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those things may be attained. Therefore, since God has disposed it that
man has the power in matrimony of using his wife for the procreation of
children, he is also given the grace without which he cannot do it in a
fitting way: just as God, or Nature, which gives the power of walking to an
animal, gives it the instruments, namely legs, with which it may be able to
walk. (Aldobrandino da Toscanella: Document 1. 13. 5)
Nature and Aristotle
Aldobrandino da Toscanella is keen on nature as well as grace,
standing out from most preachers in the corpus for his special interest
in it, except that Servasanto, the other Florentine preacher
included, is very like him in this respect. In one of his sermons Aldobrandino
celebrates nature in a passage where the precise train of
thought, though not immediately evident in detail, is optimistic and
evocative: for example, ‘natural things are delightful, . . . Everything
is a matter of delight in the time that belongs to it, like sweet
wine in winter, dry wine in summer’. The same paragraph eventually
leads into the Aristotelian idea that everything in nature
strives towards the imperishable and the divine. Some things are
imperishable in themselves so do not need to reproduce. Others
have to achieve a sort of permanence by producing something like
themselves. Thus ‘it may be preserved in something which is like
itself because of the divine being, and thus it conserves nature’.
Servasanto da Faenza finds his way to the same idea, which
he presents slightly di·erently, perhaps because refutation of the
Cathars is at the forefront of his mind. His language and way of
thinking are syllogistic and no less Aristotelian than Aldobrandino’s,
a warning not to attempt a sharp distinction between Franciscan
and Dominican Florentine preaching. He argues that if
something has a good end (note the teleological thinking), then it
too is good. But the end (i.e. the ‘telos’) of generation is to bring
into the world children for the worship of God and to preserve in
Aldobrandino da Toscanella: Document 1. 13. 3.
Deriving probably from De anima bk. 2, 415a–b.
See Aristotle’s De Anima in the Version of William of Moerbeke and the Commentary
of St. Thomas Aquinas, ed. and trans. K. Foster, S. Humphries, and I.
Thomas (London, 1951), 210 and 214–15, for the translation and/or commentary
which Aldobrandino may have used.
D. L. d’Avray, ‘Philosophy in Preaching: The Case of a Franciscan Based in
Thirteenth-Century Florence (Servasanto da Faenza)’, in R. G. Newhauser and
J. A. Alford (eds.), Literature and Religion in the Later Middle Ages: Philological
Studies in Honor of Siegfried Wenzel (Binghampton, NY, 1995), 263–73.