Handbook of the History of Logic: - Fordham University Faculty

36 John Marenbon
it presents itself stretching beyond our usia and makes God himself’. ‘Nothing’
renders us a truer account of it than any predication. Another of these glosses
[Marenbon, 1981, 202; no. XXIII] talks of usiae in the plural, as Eriugena also
does, to mean particular substances. Whereas usiae can be seen and understood
without accidents, accidents can be understood apart from a body only in the mind
— the glossator seems here to have in mind the type of mathematical abstraction
spoken about by Boethius in his second commentary on the Isagoge. The gloss
then goes on to explain, in line with the ideas of the Periphyseon, that accidents
are the cause of bodies. The lack of genuinely logical interest and concern with
metaphysical or theological questions is typical of this strand of glosses.
Looking at the standard glosses, and at how this Gloss Tradition evolves from
the ninth to the eleventh century, the impression is of a gradual turning away from
extrinsic theological and metaphysical concerns and an attempt to understand the
letter of the text, as witnessed by glosses that put the paraphraser’s (already simplified)
points in elementary terms. The more sophisticated questions about the
doctrine of Categories, raised in the Greek commentary tradition and transmitted
by Boethius, do not figure in the standard Ten Categories glosses. There is one
exception. In MS Saint Gall 274, Eriugenian material and standard glosses are
joined by some glosses peculiar to this manuscript, which show that this glossator
did know Boethius’s commentary on the Categories and was using it to help understand
the pseudo-Augustinian paraphrase. He takes careful note, for instance,
of Boethius’s description of the subject-matter of the treatise as the utterances
that signify things in that they are significant [cf. Marenbon, 1997a, 28-9].
The ‘Isagoge’
According to Yukio Iwakuma [his information is presented in Marenbon, 2000b,
99], the early medieval Gloss Tradition on the Isagoge has two strands, each found
in full form in two manuscripts, while one late-ish (11th-12th-century) manuscript
combines the two. The glosses belonging to one strand have been edited in full from
MS Paris BN 12949 [Von Waltersharsen and Baeumker, 1924], under attribution
to a certain ‘Icpa’, because a line in the explicit reads ‘I, Icpa|||| , wrote this
little book, glossing it in some way’. More recent research [Jeauneau, 1985] has
shown that the name is that of ‘Israel’ (written in Greek letters), a tenth-century
grammarian of Irish origin, whose interests can be seen more widely in this richly
annotated manuscript that includes a set of Ten Categories glosses containing
the Eriugenian strand. The Isagoge glosses themselves are simply a patchwork of
quotations, especially from both of Boethius’s commentaries, though Macrobius’s
Commentary on the Somnium Scipionis, Isidore of Seville, Alcuin’s Dialectica and
the Ten Categories glosses are also used. The glosses are well chosen to illustrate
the text, but no individual approach to the material emerges from them.