This volume offers a comprehensive examination of medieval conceptions of foreknowledge—understood both as divine prescience and as the human capacity to anticipate future events—across a range of intellectual traditions. It investigates key themes such as future contingents, prophetic discourse (both divinely inspired and natural), divinatory dreams, eschatology, scientific prognostication (in astrology and medicine), and conjectural disciplines such as geomancy, physiognomy, meteorology, and magic. Through historical reconstructions and doctrinal analyses, the contributions illuminate the theoretical frameworks and distinctive positions advanced by medieval authors within diverse cultural and scholarly contexts. Building on an extensive body of prior research, the volume documents the multiplicity of medieval strategies for engaging with the future, thereby challenging the historiographical assumption that the notion of an open and indeterminate future emerged only in the Modern period.
Alessandro Palazzo is a full professor at the Department of Humanities, University of Trento
Francesca Bonini is a post doctoral fellow at the Department of Humanities, University of Trento
Amalia Cerrito is a teaching assistant at the Department of Humanities, University of Trento
From: P. Porro, How does God’s Knowledge Differ from Tiresias’ Oracles? Revisiting Boethius’ Consolation of Philosophy, Book V (pagg. 25-27)
As formulated by Boethius himself, the well-known question raised in Book V of The Consolation of Philosophy appears to share certain features with some of the puzzles discussed today under the heading of the paradox of predictability. On the one hand, we encounter an oracular intelligence (“Laplacean Intelligence”) capable of predicting all events that will occur; on the other, an agent who, while not strictly counter-predictive, nonetheless claims the possibility – qua a being endowed with free will – of escaping any form of epistemic determination. If the Oracular Intelligence is genuinely capable, on the basis of its own knowledge or science, of predicting everything that will happen – even the intention of certain agents to act counter-predictively – then the universe in question can only be strictly deterministic, and the very possibility of acting counter-predictively becomes meaningless. If, by contrast, we admit the possibility that those subject to the knowledge of the Oracular Intelligence can in fact act in a counter-predictive manner, the Oracular Intelligence thereby ceases to be such, and its predictions prove to be merely probabilistic or doxastic.
What, then, would happen if we were to posit the existence of a rational agent or epistemic subject who, like the Laplacean Intelligence, is able to know the universe both in its general laws and in its individual details, and therefore to predict everything, but who is external to the universe itself and does not belong to it? In such a case, no interfering effect would arise – as occurs when the intelligence in question is itself part of the universe whose events it anticipates – and the predictions of this rational subject would, by definition, be infallible. In short, what would happen if we replaced Laplace’s ‘demon’ with the God of the late antique and medieval Christian tradition, for instance with Boethius’ God? This is precisely the issue I wish to address: namely, the problem of the compatibility between an omniscient and infallible rational subject – who knows everything with absolute certainty – and the possibility of preserving a margin of unpredictability, and thus of free will, within such a determinate (or indeed so deterministic) system.
There are, of course, many elements that distinguish the scenario of Book V of the Consolation from contemporary debates on predictability. I shall confine myself to mentioning two. First, the Laplacean Intelligence may be conceived as an ‘extrinsic predictor’, but may also, in a certain sense, belong to the very system whose behaviour it predicts; Boethius’ God, by contrast, as already anticipated, is entirely external to the system itself and shares none of its characteristics. Secondly, Boethius explicitly speaks of human free will, not of counter-predictive behaviour. And yet what most clearly characterises Boethius’ approach to the problem of free will – distinguishing it from that of his predecessors, and in part also from that of later authors who engage with it – is precisely the issue of unpredictability, or rather the relationship between human action and an epistemic subject (an Oracular Intelligence) that is omniscient and, above all, by definition infallible. The “epistemic objection” that Boethius raises against Philosophy in the third prose of Book V is far less naïve than it is sometimes taken to be, and in fact constitutes the very core of Boethius’ argument. If God knows in a determined and necessary way events that are in themselves contingent and unpredictable (first case), then He is mistaken in every act of knowledge concerning events of this kind, and therefore cannot be infallible or omniscient at all; if God knows in a contingent way events that are genuinely unpredictable and contingent (second case), then His knowledge is of a doxastic nature, and His predictions are reduced to mere conjectures of human soothsayers – depowered natural oracles – such as Tiresias; if, finally, God is able to predict all human behaviour in an absolutely infallible manner (third case), then such behaviour is not unpredictable at all, but rather subject to absolute predictability. In this last case, the problem becomes that of determining whether such predictability – precisely what Lady Philosophy and Boethius uphold – is compatible or incompatible with effective freedom on the part of human beings. [...]
From: P. Clarke, O.P., Prophecy’s Future and Prophecies Past: Thomas Aquinas, Peter of John Olivi, and the Prophetic Economy (pagg. 363-365)
From these three lines of inquiry, and by way of conclusion, I would like to draw out two implications that fall broadly under the rubric of the politics of time. The first relates to the fundamental importance in the thirteenth century of the theme of reformatio or renovatio temporis – within which the mendicant orders are meant to play a leading role – and, further, the nature of the novum in question. As is well known, throughout the early decades of the fratres minores and fratres praedicatores, their ecclesiastical novelty in conjunction with their claim to recover the original form of evangelical life caused no little consternation in certain quarters. In other words, it would have been difficult to be a mendicant friar in the thirteenth century without some sense of the peculiar temporality implied by his religio, at once new and old, original and eschatological, arriving late on the scene as the laborers of the undecima hora. As for the attitudes of our two friars, both take a view of the qualified novelty of this renovatio. Olivi understands the mendicant embrace of evangelical living as an ‘apocalyptic recovery’, while Thomas views it as a ‘traditional novelty’. Thomas’s early and consistent refusal of Joachimite ideas was hardly the dry fruit of a theological conservatism; rather, he opposes Joachimism and its Franciscan avatars on the grounds that they misunderstand the radicality of the evangelical novum – and its historical durability as such. Olivi stresses the epochal nature of the recovery of evangelical perfection because a prophetic economy based on Joachim’s concordantia requires a kind of escalating repetition of what has come before. Reading the lex nova typologically, as a figure of the future, means that the renewal of vita apostolica can only be a lex supernova.
The second point is a question we might pose to Thomas and Olivi bearing on what could be called their “ethics of fulfillment”: How is this renovatio to be accomplished, how is one to fulfill the demanding promise of perfectio evangelica? In his study of Olivi’s commentary on the Gospel of Matthew, Kevin Madigan rightly connects Olivi’s disagreement with Thomas on evangelical poverty to their divergent interpretations of the content of the new law, arguing that Olivi defends a “morality of imitation”, while Thomas promotes an “ethics of deliberation”. To extend this idea, we might say that for Olivi, the renewal of radical Gospel living is accomplished through imitation of a figura, and one that is precisely prophetic: pater noster Franciscus. In fulfilling the promises of Christ, Francis himself is the alter Christus, and becomes for his followers a promise, a figure, a seal to be opened through prophetic exegesis and imitation. For his part, Thomas certainly views mendicants’ reclamation of evangelical living as an imitatio Christi et apostolorum, yet this mimetic character is qualified by Thomas’s view of the central role played by human deliberation and prudential reasoning, precisely within the logic of the imitatio. This emphasis on deliberation should not be mistaken as an assertion of rationality over against charisma – that is, as yet another instance of the Weberian dialectic – but rather as the consequence of a particular understanding of the historical prophetic economy and the modes of participation available in hoc tempore. Thomas does not so much mute the prophetic in the ordinary run of things as emphasize how, as a result of the novum of
Christ, it has become extraordinarily ordinary. For that reason, and in keeping with Thomas’s famous dictum about nature and grace, prophecy does not and should not compete with the natural capacities and virtues at man’s disposal – especially prudentia, man’s participation in divine providentia. It is here that we can locate the deep incompatibility between Olivi’s Franciscan literalism – with its emphasis on the Christological exemplarity of Francis, and the Poverello’s own ideal of living the Gospel sine glossa – and Thomas’s views of the continued divine accommodatio to the human condition, and the instrumentality of poverty to the ends of perfection.I have argued that it is within a specifically economic framework that we ought to situate the speculative and practical contributions of Thomas and Olivi to the revisioning of prophetic vision. Both turn to the economy within which prophetic figures and fulfillments find their meaning, reading backwards from fulfillment to figura, and then applying this economic perspective within their conceptual decisions about prophecy’s meaning, its causes, its social function, and so on. For both Thomas and Olivi, it is the fulfillment of prophecies past that discloses the meaning of prophecy’s future.
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