Beatitude in the Structure of Aquinas' <i>Summa</i>: Is Ia 26 a Stray Question?
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Aquinas is extremely careful in a series of prologues interspersed throughout his Summa Theologiae to announce step by step what he is going to do. He offers broad overviews as well as detailed introductions, or prologues, showing the precise function of each of the over 510 questions (divided into some 3500 articles) it comprises. Thus it is easy to construct a chart outlining this massive work with main headings (Parts), subheadings, all the way to individual questions and even articles. However, one question, Question 26 of the First Part (Ia 26), apparently escaped his planning and is not included in any of his introductions. Its topic is the divine beatitude. It is divided into four articles, and is inserted at the end of his treatise on the divine essence, just before he begins the treatise on the distinctions of Persons (as announced in Ia 2 1 prol.). In his consideration of the One God, Aquinas begins with the divine substance and then passes to God's operation, and the headings of the latter consideration are God's knowledge, God's will, and God's power (as announced in Ia 14 1 prol.). One would expect from Ia 2 1 prol. that after the treatment of God's power, Aquinas would have moved directly to his treatment of the Trinity. Instead he inserts the unannounced question on God's beatitude, announces in its prologue that it follows the consideration of those things which pertain to the divine unity, but then closes it with the following words: "We have now spoken enough concerning what pertains to the unity of the divine essence" (Ia 26 4 ad 2). Not only is the question unannounced, but whether it is to be included in the treatise on the divine essence is unclear. Why is this topic important enough for Aquinas to awkwardly insert it here, seemingly beyond his original intention? What role does the theme of beatitude play in the unfolding of the Summa?
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.007 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.008 | 0.018 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.012 | 0.008 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.006 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.009 | 0.002 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".