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I N T RODUC T ION These introductory remarks are intended to assist a modern reader in understanding two difficult works by two difficult authors. Those works are a short treatise by Anicius Manlius Severinus Boethius (ca. 480–524), a work known to the Middle Ages as On the Hebdomads (the meaning of this very title will require discussion), and an exposition of that treatise by Thomas Aquinas (ca. 1225–1274). Both are presented here in our English translation of the “Leonine edition” text of 1992, tome 50, of the Opera omnia of Saint Thomas, for that edition proffers the words of Boethius along with the explanations by Brother Thomas. Intrinsic difficulties of these two works are compounded by academic and cultural transformations; the world of Boethius was not the world of Aquinas and our world is identical with neither of the two worlds that produced those authors. We have been reminded by Armand Maurer that seven centuries separate Boethius and Thomas Aquinas;1 it is also true that seven centuries separate us from Aquinas. Difficulties arising from these temporal separations are aggravated in a paradoxical way by the fact that both authors are esteemed especially in the “scholastic” tradition; the more one has been formed in some stream of that tradition (for it is far from monolithic) the more difficult becomes an objective reading of either author. Quite apart from the tradition of scholastic philosophy, other movements tend to cloud our modern vision . Approaches modish in the last fifty years—existentialism, logical positivism, phenomenology, to say nothing of advances in the understanding of the Thomistic analysis of beings, encia, under the sign of “potency ” and “act,” in Thomistic terms essencia and esse—all these are capable of distorting one’s interpretation of Boethian terms. In this double work, an exposition by Saint Thomas Aquinas of a writing by Boethius, the last Roman used the term esse frequently; the Angelic Doctor often employed, in addition, the allied terms essencia and ens. Contrasted with xi 1. Thomas Aquinas. Faith, reason and theology, tr. Armand Maurer, Mediaeval Sources in Translation 32 (Toronto: 1987), p. xxxv. the Boethian esse is the Boethian quod est or id quod est; the interpretation of all these technical terms, particularly esse, presents difficulty. The Background Biographical and bibliographical data on these authors will be provided only to the point that seems helpful in understanding the works presented. For the first, it must be recalled that the works of Boethius enjoyed a significant afterlife well into the eighteenth century, thanks to his enormous prestige with the literate public. Edward Gibbon, for instance , in an often-quoted line, termed The Consolation of Philosophy by Boethius “a golden volume, not unworthy of the leisure of Plato or Tully,”2 and in the same chapter Gibbon remarked that “the senator Boethius is the last of the Romans whom Cato or Tully could have acknowledged for their countryman.”3 As Professor Henry Chadwick has noted, this second remark of Gibbon’s echoes Lorenzo Valla: For that renaissance scholar, Boethius was “the last of the erudite.”4 Aquinas, who has provided the explanation of the treatise by Boethius, shares with Augustine of Hippo (354–430) intellectual preeminence in the history of Christian thought. During the waning years of the imperial Roman tradition, Boethius had been given an education in both Latin and Greek. Although bilingualism was still held to be suitable for the old aristocracy, Boethius seems to have impressed his contemporaries as exceptional in his control of the Greek language as well as in his control of Greek science and philosophy. Through him, it was said, not without hyperbole: Thanks to your translations, Pythagoras, master of music, Ptolomeus, the astronomer, are read as if they were natives of Italy; Nicomachus, the xii I N TRODUCT ION 2. Edward Gibbon, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, ed. J.B. Bury (London: 1909), vol. 4, ch. 39, p. 215. 3. Ibidem, pp. 211. 4. Henry Chadwick, Boethius. The Consolations of Music, Logic, Theology, and Philosophy, Oxford: 1981 (hereafter Chadwick), p. xi; Valla’s remark in which Professor Chadwick has seen the source of Gibbon’s celebrated comment was “ .l.l. eruditorum vltimus Boetius .l.l.”; see Lavrentii Vallae opera .l.l. (Basel: 1540), vol.1, p. 644 (rpt., Turin: E. Garin, 1962). For a discussion of all parties (Boethius, Valla, Gibbon, and Chadwick), see “Boethius, Valla, and Gibbon” by Edward A. Synan in The Modern Schoolman 69.3 & 4, (March...

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