Bulletin de Philosophie Médiévale, Volume 62, Issue, Page 213-250, January 2020.

The article focuses on Matěj of Knín, a member of the circle of the Bohemian followers of John Wyclif. It proposes a reconstruction of Matěj’s academic career and sheds light on the role he played...

The article focuses on Matěj of Knín, a member of the circle of the Bohemian followers of John Wyclif. It proposes a reconstruction of Matěj’s academic career and sheds light on the role he played in the late 14th and early 15th century in the reception and development of Wyclif’s metaphysical views in Prague. In particular, Matěj’s views on creatural perfection are taken into account, as they are presented in a quaestio ascribed to Matěj by a marginal note in the (...) only extant manuscript copy, and edited in the appendix. (shrink)

This article takes issue with the most authoritative argument for the commonplace that John Wyclif was an extreme determinist: he denied distinctions between divine ideas and God’s metaphysical constituents and between ideas as principle of divine cognition of creatures and as models for their production ad extra ; since as a constituent of God’s essence every divine idea is absolutely necessary, and every idea is unfailingly a pattern for creation, therefore God cannot but create anything He can think of. This (...) paper argues against the premise that Wyclif never distinguished rationes and exemplaria by examining significant excerpts from Wyclif’s edited and unedited academic writings in which the distinction is assumed or discussed. Wyclif maintains that there are more ideas in God than created essences ad extra, and that God’s absolute power covers more than His ordained power does. To stress that not every divine idea is automatically a model for creation, Wyclif sometimes includes in his standard taxonomy of being a hitherto unnoticed level, the esse intentionale, which is eternal and ad intra, like the esse intelligibile, but contingent, the kind of being in which something participates as the result of God’s free choice to bring it into existence ad extra at the due time. (shrink)

This paper deals with three references found in John Wyclif’s unpublished De scientia Dei to a certain Tractatus 13, whose title relates to the position it holds in the first book of Wyclif’s Summa de ente. They are puzzling references, since the first book of the Summa is made up barely of seven tracts. In this paper I argue that the three references are actually linking devices to the final section of the De ente praedicamentali. Moreover, I maintain that, at (...) the time of the compilation of his De scientia Dei, Wyclif conceived the first book of his Summa as containing thirteen tracts, the last seven of which later collected under a single item. This allows for a broader and more consistent account of the order and dating of the De scientia Dei and other Wyclif’s writings. (shrink)

La riflessione del maestro inglese può senz’altro essere considerata per molti versi forte: basti pensare alla piena fiducia riposta nella convergenza di ragione e fede e nella sinergia di metafisica realista e logica della scrittura. Tuttavia, non mancano tracce di debolezza: il discorso teologico del primo Wyclif non solo è più complesso e articolato di quanto non si sia soliti pensare, ma oltretutto sembra condurre a conclusioni ben lontane dall’affermazione estrema e urtante di un unico partito possibile per Dio e (...) per l’uomo. Quanto alle formulazioni più mature, oltre alla possibilità di rintracciare indizi di debolezza nello spirito delle tesi giovanili, sembra anche attestabile la presenza di tracce di indebolimento: questo è il bilancio da trarre circa gli interventi correttivi cui Wyclif sottopose le proprie dottrine teologiche, private con il procedere degli anni del sostegno garantito dai ben congegnati argomenti filosofici.La stessa ricezione del suo pensiero da parte della tradizione può dirsi debole, viziata da fraintendimenti e da letture unilaterali, nonché spesso priva del conforto di riscontri testuali.Il ritratto ben noto del riformatore inglese – alla luce di quanto detto sin qui – reclama forse un ricorso più convinto al chiaro-scuro. Basti pensare al dubbio circa l’efficacia del tentativo proposto proprio nel giovanile De universalibus, così come nel De dominio divino, di una conciliazione tra la necessità degli eventi futuri quoad prescienciam Dei e la libertà umana di determinare le proprie azioni, che pure sembrerebbe suffragata da molte evidenze testuali.Un modo, questo, per dire che la ballata leggendaria di un Wyclif determinista continuerà ancora a essere cantata. (shrink)