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THOMAS AQUINAS THOMAS AQUINAS A Historical and Philosophical Profile • Translated by Joseph G. Trabbic & Roger W. Nutt The Catholic Universit y of America Press Washington, D.C. Originally published as Tommaso d’Aquino: Un Profile storico-filosofico Copyright © 2012 by Carocci editore S.p.A., Roma Copyright © 2015 The Catholic University of America Press All rights reserved The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standards for Information Science—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1984. ∞ Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data [to be supplied] Contents Translators’ Note | vii Author’s Preface | ix 1. Student Years and Baccalaureate 3 2. The First Paris Regency (1256–59) 53 3. The Return to Italy: The Project of the Summa contra Gentiles, and the Writings of the Orvieto Period 116 4. The Years in Rome and the Construction of the Summa theologiae 185 5. The Second Paris Regency (1268–72) 262 6. The Last Neapolitan Period and a Complex Legacy 385 Bibliography | 409 Chronology | 439 Index | 000 Translators’ Note Pasquale Porro writes in straightforward, clear Italian, which made our work much easier. Joseph Trabbic translated the main text and a small part of the footnotes while Roger Nutt translated the majority of the footnotes as well as the chronology and bibliography. In the Italian edition Porro used existing Italian translations of Thomas (making occasional alterations) for quotes from Thomas’s texts. In our translation of Porro we have used or consulted existing English translations of Thomas, when available, although we made a number of alterations to the ones we used either to give a more literal rendering of the original or to fit with our word choices in the surrounding text. The English translations we used or consulted are included in the bibliography at the end of the book in the section “Principal English Translations.” In cases in which there was no existing English translation of Thomas’s text the rendering is, of course, our own. We would like to thank Sr. Albert Marie Surmanski, OP, for her generous help in proofreading our translation. We would also like to thank Susan Needham for her meticulous copy-editing, which improved the English of our translation and, in general, cleaned up our text. Finally, we would like to thank our wives for their patience and support during the year that we worked on this. Joseph G. Trabbic Roger W. Nutt vii Author’s Preface Writing a historical and philosophical profile of a thinker who did not think of himself as a philosopher and, in all probability, would not have accepted the title, might seem pointless if not exactly fiendish. The whole thing could seem still more paradoxical since Thomas Aquinas has been considered, starting at least with Leo XIII’s encyclical Aeterni Patris (1879), the “prince” of Christian philosophers. It is, nevertheless, a fact that Thomas Aquinas by no means considered himself a philosopher. In his eyes, philosophy in general represented a time that was perhaps glorious but was now over, a period that began with the Greeks and ended with the Arabs—an experience to be spoken of in the past tense. There are, however, four good reasons not to consider as arbitrary this attempt to dress Thomas in garments that are not his own. The first is that, from the very beginning, in writing his own theological works Thomas always had the works of the philosophers in mind, works that indeed often constituted a large part of his citations. In a word, there is a reason why in a strictly theological work like his Commentary on Peter Lombard’s Sentences (which was one of Thomas’s very first writings) Aristotle is cited more than two thousand times, a number that is almost double that of the citations of Fathe