Eileen C. Sweeney

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:THREE NOTIONS OF RESOLUTIO AND THE STRUCTURE OF REASONING IN AQUINAS 1 EILEEN c. SWEENEY Boston College Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts RESOLUTIO, better known by the English transliteration of its Greek counterpart, "analysis," has been touted as " the conceptual model for some of the most important ideas in the history of philosophy, including the history of the methodology and philosophy of science." 2 But while resolution /analysis may be important in the histories of philosophy and science, its own history is, to say the least, confused. A Renaissance commentator, Jeremias Triverius gives some sense of this when, after giving a list of four methods of dialectic (division, definition, demonstration, and resolution),3 he writes, 1 I have used the following abbreviations for works by Thomas Aquinas. All translations of Aquinas are my own. Commentum in Quatuor Libros Sententiarum (ed. Busa): In Sent; Compendium Theologiae (ed. Busa): Comp Theo!; E:rpositio Super Librum Boethii De Trinitate (ed. Decker): Exp de Trin; In Aristotelis Libros Posterium Analyticorum (ed. Marietti) : In Anal Post; In Duodecem Libros Metaphysicorum Aristotelis E:rpositio (ed. Marietti): In Meta; In Librum Beati Dionysii De Divinis Nominibus E:rpositio (ed. Marietti): In Div Nom; Sententia Libri Ethicorum Aristotelis ad Nichomachum: In Ethic; Sententia Libri Politicormn Aristotelis (ed. Leonine): In Pol; De Substantiis Separatis (ed. Busa): De Sub Sep; Summa Contra Gentiles (ed. Leonine): SCG; Summa Theologiae (ed. Leonine): ST; Questiones Disputatae de Veritate: QDV. 2 Jaakko Hintikka and Unto Remes, The Method of Analysis (Boston: D. Reidel, 1974), p. 1. s These four methods of dialectic are also given by a number of ancient commentators, for example, Ammonius (In Porphyrii Isagogen, in Commentaria in Aristotelem Graeca [hereafter, CAG], ed. Maximilian Wallies [Berlin, 1891], vol. IV, pt. 6, p. 34, 11. 19-20) and a later commentator, David (Davidis Prolegomena et in Porphyrii Isagogen Commentarium, CAG, ed. Adolf Busse [Berlin, 1904], vol. 18, p. 88, 11. 6-10). 197 198 EILEEN C. SWEENEY Now anyone who has some knowledge of dialectical matters knows what Definition, Division, and Demonstration are. There is no general agreement, however, so far as I can see, on Resolution. Some identify it with Division. Others regard it as contrary [to Divi- • ] 4 S!On, ••• Triverius, like many modern commentators, adds to, rather than sorts out, the confusion, continuing, " And since each one is entitled to his opinion, I am now maintaining that Resolution is contrary to Demonstration...." 5 Many centuries before Triverius we find a similar ambiguity in Greek commentators on Aristotle, who outline several types of analysis. Unlike Triverius, however, most seem untroubled by the multiple types; Ammonius and David, without puzzlement, explain carefully that analysis is the opposite of each of the other three methods.6 The lack of 4 Jeremias Triverius, In texnhn [sic] Galeni clarissimi commentarii (Lyon, 1547), p. 14; cited and translated in Nea! Gilbert, Renaissance Concepts of Method (New York: Columbia University Press, 1960), p. 106. Galen's opening remarks of the Ars medica, giving three methods of teaching (analysis, synthesis, and definition) is a common locus for the discussion of resolution/ analysis in the Middle Ages and Renaissance. Galen's contribution, at least for Aquinas, seems to have been completely mediated by Medieval Arabic commentators. Galen's own discussions are either incomplete, as in the opening passage to the Ars medica (in Claudii Galeni Opera Omnia, ed. C. G. Kiihn, [Repr. Hildesheim: Georg Olms, 1965], vol. I, pp. 305-306), which merely mentions the word, or are unclear accounts of analysis (Cf. Galen's discussion of analysis in De Peccatorum, in Opera Omnia, vol. 5, ch. 5, pp. 80-81). On two of the Arabic commentaries' descriptions of analysis to accompany medieval translations of Galen, see below, nn. 80 & 83. On Galen's supposed contribution to the notion of resolution and method in the development of experimental science, see A. C. Crombie, Robert Grosseteste and the Origins of Experimental Science (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1953), especially pp. 7680, and Gilbert, Renaissance Method, pp, 13-27, 44-46. 5 Triverius, In texnhn, p. 14; Gilbert, p. 106. 6 For analysis as the opposite of division, definition, and demonstration, see Ammonius, In Aristotelis Analyticorum Priorum Librum I Commentarium, CAG, ed. Maximilian Wallies, (Berlin, 1891...

While the history of Western philosophy as a whole can be seen as the appropriation by philosophers of the discourse of truth from the poets and makers of myth, of the replacement of the narrative form by the 'properly philosophical' form of argument, it is an appropriation that also takes place within medieval thought, particularly in the construction of theology as a legitimate academic discipline. Whether that appropriation constitutes progress or loss was as much debated in the Middle Ages as it is in recent thought. I offer this medieval chapter not to take a side on the issue, but as an example of some of the presuppositions and dangers awaiting both sides of the polemic. The particular example I would like to examine is a well-known one, the conflicts over and changes in the nature of theology in the Latin twelfth century, beginning with the even more familiar conflict between Abelard and Bernard of Clairvaux. I offer this essay with fully knowledge that characterizations of this conflict are cliché-ridden. It has often been seen as the conflict between the first stirrings of the modern critical spirit and the conservative, fideistic opposition, between an emerging ‘Scholastic’ and a revised ‘monastic’ theology, and/or between ‘systematic’ and ‘mystical’ theologies.

This essay will focus on analogies drawn from Aristotle’s account of natural motion and change which Thomas Aquinas uses to construct responses and explanations of free choice and its characteristic act, i.e. creation for God, and acts of virtue for human beings. Though these analogies to natural change recur throughout the Thomistic corpus, my analysis will focus on their use in the Summa Theologiae, where they consistently bear the weight of Aquinas’s account of the divine and human will and their acts, and tend to be used to minimize the differences between the elements, animals, human beings, and God by relating them as being which tend to, move toward, act for, and are themselves an end. In contrast to De veritate and other texts, in which categories and examples of physical change are used to distance and distinguish human or divine willing and action from motion and change, the Summa attempts to build up from the ground of material natures and change toward the human and divine in gradual steps, transforming the gap and opposition separating creature from creator into a gradual ascent.

This paper argues that the role of nature in Aquinas’s account of virtue, action and law does not require the kind of adherence to Aristotle’s ‘metaphysical biology’ that is refuted by Darwin because of the way Aquinas transforms nature as applied to a rational being and as an analogy to elucidate virtue, habit and law. Aquinas’s grounding of ethics and law in the notion of nature is also not a kind of intuitionism designed to answer all moral questions and stop all ethical debates but a model which gives principles; these principles in turn are not that from which all conclusions can be derived with universality and certainty but are principles which are the topic of reasoned and ongoing debate about their interpretation and application in particular laws or practices. The paper then examines Aquinas’s application of the principles of natural law to evaluate human law as an example of this reasoned debate, which is both subject to error and correction, showing how Aquinas’s notion of nature can work in practical applied ethics.

The paper discusses Anselm's account of human finitude and freedom through his discussion of what it means to receive what we have from God in De casu diaboli. The essay argues that Anselm is considering the same issue as Jean Paul Sartre in his account of receiving a gift as incompatible with freedom. De casu diaboli takes up this same question, asking about how the finite will can be free, which requires that it have something per se, when there is nothing, as St. Paul asserted in Romans, that we have not received. Anselm's notion that we have two wills, one for benefit or advantage, and one for justice, allows for something to come per se from the individual who wills and also accounts for the willing of the good angels as the acceptance of what they are and have as received and, hence, as finite. The essay concludes with reflection on Sartre and Camus's The Plague taking as the central ethical and existential problem of human life, as Anselm does, the problem of finitude, and comparing their responses