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Peter Damian: Could God Change the Past?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2020

Peter Remnant
Peter Remnant*
Affiliation:
University of British Columbia
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Extract

Histories of philosophy frequently depict the later eleventh century as the scene of a series of bouts between dialecticians and anti-dialecticians — Berengar vs. Lanfranc, Roscelin vs. Anselm — preliminaries to the twelfth century welterweight contest between Abelard and St. Bernard and — dare one say? — the thirteenth century heavy-weight championship between St. Thomas and St. Bonaventure.

The bouts took place — no question about that — but whether the contestants can properly be characterized as dialecticians and anti-dialecticians is less certain. Dialectics is logic, the third part of the trivium, and increasingly cultivated in the eleventh century; men like Berengar and Roscelin were plainly eager to apply the logical tools with which they had been equipped to the solution of intellectual problems. In particular they undertook the solution of certain central problems of theology — Berengar that of the Eucharist and Roscelin that of the Trinity — and it was this, we are told, that aroused the ire of the anti-dialecticians: if the aim of the dialecticians was to lay bare the mysteries of faith to the light of reason that of the anti-dialecticians was to protect those same mysteries from profanation.

Type
Research Article
Information
Canadian Journal of Philosophy , Volume 8 , Issue 2 , June 1978 , pp. 259 - 268
Copyright
Copyright © The Authors 1978

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References

1 Damian, Peter: De Omnipotentia Dei (Migne, P. L., vol. 145, cols. 595-622).Google Scholar Bracketed numbers in the text refer to the pagination of O. J. Blum's translation of selected passages, in ). Wippel, F. and Wolter, A. B. (eds.), Medieval Philosophy from Saint Augustine to Nicholas of Cusa (New York 1969).Google Scholar In its present form this paper has benefited from a number of suggestions received from an anonymous referee.

2 Migne, op. cit., col. 612. This passage is not in Wippel and Wolter; I am grateful to Dr. E. A. E. Bongie for assistance in translating it. Damian makes clear that he is not attacking Jerome, “who spoke with pious purpose,” but rather certain wicked and sharp-tongued men “who take occasion from his words to charge God with impotence” (146).

3 Wulf, Maurice de History of Medieval Philosophy (tr. Messenger, London 1952), vol. 1, p. 155.Google Scholar

4 It is of some significance that two fourteenth century exponents of the thesis that God can undo the past, Bradwardine and Gregory of Rimini, although apparently unfamiliar with Peter's account, explicitly deny that God's changing the past involves a contradiction and offer an account of it essentially the same as Peter's. For a detailed study of the fourteenth century debate over this question see Courtenay, William J. “John of Mirecourt and Gregory of Rimini on Whether God Can Undo the Past,” Recherches de theologie ancienne et medievale, 39 (1972), pp. 224-56,Google Scholar and 40 (1973), pp. 147–74.

5 S. T. Ia, Q 25, A 4.

6 I am grateful to Mr. Clive Mountford for pointing out the connection with De lnterpretatione, ch. 10, as well as for other helpful suggestions.

7 De Trinitate, IV; see also The Consolation of Philosophy, bk. V prose VI.

8 “Anselm's Reply to Gaunilon,” ch. 1 (Wippel and Wolter, op. cit., p. 165).

9 Philosophical Studies 25 (1974), pp. 137–41.

10 Peter's position is essentially the same as that defended a few years later by Anselm, in his Cur Deus Homo: “When God does something …it is always true that it has occurred. Still, it is not right to say that it is impossible for God to make what is past not to be past. For it is not … the impossibility of acting that has effect in this case but only the will of God, who, being Himself the Truth, wills the truth, as it is, to be always unchangeable” (bk. II, 17).