Chapter 48 Chapter Fourteen: The Franciscan Scholastics

In general, the Franciscan order is not as strictly orthodox as the Dominican order.There was a bitter rivalry between the two orders, and the Franciscan order refused to recognize the authority of St. Thomas.The three most important philosophers in the Franciscan order were Roger Bacon, Duns Scotus, and William of Occam. Also St. Bonaventure and Matthew the Acquaspartans deserve attention. Roger Bacon (c. 1214-c. 1294) did not receive much praise during his lifetime, but the praise he received in modern times far exceeds his achievements.Rather than saying that he is a philosopher in a narrow sense, it is better to say that he is more of a great polymath who loves mathematics and science.Science, in his day, was confounded with alchemy, and was thought to be mixed with sorcery or magic; Bacon was often plagued by suspicions of heresy and magic.In 1257 St. Bonaventure, Rector of the Franciscan Order, placed him under surveillance in Paris and forbade him to publish his works.Notwithstanding this, while the prohibition was still in force, Guy de Forec, the pope's legate in England, had ordered him, in defiance of the prohibition, to write his own philosophy for the benefit of the pope.Therefore, in a short period of time he wrote three volumes, the Great Book, the Small Book, and the Third Book.These books produced such good results that in 1268 he was released and returned to Oxford, from which he had been sent to Paris to live a life of captivity.Even so, nothing ever taught him to be cautious.He was wont to cast contemptuous criticisms of his eminent contemporaries; he was especially fond of emphasizing the incompetence of Greek or Arabic translators.In 1271 AD he wrote a book called "Principles of Philosophical Studies", in which he attacked the ignorance of monks.This incident did not increase his reputation among his peers in the slightest.In 1278 his writings were condemned by the head of the Franciscan order, and he himself was thrown into prison for fourteen years.He was released in 1292, but died shortly after his release.

His knowledge is encyclopedic but lacks system.Unlike many contemporary philosophers, he placed a high value on experimentation.He once used the theory of the rainbow to prove the importance of the experiment.He has written some brilliant articles on geography; Columbus had read and been influenced by him.He was an excellent mathematician; often citing Books VI and IX of Euclid's Geometry.He also discusses perspective drawing based on Arabic sources.He considered logic a useless science; on the other hand, he valued alchemy adequately and wrote on it. In order to explain his knowledge and methods, I will summarize some parts of "Great Works" below.

He said that there are four reasons for ignorance: 1. The example set by weak and inappropriate authority. (Because this book is written for the Pope, he is careful to state that this does not include the Church.) Second, the influence of habit.3. The opinion of the uninformed masses (this conjecture includes all his contemporaries except him).4. Cover up your ignorance in showing off your outward wisdom.These four kinds of disasters have produced all the evils in the world, and the fourth one is especially the worst. It is a mistake to argue from ancestral wisdom, custom, or common beliefs when supporting an opinion.He cited Seneca, Cicero, Avicenna, Averroes, Adelaide of Bath, St. Jerome, and St. Chrysostom, in defense of his views, He seems to think that the instances of these authorities are enough to prove that one does not respect them properly.

He respected Aristotle, but not without limits.He says that "only Aristotle and his followers are called philosophers in the judgment of all wise men." When he speaks of Aristotle, he uses the term "great philosopher," He told us that even this Stakira man had not reached the limits of human intelligence.After Aristotle, Avicenna was the "King and Leader of Philosophy." Nevertheless, Avicenna did not fully understand the phenomenon of the rainbow, because he did not recognize the root cause of the rainbow, which, according to Genesis records the escape of water vapor (though Bacon, when discussing the hauni, quotes Avicenna with admiration).From time to time he said something that smacked of orthodoxy, as in: The only perfect wisdom, as canon and philosophy show, is in the Bible.But he sounded more earnest when he said that there was nothing wrong with acquiring knowledge from heathens.In addition to citing Avicenna and Averroes, he often cites Al-Farabi' and occasionally Al-Bumacha and others.He cites Albu Macha to prove that mathematics was known to Noah and his sons before the flood; I think this statement is an example of the knowledge we can get from the heathen.Bacon praised mathematics as the only (unrevealed) source of certainty, and as the science necessary for astronomy and astrology.

Bacon, following Averroes, holds that the active intellect is essentially a separate entity from the soul.He cites a number of eminent theologians, including Grossetest, bishop of Lincoln, in support of this view contrary to St. Thomas'.He says that apparent contradictions with Aristotle's book are due to errors in translation.He never used a primary source for Plato, but a secondary source through Cicero, or a third source through an Arab translation of Pulfil.He did not take Pulfilli very seriously, and he called his theory of universals "childish." As a source of knowledge, Bacon has been appreciated in modern times for valuing experiment over demonstration.It is true that his interests and approach to problems were quite different from those of the typical scholastics.His encyclopedic tendencies are very much like those of Arab writers.These men obviously influenced him more than many other Christian philosophers.Arab philosophers were as interested in science as he was and believed in magic and astrology, while Christians believed magic was evil and astrology was a deception.He is surprising because he was so different from the Christian philosophers of the Middle Ages, but he has had little contemporary influence and, in my opinion, is not as scientific as is sometimes supposed.English writers are accustomed to say that he invented gunpowder, but this is not true.

St. Bonaventure (A.D. 1221-1274), the Franciscan prefect who banned Bacon, was a man of a completely different kind.He belongs to the tradition of St. Anselm and upholds the ontological arguments of this man.He saw a fundamental opposition between Neo-Aristotelianism and Christianity.He believed in Plato's ideas, but believed that only God could fully understand them.We often find quotations from Augustine in his writings, but no quotations from Arab works, and very few quotations from ancient pagan works. Matthew the Aquaspartan (about 1235-1302 AD) was a follower of Bonaventure, but he was more or less exposed to some emerging philosophies.He was a Franciscan monk and a cardinal; he had opposed St. Thomas on Augustinian views.But for him, Aristotle, has become "the great philosopher"; he quotes him constantly.Besides this Avicenna is often mentioned; and St. Anselm and Pseudo-Dionysius are quoted with great admiration; his chief authority, however, is St. Augustine.He said that we must find a middle way between Aristotle and Plato.Plato's ideas are "deeply wrong"; they build wisdom but not knowledge.On the other hand, Aristotle is equally wrong; he establishes knowledge but not wisdom.Our knowledge, so he concludes, is brought about by the reason of both lower and higher things, by external bodies and ideas.

Duns Scotus (c. 1270-1308 AD) continued the Franciscan controversy over Aquinas.He was born in Scotland or Ullest, and attended the Franciscan order at Oxford.Spent his later years in Paris.He opposed St. Thomas in favor of the chaste conception, and in this he won the approval of the University of Paris and eventually of the whole Catholic Church.He was an Augustinian, but in a less extreme form than Bonaventure, or even Matthew the Acquaspartan; As in the case of Thomas, it was due to a greater (via Augustine) Platonism in his philosophy. For instance he discusses the question, "Is there any certain and pure truth which is naturally known to the intellect of a passer-by without being specially illuminated by an uncreated light?" He argues that this is impossible.In his opening argument, he simply cites St. Augustine in support of this view; the only difficulty he encounters is Romans 1:20: "Since the creation of the world, some invisible things of God, by means of You can clearly know what you have made." Duns Scott was a sound realist.He believed in free will and tended towards Pelagiusism.He sees no difference between existence and essence.He was primarily interested in demonstrations, which are things known without waiting to be verified. There are three kinds of demonstrations: (1) self-evident principles, (2) things known by experience, (3) own actions.But without the shining of God we know nothing.

Most Franciscan monks followed Duns Scotus and not Aquinas. Duns Scotus argued that since there is no difference between being and essence, the "principle of individuation"—that is, the principle that makes one thing different from another—must be form, not matter. The "individualization principle" is an important issue in the school. In different forms it continues to be a problem to this day.Without referring to a particular author, we may perhaps state the problem as follows. Some of the qualities of individual things are essential, others are accidental; the accidental qualities of something are those which can be lost without losing their identity—as a man is to the hat he wears.The question then arises: Given two individuals belonging to one species, are they always different in essence, or are they exactly the same in essence?St. Thomas holds the latter view with respect to material entities, but the former with regard to immaterial entities.Duns Scotus held that there is always an essential difference between two individual things.St. Thomas' view is based on the theory that pure matter, consisting of undifferentiated parts, differs only by difference in spatial position.Thus, a human being, composed of body and mind, can only be distinguished physically from another human being by the spatial position of his body. (Theoretically, this could also happen to identical twins.) Duns Scotus, on the other hand, argued that if bodies differ, they must differ by virtue of qualitative differences.Obviously, this view is closer to Platonism than that of St. Thomas.

We must pass through various stages before we can address this difficulty in modern terms.The first step taken by Leibniz was to eliminate the distinction between essential and accidental qualities, a distinction which, like many theories inherited by the scholastics from Aristotle, whenever we try to When elaborated, it immediately becomes unrealistic.What we then get, is not "essence," but "all propositions about things that are true," (though, in general, the position of space and time will remain.) Leibniz argues that in this sense It is impossible for two things to be exactly alike; this is his principle of the "identity of unrecognizable things".This principle has been criticized by physicists who maintain that two particles of matter can be completely different simply because of their position in space and time. —Relativity makes this point of view more difficult, because relativity reduces time and space to relations.

Modernizing the above issue requires a further dismantling of the concept of "entity".After doing this, a "thing" can only become a bundle of properties, because any pure core of "thingness" can no longer exist.If "substance" is discarded, then we seem to have to adopt a view closer to Scotus than to Aquinas.This, however, raises further difficulties with respect to space and time.Regarding this question, I have discussed it in my personal opinion under the chapter "Proper Names" in "Inquiry for Meaning and Truth". William of Occam was one of the most important scholastics after St. Thomas.We know very little about his life.He was probably born between A.D. 1290 and 1300; he died on April 10, either 1349 or 1350, the year being uncertain. (A.D. 1349 was the most likely year for the Black Death.) Many say he was born in Occam, Zurich, but Dalyle Burns says he was born in Yorkshire Occam.He was at Oxford, then went to Paris, where he was Duns Scott's pupil and then his competitor.On the question of poverty, he was involved in a dispute between the Order of Francis and Pope John XXII.The pope was supported by Mikael of Sisena, the head of the order; persecution of the spiritualists.There was an agreement in the past, according to which all property donated to the dervishes had to be donated by the dervishes to the Pope, who granted the dervish the benefit of the property without guilt of birth.Such agreements were annulled by Pope John XXII, who argued that they should recognize public ownership as legitimate.Most of the order revolted under the leadership of Mikael of Sisena.Occam was originally summoned by the Pope to Avignon to answer the heresy suspicion about the incarnation issue. At this time, he and another important person, Massiglio of Batua, joined Mikael of Sisena.All three of them were punished in 1328 and escaped from Avignon to take shelter under the authority of Emperor Louis.Louis was one of two contenders for the throne; he was supported by Germany, the other by the Pope.The Pope excommunicated Louis, and Louis sued the Pope to the General Council.The pope himself was accused of heresy.

It is said that when Occam had an audience with the emperor, he said, "Please protect me with your sword, and I will protect you with my pen." In any case, he and the Batua man Maxigliou settled in Munich under the protection of the emperor. Some pretty important political papers were written there.The emperor died in 1338 AD, and Occam's deeds are unknown. Some say he compromised with the church, but this seems unfounded. The Holy Roman Empire was no longer what it had been under the Hohenstaufens; the papacy, though it seemed to continue to grow in appearance, did not enjoy the respect it had enjoyed before.Clement V moved the Holy See to Avignon in the early fourteenth century, and the Pope became politically a subject of the King of France.The decline of the Holy Roman Empire was especially marked; the strength of England and France prevented it from claiming even the pretentious universal sovereignty of the former; general requirements.So the conflict between the pope and the emperor is essentially the conflict between France and Germany.England under Edward III was at war with France, and thus made an alliance with Germany; this made England hostile to the Pope.The Pope's enemies demanded a conclave—the only ecclesiastical authority considered superior to the Pope. At this time the nature of the Pope's opposition also changed.They were no longer just for the emperor, they took on a democratic tone especially with regard to church administration.This gave them a new strength which finally led to the Reformation. Dante (AD 1265-1321), although a great innovator as a poet, was somewhat behind the times as a thinker.His work, The Monarchy, is Khibelline's in view, and might have been more timely had it appeared a century earlier.He believed that the emperor and the pope were independent, and that both were ordained by God.In the Divine Comedy, his Satan has three mouths, they chew for a long time, Judas Iscariot, Brutus and Cassius, all three of them are traitors, the first one betrayed Christ, the other two betrayed Caesar .Dante's thought is interesting not only as thought in itself, but even as a layman's thought; but his thought is not only ineffective, it is hopelessly obsolete. Massiglio of Batua (AD 1270-1342), by contrast, created a new form of opposition to the pope in which the emperor assumed the role of a primarily cosmetic authority.He was not only a close friend of William of Occam, but also influenced the man's political thinking.In politics, he is more important than Occam.He believed that the majority of the people was the legislator, and that this majority had the right to punish the king.He applied the theory of the sovereignty of the masses to the church, and included the laity in the masses.Local religious conferences including lay people should be established in various places, and they should elect representatives to participate in the church-wide conference.Only the Church Council has the power to impose punishments and authoritatively interpret the Bible.In this way, all believers have a say in decisions about doctrine.The Church should have no earthly authority; no house-breaking should be imposed without the consent of the citizens; and the Pope should have no privileges. Ockham did not reach the level of Massiglioux, but he also created a thoroughly democratic program for electing a general council. At the beginning of the fifteenth century AD, when it was necessary to pacify the Great Schism, the Synod movement was at its zenith.But when it completed this task, it fell into a low ebb again.The position of the Synod, as seen at Massiglio, was different from that later theoretically adopted by Protestants.Protestants demanded the purview of individual judgment; they were not willing to submit to any one general council. They believe that religious belief should not be adjudicated by any jurisdiction.On the contrary, Massiglio still aims to preserve the unity of the Catholic faith, but hopes to use a democratic method to achieve it without the papal autocracy.In practice, most Protestants only replaced the pope with the king after gaining power. Therefore, neither the freedom of individual judgment nor the democratic way of deciding doctrinal issues were guaranteed.But in their opposition to the Pope they found support in the principles of the Synod movement.Among all the scholastics, only Ockham was highly regarded by Luther.It should be pointed out that even in Protestant countries, a large proportion of Protestants still adhere to the doctrine of personal judgment.This was the main difference between the Independents and the Presbyterians during the English Civil War. Occam's political works are written in the style of philosophical debate, and he made positive and negative arguments for different propositions, and sometimes he did not draw any conclusions.We are used to more blunt political propaganda these days, but in his day, the methods he chose may have been more effective. A few examples are listed below to illustrate his method and viewpoint. He wrote a long treatise entitled "Eight Questions Concerning the Power of the Pope." The first of these is whether a man can be the legitimate supreme both in Church and State.Second question: Does secular authority originate directly from God?The third question is: Does the Pope have the authority to bestow secular dominion on the emperor or the monarch?The fourth question is: Did the elections carried out by the electors give sufficient power to the King of Germany?The fifth and sixth questions are: What powers does the Church acquire through the bishop's authority to anoint the king?The seventh question is: Is the coronation of an illegitimate archbishop valid?The eighth question is: Does the election of the elector give the German king the title of emperor?All of the above were, at the time, pressing problems in practical politics. Another of his treatises dealt with the question whether a prince could acquire ecclesiastical property without the pope's permission.The purpose of this article is to show that Edward III was justified in taxing monks to finance his war against France.We also remember that Edward was one of the emperor's allies. In his "Discussion on a Marriage Event", he discussed the legality of the marriage between the emperor and his cousin. We can see that Occam has done his best to obtain the protection of the emperor's sword. Now let us talk about Occam's purely philosophical doctrine.We have a good book on the subject, The Logic of William of Occam, by Ernest I. Moody.Much of what I am going to say below is based on this book he wrote.The book takes an unusual point of view, but I think he has the right one.Historians of philosophy often have a tendency to interpret predecessors from the perspective of future generations.Generally speaking, however, this is a mistake.Occam was once considered the man who brought about the collapse of scholasticism, the forerunner of Descartes, Kant, or whatever other modern philosophers were favored by individual commentators.According to Moody — and I agree with him — all of this is wrong.He believed that Occam's main concern was to restore pure Aristotle, free from the influence of Augustine and the Arabs.To a large extent, this was also the aim of St. Thomas; but, as we have seen, the Franciscan monks followed St. Augustine even more closely than Occam.According to Moody's view, modern historians try to find a gradual transition from scholasticism to modern philosophy, which leads them to interpret Occam inappropriately; Doctrine attached to him, but in fact he was only explaining Aristotle. Occam was once famous for an adage that was not in his own writings, but this adage has earned the title "Occam's Razor".The adage says: "Don't multiply entities unnecessarily".Although he did not say this, he did say something to roughly the same effect: "It is useless to do with more what can be done with less." That is to say, in If there is a science in which something can be explained without reference to some hypothetical entity or another, we have no reason to suppose it.I myself find this to be one of the most fruitful principles in logical analysis. Occam was logically—though obviously not metaphysically—a nominalist; fifteenth-century nominalists honored him as their founder. He believed that Aristotle had been misunderstood by the Scotists, partly under the influence of Augustine, partly by Avicenna, but also partly by an earlier The reason for this is because of Pulfilli's treatise on Aristotle's "Theory of Categories".Pulfilli raised three questions in this paper: (1) Are ge-nera and species entities? (2) Are they corporeal or incorporeal? (3) In the case of the latter, are they in the sensuous, or are they separate from the sensuous?He poses these questions as questions related to Aristotle's categories, thus leading to an overly metaphysical interpretation of Aristotle's Organs in the Middle Ages.Aquinas tried to eliminate this error, but it was then reintroduced by Duns Scotus.The result is that logic, and epistemology, are attached to metaphysics and theology.Occam set out to separate them again. Ockham saw logic as a tool of natural philosophy that can be developed independently of metaphysics.Logic is the analysis of reasoning science; science is about things, but logic is not.Things are individual, but in words there are universals; logic studies universals, but science uses them without discussing them.Logic is concerned with words or concepts, not as mental states but as words or concepts that carry meaning. "Man is a species" is not a logical proposition because it requires a knowledge about man.Logic is concerned with things that the mind constitutes within itself, which would not exist but for the existence of reason. A concept is a natural symbol, a word is an agreed symbol.We must distinguish words that are said as a thing from words that are used as having a meaning.Otherwise we are bound to fall into fallacies such as: "Man is one species, Socrates is one man, therefore Socrates is one species." Words denoting things are called terms of primary intention (termso e eirstintention), words referring to words are called terms of second intention (termso esecondintention), words in science belong to the first intention; words in logic belong to the second intention.Metaphysical words are rather special, they refer to both the things referred to by the first nomenclature and the things referred to by the second nomenclature.We have only six metaphysical words: Being, Thing, Something, One, Truth, and Goodness.These words have a property that they express each other.But the logical inquiry can be carried on without these as well. What is understood is the thing, not the form produced by the mind; the form is not what is understood but what is understood.In logic, universals are just words and concepts that can express many other words and concepts.Universal, kind, and species are all secondary intentional words, so they cannot mean things.However, because "one and existence are interchangeable, if a universal exists, it should be one and an individual thing. A universal is only a symbol of many things. On this point, Occam agrees with Aqua That, but against Averroes, Avicenna, and the Augustinians. Both of them believed that there were only individual things, individual spirits, and rational actions. Both Aquinas and Ockham admitted that a priori universals (universal anterem), but they only use it to explain the creation; before God created the world, there must be a universal in the mind of God. However, this belongs to theology, not to the explanation of human knowledge, which is only related to the acquired universal (universal postrem). Ockham never considered universals as things when explaining human knowledge. He said that Socrates resembles Plato, but it is by no means due to a third thing called similarity. Similarity is a The second intention word, which exists in the mind (all that's good). According to Ockham, propositions about future contingent things are not yet true or false.He wanted to reconcile this view with the omniscience of God.Here, as elsewhere, he makes logical freedom independent of metaphysics and theology. Some illustrations from Occam's arguments may be of some use. He asked: "Whether the first known to the understanding in the order of occurrence is the individual." Negative answer: The first and proper object of the understanding is the universal. Positive answer: The objects of the senses are the same as the objects of the understanding, but the individual is the first object of the senses. Therefore, the significance of the question must be stated. (Presumably because both arguments are powerful.) He goes on to write: "What is not a sign other than the soul is first apprehended by this knowledge (that is, by the knowledge of the individual), and since everything other than the soul is the individual, the individual is first known." He goes on to say that abstract knowledge is always "intuitive" (that is, perceptual) Knowledge is presupposed, and this knowledge is brought about by the individual. Then he listed four possible questions and answered them. He concludes his original question with an affirmative answer, but adds: "Universals are first objects in corresponding order, not in order of occurrence." The question here is whether perception is the source of knowledge, and if so, to what extent.We may recall that Plato, in his Theaetetus, objected to this definition of perception as knowledge.Ockham certainly did not know about Theaetetus, but if he had, he would not have approved of the book. For the question of "whether the sensible soul is distinct from the intellectual soul in a certain person".He replied that they were different, but this was difficult to prove.One of his arguments is that our appetite may desire something which our understanding rejects; therefore appetite and understanding are different things.Another argument is that sensation exists subjectively in the sensible soul, but not in the intellectual soul.Again: the sensible soul is extended and material, while the intellectual soul is neither.Here he raises four theological objections, but he answers them.Occam's view on this question may be different from what one might expect from him.At any rate, he agrees with St. Thomas and against Averroes in considering the intellect of each individual as belonging to each individual, and not as an impersonal thing. Occam's work inspired scientific research by arguing that logic and human knowledge could be studied without involving metaphysics and theology.He said that the Augustinians were wrong in first assuming that everything is incomprehensible and that humans have no intelligence, and then adding a light from infinity to make knowledge possible.On this point, he agrees with Aquinas, but he also has his own emphasis, because Aquinas is mainly a theologian, while Ockham is mainly a secular philosopher in terms of logic. His scholarly attitude gave confidence to scholars working on particular problems, such as Nicholas the Orysimian (died 1382 AD), his immediate follower, who had delved into planetary theory.This man was, in a way, a forerunner of Copernicus; he proposed geocentrism and heliocentrism, and said that both explained all the facts in his time, so that one cannot choosing between the two. There have been no great scholastics since William of Occam.The next era of great philosophers began in the late Renaissance.