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The Gilby Summa

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2024

Fergus Kerr OP
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Abstract

The Blackfriars Summa Theologiae, 60 volumes between 1964 and 1976, the greatest collective scholarly achievement of the English Dominican Province, was conceived and orchestrated by Fr Thomas Gilby. To what school of 20th century Thomism did he and his collaborators owe allegiance, if any? This paper considers that question while documenting some of the significant influences on Gilby and his collaborators on his translation of Aquinas's Summa.

Type
Original Article
Information
New Blackfriars , Volume 102 , Issue 1101 , September 2021 , pp. 772 - 794
Copyright
Copyright © 2021 Provincial Council of the English Province of the Order of Preachers

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References

1 Gilby, Thomas, Poetic Experience: An Introduction to Thomist Aesthetics (New York: Sheed & Ward, Inc., 1934).Google Scholar

2 Gilby, Thomas, Barbara Celarent: A Description of Scholastic Dialectic (London: Longmans Green and Co., 1948)Google Scholar. The tricksy title refers to the mnemonic used by logicians in 12th century textbooks to recall the valid forms of syllogism.

3 Gilby, Thomas, Phoenix and Turtle: The Unity of Knowing and Being (London: Longmans Green and Co., 1950)Google Scholar. The esoteric title alludes to the myth of the identity of lover and beloved.

4 Gilby, Thomas, Between Community and Society: A Philosophy and Theology of the State (London: Longmans Green and Co., 1953);Google Scholar Gilby, Thomas, Principality and Polity: Aquinas and the Rise of State Theory in the West (London: Longmans Green and Co., 1958).Google Scholar

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10 The degree was done at the Dominican Priory in Louvain, not the Catholic University.

11 Both Barker and Pope are said to have opposed the move to Oxford of the theology students.

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14 The article that Gilby footnotes (1a2ae q10 art 4) is where Aquinas refutes the proposition that ‘the will wills of necessity anything to which God moves it’. The footnoted text bears on the great debate between the Jesuits and the Dominicans, the controversy De Auxiliis — about what ‘helps’ human creatures require/receive by divine grace. The dispute was officially ended by Pope Paul V in 1607, declaring that the Holy See would decide (it never has done) while the Jesuits might maintain their position (Molinism, scientia media) and the Dominicans theirs (Banezianism, premotio physica), so long as the Dominicans stopped calling the Jesuits ‘Pelagian’ and the Jesuits stopped calling the Dominicans ‘Calvinist’.

15 Additionally, one should not overlook the thousands of seminarians from the 1890s until about 1960 who were turned off reading St Thomas by neo-Thomism (including many of the bishops at the Second Vatican Council).

16 Gilby, Thomas, ‘The Worst of a System…’ New Blackfriars vol. 11, issue 125 (1930), pp. 489-494.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

17 Ibid., p. 491.

18 Ibid., p. 489.

19 Ibid.

20 Ibid., p. 490.

21 Ibid., p. 491

22 Ibid., P. 492.

23 Ibid., p. 494.

24 Gredt, Joseph, Elementa Philosophiae Aristotelico-Thomisticae (Freiburg im Breisgau: Herder & Co., 1937).Google Scholar

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29 Ibid., p. 755.

30 Ibid., p. 757.

31 Ibid.

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35 Ibid., p. 346. At this point in the review Gilby mentions ‘the philosophy of the Phoenix and the Turtle’, thus anticipating the droll title of the idiosyncratic Thomist epistemology book that he would bring out twenty years later: Gilby, Thomas, Phoenix and Turtle: The Unity of Knowing and Being (London: Longman Greens and Co., 1950).Google Scholar

36 The ‘Summa Theologica’ of St Thomas Aquinas literally translated by Fathers of the English Dominican Province (London: Burns Oates & Washbourne, 1912-25).Google Scholar Gilby could have met the palaeographer, Peter Paul Mackey, and the translator, Laurence Shapcote, though Mackey moved to Rome in 1881, Shapcote to South Africa in 1917.

37 All of the text now referred to is available for free at https://www.newadvent.org/summa/

38 Shapcote and Mackey seem to have met. In one preface (anonymous of course), which Shapcote wrote in 1925, he says that fifteen years previously, so in 1910, when the English Dominican province ‘embarked on what was considered by many the hazardous and even useless venture of translating the Summa Theologica of the Angelic Doctor …there were others, not a few who approved and encouraged [which] heartened the translators to persevere, and enabled them to bring their work to a happy conclusion’.

39 One story, passed on in the 1950s in the Meat Room in Woodchester Priory, is that when the Summa volumes were presented to him in 1906, Pope Pius X enquired what he could do to reward the editors, and Mackey sought a dispensation to allow him to eat meat on fast days. The reason for a Meat Room adjacent to the refectory in a purpose-built Dominican priory was to accommodate friars dispensed from the rule, the joke being that, in those days of poor dental health, Mackey no longer had the teeth to chew meat.

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68 Ibid., p. xxvi. Gilby must have chortled at being outmanoeuvred, which does not mean, however, that he abandoned the theory of physical premotion.

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70 See ‘Catholics and Philosophy: A Spode House Conference’, New Blackfriars, vol. 35, issue 417 (1954), pp. 538-540.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

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76 Ironically, Anthony Kenny was one of the two British editors who knew neoThomism from the inside (Ceslaus Lubor Velecky was the other), in his case at the Gregorian University in Rome, as he describes so illuminatingly in A Path from Rome: An Autobiography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986)Google Scholar. From Aquinas: a collection of critical essays (South Bend: University of Notre Dame Press, 1969)Google Scholar on, Anthony Kenny has become by far the most prolific and effective exponent of Aquinas in Oxford and beyond. The 1976 collection includes his own ‘Divine Foreknowledge and Human Freedom’ (originally published in 1960) — back in effect to the theory of physical premotion!

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81 Aquinas, Thomas, Summa Theologiae: Volume 20, Pleasure, 1a2ae. 31-39, p. xiii.Google Scholar

82 Their series is interrupted with Volume 21, Fear and Anger, by Fr J.P. Reid. Reid worked on his volume in Oxford as it happens, though he was not an Oxford-style philosopher.

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99 Ibid., p. 173.

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104 Ibid., p. xxxv.

105 Ibid., p. xxxv

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116 Ibid., p. 56.

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