Before the disputeAlexander of Hales · Albert · Fishacre · Kilwardby
Empty on this page. Albert the Great stands in this band on the other cruxes of this edition, but he does not take up this question in his commentary on the distinction. Alexander of Hales, who would otherwise be here, cannot be printed at all: his Glossa was first published in 1951 and is in copyright, with no earlier edition to fall back to. Fishacre and Kilwardby are unread. Nothing here is a claim that these masters were silent.
ThomistThomas · Tarentaise · Capreolus · Denys
thomist · c. 1272 · Paris
Reply to Objection 1. The Divine Essence Itself is charity, even as It is wisdom and goodness. Wherefore just as we are said to be good with the goodness which is God, and wise with the wisdom which is God (since the goodness whereby we are formally good is a participation of Divine goodness, and the wisdom whereby we are formally wise, is a share of Divine wisdom), so too, the charity whereby formally we love our neighbor is a participation of Divine charity. For this manner of speaking is common among the Platonists, with whose doctrines Augustine was imbued; and the lack of adverting to this has been to some an occasion of error.
Not an answer to the question but an account of how the question came to be asked wrongly. Thomas grants the Augustinian texts their force and then explains them: the essence is charity as it is wisdom and goodness, and we are formally charitable by a participation of it, exactly as we are formally wise by a participation of divine wisdom. That way of speaking, he says, is a Platonist habit that Augustine had absorbed — and quod quidam non advertentes ex verbis eius sumpserunt occasionem errandi, some, not noticing it, took occasion of error from his words. The quidam is unnamed and is the Master. English is the public-domain Dominican Fathers translation of 1920, not an in-house draft. Split off from the article rostered on crux 1: there Thomas answers the question, here he diagnoses it, and they are two arguments.
English: Fathers of the English Dominican Province, 1920
thomist · c. 1426 · Toulouse
Concerning the seventeenth distinction it is asked: whether charity is some habit created in the soul.
And it is argued that it is not. No creature is worthier than the soul of Christ; but charity is worthier than the soul of Christ, since it is by charity itself that the soul of Christ is worthy and good; therefore charity is not a creature.
On the opposite side it is argued through Augustine, who, in book 3 of On Christian Doctrine (chapter 10), says: 'By charity I mean the motion of the soul towards enjoying God for his own sake'; but a motion of the soul is something created in the soul; therefore charity is something created in the soul.
In this question there will be two articles. In the first, conclusions will be set out. In the second, doubts.
Article I. Conclusions are set out. As to the first, let this be the first conclusion: that the motion of charity necessarily requires some habitual form in us, superadded to the natural power.
This conclusion is proved thus, following Saint Thomas, Summa II-II, q. 23, art. 2, where he argues in this way: «If the motion of charity so proceeds from the Holy Spirit moving the human mind that the human mind is only moved and is in no way the principle of this motion, as when some body is moved by some exterior mover, in no way will that motion be voluntary. For this is against the character of the voluntary, whose principle must be in the thing itself. Whence it would follow that to love would not be voluntary; which implies a contradiction […]»
A hundred and seventy years after Thomas, the question is put in the same words and the answer is no longer argued but defended. Capreolus's own contribution is the framing and the first conclusion; his proof is a long quotation of Thomas, which is elided here at […] because that text is on this page as its own witness. A text may be found through Capreolus and never cited through him. His copy of the Summa reads mens humana sit tantummodo mota where the Leonine has humana mens sit mota tantum — a small variant, left as he has it, since what he read is the evidence. Latin restored from the 1900 print's OCR: repair of scanning damage, not expansion of abbreviation.
A created habit
English: fresh draft (Claude), approved by Wilson Pruitt
I d.17
Cur Magister hoc tenuit, et quid deinde accidit sententiae?Why did the Master hold what he held, and what happened to the thesis?
Cap. 1 · That the Holy Spirit is the charity by which we love God and neighbor.
PL 192, col. 564
Cap. 2 · That fraternal love is God — neither the Father nor the Son, but only the Holy Spirit.
PL 192, col. 565
Cap. 3 · That the saying God is charity is not said by way of cause, in the way that Thou art my patience and my hope is.
PL 192, col. 565
Cap. 4 · In what way the Holy Spirit is sent or given to us.
PL 192, col. 566
Cap. 5 · Whether the Holy Spirit is increased in a person, or is more or less had or given, and whether he is given to one who has and to one who does not have.
PL 192, col. 566
Cap. 6 · That some say that the charity of God and of neighbor is not the Holy Spirit.
PL 192, col. 567
FranciscanBonaventure · R. Middleton · Scotus
Dissenting · nominalist · AugustinianDurandus · Auriol · Ockham · Gregory · Biel
dissenting · c. 1490 · Tübingen
In the present distinction the Master treats of the manner of the invisible mission of the Holy Spirit. And the sense of the text can be summarised in these conclusions.
First conclusion. The Holy Spirit is said to be given or sent to us when he makes us love God and neighbour, by which we remain in God and God in us.
Second conclusion. The Holy Spirit is the charity and the love by which we love God. Now if this is understood formally, it does not hold. If effectively, it is true — because he it is who infuses the habit of charity. If it is understood of the uncreated charity that is simply necessary for salvation and for loving God, then again it can be saved.
Third conclusion. Charity is said to be increased, even though the Holy Spirit in himself is neither increased nor diminished. See the text at greater length.
Three hundred and thirty years after Lombard, the distinction is no longer disputed but summarised — and the whole crux is settled in a subordinate clause. Biel reduces the littera to three conclusions and disposes of the second with a distinction: formaliter non tenetur, effective verum est, quia ipse infundit habitum charitatis. What Bonaventure and Thomas argued at the length of a disputed question, Biel decides in eleven words before the question proper has begun. The nearest thing on this page to the divisio's function on the Franciscan bench, and the reason it is rostered.
A created habit
English: fresh draft (Claude), approved by Wilson Pruitt
ReceptionLuther (WA 9) · Estius (1616)
reception · 1509–1510 · Erfurt
For guidance in resolving the authorities of Augustine.
First it is to be known that charity (whatever may be the case about what is possible) is in fact always given together with the Holy Spirit, and the Holy Spirit together with it and in it.
Secondly, when Augustine says that love is God, let it not be understood with precision or exclusively — that is, as though love were only God — but by granting that love is God, yet not only that. For there is also a created love. Just as Christ is our faith, our righteousness, our grace and our sanctification.
And the Master seems not to speak altogether absurdly, in that he says the habit is the Holy Spirit. For that fabrication about habits takes its opinion from the words of Aristotle, that rancid philosopher. Otherwise it could well be said that the Holy Spirit is the charity concurring by himself with the will towards the production of the act of loving — unless perhaps something has been determined to the contrary concerning the essence.
Written in the margin of his own copy around 1509–10, as a young friar lecturing on the Sentences, and the only voice on this page that gives the Master any ground. Luther does not simply restore the thesis: his first two principles concede a created love, so he is not where Lombard was. But he grants the Master is not absurd, and he says why the schools think otherwise — commentum illud de habitibus opinionem habet ex verbis Aristotelis rancidi philosophi. The whole habit-doctrine, on his account, is an Aristotelian import. Restoration note: the OCR reads randdi; rancidi is a conjecture, supported by the scan's systematic c-for-d confusion elsewhere in the same lines (didt for dicit, dileotio for dilectio) and by Luther's habitual epithet for Aristotle. It is the one word on this witness that a vision read of WA 9 p. 43 should confirm. ⛔ Chapter numbering: Luther's c. 5 is caput III here. He numbers by Migne's internal paragraphs, not by Quaracchi's capitula, and the two run apart from the start — his c. 3 is our caput I, c. 6 our caput IV, c. 11 our caput VI. This witness is anchored on our numbering and cites his.
The Spirit himself
English: fresh draft (Claude), approved by Wilson Pruitt
The Master lost, and this page is about how a position stops being held rather than how it is refuted.
It is refuted, of course, and quickly: within twenty years of the Sentences the Franciscan and the Dominican bench have both answered him, and by the fourteenth century the interesting arguments have moved to a question he never asked. But refutation is not what finished the thesis. Three things did, and they are visible here in order.
The first is diagnosis. Thomas's reply to the first objection of the Summa article does not deny the Augustinian texts the Master built on; it grants them and explains them away. The divine essence is charity as it is wisdom and goodness, and we are formally charitable by a participation of it exactly as we are formally wise by a participation of divine wisdom — and that way of speaking, he adds, is a Platonist habit that Augustine had absorbed. Quod quidam non advertentes ex verbis eius sumpserunt occasionem errandi. Some, not noticing this, took occasion of error from his words. The quidam is not named. It is the Master, and the charge is not that he argued badly but that he read an idiom as a doctrine.
⭐ The remarkable thing is that the other end of the tradition explains the schools by exactly the same move, and blames the opposite philosopher. Luther, in the margin of his own copy around 1509, writes that commentum illud de habitibus opinionem habet ex verbis Aristotelis rancidi philosophi — the whole habit-doctrine holds its opinion from the words of Aristotle, that rancid philosopher. Thomas accounts for Lombard by Plato; Luther accounts for Thomas by Aristotle; each takes the other side's position to be a pagan idiom that somebody mistook for theology. Neither cites the other, and the mirror is exact.
The second thing is citation. By Capreolus in 1426 the question is still put in almost the words Bonaventure used a hundred and seventy years earlier, and the answer is no longer argued but proved out of Thomas at column length: probatur sic ista conclusio, secundum sanctum Thomam. A live disputed question has become a place in a defence, and the defence is organised by the objections of men — Gregory, Auriol, Scotus — who are arguing about something else.
The third is compression, and it is the one that actually ends the thesis. Biel, about 1490, summarising the littera before his own question begins, disposes of it in a subordinate clause: si intelligitur formaliter, non tenetur; si effective, verum est. Nothing is refuted, because nothing is argued. The Master's sentence is retained in a sense he did not intend, and the reader is moved along to the question the fifteenth century cares about, which is what God can do without any created form at all. That is how a thesis dies: not answered, but summarised, and kept as a phrase that can be saved.
Luther is the coda and not a return. He gives the Master the only sympathy on any of these pages — et videtur Magister non penitus absurdissime loqui — but his own first two principles concede a created love, so he does not stand where Lombard stood. What he restores is not the thesis but the sense that there was ever a question.
⛔ And now the caveat this finding needs against itself, because the evidence is not a random sample. The arc argued above — diagnosis, then citation, then compression — rests on Capreolus in 1426 and Biel about 1490, and those are exactly the kind of book a fifteenth-century printer chose to set. Every witness on this page except one came through the early-print filter. Bonaventure, Thomas, Capreolus, Ockham, Gregory and Biel were all in type by 1600. The exceptions prove what the filter costs: Alexander of Hales, who established the genre, was not printed until 1951 and cannot appear here at all, and Luther's glosses waited until the Weimar edition of 1893 because they were marginalia in his own copy. The empty band at the head of every daf in this edition is, in the end, a printing decision made in the fifteenth century.
So the honest form of the claim is narrower than the paragraphs above make it sound. What died into citation and compression is the printed tradition. Between Gregory and Capreolus lie some seventy years of bachelors lecturing on this distinction whose commentaries survive, if at all, in a manuscript or two and were never set in type; whether the question was still live among them, this edition cannot say, and neither can any edition built the way this one is built. A pattern drawn from what was printed is a fact about printing until it is checked against what was not.
⚠ What is otherwise missing here is the seventeenth century. Estius, who would be the closing bracket — a Catholic commentator writing after Trent, on a distinction whose thesis nobody held — is not on archive.org in any Book I volume this project has found, and this band is the poorer for it. The dissenting bench appears only through Biel; Ockham and Gregory have nothing to say about why the Master held what he held, because by their generation the question is no longer about him.