Boethius and Aquinas

6. Survey of Interpretations

CHAPTER 6 Survey of Interpretations This part is devoted to three things. First, a rapid survey of scholarly opinion on the third Boethian tractate which the medievals called De hebdomadibus. Second, a look at the tractate through the eyes of St. Thomas Aquinas. Third, a brief indication of discussions of the good by Boethius and St. Thomas in other places. The deficiencies of the other interpretations will become clear and we will see that better than anyone else St. Thomas enables us (a) to understand the Boethian tractate in itself and (b) to place the solution the tractate reaches in a broader context, as an element of the comprehensive Vlew Thomas constructs from Boethian and other sources. INTERPRETATIONS OF THE TRACTATE There can be no question of surveying all interpretations that have been made of De hebdomadibus from medieval times to the present. Various partial surveys and appraisals are available.1 That of Pierre Duhem2 has been extremely influential in appraisals of the medieval interpretations of the Boethian tractates, in I. Cf. Gangolf Schrimpf, Die Axiomenschrift des Boethius (De Hebdomadibus ) als Philosophisches Lehrbuch des Mittelalters (Leiden, E. J. Brill, 1966). Volume II of the magisterial Severino Boezio of Luca Obertello (Genova, Academia ligure di scienze e lettere, 1974), is over 300 pages of Boethian bibliography , which is supplemented by that in his edition of La Consolazione della Filosofia e Gli Opuscoli Teologici (Milan, 1979). The introduction and notes of this volume add to its usefulness. It is amazing that the Toronto dissertation of Peter O'Reilly, Sancti Thomae de Aquino, Expositio super librum Boetii "De Hebdomadibus ", an edition and a study, 1960, shows up on none of the standard bibliographies and seems to have been completely ignored. Since I regard it as easily among the very best ever done on the tractate and the commentary, I am happy to draw attention to it. 2.. Le systeme du monde, tome 5, Paris, 1917, pp. 2.85-316. 162 De hebdomadibus particular that of Thomas Aquinas. Since Duhem's point is that the medieval commentators, including St. Thomas, largely missed the point of Boethius's pithy remarks, it will be important for our purposes to look at the reaction of Thomists to such estimates of their master's exposition. Since one of the features of the appraisal by Thomists of the text of Boethius is that it is Aristotelian in its doctrine,3 it should be noted that in recent years a good deal of emphasis has been put on the Neoplatonic origins of Boethius's teaching and we are told that enigmatic remarks in the tractates deliver up their meaning more easily when this is recognized. With the crescendoing of Existential Thomism, there has been an increasing urgency in the effort to show that Boethius did not teach what Thomas takes him to teach on esse. Peter O'Reilly is one of the few who has spelled out what such Thomists are saying and the relevance of his criticism is not confined to Thomists. But once a man sets out to expound the text as of that author, he is committing himself to the job of saying what the text as belonging to that author means; and therefore to the extent that he does anything other than that, he is wrong, dead wrong; and he is (knowingly or not) lying about that author's text and consequently about that author. And no amount of saying it gently or obscurely will lessen the fact.' Among those to whom this refreshingly frank judgment is taken to apply are Duhem, Roland-Gosselin, Fabro and Geiger. This enables us to see the stakes of the present chapter. It is no small matter if there should be more or less common scholarly opinion that the meaning of the Boethian tractate is significantly different from what Thomas takes it to be. If Boethius means one thing and Thomas takes him to mean another, not on minor points such as the meaning of hebdomad, but in the main 3. "Boece est reste en cette doctrine entierement fidele au point de vue d'Aristote." M.-D. Roland-Gosselin, O.P., Le De Ente et Essentia de S. Thomas d'Aquin (Paris, first edition 192.6, second 1948), p. 145. If one holds that there is a chasm between Aristotle and Thomas, linking Boethius to Aristotle has predictable results. 4. O'Reilly, op. cit., p. 32.7. Survey...