Thomas Aquinas' works with English and original Latin presented in parallel
aquinas.cc
aquinas.cc
Listing the ones I know (in no particular order, just a list I had collected a while ago):
- Physical (print) books: Loeb Classical Library (Greek and Latin) https://www.loebclassics.com/, Clay Sanskrit Library (Sanskrit) http://www.claysanskritlibrary.org/volumes_current.php, Murty Classical Library of India (various languages) https://murtylibrary.com/volumes.php.
- Perseus Hopper (Greek and Latin), https://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/
- Chinese Text Project (https://ctext.org/)
- https://nodictionaries.com/ (Latin)
- http://pseudw.herokuapp.com/iliad/books/1?start=500&end=589&... = https://github.com/nkallen/pseudw/ (Greek: The Iliad)
- http://alpheios.net/ (Latin, Greek)
- quran.com / legacy.quran.com / corpus.quran.com (The Quran: Arabic)
- Dickinson College Commentaries (Latin) e.g. https://dcc.dickinson.edu/tacitus-agricola/1
- "e-readers" under http://sanskrit.uohyd.ac.in/scl/ (Sanskrit)
- Gita Supersite (Sanskrit) e.g. https://www.gitasupersite.iitk.ac.in/srimad?language=dv&fiel...
- https://greenmesg.org/stotras/lakshmi/sri_suktam.php etc (Sanskrit)
- No Fear Shakespeare (https://www.sparknotes.com/shakespeare/)
- https://github.com/tasuki/side-by-side e.g. https://enchiridion.tasuki.org https://ttc.tasuki.org/
- This one (https://aquinas.cc/la/en/~ST.I.Pr.3)
Of these, http://alpheios.net/ and https://github.com/tasuki/side-by-side are ones that allow you to build your own webpages / present your own texts. Are there more?
Is an open source project for making alignments like this. Great for learning and close inspection.
"Because the Teacher of Catholic truth ought not only to teach the proficient, but also to instruct beginners, according to the Apostle:"
I'm not looking for: "lol, don't preach to the choir rofl. The Big Guy says so." but it's 2020ish and not 1950.
I know exactly where that language style (in the translation) comes from and it needs to go away. If I find the word "thou" later, I will go (slightly) postal. OK my left eye will twitch a bit.
> In 1910 the Province decided to have the Summa translated. Fr Laurence brought out the first volumes before he left England, but the bulk of the work was done in South Africa. In addition he also translated the Summa Contra Gentes (4 volumes, 1923 –1929), and the Quaestiones Disputatae de Potentia (3 volumes, 1932–34). This translation of the Summa is ‘literal’. […] In a way, for students who have no Latin, the Shapcote translation gives a better idea, more of the feel, of the original, even though it does not make conversation with St Thomas so easy.
> Laurence Shapcote never wrote anything: there is no way of telling what his own ‘Thomism’ was. It is a century since he started work. He did not respond to suggestions that he should unmask his anonymity. Readers who are thankful for this literal translation would surely be all the more grateful if they knew that it was done by Laurence Shapcote alone, in very austere conditions, on the Rand and in Natal, doggedly translating his way through the major works of St Thomas.
But your comment is intriguing; I'm mostly struck by the idea that the style of 1950s is so much different from that of 2020s. (For reference, 1950 was the year of publication of Asimov's "I, Robot" collection of stories published earlier, or C. S. Lewis's "The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe"; Greene's The Third Man and Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four were published the previous year.) In what sense is the sentence fragment you quoted not modern English? You gave an example of what you're not looking for; could you also give an example of how you would rewrite it?
And what does this have to do with "thou", which went out of use in the 17th century? (https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Thou&oldid=102516...) A translation into standard English wouldn't have used "thou" even in 1950 (and this 1922 translation doesn't either, except in literal quotes from the King James Bible).
(Of course, neither of us is using the technical meaning of "modern English" which includes Shakespeare too https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Modern_English&ol... .)
> But your comment is intriguing; I'm mostly struck by the idea that the style of 1950s is so much different from that of 2020s.
I threw the 1950s into my comment because that is post WW2 and pre me - I'm 50 ie off of 1970 and onwards. I perhaps didn't think it through too much. I am a Brit wot went through the private school system in general apart from the six or seven schools in West Germany, London and Manchester before age eight. My upbringing was loosely observant Church of England.
The CofE Book of Common Prayer, Hymnal etc was full of thee and thou and was modernised to you and you around those decades. You still hear "for Thine is the Kingdom" in the Lord's Prayer even today.
Thine, thee and thou (your, you and you) are still in use. You also see what looks like Ye or ye but the letter that looks like Yy is really the letter thorn so ye is really thee.
Shake the spear wrote during the time of the great vowel shift in English which seems to have taken about 300 years. Spelling in his time was pretty random and looks more like hints and indications, rather than "correct". My home town of Yeovil has over sixty documented spellings since around 400CE. A lot of them are seen in those 300 years. I would put Shakey into a different brand of English because I doubt that he and I could have conversed. My mum could make herself completely unintelligible by falling back to her girlhood Devonian dialect from the 40s/50s.
Language is way more interesting and diverse than a WP page can possibly describe. I do love WP - its a cracking project and I've written quite a lot of WM (M not P - I'm a nerd not a clever bloke) pages. However it does fall short sometimes due to some small minded editors who squat on their pages and refuse to allow changes.
Language scholarship used to need a bit of a kicking but I think that is quietly happening over the last 20-30 years. I'm not an expert in any way but I do see signs of broadmindedness and proper scholarship in some of the books I read that have a language component. That said, you then get threads like this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27721748 . Search for the terms Chinese and Sanscrit for the exciting bits (or the bits where you quietly close the door and wander off.) There are some decent ideas and comments in there but they are really hard to find.
Sadly, aggressive nationalism is rearing its ugly head in no small way. I'm a Brit and well aware of my nation's past. It seems like everyone wants to piss off the rest of the world a la the worst excesses of the British Empire. My forebears () invented the word jingoism and it is quite awful seeing others not learning the lessons of our past.
Whoops, sorry. Back in the room ... 8)
() I should point out that my documented ancestors include people who identified with all four UK nations and the male line runs back to Germany (Hanover) in around 1750 where the trail runs cold.
He's generally viewed as a net positive since Christiandom ruled the western world and Aquinas reconciled some Aristotelian and Neoplatonic views with the Catholic Church ("Nothing comes from nothing", "cause and effect", etc) But to Aquinas, those Neoplatonists from whom he derived his cosmology and philosophy were nothing better than pagans lining up to be burned in the good lord's holy fires—even though they figured the same thing about the way things appear to work.
That's true of any philosopher.
> to Aquinas, those Neoplatonists from whom he derived his cosmology and philosophy were nothing better than pagans
Ahistorical nonsense.
https://oxford.universitypressscholarship.com//mobile/view/1...
Morally, he couldn't exalt a Pagan. He only brought himself to say that they essentially "weren't all bad", and beautifully illustrated. He was right, of course, about them—but ultimately he looked down upon them from a moral and ethical standpoint.
Neoplatonism well predates the church. It's beautiful, though.
Not Christianity in all its forms, sure, but Catholicism absolutely.
Just because Aquinas questioned if "pagans" could be virtuous in spite of their beliefs, does not mean he didn't believe they were destined for exclusion from God. He might have written more positively about them than his counterparts and colleagues in the church, but he was looking down his nose at them.
I don't consider adherents to a dogma reaching out in "charity" to be a relationship of equitable footing. It reminds me of that old English nonsense of "noble savages". Just because they called them "noble"...
edit:
Happy to remove my personal opinions.
I'm not making up these perspectives; this is dogma according to the Catholic Encyclopedia: https://www.catholic.com/encyclopedia/paganism. And it's literally in the abstract of the first paper linked to.
Aquinas, as a function of his adherence to that dogma, presumed all Pagans to be doomed as a function of their not adhering to the same dogma. He considered them possibly capable of virtue, but morally inferior.
Pagan is only one category of unbeliever. There are also:
1. Heretics (bad Catholics and all Protestants)
2. Schismatics (the Eastern Orthodox and splinter groups)
3. Infidels (Muslims and anyone else who acknowledges the Abrahamic God but denies Christ)
4. Jews (for having been God's chosen people and having denied the Messiah), see #3
5. Heathens ("spiritual but not religious")
6. Atheists
> if you're not adhering to Catholic Christianity then you are doomed
Strive to enter by the narrow gate.
As something issued by all bishops in the USA, it did at one time have official status in dioceses within the United States.
But it's not a place to cite 'official' Catholic teaching, because it's not a universal Church document the way a church council, a vatican statement, or the writings of one of the church doctors would be.
It's best to cite a source that the Baltimore Catechism would have used as the authoritative source.
There are plenty of interesting things to discuss about Aquinas in his historical context. The last thing we need is to replace that with generic (and therefore tedious, and eventually nasty) arguments about "dogma" and (god help us) "the errors of modern Christianity".
[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...
I was defending my statement on Aquinas, and so I had to draw out the conclusion. I think that's fair.
I never directed any remark at anyone's beliefs, so I think this is all heavy-handed, but just the same I removed the offending opinions and tuned my comment to suit HN's mode.
The more important point here is that it's best to avoid generic tangents [2], especially on classic flamewar topics.
[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...
[2] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...
I don't think this is flamebaiting personally, but maybe I have thick skin.
The only thing he's 'wrong' about is that not every non-Catholic is considered a pagan. Some are schismatics or heretics. Again, that's not my opinion or his/her opinion. That's just a statement of what the church publicly proclaims to believe about non-catholics.
I hadn't felt I was launching into any arguments even with my opinion laced in, but it may also be that I don't tend to be patient with my wording. So what seems only matter-of-fact to me may come across more cold-hearted to others than I intended.
Either way, I appreciate your insightful additions. You'll probably be more helpful on this subject already than I've been.
The problem here isn't that the GP posted opinion rather than fact, or something like that; it's that the comment was a dramatic swerve into generic flamewar territory. More explanation if it helps: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu....
>846 How are we to understand this affirmation, often repeated by the Church Fathers?335 Re-formulated positively, it means that all salvation comes from Christ the Head through the Church which is his Body:
>Basing itself on Scripture and Tradition, the Council teaches that the Church, a pilgrim now on earth, is necessary for salvation: the one Christ is the mediator and the way of salvation; he is present to us in his body which is the Church. He himself explicitly asserted the necessity of faith and Baptism, and thereby affirmed at the same time the necessity of the Church which men enter through Baptism as through a door. Hence they could not be saved who, knowing that the Catholic Church was founded as necessary by God through Christ, would refuse either to enter it or to remain in it.336
>847 This affirmation is not aimed at those who, through no fault of their own, do not know Christ and his Church:
>Those who, through no fault of their own, do not know the Gospel of Christ or his Church, but who nevertheless seek God with a sincere heart, and, moved by grace, try in their actions to do his will as they know it through the dictates of their conscience - those too may achieve eternal salvation.337
>848 "Although in ways known to himself God can lead those who, through no fault of their own, are ignorant of the Gospel, to that faith without which it is impossible to please him, the Church still has the obligation and also the sacred right to evangelize all men.
I wonder if you might be mistaking Aquinas for Augustine? Augustine introduced huge amounts of Neoplatonism into Christianity very early---little more than a century after the original Neoplatonist, Plotinus himself. It's also worth noting that Plotinus was a disciple of the mysterious Ammonius Saccas, one of whose other disciples was none other than Origen, a very influential early Christian writer (albeit later considered a heretic).
Augustine was the foundation of Neoplatonism in the Medieval church, which was it's guiding philosophy (to some great extent) for centuries.
The works of Aristotle were lost to them. They knew of Aristotle but didn't have his writings. Around the time of Thomas Aquinas, Aristotle's works were rediscovered, having been preserved in the Muslim world. Aquinas' great task was reconciling them with the existing church.
This wasn't particular to Aquinas, but fairly common among Scholastics:
* https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/41999/what-is-th...
In some ways you're trying to steel man (as opposed to straw man) the opposing arguments. It was a reflection of the oral debating style used in universities at the time.
There is no index on the left, the scrollbar thumb doesn't work, and when you scroll down with the arrow keys, it goes only a few paragraphs before stopping.