The Gilby Summa

Abstract

The Blackfriars Summa Theologiae, 60 volumes between 1964 and 1976, the greatest collective scholarly achievement of the English Dominican Province, was conceived and orchestrated by Fr Thomas Gilby. To what school of 20^th century Thomism did he and his collaborators owe allegiance, if any? This paper considers that question while documenting some of the significant influences on Gilby and his collaborators on his translation of Aquinas's Summa.

At the English Dominican Provincial Chapter in 1958 that elected Henry St John as Provincial, Thomas Gilby got the go-ahead to edit a new translation of the Summa Theologiae — sixty volumes as it turned out, plus one of indices (1964-1976) — co-editing with T. C. O'Brien, a much younger American Dominican, and commissioning collaborators from the Irish, Australian, and North American provinces, as well as from the English Dominican Province and seven non-Dominicans. The set would be published by Blackfriars in conjunction with Eyre & Spottiswoode, London, and McGraw-Hill Book Company, New York. Key to the project was Gilby's friendship with Sir Oliver Crosthwaite-Eyre (1913-1978), Colonel in the Royal Marines by the end of the War, Conservative M.P. for the New Forest and Christchurch constituency, owner of Knoydart, Inverness-shire, and a Catholic. He was of course present, with Michael Cardinal Browne and Aniceto Fernandez, Master of the Order, on 13 December 1963, when the group representing the two publishing houses and the English Dominican Province had an audience with Pope Paul VI, who, in a ‘cordial allocution’, predicted that the successful outcome of the project ‘would undoubtedly contribute to the religious and cultural well-being of the English-speaking world’ (Volume 2, page vii).

In 2006 Cambridge University Press reprinted the edition in paperback, with a few typographical corrections: currently advertised at £1628.00 for the set, individual volumes of course available.

I. Gilby's Life: A Brief Overview

Thomas Gilby was well qualified to conduct the project. Born Norman Gilby on 18 December 1902 in Birmingham, he was received into the Church with his parents when he was eleven. He then went to St Philip's Roman Catholic Grammar School in Edgbaston, where he evidently received a good grounding in Latin and began to develop his distinctive English prose style. In September 1919, some weeks before he turned seventeen, he joined a novitiate of men back from the Great War, which included Giles Black, Cyprian Rice, and Henry St John. He was ordained in due course at Hawkesyard Priory in Staffordshire. He was sent to study at the Catholic University of Louvain, returning with a doctorate in 1929, first to teach Apologetics at Hawkesyard Priory, then Moral Theology at the Priory in Oxford. In 1934 he published Poetic Experience: An Introduction to Thomist Aesthetics.¹ In 1939 he was among the first Catholic priests to volunteer as a military chaplain, in the Royal Navy in his case, serving throughout the War. In 1949 he published Barbara Celarent: A Description of Scholastic Dialectic ² and in 1950 Phoenix and Turtle: The Unity of Knowing and Being.³ With Between Community and Society: A Philosophy and Theology of the State and Principality and Polity: Aquinas and the Rise of State Theory in the West,⁴ Gilby completed his set of books interpreting Thomas Aquinas on aesthetics, logic, epistemology and political theory, respectively. Meanwhile, with St Thomas Aquinas: Philosophical Texts and St Thomas Aquinas: Theological Texts — anthologies of texts drawn from all over Aquinas's work, demonstrating how to turn the medieval Latin into readable English —Gilby had confirmed his qualifications as a Thomist.⁵ Gilby died, unexpectedly, on 29 November 1975, in Cambridge, where he had lived since the War, having dispatched the last texts of the translation of the Summa to the printers. He had just completed Volume 59, Holy Communion, having failed to nail down anyone to do it.

II. Gilby's Early Education and Influences at Hawkesyard Priory

In the General Preface, included in the front matter of the early volumes, Gilby notes that a ‘rigid consistency has not been imposed on the editors of the different volumes among themselves’ — after all, ‘the author's thought is too lissom to be uniformly and flatly transliterated; it rings with analogies, and its precision cannot be reduced to a table of terms’.⁶ Those who knew him would have expected him to orchestrate the team with a light touch. It remains a good question, ‘In the variety of Thomisms that issued from Pope Leo XIII's endorsement in 1879 of philosophia aristotelico-thomistica, was Gilby able to manage whatever diversity of approach to the text that might be anticipated even within the Dominican cohort’? Additionally, one may ask, ‘Did he even try to do so, selecting his collaborators and briefing them appropriately’? Regardless, what version of Thomism did Gilby himself endorse?

Thomism, as it happens, is the topic of the first of the articles Gilby published in this journal: ‘The Worst of a System…’.⁷ At the time he was twenty-seven, just back home to Hawkesyard Priory, with the doctorate awarded by the Catholic University of Louvain for a thesis entitled ‘The Fortunate Man: An Enquiry into the Place of the Appetite in Real Knowledge of the Concrete’. Does that allow us to work out how young Gilby read the Summa in the postgraduate years at Louvain or to conjecture how he might have learnt to do so as a junior friar at Hawkesyard? The friars moved into the splendid new priory in Hawkesyard in 1898. Because of the Spode family, whose beneficence brought it about, the priory sat in rural Staffordshire, half an hour's walk from Rugeley, a small market town, famous for its annual horse fair. Hawkesyard was planned from the outset to house clerical entrants to the Order during their philosophical and theological formation.

On the one hand, no doubt young Gilby was quick to learn from conversations with his well-educated fellow novices. Giles Black and Henry St John were Cambridge graduates, while Cyprian Rice, as a recruit in the Levant consular service, had studied Arabic, Persian, and Turkish at Cambridge. In Volume 16, Purpose and Happiness, Gilby refers quite unexpectedly to a ‘medieval tradition of Christian sufism’ in connection with Beatitudo (beatitude) without mentioning Cyprian Rice's book The Persian Sufis ⁸ or explaining further.⁹ On the other hand, what anyone owes to teachers, whether inspired or otherwise, is not always easy to uncover. In this instance there is too little evidence to allow us to guess what Gilby may have learnt from the lecturers at Hawkesyard.

The greatest theologian in the province at the time was no doubt Vincent McNabb (1868-1943). From 1891 to 1894 he studied in Louvain and published enough for us to see how indebted his version of Thomism was to Antoninus-M. Dummermuth. But since McNabb moved to London in 1920, just as Gilby's year got to Hawkesyard Priory, it cannot be said that Gilby was even taught by McNabb (professor of dogmatic theology), let alone that Gilby was significantly indebted to McNabb. Among those whose lectures he must have attended was Austin Barker (1885-1947), who earned his Lectorate in Sacred Theology at the Ecole Biblique in Jerusalem. In 1910, after earning his degree, Barker returned to teach at Hawkesyard for the rest of his life. Hugh Pope (1869-1946), who earned his Lectorate¹⁰ in Sacred Theology from Louvain in 1898 and his Doctorate of Sacred Theology in Rome 1909, was another of Gilby's teachers. Pope was the most productive Catholic biblical scholar of the day.¹¹ It is not easy to make out who taught Aristotelico-Thomistic philosophy at that time. Rupert Hoper-Dixon (1894-1935), who earned his Doctorate of Sacred theology in Rome in 1926, became professor of philosophy in September 1927, by which time, however, Gilby had gone to Louvain. Wilfrid Ardagh (1896-1980), who was also educated at St Philip's, did post-ordination study at the University of Fribourg and taught in Gilby's time. Luke Walker (1887-1936), who earned his Lectorate of Sacred Theology from Louvain in 1912, taught philosophy and Scripture, then dogmatic theology, at Hawkesyard. He published too little, but, by oral tradition, was held to have been a fine theologian. He seems the likeliest to have played a part in Gilby's study of Aquinas, although young Gilby was perhaps self-motivated enough to be effectively self-educated in how to read St Thomas.

III. The Influence of the Catholic University of Louvain

What about Gilby's time at Louvain? The condemnation of Modernism in 1907, the imposition in 1910 of the anti-Modernist Oath, and the promulgation in 1914 of the Twenty-four Theses in Thomistic philosophy to be adhered to, probably made for a rather paranoid atmosphere. While he lived with the Belgian Dominicans (French-speaking, though many were Flemish), Gilby did not take the in-house course. Rather, his studies were pursued at the Institut Supérieure de Philosophie, founded in 1894 by the future Cardinal Mercier (one of the great neo-Thomists), in response to Pope Leo XIII's request to bring Thomistic philosophy into dialogue with the sciences, such as psychology. Sending friars to Louvain, however, was never a matter of imbibing or consolidating any brand of Thomism. The reason that the English Dominican Province sent friars to study at the Catholic University of Louvain was purely financial: burses were provided by the Belgian State to compensate for the expropriation of property in Flanders after the French Revolution. The arrangement petered out as friars counted worthy of study overseas went instead to the Angelicum in Rome or the University of Fribourg. Financially, the arrangement formally terminated only around 1970, the fund had so devalued (I was one of those who countersigned the document).

For nearly fifty years friars went from Hawkesyard to the Catholic University of Louvain, mostly for the Lectorate in Sacred Theology. Gilby, however, was not the first to take a course at Louvain. Augustine Hogg (1881-1964), who spent his life in parish ministry at Newcastle, Pendleton, and Leicester, returned with a licence in oriental languages. Kevin Clarke (1887-1965) took a degree in social sciences. He served for thirty-six years in Grenada, but he is best remembered as a friend of Henri Breuil and Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, united by their shared geological interests. Godfrey Anstruther (1903-1988) obtained a degree in historical sciences in 1928. He was the pioneer historian of recusant English Catholicism, but, at a much earlier stage in his career, translated the somewhat ‘apophatic’ Thomism of A.-D. Sertillanges. Then there was Victor White (1902-1960), who (after completing the course at Hawkesyard in 1928) spent a year of what looks like private study with the Louvain Dominicans. The friars in Louvain must have had a considerable influence on the brethren at Hawkesyard, positive and/or negative.

IV. Gilby's Lost Dissertation

Gilby's doctorate dissertation is catalogued at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, but their copy perished with thousands of books and manuscripts in 1940 when the invading German army set fire to the library. Since Gilby evidently did not keep a copy, we can only guess what the thesis argued in detail. But it had to do with a question in the philosophical psychology of moral acts— in secunda pars territory, always Gilby's predilection. Here, however, Gilby was starting from Summa contra Gentiles Book 3: chapter 92,¹² the case of how a human being might be said to be ‘favoured by fortune’, bene fortunatus, in the course of divine providence. The stars have no effect either on our minds or on our wills — ‘whatever some say’, naming Avicenna (chapters 84–87). God alone is the cause, and that means cause of the acts of the will and not only of the power of the will (chapters 88–90), — as if God might have given us the power and stepped back to allow us to exercise it on our own. This takes us to the theory of ‘physical premotion’, identified by the 16^th century Commentators, the Baroque Thomists, who grant, of course, that St Thomas never uses the phrase but maintain that it captures what he repeatedly says about divine causality and creaturely causes (a theme which was central to Dominican theism in the heyday of neoThomism). One great Louvain Dominican (mentioned above) certainly had a special interest in the subject: Antoninus-M. Dummermuth, whom Gilby never knew personally. Yet since Dummermuth taught several friars of the English province, including Vincent McNabb (who admired him greatly), there must have been stories about him at Hawkesyard, stories that Gilby would have heard. Amazingly, in Volume 17, Psychology of Human Acts,¹³ which he chose to do himself, in a footnote (p. 97) Gilby actually recommends Dummermuth's De premotione physica (Louvain 1895) — knowing, as he surely must have done, how unlikely the book was to be accessible to the readers for whom the new edition of the Summa was aimed, even those with access to Catholic libraries.¹⁴

It looks, then, that, in the Louvain dissertation, Gilby sought to show how to reconcile Aquinas's psychology of moral acts with his doctrine of universal divine causality in the anomalous case of the human creature's doing something good or evil by sheer luck — a case that Gilby no doubt found it amusing to unravel. In the background, however, there lurk very serious issues: psychological determinism, the irresistibility of divine grace, and so on — troublesome theological issues that require skilful metaphysical treatment.

V. Gilby's Thomism in New Blackfriars

The first of Gilby's articles about Thomism to appear in this journal (see note 7 above) must have been composed at much the same time as the Louvain dissertation was completed. While Gilby was writing about physical premotion in instances of good or bad luck, and evidently felt at ease doing so, he had considerable reservations about Thomism as a system. There is never a hint of the rancour at their neo-Scholastic training that was voiced by such great contemporaries as Hans Urs von Balthasar (‘sawdust Thomism’), or M.-D. Chenu (‘Wolffianism’!), or even any sign of the policy of distancing themselves as did young theologians, such as (say) Karl Rahner (‘die Schultheologie’, patronisingly), or Josef Ratzinger (Bonaventure rather than Thomas for doctoral research).¹⁵

Gilby's critique of Thomism as a system goes as follows.¹⁶ For Thomism to appeal to the English mind [sic!], this twenty-seven-year-old Thomist avers, it must ‘thrive without many of the accustomed wrappings of the schools, and, without diminishing the strength of its frame, indulge itself more in the depth and variety of the concrete’.¹⁷ In particular, he claims, there is ‘a state of mind peculiarly English’ for which ‘the structure of Thomism, as it appears in the text-books or even from a superficial reading of St Thomas, cannot fail to strike the imagination with the vastness of its conception’¹⁸ — and yet there is ‘a haunting air of unreality about it’, ‘our uneasy feeling that the majestic system … misses somehow the elusive and humble particular’.¹⁹ He lists, as ‘manifestations of that English passion for the present’ such characteristics as ‘the love of games, the interest in hobbies, the toleration of eccentricity, the sense of humour, the lyrical note in poetry, the preoccupation of our philosophers with affairs of state [and] the spirit of compromise’.²⁰ Admittedly, according to Gilby, the English easily slip philosophically into nominalism, empiricism, pragmatism, and whatnot — yet, he contends, this does not amount to ‘a real anti-intellectualism, but to a dislike for the tyranny of the abstract’.²¹ Finally: ‘Let this preoccupation with the complete, concrete, and solid be some explanation of our aversion from system-making and systems’.²² Gilby concludes that a ‘real Thomist’ (such as himself presumably) finds it intolerable when Thomism becomes a ‘system’, ‘a useful regimentation of concepts’, no better than Pelmanism (the courses offered by the Pelman Institute in London for the Scientific Development of Memory, Mind and Personality, a fashionable alternative in the 1920s).²³

No examples are offered of the expositions of Aquinas that prevent ‘British philosophers’ (J. H. Muirhead's phrase) from engaging with his work, taking it, as inevitably they do, as one more ‘system’, ‘a scientific philosophy’, ‘abstract, universal, and necessary’. Presumably Gilby was thinking of the ‘manuals’, such as Josephus Gredt's Elementa Philosophiae Aristotelico-Thomisticae ²⁴ (of which there was a stack at Hawkesyard in 1956, ninth edition 1951). But this insistence on highlighting the concrete and particular in Aquinas's text over against the abstract, which (so Gilby thinks) Thomists tend to privilege, is already a settled principle in his approach, frequently repeated as the years go by.

Gilby's next article, a few months later, is the long appreciative review titled ‘Father D'Arcy's Thomas Aquinas’.²⁵ The subject of the review is a monograph²⁶ by Martin C. D'Arcy SJ, the most eminent Catholic theologian in Oxford at the time. Not uncritical, though judging it ‘a triumph’, as significant as Pierre Rousselot's l'Intellectualisme de saint Thomas ²⁷ (not that it has turned out so), the basic themes D'Arcy has got right, such as ‘the intrinsic physical premotion of everything by God’ (first up!), and ‘the real distinction of essence and existence within Being’, which is ‘the fundamental test’, ‘the shibboleth separating the true from the false follower’.²⁸ It turns out, however, that Gilby thinks D'Arcy tends to equate ‘existence’ with ‘factualisation’.²⁹ Gilby agrees that Aquinas is better found in his own writings than in ‘modern French systematisations of his thought’ — again without giving details.³⁰ On the critical side, Gilby is dismayed by D'Arcy's allegations about Aquinas’ indifference to the emotions. On the contrary, here reiterating his liking for the secunda pars, Gilby sees long stretches of the text in which metaphysical analysis is inseparable from ‘a most lively and acute psychological observation’.³¹ Like many readers, Gilby thought, D'Arcy fails to see Aquinas's respect for the concrete.

A couple of years later there is another long review-article: ‘Thomism for the Times’.³² This essay of Gilby is about Contemporary Philosophy and Thomistic Principles ³³ by R.G. Bandas (1896-1969), an American diocesan priest, who also studied at the Catholic University of Louvain in the mid-1920s (they must have met). Bandas, according to Gilby, is right: the climate philosophically is becoming more sympathetic for a certain Thomism. Bergson is not as hostile as some would say (French Thomists no doubt). Gilby is happy to mention the Dominican, Ambroise Gardeil, and the phenomenologist, Max Scheler.³⁴ Most interestingly, he welcomes Bandas's development of Aristotle's theory of the identity of knower and known, even referring to ‘the oneness of things in an act of mind and their “own-ness” in their proper metaphysical individuality’.³⁵

VI. The Shapcote Summa and the Leonine Summa

Friars of the English Dominican Province had been engaged with the Summa long before Gilby came on the scene. The ‘Summa Theologica’ of St Thomas Aquinas literally translated by Fathers of the English Dominican Province runs to 20 volumes.³⁶ It has come back into its own, being out of copyright, in a variety of formats: £42 complete and unabridged in a single paperback (1116 pages), for example, published by Coyote Canyon Press (Claremont, California). For that matter, sets of the original edition are not difficult to find second hand.³⁷

The ‘Fathers of the English Dominican Province’ are, and never were anyone other than, Laurence Shapcote (1864–1947), who translated a number of Aquinas's writings single-handedly. Born in the Orange Free State, he was the only child of an Anglican missionary priest and his wife, who became Catholics and returned to England. Shapcote entered the Order in 1880 at Toulouse, aged seventeen. Eventually transfiliated (because of the anticlerical laws), in due course he was sent to the Catholic University of Louvain. Afterward he returned to teach at Hawkesyard, and was elected Provincial in 1902.³⁸ Afterwards, in 1917, no doubt because he was born in South Africa, he was asked by Bede Jarrett (Provincial since 1916) to resign as Prior at Leicester and to found the Order in the country of his birth. Shapcote was to spend the rest of his life as a missionary parish priest (almost like his father), in Boksburg and Newcastle, until 1946, at which point he returned to England in failing health. Shapcote brought out the first volumes of the Summa before he left England, but the bulk of the work was done in South Africa.

The Shapcote translation is self-declared ‘literal’, in this respect quite different from the Blackfriars version. According to the dust wrapper on the latter, ‘while not literal, [it] is faithful to the thought, while it attempts, so far as technicalities allow, to render into the freedom of contemporary English’. These days, paradoxically, for students who have no Latin, the Shapcote translation seems to communicate something of the feel of the medieval original—armour-plated and appropriately clunky (more so than the ‘free’ translations in the Gilby Summa).

Translation, however, is not the only form of scholarship. Peter Paul Mackey (1851-1935), the palaeographer, was born near Birmingham and schooled at Oscott College. He entered the Order in 1871, studied with the Dominicans at the Catholic University in Louvain (1874 -1879), and in 1881 was summoned to Rome to work on the newly created Leonine Commission. He spent the next fifty-five years working on the texts.³⁹ The Commission completed the Summa in nine volumes in 1906. Mackey bequeathed a collection of photographs of Rome to the British School. In September 2009, Sir John Soane's Museum in London hosted an exhibition entitled ‘Images from the Past: Rome in the Photography of Peter Paul Mackey, 1890–1901’.

VII. Gilby's non-British Collaborators on the Summa

Gilby never expected the Blackfriars Summa to be the work solely of the English Dominicans, or even exclusively of Dominicans. Of the four Australian contributors there is one Dominican, Reginald J. Batten (Volume 34, Charity),⁴⁰ two laymen, Timothy Suttor, onetime student in the Order, never ordained (Vol.11, Man)⁴¹ and Max Charlesworth (Vol.15, The World Order),⁴² together with a secular priest, Eric D'Arcy (Vol.19, The Emotions, and Vol. 20, Pleasure),⁴³ who was to become Archbishop of Hobart. These three were at ease in analytic philosophy, Suttor eventually at the University of Windsor, Ontario, while Charlesworth and D'Arcy both taught at the University of Melbourne.

From Ireland there are three Dominicans: Liam Walsh (Vol. 49, The Grace of Christ),⁴⁴ Colman O'Neill (Vol.50, The One Mediator)⁴⁵ and William Barden, eventually Archbishop of Isfahan (Vol. 58, The Eucharistic Presence),⁴⁶ writing from Tallaght, Fribourg and Tehran respectively.

Just for the record, apart from T.C. O'Brien, who edited six volumes and helped in others, the following friars of one or other of the American provinces each contributed to the project: W.A. Wallace (Vol.10, Cosmogony),⁴⁷ J.P. Reid (Vol.21, Fear and Anger),⁴⁸ W.D. Hughes (Vol. 23, Virtue),⁴⁹ John Fearon (Vol.25, Sin),⁵⁰ W. J. Hill (Vol.33, Hope),⁵¹ T. R. Heath (Vol. 35, Consequences of Charity),⁵² Kevin O'Rourke (Vol. 39, Religion and Worship),⁵³ Thomas F. O'Meara and M.J. Duffy (Vol. 40, Superstition and Irreverence),⁵⁴ Jordan Aumann (Vol. 46, Action and Contemplation, and Vol. 47, The Pastoral and Religious Lives),⁵⁵ R.J. Hennessy (Vol. 48, The Incarnate Word),⁵⁶ Thomas R. Heath (Vol. 51, Our Lady),⁵⁷ S.R. Parsons (Vol. 53, The Life of Christ),⁵⁸ T.A.R. Murphy (Vol. 54, The Passion of Christ),⁵⁹ C. Thomas Moore (Vol. 55, The Resurrection of the Lord),⁶⁰ J. J. Cunningham (Vol. 57, Baptism and Confirmation),⁶¹ and R.R. Masterson (Vol. 60, The Sacrament of Penance).⁶²

To these seventeen American Dominicans were added: Edward O'Connor (Vol.24, The Gifts of the Spirit),⁶³ and Paul T. Durbin (Vol.12, Human Intelligence).⁶⁴

Thus, given that O'Brien and Gilby did nineteen between them, more than half of the volumes were produced by non-members of the English Dominican Province. It is too difficult now to make out how many of the American collaborators Gilby chose and which of them were proposed by O'Brien. Clearly, however, the Blackfriars Summa was never a solely English Dominican Province enterprise.

VIII. Gilby's Collaborators from the English Dominican Province

The first batch of volumes was ready for the imprimatur by late 1963. The contributors had all learnt to read St Thomas before the Second Vatican Council began to impinge on Thomism. Did the English Dominican contributors show much evidence of sharing a common approach? None of them studied at the Catholic University in Louvain, apart from Gilby. In fact, of the ten, only three studied overseas: Roland Potter and David Joseph Bourke, the ‘Scripture men’, in Jerusalem, and Ceslaus Velecky, expected to teach dogmatic theology, an alumnus of the Angelicum.

The ten English Dominican translators were Timothy McDermott, Herbert McCabe, Edmund Hill, David Joseph Bourke (two volumes), Roland Dominic Potter (two volumes), Marcus Lefébure, Anthony Ross, Cornelius Ernst, Ceslaus Velecky and Kenelm Foster.

Volume 5, God's Will and Providence ⁶⁵ was done by Gilby himself but, as he says, on the basis of preliminary work by Ian Hislop and Duncan Campbell. Hislop was the convert son of a distinguished Scottish Presbyterian minister, which was enough for Gilby to pick him to annotate St Thomas on predestination — Calvin gets a mention. Whimsical as ever, Gilby dedicated the book to a future Scottish Dominican province.⁶⁶

On the English side the two non-Dominican contributors help to define Gilby's Thomism: the only Jesuit, Thomas Gornall, who was teaching philosophy at Heythrop College, then in Oxfordshire, and the philosopher, Anthony Kenny, then just appointed a tutor at Balliol College, Oxford.

Surely Gilby was teasing (again!) by commissioning a Jesuit to take on Volume 4, Knowledge in God,⁶⁷ since it includes Question 14 with the article on whether God knows contingent future events, touching then on the compatibility of Aquinas's theory of divine foreknowledge with his account of creaturely autonomy. In other words, Gilby was surely hoping to lure Gornall into the vicinity of ‘physical premotion’. But Gornall refuses to be drawn into what he describes as ‘so extremely controversial a matter’. Thus, allowing that he knows the toxic history, he notes dispassionately that the ‘the rival theories which have disputed the field are all more or less faulty in method or conclusions’. Naming none of the famous disputants, he recommends studies by two great Jesuit scholars Maurice de la Taille and Bernard Lonergan.⁶⁸ Some years later Gornall was to become an editor of The Letters and Diaries of John Henry Newman (Oxford University Press), the greatest work of English Catholic scholarship, co-editing twelve of the volumes and doing one on his own.

Anthony Kenny, the Oxford philosopher, doing Volume 22, Dispositions for Human Acts,⁶⁹ evidently disconcerted Gilby. He must have known about the Philosophical Inquiry conferences that were taking place at Spode House, started by Columba Ryan in the 1950s.⁷⁰ With an Oxford DPhil to qualify his initiative (1945, thesis on analogy) Ryan sought to bring together seminary and monastery professors of philosophy, such as D.J.B. Hawkins, Dom Illtyd Trethowan and the future Cardinal Cahal Daly, with the new wave of (Catholic) Oxbridge philosophers, such as Peter Geach, G.E.M. Anscombe, Brian McGuinness, J.M. Cameron, Michael Dummett — and Anthony Kenny himself. (Gilby never read a paper at or seemingly even attended these conferences.) No doubt Kenny's Action, Emotion, and Will ⁷¹ confirmed Gilby's confidence in Kenny's qualifications to annotate Aquinas's work in that area. Questions 49 to 54 of the prima secundae deal solely with the concept of habitus, translated by Kenny as ‘disposition’. These questions follow the questions on the emotions and lead into the questions on the virtues and vices. Given the length alone of this stretch of the Summa, it is obviously a matter of great importance in Aquinas's philosophical psychology, which Aquinas regarded as an indispensable framework for moral theology. It is the longest stretch of pure philosophy in the Summa — Scripture quoted only three times, Aristotle on every page. Aquinas has the merit, so Kenny says, ‘of having been the first great philosopher to attempt a full-scale analysis of it [habitus]’.⁷²

Gilby, however, was unhappy with Kenny's volume. Uniquely in the sixty volumes there appears this caveat in Kenny's: ‘The views represented in the footnotes and appendices, which are those of the Editor of this volume, are in some cases not shared by the Editorial Board and other collaborators’.⁷³ Which cases, and whether including all of the other collaborators, are questions unconsidered. Nor is there any attempt to consider the needs of the general reader, as promised in the General Preface, or even, in this case, of ‘technical theologians’.⁷⁴ The stumbling block was no doubt Appendix 12 on Aquinas's uses of the word esse. Although he is not as critical as he would come to be in his Aquinas on Being,⁷⁵ in Volume 22 Kenny is already on the way to arguing that St Thomas's ontological speculations are a muddle.⁷⁶

Eric D'Arcy, one of the Australian contributors, also trained at the Gregorian as well as Oxford, thanks Kenny for his ‘great help’ with Volume 19, The Emotions, actually done in Oxford.⁷⁷ No doubt D'Arcy's excellent book, Human Acts: an essay in their moral evaluation,⁷⁸ convinced Gilby to commission him. In the Introduction to the second volume that he did, on pleasure and pain,⁷⁹ D'Arcy begins by quoting G.E.M. Anscombe's Intention, where she notes that the concept of pleasure had just been returned by Gilbert Ryle to the Oxford philosophical agenda.⁸⁰ D'Arcy then lists the relevant literature, starting with Kenny's Action, Emotion and Will and going on to refer to conceptual analysis of pleasure by G.H. von Wright, J.L. Cowan, and J.C.M. Gosling, followed by studies of Aristotle's treatment, by J.O. Urmson, J.L. Ackrill, and G.E.L. Owen.⁸¹ In other words, Eric D'Arcy relates Aquinas's metaphysical analysis of the concept of pleasure to then ongoing discussions.

With Volumes 19, 20 and 22, Eric D'Arcy and Anthony Kenny deliver a distinctively ‘analytical’ reading of the most purely philosophical stretch in the Summa.⁸² There is a comparable stretch (1a qq 75–89), edited by Timothy Suttor and Paul T. Durbin, explicating Aquinas's philosophical anthropology and theory of cognition, respectively. Thus, what came to be known as Analytical Thomism infiltrated the annotation in the Blackfriars Summa, leaving Gilby nonplussed, embarrassingly so at least as regards Anthony Kenny's notes. On the other hand, if Gilby's Phoenix and Turtle were to count as a prototype of post-neo-Thomist philosophy of mind, then it might be said that P.T. Durbin⁸³ provides a reading of St Thomas's conceptual analysis of human understanding that appeals much more congenially to an unreconstructed Thomist.

IX. Contributions from the English Dominican Province

What of the ten members of the English Dominican Province who edited one (or in two cases two) volumes? Four of them would eventually leave the Order: McDermott, Bourke, Lefébure, and Velecky. Most of them produced work that must have satisfied Gilby. Ceslaus Velecky provides an account of the doctrine of the internal relations of the Trinity that would have satisfied his teachers at the Angelicum.⁸⁴ Kenelm Foster did Volume 9, Angels,⁸⁵ impeccably scholarly, as to be expected from a Cambridge don, no doubt the most academic of the British contributors. Edmund Hill produced Volume 13, Man, Made to God's Image,⁸⁶ completing the philosophical anthropology in the two previous volumes (by the philosophers Timothy Suttor and Paul T. Durbin) with a richly documented patristic and fairly Augustinian narrative of the Biblical doctrine of the human creature.

David Bourke had studied in Jerusalem and done a D.Phil. at Oxford, becoming the lecturer at Blackfriars on the Old Testament. This made him the obvious choice to do Volume 29, The Old Law,⁸⁷ a very erudite volume, indeed. Cornelius Ernst's volume on the New Law comes next.⁸⁸ Marcus Lefébure was a barrister and, so, was just the person to take on Volume 38, Injustice,⁸⁹ one of the many clusters in the secunda pars which bear out Gilby's case for St Thomas having a shrewd eye for the concrete and particular. Anthony Ross, with the collaboration of P.G. Walsh, a lay academic, took on Volume 42, Courage,⁹⁰ again producing nothing with which Gilby would disagree. Roland Potter, as the New Testament man at Blackfriars, happiest when lecturing on the Fourth Gospel, took on Volume 45, Prophecy and other Charisms,⁹¹ and Volume 52, The Childhood of Christ,⁹² doing what he could to bring Aquinas's ideas, especially in the latter, into some connection with New Testament scholarship then.

That leaves Timothy McDermott and Herbert McCabe. While there in no warning by the General Editor and the Board, as in the case of Anthony Kenny's volume on habitus, there are substantial additions by Thomas Gilby in both volumes, whether invited or agreed to, there is no way of telling.

Timothy McDermott (1926-2014) graduated in physical chemistry at Liverpool University in 1945. Soon after he started research in Cambridge but was ‘lured away’ by lectures from Dominicans (including Thomas Gilby). McDermott entered the Order in 1948. He was assigned to teach at Stellenbosch, where he produced Volume 2, Existence and Nature of God,⁹³ and, to cut a long story short, had a career in computer science while producing his Summa Theologiae: Concise Translation,⁹⁴ the OUP World Classics Aquinas: Selected Philosophical Writings,⁹⁵ and How to read Aquinas ⁹⁶— doing a great deal, after he left the Order, to make Aquinas accessible to the general reader.

In working on Volume 2, perhaps McDermott had just been too busy: twelve of the sixteen appendices are written by Gilby, allowing that the views expressed are his alone. Given that Gilby comments on the Five Ways, divine simplicity, the supreme Good, transcendence and immanence, these forty pages sum up the basic concerns of any standard natural theology course. Gilby explicitly invites the reader back earlier than the ‘High Thomism of Cajetan and Banez’, promising to adopt this earlier approach, which, instead of ‘argumentations …directed to pure concepts, forms, or essences’, is ‘searching, throughout, into an existing world, and beyond to the being who supports it’.⁹⁷ This move by Gilby would not be difficult to harmonise with McDermott's insistence (quoting Suzanne Langer on symbol making) that we human animals are ‘from the beginning inserted into the logical pattern of the world … present to the definite sense and significance of things around’.⁹⁸ According to McDermott, the Five Ways of proving God's existence, ‘should be thought of as five ways of disclosing ultimate causality within non-ultimate causality’.⁹⁹

Volume 3, Knowing and Naming God, is translated and annotated by Herbert McCabe (1926-2001), with four appendices by him, but the forty-page introduction is by Gilby.¹⁰⁰ Perhaps at this early stage of the series it was taken for granted that the General Editor would make a substantial contribution, as with McDermott and now with McCabe. As the years passed, and mostly after his death, McCabe was to become as powerful an exponent of Aquinas's work as Kenny and McDermott, each in his own way. In the Foreword to McCabe's On Aquinas,¹⁰¹ Anthony Kenny shies away from identifying him as an Analytical Thomist, on the grounds that McCabe didn't regard himself as any kind of ‘Thomist’.¹⁰²

McCabe's four appendices focus on the following theses. Appendix 1: ‘The understanding in act is the intelligible in act’; Appendix 2: God is not a ‘causal explanation of the world’; Appendix 3: ‘We can use words to mean more than we can understand’; Appendix 4: For Aquinas, ‘analogy is not a way of getting to know about God, nor is it a theory of the structure of the universe, it is a comment on our use of certain words’.¹⁰³ Each of these remarks has a good argument behind it. All give rise to further argument; the last in particular is regarded as controversial. So, what did Gilby make of these claims: was his introductory essay supportive or otherwise?

Question 12 is mainly about whether and how we humans will see God in the beatific vision. So Gilby goes through St Thomas's account of knowing as an extension of being, what the controversy about our natural desire was all about, and so on. Then, in Question 13, de divinis nominibus, rendered as ‘theological language’, Gilby provides quite a richly elaborated account of analogy as the way between anthropomorphism and agnosticism in discourse about God. He grants that ‘while it may well be that the subject of analogy has been overblown by some of his followers, he certainly did not leave it at the level of linguistics’.¹⁰⁴ The previous paragraph rails at a ‘past fashion [which] presented him [sc. Aquinas] as though he were a computer handling ideas like numbers, or like a supreme organizer moving quasi-juridical pieces on the board of Christian doctrine — in effect a univocal thinker’.¹⁰⁵ More harshly than ever, here is Gilby denouncing and dismissing the neo-Thomist systemizations of the thought of St Thomas which he knew of in earlier days. That said, apart from the crack about linguistics (which may have been directed also at Ralph McInerny) Gilby seems to have found both Timothy McDermott and Herbert McCabe congenial collaborators.

X. The Contributions of Thomas O'Brien

Thomas Chrysostom O'Brien [‘Chrys’ to Gilby] died in 1991, aged sixty-seven. He was no doubt the principal collaborator in the project. Born in Providence, Rhode Island and educated at Providence College, he eventually joined the Order, completing his graduate studies at the Angelicum in the 1950s. He would go on to teach at the Dominican House of Studies in Washington, D.C., but he left the Order in 1966 and married. Thus, during the greater part of his work on the Blackfriars Summa he was no longer a Dominican. From 1979 he worked with the International Commission on English in the Liturgy.

Of the six volumes that O'Brien did on his own at least two were to have been done by others: Vol. 7, Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, and Vol. 31, Faith.¹⁰⁶ He probably chose to edit Volume 26, Original Sin, which appeared in 1965, when he was still a Dominican, though he thanks Gilby ‘for assistance that was personal and far beyond the call of his general editorial duty’.¹⁰⁷ The volume is one of the most richly documented and learnedly footnoted. Volume 27, Effects of Sin, which appeared in 1974, notes, in the Introduction, that ‘the day of sanctioned admiration for the systematizing, synthesizing powers of St Thomas has passed’.¹⁰⁸ While once again the admirers, who got St Thomas so wrong, are not identified, O'Brien is surely echoing Gilby's judgment that what put off readers was the conception of Aquinas's work as a ‘system’. Whatever else, the Blackfriars Summa was surely intended to allow St Thomas to break free of the ‘worst of a system’, which young Gilby deplored in this journal in 1930.

Volume 14, Divine Government, published in 1975, one of the last, is one of the best; The four questions on how the angels are governed by God got O'Brien to produce a useful appendix on the Dionysian Corpus.¹⁰⁹ Aquinas's angelogy depends on copious quotations from the Pseudo-Dionysius's writings. More than this, however, while the ‘lavish eloquence’ of Dionysius is somewhat restrained by the ‘flat plainness’ of St Thomas, it reminds us of the neo-Platonic inheritance in his theological and metaphysical work as a whole.¹¹⁰ Indeed, O'Brien refers us to the studies by R.J. Henle (1956), C. Fabro (1939) and L.-B. Geiger (1942), thus allowing the Platonic stream in Aquinas's thought to be recognized, positively. Then, out of the three questions on how divine government works in the human case (qq 103–105), O'Brien plucked out another Dominican shibboleth: ‘utrum Deus operatur in omne operante’ (1a q105 art 5), which gives rise to quite a lengthy appendix on esse.¹¹¹

‘There are some who have taken God's working in everything that acts to mean that no created power effects anything in the world, but that God alone does everything without intermediaries’, Aquinas writes, spelling out the problem. Citing Moses Maimonides, he attributes this position to Islamic theologians. Whatever the problem that confronted Aquinas historically, the issue that O'Brien wants to highlight is creation: ‘God's being with the being of all beings and God's causing with the causing of all causes’.¹¹² While there is no need to ‘rhapsodize about the primacy of esse in St Thomas's thought’, the truth is that ‘the very being of creatures and their communication of being … are inescapable’.¹¹³

XI. Gilby and Interpretations of Aquinas

Volume 1, Christian Theology, is translated and annotated by Thomas Gilby, as one would have expected.¹¹⁴ In a book of one hundred and sixty-five pages, forty are taken by the text and translation of the First Question of the Summa and over a hundred to the appendices in which Gilby sets out his account of how we are to read it. It turns out, however, that he never intended to introduce the series. On the contrary it was to have been done by Victor White, who died of cancer, aged fifty-seven, on 22 May 1960.¹¹⁵ He left a draft translation and two bundles of notes, which Gilby consulted, self-mockingly regretting that the overture volume to the new Summa lacks the ‘verve, clearness, learning, and sympathy’ with which White would have charged the text. On the other hand, as he says, it will be obvious to readers familiar with his work on Aquinas that Gilby is neither so ‘warm’ to Jungian depth psychology as White was, nor so ‘cool’ towards the High Scholasticism of Cajetan, the Salamanca Carmelites, Baroque Thomism, and the Leonine revival.

From the outset, then, Gilby was well aware of how divergent from one another interpretations of Aquinas could be, including within the English Dominican Province. After all, he was a student at the Catholic University in Louvain when Joseph Maréchal S.J. was inventing what came to be Transcendental Thomism, which Gilby didn't regard as an acceptable reading (Aquinas as proto-Kant). Gilby allows a single mention of ‘the influences of Neo-Platonism’,¹¹⁶ and this lack of interest in Aquinas's inheritance from Plato is enough to define the difference between Victor White and Thomas Gilby. In ‘The Platonic Tradition in St Thomas’, reprinted in his seminal collection God the Unknown and other essays, White insists that Aquinas ‘made no greater contribution to the history of human thought than by his painstaking synthesis of Plato and Aristotle’ — even if ‘no element in his thought has received less consideration from students of his work’.¹¹⁷ Strong words! Then, however ‘cool’ White's attitude to Baroque Thomism, he concludes by quoting with approval a phrase by the great Dominican commentator, John of St Thomas (1589-1644), that relates to Aquinas's handling of the Divine Ideas at prima pars Question 15, the most famous intrusion of Platonism in the supposedly purely Aristotelian corpus.¹¹⁸

Gerald Vann was to have done Volume 43, Temperance,¹¹⁹ but he died on 14 July 1963, aged 56. He studied in Rome, not Louvain. His first book, Saint Thomas Aquinas was reprinted as The Aquinas Prescription: St Thomas's Path to a Discerning Heart, a Sane Society, and a Holy Church).¹²⁰ Borrowing freely from famous older French Thomists, such as Etienne Gilson and A.-D. Sertillanges, and allying himself with up-and-coming contemporaries, particularly Josef Pieper, Yves Congar, and Victor White, Vann (then aged thirty-four) published the only book-length interpretation of Aquinas that any friar of the English Dominican Province produced in that generation.

XII. Summing Up

Pope Paul VI's prediction for the success of the Gilby Summa was somewhat sanguine. Then, since the Blackfriars Summa is, after all, primarily a translation, the quality of the translation deserves attention: as volumes appeared they were reviewed in this journal by Professor E. L. Mascall, the Anglican scholar. Students who can look over to the Latin contend that the translation is sometimes too free — ‘dynamic equivalence’ as one might say. Then, with such a motley company of editors, the rigour of the explanation and erudition of the documentation fluctuate a good deal. However, Cambridge University Press no doubt did the market research and decided to reissue the Blackfriars Summa — in paperback.

Perhaps perception of Aquinas has changed in the years since 1958. Thomas Gilby showed no sign of ever being attracted to the Platonic side of Aquinas, noted by Victor White and T.C. O'Brien, and permeating Gerald Vann's book. The great bugbear for Gilby in the study of St Thomas was recent ‘French systematizations’, though he was never subjected to any version of Thomism that made him resentful. However, more radically, he believed that the English [sic!] were congenitally antipathetic to ‘system’ in philosophy. He set out his hopes for the Blackfriars Summa, predicting that after the Tridentine Thomas, and the Leonine Thomas, ‘he will reappear, this time not framed in a Baroque apotheosis nor quoted as the censor of the Latin Church, but more like the Brother Thomas of earlier days: patrician yet modest, large yet delicate, who lets the facts speak for themselves and is not out to grind an axe, a saint indeed for all times, whose wisdom draws from the headwaters that will fertilize Christendom so long as it lasts’.¹²¹ (p. 9).