Vitale du Four (De Furno)

VITALE du FOUR (de Furno). - Franciscan philosopher and theologian, b. at Bazas, near Bordeaux, around 1260, d. at Avignon on 16 Aug. 1327.

Between 1285 and 1291 he studied theology in Paris under Friar James of Quesnoy and Friar Raymond Rigaut, and it seems he was a fellow student of Duns Scotus. Perhaps in 1292 he was sent to teach theology at the Studium generale of Montpellier, where he certainly was in 1295-96 and where, precisely in that year, he lectured on the IV of the Sentences. From 1296 to 1307 lector at Toulouse, in 1298 he took part in the controversies stirred up by Peter John Olivi. From 1307 to 1312 he is provincial minister of Aquitaine. In Aug. 1311 he collaborates on the response to the Rotulus of Ubertino of Casale; in 1312 he works to have the papal bulls against Bonagratia of Bergamo executed. On 24 Dec. of the same year he is cardinal of the title of St. Martin in montibus. In Aug. 1316 he takes part in the election of John XXII. Having fallen into disfavor for having spoken out against the Pope on the question of the poverty of Christ and the Apostles (1322-23), he ended by submitting to the papal decision.

The philosophical-theological works are almost all collected in cod. 1/15 of the College of St. Isidore in Rome, and in cod. 95 of the Community of Todi, to which must be added cod. Vat. lat. 1095 for the commentary In IV Sent. The list of these works and of other exegetical and polemical writings was drawn up by Fr. F. Delorme and by P. Godefroy. V. d. F. has been recognized as the author of the substantial part of that compilation which goes under the title De rerum principio and has been printed several times under the name of Duns Scotus. For this compilation he made use of many writings by others. From the doctrinal point of view, V. d. F. moves in general within the circle of pre-Scotist Franciscan Augustinianism (Matthew of Aquasparta, John Peckham, Roger of Marston), but he shows that he had also undergone the influence of Henry of Ghent. In particular he accepts from the latter the thesis of the "illuminatio specialis", without which the human mind is not capable of attaining that "sincera veritas", which is the foundation of certainty; a doctrine which would be taken up again by the English Franciscan John of Rodington, in the first half of the 14th century, and which resolves the Augustinian theory of divine illumination into a kind of experience of the divine (as Gilson has rightly seen) placed at the center of epistemology.

Bruno Nardi