Robert Greystones

Abstract

Robert Greystones was a Benedictine monk, born before 1290, died in 1334. He attended Durham College in Oxford around 1306–1326, where he lectured on the Sentences between 1320 and 1323. His Sentences commentary is a valuable guide to the intellectual climate at Oxford immediately after William of Ockham but before successors such as Robert Holcot and Adam Wodeham. His single complete surviving manuscript is made all the more useful because of its many named and quoted references to his contemporaries, some otherwise unknown. Greystones reveals Scotist tendencies, but not dogmatically so. An insistence upon God’s unlimited power, as established by the Condemnation of 1277, led Greystones to radical skepticism about human knowledge. Like Descartes, Greystones held that we can be certain about our own existence (ego sum), but not about the conditions of that existence: whether we are in this life or the afterlife, in a body or not. Since God has the power to interfere in the sensations we receive, we cannot be certain about the existence of any external object. We have no certain knowledge of cause and effect, the existence of substances, or any contingent event. Preempting Descartes’ appeal to a beneficent, nondeceptive God, Greystones says: God does not deceive. But you deceive yourself if you insist on believing that something exists when you know that it might not! You know that God can intervene at any instant and thus that you can never completely trust your senses. Greystones’ skepticism, cutting-edge but representative of his intellectual milieu, is strikingly significant in light of the later historical development of philosophy.