Truth: Studies of a Robust Presence

3. Truth, Creation, and Intelligibility in Anselm, Grosseteste, and Bonaventure

102 Timothy Noone 3 S Truth, Creation, and Intelligibility in Anselm, Grosseteste, and Bonaventure What I should like to pursue as the theme of this essay is the following line of interpretation: the idea of truth as expounded in Anselm, Grosseteste, and Bonaventure is, on the one hand, developed so as to accommodate the biblical doctrine of creation, but, on the other, has features that are more or less directly continuous with the idea of truth (ἀλήθεια) as it is treated commonly among ancient pagan thinkers unacquainted with the doctrine of creation. By examining the doctrine of truth in these three authors, I hope that we may gain some further insight into the intellectual milieu of thirteenth-century discussions of epistemology, which is itself part of a longer and more complicated history of reconciling the notion of truth—above all the idea of eternal truth—with the doctrine of creation, as Fr. Armand Maurer noted over thirty years ago.1 To gain some sense for the scope of the discussions we shall be following , let us start with the Greek notion of truth. The classical notion of truth in the sense of the truth of things or ontological truth received its earliest and most telling expression in the poem of Parmenides entitled “On the Way of Truth.” Truth, according to Parmenides, is the unity of being and expresses what intellect knows about that which is or being.2 1. Armand Maurer, “St. Thomas and Eternal Truths,” Mediaeval Studies 32 (1970): 91. Reprinted in Armand Maurer, Being and Knowing: Studies in Thomas Aquinas and Later Medieval Philosophers (Toronto: PIMS, 1990), 43. 2. Parmenides, fragment 1, lines 27–30, in Hermann Diels and Walther Kranz, Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker, 6th ed. (Berlin: Weidman, 1951–52), 230. Anselm, Grosseteste, and Bonaventure   103 Hence truth is, like being in the poem, eternal, one, unchanging, and so necessary as to be incapable of alteration or change. Such a manner of conceiving truth underwent changes throughout the history of Greek philosophy in the sense that ontological truth was identified in different ways with different items of a given thinker’s ontology. In the thought of Plato, ontological truth is primarily the light shining from the Good upon the supersensible Forms,3 whereas in the teaching of Aristotle, ontological truth is co-extensive with being and form.4 Since being is said in many ways but primarily expresses the atemporal ‘what-a-substanceis ’ (τὸ τί ἦν εἶναι) even in the case of a sensible substance,5 we may characterize the classical Greek tradition as a whole as retaining to a surprising extent, given its long and complicated history, the fundamentally Parmenidean interpretation of ontological truth, at least in its higher manifestations, as unchanging and fixed and that whereby we grasp the being of things. If we turn to the notion of logical truth, the fundamental idea is that such truth obtains to the extent that a speaker says of what is the case that it is the case and of what is not the case that it is not the case. This definition of logical truth is taken almost verbatim from Aristotle’s De interpretatione and Metaphysics;6 the former text, moreover, was one of the few Aristotelian treatises to pass into Latin through the good offices of Boethius and to remain a source for philosophical and logical investigations during the long period during which the Latin West remained largely ignorant of the primary sources of Greek philosophy. Even within the De interpretatione, however, we see the connection between being , necessity, immutability, and knowability in Aristotle’s treatment of the necessity of the present;7 within properly scientific accounts of truth, such as the Posterior Analytics, the connection between knowing and ne3 . Plato Republic VI, 508e–509, in Platonis Opera, edited by Ioannes Burnet, vol. 4 (Oxford : Clarendon Press, 1902). 4. Aristotle Metaphysics II.1, 993b23–31, in Aristotelis Metaphysica, edited by W. Jaeger (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1957), 34–35. 5. Aristotle Metaphysics VII.4, 1029b23–1030b13 (ed. Jaeger, 133–34); 1037a21–b7 (ed. Jaeger , 153–54). 6. Aristotle De interpretatione 9, 18a33–b6, edited by Harold Cooke (Cambridge, Mass.: Loeb Classical Library, 1973), 132; Metaphysics IV.7, 1011b25–27; VIII.10, 1051b3–5 (ed. Jaeger, 83 and 192). 7. Aristotle De interpretatione 9, 19a24–26 (ed. Cooke, 138). 104   Timothy Noone cessity finds its expression in the insistence that scientific knowledge be based on that which cannot be otherwise...