Thomas Aquinas

English

Reply to Objection 1. The Divine Essence Itself is charity, even as It is wisdom and goodness. Wherefore just as we are said to be good with the goodness which is God, and wise with the wisdom which is God (since the goodness whereby we are formally good is a participation of Divine goodness, and the wisdom whereby we are formally wise, is a share of Divine wisdom), so too, the charity whereby formally we love our neighbor is a participation of Divine charity. For this manner of speaking is common among the Platonists, with whose doctrines Augustine was imbued; and the lack of adverting to this has been to some an occasion of error.

Fathers of the English Dominican Province, 1920 · pd

Latin

Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologiae II-II q.23 a.2 ad 1 (Leonine edition, 1895, archive.org operaomniaiussui08thom; text located via Corpus Thomisticum) · pd

Notes

Not an answer to the question but an account of how the question came to be asked wrongly. Thomas grants the Augustinian texts their force and then explains them: the essence is charity as it is wisdom and goodness, and we are formally charitable by a participation of it, exactly as we are formally wise by a participation of divine wisdom. That way of speaking, he says, is a Platonist habit that Augustine had absorbed — and quod quidam non advertentes ex verbis eius sumpserunt occasionem errandi, some, not noticing it, took occasion of error from his words. The quidam is unnamed and is the Master. English is the public-domain Dominican Fathers translation of 1920, not an in-house draft. Split off from the article rostered on crux 1: there Thomas answers the question, here he diagnoses it, and they are two arguments.

Threads

• → contests · Bonaventure
  The gentlest sentence written against the Master on this page, and the most damaging: his position is not refuted but explained. Ita etiam caritas qua formaliter diligimus proximum est quaedam participatio divinae caritatis. Hic enim modus loquendi consuetus est apud Platonicos, quorum doctrinis Augustinus fuit imbutus. Quod quidam non advertentes ex verbis eius sumpserunt occasionem errandi. The Augustinian texts the divisio carries are granted; what is denied is that they were ever meant to be read as the Master read them.
• ← parallel · Martin Luther
  ⭐ The same move, in the other direction, two hundred and fifty years apart, with neither citing the other. Thomas explains the Master by a Platonist idiom Augustine had absorbed and somebody failed to notice was an idiom. Luther explains the schools the same way and names a different pagan: commentum illud de habitibus opinionem habet ex verbis Aristotelis rancidi philosophi. Each end of the tradition accounts for the other as philosophy mistaken for doctrine.
• ← transmits · John Capreolus
  What happened to the thesis, in the shape of the argument rather than in anything anyone says about it. A hundred and seventy years after the Summa the question is still put in Bonaventure's words, and Capreolus answers it by quoting Thomas at length: Probatur sic ista conclusio, secundum sanctum Thomam, 2a 2ae, q. 23, art. 2, ubi sic arguit. The disputed question has become a citation, and this article is what it cites.