Are the Principles of sacra doctrina per se nota?

The Thomist 74 (2010): 407-35 ARE THE PRINCIPLES OF SACRA DOCTRINA PERSENOTA? GUY MANSINI, 0.S.B. Saint Meinrad Archabbey Saint Meinrad, Indiana ACCORDING TO THE first question of the Summa Theologiae, theology is a science (a. 2), and the articles of the creed are its first principles (aa. 7 and 8). These principles are not evident to us, but are received in faith from the God who reveals them. A science that receives its principles from a higher one is, for Aristotle, a subalternated science. So, for instance, music receives principles from arithmetic, and perspective receives principles from geometry (a. 2). Saint Thomas does not call theology a subalternated science in the Summa, but the idea is there and he employs the language elsewhere, notably in his commentary on Boethius' De Trinitate. Characterizing theology as a science is a part of the meeting of the gospel and Aristotle, of faith and philosophy. It has the advantage of locating revelation and sacred doctrine relative to reason and philosophy as understood by Aristotle. On the other hand, since it is revelation itself that founds the scientific character of theology, as supplying its first principles, there is no subordination of the gospel to philosophy. In fact, since the certitude of the principles of theology is greater than that of any other science just because received from God, since as speculative its subject matter is of greater dignity than any other science, and since as practical its end is that to which all other practical ends are ordered, Christian doctrine is above all other sciences (a. 5), and judges them sapientially (a. 6). Christian doctrine is brought 407 408 GUY MANSINI, O.S.B. into relation with the achievement of Aristotle not by some deformation of its nature, therefore, but by being true to itself as a wisdom received by faith. This has been brilliantly meditated on and shown by Michel Corbin.1 Maintaining that theology is a subalternated science is not without difficulty. Such a science not only receives some of its principles by faith, but ordinarily also has a different subject matter than the subalternating science. This is not true of theology relative to the divine knowledge, however, since they are both of God and of all things in relation to God.2 Saint Thomas himself points to this departure from the pure theory of subalternation in a text later interpolated into his first commentary on the Sentences of Peter Lombard.3 The only similarity of theology to, for example, perspective that remains is that they both take principles on some kind of faith, and even here the similarity is not perfect. For while an expert in perspective could, if he wished, become an expert also in geometry, we cannot in this life come to the knowledge of the articles of faith such as God has of 1 Michel Corbin, Le chemin de la theologie chez Thomas d'Aquin (Paris: Beauchesne, 1974). Other important studies of question 1 of the Summa are to be found in Jean-Pierre Torrell, "Le savoir theologique chez saint Thomas," in his Recherches Thomasiennes (Paris: Vrin, 2000), 121-57; John I. Jenkins, Knowledge and Faith in Thomas Aquinas (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), but see Brian Shanley's review in The Thomist 63 (1999): 315-19; Eugene F. Rogers, Jr., Thomas Aquinas and Karl Barth: Sacred Doctrine and the Natural Knowledge ofGod (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1995), part 1; T. C. O'Brien, "'Sacra Doctrina' Revisited: The Context of Medieval Education," The Thomist 41 (1977): 475-509; James Weisheipl, "The Meaning of Sacra Doctrina in Summa Theologiae I, q. l," TheThomist 38 (1974): 49-80; M.-D. Chenu,La theologiecommescience au XIIIe siecle, 3d ed. (Paris: Vrin, 1957), chap. 5, "La science theologique"; and Tharcisse Tshibangu, Theologie positive et theologie speculative (Louvain: Publications Un. de Louvain, 1965), 67-96. 2 By contrast, a visual line has an intelligibility unto itself that a line considered just in itself does not. Perspective and geometry thus have really different subject matters in a way that God's science of God and sacred doctrine do not. Chenu's exposition of this is very good (La...