“A Particularly Agitated Topic”: Aquinas and the Franciscans on the Subject of Theology in the Mid-Thirteenth Century

467 The Thomist 79 (2015): 467-91 “A PARTICULARLY AGITATED TOPIC”: AQUINAS AND THE FRANCISCANS ON THE SUBJECT OF THEOLOGY IN THE MID-THIRTEENTH CENTURY GREGORY F. LANAVE Pontifical Faculty of the Immaculate Conception Washington, D.C. VES CONGAR, delineating the different parts of the understanding of theology in the Golden Age of Scholasticism in his History of Theology, comments that the subject of theology was “a particularly agitated topic,” and indicates no fewer than seven opinions proffered by the tradition and maintained by the masters of the medieval schools.1 The significance of the topic may be opaque to readers untrained in the demands of Aristotelian scientia, and even those readers at home with Scholastic theology may be bemused to hear discussions of such a topic called “particularly agitated.” There is an historical reason for this: by the early fourteenth century the Franciscans, following Duns Scotus, were voicing an agreement with the Dominicans—whether following Albertus Magnus or Thomas Aquinas—that the subject of theology is God. This became the common inherited position of the tradition. Any other definition seems to be an historical 1 Yves M.-J. Congar, O.P, A History of Theology, trans. and ed. Hunter Guthrie (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday and Company, Inc., 1968), 124ff. More recent detailed work on the topic may be found especially in Henry Donneaud, Théologie et intelligence de la foi au XIIIème siècle (Paris: Parole et silence, 2006). The possibilities offered by the tradition and inherited by the authors we will be considering here are (1) the whole Christ (totus Christus), (2) things and signs (res et signa), (3) works of restoration/reparation (opera restaurationis/reparationis), (4) God (Deus), and (5) the things of faith (credibile). Y 468 GREGORY F. LANAVE curiosity, or an indication of a specific tendency of a school of theology. Thus, for example, Congar lumps Alexander of Hales, Odo Rigaud, and Bonaventure into a “synthetic” category, implying that their treatments of the topic are governed by an attempt to include as many as possible of the traditional identifications of the subject of theology in their own definitions.2 Again, when Odo or Bonaventure speak of “the whole Christ” as the subject of theology, it is sometimes taken as a sign of a Christocentric trend in their Franciscan theology, different from the theocentric trend of their Dominican contemporaries.3 The twentieth century saw an explosion of Thomistic discussions of “the nature of sacra doctrina,” including lengthy analyses of question 1 of the Summa theologiae. Article 7, on the subject of theology, comes in for its fair share of treatment—but the range of possible answers is frequently left out of account. On the basis of this literature one might conclude that, for the Thomist, it is important, critically important, that God be recognized as the subject of theology, but it is not so important to examine ways in which one might think of the whole Christ, or the works of reparation, and so on, as the subject.4 These things are relegated to the category of 2 Donneaud repeats this classification in a section entitled “A Synthetic Definition of the Subject of Theology”: “Posing the question of the subject of theologia, Odo responds in a way characteristic of the Franciscan school of Paris, directly inspired by the Summa halensis: after having enumerated several possible solutions set forth in the earlier tradition, rather than choosing one of them over the others, he tries to hold them together by means of certain philosophical distinctions pertaining to the very notion of ‘subject’” (Donneaud, Théologie et intelligence de la foi, 298). Of course, the desire piously to harmonize traditional authorities is hardly confined to the Franciscan masters, and Donneaud even refers to Aquinas’s solution in the Scriptum as “synthetic.” 3 For a very helpful treatment of the “theocentric” and “Christocentric” qualities of the positions of Aquinas and Alexander of Hales, see Boyd Taylor Coolman, “On the Subject-Matter of Theology in the Summa halensis and St. Thomas Aquinas,” The Thomist 79 (2015): 439-66. For background on the importance of a definition of the subject of theology, see James R. Ginther, “The Subject Matter of...