The soul and its powers have remained a topic of perennial interest and significance in the history of Western thought. Yet there have been periods of time when work on questions of the soul or psychology, such as the nature of human knowledge or volition, has seen an explosion of intensive activity and an almost overnight transformation, which would continue to have reverberations for many subsequent generations. The Meditations of Descartes and Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason represent some famous examples of this phenomenon, or at least they have been perceived as epoch-making in later historiographical construction.Footnote ¹

A much lesser known – indeed almost entirely neglected – example, which was arguably as influential for the Middle Ages as Descartes and Kant were for modernity – can be found in the writings on the soul that were produced by or on the basis of the work of John of La Rochelle (1190–1245). John was one of the first important masters of theology at the University of Paris, which was founded around 1200 and is regarded by many as the first degree-granting university.Footnote ² In addition, John was a member of the Franciscan religious order, which was established in 1209. In this context, he worked together with his perhaps more well-known colleague, Alexander of Hales, and other Franciscans to define a distinctly Franciscan intellectual tradition for the first time.

The product of their collaboration was the so-called Summa Halensis (SH).Footnote ³ This text was named for Alexander, who was the first head of the Franciscan school of Paris, which was founded in 1231. However John himself authored volumes I and III, on God, Christology and moral theology, while another author redacted volumes II.1 and II.2 on the basis of works by both John and Alexander.Footnote ⁴ As one of the first texts of its kind to be produced in the university context, the Summa was mostly completed between 1236 and 1245, though the questions on the rational soul (De anima rationali, hereafter, DAR), found in volume II.1, were likely written between 1241 and 1245.Footnote ⁵ The redactor responsible for this section clearly drew heavily and directly on John’s personal works on the soul. These include a Tractatus on the powers of the soul, written around 1232, which formed the basis for the more elaborate Summa de anima (SDA) of around 1236.Footnote ⁶ As the only Franciscan or indeed author of any affiliation to write so extensively on the soul at this time, John was indisputably the architect of early Franciscan psychology, who also wrote extensively on questions of moral theology and the moral law.

Although foundational for the Franciscan intellectual tradition, the psychological theories John developed have long been dismissed by scholars as insignificant, partly on the assumption that early Franciscans like him did little but synthesize and systematize the previously dominant tradition of Augustine in the face of the rising popularity of Aristotle. While Étienne Gilson, among others, has acknowledged that recently translated Arabic-language sources, especially the works of the eleventh-century Islamic philosopher Avicenna (Ibn Sīnā), and to a lesser extent those of the Jewish philosopher Avicebron (Ibn Gabirol), were utlized by early Franciscans, these sources have been perceived as largely compatible with their project of ‘systematizing’ Augustine’s ideas. As a consequence, scholars have generally taken for granted that what early Franciscans described as ‘Augustinianism’ was a genuine rendering of Augustine’s authentic views.Footnote ⁷ Any Arabic influence, if it is acknowledged at all, is deemed secondary to and basically compatible with that of Augustine.Footnote ⁸

The generation of Franciscan scholars who worked after John and Alexander, above all their prize student Bonaventure, did not help to correct the common scholarly opinion in this regard. For his part, Bonaventure defended his ‘Augustinianism’ vigorously, as if the whole weight of theological orthodoxy depended upon it, without acknowledging that this tradition as he understood it was invented only twenty-five years earlier by the likes of John and Alexander, largely on the basis of Arabic sources that were not of Christian patrimony and were far removed from Augustine, both conceptually and contextually. Since Bonaventure has been regarded by many medievalists as the mature representative of the early Franciscan tradition, the role his teachers played in forging it has been largely overlooked.Footnote ⁹

The present study will rectify that situation through a close study of the works on the soul by and based on the writings of John of La Rochelle. This study will illustrate the extent to which John invoked Augustine – or rather pseudo-Augustinian texts – and other key Christian authorities like John of Damascus, as a means to appropriating the writings of Avicenna and Avicebron, among others. As the forthcoming chapters will show, the use of this tactic was not necessarily due to any embarrassment concerning the use of the Islamic and Jewish sources themselves. Admittedly, there was considerable antipathy in this period towards followers of non-Christian religions, who were often persecuted and even forced into conversion, not least by members of the Franciscan religious order.Footnote ¹⁰

Nevertheless, Latin thinkers regarded Islamic and Jewish scholars precisely as philosophical rather than religious authorities, who had much to offer Latin scholars seeking to develop their own intellectual tradition. Still, the comparatively ‘modern’ nature of the Arabic sources meant that, under the scholastic protocol employed in the early university, those wishing to invoke them needed to find a point of contact in the earlier canon of Christian authorities, or a ‘proof text’, from the old tradition to justify the use of the new.Footnote ¹¹ Such referencing was not necessarily designed to explain or defend the view of the authority quoted; rather, it was a way of legitimizing whatever view the scholastic author himself wanted to endorse.

The first step to demonstrating this, pursued in Chapter 1, involves examining the twelfth-century background against which John of La Rochelle and other members of the early university developed their psychological positions. While there was limited interest in the early Middle Ages in the powers of the soul in their own right – and often only so far as they facilitated Christian contemplation and action – the situation changed dramatically following the eleventh-century translation of various Greek and Arabic medical works, which described the bodily powers and their relation to the functions of the soul. These texts attracted attention from members of the Cistercian religious order, among others, who took some important initial steps toward elucidating the various facets of the soul and its relation to the body, which proved influential for early Franciscans.

While the medical sources helped Latin thinkers address questions abou the body, mechanisms for offering a sophisticated account of cognitive operations only became available in the West following the translation of the aforementioned Arabic philosophical works into Latin in the mid-to-late twelfth century. Chapter 1 discusses what these works had to offer and the various factors that contributed to a delay in their full incorporation by Latin thinkers until the 1230s, when John of La Rochelle was active as a theologian. Chapter 2 situates John in relation to some of his key predecessors and contemporaries at the theology faculty in the early University of Paris. The chapter gives some background on the distinctive contributions each of these scholars made to their discipline and also assesses in a preliminary way the extent to which they embraced the newly available Islamic and Jewish philosophical sources that had been translated into Latin from Arabic. As a result of these translations, scholastics were now confronted with a new set of six main questions about the soul, which are listed below:

1. 1. Is the soul composed of matter and form, per universal hylomorphism?

2. 2. Is the soul united to the body accidentally or substantially?

3. 3. Is the soul united to the body through a medium?

4. 4. Are the vegetative, sensitive, and rational powers three substances in the soul?

5. 5. Is the essence of the soul identical with its powers?

6. 6. Do the vegetative and sense powers survive the death of the body?

In addition to these more overarching psychological questions, I noted above that scholastics inherited from the Arabic sources a sophisticated framework for defining the cognitive as well as motive or affective and volitional functions of the soul. While some of John’s contemporaries engaged with a limited number of the six questions, this chapter establishes in a preliminary way that John was the only member of his generation to deal robustly and comprehensively with all of them.Footnote ¹² Moreover, he was the only figure of his time to engage deeply with the effort to elaborate the cognitive and motive powers. The reason for this was that John, first and foremost a theologian, saw addressing those matters as key to defining the status of the soul as God’s image. Although his contemporaries were also centrally concerned with that task, what it involved precisely was very much determined and delimited by their prior theological commitments, particularly concerning the extent to which theologians should engage with philosophical material, on account of which some addressed the psychological material differently, or not at all.

Chapter 3 elaborates John and the Halensian Summist’s engagement with the first three questions mentioned above, situating their answers in the context of others that were offered by their early scholastic contemporaries. In the case of all three questions – whether the soul is united to the body accidentally or substantially, whether it is composed of matter and form, and whether it is united to the body through a medium – the chapter reveals John and his contemporaries’ debts to Arabic sources, specifically Avicenna and Avicebron, and the way in which Augustine, or in most cases pseudo-Augustinian writings, were invoked to integrate the work of those authors. The varying answers, if any, that different early scholastics gave to those questions illustrate the extent to which there was room for interpretation as regards how to use the new philosophical sources and indeed to define what it meant to be an Augustinian.

Chapter 4 details John and the Summist’s engagement with the latter three questions whether the different powers of the soul represent three distinct substances, whether the soul is identical with its powers, and whether the bodily powers survive the death of the body. Here again, John surpassed his contemporaries both in terms of dealing with all three questions and in terms of the extent to which he did so. Once again, the differences of opinion among John and his contemporaries regarding if and how to answer those questions confirm that there was disagreement not only on precisely how to adopt Arabic ideas in a Christian context but also on how to project them onto the existing Christian tradition and especially the work of Augustine. The unique commitment John had as a theologian to engaging with the full breadth and depth of the new philosophical material is the reason why his answers so outstripped those of his contemporaries in terms of comprehensiveness and depth.

In Chapter 5, I move on to a series of four interconnected chapters which deal with an area where John was virtually alone among his contemporaries in drawing on the new Arabic sources – in particular, Avicenna who served as a key source for interpreting Aristotle and Augustine during this period. This concerns the work of human cognition. As the first chapter in this series, Chapter 5 begins with John’s earliest text on the soul, the Tractatus, which delineates the cognitive and other powers that John found in Avicenna’s work and his attempt to identify broadly comparable cognitive schemata in pseudo-Augustine and John of Damascus.Footnote ¹³

The Damascene was a key new Greek patristic authority for Latin thinkers, whose invocation alongside Augustine was apparently designed to persuade John of La Rochelle’s readers that there were points of contact in the Christian tradition which allowed for Avicenna’s full incorporation. The focus of Chapter 5 is simply on laying out the content of John’s discussion, following the order in which he discusses matters, and to weigh in on the somewhat vexed question of the Tractatus’ relation to the Summa de anima, which repeats much of the material in the Tractatus on the cognitive and motive powers but exceeds the Tractatus in dealing with the six questions that are the subject of Chapters 3 and 4.

The purpose of Chapter 6 is to present a more refined interpretation of the material put forward in Chapter 5, with a view to elucidating precisely how John understands the nature of cognition and how it is facilitated by external and internal sensation. While John to some extent follows the Aristotelian tradition in allowing for the passive reception of sense data as the initial step to gaining knowledge, he posits that the actual act of perceiving requires some intervention from reason, an idea he gleans from Avicenna. Furthermore, the act of abstracting universals from sense data requires the help of certain innate first principles, given by God, which aid in the interpretation of that data and so facilitate the possibility of knowledge.Footnote ¹⁴ This was another idea John derived from Avicenna, who thus inspired him to develop what has been described as an ‘active’ theory of both perception and cognition – in which the intellect in different ways determines the course of both acts. Following John’s innovations, this kind of theory would remain a fixture in the Franciscan intellectual tradition, notwithstanding the further adaptations it would undergo.Footnote ¹⁵

A brief excursus in Chapter 7 seeks to deal with a question that arises out of the discussion of Chapter 6. In addition to the various psychological schemata of Avicenna, Augustine and the Damascene that John of La Rochelle appeals to when explaining cognition, another scheme appears, the origins of which remain something of a mystery. This scheme distinguishes between the agent, possible, and material intellects. Although scholars in the past have debated whether the scheme suggests an early influence of Averroes (Ibn Rushd), this chapter weighs the evidence and possible sources of it in order to reach the conclusion that it is a construct of the Latin tradition at the time, which drew eclectically on Avicennian and Aristotelian components in order to adapt them for Christian ends.

Finally, Chapter 8 turns to consider how John’s cognitive theory was adapted in the context of the Summa Halensis. Although the redactor certainly took liberties with the organization of John’s material, the upshot of this inquiry is that he more or less repeats the same fundamental positions that John advocated in the Summa de anima in terms of the question of how the soul engages actively perception and cognition. This brings us back to the question regarding the extent to which John’s theory of knowledge, already recognizable as the kind of theory advocated by later Franciscans, is in fact Augustinian. In the light of the foregoing chapters, it will become clear that this theory has little to do with Augustine but is a unique invention of John, who draws principally on Avicenna but introduces other elements and adaptations in order to render the theory fit for Christian and specifically Franciscan purposes.

After thus completing the inquiry into John’s theory of cognition, I turn in Chapter 9 to his treatment of the so-called sensory motive powers, which generate affections, namely, the inclinations toward or away from sense objects that result from the perception of their positive or negative significance. Interestingly, the Summa’s treatment of these powers is very brief, given how extensively they are discussed by John. This Franciscan master’s strategy for dealing with them once again involves juxtaposing Avicenna, pseudo-Augustine and John of Damascus in order to codify a typology of the affections, which later influenced Thomas Aquinas, who nonetheless spoke of passions rather than affections. In this way, he emphasized the passive way in which we are affected by sense data rather than the active and rational response that is stressed by John, in line with his Avicennian sympathies.

Chapter 10 moves on to the question of free choice, which is where the study of the affections comes to fruition, insofar as the will ultimately decides which of its affections to follow. This is the one case out of all the topics treated in this book where the position of the Summa Halensis is more influenced by Alexander of Hales than John of La Rochelle. However, that influence shows just as much as the study of John the extent to which early Franciscans were playing with and indeed redefining what it meant to be an Augustinian. As the chapter explains, Alexander completely twisted Augustine’s two key ideas about free choice; namely, that it is ordered to the good, and consists in will and reason, to advocate his own view, which is that free choice is flexible between good and evil and is principally based in the will rather than in reason. These two ideas, which became central to the subsequent Franciscan tradition, are among those which have been most commonly and mistakenly associated with Augustine on account of the Franciscan influence.Footnote ¹⁶

Chapter 11 is something of a postscript to the book which gives a window into the way that the Summa Halensis construes the key psychological topics discussed above in the case of angels by contrast to humans – a topic John himself only treats in passing. What we find here is that the structure of cognition and free choice is much the same for angels as for humans, with the major exception that it is not bound by the limitations of the body which are proper to humans. In that sense, the study of angels serves as a kind of ‘limit case’Footnote ¹⁷ for determining how human beings might function, if they were unfettered by their physical constraints.

The Conclusion sums up the findings of the book and each individual chapter, throwing into question again the notion of early Franciscan ‘Augustinianism’ by highlighting the extent to which the very definition of Augustinianism was up for debate among John and his contemporaries, who had different views on the way and extent to which Arabic sources should be incorporated for these purposes. Although John certainly agreed with some of his contemporaries on many points, he developed his ideas with much greater depth and precision into theories which in many cases eventually became closely associated with the Franciscan tradition of thought, even after scholars in other camps had abandoned them.

As the Conclusion will endeavour to suggest, the reason he and his Franciscan colleagues ultimately exhibited a preference for certain of these views over others likely had much to do with their religious ethos and indeed the example of Francis of Assisi, whose personality and vision they were in some respects attempting to articulate in theological and philosophical terms. In other words, the reasons for appropriating Avicennian ideas, with adaptations, were fundamentally theological. Shortly after John made his efforts in this regard, Averroes’ commentaries on Aristotle gained popularity, and the practice of writing commentaries or treatises de anima became commonplace.

This genre then became detached from that of the theological Summa with which it is conjoined in the early Franciscan intellectual tradition. The resulting commentaries on the soul have been relatively well studied, no doubt due to the obvious phenomenon of their sudden proliferation and the maturation of the genre as a whole within them.Footnote ¹⁸ Perhaps because of the theological, and thus supposedly Augustinian, context in which it was written, however, the work of John and early Franciscans has not been recognized as a milestone in the history of ideas.

By undertaking the first major study of early Franciscan thought on human nature, consequently, I seek to provide a basis for questioning the historiographical notion that scholars of this ilk did little but rehearse the views of Augustine. This study will show that they did so much more, incorporating Avicennian psychology and making it their own in ways that would set the terms for debates that would occupy scholars both within and outside the order for generations to come. Although tracing the lines of their influence lies beyond the scope of the present study, this nonetheless opens doors for exploring the extent to which John of La Rochelle’s decidedly Avicennian psychology continued to reverberate in the later medieval Franciscan tradition and beyond.Footnote ¹⁹