Political Philosophy in Aquinas
On Kingship is not an independent treatise on political philosophy composed by Thomas from his own reflections. Analyses of its choices among authorities and structures show that On Kingship is a clarification of inherited topics, arguments, and materials. Its novelties are novelties of balance and selection, not of doctrine or discovery. Thomas subordinates even the newest Aristotle, the Aristotle of a more complete Politics, to traditional themes and ends. Those themes and ends carry with...
Genre
Genre analysis inevitably risks essentialism. The essences may be deep patterns of representation offered to readers or tidy models for composition offered to writers, but they are essences all the same. The more like an essence genre becomes, the less useful it is as a category for readers and writers. Elaborately defined genres, for example, are invariably subject to 41 R.-A. Gauthier has cautioned that convincere in these paragraphs means, not persuasion, but the refutation of error. See his...
The Roman Lectura and the Invention of the Summa
What can be discovered about the origin of Thomas Aquinas's Summa of Theology suggests that it was a masterful improvisation in the face of very Dominican circumstances for the teaching of Christian theology. In June of 1259, at the age of 34 or 35, Thomas left Paris to attend the general chapter of Dominicans at Valenciennes, where he served as a member of a commission working on the promotion of studies within the order. In the months after that chapter meeting, and perhaps in response to it,...
Science and Art in the Summa
Thomas does speak of moral science in the Summa. The term is important, and I will return to it. Still I am convinced that mentions of science will mislead the modern reader almost entirely unless they are juxtaposed immediately with two other linguistic facts. The first is that Thomas does not propose a moral theology. He does, of course, speak of a moral part of theology, and he famously analogizes theology to certain Aristotelian conceptions of science.6 But there is no mention of a moral...
Medicine and Natural Philosophy
The conclusion about Thomas's use of medical doctrines and their sources would so far look to be entirely negative. There is no convincing evidence that Thomas knew much medicine beyond what was mediated by Albert or taught by Aristotle and his commentators. The few details of Galenic doctrine that figure in Thomas's earlier works are removed later on in favor of Aristotle. The preliminary argument for expecting detailed medical doctrine in Thomas was misleading - which ought to offer yet...
Authorities in On Kingship
For On Kingship, as for most of Thomas's works, there is little internal evidence about the date or the circumstances of composition. By combining citational and doctrinal evidence, Eschmann argued that On Kingship had to be written between 1260 and 1267.68 The Leonine edition corrects Eschmann on one detail, but concurs with the main conclusion the text was written while Thomas was in Italy during the 1260s.69 The date is suggestive for a study of the pattern of authorities in the 68 I. T....
Circumstances
Circumstantial evidence about Against the Gentiles invites a fallacy of authorial intention.2 Those who commit it classify the work as a missionary manual and include it in histories of missionary activity. In fact, the surviving evidence in no way decides the intention or even the title of the work known both as Against the Gentiles and On the Truth of the Catholic Faith. In a narration of the deeds of James I of Aragon, as part of a reminiscence of Raymond of Penafort, the Dominican...
The Structure of On Kingship
What is original in Thomas is often an order, an arrangement, or a hierarchical subordination. He illuminates received materials by displaying their pedagogical sequence, causal connections, or cognitive dependencies. So too with On Kingship its compositional motive may wait to be discovered in its structure. The discovery will not be easy. By all accounts, On Kingship is incomplete, and there is no agreement as to the order even of the extant parts. Thomas indicates in a preliminary way the...
Human Reproduction
Human reproduction is a famous crux of Aristotelian biology. Aristotle must explain not only how higher and higher states of actualization are brought about in the fetus, but also how an immaterial intellect if it is immaterial comes to be produced from or associated with an animal body. Thomas grapples with these issues in numerous places, but mostly from Aristotelian sources and in contention with Aristotelian interpreters. There are only a few other sources, and they had entered Aristotelian...
Chapter One St Thomas and the Police
If only we could read Thomas Aquinas without encountering some other of his readers especially the police. The police refers literally or figuratively. Figuratively we use the term to describe self-appointed guardians of social norms, as in the decency police or the style police. Literally we use it to refer to the forces that keep internal order municipal or state officers, the army on civic duty, and every other monitor or enforcer with the power of approved violence. Here I have both...
Definitions and Authorities
Thomas nowhere stops to construct or defend a definition of medicine in the way that he does with physics, metaphysics, or theology. Still he several times quotes definitions of medicine on the way to some other point. Three times he gives the formula, medicine is the science of the healthy and the sick in a fourth text, he says that medicine is by definition about the healthy and the sick.11 The phrases might be taken as echoes of the short definition that Galen himself calls the old account...
Preface
A small error at the beginning is great in the end, according to the Philosopher in On the Heavens and the Earth 1. Thomas Aquinas begins his first treatise with that allusion. In a gesture typical of hasty reading, the opinion is now attributed to him. Such gestures are repeated at much larger scale. Many a fat book on Thomas is undone by hasty presuppositions about reading that occur in or before its opening lines. Thomas could certainly have added a happier corollary from his own experience...
Wishing for a Thomist Medicine
One episode in what might be called the legendary history of the medieval medical school at Salerno features a role for Thomas Aquinas. For Salvatore De Renzi, Aquinas is the most complete synthesis and the most exact expression of Salernitan medical teaching through the thirteenth century.2 Andrea Sinno invokes the tradition that Aquinas taught theology in the Cathedral of Salerno for a time, apparently in close cooperation with the Masters of medicine.3 Both authors cite what they consider to...
Abbreviations and Editions
There is no single best edition for the works of Thomas Aquinas. When finished, the Leonine Opera omnia so called because commissioned and funded by Pope Leo XIII will be a superb edition of the complete works. The Leonine is likely to remain unfinished for a long time and in two senses. First, not all of Thomas's works have been edited for the series. Second, those works published before 1950 need to be revised in varying degrees. The best complete edition now available is the one published by...
Root Moisture
Thomas alludes to the doctrine of root moisture humidum radicale in seven works spread over his career. The notion is linked generally either to the discussion of digestion or to that of reproduction.54 More specifically, the notion is regularly introduced when deciding whether anything is added to human nature by digestion or what will figure in resurrected bodies.55 The second locus depends on the first, as Thomas makes clear by cross-reference within the Scriptum on the Sentences. The most...
Individual Works
Catena aurea Coll. Symb. Apost. Compend. theol. Glossa continua super Evangelia Catena aurea . Busa. Collationes in Symbolum Apostolorum. Busa. Compendium theologiae seu brevis compilatio theologiae ad fratrem Raynaldum. Busa. Contra errores Graecorum. Leonine vol. 40 1 Jean-Pierre Torrell, Bref catalogue des uvres de saint Thomas, Initiation saint Thomas d'Aquin Sa personne et son uvre Fribourg ds. Universitaires de Fribourg, and Paris ds. du Cerf, 1993 , pp. 483-525. Summa contra gentiles....