2. The unicity of substantial form in the Correctoria corruptorii fratris Thomae of Richard Knapwell, Robert Orford and John of Paris

Antonia Fitzpatrick

The Dominican general chapter of June 1286 demanded that each and every individual friar (omnes et singuli) familiarize himself with, promote and defend the teachings of Thomas Aquinas.¹ This was a response to certain events of 30 April that year. The archbishop of Canterbury, John Peckham, a Franciscan, had condemned as heretical Aquinas’s theory of human nature, according to which there is one and only one substantial form in a human being: the rational soul.² The condemnation followed – without being the inevitable conclusion of – the thirteenth century’s most acrimonious and significant scholastic debate.³ Was there one substantial form alone in a human being, as Aquinas’s (mostly Dominican) defenders argued;⁴ or was there more than one, or a plurality of forms,⁵ as his (mostly Franciscan) critics maintained?⁶ The deep philosophical and theological importance of this question will become clear shortly. At the centre of the conflict was another Franciscan’s contentious ‘corrective’ to Aquinas’s thought, William de la Mare’s Correctorium fratris Thomae (Paris, c. March 1277),⁷ mandatory reading for Franciscans studying Aquinas’s Summa theologiae following their own general chapter of 1282.⁸ For their part, Dominican leaders encouraged a deepening connection between Aquinas’s theology and Dominican group identity before 1286, even if early legislative measures emphasized discipline over doctrine: in 1278 and 1279 general chapters empowered visitators, provincial and conventual priors to punish any friar bringing scandal to the order by openly criticizing Aquinas’s writings.⁹ There were five Dominican responses to William de la Mare, each a Correctorium corruptorii fratris Thomae. Three of these will be discussed here.

The Correctoria corruptorii, self-evidently, hold out an opportunity for a case study in the formation of individuals’ thinking in relation to the institution of which they were a part. Yet it would hardly be worth returning to these texts and to the debate over the unicity of form, mapped out so well by others, were there not the possibility of revealing something new, or at least underappreciated. It is not the argument of this chapter that the Correctoria corruptorii of Richard Knapwell (Quare, Oxford, c. 1278), Robert Orford (Sciendum, Oxford, 1282–3) and John of Paris (Circa, Paris, 1283–4)¹⁰ yield a straightforward study in the homogenization and institutionalization of Dominican thought on the basis of Aquinas’s philosophy. The last study devoted to the cast of characters and the range of issues with which this chapter is concerned, Frederick J. Roensch’s Early Thomistic School (1964) – also published as The Unicity of Substantial Form and its Implications in the Early Thomistic School – presented things in exactly that way. Noting that ‘the doctrine of unicity of substantial form … constituted the most basic yardstick by which to judge the character of any early Thomist’, Roensch intended to show that our three Dominicans were ‘true and loyal Thomists’ who ‘not only defended St. Thomas, but understood his teaching in exactly the same way as he did himself ’.¹¹ Here Roensch missed something significant. Read closely, the Correctoria instead provide a case study in individual thinking deeply marked by the politics of group opposition – in this case, the institutional rivalry between the two major mendicant orders. It emerges, furthermore, that this partisan process of critical re-evaluation could have a radically disintegrative effect, generating wildly divergent renderings of Aquinas’s theory of the composition of a human being.

Admittedly, one does not have to look far to find discussions of ‘Thomism’ which suggest less stringent criteria for membership of a ‘Thomistic school’ than Roensch’s study of 1964. Still, an assumption often encountered is that this supposed intellectual school or ‘-ism’, grounded in Aquinas’s writings, has possessed, from the thirteenth century until now, an unchanging essence of ‘basic doctrines … commonly recognized as characteristic’, even if the ‘problems and polemics of their day’ have influenced the range of questions which different Thomists, as individuals or generations, have asked of Aquinas’s works and the answers they have looked to defend.¹² It may appear obvious, then, that Roensch’s concept of an ‘Early Thomistic School’ should have failed to capture the real diversity of the earliest Dominican interpretations of Aquinas: we might immediately suppose that individuals should have found themselves at least slightly adapting, rather than merely replicating, what Aquinas said, in order to keep pace with the development of debate.¹³ What is too infrequently recognized, however, and what it is crucial to understand, is that Aquinas’s ‘basic doctrines’, as set out over the range of his works, could themselves appear fundamentally underdetermined, especially when subjected to the pressure of questions which Aquinas himself (d. 1274) did not (or could not) foresee.¹⁴

This was just the case with the theory of the unicity of substantial form in humans. In some aspects, it was clear and uncompromising. In others, especially the theory’s implications for the continuity of the body after death (or the composition of the corpse), Aquinas’s thinking appeared muddled. Many different views could consequently follow. As we shall see, it was no accident that William de la Mare chose to focus his critique of the unicity of form upon the issue of post-mortem bodily continuity, or that discussion of the theory’s alleged consequences in this area could provide ample material for an increasingly complex and heated scholastic debate. It followed, too, that, while the Dominican authors of the Correctoria wrote on Aquinas’s behalf, countering de la Mare ‘secundum Thomam’ [according to Thomas], the act of constructing an effective defence of Aquinas on the subject of the composition of a human being was a case of setting out creatively and originally what Aquinas must have intended or would have said. Finally, and most importantly, it could follow that these Dominicans’ readings of the ‘basic doctrine’ of the unicity of form, profoundly shaped by the need to find a reply to a distorting Franciscan caricature of Aquinas’s thought on human nature, were just as likely (if not more) to replicate critical aspects of de la Mare’s misrepresentation as they were to attempt to rectify them.¹⁵

The political-intellectual dynamics in play can be explained much more readily with reference to what Russell Friedman has identified as rival Franciscan and Dominican intellectual ‘traditions’ at the medieval university¹⁶ than by the language of ‘-isms’ or ‘schools’. First, however, we need to return to the issue at stake. Scholastic theologians held that the two most basic components of composite things were matter and substantial form. A substantial form was a form which determined something’s nature – as a human, an animal, or a body, for instance. The question of the unicity or plurality of substantial forms in a human, then, was fundamental: a theologian’s answer would determine, inter alia, his account of how a single being could arise from the union of matter and soul; his theory of embryogenesis;¹⁷ his understanding of which of a human’s components were essential to a person’s continuing identity over his or her lifetime;¹⁸ and – as just indicated – his judgement of what continued, and what perished, at the moment of death.

Aquinas’s account of human nature was innovative.¹⁹ One substantial form alone, the rational or human soul, was to be the source of all a human’s defining characteristics and to give to it the totality of its existence (esse). ‘In one individual, there is only one substantial form [forma substantialis]’, Aquinas says, and ‘through this substantial form, which is the human soul [anima humana], this individual is not only human, but an animal, one thing, a body, a substance, and a being [ens]’.²⁰

This intervention was neither random nor arbitrary. Like the majority of the most significant philosophical theories developed by medieval universities’ most important thinkers,²¹ the theory of the unicity of substantial form in humans was motivated by theological considerations. Aquinas had the doctrine of the bodily resurrection in mind. If the soul were a human’s only substantial form, then the union between soul and matter in each human would be intimate and essential. It would make sense to say, as the Fourth Lateran Council’s declaration of faith proposed, that, at the resurrection, each person’s soul would be reunited to a body recovered from their own matter, so that the whole person, sinning flesh included, could be judged justly.²² Additionally, the theory (like the Council’s doctrinal pronouncement), was distinctively shaped by Catholic polemic with dualist heresy.²³ Aquinas thought that if there were another substantial form in a human being intervening between the soul and matter, for instance a corporeal substantial form which gave definition and existence to the body independently of the soul, then the union of a human soul to any particular body would be merely incidental. Body and soul would be substances arranged next to one another, like a woman and the clothes she wears, but not complementary components of one naturally unified thing. Reincarnation would become conceivable, a heretical opinion which Aquinas understood to have been taught ‘continuously down to today [usque hodie]’, from Plato to Origen to, now, certain ‘Manichees [Manichaei]’.²⁴ Indeed, for Aquinas, soul and body are more than just complementary components of the human being. They overlap: the soul, as the body’s substantial form, is an intrinsic component of the body. Strictly, for Aquinas matter (the body’s other component) and soul, not body and soul, come together to compose the human being.²⁵

The Correctorium fratris Thomae is dominated by a critique of the theory of the unicity of form.²⁶ Of the 117 theses de la Mare selects for ‘correction’, at least twenty-one are related to the theory, even if the central claim ‘that in a human being there is one substantial form alone’ is attacked only in article 31.²⁷ Tying together all de la Mare’s criticisms of the theory is a basic assertion: Aquinas places such great emphasis on the essential unity of body and soul, the Franciscan argues, that his theory effectively denies the autonomy of the body, or of the material part of human nature, relative to the soul. If the soul were the body’s only substantial form, what was the body just in itself? As de la Mare makes clear, several points of Catholic doctrine, not least transubstantiation, the incarnation and the contraction of original sin, appear to require a strong account of the body’s autonomy. The theological issue he places in primary position (which would also provide the focus of Peckham’s condemnation of Aquinas’s theory in 1286), however, is the continuity and identity of Christ’s corpse during the three days of His death:

That the hypostatic union between Christ’s divinity and each component of His human nature, His body and His soul, once forged, could not be dissolved, was taken as an article of faith. This implied that the corpse in the tomb (somehow, its death notwithstanding) had remained ‘the same in number’ (the selfsame individual thing) as Christ’s living body.²⁹ William de la Mare’s point is that, assuming the unicity of form, there is no bodily continuity. For when it comes to the composition of the corpse (‘body’ with soul removed), there are only two options. If all that crosses over from living body to corpse is mere prime matter, then the corpse is no body at all: scholastic theologians understood prime matter, posited as the ultimate substratum of all cases of natural change, to be completely raw and featureless, such that it was not a ‘this’, nor ‘this much’, nor ‘this way’, nor otherwise determined in any manner whatsoever.³⁰ If, however, we decide that the matter in the corpse must have a substantial form, this must be a new form altogether.³¹ Then, although we do have a body, it is a different body entirely.

For de la Mare, therefore, the faith demands a plurality of substantial forms in a human being, especially an additional bodily form giving the body existence independently of the soul and remaining after the soul’s separation. The human being’s essential unity, meanwhile, can be maintained if this subsidiary bodily form is understood to be intrinsically incomplete, bestowing an incomplete act of existence, in such a way that it is in potency to and perfected by the soul ( esse … est incompletum et in potentia ad esse completum).³²

With what conceptual resources could Aquinas’s Dominican defenders respond to William de la Mare? Though it has not been very well understood, Aquinas did develop an account of the body’s autonomy relative to the soul. If we take seriously his concern for the correct understanding of the bodily resurrection, a point of doctrine which clearly implies that the material part of human nature makes its own contribution to the person, then this should come as no surprise. Aquinas specifies, for instance, that the human essence (‘what it is to be’ human) comprises not only form, or the soul, but matter too.³³ Furthermore, Aquinas pointedly explains that the matter which enters into human nature is not mere prime matter, ‘common to all things’, but a differentiated material arrangement which is the intrinsically appropriate subject for a rational soul. He calls this the ‘ proper matter’ (materia propria) of the human being.³⁴ Finally, although he holds that the soul is the body’s only substantial form, Aquinas does not think that the soul is a shape or a physical structure. For Aquinas, there is another form in a body which gives it its physical structure and proportions, spreading out its organic parts into particular positions relative to one another and marking out and particularizing its matter. Importantly, this bodily form is not a substantial form, but an ‘accidental’ form, or a property of the bodily substance, meaning that it depends, for its existence, on the continued union between matter and soul. Aquinas calls this structuring accidental form ‘dimensive quantity’ (quantitas dimensiva).³⁵

Aquinas’s statements on the subject of post-mortem bodily continuity, however, could be deeply ambiguous and were never brought together in one place, let alone in a discussion of Christ’s corpse. Aquinas asks whether Christ’s body was the same in number living and dead at Summa theologiae, III, q. 50, a. 5, answering simply as follows:

Here, Aquinas confirms there is physical continuity across bodily death, including Christ’s. This continuity is not on the level of substantial form, or else the body would not have died at all, but rather on the level of matter. Aquinas does not actually say a new form is introduced into Christ’s corpse, nor does he explain what continuity ‘according to matter’ really means. Instead, at the crux of his argument is the corpse’s continued union to the same ultimate metaphysical subject, namely the divine hypostasis, supposit (suppositum), or person of Christ. The (presupposed) continuing hypostatic union of the divinity to the components of Christ’s human nature guarantees the absolute identity of living body and corpse in this unique case.

Elsewhere, it is true, Aquinas suggests that a new substantial form is introduced into a dead body, albeit an imperfect form, as here in his commentary on Aristotle’s De generatione et corruptione, I.3:

Again, how should the material continuity Aquinas posits between living body and corpse be construed? Aquinas nowhere suggests that all that persists is prime matter. Moreover, his general insistence on the importance of proper matter (‘the proper matters of different things are different’³⁸) dovetails with his deep commitment to the Aristotelian idea of material causation (that in order for a certain form to manifest itself, certain material conditions must necessarily be present³⁹). This makes it a priori unlikely that Aquinas would have conceded that the substratum persisting in Christ’s dead body was mere prime matter, as opposed to, say, the proper matter of a corpse. Aquinas even says that in the generation and corruption of substances material resolution never proceeds as ‘far down’ as prime matter: prime matter is rather peripheral to Aquinas’s account of substantial change.⁴⁰

One model for post-mortem bodily continuity could be found in Aquinas’s commentary on Metaphysics VII.16, in which Aristotle stated that the material parts of substances were not substances in their own right, but in a state of potentiality. Aquinas explains:

Perhaps this applied to a human being. One could say that the living body’s complex material constituents, falling on the side of matter and potentiality when in composition with the soul (corresponding here to the ‘form of the whole’), were so ‘close to act’ that they could take on an actuality or existence of their own once the human being corrupted (or died) at the soul’s separation.

If his commentary on Metaphysics VII.16 contains obscurities (what exactly is the relationship between the body’s material constituents which are ‘close to act’ and any new substantial form?), then other passages in which Aquinas discusses post-mortem material continuity appear positively inconsistent. Analysing the general resurrection, Aquinas claims that traces of a body’s structural form, its dimensive quantity, can remain to mark out its matter even after death. ‘The matter which was subject to the soul remains’, he says, ‘under the same dimensions from that which it had it when it was individual matter’.⁴² How could this be possible? Unlike Averroes, by whom this argument is inspired,⁴³ Aquinas consistently holds, elsewhere at least, that a substance is ontologically prior to its accidents:⁴⁴ if the human body corrupts at death, its accidents should go too.

Let us now turn to our Dominican Correctoria. Of the five responses to de la Mare, only three deal directly with article 31 of the Correctorium fratris Thomae.⁴⁵ The earliest, and least conceptually developed, is Richard Knapwell’s Quare:⁴⁶

Much here recalls Aquinas’s Summa theologiae, III.50.5. Of course, Knapwell says, there is a sense in which Christ’s corpse cannot have been totally the same as his living body: to claim otherwise would be to deny Christ’s true death and tantamount to heresy.⁴⁸ However, for Knapwell, as for Aquinas, the absolute identity of the body, grounded on the hypostatic union, overrides any natural substantial mutation in the body’s composition.

Note that Knapwell is ready to concede de la Mare’s point that a new substantial form must have been introduced into Christ’s corpse on the grounds that the Franciscan’s objections are thereby neutralized. The new form does not imply a new nature was absorbed into the hypostatic union: the form is not assumed in its own right by the divinity; rather, the divinity originally assumed a mortal human nature, destined always to be transformed in death. Here, however, the analysis stops. Knapwell appears to assume concrete material continuity between living body and corpse (the entombed body is evidently the very same one which is to be resurrected), but he sidesteps the question of what this physical continuity consists in, be it prime matter or anything else.

In Circa, John of Paris,⁴⁹ like Richard Knapwell, grants that a new substantial form was introduced into Christ’s corpse and denies this altered the hypostatic union: Christ voluntarily assumed a mortal body, death and all that followed from the separation of matter and soul.⁵⁰ John emphasizes, as ‘the response of brother Thomas’, that ‘numerical identity is the identity of the supposit’:⁵¹ the unbroken hypostatic union guarantees the absolute identity of Christ’s body living and dead. What is striking, however, is quite how much further than Knapwell John of Paris is willing to go in conceding de la Mare’s interpretation of Aquinas. Crucially, John clarifies that, taking the hypostatic union out of the equation, the body in the tomb was a totally new, individual body: not only did it have a new substantial form, but all that remained on a material level was prime matter. Glossing Psalm XV: 10 (‘nor will you give your holy one to see corruption’), John says: ‘The body of Christ did not suffer complete dissolution ... not because in death it was not resolved into prime matter, but because the forms of the simple elements did not succeed the rational soul immediately, but rather the form of a mixed body [forma mixti corporis], which was never corrupted further’.⁵² This picture of bodily corruption as involving a succession of ever lower forms is recognizable from Aquinas’s commentary on De generatione et corruptione I.3. In John of Paris’s hands, however, every other significant aspect of Aquinas’s thought on the composition of the corpse (notably, as we have said, his concern for concrete material continuity) has fallen away sharply. Why? It cannot be discounted out of hand that pure intellectual impulse was responsible. Yet, read closely, Circa’s argument indicates a more complex and interesting possibility. Not only, in John’s view, could much of the Franciscan reading of Aquinas be safely conceded: it could also be positively instrumentalized to reinforce the unicist position, while simultaneously undermining the pluralist line.

First, John of Paris is happy to allow radical discontinuity between living body and corpse, at least in part because he is able to argue that even pluralists have to fall back on the corpse’s union with the divinity in order to preserve bodily identity. The corporeal form which pluralists say remained in the corpse could hardly have remained in a generic way, John says. That form would have to establish the body in an entirely new species,⁵³ yielding nothing short of a new individual body:

Here, the pluralist position on bodily continuity is made to appear just as feeble as de la Mare’s construal of Aquinas’s position: in either case there was in effect a new form, and hence a new body, in the tomb.

Second, John of Paris evidently saw a particular theological advantage in taking up a reading of unicity theory which thoroughly diminished any meaningful autonomy of the material part of human nature relative to the soul. If everything essential to human nature, including everything essential to the body, ‘radically remained [radicaliter remansit]’ within the immortal soul as the one and only substantial form (and especially as the body’s substantial form), then, when it came to explaining how the bodily resurrection could happen, the knotty problem of post-mortem material continuity could be circumvented entirely:

John intends this not merely as an innovative solution to a theological problem, but as an anti-Franciscan attack on pluralist theory. As we know, the Dominican thinks he has been able to deduce that the pluralists’ corporeal form effectively falls out of existence at Christ’s death. How, then, could the very same form return at his resurrection?⁵⁶ Pluralist theory, John suggests, has heretical implications. In construing the theory of the unicity of form in this particular way, however, he ends up undermining one of the exact points of doctrine Aquinas intended the theory to preserve: the bodily resurrection literally understood.⁵⁷

Robert Orford’s⁵⁸ encounter with de la Mare’s arguments pushed him to test the limits of the theory of the unicity of form in a completely different way. In article 31 of Sciendum, looking to bolster bodily autonomy relative to the soul, Orford alters Aquinas’s metaphysical framework so significantly that he threatens the human being’s intrinsic unity. Orford begins by clarifying his terms: regarding everything composed of matter and form, we must consider ‘what it is’ (quod est), namely a composite of matter and form; and ‘that by which it is’ (quo est), or that which gives it its existence, namely form.⁵⁹ So far, so straightforward. Then, however, Orford appears to advance a pluralist account of human composition:

Recognizing the danger, Orford tries to distance himself from pluralist theory, explaining that none of the ‘partial’ substantial forms necessary in a complex organism like a human actually give existence in their own right: rather, they passively participate in the act of existence communicated by the soul as ‘form of the whole [forma totius]’.⁶¹ This ‘total’ act of existence, meanwhile, is the metaphysical glue binding soul to body:

Note, in particular, that although the rational soul gives existence to the body, it virtually contains only two ‘inferior forms’: the sensitive and the vegetative souls. The ‘partial substantial forms’ composing the body, in contrast, appear to be essentially distinct from the soul, even if they participate in the act of existence which the soul communicates. Orford even says that body and soul ‘differ according to their essence’, although they ‘come together [conveniunt] in a single act of existence’.⁶³

This is a startling interpretation of Aquinas’s theory of the unicity of form. For Aquinas, the soul did enter into what the body essentially was, as its only nature-determining form. That was rather the point. For Orford, the body has its own (albeit partial) form and the soul does not enter into what it is at all. Even the Franciscan de la Mare argued that the soul entered into the body’s essence, intrinsically perfecting it. As Orford sees it, however, there is none of this essential overlap between body and soul: a single act of existence, again, is all that connects the two. Yet now, of course, Orford can argue that what the body of Christ is (quod est) survives in its entirety across his death:

In contrast to Richard Knapwell and John of Paris, Orford can also avoid conceding de la Mare’s suggestion that there must have been a new substantial form introduced into Christ’s corpse, accurately noting that ‘Thomas can never be found to have said this about the body of Christ’.⁶⁵ Instead, citing Aristotle’s Metaphysics, VII.16, Orford explains that the body’s form (or ‘partial forms’ or, here, ‘form(s) of the parts’), although falling on the side of potency while in the composite, take on an act of existence of their own upon the soul’s separation, emerging thereby as a new form of the whole:

Along with some of the language in which this account of post-mortem bodily continuity is couched – the departure of the soul as removal of the form of the whole; the material parts of the body subsisting in a state of potency close to act – the analogy of the divided worm, whose latent forms (here souls) spring forth into act, also recalls Aquinas’s commentary on Aristotle’s Metaphysics, VII.16.⁶⁷ Again, it is Orford’s insistence on an essentially distinct corporeal form (or forms) which significantly distances his thought from Aquinas’s.

Orford’s divergence from Aquinas (and Richard Knapwell and John of Paris), is exposed again in how he handles the question of the hypostatic union. Having just shown that the body of Christ was the same in number across death as regards what it is [quod est], Orford adds that ‘besides this identity, there is the identity of the supposit [suppositum], which gives a greater unity [maior unitas]’.⁶⁸ What was the crux of the argument for the other Dominicans is plainly an afterthought here. If Orford’s claim is that Christ’s living body and corpse were the same in number anyway, then what possible greater identity can be guaranteed by the hypostatic union? Orford’s reference to the divine supposit makes sense as an indication of intellectual allegiance to his Dominican brothers, a marker of what Stephen Marrone would call ‘intellectual consanguinity’,⁶⁹ but not as a necessary stage in his argument.

What happened next?⁷⁰ Richard Knapwell made another, more decisive, intervention with his Quaestio disputata de unitate formae (1285), now as regent master in theology at Oxford. He picked up John of Paris’s anti-pluralist argument with regard to the resurrection, developing it with the help of the Averroan theory of a quantitative structure in matter to which Aquinas had been so attracted. The pluralists’ corporeal form would eventually disintegrate as the corpse decayed, Knapwell argued: only if matter had its own ‘nature of dimensive quantity’ (natura quantitatis dimensivae) could the material belonging to each individual body be marked out between their death and the general resurrection.⁷¹ This line of argument aggravated the Franciscans Roger Marston, also regent in theology at Oxford,⁷² and John Peckham at Canterbury: Knapwell’s Quaestio disputata was the proximate target of the condemnation of 1286, whose terms made particular reference to ‘dimensions’ and ‘quantity’ in the matter of dead bodies.⁷³

Knapwell, eventually, came the closest of our three Dominicans to capturing what Aquinas was trying to say about postmortem bodily continuity, but that is not the point this chapter wishes to make.⁷⁴ Neither is the point simply that William de la Mare distorted Aquinas’s thought, nor that, in responding to the Franciscan, Aquinas’s earliest Dominican defenders distorted it too – even in ways which were mutually incompatible. The purpose of examining the Correctoria so closely has been to show just how deliberate, and just how precisely and inextricably embedded within the institutional context of inter-order rivalry, were Richard Knapwell’s, John of Paris’s and Robert Orford’s very distinct readings of Aquinas.

Russell Friedman has identified the competition between Franciscan and Dominican ‘intellectual traditions’ as a, even the, principal factor which not simply drove scholastic debate forward in a general way but also shaped quite specifically the way in which debate surrounding critical concepts and ideas developed. Those oppositional dynamics apply here. Our three Dominicans ‘neither ignored nor flatly denied’ de la Mare’s critique.⁷⁵ Rather, in order to respond effectively, they conceded and incorporated parts of that critique, either neutralizing it or proceeding to show how unicist theory remained superior. Plainly, these individuals were intellectuals wholeheartedly committed to their institutions and deeply motivated by the politics of group opposition, even though they were certainly not a ‘school’, and barely even ‘Thomistic’, in the exact way Roensch would have liked them to be.

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¹ Acta capitulorum generalium Ordinis Praedicatorum, ed. B. M. Reichert (9 vols, Rome, 1898–1904), i. 235.

² Registrum epistolarum fratris Johannis Peckham archiepiscopi cantuariensis, ed. C. T. Martin (RS, 3 vols, 1882–5), iii. 922–3.

³ See A. Boureau, Théologie, science et censure au XIIIe siècle (Paris, 1999); and R. Zavalloni, Richard de Mediavilla et la controverse sur la pluralité des formes (Louvain, 1951). In English see: A. Fitzpatrick, Thomas Aquinas on Bodily Identity (Oxford, 2017), pp. 5–11, 175–80; J. F. Wippel, The Metaphysical Thought of Godfrey of Fontaines: a Study in Late Thirteenth-century Philosophy (Washington, D.C., 1981), pp. 314–47. For the later history of the debate: R. Pasnau, Metaphysical Themes 1274–1671 (Oxford, 2011), pp. 574–605.

⁴ The Augustinian Giles of Rome, additionally, was an important defender of the theory of the unicity of form. See his De gradibus formarum/ Contra gradus et pluralitatem formarum (Venice, 1500).

⁵ The secular Henry of Ghent, an early critic of Aquinas’s thought, proposed a duality (not plurality) of forms in humans. See esp. his Opera omnia, ed. R. Macken et al. (multiple vols, Leuven, 1979–), v–viii (Quodlibets, I.4, II.2, III.6 and IV.13). For commentary: Boureau, Théologie, science et censure, pp. 118–34; Wippel, The Metaphysical Thought of Godfrey of Fontaines, pp. 329–35.

⁶ For one version of the doctrinal case against the unicity of form argument, see the 1278 apologia by John Peckham’s predecessor as archbishop of Canterbury, the Dominican Robert Kilwardby, edited in F. Ehrle, ‘Der Augustinismus und der Aristotelismus in der Scholastik gegen Ende des 13. Jahrhunderts’, Archiv für Literatur- und Kirchengeschichte des Mittelalters, v (1889), 603–35, at pp. 614–32; and A. Birkenmajer, Vermischte Untersuchungen zur Geschichte der mittelalterlichen Philosophie (Münster, 1922), pp. 60–4. This apologia was one of the targets in July 1278 of the Dominican Giles of Lessines’ De unitate formae, ed. M. de Wulf (Louvain, 1902). For commentary, see Boureau, Théologie, science et censure, pp. 36–8, 63–70, 76, 80–1; Fitzpatrick, Thomas Aquinas on Bodily Identity, pp. 8–9 and n. 24. All translations are by the author.

⁷ For this dating: Boureau, Théologie, science et censure, p. 75.

⁸ ‘Definitiones Capituli Generalis Argentinae, Celebrati anno 1282’, ed. P. Geroldus Fussenegger, Archivum Franciscanum historicum, xxvi (1933), 127–40, at p. 139.

⁹ Reichert, Acta capitulorum generalium, i. 199, 204.

¹⁰ Each is named after the first word of its incipit. For an overview of the 5 Correctoria corruptorii, see M. D. Jordan, ‘The controversy of the Correctoria and the limits of metaphysics’, Speculum, lvii (1982), 292–314, esp. pp. 292–8 and n. 3, with bibliography detailing the previous 70 years of research on these texts, notably works by Hödl, Mandonnet, Ehrle, Glorieux, Creytens and Pelzer. Jordan’s dating of the Correctoria is challenged by Boureau, Théologie, science et censure, p. 79. Here this chapter follows Boureau.

¹¹ F. J. Roensch, The Unicity of Substantial Form and its Implications in the Early Thomistic School (Dubuque, Iowa, 1964), pp. ix, 19.

¹² Quotations from J. A. Weisheipl, ‘Thomism’, in New Catholic Encyclopedia (18 vols, New York, 1967–88), xiv. 126–35, at pp. 126–7 (20 ‘basic doctrines’ are listed at pp. 127–8).

¹³ On the impossibility of reconciling the evolution of scholastic debate with the notion of intellectual schools defined by doctrine, see S. P. Marrone, The Light of Thy Countenance: Science and Knowledge of God in the Thirteenth Century (Studies in the History of Christian Thought, 2 vols, Boston, Mass., 2001), i. 13–15.

¹⁴ An emphatic appreciation of this point may be the key to understanding Aquinas’s reception more broadly. Cf. H. de Lubac: ‘[C]e grand docteur … apparaît plutôt comme un auteur de transition, et l’ambivalence de sa pensée en équilibre instable, rançon de sa richesse même, explique qu’on ait pu dans la suite l’interpréter en des senses si opposés’ (H. de Lubac, Surnaturel: Études historiques (Paris, 1946), pp. 435–6).

¹⁵ Here this discussion respectfully parts ways with elements of I. Iribarren’s crucial article ‘ Responsio secundum Thomam and the Search for an Early Thomist School’, Vivarium, xxxix (2001), 255–96, at pp. 281, 295.

¹⁶ R. L. Friedman, Intellectual Traditions at the Medieval University: the Use of Philosophical Psychology in Trinitarian Theology among the Franciscans and Dominicans, 1250–1350 (2 vols, Leiden, 2013).

¹⁷ Studies include F. Amerini, Aquinas on the Beginning and End of Human Life, trans. M. Henninger (Cambridge, Mass., 2013); and M. A. Hewson, Giles of Rome and the Medieval Theory of Conception (London, 1975).

¹⁸ An indispensable study of medieval debates on personal identity over time, relating them to analogous discussions in modern philosophy and science fiction, is C. W. Bynum, ‘Material continuity, personal survival and the resurrection of the body: a scholastic discussion in its medieval and modern contexts’, in C. W. Bynum, Fragmentation and Redemption: Essays on Gender and the Human Body in Medieval Religion (New York, 1991), pp. 239–97 and 393–417.

¹⁹ S. de Boer, The Science of the Soul: the Commentary Tradition on Aristotle’s De anima, c. 1260–c. 1360 (Leuven, 2013), p. 40.

²⁰ Thomas Aquinas, Opera omnia, ed. Leonine (multiple vols, ongoing, Rome and Paris 1882–), xxiv. 2. 40 (Quaestio disputata de spiritualibus creaturis, 3c). This and other translations are the author’s own.

²¹ J. Marenbon, Later Medieval Philosophy (1150–1350) (London and New York, 1987), p. 190.

²² All were to rise in the ‘bodies which they now wear’ (Qui omnes cum suis propriis corporibus resurgent, quae nunc gestant) (Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils, ed. N. P. Tanner S.J. (2 vols, Washington, D.C., 1990), i. Nicaea I to Lateran V, pp. 230–230*).

²³ For historiographical debate, see Cathars in Question, ed. A. Sennis (York, 2016), including an important discussion by D. d’Avray, ‘The Cathars from non-Catholic sources’, pp. 177–84.

²⁴ Aquinas, Opera omnia, xiii. 520 (Summa contra Gentiles, II.83).

²⁵ For further discussion, see Fitzpatrick, Thomas Aquinas on Bodily Identity, pp. 84–5, 89–91.

²⁶ For biography and bibliography, see J. Marenbon, ‘Mare, William de la [William de Mara] (fl. 1272–1279)’, ODNB <https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/18025> [accessed 26 Aug. 2018].

²⁷ De la Mare’s text is transmitted as incorporated into Knapwell’s reply, Quare, and edited accordingly: Le Correctorium Corruptorii ‘Quare’, ed. P. Glorieux (Kain, 1927). Article 48 of Quare bears the same heading as article 31, but adds no new arguments from de la Mare, containing simply Knapwell’s extended defence of the unicity of form. The number of theses targeted is thus not actually 118, as is often claimed, but 117. Articles 8, 10, 11, 12, 27, 28, 29, 30, 32, 52, 85, 86, 88, 90, 98, 100, 102, 107, 113, 114 and 115 also relate to Aquinas’s thought on the union of body and soul.

²⁸ William de la Mare, Correctorium fratris Thomae, pp. 129–30 (a. 31).

²⁹ See discussion in J.-L. Solère, ‘Was the eye in the tomb? On the metaphysical and historical interest of some strange quodlibetal questions’, in Theological Quodlibeta in the Middle Ages: the Thirteenth Century, ed. C. Schabel (Brill’s Companions to the Christian Tradition, Leiden, 2006), pp. 526–58, esp. at p. 530.

³⁰ ‘Materia prima nec est quid, nec est quantum, nec quale, nec aliquid aliorum quibus ens est determinatum’ (Les ‘Auctoritates Aristotelis’: un florilège médiéval, ed. J. Hamesse (Louvain, 1974), p. 128).

³¹ This possible consequence of the theory of the unicity of substantial form for Christ’s corpse was identified earlier, by Henry of Ghent in his Opera omnia, v. 14–17 ( Quodlibet I.4c (dated 1276)).

³² William de la Mare, Correctorium fratris Thomae, p. 133 (a. 31).

³³ Aquinas, Opera omnia, iv. 330 (Summa theologiae, I, q. 29, a. 2, ad 3). For further discussion, see Fitzpatrick, Thomas Aquinas on Bodily Identity, pp. 83–91.

³⁴ Thomas Aquinas, In Metaphysicam Aristotelis commentaria, ed. M.-R. Cathala (Turin, 1935), p. 503 (VIII. lect. 4, § 1735), beginning ‘Quia vero, licet materia prima sit communis omnibus, tamen materiae propriae sunt diversae diversorum’. For further discussion, see Fitzpatrick, Thomas Aquinas on Bodily Identity, pp. 88–91.

³⁵ Aquinas, Opera omnia, xii. 183 (Summa theologiae, III, q. 76, a. 3, ad 2), beginning: ‘determinata distantia partium in corpore organico’; and v. 207 (Summa theologiae, I, q. 75, a. 7c), beginning: ‘nec poterit dici materia haec alia ab illa’. Constraints of space prevent further discussion of the pivotal role which dimensive quantity has to play in Aquinas’s account of the human body’s composition, individuality and identity over time. For a full account, see Fitzpatrick, Thomas Aquinas on Bodily Identity, esp. pp. 96–103, 118–27, 135–41.

³⁶ Aquinas, see, Opera omnia, xi. 484 (Summa theologiae, III, q. 50, a. 5c and ad 1).

³⁷ Thomas Aquinas, Opera omnia, iii. 292 (In De gen. et corr., I, lect. 8, § 3(60)).

³⁸ Aquinas, In Metaphysicam, VIII. lect. 4, § 1735 (Latin text above, n. 34).

³⁹ Aristotle, Metaphysics, VIII.4, 1044a 15–30; Aristotle, Physics, II.9, 200a24–b4. For commentary, see Fitzpatrick, Thomas Aquinas on Bodily Identity, pp. 31–8.

⁴⁰ Aquinas, Opera omnia, xii. 165 (Summa theologiae, III, q. 75, a. 3c): ‘praeiacens autem materia in quam corpora mixta resolvi possunt, sunt quatuor elementa, non enim potest fieri resolutio in materiam primam, ita quod sine forma existat, quia materia sine forma esse non potest’. For further discussion, see Fitzpatrick, Thomas Aquinas on Bodily Identity, pp. 108–12, 156–8. This chapter disagrees with the discussion in R. Pasnau, Thomas Aquinas on Human Nature: a Philosophical Study of Summa Theologiae 1a 75–89 (Cambridge, 2002), in particular that ‘Aquinas’s theory of matter is eliminative’ (p. 131).

⁴¹ Aquinas, In Metaphysicam, pp. 472–3 (VII., lect. 16, §§ 1633–1634, 1636).

⁴² Aquinas, Opera omnia, xv. 252 (Summa contra Gentiles, IV.81). For commentary, see Fitzpatrick, Thomas Aquinas on Bodily Identity, pp. 159–65.

⁴³ Fitzpatrick, Thomas Aquinas on Bodily Identity, pp. 69–78.

⁴⁴ E.g., Thomas Aquinas, In quattuor libros Sententiarum (Thomas Aquinas, Opera omnia, ed. R Busa (7 vols, Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt, 1980), i. I.8.5.2c), Summa theologiae, I, q. 76, a. 6c. Cf. Aristotle, Metaphysics, VII.1, 1028a21–b2.

⁴⁵ The remaining two are William of Macclesfield’s Quaestione (c.1284) (Le correctorium corruptorii ‘Quaestione’: texte anonyme du ms. Merton 276, ed. J.-P. Müller (Rome, 1954)); and Ramberto dei Primadizzi of Bologna’s Apologeticum veritatis (1286–8) (Apologeticum veritatis contra corruptorium, ed. J.-P. Müller (Vatican, 1943)).

⁴⁶ For biography and bibliography, see S. Tugwell, ‘Knapwell [Clapwell], Richard ( fl. 1284–1286)’, ODNB <https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/5434> [accessed 26 Aug. 2018].

⁴⁷ Richard Knapwell, Quare, in Le Correctorium Corruptorii ‘Quare’, ed. P. Glorieux (Kain, 1927), p. 135 (a. 31).

⁴⁸ Cf. Aquinas’s Quodlibets III.2.2c and IV.5c.

⁴⁹ For biography and bibliography, see R. L. Friedman, ‘John of Paris’, in A Companion to Philosophy in the Middle Ages, ed. J. J. E. Gracia and T. B. Noone (Oxford, 2003), pp. 382–3.

⁵⁰ John of Paris, Le Correctorium Corruptorii ‘Circa’, ed. J.-P. Müller (Rome, 1941), p. 172 (a. 30 (31)).

⁵¹ John of Paris, Circa, p. 170 (a. 30 (31)).

⁵² John of Paris, Circa, p. 173 (a. 30 (31)).

⁵³ This represents a significant hardening of the position found in Aquinas’s commentary on De generatione et corruptione, I.3, where it was permitted that formae imperfectae could succeed the soul in matter.

⁵⁴ John of Paris, Circa, pp. 172–3 (a. 30 (31)).

⁵⁵ John of Paris, Circa, p. 172 (a. 30 (31)), editor’s emphasis, my insertions.

⁵⁶ In their discussions of resurrection, scholastic theologians of the late 13th century tended to assume that continuity was necessary for identity, taking it as axiomatic that ‘Quorum substantia deperit, non redeunt eodem numero, sed specie’ (Hamesse, ‘Auctoritates Aristotelis’, p. 171). Cf. Aristotle, De generatione et corruptione, II.11, 338b14–18.

⁵⁷ Pace Bynum, who traces this theory of ‘form as identity’ back to Aquinas himself (‘Material continuity, personal survival’, pp. 258–60). John of Paris was criticized for denying a literal understanding of the resurrection when his Sentences commentary was censured in 1295. His apologia is edited in P. Glorieux, ‘Un mémoire justificatif de Bernard de Trilia’, Revue des sciences philosophiques et théologiques, xvii (1928), 407–15, at p. 411.

⁵⁸ For biography and bibliography, see S. F. Gaine, ‘Orford, Robert [Robert of Orford] (fl. c.1280–c.1293)’, ODNB <https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/20827> [accessed 26 Aug. 2018].

⁵⁹ ‘in omni re composita ex materia et forma est duo considerare, scilicet quod est et quo est. Quod est, est ipsum suppositum subsistens compositum ex utroque; quo est, est forma’ (Robert Orford, Correctorium corruptorii ‘Sciendum’, ed. P. Glorieux (Paris, 1956), pp. 137–8 (a. 31)).

⁶⁰ Orford, Sciendum, p. 138 (a. 31).

⁶¹ Cf. the Franciscan pluralist Peter John Olivi, who posited a theory of ‘formal parts’ (partes formales), each actively communicating a grade of being (gradum essendi) (not per se but qua parts of a whole), from which, collectively, a ‘total form’ (forma totalis) ‘arose’ (consurgit) (Petrus Iohannis Olivi Quaestiones in secundum librum sententiarum, ed. B. Jansen (3 vols, Ad Claras Aquas, 1922–6), ii. 36 (II.50 ad 1)).

⁶² Orford, Sciendum, pp. 138–9 (a. 31).

⁶³ Orford, Sciendum, pp. 132–3 (a. 29).

⁶⁴ Orford, Sciendum, p. 139 (a. 31).

⁶⁵ Orford, Sciendum, p. 141 (a. 31), my emphasis.

⁶⁶ Orford, Sciendum, p. 142 (a. 31).

⁶⁷ Aquinas, In Metaphysicam, VII. lect. 16, § 1635.

⁶⁸ Orford, Sciendum, p. 141 (a. 31).

⁶⁹ Marrone, The Light of Thy Countenance, ii. 571.

⁷⁰ Some Dominicans’ thought on these issues can be found in in A. Fitzpatrick, ‘Dominican theology at the early fourteenth-century universities: bodily identity in the quodlibets of Nicholas Trivet, Hervaeus Natalis, and John of Naples’, in King’s Hall, Cambridge and the Fourteenth-Century Universities: New Perspectives, ed. J. Marenbon (forthcoming).

⁷¹ Richard Knapwell, Quaestio disputata de unitate formae, ed. F. E. Kelley (Paris, 1982), pp. 67–8 ( responsio section). For commentary, see Fitzpatrick, Thomas Aquinas on Bodily Identity, pp. 178–9.

⁷² R. Marston, Quodlibeta Quatuor, ed. G. Etzkorn and I. Brady (Grottaferrata, 1994), p. 427 (IV.27 ad 1).

⁷³ John Peckham, Registrum, iii. 922–3, cf. also 866.

⁷⁴ See, further, Fitzpatrick, Thomas Aquinas on Bodily Identity, pp. 159–65, 178–9.

⁷⁵ Friedman, Intellectual Traditions at the Medieval University, i. 22.