Faith and Rhetoric in Giles of Rome

Giles of Rome’s view of faith in the reportatio of his questions on book III of the Sentences (q. 38, d. 23) is founded on a likening of faith to rhetoric. The firm intellectual assent that characterizes them both is caused by the will, motivated by emotion, or affective bias. This paper argues that this is made possible by Giles’ move away from Aquinas’ position on the assent produced by rhetorical discourse, which Aquinas thought to be of little certainty, while Giles affirms that, based on the will’s natural control over the intellect, it can be as certain as faithful assent, and that the psychological process that produces it can serve as a model for that which produces faithful assent. The new function Giles gives to rhetoric underlines the evolution of thirteenth-century views on faith, as shown through a comparison of Giles’ view with two other doctrines of faith that use examples similar to the one Giles employs: those of Philip the Chancellor and Peter John Olivi. For the former, faith founded on affective bias is a typical example of non-virtuous faith, while for the latter, just as for Giles, it is the very model of virtuous faith.

Ecstasy in the Classroom

Ecstasy in the Classroom explores the interface between academic theology and ecstatic experience in the first half of the thirteenth century, which were formative years in the history of the University of Paris, medieval Europe's “fountain of knowledge.” It considers little known and often unedited texts by William of Auxerre, Philip the Chancellor, William of Auvergne, Alexander of Hales (OFM), Roland of Cremona (OP), Hugh of St Cher, and others, to reconstruct the ways in which they addressed questions about Paul’s rapture and other modes of seeing God. As the book’s subtitle suggests, it seeks to do three things. The first is to map and analyze the scholastic discourse of a group of theologians about rapture and other modes of cognition in the first half of the thirteenth century. The second is to explicate the complex, implicit perception of the self they imply and to locate its echoes in contemporary literature, hagiography and other materials. The third is to read these discussions as a window on the predicaments of a newborn community of medieval professionals and thereby elucidate foundational tensions in the emergent academic culture and its social and cultural context. With this triple aim, Ecstasy in the Classroom challenges the often rigid historiographical boundaries between scholastic thought and medieval cultural history and joins the unified approach to intellectual creation, the conditions of its production, and its key instruments.

Philip the Chancellor (1160/85–1236)

Philip occupies a pivotal place in the development of medieval philosophy. He is among the very first in the Latin West to have a fairly complete picture of both the newly available natural philosophy and metaphysics of Aristotle and the work of the great Muslim thinkers, Avicenna and Averroes. His Summa de bono, composed sometime between 1225 and 1236, shows the broadening of philosophical interests and the growth of philosophical sophistication that accompanied reflection on these new materials. Philip’s Summa had a major impact on subsequent thirteenth-century thinkers, particularly Albert the Great, whose own Summa de bono is closely modelled on that of Philip.