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Aquinas and Simplicius on Dispositions ‐A Question in Fundamental Moral Theory

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2024

Vivian Boland OP
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One of the areas on which Fergus Kerr has kept a wise eye and to which he has made valued contributions over many years is moral philosophy. In fact he had the task of teaching ‘moral theology’ in the early years of his career but quickly moved on. He was quite relieved to do so, he told me once, not least because he found Shakespeare more relevant to morality than the geography of the fallopian tubes. Leaving behind moral theology in that sense did not mean his leaving behind a concern with moral questions. On the contrary, he has maintained great interest in developments in fundamental moral theory and in the centrality of morality for all theology.

In this he is faithful to Aquinas who, as Leonard Boyle has argued, envisaged Summa Theologiae as a work in which the moral is central. If, as Kerr himself has been arguing recently, beatitudo is a key to the unity of the Summa, then this is further support for what Boyle argued on historical and palaeographical grounds. This is not to claim that what Aquinas had in mind was anything like what moral theology came to describe later on, when a strict distinction and even separation of dogma and moral came to prevail especially in seminary training. Aquinas belongs to an earlier world, from which contemporary moral philosophers continue to learn, in which these later distinctions did not apply.

Type
Research Article
Information
New Blackfriars , Volume 82 , Issue 968 , October 2001 , pp. 467 - 478
Copyright
Copyright © 2001 Provincial Council of the English Province of the Order of Preachers

References

1 Boyle, Leonard OP, The Setting of the Summa theologiae of Saint Thomas, Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies, Toronto, 1982Google Scholar and Kerr, Fergus OP, ‘Thomas Aquinas’, in Evans, G.R., editor, The Medieval Theologians, Blackwell Publishers, Oxford, 2001, pp.209–20Google Scholar, 215‐16. Some scholars have argued against Boyle's understanding of who the ‘beginners’ mentioned at the beginning of ST are but these arguments leave untouched the other part of his thesis, that ST is a work in which the moral is central.

2 Blackfriars Summa, Volume 22,1964, p.5, note ‘b’. See also 1.11 50,1 ad 3.

3 Compare for example ST I 15 with QD de Veritate 3 on'ideas or ST I 66 1 with QD de Potentia 4 2 on the creation of matter.

4 See Marenbon, John, Later Medieval Philosophy, Routledge, London and New York, 1987, p.52Google Scholar.

5 See Weisheipl, James A., Friar Thomas d'Aquino, Blackwell Publishers, Oxford, 1975, p.332Google Scholar and Aertsen, Jan A., ‘Aquinas's Philosophy in its Historical Setting’, in Kretzmann, Norman and Stump, Eleonore, editors, The Cambridge Companion to Aquinas, Cambridge University Press, 1993, p. 14Google Scholar.

6 See Hankey, Wayne J., ‘Why Philosophy Abides For Aquinas’, Heythrop Journal 42 (2001) p.330CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Other works of Simplicius that survive are his commentaries on Aristotle's Physics and on the Enchiridion, an arrangement by Arrian of arguments from Epictetus: see Mansfeld, Jaap, Prolegomena Questions to be Settled Before the Study of an Author, or a Text, Leiden, Brill, 1994, p.110CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

7 See Wallis, R.T., Neoplatonism, London, Duckworth, 1972, pp.141‐42Google Scholar and The Cambridge History of Later Greek and Early Medieval Philosophy, edited by Armstrong, A.H., Cambridge University Press, 1991, p.313Google Scholar.

8 Wallis, p.138 and The Cambridge History, p.317.

9 Wallis, p. 142.

10 Hankey, pp.332‐34.

11 I am thinking particularly of Jordan, Mark D., ‘Theology and Philosophy’, in Kretzmann, Norman and Stump, Eleonore, editors, The Cambridge Companion to Aquim, Cambridge University Press, 1993, pp.232–251CrossRefGoogle Scholar and EOMeara, Thomas OP, ‘Virtues in the Theology of Thomas Aquinas’, Theological Studies 58 (1997) 254–285.CrossRefGoogle Scholar OMeara adds a couple of striking quotations to this effect from R.A.Gauthier and Reudi Imbach: p.277, n.60.

12 Jordan, p. 250, n.36.

13 QD de Virtutibus in communi 1 bypasses the careful account of habitus given in ST and gets straight down to virtue as dispositio perfecti ad optimum ‐ but for this definition Thomas is still indebted to Aristotle: Physics VII.3.

14 O'Meara, p.263, n.25 quoting Pesch, , Thomas volt Aquin: Grenze und Grosse mittelaltlicher Theologie, Mainz, Matthias‐Grunewald, 1988, p.241Google Scholar.

15 Geach, Peter, The Virtues, Cambridge University Press, 1977Google Scholar