Michael of Massa (d. 1337) was an Augustinian Hermit active in Paris (and elsewhere) in the 1320s and 1330s. His voluminous philosophical writings are nearly totally unpublished, but the studies of his thought to date show a keen mind and a characteristic approach to philosophical and theological challenges. In the domain of divine foreknowledge and future contingents, Michael passed on to Gregory of Rimini the criticism leveled by Francis of Marchia at Peter Auriol. If this example is representative, then Michael had an important role in the development of Parisian thought in the second quarter of the fourteenth century.
Michael of Massa is something of an enigma, and in several ways. He is certainly an enigma when it comes to his biography. We know that he was born in the region near Siena in Italy. He joined the Augustinian Hermits and was definitor at the Augustinian General Chapter held in Venice in 1332; he died, probably in Paris, in 1337. He never obtained the master’s degree, but recent research supports the position that he held lectures on the Sentences at Paris in the early 1330s (although they could have taken place anywhere from 1326-1337), while arguing that Michael’s extant commentary on I Sentences may date from c. 1324 (Courtenay 1995:204; Schabel 1998:168171; Schabel and Courtenay 2007:567), and at least the parts of the extant commentary on II Sentences that contain explicit criticism of William Ockham’s ontological and physical ideas date from the mid - to late 1330s, on the cusp of a heated discussion at Paris of aspects of Ockham’s thought (Courtenay 1995). This is basically all we know or can surmise about Michael’s curriculum vitae.
Michael is an enigma in a second way: although he has received high marks for his intelligence and importance from the few scholars who have studied his work - Albert Lang (1930:130) called Michael ‘‘an extremely gifted and prolific theologian” (ein aufierst begabter und fruchtreicher Theologe) and William J. Courtenay (1995:191) has written that Michael’s ‘‘Quaestiones in Sen-tentias remains one of the richest unedited and, for the most part, unstudied texts of the fourteenth century’’ - nevertheless we continue to know very little about his ideas. This is in part because his most important philosophical and theological work, his commentaries on the first and the second books of Peter Lombard’s Sentences are enormous (some 900 folio pages) and nearly totally unedited. Parts of Michael’s commentary on I Sentences survive in three manuscripts (Bologna, Biblioteca universitaria 2214 = Prol.-d.38,q.2; Bologna, Collegio di Spagna 40 = Prol.-d.1,q.9 and d.27,q.3-d. 38,q.2; Napoli, Biblioteca nazionale VII. C.1 = Prol.-d.8); the work was abbreviated twice in the fifteenth century, these two abbreviations each existing in two manuscripts (Andrea de Mediolano’s in Firenze, Biblioteca Nazionale C. 8. 794 and Oxford, Bodleian, Canonici Misc. 276; Johannes de Marliano’s in Bergamo, G 3. 21 and Pavia, Universitii 226). Michael’s II Sentences is found in a single manuscript (Vatican, Vat. lat. 1087), where it is anonymous; the text is clearly a composite made up of several large treatments of predominately philosophical issues (e. g., creation, the instant, duration, time, eternity, the continuum, cognitive species) added to a truncated but more traditional commentary on dd. 1-2 of the Sentences, which Damasus Trapp dubbed the Opus ordinarium (for a list of the questions found in Michael’s I and II Sentences, see Trapp 1965). In a section of his II Sentences dealing with motion, Michael makes what is probably the earliest reference at Paris to ‘‘Ockhamists’’ (Occamistae) who were teaching that motion is merely a description of the thing that is said to move, having no reality of its own; Michael, approaching the question from the point of view of physics and not of semantics, rejects the Ockhamists’ position (Courtenay 2003). In addition, in his II Sentences Michael appears to attack William Ockham by name in the process of rejecting several aspects of Ockham’s programme of ontological parsimony, like the elimination of an independent category of quantity (Hodl 1975:245-252).
Michael is an enigma in yet a third way, and this stems almost directly from the fact that we know so little about his thought: we have as yet no clear view of where he fits into later medieval intellectual history. The modern pioneer in the study of the thought of the Augustinian Hermits, Damasus Trapp, believed (Trapp 1956:163-175) that Michael was a representative of a dying intellectual movement in the Augustinian order, that of the ‘‘ultra-Aegedianists,’’ theologians who took the ideas of the Order’s teaching doctor, Giles of Rome, to extraordinary lengths. Ultra-Aegidians like Michael, according to Trapp, were opposed by more traditional Aegidians among the Augustinian Hermits, men like Gerard of Siena and Thomas of Strasbourg. For Trapp, the victorious traditional Aegidians denied Michael the doctorate and effectively buried his thought and even his name. More recent research has begun to modify this view in significant ways. First, Schabel’s and Courtenay’s suggestion that Michael read the Sentences in the early 1330s has the effect of removing anything suspicious about the fact that Michael never received the doctorate: it was quite common for Augustinian Hermits to wait many years between finishing their Sentences lectures at Paris and being awarded the doctorate, and Michael simply died before that long waiting period was up. Second, in the few recent studies of Michael’s thought (Friedman forthcoming-a; Schabel 1998:168; Schabel 2002:251-252) no trace is found of ultra-Aegidianism (however that might be defined), and indeed faithfulness to Giles’ doctrine does not seem to be a major issue. Michael rejects, for example, Giles’ famous position concerning the real distinction between essence and existence, opting instead for a purely psychological distinction based on conceiving the same thing in two different ways, statically (per modum stantis = as essence) or ‘‘flowingly’’ (per modum fluentis = as existence) (Hodl 1975:240-245).
A new picture of Michael’s place in later medieval thought is emerging from the area upon which he has been studied most intensely: future contingents and divine foreknowledge. Schabel (1998, 2000:esp. 214-220) has shown that Michael expands upon and clarifies not only the criticism that the Franciscan Francis of Marchia had made of the ideas of Peter Auriol but also Francis’ own view, even though Michael does not mention that Francis is the source of much of his position. Michael follows Francis in his rejection of Auriol’s views that propositions about the future are neither true nor false and that, strictly speaking, God does not know the future as future. Auriol postulated both of these views in order to preserve human free will from any sort of determinism. As part of his response to Auriol’s views, Michael accepts Francis’ position that the natural world is, strictly speaking, fully determined: the only sources of contingency in the world are God and human beings. Moreover, Michael accepts from Francis the distinction between two types of ‘‘indetermination’’: an indetermination about the possible (de possibili) and an indetermination about what inheres in reality (de inesse). The former is the innate indetermination of the human will by which the will is fully free and contingent; the latter is a lack of determination with respect to bringing some particular thing or action about. For both Francis and Michael, a determination toward bringing some particular action about (i. e., a determinatio de inesse) is fully compatible with the absolute freedom of the will (i. e., the will’s indeterminatio de possibili), and in fact that type of determination is required in order for the will to bring about any particular action at all. Thus, in order for our will to bring about a particular action, it must be both fully contingent and qualifiedly determined toward that action. In adopting this position, Michael of Massa was Francis of Marchia’s ‘‘truest follower on the subject of divine foreknowledge” (Schabel 2000:214). With that said, Michael’s treatment is both longer and at times more clear than Francis’. Moreover, parts of Michael’s treatment of these issues are significantly different from Francis’ treatment, and based on these differences a compelling argument can be made that Michael’s treatment influenced Gregory of Rimini’s rejection of Auriol as well as Gregory’s own positive theory. The picture of Michael of Massa’s historical significance that emerges from this example is that he served as a link between Francis of Marchia’s innovative response to Peter Auriol’s ideas, on the one hand, and Gregory of Rimini’s, on the other, and in so doing Michael ‘‘may be a key figure in the Augustinian movement away from Dominican-oriented theology and toward the Franciscans’’ (Schabel 2000:220). It should be noted that also in the area of trinitarian theology Michael clearly adopted some of Francis of Marchia’s ideas, although definitely not slavishly so. Here, as elsewhere, Michael exhibits his own theological and philosophical ‘‘style’’ (Friedman forth-coming-b: Chap. 12, Sect. 3).
Another area of Michael’s philosophical thought that has received some attention is his views on human intellectual cognition. Michael accepts the important later medieval distinction between intuitive and abstractive cognition, adding to that basic division a further type That he calls “deductive” cognition (Tachau 1988:321-322, 332-333; Friedman forthcoming-c). Further, Michael holds that the intellect’s first object in terms of generation, i. e., what first moves the intellect to its act, is the extramental singular. In arguing for this view, Michael employs a basic parallelism between the senses and the intellect, claiming that what first moves the senses must also first move the intellect, and specifically arguing that singular accidents - e. g., this white patch - are what first move our intellect. The intellectual knowledge we get on this basis is as imperfect as it can be, it is completely unprocessed, and it requires the power of the agent intellect through a process of “abstraction” to refine this initial intellectual knowledge, categorizing it and making it useful in further intellectual activity (Friedman forth-coming-a). This view of Michael’S appears to be a part of a conceptualistic tendency to emphasize the singular in both ontology and epistemology, since the singular as singular is the foundation of all our knowledge, although, as mentioned, Michael rejects the parsimonious ontology often associated with ‘‘nominalism’’ that denies motion some reality of its own and eliminates quantity as a separate category.
As the above indicates, Michael critically discussed the views of a good number of later medieval university thinkers, principal among them being Gerard of Siena, Peter Auriol, John Duns Scotus, Henry of Ghent, and Thomas Aquinas. Michael’s use of Francis of Marchia’s ideas without acknowledging his source shows that further research may uncover other influences on Michael. That Michael’s thought had an impact on his contemporaries is shown by the example of Gregory of Rimini (who also cited Michael in other contexts) as well as by that of the Augustinian Hermit Alphonsus Vargas of Toledo who in his own Sentences commentarY mentioned Michael no fewer than 15 times (Trapp 1956:221). Further, the existence of two separate fifteenth-century abbreviations of Michael’s I Sentences shows that he was being read into the next century. But, again as the example of Gregory of Rimini shows, we will only have a full reckoning of Michael of Massa’s influence when we have made available In print and have studied much more of his work, in the process determining his role in the intellectual development of his religious order and of the fourteenth century as a whole. It seems likely that his role will have been an important one.
See also: > Francis of Marchia > Giles of Rome, Political Thought > Gregory of Rimini > Peter Auriol > William of Ockham
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