Boethius and Aquinas

3. Thomas Comments on Boethius

CHAPTER 3 Thomas Comments on Boethius Boethius wrote five theological tractates or opuscula sacra and St. Thomas commented on two of them. In this chapter, after several preliminary considerations, we will take a close look at St. Thomas's commentary on De trinitate. Among the preliminary things we must consider are, first of all, the nature of the tractates and their place in the Boethian literary production. We must also notice that Thomas did not write the same kind of commentary on the two Boethian tractates on which he did comment ; that on De trinitate is far freer and more extensive in its plan-we remember that Thomas did not finish it-than that on De hebdomadibus. Given the almost uniform denigration of the latter as a commentary, I shall say a few things about what St. Thomas set out to do in the various kinds of commentary he wrote. THE OPUSCULA SACRA To turn from Boethius's logical works, where one is likely to come upon such an ejaculation as mihercule!, or from The Consolation ofPhilosophy, where the ambience seems pagan though monotheistic, can produce a shock. There is little in his other writings that suggests what a fervent Catholic Boethius was, but in the tractates he is unequivocally a Christian theologian seeking to apply close analysis to the dogmas of the faith and to refute heresies. The order in which the tractates are printed in Migne's Patrologia Latina, Tome 64, and in the Stewart, Rand and Tester edition and translation is, to use the titles of the latter, this: 97 De trinitate [1] The Trinity is One God and Not Three Gods [2] Whether Father, Son and Holy Spirit are substantially Predicated of the Divinity [3] How Substances are Good in virtue of their Existence without being Substantial Goods [4] On the Catholic Faith [5] A Treatise Against Euthyches and Nestorius1 The fifth tractate, in length the equal of the other four combined, is thought to have been written first. The other four are thought to fall to the same period, but Schurr holds that [2] was written before [1]. That all these treatises can be called theological is clear enough, but whether the adjective distinguishes the third from what pagan philosophers might do is another question. In the next chapter, we will be discussing what Boethius meant by "theology" and will propose an answer to that question on the basis of the different sort of regulae which govern [3] as opposed to the other tractates.2 The two Christological heresies Boethius refutes are that which holds that Christ has two natures and is two persons (Nestorius) and the Monophysite opposite (for which Euthyches stands), that Christ is a single person with one nature. In order to handle the opposed heresies of Eutyches and Nestorius with respect to Christ, Boethius in the fifth tractate seeks to get clear as to what is meant by nature, what by person, and what the relation between the two is, since it is from confusion about 1. Migne prints the commentaries of Gilbert of Poitiers along with the tractates which are given these titles: [1] De unitate trinitatis, [2] Utrum Pater et Filius et Spiritus Sanctus de divinitate substantialiter praedicentur, [3] Quomodo substantiae bonae sint, [4] Brevis fidei Christianae complexio, [5] Liber de persona et de duabus naturis. Thomas refers to [2] by its incipit, Quaero, an pater, and to [5] as the De duabus naturis and [3] as De fide Christiana. Cf. Bruno Decker, Sancti Thomae de Aquino Expositio super librum Boethii De Trinitate (Leiden, 1959), p. 47. Luca Obertello, in his Italian edition, La Conso/azione della Filosofia e gli Opuscoli Teologicj (Milan, 1979) presents the tractates in this order; [5], [2], [I], [3], [4]· 2. That is, the contrast between universalium praecepta regularum of De trinitate 1 (I. 29) and the terminos regulasque of the De hebdomadibus (I. 16). Chadwick , p. 174, notes that "the tltird contains nothing specifically Christian." Thomas Comments on Boethius 99 these that aberrations arise.3 Among other things, the tractate is a brief Greek-Latin lexicon of key terms employed in discussions of Christ and the Trinity. The difference between nature and person (natura: ousia and persona: hypostasis) is not unrelated to the controversies over the sense of the famous first axiom of De hebdomadibus, diversum est esse et id quod est and to seemingly parallel considerations in De trinitate. We...