6 - PETER JOHN OLIVI The Mental Word

Summary

Introduction

Peter John Olivi (1247/8–1298) was a brilliantly original thinker from the south of France. His theological and philosophical writings were twice suppressed by his own Franciscan order, in large part because of his outspoken criticism of mainstream Franciscans for an alleged laxness regarding their vow of poverty. Though many of Olivi's ideas were later developed by others, his writings have still not recovered from that early attempt at censorship, and Olivi himself remains an undeservedly obscure figure.

The selection translated below is an excerpt from the beginning of Olivi's Lecture on the Gospel of John, written sometime during the early 1280s. In standard medieval fashion, Olivi is working through the text literally: sentence by sentence, word by word. In the passage below, he's still working on the opening phrase of John 1:1:

In the beginning was the Word,

but he's gotten as far as the last word of that clause. In commenting on the significance of ‘Word’ (verbum), Olivi begins by making some straightforward exegetical remarks that rely heavily on early commentators. The discussion comes into its own only in the sixth and last section, which is significantly longer than the other five sections combined. There Olivi takes up the question of how a word in the human mind compares to the Word in the mind of God. This requires him to give a philosophical analysis of what a mental word is.

Medieval debates over the mental word are in large part debates over how intellect represents conceptual features of the world. Where modern authors speak of concept formation, medieval authors spoke of the formation of a mental word.