Friar Thomas d’Aquino by James A. Weisheipl, O. P. (review)

BOOK REVIEWS Friar Thomas d'Aquino. His Life, Thought, and Work. By JAMES A. WEISHEIPL, 0. P. Garden City, N. Y.: Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1974. Pp. 476. $8.95. The seventh centenary of the death of St. Thomas Aquinas (1224/51274 ) has evoked an outpouring of articles and commemorative studies on the Common Doctor, but few will be able to match this superb monograph on his life, thought, and work by Father Weisheipl. The result of long years of study, of personal research into 13th-century intellectual and institutional history, and of critical comparison with the very detailed but unpublished lecture notes on Aquinas by the late Father I. T. Eschmann, 0. P., Weisheipl's book emerges as the closest one can come to a definitive biography of Aquinas at the present time, and as the standard against which any future serious scholarship in this field will have to be measured. The style of writing is engaging and clear, well suited to carrying a message of considerable profundity, although hardly qualifying the work for endorsement as light reading. That the author should have been able to pack so much new information and critical appraisal into the pages allotted him is no small tribute to his command of the subject matter and to his own intellectual acumen-features that should especially commend his treatise to readers of The Thomist. The burden of Father Weisheipl's message is carried in seven chapters that develop the following themes: (1) Thomas's boyhood in the kingdom of Sicily and his young manhood in the Dominican Order, to 1252; (2) his early days at Saint-Jacques and as Sententiarius at Paris from 1252 to 1256; (3) his inception in theology and his career as Regent Master at Paris from 1256 to 1259; (4) his return to the Roman province and the various services he rendered there to the Order and the papacy from 1259 to 1265; (5) his founding of the Dominican studium at Santa Sabina and his role as lector in the priory at Viterbo, to 1268; (6) his return to Paris for a second regency in theology and the attendant controveries from 1269 to 1272; and (7) his return to Naples, the last years of his life, and the events leading to his canonization on July 18, 1323. Interwoven throughout this historical account are summaries and analyses of Aquinas's more important writings, particularly as these reveal the development of his thought in philosophy and theology. Appended material includes a summary chronology, a catalogue giving most of the factual material available on Aquinas's authentic writings, a bibliography of sources and of secondary literature, notes, and two indices, of persons and subjects respectively. 937 938 BOOK REVIEWS From the wealth of scholarly detail thus provided it is difficult to disengage a few points for particular comment. What most impressed this reviewer , however, was the author's skillful handling of two topics that have offered difficulty to previous historians, the first being Thomas's double career at the University of Paris and the second the numerous hagiographic legends that have grown up around him. With regard to the first, Weisheipl has shown conclusively, against common teaching up to now, that Aquinas's initial teaching role as a bachelor at Paris was never that of cursor biblicus, a function he had already performed at Cologne under Albert the Great before being sent to Paris, but was rather that of a baccalarius Sententiarum . It was only after functioning for four years as a Sententiarius that he incepted as a magister in theology in the Spring of l!t56, and so the entire seven years of his first stay at Paris were devoted to the teaching oi theology in the systematic sense. The second Paris regency was likewise devoted mainly to systematic theology, and particularly to the defense of Aristotelianism in its employ; in discussing this period Weisheipl is especially good at delineating the apostolic as well as the intellectual motivation behind Aquinas's Aristotelian commentaries, and the way in which he himself, by his skillful defense of the pagan Aristotle against the Averroists, actually provoked the renewal of Augustinism at Paris under Franciscan auspices. With regard...