The De anima Tradition in Early Franciscan Thought

In the 12 and early 13 centuries, we witness a steady rise in the level of sophistication with which scholars analysed the nature of the rational soul. This increase was undoubtedly attributable to the translation movement of the period, which made many Greek and Arabic philosophical texts available in Latin for the first time. This paper will show how the introduction of Avicenna’s De anima in particular mediated readings of Aristotle as well as Augustine in the period of the Summa’s authorship, specifically, as regards the account of the soul, its relationship to the body, and its cognitive operations. In this way, I will illuminate the extent to which the reading of Avicenna shaped fundamentally the ways in which the Franciscan tradition came to construe human nature. Throughout history, the soul has remained a topic of perennial interest and debate. In the 12 and early 13 centuries, we witness a steady rise in the level of sophistication with which scholars analysed the nature of the rational soul. This increase was undoubtedly attributable to the translation movement of the period, which made many Greek and Arabic philosophical texts available in Latin for the first time. The most significant of these texts were the works of Aristotle and the Islamic philosopher Avicenna, who dominated the reception of Aristotle until nearly the mid 13 century. At this point, better translations of Aristotle were produced which enabled the study of his thought in its own right. The reasons for the focus on Avicenna over or with Aristotle until this time are many, but among them, there is the fact that the translations of Aristotle that were produced in the mid-to-late 12 century were in some cases only partial and in most cases, riddled with inaccuracies. For this reason, Latin thinkers were more inclined to rely on the superior and more complete translations of Avicenna, who was in fact a very different thinker to Aristotle with a system and views all his own. Although Avicenna was clearly the main resource for reading Aristotle before, say, the 1250s and 60s, his own reception was mediated and mitigated by numerous other figures, such as Dominicus Gundissalinus, the translator of Avicenna, as well as the Spanish Jew Avicebron and the Syrian Christian Costa Ben Luca, whose works were translated by Gundissalinus and John of Spain, respectively. Furthermore, the reception of Aristotle was complicated by the wide circulation of works like the Neo-Platonic Liber de causis which was believed before 1268 to offer a genuine representation of Aristotle’s theological views; and by the so-called De spiOpenAccess. © 2020 Lydia Schumacher, published by De Gruyter. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 License. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110685022-011 ritu et anima, a 12-century work that was attributed to Augustine despite evidence to the contrary. These works generated widespread confusion about what Aristotle and Augustine really said, slanting readings of them in favour of Avicenna.What I would like to do in this paper is to give a window into the complex reception of Avicenna in this period by looking at how he was interpreted by some of those who appropriated his work most extensively and enthusiastically, especially in dealing with questions about the soul. The thinkers I have in mind are the founders of the Franciscan intellectual tradition, who worked together between 1236 and 1245 to author one of the first great theological Summae of a period that became famous for its vast intellectual syntheses. In particular, I refer to John of La Rochelle, whose works on the soul, in particular, his Summa de anima (SDA; 1235–6) formed the basis for the section on the rational soul in the Summa Halensis.1 These works by John were the first sustained effort to take advantage of the new material on natural philosophy that scholars in Paris had been banned from lecturing and publishing upon until around 1231. The only earlier attempt of a similar nature was the De anima of John Blund, who was the first university master of arts to write a treatise on the soul, and who managed to do so just before the first condemnation of Aristotle came into effect in 1210. In the years between Blund and Rochelle, the topic of the soul was obviously not neglected, nor were the Greco-Arabic sources. Nevertheless, theologians approached the topic in a way that was clearly circumscribed by what might be described as their theological or indeed ‘Augustinian inheritance’. Although they dealt with newer questions, for instance, about the body-soul relationship, so far as they felt Augustine’s works spurious or otherwise justified it, they did not explore ‘nitty gritty’ questions about the mechanics of sensation and cognition which are only treated before John by Blund and a couple anonymous authors, and then in a very cursory way that was not entirely faithful to Avicenna’s original. The analysis of such topics that John of La Rochelle gives in his Summa de anima later formed the basis for a section on the rational soul in the Summa Halensis,which thus became the first theological Summa to deal with the cognitive mechanisms that lay beyond the scope of authors like Augustine and John of Damascus,who otherwise loom large in Rochelle’s account. Although the Summa de anima and De anima rationali (DAR) section of the Summa Halensis follow almost the exact same line of questioning, and the latter repeats much of the material of the former, there are some differences that may reflect differences in dating. While John probably wrote his Summa between 1235 and 1236, in the heyday of Avicenna’s Latin reception, the De anima rationali makes a more concerted—though no more informed—effort to interact with Aristotle on some issues. This seems to suggest a possible date  John of La Rochelle, Summa de anima, ed. Jacques Guy Bougerol (Paris: Vrin, 1995). See also Rochelle’s work dating around 1232, the Tractatus de divisione multiplici potentiarum animae, ed. Pierre Michaud-Quantin (Paris: Vrin, 1964). 156 Lydia Schumacher