Finding

Every witness on this page except one answers the Master's question against him. But the page no longer shows a tally, because the two latest arrivals on the dissenting bench do not answer his question at all — one changes it, and one asks whether the answer was ever demonstrated. And the oldest arrival does not argue it: he reports it as already settled.

⭐ Albert is the earliest voice this edition has, and what he supplies is a date rather than an argument. Writing at Paris in the 1240s, before either of the two men below him, he does not open the question: Sicut ergo communiter fere omnes meliores concordant, contradicendum est Magistro in ista parte. Almost all the better men commonly agree, and so the Master is to be contradicted. By about 1246, on the testimony of the man best placed to know, Lombard's thesis was already the minority position among those who taught it. Everything below him on this page is therefore not a tradition making up its mind, but a tradition writing down a mind already made up — which is why the disagreements that follow are about proofs and not about the answer.

⭐ And Albert keeps what he denies, in a way none of his successors quite repeats. The Spirit is not the charity by which we habitually love; but the created charity is the effect most like God's goodness, effectus simillimus bonitati Dei, from which God is never separated, so that he is always given along with it to whoever receives it. The created habit does not push God one step further off. It is the thing he arrives with. ⚠ Where Albert goes on to say positively in what sense the Spirit IS charity by appropriation, the 1893 scan is unreadable and the passage is elided rather than guessed. That sentence is the one this page most wants and does not have.

Bonaventure and Thomas are writing at Paris within about two years of each other, and neither cites the other; yet both stop in the middle of their answer to report the same anonymous defence of Lombard — that the Holy Spirit alone unites the will to himself, as the Son alone united human nature to himself — and both reject it with the same argument, that the will of a saint is not taken up into the unity of a divine supposit. The defence is on this page only in the words of the two men refuting it. Whoever made it is the party the page cannot show.

Thomas's two treatments differ, and the later one is the more careful. The Scriptum reports the Master's position and answers it. The Summa, twenty years on, first says what the Master did not mean — not that the motion of love is the Holy Spirit — and then why he said what he did, propter excellentiam caritatis. Only then does it turn that regard against him: hoc magis redundat in caritatis detrimentum. The rejection got gentler in its account of Lombard and sharper in its conclusion. By Capreolus the question is no longer argued but defended: he puts it in almost the words Bonaventure used a hundred and seventy years earlier and answers it by quoting Thomas at length. What was a disputed question has become a citation.

Then Ockham changes the subject. He does not say charity is the Spirit and he does not deny the created habit; he denies that anything created can do the work the habit was posited to do. Nulla forma supernaturalis requiritur in anima — because God beatifies contingenter et libere et misericorditer, and deus per nullam rem possit necessitari. The question stops being what charity IS and becomes what it can DO, and on that question Lombard and Thomas are on the same side: both make the soul's acceptance turn on something in the soul. Ockham's opponent is not the Master.

Both sides of the new bench reach for Pelagius, and they reach in opposite directions. Ockham writes that his own view maxime recedit ab errore Pelagii, because on his account it is the created form, necessitating God, that repeats what Pelagius did with the natural act. On Gregory of Rimini's page the same name appears against the same thesis: if a man could be dear to God without an infused habit, he could be dear to him without any supernatural habit whatever, and so worthy of eternal life ex solis naturalibus — qui fuit error Pelagii.

⚠ But that sentence is not Gregory's verdict, and this page should not be read as though it were. It stands in his opening argument, before Ad oppositum est Magister in littera, and what he accepts from that argument is its ordained-power half — the whole of the article read here. The absolute-power question, which is Ockham's question, he defers to a second article that this page does not carry; and Capreolus, citing that article by reference, reports him arguing the other way, that de potentia Dei absoluta someone can be dear and accepted to God without a habitual created charity. On the question Ockham is actually asking, these two may stand together. What this page can show is that the charge of Pelagianism was available to both sides of the argument, not that either man laid it at the other's door.

Gregory, for his part, sides against the Master, and does it in the open: communiter tamen doctores oppositum opinantur, et ego una cum eis puto oppositum esse verum. His reason is 1 Corinthians 13, and he refuses the obvious escape from it — that Paul meant uncreated charity — as something that could be maintained only proterviter.

Biel arrives last and settles the crux in a subordinate clause. Summarising the littera before his question begins, he writes: quod si intelligitur formaliter, non tenetur; si effective, verum est, quia ipse infundit habitum charitatis. What Bonaventure and Thomas argued at the length of a disputed question is disposed of in eleven words. And when he states his own conclusion — that under the ordained law no one is dear to God without an infused quality — he adds the sentence no one else on this page says: haec conclusio naturali ratione probari non potest. The created habit survives, with its demonstration withdrawn. Nothing has been refuted; the burden has moved from reason to authority, and Biel's one sufficient authority is the same verse Gregory rested on.

So the page ends where it does not begin. It opens with a question about what charity is, argued by men who expect reason to settle it, and closes with that question answered in a clause and its answer held on authority alone. Luther, reading in the margin of his own copy twenty years after Biel, gives the Master the only sympathy on the page — et videtur Magister non penitus absurdissime loqui — and diagnoses the rest: commentum illud de habitibus opinionem habet ex verbis Aristotelis rancidi philosophi. He does not stand where Lombard stood; his own first two principles concede a created love. He offers a reason for finding Lombard credible that only became available once Aristotle could be treated as an intruder.

⭐ That last claim was the one this finding put at risk when the dissenting bench was empty, and it named Ockham as the obvious place for Luther's diagnosis to have been said first. It was not. Ockham's case against the created form is not that it is an Aristotelian import; it is that it would make God necessitated, and his authority against it is Pelagius, not Aristotle. Nor does Gregory or Biel say it. The diagnosis remains Luther's, and it remains late.

⭐ Auriol neither answers the Master's question nor changes it. He asks whether the answer everyone else has given was ever demonstrated, and says it was not — on the questioner's own premises. If a man in his purely natural powers can love God above himself and above all things, as the Summa allows at Ia IIae q.109 a.3, then he already has the substance of charitable love, and the habit posited to make that love possible has nothing left to do. Then he does what no one else on this page does: he asks what the habit would be like from the inside. Nobody in charity can tell by experience that he is in it — otherwise a man could know whether he were worthy of love or of hatred, against Ecclesiastes 9:1 — and the newly converted and newly confessed do not report the delight the habit is supposed to confer. Two hundred years of argument about what the act of love requires, and Auriol is the first here to answer that nobody has ever noticed the thing it is supposed to require.

⛔ And the words in which he says it are not his. His question stands on this page only because Capreolus staged it in order to answer it, and the note is marked as reported for that reason. That is not a concession made for the sake of a fuller page: this question of Auriol's Scriptum has been edited and never published, and no print of it exists. A rule refusing report would not have kept this edition purer. It would have kept the sharpest objection on the page off the page.

⭐⭐ And then, at the very end of the tradition, the page finally shows a party it had not been able to show. Denys the Carthusian, writing about 1460, takes the doctors one after another by name — the only witness in this edition who does on a page what this edition does on a page — and in the middle of that survey he quotes Scotus saying something no one else here says: mihi videtur quod in hac materia aliter sensit Magister quam communiter sibi imponitur. The Master thought otherwise than is commonly imputed to him. On this reading Lombard already posits a habit making the soul pleasing — he grants in Book II that grace is a virtue perfecting the soul, and uses the figure of rain watering the earth — and what he means is that charity and grace are one habit, with the Spirit assisting it. The baptised infants, whom the fourteenth century turns against the Master, come out on his side.

⚠ Be exact about what that does and does not settle. It is not the anonymous defence Bonaventure and Thomas both refute; that party is still unnamed. What it is, is the first witness on this page who thinks the argument has been conducted against a misreading — and every other witness here, agreeing or disagreeing, has taken the same account of what Lombard said. ⛔ And the words are Denys's report, not Scotus's own, from a text whose redaction cannot be recovered; Denys quotes him in order to reject him, saying immediately after that the opinion fails in many ways and involves a contradiction. The man who preserved the passage did not believe it.

⭐ One more thing the page can now show, and it is only visible because two witnesses were acquired in the same week from prints two centuries apart. Albert wrote in the 1240s that almost all the better men agree the Master must be contradicted. Denys quotes that sentence back in about 1460 — closely, not verbatim, doctores for the bare adjective and concedunt for concordant. The claim that the question was already settled is itself transmitted, and it outlived by two hundred years the man who made it.

⚠ All five regions are occupied for the first time on any page of this edition. The band before the dispute is no longer empty — but it holds one man, and not the one it was built for: Alexander of Hales's Glossa is its own first printing and has no public-domain text, so the earliest reading of this distinction still cannot be shown, and Albert is standing where a fuller band should be. Auriol's own text of d.17 q.1 is still unreached and, being unpublished, may never be reachable; the page has him at second hand or not at all. Scotus — who is very likely the opinio prima that Ockham spends four columns answering — is on this page only as the unnamed position Ockham reports, and Capreolus has him here at second hand of second hand, apud Aureolum, which is one remove further than the reported rule was written to carry. Four of the fourteen notes on this page are reported rather than written by the men whose names they carry, and three of the remaining ten are read from single early prints at one leaf each. ⚠ The heaviest single dependence is on Denys: he supplies one note of his own, one reported note, and the only external check this edition has on Albert's text. A page that leaned harder on him would be leaning on one 1902 volume.