Divine Ideas in Franciscan Thought (XIIIthXIVth century) ed. by Jacopo Francesco Falà, Irene Zavattero (review)

In recent years, the doctrine of the divine ideas has garnered the interest of both historians of Christian thought and systematic theologians, particularly their theological basis in the thought of St. Augustine and their eventual decline in the late middle ages. Despite this rise of scholarly interest in what was a commonplace view for centuries, there remains several lacunae of study in its historical study.

This absence of research might be due to the usual story of the divine ideas tradition: the divine ideas theory dominated Christian thought on both the epistemological basis of humankind's certainty and the ontological ground of her being, reaching its crescendo in the thought of the great Franciscan doctor St. Bonaventure. After St. Thomas Aquinas, however, the importance of the divine ideas for both epistemology and ontology declined, and in an interesting twist, it would be the Franciscans Blessed John Duns Scotus and William of Ockham who would essentially banish the divine ideas from Christian thought, and usher in various modern notions of ontology and epistemology, now cut off from their ground in the divine Logos.

This rather simplistic account of the divine ideas tradition is rectified in the Divine Ideas in Franciscan Thought (XIII^th – XIV^th Century), edited by Jacopo Francesco Falà and Irene Zavattero. The work begins the story of the divine ideas theory with Alexander of Hales and John of La Rochelle in the first decades of the thirteenth century and ends towards the middle of the fourteenth with John of Ripa. Throughout the tapestry of the divine ideas tradition in the Franciscan order, the contributors of this work demonstrate the tumultuous rise and fall of the divine ideas, from its greatest achievement and synthesis in St. Bonaventure, to the partial (but not complete) rejection of the divine ideas as exemplars in Blessed John Duns Scotus, and the back-and-forth between Scotus' intellectual descendants and their opponents.

Perhaps the greatest strength of the work is that is shows just how tendentious the debate concerning the role of the divine ideas was within the Franciscan order. (One cannot help but to hope for a similar work concerning the Dominicans.) As Falà so aptly puts it in his own contribution on the Collationes oxonienses, to deny the divine ideas in the thirteenth century would have meant "denying the existence of the Son of God;" as a result, theologians in the fourteenth century could only question "the importance of the divine ideas, denying their function as rationes cognoscendi" and not deny them outright, since "it was impossible to directly contradict Augustine on such an important matter" (110 – 111).

Nowhere was this more evident than in the circumstances surrounding Peter John Olivi. Olivi, having denied the divine ideas in the sense of being the ontological exemplars of existing things and, correspondingly, the epistemological objects of knowing by means of divine illumination, was censured and his teaching condemned in 1283. But Olivi, though denying the ontological and epistemological role that the divine ideas held for others in the order – notably St. Bonaventure – does not deny the existence of the ideas. Instead, as stated in the essay by Stève Bobillier, Olivi is more concerned with the doctrine of divine illumination rather than the ideas themselves, while he rarely mentions the ideas at all, since for Olivi, after quickly demonstrating that the ideas are not exemplars in which things participate, emphasizes the role of the will in attaining beatitude. Bobillier is correct when he identifies the extent to which Olivi's works influenced John Duns Scotus, who adroitly sidesteps the issue by stating that the divine ideas exist but, according to Falà, "function [in] precisely the opposite way as they do for imitability theorists" (87).

Scotus' move, which was to identify the divine ideas "with the objects of God's understanding," denies to them the important Augustinian ontological assertion of their...