Given their number and diversity, as well as the apparent disorder in which they occur, it is obviously impossible to offer here an exhaustive and detailed expose of the 219 (or 220) articles condemned on March 7, 1277. Nonetheless, we may discern a certain number of major themes that, once brought together, comprise the basis of the doctrinal issue of the Parisian censorship. Certain prohibited theses are striking because of their excessive nature and their outrageous character in the context of the sensibility and beliefs of a thirteenth century Christian conscience. This is the case for articles 16, 152, 174, 175, and 180, that claim, respectively ‘‘that if one says something is heretical because it is contrary to the faith, we should not care about the faith,’’ ‘‘that theological discourse is based on fables,’’ ‘‘that there are fables and falsehoods in the Christian religion, as in other religions,’’ ‘‘that the Christian religion prevents one from learning,’’ and ‘‘that one should not pray.’’ Other censored theses confront head-on certain of the most essential dogmatic foundations of Catholic doctrine. This is the case, for example, of those that concern the dogma of the Holy Trinity and that seem to echo the reprimands of Stephen Tempier when he writes, in his letter-preface, that ‘‘scholars of the Arts Faculty’’ who profess reprehensible errors ‘‘exceed the limits of their own faculty.’’ Consequently, it is not surprising that the Bishop of Paris prohibited articles 1 and 2 that maintain, respectively, that ‘‘God is not triune because the trinity is incompatible with supreme simplicity (...)’’ and ‘‘that God cannot engender a being similar to himself, because something that is engendered by something has an origin upon which it depends (...).’’ On the other hand, the condemnation of a number of assertions does not seem explicable, except by presupposing an ideological bias and less than impartial attitude on the part of the Bishop of Paris and his “commission of inquiry.’’ The interpretation of the historical significance of the Parisian censure of 1277 must thus consider the contingency of interpretative patterns that the protagonists of this event could put into place. It is not improbable that Tempier and his coreligionists, seeking to rule against the spread of teaching that they considered perilous to the truths of the Christian faith, worked as well to promote the theses of a particular school of thought to which they were attached. This would explain the presence in the syllabus of certain articles such as the following: (92) ‘‘heavenly bodies are moved by an intrinsic principle, that is the soul, and they are moved by the soul and the appetite, like animals (...)’’; (102) ‘‘the soul of heaven is an intelligence and the celestial orbs are not the instruments of intelligences but their organs, like the ear and the eye are organs of the sensitive power’’; (126) ‘‘the possible intellect is actually nothing before understanding, because in an intelligible nature, being actually something is being what is actually understanding”; (189) ‘‘when <heavenly> intelligence is full of forms, it imprints these forms on matter by heavenly bodies as with instruments’’; (204) ‘‘separate substances are located somewhere by means of their operation (...).’’ Moreover, Tempier’s syllabus contains theses that are surprising or striking, because they appear atypical in their historical context. This is the case for articles 20 and 148, which would please vegetarians and nutritionists, in proposing respectively ‘‘that a man may become numerically and individually another through means ofnutrition’’ and ‘‘that the natural law forbids the murder of animals lacking reason, as well as that of animals with reason, though to a lesser degree’’; or articles 150 and 200, that Kant would not have repudiated, which stipulate respectively ‘‘that man must not be content with authority to be certain about a question’’ and ‘‘that duration and time are nothing in reality but exist only in apprehension.’’ We are also dumbfounded by reading about the astral theory of generation that article 188 supports: ‘‘if the power of the stars in a liquid is of a similar proportion to that found in the parents’ seed, a man may be engendered from this liquid (...)!’’ Aside from these theses, a large proportion of articles censored in 1277 could be distributed over four theoretical fields where confrontation with the champions of Catholic orthodoxy was inevitable. (I) In the field of philosophical theology, numerous prohibited theses seriously undermine or actually deny God’s omnipotence or omniscience. Most of them do so in adhering to a metaphysical vision according to which the First Principle, subsisting eternally in an impenetrable folding in of itself, can only produce effects in lower strata of reality through the mediation of secondary causes emanating from itself (heavenly intelligences or heavenly bodies, for example). In that regard, we may invoke articles 3, 43, 54, and 63 of Tempier’s decree, that say respectively ‘‘that God knows nothing other than himself,’’ ‘‘that the First Principle cannot be the cause of diverse realities produced down here below, except through the mediation of other causes (...)’’ and ‘‘that the First Principle cannot immediately produce realities, since they are new effects; now a new effect requires an immediate cause that could be other than it is’’ and ‘‘that God can not produce the effect of a secondary cause without the secondary cause itself’’ (II) In the area of philosophical cosmology, a number of ideas struck down by the prohibition of the Bishop of Paris claim that the world in its entirety is eternal or that one of its components has always existed and will always exist (for example, the human species, separate substances or elements), assertions that run counter to Catholic dogma of the creation of the world from nothing at the beginning of time (ex nihilo ab initio temporis). On this point, we may refer to the following articles: (5) ‘‘all separate realities are coeternal with the First Principle’’; (9) ‘‘there was no first man and there will be no last one, but, on the contrary, there has always been and there will always be the generation of man by man’’; (87) ‘‘for all the species contained within it, the world is eternal and time is eternal (...)’’; and (107) ‘‘the elements are eternal, although they are the effects of something new in terms of the configuration they now possess.’’ (III) In the field of noetics, a number of propositions that attracted the ire of Bishop Tempier converge to support the thesis of numerical unicity and separation of the intellect (the possible or potential one, that is, the one which receives intelligible forms, as well as the agent intellect, that is, the one which produces intelligible content): this is the famous doctrine, evoked earlier, that historiography has labeled ‘‘monopsychism’’ and whose paternity was attributed, rightly or wrongly (that is another story), to the Arabic philosopher Averroes. We may readily understand that such a doctrine appeared scandalous in the eyes of medieval Catholic theologians. Indeed, claiming that there is only a single intellect for all men, which is metaphysically separated from any one human body, in other words that the entity who possesses the power of thought does not belong to any one human being, amounts to depriving individual man of all immortality (since if something survives the death of the body of man, it could only be his intellectual soul) and, consequently, this is equivalent to denying any possibility of retribution in the hereafter for acts committed down here. In short, ‘‘monopsychism’’ saps the very foundations of Christian morality. In that regard, we may refer to articles 32, 119, and 121, that posit respectively ‘‘that the intellect of all men is numerically one, since even if it is separated from a given body, it is not, however, separated from all bodies,’’ ‘‘that the operation of the separate intellect joins to the body in the same way as the operation of something not possessing the form by which it operates (...)’’ and ‘‘that the intellect, that is, the ultimate perfection of man, is radically separated.’’ (IV) A final doctrinal section groups together theses that attack the possibility of human freedom by favoring one form or another of determinism: astral, emotional, or cognitive. Articles 129, 136, 159, and 162 of Tempier’s syllabus tend in this direction, in that they claim, respectively, ‘‘that, when a passion and a particular knowledge are actually present, will cannot act against them,’’ ‘‘that the man who acts out of passion acts out of constraint,” ‘‘that the will of man is necessitated by his cognition, like the appetite of the beast’’ and ‘‘that our will is subject to the power of heavenly bodies.’’
World History
