The Salvation of Atheists and Catholic Dogmatic Theology by Stephen Bullivant, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2012, pp xi + 215, £65.00, hbk
Bibliographic record
Abstract
From Ritual Poems (1971) to Stones and Stars (2013), Paul Murray OP has demonstrated that he is a poet as well as a theologian.The question is whether the same may be said of Thomas Aquinas.That he was a 'man of prayer', and a true 'Christian contemplative', Murray establishes in the first part of this book, not a contentious thesis one might have thought, except that he starts with some extremely negative 'revelations' about Thomas's inner life that we owe to Adrienne von Speyr, the mystic friend of Hans Urs von Balthasar.Murray examines in detail four prayers that seem to owe a good deal to Humbert of Romans, fifth Master OP (1254-63), which thus place Thomas in an emerging tradition of Dominican spirituality.In the second part of the book Murray presents Thomas the exegete, taking soundings particularly in the commentaries on Paul and in the late, incomplete commentary on the Psalms, long neglected though beginning to be regarded as one of his finest works.For years we have been reminded that Thomas was primarily engaged, both at the university in Paris and in Dominican houses, in expounding Scripture.Students of the Summa Theologiae have long been advised that, while it is no doubt his greatest work, he can never have intended it to be studied in isolation from Scripture.As Murray shows, Thomas's theology is deeply Pauline (however much indebted at key points to Aristotle).The psalms, recited every day, contain the whole of the Gospel, or so Thomas believed.Finally, in the third section, we turn to the texts that Thomas composed for the Office and Mass of Corpus Christi, going on to consider the 'Adoro te devote', 'the finest prayer of Aquinas'.This is Thomas the 'poet of the Eucharist', as Murray puts it.There is a problem.While Murray thanks Adriano Oliva OP of the Leonine Commission for help with texts as yet unpublished, including the Corpus Christi Lessons, he makes no reference to Oliva's aside (in an article on quite unrelated matters), to the effect that 'the Leonine Commission does not regard "Adoro [te] devote" to be an authentic work of St Thomas' (see The Thomist July 2012: p. 398).That sounds pretty definitive.One problem has always been that it apparently took fifty years after his death before Thomas's authorship was mentioned.Then, doctrinally, the line 'Seeing, touching, tasting are in thee deceived (fallitur)' has seemed incompatible with Thomas's repeated insistence that there is no deceptio in this sacrament (e.g.ST IIIa q.75 art.5 ad 2m).As regards the delay, Claire Le Brun-Gouanvic, in her edition of William of Tocco's Ystoria sancti Thome de Aquino (Toronto 1996), surely demonstrates that this text, by a much younger friar who actually knew Thomas in his last days at Naples, includes, in its fourth and final version (1323), the 'Adoro te', attributing it to him.Then, as regards the doctrine, it is sight, touch and taste that are 'deceived', precisely in contrast to hearing (the words of consecration), which is not a thought that Thomas would have self-evidently rejected.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
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 teacher head, 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".