(Aegidius Colonna; ca. 1243–1316). One of the most outstanding students of Thomas Aquinas, Giles was born at Rome, perhaps of the Colonna family. Contrary to his family’s wishes, Giles embraced the religious life ca. 1258 at the convent of Santa Maria del Populo of the Hermits of St. Augustine. Arriving at Paris ca. 1260, he studied and taught there until 1278. He heard the lectures of Thomas during the latter’s second period of teaching at Paris (1269–71) and strenuously defended Thomistic teachings against Bishop Étienne Tempier’s condemnation in 1277. This dispute with the bishop occasioned Giles’s departure from Paris; the bishop’s death helped smooth the way for Giles’s return in 1285 as master of theology and the first Augustinian friar to hold a chair in theology at Paris (1285–91).
King Philip III of France had charged Giles with the education of his son, the future Philip IV the Fair, for whom Giles composed perhaps his best-known work, De regimine principum (1280). By 1282, the work had been translated into French and in the 14th century was translated into Castilian, Portuguese, Catalan, English, German, and Hebrew. The work was an admirable combination of Aristotelian ethics and Christian moral and spiritual teaching.
Giles maintained good relations with Philip, and in the year following his election to the post of prior-general of the Augustinians (1292) Philip granted the order the Grand Convent of the Augustinians in Paris. In 1295, Pope Boniface VIII, with Philip’s consent, elevated Giles to the archiepiscopal see of Bourges. But in the ensuing controversy between Philip and Boniface, Giles sided with Boniface, composing the treatise De ecclesiastica potestate (1301)—one of the principal sources for the papal bull Unam sanctam (1302) and one of the broadest expressions of papal supremacy in the entire controversy.
Following the death of Boniface, Giles returned to his duties in Bourges. He was active in several controversies at the time, among them the disputes with the Templars and with Peter Olivi. He was active at the Council of Vienne (1311–12) and died a few years later in Avignon.
As a teacher, Giles lectured according to the prescribed course of study, commenting first on the Bible and on the Sententiae of Peter Lombard; but his greatest love was philosophy. He left commentaries on many of Aristotle’s works on logic, physics, and metaphysics, including the Pseudo-Aristotelian Liber de causis. His works were held in such high esteem that the general chapter of his order meeting at Florence in 1287 declared that his “opinions, positions, and conclusions [sententiae] both written and yet to be written” were to receive the unqualified assent of all Augustinian teachers and students. The Franciscan philosopher William of Ockham went so far as to speak of Giles as the “Expositor” of Aristotle’s Physics.
Giles was an independent thinker, and though he shared many ideas with Aquinas he disagreed markedly with him on the relationship between essence and existence. For Giles, these are two separate things, the latter not necessarily implied in the former. In this way, he stressed the contingency of all things on the will of God and enunciated a theme that would become one of the hallmarks of later nominalism.
Giles of Rome. De ecclesiastica potestate, ed. Richard Scholz. Weimar: Böhlaus, 1929.
——.Errores philosophorum, ed. Josef Koch, trans. John Riedl. Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, 1944.
——. Sermons. In Repertorium der lateinischen Sermones des Mittelalters von 1150–1350, ed. Johannes-Baptist Schneyer. 6 vols. Münster: Aschendorff, 1969–74, Vol. 1, p. 57.
Hocediz, E. “La condemnation de Gilles de Rome.” Recherches de théologie ancienne et médiévale 4 (1932):34–58.
Luna, C. “La lecture de Gilles de Rome sur le quatrième livre des sentences: les extraits du Clm 8005.” Recherches de théologie ancienne et médiévale 57 (1992):183–255.
Nash, P.W. “Giles of Rome: Auditor and Critic of St Thomas.” Modern Schoolman 28 (1950):1–20.
——. “Giles of Rome on Boethius’ Diversum est esse et id quod est.”Medieval Studies 12 (1950):57–91.
——. “The Accidentality of Esse According to Giles of Rome.” Gregorianum 38 (1957):103–15.
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