SOURCE: Crowe, M. B. “Paradiso X: Siger of Brabant.” In Dante Soundings: Eight Literary and Historical Essays, edited by David Nolan, pp. 146-62. Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 1981.

[In the following essay, Crowe provides intellectual and philosophical context for the Paradiso, suggesting that Siger of Brabant, a controversial thinker whose ideas St. Thomas Aquinas vigorously disputed, is the “philosopher” to whom the poet often refers.]

Who is the philosopher in the Paradiso? Is it, perhaps, Dante himself? To say so would demand an investigation far beyond the scope of this paper; for it would mean a study of Dante's philosophical opinions and all their far-reaching applications in the Divine Comedy. The scope of this study is the more modest, but still difficult one of identifying “the philosopher” among the great variety of personalities that people Dante's Paradiso. Is it Thomas Aquinas, for whom he had such a regard? Or Bonaventure? Or Albert the Great? Boethius or Dionysius? Or Siger of Brabant, whose appearance in the Paradiso reflects so exactly the enigmas of his career at Paris?¹

But is philosophy not out of place in the Paradiso? Practically all the great names in philosophy, from the ancient Greeks down to Dante's own day, are in the Divine Comedy. The greatest of them, however, are in the Inferno; Socrates, Plato, Anaxagoras, Thales, Empedocles, Heraclitus, Cicero, Seneca, Avicenna, Averroes and many others together with the one who was, in Dante's eyes, the greatest of them all, Aristotle:

Poi ch'innalzai in poco più le ciglia,
          vidi 'l maestro di color che sanno
          seder tra filosofica famiglia.
Tutti lo miran, tutti onor li fanno

Inf.iv.130-3

Surely the Paradiso is the place for the theologian, not the philosopher. When theology, the queen of the sciences, appears on the scene what function remains for the handmaiden, the ancilla, philosophy? Is not the exclusion of philosophy suggested by the fact that Virgil, who has guided Dante for most of his journey in the other world, gives way to Beatrice in the Paradiso? And Beatrice, in her turn, gives way to Bernard, the doctor of mystical theology. The medievals, including Dante, took Virgil for a philosopher in the broad sense, a man possessed of wisdom. This wisdom, however, pales by comparison with faith and, above all, vision. It is not by chance that Dante's epitaph by Giovanni del Virgilio begins: Theologus Dantes nullius dogmatis expers. For his contemporaries he was not Dante the philosopher.

Yet one has the feeling that the question is more complex. For Dante was a philosopher and thought of himself as such. In the exordium to his Quaestio de aqua et terra he described himself, in a phrase reminiscent of St Paul's self-identification as the “least of all the saints”, as “inter vere philosophantes minimus”. No consideration of Dante can omit his constant preoccupation with philosophy. He is after all not merely the poet of the Divine Comedy, although it is to that masterpiece he owes his immortality. The Convivio and the De Monarchia, to go no further, are works remarkable for their philosophical content and they are literally stuffed with authorities cited in support by Dante the scholar. It is not too much to say that Dante was obsessed with philosophy. No part of the Divine Comedy, certainly not the Paradiso, can be really intelligible without some knowledge of the background to Dante's philosophical view of the universe. The medieval imprint of his thought was fundamentally philosophical. The image of man and the world with which he worked was laced with philosophical conceptions, astronomical, cosmological, anthropological. We cannot easily today enter into these conceptions (the image is now properly described by C. S. Lewis as “the discarded image”),² but they are nonetheless philosophical. Nor were they simply picked up by Dante in a sort of osmosis from his environment. They were the result of deep study by one who must be counted one of the most learned men of his age. Between the Vita nuova, which is already packed with philosophical allusions, and the Convivio, Dante went through some sort of intellectual crisis. What precisely it was cannot be certainly known. But it may not be altogether fanciful to see it as his feeling the need, in some personal and dramatic way, for a principle of unity, an intellectual point of vantage from which to survey and order his experiences, his knowledge, his observations. It is the traditional role of philosophy to offer an answer to such a need. And the fact is that Dante, when he comes to write the Convivio, eulogizes the Lady Philosophy, in a way that reminds the reader of the vision of philosophy in the golden book that so influenced Dante and the entire Middle Ages, Boethius's Consolation of Philosophy: “veramente è donna piena di dolcezza, ornata d'onestade, mirabile di savere, gloriosa di libertade” (Conv.II.xv.3).

We can, then, scarcely hope to discover the philosopher in the Paradiso, if there be one, without knowing something of Dante's philosophy and of the manner of his acquiring it. As to his formal initiation in philosophy, one's thoughts turn naturally to the Dominican studium at Santa Maria Novella. This Florentine studium became a studium generale in 1295; but even before the separation of Florence from the Roman province of the Dominicans in 1288, it was a well-known school. Beatrice died in 1290; and it is perfectly plausible to think of Dante, in great need of consolation, betaking himself to the school of the friars, shortly to receive the accolade of recognition as a fully-formed school of philosophy and theology. Here he could have heard the lectures of Fra Remigio de' Girolami, a pupil of Thomas Aquinas. Fra Remigio was the son of a Florentine merchant, Chiaro Girolami, and may even have been a friend of Dante as a layman before he set off for Paris to study law. It was in Paris that Remigio turned to the study of philosophy and took the Dominican habit—in both matters acting, quite probably, under the spell of Thomas Aquinas, then (1269-1272) in his second period as master-regent in the University. This was the period when the Averroistic crisis was threatening to tear the University apart, so that Fra Remigio, returning to his native Florence, could bring the most vivid recollections of the philosophy of St Thomas locked in ferocious combat with the speculations of the Aristotelians in the Arts Faculty led by Siger of Brabant. Made lector at Santa Maria Novella even before his ordination as a priest, Fra Remigio taught at Florence for forty-two years until his death in 1319, two years before Dante. From his writings Fra Remigio appears not merely as a fine speculative mind, at home in the most difficult questions of philosophy and theology, but also as a thinker with a practical cast of mind, one capable, in a phrase of Martin Grabmann's, of connecting the Thomistic world of thought with the storms of life.³

Another friar whom Dante may possibly have heard at Santa Maria Novella was Fra Nicola Brunacci. Fra Nicola seems to have become lector only in 1299, by which time Dante was well launched in public life. There must be some doubt whether he can be counted among Dante's teachers. But the two must certainly have met in the Florence of the turn of the century. If so, Fra Nicola provides another connection with Aquinas; for he seems to have travelled to Paris with Aquinas in 1268-69.

Whatever of these historical relationships, what is undoubted is Dante's high appreciation of the thought-synthesis of St Thomas, a synthesis that included not merely the Fathers and Christian theologians but, and more particularly, the philosophy of Aristotle. The major controversies in the intellectual life of the thirteenth century centred precisely upon the reception of Aristotle, whose works had become progressively available to the Latin West since the late twelfth century. Up to then Western Europe knew Aristotle only for his logic and that due to the happy circumstance of his logical works having been translated and commented upon by Boethius in the sixth century. When the rest of Aristotle became known, at first in corrupt Latin versions of Arabic versions of Syriac versions of the original Greek, the impact was enormous. Here was a thinker who, without the benefit of Christianity, had evolved a powerful system of thought in which there were answered the great questions of man and the world, of life and destiny. Some of the answers were, on their face, inconsistent with Christianity—the assertion of the eternity of the world, for instance, or the denial of a personal immortality of the soul. For some this may simply have added spice to the enterprise of interpreting Aristotle; to some it suggested the idea that a proposition might be provable in philosophy and yet false by comparison with theological certainties; to still others, the inconsistency simply confirmed their view that Aristotle was a pagan burning in Hell, whose opinions need not be taken into account.

Nowadays we may tend to take the Aristotelianism of Aquinas for granted. His contemporaries did not take it for granted and the series of condemnations of Aristotle at Paris and at Oxford in the thirteenth century, in which Aquinas was not untouched, shows it. When Dante described Aristotle as the “maestro di color che sanno”, this was more than an academic judgment; it was the brandishing of a banner.

What was it to be an Aristotelian? That, for Dante as for his predecessors in the thirteenth century, was the question. What Paris said, as the uncontested intellectual centre of Europe, should be decisive. But what did Paris say? Paris, unfortunately, spoke with many voices. It took the white heat of controversy, notably that between Siger of Brabant and Thomas of Aquin, to refine and purify the notion of a Christian Aristotelianism of the kind that Dante could embrace half a century after the drama of Aristotle had been fought out at Paris. These are matters to which we must return.

But first it is time to put the question more insistently: Who is the philosopher in the Paradiso? Let us, so to speak, interrogate Dante himself. In the Paradiso alone—neglecting the “filosofica famiglia” of the Inferno and thinkers like Cato of Utica in the Purgatorio—there are about thirty personalities who might in some sense be called philosophers. It is clear that nearly all the shapers of the medieval mind are here; and it is equally clear that few, if any of them are in Paradise for their philosophy. They include Albert the Great, Anselm, Aquinas, Augustine, Bernard, Boethius, Bonaventure, Dionysius, Hugh of St Victor, Isidore, Peter Lombard, Peter of Spain (the logician, later Pope John XXI), Richard of St Victor and Siger of Brabant. Does this short list, in alphabetical order, contain “the philosopher”? The question may, for the moment, be turned by asking another. Is there any claimant to the title who has escaped Dante's net? Is there any notable omission in the list?

If one were to ask a contemporary to name the philosopher par excellence of the Middle Ages the answer might very well come: Peter Abelard. The extraordinary influence of Abelard in the first half of the twelfth century, when students flocked from all parts of Europe to sit at his feet, is a factor in explaining the intellectual hegemony of Paris in the latter half of that century and thereafter. It was as a dialectician—a logician—that Abelard made his reputation and his moderate realist solution to the “universals” problem became a commonplace of thirteenth-century dialectics. He turned later, less successfully, to theology where his suspect opinions and his provocative exposition of them, led to his eventual condemnation at the Council of Sens in 1141. This condemnation was largely the work of St Bernard, whose place in Dante's Paradiso could scarcely be higher. Why, one may ask, does Abelard not appear at all, not even in the Inferno? If not as a heterodox theologian, then surely as a superb dialectician, he had claims. Indeed one would not have been surprised to find the story of Heloise and Abelard immortalized in the manner of the story of Paolo and Francesca in the Inferno.⁴ It is true that the story of Heloise and Abelard is better known to us than that of Paolo and Francesca; and this is not entirely due to the romantic embellishments of the nineteenth century. Abelard's Historia calamitatum mearum and the Correspondence with Heloise constitute a document as moving and personal as, say, the Confessions of St Augustine. But there is no echo of this in the Divine Comedy. The reason cannot be just the ecclesiastical condemnation; for that reason, as we shall see, should also exclude Siger of Brabant who, on the contrary, enjoys a position of considerable distinction in the Paradiso. This, too, is a matter to which we must return.

In the interim may we continue to circle about our main question by looking again at the philosophy of Dante. Rather it will be useful to look at two broad themes within that philosophy. First let us take the cosmogonia dantesca which has been the object of so many studies.

It is evident that the understanding of the Divine Comedy is much impaired unless the reader has an adequate conception of the geography of the Inferno, Purgatorio and Paradiso. But the phrase cosmogonia dantesca means much more than the three-dimensional image of the after-world. It includes the mental structure, imagery and speculation, through which medieval man understood his world and his own place in it. The discarding of this image, under pressure from the advances of science more than philosophy, presents the greatest obstacle to our understanding of the medieval world. The abandonment of geocentrism for heliocentrism is only one, although important, detail in which our universe differs from that of Dante's contemporaries. Space and time are problems for the post-Einsteinian culture of our day; but space and time have always been philosophical problems and, despite all our advances, what Plato and Aristotle said about time and place cannot be dismissed as simply irrelevant. When the medievals thought about God or angels, or separated souls or the after-life—and how much of the Divine Comedy is taken up with such themes—they inevitably speculated about time, eternity and aevum. Dante is no exception. On such matters he turned, like many of his contemporaries, to Aristotle and even to the Arabic commentators on Aristotle. So too, for the complicated astronomical system in which the heavenly bodies are carried around the earth on crystalline spheres and where their relative positions are explained by a system of cycles and epicycles; Aristotelian suggestions, one might say, but greatly overlaid by the explanations and refinements of Ptolemy and the Hellenistic and Arab calculators. Our space-conscious age has to make a deliberate effort to recapture such details and their implications.

The more directly philosophical matters, like creation, or the pure being of God, or the status of separated souls, do not present the same opaqueness to modern minds, because they are still philosophical problems. In these areas, too, Dante's debt to Aristotle and to Aristotle's Arab interpreters, Avicenna and Averroes, is well-documented. The point is that Dante looked to the science of his day to inform him on such matters. Already in the thirteenth century that science was bursting the bonds of the liberal arts. The arts of the trivium (grammar, rhetoric and dialectic) could scarcely contain philosophy; and those of the quadrivium (arithmetic, geometry, astronomy and music) were quite inadequate to contain all that was beginning to be known about the universe. The autonomy of the positive sciences, claimed against philosophy, was still a thing of the future and no distinction can be made between Dante the philosopher and Dante the scientist. Questions about prime matter, the totally indeterminate substrate of all being outside of God, creation, the soul, its parts and functions, the freedom of the will, these and many other topics, many of them exceedingly complex and technical, are despite their abstractness given a local habitation and a name in the Divine Comedy. They all point to the Aristotelian Unmoved Mover which, as final cause, is the source of all movement in the universe and becomes the Christian God of love:

l'amor che move il sole e l'altre stelle.

Par.xxxiii.145

These highly abstract notions can be expressed in the superb imagery of a consummate artist only because he has taken the trouble to understand what he is talking about. He has gone to the sources, to the Aristotelians of his time and notably to St Thomas Aquinas. For these were matters upon which Aristotelian philosophy, particularly in the interpretation of the Arabs, had much to say and much of it controversial.

A similar situation obtains in a second area of Dante's thought, that concerned with the relationship between philosophy and theology or, we may say, between reason and faith. Once again it is a broad theme which one cannot do much more than outline. It is, no less than the cosmogonia dantesca, part of the framework of the Divine Comedy, providing not the material images of the poem but an important part of the intellectual context in which it was written. The distinction between theology and philosophy is one that we may be tempted to take for granted. We may be more cautious when we reflect that one of the first to expound it clearly and unambiguously was St Thomas Aquinas who tells us that theology relies upon data of divine revelation whereas philosophy has to do with the objects of human rational investigation.⁵ The distinction was to be a critical one in the Averroistic controversies that involved St Thomas with Siger of Brabant at Paris 1269-1272. For the moment we may be content to note that Dante's inclinations were strongly on the side of an independent philosophy. There seems to be no evidence that he would accept the description of philosophy as the ancilla theologiae; he saw the function of philosophy as that of “a collaborator far prouder and far more independent. It is through its splendour and magnificence as a daughter of God, by virtue of the miracle of its own existence and of the effects which it produces on man through its special quality, that philosophy, a miracle to be seen every day, helps us to deem possible the miracles of Christ which we did not see”.⁶

The experience of truth described early in the Paradiso connects truth with the vision of God:

Io veggio ben che già mai non si sazia
          nostro intelletto, se 'l ver non lo illustra
          di fuor dal qual nessun vero si spazia.

Par.iv.124-6

The presence of Beatrice, recalling here the Lady Philosophy of Boethius's Consolation of Philosophy, encourages Dante:

Questo m'invita, questo m'assicura
          con reverenza, donna, dimandarvi
          d'un'altra verità che m'è oscura.

Par.iv.133-5

There are, of course, matters beyond the grasp of philosophy; but even here philosophy helps greatly towards the ultimate understanding.

Not unconnected with the distinction of faith and reason is Dante's view of the relation of Church and State. He made no secret of his conviction of the necessity of a separation of Church and State or, in the concrete terms of his time, Papacy and Empire. His De Monarchia is sufficient testimony of his views, views by no means shared by most of his contemporaries and stayed by arguments which many found less than cogent, but views, nevertheless, that were in the long run of history to gain acceptance. These were views for which Dante suffered much, including exile. It is little wonder that the papalist side of the argument fared badly in the Divine Comedy and it is no accident that Popes like Boniface VIII and Nicholas III appear in the Inferno. The independence claimed by Dante for State against Church may parallel the autonomy claimed for philosophy vis-à-vis theology. How could Dante not sympathize with one—is it Siger of Brabant?—who suffered for that autonomy?

It is time to begin to draw together the seemingly disparate threads of the argument of this paper. The process may be introduced by a brief chronicle of events at Paris half a century before the writing of the Divine Comedy. These cast long shadows, reaching right into Dante's Paradiso. The events in question took place in the early 1270's and to situate them we may conveniently contrast the earlier (1255-1259) and the later (1269-1272) sojourn of St Thomas Aquinas as master-regent in the Faculty of Theology at Paris. First time around, the laurels of the magister in sacra pagina fresh on his brow, Aquinas launched into his incomparable teaching career. He had published, as the regulations demanded, his Commentary on the Sentences of Peter Lombard and was about to embark upon his Summa contra gentiles. Aristotelianism was already causing ripples on the surface of academic calm. The condemnations of Aristotle's “natural philosophy” (in practice, his metaphysics and his psychology) of 1210, 1215, and 1231 had fallen into desuetude and the cultivation of Aristotle in the Faculty of Arts was being viewed with increasing suspicion by the Faculty of Theology. The texts of Aristotle were unsatisfactory by reason of the tortuous nature of their transmission, in a centuries-long process, through Syria and the Arab world to Spain, where they were finally translated into Latin. The help of the great Arab commentators, Avicenna and Averroes, was welcomed, and the danger posed by Aristotelianism to orthodox theology was compounded.

In all this affair the position of Aquinas was delicate. That he was a sound theologian goes, today, without saying. But not all of his fellows in the Faculty of Theology were sure. Some thought he went too far in the direction of Aristotle. As a young man he had, after all, early learnt of Aristotle and Averroes when, before becoming a Dominican, he studied under Master Peter of Ireland at Naples. He later studied at Cologne under Albert the Great, in the period of Albert's Aristotelian paraphrases. Could he be relied upon against the Aristotelians in the Arts Faculty? It seems that he could; here again the long perspective of history allows us to see more clearly than his contemporaries. Indeed, there is good reason to think that the “gentiles”, against whom the Summa contra gentiles was written, were the arabizing Aristotelians in the University.

Be that as it may, the situation had radically changed for the worse by the time of Aquinas's second Paris sojourn. It was unusual for a master to be invited to a chair of theology for a second time; and the reason for this invitation lay precisely in the crisis that faced the University of Paris. The enthusiasm of the young masters of arts for Aristotle had gone beyond all bounds and left little room for deference to theological orthodoxy. The crux was in Aristotle's views about the eternity of the world and the difficulties about personal immortality. The difficulties were exacerbated by the interpretations of the “Arabs”, i.e. Avicenna and Averroes, leaning towards the denial of creation, the extinction of personal responsibility, the abandonment of the notion of Divine Providence and the unicity of the intellectual soul. The leader of these Aristotelian masters of arts was Siger of Brabant; and it was to meet the danger presented by Siger and his followers that Aquinas returned to Paris. His strength was that, as he himself was an Aristotelian but an orthodox one, he could meet the masters of arts, and indeed Avicenna and Averroes, on their own ground. His work De unitate intellectus, usually called contra Averroistas, was the academic coup-de-grâce for the Paris Aristotelians. But, needless to say, the matter did not end there, nor for long afterwards. We shall see more presently of the riots and the disturbances, and the condemnations in which Thomas himself did not escape unscathed. For the moment we may simply note that, during his stay in Italy between the Paris periods, St Thomas had met, at the court of Urban IV in Orvieto, a Dominican confrère, William of Moerbeke, whose help was invaluable. Moerbeke was a missionary in the East, an excellent Greek scholar, and he provided the West, and Aquinas in particular, with a series of accurate translations of the Greek texts of Aristotle to replace the faulty and defective versions current until then.

The question must finally be put: Who is the philosopher in the Paradiso? Virgil, representing human reason at its best, who has guided Dante through the Inferno and the Purgatorio as far as the Earthly Paradise, has disappeared. Beatrice enters this terrestrial Paradise in the chariot of the church and represents revelation, faith. When, later, Dante penetrates the empyrean it is Bernard, the doctor of contemplation, who undertakes his guidance. But what of the theologian-philosophers in Paradiso x and xii? Surely amongst these we may hope to find the philosopher of the Paradiso? And here we meet the enigma of Siger, which has exercised generations of Dante scholars.

Entering the fourth Heaven, that of the sun or light, Dante and Beatrice meet a group of twelve spirits who, by their brightness, stand out against the sun. They form a crown or garland and circle about Dante and Beatrice in a kind of ballet. When Dante wishes to know who they are, St Thomas does the honours:

Io fui de li agni de la santa greggia
          che Domenico mena per cammino
          u' ben s'impingua se non si vaneggia.

Par.x.94-6

He introduces his neighbour on the right, his old teacher, Albert the Great:

Questi che m'è a destra più vicino,
          frate e maestro fummi, ed esso Alberto
          è di Cologna, e io Thomas d'Aquino.

Par.x.97-9

St Thomas then points out in turn the lawyer, Gratian, who helped in both civil and canon law: “che l'uno e l'altro foro aiutò”; then Peter Lombard, the author of the Book of Sentences upon which every medieval master of theology had to write his commentary; then the wise king Solomon, followed by Dionysius the Areopagite or rather the author of the neo-Platonic treatises that went under the name of that distinguished man converted by St Paul. Then comes Orosius, who wrote a complement to St Augustine's City of God. He is followed by Boethius, Isidore of Seville, the Venerable Bede and Richard of St Victor. Last of all, completing the circle and consequently flanking St Thomas on the left as Albert does on the right, comes Siger of Brabant. The puzzle is not merely the presence of Siger in such company, given that he was the defeated opponent of Aquinas, but the quite unusual deference shown to him. He is introduced in two tercets; of the others only Solomon and Boethius get such full treatment:

Questi onde a me ritorna il tuo riguardo,
          è 'l lume d'uno spirto che 'n pensieri
          gravi a morir li parve venir tardo:
essa è la luce etterna di Sigieri,
          che, leggendo nel Vico de li Strami,
          silogizzò invidiosi veri.

Par.x.133-8

Who was this Siger who, thinking grave thoughts, longed for death and had formerly taught “invidiosi veri” in the Street of Straw? Little enough was known about him in the centuries between Dante and the nineteenth century. And when modern scholarship began to lift the veil the riddle of his appearance in such distinguished company in the Paradiso was only increased. He was known to have been condemned for his part in the Averroistic controversies in Paris in 1270 and it was clear that he was the person mainly aimed at in the Great Condemnation of 219 Propositions by the Bishop of Paris, Stephen Tempier, on 7 March 1277. He was thought to have fled the University and for long Dante's reference was the only indication of his manner of death. Then there came to light a letter of John Peckham, Archbishop of Canterbury, addressed to the University of Oxford and dated 10 November 1284. In it Peckham, speaking of the unicity of the substantial form in every corporeal individual (a view defended by St Thomas among others), said that the two principal defenders of this opinion perished miserably beyond the Alps although they did not belong to that region.⁷ It is now clear beyond reasonable doubt that the reference is to Siger of Brabant and his companion Gosvin of La Chapelle.

What was this miserable death? In 1881 Ferdinand Castets published the text of a thirteenth-century Italian poem entitled Il Fiore, attributing it to Dante. It is possible that the author was another Florentine, a doctor of medicine, called Durante, who died in 1305.⁸ The poem is modelled on Jean de Meung's Roman de la Rose and consists of 232 sonnets. In sonnet 92 Falsembiante (the Faux-semblant or personification of hypocrisy of the Roman de la Rose) speaks:

Mastro Sighier non andò guari lieto.
A ghiado il fe' morire a gran dolore,
nella corte di Roma, ad Orbivieto.

Was Siger executed, put to the sword? At the Papal Court at Orvieto? The question was, as might have been expected, keenly debated, amongst others by Pierre Mandonnet, whose epoch-making Siger de Brabant et l'averroisme latin au XIIIe siècle first appeared in 1899. Just at this time came another dramatic discovery, in this case a passing reference in the Monumenta Germaniae Historica. Here the writer, apropos of the Emperor Rudolph in whose reign Albert the Great engaged in controversy with Siger of Brabant, describes how Siger, having to leave Paris, went to the Roman Curia where shortly afterwards he was stabbed by his cleric in a fit of madness.⁹

“Curiouser and curiouser!” It is difficult to see in the subject of this story the honoured colleague of St Thomas Aquinas in the fourth Heaven of Dante. Nevertheless it does now appear, in the light of three quarters of a century of research since Mandonnet first turned his attention to the Avveroist controversies at Paris, that Siger has far and away the best title to be called “the philosopher of the Paradiso”. A simple rehearsal of the conclusions of that research should convince all but the most sceptical.¹⁰

There can be no doubt that Siger was the leader of the “Averroist party” among the masters of arts in the University of Paris. Nothing is known of the origins of Siger, except that he came from the Duchy of Brabant. He first appears in a document drawn up by the Papal Legate, Simon de Brion, who had been called in to settle disturbances in the University of Paris in 1266 and it appears that he was a canon of the Church of St Paul at Liège. Brabant belonged to the diocese of Liège; and the canonry was certainly a sort of scholarship enabling Siger, who must have shown promise, to go to Paris to study. At Paris he lived up to that promise intellectually in becoming a master of arts and an influential teacher. But he was also a strong character with more than a touch of flamboyance and in fact, a faction leader. The Arts Faculty was divided into four nations, French, Normans, Picards and English, the French at this time outnumbering the other three nations. Once a month the nations elected a Rector of the University—an office that was to grow in importance and finally eclipse that of Chancellor, which belonged to the Faculty of Theology. The quarrel that Cardinal Simon de Brion was called in to settle was the result of a series of rather discreditable episodes in the relations between the nations. The French, in a majority, elected a Rector whom the other nations refused to acknowledge; Siger, who was named as a leader of the anti-French party, may even have been elected Rector by his supporters. There followed riotous behaviour, the kidnapping of rivals and even the assault on the Church of Saint-Jacques and the attempt to prevent the Dead Office being sung in the memory of William of Auxerre, a former professor in the Faculty of Theology. Simon de Brion took the affair firmly in hand, named the culprits, including Siger, decreed that the Rector should be elected only four times a year and laid down a system of resolving disputed elections. Siger's first appearance was not a happy one.

Much more significant, however, than the faction-fighting of the nations was the polarization of the University between the Aristotelians in the Faculty of Arts, led by Siger, and the conservatives in the Faculty of Theology. The intensity of the quarrel and the enormity of its implications brought about, as we have seen, the recall of Thomas Aquinas to Paris in 1269. The battle lines are drawn. St Thomas's opuscule on the Unity of the Intellect was clearly directed against Siger and against the authority of Averroes which he claimed. This indeed, of all the suspect teachings of Siger and his followers, was the most destructive; for to assert that there is only one intellect (however qualified) for the entire human race is to make nonsense of individuality, responsibility and immortality. Siger replied. It was not in his character to remain silent and he throve on controversy. But the inevitable ecclesiastical intervention took place; Stephen Tempier, Bishop of Paris, a former master in the Faculty of Theology and former Chancellor of the University, issued a condemnation of 13 propositions in 1270. This condemnation, clearly directed against Siger and his followers, was a dress rehearsal for the Great Condemnation of 1277.

Between the first and the second of these condemnations there was a lull followed by more riots and tumults that need not be detailed here. What was not appreciated until comparatively recently, and a result of the better knowledge of Siger's works, is that Siger seems to have changed his mind. It would be too much to say that he became a Thomist, even if one could pin an exact meaning on that term in the thirteenth century. But his later writings do manifest an Aristotelianism that is no longer irreconcilable with Christian thought. He still appeals to exclusively philosophical sources; he is not a theologian; and Aristotle is still the authority par excellence; but the synthesis now resembles that of St Thomas. There is no need to postulate a dramatic conversion; that would surely not have gone unrecorded in the case of so outstanding a figure on the University scene. But a gradual development in the direction of orthodoxy, stimulated it may be by the powerful argument of Aquinas's De unitate intellectus, can plausibly be read into Siger's later writings. He is beginning to look a much more presentable candidate for the task of representing philosophy in the Paradiso.

Have we proved too much? How explain Dante's curious and cautious references to Siger in the Paradiso, his grave thoughts, the death slow in coming and, above all, those “invidiosi veri” which he taught in the Street of Straw? The answer lies in the reconstruction now possible of the last years of Siger's life.

Even before the condemnation of 1277 Siger, with two of his associates, Bernier of Nivelles and Gosvin of La Chapelle (all three with Liège connections), was summoned before Simon de Val, Inquisitor of France, charged with heresy. Despite his apparent change of heart and the fact that, over the previous six or so years, he had not taught truths contrary to the faith, Siger was vulnerable because of his past and his writings. He could hardly expect a sympathetic hearing in France—Bishop, Chancellor, Legate and Inquisitor, not to speak of the Faculty of Theology, all seemed ranged against him and all had good reasons for distrusting him. Siger may well have despaired of getting a fair trial in the court of the Inquisitor. On the other hand, if he had a clear conscience in the matter of heresy, he would easily appeal to the Papal Curia, the more so as the reigning Pope was John XXI who, as Peter of Spain, had taught logic (and was consequently in the Faculty of Arts) at the University of Paris. What happened in the event is mainly conjecture, for no evidence has come to light concerning any process at the Curia. John XXI died on May 20, 1277, killed accidentally in the collapse of a ceiling in the Papal Palace at Viterbo. The Curia was subsequently transferred to Rome and later to Orvieto, under Martin IV elected in 1281. Here, some time before 1284 (the date of Peckham's letter already mentioned) Siger died, assassinated by a demented cleric. Peckham's letter is likely to be well-informed on the matter, for he was at Paris 1269-1271 when the controversies about Siger raged; and he was lector at the Papal Curia 1276-1279 when the trial of Siger may very well have taken place.

Was Siger found guilty of heresy? Hardly; for contumacious heretics were burnt. If he was guilty and recanted the penalty would have been perpetual imprisonment. It seems more likely that he was absolved of the formal charge of heresy but possibly detained in a kind of house-arrest and, because of his former career and influence, refused permission by the Curia to take up his teaching career again. The fact that he could have had the services of a clericus, a scribe or secretary presumably, is an indication that whatever the imprisonment it was not of the stricter kind. But such a detention, with close censorship of what he might write and close surveillance of all his activities, would have severely restricted a fiery and impetuous spirit like Siger's to a miserable existence in which death was welcomed as a release. Siger was not much over forty years of age when he met his tragic end.

We have in this question as much certainty as we are likely to get. It is always possible that future research will throw up further revelations about Siger of Brabant; but they are unlikely to alter the present picture in any substantial way. Dante was probably aware of the drama of Siger's career and he cannot but have been impressed by Siger's suffering for his philosophical opinions. As himself a rather eclectic and easy-going, although devoted, follower of St Thomas, Dante would not have worried unduly about differences between Thomas and Siger, above all if he knew that those differences had been mended before Siger's death. He would have been more impressed by the common fidelity to Aristotle in Siger and Thomas. It must not be forgotten that St Thomas was suspected, and even condemned, by those whose views about the hegemony of theology Dante could not accept.

Finally, a significant and important detail, Siger was and always remained a philosopher, a master of arts. He never proceeded to theology or taught in a Faculty of Theology. What better or more appropriate representative of philosophy in the Paradiso?

Notes

1. C. Vasoli, “Sigieri (Sighieri) di Brabante”, [Enciclopedia dantesca] V, 238-42.

2. C. S. Lewis, The Discarded Image (Cambridge, 1964).

3. M. Grabmann, “Die Wege van Thomas von Aquin zu Dante: Fra Remigio de' Girolami O.Pr.”, Deutsches Dante-Jahrbuch 9 (1925), 1-35, reprinted in Dante Alighieri: Aufsätze zur Divina Commedia ed. H. Friedrich (Darmstadt, 1968) pp. 201-35; Charles T. Davis, “An Early Florentine Political Theorist: Fra Remigio De' Girolami”, Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 104 (1960) 662-76. For him and for his contemporary Fra Nicola Brunacci, who follows in the text, see also: P. Mandonnet, Dante le théologien (Paris, 1935); and C.T. Davis, “Education in Dante's Florence,” Speculum 40 (1965) 415-35.

4. See note¹⁰ in the essay by C. Ryan above.

5. Summa theologiae, Ia, q. 1, a. 1. The distinction elaborated by St Thomas and ever since accepted was foreshadowed in the Jewish translators from the Arabic working at the courts of Frederick II and Manfred in Sicily. See J. Sermoneta, “Pour une histoire du thomisme juif”, Aquinas and the Problems of his Time (Louvain, 1967) pp. 130-1.

6. E. Gilson, Dante the Philosopher (London, 1948) p. 119.

7. Charles T. Martin, Registrum Epistolarum Fratris Joannis Peckham, Volume III (London, 1885) p.842, “dicuntur conclusisse dies suos in partibus transalpinis, cum tamen non essent di illis partibus oriundi”.

8. For the text I have used F. Castets ed., Il fiore: poeme italien du XIII siècle en CCXXXII sonnets, limite du Roman de la Rose par Durante (Paris, 1881). For a survey of opinions see G. F. Contini on the Fiore in Enc. d. II, 895-901.

9. Martin of Troppau's Chronicle “Continuatio Brabantina”, Monumenta Germaniae Historica 27, Scriptorum Tomus XXIV (Hanover, 1879) p. 263: “Qui Sygerus, natione Brabantinus, eo quod quasdam opiniones contra fidem tenuerat, Parisius subsistere non valens, Romanam Curiam adiit ibique post parvum tempus a clerico suo quasi dementi perfossus periit”. See C. C. J. Webb, “Some Notes on the Problem of Siger”, Medieval and Renaissance Studies 2 (1950) 121-7.

10. The fullest and most recent account is F. Van Steenberghen, Maitre Siger de Brabant (Louvain, 1977). See also R. Hissette, Enquête sur les 219 Articles condamnès à Paris le 7 mars 1277 (Louvain, 1977).