Robert Kilwardby by José Filipe Silva

Abstract

Reviewed by: Robert Kilwardby by José Filipe Silva R. James Long Robert Kilwardby. By José Filipe Silva. Oxford: Oxford University Press 2020. Pp. xvi + 304. $99.00 (hardcover). ISBN 978-0-19-067475-5. There is little question that the Dominican Robert Kilwardby deserves a place in Oxford University Press's "Great Medieval Thinkers" sesries under the editorship of Brian Davies. Following the tragically early death of the gifted Osmund Lewry, O.P., there have been few scholars devoting attention to the only member of the Order of Preachers to have assumed the archbishopric of Canterbury. It is appropriate, therefore, to acknowledge the contribution of José Silva. The book presents a comprehensive view of the current state of knowledge respecting the life and impressive range of works of the English Dominican, [End Page 507] including his metaphysics, logic, epistemology, ethics, theology and (more specifically) the Incarnation, focusing on the third book of Peter Lombard's Sentences. In the first chapter, entitled (curiously; all the chapter titles are active participles) "Living," Silva sketches what several decades of scholarship have revealed of the life and works of Kilwardby, but there remain unresolved questions respecting chronology as well as patrimony. He belongs to a school, or perhaps better a movement, that falls under the title of "Augustinianism," the central teaching of which was a quite non-Augustinian title of "universal hylomorphism," the view that all beings—including spiritual substances such as angels—are composed of the principles of matter and form. This view was common among the Dominicans, at least until the triumph of Thomism. It is for this reason, moreover, that the early Dominican masters such as Roland of Cremona (†1236), Robert Bacon (†1248), and Richard Fishacre (†1248) are so difficult to place vis-à-vis Kilwardby. To claim, however, that the aforementioned thinkers may have been "among other figures who were critical of Aquinas" (48) is to ignore the fact that all three had departed the scene before Aquinas had even begun his theological studies, never mind his not yet having written anything. Kilwardby's most popular and influential work, at least judging by the number of extant manuscripts (eighteen complete and two partial) is De ortu scientiarum, composed circa 1250 and probably at Oxford, according to the work's editor, Albert Judy. This treatise would seem to demarcate the end of Kilwardby's career as Arts master and the launch of his career as Master of the Sacred Page, thus virtually ruling out inception under Richard Fishacre. Chief among his theological writings is the Quaestiones in libros Sententiarum. Thanks to the sponsorship of the Bayerische Akademie der Wissenschaften, we now have a critical edition of this impressive work, and according to the most recent editor of the five volumes, Richard Schenk, O.P., we can date the work between 1256 and 1260. Crucial to this dating is the fact that it shows influences from both the Sentences commentary of Bonaventure (ca. 1250-52) and the abbreviatio of Richard Rufus, O.F.M., on the same work. Silva does not weigh in on the issue, but the fact is that Kilwardby's "commentary" has at best a distant relationship to Lombard's work, the latter serving only to call to mind various disputable issues in the original Books of Sentences. In addition, not every distinction in the Lombard text is represented. Lastly, according to Russell Friedman, Kilwardby's "commentary" does not seem to have any particular connection to his attainment of the magisterium in theology, for which such a commentary was a requirement at both Paris and Oxford. From the small number of manuscripts—only two complete copies and two partial—one is led to the conclusion that there was no longer much demand for the work of a Dominican unwilling to follow the via Thomistica. By way of contrast, Fishacre's commentary, composed approximately a decade earlier, boasts sixteen copies, four of them complete. [End Page 508] The chapter that struck this reader as the most lucid and fully developed is entitled "Behaving," and rests in large measure on the scholarship of Anthony Celano, who has devoted most of his career to the editing and study of Kilwardby...