Magnanimity, Christian Ethics, and Paganism in the Latin Middle Ages (2024)

John Marenbon

Aristotle’s presentation of magnanimity seems as though it would pose problems for Christian thinkers. Most of the other individual virtues discussed by ancient thinkers could be, and were, taken over by them unproblematically, as they made their choices among the differing sub-classifications of wisdom, courage, temperance, and justice. Rather, they distanced themselves from the pagan philosophers by claiming that the ancients’ understanding of virtues had been inadequate or false, and that their list of them was incomplete. By contrast the passage in the Nicomachean Ethics on magnanimity contains three linked areas of apparent difficulty from the Christian perspective. It treats honours, which Christians should value little or not at all, as the greatest of external things (1123b17–21). Worse: to be magnanimous is to observe the mean with regard to honours, to think oneself, at the right times and for the right reasons, worthy of the greatest honours.1 As such, magnanimity seems incompatible with the Christian virtue of humility. And the portrait of the magnanimous man (1124b6–1125a16), according to which he does not remember benefits done to him, is dilatory and detached, and has no care for useful things, does not fit the model for a member of a Christian community.2

Yet, with a few important exceptions, these problems failed to materialize. Magnanimity, it becomes clear, was taken into the Christian scheme as readily as other, unobjectionable subordinate virtues such as beneficence, truthfulness, and sobriety, and given more importance than them. This process was facilitated by the contingencies of textual transmission. Aristotle’s particular account of magnanimity became available only in the mid-thirteenth century. For more than a millennium before then, Christian thinkers had used the Stoic conception of this virtue, which does not present the same problems. But the arrival of the Nicomachean Ethics did not provoke a general reaction against this virtue; rather, magnanimity became even more deeply implicated within Christian moral thinking.

Although the story of magnanimity in medieval Latin philosophy is not, then, so dramatic as expected, it illuminates the delicate relations between Christianity and paganism no less, showing how the tensions between admiration for ancient, pagan teaching, on the one side, and Christian values, on the other, were resolved, or side-stepped or made manifest below the surface.3 Four illustrations, drawn from this story, will be explored here. The first is about those thinkers, among them Abelard, who developed a notion of magnanimity within a neutral scheme of virtues, from which any Christian considerations are deliberately excluded. The second is set in the late thirteenth century, when Arts Masters borrow from, and react to, Thomas Aquinas’s sophisticated theological appropriation of magnanimity, now seen in the light of Aristotle. The third is provided by the two most influential fourteenth-century Ethics commentaries. The fourth concerns a single thinker, Dante, and his inexplicit and unexpected attitude to magnanimity.

1. Magnanimity and a Neutral Scheme of Virtues

As René-Antoine Gauthier showed in his splendid and comprehensive study of magnanimity up to the time of Aquinas, it was very easy for the Christians of late antiquity to accept magnanimity as a virtue.4 The philosophical conception of it at the time was the Stoic one, according to which it is either a name for courage as a whole or for a part of courage. Moreover, the word magnanimitas was used in the pre-Vulgate translations of the Bible and was widely adopted by Latin Christian writers, who often used it synonymously with longanimitas (patience). As a result of both linguistic accident and the deliberate wish of some Greek and Latin Christians to adopt Stoic moral ideas, a conception of magnanimity as bearing and overcoming hardships with patience became common in Church writers, and magnanimity was seen by Cassian as a monastic virtue.5 Some twelfth-century authors took this Christianization even further. For Bernard of Clairvaux, for instance, magnanimity is a specifically Christian virtue exhibited in its supreme form by the magnanimitas credulitatis (‘the magnanimity of belief’) of the Blessed Virgin Mary.6

There was, however, a different line of approach among Christian thinkers, in which magnanimity was treated within a framework where the virtues, as classified and described by pagan writers (Stoics or following the Stoic scheme), are treated neutrally. They are kept close to their original form, not obviously Christianized nor supplemented by characteristically Christian virtues. But they are nonetheless presented to a Christian readership as a valuable way of understanding and engaging in moral life. The earliest example is found in the Formula vitae honestae of Martin, Bishop of Braga, in the late sixth century. The Formula is a brief exposition of the four cardinal virtues, in which magnanimity is treated, in Stoic style, as a synonym for courage in general.7 The whole work is full of phrases reminiscent of Seneca, and there is every chance that, as its editor has suggested, the work epitomizes a now lost work by him. (And, appropriately, the work was in fact attributed to Seneca and widely read in the later Middle Ages, under the title De quattuor virtutibus.) The importance of this work lies not in its contents but the conception Martin enunciates in his preface to Miro, the King of Galicia: he has called the book Guide to a Worthy Life, because ‘it does not teach the difficult and perfect things which are performed by outstanding worshippers of God, but rather proposes those things that can be fulfilled, without the commandments of the divine scriptures through the natural law of human intelligence even by lay people who live rightly and worthily’.8

The central writer who continued this line in the twelfth century is Peter Abelard. He first introduced the concept of magnanimity into his work in Book II of the Theologia Christiana (mid-1120s), a eulogy of the ancient Greek and Roman philosophers, not just for their wisdom but for their ascetic, virtuous lives. He illustrates the ‘constancy and unbeaten strength of mind’ (constantia atque animi robur inuictissimum) of Diogenes by the story of how, afflicted by fever as an old man, he slit his own throat so as not to be overcome by the illness.9 But, a moment later, with Augustine’s treatment of suicide in Book I of De civitate Dei in mind, Abelard raises an objection. Is this behaviour, he asks, not the mere appearance of virtue and bravery, but in reality madness? Augustine had introduced the idea of magnanimity here. Augustine writes (Chapter 22) that suicides (other than those acting on God’s orders) are ‘to be wondered at for their greatness of mind, rather than praised for the soundness of their wisdom’. But he goes on, correcting the suggestion here that such behaviour shows magnanimity: ‘if you are more careful to take reason into account, it will not rightly be called greatness of soul when someone, not being able to put up with difficulties or sins committed by others, commits suicide’. Abelard, who cites this passage of Augustine, writes that those who, like Samson, kill themselves in obedience to a divine command show the ‘greatness of mind and constancy’ (animi magnitudo et constantia) which belong to the virtue of courage ‘which we do not find at all in Diogenes’ (II.81). Abelard also has Cicero’s definition of courage in De inventione (II.163: courage is the considered undertaking of dangers and enduring of labours (fortitudo est considerata periculorum susceptio et laborum perpessio)) in mind. Combining it with Augustine’s emphasis on reasonableness, he declares that where ‘there is not considered—that is prudent and reasonable (prouida et rationabilis)—enduring of labours, there is no basis for tolerance and so there cannot be bravery, since it does not match up with the description of bravery’.10

It was, however, Abelard’s definition of magnanimity in a work written a few years later, the Collationes, which, as Gauthier has shown, would be enormously influential.11 For the definition of courage (fortitudo) as a whole (II.122), Abelard uses Cicero’s definition in the De inventione, but with, as in the Theologia Christiana, an explicit mention of reasonableness (considerata idest rationabilis periculorum susceptio). Unlike any of his sources, he divides courage into just two parts, magnanimity and tolerance (tolerantia); Macrobius’s Commentary on Cicero’s Somnium Scipionis, which Abelard certainly knew, lists (I.8.7) magnanimitas along with tolerantia, but they are two among seven aspects of courage. Magnanimity is defined as ‘that by which, when there is a rational cause, we are ready to undertake things however difficult’ (qua, cum rationabilis subest causa, quamlibet ardua aggredi sumus parati) and temperance is ‘that by which we persevere constantly in the undertaking of this purpose’ (qua in huius propositi incepto constanter perseueramus). For these, Abelard seems to have begun with De inventione. Although that work list neither magnanimity nor tolerance among the parts of courage, it defines (II.163) one of the parts it does include, patience (patientia), as ‘the willing and long-lasting enduring of laborious and difficult things for the sake of worthiness and usefulness’ (honestatis aut utilitatis causa rerum arduarum ac difficilium voluntaria ac diuturna perpessio). Abelard splits this virtue into two, and he gives it a more active aspect: rather than merely enduring difficult labours, we are to be ready to undertake them (magnanimity) and persist with them (tolerance).12

Magnanimity is associated with the ancient world in both the Theologia Christiana and the Collationes, but there is a subtle change between the two perspectives. In the Theologia, Abelard is brought to think about magnanimity by Augustine’s arguments against suicide, part of the polemic at the beginning of the City of God against the values, heroes, and heroines of pagan Rome. But he does not at all share Augustine’s point of view. He wishes to set up ancient Greeks and Romans, philosophers especially but not exclusively, as exemplars of the virtues, to be followed by Christians of his day. Indeed, although he has denied that Diogenes’s suicide showed genuine magnanimity, at the end of the discussion Abelard is happy to talk as if he has demonstrated the abstinence and the magnanimity of the philosophers, and will now go on to discuss their continence.13 But Abelard Christianizes this exposition of the virtues, because he regards the ancient pagan philosophers as having been divinely guided in their understanding and practice of virtue. The Church Fathers, he says, borrowed their descriptions of the virtues, such as justice and courage, from the ancient philosophers, as if ‘they had no doubt that they had been spoken by the same <Holy> Spirit’.14

In the Collationes, however, the definition of magnanimity is put into the mouth of a Philosopher, who is in dialogue here with a Christian. The Philosopher is portrayed as someone who follows no revealed law, and Abelard deliberately distinguishes him from the divinely inspired proto-Christians of the Theologia Christiana.15Although the Christian does not challenge his description of the virtues, some of the Philosopher’s remarks do not correspond to what Abelard says in his own right.16 Particularly revealing is the case of humility. Humility, a fundamental moral quality for Christians, had no place in the classifications of virtues Abelard could read in his ancient pagan sources, such as Cicero and Macrobius. Nonetheless Abelard chooses to make his Philosopher include it (II.137) as a part of temperance, but give it a description which, while compatible with the Christian conception, is stripped of any distinctively Christian content. Humility is that ‘through which we temper ourselves from an appetite for empty glory so that we do not desire to seem to be greater than we are’.

The same, deliberately classicizing, non-Christian, but not anti-Christian, perspective is found in the Moralium Dogmata Philosophorum.17 This work may seem to be no more than a florilegium, since much of it consists of passages taken from classical Latin texts, above all Cicero’s De officiis. But these extracts are arranged and amplified so as to give a systematic account of the virtues, influenced in its shape and details by Abelard’s teaching. Although the parts of courage are Macrobius’s (omitting tolerantia), the definition of magnanimity is exactly Abelard’s: ‘the voluntary and reasonable undertaking of difficult things’ (difficilium spontanea ac rationabilis aggressio).18 The author, influenced by De officiis where magnanimity is equated with the whole of courage, goes on to give this virtue an elaborate treatment, with poetic illustrations and discussion of how avarice, ambition, and recklessness prevent it.19 He emphasizes especially how magnanimity must serve the common good. The idea is proposed in a citation from De officiis (I.19.63—although there Cicero, and the Moralium Dogmata, following him, speak rather of ‘courage’—fortitudo) and in a sentence apparently composed by the author himself, where he says that the virtue looks to ‘common utility’ rather than its own desired ends (commoda).20 There is no figure of a Philosopher, as in the Collationes, nor is there anything to correspond to the presence there of his interlocutor, the Christian. Rather, the Moralium dogmata proposes its teaching about magnanimity and the other virtues without any reference to revealed religion. Humility does not appear at all in the list of virtues, although it probably was there in the source material.21

Neither in the Moralium Dogmata nor in Abelard is magnanimity presented as an ancient pagan virtue that rubs against Christian values; nor, however, is any attempt made to incorporate it within a specifically Christian doctrinal scheme. The immense popularity of the Moralium Dogmata, widely copied, translated into French, German, and even Irish, and incorporated by Brunetto Latini into his Tresor, ensured that this approach survived, at least outside the universities, into the later Middle Ages. Indeed, there is a whole project of research to be carried out on how this neutral conception of magnanimity was used in a wide range of medieval literature, with the story of Alexander, often called ‘magnanimous’, as a good starting-point.22 The approach was revived at a more philosophical level at the end of the fifteenth century when Giovanni Pontano wrote his De magnanimitate, based on Aristotle and, though addressed to his Italian contemporaries, written in entirely classical terms.23

The main influence, however, of Abelard’s definition of magnanimity (usually as transmitted by the Moralium dogmata) was, as Gauthier has shown, to be on theologians. Abelard’s neutral approach was taken into a specifically Christian doctrinal framework and, finally, used by Aquinas to help integrate Aristotle’s account of this virtue with Church teaching. Abelard, indeed, himself had used the overall view of the virtues he gave to the Philosopher of Collationes as part of his own theological teaching in his Sententie, but he does not mention magnanimity explicitly there.24 But two of the earliest authors to follow Abelard’s definition of magnanimity show the theological turn particularly clearly. The Ysagoge in Theologiam, written by Odo, seemingly an Englishman, most probably before 1139, follows Abelard in his overall understanding of the relations between prudence, justice, courage, and temperance.25 Odo uses Macrobius’s divisions of courage (missing out tolerantia), but takes a somewhat mangled version of Abelard’s definition of magnanimity: Magnanimitas est difficilium aggressio spontanea.26 Humility is not, as in the Collationes, treated as belonging to temperance but to courage. It is one of the parts of firmitas, and it is given a thoroughly Christian colouring, as the virtue ‘through which the mind, exalting itself in no way and ascribing nothing good to itself, also presents externally a cast-down appearance’.27 In his De virtutibus et de vitiis et de donis spiritus sancti, written probably about twenty years later, Alan of Lille follows the Ysagoge, with some added elaborations, in how it describes courage, including the definition of magnanimity (spontaneadifficilium agressio) and the description of humility.28 It marks, however, another stage in the Christianization of the material. In the next section Alan explains how these ‘political’ cardinal virtues become catholic virtues through faith, although he goes on to reject the idea, which would become widespread, that babies receive these infused cardinal virtues at baptism (I, art. 4–5).

2.1 Aquinas

It was not until 1246–7, with Robert Grosseteste’s translation of the complete Nicomachean Ethics, that Aristotle’s treatment of magnanimity became known in Latin Europe. The universities of Paris and Oxford, where it was principally studied, were divided into Arts faculties and the higher faculties of Theology, Medicine, and Law. By the end of the 1250s, the Arts faculties had a curriculum based on the study of the near-complete body of Aristotle’s work, naturally including the Ethics. The thinkers who first tried to understand and assimilate the complete Ethics were not, however, Arts Masters, but two Dominican theologians, Albert the Great and his pupil, Thomas Aquinas.29 Indeed, it was Aquinas’s work on the Ethics that shaped its reception among Arts Masters through to the early fourteenth century. For that reason, a brief look at his conception of magnanimity is necessary here; much more detail, and a rather different approach, will be found in Jennifer Herdt’s chapter.

Near to the end of his career, in 1271–2, Aquinas set about studying and using the Ethics in two ways. He wrote his Sententie on the Ethics, a literal, section-by-section, line-by-line commentary. In the section on magnanimity, he provides, as almost everywhere, a clear and faithful account of Aristotle’s reasoning, with only a few extra touches of his own.30

At the same time as writing the Sententie, Aquinas was working on the second part (IaIIe and IIaIIe) of his Summa Theologiae. Much of the discussion is closely related to the Ethics, to the extent that the IIaIIe might be regarded both as a re-thinking of Aristotelian ethics in the light of Christian doctrine, and of Christian doctrine in the light of Aristotelian ethics.31 It is here that Aquinas sets out most clearly the conception of magnanimity, which he had begun to develop almost twenty years earlier, when he was writing his commentary on the Sentences. Gauthier has argued that Aquinas’s main underlying conception of magnanimity is the Abelardian one, of willingness to undertake arduous, difficult tasks. This judgement may seem bizarre, given the concentration on the points and difficulties raised by Aristotle’s Ethics (unknown to Abelard) in the quaestio (IIaIIe [references to the Summa Theologiae are to the IIaIIe], q. 129) devoted to magnanimity.32 But Gauthier’s judgement is vindicated by Aquinas’s overall plan. Aquinas argues (cf. q. 129, a. 6) that by fiducia Cicero meant the same as magnanimitas. He accepts Cicero’s fourfold division of courage into magnificentia, fiducia, patientia, and perseverantia and devotes a whole article (q. 128, a. 1) to justifying it and showing its consistency with other, apparently incompatible divisions. Courage, Aquinas explains (q. 128, a. 1), has two elements, undertaking (aggredi) and bearing (sustinere). The two elements related to undertaking are fiducia (= magnanimitas) and magnificentia. Fiducia/magnanimitas provides the state of mind in which someone begins a courageous action, whilst magnificentia is the disposition needed to carry it out. These and the other two parts are integral parts with respect to courage in its strict Aristotelian sense, facing death in war—that is to say, all four are needed to make up courage in this sense. But, applied to other things, they are merely the potential parts of courage and form separate virtues distinct from it. Magnanimity (here, fiducia), then, properly speaking is concerned with the hope of performing a difficult deed (q. 129, a. 6: circa spem alicuius ardui). The link between this underlying Abelardian conception and Aristotle’s view is that, although magnanimity is directly concerned with hope, it is indirectly concerned with the object of hope, which is honour (q. 129, a. 1, ad2). Why honour? Because a great act consists in the best use of the greatest thing—that is to say, the greatest external thing, since only external things are used. But honour is the greatest of all external things. And so someone aiming to act in the greatest way will hope to win honour (q. 129, a. 1).33

By the way in which he inserts it into his complete discussion of the virtues, therefore, Aquinas refocuses Aristotelian magnanimity. The virtue is no longer that of people worthy of great honours who observe the mean with regard to their own worthiness. Rather, magnanimity, although it must involve the greatest deeds, observes a mean ‘because it moves towards those things that are greatest according to reason’ (a phrase that echoes Abelard’s insistence on reasonableness) and so it ‘does not extend itself to things greater than those for which it is worthy’ (q. 129, a. 3, ad1). For Aristotle, magnanimity is a purely self-regarding virtue. Consider someone who performs great socially beneficial actions and is honoured for them. Such a man is not for this reason magnanimous. What needs to be added for him to be magnanimous is a correct grasp of his own worthiness for these honours—a quality that makes no difference to others, but makes the man himself better.34 For Aquinas, magnanimity is an other-regarding virtue, since it is gained only through performing, reasonably (not attempting the impossible), the sort of great, socially beneficial acts that should win honour. Aquinas is not, therefore, faced with the problem of explaining why Christians should be directing themselves to honour, since honour is involved in his account of magnanimity only in connection with great and socially valuable acts.

This emphasis is very clear in how Aquinas replies to the obvious Christian objection that magnanimity is incompatible with the virtue of humility, but no virtue can be the opposite of another (q. 129, a. 3, ad4). Aquinas explains that, in humans, ‘there is something great which we possess from God’s gift, and something faulty, which belongs to us because of the weakness of our nature’. There is no contradiction in the fact that our judgements of ourselves differ when made according to the one consideration or the other. He goes on to explain that magnanimity ‘makes it that people consider themselves worthy of great things, in view of the gifts they have from God, in such a way that, if they have great virtue of soul, magnanimity brings it about that they set out to perform great deeds of virtue’. The correct judging of a person’s own worthiness, which is immediately referred to God, is not seen as valuable in itself, but only because of the stimulation it gives to performing great and virtuous deeds. Rather, it is humility that is a purely self-regarding virtue (as Aquinas will explain in detail later on: q. 161): when we consider ourselves not according to what God has given us, but our own faultiness, we count ourselves as worth little.

This explicitly Christian approach is, however, only one of two strategies Aquinas adopts to reconcile humility with magnanimity. In his discussion of humility, he takes another approach, more fully integrated with his theory and not involving specifically theological doctrines.35 Here humility and magnanimity are presented as a duo, both of which are needed if a person is to follow the right, middle course with regard to pursuing great things reasonably, neither too ambitiously nor too faint-heartedly. We need, he says, one virtue, humility, to ‘temper and restrain the mind, so that it does not seek lofty things immoderately’ and another virtue, magnanimity, which is characterized in Abelard’s terms, as being needed ‘to strengthen the mind against despair and drive it to follow through great things according to right reason’.36

2.2 Magnanimity and the Not So Radical Arts Masters

The way that Aquinas’s ethics influenced the Arts Masters was both very direct, and rather surprising. Before 1277, an Arts Master had compiled a commentary on Aristotle’s Ethics, based on—that is to say, with its ideas in large part taken from—mainly the IIaIIe of the Summa Theologiae, and to a much lesser extent from the Sententie on the Ethics.37 This commentary, christened as ‘K’ by its leading historian, Iacopo Costa, does not survive, but it is known from at least seven commentaries based on it (though not based so closely as to permit a reconstruction).38

Gauthier, who first unearthed this commentary tradition, described the authors of the commentaries deriving from K as ‘plagiarists lacking in any personality’.39 More recent scholars have discussed these texts in terms of their degree of heterodoxy, and have considered in this light whether or not each text dates from before or after 1277. In 1277 the Bishop of Paris, Étienne Tempier, condemned 211 propositions supposedly held or entertained by Arts Masters. Some of these implicated views based on Aristotle’s Ethics. K is considered to have been written before the condemnations. The commentaries based on it are believed all, or almost all, to have been written after them. Those written in the immediate aftermath are considered to be timid (any endorsem*nt of condemned views is carefully avoided), but during the decade from 1280–1300 there is, Costa suggests, ‘a gradual loss of prudence’.40 More important, though, according to Costa, is a heterodoxy not of doctrines, but of method: Aquinas had deformed Aristotelian ethics in order to adapt it to his theological summa; K and its followers deform Aquinas’s Summa Theologiae ‘so that its Aristotelian content emerges and they are restored … to a purely philosophical state’.41

Magnanimity was far too well accepted as a Christian virtue to be rejected as such in the 1277 condemnations, but Proposition 171 has implications about how it is to be understood. It declares that the virtue of humility includes self-scorn and counting one’s own good things as vile—a position that is not obviously reconcilable with Aristotle’s presentation of magnanimity.42 Yet the Arts Masters’ treatment of magnanimity in the various commentaries suggests, however, that considering K and its descendants in terms of heterodoxy may not be the best perspective for understanding their thinking. Consider the sections on the topic in the two published commentaries in the group which includes the Anonymous Commentary in Paris BnF lat 14698 (=1), probably from the 1280s, and the commentary by Radulphus Brito (=7), from the last years of the thirteenth century.43The Anonymous has just one question on magnanimity, q. 90, ‘Is magnanimity a virtue?’ corresponding to Aquinas’s article 3 of q. 129. Radulphus Brito has that question (q. 91) and two others: ‘Does magnanimity have its being with regard to honours?’ (q. 92 = Aquinas, a. 1) and ‘Do riches contribute to magnanimity?’ (q. 93 = Aquinas, a. 8 ‘Do the goods of fortune contribute to magnanimity?’). In both commentaries, much of the substance of the debate—the arguments advanced against the view which the Master wants to advance and the replies to them—comes from Aquinas.44 Moreover, in the so-called ‘body’ of the questions, where the Master gives his own view, the two Arts Masters adopt the main lines of Aquinas’s view.

This tendency to copy does not, however, mean that the two commentators end up giving the same view as Aquinas, in abbreviated form. Aquinas’s complex view about the relationship between magnanimity, honour, great deeds, and hope emerges only from considering all the articles of the question on magnanimity and placing them within the wider discussion in the Summa Theologiae. His own answer to the specific question, ‘Is magnanimity a virtue?’ is very simple (q. 129, a. 3): yes, because it provides the rational mean for honour, the greatest of all external goods. The anonymous commentary says much the same. But for Aquinas this particular answer must be understood in the light of his theory as a whole which, although it recognizes magnanimity as a mean with regard to honours, links the honours and the virtue with great and difficult actions and the hope needed to undertake them. This element is missing from the anonymous commentary, which thus succeeds in being closer to Aristotle: not because it has eliminated theological content or drifted from orthodoxy, but because it has cut out what is not relevant to its exegetical task. Radulphus Brito, by contrast, does introduce material into his answer to this question from elsewhere in Aquinas’s treatment of magnanimity, so restoring the emphasis on action and the idea of hope, and indeed offering an excellent summary of how its different aspects interlink: ‘magnanimity has its being with regard to honours, directing the appetite lest it despairs in seeking the great honours that have their being with regard to great deeds worthy of honours.’45 It may be that here Radulphus is simply taking more from K than the generally briefer anonymous commentator; or it may be that Radulphus—who would end his days as a Dominican—has introduced extra material from the Summa. Whichever is the case, the change is not one of being more or less orthodox or theological, but of coming closer to Aquinas’s overall view.

There is one objection (four for Aquinas, two for the anonymous, and three for Radulphus) that the two Arts Masters answer differently from Aquinas. The objection is about the very area brought up in the 1277 condemnations, humility: no virtue is opposite to another virtue, but magnanimity is opposite to the virtue of humility. Here Aquinas gives his first, theological answer (we are humble when we consider what belongs to us just in virtue of our own nature). Both the anonymous and Radulphus, by contrast, distinguish different sorts of humility. Two are not virtuous at all: one is the vice of pusillanimity, when people do not consider themselves worthy of the honours of which they are worthy; and another characterizes those who pretend to be less worthy than they know they are.46 Each of the commentators then suggests a third type of humility, which is virtuous. For the anonymous it is the unnamed virtue of ‘moderation over honours’ that Aristotle discusses after he has talked about magnanimity (Ethics IV.iv.4–6; 1125b12–26), although here it is made especially to apply to those worthy of only some small honours. Radulphus too says, but in the body of this question, that this unnamed virtue might be called ‘humility’.47 Radulphus’s own third sense of humility is, rather, that displayed where I know that, for a hidden reason, I am not worthy of the honours I am given—for instance, I am revered as learned, but I know that I am ignorant. Radulphus also adds a fourth meaning ‘according to the theologians’—a brief summary of Aquinas’s theological answer.48

Neither of these writers seems attracted by heterodoxy. They are trying to explain Aristotle’s ideas; they find Aquinas’s IIaIIe a wonderful guide (a fact that tells a lot about Aquinas’s daring Aristotelianism); but they need to omit, or minimize, any theological elements, since they are not theologians but Arts Masters, commenting on Aristotle. It is not surprising that they do not use Aquinas’s second, non-theological answer to the problem about humility as opposite to magnanimity, since the quaestio in which it occurs, dedicated to humility, is not one that would have been mined for a commentary on Aristotle’s Ethics. One Arts Master, however, did use that second answer—because he was not commenting on the Ethics, but answering an independent disputed question, ‘Is humility a virtue?’ The master was Siger of Brabant, teaching probably only a year or two after Aquinas finished the IIaIIe.49 Siger uses Aquinas’s second answer as the basis for the body of the quaestio, a move which allows him to talk about humility without raising anything about its specifically Christian connotations. As he says, in language close to Aquinas’s:

Gauthier noticed the borrowing, but argued that Siger deliberately changes Aquinas’s meaning. For Aquinas, magnanimity and humility are complementary virtues belonging to the same person, whereas, Gauthier says, Siger makes them into virtues belonging to different people: magnanimity for the best, humility for lesser ones.51 Gauthier can thus conclude Siger ‘could not have been more scornful of humility’ and, taking advantage of Aquinas’s ‘imprudence’, has ‘here rediscovered the genuine Aristotle’.52

For once, Gauthier is wrong. In his main discussion of humility, in the body of the question, Siger clearly has in mind a single person, as needing both magnanimity and humility, exactly as he had read in the IIaIIe. He makes this very clear in the sentence before the passage just quoted: ‘with regard to the motion of the appetite in seeking [difficult deeds], virtues are required that restrain it; but with regard to the motion of the appetite fleeing from [difficult deeds], virtues such as courage are required that drive it forward’.53 Gauthier reaches his interpretation because of Siger’s response to the objection that, since humility is the opposite of magnanimity, a virtue, it cannot be a virtue itself. Siger answers:

Here humility and magnanimity are indeed virtues of different people, but that is because here Siger is not talking about the sort humility he has taken from Aquinas in the body of his question, the complementary virtue to magnanimity. Rather, Siger is talking about humility identified with the unnamed virtue (like other Arts Masters: see above). It is identified here explicitly as ‘temperance with regard to honour’—that is to say, the virtue that those who are not worthy of great honours gain by pursuing the lesser honours which are due to them according to the rational mean. Gauthier is right, though, that Siger wants to present a view which fits into the Aristotelian framework, even though here he is not commenting on Aristotle. But he is able to do so by reading the IIaIIe selectively, leaving aside everything explicitly related to Christian doctrine and presenting accurately the positions he has chosen.

3. Magnanimity in the Fourteenth-Century Commentaries on the Ethics

The two most important fourteenth-century commentaries on Aristotle’s Ethics—indeed, along with Aquinas’s, the most influential of all the medieval commentaries—were those by Giraut Ott (Geraldus Odonis) and John Buridan.55 Ott was a Franciscan, who in 1329 became a controversial Minister General of his order, favoured by the papacy but disliked by most of his confreres. Before then, quite probably in the 1320s, when he was a master of theology in Paris, he composed a very lengthy commentary on the Ethics, which includes both a literal exegesis of the text, on the lines of Aquinas’s Sententie, but much longer and more painstaking, and quaestiones on the main problems in or suggested by Aristotle’s work.56 Buridan taught at Paris University, from the 1320s to 1350s: he remained an Arts Master for his entire career, gaining great celebrity. He commented on many of Aristotle’s works, and the commentary on the Ethics, left unfinished, is certainly later than Ott’s, which it uses, and perhaps from near the end of his life.57 Ott’s commentary survives in eighteen manuscripts and two early printed editions, Buridan’s in over a hundred manuscripts and many early printed editions.58

Although Aquinas’s views were known to both Ott and Buridan, the difference between their commentaries and the IIaIIe, along with the various Arts commentaries based on it, is striking. There is only one quaestio in common between the two fourteenth-century commentators and Aquinas’s IIaIIe: ‘Is magnanimity a virtue?’ (IIaIIe, q. 129, a. 3; Ott IV, q. 29; Buridan IV, q. 11). Whereas Aquinas aims to understand the Aristotelian virtue of magnanimity by fitting it into a conceptual scheme developed earlier in the Middle Ages, when the current idea of magnanimity was the Stoic one, Ott and Buridan confront the account in the Ethics more directly. They accept in a much less qualified way than Aquinas that magnanimity is a virtue about honours, and they then have, to a greater or lesser degree, to develop a view of it compatible with their Christian beliefs. Since Ott was a Franciscan theologian and Buridan an Arts Master, the two men regarded the nature of this task somewhat differently, but the difference should not be exaggerated. Both approached the Ethics as admiring readers of Aristotle, wishing to find a way of accepting his arguments and positions.59 Moreover, Ott states clearly that, in commenting on a moral philosopher, as he is doing, only the acquired virtues, not those which are divinely infused, are under discussion.60

Since, unlike Aquinas, they accepted that magnanimity is concerned directly and unqualifiedly with honours, both commentators realized that they needed to analyse this concept more closely than Aristotle or their medieval predecessors had done. There is an ambiguity in the idea of honours. Suppose I say: ‘Sophia is keen to win honours’. I might mean, first, that Sophia wants to act in the virtuous ways that will bring her honours. Or I might mean, second, that Sophia is concerned above all with the honours themselves—the commendatory speeches, the titles, the medals. In the first sense, my comment is clearly praising. In the second sense, it is likely to be critical—and especially so if it is made from a Christian perspective. Aristotle’s magnanimous man, who cannot be such unless he is virtuous, and who is only moderately pleased to receive honours from those worthy to bestow them, and not at all from others, can easily be read as pursuing honours just in the first way. Yet Aristotle does seem to think that, even in the second, external sense, honours have some value.

Ott and Buridan both point to this distinction, though they differ in their terminology. Ott uses the contrast (Aristotelian, but not used by Aristotle here) between form and matter. Materially, honour is the honourable thing: the status, office, disposition, or deed. Formally, it is the honour due to such a thing, ‘the demonstration of reverence in testimony of virtue’ (exhibitio reuerentie in testimonium uirtutis).61 Buridan makes a rather more elaborate, threefold distinction. ‘Honour’ can be used, he says, first to denote the preceding cause, in which case it means the thing for which a person is honoured. The only things worthy of honour in themselves are the virtues and virtuous deeds. But there are also things worthy of honour ‘by attribution to the virtues themselves and virtuous deeds, as tools which we use to perform virtuous deeds’. These things include riches, friends, and offices (such as being Pope or a cardinal, or a bishop, or indeed a bishop’s chaplain). Second, the substance denoted by honour is ‘a sign of the opinion that the honoured person acts well’ (signum benefactiue opinionis) or ‘the demonstration of reverence in testimony of virtue’. This phrase copies Ott’s definition of honours taken formally, but Buridan uses the form–matter distinction differently. The matter of honours taken substantially are the things or actions themselves—a poem written in one’s praise, or being seated at the head of the table; whereas their form is ‘the designating of the virtue and excellence of the person to whom or on account of whom such a thing is exhibited’. If someone bows to me mockingly, then the gesture becomes one of dishonour. Third, ‘honour’ can designate the effect which follows, that is to say, ‘the opinion of the virtue and excellence of the person concerned which is produced by this demonstration of reverence’. This opinion, says Buridan, produces the greatest pleasure and mental exaltation for the person honoured, and among other people it is the same as, or a large part of, good reputation (bona fama).62

Ott poses two questions about honour, and Buridan puts the same ones. The first one (Ott, II, q, 24; Buridan, IV, q. 9) is whether it is better to be honoured or to give honour. Ott argues that it is better to give honour than to receive it. His most obvious reason is that receiving honour is merely an extrinsic good, whereas giving honour is an intrinsic good. Buridan is content to accept this answer and follow this line of reasoning. But his discussion is more complex, because it is in this quaestio, rather than next as with Ott, that the apparatus of distinctions about honour is introduced. Using it, Buridan can say that, if honour is gained for a thing that is essentially honourable—the virtues and virtuous deeds:

It is with regard to honour understood in the sense of a show of reverence, which Buridan takes as the most proper meaning of the word, that he follows Ott’s view.

The second question about honour is whether the magnanimous person, as magnanimous, desires and seeks after (appetat) honours or rather scorns them. This question is a good way of bringing to light the apparent tension in Aristotle’s discussion between the value placed on honours, as the greatest of all external things and something for which a mean disposition is required, and the magnanimous man’s own apparent disregard for them in practice. For Ott, the distinction between the form and the matter of honours resolves the question. Both Aristotle’s view, he believes, and the truth of the matter is that magnanimous people scorn honours in the formal sense—the expressions and trappings of honour, but they seek for honours in the material sense, since to do so is simply to aim to act virtuously.64

Buridan agrees with Ott’s point about honour taken materially. Using the distinctions he has made about the meaning of ‘honour’, Buridan says that, if the word is taken to designate the cause why honour is principally owed to someone—being virtuous and performing virtuous deeds, then magnanimous people desire honours and do not scorn them, otherwise their desires would be wrongly directed. But his more complex set of distinctions makes him pose another question. Should a magnanimous person desire honour, when the word stands for the cause, not of why honour is principally owed to someone, but of why it is owed through attribution to the virtues and virtuous deeds? In this sense, ‘honour’ refers to friends, riches, and official dignities, all of which can help towards virtue. Buridan’s conclusion is that magnanimous people desire honours in this sense too, so long as they do not in any way impede gaining, maintaining, and practising virtue—if they do, then a magnanimous person, indeed any good person, will reject them utterly.65 Buridan is not entirely at odds here with Ott, who sees offices and dignities as part of the matter of honour, not its form. But Ott gives no indication that he would take Buridan’s tolerant attitude to the pursuit of riches and friendship.66

This difference of approach is brought out directly by Buridan’s treatment of ‘honour’ understood substantially, to designate the very acts of honouring (for Ott, the form as opposed to the matter of honour). Here Buridan engages in debate with Ott. Ott lists four reasons why people might wish to be honoured: to exalt themselves; so that others do their duty in honouring what is worthy of honour; to encourage others to virtue; and in order to glorify God.67 Buridan takes all but the first of these as good reasons, well stated by ‘a certain doctor’, for why a magnanimous person desires honours in the sense of acts of honouring.68 But, continues Buridan, further on this doctor ‘says that the magnanimous person scorns rather than desires honours as a good for himself’. Buridan says that he too agrees, but only if the effect of honours—the opinion which is produced by receiving honours—is disregarded. The transitory act of being honoured is not something the honoured themselves do, nor does it change them, and so they are no better as a result of it. But the opinion produced by the honours is a great incitement to others to act virtuously, and so it is valuable. It is not an intrinsic good, but it helps towards many great goods: for example, if you are well thought of as a teacher, then people will flock to your classes. The ‘good fame’ linked to honours is something people should care deeply about, and so ‘the magnanimous person does not scorn but greatly desires honours, not for themselves, but for the effects that follow from them’.69 Buridan goes on to note that ‘some great doctors do not agree with this view’, and he seems to have Ott mainly in mind, since he goes on to give a number of the arguments Ott uses for why the magnanimous should scorn honours understood formally.70 But Buridan thinks all these arguments can be answered:

One of the most striking differences between Ott and Buridan lies in something Buridan hardly considers at all: the relationship between magnanimity and humility. Buridan touches on humility in an argument (for the view he does not wish to hold) borrowed directly from Ott, but otherwise he leaves the subject aside.72For Ott, however, it is a major concern—not surprisingly, since Bonaventure, a founder of the Franciscan scholastic tradition, had stressed that magnanimity is humility, and suggested that Aristotle may have thought otherwise.73 Ott poses the question (q. 27) whether every magnanimous person is proud. The arguments for the positive answer are all taken from features of Aristotle’s description of the magnanimous man that make him appear to be a lover of himself and a scorner of God: he seems to scorn others, he wants to excel, he delights in receiving honours. In his response, Ott explains that, although no one who is truly magnanimous is proud, many of the same statements are true of the magnanimous and the proud, but they must be understood in different ways. Both love themselves, but the proud as ends and things whole in themselves, the magnanimous as the effect of God and as parts of the whole universe of God’s creatures. Unlike the proud, the magnanimous scorn their neighbours only in so far as they are bad, and their seeking honours consists in good deeds, whereas the proud seek honours in the formal sense. This strongly Christian reading of Aristotle continues in the following, related question, where Ott sets out to reject the view that ‘no magnanimous person is humble’. He insists that every magnanimous person is humble: Aristotle himself says that the virtues are required for magnanimity, and humility is a virtue, as can be seen from the teaching of Christ, who says ‘learn of me, because I am meek, and humble of heart’ (Matthew xi, 29). In response to the argument that the humble scorn themselves and do not count themselves worthy, whereas the magnanimous do the opposite, Ott explains, following a line already developed by Aquinas, that there are ways in which both the humble and the magnanimous regard themselves as vile—by comparison with God, who bestows benefits on them, and with what they may become—and ways in which they count themselves as worthy—by comparison with what they were before they knew themselves, and by what they are now, compared with what they would be if they ceased to be virtuous.

Both of these outstanding fourteenth-century commentaries, therefore, are alike in treating magnanimity from an Aristotelian point of view. The difference is between Ott’s decision, understandable from a theologian, also to read the Ethics in a thoroughly Christianizing way, and Buridan’s decision to read the text in a way that should be acceptable to Christians, but is only incidentally an explicitly Christian reading. There is, however, no reason to think that Buridan intended his exposition merely as an account of what Aristotle thought. Buridan seems thoroughly to endorse Aristotle as interpreted by him, with great perspicacity and, at times, a Stoic tinge, as an instructive treatise on the moral life; a guide for Christians, but not a Christian guide.

4. Dante and Magnanimity

It will be clear by now that treatment of magnanimity by medieval philosophers and theologians illustrates how the potential conflict between Aristotle’s description of the virtues and Christian values was avoided. But there is one author, both a philosopher and a poet, who may not have shared this comfortable attitude and who, while admiring magnanimity, associated it strongly with what lay outside Christianity—with paganism, heresy, or dissent. That writer is Dante. Outside the Commedia, Dante’s comments on magnanimity have nothing special to mark them out. In the Convivio, he contrasts it with pusillanimity (I.11.18–20) and gives it an Aristotelian definition (IV.17.4), though also at one point (IV.26.7) equates it, in Stoic fashion, with courage as a whole. In De vulgari eloquentia, the word is used once (II.7.2) in a comparison, for the spirit in which a genuinely great deed is done; in the Monarchia II.5.2 it is applied to Camillus, whose self-denying virtuous conduct is being praised; and in Letter 7 (20) Hercules is called ‘the magnanimous’. In the Commedia, arguably, magnanimity receives a different treatment, but it is not an explicit one. Rather, it rests on suggestions made by particular words and phrases in the Commedia, rather than on any more definite statement of position.

The word magnanimo occurs just twice in the Commedia. But both uses are significant. In the first case, near to the beginning of the work, it is applied to Virgil:

In the second case, further on in the Inferno, the word is applied to Farinata degli Uberti, the Ghibelline leader:

Virgil and Farinata may not seem to have much in common: Virgil is Dante’s hero, his guide through Hell and much of Purgatory; Farinata is one of the damned. But then, despite his virtue and lack of fault, so is Virgil, even if his damnation takes place in Limbo rather than Hell proper.75 Virgil is damned for being a pagan, and Farinata, though a contemporary of Dante’s, is also damned for not being a Christian. He is in the circle of Hell where Epicurus and his followers are placed in tombs in which they will be closed up on the Day of Judgement: the contrapasso for their sin—che l’anima col corpo morta fanno (Inferno X, 15)—their denial of human immortality, which Dante makes the distinctive, and damning, mark of Epicureanism.76

The fact that Farinata is called magnanimo was seized on by critics to suggest that Dante gives him, though damned, a tragic grandeur. More recently, however, specialists have become wary of such romantic readings. John Scott has argued that, in the Italian of his time, magnanimo carried a strong pejorative implication of pride.77 The evidence of Dante’s other uses of the Italian word (in the Convivio) and the Latin one suggests otherwise, however: in none of these instances is pride, in the pejorative sense, indicated. Moreover, few texts were so influential on the Commedia as Aristotle’s Ethics and Aquinas’s IIaIIe, and so it is likely that Dante took ‘magnanimity’ to designate a virtue. And the use of the word to describe Virgil, Dante’s hero, reinforces this suggestion. Scott has a counter-argument to just this third point. He points out that magnanimo is used here to describe Virgil because of the particular point that is being made. Dante the character is demonstrating a lack of magnanimity—a lack of willingness to undertake a great and arduous deed (his other-worldly journey) through which he will gain honour, pusillanimity—viltade as Virgil calls it, with which Virgil’s own readiness to face these dangers is contrasted. Even so, the use of the word at this point shows that Dante gives it strongly positive connotations, and indeed places it firmly within its Aristotelian context.

The most important reference to Aristotelian magnanimity in the Commedia comes, however, in a passage where the word is not itself used. Francesco Forti has noticed that the description in Inferno IV of the virtuous pagans in limbo is full of the language of greatness and honour, linking it verbally to the standard Latin translation of the Ethics and to Aquinas’s Sententie.78 One parallel is particularly striking. Aquinas comments in his Sententie on Aristotle’s characterization of the magnanimous man thus:

Dante describes the great ancient writers, heroes and heroines, who inhabit the noble castle in Limbo, in this way:

Dante’s alchemy has transformed the idea in Aristotle and Aquinas, transferring the ponderousness and gravity from movement and voice, to which they apply literally, to the eyes, about which they are true in a richer, metaphorical sense. But the link is evident.

Dante, then, implies that his emblematically virtuous pagan men and women are magnanimous; and the most emblematic of them all, Virgil, is explicitly called ‘magnanimous’. Farinata, indeed, is not a pagan, but as a follower of Epicurus, who distanced himself from Christianity not merely by a failure to know Christ, but a denial of human immortality, it is not difficult to see why Dante might want to treat him together with pagans and be ready to recognize virtues in him, which, like those of Virgil himself, do not in any way help towards his salvation.80 What makes the attitude to magnanimity evinced in the Commedia so unusual is not that this virtue is attributed to virtuous pagans and to Farinata, the dissenter, but that in the whole poem, so rich in its attribution of virtues and vices, only they are said to be magnanimous.

Perhaps this line of interpretation can be stretched even a little further. If Dante found something vitiated but admirable in Farinata, he nevertheless judged him heterodox and damned as a result. But there was a different way in which, arguably, according to Dante’s views, a Christian could think outside and without reference to Christianity. The Christian could adopt an attitude of ‘Separationism’, the limited relativism taken by some Arts Masters, who saw their job as being exclusively the teaching and study of Aristotelian science, based on reason without revelation, and who fought to defend the independence of this separate sphere of activity.81 It was against a caricatured version of such limited relativism that Étienne Tempier had issued his condemnations in 1277. The most famous of them was Siger of Brabant, and readers of the Commedia may be surprised to find him in Paradise, along with Aquinas, Albert, and Bonaventure, until they remember that Dante himself, most strikingly in the Monarchia, puts forward a version of Separationism adapted to his own position as a philosopher outside the universities.82

The canto of Paradiso in which Siger appears is no. 10. Dante specialists, aware of the almost musical tightness with which the Commedia is organized, have pointed to the importance of the vertical parallels between the same-numbered cantos of the three cantiche of the Commedia.83 The canto of Inferno in which Farinata, the ‘magnanimo’, appears is also no. 10. If Dante is using this parallel to point to a contrast, the most obvious one is between the legitimate bounds of philosophical enquiry and independence, represented by the adventurous Aristotelianism of Albert and Aquinas, as well as Siger’s. But a look at the wording of the lines about Siger suggests that Dante is also evoking the theme of magnanimity, already associated with Farinata:

Although the context is quite different, the collocation of gravi and tardo should take the alert reader back to the virtuous pagans con occhi tardi e gravi in Canto IV of Inferno and, behind that, Aristotle’s portrait of the magnanimous man. It is a hint that the reader of the Commedia should associate under the banner of magnanimity Siger, advocate of the independence of rational, Aristotelian speculation, with the virtuous pagans, notably Virgil, and the heterodox Farinata. Almost alone among medieval authors, Dante appears to have sensed that Aristotelian magnanimity should not be made to fit too easily into a scheme of Christian virtues.

5. Conclusion

In general, the story of magnanimity among the medieval Latin thinkers is one of successful assimilation of a concept that, seen in its usual, Aristotelian light, would not have been expected to fit easily into any sort of Christian framework. An important reason why the expected did not happen is that medieval writers first encountered magnanimity in its Stoic, rather than Aristotelian form. Abelard’s treatment of the Stoic virtue, influenced by Augustine, proved very influential. Abelard had deliberately put aside theological considerations in his discussion. This neutral approach to magnanimity was taken up in a whole tradition of writing on the borderline between what is considered literature and what is considered philosophy—a development not discussed here, but certainly meriting more research.

Abelard’s idea of magnanimity was also centrally important in the more strictly philosophical and theological tradition. His idea of magnanimity gave Aquinas a basis for integrating Aristotle’s account of it, now available, into specifically Christian moral thinking. In turn, Aquinas’s approach, as developed in IIaIIe of the Summa Theologiae, underlay that of the Arts Masters, who adapted it in line with their task as Aristotelian commentators. For later writers, such as Ott and Buridan, magnanimity had been so successfully domesticated within a Christian framework that they could focus on Aristotle’s account, Christianizing it more (as in Ott) or less (as in Buridan), in line with their own predilections. Dante was the exception. By suggesting in the Commedia, implicitly but powerfully, that it is a pagan virtue that jars with Christian values, Dante points to an underlying tension at once animating but hidden by other medieval accounts of magnanimity.

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