More on this book
Kindle Notes & Highlights
God could have created the world differently, so that there might have been no giraffes or so that murder might have been morally acceptable (it’s hard to see which of those would be more horrifying).
For one thing, you can’t understand the philosophical developments of the Renaissance and Reformation without knowing what happened in the fourteenth century. Of course, you’d expect me to say this, given that the whole point of this book series is to show how each stage in the history of philosophy builds upon the previous stages.
The game was to be innovative, but not so innovative that one ran into trouble with the Church.
Their plight is made more vivid by the fact that Dante’s guide at this stage is Virgil, himself a pagan and thus a resident of Limbo when he is not taking Italian poets on a tour of the afterlife.
Reacting to the taxes levied on church property by Philip and also the English Crown, Boniface issued what I can’t resist calling an angry papal bull.
It is above all the Church that he accuses of disrupting the peace. This, Marsilius wryly remarks, is a source of dissension that was unknown to Aristotle, who never had the dubious privilege of experiencing the grasping greed and temporal ambitions of the Christian Church
Of course, a lowly friar like himself did not pose much threat to papal power, though Ockham did his best by wielding his pen in a series of polemical documents. Sadly, despite rumors to the contrary the sword is quite a bit mightier than the pen.
The common nature of trees is no longer a part of particular trees and so in some sense identical with each tree. It has a full-blown and distinct reality of its own. This is why it can survive destruction at the hands of a forest fire or an axe-wielding scholastic philosopher, the way that individual trees cannot.
God knows I will vote for candidate A, since this is how I will choose. If I were to choose candidate B, then God would always have known this instead.
For him, the theory of grace found in Durandus, Ockham, and others was nothing but rank Pelagianism, since it took the initiative for salvation out of God’s hands. Instead, we must admit that nothing can happen in the created world without God’s willing it: He is the “co-mover” of every motion.
Bradwardine offered a striking anticipation of what we will find in the Protestant Reformation, to the point that we even find him saying that God eternally predestines a specific number of elect who will receive salvation.
Aquinas spelled out the consequences with a remark about human nature that Communists 650 years later would have done well to heed: were all things held in common, “everyone would avoid doing any work and leave to others that which concerns the community”
There is an obvious problem here, namely that usury is incredibly useful and even essential to a well-run economy.
in the fourteenth century, when it was about seven hundred years too early to meet a modern-day goth and about seven hundred years too late to meet the original version, the men in black were the Dominicans,
Late ancient Christians too lacked the concept of homosexuality, especially if we mean by this a settled sexual preference or identity. Sex between men, always of more concern to churchmen than lesbian sex, was certainly denounced by Augustine and others. But it did not emerge as a specific sin called “sodomy (sodomia)” until the eleventh century.
A review of such texts has concluded that the scholastics’ failure to discuss the weakness of women in any depth was “not because they were gender-blind egalitarians, but because women simply were not interesting to them as women: they were not part of their intellectual world.”
the Protestant John Bale called Wyclif the “morning star of the Reformation,” while David Hume remarked in his History of England that Wyclif was “the first person in Europe, that publicly called in question those principles, which had universally passed for certain and undisputed during so many ages.”
We’ve seen other writers of the period, like Langland, critiquing the Church for its overweening temporal power and wealth. This was not enough for Wyclif. He went so far as to declare that the Church should own no property at all.
To the contrary, Wyclif encourages secular monarchs to do the Church a favor by taking away all of its possessions, since concern with wealth distracts the clergy from their proper, spiritual tasks. In a state of grace before original sin, there was no private property and Christ’s restoration of human nature offers us the chance to live again with all things shared in common, something embraced by the Apostles, who led lives of poverty. The Church of Wyclif’s own day was obviously failing rather spectacularly to follow suit.
Wyclif was staging a double assault on the Church. He offered an intellectual rationale for depriving the Church of its assets, and more subtly, he distinguished between the Church as an institution and the true Christian community, which consists simply of those who are given grace.
All a late fourteenth-century noble needed was funding and permission from the Pope. And conveniently, there was even more than one pope to choose from!
