Aquinas’ Humanism

Medieval Interpreters of Aristotle

CLAS 4451/RELS 4451/CLAS 5701
(Winter Term)
Class Description

It appears as if a deified humanity with infinite appetite for consumption and experience,
endless expectations of what the union of science and technology can accomplish, and
neither recognizing nor setting limits on its freedom, is close to the terminus of an historical
progress which is also the destruction of the conditions of human life on earth. The natural
and engineering sciences which have enabled this seem capable now only of measuring
our steps toward this extinction, or proposing solutions of extreme and incalculable danger.
The philosophical, theological, social, and humanistic disciplines which were or are
implicated in creating both this self-confident divine Anthropos and its cynical nihilist
despair have been made, or have made themselves, powerless to move it. However, as the
Encyclical “Laudatio si” indicates, this global world order was largely a creation of the
Christian West and spread or imposed from and by it. It behooves us then to investigate
how it came about and what its essential elements are. The history this class covers will not
bring all the essentials into view but some cruxes will appear. Exposing these is its aim.

My method in this seminar will differ from what I usually do: I shall not work with
members on discerning the logic and argument of a single text. In fact, we shall read no text
completely. Instead we shall look at portions of several texts from Plato, Aristotle, Plotinus,
Augustine, Boethius, Eriugena, and Aquinas as embedded in my interpretations of them in
order to try to discern the character of an historical development. The following contain
most of my argument and most of the texts we shall examine:

1. “Placing the human: Reason as Participation in Divine Intellect for Boethius and
Aquinas,” Res philosophica 93, no. 4 (October 2018): 583–615.
2. “’Complectitur Omnem’: Divine and Human Happiness in Aristotle and in Aquinas’
Summa theologiae,” Kronos VII (2018): 187–205.
These two summarize my argument.

3. “Augustine’s Trinitarian Cosmos,”Dionysius 35 (2017): 61–98. Exposes the

interconnection of the human and divine. Usefully read with “Between and Beyond
Augustine and Descartes: More than a Source of the Self,” Augustinian Studies 32:1
(2001): 65–88, especially, pp. 7-12 of the posted text and with “Re-evaluating E.R.
Dodds’ Platonism,” Harvard Studies in Classical Philology 103 (2007): 499–541,
especially 521-23 on the shift to the human in Late Antiquity.
4. “Ratio, Preces, Intuitus: Prayer’s Mediation in Boethius’ Consolation,” Praying and
Contemplating: Religious and Philosophical Interactions in Late Antiquity, Studies
 and Texts in Antiquity and Christianity (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2018), 71–96.
Examines how the characteristic form of human knowing and willing is restored
after its absorption into the Divine.
5. “John Scottus Eriugena,” Cambridge History of Late Greek and Early Medieval
Philosophy, 2010. The most profound humanism ever developed philosophically
and theologically, see especially, pp. 10-13 of the posted text. Usefully read with
“Augustine, Denys, Eriugena and the Western turn to the World,” Hermathena 165
(Winter, 1998): 9–70, especially 39-45 of the posted text, and “Jean Trouillard:
Authentic Neoplatonism in a French Seminary.”
6. God in Himself, Aquinas’ Doctrine of God as Expounded in the Summa Theologiae,
Oxford Theological Monographs / Oxford Scholarly Classics (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1987 / 2000), Introduction. Brief assertion and contextualization
of Aquinas’ humanism.
7. “God’s Indwelling: Aquinas’ Platonist Systematization of Aristotelian Participation,”
for Participation in the Divine, edited Douglas Hedley and Evan King, Notre Dame
University Press, in press. Aquinas unites the human to the divine through the
notion of participation. Understanding how participation functions in Aquinas is
crucial.
8. “The Conversion of God in Aquinas’ Summa theologiae: Being’s Trinitarian and
Incarnational Self Disclosure,” Dionysius 35 (2017): 132–170. Demonstrates how the
human moves the Summa theologiae and explicates the Divine.

Everything necessary for the class will be posted on its Brightspace site, but
participants will find it useful to have a copy of the collected dialogues of Plato, Aristotle’s
De Anima, Metaphysics, and Nicomachean Ethics, the Enneads of Plotinus, the Confessions
of Augustine, the Consolation of Philosophy of Boethius, portions of the Periphyseon of
Eriugena, and the Summa theologiae of Aquinas. A great many of my publications and
those of my students are posted. Reading them all will be neither possible or desirable;
many embed things useful for this class in contexts quite outside it. I shall continue to give
guidance as to what portions will most usefully be worked through by participants.

October 23, 2019

W.J. Hankey
Emeritus Professor of Classics
Dalhousie University