Gregory of Rimini

Life and Historical Context

Gregory of Rimini (Latin: Gregorius Ariminensis) was born around 1300 in Rimini, on the Adriatic coast of Italy. He joined the Order of Hermits of Saint Augustine (Augustinian Hermits) as a friar and received his early training within the order. He later studied theology at the University of Paris, then the premier center of scholastic learning in Western Europe.

By the 1340s Gregory had become a master of theology (magister in theologia) at Paris and lectured on Peter Lombard’s Sentences, the standard theological textbook of the Middle Ages. His Commentary on the Sentences (Lectura super Primum et Secundum Sententiarum) constitutes his major work and the principal source for his thought.

After his Parisian career, Gregory held positions of responsibility within the Augustinian Order. In 1357 he was elected prior general of the Augustinians, the highest office in the order, a sign of his intellectual and administrative standing. While traveling on official business for the order, he died in Vienna in November 1358.

Gregory’s career unfolded during a period of intense debate in late medieval scholasticism, marked by the influence of Thomas Aquinas, John Duns Scotus, and William of Ockham. Gregory is often classed among the so‑called “moderni”—more recent thinkers who developed or responded to nominalist themes—yet he remained deeply committed to Augustinian theology, especially on issues of grace and predestination.

Theological Views: Grace, Sin, and Predestination

Gregory is best known theologically for what scholars describe as a rigorist Augustinianism. He drew extensively on Augustine of Hippo in emphasizing the severity of human sin and the absolute priority of divine grace in salvation.

For Gregory, all human beings inherit original sin, which leaves them incapable of performing truly meritorious acts without prior, unmerited grace from God. He firmly denied that unaided human free will could attain salvific good. Any good that counts toward eternal life is, on his view, the result of grace moving the will. This made him critical of more optimistic accounts of human ability sometimes associated with other scholastics.

On predestination, Gregory held that from eternity God freely wills the salvation of some and permits the damnation of others. He stressed that God’s predestining decision is not based on foreseen human merits, since those merits themselves depend on grace. In this respect, his teaching is often regarded as especially strict among medieval theologians. Critics in his own time and later have viewed this as tending toward a double predestination, although Gregory himself framed the distinction carefully in order to maintain divine justice and goodness.

Gregory also contributed to medieval discussions of divine foreknowledge and human freedom. He affirmed that God’s knowledge of future contingents is infallible, yet insisted that created choices are genuinely contingent and free. He attempted to preserve both by distinguishing different logical orders of dependence between God’s knowledge and created events, aligning himself with a broadly Augustinian tradition rather than more speculative models later associated with Molinism.

On justification and merit, Gregory emphasized that only those in a state of grace can perform acts with true supernatural merit. He distinguished sharply between acquired moral virtues (attainable by human effort) and infused theological virtues (faith, hope, and charity, given by God). This double emphasis—on moral responsibility and on the primacy of grace—was a distinctive feature of his soteriology.

Philosophical Positions: Universals, Logic, and Knowledge

Philosophically, Gregory is often described as a moderate nominalist or as a thinker close to the via moderna influenced by Ockham, although he does not simply repeat Ockham’s positions.

On universals, Gregory denied that common natures exist as real entities outside the mind. Instead, universals exist as concepts in the intellect and as spoken or written terms that signify many individuals. He argued that what philosophers call universals are best understood as signs—mental or linguistic—that can stand for many things. In this he aligned with a nominalist emphasis on the priority of individuals over abstract natures, while still granting a robust role to intellectual concepts.

Gregory’s account of signification and supposition (a medieval theory of reference) shows careful logical analysis. He held that terms can stand for (supponere pro) individual things in propositions, and that the truth of propositions depends on how these terms correspond to reality. This theory underpinned his treatment of theological sentences as meaningful claims about God and creatures, rather than as mere pious formulations.

In epistemology, Gregory accepted an Augustinian emphasis on the dependence of knowledge on God, but he also incorporated elements of the Aristotelian and Ockhamist traditions. Human knowledge, he argued, is grounded in intuitive cognition of individual things, from which the mind forms abstractive concepts. However, he was cautious about attributing to the human intellect any direct intellectual vision of God in this life; such vision, he held, belongs only to the beatific state.

Gregory took a relatively conservative line in discussions of divine power and logic. He accepted the standard medieval distinction between God’s absolute power (what God could do) and ordained power (what God has in fact willed to do), but warned against speculative uses of absolute power that might undermine trust in the stability of the created order. In logic and metaphysics he frequently balanced innovative technical tools with deference to traditional doctrinal boundaries.

Reception and Influence

Gregory of Rimini was an influential yet, for a long time, relatively understudied figure. In the later Middle Ages he acquired the nickname “tortor infantium”—“tormentor of infants”—a polemical label referring to his rigorist view that unbaptized infants, affected by original sin, are excluded from the beatific vision. This harsh‑sounding consequence of his Augustinianism made him a controversial figure in discussions of original sin and divine justice.

Within the Augustinian Order, Gregory’s synthesis of strict Augustinian theology with refined logical tools became a model for subsequent theologians. His ideas circulated in the universities of Paris, Oxford, and various German centers, influencing both nominalist and anti‑nominalist authors, who engaged with his positions on grace, predestination, and universals.

In the early modern period, some historians have seen affinities between Gregory’s doctrines on grace and predestination and later Reformed theology, particularly in the work of John Calvin, who cites medieval Augustinian authors. While direct lines of influence remain debated, scholars have explored possible channels through which rigorous Augustinian positions such as Gregory’s contributed to the broader intellectual background of the Reformation.

Modern research has led to a renewed appreciation of Gregory’s thought. Critical editions of his Sentences commentary and specialized studies of his semantics, metaphysics, and theology of grace have highlighted him as a key figure in understanding the transition from high scholasticism to the late medieval and pre‑Reformation intellectual landscape. Contemporary interpreters differ on how best to classify him—whether primarily as an Augustinian theologian, a nominalist philosopher, or a bridge between these tendencies—but there is broad agreement that his work represents a sophisticated and influential attempt to integrate rigorous logic with a strong doctrine of divine sovereignty and grace.