john of st. thomas
I. THOMISM’S CONFRONTATION WITH SUAREZIANISM
From the time of its inception, Thomism has come under attack: first from the Augustinians, then from the Scotists, and later from the Nominalists. But the greatest challenge was undoubtedly Suárez him-self. His critique was effective enough to challenge Thomism to under-go what may be called a process of “Suarezianization”—the adoption of Suarezian tenets while retaining Thomist vocabulary, or else the retention of Thomist tenets but couched in Suarezian language. (As late as 1956 an important Thomist, CORNELIO FABRO, 1911-1995, complained of l’intention assez commune à la néoscolastique de concilier les positions maîtresses du thomisme avec la métaphysique suarézienne.) 2 We shall, in the present chapter, discuss the impact of the philosophy 1 Article published as “John of St. Thomas and Suárez,” in Acta Philosophica 4-2 (1995), pp. 115-136. Changes made here.
Our quotations from John of St. Thomas are taken from the following:
1. JOANNES A SANCTO THOMA, O. P., Cursus philosophicus thomis-ticus. Beatus REISER, OSB [ed.]: Torino/Taurinum, 3 vol., 1930-1937. Vol. 1, Ars logica. Vol. 2, Naturalis philosophiae, partes I et III.
Vol. 3, Naturalis philosophiae, pars IV.
2. JOANNES A SANCTO THOMA, O. P., Cursus theologicus. In Primam Partem Divi Thomae commentarii. Solesmes Benedictines [eds.].
Paris: Desclée, vol. 1, 1931; vol. 2, 1934.
2 Cornelio FABRO, “Actualité et originalité de l’<esse> thomiste,” Revue thomiste, 56 (1956), p. 483: “the intention, quite common in Neoscholasti-cism, of reconciling the major positions of Thomism with Suarezian meta-physics.”
of Suárez on that of John of St. Thomas—classical Thomism, orga-nized by the Dominican CAJETAN (1468-1524), and systematized by the Dominican John of St. Thomas and the Carmelites of Salamanca, the Salmanticenses (1631-1704): its tenets were formulated in the 24 Theses approved by the Sacred Congregation of Studies in 1914. Clas-sical Thomism was the normative form of the system from the 16th century to the early 20th (when it was represented by the Dominican REgINALD GARRIgOU-LAgRANgE, 1877-1964), but was challenged in the mid-20th by newer interpretations of that philosophy, like the Transcendental Thomism of the Jesuit JOSEPH MARECHAL (1878-1944) and the Historical Thomism of the layman ETIENNE GILSON (1884-1978).
1. Suarezianized Thomism
A minor example of the Suarezianization of Thomism is John’s aban-donment of the time-honored commentarial method, such as had been followed, in the exposition of the system, by Cajetan and by Suárez’s older Dominican contemporary DOMINgO BÁñEZ (1528-1604); in-deed, by his younger Jesuit colleague GABRIEL VÁZqUEZ (1549-1604) himself. Before the time of Suárez instruction relied on commen-tary—of philosophy on the writings of Aristotle, and of theology on the texts of masters such as Peter Lombard. Suárez himself had begun his career employing the commentarial method, when working on the topic of the Incarnation, one that had been treated by Aquinas in the third part of his Summa theologiae. In these early works, Suárez’s com-mentary on Thomas’s text was followed by “disputations,” divided into
“sections,” and subdivided into numbers, arranged in Suárez’s own or-der, not that fixed by Aquinas. In lecturing on the Incarnation, Suárez found that he had often to interrupt his theological discourse to clarify the topic’s philosophical presuppositions. He then decided that theol-ogy would best be served if all its philosophical postulates were to be organized into one complete and consistent work. This work was the Disputationes Metaphysicae (1597), the first modern treatment of comprehensive metaphysics not written as a commentary on Aristotle, and where the discipline is structured in an organic way. With it began the definitive abandonment of the commentarial method by Baroque theologians, including John of St. Thomas.
But the systematics of Suárez differs from that of John. Suárez im-poses his own order on the entire work, on the principal and
subordi-nate themes, on their outlines and details. For John of St. Thomas, the plan of his total opus is an assemblage of the pertinent treatises of the Scholastic tradition (on logic, natural philosophy and theology) of AR-ISTOTLE (384-322 B. C.), PORPHYRY (c. 232-c. 304), PETRUS HISPA-NUS/JOHN XXI (c. 1210-1277) and of course AqUINAS. This method is particularly evident in his Cursus theologicus, his masterwork, where he follows the order of the questions of Aquinas’s Summa. However, after summarizing the Master’s questions, John proceeds to express his own ideas in disputations, arranged in his own order and not that of Thomas. In brief: the architectonics of Suárez may be described as macro-systematic and that of John of St. Thomas as micro-systematic.
Inspired by Suárez’s super-system—the melding, by a single thinker, of a systematized theology with a systematized philosophy into one organic unit, with the latter the basis of the former—John forged a Thomist super-system on a grand scale.
2. Original Thomist philosophers vs.
“Commentators”
It has become customary to call the great Thomists of the Renaissance and the Baroque “Commentators.” [The picture emerges of a portly panjandrum surrounded by his adoring acolytes.] It is demanded of them that they be faithful interpreters of the mens Divi Thomae. It is as if philosophy and theology were no more than an exegesis on Thom-as, and not an independent investigation into the truth. But these
“Commentators” deserve to be considered philosophers in their own right, no differently from any of their modern counterparts. John of St. Thomas himself is one of the great Thomists remarkable for their originality, for he was “the first semiotician to systematize the founda-tions of a doctrine of signs,”3 related to the communication between man and God, man and man, and man and nature. These Thomists may be considered commentators in the sense that Aquinas himself is a commentator, for, among a total of sixty of his writings devoted to theology and philosophy, most of them (around forty) are commen-taries and only twenty or so are independent works. The “commenta-3 John DEELY, “Semiotic in the Thought of Jacques Maritain,” Recherches sémiotiques, 6 (1986), no. 2, p. 112. For a more detailed characterization of this originality see the author’s Tractatus de Signis. The Semiotic of John Poin-sot. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985, Editorial Afterword, espe-cially pp. 491-514.
tors” can also be thought of as Thomists in the sense that Aquinas is an Aristotelian. They commented on Aquinas just as Aquinas com-mented on Aristotle, but no one today would identify Aquinas merely as an Aristotelian commentator.