III
This essay is a slightly altered version of a lecture delivered by the author in the Ateneo at Madrid and Barcelona. It appeared under the title of Actualidad del Tomismo in the collection “O Crece o Muere,” a series edited by Florentino Perez Embid (Madrid, 1952).
1 The subject was thus formulated by the organizers of the lecture series, in which this conference was originally given.
2 Quaestiones Disputatae de Spiritualibus 10 ad 8.
3 p. 22.
4 Commentary in Aristotelem de I, 1, no. 15.
5 VII, I, (1028b).
6 Commentary in Metaphysicam I, 3, no. 64.
7 Friedrich Engels, Ludwig Feuerbach und der Ausgang der klassischen deutschen Philosophie (Berlin, 1946), pp. 17ff.
8 This sentence from Engels is quoted, for instance, in the official history of the Communist Party in the Soviet Union, Geschichte der Kommunistischen Partei der Sowjetunion (Berlin, 1946), pp. 136f., in the section on dialectical and historical materialism authored by Stalin. According to I. M. Bochenski on Soviet-Russian dialectical materialism, in Der sowjetrussische dialektische Materialismus (Berne and Munich, 1950), p. 95, the Philosophical Institute of the Soviet Academy of Sciences devoted a full paragraph to Engels’ proposition, which is quoted also by Lenin. This reference occurs in the Institute’s 1948 edition of the Program for an Extensive Course in Dialectical and Historical
9 “L’homme se fait; il n’est pas tout fait d’abord, il se fait en choisissant sa morale.” p. 78.
10 p. 20.
11 Commentary on the Epistle to the I, 4.
12 This same expression “in place of the Ideas” is used in another passage to denote the position of St. Augustine. “Augustine, following Plato, in so far as this was compatible with Catholic belief, did not accept self-subsistent original patterns of things: in their place he assumed that the original patterns of things existed in God.” Cf. Quaest. Disp. de Spir. Creat. 10 ad 8.
13 De vi, 10.
14 p. 22.
15 Canon 1366, section 2, of the Codex Juris makes the teaching of St. Thomas obligatory for the philosophical and theological training of clerical students. It speaks not only of the doctrine and principles but also of the method of St. Thomas.
16 Reference may be made here to an article by Father John Baptist Lotz, S.J., in Scholastik for 1952 (no. 27), with the title Von der Geschichtlichkeit der His argument is the following: “On one side, man strives after truth . . . but on the other, for the very sake of the truth, he must realize his truth . . . for only in this way will truth really come into his possession and be experienced as truth in important regions of experience” (p. 503).
Postscript
1 Ea autem scientia, quae propter se tantum quaeritur, homo non potest libere uti . . . nec etiam ad nutum subest homini, cum ad eam perfecte homo pervenire non possit. Illud tamen modicum, quod ex ea habetur, praepronderat omnibus, quae per alias scientias Commentary in Metaphysicam I, 3, no. 60.