Truth or Transcendentals: What was St. Thomas’s Intention at De Veritate 1.1?

The Thomist 67 (2003): 197-219 TRUTH OR TRANSCENDENTALS: WHAT WAS ST. THOMAS'S INTENTION AT DE VERITATE 1.1? MICHAEL M. WADDELL Augustana College Sioux Falls, South Dakota CHOLARS HAVE LONG BEEN interested in the first article of Thomas Aquinas's Disputed Questions on Truth (De Veritate). Most of this interest has been focused on Thomas's discussion of the general modes of being entis genera/es consequentes omne ens), which later thinkers have come to refer to as "the transcendentals." Indeed, influential commentators like Umberto Eco,1 Armand Maurer,2 and Francis Kovach3 have turned to this text primarily-and sometimes only-for its insights about the transcendentals. The most important recent contribution to this exegetical tradition was made byJan Aertsen in his Medieval Philosophy and the Transcendentals: The Case ofThomas Aquinas. While Aertsen admits that Thomas "never wrote a separate treatise on the transcendentals,"4 he also claims that Thomas left «three texts [I Sent., d. 8, q. 1, a. 3; De Veritate, q. 1, a. 1; and De Veritate, q. 21, a. 1] ... that have a more general character and present the 1 See Umberto Eco, The Aesthetics of Thomas Aquinas (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1983), 20, 22. 2 See Armand Maurer, About Beauty: A Thomistic Interpretation (Houston: Center for Thomistic Studies, 1983), ch. 1, n. 26. 3 See Francis Kovach, Philosophy of Beauty (Norman, Okla.: University of Oklahoma Press, 1974), 240-42. 4 Jan Aertsen, Medieval Philosophy and the Transcendentals: The Case ofThotnas Aquinas (Leiden: Brill, 1996), 71. 197 198 MICHAEL M. WADDELL doctrine the its entirety."5 these texts, Aertsen takes the article of De Veritate to "Thomas's most complete account and afford insight into the interests motiving transcendental thought."6 It is therefore unsurpnsmg that Aertsen reads De q. 1, a, 1 as a and epistemological discourse privileges transcendental modes of being.7 There are, of course, scholars resist reading the first article of De as though it were primarily a discussion the transcendentals. In 1989, Adrian Reimers published an entitled "St. Thomas's Intentions at Veritate 1," in argued that "St. Thomas's a..nalysis these transcendentals is logical in nature, rather than ontological. . . . The ultimate purpose of De Veritate 1, 1 is to define a word, namely, 'truth'."8 Even stated in these broad terms, Reimers's claim has met objection from leading contemporary expositor of Thomas's doctrine of the transcendentalso Aertsen writes: This approach yields too limited a picture of Thoma.s's intentions. The question is "What is truth?", and Thomas looks into the conditions for every investigation into what something is. As we observed earlier, it is evident from the arguments pro and contra that the question actually disputed in 1.1 is whether truth is altogether the same as being. If Thomas were interested in a logical definition of truth, we are left with no explanation as to why he unfolds the doctrine ofthe transcendentals in precisely this text.9 The argument between these exegetes is complicated, part because their dispute is over Thomas's mode of discourse as well as the question he intended to investigateo Thus, one aspect of the controversy derives from that Reimers believes that 5 Ibid., 72. 6 Ibid., 73. See i!so ibid., 261, 336. 7 Indeed, Aertsen finds such a rich source of Thomas's ontology and epistemology there that he attempts to construct the entire edifice of medieval philosophy upon his reading of the transcendentals as the prima of human conception in De Verit., q. 1, a. 1. 3 Adrian Reimers, ast. Thomas's Intentions at De Veritate 1, 1,~ Doctor Communis 42, no. 2 (1989): 175-83. The tide of the present article, of course, refern to Reimers's suggestive piece. 9 Aertsen, Medieval Philosophy and the Transcendentals, 106-7 (emphasis added). TRU1H OR TRANSCENDENTALS? 199 Thomas's aims in this text are logical, whereas Aertsen maintains that they are more ontological and epistemological. The other aspect of the dispute arises from differing assessments of Thomas's central intention in the text. Reimers thinks Thomas intended primarily to discern a definition of truth, but Aertsen holds that Reimers's interpretation of the text does not...