Thomas Aquinas. A Historical and Philosophical Profile

458 Pages·2015·1.4 MB·English

by  Pasquale Porro

THOMAS
AQUINAS

THOMAS
AQUINAS
A Historical
and
Philosophical
Profile
•
Translated by Joseph G. Trabbic
& Roger W. Nutt
The Catholic University
of America Press
Washington, D.C.
Originally published as Tommaso d’Aquino: Un Profile storico-filosofico
Copyright © 2012 by Carocci editore S.p.A., Roma
Copyright © 2015
The Catholic University of America Press
All rights reserved
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of
American National Standards for Information Science—Permanence of Paper
for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1984.
∞
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
[to be supplied]
Contents
Translators’ Note | vii
Author’s Preface | ix
1. Student Years and Baccalaureate
3
2. The First Paris Regency (1256–59)
53
3. The Return to Italy: The Project of
the Summa contra Gentiles, and the
Writings of the Orvieto Period
116
4. The Years in Rome and the Construction
of the Summa theologiae
185
5. The Second Paris Regency (1268–72)
262
6. The Last Neapolitan Period
and a Complex Legacy
385
Bibliography | 409
Chronology | 439
Index | 000

Translators’
Note
Pasquale Porro writes in straightforward, clear Italian, which made
our work much easier. Joseph Trabbic translated the main text and
a small part of the footnotes while Roger Nutt translated the major-
ity of the footnotes as well as the chronology and bibliography. In
the Italian edition Porro used existing Italian translations of Thomas
(making occasional alterations) for quotes from Thomas’s texts. In
our translation of Porro we have used or consulted existing English
translations of Thomas, when available, although we made a number
of alterations to the ones we used either to give a more literal render-
ing of the original or to fit with our word choices in the surrounding
text. The English translations we used or consulted are included in
the bibliography at the end of the book in the section “Principal En-
glish Translations.” In cases in which there was no existing English
translation of Thomas’s text the rendering is, of course, our own.
We would like to thank Sr. Albert Marie Surmanski, OP, for her
generous help in proofreading our translation. We would also like
to thank Susan Needham for her meticulous copy-editing, which
improved the English of our translation and, in general, cleaned up
our text. Finally, we would like to thank our wives for their patience
and support during the year that we worked on this.
Joseph G. Trabbic
Roger W. Nutt
vii

Author’s Preface
Writing a historical and philosophical profile of a thinker who did not think of
himself as a philosopher and, in all probability, would not have accepted the
title, might seem pointless if not exactly fiendish. The whole thing could seem
still more paradoxical since Thomas Aquinas has been considered, starting at
least with Leo XIII’s encyclical Aeterni Patris (1879), the “prince” of Christian
philosophers. It is, nevertheless, a fact that Thomas Aquinas by no means consid-
ered himself a philosopher. In his eyes, philosophy in general represented a time
that was perhaps glorious but was now over, a period that began with the Greeks
and ended with the Arabs—an experience to be spoken of in the past tense.
There are, however, four good reasons not to consider as arbitrary this at-
tempt to dress Thomas in garments that are not his own.
The first is that, from the very beginning, in writing his own theological
works Thomas always had the works of the philosophers in mind, works that
indeed often constituted a large part of his citations. In a word, there is a reason
why in a strictly theological work like his Commentary on Peter Lombard’s
Sentences (which was one of Thomas’s very first writings) Aristotle is cited more
than two thousand times, a number that is almost double that of the citations
of Fathers of the Church like Augustine. And neither is it by chance that, to
prepare some of the more delicate and important sections of his Summa theo-
logiae, Thomas decided to write analytical commentaries on the works of Aris-
totle that would be the “scientific point of reference,” as we would say today,
for confronting specific topics (the De anima for the psychology section of the
Summa, the Nicomachean Ethics for the practical questions developed in the
second part).
The second reason is that Thomas never ceased to read and comment on
the works of Aristotle and other philosophers, even up to the last months of his
life. This is all the more noteworthy because Thomas did not teach in the faculty
of arts (that is, the faculty that, at least in Paris, after the statutes of 1255, was
transformed into a true philosophy faculty, although it retained the traditional
name), but twice in the faculty of theology and then in theological studia of
the Dominican order—institutional contexts in which commenting on Aristotle
was not the primary task. So, Thomas commented on Aristotle not because he
was obliged to but because he chose to do so. And the fact that many philosoph-
ical commentaries were concentrated in the last years of his life is especially sig-
ix
x | AUTHOR’S PREFACE
nificant. After much theological work had already been accomplished, Thomas
continued to read and comment on works such as the De caelo et mundo, the
Meterologica, and the De generatione et corruptione. Thomas’s lively intellectual
curiosity had led him over the course of his career to procure for himself not only
everything of the Latin and Greek Fathers that was available but also all of the
new translations of philosophical works. Once again it was not by chance that
Thomas was the first to realize that the Liber de causis—a text in wide circulation
but about whose origin quite disparate hypotheses had been formed—was, in re-
ality, an Arab text based upon Proclus’s Elementatio theologica—a discovery that
was made possible by the fact that he had carefully read the Latin translation of
the Elementatio produced at the time by William of Moerbeke and by his deep
and broad knowledge of the philosophical vocabulary and translations.
The third reason is that Thomas himself clarified (above all in his Commen-
tary on Boethius’s De Trinitate and in the Summa contra Gentiles) the role that
philosophy can continue to play within Christian theology, a role that we can
reduce to three principal functions: (a) to demonstrate certain presuppositions
or “preambles” of the faith accessible to natural reason, such as the existence
and oneness of God; (b) to illustrate, through appropriate likenesses, certain
truths of the faith that are otherwise hard to communicate and understand; (c)
to refute rationally every possible argument against the faith. A good part of
Thomas’s output, in effect, aims at doing these three things, and this obviously
justifies its broad use of philosophical argumentation.
The fourth reason is that, in defining his own professional occupation,
Thomas adopted the term sapiens or “wise man.” This is a term that, although
it was certainly not unknown in the theological lexicon, and was, indeed, a
fixture of it, nonetheless indicated (in the Aristotelian tradition in particular)
the philosopher and the metaphysician. Thomas’s sapientia is evidently theology
founded on revelation (sacra doctrina or theologia nostra), but it retains many of
the characteristics attributed by Aristotle to philosophy. Thus, even if what was
said earlier is true, namely, that Thomas would perhaps never have accepted the
title “philosopher,” it is also true that when he describes what pertains to the
task or function of the wise man (the officium sapientis), he employs the Aristo-
telian characterization of philosophical wisdom.
To these four reasons, we could add a fifth, and that is the fact that the very
masters of the Paris faculty of arts (the “philosophers” of that period) consid-
ered Thomas, if not exactly as one of their number, as someone quite close to
their interests. We will return to this in Chapter 6. If philosophy, for Thomas,
belongs to a time that has come to a close because revelation has altered the
situation, that time has not died or been forgotten: what it produced retains its