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)

BOOK REVIEWS Les debuts de l'enseignement de Thomas d'Aquin et sa conception de la Sacra Doctrina: Edition du prologue de son commentaire des Sentences de Pierre Lombard. By ADRIANO OLIVA. Paris: Vrin, Bibliotheque Thomiste, 2006. Pp.432. 35 €(paper) ISBN: 978-2-7116-1827-9. 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 ofAquinas's 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 Lombard's Book of Sentences. The double concern echoes an interest of Torrell and of James A. Weisheipl, both ofwhose biographical investigations naturally led them to look into the meaning of Aquinas's term for his metier, sacra doctrina. As the subtitle indicates, the volume culminates in an edition of the commentary's prologue (301-46), which provides a focus for the volume's various biographical and interpretative considerations in a crucial early passage ofthe 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 Aquinas's 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 ofsources mentioned and unmentioned byAquinas-with which the 313 314 BOOK REVIEWS text is furnished. Throughout these six chapters the author displays the acumen of a gifted historian who, without neglecting the relevant Thomistic scholarship of the past century-including that of eminent Leonine editors such as Gauthier, Bataillon, and Gils- takes nothing for granted (341), as he reasons and imagines, while patiently and thoroughly sifting the evidence. The import of the word prologue (67 n. 3) here calls for clarification. Strictly speaking the term would refer to the first two units of text in the commentary, both of which are included in the edition. The first of these is a general introduction that begins by quoting Ecclesiasticus 24:5 and then develops a reflection on divine wisdom that turns into an explanation of the divisions of both the scriptural verse and Lombard's work into four parts, each division reflecting four things done through the divine wisdom: (1) manifestation of the hidden things of God, (2) production of creatures, (3) restoration of man in the Incarnation, and (4) perfection of man in his final end. The second unit of text is a quaestio of five articles, the third divided into three subquestions, on the nature of sacra doctrina: (1) whether any teaching is necessary to man besides the philosophical sciences; (2) whether sacra doctrina is one doctrine or more than one; (3a) whether it is practical or speculative, (3b) whether it is science, and (3c) whether it is wisdom; (4) what its subject is; and (5) what its mode. The text edited, however, includes not just this two-part prologue of Aquinas's commentary, but also his commentary on Lombard's prologue, which, with reference to a classical rhetorical principle, he divides into...