Robert Grosseteste and Theories of Education

The Ordered Human

Jack P. Cunningham, Steven Puttick

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781000761313
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

This book examines Robert Grosseteste's often underrepresented ideas on education. It uniquely brings together academics from the fields of medieval history, modern science and contemporary education to shed new light on a fascinating medieval figure whose work has an enormous amount to offer anyone with an interest in our educational processes.

The book locates Grosseteste as a key figure in the intellectual history of medieval Europe and positions him as an important thinker who concerned himself with the science of education and set out to elucidate the processes and purposes of learning. This book offers an important practical contribution to the discussion of the contemporary nature and purpose of many aspects of our education processes.

This book will be of interest to students, researchers and academics in the disciplines of educational philosophy, medieval history, philosophy and theology.

Part I

Robert Grosseteste and the medieval ordered human

1 Deification as the goal of the ordered human according to Robert Grosseteste

Gioacchino Curiello

The emergence of the idea of deification

Grosseteste presents theology as the study of creation as flowing from God, the One, and as returning to Him (Grosseteste 1996, 52). Grosseteste connects his conception of ‘return’ with the place in the cosmos that he attributes to man. It is through humanity that the created world can return to God, for the human being is the summary of creation.¹ The return of human beings to God begins in this life, or what Grosseteste calls the ‘first life’, and consists in the practise of virtues. The ‘second life’ is that of glory, the blessed experience after the resurrection. The return of humanity means that the union between the Creator and the creature will be fully realised, and thus the human being will participate, as much as he can, in divinity.

In the writings that predate his episcopal ordination (1235), this topic was not among Grosseteste’s primary interests.² In this period he was more interested in the ‘first life’ and in the ‘first death’ (that caused by sin) than in the ‘second life’ and the ‘second death’ (the eternal damnation). Between 1238 and 1243 however, Robert Grosseteste translated and commented on the four treatises of the Corpus Dionysiacum (henceforth Corpus).³ The Corpus, written by the Neoplatonic thinker Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite (fifth and sixth century), is of paramount importance for the intellectual history of the Middle Ages. The Corpus consists of four treatises – The Celestial Hierarchy, The Ecclesiastical Hierarchy, The Divine Names (henceforth DN), and The Mystical Theology – as well as ten letters. Via Dionysius, Grosseteste enriches his conception of the return to God with the doctrine of deification. The doctrine of the deification of man has influenced many Eastern Fathers, but it does not have many followers in the Latin Church. Grosseteste is an exception. From the Commentary on the Corpus onwards, he devotes much more attention to the discussion of deification and resurrection.⁴

According to Grosseteste, the second life, the life of glory, begins already while the human being is on earth, and some people may experience it; however, it will be fully realised at the resurrection. This second life is the recovery of the image of God that human nature lost because of original sin; it is the participation in divinity and thus becoming deified. Being part of the sacred order (hierarchia) is what allows deification.⁵ In order to present Grosseteste’s view about the goal of a human being, first, I need to demonstrate how the concepts of hierarchy and deification are connected. Second, I will argue that deification implies an improvement of human nature, knowledge, and love. Finally, I will discuss whether Grosseteste considered the return of the human being to the Creator as a return to Eden, or to a better condition.

Deification and the goals of the hierarchy

In The Ecclesiastical Hierarchy, Dionysius defines deification as ‘being as much as possible like and in union with God’ (Dionysius 1987, 198; ch. 1, 3). When he discusses the definition, he equates deification with imitating God, participating in Him and becoming good (Dionysius 1987, 263; Letter 2). Grosseteste, following Dionysius, connects the definition of deification with the definition of hierarchy given in The Celestial Hierarchy. The reason for this connection is that deification is the goal of hierarchy. Dionysius defines hierarchy as follows: ‘In my opinion a hierarchy is a sacred order, a state of understanding and an activity approximating as closely as possible to the divine’ (Dionysius 1987, 153; ch. 3, 1).

Commenting on this passage, Grosseteste considers Dionysius to be presenting both a material and a formal definition of hierarchy (Grosseteste 2015, 66). The material definition of a thing specifies how it must be constructed to perform that function – that is, to be an efficient cause of certain effects – while the formal definition specifies its function, which involves a final cause. Three elements compose the material definition of hierarchy, namely order, knowledge and love (Grosseteste 1991, 293; ch. 1). The pivotal passage is that in which Grosseteste makes the formal definition of hierarchy coincide with the definition of deification – that is, assimilation and union with God:

He [Dionysius] considers now the formal proposed definition simply and formally, saying the scope of hierarchy is this, namely, the assimilation to God as far as possible.… [I]t follows that the scope of the hierarchy is also union with God as far as possible.

(Grosseteste 2015, 69f.; ch. 3, 3)⁶

A few lines later, Grosseteste explains that assimilation means to resemble God, but he specifies that it is an imitative likeness and not a likeness of equality. Indeed, as he said in the Hexaëmeron – a commentary on the six days of creation narrated in the book of Genesis – only the Son is a perfect image of the Father, while human beings can only imitate God (Grosseteste 1996, 221; VIII, I, 1). Grosseteste is also cautious about the term ‘union’. It is love that permits human beings to be united with God, but he immediately specifies that to be one with God does not mean to have the same substance as God; the biblical verse, ‘whoever joined to the Lord becomes one spirit with him’ (1 Cor. 6:17), means that there is a sort of uniformity with God. He does not explain what he means by ‘uniformity’ with any precision; it is a way to express the ontological difference between God and the creatures.

In The Ecclesiastical Hierarchy, Dionysius proposes other goals for the hierarchy, which develop the ones given in The Celestial Hierarchy. He writes:

The common goal of every hierarchy consists of the continuous love of God and of things divine, … and, before this, the complete and unswerving avoidance of everything contrary to it. It consists of a knowledge of beings as they really are. It consists of both the seeing and the understanding of sacred truth. It consists of an inspired participation in the one-like perfection and in the one itself, as far as possible. It consists of a feast upon that sacred vision which nourishes the intellect and which divinizes everything rising up to it.

(Dionysius 1987, 198; ch. 1, 3)

Grosseteste, in the first instance, paraphrases Dionysius’s text, but then concludes by proposing his own order of goals. According to him, the purpose of a hierarchy is to enable human beings to reach five goals that can be considered as one: the love (dilectio) of God; the cognition of God derived from the knowledge of the creatures; the speculation of divine truth in things; the participation in His perfections; the pure and direct vision (visio) of Him (Grosseteste 1991, 339; ch. 1).⁷

Table 1.1 enables us to visualise the differences between Dionysius and Grosseteste.

My interpretation is that Grosseteste presents the order of the goals in this way to show more clearly that it mirrors the elements of the material definition of hierarchy (order, knowledge, love). Indeed, we can divide these five goals into three categories: love pertains to human will; participation to being; cognition and speculation to knowledge. Vision recapitulates and perfects all the other goals. The two orders have in common the idea that love is the first goal of the hierarchy. To make sense of the order proposed by Grosseteste, I argue that it is given according to the cognitive aspect of the process of deification. After love, which is what moves a human being towards God, the first goal is the general cognition of beings; the second goal is speculation, understood as the human ability to ascend from material beings to the highest truths; finally, the last goal is vision, the pure and direct cognition of God. In other words, the first goal is the general recognition of material things; the second goal is for the human mind to perceive the higher concepts such as truth, justice or love; finally it is possible to attain true knowledge of God. Vision is the highest level of knowledge in Grosseteste’s order. It is last on the list, thus it encapsulates even the participation in God’s perfections and connects the cognitive side to the appetitive one: the vision of God fulfils not only human knowledge, but also his will. This means that when the soul rests in God, it achieves the fulfilment of his spiritual (immaterial) faculties: intellect and will.

Table 1.1 Steps in the ascent to God

Dionysius	Grosseteste
Avoidance of everything contrary to love of God Love of God Knowledge of beings in themselves Seeing and understanding of sacred truth Participation in the one itself Feast	Love of God Knowledge of God Speculation of divine truth Participation Vision of God

The cognitive aspect of deification prevails clearly in another text. When Grosseteste must explain the meaning of the Dionysian expression ‘assimilation to the godlike (deiforme) as far as possible’, he considers the idea that deiforme can signify two things: God Himself, as He is in Himself (but this aspect is not developed); or reference to a renewal of the rational spirit (Grosseteste 2015, 67; ch. 3, 1). This conception of deification, as the enlightenment of the intelligence, is a legacy of St Augustine of Hippo.⁸ My interpretation of the order of the goals of deification clarifies the fact that Grosseteste wants to keep two purposes of deification together, namely, participation in divinity, and the direct knowledge of God (beatific vision). These two goals are both considered by Dionysius and Augustine, but the former emphasises the aspect of participation, the latter that of knowledge. The next section will examine in depth these two aspects.

Deification as human goal and perfection

Commenting on The Ecclesiastical Hierarchy, Grosseteste affirms that deification is the perfection of rational creatures (Grosseteste 1991, 294; ch. 1). As noted above, the five goals of the hierarchy can be related to the three elements of the material definition of hierarchy, namely, order, knowledge and love. Now that we have explained what deification amounts to for Grosseteste, we can consider the consequences of deification in each aspect of human life: order, knowledge and love.

Deification and order

The first element of the definition of hierarchy is order. ‘Order is the disposing of equal and unequal things, allotting to each its place … and this disposing becomes sacred then when it is directed and directs to understanding and enjoying God’ (Grosseteste 2015, 66; ch. 3, 1). When Grosseteste talks of order, he actually means the disposition of beings in a hierarchy according to their proximity to their cause (God).

In order to understand the sentence, it is necessary to recall that God as the form of everything is the centre of Grosseteste’s theology of creation.⁹ The metaphysical principle that supports this statement is that everything participates in God; from this, it follows that everything is an image of God and likewise modelled after Him. However, when Grosseteste refers to the ‘sacred disposition’ – hierarchy – he means something more. The mention of understanding and enjoying shows that it pertains to rational beings. In particular, deification refers to the process of a human being’s becoming like God. The Bible also refers to human beings as gods (Ps. 82:6). To avoid any form of ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Notes on contributors
• Preface
• The educational renaissance in twelfth- and thirteenth-century Western Europe
• PART I: Robert Grosseteste and the medieval ordered human
• PART II: Modern education through the Grossetestian lens
• PART III: Grossetestian theories of learning and pedagogy
• Index