Abstract

William of Auxerre, theology master in the University of Paris, was the procurator of the pope Gregory the IX of the Bull Parens scientiarum. The same pope named him, by letter of April 23, 1231, president of the Commission entrusted to examine Aristotle’s books and to expurgate the noxious doctrine for the Christian faith contained in them. He wrote Summa Aurea, following the structure of Peter Lombardic’s Liber Sententiarum, but with his own ordo disciplinae. His thought registers in the average platonic-agustinian, opening up prudently to the novelty of the aristotelism. In the path of the fides quaerens intellectum, Master William treats, for the first time in a theological summa, the problem of the faith-reason relationship. Like this the rationes humanae, while seeking the knowledge of the divine things, are the rationes theologicae and not the rationes propriae rerum naturalium, just as it is demanded by the nature of the subject of knowledge of the theological science. Assuming the dialectic of the Magnificent Doctor’s greatness, he presents in the beginning of the Summa Aurea four proofs of the existence of God, founded in philosophical arguments. The fourth argument belongs to the magister Anselmus Cantuariensis\ Intelligibile est aliquidquo maius excogitari nonpotest.... And if we ask him for the role of the reason in the ambit of the theology, he answers: the human reason guarantees, in fact, the validity of the reflexive understanding, and the credibility of the knowledge of the divine things in the pattem of a qualitative scale of the human being noetic possibilities.