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.
When Descartes’s friend Marin Marsenne read the Discourse on Method he pointed out the similarity between Descartes’s cogito argument and an argument of St. Augustine’s in the City of God, XI, 26. Against the suggestion that he might be mistaken about his own existence, Augustine writes:
Quid si falleris? Si enim fallor, sum. Nam qui non est, utique nec falli potest; ac per hoc sum, si fallor. Quia ergo sum si fallor, quomodo esse me fallor, quando certum est me esse, si fallor? Quia igitur essem qui fallerer, etiamsi fallerer, procul dubio in eo, quod me novi esse, non fallor. Consequens est autem, ut etiam in eo, quod me novi nosse, non fallar.
It has now become standard to note the similarity between Descartes’s argument and Augustine’s.
But no one seems ever to note the similarity between the cogito argument and certain arguments proposed by St. Thomas. Consider De veritate, q. 10, a. 12, for example. In this article Thomas asks whether God’s existence is per se notum. In the seventh objection we read this:
…verius esse habet Deus quam anima humana. Sed anima non potest se cogitare non esse. Ergo multo minus potest cogitare Deum non esse.
Thomas replies in the following way:
[C]ogitari aliquid non esse, potest intelligi dupliciter. Uno modo ut haec duo simul in apprehensione cadant; et sic nihil prohibet quod aliquis cogitet se non esse, sicut cogitat se quandoque non fuisse. Sic autem non potest simul in apprehensione cadere aliquid esse totum et minus parte, quia unum eorum excludit alterum. Alio modo ita quod huic apprehensioni assensus adhibeatur; et sic nullus potest cogitare se non esse cum assensu: in hoc enim quod cogitat aliquid, percipit se esse.
So, no one can assent to the thought that he does not exist because in the very act of thinking he perceives that he exists. (The same pattern of argument can be found in De veritate, q. 10, a. 8, ad 5 and Summa contra gentiles, III, c. 46.) Unlike Descartes, however, Thomas does not make this truth into a first principle. For Thomas, being (ens) is the first principle because, he says, it is the first thing that is “most evident” (notissimum) to us (De veritate, q. 1, a. 1).
(I originally posted this on the AMU Philosophy Department blog last month. I believe in recycling. It’s good for our planet.)
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.
Naturally, there is a significant amount of incommensurability. Consider this bit from the Catechism, §2257:
Every society's judgments and conduct reflect a vision of man and his destiny.
It has a name and a definition. We’ve been experiencing it for about a decade (or more?) but I never knew what to call it (at least I never hit on anything pithy) or how to define it. Check out NY Times opinion editor Bari Weiss’s informative explanation:
What do Thomists think of safetyism? If you’re an American academic, safetyism isn’t something you can ignore. It has also become a major force in our politics; but that isn’t news to anyone. Are we now beyond liberalism or is this a creature of liberalism?
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!
The introit for yesterday’s vetus ordo Mass (Dominica infra Octavam Nativitatis) is quite beautiful:
Dum medium silentium tenerent omnia, et nox in suo cursu medium iter haberet, omnipotens sermo tuus, Domine, de caelis a regalibus sedibus venit. Dominus regnavit, decorum indutus est: indutus est Dominius fortitudinem, et praecinxit se.
The words are taken from Wisdom 18:14-15 and Psalm 92:1.
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.)
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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.
Under the direction of the Sacra Doctrina Project
