Michael Szlachta

Treatments of the equality of the divine persons in the High Middle Ages were framed by several authorities: the Athanasian Creed, according to which the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit are equal; Aristotle, according to whom equality is based on unity in quantity; and the pseudo-Augustinian De fide ad Petrum, according to which divine equality is a threefold equality in eternity, magnitude, and power. For the theologians of the High Middle Ages, who also believed that the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit are one and the same God, explaining divine equality presented many challenges. In this paper, I examine the treatment of divine equality in the so-called Summa Halensis and the Sentences commentaries of Bonaventure and Richard of Menneville (Mediavilla). I show how the success of these treatments depends on the way that these Franciscan theologians thought about quantity in general and the distinction between quantity of mass ( quantitas molis ) and virtual quantity ( quantitas virtutis ) in particular. By arguing that the divine essence is a virtual quantity that is one by a unity of indivisibility, Richard of Menneville presents a treatment of divine equality that avoids the problems faced by his fellow Franciscans.

Thomas Aquinas famously draws a distinction between a potency in the will to the specification of its act and a potency in the will to the exercise of its act. He also thinks that the will is moved to the specification of its act by the good apprehended by reason and to the exercise of its act by itself. Although Aquinas’s distinction has many attractive features, his explanation of how the will moves itself to the exercise of its act (namely, by moving reason) is not adequate; it does not really explain how the will’s potency to the exercise of its act is actualized. I argue that, by distinguishing between three modes of self-motion, effective, accidental, and consecutive, and two types of potency, essential and accidental, the early Oxford Thomist Thomas of Sutton (ca. 1250–1315) presents a plausible development of Aquinas’s distinction that addresses this problem; the will, by willing some end, actualizes its accidental potency to willing some means to that end, thereby moving itself consecutively. Although I think that Sutton does give us the means to clear up some of the confusion surrounding Aquinas’s view on the will, I also motivate some doubts about whether he really succeeds in preserving what makes Aquinas’s distinction so attractive in the first place.

William de la Mare suggests in his Correctorium fratris Thomae that it is possible to read Aquinas as saying that the will is necessitated by the intellect. Early defenders of Aquinas thought that this was nonsense (a fictio). However, I analyze Aquinas’s corpus and show that he has a consistent view of the relationship between the will and the intellect according to which the will is indeed necessitated by the intellect, not absolutely but conditionally: it is necessary that, if the intellect apprehends some object as good, then the will wills that object. However, I also argue that, although Aquinas is committed to the necessitation of the will by the intellect, it does not follow that the will lacks alternate possibilities.

Godfrey of Fontaines, a medieval compatibilist about freedom and determinism, faces a challenge. His compatibilism seems to have the consequence that no exterior act, like giving someone a gift or stealing a neighbor's pears, is imputable to a human agent such that she can be praised or blamed for doing it. I explain how Godfrey responds to this challenge by arguing that a human being has power over the interior acts of apprehending and appetition from which every exterior act proceeds. I also draw attention to the intentionality of interior acts to make sense of how the apprehending and appetitive potencies of human beings are really the subjects of apprehending and appetition, respectively.