SOURCE: Marrone, Steven P. “Truth in Simple Knowledge according to Grosseteste's Early Works.” In William of Auvergne and Robert Grosseteste, pp. 144-56. Princeton, N. J.: Princeton University Press, 1983.

[In the following essay, Marrone examines Grosseteste's early theological treatises, arguing that they offer insights into Grosseteste's later views, particularly regarding his ideas about truth as a simple quality, and the scientific ideal of knowledge as it evolved in his work.]

The theological treaties of Grosseteste's early years represented a less elaborate and complete investigation of the problem of truth than was to be found in his commentaries on Aristotle, but more important than this, they struck a philosophical tone quite different from that of his later works. It should hardly be surprising that this was the case, since as much as fifteen years may have intervened between the composition of the two sets of works, and they were years of great intellectual ferment both at Oxford and at the University of Paris. Nevertheless, the shift in Grosseteste's views has been virtually overlooked in modern expositions of his thought.¹ Its importance for a study of this sort cannot be stressed too much.

The key to the difference between the two sets of works is that only in the latter did Grosseteste come to espouse the scientific ideal of knowledge and to take an interest in formulating an explicit set of criteria upon which to establish it. His earlier writings were free of these concerns, and in them he could speculate about truth without any of the constraints they imposed. Among other things this meant that in his theological treatises he could pass over the whole question of the truth of complex knowledge—knowledge that lay at the heart of science—with only a comment. For Grosseteste's views on the nature of complex truth it is necessary to turn to his later works, where he indeed devoted most of his attention to that aspect of the problem. The case of truth in simple cognition was a different matter, and Grosseteste gave a full account of his ideas on this aspect of the problem of truth in both his early and his later writings. An examination of these accounts reveals that in the years between the composition of the two sets of works, Grosseteste radically altered his vision of the nature of simple truth and man's knowledge of it. In order to understand him it is necessary to keep these two accounts separate and to realize that for all the points of comparison between them, they represent the two poles of a development that was of critical importance in his thought.

Grosseteste, like William of Auvergne, followed Aristotle in holding that of the two types of knowledge, simple and complex, only the latter could be qualified by the notions of truth and falsehood. He maintained that the truth of knowledge was a measure of the value of a proposition or statement and not of a simple idea.² Indeed, it made no sense to talk of the truth of a simple concept or to speak of a true idea. Every concept or idea referred to something, whether that thing itself truly existed or not, and so each concept or idea had its own validity outside of any judgmental considerations. This was not to say that the problem of truth had nothing to do with the problem of simple cognition, and Grosseteste, again like William of Auvergne, made a large place for the idea of truth on that cognitive level. The kind of truth that entered into simple knowledge did not attach to the knowledge itself but rather to the object understood; it belonged in the extramental world as something toward which the intellect was directed.

For his primary definition of simple truth in the early treatise De veritate, Grosseteste went back to Anselm, who in his own De veritate had maintained that truth was first and foremost a rightness (rectitudo).³ The adoption of such a definition shows how traditional Grosseteste's thought still was when he wrote his theological treatises and contrasts sharply with the identification of simple truth and being that would appear later in William of Auvergne's Magisterium divinale or in Grosseteste's own mature speculation on truth. Grosseteste glossed Anselm's definition by explaining that being right involved conforming to a rule that revealed what ought to be.⁴ In the case of simple truth the rule was the divine word itself, and so the truth of things could be defined quite plainly as their conformity to God's eternal word.⁵ In more precise terms, this meant conforming to an idea (ratio) in the mind of God, for the divine ideas were the exemplars or standards by which His word created all things in the universe.⁶

By casting his definition the way he did Grosseteste made it clear that simple truth was an attribute of created things. Defined as a relation attached to real objects in the world, it was involved in human cognition only as it became known. Thus, while it made no sense to speak of the truth of simple knowledge, it was perfectly reasonable to talk about knowledge of the simple truth, and so to explain the place of truth in simple cognition was not so much a matter of the logical analysis of the form of thought or expression as a question of noetics. It was necessary to describe the process of simple cognition by which simple truth was perceived.

Grosseteste realized this and devoted a section of his De veritate to a discussion of just such noetic concerns. It is, however, difficult to make an absolutely unambiguous analysis of this work. Although Grosseteste spoke as if he were giving a perfectly straightforward exposition of a single epistemological procedure, in fact he offered two different descriptions of the way the mind came to know simple truth, each one dependent on a model not fully compatible with the other.

The terms of the formal definition of simple truth in De veritate made it necessary to explain human knowledge of such truth as dependent on some sort of Godly intervention, and it was only natural that Grosseteste should have turned to the traditional way of explaining such a process, the notion of divine illumination. As he said at the beginning of his discussion: “Since the truth of each thing is its conformity to its exemplar (ratio) in the eternal Word, it is clear that every created truth is perceived only in the light of the Highest Truth.”⁷ Yet even though Grosseteste introduced his subject by referring to God's role in terms of light, he cast his first account of knowledge of simple truth in language that did not make use of this image. Instead, he built this account on a model derived directly from the formal definition, by which truth was the conformity of thing to idea. He maintained that one could perceive the conformity of one thing to another only if one could see that other thing to which the first object should conform. Likewise, one could not know a thing as right (rectificata) or know its rightness (rectitudo) unless one knew the rule or standard (regula) by which it was judged to be so. In the case of simple truth, of course, the rule or idea lay in God Himself, so that knowledge of the truth depended on seeing the true object and at the same time having a mental vision of the divine idea that made it true. By comparing one to the other the mind came to perceive truth itself.⁸

Immediately after this first description Grosseteste offered a second one. It was not, however, completely congruent with what he had just said. In this second account he returned to the image of light.⁹ As he characterized things, there were three elements, besides the mind, that had to do with the process he was examining: they were the light of divine Truth (lux summae veritatis), created truth (creata veritas), and id, quod est. The light of divine Truth needs no explanation. The created truth Grosseteste had in mind was the simple truth in the world he had been speaking of all along, that special relationship between a created thing and its divine exemplar. This is evident from the fact that he substituted for the term “created truth” the term “truth of the thing” (veritas rei), which he later defined as a conformity along exactly the same lines as his formal definition of simple truth.¹⁰Id, quod est was, as has been shown above, a term principally associated with a much-debated text from the works of Boethius. As Boethius had used it, the term referred to the complete substance of a real thing, and Grosseteste held to essentially the same definition, alternating the term with an equivalent form, “the true thing” (res vera).¹¹

The way these three elements cooperated in knowledge of the simple truth was relatively uncomplicated. Drawing on a phrase of Augustine's, Grosseteste maintained that created truth revealed the substance of a thing (id, quod est), which was to say the existing substance (res vera).¹² It could not, however, do this on its own, without relying on the Highest Truth, God Himself. Grosseteste compared the workings of the three basic elements in the process to that of light, color, and body in sensory vision. Just as color indicated the colored body, but only in the presence of light, so created truth revealed an existing substance, but only in the light of the First Truth.¹³ Another way Grosseteste described the process was to say that the divine Truth illuminated created truth, which then showed the mind the true thing.¹⁴ In any case primary efficacy in revealing existing substance lay with God, the First Truth; created truth was the secondary and more immediate cause. In Grosseteste's words: “The light of the Highest Truth alone reveals substance (id, quod est) first and completely on its own, just as light alone reveals bodies. Yet through this light the truth of a thing (veritas rei) also reveals substance (id, quod est), just as color reveals bodies through the light of the sun.”¹⁵

From this simple exposition alone it is clear how different Grosseteste's two descriptions appear when subjected to close analysis. He not only employed a different model in each case, he even changed the basic nature of the process he was trying to explain. In the first of the two cases, the true thing along with the Highest Truth made it possible for the mind to see simple truth in the world. In the second, it was created simple truth, along with the Highest Truth, that revealed the true thing. The role of instrument and final object had been reversed.

Yet surely Grosseteste intended his two accounts to be compatible, and he had no reason to believe they would be read in any other way. The whole tradition surrounding the notion of divine illumination, going back at least as far as Augustine, had contained a similar imprecision concerning the exact role of the divinity, providing an umbrella wide enough to cover both of the descriptions Grosseteste gave. In fact, Augustine's language about truth and human knowledge of it would never have survived the kind of critical scrutiny being applied here. His ideas had not been intended to meet the scientific standards that began to be demanded in the schools of the West over the course of the thirteenth century. But the ambivalent theoretical model Grosseteste used not only had a long history, it also had strengths, ones deriving in large part from the ambivalence itself. The body of images associated with divine illumination, because of its two-faced nature, could serve two somewhat different functions at the same time. On the one hand, those elements emphasizing a comparison of exemplars explained how the formal definition of truth as a rectitude could be applied to the objects of human intellection. On the other hand, the literal image of a divine light shining over the intellective process, in some way generating it, made more plausible the role of divine intervention in the business of understanding, although at the expense of some formal clarity. The fact that each specific explanation had its own drawbacks makes it easier to understand why no one was in any hurry to settle the difference between the two for the sake of consistency alone. Grosseteste's language did, therefore, purchase a certain philosophical advantage, if at the cost of imprecision and ambivalence. So long as he was not concerned with close analysis, he could use this language without hesitation.

The way Grosseteste drew on the strengths and skirted the weaknesses is clear enough. His first description of the knowledge of simple truth focused in the nature of the objects of that knowledge—that is, on the exact referential conditions that had to obtain. According to his formal definition, simple truth in the world was the conformity of a real thing to its divine exemplar. In order for the mind to recognize this truth, therefore, it had to make a comparison between the two elements, and this implied that it had to be able in some way to see them both. The first description translated this requirement literally into the terms of cognitive object. In effect, it stipulated that there were two referents in human knowledge of the simple truth, one a created thing and the other a divine idea.

Yet there was a problem with Grosseteste's first description of knowledge of simple truth, and it stemmed from the very fact that he stuck so literally to the terms of his formal definition. By insisting that there was a divine object as well as a created one in human knowledge of the truth, Grosseteste implied that knowing the truth involved in some way knowing or seeing God in the literal sense of having some vision of the ideas in His mind.¹⁶ Common sense alone seemed to require as much, since if one were going to compare a standard with the object it was designed to measure, then one had to see the standard in itself. Any less straightforward access to the standard, in this case to the divine essence, would have appeared to make a mockery of the formal definition of simple truth. The problem was that on every other occasion throughout his early works, Grosseteste maintained that in the world the mind could not have any direct intellectual vision of the divine essence or the exemplary forms inhering in it.¹⁷ To say differently would come dangerously close to bringing the beatific vision down to earth.

It was probably Grosseteste's appreciation of this shortcoming of his first model that prompted him to give it so little attention and to turn instead to his second model, which offered an escape from his dilemma. In lieu of analyzing the exact makeup of the object of knowledge of the simple truth, this model focused more on the process by which such knowledge was attained. The key lay in drawing an analogy between sensory sight and intellectual vision. The eyes were capable of seeing only in an atmosphere of light, and the same was true, on a more spiritual level, when it came to the sight of the mind. The point was that for most cases of vision, whether sensible or intellectual, there were two sorts of agent, one proximate and the other primary and fundamental. In sensory vision both color and light were necessary for the eyes to see an object. On the level of the intellect these two agents were replaced by simple truth in the world and the light of God's Truth, and both were necessary for human knowledge. Although truth in the world might be the proximate cause of knowledge of true things, it could work only if aided by the Highest Truth.

This second description avoided the difficulties of the first. God retained a fundamental role in the process of knowing the truth, but since this role was to act as a light in which perception of the true object took place, it was possible to say that man could know the truth without having any direct knowledge of God or the exemplars in His mind. Grosseteste explained how this was so by following out his analogy with sensory vision:

Just as the weak eyes of the body cannot see colored bodies except as they are enveloped in the light of the sun, and nevertheless they do not see the light of the sun in itself but only as it envelops colored bodies, so the weak eyes of the mind do not perceive true things except in the light of the Highest Truth, even though they are not able to perceive this Highest Truth in itself but only in a kind of conjunction with those true things it envelops.¹⁸

The crucial distinction lay between seeing the First Truth in itself and seeing other things in its light. Since it was only in the latter way that the mind perceived true objects and hence the truth, knowing the simple truth did not imply directly and consciously knowing God's Truth itself. Nevertheless, Grosseteste insisted that the terms of this process, even if they allowed knowledge of the truth without a direct vision of God, did show that whoever recognized the truth, whether he was the worst of sinners, in some meager way made contact with God.¹⁹ The fact that few men realized this was no argument that it was not so. Just as someone who spent his time looking only at colored things in the world would not know of the sun until he raised his eyes to see it or was told about it by someone else, so the mind might spend its worldly days discovering truths without ever knowing it was depending on God's light.²⁰ Since only the blessed could see God in Himself, and only the wise understood the process of divine illumination, most men never had any occasion to know that their perception of the truth in some way participated in the Highest Truth. In short, Grossseteste's second model allowed him in his early works to maintain God's role in the everyday cognition of simple truth without sacrificing the uniqueness of the blessed vision.

Yet there were problems with the second model, too. While the first model risked attributing a power to the human mind that might be theologically embarrassing, the second obscured the formal nature of truth itself. To a great extent the difficulty rested on an ambiguity. The second account was based, after all, on an analogy drawn with sensible cognition. Unfortunately, the analogy did not exactly fit the terms to which it was meant to apply. It was easy enough to compare the sun's light with God's Truth, given the traditions of Neoplatonic thought, and a corporeal substance with a true object; but it was practically impossible to see how color had anything in common with the created truth. Comparing the latter two elements did, to be sure, drive home the lesson that created truth was the secondary agent in knowledge of true things, but it only made it harder to understand what created truth actually was. Up to this point in De veritate, Grosseteste had consistently described created truth as a relation, but if it were to be comparable to color, it would have to be described as something like a simple quality of the object to which it adhered. Whatever this colorlike truth was, it could hardly have come very close to the formal definition Grosseteste gave in this work. What sense would it have made to say that God's light had to shine on truth, which in turn revealed the real object, if that truth were in fact the relation between God and thing? Of course, the visual analogy could have been read as a loose metaphor for the process explained by means of the first model as a comparing of exemplars, but that would have then denuded it of its value and contradicted Grosseteste's explicit statement that it was because God was involved in human cognition as a light, and not as a direct object, that the mind could be said to have some access to Him in the world.

In short, the terms of Grosseteste's second description threatened to undermine his formal definition of simple truth as a conformity, implying instead that it was a simple objective quality that revealed existing things to the mind. It is interesting to note that on a few occasions in De veritate Grosseteste actually described the truth of things as something simple. It was, so he maintained, the same as the being (esse) or id, quod est of a thing—that is to say, its existing reality as an object in the world.²¹ In this way he conflated the last two elements of his second description: created truth and the true thing. The logical manifestation of this simple truth was the thing's definition, and in fact it was even possible to say, although only in a manner of speaking, that the truth of a thing was the definition itself.²² Whichever way one described it, truth according to this new and secondary notion was something complete in itself and did not formally involve a comparison between thing and divine idea. To this extent Grosseteste anticipated the position that William of Auvergne would take in his Magisterium divinale and that he himself would fully adopt in his Commentary on the Posterior Analytics.

The view of truth as a simple quality or substance was, however, an exception to the rule in Grosseteste's early works. For the most part he adhered to his original formal definition, whereby simple truth consisted in the conformity of a thing to its divine exemplar. And he continued to see this definition as a perfectly logical part of the traditional notion of divine illumination. The ambiguities of this tradition—so interesting to the modern historian concerned with the development of the notion of truth in general and of God's role in human cognition in particular—although in some way already apparent in his struggles to explain how the process worked, did not yet bother him sufficiently to drive him to look for a new solution. This alone shows how much he still held to a traditional, uncritical view of the problem and how far he was from the scientific aspirations of his later years. Grosseteste's allegiance in his early works lay firmly with a definition of simple truth that explicitly implicated God and with an explanation of the process by which this truth was known that gave the divine Truth a fundamental role. The central theme around which all his discussions of truth in the theological treatises turned was that God was instrumental to man's knowledge of simple truth.

Notes

1. The major works on Grosseteste's philosophy are Ludwig Baur, Die Philosophie des Robert Grosseteste, Bischofs von Lincoln, Beiträge XVIII, 4-6 (Münster, 1917); Crombie, Robert Grosseteste; and Callus, “Robert Grosseteste as Scholar.” (An interesting critique of Crombie can be found in Alexandre Koyré, “The Origins of Modern Science: A New Interpretation,” Diogenes 16 [1956], 1-22.) Three more recent publications of considerable importance for the subject of the present study are Bruce S. Eastwood, “Medieval Empiricism: The Case of Grosseteste's Optics,” Speculum 43 (1968), 306-21; William A. Wallace, Causality and Scientific Explanation, I: Medieval and Early Classical Science (Ann Arbor, 1972); and Eileen F. Serene, “Robert Grosseteste on Induction and Demonstrative Science,” Synthese 40 (1979), 97-115. On Grosseteste's thought in general, see also Ludwig Baur, “Das Licht in der Naturphilosophie des Robert Grosseteste,” in Festgabe zum 70. Geburtstag Georg Freiherrn von Hertling (Freiburg im Br., 1931), pp. 41-55; Dorothea E. Sharp, Franciscan Philosophy at Oxford in the Thirteenth Century (Oxford, 1930), pp. 7-46; Alistair C. Crombie, “Robert Grosseteste on the Logic of Science,” Actes du XI^e Congrès International de Philosophie, Brussels, 22-26 August 1953 (Amsterdam, 1953), XII, 171-73; and “Grosseteste's Position in the History of Science,” in Robert Grosseteste, Scholar and Bishop, pp. 98-120; and Rossi, “Un contributo.” Other studies of Grosseteste's thought, in particular his epistemology, are Johannes Beumer, “Robert Grosseteste von Lincoln der angebliche Begründer der Franziskanerschule,” Franziskanische Studien 57 (1975), 183-95; Lawrence E. Lynch, “The Doctrine of Divine Ideas and Illumination in Robert Grosseteste, Bishop of Lindoln,” Mediaeval Studies 3 (1941), 161-73; V. Miano, “La teoria della conoscenza in Roberto Grossatesta,” Giornale di Metafisica 9 (1954), 60-88; and Robert J. Palma, “Robert Grosseteste's Understanding of Truth,” The Irish Theological Quarterly 42 (1975), 300-306; and “Grosseteste's Ordering of Scientia,” The New Scholasticism 50 (1976), 447-63. An interesting recent work that interprets Grosseteste differently from the present study, particularly on the issue of divine illumination, is James McEvoy, “La connaissance intellectuelle selon Robert Grosseteste,” Revue Philosophique de Louvain 75 (1977), 5-48.

2. De veritate (Die philosophischen Werke des Robert Grosseteste Grosseteste, Bischof von Lincoln Ed Ludwig Baur. Beiträge IX. Münster 1912, p. 134.) Grosseteste's language here echoes that of Anselm in De veritate, 2 (Schmitt, ed., Anselm, Opera Omnia, I, 1–87, Edinburgh, 1946, p. 177).

3. “Possumus igitur, nisi fallor, definire quia veritas est rectitudo mente sola perceptibilis.” Anselm, De veritate, 11 (Schmitt, ed., Opera omnia, I, 191). Grosseteste quoted this passage in his De veritate (Phil. Werke, p. 135).

4. De veritate (Phil. Werke, pp. 134-35).

5. De veritate (Phil. Werke, p. 135). Grosseteste's account was consonant with the ideas Anselm himself propounded in De veritate, 7.

6. See De veritate (Phil Werke, pp. 137 and 139).

7. De veritate (Phil. Werke, p. 137).

8. Ibid.

9. Ibid.

10. The term “veritas rei” appears as an equivalent for “creata veritas” in De veritate (Phil. Werke, p. 138). In De veritate (Phil. Werke, p. 139), Grosseteste defined veritas rei as the conformity of a thing to divine idea. It is essentially the same as the veritas essentiae rerum or veritas rerum Anselm spoke of in his De veritate, 7. See above, Chapter II, n. 14.

11. Grosseteste cited several occasions where Augustine had spoken of id, quod est. (See below, nn. 12 and 21.) Augustine's meaning was, however, perfectly compatible with the way the term was later used by Boethius.

12. “Veritas igitur etiam creata ostendit id, quod est. …” De veritate (Phil. Werke, p. 137). Grosseteste attributed this formula to Augustine (see De veritate [Phil. Werke, p. 132]). It came from De vera religione, 36.

13. De veritate (Phil. Werke, pp. 137 and 138).

14. De veritate (Phil. Werke, p. 137).

15. De veritate (Phil. Werke, pp. 137-38).

16. When describing knowledge of the truth in this first way, Grosseteste was explicit about the need to see the exemplar itself: “Aut qualiter cognoscetur, quod res est, ut esse debet, nisi videatur ratio, secundum quam sic esse debet?” De veritate (Phil. Werke, p. 137). It was a commonplace of medieval thought that the divine ideas were one with the divine essence, so that seeing the ideas inevitably implied seeing at least some aspect of God's essence.

17. At the end of De veritate, Grosseteste stated that the mind's eye, when it was healthy, had the power to see God in Himself, and in Him all the things he had created (De veritate [Phil. Werke, p. 142]). This was the same sort of vision or knowledge which, in his Quaestiones theologicae, Grosseteste had reserved for God alone (see Callus, “Summa theologiae,” p. 195). The only way to reconcile these two passages is to assume, as must surely be the case, that when in De veritate Grosseteste spoke of the healthy mind's eye he was referring to the intellect before the Fall or after the Resurrection, so that when in the Quaestiones he limited knowledge of the divine exemplars to God alone he was simply contrasting God's powers with those man could exercise here on earth.

18. De veritate (Phil. Werke, p. 138). Note how close Grosseteste's metaphor was to Augustine's in the Soliloquia, I, 6, 16, quoted above in the general Introduction, n. 14.

19. De veritate (Phil. Werke, p. 138).

20. Ibid.

21. De veritate (Phil. Werke, p. 141). Compare De veritate (Phil. Werke, p. 135). As an authority for his identification of truth and id, quod est, Grosseteste cited Augustine. In his Soliloquia, II, 5, 8 (PL, 32, 889), Augustine did define truth as id, quod est, although he offered other, incompatible definitions for truth in the same work. He was, however, not interested in the definitions as such but rather hoped that while juggling several different notions of truth at the same time he could ultimately make the point that truth was inextinguishable and that therefore the soul, the seat of truth, was immortal.

    Another medieval source that defined truth similarly—as quod est res—was the Latin translation of Isaac Israeli's Book of Definitions (J. T. Muckle, ed., “Isaac Israeli: Liber de definicionibus,” Archives d'Histoire Doctrinale et Littéraire du Moyen Age, 12-13 [1937-38], 322). See also the discussion in Altmann and Stern, Isaac Israeli, pp. 58-59.

    By identifying truth (veritas) with id, quod est, Grosseteste broke down the distinction he otherwise maintained in De veritate between veritas rei and id, quod est or res vera. He thereby momentarily abandoned Anselm's definition of simple truth. What is more, when he made esse quivalent to id, quod est, he forsook the meaning Boethius had given to these two terms, much in the way William of Auvergne would do. Grosseteste's language was, however, more explicit than William's, who never went so far as to declare in so many words that esse and id, quod est could be seen as the same thing.

22. De veritate (Phil. Werke, p. 142).