Scotus also differs from Thomas when it comes to the scientific character of theology. In refuting Thomas in book III, d. 24 (nn. 16, 22) of the Reportatio Parisiensia he denies that in the strict Aristotelian sense we can have both science and faith about the same thing in the same respect, but at the beginning of the work, in his “Prologue,” questions 1 to 3, he argues that theology as “a science of faith” possesses a scientific character insofar as it orders its contents “under the proper aspect of deity,” although its forms of evidence will not be the same as those of other sciences.27 Scotus also differs from Thomas, who argued that sacra doctrina/theologia was primarily theoretical and to a lesser extent practical, by insisting that theology is only a practical science related to right action, that is, to loving God. This is true even with regard to the teachings that seem theoretical, such as the statement “God is a Trinity.” No, says Scotus: “I say that such truths are practical; theology includes in a virtual way knowledge of the correctness of the love tending towards the three persons, so that if an act were elicited towards one person alone and excluding the others, it would not be a correct act” (Ordinatio, Prol. Pars 5, q. 1, n. 322).
The German Dominican Meister Eckhart (ca. 1260–1328), like Thomas, was also twice called to the Dominican chair at Paris. Eckhart was a famous vernacular preacher and mystic, but also a profound philosopher-theologian, who planned a massive, but incomplete, synthesis he called the Three-Part Work (Opus tripartitum). The first part of this work, the Work of Propositions, was intended to be an exercise in axiomatic theology; but the second, the Work of Questions, was to have been modeled on Thomas’s Summa. Most of what survives is from the third part, the Work of Expositions, consisting of commentaries on the Bible designed to aid in preaching. Eckhart had a profound respect for Thomas and appealed to the example of his confrere, now a saint, when he himself was under investigation for heresy at the end of his life (1326–28). Eckhart knew Thomas and the Summa inside out, citing it hundreds of times in his Latin writings and showing a special preference for the Prima Pars.28 Nevertheless, Eckhart was not a strict follower of Thomas. Rather, he used Thomas as a conversation partner in creating his own system of thought.
Eckhart’s independence can be partly explained by the reception of Thomas and the Summa among the German Dominicans trained at the studium generale in Cologne. The German Dominican School, especially its contributions to philosophy, has come in for considerable study in recent years. Between about 1260 and 1350 the German Dominicans produced a succession of thinkers whose philosophical and theological positions, though often influenced by Thomas, show real independence.29 Albert the Great’s turn to the negative theology of Dionysius, as well as developments of his Aristotelian theory of the intellect with marked Neoplatonic and Avicennan elements, shaped many of these thinkers in ways that have not yet been fully studied. Eckhart’s contemporary, Dietrich of Freiburg (ca. 1250–1320), who has emerged as the most interesting philosophical mind among the German friars, took a decidedly anti-Thomist stance on many issues, including his introduction of the notion of “conceptual being” and his teaching on the relation of the active intellect and natural felicity. Other Dominicans, such as John of Sterngassen (active ca. 1320), were Thomist in outlook. Meister Eckhart was independent.
Eckhart was influenced by Dietrich, but his thought differed from his contemporary’s as much as it did from Thomas’s.30 Citing a few examples of the differences between Thomas and Eckhart will illustrate the German’s independent use of Thomas. First, Eckhart, unlike Thomas, held that a priori proofs for God’s existence were valid. Second, with regard to the perfective terms used of God, in his Parisian Questions given in Paris 1302–3 Eckhart parts company with Thomas on the priority of the language of existence (esse) when used of God. “I declare,” he says, “it is not my present opinion that God understands because he exists, but rather that he exists because he understands. God is intellect and understanding and his understanding is the ground of his existence” (Parisian Questions, q. 1). Third, Eckhart’s understanding of the nature of the intellect is different from that of Thomas. While Thomas held that the human mind is made “to the image” of God (Ia, q. 92), Eckhart insisted that the human mind was both made to the image (hence, different from God) and, on a deeper level, identically one with the image, or Second Person of the Trinity. This helps explain why, fourth, Eckhart’s view of human action is nonteleological (not goal-oriented), in distinction from Thomas’s view that human moral action is always directed to final happiness. For Eckhart, since the intellect is identical with God’s image, human virtuous activity, like God’s, should be “without a why,” that is, done for itself alone, not for any further purpose. Good action springs from the inner divine formal cause, the ground of the soul, not from striving toward an external final cause (e.g., Commentary on John n. 336).31
At the root of Eckhart’s creative misreading of Thomas is a contrasting notion of the relation of theology and philosophy. Aquinas distinguished between truths known by reason and those taught only by faith and sought to show the relation, as well as the nonopposition of philosophy and theology. For Eckhart reason and revelation are coterminous, differing not in what they teach, but only in the way they teach. In a noted passage he says, “Moses [i.e., the Old Testament], Christ, and the Philosopher [Aristotle] teach the same thing, differing only in the way they teach, namely as worthy of belief [Moses], as probable or likely [Aristotle], and as truth” (Commentary on John n. 185). Aquinas contended that there could be no real contradiction between the truths taught by faith and human reason; for Eckhart human reason as the presence of God in the mind is capable of knowing and unknowing both natural truths and the mysteries of faith, such as the Trinity. Given his insistence on the perfect reciprocity between reason and revelation, he describes his scriptural commentaries as designed “to show how the truths of natural principles, conclusions and properties are well intimated for him ‘who has ears to hear’ [Matt. 13:43] in the very words of sacred scripture that are interpreted through these natural truths” (Commentary on John n. 3). For Eckhart, in contrast to Thomas, all metaphysical, ethical, and theological truths are fundamentally one.
Thomas Aquinas’s position in the church changed dramatically in the second decade of the fourteenth century. Pope John XXII ascended the throne of Peter in 1316. His fondness for Aquinas is evident both from his own library and from the support he gave to the Dominican initiation of a canonization inquiry regarding the teacher who was already being called the “common doctor” (doctor communis). After inquiries held at Naples and Fossanova in 1319 and 1321, the case went to the pope at Avignon and on July 18, 1323, John solemnly proclaimed Thomas Aquinas a saint in strong language: “He has illuminated the church more than all the other doctors. In his books a person can gain more profit in a year than in the teaching of others for a whole lifetime.” The canonization process also involved a theological component, because John XXII commissioned the Dominican Giovanni Dominici (d. 1324) to compile a long abbreviation of the Summa, which in effect was something like a commentary, the first of its kind. After all the controversy surrounding his teaching, Thomas had achieved a recognition that put him beyond condemnation. Under pressure from the Paris masters, on February 14, 1325, Stephen Bourret, the bishop of Paris, revoked Tempier’s condemnation of 1277, insofar as it might affect Thomas. The wheel had turned.
The Fortunes of the Summa (1325–1500)
The next two centuries reveal a shifting story in the fortunes of the Summa theologiae. The fourteenth-century world of academic theology was divided into contending schools of Scotists, Albertists, Thomists, and especially the “modernists” (moderni), or “Nominalists,” who adopted in greater or less degree the critical philosophy and theology of William of Ockham (d. 1347), as contrasted to the “old-timers” (antiqui), or the “Realists,” who adhered to the teaching of one or the other of the major thirteenth-century scholastics. Thomas Aquinas was the official theologian of the Dom
inicans, but this did not make his Summa their main teaching text. Nevertheless, Thomas’s book was recognized as an impressive summary of the teaching of the Latin Church, as is evident from the fact that it was translated into Armenian and Greek in the fourteenth century, as well as into Middle High German.
Byzantine interest in Thomas is noteworthy, given the opposition between Orthodox theology and the Latin West. Nevertheless, there was a line of fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Greek theologians, some of them converts to Catholicism, who studied and translated Thomas’s works, including Demetrios Cydones (d. 1397), who rendered both the Summa theologiae and the Summa contra Gentiles into Greek. Byzantine Thomism was primarily philosophical and not theological: Thomas was seen as the best interpreter of Aristotle.32 Greek interest in Thomas continued on into the fifteenth century, as can be seen in Cardinal Bessarion (d. 1472), whose thought was shaped by Orthodox theology, but who read Thomas assiduously both before and after his conversion to Rome.33 There were even translations of parts of the Summa into Hebrew. The interest of Jewish philosophers in the thought of Thomas as a way to counter Averroistic readings of Aristotle that conflicted with the Hebrew Bible, something that had begun in the late thirteenth century with thinkers like Rabbi Hillel of Verona and Jehudah ben Daniel Romano, continued on during the fourteenth century.34 Still, the fourteenth century in general did not witness the appearance of major Thomists or original uses of the Summa, perhaps due to the crisis of society and academia at the time of the Black Death in the middle of the century.
The early fifteenth century marked a change in the fortunes of Thomas and the Summa theologiae. Three important developments deserve attention. The first was a renewed focus on the Summa accompanied by the growth of the commentarial tradition. The second was the encounter of Thomas’s thought and the Summa with Humanism in Italy. The third factor was the birth of printing and the possibilities it provided for the dissemination of the book to a wider audience.
As Bernard Lonergan once observed, “St. Thomas practiced a method, the method of the quaestio. The great Thomists practiced a method, the method of the commentary.”35 It was in the fifteenth century that the Summa began to become the subject of multiple commentaries. The commentary, according to Paul Griffiths, is a form of “meta-work” based on another text and featuring (1) extensive quotation, summary, or paraphrase of the base text, that (2) quantitatively or qualitatively outweighs other elements in the work, and that (3) provides the structure and order of the meta-work.36 With the exception of the Bible, few books in the history of Christianity have inspired more commentaries than the Summa. For the succession of schools of Thomism teaching and commenting on the book became the essential mortar. Thomist commentators often invoked general interpretive principles. Two of the most common were reading “according to the mind of St. Thomas” (ad mentem S. Thomae), and speaking of “St. Thomas as his own interpreter” (Divus Thomas sui interpres)—certainly laudable principles, although they did little to curtail the variety of readings.
The earliest of the great commentators was the French Dominican John Capreolus (1380–1444), who taught at Paris and Toulouse. Called “the Leader of the Thomists,” Capreolus was a defender of Thomas’s views against other scholastics, such as Henry of Ghent, Durandus of St. Pourçain, Scotus, and William of Ockham. He did so through a massive commentary on Thomas’s Writing on the Sentences called the Defenses of the Theology of St. Thomas, written between 1408 and 1433. The Defenses do, however, contain much material from the Summa. Capreolus begins his work with the pious statement dear to all Thomist commentators: “I make one prefatory remark, namely that through this whole reading I have one supposition and it is that I intend to introduce nothing of my own, but only the views that seem to me to belong to the mind of St. Thomas, and I will not employ any proofs or conclusions beyond his own words, except on rare occasions.”37 With Capreolus, however, we can detect a major shift from Thomas’s view of theology as sacra doctrina. For Thomas sacred teaching is scientific because it is primarily a form of deductive teaching (i.e., an activity) based on revealed first principles. For Capreolus theology is a science of conclusions: “It is not a science of the articles of faith, but of the conclusions which follow from them.”38 Many later Thomist commentators were to follow Capreolus to the extent that they treated faith as a kind of preliminary starting point, so that theology became a form of natural metaphysical argumentation.39 This misunderstanding was instrumental in the development of the tradition of seeing Thomas as more of a philosopher than a theologian.
During the fifteenth century, first in Germany and soon spreading widely, both Dominicans and non-Dominicans began to employ the Summa as a school text. The University of Cologne was the earliest center of teaching and commenting on the Summa.40 The initiators were secular priests. The Dutch Henry of Gorcum (called “the Monarch of the Cologne Thomists”) studied at Paris, came to Cologne to teach in 1420, and died in 1431. It is not known if his Compendium of the Summa theologiae, printed in 1473, is actually based on class lectures, but it is one of the first major commentaries. His disciple, the Belgian secular master John Tinctor (d. 1469), wrote a Commentary on the Summa theologiae in the 1460s that was certainly based on class lectures. John’s commentary concentrated on the objections and doubts raised about Thomas’s positions, so he does not deal much with the actual arguments in the body of the Summa articles. Quite different was the contemporary work of the Dominican Gerard of Elten (d. 1484), the Lectura on the First Part of the Summa of St. Thomas. Gerard, one of the first to reflect on the structure of the Summa, divided his treatment of each of Thomas’s articles into a “declaration of the text,” where he reduced the arguments in the body of the articles into syllogisms, and a “solution of difficulties,” in which he added his own reflections. Perhaps the most important of the Cologne Thomists was another Dominican, Konrad Köllin, whose Exposition of the IaIIae of the Angelic Doctor St. Thomas Aquinas was published in 1512 on the eve of the Reformation. By this time the teaching of the Summa was widespread in Germany (e.g., Vienna, Freiburg, Rostock) and was also found in other countries. The Italian Dominican Tomasso di Vio (1469–1534), called “Cajetan,” began to lecture on the Summa in Pavia in 1497, and the Belgian Dominican, Peter Crockaert, began to teach the Summa in Paris in 1507. The spreading use of Thomas’s work in the fifteenth century is also evident in the creation of tools to assist in using the book, such as abbreviations, concordances, indices (this process had begun in the fourteenth century). The prolific Dutch scholar Denys the Carthusian (d. 1471) produced a compendium to the Summa called the Summa of Orthodox Faith, while the Italian Dominican Peter of Bergamo (d. 1482) compiled the massive index known as the Golden Table (Tabula aurea), first printed in 1473. This work, often appended to editions of the Summa even into modern times, was the most complete index until the publication of the forty-nine volume electronically generated Index Thomisticus by Robert Busa (1974–81).
The role of Thomas and the Summa theologiae in Renaissance Humanism, especially in Italy, has often been misunderstood.41 Disputes about the meaning of the Renaissance have been many, at least since the publication of the Swiss historian Jacob Burkhardt’s The Renaissance in 1864. Burkhardt stressed the break between the Humanist intellectuals and artists who turned back to the Classical past to devote themselves to the studia humanitatis, on the one hand, and, on the other, their scholastic predecessors of what the Humanists themselves were the first to call “the Middle Age.” Later investigators, however, pointed out that many of the figures considered central to the Renaissance, for all their criticisms of the narrow scholasticism and rigid clerical ecclesiasticalism of their day, were religious reformers who were familiar, though in varying ways, with the thought of the scholastics, not least Thomas Aquinas. Humanist emphasis on Platonic theology by no means led to a total break with scholasticism and Thomas.
A number of Italian Dominicans, such as Vincent Bandelli of Castronovo (1435–1506), were able to combine dev
otion to Thomas and his Summa with Humanist sympathies, although members of other religious orders sought to resist the growing movement to elevate Thomas above other doctrinal authorities. Thus, the Carmelite Battista Spagnoli, called “Mantuanus” (1447–1516), wrote a treatise around 1490 called The Golden Work Against the Thomists in which he argued that Thomas was a worthy member of the third class of teachers (the scholastics), but these were inferior in authority to the first class (the apostles) and even the second class (the Fathers of the patristic period). Thomas would not have disagreed. Renaissance emphasis on the power of rhetoric fostered the preaching of sermons in praise of Thomas on his feast day of March 7.42 The most interesting was given by the layman Lorenzo Valla in Rome at the church of Santa Maria sopra Minerva in 1457, the year of his death. Valla’s antipanegyric praises Thomas’s sanctity, but has less use for his scholasticism, because the Dominican, like other scholastics, mixed the water of philosophy with the wine of sacred teaching. Thomas’s thought was also used in the Philosophical Faculty at the University of Padua in the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, when his views were seen as a counter to the reigning Averroistic interpretation of Aristotle.43
Interesting encounters of Thomas with Renaissance thought are found in the premier Platonizing philosophers of the Renaissance, Marsilio Ficino (d. 1499) and Giovanni Pico della Mirandola (d. 1494). Neither can be considered a Thomist, but they both knew the friar’s works. Ficino’s Platonic Theology Concerning the Immortality of the Soul, composed between 1469 and 1474, was the closest thing to a summa produced by the Renaissance philosophers. Ficino found an ally in Thomas for his attempt to demonstrate the immortality of the soul against the Averroists. He occasionally cites Thomas by name and silently refers to him in a number of places. Ficino, however, uses Thomas within the context of his own Neoplatonizing philosophy. For example, in the discussion of the divine nature in book 2, Ficino makes use of Thomas about twenty-five times and includes a reference to “our divine Thomas, the splendor of theology” (II.12.8). Ficino’s program, however, remains fundamentally Platonic. Ficino makes use primarily of the Summa contra Gentiles not the Summa theologiae.44 Giovanni Pico della Mirandola read widely, not only in ancient philosophy, Jewish and Arabic sources, but also among the scholastics. His bold syncretistic plan to dispute nine hundred theses at Rome was stopped by Innocent VIII, who condemned thirteen of the announced theses as dangerous or heretical in 1487. Among the list of nine hundred were forty-five of Thomist origin (mostly from the Writing on the Sentences).45
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