PENGUIN CLASSICS

THOMAS AQUINAS: SELECTED WRITINGS

St Thomas Aquinas was born around 1225 at Roccasecca near Aquino, to the nobleman Landulf of Aquino. Educated by Benedictine monks at Monte Cassino and then at the University of Naples, it was during his time at university, around 1244, that he joined the Dominican monastic order. This decision so shocked the other members of his noble family that they kidnapped him and held him against his will for a year. Despite this, he remained committed to the religious life and, once he was free, Aquinas went to Cologne to study under St Albert the Great. In 1256 he took the degree of Master in Theology, and then embarked on a life of teaching, preaching and writing, living and working in France and Italy. He died from an illness at the abbey of Fossanuova while on his way to attend a meeting of the general council at Lyon in 1274. Thomas Aquinas was formally canonized in 1323.

Aquinas’ religious writing has had a significant influence on both theological and philosophical thought through the centuries. His two great works are Summa contra Gentiles (1259–64), a treatise on God and his creation, and Summa theologica (1266–73), a massive, though unfinished, work, designed as a complete systematic exposition of theology.

Ralph Mcinerny is the Michael P. Grace Professor of Medieval Philosophy at the University of Notre Dame, Indiana. He is a fellow of the Pontifical Academy of Saint Thomas Aquinas and has published several works on the thought of Thomas, most recently Aquinas and Analogy (1996) and Ethica Thomistica (1997).

Chronology

A Note on the Texts

The following selections follow the chronological order of their composition, an approach that was decided on after the undoubted attractions of various alternatives had been explored. The aim has been to give as comprehensive a portrait of the thought of Thomas Aquinas as possible. While emphasis is on Aquinas as philosopher, it is essential to see how he distinguished philosophical from theological inquiry. Because of his conception of theology, a good deal of philosophy is either imported into theological works or developed there in order to be put to theological purpose. This is why selections meant to convey his philosophical positions are sometimes drawn from theological writings. Explicitly theological selections are meant to illustrate Thomas’s employment of philosophical reasoning in pondering the mysteries of the faith.

No one can fail to be struck by the amount of attention Thomas devoted to understanding and explaining the thought of others. In the case of his biblical commentaries, the motivation is obvious. Similarly, his exposition of the Sentences of Peter Lombard. But commentaries on two works of Boethius serve as a kind of bridge into the interpretation of Aristotle. Chronologically, commentaries on Aristotle fall to the last periods of Thomas’s academic career. But Aristotle is present from the beginning as On Being and Essence and The Principles of Nature, early works, illustrate. Such short works could be included in their entirety, but given the extent of expositions and commentaries, selection had to be made of sections that are fairly self-standing. So too with such a disputed question as that on truth: it was possible to present entire sub-questions. Mere snippets have been avoided and the ideal of this series – to translate complete works – has been the ideal striven for but, for reasons just mentioned, not always reachable as such.

The inner divisions of the texts follow those of the editions from which the translations were made. In the case of the Aristotelian commentaries, the convention of the original Leonine editions is adhered to – that is, division into lessons – rather than the more recent Leonine practice of dividing them by the chapter divisions of the work being explained. I have also retained paragraph numbers in the commentaries on Aristotle, in order that nearly a century of scholarship can be easily related to the text.

Student of the liberal arts at Monte Cassino, student at the University of Naples in the faculty of arts, student at Paris, at Cologne and then at Paris again – Thomas Aquinas served a long apprenticeship before he became a master of theology in his early thirties. He was twenty-seven when he returned from Cologne to Paris as a Bachelor of the Sentences. The task of giving a superficial or cursive commentary on the Bible that was part of the apprenticeship of the aspiring theologian seems to have been fulfilled while Thomas was at Cologne.

Lodged in the Dominican Convent of St Jacques, Thomas lived the life of a mendicant friar, bound by the three great vows of poverty, chastity and obedience, and he was now a priest as well. It is easy for us to think of him as the dominant figure at the University of Paris. We have already recounted the story of the faculty of theology requesting that the body of Thomas be returned to Paris so that he might be permanently venerated by his fellow masters. But this posthumous collegiality should not obscure the fact that from the outset Thomas and his fellow friars would have felt a little less than welcome.

There was an animus against mendicant masters. It was one thing for the new religious orders to want their men to profit from a Parisian theological education, after which they could return to their Dominican and Franciscan houses of study and teach there. And there is no doubt that the frequent turnover in the two Dominican chairs in theology was a feature of the effort to credential as many friars as possible for teaching roles within the order. The secular masters, understandably perhaps, felt that their turf was being invaded by friars who came to stay.

There were at the time some dozen masters in the faculty of theology at Paris. Of these, three were held by the mendicants, the Franciscans had one, the Dominicans two. The canons of the cathedral of Notre Dame also held chairs, so the secular masters understandably felt their position to be precarious. When to this is added the great popularity and success of the non-secular masters, and the memory of the fact that when the whole university went on strike in 1229, the Dominicans remained in place and continued to teach, all the ingredients for a feud are present. A disciple of Joachim of Fiore, in promulgating his master’s view that mankind had entered into a new age, a third age, the age of the Holy Spirit, which had been preceded by the Age of the Son and the Age of the Father, suggested that Antichrist might be identified with the mendicants. The Convent of St Jacques, where Thomas lived and taught, was the site of demonstrations and protests.

The campaign against the mendicants reached rhetorical excesses that must seem overdrawn to us. William of St Amour, as if to prove that names are not destiny, became a rabid foe of the mendicants, who were, he was convinced, the Antichrist himself. Among the early writings of Thomas at Paris are those defending his vocation and the practices of his order. When he completed his apprenticeship and had become a master of theology, teaching at St Jacques, he was refused admittance into the corporation of masters. Bonaventure, who became master at the same time, was similarly excluded. When a year later, at the command of the Pope, they were admitted, only Thomas functioned as a regent master. Bonaventure had been elected master general of the Franciscan order, would eventually be named a cardinal and, in 1274, at the Council of Lyons that Thomas failed to reach, Bonaventure died.

In this part will be found two of the inaugural sermons Thomas delivered at the extended academic ceremony that marked the successful completion of his theological apprenticeship. Two works that antedate that occasion are also found here, one that summarizes Aristotelian hylomorphic theory, the other on being and essence that might have been written when Thomas was at the very height of his powers. These little works were said to have been composed by Thomas for his fellow students. Throughout his life, Thomas responded to requests for help on one difficult question or another. It is plausible that he would have written these opuscula on request. That Thomas was early recognized as an intellectual phenomenon is supported by a number of stories.

The Scriptum or commentary on the Sentences of Peter Lombard grew out of the teaching tasks Thomas performed prior to being named master. But the commentary was polished and prepared for publication during Thomas’s first regency. None the less, it seems fitting to include an important section of it here.

After completing his lengthy apprenticeship and being named master, Thomas was not immediately welcomed into the professorial ranks at the University of Paris. Indeed, it took a papal intervention to counter the reluctance of the secular masters to his elevation. Among the reasons for this resistance was a reluctance to recognize the new mendicant orders in general and the appropriateness of their members becoming masters of theology in particular. Thomas could not be expected to remain silent when the very legitimacy of his religious vocation was called into question. It would be possible, if somewhat distorting, to make his response to the attacks on his Order the centrepiece of his first stint as a regent master in Paris. Polemical skills that will remain quiescent until the flare-up of Latin Averroism ten years later are vibrantly on display.

The principal opponent of the mendicants was William of St Amour, who had set down his condemnations in a Treatise on the Perils of the Last Days. Casting the followers of St Francis and St Dominic in the role of Antichrist is a rhetorical excess that would seem to discredit the discrediter, but Thomas took this attack with great seriousness, responding to it in detail in Against Those Impugning Religion and the Cult of God, thought to have been written in 1256. In it Thomas defended the new Orders and justified the teaching mission of the mendicants and their roving commission as preachers and confessors. An irony of this is that Thomas was unaware when he wrote this response that William’s work had already been condemned.

What was Thomas’s day like as a regent master resident in the Dominican convent on the Rue St Jacques? His day began with Mass – the saying of his own and the hearing of another. It was still very early in the day when Thomas gave his lecture. His was followed by that of the bachelor apprenticed to him. The afternoon was given to disputation, and to this we owe the series of disputed questions brought together under the portmanteau title On Truth.

Disputation, along with lecturing and preaching, made up the threefold task of the master. Lecturing was the lectio, the reading and explication of a book of Scripture or the Sentences of Lombard. Here the indispensable task of assimilating a tradition was observed. One must grasp the authors (auctores) who were authorities (auctoritates) in one’s discipline. The scholar was engaged in a communal enterprise that antedated him and would continue when he was no more. T. S. Eliot’s ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’ discusses the delicate dialectic that the poet must engage in between the old and the new, the poetic tradition and his contribution to it. Mutatis mutandis, the essay can be taken to describe the task of the medieval scholar.

Mastering texts might seem to threaten a backward-looking attitude, a nostalgia for a lost golden age, but for two things. First, the concept of a commentary developed, so that room was made for an independent discussion of themes raised by an authoritative text – after the scholar had shown that he understood the text as such. Furthermore, there was the second magisterial task, namely, to dispute. In a dispute the master offered to defend a given resolution of a question. But this was prefaced by a search for the best arguments in favour of the opposite answer. With those before him, the master would redirect the discussion by first appealing to an authority that favoured his proposed answer – sed contra est. Then he would develop arguments on behalf of his proposed resolution of the question. Finally, since the value of a solution can best be seen in its ability to handle initially attractive objections, the master took up the counter-arguments one by one.

The disputed questions that have come down to us are not transcripts of the lively occasions that filled the afternoons at St Jacques. But they are directly and essentially connected to them. As made available for copying, they retained the living language of thought, the conversation of the soul that Plato spoke of which requires more than one voice, recognizes a plurality of plausible answers to a question and then defends an answer against its worthy competitors. Thomas found this method so congenial that he adapted it for use in his masterpiece, the Summa theologiae.

Appropriately, then, the readings selected for this part rely heavily on the Disputed Question on Truth. But the selections begin with two commentaries on Boethius, commentaries of two significantly different kinds, which are of fundamental importance in grasping the mind of Aquinas.

Thomas had been absent from Italy for some fourteen years when he returned in 1259, more likely than not first going to his home priory in Naples. I say more likely than not because historians are far from being of one mind on how Thomas spent the ten years before his return to Paris in 1269. If he did indeed return to Naples, he would have remained there until 1261 when he assumed the post of lecturer in the convent at Orvieto. It is thought that Thomas was associated with the papal court, which in those years was something of a movable feast, spending time in one town or another north of Rome. In Viterbo there is a pulpit on a street corner from which Thomas Aquinas allegedly preached during these years. From 1265 to 1268, Thomas was regent master at Santa Sabina in Rome.

But of course it is the works Thomas wrote during this period that most interest us. Before leaving Paris he conceived the idea of the Summa contra Gentiles, a work in four books, the first three of which were to be a defence of the faith on the basis of principles available to all, not only to adherents of other religions of the Book, but to non-believers as well. Only in Book 4 does Thomas claim to be mounting formally theological arguments, that is, arguments whose premisses are supernatural truths that God has chosen to reveal. The work was completed in 1265 and we have the bulk of the text in Thomas’s own hand. But the text also indicates another factor in the literary production of Thomas, the help of secretaries. Increasingly, he would dictate to a Dominican socius assigned to him for this purpose. Reginald of Piperno thus makes his début in the career of Thomas, a faithful and devoted companion to the end. But there are other hands in evidence as well, indicating that Thomas had the help of more than one confrère in his writing.

Among the scriptural commentaries contemporary with the Summa contra Gentiles, mention must be made of that on Job. In the prologue Thomas tells us that he intends to produce a commentary on the literal meaning of the text, its moral meaning having been exhaustively treated by St Gregory the Great. Boleslaw Sobocinski, the logician, professed to be an admirer of this commentary because of its logical sophistication. Increasingly, students of Thomas’s biblical writings are recognizing the importance of his commentary on Job. Thomas also composed the extraordinary Golden Chain during this period, beginning it at Orvieto and completing it in Rome. Patristic sources are mined to produce a commentary on the four Gospels: it is one of the most self-effacing of Thomas’s works. He is nowhere in it, yet of course presides over the selection and orchestration of the texts. This is a work that found its way into English because of the interest of John Henry Newman and his fellows in the Oxford Movement.

Thomas’s three-year stay at Santa Sabina is notable for several reasons. First, the Disputed Question on the Power of God, from which we have selected the imposing Question 7 dealing with the divine simplicity and the reach of human language to speak of God. Second, in his final year in Rome, Thomas commented on Aristotle’s On the Soul . This was the first of twelve commentaries on Aristotelian works he would compose during the next five years. Finally, it was in Rome that Thomas began the Summa theologiae, writing there the first part of that magisterial work.

When Thomas returned to Paris for an unusual second term as regent master of theology at the Dominican convent on the Rue St Jacques, he was coming into a maelstrom. During his absence in Italy, the academic scene had changed entirely. Before, it was the animosity between the secular masters and the mendicants that had to be contended with. Now Thomas himself and his teachings were being looked at askance. And numbered among his foes were Franciscans.

The bone of contention was Aristotle. The young masters of the Faculty of Arts embraced Aristotle with an enthusiasm that led to heterodoxy. Theologians began to have second thoughts about the growing influence of the Philosopher. After all, Aristotle had taught a number of things that were in real or apparent conflict with revealed truth. Since contradictories cannot be simultaneously true, either Aristotle was wrong or Christianity was. There would of course be little doubt where a Christian’s allegiance lay – or so it seemed. But the young masters of arts who came to be called Latin Averroists sought to adopt a mind-boggling via media. They appeared to want to accept as philosophical truth what was in conflict with what they as Christians believed.

Aristotle had taught that the world is eternal. Genesis speaks of the beginning of the world’s existence. The Latin Averroists seemed to want to assent to both claims. They were called Averroists because they accepted as good money the Commentator’s reading of Aristotle. Does every person have an intellect or is there but one intellect existing apart that thinks through each of us? Averroes adopted the latter view. But it was the immaterial activity of the agent intellect that grounded Aristotle’s proof of the soul’s immortality. On Averroes’ reading, personal immortality was not only unproved, but incoherent.

The Aristotelian tenet that each substance has but one constitutive form making it to be and to be what it is was thought to run afoul of the Christian belief that for three days the dead body of Christ awaited resurrection. What made it one body? What made it Christ’s? Perhaps we need a substantial form making the body to be the body, before the advent of soul.

These and other issues, involving as they did the religious and cultural underpinnings of the university, were far more than academic questions. Shortly after Thomas’s return there was the condemnation of 1270, which expressed the concern about the inroads of pagan philosophy on the understanding of Christian doctrine. An animus against Aristotle, and philosophy itself, was growing. Thomas as we have seen, and as his contemporaries knew, had found little to balk at in the doctrine of Aristotle. His attitude was rather one of grateful amazement at the reach of the human intellect even when unaided by the ambience of grace and revelation. His position was complicated by the fact that he was every bit as appalled by the Latin Averroists as any other theologian. Waffling on the principle of contradiction seemed an odd way for alleged followers of Aristotle to behave. Thomas had to steer a middle course between the Latin Averroists on the one hand and the understandably upset theologians on the other.

He began with two polemical works, On the Eternity of the World and On the Uniqueness of Intellect. The latter is a thorough analysis and rejection of the Averroistic reading of Aristotle’s On the Soul. Correctly read, Thomas argued, Aristotle’s doctrine on soul re-enforced the Christian belief in immortality. As to the eternity of the world, Thomas attacked those who thought this was an incoherent notion. He argues that it is not. The believer must hold Aristotle mistaken in claiming the world is eternal, but he does so by appeal to Revelation. God could have created an eternal world, however, so Aristotle’s position was not incoherent nor was there any philosophical proof that it was false.

Furthermore, the commentary on Aristotle’s On the Soul which had occupied Thomas in Rome, became the first in a series of twelve commentaries, close and careful readings clearly meant to show that, correctly understood, Aristotle was one of the greatest assets of the human mind and consequently an invaluable support of Christianity. This did not mean that whatever Aristotle might have meant, we none the less can use his words, according them an irenic sense. Thomas was a serious man. It was the truth he found in Aristotle that won his allegiance in the first place. That allegiance strengthened as he subjected the text to the extended analysis that makes his commentaries a major factor in the history of Aristotelianism.

Everything I have mentioned thus far was on the margin of Thomas’s main task as regent master. The polemical writings and the Aristotelian commentaries did not emerge from his teaching. He continued his work on the Summa theologiae, he added to the fund of his Disputed Questions. But the very manner in which he did theology required the defence of Aristotle contained in polemical writings and effectively in the commentaries. In his remarkable, impressionistic book on Thomas Aquinas, G. K. Chesterton grasped the stakes involved in Thomas’s defence of Aristotle. Western civilization had reached a crossroads where obscurantism attracted some and an oddly dissociated conception of the truth of faith attracted others. Thomas was the champion of the compatibility of faith and reason and of their mutual re-enforcing, not as a slogan but as a policy pursued and illustrated in thousands of pages. His victory was not immediate – there was another condemnation in 1277 – nor was it complete. But it has stood as the fullest and most satisfying synthesis of faith and reason produced in the Christian era.

After a stormy three years in Paris, Thomas returned to Naples to take up the post of regent master in the Dominican convent there and to create a studium generale, in effect, a Dominican university. He continued commenting on Aristotle and completed his exposition of the epistles of St Paul, he commented on the psalms, getting halfway through the 150, and of course he continued work on the Summa theologiae, turning now to Part 3. It was in this period that he commented on the Book of Causes, a work of Arabic origin that was based on the work of the Neoplatonist Proclus. Thomas was clearly at the peak of his powers. He was forty-seven years old. And yet he was in the twilight of his life.

Josef Pieper, in The Silence of St Thomas, meditates on the event that suddenly altered Thomas’s life. A mystical experience of great intensity left him with the conviction that everything he had written was no better than straw. And he stopped writing. The last year of his life was spent in literary silence. The great Summa theologiae was to remain unfinished.

The canonization process gives us a vivid portrait of Thomas, one we would not otherwise have. There was an inquiry at Naples at which many Dominicans who had known him as a confrère at different stages of his life testified. There emerges a portrait of a man whose great intelligence and intellectual labours were the complement of his spiritual life. We learn of miraculous happenings, of the amount of prayer that formed part of his study and writing. Should we be surprised that a theologian who spent his life meditating on the Christian message exhibited it in his life? But it is the depth of his holiness that strikes us as we read these witnesses. Doubtless they were partisan, of course they wanted a member of their order recognized for his holiness, but only a cynic would think this vitiates their testimony. The Thomas who emerges from these accounts is an engaging personality. His charge against Averroes’s reading of Aristotle on mind was that the Commentator could not give a meaningful account of the statement, ‘This man thinks.’ The recollections of his friends acquaint us with the very singular man behind the thinking and writing.

Thomas was asked to attend a Council at Lyons and set off to comply with the request. He did not get far. He fell ill on the way, sought refuge with a sister but then was transferred to the Cistercian abbey at Fossanova. The abbey is still there. One can visit the room in which Thomas died. The distance from Roccasecca where he was born to Fossanova is perhaps fifty kilometres. The journey from beginning to end seems short. But something began on 7 March 1274 that continues to this day. The measured tones of Thomas continue to form part of the great philosophical conversation as friend and foe alike turn to his writings for clarity, precision and a relevance that transcends the thirteenth century.