Wisdom from the 42nd Page

A Summa of the Summa

In “A Summa of the Summa,” Peter Kreeft's annotated edition of St. Thomas Aquinas's Summa Theologica, we read, on the 42nd page (some emphasis added):

Reply Obj. 1. It may well happen that what is in itself the more certain may seem to us the less certain²³ on account of the weakness of our intelligence, "which is dazzled by the clearest objects of nature;²⁴ as the owl is dazzled by the light of the sun" (Metaph. ii lect. i). Hence the fact that some happen to doubt about articles of faith is not due to the uncertain nature of the truths, but to the weakness of human intelligence; yet the slenderest knowledge that may be obtained of the highest things is more desirable than the most certain knowledge obtained of lesser things, as is said in de Animalibus xi.²⁵

Reply Obj. 2. This science can in a sense depend upon the philosophical sciences, not as though it stood in need of them, but only in order to make its teaching clearer. For it accepts its principles not from other sciences; but immediately from God, by revelation. Therefore it does not depend upon other sciences as upon the higher, but makes use of them as of the lesser, and as handmaidens:²⁶ even so the master sciences make use of the sciences that supply their materials, as political of military science. That it thus uses them is not due to its own defect or insufficiency, but to the

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23. Many students today find quite unintelligible this simple distinction because the notion of that which is "in itself more certain" presupposes an epistemological objectivism and realism which modern post-Kantian "critical" or skeptical thought has ceased to assume, to believe, or even sometimes to comprehend. Yet the notion is commonsensical, e.g., it is objectively more certain that it will not snow today in Bermuda than that it will snow today in Greenaland; yet a Greenlander who knows nothing about Bermuda feels subjectively less certain that it will not snow today in Bermuda than that it will in Greenland.
24. "The clearest objects of nature" here means not physical objects that are not dark to the eye, but those objects which by their own nature are the most clear and rational, like the mind of God and angels.
25. Cf. the last paragraph of n. 17.
26. The medieval formula "philosophy the handmaid of theology" (philosophia ancilla theologiae) and the associated idea of theology as "the queen of the sciences" are seldom taken seriously today, even in most "Catholic" universities. Yet neither philosophy nor science have ever refuted that claim during the past seven hundred years. It has been dismissed by fashion, not by reason. If God is, and is our ultimate end, then the science of God must indeed be the queen of sciences.

My good friend Will Duquette has recently begun Blogging Aquinas and interested readers are welcome to join him.

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Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas

169 years ago today the great 19th-century Brazilian author Joaquim Maria Marchado de Assis was born.

In honor of his birthday we are pleased to present the forty-second page of Gregory Rabassa's English translation of Machado de Assis's 1881 novel, “Memórias Pósthumas de Brás Cubas.”

(Machado de Assis dedicated this novel "to the worm who first gnawed on the cold flesh of my corpse, I dedicate with fond remembrances these Posthumous Memoirs.")

On page 42 of Rabassa's translation we read (some emphasis added):

the vizier's wife, she beckoning to you with possession and you running, running, up to the long tree-lined drive from where you came out onto the street where all the harness-makers jeered at you and thrashed you. Then it seemed to me that Marcela's hallway was the drive and the street was in Baghdad. As a matter of fact, looking toward the door I saw three harness-makers on the sidewalk, once in a cassock, another in livery, another in civilian clothes, as all three entered the hallway, took me by the arms, put me into a carriage, my father on the right, my canon uncle on the left, the one in the livery on the driver's seat, and from there they took me to the house of a police official, from where I was transported to a ship that was to leave for Lisbon. You can imagine my resistance, but all resistance was useless.

Three days later I left the harbor behind, downcast and silent. I wasn't even weeping. I had an id&eeacute;e fixe... Damned id&eeacute;es fixes! The one on that occasion was to dive into the ocean repeating Marcela's name.

XIX

On Board

We were eleven passangers: a crazy man accompanied by his wife, two youths going on an excursion, four businessmen, and two servants. My father entrusted me to all of them, starting with the ship's captain, who had much of his own to look after as well because, on top of everything else, he was carrying his wife, who was in the last stages of tuberculosis.

I don't know whether the captain suspected anything of my lugubrious project or whether my father had put him on the alert, but I do know that he never took his eyes off me, called to me everywhere. When he couldn't be with me he brought me to his wife. The woman was almost always on a low couch, coughing a lot, and promising to show me the sights in Lisbon. She wasn't thin, she was transparent. It was impossible to know why she didn't die from one moment to the

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The Violent Land

On the forty-second page of “The Violent Land” (originally published as Terras do Sem Fim in Portuguese in 1943) author Jorge Amado wrote—as translated into English by Samuel Putnam (emphasis added):

making of it, of the cacao groves, and of the wood one single entity bound by the dusk that was equal to night itself. The trees would assume gigantic shapes, growing in stature with the mysterious spreading of the shadows. Dolorous sounds would be heard, the cry of unknown birds and of animals, coming from—where? She did not know. And the hissing of the reptiles, the rustling of dried leaves where they crawled. Ester always had the feeling that one day the snakes would end by coming up on the veranda and making their way into the house, some stormy night, until they reached her own and her child's throat, which they would encircle like a necklace. She herself could never have told the horror of those moments, which lasted from the fall oftwilight until the storm broke. And then, when at last it descended in all its fury and Nature appeared bent upon destroying everything, she would seek out those places where the light of the kerosene lamps was brightest. Even then the shadows cast by the light made her afraid and set her imagination to work, leading her to believe the most superstitious of the stories that the Negroes told.

There was one thing that she always remembered on these nights, and that was the cradle lullabies her grandmother had sung to her to calm her fears when she was a child, so many years before. And so now, beside her own child's cradle, she tearfully sang them over again, one after another, in a low voice, once more convinced of their magic efficacy. She sang them to her son as he looked up at her with his hard brown eyes. Horacio's eyes; but she sang them for herself as well, for she too was a frightened child. She sang in a low voice, lulling herself iwth the melody as the tears streamed down her face. She forgot the darkness of the veranda, those terrible shadows outside, the ominous hoot of the owls in the trees, the melancholy of the night, and the forest and its mystery. She sang the songs of long ago, simple melodies, efficacious against spells. It was as though her grandmother's protecting shade were hovering over her, lovingly and understandingly.

And then of a sudden the cry of a frog in the pool, killed by a snake, would come through the forest, through the cacao groves, and would enter the house; it was louder than the owls' hoot or the rustling of leaves, louder than the whistling wind itself, as it came to die away in the lamp-lit room where Ester sat, her body all a-tremble. She sang no more. Closing her eyes, she could see—in every slightest detail—the slimy, repulsive reptile slithering along over the ground and among the fallen leaves,

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