A blog for Notre Dame’s Medieval Institute

The Medieval Institute at Notre Dame has just set up a blog. Here is the announcement from Roberta Baranowski:

Dear Medievalists,

During this past year, our University of Notre Dame Medieval Institute graduate students have been particularly active in encouraging a sense of community among our medievalist community on campus by sponsoring coffee and social hours, a field trip to the Newberry library for students, and other activities.

In the same spirit, I am initiating an Internet blog for current and past students, faculty, and visitors to the Medieval Institute. My recent pilgrimage to Kalamazoo reminded me that one of the real pleasures of academic life is the opportunity to meet and re-meet interesting colleagues and maintain relationships with individuals who actually get excited about most things medieval.

I hope you will take advantage of the opportunity to share your own thoughts and comments with others who have journeyed through our reading room. Your participation in our on-line community is most welcome and I encourage you to share the following link with other colleagues who may want to keep in touch with our company of scholars.

http://ndmedinst.blogspot.com

I confess to knowing almost nothing about the mechanics of blogging, so I've gone the way of using a template that put me in business in under 5 minutes. Refinements, suggestions, and of course, postings, are very welcome.

Cordially,

Roberta Baranowski
Assistant Director, Medieval Institute
University of Notre Dame

PIMS posts Gilson Lecture PDFs

The publications department at the Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies in Toronto (PIMS) has placed some PDF versions of the annual Etienne Gilson Lecture onto their site for free downloading. Every year the Institute invites a senior medievalist to deliver the lecture—this spring's lecture was by M. Michèle Mulchahey—and thereafter publishes the lecture in a small booklet. Leonard Boyle's epic The Setting of the Summa theologiae of Saint Thomas (link), published many times, first saw light as this lecture, as did Mark Jordan's The Alleged Aristotelianism of Thomas Aquinas (link). The Institute provides a separate page devoted to it, which includes the detailed on the following past lectures, and links to the PDF versions of their lectures. Here is a sampling:

• 2000: Marcia L. Colish. Remapping Scholasticism. Etienne Gilson Series 21. 2000; 21 pages. ISBN 0–88844–721–3. Available in a PDF version.
• 2002: Francis Oakley. Omnipotence and Promise: The Legacy of the Scholastic Distinction of Powers. Etienne Gilson Series 23. 2002; 28 pages. ISBN 0–88844–723–X. Available in a PDF version.
• 2004: Karl F. Morrison. The Male Gaze and Other Reasons for the Hypothetical End of Christian Art in the West. Etienne Gilson Series 26. 2005. 36 pages. ISBN 0–88844–726–4. Available in a PDF version.
• Related Lecture (NOTE: not a Gilson Lecture, but a fine one, indeed): Anthony J. Celano. From Priam to the Good Thief. The Significance of a Single Event in Greek Ethics and Medieval Moral Teaching. EGS 22 / Studies in Medieval Moral Teaching 2. 2001. 24pp. ISBN 0–88844–722–1. Available in a PDF version.

Of related interest is this: PIMS has republished nine of these lectures in a single volume as part of its Spring 2008 catalog of publications. This volume includes the lectures of the well-known Thomists, Leonard Boyle, Edward Synan, James Weisheipl, Mark Jordan, and James P. Reilly.

Follow-up on Fr Pinckaers

Laura Arrington at Notre Dame points out that an extensive interview was conducted with the late Fr Servais Pinckaers, OP on the Thomas Instituut of Utrecht's website (main link), in the year 2000. You can find the interview directly here (by-passing the frames of the site).

Principe on Aquinas’s Spirituality

One of my teachers in Toronto, Walter Principe, C.S.B., had a long-standing interesting in St Thomas's "spirituality," worked on this topic, and published on it, until the very end of his life, in 1996.

Isn't life interesting? Another one of my other teachers, James Weisheipl, OP, wrote an article once insisting that St Thomas had no spirituality, to his credit!

Anyway, a nice overview of Fr Principe's thinking on Thomas's spirituality can be found on-line, on the Spirituality Today website. The article is entitled "Aquinas' Spirituality for Christ's Faithful Living in the World," Spirituality Today 44/2 (1992): 110-131 (link).

Cappelli never goes away

It's going to be a paleography-intensive rest-of-the-semester for me, as I return to some editing projects. It can be really good to return to, and tarry in, one's roots.

Two weeks ago my teaching assistant kindly Xeroxed off for me Auguste Pelzer's Abréviations latines médiévales. Supplément au Dizionario di abbreviature latine (Paris: Béatrice-Nauwelaerts, 1966)—twice, actually, so that I can have a copy for work and a copy for home. As its name suggests, Pelzer's short book is a supplement to Adriano Cappelli's essential tool, Lexicon abbreviaturarum: dizionario di abbreviature latine ed italiane, which was in its fifth edition when I bought my first copy in 1983. Pelzer based his work on manuscripts at the Vatican Library, with an eye towards medieval philosophical and theological texts.

Well, Cappelli itself is now on-line, and impressively, at Moscow State University. Follow this link. I'm not sure whether used copies of Cappelli are readily available, but this on-line version will certainly be helpful if you've got a computer nearby as you transcribe.

Thanks to Dick Taylor for the link.

Interesting read from Mortimer Adler

Jack Calahan over at Resources for Modern Aristotelians lets us know that his site has an article from Mortimer Adler that "should be required reading for all philosophy graduate students and advanced undergraduates. (Shame on those who do not have their students read it!)." The article is entitled "The Superiority of Aristotelian to Modern Philosophy and the Failings of Modern Aristotelian Philosophers," and can be downloaded here (14 pages).

Riviste on line: a new Italian research site

Thanks, as always, to Jörgen Vijgen, for sending this along. There is a new, on-line database of titles and abstracts of articles published in Italian Journals: Reviste on-line (or ROL). Here is the presentation, by the site’s project-leader, Francesco Testaferri:

Presentazione del progetto “Riviste on line”

Gentili Responsabili Istituti Aggregati e Affiliati PUL:

Ho il piacere di segnalare l’inaugurazione del nuovo sito: www.rivisteonline.org, un progetto da me curato col sostegno dell’Istituto Teologico di Assisi e della C.E.I. Il progetto rende disponibile gratuitamente a tutti i visitatori del sito, docenti, studenti, ricercatori e altri interessati, una grande banca dati contenente lo spoglio delle riviste teologiche italiane.

Si tratta di una risorsa informatica in crescita, di notevole valore e agilità già allo stato attuale. Risulterà a studenti e studiosi di grande vantaggio nella conduzione delle ricerche bibliografiche.

Tutti gli interessati possono liberamente consultare il sito: www.rivisteonline.org e se lo desiderano leggere la prima presentazione del progetto reperibile nella pagina “informazioni” alla sezione “comunicati stampa”, ove si trovano anche altre particolari indicazioni.

Considerando estremamente utile il servizio di indicizzazione proposto, con la presente si chiede la possibilità di una segnalazione nel modo che vi sar possibile.

Con l’occasione, in attesa di un riscontro, si porgono distinti saluti, chiedendo, nella misura del possibile, di favorire al meglio la divulgazione della notizia di modo che il progetto venga conosciuto nel miglior modo possibile e raggiunga rapidamente tutti i possibili destinatari e gli interessati.

Rimanendo a disposizione per qualsiasi chiarimento o suggerimento, ci è gradito porgere distinti saluti.

Prof. Francesco Testaferri
Ideatore e curatore del progetto
Istituto Teologico di Assisi
mail: informazioni@rivisteonline.org

You can access the site at http://www.rivisteonline.org. Many journals that Thomists regularly consult are found on the site: Angelicum, Aquinas, Gregorianum, Studi morali, on and on. A great find.

Another link to Farrell's "Companion to the Summa"

From Thérèse Bonin of Duquesne University, a link to a different on-line version of Walter Farrell’s Companion to the Summa (see the original post). This one is found on catholicprimer.org, and has the advantage of not requiring frames. You can access the microsite here.

Fr Farrell’s Companion to the Summa

Having disappeared from a Dominican website, Fr Walter Farrell's monumental Companion to the Summa is on-line.

Steve Brock rocks!

All of this on-line searching reminds me that my friend and hero, Fr Stephen L. Brock, has a webpage at the website for the Philosophy Faculty at the Pontificia Università della Santa Croce, the Opus Dei university in Rome. Fr Brock and I were school-mates in Toronto. His webpage has a list of his many publications, for most of which you can download PDF versions of the article. In fact, there is a PDF file of his important doctoral dissertation, defended back in the stone-age of the Internet (1988): The Legal Character of Natural Law according to St. Thomas Aquinas.

The articles you’ll find are primarily in the fields of ethics and metaphysics, as well as some reviews he has done of others’ writings. Helpfully the downloaded PDFs agree with the pagination of the journals in which the article or review appeared, such that you can download the PDF and use it, citing its pagination.

Michael Sherwin, OP, and some theses at Fribourg

Fr Michael Sherwin, OP, in the Faculté de Théologie in Fribourg, has directed some theses on moral theology recently that are on St. Thomas, and in English. The theses are in PDF format, and are fully-downloadable from the website. See:

• TITUS, Criag Stephen (2002): Resilience and Christian Virtues: What the Psychosocial Sciences Offer for the Renewal of Thomas Aquinas' Moral Theology of Fortitude and Its Related Virtues (download PDF).
• THERRIEN, Michel (2007): Law, Liberty and Virtue: A Thomistic Defense for the Pedagogical Character of Law (download PDF).

While we're on it, Fr Sherwin himself has an informative website on the University's webspace. They're keeping busy.

Resources for Modern Aristotelians

John C. Cahalan has established a web site, Resources for Modern Aristotelians: Philosophical, Theological, Socio-Political and Pastoral, containing modern Aristotelian papers that one may find helpful, which can be downloaded and copied at no charge. The address is:

http://www.foraristotelians.info

The site contains a paper of special interest collecting in a logically integrated way almost everything Yves Simon wrote on the problem of thing and object, the question Maritain considered second in significance only to the real distinction of essence and existence. Among other things, the paper includes material otherwise buried in the important endnotes to The Material Logic of John of St. Thomas (Poinsot). To access this paper click “Virtual Anthology of Modern Aristotelian Philosophy,” also at the above web site.

Other papers at the web site are:

• “How Simon Trumps Cajetan on Analogy.” In only 3 pages, this shows why the value of Simon’s crucial contribution to analogy does NOT depend on the Cajetanian framework he employed. Click on “Contributions to Modern Aristotelian Philosophy.”
• “Maritain and Marin-Sola on Predestination: A Reply to Michael Torre.” This replies to a Nova et Vetera article by Michael. Click on “Contributions to Modern Aristotelian Philosophy.”
• “A Theory of the Incarnation and Subsistence.” This puts Maritain’s contribution to the problem of subsistence on a firmer footing and offers a solution to the problem of how a substance causes its necessary accidents. Click on “Theological Contributions.”

Soon to come:

• “How Sensory Intentionality is Caused (and Related Matters)”. Offers a solution to the problem (Garrigou-Lagrange, Maritain and Simon’s), that sensory intentionality seems to require a special dependence on God. Also makes de-mystifying contributions on how the agent intellect works.

There are more papers, by Calahan and others, to come. All the material is copyrighted, but you have permission to download and copy it, free of charge, as you please.