Feast of St. Thomas Aquinas at Toulouse

I spotted this video clip on YouTube this morning. Add one more item to my life’s “to-do” list: spend Thomas’s feast day (January 28) at l’église des Jacobins in Toulouse!

Brian Mullady’s website

Brian Mullady, OP, who authored the important book in the 1980's, The Meaning of the Term "Moral" in St. Thomas Aquinas (Città del Vaticano: Libreria Editrice Vaticano, 1986) (permalink) has been busy on the pastoral side of things, and now has a website the lists his activities. It sports some YouTube videos dealing with nature and grace, as well as a link to a catalogue of his CD's and writings.

¡Lawrence Dewan…in Spanish!

A while back Fr Lawrence Dewan shared with me the new that there is a "Dewan Project" at Sergio Arboleda University in Bogota, Columbia. Under the supervision of Liliana Beatriz Irizar, who just published the book, Tras las Huellas del Sentido: Sabiduria y Felicidad en Lawrence Dewan (Bogota, 2008), the Dewan Project website has numerous resources about the work of Dewan, in Spanish, but also in English (here, with PDFs from Stephen Brock and Peter Kwasniewski).

Update on 2009-01-26 23:01 by Mark Johnson

Liliana Irizar provides an update and further explanation:

“We have already translated into Spanish his Marquette Lecture, thefive lectures of the Seminar on Metaphysical Foundations of Ethics (it was the Seminar’s content which Fr. Dewan gave us during his Bogotá stay last September) and his lecture on Human Rights and Human Dignity (it was Fr. Dewan’s lecture also gave here inour University). Moreover, I am preparing an article entitled “Form and Being in Saint Thomas. A study of Lawrence Dewan’s metaphysical approach.” In addition to this, we plan to publish two books in the near future: Metaphysics for Beginners and The Ontological Foundations of the Spiritual Life. Both books will contain different Fr. Dewan´s writings translated into Spanish. Thus, we need to get quite a lot of people for this task.”

Albert the Great news: Alberti magni e-corpus

Students of Albert the Great now have an on-line resource this is analogous to the enviable Corpusthomisticum.org of Enrique Alarcon; Bruno Tremblay in Canada has sponsored an on-line presence for the writings of St. Albert the Great, using PDF files of the Bourgnet edition from the 1800's. The site is called "Alberti Magni e-corpus" (link). All the texts are PD (public domain) at this point, and can be downloaded. And while these texts do not have the critical standing of the Cologne critical edition, they are nonetheless a solid starting place for researching the saint's teaching. Here's some scraping from ALBERTI MAGNI E-CORPUS site:

Albert the Great (ca. 1200 – 1280) is one of the most important medieval philosophers and theologians, yet his thought remains as a whole relatively understudied. This can be explained by a variety of philosophical and historical reasons, but purely « material » factors are also at play. There is indeed no truly complete edition of his works, and the age and the rarity of the most complete one (Opera omnia, ed. A. Borgnet, 1890-1899) render it hard to access for many scholars. The new critical edition (sometimes called Editio Coloniensis), begun in 1951 and very competently led by the Albertus-Magnus-Institut of Bonn, offers a much more reliable text but will not be completed before many more decades and its high cost means that not all university libraries — including in North America and in Western Europe — can afford a subscription to it. In addition, the impressive number of Albert's works, as well as the huge size of many of them, lead one quickly to dream of the day when the critical edition will be completed and made available electronically. (One can also dream, perhaps unrealistically, that the equivalent of the Corpus Thomisticum will one day exist for Albert the Great, thus enabling anyone with access to the internet to consult the best available editions of his works for free.)

While waiting for this providential day to come, scholars can use the present website in order to :

1) download image files (.pdf) of all of Albert's works which can be found in the Borgnet edition, as well as a few other writings which have been edited individually and which, like the Borgnet edition, are too old to be covered by copyright law;
2) browse more than twenty of those works on line;
3) consult those same works, this time using a search engine endowed with boolean operators.

This site will be updated at irregular intervals, both to fix the inevitable problems occurring in this first version and to add new texts to those that can be electronically searched. A first update is planned for Spring 2009

If you choose to download some of the PDF's, note that some of them are mondo-big; the PDF for Albert's In I Sententiarum is 146 Mb in size.

Thanks, Bruno, for such a wonderful resource!

An Albert the Great Bibliography

From Jörgen Vijgen (whose wonderful website see here), a downloadable PDF file containing his personal select-bibliography on Saint Albert the Great. Jörgen says, "I attach a file (the need for an Albertus Magnus bibliography for myself got a bit out of hand); maybe Thomistica-readers can profit from it." Keep letting things get out of hand, J!

Oh, the PDF file is here.

Some Thomism in Spanish

Got a short note from Columbia reminding me of some sites devoted to Aquinas in Spanish:

• Sociedad Internacional Tomás de Aquino
• A blog site devoted to José Luis Osvaldo Lira Pérez SSCC, a 20^th century interpreter of St Thomas

Time to update the links page!

Thomas O’Meara’s Thomistic Bibliography and translation on Albert

Scrounging around the "studies" section of the Dominican Central website (the website of the Central Province of the Dominican Order here in the United State [the Province of St. Albert the Great]), I was also reminded of Fr Thomas O'Meara's informative "Thomistic Bibliography," which was also printed in his book on Aquinas, Thomas Aquinas Theologian (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1997). The Bibliography is a great help and a reminder of how much one has to do if one is committed to the study of Aquinas!

Don't miss Fr O'Meara's translation from the German of Rudolf Schieffer's "Albertus Magnus. Mendicancy and Theology in Conflict with Episcopacy." The story of Albert's resignation from the episcopacy of Regensburg is fascinating to me, in large part because it led him to be at the curia in Orvieto in the early 1260's, where Thomas himself was assigned at the time, thus spending up to six months with his former student (of about ten year previous). What I would do to know what the two talked about!

Weisheipl on the Thomistic Revival

It was my pleasure to visit for about five days with Fr Adriano Oliva, OP (Praeses, Leonine Commission), at the beginning of October, while he was here in the United States attending conferences at the University of Notre Dame and then at Marquette University here in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. We spoke about a million things, mostly concerning the work of the Commission. One of the neat things we did was to tape an interview here at Marquette, in Italian—I hope to post that on the site before the end of this semester. My first question to Fr Oliva was the general "hey-tell-me-about-the-Leonine-Commission-and-its-history" type question, which Fr Oliva answered with clarity. One thing struck me about the beginning of his answer, something I had known forever, but had forgotten—being reminded of it by Fr Oliva had the effect of putting the whole issue into new light for me. At the outset of his answer about the Leonine Commission's origins Fr Oliva mentioned Pope Leo XIII's Aeterni patris and the fact that Leo's intent was to publicize the philosophical teaching of St. Thomas.

Having studied Thomas for two-and-a-half decades now, in a somewhat "integrationist" fashion, I knew and appreciated the presence of philosophical teaching in Thomas's work—Fr Oliva's paper here at Marquette, as it happens, was on precisely that topic—but I've always somewhat chaffed at the bit when Thomas was termed "a philosopher"; Fr Oliva's reminder made me realize that "Thomas-the-philosopher" was at least part of Leo's immediate intention in the Thomistic revival.

I scurried to my offprints to find the article I had first read about the topic of the Thomistic revival, an offprint that my beloved James Weisheipl gave me when I got to Toronto in 1983. Re-reading it was informative, corrective, and heart-warming—it is always an emotional thing for me to re-read Fr Weisheipl's texts, since I can almost detect his spoken cadence as I read. The article, entitled "The Revival of Thomism: An Historical Survey," and dating from 1962, can happily also be found on the web, at the Dominican Central website, by following this link.

Website: Electronic Resources for Medieval Philosophy

Thanks to Jean-Luc Solère (at Boston College) for informing me of the fantastic sub-site of the SIEPM's larger site (Société Internationale pour l'Étude de la Philosophie Médiévale), one devoted to providing on-line access to a range of medieval philosophy sources. See his Electronic Resources for Medieval Philosophy website (now also listed on the "links" section here at Thomistica.net). The site points to manuscript resources, edited texts, bibliographies, and other sites. Certainly to be book-marked.

William A. Wallace, O.P. on the Philosophy of Nature

Cruising though the ‘net last evening—where did I start from?—I came across an on-line version of a short course in natural philosophy, taught by one of my Dominican heroes of the River Forest School (though he was never located at River Forest, Illinois), Fr William A. Wallace, OP (also here). The course is affiliated with Ralph McInerny’s International Catholic University. The course exists in six-parts, and constitutes a wonderful overview of Thomistic natural philosophy (based on Aristotle), as well as the other elements of philosophy in a Thomistic worldview. A good way to get “up and running.”

You can also see Fr Wallace himself read through the opening lecture on YouTube:

A follow-up of sorts. You can see a two-part interview with Fr Wallace on the Dominican Order and the Intellectual Life, dating from 1982, which has much of Fr Wallace’s own life-experience (part 1 / part 2).

Common abbreviations in critical texts

This is surely for medievalist geeks. Reading through Eric Knibbs, "How to Use Modern Critical Editions of Medieval Latin Texts," History Compass 5, no. 5 (2007): 1521-49, I came across a link to web page with what seem to be all the abbreviations one is likely to find in a critical edition of a classical—I add: medieval—text. The page (here) is put together by Karl Maurer of the University of Dallas.

Maurer's page is probably overkill for the Thomist. Still useful—indeed, normative, perhaps—is Fr Antoine Donaine's «Liste des abbréviations latines et sigles recommandés pour l'apparat critique,» Bulletin SIEPM 2 (1960): 142-149, which you can see on Enrique Alarcon's miraculous Index Thomisticus website (here).

Aquinas on Romans available as PDF

The people at Ave Maria University’s Aquinas Center have posted a PDF containing an English translation of Aquinas’s commentary on Romans (based upon Fr Fabian Larcher, O.P.’s translation). Jeremy Holmes did the updating and editing. As mentioned here three years ago (!), the Aquinas Center has a page on their website linking to PDFs of Aquinas’s commentaries in English on: Hebrews, 1 and 2 Corinthians, Colossians and Ephesians. The one on Romans now joins that earlier group.