A Book on St. Albert’s Moral Philosophy

Stanley Cunningham has written an important book for anyone interested in Aquinas's moral teaching, and a fortiori St. Albert's own moral teaching. His Reclaiming Moral Agency: The Moral Philosophy of Albert the Great was published in late 2008. The people at CUA Press have provided a PDF file, from which I scraped the following description:

This book provides a comprehensive analysis of the moral philosophy Albert the Great (1200-1280)—the first and only such undertaking in English. It lays out what is, with rare exceptions, an unknown, ignored, or poorly-understood aspect of Albert's humanism. It also fills in a major lacuna in both the history of medieval philosophy and the wider history of moral theory.

Prior to Albert, most medieval thinkers refused to acknowledge the very existence of natural moral goodness. They believed that one could not perform good acts without God's infused graces. Albert was the first to establish in a systematic fashion the value of naturally-acquired virtue, natural law, and the virtue-dependent states of friendship and natural happiness, and their importance in a human lifetime. To achieve this, he undertook the elaboration of a rigorous moral philosophy.

These findings stand in contrast to an old cliché that Albert the Great was a scholar of enormous erudition, an impressive assembler of learning and scientific information, but deficient when it came to elaborating a systematic philosophical or theological theory of his own. This book deflates that myth. It demonstrates that Albert was very concerned to produce a rigorously organized philosophy of moral goodness, and for the most part succeeded in that aim.

This book opens with a comprehensive introduction that is unprecedented in Albertinian scholarship. It uncovers certain parallels between the career of modern virtue-theory ethics and Albert's historical situation in such a way as to help the modern reader understand developments in the mid-thirteenth century. This book also makes possible a closer study of Thomas Aquinas's material dependence upon Albert's ethical concepts.

Stanley Cunningham is professor emeritus at the University of Windsor.

Virginia Brown of PIMS (1940-2009)

Generations of students at Toronto's Centre for Medieval Studies and the Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies took a course in the editing of Medieval Latin texts, taught by Virginia Brown. Dr Brown died on July 4, 2009, after battling pancreatic cancer. Here is the e-mail message her husband circulated:

I'm sorry to write to you all collectively but I wanted you to know the sad news immediately. My wife Virginia passed away in her sleep yesterday, July 4, at around 4.30 from the complications of bilio-pancreatic cancer. She was 68. She had been suffering from abiliary blockages since the summer of 2007 and was diagnosed with cancer on April 30 of this year. At no point since her diagnosis did she experience any pain, and she kept her sweetness and bright spirit to the end. She will be buried with my family in Valley Forge, Pennsylvania.

I am grateful to so many of you who in these last few weeks sent notes, emails, cards, flowers and your thoughts and prayers. I am particularly grateful that she was able to enjoy the many honors she received in the last few years, the two conferences in her honor at Ohio State and UCLA, the Festschrift edited by Frank Coulson and Anna Grotans, the Medieval Academy teaching award, the honorary citizenship of Benevento and the ceremony in honor of her work on Beneventan script at the abbey of Montecassino last October. She was most grateful for the moving collection of reminisces and tributes from her PIMS students put together by Aden Kumler and Magda Hayton, which arrived a few weeks ago.

Ginny expressed to me her wish that, in lieu of flowers, contributions be sent to the Library of the Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies in Toronto (http://www.pims.ca) or to support the Virginia Brown Fellowship at the Center for Epigraphical and Paleographical Studies at the Ohio State University (http://epigraphy.osu.edu).

Jim Hankins

Though the subject of her famous "The Edition of Medieval Latin Texts" course was the Franciscan, Thomas of York's Sapientiale, her personal academic interest was especially the life and liturgy of Monte Cassino and its Beneventan script and texts. Please God may she be meeting up with the blessed monks of Monte Cassino now—as well as one of its former oblates.

Brepols Publishers celebrate St. Anselm with a discount

A current project has me studying St. Anselm's doctrine of the will, so I was happy to get an e-mail from Brepols Publishers announcing a 25% discount on their holdings related to him and his world. Here is their text:

On the occasion of the 900th anniversary of the death of Anselm of Canterbury (c.1033-1109), Brepols Publishers are delighted to offer a broad range of titles at a special 25% discount, unless otherwise stated. The selected titles are related to the world of Anselm of Canterbury, his thoughts and ideas, his contemporaries, the medieval society he lived in, and so on. The books are classified into five groups: Medieval Philosophy & Theology, Medieval Church History, General Works & Studies on the Middle Ages, the series Civicima, Latin Sources & Medieval Sources in Translation, and Studies in Medieval Art History.

We wish to remind you that this special offer is valid until 30 September 2009. The discount is not applicable on new titles (marked with « NEW »). Additionally, we are offering free shipping for all orders with a total value exceeding 100 euro (after discount). The prices on the leaflet do not include the discount. To download the leaflet click here.

Of course, Brepols's books are "high-end," to say the least, so it's nice to be at a university that has standing orders for their catalog. But if you need to have dominion over a particular text, this is a good way to do it.

New President of PAST

On June 13, 2009 Pope Benedict XVI has appointed Mons. Lluís Clavell of the Prelature of Opus Dei as the new President of the Pontifical Academy of Saint Thomas Aquinas (PAST). He is the third president since the reform of the Academy in 1999 by Pope John Paul II by way of the Motu Proprio Inter munera academiarum. The previous presidents were Edward Kaczynski O.P. (2005-2009) and Abelardo Lobato O.P. (1999-2005).

Professor Lluís Clavell (Barcelona, 1941) holds the chair of metaphysics at the Pontifical University of the Holy Cross, Rome.

Update to Albert the Great Bibliography

All-around superman, Jörgen Vijgen, has updated his Albert the Great Bibliography, and has sent me an updated PDF of the same.

More Albert news to follow.

Boston Colloquy in Historical Theology for Summer 2009

By way of Boyd Taylor Coolman, the line-up for this summer's Boston Colloquy in Historical Theology, which will run Friday and Saturday, July 31-August 1, 2009.

Patristic

• Robert Wilken, University of Virginia, "The Nature of Historical Theology"
• Charles Stang, Harvard Divinity School, "Pseudo-Dionysius"
• Steven Hildebrand, Franciscan University of Steubenville, "Basil the Great's Trinitarian Theology"
• Ute Possekel, Holy Cross Greek Orthodox, "Ephrem the Syrian"

Medieval

• Stephen F. Brown, Boston College, "University Sermons on Lombard's Sentences"
• Paul Rorem, Princeton Theological Seminary, "Hugh of St. Victor"
• Giulio Silano, Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies, "Gratian and the Theologians"

More information can be found on the organization's website.

Upcoming conference: Renewing the Face of the Earth: The Church and the Order of Creation (St. Paul, MN)

From the St. Paul Seminary School of Divinity (at the University of St. Thomas in St. Paul, Minnesota), comes a call for papers (PDF) for their conference, “Renewing the Face of the Earth: The Church and the Order of Creation,” to be held in St. Paul on October 29-31, 2009. Here is the announcement:

And God saw everything that he had made, and behold, it was very good.

It would be an understatement to say that the natural environment is a current topic of concern in contemporary culture. And yet, though many may share in the concern, little work has been done to arrive at a common framework for considering possible solutions.

While a myriad of practical proposals have been aired in the public sector, this conference emerges from the conviction that more fundamental theological questions lie at the heart of the concern for our care of the earth, questions which the Catholic intellectual tradition is uniquely equipped to address: What is responsible stewardship? What is the meaning, value and destiny of created goods? How does one situate the dignity of the human person vis a vis created things? And are there distinctive Catholic features to any authentic response?

The aim of the conference is to consider the significance of grasping anew the Catholic theological and philosophical principles which may be drawn upon to illuminate the problem o f the environment. We invite papers that bring the wisdom of our own intellectual heritage, especially that of St. Thomas Aquinas, to articulate an adequate vision of responsible stewardship, one that is coherent, meaningful and faithful.

The conference will be held at the St. Paul Seminary School of Divinity in St. Paul, Minnesota. Paper proposals should be sent to Dr. Deborah Savage at pdsavage@stthomas.edu by June 1, 2009.

As the announcement indicates, there is a certain forefronting of the doctrine of Aquinas. The conference’s website is here.

Philosophy posting at Wyoming Catholic College

The people at the Wyoming Catholic College have a philosophy posting for this coming fall:

Wyoming Catholic College seeks to hire a full-time professor of Philosophy, to start teaching September 2009.  The applicant shall be knowledgeable in the philosophia perennis or classical philosophical tradition as embodied particularly in the works of Plato, Aristotle, St. Augustine, and St. Thomas Aquinas.  He or she will be capable of teaching the full range of philosophy courses offered at the College, ranging from natural philosophy and metaphysics to ethics and politics (see Catalog, pp. 67-71), and ideally in possession of a doctorate in philosophy.  Because of the College's integrated academic curriculum, the applicant should also be conversant with a wide variety of humanistic and theological texts.  A candidate who demonstrates aptitude for teaching in disciplines other than philosophy (e.g., science, theology) would be considered as a teacher for those areas as well.

The rest of the advertisement can be found here.

How do clean air and committed students sound?

Got 24 theses?

Proh dolor! I’m collecting items for the eventual posting of another 10 reasons I am not a Thomist, and came across this item/issue this morning. As a student of Aquinas in the post-neo-scholastic period I of course knew about the existence of the famous “24 Thomistic theses,” asserted by Pius X in 1914 to be the central theses of the philosophical teaching of Aquinas, especially in the metaphysical realm. My teachers, Fr James Weisheipl and Lawrence Dewan—the former a member of River Forest Thomism, and the latter a clarification, he would argue, of the Toronto Existential Thomistic school—both had referred to the theses now and again, and how the philosophical system “Thomism” was thought to be staked-out by these discrete tenets. Neither required us to think that our learning would fail to be ad normas sancti Thomae, however, should we fail to memorize the theses.

Fine. But it dawned on me today, as I was hunting through various websites, that I’m not sure that I could enunciate even one of those theses! Materially I could, of course, in the sense that I could probably name this or that Thomistic philosophical teaching, and provide some explanation and that, as it happens, a doctrine I mention might be among the 24 theses. But formally speaking, if you were to ask me something like, “what are the ____ (give number here) essential theses of Thomistic metaphysics?” I’d swing and miss.

Not to worry. Today I found some handy resources, in the form of Hugh McDonald’s Latin-based list and translation of the theses, and another rendering of the theses with footnotes to places in Thomas’s works where the thesis is found or substantiated. So at least I know what the theses are now.

Failure to know them certainly does not make someone a non-Thomist, but since I try to know as much as I can about the history of Thomas’s teaching (and its antecedents), it’s clear that I’ve got to do more study on this part of the history of Thomism.

PMR 2009 (October 16-18, 2009)

Scraped from various announcements of this year’s PMR Conference at Villanova University (Philadelphia, PA):

Call for Papers Patristic, Medieval, and Renaissance Studies (PMR) at Villanova University invites you to participate in its 34th International P M R Conference October 16-18, 2009, featuring:

• John Van Engen (University of Notre Dame), author of Sisters and Brothers of the Common Life
• M. Michèle Mulchahey (Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies, Toronto), author of First the Bow is Bent in Study

The P M R committee this year makes a special invitation to scholars from all disciplines in these fields to address our plenary theme: Ora et Labora. Pray and Work.
As always, the PMR makes an OPEN CALL to scholars, institutions, and societies to propose Papers, Panels, or Sponsored Sessions in all areas and topics in LATE ANTIQUITY/PATRISTICS, BYZANTINE STUDIES, MEDIEVAL STUDIES, ISLAMIC STUDIES, JEWISH STUDIES, and RENAISSANCE & REFORMATION STUDIES.

From the Christian liturgy of the hours to Jewish daily liturgy and the Muslim call to prayer, the cultures of Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages marked the movement of the day's work with prayer. The day's frame was set by spiritual exercises of many sorts, and thus the fruits of one's labor, one's work, bore within it something of the fruits of the spirit. What is the relationship between the many forms of work – intellectual, manual, cultural, artistic, social, political, economic – and prayer? Are there points of tension? Resistance? From lectio divina and sacred theology, to scholastic philosophy and canon law; from the Divine Comedy and liturgical plays, to sacred architecture and iconography; from the Holy Roman Empire and educational foundations, to Byzantine schools and monasteries, to Jewish chevruta and Islamic madrasas, this year's thematic "conference within a conference" will explore these questions and more, opening up a fresh, new perspective on perennial questions of matter and spirit, reason and faith, politics and religion.

Deadline for submissions: May 29, 2009
Notice of acceptance will be made by June 30, 2009

For more information please visit the conference’s website.

New books by Chris Kaczor

Chris Kaczor (site) has been busy. He's got two more books out, this time from Sapientia Press of Ave Maria University, on Aquinas on Faith, Hope, and Love and Aquinas On the Cardinal Virtues. Check out this PDF. Perfect for students learning to read Aquinas.

Bernard Lonergan website

One of our most esteemed colleagues here in the Theology Department at Marquette University is Fr Robert Doran, SJ, a student of Bernard Lonergan’s, and together with Frederick Crowe, SJ, an editor of Lonergan’s works. Since he came here he has been working away in an effort to get a website devoted to Lonergan launched, which would house all the digital content of Lonergan that exists (video clips, audio, PDF’s, on and on). Well, that’s been done, and the site is stunning. Take a look at http://www.bernardlonergan.com. All you need do is register on the site (it’s free and easy), and then you can have access to the digital content. Fr Doran has the ambition to make much of Lonergan’s most famous material—and material of direct interest to Thomists—available on the site.