“A Late Medieval Reaction to Thierry of Chartres’s (d. 1157) Philosophy: The Anti-Platonist...

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2012 DOI: 10.1163/156853412X629855

Vivarium 50 (2012) 53-84 brill.nl/viv

vivarium

A Late Medieval Reaction to Thierry of Chartres’s (d. 1157) Philosophy: The Anti-Platonist Argument

of the Anonymous Fundamentum Naturae

David AlbertsonUniversity of Southern California

AbstractAn anonymous manuscript from the fourteenth or early fifteenth century, recently discovered, apparently transmitted Thierry of Chartres’s philosophical theology to Nicholas of Cusa around 1440. Yet the author of the treatise is not endorsing Thierry’s views, as both Cusanus and modern readers have assumed, but in fact is writing in order to refute them. Curiously the author never mentions Thierry’s best known triad of unitas, aequalitas and conexio. But a careful comparison of the structure of the author’s argument to Thierry’s extant works shows that the author was nevertheless quite familiar with the Breton master’s writings. The reatise’s author offers an incisive critique of Thierry’s theory of “four modes of being” and rejects two of the modes in particular. From this new perspective, the manuscript can be valued as the first known evidence of Thierry of Chartres’s late medieval reception.

KeywordsThierry of Chartres, School of Chartres, Trinity, world soul, Boethius, Nicholas of Cusa

1. The Problem of Fundamentum naturae

In 1995 Maarten J.F.M. Hoenen found an anonymous manuscript while studying volumes possessed by the late medieval Dominican, Georg Schwarz. The short treatise, not in Schwarz’s hand, is titled Fundamentum naturae

*) Research for this article was supported by an Advancing Scholarship in the Humanities and Social Sciences grant from the University of Southern California. I would like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their helpful suggestions.

54 D. Albertson / Vivarium 50 (2012) 53-84

quod videtur physicos ignorasse (“The foundation of nature which the natural philosophers apparently do not know”).1 Noticing that the text parallels, nearly verbatim, several chapters of Nicholas of Cusa’s famous De docta igno-rantia from 1440, Hoenen made a persuasive argument that Cusanus used the anonymous Fundamentum as the “kernel” of his magnum opus.2 It has long been known that Cusanus borrowed from Thierry of Chartres in the first book of De docta ignorantia, but Hoenen’s discovery shows that in the second book of De docta ignorantia, Cusanus accessed Thierry’s ideas via an intermediate source, the Fundamentum treatise. This was justly hailed as “the most extraor-dinary discovery in Cusan studies in recent years.”3

The Fundamentum manuscript merits further attention, however, not only because it has been largely ignored in subsequent scholarship on De docta ignorantia, but also because Hoenen’s argument can be strengthened. In a previous article, I evaluated counterarguments from Hoenen’s critics (H. Pauli, W. Dupré, K. Kremer, H.-G. Senger and J. Hopkins), offered new textual evidence in Hoenen’s favor, and concluded that Hoenen’s analysis of Funda-mentum would benefit from further investigation of the treatise’s relation to its own twelfth-century sources.4 This task, however, is complicated by Cusanus’s own complex appropriations from the so-called “school of Chartres.”5 For this

1) Eichstätt Cod. st 687, fols. 4r-9v. On Schwarz’s collection, see Maarten J.F.M. Hoenen, Speculum philosophiae medii aevi. Die Handschriftensammlung des Dominikaners Georg Schwarz († nach 1484) (Amsterdam, 1994).2) Maarten J.F.M. Hoenen, ‘ “Ista prius inaudita.” Eine neuentdeckte Vorlage der De docta ignorantia und ihre Bedeutung für die frühe Philosophie des Nikolaus von Kues’, Medioevo. Rivista di Storia della filosofia medievale XXI (1995), 375-476. A transcript of the manuscript can be found on pp. 447-476. Hoenen anticipates and responds to several objections, including inter alia the possibilities that Fundamentum naturae is an early draft of De docta ignorantia by Cusanus or a later recension by someone else. 3) Zénon Kaluza, ‘Bulletin d’histoire des doctrines médiévales. Les XIVe et XVe siècles’, Revue des sciences philosophiques et théologiques 81 (1997), 129. 4) David Albertson, ‘A Learned Thief? Nicholas of Cusa and the Anonymous Fundamentum Naturae: Reassessing the Vorlage Theory’, Recherches de Théologie et Philosophie médiévales 77/2 (2010), 351-390. For the purposes of the present study, therefore, I do not intend merely to assume the veracity of Hoenen’s claims, but rather to continue to weigh his proposal by explor-ing the significance of the Chartrian background of the text. Only after the relationship between Fundamentum naturae and Thierry’s thought has been better determined can one return to Hoenen’s questions about Cusan authorship of De docta ignorantia, as I will do in a forthcom-ing work. 5) Regarding Richard Southern’s well-known skepticism about the existence of such a “school,” I agree with Marcia Colish, Peter Lombard, vol. 1 (Leiden, 1994), 254: “there is a detectable family

D. Albertson / Vivarium 50 (2012) 53-84 55

reason, in this article I will suspend discussion of the circumstances surround-ing Cusanus and De docta ignorantia. Instead I will focus exclusively on how the author of the Fundamentum treatise himself relates to Thierry of Chartres’s writings. The results I propose will help improve our poor understanding of the medieval reception of Thierry’s thought between Helinand of Froidmont in the late twelfth century and Nicholas of Cusa in the fifteenth.6 But they will also inevitably carry consequences for future research on De docta ignorantia.

Hoenen establishes that Fundamentum must have been written between 1267 and 1440.7 To further specify its provenance, he attempts to name its essential theme and philosophical interests. He observes that the treatise “strongly recalls” the terminology of Thierry of Chartres and his student Clarembald of Arras.8 He also notes several points of contact with the school of late medieval Albertism.9 Albertism was associated with the University of Cologne, where Georg Schwarz studied for two years and where Cusanus encountered Heymericus de Campo in the mid-1420’s. Hoenen proposes that when the Fundamentum treatise contrasts the “absolute” and the merely “contracted,” as it frequently does, it is in fact engaging the long medieval discussion of the One and the Many. “The problem that the treatise attempts to solve,” he writes, “concerns the question of how to understand this unity and multiplicity and how they relate to each other.”10 This is noteworthy because Heymericus was interested in this problem as well. Thus Hoenen sug-gests that perhaps Thierry of Chartres’s discussions of the dialectic of unitas and pluralitas caught the eye of an Albertist in Heymericus’s Cologne circle in the 1420’s or 1430’s. Attracted by Thierry’s attention to the One and the Many, the author of Fundamentum must have availed himself of Thierry’s ideas and thus come to the attention of Nicholas of Cusa.11

Hoenen’s speculation makes a fine starting point, but ultimately it relies on only one contextual factor, the philosophical problem of the One and the

resemblance among the thinkers committed to the Chartrain project, despite their individual differences, and irrespective of whether they themselves studied or taught at Chartres.” 6) Hoenen, ‘Ista prius inaudita’, 404-405. 7) Fundamentum cites the popular florilegium Auctoritates Aristotelis that originates between 1267 and 1325. Ibid., 425-26. 8) Ibid., 423-24. 9) Ibid., 426-29. See Maarten J.F.M. Hoenen, ‘Thomismus, Skotismus und Albertismus. Das Enstehen und die Bedeutung von philosophischen Schulen im späten Mittelalter’, Bochumer Philosophisches Jahrbuch für Antike und Mittelalter 2 (1997), 81-103.10) Hoenen, ‘Ista prius inaudita’, 429-30.11) Ibid., 430-34.


Many. Moreover, Hoenen’s proposed scenario assumes that the author was attracted to Thierry’s philosophy of unity and plurality. But is this true? Did the author of Fundamentum view Thierry of Chartres’s ideas with the same enthusiasm as Cusanus viewed them? It is easy to assume (and Hoenen does) that the treatise’s author hands down Thierry’s ideas more or less neutrally to the cardinal. But a careful reading reveals that this is not the case.

In fact, Fundamentum’s author writes precisely against Thierry of Chartres’s ideas. As I will show, the very raison d’être of the Fundamentum treatise is to reject several of Thierry’s most distinctive philosophical and theological inno-vations. But the author executes his elegant critique by turning Thierry’s con-cepts against themselves. This means that although he rejects the Chartrian doctrines, the author preserves much of their vocabulary within his pages and thus indirectly transmits Thierry’s distinctive terms to his readers. A hasty reader who was familiar with Thierry’s ideas from other texts, but only skimmed the Fundamentum treatise, might mistake the clever deconstruction of Thierry’s thought for a simple précis. Ironically, even after Hoenen’s dis-covery of Fundamentum exposed Cusanus’s startling debt to the treatise, the cardinal’s erroneous reading of it has remained unperturbed.

Once the possibility is raised that its author disagrees with Thierry of Chartres, basic features of Fundamentum take on a new light. The treatise’s very title appears to oppose itself to someone quite like Thierry of Chartres: “Fundamentum naturae quod videtur physicos ignorasse.”12 The phrase names three elements: a contested topic, the author’s opponents, and the reason for writing against them, namely their inadequate understanding of the contested topic. Early in Fundamentum one learns that the eponymous “foundation of nature” is unformed prime matter.13 According to Fundamentum’s author, many philosophers have tried to understand prime matter, but have only par-tially grasped it amidst great ignorance.14 Within medieval Christian texts, this trope of philosophers misconstruing creation without the light of revela-tion recalls especially Augustine’s suspicions of Platonic cosmology, particu-

12) I cite Fundamentum naturae from Hoenen’s transcription as F, giving both folio and page numbers: F 4r, 448. The two occasions of “fundamentum naturae” in the treatise both occur in the passages borrowed from the florilegium Auctoritates Aristotelis. Even if the title were not given by the author, but by Schwarz’s copyist, it nevertheless remains entirely consonant with the treatise’s argument.13) F 4r, 448, 450.14) F 5r, 452.


larly on the counts of prime matter and the Trinity.15 Since late antiquity, such natural philosophers attempting to understand matter through the appli-cation of reason were designated physici, those who study nature.16 The very title of the Fundamentum treatise, then, takes aim generally at natural philoso-phers who misconceive creation by attempting to understand it through rea-son alone, perhaps out of an untoward sympathy with Platonism.

If the author of Fundamentum worries over the theological interpretation of prime matter or decries the blindness of philosophers to God’s presence in creation, these are certainly common gestures in medieval Christian thought influenced by Augustine. But they do not accord at all with Thierry of Char-tres’s idiosyncratic doctrine of creation. In fact Thierry fits the bill rather well of those whom the treatise’s title would single out for rebuke. One of Thierry’s students proudly applies the term physicus to the Breton master himself.17 Another of his immediate students, Clarembald of Arras, already shows signs of Augustinian anxiety about his master’s daring Genesis commentary, particularly on the subject of prime matter.18 Thierry’s Tractatus on Genesis proposed to interpret the days of creation, precisely, “according to natural philosophy” (secundum physicam). His invocation of “philosophers” is always sanguine in his commentaries on Genesis and on Boethius, commending to the reader the wisdom of Pythagoras, Asclepius, Plato, Aristotle and Virgil. The particular genius of Thierry’s theology, as Peter Dronke has remarked, is its capacity to combine extreme Platonism with extreme naturalism.19

The next step toward supplementing Hoenen’s analysis is therefore a careful study of how the author of the Fundamentum treatise presents Thierry’s doc-trines. How does this philosophical critique operate, and what concepts does it use? What does it tell us about the unknown author’s knowledge of Thierry’s works? In what follows, I show how Fundamentum’s author organizes his

15) To name just two examples: see Confessiones, Lib. VII, in James J. O’Donnell, Augustine: Confessions (Oxford, 1992), vols. 1-2; De genesi ad litteram, CSEL 28/1, ed. Joseph Zycha (Vienna, 1894), Lib. I, 3-31.16) See H. Schipperges, ‘Zur Bedeutung von ‘physica’ und zur Rolle des ‘physicus’ in der abendländischen Wissenschaftsgeschichte’, Sudhoffs Archiv 60/4 (1976), 354-74; Andreas Speer, Die entdeckte Natur. Untersuchungen zu Begründungsversuchen einer “scientia naturalis” im 12. Jahrhundert (Leiden, 1995).17) See the anonymous Hermetic treatise (formerly attributed to John of Salisbury), De septem septenis, PL 199: 960A-960C.18) See Clarembald of Arras, Tractatulus super librum Genesis, in Life and Works of Clarembald of Arras, ed. Nikolaus M. Häring (Toronto, 1965), 225-249.19) Peter Dronke, ‘Thierry of Chartres’, in A History of Twelfth-Century Western Philosophy, ed. Peter Dronke (Cambridge, 1988), 384 (358-85).


treatise as a direct confrontation with some of Thierry’s distinctive conceptual inventions, and how this antagonistic perspective raises new questions regard-ing the provenance of the anonymous Fundamentum treatise.

2. Thierry of Chartres’s Innovations and the Argumentative Structure of Fundamentum naturae

In order to measure how Fundamentum’s author repeats, critiques, or other-wise manipulates Thierry of Chartres’s ideas, it is important first to map some of Thierry’s most distinctive philosophical and theological inventions. Thierry of Chartres is perhaps best known for reviving Augustine’s mathemat-ical triad of “unity,” “equality,” and their mutual “connection” as a name for the divine Trinity.20 This doctrine appears in Thierry’s early commentary on Genesis and in each of his subsequent Boethian commentaries.21 Already in the twelfth century, Clarembald of Arras, Achard of Saint Victor, Alan of Lille and others all repeated Thierry’s mathematical Trinity in their own works, and since Nicholas of Cusa also frequently cites the triad, it is this aspect of Thierry’s thought that has received the most scholarly attention.22 The Fundamentum

20) “Eadem tribus aeternitas, eadem incommutabilitas, eadem maiestas, eadem potestas. In patre unitas, in filio aequalitas, in spiritu sancto unitatis aequalitatisque concordia, et tria haec unum omnia propter patrem, aequalia omnia propter filium, conexa omnia propter spiritum sanc-tum.” Augustine, De doctrina christiana, I.12 (V.5), in Augustine: De Doctrina Christiana, ed. R.P.H. Green (Oxford, 1995), 16. See further Bernard McGinn, ‘Does the Trinity Add Up? Transcendental Mathematics and Trinitarian Speculation in the Twelfth and Thirteenth Cen-turies’, in Praise No Less Than Charity: Studies in Honor of M. Chrysogonus Waddell, ed. Rozanne Elder (Kalamazoo, 2002), 237-64.21) See Thierry of Chartres, Tractatus de sex dierum operibus 30-47, in Commentaries on Boethius by Thierry of Chartres and His School, ed. Nikolaus M. Häring (Toronto 1971) [hereafter TC ] 568-575; Commentum II.30-38, TC 77-80; Lectiones V.16-19, TC 218-219; Glosa V.17-29, TC 296-299.22) See, for example, M.-D. Chenu, ‘Une définition Pythagoricienne de la vérité au moyen âge’, Archives d’histoire doctrinale et littéraire du moyen âge 28 (1961): 7-13; Édouard Jeauneau, ‘Mathématique et Trinité chez Thierry de Chartres’, in Metaphysik im Mittelalter. Miscellanea Mediaevalia 2, ed. Paul Wilpert (Berlin, 1963), 289-95; ibid., ‘Note sur l’Ecole de Chartres’, in ibid., Lectio philosophorum. Recherches sur l’Ecole de Chartres (Amsterdam, 1973), 5-36 (9-23); Werner Beierwaltes, ‘Einheit und Gleichheit. Eine Fragestellung im Platonismus von Chartres und ihre Rezeption durch Nicolaus Cusanus’, in Denken des Einen. Studien zur Neuplatonischen Philosophie und ihrer Wirkungsgeschichte (Frankfurt am Main, 1985), 368-84; Klaus Riesenhuber, ‘Arithmetic and the Metaphysics of Unity in Thierry of Chartres: On the Philosophy of Nature and Theology in the Twelfth Century’, in Nature in Medieval Thought—Some Approaches East and West, ed. Chumaru Koyama (Leiden, 2000), 43-73.


treatise, significantly, does not refer to Thierry’s mathematical Trinity—a cru-cial and perhaps deliberate oversight, which I consider further below. Given this situation, it is important to recall Thierry’s several other distinctive inno-vations, not only theological but also philosophical, that the Fundamentum treatise does engage but that have tended to receive less attention by historians of philosophy.23 Here I briefly list four other concepts that Thierry innovated and note the work in which the concept apparently originated.24

(1) The trinity of perpetuals. In his Commentum on Boethius’s De trinitate, Thierry proposes that a “trinity of perpetuals” descends from the mathemati-cal Trinity.25 These “perpetuals” are the fixed cosmic constants: materia, forma and spiritus. Although each proceeds from the divine unity, each is asso-ciated with a different divine person. Matter in its alterity descends from divine unity, the ground of every difference. The forms of beings, in their self-identical integrity, descend from divine equality. Thierry calls the third perpetual descended from the divine conexio either “spirit,” “substantial motion,” or “substantial motion of spirit.” Matter and form naturally seek union with each other, just as unitas and equalitas are drawn together in conexio. Hence the universal movement of matter toward form reflects the love that structures intra-Trinitarian relations. Thierry’s doctrine of perpetuals appears exclusively in his Commentum on Boethius and not the more mature Lectiones or Glosa.

23) More balanced discussions of Thierry’s different doctrines can be found in Anneliese Stol-lenwerk, Der Genesiskommentar Thierry von Chartres und die Thierry von Chartres zugeschriebenen Kommentare zu Boethius “De Trinitate,” Diss. Universität zu Köln, 1971; Enzo Maccagnolo, Rerum universitas. Saggio sulla filosofia di Teodorico di Chartres (Florence, 1976); Dronke, ‘Thierry of Chartres’; Stephen Gersh, ‘Platonism—Aristotelianism—Neoplatonism. A Twelfth-Century Metaphysical System and its Sources’, in Renaissance and Renewal in the Twelfth Century, eds. Robert L. Benson and Giles Constable (Toronto, 1991), 512-34; Vera Rodrigues, ‘Thierry de Chartres, Lecteur du De Trinitate de Boèce’, in Boèce ou la chaîne des savoirs, ed. Alain Galonnier (Louvain/Paris, 2003), 649-63; ibid., ‘Pluralité et particularisme ontologique chez Thierry de Chartres’, in Arts du Langage et Théologie aux confins des XIe et XIIe siècles. Textes, Maîtres, Débats, ed. Irène Rosier-Catach (Turnhout, 2011), 509-536.24) On dating Thierry’s works I concur with Häring’s sequence of Tractatus, Commentum, Lec-tiones and Glosa, pace Maccagnolo, Rerum universitas, 211-215, and Dronke, ‘Thierry of Char-tres’, 360. On the critical issue of dating Commentum see further Constant J. Mews, ‘In Search of a Name and Its Significance: A Twelfth-Century Anecdote about Thierry and Peter Abaelard’, Traditio 44 (1988), 192 n. 80 (171-200).25) Commentum II.39-42, TC 80-82.


(2) Reciprocal folding. Although Thierry mentions “folding” once in pass-ing in Commentum, he fully explores it in the later Lectiones.26 Drawn origi-nally from Boethius’s discussion of providence, the terms complicatio and explicatio designate the reciprocal movements of God “enfolding” the world and the world “unfolding” God.27 Thierry uses the terms to explain how theo-logical knowledge is inextricably connected with natural scientific knowledge. Theology knows God as the enfolding of what natural science knows as the unfolded cosmos. The figure of folding prohibits one from distancing the cre-ation from the Creator as if spatially separated. Rather, it sets up a new spatial-ity (folding) in which divine unity becomes the very ground of creaturely difference, the singular point expressed in the unfurling curve of the fold. Thierry almost always deploys the two terms together in order to define the relation between unity and plurality. Thus God is the simple unity that “enfolds” the universe of things, but the universe’s plurality and alterity are the “unfolding of unity,” and together, the “unfolding of this enfolding is all things that were and shall be and are.”28 Besides this general use, however, reciprocal folding mostly appears in Thierry’s theory of science; it explains how theology, mathematics and physics approach knowledge of the same fold of Creator-creation differently through four different modes of being.

(3) The four modes of being. Thierry sketched a five-fold hierarchy of being in the earlier Commentum, but abandoned it for the system of four modes introduced in Lectiones.29 The major improvement of the modal theory in Lectiones is its articulation through reciprocal folding at two different levels (hence four modes): (i) “absolute necessity,” or God; (ii) “the necessity of enfolding,” which appears to be equivalent to the unfolding of simple divine necessity; (iii) “determined possibility,” or unfolded possibility; and (iv) “abso-lute possibility” or enfolded possibility.30 Boethius suggested in De trinitate

26) Commentum II.49, TC 84.27) Boethius, De consolatione philosophiae, IV.6.7-13, in Boethius. De consolatione philosophiae. Opuscula theologica, ed. C. Moreschini (Munich/Leipzig, 2005), 122:20-123:56. Thierry acknowl-edges this dependence at Lectiones II.6, TC 156; see also Commentum IV.42-44, TC 107.28) Lectiones II.4-5, TC 155.29) Commentum II.28, TC 77, and IV.7, TC 97. 30) Lectiones II.9, TC 157. Later Thierry makes clear that reciprocal folding structures two pairs of terms: Lectiones II.10-11, TC 157-58; Glosa II.20-21, TC 273. Here and elsewhere I will translate necessitas complexionis, the second mode of being, as “the necessity of enfolding,” even though when the term appears in Cusan texts it is usually translated as “the necessity of connec-tion” (D. and W. Dupré; P. Wilpert and H.G. Senger; H.L. Bond) or “connecting necessity” ( J. Hopkins). These translations imply that complexio resembles conexio, but we may also com-pare complexio to complicatio, since both share the Greek root plekein (to weave, fold, enfold);


that the wise man studies each discipline according to the appropriate rationes of each field of knowledge.31 Thierry draws the conclusion that if physics, mathematics and theology all study the same cosmos, then the intellect grasps different modes through different sciences.32 Each mode denotes a different way of seeing the cosmos, a temporary phenomenal reduction, as it were:

For theology considers [absolute] necessity which is unity and simplicity. Mathematics considers the necessity of enfolding which is the unfolding of simplicity, for mathematics considers the forms of things in their truth. But physics considers determined and absolute possibility. Thus absolute necessity and absolute possibility are the extremes among these, and the remaining two modes are intermediate means (which has been explained better elsewhere).33

In the subsequent Glosa on Boethius, Thierry suggests that his four modes can provide a framework to organize the theological terms recently rediscovered in Stoic, Pythagorean and Hermetic sources that so excited Christian Platonists in the twelfth century.34

on the Neoplatonic roots of complicatio and explicatio, see Thomas P. McTighe, ‘A Neglected Feature of Neoplatonic Metaphysics’, in Christian Spirituality and the Culture of Modernity: The Thought of Louis Dupré, ed. Peter Casarella (Grand Rapids, 1998), 27-49. This translation better conveys the structural links that Thierry consistently emphasizes among the four modes of being in the passages I have just cited. Dronke’s “necessity of make-up” (‘Thierry of Chartres’, 369) is better, and accords with the medieval philosophical sense of complexio as a natural constitu-tion, composition or state, as in William of Conches, for example. But Dronke’s translation leads readers away from the all-important link between the second mode and reciprocal fold-ing. Moreover, Thierry is capable of using the term “necessity of connection” when he wishes to do so: “Eadem enim uniuersitas et in simplicitate diuine mentis conplicite et in necessitate conexionis ut alibi dicitur.” Abbreviatio monacensis de hebdomadibus II.40, TC 412. It may well be that Thierry viewed necessitas complexionis and necessitas conexionis as equivalent expressions for the second mode of being, but this important question is occluded when the translator has already conflated the two.31) Boethius, De trinitate II, ed. Moreschini 168:68-169:80. Cf. Aristotle, Metaphysics VI.1 (1025b3-1026a33).32) Lectiones II.3-6, TC 155-56; II.13-15, TC 158-59.33) “Considerat enim theologia necessitatem que unitas est et simplicitas. Mathematica consid-erat necessitatem conplexionis que est explicatio simplicitatis. Mathematica enim formas rerum in ueritate sua considerat. Phisica uero considerat determinatam possibilitatem et absolutam. Absoluta autem necessitas et absoluta possibilitas in his extrema sunt. Reliqui uero modi uelud media. Quod alibi melius explicatur.” Lectiones II.11, TC 158. Thierry likely refers to Com-mentum II.28, TC 77.34) Glosa II.15-22, TC 272-73.


(4) The form of forms. According to Boethius, God is not formless or beyond form, but is the one true form (vere forma) and the form of all being ( forma essendi). Since all other forms imitate the one divine form, Boethius calls them not forms but “images” remaining in matter.35 Thierry was captivated by Boethius’s theological aesthetics. In his commentaries on Boethius’s De hebdomadibus and De trinitate, Thierry brings together both notions of divine form under a new term adapted from an Augustinian phrase. God is the “form of forms” ( forma formarum), a kind of super-form, according to Thierry.36 This neatly synthesizes Boethius’s scattered terms and advances beyond Augus-tine by marking out several interrelated levels of form.37 But more impor-tantly, Thierry explicates his new concept in terms of his own doctrine of the four modes of being. Although Thierry never equates the first mode of abso-lute necessity with the form of forms outright, he does identify the forma for-marum with the mens divina that in its unity, simplicity and eternity “enfolds” the lesser forms.38 In a remarkable passage from the Lectiones, Thierry com-pares the forms to many “plural exemplars in the necessitas complexionis,” and the form of forms to “one exemplar in the divine mind.”39 Thus the modal theory and reciprocal folding together provided Thierry the scaffolding he needed to construct forma formarum as a name for the divine mind.

This brief inventory of Thierry’s innovations enables one to detect when the author of Fundamentum naturae deviates from Thierry, even when using sim-ilar terms. To begin with, it illuminates the structure of the Fundamentum

35) Boethius, De trinitate II, ed. Moreschini 169:79-83, 170:92-93 and 170:110-171:117; De hebdomadibus, Regula II, ed. Moreschini 187:26-28. See further Fernand Brunner, ‘Deus forma essendi’, in Entretiens sur la Renaissance du 12e siècle, eds. Maurice de Gandillac and Édouard Jeauneau (Paris, 1968), 85-116; Pierre Hadot, ‘Forma essendi. Interprétation philologique et interprétation philosophique d’une formule de Boèce’, Les études classiques 38 (1970), 143-56; Jean-Michel Counet, Mathématiques et dialectique chez Nicolas de Cuse (Paris, 2000), 133-171.36) Abbreviatio monacensis de hebdomadibus 21-44, TC 408-413, but especially 25-26, TC 409; Lectiones II.38-41, TC 167-168; and Lectiones II.47, TC 170. Häring notes that Augustine uses the phrase “forma omnium formatorum” in Sermo 117.37) See Gangolf Schrimpf’s analysis of forma formarum in ‘Idee’, Historisches Wörterbuch der Philosophie, Bd. 4, ed. Joachim Ritter and Karlfried Gründer (Basel/Stuttgart, 1976), 78-79.38) “Dicitur autem prima forma que est diuinitas forma formarum quia est generatiua formarum. Mens etenim diuina generat et concipit intra se formas i.e. naturas rerum que a philosophis uocantur ydee.” Lectiones II.43, TC 168. “Unde mens diuina que est forma essendi forma omnium formarum merito dicitur et est. . . . Est enim unitas est eternitas est simplicitas conpli-cans in se uniuersitatem rerum que precedit et causa est omnium rerum.” Abbreviatio monacensis de hebdomadibus 28, TC 410.39) “Formis dixit pluraliter quia sunt ibi in necessitate conplexionis plura rerum exemplaria que omnia sunt unum exemplar in mente diuina.” Lectiones II.66, TC 176.


treatise and in turn reveals new information about the author’s point of view.40 The treatise is evidently organized to echo Thierry’s four modes of being. In a brief preface, the author outlines Thierry’s views irenically without hinting at the criticism to come in the following sections. This unpolemical introduction makes the Fundamentum all the more susceptible to misinterpretation.

The author begins by immediately naming the four “universal modes of being.” He does not yet associate them with a particular school or epoch, as he will later in the treatise. The first mode, absolute necessity, is God: “the form of forms, the being of beings, the essence [ratio] or quiddity of things.” The second mode is necessitas complexionis, in which “the true forms of things exist in themselves, with the distinction and order of nature, just as in the mind.” The third and fourth modes are determined possibility and absolute possibility.41 So far the author follows Thierry of Chartres closely, even if Thierry’s extant texts only imply but never state the identity of forma formarum and necessitas absoluta.42

But then the author adds that the three lower modes of being collectively make up “one universe,” in opposition to the divine first mode. He calls this one universe the “contracted maximum.”43 After the preface, each of the trea-tise’s subsequent three parts corresponds to one of these lower three modes. In each part, the author connects the given mode with another cosmic principle: part one on the fourth mode with “the possibility or matter of the universe,” part two on the second mode with “the world soul or the form of the uni-verse,” and part three on the third mode with “the spirit of connection or the power of the universe.” This overlaid triad of materia, forma and spiritus could simply be taken as a general reference to the Aristotelian physics assumed elsewhere in the treatise (and available within the Auctoritates florilegium). But given the author’s evident familiarity with Thierry of Chartres’s Boethian commentaries, the triad might also echo Thierry’s trinity of perpetuals. This suspicion receives some confirmation when, in the treatise’s third part, the

40) See Hoenen’s analysis at ‘Ista prius inaudita’, 394-401.41) “Est enim modus essendi, qui absoluta necessitas dicitur, uti deus est forma formarum, ens entium, rerum ratio sive quiditas, et in hoc essendi modo omnia in deo sunt ipsa necessitas absoluta. Alius modus est, ut res sunt in necessitate complexionis, in qua sunt formae rerum in se verae cum distinctione et ordine naturae, sicut in mente. Alius modus essendi est, ut res sunt in possibilitate determinata actu hoc vel illud. Et quartus ultimus modus essendi est, ut res possunt esse, et est possibilitas absoluta.” F 4r, 448.42) Lectiones II.39-43, TC 167-168; and Abbreviatio monacensis de hebdomadibus II.25-30, TC 409-410.43) F 4r, 448.


author emphasizes spiritus and conexio, Thierry’s terms for the unity of matter and form, as well as the Aristotelian motus.44 Moreover, the author appears to echo Thierry’s trinity of perpetuals when he proposes a similar triad as an alternative.45 But even if this triad is simply Aristotelian, it is indisputable that author radically changes the meaning of Thierry’s four modes of being: first by isolating the second, third and fourth modes as collectively “contracted,” and second by reading the second and fourth modes in terms of form and matter. Thierry never combines the four modes and the three perpetuals, nor does he ever parse the four modes in terms of matter and form.

The author’s reorganization of the four modes immediately commences his critique of Thierry’s use of the four divine modes and thus reveals the core of his objections. For the author of Fundamentum, more important than each mode’s discrete identity is their common unity in being collectively distin-guished from the highest mode, the divine principle. By sharply marking off the first mode as uniquely divine, the author distances God from creation. By contrast, Thierry consistently emphasizes that together all four modes com-prise “one universe.”46 Thierry’s point is that different scientific disciplines (rationes or considerationes)47 address themselves to different modes of being of the single universe available to human apprehension. Viewed in its absolute necessity, the same universe appears to theology as God as the universe that, viewed in its determined possibility, appears to physics as discrete creatures.

To the anonymous author, Thierry’s views that God is absolute necessity and ordinary beings are determined possibility are unobjectionable and indeed in harmony with Aristotelian physics. The third part of the treatise embraces these ideas. However, Thierry’s second mode and fourth mode, according to Fundamentum, merely inflate the concepts of form and matter to the status of semi-divine cosmic principles. They jeopardize the sovereignty of the absolute divine mode by interposing two kinds of false mediators between the “abso-lute” God and the “contracted” creation. This is why the first two parts of the treatise are spent deflating Thierry’s concepts of absolute possibility and the necessity of enfolding.

44) “Motum, per quem est conexio formae et materiae, spiritum quendam esse, inter formam et materiam medium, quidam opinati sunt. Hunc spiritum conexionis procedere ab utroque, scili-cet possibilitate et anima mundi, dixerunt.” F 8v, 468-70. Cf. Aristotle, Physics III.1-3 (201a10-202b29).45) F 9r, 472. I discuss the author’s triad of absolute possibility, absolute form and absolute con-nection in the final section below.46) Lectiones II.3, 4, 6, 13, 15, TC 155-59.47) Lectiones II.2-4, TC 154-55.


Thierry’s four modes and three perpetuals both operate as devices for theo-logical mediation: the simultaneous connection and distinction effected by an intermediary plane between God and creation. Whatever one makes of Thierry’s theology, clearly one of the major goals of his Boethian commentar-ies is to name the mediations that guarantee the radical immanence of God within creation. Thierry uses the term modi, for example, to express how the descent from eternal necessity to contingent possibility is mediated by two terms.48 Later in Commentum, Thierry puts forward several possible candidates to be the agent of that mediation: spiritus creatus, natura, or numerus.49 The mediating function of the “trinity of perpetuals” stems from their middle status as neither eternal nor temporal.50 By contrast, the author of Fundamentum works to remove all mediations of God and world except for the divine Word, by means of an internal critique operating within Thierry’s own mediating terminology.

Precisely in opposition to Thierry’s original intent, therefore, the remotion of the divine principle becomes the guiding purpose of the treatise. The author suggests that the original doctrine of the four modes collapses upon itself and that its consequent resolution into two modes installs a sharper, more appro-priate distinction between Creator and creature, or in the author’s preferred terms, the absolute and the contracted. In the next two sections, I examine the author’s arguments against Thierry’s fourth and second modes.

3. Arguments against Thierry’s Fourth Mode of Being

Thierry defines his fourth mode as the universe considered in its “possibility but without any act.”51 He classifies it as one of the modes studied by physici, who have variously called it primordial matter, chaos, hyle, silva, aptitude for form, or lack of form.52 Thierry sees no conflict between the fourth mode and the first; they both enfold all things in different ways.53 In the first part of Fundamentum the author rejects this idea. He contends that the fourth mode either does not exist, or else exists only in identity with God. It cannot exist,

48) Commentum II.28, TC 77.49) Commentum IV.7, TC 97.50) Commentum II.39-40, TC 80-81.51) Lectiones II.9, TC 157.52) Lectiones II.10, TC 157; Glosa II.18, TC 272. 53) Thierry attributes the plurality and mutability of the universe to its fourth mode: Glosa II.17, TC 272.


as Thierry would have it, as a mode of universal being alongside the first divine mode of absolute necessity, as a second absolute. In other words, the author attempts to prevent the fourth mode from becoming a possible competitor with divine transcendence. The author first reviews past philosophical treat-ments of possibility and then presents his own arguments against them.54 He then concludes the treatise’s first part with a rather prosaic outline of Aristote-lian physics, drawing on passages from the florilegium Auctoritates Aristotelis.55 This deliberately traditional account of natura stands as a corrective to the ignorant novelties of the physici named in the treatise’s title.

The form of the author’s argument adopts the posture of an Aristotelian critique of Platonic idealism.56 Just as Aristotle remonstrates against Plato and the Pythagoreaus in the first book of the Metaphysics, the treatise’s author holds that beings should be understood relative to other beings, not in terms

54) F 5r-6r, 452-58.55) F 6r-6v, 458. 56) Some readers may concur with one anonymous reader of the present study, who suggested that this fact renders Hoenen’s proposal implausible prima facie. That is: why would Cusanus, an avowed Platonist, adopt explicitly anti-Platonist passages from an Aristotelian author and place them at the center of De docta ignorantia? Two responses can be made. (1) Cusanus’s early affiliation with Heymericus de Campo’s Albertism may have generally predisposed him to seek to harmonize Platonism and Aristotelianism. The Albertist school advocated a read-ing of Aristotle influenced by Proclus, Ps.-Dionysius and the Liber de causis and claimed Boethius (who famously declared his plans to harmonize Plato and Aristotle) as an intellectual ancestor. See Maarten J.F.M. Hoenen, ‘Via Antiqua and Via Moderna in the Fifteenth Cen-tury: Doctrinal, Institutional and Church Political Factors in the Wegestreit’, in The Medieval Heritage in Early Modern Metaphysics and Modal Theory, 1400-1700, eds. R.L. Friedman and L.O. Nielsen (Dordrecht, 2003), 9-36. Cusanus likewise praised Boethius in Book I of De docta ignorantia and then, like other fifteenth-century Platonists, pursued a new dialogue with Aris-totle in such later works as Apologia doctae ignorantiae (1449), Idiota de mente (1450) and De beryllo (1458). See Maurice de Gandillac, ‘Platonisme et Aristotelisme chez Nicholas de Cues’, in Platon et Aristote à la renaissance, ed. Jean-Claude Margolin (Paris, 1976), 7-23; Hans Gerhard Senger, ‘Aristotelismus vs. Platonismus. Zur Konkurrenz von zwei Archetypen der Philosophie im Spätmittelalter’, in Aristotelisches Erbe im arabisch-lateinischen Mittelalter. Übersetzungen, Kommentare, Interpretationen. Miscellanea Mediaevalia 18, ed. Albert Zimmermann (Berlin/New York, 1986), 53-80; Meredith Ziebart, ‘Some Reflections on Aristotle in the Works of Cusanus’, in Universalität der Vernunft und Pluralität der Erkenntnis bei Nicolaus Cusanus, eds. Klaus Reinhardt and Harald Schwaetzer (Regensburg, 2008), 135-168. (2) I grant that in this particular instance, however, the tension between Fundamentum’s anti-Platonist intentions and Cusanus’s thoroughly Platonist predilections is so great that—if Hoenen’s theory is correct—we should expect to observe traces of discord or discomfort as Cusanus attempts to integrate the anonymous treatise into De docta ignorantia. I believe that one can indeed identify such traces of tension in Book II, as I will show in a forthcoming work.


of a separate absolute posited by philosophers. The author explicitly desires to correct the false views of those he calls “Platonists” later in the treatise.57 Like Aristotle, after reviewing the concepts of previous philosophers, the author demonstrates the incoherence of the concept taken as a separate idea (the fourth mode) by showing that all instances of its concrete manifestation devolve into less speculative, more easily understood terms (either the first mode or the third mode).

The author reviews three previous theories of prime matter: Aristotle on hyle, Constantinus Africanus on elements as minima, and finally the suspect doctrine of possibilitas absoluta.58 He is evidently most troubled by the latter. After summarizing Aristotelian material from the florilegium, the author defines the problem as follows:

And indeed the ancients assert that there is a certain absolute possibility of being all things and that this is eternal, in which they believed all things to have been enfolded in terms of their possibility. And thus they only grasped prime matter in ignorance, for we find that it would be impossible for possibility to be absolute.59

Thus the issue to be addressed in the first part of the treatise echoes the trea-tise’s titular concern: ignorance regarding the true meaning of the fundamen-tum naturae and the concomitant theological errors, namely, the idolatrous predication of absoluteness to possibility.60 The author’s corrections will pre-suppose two maxims: God alone is absolute, since God is “maximity” (maximitas); and the world cannot be absolute, since it is “contracted” (contractio). This disjunction between the divine absolute and contracted uni-verse is reflected in the introductory section when the author divides Thierry’s four modes between the one divine mode and three lesser cosmic modes.61 By excluding every mediating tertium quid between God and world, the author safeguards the unity of divine transcendence. In practice this exclusion is executed through the author’s explication of his notion of contractio. Once

57) The author refers to the Platonici four times, all within the treatise’s second part: F 7r, 460; F 7v, 466; F 8r, 466; F 8r, 468.58) F 4r, 550. Cf. Hoenen, ‘Ista prius inaudita’, 424 n. 124.59) “Et ideo veteres quandam absolutam omnia essendi possibilitatem et illam aeternam affir-marunt, in qua omnia possibiliter complicata credebant. Et ita non nisi ignoranter materiam attingerunt. Reperimus enim fore impossibile possibilitatem absolutam esse.” F 5r, 452-54.60) F 4r, 448-50.61) F 4r, 448.


matter is characterized as “contracted,” the theological critique of the fourth and second modes follows. Contraction implies an absolute, and indeed a singular absolute.

The author never defines contractio directly.62 He immediately deploys the concept in his overview of the treatise’s structure, and then early in his discus-sion of the fourth mode he asserts that “all possibility is contracted.”63 Upon closer inspection, however, contractio seems intended as a paraphrase or meta-phorical amplification of determinatio: the idea of contraction expresses more precisely what is entailed by the determination of matter by form. The author explains, for instance, that things are contracted “through act” in the same way that something is determined through act, and he contrasts something contracted with something “indeterminate.”64 If the metaphorical force of determinatio is constraint toward a fixed end (terminus), then contractio would connote a spatial reduction, a drawing (trahere) inward or downward. The author uses contractio in two different ways. First, possibility and act are mutu-ally “contracted” or determined by each other.65 Second, actuality is con-tracted by maximal act, or maximitas, which is God.66 In this critical second sense, “contraction” denotes a reduction from the absolute to a lesser determi-nation of being.67

62) The concept of contractio has been customarily associated with Nicholas of Cusa’s philoso-phy and with De docta ignorantia in particular. Some readers may ask whether its appearance in Fundamentum naturae is not evidence of the priority of De docta ignorantia. But in fact, for con-tractio to appear in another work before De docta ignorantia is entirely unremarkable, since the two particular senses given the term in the Fundamentum treatise (see n. 67 below) can be dated back to Giles of Rome’s commentary on the Liber de causis. See Graziella Federici Vescovini, ‘Temi ermetico-neoplatonici de La dotta ignoranza di Nicola Cusano’, in Il Neoplatonismo nel Rinascimento, ed. Pietro Prini (Rome, 1993), 117-32; and especially Leo Catana, The Concept of Contraction in Giordano Bruno’s Philosophy (Aldershot, 2005), 103-134. Therefore it is difficult to object to Hoenen’s theory, as some have, merely on the grounds that contractio is more at home within De docta ignorantia than within the Fundamentum treatise. On the contrary: there are signs of awkwardness in Cusanus’s own use of the term. As I have argued previously (see ‘Learned Thief’, 365-72), the cardinal seems to have difficulty fleshing out the sense of contractio in De docta ignorantia and, somewhat curiously, continually resorts to Thierry of Chartres’s concepts in order to do so. 63) F 4r, 448; F 5v, 454.64) F 5v, 454-58.65) F 5v, 456.66) F 6r, 456.67) Regarding the author’s first and second senses of contractio, see Catana, Concept of Contrac-tion, 129-33 and 123 respectively.


The concept of contractio operates as the basic structural principle that grounds the author’s cosmology. By his account the universe consists in infi-nite degrees of difference along a homogeneous continuum. But each degree, however formally identical, is itself a unique combination of act and potential, which are “contracted” by one another. Together these “differences and gradations” construct an ordered progression of beings in a continuum regress-ing symmetrically toward two opposed endpoints: a minimum (matter, pure possibility) and a maximum (God, pure actuality).68 This vision of the cosmos makes use of both meanings of contractio: contraction into differ-ent degrees of act and potential, and contraction, by such degrees, away from the one absolute.

This cosmology allows the author to make two arguments against the fourth mode of being, both of which draw inspiration from Aristotle. First, the fact that the continuum of contracted degrees is infinitely differentiated entails that there is no “simple maximum” of act or potential that can be separated from the continuum.

There arise differences and gradations, such that one thing is greater in act and another greater in potential. Were this not so it would regress to the maximum and minimum simply, because the maximal and minimal act [would] coincide with the maximal and minimal potential, such that they [would be] called the maximum absolutely.69

If different things were found in the world existing in such a way that they could be more from one thing than from another, then there could be no regression to the maximum and minimum simply and absolutely. But since things do exist in this way, it is clear that abso-lute possibility cannot be given.70

In short, since every instance of possibility belongs within the continuum of degrees, there is no conceivable instance of a separated or “absolute” possi-

68) F 5v, 456.69) “Cadunt autem differentiae et graduationes, ut unum actu magis sit, aliud magis potentia, absque hoc quod deveniatur ad maximum et minimum simpliciter, quoniam maximus et mini-mus actus coincidunt cum maxima et minima potentia ut sunt maximum absolute dictum.” F 5v, 456. There is a textual problem in the last clause, where one would expect a subjunctive verb. Most manuscripts of De docta ignorantia, for example, substitute et for ut: see De docta ignorantia II.8 (§137), ed. Ernst Hoffmann and Raymond Klibansky, Nicolai de Cusa. Opera Omnia, vol. I (Leipzig, 1932), 88:22. I thank the anonymous reviewer who clarified this point. I have inserted words in brackets to express what I take to be the author’s intended argument.70) “Si enim reperiuntur diversa in mundo ita se habentia, quod ex uno possunt plura esse quam ex alio, ad maximum tamen et minimum simpliciter et absolute non devenitur. Sed quia illa reperiuntur, patet possibilitatem absolutam non esse dabilem.” F 5v-5r, 454.


bility. The author’s argument in the first text is a reductio ad absurdum. If actualia were not differential degrees of contraction, then there would only remain maximal act (i.e., minimal potential) and maximal potential (minimal act). Without intermediaries, the distinct maxima would “coincide” by virtue of their common withdrawal from all contracted conditions. Because such a coincidence is unthinkable, we must retain the principle that all possibility is contracted to actualia. (In a similar way, the author remarks in the final sec-tion of Fundamentum that there is no such thing as maximal motion because this would coincide with rest, and that is impossible.)71 In the second text the author states his point affirmatively: since all potential and act are contracted to relative degrees, one never arrives at a final, absolute degree of either one that is distinct from the continuum.

The author’s second argument against the fourth mode echoes Aristotle’s account of causation and chance in the Physics.72 Aristotle argues that what appears to be random chance is simply misunderstood causation (a deficit of knowledge concerning the cause) or incidental causation (when effect differs from intention). Since all matter is determined by form, and both matter and form are sources of causation, all determinate beings must have a cause. The author of Fundamentum argues similarly that without contraction—that is, given a hypothetical world in which the fourth mode did exist—all things would exist by random chance.73 This, says the author, was the mistake of Epicurus. A rational order of causes in the world requires that every actualiza-tion of possibility express a definite difference and thus a particular degree of contraction. Possibility cannot be infinite, formless, or absolute, but must always be discrete, finite and restrained through its delimitation by form. Unless all possibility is contracted to a unique “difference and gradation,”

71) F 9r, 472. The author may have in mind Aristotle’s law of non-contradiction; see Metaphysics IV.3-4 (1005b17-1009a5). Johannes Wenck, a scholastic trained in Heidelberg, rejected coin-cidentia on these grounds in his De ignota litteratura (1442-43), prompting Cusanus’s reply in Apologia doctae ignorantiae (1449). Unlike the author of Fundamentum, Cusanus thinks such coincidentia is valid when expressing higher (theological) truths of the intellect. See Franz-Bernhard Stammkötter, ‘ “Hic homo parum curat de dictis Aristotelis”. Der Streit zwischen Johannes Wenck von Herrenberg und Nikolaus von Kues um die Gültigkeit des Satzes vom zu vermeidenden Widerspruch’, in “Herbst des Mittelalters”? Fragen zu Bewertung des 14. und 15. Jahrhunderts. Miscellanea Mediaevalia 31, eds. Jan A. Aertsen and Martin Pickavé (Berlin/New York, 2004), 433-444.72) Physics II.4-6 (195b30-198b8).73) F 5v, 456.


there is no reason why absolute possibility should produce any given being rather than another.

In the third part of Fundamentum, the author amplifies his notion of con-tractio by adding two further meanings. The first is that contraction is a recip-rocal movement between matter and form. Reading the treatise’s third part, one first notices the author’s apparent reliance upon the Auctoritates florile-gium to reiterate the Aristotelian doctrine of natura as immanent motus bind-ing matter to form.74 But on closer inspection there is an important difference. In Aristotle the motion of actualization is, so to speak, horizontal and unidi-rectional: the increasing application of form to matter, passing from lack to fulfillment, drives toward complete actualization.75 By contrast the author of Fundamentum envisions actualization as vertical and bidirectional, a simulta-neous ascent and descent:

[Form] descends in order to exist contractedly in possibility—that is, while possibility is ascending toward act, form descends, in order that it may determine, perfect and delimit possibility. And thus from the ascent and the descent arises a motion connecting each to the other. This motion is a medium of connection of potential and act, since out of the moveable possibility and the formal mover, the medium begins to move.76

According to the author, then, contraction is a double movement into actualia coordinated by natura or, as he prefers, the spiritus creatus descended from the divine spirit.77

The second new sense of contractio is that contraction results in a graduated continuum of unique “degrees” of individuation. Recall that in the first part of the treatise, a simple progression to absolute possibility was ruled out because “differences and gradations,” generated by relative degrees of potenti-ality and actuality, introduce an infinite distance from the absolute. Now in the third part the author supplements this argument with a corresponding cosmology of graduated contraction. “Motion,” he explains, “gradually descends from the universal into the particular, and there it is contracted by means of a

74) F 8v, 468-470.75) Physics III.3 (202a13-202a22).76) “. . . descendit, ut sit contracte in possibilitatem, hoc est, ascendente possibilitate versus actu esse descendit forma, ut sit finiens, perficiens et terminans possibilitatem. Et ita ex ascensu et descensu motus exoritur conectens utrumque. Qui motus est medium conexionis potentiae et actus, quoniam ex possibilitate mobili et motore formali oritur ipsum movere medium.” F 8v, 470. 77) F 9r, 472. The author’s notion of spiritus creatus resembles De septem septenis: see PL 199: 961D-962A.


temporal or natural order.”78 The order of this stepwise descent is “conserved through its degrees” (servato per gradus suos).79 Hence all individuals are arranged uniquely—always singulariter, writes the author, and never aequaliter—on the continuum of discrete differences, precisely by virtue of their contraction.80 Contraction is thus a reduction from the universal to the particular made pos-sible by a certain order, an order preserved in its sequence by means of its distinct degrees of differentiation. The absence of equality means that differ-ences never repeat but relate serially in a measured progression, such that each added difference necessitates a new gradus.

The critical power of applying the concept of contractio is remarkably effi-cient. If the author intended to disable Thierry’s modal theory, he could not have picked a better method. The term that structures the four modes in Thierry’s account, beyond the pair complicatio and explicatio, is determinatio. The only difference between the two necessities and two possibilities is that while one of each pair is “absolute,” the other is “determined.”81 Thus simply by reinterpreting determinatio as contractio, the author of Fundamentum has turned Thierry’s modal theory against itself. In effect he measures the coher-ence of the fourth mode against Thierry’s own language for the third mode. Once the third mode is glossed not as “determined possibility” but as “con-tracted possibility,” the author can contrast two sharply opposed alternatives:

If absolute possibility were God, if we consider the world as in absolute possibility, then the world exists as in God, who is the being of all things and is eternity itself. But if we consider the world as it exists in contracted possibility, then possibility naturally precedes only the world. Such contracted possibility is neither eternity nor is coeternal with God, but descends from eternity itself, as the contracted from the absolute, which are infinitely separated.82

The author’s implication is that once scrutinized, the fourth mode leads either to God or to an absurdity. Either “absolute possibility” trivially restates the

78) “Ita quidem motus gradatim de universo in particulare descendit et ibi contrahitur ordine temporali aut naturali.” F 8v, 470.79) Ibid.80) F 9r, 472.81) Thierry usually calls the third mode possibilitas determinata, but occasionally also glosses the second mode as necessitas determinata. Glosa II.21, TC 273.82) “Unde cum possibilitas absoluta sit deus, si mundum consideramus ut <in> ipsa est, tunc est ut in deo, qui est esse omnium, et est ipsa aeternitas. Sed si ipsum consideramus ut est in pos-sibilitate contracta, tunc possibilitas naturaliter tantum mundum praecedit, et non est ista pos-sibilitas contracta nec aeternitas nec deo coeterna, sed cadens ab ipsa aeternitate, ut contractum ab absoluto, quae distant per infinitum.” F 6r, 456-58.


idea of divinity, by naming the world’s origin in God, or it attempts to say something about the universe. But in the latter case, possibility truly cannot be absolute. For even if a separated, abstract possibility were to precede all actuality (the world), this would not make it identical with God, and its dis-tance from God would still remain defined as a contraction of the absolute. Only God’s eternity is absolute, and it is impossible to characterize possibility in similar terms coherently. In the author’s pithy summary: “absolute possibil-ity in God is God, but outside of God it is impossible.”83

Accordingly, as soon as one accepts the author’s argument that all possibility is contracted, Thierry’s fourfold modal system collapses: the fourth mode must either be elevated into the first mode or absorbed into the third. This section of the Fundamentum treatise thus attempts to eliminate any latent competi-tion with divine transcendence by installing a stricter distinction between God and world that will prevent such false mediations as the fourth mode.

4. Arguments against Thierry’s Second Mode of Being

Thierry devoted the most time in his commentaries to the second mode of being.84 It is altogether fitting, then, that the author of Fundamentum devotes his treatise’s central part to attacking necessitas complexionis as another false mediator and another threat to divine transcendence. Again the author applies the concept of contraction in order to force a dilemma: one must reduce the second mode to the first mode (the divine Creator) or to the third mode (actual creation), removing all mediation between them. Hence by the con-clusion of this second part, the author is able to formulate his clearest explana-tion yet of the theological import of contractio:

There can be no creature that is not diminished as a result of contraction, infinitely sepa-rated from the divine work. Only God is absolute; all others are contracted. Nor does a medium arise in this way between absolute and contracted, as those Platonists have imag-ined who thought the anima mundi to be Mind, after God but before the contraction of the world.85

83) “Quare possibilitas absoluta in deo est deus, extra vero non est possibilis.” F 5r, 454.84) Lectiones II.7-34, TC 156-166, passim; Glosa II.20-21, TC 273; Abbreviatio monacensis de hebdomadibus II.39-42, TC 412. 85) “Et nulla potest esse creatura, quae non sit ex contractione diminuta, ab isto opere divino per infinitum cadens. Solus deus est absolutus, omnia alia contracta. Nec cadit eo modo medium inter absolutum et contractum, ut illi Platonici imaginati sunt, qui animam mundi mentem putarunt post deum et ante contractionem mundi.” F 8r, 468.


In other words: when the second mode is treated as a sub-divine mediator between Creator and creatures, then the principle of contraction is violated and divine transcendence compromised. The second mode should either be identified with God or deflated to contracted creaturehood, but it cannot hover in between after the fashion of the “Platonists.”

As this passage indicates, the heart of the controversy concerns the names given to this quasi-divine entity. The author himself notes that the second mode goes by other names: the Platonic mens, intelligentia, and anima mundi, as well as the Stoic fatum.86 By enunciating these alternatives, Fundamentum’s author shows that he desires to do more than simply contest the semi-divine autonomy of the second mode. He also wishes to locate its proper function within the Christian theological economy. When “the Platonists” propose the notion of a second mode, the author believes that they name something real, but misrecognize it as the anima mundi. The philosophers interpose false mediators between God and the world because they do not grasp the world’s contracted nature. But what they mistakenly call necessitas complexionis, writes the author, is in fact the divine Word: “The necessity of enfolding is not Mind, as the Platonists suppose, lesser than the Begetter, but is the Word and the Son equal to the Father in divinity, and is called Logos or ratio, since it is the ratio of all things.”87

Such is the essence of the author’s rejection of the second mode. But a more careful analysis of the second part of Fundamentum reveals something more. There are four major steps to consider in the author’s argument. (1) The “Pla-tonists” identify the second mode in various ways, but all incorrectly. (2) If it existed, the second mode would be singularly unique: not simply universal form, but the one form of forms, or the one enfolding exemplar of all other forms. (3) Therefore, the Platonists are wrong to treat the second mode as an independent being (such as Mind, intelligence or world soul), since in fact it is the divine Word equal to the Father. (4) The Platonists’ mistake, in short, is to think that the second mode is an immediate unfolding of the first mode, unconditioned by contraction. Remarkably, each of these four steps corre-sponds to, but somehow contradicts or alters, theological ideas stemming from

86) F 7r, 460.87) “Unde necessitas complexionis non est, ut posuerunt Platonici, scilicet mens minor gignente, sed est verbum et filius aequalis patri in divinis, et dicitur logos seu ratio, quoniam est ratio omnium.” F 7v-8r, 466.


Thierry of Chartres. In order to make his case against necessitas complexionis, the author borrows and then subtly adjusts Thierry’s other distinctive concepts, turning them against his opponent. I will briefly examine these in order.

(1) When the author of Fundamentum turns his attention to Thierry’s neces-sitas complexionis, he defines the mode in terms resembling Thierry’s own exposition. The author introduces his analysis of the second mode with a list of cognates that echoes a similar list from Thierry in his Glosa:

Fundamentum 7r, 460 . . .Hanc excelsam naturam alii mentem, alii intelligentiam, alii animam mundi, alii fatum in substantia, alii, ut Platonici, necessitatem complexionis nominarunt, qui aestimabant possibilitatem necessitate per ipsam determinari, ut sit nunc actu, quod prius natura potuit.

Glosa II.21, TC 273Hec uero determinata dicitur necessitas uel necessitas complexionis eo quod cum aliquam eius materiam incurrimus causarum reliquarum seriatam conexionem uitare non possumus. Quam alii legem naturalem alii naturam alii mundi animam alii iusticiam naturalem alii ymarmenem nuncupauerunt. At uero alii eam dixere fatum alii parchas alii intelligentiam dei. Quod si nullam eius causam attigerimus ei causarum conexioni minime subiacemus. Et ideo determinata uel ordinis dicitur necessitas hec.

In both texts, necessitas complexionis is identified with “fate,” the “divine intel-ligence” and the “world soul.” Such similarities could have been drawn from a common source, but given the author’s familiarity with Thierry’s other doc-trines in the rest of the second part of Fundamentum, this initial correspon-dence is striking.

(2) In the first part of Fundamentum, the author established that all beings are contracted to a continuum of relative degrees, such that the maximum must be entirely absolute from different grades of possibility and actuality. This meant that the notion of an “absolute possibility” is either nonsensical or an ill-advised expression for the divine absolute. Now, as the author turns to the second mode, he returns to his concept of contractio. There can be no mediation triangulated between contracted and absolute, because the second mode—unless it is God—is also contracted:

It must be known that it is impossible to progress to the maximum directly. This means that there can be no absolute possibility, absolute form or absolute actuality which is not God, and that no being besides God is uncontracted, and that there is only one form of forms and truth of truths, and the highest truth of the circle is the same as that of the


square. Hence the forms of things are only distinct as they exist contractedly. For as they exist absolutely, they are one indistinct form, which is the divine Word.88

In order to distinguish the absolute from the contracted, the author of Funda-mentum conspicuously draws upon Thierry’s concept of forma formarum. The author also explicitly equates the term with God in the treatise’s preface.89 Lest one think such parallels with Thierry’s vocabulary are accidents of the superla-tive, the author uses forma formarum again in the treatise’s second part specifi-cally in the context of Boethian theological aesthetics: “Therefore what the Platonists have said concerning the images of the forms counts for nothing, since there is only one infinite form of forms, of which all forms are images.”90 Without the context of Thierry’s commentaries on Boethius, one might miss the polemical force of the author’s allusions in this sentence. But as I discussed above, Thierry innovated forma formarum precisely in the course of comment-ing on Boethius’s distinction of form and images. Hence the author’s refer-ence to “the images of the forms” suggests that his reinterpretation of the second mode may well be unfolding in close conversation with Thierry’s com-mentaries.

Like Thierry, the author uses forma formarum to insist upon the singularity of divine form. But he contradicts a specific Boethian interpretation broached by Thierry in Lectiones. In De trinitate Boethius had distinguished images (forms in matter) from true forms (forms outside matter).91 Commenting on this passage, Thierry asks why Boethius retains the plural here, and where the forms are, if they are outside matter. His answer returns to the second mode:

They [viz. true forms] exist outside matter in their truth, namely in the necessitas com-plexionis. He said from forms in the plural since there are, there in the necessitas complex-ionis, many exemplars of things, which are all one exemplar in the divine Mind. For this

88) “Est notandum quod impossibile est devenire ad maximum simpliciter, quare non potest esse absoluta potentia, absoluta forma siue actus, quae non <sit> deus, et quod non sit ens praeter deum non contractum, et quod non est nisi una forma formarum et veritas veritatum, et non est alia veritas maxima circuli quam quadranguli. Unde formae rerum non sunt distinctae, nisi ut sunt contracte. Ut enim sunt absolute, tunc sunt una indistincta forma, quae est verbum in divinis.” F 7r, 466.89) F 4r, 448.90) “Nihil est ergo illud, quod de imaginibus formarum Platonici dixerunt, quoniam non est nisi una infinita forma formarum, cuius omnes formae sunt imagines.” F 8r, 466.91) “Ex his enim formis quae praeter materiam sunt, istae formae venerunt quae sunt in materia et corpus efficiunt. Nam ceteras quae in corporibus sunt abutimur formas vocantes, dum imag-ines sint. . . .” Boethius, De Trinitate II, ed. Moreschini 171:113-116.


reason Plato says in Parmenides according to Calcidius that the exemplar of all things and the many exemplars are one, in which there is neither difference nor the contrariety arising from difference, just as is said in Plato.92

According to Thierry, ordinary beings are images of their exemplary true forms, and these plural exemplars are themselves gathered into the second mode, which enfolds them into the mens divina. So Boethius’s plural grants Thierry an occasion to advertise the explanatory utility of the second mode, a mode that (to Thierry’s thinking) certainly does not mitigate the transcen-dence of the first mode.

But this view of the second mode is precisely the theological error opposed by the author of Fundamentum. He is prepared to accept forma formarum for its salutary emphasis upon the supremacy of the first mode. But the author wholly rejects the suggestion of plural exemplars:

Therefore it is not possible for there to be plural distinct exemplars. For any exemplar would be the maximum instance and the highest truth of what it exemplifies. But this is impossible, since then there would be multiple maxima and multiple highest truths. Hence it is fitting and necessary that there be only one infinite exemplar, in which all things exist as ordered in sequence, an exemplar which perfectly enfolds all distinct reasons of things whatsoever.93

92) “Praeter materiam sunt in ueritate sua: scilicet in necessitate conplexionis. Formis dixit pluraliter quia sunt ibi in necessitate conplexionis plura rerum exemplaria que omnia sunt unum exemplar in mente diuina. Secundum quod Plato dicit in Parmenide Calcidio testante quod unum est exemplar omnium rerum et plura exemplaria in quo nulla diuersitas nulla ex diuersi-tate contrarietas sicut in Platone dicitur.” Lectiones II.66, TC 176. In the passage to which Thi-erry refers, Calcidius notes the difficulty of the problem of singular or plural formal exemplars in Plato: “Ignis porro purus et ceterae sincerae intellegibilesque substantiae species sunt exemplaria corporum, ideae cognominatae; quarum ad presens differt examinationem nec quaerit, unane sit archetypa species eorum quae sunt communis omnium, an innumerabiles et pro rerum existen-tium numero, quarum coetu et congregatione concreuerit uniuersa moles, an uero idem unum pariter et multa sint, ut docet in Parmenide.” Calcidius, In Timaeum Platonis 272, in Timaeus a Calcidio translatus commentarioque instructus, ed. J. Waszink (London/Leiden, 1962), 276:14-277:3. See Stephen Gersh, Middle Platonism and Neoplatonism: The Latin Tradition, Vol. 2 (Notre Dame, 1986), 460-467, esp. 466 n. 203.93) “Non est ergo possibile plura distincta exemplaria esse. Quodlibet enim ad sua exemplata esset maximum atque verissimum. Sed hoc non est possibile, ut sint plura maxima et verissima. Unum enim infinitum exemplar tantum est sufficiens et necessarium, in quo sunt omnia ut ordinata in ordine, omnes quantumcumque distinctas rerum rationes adaequatissime compli-cans. . . .” F 7v, 466.


In a contracted universe, the ordered continuum of graduated difference leaves no room for plural exemplars, but only one “maximum” exemplar. In the author’s view, there is either the form of forms, also known as the infinite exemplar (the first mode), or the “distinct reasons” of things (the third mode). But if the author embraces the concept of exemplar here, why does he protest against the related “Platonist” doctrine of “images”? The answer becomes clear now that we have considered Thierry’s reading of Boethius as background for the particular arguments made by the treatise’s author. When the author referred to a false notion concerning the “images of forms,” this was shorthand for the rejected second mode in the context of his polemic against Thierry.

(3) Reading Fundamentum in light of Thierry’s Boethian commentaries also illuminates the author’s preoccupation with mens and anima mundi in the second part of the treatise. I already noted that the author echoes Thierry’s list of alternative names for the second mode, including anima mundi. The author borrows two other names (intelligentia, fatum) from Thierry, but then puts an additional suspect name at the front of the list: mens. Whereas the author uses anima mundi to name the subject matter of the second part of Fundamentum generally, he seems to reserve mens for specific refutations aimed against the views of the Platonici.94 Clearly mens is a subject of particular concern.

At first the author applies his now familiar arguments against anima mundi and mens jointly. Given that the world is contracted, there cannot exist a world soul or divine Mind that is separated from matter and yet not divine; put differently, if there is a separated soul or mind, it is eo ipso God and not a mediating being.95 But then mens reappears twice more in the second part of Fundamentum.96 On both occasions, the most direct rejection of mens arrives in the same climactic sentences where the author reveals the divine Verbum as the true identity of the second mode. In order to draw the maximal possible contrast, so to speak, between the divine Word and Platonic mediation, the author selects mens as the most notorious representative of the latter. In these passages what apparently concerns the author is not simply mens but mens minor gignente: that is, Mind conceived of as sub-divine by virtue of its gen-eration. The opposition of such an entity to the divine Word and Son is clear enough; the Son is fully divine through his generation as the second person of the Trinity, as the allusion to Nicene orthodoxy emphasizes (aequalis patri in

94) F 6v, 460; F 8r, 468; F 8v, 470.95) F 7r, 466.96) F 7v-8r, 466; F 8r, 468.


divinis). But why does the author view mens as a special threat to the Trinitar-ian economy?

One reason why the Fundamentum treatise singles out mens for heightened scrutiny may be that Thierry himself often used the term. Naming a second divine principle mens goes back at least to Plotinus, who placed nous in a mediating position after the One and before the world soul.97 This Plotinian doctrine was conveyed to twelfth-century authors chiefly via Macrobius, a source of great importance for Thierry of Chartres and his circle.98 Macrobius speaks of a mens enata ex summo deo that, as for Plotinus, is the repository of the ideal forms (species) of created things; it is born out of God, and at least within the Plotinian theory, this procession from the One makes it lesser than the One.99 Thierry frequently uses mens to designate God generally, and some-times the second person of the Trinity. In the Tractatus, for example, Thierry states that what Christians call the Word or Son has many other names: “the ancient philosophers named this equality or mean of unity the ‘Mind of divinity,’ or ‘Providence,’ or the ‘Wisdom of the Creator.’”100 On at least two occasions, Thierry identifies the divine mens (without further Trinitarian determination) with the forma formarum.101 For these reasons it is possible that the object of Fundamentum’s suspicion, formulated by the author as a

97) See, for example, Ennead V.2. Gersh analyzes the Macrobian doctrine of the second hypos-tasis, as well as its Middle Platonic and Plotinian sources, in Middle Platonism and Neoplatonism, 530-545. 98) See Édouard Jeauneau, ‘Gloses de Guillaume de Conches sur Macrobe. Note sur le manu-scrits’, in Lectio philosophorum. Recherches sur l’Ecole de Chartres (Amsterdam, 1973), 267-278; ibid., ‘Macrobe, source du platonisme chartrain’, in Lectio philosophorum, 279-300. 99) “Haec monas initium finisque omnium, neque ipsa principii aut finis sciens, ad summum refertur deum eiusque intellectum a sequentium numero rerum et potestatum sequestrat, nec in inferiore post deum gradu frustra eam desideraveris. Haec illa est mens ex summo enata deo, quae vices temporum nesciens in uno semper quod adest consistit aevo, cumque utpote una non sit ipsa numerabilis, innumeras tamen generum species et de se creat et intra se continet.” Ambrosii Theodosii Macrobii Commentarii in Somnium Scipionis, ed. J. Willis (Leipzig, 1963), I.6.8, 19-20. “Ceterum cum ad summum et principem omnium deum, qui apud Graecos taga-thon, qui prōton aition nuncupatur, tractatus se audet attollere, vel ad mentem, quem Graeci noun appellant, originales rerum species, quae ideai dictae sunt, continentem, ex summo natam et profectam deo: cum de his inquam loquuntur summo deo et mente, nihil fabulosum penitus attin-gunt . . . ideo et nullum ei simulacrum, cum dis aliis constituerentur, finxit antiquitas, quia sum-mus deus nataque ex eo mens sicut ultra animam ita supra naturam sunt. . . .” Ibid., I.2.14, 16, ed. Willis, 6-7. Emphases are mine.100) “Istum autem modum siue unitatis equalitatem antiqui philosophi tum mentem diuinitatis tum prouidentiam tum creatoris sapientiam appellauerunt.” Tractatus 42, TC 572.101) Lectiones II.43, TC 168; Abbreviatio monacensis de hebdomadibus 25-27, TC 409-10.


spurious mens minor gignente, is Thierry’s views on the mens divina. The author’s insistence that the second mode can only be the divine Word may have been a doctrinal corrective aimed especially at Thierry, even as the author makes good use of Thierry’s other doctrines such as forma formarum and exem-plar complicans.

(4) The author concludes the treatise’s second part with a lapidary summary of his opponents’ fundamental error: “Indeed the philosophers have not been sufficiently instructed concerning the divine Word and the absolute maxi-mum. Therefore they have considered the Mind and soul [of the world], as well as necessity, in a certain unfolding of absolute necessity without contraction.”102 According to the author, the Platonists fail to understand that the divine Word is the sole mediator, and that other rival mediators are in fact contracted like everything else in the world. The most intriguing element of this text is the author’s deft use of Thierry’s “unfolding” (explicatio) in order to disqualify the second mode of being. Thierry had used reciprocal folding to provide a substructure for the four modes, but here the author uses it to pit one mode against another.

For his part, Thierry of Chartres uses complicatio and explicatio jointly and reciprocally, and intends the two terms to operate as a pair. By contrast, the Fundamentum’s author uses complicatio always by itself and exclusively to express the transcendence of the divine first mode.103 The text cited above is the sole instance of explicatio in the Fundamentum, and clearly it appears only to formulate a theological error. The mistake of the “Platonists,” according to the author, was to have granted a space for an “unfolded” second mode out-side of the singular absolute of God. The centripetal pull, so to speak, of the first mode’s enfolding does not allow a second mode to unfold away from it, taking up a mediating position between God and world, as a mere simula-crum of divine enfolding.

Notably, the Fundamentum’s critique does state Thierry’s views quite accu-rately. Thierry defines the first mode as the complicatio of the second mode, and the second as the explicatio of the first. The first and fourth modes are

102) “Philosophi quidem de verbo divino et maximo absoluto sufficienter instructi non erant. Ideo mentem et animam ac necessitatem in quadam explicatione necessitatis absolutae sine con-tractione considerarunt.” F 8r, 468.103) F 7v, 466; F 8r, 468. In Fundamentum’s third part, he also uses complicatio to define the divine rest from which all motion proceeds: “Non est ergo aliquis motus simpliciter maximus, quia ille cum quiete coincidit. Quare non est motus aliquis absolutus, quoniam absolutus motus est quies et deus. Et illa quies complicat omnes motus.” F 9r, 472.


both enfoldings, and the second and third modes are unfoldings thereof.104 An astute critic, the author of Fundamentum simply turns Thierry’s conceptual pair against itself. He uses one (complicatio) to exalt the first mode, and rejects the other (explicatio) in order to discount the second mode. Such examples strongly suggest that the author’s critique of the Thierry’s four modes of being is executed in dialogue with Thierry’s texts. All told, Fundamentum makes use of the following concepts generally attributed to Thierry: precise definitions of the four modes themselves; the second mode as mens and as exemplar ; the function of the latter as enfolding (complicans) the forms; divine form as forma formarum; the Boethian-Calcidian discourse of image and form; and the list of alternative names for the second mode. Such selective use of Thierry’s writ-ings reveals either a very confused or a very sophisticated knowledge of them. Given the subtlety and even elegance of Fundamentum’s critique, one must incline toward the latter judgment. The author confronts the theological limi-tations of his source and creatively selects texts that can be deployed to self-correct those limitations, at least as judged by his own Aristotelian canons.105

5. Conclusions and Further Questions

Studying the views of the Fundamentum treatise on its own terms, and not yet in relation to Cusanus, shows that its author was apparently familiar with a range of Thierry of Chartres’s ideas and yet condemned several of them. The author engages so many facets of Thierry in the course of his critique that he must have had access to more than a second-hand report. Whoever the author is, he is an astute interpreter of Thierry. This evidence can inform our ongoing deliberations about the date and provenance of the treatise as well as the author’s philosophical or theological motivations for writing. To begin with, it appears the author was not simply writing out of interest in the problem of the One and the Many, pace Hoenen, but rather to refute a particular phi-losopher, Thierry of Chartres, and more precisely the theological consequences of Thierry’s doctrine of the four modes of being.

Given the author’s facility for careful reading and his evident concerns about Trinitarian orthodoxy, his silence on one point is particularly striking (the dangers of the argumentum ex silentio notwithstanding). He omits any mention of Thierry’s doctrine of the divine Word as aequalitas, or Thierry’s

104) Lectiones II.4-6, II.10-11, TC 155-58; Glosa II.20-21, TC 273.105) By noting the elegance of the author’s argumentation, I do not intend to elevate the doctrine of Fundamentum over that of Thierry of Chartres.


mathematical trinity of unitas, aequalitas and conexio. In several of the texts with which the author appears familiar, Thierry discussed aequalitas at length, and yet the author either overlooks or ignores such passages.106 For example, in the Tractatus on Genesis, Thierry identified aequalitas with the divine mens as well as the forma essendi.107 In Lectiones, when Thierry introduces his forma formarum, he also names it aequalitas in the same breath.108 In the Glosa too, Thierry identifies divine aequalitas with the forma essendi.109 The Fundamen-tum treatise rarely mentions unitas, and never in Thierry’s sense of the word, and he avoids linking unitas and aequalitas.110

Several reasons can be conjectured for this possibly deliberate oversight. (1) Perhaps the formula was simply too Platonizing for the author. Just as he reacted against Thierry’s use of mens, he may have scrupulously avoided aequalitas as yet another misleading abstraction that competes with the Word’s transcendence. (2) Another possibility is that the author only had access to texts in which Thierry does not foreground the mathematical trinity. But the triad appears in one form or another in all of the Genesis and Boethius com-mentaries, including fragments (likely by Thierry’s students) appended to some extant manuscripts.111 (3) Or perhaps Fundamentum’s author avoids Thierry’s triad because he is preparing to introduce his own alternative triad in the treatise’s final part. This last motivation (3) could even be linked to (1): the author may have omitted Thierry’s theologically dubious triad in order to clear the ground for his own superior alternative.

106) On divine aequalitas in Thierry of Chartres, see Tractatus 37-47, TC 570-75; Commentum II.31-36; Lectiones VII.5-7, TC 224-25; Glosa V.17-21, TC 296-97. Aequalitas is also promi-nent in two works transmitted with Thierry’s texts by members of his circle of students: Com-mentarius Victorinus 81-95, TC 498-501; Tractatus de trinitate 12-19, TC 306-307.107) Tractatus 41-42, TC 572; Tractatus 45, TC 574.108) Lectiones II.38, TC 167.109) Glosa V.19, TC 297.110) See Albertson, ‘Learned Thief’, 376 n. 79.111) Tractatus de sex dierum operibus exists in nine manuscripts, mostly of French provenance, and excerpts appear in other twelfth-century works such as Helinand de Froidmont’s Chronicon. It therefore “holds a key position in any attempt to establish the extent of the literary activity and influence that emanated from Thierry and his school” (Häring, TC 46). The Boethian com-mentaries are more rare: Commentum survives in four manuscripts, Lectiones in two, and Glosa in one. One Parisian codex (BN Lat 14489) preserves a copy of Lectiones along with three other related glosses probably not by Thierry himself. However, an abridged version of Lectiones (date unknown), along with two of the Commentum manuscripts, can be traced to thirteenth-century Cistercian monasteries in Bavaria—“a fact,” notes Häring, “which reveals the lasting interest in Thierry’s ideas at least among Cistercians,” the order to which the Breton master retired in his later years (TC 34).


In the first two parts of Fundamentum naturae, as we have seen, the author takes aim at the fourth and second modes of being. The modes that survive the critique are necessitas absoluta (God) and possibilitas determinata (ordinary actualia). It remains for the author to explain in the treatise’s final part how this remnant third mode relates to the absolute God. With the corrective work of the critiques completed, he is free to elaborate his own positive theological vision. But once again the author’s answer appears to modify one of Thierry of Chartres’s doctrines. Instead of a trinity of perpetuals, he substitutes a trinity of absolutes. Throughout Fundamentum, the author objected to Thierry’s uni-vocal use of absoluta in the first and fourth modes, preferring to reserve the term for God alone.112 Now he proposes a better use of absoluta: possibility, form and motion constitute a contracted likeness (similitudinarie contracta) of the “absolute” Trinity:

Just as all possibility is in the absolute [possibility] which is the eternal God; and all form and act are in the absolute form which is the Word of the Father and the divine Son; so too all motion of connection, as well as unifying proportion and harmony, is in the absolute connection of the divine Spirit, so that God is the one principle of all things.113

There is no medium between the absolute and the contracted, as the author states earlier in Fundamentum, no space after the Creator but before the cre-ated world.114 But here he grants that matter, form and motion exist “in” the distinct absolutes of the Trinity, not unlike Thierry’s notion in Commentum that they “descend” from the Trinity.115 The author emphasizes that the differ-ent absolutes are a tri-unity, since the absolute God is one. He sees the triad reflected at the level of knowing (degrees of potential, act and motion) and being (matter, form and their nexus) as a kind of Augustinian vestigia of the Trinity, though he does not use the term.116 This refusal first to mention Thi-erry’s most well-known triad of unitas, aequalitas and conexio, and then to link his own proposed triad to Thierry’s similar model, should be taken as impor-tant aspects of his rebuttal of the theology of the “Platonists.”

112) See F 5r, 454; F 6r, 456; F 6r, 458; F 6v, 458; F 7r, 466.113) “Sicut ergo omnis possibilitas est in absoluta, quae est deus aeternus, et omnis forma et actus in absoluta forma, quae est verbum patris et filius in divinis, ita omnis motus conexionis et proportio ac harmonia uniens est in absoluta conexione divini spiritus, ut sit unum omnium principium deus. . . .” F 9r, 472.114) F 8r, 468.115) Commentum II.39, TC 80-81.116) F 9r-9v, 472.


These conclusions raise two questions that I can only mention briefly here as desiderata for future research. First, which manuscripts of Thierry’s works did the author of Fundamentum naturae encounter, and where? It is worth noting that three of the Cistercian monasteries that hold copies of Thierry’s works (Fürstenfeld, Aldersbach and Heilsbronn) are in the vicinity of the Eichstätt diocese. Second, it would be helpful to know how the Fundamentum text fits within the known reception history of Thierry of Chartres, as repre-sented by authors like Clarembald of Arras or Alan of Lille. How were Thierry and other “Chartrian” Platonists read, if at all, in the later Middle Ages? Were one to find any discernible continuities in their reception histories, this would be an important factor that could help triangulate the temporal, spatial and conceptual distances between the anonymous author, his Chartrian targets, and the problematic combination of the two that Nicholas of Cusa ventured in 1440.

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