Abstract

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Reading Aristotle with Thomas Aquinas: His Commentaries on Aristotle’s Major Works by Leo J. EldersEfrem Jindráček O.P.Reading Aristotle with Thomas Aquinas: His Commentaries on Aristotle’s Major Works. By Leo J. Elders. Edited by JÖrgen Vijgen. Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 2023. Pp. xi + 560. $75.00 (hardcover). ISBN: 978-0-8132-3579-0.The prolific Thomistic scholar Jörgen Vijgen has edited a new book by the well-known and recently deceased Thomistic Dutch philosopher, university [End Page 718] professor, and religious priest Leo J. Elders, S.V.D. (1926–2019). According to the bookplate, the book is based on the French original Aristote et Thomas d’Aquin (Paris, 2018), but according to the editor’s preface it is the original English version: “while originally written in English, a French translation appeared already in 2018” (vii). In any case, this is a very precise and interesting panoramic presentation of all twelve of Thomas’s commentaries on Aristotle’s books. The presentations are arranged not according to the chronological sequence of Thomas’s writing, but rather according to the order in which we usually arrange the treatises of Aristotle (i.e., from On Interpretation to Politics). The text is based on Elders’s lecturing activities in Houston in the 1980s, which he himself revised and added to towards the end of his life. It is also obviously a thematic follow-up to several of his articles continuously published on the subject (“Saint Thomas d’Aquin et Aristote,” Revue Thomiste 88 [1988]: 357–76; “St. Thomas Aquinas’s Commentary of Aristoteles’s Physics,” Doctor Angelicus 7 [2007]: 17–51; “The Aristotelian Commentaries of St. Thomas Aquinas,” The Review of Metaphysics 63 [2009]: 29–53).The author has, of course, chosen the best existing Latin editions of Thomas’s texts (Leonine and Marietti), but for the sake of easier editing and citation he has kept the numbering of the paragraphs according to the Marietti edition. Each chapter devoted to one of Thomas’s commentaries has almost the same structure (the presentation of Aristotelian text, Thomas’s intention and commentary according to uniform books, concluding remarks). The book concludes with an extremely comprehensive bibliography (511–25), index of names (527–31) and a subject index (533–36).Elders articulates the basic philosophical question that drives this work in the preface: “if they [Thomas’s commentaries] contained Thomas’s own philosophy and if they were a reliable presentation of Aristotle’s thought, or, on the contrary, if they deformed it in some place by introducing some of Thomas’s Christian faith and theology” (ix). After the analysis of Thomas’s twelve commentaries, Elders arrived at the conclusion that “the commentaries are a masterful and faithful presentation of Aristotle’s thought and of that of Thomas himself. Thomas’s Christian faith does not falsify or alternate the text, but give occasionally an outlook at what lies behind philosophical thought” (ibid.).In the Introduction (1–13), Elders discusses the objections of other contemporary scholars (É. Gilson, J. Owens, M. D. Jordan, H. V. Jaffa) who have reached different positions, even with the help of texts that are, on the contrary, close to the author’s view (D.-M. Chenu, C. Kaczor, F. del Punta). And not only that: “In order to trace the relatively few texts where Thomas disagrees with certain doctrine of Aristotle or completes certain statements, my method is to go through each chapter of the different commentaries and to note where Thomas makes observations and advances a different explanation. In order to do so, it seemed best to present a summary of the contents of the different chapters of each treatise, noting those places where Thomas makes [End Page 719] corrections and additions, or brings in sentences expressing truths of the Christian faith” (13).In order to examine Elders’s analytical reading of Thomas’s commentaries, we will consider three representative chapters: namely, his treatment of Thomas’s commentaries on Peri hermeneias (14–58), Meteorologica (205–32), and Metaphysics (311–400). These three commentaries are unequal in several respects: not all were completed by Thomas himself, and not all...