Project MUSE®: Nova et vetera - Latest Articles
https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/686
Project MUSE®: Latest articles in Nova et vetera.daily12026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00text/htmlen-USVol. 14 (2016) through current issueLatest Articles: Nova et veteraTWOProject MUSE®Nova et vetera2470-58611542-7315Latest articles in Nova et vetera. Feed provided by Project MUSE®When I Am Lifted Up, I Will Draw All Men to Myself: Eucharistic Sacrifice and Eucharistic Adoration
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/989084
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The London Assize of Nuisance1 for the year 1370 records a case brought against a certain Walter Doget by the parish priest of St. Leonard’s, Eastcheap, for having damaged the wall of the church adjacent to his house to create an opening through which he could view the celebration of Mass.2In her book, Corpus Christi: The Eucharist in Late Medieval Culture, Miri Rubin offered this and other examples of the compelling desire to behold, to gaze upon, to contemplate, the consecrated chalice and host during, and outside of, the Mass. Tracing the absorbing historical development of Eucharistic ritual and devotion, Rubin notes that, in the late twelfth century, “a gesture of elevation came to mark the moment of
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/686/image/coversmallWhen I Am Lifted Up, I Will Draw All Men to Myself: Eucharistic Sacrifice and Eucharistic Adoration2026-05-05text/htmlen-USWhen I Am Lifted Up, I Will Draw All Men to Myself: Eucharistic Sacrifice and Eucharistic Adoration2026-05-052026TWOProject MUSE®388772026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002026-05-05Priestly Power and Prophetic Critique: A Historical Reflection
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/989085
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In his remarkable book, The Bible and the Priesthood: Priestly Participation in the One Sacrifice for Sins, Anthony Giambrone, O.P., provides an exegetically sensitive and theologically insightful biblical theology of priesthood. The three chapters on the Old Testament use key passages to illuminate a major theological theme: priesthood as theophany, the prophetic critique of priestly sin, and the anticipation of a renewed, cleansed priesthood. Turning to the New Testament, Giambrone then explores in two chapters how Jesus inaugurates this new priesthood. Each of these five chapters is accompanied by two excurses, which delve into related topics. The result is a robust biblical theology that effortlessly integrates
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/686/image/coversmallPriestly Power and Prophetic Critique: A Historical Reflection2026-05-05text/htmlen-USPriestly Power and Prophetic Critique: A Historical Reflection2026-05-052026TWOProject MUSE®561282026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002026-05-05As Beautiful as Fiction and as Real as Fact: Saints in the Theological Imagination of John Henry Newman
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/989086
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Midway through his own life’s journey, J. R. R. Tolkien penned a short story entitled “Leaf by Niggle,” a story about a “little man called Niggle, who had a journey to make.” Niggle is an artist, and the story focuses on one of his paintings—a tree in which he becomes wholly invested. While Niggle delights in his tree, he cannot shake the feeling that it is still somehow incomplete. It was to him “very lovely,” and indeed “the really only beautiful picture in the world,” and yet it still seemed “wholly unsatisfactory.”1 Niggle gets sick after trying to help his neighbor, Parish, in the cold and rain, and while bedridden he is visited by an Inspector who tells him it is time for him to begin his “journey.” Niggle is
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/686/image/coversmallAs Beautiful as Fiction and as Real as Fact: Saints in the Theological Imagination of John Henry Newman2026-05-05text/htmlen-USAs Beautiful as Fiction and as Real as Fact: Saints in the Theological Imagination of John Henry Newman2026-05-052026TWOProject MUSE®603452026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002026-05-05Guardian Angels in Early Modern Jesuit Theology
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/989087
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The veneration of guardian angels has ancient roots within the Church, extending beyond the early modern era. Its foundations lie in the traditions of the ancient Church, and during the Middle Ages, it experienced rapid proliferation, reaching its zenith in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.1 However, Ulrich Lehner aptly notes that the formal recognition of the Feast of the Guardian Angels by Pope Paul V in 1608,2 followed by its confirmation by Clement X a few decades later in 1670, signifies that this devotional practice can be considered distinctly characteristic of post-Tridentine Catholicism.The Jesuit order emerged as a pivotal force in the promotion of the veneration of guardian angels.3 Lehner, in
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/686/image/coversmallGuardian Angels in Early Modern Jesuit Theology2026-05-05text/htmlen-USGuardian Angels in Early Modern Jesuit Theology2026-05-052026TWOProject MUSE®967272026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002026-05-05The Centrality of the Nicene Homoousion for Joseph Ratzinger’s Theology
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/989088
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With the seventeen-hundred-year commemoration of Nicaea taking place this year, there is much discussion on this most foundational of ecumenical councils. It is fair to ask what the theological implications of these discussions should be, perhaps by comparison with prior commemorations of ecumenical councils. The fifteen-hundred-year commemoration of the Council of Chalcedon, in 1951, for example, was marked with Pope Pius XII’s encyclical Sempiternus Rex Christus—which followed in the footsteps of Pius XI’s commemoration of the sixteen-hundred-year anniversary of Nicaea in 1925, and the same Pope’s 1931 encyclical Lux Veritatis commemorating the Council of Ephesus. Sempiternus Rex Christus charts the circuitous
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/686/image/coversmallThe Centrality of the Nicene Homoousion for Joseph Ratzinger’s Theology2026-05-05text/htmlen-USThe Centrality of the Nicene Homoousion for Joseph Ratzinger’s Theology2026-05-052026TWOProject MUSE®573552026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002026-05-05Predestination, Grace, and Free Will: Attempt at a Personal Synthesis
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/989089
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Having set forth the teaching of St. Thomas in other works, we want here first (1) to synthesize the essentials in a few propositions forming a doctrinal bouquet, with which we will take the opportunity to dispel some misunderstandings, then (2) to mention some limitations noticed in passing when reading the Common Doctor, and finally (3) to suggest some personal paths for overcoming, we hope, the difficulties encountered.We will examine the problems involved first in the divine plan in God (from the divine science and the divine will, to providence, predestination, election, and reprobation), and then in its realization in creatures. And on each aspect, we will follow the same order as in the previous
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/686/image/coversmallPredestination, Grace, and Free Will: Attempt at a Personal Synthesis2026-05-05text/htmlen-USPredestination, Grace, and Free Will: Attempt at a Personal Synthesis2026-05-052026TWOProject MUSE®1341272026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002026-05-05The Reception of Pastor Aeternus by Jesuit Theologians and the Possibility of Papal Heresy
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/989090
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St. Robert Bellarmine (1542–1621) held two basic positions concerning the extent of the infallibility of the papal magisterium. The first he calls the “fourth view,” which held that the pope is infallible when defining a matter pertaining to faith and morals and when certain limiting conditions are met. The second position he calls the “fourth proposition,” which held that the pope, even when not defining, is not able to be a pertinacious heretic (although he may teach lower errors). In two recent articles, Emmet O’Regan has argued not only that the First Vatican Council defined dogmatically Bellarmine’s “fourth view,” but that the Council also elevated Bellarmine’s “fourth proposition” to the “dignity of a
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/686/image/coversmallThe Reception of Pastor Aeternus by Jesuit Theologians and the Possibility of Papal Heresy2026-05-05text/htmlen-USThe Reception of Pastor Aeternus by Jesuit Theologians and the Possibility of Papal Heresy2026-05-052026TWOProject MUSE®1147212026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002026-05-05Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them in Aquinas: The Chimera, The Phoenix, and God
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/989091
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Throughout the corpus of St. Thomas Aquinas, we find mention of numerous animals. He asks us to consider such natures as those of a man and a horse; the birds and the bees; lions and tigers and bears (O mi!). “All animals,” Aquinas tells us, “are equally animals. Nevertheless,” he is careful to add, “they are not [all] equal animals. Rather, one animal is greater and more perfect than another.”1 In other words, all animals equally belong to the genus animal,2 but their differences make all the difference, resulting in grades and an order among the species, with man ranked above the other animals.3 There is, however, a certain type of animal that he considers on occasion to which these observations are not relevant
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/686/image/coversmallFantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them in Aquinas: The Chimera, The Phoenix, and God2026-05-05text/htmlen-USFantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them in Aquinas: The Chimera, The Phoenix, and God2026-05-052026TWOProject MUSE®1306012026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002026-05-05Aquinas on the History of the Philosophy of Being
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/989092
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Aquinas wrote a “short history of being” or “a short history of the philosophy of being” in the era of ancient Greek philosophy. Many historians of philosophy commented on it.1 This short history paints the picture of a development from the study of being or the whole of being as such being or as accidental being (by the sophists), and as this being or substance (by Aristotelian physics and Plato’s philosophy), to the study of the whole of being as universal being (by Aristotle’s, Plato’s, and Avicenna’s metaphysics).2 The present contribution enquires especially into the presuppositions which enable Aquinas to describe this development of philosophical thinking toward metaphysics. At first, Aquinas has a specific
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/686/image/coversmallAquinas on the History of the Philosophy of Being2026-05-05text/htmlen-USAquinas on the History of the Philosophy of Being2026-05-052026TWOProject MUSE®2889962026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002026-05-05Thomas Aquinas and the Search for His Original Insight
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/989093
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For Rolf Schönberger, on the occasion of his seventieth birthday.“[Despite the insufficiency of natural means needed to attain their perfection], human beings are ordered to a higher end. Even if human beings stand in need of manifold external aids in order to attain this end, and even though their natural resources are insufficient to reach this goal on their own, nonetheless human beings are still more perfect than more self-sufficient creatures.”“This [lack of instinctual determination and of the basic self-sufficiency of any isolated individual] is on account of the nobility of human beings and the comparative innobility of other animals, as you will soon see further below.”A link between Thomas Aquinas in the
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/686/image/coversmallThomas Aquinas and the Search for His Original Insight2026-05-05text/htmlen-USThomas Aquinas and the Search for His Original Insight2026-05-052026TWOProject MUSE®1017552026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002026-05-05Mercenary Love: A Scholastic Debate over a Patristic Notion and Aquinas’s Solution
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/989094
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Although it was over forty years ago that Robert Wielockx first drew our attention to the early Scholastic debates over the nature of charity, his groundbreaking dissertation remains largely unknown.1 Wielockx masterfully reconstructs these debates and convincingly points to their influence on later definitions of charity. These debates arose in the early twelfth century some eighty-five miles northeast of Paris within the walled city of Laon.2 They subsequently moved to Paris and reverberated out to the monasteries of France and its adjoining regions. They were debates about Augustine’s theology of charity, and were unleashed by an anonymously authored work that has come to be known as the De caritate.3 The
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/686/image/coversmallMercenary Love: A Scholastic Debate over a Patristic Notion and Aquinas’s Solution2026-05-05text/htmlen-USMercenary Love: A Scholastic Debate over a Patristic Notion and Aquinas’s Solution2026-05-052026TWOProject MUSE®685412026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002026-05-05Is Dionysius’s Christian Platonism Incoherent? Thomas Aquinas Versus Étienne Gilson on How to Interpret Dionysius’s Metaphysics of Esse in De Divinis Nominibus
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/989095
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Christian philosophers and theologians such as Origen, Augustine, Proclus, Dionysius, Bonaventure, and Thomas Aquinas made use of Plato’s thought—or interpretations of it by philosophers such Aristotle, Plotinus, and Porphyry—to explain Christian doctrines such as the doctrine of creation.1However, critics object that any such attempt is doomed to fail because Platonic metaphysics is incompatible with a Christian account of the creation. In other words, critics claim that something which is usually called “Christian Platonism” is an incoherent view. For example, having presented what he considers to be the Platonic doctrine of being (esse)2 and Proclus’s project to use Plotinus’s interpretation of the latter to
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/686/image/coversmallIs Dionysius’s Christian Platonism Incoherent? Thomas Aquinas Versus Étienne Gilson on How to Interpret Dionysius’s Metaphysics of Esse in De Divinis Nominibus2026-05-05text/htmlen-USIs Dionysius’s Christian Platonism Incoherent? Thomas Aquinas Versus Étienne Gilson on How to Interpret Dionysius’s Metaphysics of Esse in De Divinis Nominibus2026-05-052026TWOProject MUSE®888282026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002026-05-05Newman on Doctrinal Corruption by Matthew Levering (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/989096
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As in Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Purloined Letter,” Matthew Levering is something of a secret hidden in plain sight. He is so prodigiously productive that, like trains running constantly just overhead where we eat and sleep, we no longer notice. Somehow we have become inured to the vast extent of his reading, his truly catholic sympathies, and the level of his mastery of the Catholic tradition. Perhaps it is a matter of self-protection: with not only all those monographs on theological topics (e.g. revelation, creation, Mary, Christ, resurrection, biblical interpretation) and figures (e.g. Augustine, Balthasar, and now Newman), but all those superb edited volumes (e.g. Trinity, Deification), we find ourselves
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/686/image/coversmallNewman on Doctrinal Corruption by Matthew Levering (review)2026-05-05text/htmlen-USNewman on Doctrinal Corruption by Matthew Levering (review)2026-05-052026TWOProject MUSE®415482026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002026-05-05The Incarnation by Timothy J. Pawl (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/989097
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Within the Cambridge Elements series, which seeks to present introductions to topics concerning the philosophy of religion, Timothy Pawl gives us in this recent volume an exposition of the coherence of the doctrine of the Incarnation. This book aims to respond to what Pawl calls “the Fundamental Philosophical Problem” of the Incarnation, which he summarizes in this question: “How can one person be both God, having all the perfections of divinity, and human, having all the limitations of humanity?” This problem opens the way for Pawl to present his response and illustrate the doctrine of the Incarnation as a whole. As a note on my presentation of this book, due to its brief and carefully divided nature, I will
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/686/image/coversmallThe Incarnation by Timothy J. Pawl (review)2026-05-05text/htmlen-USThe Incarnation by Timothy J. Pawl (review)2026-05-052026TWOProject MUSE®149172026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002026-05-05The Roman Mass: From Early Christian Origins to Tridentine Reform by Uwe Michael Lang (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/989098
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When Uwe Michael Lang discusses the search for the early origins of Christian worship in his work The Roman Mass, he contrasts the perspectives toward this search embodied in two quotes: one by Erasmus of Rotterdam and the other from John Henry Newman. According to Erasmus, “it is at the very source that one extracts pure doctrine” (47). Newman, on the other hand, highlights the development of doctrine using the image of a stream: “It is indeed sometimes said that the stream is clearest near the spring. Whatever use may fairly be made of this image, it does not apply to the history of a philosophy or belief, which on the contrary is more equable, and purer, and stronger, when its bed has become deep, and broad, and
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/686/image/coversmallThe Roman Mass: From Early Christian Origins to Tridentine Reform by Uwe Michael Lang (review)2026-05-05text/htmlen-USThe Roman Mass: From Early Christian Origins to Tridentine Reform by Uwe Michael Lang (review)2026-05-052026TWOProject MUSE®140642026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002026-05-05Liturgical Theology in Thomas Aquinas: Sacrifice and Salvation History by Franck Quoëx (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/989099
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English readers are indebted to Zachary Thomas for his translation of the late Rev. Franck Quoëx’s Liturgical Theology in Thomas Aquinas. Quoëx’s book is an examination of the Summa theologiae’s [ST] teaching on the nature of external worship, and it is organized chronologically in accord with the “cultic regimes proper to the various stages” of salvation history (7–9). Hence, Quoëx analyzes Aquinas’s teaching on the nature of worship in the natural law (chap. 1), the Old Covenant (chap. 2), the life of Christ (chap. 3), the life of the Church (chap. 4), and especially in the Eucharist (chap. 5). The appendices examine Aquinas’s commentary on the rite of the Mass and are substantial chapters of their own. This
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/686/image/coversmallLiturgical Theology in Thomas Aquinas: Sacrifice and Salvation History by Franck Quoëx (review)2026-05-05text/htmlen-USLiturgical Theology in Thomas Aquinas: Sacrifice and Salvation History by Franck Quoëx (review)2026-05-052026TWOProject MUSE®145942026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002026-05-05Lying and Truthfulness: A Thomistic Perspective by Stewart Clem (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/989100
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Stewart Clem has written a multifaceted book in which he furnishes a historically informed account of Aquinas’s position on lying and puts forward his own, broadly Thomistic, proposals regarding various aspects of the moral question of lies. The author states that the primary aim of the book is “to rehabilitate Aquinas’s position on lying and demonstrate its contemporary relevance” (3). Clem contends that conventional portrayals of Aquinas as one “absolutist” amongst many fail to reflect properly the nuances of Aquinas’s perspective on the moral status of lies. Such misrepresentations have caused Aquinas’s view on lying to be summarily dismissed, argues Clem, who also takes issue with certain apologists for Aquinas
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/686/image/coversmallLying and Truthfulness: A Thomistic Perspective by Stewart Clem (review)2026-05-05text/htmlen-USLying and Truthfulness: A Thomistic Perspective by Stewart Clem (review)2026-05-052026TWOProject MUSE®189512026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002026-05-05Pierced By Love: Divine Reading with the Christian Tradition by Hans Boersma (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/989101
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Hans Boersma’s Pierced by Love introduces the reader to the practice and effects of lectio divina through rich patristic literature. While the book does trace the steps of lectio divina, it is not a how-to guide. Rather, it means to preserve and perpetuate the way that the fathers of the Church understood the practice of reading Scripture.In his introduction, Boersma argues that the fathers of the Church make no distinction between lectio divina and ordinary Bible reading; therefore, lectio divina is the ordinary, standard way of reading the Scriptures (3). It is ordinary insofar as it is a believer who reads in order to encounter Christ, who is “the source, the content, and the meaning of the Scriptures” (3
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/686/image/coversmallPierced By Love: Divine Reading with the Christian Tradition by Hans Boersma (review)2026-05-05text/htmlen-USPierced By Love: Divine Reading with the Christian Tradition by Hans Boersma (review)2026-05-052026TWOProject MUSE®149122026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002026-05-05