Cicero in the Courtroom of St. Thomas Aquinas by E. K. Rand (review)

BOOK REVIEWS Cicero in the Courtroom of St. Thomas Aquinas. (Aquinas Lecture 1945.) By E. K. RAND, Pope Professor of Latin, Emeritus, Harvard University . Milwaukee, Marquette Univ. Press, 1946. Pp. 114. The justly eminent Latin scholar, Professor Rand, author of Foundera of the Middle Agea and many critical studies on classical and late Latin authors, presented a purely personal commentary on certain aspects of the Summa Theologica as the Aquinas Lecture at Marquette University in 1945. It is based on a study, apparently not of the text, but of citations and passages supplied from the Concordance which Dr. Deferrari and Sr. Inviolata , C. D.P., are working on at the Catholic University. He anticipates adverse criticism and possible disaster, "partly from my ignorance of the Summa Theologica in its whole extent,. partly because I purposely neglected to examine . . . what the authorities of our day have said about St. Thomas." (p. 3.) Professor Rand sought to enliven what might have been a very dull and pedantic piece of work by the extended use of a rather striking figure. The Summa Theologica is a courtroom; St. Thomas, or rather Veritaa, Truth, is the judge; and the host of authorities, sacred and profane, that St. Thomas cites in the course of his work are witnesses to Truth. Thus Cicero appears not as a culprit to be convicted or acquitted of the intellectual crime of error, but only as a witness. The burden of the lecture is not a critical study of the philosophical thought of Cicero in the light of St. Thomas, but rather the urbane comments of a true gentleman educated in the liberal arts in the Nineteenth Century on the liberal education of a Christian gentleman of the Thirteenth Century as revealed in his wide acquaintance with and discriminating use of the liberal arts as cultivated by a gentleman of the first century before Christ. In his far from unsympathetic approach to St. Thomas and his genial observations, Professor Rand reveals himself not only as a scholar but also as a person of cultivation and education in the best sense of the term. Within the field of his own competence, and he is the first to disclaim pretensions in any other, his lecture abounds in remarks of a sort seldom heard in intellectual circles outside the School. On the use of authorities, he pays tribute to St. Thomas' phenomenal memory and his ability to draw from the " deep well " whatever suited his purpose. " For the moment St. Thomas is interested not in the source, but in the element of truth that it may contain. He follows Ovid's maxim: 120 BOOK REVIEWS 121 Faa est et ab hoste doceri." (p. 68.) This is a handsome admission when we remember how many of Professor Rand's colleagues and contemporaries dismiss the Schoolmen as mere parrots, " apes of Aristotle," addicted to ipsedixitism. Nor has he the myopic regard for footnotes characteristic of German scholarship, for he remarks of St. Thomas, " He often will quote like a gentleman, that is, inexactly, nor was he obliged-oh happy age!to verify his references, or to give them nicely." (p. 7.) He finds St. Thomas a liberal gentleman, widely read in the Latin classics, with a sense of humor (p. 20) for whom the liberal arts are" obviously, a fixed part of his thought." (p. 16.) "St. Thomas is a Christian humanist, like that good householder of whom Our Lord speaks, who drew from his treasury things old and new. The treasury from which St. Thomas drew was his well-stocked and retentive and harmonizing mind." (p. 85.) On the Latinity of the Summa, in place of the condescending or critical remarks we might expect from a man of his classical background, Professor Rand finds that the Latin style of St. Thomas while not Ciceronian-" why should it be "-has a "clarity, simplicity, and nobility" of its own. "His style has the dignity, and sometimes the technical exactness, of Cicero's periods." (p. 24.) He gently derides the misconception that the Schoolmen were mere syllogizers, juggling " therefores " and " whereases " into a childishly imposing pile they called science, the misconception found, among others, in Thatcher and Schevill...