La volonté de croire au Moyen-Âge. Les theories de la foi dans la pensée scolastique du XIIIe siècle by Nicolas Faucher (review)

This excellent book provides a novel analysis of medieval theories of faith, using as its conceptual basis the notion of doxastic voluntarism: the thought that belief is in some sense in our power to choose. This notion fits very neatly with medieval accounts, since, other than in cases in which the intellect's assent is compelled (for example, by necessary truths), the medieval philosophers all maintained that assent to a given proposition—paradigmatically the supernatural claims of Catholic Christianity, the principal interest of the earliest thinkers in Nicolas Faucher's account—was in some sense voluntary. Indeed, one thing that the book illustrates very nicely is the way in which problems that begin in the early thirteenth century as fundamentally theological in nature become progressively more general and philosophical in character by the beginning of the fourteenth.

Faucher locates the beginning of modern doxastic voluntarism in William James's famous essay "The Will to Believe." James's interests were fundamentally phenomenological: an analysis of the experience of believing. Faucher presents two strands in his analysis of medieval accounts. One is, somewhat like James's, fundamentally experiential, and in addition, emphasizes the role of supernatural activity moving the will to assent to the claims of the Catholic faith. The second is fundamentally naturalistic, motivated by the principle of parsimony to render superfluous supernatural activity in generating assent to the claims of the Catholic faith, and in consequence, to minimize the role of the will in faith. And this naturalism ultimately meant that the account of belief could be generalized to cover cases of assent in the absence of wholly compelling evidence.

Setting the issue out in this way allows Faucher to present a novel taxonomy of medieval analyses of faith, pitting on one side Alexander of Hales, Bonaventure, Aquinas, and Peter Olivi, against Henry of Ghent, Godfrey of Fontaines, and Duns Scotus, on the other. Strange bedfellows, one might think, given that such categorizations would generally range Aquinas and Godfrey against all the others.

Here, in brief, are the narratives of these two streams. According to Alexander of Hales, writing in the 1240s, the divine gift of supernatural faith (expressed in the claims of the Catholic faith) is the occasion for the human will to cause intellectual assent to these claims. Bonaventure, a few years later, modifies this so that the will can cause assent to the relevant propositions even in the absence of supernatural grace—perhaps based on some external teaching. Aquinas, a few years later still, continues this line of thinking, adding the provision that the will's causal action can be effected on the basis of some practical natural reason for believing certain of the claims of the Christian faith, followed by supernatural faith grounded on the basis of divine authority. Olivi extends this model to a much wider domain of human doxastic practices: we assent to certain propositions (for example, about people's motivations and characters) based on the love that we have for the subjects of the various propositions. In the case of divine faith, an individual might be motivated to accept Catholic Christianity by a sense of moral duty to honor God.

These accounts make the will's activity central to the acquisition of faith. But to the extent that they do this, it seems that the question of truth has been sidelined: we have practical or appetitive reasons for assent, but these do not by themselves seem relevant to questions of truth. Matters are quite different in the second stream. According to Henry of Ghent, roughly contemporary with Olivi, the will naturally directs the intellect to topical arguments in favor of the Christian doctrine; supernatural faith, an intellectual habit, then causes the intellect's assent to the claims of Catholic Christianity. Godfrey of Fontaines, a decade later...