I decided to un-clutter my main blog and make my ongoing study of Summa contra gentiles more accessible for web searches and those who take an interest in it. I will transplant my previous posts of SCG––approximately chapters 1–27 of Book 1, as––to this blog and then proceed glossing SCG here (and crosslink to it at my main blog, FCA).
ADDENDUM:
It was not until about the 14th or 15th chapter of book 1 that I began really glossing the content, and not till about the same point or later that I began systematically adding the original Latin to key points in the text.
Cool new blog! As promised, and update regarding the Whole Dr. Cross and the Corruption of Eastern theology issue. I actually got a reply from Dr. Cross himself, and i think Lee Faber might have listened to a talk from a different person seriously. Here are his words verbatim:
ReplyDelete" A couple of thoughts. I've given a couple of talks on the Trinity recently, in which I worried about questions of divine simplicity and the coherence of the doctrine given certain strong accounts of simplicity. Here's the problem. If the divine essence is wholly simple and undifferentiated, and if there are no grounds for predications in divinis other than the divine essence (as, arguably, some Western theologians hold0, it looks as though there are insufficient grounds for Trinitarian claims. I don't have any plans to write on Palamas in the immediate future, though clearly he might in principle have ways of avoiding the simplicity problem. I think your acquaintance misled you if he/she ascribed to me a serious claim that the Eastern tradition was corrupt on these questions: I'm rather inclined to the view that the Western theologians are more vulnerable to coherence worries than some of the Eastern ones - though I don't know a way to show that the simplicity problem cannot be solved. (Perhaps one could appeal to mystery.) The Eastern positions are in general interesting, and I don't know an account of them which is philosophically nuanced: it all depends on how one understands energies, epinoiai, and things peri ten phusin/ousian. And I have a strong suspicion that these terms are not used in the same senses in individual authors, and certainly not from Gregory of Nyssa to Palamas.
I think that'll be all I'll have said in any talk on the subject - I remember mentioning some of the Eastern theologians in question and answer sessions after the papers, but I don't remember exactly what I said.
Best wishes,
Richard"
Cross posted on your other blog, in case you don't catch it here