Wyclif’s epistemology is an important part of his philosophical approach, grounded in his conviction that reality is propositionally structured. His account of cognition is structured on the model of optics, as was common in fourteenth-century Oxford: how the mind perceives truths about the world is analogous to the way in which the eye perceives objects in the world. While Ockham had argued that we directly perceive objects, many of his immediate successors, including Adam Wodeham, Robert Holcot, Richard Fitzralph, and William Crathorn, argued for the species model of perception. In this model, objects of perception emit appearances, or species, which are refracted in the eye and converted by mental act into the material of intuitive cognition. Crathorn is exceptional among species theorists in dismissing the need for mental acts in the process, arguing instead that the species enters directly into the mind to become the idea of the object perceived. Wyclif directed his epistemic account against
Crathorn, arguing that mental acts are qualities of the mind while enthusiastically advocating the species model. Indeed, his fondness for the heuristic of optics appears frequently throughout the body of his works; for example, he uses the terminology and mechanics of optics to account for the real presence of Christ in the elements of the Eucharist and also in his discussion of kingship. Wyclif follows Fitzralph, Henry of Ghent, and ultimately Robert Grosseteste in his belief that understanding is reliant on divine illumination, although he does not argue directly for the position in his discussions of epistemology. Instead, his frequent assertions that human understanding is impossible without its assent to the divinely given teaching lead the reader to recognize that his epistemology depends on God’s illumination of truth for its model of certainty. The mental assent we give to what we come to know is common to both truths known about the perceptible world, truths we learn through deductive reasoning, truths we are shown through direct divine illumination, and truths that are accepted as matters of faith. Faith has a natural place in all our acts of understanding, great and small, and if we can claim to have an accurate explanation for even the least act of understanding the simplest thing, we should also admit to the possibility that great truths of faith, like the Trinity, may be explored and understood by human reason. So to view faith and reason as incompatible is premature. Faith is at once an act of believing and assent to a truth; since what is known is believed as well, faith and knowing are not really incompatible. This incorporation of faith into every act of knowing forms the basis for his refutation of the Moderni contention that theology and philosophy are different in kind, which Wyclif articulates in the first part of his philosophical analysis of the Trinity.
Wyclif’s metaphysics, like that of many of his Oxford predecessors, grows out of his understanding of how terms fit together in propositions, and he is not the first to have concluded that universals have a reality apart from the particulars of which they are predicated. Walter Burley had argued that fundamental truths that we form about the world, like ‘‘Socrates is Human,’’ are structured like their objects, such that Humanity is something real that is a part of Socrates that is also a part of every other particular of which Humanity is predicable. The universal Humanity cannot exist apart from the particulars of which it is a part, but it has a ‘‘specific identity’’ that is different in kind from the ‘‘numerical identity’’ of individual substances. There is a certain reciprocity relation holding between the two kinds ofidentities: the identity of the particular depends on the identity of the universal, but the being of the universal depends upon the being of the particulars. Wyclif believed that Burley’s position was dangerously close to Platonism, in which universals have being apart from particulars and apart from God’s ideas of created beings. On the other hand, he was unable to accept the Ockhamist rejection of their reality, and he felt that the Thomist and Scotist position, in which universals have reality arising from our cognition of individual objects, was likewise inaccurate. Their answer was to emphasize the commonality of the form of the human beings, which commonality is realized as a universal Man in our understanding of the things. Wyclif argued that it was better to distinguish between Man’s existence in God’s mind, and its existence in creation, a distinction between first - and second-intention universals. A first-intention term is a concept we derive from a real thing: when I hold a red apple, I can consider the redness of that apple. That concept is a first-intention concept of the apple’s redness. I can then reflect back on all the other red apples I have encountered and compare this apple’s redness with them. This reflection back is itself a concept, derived from earlier concepts, and is a second-intention concept. Similarly, universals have existence as objects of God’s mind, or divine Ideas, and they also have existence in the being of things. When we encounter an individual apple, we recognize the universal ‘‘fruit’’ as it exists in the essential nature of the apple as a universal of the first intention. This gives us a foundation for understanding the universal’s primary being, which is to have being as a second-intention Idea in God’s mind. Since the divine Ideas are eternal, while universals are created, this means that second-intention universals have ontological primacy over first-intention universals.
Wyclif’s realism is very carefully developed, beginning with a distinction between universals of causality, univer-sals by community, and universals by signification, exhaustive analysis of relation holding between the real predication of universals by created beings and the species of predication by which we formulate truths about the identities of these beings and their universals, and patient treatment of the manifold objections to ontological realism that were common in fourteenth-century arguments. It is necessary to understand the relation of Wyclif’s treatise on universals to his treatise on the divine Ideas, which together articulate his understanding of the relation of first - and second-intention universality. The realism described in De universalibus can easily lead one to wonder how he understands the divine understanding of the universals to be distinct, yet not a detraction from the divine unity. This is the substance of his argument in De ideis, making it an important part of his ontological program.
World History
