The Fathers and Beyond by Marcia L. Colish;

Author:Marcia L. Colish;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor & Francis (Unlimited)
Published: 2023-04-26T00:00:00+00:00

The passage just quoted is the one that has been recognized in passing as a likely jumping-off point for Fredigisus’s argument in the Be substantia. For all the semantic problems that he leaves dangling, Alcuin at least shows why the questions posed by Fredigisus, if not his answers to them, should have seemed plausible to the Carolingian mind. At the same time, in order to place Fredigisus in historical perspective we also need to measure him against the yardstick of the other sources relevant to nihil and tenebrae of which he and his contemporaries were co-heirs with Alcuin. Fredigisus certainly echoes his Augustinian, Boethian, and grammatical models to some extent. At the same time, he ignores or rejects them all in part, including Alcuin. Fredigisus’s chief limitation is not his belief that all nouns represent something. Rather, his shortcomings are the result of other sins of omission and commission. He includes arguments that do not help his case; he tries to avoid difficulties by pretending that they do not exist; he neglects features of some of the ideas he includes that would have been useful to him; and he bypasses still other principles available to him that would have enabled him to answer the questions he raises within the setting in which he raises them, and rather more acceptably to his peers than he managed to do.

81 Ibid. 16, PL 101:972 D. 82 Ibid., PL 101:973 C. The emphasis is the editor’s. The major topic that Fredigisus includes that is simply not germane to his argument is the capacity of nouns to signify both individual things and the traits they possess in common. As has been shown already, this grammatical commonplace has as little to do with the debate over universals for Fredigisus as it does for Alcuin, Priscian, Donatus, and the Boethius of the Contra Eutychen. Even more to the point, it has nothing to do with nihil and tenebrae either. This fact is tacitly acknowledged by Fredigisus’s lack of interest in trying to apply the idea to those nouns. The power of his remark about the double semantic aptitudes of some nouns to distract attention from the real inquiry he wants to make into nihil and tenebrae has been borne out by the modern commentators. Even in the Carolingian age its irrelevance both to the meaning of nihil and to the realism-nominalism controversy could be recognized and exposed, as the sequel will show.

The chief example of Fredigisus’s unsuccessful attempt to ignore problems raised by his argument is one connected with his evocation of one of Augustine’s major strategic contributions to the discussion of nihil and tenebrae, the argument from grammatical parallels. As we have seen, Augustine departs only once from this type of analysis, in his effort to account for the isomorphy of the divine locutions naming night and day notwithstanding the lack of symmetry of the passages in which God is shown creating light but merely dividing the darkness from it. His solution is to apply figurative

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