Gregory of Rimini

Gregory of Rimini (Latin: Gregorius Ariminensis; Italian: Gregorio da Rimini) was a leading scholastic theologian and philosopher of the fourteenth century and a member of the Order of Hermits of Saint Augustine. He was born in Rimini, in the Romagna region of the Italian peninsula, around the beginning of the fourteenth century. He entered the Augustinian convent in his native city and was formed in the intellectual tradition of his order, which looked especially to Augustine of Hippo and to Giles of Rome. Like many promising friars of the period, he was sent to the University of Paris, then the foremost center of theological learning in the Latin West. After completing his studies he taught in several houses of his order in Italy, including Bologna, Padua, and Perugia, and he returned to Paris to lecture on the Sentences of Peter Lombard in the early 1340s. Those lectures, preserved as a commentary on the first and second books of the Sentences, constitute his chief surviving work and the basis of his later reputation.

Before and after his Parisian teaching he served in the studia of his order in Italy and took part in the ordinary academic and administrative life of a mendicant congregation that maintained a network of schools across Latin Europe. His commentary shows wide reading in the Sentences literature of the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries, including Thomas Aquinas, John Duns Scotus, Peter Auriol, and William of Ockham, as well as a determined return to the texts of Augustine. He is frequently classified among the nominalists or as a representative of the via moderna, because he adopted much of the terminist logic and the critical approach to universals associated with Ockham. At the same time he rejected what he regarded as excessive confidence in natural human powers after the Fall, and he presented himself as a faithful interpreter of Augustine rather than as a mere follower of any one recent master.

Gregory’s theology is marked by a severe Augustinian account of sin and grace. He held that in the state of fallen nature no one can perform a morally good act, or an act worthy of merit, without a special divine assistance over and above God’s general concursus with creatures. He defended predestination and reprobation in terms that later interpreters found close to a strong doctrine of divine election, and opponents sometimes attacked his teaching on the fate of unbaptized infants. In philosophy of mind and language he is remembered for the theory of the complexe significabile: the object of knowledge or of assent is not a thing in the world, nor a spoken or mental sentence as such, but that which is signifiable in a complex manner, the significate of a proposition. He also wrote on the nature of relations, on the eternity of the world, and on the knowledge of God. Later scholastic tradition sometimes named him Doctor authenticus in recognition of his claim to recover the genuine teaching of Augustine.

In 1357 the general chapter of the Augustinian Hermits, meeting at Montpellier, elected Gregory Prior General of the order. The office required him to govern a large international congregation and to visit its provinces and houses. It was in the course of such a visitation that he came to Vienna, where the Augustinians had an important convent. He died there in November 1358 and was succeeded as Prior General by Hugolino of Orvieto, another theologian of the order. Gregory left no closed school of disciples bound to a single set of theses, but his Sentences commentary was copied in the later fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, especially in the universities of the Empire and of Central Europe, and it was printed in the early modern period. Modern historians treat him as a central witness to fourteenth-century debates on grace, predestination, and the object of knowledge, and as a major channel through which a rigorous Augustinian theology entered late medieval scholasticism. He was not a bishop, was not elected pope, and has not been the object of a formal canonization or of a generally observed liturgical feast.