Medieval moral philosophy was never the same after the introduction in the Latin West of the translation of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics in the late twelfth century. The first Latin commentaries on the text, from the first half of the thirteenth century, centered around the concepts of the good, human happiness, and virtue, which form the core of the Aristotelian treatise. Much has been published in recent decades about these early discussions, and Anthony Celano’s study, Robert Kilwardby’s Commentary on the Ethics of Aristotle, is a very welcome addition to this scholarship on medieval ethics, as well as to the thirteenth-century Dominican Robert Kilwardby.
The book is divided into two parts: the first consists of a lengthy study of Kilwardby’s commentary on the first three books of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics whereas the second includes the edition of Robert Kilwardby’s Expositio super libros Ethicorum. The first part of the volume consists of five chapters, with the first two providing a characterization of the context in which this text was written (chapter 1) and the background of its author (chapter 2). The lengthier chapter 3 examines the Expositio super libros Ethicorum in connection with other works by Kilwardby and some of his contemporaries, while chapter 4 focuses on the key topics considered in the Ethica vetus and Chapter 5 provides a conclusion to this interpretative part of the study.[1] Chapter 6, which is preceded by the brief sections 1–3 on editorial notes (manuscripts used, methodology, orthography and sigla), marks the start of the second part of the book, the edition of Kilwardby’s commentary. In these final sections of the introduction, Celano lists the most common variants found in the two manuscripts used for this edition of the text and explains the rationale for choosing between the alternative variants. This decision is well justified, for instance, with respect to those instances that are due to scribal error. In such cases, the editor opted for the variant that best makes sense in the explication of Aristotle’s text.
The commentary by Kilwardby is an important testament to the early reception of Aristotelian moral and ethical theory. There are few (six) extant commentaries from this period (1230–1250), all presumably written by Master of Arts scholars at the University of Paris on the basis on the Latin translation, (probably) done by Burgundio of Pisa some time before 1150. Of the three or so surviving texts that focus on both the Ethica nova (comprising book I) and vetus (consisting of books II and III), the text here edited and attributed to Kilwardby is one of the earliest whose authorship is not anonymous. The first commentaries on the complete version of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics started to appear after the translation of all ten books by Robert Grosseteste just before 1250, as well as the commentaries on the NE by Albert the Great and Thomas Aquinas. Celano raises important questions in the introduction as to why Aristotle’s Ethics did not receive more attention in the first half of the thirteenth century, a fact which is attested to not only in the limited number of commentaries but also (and perhaps a main reason for that scarcity) by the fact that the major universities of Paris and Oxford did not require that master’s degree students read the work until as late as 1255 in the case of Paris (only four books, though) and 1350 in the case of Oxford (pp. 2–3). Turning to the text itself, Anthony Celano describes Kilwardby’s contribution in this debate as “represent[ing] the culmination of fifty years of study on Aristotle’s moral philosophy, rather than the beginning of a new phase of exegesis” (p. 14), an assessment that is compatible with Kilwardby’s contribution to other areas of thought.
Celano’s study is based on initial research and transcription work done by the late Dominican scholar Patrick Osmund Lewry for two manuscripts: the Cambridge Peterhouse 206 (ff. 285ra–307vb), which contains the full text of books I–III, and the Prague Czech State (University) Library III.F.10 (1ra–11vb), which contains only the Ethica nova. The attribution in a (14th-century) flyleaf of the Cambridge manuscript to Kilwardby does not suffice as proof of Kilwardby’s authorship, despite Lewry’s taking it as a reliable source for the logical set of works found in the same codex. On pp. 82–89, Anthony Celano systematically reviews the existing evidence, especially that presented by Lewry earlier on,[2] and makes a convincing case for this attribution on the basis of stylistic similarities and substantial conceptual agreement with what is found in other works attributed with certainty to Kilwardby.
I share with Celano and Lewry the view that the work was written around the year 1245 and that the style is compatible with what is found in works attributed to Robert Kilwardby. Like other works written in this period, that is, prior to 1250, especially those written in Paris, which are mostly commentaries on Aristotle, Kilwardby follows quite closely the text that he is commenting on instead of elaborating on his own views. Kilwardby makes it clear that his primary aim is to explicate the meaning of the Aristotelian text and to interpret it in the best, that is, the most faithful and charitable way, possible. (There are a few exceptions, though, for instance with respect to the concept of choice: see pp. 75–76.) Furthermore, Kilwardby does not, in texts from this period, adopt the method of the questio, preferring rather to use the method of divisio textus, in which he either simply explains the meaning of the text or presents determinations about specific passages, often introduced by expressions such as ‘Hic intendit dubitata determinare’ (p. 161). We find this type of commentary in this text, as we do in Kilwardby’s Notule libri Priorum (Commentary on the Prior Analytics) and the set of treatises constituting the so-called Logica vetus. In the background is the pedagogical nature of these texts, which were produced in the context of teaching. What is missing from this particular text is Kilwardby’s standard introduction to an Aristotelian text according to the scheme of the four causes, which we find in, for instance, Notulae super librum Porphyrii or Notule super librum Peryermeneias. There are, however, admittedly are exceptions to this procedural method, for instance in De natura relationis and in Notule libri Posteriorum, so this absence should not be taken as proof that Kilwardby did not write the Expositio.
Apart from stylistic matters, the text also supports the views expressed by Kilwardby in other works. For instance, as Celano demonstrates in chapter 3 (pp. 15–16), the author cites Plato in both De ortu scientiarum (a work from c. 1250) and Expositio super libros Ethicorum in support of the view that speech is the expression of the soul’s will, and thus, the science of speech is fundamental to the other sciences. For Celano, the consistent approach to the notions of fronesis and felicitas throughout all the works serves as sufficient evidence to attribute this perspective to Kilwardby: with regard to the former, he takes it to be both an intellectual and practical virtue; moreover, he believes the latter to be achievable in this life (and not simply in the afterlife) as a result of living and acting well, in conformity with reason. This account of human happiness, based on philosophy and in contrast to the theological conception of human happiness as resulting from the union with God, is a distinctive (and influential) element of Kilwardby’s moral theory, thus being essential to the idea “in the absence of any evidence to the contrary” (p. 83), found in Expositio super libros ethicorum and attributed to Kilwardby.
Turning now to the text itself, it is important to start by noting how, in his introduction to the study, Celano compares the structure of the text and Kilwardby’s approach with other commentaries from the same period. This strategy is quite useful for understanding Kilwardby’s originality, especially for readers less acquainted with source material from this period. More references to Albert the Great’s works on moral philosophy (De bono and Super Ethica) would have been an interesting addition, despite Albert’s having had access to the complete text of Ethics, because Albert/he is known to have borrowed from Kilwardby’s (logical) works. (Celano does occasionally compare the two authors, for instance on p. 83.)
One important characteristic of these early commentaries is their understanding of happiness as the Aristotelian natural end to human action, in connection with the Christian ideal of beatitude, the direct contemplation of God, taken as the ultimate human end. Instead, the Aristotelian text promotes the quest for happiness in this life, which is not to be understood in a mundane way, as the pursuit of riches or pleasure more generally, but rather as the acquisition of a disposition of character that is aligned with what is proper with respect to human nature and its defining rationality. As other scholars have noted, Kilwardby insists on a close reading of Aristotle and avoids offering theologically loaded explanations for the philosophical text in Ethics. In Expositio, Kilwardby makes it clear that when we grasp the nature of the good, or what appears as good, we cannot help but choose it because all things desire the good. But there are different kinds of desires or appetites and different levels of goodness, and the highest level is that of happiness: a perfect, continuous state of being. Human virtue is a means to achieve that ultimate good, and thus, is subordinated to it but not necessarily identified with it. As Celano notes in his introductory essay, Kilwardby and other early commentators on Ethics viewed virtue as an inferior good that is subordinated to happiness due to their lack of familiarity with book VI and the analysis of phronesis therein. But for Kilwardby, to act in the pursuit of the good is done for the right reason (“recta ratio”) and not as the result of some direct, divinely infused virtuous intervention, as others would have it (see, for instance, Book I, chapter 13, page 155). In demonstrating a strong familiarity with the text that he is commenting on and a clear understanding (and respecting) of Aristotle’s original intention, Kilwardby departs from other early commentators in his identification of fronesis and prudentia (“Similiter et fronesis, cum sit prudentia in eligendo prius cognita et amata”, Book I, chapter 18, p. 181).
Kilwardby claims that the human good should be understood in the exercise of human rationality, as applied to those mental operations related to action, while extending also to those operations related to theoretical understanding. Furthermore, Kilwardby argues that good applies to both the acts or operations and the effects or results of those operations or acts, even if the acts have primacy from a moral standpoint. The human good is the virtuous process of living and acting well that takes place in this lifetime, in conformity with the dictates of reason. Virtue is subordinated to happiness in viam, but importantly happiness should not be identified with beatitude because, as Celano points out, “Kilwardby is careful to retain the theological notion of the separate good as the ultimate human end, but he dismisses it as irrelevant to the explication of the text of the NE [Nicomachean Ethics]” (page 27). Likewise, Kilwardby understands the cardinal virtues of fortitude, temperance, justice, and prudence in a political sense, that is, he understands them in the context of the relationship between citizens and the state rather than in the more conventional individual or theological sense. Celano rightly observes (pp. 23–24) that Kilwardby holds a similar view in both the De ortu scientiarum and in Questiones in libros Sententiarum, thus providing further arguments for the attribution of the Expositio to the Dominican.
To conclude: the publication of this edition by Anthony Celano is a much awaited and welcome contribution to the study of medieval moral theory, especially in the context of the early reception of Aristotle’s Ethics. Together with Celano’s numerous studies on the topic, including his seminal work Aristotle’s Ethics and Medieval Philosophy (Cambridge University Press 2016), we are now in a privileged position to understand how early late medieval thinkers understood the human good, human happiness, and its relationship with virtue. The book is essential reading for anyone interested in medieval moral theory and, of course, in the philosophical contribution of that great medieval thinker, Robert Kilwardby.
Notes
[1] The first few chapters contain some printing errors that could have been avoided with a careful proofreader: see, for example, “knew of the other other books” (p. 2); “in his interpretaion” (p. 24); “he ultimatelyaccepts the idea” (p. 25); or “although the this idea is taken” (p. 29).
[2] See in particular P.O. Lewry, “Robert Kilwardby’s Commentary on the ‘Ethica nova and vetus’,” in C. Wenin (ed.), L’ homme et son Univers au Moyen Âge. Louvain-la Neuve: Éditions de l’Institut Supérieur de Philosophie, 1986, pp. 799–807.