St. Thomas Aquinas

Ralph Mcinerny

Description

St. Thomas Aquinas enables the reader to appreciate both Thomas's continuity with earlier thought and his creative independence. After a useful account of the life and work of St. Thomas, McInerny shows how the thoughts of Aristotle, Boethius, and Augustine and Pseudo-Dionysius were assimilated into the personal wisdom of St. Thomas. He also offers a helpful study of the distinctive features of Aquinas's Christian theology.

Sujets

• Philosophie
• Philosophie de la religion
• Religion
• Christianisme
• Medieval
• Religious
• HISTORY
• PHILOSOPHY
• Philosophie et théologie
• Religión
• Edad Media
• Theology
• Middle Ages
• Italy
• Catholic
• Christianity
• My Last Duchess
• Christian
• Europe

Informations

• Publié par: University of Notre Dame Press
• Date de parution: 27 février 2017
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780268161323
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

ST. THOMAS AQUINAS
By RALPH McINERNY
University of Notre Dame
UNIVERSITY OF NOTRE DAME PRESS NOTRE DAME
University of Notre Dame Press edition 1982 Notre Dame, Indiana 46556 www.undpress.nd.edu
Reprinted by arrangement with Twayne Publishers Copyright 1977 by G. K. Hall Co.
All Rights Reserved
Published in the United States of America
Reprinted in 1985, 1989, 1995, 2004
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
McInerny, Ralph M.
St. Thomas Aquinas.
Reprint ed. originally published: Boston:
Twayne, c1977.
Bibliography: p.
Includes index.
1. Thomas, Aquinas, Saint, 1225?-1274. I. Title. II. Title: Saint Thomas Aquinas.
B765.T54M244 1982 230 .2 0924 81-16293
ISBN 0-268-01707-7 (pbk.) AACR2
ISBN 9780268161323
This book is printed on acid-free paper .
This e-Book was converted from the original source file by a third-party vendor. Readers who notice any formatting, textual, or readability issues are encouraged to contact the publisher at [e-mail] .
Filiabus filiisque meis:
Cathy, Mary, Anne, David, Beth and Dan
Contents
Preface
Chronology
1. Works and Days
I. Youth and First Studies
II. Paris: 1252-1259
III. Italy: 1259-1268
IV. Paris: 1269-1272
V. Italy: 1272-1274
2. Thomas Aquinas and Aristotle
I. Aristotle Goes West
II. The Eternity of the World
III. The Nature of Man
A. The Structure of Physical Objects
B. The Structure of Man
1. Cognition and the Cosmos
2. Intellect and Survival After Death
3. Resurrection of the Body
IV. Man as Moral Agent
A. Man and Nature
B. Free Will
C. The Teleology of Human Acts
D. Theoretical and Practical Thinking
E. Nature Law
F. Moral Science
G. The Practical Syllogism
3. Thomas Aquinas and Boethius
I. The Kinds of Speculative Science
A. Boethius and Platonism
B. The Object of Speculation
1. Intuition
2. Scientific Knowing
3. Modes of Defining
4. Degrees of Abstraction?
C. Abstraction, Separatism, and Metaphysics
1. Two Mental Acts
2. Two Kinds of Abstraction
3. The Controversy
II. Essence and Existence
A. The Boethian Axiom
B. Separation and the Real Distinction
III. Omnipotence, Omniscience, and Free Will
A. The Divine Omnipotence
B. The Divine Omniscience
4. Thomas Aquinas and Platonism
I. The Platonism of the Fathers
A. Saint Augustine (345-430)
B. Pseudo-Dionysius
II. The Problem of Universals
III. Illumination and Abstraction
IV. Essential and Participated Perfection
V. Magis Amicus Veritas
5. The Tasks of Theology
I. Ontology or Theology?
II. Analogous Terms
III. Analogy and the Subject of Metaphysics
IV. The Two Theologies
V. Faith and Theology
A. Some Mental Acts
B. Two Kinds of Belief
C. Preambles of Faith
1. Criteria for Preambles
2. Why Reveal the Knowable?
3. Accepting What Cannot Be Understood
4. The God of the Philosophers
5. Preambles and Mysteries of Faith
6. Proofs of Faith?
VI. Proving that God Exists
VII. Concluding
6. Envoi
Notes and References
Selected Bibliography
Index
About the Author
Ralph McInerny was born in Minneapolis and was educated at the St. Paul Seminary, the University of Minnesota and Laval University. He has been a member of the Department of Philosophy at the University of Notre Dame since 1955. He was a Fulbright Research Scholar at the University of Louvain in 1959-1960. A past president of the American Catholic Philosophical Association, he is Associate Editor of The New Scholasticism . Among his publications are The Logic of Analogy, Studies in Analogy, A History of Western Philosophy , Volume 1, From the Beginnings to Plotinus , Volume 2, From Augustine to Ockham , and Thomism in an Age of Renewal .
Preface
In this book, I have aspired to write an introduction to the thought of a man who for some seven hundred years has been a major influence in philosophy and theology. I say aspired , because, far from being an easy thing, something one might do at odd moments and with but half one s mind engaged, writing an introduction is a difficult thing. The reader will detect, I trust, a note of anguished sincerity in that remark. I wanted to make the thought of Thomas Aquinas attractive, but attractive for the right reasons. So I have at least suggested the structure of the arguments he uses to arrive at his positions. I wanted the book to be comprehensive, yet I hoped to avoid thinness. Most important, I have tried to present Thomas in such a way that my reader would quickly leave me and go to the works of Aquinas himself.
Perhaps no book could have accomplished all this. The structure I have used is at once natural and unusual. The reader will swiftly see how reliant Thomas was on his predecessors; many of his works are commentaries on earlier ones. Why not present the thought of Thomas in close connection with its major sources? This method seemed a good idea and presented no insuperable difficulties as I put it into effect. The Table of Contents will convince the reader that I have managed to cover a wide range of topics without grievous overlapping. Of course, my eye has been mainly on what Thomas made of his sources rather than on the sources themselves. Nonetheless, my procedure should enable the reader to appreciate both Thomas s continuity with earlier thought and his creative independence of it.
The translations in the text are all mine. This is not because of any negative judgment on the translations that are listed in the Bibliography. The truth is, I do not have any opinion at all about the vast majority of those translations-except to wish that they were not necessary. Thomas s Latin is the least difficult thing about reading him and anyone with the slightest gift for languages could learn to read the Summa theologiae , say, in short order. In any case, in drafting these chapters, I have turned Thomas into English whenever I wanted to quote him. I might have replaced these with the more careful translations of others before sending the book to the printer, but I decided against this for several reasons. First, there is a sameness of style in the quotations now, and of course I do not regard sameness as a literary achievement. Second, I deliberately rendered Thomas loosely, in the interests of accuracy, dreading that fidelity to the text which can turn it into a dead letter. I have taken no distorting liberties, and perhaps I overstate my looseness and underestimate the dullness of the English I have made Thomas speak. Finally, it was a great practical advantage to have done my own translating. I was saved the enormous bother of requesting permission to use the translations of others.
Over the more than two decades of my academic career, during which I have been a constant reader of Aquinas, I have watched his philosophical stock rise and fall and now see it begin to rise again. Once he was a household word in Catholic universities and colleges; then he became almost an unknown figure. But elsewhere he was read closely and learned from. Perhaps the two events are not unconnected. These minor fluctuations give no true indication of the continuing surge of his influence. The year 1974 marked the seven hundredth anniversary of the death of Thomas Aquinas. The global character of the commemorations was overwhelming. There were countless meetings, conventions, symposia held in his honor. An international meeting held in Rome and Naples in April 1974 brought delegates from the ends of the earth. Special issues of learned journals were devoted to the thought of Thomas. I had hoped to finish this book in time for it to appear during that anniversary year. That was not to be. Perhaps it can play some small part in the beginning of the next seven hundred years of Thomas s historical influence.
R ALPH M C I NERNY
University of Notre Dame
Chronology
1216
Order of Preachers confirmed by Pope Honorius III.
1217
Dominicans arrive in Paris.
1224/5
Thomas born at Rocca Secca.
1230/1
Thomas becomes a Benedictine oblate at Monte Cassino.
1239
Thomas studies at Naples.
1244
Thomas joins Dominicans and is held captive by his family for a year.
1245-1248
Thomas at Dominican convent of St. Jacques in Paris.
1248-1252
Thomas studies under Albert the Great in Cologne.
1250/1
Thomas is ordained priest.
1252-1256
Thomas studies theology at Paris.
1256-1259
Thomas teaches theology at Paris. Writes expositions of Boethius s On the Trinity and De hebdomadibus .
1259-1265
Thomas in Naples and Orvieto. Completes Summa Against the Gentiles . Writes Part One of Summa theologiae .
1265-1268
Thomas at Santa Sabina in Rome, then in Viterbo. Writing commentaries on Aristotle.
1269-1272
Thomas again teaches theology at Paris. Writes against the Latin Averroists; completes Part Two of Summa theologiae .
1272
Thomas assigned to Naples. Writes first ninety questions of Part Three of Summa theologiae .
1274
March 7: Thomas dies at Fossanova.
1277
March 7: Thomas condemned at Paris.
1323
Thomas is canonized.
1325
Paris condemnation revoked.
CHAPTER 1
Works and Days
T OMMASO d Aquino was born in the family castle at Rocca Secca in Southern Italy in 1225, the youngest son of a large family. The first records of the family date from the 9th century; the title of count was held from the 10th to the 12th century; one of Tommaso s ancestors was abbot of Monte Cassino, which, like Rocca Secca, lies midway between Rome and Naples. Today the traveller moves swiftly between these two cities on a magnificent autostrada , and, when his eye is caught by the white eminence of the great Benedictine monastery, rebuilt since World War II when it was bombed by the Allies, he may be tempted, as the blue and white highway signs announce Aquino, to turn off and seek out such physical reminders as remain of the origins of the man we know as St. Thomas Aquinas. As is often the case with great men, nothing the traveller finds will suggest any inevitability in the rise to wo