On-line database of Glorieux's "La littérature quodlibétique"

Thanks go to Jörgen Vijgen (what else is new?) for noting Quodlibase, an on-line rendering of Palémon Glorieux’s ground-breaking La littérature quodlibétique de 1260 à 1320 2 vols., (Le Saulchoir: RSPT, 1925; Paris: J. Vrin, 1935 [biblio. info.]). Glorieux scoured the libraries of Europe to come up with what turned out to be a toe-hold into the vast world of quodlibetal literature, the place where “real-world” questions were often addressed to Masters.

Quodlibase lets you into that world. Here is the site’s self-description:

Base de données des Quodlibets théologiques (1230-1350)

Séances extraordinaires de questions disputées, organisées deux fois par an à l’Université de Paris, à l’Avent et pendant le Carême, les Quodlibets permettaient à un public élargi d’interroger les maîtres qui se soumettaient à l”exercice sur toutes sortes de questions. De ce fait, les documents qui retranscrivent ces exercices permettent de saisir la vitalité des débats intellectuels médiévaux.

Quodlibase a pour première matière les répertoires dressés par Palémon Glorieux (1925 et 1935), corrigés et mis à jour en fonction des recherches et éditions de texte menés depuis lors.

Pour la consulter, il est nécessaire de s’identifier. Si vous n’avez encore jamais consulté la base, vous devez vous inscrire en utilisant le formulaire prévu à cet effet.

As the last line notes, you need to register at the site to get access (an instant process).

A “Virtual Library of Christian Philosophy”

The people at Calvin College's Philosophy Department have created an on-line library of papers by well-known Christian philosophers in the Protestant, especially Reformed, tradition. Here is the site's self-description:

Calvin's Philosophy Department houses one of the finest undergraduate philosophy programs in the nation. Calvin's Philosophy Department was the undergraduate and/or teaching home of four American Philosophical Association Presidents—Alvin Plantinga, Nicholas Wolterstorff, William Frankena and O. K. Bouwsma.

At present the Library holds 177 articles, with some of the listed authors having no articles represented, while Alvin Plantinga has twenty. The site's address is: http://www.calvin.edu/academic/philosophy/virtual_library/

More updates at Proyecto DEWAN en Español

Liliana Irizar sent along a reminder that the Spanish-language website devoted to the work of Lawrence Dewan, OP, continues to improve. See the site here.

Update on 2009-07-07 02:28 by Mark Johnson

More news: According to Liliana Irizar, “we are translating Fr. Dewan’s metaphysical lessons (his metaphysics classes). The book will entitled “Lecciones de Metafísica.” The plan is it comes out at the end of this year.”

Documenta Catholica Omnia

This seems to be the mother of all on-line resources for Catholic texts, often in the Latin. I got an e-mail from Poland encouraging me to look at Documenta Catholica Omnia. I’ve only looked at it briefly, but the site has the Bible, Du Cange and Mansi! At the least I’ll bookmark the site, and return for further study.

On Love and Charity: a translation of Aquinas

Peter A. Kwasniewski, Thomas Bolin, O.S.B., and Joseph Bolin, have collaborated to produce a book of translations and notes on St Thomas's teaching on love and charity, as found in his scriptum on the Sentences. Published by CUA Press, here is an abbreviated description:

The Commentary on the Sentences of Peter Lombard has suffered almost total neglect among translators. Such neglect is surprising, considering that the massive Commentary is not only Aquinas's first systematic engagement with all the philosophical and theological topics on which he expended his energy over the span of a short career but is also characterized by an exuberance and elaborateness seldom found in his subsequent writings. The present volume, containing all the major texts on love and charity, makes available what is by far the most extensive translation ever to be made from the Commentary with the added benefit that the better part of the translation is based on the (as yet unpublished) critical edition of the Leonine Commission. The collection of texts from all four books has a tight thematic coherence that makes it invaluable to students of Thomas's moral philosophy, moral theology, and philosophical theology. In addition, the inclusion of parallel texts from Aquinas's first (Parisian) Commentary as well as from his second (Roman) attempt at a commentary--the recently rediscovered Lectura Romana--makes this edition all the more valuable for those who wish to track the internal development of Thomas's thinking.

The printed volume is supplemented by a web-based document containing a fuller introduction, "webnotes," and a bibliography, which you can get here.

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.