New Grosseteste Edition

An important new edition of Grosseteste has come out, his commentary on pseudo-Dionysius' De caelesti hierarchia. Available here. For a cool 210,00 euro (!)

I've already added it to the notes of my edition of Petrus Thomae's De ente. (yes, Scotists read Grosseteste and ps.-Dionysius: Mayronis wrote commentaries on the Dionysian corpus).

This edition was begun in the 60's as a dissertation, and handed on to several generations of scholars being published only in 2015. What I found utterly shocking was the mention that McEvoy taught in a department of "Scholastic Philosophy", which eventually closed, perhaps in the 70's. Such bygone times I can't conceive of them, or even imagine what it would be like to be part of a mainstream movement (even if only in the Catholic world).

One nice thing about this edition is that they have retained the internal divisions of the text as it was read in the middle ages. Maybe this wasn't an issue since it is a medieval book. I'm thinking here of the Aristoteles Latinus and Avicenna Latinus editions, which do not report the medieval chapter and book divisions, only Bekker's. This makes it difficult to actually find anything with medieval citation practices (aside from sitting down and reading it straight through, of course). This I find stupid because scholars who work on Aristotle and Avicenna read their works in the original language and pay no attention to medieval translations. And rightly so. These editions are only going to be used by people working on medieval latin material, but the editors have made it more difficult for us on purpose! But, again, happily this is not the case for the volume under discussion here.

Anyway, buy this book and read it:

Corpus Christianorum


Corpus Christianorum Continuatio Mediaevalis (CCCM 268)

Robertus Grosseteste

Versio Caelestis Hierarchiae Pseudo-Dionysii Areopagitae cum scholiis ex Graeco sumptis necnon commentariis notulisque eiusdem Lincolniensis

D. A. Lawell (ed.)


XLII+330 p., 155 x 245 mm, 2015

ISBN: 978-2-503-55593-5

Languages: Latin, English

Hardback

The publication is available.

Retail price: EUR 210,00 excl. tax





Robert Grosseteste's translation of and commentary on the Celestial Hierarchy of Pseudo-Dionysius.


This volume contains Robert Grosseteste's translation of the Pseudo-Dionysius's Celestial Hierarchy. The Latin text is accompanied by Grosseteste's translation of the Greek scholia as well as his commentary and notes made on the Celestial Hierarchy and scholia. Grosseteste's work presents another insight into the renaissance of Dionysian studies which took place in the thirteenth century, as witnessed by commentators on the Areopagite such as Aquinas, Albert and Thomas Gallus. Grosseteste's commentary is greatly informed by his command of the Greek language which resulted in not only a detailed philological understanding of the Greek but also in a rich interpretation of the mind of Dionysius.


Declan Lawell is a Teacher of Latin in Liverpool. He has already published volumes by Thomas Gallus in the Corpus Christianorum Continuatio Mediaevalis series.

Dionysian Scotism

A common complaint against Duns Scotus is that he is at odds with the Christian tradition, which, depending on the author can mean something as simple as Thomism, or as broad as the Fathers, the Nicene creed, or Christian Platonism.  One also meets attempts to classify Scotus in terms of the dominant -isms of the late thirteenth century (for example, avicennizing-aristotelianism). I'm thinking now of pseudo-Denys; I don't think I have ever seen anyone classify Scotus as Dionysian. It is true that one rarely meets with citations of the pseudo-Dyonisius in Scotus' works. Yet Scotus owes at least one significant doctrine to pseudo-Denys, that of unitive containment, which is based on the notion that God pre-eminently contains the perfections of creatures within himself, albeit in a higher and ineffable way.  But the relative paucity of citations is not true of the works of Scotus' followers. I was struck by the prevalence of Denys-citations recently while reading three very different Scotists: Francis of Meyronnes, Petrus Thomae, and William of Alnwick. Petrus Thomae is constantly citing pseudo-Denys in his Quaestiones de ente, although interestingly they do not appear at all in his Quaestiones de esse intelligibili. In the case of Alnwick, questions 6-8 of his Quodlibet are basically and extensive defense and explanation of unitive containment and the Dionysian principle of pre-eminent containment.

So the modest contribution of this blogpost is that we have an important -ism to add to our taxonomy of Scotism: Dionysianism.

Ruminations on the Fall

A post over at Vox Nova caused me to pause and think (imagine the scene in Fellowship where Gandalf suspects the ring might be the 'One' and sits in the corner muttering and smoking). Much of the content is standard pseudo-Dionysianism; God is beyond all being, predication, affirmation, negation, etc. etc., though no one ever seems to draw the obvious conclusion from this, viz. that God is completely unknowable. Longtime readers will already know the standard Scotistic responses that I could trot out, that there is a univocal concept of being, that theology presupposes said univocal concept, that the object of the intellect is being, and so on. I was more interested in their view that the fall has corrupted human nature, even that logic has been corrupted. Not just that the human capacity to reason has been corrupted, but that 'logic' was as well (I suppose then that if Adam hadn't sinned, not only would no one ever commit a fallacy of equivocation but fallacy's of equivocation would have been valid? and in light of recent posts here, perhaps square-circles would be possible beings?).

It is interesting to note that Scotus stands as opposed to this appearance of christian platonism, if it is that, rather than some baleful influence of Luther, as he does to negative theology. He really seems to have been one of the post positive theologians of the middle ages. Forget Doctor subtilis et Marianus, we should call him the Doctor Positivus. For his view of human nature with respect to the fall seems to be summed up in the notion that what was lost by Adam's sin was rectitude in the will. There was no darkening of the intellect, weakening of nature, etc., or anything of the kind. To be sure, the preternatural gifts were lost, though perhaps only immortality. A hasty consultation of Ott's Fundamentals reveals that these in fact are the only two effects of the fall that are 'de fide' (that is, loss of immortality and sanctifying grace; the latter of these Scotus would associate with a quality in the will). This trend towards the negative and pessimistic is by no means restricted to the vox nova crowd; they are just echoing what really seems to be the common opinion of the contemporary thomist-platonist movement. I suspect this may be the root cause of the hatred (yes, I say hatred) of the Cambridge Phantasists (for our newer readers, that is our preferred name for 'radical' 'orthodoxy'), who seek to counter nihilism by embracing a negation; Scotus is their polar opposite on this as well as probably many other issues.

I will close by nuancing somewhat Scotus' positive position. Although he does not think that the fall has corrupted human nature or damaged all our natural powers, his view that being is the object of the intellect requires qualification. For if true, we would expect that since God is infinite being, and being is the object of the intellect, our intellects would be moved by God in this life. Or to put it another way, we would know everything that falls under the concept of being. Scotus denies this, and says that pro statu isto, as far as the wayfaring state is concerned, the object of the intellect is the quiddity of sensible things. He says this may be part of the punishment of original sin (punishment; still not a darkening, though it may amount to what the endarkeners mean by the term), or part of the natural concord of the powers, or merely from the will of God. Whatever the reason, it is not from the nature of the intellect as intellect.

Clarity at last

I often wondered what they thought about who pseudo-Denys really was. Here's the answer:

"Of course, I don’t believe that the writer of The Divine Names, Mystical Theology, etc. is a Pseudo-Dionysios 5th Century writer coming from historical textual criticism from 19th century German scholars, but rather St. Paul’s actual convert in Acts as we hymn in the liturgy. That’s a seperate matter though, but it is an important one.

Photios"

http://energeticprocession.wordpress.com/2009/07/16/saint-cyril-on-divine-simplicity/

I guess he must have taught Proclus then, or else close textual parallels are purely coincidental. And yet its us latins that have been corrupted by Platonism.