NICHOLAS OF AUTRECOURT. - Theologian and philosopher, born at the beginning of the 14th century in Autrecourt (diocese of Verdun), died after 1350. Having obtained the titles "magister in artibus," "baccalaureus in theologia et in legibus," he taught theology at the Sorbonne. In 1340, Benedict XII summoned him to Avignon to answer for his suspect doctrine, which was condemned in 1346. His writings were publicly burned in Paris, and he was forced to recant his errors in 1347. In 1350, he became dean of the Chapter of Metz. No further information about him is available.
His most important works are the commentary on Book I of the Sentences and Aristotle’s Politics, nine letters to the Franciscan theologian Bernard of Arezzo, and the treatise Exigit Ordo executionis, from which the condemned propositions were extracted. Of these writings, the first and second letters to Bernard of Arezzo survive, along with a letter from a certain Giles containing fragments of Nicholas’s reply, and the treatise Exigit, discovered by A. Birkenmayer in a manuscript of the Bodleian Library in Oxford (Can. Misc. 43, ff. 1-24) and published by R. O’Donnell in Mediaeval Studies, I (1939), pp. 179 ff.
Nicholas embodies the critical spirit of the philosophical movement known as the "modern way," in contrast to the philosophy of Aristotle and St. Thomas. His entire work is characterized by opposition to Aristotelianism and by rigorous deduction of extreme consequences from his premises. At the foundation of his thought lies a theory of knowledge based on consent. Certainty is derived from immediate evidence, obtained through experimental observation—the source of knowledge—and through the principle of identity, the criterion of truth. Once it is experimentally established that a thing exists, the principle of identity does not permit one to conclude anything else about it; one must affirm only that it is what it is. The application of this principle to the critique of the ideas of cause, substance, end, and perfection led to far-reaching consequences. The connection between cause and effect is not necessary or evident but is merely an empirical observation of the succession of two events. Therefore, it is only probable that, given the same causes, the same effects will recur. From accidents, known through the senses, one cannot deduce substance, which is not observed. Nor can one thing be said to be more of an end or more perfect than another.
Nicholas’s theory of knowledge precluded the natural knowledge of God through the principles of causality and finality. He modified the classical concepts of matter and the soul; rejecting Aristotelian metaphysics and physics, he turned to Epicurean atomism, explaining the generation and corruption of bodies through the association and dissociation of atoms. The soul is composed of a spirit called sense and another called intellect, which, upon the disintegration of the body’s atoms, continue to exist. Thus, the immortality of the soul and future retribution are assured. The essential character of Nicholas’s doctrine is experimentalism, from which springs the skepticism evident in his writings. He is skeptical about things not verified by experience. For the knowledge of truth, he urges men to apply themselves to the observation of natural phenomena rather than to the study of Aristotle.