Kilwardby, Robert

KILWARDBY, ROBERT. - English Dominican, b. in the county of Leicester ca. 1200, d. at Viterbo on 11 Sept. 1279. He entered the Order between 1240 and 1245, when he was or had already been a master in the arts at Paris. From 1248 to 1261 he held the Dominican chair at Oxford; he was then provincial for England until 1272, when he was created archbishop of Canterbury. In 1274 he took part in the Council of Lyon. He was named cardinal bishop of Porto and S. Rufina on 12 March 1278.

As a teacher in the Faculty of Arts, he wrote commentaries on Donatus, on Priscian, on Boethius, on the Prior and Posterior Analytics, on the Sophistical Refutations, on the Physics, on De anima and on Aristotle's Metaphysics; as a theologian he commented on the Sentences and on some books of the Bible. But he is also the author of treatises, such as De ortu et divisione scientiarum, De unitate formarum, De tempore and others. In the whole of his work, K. remains faithful to pre-Thomistic Augustinian and Avicennian scholasticism. In De ortu (ch. 31) he admits, with Avicebron, a common matter in all created beings, corporeal and incorporeal, and attributes to universals a physical existence as generic forms of this matter.

On 18 March 1277 he induced the masters of Oxford to censure as harmful thirty theses, no fewer than ten of which were notoriously defended by St. Thomas, and in particular those concerning the origin of the human soul and its simplicity. In reality the Thomistic doctrine struck at an old theory very widespread among English theologians, as Roger Bacon attests (Comm. natural., IV, 3, 1). Following the remonstrances of his confrere Peter of Conflans, bishop of Corinth, K. was induced, in a long letter to him, to take up the defense of the Anglican thesis, declaring the Thomistic one «fatta positio vel imaginatio phantastica». He was refuted by Giles of Lessines (v.).

Bruno Nardi