Note on the Translation
Note on the Translation
Our aim with this volume has been to offer a translation of Thomas Aquinas’s Quodlibetal Questions that is faithful to his Latin while also being readily intelligible to contemporary readers of English. To this end we have broken up Aquinas’s long sentences into shorter, more readable ones, and have often reproduced the subjects and objects of sentences and clauses. We have also made explicit in the English text certain things that remain only implicit in the Latin. This has meant introducing English words that do not correspond one to one to any words of the Latin text. For example, in Quodlibet VII, q.3, a.1, Aquinas addresses the question, “Is divine immeasurability incompatible with a plurality of persons?” Here we have introduced the adjective “divine” before “persons” in order to make it immediately clear what Aquinas is talking about. To give another example, we have translated Aquinas’s phrase “the grace that makes one pleasing” as “the grace that makes one pleasing to God.” For reasons of clarity we have also avoided transliterations such as “suppositum” and “quiddity,” which are common in other translations of Aquinas, yet unlikely to be understood by those not already familiar with the technicalities of his thought. Some transliterations and technical terms are unavoidable in any translation of Aquinas. In order to help readers understand these, we have provided a glossary of terms at the end of the volume. We have also provided a glossary of authors and works cited by Aquinas. Our hope is that, with the help of the introduction and glossaries, even those unfamiliar with Aquinas’s thinking will be able to read and understand his Quodlibetal Questions.
Our translation is based upon the critical edition of Aquinas’s Latin text produced under the direction of René-Antoine Gauthier and published by the Leonine Commission in 1996. With permission from the Leonine Commission, we have reproduced only the barest minimum of the critical edition’s lengthy and learned footnotes. Our notes are only meant to direct readers to the sources from which Aquinas quotes or to which he alludes. We have followed the critical edition’s convention of using italics to indicate these quotations and allusions, for a number of reasons. Medieval Latin texts lack contemporary forms of style and punctuation such as italics, commas, quotation marks, and so on. This makes it difficult to determine where a quotation given by Aquinas begins and ends. It also makes it difficult to determine when he is quoting rather than merely alluding to a text. Even when he is obviously quoting, his quotation is often different from the original text from which he quotes. To cite just one of countless examples, the first quotation given in Quodlibet I, q.1, a.1, reads, “All creation becomes insignificant to the soul that sees God.” But the original text actually says, “All creation is insignificant to the soul that sees the creator.” As this example shows, Aquinas’s quotations are often partial paraphrases or interpretations or reformulations rather than completely verbatim excerpts. This is especially true of his biblical quotations, in which text and exegesis are often seamlessly interwoven. For these and other reasons, the use of quotation marks to indicate Aquinas’s use of texts would be very difficult, if not impossible, and also very misleading, since his approach to authoritative texts was so very different from our own. That is why we have followed the critical edition’s prudent use of italics to indicate when Aquinas uses the exact same word that appears in the original text from which he quotes or to which he alludes. This allows readers to see the relationship between the original text and Aquinas’s own use of it, and the role he played in its reception.
The words of the Bible have been translated directly from the quotations and allusions in Aquinas’s Latin text, but they correspond loosely to the Douay-Rheims translation of the Latin Vulgate. Book titles, chapter numbers, and verse numbers are from the Douay-Rheims, but those of the Revised Standard Version have been provided in parentheses when the two differ.