Part Two Master At Paris (1256–9)
PART TWO
MASTER AT PARIS (1256 – 9)
After completing his lengthy apprenticeship and being named master, Thomas was not immediately welcomed into the professorial ranks at the University of Paris. Indeed, it took a papal intervention to counter the reluctance of the secular masters to his elevation. Among the reasons for this resistance was a reluctance to recognize the new mendicant orders in general and the appropriateness of their members becoming masters of theology in particular. Thomas could not be expected to remain silent when the very legitimacy of his religious vocation was called into question. It would be possible, if somewhat distorting, to make his response to the attacks on his Order the centrepiece of his first stint as a regent master in Paris. Polemical skills that will remain quiescent until the flare-up of Latin Averroism ten years later are vibrantly on display.
The principal opponent of the mendicants was William of St Amour, who had set down his condemnations in a Treatise on the Perils of the Last Days.Casting the followers of St Francis and St Dominic in the role of Antichrist is a rhetorical excess that would seem to discredit the discrediter, but Thomas took this attack with great seriousness, responding to it in detail in Against Those Impugning Religion and the Cult of God, thought to have been written in 1256. In it Thomas defended the new Orders and justified the teaching mission of the mendicants and their roving commission as preachers and confessors. An irony of this is that Thomas was unaware when he wrote this response that William’s work had already been condemned.
What was Thomas’s day like as a regent master resident in the Dominican convent on the Rue St Jacques? His day began with Mass – the saying of his own and the hearing of another. It was still very early in the day when Thomas gave his lecture. His was followed by that of the bachelor apprenticed to him. The afternoon was given to disputation, and to this we owe the series of disputed questions brought together under the portmanteau title On Truth.
Disputation, along with lecturing and preaching, made up the threefold task of the master. Lecturing was the lectio, the reading and explication of a book of Scripture or the Sentencesof Lombard. Here the indispensable task of assimilating a tradition was observed. One must grasp the authors (auctores) who were authorities (auctoritates) in one’s discipline. The scholar was engaged in a communal enterprise that antedated him and would continue when he was no more. T. S. Eliot’s ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’ discusses the delicate dialectic that the poet must engage in between the old and the new, the poetic tradition and his contribution to it. Mutatis mutandis, the essay can be taken to describe the task of the medieval scholar.
Mastering texts might seem to threaten a backward-looking attitude, a nostalgia for a lost golden age, but for two things. First, the concept of a commentary developed, so that room was made for an independent discussion of themes raised by an authoritative text – after the scholar had shown that he understood the text as such. Furthermore, there was the second magisterial task, namely, to dispute. In a dispute the master offered to defend a given resolution of a question. But this was prefaced by a search for the best arguments in favour of the opposite answer. With those before him, the master would redirect the discussion by first appealing to an authority that favoured his proposed answer – sed contraest. Then he would develop arguments on behalf of his proposed resolution of the question. Finally, since the value of a solution can best be seen in its ability to handle initially attractive objections, the master took up the counter-arguments one by one.
The disputed questions that have come down to us are not transcripts of the lively occasions that filled the afternoons at St Jacques. But they are directly and essentially connected to them. As made available for copying, they retained the living language of thought, the conversation of the soul that Plato spoke of which requires more than one voice, recognizes a plurality of plausible answers to a question and then defends an answer against its worthy competitors. Thomas found this method so congenial that he adapted it for use in his masterpiece, the Summa theologiae.
Appropriately, then, the readings selected for this part rely heavily on the Disputed Question on Truth. But the selections begin with two commentaries on Boethius, commentaries of two significantly different kinds, which are of fundamental importance in grasping the mind of Aquinas.