Abstract
This paper explores Robert Grosseteste’s account of divine infinitude and maintains that the Bishop of Lincoln was unique among his contemporaries and important for succeeding generations of Christian theologians in that he generated a theoretical framework that could substantiate and develop further, religious belief in an intrinsic and entitively perfective concept of divine infinitude which was a central tenet of much medieval metaphysical speculation at the end of the thirteenth century and beyond. The backdrop of Grosseteste’s thinking are ancient philosophies of nature, especially that of Aristotle, which find infinitude—allied as it is to the pure potentiality of matter—to be an incomprehensible morass of indeterminacy. Motivated equally by (1) his theological commitment to Patristic thinking about the nature of God as infinite and (2) his cosmogonical accounts of the universe (as found most especially in his De luce) that are as much mathematical (if not more so) as they are physical, Grosseteste reformulates and deploys the concept of ‘infinitude’ in a positive direction that, as this paper shows, has decisive significance for succeeding generations of medieval thinkers, especially Richard Fishacre, but also Thomas Aquinas, Bonaventure, and Duns Scotus who are committed to a positive understanding of God’s entitive infinitude.
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Notes
- 1.
I have chosen to translate ‘atomus’ as ‘dust mote’ to avoid any connotations that the term ‘atom’ may convey to the contemporary reader. Fishacre, I believe it safe to say, was not a proponent of contemporary quantum theory.
- 2.
Thomson places the date of composition of the majority of Grosseteste’s Dicta after 1220 and most likely between 1229 and 1232 during Grossetest’s archdiaconal period. See (Harrison 1940). It is fairly safe to say, then, that Fishacre’s Commentary on the Sentences, written around 1245, did not antedate the Dictum in question.
- 3.
Grosseteste mentions ‘love’ (amor) instead of the more common ‘will’; cf. Dictum 60, 156.
- 4.
That Grosseteste is a universal hylomorphist seems clear from his De motu corporali et luce in which he describes magnitude as a consequence of first form and first matter. There he states that there is nothing common among all bodies except prime matter, prime form, and magnitude.
- 5.
For God as divine numerator see (McEvoy 1982).
- 6.
For Albertus Magnus’s treatment of this problem see his De causis et processu universitatis, 1.4.8, vol. 17.2.
- 7.
James McEvoy helpfully enumerated and described these four (1982).
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Salas, V. (2016). A Theoretical Fulcrum: Robert Grosseteste on (Divine) Infinitude. In: Cunningham, J.P., Hocknull, M. (eds) Robert Grosseteste and the pursuit of Religious and Scientific Learning in the Middle Ages. Studies in the History of Philosophy of Mind, vol 18. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-33468-4_11
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