Divine Action – in Berkeley

The Dominican School of Philosophy and Theology in Berkeley, California, recently held a book launch for Unlocking Divine Action: Contemporary Science and Thomas Aquinas (Catholic University of America Press, 2012) by Fr. Michael Dodds, OP, Professor of Philosophy and Theology at DSPT and the Graduate Theological Union (GTU), Berkeley. Bringing the teachings of Thomas Aquinas into dialogue with contemporary science, Fr. Dodds’ book finds new ways to understand God’s action in the natural world and in human life. Presenters were Dr. Robert John Russell, Founder and Director of the Center for Theology and the Natural Sciences (CTNS) at the GTU; Dr. Ted Peters of CTNS, Professor of Systematic Theology, Pacific Lutheran Theological Seminary and the GTU; Dr. Lara Buchak, Assistant Professor of Philosophy, University of California at Berkeley, and Fr. Mariusz Tabaczek, OP, GTU doctoral student from the Dominican Province of Poland. Presentations at the event are available on video (here).

Census of North American Doctoral Dissertations on Medieval Philosophy

The website In Medias PHIL, Robert Pasnau’s medieval philosophy blog, has a recent post that lists philosophy doctoral dissertations on medieval topics currently in progress at North American universities. Nearly half of them (32 out of 68 listed dissertations) contain Aquinas’s name in their respective titles. Other medieval philosophers whose names appear more than once include: Avicenna (4), Ockham (3), Anselm (2), Augustine (2), and Albert the Great (2). Pasnau promises a future survey of European dissertations in progress. 

Aquinas Lecture at DSPT Berkeley

The 23rd Annual Aquinas Lecture at the Dominican School of Philosophy and Theology in Berkeley, CA, will be delivered by Fr. Augustine Thompson, OP, DSPT Professor of History, on Wednesday, February 27, at 7:30 pm PST (10:30 pm EST). Entitled “Baptismal Theology and Practice in the Age of St. Thomas Aquinas,” the lecture will examine new discoveries about the liturgical and social significance of baptism in the cities of thirteenth-century Italy and will compare these developments to the development of the theology of baptism from the twelfth century to Thomas Aquinas in the late thirteenth. The lecture will be live-streamed.

Dissertation on Analogy

Congratulations to the Center for Thomistic Studies’ most recent PhD, my student Domenic D’Ettore.  His dissertation is “Early Thomists on Demonstration with Analogous Terms.”  For more info, click here.

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.

On the future of Thomistica.net

In late June I had come to the decision that I could no longer devote the time and resources to authoring and supporting this web site, and had decided—in actu signato sed nondum in actu exercito—to inform the site’s visitors of this, and then close the site down. When I sent around my draft valedictory to some close colleagues, I was urged by friends at The Aquinas Center at Ave Maria University to consider another option. “What if we take over the main support of the site,” they wondered, “add some contributors, and take the burden off your shoulders?”

Phew. That was welcome news, indeed. And in the interim, mostly behind the curtain but occasionally on the proscenium (e.g., posts by new contributors), the fine people at Ave Maria and I have been transitioning the logistics for the site and bringing on the new contributors and chief editor—a post from the new management will follow shortly.

Closing the site would have been hard to live with. When the idea for it came to me in the year 2000, there were no readily-available, on-line blogging sites. So I created my own, and struggled to learn .NET, SQL, XML, HTML and CSS, and endured all the hassles of coding for different web browsers—Microsoft’s IE 6 was truly of the devil—and was tearful with gratitude to happen upon the fledgling squarespace.com in 2004, whose stellar hosting and authoring system let me pursue the dream of having a news site for the academic study of St. Thomas, with opinions, newsletters, picture galleries, and the like. Thanks to the collaborative efforts of Jörgen Vijgen, Robert Barry, Steve Perisho, David Whidden, and Michael Dougherty, we’ve been able to have a cheerful and informative site.

The great news is that the site will remain sure-footed under the direction and support of the people at The Aquinas Center at Ave Maria University, will in fact have a larger base of fine and diverse contributors, and will assuredly expand its viewership to an ever-widening audience of those interested in the academic study of St. Thomas Aquinas. Roger Nutt will be overseeing the site, with help of Michael Dauphinais and Joseph Trabbic. The new contributors will include Fr. Matthew Lamb and Steven Long of Ave Maria and Christopher Malloy of the University of Dallas and Fr. Timothy Bellamah of the Dominican House of Studies.

For myself I need and plan to live small, which will not be inherently antithetical to an occasional contribution—something the new editorship has generously encouraged.

That’s it for now. The esse of the site perdures, stemming from its continued final cause and appropriate, now-increased and diversified efficient and material causes. Thanks to all who have submitted information for us to share over the years. Thanks for your visiting and gathering useful information. And above all, thanks for any pleasure you may have derived from your visits and participation. Such enjoyment has been the purpose of the site, after all, from day one.

Let’s keep this thing going.

A tribute to Fr Busa, from Stephen Ramsay (repost)

Via Fr. Matthew Lamb of Ave Maria University, who knew Fr Busa in Italy in the 1970’s (and who suggested to Busa the idea of putting the Index Thomisticus on CD-ROM), comes a tribute from Dr. Stephen Ramsay, Associate Professor of English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, and a member of the digital humanities community, who greatly admired Fr. Busa’s work (and had corresponded with him):

(Note: reposted with permission of Dr. Ramsay):

Fr. Roberto Busa, S.J. (1913-2011)

Last night, I learned of the passing of Roberto Busa – a man that many consider the founder of Digital Humanities.

In recent years, people have called that lofty title into question, and not without justice. It seems that Busa was one among the many who were striving to bring computer technology – then in its early infancy – to bear on humanistic problems back in the forties. Like most DH scholars today, he was part of a much wider intellectual network.

But when I was starting out in the field, it was taken more-or-less for granted that Busa had started it all, and it’s not difficult to understand why. He was a Jesuit – a member of that most troublesome of religious orders, universally renowned both for its learning and for its many provocations both theological and disciplinary. His project recalled the ancient roots of the European university itself: a massive concordance to the works of Thomas Aquinas, who was himself a scholar and an intellectual revolutionary. It’s undoubtedly the case that many at the time were thinking of ways to use computers to conduct research in the humanities, but the scale and sweep of Busa’s project stands alone. It’s a story about old becoming new, and yet about continuity with the past.

His 1980 essay “The Annals of Humanities Computing: The Index Thomisticus” used to be required reading of sorts for people starting out, and it’s still my favorite. It’s a personal essay on how the Index came to be. The beginning is unforgettable:

I entered the Jesuit order in 1933. I was then 20. Later my superior asked me: “Would you like to become a professor?”

“In no way!” My wish was to become a missionary to take care of the poor.

“Good. You’ll do it, all the same.”

The subject of Busa’s research – and the occasion for creating the Index – was detailed study of the notion of “presence” in Thomas. Perhaps the New Criticism was taking hold in some other part of the world, but for Busa, philology was the proper hermeneutical framework.

[A]ll functional or grammatical words (which in my mind are not “empty” at all but philosophically rich) manifest the deepest logic of being which generates the basic structures of human discourse. It is this basic logic that allows the transfer from what the words mean today to what they meant to the writer.

The methodology for exploring that logic was clear enough:

According to the scholarly practices, I first searched through tables and subject indexes for the word praesens and praesentia. […] My next step was to write out by hand 10,000 3” X 5” cards, each containing a sentence with the word in or a word connected with in. Grand games of solitaire followed.

Busa himself eschewed the title of founder, and goes out of his way in this essay to list the others whom he thought were far ahead of him. But how can we deny the title to someone who writes:

It was clear to me, however, that to process texts containing more than ten million words, I had to look for some kind of machinery.

(If you’re not ready to do the first ten million by hand, you’re simply not in the good Father’s philological league).

He eventually made his way to IBM. In fact, he made his way to the office of Thomas Watson himself:

I knew, the day I was to meet Thomas J. Watson, Sr., that he had on his desk a report which said that IBM machines could never do what I wanted. I had seen in the waiting room a small poster imprinted with the words, “the difficult we do right away; the impossible takes a little longer,” (IBM always loved slogans). I took it with me into Mr. Watson’s office. Sitting in front of him and sensing the tremendous power of his mind, I was inspired to say: “It is not right to say ‘no’ before you have tried.” I took out the poster and showed him his own slogan. He agreed that IBM would cooperate with my project until it was completed “provided that you do not change IBM into International Busa Machines.” I had already informed him that, because my superiors had given me time, encouragement, their blessings and much holy water, but unfortunately no money, I could recompense IBM in any way except financially. That was providential!

Is it any wonder that Busa became the patron saint of DH? John Unsworth, in a talk a few years ago, noted, “Most disciplines can’t point to a founding moment, much less a divine one.”

(I assume the non-DH-er in that photograph is Pope Paul VI)

And then there’s this:

I feel like a tight-rope walker who has reached the other end. It seems to me like Providence. Since man is a child of God and the technology is a child of man, I think that God regards technology the way a grandfather regards his grandchild. And for me personally, it is satisfying to realize that I have taken seriously my service to linguistic research.

Those words, written thirty years ago, are of a man who intends to live long and well.

And he did.

A calling card from Tommaso Zigliara, OP

Got a neat e-mail and attachment from Martin Walter, who a few years back provided us with some stunning pictures, and who helped the entire Thomistic community by editing John of St. Thomas’s Cursus philosophicus. It turns out that he recently bought vol. 1 of the Leonine Edition (dating from 1882), which contained Thomas’s commentaries on Aristotle’s De intepretatione and on the Posterior Analytics—both of these editions were re-edited in 1989 as Leonine 1*/1 and 1*/2. The first tomus was published under the general editorship of Tommaso Zigliara, OP.

But Walter turned out to have purchased not just any old copy of the original volume 1 of the Leonine edition, for on the inside, on page 2, there is a well-wrought inscription that tells a story:

Here’s a transcription, followed by a translation:

Hic primus tomus operum Sancti Thomae Aquinatis
ad cujus editionem operam contulerunt
Reverendus Pater Albertus Hoogland et Reverendus Pater Constantius
Suermondt e provincia nostra Romam
accersili, Bibliotecae nostrae in Conven-
tu Huisensi dono datus est ab
Eminente Fratre Thoma Zigliara
Ordinis Praedicatorum
Sanctae Romanae Ecclesiae Cardinali.

This first tome of the works of St. Thomas Aquinas,
toward whose publication Rev. Father Albertus Hoogland and Rev. Father Constantius Suermondt contributed (summoned to Rome from our province), was given as a gift to our library in the convent in Huissen by <his> eminence, Brother Tommaso Zigliara of the Order of the Preachers, Cardinal of the Holy Roman Church.

Both Frs Hoogland and Suermondt came from the Dominican Convent in Huissen, which seems to be the provenance of the book that Martin Walter bought. Which of course raises the question, “why did a Dominican convent part with a prized copy of a work by Thomas Aquinas?” That’s another investigation—Walter tells me that the book had multiple owners, at one point being owned by an Oratory.

Thanks to Martin Walter for sharing this interesting discovery. Zigliara should not be forgotten.

PS: Zigliara was not merely the general editor of the first edition of Thomas’s Commentary on the Posterior Analytics. He was also the author of careful annotations on Thomas’s text (i.e., made a commentary on Thomas’s commentary). Fr. James Weisheipl, in his own handbook on this key Aristotelian text (and Thomas’s commentary), singles out Zigliara’s fine treatment of how we are able to apprehend the essential forms of things through the senses (see Thomas, In II. Post., lect 13, no. 7 [Marietti edition]), and Zigliara’s notes (Leonine volume 1, p. 375 cols. a-b).

Benedict XVI on Albert the Great: “He still has a lot to teach us”

Below is an excerpt from Benedict XVI’s appreciative and enthusiastic commendation of St. Albert’s manifold accomplishments in philosophy, theology, and science.  These comments were delivered at the General Audience held on March 24^th, 2010.

….

He still has a lot to teach us. Above all, St Albert shows that there is no opposition between faith and science, despite certain episodes of misunderstanding that have been recorded in history. A man of faith and prayer, as was St Albert the Great, can serenely foster the study of the natural sciences and progress in knowledge of the micro- and macrocosm, discovering the laws proper to the subject, since all this contributes to fostering thirst for and love of God. The Bible speaks to us of creation as of the first language through which God who is supreme intelligence, who is the Logos reveals to us something of himself. The Book of Wisdom, for example, says that the phenomena of nature, endowed with greatness and beauty, is like the works of an artist through which, by analogy, we may know the Author of creation (cf. Wis 13: 5). With a classical similitude in the Middle Ages and in the Renaissance one can compare the natural world to a book written by God that we read according to the different approaches of the sciences (cf. Address to the participants in the Plenary Meeting of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, 31 October 2008; L’Osservatore Romano English edition, 5 November 2008, p. 6). How many scientists, in fact, in the wake of St Albert the Great, have carried on their research inspired by wonder at and gratitude for a world which, to their eyes as scholars and believers, appeared and appears as the good work of a wise and loving Creator! Scientific study is then transformed into a hymn of praise. Enrico Medi, a great astrophysicist of our time, whose cause of beatification has been introduced, wrote: “O you mysterious galaxies… I see you, I calculate you, I understand you, I study you and I discover you, I penetrate you and I gather you. From you I take light and make it knowledge, I take movement and make it wisdom, I take sparkling colours and make them poetry; I take you stars in my hands and, trembling in the oneness of my being, I raise you above yourselves and offer you in prayer to the Creator, that through me alone you stars can worship” (Le Opere. Inno alla creazione).

St Albert the Great reminds us that there is friendship between science and faith and that through their vocation to the study of nature, scientists can take an authentic and fascinating path of holiness.

His extraordinary openmindedness is also revealed in a cultural feat which he carried out successfully, that is, the acceptance and appreciation of Aristotle’s thought. In St Albert’s time, in fact, knowledge was spreading of numerous works by this great Greek philosopher, who lived a quarter of a century before Christ, especially in the sphere of ethics and metaphysics. They showed the power of reason, explained lucidly and clearly the meaning and structure of reality, its intelligibility and the value and purpose of human actions. St Albert the Great opened the door to the complete acceptance in medieval philosophy and theology of Aristotle’s philosophy, which was subsequently given a definitive form by St Thomas. This reception of a pagan pre-Christian philosophy, let us say, was an authentic cultural revolution in that epoch. Yet many Christian thinkers feared Aristotle’s philosophy, a non-Christian philosophy, especially because, presented by his Arab commentators, it had been interpreted in such a way, at least in certain points, as to appear completely irreconcilable with the Christian faith. Hence a dilemma arose: are faith and reason in conflict with each other or not?

This is one of the great merits of St Albert: with scientific rigour he studied Aristotle’s works, convinced that all that is truly rational is compatible with the faith revealed in the Sacred Scriptures. In other words, St Albert the Great thus contributed to the formation of an autonomous philosophy, distinct from theology and united with it only by the unity of the truth. So it was that in the 13th century a clear distinction came into being between these two branches of knowledge, philosophy and theology, which, in conversing with each other, cooperate harmoniously in the discovery of the authentic vocation of man, thirsting for truth and happiness: and it is above all theology, that St Albert defined as “emotional knowledge”, which points out to human beings their vocation to eternal joy, a joy that flows from full adherence to the truth.

St Albert the Great was capable of communicating these concepts in a simple and understandable way. An authentic son of St Dominic, he willingly preached to the People of God, who were won over by his words and by the example of his life.

Dear brothers and sisters, let us pray the Lord that learned theologians will never be lacking in holy Church, wise and devout like St Albert the Great, and that he may help each one of us to make our own the “formula of holiness” that he followed in his life: “to desire all that I desire for the glory of God, as God desires for his glory all that he desires”, in other words always to be conformed to God’s will, in order to desire and to do everything only and always for his glory.

Benedict XVI on the enduring value of Peter Lombard

Below are two interesting excerpts from a General Audience (December 30^th, 2009) of Benedict XVI reflecting on the life and work of Peter Lombard.  In this audience Benedict highlights several aspects of The Lombard’s famous work, The Sentences, which are particularly important contributions to the history of theology.

Like all theology teachers of his time, Peter also wrote discourses and commentaries on Sacred Scripture. His masterpiece, however, consists of the four Books of the Sentences. This is a text which came into being for didactic purposes. According to the theological method in use in those times, it was necessary first of all to know, study and comment on the thought of the Fathers of the Church and of the other writers deemed authoritative. Peter therefore collected a very considerable amount of documentation, which consisted mainly of the teachings of the great Latin Fathers, especially St Augustine, and was open to the contribution of contemporary theologians. Among other things, he also used an encyclopedia of Greek theology which had only recently become known to the West: The Orthodox faith, composed by St John Damascene. The great merit of Peter Lombard is to have organized all the material that he had collected and chosen with care, in a systematic and harmonious framework. In fact one of the features of theology is to organize the patrimony of faith in a unitive and orderly way. Thus he distributed the sentences, that is, the Patristic sources on various arguments, in four books. In the first book he addresses God and the Trinitarian mystery; in the second, the work of the Creation, sin and Grace; in the third, the Mystery of the Incarnation and the work of Redemption with an extensive exposition on the virtues. The fourth book is dedicated to the sacraments and to the last realities, those of eternal life, or Novissimi. The overall view presented includes almost all the truths of the Catholic faith. The concise, clear vision and clear, orderly schematic and ever consistent presentation explain the extraordinary success of Peter Lombard’s Sentences. They enabled students to learn reliably and gave the educators and teachers who used them plenty of room for acquiring deeper knowledge. A Franciscan theologian, Alexandre of Hales, of the next generation, introduced into the Sentences a division that facilitated their study and consultation. Even the greatest of the 13th-century theologians, Albert the Great, Bonaventure of Bagnoregio and Thomas Aquinas began their academic activity by commenting on the four books of Peter Lombard’s Sentences, enriching them with their reflections. Lombard’s text was the book in use at all schools of theology until the 16th century.

…

Among the most important contributions offered by Peter Lombard to the history of theology, I would like to recall his treatise on the sacraments, of which he gave what I would call a definitive definition: “precisely what is a sign of God’s grace and a visible form of invisible grace, in such a way that it bears its image and is its cause is called a sacrament in the proper sense” (4, 1, 4). With this definition Peter Lombard grasps the essence of the sacraments: they are a cause of grace, they are truly able to communicate divine life. Successive theologians never again departed from this vision and were also to use the distinction between the material and the formal element introduced by the “Master of the Sentences”, as Peter Lombard was known. The material element is the tangible visible reality, the formal element consists of the words spoken by the minister. For a complete and valid celebration of the sacraments both are essential: matter, the reality with which the Lord visibly touches us and the word that conveys the spiritual significance. In Baptism, for example, the material element is the water that is poured on the head of the child and the formal element is the formula: “I baptize you in the name of the Father, of the Son and of the Holy Spirit”. Peter the Lombard, moreover, explained that the sacraments alone objectively transmit divine grace and they are seven: Baptism, the Eucharist, Penance, the Unction of the sick, Orders and Matrimony (cf. Sentences 4, 2, 1).

Solvency soon, 'cause we're finally making some money. . .

A week or so back I went to my mailbox here at home and pulled out a check for $5.00 from the people at CafePress, the online merchandise people who let you sell branded gear for free. If you’ve ever noticed the Thomistica.net sweatshirts in the right columns (“Got Summa?”), then you’ve seen these CafePress products. In a fit of creativity of few years back—procrastination?—I put together a fun little product line of things, hoping that now and again someone might buy something, and the money from sales would help to make Thomistica.net self-sustaining. Oh, to have the site be revenue-neutral!

Someone must have taken the bait, because when an item is sold a sliver of the cost goes back to the owner of the “product line,” in this case, back to me. So, to whoever actually bought something from the Thomistica.net CafePress mini-site, a hearty thank you for helping to defray the monthly cost of keeping the site going.

Spring’s coming, so it may be time to put together some Thomistica.net baseball caps!

Thomas Aquinas: St Albert's onetime lackey?

When my beloved teacher, James A. Weisheipl, OP, wrote his Friar Thomas d’Aquino back in 1974 he contended that Thomas Aquinas’s earliest scripture commentaries were cursory readings on Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Lamentations done while Thomas was with St. Albert the Great in Cologne, in the period 1248-1252. For Weisheipl these early works and their supposed sterilitas doctrinae were not the product of the precocious bachelor of the Sentences doing his work in Paris from 1252-1256, but were better considered the work of a talented young Dominican in St. Albert’s retinue in Cologne, a baccalaureus biblicus—even though no contemporary witness ever said that Thomas lectured on the Bible, even cursorie, while with Albert in Cologne. Besides, as the “dumb ox” (bos mutus) story indicated, Thomas was just too smart to have been with Albert only as a student or even as an—gasp!—assistant.

Or, as Fr Dewan put it to me once, “Fr Weisheipl couldn’t imagine that Thomas was ever Albert’s lackey”!

As it happens, in discoveries made this past decade it is now pretty clear that Thomas was indeed an assistant to St. Albert, doing some legwork so that Albert could have the best text available as he produced his commentaries on the works of Pseudo-Dionysius (a copy of whose Albertine commentaries we have in Thomas’s own autograph). In 2005 Maria Burger published some of the research she conducted as part of the Cologne edition of St. Albert’s works. She found a manuscript from Cologne’s Cathedral church library (Codex 30) that contained an 11th-century copy of the works of Pseudo-Dionysius, running the gamut from the Celestial Hierarchy to the Divine Names. But found in the margins and between the lines of this 11th-century hand were notes written in the telltale littera illegibilis of the young Thomas Aquinas. It turns out that his task had been to compare the Latin text found in Codex 30 (which contained the original Eriugena translation) with Eriugena’s revised translation and with John the Saracen’s translation—all of which Thomas did with diligence. As Burger showed in her original article (PDF), Albert then used Thomas’s marginal and interlinear notes in the course of composing his commentaries on Pseudo-Dionysius.

I am looking to see whether I can make available the English translation of her article (which appeared just recently in “Thomas Aquinas’s Glosses on the Dionysius Commentaries of Albert the Great in Codex 30 of the Cologne Cathedral Library,” in Via Alberti Texte – Quellen – Interpretationen [Münster: Aschendorff, 2009] 561-582). Here is the abstract from that latter article:

Albertus Magnus commented on the works of Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite in the years 1248–1250. The bases for these commentaries were the Latin translations by John Scotus Eriugena and John Sarracenus. Codex 30 of the Dombibliothek in Cologne conveys the Dionysius text in an older version of the Eriugena translation that Albert had evidently employed for purpose of comparison. Maria Burger finds numerous interlinear and marginal entries in this codex that, on the basis of careful handwriting analysis, can be assigned to Thomas Aquinas. He was Albert’s student and assistant in Cologne at that time and prepared a copy of the entire text in his own hand which is to this day preserved in the manuscript Naples, Biblioteca Nazionale I B 54. For this reason it is possible to make a more precise comparison of the entries in Codex 30 with Thomas’ handwriting. In addition, the marginalia in the Cologne Codex permit a more exact dating of Albert’s commentary on De caelesti hierarchia, the text with which the corpus of commentaries begins.

The people in Cologne have placed hi-res images of Codex 30, among others, available on a website devoted to church manuscripts from Cologne (link to main site). If you’d like to see some folios, click here, and then scoot ahead to, say, folio 35r, and hunt around from there (note that the images come in three sizes, the highest resolution of which zooms in tremendously).

So it does seem that Thomas was a trusted assistant—hardly a lackey—to St. Albert.

PS: Adriano Oliva dealt with Weisheipl’s dating of the cursory biblical works with great care in his Les débuts de l’enseignement de Thomas d’Aquin et sa conception de la Sacra doctrina (Paris: J. Vrin, 2006), 207-224. The three commentaries, Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Lamentations, should be dated to Paris in the early 1250’s (most likely starting around 1252).