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At the University of Oxford from 1230 to 1250, the ideas of Robert Grosseste and
Richard Rufus were most influential. Grosseste “advanced an interpretation according to which
the philosophers’ universe is an eternal uncreated one having no single ultimate principle, and
advised his contemporaries to oppose any compromise with Aristotelianism on this score.” 25 If
there is no single ultimate principle of the universe, then the world is independent from God.
Hence, for Grosseste the notion of eternal creation was not only false but also heretical. While
Rufus acknowledged the eternity of the philosophers’ universe, he maintained that the
philosophers recognized God as the sole ultimate principle of the universe. 26 Rufus proposed
that according to the philosophers, the world was caused by God but was not created. 27 Clearly,
Grosseste and Rufus differed in their evaluation of the dependence of philosophers’ universe on
God; however, both had the same notion of creation as the scholastics from Paris which excluded
the possibility of infinite past duration. They too understood creation out of nothing as
possessing being after non-being and hence possessing a temporal beginning.
25
Ibid, 289.
Ibid.
27
Ibid, 288.
26
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