Traveling the Via Moderna with Pierre d'Ailly
Pierre d'Ailly
During the long fourteenth century in Latinate Europe, the term modernus, a relative term which simply meant “contemporary” (the use of the term to designate a specific historical era was an invention of the late medieval world), was bandied about with renewed energy. As debates swirled about the utility of philosophy, the status of universals, and the nature of language, modernus proved an adaptable heuristic to categorize opponents deemed to be peddling noxious novelties and (especially in Germany) to designate university faculties that opted for newer academic approaches, such as terminism and/or nominalism, rather than more traditional approaches.
For thinkers in western and central Europe in the years leading up to 1400, there was a shared perception of a new climate of thought, a new set of intellectual problems, and—largely inflected by the sweeping effects of Black Death pandemics and intractable wars—a sense of having a new existential location within history. Apocalyptic thinking was on the rise, papal schism challenged assumptions about the Church’s reliability, and in the wake of William Ockham new approaches to grammar and logic upended long-standing methods for theology and philosophy. As these forces collaborated and colluded, figures across society noted that it was a time of transition, a modern time. As a result of this foment, scholars have long observed that the via moderna (or “modern way,” as this new wave of intellectual production was called by the late medievals themselves) was internally diverse and not the product of any single thinker. As we shall see, these moderni self-describe in ways strikingly resonant to moderns of our own day.
One such modernus was the fourteenth-century chancellor of the University of Paris and highly influential theologian Pierre d’Ailly. By all accounts, d’Ailly is emblematic of the via moderna. He substantively built on the terminist thought of the likes of William Ockham and Gregory of Rimini—an approach to language that sees it as comprised of contingent and variable terms rather than as the bearer of a discrete, fixed meaning. He also steeped himself in the contemporary literary scene of the late-medieval world, and he would become an exceptionally influential textbook figure, studied by subsequent generations of philosophers and theologians across European universities through the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.
Lady Philosophy offers Boethius wings so his mind can fly aloft. The French School (15th Century).
Early in his career, around 1372, he penned a treatise on a much older text: Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy (penned c. 524). While d’Ailly was motivated by grand epistemological questions about philosophy in most of the book (e.g., “whether a philosopher through philosophical investigation with the natural light [of reason] is able to arrive at true knowledge of human beatitude”), the introduction perhaps surprisingly grapples with two other questions: poetry and classical reception. This is unexpected for two reasons. First, the rest of the text is intensely focused on technical logic. Second, the introduction eschews the large number of Christian scholastic authors writing on philosophy in favor of engaging with pre-Christian thinkers.
After opening with a modesty topos that he has little standing as a scholar to contribute to such weighty questions, d’Ailly turns to classical Roman texts—Horace’s Art of Poetry and one of Seneca’s epistles—to describe the consoling power of Boethius’s Consolation. He says that before he read Boethius he was “forsaken and [had] collapsed under a weight,” namely the burden of pursuing work without the leisure of literature. On the one hand, the language he uses throughout the introduction emphasizes the demands of study and intellectual rigor that were prized in the age of the via moderna. On the other, he draws on imagery of bodily affliction and human suffering to describe his existential need for consolation to relieve the anxieties of his intellectual labor. Thus alienated by the state of contemporary philosophy, d’Ailly turned to the past for some relief. Boethius showed him that even older poetry could prove vital.
In his introduction, d’Ailly gives us an account of what this relief, this consolation, looks like and how it may be found within the pages of Boethius’s prosimetrum. He suggests that the blessing of enduring consolation would require an ethical and well-ordered society, a practical application of intellectual wisdom within the course of everyday life. Ever the scholar, he gives ample citations from Aristotle to establish the necessity of ethics and politics to achieve this goal. D’Ailly then pivots and turns to Plato’s Republic and its assertion that the best polity would be one ruled by those who study wisdom, by philosophers. This outlook is hardly limited to Plato, however. D’Ailly illustrates that it is an enduring view throughout time, carefully quoting Aristotle, the late-Roman writer Vegetius, and the twelfth-century poet Alan of Lille as all in agreement with Plato. D’Ailly’s support for Plato’s idea places him at the tail end of this trajectory, which, obviously, extends beyond the sixth-century Boethius in both directions.
The genealogy he has sketched, however, does not offer easy answers to how we can find consolation. After all, the blessed polity hoped for by all these writers is more a utopia than a reality. D’Ailly accordingly turns to the substance of his introduction, a defense of the need to identify the end of philosophy with moral formation. Citing Aristotle and Cicero at length, he lays out an argument that philosophy, at its best, is not as much about knowing the right things, but rather about convincing one to pursue the right things and enact them. Boethius, he suggests, was crucial for his own achievement of this consolation.
Yet how did Boethius console d’Ailly, where the Aristotle and Cicero he read did not? Perhaps surprisingly, d’Ailly does not credit Boethius’s Christianity as the determining factor. Rather, d’Ailly homes in on the poetic form of the Consolation. It is Boethius’s use of poetry, d’Ailly argues, that makes his Consolation rhetorically effective and able to sway the readers to a better and consoling life, beyond simply rehearsing logical syllogisms. As he understands it, the logical side of philosophy (represented in Boethius’s text by the portions of discursive prose) can explain the content of the good life, but the rhetorical force of poetry (represented by Boethius’s regular poetic passages) is needed to provide a form for it to take hold in the reader.
As d’Ailly frames it in his introduction, however, Boethius’s recognition of the importance of poetry was not a personal insight or a product of his Christian religion. Rather, d’Ailly suggests that Boethius in fact perceived this in the writings of pre-Christian poets, most especially Horace and Seneca. In these writers and others like them, Boethius saw a model of how wisdom and flourishing life could be synthesized in poetic form and provide an antidote to noxiously empty varieties of philosophy. Like d’Ailly, Boethius himself needed to look back to an earlier age to find the unity he perceived to be lacking in his own sixth-century day.
From the vantage point of d’Ailly’s introduction to the Consolation, then, history looks like a tower of hand-wringing moderns all the way down. Discontent with his own time, he had to look back to Boethius. Boethius in turn had to look back to Horace and Seneca, who looked back to Homer, and so on. D’Ailly’s retrieval of consolation from Boethius is, at best, a second-hand retrieval.
While we may not share d’Ailly’s assessment of history as a cycle of anxious ages looking to ancient poetry—and we certainly should recognize substantive differences between the epistemic and discursive conditions of modernity as we inhabit it and the milieus of d’Ailly, Boethius, Horace, et al.—he presents us with a valuable insight: the genealogical project, that of construing the historical contingencies that have come together to assemble the present moment, itself must be historicized. Ours is not the first age to feel that the past synthesized wisdom in ways now lost to us. Nor are we new in recognizing the complexities of interpreting language given its contingency and relativity. D’Ailly’s response to the anxieties of a modern age, however, is different from genealogical projects that try to recover the content of past eras or to mitigate new developments in thinking. Instead, d’Ailly suggests that giving attention to forms of thought, to the aesthetic contours of our experience and knowledge, may lessen the weight of our own anxiety—be it from pandemics, imperial violence, or alienation amid modern economic orders.
We are not the first moderns, and, in our own pursuits of self-understanding in the modern age, it may behoove us to consider the methods employed by historical others in their own work as genealogists.
Matthew Vanderpoel is a postdoctoral Teaching Fellow at the University of Chicago whose research centers on the intellectual and literary history of late-medieval and early-modern Christianity.