VITALE du FOUR (de Furno). — Franciscan philosopher and theologian, b. at Bazas, near Bordeaux, around 1260, d. at Avignon on 16 August 1327.
Between 1285 and 1291 he studied theology in Paris under Fra Giacomo di Quesnoy and Fra Raimondo Rigaut, and apparently was a fellow student of Duns Scotus. Perhaps in 1292 he was sent to teach theology at the Studium generale of Montpellier, where he was certainly present in 1295–96 and where, precisely in that year, he lectured on Book IV of the Sentences. From 1296 to 1307 he was a lecturer at Toulouse; in 1298 he took part in the controversies provoked by Pier di Giovanni Olivo. From 1307 to 1312 he was provincial minister of Aquitaine. In August 1311 he helped draft the response to Ubertino da Casale’s Rotulus; in 1312 he worked to secure the execution of the papal bulls against Bonagrazia da Bergamo. On 24 December of the same year he became cardinal-priest of the title of S. Martino in montibus. In August 1316 he took part in the election of Giovanni XXII. Having fallen into disfavour for having spoken against the Pope on the question of the poverty of Christ and the Apostles (1322–23), he eventually submitted to the papal decision.
His philosophical and theological works are found almost entirely collected in cod. 1/15 of the College of S. Isidoro in Rome and in cod. 95 of the Community of Todi; cod. Vat. lat. 1095, containing the comm. In IV Sent., should be added to these. The list of these works and of other exegetical and polemical writings was drawn up by P. F. Delorme and P. Godefroy. V. d. F. has been recognized as the author, in the substantial part, of the compilation that bears the title De rerum principio and has several times been printed under the name of Duns Scotus. In preparing this compilation he made use of many writings by others. From the doctrinal point of view, V. d. F. generally moves within the circle of pre-Scotist Franciscan Augustinianism (Matteo d’Acquasparta, Giovanni Peckham, Ruggiero di Marston), but he also shows that he was influenced by Enrico di Gand. In particular, he accepts from him the thesis of the «illuminatio specialis», without which the human mind is incapable of attaining that «sincera veritas» which is the foundation of certainty; this doctrine was later taken up by the English Franciscan Giovanni di Rodington in the first half of the 14th century, and transforms the Augustinian theory of divine illumination into a kind of experience of the divine (as Gilson has clearly seen), placed at the centre of epistemology.