Harvard University Press to open a medieval "Loeb"

According to Karen Green, the Ancient and Medieval History and Religion Librarian at Columbia University, Dr. Jan Ziolkowski, the new director of Dumbarton Oaks, recently talked Harvard University Press into opening a new “Loeb” for the medieval period, to be entitled something like the Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library.  Ten titles within two years, and then eight (or is it four?) per year thereafter.  Note that this is in addition to what it’s been doing for the Renaissance (I Tatti Renaissance Library).  An English translation facing the original.

The theologian as Jacob wrestling with the angel (Chenu)

A colleague in the American Theological Library Association wrote its listserv ATLANTIS as follows:

I’m looking for the source of a statement by Thomas Aquinas [to the effect] that delving into the doctrine of the Trinity is like Jacob wrestling with the angel. Can someone suggest where this might be from? I’m assuming it’s in [the] Summa Theologi[ae] somewhere, but that’s not very specific. Thanks.

After much free-searching of Index Thomisticus, I’ve had to settle for the following, which I discovered via Google, and which I would like very much to track to its source. A major problem is that Chenu gives not the slightest indication where (in Aquinas?) he encountered it:

In a very suggestive allegory, St Thomas gives a symbolic description of the theologian confronted with the mystery of God [(note: not specifically the Trinity, as requested)]. Calling to mind Jacob’s struggle with the angel he writes:

The whole night they wrestled [(s’affrontèrent)], muscles straining, neither yielding [(muscles tenus, sans que l’un ou l’autre cédassent)]; but at daybreak the angel disappeared, apparently leaving the field clear to his adversary. But Jacob then felt a violent pain in his thigh [(un douleur vive à la cuisse)]. He was left wounded and limping [(blessé et claudicant)]. It is thus that the theologian grapples with the mystery [(le théologien affronte le mystère)] when God brings him face to face with it. He is taut, like a bent bow, grappling with human language [(tendu, comme arc-bouté à ses expressions humaines)]; he struggles like a wrestler [(en saisit les objects à bras-le-corps)]; he even seems to win the mastery [(s’enrendre maitre)]. But then he feels a weakness, a weakness at once painful and delicious [(une faiblesse douloureuse et delectable à la fois)], for to be thus defeated is in fact the proof that his combat was divine [(de son divin combat)]

(M. D. Chenu, Is theology a science?, 47). Fragments of the original French I insert not from La théologie est-elle une science? directly, but from The Trinity: an analysis of St. Thomas Aquinas’ Expositio of the De Trinitate of Boethius, by Douglas C. Hall, who treats Chenu as a gloss on a passage from the commentary on Genesis by Peter John Olivi, which he (Hall) attributes erroneously to Aquinas himself.

Treating the Chenu as a possible loose rendition of chap. 32 of Olivi’s (not Aquinas’) commentary on Genesis seems a promising lead at first, given especially certain echoes, e.g. “neither overcoming the other, neither yielding” (trans. Hall; cf. Chenu, above), the potential bow-language (flectendo, “bowing [it]”; cf. Chenu on the “bent bow”, above), and so forth. But the most important of these, the former, is, so far as I can tell, a mistranslation, indeed, probably the result of Hall reading Olivi in the light of Chenu, rather than the Latin actually before him (those of you who know Latin better please correct me, as I’m a rank amateur). I give first the Hall, then the Latin, then my own fumbling translation:

‘No longer will you be called Jacob, but Israel. For if you have placed your strength against God,’ by means of violence, that is, he grasped God and fought with God, neither overcoming the other, neither yielding… . ‘And you ask my name, which is marvelous?’ The sense of this can be that here it is said that his name is marvelous, or that his name is marvelous in that it is not comprehensible for us.

Nequaquam Jacob appellabitur nomen tuum, sed Israel. … quia si contra Deum fortis fuisti, per violentiam scilicet detentivarum precum et importunarum pulsationum cum Deo pugnando, ejusque rigorem superando, sive flectendo: quanto magis contra hominess praevalebis? … Cur quaeris nomen meum, quod est mirabile? Sensus potest esse, quod … mirabile est nomen ejus: vel quod nomen suum est mirabile, quod non est nobis comprehensibile.

Your name shall be no longer Jacob, but Israel. … because if you have been strong against God, contending with God and overcoming his rigidity or [at least] bending/bowing [it] through violence, namely [etc.] … Why do you ask for my name, which is wonderful? The sense can be [either] that … his name is Wonderful, or that his name is wonderful, i.e. to us incomprehensible.

Translated in this way, the phrase “neither overcoming the other, neither yielding”, so reminiscent of Chenu’s “muscles taut, neither yielding”, simply vanishes. Add to this the lack of any reference in the Latin here to Jacob’s being “taut, like a bent bow” (here it is the Lord whose muscular inflexibility is ultimately bent or bowed by Jacob), the lack (in the rest of this chapter, at least) of any interest in the work of the theologian specifically, or his/her grapplings with the limitations of human language, so central to the passage quoted by Chenu, etc., and this, too, falls away as probably a false lead.

This is not to say that there is not some other passage in this pseudo-Thomistic commentary on Genesis or even Aquinas himself (or some other Father) to match the Chenu, or even something other than the Chenu that I should be trying to trace back to a source in Thomas, but only that it doesn’t seem to be this one (chap. 32 of the Olivian commentary on Genesis), despite this suggestive juxtaposition (but also misleading translation?) in Hall. Perhaps the fragments of the original French I give above will help someone else search Index Thomisticus more effectively than I have done.

I would be grateful for any further input.

Steve Perisho
Theology/Humanities/Fine Arts Librarian
Seattle Pacific University

Update on 2008-01-04 20:33 by Steve Perisho

I have now the original French (pp. 47-48 of La théologie est–elle une science?) before me, and see that Chenu neither places these words in quotation marks nor makes of them (as does the English translation) an indented block quotation.  (Elsewhere in La théologie est–elle une science? he abides by the usual conventions.)

His introduction to them, though, is pretty explicit: “Dans une allégorie très suggestive, saint Thomas décrit symboliquement l’affrontement du théologien au mystère de Dieu. Evoquant l’épisode de la lutte de Jacob avec l’ange (Genèse, chap. 32), il commente:”, etc.  “Genèse, chap. 32” could be invoking the commentary by Olivi, but is more likely a reference to the biblical text itself.

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!

RIP: B.-G. Guyot, OP

This sad news in, from Fr. Adriano Oliva, OP, president of the Leonine Commission, in Paris:

Chère Amie, Cher Ami,
Il y a une heure, dans le couvent de l'Annonciation à Paris, le P. Betrand Georges Guyot s'est endormi dans le Seigneur. Il était dans sa 87ème année, 62ème de vie religieuse. Le 12 avril j'avais parlé avec lui et il se sentait très fatigué, sans savoir pourquoi. Il était serein et joyeux comme nous l'avons connu. Dès que nous connaîtrons le jour de ses obsèques je vous le communiquerai.

Amitiés, Adriano Oliva.

Fr Guyot was one of the hard-working members of the Commission for many, many years, and author of critical articles on medieval manuscripts, particularly those pertaining to philosophy and theology.

The work of Fr Leo Elders SVD

This is just in from Holland: the updated bibliography of Prof. Leo Elders, probably best known to the English-speaking readers of Thomistica for his books on the metaphysics, philosophical theology, natural philosophyand most recently the ethics of St. Thomas.

Leo Elders was born in Enkhuizen (Netherlands), studied philosophy and theology at the houses of study of the Societas Verbi Divini in the Netherlands and Germany and was ordained in 1953. His Ph.D. dissertation, begun under Werner Jäger at Harvard University and completed at the University of Montréal (Canada) under Vianney Décarie in 1959 was published as Aristotle’s theory of the One. A commentary on Book X of the Metaphysics in 1961.

Fr. Elders taught from 1959 until 1971 at Nanzan University, Nagoya, Japan, where he served as dean of the philosophy department and rector of the Major Seminary of Nagoya (Theology Faculty of the University Nanzan). He worked for the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith from 1971-1976 while teaching at the Angelicum and the Lateran University in Rome. Since 1976 fr. Elders is a member of the faculty of the Major Seminary Rolduc (Netherlands). He has been visiting professor at the Center for Thomistic Studies in Houston from 1981-1987 and holds the chair of metaphysics since 1988 at the Faculté de philosophie comparée in Paris and the chair of the history of philosophy at the Gustav-Siewerth-Akademie in Germany. Here one can find a more complete CV.

In addition to the books mentionned above, his current list of publications numbers 306 titles covering almost every aspect of Aquinas’s philosophy and theology. Here is the complete list. Among the recent titles are: ‘Tomás de Aquino, comentador de San Pablo’ (2006), ‘Présence de saint Jérôme dans les oeuvres de Thomas d’Aquin’ (2005), ‘La teología de Santo Tomás de la imagen de Dios en el hombre’ (2004), ‘St. Thomas Aquinas on education and instruction’ (2003), ‘La paternité de Dieu dans la théologie spirituelle de saint Thomas d’Aquin’ (2001), ‘Il dialogo in San Tommaso’ (2001), ‘La relation entre l’Ancienne et la Nouvelle Alliance selon saint Thomas’ (2000).

Basic bibliography for the Lectura romana from Santiago Argüello

I wanted to post this a while back, but forgot!

Santiago Argüello has been working on some texts from the Lectura romana this past year at PIMS in Toronto, and he kindly send along the following bibliographical notes, listing the basic bibliography for the Lectura:

Biographers of St. Thomas referring the fact

Bernardus Gui , Legenda sancti Thomae Aquinatis, in Angelico F errua , S. Thomae Aquinatis vitae fontes praecipuae, Edizioni Dominicane, Alba, 1968, 127-95: vid. 189.

Ptolomeus de Lucca , Historia ecclesiastica nova, in A. F errua , op. cit., 355-69: vid. 368.

Torrell , Jean-Pierre, Initiation à saint Thomas d’Aquin. Sa personne et son oeuvre, Éditions Universitaires (Fribourg, Suisse) – Éditions du Cerf (Paris), 1993: vid. 66-9 and 210.

Weisheipl , James Athanasius, Friar Thomas d’Aquino. His Life, Thought, and Works, The Catholic University of America Press, Washington, D. C., 1983 (with Corrigenda and Addenda): vid. 216-7 and 359.

Bibliography referring the fact

Bataillon , Louis Jacques, “Bulletin d’histoire des doctrines médiévales. Le treizième siècle: Th omas d’Aquin”, Revue des sciences philosophiques et théologiques, 73 (1989), 584-604; especially: 590-1.

Biffi , Inos, “Il Co mmento di S. Tommaso alle «Sentenze» di Pietro Lombardo”, Sacra Doctrina, 46,5 (2001), 11-122: repr. of his “Introduzione generale” to italian ed. of the Scriptum (2000).

Dondaine , Antoine, “Autor de secrétaires de saint Thomas”, in Paul Wilpert (ed.) Miscellanea Medievalia, Band 2: “Die Metaphysik im Mittelalter”, Walter de Gruyter & Co., Berlin, 1963, 745-54. ————- This is the first time in which is announced the existence of the texts in the margins of the Ms. Lincoln College.

——. “ Hayen A. S. Thomas a-t-il édité deux fois son Commentaire sur le livre des Sentences. – Rech. théol. anc. et méd. IX (1937), pp. 219-236”, Bulletin Thomiste, 6 (Anées XVII-XIX: 1940-2), 100-8.

Hayen, A., “S. Thomas a-t-il édité deux fois son Commentaire sur le livre des Sentences?”, Recherches de théologie ancienne et médiévale, 9 (1937), 219-236.

Mandonnet, Pierre, Des écrits authentiques de saint Thomas d’Aquin, Imprimerie de l’oeuvre de Saint-Paul, Fribourg (Suisse), 1910 (2 ^e éd. Revue et corrigée).

Merriell, Juvenal, To the Image of the Trinity. A Study in the Development of Aquinas’ Teaching, Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, Toronto, 1990.

Motte, A.-R., “ Dondaine , A., O. P. Saint Thomas a-t-il disputé à Rome la question des «Attributs Divins»? (I Sent., d. 2, q. 1, a. 3). – Notes et Comm. du Bull. Thom., I (1931-33), pp. 171*-182*”, Bulletin Thomiste, 4 (Anées XI-XIII: 1934-6), 135-6.

Ramírez, Santiago, “Introducción general” a Santo Tomás de Aquino , Suma teológica, B.A.C., Madrid, 1947, 1*-237*: vid. 33* and 183*-4*.

Torrell , J.-P., “Introduction” to Boyle , L.E., Facing History…, especially xviii-xxiv.

Vansteenkiste, P. Clemente, “ Boyle , Leonard E., A.P., «Alia lectura fratris thome» . MSt 1983 (45) 418-429”, Rassegna di Letteratura Tomistica (Nuova serie del «Bulletin Thomiste» - Vol. XXXI), 19 (1986: letteratura dell’anno 1983), p. 40, n. 73.

“ Boyle , Leonard E., The setting of the Summa Theologiae of Saint Thomas . (The Etienne Gilson series, 5). Toronto Pontif. Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1982”, Rassegna di Letteratura Tomistica (Nuova serie del «Bulletin Thomiste» - Vol. XXX), 18 (1985: letteratura dell’anno 1982), 45-6.

“Dondaine , H.-F., Alia lectura fratris Thome? (Super 1 Sent.)”. MSt 1980 (42) 308-336.

Thanks for your help, Santiago.

Someday I'll see this painting in person

Take that, Averroes!A buddy of mine just returned from a conference he attended in Florence, and, a few days later, he received this picture from someone he met at the conference. I spent a whole semester in Florence in 1981 during my junior year in college, and never actually went into the Spanish Chapel at Santa Maria Novella. It goes without saying that, now that I’ve devoted my academic life to studying Thomas, I won’t let that chance slip away again.

Fr. Joseph Owens, CSSR, dies in Toronto, Canada (Oct. 30, 2005)

Some very sad news from Toronto. Fr. Joseph Owens, CSSR, one of the very first students at the Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies in Toronto, Canada, has died, at the age of 97 years old. I was blessed to have Fr Owens for two classes in Toronto, on Aristotle’s De anima and on the Nicomachean Ethics. He would come to class with only one thing: the small Oxford edition of the relevant work of Aristotle, in Greek. Nothing else. He would perch his reading classes on his forehead (never on top of his head; how did those glasses stay put?), and explain some point, citing the book, chapter, and often even the Becker number, of Aristotle’s text. He was gentle and clear, always a role-model of excellent scholarship and even better collegiality.

The good people at Owens’s beloved Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies have posted an obituary article on their web site. Here is the obituary, from the Toronto Globe and Mail (November 2, 2005):

REV. JOSEPH OWENS C.Ss.R. At the Providence Health Centre, Toronto on Sunday, October 30, 2005, in his 98th year and the 77th year of his Religious Life. Father Owens was ordained in 1933. Born in Saint John, New Brunswick on April 17, 1908, son of Louis Owens and Josephine Quinn. Father Joseph is survived by two nieces, Anne (David) Cole, Katherine (Ralph) Furness and by his nephews, Bryson (Jacqueline) Eldridge, William (Trina) Eldridge, Robert Eldridge and Gerard (Susan) Eldridge. He served in parishes in Saskatchewan and British Columbia and did graduate studies in Toronto at the Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, and taught philosophy to younger members of his Community, until he received his Licentiate in Mediaeval Studies in 1946. Father Owens then continued to study at the Institute while also lecturing in philosophy in Redemptorist houses of study. In 1951 he received his Doctorate in Mediaeval Studies summa cum laude from the Institute and became a professor of philosophy at the Pontifical Institute in 1954. In medieval philosophy he taught and wrote extensively on the philosophy of St. Thomas, especially in the areas of metaphysics (the study of ultimate reality), the philosophy of the human person, the philosophy of knowledge, and ethics. Father Owens wrote nine philosophy books and almost a hundred and fifty articles and forty book reviews. In 1973, having passed the usual retirement age, he continued to publish and teach part-time for another twenty-five years. Friends may call at St. Patrick’s Church, 141 McCaul Street, Toronto, on Thursday, November 3rd from 2 p.m. to 4 p.m. Mass of the Thanksgiving will be concelebrated on Thursday evening, November 3rd at 7 o’clock. Funeral Mass will be held at St. Peter ‘s Church, Saint John, New Brunswick on Monday, November 7th followed by interment in Calvary Cemetery. Funeral arrangements entrusted to the Rosar-Morrison Funeral Home & Chapel (416) 924-1408.

I’m sure that there are many who have strong remembrances of Fr Owens. Please leave comments…