Biographical Information

William of Auvergne, also known as William of Paris, was born c. 1180–1190 in Aurillac in the former Province of Auvergne, southwest of the present Clermond-Ferrand. Little is known of his early life, but after studying at Paris, he became a canon of the cathedral and was a master in theology at the University of Paris by 1223 (Marrone 1983). When Barthomaeus, bishop of Paris, died in 1227, William was displeased over the man chosen by the canons to replace him. Accordingly, William went to Rome where he persuaded Gregory IX to ordain him bishop and place him over the see of Paris in 1228; here he remained bishop until his death in 1249 (Valois 1880). Although he was strongly reprimanded by Gregory for failing to settle the strike at the University during the years 1229 to 1231, William soon returned to the good graces of the pope for whom he carried out several diplomatic missions. During the strike of the masters and students at the university, he appointed the first members of the mendicant religious orders to chairs in theology at the university, the Franciscan Alexander of Hales and the Dominican, Roland of Cremona, thus giving entree to members of these orders from which would come some of the greats of medieval philosophy and theology (Switalski 1976). William strongly opposed a plurality of benefices and condemned various theological errors in 1241 or 1244, thus setting a pattern for more significant condemnations in the future by bishops of Paris (Bianchi 2005). He also issued strong condemnations of the Talmud in 1248. William was on good terms with the royal family, first with the regent, Blanche of Castille, and then with Louis IX, the future saint. William strongly discouraged Louis against undertaking a crusade, which he vowed to do upon recovering from a fever, but to no avail. By the time Louis returned to Paris, William was dead and was buried at Saint Victor’s.

Philosophy

William was one of the first in the Latin West to give a favorable reception to the Greek and Arabic philosophy that was rapidly becoming available through the recent translations and presenting to Christian Europe a new and scientific view of the world that was often at odds with the Christian faith. Though the teaching of Aristotle was repeatedly condemned by ecclesiastical authorities during the early thirteenth century, William, the bishop of Paris, clearly read and appreciated the thought of the Greek and Islamic philosophers, especially of Avicenna. He, of course, could not and did not completely accept such philosophy, but upheld it where he could and rejected it where the Christian faith required.

His Teaching on God in the Mode of Wisdom (Magisterium divinale et sapientiale), which has generally been viewed as one huge summa-like work in the author’s intention, but also more recently simply as a way of philosophizing (Corti 1968), was begun in the years before his episcopacy and was continued until his death. The magisterium is usually said to consist of seven works: On the Trinity, or First Principle (De trinitate, sive primo principio), On the Universe of Creatures (De universo creaturarum), On the Soul (De anima), Why God Became Man (Cur Deus homo), On the Faith and the Laws (De fide et legibus), On the Sacraments (De sacramentis), On the Virtues and Morals (De virtutibus et moribus). Thus the whole magisterium has the full sweep of the emergence from God of the world, the creation of human beings, as well as their return to God through the redemption, sacraments, virtues, and final reward in heaven. In that respect the magisterium has the same plan of emergence from and return to God as works of the later thirteenth century, such as the Summa theologiae of Thomas Aquinas. Viewing the magisterium as a way of doing philosophy rather that as one huge work has the advantage of allowing one to include other works of William, such as Divine Rhetoric (Rhetorica divina) and On Grace (De gratia) under that rubric, for which there seem to be good reasons.

William’s works were treated simply as individual works in the Opera omnia and were recognized as forming the huge magisterium only early in the twentieth century (Kramp 1920, 1921). His extant works, manuscripts, and translations have been recently listed (Ottmann 2005), and advances have been made in their relative and absolute dating (Corti 1968). The magisterium contains a more philosophical primum magisterium, which aims at demonstrative proofs, within the more theological whole magisterium, which aims at the glory of God through the perfection of human souls and their attainment of eternal life, although the two parts of the magisterium are not sharply distinguished either in terms of the time of their composition or of their intended order within the magisterium.

The present article is limited to four of William’s works that contain his main philosophical teachings on God, the created world, the human soul, and ethics. On the Trinity, or First Principle, the first work in the magisterium in terms of temporal composition and intended order, contains a philosophical approach to God as the first principle of creatures as he is known through reason and as the triune God of the Christian faith. The influence of Avicenna on William’s thought is clearly seen in his distinction between essence and existence in creatures and in his argument from beings possible in themselves, although actually existing, to God as a being necessary through himself. William, however, rejects and argues against both the Aristotelian and Avicennian arguments for the eternity of the world and argues for the freedom of God in creating the world. William’s metaphysics combines an Avicennian account of the structure of the world with Avencebrol’s emphasis on the divine will as the explanation of why there is a created world at all (Caster 1996). The Trinitarian part of the work may have been intended more as a demonstrative proof of the Trinity than as a faith-based understanding of the Christian mystery. It, for example, appeals to an Avicennian principle to show that God could generate only one Son (Teske 2006).

The second work in the magisterium in terms of the intended order, but not of its time of composition, The Universe of Creatures is divided into a first principal part on the universe in general and more specifically on the world of bodily creatures and a second principal part on the spiritual universe, that is, of the separate substances or intelligences, including the good and bad angels. In the first principal part, William takes up some questions on the universe in general. For instance, he argues that there is only one world, rejects the dualism of good and evil found in the Carthar or Manichaean view of the world, where he adapts arguments from Avicenna rather than borrows from Augustine (Teske 2006).

William argues against Avicenna’s doctrine that from the first intelligence or God only one second intelligence can proceed, and so on with the third, fourth, and others. Although he agrees with the truth of the Avicennian principle that from one as one only something one can proceed, he insists that from God or the first intelligence other things proceed not from the unity of God, but from his will. Against Avicenna William appeals to Avencebrol, a Jewish philosopher, but one whom he takes to be Christian, who held that God created through his word.

William argues against the eternity of the world and develops a concept of divine eternity as all at once, distinguishing it from the sort of eternity that the Aristotelians claimed for the world (Teske 2006). He also employed the sort of arguments ultimately derived from the Greek philosopher, John Philoponus, but perhaps more proximately from kalam arguments of various Islamic thinkers, for the finiteness of past time (Teske 2006). In this respect he anticipated the position of Bonaventure as opposed to that which Aquinas was going to defend.

The three sections of the second part discuss the intelligences, which William understood in terms of Avicennian metaphysics as pure spirits or incorporeal substances, thus clearly departing from the Augustinian view that the angels were composed of matter and form, albeit spiritual matter. William, however, insisted that, unlike the nine Avicennian intelligences that cascaded forth successively after the first, there are many more than nine intelligences or angels in the heavenly court since, as William argues, nine courtiers are far too few even for a respectable royal court on earth. He also holds that they do not necessarily proceed from the first and that they are certainly endowed with wills and are not merely intellects. For otherwise they could have no goodness or virtues. With such important qualifications the separate intelligences are according to William pure spirits ontologically on a par with the angels and demons, to which the remainder of the second part is devoted, although further discussion of them will be omitted here.

In psychology William is greatly indebted to Avicenna’s De anima. He endorses the latter’s conception of a human being as a spiritual soul, but he expresses his amazement that philosophers have classified the study of the soul as a natural science as opposed to a divine science (De anima, Prologue). He critically examines Aristotle’s definition of soul as the first act of a body potentially having life, which he fails to understand, and borrows Avicenna’s “floating man” argument, quoting it twice, to prove that a human being or soul is not a body (Teske 2005). William divides the powers of the soul into cognitive and moving powers. The cognitive powers include the five external senses, various internal senses, such as the memory, imaginative and estimative powers, and the intellect, while the moving or appetitive powers are divided into a higher moving power, namely, the will, and the lower moving powers, namely, the concupiscible and irascible appetites. William’s arguments for the soul’s immortality in On the Soul closely parallel those found in On the Immortality of the Soul (De immortalitate animae), which had once been attributed to Gundissalinus, but is now accepted as William’ work. Hence, the bishop has been cleared of the charge of plagiarism.

William strongly argues against the role of Avicenna’s agent intelligence in the acquisition of knowledge. For he saw the agent intelligence, the tenth intelligence, as simply pouring knowledge into souls and, hence, making the acquisition of knowledge an entirely passive reception that does away with all study and effort at learning. He also rejected the Platonic archetypal world of Forms or Ideas, which he knew only through Cicero’s translation of part of the Timaeus, because he was convinced that such a really real world led to a reduction of the sensible world to something less than real, though like the real world. He also greatly reduced the role of divine illumination, which Augustine had given as a source for our knowledge, to only a few ideas found in both God and creatures, such as being, one, true, and good (Marrone 1983). Despite a common view to the contrary, William did not have God play the role of the agent intellect (Teske 2006).

Up until the fifth of the seven parts, William treats the essential properties of the soul, such as its incorporeality, indivisibility, and immortality. But then William takes up the fallen nature of the soul, which he argues is a penal condition, of which he claims that Aristotle had no knowledge, although he says that he should have been able to infer it from our present state. Our present state of misery is clearly, William claims, one of punishment that must stem from the first parents’ sin. As one of the first Christian thinkers to come into contact with the Aristotelian concept of nature, William was faced with the challenge of trying to reconcile the Augustinian and the Aristotelian concepts of nature. He attempted to combine a philosophical conception of the nature of the soul derived from Avicenna, which remains unchanged in its essentials, with an Augustinian concept of nature, which changed over time. He speaks of the original state of our nature, its present fallen state, which may be somewhat healed by grace, and its future state in glory. According to William our present state of misery is due to our bodies rather than out souls since he claims that God could not and does not create damaged souls; rather, souls suffered damage through their union with bodies. The original condition of our first parents, however, contained many elements that later theologians labeled as preternatural or supernatural (Teske 2006). Clearly William is struggling to integrate an unchanging Aristotelian concept of nature with an Augustinian nature that has changed and will change.

In ethics, William’s knowledge of the Nicomachean Ethics was limited to the books two and three contained in the versio vetissima (Jüssen 1995). In his On the Virtues, William criticizes Aristotle’s definition of virtue from the Nicomachean Ethics and finds fault with other ideas of his, such as that a virtue stands in the mean between two extremes and that a person can have one virtue without the others. He clearly prefers Augustine’s account of the cardinal virtues from De moribus as four forms of love. He distinguishes three sorts of virtue: natural virtues such as Adam’s soul and, it seems, our soul had when created; consuetudinal or moral virtues, such as those of which Aristotle spoke; and gratuitous virtues, such as Christian faith, hope, and charity, which are infused by God. William compares the consuetudinal virtues to crutches or wooden legs insofar as they repair to some extent the damage done to our natural powers or virtues, but do not completely restore them to their original condition.

William expresses amazement at the fact that Aristotle, by whom he usually means Avicenna, said so much about intellect and little or nothing about will. He argues that the will is most free in its act of willing and refers to it as the king and emperor over the other powers of the soul (Teske 1994). The intellect acts merely as a counselor to the will, and the senses serve as messengers that seek out and bring back information to their king.

See also: Aristotelianism in the Greek, Latin, Syriac, Arabic, and Hebrew Traditions; Augustine; Avicebron; Being; Boethius; Bonaventure; Dominicus Gundissalinus; Epistemology; Essence and Existence; Ethics; Form and Matter; Ibn Sīnā, Abū ʿAlī (Avicenna); John Philoponus; Metaphysics; Thomas Aquinas; Trinity; Virtue and Vice; Will