Super Boethium De Trinitate
| Also called | Expositio super librum Boethii De Trinitate; Super Boetium De Trinitate |
|---|---|
| Author | Saint Thomas Aquinas, O.P. |
| Setting | Paris, late 1250s |
| Shape | Unfinished; six questions in three parts |
| Doctrinal standing | An authentic early work; principal Thomistic locus for the sciences and the preambles |
Super Boethium De Trinitate is Saint Thomas Aquinas's unfinished exposition of Boethius's treatise On the Trinity, treating the knowledge of God, the preambles of the faith, and the division and methods of the speculative sciences.[1][2]
An unfinished exposition
Boethius wrote a short theological tractate on the Trinity. Thomas began an exposition of it at Paris in the late 1250s and did not finish. The surviving work contains a prologue and six questions: knowledge of divine things; the manifestation of divine truth; the knowledge possessed by faith; the cause of plurality; the division of speculative science; the methods of speculative science. It does not reach the later, more difficult stretches of Boethius's text.
The 1913 Catholic Encyclopedia lists Thomas's expositions of Boethius among the authentic works. The De Trinitate commentary is also among the few Thomistic texts for which autograph evidence is discussed in the scholarly tradition. That palaeographical fact, when secure, is historical. It does not make the unfinished questions a fifth Gospel. It does make careless printings easier to check.[2]
Knowledge of God and the preambles
The opening questions are a principal Thomistic locus for how God is known. Some things about God can be demonstrated from creatures. Others are held only by faith. Reason can show that the mysteries are not contradictory and can find analogies; it cannot demonstrate them. The language of praeambula fidei belongs to this climate. Sacred doctrine uses philosophy; it is not reduced to philosophy.[1]
Benedict XVI, presenting Thomas, named the three offices of reason toward faith in terms that match this work's labor: demonstrating preambles, illuminating mysteries, answering objections. Dei Filius later defined the knowability of God and the existence of mysteries in conciliar form. The Boethian exposition is earlier school theology. It is one of the reasons later councils could speak so cleanly. It is not itself those councils.[3][4]
The division of the sciences
Questions 5 and 6 treat speculative science as divided by the degree to which the object is separated from matter and motion: natural philosophy, mathematics, and metaphysics or theology. The division is Aristotelian and Boethian, received by Thomas as a map of how the intellect may be led toward God. Natural theology in the later sense lives here as a possibility of metaphysics, not yet as a seminary tract with that name.
The map is pedagogical. It is not a defined list of university faculties. Later scholastics argued over the object of metaphysics and over whether one starts from ens commune or from God. Those arguments often appeal to these questions. They remain school arguments. A Catholic physicist does not need Thomas's sixth question in order to be in the state of grace. A Catholic metaphysician who has never read it has missed a primary text.
How to read an unfinished book
The work is cited by question and article. Missing commentary on the rest of Boethius is not supplied by guesses attributed to Thomas. The Summa's treatise on the Trinity and on the names of God is the later, fuller theological determination. Super Boethium is the earlier, more methodological book. Both are his. The later does not make the earlier a mistake, and the earlier does not make the later optional.
Latin and English presentations exist in the ordinary corpora. Copyrighted modern translations are to be cited rather than copied. The Leonine and related critical work on the text is the scholarly measure. Catholic use is to learn from Thomas how faith and the sciences are distinguished without being torn apart. That lesson is the book's permanent service, even in its unfinished state.[5]
References
- Back to citation occurrence 1.0 Back to citation occurrence 1.1 Thomas Aquinas, Super Boethium De Trinitate — Unfinished exposition of Boethius on the Trinity, treating knowledge of God, the preambles of faith, and the division of the sciences.
- Back to citation occurrence 2.0 Back to citation occurrence 2.1 Catholic Encyclopedia (1913), St. Thomas Aquinas — Public-domain life and catalogue of Aquinas's works, including the Catena aurea, Sentences commentary, and opuscula.
- Back to citation Benedict XVI, general audience on Saint Thomas Aquinas, 16 June 2010 — Papal catechesis on reason's service of faith by demonstrating preambles, illuminating mysteries by analogy, and answering objections.
- Back to citation First Vatican Council, Dei Filius — Dogmatic constitution on God the Creator, the natural knowability of God, the distinction and harmony of the natural and supernatural orders, and the gratuity of revelation.
- Back to citation Leonine Commission, Opera omnia Sancti Thomae Aquinatis — The Holy See's commission for the critical edition of Aquinas's authentic works.