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.

Mellon Fellowship at Notre Dame

From Roberta Baranowski (Assistant Director, Medieval Institute, University of Notre Dame):

A. W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship in Medieval Studies

The Medieval Institute at the University of Notre Dame offers a Postdoctoral Fellowship for a junior scholar in Medieval Studies, made possible through the generosity of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. The fellowship will permit an outstanding young scholar in any field of medieval studies to continue his or her research while in residence at Notre Dame's Medieval Institute during the academic year 2008-2009.

The Mellon Fellow's principal obligation will be to pursue his or her research. Though the Fellowship carries no teaching responsibilities, it is expected that the Fellow will take advantage of the opportunity to participate in the intellectual life of the Institute and the multidisiciplinary activities that it sponsors for the medievalist community at Notre Dame. The Fellow will be provided with an office in the Medieval Institute, full library and computer privileges, and access to the Institute's research tools. The Fellow will be expected to reside in South Bend.

Eligibility: Applicants must hold a regular appointment at a U.S. institution and plan to return to their institution following their fellowship year. They must have the Ph.D. in hand as of the application date and must not be more than five years beyond the Ph.D.

Stipend: $40,000.
Application deadline: January 15, 2008.

Application procedure: There is no special application form. Rather, applicants should submit a narrative of no more than five pages describing their proposed research, indicating how it builds on existing scholarship, and suggesting how it will benefit from broader interdisciplinary studies. Applicants should also submit a current curriculum vitae and arrange for three letters of reference to be sent to the Medieval Institute by the January 15 deadline.

Announcement of the selection will be made in mid-February 2008.

Please send applications to the address below:

Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship Application
Medieval Institute
715 Hesburgh Library
University of Notre Dame
Notre Dame, IN 46556
FAX (574) 631-8644.

For further information, contact: Roberta Baranowski, (574) 631-8304, Roberta.Baranowski.7@nd.edu

Doctor Angelicus 2007 is out

The 7th volume of the International Thomistic Yearbook Doctor Angelicus is out.

Here is the table of contents:

Articuli:

1. Dulles, Avery R.: The apologetics of Thomas Aquinas 5-15
2. Elders, Leo J.: St. Thomas Aquinas’s commentary of Aristotles’s Physics 17-51
3. Vijgen, Jörgen: Did St. Thomas attribute a doctrine of divine providence to Aristotle? 53-76
4. Storck, Thomas: St. Thomas on art 77-88
5. Kwasniewski, Peter A.: A Thomistic preface to theology : “the science of God and of the blessed” 89-108
6. Rauhut, Robert: Die “conversio substantialis” in der “Summa theologiae” des Thomas von Aquin vor dem Hintergrund seines Theologieverständnisses : (Teil 2) 109-187

Notae:

1. Hauke, Manfred: Alexis-Henri-Marie Lépicier : Förderer der thomistischen Dogmatik und “Kardinal Mariens” 189-197
2. Couillaud, Bruno: John Marenbon - “Le temps, l’éternité et la prescience de Boèce à Thomas d’Aquin” 198-205

Recensiones

The End of Neothomism?

The German publisher nova & vetera (Bonn) has published a fascinating book on how by the end of the 1970 Thomism at the faculty of philosophy of the university of Fribourg (Switzerland) came to an end. Here is the table of contents in Pdf.

Das Ende des Neuthomismus. Die 68er, das Konzil und die Dominikaner, written by Eduard Habsburg-Lothringen, comprises three parts. Part 1 applies Thomas Kuhn’s idea of scientific revolution to the movement of Neothomism in general. Part 2 traces the reactions of the Order of Preachers to the Church’s documents on the doctrine of St. Thomas from Leo XIII to John Paul II. Finally part 3 chronicles in detail the history of the faculty of philosophy from the illustrious Gallus Manser (1866-1950) to the tireless but unsuccesfull efforts by the Flemish Dominican Norbertus Luyten (1909-1986) to maintain the chairs, traditionally conferred to the Dominicans. It discloses for the first time important archival material from the correspondence between Fribourg and the Dominican Roman curia. Father Luyten concluded: “C’est vraiment la fin d’une époque”.

10th volume Opera Omnia Cornelio Fabro

The 10th volume of the Collected Works of the Italian Thomist Cornelio Fabro(1911-1995) has been published. For more information on the Opera Omnia of Cornelio Fabro, see our March 2005 Newsletter.

The following comes from the introduction by the author:

“Il libro Dio. Introduzione al problema teologico, cerca di rispondere al «“problema essenziale dell’uomo essenziale”, dal quale ogni altro problema dell’esistenza prende chiarezza (l’etica, il diritto, l’economia…)», cioè il problema di Dio. «L’intelletto umano che tende naturalmente alla verità come al suo bene proprio, è spinto presto o tardi a porsi il problema di Dio, a cercare quindi la dimostrazione della sua esistenza: perché il significato e valore ultimo di ogni verità viene da Dio ed ha in Dio il suo ultimo fondamento, come verità per essenza da cui s’irradia ogni verità creata ch’è verità soltanto per partecipazione». «L’esistenza di Dio è il problema dei problemi: esso costituisce la conclusione di tutta la filosofia e della conoscenza umana sia ordinaria come scientifica, perché da esso dipende l’orientamento definitivo che l’uomo deve dare alla sua condotta e alla sua vita intera”.

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.

The ACPA in Milwaukee

The ACPA (website: American Catholic Philosophical Association) is holding its annual conference here in Milwaukee this fall, from November 9-11, on the theme: Freedom, Will, and Nature. Here is the program for the conference, in DOC and PDF format.

A Festschrift for Fr Horst

Fr Ulrich Horst, OP, has a Festschrift in his honor appearing in Germany. Kirchenbild und Spiritualität: Dominikanische Beiträge zur Ekklesiologie und zum kirchlichen Leben im Mittelalter. Festschrift für Ulrich Horst OP zum 75. Geburtstag, is edited by Thomas Prügl of the University of Notre Dame and Marianne Schlosser. We have a Table of Contents in PDF form (articles by Prügl, Wawrykow, Senner, Bataillon, O’Meara, and many others), and here’s the blurb for the book from the publisher’s website:

Der langjährige Leiter des Münchener Grabmann-Institutes zur Erforschung der mittelalterlichen Theologie und Philosophie, Prof. em. Dr. Ulrich Horst O.P., ist vor allem durch seine Forschungen zur Kirchen- und Papsttheorie in Mittelalter und früher Neuzeit, sowie durch seine Studien über Thomas von Aquin und Theologen aus dem Dominikanerorden in Mittelalter und früher Neuzeit bekannt. Als akademischer Lehrer betreute er Dissertationen und Habilitationen aus dem Bereich der mittelalterlichen Theologiegeschichte, mit Schwerpunkten auf der Ekklesiologie, Thomas von Aquin und der Theologie des Ordenslebens. In der vorliegenden Festschrift ehren ihn Kollegen und Schüler mit Beiträgen aus eben diesen Gebieten, wobei der Schwerpunkt auf dem Wirken und der Bedeutung des Dominikanerordens für das mittelalterliche Kirchenbild liegt. Der Band, der insgesamt 22 Beiträge umfasst, ist in fünf Abschnitte unterteilt. Im ersten Teil finden sich Beiträge zu theologischen und ekklesiologischen Themen bei Thomas von Aquin und Albertus Magnus. Der zweite Teil beleuchtet die Rolle der Mendikanten in den ekklesiologischen Auseinandersetzungen des 13. und 14. Jahrhundert, vor allem im Zusammenhang mit dem Bettelordenstreit, aber auch im Hinblick auf den kontroverstheologischen Dialog mit der Ostkirche. Ein weiterer Ab-schnitt widmet sich Aspekten der mendikantischen, vor allem der dominikanischen Ordenstheologie. Teil IV greift Themen aus dem Bereich Kirchenreform und Konzilien im Spätmittelalter auf, und ein abschließender Teil schlägt die Brücke in die Neuzeit. Der Band wird ergänzt durch eine Einführung zu Leben und Forschungen, sowie durch ein Schriftenverzeichnis des Jubilars.

A Surprise for John Deely

John Deely of the University of St. Thomas in Houston got a smile recently when he found out that, in the front window of a Borders Bookstore in Singapore, his new book, Intentionality and Semiotics: A Story of Mutual Fecundation, was prominently placed alongside those of Alan Greenspan and Al Gore!

Says John Deely: “How great bookstores display books.”

The Nachlass of Angelus Walz, OP

Angelus Walz, OP (1893-1978), was for years a prolific professor of church history at the Angelicum in Rome, and contributed to the cause of Thomas-scholarship in many ways, notably by his biography of Aquinas (especially in its French translation, known simply as Walz-Novarina).

This past week I received an e-mail from a Martin Walter in Germany, who told me that he had found (about five years ago) some interesting pictures in the “Nachlass” of Fr Walz in the Dominican convent in Augsburg. These pictures had been evidently taken by a photographer named Anderson, who had a shop in Rome, in the 1920’s. The pictures were of triumphalistic paintings of St. Thomas, and Fr Walz had obtained copies with the option of having them used in the ground-breaking Xenia Thomistica, a 3-volume publication in 1925 commemorating the 600^th anniversary of Thomas’s birth, loaded with articles by key players in early 20^th-century Thomism (Maritain, Lottin, Garrigou-Lagrange, Merkelbach, Prümmer, Mandonnet, Walz, Grabmann, Pelster, Roland-Gosselin, Chenu [in Latin!]). Of the pictures in Fr Walz’s Nachlass, only one made it into Xenia Thomistica, the one by the painter Francisco de Zurbarán, which you can see in the frontispiece of the third volume.

Martin Walter scanned the three pictures he found, and kindly sent them to me for presentation here. They are found below.

Francisco de Zurbarán’s “Apotheosis of St. Thomas” (1661): this is the picture found in volume 3 of Xenia Thomistica (Seville).

Ludwig Seitz’s “St. Thomas Offers His Works to the Church,” commissioned by Pope Leo XIII (Vatican Museum).

“Heretics Vanquished by the Works of St. Thomas,” also by Ludwig Seitz, and commissioned by Leo XIII (Vatican Museum).

Thank you, Martin Walter!

Turning off references for a while

I've had to turn-off the ability for visitors to create references to articles on the web site because in the last two days fully thirty-five spam references have been created, pointing to web sites whose content would make one's skin crawl. We'll see whether an extended period of down-time will calm the storm, and allow me to open things up again.