William of Auxerre

French philosopher

• Born: c. 1150
• Birthplace: Auxerre, Bishopric of Auxerre (now in France)
• Died: November 3, 1231
• Place of death: Rome (now in Italy)

William was one of the first European medieval scholars to use the methods of philosophy to answer theological questions. He ranks as a pioneer in the growth of Scholasticism and the centuries-long attempt to harmonize Aristotelian philosophy with the theology of Saint Augustine.

Early Life

As is true of most medieval intellectuals, virtually nothing is known of the origins or early career of William of Auxerre (oh-seer). Because it was customary in the twelfth century for young men planning for an academic life to enter the university at age thirteen or fourteen, he had probably already begun his studies by that age. The University of Paris, where William was to spend nearly all of his life, was Europe’s most renowned center of learning, especially in the areas of theology and philosophy. A new student typically spent six years studying the seven liberal arts grammar, rhetoric, logic (the trivium); and arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and music (the quadrivium) which had been inherited from the ancient world. The arts as a whole were often referred to as “philosophy.” Following this generalized preparation, the scholar could become a teacher of the arts himself or begin specialized studies in theology, law, or medicine.

The greatest minds of the time chose theology, which was by far the most rigorous and respected discipline. That was natural because the university itself was an outgrowth of the cathedral school of Notre Dame de Paris and was still under the jurisdiction of the Church. Though many were never ordained as priests, students of the university were regarded as “clerics” and were subject to the discipline of the chancellor, an official of the cathedral.

After six years of attending lectures on the Bible and selected works of theology, the student received the baccalaureate and was then himself required to lecture for two years on two books of the Bible. After several more years of study, the apprentice teacher engaged in several “disputations,” theological debates judged by a member of the faculty. If he successfully completed these tasks, the student was awarded the doctorate and, at age thirty-four, was allowed to teach theology. It is known that William made it through this arduous course, for by 1189 hewas already famous as a “master” (professor) of theology.

Life’s Work

The thirteenth century was an age of intellectual ferment, particularly at the University of Paris. The university itself owed its existence to the revival of learning that had begun after about the year 1000. The gradual rediscovery of the literature of the pre-Christian world had increasingly challenged the relatively simple and dogmatic faith of the earlier Middle Ages, and scholars had begun to use the tools of logic to justify and explain their Christian beliefs and doctrine. By the end of the twelfth century, a flood of translations of the works of the Greek philosopher Aristotle as well as commentaries on him by Islamic philosophers such as Avicenna had begun to arrive in Paris from Moorish Spain. Aristotle’s wide-ranging intellect had applied itself to virtually every area of human knowledge, from the creation of the universe and the nature of the soul to the proper structure of a logical argument. It was obvious that Aristotle was a genius, yet, as a pagan, he had arrived at conclusions and insights that often conflicted with the accepted doctrine of the Church.

From throughout Europe, scholars came to Paris to study the “new” learning; thus the cathedral school had expanded to become practically a separate institution, the university. By the time of William, famous medieval scholars such as Peter Abelard and Peter Lombard had been developing for more than a century the techniques of intellectual inquiry that would later be called Scholasticism. The Scholastic approach involved the solution of an intellectual problem by posing it as a question, such as “Is the universe eternal?” The medieval scholar would respond to the question by juxtaposing answers derived from the Bible, or works of the Church fathers, to those offered by philosophy or reason, often as supplied by Aristotle. By constructing such a back-and-forth argument, called the “dialectic,” the scholar hoped to reconcile the two positions, thus allowing reason to support faith. While Scholasticism clearly fostered a considerable amount of intellectual ingenuity, it later got a bad reputation because its practitioners always deferred to established authority, whether that of the Church or of the philosophers, rather than venturing to observe the real world or setting up empirical experiments. The reasoning of the Scholastics became increasingly abstract, and they often dealt with issues that were fantastically irrelevant. (The most famous of these is the old question, “How many angels can dance on the head of a pin?”)

While it may seem strange today that the great intellectuals of the Middle Ages spent so much time trying to “marry” what now are considered the distinctly separate fields of philosophy and theology, the attempt itself represented a tremendous advance over the thinking of the early Christian period and the early Middle Ages, when many Church authorities had disparaged the use of reason, insisting that, should philosophy and faith disagree, philosophy must always give way. Many of the Church fathers had actually regarded study of the ancient authors as pernicious and sinful one of the reasons that Aristotle’s works had largely disappeared until the period of the Crusades. The efforts of the Scholastics to make philosophy and theology work together demonstrated that the processes of reason and logic had once again become respectable.

By the time of William, those works of Aristotle which had become available had themselves already gained the status of authority and threatened to dethrone Church doctrine, at least as far as many of the students at the university were concerned, as the basis of theology. In the eyes of the Church authorities, this threat was so dangerous that, in 1215, when the basic statutes of the university were drawn up, the papal legate (representative) at Paris prohibited the teaching of those works of Aristotle that dealt with “natural philosophy,” meaning science. This decree apparently had little effect, for in 1231 Pope Gregory IX felt compelled to create a commission of three scholars to study and “correct” the works of Aristotle, so that they could be used at the university without contradicting Church doctrine.

The head of the commission was William, who had by this time become famous both as a theologian and as a churchman. During the reign of Pope Honorius III (1216-1227), William had become archdeacon of Beauvais, a powerful and influential office, as well as a proctor of the University of Paris. In the latter capacity, he presented the interests of the university to the papal court at Rome; he had been sent there by King Louis IX in the spring of 1230 to advise the new pope, Gregory IX, on how to resolve a strike of teachers and students that had begun the year before. The bishop of Paris, William of Auvergne, had failed to end the strike and may even have exacerbated the situation by bringing in Dominican friars to replace the striking teachers.

The strike had arisen out of a student riot that had occurred during the Shrove Tuesday festivities of February, 1229. Townsmen had requested the intervention of royal troops to quell this drunken rampage, and several students were killed in the ensuing melee. When demands by both students and masters for compensation went unsatisfied, the scholars voted to strike and return to their homes. By the time William of Auxerre left for Rome, however, the original issue had been subsumed in more general conflicts that had been brewing between the Church and the university for several years. The arts faculty, in particular, resented Church hostility toward their growing acceptance of Aristotle, and the university faculty as a whole had long been seeking policy-making autonomy from the Church.

The pope now believed that his personal intervention was necessary, but he was unsure of the best course of action. William of Auxerre, who seems to have been a peaceful individual of very even temperament, apparently helped to craft Gregory’s conciliatory response, which not only ordered the university authorities to reinstate the strikers but also promised to set up a commission to investigate the issues involved, including the position of Aristotle in the curriculum of the university. While the ban of 1215 on Aristotle’s works on natural philosophy was maintained, it was only provisional, to be held until the papal commission had an opportunity to investigate Aristotle’s works. Nowhere was it suggested that the use of Aristotelian logic to examine and analyze philosophical or theological questions be discontinued. Faculty and students returned triumphantly to Paris, regarding the papal decree as an academic bill of rights.

Unfortunately, the commission never really started work, probably because William of Auxerre died on November 3, 1231, only seven months after he was appointed to it. Why the pope did not appoint a successor is unclear: Possibly the commission had already decided that the effort to expurgate such a large and popular body of work would be impossible. The ban was allowed to expire without having much effect, and the process of attempting to reconcile philosophy and theology continued, leading eventually to the brilliant synthesis of Thomas Aquinas later in the thirteenth century.

William of Auxerre himself contributed to this process in a work that had a considerable amount of influence on his contemporaries, Summa super quattuor libros sententiarum, usually known as Summa aurea (golden summation), written between 1215 and 1220. This was a commentary on the compilation of Christian teachings created by Peter Lombard in a series of four books used as basic texts in the fifth and sixth years of theological training at the university. Lombard had used the dialectic to address many questions of theology, but a host of new issues had been occasioned by the influx of translations of Aristotle and the Arabian philosophers. It was common practice among Scholastics of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries to write commentaries on earlier works regarded as authoritative and to bring them up to date, but Summa aurea is outstanding in that it not only looks back at the pre-Aristotelian framework of theology but also comes to grips with some of the new questions addressed by Aristotle.

While the core of William’s view of the relationship between reason and faith is derived from Saint Augustine and is therefore completely traditional, William also shows how some of the philosophy of Aristotle can be put to the service of Christian theology. Pre-Aristotelian Scholastics, for example, had discussed the nature of God and the Trinity at great length without ever seeing the need to prove God’s existence. That, they believed, was self-evident, a matter of faith not to be questioned. Yet Aristotle, in Metaphysica (fourth century b.c.e.; Metaphysics, 1801) and other works, had attempted to understand the natural world around him by making direct observations and reasoning about them. Because God was not directly perceivable with the senses, Aristotle maintained that the answer to the question of his existence was unknowable. Summa aurea marks a break with the past because William addresses such questions and seeks to answer them with philosophical reasoning: He proves the existence of God, for example, by using the philosopher Avicenna’s argument for the necessity of what was called a “prime cause,” meaning an agency of creation from which everything else must ultimately originate.

In similar fashion, Summa aurea deals with problems such as natural law, free will, the nature of the soul, and the definition of virtue issues seen by William’s predecessors only in theological terms. William, however, often uses the tools of Aristotelian logic to substantiate the traditional answers of faith. Thus he asks, as Aristotle had, if the universe is eternal, but he disagrees with Aristotle’s affirmative answer; since the universe was created by God, William reasons that it cannot have always existed. His general approach is thus to ask some of the questions that Aristotle’s works necessitate but to use both reason and faith to prove the truth of the beliefs of the past. At the same time, though, William is inconsistent; he is often satisfied simply to repeat the doctrines of his predecessors, and he creates no new comprehensive system or approach to theological thinking. Summa aurea is, therefore, a work of transition, one that points the way to the future but is firmly rooted in the past.

Significance

William of Auxerre was the first medieval theologian to acknowledge explicitly the arguments of the philosophers, but he mixed them indiscriminately with those of earlier theologians. Yet even his reliance on the past seemed to foreshadow the views of his better-known successors, for he insisted that theology is an “art” or “science” rather than a simple matter of blind faith because it argues from principles, even if these principles are themselves articles of faith. Further, he insisted that philosophy can be useful to theologians because they can use it to prove the articles of faith.

Such an argument, if offered today, might seem hopelessly backward, for science (philosophy) and religion (theology) have become completely separate; the idea of using logic to prove what faith believes appears to be a paradox. William of Auxerre’s viewpoint may be viewed more sympathetically, however, if the context is considered. He was arguing for the validity and existence of philosophy against many who believed that all such approaches to knowledge should be suppressed. The university was a religious establishment; as an important member of the theological faculty, he could not, unlike some of the faculty in the arts, hope to escape intellectually the consequences of his position. In encouraging the integration of Aristotle into the teaching of theology, he demonstrated a courage and an open-mindedness, as well as an intellectual originality, which helped to make the University of Paris a bastion of academic freedom and intellectual growth. Until recently, the originality of William and his contemporaries and immediate successors, such as Philip the Chancellor and William of Auvergne, was largely ignored because these pioneers in religious philosophy did not attempt to create an entirely new system of thought. It is only now being realized by historians of medieval philosophy that the achievements of the great Scholastics who followed later, such as Thomas Aquinas and William of Ockham, were possible only because William of Auxerre was instrumental in clearing the path.

Bibliography

Copleston, Frederick. A History of Philosophy. 9 vols. New York: Image Books, 1985. Part of an extremely well-written series by a prominent Jesuit philosopher. Volume 2, Medieval Philosophy: Augustine to Scotus, includes an informative discussion of the development of the University of Paris in its early years, as well as its curriculum, teaching methods, and student life during this period. Contains a short discussion of William and Summa aurea.

Gilson, Étienne. History of Christian Philosophy in the Middle Ages. New York: Random House, 1955. An authoritative and scholarly work in the field and still a standard reference, this work includes a thorough set of notes on nearly every philosopher of the period, including William, and works by or related to each. Covers the entire period from the earliest Christian philosophers to the beginning of the fourteenth century.

Haren, Michael. Medieval Thought: The Western Intellectual Tradition from Antiquity to the Thirteenth Century. 2d ed. Buffalo, N.Y.: University of Toronto Press, 1992. An excellent, brief summary that assumes a good deal of background on the reader’s part. Contains one of the few discussions of any length on the views of William expressed in Summa aurea on specific questions.

Kretzmann, Norman, Anthony Kenny, and Jan Pinborg, eds. The Cambridge History of Later Medieval Philosophy: From the Rediscovery of Aristotle to the Disintegration of Scholasticism, 1100-1600. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1982. An immense compilation by many scholars, organized topically, this study contains several brief comparative discussions of William but no separate section. Has a pronounced emphasis on English philosophers. Primarily useful as a reference, particularly for its outstanding bibliography.

Leff, Gordon. Medieval Thought: St. Augustine to Ockham. Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1965. An excellent, brief introduction to medieval philosophy. Divides the era into three periods, each with an introduction that offers helpful general comments. Notes the transitional role of William and the place of Summa aurea in the development of Scholasticism. Especially useful for those with no background in philosophy.

McInerny, Ralph M. Philosophy from St. Augustine to Ockham. Vol. 2 in A History of Western Philosophy. Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1970. A very good text for those new to philosophy. Well organized by prominent scholars. Several chapters of background information on related topics help to provide a solid context.

Marrone, Steven P. The Light of Thy Countenance: Science and Knowledge of God in the Thirteenth Century. 2 vols. Boston: Brill, 2001. Volume 1 discusses attempts by thirteenth century scholars to reconcile and adapt the tradition of Augustinian-inspired theology with an emerging Aristotelean-inspired science.

Zupko, Jack. “William of Auxerre.” In A Companion to Philosophy in the Middle Ages, edited by Jorge J. Gracia. Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2003. The author discusses the life and work of William in the context of Middle Ages philosophy.