Robert Grosseteste (review)

Robert Grosseteste. By James McEvoy. [Great Medieval Thinkers.] (New York: Oxford University Press. 2000. Pp. xx, 219. $35.00.)

James McEvoy surely knows Robert Grosseteste better than anyone has since the thirteenth century. Which makes McEvoy the natural choice to write the volume on Grosseteste in the new Oxford series, "Great Medieval Thinkers." Fully up to expectations, he has produced a splendid book, the best single piece on the great English scholastic to appear to date.

Especially nice are the sections (chapters 1 to 3 and 6 to 11) zeroing in on the fundamentals—the life, that is, and the works. Since the early twentieth century Grosseteste has been largely the preserve of historians of philosophy. While there is no gainsaying his place in the history of philosophical speculation in the European West, that certainly provides too narrow a perspective for us to seize either the man in his time or his importance in the grand scheme of things. McEvoy puts the emphasis instead on Grosseteste the theologian and, in the astoundingly productive last two decades of his life, bishop and pastor to his flock. Not only would Grosseteste have wanted to be seen this way, but it also affords a more honest appreciation of his many accomplishments, all of them driven by compelling theological and religious aims. Moreover, McEvoy convincingly argues that Grosseteste's theology was special even in his day for its reliance on the Greek tradition. Unusual enough is the fact that Grosseteste took the time to learn Greek in order to confront his sources directly in their original form. But by proposing that Grosseteste's first efforts in this regard date quite early, perhaps even to the mid-1220's, McEvoy suggests how pervasively the Greek influence permeated his theological imagination. This, in turn, allows McEvoy to highlight a pronounced turn toward mystical and affective themes inGrosseteste's most mature work, where the noetic rhythms of Pseudo-Dionysius make themselves particularly apparent.

Of course, followers of the history of philosophy will still make up a good part of the audience for McEvoy's book. So it is fortunate that chapter 6, on Grosseteste's philosophy, is skillfully crafted, particularly in its first two parts, and that the account of Grosseteste's use of Aristotelian epistemology is so lucid and perceptive. Not that everything in this chapter is beyond dispute. It is perhaps a sign of McEvoy's disagreement with the present reviewer that the latter's own writings on Grosseteste are nowhere cited here. That may help to explain why, to this reviewer's taste, far too much is made in the volume of the so-called "metaphysics of light." An ideological complex which, as McEvoy admits, Grosseteste himself never drew together systematically anywhere in his works, it is an idea preferably dispensed with altogether. Grosseteste's philosophical passage, as McEvoy puts it, from "metaphorics of light" to light "metaphysics" simply never occurred. Better to home in on a "cosmogony of light," which even McEvoy recognizes as integrated and distinct, where Grosseteste laid the foundations for Roger Bacon's "multiplication of species" and the mathematicizing physics associated with it.

More broadly again, however, McEvoy deserves praise for making such good sense of Grosseteste's place in the context of his times. How happy an idea to start out examining the great man by looking at his role as conscience of the Church at the First Council of Lyons and thereafter, during the pontificate of Innocent IV. And how perfectly on the mark is McEvoy's insistence that as ecclesiastic, where he stood squarely behind the reforming ideals promoted at the Fourth Lateran Council, and as university teacher, he was in his day neither marginal nor eccentric. For all Richard Southern's powers as a medievalist, his own book on Grosseteste has done a great disservice by drawing attention to a presumed exceptionalism and specifically English habit of mind in the man. McEvoy's book will remind us that Grosseteste's was...