Aquinas, Sacraments & Wormholes

[Hovannes]

Alright, I'm game
Del, which translation of Boethius' Consolation of Philosophy do you recommend?

[Del]

Alright, I'm game
Del, which translation of Boethius' Consolation of Philosophy do you recommend?

If you are still any good with Middle English, the translation by Geoffrey Chaucer was very popular.

If you insist on modern American English, it doesn't matter much. I have compared a few different versions, and they all read easily. I am holding the Penguin Classics edition, right now.

There is one point of difference.

In the opening pages Boethius is languishing in prison, writing verses through his tears lamenting his sorry state. Lady Philosophy appears before him. And the Muses of Poetry who have been dictating to him are also revealed. Lady Philosophy is angry.

"Who," she demanded, her piercing eyes alight with fire, "has allowed these intoxicated dancing girls to approach this sick man's bedside?"

Except for the Penguin Classics edition, translated by Victor Watts, wherein the Muses are rendered as "hysterical sluts."

So... it depends on whether you are more comfortable with strippers or hookers.

[Del]

Alright, I'm game
Del, which translation of Boethius' Consolation of Philosophy do you recommend?

As you just finished the Summa, here's a bit of Western Civ. history:

Boethius wrote his Consolation in 524 A.D. At about the same time, St. Benedict of Nursia was establishing the first monasteries.

The university system was developed by and evolved with the monasteries. Sometime in the 700's, actual "universities" developed at certain monasteries as centers of learning. In order to be a "teacher," a "doctor of philosophy" -- a Ph.D. -- a scholar had to demonstrate his mastery of topics by writing his own commentary on Boethius's Consolation.

In 1150 A.D. Peter Lombard published his Sentences, inventing the study of systematic theology. Basically this was a review of Scripture and the Early Church Fathers, organized by topic. Any man who asserted his authority to teach (i.e., meriting a Ph.D.) had to write his own commentary on the Sentences. Aquinas wrote a commentary on the Sentences.

Thomas Aquinas published the Prima Pars of the Summa around 1265. He worked on the Summa for the rest of his life. Rather quickly, a scholar merited his Ph.D. by writing a commentary on the Summa.

Commenting on the Summa is most fitting for anyone claiming to be educated and a scholar. Mastery of the Summa requires mastery of Greek philosophy, Christian theology, Christian Sacred Scripture, and European history -- especially biographical knowledge of the many influential thinkers whom Thomas quotes in each article. Guys like St. Augustine and Boethius.

With the Reformation, the connection between University knowledge and Western tradition began to break down. Reformation theology required study of the Bible, but it was untethered from the Tradition in which the Bible was written to be understood. Novel interpretations of Scripture were more respectable; Traditional understanding was often rejected.

By the 1700's and the ascendency of the sciences, a Ph.D. in any discipline no longer required mastery of ancient wisdom. The candidate only needed to contribute something novel to the body of knowledge. He had to "invent" something within a narrow discipline in order to prove his ability to teach it.

As a result, our modern universities are a mess. They are used to indoctrinate youth with the latest fads, but very little education occurs. Chesterton points this out often in his journalism.

This is why some are calling for a "Benedict Option." As Boethius noted in his day, our civilization has already died on the inside. We just haven't noticed yet, because all the old buildings are still standing. It's time to start preserving and translating the ancient wisdom, so future generations can have something to rebuild upon.
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Enjoy Boethius! He watched Rome implode, and he stood tall upon the rubble until the lifetime of C.S. Lewis.

Buy him on Amazon.

Boethius was an eminent public figure under the Gothic emperor Theodoric, and an exceptional Greek scholar. When he became involved in a conspiracy and was imprisoned in Pavia, it was to the Greek philosophers that he turned. The Consolation was written in the period leading up to his brutal execution. It is a dialogue of alternating prose and verse between the ailing prisoner and his 'nurse' Philosophy. Her instruction on the nature of fortune and happiness, good and evil, fate and free will, restore his health and bring him to enlightenment. The Consolation was extremely popular throughout medieval Europe and his ideas were influential on the thought of Chaucer and Dante.

P.S. Pipeson loves reading the classics. He is reading Chaucer's Canterbury Tales now. (Pipeson is an expressive reader. He talks excitedly about whatever he is reading at the time. So I've read a lot of books that I've never opened! Someday I should read Thucydides and Plutarch for myself. They were a lot of fun.)

The Introduction in his copy mentions that Chaucer translated Boethius, causing Pipeson to find a facsimile copy of Chaucer's Consolation in Middle English (published in 1884) for his collection. He ordered it for Christmas ("from me to me!").

Wikipedia says that Boethius clearly influenced Chaucer's retelling of "The Knight's Tale." Pipeson says it is obviously so.

[Hovannes]

I read Canterbury Tales in Middle English and enjoyed it immensely.
Middle English is easy, but Greek....Greek? Well it's all kind of Greek to me LOL!

[tuttle]

With the Reformation, the connection between University knowledge and Western tradition began to break down. Reformation theology required study of the Bible, but it was untethered from the Tradition in which the Bible was written to be understood. Novel interpretations of Scripture were more respectable; Traditional understanding was often rejected.

By the 1700's and the ascendency of the sciences, a Ph.D. in any discipline no longer required mastery of ancient wisdom. The candidate only needed to contribute something novel to the body of knowledge. He had to "invent" something within a narrow discipline in order to prove his ability to teach it.

As a result, our modern universities are a mess. They are used to indoctrinate youth with the latest fads, but very little education occurs. Chesterton points this out often in his journalism.

Just can't let this slide in an otherwise marvelous post. Far from being untethered from Tradition, the Reformers relied heavily upon the teachings of the Early Church to undergird their efforts. Agree or disagree, their works are so dependent upon the Early Church Fathers that it makes a room of baptists nervous. What they were reforming were the errors (agree or disagree) they found in the contemporary (in their day) church. They were able to trace where the errors began and used Scripture and the ECFs to validate. Traditional understanding wasn't rejected, it was relied upon. From their vantage what they were rejecting were innovations, not Tradition. Even if one disagrees with what the reformers believed to be innovations, that's at least a more even handed look at the situation than you offered.

But more to your point: when the learned man stopped looking to ancient wisdom. CS Lewis rejects the modern historians that claim that the breakdown occurred between the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. He places the Great Divide somewhere between us and the age of Walter Scott and Jane Austen. You touched upon it with the 'ascendency of the sciences' but Lewis pushes the date down the way from you because even though that time period unleashed the lion, at that point it was still a young gamboling lion, only later did it kill its owners.

[tuttle]

I read Canterbury Tales in Middle English and enjoyed it immensely.
Middle English is easy, but Greek....Greek? Well it's all kind of Greek to me LOL!

I didn't know there was a Chaucer translation of Boethius available. That sounds fun.

I too read Canterbury Tales in ME. The trick I found is to read it out loud. It's surprisingly easy after a few pages.

[Hovannes]

I'll go with Watt's translation.

[Del]

With the Reformation, the connection between University knowledge and Western tradition began to break down. Reformation theology required study of the Bible, but it was untethered from the Tradition in which the Bible was written to be understood. Novel interpretations of Scripture were more respectable; Traditional understanding was often rejected.

By the 1700's and the ascendency of the sciences, a Ph.D. in any discipline no longer required mastery of ancient wisdom. The candidate only needed to contribute something novel to the body of knowledge. He had to "invent" something within a narrow discipline in order to prove his ability to teach it.

As a result, our modern universities are a mess. They are used to indoctrinate youth with the latest fads, but very little education occurs. Chesterton points this out often in his journalism.

Just can't let this slide in an otherwise marvelous post. Far from being untethered from Tradition, the Reformers relied heavily upon the teachings of the Early Church to undergird their efforts. Agree or disagree, their works are so dependent upon the Early Church Fathers that it makes a room of baptists nervous. What they were reforming were the errors (agree or disagree) they found in the contemporary (in their day) church. They were able to trace where the errors began and used Scripture and the ECFs to validate. Traditional understanding wasn't rejected, it was relied upon. From their vantage what they were rejecting were innovations, not Tradition. Even if one disagrees with what the reformers believed to be innovations, that's at least a more even handed look at the situation than you offered.

But more to your point: when the learned man stopped looking to ancient wisdom. CS Lewis rejects the modern historians that claim that the breakdown occurred between the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. He places the Great Divide somewhere between us and the age of Walter Scott and Jane Austen. You touched upon it with the 'ascendency of the sciences' but Lewis pushes the date down the way from you because even though that time period unleashed the lion, at that point it was still a young gamboling lion, only later did it kill its owners.

I don't mean to split hairs. I just wanted to paint the evolutionary spectrum of university expectations, from Boethius to Thomas to the present.

The Protestant Fathers did what they did.... but a century later, the effect of the Reformation upon the Universities was what it was. And the Universities were without Thomas Aquinas.

The devolution continues, such that one can "earn" a degree in English from Oxford University without being required to study Shakespeare. Shakespeare is "offensive" nowadays. Students are not even taught that they should respect Aquinas or Shakespeare.... in the institutions that once existed to transmit Aquinas and Shakespeare.

The people whom I respect, such as GK Chesterton, would regard such a graduate as insufficiently educated. Overly educated, yet still lacking in the essentials.

I am doing my small part by encouraging everyone to meet Boethius. He is easy to read, easy to know, and easy to love. CS Lewis says so, so you don't have to take my word for it.

[mcommini]

With the Reformation, the connection between University knowledge and Western tradition began to break down. Reformation theology required study of the Bible, but it was untethered from the Tradition in which the Bible was written to be understood. Novel interpretations of Scripture were more respectable; Traditional understanding was often rejected.

By the 1700's and the ascendency of the sciences, a Ph.D. in any discipline no longer required mastery of ancient wisdom. The candidate only needed to contribute something novel to the body of knowledge. He had to "invent" something within a narrow discipline in order to prove his ability to teach it.

As a result, our modern universities are a mess. They are used to indoctrinate youth with the latest fads, but very little education occurs. Chesterton points this out often in his journalism.

Just can't let this slide in an otherwise marvelous post. Far from being untethered from Tradition, the Reformers relied heavily upon the teachings of the Early Church to undergird their efforts. Agree or disagree, their works are so dependent upon the Early Church Fathers that it makes a room of baptists nervous. What they were reforming were the errors (agree or disagree) they found in the contemporary (in their day) church. They were able to trace where the errors began and used Scripture and the ECFs to validate. Traditional understanding wasn't rejected, it was relied upon. From their vantage what they were rejecting were innovations, not Tradition. Even if one disagrees with what the reformers believed to be innovations, that's at least a more even handed look at the situation than you offered.

But more to your point: when the learned man stopped looking to ancient wisdom. CS Lewis rejects the modern historians that claim that the breakdown occurred between the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. He places the Great Divide somewhere between us and the age of Walter Scott and Jane Austen. You touched upon it with the 'ascendency of the sciences' but Lewis pushes the date down the way from you because even though that time period unleashed the lion, at that point it was still a young gamboling lion, only later did it kill its owners.

Indeed, the Magisterial Reformation had much respect for the writings of the Fathers, and had they had access to some of the texts from the early Church (or the evidence that songs like "Beneath Thy Protection" were even more ancient than attested at that time) and Second Temple Judaism that we currently have thanks to recent discoveries of codices in remote non-Chalcedonian monasteries and the Dead Sea Scrolls, the Reformation churches might have turned out much closer to Catholicism.

The problem is, the Magisterial Reformers only really cared about the textual and intellectual aspects of the Tradition, giving the writings of various Fathers more weight than the praxis of the Fathers- that is to say the oral and practiced aspect of the Tradition. Certain teachings of the Early Church such as the invocation of the saints and veneration of the Blessed Virgin were never really written about early on simply because they were uncontested- Christians knew about these things not because a St Paul or Clement or Ignatius (whose feast day in the Orthodox Church happens to be today) had to write an epistle about them but because they were already present in the liturgy.

When Fathers do start mentioning these things it is not to defend or explain them- the Fathers start writing about these things in the 4th Century not because this is some novel teaching but precisely because they are arguing about the Trinity with the Arians (and Sabellians. And Apollinarians) and the Arians are taking a hard-line Sola Scriptura stance- and these are extra-biblical teachings so universal they are to be found in the very liturgies the Arians used. It doesn't matter if the word "Trinity" (really "homoousia" was the big controversy) is never to be found in the Scripture- the invocation of the saints isn't either, but it is the universal practice of the Church, as it has always been the practice of the Church to baptize in the single name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Scripture never explicitly identifies the Holy Spirit as God with the same boldness St John opens his Gospel and identifies Christ as such- it doesn't matter, the liturgy has since time immemorial just as it has always had hymns to Mary.

Really, the Reformers had a failure of imagination- they see St Basil make these references and think "oh, that's two centuries after the Apostle John died. Well, we've seen how badly the Christian faith can go downhill in just two centuries." and assume that the "Roman errors" of the Mass had been creeping in by this point. More, they were used to a fairly ancient and standardized liturgy- the Western Church had a variety of local uses, but the main framework of the Mass (the priest's parts) was the same.

The Nicene era knew of no such thing- the Catholic Church was emerging from the catacombs of persecution and the local churches were beginning to compare notes to a degree to which they couldn't when they were underground. And they are delighted to discover that there is indeed a Catholic Church. From Glastonbury to Dharjeeling, the liturgy might contain vastly different elements but some things are constant- there is always a Eucharist, there is always an invocation of the saints, hymns are sung to the Blessed Virgin, baptism and prayer are in the name of the Trinity, and people everywhere make the sign of the cross.

It is difficult to overstate the improbability of these practices being post-Apostolic in origin yet so universal in practice- the persecuted Church had no magisterial mechanism to develop and impose new practices across such a large territory. A local council of few bishops might be called to discuss certain matters of controversy (such as the Montanists) but they had no way of imposing any rulings of such a council beyond their specific territories- the best they could is communicate the results of their council to other respected bishops and hope they agree. The one time the bishop of Rome tried to exercise such an authority over the dating of Easter he was politely rebuffed with "thanks, but we'll keep celebrating the way the Apostle John taught us".

Every diocese at that time was a local Church with the highest authority resting in the bishop. And every bishop had the ultimate authority over the liturgy practiced by his parishes - including keeping up with the maintenance of the codices containing that local Church's Gospels and Epistles.

Incidentally, there is little debate between the Fathers on the canonicity of the Scriptures (and there certainly was no Ecumenical Council of the pre-Schism Church that laid down a canon) . The Church as a whole never really set down a canon- the Roman Church would not do so until Trent in response to Luther. What you do see often among the Fathers is a discussion of canon- "Hey, Ephesus, our scroll of St Paul's Epistles is getting worn out and we're getting ready to copy a new one. We only have seven letters. We'd heard heard he'd written to you and were kind of wondering if we could get a copy." "Sure thing, Alexandria. Oh, by the way, our scroll of St Paul has fourteen letters. Wanna send your scribe over and copy the whole thing?" "Do we ever!" After St Constantine the various Churches were proclaiming their various local canons in triumph- "This is the deposit left to us!" and noting just how similar they were in content. Sure, some codices might have odd additions like The Shepherd of Hermas or the Apostolic Constitutions- but even these books were known to the other Churches, they just weren't considered acceptable for liturgical use (and none of the accretions were anything of Gnostic origin. At no point did the Church need to weed out the Gospel of Thomas, sorry Dan Brown).

I raise the point about the liturgical authority of the local bishop in the early Church because again, we have two centuries of each diocese being capable of it's own liturgical developments and they all come back together with liturgies teaching the exact same thing in regards to the Trinity, the Invocation of the Saints, and Marian hymns. Contrast this by walking into a random selection of Episcopalian churches and seeing how many have retained orthodoxy and how many have pretty much made up their own creeds based on whatever whimsy of bad theology has infected the local parish (but, really, don't, it's not worth it).

This doesn't even begin to get into the precedents for Trinitarian theology, Marian (or the Queen Mother of the Davidic heir) devotion, and veneration of the saints we are discovering all the time in recently uncovered Second Temple Judaic writings.

So while Luther, Calvin, and Cranmer might have had the utmost respect for the writings of the Fathers (after the Scriptures), Del is completely right in saying that the Reformers were divorced from the Tradition. The Liturgy is the Tradition of the Church- beyond the writings of any of the Fathers. And because Luther looked at the Roman practice of veneration and found it wanting, he removed as much as he respectfully could from the Mass- he thought to teach the Mass, when the Mass was only ever supposed to teach him.

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You (and Lewis) are completely correct about the dating of the ultimate breakdown. The seventeenth and eighteenth century "scientists" that modern historians would like to point to called themselves "natural philosophers" for good reason as they were well immersed in the philosophic tradition of the day. Like all good traditional philosophers they did not limit themselves to "natural philosophy" but were more than happy to spout forth on topics such as theology, epistimology, and (in the case of Newton) Enochian magic. You can't say that Newton was outside the tradition just because he primarily wrote about physics and calculus unless you want to toss Pythagoras as well (who also had weird magic practices- inventing a new math must break some part of the brain). Modern historians want a myth of the rise of Progress from the ashes of Regressive Religion (much as Landmark Baptists want a myth of unbroken succession to Apostolic times) and will point to any figure from the Renaissance on that fits this mold (much as Landmark Baptists will point to any historical heresy that disagreed with Rome on sacraments). But modern historians wants and the realities as they have happened are very rarely the same thing.

[tuttle]

I am doing my small part by encouraging everyone to meet Boethius. He is easy to read, easy to know, and easy to love. CS Lewis says so, so you don't have to take my word for it.

During a certain period of my life I had an amazon list specifically dedicated to books/authors recommended by CS Lewis. Boethius was an early purchase