Digital edition of the works of Albert the Great

The Albertus Magnus Institute in Bonn (Germany), responsible for the critical edition of Saint Albert the Great, has now prepared a digital edition of the 28 volumes which since 1951 have appeared. Here you can download the English-German flyer with detailed information on the use of this digital edition. Free access to a trial version is available here.

As a complement to this ‘Editio digitalis’ the ‘Alberti Magni e-corpus’ has been available for some time, which focuses on the volumes not yet critically edited and where one can download both the Borgnet and the Jammy editions.

La ciencia tomista Publishes General Index That Covers a Century

The legendary journal of Spanish Thomism, La ciencia tomista, has published a comprehensive index for its now-100 year run. Wow. The issue’s Presentation can be found here.

Are you sure that in your lit-search you covered everything?

Mandonnet-Moos edition of Sentences commentary on-line

Thomas’s commentary on Peter Lombard’s Sentences is online in searchable PDF format (thanks to the SIEPM site for this information), which you can download via the following four links: 

1. In I Sent. (PDF)
2. In II Sent. (PDF)
3. In III Sent. (PDF)
4. In IV Sent. (PDF)

This is the edition attempted—never fully completed, alas (bk 4 goes only up to distinction 22)—by Pierre Madonnet and Fabien Moos (Paris: 1927-1947). Still, getting this edition for one’s personal library was the pearl of great price when I was in graduate school in the 1980’s.

Note: the file sizes are daunting (~50 MB each).

Gratian on the Web

Postings here occasionally note Aquinas’s use of Gratian (see here and here). Recently while tracking down some items in the Decretum I was surprised to find a wealth of online Gratian-related canon law resources. The 1582 Editio Romana of Gratian’s Decretum and the Glossa ordinaria are available in a wonderful format at UCLA’s digital canon law collection. (N.B.: the Glossa ordinaria on Gratian should not be confused with the 12^th century commentary on the Latin vulgate with the same name). Emil Friedberg’s edition of Gratian’s work can be found in a variety of formats (e.g., 1, 2, 3). There are also assorted 19^th-century editions of the Decretists on Gratian’s Decretum (e.g., Paucapalea, Rolandus, Rufinus, Stephen of Tournai) on various sites.

What other treasures have I missed?

Philosophy Research Index

Users of The Philosopher’s Index might be interested in a new competing bibliographic tool, the Philosophy Research Index, a venture of the Philosophy Documentation Center. The PRI aims to cover articles in 360 journals, as well as dissertations, books, and reviews in philosophy, from the 15^th century (!) to the present. Journals include The Thomist, Aquinas, Divus Thomas, the ACPQ, and even some series no longer in print. Individuals can sign up for a 1-week free trial to the database here.

More Online Thomistic Resources

Some previous posts have noted the online presence of scans of important Thomistic texts. I just recently came across the HathiTrust Digital Library, a free repository of online books. A quick search for Thomistic-related items using the “full-view” option revealed a few items, such as the first 28 volumes of Revue thomiste (split up here and here), several classic Marquette Aquinas Lectures (e.g., Owens, Phelan, Maritain, Bourke, Adler, Régis), the occasional Latin text, and most of the Summa contra Gentiles in English.

There are many great texts available in similar repositories like Internet Archive and Google Books. There is some overlap between the three sites, and sometimes one scan will be full view on one site but preview-only on another, so it is best to look around. (With some surprise, I discovered that all of Johannes Capreolus’s Defensiones is available in Google Books – this means the text is searchable!). With just a computer, it seems, one now has more access to books than a certain famous wealthy Renaissance bibliophile.

Might there be other substantive online repositories of scholarly books beyond HathiTrust, Internet Archive, and Google Books that should be mentioned here? Reader comments below are welcome.

Online Aquinas Lecture from the Center for Thomistic Studies

The good folks at the Center for Thomistic Studies at the University of St. Thomas in Houston have placed videos online of their annual Aquinas Lecture for the past few years. The most recent installment is last month’s lecture by Peter Kreeft, titled “Thomistic Personalism: A Marriage Made in Heaven, Hell, or Harvard?”

Other available videos of past lectures are:

• Archbishop J. Michael Miller, CSB, “The Church’s ‘Common Doctor’: Thomas Aquinas and the Contemporary Catholic University”
• Kenneth Schmitz, “Paths of Being: Compass of Discourse”
• Germain Grisez, “The Restless Heart Blunder”
• Cardinal Avery Dulles, SJ, “The Apologetics of Thomas Aquinas”
• John M. Rist, “Practical Reasoning After the ‘Fall’”
• Msgr. John F. Wippel, “Thomas Aquinas and the Controversy Concerning Unity of Substantial Form in Human Beings”

All of the online lectures can be found here.

On-line articles about Natural Law at Witherspoon Institute

The people over at the Princeton’s Witherspoon Institute have a new website, Natural Law, Natural Rights, and American Constitutionalism, which houses a number of online articles concerning natural law. Here’s a Thomist-centric culling of some of the articles and authors (many other articles are there as well!):

Aristotle, Natural Law, and the Founders
Michael Pakaluk, Ave Maria University
Aquinas’s Theory of Natural Law
Thomas D. D’Andrea, University of Cambridge
Ockham to Hooker: Late Medieval Transformations of Natural Law
Paul E. Sigmund, Princeton University
New Natural Law Theory
Christopher O. Tollefsen, University of South Carolina

Many of these on-line articles have PDFs as well.

Migne on-line. All of it.

Years back I remember Fr. Leonard Boyle lamenting that, after the Council, “you could buy a volume of Migne in Rome for a 100 lira.” At the time (1983-1984) he might not have foreseen how powerful the Internet was destined to be. Were he alive today he’d be thrilled to know that the abandonment of Migne was not successful, or total.

From David Whidden comes the following:

About a year ago you posted a link to this website on Thomistica.net: http://www.documentacatholicaomnia.eu. I had forgotten about it until I started looking for an on-line version of Hugh’s Didascalicon and it took me to their site. It appears that since your post that they have gone on and scanned all of Migne – all of Migne!! I wasn’t sure if you were aware of the development, but I know I’ll be using it quite a bit.

A welcome development. Check out the Patrologia latina (PL) here. David also notes that the individual PDF’s were scanned at high-resolution, so the download time, and footprint on your storage device, could be significant.

PS: for the Greek Fathers (PG) see here.

Follow-ups to Thomistic Commentators on-line

The post on “Thomistic Commentators online” drew some cheerful, immediate response. First, Fr Nicholas Austin, SJ, sent the following:

Following your post on the Thomistic commentators online, you and your readers may be interested to know that most of the Leonine edition of St Thomas’ Opera Omnia is online.  All of the Summa Theologiae volumes except one are present, together, of course, with Cardinal Cajetan’s famous commentary.  Some of the other volumes are also there.

To access the volumes, simply go to the following website http://www.archive.org/ and type into the search engine the words “opera omnia iussu leonis”.

Thanks, Father, for this helpful contribution; not having online access to Cajetan’s commentary would have been a loss, indeed.

Second, Meg Keller of Alexander Street Press (the people I mentioned in that early post), wrote me with a special offers for visitors to Thomistica.net:

Many thanks for the mention of Alexander Street’s theology resources. We’re happy to offer your readers free access to all three online theology collections through the month of August at the following URLs (see username and password below): 

• Digital Library of the Catholic Reformation: http://dlcr.alexanderstreet.com
• Digital Library of Classic Protestant Texts: http://tcpt.alexanderstreet.com
• Digital Karl Barth Library: http://bart.alexanderstreet.com 

USERNAME: thomistica

PASSWORD: alexanderstreet

Inquires from libraries regarding pricing or trial access should go to: sales@alexanderstreet.com.

It’s great to have such an informed and responsive readership!

Thomistic commentators online

Huh? How did I not know about this?!? There’s an publishing house called the Alexander Street Press that has a website devoted to literature from the Catholic Reformation, on which you can find the works of classic Thomistic commentators such as Thomas de vio Cajetan, Domingo Báñez, Menchior Cano, Domingo de Soto and Francisco de Vitoria. The main page for Digital Library of the Catholic Reformation is publicly accessible, but further access seems to require some subscription (my access is possible through Marquette University’s subscription).

The site contains the Opuscula omnia of Cajetan, including his De nominum analogia, De conceptu entis and his commentary on Thomas’s De ente et essentia. Alas, it does not contain Cajetan’s commentary on the Summa theologiae. On the other hand, Báñez’s Scholastica commentaria for the Prima pars as well as the Secunda secundae is to be found there, as is Cano’s De locis theologicis, and Soto’s De natura et gratia. De Vitoria’s holdings are simply his Relectiones theologicae, but these contain interesting material on ecclesial politics and power, as well as discussions of war-making in the New World.

In keeping with the Reformation-focus, the Alexander Street Press also has a Digital Library of Classic Protestant Texts, as well as a similar resource on Karl Barth.

Three happy words: Lawrence. Dewan. iTunes.

Here are three words that made my day: Lawrence. Dewan. iTunes.

The Dominicans are hard at work bringing the recorded contents of their recent conference in Warsaw to iTunes. As of this writing at least three are available. To make sure that I get it all I’ve simply subscribed to the entire podcast feed for the Dominican House of Studies - Priory (Washington, DC, USA). This morning I discovered that the presentation at the conference of my teacher and mentor from PIMS in Toronto, Lawrence Dewan, O.P., has been inserted into the podcast stream. His paper was entitled “Saint Thomas and Philosophia perennis.”

While you’re at the iTunes podcast section don’t forget to subscribe to the equally informative Lectures in Dominican History podcast stream, which contains lectures given by Fr. John Frederick Hinnebusch, O.P.