449. Anna Tropia on Jesuit Philosophy
We learn from Anna Tropia how Jesuit philosophy of mind broke new ground in the scholastic tradition.
Note: this transcription was produced by automatic voice recognition software. It has been corrected by hand, but may still contain errors. We are very grateful to Tim Wittenborg for his production of the automated transcripts and for the efforts of a team of volunteer listeners who corrected the texts.
PA: We have been talking about scholastic philosophy in the Counter-Reformation in the last few episodes, especially I talked already about the Jesuits and about the Dominicans with their revival of Aquinas. I also mentioned the Franciscans a little bit. For example, I mentioned Cardinal Cisneros, who founded the university of Alcalá. So we've seen the various orders here, but I'm not sure that the listeners would yet have a really distinct feel of what differentiates the orders from each other, especially in terms of their philosophical commitments. Could you say something about the Jesuits in this respect? Is there anything sort of distinctive about their approach to scholastic philosophy?
AT: Sure. That's a very good question. And this is also a question that often comes up when talking about just with scholasticism: What makes it distinctive? What differentiates them from other thinkers, religious thinkers, such as the Franciscans, whom you mentioned? Of Dominicans? Well, a lot of things come to my mind because I am a specialist of Jesuit thought. And although I still think that every Jesuit somehow is a word in itself, so I think about them as all distinct thinkers. Nevertheless, there are two concepts that easily would come to my mind: I would say erudition and eclecticism. These are like two very large labels, so I have to explain a little bit what I want to say. Erudition because, first of all, since the foundation of the Society of Jesus in 1541, the founder, Ignatius of Loyola, thought about this project as a pedagogical one. So first of all, he wanted to find an author which actually would make as number one point of its agenda pedagogy. The foundation of many colleges around Europe is a sign of this. Many colleges and teaching. This is actually what counts the most for Ignatius and for his (brothers?) as well. But this is about pedagogy. This is not exactly erudition. Why erudition? Well, I can give you an example. I think that giving examples is always the best to understand. If we take one of the works produced by one of the Jesuits I'm going to talk about today: Girolamo Dandini, an Italian Jesuit who was a philosophy teacher in Paris in the 16th century. Well, he is the only one, by the way, who published a work of his own in Paris from the Parisian College. He published this work, De Corpore Animato, in 1610 in Paris, which is basically not a commentary on Aristotle, but we could say an exploded commentary on Aristotle. A real Summa on the Scientia de Anima. Basically, an all there is to know about the science of the soul from Aristotle up to the present day. It was really, I think, very important for them to show that they could provide students with the best possible education. And why erudition? Because they really wanted to exhibit their great knowledge, knowledge of the sources, knowledge of Greek, for instance, about Aristotle. Sometimes they also brag off a little bit about some kind of Arabic knowledge, which is pretty interesting. Of Jewish as well. Because they were... mostly the first generation of Jesuits, they were all humanist thinkers. So they gave great importance to philology, to a precise cognition of the text. And if you compare these to other texts produced in more or less the same period, it's very different. You won't find this attitude; this humanist attitude or erudite attitude in Dominican texts. Eclecticism, the second word which comes to my mind. The founder, let's go back to Ignatius, he gave his brethren only basically one rule to the teachers: 'You will follow Aristotle in philosophy and Thomas Aquinas in theology.' This rule is pretty famous. We can find it in the Constitutiones, the first kind of regulation the Jesuits had for teaching, which precedes many years the more famous Ratio Studiorum, the study plan of the Jesuits. This rule was basically made, I think, to be ignored because the way they were commenting on Aristotle, the way they were commenting on Thomas Aquinas, or basically each time they mention Aquinas is basically to go against him. With Aristotle it's different because they literally could make say Aristotle whatever they wanted to. Like another example to understand that the soul is immortal, is something which Aristotle, according to them, defended everywhere in his works. Sure, in an explicit way with plenty of proof. With Aristotle it was easier, right? But with Aquinas less easier because of his authoritative role as a theologian, because in 16th century Aquinas actually gained more power in the university. People stopped commenting on the Peter Lombard Sentences and started commenting on the Summa directly. Well, if you want to find an example of how much they were going against Aquinas, you have to go to the commentaries they produced on the Summa by Thomas Aquinas. They were commenting this just to go against him, which is really interesting. But this is something which applies to all the Jesuits I know - no exceptions. That is why I thought about these two concepts, although they are very broad - erudition and eclecticism -, but because I was thinking mainly about the number of the sources we find in their works and also about the freedom they had, this free approach to philosophy and to authority as well.
PA: Okay, that would really be a good contrast to the Dominicans, of course, because they tend to stick to Aquinas' authority pretty closely, not slavishly. Let's also just cover quickly which authors we're going to be talking about. So you already mentioned one commentator on the De Anima. Do you want to give us his name again?
AT: Girolamo Dandini. The Parisian College was amazing. It was like there was a certain mix of people. There was just one French teacher, Jean Châtelier. The other ones were mainly Spanish, like the founder, Ignatius of Loyola. So I have mentioned Girolamo Dandini, who was an Italian, and other teachers in Paris were Juan Maldonado and Jacob of Borrasa, mostly known as the Valentinus. I don't know why, but this is the name I found everywhere in the manuscripts. And then Jean Châtelier, and then Dandini. These guys were teachers, philosophy and theology teachers, teaching in Paris. Why am I talking just about Paris? Because thus far... (it's many years, too many years already), I have been carrying out a project of edition of still unpublished sources of lecturers, of philosophy and theology teachers. What I'm talking about is mainly notes taken by the students, the reportationes by students, which are still unpublished, that can be found everywhere in Europe, in every big library. That's why I would like to come to Munich, to see you, but also to go to consult some sources I haven't seen yet. I have focused on Paris mostly because we don't know anything about the cultural production of the Jesuit Parisian College thus far. I have edited some years ago the first... what is extant of the first philosophy lecture given by Juan Maldonado there in 1564. So rather early, the Society of Jesus was something relatively new, so to say. There was still no official regulations such as the Ratio Studiorum and... even more freedom. So who is Juan Maldonado? Who are the others? And why should anyone be caring about these perfect, unknown people? Well, because usually when you think about the Jesuits of the 16th century, the big names of those that come to mind like Pedro de Fonseca, Francisco Suarez, or Luis de Molina... Why these names come to mind? Because these authors actually published a book, and we tend to think that if you publish a book, you have a certain dissemination. Well, I'm not convinced at all that this can be applied to Jesuits and overall to thinkers of the 16th century, because the practice of not (taking?) was pretty lively by then. And it was enough to assure the popularity of a teacher. For instance, Maldonado, whose name today is mostly forgotten, enjoyed a very large popularity in his day. And well, I can say something about him because I don't expect anyone to know who he was.
PA: Yeah, I have to say, I'd never heard of Maldonado until I read your work on him.
AT: Sure, that makes perfect sense. As you can imagine easily, he was a Spanish man from Extremadura and he studied in Salamanca. He was the student of another relatively famous Jesuit, Francisco de Toledo. He was very talented, apparently, in philosophy. He had great popularity as a teacher. So aged 24, he was sent to the very famous Roman college to teach, and then to the newly-founded Parisian college. That was very important because Ignatius was already dead and gone, but Paris was the place where the society of Jesus was founded. So a rather important place in the heart of a Jesuit, and Maldonado was sent there to inaugurate the teaching of philosophy. Even his enemies, still we find traces even in his enemies' text about one fact, that his popularity was crazy. People were literally fighting to get a place in the classroom, and you had poor people together with princes, noble people of France. So he was someone rather authoritative, rather popular. What else? He was a philologist, as I already said. He had this humanist approach. What does this mean? For instance, in the text I edited, which is what is extant from his first course: a lecture on Aristotle on the soul. I recall for those who might not remember that Aristotle was basically an essential part of the study plan in Jesuit colleges. The students were spending the first three years of their formation by reading Aristotle. So they started with the logic and then the studies on animals. And then in the second year, they were maybe passing to Physics and On the Soul. And then at the end, Metaphysics. This was more or less the plan, but of course, there could be changes. The first course taught by Maldonado is a course On the Soul. This course is nowadays lost because as I might have said, Maldonado, as he was alive, never published anything. Which sounds as a contrast with our nowadays motto, 'Publish or perish', of course, but it was another time.
PA: He wouldn't have gotten tenure today.
AT: Never, never. He was a great teacher, but this is actually... this got to my point. Why to care about unknown, obscure people who most likely did not publish anything? Why don't we have content just by reading Suarez, Fonseca or Molina? Well, because the fact that these guys, the guys like Maldonado or Châtelier; Dandini actually published something big. The fact that they didn't publish doesn't mean anything about the quality of the teaching, of their thought. Actually, I think that it is the other way around: at that time, publishing was an exception and not the rule. Lucky guys, because today it's exactly the contrary: we tend to publish way too much, I think. But going back to Maldonado, I have edited (it is now accessible to everybody) what is extant from his first course, which was a course on the soul. But what is extant is a synthesis of the course. A text which is called 'De Origine Natura et Immortalitate Anime', so 'On the Origin, Nature and the Immortality of the Soul'. It's a companion, very short text. But this short text, this short companion, will become almost a literary genre because we find it everywhere. At the end of the commentaries on the soul, produced by the Parisian Jesuits (but not only), I found similar things everywhere in the reportationes by students taken from lectures on the soul. So it was rather influential, I think. Another proof of Maldonado's influence, which is very far the 'publish or perish', is that we find manuscripts which contain reportationes of his courses really literally in every big or even less big library in Europe, everywhere. It's crazy. I have not finished myself a comprehensive catalogue, but thus far I have counted something like 100 manuscripts - It's a lot; it's really a lot.
PA: Yeah, that's amazing. Well, let's move on to the content of these reports about his teaching. You just said that they come under the title of 'On the Immortality of the Soul'. So what's the basic idea here? So how does he argue for the immortality of the soul? Presumably on broadly Aristotelian grounds, right?
AT: Yeah, presumably. That's a good objective. Because as I already said, for instance, people like Maldonado, but I would say like every Jesuit, not only the Parisian Jesuit, I'm trying to focus on in my work by editing the text by focusing also systematically on the doctrine. Everybody was actually working and talking about the immortality of the soul in a precise context, namely at the end of the 'Expositio De Anima', so at the end of the lecture on the soul. They were actually using different strategies. Why presumably in an Aristotelian way? Because they were using Aristotle, as I already said, to make him say whatever they wanted to. For instance, Maldonado employs 40 arguments in which his text, 'De Origine Natura et Immortalitate Anime', to say that actually everywhere, in every single writing, in every single work by Aristotle, Aristotle defended strenuously soul's immortality. He also arrives to claim, to interpret in a very, in a rather peculiar way, the most difficult passage of On the Soul, Book 3, Chapter 5 - on the agent intellect - to add some... to support his argument on the soul's immortality as it follows. When Aristotle talks about the active intellect and the patient intellect, he's in fact not talking about two intellects. This distinction is not even Aristotelian, he says. He's only talking about one intellect, the agent one, because he qualifies... Aristotle qualifies the agent intellect as impassive, eternal, and therefore immortal. So there can be no doubt that according to Aristotle the human soul is immortal. When Aristotle talks about the patient intellect... by that he was meaning in a very large sense, intellect in a rather broad sense, namely the senses, because the senses are passive and the senses die together with the body. So this is a kind of peculiar, I would say, interpretation rather strong, rather bold, because he says that the distinction between agent and patient intellect is not even Aristotelian and not philosophical either, which is kind of strong, I would say, because it is not exactly what everybody would have said. So Maldonado's strategy is to focus on the activity of the intellect, I would say to focus on the immateriality of the intellect, which is what everybody before him, of course, was doing. It's not that Aquinas was doing something particularly different. The intellect is immaterial and therefore subsistent: you can carry out an operation on its own, an activity on its own, without the help of the senses. So far so good, but Maldonado and as well as the others emphasize not only the immateriality of the intellect, but also its activity and autonomy from the senses. Striking difference, this I need to say, between these thinkers and people like Aquinas, is that they think that not the entire human soul is immaterial, only the intellect. They think that the sensitive soul is actually material and dies together with the body. That I would say quite a difference. And that is the reason behind this emphasis on the intellect's autonomy with respect to the senses.
PA: Something else that you mentioned in some of your work on this, which I find surprising, is that they say that the intellect is capable of directly grasping particular things. So when I think about the tradition of Aristotelian philosophy of mind, usually I associate that with the idea that the intellect grasps universals, like let's say giraffe. And then you use your senses and imagination and memory to grasp a particular giraffe, like Hiawatha. (I haven't mentioned her in a while, so I'm bringing her in here.) Whereas they think that intellect is capable of just grasping Hiawatha, the particular giraffe. Does that go along with what you were just saying, which is that Maldonado uses the word intellect in this kind of generic or broad way to refer to what we might call cognition, so that it could include something like sensation? Or does he really mean that you could have a properly intellective grasp of a particular, just that particular giraffe or person, whatever it is?
AT: That's a very important point because it also helps us out understanding and situating these fingers because Maldonado is not the only one in doing so. It helps us situate them in a philosophical context. We take the measure of how much they were far from Thomas Aquinas, for instance, insofar as they all defend the idea according to which the intellect can have a direct grasp of singulars without being bypassed, without doing first the conversio: first the universals, and then maybe we get a grasp of what a singular is thanks to our other source faculties. It doesn't work like this. The intellect is able to grasp both singular and universals. How? On its own. Maldonado has a very nice text because he says that the intellect can grasp its cognitive object in the way it wants. Basically, it can elicit its cognition depending on what kind of cognition it wants to get, which is rather surprising as a formula because this means that basically we can grasp singulars directly and then by making an intellectual comparison among the singulars, which is what Maldonado would call abstraction, then we can arrive to the production of our universal concept. Why was I mentioning the context of philosophical larger backgrounds? Because this is very far from Thomas Aquinas, and this gets actually much closer to a nominalist approach to philosophy of mind, for instance. Maldonado never quotes positively the nominalists, but others like Jean Châtelier, like Valentinus, or also other Jesuits - I'm thinking about Bento Pereira because I recently edited a text on the agent intellect by him -, they all quote in a very enthusiastic way Durand of St Pourçain and the anti-Thomist medieval philosophers, which is rather interesting.
PA: He's a relatively obscure 14th century nominalist, so he's in the general direction that we looked at when we were talking about people like Ockham and Buridan. The idea would be that there are only particulars out in the world, there are no real universals out in the world, and they would think that you could have some kind of cognitive grasp of a particular as such. That idea is being basically absorbed into this broadly Thomist tradition, which we are talking about here with the Jesuits.
AT: Yeah. As you can see, there is really nothing Thomist in their approach: it's actually the other way around, they are very far from Aquinas. They seem to share views with other kind of thinkers, such as Durand. Yeah, rather obscure, unfortunately, someone who definitely needs to be more studied, because he was very influential in the 16th century. We find this name everywhere in manuscripts, but interestingly, in the published books by Jesuits, the people like Suarez, for instance, who is a Durandian, I would say, definitely someone who is a fan of Durand. Nevertheless, they always try to officially part ways, like, 'no, no, no, I mean... I side with Thomas, but...', '...and Durand is wrong', '...and Scotus is wrong...'. But then eventually they always finish to assume exactly the position by a nominalist, such as Durand, and sometimes it might be Ockham as well (less obscure than Durand). But it is really Durand, I would say, the main source of inspiration they had.
PA: Is the nominalist background also relevant for something else you mentioned in your studies of this? Which again, I found quite striking. There had been this traditional set of powers or faculties that were recognized as being within the human soul. So you have intellect all the way at the top, as we already talked about, and then sensation all the way at the bottom. And then in between, you have a range of different faculties that kind of all are in the direction that Aristotle would have called phantasia. So you've got things like memory, the estimative faculty, you've got imagination... I associate all of this very strongly with Avicenna, because, of course, I'm really interested in Avicenna, right? And he develops this theory of the so-called internal senses, which would include all of these cognitive powers that lie between sensation and intellection. And something that you talk about in some of your work is that there's a kind of reductionism whereby these Jesuits eliminate some of these powers or reduce some of them to others. Can you sort of explain how that works and why they were interested in doing that?
AT: Yes, I will try to. That's actually a very interesting point, because before I was mentioning Maldonado's distinctive strategy to defend the soul's immortality, which is rather interesting, it's a philosophical approach, like he arrives to deny the traditional distinction between agent and patient intellect, and he reduces the twofold nature of the intellect to one only. When I started studying this kind of text, I was really surprised and I was asking myself, 'Why? What's the point in doing this?' And then I understood that they were all interested in reducing their accounts of the soul in a sort of a, to propose a simplified version of what has to be found in Aristotle, but mostly in the long tradition. In the long Aristotelian tradition. They wanted to get rid of all these complex terminology, for instance, which they keep using though, like agent and patient intellect, or the internal senses, which mainly they reduce most of the time to only one: to imagination. They wanted to defend a simpler account of the soul. My idea is that the reason they were doing this is because of this strong nominalist influence I had mentioned. Because if there is someone who is always quoted or referred to... the manuscripts in their courses about the precise point of the distinction, which is to reject between the two intellects is Durand. Durand famously rejected the necessity of an agent, the intellect. So basically our mind is simple, in the same time, able to be passive and active we could rephrase it, to bring itself from a state of ignorance to a state of actual current cognition by itself, because it is its own power. And we don't need to actually split the intellect in two parts. Not that we need to talk about the necessity of the support of the senses, of the so-called images, the phantasm, to carry out an intellectual process, because there is, as Durand says many times in his own text, it is impossible to think that two ontologically different things, such as the material intellect and the material parts of the soul of the material phantasm can interact. So this impossible interaction, it's something, it's an element that actually shaped a lot the theories of mind of such as the Jesuits'. It is a sentence we find everywhere. It is impossible that a phantasm can exert any kind of influence upon the intellect because of this diversity. This diversity is actually what led Jesuits to shape their accounts of cognition in a certain way, actually.
PA: That's amazing, actually, because in the Islamic world, there were critics of his theory of internal senses and they made exactly the same point. So they said, well, if you have these separate powers, then how are they, as it were, talking to each other? Because for example, if I know that all giraffes are plant-eating, then I need to be able to apply that to Hiawatha and say that Hiawatha is plant eating because all giraffes are plant eating. So who's doing that? Which power would be doing that? It could only be the soul itself, which is dealing with a universal and a particular simultaneously. It sounds like Durand of Saint-Pourçain and then these Jesuit followers that come along much later are basically making the same point, which is really interesting because there's a parallel development with no historical connection.
AT: It's super interesting also to me because the treatment of Arabic sources is always rather peculiar. I mean, I never found, for instance, any positive quote of Avicenna in the writings. I'm talking about the commentaries on the soul. And of course, Averroes was public enemy number one because it was the main enemy, the one who made the human soul perishable, and the Jesuits, first of all, they wanted to think about themselves as the living defensor of the Pope and of the Catholic Church. So they took on literally what was said in the most famous Papal bull, the Apostolici Regiminis, which was emanated in 1513. So what did the bull say? That basically philosophy teachers had to defend philosophically the truth of faith, that there is no contradiction between truth of faith and truth of philosophy, this against their enemies and in particular against the impossibility of defending the soul's immortality. So Arabic philosophers are always qualified in a very negative way in this text. But nevertheless, they knew them really well, and they were very aware of the existence of this large tradition on the science of the soul as Dandini shows very blatantly actually. One thing I wanted to add is that the way they consider the intellect is, this is something I've asked myself very often, like 'What is the intellect if we cannot talk about it in properly in Aristotelian terms?' We can say that the intellect is a sort of superpower, which is able to do whatever it wants by itself, when it wants, and in the way it wants as well, if it doesn't need the senses, but we could say in an occasionalist way. So I think about the intellect as a sort of gate, a look upon things. And I think also about the way it works in a sort of rather free superpower (superpower is indeed the best definition). But nevertheless, we need the presence of the objects because nobody, at least in my knowledge, was defending an innatistic account of cognition, like Descartes, for instance. So human beings do not have innate cognition from the start. We need to get experience in order for us to know. But how does this happen? I mean, we do not really need the senses. So how does this happen? We could say that I said occasionally approach to cognition because we need the objects to be present, senses up there, but nevertheless, there is no interaction between what the intellect does and what the senses do. They are both powers rooted in the same soul. They have powers rooted in the very same human soul, but nevertheless, they are not in touch, and we need objects to be present. But that's it. They just provide us with an occasion for intellectual knowledge or for a sensitive sense perception, for instance. That is very interesting as well because if we think about the posterity of these Jesuits, of course, we cannot say: they already said what Descartes said, as Gilson for instance, said. It's not exactly so, but we find a very interesting background for what happened next in modern philosophy.
PA: That was the last thing I was going to ask you, is whether these Jesuit texts, I mean, you said that there are all these manuscripts that are found all over Europe and they presumably would give us some insight into the kind of education that someone like Descartes would have been receiving at a Jesuit college in the early 17th century, right? Are the Enlightenment thinkers carrying forward some of these ideas, or are they more reacting against them?
AT: Well, one quick thing and then I will reply more properly. I mentioned Jean Châtelier, a philosophy teacher in Paris, a Jesuit. Well, Jean Châtelier was the dean of the College of La Flèche when Descartes was a student there, for instance. There is an immediate link.
PA: That's a very direct connection. The guy who would have been giving Descartes his detention if Descartes had misbehaved.
AT: And speaking about the dissemination, manuscript dissemination, we should consider manuscripts, although, of course, this is so unpopular today because we live in such a different age: We need to publish a lot; we need to be fast and furious sometimes. And of course, there is nothing less fast and less furious than considering the production of culture as preserved within manuscripts. This is something which is slow, by definition. It's difficult. It's slow. It requires time. Sometimes it requires traveling. But this is exactly how these people were living. I think that ideas were percolated through these notes to these reportationes because not everybody could afford a book, for instance, to buy books. And this is something that we tend to forget. Not everybody could afford to have at home Aristotle and so on and so forth, but copying the notes from someone else was rather popular. We have facts. We have manuscripts everywhere in every library, as already recalled. And this is one part of my answer. The second part, if you want to be more systematic, as I already mentioned, considering the theory of mind that comes from the Jesuits, I would say that in many respects, they anticipate - although I don't like the idea of anticipation - they were doing something on their own, right? Nevertheless, in many respects, they anticipate modern philosophy. In so far they propose a simpler account of the mind. They are Aristotelian only because they keep using Aristotelian labels. They talk about patient and agent intellect. They talk about receiving impression, which sounds very Aristotelian. They sometimes talk about medieval doctrine of the species as well. So senses and intellect receives from outside to be actualized. This is truly Aristotelian jargon. But they talk about it with a completely different sense to say that basically this doesn't make any sense. There is just one intellect. Our internal senses have just one imagination. And if you think about it, this is rather close to the account of mind that we find in later thinkers, thinking about Malbranche, Descartes, Locke, Hume. Why not? So we find somehow already ingredients of modern philosophy enacting already in their works.
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