Fallible Authors. Alastair Minnis

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      Gerard of Bologna, who produced his own summa between 1313 and 1317, expressed the view therein that Henry of Ghent was unclear in his analysis of the case where a teacher of theology sins in the actual act of teaching.³⁹ Furthermore, he seems to have been concerned that Henry was underrating the culpability of the sinful preacher who sins through another kind of act (ex alio actu).⁴⁰ Sins of both types can be hidden, Gerard argues, and it cannot be said that a man is preaching from wicked intention more in one case than in the other. Why should the preacher who sins ex actu predicandi be deemed to be committing mortal sin while the preacher who sins in a different way be regarded as liable to benefit spiritually from the help which he gives others through his doctrine? Gerard inclines to the view that in neither case should the sinful preacher be able to benefit.

      That is a telling point; however, the strengths of Henry’s excursus are considerable. His approach to the problems of public and private morality, of manifest and secret sin, is one of the fullest of its kind, and distinguished by the extent to which it seeks to balance the conflicting claims of idealism and pragmatism. Thereby it affords a good instance of how scholasticism could generate thought about society and take actual society into account in its thought. And it should be appreciated that, like Gerard of Bologna, Thomas of Chobham, and all the other schoolmen who addressed themselves to the knotty problem of the deviant preacher, Henry was struggling to make his ideological apparatus and logical equipment fit the exigencies of actual and probable real-life situations which were—and still are—difficult or even impossible to reduce to order and rule.

Art versus Virtue: The Challenge of Aristotle

      Many of the ideas canvassed in thirteenth-century considerations of the sinful preacher/teacher are, however, so startling that their origins demand investigation, particularly the notion that intellect and knowledge need not coexist with moral virtue. Like so many of his contemporaries who worried over the same issue, Henry was heavily influenced by (although he does not mention it in the quaestio under discussion here) Aristotle’s distinction between art and virtue as propounded in the second book of the Ethics.⁴¹ Averroes, commenting on the relevant passage, explains that, for a craftsman to attain perfection in his art it is enough that the artifacts he produces are good.⁴² By contrast, for a man to lead a virtuous life he must be virtuous in himself and perform virtuous actions, these things being equally necessary. For example, he should both perform just and chaste (castus) actions and himself be just and chaste. Similarly, Aquinas, expounding the same passage, describes Aristotle’s central point as being that “there is no similarity in art and virtue since works of art have in themselves what belongs to the perfection of the art,” whereas virtues are principles of actions that do not go out into external matter but rather remain in the agents.⁴³ Hence actions of this kind are perfections of the agents. And that is why, Aquinas continues, Aristotle asserts that, in order that actions be justly and temperately performed, it is not enough that what is done be good, but the agent must work in the correct manner. His account of the three aspects of this “correct manner” follows and elaborates on what Averroes had said in his commentary.⁴⁴ First, the person performing a virtuous action should do it not just by chance or fluke; he should know what he is doing. Second, it should not be done out of passion, as when a man performs a good action out of fear. Neither should it be done for any motive other than the wish to do good, “as when a person performs a good action for money or vainglory.” Rather, good actions “should be done for the sake of the virtuous work itself which, as something agreeable, is inherently pleasing to him who has the habit of virtue.” Third, people should be virtuous consistently, without variation or vacillation.

      The wherewithal necessary to distinguish between art and virtue has here been provided. Only the first of these requirements for virtue, namely knowledge, is required in the arts. A man can be a good artist, Aquinas says, even if he never chooses to work according to art and does not persevere in his work. But in the moral sphere, action and perseverance really matter; doing is more important than knowing. Action produces the moral habitus rather than the other way round; by performing just and temperate actions a man becomes just and temperate. Hence, “knowledge has little or no importance in a person being virtuous,” this being Aquinas’s phrasing of Aristotle’s own statement (as rendered by a version of Robert Grosseteste’s translation) that mere knowledge has little or no importance as far as the virtues are concerned: “Ad virtutes autem scire quidem parum aut nihil potest.”⁴⁵ That dictum was to resonate through generations of scholastic treatments of the nature of ethics, of the relative merits of intelligence and action, of the qualities essential for the Christian teacher. Here our main concern is with the crucial point that knowledge and moral virtue are distinct because the end of moral science—like, we may add, the end of the science of theology—is not knowledge alone, “which those enslaved to passion can perhaps gain” (to quote a gloss from an earlier part of Aquinas’s Ethics commentary).⁴⁶ This is a concomitant of the principle that the conditions and operations which produce a moral habitus are quite different from those which produce an intellectual habitus. As Aquinas says elsewhere (in his Summa theologiae), for a human to act well “it is requisite that not only his reason be well disposed through a habit of intellectual virtue, but also that his appetite be well disposed through a habit of moral virtue.”⁴⁷ Socrates’ belief that as long as a man possesses knowledge he cannot sin is, therefore, “based on a false supposition.” (This notion was, of course, criticized in Aristotle’s Ethics.)⁴⁸ Can, then, intellectual virtue exist without moral virtue? After all, “intellectual virtue, which is perfection of reason, does not depend on moral virtue, a perfection of the appetitive part.”⁴⁹ Aquinas’s response is that intellectual virtues can indeed exist without moral virtue (with the exception of prudence). And this—to return to Aquinas’s commentary on the Ethics—is why Aristotle and his interpreters reject the opinion of those who, thinking “they can become virtuous by philosophizing,” talk about virtues rather than exercising them.⁵⁰ Which is like saying that those who hear the advice of medical doctors but disregard it will enjoy good bodily health. Moral virtue is not a matter of theory alone, it requires appropriate behavior of the teacher and of the taught.

      Here, then, is the intellectual tradition behind (inter alia) Henry of Ghent’s two definitions of the doctor: someone who is capable of teaching because he has the requisite habitus of knowledge, and someone who has the office of teaching (officium docendi), being acceptable to auditors who, because of his own good life, trust him to do them some good. Henry’s discussion seems to be somewhat unusual, however, when placed in the perspective of the other quaestiones on the same and related issues (as illustrated above), because they tend to focus on the praedicator rather than work with the more inclusive term doctor, and some of them make the relevant Aristotelian distinction between moral and intellectual virtues altogether more cogent by identifying the respective duties of the praedicator and the lector, as in Thomas of Chobham’s treatment of the subject.⁵¹ The lector’s brief is simply to improve the minds, rather than save the souls, of his auditors. Knowledge (scientia) is not a moral virtue, Thomas continues, because, as Aristotle says, it does little or nothing to lead one to the virtues—a reference to the seminal passage from Book ii of the Ethics which we discussed above. Ad virtutes autem scire quidem parum aut nihil potest. ⁵² The fundamental difference between this type of approach and Henry’s is obvious. However, Henry had no hesitation in employing the basic distinction between preaching and lecturing in several other quaestiones. Perhaps in the case of art. XI, qu. 5 he wished to treat the problem of the sinful teacher in its most comprehensive and widest aspect and hence the term praedicator, being too specific for his purpose, was passed over in favor of doctor as the central term.⁵³ However, I find more persuasive the hypothesis that Henry found the praedicator/doctor distinction, as applied in this context, far too reductive and misleading, perhaps even quite at variance with the truth of the matter as he saw it. For an essential part of the message of his quaestio on the sinful teacher is that even an СКАЧАТЬ