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https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/wyclif/ | In the Purgans errores circa universalia in communi (chap. 2), the three main types of predication are the following: formal predication, essential predication, and causal predication. In the Tractatus de universalibus (chap. 1, pp. 28–37), causal predication has been replaced by habitudinal predication — a kind of predication that Wyclif had already recognized in the Purgans errores circa universalia in communi, but whose position within the main division of types of predication was not clear. In the Tractatus de universalibus, formal predication, essential predication, and habitudinal predication are described as three non-exclusive ways of predicating, each more general than the preceding. We speak of causal predication when the form designated by the predicate term is not present in the entity signified by the subject term, but is something caused by that entity. No instances of this kind of predication are given by Wyclif. Formal predication, essential predication, and habitudinal predication are defined in almost the same way in the Purgans errores circa universalia and in the Tractatus de universalibus. | wyclif |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/wyclif/ | Formal predication is that in which the form designated by the predicate term is directly present in the entity signified by the subject term. This happens whenever an item in the categorial line is predicated of something inferior, or an accident is predicated of its subject of inherence. In fact, in both cases, the subject term and the predicate term refer to the same reality in virtue of the form connoted by the predicate term itself. | wyclif |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/wyclif/ | To speak of essential predication, it is sufficient that the same empirical reality is both the real subject and the predicate, even though the formal principle connoted by the predicate term differs from that connoted by the subject term. ‘God is man’ and ‘The universal is particular’ are instances of this kind of predication. In fact, the same empirical reality (or essence) that is a universal is also an individual, but the forms connoted by the subject term and by the predicate term differ from each other. | wyclif |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/wyclif/ | Finally we speak of habitudinal predication when the form connoted by the predicate term does not inhere, either directly or indirectly, in the essence designated by the subject, but simply implies a relation to it, so that the same predicate may be at different times truly or falsely spoken of its subject without there being any change in the subject itself. According to Wyclif, we use such a kind of predication mainly when we want to express theological truths, like: God is known and loved by many creatures, and brings about, as efficient, exemplar, and final cause, many good effects. It is evident that habitudinal predication does not require any kind of identity between the entity signified by the subject term and the entity signified by the predicate term, but formal predication and essential predication do. So the ontological presuppositions of the most general type of predication, implied by the other types, are completely different from those of the other two. | wyclif |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/wyclif/ | The final result of Wyclif’s revolution is therefore an incomplete system of intensional logic, which he superimposes on the standard extensional system inherited from Aristotle. As a result, the copula of the philosophical propositions that are dealt with cannot be extensionally interpreted, since it does not properly mean that a given object is a member of a certain set or that a given set is included in another; rather it means degrees of identity. Only in virtue of renouncing any extensional approach to the matter were Wyclif’s followers able to give a logically satisfactory solution of the problem of the relationship between universals and individuals, which had always been the most difficult issue for medieval Realists. | wyclif |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/wyclif/ | The relationship between thought and reality was a focal point of Wyclif’s reflection. On the one hand, Wyclif believed that thought was linguistically constrained by its own nature; on the other hand, he considered thought to be related to reality in its elements and constitution. Hence he deemed language, thought, and external reality to be of the same logical coherence (see Conti 2006, pp. 114–18, and Spruyt 2008, pp. 24–25). Within this context, the theory of supposition was intended to explain the different roles that words (or phrases) can have in relation to language and the extra-mental world when they appear as extremes (that is, as subject or predicate) in propositions. Characteristically, his theory of supposition provides an account not only of the truth-values of a sentence, but also of its meaning; it is not therefore simply a theory of reference, but a sort of complex analysis of language viewed as a semiotic system whose unique interpretative model was the reality itself. It gives clear evidence of Wyclif’s realist choice and of his conviction that any kind of linguistic and semantic features must be grounded on ontological structures. | wyclif |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/wyclif/ | In what follows, I shall consider the most important aspects of Wyclif’s theory of supposition, trying to set it in relation to the medieval tradition of treatises on signification and supposition and particularly to its main source, the theory expounded by Walter Burley in his De puritate artis logicae tractatus longior (composed between 1325 and 1328), which contains an original and intelligent defence of the old view of signification and simple supposition against Ockham’s attacks. | wyclif |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/wyclif/ | Wyclif defines supposition as the signification of one categorematic extreme of a proposition (subject or predicate) in relation to the other extreme (De logica, chap. 12, vol. I, p. 39). This definition, which is drawn from Burley’s De suppositionibus (composed in 1302), sounds partially different from the standard definition of supposition, as it seems to somehow equate signification and supposition, since supposition is considered as a particular kind of signification. On the contrary, according to the most common view, which went back to Peter of Spain’s Summulae logicales, signification and supposition of terms were clearly distinct functions, inasmuch as the latter presupposed the former, but it was a proprietas terminorum (a term property) totally different from it. In fact, (1) signification consisted in the relation of a linguistic sign to what it signifies apart from any propositional context; (2) a word capable of standing for something else or for itself in a proposition had first to have signification; (3) a term only had supposition in a propositional context; and (4) the kind of supposition a term had depended on its propositional context. In any case, in a traditional realist perspective, supposition served to tell us which things are involved in the truth-conditions of a given sentence: whether they are expressions, real universals, or individuals. | wyclif |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/wyclif/ | At the very beginning of the chapter on supposition, like Walter Burley, Wyclif divides supposition into improper, in which a term stands for something different from its primary significatum by special custom (ex usu loquendi), and proper, in which a term stands for something by the virtue of the expression itself. So a term has improper supposition when it is used in a figurative speech. It is the case of the term ‘cup’ in the sentence ‘I have drunk a cup <of wine>’. Wyclif divides proper supposition into material, when the term stand for itself or its sound (as it occurs in “‘I’ is a pronoun” or “‘Iohannes’ is trisyllabic”), and formal, when the term stands for what it properly signifies. Formal supposition is twofold: simple and personal. Like William of Sherwood, Peter of Spain, and Burley, and against Ockham and his followers, Wyclif affirms that the supposition is simple if the term stands for an extra-mental universal only, as it occurs in ‘Man can be predicated of every man’, and ‘Man is a species’. According to Wyclif, in both cases the term ‘man’ supposits for the human nature, which is an extra-mental form common to a multiplicity of singulars. Simple supposition is divided into equal and unequal. A term is in simple equal supposition if it stands for the common nature that it directly signifies, as it occurs in ‘man is a species’. A term is in simple unequal supposition when it stands for (1) a less common nature than that it signifies, as it occurs in ‘substance is a species’, or (2) a concrete accident or the characterizing property (pro accidente vel proprio primo), as it occurs in ‘this universal-man is capable of laughing’ (‘hic homo communis est risibilis’) — where the presence of the demonstrative ‘this‘ modifies the significate of the subject-term ‘universal-man’, so that in the sentence it supposits for that concrete exemplification (the human nature proper to an individual man) which is identical with the subject of inherence (a given human being) of the accidental form, or characterizing property (in the example, the capacity-of-laughing), signified by the predicate-term. The supposition is personal when the term which plays the role of subject in a sentence stands for one or more individuals. In the first case, the supposition is personal and singular, as it occurs in ‘this man is’ (‘hic homo est’); in the second one, it is personal and common. The personal and common supposition is twofold. If the term stands for many singulars considered separately or for some (that is, at least one) determinate individual named by the common term itself, the supposition is personalis distincta (or determinate, as Wyclif calls it in the final section of the chapter 12), as it occurs in ‘these (men) are’ (‘isti sunt’). If the term stands for many singulars considered together, the supposition is a personal universal supposition (personalis universalis). In turn, the personal universal supposition is divided into confused and distributive (confusa distributiva) and merely confused (confusa tantum). There is suppositio personalis communis universalis confusa distributiva when the (subject-)term stands for everything which has the form it signifies, as it occurs in ‘every man is’ (‘omnis homo est’). There is suppositio personalis communis universalis confusa tantum when the form (or property) signified by the term at issue is affirmed (or not affirmed) equally well of one of the bearers of that form as of another, since it applies (or does not apply) to each for exactly the same reasons, as it occurs in ‘both of them are one of the two’ (‘uterque istorum est alter istorum’), where the expression ‘one of the two’ has merely confused supposition, since none of the two can be both of them. The confused suppositions are so called since they involve many different individuals, and this is the case for the subject of a universal affirmative proposition (De logica, chap. 12, pp. 39–40). | wyclif |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/wyclif/ | Wyclif takes a resolutely realist stand, as his formulation and division of supposition (where simple supposition is described as that possessed by a term in relation to a universal outside the intellect and personal supposition as that possessed by a term in relation to one or more individual) make evident. In this way, he stresses the ontological entailments of Burley’s theory. In his De suppositionibus and De puritate artis logicae Burley had adopted a semantic point of view in describing supposition, since he had defined formal supposition as the supposition that a term has when it stands for its own significatum or for the (individual) items which fall under it. In the first case, we properly speak of simple supposition, and in the second, we speak of personal supposition. Wyclif makes clear what Burley had stated only implicitly: the significatum of a common term is always a common nature (that is, a universal form) really existing outside the intellect. This fits in with his theory of meaning and his ontology. | wyclif |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/wyclif/ | In the first chapter of his treatise on logic (De logica, chap. 1, pp. 2–7) Wyclif maintains that: (1) a categorematic term is a dictio to which a mental concept, sign of a thing, corresponds in the soul. (2) Categorematic terms are divided into common (namely, general expressions), like ‘man’ and ‘dog’, and discrete (namely, singular referring expressions), such as personal and demonstrative pronouns and proper names. (3) Common terms originally and primarily signify common natures — for instance, the term ‘man’ originally and primarily signifies the human nature. (4) Categorematic terms can be divided into substantial terms, such as ‘man’, and accidental terms, such as ‘white’. A substantial term signifies a common nature proper to a set of individuals (of which the term is the name) without connoting any accidental property; while an accidental term signifies (but we would rather say: ‘referes to’) a common essence, proper to a set of individuals, and also (we would add: connotes) an accidental property, that is, a property which is not constitutive of the essence referred to. (5) Categorematic common terms can be divided also into abstract and concrete. According to Wyclif, a concrete term, like ‘man’, is a term which signifies a thing that can have both simple and personal supposition at once. On the contrary, an abstract term is a term which signifies only a common nature without connoting anything else, like ‘humanity’ and ‘whiteness’. It is worth noticing that in defining concrete terms Wyclif a) plainly attributes the capacity for suppositing to things; b) does not clarify the metaphysical composition of such things signified by concrete terms; and c) describes the twofold supposition of concrete terms as a sort of signification. (6) Finally, categorematic terms can be divided into terms of first and second intention. A term of first intention is a sign which signifies without connoting the properties of being-individual or being-universal which characterize categorial items. For example, ‘God’ and ‘man’ are terms of first intention. On the contrary, a term of second intention is a term which connotes such properties and refers to a common nature without naming it. ‘Universal’ and ‘primary substance’ are terms of second intention. | wyclif |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/wyclif/ | As is evident, the basic ideas of Wyclif’s theory of meaning are that (1) every simple expression in our language is like a label naming just one essence in the world; and (2) distinctions among terms as well as their linguistic and semantic properties are derived from the ontological features of signified things. He affirms that everything which exists signifies in a complex manner that it is something real (De logica, chap. 5, p. 14 — see Cesalli 2005); expressly claims that supposition is also a property of signified things; and explains the semantic difference between general terms, such as ‘man’, which can name a set of individuals, and singular expressions, such as ‘Socrates’ or ‘a certain man’ (‘aliquis homo’), which name just one item, by means of the different modalities of existence of their different signified things (significata). Singular expressions name and signify individuals, albeit general terms name and signify common natures. In Wyclif’s view, a common term gives name to a certain set of individuals only by way of the nature that it originally and directly signifies, and is common to a certain group of individuals as their own quiddity (De logica, chap. 1, p. 7). As is evident from what he says in the first three chapters of his De logica (on terms, universals, and categories respectively), Wyclif identifies secondary substances (that is, the universals of the category of substance) with the significata of general (concrete) terms of that category (such as ‘man’ or ‘animal’) and individual substances with the significata of singular expressions of that category (such as ‘this man’, which refers to a single human individual only). Furthermore, he holds that (1) common terms of the category of substance, when used predicatively, specified which kind of substance a certain individual substance is; (2) individual substances are unique physical entities, located at a particular place in space and time; and (3) universal substances are the specific or generic natures proper to the individual substances, immanent in them, and apt to be common to many individuals at the same time. As a result, like Burley, Wyclif thinks of universals and individuals as linked together by a sort of relation of instantiation. In other words, he conceives of individuals as the tokens of universal natures, and universal natures as the types of individuals. This consequence is common also to many other Realist authors of the 13th and 14th centuries. But, because of his peculiar reading of the relation between universals and individuals, Wyclif derives from it an original conception of the signification and suppostion of concrete accidental terms, such as ‘white’, that inspired the new theories and divisions of supposition developed in Oxford between 14th and 15th centuries. According to them, any concrete accidental term which occurs as an extreme in a proposition can stand for (1) the substrate of inherence of the accidental form that it connotes (suppositio personalis), or (2) the accidental form itself (suppositio abstractiva), or (3) the aggregate composed of the individual substance, which plays the role of the substrate of the form, and the singular accidental form at issue (suppositio concretiva) (so, for instance, William Penbygull in his treatise on universals). | wyclif |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/wyclif/ | Wyclif ends chapter 12 of his De logica with three notanda (pp. 40–42), by which he completes his treatment of supposition. In the first one, he recalls that categorematic common concrete terms can supposit both personaliter and simpliciter at once (mixtim) when the propositions where they occur as subjects are universal affirmative or indefinite. For instance, the term ‘animal’ in (1) ‘every animal was in Noah’s ark’ (‘omne animal fuit in archa Noe’ as well as the term ‘man’ in (2) ‘man dies’ (‘homo moritur’) can supposit personaliter for every individual animal and man respectively, and if so, the first sentence is false and the second true, and simpliciter for every species of animals and the human nature respectively, and then both sentences are true. In the second notandum, Wyclif contends that proper names, personal and demonstrative pronouns, and those terms of second intention by which we speak of the singular items considered as such (namely, expression like ‘persona’ and ‘individuum’) cannot supposit distributively, since they were devised in order to signify discrete vel singulariter only. Finally, in the third one, he lays down the following rules about the supposition possessed by the subject-term and the predicate-term in the Square of Oppositions: (1) in every universal affirmative proposition, the subject supposits mobiliter, that is: it has confused and distributive supposition, while the predicate has suppositio confusa tantum or simple. The supposition is merely confused if it does not allow for descent to a certain singular nor a universal — in other words, a (predicate-)term has the supposition confusa tantum when it is used attributively of its extension. The supposition is simple if the predicate-term refers to a common nature, as it is the case in ‘every man is man’, where the predicate ‘man’ supposits for the human nature. (2) Both the subject and predicate of a universal negative proposition have confused distributive supposition, if they are common terms, as it occurs in ‘no man is a stone’. (3) In particular affirmative propositions, such as ‘some man is animal’, both the subject and predicate have determinate supposition. (4) In particular negative propositions, the subject-term has determinate supposition and the predicate-term has distributive confused supposition. | wyclif |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/wyclif/ | Wyclif’s own discussion of the sophism I promise you a coin that I do not promise (Logicae continuatio, tr. 3, chap. 3, vol. 2, pp. 55–72; but see also the Tractatus de universalibus, chap. 7, pp. 133–35) makes evident the realist stand showed by his theories of meaning and supposition. Like Burley before him, in his Logicae continuatio Wyclif defends the claim that what is explicitly promised in such a promise, ‘I promise you one or other of these coins I have in my hands’ (promitto tibi alterum illorum denariorum in altera manuum mearum), is the universal-coin, and not a singular one, even if I can fulfil the promise only by giving any singular coin, since a universal cannot be given or possessed except by a singular (Logicae continuatio, tr. 3, chap. 3, p. 62). Thanks to his distinction between simple and personal supposition, Wyclif is able to explain from a semantic point of view the difference between promising a coin in general and promising a particular coin: in the first case the term ‘coin’ (denarius) has simple supposition, and therefore the proposition is true if and only if what is said is true of the universal-coin; on the contrary, if the term ‘coin’ has personal supposition (more precisely, personal and singular supposition), the proposition is true if and only if what is said is true of a particular coin. According to him, by promising a singular, a universal is promised secundarie and confuse, and conversely (ibid., p. 64). So, given two coins in my hands, the coin A and the coin B, the proposition ‘I promise you one or other of these coins’ is true, even though, when asked whether I promised the coin A, my answer is ‘No’, and so too when asked whether I promised the coin B. In fact, according to Wyclif, what I promised is the universal-coin, since the phrase ‘one or other of these coins’ has simple supposition and therefore stands for a universal, however restricted in its instantiations to one or other of the two coins in my hands (ibid., p. 67). | wyclif |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/wyclif/ | This does not mean that the universal-coin is a sort of third coin over and above the two coins in my hands. Wyclif had already rejected this mistaken conclusion in the previous chapter of the Logicae continuatio. He argues that to add the universal-man as a third man to Socrates and Plato, given that there are only these two individual men in the world, exhibits a fallacy of equivocation. When a number is added to a term of first intention (like ‘man’), the presence of this numerical term modifies the kind of supposition from simple to personal; but one can refer to a universal only with a term with simple supposition. As a consequence the universal cannot be counted with its individuals – and in fact any universal is really identical to each one of its individuals, and so it cannot differ in number from each of them (ibid., chap. 2, p. 48). | wyclif |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/wyclif/ | The point of departure for Wyclif’s metaphysics is the notion of being, since it occupies the central place in his ontology. After Duns Scotus, the real issue for metaphysics was the relationship between being and, on the other side, God and creatures, as Scotus’ theory of the univocity of the concept of being was an absolute novelty, full of important consequences for the development of later medieval philosophy. Wyclif takes many aspects from Scotus’ explanation, but strongly stresses the ontological implications of the doctrine. Wyclif, like Scotus, claims that the notion of being is the most general one, a notion entailed by all others, but he also states that an extra-mental reality corresponds to the concept of being-in-general (ens in communi). This extra-mental reality is predicated of everything (God and creatures, substances and accidents, universal and individual essences) according to different degrees, since God is in the proper sense of the term and any other entity is (something real) only insofar as it shares the being of God (De ente in communi, chap. 1, pp. 1–2; chap. 2, p. 29; De ente praedicamentali, chap. 1, p. 13; chap. 4, p. 30; Tractatus de universalibus, chap. 4, p. 89; chap. 7, p. 130; chap. 12, p. 279; De materia et forma, chap. 6, p. 213). | wyclif |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/wyclif/ | If being is a reality, it is then clear that it is impossible to affirm its univocity. The Doctor Subtilis thought of being as simply a concept, and therefore could describe it as univocal in a broad sense (one name — one concept — many natures). Wyclif, on the contrary, is convinced that the being-in-general is an extra-mental reality, so he works out his theory at a different level than does Scotus: no more at the intensional level (the meaning connected with the univocal sign, or univocum univocans), but at the extensional one (the thing signified by the mental sign, considered as shared by different entities according to different degrees). For that reason, he cannot use Aristotelian univocation, which hides these differences in sharing. Thus he denies the univocity of being and prefers to use one of the traditional notions of analogy (De ente praedicamentali, chap. 3, pp. 25, 27), since the being of God is the measure of the being of other things, which are drawn up on a scale with the separated spiritual substances at the top and prime matter at the bottom. Therefore he qualifies being as an ambiguous genus (ibidem, p. 29), borrowing an expression already used by Grosseteste in his commentary on Aristotle’s Posterior Analytics. The analogy of being does not entail a multiplicity of correlated meanings, however, as in Thomas Aquinas. Since Wyclif hypostatizes the notion of being and considers equivocity, analogy, and univocity as real relations between things, not as semantic relations between terms and things, his analogy is partially equivalent to the standard Aristotelian univocity, since what differentiates analogy from univocity is the way a certain nature (or property) is shared by a set of things: analogous things (analoga) share it according to different degrees (secundum magis et minus, or secundum prius et posterius), while univocal things (univoca) share it all in the same manner and at the same degree. This is the true sense of his distinction between ambiguous genera, like being and accident (accidens), and logical genera, like substance (De ente praedicamentali, chap. 4, pp. 30, 32). Hence, according to this account, being in general is the basic component of the metaphysical structure of each reality, which possesses it in accordance with its own nature, value, and position in the hierarchy of created beings. | wyclif |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/wyclif/ | Unfortunately, this theory is weak in an important point, since Wyclif does not clarify the relation between being-in-general and God. On the one hand, being is a creature, the first of all the creatures; on the other hand, God should share it, as being-in-general is the most common reality, predicated of all, and according to him to-be-predicated-of something means to-be-shared-by it. As a consequence, a creature would be in some respect superordinated to God — a theological puzzle that Wyclif failed to acknowledge. | wyclif |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/wyclif/ | According to Wyclif, the constitutive property of each kind of being is the capacity to be the object of a complex act of signifying (De ente in communi, chap. 3, p. 36; De ente primo in communi, chap. 1, p. 70). This choice implies a revolution in the standard medieval theory of transcendentals, since Wyclif actually replaces being (ens) with true (verum). According to the common belief, among the transcendentals (being, thing, one, something, true, good) being was the primitive notion, from which all the others stemmed by adding a specific connotation in relation to something else, or by adding some new determination. So true (verum) was nothing but being (ens) itself considered in relation to an intellect, no matter whether divine or human. In Wyclif’s view, on the contrary, being is no longer the main transcendental and its notion is not the first and simplest; rather there is something more basic to which being can be reduced: truth (veritas or verum). According to the English philosopher, only what can be signified by a complex expression is a being, and whatever is the proper object of an act of signifying is a truth. Truth is therefore the true name of being itself (Tractatus de universalibus, chap. 7, p. 139). Thus everything that is is a truth, and every truth is something not simple but complex. Absolute simplicity is unknown within Wyclif’s metaphysical world. From the semantic point of view, this means the collapsing of the fundamental distinction in the common Aristotelian theory of meaning, the one between simple signs (like nouns) and compound signs (like propositions). From the ontological point of view, this entails the uniqueness in type of what is signified by every class of categorematic expressions (Logica, chap. 5, p. 14). Within Wyclif’s world, it is the same kind of object that both concrete terms and propositions refer to, as individual substances have to be regarded as (atomic) states of affairs. According to him, from the metaphysical point of view a singular man is nothing but a real proposition (propositio realis), where actual existence in time as an individual plays the role of the subject, the common nature (i.e., human nature) plays the role of the predicate, and the singular essence (i.e., that by means of which this individual is a man) plays the role of the copula (ibid., pp. 14–15). | wyclif |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/wyclif/ | Despite appearances, Wyclif’s opinion on this subject is not just a new formulation of the theory of the complexe significabile. According to the supporters of the complexe significabile theory, the same things that are signified by simple concrete terms are signified by complex expressions (or propositions). In Wyclif’s thought, on the contrary, there are no simple things in the world that correspond to simple concrete terms; rather, simple concrete terms designate real propositions, that is, atomic states of affairs. Wyclif’s real proposition is that everything that is, as everything save God is composed at least of potency and act (De ente praedicamentali, chap. 5, pp. 38–39), can therefore be conceived of and signified both in a complex (complexe) and in a non-complex manner (incomplexe) (Tractatus de universalibus, chap. 2, pp. 55–56; chap. 3, pp. 70, 74, and 84; chap. 6, pp. 118–19). When we conceive of a thing in a complex manner, we consider that thing according to its metaphysical structure, and so according to its many levels of being and kinds of essence. As a consequence, Wyclif’s metaphysical world, like his physical world, consists of atomic objects, that is, single essences belonging to the ten different types or categories. But these metaphysical atoms are not simple but rather composite, because they are reducible to something else, belonging to a different rank of reality and unable to exist by themselves: being and essence, potency and act, matter and form, abstract genera, species and differences. For that reason, everything one can speak about or think of is both a thing and an atomic state of affairs, while every true sentence expresses a molecular state of affairs, that is, the union (if the sentence is affirmative) or the separation (if the sentence is negative) of two (or more) atomic objects (on Wyclif’s theory of proposition see Cesalli 2005). | wyclif |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/wyclif/ | Among the many kinds of beings Wyclif lists, the most important set is that consisting of categorial beings. They are characterized by the double fact of having a nature and of being the constitutive elements of finite corporeal beings or atomic states of affairs. These categorial items, conceived of as instances of a certain kind of being, are called by Wyclif ‘essences’ (essentiae). An essence therefore is a being that has a well defined nature, even if the name ‘essence’ does not make this nature known (De ente primo in communi, chap. 3, pp. 88–89; De ente praedicamentali, chap. 5, p. 43; Tractatus de universalibus, chap. 7, pp. 128–29; De materia et forma, chap. 4, pp. 185–86). So the term ‘essence’ (essentia) is less general than ‘being’ (ens), but more general than ‘quiddity’ (quidditas), since (i) every essence is a being, and not every being is an essence, and (ii) every quiddity is an essence, and not every essence is a quiddity, as individual things are essences but are not quiddities (see Kenny 1985, pp. 21 ff.; and Conti 1993, pp. 171–81). | wyclif |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/wyclif/ | According to Wyclif, being is the stuff that the ten categories modulate according to their own nature, so that everything is immediately something that is (De ente praedicamentali, chap. 4, p. 30; Tractatus de universalibus, chap. 7, p. 130); therefore, he maintains no real distinction between essence and being. The essences of creatures do not precede their beings, not even causally, since every thing is identical with its essence. The being of a thing is brought into existence by God at the same instant as its essence, since essence without being and being without essence would be two self-contradictory states of affairs. In fact, essence without being would imply that an individual could be something of a given type without being real in any way, and being without essence would imply that there could be the existence of a thing without the thing itself (Tractatus de universalibus, chap. 6, pp. 122–23). As a consequence, the pars destruens of his theory of being and essence is a strong refutation of the twin opinions of St. Thomas and Giles of Rome. Although Wyclif does not name either the Dominican master or the Augustinian one, it is nevertheless clear from the context that their conceptions are the object of his criticisms (ibid., pp. 120–22). | wyclif |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/wyclif/ | On the other hand, it is evident that while from the extensional point of view the being and essence of creatures are equipollent, since every being is an essence and vice versa, from the intensional point of view there is a difference, because the being of a thing logically presupposes its essence and not vice versa (De materia et forma, chap. 4, pp. 184–85). Moreover, in Wyclif’s opinion, every creature has two different kinds of essence and four levels of being. Indeed, he clearly distinguishes between singular essence and universal essence (essentia quidditativa speciei vel generis) — that is, the traditional forma partis and forma totius. The singular essence is the form that in union with the matter brings about the substantial composite. The universal essence is the type that the former instantiates; it is present in the singular substance as a constitutive part of its nature, and it discloses the inner metaphysical structure of the substantial composite (Tractatus de universalibus, chap. 6, pp. 116–18). Furthermore, he speaks of four-fold level of reality (esse): | wyclif |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/wyclif/ | Thus the identity between essence and being cannot be complete. Consequently Wyclif speaks of a formal difference (distinctio or differentia formalis) — which he also calls a ‘difference of reason’ (distinctio rationis) — between essence and being. More precisely, he holds that: | wyclif |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/wyclif/ | In this way, Wyclif establishes a close connection between singular essence and essential being, on the one hand, and a real identity between universal and individual (that is, between universal essence and singular essence), on the other hand. Essential being is the level of being that matches singular essence, while actual existence is in a certain way accidental to the singular essence, as the latter is nothing else but the universal essence considered as informing matter. | wyclif |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/wyclif/ | Since Wyclif thought of substance as the ultimate substrate of existence and subject of predication in relation to anything else, the only way to demonstrate the reality of the items belonging to other categories was to conceive of them as forms and attributes of substance. Accordingly, he insists that quantity, quality, and relations, considered as accidents, are forms inherent in the composite substances (cf. De ente praedicamentali, ch. 6, p. 48). In this way, just like Walter Burley, Wyclif wanted to safeguard the reality of accidents as well as their (real) distinction from substance and from each other, while at the same time affirming their dependence on substance in existence. | wyclif |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/wyclif/ | Among the nine genera of accidents, quantity is the most important one, as it is the basis of all further accidents, because every other accident presupposes it. Indeed, quantity orders substance for receiving quality and the other accidental forms. In his commentary on the Categories (ch. 10, § 4) and in the first part of his Summa Logicae (pars I, ch. 44) Ockham had claimed that it was superfluous to posit quantitative forms really distinct from substance and quality, since quantity presupposes what it is intended to explain, that is, the extension of material substances and their having parts outside parts. As an accident, quantity presupposes substance as its substrate of inherence. Like Burley, Wyclif also denies that material substance can be actually extended without the presence of quantitative forms in it, thereby affirming their necessity (cf. De ente praedicamentali, ch. 6, p. 50.), and consequently he tries to confute Ockham’s argumentation (ibidem, pp. 50–58). He admits that the existence of any quantity always implies that of substance, but he also believes that the actual existence of parts in a substance necessarily implies the presence of a quantitative form in it, distinct (1) from the substance (say Socrates) in which it inheres, and (2) from the truth, grounded on the substance at issue, that this same substance is a quantified thing (ibidem, pp. 51–53). He does not give us any sound metaphysical reason for this preference. Nevertheless, it is easily understandable, when considered from the point of view of his semantic presuppositions, according to which, the reality itself is the interpretative pattern of our language. | wyclif |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/wyclif/ | As a consequence, the structure of language is a mere mirroring of that of reality. In Wyclif’s opinion, therefore, some entities must correspond in the world to the abstract terms of the category of quantity (like ‘magnitudo’) – entities really distinct from the things signified by the substantial terms. In any case, the most important evidence he offers for proving his thesis is a sort of abductive reasoning, whose implicit premise is the following inferential rule: if we can recognize a thing as the same thing before and after its undertaking a process of change, then what is changed is not the thing at issue, but a distinct entity really present in that thing as one of its real aspects. The second premise is the observation that men are of different size during their lives. And the conclusion is that those changes are due to an accidental form distinct from the substances in which it inheres (ibidem, p. 50). | wyclif |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/wyclif/ | Immediately after quantity, quality comes. Following Aristotle (Categories, ch. 8, 8a 25), Wyclif defines quality as that in virtue of which substances are said to be qualified. The chief feature of Wyclif ’s treatment of quality is his twofold consideration of quality as an abstract form and as a concrete accident. In De ente praedicamentali he clearly states that quality is an absolute entity, with a well determined nature, and really distinct from substance (cf. ch. 7, p. 61). Furthermore, even if incidentally, against Burley, he notes that qualitative forms can admit a more or a less, since the propria passio of the category of quality is to be more or less intense (see ibidem, ch. 3, p. 28). | wyclif |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/wyclif/ | By contrast, in the De actibus animae (pars II, ch. 4), he seems to conceive of it as a mode of substance, without an actually distinct reality. Truly, there is no effective difference between the theses on quality maintained in those two works, but only a difference of point of view. As what he says about the real-and-essential distinction and the first sub-type of formal distinction makes evident, quality considered in an absolute way, according to its main level of being, is an abstract form, really distinct from substance; yet, if considered from the point of view of its existence as a concrete accident, it is not really distinct from the substance in which it is present, but only formally. In the latter case,it is a mere mode of the substance, like any other concrete accident. In fact, in the De ente praedicamentali Wyclif speaks of quality,using the abstract term, while in the De actibus animae he constantly utilises concrete expressions, such as ‘quale’ and ‘substantia qualis.’ | wyclif |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/wyclif/ | Aristotle’s treatment of relations in the Categories (ch. 7) and in the Metaphysics (V, ch.15) is opaque and incomplete. Because of this fact, in the Late Antiquity and in the Middle Ages many authors tried to reformulate the doctrine of relatives. Wyclif ’s attempt is one of the most interesting among those of the whole Middle Ages, as he very likely was the first medieval author able to work out a concept of relation conceived of as an accidental form which is in both the relatives at once, even though in different ways. Consequently his relation can be considered the ontological equivalent to our modern functions with two variables, or two-place predicates, whereas all the other authors of the Middle Ages had thought of the relations in terms of monadic functions. As a matter of fact, according to Wyclif, relation is different from quality and quantity, since it presupposes them just as what follows by nature presupposes what precedes. Moreover, quantity and quality are, in a certain way, absolute entities, but relation qua such is a sort of link between two things (see De ente praedicamentali, ch. 7, p. 61). | wyclif |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/wyclif/ | Wyclif thinks that the items directly falling into any categorial field are simple accidental forms, therefore he distinguishes between relations (relationes) and relatives (relativa or ad aliquid) – these latter being the aggregates formed by a substance, a relation, and the foundation (fundamentum), of the relation. Accordingly, the relationship between relation and relatives is, for him, similar to the ones between quantity and what is quantified, and quality and what is qualified. The relation is the very cause of the nature of the aggregates (that is, the relatives) of which it is a constituent; yet, unlike the other accidental forms, relations do not directly inhere in their substrates, but are present in them only by means of other accidental forms, that Wyclif, following a well established tradition, calls ‘foundations of the relation’. In his view, quantity and quality only can be the foundation of a categorial relation (ibidem, pp. 61–62).Thus, according to Wyclif’s description, in the act of relating one substance to another four different constitutive elements can be singled out: (1) the relation itself (for instance, the form of similarity); (2) the foundation of the relation, that is, the absolute entity in virtue of which the relation at issue is present in the two substances correlated to each other (in this case, the form of whiteness which makes the two substances at issue similar to each other); (3) the subject of the relation (or its first extreme), that is, the aggregate compound of (a) the substance which denominatively receives the names of the relation (in our example, the substance which is similar to another, say Socrates) and (b) of the foundation of the relation ; (4) the second extreme (of the relation), that is, another aggregate compund of a substance and its own foundation, that the subject of the relation is connected with, (in our example, a second substance which is, in its turn, similar to the first one, say Plato). | wyclif |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/wyclif/ | The fundamentum of the relation is the main component, since it (1) joins the relation to the underlying substances, (2) lets the relation link the subject to the object, and (3) transmits to the relation some of its properties. Even though relation depends for its existence on the foundation, its being is really distinct from it, as when the foundation fails the relation also fails, but not vice versa (ibidem, pp. 62–64 and 67). | wyclif |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/wyclif/ | Some rather important conclusions about the nature and the ontological status of relations and relatives follow from these premisses: | wyclif |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/wyclif/ | Like Duns Scotus, Wyclif divides relations into transcendental and categorial relations (ibidem p. 61–62), and, moreover, like many of his predecessors and contemporaries, among the latter he contrasts real relatives (relativa secundum esse) with relatives of reason (relativa rationis), or linguistic relatives (relativa secundum dici – see ibidem, pp. 62–64). Wyclif defines real relatives as those aggregates (1) made up of a substance and (2) an absolute accidental form (quantity or quality), (3) whose reality consists in being correlated to something else. If one of these three conditions is not fulfilled, we will speak of relatives of reason (cf. ibidem, p. 63). | wyclif |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/wyclif/ | In this way, Wyclif eliminates from the description of the relatives of reason any reference to our mind, and utilizes objective criteria only, based on the framework of reality itself. In fact he maintains that there are three kinds of relations of reason, each one characterized by the occurrence of at least one of these negative conditions: (1) one of the two extremes of the relation is not a substance with its foundation; (2) both the extremes of the relation are not substances; (3) there is no foundation for the relation, or it is not an absolute accident – that is, a quantity, or a quality (ibidem). The strategy which supports this choice is evident: Wyclif attempts to substitute references to mental activity by references to external reality. In other words, he seeks to reduce epistemology to ontology, in accordance with his realist program. | wyclif |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/wyclif/ | Wyclif’s world is ultimately grounded on divine essence. Thus there is a close connection between any kind of truth and the divine ideas (cf. Tractatus de universalibus, chap. 15, pp. 371–74; De materia et forma, chap. 2, pp. 170–76). Divine ideas play a threefold role in relation to God and creatures: they are (i) the specific essences of individual things themselves, considered according to their intelligible being in the mind of God; (ii) God’s principles of cognition of creatures; and (iii) the eternal models of creatures. If we also take into account that in his opinion (iv) divine ideas are really the same as the divine essence and formally distinct from it, and (v) this distinction originates from their being efficient (con)causes in relation to the different kinds of creatures, we can easily realize why Wyclif’s position on this matter leads to heretical consequences from the point of view of the Catholic theology: (i) metaphysical and theological necessitarianism; (ii) restriction of divine omnipotence; (iii) negation of the process of transubstantiation in the Eucharist. In fact, Wyclif defines ideas as the divine nature in action, since they are the means by which God creates all that is outside Himself. In this way, any distinction between the ideas as pure rationes and the ideas as exemplaria, stated by St. Thomas in his Summa theologiae (I, q. 15), is abolished. Furthermore, ideas are the constitutive principles of divine nature, essentially identical with it. Thus divine ideas become as necessary as the divine nature itself. On the other side, ideas are the first of the four levels of being proper to creatures. Indeed, since God could not help but create this Universe (as we shall see in Section 4.2), everything which is is necessary and so is a necessary object of God’s volition. Thus, the three spheres of possible, existent, and necessary totally coincide. As a matter of fact, Wyclif, having defined necessary truths as those truths which cannot not be the case, (i) distinguishes between absolutely necessary truths and conditionally (or relatively – secundum quid) necessary truths, and (ii) tries to show how relative necessity is consistent with supreme contingence (Logicae continuatio, tr. 1, chap. 11, vol. 1, pp. 156–65). He thought that such distinctions enabled him to maintain simultaneously the necessity of all that happens and human freedom (cf. Tractatus de universalibus, ch. 14, pp. 333–47); and many times he affirms that it would be heretical to say that all things happen by absolute necessity; but his attempt failed in achieving its goal. | wyclif |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/wyclif/ | According to him, absolutely necessary truths are such truths as (i) those of theology (like the real proposition that God exists), that are per se necessary and do not depend on something else; (ii) those of geometry, that neither can, nor ever could, nor ever will be able to be otherwise, even though they depend on something else (est ab alio sed non potuit non esse); and (iii) the past and present truths (like the real proposition that I have existed – me fuisse), that cannot be, but might have been otherwise (per accidens necessarium, quia est necessarium quod potuit non esse). On the contrary, relative necessity applies to those events that must follow certain conditions in order to be or happen – so that any contingent truth is relatively necessary if considered in relation to its conditions (Logicae continuatio, tr. 1, chap. 11, p. 157). In its turn, relative necessity is divided into antecedent, consequent, and concomitant. (i) A certain truth is an antecedent relative necessity when its existence causes the existence of another contingent truth (antecedens ut causa contingentis, inferens posterius naturaliter). An instance of such a necessity is the necessity of volition, as where my unconstrained will or the unconstrained will of God is the cause which necessitates something else (ibid., p, 158). (ii) A certain truth is a consequent relative necessity when its existence is caused by an antecedent (relative) necessity. And finally, (iii) a certain truth is a concomitant relative necessity when it merely accompanies another true event (ibid., p. 157). These features proper to the relative necessity are not opposites, and the same truth may be necessary in all the three ways (ibid., pp. 157–58). Wyclif insists that all three kinds of relative necessity are contingent truths in themselves (ibid., p. 158), yet he was unable to show how this is possible. He thought he had an explanation, but he was mistaken. In his Tractatus de universalibus (where he uses all these distinctions in order to try to solve the problem of the relationship between divine power and human freedom), he explicitly maintains that in relation to the foreknowledge of God every effect is necessary to come about (Tractatus de universalibus, chap. 14, p. 333), and the Aristotelian principle that everything which is, when it is, necessarily is (the well known formulation of the diachronic contingence), applies also to what will be and has been (ibid., p. 334). Taking into account that God himself cannot begin or cease actually to know or will something, and thus He cannot change from knowing that p to knowing that not-p (where p is a given truth), nor from volition to non-volition or vice versa (ibid., p. 335; cf. also De volucione Dei, chap. 3, p. 149), the logical result is that in Wyclif’s world nothing may happen purely contingently. It is true that Wyclif insists that even if God can never change from volition to non-volition, the fact that God wills p is in itself contingent, if p is not a theological truth (De volucione Dei, chap. 7, p. 192), but, like Bradwardine, he maintains that God’s antecedent will is naturally prior to what He foresees. Given that God is immutable, and hence that the divine power is not affected by the passage of time, and divine ideas, within Wyclif’s system, are as necessary as the divine essence itself, the logical consequence is that, despite Wyclif’s claims of the contrary, the whole history of the world is determined from eternity. As a matter of fact, Wyclif’s conditional (or relative) necessity is as necessary as his absolute necessity: given God, the world’s entire history follows. | wyclif |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/wyclif/ | This doctrine of divine ideas and the connected theory of being had a significant result also for the notion of divine omnipotence. In the Middle Ages, one of the most important features of divine omnipotence was the capacity of annihilating, which was viewed as the necessary counterpart of the divine capacity of creating. Wyclif denies the thesis of an opposition between creation and annihilation, and explicitly denies that God can annihilate creatures. He argues that nothing is contrary to creation, since the act of creating is peculiar to God, and nothing is opposite or contrary to God. In fact, absolute non-being (the only “thing” that could be considered opposite to God) is something self-contradictory, and therefore logically impossible. Accordingly, there cannot be any action opposite to creation. The only possible kind of non-being admitted by Wyclif is corruption (corruptio), that is, the natural destruction of the actual existence in time of an object in the world (Tractatus de universalibus, chap. 13, pp. 302–3). | wyclif |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/wyclif/ | On the other hand, according to Wyclif, annihilation, if possible, would be equivalent to the total destruction of all of a creature’s levels of being (ibid., p. 307), and thus would imply the following absurdities: | wyclif |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/wyclif/ | The image of God Wyclif draws here is not the Christian image of the Lord of the universe, who freely creates by an act of His will and has absolute power and control over everything, but a variation of the Neoplatonic notion of the One. Wyclif’s God is simply the supreme principle of the universe from which everything necessarily flows. Within Wyclif’s system, creation is a form of emanation, as each creature is necessarily connected with the divine essence itself by means of its esse ideale. God has been deprived of the power of revocation (ibid., pp. 304–5), and the only action He can, or rather has to, perform is creation. Because of the necessary links between (i) the divine essence and the eternal mental being that every creature has in God and (ii) this first level of being of creatures and the remaining three, for God to think of creatures is already to create them. But God cannot help thinking of creatures, since to think of Himself is to think of His constitutive principles, that is, of the ideas of creatures. Therefore, God cannot help creating. Indeed, He could not help creating just this universe. | wyclif |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/wyclif/ | Wyclif’s rejection of the possibility of annihilation and the subsequent new notion of divine onnipotence shed light on his theory of universals, as they help us to appreciate the difference between his thesis of the identity between universals and individuals and the analogous thesis of moderate Realists. For these latter theses, this identity meant that the individuals are in potentia universal; for Wyclif it means that the individuals are the universals qua existing in actu — that is, the individuals are the outcome of a process of production that is inscribed into the nature of general essences themselves, and through which general essences change from an incomplete type of subsistence as forms to a full existence as individuals. This position is consistent with (i) his theory of substance, where the main and basic composition of every substance, both individual and universal, is not the hylemorphic one, but the composition of potency and act (De ente praedicamentali, chap. 5, pp. 38–39), and (ii) a Neoplatonic reading of Aristotelian metaphysics, where universal substances, and not individual ones as the Stagirite had taught, are the main and fundamental kind of being (on Wyclif’s doctrine of the divine omnipotence see A. D. Conti, “Annihilatio e divina onnipotenza nel Tractatus de universalibus di John Wyclif,” in MT. Fumagalli Beonio Brocchieri & S. Simoneta 2003, pp.71–85. | wyclif |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/wyclif/ | Wyclif’s heretical theses concerning the Eucharist are the logical consequence of the application of this philosophical apparatus to the problem of the real presence of the body of Christ in the consecrated host. According to Catholic doctrine, after consecration the body of Christ is really present in the host instead of the substance of the host itself, while the accidents of the host are the same as before. St. Thomas’s explanation of this process, called ‘transubstantiation’, was that the substance of the bread (and wine) was changed into the body (and blood) of Christ, whereas its quantity, through which the substance of the bread received physical extension and the other accidental forms, was now the entity that kept the other accidental forms physically in being. Duns Scotus and Ockham, on the contrary, had claimed that after consecration the substance of the bread (and wine) was annihilated by God, while the accidents of the bread (and wine) remained the same as before because of an intervention of divine omnipotence. | wyclif |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/wyclif/ | Wyclif rejects both solutions as well as the Catholic formulation of the dogma, since he could not accept the ideas of the destruction of a substance by God and of the existence of the accidents of a given singular substance without and apart from that singular substance itself — two evident absurdities within the metaphyisical framework of his system of thought. As a consequence, Wyclif affirms the simultaneous presence in the Eucharist of the body of Crhist and of the substance of the bread (and wine), which continues to exist even after the consecration. According to him, transubstantiation is therefore a twofold process, natural and supernatural. There is natural transubstantiation when a substitution of one substantial form for another takes place, but the subject-matter remains the same. This is the case with water that becomes wine. There is supernatural transubstantiation when a miraculous transformation of the substantial entity at issue takes place. This was the case, for instance, with the incarnation of the second person of the Trinity, who is God and became man (De apostasia, p. 170). The Eucharist implies this second kind of transubstantiation, since the Eucharist, like Christ, has a dual nature: earthly and divine. According to its earthly nature the Eucharist is bread (and wine), but according to its divine nature it is the body of Christ, which is present in the host spiritually or in a habitudinal fashion, since it is in virtue and by means of faith only that it could be received (De apostasia, pp. 180 and 210; De eucharistia, pp. 17, 19, 51–52, and 230; for a description of the habitudinal presence, see the definition of the habitudinal predication above, Section 2.3 – on the links between his realism and his eucharistic doctrine see P. J. J. M. Bakker, “Réalisme et rémanence. La doctrine eucharistique de Jean Wyclif,” in MT. Fumagalli Beonio Brocchieri & S. Simoneta 2003, pp. 87–112; see also Kenny 1985, pp. 68–90). | wyclif |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/wyclif/ | Wyclif conceives of Sacred Scripture as a direct emanation from God himself, and therefore as a timeless, unchanging, and archetypal truth independent of the present world and of the concrete material text by means of which it is manifested. As a consequence, in his De veritate Sacrae Scripturae (On the Truth of Sacred Scripture — between late 1377 and the end of 1378) he tries to show that, despite appearences, the Bible is free from error and contradictions. The exegetic principle he adopts is the following: since the authority of Scripture is greater than our capacity of understanding, if some errors and/or inconsistencies are found in the Bible, there is something wrong with our interpretation. The Bible contains the whole truth and nothing but the truth, so that nothing can be added to it or subtracted from it. Every part of it has to be taken absolutely and without qualification (De veritate Sacrae Scripturae, vol. 1, pp. 1–2, 395, 399; vol. 2, pp. 99, 181–84). | wyclif |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/wyclif/ | In attributing inerrancy to the Bible, Wyclif was following the traditional attitude towards it, but the way he viewed the book detached him from Catholic tradition, as he thought that his own metaphysical system was the necessary interpretative key for the correct understanding of Biblical truth. In fact, in the Trialogus (Trialogue — between late 1382 and early 1383), where Wyclif gives us the conditions for achieving the true meaning of the Bible, they are the following: | wyclif |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/wyclif/ | Only on the basis of this logical and metaphysical machinery is it possible to grasp the five different levels of reality of the Bible, which are at the same time: | wyclif |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/wyclif/ | This same approach, when applied to the Church, led Wyclif to fight against it in its contemporary state. (On Wyclif’s ecclesiology see Leff 1967, pp. 516–46.) The starting point of Wyclif’s reflection on the Church is the distinction between the heavenly and the earthly cities that St. Augustine draws in his De civitate Dei. In St. Augustine such a division is metaphorical, but Wyclif made it literal. So he claims that the Holy Catholic Church is the mystical and indivisible community of the saved, eternally bound together by the grace of predestination, while the foreknown, i.e. the damned, are eternally excluded from it (De civili dominio, vol. 1, p. 11). This community of the elect is really distinct from the various particular earthly churches (ibid., p. 381). It is timeless and outside space, and therefore is not a physical entity; its being, like the actual being of any other universal, is wherever any of its members is (De ecclesia, p. 99). All its members always remain in grace, even if temporally in mortal sin (ibid., p. 409), as conversely the damned remain in mortal sin, even if temporally in grace (ibid., p. 139). The true Church is presently divided into three parts: the triumphant Church in heaven; the sleeping Church in purgatory; and the militant Church on earth (ibid., p. 8). But the militant Church on earth cannot be identified with the visible church and its hierarchy. Even more, since we cannot know who are the elect, there is no reason for consenting to recognize and obey the authority of the visible church (see De civili dominio, vol. 1, p. 409; De ecclesia, pp. 71–2). Authority and dominion rely on God’s law manifested by Sacred Scripture. As a consequence, obedience to any member of the hierarchy is to be subordinated to his fidelity to the precepts of the Bible (De civili dominio, vol. 2, p. 243; De potestate papae [On the Power of the Pope — ca. 1379], p. 149; De ecclesia, p. 465). Faithfulness to the true Church can entail the necessity of rebelling against the visible church and its members, when their requests are in conflict with the teaching of Christ (De civili dominio, vol. 1, pp. 384, 392). | wyclif |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/wyclif/ | In conclusion, since the visible church cannot help the believers gain salvation, which is fixed from eternity, and its authority depends on its fidelity to divine revelation, it cannot perform any of the functions traditionally attributed to it, and it therefore has no reason for its own existence. To be ordained a priest offers no certainty of divine approval and authority (De ecclesia, p. 577). Orthodoxy can only result from the application of right reason to the faith of the Bible (De veritate Sacrae Scripturae, vol. 1, p. 249). The Pope, bishops, abbots, and priests are expected to prove that they really belong to the Holy Catholic Church through their exemplary behavior; they should be poor and free from worldly concerns, and they should spend their time preaching and praying (De ecclesia, pp. 41, 89, 129). In particular, the Pope should not interfere in worldly matters, but should be an example of holiness. Believers are always allowed to doubt the clergy’s legitimacy, which can be evaluated only on the basis of its consistency with the Evangelic rules (ibid., pp. 43, 456). Unworthy priests forfeit their right to exercise authority and to hold property, and lay lords might deprive them of their benefices (De civili dominio, vol. 1, p. 353; vol. 3, pp. 326, 413; De ecclesia, p. 257). | wyclif |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/wyclif/ | As Leff remarked (Leff 1967, p. 546), the importance of Wyclif’s teaching on dominion and grace has been exaggerated. His doctrine depends on Richard Fitzralph’s theory, according to which the original lordship is independent of natural and civil circumstances (on Fitzralph’s conception see Robson 1961, pp. 70–96), and is only a particular application of Wyclif’s general view on election and damnation. In fact, the three main theses of the first book of his De civili dominio are the following: | wyclif |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/wyclif/ | Wyclif defines dominion as the right to exercise authority and, indirectly, to hold property. According to him, there are three kinds of possession: natural, civil, and evangelical. Natural possession is the simple possession of goods without any legal title. Civil possession is the possession of goods on the basis of some civil law. Evangelical possession requires, beyond civil possession, a state of grace in the legal owner. Thus God alone can confer evangelical possession (ibid., p. 45). On the other hand, a man in a state of grace is lord of the visible universe, but on the condition that he shares his lordship with all the other men who are in a state of grace, as all men in a state of grace have the same rights. This ultimately means that all the goods of God should be in common, just as they were before the Fall. Private property was introduced as a result of sin. From this point of view it is also evident that Aristotle’s criticisms against Plato are unsound, since Platonic communism is correct in essence (ibid., pp. 96 ff.). The purpose of civil law is to preserve the necessities of life (ibid., pp. 128–29). The best form of government is monarchy. Kings must be obeyed and have taxes paid to them, even if they become tyrants, since they are God’s vicars that He alone can depose — so that only secular lordship is justified in the world (ibid., p. 201). | wyclif |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/wyclif/ | [Please contact the author with other suggestions.] | wyclif |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/wyclif/ | Alyngton, Robert | analogy: medieval theories of | Aquinas, Thomas | Burley [Burleigh], Walter | Duns Scotus, John | Giles of Rome | medieval philosophy | Paul of Venice | Penbygull, William | Sharpe, Johannes | universals: the medieval problem of | wyclif |
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https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/wyclif-political/ | The central idea of Wyclif's political philosophy is that the dominium defining God's primary relation to creation justifies all human dominium, whether it be the mastery of a king, a lesser civil lord, or a priest. But unlike predecessors who were content to define God's mastery as foundational to human lordship in non-metaphysical terms, Wyclif made ready use of his realist ontology to argue that God's dominium functions as a universal by causality for all instances of just human dominium. For medieval political theorists, this was not common practice; some, like Aquinas, can be argued to present unified systems of metaphysics, political thought, and ecclesiology, but many others, including Ockham, Marsilius of Padua, John of Paris, and Giles of Rome, did not. If, like Ockham or Giles, they had metaphysical positions, it is impossible to argue persuasively that their ontologies affected their politics. This makes Wyclif's political and ecclesiological thought notable, for it is one of the few cases where a distinguished metaphysician used his ontology as a foundation for a detailed examination of the just arrangement of authority in church and state. An immediate corrollary to Wyclif's axiomatic position that all just human dominium derives from God is that no private property relations, which serve as the underpinnings for all human mastery, are just without grace. Because, following Augustine, private property is a direct result of the Fall of man, the ideal state is one of communal ownership. Since the Church is the re-established ideal state, grace does not provide for its just ownership of any property whatsoever. Because Wyclif saw the fourteenth-century church enjoying the lion's share of property ownership in England, he argued that the king was bound by God to relieve the church of its property, and to rule over it as a divinely appointed steward. The substance of this argument was realized by Henry VIII, and so Wyclif has been associated, if only as prophetic forerunner, with Tudor reformation. The form of Wyclif's arguments are in no way comparable to modern arguments, though, and are more directly associated with earlier Franciscan positions, like those of Ockham, than they are with later political theory. In this essay, the Latin term dominium will be used to distinguish Wyclif's theologically medieval view from its modern English correlate 'dominion', which connotes absolute mastery. | wyclif-political |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/wyclif-political/ | Government and the relation of divine justice to human law, both secular and ecclesiastical, figure as occasional themes throughout the treatises of the Summa de Ente. After receiving his doctorate in theology in 1373, his attention began to focus more completely on these topics, and his realism continued to undergird his thought at least through 1381, during which period he wrote the treatises that make up the second of his great Summae, the Summa Theologie. In late 1373, he began De Dominio Divino, which serves as bridge from the later, formal theological treatises of the Summa de Ente to the political, social, and ecclesiological subject matter of the Summa Theologie. He began royal service during this period, participating in an embassy to Bruges for negotiations with papal envoys in 1374. Wyclif remained in the service of John of Gaunt for the rest of his life; the Duke protected him from the formal prosecution prompted by five bulls of papal condemnation in 1377. After being condemned for his views on the Eucharist at Oxford in 1381, Wyclif withdrew to Lutterworth, where he remained until his death in December 1384. Though still protected by John of Gaunt, he was no longer in active service after 1379. During these tumultuous years, Wyclif wrote the ten treatises of the Summa Theologie: four on just human government, two on the structure and government of the church, one on scriptural hermeneutics, and three on specific problems afflicting the Church. Our interest lies in De Mandatis Divinis (1375–76), De Statu Innocencie (1376), and De Civili Dominio (1375–76), where he provides the theological foundation for the radical transformation of the church he prescribes in De Ecclesia (1378–79) De Potestate Pape (1379), and De Officio Regis (1379). Towards the end of his life, Wyclif summarized his entire theological vision in Trialogus (1382–83), reiterating the connections between his earlier philosophical works and later political treatises in a three-way dialogue written in language that would appeal to members of the royal court. | wyclif-political |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/wyclif-political/ | Dominium and its generally accepted translation, 'lordship', suggest the sovereignty exercised by one individual over another, but Roman law allowed for complexity in distinguishing between property ownership, its primary referent, and jurisdiction, governance, and political power. When twelfth-century canon lawyers resurrected Roman law as the foundation for the ascendant papal monarchy, it was common to distinguish between jurisdictive authority, secular power, and the use and possession of private property.[1] By the beginning of the fourteenth century, dominium largely connoted property ownership, though this usually entailed jurisdictive authority. Most political theorists agreed with Thomas Aquinas in saying that a civil lord who supposed that his jurisdictive authority arose from property ownership rather than from a constitution would be a tyrant (Summa Theologiae IaIIae, Q.56, a.5; Q.58, a.2). Given that the legal use of dominium referred to property ownership and not to the authority to govern, it seems odd that Wyclif used the term to do so much more. The reason may be found in the connection of Augustinian theology to theories of the justice of property ownership. As the papal monarchy developed, its theorists, such as Giles of Rome, found it useful to identify all earthly justice, including just property ownership, with the source of justice in creation. | wyclif-political |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/wyclif-political/ | Augustine's De Civitate Dei was the basis for relating property ownership and secular justice to divine authority. Here the division between two classes of men is clear: some are members of the City of Man, motivated by love of self, while others are motivated by the love of God and a contempt for self, placing them in the City of God.[2] There is really only one true Lord in creation. Mastery of one man over another is the result of Original Sin and is therefore unnatural except in the case of paternity, which is founded on parental love for a child. Among members of the City of God, the relation of prince and subject is not political and does not entail the sort of mastery we see in the City of Man, but rather involves service and sacrifice, as exemplified by the parent/child relationship. | wyclif-political |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/wyclif-political/ | Property ownership has been united to mastery in the City of Man because of Original Sin, whereby man turned away from God in the mistaken belief that he could make claims of exclusive ownership on created beings. This is not to say that Augustine thought that all private property relations are wrong; indeed, he is famous for having argued that all things belong to the just (De Civitate Dei 14, ch. 28). But people who own things are not de facto just. Those for whom ownership is not an end in itself but a means by which to do God's will are freed from the bondage of selfishness imposed by the Fall. They easily recognize the truth of the dictum that one should abstain from the possession of private things, or if one cannot do so, then at least from the love of property (Enarratio in Psalmam 132, ch.4). | wyclif-political |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/wyclif-political/ | Augustine's thought on the relation of ownership to political authority is open to interpretation. One can easily read him as arguing that the Church, as the Body of Christ and earthly instantiation of the City of God, can best exemplify loving lord/subject relations through its ecclesiastical structure, thereby justifying a top-down papal monarchy. Likewise, one can read him as having so separated secular political authority from the rule of love as to make political and ecclesiastical jurisdictive authority utterly distinct. Again, one could interpret Augustine's 'all things belong to the just' as meaning that the Church is the arbiter of all property ownership in virtue of being the Body of Christ and seat of all created justice, or one could argue that the Church should abandon all claims to property ownership, just as the Apostles abstained from the possession of private property. This ambiguity in interpretation was the source of some of the competing theories that influenced Wyclif's position. | wyclif-political |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/wyclif-political/ | During the conflict between Philip IV of France and Pope Boniface VIII in 1301, Giles of Rome wrote De Ecclesiastica Potestate, establishing the absolute secular superiority of the papacy. Giles' master Boniface VIII was responsible for the two famous Bulls, Clericos laicos (1296), which forbade clergy to give up property without papal approval, and Unam sanctam (1302), which declared that secular power is in the service of, and subject to, papal authority. De Ecclesiastica Potestate is an articulation of the concept of power underlying these two Bulls and arising from one of the two interpretations of Augustine described above. In it, Giles describes all power “spiritual and secular” as rooted in the papacy, likening its structure to a papal river from which smaller, secular streams branch out. The source of this river, he continues, is the sea, which is God: “God is a kind of font and a kind of sea of force and power, from which sea all forces and all powers are derived like streams.”[3] Not only is secular power reliant on papal authority; all property ownership, insofar as it is just, is similarly dependent on an ecclesiastical foundation. The key element in just secular power and property ownership, he continues, is grace: without God's will directly moving in creation through the sacraments of the Church, power and ownership are empty claims, devoid of justice. Although Giles did not explicitly call the combination of ownership and temporal power dominium, his uniting the two in a consistent, Augustinian fashion was sufficient for the next generation of Augustinian theorists. | wyclif-political |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/wyclif-political/ | Thirty years earlier, in Bonaventure's Apologia pauperum of 1269, the Franciscans had defined any property ownership, communal or individual, as inimical to the ideals of their Order. The Fall from paradise and the introduction of selfishness to human nature makes property ownership of any type, private or communal, an abberation. For the Franciscans, “all things belong to the just” only in the sense that “belonging” entails non-exclusive sharing (usus pauper), not ownership. Within three decades, the Franciscans were divided on this issue: one party, the Spirituals, demanded that the friars adopt usus pauper as their ideal of spiritual perfection, while the other, the Conventuals, argued for a more lenient interpretation of the Rule. The Spirituals, under the guidance of the philosopher John Peter Olivi and his follower Ubertino de Casale, outnumbered the Conventuals by century's end, and had become sufficiently vocal to attract the attention of the pope.[4] John XXII was deeply suspicious of the Spiritual Franciscans' arguments, perhaps fearing a reappearance of the communitarian Waldensian heresy. Private ownership, John argued, was not the result of Original Sin, but a gift from God that Adam enjoyed in Paradise and which the blessed still can enjoy, secure in the knowledge that their ownership is sanctioned by God's dominium. This argument was to have notable consequences. John's eventual controversy with the Spiritual's champion, William Ockham, led to the first important use of the concept of natural right. But for our analysis, the important thing is that iurisdictio and proprietas were united in the concept of dominium. Wyclif would make use of the Franciscans' arguments for apostolic poverty, as well as of John XXII's idea that divine dominium provides the basis for all human dominium, though in a way that would certainly have displeased both parties.[5] | wyclif-political |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/wyclif-political/ | By the 1350s, opponents of the Franciscans had broadened their range of criticism to question the legitimacy of the Order itself. Richard Fitzralph, (d. 1360) wrote De Pauperie Salvatoris, a sustained examination of the Franciscans' claim to function without supervision by diocesan bishop in which he argues that if the friars rely on the justice of the owners of what they use, they are bound by the same laws that bind the owners. Thus, if the owners of what the friars use are ecclesiastical, it follows that the friars must obey ecclesiastical authority.[6] Fitzralph's position is important here because it argues that grace alone is the justification for any instance of dominium in creation, and that all just dominium ultimately relies on God's dominium. Both serve as cornerstones of Wyclif's position. God's dominium is a natural consequence of the act of creating, and with it comes divine governance and conservation of created being. The rational beings in creation, angels and human beings, enjoy the loan of elements of God's created universe, but this is not a divine abdication of ultimate authority since everything is still directly subject to divine dominium. | wyclif-political |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/wyclif-political/ | When the nature of the dominium lent to Adam changed with the Fall, the love defining our natural dominium was affected, but not eradicated. Men devised political dominium to regulate property relations, and although sin keeps them from recognizing the borrowed nature of any dominium, it does not preclude there being grace-justified property ownership. In some cases, God infuses the artificial property-relations that we call dominium with sufficient grace to make them generally equivalent to prelapsarian dominium. These grace-favored cases of human dominium do not replicate the authority of God's dominium, but can exhibit the love that characterizes it. Fitzralph's expression of the Augustinian papal position makes grace the deciding factor in ownership relations and ultimately in political authority, both of which had become nested in the term dominium. Wyclif's interpretation of the Augustinian position would stretch past arguments about papal authority and the friars, even past arguments between popes and kings, to stir the very nature of the church as Christ's earthly body. All of this begins, he would argue, with an understanding of God's dominium as the causal exemplar of created lordship. | wyclif-political |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/wyclif-political/ | The relation of universal to particular defines Wyclif's conception of how God's dominium causes all instances of dominium in creation. Divine dominium is “the standard prior to and presupposition of all other dominium; if a creature has dominium over anything, God already has dominium over it, so any created dominium follows upon divine dominium” (De Dominio Divino I, ch. 3, p.16.18–22). This relation exceeds mere exemplarity, where human dominium only imitates God's dominium without divine causal determination. God's dominium has causal efficacy over all instances of human mastery such that no true created dominium is possible without direct participation in and constant reliance upon God's dominium. The instrument through which divine dominium moves is grace, which instills in human rulers an essential love defining their every ruling action. Thus, every case of just human dominium entails a constant reliance upon grace as the hallmark of its being an instantiation of God's universal dominium. | wyclif-political |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/wyclif-political/ | God's dominium has six aspects, three identifiable with lordship's ruling element (creation, sustenance, and governance), and three that define lordship's proprietary nature (giving, receiving, and lending) (De Dominio Divino III, ch. 1, p.198.9).7 The necessary precondition for an act of dominium is creation, of which no created being is capable. This makes God's dominium the only true instance of dominium and the source of all created instances of dominium. Because the Divine Ideas and their created correlates, the universals, are ontologically prior to particular created beings, God's dominium over universals is prior to His dominium over particulars. This means that God creates, sustains, and governs the human species prior to ruling over — and knowing — individual people. This led to questions about determinism that served as a starting point for many refutations of Wyclif's theology. | wyclif-political |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/wyclif-political/ | The second set of acts that define dominium — giving, receiving, and lending — provides the foundation for Wyclif's argument that all created dominium necessarily requires grace. God's giving of the divine essence in creating is the truest form of giving because God is giving of Himself through Himself, which no created being can do. Nor can any created being receive as God receives; God truly receives only from Himself through His giving. God gives up nothing in His giving, and acquires nothing in His receiving; creation is God's self-expression, an act in which the divine essence is neither decreased nor increased. The crucial act from the created standpoint is God's lending, for here there is real interaction between Lord and subjects. What human beings as conscious participants in God's lending relation can claim as their own is lent to them by divine authority, which they enjoy through grace. | wyclif-political |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/wyclif-political/ | It is easy to confuse giving with lending because a lord who has only been “lent” a gift of God for use during his lifetime appears to have been “given” that gift. God's giving is communicative, not translative. For us, most giving is translative in that it involves the giver's surrender of every connection to the gift, making it natural for us to suppose that God renounces His authority over what He gives us. In fact, God's giving is communicative, which does not involve surrender of the gift. Because all that God gives to creation will ultimately return to Him, it makes more sense to speak of God's giving as lending. | wyclif-political |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/wyclif-political/ | With any instance of lending, Wyclif explains, the lender seeks assurance that the borrower truly deserves what is to be lent. Human desert of the dominium they are lent is a matter of some complexity involving examination of the theological concept of grace. When a temporal lord lends his subject according to the subject's worthiness, the subject's merit is commensurable with the lord's, and the mutual agreement defining the loan can be made according to the respective merit of each party. The merit that allows the subject desert of consideration for the loan is “condigna”, i.e., grounded in the dignitas shared by lender and subject. Condign merit implies that the meritorious truly deserve the reward, requiring the giver to give it to the merited as something due, as when an olympic athelete earns a gold medal by besting all her opponents. Such a loan is impossible between Creator and creature, because there is no way of placing a creature's merit on the same scale as God's perfect nature; all the creature has, including its worth, is from God, whereas God's perfection is per se. There is no way in which a creature can be considered to deserve anything from God in such a relation. Congruent merit obtains when the meritorious does not have the power to require anything of the giver. In instances of congruent merit, the goodness of the act does not require the giver to reward the agent, though it does provide sufficient cause for the reward to be given, as when one receives an Academy Award: although many of the audience members may deserve an Oscar, the winner receives it because something about her performance is somehow pleasing to the Academy. Still, Wyclif holds that “It is the invariable law of God that nobody is awarded blessedness unless they first deserve it” (De Dominio Divino III, ch. 4, p.229.18). We can move our wills to the good, and from this, Wyclif says, grace may — but need not — follow. Thus, we merit congruently thanks to God's generosity towards a will in accord with His own. In effect, God lends merit. | wyclif-political |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/wyclif-political/ | Wyclif's theology of grace is the key to understanding how his theory of human dominium relates to divine dominium, its causal paradigm. Man's lordship is at once ownership and jurisdictive mastery, but when a human lord governs, or gives, or receives, or lends, these acts are only just insofar as the lord recognizes that his authority is that of a steward: “Any rational creature is only improperly called a lord, and is rather a minister or steward of the supreme Lord, and whatever he has to distribute, he has purely by grace” ([De Dominio Divino III, ch. 6, p.250.25–29). The essential characteristic of every instance of human dominium is the grace God lends to the individual lord, which itself is grounded in the grace of the Holy Spirit. The human lord appears to have proprietary and juristictive authority by virtue of his own excellence, but this is really only an instantiation of divine dominium, a grace-realized agent of God's lordship. This makes the human lord both master and servant; from the divine perspective, the lord is God's servant, but from the viewpoint of the subject, he is master. Wyclif is tireless in his emphasis on the illusory nature of this mastery; grace allows the human lord to recognize that he is, in fact, the servant of his subjects, ministering to them as a nurturing steward, not lording over them as would a powerful sovereign. | wyclif-political |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/wyclif-political/ | De Civili Dominio begins with the motto, “Civil justice presupposes divine justice; civil dominium presupposes natural dominium.” Man's dominium is threefold — natural, civil, and evangelical — but comprehensible as an instantiation of the justice of God's dominium. As he moved into his general analysis of human dominium, Wyclif's thoughts turned to the most fundamental instance of God's loving governance, the Scriptural commandments. The foundation of all that is right (ius) in creation, he explains, is divine justice (iustitia), so we cannot begin to understand right and wrong in creation without understanding God's uncreated right. This was a significant departure from the Aristotelian position that unaided human reason is capable of justice, and Wyclif explicitly rejects any conception of justice that does not rely on uncreated right.[8] The laws of Scripture are the purest expression of uncreated right available to human eyes, he explains, and are most clearly expressed in the Ten Commandments of Exodus 20, and again in the two greatest commandments of Matthew 22: 37–40. Wyclif's analysis of Christ's law of love and of the Ten Commandments proceeds directly from his disquisition on the relation of earthly justice to eternal right in De Mandatis Divinis. That Wyclif uses the same title -->Robert Grosseteste--> had used in his analysis of the decalogue is no accident; Wyclif's debt to Grosseteste's conceptions of sin, love of God, idolatry, and the substance of true faith is obvious throughout the treatise. In De Statu Innocencie, the innocence into which we were created before the Fall, he says, is the optimal condition for any rational being. In our prelapsarian state, our wills would have been in perfect concord with the divine will, so that all human action would be just, effortlessly aligned with the natural order of creation. In this condition, there would be no need for civil or criminal law, since we understood what is right naturally. | wyclif-political |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/wyclif-political/ | This denial of the need for human law is of special import, for Wyclif later argues that the evangelical lord, or priest, as heir of Christ's restoration of the possibility of natural dominium, should never be concerned with such matters. In such a state, private property ownership was unknown. The natural dominium described in Genesis 1:26 is characterized by lack of selfishness, ownership, or any distinction between 'mine' and 'thine'. The true sense of Augustine's “All things belong to the just” is most fully apparent in the prelapsarian natural disposition to share in the use of creation while acting as faithful steward to its perfect lord. The Fall was brought about by the first sin, which Wyclif characterizes as a privation of God's right in man's soul. We are left with wills prone to value the physical, material world above spiritual concerns, and the unavoidable result is private property ownership. We no longer understand a given created good as a gift on loan from God, but can only see it in terms of our own self-interest, and the unfortunate result is civil dominium, an enslavement to material goods. | wyclif-political |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/wyclif-political/ | Wyclif's definition of civil dominium as “proprietary lordship in a viator over the goods of fortune fully according to human law” is centered not on legislative authority, but on the private property ownership enjoyed by the viator, or wayfarer, along life's path (De Civili Dominio III ch. 11, p.178.9–17).[9] This is because all civil dominium is based on the use of goods owned, which is the basis for all postlapsarian conceptions of justice (recall that for Wyclif, only God truly owns created things because creating a thing is necessary for owning it; hence, human beings are only lent created things and can use them justly, or unjustly in case they appropriate them for themselves). Before the Fall, our use of created goods was communal, unencumbered by the complexity that follows upon selfishness. But now, Wyclif explains, there are three types of use: that directly consequent upon civil ownership, civil use without ownership, and evangelical use. The first two are natural results of the Fall, and the third is the result of Christ's Incarnation. Before the Incarnation, civil ownership and civil use were grounded in man-made laws designed primarily to regulate property ownership. These legal systems tended to have two general structures: they were either monarchies, as in most cases, or else they were aristocratic polities. The harmony of the aristocratic polity is certainly preferable because it most resembles the state enjoyed before the Fall; the benevolent aristocracy, as evidenced in the time of the Biblical judges, would foster the contemplative life, communalism, and an absence of corruptible governmental apparatus. | wyclif-political |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/wyclif-political/ | The most common species of civil dominium is monarchy, in which a chief executive power holds ultimate legislative authority. This centralized authority in one man is necessary to implement order; there is no real possibility that the many are capable of ruling on behalf of the many, given the prevalence of sin. The point of civil dominium is not, as with Aristotle, the sustenance of individual virtuous activity. Civil dominium is a phenomenon based on Original Sin, and is therefore unlikely to produce justice per se. If the government of Caesar is occasionally just, it is because it has accidentally realized divine justice. But if civil dominium that is not grounded directly in divine dominium is incapable of sustained just governance, and if natural dominium is the instantiation of divine dominium for which man was created, how can any talk of just civil dominium be possible? To return to the opening dictum of De Civili Dominio, if natural dominium is free from private property ownership, how can civil dominium rely upon it in any way? | wyclif-political |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/wyclif-political/ | Before resolving this problem, we will need to address evangelical dominium as yet another factor in Wyclif's conception of man's postlapsarian state. | wyclif-political |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/wyclif-political/ | Christ restores the possibility of gaining our lost natural dominium both through His apostolic poverty and His redemptive sacrifice as described in Holy Scripture. Because of Christ's sinless nature, He was the first man since Adam capable of exhibiting the purity of natural dominium. This Christ shared with His disciples, who were able to renounce all exclusive claims to created goods in a recreation of the communal caritas lost in the Fall (De Civili Dominio III, 4, p. 51.17–24). This poverty is not simply the state of not owning things; one can live sinfully as easily in squalor as one can in luxury. The apostolic poverty of the early Church is a spiritual state, not an economic rejection of civil dominium. The similarity between Wyclif's conception of spiritual poverty as the ideal state for Christians and the Franciscan ideal is noteworthy. Wyclif seems to make a case similar to the Spiritual Franciscans: Christ's life was exemplary for all Christians and Christ lived in apostolic poverty; therefore, all Christians ought follow His example, or at the least have that option open to them. Wyclif's consonance with the Franciscan tradition is also suggested in his use of Bonaventure's definition of apostolic poverty in the third book of De Civili Dominio, but Wyclif's motives are distinctly different from the Friars' (De Civili Dominio III, 8, pp. 119–120). While the Franciscans argued that their rule allowed them to regain the ownership-free purity enjoyed by the early Apostolic church, Wyclif contended that Christ's redemptive sacrifice enabled all Christians to regain natural dominium itself, not just its purity. This suggested that the Franciscan life was a pale imitation of true Christianity, which Wyclif's Franciscan colleagues were quick to point out. One of the first critics of Wyclif's dominium thought was William Woodford, O.F.M., who argued that Wyclif had gone too far in equating apostolic, spiritual poverty with prelapsarian purity. The extensive third book of De Civili Dominio is Wyclif's response to Franciscan critics like Woodford, and in which lie the seeds of the antifraternalism that would characterize his later writings. | wyclif-political |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/wyclif-political/ | Wyclif describes apostolic poverty as a mode of having with love, comprehensible in terms of the individual's use of a thing for the greatest spiritual benefit. God alone can bring about the love instantiating divine dominium, making grace necessary for apostolic poverty. Because the church is founded not on the materially-based laws of man, but on the spiritually-grounded lex Christi, it must be absolutely free of property ownership, the better to realize the spiritual purity required by apostolic poverty. Any material riches that the church comes upon as “goods of fortune” must be distributed as alms for the poor, following the practice of Christ and the disciples, and the apostolic church. This is the ideal to which the Church must aspire through the example of Christ, and some of the harshest invective in Wyclif's prose is directed against the Church's refusal to return to this apostolic state. The turning point in Church history was the Donation of Constantine, on the basis of which the Church claimed to have the civil dominium of a Caesar. Wyclif was vigorous in his condemnation of the Donation, and would likely have been pleased had he lived into the early fifteenth century, when Nicholas of Cusa argued persuasively that the document was a ninth-century forgery. | wyclif-political |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/wyclif-political/ | Given the deleterious influence civil dominium has had on the evangelical dominium of Christ's law, it is difficult to imagine how Wyclif would set aside some civil lords as capable of instantiating divine justice. But apostolic poverty is not identical with an absence of property ownership; it is having with love. While the clergy as spiritual lords ought to follow Christ's example of material poverty, it does not follow that all ownership precludes love. God can certainly bestow grace on those whom He wills to be stewards of created goods. Wyclif envisions the just civil lord or king as the means by which the Church is relieved of its accumulated burden of property ownership. So long as the Church exists in postlapsarian society, it must be protected from thieves, heresy, and infidels. Certainly no evangelical lord ought to be concerned with such matters, given their higher responsibility for the welfare of Christian souls. As a result, the Church needs a guardian to ward off enemies while caring for its own weel-being and administering alms to the poor. This allows Wyclif to describe just, grace-favored civil dominium as different in kind from the civil lordship predicated on materialistic human concerns: “It is right for God to have two vicars in His church, namely a king in temporal affairs, and a priest in spiritual. The king should strongly check rebellion, as did God in the Old Testament, while priests ought minister the precepts mildly, as did Christ, who was at once priest and king.” When he raises conventional topics in political thought, like the particulars of just rule, the responsibilities of royal councillors to their king, the nature of just war, and royal jurisdiction in commerce, his advice is priestly: “[A] lord ought not treat his subjects in a way other than he would rationally wish to be treated in similar circumstances; the Christian lord should not desire subjects for love of dominating, but for the correction and spiritual improvement of his subjects, and so to the efficacy of the church” (De Officio Regis ch. 1, p. 13.4–8). The king ought provide few and just laws wisely and accurately administered, and live subject to these laws, since just law is more necessary for the community than the king. Also, the king should strive to protect the lower classes' claims on temporal goods in the interests of social order, for “nothing is more destructive in a kingdom in its political life than immoderately to deprive the lower classes of the goods of fortune” (De Officio Regis ch. 5, p. 96.9–27).[10] On occasion he discusses the king's need of reliable councillors, generally when discussing the king's need for sacerdotal advice in directing church reform, but he never mentions Parliament as a significant aspect of civil rule. | wyclif-political |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/wyclif-political/ | The most immediate concern of a civil lord living in an age when the Church is being poisoned by avarice should be the radical divestment of all ecclesiastical ownership. Wyclif is tireless in arguing for the king's right to take all land and goods, and indeed, even the buildings themselves, away from the Church. Should the clergy protest against royal divestment, threatening the king with excommunication or interdict, the king should proceed as a physician applies his lancet to an infected boil. No grace-favored civil lord will be disposed to save up the divested goods of the Church for his own enrichment, despite the obvious temptation. He will distribute the Church's ill-gotten lands and goods to the people. This, Wyclif explains, will be his continued responsibility even after the Church has been purged, for he is the Church's custodian as well as its protector. | wyclif-political |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/wyclif-political/ | The hereditary succession by which civil lordship passes from father to son is a problem for Wyclif. People cannot inherit the grace needed to ensure just ownership and jurisdiction. Primogeniture imperils grace-founded civil lordship, making lords prone to rule on behalf of their own familial interests rather than in the interests of their subjects. The only means by which Wyclif can envision hereditary succession operating is through spiritual filiation, in which a civil lord instructs a worthy successor. He suggests adoption as the basis for the spiritual primogeniture by which lordship is passed on, which would be preferable to general election, for Wyclif is clear about the impossibility of widespread recognition of grace in a potential civil lord: “It does not follow, if all the people want Peter to be their civil lord, that therefore it is just” (De Civili Dominio I, 18, p. 130.6). Central to his ecclesiology is the impossibility of determining the presence of grace in another's soul, which militates against identifying members of the elect with certainty, and therefore against excommunicating any of them from the Church, as well as ruling out popular election as a means of instituting just civil dominium. Grants in perpetuity, commonly employed by civil lords to guarantee the ongoing obligation of subjects in return for a gift of land or political authority, are as impossible as hereditary inheritance. A lord might reward someone with a grant while acting as God's steward, but he certainly cannot thereby make his subject's progeny deserve the gift. | wyclif-political |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/wyclif-political/ | History is rich with examples of kings who, wittingly or unwittingly, lose sight of their ministerial position and wield secular authority in their own interests, cruelly using the land and church for their own gain. Such tyrants cause Wyclif some problems, for in many cases it is difficult for the subjects to determine whether their lord is acting viciously as a crowned brigand, or sternly, as a physician purging a patient. For the same reason that Wyclif denies the suitability of popular elections, he is cautious regarding tyranny: it is impossible for human minds to gauge the absence of grace in another. What may look like cruel persecution of a subject may in fact be just punishment, while what may appear to be benign, permissive rule may in fact be the lassitude of misrule. Certainly no priest is in a position to assess the justice of a civil lord, given his dedication to apostolic ideals foreign to civil dominium. In some cases, Wyclif advises that one must suffer tyrannical rule as a divine punishment, particularly when a king deprives His subjects of material wealth. In other cases, especially when a civil lord fosters ecclesiastical decay by not persecuting heretics or regulating the Church's goods, Wyclif suggests that resistance to tyranny may be justifiable: better to focus on the greater danger of priestly tyranny; after all, a tyrannical civil lord can only do damage to one's material well-being, but a tyrannical priest can endanger one's eternal soul. The guardian against priestly tyranny must be the civil lord, whose responsibility to the Church requires him to monitor the clergy's execution of its spiritual duties. Those who argue that a civil lord has no business interfering with spiritual concerns overlook the fundamental relation holding between just civil law and divine law: because the civil lord's responsibility is to God, his first concern must be to ensure that nothing will impede obedience to divine law. The canon law that has built up over the centuries like barnacles on a ship's hull is held up as the means by which the Church regulates spiritual affairs, but this, Wyclif explains, is a superfluous creation of priests, ultimately hindering the Church by introducing material structure to what should be a purely spiritual enterprise. | wyclif-political |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/wyclif-political/ | The king uses bishops, an office justly instituted by the early church, to monitor the spiritual offices of priests to counteract problems like simony, pluralism, absenteeism, and heresy. These bishops ought also to act as royal theological advisors, helping the civil lord to understand how Christ's law is best implemented in his own legislation. Just as a civil lord is God's steward and a servant to his subjects, a bishop is not superior to the laity or the priests, but a steward whose responsibility is to God and the divine law, which ordains subservience to the grace-favored civil lord. Wyclif continued to argue for the centrality of episcopal office throughout his life, despite his own troubles with the Bishop of London and the Archbishop of Canterbury. | wyclif-political |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/wyclif-political/ | Aquinas, Thomas | Augustine, Saint | Bonaventure, Saint | Cusanus, Nicolaus [Nicolas of Cusa] | Giles of Rome | Grosseteste, Robert | Ockham [Occam], William | Wyclif, John | wyclif-political |
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https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/wyclif-political/ | Library of Congress Catalog Data: ISSN 1095-5054 | wyclif-political |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/xenocrates/ | Xenocrates (of Chalcedon, a city on the Asian side of the Bosporus opposite Byzantium, according to Diogenes Laertius (D.L.) iv 14), became head of the Academy after Speusippus died, in 339/338 (“in the second year of the 110th Olympiad”). D.L. says he held that position for twenty-five years, and died at 82. So his dates work out to 396/395–314/313. | xenocrates |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/xenocrates/ | On the death of Plato, when Speusippus became head of the Academy, Xenocrates and Aristotle may have left Athens together at the invitation of Hermeias of Atarneus (see Strabo XIII 57, printed in Gaiser 1988, 380–381, discussed at 384–385), and Xenocrates returned to succeed Speusippus. According to D.L. (iv 3), this was at Speusippus’ request, while the Academicorum Index Herculanensis (cols. VI-VII: Mekler 1902, 38–39, Gaiser 1988, 193) tells us that the younger members of the Academy voted on the succession and confirmed Xenocrates by a narrow margin. These two accounts, although not incompatible, do not tell the same story, and it does not appear possible to get behind them to what really happened. | xenocrates |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/xenocrates/ | D.L.’s bibliography (iv 11–14) lists over 70 titles; nothing whatever of these has survived, even in the form of identifiable quotations in other authors. Reconstruction of Xenocrates’ views turns, as in the case of Speusippus, on Aristotle, and, again as in the case of Speusippus, this is made the more difficult by Aristotle’s frequent failure actually to name Xenocrates when talking about his views. In fact, Aristotle never mentions Xenocrates by name in discussing his metaphysical views. | xenocrates |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/xenocrates/ | What is left of Xenocrates’ views is here divided up under three headings: Metaphysics, Theory of Knowledge, and Ethics. Sextus Empiricus tells us (Adversus mathematicos vii 16; fr. 1H, 82IP: here and in the sequel ‘H’ refers to the collection of fragments in Heinze 1892 and ‘IP’ to that in Isnardi Parente 1982) that Xenocrates was explicit about the division of philosophical topics implicit in Plato, into ‘physics’, ‘ethics’, and ‘logic’; this became the norm in Stoicism and Hellenistic philosophy in general. We have a great deal more to work with under the first heading than under the other two. As is standard with this terminology, what we are accustomed to refer to as metaphysics and theory of knowledge are included in ‘physics’ and ‘logic’, respectively. | xenocrates |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/xenocrates/ | Sextus’ report about the standard division of philosophy coming through Xenocrates but ultimately from Plato is typical of much of what we hear about Xenocrates: he appears to have been at least as concerned to carry on the thought of Plato as to promulgate ideas of his own. | xenocrates |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/xenocrates/ | Most of what we can reconstruct about Xenocrates pertains to his metaphysics. We do this largely by identifying views of his that appear in Aristotle’s criticisms of the metaphysical views of his predecessors and contemporaries, and chaining together with these other texts that can plausibly be taken as dealing with his views. But there are a few sources other than Aristotle. | xenocrates |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/xenocrates/ | One of them is Proclus, who says, commenting on the Parmenides (Cousin 1864, 888.11–19, 36–38; fr. 30H, 94IP): | xenocrates |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/xenocrates/ | ‘The founder’ is Plato. The phrase ‘mounted on a holy pedestal’ comes from Plato, Phaedrus 254b7, where the soul has been likened to a charioteer who sees the Forms of the beautiful and temperance so mounted. Some of the phrasing is no doubt neoplatonist rather than Xenocratean, but the formulation, ‘the idea is a paradigmatic cause’, seems to be, as Proclus says, Xenocrates’ attempt to capture Plato’s intent: see here Plato, Parmenides 132d. | xenocrates |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/xenocrates/ | There is disagreement over the rest of the formulation Proclus attributes to Xenocrates: in speaking of ‘the things that are always constituted according to nature’, did Xenocrates intend to rule out forms for individuals, which are transitory, and for artefacts, which are not constituted according to nature? This is the way Proclus goes on to interpret Xenocrates, and it is hard to see how to get around that, although attempts have been made (see Cherniss 1944 [1962], 256). But there is indirect confirmation of Proclus’ interpretation, at least where artefacts are concerned, from Clement of Alexandria, who tells us (in Stromateis II 5) that Xenocrates claimed that knowledge of the intelligible substance is theoretical as opposed to practical ‘judgment’; at that rate, carpenters are not contemplating forms when they make beds and shuttles, despite what is said by Plato in Republic X 596b and Cratylus 389a–b, and (if it is by Plato) Letter vii 342d. But it should be noted that the rejection of forms for artefacts is in agreement with what Aristotle has to say about Plato and Platonists in Metaphysics I 9. 991b6–7, XII 3. 1070a13–19, and in the fragmentary remains of On Ideas in Alexander (see esp. Hayduck 1891, 79.23–24, 80.6). Likewise the rejection of forms for individuals squares with Aristotle’s attack on the ‘argument from thinking’ (Metaphysics I 9. 990b14–15 = XIII 4. 1079a10–11, supplemented by Alexander, Hayduck 1891, 81.25–82.7): if every object of thought is a form, then there are forms also “for the perishables” (990b14 = 1079b10) or “for the particulars and perishables, such as Socrates, Plato” (Alexander, Hayduck 1891, 82.2–3). | xenocrates |
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/xenocrates/ | The version of the Theory of Forms associated with Xenocrates is that which Aristotle ascribes to the later Plato (see Metaphysics XIII 4. 1078b10–12 for the qualification ‘later’), in which the Forms are ‘generated’ and are, in the first instance, numbers. Xenocrates operated, in parallel with Speusippus and Plato (as Aristotle reports Plato), with a scheme in which two principles--the One and something called any or all of ‘the everflowing’, ‘plurality’ (Aëtius i 3. 23), or ‘the Indefinite Dyad’ (Theophrastus, Metaphysics vi)--generate these form-numbers, and then, in turn, lines, planes, solids, and perceptible things. | xenocrates |