Cicero in the Courtroom of St. Thomas Aquinas

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CICERO IN THE COURTROOM OF ST. THOMAS AQUINAS

PUBLISHED AQUINAS LECTURES St. Thomas and the Life of Learning (1937) by the Rev. John F. McCormick, S.J., former professor of philosophy at Loyola University. St. Thomas and the Gentiles (1938) by Mortimer J. Adler, Ph.D., associate professor of the philosophy of law, University of Chicago. St. Thomas and the Greeks (1939) by Anton C. Pegis, Ph.D., associate professor of philosophy, Fordham University. The Nature and Functions of Authority (1940) by Yves Simon, Ph.D., associate professor of philos¬ ophy, University of Notre Dame. St. Thomas and Analogy (1941) by the Rev. Gerald B. Phelan, Ph.D., president of the Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, University of Toronto. St. Thomas and the Problem of Evil (1942) by Jacques Maritain, Ph.D., professor of philosophy, Institute of Mediaeval Studies, University of Toronto. Humanism and Theology (1943) by Werner Jaeger, Ph.D.,- Litt.D., "university” professor, Harvard University. The Nature and Origins of Scientism (1944) by the Rev. John Wellmuth, S.J., chairman of the Depart¬ ment of Philosophy, Loyola University. Cicero in the Courtroom of St. Thomas Aquinas (1945) by E. K. Rand, Ph.D., Litt.D., L.L.D., Pope Professor of Latin, emeritus, Harvard Uni¬ versity.

The Aquinas Lecture, 1945

CICERO IN THE COURTROOM OF ST. THOMAS AQUINAS Under the Auspices of the Aristotelian Society of Marquette University BY E. K. RAND • * %

Pope Professor of Latin, emeritus, Harvard University

MARQUETTE UNIVERSITY PRESS MILWAUKEE 19 46

kVT7£>

COPYRIGHT,

1946

BY THE ARISTOTELIAN SOCIETY OF MARQUETTE UNIVERSITY

I

PRINTED AT THE MARQUETTE UNIVERSITY PRESS MILWAUKEE,

WISCONSIN

THE AQUINAS LECTURES The Aristotelian Society of Marquette Uni¬ versity each year invites a scholar to speak on the Philosophy of St. Thomas Aquinas. These lectures have come to be called the Aquinas Lectures and are customarily deliv¬ ered on the Sunday nearest March 7, the feast day of the Society’s patron saint. For the year 1945, the Society has the pleasure of publishing the lecture by Edward Kennard Rand, Ph.D., Litt.D., LL.D., Pope Professor of Latin emeritus, Harvard Uni¬ versity. Professor Rand was born in Boston, Mass., in 1871 and graduated from Harvard Univer¬ sity in 1894 with the degree of Bachelor of Arts summa cum laude. He obtained his Mas¬ ter’s degree the next year and spent the fol¬ lowing years in study at the Harvard Divinity School and at the Episcopal Theological Sem¬ inary (in Cambridge, Mass.) and as an In¬ structor in Latin at the University of Chicago. After a year of study at the University of Munich, from which he received the degree

of Doctor of Philosophy in 1900, he returned to Harvard in 1901 to enter upon a career of teaching and scholarship in classical and me¬ diaeval

Latin

literature

and

paleography.

When, after forty-one years, he retired from Harvard in 1942, he passed two winters as resident scholar at the Institute for Byzantine Studies at Dumbarton Oaks in Washington, D. C. Professor Rand was exchange professor at the Sorbonne, Sather professor of Classical Literature at the University of California, and annual professor at the American Academy in Rome. He received the honorary degree of Doctor of Letters from Victoria University, Manchester (Eng.), Western Reserve Univer¬ sity, Trinity College, Dublin, from his own university

of

Harvard,

and

posthumously

from the Sorbonne, and the honorary degree of Doctor of Laws from the Universities of Glasgow and Pennsylvania. He was a founder and first president of the Mediaeval Academy of America, a mem¬ ber and former president of the American Philological Association, and a former trustee

and life member of the American Academy in Rome. He was a member or fellow of the American Philosophical Society, of the Massa¬ chusetts Historical Society, of the National In¬ stitute of Arts and Letters, of the Dante So¬ ciety, and of the Archaeological Institute of America. Abroad, he was a corresponding member or fellow of the British Academy, of the Academy of Inscriptions of the French Institute, of the Bavarian Academy of Sci¬ ences,

of

the

Bollandist

Society,

and

of

academies at Mantua and Lund. Professor Rand made pioneer studies of the Carolingian scriptorium of Tours: A Survey of the Manuscript of Tours (1929) and The Earliest Book of Tours (1934).

He edited

and translated Boethius for the Loeb Library with the Rev. H. F. Stewart (1918) and pub¬ lished with E. H. Wilkins Dantis Alaghieri Operum Latinorum Concordantiae (1912). He was editor-in-chief for a critical edition of Sevius’ Commentary on Virgil.

Other, more

popular works were: Ovid and His Influence (1925), Founders of the Middle Ages (1928), The Magical Art of Virgil (1931), Les Esprits

Souverains dans la Litter at me romaine (1936),

and The Building of Eternal Rome (1943). His numerous articles and reviews appeared not only in scholarly journals but also in such magazines as The Atlantic Monthly and The Saturday Review of Literature.

To these the Aristotelian Society takes pleasure in adding Cicero in the Courtroom of St. Thomas Aquinas. The author himself did

not read the proofs, a task which was performed by colleagues on the Harvard faculty. Professor Rand died suddenly in Cambridge, Mass., on Sunday, October 28, 1945.

Requiescat in Pace.

PREFACE I wish, first of all, to thank various friends for services without which the present volume could not have seen the light. Professor Roy J. Deferrari and Sister Inviolata, C.D.P., of the Catholic University of America furnished the basic material from their Concordance to the Summa Theologica of St. Thomas Aquinas. To the Very Reverend Gerald B. Phelan, Presi¬ dent of the Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies at Toronto, and to the Reverend Rob¬ ert J. Slavin, O.P., Ph.D., of the Catholic Uni¬ versity of America I am obliged for important details, as will be seen in the Notes. Finally, I shall never cease to be grateful to the Rever¬ end Gerard Smith, S.J., for the invitation to this distinguished lectureship, for the courtesy, and merry wit of his letters, for his painstaking examination of my manuscript, and for per¬ mitting it to be published despite its abnormal size. E. K. Rand

Cicero in the Courtroom of St. Thomas Aquinas

I

T is only too easy for us, as we survey the panorama of human history, to miss the

full significance of the thirteenth century of our era and of St. Thomas Aquinas, its fore¬ most representative in the field of philosophic thought. The whole period, we declare, es¬ pecially after the recovery of part of the orig¬ inal text of Aristotle, was devoted to nothing but scholastic speculation, and St. Thomas Aquinas was the foremost in that pursuit. In the ancient battle described by Plato between philosophy and poetry, philosophy had won the day. Paris with its schools of dialectic had triumphed over Orleans, home of the liberal arts. In an address that I delivered some years ago, before the Mediaeval Academy of Amer¬ ica, I endeavored to show that the interest in

2

CICERO IN THE COURTROOM

literature conspicuous in what Haskins well called the Renaissance of the twelfth century, had by no means subsided.1 To speak in aca¬ demic terms, the college was still functioning although a new and vigorous graduate school had been added to the university. The ancient Latin classics, prose and poetry, were still read and enjoyed. Their influence was still conspic¬ uous in the Latin poetry of the day, and in a far more impressive and original fashion in the masterpieces of vernacular literature—in Guillaume de Lorris, in Jean de Meun, and above all in Dante.2 I am going this afternoon to launch a very small craft in the mighty sea of the Summa Theologica of St. Thomas Aquinas—il mare di tutto senno, as Dante might have said of him no less than of his master Virgil. Nor should I have been able to set sail at all without a push from my good friends of the Catholic Univer¬ sity of America, Professor Deferrari and Sister Inviolata, who put at my disposal their Con¬ cordance of the Summa Theologica, and pro-

OF ST. THOMAS AQUINAS

3

vided me with copies of their references to three important ancient Latin authors, Cicero, Seneca and Boethius. This my craft is small but firm, composed of solid planks, of bits of St. Thomas’s own text, enough, I feel, such is my confidence in that fine Concordance, to serve my present purpose. Even so, my little boat is exposed to high waves and mighty breezes on the ocean of which it explores only a tiny part. It runs the risk of capsizing, partly from my ignorance of the Summa Theologica in its whole extent, partly because I purposely ne¬ glected to examine, whether anew or afresh, what the authorities of our day have said about St. Thomas. Not wishing to discover how un¬ informed I was and having a high regard for concordances, I wanted to see how much a concordance would teach me. I had indeed read the delightful and informing lectures of my predecessors in the Marquette series, and wisely avoided a tilt in any of their fields. But let us cast off for this venturesome voyage and a report of what I observed on the way.

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CICERO IN THE COURTROOM

The ancient Latin authors to whom St. Thomas most frequently refers are Cicero, Seneca and Boethius. I had intended at first to study the references furnished by the editors of the Concordance to all these writers, allured by the prospect, which still allures, of finding what attracted St. Thomas to men so different in temperament, scope and purpose as Cicero, Seneca and Boethius. A word on this matter will be found at the end of this volume. But the material on Cicero is so rich, and Cicero himself, the prince of humanists, is so typical of the culture imbued by the liberal arts, from which St. Thomas and the philosophers of his age are supposed by some to have turned away, that I would call your particular atten¬ tion this afternoon to Cicero. Let me say, first of all, that if you search for the name of Cicero in the Summa Theologica, it is there, a half-dozen times, in quotations taken from St. Augustine or St. Isidore. But he is there at first¬ hand, none the less, a host of times, only that

OF ST. THOMAS AQUINAS

5

St. Thomas like Dante preferred to call him Tullius.3 I next fell to wondering just how St. Thomas collected and arranged his numerous quotations from the ancients and from the moderns. Not, like the modern scholar, in folders packed with notes. Parchment was too dear to be used like scrap paper, and paper was only just coming into use for books. He might have jotted down some notes on parch¬ ment, later to be erased. But St. Thomas’s chief depository, I am convinced, was the tab¬ let of his memory. Before the invention of printing vastly increased the number of books, one read

to

remember.

The

training

of

memoria was one of the five tasks of the orator, and Cicero discourses in a work that St. Thomas knew (the Ad Herennium) on the natural power of memory and on methods of improv¬ ing it; 'mnemonics’ is his word.4 Cicero tells us that his rival Hortensius learned by heart not only his own speeches but those of the lawyer on the other side—a formidable equipment

6

CICERO IN THE COURTROOM

when it came to the rebuttal. Seneca the Elder, could rattle off 2,000 names in the order given, and when a group of friends each quoted a verse of poetry in turn and the number of verses ran over 200, Seneca could start with the last and go back to the first. He has preserved for us in his Suasoriae and Controversiae inval¬ uable selections from the declaimers of the Augustan Age that he had learned by heart some decades before when he heard those ora¬ tors declaim.5 St. Thomas also, according to his contemporary biographers, possessed an extraordinary memory, and he further had one aid to remembrance to which Cicero and Sen¬ eca did not appeal. He did all things for God. He started his work and his reading with pray¬ er. In his prologue to the Summa Theologica, he prays God to help him achieve his plan. As the ancient poet turned to his Muse for guid¬ ance, so St. Thomas found in God strength for his thought, his utterance and his memoryt6 St. Thomas very probably could not have read all of the works from which he draws.

OF ST. THOMAS AQUINAS

7

His master Albertus Magnus and before him Peter the Lombard could furnish him with wealthy matter for his plan. He may have used some anthologies of philosophical or theo¬ logical utterances, such as we find in Chaucer’s Meliboeus. All that is incidental. Wherever he

found something good, he would drop into what John Livingston Lowes calls "the deep well” of his memory the bits on which his "falcon eye” had pounced, later to draw them up at will.7 He often will quote like a gentle¬ man, that is inexactly, nor was he obliged—oh happy age!—to verify his references, or to give them nicely.

For neither the pages of

mediaeval manuscripts nor lines of poetry were numbered. Mention of the author and the number of the book from which the pas¬ sage was taken suffices. If the reader wanted to verify the citation he could review the book— that would do him no harm. But what interest would St. Thomas, su¬ preme metaphysician, take in either the philo¬ sophical essays or the rhetorical treatises of

8

CICERO IN THE COURTROOM

Cicero ? He at least repeated the high title of "eminent orator” (locutor egregius) that St. Augustine had bestowed on Cicero.8 Clearly St. Thomas does not view rhetoric with con¬ tempt. In his article on the parts of Wisdom (Prudentia, Lav Graeci vocant: prudentiam enim, quam Graeci