Fitzralph’s Sentence commentary appears to have been influential in staking out a generally mediating position in Oxford’s ‘‘Golden Age’’ of theology. The Ockhamists, broadly construed as those influenced by Ockham’s metaphysics and epistemology, including Adam Wodeham, Robert Holcot, and to a lesser extent, Walter Chatton and William Crathorn, made one camp, and their opponents, including Walter Burley, Thomas Wilton, and Thomas Bradwardine, led the other, although the range of thought of the period defies simple classification. Later theologians came to understand Fitzralph’s position as incorporating elements of each in the establishment of a philosophical theology consonant with a traditional approach, yet sensitive to the complexities of Moderni thought. A thorough understanding of Fitzralph’s position will only be possible with the publication of his Sentence commentary, though, and what follows is a very general sketch of his position.
Fitzralph was strongly influenced by Henry of Ghent in three areas. He supported Henry’s belief that intellect, memory, and will are distinct within the human mind, and so serve as an image of the Trinity, his epistemic account includes species, and he distinguished between sensory and intelligible knowledge, following Henry in asserting that the human mind relies upon divine illumination for understanding. Each of these positions runs against the Ockhamist position, which has led scholars to classify Fitzralph as among the traditionally minded critics of Ockhamism. Presently it seems clear that, while Fitzralph represents an epistemological approach representative of a generally traditional position consistent with Henry of Ghent, he was by no means the ardent theological traditionalist that Bradwardine was, as is apparent in his position regarding God’s knowledge of future contingents.
The need for recognizing a distinction of some sort between memory, reason, and will is based in the traditional Augustinian understanding of our capacity to recognize the Trinity through analogy with our own mental structure. By the fourteenth century, this position did more than signify allegiance to an Augustinian view of the mind’s faculties, though; it indicated a firm stand on the question of the compatibility of faith and human reason. Before Ockham, it had been standard for Thomists and Scotists to account for the apparent conflict between unaided human reason and the Christian faith by stipulating that properly understood, the truths of the faith perfect rational understanding. Regarding the analogy of the human mind to the Trinity, the relation only becomes comprehensible once the reason makes the appropriate recognition of the possibility of real distinctions. The relation of the divine persons is a distinction holding between three really distinct persons in one divine nature; this is an element of the faith, which when recognized, allows the faithful reason to perceive a similar, but by no means identical, relation holding between the faculties within the human mind. Ockham’s response was to argue that certain theological truths, foremost among them those regarding God’s triune nature, so far exceed human reason as to preclude the applicability of basic logical rules. This amounts to the need for recognizing a difference in kind between faith and reason, rendering impossible the unaided reason’s recognition of similarity holding between the threefold structure of the human mind and the relation of the divine persons. Hence, Fitzralph’s arguments in favor of the reasonability of recognizing this similarity represent a determined opposition to Ockham’s separation of theology and philosophy.
Fitzralph’s defense of a species-based epistemology is another instance of this opposition to Ockhamism. Roger Bacon had constructed an epistemic model based on the apparent functioning of the eye, arguing that the objects we perceive project their actual appearance by means of species, or apparent images, that we perceive and that serve as the basis for our understanding of the world. Philosophers had followed this species-based epistemic model, using it as the basis for complex accounts of the apprehension, perception, conceptualization, and comprehension of objects in the world. Ockham’s rejection of the species account was based in the threat of skepticism he believed it entailed; if what we perceive of an object are the species, and not the object itself, what basis is there for certainty that the species are reliable indicators of the object and its properties? Ockham rejects the species account in favor of what philosophers today would call ‘‘direct perception’’; when we perceive an object, we do not perceive the appearance of the object, but the object itself. This is not to say that the eyes actively reach out in some manner to ‘‘touch’’ the object. Instead, Ockham believes that the object we perceive acts upon our vision, producing a veridical intuitive cognition of the object. This simplified model was popular, and led to considerable discussion regarding the possibility of error; if we directly perceive the object, how to account for illusions? And
Given that God is sufficiently powerful to cause us to perceive what is not there, how to be certain that this does not happen with some regularity? Ockham’s rejection of species was influential on Wodeham and Auriol, and those who defended species in epistemology were among the minority in mid-fourteenth century Oxford. Hence, Fitzralph’s assertion that the older model, reliant on species in accounting for human perception, puts him in the anti-Ockhamist camp, but this does not mean that his position is consonant with Aquinas or Scotus. In his argument in favor of the need for divine illumination for intellectual cognition of God and eternal truths, he rejects the Thomist argument that sense-based knowledge can lead to intellectual understanding of higher truths. Following Henry of Ghent, he distinguishes between two kinds of illumination. In one, all human beings capable of rational understanding are given access to the higher truths of mathematics, logic, and metaphysics, but in the other, God provides the elect with an understanding ofthe theological truths of the faith.
Fitzralph was also active in the ongoing Oxford debates regarding motion, time, and eternity, following the lead of the Mertonian ‘‘Calculators’’ who had revolutionize Aristotelian physics with their attention to mathematical analysis of problems that had generally been the province of a more purely philosophical approach. The Mertonian Bradwardine, whose innovations typify the Calculators’ method, was also notably Augustinian in his attitude toward Ockham in the question of predestination and human free will. Despite advocating a notably Augustinian epistemology, and following the Mertonian approach in questions of physics, Fitzralph was unwilling to endorse Bradwardine’s profoundly deterministic approach in refuting Ockhamist arguments regarding God’s knowledge of what for us are future-contingent events. Rather than engage in concentrated analysis of questions of kinds of necessity, or distinguishing between species of grace, as was common in the ongoing debates that came to define Oxford theology in the mid-fourteenth century, Fitzralph relied on Scriptural precedent alone to assert the compatibility of God’s foreknowledge and human free will.
De pauperie salvatoris
By the 1350s, the Franciscan Poverty Controversy had evolved from its earlier focus on arguments regarding usus pauper, shifting to the friars doing pastoral work outside of diocesan supervision. While at Oxford, Fitzralph’s attitude toward the friars may have been friendly, but when he became Archbishop of Armagh in 1346 his opinion changed, and he developed a concerted philosophical criticism of the mendicant ideal into a collection of seven books entitled De pauperie salvatoris. While he held respect for their ideals of apostolic poverty and their commitment to pastoral care, he could not understand their reasoned refusal to cooperate with the ecclesiastical hierarchy as they made use of the its property. In analyzing their position, he catalogues the species of private, communal, and corporate property relations then common in fourteenth-century dialogue regarding property ownership and authority. At the same time, he developed the idea that grace alone is the justification for any instance of dominion, or just lordship, which is ultimately directly associated with God’s eternal lordship. Human lordship was initially shared by all, which entailed communal use and ownership of property, but the Fall introduced private property ownership and a corresponding political authority, which is the hallmark of the postlapsarian world. God infuses certain instances of this lordship with grace to facilitate justice in the fallen world, although Fitzralph is not especially clear regarding the hallmarks of this grace. This theory of grace-founded lordship was influential in later political theory, most especially in the thought of John Wyclif.
See also: > Adam Wodeham > John Wyclif > Oxford Calculators > Peter Auriol > Roger Bacon > Thomas Bradwardine > Thomas Wylton > Walter Burley > Walter Chatton > William Crathorn > William of Ockham
World History
