Illustrations of the History of Medieval Thought and Learning/Appendix V

by Reginald Lane Poole

V. Excursus on a supposed Anticipation of Saint Anselm.

1. Saint Anselm has been generally regarded as the first writer in the course of the middle ages who put forth a formal argument in favour of the existence of a God. Dr. von Prantl, however, claims the priority for William abbat of Hirschau, and infers from the fact that William is known to have been in correspondence with Anselm, at a date anterior to the publication of his Monologium, that the latter derived from William the idea of framing the argument in question. Dr. von Prantl's hypothesis is contained in a paper printed in the first part of the Sitzungsberichte der königlich Bayerischen Akademie der Wissenschaften zu München for 1861; and his results on the particular point which I have stated are given in full in his ^m Geschichte der Logik im Abendlande. The two arguments, however, are quite different, William's resting upon the design and orderly government of the universe, while Anselm's proceeds from the existence of relative good to that of an absolute Good; a reasoning which he subsequently exchanged for the simple proof that the being of God is implied in our thought of him. Besides, it is clear that the link sought to be established is at best a plausible conjecture: we have no evidence that the two men corresponded on the subject. Still it would be a sufficiently interesting coincidence if we could show that the first attempt among Christians during the middle ages to prove the existence of a God suggested itself to these two contemporaries.

2. Dr. von Prantl thinks that the argument was derived from Constantine the Carthaginian, afterwards a monk of Monte Cassino, who died before the year 1072, and who had acquired it, together with the physical learning for which he was famous, during a scholar's life of near forty years in the Mohammadan east. It is certain that the 'argument from design' appears in Arabian philosophy a century earlier,^[1] but there is no hint that it occurs in Constantine's writings. William, it is added, was in Rome in 1075, a few years after Constantine's death, and may then have made the acquaintance with the latter's books, which his own productions show him to have turned to good account. We have, however, no information as to the date at which William himself wrote the treatise; and an examination of the book will soon show us that it is really later by a couple of generations than its supposed date, and has only by a blunder been attributed to William of Hirschau.

3. The little volume of Philosophicarum et astronomicarum Institutionum Guilielmi Hirsaugiensis olim Abbatis Libri tres, which was printed at Basle in 1531, quarto, is textually the same book with the Περὶ Διδάξεων sive Elementorum Philosophiae Libri IV, printed among the works of ⁿ Bede in the Basle edition of 1563, folio. This Περὶ Διδάξεων, however, although it is actually quoted as Bede's, and as a possible source of an opinion of Abailard, by so accomplished a scholar as ^o Charles de Rémusat, has been generally recognized as the work of William of Conches, certainly since the publication of ^p Oudin's Commentarius de Scriptoribus Ecclesiasticis, and of the ^q twelfth volume of the Histoire littéraire de la France. As long ago too as 1838 Charles Jourdain pointed out that the work in question existed also in the twentieth volume of the Lyons Maxima Bibliotheca Patrum the title De Philosophia Mundi, and under the name of Honorius of Autun;^[2] and neither Jourdain nor any other writer (previous to Dr. von Prantl) who had mastered the facts, with reference either to the Περὶ Διδάξεων or to the De Philosophia Mundi, had any doubt that their, or rather its, authorship belonged to William of Conches. Nor is manuscript authority wanting: it is found with his name, to take a single example, in a manuscript of ^r University college, Oxford, nr vi p. 389, under the title Philosophiae Compendium. The fact, however, that the contrary hypothesis is supported by a scholar so distinguished as Dr. von Prantl, even though he has failed to observe the identity to which I draw attention, seems to justify a renewed examination of the question, in order to ascertain whether the book already thrice obscured under the names of William of Hirschau, Bede, and Honorius of Autun, could by any possibility be by the first of the three. I shall cite the three recensions as 'Hirschau,' 'Bede,' and 'Honorius,' premising that when I speak of identity I do not exclude divergences, often wide divergences, extending not only to the interchange of unimportant words, inflexions, &c., but also to the order of words in a sentence, and even further; such, in fact, as one is prepared to find in works so carelessly reproduced as those of a medieval writer, not of the first rank, would naturally be.

4. In each edition the work bears a different title, and in 'Hirschau' it is divided into three books, while the others have four. The manner in which quotations are introduced throws a curious light on the processes by which writings were adapted to different authors. The writer of the manuscript from which 'Bede' is printed, intentionally effaced what occurred to him as incompatible with the age of the presumed author.^[3] He has, however, gone carelessly enough to work. After, for instance, changing ^s Constantini, which refers to the eleventh-century Carthaginian, into the plural ^t philosophorum, he has left secundum eum immediately after: and he suppresses the name ^u Johannitius, which indicates Honain ben-Isaac, a Jewish physician of the ninth century, while he leaves untouched the reference to this writer's ^v medical treatise known as the Isagoge, possibly through an ignorant confusion with the work of Porphyry which exercised so signal an influence on the learning of the middle ages. Yet the citations of classical and subclassical authors, some perhaps more obscure than Constantine, are as a rule correctly given. In one instance a reference has been obscured in 'Hirschau,' apparently in the interest of his authorship; it is suggested in 'Bede' and is given fully in 'Honorius':

Honorius p. 999 a.	Bede 313.	Hirschau 8.
w Cuius expositionem si quis quaerat, in glossulis nostris super Platonem inveniat.	Cuius exponere, si quis quaerat in aliis nostris scriptis inveniet.	Cuics expositio alias est.

5. Of the three recensions of the treatise, 'Bede' is by far the worst;^[4] as a rule it is inferior to 'Hirschau,' while the latter is perhaps slightly inferior to 'Honorius.' None of the three editions, however, is complete. 'Hirschau' breaks off first, just ^x after having introduced the subject of the soul, whereas 'Bede' proceeds from that point for a page and a-half further and 'Honorius' a few sentences further still, the additional matter consisting of nearly twelve chapters in 'Honorius.' This continuation is partly occupied with ^y the soul, which, however, is only cursorily treated. The author then passes on to ^z the ages of man and their characteristics, and thus arrives at the subject of ^a education. These last four chapters occur also in 'Hirschau,' but at the beginning of the book, under the title of Aliquot philosophicae Sententiae. In the closing sentence of 'Bede,' which also concludes the section prefixed to 'Hirschau,' we read the following scheme of the order in which learning should proceed:

^b Ordo vero discendi talis est ut quia per eloquentiam omnis fit doctrina, prius instruamur^[5] in eloquentia cuius sunt tres partes.... Initiandi ergo sumus in grammatica, deinde in dialectica, postea in rhetorica. Quibus instructi et ut armis muniti, ad studium philosophiae debemus accedere, cuius hic est ordo, ut prius in quadrivio,.. deinde in divina pagina, quippe ut per cognitionem creaturae ad cognitionem creatoris perveniamus.

This in reality opens a new division of the author's whole subject; for, as 'Honorius' continues, quoniam in omni doctrina grammatica praecedit, it is his design to treat of grammar and, we may presume, of the other studies in their order. ^c Sed quoniam, he concludes, de propositis supra.. sectantes compendia diximus, ut animus lectoris alacrior ad caetera accedat, hic quartae partis longitudinem terminemus.

6. Hitherto I have assumed nothing with respect to the authorship of the work in question, although at the outset its absence from the list of William of Hirschau's works given by ^d Trittenheim, who had peculiar qualifications for knowing about the monastery of Hirschau, may seem to raise a presumption against its accuracy; not to speak of the surprise with which we find that most orthodox abbat credited with a theology betraying only too evidently the influence of Abailard. I have limited myself to showing the identity of the three works, which had previously, as I thought, escaped detection. In this I have since learned that I was mistaken. The fact was pointed out by Dr. Valentin Rose in the Literarische Centralblatt so long ago as ^e June 16, 1861. The sequel was interesting. ^f Dr. von Prantl in a reply professed with remarkable courage his familiarity with the phenomenon of which Dr. Rose charitably supposed him to be ignorant. It was difficult to believe that a man could describe at length a treatise which he knew to be textually identical with another work printed under a different name, and purporting to belong to a different century, without a word of allusion to the latter.^[6] Dr. von Prantl added that he proposed to prove from further evidence that William of Conches had used the work of William of Hirschau. [In his second edition Dr. von Prantl suppressed the pages about William of Hirschau, and transplanted something from them into his account of William of Conches, pp. 127 sq.]

The blunder, however, has survived, and Dr. von Prantl's theory was treated seriously by professor Wagenmann in the ^g Goettingischen gelehren Anzeigen for 1865 and by ^h Dr. Reuter.

1. See the passage cited in the Sitzungsberichte, ubi supra, p. 20, n. 55 from Dieterici, Die Naturanschauung und Naturphilosophie der Araber im zehnten Jahrhundert, p. 162; Berlin 1861.
2. Jourdain claims the discovery in the Notices et Extraits des Manuscrits, 20 (2) 43, n. 1. The Histoire littéraire impartially describes the same work under the head both of Honorius (vol. 12. 178 sq.) and of William of Conches. M. Hauréau, Singularités historiques et littéraires 243, supposes that the original ascription of the work to Honorius by the editors of the Maxima Bibliotheca Patrum was a mere guess: this is improbable.
3. M. Haureau, Singularités 238, has not noticed this peculiarity, and charges the editors with inadvertence in admitting a work as Bede's which contained references to later writers. As a matter of fact M. Hauréau takes his quotations from Honorius.
4. In a few cases it contains good readings, as in p. 316, where commixtio and coniunctio stand in an inverted order from that in Hirschau 18, thus rendering Dr. von Prantl's emendation, p. 15 n. 39, superfluous.
5. I correct from Hirschau.
6. The work is described under William of Hirschau, Gesch. der Logik 2. 83–85; and under William of Conches, 2. 127 sq.