Romanus Cessario, OP: Thomism in the 21st Century

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.

"Aquinas amongst the analytics"

3:AM Magazine has a lengthy and wide-ranging interview with John Haldane titled “Aquinas amongst the analytics.”  Part 1. Part 2.

The Return of Thomistic Political Philosophy, Part II

Here is the second part of our interview with Raymond Dennehy about two recently re-issued works of Jacques Maritain’s political philosophy, Christianity and Democracy and The Rights of Man and Natural Law. You can read the first part of the interview here.

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Thomistica.net: What is the relevance of these books to the political and cultural scene in the US and Europe and elsewhere in the world?

Dr. Dennehy: Again, permit me to recall what I wrote in the book’s foreword:

The decision to reissue the single-volume edition of Jacques Maritain’s Christianity and Democracy and The Rights of Man and Natural Law could hardly have come at a more urgent time, a time when, perhaps as never before, the future of democracy hangs in the balance. That Maritain wrote them back in the 1940s, in answer to the Fascist and Communist attacks on democracy, human rights, and Christianity, does nothing to diminish their timeliness. Yes, Fascism and Communism have been defeated, but the secularization of the West that fuels the treats to Christianity and human freedom continue unabated. Consider, for example, the absence of any reference to God in the European Union’s constitution; the legal challenges to the phrases ‘under God’ in our Pledge of Allegiance and “In God We Trust” on our currency; the British law that forbids teachers in Catholic schools from teaching that homosexuality is immoral; the astonishing success of the homosexual agenda in the United States, Europe, and Latin America in legalizing same-sex “marriage”; and (to borrow then Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger’s characterization) the “atomic bomb” that was dropped on democracy in 1973 – the U.S. Supreme Court’s Roe v. Wade decision and its logical consequences: laboratory reproduction and human embryo stem-cell research. The right to life is the most fundamental and important of all rights. The other rights of speech, worship, assembly, etc., are important because there can be no political society worthy of human beings without them; however, the primacy of the right to life comes down to this: if one does not have life, one does not have anything, let alone rights. A government that fails to respect the right to life can hardly be expected to respect any other rights and certainly cannot be accused of inconsistency for failing to do so.

In the long run, the most devastating of these assaults on human dignity and freedom is the movement now underway to relegate Christianity to a backwater subculture of crosses and candles. To be sure, these other assaults directly attack the pillars of democracy: freedom of religion and speech, the right to life, the meaning of marriage and family life. But, as Maritain argues in both Christianity and Democracy and The Rights of Man and Natural Law the ideals of modern democracy are Christian in origin and the values of Christianity energize its institutions. Thereby hangs a tale. Attempts to establish religion without God do not succeed. John Dewey’s A Common Faith is a case in point. If there can be no religion without God, it follows that there can be no Christianity without God; and if there can thus be no Christianity, can there be democracy?

Thomistica.net: Some Catholic thinkers have criticized the notion of human rights, Alasdair MacIntyre for instance. How do you think Maritain would respond to critiques like MacIntyre’s?

Dr. Dennehy: I have not read MacIntyre in some years, but my initial thought is that Maritain would respond to the communitarian argument in two ways. First, he would point out that the “society of free men” that he describes and defends is not individualist in the way that advocates of the laisssez faire conceived of society as a kind of heap of individuals struggling to ascend to the top and whose obligations to society were negatively conceived as not harming others by force, fraud, or intimidation. Maritain argues, on the contrary, that a society of free men has four characteristics; it is personalist, communal rather than individualistic, pluralist, and Christian or at least Theist. Thus for Maritain a society worthy of free persons must not only be just but also commit itself to “civic friendship.” The second way that Maritain would reply to the communitarians is to call attention to the rights of the person as ontologically grounded in human nature in virtue of what it means to be a human being. The exigencies of the human person arise from that ontological fact: each human being is not simply a part of society but a whole as well. Unlike animal groups, human society has a common good, which Maritain describes as a moral good that pertains to society as a whole and yet flows over each of its members. If I am qualified to teach philosophy, society can compel me to teach the subject, but it cannot compel me to teach a particular philosophy as true. The reason is that each of us is a whole in himself has been created by God to exist by his own free will. Maritain borrows here from Aquinas who argues that just as the runner strives to win the race but cannot put all that he is and has in the effort to win (he knowledge of astronomy and the Bible, e.g.), so the person cannot put all that he is and has into serving society (his knowledge of God, the desire to know the truth, and to increase his “freedom of personal expansion,” e.g.). Thus, for Maritain, the rights of the person follow from the nature of the person.

The second book in this volume, The Rights of Man and the Natural Law, contain seminal references to the human person that Maritain will develop more fully in his book, The Person and the Common Good, which appeared in print about 1948.

Thomistica.net When did you become interested in Maritain? What has been the focus of your research in Maritain?

Dr. Dennehy: I first read Maritain while an undergraduate at the University of San Francisco, having been taught philosophy by a series of Thomists there. While in my doctoral studies at the University of Toronto, I read Jacques Maritain, mainly his Degrees of Knowledge. I was searching for a philosophical basis for human rights, which basis I stumbled upon on in The Person and the Common Good. That was his notion of subsistence, which served as the foundation of my doctoral dissertation, The Subject as the Metaphysical Ground of Maritain’s Personalism.

I am a founding member of the American Maritain Association and served as its president for seven years.

The Return of Thomistic Political Philosophy, Part I

                                              

Two volumes of Jacques Maritain’s political philosophy are being re-issued by Ignatius Press. The books in question, Christianity and Democracy and The Rights of Man and the Natural Law, are being released as a single volume. We spoke with Raymond Dennehy, professor of philosophy at the University of San Francisco and author of the foreword to the re-issue. Below is the first part of that interview. Part two of the interview will appear shortly.

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Thomistica.net: When were Christianity and Democracy and The Rights of Man and the Natural Law originally published?

Dr. Dennehy: Both works were published in French in New York by Editions de la Maison Francaise, Les Droits de l’ Homme et la Loi Naturelle in 1942 and Christianisme et Democratie in 1943.

Thomistica.net: Could you tell us something about the context of these books? Why did Maritain write them? How do they relate to his other work, including his other work in political theory?

Dr. Dennehy: When the outbreak of World War II made it impossible for Maritain and his wife to return to France from his lecture tour in Canada and the United States, he continued to support his countrymen by working with the Free French in New York City. Through radio addresses and publications, he called the attention of Americans to the condition of the French people, appealing for food and money for French relief. Throughout the war, Maritain also worked with the New School in New York City, producing works of a more philosophical and scholarly nature on the subjects of democracy, totalitarianism, and human rights, such as Les Droits de l ‘Homme et la Loi Naturelle; miniature editions of Christianisme et Democratie were dropped by British Royal Air Force planes over occupied France in 1944.

One way that these works relate to other of Maritain’s works is that the theme of the relation between philosophy and faith constitutes an idee fixe in his writings. Consider, for example, his Integral Humanism, the chapter in his Man and the State entitled “The Democratic Charter,” Scholasticism and Politics, and An Essay on Christian Philosophy. Maritain was convinced that the ideals of modern democracy are Christian in origin and that the values of Christianity energize its institutions. (See my foreword in the Ignatius Press edition of Christianity and Democracy and The Rights of Man and the Natural Law for an account of how Maritain sees the relation between faith and speculative philosophy and faith and practical philosophy and thus for what he understands the term “Christian philosophy” to mean.)

None of which diminishes Maritain’s personal drama in reconciling faith and reason. Despairing of ever finding truth (their teachers at the Sorbonne were skeptics and materialists), Maritain and his wife, Raissa, entered into a suicide pact: if they could not find meaning in materialism within one year, they would kill themselves. Fortunately, their discovery of the lectures of Henri Bergson at the College de France showed them that the human mind could transcend the physic-mathematical symbols of mechanistic science and know reality as it is in itself. Bergson’s doctrine, seemed to Maritain and his circle, to promise a new metaphysics: “…Bergson revived the worth and dignity of metaphysics in the minds of his listners, minds engaged in their sorrow by agnosticism or materialism, when he said, with an unforgettable emphasis, to those minds brought up in the most depressing pseudo-scientific relativism, ‘it is in the absolute that we live and move and have our being.’”

While strongly attracted to Bergson’s doctrine of intuition, Maritain eventually arrived at the point where he could no longer accept Bergson’s critique of the concept and his identification of the real with absolute becoming. It was, interestingly enough, Martain’s conversion to Catholicism that led him to this repudiation. The Maritains were baptized in the Catholic Church in 1906. Leon Bloy was their godfather. With his introduction to Catholic doctrine, Maritain found himself unable to square Bergson’s critique of the concept with the “conceptual pronouncements of the religious faith.” The precise difficulty was this: God presents the transcendent truths of revelation, truths that are “inaccessible to our reason,” in the form of conceptual propositions. Now if, as Bergson contends, the concept is incapable of grasping the real as it is and is only a practical instrument for symbolizing it, then Divine revelation is impossible. Maritain rejected this conclusion, concluding instead that the Bergsonian critique of the concept rests on an error.

This moment in Maritain’s life testifies to his personal integrity. Entering the Church with the conviction that philosophy contained inherent errors that made it incompatible with revealed truth, he was prepared to abandon the intellectual life altogether. What was at stake here was Maritain’s search for absolute truth, and, believing that this was found only in Christian doctrine and that philosophy was essentially incompatible with that doctrine, he would give up his philosophical interests. For two years after his conversion, Maritain gave himself over mainly to the study of theology and religion.

Although his initial reasons for repudiating Bergsonism were theological, there were also philosophical ones. Like Bergson, he wished to defend our direct and veridical knowledge of the real in all its dynamism and diversity; but, unlike him, he sought to defend the conditions of intelligibility, viz., conceptual knowledge, on the ground that otherwise we could have no knowledge at all. His introduction to the writings of Thomas Aquinas in 1908, thanks to Father Clerissac, provided him with metaphysical and epistemological principles that persuaded him that his position on the concept was philosophically defensible and reconcilable with divine revelation.

Thomistica.net: What is Maritain’s thesis in Christianity and Democracy? What is his thesis in The Rights of Man and the Natural Law?

Dr. Dennehy: Maritain’s main thesis in Christianity and Democracy is, as I stated above, that the ideals of modern democracy are Christian in origin and that the values of Christianity energize its institutions. However, as Donald Gallagher points out in his global introduction to the volume, besides offering support for the war effort against Nazi Germany, the two books contain a number of ideas central to Maritain’s philosophy; “ideas whose ramifications extend to every aspect of philosophy and which are inspired by theology.” Among them the reader will find ideas and themes that include “the dignity of the human person, the person and the common good, the rights of the person and natural law, organic and personalist democracy, equality and the free society, the ‘terminal freedom’ of autonomy and fulfillment, the inspiration of the Gospel in the socio-temporal order. All these are expressed trenchantly in Christianity and Democracy and Rights of Man and are developed fully in works published by Jacques Maritain in the 1940s and early 1950s.”

Aquinas in a Bottle: An Interview with Donny Sebastiani Jr., Part 1

The Sebastiani family has been making and selling wine in California for over one hundred years. The latest incarnation of the family business, Don Sebastiani and Sons, was launched in 2001 as an international wine negociant. Several years ago the company introduced the “Aquinas” label of Napa Valley wines. Thinking that our readers might be interested in knowing more about the Aquinas line, last month we spoke with Donny Sebastiani, Jr., who is the executive director of Don Sebastiani and Sons.  We are publishing the interview in two parts. The first part is below. The second part will appear next week.

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Thomistica.net: How long has your family been in the wine business?

Donny Sebastiani: We have been, as a group, as clan, making wine for a little more than a hundred years, at least in California. My great grandfather, Samuele Sebastiani emigrated from Italy, came to New York, and eventually made his way to Sonoma, where he began making wine, which he sold to his neighbors. This was right around 1904 and that is when we think of the Sebastiani winery as beginning. He ran the winery and got involved in a lot of other things too; he was a pretty entrepreneurial guy. He was deep in the real estate around the city of Sonoma. He was a very successful guy even during the Depression. He did on a local scale what Roosevelt was doing on a national scale with make-work projects. He was heavy in cash and put people to work building the local grocery store, skating rink, hotel, and so on. Even when I was a kid back in the 1980s the Sebastiani name was all over the city. There was the Sebastiani Hotel, the Sebastiani Apartments, the Sebastiani Theater, etc.

But to follow the trail of the winery – when my great grandfather died in the mid-1940s my grandfather August Sebastiani took over the operation. At that time they were mostly making wine for other wineries to bottle. My grandfather continued that business but expanded it and started bottling other people’s wine and eventually began bottling wine with the Sebastiani label.

My grandfather passed in 1980 and my Uncle Sam ran the business for five or six years, my dad ran it for fifteen years, and my aunt ran it for five or six years after that. When my dad took it over it was about a two million case winery and he grew it to an eight million case operation in fifteen years. He purchased a couple of wineries out in the Central Valley for popularly priced lower-end wine but then, in 2001, sold them to Constellation, the second biggest wine company in the US. In 2008 Sebastiani Vineyards and Winery was sold to Bill Foley.

After the sale of the Central Valley assets in 2001 we started Don Sebastiani and Sons, which is the company that we have today.

Thomistica.net: Did you always want to be in the wine business or did you have other career ideas at some point?

Donny Sebastiani: When I was eighteen or nineteen years old I was more worried about what was for dinner and what the Giants were doing that night. That’s as deep as I got. I was never a “big picture” guy and I’m still kind of not. But I think that I’m a very competitive guy and a goal-oriented guy. But I was never like those people who you read about, you know, rich businessmen or professional athletes, who make contracts with themselves – “I will do this….”

I guess that I always deep down supposed that I would be working for the family company; it’s a great opportunity, it’s a lot of fun, I mean, c’mon it’s the wine business. There are a lot of businesses that are a lot of fun to be in. I could be the general manager of the 49ers or something. There aren’t many things that I’m qualified to do besides run a wine business. But it’s something I love. Had I gone into investment banking or if I was a general contractor, my friends probably would have said, “Why did you do that? Your family owns a winery. What are you doing?”

Thomistica.net: What do you like best about your work?

Donny Sebastiani: Working for my family I’m able to keep a good work/life balance. Working investment banker hours, I don’t know that I would be able to live the way that I want to. Working for my family affords me a more flexible schedule. But also I try to promote that sort of culture at the company. You know, if someone has to go home and pick up their kid or something like that, I try to make that possible. It’s not a 9 to 5 world anymore. People are checking their email at night, they’re on their i-Phones, they’re waiting in line at the airport and checking their Twitter account to see what’s going on. Some of that may be just the way the world is but it’s also the company my dad has always tried to run and it’s also something I try to foster. That’s probably the thing that I’m the most proud of, creating that type of environment. My kids know my name and I go to school with them twice a week. I’m pretty lucky to be able to do that.

A better answer to your question about what I like best about my work might be the blockbuster cabernets that we make but the reality is that you could go to work for someone who makes blockbuster cabernets and not have that work/life balance and I don’t know that I would want that sort of job.

Thomistica.net: Your family produces wines under several labels. Smoking Loon and Pepperwood Grove are probably the most widely known and the most widely available. But I think our readers will be most interested in your Aquinas wines. Whose idea was this line? Why “Aquinas”?

Donny Sebastiani: Brand brainstorming, ideation, whatever you want to call it, is kind of fuzzy. It’s usually not a linear progression: “First we did this, then we decided this.” The idea for the trademark itself – I think I came up with it, but if somebody showed me some videotape of a meeting room where someone else came up with the idea, I would believe it because it might have happened.

As for the specifics of it, it’s tough finding a trademark in general and the wine business is no exception. You are limited by what you can use and you look internally for inspiration. And our faith, our Catholic faith, is important to us. That’s where the inspiration for the name came from.

Wine has a significant place in Catholicism. You see people making and drinking wine in the Old Testament and New Testament. You see Jesus and his disciples drinking wine.

With the “Aquinas” label we saw a natural opportunity to have something with a bit of a Catholic aspect to it. Obviously we want to market ourselves to a wide consumer base, so you don’t want to beat people over the head with a big picture of a crucifix on the label. But the Aquinas wines are still a clear, less than subtle reference to our faith. It was a natural, obvious choice. We have people of all different denominations that sell it. But they get it and they enjoy selling it.

There is also the fact that education was important for Aquinas and it is important for our family too. We have done a lot to support education locally. We helped to start The Presentation School in Sonoma and my mother is president of the board there.

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In Part 2 of this interview next week Donny will talk about the different varietals bottled under the Aquinas label and about his personal favorite. You can learn more about the Aquinas wines on the label’s page at the Don Sebastiani and Sons website.

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UPDATE 11/20/2011: I just found out that Mark also posted on Aquinas wines back in 2006. Great minds…

Aquinas’s De unione verbi incarnati: An Interview with Klaus Obenauer, part 2.

On Wednesday, July 27^th we posted an announcement about a new volume on Aquinas’ disputed question, De unione verbi incarnati. Below is the second installment of an interview with the author, translator, and editor of the volume, German scholar Prof. Dr. Klaus Obenauer. Click here to read the first installment.

Thomistica.net: Your commentary on the text is nearly 500 pages. How long did the translation and commentary take you to complete?

Dr. Obenauer: It´s difficult to say, because of the interruptions and overlaps with other activities, such as teaching etc. All in all, I’d say about three years altogether.

Thomistica.net: Which aspect of the commentary was most enjoyable for you to work on? And, which aspect do you think makes the biggest contribution to scholarship in relation to the De unione and Aquinas’ Christology?

Dr. Obenauer: I’ll limit my comments to articles 3–5. - And insofar I succeeded (as I hope) in offering innovative contributions and insights the whole commentary on these articles is, I think, relevant.

With regard to the text of De unione itself the famous article 4 (on Christ’s esse) is, without question, of the highest interest to most. But I hope to have shown that the specific content and development of articles 3 (on Christ’s Unity) and 5 (Christ’s operations) are also of primary interest. These articles (3 and 5) have been, up to now, not sufficiently appreciated (pace Patfoort).

Concerning my personal preferences, I´d say, that in some way, I enjoyed commenting on article 3 the most. It has its own speculative profundity. Even though it bridges with article 4, article 3 is fascinating because of its symmetry (“simpliciter unum propter unum suppositum, secundum quid duo propter duas naturas”). This degree of symmetry is lacking, at least in terms of resplendence, in article 4.

Thomistica.net: Some commentators on Aquinas, because of the uniqueness of certain aspects of the De Unione, such as article 4, have either dismissed the work as spurious or relegated it to Aquinas’ early period. You, however, argue that the De unione is both a mature articulation and a work that should be dated rather late in Aquinas’ career. What are your reasons for these positions?

Dr. Obenauer: The days of assigning the De unione to Aquinas’ “early period” or viewing the text as “spurious” are past. The very opposite judgment is held to be the “common sense” position nowadays. But whereas classical historians, such as Pelster, Synave and Torrell, have assigned the De unione to the end of the second Parisian period, there are good reasons to think of ca. 1270 as the year of writing.

This suggestion is made formally by Concetta Luna (in the context of her edition of the ‘lectura sententiarum’ of Aegidus of Rome [cf. my historical comment on the first article]); I have tried to demonstrate that this is a veritable scenario. But I do not see it as more than that! There are a number of reasons to read De unione 3 and 5 as improvements over the parallel passages in the tertia pars.

And, as already shown by Pelster and Synave and illustrated in my own synopsis, the striking parallels from De unione 1 to STh III, 2, 1 and 2 do not allow the redaction of De unione to be too far removed (in time) from that of the tertia pars.

Thomistica.net: Prior to the publication of your volume, the French translation and commentary by Marie-Hélène Deloffre, “Question dispute L’union du verbe incarné” (Vrin: 2000) was, perhaps, the most sustained treatment of the De Unione in print. What are some of the points of agreement and divergence between your reading of the De Unione and that of Sr. Deloffre’s?

Dr. Obenauer: I admire the contribution of Sr. Deloffre as a very valuable repertorium in matters of St. Thomas´ “Opera Omnia” and the historical background of the De unione. With respect to her options as a historical and systematical theologian, Sr. Deloffre is very indebted to the classical “theory of integration” developed by Hermann Diepen and his followers. Accordingly she interprets the saltem prima facie divergences in the texts with hermeneutics of harmonizing.

From the point of view of a historian I am not in agreement with this reading. In my view, De unione 4 is a deviation! In STh III, 17, 2, for example, there is no mention of or place for a “hidden second substantial or non-accidental esse.” The framework of the distinctions leaves no room for the assertions of De unione 4—even if it is not completely impossible to identify some ambiguities in III, 17, 2 too.

On this point, in particular, I am in agreement with the analysis of A. Patfoort. Even more: I think that Bernhard of Auvergne, Capreolus and Billot have been the legitimate interpretive heirs to STh III, 17, 2 (and the parallel passages). As a systematic theologian I have put myself forward as being in favor of a synthetic conception. I articulate my own interpretive option this way: The conception of the ‘unio secundum subsistentiam’ has to fix, principally, our understanding of how to apply the so called ‘esse personale Verbi’ (as the subsistence or personality of the hypostasis of the divine Son) to the human nature.

This is a crucial point: the application of the divine esse to Christ’s human nature has to be made without making a (even if only conceptual) distinction between the subsistence and the act of substantial existence. In addition to this it may be asked, if there is room for a (‘etiam ratione actus’) second substantial esse as a (as I call it) “formal secum-ferential” of the “esse personale” in my interpretation? In order to safeguard the appropriateness of the “formal efficiency” of the divine esse in favor of the-Son-as-being-man, a second esse that performs only this function does agree with my postion, as long as it does not differ (numerically) from divine esse (‘in nova habitudine’) as ‘esse-simpliciter’ and ‘esse-hominem’. This way, and only this way, there is a kind of convergence between myself and the “integrationists,” but perhaps more so a trace of Louis Billot and Maurice De la Taille.

Thomistica.net: Finally, tell us a little bit about how the book has been received?

Dr. Obenauer: The reception of my book is in the very beginning stages, and in Germany there are only a few scholars interested and able to give such quick feedback. All that I have heard up to now is positive.

Aquinas’ "De unione verbi incarnati": An Interview with Dr. Klaus Obenauer, part 1.

On Wednesday, July 27^th we posted an announcement about a new volume on Aquinas’ disputed question, De unione verbi incarnati.  Below is the first installment of an interview with the author, translator, and editor of the volume, German scholar Prof. Dr. Klaus Obenauer.

Thomistica.net: tell us a little bit about yourself, your education, research interests, and your teaching.

Dr. Obenauer: I am a so called Research Assistant at the Faculty for Catholic Theology of the University of Bonn. This position is sustained by the “German Research Society” (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft [DFG]).  

I teach Dogmatic Theology in Bonn and (temporarily) in Cologne.

My primary field of research is what we call the “Constitutional-Christology” of St. Thomas and his School. My specific projects in this area include: St. Thomas’ De unione (now completed and published in the volume that we discuss below).  Currently I am researching the contributions of a few select great Thomists: Bernhard of Auvergne, Capreolus, Cajetan, Bánez, and The Salmanticenses.

As a systematic theologian I am drawn to a thomistically “orientated” metaphysics: the possibility of a critical foundation of such a metaphysics (with some free adaptation and personal development of the Continental Transcendental Thomism) was the subject of my second thesis, what we call here the “habilitation thesis.”

Thomistica.net: How did you become interested in the De unione project?

Dr. Obenauer: Potius casu et fortuna. - And: After having worked on Aquinas’ metaphysics in my habilitation thesis, my interests became focused on the crucial problems of Constitutional Christology.

Thomistica.net: Tell us a little bit about the preparation of the critical edition of the Latin text.

Dr. Obenauer: Apart from the concrete (and final) redaction which always entails that difficult judgments be made, the preparation of the Latin text was in no way based solely on my merits. I am in deep gratitude to Fr. Adriano Oliva, Ph.D., who is currently head of the Leonine Commission. Fr. Oliva gave me access to copies of the manuscripts that the members and cooperators of the Commission deemed most important.

The critical Latin text included in my volume on the De unione is the result of a process of collaboration, in which Fr. Walter Senner, Ph.D., who teaches at the Angelicum in Rome and who is a former member of Leonine Commission, along with his assistant, had the principal role in evaluating the manuscripts.  We met for a series of sessions in which the manuscripts were collated for critical evaluation.

Thomistica.net: Do you know anything about the current status of the Leonine Commission’s work on the De Unione? And, will there be any relationship between your text and the work of the Commission on the De Unione?

Dr. Obenauer: As I noted in the previous question, Frs. Oliva and Senner were extremely helpful in my work on the De unione, but there is no formal relationship between my text and the Commission.  Furthermore, as you probably understand, it would be indiscreet for me to say more than that I am aware of existing preparatory works on the text by the Commission. And, I think that a Leonine Edition of De unione is not to be expected, at least in the next several years.

Thomistica.net: Can you mention one or two aspects of the Latin text in your volume that you think scholars and students of Aquinas will find particularly interesting?

Dr. Obenauer: Apart from the supplementary passages in DU 1 ad15 - presented already by Deloffre in her volume on the De unione (Paris: Vrin, 2000), which I discuss more in part 2, - the most surprising fact is that the 13^th and 14^th-century manuscripts, which we consulted, with respect to article 4 use “sustentificare” instead of “substantificare.” This is a significant change, say, from the common text published in the Marietti edition.  It appears three times in the third paragraph of the body of article 4.  In this group of manuscripts there is but one exception to this usage.

The only parallel, known up to now with regard to the critical editions, is the Qu. quodl. 3,2,2(/4) arg/ad1 (also christological context!).  In addition: It´s also not completely impossible that the respective preliminary passage in the corpus of article 3 has to be improved in favour of “vel secundum formam accidentalem vel secundum substantiam,” instead of  “substantia-lem”.

The second part of this interview is forthcoming.