New Issue of the European Journal for the Study of Thomas Aquinas

THE most recent issue of The European Journal for the Study of Thomas Aquinas (Vol. 38, issue 1) includes three articles of possible interest to readers of this site.

Matthew Dugandzic’s paper, “The Passio Corporalis and the Passio Animalis in Aquinas,” argues that even though Thomas omits discussing the distinction between the passio corporalis and the passio animalis in his “lengthiest and most mature treatment of the passions, the so-called ‘Treatise on the Passions’ in the Prima Secundae,” it is actually very important, especially forAquinas’ understanding of Christ’s suffering. One important point Dugandzic raises is that passio animalis cannot be confounded with a passio animae as doing so would imply that pain is a passio animalis. Were that the case, however, the conclusion that Christ did not truly suffer would seem to follow necessarily, Dugandzic argues. Some authors think that the mature Aquinas came to think that the “corporalis-animalis” distinction was not helpful. Dugandzic rather convincingly argues, however, that it was not the case that he came to think of it as unhelpful. To the contrary, Thomas especially uses it to enumerate and analyze the ways in which Christ suffered and, for that reason, although it is not found in the Treatise on the Passions, it is found in other later works.

Dugandzic does, however, grant that Aquinas refined his view of the passion of pain  in order to refute Hilary, who had argued that Christ did not feel pain. In short, the later Thomas thought of the pain Jesus endured as a passion of the sensitive appetite and not just as a sensation, which enabled the Angelic Doctor to highlight the intensity of His suffering. Dugandzic’s related discussion of the hylomorphic unity of body and soul and the proper way of understanding the passio animalis and the passio corporalis on this point is certainly worthwhile.

In the article, “Aquinas on Relations: A Topic Which Aquinas Himself Perceives as Foundational to Theology,” Whitfield rightly points out that Thomas believed the topic of relations is necessary for providing the foundations of many important topics (e.g., the Divine persons, creation, and the Incarnation). Whitfield especially focuses on the topic of mixed relations in this article, though, because of its importance in understanding the way all things are ordered to God. The article is divided into two parts. The first provides an overview of the “nature and types of relation as understood by Aquinas and inherited from Aristotle,” and the second explores mixed relations in particular since they are the relations that must exist between God and creatures.

In the first part, Whitfield does an excellent job of providing an overview of relation, which Aquinas described as an accident that affects the subject intrinsically “whose proper being consists in being toward another.” In other words, it is different from absolute accidents (such as the color of a substance) that pertain to the subject itself because it inheres in another. Whitfield ably produces pertinent quotations from Emery and Svoboda to explain this in further detail. He then discusses the conditions of a relation (namely, that there must be a subject, term, and foundation of the relation) and the types of relations (real and logical).

In his treatment of mixed relations, after admitting  that relations are usually symmetrical--“either both being real (as in the case of fatherhood and sonship) or both logical (as with a man’s theoretical future fatherhood and the corresponding future sonship/daughterhood),”--Whitfield explains why there must be asymmetrical (i.e., mixed) relations between the Creator and the creature. In this case, “the relation from one side is an accident really inhering in one extreme, while the corresponding relation with regards to the other extreme exists only in the mind.” Interestingly, Thomas likens mixed relations to the relationship between knowledge and the known object. Whitfield goes on to provide a cogent explanation of the reason why creatures have a real relation to God even though God only has a logical relation to creatures. After providing some important clarifications pertaining to relations of reason by contrasting Aquinas with Ockham, he concludes by emphasizing the importance and well-nigh indispensability of understanding relation in order to read Aquinas well.

In “Thomas Aquinas on Human Beings as Image of God,” Henk J.M. Schoot makes use of a manipulated photograph known as “The Missing Person” to explore St. Thomas’s teaching regarding human beings being made in the Image of (the Triune) God. The photograph is the product of Ger van Elk who was a member of the conceptual art movement, that Schoot explains was intended to make the invisible visible. Given that creatures come to know God through His effects and that man is a special kind of effect since he is made in His image, it is understandable that Schoot thought of using the photograph to discuss Thomas’s teaching on the image of God in man. For particulars regarding the photograph, I will let the reader view the article rather than describing its import for the article here.

Schoot begins with introductory remarks pertaining to the first chapter of Genesis that provide the foundation for Thomas’s teaching. Although he says the verse that says man is made in God’s image is preeminently worthy of reflection, he goes on to suggest there may be truth to the notion that “humankind as image of God is in fact part of an obsolete vision that is responsible for humankind exploiting and damaging the natural world.” He says Thomas himself would not consider “human beings as ruler (sic) of what is placed under them” and that Aquinas would not say “humankind is meant to exercise dominion.” This is an unfortunate assertion for a variety of reasons. First, because Aquinas insists that Sacred Scripture, which in this case plainly teaches that God gave dominion to man over “every living thing” (Gn. 1:28), is without error (I, q. 1 a. 10 ad 1 & ad 3; see III, q. 31 a. 3 s.c.). Secondly, because Thomas’s appreciation of reason, which distinguishes man from beasts (I, q. 3 a. 1 ad 2; q. 93 a. 3), was so great that he said “man should be master over animals” and lesser creatures since “the imperfect are for the sake of the perfect” and since “Divine Providence… always governs inferior things by the superior”(I, q. 96 a. 1).

Having said that, the article is by no means devoid of value. Schoot goes on to explain Thomas’s insight by first discussing analogy, similitude, and image in particular and then summarizing the teaching of Thomas by insisting that it is a central concept in the Summa. By way of introducing analogy, he points out that “for understanding and naming [God] there are two ways of knowing and speaking available: the way which leads from the created to the Creator, and the other way around, the way that leads from the Creator to the created.” He calls the first way philosophical and the second theological and argues that, in either case, human language falls short since we cannot know what God is, “only what He is not” (I, q. 3). For this reason, the “unity of God and human beings” is “only according to analogy or proportion.”

Schoot proceeds to give a readable and accurate account of question 93 of the Prima Pars that should prove valuable for anyone who has not read it and wants an overview. He also provides the reader with a substantial section of a marvelous sermon St. Thomas gave on the imago Dei. The article is worth reading for that sermon alone, but Schoot’s explanations and insights (with the exception of the portion critiqued above) are sure to provide readers with even greater insight into its value.

New Issue of the ACPQ

The latest issue of the American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly, vol. 94, no. 3 (2020) has various articles that may be of interest to readers of this site.

Several articles consider familiar themes from Thomistic and scholastic philosophy. First, Christopher A. Bobier’s essay “Aquinas on the Emotion of Hope: A Psychological or Theological Treatment?” considers whether St. Thomas’s account of the emotion of hope is theologically informed, concluding that it is. Bobier’s exposition examines in detail one key element to make this connection: why the soul’s passio or emotion of hope is limited in its object to arduous goods, when at least colloquially we say that we “hope for” things that do not seem arduous. To Bobier’s mind, “Aquinas’s limitation of the emotion of hope to future arduous goods that are possible to attain allows for a similarity between theological and emotional hope, a similarity that otherwise would not be there.” This result, however, still comes with the qualification that St. Thomas’s account of hope, even limited to arduous goods, still has non-theological, philosophical grounds.

The arduous good of theological hope, of course, is the attainment of eternal life by the predestined with God’s help. “Was Báñez a Bañecian?” by David Torrijos-Castrillejo aims to determine Domingo Báñez’s “personal opinion regarding the ontology of physical premotion without presupposing the later development of Bañecian doctrine.” In opposition to the more typical interpretation of Thomists he finds in the contemporary literature, and relying on the work of Beltrán de Heredia, OP, among others, Torrijos-Castrillejo argues that Báñez did not consider physical premotion a tertium quid entity between God’s creative action and the human action. Rather, “Báñez only tries to formulate anew the thesis defended by Aquinas himself: namely, that the only numerically new effect of divine motion is the deliberate human action that God and created free will produce together.”

J. Caleb Clanton and Kraig Martin, in “William of Ockham, Andrew of Neufchateau, and the Origins of Divine Command Theory,” place the blame for being the medieval progenitor of divine command theory upon Andrew of Neufchateau rather than William of Ockham. They review the claim that Ockham can be read in a more nuanced way to relieve him of blame for this account of natural law ethics, and then, relying upon and extending the work of Janine Marie Idziak, they argue that Andrew clearly and thoroughly adopts and defends the view that “all features of morality—value, obligation, and natural law itself—arise in virtue of the free decrees of God’s will.”

Shifting from classic debates in perennial philosophy to a contemporary one, the issue also features a book discussion of Aristotle’s Revenge: The Metaphysical Foundations of Physical and Biological Science (reviewed by Thomistica last year). The author, Edward Feser, provides a brief précis of the book followed by the criticisms of philosopher Robert C. Koons and physicist Stephen M. Barr. These articles were previously given as papers at the most recent meeting of the American Catholic Philosophical Association to a standing-room-only crowd.

Koons, sympathetic to the book’s project overall, raises various challenges on behalf of the B-theory of time—sometimes called the “tenseless” theory of time—in response to Feser’s view that there is a more natural place in the Aristotelian philosophy of time for the A-theory and presentism—a “tensed” theory of time, where all that exists only exists in the present. Koons’s exposition turns on the B-theorist’s interpretation of the six key Aristotelian commitments that Feser highlights: time as the measure of change, the successive nature of time and change, the successive existence of time, the existence of time outside the mind, the continuity of time and change, and the nature of change as actualizing potentialities. Barr, not as sympathetic as Koons to Feser’s project, criticizes select aspects of the book: its method being too aprioristic, its putative misunderstanding of modern physics’s account of space, and for the inaccuracy and inapplicability, in the inorganic realm, of the concept of substantial form and its unicity. Feser’s response systematically considers all nine of these points raised by Koons and Barr. I leave it to readers to judge the results. At the very least, the discussion illustrates both the difficulties faced by those who, like Feser, would propose the Aristotelian philosophy of nature to analytic philosophers or contemporary scientists, as well as some ways to be successful while doing so.

Last on our list to be mentioned, but given the first word in the journal issue itself, is an article addressing the proper order between language and thought: “Aquinas’s Teachings on Concepts and Words in His Commentary on John Contra Nicanor Austriaco, OP.” In it, Marie I. George critiques the view put forward by Fr. Austriaco in his 2018 ACPQ article “Defending Adam After Darwin: On the Origin of Sapiens as a Natural Kind.” Specifically, George argues that St. Thomas would deny two claims made by Fr. Austriaco: first, that the capacity for abstraction presupposes the capacity for language, and second, that we grasp concepts through words. He bases both of these claims from a passage of St. Thomas’s commentary on the gospel of St. John, but George argues that he does so mistakenly. She then turns to the broader context of St. Thomas’s doctrine of abstraction, language, concept formation, the predisposition of the human imagination for the intellectual capacity, and, crucially and generally, the temporal priority and role of vague, imperfect concepts in the development of the mind. This brings the classic Meno paradox to bear on the pressing question of the Thomistic philosophical interpretation of human evolution. George concludes that while “Aquinas would be open to the idea that a brain structured in a manner that allows for the imagination of signs suitable for language is a necessary, or even the final, disposition for the reception of the rational soul,” nonetheless “for Aquinas, there is always some priority of abstract thought over language.”

– Reviewed by John G. Brungardt, PhD

New Issue of The Thomist

The most recent issue of The Thomist now available through online indexes (Vol. 83, no. 3, 2019), includes various articles of possible interest to readers of this site.

The main articles feature three devoted to explicating points of natural law, all balanced by one article on the spiration of the Third Person of the Holy Trinity. Opening his “Retributive Justice and Natural Law” with a consideration of C. S. Lewis’s defense of the essentially retributive character of just punishment, Peter Karl Koritansky argues that retributive justice is intelligible and defensible only on the principles of Thomistic natural law. His article criticizes the shortcomings of the “unfair advantage” theory of punishment, a contemporary alternative attempt to justify retributive justice. St. Thomas’s account is incompatible with the unfair advantage story, provides a sounder basis for understanding punishment, and successfully distinguishes retribution from revenge.

Stephen L. Brock, in “The Specification of Action in St. Thomas: Nonmotivating Conditions in the Object of Intention,” considers the intricate details of the principle of double effect. He argues that “head on effects,” nonintended effects that are per se to intentional actions, escape and bode ill for the typical division between intended effects and side effects. His central claim is that “for Thomas, features of an action that do not motivate the agent, or do not provide reasons for acting, can fall within the agent’s intention, and can sometimes even specify the action.” Defending this thesis allows him to correct mistaken readings of St. Thomas, including some proposed by adherents of the New Natural Law theory.

“Lawrence Dewan, Legal Obligation, and the New Natural Law” finds Charles Robertson also raising various points of debate with the New Natural Law theory, all while expanding upon Fr. Dewan’s metaphysically-rooted account of the legal character of the natural law. Advocates of the former, such as Grisez and Tollefsen, source the obligatory character of natural law in the prescriptions of practical reason. By contrast, Robertson follows St. Thomas and roots the obligatory character of the natural law in the binding force of conscience, itself derived from the divine ordinance that also orders the human good within the common good of the universe as a whole. His exposition allows Robertson to partially correct and extend Dewan’s original account. Robertson mentions as a key source in his considerations the doctoral dissertation of Stephen L. Brock, and so I note that a revised version of that dissertation has been published this year as The Light That Binds: A Study in Thomas Aquinas’s Metaphysics of Natural Law.

The human intellectual soul, participating in the light of the truth of eternal law by knowing the natural law, is a mirror of the divine in other ways. “The Spiration of Love in God according to Aquinas and His Interpreters,” by Jeremy D. Wilkins, aims to polish theoretically that created speculum in which we find theological analogies to contemplate the Holy Trinity. He focuses on the exegetical questions surrounding St. Thomas’s understanding of “whether the will emanates an operatum, parallel in some way to the procession of the inner word within the intellect.” The exegesis examines St. Thomas’s understanding of the psychological side of the analogy—the activity of the will and love in the human case—for the sake of theological clarity, and adjudicates between available interpretive options. John of St. Thomas and Gilles Emery represent one line of interpretation, Bernard Lonergan and followers (and possibly Cajetan) another; the latter view, Wilkins contends, “succeeds better than the alternative in ascertaining the spiritual structure of contemplation and the spiration of contemplative love, which is Aquinas’s analogue for the spiration of love in God.”

- Reviewed by John Brungardt, PhD

Austin Woodbury, Student of Garrigou-Lagrange (works available for free)

Austin Woodbury, S.M. (1899-1979), was a faithful student of Fr. Garrigou-Lagrange’s at the Angelicum. His writings, which mostly take the form of lecture notes, have been made available at http://www.austinwoodbury.com/.

As the website relates, his works manifest “a heavy reliance on the writings of St Thomas Aquinas, as well as commentators of St Thomas, such as Cajetan and John of St Thomas, as well as other more recent Thomist philosophers. The writings also attempt an engagement with modern and contemporary philosophers and issues. They are written in the ‘manualist’ tradition but go beyond what is commonly found in manuals of philosophy in virtue of the breadth of topics covered and degree of detail. Also, the fact that they were written in English makes them quite rare in the manualist tradition.”

Manuals and manualists, of course, have not gotten good press of late. It is important to note, though, that manuals were essentially handbooks intended to provide systematic knowledge - albeit cursory knowledge - of essentials on any given topic. When it comes to moral manuals in particular, they are sometimes especially unappreciated because, it is said, they tended to overlook the role of happiness and virtue in the moral life. Although in general that seems like a false characterization, that is for another post. In this post, we should simply relate that Woodbury himself does not overlook either of those important topics in his ethical writings.

A partial list of his available works is found below. Please keep in mind that in order to access them, you will first have to register and wait for an email confirming the registration.

PHILOSOPHICAL WORKS

• Basic Morals

• Defensive Metaphysics

• Ethics

• Introduction to Philosophy

• Logic

• Natural Philosophy

• Ostensive Metaphysics - Natural Theology

• Ostensive Metaphysics - Ontology

• St Thomas' Proof of God from motion

• Natural Philosophy - Psychology

THEOLOGICAL WORKS

• Apologetics Commentary on Summa Theologiae I, qq. 1-2

• Commentary on Summa Theologiae I, qq. 1-2

• Existence of God

• God as Consummating His Works or the Last Things

• Essence of Grace

• The Sacraments in Common

• Sacred Theology

• The Supernatural and Grace

• Treatise on Message of Salvation (The Gospels; Sanctifying Grace)

Graduate Scholarships for Canadian Students in Philosophy at Dominican University College / Collège universitaire dominicain

Dominican University College (Collège universitaire dominicain), based on Ottawa, Ontario, Canada, is offering four scholarships this coming academic year for Canadian graduate students in philosophy. The scholarships are available for either master’s or doctoral studies and are offered to those students who wish to work in particular on the thought of Thomas Aquinas. Please click here for more information.

New Book on Aquinas's Ethics Free Online until May

My new very short book, Aquinas’s Ethics, just came out and is free for a month from Cambridge University Press.  It is for a more general audience than my other work is. Some readers might find it helpful. It will give you something to do if you are stuck at home! 

The site is here:  https://www.cambridge.org/core/elements/aquinass-ethics/6E12E058585683A44571D91568CEDBC1.

New Issue of American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly

The most recent issue of the American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly (94.2, 2020) features several articles that may be of interest to Thomists and readers of this site. On offer are a range of essays generally concerned with ethical and natural law themes.

What appears to be the most relevant to contemporary Thomistic interests is Justin Matchulat’s “Thomas Aquinas on Natural Inclinations and the Practical Cognition of Human Goods: A Fresh Take on an Old Debate.” Matchulat promises to break new ground in the “old” vs. “new” natural law debate over Aquinas’ understanding of how our natural inclinations relate to knowledge of human goods. Central to his case are that the natural inclinations play a “directive role” in our attending to basic human goods, such that as someone is, so does the end seem to such a one.

Of course, one of those natural inclinations is to seek knowledge of God. However, would the Philosopher tell us to worship the prime mover or “Thought Thinking Itself”? In his “Aristotle on the Proper Attitude Towards True Divinity,” Mor Segev analyzes possible grounds for an Aristotelian virtue of religion, and finds them in the virtue of magnanimity, which, in the face of the divine, resembles humility. He argues that Aristotle would have endorsed a “total devotion to the divine.”

Now, if you fail to be a virtuously religious philosopher, the bad news is that even the natural law demands that you be punished. Scott J. Roniger’s “Is There a Punishment for Violating the Natural Law?” proposes to examine that neglected question in Thomistic natural law theory. Augustine, Aristotle, and Plato’s Gorgias all assist Roniger’s elaboration of a Thomistic account of a three-fold punishment proper to the natural law (remorse of conscience, and a failure of friendship both to oneself and to others).

As the saying goes, traduttore, traditore. But can one be traitorous for a good end? José A. Poblete examines the influence of Grosseteste’s Latin translation of the Nicomachean Ethics 1134b18–35b5 in “The Medieval Reception of Aristotle’s Passage on Natural Justice.” Grosseteste’s interpretive transmission of what is “immutably just” influenced the commentaries of St. Albert the Great and St. Thomas Aquinas.

Also digging into the historical roots of the scholasticism in Aristotle’s Ethics is Henrik Lagerlund’s “Willing Evil: Two Sixteenth-Century View of Free Will and Their Background.” A ensemble cast of well-known and “virtually unknown” philosophers are ranged to debate the controversial apparent proposal of 16th-century Aristotelian commentator John Mair that “we can will evil for the sake of evil.” (What natural inclination leads to such a view, or what punishment the natural law demands, I leave to the readers of the ACPQ.)

Last but not least, Robert McNamara considers a more contemporary topic, “The Concept of Christian Philosophy in Edith Stein.” McNamara examines the key factors that contribute to Edit Stein’s account of a “positively Christian and specifically Catholic philosophy,” and then contrasts this proposal with the Thomistic one defended by Jacques Maritain.

- Reviewed by John Brungardt, PhD

Eleventh International Thomistic Conference Postponed Due to COVID-19

The Eleventh International Thomistic Conference, which was supposed to take place in Rome between September 21 and 25 of this year, has been postponed due to COVID-19. The revised dates have yet to be released. Please find more information here.

New Issue of New Blackfriars

New Blackfriars has just released its May 2020 issue (volume 101, issue 1093), which contains two articles that may be of interest to the readers of Thomistica. First, there is Shawn Colberg’s article, “‘Lord Have Mercy on Me, a Sinner’: Aquinas on Grace, Impetration, and Justfication," which analyzes Aquinas’s understanding of the ways in which divine grace moves a person toward justification. It pays particular attention to the language of “impetration,” which shows up in Aquinas’s treatment of prayer in the Secunda secundae, and uses this to examine the ways in which the not-yet-justified person does and does not contribute to his own justification. Second, there is Stephen J. Pope’s “Christocentric Exemplarism and the Imitation of Jesus.” This article is a contribution to an ongoing discussion within Thomistic virtue ethics related to exemplarism. Pope argues that those who wish to develop a Christocentric virtue ethics would do well to “give more prominence to the imitation of Jesus.”

Thomistic Summer Conference

Thomas Aquinas College plans to launch a new event this year. This summer they are holding the first Thomistic Summer Conference at Thomas Aquinas College, California, on June 18-20, 2020. The theme for this summer’s conference is “Faith & Reason.” Featured speakers include Michael Sherwin, OP (University of Fribourg), John O’Callaghan (University of Notre Dame), Steven Long (Ave Maria University), and Michael Augros (Thomas Aquinas College). Please see the conference flyer below. If you are unable to attend the Sacra Doctrina Project’s Conference or missed the deadline for the Call for Papers for that conference, this is a great opportunity as abstracts are not due until March 7th. More information, including a Call for Papers, can be found at www.thomasaquinas.edu/tsc.

Invitation for submissions to the European Journal for the Study of Thomas Aquinas

The board of the European Journal for the Study of Thomas Aquinas is currently preparing volume 38 and is asking for submissions for it. The deadline for the issue is March 1st 2020. You can find out more here.

Call for papers! Sacra Doctrina Project's Conference on Development of Doctrine

The Sacra Doctrina Project is going to hold a timely conference on the Development of Doctrine in Cedar Rapids, IA on June 18 - 20, 2020. Matthew Levering and Aquinas Guilbeau will be just two of the outstanding scholars presenting there.See the conference poster below and www.sacradoctrinaproject.org/conference for more details.