Alexander of Hales

← Encyclopedia

A title outran the man. By the time the schools had a settled vocabulary for ranking their masters, the one fixed on Alexander was Doctor Irrefragabilis — the irrefutable, or unanswerable, teacher — a phrase his admirers carried forward and that Pope Alexander IV used of him in a papal letter a decade after his death. To it later catalogs added Doctor Doctorum, doctor of doctors, and Monarcha theologorum, king of the theologians. The honorifics are reception, not argument: superlatives of the kind the middle-ages hung on its authorities once their reputations had hardened. What they obscure is the quieter, harder fact of what he actually did — which was not to win an argument no one could answer, but to set the form in which arguments would be put for the next three hundred years.

Alexander of Hales (c. 1185–1245), the Franciscan master called Doctor Irrefragabilis, in a later portrait engraving — via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

He came from Hales, traditionally placed in Shropshire (today Halesowen, in the West Midlands), and was born around 1185. The early life is recoverable only in outline. He was a regent master in the faculty of arts at Paris by 1210, which means he had crossed the Channel young and risen in the one school where a theological career then meant most. By the early 1230s he held English benefices — canon of Lichfield, archdeacon of Coventry — the ordinary endowments of a successful secular cleric. He had, in short, arrived: an established master with a chair, a reputation, and an income, at the leading theological faculty of Latin christianity. What he did next was the part his order would never forget.

The chair he carried into the order

At the opening of the academic year 1236–37, already past fifty, Alexander disposed of his wealth and entered the Franciscan order. The Friars Minor were then barely a generation old — Francis of Assisi had died in 1226 — and they were a mendicant movement, vowed to poverty, not an academic guild. For a senior master to take their habit was rare; for him to take it without vacating his chair was decisive. By entering while regent, Alexander effectively gave the order his teaching post. He founded what became the Schola Fratrum Minorum at Paris and was its first holder, remembered in the order’s memory — and in the historical record — as the first Franciscan to hold a chair of theology at the university.

The consequence outran the gesture. A movement defined by renunciation now had a permanent seat at the center of academic theology, and the men who filled the benches around Alexander would carry the Franciscan name into the heart of the schools. The school that formed around him produced Bonaventure, who studied theology under Alexander and his colleague John of La Rochelle before becoming, with Thomas Aquinas, one of the two masters the university recognized together in 1257. Through Bonaventure the line ran on to the later Franciscan masters — to Duns Scotus and, at the far end of the century, to William of Ockham — each of whom inherited an order that held its university ground because an aging secular master had, one autumn, walked his chair across into a community of friars.

The shift that made theology a discipline

His most consequential act, though, was not institutional. It was a change in the form of teaching, and it is the reason he matters beyond the order’s house chronicles.

The medieval theology lecture had been, by long custom, a running commentary on Scripture: the master read the sacred page verse by verse and glossed it. Theology was, in its teaching form, exegesis. Alexander is credited with the move that displaced this — making Peter Lombard’s Sentences the book a master lectured on and disputed from. The Sentences was a mid-twelfth-century compilation: patristic and scriptural authorities, the sententiae of the Fathers, gathered and arranged not by the order of the biblical text but by topic — God and the Trinity, creation, the incarnation, the sacraments, the last things. Lecturing on it rather than on Scripture meant lecturing on a structure already sorted by question. The exposition stopped following the order of revelation and began following the order of problems.

Alexander’s Glossa in quatuor libros Sententiarum — composed, on the scholarly dating, around 1223 to 1227, while he was still a secular master — was the formative instance of the genre: among the first magisterial commentaries on the Lombard, and the one that fixed the form others would follow. He is also credited with imposing on the Lombard’s text the division into distinctions — the numbered subdivisions that gave the four books a clear, citable architecture, the scaffolding on which every later commentator hung his questions. That apparatus is why a thirteenth-century master and a sixteenth-century one could argue across four hundred years using the same coordinates.

The effect was structural and lasting. Theology became a discipline organized by question rather than by verse — a field one entered by taking up a settled list of topics and disputing each in turn. The Sentences held that office for roughly three centuries: to become a master of theology, a candidate lectured on the four books, and the resulting Sentences commentary was the standard early work of nearly every important Latin theologian who came after. Aquinas began there; so did Bonaventure, Scotus, and Ockham. The genealogy of scholasticism as a teaching method — the running quaestio, the marshaled authorities for and against, the master’s determination — runs back through this change in textbook. It was a curricular decision with the force of a method.

Not everyone read it as progress. Roger Bacon, who had once held Alexander in the highest regard, came to name precisely this innovation — lecturing on the Lombard in place of the sacred page — as among the causes of theology’s decline, a charge that belongs to the contested judgments of the age rather than to settled history. The complaint is itself a measure of the shift: a contemporary could see, and resent, that the center of gravity had moved off Scripture and onto a topically sorted book. That the move took hold anyway, against such resistance, is the better evidence of how completely the schools had decided which form of teaching they wanted.

What is securely his, and what is not

The work that travels under Alexander’s name complicates the portrait, and the complication is itself instructive about how medieval authorship worked. The vast Summa Universae Theologiae long ascribed to him — the Summa fratris Alexandri, or Summa Halensis — is no longer read as the book of one hand.

A page from the Summa universae theologiae (Summa Halensis) in the 1489 Pavia edition, digitized from the Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale di Firenze — via Internet Archive and Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

Modern scholarship, beginning with the Quaracchi editors who prepared the critical edition in the early twentieth century, established that it is a collaborative production of the early Franciscan school at Paris: the greater part of the first three books assembled in the years around 1241 to 1245, drawing on Alexander’s own Glossa and disputed questions but worked up by his colleagues and pupils, John of La Rochelle prominent among them. The fourth book was not added until after Pope Alexander IV, in the bull De fontibus paradisi of 7 October 1255 — a decade after Alexander’s death — ordered the unfinished Summa completed; that final book is largely the work of William of Melitona, and the labor of completion continued, unfinished, into the 1260s.

A famously sour contemporary witness survives. Roger Bacon, again, jeered that the Summa weighed more than a horse and was crammed with error — and, tellingly, said that Alexander did not write it; others did. The polemic is hostile and not to be taken for sober description, but it preserves something real: even in the generation after Alexander, the Summa was known to be a composite, not the testament of a single master. The honorifics that gathered on the man’s name had begun to gather on the book, and the book could not carry them.

Set against the contested Summa, what is securely Alexander’s is narrower and more characteristic: the Glossa on the Sentences, his Quaestiones disputatae — the recorded school-disputations, the living form of his teaching — and his scriptural lectures. These are the works of a master at the lectern, not of a system-builder retired to compose. Recent scholarship, while restoring the Summa Halensis to its collaborators, has also rehabilitated it as a coherent and original early-Franciscan synthesis rather than a clumsy compilation; but that achievement belongs to the school, and the school’s debt to Alexander is the form it inherited from him more than any single doctrine he closed.

The texts and the scholarship

The recovery of the real Alexander — the master behind the school product — has been the work of critical editing. The Quaracchi Franciscans issued the Summa fratris Alexandri in the early twentieth century and, with it, the apparatus that let scholars finally separate Alexander’s hand from his collaborators’. His Glossa in quatuor libros Sententiarum was edited at Quaracchi in four volumes (1951–57); the modern English-facing edition of the first book, in the Dallas Medieval Texts and Translations series, makes the foundational Sentences commentary readable in translation (Dallas Medieval Texts, via JSTOR). The decisive study of his Christology — and the clearest demonstration that he stands at the hinge between the Augustinian inheritance and the new Aristotelian vocabulary — remains Walter H. Principe’s Alexander of Hales’ Theology of the Hypostatic Union (Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, Toronto, 1967), the second volume of his study of the hypostatic union in the early thirteenth century (review, Project MUSE). The most consequential recent turn is Lydia Schumacher’s reappraisal of the Summa Halensis and the early Franciscan school as a coherent and innovative intellectual program — the De Gruyter Summa Halensis volumes and the related reader of early Franciscan theology (Sources and Context, open access via OAPEN; A Reader in Early Franciscan Theology, Fordham) — which together return the long-disparaged compilation to its place as a founding document of the Franciscan tradition, even as they confirm that it is the work of the school Alexander gathered rather than of Alexander alone.

At the seam of two inheritances

Alexander worked at a hinge in the history of Latin thought. The newly translated and newly digested texts of Aristotle — the natural philosophy, the metaphysics, the full logical apparatus — were entering the schools in his lifetime, arriving faster than the curriculum could absorb them and faster than ecclesiastical authority could decide what to do with them. His own thought sits across the seam: rooted in the older Augustinian and broadly Neoplatonic inheritance that ran down through Anselm of Canterbury and the cathedral schools — the world of Alcuin’s Carolingian custodianship and the twelfth-century Platonism of Alain of Lille and his Chartrian milieu — while reaching toward the Aristotelian instruments that the next generation would make into full syntheses. Walter Principe’s close study of Alexander’s Christology (the theology of the hypostatic union, 1967) reads him exactly there: drawing on the Augustinian frame while pressing the new technical vocabulary into it, a transitional theologian whose categories are being remade under his hands.

He was not, by temperament or achievement, an innovator in the manner of those who came after — not a closer of questions like Aquinas, nor a re-founder of metaphysics like Scotus, and the sharper conceptual wars of the later century, the Parisian Aristotelianism that would erupt around Siger of Brabant, lay a generation past him. His genius was for arrangement, for the disposition of the question and the management of the disputation. What he settled was not a doctrine but a procedure.

And a procedure, once set, does its work through others. The question, the textbook, the disputation: Alexander gave the schools a vessel, and the great theologians of the later thirteenth century are, in their first works, the men who filled it. To lecture on the Sentences was to begin where he had pointed; to dispute a quaestio was to argue in the shape he had fixed. Aquinas glossing the Lombard, Bonaventure on the same four books, every bachelor of theology who ever divided his task into distinctions and marshaled his authorities pro and contra — each worked inside a procedure he had standardized: the question divided, the objections marshaled, the resolution and the replies. The doctrines that procedure would later prove or overturn were no one’s to predict; the grammar in which the proving was done is what bears his fingerprint.

→ Related: Siger Of Brabant · Fulbert Of Chartres · Middle Ages · Neoplatonism · Bonaventure · Aristotle · Thomas Aquinas · Scholasticism · Augustine Of Hippo · Duns Scotus · Anselm Of Canterbury · William Of Ockham · Alain Of Lille · Alcuin