De causa Dei: Book III, Chapter 37
Thomas Bradwardine, De causa Dei contra Pelagium (1344). English translation: Wroot Press, CC BY-NC 4.0; machine-learning use permitted with attribution (https://bradwardine.wrootpress.com/rights/).
Source: Henry Savile's edition, London 1618, 768C–768E; Latin from EEBO-TCP A16626 (public domain).
Canonical: https://bradwardine.wrootpress.com/3/37/
Status: draft translation, not yet reviewed.

[768C–768E]
CHAPTER XXXVII. He argues against the fourth reply.

The fourth reply says that the incomplex and simple vision of a simple object in the Word could have been the cause of such a past effect. Simply speaking, this claims a great deal. For the incomplex cognition of an object alone does not sufficiently move anyone to act, for instance to speak, to run, to build, and to do similar things. Beyond that cognition, will is necessarily required, as the eighth of the first [n1] taught. Again, certain effects that are not voluntary (pleasure, sadness, confidence, fear, dilation, constriction, and other bodily passions of this kind) are not caused, or not to so great a degree and so vehemently, by the incomplex cognition of an object alone, or by the judgment or opinion that it will befall the one who knows, and this as something imminent. For we all know that we shall die, yet we do not grieve or fear much, because we do not suppose that it will happen at once. Each of us can test this for himself. So the Philosopher too, in On the Soul 2, 152, proves that phantasy, or imagination, is not opinion [n2], by this: when we hold the opinion that something terrible is happening to us, we at once suffer with it; when we merely imagine it, not at all, just as when we look at terrible things in a picture. This reply, then, does not answer for effects of that kind.

Again, let an object be posited as seen in the Word, a single effect that will occur contingently, for instance the salvation or damnation of the one who so sees, or of someone dear to him. Then that object can fail to exist and can never have been seen, since it was not shown in the Word either. Consequently any effect of it, present or past, can for now fail to be present, and can fail to have been past. Or let us posit that the object seen in the Word is a single revelation in the Word concerning some future contingent. Let it be revealed to Daniel in the Word that Jeremiah sees, or has seen, in the Word that A will be on the morrow, and so on, as before. [n3]

NOTES

1. octauum primi: "the eighth of the first," a cross-reference in Bradwardine's own form (§5.4), left unexpanded. It refers to the eighth part of the first book (or of its corollaries), where he argued that will is required for action.
2. Savile's "2. de Anima 152" does not match modern numbering. The argument that phantasy is not opinion, because opinion carries emotion and imagination does not, is Aristotle, De anima III.3, 427b17–24. "152" is presumably a text or comment number in the medieval commentary tradition.
3. In the last sentence the keyed Latin reads vidissem verbo. The print reads vidisse in verbo, and I translate the print (see Errata). Throughout, in verbo means "in the Word": the vision of the blessed in the divine Word.