New book by R.J. Matava on Báñez and physical premotion

R.J. Matava has published a book with Brill entitled Divine Causality and Human Free Choice: Domingo Báñez, Physical Premotion and the Controversy de Auxiliis Revisited. Here's the publisher's description:

In Divine Causality and Human Free Choice, R.J. Matava explains the idea of physical premotion defended by Domingo Báñez, whose position in the Controversy de Auxiliis has been typically ignored in contemporary discussions of providence and freewill. Through a close engagement with untranslated primary texts, Matava shows Báñez’s relevance to recent debates about middle knowledge. Finding the mutual critiques of Báñez and Molina convincing, Matava argues that common presuppositions led both parties into an insoluble dilemma. However, Matava also challenges the informal consensus that Lonergan definitively resolved the controversy. Developing a position independently advanced by several recent scholars, Matava explains how the doctrine of creation entails a position that is more satisfactory both philosophically and as a reading of Aquinas.

For the book page at Brill, go here. To purchase it at Amazon, go here. No doubt this volume by Matava will be a very important contribution to, among other things, the debates over physical promotion and the Congregatio de Auxiliis and their history.

Matava, who received his Ph.D. from the University of St. Andrews, is assistant professor of theology at the Christendom Graduate School.

Summer Program in Norcia on St. Thomas's Commentary on Hebrews

Since 2012, the Albertus Magnus Center for Scholastic Studies, in cooperation with the Benedictine Monks of Norcia, has offered a two-week summer theology program at the birthplace of SS. Benedict and Scholastica.

This year, for their fifth summer, the Center has planned a truly marvelous program: “The Transcendent Christ: St. Paul’s Letter to the Hebrews.” Participants will study St. Thomas Aquinas’s Commentary on Hebrews, exploring its rich doctrine on Christology, priesthood, sacrifice, sacraments, and worship. The Epistle offers the opportunity to explore the mystery of grace in its source, Jesus Christ, the Head of the Mystical Body, and how the excellence of the work of Christ has a threefold extension: to the whole of creation, to the rational creature, and to the justification of the saints. Seminars and lectures culminate in a full-scale scholastic disputation, with arguments offered on both sides by participants and an authoritative determination given by the appointed magister.

This will be the first year that I will be on the faculty of the summer program. Other faculty members include Fr. Cassian Folsom, OSB, Fr. Thomas Crean, OP, John Joy, Christopher Owens, Daniel Lendman, and Br. Evagrius Hayden, OSB.

The goal of the AMCSS is to offer a meaningful academic experience of scholastic theology in its original fullness: studying Sacred Scripture, St. Thomas Aquinas, and the Fathers of the Church, in the peaceful and enchanting setting of a medieval Italian town, imbued with the spiritual and liturgical life of the Benedictine monks (daily High Mass in the usus antiquior, fully chanted monastic office), and all the culinary delights of the prosciutto and black truffle capital of Italy — in other words, a Catholic feast for mind, soul, and body. This year the course dates include Norcia’s festive celebration of the feast of St. Benedict on July 11th. Pilgrimages to the nearby towns of Assisi and Cascia are included in the cost, with the option of participating in a weekend trip to Rome at the end.

The dates for the Summer program are July 10–24, 2016. Most remarkably, the cost for tuition, room, and half-board (a light breakfast and a five-course Italian dinner every day) is 900 Euros. Tuition includes a hardcover bilingual edition of the Commentary on Hebrews as well as any other course materials. A background in academic theology is not required. (Students working towards degrees may request a summary of the program with faculty credentials and a certificate of completion that they may submit for possible course credit elsewhere.)

For more information, please click here. I recommend exploring the site and letting other folks know about it. The AMCSS has a great thing going, and each year they seem to gain momentum. In addition to the (relatively few) departments of theology out there that engage seriously with the great medieval minds, we also need grassroots initiatives that offer a lively engagement with scholastic authors in a Catholic environment such as those authors enjoyed and presumed. For this, Norcia is an ideal setting.

S.M.A.R.T. Call for Papers

The Society for Medieval and Renaissance Thomism (S.M.A.R.T.) is planning a session for the 2016 meeting of the American Catholic Philosophical Association, San Francisco, CA, 3-6 November 2016. It is looking for papers which address the topic of “being as first known” but is accepting papers on all aspects of Thomism from 1274 to the publication of the Carmelite Cursus Theologiae (1631-1701).

Please send papers and direct enquiries to Domenic D’Ettore at ddettore[at]marian[dot]edu. Papers and abstracts received by 15 May will receive full consideration. Selection preference will be given to complete papers. A final version of the paper will be required by 1 September in order to facilitate a response paper which will be given during the conference session.

A Word about the Word - DSPT Aquinas Lecture 2016

Fr. Olivier-Thomas Venard, OP, Professor of New Testament and Vice Director of the École Biblique et Archéologique Française de Jérusalem, will deliver the 2016 Aquinas Lecture at the Dominican School of Philosophy & Theology in Berkeley, California. In his presentation, “Life, Language and Christ: A Thomistic Approach,” Venard will posit that Aquinas sees a deep analogy, even a participation, between the Word and our words. The event, to be held Tuesday, February 23rd, at 7:30 pm PST (10:30 pm EST), will be available via live-streaming.

Fabro Symposium at CUA, April 1-2

Father Dreyer of the Institute of the Incarnate Word has announced that there will be a Fabro Symposium at CUA on April 1-2.  It looks great.  You can find more information about it here:

 http://www.iveamerica.org/images/fabro/institute-of-the-incarnate-word-Fabro-Symposium-Poster.jpg

A trove of digitized Garrigou-Lagrange texts

Not long ago there were not (as far as I know) many of Garrigou-Lagrange's writings available electronically online. Last month I discovered that there are now over a dozen available at the Internet Archive. They are all English translations, but for those whose French or Latin is poor or non-existent, this is quite a resource. Obviously, it will also be useful for professors who would like to incorporate some of Garrigou's texts in their classes.

There are now a total of fourteen texts up. You can find them here. Also included is the hitherto hard to obtain English translation of Garrigou's famous (for some, notorious) 1946 Angelicum article "La nouvelle théologie: oú va-t-elle?" Here's what's available as of this posting:

Beatitude: A Commentary on St. Thomas' Theological summa, Ia IIae, qq. 1-54

Christian Perfection & Contemplation

God: His Existence and His Nature (vol. 1)

God: His Existence and His Nature (vol. 2)

The Love of God and the Cross of Jesus (vol. 1)

The Love of God and the Cross of Jesus (vol. 2)

The Mother of The Savior and Our Interior Life

Our Saviour and His Love for Us

Predestination

The Last Writings

The Priest in Union with Christ 

The Three Ages of the Interior Life (vol. 1)

The Three Ages of the Interior Life (vol. 2)

“Where is the New Theology Leading Us?”

There were two other entries that I did not include in this list because I'm not sure what they are. They are supposed to be an index and a bibliography to The Three Ages of the Interior Life. When I clicked on the links, however, I was led to blank pages. 

We certainly owe a debt of gratitude to whoever made the effort to put all of this up.

New translation of Dignitatis humanae

Thomistica.net contributor Michael Pakaluk has produced a new draft translation of the Second Vatican Council's declaration on religious liberty Dignitatis humanae. December 7 was the fiftieth anniversary of the document's promulgation by Paul VI, and December 8 was the fiftieth anniversary of the Council's closing.

Michael tells me that his main goal was to produce an instrument for accurate study. He believes that his translation better reveals Dignitatis humanae's classical roots and the care with which the document was written. He welcomes any corrections and suggestions for improvement.

You can find Michael's translation here on his Academia.edu page.

Thomism and hermeneutic violence: five Dominicans respond to Adriano Oliva

A few weeks ago on Thomistica.net one of our contributors, Tom Osborne, shared some brief thoughts on Adriano Oliva's new book Amours. Oliva, a Dominican, is the president of the Leonine Commission. In Amours he argues for a number of controversial theses, including the moral goodness of some homosexual acts and the permissibility of the reception of communion by divorced and civilly remarried Catholics. He enlists Aquinas in making these arguments.

Prior to Osborne's negative evaluation there was also a highly critical review by Thibaud Collin in La Croix, which you can find here. One of Collin's criticisms has to do with Oliva's reading -- or radical misreading, rather -- of ST, Ia-IIae, q. 31, a. 7. His comments are sharp:

Une telle argumentation repose sur des contresens qu’il convient de manifester. Il semble y avoir ici une lecture sélective du texte de saint Thomas. On rompt la cohérence interne de la doctrine thomasienne pour mieux ensuite piocher ce dont on a besoin afin de reconstruire sa propre théorie, plus proche de celle de Michel Foucault que celle du saint dominicain.

Now, five Dominicans -- Bernhard Blankenhorn, Catherine Joseph Droste, Efrem Jindráček, Dominic Legge, and Thomas Joseph White -- have responded to Oliva at First Things. Like Collin, they also charge Oliva with a radical misreading of Aquinas (among other things). You can find their comments here. I can only (not without sadness) concur with their judgments.

New Collection of Essays on Aquinas’s De malo

There is a new collection of essays from Cambridge University Press titled Aquinas’s ‘Disputed Questions on Evil’: A Critical Guide.

Chapters and contributors include:

1. Metaphysical Themes in De malo, 1 John F. Wippel
2. Weakness and Willful Wrongdoing in Aquinas’s De malo Bonnie Kent and Ashley Dressel
3. Free Choice Tobias Hoffmann and Peter Furlong
4. Venial Sin and the Ultimate End Steven J. Jensen
5. The Promise and Pitfalls of Glory: Aquinas on the Forgotten Vice of Vainglory Rebecca Konyndyk DeYoung
6. The Goodness and Evil of Objects and Ends Thomas M. Osborne, Jr
7. Evil and Moral Failure in De malo Carl N. Still and Darren E. Dahl
8. Attention, Intentionality, and Mind-reading in Aquinas’s De malo, q. 16, a. 8 Therese Scarpelli Cory
9. Evil as Privation: The Neoplatonic Background to Aquinas’s De malo, 1 Fran O’Rourke
10. Moral Luck and the Capital Vices in De malo: Gluttony and Lust M. V. Dougherty

From the Publisher's blurb:

This collection of ten, specially commissioned new essays, the first book-length English-language study of Disputed Questions on Evil, examines the most interesting and philosophically relevant aspects of Aquinas’s work, highlighting what is distinctive about it and situating it in relation not only to Aquinas’s other works but also to contemporary philosophical debates in metaphysics, ethics, and philosophy of action. The essays also explore the history of the work’s interpretation.

Publisher’s page is here.

New book on Aquinas's philosophy by Stephen Brock

Stephen L. Brock, professor of medieval philosophy at the Pontificia Università della Santa Croce in Rome, has just published a book entitled The Philosophy of Saint Thomas Aquinas: A Sketch. Here is the book description from Cascade Books (an imprint of Wipf and Stock):

If Saint Thomas Aquinas was a great theologian, it is in no small part because he was a great philosopher. And he was a great philosopher because he was a great metaphysician. In the twentieth century, metaphysics was not much in vogue, among either theologians or even philosophers; but now it is making a comeback, and once the contours of Thomas's metaphysical vision are glimpsed, it looks like anything but a museum piece. It only needs some dusting off. Many are studying Thomas now for the answers that he might be able to give to current questions, but he is perhaps even more interesting for the questions that he can raise regarding current answers: about the physical world, about human life and knowledge, and (needless to say) about God. This book is aimed at helping those who are not experts in medieval thought to begin to enter into Thomas's philosophical point of view. Along the way, it brings out some aspects of his thought that are not often emphasized in the current literature, and it offers a reading of his teaching on the divine nature that goes rather against the drift of some prominent recent interpretations.

This sounds like an important new contribution. Personally, I am looking forward to seeing what in Brock's reading of Aquinas's teaching on the divine nature goes "against the drift of some prominent recent interpretations."

You can find out more information and purchase Brock's book here or here.

Aquinas and Whitehead

The managing editor of Open Theology, Katarzyna Tempczyk, has written Thomistica.net to inform us of a special issue of the journal on Whitehead and Aquinas. The contributions come from papers delivered this past summer at the 10th International Whitehead Conference at the Center for Process Studies in Claremont, California. The special issue is edited by Joseph Bracken, who also writes an introduction to the papers. All the papers can be accessed for free at the journal site.

Open Theology is a peer-reviewed open-access journal published by De Gruyter. If you would like further info on the journal, including submission guidelines, go here.