere etiam potest dici species sive forma.” Cf. Quodl. x, q. 12, (ed.)
Hoffmans, 361: “Sic autem nunquam posuit Aristoteles speciem [sc. rei similitudinem alia
ab actu intelligendi et rationem formalem secundum quam intellectus possibilis fit in
actu intelligendi], sed bene dicit ipsum actum intelligendi quandam speciem in quantum
est quaedam similitudo rei per quam etiam intellectus dicitur rei assimilari. … Et secun-
dum hoc dicit Philosophus quod lapis non est in anima, sed species lapidis. Id autem
quod de lapide est in anima constat quod est ipse actus intelligendi.”
59 Quodl. i, q. 13, 185, ll. 74–76.
60 Ibid., 185–86, ll. 82–119.
Intellect and Intellectual Cognition 233

that substitutes for it, and which, being present in the mind, is the proxi-
mate cause of the cognitive act.61
2. Dematerialization (depuratio): A sensible object that directly touches
an organ does not provoke a sensation (for instance, a thing placed just
against the eye is not seen).62 This is because the senses receive only
forms that have been somehow dematerialized. But a form that exists
in matter, in the object itself, cannot suddenly acquire the immaterial
existence that it must have in order to be received in the sensory faculty,
which is part of the soul. Therefore, the form must first go through a me-
dium in which it undergoes a preliminary dematerialization, before be-
ing still more dematerialized in the organ and finally received in the sen-
sory faculty. Likewise for the intellect: a phantasm is still too material for
the intellect, since it is related to an organ (namely, a part of the brain). So
before intellection can happen the form must be further dematerialized,
and such is the mediating role of the intelligible species.63
3. Actualization: Although the agent intellect modifies the possible intellect
by the intermediary of the phantasm, the possible intellect is not a mere
receptacle, but cooperates in the process and has an action of its own. It
forms in itself a concept, or at least the very act of cognition (conceptus
vel operatio intelligendi). But nothing acts without being in actuality un-
der an adequate form. Therefore, before producing the end result of the
whole process—namely, an episode of cognition—the possible intellect
must be actualized by a form, that is to say, an intelligible species, which
is the principle of the cognitive act.
4. Conservation: The sensory faculties are able to retain sensible species as
representations of an object that is no longer present. A fortiori, the in-
tellect should be able to keep intelligible contents while it is not know-
ing them in actuality. Such is the role of intelligible species, which is
conserved in the intellectual memory.64

61 Giles of Rome, De cognitione angelorum, q. 4 (Venice, 1503), f. 83va; Quodl. ii, q. 21, 104b–
105a; Quodl. iii, q. 14, 172b.
62 Cf. Godfrey of Fontaines, Quodl. ix, q. 19, (ed.) Hoffmans, 274.
63 Giles of Rome, De cognitione angelorum, q. 4, f. 83vb–84ra; Quodl. iii, q. 13, 170b–71a; In ii
Sent., d. 24, pars 1, q. 2, a. 2, 259a–b. The same idea can be couched in terms of potential-
ity and actuality (De cognitione angelorum, q. 4, f. 84ra): “Species intelligibilis non habet
esse ita potentiale sicut phantasma nec ita actuale sicut intellectio, sed habet esse me-
dium inter illa.” Interestingly, in these texts Giles of Rome invokes, like James, the law of
continuity, according to which one cannot pass from one extreme to the other without
intermediary steps, but he uses it for a conclusion that James opposes.
64 Giles of Rome, In ii Sent., d. 24, pars 1, q. 2, a. 2, 258b–59a.
234 Solère

Confronted with this debate between Godfrey and Giles, James’s innatist the-
ory does not allow him to side with one against the other. Since he believes
that the mind can self-actualize to an occurrent intellectual cognition, he
must maintain, against Godfrey, that the mind contains the formal principles
of these operations. These intrinsic formal principles are of course the innate
“predispositions.” But since these predispositions are incomplete representa-
tions (similitudines) of things and aptitudes to have complete representations,
and since the representation of a thing in the mind is called a “species,” the
idoneitates qualify as intelligible species. The incomplete species are the prin-
ciples from which cognitive acts spring. When they are fully actualized, they
become full-fledged representations. In other words, the cognitive process
consists in the passing from imperfect intelligible species to perfected intel-
ligible species.65
On the other hand, James cannot side with Giles either. If we have these
innate species, none of the four arguments cited above is acceptable. Re (1):
we do not need to acquire species because the innate “predispositions,” once
awakened by phantasms, suffice to reach actual conceptual representations.66
Re (2): there is no need for dematerialization, because cognitive acts are not
caused by phantasms, which only “excite” the intellect.67 Re (3): the innate
­species suffice as formal principles of the cognitive act, and the mind actual-
izes them by itself.68 Re (4): the intelligible contents are conserved precisely
as innate incomplete species, and inasmuch as it contains these species, the
mind is an intellective memory, as we have seen earlier.
Moreover, partially concurring with Godfrey, James adds that acts of intel-
lection are not subsequent to the full actualization of the intelligible species.
An act of intellection, which is an operation of the intellect, is in fact the per-
fected, totally actualized species itself.69 Therefore, no full-fledged intelligible

65 Quodl. i, q. 13, 186–87, ll. 120–36. Of course, the same analysis applies to sensory cognition.
66 Ibid., 187, ll. 138–40. Let us recall, however, that their natures are different; see Quodl. i, q.
7, 94, ll. 483–92. It is not the same species numerically that is first an aptitude and then
becomes actualized. There simply is a relation of affinity or similitude between the innate
species and the actualized species (ibid.). See also section 6.2.2 in the previous chapter, at
note 39.
67 Quodl. i, q. 13, 187, ll. 140–48. In the same way, the dematerialization done by the medium
and the organ is sufficient for the sense faculty to be “excited” by the presence of a sensi-
ble species in the organ, and for a sensation to occur. Sensation does not require a species
to be imprinted in the sensory faculty, and is nothing other than the act of this faculty.
68 Ibid., 187, ll. 152–53.
69 Ibid., ll. 125–26: “[A]nima movet se ad similitudines completas, quae non sunt aliud
quam ipsae actiones vel operationes.” Ibid., 186, ll. 133–35: “[S]pecies in actu … sunt ipsae
Intellect and Intellectual Cognition 235

species is in the intellect before and besides an act of intellection. A species

either is the innate predisposition that is cause and principle of the cognition,
or it is that by which the cognizer formally is cognizing, as whiteness is that by
which a white thing is white, and action is that by which an acting thing acts.70

7.3.2 Henry of Ghent and James of Viterbo

However, James has to address another challenge to the species theory: Henry
of Ghent’s theory of cognition. Henry’s attack against intelligible species was
prompted by the problem of the beatific vision. A species contained within the
intellects of the blessed, which is necessarily finite just as these intellects are,
cannot represent God, who is infinite. The only form by which the blessed see
God must be the divine essence itself. But then it cannot be conjoined with
their intellect, since the beatific vision is not a case of hypostatic union.71 As a
result, Henry proposes an alternative model.72 Contrary to the received opin-
ion, he thinks that cognition does not require the form of the known thing to

­actiones ad quas anima movet se a rebus excitata per sensus.” Cf. Quodl. i, q. 14, 193, ll.
22–24: “[S]pecies in intellectu dupliciter sumitur. Uno modo, pro naturali quadam apti-
tudine, per quam se movet anima ad intelligendum actu; alio vero modo, pro ipsa cogni-
tione actuali.” In fact, Giles says as much in his Quodl. iii, q. 14, 175a: “Dicemus quod ipsa
intellectio, sive ipse actus intelligendi possit dici species; hujusmodi enim actus aliquid
est, et quid formale, et perfectio intellectus est, et actus ejus est; sed perfectio, endelichia,
actus, forma, et species unam et eandem rem nominant. Ipsa ergo intellectio, sive ipse ac-
tus intelligendi, est quaedam forma, et quaedam perfectio intellectus; ideoque quaedam
species dici potest.”
70 Quodl. i, q. 14, 193–94, ll. 27–32: “[P]er speciem, quae est naturalis aptitudo, dicitur aliquid
actu cognosci tamquam per id quod est causa et principium actualis cognitionis, eo modo
quo aliquid dicitur agere per id quod est actionis principium. Per speciem vero quae est
ipsa cognitio actualis, dicitur aliquid actu cognosci formaliter, eo modo quo aliquid di-
citur agere per actionem, vel esse album per albedinem.” Both species proceed from the
soul. However, the predispositions proceed immediately, as a property is said to flow from
the substance. The species that is the completed act of cognition, on the other hand,
proceeds from the soul through the mediation of the first kind of species, as for instance
a motion is said to proceed from the form of a thing. See ibid., 194, ll. 39–46.
71 Cf. Giles of Rome, Quodl. iii, q. 14, 174a–b.
72 See Pini, “Il dibattito sulle specie intelligibili,” 288; Martin Pickavé, “Causality and Cogni-
tion: An Interpretation of Henry of Ghent’s Quodlibet v, q. 14,” in Intentionality, Cognition,
and Mental Representation in Medieval Philosophy, (ed.) Gyula Klima (New York, 2015),
46–80; Bernd Goehring, “Henry of Ghent’s Use of Aristotle’s De anima in Developing
His Theory of Cognition,” in Medieval Perspectives on Aristotle’s De anima, (eds.) Russell
Friedman and Jean-Michel Counet (Leuven and Louvain-la-Neuve, 2013), 61–99; Michael
Rombeiro, “Intelligible Species in the Mature Thought of Henry of Ghent,” Journal of the
History of Philosophy 49 (2011): 181–220.
236 Solère

be received in the cognizer as in a subject of inherence. It is enough that the

cognizable content be “present” to the cognitive power and have “objective be-
ing” (the being of an object) for this power. The content need not have formal
being (the being of a form) in the cognizer.73 Therefore, we can do away with
the idea of intelligible species imprinted in the possible intellect. It may be
that the perceptual content of external things needs to be imprinted as a form
in the sensory organs.74 But the intelligible content is supposed to be already
contained in the phantasms, which are in the imagination and are immedi-
ately present to the possible intellect, since imagination and intellect are two
faculties of the same soul. True, this content is at first only potentially intel-
ligible, and has to be actualized by the agent intellect. But when doing so, the
agent intellect makes the content exist for the possible intellect not as a form
received in a subject, but precisely as an object of intellection, with only ob-
jective being.75 The actualized intelligible content can directly determine the
possible intellect and make it elicit an act of intellection. It does not have to be
further conveyed to the possible intellect by an intelligible species imprinted
in the latter.
Hence the question addressed by James in his Quodlibet ii, question 6: can
the intellect know something by a form that is not ontologically (secundum
esse) conjoined with it? In order to prepare his response, James observes that
something can be a “form of the intellect” in three senses.76 (1) As an act: in this

73 Henry of Ghent, Quodl. v, q. 14, ff. 174r–179v, esp. f. 175rD: “[E]t hoc non ut in subiecto cui
inhaereat formaliter, sed ut in concipiente obiective.”
74 Henry of Ghent, Quodl. xiii, q. 8, (ed.) Jos Decorte (Leuven, 1985), 51, ll. 59–64: “Et in
summa facit [intellectus agens] duo circa phantasmata, et duo circa possibilem intel-
lectum. Circa phantasmata enim quasi resplendendo super illa et illuminando ea, non
egrediendo a possibili sed convertendo se ad illa, quia in eadem substantia animae sunt
phantasia, in qua sunt phantasmata, et intellectus agens. Primo facit illa esse actu intel-
ligibilia, secundo dat eis vim movendi secundum actum intellectum possibilem, in quan-
tum scilicet sunt quasi imbuta et commixta lumini agentis.”
75 Henry of Ghent, Summa quaestionum ordinariarum, a. 33, q. 2, ad 3, (ed.) Raymond Mack-
en (Leuven, 1991), 146: “Penes vero secundum dictorum modorum potentia intelligens
non educitur effective in actum per aliquam formam sibi impressam, sed solummodo ab
ipso intelligibili obiective praesenti intellectui sicut cognoscibile cognoscenti”; Quodl. iv,
q. 21, (eds.) Gordon Wilson and Girard Etzkorn (Leuven, 2011), 339, ll. 93–98: “[I]ntentio-
nes imaginatae non movent ut obiecta intellectum materialem nisi quando efficiuntur in
actu universales postquam erant in potentia, et per hoc fiant in intellectu possibili non
sicut in subiecto, sed sicut in cognoscente, ut sic componantur intellectus materialis et
intentio intellecta ita quod compositum non sit tertium ex eis sicut de aliis compositis ex
materia et forma.”
76 Quodl. ii, q. 6, 98, ll. 31–57.
Intellect and Intellectual Cognition 237

sense, the very act of understanding is a form (species) of a cognizing intellect,

as we just saw.77 (2) As a habitus, and this can be understood according to three
different senses of “habitus”: (2.1) Habilitas, skill, either naturally acquired like
science, or infused by God. (2.2) A likeness that represents an object, according
to those who posit in the intellect an intelligible species that is the principle
of the act of understanding and remains as a habitus in the intellect when we
are not using it. (2.3) A natural “predisposition” in James’s sense, who also calls
such innate aptitudes habitus.78 (3) As an intelligible object. In effect, the cog-
nized object can be called a form or species of the intellect since it shapes it in
the act of cognition, so to speak.
Are any of these “forms” not ontologically conjoined with the intellect?
­Obviously, act and habitus (in the three senses of the term) have to be conjoined
with it, because they are in the intellect as accidents are in their ­subject.79 But
the intelligible object is not necessarily a form that resides in the intellect. It
is an “exemplar” for the intellect, and an exemplar does not have to be in that
which imitates it. In the cognitive process the intellect makes itself similar to
the object, that is, it reproduces its patterns, and in the resulting act of intel-
lection it is a likeness of the object.80 The cognizing subject is said by Aristotle
to become in actuality the cognized object inasmuch as a likeness is said to
be somehow that of which it is the likeness.81 Even De anima 3.7 (431b2) can
be interpreted in Henry’s sense: when Aristotle says that the intellect knows
the species in the phantasms, he is here calling “species” (forms) the object of
the intellect, with the result that the intelligible species taken in this sense is
not “in” the cognizer.82
However, the question is not yet settled. It may be that as the endpoint of
cognition, the cognized object, in a sense, is a form of the intellect but not “in”
the intellect; but what we want to know is whether the forms “by which” (per)
the ­intellect knows are conjoined with the intellect. Obviously, the intellect cog-
nizes “by” its acts and its habitus (in whichever sense of the term), and these
are forms that reside in it. But in addition, it also cognizes “by” the intelligible
object, which as we just saw, is an extrinsic form. The preposition “by” expresses
a relation of causality. The intelligible object is a cause of the act of intellection

77 Cf. Quodl. i, q. 14, 193–94, ll. 27–32, quoted above at note 70.
78 See sections 6.3.3 and 6.3.5 in the previous chapter.
79 Quodl. ii, q. 6, 98, ll. 57–61.
80 Ibid., 98–99, ll. 61–66.
81 Ibid., 99, ll. 67–68.
82 Ibid., 98, ll. 51–53.
238 Solère

in three ways: (1) as its efficient cause,83 (2) as its exemplar (formal cause), and
(3) as an intermediary (medium) and means of understanding (ratio intelligen-
di). Admittedly, the expressions “intermediary” and “means of understanding”
cannot be taken in the normal positive sense, for the object is not something by
which we arrive at the end term (terminus) of the cognition, but is the end term
itself. It can be an intermediary in the cognition of something else (another in-
telligible object, as when a cause is discovered from its effect), but it cannot be
an intermediary for its own cognition. Nonetheless, one can also take the ex-
pressions “intermediary” and “means of understanding” in a negative sense, as
when we say that God is God’s own cause of existence (a se): we do not mean
that God is positively the cause of himself, but only that God is not caused by
something. Likewise, we can say that an object is cognized “by” itself if we mean
that it is not known by the mediation of another intelligible object.84
In all these senses of “by,” the intellect knows by the form of the intelligible
object, which is not conjoined with it, in addition to the forms (acts and habi-
tus) that reside in it. Thus, James concurs with Henry, but only partially, for as
far as natural cognition is concerned, there is indeed in us a preexisting species
of the object: the idoneitas. But it is not necessary for the form of the intelli-
gible object to be ontologically received in the intellect. Such is the case of the
divine essence for the blessed: it is the form of their intellect as an extrinsic in-
telligible object, an exemplar and efficient cause, known through no other, and
by which they know everything else.85 The blessed do not contemplate God by
a representing likeness of God.86 In this special case, our cognition does not
even presuppose an inner predisposition or innate species; it is entirely caused
by God in the blessed as a supernatural habitus.87
Admittedly, the intellect is supposed to act and any action is accomplished
thanks to a form. But this form does not always have to be in the agent. In
fact, many causes of action are not forms that are in the agent: for instance,
final causes or instrumental causes. Both in immanent and transeunt actions,
the agent can act because of an extrinsic exemplar. For instance, a painter
who wants to represent a group of prostitutes in a brothel can be inspired
by African masks and statues and imitate their style. As a result, he has two
exemplars, one intrinsic (the scene he had in mind), the other extrinsic (the
elements of African art he wants to use), and he acts through both of these

83 See Chapter 6 in this volume, note 65.

84 Quodl. ii, q. 6, 99, ll. 79–105.
85 Ibid., 100–101, ll. 106–53.
86 Cf. ibid., 103, ll. 214–18.
87 Ibid., 104, ll. 242–44: “Non enim in intellectu creato est habilitas naturaliter indita ad in-
telligendum divinam essentiam secundum se. Ideo indiget habilitate supernaturaliter
infusa.”
Intellect and Intellectual Cognition 239

exemplars. Likewise, when we intellectually know, we act according to both

intrinsic forms (predispositions and resulting acts) and extrinsic forms (the
intelligible objects).88
Still, the nature of the intellectual act entails that the object is thereby pres-
ent in us. In effect, James explains, there are four ways in which something can
be said to be in something else:

1. A can contain B materially, in passive potency.

2. A can contain B in active potency, as its efficient cause.
3. A can contain B by composition, as mixtures contain elements or
wholes contain parts.
4. A can contain B by “conformity,” as for instance when B is ­represented
by A, which resembles it. Given that A somehow is B because it
­resembles it,89 B is somehow in A.90

The fourth mode is, of course, the one that applies to cognition. It is in this
way that all things can be in the soul and the soul is potentially all things, as
Aristotle says. When things are known, it is because the soul is their likeness
or representation.91 This conformity by resemblance of the soul with external
things occurs at two levels: first, in potentiality, and in this way the soul con-
forms to things even before it knows them in actuality, because it is naturally
apt to be their likeness; thereafter, this conformity is expressed in actuality by
the very act of cognition itself.

7.4 What Do We Know?

7.4.1 The Problem of the Knowledge of Substances

Granted that our intellect is one way or another acquainted with intelligible
forms, a subsequent question was much debated in James’s day: do we get to
know quiddities of substances by an adequate (propria) species?92 Richard of

88 Ibid., 101, ll. 154–81.

89 Quodl. i, q. 7, 91, ll. 388–89: “Quod enim est alicui simile et conforme, est quodammodo
illud.”
90 Ibid., 91, ll. 387–88: “… in suo simili.”
91 Ibid., 91, ll. 402–405: “Sed quarto modo res omnes sunt in anima, et anima est quodam-
modo omnes res, scilicet per quamdam conformitatem et similitudinem. Hoc enim modo
per sensum est quodammodo omnia sensibilia et per intellectum omnia intelligibilia et
per appetitum omnia appetibilia.”
92 See Robert, “L’universalité réduite au discours,” 382–89; “Scepticisme ou renoncement au
dogme? Interpréter l’eucharistie aux xiiie et xive siècles,” Chora 6 (2008): 251–88; “The
240 Solère

Mediavilla (Menneville), in the 1280s, had raised worries about whether this is
possible. As hinted at earlier,93 if phantasms present or convey to the possible
intellect (with the help of the agent intellect) fodder for thought, it is difficult
to explain how our mind can know substances. Phantasms are representations
that combine the information given by the senses, and senses relate only to
accidental forms; consequently, phantasms consist only in a collection of acci-
dental features. How then could they provide information about the essences
of substances, even potentially? How could they help to cause in the intellect
an intelligible species that represents the essential core of a substance?94 The
root of the problem is that Aristotle’s epistemology is founded on the idea of
a replication of form, from the object to the cognizer. This works well for sen-
sibility, but the difficulty lies in passing from sensibility to intellectual cogni-
tion. Cognition of this kind seems to require that the intelligible form that ends
up in the intellect be somehow already present in the sensory representations
from which it has to be actualized, extracted, separated, etc., by the agent in-
tellect. However, sensory representations cannot contain anything like this if
they derive from accidental properties in the things.
James reviews the various earlier attempts that had been made to address
this problem:

(1) The first answer is that of Richard himself, who in fact concedes that in
our present state of existence (in statu viae), we do not get to directly
know the nature of substances through adequate species.95 Accidents,
not substances, are the first objects not only of our sensory cognition
but also of our intellectual cognition. In other words, that of which we
have intuitive intellectual cognition—defined as having a proper species
of X that directly leads to knowing X96—includes such things as colors,
shapes, etc. (not this particular hue of red or this particular square, which
perception deals with, but very likely general notions of redness, square-
ness, etc.). However, it is possible to use the information conveyed by

Knowability of Material Substances in Late Medieval Philosophy” (forthcoming). See also

Timothy B. Noone, “The Problem of the Knowability of Substance: The Discussion from
Eustachius of Arras to Vital du Four,” in Philosophy and Theology in the Long Middle Ages:
A Tribute to Stephen F. Brown, (eds.) Kent Emery, Jr. et al. (Leiden, 2011), 63–90; Côté, “La
critique de la doctrine de l’abstraction,” 246–61; Introduction to Jacques de Viterbe: L’âme,
l’intellect et la volonté, (ed.) Antoine Côté (Paris, 2010), 41–53.
93 See Section 1.3. above.
94 Quodl. i, q. 13, 187, ll. 161–66.
95 Ibid., 188, ll. 169–84. Cf. Richard of Mediavilla, In ii Sent., d. 24, q. 3 (Brescia, 1591), f. 309b;
Quaestiones disputatae, q. 42, (ed.) Alain Boureau (Paris, 2014), 388–92.
96 Richard of Mediavilla, Quaestiones disputatae, q. 42, (ed.) Boureau, 386.
Intellect and Intellectual Cognition 241

accidents to know something about the substances they depend upon

and to tell these substances apart. For instance, we approximate the
nature of fire by its characteristic properties of heat, dryness, lightness,
and so forth. We approximate human nature by its characteristic acts. In
other words, Richard replaces Aristotle’s model of the transfer of forms
with an inferential knowledge of the substance from the accidents.97 The
substance can be known from its accidents as the cause is known from its
effects, because accidents are like the effects of substances.
(2) However, as Aristotle says in Metaphysics 7. 1, substance is prior to acci-
dents by nature, in time, and in the order of cognition. So Richard’s way
out is deemed by many to be unworkable. Substance has to be the first
object of cognition; therefore, there must be some adequate species that
directly represent the natures of substances.98 There are three ways of
explaining how that would be possible.
(2.1) The first theory comes from Roger Bacon.99 According to him, the spe-
cies of the essence is hidden under the species of its accidents (or more
exactly, of its proper qualities). In effect, in the process of reproducing
species in the surrounding medium, the whole material thing replicates
itself. The species are species not only of its accidental forms, but also of
its substantial form (and even of its matter, Bacon adds). Sensory facul-
ties, up to the common sense, are not able to detect the species of the
substantial form. Nevertheless, this species is present in what affects the
senses. In fact, it underlies the species of accidental properties detected
by the senses exactly as the substance out there underlies the accidents.
A suitable cognitive faculty will be able to detect it, and this starts, ac-
cording to Bacon, with the estimative faculty, as in Avicenna’s famous
example of the sheep which identifies the wolf as an enemy. It may be
that the species of the substance next reaches the intellect.100

97 Richard of Mediavilla, In ii Sent., d. 24, a. 3, f. 310b: “Non cognoscimus substantiam per

propriam eius speciem, sed per suas proprietates argumentando.”
98 Quodl. i, q. 13, 188, ll. 187–92.
99 Ibid., 188, ll. 193–200. Cf. Roger Bacon, De multiplicatione specierum, lib. 1, c. 2, (ed.) David
Lindberg (Oxford, 1983), 20–29.
100 See Katherine H. Tachau, Vision and Certitude in the Age of Ockham: Optics, Epistemology
and the Foundations of Semantics 1250–1345 (Leiden, 1988), 11; Yael Raizman-Kedar, “The
Intellect Naturalized: Roger Bacon on the Existence of Corporeal Species within the Intel-
lect,” Early Science and Medicine 14 (2009): 139–40. One may wonder whether the position
reported by James is exactly Bacon’s or if it is only inspired by it. In his report, James
concludes that according to this theory the essence of the thing, virtually contained in
the representation offered by the phantasia, is eventually extracted or actualized by the
242 Solère

(2.2) For his part, Giles of Rome argues that in natural processes the action
of an accident on a patient ends up actualizing the nature of the sub-
stance that underlies this accident. For instance, fire, as a substance, acts
through a quality, heat, and eventually the nature of fire is actualized in
the wood. Likewise, species of accidents in the power of imagination
can, by virtue of the substance with which these accidents are conjoined,
cause in the intellect a species of that substance (thanks also to a boost
given by the agent intellect).101
(2.3) Finally, some submit that all the intelligibles preexist in the agent intel-
lect, which imprints the species of the substance in the possible intellect
when the corresponding phantasms have been acquired.102

In sum, solutions 2.1 and 2.2 try to find a way of explaining how the intelligible
content that is actualized in the possible intellect can be somehow already
present in, and conveyed by, the phantasms, whereas solution 2.3, like solu-
tion 1, doubts that this is possible. Solution 1 concedes that we do not get ad-
equate species of substances, while solution 2.3 has them precontained in the
intellect.

7.4.2 James’s Solution

James too believes that it is not possible to derive, by information transfer,
conceptual knowledge of substances from the perception of accidents. But he
agrees with the opposition to Richard of Mediavilla (i.e., solution 1) that sub-
stances have to be cognized by characteristics that belong to their essence (i.e.,
by adequate species) because they are ontologically prior to accidents. James
agrees with solution 2.3 insofar as it makes the intellect the sole place from
which intelligible content comes. Nonetheless, he cannot adopt it, although
it is innatist, because he does not accept that intelligible forms are natively in
actuality in the agent intellect,103 and he denies that the latter is distinct from
the possible intellect.

intellect; see Quodl. i, q. 13, 188, ll. 193–200. But Bacon seems to have abandoned the idea
of abstraction; see Raizman-Kedar, “The Intellect Naturalized,” 139–45. See also Côté, “La
critique de la doctrine de l’abstraction,” 252, n. 41.
101 Quodl. i, q. 13, 188–89, ll. 201–207. Cf. Giles of Rome, De cognitione angelorum, q. 3, f.
81va–b.
102 Quodl. i, q. 13, 188, ll. 208–11. This innatist position is mentioned by Richard of Mediavilla;
see references in note 95 above.
103 See section 6.3.5 in the previous chaper.
Intellect and Intellectual Cognition 243

James’s own solution follows directly from his own brand of innatism. If the
mind is equipped with innate concepts—albeit in an incomplete state, as the
idoneitates are104—it is easy enough to explain how the intellect knows sub-
stances by an adequate species even though only species of accidents are con-
tained in the phantasms. As we saw earlier,105 the intellect does not perform
any operation on the phantasms (this would require the intelligible content
to be somehow already present in them). Conversely, phantasms do not act
on the intellect otherwise than by “exciting” it, and to be exciting causes they
need only to have traits which have some relation with the intelligible content
to be triggered in the intellect, without being formally identical to it either
in actuality or potentially. Therefore, for James there is no particular problem
in the gap between, on the one hand, the mere information about accidents
that the senses are capable of conveying, and, on the other hand, the resulting
knowledge of the essences 0f substances in the intellect. Some of the innate
conceptual “predispositions” are precisely species of substantial natures, and
the mind spontaneously actualizes them when the right kinds of accident are
presented in sensory images.106
Which accidents are of the right kind for triggering conceptual schemes?
These must be propria in Porphyry’s sense, that is to say, properties which,
without being parts of the essence, belong to all the members of a natural kind
and only to this natural kind.107 They have the same relation to their substances

104 See sections 6.2.2 and 6.3.2 in the previous chapter.

105 See section 7.2.4 above.
106 Quodl. i, q. 13, 190, ll. 244–50. As a consequence, intuitive knowledge of immaterial sub-
stances is inaccessible to us (even if we have the appropriate conceptual predispositions),
because these substances do not have accidents that fall under the senses, and we can
have only indirect knowledge of them; see ibid., ll. 257–64.
107 Ibid., 190, ll. 205–56. James writes “proprium accidens.” Strictly speaking, a proprium is
not an accident (see Porphyry, Isagoge, cc. 4, 5, and 26). But how exactly to distinguish
between propria and “inseparable accidents” (i.e., accidents which always accompany a
given substance) was a vexed question in medieval philosophy, and the former are often
treated as close to the latter; see Robert, “L’universalité réduite au discours,” 389–92. Be
that as it may, it remains true that we are acquainted with propria through sensory experi-
ence (for example, melting temperature, which is unique to each metal element, has to be
empirically observed); and so, like accidents, propria are collected in phantasms. However,
these phantasms inform us about a given kind of substance: it surely puts us on the way to
understanding what gold is to know that it is the metal (24K pure) that melts at 1064.18°C.
I would add, however, that it is perhaps not inconceivable that knowledge of substances
could obtain thanks to inseparable accidents too. Admittedly, unlike a proprium, a given
inseparable accident is not found in one natural kind only. For example, gold cannot be
but yellowish, but other things are yellowish too. Even so, a set of several inseparable
244 Solère

that the proper and per se effect of a cause has to its cause. Knowledge of one
entails knowledge of the other. This is why the adequate conceptual predis-
positions can be activated by sensory representations of such properties and
make us understand what the nature of their substance is. Conversely, not just
any phantasm can activate the innate conceptual schema for a definite sub-
stance, but only phantasms of properties of the corresponding sort. Conse-
quently, it is in a way correct to say that an appropriate sensory representation
is a species of the substance, although technically it is only a species of its
accident(s), provided this accident has a determinate relation to the essence of
the substance and induces the knowledge of the substance by the intellect.108
Given that God creates human souls with their predispositions, we may
expect that the knowledge yielded by the actualization of one of them will
exactly correspond to the nature of the substance the accidents of which have
occasioned this actualization.109 Like Descartes with his innate ideas, James
is much more in a position to guarantee the perfect objectivity of our con-
ceptual cognition (generally a major concern and requirement in medieval
philosophy) than Richard of Mediavilla with his inferences from accidents to
substances.
But is this not too good to be true, namely, that as soon as a sensory repre-
sentation of the right kind is given we automatically actualize an adequate
concept of a thing? Well, in the first place, James does not say whether only
one phantasm taken from a single experience can immediately provoke an
actualization of the matching conceptual predisposition, or whether repeat-
ed sensory experiences are required. The right kind of phantasm—that is, a
phantasm that can provoke a conceptualization because it is comprehensive
enough and includes the relevant propria—could be a representation that re-
sults not from a single experience but from the accretion of different experi-
ences stored in memory. For instance, if the first duck I ever see is swimming
on a river, and if at another time I see another duck while it is flying, I can
aggregate the two images in the sensory representation of a feathered creature
that can alternately swim and fly, and this phantasm triggers the conceptual

accidents might be characteristic of a given natural kind. For instance, being yellowish,
and heavy, and malleable, and dissolvable in aqua regia, etc. Each of these qualities alone
is not characteristic of gold, but their conjunction is. In this case, pace Locke, the phan-
tasm that gathers these accidents might also activate a conceptual predisposition.
108 Quodl. i, q. 13, 190, ll. 265–72.
109 Cf. Quodl. i, q. 14, 195, ll. 92–94: “[E]t quia huiusmodi species, quae est naturalis aptitudo,
derivata est ab inviolabili veritate, quae Deus est, et ab aeternis rationibus quae continen-
tur in ipsa.” Quiddities of substances are derived from the same eternal reasons. There-
fore, our predispositions necessarily match these quiddities.
Intellect and Intellectual Cognition 245

understanding of what an aquatic bird is. Therefore, we should not assume

that James claims that arriving at scientific knowledge is quick and easy. It may
take time to build the appropriate phantasm.
In addition, James himself specifies that the first actualization of a concep-
tual predisposition is not the end stage of a cognitive process. We need to go
back to experience and refine our knowledge of the substance by exploring
more of its propria. Knowledge by adequate species is called “intuitive cogni-
tion” as opposed to “knowledge through investigation” (inquisitiva cognitio).110
James maintains we eventually have intuitive cognition of a substance’s quid-
dities, but the fact that this cognition is intuitive does not mean that it is imme-
diately perfect and distinct. To reach a more perfect and distinct knowledge,
that is to say, an adequate species of a substance, we have to use discursive rea-
soning and hunt for definitions, either by the propria of the essence or by com-
position and division of other cognitions. As a consequence, our knowledge
progresses in the following back-and-forth order:111 first, we have an intuitive
but confused cognition of a substance’s quiddity. Then, we have an imperfect
cognition of the accidental properties of this substance. Next, thanks to the
knowledge of these properties, we return to the substance and now reach a
distinct, definitional knowledge of it. And finally, we return to the accidental
properties and obtain a perfect cognition of them.
Thus, the process is much longer and more complex than it looks at first
sight. If I may venture a modernized example: we first know very confusedly
about gold (step 1) because, say, we have realized through its accidents that it is
not like lead (this would be Mediavilla’s discursive or inductive knowledge of
the substance). Next (step 2), among the accidents we identify its inseparable
accidents and its propria, such as its melting point.112 This is the springboard to
circumscribing the nature of gold, understanding more about it, and eventu-
ally discovering its distinctive atomic structure (step 3). Finally (step 4), we can
go back to its properties and understand them better in the light of its atomic
structure: we come to know why it melts at the temperature of 1064.18°C, why it
looks yellowish (this is due to loosely bound electrons), and so forth.

7.4.3 Knowledge of the Self

However, there is a special case of cognition, which is the knowledge we have
of ourselves, or rather of our own mind. How can the mind know itself if no
sensory representations of it are provided? And if it knows itself, does it do so

110 Cf. Quodl. i, q. 13, 183, ll. 9–11; 191, ll. 291–96.
111 Ibid., 191, ll. 296–305.
112 See note 107 above.
246 Solère

by the mediation of a species? Augustine seems to maintain that the mind, on

the contrary, knows itself without species and that its self-knowledge is imme-
diate.113 James answers that since it is an incorporeal substance, the soul has
the typical Neoplatonist property of “reverting to itself,”114 regarding both its
substance and its operations (namely, cognition and love). However, because
the soul is not absolutely simple, the reflection on its operations is distinct
from the reflection on its substance. Only in God are operation and substance
identical, and as a result, God’s self-knowledge is simple and perfect. But when
our soul knows itself, the act of self-cognition differs from the soul even though
the knower and the known are in reality identical. Therefore, if we take “spe-
cies” in the sense of “actual cognition,” our soul knows itself by a species and
this species is different from its own substance.115 In addition, whenever the
cognitive act differs from the knower, there must be in the knower a “predispo-
sition” thanks to which the mind accesses the perfection of actual cognition.
Therefore there also must be in the soul an innate species, in the sense of pre-
disposition, of itself.116
Yet the conditions that apply to every cognitive process apply to this innate
species too. That is, in order to reach complete actuality the predisposition
must be aroused by phantasms. But we cannot have phantasms of our own
soul, since it is immaterial, and so we cannot immediately actualize our own
species. Therefore, the soul, excited by other phantasms, must first cognize
some other object; then, because the soul realizes that it is having a cognitive
act, it comes to know that it exists.117 This is an indistinct and imperfect knowl-
edge, which Augustine calls notitia sui. The soul is always present to itself and
always knows itself in this fashion.118 Under this aspect, the very nature of the
mind is memory—recollection of oneself, as Augustine says.119 That is, the soul
is aware of its own existence while it is having a cognitive act about something
else, but does not know itself. Nevertheless, this constitutes a sufficient basis to
proceed further and actualize more of the innate species of oneself, that is, to

113 Cf. Augustine, De Trinitate, lib. 9, c. 3, (eds.) Mountain and Glorie, 296, ll. 18–19: “Ergo
[mens] et se ipsam per se ipsam nouit quoniam est incorporea.”
114 Quodl. i, q. 14, 194, ll. 61–62: “… est ad se conversiva.”
115 Ibid., 195, ll. 70–82.
116 Ibid., 195, ll. 83–87.
117 Ibid., 195–96, ll. 97–107.
118 Cf. Quodl. i, q. 12, 170, ll. 460–62: “[A]nima semper est actu intelligens, secundum actum
quemdam incompletum, qui dicitur potentia naturalis, vel aptitudo.”
119 Augustine, De Trinitate, lib. 14, c. 6, (eds.) Mountain and Glorie, 432, ll. 33–34.
Intellect and Intellectual Cognition 247

access a more distinct cognition of oneself by which the soul glimpses its own
nature.120 This is what Augustine calls cogitatio.
However, in the present life, we cannot arrive at a perfect self-cognition.
The soul does not know itself as a self-subsisting substance; the best it can do
is to know itself in relation to the body that it informs. This is why Aristotle’s
definition of the soul is correctly derived from the acts that the body performs:
the soul is that by which we live, sense, move, and know, and is “the actuality
of a physical, organ-endowed body that has life in potentiality.”121 Thus, with
respect to “habitual cognition,” Augustine is right to say that the soul knows
itself by itself, as this cognition does not obtain through the cognition of some-
thing else; but this is not the case with cogitatio. Moreover, whereas notitia sui
is a “habitual cognition” that is always present in the mind, the cogitatio type
of self-knowledge does not permanently occur.122

7.5 Conclusion

Let us summarize what we have learned of James of Viterbo’s theory of intel-

lectual cognition. His innatist foundations enable him to have an original posi-
tion on the main issues that were debated in the 1280s and 1290s. Like Thomas
Aquinas and Giles of Rome, he maintains the real distinction between the
soul and its faculties, because the faculties themselves are “predispositions,”
that is, imperfect forms in the soul. At the same time, precisely because all
the predispositions are innate and stored in the soul, James defends the Trini-
tarian model of the faculties, according to which intellective memory is dis-
tinct from, and is the root of, the two other powers of intellect and will. On
the other hand, he rejects the distinction between agent intellect and patient
intellect, since the mind can be an agent for itself owing to its predispositions;
he points out that this is more consonant with the teaching of Augustine and
Boethius. By the same token, James circumvents the difficulty of explaining
what exactly the intellect does to sensory representations in order to abstract
intelligible content from them. Concept formation obtains because the mind,
when “excited” by sensory representations, actualizes in and by itself an innate
conceptual scheme. These conceptual predispositions can be viewed as intel-
ligible ­species in an imperfect state of actualization. This is why James main-
tains, against both Godfrey of Fontaines and Henry of Ghent, the necessity

120 Quodl. i, q. 14, 196, ll. 98–107.

121 Ibid., 196, ll. 108–118.
122 Ibid., 197, ll. 156–57: “[A]nima semper se novit, sed non semper de se cogitat.”
248 Solère

of intelligible species as formal principles of intellectual operations. However,

he does not share Giles of Rome’s more traditional justification of these prin-
ciples, which is grounded in the necessity of having intellect-adapted vehicles
for information collected outside. James also maintains, like Godfrey, that acts
of intellection are not subsequent to the complete actualization of intelligible
species, but are identical to them. Moreover, he concedes to Henry that an in-
telligible object is not necessarily a form that resides in the intellect, as the
particular case of the beatific vision exemplifies. Regarding natural cognition,
James obviates the doubts raised by Richard of Mediavilla about our ability to
know the essences of substances by adequate species rather than by inference.
Even though the senses only deal with accidents, the mind has inbuilt con-
ceptual schemes that correspond, with God warranting it, to substantial na-
tures. However, the conceptual predispositions must be triggered by the right
sort of sensory representations, namely, phantasms that present the propria of
substances. Acquiring such phantasms requires effort and time. On the other
hand, the soul immediately and constantly knows about itself by a natural “ha-
bitual cognition,” but this is only an imperfect knowledge of itself.
 chapter 8

James of Viterbo on the Will

Stephen D. Dumont*

8.1 Introduction

As regent master of theology, James of Viterbo devoted more attention to the

problem of free will than to any other single issue, disputing a dozen questions
on the topic under various rubrics.1 This reflected his own significant role in
the later stage of the extensive 13th-century debate over the will at the Uni-
versity of Paris. This phase of the dispute, which began in the mid-1280s, was
marked by a polarization of views now commonly labelled “intellectualism”
and “voluntarism,” indicating the source of human freedom to be respectively
the intellect or the will.2 In this period, the most prominent and radical rep-
resentative of voluntarism was undoubtedly Henry of Ghent, who upheld the

* Research for this publication was supported by a National Endowment for the Humanities
Fellowship (fa–57408) as part of a project entitled “The Two Affections of the Will: From
­Anselm of Canterbury to John Duns Scotus.” The following abbreviations refer to editions
published in series. For the Latin translations of Aristotle, al=Aristoteles Latinus, (eds.)
­Lorenzo Minio Paluello et al. (Bruges et al., 1951–), which are here cited by volume and fas-
cicule. For the Quodlibeta of Godfrey of Fontaines, pb=Les Philosophes Belges (Louvain,
1901ff.) according to the following volumes: pb 2=Les quatre premiers Quodlibets de Godefroid
de Fontaines, (eds.) Maurice De Wulf and Auguste Pelzer (1904); pb 3=Les Quodlibets cinq,
six et sept de Godefroid de Fontaines, (eds.) Maurice De Wulf and Jean Hoffmans (1914); pb
4=Le huitième Quodlibet, Le neuvième Quodlibet, Le dixième Quodlibet de Godefroid de Fon-
taines, (ed.) Jean Hoffmans (1924–1931); pb 5=Les Quodlibets onze-quatorze de Godefroid de
Fontaines, (ed.) Jean Hoffmans (1932–1935).
1 James disputed nine quodlibetal questions on the will as well as three Ordinary questions,
which remain unedited. See the list and comments in the Appendix to the chapter. I am
grateful to Christopher Schabel for allowing me to consult his transcriptions of the three
O
­ rdinary Questions on the will. On James of Viterbo’s theory of free will, see Francis Ruello,
“Les fondements de la liberté humaine selon Jacques de Viterbe, Disputatio prima de Quoli-
bet, q. vii (1293),” Augustiniana 24 (1974): 283–347 and 25 (1975): 114–142 and Antoine Côté,
“Simplicius and James of Viterbo on Propensities,” Vivarium 47 (2009): 24–53.
2 For an overview of the debate, see Tobias Hoffmann, “Intellectualism and Voluntarism,”
in The Cambridge History of Medieval Philosophy, (ed.) Robert Pasnau (Cambridge, 2010),
414–27. Although dated, Odon Lottin, Psychologie et morale aux xiie et xiiie siècles, 2nd ed.,
vol. 1 (Gembloux, 1957), 225–389, is still useful.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���8 | doi 10.1163/9789004361881_010

250 Dumont

will as a self-moving power and reduced the intellect to an incidental factor in

human freedom. At the other extreme was Godfrey of Fontaines, who force-
fully rejected Henry’s concept of the will as a violation of Aristotle’s funda-
mental prohibition against any absolute self-mover and, accordingly, made the
intellect the source of freedom. Between these limiting positions were more
moderate strategies that apportioned substantial roles to both intellect and
will, often reworking Aquinas’s balanced solution in question 6 of his Quaestio-
nes disputatae de malo. Such were the accounts, for example, of Giles of Rome
and the Franciscan John of Murro, and both were expressly rejected by Henry
and Godfrey alike.
The above debate over free will was largely prosecuted in public, specially
held “quodlibetal” disputations at the University.3 James of Viterbo was already
in Paris pursuing theological studies under Giles of Rome when Henry of Ghent
first put this part of the debate into motion with his Quodlibet ix, question 5.4
There Henry set out his most extensive and uncompromising account of the
will as a self-moving power, sharply attacking Aquinas’s solution in Quaestiones
disputatae de malo, question 6. As a bachelor progressing through the ranks of
sententiarius and formatus, James witnessed, and perhaps even participated in,
key moments of the dispute: Godfrey of Fontaines’s lengthy response to Henry
in his Quodlibet vi, question 7 (1289), Giles’s own version of free will in his
Quodlibet iii, question 15 (1288), which was immediately rejected by Henry in
his Quodlibet xii, question 26 (1288) and then later by Godfrey in his Quodlibet
viii, question 16 (1292/93). James himself became master of theology at Paris
in 1293, succeeding Giles of Rome as the Augustinian regent.5 That is, James

3 On the debate during this period, see François-Xavier Putallaz, Insolente liberté: ­Controverses
et condamnations au xiiie siècle (Fribourg and Paris, 1995) and Antonio San Cristóbal-­
Sebastián, Controversias acerca de la voluntad desde 1270 a 1300 (Madrid, 1958), which is to
be used with caution. On the roles and positions on the will in Henry, Giles, and Godfrey in
particular, see Raymond Macken, “Heinrich von Gent im Gespräch mit seinen Zeitgenos-
sen über die menschliche Freiheit,” Franziskanische Studien 5 (1977): 125–82; Peter S. Eardley,
“Ethics and Moral Psychology,” in A Companion to Giles of Rome, (eds.) Charles F. Briggs and
Peter S. Eardley (Leiden, 2016), 173–211; Odon Lottin, “Le libre arbitre chez Godefroid de Fon-
taines,” Revue néo-scolastique de philosophie 54 (1937): 213–41.
4 Capitular documents of the Order establish that James of Viterbo was in Paris as a bachelor
of theology in 1288. Ypma argues that he was a sententiarius at this time and would have
been at Paris a few years earlier as a biblicus, likely going to Paris when Giles of Rome was
promoted to master in 1285. See Eelcko Ypma, “Recherches sur la carrière scolaire de Jacques
de Viterbe,” Augustiniana 24 (1974): 254–257.
5 The start of James’s regency at Paris in 1293 is firmly established by capitular documents; cf.
Ypma, “Recherches sur la carrière scolaire,” 257, n. 26. John Wippel, however, has questioned
James of Viterbo on the Will 251

began his teaching career at Paris just as those of both Giles and Henry ended.6
The departure from the Parisian faculty of these two prominent theologians
and principal figures in the free will debate set the stage for James to determine
as a master the issue he had heard publicly disputed for years as a student.
And thus in his inaugural Quodlibet i, question 7, James was confronted with
a precisely formulated question that went to the core of the free will dispute:
“Is the movement of the will towards the end an act of the will or an act of the
intellect (Utrum motus voluntatis in finem sit actus voluntatis vel intellectus).”
James attached great importance to his response, which is the second longest
of all his academic disputations. In effect, this extensive question constitutes
James’s definitive treatise on the will.
What follows is an examination of James’s theory of free will, focusing
on the central problem of self-motion. As his academic history at Paris sug-
gests, James developed his theory taking into full account the solutions of his
contemporaries. What emerged, however, was not something derivative but
rather a highly original concept of the will based on his distinctive and fun-
damental doctrine of “aptitudes,” an innovation in which James saw a recon-
ciliation with the Aristotelian prohibition against self-motion. Unsurprisingly,
commentators view James as advancing a voluntarist program aligned with
Henry of Ghent: the will is a self-moving power, the ultimate source of free-
dom, and the highest capacity of the soul. Indeed, some have gone so far as
to see James developing a form of voluntarism even more radical than that of

the 1293 dating of James’s Quodlibet i, since it is found summarized and attacked by Godfrey
of Fontaines in his Quodlibet viii, which is dated either 1290 (Glorieux) or 1291/92 (­Wippel).
See his “The Dating of James of Viterbo’s Quodlibet i and Godfrey of Fontaines Quodlibet
viii,” Augustiniana 24 (1974): 348–386 at 372–383. Godfrey’s Quodlibeta, however, should be
used cautiously as evidence for dating. Godfrey has been shown to have revised his Quodli-
beta by reporting positions of other authors taken from their disputations held as much as
three years later. For example, Concetta Luna has shown that Godfrey’s Quodlibet i, ques-
tion 5, disputed in 1285, reports verbatim a column of text from the redacted form of Henry
of Ghent’s Quodlibet xii, question 1, which was not disputed until 1288. See her “Una nuova
questione di Egidio Romano De subiecto theologiae,” Freiburger Zeitschrift für Philosophie
und Theologie 37 (1990): 417, 420–421, 426. Under these circumstances, then, the presence of
James’s initial Quodlibet of 1293 in Godfrey’s earlier Quodlibet viii presents no anomaly. This
is relevant, since Godfrey’s Quodlibet viii is his initial reaction to James’s theory of the will.
6 Henry of Ghent stopped teaching in 1292 and died the next year. Giles of Rome was elect-
ed prior general of the Augustinians in 1292 but probably continued teaching at Paris ­until
James became regent. On Henry’s career, see the Introduction to Henry of Ghent, Quodl. I,
(ed.) Raymond Macken, Opera Omnia 5 (Leuven, 1979), xii. On Giles, see Eelcko Ypma, La
formation des professeurs chez les Ermites de Saint A ­ ugustin de 1256 à 1354 (Paris, 1956), 81–84,
who argues that Giles continued teaching until James was promoted in 1293.
252 Dumont

Henry himself.7 On our analysis, James is certainly a voluntarist, but one who
goes to some lengths to moderate the doctrine by accommodating Aquinas in
ways that Henry of Ghent would certainly have rejected. These considerations
raise a broader question about the coherence of James’s theory. In particular, is
James’s innovation itself of “aptitudes,” which he applied across his psychology,
consistent with a strong form of voluntarism in which the will is a uniquely
self-moving power?

8.2 Background in Aristotle

At first glance, the above question confronting James in his inaugural

­Quodlibet—whether the movement of the will to the end is an act of the will
or an act of the intellect—seems entirely trivial. How can the movement of the
will towards an object be not its own act but rather that of the intellect? This
reading, however, belies the technical significance of the question, which goes
to the heart of the difficulty the medievals faced in adapting Aristotle to the idea
of free will. To understand this technical meaning, which James i­mmediately
parses in his response, it will be helpful to set out the presupposed Aristotelian
sources and vocabulary. At issue is Aristotle’s analysis of animal movement in
De anima 3.10 and his analysis of motion in both Physics 3.3 and 8.5.
The framework for the medieval discussion of free will comes broadly from
Aristotle’s account of animal self-motion in De anima 3.10.8 In this text, Aristot-
le is obviously concerned with the role of the soul in animal locomotion rather
than with bodily mechanics. Within the soul, he identifies two factors that ac-
count for movement: mind and desire (intellectus et appetitus).9 Aristotle takes

7 Antoine Côté, “Deux questions inédites de Jacques de Viterbe sur les habitus,” Archives
d’histoire doctrinale et littéraire du Moyen Âge 79 (2012): 301: “Le premier [sc. Thomas d’Aquin]
a trait à la conception de la volonté que se fait Jacques de Viterbe. Celui-ci est le partisan d’un
volontarisme fort”; idem, “Simplicius and James of Viterbo,” 32: “Thus Godfrey of Fontaines
espouses a form of intellectualism that is more rigid than that of Aquinas and James a form
of voluntarism that is arguably more extreme than Henry’s.”
8 For a commentary on this text, see Ronald Polansky, Aristotle’s De anima: A Critical Com-
mentary (Cambridge, 2008), 514–26. In what follows, the medieval Latin text of the De anima
is cited according to the translatio nova of William Moerbeke as edited in Thomas Aquinas,
Sentencia libri De anima, (ed.) Leonina, Opera Omnia 45.1 (Rome and Paris, 1984). (Unless
noted otherwise, all references to Aquinas’s texts are to the Leonine edition of his works
[Rome, 1882–]).
9 Aristotle, De anima 3.10, 433a8–10. Aristotle is clear that he regards appetite as the genuine
mover in the soul (433a22, 30). Mind or imagination is required for the external object to
function as the other moving factor.
James of Viterbo on the Will 253

these terms broadly, extending “mind” to imagination and, importantly for the
medieval discussion, “desire” to will (voluntas enim appetitus est).10 He then
sets out how these two factors contribute to movement. Invoking his general
tripartite analysis of motion from Physics 8, Aristotle resolves animal move-
ment into (1) a mover, (2) an instrument, which is an intermediate that both
moves and is moved, and (3) the ultimate object moved.11 As applied to the
animal, (2) the instrument is the corporeal organ by which the soul moves the
animal, which Aristotle identifies elsewhere with connate pneuma as the in-
termediate between soul and body.12 The (3) object moved, obviously, is the
animal itself. But it is (1) the mover that is Aristotle’s focus in De anima 3.10
and, in particular, the role played by the soul. Aristotle tacitly rules out that the
soul moves the animal because it is a self-mover. In the Physics, Aristotle had
rejected self-motion in the strong sense of something originating movement
in itself as a whole. This is impossible, argued Aristotle, since such a puta-
tive self-mover would at once possess the same property both actually (as the
mover) and potentially (as the moved). Rather, any self-moving whole must
comprise two distinct parts, a mover that is itself unmoved and a mover that
is moved.13 Applying this analysis to animal motion in De anima 3.10, Aristotle
further resolves (1) the mover into a complex of (1a) an unmoved mover and
(1b) a moved mover.14 The (1a) unmoved mover is the external object of desire
insofar as it is apprehended by the intellect or the imagination (eo quod sit
intellectum aut imaginatum).15 The (1b) moved mover is the appetitive faculty
of the soul that is put into a state of desire by the external object so apprehend-
ed.16 In a remark again important for the medieval discussion, Aristotle calls
the occurrent desire engendered in the appetitive faculty by the apprehend-
ed object “a type of motion or act” (appetitus motus aut actus quidam est).17

10 De anima 3.10, 433a24.

11 De anima 3.10, 433b13–14 which quotes Physics 8.5, 256b13–15.
12 Namely at De motu animalium 10, 703a9–10. On the identification and role of pneuma
in animal movement, see Aristotle, Generation of Animals, trans. A.L. Peck (Cambridge,
1943), 576–79 and Sylvia Berryman, “Aristotle on pneuma and Animal Self-Motion,” Oxford
Studies in Ancient Philosophy 23 (2002): 85–97.
13 Physics 8.5, 257a35ff. See David Furley, “Self-Movers,” in Aristotle on Mind and the Senses:
Proceedings of the Seventh Symposium Aristotelicum, (eds.) G.E.R. Lloyd and G.E.L. Owen
(Cambridge, 1978), 165–79; reprinted in M.L. Gill and J.G. Lennox (eds.), Self-Motion from
Aristotle to Newton (Princeton, 1994), 3–14.
14 De anima 3.10, 433b14–15.
15 De anima 3.10, 433b12.
16 De anima 3.10, 433b15–18.
17 De anima 3.10, 433b18. The corresponding Greek text reads ἡ ὄρεξις κίνησίς τίς ἐστιν ἢ
ἐνέργεια, but manuscripts transmit both ἢ (aut) and ᾗ (qua); the medieval Latin text
254 Dumont

Having been “moved” in this sense by the desirable object in the imagination
or intellect, the appetitive part in turns moves the animal by means of (2) the
corporeal instrument of pneuma.18 In sum, then, Aristotle’s account of animal
motion in De anima 3.10 conforms to his general tripartite structure of change
entailed by his denial of any strict self-motion. There is an unmoved mover
(the apprehended object of desire), a moved mover (the appetitive faculty of
the soul), and the moved object (the animal itself).
The medieval debate over free will focused exactly on the juncture in Aristo-
tle’s above account where the cognized object of desire “moves” the appetitive
faculty. Identifying the will as the relevant appetitive power in human action,
and then taking as an Aristotelian dictum that “the will is moved by the object
as apprehended by the intellect,” the 13th-century debate concerned precisely
how the will could be a mover that was itself moved, that is, put into an act of
desire by the object in the intellect.19 The overriding worry was that Aristotle’s
scheme rendered the will a merely passive recipient of an act or movement
from the object in the intellect. This conclusion seemed to follow from Aristot-
le’s ontology of motion itself as an actuality realized in a patient by an agent. At
issue here is Aristotle’s claim in Physics 3.3 that the actuality in which motion
consists is one or, as he expresses it, that the actuality of the agent is that of the
patient.20 That is, when an agent moves a patient, there is only one motion,
and it exists in the patient as in a subject. It is not as if, for example, teaching
and learning were two different motions, one in the instructor and another in
the student. There is rather only one actuality described in two different ways:
“learning,” indicating its existence in the student as patient, and “teaching,” in-
dicating its origin from the instructor as agent.21 For the medievals, Aristotle’s

c­ arries the former. On this text, see J.B. Skemp, “ὄρεξις in De anima iii 10,” in Aristotle on
Mind and the Senses, 180–183.
18 De anima 3.10, 433b18–22.
19 Cf. Aquinas, Summa theologiae (=st) i, q. 82, a. 4 corp., 303: “Et hoc modo intellectus
movet voluntatem, quia bonum intellectum est obiectum voluntatis”; James of Viterbo,
Quodl. i, 7, 97, ll. 13–14: “… commune dictum, videlicet quod voluntas movetur a bono ap-
prehenso per intellectum …” (James’s four Quodlibeta have been edited by Eelcko Ypma
[Würzburg, 1968–1975]). In this form the dictum seems to derive from Averroes’s text of
the De anima 3.10, where the Greek (433b15) for the external object of desire (τὸ πρακτὸν
ἀγαθόν) is rendered bonum intellectum. See Averroes, In De anima 3, com. 54, (ed.) F. Stu-
art Crawford (Cambridge, ma, 1953), 523, l. 10.
20 Physics 3.3, 202a13–22. Motion is defined at Physics 3.1, 201a10–11; cf. Physics 3.2, 202a5–
7. See Mary Louise Gill, Aristotle on Substance: The Paradox of Unity (Princeton, 1989),
204–11.
21 Physics 3.3, 202b5–22, esp. 19–22.
James of Viterbo on the Will 255

thesis of the unity of motion in Physics 3.3, when applied to his schema in De
anima 3.10, implied that the will was reduced to a merely passive subject of
motion with respect to the intellect as an agent. Their ultimate concern was
that this in turn resulted in a necessitation of the will by the intellect and,
consequently, in the destruction of human freedom. This concern, expressed
in unambiguously Aristotelian language, was repeatedly condemned in 13th-
century censures.22

8.3 Self-motion and Freedom: Quodlibet i, Question 7

The question whether the “motion of the will” is an “act” of the intellect or
an “act” of the will confronting James in his first Quodlibet was therefore not
trivial. It went in a technical way to the very heart of the conflict between a
self-moving will and Aristotle’s psychology and physics. The initial objection
to the Quodlibet lays out the main argument against the voluntarist position
incorporating the key positions from the above two texts of Aristotle. The ma-
jor premise, that the act of the agent is in the patient, is demonstrated from
the unity of motion thesis in Physics 3.3. The minor premise is proven from the
dictum in De anima 3.10 that the will is moved by the object apprehended in
the intellect. The resulting conclusion is that the movement of the will is not
its own act but rather that of the intellect. As James later points out, the intent
of this argument is to reject the possibility of a self-moving will.

It seems that the motion of the will towards an end is an act of the intel-
lect. [Major] The motion that belongs to something as a passion is not
the act of it but rather of that to which the motion belongs as an action.
[Minor] But the motion of the will towards an end belongs to the will
as a passion, because the will is moved and passive. Therefore, a motion
of this kind is not an act of the will but rather the act of that to which
it belongs as an action, that is, of that by which the will is moved. This,
however, is the intellect. Thus, the motion of the will to an end is an act

22 Chartularium Universitatis Parisiensis, (eds.) H. Denifle and E. Châtelain, vol. 1 (Paris,

1889), 487, no. 432: 3. “Quod voluntas hominis ex necessitate vult et eligit”; 9. “Quod libe-
rum arbitrium est potentia passiva, non activa; et quod necessitate movetur ab ­appetibili.”
Roland Hissette, Enquête sur les 219 articles condamnés à Paris le 7 mars 1277 (­Louvain,
1977), 231 (no. 151/194): “Quod anima nihil vult, nisi mota ab alio. Unde illud est falsum:
anima seipsa vult. –– Error si intelligatur mota ab alio, scilicet ab appetibili vel obiecto, ita
quod appetibile vel obiectum sit tota ratio motus ipsius voluntatis.”
256 Dumont

of the intellect not of the will. In proof of the major, it is assumed that
action and passion are one motion. This motion, however, belongs to the
moved as a passion and to the mover as an action. In proof of the minor
is adduced the common principle that “the will is moved by the good
apprehended by the intellect.” Thus, the will is a patient, taking “passion”
broadly.23

James divides his response into four articles that can be reduced to two main
parts of his solution: his formal answer to the question and then his responses
to objections from Aristotle. In the first part (articles 1–3), James disambigu-
ates the critical term “act” (article 1), divides the problem into two separate
questions according to these meanings, and then gives his basic determina-
tions to each (articles 2 and 3). It is, however, the second part (article 4) that
constitutes by far and away the greater share of James’s response. There James
raises four dubitationes in which he confronts the most fundamental Aristote-
lian objections to his position.24 It is in response to these objections that James
fully articulates his sweeping and novel position on the will and relates it to the
prior solutions of Aquinas, Henry of Ghent, and Godfrey of Fontaines.

8.3.1 Article 1: Meaning of the Question

In the first article, then, James parses each term of the posed question to de-
termine its various meanings. First, James notes that the expression “motion of
the will” (motus voluntatis) in the question does not refer to movement in the
proper sense of a successive change (mutatio) towards some perfection, such

23 Quodl. i, q. 7, 79, ll. 2–8: “Et videtur quod sit actus intellectus. Ille enim motus qui est
alicuius sicut passio, non est actus ipsius, sed magis illius cuius est sicut actio. Sed motus
voluntatis in finem est ipsius voluntatis sicut passio, quia movetur et patitur. Igitur hui-
usmodi motus non est actus voluntatis, sed magis est actus illius cuius est sicut actio, id
est illius a quo voluntas movetur. Hoc autem est intellectus. Quare motus voluntatis in
finem est actus intellectus, et non voluntatis. Ad declarationem autem maioris assume-
batur quod actio et passio sunt unus motus. Iste tamen motus est ipsius moti ut passio,
est autem ipsius moventis ut actio. Ad probationem vero minoris adducebatur commune
dictum, videlicet quod voluntas movetur a bono apprehenso per intellectum; et sic pati-
tur, sumpta passione communiter.”
24 The device of dubitatio is found in older theological literature, such as Bonaventure’s
commentary on the Sentences. It was introduced by Giles into the massive revision of his
second book on the Sentences. See Giles of Rome, Reportatio Lecturae super libros i–iv
Sententiarum, Reportatio monacensis, (ed.) Concetta Luna, Opera omnia 3.2 (Florence,
2003), 134–135. Giles began this revision just before James was promoted, so perhaps this
influenced him to introduce it as a device in his Quodlibeta.
James of Viterbo on the Will 257

as bodily locomotion from one place to another or alteration of one quality to

another. Rather, motion here means an operation (operatio) that is realized all
at once (simul tota), such as are all psychological activities. James is here fol-
lowing Aristotle’s distinction made earlier in De anima 3.7 between kinēsis and
energeia, taken as standard by the scholastics.25 Thus, the “motion of the will”
at issue is motion in an extended sense.
Next is the key term “act” (actus) in the phrase “act of the will.” This is the
most important ambiguity in the question, and its interpretation will deter-
mine the problem at issue. James distinguishes three different meanings of
“act” that yield three different senses of the question. The first two are con-
nected and the most critical. For these two senses, James turns to Metaphysics
9.6, where Aristotle states that “act” is an equivocal term known by analogy.
The exegesis James gives to the passage deserves attention.

Thus, Aristotle in Metaphysics 9 … distinguishes act into motion and

form, asserting: “Not all things are said to be in act in the same way but by
analogy, either as ‘this in this’ or ‘this from this.’ In the one case, act is mo-
tion with respect to potency, in the other it is substance”—that is, form—
“with respect to matter.” According to this, therefore, act is taken in two
ways: as a form and it means “this in this”; in another way as a motion and
operation, and then it means “this from this,” for motion is from a mover,
and operation is from the one acting. Nevertheless, the act that is “from
this” is also “in this” because an act is in a subject, but the act taken as “in
this” differs in consideration (ratio) from it taken as “from this.”26

25 De anima 3.6, 431a4–7. Cf. Aquinas, In Phys., lib. 6, lect. 8, n. 14, 301: “Unde dicit quod
illud quod factum est, necesse est prius fieri, et illud quod fit, necesse est factum esse,
quaecumque tamen sunt divisibilia et continua. Quod quidem ponitur, ut Commentator
dicit, ad excludendum quaedam quae indivisibiliter fiunt absque motu continuo, sicut in-
telligere et sentire, quae etiam non dicuntur ‘motus’ nisi aequivoce, ut in tertio De anima
dicitur.”
26 Quodl. i, q. 7, 80–81, ll. 46–59: “Unde dicit Philosophus, in ix Metaphysicae, … et … dividit
actum in formam et motum dicens: ‘Dicuntur autem actu non omnia similiter, sed aut
proportionaliter, ut hoc in hoc, aut hoc ab hoc. Hoc quidem enim ut motus ad potentiam.
Illa vero ut substantia,’ idest forma, ‘ad aliquam materiam.’ Secundum hoc ergo dupliciter
sumitur actus: uno modo pro forma et ut dicit hoc in hoc; alio modo pro motu et opera-
tione et ut dicit hoc ab hoc, quia motus est a movente et operatio ab operante. Est tamen
intelligendum quod actus, qui est ab hoc, est etiam in hoc, quia est in aliquo subiecto. Sed
alia ratio est accipiendi aliquem actum ut est in hoc, et alia ut est ab hoc.” The Aristotle is
Metaphysics 9.6, 1048b5–7. See next note.
258 Dumont

This passage is remarkable for several reasons. First, James is quoting from
a variant version of the media translation of the Metaphysics. Aristotle’s text
actually reads, both in the Latin translation and in the underlying Greek,
“­proportionaliter, ut hoc in hoc aut ad hoc, hoc in hoc aut ad hoc.”27 The
variant transmission in the media version that James quotes carries instead
“­proportionaliter, ut hoc in hoc aut ad hoc,” omitting the second comparison.28
Second, James himself compounds that variant by emending Aristotle’s text,
changing the original ad hoc to ab hoc.29 Finally, he glosses Aristotle’s text, in-
terpreting substantia as forma. All of this has enabled James to construe Aris-
totle’s passage in terms of the unity of motion discussed in Physics 3.3. That is,
Aristotle’s actual statement in Metaphysics 9.6 about the analogous meanings
of “act” draws a comparison between motion as act on the one hand, and sub-
stance as act on the other, to show their similarity. James’s revision to this text
makes the comparison apply not to two similar kinds of act, namely, substance
and motion, but to the comparison within motion itself of agent to patient. By
changing Aristotle’s phrase from in hoc aut ad hoc to in hoc aut ab hoc, James
aligns the passage in Metaphysics 9.6, which concerns the ambiguity among
different kinds of act, with the passage examined above in Physics 3.3, which
concerns the ambiguity within motion itself as a single actuality differently de-
scribed as agent and patient. In the shorthand terminology of the scholastics,
the same actuality of motion is described in relation to the patient as “in” (in
hoc) but in relation to the agent as “from” (ab hoc). This vocabulary comes from
the relevant text in Physics 3.3 (202b21–22) commonly quoted as “Quod enim
huius in hoc, et quod huius ab hoc actum esse, ratione alterum est.”30 All of this

27 Metaphysics 9.6, 1048b5–7. The text in the critical edition of the translatio media (al 25.2,
174, l. 24–26) reads: “Dicuntur autem actu non omnia similiter sed aut proprotionaliter, ut
hoc in hoc aut ad hoc, hoc in hoc aut ad hoc. Haec enim ut motus ad potentiam illa vero
substantia ad aliquam materiam.” It is the same in the Moerbeke translation; cf. al 25.3.2,
186, ll. 193–196.
28 See the apparatus criticus in al 25.2, 174, l. 26. In fact, the majority of the manuscripts col-
lated carry the text with the omission as quoted by James. Presumably, at some early point
in the transmission, the phrase was omitted either by homoeoteleuton, or it was deleted
to correct what seemed to be a mistaken repetition.
29 Ruello, “Les fondements,” 295, n. 72 surmises that Ypma has here made a transcription
mistake of ab for ad. Ypma did not make a mistake; rather, James has modified Aristotle’s
text.
30 This is the translatio nova by William of Moerbeke in 1270, printed in the 1884 Leonine
edition of Aquinas’s Physics. See Aquinas, In Phys., lib. 3, lect. 5, 111, ll. 40–45: “Omnino
autem dicere est, neque doctio cum doctrina, neque actio cum passione idem proprie
est, sed cui insunt haec, motus. Quod enim huius in hoc, et quod huius ab hoc actum esse,
ratione alterum est.” This is glossed by Aquinas as follows (ibid., n. 13, 114): “Motus autem
James of Viterbo on the Will 259

is an effort by James to connect his main concern—Aristotle’s treatment of

motion as a single actuality in Physics 3.3—with his formal analysis of act and
potency in Metaphysics 9.6.
Despite his exegetical strong-arming of Metaphysics 9.6, James’s conceptual
point about Aristotle’s analysis of motion remains valid. For Aristotle, motion
is a single actuality (actus) of both the patient and the agent but differently
described as in hoc or passio and ab hoc or actio. The aim of the posed question
is to probe which sense of “act” applies when it is asserted that motion towards
an end is “an act of the will.” James says that if “act” is taken in the first mean-
ing, so that such movement is an act of the will in the sense of “existing in a
subject” (in hoc), then there is no controversy. It is clear that movement to an
end exists in the will as a subject and not in any other power. If, however, “act of
will” refers in the latter sense, so that the will is the agent by which the motion
is caused (ab hoc), then this is controversial. In this sense, the question asks
whether the will can originate its own act of movement, or must be caused by
the intellect. James says that this was the intended meaning of the question as
posed, which he says is clear from the initial argument examined above, and
amounts to asking whether the will can move itself.31 Nearly the entirety of
James’s response addresses this question.
In addition to these two senses of the question, James says that there is a
third arising from another meaning of “act.” This is act in the sense of a free op-
eration, namely, an act that is in the power of the agent. In this more restrictive
meaning of the term, acts do not belong to animals generally but only to rational
agents. It is in this sense of act, for example, that Damascene says that “animals
do not so much act as are acted upon.”32 When “act” is construed in this sense,

dicitur actio secundum quod est actus agentis ut ab hoc; dicitur autem passio secundum
quod est actus patientis ut in hoc.” It is in this sense that James construes the text. These
idioms, however, were later assigned to action and passion differently. See, for example,
Peter Auriol’s rehearsal of common usage in Lauge O. Nielsen, “Peter Auriol on the Cat-
egories of Action and Passion: The Second Question of His Quodlibet,” in Philosophy and
Theology in the Long Middle Ages: A Tribute to Stephen F. Brown, (eds.) Kent Emery, Jr. et al.
(Leiden, 2011), 375–436, esp. 400–404.
31 Quodl. i, q. 7, 81, ll. 81–86: “Secundum vero quod accipitur actus pro operatione et ut dicit
hoc ab hoc, sic intelligitur quaestio, utrum motus voluntatis sit actus voluntatis vel intel-
lectus, idest utrum sit a voluntate, sicut a movente et agente habet actum in se ipsa, vel
sit ab intellectu. Et hoc est quaerere: utrum voluntas moveatur ad actum volendi a se
ipsa, vel ab intellectu. Et ad hunc intellectum fuit quaestio adducta, sicut ex argumentis
apparet.”
32 John of Damascus, De fide orthodoxa, c. 41, (ed.) Eligius M. Buytaert (St. Bonaventure,
ny, 1955), 153: “Unde et irrationalia non sunt libera arbitrio, aguntur enim magis a natura
quam agant.”
260 Dumont

then, the question facing James is whether the movement of the will towards
the end is free, and if so, whether that freedom derives from the intellect or from
the will.33 So interpreted, the question thus raises a second key issue in the de-
bate over voluntarism that is separate from, but not wholly unrelated to, that of
self-motion of the will. This concerns the basis of human freedom. Does it arise
principally from the intellect or from the will? Henry, Giles, and Godfrey all dis-
puted this latter issue under several titles while James was in Paris.34
Once disambiguated, then, James sees the question posed to him as can-
vassing the two key issues in the debate over voluntarism and intellectualism:
whether the will can move itself, and whether it, rather than the intellect, is the
source of human freedom. James addresses each in a separate article before
confronting at length the formidable Aristotelian objections to his affirmative
answers to both questions.

8.3.2 Article 2: Self-motion of the Will

To the first question, James gives a clear and direct response: the will moves it-
self to all its objects, whether ends or means, so that it is related to its act of vo-
lition not merely as a patient but also as an agent.35 James gives two arguments
for this, which he says are specific to the will and so differ from the usual ones
that can also apply to intellect or even to the senses. These are the arguments
from the will’s freedom (libertas) and its dominion (dominium). Both are based
in effect on the autonomy of the will, the first with respect to external causes,
the second with respect to the other powers in the soul.

33 Quodl. i, q. 7, 81–82: “Secundum vero quod accipitur actus pro operatione libera, sic
intelligitur quaestio, utrum motus voluntatis in finem sit actus voluntatis et utrum
sit operatio libera, libertate ipsius voluntatis vel libertate intellectus, quamvis eti-
am in hoc impliceatur alia quaedam difficultas, quae est utrum voluntas sit libera
respectu finis.”
34 Henry of Ghent, Quodl. xiv, q. 5: “Utrum intellectus et voluntas sint aeque liberi, sup-
ponendo quod ambo sint liberi,” (ed.) Jodocus Badius (Paris, 1518; repr. Louvain, 1961),
ff. 564r–66v; Giles of Rome, Quodl. iv, q. 21, “Utrum sit libertas in voluntate,” (ed.) Petrus
de Coninck (Louvain, 1646), 255–59; Godfrey of Fontaines, Quodl. iii, q. 15, “Utrum vol-
untas sit magis libera potentia quam intellectus,” pb 2, 226–27; Quodl. viii, q. 16, “Utrum
appetitus bruti sit liber et sic possit dici voluntas,” pb 4, 140–177; cf. Peter of Auvergne,
Quodl. ii, q. 10, “Utrum immunitas a materia sit per se principium libertatis,” in Paris, Bib-
liothèque nationale de France, lat. 15841, ff. 16va–17rb. This last question is dated 1297. On
the extensive discussion of the topic by Henry of Ghent, see Martin Pickavé, “Que signifie
‘être libre’? Le cas de Henri de Gand,” Médiévales 63 (2012): 91–105.
35 Quodl. i, q. 7, 82, ll. 98–101: “Ad quod sine praeiudicio videtur mihi esse dicendum, quod
voluntas movetur ex se ad volendum quodcumque volitum, sive sit finis sive sit aliquid ad
finem, ita quod ad actum volendi non se habet pure passive, sed habet se active.”
James of Viterbo on the Will 261

The major premise of the “freedom argument” is that every free power
moves itself to act. Since the will is free, it must therefore move itself. Given a
general admission that the will is free, the burden of proof falls on the major
premise that a free power is one that moves itself. James argues this by exam-
ining the notion of freedom (libertas). In general usage, “freedom” means an
“immunity from defect in the sense of being liberated,” as when St. Paul says
that we “will be liberated from bondage into freedom.”36 As applied specifically
to a power capable of acting, freedom is “a certain excellence through which a
power is not necessitated to its act.”37 This definition is supported by the com-
mon idea that we are said to be free for what is in our power, as when Aristotle
says that “a person is free who exists for his own sake.”38 Thus, a free power is
one that is within the control of the one possessing it. But for a power to be
within our control means simply that its act is not necessitated. This comports
with the general idea of freedom as being liberated from weakness, since to be
necessitated to an act is a weakness or defect in a power.
James then specifies the sense of “necessity” at issue in the definition. It
can mean either immutability or compulsion (coactio).39 The former neces-
sity is compatible with freedom—otherwise God could not be both free and
changeless—but the latter is not. Compulsion is here taken broadly. It is not
limited to violent or forced motion contrary to nature but extends to all bodily
movement. Moreover, compulsion in this sense applies not just to patients
but also to agents, for neither move of themselves but owe their movement to
something else. From all this, James concludes that what is put into motion by
another, so that it in no way moves of itself, is necessitated in this sense of com-
pulsion. Thus, if freedom means not being necessitated, it follows that a free
power cannot be moved in any way by another, or if it is moved by another it
is also moved of itself. This final qualification might seem surprising as applied
to the will, but James adds it to protect God as the only true self-mover. Thus,
he says that the will, since it is free, moves of itself (movetur ex se), although
it is also moved by another (movetur ab alio). But something has even greater

36 Quodl. i, q. 7, 80: “… libertas, communiter accepta, est immunitas a defectu a liberando

dicta, sive sit defectus in esse sive in operari.”
37 Ibid.: “… libertas est quaedam nobilis conditio potentiae, per quam potentia non neces-
sitatur ad actum.”
38 Metaphysics 1.2 (982b26–27; al 25.3.2, 16, ll. 135–36): “… ut dicimus, homo liber qui suimet
et non alterius causa est.”
39 This standard distinction goes back to Anselm; see Cur Deus Homo, lib. 2, cc.5 and 10, (ed.)
F.S. Schmitt, Opera omnia 2 (Edinburgh, 1946), 100, l. 24; 108, ll. 3–6.
262 Dumont

freedom if it is moved by nothing else at all. In this way, God is free maximally
and in the truest sense, for God is moved by nothing at all.40
James bases his “dominion argument” on another commonly held view con-
cerning the will. In this case, the will is said to move all the other powers of
the soul, that is, to have dominion over them.41 James then argues that the
first and universal moved mover (movens motum) within a given order must
be in motion of itself (motum ex se). But among the powers of the soul, the
will is the first, universal moved mover, and so must move of itself. Once again,
James’s description here of the will as a “moved mover” (movens motum) seems
to conflict with his depiction of it as a self-mover, but as before, James appears
to use this description in relation to God. In support of the major premise that
the first in an order must move itself, James invokes two authorities. The first
is Aristotle’s Physics 8, where the first mobile (primum mobile) is said to move
of itself (moveri ex se).42 James does not elaborate on the Physics text, but it is
worth expanding his point. He is comparing the will as the first cause of mo-
tion in the soul to the outermost celestial sphere (primum mobile) as the first
source of motion in the universe. The first celestial body is said to move of
itself (moveri ex se), since it is the first entity in motion in the cosmos.43 It thus
does not derive its movement from anything else in motion, but all else de-
rive their movements from it. (Obviously, the unmoved mover does not cause
movement as a result of itself being in motion.) Thus, the analogy implied by
James is that the will is related to the other powers of the soul as the first mo-
bile is related to all other moveable objects in the world. Since their move-
ments are the source of all other motion in their respective orders, they must
move of themselves. At the same time, both the will and the celestial sphere

40 Quodl. i, q. 7, 84–85, especially ll. 180–83: “[I]llud quod liberum esse dicitur, aut nullo
modo movetur ab alio, aut si movetur ab alio, movetur etiam ex se. Voluntas igitur, cum
sit libera, ex se movetur, quamvis etiam ab alio moveatur.”
41 On the sources and history of the will as “ruler of the soul,” see Roland J. Teske, “The
Will as King over the Powers of the Soul: Uses and Sources of an Image in the Thirteenth
Century,” Vivarium 32 (1994): 62–71. The dictum that “the will moves all the powers of the
soul” was widely invoked, even if qualified in various ways. See, for example, Aquinas, st i,
q. 82, a. 4 corp., 303: “Et hoc modo voluntas movet intellectum et omnes animae vires.”
42 Cf. Physics 8.5, 256a19–21.
43 See, for example, Aquinas, Scriptum super Sent., lib. 1, d. 8, q. 3, a. 1, ad 3, (ed.) Pierre Man-
donnet (Paris, 1929), 212: “Unde secundum philosophos, omnia mobilia reducuntur ad
primum mobile, quod dicebant motum ex se;” Summa contra Gentiles, lib. 1, c. 13, 33b: “…
quod supponitur in praedictis demonstrationibus primum motum, scilicet corpus cae-
leste, esse motum ex se.”
James of Viterbo on the Will 263

are movers moved by a higher cause that it is wholly immobile, namely, God.
In this sense, they are moved movers, but move of themselves.
The second authority James adduces in support of the major premise is the
single, most important one for his overall theory of free will. This is Anselm’s
theory of the two affections, according to which the will is said to be “an in-
strument that moves itself by means of its affections.” For the purposes of his
present argument, James simply invokes Anselm’s division of the will into an
instrument, affection, and use (i.e., operation). Anselm says that the will as
instrument moves all other instruments of the soul that we freely use, wheth-
er internal, such as the power of sight, or external, such as a pen. As the first
mover of the soul, the will moves itself by means its affections (ipsa vero se suis
affectionibus movet).44 As we shall see, James will put Anselm’s two affections
at the center of his solution of how the will can move itself.
To summarize, James argues that both freedom and dominion of the will
requires it to be a self-moving power. Notable about these arguments is, in
the first place, that the will, absolutely speaking, is a moved mover (motum
movens) owing to its dependence on God. As will eventually emerge, however,
the will must also be moved, in some sense, by the intellect. Secondly, it is to
be noted that James’s first argument assumes only that self-motion is a neces-
sary rather than a sufficient condition for freedom. That is, as will be explicitly
stated in the next article, if something is free, it must be self-moved, but the
converse does not follow. Thus, something more than self-motion is required
for freedom, and this will be a looming concern throughout the question.
­Finally, both arguments could be accused of question begging. For example,
an opponent of self-motion might reject the minor premise of the first proof
by denying that the will is a free power except in some derivative way from the
intellect. It is this latter concern, the indigenous freedom of the will, that the
question taken in the third meaning of “act” addresses.

8.3.3 Article 3: Freedom of the Will and the End

As indicated, James says that if “act” is taken in the sense of a free operation,
then the posed question is whether the movement of the will to an end is free
by virtue of the intellect or the will itself. This in turn, James says, involves two
separate issues: (a) whether freedom is proper and intrinsic to the will or only
derived from the intellect, and then, if proper to the will, (b) whether the will
is still free with respect to the end or only to the means.45

44 Quodl. i, q. 7, 86, ll. 214–22.

45 Ibid., ll. 226–36.
264 Dumont

To the first issue (a) James says that the will has its own naturally endowed
freedom, and that all other powers are said to be free insofar as they can be
moved by the will, which is free of itself. This is the case even though, as will be
explained, some powers can move themselves:

And given that some power other than the will is capable of moving itself
(sui motiva) in some way, nevertheless it is not said to be free, since it is
necessitated to such movement, which is in our power only to the extent
that it is subject to the will. Although everything that is free can move
itself, nevertheless not everything that can move itself is free, as will be
made clear below.46

James develops a general theory of the powers of the soul that, in a sense, s
makes them all self-moving. Self-motion, then, is not a sufficient condition
for freedom, as the above passage states. As he did earlier, James here char-
acterizes freedom as “being in our power,” that is, not being necessitated. The
will is the only c­ apacity that is natively within our power. James argues that
the ­intellect is the only other candidate for the source of freedom, but what the
intellect reveals to us about an object is not within its power. To the extent that
the intellect is within our power, as when we freely direct it to this or that ob-
ject, this is only because it is under the control of the will. Thus, the will does
not derive its freedom from the intellect, but rather the opposite is true. Ab-
sent the will, no other power, including the intellect, would be free. Although
James’s position on the will as the source of freedom is clear in this response,
the precise relation that he sees between its self-motion and native freedom
remains an open question.
The second issue (b) concerning the will’s freedom with respect to the end
addresses the commonly held view that once the will is set in motion by the
end, it can then move itself in relation to the means. Aquinas in particular
held this position, which Godfrey called the common view. While denying self-­
motion in any absolute sense, Aquinas nevertheless argued that the will, once
put into an act of desire by the end, could move itself to desire the means
to that end, just as the intellect, once it grasped theoretical principles, could

46 Quodl. i, q. 7, 86–87, ll. 242–47: “Et dato quod aliqua alia potentia, praeter voluntatem,
sit sui motiva, secundum aliquem modum, non tamen dicitur libera, quia necessitatur
ad hunc motum; nec est in nostra potestate, nisi quatenus voluntati subiacet. Licet enim
omne quod liberum est sit ex se mobile, non tamen omne mobile ex se liberum est, ut
infra patebit.”
James of Viterbo on the Will 265

move itself to deduce their conclusions.47 All of this implied that the will was
not free with respect to the end but only the means.
Against this view, James argues that the will is free with respect to all its
objects, whether means or end. Indeed, James claims that his analysis of free-
dom means that the will is more free with respect to the end than the means.
In support of this claim, James cites a second critically important passage from
Anselm. In the first instance, James had cited Anselm’s authority that “the will
moves itself by means of its affections.” Here James adduces Anselm’s division
of those affections into the one for happiness (affectio commodi) and the other
for justice (affectio iustitiae). In a highly significant move, James then identifies
the affectio commodi with an inclination to the end, and the affectio iustitiae
with an inclination to the means. James’s argument appears to be that, since
Anselm holds that the will moves itself by its affections, and given that the
will is comprised of affections for both end and means, it must move itself to
both. In any case, the true importance of this passage is that it is the only place
where James assigns a function to each of the two affections. This will turn
out to provide a revealing insight into the degree of his voluntarism. Strong
voluntarists such as Henry and Duns Scotus associate the will’s freedom with
the affection for justice, giving it a preeminence over the affection for happi-
ness. In the present passage, James has inverted that relation, assigning the
more eminent role to the affection for happiness, since the will is “more free”
(liberior) for the end than the means. A full assessment of James’s voluntarism
in light of his use of Anselm’s two affections can only be made in light of his
responses in the dubitationes, which contain the full account of his theory of
the will. It is to these that we now turn.

8.3.4 Article 4: Dubitationes

In a sense, the above formal responses by James to the question are somewhat
perfunctory and by themselves reveal little of the deeper structure of his con-
cept of the will. This only emerges from the pressure exerted on his position
by the Aristotelian objections motivating the quodlibetal question in the first

47 Thomas Aquinas, Quaestiones disputatae de malo, q. 6, ad 20, 562: “Ad vicesimum dicen-
dum, quod idem secundum idem non movet seipsum; sed secundum aliud potest seipsum
movere; sic enim intellectus, in quantum intelligit actu principia, reducit seipsum de po-
tentia in actum quantum ad conclusiones; et voluntas in quantum vult finem, reducit se
in actum quantum ad ea quae sunt ad finem.” This was a common view; cf. Godfrey of
Fontaines, Quodl. x, q. 1, pb 4, 382: “… licet communiter ponatur quod voluntas non movet
se respectu finis, sed respectu eorum quae sunt ad finem.”
266 Dumont

place. There are four such objections or dubia, and they concern the two dif-
ferent senses of “act” at issue in the question. The first two concern the will as
a self-mover, the second two the will’s relation to the end. It is the first two that
are most important, and they concern respectively the objection against self-
motion from the Physics and the relation of intellect and desire as mover and
moved in De anima 3.10. Indeed, the reply of James to the first dubitatio by it-
self occupies half of his entire response to the question. The four dubia, there-
fore, assert that James’s position contradicts the following fundamental theses:

i. Aristotle’s prohibition against self-motion in Physics 8;

ii. Aristotle’s account in De anima 3.10 that the will is a moved mover;
iii. the accepted opinion that the intellect has its own freedom, so that
freedom does not belong to the will alone;
iv. the generally held position that will is not free with respect to the
end.

Dubitatio i
In the first dubium James sets out two standard arguments against self-motion
in Physics 8 that, as indicated, are the principal Aristotelian impediments to
voluntarism.48 First, self-motion violates Aristotle’s principle that “whatever is
in motion is put in motion by another.” This is a general principle that applies
to all moving bodies, both inanimate and animate. In the case of inanimate
bodies, which appear to move themselves, Aristotle shows that their motion
ultimately derives from the prior causes that generated them. Animate bod-
ies, however, really do move themselves—self-motion is a chief feature of
­animals—but their self-motion is a product of two prior and really distinct
parts in the animal, one that moves and the other that is moved. Nothing
therefore moves itself primarily.
The second argument is that if something were to move itself, it would have
to act on itself. But something only moves or acts to the extent that it is actual
in some respect, and it only is moved or acted upon to the extent that it is po-
tential in the same respect. Thus, if something moved itself, it would be both
in act and in potency in the same respect. Since this is impossible, it cannot be
held that the will moves itself.49
James prefaces his lengthy response with a short history of the Parisian de-
bate over the will in order to position his own resolution of the problem. His

48 Aristotle, Physics 8.4, 254b7–256a4.

49 James of Viterbo, Quodl. i, q. 7, 88–89.
James of Viterbo on the Will 267

summary of the Parisian dispute focuses on the solutions of Henry of Ghent and
their rejection by Godfrey of Fontaines, whose public exchanges, as indicated,
James directly witnessed. James says that there were three main s­ olutions to
Aristotle’s arguments against self-motion. The first attempted to overcome the
difficulty by dividing the will into distinct active and passive parts, just as the
intellect is divided into active and passive powers. This position had already
been reported and rejected by Godfrey of Fontaines in his Quodlibet iv, ques-
tion 8. James rejects it on the same grounds as Godfrey did: no one actually
held this view nor are there any authorities supporting it. Moreover, Godfrey
had added that there was no need for an “agent will,” since the intellect itself
rendered the object suitable for presentation to the will.50
The second solution that James reports is that of Henry of Ghent in his Quod-
libet x, question 9, where Henry was responding to criticisms of his strong claim
in Quodlibet ix, question 5 that the will is without qualification a self-mover.51
Henry argued that Aristotle’s prohibition against self-motion was restricted to
material entities and so did not apply to spiritual powers like the will. In sup-
port of this, Henry cited Proclus’s dictum that incorporeal beings can “reflect”
on themselves and are thus self-movers.52 Against this view, James reports the
criticism of Godfrey of Fontaines, who argued that since potency and act are
properties of being taken in general, Aristotle’s prohibition against self-motion
applied to all beings. If, then, Aristotle’s argument against self-­motion is valid
for material beings, then it applies to immaterial beings as well.53

50 Ibid., 89; cf. Godfrey, Quodl. iv, q. 8, pb 2, 257.

51 Henry of Ghent, Quodl. ix, q. 5, (ed.) Raymond Macken, Opera Omnia 13 (Leuven, 1983),
131: “ … simpliciter ergo dicendum quod voluntas in actum volendi a nullo alio, sed a se
ipsa sola movetur.” On Henry’s treatment of the will as self-mover, see Roland J. Teske,
“Henry of Ghent’s Rejection of the Principle: Omne quod movetur ab alio movetur,” in
Henry of Ghent: Proceedings of the International Colloquium on the Occasion of the 700th
Anniversary of his Death (1293), (ed.) Willy Vanhamel (Leuven, 1996), 279–308.
52 James of Viterbo, Quodl. i, q. 7, 89, and Henry of Ghent, Quodl. x, q. 9, (ed.) Raymond
Macken, Opera Omnia 14 (Leuven, 1981), 233–34, where Henry cites Proclus, Elementatio
theologica, (ed.) Helmut Boese (Leuven, 1987), prop. 17, 12. In reporting Henry’s position,
James cites the same text of Proclus and then adds other supporting passages from propo-
sitions 15 and 32 (ed. Boese, 11 and 21).
53 James of Viterbo, Quodl. i, q. 7, 89–90; Godfrey of Fontaines, Quodl. vi, q. 7, pb 3, 170: “Quia
ex metaphysica hoc scire debemus quod unum et idem non potest esse in actu et potentia
et quod illud quod est in potentia ad aliquid non potest se reducere ad actum secundum
illud–et hoc pertinet ad metaphysicam, quia est commune omni enti–ideo hoc debemus
supponere circa angelos et circa animam. … Si ergo alicui videatur quod, supposito quod
voluntas non moveat seipsam, difficile sit servare libertatem … non debet procedere ad
negationem priorum et certorum, sed propter certitudinem priorum quae supponere
268 Dumont

The third solution reported by James comes once again from Henry of
Ghent, who explains how, given his view that the will can move itself, it can
be in act and potency at the same time.54 Henry replies that the same thing
can be in act and potency, as long as it is not such in the same manner (eo-
dem modo). That is, Henry relaxes the distinction needed between mover and
moved in a self-moving whole to avoid contradiction. Mover and moved need
not differ really but only in manner or mode. The distinction of “mode” that
Henry exploits is the standard one between two ways a cause can contain or
produce its effect: virtually or formally.55 A cause contains its effect formally
when it communicates the same form it possesses to another subject capable
of receiving it. In this way, a fire can convey the form of heat to a stone. By con-
trast, a cause contains its effect virtually if it has the power, owing to its greater
perfection, to cause a different but less perfect form. Thus, the sun can cause
heat in the lower bodies, although, as a celestial cause, it does not itself possess
the terrestrial form of heat. Henry then applies this distinction to the problem
of self-motion. Considered as mover, the will virtually contains its act, while
considered as moved, it is formally in potency to receive that act. In moving
itself, the will thus reduces itself from potency to act formally speaking, but not
by being—absurdly—already in act formally but rather virtually.56
James then reports Godfrey’s rejection of Henry’s analysis. Godfrey accepts
the distinction between virtual and formal containment but says that it applies
to different kinds of agents. In the former case, the cause does not have the
same nature (ratio) as its effect, and so the effect is equivocal with respect to its
cause. In the latter, the cause and effect have the same nature and thus are uni-
vocal. But Godfrey argues that the same agent—in this case the will—cannot
cause an effect virtually and receive it formally, since then one and the same
effect would be equivocal and univocal with respect to the same cause. If this
were the case, for example, the sun could cause terrestrial heat in itself, which

­ abet debet studere quomodo illis posteriora concordet.” Cf. idem, Quodl. viii, q. 2, pb 4,
h
19–20. On Godfrey’s treatment of self-motion, see John F. Wippel “Godfrey of Fontaines
and the Act-Potency Axiom,” Journal of the History of Philosophy 11 (1973): 299–317.
54 James of Viterbo, Quodl. i, q. 7, 90, ll. 346–55.
55 The basic solution Henry advances here is already reported precisely by Siger of Brabant
in his Quaestiones naturales, q. 2 in Siger de Brabant, Écrits de logique, de morale et de
physique, (ed.) Bernardo Bazán (Louvain, 1974), 120. The Franciscan Walter of Bruges may
have influenced Henry on this point. See Jos Decorte, “Der Einfluß der Willenspsycholo-
gie des Walter von Brügge ofm auf die Willenspsychologie und Freiheitslehre des Hein-
rich von Gent,” Franziskanische Studien 65 (1983): 215–40, esp. 230–34.
56 Henry of Ghent, Quodl. x, q. 9, (ed.) Macken, 230–31; Quodl. xiv, q. 2, (ed.) Badius, f.
559vB–C.
James of Viterbo on the Will 269

is impossible. On Godfrey’s view, then, the original absurdity of self-motion

recurs in Henry’s revised solution simply in a different form.57
The conclusion drawn by James from his survey of the debate at Paris is that
the opposing positions of the great masters have reached an impasse. Henry of
Ghent’s elaborate account of the will as a self-moving power cannot discharge
Godfrey of Fontaines’s devastating objections. Consequently, a new theory is
needed that goes beyond the existing discussion to give an account of the will
as self-moving that is coherent and does not contradict Aristotle. That theory,
according to James, can be found in Anselm of Canterbury’s concept of the
affections of will.

Because it does not seem that the adduced objections [i.e., of Godfrey]
can be avoided by the above solutions [i.e., of Henry], it is necessary to
consider further other things that can make it clear in some way how
the will moves itself without entailing either an absurdity or something
inconsistent with what Aristotle has demonstrated. The basis of the re-
sponse can be taken from the above text of Anselm, who says that “the
will moves itself by its own affections.” If this is understood appropriately
and correctly, it will lead to a solution of the above dilemma. To so under-
stand this, it is first necessary to see what is meant by such affections, and
then how the will can move itself by means of them.58

The dictum of Anselm that James will put at the center of his positive
a­ ccount—that the will moves itself by means of its affections—does not ap-
pear anywhere in Aquinas. It had, however, been regularly invoked by more
voluntarist inclined thinkers, particularly the Franciscans, and came into great
prominence in the current Parisian debate. Just before James’s present ques-
tion, Henry of Ghent in his Quodlibet xiii, question 7 (1289/90) had subjected
Anselm’s theory of the affections of will to its most detailed examination in the

57 James of Viterbo, Quodl, i, q. 7, 90, ll. 356–64; Godfrey of Fontaines, Quodl. vi, q. 7, pb 3, 151;
Quodl. vii, q. 6, pb 3, 343.
58 James of Viterbo, Quodl. i, q. 7, 90: “Quia igitur per nullam praedictarum solutionum vi-
dentur posse vitari [nitari ed.] rationes inductae, ideo oportet ulterius alia proferre in
medium, per quae possit aliqualiter fieri manifestum quomodo voluntas movetur ex se, et
tamen nullum ex hoc sequatur inconveniens nec aliquid repugnans his quae ab Aristotele
sunt probatae. Principium autem dicendi potest assumi ex auctoritate Anselmi, superius
inducta, qui dicit quod voluntas movet se suis affectionibus. Hoc enim, si convenienter
et recte intelligatur, ianuam praedictae dubitationis aperiet. Ad huiusmodi igitur intel-
lectum videre oportet primo, quid per huiusmodi affectiones intelligi debeat, et conse-
quenter quomodo voluntas se huiusmodi affectionibus movet.”
270 Dumont

scholastic period. Although in the end, Henry, like Peter John Olivi before him,
would deny that the will required “affections” to move itself, Henry’s extensive
analysis of Anselm without a doubt had a direct influence on James. Unique,
however, to James’s treatment would be a reinterpretation of Anselm’s theory
of affections based upon the concept of an “aptitude” taken from Simplicius’s
commentary on the Categories. In this, James attempted an entirely original
concept of the will and indeed, more generally, an original theory of the soul.
James’s positive answer to this first dubium has three parts: first, an expla-
nation of the concept “affections” as innate, active capacities of the soul; sec-
ond, an application of this concept to the problem of self-movement; finally,
a ­solution of the Aristotelian objection against self-motion in light of these
results.

(a) The Concept of affectio

James develops his concept of an affection under the broad Aristotelian prin-
ciple that “the soul is in a way all things,” which he interprets to mean that
the soul has a certain conformity or similarity (conformitas et similitudo) to its
various objects.59 This is evident from the differentiation of capacities within
the soul corresponding to its distinct objects of sense, intellect, and appetite.
James recognizes, of course, that the soul is in actual conformity or similarity
to an object when knowing or desiring it. But it is the soul’s potential confor-
mity to an object, antecedent to any such occurrent act of knowing or desir-
ing, that renders it “in a way all things.” In this, James implicitly follows Ar-
istotle’s dictum that “the mind is all things only in potency.”60 At this point,
however, James makes his crucial move. Essentially rejecting the second part
of Aristotle’s dictum that the “intellect is nothing in act before it thinks,” James
says rather that “in potency,” when used to describe the way in which the soul
is all things, does not mean “purely passive” or devoid of all act. If the soul
were simply a passive recipient of its various acts of cognition and desire, then
these could not be imputable to soul as its own operations, any more than the
image of an object in a mirror can be called an act of the reflective surface.
Rather, the soul must be “in potency” to its objects in a more active sense of
a natural ability or tendency that can be perfected over time. James identifies
this sense of potency with natural capacities corresponding to Aristotle’s sec-
ond species of quality in the Categories, such as an inborn athletic ability. As
has been well documented, James takes this special sense of “potency” and its

59 De anima 3.8, 431b21.

60 De anima 3.4, 429b29–430a2.
James of Viterbo on the Will 271

­related ­vocabulary of “aptitude” or “propensity” (epitēdeiotēs; idoneitas) from

Simplicius’s commentary on the Categories.61

And therefore it seems that, since the soul is a power that conforms to
things, a power in this sense is not purely passive, but is a certain in-
complete actuality, that is, a start, beginning, and certain readiness with
respect to a further act. Thus, it can be called a type of aptitude or pro-
pensity towards a completed act. An aptitude of this kind is an innate
and natural endowment of the soul, and therefore remains permanently
in the soul, although at one time it is incomplete but at another com-
pleted by actions. This potency seems to belong to the second species of
quality, for as Simplicius says in the Categories, since the term “potency”
has many meanings, the “potency” that pertains to this species of qual-
ity is a natural aptitude, not taken absolutely but according to a kind of
beginning. As Simplicius says, this genus of potency belongs to anything
that can be completed in some way. … Thus, as he says, a potency of this
kind is an aptitude (aptitudo), a propensity (idoneitas), and a beginning
(exordium) of the further perfection of the human being towards the sci-
ences and virtues.62

61 James of Viterbo, Quodl. i, q. 7, 91–92. For a very helpful summary of the literature and
analysis of Simplicius on this point, see Mareike Hauer, “The Notion of ἐπιτηδειότης in
Simplicius’ Discussion of Quality,” Documenti et studi sulla tradizione filosofica medievale
27 (2016): 65–83.
62 Quodl. i, q. 7, 92: “Et ideo videtur esse dicendum quod, cum anima dicitur esse potentia
conformis rebus, huiusmodi potentia non est pure passiva, sed est quaedam actualitas in-
completa, et est inchoatio et exordium et praeparatio quaedam respectu actus ulterioris.
Unde potest dici aptitudo quaedam, et idoneitas ad completum actum. Et est huiusmodi
idoneitas animae connaturalis et naturaliter indita, ideoque et semper in ipsa manens;
sed quandoque imperfecta, quandoque vero perfecta per actus. Videtur autem haec po-
tentia pertinere ad secundam speciem qualitatis. Sicut enim dicit Simplicius, in Praedica-
mentis, cum nomen potentiae multa significet, potentia, quae pertinet ad hanc speciem
qualitatis, est idoneitas naturalis, non simpliciter sed secundum exordium quoddam con-
siderata, et sicut dicit, hoc genus potentiae conveniens est omnibus quae qualitercumque
perficiuntur. … Unde, ut ait, huiusmodi potentia est aptitudo et idoneitas et exordium
quoddam ulterioris perfectionis hominis ad scientias et virtutes.” Cf. Simplicius, Com-
mentaire sur les Catégories d’Aristote: Traduction de Guillaume de Moerbeke, (ed.) Adri-
aan Pattin (Louvain, 1971), vol. 2, 332, ll.19–22 and 340–41, ll. 72–78, which James quotes
verbatim.
272 Dumont

For James, then, the soul is potentially all things in the sense of having apti-
tudes or propensities that are already in act to some extent, forming starting
points and propensities for their further development. James thus says that
these powers are “incomplete acts” in the sense that they can be brought to
fulfillment by their exercise.63 In this way they are like the natural virtues
­discussed by ­Aristotle in book 6 of the Nicomachean Ethics, such as judgement
or ­understanding, which are inborn abilities developed by experience.64 James
fully generalizes this concept of power as a propensity across the soul, which is
articulated into as many such capacities as there are types of objects to which
it can conform and assimilate. They are ordered and structured within the soul
from general to specific. The most general are the cognitive and affective pro-
pensities, under which fall increasingly specialized capacities. Thus, the cogni-
tive aptitude is divided into the intellectual and sensitive, the latter into the
internal and external, and finally the latter of these into the particular senses.
James adds that in our present state we cannot fully discern all of the soul’s
capacities. Among these propensities some are common to all rational souls,
while others are more actively present in some rather than others according to
naturally occurring inequality.65
With all of this structure in place, James applies it to his principal concern of
the will and draws his central conclusion: the will is not a purely passive power
with respect to its volition, since it is a propensity or aptitude for that act. James
then proceeds to give the broad structure of the will, comprising general and
specific propensities, which he takes from Anselm’s division of the will into in-
strument, affection, and use. The general affective propensity is the will taken
as a power in the above sense, and this is what Anselm terms the will as instru-
ment. This is broadly articulated into the main kinds of affective propensities,
namely, one for the end and the other for the means. These correspond respec-
tively to Anselm’s affection for happiness (affectio commodi) and affection for

63 Quodl. i, q. 7, 92, ll. 483–92. Here James importantly explains that the completion of a pro-
pensity is not a case of the ordinary intensification of a quality, where the same specific
form, such as a color, becomes more intense. Rather, the propensity and its completion
belong to different kinds of quality, namely, as a potency (second species) and a habit
(first species). James says that the two states are thus related by similitude and participa-
tion (ll. 490–92).
64 Ibid., 93, ll. 468–70: “Unde, virtutes quas Philosophus, in vi Ethicorum, naturales vocat,
non aliud sunt quam huiusmodi idoneitates et aptitudines ad virtutes ex actibus acquisi-
tas.” Cf. Nicomachean Ethics 6.11, 1143a19–b17, esp. b7–10. James says it is irrelevant to his
point that only some possess this type of natural virtue owing to the natural inequality of
souls.
65 Ibid., 93.
James of Viterbo on the Will 273

justice or rectitude (affectio iustitiae vel rectitudinis). Finally, to Anselm’s con-

cept of will as use corresponds the voluntary acts themselves by which the af-
fective propensity is perfected. This can be summarized as follows:

Anselm’s Affections of Will According to James of Viterbo

voluntas-instrumentum = idoneitas generalis, scilicet potentia voluntatis

affectio commodi ad volendum finem

voluntas-affectio/
affectiones instrumenti = idoneitates speciales

affectio rectitudinis ad volendum illa quae sunt

ad finem
voluntas-usus/
usus instrumenti = ipse actus volendi quo perficitur idoneitas vel affectio.

James’s basic strategy for a new account of the will as a self-moving p

­ ower was
to introduce Anselm’s idea that the will moves itself by means of its a­ ffections
and then to identify the concept of such an “affection” with an Aristotelian cat-
egory. This latter move was required if James was to respond in a relevant way
to the objections against self-motion, since they were themselves based upon
fundamental Aristotelian concepts. Simplicius’s commentary on the Catego­
ries provided a fortuitous and powerful means to translate Anselm into Aristo-
tle, and James did so in an ingenious way. In the second part of his answer to
this dubium, James finally explains how such an affection or aptitude can be
said to move itself.

(b) Self-motion
James follows a general strategy already pursued by Henry of Ghent who, as
seen, did not universally deny Aristotle’s law against self-motion, but instead
restricted its application. While Henry had distinguished the applicability of
Aristotle’s prohibition according to the different kinds of substances—­denying
self-motion in material beings but allowing it for immaterial entities—James
­instead does so according to the different kinds of causes. James says that mo-
tion can be produced by either an efficient or a formal cause. In the first instance,
motion comes from an agent that already possesses a form completely, as when
something already warm conveys its heat. Motion in this case is ­always caused
by one thing in another—ab alio in aliud—for nothing can cause in i­ tself what
274 Dumont

it already possesses. Consequently, neither the will nor anything else can move
itself as an efficient cause. It is otherwise, however, with a formal cause. Here
motion arises when something possesses a form incompletely or not accord-
ing to its ultimate perfection. In this case, such an imperfect form has a natural
inclination to its own fulfillment, towards which it immediately moves unless
impeded, as when a heavy object tends downward to achieve its natural place.
Unlike in an efficient cause, motion in this case originates and occurs in one
and the same thing (ab eodem in idem). Thus, the will as well as other things
can move themselves formally, but nothing can do so efficiently.66
James amplifies this solution with a number of important clarifications and
comparisons. First, he makes it clear that he is rejecting Henry of Ghent’s posi-
tion that a subject is the efficient cause of its own accidents, from which Henry
concluded that the will moves itself to act efficiently.67 James says that prop-
erly speaking, the effect of an efficient cause is the subject itself, which then
can bring about its own motion formally. By rejecting in unmistakable terms
Henry’s position that self-motion is caused efficiently, James would seem to be
forestalling the lengthy objection brought against it by Godfrey of Fontaines.68
That is, James is conceding to Godfrey that nothing moves itself as an efficient
cause, since this would render it in potency and act at the same time, but then
he explains such movement by formal causality. As we shall see, it will remain
for Godfrey to attack James’s new solution on different grounds.

66 Quodl. i, q. 7, 95. In this passage at line 541 Ypma’s text has an unfortunate mistake in the
phrase here italicized: “Et est huiusmodi motio alterius modi, quam illa quae ad causam
efficientem pertinet, quae dicitur principium. Unde motus sicut et motio, qua dicitur
­aliquid moveri a fine, est alterius rationis ab utraque praedictarum.” The text should read
instead: “Et est huiusmodi motio alterius modi, quam illa quae ad causam efficientem
pertinet, quae dicitur ‘principium unde motus,’ sicut et motio, qua dicitur aliquid moveri
a fine, est alterius rationis ab utraque praedictarum.” The phrase principium unde mo-
tus is Aristotle’s expression for an efficient cause, which James is contrasting here with
formal and final causality, as does Aristotle. See Aristotle, Physics 2.7, 198a26–27; al
7.3, 70.
67 Quodl. i, q. 7, 96, ll. 543–53. Henry’s position is found in his Quodl. x, q. 9, (ed.) Macken,
221–23: “Dicendum quod quaestio ista proposita est de causa efficiente accidentis gener-
aliter, sed specialiter propter accidens quod est ipse actus volendi: quomodo possit cau-
sari effective ab ipsa voluntate quae est subiectum eius. … Et sic quoad istud membrum
quaestionis respondeo dicens quod omne subiectum per suam formam est causa agens
et efficiens suorum accidentium propriorum et similiter communium.”
68 Godfrey of Fontaines, Quodl. viii, q. 2, pb 4, 26. For a discussion of Godfrey’s rejection of
Henry on this point, see John F. Wippel, The Metaphysical Thought of Godfrey of Fontaines:
A Study in Late Thirteenth–Century Philosophy (Washington, dc, 1981), 176–84.
James of Viterbo on the Will 275

Secondly, James expands on the exact relation between the terms of self-
motion. That is, how can an imperfect form move itself to its own completion?
Developing his earlier point, James says that the imperfect form from which
the motion begins and the perfect form to which it tends cannot be specifically
the same. A dull white cannot make itself more brilliant. Intensification within
a given specific form cannot arise from self-motion. Rather, in self-motion, the
beginning, imperfect form and the final, perfected form are acts of different
natures (diversarum rationum) that are nonetheless related and similar. Thus,
in the example of the falling body, it is the form of heaviness that moves itself
to its own completion, but the completion of this movement does not make
the body heavier. The completion consists rather in reaching the natural place
of rest to which all heavy bodies tend and in which they find the fulfillment
of their natural inclination. A heavy body will therefore accelerate as it draws
closer to its natural place, indicating an increasing inclination as it draws clos-
er to its completion, but it does not thereby become heavier. Thus, the two
terms in such a self-motion are different kinds of act, the form of heaviness and
the body’s downward existence, but they are nonetheless related.69
It is, however, a third point introduced by James that will prove to be a ­focus
of contention, as it goes to the core of the Aristotelian ontology of motion.
In Aristotle’s analysis, as indicated, motion is a single actuality differently
described as an action from an agent (ab hoc) and as a passion received in
a patient as in a subject (in hoc). James must thus confront the basic ques-
tion of whether the motion arising from this self-moving form is an action or
a passion. Correspondingly, is the form—the aptitude, propensity, or affec-
tion—that causes such self-motion itself active or passive? James replies that,
properly speaking, such motion is neither an action nor a passion, and conse-
quently the underlying motive form is neither active nor passive. This answer
suggests that James’s account of the will has finally hit an Aristotelian wall and,
seemingly, that his only way around it is to abandon Aristotle’s fundamental
analysis of movement in terms of action and passion. James, however, claims
that ­Aristotle in fact allows for cases of motion that are neither actions nor
passions. These are “absolute actions,” that is, ones for which there is no cor-
responding passion. James says that Aristotle refers to these as “immanent”
actions (actiones manentes) in the sense that they remain in the agent and do
not pass over into anything else that would function as a receptive patient.70

69 Quodl. i, q. 7, 96, ll. 554–71.

70 The source in Aristotle is Metaphysics 9.8, 1050a30–b2; al 25.3.2, 189–90; cf. Aquinas, st i,
q. 37, a. 1, ad 2, 388: “Ad secundum dicendum quod intelligere et velle et amare, licet sig-
nificentur per modum actionum transeuntium in obiecta, sunt tamen actiones manentes
276 Dumont

Examples are “shining” or, in the case of rational operations, “thinking.” Cor-
respondingly, James says, the underlying aptitudes causing such intrinsic mo-
tions are in a way both active and passive: active as that from which the motion
arises and passive as that which is perfected by such motion. At the same time,
however, James qualifies even this solution, saying that such absolute actions
as result from self-motion are not completely absolute, like the act of shining,
as they have a relation to a term towards which they tend. The act of shining,
however, does not have such a term and is thus strictly absolute.71
As James goes on to explain, the concepts of absolute action and passion
apply only to motion arising from formal causality, while the full roles of action
and passion are preserved in the efficient cause of motion.72 Moreover, as we
shall see, James has taken the concept of “absolute actions” from Simplicius,
whom he does not here cite. Nevertheless, this part of his solution in which
action and passion become greatly weakened perhaps makes his distance from
Aristotle most conspicuous. Indeed, as we shall see, when Godfrey of Fontaines
responds to James’s theory of self-motion, he will focus precisely on the above
account of motion as an absolute action and mount a lengthy attack against it.
James completes his account of self-motion by explaining the relation be-
tween the efficient and formal causes of movement in the will. To illustrate
how the will is self-moving, he compares it to the more accessible case of a
falling body, drawing exact parallels between the two. Thus, what moves itself
formally also has an efficient cause of that motion, namely, the generator that
gives the substance its form, such as heaviness or the soul, by which it moves
itself formally. Moreover, the heavy body and the will, having moved them-
selves formally can in turn move something else as an efficient cause. Thus,
just as the falling body moves the medium efficiently by dividing it, so the will,
having moved itself formally, moves the other powers of the soul as an efficient
cause to their acts. Finally, self-movers can even incidentally move themselves
as efficient causes. So, by dividing the medium as an efficient cause, the fall-
ing body also incidentally moves itself efficiently by removing an impediment

in agentibus, ut supra dictum est; ita tamen quod in ipso agente important habitudinem
quandam ad obiectum”; st i, q. 85, q. 2 corp., 334: “Cum enim sit duplex actio, sicut dicitur
ix Metaphysicorum, una quae manet in agente, ut videre et intelligere, altera quae transit
in rem exteriorem, ut calefacere et secare; utraque fit secundum aliquam formam. Et sicut
forma secundum quam provenit actio tendens in rem exteriorem, est similitudo obiecti
actionis, ut calor calefacientis est similitudo calefacti; similiter forma secundum quam
provenit actio manens in agente, est similitudo obiecti.” As indicated below, however, the
real source for James here is Simplicius.
71 Quodl. i, q. 7, 97–98, ll. 586–616.
72 Ibid., 98, ll. 629–32.
James of Viterbo on the Will 277

to its downward fall. Similarly, the will in moving the intellect as an efficient
cause to its act, in turn moves itself efficiently in an incidental way, since with-
out the intellect, the will cannot move itself to an act of volition.73 These causal
relations can be summarized as follows:

Type of cause Will Heavy body

Moves itself FORMALLY per se by its affections by its form of

heaviness
Is moved EFFICIENTLY per se by God creating it by its generator
with affections giving it heaviness
Moves others EFFICIENTLY moves the other moves the medium
per se powers of soul by dividing it
Moves itself EFFICIENTLY by moving the by removing medium
incidentally (per accidens) intellect without as impediment by
which it cannot dividing it
move itself

(c) Replies to Physics 8

With all this apparatus in place, James says that the answers to the two Aris-
totelian objections against self-motion are clear. To Aristotle’s first argument,
based on the principle that “whatever is in motion is put in motion by another,”
James replies that it applies only to an efficient but not to a formal cause of
­motion. James concedes that in the order of efficiency the mover and moved
must be really distinct, and this is what Aristotle’s argument proves. James’s
reading of Aristotle’s second argument, based on the principle that nothing
can be in both potency and act, is the same. Here also Aristotle’s proof estab-
lishes that nothing can move itself as an efficient cause. Taken in this sense,
Aristotle’s argument is valid, says James, since such a self-mover would be in
potency and act not just with respect to the same thing but even in the same
way (idem secundum idem et eodem modo). James agrees that this is impos-
sible. This same reasoning does not apply to what moves itself formally, for
although it is at once in potency and act, it is not so in the same way (non
eodem modo). As shown, self-motion can occur formally because it is in act in-
completely and in potency to its completion. This is not the case in an ­efficient
cause of ­motion, since there the agent is already in a complete act, and there-
fore it cannot also be in potency to such an act. Moreover, as also explained,

73 Ibid., 98–99.
278 Dumont

the self-motion originating from a formal cause is an absolute or immanent

action, not a transitive one passing over into another subject, and thus is more
properly called an operation.74 In general, then, James constrains Aristotle’s
argument of Physics 8 to the category of efficient cause of motion, having de-
voted most of his solution to justifying a distinct category of formal cause.
James then compares his own solution of the Aristotelian objections against
a self-moving will to those of Henry of Ghent and Thomas Aquinas. As indi-
cated, Henry’s device was to place within the will its act virtually. James fully
accepts Godfrey’s criticism that nothing can cause in itself what it contains vir-
tually, if “virtually” means “in a more eminent way.” On the other hand, James
continues, if the concept of “virtually in act” can be identified with his own idea
of “formally in act,” namely, an incomplete act in the sense of a natural propen-
sity and aptitude, then Henry’s solution can be made good.75 Clearly, James
regards his own elaborate answer to the Aristotelian objection as pursuing the
same general strategy as Henry’s response. Both attempted to place a latent yet
active capacity within the will that rendered it capable of originating its own
act and thus be self-moving. Henry tried to exploit the already recognized cat-
egory of “virtual containment,” but Godfrey rejected Henry’s new a­ pplication
of this otherwise acceptable concept as incoherent. James constructed a novel
alternative from Anselm and Simplicius to avoid Godfrey’s criticism.
Next James compares his solution to that of Aquinas (magnus doctor), who
had a stricter reading of Aristotle’s act-potency principle. Whereas both James
and Henry had allowed that the will could be in both act and potency accord-
ing to same thing (secundum idem), although not in the same manner (eodem
modo), Aquinas held the more restrictive position that only allowed for self-
motion if not according to the same thing (non secundum idem).76 Thus, if the
will is put into act by one thing, namely, an end, it can then move itself towards
another thing, namely, the means, and in this way can be considered self-­
moving. In this respect, James adds, Aquinas does not regard the will as more

74 Ibid., 99.
75 Ibid.
76 James here quotes Aquinas, st i–ii, q. 9, a. 3, ad 1, 78: “Ad primum ergo dicendum quod
voluntas non secundum idem movet et movetur. Unde nec secundum idem est in actu
et in potentia. Sed inquantum actu vult finem, reducit se de potentia in actum respectu
eorum quae sunt ad finem, ut scilicet actu ea velit.” Regarding the self-motion of the in-
tellect, he alludes to Aquinas, Quaestiones disputatae de malo, q. 6, ad 20, 562: “Ad vic-
esimum dicendum, quod idem secundum idem non movet seipsum; sed secundum aliud
potest seipsum movere; sic enim intellectus, in quantum intelligit actu principia, reducit
seipsum de potentia in actum quantum ad conclusiones; et voluntas in quantum vult
finem, reducit se in actum quantum ad ea quae sunt ad finem.”
James of Viterbo on the Will 279

self-moving than the intellect, which can move itself to deduce conclusions
once it has been put into act by principles. Thus, James disagrees with Aquinas,
who requires a greater distinction between act and potency for a coherent ac-
count of self-motion. At the same time, however, James shows how his position
can also accommodate self-motion in the same sense as Aquinas’s. Here James
appeals to his theory that the various aptitudes and affections in the soul are
ordered as general to specific. Thus, if the will moves itself according to a prior,
more general affection, it is rendered more suitable and capable of moving
itself by means of a posterior, specific affection. Alluding to his earlier identifi-
cation of Anselm’s affectio commodi with a general movement to the end, and
the affectio iustitiae with more specific one to the means, James says that if the
will moves itself to an end by the former, it becomes more apt and ready to
move itself to the means by the latter. James thus shows how his position can
accommodate a standard picture of voluntary self-motion given by Aquinas.77

Dubitatio ii
In his above lengthy and complex response, James addressed the first leg of
the Aristotelian objection to a self-moving will. It concerned the ontology of
motion in general as set out in Aristotle’s Physics. In this second dubium, James
now confronts the other leg of the objection, this one taken from the specific
case of animal motion as analyzed in De anima 3.10. Unlike the first objec-
tion, then, this one directly attacks self-motion in the will. As outlined above,
­Aristotle makes appetite a moved mover relative to the appetible object, which
functions as an unmoved mover. James adds to this Aristotelian picture its
standard refinement by Averroes, who in his commentary on Metaphysics 12
had distinguished the causal roles of the appetible object according as it exists
outside the soul or within the soul as apprehended by the imagination or intel-
lect. Averroes made the object as it exists in the soul as thought or imagined
the efficient cause of desire and movement (agens desiderium et motum); he
made the object existing outside the soul the final but not efficient cause of
desire (finis desiderii non agens), since it was the actual end to be attained.78

77 Quodl. i, q. 7, 100, ll. 689–717.

78 Averroes, In De an. 3 [433b15–20], com. 54, (ed.) Crawford, 524, ll. 38–44: “Et dixit: ‘Non
motum autem est bonum intellectum,’ etc. Idest, illud autem quod est in hoc motu mov-
ens non motum est bonum intellectum, quod comprehendit anima appetitiva. Motor
autem et motum est res appetitiva, idest membrum corporis in quo est ista pars animae;
appetitus autem est motus qui est a re appetita per intellectum in actu.” In Metaph. 12
[1072a26], com. 36, in Aristotelis opera cum Averrois commentariis, vol. 8 (Venice, 1562–
1574; repr. Frankfurt a. M., 1962), f. 318vI–K: “Haec autem differunt in nobis, scilicet illud
quod movet nos in loco secundum quod est agens, et quod movet nos in loco secundum
280 Dumont

James acknowledges the overwhelming authority of and consensus on this

view: Aristotle, his Commentator, and the common opinion of the masters all
agree that the will does not move of itself, but is moved by the appetible object
existing in the intellect.79
The first arm of the dilemma taken from the Physics objected to a self-­moving
will on the grounds of coherence. In Aristotelian terms, self-motion seemed to
entail that the same thing could be at once in act and potency. This second
arm of the dilemma taken from the De anima presents a different problem for
a self-moving will, namely, one of relevance. If the will moves itself ­towards an
object of desire, then any causal contribution of the object itself or its appre-
hension is superfluous to an act of volition. Moreover, if thinking is not causal-
ly connected to volition, then how can acts of the will be considered ­rational?
One obvious solution would be to make both the intellect and will causes of
volition but in different orders. James might, for example, maintain that the
will moves itself formally, but then assign to the object or its apprehension a
role as the efficient cause. But this solution would not seem available to James,
since he had already limited the efficient cause of motion to the production of
the subject itself. Clearly, this cannot be imputed to an object of desire, even
if considered as existing outside the soul, much less as apprehended in the
mind. Yet, it is this very strategy that James pursues. He holds that although the
will moves itself, it is also moved by both the object and the intellect (voluntas
movetur a se, et cum hoc etiam movetur ab obiecto et ab intellectu).80
Given that James has based his theory of self-motion on Anselm’s concept
of an affection, he invokes Anselm himself to show that none of our powers are
sufficient for their own acts. For example, vision requires not just the power of
sight, but a visible body, an illuminated medium, and the removal of impedi-
ments. Since, as indicated, James accepts from Anselm that all powers of the
soul are structured according to affection, instrument, and use, the need for a
motive object applies no less to the will than to vision. Thus, James concludes

quod est finis. Et habet duplex esse in anima et extra animam. Quod autem est in anima
est agens motum; secundum vero quod est extra animam est movens secundum finem.
Verbi gratia, quoniam balneum duplicem habet formam in anima et extra animam …
forma igitur animae balnei inquantum est in anima est agens desiderium et motum; se-
cundum autem quod est extra animam est finis motus, non agens.”
79 Quodl. i, q. 7, 102, ll. 760–62, 769–71: “Secunda dubitatio est circa idem, videlicet circa hoc
quod dictum est: voluntatem ex se moveri. Videtur enim hoc esse contra ea quae dicuntur
a Philosopho et Commentatore et a doctoribus communiter. … Et sic videtur dicendum
quod voluntas non moveatur a se, sed a forma apprehensa per intellectum. Dicitur etiam
communiter a doctoribus quod bonum cognitum movet voluntatem.”
80 Quodl. i, q. 7, 102, ll. 772–75.
James of Viterbo on the Will 281

with the support of Anselm that, absent a desirable object apprehended by

the intellect, the will would not be able to move itself at all (sine quo minime
se movet).81
For resources to explain how a self-moving will could also be moved by
the apprehended object, James turns to Aquinas, who had both modified and
expanded the analysis of Averroes in Metaphysics 12. James identifies three
claims that Aquinas makes about the causal role of the object apprehended
in the intellect: (1) it moves the will as a final (ut finis) and not as an efficient
cause (ut agens); (2) it moves the will according to the specification and not
the exercise of its act; finally, (3) it and the object existing outside the mind
move the will in the same way.82 Surprisingly, James denies the first claim, in
which Aquinas had replaced Averroes’s efficient cause with a final cause and
thereby rejected the separation Averroes had made between the causal func-
tion of the object as apprehended in the mind and as actually existing outside
it. Rather, James argues, Averroes’s analysis that the object in the intellect pro-
duces desire (agens desiderium) in the will is reasonable. If the object in the
intellect did not effect something in the will (nihil ageret in voluntatem), then
it could not be explained why the will would be more determined to willing
something apprehended by the intellect rather than not.83 On the other hand,
James perceived something very useful in Aquinas’s distinction between the
specification and exercise of an act.
Aquinas developed his distinction between exercise and specification in a
technical way during his second Parisian regency, making it the centerpiece
of his definitive treatment of the will in Quaestiones disputatae de malo, ques-
tion 6, a disputation held about the time of Stephen Tempier’s condemnation
issued in December 1270. Aquinas’s distinction became a central point of refer-
ence in the free will debate into the early 14th century. Henry of Ghent in par-
ticular repeatedly attacked Aquinas’s application of his distinction to the will

81 Ibid., 102–3. For Anselm, see De libertate arbitrii, c. 3, (ed.) Schmitt, 1, 212–13.
82 Aquinas, st i, q. 82, a. 4 corp., 303: “Et hoc modo intellectus movet voluntatem, quia bo-
num intellectum est obiectum voluntatis, et movet ipsam ut finis”; st i–ii, q. 10, a. 2 corp.,
86: “Respondeo dicendum quod voluntas movetur dupliciter, uno modo, quantum ad ex-
ercitium actus; alio modo, quantum ad specificationem actus, quae est ex obiecto.” There
is no text proximate to these two in which Aquinas expressly says that the mental and real
object of desire cause volition in the same way. Cf., however, his Super evangelium Iohan-
nis lectura, c. 13, lect. 1, n. 1742, (ed.) Raphael Cai (Turin and Rome, 1952), 326: “Quia vero
voluntas movetur ab exteriori obiecto sicut a bono apprehenso ….”
83 Quodl. i, q. 7, 103, ll. 787–97.
282 Dumont

as entirely deterministic.84 In his questions on the will in both Summa theolo-

giae i–ii, question 9 and Quaestiones disputatae de malo, question 6 Aquinas
advanced the distinction as a general analysis of how powers are related to
their objects.85 Aquinas argues that all powers of the soul can act in two ways.
Either they can act or not act at all (agere vel non agere), or they can do this or
that (agere hoc vel illud). The first Aquinas calls the exercise of the act, and it
arises from the power itself as it exists in a subject. That the eye sees or not, or
sees well or poorly, comes from the power of vision. Aquinas terms the second
aspect the specification or determination of an act, and this derives from the
object, since it specifies the kind of act, such as whether the eye sees white
or black. As applied to the relationship between intellect and will, Aquinas
concludes that in the exercise of its act, the will moves itself and indeed all the
other powers of the soul. On the other hand, in the determination of an act to
a specific kind the will is moved by the desirable object as apprehended by the
intellect.86
James greatly extends Aquinas’s basic distinction to allocate in some detail
the various causal responsibilities behind an act of will; indeed, his account
may well constitute one of the most expansive developments of De anima 3.10
in the medieval period. James gives three ways in which the will and object
contribute to an act of volition: (1) in the exercise of its act, the will moves itself
formally and is moved efficiently by God; (2) in the determination or specifi-
cation of that act, the will is moved by the object outside the soul; (3) finally,
the object apprehended in the intellect moves the will with respect to both (a)
the exercise and (b) the specification of its act. James says that (1) is clear from
the foregoing. The will from its innate affections and propensities formally
causes its own act as to its exercise. This is the principal sense in which the will
moves itself. God also causes the exercise of the same act, but as an efficient
cause, in creating the will with its self-moving affections and propensities. It is,
however, the role of the object taken both (2) in itself and (3) in the mind that

84 See Henry of Ghent, Quodl. ix, q. 5, (ed.) Macken, 122–123. In his Quodlibet xi, q. 6, Henry
transcribed and then refuted sentence by sentence a short treatise, as yet unattributed,
that defended Aquinas’s exercise/specification distinction. See Macken, “Zeitgenossen,”
161–66.
85 Aquinas, st i–ii, q. 9, aa.1 and 3; Quaestiones disputatae de malo, q. 6, 145–53.
86 Quaestiones disputatae de malo, q. 6, 149, ll. 360–64, 418–22: “Quantum ergo ad exercitium
actus, primo quidem manifestum est quod uoluntas mouetur a se ipsa, sicut enim mouet
alias potentias, ita et se ipsam mouet. … Si autem consideretur motus uoluntatis ex parte
obiecti determinantis actum uoluntatis ad hoc uel illud uolendum, considerandum est
quod obiectum mouens uoluntatem est bonum conueniens apprehensum.”
James of Viterbo on the Will 283

requires explanation, but particularly in the latter case, since it conveys the
main burden of the Aristotelian objection from De anima 3.10.87
Regarding (2), James says that the external object of desire moves the will
as to the specification of the act, since acts are determined and defined by
their objects. The problem here is how such specification or determination
caused by the external object can be construed as a “motion.” At the back of
this concern is Averroes’s above analysis in Metaphysics 12.6 that the external
object functions only as an end and not as an agent, i.e., not as a mover (finis
desiderii non agens). To explain this, James turns to the standard Aristotelian
authority used to gloss this statement of Averroes, namely, that the end moves
only “metaphorically.”88 As interpreted by James, this means that the external
object “moves” as the term towards which the will tends in order to become
similar to it. This is the reverse of a moving cause in the proper sense, which
acts on something to make it similar to itself. Since in both cases an assimila-
tion occurs, the object can be construed as a mover in an analogous sense,
and according to it the act of the will is specified.89 Curiously, James does not
explicitly say here what his account clearly indicates, namely, that the external
object functions as a final cause of volition. It is a point, however, that he states
expressly when discussing the will again in Quodlibet ii.90
James’s basic answer, then, to the Aristotelian objection is that the will both
moves itself to act as a formal cause, but it is also jointly moved—in a meta-
phorical sense—by the external object as a final cause. Following Aquinas,
James makes the will itself account for the exercise of the act and the object

87 Quodl. i, q. 7, 103, ll. 798–807.

88 This is from Aristotle, De generatione et corruptione 1.7, 324b14–15, which became the auc-
toritas “Finis non agit nisi metaphorice.” See Jacqueline Hamesse, Les Auctoritates Aristo-
telis: Un florilège médiéval; Étude historique et édition critique (Louvain, 1974), 168.
89 Quodl. i, q. 7, 103–4, ll. 810–30.
90 Quodl. ii, q. 7, 106–7: “Ratio vero quare non potest aliquid appeti, nisi habeat hoc duplex
esse, scilicet in anima et extra animam, ex hoc accipi potest. Voluntas enim ab obiecto
suo dupliciter movetur, videlicet per modum finis et per modum agentis. Per modum
quidem finis, quia obiectum voluntatis finis est, vel simpliciter, vel quodam modo. … Illud
autem quod movet ut finis, oportet quod sit res aliqua extra animam, et non solum in ap-
prehensione. Non enim movet aliquid ut finis nisi ratione bonitatis. Bonum autem, ut iam
dictum est, in rebus ipsis est. … Licet autem res ut est extra animam, vel in potentia vel
in actu, possit movere appetitum per modum finis et termini, non tamen potest movere
per modum agentis, cum non sit in anima secundum se ipsam.” Also, ibid., 111: “Voluntas
enim tendit in obiectum secundum quod movet ut finis. Hoc autem convenit obiecto se-
cundum esse quod habet extra animam simpliciter loquendo; non autem secundum esse
apprehensum nisi secundum quid, scilicet prout apprehensio est similitudo obiecti.”
284 Dumont

for its specification. In making the external rather than the internal object the
final cause of the will’s movement, James follows Averroes rather than Aquinas
and the common view. James now turns to the role of (3) the object as appre-
hended, which in fact plays the critical role in the Aristotelian objection.
James says that (3) the object as apprehended by the intellect moves the
will both to (a) the exercise and (b) the determination of its act. The reason for
this is that the object existing in the intellect has two aspects. First, it is a rep-
resentation of the externally existing object as its similitude. As far as moving
the will is concerned, the external object and its internal similitude function
as the same object. That is why the mere presence of an object of desire in the
mind can move the will, even if the corresponding real object does not actually
exist. Consequently, the apprehended object in the intellect moves the will in
the same way as the real object outside the soul, namely, to (b) the specifica-
tion of its act.
In addition to its representational aspect, the object also exists in the intel-
lect as a perfection in itself, that is, as an actuality of the intellectual power. So
considered, the object additionally moves the will to (a) the exercise of its act.
Thus, owing to this dual aspect of its mental existence as both a representa-
tion and a perfection, the object in the intellect moves the will both to (b) the
specification and to (a) the exercise of its volition. Here, however, a genuine
redundancy in James’s analysis occurs, for now the will both moves itself and is
also moved by the object in the intellect in the same respect, namely, to (a) the
exercise of its act. James resolves the difficulty by assigning these two causes
of the will’s movement, as putatively suggested above, to different orders. With
respect to the exercise of its act, the will moves itself as a formal cause, but
then it is also moved by the object in the intellect as an efficient cause. James
addresses the obvious difficulty: God had already been identified as the effi-
cient cause of the will’s act. Indeed, says James, by producing the will with its
motive capacities God is the only efficient cause in the proper sense of every
volition. Yet, James identifies another, weaker sense of efficient cause more
proximately at work in the voluntary act.
To explain this sense of efficient cause, James appeals to a standard view
that since the cognitive and affective powers are commonly rooted in the
same essence of the soul, they are connected to and have influence on one
­another (per quamdam connexionem et redundantiam). In this way, for exam-
ple, the contemplation of truth in the intellect can have a moderating effect
on the emotions.91 Thus, because the intellect and will are so connected, when

91 This is a common theme and language in Aquinas. See, for example, Scriptum super Sent.,
lib. 3, d. 23, q. 1, a. 2, ad 3, (ed.) Marie-Fabien Moos (Paris, 1933), 704: “Intellectus autem
James of Viterbo on the Will 285

the ­intellect considers an object of desire, it causes an inclination in the soul

that induces the will to move itself to that object. Because of this inclination,
the intellect is said to move the will and hence to be an efficient cause of its act.
James says this movement caused by the intellect can be called a “stimulation”
(excitatio), and generally this type of motion occurs between other powers of
the soul that are appropriately connected. In all other powers, however, such
an inclination necessarily results in their self-motion—recall that all powers of
the soul are self-moving formally according James—but the will moves itself
freely once it is so prompted. For this reason, the intellect’s action on the will is
better described by Augustine as an “attraction” (allectio).92 James says that he
has placed this type of movement in the genus of efficiency following Aristotle,
who identified deliberation as an efficient cause of movement.93
In his answers to these first two dubitationes James has advanced a recon-
ciliation of the concept of the will as a self-moving power with the standard
Aristotelian view, accepted by both the tradition and his medieval contempo-
raries, that the will is put into motion by the object of desire in the intellect.
Philosophically speaking, self-motion accounted for freedom of the will, while
its movement by the intellect rendered it rational. The solution constructed by
James was perhaps the most involved and eclectic in the 13th century. In the
ultimate analysis, however, it involved three main elements: Anselm’s theory
of the affections of will, Aquinas’s own solution to the same problem in Quaes-
tiones disputatae de malo, question 6 based on his fundamental distinction
between exercise and specification, and Simplicius’s concept of a propensity.
James found in Anselm the concept of the will as a self-moving power, and in
Aquinas a more refined analysis that enabled its reconciliation with the ob-
ject in the intellect as a mover. Simplicius was also essential to James’s solu-
tion in providing an Aristotelian category for Anselm’s idea of an affection. As
we shall see, Simplicius also gave James a critical concept for his resolution of

cum sit potentia non utens organo corporali, potest cognoscere actum suum, secundum
quod patitur quodammodo ab objecto, et informatur per speciem objecti; sed actum vol-
untatis percipit per redundantiam motus voluntatis in intellectu ex hoc quod colligantur
in una essentia animae, et secundum quod voluntas quodammodo movet intellectum,
dum intelligo, quia volo; et intellectus voluntatem, dum volo aliquid, quia intelligo illud
esse bonum”; Quaestiones disputatae de veritate, q. 13, a. 3, ad 3, 426: “Secus autem est in ali-
is hominibus, in quibus ex quadam colligantia potentiarum animae ad invicem sequitur
de necessitate quod fiat redundantia vel impedimentum ex una potentia in aliam”; ibid.,
q. 26, a. 10 corp., 508: “Similiter ex viribus superioribus fit redundantia in inferiores ….”
92 Augustine, De libero arbitrio, lib. 3, c. 25, (ed.) W.M. Green, Corpus Christianorum Series
Latina 29 (Turnhout, 1970), 319.
93 Quodl. i, q. 7, 104–5; for Aristotle’s view, see Metaphysics 5.1, 1013a29–32.
286 Dumont

another Aristotelian objection, namely, that of an “absolute action.” This would

turn out to be, for Godfrey of Fontaines, the Achilles heel of his position.

Dubitationes iii–iv
The last two objections arise from the more narrow meaning of “act” operat-
ing in the question, namely, free action. Here the problems are whether the
will alone is free, and if so, whether that freedom extends to both its end and
means. In the first case, it is argued that freedom is not proper to the will, since
it also extends to intellect. This is commonly accepted on multiple grounds:
the intellect is immaterial, determines itself to act, and finally is a power for
opposites. This last argument is particularly forceful, since it is the mark of a
rational power to be capable of opposite effects.94
James responds, as he did in his main solution, that the will alone has its
own liberty; the freedom of all other powers, including the intellect, derive
from that of the will. His argument for this is brief. It seems reasonable that
only one power in the soul should be properly free as that which rules over all
the others. This, however, is the will. The soul itself is free owing to its proxim-
ity to God, who is most truly free. In reply to the arguments, James says that
something must be immaterial to be free, but this is not sufficient for free-
dom. More difficult is the argument from a power for opposites. James says
that a truly free power must have a capacity not only for opposite objects but
also to act or not, and this belongs only to the will. Read in terms of Aquinas’s
distinction of exercise and specification, which James accepted, freedom thus
concerns exercise regarding acts (agere et non agere) rather than specification
regarding objects (agere hoc et illud). The intellect, like other powers, can only
act or not to the extent that it is moved by the will. Although the capacity to
act or not properly belongs to the will alone, the nature or essence of freedom
does not primarily consist in this. Rather, the fundamental basis of freedom is
“not to be necessitated to act.” That is, to be able to act or not is rather an effect
or indication, not the cause, of freedom.95 Thus, James says that if a power can
act or not, then it is not necessitated, but it does not follow that if it is not ne-
cessitated, then it can act or not.96 The reason for this, it seems, is to preserve in
some sense the will’s freedom for the end, which is the last objection.

94 Ibid., 106–107; cf. Aristotle, Metaphysics 9.2, 1046b5–6.

95 Quodl. i, q. 7, 106–108, esp. 108, ll. 990–92: “Est etiam sciendum quod, licet posse agere et
non agere non conveniat nisi potentiae liberae, non tamen in hoc consistit primo ratio
libertatis; sed in hoc quod est: non necessitari ad actum.” Ibid., 109, ll. 1005–6: “… illud
quod est effectus et indicium libertatis, et hoc est ‘posse agere et non agere.’”
96 Ibid., 108, ll. 992–95.
James of Viterbo on the Will 287

In the final dubitatio, it is argued that the will cannot be free with respect
to its end, since as an appetite it naturally and of necessity tends to that end.
James reports the common answer to this objection, which in fact is taken from
Aquinas’s Quaestiones disputatae de malo, question 6. There Aquinas had held
that with respect to the end, the will is free in the exercise of its act, since it can
will or not will the end, but in the determination of the act, it is moved by the
end of necessity.97 James, however, finds this solution inadequate. Such free-
dom would be incidental, since it would only occur when the intellect is not in
active consideration of the end. Whenever the end is considered, however, the
will would be necessitated even in the exercise of its act. Thus, James says that
a different answer is required based upon his prior analysis of freedom. The
capacity to act or not—in this case to will or not will—is not the primary basis
of freedom. As indicated in the response to the prior dubitatio, the essence of
freedom is “not to be necessitated.” Thus, even if the will were unable not to
will the end, it would still be a free act if not necessitated in the sense of being
under compulsion. In this way, the will can both be necessitated by the end
in the sense of immutability, and yet be free with respect to it. This is only the
case in the ultimate end; in all other cases, the will is also free in the sense of
being able to will it or not.98

8.3.5 Self-motion and Free Will

By way of a conclusion to James’s innovative and extensive account of self-
motion of the will in Quodlibet i, question 7, it seems fair to ask what the re-
lation is between self-motion and freedom, as this is a general characteristic
of medieval voluntarism. A striking outcome of James’s above account is that
self-motion is not limited to the will. Quite to the contrary, the formal causality
that produces self-motion is a general feature of the changeable world, extend-
ing from inanimate bodies up to powers of the rational soul. Indeed, the very
exact similarities that James draws between a falling body and the will seem
wholly unexpected in a voluntarist theory.99 Both have innate tendencies—
their affections or propensities—to reach their own perfection that actualize
unless otherwise impeded. James mentions two differences between the cases:

97 Aquinas, Quaestiones disputatae de malo, q. 6 resp., 150, ll. 432–40: “… et propter hoc homo
ex necessitate appetit beatitudinem, que secundum Boetium est ‘status omnium bono-
rum congregatione perfectus.’ Dico autem ex necessitate quantum ad determinationem
actus, quia non potest uelle oppositum, non autem quantum ad exercitium actus, quia
potest aliquis non uelle tunc cogitare de beatitudine, quia etiam ipsi actus intellectus et
uoluntatis particulares sunt.”
98 Quodl. i, q. 7, 109–110.
99 See above, page 277.
288 Dumont

the movement of a falling body is successive, while that of the will is instan-
taneous, and such a body has only one affection, while the will has several.100
But these differences do not seem adequate to answer the obvious question. If
self-motion by means of innate affections, aptitudes, or propensities is com-
mon to the entire realm of physical and psychological change, extending from
inanimate bodies to the senses to the intellect, of what special relevance is it
to the problem of free will? James is perfectly aware of this question. He raises
it himself:

From the foregoing a problem arises that we should not fail to mention.
It has been shown how something can move itself formally, although not
efficiently. This whole discussion has been on account of the will, but in
so moving itself, the will does not seem to have any preeminence. Natural
bodies move themselves in this way, as was just shown about something
heavy, as do all the powers of the soul.101

James’s answer here is that self-motion belongs to the will “in a special and
more proper way,” namely, that it is not necessitated to such motion. But then
why does the will move itself in this free manner, while none of the other self-
moving powers do? What accounts for the “special way” in the will? One an-
swer might be that, as just mentioned, other self-movers, such as stones, only
have one affection, but the will has several. Thus, different affections could
provide different inclinations for the will, and thus different volitions, while
for the stone there would be only one inclination and one movement. But then
this does not explain why the acts of all the other powers of the soul are not
also free, since they all have numerous, structured affections just as the will
does. Moreover, the mechanism of self-motion seems the same across the vari-
ous powers in the soul. There is an excitatio that leads to a self-movement by
the affection, propensity, or aptitude towards its own perfection. James seems
to describe this process identically for all the soul’s capacities. So, why is self-
motion in the will free but not in the other powers? Perhaps, ultimately, it is
just the nature of the will to be a free power, so that its acts cannot be neces-
sitated by its objects and capacities, while all the other powers are of such a

100 Ibid., 96–97, ll. 572–85.

101 Ibid., 101: “Sed ex praedictis oritur dubitatio quaedam non praetereunda. Ostensum enim
est quomodo potest aliquid ex se moveri, quia videlicet formaliter, non autem efficienter.
Et hoc totum declaratum est propter voluntatem. Sed in hoc nullam videtur praeeminen-
tiam habere voluntas. Nam et corpora naturalia hoc modo se ipsa movent, ut dictum est
de gravi. Similiter et aliae potentiae animae moventur hoc modo ex se.”
James of Viterbo on the Will 289

nature that they are so necessitated. If this is the case, then once again self-
motion seems unrelated to freedom.
Two points are clear from James’s treatment. First, self-motion is not a suf-
ficient condition for freedom. This, however, does not mean the two are un-
related. Rather, as James’s first argument that the will is self-moved shows,
self-motion is a necessary condition for freedom. The second point is that the
precise reason why a self-moving power is free is that it cannot be necessi-
tated in the sense of being compelled. The question is what accounts for this
additional condition of not being necessitated? James is clear that this is not
explained by the will as a capacity for opposites. James makes this only a con-
sequence rather than the cause of such freedom, and, in any case, he says that
it is not coextensive with free acts, as his discussion of the end shows. James’s
answer seems to be that the will is not necessitated because of its position as
the highest power and the first mover of the soul, as indicated in his second
principal argument that it is self-moved. Since there is no other created power
to which the will would be subordinated as something moved, its act is not ne-
cessitated in the sense of being compelled. Thus, if a power is both self-moving
and primary, then it is free in the requisite sense. In this, the voluntarism of
James differs from that of Henry and others. In their cases, the will is set apart
from all the other powers as the one that is genuinely active and self-moving.
In Henry’s case, then, genuine self-motion is unique to the will and thus suf-
ficient for freedom. For James, on the other hand, all the powers of the soul are
self-moving. The will is thus set apart from the others as free by being the first
self-mover.
Having examined James’s extensive solution to the problem of self-motion
and free will, we turn now to two significant reactions by his contemporaries.
The first concerns James’s treatment—or more accurate non-treatment—of a
key component of Henry of Ghent’s voluntarism, namely, the demotion of the
object in the intellect to a merely sine qua non cause of volition. The second is
Godfrey of Fontaines’s utter rejection of a critical element in James’s account
of self-motion, that of an “absolute action.”

8.4 Sine qua non Causality: Quodlibet ii, Question 7

A conspicuous feature of James’s lengthy solution in Quodlibet i, question 7

was that it completely ignored sine qua non causality. This omission was par-
ticularly glaring given James’s rehearsal of the debate between Henry of Ghent
and Godfrey of Fontaines. A main component of Henry’s account had been to
reduce the object in the intellect to a sine qua non cause in order to preserve
290 Dumont

the will as a self-moving power, a strategy that Godfrey strongly rejected.102 In

particular, Henry deployed this idea in Quodlibet ix, question 5 as part of his
forceful rejection of the distinction between exercise and specification that
Aquinas had used to explain in what way the intellect moves the will. That the
intellect or object functions as a sine qua non cause for volition was not new
with Henry, but he gave it prominence.103 The concept of a sine qua non cause
in this context went back originally to Aristotle’s discussion of self-motion in
Physics 8.5. Summarizing his conclusion that everything is moved by another,
Aristotle said that inanimate bodies are moved in two ways: by the generator
that gave them their natural forms of heavy or light, and by that which removes
impediments to their motion (ab eo quod impedientia et prohibentia solvit). Ar-
istotle’s statement was glossed by the medievals as identifying respectively the
essential and accidental causes of motion.104 Thus, the removal of an impedi-
ment was considered an incidental cause of motion in the sense that it does
not contribute as one of the four essential classes of cause, but is nonetheless
something without which (sine quo non) such an effect cannot occur. Trans-
ferring Aristotle’s example in Physics 8 to the will, Henry said that the intel-
lect “shows” or “presents” the object of desire, but it does not exercise causal
influence on the will, which is alone the essential cause of its volition. Rather,
this “showing” of the object by the intellect merely removes an impediment,
namely, ignorance, to the will’s own self-actualization; it does not impress

102 Godfrey of Fontaines, Quodl. vi, q. 7, pb 3, 151–52. For an overview of sine qua non cause as
applied to the will, see Bonnie Kent, Virtues of the Will: The Transformation of Ethics in the
Late Thirteenth Century (Washington, dc, 1995), 137–43.
103 Henry of Ghent, Quodl. ix q. 5, (ed.) Macken, 123: “Ita quod utroque modo maneat plena
libertas voluntatis respectu sui actus, nec operatur intellectus ad hoc quod fiat in suum
actum ipsa voluntas, nisi ostendendo sive offerendo ipsum obiectum, et hoc non nisi si-
cut causa per accidens et sine qua non”; Quodl. x, q. 14, (ed.) Macken, 297: “Et quod ar-
guitur ‘quod sic, quia voluntas per praesentiam intellectus secundum actum fit in actu et
per absentiam non fit,’ dicendum secundum praedicta quod verum est sicut causa sine
qua non, non autem sicut causa propter quam sic”; Quodl. xi, q. 6, (ed.) Badius, f. 457rS:
“Operatio vero volitiva habet esse in volente nullo modo ab ipso obiecto volito, nisi sicut
sine quo non”; Quodl. xiii, q. 10, (ed.) Jos Decorte, Opera omnia 18 (Leuven, 1985), 82: “Si
tamen eam sequatur voluntas in sua actione, hoc non est nisi sicut causam sine qua non,
sicut saepius declaravimus alibi.”
104 Aristotle, Physics 8.3, 255b35–56a3. Moerbeke’s text in Aquinas, In Phys., lib. 8, lect. 8, 391:
“… ut levia et gravia (aut enim a generante et faciente leve et grave, aut ab eo quod impedi-
entia et prohibentia solvit); omnia ergo quae moventur, ab aliquo movebuntur.” Aquinas’s
comment in ibid., 393: “… quia aut moventur per se a generante, quod facit ea esse gravia
et levia; aut moventur per accidens ab eo quod solvit, idest removet, ea quae impediunt
vel removent naturalem motum.”
James of Viterbo on the Will 291

or effect anything in the will.105 The object in the intellect is therefore mere-
ly an incidental (per accidens) not an essential (per se) cause. Applying this
to Aquinas’s solution, Henry utterly rejected the idea that freedom could be
preserved in the will by making it the agent with respect to the exercise of
its act, but then allowing the object apprehended in the intellect to move it
with respect to specification. Henry argued that if the object in the intellect
moved the will “however slightly” (quantumcumque modice)—even in respect
of specification—freedom would be destroyed.106
Given that James had adopted and elaborated Aquinas’s structure of ex-
ercise and specification to make the object in the intellect a type of efficient
cause of volition, his complete silence on whether this type of cause is essen-
tial or merely sine qua non was no doubt glaring to his contemporaries. Thus, in
the following year, James was directly asked that very question in his Quodlibet
ii, question 7: “Is the apprehension of the object with respect to the will an
essential efficient cause or only an efficient cause sine qua non?” How James re-
sponds to this question should be of some interest, given that Henry of Ghent
is seen as a radical voluntarist for holding the sine qua non view. It should pro-
vide some gauge of the degree of James’s own voluntarism.
James begins his Quodlibet ii, question 7 with a summary of his argument
and position from the previous year in Quodlibet i, question 7. Given that he
made the object in the intellect a moving cause (causa agens) of the will, James
says that the present question is asking whether the object in that role is an
essential or a sine qua non cause of volition. On this question, James says that
there are two extreme views. These belong respectively to Henry and Godfrey,
and James quotes Henry’s position with particular precision:

Some reply that apprehension of the object is only a sine qua non cause
with respect to the act of will. According to them, a sine qua non cause
is, as they express it, “what contributes nothing (nihil operatur) to the

105 Henry of Ghent, Quodl. x, q. 9, (ed.) Macken, 225: “Et est tota voluntas movens et mota
tota, sed movens ratione qua est libera, quae libertas est formale in ipsa, mota autem
ratione qua est natura, quae est materiale in ipsa. Et hoc cessante impedimento, quemad-
modum dictum est de gravi et levi respectu translationis sursum et deorsum. … Primo
modo impeditur voluntas ne velit, per coactionem, secundo vero modo impeditur per
ignorantiam, quia obiectum volitum est sibi absens, quod non est natum esse ei praesens
nisi per scientiam sive notitiam in intellectu”; ibid., 238: “Quod dicunt, quod ‘nihil est
dicta causa sine qua non, quia non est causa nisi agat per se aut per accidens,’ dicendum
quod reducitur ad causam per accidens.”
106 For Henry’s first criticism of Aquinas’s distinction, see his Quodl. ix, q. 5, (ed.) Macken,
122–24.
292 Dumont

effect.” The apprehension of the object, however, contributes nothing to

an act of will, because it does not move the will, but rather the will moves
itself. Apprehension, however, shows and proposes the object to the will,
which cannot move itself unless shown an object by the intellect. Thus,
apprehension is a cause only in the sense of sine qua non.107

Thus, at one extreme is Henry, who denies that the object in the intellect exer-
cises any action on the will at all. At the other extreme is Godfrey of Fontaines,
who holds that apprehension of the object is a per se cause of the volition be-
cause the will cannot move itself with respect to the same thing (secundum
idem). James says that he himself has taken a middle view (via media) between
these two, as he had determined in his previous Quodlibet.108 He holds against
Henry that apprehension actually does something to bring about the act of
willing (apprehensio aliquid agit ad actum volendi). This denies the central fea-
ture of Henry’s concept of sine qua non cause, namely, that it does not contrib-
ute to the effect (nihil operatur ad effectum). Against Godfrey, James holds that
the will nevertheless moves itself. Thus, the present question, says James, is
whether the apprehension of the object by the intellect, which he had admit-
ted is an agent and a mover of the will (agens et movens), should be classified
as an essential or merely sine qua non cause.
James answers by clarifying the idea of a sine qua non cause, which he
thinks applies to two entirely different types of non-essential causes. (a) The
first type of sine qua non cause is a per accidens or a merely incidental cause.

107 Quodl. ii, q. 7, 108: “Ad hoc autem dicunt quidam quod apprehensio est solum causa sine
qua non, respectu voluntatis in actu. Cuius declaratio est, secundum eos, quia causa sine
qua non, ut dicunt, est quae nihil operatur ad effectum. Apprehensio autem nihil op-
eratur ad actum volitionis, quia non movet voluntatem, sed ipsa voluntas a se movetur.
Apprehensio autem se habet ut ostendens et proponens obiectum voluntati, quae ex se
moveri non posset, nisi ostenderetur ei obiectum per intellectum. Et sic apprehensio est
causa solum ut sine qua non.” This reports faithfully Henry of Ghent, Quodl. ix, q. 5, (ed.)
Macken, 123: “Ita quod utroque modo maneat plena libertas voluntatis respectu sui actus,
nec operatur intellectus ad hoc quod fiat in suum actum ipsa voluntas, nisi ostendendo sive
offerendo ipsum obiectum, et hoc non nisi sicut causa per accidens et sine qua non”;
Quodl. xiii, q. 11, (ed.) Decorte, 88: “Dico quod aliquid ad actum aliquem eliciendum re-
quiritur dupliciter. Uno modo ut causa sine qua non, quae nihil agit omnino in eliciendo
actum, aut in causando dispositionem qua eliciatur actus, aut qua in passivo recipiatur,
quemadmodum requiritur removens prohibens ad descensum gravis. Et hoc modo, ut
saepius tractavi, ad actum voluntatis eliciendum necessario requiritur obiecti ostensio et
forma intellectus circa ipsum.”
108 Quodl. ii, q. 7, 108, ll. 115–121.
James of Viterbo on the Will 293

This contributes nothing essential to the relevant effect (non per se agit ad
e­ ffectum), as it does not act on the relevant patient. The standard example of
this type is the removing of a pillar that prevents a stone from falling. The agent
that moves the pillar indeed acts as an essential cause of that motion, but it
does not act on the stone to cause its downward motion, as that results entirely
from its natural form of heaviness. (b) A different kind of sine qua non cause
is called ex consequenti. In this case, the cause contributes to the effect but in
a secondary way connected to the principal cause. James gives two kinds of
cause ex consequenti: (i) matter and (ii) disposition. (i) While certainly form is
the principal agent, nevertheless it cannot act except insofar as it exists in mat-
ter. For example, Aristotle says that we are healthy both by the form of health
and by the body. Thus, matter is in a secondary way a basis of causal action
(ratio agendi). (ii) In a more active way, although still secondarily, a cause that
disposes towards an action is also sine qua non. Thus, if someone persuades a
friend to do something that he would not otherwise have done, the one who
acts on the advice is the principal cause of the deed, but the one who persuad-
ed him is the secondary cause, without which the principal cause would not
have acted. Both types of ex consequenti causes (i–ii) are sine qua non (b), yet
they still contribute to the effect (operatur ad effectum). They are thus distinct
from per accidens (a) causes, which do not so contribute.109
Given these clarifications, James replies to the main question of whether he
holds the apprehension of the object in the intellect to be an essential (per se)
or only a sine qua non cause of volition. James answers that since a per se cause
is here contrasted with a sine qua non cause, it is also correspondingly ambigu-
ous according to the above distinctions. Thus, if by per se is meant simply not
(a) per accidens in the stated sense, then James concedes that the object in the
intellect is a per se and not merely a sine qua non cause of volition. The reason
is that a per accidens cause contributes nothing to the effect but is merely inci-
dental to it. If, however, per se is taken more strictly to mean both not (a) per ac-
cidens and not (b) ex consequenti, so that a per se cause is both a non-accidental
and also a principal cause, then he admits that he holds the apprehended object
to be a sine qua non cause, since it is a contributing, but non-principal, cause.110
While the clarifications that James brings to the non-essential categories of
causation—per accidens, ex consequenti, and sine qua non—are instructive,
the most important result of this question is the following: James here abso-
lutely and explicitly denies that the apprehended object is merely a sine qua
non cause of volition in the sense that Henry of Ghent understood the concept.

109 Ibid., 108–110.

110 Ibid., 110.
294 Dumont

Henry prohibited any action by the apprehended object on the will at all, ex-
pressly excluding a disposition to elicit its act (quae nihil agit omnino in elici-
endo actum, aut in causando dispositionem).111 Moreover, for this reason, Henry
had completely and repeatedly rejected Aquinas’s distinction between exercise
and specification as applied to the will. James, as just seen, is explicit that the
apprehended object positively contributes to the will’s own act (apprehensio
aliquid agit ad actum volendi). It does so by inducing an inclination that incites
the will to move itself. Again, in complete contradiction to Henry, James en-
dorsed and applied Aquinas’s analysis of the exercise and specification to the
will; indeed, he applied a stronger version of it by making the apprehended ob-
ject not just a final but an agent cause. Consequently, there can be no question
that James has a less radical form of voluntarism than Henry of Ghent, a point
on which he himself is quite clear by depicting his position as a “middle way.”

8.5 Actio Absoluta: Quodlibet iii, Question 4 and Godfrey of Fontaines,

Quodlibet xiii, Question 3

Godfrey of Fontaines appears to have first reacted to James’s theory of self-

motion by innate affections in his Quodlibet viii, question 2 and then again in
Quodlibet ix, question 19 when discussing the specific case of the intellect.112
It was not, however, until his Quodlibet xiii, question 3 that Godfrey turned
his full attention to James’s version of the will as a self-moving power. James in
turn responded to Godfrey in his own Quodlibet iii, question 4, at least in its
redacted form that we now possess. Here we face a common problem in dating
closely related quodlibetal disputes in the period. Current scholarship places

111 Henry of Ghent, Quodl. xiii, q. 11, (ed.) Decorte, 88: “… quae nihil agit omnino in eliciendo
actum, aut in causando dispositionem qua eliciatur actus, aut qua in passivo recipiatur.”
112 Godfrey of Fontaines, Quodl. viii, q. 2, pb 4, 25: “Item, alio modo etiam dicunt aliqui quod
voluntas et intellectus faciunt se in actus suos etiam primos; quia dicunt quod in vol-
untate sunt quaedam affectiones ab ipsa realiter differentes, et harum virtute facit se in
actum aliquem secundum modum et condicionem affectus quem habet.” See also Quodl.
ix, q. 19, pb 4, 270–281. Godfrey’s latter Quodlibet must have been very close to Quodlibet i
of James, since they both describe in identical terms an unusually expressed view that the
intellect and will move themselves. Godfrey, ibid., 278: “Et ita etiam in aliis prout etiam
ab aliquibus dicitur quod voluntas est volefaciens et volefacit se ipsam et est volefactiva
et volefit a se ipsa”; cf. James of Viterbo, Quodl. i, q. 7, 111, ll. 1067–70: “… et voluntas move-
tur, allicitur, provocatur et inclinatur ab intellectu, vel, ut aliqui dicunt, quod intellectus
volefacit voluntatem et voluntas volefit; licet talis modus dicendi non multum habeatur
in usu. Et hoc modo motus voluntatis potest dici actio intellectus.”
James of Viterbo on the Will 295

James’s Quodlibet iii, question 4 as much as two years prior to Godfrey’s Quod-
libet xiii, question 3.113 Yet comparison indicates that, in its present form,
James’s Quodlibet iii, question 4 is responsive to Godfrey’s Quodlibet xiii,
question 3. On the other hand, Godfrey’s Quodlibet xiii, question 3 shows no
awareness of James’s new strategy in Quodlibet iii, question 4 of distinguishing
between transmutatio and inclinatio as the primary division of the category
of action. Thus, it seems that James redacted his Quodlibet iii, question 4 af-
ter Godfrey’s Quodlibet xiii, question 3. Whatever its chronological position,
Quodlibet xiii, question 3 contains Godfrey’s most extensive refutation of the
precise point upon which James’s entire case for an Aristotelian construction
of genuine self-motion ultimately rests, namely, the coherence of an “absolute
action.”
The problem that James’s theory faced had been set out clearly in the initial
objection to his Quodlibet i, question 7. As rehearsed above, the difficulty was
Aristotle’s fundamental ontology of motion itself in Physics 3.3. There Aristotle
reduced motion to a single actuality existing from the agent as an actio, and in
the patient as a passio. To hold that something was self-moved simply contra-
dicted the Aristotelian concept of motion as the act of an agent in the patient.
In his formal response to that initial objection, James developed the idea of an
actio absoluta that did not pass over into a patient, and claimed that willing,
like thinking or seeing, was such an absolute action that remained in the agent.
It was this idea that was singled out for scrutiny in Quodlibet iii, question 4:
“Is there a passion corresponding to the action in the will?” James himself de-
tails the circumstances motivating this question. He says it arose because of
his earlier claim that the motion or act of the will was an actio, which seemed to
some—that is, to Godfrey—to imply a contradiction, since to every actio there
corresponds a passio. Thus, if the motion existing in the will were an actio—and
according to Aristotle the actio of the agent exists in the patient—then the will
would be both the agent and patient in the same respect. James says that he re-
sponded to this problem in his earlier Quodlibet by making the act of the will
an actio absoluta to which no passio corresponded, a concept that he here now
identifies as coming from Simplicius. James observes that, without a doubt, the
present question concerning actio in the will was posed because the idea of an
actio absoluta seemed absurd to some—again, a reference to Godfrey.114

113 Current dating would put James’s Quodlibet iii in 1295/96 and Godfrey’s Quodlibet xiii
in either 1296 (Glorieux) or 1297/98 (Wippel). See Eelcko Ypma, “Recherches sur la proc-
ductivité littéraire de Jacques de Viterbe jusqu’à 1300,”Augustinana 25 (1975): 282; ­Wippel,
Metaphysical Thought, xxvii–xxviii. See, however, note 5 above regarding the caution
needed in dating Godfrey’s quodlibetal questions.
114 James of Viterbo, Quodl. iii, q. 4, 56–57.
296 Dumont

In this question, James first gives a brief review taken from his Quodlibet i,
question 7, summarizing the various solutions to the problem of self-­motion
in the will, including Proclus’s (spiritual powers turn back on themselves),
Henry of Ghent’s (distinction within the will of virtual and formal causes), and
­finally his own, namely, that the will causes its movement formally not virtu-
ally and, appealing to Simplicius, that such motion is an absolute act to which
no passion corresponds.115 James then outlines the arguments against these
solutions, ending with one against his use of Simplicius. Here, James says, it
is objected to his interpretation of “absolute action” found in Simplicius. Con-
trary to James’s reading, by an absolute action Simplicius did not mean one to
which no ­patient corresponds at all, but only that such action does not exist in
a patient external to and really distinct from the agent. Thus, in his example of
walking, Simplicius did not mean that this action exists without a patient, but
only that the walking does not pass outside the animal as an act of something
else, as if, for instance, the pavement were itself a patient put into the act of
walking.116 This criticism comes precisely from Godfrey’s Quodlibet xiii, ques-
tion 3, perhaps indicating that James redacted his Quodlibet with Godfrey’s
text at hand.117
Godfrey’s Quodlibet xiii, question 3 contains an extensive refutation of
James’s view. Next to Godfrey’s summary of James’s opinion, the annotator of
the ancient manuscript in Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, lat. 14311
indicated in the margin opinio contraria Ia<cobi> Augustiniensis. The same
annotator then noted at the start of its refutation that Godfrey had amassed
fifteen arguments against it, refuted three of James’s own arguments, correctly
interpreted the texts of Simplicius upon which James based his view, and fi-
nally explained how actions can remain (manens) in the soul.118 Ultimately,
Godfrey argues that James contradicts the universally accepted understanding
of Aristotle according to which, in reality, there is only one motion, considered

115 Ibid., 57–59.

116 Ibid., 62–63, ll. 187–202.
117 Ibid., 63, ll. 197–202. This reports Godfrey of Fontaines, Quodl. xiii, q. 3, pb 5, 204. For
the passage under dispute, see Simplicius, Commentaire sur les Catégories, (ed.) Pattin, 2,
410–11. See Pattin’s references to the present questions of both Godfrey and James in his
notes to lines 25–34 and 32–34.
118 See Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, lat. 14311, f. 212ra and f. 213ra marg. inf.: “Ter-
tio hic cum dicit ‘Quae etiam dicuntur’ [=pb 5, 196, l. 22] reprobat opinionem primam
per xv rationes, quas inducit <contra> diversa dicta sic dicentium, et solvit tres rationes
eorum, et ad verba Simplicii respondet. Interserit etiam quare actiones animae, cum sint
passiones, dicantur actiones, et quare manentes.” For the identification of James, see also
Vatican City, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Vat. lat. 1032, f. 213rb.
James of Viterbo on the Will 297

from the agent but in the patient. That is, to place action in the agent is, on
Aristotelian terms, to contradict the very relation that constitutes an agent:

Up to now, it has always been customary to say that, according to the

intended meaning of Aristotle, true action and passion are relations not
properly said of the agent and patient, but of a single motion or change
in reality, for one and the same motion is called an action insofar as it is
from another as an efficient cause; it is called a passion insofar as it is in
another as a subject. Therefore, it is customary to say that “action is not
in the agent, but in the patient,” because that relation according to which
action takes its nature is based on the motion that is in the patient, not in
the agent, but rather from it.119

Godfrey thus rejects as incoherent the concept of an “absolute action” if by

this is meant a real action apart from any relation to a patient. No support
for such an idea can be found in either Aristotle or Simplicius. The passage in
Metaphysics 9 where Aristotle speaks of an action “remaining” (manens) in the
agent does not imply that there is no corresponding patient. Indeed, Godfrey
adduces from the same text Aristotle’s express statement that an agent acts
on another insofar as it is other.120 The same is true of the passage in which
Simplicius speaks of an absolute action, which Godfrey says James wrongly
(male) interpreted. Simplicius’s use of “absolute” does not contemplate an ac-
tion to which nothing passive corresponds or that does not exist in a patient.
Rather, Simplicius refers to certain actions that do not reside in a patient exter-
nal to the agent, as his example of an animal walking on the pavement shows.
Rather, there are separate parts within the animal itself in which such move-
ments exist as in a patient. In these authorities, Godfrey says, we are misled
by the intransitive or passive forms of verbs that describe such actions, such
as “shining,” “walking,” and the like. These verb forms signify as though their

119 Godfrey of Fontaines, Quodl. xiii, q. 3, pb 4, 196. “Hactenus enim semper consuevit dici
quod, secundum intentionem Philosophi, actio vera et passio dicunt habitudines non
proprie agentis et patientis, sed unius motus vel transmutationis secundum rem; quia
motus unus et idem secundum quod est ab alio effective dicitur actio; secundum quod
est in alio subiective dicitur passio. Et ideo solet dici quod actio non est in agente, sed in
passo; quia habitudo illa, secundum cuius rationem sumitur actio, fundatur in motu qui
est in passo; non in agente, sed ab ipso.”
120 Godfrey of Fontaines, Quodl. xiii, q. 3, pb 5, 198, citing Metaphysics 9.1, 1046a10–13; al
25.3.2, 180, ll. 23–24: “… quod est principium transmutationis in alio in quantum est aliud.”
Cf. Wippel, Metaphysical Thought, 177, n. 17.
298 Dumont

described actions exist apart from any relation to a patient, when in reality
they do not.121
Godfrey compares the solution of James to that of Henry of Ghent, who is
“of no lesser authority.” Godfrey judges that Henry’s position, even though it
made the will both active and passive, was nevertheless “less irrational” (minus
irrationabiliter) because it at least preserved the agent-patient relation. James,
however, held the additional contradiction that there could be something truly
active without anything passive corresponding to it.122 In the end, then, God-
frey diagnoses where he thinks James’s idea of a self-moving will ultimately
broke with Aristotle. It was not that James’s theory made the same thing ac-
tive and passive. His break, in Godfrey’s view, was more radical. He violated
the concept of agency itself as required by Aristotle’s ontology of motion as a
single actuality.
Whatever the order of their actual disputations, James’s Quodlibet iii, ques-
tion 4 contains an extensive response to Godfrey’s above critique in Quodlibet
xiii, question 3. In general, James responds to Godfrey by limiting the type
of action requiring a patient to the genus of change (transmutatio), while the
will, among other powers, acts by inclination (inclinatio). In other words, the
category of action contains several genera, and Godfrey’s strict requirement
applies to only one of them. In terms of positive treatment, this represents a
development by James beyond his earlier Quodlibet i, question 7 and permits
him to clarify further the relation of the object to the will in its act. Secondly,
after his positive treatment, James responds to Godfrey’s reading of Simplicius
on absolute acts.
James’s main solution in Quodlibet iii, question 4 is built, ultimately, on
an analysis of the Aristotelian category of action that is heavily indebted to
Simplicius. Shortly after his Quodlibet i, James had treated the categories of
action and passion in his Quaestiones de divinis praedicamentis (=qdp), ques-
tions 16 and 17, which relied in some detail on Simplicius’s lengthy chapter on
action in his commentary on the Categories.123 James’s close reading of Simpli-
cius seems to have influenced his more developed approach to action evident
in the present Quodlibet iii, question 4. In his commentary, Simplicius had

121 Godfrey of Fontaines, Quodl. xiii, q. 3, pb 5, 203–4.

122 Ibid., 198.
123 James discusses in some detail his reading of Simplicius on actio absoluta in qdp,
qq. 16–17, (ed.) Eelcko Ypma (Rome, 1986), 297–302, including Simplicius’s criticisms of
Plotinus. He had written this question of the qdp by the time of his second Quodlibet. See
his Quodl. ii, q. 5, 89, ll. 1006–8. He also refers to them in the present question at Quodl.
iii, q. 4, 81.
James of Viterbo on the Will 299

r­ejected attempts to reduce action and passion to other categories, whether

to relation, by construing each of the two as merely relative to the other, or
to a new category of motion, under which they would both fall, as Plotinus
had argued.124 Thus, on James’s reading, Simplicius construed the category of
action, taken in its common nature and in itself, as neutral with respect to pas-
sion. In its pure nature, action simply means “to act of itself” or “to be an active
principle.” It does not, of itself, include any relation to a patient. Rather, such
a relation is the basis of the division of the category of action into its two pri-
mary genera, namely, into action that has an opposed relation to patient and
one that does not. The first genus is change (transmutatio), and the second is
inclination (inclinatio). That is, taken in itself, action is just the capacity to act
(agere a se), and this can be either a se et in aliud, which is a transmutatio, or
a se et non in aliud, which is an inclinatio. James then identifies these with the
Aristotelian ideas respectively of action going out from (transiens) or remain-
ing in (manens) the agent. It is this latter class that Simplicius calls absolute ac-
tion (actio absoluta).125 In the final analysis, then, James justifies the coherence
of an absolute action, that is, one that is an inclination internal to the agent
and lacking a related patient, by its independent and absolute character as an
Aristotelian category. To make action in itself consist of an opposition to pas-
sion would collapse both categories into species of relation. In this view, James
seems to have been inspired by Simplicius.
Turning to the two species of action, James says that transmutatio is the
change in which an agent brings something to act that previously existed in
potency. Such an agent requires a subject on which to act, and therefore has
an opposed patient. In this sense, its action passes over into something else
(transiens in aliud), namely, the subject in which the change is effected. This
is not the case with inclinatio, which arises within the agent to the extent that
it has an active principle of its own action (sui actus), whether this is a power
or a habit, whether innate or acquired. Strictly speaking, in such internal ac-
tion there is not a mover and a moved, as there is in transmutatio. In inclinatio,

124 On Simplicius’s treatment, see Nicolas Vamvoukakis, “Les catégories aristotéliennes

d’action et de passion vues par Simplicius,” in Concepts et catégories dans la pensée an-
tique, (ed.) Pierre Aubenque (Paris, 1980), 253–269 at 256.
125 James of Viterbo, Quodl. iii, q. 4, 68–69, ll. 357–80, especially ll. 365–72: “Unde dicit Sim-
plicius in Praedicamentis quod ‘pura ratio actionis est agere a se’; in aliud autem vel non
in aliud agere non pertinet ad communem rationem actionis, immo accidit actioni ut
actio est. Sed per hoc diversificantur modi actionum sub actione generaliter sumpta, quia
unus modus actionis est agere a se in aliud, alius autem modus est agere a se non tamen
in aliud.” For the Simplicius, see Commentaire sur les Catégories, (ed.) Pattin, vol. 2, 438, l.
14 and 430, ll. 78–79. Cf. James of Viterbo, qdp, qq. 16–17, 289–302.
300 Dumont

therefore, the agent does not strictly speaking “move itself” (movere se) or “act
on itself” (agere in se), but it is rather in motion of itself (moveri ex se) or acts
by itself (agere a se).
Although change and inclination are two distinct kinds of action, they often
jointly contribute to motion in the natural order, in which case the action is
said to be a mixture of transmutatio and inclinatio. Such mixed actions are
especially found in the soul, since its powers are already more actual and thus
more ready to act by way of inclination. Of the powers of the soul, the will most
of all exhibits action in the sense of inclinatio, since it is the power nearest to
act owing to its freedom. Accordingly, volition is a mixed action comprised of
both transmutatio and inclinatio, but only one of these involves a correspond-
ing patient. In the act of volition, the transmutatio is the change brought about
by the object in the will. In this component of volition the object is the agent
and the will its patient.126 Such a change is really a stimulation (excitatio) or
more properly an attraction (allectio) of the will. The inclinatio then arises from
the will prompted by the action of the object, but in this component, there is
only the action of inclination from the innate affection of the will itself; there
is no passion opposed to this action. For this reason, then, the will does not
properly speaking move itself (movere se) but acts of itself (agere a se). In this
inclination, of course, the will tends to an object as its end or term (terminus),
but in that role the object is not a patient. Volition is thus a mixed action in-
volving the conjunction of both a transmutatio between the object and the
will, to which corresponds an opposed passion, and then an inclinatio of the
will itself to its term, but without any opposed passion. In volition, therefore,
there are two actions but only one passion. These two types of actions are nev-
ertheless conjoined in the will, so it is customary to say that there is a passion
opposed to the will’s inclination, but in truth there is not.127
Finally, James addresses Godfrey’s denial that any notion of an actio ab-
soluta can be found in Simplicius that would refer to an action apart from any
passion. To this James can only respond that the idea is most evident in Sim-
plicius, who mentions it not just once, but repeats and explains it several times
throughout his entire chapter on action, as is clear to anyone who has both read
and understood it. As to Simplicius’s example of walking, James can treat this
easily in terms of his above account of it as a mixed action. Insofar as ­appetite
inclines the animal to move, the action is absolute; insofar as the animal walks

126 Quodl. iii, q. 4, 79, ll. 658–660.

127 Ibid., 69–71 and 75.
James of Viterbo on the Will 301

by moving its limbs and bodily parts, it undergoes a change that is not absolute
but one that involves the opposition of mover and moved.128
To summarize, then, James argues that in psychological operations, such as
seeing, understanding, and willing, there is an admixture of absolute and non-
absolute action. The non-absolute action is a change (transmutatio) effected
by the object on the power, stimulating it (excitatio) to act or move. As such,
the object acts in a transitive way on a power that is passive with respect to
it. Once so awakened, the power, which is an active affection or propensity,
acts further by way of inclination (inclinatio) towards its end or fulfillment.
This is an absolute action, since it is not related to any opposed patient. Thus,
James says, one and the same power, such as the intellect or will, is a subject
for both an action and a passion, but in different ways. Once again, the action
of inclination in the power is absolute, since it is not related by opposition to
the passion residing in the same subject; rather, that passion is opposed to the
action of the object that is a stimulation (excitatio).129 Against Godfrey, James
cites explicit textual support for his analysis in Simplicius.130
With this extensive response in Quodlibet iii, question 4 we come finally
to the full answer James gives to the initial objection that he faced two years
earlier in his first Quodlibet concerning self-motion in the will. This objec-
tion argued that for Aristotle motion was a single actuality that existed as the
action of the agent in the patient. If the will moved itself, it would be both
agent and patient in the same subject and in the same respect. In the ultimate
analysis, James handled the problem by distinguishing two kinds of action,
one of which conformed to Aristotle’s generally accepted account of change,
while the other kind—absolute action—did not. The first type was the change
effected by the external object on powers of the soul. It involved an action
and an opposed patient, and so was not absolute. The second kind or abso-
lute action was the operation internal to the soul and its powers. To such ac-
tion there did not correspond an opposed patient. Thus, the self-motion of the
will and other psychological powers did not involve the coincidence of agent
and ­patient, act and potency. The opposed relations of action and passion did
not coincide in the same subject—say the will or intellect—since that rela-
tion existed between the separate object and power. The absolute action, not

128 Ibid., 75–77.

129 Ibid., 77.
130 See especially ibid., 77, ll. 607–611, where James quotes Simplicius on mixed actions that
comprise an inner operation that has been aroused in the power (intrinseca excitata
o­ peratio). This quotes Simplicius, Commentaire sur les Catégories, (ed.) Pattin, vol. 2, 429,
ll. 42–48.
302 Dumont

­ aving an opposed passion, did not conflict with the passion in the power,
h
since that was opposed to the action of object. Of course, to avoid the conflict
of a coincidence of action and passion, James had to admit, contrary to what
­everyone had accepted in Aristotle, that there could be an action absolute of
any ­relation to a patient. James did this with the help of Simplicius, consis-
tent with his ­appropriation of the related concept of affection, propensity, or
idoneitas.

8.6 Conclusion

Clearly, James of Viterbo is a voluntarist. He developed one of the most ambi-

tious and original theories in the medieval period of the will as a self-moving
power. But is he a radical voluntarist? Some comparisons to Henry of Ghent,
his contemporary and influence, are instructive. Both admitted the will to be
self-moving, and James even assimilated Henry’s solution based on virtual
causality in the will to his own based on formal causality. On the other hand,
it seems clear that James has moderated a number of Henry’s more radical
stands. Most conspicuously, James made the object a much more robust cause
of volition than Henry. James expressly denied that it was merely a sine qua
non cause in the extreme sense that Henry took it, namely, as a merely inciden-
tal cause removing an impediment to the will’s own self-actualization. Rather,
James assigned the object in the intellect a real causal influence on the will,
even going so far as to call it a type of efficient cause in Quodlibet i, question 7
and then characterizing its action as a transmutatio in Quodlibet iii, question
4. Henry rejected any such strong causal relation of the object to the will. More-
over, James’s analysis on this point is related to his adoption and expansion of
Aquinas’s distinction between exercise and specification. Henry spent the lat-
ter part of his career attacking Aquinas’s own application of this distinction to
explain the relation of the apprehended object to the will. For Henry, Aquinas’s
distinction resulted in complete determinism. For James, on the other hand,
Aquinas’s distinction was not only consistent with, but a principal element in,
his conception of the self-moving will.
Of course, the central idea to James’s account of the will as self-moving
were the affections of Anselm translated into the idoneitates of Simplicius. For
James, the will moved itself by means of its affections. As mentioned, Henry
towards the end of his career examined in detail the role of Anselm’s affections
in the will, a treatment that would later have a direct influence on Duns Scotus.
As part of his analysis, Henry gave the will the innate affections of justice and
happiness, a view James himself adopted. On the issue of the two affections,
James of Viterbo on the Will 303

a comparison could be made between James and the later voluntarist, John
Duns Scotus. Also influenced by Henry’s analysis, Scotus put innate affections
in the will, through which he secured its freedom.131 But here again, and per-
haps even more so, comparison shows James to be less the voluntarist. As seen,
James had made the affection for happiness (affectio commodi) the capacity
towards the end, and the affection for justice (affectio rectitudinis) the one for
the means. He then argued that the will was more free with respect to the end
than the means, thereby subordinating the affection for justice to that for hap-
piness. For Scotus, however, the affectio commodi is a drive for happiness that is
not free, since it is a purely natural inclination; only its restraint by the affectio
iustitiae preserves any freedom in the will. For Scotus, James’s theory of the
will would be entirely deterministic, an assessment that he would have found
confirmed in James’s close alignment between the fall of heavy bodies seeking
their natural place and the will seeking its own perfection. Again, comparison
between the two thinkers requires caution, but in general, James would seem
to be less the voluntarist than Scotus.
Finally, James’s theory is a general account of self-motion that applies not
only to psychological action but, as shown above, extends even to the realm of
natural motion. As such, the will is not the only genuine self-mover. Indeed,
while James recognizes that the soul is more self-moving than natural bodies,
and that within the soul the will is the most self-moving of its powers, and
thus free, nevertheless, he immediately concedes that “the truth of the matter
is that the other powers of the soul also move of themselves.”132 In this way,
James seems to have a weaker form of voluntarism in that his version allows
for a greater assimilation of the will to the other powers of the soul, at least as
regards self-motion. However his voluntarism be assessed, James of Viterbo’s
innovative and expansive theory of self-motion was in a sense the culmination
of the 13th-century debate over the will at Paris, to which he was both witness
and contributor.

131 On Scotus’s two affections, see Allan B. Wolter, “Native Freedom of the Will as a Key to the
Ethics of Scotus,” in Deus et homo ad mentem i. Duns Scoti: Acta tertii Congressus scotis-
tici internationalis, Vindobonae, 28 sept.–2 oct. 1970, Studia scholastico–Scotistica 5 (Rome,
1972), 359–70.
132 Quodl. iii, q. 4, 71, ll. 432–36: “Adhuc inter operationes animae maior inclinatio videtur
esse in operatione voluntatis, quia inclinatio voluntatis est libera et in potentia ipsius;
quod non contingit in aliis potentiis. Et propter hoc specialius dicitur de voluntate quod
movetur a se quam de aliis animae potentiis, licet secundum rei veritatem etiam aliae
moveantur a se per inclinationem.”
304 Dumont

Appendix: Questions on the Will in James of Viterbo

James of Viterbo has a total of twelve questions directly on the will, the most of
any topic in his corpus. Nine are in his Quodlibeta and three in his qdp. These
latter three questions are unedited and do not seem to belong to the original
set of the qdp; they are off topic and in some of the manuscripts occur after
the main series. As indicated in the chart below, manuscripts B, N, and T of the
qdp insert these three questions on the will after question 23 on divine power,
according to the numbering adopted by Ypma.133 Manuscripts P and R, how-
ever, append them after the series and then also consolidate the solutions of
all three questions under the last title.134 Despite Ypma’s repeated statements
to the contrary, manuscript B lacks the important question 30, although it is
recorded in the table at the end of the codex. According to Ypma, the qdp on
the will are chronologically posterior to Quodlibet ii.135

• Quodlibeta:
i, q. 7 Utrum motus voluntatis in finem sit actus voluntatis vel intellectus.
i, q. 8 Utrum beatitudo principalius consistat in actu intellectus quam in
actu voluntatis, vel econverso.
ii, q. 7 Utrum ad obiectum voluntatis pertineat apprehensio per se et es-
sentialiter vel solum sit causa sine qua non.
ii, q. 14 Utrum potentiae animae, scilicet memoria, intelligentia et volun-
tas, sint idem quod essentia animae.
iii, q. 4 Utrum actioni voluntatis correspondeat aliqua passio.
iii, q. 5 Utrum actus voluntatis realiter differat a potentia voluntatis.
iii, q. 21 Utrum inter virtutes morales acquisitas sit ponere unam in voluntate
quae sit forma omnium earum, sicut inter virtutes infusas ponitur
una in voluntate, scilicet caritas, quae est forma omnium virtutum.
iv, q. 4 Utrum idem subiecto posset movere se ipsum.
iv, q. 29 Utrum habitus morales sint in voluntate vel in appetitu sensitivo.

133 See Ypma’s question list in his edition of qdp, qq. 1–10, Introduction (Rome, 1983), xix.
134 See the table in Ypma, “Recherches,” 258 and remarks in the introduction to the above
cited volume, xiii.
135 Ypma, “Recherches,” 273: “Il disputa les trois questions sur la volonté apres le ‘Quodlibet’ ii.
Elles faisaient sans doute partie d’un autre ensemble de questions.” See note 124 above.
James of Viterbo on the Will 305

• De divinis praedicamentis (questions on the will are unedited):

Manuscripts:
b = Bordeaux, Bibliothèque Municipale, ms 167, f. 1r–92r.
n = Napoli, Biblioteca Nazionale, ms VII.C.4, f. 1r–86r.
p = Padova, Biblioteca Universitaria, ms 2006, f. 1r–49v.
r = Roma, Biblioteca Angelica, ms 213, f. 1r–135v.
t = Toulouse, Bibliothèque Municipale, ms 56, f. 112r–198v.
y = Numbering according to Ypma’s list.

Title in qdp B N P R T Y

Utrum potentia volendi deest q. 24 q. 30 q. 30 q. 23 q. 30

dicatur tantum una res f. 63ra f. 46vb f. 126vb f. 170rb
absoluta.
Utrum ad actum q. 21 q. 25 q. 31 q. 31 q. 24 q. 31
volendi voluntatis f. 69va f. 66va f. 47ra f. 132rb f. 173va
principalius operetur
potentia ipsa quae
est voluntas quam
obiectum vel converso.
Utrum voluntas sit q. 22 q. 26 q. 32 q. 32 q. 25 q. 32
libera respectu f. 71ra f. 68ra f. 47ra f. 134rb f. 175ra
cuiuslibet sui actus.
 chapter 9

James of Viterbo’s Ethics

Thomas Osborne

9.1 Introduction

James of Viterbo’s ethical writings focus mostly on happiness and virtue. His
basic approach is Aristotelian. Although he is not a Thomist, he frequently
quotes or paraphrases Thomas Aquinas while arguing for his own positions,
especially in response to views defended by such figures as Giles of Rome, God-
frey of Fontaines, and Henry of Ghent. James departs from Aquinas by arguing
that all acquired virtue is based on an ordered love of self. James’s emphasis
on self-love is in turn supported by his own understanding of willing and hap-
piness, which involves a Neoplatonic account of the ratio boni as consisting in
unity. Consequently, many aspects of James’s Aristotelian moral thought are
ultimately based on an understanding of the good that has its roots in Neopla-
tonic authors.
In this chapter I will lay out the distinctive aspects of James’s moral theory
and show how they are related to those of his immediate predecessors and
contemporaries. I argue that James emphasizes three interconnected themes:
(1) a Neoplatonic understanding of unity as the basis for love; (2) a partly
Thomistic account of virtue; and (3) a unique account of the way in which
both justice and friendship are forms of the virtues. Accordingly, this c­ hapter
begins with a consideration of James’s understanding of how love is based on
unity, shedding light on his understanding of the distinction between infused
and acquired moral virtue. The focus on unity explains his position that the
root of all acquired virtue is self-love, whereas the root of infused virtue is char-
ity, which involves the unity with God that is established through grace. The
second section concentrates on James’s contributions to debates about these
virtues, and in particular his agreement with Aquinas that there are both ac-
quired and infused moral virtues, and that the acquired virtues are connected
through a prudence that is specifically and not generically one, and his rejec-
tion of Aquinas’s view that some moral virtues have as their subject not the will
but the sense appetites. The third and final section explains how, even though
James bases the acquired virtues on self-love, he gives a robust account of how
both acquired legal justice and acquired friendship are concerned with the
good of other persons, and are the forms of the acquired virtues.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���8 | doi 10.1163/9789004361881_011

James of Viterbo’s Ethics 307

9.2 Unity as the Basis for Love

Since the good is the object of the will, and for James its nature (ratio) is simili-
tude and unity, it follows that love, which is an act of the will, both follows on
unity and causes unity. Since James thinks that happiness consists primarily
in the will’s activity, he thinks that the human good consists in union with the
highest good through will and desire. But why does James connect unity with
goodness?
In the 13th century, it was common to connect love with unity or similitude.
But there were different accounts of the ratio of the good. James recites the
contemporary options in both of his major discussions of the ratio of the good,
namely, Quaestiones de divinis praedicamentis (=qdp), question 24, and Quod-
libet i, question 8.1 Although the details differ, in both accounts he rejects three
views on the ratio of the good, namely, that it primarily consists in perfection,
in being an end, or in being desirable. According to James, the good is prior
to and common to more things than perfection is, since perfection involves
merely the generation or production of a good. Similarly, the good is prior to
the notion of the end, since the end must first be good in order to be an end.
James gives superficially different accounts of the thesis that the good is desir-
able. In the qdp, James states that not every good is desirable, that goodness is
in things and not in the appetite, and that the relationship of the good object
to the power of desire is not itself the ratio of the good, but follows this ratio.
In Quodlibet i, question 8, James uses the notion of desirability to establish that
the ratio consists in unity.
In the discussion in Quodlibet i, James states that the ratio of desirability
is itself taken from fittingness and similitude.2 He quotes Boethius’s De heb-
domadibus to the effect that “every diversity is at variance, but similitude is to
be desired.”3 Both similarity and fittingness are connected with a connatural-
ity between that which desires and that which is desired. Consequently, the
ratio of the good and the ratio of the one are the same. James writes: “Just as
everything desires the good, so everything desires unity.”4 James supports this
reasoning with a nod to Boethius’s De consolatione philosophiae. He also cites

1 qdp, q. 24, (ed.) Eelcko Ypma, in Augustiniana 46 (1996): 339–69, 342–47, ll. 66–185; Quodl. i,
q. 8, 121–22, ll. 329–52. James’s four Quodlibeta have been edited by Eelcko Ypma (Würzburg,
1968–1975).
2 Quodl. i, q. 8, 122–23, ll. 352–79.
3 Quodl. i, q. 8, 122, ll. 349–53: “[O]mnis diversitas discors, similitudo vero appetenda est.” See
also qdp, q. 24, 349, ll. 239–41; Quodl. iii, q. 18, 245, ll. 65–68. The text quoted is Boethius, De
hebdomadibus, reg. 9, in De consolatione philosophiae et opuscula theologica, (ed.) Claudio
Moreschini (Munich and Leipzig, 2005), 188, ll. 44–46.
4 Quodl. i, q. 8, l. 359: “[S]icut omnia bonum appetunt, sic omnia appetunt unitatem.”
308 Osborne

the Neoplatonist Proclus and refers to Pseudo-Dionysius and Plato.5 Although

his sources seem to be primarily Platonic or Neoplatonic, James also mentions
Aristotle’s view that the ratio of the one is first of all the rationes that are found
in being.6 Although it is lengthier, James’s argument in the qdp is similarly
based on texts from Proclus, Boethius, and Pseudo-Dionysius.7 In both discus-
sions, he focuses on the connection between unity and preservation in exis-
tence. When the parts of a substance are dispersed, the substance itself ceases
to exist. Goodness is the same as unity.
James’s identification of unity and goodness provides the basis for the role
of love in his moral philosophy. Since the will tends to some object only on ac-
count of the object’s goodness, and goodness consists in unity, all love is based
on some unity.8 Moreover, love causes unity. James invokes Pseudo-Dionysius
in support of his position that love itself has unitive force.9 Giles of Rome, his
predecessor in the Augustinian chair at the University of Paris, had similarly
focused on the unitive power of love and related texts from Pseudo-Dionysius’s
De divinis nominibus, such as: “We say that love, whether divine, or angelic,
or intellectual, or animal, or natural, is a certain unitive power (virtus).”10 For

5 Quodl. i, q. 8, 122–23, ll. 357–79. Cf. Boethius, De consolatione philosophiae, lib. 3, c. 11,
(ed.) Moreschini, 86–96; Proclus, Elementatio theologica, translata a Guillelmo de Mor-
becca, prop. 13 et comm., (ed.) Helmut Boese (Leuven, 1987), 10, ll. 1–17; Pseudo-Dionysius,
De divinis nominibus, cc. 4–5. For James’s access to different sources, see Eelcko Ypma,
“Recherches sur la carrière scolaire et la bibliothèque de Jacques de Viterbe †1308,” Au-
gustiniana 24 (1974): 273–82. For the use of Pseudo-Dionysius in the 13th century, see
Édouard Jeauneau, “Denys l’Aréopagite, promoteur du néoplatonisme en Occident,” in
Néoplatonisme et philosophie médiévale, (ed.) Linos G. Benakis (Turnhout, 1997), 17–22;
Paul Rorem, Pseudo-Dionysius (Oxford, 1993), 219–24; Hyacinthe-François Dondaine, Le
corpus dionysien de l’Université de Paris au xiiie siècle (Rome, 1953).
6 Quodl. i, q. 8, 123, ll. 368–74. Aristotle, Metaphysics 4.2, 1003b23–34.
7 qdp, q. 24, 347–49, ll. 184–243.
8 Quodl. i, q. 8, 126, ll. 498–99; Quodl. iii, q. 18, 239, ll. 63–72.
9 Quodl. i, q. 8, 119, ll. 265–69.
10 Pseudo-Dionysius, De divinis nominibus, c. 4, n. 19, trans. Robert Grosseteste, (ed.) Philippe
Chevallier, in Dionysiaca: Receuil donnant l’ensemble des traductions latines des ouvrages
attribués au Denys de l’Aréopage, vol. 1 (Paris, 1937), 225: “Amorem sive divinum sive ange-
licum sive intellectualem sive animalem sive naturalem dicimus, unitativam quamdam
et concretivam intelligemus virtutem.” Quoted by Giles of Rome, Quodl. v, q. 5 (Louvain,
1646), 277: “Amorem sive divinum, sive Angelicum, sive intellectualem, sive animalem,
sive naturalem, unitivam quandam dicimus esse virtutum.” This question is reproduced
as Giles’s In iii Sent., d. 14, pars 1, q. 1, a. 3 (Rome, 1623), 497–99. See also Giles of Rome, De
laudibus divinae sapientiae, c. 15 (Rome, 1555), f. 31r–v (=In iii Sent., d. 31, pars 1, a. 1, 622–
24), and In I Sent., d. 10, pars 1, q. 2, corp. (Venice, 1521), f. 61vI–K. See Aquinas’s similar use
James of Viterbo’s Ethics 309

James this notion of unity takes center stage in explaining both the cause and
effect of love.
James emphasizes that the will tends naturally to the final end on account
of its desire for union with it.11 The will tends to the last end naturally and,
under the right conditions, necessarily. James states that if the last end is seen
clearly, then the will loves it by a necessity of immutability. But James denies
that this necessity takes away freedom. According to James, even though the
capacity to choose between objects is an indication of freedom, the very na-
ture of freedom consists only in the fact that there is not a necessity of com-
pulsion by which the will could be forced. Since the will is not forced by a
necessity of compulsion to will the ultimate end, it follows that it wills this end
necessarily and freely.
It is important that on a natural level not even God’s own good is loved for
God’s own sake but only on account of its union with the lover.12 Naturally
speaking, the will tends to God in much the same way in which everything
desires God, namely by a love of concupiscence, whereby the lover loves the
object for the lover’s own good. Such love tends to God insofar as the crea-
ture itself is the divine goodness by similitude.13 James thinks that in order
for an agent to regard the good of another as truly good, the other’s good
must be seen as somehow connatural to or suitable for the agent. James states
that it is impossible for something to naturally desire the good of another in
itself (secundum se) because it is impossible for the perfection of another in it-
self (secundum se) to be its own perfection. Desirability presupposes goodness,
and goodness is the same as unity.
The difference between natural and gratuitous love for God rests on the dif-
ference between the kinds of unity on which the different loves are based.14
Moral philosophy is about natural human powers and does not appeal to rev-
elation. It is ordered to God by the love of concupiscence. It is impossible for

of this same text from Pseudo-Dionysius in Summa theologiae (=st) ii-ii, q. 25, a. 4, corp.,
200. (Unless noted otherwise, all references to Aquinas’s texts are to the Leonine edition
of his works [Rome, 1882–]) For James’s reading of this text as aligning with Aristotle’s
Metaphysics, see Quodl. i, q. 8, 123, ll. 368–79; cf. Aristotle, Metaphysics 4.2, 1003b23–34.
11 Quodl. i, q. 7, 109–10, ll. 1008–54.
12 Quodl. ii, q. 20, 206, ll. 125–42. This question is translated in Arthur Stephen McGrade,
John Kilcullen, and Matthew Kempshall (eds.), The Cambridge Translations of Medieval
Philosophical Texts. Vol. 2: Ethics and Political Philosophy (Cambridge, 2001), 286–300.
13 See also qdp, q. 24, ad 12, 368, ll. 805–806; cf. Thomas Aquinas, st i, q. 6, a. 1, ad 2, 66b.
14 Quodl. ii, q. 20, 206–208, ll. 158–203; Quodl. iii, q. 1, 20–22, ll. 375–437. See Thomas M. Os-
borne, Jr., Love of Self and Love of God in Thirteenth-Century Ethics (Notre Dame, in, 2005),
164–65.
310 Osborne

anyone to love another more than oneself by such love, since such love is based
on the numerical identity that the lover has with the beloved. James thinks
that the pagan philosophers did discuss the duty to love God, but he is unclear
about what this love is and how it is affected by the priority of self-love in the
natural order. In his Quodlibet ii, question 20, he concedes, perhaps for the
sake of argument, that there is a natural obligation to love God more than one-
self, but then he states that this obligation cannot be fulfilled through natural
powers.
Godfrey of Fontaines had argued that we can love God more than ourselves
naturally because we can prove through natural reason that we ought to. Ac-
cording to Godfrey, “ought” implies “can.” James responds to Godfrey’s argu-
ment as follows:

Nature cannot do through its own principles everything that natural

r­eason dictates. For reason dictates and convinces us that God is the
greatest thing that can be known, and yet we do not naturally have the
greatest knowledge of God. So too all the precepts of the law are dictated
by natural law, yet humans cannot fulfill them without the grace of God.
In the same way, although natural reason dictates that God is most lov-
able above all things, it does not follow on this account that natural love
can love him above all things by the love of friendship.15

In this response to Godfrey, James concedes, at least for the sake of argument,
that natural reason dictates that God be loved more than oneself through the
love of friendship. This obligation is recognized through natural reason even
though it cannot be fulfilled through merely natural human abilities and natu-
ral habits.
In Quodlibet iii, question 1, James again states that the precept to love God
belongs to the natural law (ius naturalis), but indicates that this duty entails
merely a love of concupiscence for God.16 According to James, the naturally

15 Quodl. ii, q. 20, 211, ll. 301–308: “[N]on quicquid naturalis ratio dictat, natura potest per
sua principia. Dictat enim ratio et convincit Deum esse maximum cognoscibilem; nec
tamen naturaliter Deum maximum cognoscimus. Sic etiam omnia legis praecepta sunt
de dictamine legis naturalis; quae tamen homo sine gratia Dei implere non potest. Quare
similiter, licet ratio naturalis dictet Deum esse super omnia diligibilem, non propter
hoc sequitur quod naturalis dilectio in hoc possit ut eum super omnia diligat dilectione
amicitiae.” I have modified the Cambridge translation, 297. See also Bernhard Neumann,
Der Mensch und die himmlische Seligkeit nach der Lehre Gottfrieds von Fontaines (Limburg,
1958), 34.
16 Quodl. iii, q. 1, 20–21, ll. 375–404.
James of Viterbo’s Ethics 311

known precept to love God concerns God only as the principal part of ethics
and the end of other acts. Moreover, the precept demands such love only in-
sofar as it can be produced from natural principles or a merely acquired habit.
In addition, this love is the love of concupiscence, whereby we love God not
for his own sake, but as a means or an end for someone else’s sake, presumably
that of the agent. Such love is not the love of friendship, by which we could
love any end or means for God’s own sake. In this later discussion he seems to
say that the commanded natural love of God might not be a love of God over
self through the love of friendship, but a kind of love of concupiscence. On a
natural level, the agent directs ends and means to his own self.
James has a careful discussion of whether the precept to love God was
known by the philosophers. James notes that Aristotle seems to reject the very
possibility of friendship with God in the Magna Moralia, which James and his
contemporaries attributed to Aristotle. In this text Aristotle states that gods do
not love or care for men.17 However, James points out that the Magna Moralia
was written for a popular audience and consequently mentions only the pa-
gan idols. In contrast, Aristotle discusses something like friendship with God
in book 10 of the Nicomachean Ethics when he writes that the happy man is
most loved by the gods.18 This text suggests a reciprocal love, and consequently
friendship. James states that since the ultimate basis of all natural virtue and
love is self-love, even this friendship does not involve a love of God over self.
Bonnie Kent thinks that James’s emphasis on self-love reflects his Augus-
tinian theology, especially in a passage from Quodlibet iii, question 21, where
James states that “just as the unordered love of self, which is a vice, is said
to be the origin and principle of all vices, so the ordered love of self, which
pertains to friendship, is the principle and cause of all the virtues.”19 Accord-
ing to James, in the natural order self-love is the root of every action, whether
virtuous or vicious. The difference between virtue and vice lies in the kind of
self-love. Augustine’s influence might be in the background, but James thinks
that his account of natural self-love and virtue is the same as that of Aristo-
tle, who also distinguishes between a virtuous and a vicious self-love when

17 Quodl. iii, q. 1, 21, ll. 405–22. Aristotle, Magna Moralia 2.15, 1212b–13a10.
18 Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics 10.8, 1179a1–30.
19 Quodl. iii, q. 21, 258, ll. 196–98: “[S]icut amor sui inordinatus, quae est vitium, dicitur esse
origo et principium omnium vitiorum, sic amor sui ordinatus, qui ad amicitiam pertinet,
principium et causa est omnium virtutum.” Cf. Bonnie Kent, “Justice, Passion, and Anoth-
er’s Good,” in Nach der Verurteilung von 1277: Philosophie und Theologie an der Universität
von Paris im letzten Viertel des 13. Jahrhunderts; Studien und Texte, (eds.) Jan Aertsen et al.
(Berlin, 2001), 713.
312 Osborne

discussing the self-love of the virtuous citizen who sacrifices himself for the
community.20 It is this difference between kinds of self-love that is at stake,
not the difference between a love for self and a love for others. Moreover, in his
discussion of loving God in Quodlibet ii, question 20, James invokes Aristotle’s
understanding of friendship in the context of natural self-love: “With respect
to this love, what the Philosopher said is true, namely that the notes of friend-
ship which are for another, come from those notes of friendship which are
for oneself.”21 According to James, this dictum indicates that on a natural level
everyone loves himself more than others on account of the fact that he is more
one with himself than with others. He uses this dictum to explain his own the-
ory that unity is the ratio boni.22 James’s understanding of virtuous self-love is
explicitly Aristotelian even though he interprets Aristotle in his own fashion.
James’s approach to Aristotle is illustrated by his disagreement with Thomas
Aquinas, Giles of Rome, and Godfrey of Fontaines over the proper understand-
ing of Aristotelian self-love.23 Although Aristotle states that a virtuous person
truly loves himself, he is not clear whether such a person loves himself more
than the common good. Thomas and Godfrey think that such a person’s will-
ingness to sacrifice himself indicates that he loves the common good more
than himself. Along with Siger of Brabant, James thinks that the self-sacrificing
citizen really exposes himself to danger for the sake of his own good, namely
the good of virtue.24 This citizen loves the common good more than his own
body, but not more than himself. His apparent self-sacrifice is in fact an act of
love for what pertains to his own perfection. In support of his thesis that the

20 Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics 9.8.

21 Quodl. ii, q. 20, 208, ll. 197–99: “[Q]uantum ad hanc dilectionem, verum est quod ait
Philosophus, scilicet quod amicabilia quae sunt ad alterum, venerunt ex amicabilibus quae
sunt ad se ipsum.” For a somewhat similar connection of this dictum with Pseudo-Diony-
sius’s understanding of love and unity, see Thomas Aquinas, st ii-ii, q. 25, a. 4, corp., 200.
22 qdp, q. 24, 351, ll. 303–305.
23 Matthew S. Kempshall, The Common Good in Late Medieval Political Thought (Oxford,
1999), 214–18; Osborne, Love of Self and God, 153–65. My discussion includes much mate-
rial from my earlier “James of Viterbo’s Rejection of Giles of Rome’s Arguments for the
Natural Love of God over Self,” Augustinana 49 (1999): 235–49. For the importance and
influence of James’s view, see Thomas Jeschke, “Über natürliche und übernatürliche Got-
tesliebe: Durandus und einige Dominikaner gegen Jakob von Viterbo (mit einer Textedi-
tion von In iii Sententiarum, d. 29, q. 2, des Petrus de Palude),” Recherches de théologie et
philosophie médiévales 76 (2009): 111–98.
24 Quodl. ii, q. 20, 212–13, ll. 331–61. Cf. Siger of Brabant, Quaestiones morales, q. 5, in Siger
de Brabant: Écrits de logique, morale, et de la physique, (ed.) Bernardo Bazán (Louvain
and Paris, 1974), 103–105; for discussion see Fernand van Steenberghen, Maître Siger de
Brabant (Louvain and Paris, 1977), 388–89; Osborne, Love of Self and God, 114–17.
James of Viterbo’s Ethics 313

good man loves himself most of all, James quotes the discussion of virtuous
self-love from the Magna Moralia.25 James intends to be as thoroughly Aristo-
telian on this point as Aquinas, Giles, and Godfrey, but he interprets Aristotle
differently.
Although natural virtue is rooted in self-love, gratuitous virtue is rooted
in the love that stems from friendship and unity with God. Such friendship
­requires a shared life (communicatio) with God, which is strictly speaking im-
possible on a natural level.26 According to James, although the Platonists dis-
cussed the dealings of the soul with the gods in the future life, they did so in
an unsuitable manner. Only grace makes humans sons and friends of God, and
consequently capable of friendship with him. Whereas moral philosophy is
directed to God only through the love of concupiscence, theology (sacra scrip-
tura) is concerned with that love of friendship whereby we love God by both
loves. It is by the love of friendship that someone loves the divine good for
God’s sake. If we love God by such a love of friendship, we also love God by the
love of concupiscence, because we love God for our own sake and for others.
This love for God is based on a unity that we have with God through grace. This
union is achieved to some extent by grace and charity in this life, and through
the beatific vision in the next.
James mentions Bernard of Clairvaux’s distinction between the different
kinds of love.27 In his De diligendo Deo, Bernard discusses two kinds of love
whereby the self is loved primarily, namely the love of self for one’s own sake
and the love of God for oneself. James identifies these two loves with natu-
ral love. Bernard mentions two other kinds of love whereby God is primarily
loved, namely the love of God for God’s own sake, and the love of God and even
oneself for God’s sake. James identifies these latter kinds of love as belonging
to the order that is brought about by grace. James’s use of Aristotle and Ber-
nard shows how he incorporates what he thinks is Aristotle’s understanding
of self-love into a wider Christian account. The ultimate basis of the difference
between natural and gratuitous love is the difference between identity with
oneself and union with God through grace. It is important that the natural
love is not perverse even though by it one loves oneself most of all, and God
for the sake of oneself.28 The rightly ordered self-love is perfected and elevated
by charity.

25 Aristotle, Magna Moralia 2.14.

26 Quodl. iii, q. 1, 21–22, ll. 416–37. Cf. Quodl. ii, q. 20, 207–208, ll. 166–94.
27 Quodl. ii, q. 20, 208–209, ll. 210–28. Bernard of Clairvaux, De diligendo Deo, cc. 8–10,
nn. 23–27, (eds.) Jean Leclercq and H.M. Rochais, Opera Omnia 3 (Rome, 1963), 138–44.
For related scholarly interpretations, see Osborne, Love of Self and God, 29–31.
28 Quodl. ii, q. 20, 210–11, ll. 274–98.
314 Osborne

The last end of human beings, namely the vision of God, involves similitude
and unity. Someone who has that vision is transformed through love into God
himself. The end that is willed by the agent is not this beatific cognitive act
considered merely in itself, but this same cognitive act insofar as it is an as-
similation of the knower to God. James writes:

Therefore this vision itself has the nature of an end, as it is compared and
referred to God. ... And in this way the will tends to the vision of God just
as to an end, inasmuch namely as it is a similitude of God.29

The good of any creature consists in unity or union with what is fitting for it.
The health or well-being of a rational creature is that union with the highest
good which occurs through love.30
Unlike Aquinas, James argues that union with this highest good consists
principally in the activity of the will rather than that of the intellect. One dif-
ference between the intellect and the will is in part based on the way in which
the soul is conformed to an object through them.31 The soul is conformed to
an object through the intellect on account of the way in which the intellect
represents and manifests the object to it. In contrast, the will’s act is a love
that, as we have seen, has unitive force. The soul becomes conformed to an ob-
ject through the will on account of connaturality and suitability. Consequently,
this love unites the soul with the object that is loved. For instance, the soul
itself is rendered base not so much by thinking about base objects as by will-
ing the objects. The union through love transforms the soul into what it loves.
James does not deny that the intellect is necessary for such a union, but merely
that that union primarily consists in knowledge. An object cannot be willed
unless it is known, but the knowledge by itself does not unite the soul with the
object in the way that the will does. The intellect is prior with respect to the
act’s origin, but the will has greater perfection.
James’s understanding of the real if not conceptual identity of unity and
the good explains his understanding of love as both the result and the cause of
unity between the lover and the object of love. This unity explains how the soul
is directed towards an end to which it is already united if only by similitude,

29 Quodl. i, q. 8, 118, ll. 208–13: “Habet igitur ipsa visio rationem finis, ut comparatur et refer-
tur ad Deum, velut quaedam eius similitudo, secundum quem modum non est finis alius
et distinctus a Deo. … Et hoc modo tendit voluntas in visionem Dei sicut in finem, in
quantum scilicet est Dei similitudo.”
30 Quodl. iii, q. 1, 16, ll. 257–62.
31 Quodl. i, q. 8, 119–20, ll. 243–79.
James of Viterbo’s Ethics 315

and why it attains this end primarily through love rather than knowledge. Dif-
ferent kinds of love cause and direct different kinds of acts and even different
kinds of virtues. Disordered self-love is the root of vice. Well-ordered natural
love causes virtuous acts. A soul that loves God out of charity loves God on ac-
count of a similitude which has been made possible by grace. The loving itself
contributes to the union. This love for God also causes and directs acts of other
virtues to God. Before considering James’s understanding of how the different
kinds of love form the different kinds of virtue, it will be helpful to consider
what the different kinds of virtue are and how the virtue are related to each
other.

9.3 The Moral Virtues

Whereas James’s understanding of unity and love has its source not only in Ar-
istotle but also in Proclus, Boethius, and Pseudo-Dionysius, his understanding
of virtue is primarily Aristotelian and to some extent Thomistic. James follows
Thomas Aquinas by distinguishing between acquired and infused moral vir-
tues, and by arguing that ordinary moral virtues are united through a prudence
that is specifically one. In one text, however, James departs from the view of
Aquinas and his own predecessor Giles of Rome by stating that the virtues of
temperance and courage have the will as their subject.
Thomas Aquinas seems to have introduced the position that there are spe-
cifically distinct infused moral virtues for each acquired moral virtue.32 In-
fused virtues are caused by God whereas acquired virtues are brought about
through human acts. Along with his predecessors, Thomas thinks that the
three theological virtues of faith, hope, and charity are infused and have no
acquired counterparts. Aquinas’s originality lies in his thesis that the moral vir-
tues, including principally the cardinal virtues of temperance, courage, justice,
and even prudence, can be acquired or infused. For instance, someone who ha-
bitually drinks enough to sin mortally does not have the virtue of temperance;

32 For an overview of the Thomistic thesis and its reception, see Odon Lottin, “Les vertus
morales infuses pendant la seconde moitié du xiiie siècle,” in idem, Psychologie et morale
aux xiie et xiiie siècles, vol. 3.2 (Gembloux, 1949), 459–535. The most thorough treatment
of Aquinas is still Gabriel Bullet, Vertus morales infuses et vertus morales acquises selon
Saint Thomas d’Aquin (Fribourg, 1958). For historical context, see William C. Mattison,
“Thomas’s Categorizations of Virtue: Historical Background and Contemporary Signifi-
cance,” The Thomist 74 (2010): 189–229. For James’s general use of Aquinas’s writings, see
Ypma, “Recherches sur la carrière scolaire,” 272–73.
316 Osborne

he can gain the acquired virtue of temperance only by acting temperately. Nev-
ertheless, if he repents and goes to confession, he acquires the infused virtue
of charity as well as the infused moral virtues, including the infused virtue of
temperance. He can perform temperate acts in accordance with this infused
virtue even if he lacks the acquired one. Moreover, this infused virtue has a dif-
ferent mean and directs the act to a higher end. For instance, by the infused vir-
tue of temperance someone might fast and abstain more stringently in order
to perfect acts insofar as they are ordered to his supernatural end. If someone
has both the acquired and infused virtue, then the infused virtue directs the
corresponding act of the acquired virtue to this higher end.
Aquinas’s thesis that there are infused moral virtues came under sharp criti-
cism during the 1280s and 1290s. Both Henry of Ghent and Godfrey of Fon-
taines argue that such infused virtues are superfluous in someone who has
charity.33 James was among the few thinkers outside the Dominican order who
defended a view like that of Aquinas.34 James’s treatment of the difference be-
tween the two virtues is not as long or as complex as Aquinas’s. He gives three
arguments for the conclusion that the acquired and infused moral virtues dif-
fer specifically. First, he argues that they have distinct active principles, namely
human actions and God.35 Although Aquinas does not typically use this point
to argue for a specific difference, the thesis itself does comes from him.36 Sec-
ond, James states that the acquired and infused moral virtues have different
objects on account of their ends, and that their different ends account for the
different rules that determine their different rules of reason. This argument
resembles several that can be found in Aquinas in support of the same thesis.37
Third, James argues that the acquired virtues prepare for the infused virtues in
somewhat the same way that the human virtues are related to heroic virtues
in philosophy. Although the clear reference is to Aristotle, he also considers
that perhaps heroic virtue is the same as the virtues of the purged soul that are
described by Macrobius.38
It is helpful to consider James’s interlocutors on this discussion of heroic vir-
tue. In his general description of the relationship between human and heroic
virtue he writes: “One habit prepares for an act fitting to a superior nature; but

33 Lottin, “Les vertus morales infuses,” 487–510.

34 See Lottin, “Les vertus morales infuses,” 482–87.
35 Quodl. iii, q. 20, 249–51, ll. 55–101.
36 Thomas Aquinas, st i–ii, q. 63, a. 3, 409.
37 See Thomas Aquinas, De virtutibus in communi, a. 10, ad 9, in Quaestiones disputatae, vol.
2, (eds.) P. Bazzi et al. (Turin and Rome, 1965), 736; st i–ii, q. 63, a. 4, 410–11.
38 Quodl. ii, q. 20, 250–51, ll. 92–95. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics 7.1, 1145a19–33.
James of Viterbo’s Ethics 317

the other habit prepares for an act fitting to an inferior nature.”39 This passage
is almost exactly the same as a passage from the Summa theologiae in which
Aquinas indicates different ways in which habits can specifically differ.40
­According to Aquinas, such a relationship to a superior nature distinguishes
divine or heroic virtue from ordinary virtue. James interestingly takes this ar-
gument from Aquinas’s general account of the distinction between kinds of
virtues and places it more narrowly in the context of the distinction between
acquired and infused virtues.
In general, Aquinas does not clearly identify heroic virtue with infused
virtue or with Macrobius’s purged virtue. In his commentary on the Nicoma-
chean Ethics, Aquinas states that, for Aristotle, heroic or divine virtue is that
which is above the common mode of human virtue.41 In another text from the
Summa theologiae, he states that purged virtues belong only to the blessed in
heaven and to the most perfect here, and not to everyone who has charity.42
Therefore, according to Aquinas, infused virtue is possessed much more widely
than purged virtue or heroic virtue. Since James identifies infused virtue with
both purged virtue and heroic virtue, he clearly differs from Aquinas. His use of
the Summa theologiae illustrates how he sometimes does not follow Aquinas
exactly, even when he quotes or paraphrases him. He uses a text from Aquinas
to develop a more complete argument for Aquinas’s own thesis that the ac-
quired and infused virtues are distinct.
Another important aspect of James’s doctrine of infused virtue is his un-
derstanding of the adage that “grace perfects nature.” Godfrey of Fontaines
uses this adage to criticize James’s claim that by nature we love ourselves more
than anything else, including God. Godfrey thinks that for James the natural
and supernatural orders are opposed. On the other hand, James thinks that
although ordered self-love and the acquired virtues are specifically different
from charity and the infused virtues, they are at the same time suited for being
raised to a higher level by their infused counterparts. The two kinds of moral
virtue are compatible even though their difference is greater than a mere spe-
cific difference.43 The two orders are not opposed although they are ultimately

39 Quodl. iii, q. 20, 249, ll. 45–47: “Alio modo distinctio habituum secundum naturam con-
tingit ex eo quod unus habitus disponit ad actum convenientem naturae superiori; alius
autem habitus disponit ad actum convenientem naturae inferiori.”
40 Thomas Aquinas, st i–ii, q. 54, a. 3, corp., 343b: “Alio modo secundum naturam habitus
distinguuntur, ex eo quod habitus unus disponit ad actum convenientem naturae infe-
riori; alius autem habitus disponit ad actum convenientem naturae superiori.”
41 Thomas Aquinas, Sententia libri Ethicorum, lib. 7, lec. 1, 381–82, ll. 80–156.
42 Thomas Aquinas, st i–ii, q. 61, a. 5, corp., 398.
43 Quodl. iii, q. 20, ll. 103–11.
318 Osborne

rooted in different kinds of love. There is an opposition between charity and

the disordered self-love that is a foundation for vice, but not between charity
and a well-ordered self-love.
Similarly, James’s discussion of the connection between the virtues shows
a dependence on Aquinas along with an attempt to respond to difficulties
raised by his contemporaries. Aquinas had helped to shift the late 13th-century
discussion from the connection of the virtues away from a discussion of the
virtues as general conditions or formalities to an Aristotelian understanding
of the major moral virtues as specifically distinct habits which are connected
through the virtue of prudence.44 Moral virtue is necessary for having the right
end, and prudence is necessary for commanding the means to the end. Aqui-
nas distinguishes between an imperfect prudence that is concerned with the
good in only one area, and complete or perfect prudence, which considers the
matter of the different major moral virtues from the perspective of the good
life as a whole, and is specifically one.45
The late 13th-century debates on the connection of the virtues are intricate
and they involve many issues.46 It is sufficient here to note that Henry of Ghent
distinguishes four levels of virtue.47 The first two levels, involving either the
natural disposition to virtue or a developing virtue, are dispositions rather
than habits. The second two levels, namely perfect or complete virtue and
heroic virtue (virtue which exceeds the ordinary human level of virtue), are
habits and moral virtues in the proper sense. Henry thinks that perfect virtue
is capable of stages of virtue in its development towards heroic virtue, which
is the only kind of virtue which is necessarily connected through prudence.48

44 Thomas Aquinas, st i–ii, q. 65, a. 1, 418–19. For different texts, see Odon Lottin, “La con-
nexion des vertus morales chez Saint Thomas et ses prédécesseurs,” in idem, Psychologie
et morale, vol. 3.1 (Gembloux, 1949), 232–35 and 247–49.
45 st ii-ii, q. 47, a. 13, 361.
46 Odon Lottin, “La connexion des vertus morales acquises de saint Thomas d’Aquin à Jean
Duns Scot,” in idem, Psychologie et morale aux xiie et xiiie siècles, vol. 4.2 (Gembloux,
1954), 551–663; Rega Wood, Ockham on the Virtues (Indianapolis, 1996), 40–53.
47 Henry of Ghent, Quodl. v, q. 17, (ed.) J. Badius (Paris, 1518), ff. 189vC–191rN. See also Lot-
tin, “La connexion des vertus morales acquises,” 569–75; Wood, Ockham on the Virtues,
50–51; Tobias Hoffmann, “Walter Chatton on the Connection of the Virtues,” Quaestio 8
(2008): 58–63; Jean-Michel Counet, “Henri de Gand: La prudence dans ses rapports aux
vertus morales,” in Henry of Ghent and the Transformation of Scholastic Thought: Studies
in Memory of Jos Descorte, (eds.) Guy Guldentops and Carlos Steel (Leuven, 2003), 227–40;
Marialucrezia Leone, “Moral Philosophy in Henry of Ghent,” in A Companion to Henry of
Ghent, (ed.) Gordon Wilson (Leiden, 2011), 292–301.
48 On Henry on the connection through prudence of the perfect virtues and of the heroic
virtues, see Leone, “Moral Philosophy in Henry of Ghent,” 299; cf. Wood, Ockham on the
Virtues, 51.
James of Viterbo’s Ethics 319

Henry is concerned to distinguish between experiential prudence, which is the

prudence that accompanies and connects the moral virtues, and general pru-
dence, which is the basic moral knowledge that is originally required for moral
virtue’s growth. Henry’s position is distinctive in its attention to the develop-
ment of virtue. General prudence is possessed by every agent and necessary for
the original growth in virtue. Experiential prudence develops alongside virtue.
James distinguishes the virtues in a more straightforwardly Aristotelian way
by distinguishing between the general aptitude for virtue, an aptitude an indi-
vidual might have by nature, and the habit or act of virtue.49 The connection of
the virtues concerns only this latter kind of virtue. James adds to the discussion
by clearly distinguishing between two ways that such virtue can be imperfect:
it might be imperfect in a way that to some extent matches Henry’s second
level, namely that it would be only a disposition and thereby lack firmness; or
it might be a full habit, and yet be imperfect in that it lacks a feature of virtue.
This second imperfection might match more or less Henry’s third level. But the
distinction among these kinds of moral virtue helps James to address the claim
that only heroic virtues are necessarily connected through prudence.
According to James, prudence might be relevantly imperfect in both ways.50
First, it can be imperfect in that it is about only one kind of human action
and not a whole human life. Second, it can be imperfect because it is weak.
This latter imperfection in no way diminishes the fact that the moral virtues
are connected through a prudence that is specifically one. If any of the major
moral virtues or prudence is perfectly possessed, then all of the major moral
virtues and prudence are perfectly possessed. James is careful to note that this
connection does not obtain if prudence is imperfect in the first way. But such
prudence is not properly called “virtue.” Since the different areas of the moral
life are connected, someone cannot truly have the virtue of prudence concern-
ing one area, such as anger, and not concerning another area, such as bodily
pleasures. Nevertheless, a perfect prudence concerning the whole human life
can be imperfect in the sense that it might be a weak disposition. Although it
is weak, it connects moral virtues. Both prudence of this kind and the moral
virtues can be developed and made more perfect.
The contrast between Henry and James can in part be seen in James’s re-
sponse to the objection that prudence cannot depend on moral virtue because
prudence is necessary for the acquisition of moral virtue.51 James’s account
of the development of prudence alongside virtue is in some way similar to
that of Henry’s account, which may have been influenced by the Arts Faculty’s

49 Quodl. ii, q. 17, 174, ll. 17–27; 176, ll. 78–92. Cf. Thomas Aquinas, st i–ii, q. 51, aa. 1–2, 325–28.
50 Quodl. ii, q. 17, 185–87, ll. 380–417.
51 Quodl. ii, q. 17, 183–84, ll. 289–329.
320 Osborne

Aristotelianism.52 However, instead of adopting Henry’s distinction between

general and experiential prudence, he distinguishes between a right reason
that precedes prudence and the perfect possession of prudence. James follows
Aristotle in stating that prudence is not concerned with the universal end of
life, but with the attainment of particular ends. The first act that disposes one
to moral virtue is an act of the will that follows the first apprehension of a par-
ticular end. Each additional act is more perfect than the preceding, so that they
both develop together. James writes that “they are acquired at the same time
and perfected at the same time.”53
James’s distinction between the kinds of imperfect virtue allows him to give
a fuller account of how the moral virtues can be imperfect in that they can
grow, and yet be perfect in that they are connected with each other through
prudence. Although James is inspired by Aquinas’s understanding of the con-
nection of the virtues, he develops this account by considering how moral vir-
tue and prudence are developed. Ultimately, although James and Henry both
refer to Aristotle on this point, James’s account is more Aristotelian in that he
shows how there can even be growth among virtues that are already connected
through specifically one prudence.
Although James follows Aquinas in his understanding of the infused and
acquired moral virtues, as well as the connection of the acquired moral virtues
through prudence, he departs from Thomas on the subject of the virtues. Ac-
cording to Thomas, justice is in the will, which is the rational appetite.54 The
will in this case needs a habit because the virtue is concerned with another’s
good and not one’s own. But the virtues of temperance and courage are in the
sense appetites, since they moderate its passions.55 The will does not need a
habit if it has these virtues, since the good is its proper object. In willing the
good in these areas it finds no difficulty such as it finds when willing another’s
good. Henry of Ghent and many Franciscans reject Aquinas’s position that
some moral virtues are in the sense appetite and not in the will. They note that
the act of virtue, which is choice or a kind of love, is always an act of the will.56
Consequently, the habits corresponding to these acts also belong to the will,

52 For the immediate historical background, see Counet, “Henri de Gand: La prudence,”
234–36.
53 Quodl. ii, q. 17, 183, l. 310: “[S]imul acquiruntur et simul perficiuntur.”
54 Thomas Aquinas, st i–ii, q. 56, a. 6, 361–62. See also Bonnie Kent, Virtues of the Will: The
Transformation of Ethics in the Late Thirteenth Century (Washington, dc, 1995), 216–24.
55 st i–ii, q. 56, a. 4, 359–60.
56 Henry of Ghent, Quodl. iv, q. 22, (eds.) Gordon A. Wilson and Girard J. Etzkorn, Opera om-
nia 8 (Leuven, 2011), 349–74. Kent, Virtues of the Will, 224–36; Leone, “Moral Philosophy in
Henry of Ghent,” 286–91.
James of Viterbo’s Ethics 321

although there may be related habits in the sense appetite. In his probably
later Quodlibet xiii (1298) and his perhaps much earlier Quaestio disputata 3,
Godfrey of Fontaines reacts strongly to their position on the natural moral vir-
tues by arguing that all the moral virtues, even justice, are in the sense appe-
tite.57 The will does not need any habit in order to choose the suitable natural
good. The will needs only the habit of charity because it must be commanded
and informed by charity to perform supernatural acts.
James is hesitant to depart from Aquinas’s view in his first account of the
subject of the virtues, which is in a passing remark from Quodlibet iii, question
21, where he considers justice and friendship as forms of virtue. He states that
at least justice and friendship are in the will.58 He clearly departs from what
might be Godfrey’s account and appeals to Aquinas’s argument that the will
needs the habit of justice because justice is concerned with another’s good. He
seems inclined to Aquinas’s position although he does not endorse it.
In Quodlibet iv, question 19, James develops a seemingly original position.59
He argues that all of the moral virtues must be both in the will and in the sense
appetite, although they are in the first principally and in the second in a quali-
fied way (secundum quid). James explicitly mentions the relevant positions of
Henry and the Franciscans, Godfrey, and Thomas Aquinas before he gives his
own distinctive opinion. According to James, the need for both faculties to be
subjects can be shown by examples and by reason. He states that the case is
clear enough for virtues which are about the passions, such as courage and
temperance. Their principle must be the will, but they also need the coopera-
tion of the sense appetites. The other virtues are trickier. James points out that
all virtuous acts are about singulars. Just as particular knowledge is necessary
for operations, so also is a particular act of the will. But the will attains the
particular only through the cooperation of the sense appetites. Consequently,
such virtues must be not only in the will but also in the cooperating sense ap-
petites. James’s argument from reason is based on a similar understanding of

57 Godfrey of Fontaines, Quodl. xiv, q. 3, in Les Quodlibets onze–quatorze, (ed.) Jean Hoff-
mans, Les Philosophes Belges 5 (Louvain, 1932–1935), 340–46. Godfrey also addressed the
issue in his early Quodl. iii, q. 13 (1286), in Les quatres premiers Quodlibets de Godefroid
de Fontaines, (eds.) Maurice De Wulf and Augustin Pelzer, Les Philosophes Belges 2 (Lou-
vain, 1904), 225–26, but his response is not extant. For problems with his first four Quodli-
beta, see John F. Wippel, The Metaphysical Thought of Godfrey of Fontaines: A Study in Late
Thirteenth-Century Philosophy (Washington, dc, 1981), xxviii–xxix. His Quaestio disputata
3 can be found in Neumann, Der Mensch und die himmlische Seligkeit, 160–61. See also
Kent, Virtues of the Will, 236–37.
58 Quodl. iii, q. 21, 253, ll. 48–54; 254, ll. 75–76.
59 Quodl. iv, q. 19, 104–107.
322 Osborne

the need for the sense appetite for the acts of every moral virtue. Since such
acts require the cooperation of the sense appetite, it follows that habits are
needed in the sense appetite. Nevertheless, the virtues are primarily in the will,
which needs them because by nature the will is defectible and changeable.
James rejects Godfrey’s position that the will does not need habits for naturally
virtuous acts. James departs from Aquinas in two distinct ways. First, he states
that the will needs a habit even to will the agent’s own good easily and prompt-
ly, and that consequently virtues such as temperance and courage can exist in
the will; in contrast, Aquinas had denied that the will needs such virtues, since
the objects of these virtues do not extend beyond the agent’s own good, which
is the proper object of the will. Second, he argues that even a virtue such as
justice needs a habit in the sense appetite, since no human acts occur without
this appetite’s cooperation.
In developing his own account of the virtues, James clearly has in mind texts
of Aquinas, and shows respect for them even when he disagrees. Nevertheless,
he develops and even discards Aquinas’s views when he addresses problems
raised by his contemporaries. He seems not to follow a particular school or
group of predecessors when developing his own positions. Even though his
view on the subject of moral virtue is influenced by Henry of Ghent and the
Franciscans, his own position is distinctive.

9.4 Justice and Friendship

We have looked separately at James’s understanding of the connection be-

tween beatitude and unity, and his views on virtue. These two themes come
together in his discussion of legal justice, which he describes along with friend-
ship as a form of the virtues. Acquired friendship is based on that ordered self-
love which is the root of the acquired virtues. Charity is a kind of supernatural
friendship that is the root of the supernatural virtues. Justice in particular is
about another’s good, and legal justice orders the agent’s acts to the common
good. James is especially concerned with the way in which legal justice is af-
fected by the two related virtues of friendship and equity.
In Quodlibet iii, question 21, James provides his first account of legal jus-
tice in order to argue that both legal justice and friendship are forms of other
virtues. He follows Aristotle in making two divisions.60 First, justice is divided
into special justice and legal justice; second, justice as a special virtue, which

60 Quodl. iii, q. 21, 253, ll. 55–63. Cf. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics 5.1–2.
James of Viterbo’s Ethics 323

considers what is owed to another precisely as another, is divided into com-

mutative and distributive justice.
Legal justice is a general virtue which directs the acts of other virtues to-
wards the common good.61 It is called “general” because it has no matter of
its own; it is called “legal” because it is concerned with acts insofar as they are
ordered by law, which always directs towards the common good. Legal justice
is called general not only because of its common matter, but also because it
causes other acts. For instance, a temperate act might be considered as good for
the agent or as ordered to the common good of his political community. In the
first respect, the temperate act belongs only to the virtue of temperance, but
when considered in the second way, the act belongs both to temperance and to
legal justice. The temperate act is ordered to the common good by legal justice.
Before considering the connection between general justice and friendship,
it might be helpful to consider James’s understanding of the relationship be-
tween general justice and the law. Is general justice less general than it would
be if it did not also have to be “legal”? If general justice is about the acts of
other virtues only insofar as they are directed to the common good by law,
then it seems that it might direct only some acts of every virtue, and not every
morally virtuous act. Moreover, if the law under discussion is merely human
law, then since human law does not cover all virtuous acts it would seem that
general justice is similarly limited. In his later Quodlibet iv, question 28, James
discusses these issues in the context of Aristotle’s distinction between justice
and equity.62
Among other common opinions, James mentions the position that “the just
is said to be that which is posited in law; but the equitable is said to be that
which is just according to nature.”63 He notes that this distinction between the
equitable and the just is reflected in Isidore of Seville and the Gloss on Saint
Paul.64 If this distinction were correct, then it would be hard to see how gener-
al justice could be the form of the virtues. James sets out two important points
that clarify this issue. First, he states that human law is ultimately derived from
natural law. Second, he distinguishes between general justice widely speaking,

61 Quodl. iii, q. 21, 253–54, ll. 64–67. For more on the connection with law, see Quodl. iv,
q. 28, 102, ll. 54–57.
62 Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics 5.10.
63 Quodl. iv, q. 28, 101, ll. 32–34: “[I]ustum dicitur illud quod est in lege positum; aequum
autem dicitur illud quod est secundum naturam iustum.” Isidore’s Etymologiae belonged
to the poorly equipped library of the Augustinian studium. See Ypma, “Recherches sur la
carrière scolaire,” 273–74.
64 Quodl. iv, q. 28, 101, ll. 34–38.
324 Osborne

which includes equity and the intention of the lawgiver, and a narrower gen-
eral justice that is concerned only with the letter of the law.
Thomas Aquinas seems to influence James’s understanding of the way in
which legal justice is related to natural law. In Summa theologiae i–ii, question
95, article 2, Aquinas states that human law is derived from natural law either
as a conclusion or as a determination. An example of derivation through deter-
mination occurs when a human law against murder is derived from a precept
of natural law such as that one ought not to do evil to anyone. An example of
derivation as a conclusion is when a particular punishment is prescribed by
human law. Natural law demands that there be punishment, but it does not
specify what the punishment shall be. James uses these two kinds of deriva-
tion and even the example to explain the way in which legal justice involves
a law that is ultimately derived from natural law.65 As he did when discussing
infused virtue, he uses a text from Aquinas in a different context in order to
make his own point.
James’s discussion of the distinction between equity and general justice
closely resembles Aquinas’s discussion in Summa theologiae ii-ii, question 114.
In article 1 of this question, Aquinas states that law is concerned with singular
acts, which vary greatly. Consequently, law is concerned with what happens
for the most part. For example, the law commands that borrowed items ought
to be returned. Such a law covers most cases, but it should be disobeyed if
the borrowed item will be used by its owner to cause serious harm. In such a
case, following the law would be vicious. Equity is the virtue by which one sets
aside the letter of the law in such exceptional cases. It is concerned with the
intention rather than the letter of the law. James repeats Aquinas’s descrip-
tion of equity and the example of the borrowed item.66 He uses Aquinas in
order to address Isidore’s identification of equity with natural right. According
to James, the law is intended to conform to natural reason. Since equity leads
one to set aside the letter in favor of natural reason, it can be identified with
what is naturally right.
In article 2 of the same question, Aquinas argues that equity is a part of jus-
tice. The first objection in this article contains an argument that equity cannot
be part of legal justice because it is concerned with what is outside of the law.
In his response to this objection, Aquinas distinguishes between two senses of
legal justice. If “legal justice” means being concerned with both the letter and
the intention of the law, then equity belongs to legal justice. If “legal justice”
means the letter and not the intention of the law, then legal justice is separate

65 Quodl. iv, q. 28, 101, ll. 45–52.

66 Quodl. iv, q. 28, 102, ll. 58–67.
James of Viterbo’s Ethics 325

from equity. James substantially repeats these statements and uses them to ar-
gue that the opposition between nature and legal justice holds only if legal jus-
tice is understood in the narrow sense, as excluding the lawgiver’s intention.67
James’s discussion of legal justice and equity is important because it sheds
light both on his use of Aquinas and on his own understanding of legal justice.
First, as in his other discussions, James clearly has Aquinas’s text in mind. Here
he applies Aquinas’s distinction to some different objections and problems,
but the content is nearly the same. Second, legal justice in a broad sense in-
volves not only the letter of human law, but also natural law and in general the
intent of law, which is the common good.
In Quodlibet iii, question 21, James connects this broad understanding of
legal justice with the virtue of friendship. He follows Aristotle’s distinction
among friendships that are based on pleasure, on utility, and on the morally
worthy (honestum).68 This third kind of friendship is always accompanied by
virtue both in the lover and in the friend who is loved. There is mutual love be-
tween those who are alike in virtue. He seems to have in mind Aristotle’s state-
ment that friendship is a virtue or accompanies virtue (cum virtute).69 James
argues that such virtuous friendship is closely aligned with legal justice, since
both virtues are directed to others.
James’s understanding of friendship and general justice seems most ob-
viously influenced by Henry of Ghent. In Quodlibet x (1286), Henry argues
that friendship orders other virtues and is thereby similar to charity.70 His
­understanding of friendship might at first seem indebted to Christian thought,
but he quotes Cicero’s claim that “friendship is nothing other than an agree-
ment on all divine and human things with highest benevolence and charity
(caritate).”71 Henry connects friendship with both general justice and the Gold-
en Rule:

67 Quodl. iv, q. 28, 103, ll. 90–97.

68 Quodl. iii, q. 21, 254–55, ll. 97–112.
69 Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics 8.1, 1115a3.
70 Henry of Ghent, Quodl. x, q. 12, (ed.) Raymond Macken, Opera omnia 14 (Leuven, 1981),
274–85. See also Richard Egenter, Gottesfreundschaft: Die Lehre von der Gottesfreundschaft
in der Scholastik und Mystik des 12. und 13. Jahrhunderts (Augsburg, 1928), 109–121; Ray-
mond Macken, “Human Friendship in the Philosophy of Henry of Ghent,” Franziskanische
Studien 70 (1988): 176–84; James McEvoy, “The Sources and the Significance of Henry of
Ghent’s Disputed Question, ‘Is Friendship a Virtue?’,” in Henry of Ghent: Proceedings of the
International Colloquium on the Occasion of the 700th Anniversary of His Death (1293), (ed.)
Willy Vanhamel (Leuven, 1996), 120–38.
71 Cicero, De amicitia, c. 6, n. 20: “Amicitia nihil aliud quam omnium divinarum rerum
humanarumque summa cum benevolentia et caritate consensio.” Quoted in Henry of
326 Osborne

With respect to the exercise of the work of the other virtues, [friendship]
is a certain general and principal part of general justice, rendering to
each his due and fulfilling that precept of nature: “Whatever you wish to
be done to you, do this to others; whatever you do not wish to be done
to you, do not do to others.”72

For Henry, friendship is the natural moral virtue that is the closest to charity.
Although Thomas Aquinas thinks that charity involves friendship with God
and is the form of all the virtues, he seems not to think that friendship on a
natural level plays such a role. In his discussion of friendship in Summa theo-
logiae ii-ii, question 114, article 1, ad 2, he states that there is a general love of
every man for another, but that this love is not the virtue of friendship, which
is directed towards particular persons. Godfrey of Fontaines uses a similar ac-
count of friendship as directed to individuals in his argument against the posi-
tion of Henry and James that friendship is a general virtue.73
James holds that the virtues of legal justice and friendship are convertible,
although they differ in their aspects (rationes). At first glance it might seem as
if James is influenced more by Henry of Ghent than by Thomas Aquinas. How-
ever, in his description of the difference between the two virtues, James more
or less quotes Aquinas when he states:

Both taken in themselves are a virtue towards another, but under a dif-
ferent aspect (ratio). For justice is for another under the aspect of what
is legally due; but friendship is for another under the aspect of what is
due morally or by friendship, or more under the aspect of a free benefit.74

Ghent, Quodl. x, q. 12, 282, ll. 79–81. On the influence of Cicero, see McEvoy, “Sources and
Significance,” 123–26.
72 Henry of Ghent, Quodl. x, q. 12, 282, ll. 89–92: “[Q]uantum ad exercitium operis respectu
aliarum virtutum est virtus quaedam generalis et pars principalis iustitiae generalis, red-
dens unicuique quod suum est et implens illud naturae praeceptum: ‘Quod tibi vis fieri,
hoc feceris alii; quod tibi non vis fieri, ne feceris alii.’” Cf. Macken, “Human Friendship,”
182–84.
73 Godfrey, Quodl. xiv, qq. 1–4, (ed.) Hoffmans, 303–432. This particular set of questions is
unusually lengthy and well-organized. For discussions, see Egenter, Gottesfreundschaft,
121–32; Neumann, Der Mensch und die himmlische Seligkeit, 61–64; Kent, “Justice, Passion,
and Another’s Good,” 713–18; Kempshall, The Common Good, 220–32. Egenter mentions
only Godfrey’s criticism of Henry, and Kent only the criticism of James.
74 Quodl. iii, q. 21, 255, ll. 114–17: “[U]traque secundum se sumpta est virtus ad alterum, licet
sub diversa ratione. Iustitiam enim est ad alterum sub ratione debiti legalis; amicitia vero
est ad alterum sub ratione debiti amicalis vel moralis, aut magis sub ratione beneficii
James of Viterbo’s Ethics 327

The quoted passage is not from Aquinas’s discussion of friendship in the pre-
viously mentioned question 114 of Summa theologiae ii-ii, but from the ear-
ly question 23, article 3, also of Summa theologiae ii-ii. This earlier article is
about whether charity is a virtue. The first objection is that charity is not a
virtue because it is a kind of friendship, and friendship is not a virtue. Aquinas
replies that friendship “can be said” (potest dici) to be a virtue, though a few
lines later he says that it seems not to be a virtue but to be founded on human
virtue. His final response to the objection is that charity is a virtue because it is
a friendship founded on divine goodness, but acquired virtue is not. This text
is another instance of how James uses Aquinas’s text to argue for a point that
was not made by Aquinas. In this case, he takes what Aquinas considers to be
a possible response to an objection and makes it the cornerstone of his own
view that the moral virtues are informed by both legal justice and friendship.
According to James, a virtue is a form of another virtue insofar as it orders
and commands the other virtue to a higher end.75 He states that this order be-
tween virtues is the same as the ordering between arts that Aristotle discusses
in book 1 of the Nicomachean Ethics. The informing virtue is general by reason
of its causality. The most obvious example is charity, which informs the other
virtues by ordering their acts to a supernatural last end.
James states a common opinion that only prudence is the form of the vir-
tues, since it concerns the end of the whole human life and commands the
other virtues.76 Although Aquinas does not mention this position in the Sum-
ma theologiae, he defends it in many other texts, at least with respect to the
acquired moral virtues.77 He notes that without right reason caused through
prudence, the moral virtues would not be virtues. James concedes that right
reason is necessary for moral virtue, but he argues that the real mover of the

gratuiti.” Thomas Aquinas, st ii-ii, q. 23, a. 3, ad 1, 168a: “[Amicitia] est virtus moralis
circa operationes quae sunt ad alium, sub alia tamen ratione quam iustitia. Nam iustitia
est circa operationes quae sunt ad alium sub ratione debiti legalis: amicitia autem sub
ratione cuiusdam debiti amicabilis et moralis, vel magis sub ratione beneficii gratuiti.”
Cf. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics 8.13, 1162b21–22.
75 Quodl. iii, q. 21, 252, ll. 21–31. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics 1.1.
76 Quodl. iii, q. 21, 255–56, ll. 124–31.
77 Thomas Aquinas, Scriptum super Sent., lib. 3, d. 27, q. 2, a. 4, qc. 3 sol., (ed.) Marie-Fabien
Moos (Paris, 1933), 889–90; Quaestiones de veritate, q. 14, a. 5, ad 11, 454a, ll. 262–76; ibid.,
q. 27, a. 5, ad 5, 811a, ll. 272–94; De caritate, a. 3, ad 13, in Quaestiones disputatae, vol. 2,
(eds.) P. Bazzi et al. (Turin and Rome, 1965), 762; cf. Kent, “Justice, Passion, and Another’s
Good,” 708. See also Godfrey of Fontaines, Quaestio disputata 4, in Lottin, Psychologie et
morale, vol. 4.2, 595, ll. 209–16; cf. Neumann, Der Mensch und die himmlische Seligkeit, 90.
328 Osborne

other virtues is not prudence itself, which is in the intellect, but the will.78 Since
prudence belongs to the intellect and not the will, it cannot strictly speaking
be a form of the virtues. Prudence directs the will but it does not incline it as a
moving cause. Prudence is a form of the virtues only in a restricted sense (se-
cundum quid). James here contradicts those texts in which Aquinas argues that
prudence is the form of the acquired moral virtues. Part of the difference might
result from Aquinas’s understanding of prudence as fully practical. Its proper
act, namely command (praeceptum), always involves action. Consequently,
even though prudence belongs to the intellect, it truly commands and orders
other acts. James does not address this issue fully, and he may disagree.
James defends the view that legal justice is a form of the moral virtues since
it directs the other moral virtues to the common good, which is their end.79
Since a virtue that orders another to its end is the form of another virtue, it fol-
lows that legal justice is the form of the other virtues. He claims that its formal
role explains why Aristotle describes it as the most magnificent (praeclaris-
sima) virtue. Aquinas similarly understood Aristotle in this text as indicating
that legal justice is superior to the other virtues because it orders them to the
common good.80 He even states that legal justice, as a special virtue, orders the
acts of all virtues to the common good in a way similar to that by which charity
orders virtuous acts to the divine good.81 Nevertheless, although both Aquinas
and James agree that legal justice orders the other virtues, only James describes
it as a form of the virtues. In general, Aquinas reserves the use of the term
“form of the virtues” to prudence and charity, and in the Summa theologiae he
mentions only one such form, namely charity. Nevertheless, he thinks that a
virtue or act that commands another is formal in relation to the commanded
act. For instance, when discussing charity as form in the Summa theologiae, he
states precisely that for a virtue to inform an act of another virtue is for it to
order that act to its end.82 The difference between Aquinas and James may be
less stark than might appear from their verbal differences.
Since James thinks that justice is a form of the other virtues, and he holds
that legal justice and friendship always accompany each other although
they differ in certain respects, he concludes that friendship is also a form of
the moral virtues.83 Whereas legal justice directs acts to the common good,

78 Quodl. iii, q. 21, 256, ll. 132–61.

79 Quodl. iii, q. 21, 257, ll. 164–67.
80 st ii-ii, q. 58, a. 12, corp., 19.
81 st ii-ii, q. 58, a. 6, corp., 13–14.
82 st ii-ii, q. 24, a. 4, corp., 177.
83 Quodl. iii, q. 21, 257, ll. 177–85.
James of Viterbo’s Ethics 329

friendship directs acts to that happiness which is the goal of all the virtues.
Since friendship directs these acts more liberally and pleasurably than justice
does, it is more virtuous than justice. Friendship moves these other virtuous
acts insofar as they are themselves virtuous. Because friendship itself is more
virtuous than legal justice, it is more a mover of other virtuous acts than legal
justice is. Consequently, friendship is more principally the form of the virtues
than legal justice is. James writes:

Whence, just as infused friendship, which is called charity, is the form of

the other gratuitous virtues, so friendship, which is an acquired virtue, is
the form of all the acquired moral virtues: since just as through charity
someone loves himself and others with respect to the good of supernatu-
ral beatitude, so through acquired friendship someone loves himself and
the other with respect to the good of natural beatitude.84

James thinks that the role of friendship as form of the virtues explains why
Aristotle discusses friendship so carefully after he discusses the other moral
virtues. James combines what he regards as an Aristotelian understanding of
acquired friendship as a form of the moral virtues with a Christian understand-
ing of supernatural friendship as the form of the infused virtues.
How is legal justice related to charity?85 James distinguishes between ac-
quired and infused legal justice. In the same way that acquired friendship is
related to charity, so is acquired legal justice to infused legal justice. Acquired
legal justice directs acts of other acquired virtues to the natural common good
as indicated by law. Infused legal justice directs acts of other infused virtues
to the supernatural common good, which is the goal of divinely inspired law.
Infused legal justice differs from charity in the same way that acquired legal
justice differs from acquired friendship: in both cases justice lacks a certain
liberality.
James’s understanding of friendship and justice sets him apart from his
contemporaries and predecessors. Although his overall view of friendship as
a general virtue and close to charity is close to that of Henry of Ghent, he him-
self thinks that it is Aristotelian. He uses Aquinas’s own description of general

84 Quodl. iii, q. 21, 257, ll. 187–91: “Unde sicut amicitia infusa, quae caritas dicitur, est forma
omnium virtutum gratuitarum, sic amicitia, quae est virtus acquisita, est forma omnium
virtutum moralium acquisitarum; quia sicut per caritatem quis diligit se et alium quan-
tum ad bonum beatitudinis supernaturalis, sic per amicitiam acquisitam diligit quis se et
alium ad bonum beatitudinis naturalis.”
85 Quodl. iii, q. 21, 258, ll. 199–210.
330 Osborne

justice and friendship to argue for a position that Aquinas himself does not
consider, namely that they are forms of the other virtues. Godfrey of Fon-
taines will later attack both Henry and James for holding this position, which
he thinks conflicts with Aristotle’s understanding of friendship. But James de-
scribes himself as following Aristotle. The debate between Godfrey and James
is not about whether to accept Aristotle’s account of friendship and justice, but
about what this account is.

9.5 Conclusion

James’s ethics contains a moral philosophy and a moral theology which are
sharply demarcated. Both involve virtues that are informed by love. The differ-
ence between the kinds of virtues and loves is based on different kinds of unity,
which James regards as in some sense identical to goodness. On the natural
level, James thinks that virtue has its roots in a rightly ordered self-love, which
is based on the identity that one has with oneself. He explains this account of
self-love in part by invoking Aristotle’s discussion of friendship. His description
of these virtues and their connection is largely Aristotelian. His understand-
ing of the gratuitous virtues is indebted to previous Christian thinkers such as
Bernard of Clairvaux and Thomas Aquinas. Underlying both kinds of love is
an understanding of goodness as somehow consisting in unity. James’s under-
standing of goodness seems to be based on Neoplatonic sources.
James’s use of Thomas Aquinas provides insight into the reception of Aqui-
nas in the late 13th century. James frequently paraphrases or quotes Aquinas,
and always does so respectfully. He sometimes agrees with Aquinas, but he
also often uses Aquinas’s text to develop a new argument for Aquinas’s own
position, or even to argue for a thesis that does not belong to Aquinas. Never-
theless, on the level of moral philosophy, James is not so much Thomistic as
his own kind of Aristotelian. On the crucial issue of natural self-love, James
sides with his own interpretation of Aristotle against that of Thomas Aquinas
and Godfrey of Fontaines. If we keep in mind the Neoplatonic metaphysics of
unity in the background of his discussion of both natural love and charity, it
is clear that James’s moral thought is an original synthesis of widely disparate
elements.
 chapter 10

De regimine Christiano and the Franco-Papal

Crisis of 1296–1303

R.W. Dyson

10.1 Introduction

De regimine Christiano is James of Viterbo’s only venture into the field of po-
litical controversy. In the title of his edition of 1926, Henri-Xavier Arquillière
describes the work as “le plus ancien traité de l’église.”1 Walter Ullmann, pre-
sumably following Arquillière, calls it “the first systematic exposition of the
concept of the Church.”2 But these phrases convey nothing of the significance
of De regimine Christiano as a contribution to the political literature of the
“high” Middle Ages. The treatise—especially its first part—may have some in-
cidental interest as an essay in ecclesiology, but it is in connection with the ide-
ology of the papacy at the turn of the 13th and 14th centuries that its primary
importance to the historian lies. In order to understand it, we must give some
attention to the context in which it was produced.

10.2 Background

The years 1296 to 1303 are distinguished by two major episodes of controversy
between Pope Boniface viii and King Philip iv of France. These episodes are
well documented,3 but in view of their significance for the final ebullition of
papalist political doctrine it will be appropriate to summarize them here.

1 Henri-Xavier Arquillière, Le plus ancien traité de l’église: Jacques de Viterbe, De regimine Chris-
tiano (1301–1302) (Paris, 1926); a more recent edition is R.W. Dyson (ed.), James of Viterbo, De
regimine Christiano: A Critical Edition and Translation (Leiden, 2009).
2 Walter Ullmann, Medieval Foundations of Renaissance Humanism (Ithaca, ny, 1977), 144.
3 The major source of documents is Pierre Dupuy, Histoire du différend d’entre le Pape Boniface
VIIIe et Philippes le Bel, Roy de France (Paris, 1655). Some of the following are rather old, but
useful nonetheless: T.S.R. Boase, Boniface viii (London, 1933); Georges Digard, Philippe le Bel
et le Saint-Siège de 1285 à 1304, 2 vols. (Paris, 1936); Heinrich Finke, Aus den Tagen Bonifaz viii:
Funde und Forschungen (Münster, 1902; repr. Rome, 1964); Franklin J. Pegues, The Lawyers of
the Last Capetians (Princeton, 1962); Jean Rivière, Le problème de l’église et de l’état au temps

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���8 | doi 10.1163/9789004361881_012

332 Dyson

By 1296, Philip had been at war with Edward i of England for the better part
of two years. Among other expedients, he sought to defray the expenses of war-
fare by imposing extraordinary—non-feudal—taxes on the French clergy. In
doing this he was, strictly speaking, in breach of canon 46 of the Fourth Lateran
Council of 1215, which required compulsory levies on ecclesiastical resources
to be preceded by consultation with the pope;4 but throughout the 13th cen-
tury popes had in practice been prepared to forgo such consultation, especially
in the case of taxes intended to finance a crusade against the church’s enemies.
In this instance, however, the taxes were not only onerous but were being lev-
ied for purposes of purely secular warfare. The French Cistercians and others
sent a letter of petition to Rome.
On 24 February 1296 Boniface responded with the bull Clericis laicos.5 Hav-
ing begun with a trenchant assertion that the laity have no jurisdiction whatso-
ever over the persons or goods of ecclesiastics, he went on to forbid the clergy
to pay, and lay officials to collect, taxes levied on clerical property without pa-
pal authorization. The penalty of excommunication incurred by anyone disre-
garding this injunction was not to be lifted, save by special papal dispensation,
until the moment of death, “for it is our intention that so terrible an abuse of
secular power shall not be carried on under any pretext whatsoever.”6
Clericis laicos exemplifies the imprudence that Boniface viii was to display
throughout his disputes with France. No doubt the situation could have been
soothed by suitable diplomatic means; impatient of negotiation, however,
the pope bluntly instructed the clergy and laity of France to disregard a royal

de Philippe le Bel: Étude de théologie positive (Louvain, 1926); Richard Scholz, Die Publizistik
zur Zeit Philipps des Schönen und Bonifaz’ viii: Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte der politischen An-
schauungen des Mittelalters (Stuttgart, 1903); Joseph R. Strayer, “Defence of the Realm and
Royal Power in France,” in Studi in onore di Gino Luzzatto, (eds.) Corrado Barbagallo et al.,
(Milan, 1949), vol. 1, 289–96; idem, The Reign of Philip the Fair (Princeton, 1980); Charles T.
Wood (ed.), Philip the Fair and Boniface viii: State vs. Papacy (New York, 1967). For more re-
cent work see Agostino Paravicini Bagliani, Boniface viii: Un pape hérétique? (Paris, 2003);
Keith Sisson, Papal Hierocratic Theory in the High Middle Ages: From Roman Primacy to Uni-
versal Papal Monarchy (Saarbrücken, 2009).
4 J.D. Mansi, Sacrorum Conciliorum nova et amplissima collectio, vol. 22 (Venice, 1778; repr. Graz,
1960), 1030–31: “Propter imprudentiam … quorumdam Romanum prius consulant pontifi-
cem, cuius interest communibus utilitatibus providere.” See also Henry Joseph Schroeder,
Disciplinary Decrees of the General Councils: Text, Translation and Commentary (St. Louis,
1937), 236–96.
5 Les registres de Boniface viii: Recueil des bulles de ce pape (=Reg.), (eds.) Georges Digard et al.,
4 vols. (Paris, 1904–1939), n. 1567, vol. 1, cols. 584–85.
6 Ibid., col. 585: “… cum nostre intentionis exsistat, tam horrendum saecularium potestatum
abusum nullatenus sub dissimulatione transire.”
De regimine Christiano and the Franco-papal Crisis of 1296–1303 333

command. He chose moreover to assert his own right to correct the “terrible
abuse of secular power” that he deemed that command to constitute. Clericis
laicos could be taken only as a denial that the king of France is sovereign in his
own realm.
The French response was delivered to the papal legates on 20 April 1297:

Control over the temporalities of his kingdom belongs to the king alone
and to no one else. He neither recognizes nor has anyone as his superior
in it, and in things pertaining to the temporal rule of the kingdom he does
not intend to subordinate or subject himself in any way whatsoever to
any living man.7

There were kings before there were clerics, retorted a French pamphleteer
in a spirited reply to Clericis laicos known as Antequam essent clerici.8 Kings
have always been entitled to make whatever laws they think necessary for the
welfare of their kingdoms without having to seek the approval of any external
authority. Since the clergy are not allowed to fight on their own behalf, why
should they not pay those who risk their lives to fight for them? They are happy
enough to spend money on actors and mistresses; let them contribute to the
defence of the realm. Antequam essent clerici purports to have been written
by the king himself, though it is more likely to have come from the hand of his
chief minister, Pierre de Flotte.
Philip’s most telling response to Clericis laicos was an embargo on the ex-
port from the kingdom of “horses, arms, money, and similar things.” This em-
bargo was imposed in August 1296, ostensibly “lest those things should chance
to come into the hands of his enemies through the deceit of wicked men, to
the prejudice of the lord king and his kingdom.”9 But it also had the effect of

7 Dupuy, Histoire du différend, preuves, 28: “[R]egimen temporalitatis regni sui ad ipsum regem
solum et neminem alium pertinere, seque in eo neminem superiorem recognoscere, nec ha-
bere, nec se intendere supponere vel subiicere modo quocunque viuenti alicui, super rebus
pertinentibus ad temporale regimen regni.”
8 For this and other short works produced in support of Philip the Fair, see R.W. Dyson (ed.),
Three Royalist Tracts, 1296–1302 (Bristol, 1999); idem, Quaestio de potestate papae (Rex paci-
ficus): An Enquiry into the Power of the Pope (Lewiston, ny, 1999). The much longer treatise
of John of Paris (Jean Quidort) called De potestate regia et papali has been edited by Jean
Leclercq, Jean de Paris et l’ecclésiologie du XIIIe siècle (Paris, 1942) and Fritz Bleienstein, Über
königliche und päpstliche Gewalt (De regia potestate et papali) (Stuttgart, 1969). See also Chris
Jones, Eclipse of Empire? Perceptions of the Western Empire and Its Rulers in Late-Medieval
France (Turnhout, 2007).
9 Dupuy, Histoire du différend, preuves, 13: “[D]ominus rex qui nunc est equos, arma, pecunias
et similia generali edicto prohibuit extrahi de regno suo, ne forsitan talia per malignorum
334 Dyson

depriving Boniface of the revenues of the church in France, revenues so great

that their withdrawal threatened the collapse of the Italian banking system.
Also, on 2 May 1297, Boniface embarked on a protracted and expensive quar-
rel with the Colonna family. His attention was at the same time distracted by
war in Sicily (the Sicilian Vespers), the war between Venice and Genoa that
had begun in 1294, and civil strife in Florence between the Bianchi and Neri
factions. These pressures forced a capitulation, and on 7 February 1297 Clericos
laicos was suspended by the bull Romana mater ecclesia,10 followed in July by
the bull Etsi de statu, in which the provisions of Clericis laicos were revoked
insofar as they related to France.11 For good measure, on 11 August Boniface
canonized Philip’s grandfather, Louis ix. But the peace was to be short-lived.
The pope’s spirits and fortunes were revived by the enormous sums collect-
ed during the Jubilee year of 1300—Guglielmo Ventura famously records the
spectacle of two clerics at the altar of St Paul gathering the coins of the faithful
with rakes12—and when, in the following year, there occurred a further infrac-
tion of ecclesiastical liberties in France, he returned to the fray with renewed
enthusiasm.
On 12 July 1301, Bernard de Saisset, bishop of Pamiers and a partisan of
the pope, was arrested on charges—some of them plausible, others plainly
­spurious—of treason, blasphemy, and heresy. He was detained for some three
months, tried in the presence of the king on 24 October, deprived of his see,
and imprisoned. Philip then sent an account of the proceedings to Boniface,
seeking the pope’s retrospective approval.13 In so acting, the king was disre-
garding the canonical principle, established in the Dictatus papae of Gregory
vii, that a delinquent bishop should be tried only by the pope. So blatant was
this disregard that one is inclined to suspect that the trial of de Saisset was a
deliberate act of provocation intended to bring about a further contest with
Rome: a contest that might free France finally from papal interference.
If this incident was intended as bait, Boniface rose to it with what, to his
French adversaries, must have been gratifying readiness. He again threatened

fraudulentiam ad manus inimicorum in domini regis et regni praeiudicium devenirent.”

Cf. Dyson, Three Royalist Tracts, 2; Ordonnances des Rois de France de la troisième race,
vol. 11, (eds.) Louis-Guillaume de Vilevault and Louis George Oudard Feudrix de Bréquig-
ny (Paris, 1769), 386–87.
10 Reg., n. 2312, vol. 1, col. 908.
11 Reg., n. 2354, vol. 1, cols. 941–43.
12 Guglielmo Ventura, Chronicon Astense, (ed.) L.A. Muratori, Rerum Italicarum Scriptores 11
(Milan, 1727), col. 192.
13 See Jean-Marie Vidal, Histoire des évêques de Pamiers, vol. 1: Bernard Saisset (1232−1311)
(Pamiers, 1926).
De regimine Christiano and the Franco-papal Crisis of 1296–1303 335

the king with excommunication, demanded the release of the bishop, and
retracted the concessions made in Etsi de statu and related documents.14 On
5 December 1301, he issued the bull Ausculta fili, setting out, in a lofty manner
certain to offend, a long list of grievances as to Philip’s treatment of the church
in France,15 accompanied by another reminder that God has placed the pope
above kings and kingdoms. Anyone who thinks otherwise “is a fool; and if he
obstinately affirms it, is convicted as an unbeliever, nor is he within the fold of
the Good Shepherd.”16
Ausculta fili damaged Boniface’s standing in France still further. By means
not distinguished by scrupulousness, Pierre de Flotte was able to turn the
French clergy against the pope. A forgery, or at any rate a substantially mis-
leading paraphrase of Ausculta fili, called Deum time was put about.17 The clear
purpose of this document was to convince the people of France that the pope
had insulted their king and to persuade the clergy that the benefices that they
held of the king were in jeopardy.29 An equally insulting reply, Sciat tua max-
ima fatuitas, was circulated in France, though probably never actually sent to
Rome.18
In February 1302, Philip summoned the nobles and clergy of France to ad-
vise him, at the first convocation of what was to become known as the états
généraux.19 The assembly was addressed by de Flotte. His chief complaint, evi-
dently made on the strength of the spurious Deum time, was that Boniface had

14 See Salvator mundi, 4 December 1301, Reg., n. 4422, vol. 3, cols. 325–27; Secundum divina,
5 December 1301, Reg., n. 4432, vol. 3, cols. 339–40.
15 Reg., n. 4424, vol. 3, cols. 328–35.
16 Ibid., col. 329: “… nam desipit qui sic sapit, et pertinaciter hoc affirmans convincitur infi-
delis, nec est intra boni pastoris ovile.”
17 Dupuy, Histoire du différend, preuves, 44: “Bonifacius Episcopus servus servorum Dei,
Philippo Francorum Regi. Deum time, et mandata eius observa. Scire te volumus, quod in
spiritualibus et temporalibus nobis subes. Beneficiorum et praebendarum ad te collatio
nulla spectat: et si aliquorum vacantium custodiam habeas, fructus eorum successoribus
reserves: et si quae contulisti, collationem huiusmodi irritam decernimus; et quantum de
facto processerit, revocamus. Aliud autem credentes haereticos reputamus.”
18 Ibid.: “Philippus Dei gratia Francorum Rex, Bonifacio se gerenti pro Summo Pontifice,
salutem modicam, seu nullam. Sciat tua maxima fatuitas in temporalibus nos alicui non
subesse. Ecclesiarum ac praebendarum vacantium collationem ad nos iure regio perti-
nere, fructus earum nostros facere: collationes a nobis factas, et faciendas fore validas
in praeteritum et futurum, et earum possessores contra omnes viriliter nos tueri: secus
autem credentes, fatuos et dementes reputamus.”
19 Georges Picot (ed.), Documents relatifs aux États généraux et Assemblées réunis sous
Philippe le Bel (Paris, 1901), 1–2. See also Sophia Menache, “A Propaganda Campaign in the
Reign of Philip the Fair, 1302–1303,” French History 4 (1990): 427–54.
336 Dyson

claimed to be lord of France temporaliter, and had in effect, asserted that the
French kingdom was held of him as a papal fief. The nobles and clergy of France
dispatched reproachful letters to the pope.20 Boniface sought to clarify his po-
sition, first in writing and then at a consistory held in Rome in the summer of
1302, where he and Cardinal Matthew of Acquasparta addressed an audience
of French emissaries. On this occasion, having angrily protested that Ausculta
fili had been falsified by de Flotte, the pope clearly affirmed his commitment
to the Augustinian/Gelasian principle of duality.21 He did so, however, in terms
scarcely likely to appease royalist sentiment:

We have been learned in the law for forty years, and we know that there
are two powers ordained of God. Who, therefore, should or can believe
that anything so foolish or stupid [as the contrary] is or has been in our
head? We declare that we do not wish to usurp the jurisdiction of the king
in any way. … [But] the king cannot deny that, like all the faithful, he is
subject to us by reason of sin. … Our predecessors deposed three kings
of France; they have it in their chronicles and we in ours, and one case
is found in the Decretum.22 And although we are not worthy to walk in
the footsteps of our predecessors, if the king committed the crimes that
those committed, and greater ones, we should, albeit with grief and great
sadness, dismiss the king like a servant.23

Simultaneously with the promulgation of Ausculta fili, the pope summoned

the bishops and abbots of France to a council to be held in Rome in November
1302. Philip, informed of the proposed council in Ausculta fili, was invited to

20 Picot (ed.), Documents relatifs aux États généraux, 5–18.

21 See R.W. Dyson, Normative Theories of Society and Government in Five Medieval Thinkers
(Lewiston, ny, 2003).
22 Gratian, Decretum, pars 2, causa 15, q. 6, canon 3: Alius item, (ed.) Emil Friedberg in Corpus
iuris canonici, vol. 1 (Leipzig, 1879; repr. Graz, 1955), col. 756. This text refers to the dis-
missal by Pope Zachary of Childeric iii in 762, the standard example of papal deposition.
It is not clear to what other cases the pope is referring.
23 Dupuy, Histoire du différend, preuves, 77–79: “Quadraginta anni sunt quod nos sumus
­experti in jure, et scimus quod duae sunt potestates ordinatae a Deo. Quis ergo debet cre-
dere, vel potest, quod tanta fatuitas, tanta insipientia sit vel fuerit in capite nostro? Dici-
mus quod in nullo volumus usurpare jurisdictionem regis. … Non potest negare Rex seu
quicunque alter fidelis, quin sit nobis subiectus ratione peccati. … Praedecessores nostri
deposuerunt tres Reges Franciae, et ipsi hoc habent in chronicis suis, et nos in nostris, et
de uno habetur in decretis; et licet nos non valeremus pedes nostrorum praedecessorum,
tamen cum Rex commisit omnia [crimina?] quae illi commiserunt et maiora, nos depon-
eremus Regem ita sicut unum garcionem, licet cum dolore et tristitia magna.”
De regimine Christiano and the Franco-papal Crisis of 1296–1303 337

send representatives, but it was clear that it would go ahead whether he did
or not. Told in plain terms that that the council would consider not only mea-
sures for strengthening the French church but also ways of securing the good
government of his kingdom, Philip unsurprisingly forbade the French clergy to
attend. More than half of those summoned complied with the king’s wishes.
The pope’s sense of betrayal goaded him into what proved to be a crowning
indiscretion. On 18 November 1302, he promulgated the bull Unam sanctam:

Urged by faith, we are obliged to believe and maintain that the church is
one, holy, catholic, and apostolic. We believe in her firmly and we con-
fess absolutely that outside her there is neither salvation nor remission
of sins. … We are instructed by what is said in the gospels that in this
church and in her power are two swords, namely, the spiritual and the
temporal. For when the Apostles say, “Behold, here are two swords” [Luke
22:38]—that is to say, in the church, since the Apostles were speaking—
the Lord did not reply that this was too many, but enough. Certainly he
who denies that the temporal sword is in the power of Peter has ill under-
stood the words of the Lord when He commanded, “Put up thy sword into
the sheath” [Matt. 26:52]. Both, therefore, are in the power of the church,
that is, the spiritual sword and the material; but the former is to be ad-
ministered for the church and the latter by the church: the former by the
hands of the priest and the latter by the hands of kings and soldiers, but
at the will and sufferance of the priest. However, the one sword ought to
be under the other and temporal authority subject to spiritual power. …
Therefore, if the earthly power err, it will be judged by the spiritual power,
but if a lesser spiritual power err it will be judged by a superior spiritual
power, and if the highest power err it can be judged only by God and not
by man, according to the testimony of the Apostle: “The spiritual man
judgeth of all things and he himself is judged by no man” [1 Cor. 2:15]. This
authority, however, though it has been given to a man and is exercised
by a man, is not human but rather divine, granted to Peter by the divine
mouth and established for him and his successors upon a rock by Him
Whom Peter confessed, the Lord saying to Peter himself, “Whatsoever
thou shalt bind on earth shall be bound also in Heaven,” and so on [Matt.
16:19]. Therefore whoever resists this power thus ordained of God “resists
the ordinance of God” [Rom. 13:2]. … Furthermore, we declare, state, de-
fine, and pronounce that it is entirely necessary for salvation that every
human creature be subject to the Roman pontiff.24

24 Reg., n. 5382, vol. 3, cols. 888–90: “Unam sanctam ecclesiam catholicam et ipsam apostoli-
cam urgente fide credere cogimur et tenere, nosque hanc firmiter credimus et ­simpliciter
338 Dyson

To those directing affairs in France, so forceful and public an assertion of the

papacy’s jurisdictional supremacy over kings was an intolerable provocation.
Addressing the états généraux in the spring of 1303, the king’s new chief min-
ister Guillaume de Nogaret (de Flotte had died in the battle of Courtrai in July
1302) urged that steps be taken for the pope’s deposition. Theological experts at
the University of Paris were enlisted to find ways of justifying such a measure
in terms of the pope’s conduct and the doubtful circumstances of his succes-
sion. Accusations of every kind of crime and sin—homicide, simony, sodomy,
trafficking with demons—were levelled at Boniface. In the heat of some mo-
ment or other, Boniface had said that he would rather be a dog or a donkey or
just about any kind of brute beast than a Frenchman. This statement was sol-
emnly repeated as proof that the pope was a heretic who believed that French-
men have no souls.25
Preparations for military action were made during the summer of 1303. On 7
September the papal residence at Anagni was entered by soldiers commanded
by de Nogaret and an old enemy of the pope, Sciarra Colonna—the same Sci-
arra Colonna who twenty-five years later was to place the imperial crown on
the head of Ludwig of Bavaria. Their purpose, it seems, was to abduct the pope
and have him deposed by a council arranged by the French king. There exists
an eyewitness account by an Englishman, William of Hundleby.26 Threatened

confitemur, extra quam nec salus est, nec remissio peccatorum. … In hac eiusque
potestate duos esse gladios, spiritualem videlicet et temporalem, evangelicis dictis in-
struimur. Nam dicentibus Apostolis: Ecce gladii duo hic, in ecclesia scilicet, quum apostoli
loquerentur, non respondit Dominus, nimis esse, sed satis. Certe qui in potestate Petri
temporalem gladium esse negat, male verbum attendit Domini proferentis: Converte gla-
dium tuum in vaginam. Uterque ergo est in potestate ecclesiae, spiritualis scilicet gladius
et materialis. Sed is quidem pro ecclesia, ille vero ab ecclesia exercendus. Ille sacerdotis, is
manu regum et militum, sed ad nutum et patientiam sacerdotis. Oportet autem gladium
esse sub gladio, et temporalem auctoritatem spirituali subiici potestati. … Ergo si deviat
terrena potestas, iudicabitur a potestate spirituali; sed si deviat spiritualis minor, a suo
superiori; si vero suprema, a solo Deo, non ab homine poterit iudicari, testante Apostolo:
Spiritualis homo iudicat omnia, ipse autem a nemine iudicatur. Est autem haec auctoritas,
etsi data sit homini et exerceatur per hominem, non humana, sed potius divina, ore di-
vino Petro data sibique suisque successoribus in ipso quem confessus fuit, petra firmata,
dicente Domino ipsi Petro: Quodcumque ligaveris etc. Quicunque igitur huic potestati a
Deo sic ordinatae resistit, Dei ordinationi resistit. … Porro subesse Romano Pontifici omni
humanae creaturae declaramus, dicimus, definimus et pronunciamus omnino de neces-
sitate salutis.”
25 Dupuy, Histoire du différend, preuves, 102–09.
26 Ed. and trans. Henry G.J. Beck as “William of Hundleby’s Account of the Anagni Outrage,”
Catholic Historical Review 32 (1946): 190–220.
De regimine Christiano and the Franco-papal Crisis of 1296–1303 339

with violence and adjured to relinquish the papacy, the pope uncovered his
throat. E le col; e le cape—“Here is my neck; here is my head.” As he watched
the looters carting away his possessions he murmured to himself the words of
Job: “Dominus dedit; Dominus abstulit. Sit nomen Domini benedictum.” The
people of Anagni rallied to Boniface’s side and the invaders were repulsed after
a couple of days, but there seems no doubt that the treatment to which he had
been subjected contributed to his death just over a month later.27

10.3 Date and Literary Character

At the heart of these momentous events lay certain long-standing and difficult
questions of principle. Given the undisputed presence of two potestates in the
Christian world, where exactly does the boundary between spiritual and tem-
poral matters lie? How is the conduct of those entrusted with secular power to
be understood in relation to the guiding and corrective influence of spiritual
authority? Why, how, and to what extent is the pope entitled to interfere in the
purely secular affairs of a kingdom? In one way and another, questions of this
kind had been presenting themselves since the 4th century, and the general
trend of papal thought had been in the direction of the expansion of eccle-
siastical authority: if the ultimate destiny of humankind is eternal salvation,
surely the things that are Caesar’s must in all cases be subordinate to the will
of Christ’s vicar.
It was to address these issues of principle in a specific context that De regi-
mine Christiano was composed, in all probability during the early spring and
summer of 1302—some little time after the promulgation of Ausculta fili but
somewhat before James’s appointment as archbishop of Benevento on 3 Sep-
tember 1302. The main evidence for its dating may be briefly summarized. On
the one hand, it seems unlikely that a full-dress controversial treatise—a ma-
jor work standing out so clearly against the background flurry of pamphlets,

27 Attempts to traduce Boniface’s character did not end with his death. Thomas of Walsing-
ham, cited by Dupuy (Histoire du différend, preuves, 196) records the prophecy of Boni-
face’s predecessor Celestine v: “Ascendisti ut vulpes, regnabis ut leo, morieris ut canis.”
The story got about that in the madness of frustrated ambition the pope had beaten out
his brains against the wall of his room; that he had succumbed to a “frenesie si cruelle et
vehemente qu’il rongea et mangea ses mains et mourut pitieusement” (Dupuy, Histoire
du différend, preuves, 199). But “[w]hen they opened his tomb in 1605, the body, well pre-
served, showed no signs of violence” (Boase, Boniface viii, 351). For documents relating
to the French campaign to discredit Boniface posthumously see Jean Coste (ed.), Boniface
viii en procès: Articles d’accusation et dépositions des témoins (1303–1311) (Rome, 1995).
340 Dyson

letters and indignant exchanges—would have been written before the pope’s
quarrel with Philip iv had developed into a major crisis. This tipping point
is most clearly identified by the angry reception accorded to Ausculta fili in
France and the subsequent production of the supposititious Deum time. On
this assumption, we have a terminus a quo of 10 February 1302. On the other
hand, in his dedicatory letter to Boniface viii, James refers to himself not as
archbishop of Benevento or Naples,28 but as “Brother James of Viterbo, of the
Order of Hermits of Saint Augustine, professor in the faculty of theology;”29
then, in the prologue, as “a member of the fraternity of doctors of theology
in number if not in merit.”30 The closing sentence of the treatise (which may,
however, be a colophon supplied by a copyist) describes it as “composed by
Brother James of Viterbo of the Order of Hermits of Saint Augustine.”31 Such
descriptions seem most consistent with a terminus ad quem of September 1302.
These and a few ancillary considerations carry us as close to a precise date as
we are likely to get.32
The purpose of De regimine Christiano is to offer not a “traité de l’église” as
such, but a reasoned assertion, in the fullest possible terms, of the doctrine
of papal sovereignty in spiritual and temporal matters alike—a sovereignty
­extending to the correction and, if necessary, the deposition of kings. As a
statement of the hierocratic ideology of the papacy it has been to an extent
overshadowed in the minds of historians by the more elaborate and forceful De
ecclesiastica potestate of James’s older contemporary and fellow Augustinian
Giles of Rome.33 In fact, James’s work seems not entirely independent of that
of Giles, under whom he had studied during his years in Paris. There are several
reasons for thinking that De ecclesiastica potestate was written first, and that
James had a copy or draft of it before him as he worked. James’s choice, in book 2,

28 James was archbishop of Benevento for less than three months. At the request of Charles
ii of Naples, he was translated to the archiepiscopal see of Naples in December 1302.
29 De regimine Christiano, epistola auctoris, (ed.) Dyson, 2: “[F]rater Iacobus de Viterbio, or-
dinis eremitarum sancti Augustini, theologie facultatis professor….”
30 Ibid., prologus, 6: “[D]octorum theologorum consortio aggregatus numero etsi non
merito….”
31 Ibid., pars 2, c. 10, 326: “Explicit opusculum de regimine Christiano compilatum a fratre
Iacobo de Viterbio, ordinis eremitarum sancti Augustini.”
32 For a different dating see Eric Saak’s chapter in this volume.
33 R.W. Dyson (ed. and trans.), Giles of Rome’s “On Ecclesiastical Power”: A Medieval Theory of
World Government (New York, 2004). There is an earlier edition by Richard Scholz (Wei-
mar, 1929; repr. Aalen, 1961). See also Giuseppe Boffito and Giuseppe Ugo Oxilia, Un trat-
tato inedito di Egidio Colonna (Florence, 1908). This work has a useful introduction, but is
a rather inaccurate transcription of a single manuscript.
De regimine Christiano and the Franco-papal Crisis of 1296–1303 341

chapter 734 of bridle-making as an example of an art ordered to the end of a

higher art, and his use of the somewhat unusual term frenifactiva, reflects the
similar remark of Giles at De ecclesiastica potestate, book 2, chapter 6, though
both authors of course have in mind book 1, chapter 1 of Aristotle’s Nicoma-
chean Ethics (1094a10). He does not dwell on it at length, but James is clearly
familiar with the dominium theory developed in such detail by Giles: that all
temporal property is held ultimately of the church and can be confiscated from
the sinner at the church’s direction. James’s brief summary of this doctrine in
book 2, chapter 735 is very reminiscent in its language of Giles’s various exposi-
tions of it. Similar correspondences of language in James’s discussion of canon
law in book 2, chapter 836 suggest that this discussion is a close compression of
Giles’s commentary on a number of apparently problematical decretals in De
ecclesiastica potestate, book 3, chapters 5–8. But De regimine Christiano differs
markedly from De ecclesiastica potestate in style and arrangement. It contains
quite a few pages of abstruse and difficult technical theology, but James’s writ-
ing is largely free from the repetition and elaboration so characteristic of Giles,
and De regimine Christiano is in general terms much more coherent in struc-
ture than De ecclesiastica potestate. Also, James’s work is, as Arquillière says,
“écrit en un style exempt de passion et impersonnel.”37 There is no reference
in it to the events that we outlined in the previous section. No one unaware of
its context would be able to infer from the text of De regimine Christiano that it
was produced during an international crisis of the highest significance. It is a
controversial treatise, but one that holds itself tactically apart from the specif-
ics and personalities of the controversy.
Apart from Scripture and the standard scriptural glosses (clearly taken in
quite a few instances from Aquinas’s Catena aurea), James’s chief literary au-
thorities are: Augustine, mainly De civitate Dei; Bernard of Clairvaux’s De consid-
eratione; the Etymologiae and Sententiae of Isidore of Seville; Thomas Aquinas;
and the Pseudo-Dionysius. There are scattered references to Ambrose, Aristo-
tle, Boethius, the Pseudo-Cyprianic treatise De duodecim abusionibus saeculi,
Pseudo-Cyril of Alexandria, John Chrysostom, Gregory the Great, Innocent
iii, Origen, and Hugh and Richard of Saint Victor. There is also a single quo-
tation, evidently borrowed from Thomas Aquinas, from Pseudo-Andronicus’s
De affectibus. James relies for the most part on scriptural, theological, and
ecclesiastical authorities and on the whole refrains from legal technicalities.

34 De regimine Christiano, lib. 2, c. 7, (ed.) Dyson, 211.

35 Ibid., 225–27.
36 Ibid., lib 2, c. 8, 243–45.
37 Arquillière, Introduction to Le plus ancien traité de l’Église, 16.
342 Dyson

There are only a couple of brief citations of civil law, and for most of his
­allusions to canon law he is almost certainly reliant on Giles of Rome. He
resorts occasionally—more than once when he plainly has Giles in mind—
to some such phrase as arguunt quidam; but he is usually scrupulous and
(with one or two exceptions) accurate in his attributions. He never mentions
­Aquinas by name, but, unsurprisingly, he is thoroughly familiar with the Sum-
ma theologiae and De regimine principum, and he often paraphrases Aquinas
closely.
Typically enough of medieval authors, James often quotes Scripture and
other sources with a disregard for accuracy that is surprising to the modern
reader. Some of his quotations are close approximations; in other cases, pas-
sages that are obviously meant to be read as quotations have more the charac-
ter of resonance, paraphrase, or even invention. No doubt such departures are
due partly to the fact that James is quoting from memory, though now and then
he introduces a nuance that makes a quotation or reference suit his argument
more aptly than it otherwise would.

10.4 Argument

The intellectual orientation of De regimine Christiano has been described as “a

Thomistic Aristotelianism [adapted] to serve the papal claims to direct power
over the secular state.”38 As a more recent scholar has put it:

It is in this treatise especially that is caught the authentic hierocratic

note of this period. … In these theories, where society is equated with
the ecclesia, the autonomy proper to the temporal order is suffocated
by the primary authority of the spiritual and lost to the demands of an
all-embracing Christian ministry.39

De regimine Christiano has two parts. The first and shorter part—the “traité de
l’église”—begins with an analysis of the church as a community in the light of
book 1 of Aristotle’s Politics. Then comes a commentary on the Nicene Creed’s
definition of the church as one, holy, catholic, and apostolic. That these words
are also the opening words of Unam sanctam may or may not be a coincidence.

38 Ewart Lewis, Medieval Political Ideas (London, 1954), vol. 1, 182.

39 J.A. Watt, “Spiritual and Temporal Powers,” in The Cambridge History of Medieval Political
Thought, c.350–c.1450, (ed.) J.H. Burns (Cambridge, 1988), 400.
De regimine Christiano and the Franco-papal Crisis of 1296–1303 343

(If it was James’s purpose to offer what is, in effect, an extended meditation
on Unam sanctam, this is a further fact bearing somewhat on the question of
date; but of course we cannot be sure that this was his purpose.) It is in Part 2
that the substance of James’s political doctrine is presented. It is inevitable
that a work called forth by so urgent a press of events should show signs of
hasty composition, and James’s arguments are no doubt less well organized
than they would have been had he had time to polish and refine them. Some
of his best arguments come in the final chapter of Part 2, which looks rather
like a compendium of afterthoughts. But the treatise is on the whole admirably
clear, and, with some rearrangement in the interests of logical order, can be
summarized in a few paragraphs.
The church is the most self-sufficient of all human communities, containing
everything needful to the bodily and spiritual welfare of mankind. (When he
speaks of the church in this way, of course, James means the whole commu-
nity of the faithful, lay and clerical alike: the ecclesia in its broadest accepta-
tion rather than the church in a narrow or “institutional” sense.) The various
aspects of this self-sufficiency can be gathered from the credal description of
it as one, holy, catholic, and apostolic. Being the most self-sufficient of commu-
nities, the church is also the most perfect—the most complete—of communi-
ties. But the most perfect community must be ruled in the most perfect way,
and the most perfect form of rule, because the most natural, is monarchy. The
church, therefore, is a monarchy. It is a kingdom, and its king is Christ. Christ is
no longer with us in person, but Christ appointed Peter to be his earthly vicar
or representative, entrusted with the task of feeding his sheep everywhere. Pe-
ter and his successors thus rule the church as vice-regents on Christ’s behalf.
The pope is the ruler of the whole Christian world in actuality, and potentially
of the world of unbelievers also.
In book 2, chapters 1–2, following closely the christological technicalities of
Aquinas, James analyzes the different aspects of Christ’s power and its trans-
mission and general distribution to mankind after the Ascension. As the sec-
ond person of the Trinity, Christ is both God and man. As God, he has all power.
As man, he has all the powers that ordinary men have and every divine power
also, with two exceptions: he cannot create something from nothing, and he
cannot create—as distinct from giving effect to—a sacrament. Under the as-
pect of his humanity, he is the instrument or agent of the Godhead, the bridge
or mediator between man and God the Father. His power as such is a potestas
ministerii, a “ministerial” power—that is, a power ordered to government as
distinct from creation. It has three dimensions: the power to perform miracles,
priestly power (the power to perform sacramental acts), and royal power (the
344 Dyson

power to judge). Because Christ alone is hypostatically united with the God-
head, and because it is exclusively through his Passion that we are redeemed,
his ministerial power is a potestas excellentie, a “power of excellence,” by which
is meant that it is a higher or more excellent kind of ministry than any mortal
creature can have, and cannot be communicated to anyone else in its fullness.
He has, however, communicated some part of his power to humans as second-
ary ministers, as deputies to whom the conduct of his primary or pre-eminent
ministry is entrusted in his absence.
Thus, though no one can have them as excellently or as completely as Christ
does, there are three kinds or manifestations of power in the post-Ascension
world: the power to work miracles, priestly power, and royal power. The power
to work miracles need be mentioned only in passing. It seems to be distributed
according to no principle that anyone can discover. Sometimes good men have
it, but many good men do not; it was a great deal more common in the past
than it is now; and it is not unknown for even the wicked to have it, as Christ’s
own words at Matthew 7:22–23 testify. Next, James comes to priestly power,
the power to sanctify and to mediate between God and man, that is, to pray,
to offer sacrifice, and to administer the sacraments. Finally, royal power is dis-
tinctively the power of jurisdiction or judgement: “the principal and especial
action of royal power,” he says, “is to judge.”40
At this point James departs from what we may call the “normal” papalist
stratagem. One would expect him now to say that only the clergy have priestly
power, that kings have royal power, that priestly power is superior to royal pow-
er by reason of the metaphysical superiority of the spiritual over the tempo-
ral, and that kings must therefore submit to priestly power, above all to papal
power. This is what one might call the typical form of the papalist hierocratic
doctrine. James’s analysis is, however, rather more complex than this, though
he is not always entirely consistent in it.
It is, he says, certainly true that only ordained priests—those who have
what is technically called the potestas ordinis—can administer the sacraments.
More broadly, however, every individual is responsible for the spiritual quality
of his own life, and hence for offering to God the sacrifices of prayer and a
contrite heart. In this sense, even laymen have a measure of priestly power:
every Christian, whether in orders or not, is called upon to perform certain pri-
vate kinds of sacrifice that, as sacrificial, are priestly acts.41 Royal power, on the

40 De regimine Christiano, lib. 2, c. 4, (ed.) Dyson, 148: “Principalis autem actus et precipuus
regie potestatis est iudicare.”
41 This and the related idea that all Christians are in a certain sense kings perhaps comes
from Thomas Aquinas, De regimine principum, lib. 2, c. 3 (lib. 1, c. 14), 466, ll. 107–09:
De regimine Christiano and the Franco-papal Crisis of 1296–1303 345

other hand, is specifically the power to judge; but here, James suggests, there is
an important distinction to be drawn. This is a distinction between two kinds
or dimensions of royal power: royal power over temporal things (potestas regia
temporalis) and royal power over spiritual things (potestas regia spiritualis).
Royal power over temporal things is the power ordinarily exercised by kings
in governing the secular affairs of their kingdoms. Royal power over spiritual
things is primarily the power to judge in matters of sin. It is the potestas iuris-
dictionis that the priest exercises when, in making delegated use of the keys en-
trusted to Peter by Christ, he judges the penitent and pronounces them worthy
or unworthy of admission to the kingdom of heaven. Royal power, therefore,
understood as the power (or, as we would more naturally say, the authority) to
give judgement, is not the exclusive preserve of secular rulers. Priests also have
it insofar as they are empowered to judge sinners. They are not customarily
called kings, mainly because it would not be good for them to bear a title that is
so much associated with sin: “The name of king seems to imply pride, because
of the malice of those who have often abused royal power.”42 But, because they
have a power of judgement, priests are nonetheless kings in reality. They are,
one might say, kings in a suitably decorous disguise.
The two kinds of power that priests have are, strictly speaking, distinct. Inso-
far as it is simply a sanctifying or sacrificial power, the priestly potestas ordinis
is inferior to the potestas regia spiritualis because it lacks the royal dimension
of jurisdiction or judgement. But the two powers are in most cases combined
in the same person: the priest’s function would be severely restricted if he
did not have also a potestas iurisdictionis. Clearly, royal power over spiritual
things is a type of jurisdiction superior to royal power over temporal things.
The jurisdiction that clerics have insofar as they are judges is superior to that
of temporal kings because spiritual things are in their nature superior to tem-
poral ones. James suggests that spiritual jurisdiction contains or comprehends
temporal jurisdiction in the way that wholes contain parts, and causes contain
effects: “Peter and each of his successors, in whom fullness of spiritual power
resides, have temporal power pre-existently:43 not … in the same way that the

“Et quod est amplius, omnes Christi fideles, in quantum sunt membra eius, reges et sacer-
dotes dicuntur.” (All references to Aquinas’s texts are to the Leonine edition of his works
[Rome, 1882–]). See also Michael Wilks, The Problem of Sovereignty in the Later Middle
Ages (Cambridge, 1963), 136, n. 2.
42 De regimine Christiano, lib. 2, c. 3, (ed.) Dyson, 140: “Nomen autem regis videtur superbiam
importare, propter illorum malitiam qui sepe abutuntur potestate regali.”
43 That is, in the way that a cause has already within it the power subsequently manifested
in its effects.
346 Dyson

temporal prince has it, but in a higher and worthier and more excellent way.”44
Royal power over temporal things is in this sense imperfect, secondary, and
dependent. Spiritual judges stand in relation to temporal judges in the way
that an architect does in relation to stonemasons or carpenters, or as a cavalry
commander does in relation to the bridle-maker. The contribution of each is
necessary to the work of the other, but their relationship is one of subordina-
tion and superordination, in which the lower agency is guided and directed by
the higher.
As papalist arguments go, James’s is thus rather more complex than one
might have anticipated. All men are in a sense priests, and all priests are in a
sense kings. At first sight, it might seem that this is to introduce an unnecessary
complication. Would it not have been easier, and just as effective, merely to say
that spiritual power is metaphysically superior to royal power and that papal
power, as the supreme expression of spiritual power, is the highest power of
all? It is likely, however, that, in developing his argument along the lines that he
does, James intends to head off an objection that we nowadays associate most
readily with a work written more than twenty years after De regimine Christia-
no, namely, Marsilius of Padua’s Defensor pacis.45 This objection is that priestly
power, being in its nature spiritual, has no application to temporal things, and
hence no claim to regulate the things of this world. The jurisdiction of priests is
confined to spiritual judgements; but spiritual judgements have reference only
to the world to come, because it is in the next world that the sinner will be pun-
ished and the good rewarded by God. On this view, priests have only a directive
power: they can teach and admonish with an eye to the next world, but they
have no authority to intervene in the affairs of this one, and no power to inflict,
or to require the infliction, of temporal penalties. Plainly, this is not a conclu-
sion that James wishes to leave open. He does not, of course, say that priestly
power qua spiritual—the potestas ordinis—is inferior to the temporal power
of kings. On the contrary: “Royal power over temporal things, inasmuch as it
is temporal, is inferior to and less worthy than [the] priestly (potestas ordinis),

44 De regimine Christiano lib. 2, c. 7, (ed.) Dyson, 216: “Petrus et quilibet eius successor, in
quo plenitudo spiritualis potestatis residet, prehabet potestatem temporalem: non …
secundum eumdem modum secundum quem habetur a principe temporali, sed modo
superiori et digniori et prestantiori.”
45 (Ed.) C.W. Previté-Orton (Cambridge, 1928); also by Richard Scholz (Hanover, 1932). There
is an English translation by Alan Gewirth, Marsilius of Padua: The Defender of Peace (New
York, 1956), with an accompanying volume of commentary: Alan Gewirth, Marsilius of
Padua and Medieval Political Philosophy (New York, 1956); for a more recent translation
see Annabel Brett, Marsilius of Padua: The Defender of the Peace (Cambridge, 2005).
De regimine Christiano and the Franco-papal Crisis of 1296–1303 347

which is spiritual.”46 He does, however, say that it is by virtue not of the priestly
power of order, but of the power of spiritual jurisdiction associated with it—
the potestas regia spiritualis—that ecclesiastical power is superior to secular
kingship specifically with respect to secular judgements. It is in the claim that
the priestly power of jurisdiction is a royal power that the essence of James’s
argument lies.
But whereas all priests are equal in terms of their potestas ordinis, not all are
equal with respect to their potestas iurisdictionis. Bishops hold royal power over
spiritual things in a more perfect—in a more extended or c­ omprehensive—
form than do less elevated priests, and the pope holds it in the most perfect
form of all. As head of the ecclesiastical hierarchy, the pope is “the king of all
spiritual kings.”47 All authority derives from him, and no one in the church
militant is exempt from his jurisdiction. From his decision there is no appeal,
because there is no one on earth to whom such appeal might be made:

Though he governs the various individual churches through the media-

tion of other shepherds, he can nonetheless exercise immediate kingship
over any church whatsoever. … He is the supreme and single priest to
whom all the faithful owe obedience as to the Lord Jesus Christ. He is the
general judge who judges all the faithful of whatever condition, dignity,
and station, and who can himself be judged by no one. … It is to him that
the keys of the church have been most fully delivered by Christ, by which
he binds and releases, closes and opens, excludes and receives, sentences
and judges.48

There is, indeed, a sense in which secular princes can play some part in the
disposition of spiritual things: for example, by nominating suitable candidates
to benefices (this is a passing reference to the delicate question of lay investi-
ture; perhaps it is to be read as a sort of minor captatio benevolentiae). But they

46 De regimine Christiano, lib. 2, c. 4, (ed.) Dyson, 166: “Potestas … regia temporalis, in quan-
tum temporalis est, inferior et minus digna quam sacerdotalis, que spiritualis est.”
47 Ibid., lib. 2, c. 5, 174: “… rex omnium spiritualium regum.”
48 Ibid.: “Qui, licet mediantibus aliis pastoribus gubernet diversas ecclesias speciales, ta-
men immediatum regnum exercere potest super ecclesiam quamlibet. … Hic est sacerdos
summus et unus, cui omnes fideles obedire debent tamquam Domino Iesu Christo. Hic
est generalis iudex, qui omnes fideles, cuiuscumque conditionis, dignitatis et status, iudi-
cat et ipse a nemine iudicari potest, sed Apostoli voce pronunciat: ‘Qui me iudicat Domi-
nus est’ [1 Cor. 4:4]. … Hic est apud quem plenissime sunt claves a Christo ecclesie tradite,
quibus ligat et solvit, claudit et aperit, excludit et recipit, stringit et relaxat, sententiat et
iudicat.”
348 Dyson

can enter the spiritual sphere to this limited extent only with the permission
and under the supervision of the spiritual power. The pope, by contrast, can
without anybody’s permission render judgement in temporal cases as well as
spiritual ones whenever he considers it necessary to the salvation of the faith-
ful to do so, and he can do this precisely because he has a supreme royal juris-
diction over spiritual things. James’s argument is essentially that developed in
Innocent iii’s bull Novit of 120449 and elaborated by decretalist commentators
on it,50 namely, that papal authority is comprehensive with regard to earthly
judgements not because the pope has or claims a mere vulgar temporal power,
but ratione peccati. It will be recalled that Innocent iii, while insisting that he
has no wish to usurp or diminish the jurisdiction of kings, goes on to say:

No one who is of sound mind does not know that it may belong to our
office to correct every Christian for every mortal sin and to coerce him
by ecclesiastical penalties if he despises our correction. … But perhaps it
may be said that kings are to be treated in one way and others in another.
We, however, know what is written in the divine law [Deut. 1:17]: “You
shall judge the great as the little, nor shall there be respect of persons
among you.”51

The adjudication of the moral or spiritual character of every act falls within the
prerogative of the pope because what is and is not necessary to the salvation
of the faithful, and what is and is not sinful in the conduct even of kings, can
be judged only according to criteria of which the pope is the final interpreter.
From this it follows that he may intervene in any case whatsoever, spiritual
or temporal, subject to no judgement but his own, if he considers that mat-
ters of sin and salvation are at stake, because—and here is the nub—there
is no earthly action whatsoever that is not capable of being sinful. Of course
the pope does not and could not always act in his own person. He has under

49 Gregory ix, Decretales, lib. 2, titul. 1, c. 13, (ed.) Emil Friedberg, in Corpus Iuris Canonici,
vol. 2 (Leipzig, 1881; repr. Graz, 1955), cols. 242–44.
50 See Walter Ullmann, Medieval Papalism: The Political Theories of the Medieval Canonists
(London, 1949), chap. 4. See also Sidney R. Packard, Europe and the Church under Innocent
iii (New York, 1968).
51 Gregory ix, Decretales, lib. 2, titul. 1, c. 13, (ed.) Friedberg, cols. 243–44: “[N]ullus qui sit
sanae mentis ignorat quin ad officium nostrum spectet de quocunque mortali peccato
corripere quemlibet Christianum et, si correctionem contempserit, ipsum per districtio-
nem ecclesiasticam coercere. … Sed forsan dicetur, quod aliter cum regibus et aliter cum
aliis est agendum. Ceterum scriptum novimus in lege divina: ‘Ita magnum iudicabis ut
parvum, nec erit apud te acceptio personarum.’”
De regimine Christiano and the Franco-papal Crisis of 1296–1303 349

him “other shepherds” who function as his deputies. But casualiter—in spe-
cific cases chosen according to his own discretion—he can without consulting
anyone else do, or direct any subordinate to do, whatever he judges to be in the
interests of the faithful.
The fact that the pope may, as and when he thinks fit, assume final jurisdic-
tion even over temporal things does not, of course, make the secular prince
redundant. Though he has ultimate charge of all the affairs of this world, the
pope usually chooses to leave temporal matters to the intermediate agency of
princes, just as God, though he can suspend the order of nature at will, usu-
ally governs the world through the agency of secondary causes. For one thing,
it is in the interests of order and dignity that there should be a hierarchy of
powers in this world, just as there is in the universe as a whole.52 For another,
it would not be fitting for the pope or other clerics to occupy themselves regu-
larly and generally with matters that are base, unworthy, or trivial. This is an
echo of the “Augustinian” view of politics as intrinsically sordid and sin-laden
that had been given its most forthright expression by Gregory vii.53 The pope’s
task is to wield the spiritual sword and to leave the material sword to those
who are, in the words of 1 Corinthians 6:4, “least esteemed in the church.”54
But both swords belong ultimately to the pope. In the language of Bernard

52 This frequent motif of medieval political thought is associated especially with Pseudo-
Dionysius. See Walter Ullmann, Principles of Government and Politics in the Middle Ages
(London, 1966), 46ff. See also Thomas Finan and Vincent Twomey (eds.), The Relationship
between Neoplatonism and Christianity (Dublin, 1992); Dominic J. O’Meara, Neoplatonism
and Christian Thought (Albany, ny, 1982).
53 See Dyson, Normative Theories, chap. 2; also Henri-Xavier Arquillière, L’augustinisme poli-
tique: Essai sur la formation des théories politiques du Moyen-Âge (Paris, 1934; repr. 1972).
54 The “two swords” imagery so standard in medieval political debate originates with the
conversation of Christ with the disciples at Luke 22:38. Its earliest use in a political con-
text is, as far as I know, in a treatise written around 1097 by Cardinal Deusdedit, a partisan
of Gregory vii, called Libellus contra invasores et Symoniacos et reliquos scismaticos ([ed.]
Ernst Sackur, in Libelli de lite imperatorum et pontificum saeculis xi et xii, vol. 2 [Hanover,
1893], 292–365). The priest, the author says in his prologue, uses the sword of the word;
the king wields the material sword “because he is the Lord’s minister;” neither should in-
terfere with the other. The first authority to make use of this imagery in the form in which
it was thereafter to be cited so often was Bernard of Clairvaux, in his manual of advice
called De consideratione written between 1145 and 1153 for Pope Eugenius iii ([ed.] Jean
Leclercq and Henri Rochais, Opera Omnia 3 [Rome, 1963], 379–493). The gladius materia-
lis, the “material sword,” is often also called the gladius sanguinis, the “sword of blood,”
thus appropriating the Biblical impurity of blood to the contention that the church may
not defile her hands with worldly business.
350 Dyson

of Clairvaux, the spiritual is his to use (ad usum), and the material is his to
command; ­literally, it is his to direct by a nod (ad nutum). Princes wield the
material sword with the pope’s permission and subject to his control and guid-
ance. christian princes are to regard themselves as the church’s servants and
auxiliaries, whose task is to defend the church under the direction of the vicar
of christ.
James gives considerable attention to the words of Romans 13:1: “The powers
that be are ordained of God.” These words present a troublesome and exploit-
able ambiguity. On one interpretation—the favored royalist ­interpretation—
they mean that the power of kings is derived from God directly. The time-
honored ritual of coronation of which the church makes so much55 is on this
view no more than a dramatic representation of this d­ erivation, and in no
sense a bestowal of power on kings by the church. Kings, being ordained of
God, are answerable to God alone, without any ­intervening accountability to
ecclesiastical authority,56 and papal claims to depose kings or dispense their
subjects from allegiance are thus vacuous. From the point of view that James
wishes to defend, it is clearly necessary to rebut this ­standard royalist argu-
ment. It is necessary to construe Romans 13:1 as meaning that kings hold of-
fice through the agency and at the pleasure of the church, to which they are
answerable for their conduct. Like Giles of Rome, James relies to an extent on
the oft-repeated dictum of Hugh of Saint Victor that the spiritual power has
to institute the earthly power that it may exist, and judge it if it is not good.57

55 The church began at an early stage to avail herself of the dramatic possibilities of corona-
tion as illustrating the subordination of temporal rulers to the church: by far the best-
known example is, of course, the coronation of Charlemagne by Pope Leo iii in 800. See
also Roger of Hoveden’s account of the coronation of Richard i of England in The Annals
of Roger de Hoveden, Comprising the History of England and of Other Countries of Europe
from a.d. 732 to a.d. 1201, (trans.) Henry T. Riley, vol. 2 (London, 1853; repr. 1968), 117–20,
esp. 118: “They clothed him in the royal robes, first a tunic, then a dalmatic, after which the
… archbishop delivered to him the sword of rule, with which to crush evildoers against
the Church.” See also C.A. Bouman, Sacring and Crowning: The Development of the Latin
Ritual for the Anointing of Kings and the Coronation of the Emperor before the Eleventh
Century (Groningen, 1957). See also Walter Ullmann, The Growth of Papal Government in
the Middle Ages (London, 1970), chaps. 3, 5, and 8.
56 For a lively example of this argument, see Henry iv’s letter of January 1076 to Gregory vii
in Quellen zur Geschichte Kaiser Heinrichs iv, (eds.) C. Erdmann and Franz-Josef Schmale
(Darmstadt, 1963), 62–64; translated in Theodor E. Mommsen and Karl F. Morrison, Impe-
rial Lives and Letters of the Eleventh Century (New York, 1962), 150–51.
57 E.g., De regimine Christiano, lib. 2, c. 7, (ed.) Dyson, 214: “Unde dicit Hugo de Sancto Vic-
tore quod spiritualis potestas terrenam potestatem et instituere habet, ut sit, et iudicare
habet, si bona non fuerit.”
De regimine Christiano and the Franco-papal Crisis of 1296–1303 351

But there are difficulties. Coronation ceremonies modelled on the example

of Saul’s anointing by Samuel are certainly intended to show that God gives
power to kings through the church: that kings are, in effect, ecclesiastical aux-
iliaries holding office at the church’s pleasure. But what about the righteous
chieftains of Israel who became kings in all but name without any spiritual
anointing? And what about the fact that to this day unbelievers are governed
by rulers who are plainly kings but whose power is not in any sense derived
from or through the church?
In dealing with such difficulties, James avoids the extreme and implausible
view of Giles of Rome that sensu stricto there can be no such thing as a non-
Christian king because all temporal power is illegitimate and unjust unless re-
generated through spiritual institution. It would, he concedes, be captious to
deny that non-Christian kings are kings or to say that their power is contrary to
the divine will. All power comes from God, after all, in the obvious sense that
everything comes from God; even the power of tyrants is ordained of God, to
test the righteous and punish the wicked. Also, it is not obvious that all kings
not instituted by the church are tyrants. There are many instances of benign
earthly power that have not come into being through the church either be-
cause there was no visible church at the time of their institution, or because the
holders of such power have acquired it in parts of the earth where the church
has no influence. The power of non-Christian rulers is thus not wicked or un-
just of itself. Holding more consistently to Aristotle than Giles of Rome does,
James observes that government arises not from sin but from the disposition
to social life and cooperation that is part of the nature of mankind. Inasmuch
as it is natural, even the government of unbelievers is, of itself, a good, but, like
all merely natural things, it is imperfect: it comes from God “in an incomplete
and material sense” through the inclination of human nature.58 The church
could in principle remove the power of unbelieving princes “because of their
unbelief,”59 that is, because they lie outside the community of grace and to
that extent present a potential threat to the salvation of the believer. All things
being equal, however, such power may be recognized as legitimate—and may
be tolerated—even if, in circumstances that are unavoidable without scandal,
Christians are subject to it. For as long as it does not compromise the faith or
welfare of the faithful it is for practical purposes legitimate, albeit in an incom-
plete or flawed sense, “just as the marriage of unbelievers is neither perfected

58 Ibid., 210: “[P]otestatis temporalis materialiter et inchoatiue habet esse a naturali homi-
num inclinatione, ac per hoc a Deo, in quantum opus nature est opus Dei.”
59 Ibid., lib. 2, c. 10, 291.
352 Dyson

nor confirmed yet still has a kind of truth and legitimacy.”60 The power of Chris-
tian rulers, on the other hand, is both natural and fully legitimate because it
is instituted and perfected by the spiritual power. James alludes several times,
though without attribution, to the dictum of Thomas Aquinas that the effect
of grace is to perfect nature, not abolish it.61 The power of the Christian king is
a natural power completed by grace. It is, in other words, power conferred or
validated by the church. But what the church confers it can also withdraw. Just
as it could if necessary take power away from unbelievers by reason of their
unbelief, so it can take the power that it has given to believers away from those
who use it ill, because they too, though in a different way, present a threat to
the spiritual welfare of the faithful:

For [the spiritual power] has the task of judging [the temporal] because
it can and must correct and guide it, punish it, and impose on it a penalty
not only spiritual but temporal by reason of crime and fault, and proceed
even to its deposition if the character of the fault so requires.62

By these means, James contrives to overcome the ambiguity of Romans 13:1

without having to defend the extreme and hardly plausible position that non-
Christian kings are not kings. All power is ordained of God, and it is not denied
that non-Christian kings are kings; they are imperfect specimens of kingship,
but kings for all that. However, all kingly power in the full and perfect sense
comes from God through the church. In either case, royal power is removable
for good cause by the spiritual authority of the church, which is, of course,
equivalent to saying that it is removable by the spiritual authority of the pope.
James is aware also of the complication potentially presented to his argu-
ment by the Donation of Constantine. Insofar as it effectively makes the pope
the legal successor of the Caesars (on the then almost entirely unquestioned
assumption of its authenticity), the Donation would seem to furnish—and
on past occasions had furnished—the Holy See with a formidable weapon.
Aside from anything else, does it not provide another avenue by which the

60 Ibid., lib. 2, c. 7, 212: “[S]icut neque matrimonium infidelium perfectum est et ratum, licet
sit aliqualiter uerum et legitimum.”
61 Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologiae i, q. 1, a. 8, ad 2: “Gratia non tollat naturam, sed
perficiat.”
62 De regimine Christiano, lib. 2, c. 7, (ed.) Dyson, 214: “Habet enim eam iudicare, quia eam
potest et debet corrigere et dirigere, punire et penam ei inferre non solum spiritualem
sed temporalem, ratione criminis et delicti, etiam usque ad eius destitutionem procedere,
si hoc delicti qualitas exigat.”
De regimine Christiano and the Franco-papal Crisis of 1296–1303 353

pope might exercise temporal authority over the king of France?63 But by the
time of Innocent iii, as papal power came to be defined in terms of the pope’s
status as vicar of Christ rather than heir of Constantine, the Donation had also
become a possible source of difficulty, a difficulty captured in Bernard’s re-
mark to Pope Eugenius iii that in temporal matters “successisti non Petro sed
Constantino.”64 The premise that the pope’s temporal power is to be attributed
to the gift of a secular prince is exactly the opposite of what such papalist au-
thors as Giles of Rome and James of Viterbo believe to be the truth: that he has
it by divine rather than human law as an implicit part of his supreme spiritual
authority, and therefore cannot lose it or be disobeyed without sin in matters
of temporal judgement. How, then, can the terms of the Donation be accom-
modated to the theory of papal power that it is now desired to advance?
This question is dealt with by James at some length in his long and dense
final chapter (book 2, chapter 10). He considers to some extent the idea, sug-
gested by Augustine’s remarks on justice, that Constantine could not have giv-
en the empire to Pope Sylvester after all. It was not his to give because, having
acquired it as a pagan, he never held it de iure: there is no justice save in that
kingdom whose founder and ruler is Christ.65 This suggestion is not, one would
have thought, without promise from the point of view of someone wishing
to avoid the conclusion that the pope’s temporal authority is a matter of hu-
man law. Nor, however, is it without disadvantages, partly because to develop
it would require a retreat from the reasonable position that the power of non-
Christians has a legitimacy of its own, and partly because the possible invalid-
ity of the Donation has an obvious royalist implication also.66 James does not
rely on it, but favors instead a view already well developed in the canonist lit-
erature.67 When Constantine appeared to “give” imperial authority to the pope
he only confirmed or proclaimed through the medium of human law what the
pope possessed anyway under divine law; he demonstrated his own deference
and submission to the pope; and he conferred upon the papacy the power to
do in fact what it could in any case do as of right. At most, Constantine added
a de facto power to the pope’s preexisting authority. He did not give the pope

63 And also, incidentally, a justification for his endorsement of the imperial candidature of
Albrecht of Austria. See Jones, Eclipse of Empire?, 231–33.
64 De regimine Christiano, lib. 2, c. 10, (ed.) Dyson, 292.
65 Cf. Augustine, De civitate Dei, lib. 2, c. 21.
66 See Quaestio in utramque partem, (ed.) Dyson, Three Royalist Tracts, 106; John of Paris, De
potestate regia et papali, (ed.) Leclercq, 244–45; Pierre Dubois, “Deliberatio,” in Dupuy,
Histoire du différend, preuves, 46.
67 See Ullmann, Medieval Papalism, 107–09.
354 Dyson

anything de iure, because de iure the pope already had everything by virtue of
the royal power inherent in his spiritual office. It must be admitted that this
rather tortuous attempt to make the Donation of Constantine bear a construc-
tion consistent with the idea that the pope has temporal power iure divino is
not a conspicuous success. There is, however, no justification for assuming it to
be a merely cynical rewriting of history by James and the various 13th-century
commentators who say much the same thing. It is perhaps best regarded as a
sincere effort by believers in an advanced theory of papal monarchy to make
such sense of the evidence as can be made.

10.5 Conclusion

This is as far as we can or need to carry the process of summary. It goes with-
out saying that no summary can do justice to its complexity; but, reduced to
its essentials, James’s argument amounts to a straightforward proposition, on
its own terms unanswerable. Because the pope has the fullest possible juris-
diction—a royal jurisdiction—in matters of sin, and because any human act
whatsoever can involve sin, his jurisdiction over the conduct of all men, grant-
ed that it is in normal circumstances deputed to others, is ultimately supreme.
That this jurisdiction extends as much to the acts of kings as to those of any
other Christian is self-evident.
The outline of events given in the first part of this chapter illustrates the
amplitude of the papal claims that were made during the conflicts of 1296 to
1303 and the decisive strength of reaction that those claims provoked. It is in
defense of those claims, and against the background of those conflicts, that
De regimine Christiano was produced. It is worth remembering, however, that
neither Boniface viii nor any of his champions made any substantively new
­statements about the temporal authority of the papacy; nor is the pope’s lan-
guage in Unam sanctam immoderate when measured against that of some of
the tracts written in support of the theory of papal supremacy from the time of
Gregory vii. When we look at Ausculta fili, Unam sanctam, and the pope’s state-
ment at the consistory of 1302, we find no language or connotation that had
not already been well developed and used in the papalist cause. Such elements
as the “two swords” imagery and the assertion that “the king is subject to us by
reason of sin” can only be intentional references to Innocent iii’s ­Decretal No-
vit and Bernard of Clairvaux’s De consideratione; and, in their general tenor, the
pope’s statements add nothing to what had been said by Gregory vii and Inno-
cent iii. However infuriating to the king of France, the claim that the pope, or
the church, can judge and depose kings had been made often enough before,
De regimine Christiano and the Franco-papal Crisis of 1296–1303 355

on rational grounds arguably traceable back to Augustine: spiritual things are

superior to temporal things, and temporal princes must therefore submit to the
judgement of the spiritual power and incur censure if they do not. The pope’s
haughty de haut en bas manner of addressing the king was unquestionably a
tactical error, and it is hardly to be doubted that Boniface’s lack of finesse in
diplomacy served the papacy’s cause ill. In substance, however, Boniface viii
was a continuator of a tradition of papal theorizing going back some two and
a half centuries and traceable in its outlines to foundations laid much earlier.
We cannot, then, attribute much in the way of originality or innovation to
James of Viterbo; but, having regard to the circumstances of haste and crisis in
which it was produced, it is fair to say that De regimine Christiano is a work of
subtlety and sophistication in which the question of regnum and sacerdotium
is addressed honestly and without evasion. It is perhaps too much to call it
“one of the most impressive writings of the Middle Ages,”68 but it is interesting
to wonder what James might have made of his material had he been able to
devote more time to composition and revision. In terms of its scope, force, and
immediate impact, the treatise is likely to be found superficially less imposing
than Giles of Rome’s De ecclesiastica potestate. At a less superficial level, De
regimine Christiano is in some respects more telling and more skillful in its ex-
ecution than its more celebrated companion. James habitually prefers what he
calls “a middle way, which seems more reasonable.”69 By this more reasonable
and inoffensive way, he contrives to formulate a theory of papal monarchy that
is every bit as imposing and ambitious as that of Giles, while being systemati-
cally less provocative and extreme in its treatment of questions of legitimacy
and dominium.
At the beginning of this chapter, however, we suggested that De regimine
Christiano is part of the “final ebullition” of papalist writing. The events lead-
ing up to Boniface viii’s momentous humiliation heralded the effective eclipse
of the medieval papacy’s hierocratic vision. The controversies of 1296 to 1303
were not so much a trial of strength between Boniface viii and Philip iv as a
collision of two incompatible principles: the Gregorian ideal of the papacy as
a unifying political force reaching across territorial boundaries, and the newer
conception, so rapidly displacing older feudal loyalties, of the self-contained
nation-state acknowledging no sovereign but its own king and tolerant of
no regulation or interference from without. This collision inflicted upon the
papacy’s vigor and credibility a wound from which it never fully recovered, a

68 Lewis, Medieval Political Ideas, vol. 1, 182.

69 De regimine Christiano, lib. 2, c. 7, (ed.) Dyson, 210: “… via media, que rationabilior esse
videtur.”
356 Dyson

wound kept open by the demoralizations of the next hundred years: the scan-
dalous exile of the popes in Avignon and the “Great Western Schism” of 1378
to 1417. In the face of the deterioration of its own moral authority, the church
could no longer hold with any hope of success to the doctrine that kings are
merely the enforcers of the spiritual power. A quarter of a century after the
death of Boniface viii, one last struggle was to be enacted, between Ludwig of
Bavaria and Pope John xxii, but the papalist literature produced during this
time is weary and derivative. This last struggle served only to accelerate the
political exhaustion of the papacy and refine the arguments of its opponents.
It is not fanciful to say that Unam sanctam was the epitaph of the medieval pa-
pacy’s conception of its own temporal supremacy70 and that James of Viterbo
was one of that supremacy’s last champions.

70 See John Courtney Murray, “Contemporary Orientations of Catholic Thought on Church

and State in the Light of History,” Theological Studies 10 (June 1949): 180.
 Appendix 1

The Authorship of the Quaestiones septem de Verbo

Attributed to James of Viterbo

Stephen D. Dumont

1.1 Introduction

Modern scholarship has universally assigned three main works to the P ­ arisian
regency of the Augustinian theologian James of Viterbo: a set of four Q
­ uodlibeta
and two distinct sets of ordinary disputed questions, one on the divine catego-
ries (Quaestiones de divinis praedicamentis=qdp) and a second on the divine
Word (Quaestiones septem de Verbo=qdv).1 As it turns out, however, this latter
set of disputations on the divine Word is not a work by James of Viterbo; it
belongs instead to his near-successor to the Augustinian chair at Paris, Henry
of Friemar (the Elder). One of the most important 14th-century Augustinians,
Henry was regent at Paris from 1305 until about 1312, after which he remained
lector at the studium of Erfurt until his death in 1340.2 That the qdv are the

1 In addition to the literature cited below, the following standard reference works list the
Quaestiones disputatae de Verbo among the authentic writings of James of Viterbo: Palémon
Glorieux, Répertoire des maîtres en théologie de Paris au XIIIe siècle, vol. 2 (Paris, 1934), 310;
Edward Mahoney, “James of Viterbo,” in Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy, (ed.) Edward
Craig, vol. 5 (London, 1998), 59; R.W. Dyson, James of Viterbo, De Regimine Christiano: A Criti-
cal Edition and Translation (Leiden, 2009), xv; Robert Pasnau (ed.), The Cambridge History of
Medieval Philosophy (Cambridge, 2009), 899–900; Rolf Schönberger et al. (eds.), Repertorium
edierter Texte des Mittelalters aus dem Bereich der Philosophie und angrenzender Gebiete, 2nd
ed. (Berlin, 2011), 2109; Paolo Vian, “Giacomo da Viterbo: Vita e opere; Una rassegna bibli-
ografica,” in Giacomo da Viterbo al tempo di Bonifacio viii: Studi per il vii centenario della
morte, (eds.) Pasquale Giustiniani and Gianpiero Tavolaro (Rome, 2011), 19; Alexander Brungs
et al. (eds.), Die Philosophie des Mittelalters, vol. 4: 13. Jahrhundert. Überweg – Grundriss der
Geschichte der Philosophie (Basel, 2017), 986.
2 The main monograph on Henry of Friemar is Clemens Stoick, Heinrich von Friemar: Leben,
Werke, philosophisch-theologische Stellung in der Scholastik (Freiburg, 1954), which contains
long excerpts from Henry’s first Parisian Quodlibet. Unfortunately for the question we discuss
here, Stroick was unaware of the existence of Henry’s Quaestiones ordinariae, first identified
by Franz Pelster in 1954 (see note 13 below), the year after Stroick’s own study appeared. On
Henry’s works and career, see also Adolar Zumkeller, Manuskripte von Werken der Autoren
des Augustiner-Eremitenordens in mitteleuropäischen Bibliotheken (Würzburg, 1966), 125–63,

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���8 | doi 10.1163/9789004361881_013

358 Dumont

work of Henry of Friemar is established beyond doubt by a second, well-known

manuscript containing these same questions but whose connection to those
traditionally attributed to James has gone unnoticed.

1.2 The Attribution of the qdv to James of Viterbo

The qdv were first identified and ascribed to James of Viterbo nearly a ­century
ago by Albano Sorbelli in his description of Bologna, Biblioteca comunale
dell’Archiginnasio A 971 [= B].3 This manuscript contains the first three Quodli-
beta of James of Viterbo (ff. 1ra–61vb), followed by a set of anonymous, ­untitled
disputations that Sorbelli himself labelled Quaestiones septem de Verbo
(ff. ­62ra–79vb). Sorbelli noted that these questions were not attributed to James
in historical lists, but he thought that they “more likely” belonged to him. They
followed directly upon the authentic Quodlibet, were copied by the same scribe,
and the authority they cited most frequently is Augustine.4 Sorbelli’s attribution
was immediately taken up in the scholarly literature, most significantly by Da-
vid Gutiérrez in his monograph on the life and works of James.5 Strengthening
Sorbelli’s circumstantial case, Gutiérrez observed that the qdv shared stylistic
features with James’s qdp and Quodlibeta, such as the formulaic phrases used
to ­introduce the opinions of Aquinas and Giles of Rome. Gutiérrez concluded
that the qdv are “certainly” a genuine work of James (opus certe genuinum).
After Gutiérrez, the qdv were regarded u ­ nquestioningly as ­authentic by most

579–89; Charles Lohr, “Medieval Latin Aristotle Commentaries: Authors G–I,” Traditio 24
(1968): 221–24; Odd Langholm, Economics in the Medieval Schools (Leiden, 1992), 536–37;
Christopher Schabel and William J. Courtenay, “Augustinian Quodlibeta after Giles of Rome,”
in Theological Quodlibeta in the Middle Ages: The Fourteenth Century, (ed.) Christopher Scha-
bel (Leiden, 2007), 550–52.
3 Albano Sorbelli and Giuseppe Mazzatinti, Inventari dei manoscritti delle biblioteche d’Italia,
vol. 32 (Bologna and Florence, 1925), 117–18.
4 Ibid., n. 2: “L’Ossinger (Biblioth. Augustiniana, Ingolstadii, 1768, 203–04) fra le opere del Cap-
pocci non ne cita alcuna con questo titolo preciso; il fatto però che queste Questioni sono
poste nel Codice immediatamente dopa i Quodlibeta del Cappocci, cosicchè anche per
l’identità della scrittura, ne sembrano la naturale continuazione, induce a pensare che esse
pure siano opera o parti di opera dello stesso autore: ipotesi che appare ancora più verosimi-
le, quando si osservi che fra gli scrittori addotti a conforto delle diverse argomentazioni il più
spesso citato è S. Agostino.” Cf. Johann Ossinger, Bibliotheca Augustiniana (Ingolstadt, 1768),
203–05, who had compiled his own entry from numerous chronicles going back to Jordan of
Quedlinburg.
5 David Gutiérrez, De B. Iacobi Viterbiensis o.e.s.a. vita, operibus et doctrina theologica (Rome,
1939), 28–30. Sorbelli’s attribution immediately entered bibliographies on James; e.g., Ugo
Mariani, Scrittori politici Agostiniani del sec. xiv (Florence, 1927), 93.
The Authorship of the Quaestiones septem de Verbo 359

scholars, including Eelcko Ypma, the most important scholar of James of

­Viterbo, and Ciriaco Scanzillo, who published the initial question of the qdv.6
In retrospect, however, it is clear that the original case for attributing the
qdv to James was not compelling. Most scholastic manuscripts, of course, have
survived as compilations of works by various authors, so that the proximity
of two items in a codex is not by itself much of an argument for their com-
mon authorship. Also, prima facie evidence seemed rather to go against the
attribution. Why would the 14th-century chronicle by Jordan of Quedlinburg
(also called Jordan of Saxony) list two works from James’s regency at Paris—
his Quodlibet and the qdp—but then omit a lengthy third set of his univer-
sity questions on the Verbum?7 Or again, how could Johann Ossinger cull from
numerous catalogues some two dozen titles attributed to James, and yet not
detect such an important work?8
As research on James progressed, further difficulties with the attribution
emerged. In his Quodlibeta, James refers by title to his authentic qdp nearly
a dozen times, but never once names a work corresponding to the qdv.9 Con-
versely, as scholars examined the qdv itself in more detail, they found cross-
references to quodlibeta that appear not to correspond to any by James. Ypma
cited a number of explicit references in the qdv to a Quodlibet, such as that
found in qdv, question 6:

Ad probationem falsitatis consequentis, dico quod ibi duo difficultates

implicantur, videlicet an cognitio creaturarum praesupponat in Patre
productionem Verbi, et an productio creaturarum praesupponat ema-
nationem personarum. … Ad secundam [differentiam B] patebit in De
q­ uolibet quid sit dicendum, quia haec difficultas ibi ex proposito inquiri-
tur in quadam quaestione. (B, f. 76rb–va)

6 Eelcko Ypma, “Recherches sur la productivité littéraire de Jacques de Viterbe jusqu’à 1300,”
Augustiniana 25 (1975): 251–56; Ciriaco Scanzillo, “Jacobus de Viterbio osa: La ‘Prima quaestio
disputata de Verbo’ del codice A. 971 delle Biblioteca dell’Archiginnasio di Bologna; ­Edizione e
note,” Asprenas 19 (1972): 41–61.
7 Jordan of Quedlinburg, Liber Vitasfratrum, lib. 2, c. 22, (eds.) Rudolph Arbesmann and Win-
fried Hümpfner (New York, 1943), 238, ll. 130–35.
8 See note 4 above.
9 James expressly cites the qdp in the following passages in his Quodlibeta: Quodl. ii, q. 2, 26, l.
135; q. 5, 89, l. 1007; q. 6, 102, l. 184; q. 7, 108, l. 121; Quodl. iii, q. 3, 55, ll. 265–66; q. 4, 81, l. 715; q.
6, 90, ll. 90–91; q. 8, 131, ll. 108–09 and 132, l. 161; q. 9, 138, ll. 16–17 and 142, ll. 133–34. James’s four
Quodlibeta and parts of his Quaestiones de divinis praedicamentis (=qdp) have been edited
by Eelcko Ypma (Würzburg, 1968–1975 [Quodlibeta]; and Rome, 1983–1986 [qdp, qq. 1–17];
editions of further questions of the qdp have appeared in Augustiniana).
360 Dumont

This passage clearly refers to a Quodlibet containing a question with the title,
“An productio creaturarum praesupponat emanationem personarum.” But
there is no quodlibetal question by James of Viterbo that answers to this title or
even to this topic. This forced Ypma to suggest a vaguely connected passage in
James’s Quodlibet i, question 3 that concerns the distinction between creation
and conservation rather than the specific issue mentioned in the reference.10
More problematic still was a second instance adduced by Ypma in which the
qdv referred to another quodlibetal question. In this case, the citation comes
from qdv, question 5, on God’s knowledge of creatures:

Ad probationem dico quod cognitio rerum in Verbo non fit formaliter per
aliquem respectum Verbi ad creaturam, quia respectus non potest esse
formaliter principium nec cognitionis nec productionis rerum. … Unde
non ­intelligo quod idea, quae ab Augustino ponitur esse principium cog-
nitionis et factionis ­rerum, importet principaliter respectum, quia ea quae
dicit Augustinus de ideis, ut quod sint principales formae et quod earum
participatione fiant quaecumque fiunt, nequaquam de tali respectu pos-
sent verificari. Quid tamen importetur nomine ideae, et an [a natura B]
essentia divina secundum se et absolute, circumscripto omni respectu
intrinsece ex parte sui, sit ratio cognoscendi et producendi plura, de hoc
forte locus erit in De quolibet ex proposito disserendi.11

The only place in James of Viterbo’s works to which the above passage could
possibly refer is his explicit definition of a divine idea in Quodlibet i, ques-
tion 5. There James expressly states that a divine idea is formally the divine
essence understood as imitable by creatures: “formaliter est idea, quae nihil
est aliud quam divina essentia ut imitabilis intellecta ab ipso Deo.”12 However,
this directly contradicts the depiction of a divine idea in the above passage
of the qdv, which emphatically denies that an idea, according to which God
produces and knows creatures, is formally the divine essence taken under any
respect or relation, such as imitability. It therefore does not seem possible that
the above passage refers to a Quodlibet by James of Viterbo.
Ultimately, the long-accepted attribution of the so-called qdv to James of
Viterbo rested on the sole fact that, in a single manuscript, these anonymous
questions immediately follow his certainly authentic Quodlibet. On the other

10 Ypma, “Recherches sur la productivité littéraire,” 255–56, citing Quodl. i, q. 3, 40–41.

11 B, f. 73vb; Ypma, “Recherches sur la productivité littéraire,” 255. Ypma’s transcription as
published contains several mistakes, which I have silently corrected from the manuscript.
12 Quodl. i, q. 5, 65, ll. 108–09.
The Authorship of the Quaestiones septem de Verbo 361

hand, contemporary chronicles and cross-references in the qdv indicate that

these two works do not belong to the same author. In fact, the true author of
the so-called qdv is established by a second manuscript containing these same
disputed questions, which, despite having been repeatedly described in detail
over the past fifty years, have never been connected to the anonymous set in
the Bologna witness.

1.3 Toulouse, Bibliothèque d’Étude et du Patrimoine (olim

Bibliothèque Municipale) 739 [= T]

Manuscript T is a large codex containing more than two dozen works, includ-
ing the Quodlibeta of Thomas of Sutton, Duns Scotus, and Peter Auriol, as well
as the De compositione angelorum and De motu angelorum of Giles of Rome.
Given its significance, T has been described in detail several times, most no-
tably by Franz Pelster, Raymond Macken, and Concetta Luna.13 Among the
­numerous works in T are a set of questions identical to the so-called qdv found
in B and traditionally attributed to James of Viterbo. Despite all the scholarly
attention given to T, the identity of its series of questions with those in B has
gone undetected. The reason for this disconnect is that T contains a formal
­annotation expressly assigning these questions not to James of Viterbo, but
rather to “Magister Henricus” of the Augustinians, identified by Pelster as
­Henry of Friemar.14

T, f. 74r marg. inf. a. m.: Quaestiones infrascriptae sunt ordinariae dispu-

tatae venerabili doctore magistro Henrico ordinis heremitarum sancti
Augustini.

13 Catalogue général des manuscrits des bibliothèques publiques des départements vii: Tou-
louse; Nîmes (Paris, 1885), 434–35; Franz Pelster, “Cod. 739 der Stadtbibliothek Toulouse
mit teilweise unbekannten Quästionen des Thomas von Sutton o.p., Johannes von Paris
o.p., Aegidius Romanus und Heinrich von Friemar o.e.s.a.,” Scholastik 32 (1957): 247–55;
Raymond Macken, Bibliotheca manuscripta Henrici de Gandavo, Henrici de Gandavo
­Opera Omnia 1–2 (Leuven, 1979), 711–17; Francesco Del Punta and Concetta Luna, Cata-
logo dei manoscritti: Francia (dipartimenti), Aegidii Romani Opera Omnia 1.1/3* (Florence,
1987), 156–66. See also Concetta Luna, Repertorio dei sermoni, Aegidii Romani Opera Om-
nia 1.6 (Florence, 1990), 103–10, 327–35, and 517–64, where she analyzes and edits the ser-
mons in T that are similar in style to those by Giles of Rome.
14 Pelster, “Cod. 739,” 253–54. As noted above, Stroick published his monograph on Henry of
Friemar the year before Pelster’s article appeared, and so was unaware of Henry’s Quaes-
tiones ordinariae.
362 Dumont

Comparison of the seven questions in the two manuscripts shows that, minor
variants aside, their titles and order are precisely the same. T, however, adds
three further questions to those in B that all descriptions of the codex construe
as belonging to this same disputation. As will be shown below, these additional
three questions belong instead to Gerard of Bologna, as do a number of other
questions in T that were left anonymous in previous descriptions.

B, ff. 64ra–79vb: T, ff. 74va–95va:

1. Utrum verbum sit ratio ali- 1. Utrum verbum sit ratio alicuius
cuius alterius productionis alterius productionis intrinsecae
in Trinitate (f. 62ra) (f. 74va)
2. Utrum productio verbi dif- 2. Utrum productio verbi differat
ferat realiter ab alia produc- ­realiter ab alia productione intrin-
tione in Trinitate in divinis seca in divinis (f. 76va)
(f. 64ra) 3. Utrum verbi ad spiritum sanctum
3. Utrum verbi ad spiritum esset personalis distinctio, si ­spiritus
sanctum esset personalis sanctus non procederet ab eo
distinctio, si spiritus ­sanctus (f. 79va)
non procederet ab eo 4. Utrum productio verbi in divinis
(f. 67ra) praesupponat in patre cognitionem
4. Utrum productio verbi in creaturarum (f. 82rb)
divinis praesupponat in 5. Utrum cognitio creaturarum in
patre cognitionem creatura- verbo pertineat in divinis ad scien-
rum (f. 70ra) tiam practicam vel speculativam
5. Utrum cognitio creatura- (f. 85rb)
rum pertineat in divinis ad 6. Utrum in nomine verbi importetur
scientiam practicam vel respectus ad creaturam (f. 88ra)
speculativam (f. 71vb) 7. Utrum respectus verbi ad dicentem
6. Utrum in nomine verbi realiter differa[n]t in divinis a funda-
importetur respectus ad mento (f. 91rb)
creaturam (f. 74rb) 8. Utrum habitus fidei sit virtuosus
7. Utrum respectus verbi ad sine caritate (f. 94ra)
dicentem realiter differat in 9. Utrum habitus fidei sit in intellectu
divinis a fundamento practico vel speculativo (f. 94rb)
(ff. 77rb–79vb) 10. Utrum habitus fidei possit simul
stare cum habitu visivo divine
­essentiae (f. 95ra–va)
The Authorship of the Quaestiones septem de Verbo 363

Comparison of the opening paragraphs of the first question in the two

manuscripts confirms that the Ordinary Questions in T are identical to those in
B. These passages are additionally important because they show that this initial
Ordinary question is the resumptio of an inception exercise, as indicated by
the phrases “ex dictis in aula resumam” and “ex determinatione habita in aula.”

B, f. 62ra: T, f. 74va:

Utrum Verbum sit ratio alicuius alte- Utrum Verbum sit ratio alicuius
rius productionis in Trinitate. alterius productionis intrinsecae.

Dicendum quod ista quaestio suppo- Dicendum quod ista quaestio

supponit quod in divinis sit aliqua
nit quod in divinis sit altera productio
a productione verbi, et quaerit utrum alia productio a productione verbi,
Verbum alterius productionis sit ratioet quaerit utrum Verbum illius
et principium. Unde in quaestione productionis sit ratio et principium.
sic procedam. Nam primo ex dictis in Unde in quaestione sic procedam.
aula resumam quandam distinctio- Nam primo ex dictis in aula re-
nem necessariam pro intellectu quaes- sumam quandam distinctionem
tionis. Secundo ex illa descendam ad necessario pro intellectu quaestio-
quaestionem. nis. Secundo ex illa descendam ad
quaestionem.
Propter primum sciendum quod ratio Propter primum sciendum quod
uno modo potest accipi pro principio ratio uno modo potest accipi pro
formali elicitivo, alio modo pro sup- principio formali elicienti [?], alio
posito eliciente, et sic accipitur in modo pro supposito eliciente, et
proposito. Sed tunc subdistinguo. Nam sic accipitur in proposito. Sed tunc
Verbum esse rationem et principium subdistinguo. Nam Verbum esse ra-
productionis per modum suppositi tionem et principium productionis
producentis potest esse dupliciter: per modum suppositi producentis
uno modo cum praecisione alterius potest esse dupliciter: uno modo
suppositi, alio modo cum coexigentia cum praecisione alterius suppositi,
alterius suppositi. Et isto secundo alio modo cum coexigentia alterius
modo intelligitur quaestio proposita, suppositi. Et isto secundo modo
ut patet ex determinatione habita in intelligitur quaestio supposita, ut
aula. patet ex determinatione habita in
aula.
Circa cuius dissolutionem tria per Circa cuius solutionem tria per
ordinem sunt videnda. ordinem sunt videnda.
364 Dumont

While Pelster’s initial identification of the Augustinian “Magister Henri-

cus” with the Parisian master Henry of Friemar was generally accepted, the
annotation in T does not in fact specify the Henry who is intended. This led
­Zumkeller to speculate that the author was possibly another Augustinian mas-
ter named Henry who was at Paris during this period, Henry of Rottleberode.15
There can be no doubt, however, that the author of these Ordinary Questions is
­indeed Henry of Friemar. This can be unquestionably established from histori-
cal inventories of his works and further confirmed by cross-references to his
Quodlibet.

1.4 Henry of Friemar

The first medieval catalogue of Henry of Friemar’s writings was compiled by

Jordan of Quedlinburg for his Liber Vitasfratrum.16 The younger Jordan and the
much older Henry were close acquaintances during their long time together at
the Erfurt studium, and in his chronicle Jordan even remarks on their frequent
conversations (prout ab eo saepius narrante audivi).17 Thus, Jordan’s list was
contemporary with Henry himself and must be taken as authoritative. Among
the seven main works of Henry that Jordan reports are two Quodlibeta and
“numerous Ordinary questions disputed at Paris.” This latter title corresponds
to that given in the above ascription in T, and, as will be shown in the cross-
references adduced below, to Henry’s own citations.

… Magister Henricus de Frimaria, cuius supra et infra pluries commemo-

ravi. … Hic inter cetera studiositatis suae opera scripsit: … Quodlibet duo,
cum multis Quaestionibus Ordinariis disputatis Parisius.18

That Jordan of Quedlinburg’s above attribution of Henry’s Quaestiones ordina-

riae disputatae Parisius refers precisely to the questions contained in B and T
can be proved in a remarkable way by the prolific and important Augustinian

15 Zumkeller, Manuskripte, 153 and idem, “Zur Frühgeschichte der Augustiner in Deutsch-
land,” Augustiniana 9 (1959): 100–04.
16 Jordan of Quedlinburg, Liber Vitasfratrum, lib. 2, c. 22, (eds.) Arbesmann and Hümpfner,
238–39, ll. 136–60; see also ibid., 474, n. 86.
17 On their relationship, see Eric L. Saak, High Way to Heaven: The Augustinian Platform be-
tween Reform and Reformation, 1292–1524 (Leiden, 2002), 223, 273–76.
18 Jordan of Quedlinburg, Liber Vitasfratrum, lib. 2, c. 22, (eds.) Arbesmann and Hümpfner,
239, ll. 155–59.
The Authorship of the Quaestiones septem de Verbo 365

author, John Capgrave, writing in England a century later.19 Capgrave’s Liber

de illustribus Henricis is a chronicle of all the English, French, and German
kings named Henry and was dedicated in 1446 to his own king, Henry vi.20
Capgrave, however, appends a final section on famous but non-royal Henrys,
reserving his final entry for the most renowned one in his own Order, Henry of
Friemar. Capgrave expressly reports Henry’s works according to the list of Jor-
dan of Quedlinburg. This report is particularly precious, because it survives in
Capgrave’s autograph copy of the De illustribus Henricis.21 In his list Capgrave
indicates which works of Henry he had actually seen. The autograph reveals
that Capgrave had left a space after the titles of these works in order to insert
their incipits directly from a copy at hand. Among the listed works, Capgrave
says that he had seen Henry’s Ordinary Questions. The autograph indeed shows
that the incipit for this work was written in darker ink, indicating that Cap-
grave had later transcribed it directly from the copy under his eyes.22 That in-
cipit matches precisely the title of the first of the Quaestiones ordinariae given
above: “Utrum verbum sit ratio alicuius alterius productionis.”

De Henrico de Urimaria, Doctore Parisiensi … Haec quattuor opuscula

ego non vidi, sed ex libro Fratris Jordani, qui vitam eius et aliorum scrip-
sit, intitulavi. Vidi autem opus Super libros Ethicorum, et Quaestiones suas
ordinarias, quarum initium est “Utrum verbum sit ratio alicuius alterius
productionis.”23

Having established beyond any doubt that the seven Ordinary Questions in
manuscripts B and T belong to Henry of Friemar, it is possible to identify their
cross-references to certain quodlibetal questions mentioned above. These ref-
erences correspond precisely to the Quodlibet ascribed to Henry of Friemar
and contained in Padova, Biblioteca Antoniana MS 662, ff. 187r–209v, which
carries this formal and dated explicit:24

19 The literature on Capgrave is enormous. See Karen A. Winstead, John Capgrave’s Fifteenth
Century (Philadelphia, 2006).
20 John Capgrave, Liber de illustribus Henricis, (ed.) Francis Charles Hingeston (London,
1858).
21 The autograph is Cambridge, Corpus Christi College, Parker Library ms 408. A beautiful
digital copy of the manuscript is available at the Parker Library’s superb website: http://
parker.stanford.edu.
22 See Hingeston’s “General Introduction” in Liber de illustribus Henricis, i–lii.
23 Capgrave, Liber de illustribus Henricis, 181, 183; Cambridge, Corpus Christi College, Parker
Library ms 408, 138 (the manuscript is paginated).
24 On the manuscript, see Giuseppe Abate and Giovanni Luisetto, Codici e manoscritti della
Biblioteca Antoniana (Vicenza, 1975), 631–32, with the explicit as transcribed on 632, and
366 Dumont

Et in hoc completur Quodlibet disputatum et determinatum Parisius per

fratrem Henricum de Alemannia Ordinis Fratrum sancti Augustini. Anno
Domini M.CCC.VI.

As indicated, Ypma had quoted the following reference from the Ordinary
Questions to a specific quodlibetal question on whether creation presuppos-
es the emanation of the divine persons. While no such title exists among the
Quodlibeta of James of Viterbo, it is found exactly in Quodlibet, question 5 of
Henry of Friemar:

Henry of Friemar, Quaestiones ordinariae, Henry of Friemar,

q. 6, T, f. 90rb (cf. B, f. 76rb–va): Quodlibet, q. 5, ed. Stroick,
Heinrich von Friemar, 206:

Ad probationem falsitatis consequentis, dico

quod ibi duae difficultates implicantur, vide-
licet an cognitio creaturarum praesupponat
in Patre productionem Verbi, et an productio Quinto quaerebatur utrum pro-
creaturarum praesupponat emanationem ductio creaturarum de necessi-
personarum. … Ad secundam autem patebit tate absoluta praesupponat in
in De quolibet quid sit dicendum, quia haec divinis causaliter emanationem
difficultas ibi ex proposito inquiritur in personarum.
quadam quaestione.

As also shown above, Ypma cited a second cross-reference in the Ordinary

Questions to a quodlibetal question in which the divine ideas are said to
­pertain to the divine essence prior to any respect or relation. While directly op-
posed to the view of James of Viterbo, this exact position is found in question
1 of the Quodlibet of Henry of Friemar. The cross-reference in manuscript T is
even more exact than that in B, as it specifies the first question of the Quodlibet,
which indeed is the location of Henry of Friemar’s statement.

Cesare Cenci, “Manoscritti e frati studiosi nella Biblioteca Antoniana di Padova,” Archi-
vum Franciscanum Historicum 69 (1976): 508. Extensive excerpts from the Quodlibet are
edited in Stroick, Heinrich von Friemar, 191–246. Individual questions are contained in
two other manuscripts but are unattributed: Assisi, Biblioteca del Sacro Convento di
S. Francesco 172, ff. 183v–189r (qq. 6 and 7) and Vatican City, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana,
Vat. Lat. 1012, ff. 121rb–122rb (q. 6) and 124va–125rb (q. 14). See Victorin Doucet, “Descrip-
tio codicis 172 bibliothecae communalis Assisiensis,” Archivum Franciscanum Historicum
25 (1932): 512 and William O. Duba, “Continental Franciscan Quodlibeta after Scotus,” in
Theological Quodlibeta in the Middle Ages: The Fourteenth Century, (ed.) Schabel, 648–49.
The Authorship of the Quaestiones septem de Verbo 367

Henry of Friemar, Quaestiones ordinariae, Henry of Friemar,

q. 5, T, f. 87rb–va (cf. B, f. 73vb): ­Quodlibet, q. 1, ed.
Stroick, Heinrich von
Friemar, 194:

Ad probationem, dico quod cognitio rerum in

verbo non sit formaliter per aliquem respectum
verbi ad creaturam, quia respectus non potest
esse formale principium cognitionis nec
productionis rerum, secundum quod fit obiective
per ipsam essentiam, quia ex se ipsa circumscripto … essentia divina ex
omni respectu [87va] ex parte sui est sufficiens se ipsa, circumscripto
ratio cognoscendi et producendi alia a se, quod omni respectu praevio et
tamen alias in prima, videlicet quaestione De determinante, est ratio
quolibet nostro, ubi ista difficultas ex proposito cognoscendi alia a se, ut
inquiritur plenius, poterit declarari. probatum est supra.

Quite apart from the references by Ypma already noted above, there are con-
versely citations in the Quodlibet of Henry of Friemar to his own Ordinary
Questions. For example, in question 5 of his Quodlibet, Henry refers to his posi-
tion in his first Ordinary Question that the Father is not the sole principle of the
emanation of the Holy Spirit. This statement is indeed found exactly in the first
Ordinary Question, as indicated below.

Finally, Abate and Luisetto note (632) in their description that immediately following
Henry’s Quodlibet a different hand has entered nearly a column of text on f. 209vb that
begins: “Hic incipiunt quaestiones disputatae. Cum unum verbum sit ratio alicuius … .”
They suggest that “forse è l’inizio di qualche quodlibet, mutilo in principio.” Rather, the
passage after the rubric actually reads: “Utrum [Cum ms.] Verbum sit ratio alicuius al-
terius productionis intrinsicae. Dicendum quod ista quaestio supponit quod in divinis
sit altera productio a productione Verbi … sic convenientia virtutis spirativae ad actum
requirit in suppositis spirantibus rationem nexus (exp.).” This is in fact the first Quaestio
disputata of Henry of Friemar, as the rubric expressly indicates. The text breaks off in
the edition of Scanzillo at 44, l. 10. Clearly, this manuscript originally contained both of
Henry’s Parisian disputations, but only the Quodlibet has been preserved.
368 Dumont

Henry of Friemar, Henry of Friemar, Quaestiones ordinariae,

Quodlibet i, q. 5, ed. q. 1, B, f. 62rb–va (cf. T, ff. 74vb–75ra):
Stroick, Heinrich von
Friemar, 208:

Sed hoc aliis non placet, immo pater neces-

sario coexigit verbum in productione spiritus
sancti, quod patet ex tribus. … Concludunt ergo
… quia tamen virtus spi- isti quod ratio mutuae coexigentiae sumitur ex
rativa quae est voluntas duobus, primo quidem ex conditione principali
mutua concors duorum spirationum, quae est voluntas, ut infra pate-
non est in patre solum, bit, quae non est foecunda nisi ut concors, nec
ideo tale principium spi- est concors nisi duorum, et ideo in solo patre
rationum non est in patre exsistens non est praecise istius actus principium,
solo cum debita conve- et ideo coexigit filium; secundo vero ex ordine
nientia ad actum; propter naturali, qui est [B 62va] inter principia actio-
quod solus pater spirare num et ipsas actiones et terminos actionum.
non potest, ut fuit alias in Et quia ista via mihi videtur probabilior, ideo
prima Quaestione Ordina- ipsam sustinendo respondendum est ad rationes
ria declaratum. ­alterius opinionis.

There is no doubt, then, that the disputed questions attributed to James of

Viterbo under the title Quaestiones septem de Verbo are instead the Pari-
sian Quaestiones ordinariae of Henry of Friemar. Moreover, Henry’s precise
cross-references between his certainly authentic Ordinary Questions and the
­Quodlibet attributed to him by express explicit put to rest any supposed doubts
about the authenticity of the latter work.25

25 Stroick (Heinrich von Friemar, 112–16) had raised doubts about the authenticity of Henry’s
Quodlibet owing to its very close correspondence in the question on divine ideas to Thom-
as of Bailly’s Quodlibet i, q. 2, disputed in 1304. Ultimately, Stroick concluded that Henry’s
Quodlibet is authentic but, as noted, did so without the benefit of the decisive evidence
provided by Henry’s Quaestiones ordinariae. It can be added that Henry’s Quodlibet is ac-
curately attested by Hugolino of Orvieto, Commentarius in quattuor libros Sententiarum,
(ed.) Willigis Eckermann, vol. 2 (Würzburg, 1988), 147: “Sic exponit Henricus senior de
Alemannia, primo Quodlibeto quaestione 17.” Cf. Henry of Friemar, Quodl. i, q. 16, (ed.)
Stroick, 238–40.
The Authorship of the Quaestiones septem de Verbo 369

1.5 Manuscript T and the Ordinary Questions of Gerard of Bologna

As indicated, manuscript T adds three further questions to the seven Ordinary

Questions of Henry as they occur in manuscript B. All previous descriptions
of T list these additional questions as included in Henry’s Ordinary Questions.
Examination shows, however, that they belong instead to the Ordinary Ques-
tion of Gerard of Bologna.26 Moreover, while not detected in prior descriptions
of T, seven more Ordinary Questions of Gerard can be identified elsewhere in
the codex. Located some sixty folios earlier in the manuscript, these further
questions are scattered among what all descriptions list simply as anonymous
works.27 Altogether, then, manuscript T in fact constitutes a fourth, a newly
identified witness to the first ten Ordinary Questions of Gerard, which comprise
those on the theological virtues. (In three separate questions Gerard deals with
the natural virtues.) We list these questions following the structure of Luna’s
description, which is organized according to the different parts of the codex.
The numbering of the questions, added by Del Punta and Luna for reference,
has been retained for comparison.

ms T, Part 1, Section 6 (ff. 32va–56vb), Del Punta and Gerard of

Luna, Catalogo dei manoscritti, 157: Bologna,
Qq. Ord.

q. 1 Utrum habitus caritatis viatoris et comprehensoris sint = q. 9

idem habitus specie (ff. 32vb–34vb)
q. 2 Utrum habitus caritatis possit diminui cum affectu = q. 10
(ff. 34vb–36vb)
q. 3 Utrum necesse vel possibile fuerit ab aeterno mundum
fuisse (ff. 37ra–41va)

26 For the other manuscripts of Gerard’s Ordinary Questions, which have not been edited,
see Bartholomaeus Maria Xiberta, De scriptoribus scholasticis saeculi xiv ex ordine Car-
melitarum (Louvain, 1931), 87, and Hubert Borde, “Gérard de Bologne O. Carm. († 1317):
Sa conception de la théologie et de la puissance de Dieu” (Ph.D. dissertation, Université
Paris-Sorbonne, 2005), 94, 110–11.
27 Originally Pelzer (“Cod. 739,” 251) had attributed q. 4 (ff. 41va–43rb), on the subject of
theology, to Giles of Rome owing to its use of Giles’s Tractatus de subiecto theologiae. Con-
cetta Luna, who edited the question in T, showed rather that it most likely is not by Giles
but was nonetheless influenced by his doctrine. See her article “Una nuova questione di
Egidio Romano De subiecto theologiae,” Freiburger Zeitschrift für Philosophie und Theologie
37 (1990): 399–400 (analysis), and 38 (1991): 159–73 (edition).
370 Dumont

ms T, Part 1, Section 6 (ff. 32va–56vb), Del Punta and Gerard of

Luna, Catalogo dei manoscritti, 157: Bologna,
Qq. Ord.

q. 4 Utrum deus secundum quod deus sit subiectum in See note 27.
sacra pagina (ff. 41va–43rb)
q. 5 Utrum habitus fidei sit nobilior omnibus habitibus = q. 4
intellectualibus naturaliter inditis et acquisitis (ff.
43va–44ra)
q. 6 Utrum spes sit virtus distincta ab aliis virtutibus = q. 5
theologicis (f. 44ra–vb)
q. 7 Utrum habitus caritatis possit augeri secundum gradus = q. 6
in essentia vel secundum gradus in esse (ff. 44vb-47vb)
q. 8 Utrum caritas sit habitus unus creatus in anima = q. 7
(ff. 47vb–49rb)
q. 9 Utrum caritas sit in anima secundum eius essentiam = q. 8
vel potentiam (ff. 49rb–52vb)
q. 10 Utrum natura humana in Christo sit nobilior natura
angelica secundum quod consideratur in puris natu-
ralibus (ff. 52vb–53ra)
q. 11 Utrum lucifer appetierit aequalitatem dei sive potuerit
appetere (ff. 53rb–va)
q. 12 Quaeritur utrum divina essentia posset videri a beatis
sine specie (ff. 53vb–55va)
q. 13 Utrum augmentum caritatis habeat determinatum
terminum (ff. 55va–56vb)

ms T, Part 1, Section 9 (ff. 74va–95va), Del Punta and Gerard of Bologna,

Luna, Catalogo dei manoscritti, 159: Qq. Ord.

q. 8 Utrum habitus fidei sit virtuosus sine caritate (f. = q. 1

94ra–rb)
q. 9 Utrum habitus fidei sit in intellectu practico vel = q. 2
speculativo (ff. 94rb–95ra)
q. 10 Utrum habitus fidei possit simul stare cum habitu = q. 3
visivo divine essentiae (f. 95ra–va)
The Authorship of the Quaestiones septem de Verbo 371

It seems convenient to identify further items in manuscript T that were left as

anonymous in prior descriptions. These include excerpts from the Sentences
of John of Sterngassen and isolated questions from both Richard of Middleton
and Giles of Rome.

1.6 Manuscript T and Richard of Middleton, John of Sterngassen, and

Giles of Rome

In Part 1 of manuscript T, whose quires are misbound, Del Punta and Luna list
the following anonymous question as item 5:

5 (ff. 16rb–17vb): Anonymus, Quaestio. inc.: Utrum angeli imprimant

­formas corporales in materia vel educantur per naturam de potentia
materie et intendo loqui de formis viventium et non viventium que non
generantur per propagationem; exp.: quia numerus illorum principiorum
non est secundum numerum individuorum generabilium et corruptibili-
um, sed secundum numerum specierum.

This is in fact Quaestio disputata 17 of Richard of Middleton. The copy in T ap-

pears to be a slight abbreviation, particularly in the replies to the initial objec-
tions, omitting the last response altogether.28
Part 3 of T contains a long section of some thirty-one questions marked
as anonymous by Del Punta and Luna. In fact, the first fifteen of these ques-
tions are from the Sentences commentary of John of Sterngassen, a Domini-
can roughly contemporary with Henry of Friemar. Unfortunately, the precise
date and location of Sterngassen’s commentary is not known. It is strongly
Thomistic in orientation and enjoyed a circulation equivalent to the Sentences
of James of Metz and William Peter Godinus. Its occurrence in T had not been
previously identified. The following table gives the questions in T with their
title and edition, if available, in the fundamental study on Sterngassen’s Sen-
tences by Walter Senner.29

28 These questions have been recently edited and translated into French by Alain Boureau
in Richard de Mediavilla: Questions disputées, 6 vols. (Paris, 2011–14). The present question
is found in vol. 3, 175–229, and the above explicit occurs on 226, l. 28.
29 See Walter Senner, Johannes von Sterngassen op und sein Sentenzenkommentar, 2 vols.
(Berlin, 1995), which contains a complete list of questions with many of them edited, as
well as his “Jean de Sterngassen et son commentaire des Sentences,” Revue Thomiste 97
(1997): 83–98. See also Russell Friedman, “The Sentences Commentary, 1250–1320: G ­ eneral
372 Dumont

Finally, in this same section, question 29 can be identified as a copy of a

previously unidentified question by Giles of Rome. While identical in title to
Quodlibet ii, question 4 of Godfrey of Fontaines, it is nevertheless by Giles, as
will be established elsewhere.30 For reference, all questions in this section are
listed below according to the description by Del Punta and Luna with the pres-
ent identifications indicated.

ms T, Part 3, Section 2 (ff. 119va–31rb), Del Edition in Senner,

Punta and Luna, Catalogo dei manoscritti, 162–63: Johannes von
­Sterngassen, vol. 2:

q. 1 Quaeritur primo utrum theologia sit Prol., q. 1, a. 1, 1,

scientia (f. 119va–b) 81–89.
q. 2 Secundo quaeritur utrum essentia animae sit lib. 1, d. 3, q. 2. a. 1, 3,
eius potentia (ff. 119vb–120va) 115–46.
q. 3 Quaeritur utrum in creatura differt esse et lib. 1, d. 8, q. 1, a. 1, 4,
­essentia (ff. 120va–121rb) 149–73.
q. 4 Quaeritur utrum caritas sit aliquid creatum in lib. 1, d. 17A, q. 1 a.
anima qua diligimus invicem (f. 121rb–vb) 1, 7.
q. 5 Quaeritur utrum caritas augeatur (ff. lib. 1, d. 17B, q. 1, a.
121vb–122rb) 1, 8.
q. 6 Quaeritur utrum sit necessarium [notum ed.] lib. 2, d. 1, q. 1, a. 1, 17.
omne ens esse creatum a deo (f. 122rb–vb)
q. 7 Quaeritur utrum angelus sit compositus ex lib. 2, d. 3, q. 1, a. 1, 18.
materia et forma rationis (ff. 122vb–123ra)
q. 8 Quaeritur utrum caelum habeat materiam lib. 2, d. 12, q. 1, a. 1,
(f. 123ra–va) 21, 236–47.
q. 9 Quaeritur utrum deus potuit producere mate- lib. 2, d. 12, q. 2, a. 1,
riam quae est purum possibile (f. 123va–b) 21.
q. 10 Quaeritur utrum lux habeat esse reale vel lib. 2, dd. 13–15, q. 1,
virtuale (ff. 123vb–124ra) a. 3, 22.
q. 11 Quaeritur utrum anima sit composita ex ma- lib. 2, dd. 16–17, q. 1,
teria et forma (f. 124ra) a. 1, 22, 248–51.
q. 12 Queritur utrum anima intellectiva sit forma lib. 2, dd. 16–17, q. 1,
corporis humani (f. 124ra–b) a. 3, 22, 249, 252–63.

Trends, the Impact of the Religious Orders, and the Test Case of Predestination,” in Medi-
aeval Commentaries on the Sentences of Peter Lombard, Volume i: Current Research, (ed.)
Gillian R. Evans (Leiden, 2002), 58–59.
30 See my forthcoming study, “New Questions by Giles of Rome (i): Intension and Remission
of Forms.”
The Authorship of the Quaestiones septem de Verbo 373

ms T, Part 3, Section 2 (ff. 119va–31rb), Del Edition in Senner,

Punta and Luna, Catalogo dei manoscritti, 162–63: Johannes von
­Sterngassen, vol. 2:

q. 13 Quaeritur utrum praeter animam in homine lib. 2, dd. 16–17, q. 2.,

sit aliqua forma (f. 124rb–vb) a. 1, 23.
q. 14 Quaeritur utrum forma que educitur de lib. 2, dd. 18–19, q. 1,
materia aliquid in materia praeexistat (ff. a. 1, 23, 264–71.
124vb–125rb):
q. 15 Queritur utrum anima humana educatur de lib. 2, dd. 18–19, q. 2,
potentia materiae virtute seminis (f. 125rb) a. 1, 23.
q. 16 Quaeritur utrum dominus [pro deus] potest
facere materiam sine forma (f. 125rb–va)
q. 17 Quaeritur utrum spiritus sanctus distinguer-
etur a filio si non procederet ab eo (f. 125va)
q. 18 Quaeritur utrum Christus defecisset senio, si
non fuisset occisus (f. 125va–b)
q. 19 Quaeritur utrum Christus ascendit super
omnes caelos (f. 125vb)
q. 20 Utrum genus possit salvari in una [fort. pro
unica] specie (f. 125vb)
q. 21 Utrum ista consequentia “si deus quolibet die
fecisset unum lapidem, ergo omnibus simul”
sit bona vel quod sit actu infinitum (f. 125vb)
q. 22 Quid sit principium individuationis
(ff. 125vb–126ra)
q. 23 Utrum differant realiter essentia et esse
(f. 126ra)
q. 24 Utrum illud quod videtur in speculo sit imago
(f. 126ra–b)
q. 25 Utrum quando quantitas [pro qualitas] inten-
ditur et remittitur maneat numero in eodem
subiecto (f. 126rb)
q. 26 Utrum dimensionis increatae [pro dimensio-
nes interminatae] praecedant rem generatam
sive formam in materia (f. 126rb)
q. 27 Utrum aliquod corpus suum induebat [fort.
pro simplex moveat] se ipsum, puta gravia et
levia (f. 126rb–vb)
374 Dumont

ms T, Part 3, Section 2 (ff. 119va–31rb), Del Edition in Senner,

Punta and Luna, Catalogo dei manoscritti, 162–63: Johannes von
­Sterngassen, vol. 2:

q. 28 Utrum sint sicut ponendi epicycli vel ecclesi-

astici [pro eccentrici] secundum philosophos
propter tres rationes quas ponit Commenta-
tor (f. 126vb)
q. 29 Quaestio est utrum substantia creata possit Giles of Rome, Quaes-
esse immediatum principium alterius opera- tio disputata
tionis (f. 127ra–va)
q. 30 Utrum deus sub aliqua ratione absoluta erit
subiectum in sacra scriptura homini revelata
(ff. 127va–129rb)
q. 31 Quaestio utrum theologia sit imago sapientiae
divinae increatae (ff. 129rb–131rb)

1.7 Conclusion

The disputed questions attributed to James of Viterbo for nearly a century un-
der the pseudo-title of Quaestiones septem de Verbo are in reality the Quaestio-
nes ordinariae of Henry of Friemar, who was the Augustinian theologian regent
at Paris some five or more years after the tenure of James. The first of these
questions is actually Henry’s resumptio of his inception exercise, reflecting the
practice of publishing these inaugural disputations in quodlibetal or ordinary
form.31 Given that Henry’s first Quodlibet is dated by explicit to 1306, we can

31 For example, John of Pouilly’s first Quaestio ordinaria is taken from his vesperies. See
Ludwig Hödl, “Die Kritik des Johannes de Polliaco an der philosophischen und theolo-
gischen Ratio in der Auseinandersetzung mit den averroistischen Unterscheidungsleh-
ren: Eine historische Studie zu den Quaestiones quodlibetales und Quaestiones ordinariae
des Johannes de Polliaco,” in Miscellanea Martin Grabmann: Gedenkblatt zum 10. Todestag
(Munich, 1959), 15–16; and Christopher Schabel, “John of Pouilly’s Quaestiones ordina-
riae de scientia Dei,” Recherches de théologie et philosophie médiévales 81 (2014): 260–62.
Also, in the same period Thomas Wylton incorporated his aula verbatim into his quodli-
betal question on the formal distinction. See my forthcoming “The Inception of Thomas
Wylton.”
The Authorship of the Quaestiones septem de Verbo 375

conclude that he incepted in 1305. This is confirmed by his role as an opposing

master in the inception of John of Pouilly in either 1306 or 1307, whose own
Ordinary Questions are closely related to those of Henry.32 Reuniting the two
manuscripts B and T makes possible a more reliable edition of these Ordinary
Questions by Henry, who was present at Paris during a golden period, when
Duns Scotus and Meister Eckhart were lecturing or disputing.33 Indeed, Henry
likely incepted in the same year as Duns Scotus, and his attack on Scotus’s doc-
trine of univocity registers one of the earliest Parisian reactions.34 At the same
time, the delisting of these questions from the corpus of James of Viterbo will
prevent futile attempts to reconcile doctrinal conflicts or postulate evolutions
in his thought that in fact never existed.

32 On the dating of John of Pouilly’s inception and regency, see Schabel, “John of Pouilly,”
257–59. For example, Henry and John of Pouilly exchanged arguments on the question
of the divine ideas. In his own Quaestiones ordinariae Pouilly quotes Henry’s opposing
arguments at length, samples of which are transcribed by Stroick (Heinrich von Friemar,
124–25, n. 59). Unfortunately, Stroick (xi) gives the manuscript from which he has tran-
scribed these passages of Pouilly’s Quaestiones ordinariae as Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale
de France, lat. 15372. Rather, Stroick has used lat. 14656. Also, Stoick’s reference on 124, n.
59 to the passage containing Pouilly’s citation of Henry should be to f. 215vb, not 215rb. See
also Schabel, “John of Pouilly,” 263.
33 On Henry’s relation to Meister Eckhart, see Jeremiah Hackett, “The Reception of Meister
Eckhart: Mysticism, Philosophy and Theology in Henry of Friemar (the Elder) and Jorda-
nus of Quedlinburg,” in Meister Eckhart in Erfurt, (eds.) Andreas Speer and Lydia Wegener
(Berlin, 2005), 560–72, esp. 560, n. 7 for a comparative summary of their careers.
34 Quodl., q. 17, (ed.) Stroick, Heinrich von Friemar, 241: “Dicendum quod … licet communis
sit sententia omnium philosophorum et sanctorum et etiam doctorum tam modernorum
quam antiquorum quod nihil dicatur de Deo et creatura univoce, quidam tamen novitate
gaudentes contrarium asserunt moti quibusdam rationibus sophisticis.”
 Appendix 2

The So-called Abbreviatio in i Sententiarum Aegidii

Romani of James of Viterbo: A New Hypothesis

Gianpiero Tavolaro*

2.1 Introduction

In the list of the authentic writings of James of Viterbo, first David Gutiér-
rez and then Eelcko Ypma mention an Abbreviatio in i Sententiarum Aegidii
Romani.1 This brief treatise is preserved in a single codex, the autograph manu-
script Naples, Biblioteca Nazionale, vii C 52.2

* The present work contains some of the results of my doctoral research, conducted at the
University of Salerno and the École Pratique des Hautes Études in Paris under the direction
of Alessandro Conti and Olivier Boulnois, to whom I owe my deepest gratitude. I also wish to
thank Antoine Côté and Martin Pickavé for inviting me to contribute to this volume, pending
a complete publication of my research.
1 See David Gutiérrez, “De vita et scriptis beati Iacobi de Viterbio,” Analecta Augustiniana 16
(1937–38): 284; Eelcko Ypma, “Recherches sur la productivité littéraire de Jacques de Viterbe
jusqu’à 1300,” Augustiniana 25 (1975): 281–82. Ypma’s study is restricted to the writings of
James’s Parisian regency.
2 The manuscript, in parchment, comprises sixty 265x205 mm sheets recto/verso. It lacks an
incipit but begins with the words: “Sicut dicit Philosophus in primo Physicorum, innata est
nobis uia ex notioribus nobis et certioribus, in ea que nobis sunt ignota et incerta” (f. 1ra).
The text ends with the words: “… in quantum nobis reuelatur ab ipso Deo, in quo sit finis et
consummatio nostri sermonis. Qui existens omnium principium atque finis sine principio et
sine fine uiuit et regnat unus Deus benedictus in secula seculorum. Amen. Explicit et cetera”
(f. 60vb). The status of the Naples manuscript as James’s autograph is established by the pres-
ence of several elements that are usually present in autographs (cursive and compact script,
the distinctive peculiarity of the letters, extensive use of abbreviations and the presence of
personal abbreviations, emendations, and signs of the drafting process) and by comparison
with another autograph by James that has already been identified (Vatican City, Biblioteca
Apostolica Vaticana, Arch. Cap. S. Pietro, D. 213, ff. 1r–126v [Sermones diversarum rerum]): it
has the same morphology of letters and system of abbreviations, the employment of similar
marginal summarizing schemes, and the same system of punctuation. See, among others,
Jacqueline Hamesse, “Les autographes à l’époque scolastique: Approche terminologique et
méthodologique,” in Gli autografi medievali: Problemi paleografici e filologici; Atti del con-
vegno di studio della Fondazione Ezio Franceschini, Erice, 25 settembre–2 ottobre 1990, (eds.)

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���8 | doi 10.1163/9789004361881_014

The So-called Abbreviatio in I Sententiarum Aegidii Romani 377

According to the historiographical tradition, the Abbreviatio was composed

either between 1300 and 1302 in Naples (Gutiérrez’s hypothesis) or between
1283 and 1285 in one of the Augustinian convents in the Roman province
(Ypma’s hypothesis). Not only the dating of the work, but also its contents are
uncertain. Both Gutiérrez and Ypma considered it to be an abridgement of
Giles of Rome’s commentary on the first book of the Sentences, but in fact the
title is not autograph but was added to the manuscript later; moreover, the
work has none of the formal characteristics of a shortened version of a com-
mentary on the Sentences. Neither Gutiérrez nor Ypma based their hypotheses
on a detailed examination of the manuscript and its contents; at the end of the
1970s, Pasquale Giustiniani edited six opening questions on theological science
and distinction 36 on divine ideas,3 but he did not use them to support Gutiér-
rez’s arguments, which he shared but to which he did not add anything. The
purpose of this short piece is to discuss briefly these “open questions” in order
to provide a new hypothesis about the so-called Abbreviatio and some remarks
on its nature and its sources.

2.2 ms vii C 52 and James of Viterbo

According to the hypothesis proposed by Gutiérrez4 and later adopted by

­Giustiniani,5 the Abbreviatio was composed in Naples between 1300 and 1302,
when James was the lector principalis of the Augustinian studium generale in
that city. This hypothesis rests on two main arguments. The first is based on
the “full conformity” (plena conformitas)6 of the Abbreviatio’s doctrines with

Paolo Chiesa and Lucia Pinelli (Spoleto, 1994), 200; Paolo Vian, “Giacomo da Viterbo (m. 1308):
Sermones. Autografo,” in Diventare santo: Itinerari e riconoscimenti della santità tra l­ ibri, docu-
menti e immagini, (eds.) Giovanni Morello, Ambrogio M. Piazzoni and Paolo Vian (Vatican
City and Cagliari, 1998), 131. Two sermons have been edited in Gianpiero Tavolaro, “Opus
­nature est opus Dei: Potestas regalis et potestas sacerdotalis nel pensiero di Giacomo da Vit-
erbo,” Archives d’histoire doctrinale et littéraire du Moyen Âge 81 (2014): 39–98 (edition: 90–98).
3 See Pasquale Giustiniani, “Due questioni inedite sullo statuto epistemologico della teolo-
gia nella Abbreviatio in i Sententiarum Aegidii Romani di Giacomo da Viterbo,” Asprenas 26
(1979): 23–57 (edition: 45–57); “Il problema delle idee in Dio secondo Giacomo da Viterbo,
oesa,” Analecta Augustiniana 42 (1979): 283–342 (edition: 324–38); “La teologia studiata sec-
ondo le 4 cause aristoteliche in un’opera inedita di Giacomo da Viterbo o.e.s.a.,” Asprenas 27
(1980): 161–88 (edition: 169–88).
4 See Gutiérrez, “De vita et scriptis beati Iacobi de Viterbio,” 294–95.
5 See Giustiniani, “Due questioni inedite,” 23–30.
6 Gutiérrez, “De vita et scriptis beati Iacobi de Viterbio,” 295.
378 Tavolaro

those of Thomas Aquinas. According to the supporters of this hypothesis,

this conformity can be easily inferred from James’s general preference in the
­Abbreviatio for Aquinas’s positions over those of Giles. According to Gutiérrez
and ­Giustiniani, such a preference cannot date back to James’s early teaching
activities, when he would have been too young to distance himself from Giles,
the first Augustinian master in 1285 and the official doctor of the Order since
1287. The plena conformitas with Aquinas’s opinions is disproven, however, by
an analysis of the works that James wrote in Naples and by a comparison with
those from the period of his Parisian regency (though it is true that in his later
works, such as the Summa de peccatorum distinctione,7 he seems to use Aqui-
nas’s texts and doctrines more freely).
Moreover, it is unlikely that James would have written an abridgement of
Giles’s commentary on the Sentences while he was himself lecturing on the Sen-
tences. Like Gutiérrez, Giustiniani distinguished the Abbreviatio from James’s
Lectura.8 They both assumed that it is the latter that is preserved in the manu-
script Siena, Biblioteca Comunale, G.V.15 under the title Lectura super quattuor
libros Sententiarum. This second argument is weakened, however, in the light
of Ypma’s demonstration that this Lectura was not written by James, but by an
author belonging to a Dominican setting, perhaps Romanus of Rome.9 Thus,
the existence of a Lectura distinct from the Abbreviatio has at present no con-
firmation in the manuscript tradition.
The second hypothesis was advanced by Ypma,10 but it is no less problem-
atic. It dates the Abbreviatio back to 1283–85, when James was a lector in one of
the Augustinian convents in the province of Rome. Contrary to Gutiérrez and
Giustiniani, Ypma claims that as lector principalis James was not allowed to de-
vote himself to lecturing on the Sentences, nor was he allowed to lecture from
commentaries by other authors, especially not in the form of abridgements,
since the task of a lector principalis was to explain the Scriptures and to lecture
on philosophical matters. Ypma also argues that James did not write the Abbre-
viatio at the time when he was baccalaureus sententiarius, since the regulations

7 See Domenico Ambrasi, “La Summa de peccatorum distinctione del b. Giacomo da Viterbo
dal ms. vii G 101 della Biblioteca nazionale di Napoli,” Asprenas 6 (1959): 47–78, 189–218
(transcription of the incipit, prologus, and selected texts), and 288–308.
8 The first medieval catalogue of James’s works was composed by Jordan of Quedlinburg,
who ascribes to James a text entitled Lectura. See Jordan of Quedlinburg, Liber Vitasfra-
trum, lib. 2, c. 22, (eds.) Rudolph Arbesmann and Winfried Hümpfner (New York, 1943),
238, ll. 133–35 (with apparatus criticus): “Item lecturam Sententiarum cum multis aliis
conceptibus suis, qui post mortem suam non omnes ad lucem venerunt, quia quidam
furati sunt opera sua multa facientes sibi de falso cornua.”
9 See Ypma, “Recherches sur la productivité littéraire,” 230–43.
10 See ibid., 244–49.
The So-called Abbreviatio in I Sententiarum Aegidii Romani 379

of the University of Paris forbade bachelors from lecturing on the Sentences

using the notes of others.11 For this reason, Ypma prefers to date the composi-
tion of the Abbreviatio to a date before James obtained the title of Bachelor of
the Sentences.
However, even if Ypma’s argument about the tasks of the lector principalis is
valid, it does not necessarily entail the dating that he proposes, since the regu-
lations of the University of Paris allowed bachelors to use authorities and argu-
ments that could be helpful for the debate on certain questions.12 Moreover, in
light of the fact that James uses many texts by Giles, it seems more likely that
the composition of the Abbreviatio was subsequent to his reintegration as a
teacher and the decision of the Order to appoint him as the intellectual guide
of the Augustinians.
In any case, these two hypotheses refer to the question of the real con-
tent of the treatise, which does not exhibit the typical characteristics of an
abridgement (abbreviatio). The title was affixed to the manuscript on the
recto of the first sheet in the late 15th or early 16th century and on the verso
of the last sheet in the 15th century.13 According to Ludger Meier, who has stud-
ied the rich tradition of the abbreviationes of Bonaventure’s commentary on
the Sentences in the Franciscan school of Erfurt in the 15th century,14 abridge-
ments can be divided into two categories: abbreviationes brevissimae and

11 Statuta Facultatis theologiae, in Chartularium Universitatis Parisiensis, (eds.) Heinrich

Denifle and Émile Chatelain (Paris, 1889–1897), vol. 2, n. 1189, para. 8: “Item, quod nullus
legens Sententias le[gat quest]ionem suam aut suum principium per quaternum aut alias
in scriptis.”
12 Ibid.: “Non tamen prohibetur vel inhibetur quin bacalarius possit portare ad cathedram
aliquid, ex quo possit si necesse fuerit sibi reducere ad memoriam aliquas difficultates
tangentes questionem suam aut argumenta seu auctoritates ad ipsam questionem aut
aliquam expositionem pertinentes.”
13 The first time that the title appears in a catalogue of works of James is at the end of the
16th century, in the catalogue written by Maurizio Terzo of Parma: he was the first to
ascribe the Abbreviatio to James, even though the catalogue of the Augustinian convent
of Rome (dated to 1478) assigns to him a work that begins with the same words (“Prin-
cipium. Sicut dicit Philosophus in i Phisicorum”) and ends with the words “Finis. Super
primo libro Sententiarum.” See David Gutiérrez, “La Biblioteca di S. Agostino di Roma nel
secolo xv. B. Inventario del 1478,” Analecta Augustiniana 28 (1965): 79, n. 98. Maurizio
Terzo’s catalogue was published, together with a Vita beati Jacobi, in Alessio S. Mazzoc-
chi, De Sanctorum Neapolitanae ecclesiae episcoporum cultu (Naples, 1753), vol. 2, 413–18.
The analysis of the manuscript suggests that James’s text does not consist exclusively of
quotations from Giles of Rome, but also from Thomas Aquinas, as the initials E (Egidius/
Giles) and T (Thomas) in the margin of the text indicate, with Aquinas constituting the
primary source.
14 Ludger Meier, “De schola franciscana Erfordiensi,” Antonianum 5 (1930): 157–202.
380 Tavolaro

abbreviationes breves. The former are the shortest, since they briefly lay out
the opinion of the author they refer to, while the latter are characterized by
a more complex structure reproducing the typical framework of a commen-
tary, organized into arguments for and against (pro and contra), the respondeo,
and answers to each argument. In both cases, however, the “one to one” re-
lationship between the original text and its abridgement must be preserved.
An interesting example of the first kind of abbreviatio is the Conclusiones of
Humbert of Preuilly, written in Paris between 1290 and 1294. Humbert, a Cister-
cian master active in Paris between 1290 and 1298, used Aquinas’s and Giles’s
commentaries on the Sentences as sources for his abridgement: for the first
book of the Sentences he summarized Giles’s commentary, and for the other
three he shortened Aquinas’s.15 Unlike in James’s text, however, texts of Giles
and Aquinas are never combined together within the same article or question,
though in the prologue of the Conclusiones Humbert evidently used a text from
Giles’s Quodlibeta in order to define theology as an organum ad felicitatem.16
In any case, James’s text does not have a simple structure such as that of the
Conclusiones: James not only offers the solution proposed in his source text,
but he also provides several pro and contra arguments, and the main answer
and other secondary answers, one for each argument, in accordance with the
typical structure of a commentary on the Sentences.
Clearly James’s treatise is not an abbreviatio brevissima, but it also differs
from the abbreviationes breves in its use of multiple sources, namely, Giles and

15 Monica Brinzei maintains that the use of both Aquinas’s and Giles’s commentaries can
be explained by considering that, when Humbert wrote the Conclusiones, Giles had pub-
lished only the first book of his commentary, and probably Humbert did not hesitate to
use Aquinas’s commentary for the other books because of Giles’s closeness to different
doctrines of Aquinas; see Monica Brinzei, “Le premier commentaire cistercien sur les
Sentences de Pierre Lombard par Humbert de Preuilly (m. 1298),” Bulletin de philosophie
médiévale 53 (2011): 84–85.
16 Humbert shared Giles’s position: theology has God as its subject (subiectum) and its main
purpose is to order us to the final glorification, which consists in loving God and is at-
tained by knowing God.

Humbert of Preuilly, Conclusiones, prol., q. 3, Giles of Rome, Quodl. iii, q. 2, corp.

Reims, Bibliothèque municipale, 493, f. 1rb (Louvain, 1646), 128b
Glorificatio tamen est principalis ratio Tertia uia sumitur ex parte huius
subiecti theologie, quia quicquid in theo- scientie, ut refertur ad suum finem.
logia consideratur, hoc est in quantum nos Est etiam hec scientia quasi organum
ordinat ad nostram glorificationem; unde et ad felicitatem, et ad hunc finem data
theologia est organum ad felicitatem et datur est homini propter beatitudinem
nobis in cultum diuinum. adipiscendam.
The So-called Abbreviatio in I Sententiarum Aegidii Romani 381

Thomas Aquinas.17 Moreover, an analysis of the distinctions reveals that their

structure does not always correspond to that of Giles’s commentary.18 Lastly,
the structure of questions and articles is not the same as the one found in Giles’s
work. These differences are partly due to the dependence on Aquinas, but this
does not explain everything. For both the content and the structure, therefore,
James’s work is not comparable to an abridgement, since it lacks the “faithful”
reference to a single model, the essential characteristic of an abbreviatio.
An analysis of the manuscript shows that the text preserved in it is more
like an independent work on book 1 of the Sentences. First of all, its forty-eight
distinctions—corresponding exactly to the forty-eight distinctions in the first
book of Peter Lombard’s Sentences—are preceded by a text with the introduc-
tory invocation, “Adsit principio Virgo Maria meo” (f. 1r), which identifies it as
the principium, that is, the inaugural lesson held by a Parisian bachelor at the
beginning of his course on the Sentences.19 This kind of invocation is present in
several anonymous Latin manuscripts from before the 16th century and some
of them contain commentaries on the Sentences.20 In such cases, the invoca-
tion is a general request for help that the scribe addresses to the Virgin Mary to
obtain her assistance in his copying. Since James’s manuscript is an autograph,
it seems more likely that in this context the word “principium” is a technical
term meaning the beginning of the reading of the Sentences. In confirmation of
this is the fact that the text of this principium concludes at the end of the verso
of the first folio with the marginal gloss “Ista sufficiant ad presens. Rengratior
uobis et cetera.” This is followed by the commentary proper, which starts from
the prologue to the Sentences (“Cupientes aliquid de penuria”), introduced at
the top of the first column of the next folium (f. 2ra) by the marginal notation
“Prologus.” Moreover, here, as elsewhere, the marginal glosses attest that the
transmitted version of this commentary is very close to an oral lecture, since
it addresses an audience rather than a reader. The structure of the text, which
is made up mainly of direct and often very long quotations from Aquinas and
Giles, suggests that the text is not a reportatio recorded by James from oral lec-
tures by other people, while the presence of numerous corrections, deletions,

17 James uses many of Aquinas’s texts, and the solutions he proposes are not always those of
Giles.
18 James always quotes Giles’s commentary on the first book of the Sentences in the re-
worked version of the Ordinatio.
19 James’s principium has not previously been identified as such; Giustiniani edited this text
as the prologus to the Abbreviatio. See Giustiniani, “Due questioni inedite,” 45.
20 See Colophons de manuscrits occidentaux des origines au XVIe siècle, (ed.) Bénédictins du
Bouveret (Fribourg, 1965–1982), vol. 6, nn. 19994–20012.
382 Tavolaro

and additions shows that the text was reworked by its own author. Finally, the
sections of text that are not direct or indirect quotations from Aquinas or Giles
share stylistic and methodological features with James’s Parisian disputed
questions, such as, for example, the comparison between different opinions in
order to identify the more reasonable or more likely doctrine.
Thus, the text preserved in ms vii C 52 of Naples and known as the Abbre-
viatio in i Sententiarum Aegidii Romani can be identified with the set of notes21
used by James to “read” the Sentences,22 and can be identified as James’s Lec-
tura super primum Sententiarum. It corresponds to the first step in writing a
commentary on the Sentences (the so-called lectura lecta)—often several years
could be required before a reviewed edition was made—and it was held at
Paris between 1287 and 1288.23

2.3 James’s Lectura: Methodological Remarks and Sources

According to the periodization of commentaries on the Sentences proposed

by Russell Friedman, James’s Lectura should be dated to the beginning of the
second phase (1285–1300),24 which was marked by the opposition between
the Dominican and Franciscan traditions in the wake of the condemna-
tions of 1277 and of the Correctorium fratris Thomae by William de la Mare.

21 Evidently, the texts of Aquinas and Giles are used as argumenta or auctoritates.
22 Tradition speaks of a Lectura, Commentarii, and later of Notabilia and a Liber divisionis
s­ uper Sententias, but the texts that correspond to these titles cannot be confirmed by the
documentary evidence, as no manuscript transmits them. It is possible that they are lost,
but it is very likely that these different titles are the result of errors in transmission of the
title of the very same work on the Sentences.
23 James became baccalaureus formatus in 1288: see “Capitula antiqua prouincie Romane:
­Capitulum prouinciale loci Sancti Nicholai de Stricto, Mense Madii, in die Sancto Pen-
tecostes 1288,” Analecta Augustiniana 2 (1907/1908): 272. The mendicant orders were
­allowed an exemption from the rule of the two-year reading of the Sentences; see Chartu-
larium Universitatis Parisiensis, vol. 2, n. 1189, para. 30.
24 See Russell L. Friedman, “The Sentences Commentary, 1250–1320: General Trends, the Im-
pact of Religious Orders, and the Test Case of Predestination,” in Mediaeval Commentar-
ies on the Sentences of Peter Lombard. Volume i: Current Research, (ed.) Gillian R. Evans
(Leiden, 2002), 56: “1285 is by no means a magic date; but in the 1290’s we can see clearly a
change of structure of Sentences commentaries and in the pattern of their being read that
continues throughout the rest of the period under examination here. … Moreover, there
are doctrinal developments after 1285 that speak for making a cutoff point at 1285. In the
aftermath of the condemnations of 1277, which touched on some of Thomas Aquinas’s
doctrine, and the writing of the Correctorium fratris Thomae by William de la Mare, there
is a general drawing of doctrinal lines starting around 1285.”
The So-called Abbreviatio in I Sententiarum Aegidii Romani 383

With respect to this periodization, the Lectura shows that in its early phase of
formation the “school” of the Augustinian Hermits was deeply tied to, or at least
attentive to, the Thomistic tradition, as well as to the teachings of Giles of
Rome.25 Moreover, the reference to other theological traditions in James’s later
works confirms that the formation of the Augustinian school was a complex
process. The Lectura thus offers a singular example of the teaching activities of
an Augustinian bachelor before the foundation in Paris of the Order’s indepen-
dent studium,26 in a context both of general distancing from the condemna-
tions of the 1270s and of affirmation of the authority of Giles.
The Lectura also helps to clarify the evolution of James’s doctrinal positions,
at least as regards the themes he dealt with in his other writings. Though it is the
first work by James, and is not properly speaking an original work, but rather
a sort of patchwork of texts of Aquinas and Giles strung together and supple-
mented by some short personal remarks, it is, in the absence of a “published”
commentary by James on the Sentences (unlike the case with most of James’s
contemporaries, who did produce Sentences commentaries), of great impor-
tance. Indeed, commentaries on the Sentences played an important role in the
13th and 14th centuries as a privileged instrument for the development of theo-
logical and philosophical thought at universities and studia,27 contributing to
the formation of different traditions. Obviously, James’s Lectura does not offer
the final and “reviewed” thought of its author, and so his personal position has
to be sought above all through the choice of the materials which he used. In any
case, it is the point of departure of James’s thought, allowing access to the early
stage of the long and complex drafting process that would have led to the edi-
tion of a commentary which James never wrote or perhaps is lost.
According to the method used in the principium and in the prologus, James
introduces the more reasonable and probable opinions to his audience. In fact,
in the opening questions on theological science, James chooses what seems to
him more suitable and invites his listeners to do the same by explicitly compar-
ing Giles’s positions in his commentary with Aquinas’s in the Summa theologi-
ae and/or his Sentences commentary. The following passage gives an example
of the author’s typical method:

25 Even afterwards, the Augustinians maintained the custom of sending at least one of their
students to another theological studium.
26 The studium was active from 1288 or 1289. See Benedict Hackett, “The Foundation of the
Augustinian studia generalia at Paris, Oxford and Cambridge,” in Studio e studia: Le scuole
degli ordini mendicanti tra xiii e xiv secolo; Atti del xxix Congresso internazionale di studi,
Assisi, 11–13 ottobre 2001 (Spoleto, 2002), 159.
27 These commentaries represent generally (but not necessarily) the early phase of the de-
velopment of the opinions of the magistri.
384 Tavolaro

Prol., q. 1, corp., f. 2ra–b:28

secundum diuersorum oppiniones, diuerse sunt assignationes subiecti
huius scientie, quarum tres magis probabiles sufficiat recitare, aliis
pretermissis.

<T> <Prima oppinio> <E> <Secunda oppinio> <T> <Tertia oppinio> Aliis
Quidam igitur posuerunt Sed hec assignatio, licet tamen neutra istarum
Deum esse subiectum in contineat ueritatem, aliis uidetur esse sufficiens et
hac scientia et quod ita sit tamen non uidetur esse propria. Et huius ratio est
ex duobus apparet. Primo sufficiens. Et huius ratio quia, sicut in ­argumentando
quidem quia, sicut se habet est quia subiectum in quodammodo tactum fuit,
obiectum ad potentiam, scientia semper debet oportet quod subiectum
ita se habet subiectum assignari sub aliqua alicuius scientie omnia per
ad scientiam. Illud autem speciali ratione. Alias se determinata in scientia
dicitur obiectum proprie esset confusio in scientiis, comprehendat; licet autem
alicuius potentie sub cuius cum multe scientie Dei cognitio in theologia
ratione omnia ad potentiam determinent de eodem, principaliter intendatur, non
referuntur, sicut sub ratione et de Deo scientie etiam tamen hoc sufficiens ad hoc
colorati uel lucidi omnia humaniter inuente quod Deus in ea subiectum
referuntur ad uisum; omnia determinent. Secundum esse dicatur, cum de multis
enim uidentur in quantum hoc ergo dicendum est aliis quam de Deo in ipsa
sunt colorata et lucida. Vnde Deum esse subiectum in tractetur, sicut etiam licet
et coloratum et lucidum hac scientia, sub aliqua metaphysica principalius
proprie est obiectum uisus. tamen speciali ratione; consideret de substantia
In hac autem scientia omnia hec autem specialis quam de aliis entibus,
considerantur sub ratione ratio est in quantum non tamen substantia est
Dei, uel quia sunt ipse Deus est principium nostre subiectum in metaphysica,
uel quia ad ipsum habent restaurationis et finis sed est solum in quantum
ordinem, ut ad principium ens. Est ergo <aliter>
uel ad finem. Quare dicendum quod subiectum
ponendum est Deum esse in sacra pagina est ens
subiectum huius scientie. diuinum
Secundo hoc idem apparet
ex principiis huius scientie,
que sunt articuli fidei. Que
fides est de Deo. Obiectum
enim fidei principale est

28 My transcription diverges from Giustiniani’s at some points.

The So-called Abbreviatio in I Sententiarum Aegidii Romani 385

prima ueritas, que Deus et consummatio nostre cognoscibile per

est ens. Idem autem est glorificationis.30… inspirationem,31 ut accipiatur
subiectum uel obiectum Vtraque autem istarum communiter ens diuinum,
principiorum et totius assignationum satis est scilicet per essentiam,
scientie, cum tota scientia competens et precipue per participationem,
uirtute in principiis secunda, sicut uisum est, per unionem, per
contineatur. Quare Deus est est multum ­probabilis et significationem, quod
subiectum huius scientie.29 subtilis. respondet quattuor libris
Sententiarum.

Quelibet autem harum assignationum est satis competens. Due tamen

prime sunt magis probabiles et communius tenentur. Precipue autem
secunda est ualde rationalis. Non enim uidetur quod ens diuinum quod
sub se omnia comprehendit debeat assignari subiectum alicuius scientie
specialis cuiusmodi est theologia. <Accipiatis tamen illam que magis uo-
bis uidetur probabilis.>

Even if this sort of comparison is no longer done explicitly after the p

­ rologue,
it is still present in the structure of the questions that follow, in which
the  main  answer—usually introduced by “ad istam questionem dicendum
29 See Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologiae (=st) i, q. 1, a. 7 corp., 19a–b: “Sic enim se habet
subiectum ad scientiam, sicut obiectum ad potentiam vel habitum. Proprie autem illud
assignatur obiectum alicuius potentiae vel habitus, sub cuius ratione omnia referuntur ad
potentiam vel habitum: sicut homo et lapis referuntur ad visum inquantum sunt colorata,
unde coloratum est proprium obiectum visus. Omnia autem pertractantur in sacra doc-
trina sub ratione Dei: vel quia sunt ipse Deus; vel quia habent ordinem ad Deum, ut ad
principium et finem. Unde sequitur quod Deus vere sit subiectum huius scientiae. Quod
etiam manifestum fit ex principiis huius scientiae, quae sunt articuli fidei, quae est de
Deo: idem autem est subiectum principiorum et totius scientiae, cum tota scientia virtute
contineatur in principiis.” Unless noted otherwise, all references to Aquinas’s texts are to
the Leonine edition of his works (Rome, 1882–).
30 See Giles of Rome, In I Sent. (Ordinatio), prol., q. 3, corp. (Venice, 1521), f. 3vaL: “[T]heo-
logia cum sit scientia specialis, de his de quibus determinat, determinabit sub speciali
modo. Et ideo sic subiectum in scientia communi est commune in eo quod commune, ita
subiectum in scientia speciali debet esse speciale in eo quod speciale. Et ideo Deus, de
quo principaliter intendit ista scientia, sub aliqua speciali ratione debet esse subiectum
in ea. Ista autem specialis ratio potest esse in quantum est principium nostre restauratio-
nis et consummatio nostre glorificationis.”
31 See Thomas Aquinas, Scriptum super Sent., prol., q. 1, a. 4, corp., (ed.) Pierre Mandonnet
(Paris, 1929), 15–16: “[S]ubjecti cognitio principaliter intenditur in scientia. Unde, quia ista
scientia principaliter est ad cognitionem Dei, posuerunt Deum esse subjectum ejus. … Si
autem volumus invenire subjectum quod haec omnia comprehendat, possumus dicere
quod ens divinum cognoscibile per inspirationem est subjectum hujus scientiae.”
386 Tavolaro

est”—expresses the opinion that James adopts. Sometimes he uses both Aqui-
nas and Giles, as can be observed in the following respondeo:32

Ad istam questionem dicendum est quod in Deo perfectissime est sci-

entia.33 Quod quidem tripliciter ostendi potest secundum quod Deum
tripliciter cognoscimus, scilicet per superexcellentiam, per remotionem
et per causalitatem,34 ut supra dictum fuit.
<1> Primo igitur potest ostendi esse scientia in Deo per superexcellen-
tiam. Ostensum enim fuit supra, quod in Deo preexistunt superhabun-
danter omnes perfectiones quorumlibet entium. Inter omnes autem
perfectiones entium ipsum intelligere uel scire precellere uidetur, cum
res intellectuales sint omnibus aliis potiores. Quare oportet Deum esse
intelligentem35 et etiam scientem.
<2> Secundo hoc ostendi potest per remotionem. Cum enim, ut supra
dictum est, Deus sit actus purus absque potentialitatis permixtione36
omnis imperfectio et potentialitas et materialitas ab eo remouetur.37
Immunitas autem a materia est causa intellectualitatis. Cuius signum
est quod forme materiales efficiuntur intelligibiles actu per hoc quod
abstrahuntur a materia et a materialibus conditionibus.38 Et illud quod
est a materia separatum non solum est actu intelligibile, sed actu in-
telligens si sit per se subsistens. Cum igitur Deus sit omnino a materia
separatus et maxime ei competat per se esse potissime erit sciens et
intelligens.39
<3> Tertio post hoc ostendi per causalitatem. Vt enim supra dictum est,
Deus est primum mouens40 et prima et summa omnium causa.41 Non

32 James of Viterbo, Lectura, d. 35, princ. 1, q. 1, corp., f. 48rb–va.

33 Thomas Aquinas, st i, q. 14, a. 1, corp., 166a.
34 Giles of Rome, In I Sent., d. 35, princ. 1, q. 2, corp., f. 180vaK.
35 Thomas Aquinas, Compendium theologiae, lib. 1, c. 28, corp., 91a, ll. 2–7.
36 Ibid., 8–9.
37 See Thomas Aquinas, Scriptum super Sent., lib. 3, d. 6, q. 2, a. 3, arg. 4, (ed.) Marie-Fabien
Moos (Paris, 1933), 241: “Sed omnis imperfectio et materialitas a Deitate est aliena.”
38 Thomas Aquinas, Compendium theologiae, lib. 1, c. 28, corp., 9a, ll. 11–15.
39 See Giles of Rome, In I Sent., d. 35, princ. 1, q. 2, corp., f. 180vaL: “[C]um igitur Deus sit ab om-
nibus materialibus segregatus et potissime habeat per se esse, potissime intelligens erit.”
40 Thomas Aquinas, Compendium theologiae, lib. 1, c. 28, corp., 9a, l. 17. See also Thomas
Aquinas, Scriptum super Sent., lib. 1, d. 15, q. 4, a. 2, ad 2, (ed.) Mandonnet, 354; d. 30, q. 1, a.
1, arg. 1, (ed.) Mandonnet, 701.
41 Thomas Aquinas, Scriptum super Sent., lib. 4, d. 49, q. 2, a. 6, contra 4, ed. Parma, Opera
omnia 7.2 (Parma, 1858), 1208b.
The So-called Abbreviatio in I Sententiarum Aegidii Romani 387

autem agit ex necessitate nature quia sic non esset primum agens. Cum
omne agens per naturam agat motum et directum ab aliquo agente per
intellectum oportet igitur Deum agere per cognitionem et intellectum.
Est igitur Deus intelligens et sciens.42
Has autem tres uias tangit Dionysius vii De diuinis nominibus.43

This passage provides an interesting example of James’s method. At the

­beginning of distinction 35 (on divine science), he refers to the Dionysian
­triplex via: this argument is present in Aquinas’s and Giles’s commentaries
on the Sentences and also in Aquinas’s Compendium theologiae. James pre-
fers the ­sequence superexcellentia-remotio-causalitas—present both in Giles’s
Sentences commentary and in Aquinas’s Compendium—over that of Aquinas
(remotio-causalitas-superexcellentia). He thus takes as the starting point of his
argumentation the preexistence of all perfections in God in a more eminent
way; this is a key concept for solving other questions in this same section (dd.
35–41).44 However, the quotations used in the respondeo are drawn not just
from Giles’s commentary and Aquinas’s Compendium, but also from Aquinas’s
Sentences commentary and Summa theologiae.
After considering other passages,45 it is possible to maintain that the prin-
ciple of rationabilitas or probabilitas is used both when the views of the two

42 See Thomas Aquinas, Scriptum super Sent., lib. 1, d. 35, q. 1, a. 1, corp., (ed.) Mandonnet,
809–10: “Omne enim agens habet aliquam intentionem et desiderium finis. Omne autem
desiderium finis praecedit aliqua cognitio praestituens finem, et dirigens in finem ea
quae sunt ad finem. … [U]nde, Philosophus, ii Physic., text. 75, dicit, quod opus naturae
est opus intelligentiae. … [O]portet quod primum non agat per necessitatem naturae,
quia sic non esset primum, sed dirigeretur ab aliquo priori intelligente. Oportet igitur
quod agat per intellectum et voluntatem; et ita, quod sit intelligens et sciens.” Cf. Giles of
Rome, In I Sent., d. 35, princ. 1, q. 2, corp., f. 180vaM: “Tertia uero uia habetur cum subiun-
git secundum omnium causam in seipso omnem scientiam preaccipiens: et si cogimur
Deum ponere intelligentem et cognoscentem.”
43 Giles of Rome, In I Sent., d. 35, princ. 1, q. 2, corp., f. 180vaL.
44 See, for example, James of Viterbo, Lectura, d. 35, princ. 1, q. 3, corp., f. 48vb; q. 4, corp., f.
49ra; d. 36, princ. 1, q. 1, corp., f. 49vb; d. 39, princ. 2, q. 1, corp., f. 54ra; d. 40, princ. 1, q. 1,
corp., f. 55ra. James employs the argument for the preexistence in God of all the perfec-
tions with a frequency that has no equivalent either in the sections on divine science in
Aquinas’s and Giles’s commentaries or in the questions on the same topic in Aquinas’s
Summa theologiae and Quaestiones disputatae de veritate.
45 I have developed this research further in “Scientia, potentia e voluntas Dei nella Lectura
super primum Sententiarum di Giacomo da Viterbo” (Ph.D. dissertation, Università di
Salerno and École Pratique des Hautes Études, Paris, 2016).
388 Tavolaro

masters are essentially different46 and when they defend the same thesis,
even if they use different supporting arguments. When the arguments are
essentially the same,47 the choice is probably due to didactic considerations,
in order to obtain a clearer or briefer argumentation, depending on the
circumstances.
With regard to Giles, James quotes only his Ordinatio,48 but the situation
with Aquinas’s writings is more complex, since James uses not only Aquinas’s
Sentences commentary, but also Summa theologiae i, the Quaestiones dispu-
tatae de veritate, and Compendium theologiae i.49 James’s pattern of selection
from Aquinas’s texts suggests that he was aware of the development of some of
Aquinas’s positions, and therefore searches his works for the best-formulated
opinions, employing a way of “reading” Aquinas that was widespread among
his supporters in response to William de la Mare’s Correctorium.50
The doctrines presented in the Lectura generally correspond to the opin-
ions on several issues that can be found in both Aquinas and Giles. These opin-
ions are also shared, at least in their general lines, by other “modern” authors
such as Bonaventure and Henry of Ghent.51 Especially after 1277, they could

46 Such is the case of the doctrine of the presence of the angels in an indivisible place. James
shares this doctrine with Aquinas and it is at exactly this point that James omits the part
of the text of Giles where he maintains that an angel cannot be present in an indivisible
place; see Lectura, d. 37, pars 2, princ. 1, q. 2, corp., f. 52ra.
47 Such is the case of the knowledge of the enuntiabilia: see, for example, Lectura, d. 38, q. 3,
corp., f. 53ra–b.
48 Giles’s commentary dates to the years 1272–73. The absence of references to Giles’s De
praedestinatione et praescientia (composed between 1286 and 1289) is likely due to the
fact that this work had not been completed when James was a bachelor.
49 According to Ypma’s reconstruction of his Parisian library, James would have read only
the Quaestiones disputatae de veritate and the Summa theologiae. See Eelcko Ypma, “Re-
cherches sur la carrière scolaire et la bibliothèque de Jacques de Viterbe († 1308),” Augus-
tiniana 24 (1974): 282.
50 Something analogous to James’s selection method can be found in the Articuli in qui-
bus frater Thomas melius in Summa quam in Scriptis, a collection of Aquinas’s positions,
which, according to its anonymous compiler, were better formulated in the Summa than
in the commentary on the Sentences; see René-Antoine Gauthier, “Les Articuli in quibus
frater Thomas melius in Summa quam in scriptis,” Recherches de théologie ancienne et
médiévale 19 (1952): 271–326. This collection had circulated in the Dominican milieu in
Paris since the early 1280s, but it is not possible to demonstrate that James relies directly
on these Articuli, since he never refers to them explicitly and he does not always prefer the
Summa over the Sentences commentary.
51 Such issues include, for example, the presence of ideas in God, the impossibility of find-
ing a cause of God’s will, and the infinity of God’s power. Of course, it is necessary to point
The So-called Abbreviatio in I Sententiarum Aegidii Romani 389

not fail to take into account the condemnation by ecclesiastical authority of

errors ascribed by the censors to an indiscriminate use of the Greek-Arabic
Aristotelian tradition.52 The obvious and undeniable similarity to Aquinas’s
positions does not make the Lectura a mere summary of Thomistic thought,
just as the presence of texts by Giles of Rome does not make it a summary of
Giles’s thought. James “reads” Aquinas, taking care to highlight especially the
Neoplatonic and Dionysian background of his thought, in which the “rising”
Augustinian theology found inspiration in the effort to establish its own iden-
tity. This is particularly clear, for example, in the attention paid to the doctrine
of the preexistence of created realities in the divine intellect as their cause, or
in James’s preference for Aquinas’s more “apophatic” texts on predestination,53
and in general in the quantity and quality of the Neoplatonic sources in the
quotations from Aquinas. There is no doubt that the Neoplatonic background
of James’s thought emerged more clearly in his later works, which are marked
by an evident doctrinal turn towards more “Augustinian” positions shared by
the Franciscans or, in some cases, by secular masters such as Henry of Ghent.
This is the case, on the epistemological side, in the shift from the doctrine
of abstractio (to which James refers in the Lectura54) to the doctrine of exci-
tatio (which is present in the quodlibetal questions55), based on the notion
of aptitudines/idoneitates,56 or more generally in the rejection of Aquinas’s

out some important differences between the perspectives of the above-mentioned theo-
logians on these very same points, as, for example on the question of whether the divine
will or the divine intellect is primary.
52 See, for example, distinction 37, on the location of the angels. In this context, James, like
Aquinas, says that the local presence of an angel is not necessary, as Giles suggests con-
sidering the connection of the universe, which involves the contact of all its parts, both
spiritual and corporeal. The option for Aquinas’s position can be explained as an effort to
escape the error of those who believe that the separate substances should be present in
some place as the motors of corporeal reality. See Chartularium Universitatis Parisiensis,
vol. 1, n. 473, art. 77: “[S]i esset aliqua substantia separata, que non moveret aliquod cor-
pus in hoc mundo sensibili, non clauderetur in universo.”
53 On this last subject, see Michał Paluch, La profondeur de l’amour divin: Évolution de la
doctrine de la prédestination dans l’oeuvre de saint Thomas d’Aquin (Paris, 2004), 222; see
also Harm J.M.J. Goris, “Divine Foreknowledge, Providence, Predestination and Human
Freedom,” in The Theology of Thomas Aquinas, (eds.) Rik Van Nieuwenhove and Joseph
Wawrykow (Notre Dame, 2005), 115.
54 Lectura, d. 36, princ. 1, q. 1, ad 1, f. 49vb.
55 See Quodl. i, q. 12, (ed.) Eelcko Ypma (Würzburg, 1968), 175, ll. 613–17. See also Antoine
Côté, “La critique de la doctrine de l’abstraction de Jacques de Viterbe,” Medioevo 38
(2013): 235–62, and the chapters by Jean-Luc Solère in this volume.
56 See Quodl. i, q. 7, 91–95, ll. 390–514. See Antoine Côté, “Simplicius and James of Viterbo
on Propensities,” Vivarium 47 (2009): 24–53. In the works from his Parisian regency, James
390 Tavolaro

moderate intellectualism57 in favor of an equally moderate voluntarism.58

Given the absence of precise information on James’s education as bach-
elor, it is difficult to establish whether his closeness to several Thomistic
doctrines at the time of his early teaching activity and literary production
was due exclusively to Giles’s mediation. However, it would be simplistic to
interpret certain subsequent turns in James’s thought only in terms of break-
ing away from the positions of the Lectura, since already in this phase,
James uses the Neoplatonic tradition in order to support his positions, even
when they could be based on other sources. On the contrary, these results
are the “natural” development of his positions at the time of the Lectura,
in the direction of an even more pronounced reception of Neoplatonic el-
ements. As the critical edition of his works has proved, James had such an
extraordinary knowledge of Neoplatonic authors (such as Proclus, Simpli-
cius, and Philoponus), compared to his Parisian contemporaries, as to be a
privileged witness of the second reception of Proclus in Paris after the mar-
ginalization of Proclus’s texts in the 1270s.59 In this regard, if it is possible
to find a clear confirmation of the influence of Proclus on James’s thought,
beginning from the Quodlibeta and the Quaestiones de divinis praedicamentis

maintains the doctrine of knowledge in rationibus aeternis, which Aquinas never held;
see, for example, Quodl. i, q. 12, 176, ll. 631–34.
57 See, for example, Lectura, d. 8, pars 1, princ. 1, q. 3, corp., f. 14rb; d. 35, princ. 1, q. 1, corp.,
f. 48rb. On Aquinas’s intellectualism, see Pasquale Porro, Tommaso d’Aquino: Un profilo
storico-filosofico (Rome, 2012), 330–31.
58 I call James’s voluntarism “moderate” since for him the will, though it is more noble than
the intellect, is “moved” by the intellect’s apprehension of its objects both in the determi-
nation of the act and in its exercise. See Quodl. i, q. 7, 102–05, ll. 760–917. See also Stephen
Dumont’s chapter in the present volume.
59 This “marginalization” could be due “on the one hand, to the ‘editorial failure’ of the com-
mentary on the Parmenides and the Opuscula and, on the other, to the reduction, or ‘styl-
ization,’ of the topics of the Elementatio to a few commonplaces” (Pasquale Porro, “The
University of Paris in the Thirteenth Century: Proclus and the Liber de causis,” in Interpret-
ing Proclus: From Antiquity to the Renaissance, [ed.] Stephen Gersh [Cambridge, 2014],
268). See also Loris Sturlese, “Il dibattito sul Proclo latino nel Medioevo fra l’Università
di Parigi e lo Studium di Colonia,” in Proclus et son influence: Actes du colloque de Neuchâ-
tel, juin 1985, (eds.) Gilbert Boss and Gerhard Seel (Zurich, 1987), 261–85; Egbert P. Bos
and Pieter A. Meijer (eds.), On Proclus and His Influence in Medieval Philosophy (Leiden,
1992); Martin Grabmann, “Die Prokloslibersetzungen des Wilhelm von Moerbeke und
ihre Verwertung in der lateinischen Literatur des Mittelalters,” in idem, Mittelalterliches
Geistesleben: Abhandlungen zur Geschichte der Scholastik und Mystik (Munich, 1936), 413–
23; idem, Guglielmo di Moerbeke o.p. il traduttore delle opere di Aristotele (Rome, 1946),
156–58.
The So-called Abbreviatio in I Sententiarum Aegidii Romani 391

(after 1293)—as Pasquale Porro has recently highlighted60—this influence is

anticipated in the Lectura by a more general sensitivity towards Neoplatonic
sources.
In the light of these considerations, it is not possible to speak of James’s
“conversion” to Aquinas’s teaching,61 since the Lectura already exhibits a
significant influence by Aquinas’s thought. Thus, if the works of the Neapoli-
tan period exhibit a more frequent and explicit use of Aquinas’s texts and
doctrines (as, for instance, in the Summa de peccatorum distinctione62), this
is not a radical change of perspective, but only the resumption of something
that was already present in the early phase of James’s training.63 In general,
therefore, we should approach James’s entire corpus by paying greater atten-
tion to the Thomistic background of his thought, too often interpreted only
in the light of the connections with Giles of Rome, Henry of Ghent, Godfrey
of Fontaines, and later with some of the Franciscan masters contemporary
with him. In short, Aquinas was for James a constant point of reference, no
less than were other modern doctors with whom James maintained a clear
dialogue.

2.4 Conclusion

James’s autograph preserved in MS Naples, Biblioteca Nazionale, vii C 52 and

usually considered to be his Abbreviatio in i Sententiarum ­Aegidii Romani is in
reality the set of notes that he used to “read” the Sentences: this lecture appears
as a set of excerpts from Thomas Aquinas and Giles of Rome that provided
him with the arguments to structure and develop his own a­ rgumentation.
Even though it is not an original and revised work, it clearly ­reveals the opin-
ions held by James, who selected auctoritates and argumenta according to the
principle of rationabilitas or probabilitas. After considering the Lectura’s na-
ture and contents and in the light of a comparison with his subsequent writ-
ings, the possibility of finding a fundamental unity in James’s works seems to
depend ultimately on his ability to read the ancient and modern doctores with
respect, but also with freedom. This is perhaps the ­deepest influence that Giles
had on James and on the whole Augustinian school g­ enerally, without which,

60 See Porro, “The University of Paris in the Thirteenth Century,” 270–75. As seen above, it is
necessary to refer not only to the Elementatio theologica, but also to the Opuscula.
61 See Giustiniani, “Due questioni inedite,” 42.
62 See Ambrasi, “La Summa de peccatorum distinctione,” 288–308.
63 See Tavolaro, “Opus nature est opus Dei,” 87.
392 Tavolaro

beyond the doctrinal appeal to the authority of ­Augustine and to the Neopla-
tonic tradition, the Augustinian Hermits would never have achieved the philo-
sophical homogeneity that the general chapters of the Order set out to pursue
in the 1280s. James’s faithfulness to Giles’s teaching consisted primarily in the
adoption of his research method, according to which any opinion could be
considered, regardless of the particular philosophical or theological tradition
to which it belonged, as long as it did not entail a danger to faith.64 This was the
method to which James would always remain faithful.

64 See Giles of Rome, De gradibus formarum, pars 2, c. 6 (Venice, 1502), ff. 206vb–207ra:
“[N]ulli enim claudenda est uia ad contrarie opinandum, ubi sine periculo fidei possumus
contrarie opinari; nec cogendi sunt discipuli ut in omnibus suorum doctorum opiniones
retineant, quia non est captiuatus intellectus noster in obsequium hominis, sed in obse-
quium Christi.”
Bibliography

Primary Sources

Ancient and Medieval

Albert the Great. Metaphysica, (ed.) Bernhard Geyer. Opera Omnia 16. Münster, 1960.
Albert the Great. Summa theologiae sive de mirabili scientia Dei. Liber primus, (eds.)
Dionysius Siedler et al. Opera Omnia 34.1. Münster, 1978.
Alphonsus Vargas of Toledo. In tres Aristotelis libros de anima quaestiones. Venice, 1566.
[Anonymous]. Lectura in librum De anima a quodam discipulo reportata, (ed.) René-
Antoine Gauthier. Grottaferrata, 1985.
[Anonymous]. Liber de causis, (eds. and trans.) Pierre Magnard, Olivier Boulnois, Bru-
no Pinchard and Jean-Luc Solère. La Demeure de l’être: Autour d’un anonyme. Étude
et traduction du Liber de causis. Paris, 1990.
[Anonymous]. Quaestio de potestate papae (Rex pacificus), (ed. and trans.) R.W. Dyson.
Lewiston, ny, 1999.
[Anonymous]. Quaestio in utramque partem, (ed. and trans.) R.W. Dyson. Three
Royalist Tracts, 1296–1302. Bristol, 1999.
[Anonymous]. Questiones in libros De anima, (ed.) Joachim Vennebusch. Ein anonymer
Aristoteleskommentar des xiii. Jahrhunderts. Paderborn, 1963.
[Anonymous]. Quaestiones super De substantia orbis Averrois. Florence, Biblioteca
Nazionale Centrale, Conv. Soppr. I.3.6.
Anselm of Canterbury. Opera omnia, (ed.) F.S. Schmitt, 6 vols. Edinburgh, 1946–1961.
Antiquiores quae extant definitiones capitulorum generalium ordinis, (ed.) Eustasio
Esteban, in Analecta Augustiniana 2–8 (1907–20).
Aristoteles Latinus, (ed.) Lorenzo Minio Paluello. Bruges, Paris, and Leiden, 1951–.
Aristotle. Analytica Priora et Posteriora, (eds.) W.D. Ross and Lorenzo Minio Paluello.
Oxford, 1964.
Aristotle. Categoriae, (ed.) Lorenzo Minio Paluello. Oxford, 1949.
Aristotle. De anima, (ed.) W.D. Ross. Oxford, 1956.
Aristotle. De generatione animalium, (ed. and trans.) A.L. Peck. Cambridge, 1943.
Aristotle. De generatione et corruptione, (ed.) Marwan Rashed. Paris, 2004.
Aristotle. De motu animalium, (ed.) Martha Nussbaum. Princeton, 1986.
Aristotle. Magna Moralia, (ed.) Franz Susemihl. Leipzig, 1883.
Aristotle. Metaphysics, (ed.) Werner Jaeger. Oxford, 1957.
Aristotle. Nicomachean Ethics, (ed.) Ingram Bywater. Oxford, 1894.
Aristotle. Physics, (ed.) W.D. Ross. Oxford, 1936.
Aristotle. The Complete Works of Aristotle: The Revised Oxford Translation, (ed.)
­Jonathan Barnes, 2 vols. Princeton, 1984.
394 Bibliography

Auctoritates Aristotelis, (ed.) Jacqueline Hamesse. Les Auctoritates Aristotelis: Un

florilège médiéval; Étude historique et édition critique. Louvain, 1974.
Augustine. Confessiones, (ed.) Martin Skutella. Stuttgart, 1969.
Augustine. De diuersis quaestionibus octoginta tribus, (ed.) Almut Mutzenbecher.
Corpus Christianorum Series Latina 44A. Turnhout, 1975.
Augustine. De Genesi ad litteram libri duodecim, (ed.) Joseph Zycha. Corpus Scriptorum
Ecclesiasticorum Latinorum 28.1. Vienna, 1894.
Augustine. De libero arbitrio, (ed.) W.M. Green. Corpus Christianorum Series Latina 29.
Turnhout, 1970.
Augustine. De musica, (ed.) Martin Jacobsson. Stockholm, 2002.
Augustine. Retractationum libri duo, (ed.) Almut Mutzenbecher. Corpus Christiano-
rum Series Latina 57. Turnhout, 1984.
Augustine. Soliloquiorum libri duo, De inmortalitate animae, De quantitate animae,
(ed.) Wolfgang Hormann. Corpus Scriptorum Ecclesiasticorum Latinorum 89.
Vienna, 1986.
Augustine. De Trinitate, (eds.) W.J. Mountain and F. Glorie. Corpus Christianorum
Series Latina 50–50A. Turnhout, 1968.
Augustine (Pseudo-). De spiritu et anima, (ed.) Jacques-Paul Migne. Patrologia Latina
40, 779–832. Paris, 1865.
Averroes. Aristotelis opera cum Averrois commentariis, 10 vols. Venice, 1562–74; reprint
Frankfurt a. M., 1962.
Averroes. Commentarium magnum in Aristotelis de anima libros, (ed.) F. Stuart Craw-
ford. Cambridge, ma, 1953.
Averroes. De substantia orbis, (ed.) Arthur Hyman. Averroes’ De substantia orbis: Criti-
cal Edition of the Hebrew Text with English Translation and Commentary. Cambridge,
MA, and Jerusalem, 1986.
Avicenna. Liber de anima, (ed.) Simone van Riet, 2 vols. Leuven and Leiden, 1972.
Avicenna. Liber de philosophia prima sive scientia divina, (ed.) Simone van Riet, 3 vols.
Leuven and Leiden, 1977–1983.
Bernard of Auvergne. Reprobatio primi Quodlibet Iacobi de Viterbio. Reprobatio quinte
questionis, (ed.) Antoine Côté, in James of Viterbo’s Doctrine of Possibles: With a
Critical Edition of Bernard’s Reprobatio of James’s Quodlibet 1, question 5. Augus-
tiniana 66 (2016): 151–84.
Bernard of Clairvaux. Opera, (eds.) Jean Leclercq, Charles Talbot, and Henri Rochais, 8
vols. Rome, 1957–1977.
Boethius. De consolatione philosophiae et opuscula theologica, (ed.) Claudio M
­ oreschini,
2nd ed. Munich and Leipzig, 2005.
Boethius. The Consolation of Philosophy, (trans.) S.J. Tester. Cambridge, ma, 1973.
Boethius. In Isagogen Porphyrii Commenta, (eds.) Georg Schepps and Samuel Brandt.
Corpus Scriptorum Ecclesiasticorum Latinorum 48. Vienna, 1906.
Bibliography 395

Bonaventure. Opera omnia, (ed.) PP Collegii a S. Bonaventura, 10 vols. Quaracchi,

1882–1902.
[Boniface viii]. Les registres de Boniface viii, (eds.) George Digard, Maurice Faucon,
Antoine Thomas, and Robert Fawtier, 4 vols. Paris, 1904–1939.
Capitula antiqua prouincie Romane: Capitulum prouinciale loci Sancti Nicholai de Stric-
to, Mense Madii, in die Sancto Pentecostes 1288. In Analecta Augustiniana 2 (1907/8):
271–73.
Capgrave, John. Liber de illustribus Henricis, (ed.) Francis Charles Hingeston. London,
1858.
Chartularium Universitatis Parisiensis, (eds.) Heinrich Denifle and Emile Chatelain, 4
vols. Paris, 1889–1897.
Cicero. De amicitia, (ed.) J.G.F. Powell. Oxford, 2006.
Clarembald of Arras. Tractatulus super Genesim, (ed.) Nikolaus M. Häring. Life and
Works of Clarembald of Arras, 223–49. Toronto, 1965.
Deusdedit (Cardinal). Libellus contra invasores et Symoniacos et reliquos scismaticos,
(ed.) Ernst Sackur, in Libelli de lite imperatorum et pontificum saeculis xi et xii, vol.
2, (eds.) Ernst Dümmler, Friedrich Thaner, Ernst Sackur et al., 292–365. Hanover,
1893.
Dionysius the Areopagite (Pseudo-). De divinis nominibus, (ed.) Philippe Chevallier.
Dionysiaca: Recueil donnant l’ensemble des traductions latines des ouvrages attribués
au Denys de l’Aréopage, 2 vols. Paris, 1937–50.
Giles of Rome. De ecclesiastica potestate, (eds.) Giuseppe Boffito and Giuseppe Ugo
Oxilia. Un trattato inedito di Egidio Colonna. Florence, 1908.
Giles of Rome. De ecclesiastica potestate, (ed.) Richard Scholz. Weimar, 1929; reprint
Aalen, 1961.
Giles of Rome. De ecclesiastica potestate, (ed. and trans.) R.W. Dyson. Giles of Rome’s On
Ecclesiastical Power: A Medieval Theory of World Government. New York, 2004.
Giles of Rome. De gradibus formarum. In idem, In libros de physico auditu Aristotelis
commentaria … Eiusdem quaestio de gradibus formarum, ff. 199ra–216rb. Venice,
1502; reprint Frankfurt a. M., 1968.
Giles of Rome. De laudibus divinae sapientiae. In idem, Opera, ff. 24–34. Rome, 1554–
1555; reprint Frankfurt a. M., 1968.
Giles of Rome. Expositio super libros de anima. Venice, 1500; reprint Frankfurt a. M.,
1982.
Giles of Rome. In I Sententiarum (Ordinatio). Venice, 1521; reprint Frankfurt a. M., 1968.
Giles of Rome. In ii Sententiarum (Ordinatio). Venice, 1581; reprint Frankfurt a. M., 1968.
Giles of Rome. In iii Sententiarum. Rome, 1623; reprint Frankfurt a. M., 1968.
Giles of Rome. Opus super authorem de causis. Venice, 1550; reprint Frankfurt a. M., 1968.
Giles of Rome. Quaestiones de esse et essentia, de mensura angelorum, et de cognitione
angelorum. Venice, 1503; reprint Frankfurt a. M., 1968.
396 Bibliography

Giles of Rome. Quaestiones metaphysicales. Venice, 1501; reprint Frankfurt a. M., 1966.
Giles of Rome. Quodlibeta. Louvain, 1646; reprint Frankfurt a. M., 1966.
Giles of Rome. Reportatio lecturae super libros i–iv Sententiarum. Reportatio monacen-
sis, (ed.) Concetta Luna. Opera omnia 3.2. Florence, 2003.
Giles of Rome. Theoremata de esse et essentia, (ed.) Edgar Hocedez. Leuven, 1930.
Giles of Rome. Theoremata de corpore Christi. Venice, 1554b.
Giles of Rome. Les quatre premiers Quodlibets de Godefroid de Fontaines, (eds.) Maurice
de Wulf and Augustin Pelzer. Les Philosophes Belges 2. Louvain, 1904.
Godfrey of Fontaines. Les Quodlibet cinq, six et sept, (eds.) Maurice de Wulf and Jean
Hoffmans. Les Philosophes Belges 3. Louvain, 1914.
Godfrey of Fontaines. Le huitième Quodlibet, Le neuvième Quodlibet, Le dixième Quodli-
bet, (ed.) Jean Hoffmans. Les Philosophes Belges 4. Louvain, 1924–1931.
Godfrey of Fontaines. Les Quodlibets onze-quatorze, (ed.) Jean Hoffmans. Les Philos-
ophes Belges 5. Louvain, 1932–1935.
Godfrey of Fontaines. Quaestio disputata 3, (ed.) Bernhard Neumann, in Der Mensch
und die himmlische Seligkeit nach der Lehre Gottfrieds von Fontaines, 160–61. Lim-
burg, 1958.
Godfrey of Fontaines. Quaestio disputata 4, (ed.) Odon Lottin, in Psychologie et morale
aux xiie et xiiie siècles, vol. 4.2, 581–88. Gembloux, 1954.
Gratian. Decretum. In Corpus iuris canonici, (ed.) Emil Friedberg, vol. 1. Leipzig, 1879 ;
reprint Graz, 1955.
Gregory ix. Liber extravagantium decretalium (Decretales Gregorii ix). In Corpus iuris
canonici, (ed.) Emil Friedberg, vol. 2. Leipzig, 1881; reprint Graz, 1955.
Henry of Friemar. Quaestiones disputatae de verbo, q. 1, (ed.) Ciriaco Scanzillo, in
Jacobus de Viterbio osa: La “Prima quaestio disputata de Verbo” del codice A. 971
delle Biblioteca dell’Archiginnasio di Bologna; Edizione e note. Asprenas 19 (1972):
41–61.
Henry of Friemar. Quodlibet, (ed. part.) Clemens Stroick, in Heinrich von Friemar: Leb-
en, Werke, philosophisch-theologische Stellung in der Scholastik, 191–246. Freiburg,
1954.
Henry of Friemar. Tractatus de origine et progressu ordinis fratrum heremitarum et vero
ac proprio titulo eiusdem, (ed.) Rudolph Arbesmann, in Henry of Friemar’s “Treatise
on the Origin and Development of the Order of Hermit Friars and Its True and Real
Title.” Augustiniana 6 (1956): 37–145.
Henry of Ghent. Opera omnia, (eds.) Raymond Macken et al. Leuven, 1981–.
Henry of Ghent. Quodlibeta, (ed.) Jodocus Badius. Paris, 1518; reprint Louvain, 1961.
Henry of Ghent. Summa quaestionum ordinariarum, (ed.) Jodocus Badius, 2 vols. Paris,
1520; repr. St. Bonaventure, ny, 1953.
Hugolino of Orvieto. Commentarius in quattuor libros Sententiarum, (ed.) Willigis Eck-
ermann, 4 vols. Würzburg, 1980–88.
Isidore of Seville. Etymologiae, (ed.) W.M. Lindsay. Oxford, 1911.
Bibliography 397

James of Viterbo. Abbreviatio in I Sententarium Aegidii Romani. Naples, Biblioteca

Nazionale vii C 52. (ed. part.) Pasquale Giustiniani, in Due questioni inedite sullo
statuto epistemologico della teologia nella Abbreviatio in I Sententiarum Aegidii
Romani di Giacomo da Viterbo. Asprenas 26 (1979): 23–57; La teologia studiata sec-
ondo le 4 cause aristoteliche in un’opera inedita di Giacomo da Viterbo O.E.S.A.
Asprenas 27 (1980): 161–88 [four questions from the “prologue”]; Il problema delle
idee in Dio secondo Giacomo da Viterbo oesa, con edizione della Distinzione 36
dell’Abbreviatio in I Sententiarum Aegidii Romani. Analecta Augustiniana 42 (1979):
288–342 [d. 36].
James of Viterbo. De episcopali officio, (ed.) Ciriaco Scanzillo, in Il De episcopali officio
del codice 793 O. di Montecassino. Asprenas 15 (1968): 158–99.
James of Viterbo. De regimine Christiano, (ed.) Henri-Xavier Arquillière. Le plus an-
cien traité de l’Église: Jacques de Viterbe, De regimine Christiano (1301–1302). Paris,
1926.
James of Viterbo. De regimine Christiano, (trans.) G.B. Marcoaldi and A. Rizzacasa. Il
governo della Chiesa. Florence, 1993.
James of Viterbo. De regimine Christiano, (ed. and trans.) R.W. Dyson. Leiden, 2009.
James of Viterbo. Disputationes de quolibet, (ed.) Eelcko Ypma, 4 vols. Würzburg,
1968–1975.
James of Viterbo. Quodlibet I, qq. 7, 12, 13. Trans. in Jacques de Viterbe: L’âme, l’intellect et
la volonté, (ed.) Antoine Côté. Paris, 2010.
James of Viterbo. Quodlibet I, q. 17, (trans.) Antoine Côté. Le Quodlibet I, question 17
de Jacques de Viterbe: Introduction, traduction et notes. Augustiniana 62 (2012):
45–76.
James of Viterbo. Quodlibet ii, q. 20. Trans. in The Cambridge Translations of Medieval
Philosophical Texts, vol. 2: Ethics and Political Philosophy, (eds.) McGrade, Kilcullen,
Kempshall, 286–300.
James of Viterbo. Quaestiones de divinis praedicamentis i–x, (ed.) Eelcko Ypma. Rome,
1983.
James of Viterbo. Quaestiones de divinis praedicamentis xi–xvii, (ed.) Eelcko Ypma.
Rome, 1986.
James of Viterbo. Quaestiones de divinis praedicamentis, Quaestio xviii, (ed.) Eelcko
Ypma, in Augustiniana 38 (1988), 67–98.
James of Viterbo. Quaestiones de divinis praedicamentis, Quaestio xix, (ed.) Eelcko
Ypma, in Augustiniana 39 (1989): 154–85.
James of Viterbo. Quaestiones de divinis praedicamentis, Quaestio xx, (ed.) Eelcko
Ypma, in Augustiniana 42 (1992): 351–78.
James of Viterbo. Quaestiones de divinis praedicamentis, Quaestio xxi, (ed.) Eelcko
Ypma, in Augustiniana 44 (1994): 177–208.
James of Viterbo. Quaestiones de divinis praedicamentis, Quaestio xxii, (ed.) Eelcko
Ypma, in Augustiniana 45 (1995): 229–318.
398 Bibliography

James of Viterbo. Quaestiones de divinis praedicamentis, Quaestio xxiii, (ed.) Eelcko

Ypma, in Augustiniana 46 (1996): 147–76.
James of Viterbo. Quaestiones de divinis praedicamentis, Quaestio xxiv, (ed.) Eelcko
Ypma, in Augustiniana 46 (1996): 339–69.
James of Viterbo. Quaestiones de habitibus, (ed.) Antoine Côté, in Deux questions in-
édites de Jacques de Viterbe sur les habitus, Archives d’histoire doctrinale et littéraire
du Moyen Âge 79 (2012): 303–11.
James of Viterbo. Sermones. Vatican City, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Archivio
del Capitolo di S. Pietro, D. 213. Two sermons, (ed.) Gianpiero Tavolaro, in Opus
nature est opus Dei: Potestas regalis et potestas sacerdotalis nel pensiero di Gia-
como da Viterbo. Archives d’histoire doctrinale et littéraire du Moyen Âge 81 (2014):
39–98.
James of Viterbo. Summa de peccatorum distinctione, (ed. part.) Dominico Ambrasi, in
La Summa de peccatorum distinctione del B. Giacomo da Viterbo dal ms. vii G 101
della Biblioteca Nazionale di Napoli. Asprenas 6 (1959): 47–78, 189–218, 288–308.
Jean de Meun. Romance of the Rose, (trans.) Frances Horgan. Oxford, 1994.
John of Damascus. De fide orthodoxa. Versions of Burgundio and Cerbanus, (ed.) Eligius
M. Buytaert. St. Bonaventure, ny, 1955.
John Duns Scotus. Opera omnia, ed. Vaticana. Vatican City, 1950–.
John Duns Scotus. Opera omnia, (ed.) Luke Wadding, 12 vols. Lyons, 1639, reprint
Hildesheim, 1968.
John Duns Scotus. Opera philosophica, (eds.) Robert Andrews et al., 5 vols. St. Bonaven-
ture, ny, 1997–2006.
John of Paris. De potestate regia et papali, (ed.) Jean Leclercq. Jean de Paris et
l’ecclésiologie du xiiie siècle, 169–260. Paris, 1942.
John of Paris. De regia potestate et papali, (ed. and trans.) Fritz Bleienstein. Johannes
Quidort de Paris: Über königliche und päpstliche Gewalt (De regia potestate et papali).
Stuttgart, 1969.
John Pecham. Tractatus de anima, (ed.) Gaudenzio Melani. Florence, 1948.
John Philoponus. In Aristotelis libros De anima commentaria, (ed.) Michael Hayduck.
Commentaria in Aristotelem Graeca 15. Berlin, 1897.
John Philoponus. Commentaire sur le De Anima d’Aristote, traduction de Guillaume de
Moerbeke, (ed.) Gérard Verbeke. Leuven and Paris, 1966.
John Philoponus. On Aristotle on the Intellect (de Anima 3.4–8), (trans.) William Charl-
ton. London and Ithaca, ny, 1991.
John of Sterngassen. In IV Sententiarum, (ed.) Walter Senner, 2 vols. Berlin, 1995.
John of Quedlinburg. Liber Vitasfratrum, (eds.) Rudolph Arbesmann and Winfried
Hümpfner. New York, 1943.
John of Quedlinburg. Opus Dan (Sermones de sanctis). Paris, 1521.
Marsilius of Padua. Defensor Pacis, (ed.) C.W. Previté-Orton. Cambridge, 1928.
Bibliography 399

Marsilius of Padua. Defensor Pacis, (ed.) Richard Scholz. Monumenta Germaniae His-
torica, Fontes Iuris Germanici Antiqui 7. Hanover, 1932.
Marsilius of Padua. The Defender of Peace, (trans.) Alan Gewirth. New York, 1956.
Marsilius of Padua. The Defender of the Peace, (trans.) Annabel Brett. Cambridge,
2005.
Matthew of Acquasparta. Quaestiones disputatae de fide et cognitione, (ed.) PP. Collegii
S. Bonaventurae. Quaracchi, 1957.
Nemesius of Emesa. De natura hominis: Traduction de Burgundio de Pise, (eds.) Gérard
Verbeke and J.R. Moncho. Leiden, 1975.
Peter John Olivi. Quaestiones in secundum librum Sententiarum, (ed.) Bernard Jansen,
3 vols. Quaracchi, 1922–1926.
Peter John Olivi. Quodlibeta quinque, (ed.) Stefano Defraia. Grottaferrata, 2002.
Peter of Trabes. ii Sent., d. 24, (ed.) Ephrem Longpré. Studi Francescani 8 (1922): 267–90.
Philip the Chancellor. Summa de bono, (ed.) Niklaus Wicki, 2 vols. Berne, 1985.
Porphyry of Tyre. Isagoge et In Aristotelis Categorias commentarium, (ed.) Adolf Busse.
Commentaria in Aristotelem Graeca 4.1. Berlin, 1887.
Porphyry of Tyre. Sentences, (eds.) Luc Brisson et al., 2 vols. Paris, 2005.
Priscian of Lydia. Metaphrasis in Theophrastum, (ed.) Ingram Bywater. Supplementum
Aristotelicum 1.2. Berlin, 1906.
Priscian of Lydia. On Theophrastus on Sense-Perception, (trans.) Pamela Huby. London
and Ithaca, ny, 1997.
Proclus Diadochus. Elementatio theologica translata a Guillelmo de Morbecca, (ed.)
Helmut Boese. Leuven, 1987.
Prosper of Reggio Emilia. In libros Sententiarum. Vatican City, Bibliotheca Apostolica
Vaticana, Vat. Lat. 1086.
Quellen zur Geschichte Kaiser Heinrichs iv, (eds.) Carl Erdmann and Franz-Josef
Schmale. Darmstadt, 1963.
Richard Fishacre. Commentarium in libros Sententiarum, (ed. part.) R. James Long, in
The Problem of the Soul in Richard Fishacre’s Commentary on the Sentences, *1–
*151. Ph.D. dissertation, University of Toronto, 1968.
Richard of Mediavilla. Quaestiones disputatae, (ed.) Alain Boureau, 6 vols. Paris,
2011–2014.
Richard of Mediavilla. Super quatuor libros Sententiarum Petri Lombardi quaestiones
subtilissimae, 4 vols. Brescia, 1591.
Robert Grosseteste. Commentarius in Posteriorum Analyticorum libros, (ed.) Pietro
Rossi. Florence, 1981.
Roger Bacon. De multiplicatione specierum, (ed.) David C. Lindberg. Roger Bacon’s
Philosophy of Nature: A Critical Edition, with English Translation, Introduction, and
Notes, of De multiplicatione specierum and De speculis comburentibus. Oxford,
1983.
400 Bibliography

Roger of Hoveden. The Annals of Roger de Hoveden, Comprising the History of England
and of Other Countries of Europe from A.D. 732 to A.D. 1201, (trans.) Henry T. Riley, 2
vols. London, 1853; reprint 1968.
Roger Marston. Quaestiones disputatae de emanatione aeterna, de statu naturae lapsae
et de anima, (ed.) PP. Collegii S. Bonaventurae. Quaracchi, 1932.
Roger Marston. Quodlibeta quatuor, (eds.) Girard Etzkorn and Ignatius Brady. 2nd ed.
Grottaferrata, 1994.
Siger of Brabant. Quaestiones morales, (ed.) Bernardo Bazán. Siger de Brabant: Écrits de
logique, morale, et de la physique, 98–105. Louvain and Paris, 1974.
Siger of Brabant. Quaestiones naturales, (ed.) Bernardo Bazán. Siger de Brabant: Écrits
de logique, morale, et de la physique, 106–26.
Simplicius. In Aristotelis Categorias commentarium, (ed.) Karl Kalbfleisch. Commen-
taria in Aristotelem Graeca 8. Berlin, 1907.
Simplicius. Commentaire sur les Catégories d’Aristote: Traduction de Guillaume de Moer-
beke, (eds.) Adriaan Pattin, W. Stuyven, and Carlos Steel, 2 vols. Louvain and Leiden,
1971–1975.
Simplicius. On Aristotle’s Categories 7–8, (trans.) Barrie Fleet. London and Ithaca, ny,
2002.
Simplicius (Pseudo-). In libros Aristotelis de anima commentaria, (ed.) Michael Hay-
duck. Commentaria in Aristotelem Graeca 11. Berlin, 1882–.
Simplicius (Pseudo-). On Aristotle’s “On the Soul” 2.5–12, (trans.) Carlos Steel and J.P.
Urmson. London and Ithaca, ny, 1997.
Thomas Aquinas. Opera omnia, ed. Parma, 25 vols. Parma, 1852–1873.
Thomas Aquinas. Opera omnia, ed. Leonina. Rome 1882–.
Thomas Aquinas. In Metaphysicam Aristotelis, (ed.) M.-R. Cathala. Turin, 1935.
Thomas Aquinas. Quaestiones disputatae, (eds.) P. Bazzi, M. Calcaterra, T.S. Centi, E.
Odetto, and P.M. Pession, 2 vols. Turin and Rome, 1965.
Thomas Aquinas. Scriptum super Sententiis, (eds.) Pierre Mandonnet and Marie-­Fabien
Moos, 4 vols. Paris 1929–1947.
Thomas Aquinas. Super Evangelium Iohannis Lectura, (ed.) Raphael Cai. Turin and
Rome, 1952.
Thomas of York, Sapientiale, lib. 6, (ed.) John P.E. Scully, in Reality and Truth in Thomas
of York, vol. 2. Ph.D. dissertation, University of Toronto, 1960.
Ventura, Guglielmo. Chronicon Astense, (ed.) L.A. Muratori. Rerum Italicarum Scrip-
tores 11. Milan, 1727.
William of Alnwick. Quaestiones disputatae de esse intelligibili et de quodlibet [sic],
(ed.) Athanase Ledoux. Florence, 1937.
William of Auvergne. Opera omnia, 2 vols. Paris, 1674.
William of Cremona. Litterae Prioris Generalis Fr. Guillelmi de Cremona. In Analecta
Augustiniana 4 (1911): 29–32.
Bibliography 401

William of Hundleby. The Anagni Outrage, (ed.) Henry G.J. Beck, in William of Hundle-
by’s Account of the Anagni Outrage. Catholic Historical Review 32 (1946): 190–220.

Early Modern and Contemporary

Armstrong, David. Truth and Truthmakers. Cambridge, 2004.
Campbell, Keith. Abstract Particulars. Oxford, 1990.
Descartes, René. Oeuvres de Descartes, (eds.) Charles Adam and Paul Tannery, revised
by Pierre Costabel and Bernard Rochot, 13 vols. Paris, 1996.
Descartes, René. The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, (trans.) John Cottingham, Rob-
ert Stoothoff, Dugald Murdoch, and Anthony Kenny, 3 vols. Cambridge, 1984–1991.
Heil, John. Relations. In The Routledge Companion to Metaphysics, (eds.) Robin Le
Poidevin, Peter Simons, Andrew McGonigal, and Ross P. Cameron, 310–21. London,
2009.
Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm. Nouveaux essais sur l’entendement. In Die philosophischen
Schriften, (ed.) C.I. Gerhardt, vol. 5. Berlin, 1882; reprint Hildesheim, 2008.
Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, (trans.) David Pears and Brian
McGuinness. London, 2001.

Secondary Literature

Abate, Giuseppe and Giovanni Luisetto. Codici e manoscritti della Biblioteca Antoniana,
2 vols. Vicenza, 1975.
Adams, Marilyn McCord. Some Later Medieval Theories of the Eucharist: Thomas Aqui-
nas, Giles of Rome, Duns Scotus, and William Ockham. Oxford, 2010.
Aiello, Andrea and Robert Wielockx. Goffredo di Fontaines, aspirante baccelliere
sentenziario: Le autografe “Notule de scientia theologie” e la cronologia del ms.
Paris BnF lat. 16297. Corpus Christianorum. Autographa Medii Aevi 6. Turnhout,
2008.
Alès, Adhémar d’. Jacques de Viterbe, théologien de l’Église. Gregorianum 7 (1927):
339–53.
Ambrasi, Dominico. La Summa de peccatorum distinctione del B. Giacomo da Viterbo
dal ms. vii G 101 della Biblioteca Nazionale di Napoli. Asprenas 6 (1959): 47–78,
189–218, 288–308.
Amerini, Fabrizio. Aquinas on the Beginning and End of Human Life, (trans.) Mark Hen-
ninger. Cambridge, MA, 2013.
Anderson, David. ‘Dominus Ludovicus’ in the Sermons of Jacobus of Viterbo (Arch.
S. Pietro D.213). In Literature and Religion in the Later Middle Ages: Philological Stud-
ies in Honor of Siegfried Wenzel, (eds.) Richard Newhauser and John A. Alford, 275–
95. Binghamton, ny, 1995.
402 Bibliography

Arámburu Cendoga, Ignacio (ed.). Las primitivas Constituciones de los Agostinos. Val-
ladolid, 1966.
Arquillière, Henri-Xavier. Le plus ancien traité de l’Église: Jacques de Viterbe, De regimine
Christiano (1301–1302). Paris, 1926.
Arquillière, Henri-Xavier. L’augustinisme politique: Essai sur la formation des théories
politiques du Moyen-Âge. Paris, 1934; reprint 1972.
Bassetti, Sandro. I Templari a Viterbo. Orvieto, 2013.
Bataillon, Louis-Jacques. Quelques utilisateurs des textes rares de Moerbeke (Philo-
pon, tria opuscula) et particulièrement Jacques de Viterbe. In Guillaume de Moer-
beke: Recueil d’études à l’occasion du 700e anniversaire de sa mort (1286), (eds.) Jozef
Brams and Willy Vanhamel, 107–12. Leuven, 1965-1982.
Becker, Marvin B. Medieval Italy: Constraints and Creativity. Bloomington, in, 1981.
Bénédictins du Bouveret (eds.). Colophons de manuscrits occidentaux des origines au
XVIe siècle, 6 vols. Fribourg, 1965–1982.
Beneš, Jaroslav. Valor “Possibilium” apud S. Thomam, Henricum Gandavensem, B. Ia-
cobum de Viterbio. Divus Thomas (Piacenza) 29 (1926): 612–34; 30 (1927): 94–117,
333–55.
Bergdolt, Klaus. Das Auge und die Theologie: Naturwissenschaften und “Perspectiva” an
der Päpstlichen Kurie in Viterbo (ca. 1260–1285). Paderborn, 2007.
Berryman, Sylvia. Aristotle on pneuma and Animal Self-Motion. Oxford Studies in An-
cient Philosophy 23 (2002): 85–97.
Boase, T.S.R. Boniface viii. London, 1933.
Borde, Hubert. Gerard de Bologne O. Carm. († 1317): Sa conception de la théologie et de
la puissance de Dieu. Ph.D. dissertation, Université Paris-Sorbonne, 2005.
Bos, Egbert P. and Pieter A. Meijer (eds.). On Proclus and His Influence in Medieval Phi-
losophy. Leiden, 1992.
Bouman, C.A. Sacring and Crowning: The Development of the Latin Ritual for the Anoint-
ing of Kings and the Coronation of the Emperor Before the Eleventh Century. Gronin-
gen, 1957.
Boyer, Jean-Paul. Prédication et état napolitain dans la première moitié du xiv siècle.
In L’état Angevin: Pouvoir, culture et société entre xiiie et xive siècle, 127–57. Rome,
1998.
Boyer, Jean-Paul. Vertus privées et bien public: Reines et princesses selon la prédica-
tion “de mortuis” à la cour de Naples (première moitie du xive siècle). In Reines et
princesses au Moyen Âge: Actes du cinquième Colloque internationale de Montpellier
Université Paul Valéry (24–27 novembre 1999), (ed.) Marcel Faure, 413–35. Montpel-
lier, 2001.
Boyer, Jean-Paul. Spirituel et temporel dans les sermons napolitains de la première
moitie du xive siècle. In Preaching and Political Society from Late Antiquity to the
End of the Middle Ages, (ed.) Franco Morenzoni, 267–309. Turnhout, 2013.
Brenet, Jean-Baptiste (ed.). Guillaume d’Auvergne: De l’âme (vii, 1–9). Paris, 1998.
Bibliography 403

Briggs, Charles F. Life, Works, and Legacy. In A Companion to Giles of Rome, (eds.)
Briggs and Eardley, 6–33.
Briggs, Charles F. and Peter S. Eardley (eds.). A Companion to Giles of Rome. Leiden,
2016.
Briguglia, Gianluca. La questione del potere: Teologi et teoria politica nella disputa tra
Bonifacio viii e Filippo il Bello. Milan, 2009; French translation: Le pouvoir mis à la
question: Théologiens et théorie politique à l’époque du conflit entre Boniface viii et
Philippe le Bel. Paris, 2016.
Brinzei, Monica. Le premier commentaire cistercien sur les Sentences de Pierre Lom-
bard par Humbert de Preuilly (m. 1298). Bulletin de philosophie médiévale 53 (2011):
81–148.
Brower, Jeffrey E. Aquinas’s Ontology of the Material World: Change, Hylomorphism, and
Material Objects. Oxford, 2014.
Brungs, Alexander, Vilem Mudroch, and Peter Schulthess (eds.). Philosophie des Mittel-
alters, vol. 4: 13. Jahrhundert: Überweg—Grundriss der Geschichte der Philosophie.
Basel, 2017.
Bruzelius, Caroline. The Stones of Naples: Church Building in Angevin Italy, 1266–1343.
New Haven and London, 2004.
Bullet, Gabriel. Vertus morales infuses et vertus morales acquises selon Saint Thomas
d’Aquin. Fribourg, 1958.
Cantera, Biagio. Documenti risguardanti il beato Giacomo da Viterbo, arcivescovo di Na-
poli. Naples, 1888.
Casado, Fidel. El pensamiento filosófico del Beato Santiago de Viterbo. La Ciu-
dad de Dios 163 (1951): 437–54; 164 (1952): 301–31; 165 (1953): 103–44, 283–302,
491–500.
Casado, Fidel. Quaestiones de quolibet de Santiago de Viterbo (Quodlibeto I, q. 12).
Archivo Teológico Agustiniano, 2 (1967): 109–30.
Casado, Fidel. El primero Quodlibeto de Santiago de V., O.S.A. Estudio agustiniano 4
(1969): 557–65.
Casado, Fidel. Santiago de Viterbo. ¿Un evolucionista preteilhardiano en el Medioevo?
Estudio agustiniano 11 (1976): 115–27.
Catalogue général des manuscrits des bibliothèques publiques des départements vii:
Toulouse; Nîmes. Paris, 1885.
Cenci, Cesare. Manoscritti e frati studiosi nella Biblioteca Antoniana di Padova. Archi-
vum Franciscanum Historicum 69 (1976), 496–20.
Ciampi, Ignazio (ed.). Cronache e statuti della Città di Viterbo. Florence, 1872.
Colish, Marcia. The Stoic Tradition from Antiquity to the Early Middle Ages, 2 vols.
Leiden, 1985.
Conti, Alessandro. Intelletto ed astrazione nella teoria della conoscenza di Egidio Ro-
mano. Bullettino dell’Istituto Storico Italiano per il Medio Evo e Archivio Muratoriano
95 (1989): 123–64.
404 Bibliography

Constable, Giles. The Ideal of the Imitation of Christ. In idem, Three Studies in Medi-
eval Religious and Social Thought, 143–248. Cambridge, 1995.
Coste, Jean (ed.). Boniface viii en procès: Articles d’accusation et dépositions des témoins
(1303–1311). Rome, 1995.
Côté, Antoine. Simplicius and James of Viterbo on Propensities. Vivarium 47 (2009):
24–53.
Côté, Antoine. Le progrès à l’infini des perfections créées selon Godefroid de Fontaines
et Jacques de Viterbe. In Actualité de l’infinité divine aux xiiie et xive siècles, (ed.)
D. Arbib. Les Études Philosophiques 4 (2009): 505–30.
Côté, Antoine (ed.). Jacques de Viterbe: L’âme, l’intellect et la volonté. Paris, 2010.
Côté, Antoine. Deux questions inédites de Jacques de Viterbe sur les habitus. Archives
d’histoire doctrinale et littéraire du Moyen Âge 79 (2012): 289–311.
Côté, Antoine. Le Quodlibet I, question 17 de Jacques de Viterbe: Introduction, traduc-
tion et notes. Augustiniana 62 (2012): 45–76.
Côté, Antoine. La critique de la doctrine de l’abstraction de Jacques de Viterbe. Medio-
evo 38 (2013): 235–62.
Côté, Antoine. James of Viterbo. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (2014), http://
plato.stanford.edu/entries/james-viterbo/.
Côté, Antoine. Bernard of Auvergne on James of Viterbo’s Doctrine of Possibles:
With a Critical Edition of Bernard’s Reprobatio of James’s Quodlibet 1, Question 5.
Augustiniana 66 (2016): 151–84.
Counet, Jean-Michel. Henri de Gand: La prudence dans ses rapports aux vertus mo-
rales. In Henry of Ghent and the Transformation of Scholastic Thought: Studies in
Memory of Jos Decorte, (eds.) Guldentops and Steel, 227–40.
Courtine, Jean-François. Suarez et le système de la métaphysique. Paris, 1990.
Damiata, Marino. Alvaro Pelagio, teocratico scontento. Florence, 1984.
Damiata, Marino. Il pensiero politico di Giacomo da Viterbo nel De regimine christiano
e Alvaro Pelagio. Studi francescani 81 (1984): 639–71.
Decorte, Jos. Der Einfluß der Willenspsychologie des Walter von Brügge ofm auf die
Willenspsychologie und Freiheitslehre des Heinrich von Gent. Franziskanische Stu-
dien 65 (1983): 215–40.
Decorte, Jos. Henry of Ghent on Analogy: Critical Reflections on Jean Paulus’ Interpre-
tation. In Henry of Ghent: Proceedings of the International Colloquium on the Occa-
sion of the 700th Anniversary of his Death (1293), (ed.) Vanhamel, 71–105. Leuven, 1996.
Decorte, Jos. Giles of Rome and Henry of Ghent on the Reality of a Real Relation. Docu-
menti e studi sulla tradizione filosofica medievale 7 (1996): 183–211.
Del Punta, Francesco and Concetta Luna. Catalogo dei manoscritti: Francia (diparti-
menti). Aegidii Romani Opera Omnia 1.1/3*. Florence, 1987.
Del Punta, Francesco, Silvia Donati, and Concetta Luna. Romano, Egidio. In Dizionario
biografico degli Italiani vol. 42, coll. 319–340. Rome, 1993.
Bibliography 405

Dewan, Lawrence. Form and Being: Studies in Thomistic Metaphysics. Washington, dc,
2006.
Di Prospero, Gianluca. Viterbo, custode segreta: Papa Alessandro iv, le sacre reliquie e I
Templari. Orvieto, 2011.
Digard, Georges. Philippe le Bel et le Saint-Siège de 1285 à 1304, 2 vols. Paris, 1936.
Donati, Silvia and Cecilia Trifogli. Natural Philosophy. In A Companion to Giles of Rome,
(eds.) Briggs and Eardley, 73–113.
Dondaine, Hyacinthe-François. Le corpus dionysien de l’Université de Paris au xiiie
siècle. Rome, 1953.
Doucet, Victorin. Descriptio codicis 172 bibliothecae communalis Assisiensis. Archi-
vum Franciscanum Historicum 25 (1932): 257–74, 378–89, 502–24.
Duba, William O. Continental Franciscan Quodlibeta after Scotus. In Theological Quod-
libeta in the Middle Ages: The Fourteenth Century, (ed.) Schabel, 569–650.
Duijnstee, X.P.D. ’s Pausen Primaat in de latere Middeleeuwen en de Aegidiaansche
School, 3 vols. Hilversum, 1935.
Duin, J.J. La bibliothèque philosophique de Godefroid de Fontaines. Estudios Lulianos
3 (1959): 21–36, 137–60.
Dumont, Stephen. Henry of Ghent and Duns Scotus. In The Routledge History of Phi-
losophy iii: Medieval Philosophy, (ed.) John Marenbon, 291–328. London, 1998.
Dumont, Stephen. The Inception of Thomas Wylton. Forthcoming.
Dumont, Stephen. New Questions by Giles of Rome (I): Intension and Remission of
Forms. Forthcoming.
Dunbabin, Jean. Charles I of Anjou: Power, Kingship and State-Making in Thirteenth-
Century Europe. London, 1998.
Dunbabin, Jean. The French in the Kingdom of Sicily, 1266–1305. Cambridge, 2011.
Dupuy, Pierre. Histoire du différend d’entre le pape Boniface viiie et Philippes le Bel Roy
de France. Paris, 1655; reprint Tucson, 1963.
Dyson, R.W. (ed.). Three Royalist Tracts, 1296–1302. Bristol, 1999.
Dyson, R.W. (ed.). Normative Theories of Society and Government in Five Medieval
Thinkers. Lewiston, ny, 2003.
Dyson, R.W. (ed.). Giles of Rome’s On Ecclesiastical Power: A Medieval Theory of World
Government. New York, 2004.
Dyson, R.W. (ed.). James of Viterbo, De regimine Christiano: A Critical Edition and
Translation. Leiden, 2009.
Eardley, Peter S. Ethics and Moral Psychology. In A Companion to Giles of Rome, (eds.)
Briggs and Eardley, 173–211.
Ebert, Theodor. Aristotle on What Is Done in Perceiving. Zeitschrift für philosophische
Forschung 37 (1983): 181–98.
Egenter, Richard. Gottesfreundschaft: Die Lehre von der Gottesfreundschaft in der Scho-
lastik und Mystik des 12. und 13. Jahrhunderts. Augsburg, 1928.
406 Bibliography

Elssius, Philipp. Encomiasticon Augustinianum. Brussels, 1654.

Finan, Thomas and Vincent Twomey (eds.). The Relationship between Neoplatonism
and Christianity. Dublin, 1992.
Finke, Heinrich. Aus den Tagen Bonifaz viii: Funde und Forschungen. Münster, 1902.
Friedman, Russell L. The Sentences Commentary, 1250–1320: General Trends, the
Impact of the Religious Orders, and the Test Case of Predestination. In Mediaeval
Commentaries on the Sentences of Peter Lombard. Volume I: Current Research, (ed.)
Gillian R. Evans, 42–128. Leiden, 2002.
Friedman, Russell L. Intellectual Traditions at the Medieval University: The Use of Philo-
sophical Psychology in Trinitarian Theology among the Franciscans and Dominicans,
1250–1350. Leiden, 2013.
Frothingham, Arthur J. Jr. Notes on Roman Artists of the Middle Ages. iii: Two Tombs
of the Popes at Viterbo by Vassallectus and Petrus Oderisi. The American Journal of
Archaeology and of the History of the Fine Arts 7 (1891): 38–53.
Furley, David. Self-Movers. In Aristotle on Mind and the Senses: Proceedings of the Sev-
enth Symposium Aristotelicum, (eds.) G.E.R. Lloyd and G.E.L. Owen, 165–79. Cam-
bridge, 1978. Reprinted in Self-Motion from Aristotle to Newton, (eds.) Mary Louise
Gill and James G. Lennox, 3–14. Princeton, 1994.
Gauthier, René-Antoine. Les Articuli in quibus frater Thomas melius in Summa quam in
scriptis. Recherches de théologie ancienne et médiévale 19 (1952): 271–326.
Gauthier, René-Antoine. Le cours sur l’Ethica nova d’un maître ès arts de Paris. Archives
d’histoire doctrinale et littéraire du Moyen Age 42 (1975): 71–141.
Gewirth, Alan. Marsilius of Padua and Medieval Political Philosophy. New York, 1956.
Gill, Mary Louise. Aristotle on Substance: The Paradox of Unity. Princeton, 1989.
Giustiniani, Pasquale. Due questioni inedite sullo statuto epistemologico della teolo-
gia nella Abbreviatio in I Sententiarum Aegidii Romani di Giacomo da Viterbo. As-
prenas 26 (1979): 23–57.
Giustiniani, Pasquale. Il problema delle idee in Dio secondo Giacomo da Viterbo oesa,
con edizione della Distinzione 36 dell’Abbreviatio in I Sententiarum Aegidii Romani.
Analecta Augustiniana 42 (1979): 288–342.
Giustiniani, Pasquale. La teologia studiata secondo le 4 cause aristoteliche in un’opera
inedita di Giacomo da Viterbo O.E.S.A. Asprenas 27 (1980): 161–88.
Giustiniani, Pasquale. Giacomo da Viterbo nel clima di transizione culturale. In
­Giacomo da Viterbo al tempo di Bonifacio viii, (eds.) Giustiniani and Tavolaro, 27–62.
Giustiniani, Pasquale and Gianpiero Tavolaro (eds.). Giacomo da Viterbo al tempo di
Bonifacio viii: Studi per il vii centenario della morte in onore di S. E. Rev.ma Mons.
Lorenzo Chiarinelli Vescovo emerito di Viterbo. Rome, 2011.
Glorieux, Palémon. Répertoire des maîtres en théologie de Paris au xiiie siècle, 2 vols.
Paris, 1933–1934.
Bibliography 407

Goehring, Bernd. Henry of Ghent’s Use of Aristotle’s De anima in Developing His

Theory of Cognition. In Medieval Perspectives on Aristotle’s De anima, (eds.) Rus-
sell L. Friedman and Jean-Michel Counet, 61–99. Leuven and Louvain-la-Neuve,
2013.
Gómez Caffarena, José. Ser participado y ser subsistente en la metafísica de Enrique de
Gante. Rome, 1959.
Goris, Harm J.M.J. Divine Foreknowledge, Providence, Predestination and Human
Freedom. In The Theology of Thomas Aquinas, (eds.) Rik Van Nieuwenhove and Jo-
seph Wawrykow, 99–122. Notre Dame, in, 2005.
Gossiaux, Mark D. The Metaphysical Structure of Finite Being According to James of
Viterbo. Ph.D. dissertation, The Catholic University of America, 1998.
Gossiaux, Mark D. James of Viterbo on the Relationship Between Essence and Exis-
tence. Augustiniana 49 (1999): 73–107.
Gossiaux, Mark D. James of Viterbo and the Late Thirteenth-Century Debate Concern-
ing the Reality of the Possibles. Recherches de théologie et philosophie médiévales 74
(2007): 483–522.
Gossiaux, Mark D. James of Viterbo on the Nature and Division of the Categories.
Quaestiones Disputatae 4 (2014): 167–90.
Grabmann, Martin. Doctrina S. Thomae de distinctione reali inter essentiam et esse
ex documentis ineditis saeculi xiii illustratur. In Acta Hebdomadae Thomisticae Ro-
mae celebratae 19–25 novembris 1923, 131–90. Rome, 1924.
Grabmann, Martin. Die Lehre des Jakob von Viterbo († 1308) von der Wirklichkeit
des göttlichen Seins: Beitrag zum Streit über das Sein Gottes zur Zeit Meister Eck-
harts. In Philosophia perennis: Festgabe für Joseph Geyser zum 60. Geburtstag, (ed.)
Fritz-Joachim von Rintelen, 288–308. Regensburg, 1930. Reprinted in idem, Mittelal-
terliches Geistesleben, vol. 2, 490–511. Munich, 1936.
Grabmann, Martin. Die Proklosübersetzungen des Wilhelm von Moerbeke und ihre
Verwertung in der lateinischen Literatur des Mittelalters. In idem, Mittelalterliches
Geistesleben: Abhandlungen zur Geschichte der Scholastik und Mystik, 413–23. Mu-
nich, 1936.
Grabmann, Martin. Guglielmo di Moerbeke O.P. il traduttore delle opere di Aristotele.
Rome, 1946.
Grabmann, Martin. Die Lehre des Erzbischofs und Augustinertheologen Jakob von
Viterbo († 1307/8) vom Episkopat und Primat, und ihre Beziehung zum hl. Thomas
von Aquin. In Episcopus: Studien über das Bischofsamt; Seiner Eminenz Michael Kar-
dinal von Faulhaber, Erzbischof von München-Freising zum 80. Geburtstag, 185–206.
Regensburg, 1949.
Gracia, Jorge J.E. (ed.). Individuation in Scholasticism: The Later Middle Ages and the
Counter-Reformation 1150–1650. Albany, ny, 1994.
408 Bibliography

Grant, Edward. The Medieval Doctrine of Place: Some Fundamental Problems and
Solutions. In Studi sul xiv secolo in memoria di Anneliese Maier, (eds.) Maierù and
Paravicini Bagliani, 63–72. Rome, 1981.
Guldentops, Guy and Carlos Steel (eds.). Henry of Ghent and the Transformation of
Scholastic Thought: Studies in Memory of Jos Decorte. Leuven, 2003.
Gutiérrez, David. De vita et scriptis beati Jacobi de Viterbio. Analecta Augustiniana 16
(1937–1938): 216–24; 282–305; and 358–81.
Gutiérrez, David. De doctrina theologica Beati Jacobi de Viterbo. Analecta Augustini-
ana 16 (1937–1938), 432–66 and 523–52.
Gutiérrez, David. De B. Iacobi Viterbiensis O.E.S.A. vita, operibus et doctrina theologica.
Rome, 1939.
Gutiérrez, David. La Biblioteca di S. Agostino di Roma nel secolo xv: Inventario del
1478. Analecta Augustiniana 28 (1965): 57–153.
Hackett, Benedict. The Foundation of the Augustinian studia generalia at Paris, Oxford
and Cambridge. In Studio e studia: Le scuole degli ordini mendicanti tra xiii e xiv
secolo; Atti del xxix Congresso internazionale di studi, Assisi, 11–13 ottobre 2001, 151–74.
Spoleto, 2002.
Hackett, Jeremiah. The Reception of Meister Eckhart: Mysticism, Philosophy and The-
ology in Henry of Friemar (the Elder) and Jordanus of Quedlinburg. In Meister Eck-
hart in Erfurt, (eds.) Andreas Speer and Lydia Wegener. Miscellanea Mediaevalia 32,
560–72. Berlin, 2005.
Hadot, Ilsetraut. Aspects de la théorie de perception chez les néoplatoniciens. Docu-
menti e studi sulla tradizione filosofica medievale 8 (1997): 33–85.
Hamesse, Jacqueline. Les autographes à l’époque scolastique: Approche termi-
nologique et méthodologique. In Gli autografi medievali: Problemi paleografici e
filologici; Atti del convegno di studio della Fondazione Ezio Franceschini, Erice, 25
settembre–2 ottobre 1990, (eds.) Paolo Chiesa and Lucia Pinelli, 179–205. Spoleto, 1994.
Hanska, Jussi. Catastrophe Sermons and Apocalyptic Expectations: Eudes de Châte-
auroux and the Earthquake of 1269 in Viterbo. In The Last Judgement in Medieval
Preaching, (eds.) Thom Mertens, Maria Sherwood-Smith, Michael Mecklenburg,
and Hans-Jochen Schiewer, 117–34. Turnhout, 2013.
Hauer, Mareike. The Notion of ἐπιτηδειότης in Simplicius’ Discussion of Quality. Docu-
menti et studi sulla tradizione filosofica medievale 27 (2016): 65–83.
Hauréau, Barthélemy. Jacques de Viterbe, théologien. Histoire littéraire de la France,
vol. 27, 45–63. Paris, 1877.
Henninger, Mark. Relations: Medieval Theories 1250–1325. Oxford, 1989.
Herrera, Thomas de. Alphabetum Augustinianum. Madrid, 1644.
Hissette, Roland. Enquête sur les 219 articles condamnés à Paris le 7 mars 1277. Louvain,
1977.
Hödl, Ludwig. Die Kritik des Johannes de Polliaco an der philosophischen und
theologischen Ratio in der Auseinandersetzung mit den averroistischen
Bibliography 409

­Unterscheidungslehren: Eine historische Studie zu den Quaestiones quodlibetales

und Quaestiones ordinariae des Johannes de Polliaco. In Miscellanea Martin Grab-
mann: Gedenkblatt zum 10. Todestag, 11–30. Munich, 1959.
Hoffmann, Tobias. Walter Chatton on the Connection of the Virtues. Quaestio 8 (2008):
57–82.
Hoffmann, Tobias. Intellectualism and Voluntarism. In The Cambridge History of Medi-
eval Philosophy, (ed.) Pasnau, 414–27.
Hoffmans, Jean. La table des divergences et innovations doctrinales de Godefroid de
Fontaines. Revue néoscolastique de philosophie 36 (1934): 412–36.
Honnefelder, Ludger. Possibilien. I. Mittelalter. In Historisches Wörterbuch der Philoso-
phie 7, coll. 1126–35. Basel, 1989.
Honnefelder, Ludger. Scientia transcendens: Die formale Bestimmung der Seiendheit
und Realität in der Metaphysik des Mittelalters und der Neuzeit (Duns Scotus, Suárez,
Wolff, Kant, Peirce). Hamburg, 1990.
Imbach, Ruedi. Averroistische Stellungnahmen zur Diskussion über das Verhältnis von
esse und essentia: Von Siger von Brabant zu Thaddaeus von Parma. In Studi sul xiv
secolo in memoria di Anneliese Maier, (eds.) Maierù and Paravicini Bagliani, 299–339.
Jeauneau, Édouard. Denys l’Aréopagite, promoteur du néoplatonisme en Occident. In
Néoplatonisme et philosophie médiévale: Actes du Colloque international de Corfou,
6–8 octobre 1995, (ed.) Linos G. Benakis, 1–23. Turnhout, 1997.
Jeschke, Thomas. Über natürliche und übernatürliche Gottesliebe: Durandus und ei-
nige Dominikaner gegen Jakob von Viterbo (mit einer Textedition von In iii Sen-
tentiarum, d. 29, q. 2, des Petrus de Palude). Recherches de théologie et philosophie
médiévales 76 (2009): 111–98.
Jones, Chris. Eclipse of Empire? Perceptions of the Western Empire and its Rulers in Late-
Medieval France. Turnhout, 2007.
Kempshall, Matthew S. The Common Good in Late Medieval Political Thought. Oxford,
1999.
Kent, Bonnie. Virtues of the Will: The Transformation of Ethics in the Late Thirteenth
Century. Washington, dc, 1995.
Kent, Bonnie. Justice, Passion, and Another’s Good. In Nach der Verurteilung von
1277: Philosophie und Theologie an der Universität von Paris im letzten Viertel des 13.
­Jahrhunderts; Studien und Texte, (eds.) Jan Aertsen, Kent Emery, Jr., and Andreas
Speer. Miscellanea Mediaevalia 28, 704–18. Berlin, 2001.
King, Peter. The Problem of Individuation in the Middle Ages. Theoria 66 (2000):
159–84.
Kobusch, Theo. Heinrich von Gent und die neuplatonische Ideenlehre. In Néopla-
tonisme et philosophie médiévale: Actes du Colloque international de Corfou, 6–8 oc-
tobre 1995, (ed.) Linos G. Benakis, 205–9. Turnhout, 1997.
Kölmel, Wilhelm. Regimen christianum: Weg und Ergebnis des Gewaltenverhältnisses
und des Gewaltenverständnisses (8. bis 14. Jahrhundert). Berlin, 1970.
410 Bibliography

König-Pralong, Catherine. Avènement de l’aristotélisme en terre chrétienne. Paris,

2005.
Korolec, Jerzy B. Les questions quodlibétiques de Jacques de Viterbe dans les manu-
scrits de la Bibliothèque Jagellone. Mediaevalia philosophica Polonorum 12 (1966):
107–16.
Kuiters, Raphael. Was bedeuten die Ausdrücke “directa” und “indirecta potestas papae
in temporalibus” bei Aegidius Romanus, Jakob von Viterbo und Johannes von Paris?
Archiv für katholisches Kirchenrecht 128 (1957–1958): 99–105.
Kuksewicz, Zdzisław. Criticisms of Aristotelian Psychology and the Augustinian-Ar-
istotelian Synthesis. In The Cambridge History of Later Medieval Philosophy, (eds.)
Norman Kretzmann, Anthony Kenny, and Jan Pinborg, 623–28. Cambridge, 1982.
Langholm, Odd. Economics in the Medieval Schools. Leiden, 1992.
Lanza, Lidia. Augustinereremiten. In Philosophie des Mittelalters, vol. 4: 13. Jahrhundert.
Überweg—Grundriss der Geschichte der Philosophie, (eds.) Brungs, Mudroch, and
Schulthess, 986–94.
Lanza, Lidia and Toste, Marco. The Bridle-Maker and the Pope: The Use of Causality
in John of Paris’s De potestate regia et papali and in the Early De potestate papae
Treatises. In John of Paris: Beyond Royal and Papal Power, (ed.) Chris Jones, 309–60.
Turnhout, 2015.
Leclercq, Jean. Jean de Paris et l’ecclésiologie du xiiie siècle. Paris, 1942.
Léonard, Émile G. Les Angevins de Naples. Paris, 1954.
Leone, Marialucrezia. Moral Philosophy in Henry of Ghent. In A Companion to Henry
of Ghent, (ed.) Wilson, 292–301.
Lewis, Ewart. Medieval Political Ideas, 2 vols. London, 1954.
Libera, Alain de. D’Avicenne à Averroès, et retour. Sur les sources arabes de la théo-
rie scolastique de l’un transcendental. Arabic Sciences and Philosophy 4 (1994):
141–79.
Lindberg, David C. Lines of Influence in Thirteenth Century Optics: Bacon, Witelo and
Pecham. Speculum 46 (1971): 66–83.
Little, Lester K. Religious Poverty and the Profit Economy in Medieval Europe. London,
1978.
Lohr, Charles. Medieval Latin Aristotle Commentaries: Authors G–I. Traditio 24 (1968):
149–245.
Lottin, Odon. Le libre arbitre chez Godefroid de Fontaines. Revue néo-scolastique de
philosophie 54 (1937): 213–41.
Lottin, Odon. Psychologie et morale aux xiie et xiiie siècles, 6 vols. Gembloux, 1942–1960.
Luna, Concetta. Repertorio dei sermoni. Aegidii Romani Opera Omnia 1.6. Florence,
1990.
Luna, Concetta. Una nuova questione di Egidio Romano De subiecto theologiae. Freiburg-
er Zeitschrift für Philosophie und Theologie 37 (1990): 399–400; 38 (1991): 159–73.
Bibliography 411

Luna, Concetta. La Reportatio della lettura di Egidio Romano sul libro iii delle ­Sentenze
(Clm. 8005) e il problema dell’autenticità dell’Ordinatio. Documenti e studi sulla
­tradizione filosofica medievale 1 (1990): 113–225; 2 (1991): 75–146.
Macken, Raymond. Heinrich von Gent im Gespräch mit seinen Zeitgenossen über die
menschliche Freiheit. Franziskanische Studien 5 (1977): 125–82.
Macken, Raymond. Bibliotheca Manuscripta Henrici de Gandavo, 2 vols. Henrici de
Gandavo Opera Omnia 1–2. Leuven, 1979.
Macken, Raymond. Human Friendship in the Philosophy of Henry of Ghent. Franzis-
kanische Studien 70 (1988): 176–84.
Madoz, José. Una nueva redacción de los textos seudo-patrísticos sobre el primado en
Jacobi de Viterbo? Gregorianum 17 (1936): 562–83.
Mahoney, Edward. Themistius and the Agent Intellect in James of Viterbo and Other
Thirteenth Century Philosophers (Saint Thomas, Siger of Brabant and Henry Bate).
Augustiniana 23 (1973): 422–67.
Mahoney, Edward. Duns Scotus and Medieval Discussions of Metaphysical Hierarchy:
the Background of Scotus’ “Essential Order” in Henry of Ghent, Godfrey of Fon-
taines and James of Viterbo. In Via Scoti: Methodologica ad mentem Joannis Duns
Scoti; Atti del Congresso scotistico internazionale, Roma, 9–11 marzo 1993, (ed.) Leon-
ardo Sileo, 359–74. Rome, 1995.
Mahoney, Edward. James of Viterbo. In Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy, (ed.)
Edward Craig, vol. 5, 58–60. London, 1998.
Maier, Anneliese. Die Vorläufer Galileis im 14. Jahrhundert: Studien zur Naturphilosophie
der Spätscholastik. Rome, 1949.
Maierù, Alfonso and Agostino Paravicini Bagliani (eds.). Studi sul xiv secolo in memoria
di Anneliese Maier. Rome, 1981.
Mansi, Gian Domenico (ed.). Sacrorum Conciliorum nova et amplissima collectio. Flor-
ence and Venice, 1759–1798; reprint Graz, 1960–1961.
Marcolino, Venicio. Der Augustinertheologe an der Universität Paris. In Gregor von
Rimini: Werk und Wirkung bis zur Reformation, (ed.) Heiko A. Oberman, 127–94. Ber-
lin, 1981.
Mariani, Ugo. Il “De regimine christiano” di Giacomo da Viterbo. Giornale dantesco 27
(1924): 108–21.
Mariani, Ugo. Giacomo da Viterbo. Archivio della Società romana di storia patria 48
(1925): 137–69.
Mariani, Ugo. De conventu nostri ordinis Viterbiensis. Analecta Augustiniana 11 (1925):
227–35.
Mariani, Ugo. Scrittori politici Agostiniani del sec. xiv. Florence, 1927.
Mariani, Ugo. Chiesa e Stato nei teologi agostiniani del secolo xiv. Rome, 1957.
Mariucci, Francesco. Sacerdotium e regnum nella societas christiana di Giacomo da
Viterbo. Analecta Augustiniana 65 (2002): 197–300.
412 Bibliography

Marrone, Steven P. William of Auvergne and Robert Grosseteste: New Ideas of Truth in
the Early Thirteenth Century. Princeton, 1983.
Mattison, William C. Thomas’s Categorizations of Virtue: Historical Background and
Contemporary Significance. The Thomist 74 (2010): 189–229.
Maurer, Armand. Ens Diminutum: a Note on its Origin and Meaning. Mediaeval Studies
12 (1950): 216–22.
Mazzocchi, Alessio S. De Sanctorum Neapolitanae ecclesiae episcoporum cultu disser-
tatio. Naples, 1753.
McCready, William D. Papal “plenitudo potestatis” and the Source of Temporal Author-
ity in Late Medieval Hierocratic Theory. Speculum 48 (1973): 654–74.
McEvoy, James. The Sources and the Significance of Henry of Ghent’s Disputed Ques-
tion, “Is Friendship a Virtue?” In Henry of Ghent: Proceedings of the International Col-
loquium on the Occasion of the 700th Anniversary of His Death (1293), (ed.) Vanhamel,
120–38.
McGrade, Arthur Stephen, John Kilcullen, and Matthew Kempshall (eds.), The Cam-
bridge Translations of Medieval Philosophical Texts, vol. 2: Ethics and Political Phi-
losophy. Cambridge, 2001.
Meier, Ludger. De schola franciscana Erfordiensi. Antonianum 5 (1930): 157–202.
Menache, Sophia. A Propaganda Campaign in the Reign of Philip the Fair, 1302–1303.
French History 4 (1990): 427–54.
Merle, Hélène. Aptum natum esse: Aptitudo naturalis. Archivum latinitatis medii aevi /
Bulletin Du Cange 43 (1981–82): 122–39.
Miethke, Jürgen. De potestate papae: Die päpstliche Amtskompetenz im Widerstreit
der politischen Theorie von Thomas von Aquin bis Wilhelm von Ockham. Tübingen,
2000.
Miola, Alfonso. Intorno a un’antica imagine di Giacomo da Viterbo in un codice della
Nazionale di Napoli. Atti dell’Accademia Pontaniana 24 (1894): memoria n. 8.
Mommsen, Theodor E. and F. Morrison (trans.). Imperial Lives and Letters of the Elev-
enth Century. New York, 1962.
Moody, Ernest A. William of Auvergne and His Treatise De Anima. In idem, Studies in
Medieval Philosophy, Science, and Logic, 1–109. Berkeley, 1975.
Murray, John Courtney. Contemporary Orientations of Catholic Thought on Church
and State in the Light of History. Theological Studies 10 (1949): 177–234.
Nardi, Bruno. La dottrina d’Alberto Magno sull’ “inchoatio formae.” In idem, Studi di
filosofia medievale, 69–102. Rome, 1960.
Neumann, Bernhard. Der Mensch und die himmlische Seligkeit nach der Lehre Gottfrieds
von Fontaines. Limburg, 1958.
Nielsen, Lauge O. Peter Auriol on the Categories of Action and Passion: The Second
Question of His Quodlibet. In Philosophy and Theology in the Long Middle Ages: A
Bibliography 413

Tribute to Stephen F. Brown, (eds.) Kent Emery, Jr., Russell Friedman, and Andreas
Speer, 375–436. Leiden, 2011.
Noone, Timothy B. The Problem of the Knowability of Substance: The Discussion from
Eustachius of Arras to Vital du Four. In Philosophy and Theology in the Long Middle
Ages: A Tribute to Stephen F. Brown, (eds.) Kent Emery, Jr., Russell Friedman, and
Andreas Speer, 63–90. Leiden, 2011.
O’Meara, Dominic J. Neoplatonism and Christian Thought. New York, 1982.
Osborne, Thomas M., Jr. James of Viterbo’s Rejection of Giles of Rome’s Arguments for
the Natural Love of God over Self. Augustiniana 49 (1999): 235–49.
Osborne, Thomas M., Jr. Love of Self and Love of God in Thirteenth-Century Ethics. Notre
Dame, in, 2005.
Ossinger, Johann. Bibliotheca Augustiniana. Ingolstadt, 1768.
Packard, Sidney R. Europe and the Church under Innocent iii. New York, 1968.
Paluch, Michał. La profondeur de l’amor divin: Évolution de la doctrine de la prédestina-
tion dans l’oeuvre de saint Thomas d’Aquin. Paris, 2004.
Paravicini Bagliani, Agostino. Boniface viii: Un pape hérétique? Paris, 2003.
Pasnau, Robert (ed.). The Cambridge History of Medieval Philosophy, 2 vols. Cambridge,
2009.
Pattin, Adriaan. La structure de l’être fini selon Bernard d’Auvergne op (après 1307).
Tijdschrift voor Filosofie 24 (1962): 668–737.
Paulus, Jean. Henri de Gand: Essai sur les tendances de sa métaphysique. Paris, 1938.
Pegues, Franklin J. The Lawyers of the Last Capetians. Princeton, 1962.
Pelster, Franz. Cod. 739 der Stadtbibliothek Toulouse mit teilweise unbekannten Quäs-
tionen des Thomas von Sutton O.P., Johannes von Paris O.P., Aegidius Romanus
und Heinrich von Friemar O.E.S.A. Scholastik 32 (1957): 247–55.
Phelps, Mary. The Theory of Seminal Reasons in James of Viterbo. Augustiniana 30
(1980): 271–83.
Pickavé, Martin. The Controversy over the Principle of Individuation in Quodlibeta
(1277–ca. 1320): A Forest Map. In Theological Quodlibeta in the Middle Ages: The
Fourteenth Century, (ed.) Schabel, 17–79.
Pickavé, Martin. Henry of Ghent on Metaphysics. In A Companion to Henry of Ghent,
(ed.) Wilson, 153–79.
Pickavé, Martin. Henry of Ghent on Individuation, Essence, and Being. In A Compan-
tion to Henry of Ghent, (ed.) Wilson, 181–209.
Pickavé, Martin. Que signifie ‘être libre’? Le cas de Henri de Gand. Médiévales 63 (2012):
91–105.
Pickavé, Martin. Causality and Cognition: An Interpretation of Henry of Ghent’s Quod-
libet V, q. 14. In Intentionality, Cognition, and Mental Representation in Medieval Phi-
losophy, (ed.) Gyula Klima, 46–80. New York, 2015.
414 Bibliography

Pickavé, Martin. Metaphysics. In A Companion to Giles of Rome, (eds.) Briggs and Eard-
ley, 114–49.
Picot, Georges (ed.). Documents relatifs aux États généraux et Assemblées réunis sous
Philippe le Bel. Paris, 1901.
Pini, Giorgio. Being and Creation in Giles of Rome. In Nach der Verurteilung von 1277:
Philosophie und Theologie an der Universität von Paris im letzten Viertel des 13 Jah-
rhunderts, (eds.) Jan A. Aertsen, Kent Emery, Jr., and Andreas Speer. Miscellanea
Mediaevalia 28, 390–409. Berlin and New York, 2001.
Pini, Giorgio. Categories and Logic in Duns Scotus. Leiden, 2002.
Pini, Giorgio. Il dibattito sulle specie intelligibili alla fine del tredicesimo secolo. Me-
dioevo 29 (2004): 267–306.
Pini, Giorgio. Ex defectu intellectualis luminis: Giles of Rome on the Role and Limits of
Metaphysics. Quaestio 5 (2005): 205–19.
Pini, Giorgio. Le letture dei maestri dei frati agostiniani: Egidio Romano e Giacomo da
Viterbo. In Libri, biblioteche e letture dei frati mendicanti (secoli xiii–xiv): Atti del
xxxii Convegno Internazionale. Assisi, 7–9 ottobre 2004, 79–114. Spoleto, 2005.
Pini, Giorgio. The Individuation of Angels from Bonaventure to Duns Scotus. In A
Companion to Angels in Medieval Philosophy, (ed.) Tobias Hoffmann, 79–115. Leiden,
2012.
Pinzi, Cesare. Storia della città di Viterbo, 4 vols. Rome, 1887–1913.
Polansky, Ronald. Aristotle’s De anima: A Critical Commentary. Cambridge, 2008.
Porro, Pasquale. Ex adiacentia temporis: Egidio Romano e la categoria ‘quando’. Docu-
menti e studi sulla tradizione filosofica medievale 2 (1991): 147–81.
Porro, Pasquale. Possibilità ed esse essentiae in Enrico di Gand. In Henry of Ghent: Pro-
ceedings of the International Colloquium on the Occasion of the 700th Anniversary of
His Death (1293), (ed.) Vanhamel, 211–53.
Porro, Pasquale. Tommaso d’Aquino: Un profilo storico-filosofico. Rome, 2012.
Porro, Pasquale. The University of Paris in the Thirteenth Century: Proclus and the
Liber de causis. In Interpreting Proclus: From Antiquity to the Renaissance, (ed.) Ste-
phen Gersh, 264–98. Cambridge, 2014.
Prezioso, Faustino. L’attività del soggetto pensante nella gnoseologia di Matteo
d’Acquasparta e di Ruggero Marston. Antonianum 25 (1950): 268–70.
Pryds, Darleen. Studia as Royal Offices: Mediterranean Universities of Medieval Eu-
rope. In Universities and Schooling in Medieval Society, (eds.) William J. Courtenay
and Jürgen Miethke, 83–99. Leiden, 2000.
Pryds, Darleen. Women of the Streets: Early Franciscan Women and the Mendicant Voca-
tion. St. Bonaventure, ny, 2010.
Putallaz, François-Xavier. Insolente liberté: Controverses et condamnations au xiiie siè-
cle. Fribourg and Paris, 1995.
Bibliography 415

Radke, Gary M. Medieval Frescoes in the Papal Palaces of Viterbo and Orvieto. Gesta
23 (1984): 27–38.
Raizman-Kedar, Yael. The Intellect Naturalized: Roger Bacon on the Existence of Cor-
poreal Species within the Intellect. Early Science and Medicine 14 (2009): 131–57.
Rashdall, Hastings. The Universities of Europe in the Middle Ages, (eds.) F.M. Powicke
and A.B. Emden, 3 vols. Oxford, 1936.
Richstaetter, Carl. Christusfrömmigkeit in ihrer historischen Entfaltung: Ein quellenmäs-
siger Beitrag zur Geschichte des Gebets und des mystischen Innenlebens der Kirche.
Cologne, 1949.
Rigobert, M. Un traité de l’Église au Moyen Âge: Étude historique et doctrinale du De
regimine christiano (1301–1302) de Jacques de Viterbe. Albi, 1947.
Rivière, Jean. Le problème de l’église et de l’état au temps de Philippe le Bel: Étude de
théologie positive. Louvain, 1926.
Rizzacasa, Aurelio. L’agostinismo di Giacomo da Viterbo e di Egidio Romano. In Gia-
como da Viterbo al tempo di Bonifacio viii, (eds.) Giustiniani and Tavolaro, 81–106.
Robert, Aurélien. L’universalité réduite au discours: Sur quelques théories francis-
caines de l’abstraction à la fin du xiiie siècle. Documenti e studi sulla tradizione
filosofica medievale 18 (2007): 363–93.
Robert, Aurélien. Scepticisme ou renoncement au dogme? Interpréter l’eucharistie aux
xiiie et xive siècles. Chôra 6 (2008): 251–88.
Robert, Aurélien. The Knowability of Material Substances in Late Medieval Philosophy.
Forthcoming.
Rombeiro, Michael. Intelligible Species in the Mature Thought of Henry of Ghent.
Journal of the History of Philosophy 49 (2011): 181–220.
Rorem, Paul. Pseudo-Dionysius. Oxford, 1993.
Ruello, Francis. L’analogie de l’être selon Jacques de Viterbe, Quodlibet 1, Quaestio 1.
Augustiniana 20 (1970): 145–80.
Ruello, Francis. Les fondements de la liberté humaine selon Jacques de Viterbe, Dis-
putatio prima de Quolibet, q. vii (1293). Augustiniana 24 (1974): 283–347; 25 (1975):
114–142.
Rüssmann, Heinrich. Zur Ideenlehre der Hochscholastik unter besonderer Berücksichti-
gung des Heinrich von Gent, Gottfried von Fontaines und Jakob von Viterbo. Würzburg,
1938.
Saak, Eric L. High Way to Heaven: The Augustinian Platform between Reform and Refor-
mation, 1292–1524. Leiden, 2002.
Saak, Eric L. In Search of Origins: The Foundation(s) of the oesa. Analecta Augustini-
ana 75 (2012): 5–24.
Saak, Eric L. Giles of Rome. In The Oxford Guide to the Historical Reception of Augustine,
(eds.) Karla Pollmann and Willemien Otten, vol. 2, 1047–49. Oxford, 2013.
416 Bibliography

Saak, Eric L. James of Viterbo. In The Oxford Guide to the Historical Reception of
A
­ ugustine, (eds.) Karla Pollmann and Willemien Otten, vol. 3, 1201–1203. Oxford,
2013.
Saak, Eric L. Catechesis in the Later Middle Ages I: The Exposition of the Lord’s Prayer of
Jordan of Quedlinburg, oesa (d. 1380): Introduction, Text, and Translation. Leiden,
2015.
San Cristóbal-Sebastián, Antonio. Controversias acerca de la voluntad desde 1270 a 1300.
Madrid, 1958.
Santini, Gabriella. La festa di Santa Rosa a Viterbo: Uno sguardo antropologico. Rome,
2012.
Scanzillo, Ciriaco. Jacobus de Viterbio osa: La “Prima quaestio disputata de Verbo” del
codice A. 971 delle Biblioteca dell’Archiginnasio di Bologna; Edizione e note. Aspre-
nas 19 (1972): 41–61.
Scanzillo, Ciriaco. La via notarum nel De regimine christiano di Giacomo da Viterbo: Il
primo trattato del De regimine christiano. Asprenas 23 (1976): 363–90.
Scanzillo, Ciriaco. Apostolicità della Chiesa e potere temporale in Giacomo da Viterbo:
Introduzione alla seconda parte del “De regimine christiano.” Asprenas 32 (1985):
295–310.
Schabel, Christopher (ed.). Theological Quodlibeta in the Middle Ages: The Fourteenth
Century. Leiden, 2007.
Schabel, Christopher. John of Pouilly’s Quaestiones ordinariae de scientia Dei. Recher-
ches de théologie et philosophie médiévales 81 (2014): 237–72.
Schabel, Christopher and William J. Courtenay. Augustinian Quodlibeta after Giles of
Rome. In Theological Quodlibeta in the Middle Ages: The Fourteenth Century, (ed.)
Schabel, 545–68.
Schönberger, Rolf. Die Transformation des klassischen Seinsverständnisses: Studien zur
Vorgeschichte des neuzeitlichen Seinsbegriffs im Mittelalter. Berlin, 1986.
Schönberger, Rolf. Relation als Vergleich: Die Relationstheorie des Johannes Buridan im
Kontext seines Denkens und der Scholastik. Leiden, 1994.
Schönberger, Rolf, Andrés Quero Sánchez, Brigitte Berges and Lu Jiang (eds.). Reper-
torium edierter Texte des Mittelalters aus dem Bereich der Philosophie und angren-
zender Gebiete. 2nd ed. Berlin, 2011.
Scholz, Richard. Die Publizistik zur Zeit Philipps des Schönen und Bonifaz’ viii: Ein Be-
itrag zur Geschichte der politischen Anschauungen des Mittelalters. Stuttgart, 1903.
Schroeder, Henry Joseph. Disciplinary Decrees of the General Councils: Text, Translation
and Commentary. St. Louis, 1937.
Senner, Walter. Johannes von Sterngassen op und sein Sentenzenkommentar, 2 vols. Ber-
lin, 1995.
Senner, Walter. Jean de Sterngassen et son commentaire des Sentences. Revue thomiste
97 (1997): 83–98.
Bibliography 417

Silva, José Filipe, and Mikko Yrjönsuuri (eds.). Active Perception in the History of Phi-
losophy: From Plato to Modern Philosophy. Dordrecht, 2014.
Sisson, Keith. Papal Hierocratic Theory in the High Middle Ages. Saarbrücken, 2009.
Skemp, J.B. ὄρεξις in De anima iii 10. In Aristotle on Mind and the Senses: Proceedings
of the Seventh Symposium Aristotelicum, (eds.) G.E.R. Lloyd and G.E.L. Owen, 181–18.
Cambridge, 1978.
Solère, Jean-Luc. Les degrés de forme selon Henri de Gand (Quodl. iv, q. 15). In Henry
of Ghent and the Transformation of Scholastic Thought: Studies in Memory of Jos De-
corte, (eds.) Guldentops and Steel, 127–55.
Solère, Jean-Luc. Durand of Saint-Pourçain’s Cognition Theory: Its Fundamental Prin-
ciples. In Medieval Perspectives on Aristotle’s De Anima, (eds.) Jean-Michel Counet
and Russell L. Friedman, 185–248. Leuven and Louvain-la-Neuve, 2013.
Solère, Jean-Luc. Sine qua non Causality and the Context of Durand’s Early Theory of
Cognition. In Durand of Saint-Pourçain and His Sentences Commentary: Historical,
Philosophical and Theological Issues, (eds.) Andreas Speer, Fiorella Retucci, Thomas
Jeschke and Guy Guldentops, 185–227. Leuven, 2014.
Sorabji, Richard (ed.). The Philosophy of the Commentators, 200–600 ad: A Sourcebook,
3 vols. London and Ithaca, ny, 2005.
Sorbelli, Albano and Guiseppe Mazzatinti. Inventari dei manoscritti delle biblioteche
d’Italia, vol. 32. Bologna and Florence, 1925.
Sorge, Valeria. L’astrazione nella gnoseologia di Egidio Romano. Rivista di filosofia neo-
scolastica 72 (1980): 670–80.
Sorge, Valeria. Napoli al tempo di Giacomo da Viterbo: Profili storico-filosofici. In Gia-
como da Viterbo al tempo di Bonifacio viii, (eds.) Giustiniani and Tavolaro, 173–84.
Southern, R.W. The Making of the Middle Ages. New Haven and London, 1953.
Spruit, Leen. “Species Intelligibilis”: From Perception to Knowledge, 2 vols. Leiden,
1994–1995.
Strayer, Joseph R. Defence of the Realm and Royal Power in France. In Studi in onore di
Gino Luzzatto, (eds.) Corrado Barbagallo et al., vol. 1, 289–96. Milan, 1949.
Strayer, Joseph R. The Reign of Philip the Fair. Princeton, 1980.
Stroick, Clemens. Heinrich von Friemar: Leben, Werke, philosophisch-theologische Stel-
lung in der Scholastik. Freiburg, 1954.
Sturlese, Loris. Il dibattito sul Proclo latino nel Medioevo fra l’Università di Parigi e lo
Studium di Colonia. In Proclus et son influence: Actes du colloque de Neuchâtel, juin
1985, (eds.) Gilbert Boss and Gerhard Seel, 261–85. Zurich, 1987.
Sylla, Edith D. Godfrey of Fontaines on Motion with Respect to Quantity of the Eucha-
rist. In Studi sul xiv secolo in memoria di Anneliese Maier, (eds.) Maierù and Paravi-
cini Bagliani, 105–41.
Tachau, Katherine H. Vision and Certitude in the Age of Ockham: Optics, Epistemology
and the Foundations of Semantics 1250–1345. Leiden, 1988.
418 Bibliography

Taglialatela, Gioacchino. Il beato Giacomi Capocci da Viterbo, arcivescovo di Napoli: Me-

moria letta nell’Accademia napolitana di archeologia e storia ecclesiastica. Naples,
1887.
Tavolaro, Gianpiero. Opus nature est opus Dei: Potestas regalis et potestas sacerdotalis
nel pensiero di Giacomo da Viterbo. Archives d’histoire doctrinale et littéraire du
Moyen Âge 81 (2014): 39–98.
Tavolaro, Gianpiero. Scientia, potentia e voluntas Dei nella Lectura super primum Sen-
tentiarum di Giacomo da Viterbo. Ph.D. dissertation, Università di Salerno and
École Pratique des Hautes Études, Paris, 2016.
Teske, Roland J. The Will as King over the Powers of the Soul: Uses and Sources of an
Image in the Thirteenth Century. Vivarium 32 (1994): 62–71.
Teske, Roland J. Henry of Ghent’s Rejection of the Principle: Omne quod movetur ab
alio movetur. In Henry of Ghent: Proceedings of the International Colloquium on the
Occasion of the 700th Anniversary of His Death (1293), (ed.) Vanhamel, 279–308.
Trifogli, Cecilia. La dottrina del luogo in Egidio Romano. Medioevo 14 (1988): 275–90.
Ullmann, Walter. Medieval Papalism: The Political Theories of the Medieval Canonists.
London, 1949.
Ullmann, Walter. Principles of Government and Politics in the Middle Ages. London, 1966.
Ullmann, Walter. The Growth of Papal Government in the Middle Ages. London, 1970.
Ullmann, Walter. Medieval Foundations of Renaissance Humanism. Ithaca, ny, 1977.
Vamvoukakis, Nicolas. Les catégories aristotéliennes d’action et de passion vues par
Simplicius. In Concepts et catégories dans la pensée antique, (ed.) Pierre Aubenque,
253–69. Paris, 1980.
Van Steenberghen, Fernand. Maître Siger de Brabant. Louvain and Paris, 1977.
Vanhamel, Willy (ed.). Henry of Ghent: Proceedings of the International Colloquium on
the Occasion of the 700th Anniversary of his Death (1293). Leuven, 1996.
Vian, Paolo. Giacomo da Viterbo (m. 1308): Sermones; Autografo. In Diventare santo:
Itinerari e riconoscimenti della santità tra libri, documenti e immagini, (eds.) ­Giovanni
Morello, Ambrogio M. Piazzoni, and Paolo Vian, 131. Vatican City and Cagliari, 1998.
Vian, Paolo. Giacomo da Viterbo. In Dizionario biografico degli Italiani vol. 50, 243–46.
Rome, 2000.
Vian, Paolo. Giacomo da Viterbo: Vita e opere; Una rassegna bibliografica. In Giacomo
da Viterbo al tempo di Bonifacio viii, (eds.) Giustiniani and Tavolaro, 11–26.
Vidal, Jean-Marie. Histoire des évêques de Pamiers, vol. 1: Bernard Saisset (1232−1311).
Pamiers, 1926.
Vilevault, Louis-Guillaume de, and Louis George Oudard Feudrix de Bréquigny (eds.).
Ordonnances des Rois de France de la troisième race, vol. 11. Paris, 1769.
Walther, Helmut G. Aegidius Romanus und Jakob von Viterbo—Oder: Was vermag
Aristoteles, was Augustinus nicht kann? In Politische Reflexion in der Welt des späten
Mittelalters/Political Thought in the Age of Scholasticism: Essays in Honour of Jürgen
Miethke, (ed.) Martin Kaufhold, 151–69. Leiden, 2004.
Bibliography 419

Wanke, Otto. Die Kritik Wilhelms von Alnwick an der Ideenlehre des Johannes Duns
Skotus. Bonn, 1965.
Watt, J.A. Spiritual and Temporal Powers. In The Cambridge History of Medieval Politi-
cal Thought, c.350–c.1450, (ed.) J.H. Burns, 367–423. Cambridge, 1988.
Wei, Ian. Intellectual Culture in Medieval Paris: Theologians and the University c. 1100–
1330. Cambridge, 2012.
Wei, Ian. Discovering the Moral Value of Money: Usurious Money and Medieval Aca-
demic Discourse in Parisian Quodlibeta. Mediaevalia 33 (2012): 5–46.
Weisheipl, James. Friar Thomas D’Aquino: His Life, Thought and Works. Washington, dc,
1974.
Wilks, Michael. The Problem of Sovereignty in the Later Middle Ages. Cambridge, 1963.
Wilson, Gordon (ed.). A Companion to Henry of Ghent. Leiden, 2011.
Winstead, Karen A. John Capgrave’s Fifteenth Century. Philadelphia, 2006.
Wippel, John F. Godfrey of Fontaines and the Act-Potency Axiom. Journal of the History
of Philosophy 11 (1973): 299–317.
Wippel, John F. The Dating of James of Viterbo’s Quodlibet 1 and Godfrey of Fontaines’
Quodlibet viii. Augustiniana 24 (1974): 348–86.
Wippel, John F. Godfrey of Fontaines on Intension and Remission of Accidental Forms.
Franciscan Studies 39 (1979): 316–355.
Wippel, John F. The Metaphysical Thought of Godfrey of Fontaines: A Study of Late Thir-
teenth-Century Philosophy. Washington, dc, 1981.
Wippel, John F. James of Viterbo on the Essence-Existence Relationship (Quodlibet
1, q. 4), and Godfrey of Fontaines on the Relationship between Nature and Sup-
posit (Quodlibet 7, q. 5). In Sprache und Erkenntnis im Mittelalter: Akten des vi.
­Internationalen Kongresses für mittelalterliche Philosophie der Société Internationale
pour l’Étude de la Philosophie Médiévale, (ed.) Wolfgang Kluxen. Miscellanea Medi-
aevalia 13, 777–87. Berlin, 1981.
Wippel, John F. The Reality of Nonexisting Possibles According to Thomas Aquinas,
Henry of Ghent, and Godfrey of Fontaines. The Review of Metaphysics 34 (1981):
729–58.
Wippel, John F. The Relationship between Essence and Existence in Late-Thirteenth
Century Thought: Giles of Rome, Henry of Ghent, Godfrey of Fontaines, and James
of Viterbo. In Philosophies of Existence: Ancient and Medieval, (ed.) Parviz More-
wedge, 131–64. New York, 1982.
Wippel, John F. Essence and Existence. In The Cambridge History of Later Medieval
Philosophy, (eds.) Norman Kretzmann, Anthony Kenny, and Jan Pinborg, 385–410.
Cambridge, 1982.
Wippel, John F. The Role of the Phantasm in Godfrey of Fontaines’ Theory of Intellec-
tion. In L’homme et son univers au Moyen Âge: Actes du septième congrès interna-
tional de philosophie médiévale (30 août–4 septembre 1982), (ed.) Christian Wenin,
573–82. Louvain-la-Neuve, 1986.
420 Bibliography

Wippel, John F. James of Viterbo (b. ca. 1255; d. 1308). In Individuation in Scholasti-
cism: The Later Middle Ages and the Counter-Reformation, 1150–1650, (ed.) Gracia,
257–69.
Wippel, John F. The Metaphysical Thought of Thomas Aquinas: From Finite Being to Un-
created Being. Washington, dc, 2000.
Wippel, John F. Godfrey of Fontaines on Intelligible Species. In Intellect et imagina-
tion dans la philosophie médiévale / Intellect and Imagination in Medieval Philoso-
phy / Intelecto e imaginação na filosofia medieval: Actes du xie congrès international
de philosophie médiévale de la Société Internationale pour l’Étude de la Philosophie
Médiévale, siepm, Porto, du 26 au 31 août 2002, (eds.) Maria C. Pacheco and Jose F.
Meirinhos, 1131–41. Turnhout, 2006.
Witt, Ronald G. The Two Latin Cultures and the Foundation of Renaissance Humanism in
Medieval Italy. Cambridge, 2012.
Wolter, Allan B. Native Freedom of the Will as a Key to the Ethics of Scotus. In Deus et
homo ad mentem I. Duns Scoti: Acta tertii Congressus scotistici internationalis, Vin-
dobonae, 28 sept.–2 oct. 1970, Studia Scholastico–Scotistica 5, 359–70. Rome, 1972.
Wood, Charles T. (ed.). Philip the Fair and Boniface viii: State vs. Papacy. New York,
1967.
Wood, Rega. Ockham on the Virtues. Indianapolis, 1996.
Xiberta, Bartholomaeus Maria. De scriptoribus scholasticis saeculi xiv ex ordine Car-
melitarum. Louvain, 1931.
Ypma, Eelcko. La formation des professeurs chez les Ermites de Saint-Augustin de 1256 à
1354. Paris, 1956.
Ypma, Eelcko. Recherches sur la carrière scolaire de Jacques de Viterbe. Augustiniana
24 (1974): 247–82.
Ypma, Eelcko. Recherches sur la productivité littéraire de Jacques de Viterbe jusqu’à
1300. Augustiniana 25 (1975): 223–82.
Ypma, Eelcko. A propos d’un exposé sur Jacques de Viterbe. Augustiniana 30 (1980):
43–45.
Ypma, Eelcko. La méthode de travail de Jacques de Viterbe: L’analyse d’une question.
Augustiniana 30 (1980): 254–70.
Ypma, Eelcko. Jacques de Viterbe, témoin valable? Recherches de théologie ancienne et
médiévale 52 (1985): 232–34.
Ypma, Eelcko. Jacques de Viterbe, lecteur attentif de Gilbert de la Porrée. Recherches de
théologie ancienne et médiévale 54 (1987): 257–61.
Ypma, Eelcko. La relation est-elle un étre réel ou seulement un être de raison, d’après
Jacques de Viterbe. In Lectionum varietates: Hommage à Paul Vignaux (1904–1987),
(eds.) Jean Jolivet, Zenon Kaluza, and Alain de Libera, 155–62. Paris, 1991.
Zimmermann, Albert. Ontologie oder Metaphysik? Die Diskussion über den Gegenstand
der Metaphysik im 13. und 14. Jahrhundert. 2nd ed. Leuven, 1998.
Bibliography 421

Zumkeller, Adolar. De doctrina sociali scholae Augustininae aevi medii. Analecta Au-
gustiniana 22 (1951): 57–84.
Zumkeller, Adolar. Zur Frühgeschichte der Augustiner in Deutschland. Augustiniana
9 (1959): 93–104.
Zumkeller, Adolar. Die Augustinerschule des Mittelalters: Vertreter und philosophisch-
theologische Lehre. Analecta Augustiniana 27 (1964): 167–262.
Zumkeller, Adolar. Manuskripte von Werken der Autoren des Augustiner-Eremitenordens
in mitteleuropäischen Bibliotheken. Würzburg, 1966.
Index of Names and Subjects

Abate, Giuseppe 365–367n24 Aquinas, Thomas see Thomas Aquinas

abbreviationes 379–381 Aristotle
absolute action 4, 181, 275–276, 278, 295–302 on animal motion 252–254, 279
See also immanent action on being 48, 111
abstract and concrete terms 50–51 Categories 159, 173, 203
abstraction 203, 224–225, 228–229 De anima 177, 186, 207, 214, 215, 224, 237,
accident 43, 44, 54–60, 59–60, 132, 240 252, 270, 279
act anonymous commentaries 210–211
meaning of the term 257–260, 286 De motu animalium 253
See also action on four causes 35, 274n66
act-potency principle 266, 277, 278, 280 on freedom 261
action on friendship 312
category of action 298–300 on government 351
kinds of action distinguished 301 on justice 322–323, 328
actuality and potentiality 53, 76, 81, 89–90, on love of self 311–312, 313
92, 133, 145, 160, 177, 221 Magna Moralia 311, 313
active and passive 112 Metaphysics 33–34, 42, 108, 116, 181, 241,
actuality, first and second 177–178 257–259
Adams, Marilyn McCord 157n96 translatio media 258n27
Aegidius Romanus see Giles of Rome translatio nova (by William of
affections see passions Moerbeke) 258n30
affections of the will see under will on motion 257–259, 266, 275, 290, 295,
agent and patient 141, 254, 258, 275 297
Aiello, Andrea 90n79 Nicomachean Ethics 272, 311, 327, 341
Albert the Great 21, 136n32, 147n66, 175n35 Physics 100, 158, 163, 179, 180, 252, 258,
Alexander iv (pope, 1254–1261) 12, 14 262, 266, 277–279
Alexander of Alexandria 175n35 Politics 342
Alexander of Aphrodisias 175n35, 224 Posterior Analytics 34n6, 127
Ambrasi, Dominico 31n101, 378n7, 391n62 on virtues 317, 327
Ambrose, Saint 341 Armstrong, David 101, 111, 113, 122
Amerini, Fabrizio 143n54 Arquillière, Henri-Xavier 7, 12n2, 29, 331,
analogy of being 2, 39–46 341, 349n53
See also attribution attraction (allectio) 285, 300
Anaxagoras 142 See also inclination
Anagni 32, 338, 339 attribution 41, 42, 44, 118–119
angels 205, 207, 211, 388n46 Augustine of Hippo 70, 77, 78, 135, 169,
Anselm 50, 51, 94, 197n120, 261n39, 263, 265 185, 189, 192, 196, 213, 215, 221, 341,
tripartite division of the will see under will 355
See also affections of the will on knowledge of the self 246–247
Antequam essent clerici (pamphlet replying to Augustine of Tarano (prior general of
Clericis laicos) 333 oesa) 30
anticlericalism 22–23 Auriol, Peter see Peter Auriol
aptitude 5, 81, 131, 145n62, 161, 173–178, 180, Ausculta fili (papal bull) 335, 336, 339, 354
186, 188, 196–199, 202, 219, 220, 234, 238, Averroes 34, 42–43, 48, 51, 133, 136, 146, 156,
243, 270–272, 278, 287, 302, 389 179, 224, 254n19, 279
Index of Names and Subjects 423

Avicenna (Ibn Sīnā) 34, 48, 84, 98, 107–108, cardinal virtues 315

142, 143, 175n35, 224, 241 See also virtues
Avignon papacy 11, 356 Casado, Fidel 1n1
categories 55–60, 79, 125–126, 202
“Babylonian Captivity” see Avignon papacy causa sine qua non 6, 183–184, 289–294
Bacon, Roger see Roger Bacon causality see efficient cause, final cause,
Bassetti, Sandro 13n10 formal cause
Bataillon, Louis-Jacques 217n194 Celestine v (pope, 1294) 22, 29, 339n27
beatific vision 23, 183n66, 235, 314 Cenci, Cesare 366n24
Beck, Henry G.J. 338n26 change 298, 299, 300
Becker, Marvin B. 13n13 natural change 133, 141
being qualitative change 160
absolute vs. qualified 54 quantitative change 156–159
formal 116, 163–164, 235, 236, 268, 278 reality of change 148–149
See also virtual containment substantial change see generation
hierarchy of beings 130 substrate and terminus 158
of reason 75 See also motion, self-motion
as the subject of metaphysics 34 charity 313, 315, 316, 317, 326,
See also esse 327, 328
Beneš, Jaroslav 71n5, 82n54, 86–87n68 Charlemagne 350n55
Bergdolt, Klaus 13n11 Charles i (king of Naples, 1266–1285) 11
Bernard of Auvergne 91–93, 167n126 Charles ii (king of Naples, 1285–1309) 11, 29,
Bernard of Clairvaux 313, 330, 341, 349–350, 340n28
353, 354 Chimaera 80, 84
Berryman, Sylvia 253n12 Christ
Black Death 11 in James’s political theory 343–344
blank slate 170, 187, 188–189, 210, 215, 216 See also Trinity
Bleienstein, Fritz 333n8 church
Boase, T.S.R. 32n109, 331n3, 339n27 authority of 350–352
Boethius 52, 57, 58, 116, 121–122, 170, 174n28, See also papal authority
192–193, 195–196, 210, 217, 307, 315, 341 as a political community 343
Boffito, Giuseppe 340n33 church militant 347
Bonaventure 11, 379, 388 Ciampi, Ignazio 13n15
Boniface viii (pope, 1294–1303) 2, 11, 22, 28, Cicero 325
32, 331, 332–339, 354–355 Cistercians 332
Borde, Hubert 369n26 Clarembaud of Arras 187n87
Bos, Egbert P. 390n59 Clement iv (pope, 1265–1268) 12, 13
Bouman, C.A. 350n55 Clement v (pope, 1305–1314) 11
Boureau, Alain 371n28 Clericis laicos (papal bull) 332–334
Bradley, F.H. 106 cognition 154, 168–217 passim
Brenet, Jean-Baptiste 208n159 act of cognition 230–232, 234–235
Brinzei, Monica 380n15 divine 70–96
Brower, Jeffrey E. 128n3 ground of 78, 83
Brungs, Alexander 357n1 object of 182, 185, 197, 215, 231, 232–233,
Bruzelius, Caroline 30 236–237
Bullet, Gabriel 315n32 as operation of the soul 171, 181
passivity of 172, 181–186
Campbell, Keith 99–100, 101 See also divine cognition
Capgrave, John 365 cognitive content 172, 187
424 Index of Names and Subjects

Colonna family 334 disposition, dispositional property 48,

Colonna, Sciarra 338 112–113, 138, 159, 175n35, 189, 191, 203,
common good see under good 205
common sense (cognitive power) 241 See also habitus
commonness 44 distinction
concept formation 227 intentional 46, 102, 125–126
Condemnation of 1277, 389 modal 158
See also Tempier, Stephen numerical 63–64, 146
conformity see similarity real 52, 53
confused cognition 210, 216n193 divine cognition 70–96, 360
connaturality 314 divine essence 3, 44, 70, 71–73, 76–77, 82, 83,
Constable, Giles 13n12 89–90, 93–96, 235, 238, 360, 366
containment 239 divine ideas 70–96 passim, 186, 213
Conti, Alessandro 219n4 divine will 51
coronation 350, 351 Donati, Silvia 21n43, 157n97
Coste, Jean 339n27 Donation of Constantine 352–354
Côté, Antoine 3, 4, 14n18, 26n79, 87n69, Dondaine, Hyacinthe-François 308n5
91n80, 136n33, 173nn25–26, 186n86, Doucet, Victorin 366n24
187n87, 199n128, 211, 217n193, 224n24, Duba, William O. 366n24
225n30, 227n36, 240n92, 249n1, 252n7, Duijnstee, X.P.D. 12n4
389nn55–56 Duin, J.J. 90n78
Counet, Jean-Michel 318n47, 320n52 Dumont, Stephen 8–9, 46n27, 372n30,
counterfactuals 80 374n31
Courtenay, William J. 358n2 Dunbabin, Jean 11n2, 18n29, 28
Courtine, Jean-François 39n15 Duns Scotus see John Duns Scotus
Courtrai, battle of (1302) 338 Dupuy, Pierre 331n3, 333nn7, 9, 335n17,
creation 46, 47, 53, 89 338n25, 339n27
temporality of 76, 77–78 Durand of Saint-Pourçain 183, 229
Dyson, R.W. 2, 7–8, 27, 331n1, 333n8, 334n9,
Dante Alighieri 11 336n21, 340n33, 352n53, 357n1
dator formarum 138, 142
Decorte, Jos 45n27, 125n73, 268n55 Eardley, Peter 250n3
Decretum see Gratian Ebert, Theodor 195n116
definition 245 ecclesiastical authority 339, 347
Del Punta, Francesco 21n43, 361n13, See also priestly power, spiritual and
369, 371 temporal power
dematerialization 233, 234 Eckhart, Meister 375
denominative names 51 eduction of forms 138–140, 143, 155n89,
Descartes, René 5, 189–190, 198–199, 244 166–167, 208, 227
desire 252–254, 307 Edward i (king of England, 1272–1307) 332
object of 279 efficient causation 154, 155, 164, 166, 180–181,
Deum time (forged papal bull) 335 182, 273–274
Deusdedit, Cardinal 349n54 Egenter, Richard 325n70, 326n73
Dewan, Lawrence 142 elements 112–113
Di Prospero, Gianluca 12n7 Elssius, Philipp (aka Elsen, Philippe) 30
Dictatus papae of Gregory vii 334 episcopal power 347
Digard, Georges 331n3 equity 323, 324
dignitates see logical axioms equivocity 39, 41, 268
diminished being see esse cognitum Erfurt 379
Index of Names and Subjects 425

esse cognitum 75, 89, 92 Friedman, Russell L. 9n2, 371n29, 382

esse essentiae 87, 89 friendship 311–312, 321, 322, 325–327,
esse possibile 94–95 328–329
essence, knowledge of 225 Frothingham, Arthur L. 13n9
essence and existence 2–3, 46–53 Furley, David 253n13
Estates General (États généraux) 335, 338
Ethica vetus and Ethica nova, anonymous Gauthier, René-Antoine 209nn160–161,
commentary 209, 210–211 388n50
Etsi de statu (papal bull) 334, 335 generation 136, 156, 160–161
Eucharist 130, 157 Genoa 334
Eugenius iii (pope, 1145–1153) 349n54, genus and species 43
353 Gerard of Bologna 362, 369–370
excitation 215, 228, 234, 243, 285, 288, Gewirth, Alan 346n45
300, 389 Giles of Rome 7, 9, 19–21, 28–29, 342, 350,
See also inclination, occasional cause 351, 358, 361n13, 371, 372–374, 377–391
excommunication 332 passim
exemplar 237, 238 on analogy of being 45
exemplary causation 83 on being 49, 53
on the categories 57n60
faculties of the soul 218–223 on change 157
ficta 75–76 on cognition 206–208, 232–234, 242
final cause 35, 42, 238, 274n66, 279, 281, De compositione angelorum 361
283–284, 294 De ecclesiastica potestate 27, 29, 340–341,
Finan, Thomas 349n52 355
Finke, Heinrich 22n46, 331n3 De motu angelorum 361
first principles, knowledge of 200–206 on God as subject of metaphysics 38
Fishacre, Richard see Richard Fishacre on idoneitas 174n28
Florence 334 on individuation 65n79
Flotte, Pierre de (chief minister of Philip the on love 308
Fair) 333, 335–336, 338 on place 151
Fodor, Jerry 199n128 on powers of the soul 219–220, 222n17
form on real distinction 46–47, 49
inchoate 144, 162–165 on virtue 315
and matter 128–135 on the will 250
origin of 137–138 Gill, Mary Louise 254n20
preexistence in matter 138–140 Giustiniani, Pasquale 1n1, 32n110, 72n5,
succession 139 357n1, 377–378, 381n19, 391n61
See also eduction of forms Glorieux, Palémon 357n1
formal being see under being Gloss on Saint Paul 323
formal cause 66, 68, 178–181, 184, 215, 238, God 46, 51, 104, 153, 155, 169, 185, 190,
273–274, 276, 278, 283, 296, 302 198n123, 210, 224, 235, 238, 246,
formal motion 164 349
Fourth Lateran Council 332 as creator 70, 82n53, 84–85, 88, 93, 186,
Frederick ii (holy Roman emperor, 197, 209, 244, 387
1220–1250) 12 as efficient cause 49, 53, 66, 68, 89, 179,
freedom 168, 260, 261, 286, 309 183n66, 185, 277, 282, 284
with respect to means and end 264–265, as first cause 45, 263, 284, 349
286–287 and form 138, 139
See also will and matter 128–135 passim
426 Index of Names and Subjects

God (cont.) habitual knowledge 186, 200–206, 215–216,

as object of desire 309 247
as free 261, 262, 286 habitus 176, 223, 237, 311, 320–321
as source of political authority 351 innate 200–206, 215
as subject of metaphysics 2, 34–36, See also disposition
37–38 Hackett, Benedict 383n26
as subject of theology 36, 37–38 Hackett, Jeremy 375n33
union with 309, 314 Hadot, Ilsetraut 173n27, 193n109
See also analogy of being, beatific vision, Hadrian v (pope, 1276) 13
divine cognition, divine ideas, grace, Hamesse, Jacqueline 283n88, 376n2
under love, Trinity, univocity, virtues Hanska, Jussi 14n16
(acquired and infused) happiness 307
Godfrey of Fontaines 7, 391 Häring, Nikolaus M. 187n87
on absolute action 294–302 Heil, John 97
on act and potency 86n65, 173 Henninger, Mark G. 3–4, 55n54, 102n10,
on agent intellect and possible 103n11, 115n43, 125n73
­intellect 224, 225 Henry iv (holy Roman emperor, 1056–1105) 
on causa sine qua non 183 350n56
on change 159 Henry vi (king of England, 1422–1461) 365
on divine cognition 79, 87–91 Henry of Friemar 8, 30, 357–358, 361,
on essence and existence 47 364–369, 371, 374
on friendship and justice 330 Henry of Ghent 388, 389, 391
on intellectual cognition 230–232 on being 45
on love of God and self 310 on categories 55
on self-motion 267, 268–269, 274, 290, on causa sine qua non 289–291
292 on divine cognition 79
on virtue 312, 316, 321, 322 on divine ideas 82–86
on the will 250, 264 on exercise and specification 281
Golden Rule 325–326 on friendship 325–326, 329–330
Gómez Caffarena, José 82n54 on freedom of the will 265, 302
goodness 307, 308 on inclination 182
common good 312, 323, 328 on intellectual cognition 235–236
ratio boni 102, 306, 307, 312 on intentional distinction 46–47, 53, 102,
and unity 314–315 125–126
Goris, H.J.M.J. 389n53 on natural forms 162
Gossiaux, Mark D. 2–3, 47n32, 55n53, 72n5, on operations 171n10
81n51, 82n54, 87n71 on perception 195n117, 196n118
Grabmann, Martin 390n59 on powers of the soul 219
grace 313, 315, 317, 352 on relations 102, 115, 125–126
Gracia, Jorge J.E. 60n67 on self-motion 6, 163, 172, 267–270,
Grant, Edward 151n79 273–274, 278, 296, 298
Gratian 25, 336 on virtues 316, 318–320, 325
Great Northern Famine 11 Henry of Harclay 102, 115
“Great Western Schism” 356 Henry of Rottleberode 364
Gregory i the Great (pope, 590–604) 341 Herrera, Thomas de 14n20
Gregory vii (pope, 1073–1085) 334, 349, hiddenness of forms see latitatio formarum
354 Hingeston, Francis Charles 365
Gregory x (pope, 1271–1276) 12 Hissette, Roland 255n22
Gutiérrez, David 9n2, 10n3, 14n18, 30, 358, Hödl, Ludwig 374n31
376–378, 379n13 Hoffmann, Tobias 249n2, 318n47
Index of Names and Subjects 427

Honnefelder, Ludger 75n20, 84n62, 86n67, education 15–17

89n74 Lectura super primum Sententiarum
Hugh of St. Victor 25, 341, 350 (= Abbreviatio) 9, 382–383
Hugolino of Orvieto 368n25 Lectura super quattuor libros Sententiarum
Humbert of Preuilly 380 (wrongly ascribed) 378
Hundred Years War 22 manuscripts of works 304–305
hylomorphism 128–129, 136 in Naples 28, 30–32, 377–378, 391
See also form, matter in Paris 18–29, 359
Hyman, Arthur 156n95 Quaestiones de divinis praedicamentis 3
Quaestiones septem de Verbo (wrongly
Ibn Sīnā see Avicenna ascribed) 8, 357–375
idoneitas see aptitude questions on the will 304–305
illumination 169 Quodlibeta, topics addressed 2, 24
imagination see phantasia in Roman province 378
Imbach, Ruedi 46n28 Summa de peccatorum distinctione 378,
immanent action 165–166, 171, 177, 179, 238, 391
299 surname Capocci 12
impediment, removal of 143, 154–155, 164, in Viterbo 12–17
180, 183, 276–277, 290 works 24, 31, 359, 282n22
See also causa sine qua non Jean de Meun 22–23
inclination 181–186, 285, 300 Jeauneau, Édouard 308n5
individuation 3, 60–69 Jeschke, Thomas 312n23
innate concepts 5, 228 John xxi (pope, 1276–1277) 13
See also habitual knowledge John xxii (pope, 1316–1334) 356
innate ideas in Descartes 198 John Chrysostom 341
Innocent iii (pope, 1198–1216) 8, 341, 348, John Duns Scotus 74–75, 99, 103, 107–110,
353 113, 115, 185n80, 361, 375
intellect 196–199, 264, 284, 286, 314 on freedom of the will 265, 302–303
agent intellect 6, 169, 172, 177, 186, 201, John of Damascus 116, 119, 121, 259
206–207, 224–248 passim John of Murro 250
as “form of forms” 207 John of Paris (Jean Quidort), De potestate
possible intellect 6, 172, 206–207, regia et papali 29, 333n8, 353n66
224–248 passim John Pecham 187
intelligible species 212, 214–215, 223, John Philoponus 5, 176–177, 187–189, 192,
229–239 217, 224, 390
as predispositions/aptitudes 243, 244 John of Pouilly 374n31, 375
intension and remission of forms 161–162, John of Sterngassen 371
275 Jones, Chris 333n8, 353n63
intentional distinction see under distinction Jordan of Quedlinburg (aka Jordan of
intuitive cognition 245 ­Saxony) 30, 359, 364, 365, 378n8
Isidore of Seville 323, 324, 341 justice 321–330
and equity 323
James of Metz 371 general justice 323–324
James of Viterbo legal justice 323–326, 328–329
Abbreviatio in I Sententiarum Aegidii special justice 322
Romani 9, 19, 376–392
archbishop of Benevento 28n88, 31, 339 Kempshall, Matthew S. 26n79, 312n23,
archbishop of Naples 31–32, 340n28 326n73
De regimine Christiano 2, 7–8, 26–27, Kent, Bonnie 290n102, 311, 320nn54, 55,
339–354 321n57, 326n73, 327n77
428 Index of Names and Subjects

King, Peter 60n67 Maier, Anneliese 157n96

Kobusch, Theo 79n39, 82n54 Mansi, J.D. 332n4
König-Pralong, Catherine 46n28 Mariani, Ugo 12n4, 14n20, 31n101, 358n5
Kuksewicz, Zdzisław 206n152 Marrone, Steven P. 208n159
Marsilius of Padua, Defensor pacis 8, 346
Langholm, Odd 358n2 Martin iv (pope, 1281–1285) 13
latitatio formarum 142–143, 144 mathematics 113
law matter 4, 62, 66–67
civil and canon law 342 aptitude 129–130
human 323–324 and form 128–135, 140
intent and letter of the law 324–325 ontological status 128–129
natural 310, 323–324 potency 134–135
See also justice Matthew of Acquasparta 336
law of continuity 186, 220 Mattison, William C. 315n32
lay investiture 347 Maurer, Armand 89n74
Leclercq, Jean 333n8 Mazzatinti Giuseppe 358n3
Leibniz, G.W.F. 5, 190–191, 206 Mazzocchi, Alessio S. 379n13
Leo iii (pope, 795–816) 350 McEvoy, James 325n70, 326n71
Leonard, Carey J. 219n4, 224n27 Meier, Ludger 379
Léonard, Émile G. 29n93 Meijer, Pieter A. 390n59
Leone, Marialucrezia 318nn47–48, 320n56 memory 211, 214, 216, 221–223
Lewis, Ewart 342n38, 355n68 Menache, Sophia 335n19
Liber de causis 207, 208, 213 Merle, Hélène 175n35, 187n87
Liber vitasfratrum see Jordan of Quedlinburg metaphorical motion 185, 283
Lindberg, David 13 See also final cause
Little, Lester K. 25 metaphorical predication 41
logic 37, 38 metaphysics
logical axioms 200, 204–205 as a science 33–39
Lohr, Charles 358n2 subject of 2, 34–36
Lottin, Odon 249n2, 250n3, 315n32, Minutolo, Filippo (archbishop of Naples,
316nn33–34, 318nn44, 46–47, 327n77 1288–1301) 32
Long, R. James 211n169 miracles 153, 343
Louis ix (king of France, 1226, 1270) 11, 334 modal distinction see under distinction
love 307–315 mode of being 130
of concupiscence 309–311, 313 modes 102, 125–126
of friendship 311, 313 Mommsen, Theodor E. 350n56
of God 7, 13, 20, 309–313 monadic properties 97
natural and gratuitous 309, 313 Moody, Ernest A. 208n159
of self 7, 310, 311–313, 322 Morrison, Karl F. 350n56
See also friendship motion
Ludwig iv (Louis the Bavarian, holy Roman Aristotle’s account 257–259
emperor, 1328–1347) 338, 356 role of appetible object 279–281
Luisetto, Giovanni 365–367n24 See also formal motion, metaphorical
Luna, Concetta 20n38, 21n43, 250n5, 361, motion
369, 371 Murray, John Courtney 356n70

Macken, Raymond 250n3, 251n6, 282n84, Naples, University of 28–29

325n70, 326n72, 361 Nardi, Bruno 136n33
Macrobius 316, 317 nation-state 355
Mahoney, Edward 357n1 natural kind 243
Index of Names and Subjects 429

natural law see under law passions (affections) 59, 165, 172, 181, 184,
natural principles 169, 311 192–193, 255–256, 275, 276, 295–297,
natural reason 310 320, 321
necessity 261, 286–287, 309 See also absolute action, immanent action
negations 117–118 passion (category) 298–299
Nemesius 193 passiones entis see transcendentals
Neumann, Bernhard 310n15, 321n57, 327n77 pastores (crusading movement) 13–14
Nicene Creed 342 Pattin, Adriaan 91
Nicholas iii (pope, 1277–1280) 13 Paulus, Jean 82n54, 87n70
Nicholas iv (pope, 1288–1292) 22 Pegues, Franklin J. 331n3
Nielsen, Lauge 259n30 Pelster, Franz 357n2, 361, 364, 369n27
Nogaret, Guillaume de (chief minister to perfection 36, 53, 60, 62, 66, 72,
Philip the Fair) 338 76, 107, 130, 142, 160, 176, 220,
Noone, Timothy B. 240n92 230, 232, 246, 256, 274, 307, 314,
notitia sui 247 317, 387
Novit (decretal of Innocent iii) 8, 348, 354 Peter Auriol 103, 115, 123–124, 259n30,
numerical distinction see under distinction 361
Peter of Auvergne 260n34
objective being 236 Peter John Olivi 135n32, 145n60, 149, 168,
See also esse cognitum 179, 270
occasional cause 184, 185, 187, 212, 215–216 Peter of Trabes 187n88
See also causa sine qua non phantasia 228, 236
Odo of Chateauroux 14 phantasms 183, 224, 226–229, 231, 233, 236,
Olivi, Peter John see Peter John Olivi 240, 243, 244
O’Meara, Dominic J. 352n52 Phelps, Mary 91n80, 136n33, 167n126
ontological order 111–112, 349 Philip iii (king of France, 1270–1285) 11
operations of the soul 155, 219 Philip iv (the Fair, king of France, 1285–
Order of Hermits of St. Augustine 1314) 2, 7–8, 11, 22, 331–337, 355
(oesa) 14, 392 Philip the Chancellor 208–210
studium generale in Naples 28, 31, 377 Pickavé, Martin 5, 46n27, 47n30, 55n54,
studium generale in Paris 18, 383 60n67, 65n79, 126n74, 235n72,
training 15–17 260n34
Origen 341 Picot, Georges 335n19, 336n20
original sin 21, 211 Pini, Giorgio 39n15, 46n29, 55n54, 66n80,
Osborne, Thomas M., Jr. 7, 13n14, 20n41, 229n49, 235n72
309n14, 312n23 Pinzi, Cesare 12n5
Ossinger, Johann 358n4, 359 place 151–153
Oxilia, Giuseppe Ugo 340n33 Plato 143, 186, 189, 215, 308
Platonism and Platonists 152, 313
Packard, Sidney R. 348n50 Plotinus 298n123, 299
Paluch, Michał 389n53 pneuma 253
papal authority 25–26, 338, 340, 346, 347, Polansky, Ronald 252n8
348, 353 polyadic properties 98
dominium theory 341, 355 Porphyrian tree 204
power to depose kings 336, 340 Porphyry 173n28, 193–194
See also spiritual and temporal power Porro, Pasquale 82n54, 84n62, 150n77,
Paravicini Bagliani, Agostino 332n3 390nn57, 59, 391
Paris, University of 249–250, 379 position 153
parts and wholes 205 possibilia 75–77, 81, 85–86, 92, 94
Pasnau, Robert 357n1 postpraedicamenta 202
430 Index of Names and Subjects

potency (potentiality) categorial 98

active 270 and change 100, 122, 125
distinguished by type 188 foundation 3–4, 115–116
essential and accidental 179 ontological status
objective and subjective 84–85 as being of reason 103–105, 106,
passive 85, 270 123–124
potestas ministerii 343–344 according to James of Viterbo 110–123
powers of the soul 264, 270 passim
predication 121 as mode 120–121
predisposition see aptitude as real being 101–103, 105–110
presentism 149 reducibility to foundation 99–104
Previté-Orton, C.W. 346n45 taxonomy of views 97
Prezioso, Faustino 216n193 reminiscence 216
priestly power 8, 343, 344–346, 355 res a reor-reris/res a ratitudine 84
primitive notions 203–204 Richard i (king of England,
principium (inaugural lecture) 381 1189–1199) 350n55
Priscian of Lydia 147n66, 195n115, 197n122 Richard Fishacre 5, 211–213
privation 117–118, 174 Richard of Mediavilla (aka Richard of
Proclus 179n54, 267, 296, 308, 315, 390 ­Middleton) 239–241, 242, 244, 245, 371
propensity see aptitude Richard of Saint Victor 341
propositions 80 Richstaetter, Carl 13n12
propria 243, 244 right reason 327
Provençal 30 Rivière, Jean 331n3
prudence 315, 318–320, 327–328 Rizzacasa, Aurelio 27n83
Pryds, Darleen 12n6, 28n87 Robert of Anjou (king of Naples,
Pseudo-Andronicus, De affectibus 341 1309–1343) 11
Pseudo-Augustine, De spiritu et anima  Robert, Aurélien 224n28, 239n92, 243n107
212n173, 222n19 Robert Grosseteste 50
Pseudo-Cyprian 341 Roger Bacon 13, 241
Pseudo-Cyril of Alexandria 341 Roger of Hoveden 350n55
Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite 25, 308, Roger Marston 69n87, 136n32, 175n35, 187,
315, 341, 349n52 212
Pseudo-Simplicius, In De anima 194–195 Romana mater ecclesia (papal bull) 334
Putallaz, François-Xavier 350n3 Romance of the Rose 22–23
Rombeiro, Michael 235n72
quality, species of 159, 173–174n28, 175, 203, Rorem, Paul 308n5
270 Rose of Viterbo, Saint 12
quantity royal power 8, 343, 344–346, 347, 350, 355
determinate and indeterminate 156–157 and Christianity 351–352
geometric 151–152 temporal and spiritual 8, 345
quiddity 239 Ruello, Francis 39n16, 249n1, 258n29
See also substance Russell, Bertrand 114
Rüssmann, Heinrich 72n5, 79n39
Radke, Gary M. 12n8
Raizman-Kedar, Yael 241n100 Saak, Eric 1–2, 11n1, 14n19, 19n33, 23n51,
Rashdall, Hastings 28n87 364n17
ratio boni see under goodness Saisset, Bernard de 334
real distinction see under distinction Salvator mundi (papal bull) 335n14
relations 97–126, 299 San Cristóbal-Sebastián, Antonio 250n3
Index of Names and Subjects 431

Santini, Gabriella 12n6 spiritual and temporal power 25–26, 339,

Scanzillo, Ciriaco 359 345, 350, 353
Schabel, Christopher 358n2, 374n31, 375n32 See also royal power
Scholz, Richard 27n83, 332n3, 340n33 Spruit, Leen 206n150, 206n152, 209
Schönberger, Rolf 104n12 states of affairs 119
Schroeder, Henry Joseph 332n4, 357n1 Stoicism 105, 135, 170
Sciat tua maxima fatuitas (letter of Philip the Solère, Jean-Luc 5–6, 162n110, 168n1, 169n4
Fair) 335 Sorge, Valeria 2930n93
science 35, 37 soul 219–220
Scotus, John Duns see John Duns Scotus Trinitarian model 221–223
Scully, John P.E. 213n178 Southern, Richard W. 13n12
secular power 339 Strayer, Joseph R. 332n3
Secundum divina (papal bull) 335n14 Stroick, Clemens 357n2, 361n14, 368n25,
self-knowledge 245–247 375n32
self-actualization see self-motion Sturlese, Loris 390n59
self-love see under love substance 43, 44, 54–60, 59–60, 160, 225
self-motion 4, 143–144, 162–166, 172, 177, 230, cognition of 239–245
234, 250, 253, 255–286 passim substantial form 160
arguments against 265–287 passim supposit 63
“formal” vs. “efficient” 178–181 Sylla, Edith D. 157n96, 159n102
of the will 259, 260–263, 274, 279–289 Sylvester (pope, 314–335) 353
seminal reasons 4, 81, 135–146, 153–155, 186,
220–221 Tabula discordantium 88n71
semiotic triangle 80 Tachau, Katherine H. 241n100
Senner, Walter 371 Tavolaro, Gianpiero 1n1, 9, 19n35, 32n110,
sensation 187, 191–196, 212, 233 357n1, 377n2, 387n45, 391n63
faculties 196–199, 221, 225, 241 taxation of clergy 332
sense appetite 320–322 temperance 323
sensible species 182, 212, 225, 229 Tempier, Stephen (bishop of Paris) 11,
sensory representation see phantasm 66n80, 281
Sicilian Vespers 334 terminus of cognitive act 184–185, 238
Siger of Brabant 7, 268n55, 312 Terzo, Maurizio 12n4, 379n13
Silva, José Filipe 168n1, 212n172 Teske, Roland J. 173n23, 262n41, 267n51
similarity 38, 44, 98, 106, 109–110, 114, 124, Themistius 224
229, 239, 270, 307, 309, 314 theology 20, 35–38, 313, 330, 380
Simplicius 5, 40, 42, 56, 57n60, 105, Thomas Aquinas 7, 9, 11, 330, 341, 342, 352,
112, 132, 136, 165, 173, 175, 186, 203, 358, 378–391 passim
217, 220, 270–271, 273, 285, 295–301 on action and passion 258–259n30
passim, 390 on agent intellect and possible
See also Pseudo-Simplicius ­intellect 224, 225
sin 8, 25, 209, 315, 336, 345, 348, 351 on angels 66n80
sine qua non cause see causa sine qua non on exercise and specification 282, 291,
singularity vs. individuality 63–64 302
Sisson, Keith 332n3 on friendship 326–327
Skemp, J.B. 254n17 on God and metaphysics 38
skepticism 185–186 on innate habitus 5, 200–206
Sorabji, Richard 193n109 on justice and law 324–325, 326–327,
Sorbelli, Albano 358 328
Sorge, Valeria 206n150 on matter 128n4
432 Index of Names and Subjects

Thomas Aquinas (cont.) virtues 306, 311, 315–322

on natural forms 138n40, 140n42, acquired and infused 316–318, 320, 329
142–144 connection of 318–320
on powers of the soul 219–220, 223 degrees of 318–320
on prudence 327–328 heroic 316–317
on ratio 102 ordering of 327
on relations 99, 115 perfected 319–320
on self-motion 178n51, 278–279, 281 purged 317
on seminal reasons 154 subject of 320–322
on virtues 312, 315–317, 318, 320, 321, 322, Vital du Four 136n32
327–328 vital operations 171
on the will 250, 264, 286 Viterbo (city) 12–14
Thomas of Bailly 368n25 and papacy 12–13
Thomas of Sutton 361 Church of the Holy Trinity 14
Thomas of Walsingham 339n27 Mons Rosarius 14
Thomas Wylton 374n31 Viterbo, James of see James of Viterbo
Thomas of York 5, 213–217 volition
time end and means 263, 278
defined by Aristotle and Augustine 150 as mixed action 300–301
as distension of change 146–148 role of object 282–286, 293, 300
reality of 149–151 See also will
transcendentals 120–121 voluntarism 6, 265, 302–303, 390
transeunt action 165–166, 179, 230, 238, 299
Trifogli, Cecilia 151n79, 157n97 Walther, Helmut G. 26n79
Trinity 44, 57, 58, 104, 119, 122–123, 221, 343, Wanke, Otto 93n87
366, 367 Watt, J.A. 342n39
truthmakers 80, 113–114 Wei, Ian 21, 22, 25n70
“two swords” 349–350, 354 Weisheipl, James 28n87
Twomey, Vincent 349n52 Wielockx, Robert 90n79
Wilks, Michael 345
Ullmann, Walter 331, 348n50, 349n52, will 173, 180, 223, 249–305, 309, 314
350n55, 353n67 affections of the will 197n120, 263, 265,
Unam sanctam (papal bull) 29, 337, 269, 270–273, 279, 288, 302–303
342–343, 354, 356 Anselm’s tripartite division 263, 272, 280
unity 306, 307–308, 312 dominium of the will 260, 262–263
numerical unity 60–62 exercise and specification 281–284, 286,
univocity of being 39, 41 291
unmoved mover 262 as first mover in the soul 262, 263, 289
Urban iv (pope, 1261–1264) 12 and intellect 263, 280, 284–285, 293–294
object of 307
Vamvoukakis, Nicolas 299n124 propensities 288
Vargas, Alphonsus 167n126 as source of freedom 264, 286
Venice 334 ultimate end of 309
Vennebusch, Joachim 209 See also freedom, self-motion, volition
Ventura, Guglielmo 334 William of Alnwick 93–95
Vian, Paolo 15n21, 357n1, 377n2 William of Auvergne 187, 196n117, 208n159
vice 311, 315 William of Cremona 15
Vidal, Jean-Marie 334n13 William de la Mare 382, 388
virtual containment 268, 278 William of Hundleby 338
Index of Names and Subjects 433

William of Moerbeke 13, 175n35, 217n194 Xiberta, Bartholomaeus Maria 369n26

William of Ockham 115, 229
William Peter Godinus 371 Ypma, Eelcko 15n20, 19n35, 24, 26n79, 71n2,
Winstead, Karen A. 365n19 104n12, 250nn4–5, 251n6, 295n113, 304,
Wippel, John F. 20n36, 38n14, 46n28, 47n31, 308n5, 315n32, 323n63, 359, 360, 366,
72n5, 79n39, 81n51, 84n60, 87n70, 88n71, 367, 376–379, 388n49
128n4, 173n24, 224n27, 250–251n5, Yrjönsuuri, Mikko 168n1
268n53, 274n68, 295n113, 321n57
Witt, Ronald 30 Zimmermann, Albert 34n3
Wittgenstein, Ludwig 107 Zumkeller, Adolar 31n101, 39n15, 357n2, 364
Wolter, Allan B. 303n131
Wood, Charles T. 332n3
Index of Manuscripts

Assisi, Biblioteca del Sacro Convento di S. Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale de France, lat.
Francesco 172 366n 15350 90
Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale de France, lat.
Bologna, Biblioteca Comunale 15372 375n
dell’Archiginnasio A 971 8, 358–361 Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale de France, lat.
Bordeaux, Bibliothèque Municipale 167 305 15841 260n

Cambridge, Corpus Christi College, Parker Reims, Bibliothèque Municipale 493 380n

Library 408 365n Rome, Biblioteca Angelica 213 305

Florence, Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale, Siena, Biblioteca Communale, G.v.15 378

Conv. Soppr i.3.6 133n, 144n
Toulouse, Bibliothèque d’Étude et du Patri-
Montecassino, 743 31n moine (olim Bibliothèque Municipale)
56 305
Naples, Biblioteca Nazionale vii C 4 305 Toulouse, Bibliothèque d’Étude et du Patri-
Naples, Biblioteca Nazionale vii C 52 9, moine (olim Bibliothèque Municipale)
376, 391 739 8, 361–364
Naples, Biblioteca Nazionale vii G 101 31n,
378n Vatican City, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana,
Arch. Cap. S. Pietro, D. 213 376n
Padua, Biblioteca Antoniana 662 365, 366 Vatican City, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana,
Padua, Biblioteca Universitaria 2006 305 Vat. Lat. 1012 366n
Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale de France, lat. Vatican City, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana,
14311 296 Vat. Lat. 1032 296n
Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale de France, lat. Vatican City, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana,
14656 375n Vat. Lat. 1086 24n