Kevin White

Aquinas on Oral Teaching

I N QUESTION 42, article 4 of the Tertia Pars, Aquinas asks whether Christ should have handed on his teaching in writing. He argues that it was fitting he did not, for three reasons: because of his dignity, because of the excellence of his teaching, and so that his teaching might go forth from him to everyone else in an order. I propose to consider this article more closely. 1 By way of a prologue, I will begin with a look at its most important written philosophical antecedent, even though Aquinas does not seem to have known it, namely, the argument in Platos Phaedrus that no serious teaching can be transmitted in writing. To contextualize the issue in Aquinass work I will then briefly mention some passages on writing in his commentary on Boethiuss De Trinitate and his Summa Theologiae. Finally, with respect to the article on Christs not having written, I will discuss its Augustinian source, its sed contra, and its three arguments.

Les débuts de l'enseignement de Thomas d'Aquin et sa conception de la Sacra Doctrina: Édition du prologue de son commentaire des Sentences de Pierre Lombard by Adriano Oliva (review)

Here, from a former student of Jean-Pierre Torrell who is now president of the Leonine Commission, is an exceptionally valuable piece of Thomistic scholarship. In keeping with the importance of paying attention to beginnings, it provides, as its title promises, an historical examination both of the circumstances surrounding the beginnings of Aquinass teaching at the University of Paris, and of the distinctive understanding of sacra doctrina that he first had occasion to articulate at the start of his Parisian commentary on Peter Lombards Book of Sentences. The double concern echoes an interest of Torrell and of James A. Weisheipl, both of whose biographical investigations naturally led them to look into the meaning of Aquinass term for his metier, sacra doctrina. As the subtitle indicates, the volume culminates in an edition of the commentarys prologue (301-46), which provides a focus for the volumes various biographical and interpretative considerations in a crucial early passage of the work composed at a crucial early moment of the life. The first part of the volume (13-300) introduces the edition with a critical and literary study in seven chapters. The first chapter explains the method of text editing developed by the Leonine Commission in its gradual production of volumes of Aquinass opera omnia. Chapters 2 and 3 discuss respectively the witnesses to the text of the Sentences commentary (including a manuscript that belonged to Pierre Roger, the future Clement VI [see 52-53]) and the chain of transmission of the text from a university exemplar. Such exemplars were divided into peciae for piecemeal copying, and in the exemplar of the commentary the first pecia almost coincided with the text of the prologue. Chapter 4, on corrections Aquinas introduced into the university exemplar, and chapter 5, on the chronology of his early years in Paris, are the longest chapters, together making up roughly half of the first part. Chapter 6 discusses the novelty of the questions Aquinas addresses in the prologue, and chapter 7, on the presentation of the text, discusses the admittedly problematic Leonine ideal of printing words in medieval spellings, and explains the three apparatuses-of variants and of sources mentioned and unmentioned by Aquinas-with which the