March 7 is St. Thomas's liturgical feast according to the pre-1969 General Roman Calendars. St. Thomas died on that date in 1274 at the abbey of Fossanova, where he had stopped after taking ill on his way with Reginald da Piperno to the second Council of Lyons.
January 28 is St. Thomas’s liturgical feast according to the General Roman Calendar of 1969. On that date in 1369 St. Thomas’s relics were translated to the Dominican church in Toulouse.
January 28 is the feast of St. Thomas Aquinas in the 1969 General Roman Calendar. Happy feast day!
This would be the perfect day to listen to Ēriks Ešenvalds truly heavenly setting of St. Thomas’s eucharistic hymn O salutaris hostia. Here’s a performance of it by the choir of Trinity College Cambridge conducted by Stephen Layton.
The Josias just posted a short essay of mine on analogy. It is written for an educated but non-specialist audience. However, non-specialists might find it interesting too.
In February I gave a talk for the Thomistic Institute at Mississippi State University entitled “Is Postmodernism a Problem for Religion?” In the first half of the talk I pack in a discussion of truth, reason, fideism, constructivism, and skepticism. This is meant to set up what comes next. In the second half I discuss Jean-François Lyotard and Thomistic philosophical theology with the aim of showing that the latter is unscathed by Lyotard’s critique of metanarratives in The Postmodern Condition. Inspired by Wittgenstein, Lyotard argues (more or less) that truth is language game dependent (hence, l’incrédulité à l’égard des métarécits). I counter that this can’t be the case for all truths and that it is, in any event, self-refuting in an obvious way. The talk was pitched to a general audience, so I did my best to put things simply and non-technically. You can find an audio recording of it here.
Longtime readers of Thomistica will know that I have written several posts in the past on political philosophy and theology. If those topics interest you, you might check out a three-part series I just completed for Catholic World Report on Thomism and political liberalism. Here are the links: part 1, part 2, part 3.
Today is St. Thomas’s feast day according to the pre-Pauline calendar of the Roman Rite. He died on March 7, 1274 at the abbey of Fossanova while on his way to the second Council of Lyons.
January 28 is the feast of St. Thomas Aquinas in the 1969 General Roman Calendar. Happy feast day!
After Jean-Luc Marion’s critique of Aquinas as an ontotheologian in L’idole et la distance (1977) and Dieu sans l'être (1982) people made a big deal of an alleged retraction in “Saint Thomas d’Aquin et l'onto-théo-logie” (1995) published in Revue thomiste. The text was even inserted into the 2013 edition of Dieu sans l'être as a supplement. In Marion’s “defense” of Aquinas against the charge of ontotheology in the Revue thomiste article he tells us that we should seriously consider the possibility that the esse that Aquinas predicates of God has no positive content but is purely a nom négatif. Indeed,
pourquoi pretendre le traiter comme un nom affirmatif, fournissant l’équivalent d’une essence, l’équivalent d’une concept, l’équivalent d’une définition, l’équivalent d’une connaissance?
Is this Marion channeling Sertillanges? Is he in earnest or is it all in jest?
I think it was the latter. Marion published an article in a 2004 issue of Conférence in which he argued once again, as he had before 1995, that Aquinas limits God’s transcendence by predicating esse of him.
Marion’s argument in the 2004 piece is weak, to say the least. He begins, harmlessly enough, by explaining that, for Aquinas, God’s esse and essentia aren’t really distinct from each other, as they are in creatures, but identical. This means that God isn’t simply an ens. However, he goes on, this won’t do to ensure God’s transcendence.
Que la transcendance de Dieu ne joue plus à l'intérieur d'un concept d'étant […] ne suffit pas à la libérer; puisqu'elle ne s'ouvre encore que dans l'interstice entre l'essence et l’esse, donc definitivement dans l'horizon de l’être.
It’s unclear whether être here is meant to refer to Heideggerian Sein (which Marion had mentioned in the previous paragraph). If it is, then Sein, being finite (as it surely seems to be), would necessarily limit God’s transcendence were he subject to it. But why should we think that esse and essentia as Aquinas predicates them of God can be reduced to Sein? If this is what Marion has in mind, he doesn’t explain why we should buy it. On the other hand, if être isn't Sein but has a more indefinite reference, why should we think it limits God? Marion doesn’t explain. Of course, we know that Aquinas holds that divine esse is unlimited (cf., e.g., ST, Ia, q. 13, a. 11). If God is without limits, then he can’t help but be transcendent. How does Marion show that Aquinas is wrong to think that divine esse is unlimited? He doesn’t.
The title of the 2004 article is “L’impossible pour l’homme – Dieu.” Marion presented an English version of it at one of John Caputo’s “Religion and Postmodernism” conferences at Villanova. But I don’t remember whether that was before or after the French version appeared.
Several years ago I thought about publishing something about all of this but I never got around to it. Maybe it doesn’t require any drawn-out discussion. The basics can be noted without much ado. In any event, let this blog post suffice for now.
(This is a reblog of a post of mine at the AMU Philosophy Department blog.)
***
Post scriptum (12.7.18): I should make it clear that I do think that, for Aquinas, esse as predicated of God does have some positive content. It’s not merely a negative name, as Marion suggests in the Revue Thomiste article. In the general debate about Aquinas’s apophaticism, I side with Maritain (and Garrigou, Cajetan, and — with some qualifications — Milbank) against Sertillanges.
In Der Satz vom Grund Heidegger writes:
Wenn wir von etwas sagen: “Es ist” und “es ist das und das,” dann wird es im solchen Sagen als Seiendes vorgestellt. Nur Seiendes “ist,” das “ist” selber, das “Sein” “ist” nicht (GA 10, p. 93).
In his commentary on Boethius’s De ebdomadibus Aquinas writes:
[S]icut non possumus dicere quod ipsum currere currat, ita non possumus dicere quod ipsum esse sit; set id quod est significatur sicut subiectum essendi, uelud id quod currit significatur sicut subiectum currendi; et ideo sicut possumus dicere de eo quod currit siue de currente quod currat in quantum subicitur cursui et participat ipsum, ita possumus dicere quod ens siue id quod est sit in quantum participat actum essendi. Et hoc est quod dicit quod ipsum esse nondum est quia non attribuitur sibi esse sicut subiecto essendi, set id quod est, accepta essendi forma, scilicet suscipiendo ipsum actum essendi, est atque consistit, id est in se ipso subsistit (Expositio De ebdomadibus, l. 2; Leonine, L, p. 271).
I truly doubt that Heidegger's Sein is the same thing as Aquinas's esse. There is very good reason (which I won't go into here) to see them as different things. Nevertheless, the parallel between these two texts is interesting and worth thinking about.
At Public Discourse, Nicanor Austriaco, O.P., argues against Michael Chaberek, O.P., that evolutionary biology is compatible with Thomistic philosophical principles.
I don't think we got around to wishing you a happy feast day on January 28. So, we'll kill two birds with one stone today, which is Thomas's feast according to the old calendar of the Roman Rite. Buona festa a tutti!
See my post on this at the AMU Philosophy Department blog.
Under the direction of the Sacra Doctrina Project
