Throughout scattered passages in Quodlibeta Avenionensia and the comments on Liber Sententiarum we can reconstruct the hardly explored core of some metaphysics of the transcendentals in the thought of Durandus of Saint-Pourçain. Bonum: an extrinsic denomination of the entity diverted from the distinctions of negotiantis et ratiocinantis reason, which would redefine evil as disconvenientia, without dismissing its definition as privation of good. The relative being of truth as the relationship of the thing with itself according to its intellective being (...) and its effective real being, or the characterization of the transcendental unum as convenience of the esse individuum to that which exists per illud quod est with explicit veto on the condition of separable accident, outline an original collage, with diverse doctrinal elements, which condemns the dimension of absolute res or the positive formal matrix of the transcendentals. (shrink)

This notice answers two long-running questions of authorship. The first part of the notice addresses the famous question “Utrum Aristoteles sit salvatus” that survives in the manuscript Città del Vaticano, BAV, Cod. Vat. lat. 1012, a miscellany of primarily Franciscan texts. On the basis of contextual, textual and thematic parallels, the authorship of the question should be ascribed to Hugh of Neufchâteau, OFM. The second part considers the case of the Evidentiae contra Durandum, whose author, known as Durandellus, Joseph Koch (...) identified with a certain Nicolaus Medensis in 1927. A re-examination of Koch’s reasoning makes this attribution doubtful, and the witness of the original Reportatio of William of Brienne, OFM, shows that the Dominican theologian Durand of Aurillac is more likely the author of the Evidentiae. (shrink)

The question of whether relics which were part of the historical body of Jesus could exist, arose in the first decades of the 12th century, as the monks of St. Medard des Soissons claimed to have a tooth of Jesus. Based on historical and theological reasoning it seemed to Guibert of Nogent impossible that this kind of relic could exist or that they could mediate the redemption which Christ attained on the Cross. According to him, the prize of salvation could (...) only be mediated through the eucharist. Guibert perceived a twofold mediality of the eucharist which at the same time reprents the holy body of Christ and mediates salvation. This medial dimension of the eucharist is denoted with the term figura. Since the Second Eucharist Debate and as a result of the criticism of Berengar of Tours the term figura became precarious. The discussion between Berengar and his opponents such as Durandus of Troarn, Guitmund of Adversa, Alger of Liège about the term figura can be viewed as a debate concerning mediality. (shrink)

Focusing on Meister Eckhart, John Duns Scotus, Hervaeus Natalis, Durandus of St.-PourAain, Walter Burley and Petrus Aureoli, this volume investigates the nature ...

In 1293, only two years after the fall of Acre, but many years before the end of crusading aspirations to reclaim Jerusalem, William Durandus, Bishop of Mende, composed a new rite for those taking up the cross “to go in aid of the Holy Land,” which he included in his magisterial and enduring edition of the Roman pontifical. In this rite the bishop would bless and then bestow to the departing crusader the devotional insignia of his canonical status: the (...) cross, along with the traditional pilgrim's scrip and staff. Durandus' rite drew on a number of long-standing texts for travel benedictions and pilgrimage benedictions, but reworked them into an elegant whole, the sum of which was far greater than its inherited parts. It enjoined the crusader to “take up the cross” and hasten towards “your [that is, Christ's] tomb,” beseeched God to protect him from danger and absolve him from the chains of sin, and emphasized taking the cross as a passion emblematic of Christ's own salvific sacrifice. The rite thus echoed the ideals, shaped the language, and embodied the spiritual and devotional values of crusading around 1300, which had increasingly emphasized Christomimetic suffering as central to the spiritual value of crusade. As such, the rite is testament to the idea of the crusade and crusading as it had developed over the course of two centuries. (shrink)

Contemporary historians examining moral theology in the Middle Ages question whether the practice of proscribing certain kinds of human acts as intrinsic moral evils has a legitimate basis in the Christian ethical tradition. John Dedek argues that this proscription does not fully emerge until the work of the fourteenth-century thinker Durandus of St. Pourçain. Dedek’s historical focus, however, is upon theological discussions which consider God’s absolute power and his ability to dispense from or command any human act whatsoever. The (...) focus for addressing this question should be instead to examine how medieval thinkers understand the structural elements of a human act, especially in response to the ethical intentionalism promoted by the twelfth-century thinker Peter Abelard. An examination of Peter Lombard’s response to Abelard reveals that certain human acts were proscribed as intrinsic moral evils long prior to Durandus, and that Augustine serves as a source for this doctrine. (shrink)

The official documents of the Parisian Faculty of Arts (starting from the Statute of March 1255) show a close identification between the philosophical sciences and the corresponding textbooks: to learn a particular science means essentially to read certain, prescribed books. The case of theology seems to be different, however. In spite of the fact that the Bible served as a paradigm for the ‘textualization’ of all kinds of knowledge, and even of the whole world, it did not fit perfectly the (...) epistemological criteria which Aristotle’s Posterior analytics established as necessary for every science. Already in the second half of the 13thcentury, both Thomas Aquinas and Henry of Ghent tried to construct theology as a science, in the Aristotelean sense, by appealing respectively to the theory of the subalternation of the sciences and to the doctrine of the lumen medium. The different reactions to these two models by Godfrey of Fontaines, Durandus of Saint-Pourçain and Peter Auriol seem to indicate a process in which theology can constitute itself as a true science only through a broadening of its textual basis, outside the scope of Sacred Scripture. (shrink)

This article aims at reassessing a widespread view, according to which Francisco Suárez left behind the scholastic model of truth as adaequatio, founding a new concept of truth based on his metaphysics of objective being. In the first part, I reconstruct the debate on the complex and incomplex truth, focusing especially on the sources of Suárez’s Disputation 8, and presenting the views of Aquinas, Henry of Ghent, Hervaeus, Durandus, Capreolus and Fonseca. Especially the latter proposes an eclectic synthesis, blending (...) elements from the Dominican tradition and Henry of Ghent. In the second part, I analyze Suárez’s Disputation 8, showing that his doctrine of truth reprises and mitigates Fonseca’s, thus following most of the Dominican commentators of Aquinas. Here I explain especially the role played by objective being in the constitution of the truth in cognoscendo, also showing that the latter cannot be given without a previous adequation on the level of the truth in significando (the species). In the third part, I discuss three textual passages used by contemporary historiography to legitimate Suárez’s alleged abandonment of adaequatio, pointing out, in the light of the previous reconstruction, some misreadings in these interpretations. (shrink)

John Baconthorpe canvasses a number of views on the question of the identity of the feature of a divine person that enables that person to become incarnate. The possible features are: the divine essence, the personal property, or the union of both. The views considered are those of Duns Scotus, Durandus of Saint-Pourcain, Peter Auriol, and an Oxonian theologian Walter Burdon, none of whose writing otherwise survive. Baconthorpe's own view is that the union of essence and person is the (...) relevant incarnation-permitting feature. (shrink)

Duns Scotus's famous proposition was first attacked in a short polemical treatise attributed to Thomas of Sutton. By the time of Ockham, the proposition was known as the propositio famosa, so called by Walter Chatton, Ockham's colleague at Oxford and London, who defended it against Ockham's lengthy critique. At Paris, during the same period, it was called the propositio vulgata and was used approvingly by Francis of Meyronnes, Peter of Navarre and Durandus St. Pourçain. This “famous proposition” was so (...) controverted because on it depended the acceptance, with Duns Scotus, or the rejection, with Ockham, of theology as a strict, propter quid science. As its detractors and defenders must have realized, it also struck at the heart of the divergent philosophical outlooks of Duns Scotus and Ockham. For all of this, Duns Scotus's famous proposition and its history have all but escaped notice. (shrink)

This chapter focuses on the question of the specific truth granted to the human intellect’s concepts qua concepts (simplex apprehensio), as it is presented and discussed in Sebastião do Couto’s commentary on On Interpretation, included in his general commentary on Aristotle’s Dialectics (1606), the final volume of the famous and influential Cursus Conimbricensis (1592–1606). Such a topic finds it roots in a large medieval debate that runs through many authors and especially Augustine, Aquinas, Scotus, Durandus, and Ockham, reaching in (...) the Jesuit early modern context, with Pedro da Fonseca and Francisco Suárez, a complete and eclectic account that paved the way for the modern understanding of “mind.” . (shrink)