DAVID di DINANT (DINAN). – Medieval philosopher about whose life and activity we have scant information. Born at Dinant in the province of Liège, or, according to others, in Brittany, he is called by Innocent III in a document of 1206 “our master and chaplain” (PL 225, 901–902). In 1210 a provincial Council of Paris condemned his doctrine together with that of Amaury di Bène, and ordered anyone possessing his writings (quatermuli) to surrender them, under penalty of excommunication, so that they might be given to the flames (H. Denille-A. Chatelain, Char. Univ. Paris, I, Paris 1889, p. 70). In 1215 Roberto de Courçon, in a letter addressed to the University of Paris, repeated the condemnation: “The books of Aristotle concerning metaphysics and natural philosophy are not to be read, nor the compendia of these works or of the doctrine of D. di D.” (ibid., p. 79). And the sentences were carried out so rigorously that none of D.’s writings has come down to us. The decree of condemnation itself and various passages by thirteenth-century philosophers allow us to glimpse the main lines of his system. Alberto Magno reports that he had encountered a collection of D.’s propositions (Summa de creaturis, part 2, q. 5, a. 2), probably extracted from his works on the occasion of the synod.
Alberto Magno devoted three discussions to the system of the master of Dinant: Summa de creaturis (part 2, q. 5, a. 2) and Summa theologica (part 2, tr. I, q. 4, quæst. incid. 2, m. 3; tr. XII, q. 72, m. 4, a. 2), and he quotes verbatim the work before him, whose title he also reports as Liber de tomis, sive de divisionibus. Fr. G. Théry believes, with every likelihood, that this writing is to be identified with the quatermuli condemned by the Council of Paris, and, using the excerpts transmitted by Alberto Magno and s. Tommaso, offers us a reconstruction from which several corollaries can easily be deduced, shedding sufficient light on the teaching of master D. He was certainly a materialist, and s. Tommaso precisely apprehends this character of his system.
“It was the error,” says the Aquinate, “of certain ancient philosophers to believe that God entered as an essential element into all things. They held that all realities were one and did not differ from one another except according to sense and opinion, as Parmenides said. These ancient doctrines were adopted by certain modern thinkers, among them D. di Dinant.” D. groups substances into three categories: that of bodies, that of souls, and that of separate and eternal substances; he denies any distinction among them and asserts that they constitute one and the same reality, one essence. Nevertheless, D. is not a materialist in the modern sense of the word, because alongside matter he posits a second principle of existence.
In the world of bodies, according to his doctrine, the sole indivisible reality is prime matter, in which the multiple beings of physical nature are identified, but in the sphere of human spirits and separate substances the same role is sustained by the 1905 and by God. Yet one and the same reality is to be posited among God, the intellect, and matter, and consequently the existing substance must be regarded as one—not only that of all bodies, but also that of all souls—and it is none other than God. And since the substance from which bodies proceed is called hyle, while that from which souls derive is called ratio or mens, it must be deduced that God is the reason of all souls and of all bodies. This is the conclusion of Alberto Magno’s critique of the teaching of D. di D. in the passages cited from the Summa de creaturis and the Summa theologica.
Among the ancient philosophers who exerted the greatest influence on D. di D. must be placed the Stagirite. Indeed, all of D. di D.’s philosophy is based on Aristotelianism. He argues concerning act and potency, substance and accident, and the distinction of causes: his system appears to have been devised in order to preserve Aristotle’s twofold principle of matter and form. And he arrives at the theory of the unity of being, the keystone of his doctrinal edifice, because he misunderstood certain fundamental points of the great master’s thought. At the end of the fifteenth century he was one of the representatives of the philosophical movement that introduced into the Christian West Aristotelianism as it had passed through Arab philosophy. This was the reason that drew upon him the attention and condemnation of his contemporaries.