The Thomistic Institute of the Pontifical Faculty of the Immaculate Conception is sponsoring a conference entitled "Aquinas on Metaphysics and Morals" at the Catholic Center of New York University on April 18. Papers will be given by Reinhard Hütter, John O'Callaghan, Eleonore Stump, and Candace Vogler. You can find more information here.
In from Harm Goris is news of a December, 2015 conference in Utrecht on "The Virtuous Life: Thomas Aquinas on the theological nature of moral virtues." The conference takes place from 16–19 December 2015, and abstract submissions are due by June 1, 2015. Here's a short scrape from the conference's site:
The teachings of the moral part of Thomas Aquinas’ Summa Theologiae continue to inspire and to enlighten theologians and ethicists. Especially for those who are interested in a specifically Christian account of human moral and spiritual life, Aquinas’ ethical investigations in the Summa are an inexhaustible source. In his rich and detailed treatment of both the moral and the theological virtues, however, Aquinas fails to explain unambiguously to what extent the Christian faith determines human moral life. As a result, this topic is the subject of an ongoing debate in the literature.
For more information on this excellent opportunity, go to the conference's website.
On March 20th, 2015, the Leonine Commission will celebrate the release of the next critical edition of Aquinas's opera omnia. The celebration will take the form of a day-long conference in Rome which will include presentations by members of the Commission who participated in the preparation of the volume. For more information click here.
We are inaugurating a new series on thomistica.net, aimed at promoting recent and forthcoming work on Thomas Aquinas. Rather than doing a formal review of the work, we will be interviewing the author of the book and allowing the author to introduce the work to us in his or her own words. We are happy to begin this series with a new book on Aquinas’s aesthetics, Aquinas on Beauty, by Scott Sevier. Dr. Sevier received his Ph.D. in Philosophy from the University of California, Riverside and he currently teaches philosophy at the College of Southern Nevada. Dr. Sevier’s book is available for order now and we would encourage you to make sure that your local academic library has a copy, if not your personal library too.
Dr. Sevier, in your introduction you mention Umberto Eco’s influential work, The Aesthetics of Thomas Aquinas. How do you find yourself engaging with his ideas? That is, what is different in your approach or conclusions from his?
I read Eco’s little book, Art and Beauty in the Middle Ages, in one sitting, on my birthday one year while I was in grad school. I was thoroughly mesmerized by his treatment. The medieval worldview, especially in its integration, was so rich and made the modern ways of looking at the world seem flat and uninteresting by comparison. This little book spurred me to read his book on Aquinas’s Aesthetics, after which I felt like I’d gotten a taste of what a truly rich and satisfying account of beauty might look like. But I didn’t feel that Eco’s treatment was as thorough as I was looking for. It turned out there really wasn’t anything quite as comprehensive as I was looking for, and that is why I decided to pursue the topic on my own. One can piece together the view that I hope I have captured in my modest work, but not all in one place. There are lots of works on various aspects of Aquinas’s aesthetics, but my task was to assimilate them into a single coherent treatment. As far as my conclusions, the primary difference between Eco and myself is that he doesn’t think Aquinas’s vision of the world is still available to modern man. I disagree. I think that Aquinas does provide a viable alternative. Of course, it does require some metaphysical commitments that will be difficult if not impossible for a naturalist, but it is within reach of many Christian theists. I should perhaps add that though I am a Christian theist, I am not Catholic. So I have never felt like I’m stuck with Aquinas. Rather, I’ve been drawn to him. He has wooed me with reason, insight, and argument.
You mention that Aquinas diverges from his contemporaries in his understanding of beauty. How so?
In Aquinas’s day, the going theory of beauty is what has been called the “great theory” of beauty, which comes down from antiquity. It views beauty as objective. Now Aquinas also views beauty as essentially objective, but he adds a subjective component to it – he explains the human experience of beauty as well as the formal constituents of beauty. To my mind, this had not been clearly done before, nor really has it been done since. Ancient theories tended towards objectivity; modern and contemporary ones tend towards subjectivity. Aquinas, in this as in many things, finds that golden via media between the two potential extremes; and manages to do justice to both of these seemingly competing intuitions.
What does Aquinas’s take on beauty tell us about God and his relation to the world?
The world is beautiful because God is beautiful. This is difficult to imagine only because we tend to think of beauty in strictly physical terms. One thing that can make Aquinas’s view of beauty difficult to engage is that it is not dominated by appeal to physical beauty, preferring rather moral and intellectual beauty. On his view, God is Beauty, and the cause and source of all beauty in the world. Beauty is deeply good and beneficial. It is part of the right order of the world. God thus cares about beauty, and beauty is intrinsically valuable and, in that sense, requires no justification. Nevertheless, beauty is a route to God, if it is appreciated and pursued in the right way.
I frankly think that people who create beauty, especially who make beauty publicly available to others, are doing great good. Plato said that the form of the beautiful is of the forms the most accessible (to sense-enslaved humans). I think he is right about that. So I think beauty can be an available route by which some may find their way to God.
You spend a considerable amount of time on Aquinas’s description of the affective aspect of aesthetic response. What is the role of desire in his aesthetics?
Desire is the motivator that gets us to the good in which we take pleasure. When we take pleasure in things “apprehended” (via sight, sound, or intellect), we are having an aesthetic experience. So pleasure is intimately related to our experience of beauty. But pleasure is simply the soul’s natural response to obtaining what it takes to be good. And whatever I find good, I am drawn to pursue (when I don’t yet have it). That’s where desire comes in. So desire is also intimately related to beauty as well. We have a natural desire for those things we perceive to be beautiful. When we are able to encounter them (typically, we do not need to possess or consume beautiful things in order to encounter and enjoy them), we experience intellectual pleasure or joy. We long for beauty and encountering beauty brings joy.
What is the relationship between Aquinas's aesthetics and his ethics?
This is related to the question above about the role of desire. Again, in a general sense, we desire the good. Whenever we desire something, it is because it appears to us as good under some description. If I perceive something as good that is merely apparently good, but not good in truth, then I desire that thing in a perverse way. Also, I experience pleasure upon obtaining that object. Now depending on what this is there can be moral implications. I am responsible for what I apprehend as good, and so my desire for it, and my pleasure in its attainment. Since Aquinas’s view of aesthetic experience is laid out along these same lines, that means I can be held accountable for what I perceive as beautiful, my desire for it, my pleasure in it, etc. If I can train myself to love the true good by habituation and familiarity and truth, if I can train myself to hate false goods in much the same ways, then I can do the same in the aesthetic realm. If I find something truly beautiful to be “merely sentimental” because it’s too common, not novel, etc., then I can be judged morally defective in some sense. I have failed to see real beauty, and that ought not be the case. And if in the end I have a moral responsibility for the things I desire and in which I take pleasure, there seems to me to be no good reason to exclude aesthetic desire and pleasure from the realm of the moral. So aesthetics is a kind of subdivision of ethics.
How might Aquinas’s understanding of beauty be applied to contemporary discussions, say about things like pornography or video games?
I think I’ve already given a kind of gesture to this in my answer above about the tie in between aesthetics and ethics, but I’d say that on Aquinas’s view, if I am responsible for those things that I come to apprehend as beautiful, then when I expose myself (as happens in pornography) to things that share in an element of real beauty – such as the good of sex in marriage – but without its proper context, and without the right ends in view, then I am going to over time habituate myself to see that as beautiful or (what is more likely) diminish my view of the beauty of the good and beautiful act of marital sex. The same sort of thing can happen in video games, which encourage players to adopt a disposition towards other “humans” that is unkind and, to that extent, unlovely. How much habituation of this mindset is required before I actually come to disdain actual acts of kindness or cease to view human beings as inherently valuable and good, as means and not ends to my own enjoyment, etc. Beauty (or, at least, apparent beauty) is a doorway through which perverse things can find a way into my life. If they can take root, they choke out the life of the good things that grow there, and replace them with weeds. I think we ought to seriously think about what we call beautiful, what we encourage ourselves and our friends and our children to indulge in, to practice, to habituate. And we need to educate ourselves and one another on true beauty and to love the beautiful. Whatsoever things are lovely – we should dwell on these.
You argue that for Aquinas beauty is primarily a spiritual reality – isn’t this even harder to judge than physical beauty? And is this idea what you see as corrective of the abuses of the Romantic movement?
Spiritual beauty is indeed much harder to judge than physical beauty. So is moral or intellectual beauty, to the extent that these are distinct, and its not always clear where the lines of distinction lie. As Plato noted, physical beauty is relatively easy. For all the discussion today about changing norms of beauty, and the implications of this for the relativity and subjectivity of beauty, most people I think have very little difficulty in picking out things that are to them physically beautiful, and this applies to people. But even evolutionary psychologists point out that our ideals of beauty in landscape are astonishingly similar across times, places, cultures, and experiences. These are of course explained as being related to the survival of the species, but it doesn’t really matter how you interpret the data – its still the case that almost everyone finds certain kinds of landscape to be more beautiful than others – to prefer some over others. So the basic fact of the matter is there. Its not that complicated. Much more difficult is getting someone to see the beauty in a human action (e.g., holding an umbrella over someone’s head who is struggling in the rain) or the beauty of a theorem or mathematical equation. These are not open to everyone, and some require training, and some require a certain type of natural aptitude of mind. Theological truths can be beautiful, and they may stand in relation to other truths and these relations themselves display incredible order and harmony. These can be difficult to apprehend. But for the one who has apprehended them, I think they would generally say that sort of beauty exceeds the beauty of the senses. I often return to Plato on this, though I think Aquinas is in the same boat with him in the area of aesthetics, we are in love with our senses. For good reason. We have animal bodies, and depend upon the senses. But we are also rational beings who partake in the divine, and as such have capabilities that far exceed the merely sensory. But it is harder. It takes work, practice, and a good guide. Its abstract, and to the extent that the abstract takes us in the opposite direction of the sensory, we resist.
What drew you to the topic of Aquinas and beauty? Were you interested in beauty and found a fruitful place of engagement in Aquinas? Or were you interested in Aquinas and found his thoughts on beauty worth investigating?
I have been interested in Aquinas almost since I became interested in philosophy. I was in my last semester of my Masters in Biblical and Theological Studies when I took my first graduate level Philosophy of Religion course. What amazed me at the time was that every time some really gnarly issue cropped up, there was always a voice (or two) of reason emerging from the middle ages. More often than not, that voice was Aquinas’s. When I returned a few years later to pursue graduate studies in Philosophy, I determined to specialize in medieval philosophy, and Aquinas in particular.
My interest in beauty arose quite separately, at least at first. Between my graduate programs, I experienced a period of intense depression. Beauty was one of the primary means of my healing, especially the beauty of nature. That planted a seed that would crop up later in my philosophical studies.
Thanks, Dr. Sevier, for taking time to answer our questions. And if any readers know authors of recent or forthcoming books on Aquinas who we could interview, please contact us.
The 25th Annual Aquinas Lecture at the Dominican School of Philosophy & Theology, Berkeley, California, will be delivered by DSPT Professor of Religion and the Arts Michael Morris, OP. In his illustrated presentation, Saint Thomas Aquinas in Art and Legend: An Iconographic Study of the Angelic Doctor, Fr. Morris, an art historian, will examine the iconography of the saint and explore the fables and the facts behind the Church’s most honored theologian. The event, scheduled for Wednesday, March 18 at 7:30 pm PDT (10:30 pm EDT), will be live-streamed.
Fr. Wallace passed away last night. There is a notice here: http://www.opeast.org/2015/03/04/passing-of-fr-alan-morris-and-fr-william-wallace/
Baylor University recently announced that it has hired John Haldane to a new chair in philosophy. The full announcement can be found here.
Romanus Cessario, OP, gave an interview with America Magazine on the topic of "Thomism in the 21st Century." A snippet:
"One extreme would be superficiality. To reach up to the mind of Aquinas, as Father Lonergan used to say, requires that one commit to a long period of focused and assiduous study. One cannot learn only the conclusions of Aquinas. The other extreme would be what I call “spiffiness.” Spiffy Thomists assume that Aquinas can only survive when he is put into dialogue with contemporary thought-forms."
The complete interview can be found here.
The Society for Medieval and Renaissance Thomism (S.M.A.R.T.) is planning a session for the 2015 meeting of the American Catholic Philosophical Association, Boston, MA, 8-11 October 2015. It is accepting papers on all aspects of Thomism from 1274 to the publication of the Carmelite Cursus Theologiae (1631-1701), with a preference for the period from John Capreolus (d. 1444) to John of St. Thomas (1589-1644). Please send papers and direct enquiries to Domenic D’Ettore at ddettore[at]marian[dot]edu. Special consideration will be given to papers received by March 25.
A few months ago J. Budziszewski (University of Texas at Austin) published a line by line commentary on Summa theologiae, I-II, qq. 90-97 with Cambridge University Press entitled (aptly enough) Commentary on Thomas Aquinas's Treatise on Law. I am not aware of another such commentary in English. Here is CUP's description.
Natural moral law stands at the center of Western ethics and jurisprudence and plays a leading role in interreligious dialogue. Although the greatest source of the classical natural law tradition is Thomas Aquinas' Treatise on Law, the Treatise is notoriously difficult, especially for nonspecialists. J. Budziszewski has made this formidable work luminous. This book - the first classically styled, line by line commentary on the Treatise in centuries - reaches out to philosophers, theologians, social scientists, students, and general readers alike. Budziszewski shows how the Treatise facilitates a dialogue between author and reader. Explaining and expanding upon the text in light of modern philosophical developments, he expounds this work of the great thinker not by diminishing his reasoning, but by amplifying it.
You can find additional material related to the book at Budziszewski's website The Underground Thomist. Included in the material is a PDF file of a Companion to the Commentary, which features a line by line treatment of selections from qq. 98-108 along with further discussion of topics from various articles across the Treatise. The Companion itself is 239 pages! Budziszewski says that the material in the Companion was not added to the original book because then the entire text would have come out to 800 pages and "a book shouldn't be a concrete block." Well, I would have still bought it. Some of the best books I own are concrete blocks.
People familiar with Budziszewski's work know that he has been writing (and teaching) about natural law, especially Aquinas's version of it, for many years. So, he was well prepared to write this book. It is surprising that he did not write it sooner! At any rate, I think it will prove a valuable resource.
Fr Dewan has died.
Read MoreDr. Mary Catherine Sommers informed me about an Endowed Chair in Business Ethics at the University of St. Thomas in Houston, Texas. Here's a portion of the advertisement, the full copy of which is in this PDF:
The Cameron School of Business at the University of St. Thomas (UST) in Houston, Texas is inviting applications for a senior scholar to assume the Endowed Chair in Business Ethics.
The University of St. Thomas is a private Catholic University committed to the liberal arts and to the religious and intellectual tradition of Catholic higher education.
The Cameron School of Business educates students of diverse backgrounds, teaching professional skills necessary for a changing global economy and instilling a deep appreciation for ethical behavior inspired by the educational tradition of the founding Basilian Fathers. Small classes and a low student-to-faculty ratio assure individual attention. The Cameron School of Business has achieved accreditation of the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business.
We seek an individual with a background in business, a doctorate in a relevant discipline, a distinguished scholarly record in the field of business ethics, and proven teaching excellence at all levels. The ideal candidate should be willing to build relationships with the university community, local business leaders, and colleagues in the field of business ethics.
Applications should address the candidate’s support of and ways he/she will contribute to the mission of Catholic higher education with particular reference to Ex corde ecclesiae. Applicants should consult and address Ex corde ecclesiae, the apostolic constitution “On Catholic Universities” of Pope John Paul II, in preparing their statement. Ex corde is available at this link: Ex corde ecclesiae.
Under the direction of the Sacra Doctrina Project
