Albert the Great and Thomas Aquinas on Person, Hypostasis, and Hypostatic Union

2008 ◽  
Vol 72 (1) ◽  
pp. 107-146 ◽  
Author(s):  
Corey L. Barnes
Author(s):  
Mónica García-Salmones Rovira

Paying careful attention to his use of language, this chapter introduces Albert the Great’s contribution to natural rights into the scholarly debate between subjective and objective rights. Teacher of Thomas Aquinas, Albert’s work on ius naturale has been overshadowed in many aspects by the significance and impact of his student’s. However, Albert’s early appearance on the stage of empirical sciences as a student of nature has been widely recognized. Eclectic in his use of sources, Albert would generously use Stoic writings, and would become as well a first-rate commentator of Aristotle’s works. As a theologian, Albert’s Augustinian influences cannot be neglected. The text examined here, De bono (1242), constitutes an early and thorough elaboration of an original doctrine of natural right and, importantly, of natural rights.


2021 ◽  
Vol 39 (1) ◽  
pp. 24-42
Author(s):  
Franklin T. Harkins

Abstract This article broadly considers the commentaries on Job of Thomas Aquinas and Albert the Great as offering a helpful theological alternative to some modern philosophical approaches to the ‘problem of evil’. We seek to show that whereas some modern philosophers understand evil as a problem for the very existence of God, whether and how God can coexist with evil was never a question that evil seriously raised in the minds of Aquinas and Albert. In fact, although the suffering of the just in particular led our medieval Dominicans to wonder about divine providence and our ability to know God in this life, they understood the reality of evil as compelling evidence for the existence of God.


2021 ◽  
Vol 114 (4) ◽  
pp. 491-507
Author(s):  
Roger W. Nutt

AbstractThe claim that article four of Thomas Aquinas’s De unione verbi incarnati is a reversal of his consistently held single esse position is challenged in this paper. The article argues that reading all five articles of the De unione as a single-structured argument discloses a single esse understanding of the Incarnate Word. The very nature of the radically hypostatic union between God and man in Christ is at stake in this dispute. According to Thomas, positing a second esse in Christ not only contradicts the tradition, especially of the Christian East, that he appropriates, but it would also compromise the reality of the hypostatic union itself.


Author(s):  
Kent Emery

Denys de Leeuwis was born in the village of Rijkel, in modern Belgium. In 1421 he matriculated at the University of Cologne, where he received the Master of Arts degree in 1424. There he followed ‘the way of Thomas Aquinas’, whom he calls his ‘patron’ in his early works. Later Denys adopted ‘Albertist’ against ‘Thomist’ positions on a number of philosophical issues. After leaving the University, he entered the Carthusian monastery in Roermond, where, save for brief periods, he spent the rest of his life. He corresponded with Nicholas of Cusa and dedicated two or three works to him. Denys was a voracious reader of the ancient and medieval philosophers whose writings were available in Latin, and of scholastic theologians. Because of his extensive references to authorities, historians often call him ‘eclectic’. Yet from his sources he educes his own distinctive philosophy. Like Albert the Great, Denys practised philosophy and theology by paraphrasing and analysing their histories.


Author(s):  
William E. Mann

A twelfth- and early thirteenth-century philosopher who may have taught at Paris, David of Dinant was noted for a heretical, pantheistic view that identified God, mind and matter. None of his works survive intact, and we know of them primarily through the works of other authors. His major work, the Quaternuli, was condemned at Paris in 1210. His heretical views were influential enough to receive critical attention in the works of Albert the Great and Thomas Aquinas.


2018 ◽  
Vol 37 ◽  
pp. 51-75
Author(s):  
Mário João Correia

From an early stage, the Aristotelian list of ten categories was seen with suspicion. Authors discussed not only the scope of the list - expressions, concepts, realities -, but also its alleged arbitrariness. One of the attempts to give an account of the completeness and sufficiency of the Aristotelian categories was inspired by a passage in Aristotle’s Topics: a via divisiva, in a shape of a tree, which covers all the possibilities. At least since Porphyry, several authors applied this scheme to the ten categories. With this work, I intend to present some of the viae divisivae created by 13th century authors, i.e., Robert Kilwardby, Albert the Great and Thomas Aquinas. In a second moment, I will give an account about Duns Scotus’ critique to this kind of procedure. According to Scotus, theviae divisivae do the opposite of what is intended.


2020 ◽  
Vol 50 (2) ◽  
pp. 199-231
Author(s):  
Ritva Palmén

Current approaches to understanding shame are rooted in controversial and even radically contrasting assumptions about shame and its relevance for social interaction and individual well-being. Classical and medieval sources themselves embrace surprisingly various notions about the workings of shame. While the Aristotelian tradition prevails in late antique and medieval philosophical psychology, it is also possible to discern a parallel tradition of shame that adapts and exploits Latin Stoic and eclectic material. This article surveys this largely unexplored Latin tradition (Cicero and Ambrose) and its treatment in later moral-philosophical and pastoral debates (Gregory the Great, Richard of St. Victor, Thomas Aquinas, Albert the Great, and William Peraldus). Late antique and medieval Christian authors regard a positive responsiveness to shame as a constructive habit signaling the ability to live a socially harmonious life. The discussion demonstrates the inherent moral value of shame (and other self-reflexive emotions) and the constitutive role of shame for moral agency.


Author(s):  
Jasper Hopkins

Also called Nicolaus Cusanus, this German cardinal takes his distinguishing name from the city of his birth, Kues (or Cusa, in Latin), on the Moselle river between Koblenz and Trier. Nicholas was influenced by Albert the Great, Thomas Aquinas, Bonaventure, Ramon Llull, Ricoldo of Montecroce, Master Eckhart, Jean Gerson and Heimericus de Campo, as well as by more distant figures such as Plato, Aristotle, Proclus, Pseudo-Dionysius and John Scottus Eriugena. His eclectic system of thought pointed in the direction of a transition between the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. In his own day as in ours, Nicholas was most widely known for his early work De docta ignorantia (On Learned Ignorance). In it, he gives expression to his view that the human mind needs to discover its necessary ignorance of what the Divine Being is like, an ignorance that results from the infinite ontological and cognitive disproportion between Infinity itself (that is, God) and the finite human or angelic knower. Correlated with the doctrine of docta ignorantia is that of coincidentia oppositorum in deo, the coincidence of opposites in God. All things coincide in God in the sense that God, as undifferentiated being, is beyond all opposition, beyond all determination as this rather than that. Nicholas is also known for his rudimentary cosmological speculation, his prefiguring of certain metaphysical and epistemological themes found later in Leibniz, Kant and Hegel, his ecclesiological teachings regarding the controversy over papal versus conciliar authority, his advocacy of a religious ecumenism of sorts, his interest in purely mathematical topics and his influence on the theologian Paul Tillich in the twentieth century. A striking tribute to Nicholas’ memory still stands today: the hospice for elderly, indigent men that he caused to be erected at Kues between 1452 and 1458 and that he both endowed financially and invested with his personal library. This small but splendid library, unravaged by the intervening wars and consisting of some three hundred volumes, includes manuscripts written in Nicholas’ own hand.


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