Dear Luciana,
Thank you for your corrections! My account was in fact overmuch simplifying
and could give a wrong impression both of the scholastic discussion and of
the way how Dante inserts himself into it.
To begin with, Dante does not really speak of 'Jerome's error', as I had
phrased it. He rather states that Jerome 'wrote about' the pre-creation of
the angels ("vi scrisse lungo tratto / di secoli de li angeli creati / anzi
che l'altro mondo fosse fatto"), thus leaving a backdoor for the
interpretation that Jerome was only raising a certain subject or
paraphrasing a certain opinion without necessarily teaching or sharing it.
As regards his scholastic predecessors, without having investigated the
question thoroughly (and without having Nardi's pages at hand) I am not
aware of any scholastic author who did *not* decide that the opposite
(con-creation) was true or at least more likely. But, again, my suggestion
that it was commonplace to point out and reject Jerome's 'error' does not
do justice to the way how this rejection was usually phrased. Because it
was in fact fairly common to point out that Jerome did not or not
necessarily share the opinion in question (Ps.-Hugh: "Nos tamen quod dictum
est prius, magis approbamus; et quod Hieronymus dicit, ex dictis Origenis
fuit, nec asserendo dictum est sed dubitando dixit, inquirendo 'quantas
aeternitates', etc., 'arbitrandum est prius fuisse', etc."; Peter the
Lombard: "Nos autem quod prius dictum est, pro captu intelligentiae nostrae
magis approbamus, salva tamen reverentia secretorum, in quibus nihil temere
asserendum est; et illud Hieronymum dixisse non ita sentiendo, sed aliorum
opinionem referendo arbitramur"). Peter of Poitiers even claims that Jerome
was actually rejecting this opinion (_Sententiae_, lib. II, cap. 1, PL
211,942: "Sed dicendum est quod hoc non dixit Hieronymus asserendo, imo
quorumdam male dogmatizantium sententiam retractando"). Whereas Aquinas in
his _Summa theologiae_, already quoted by you, does not exactly suggest
that Jerome did not share this opinion but nevertheless states that he was
"speaking according to the teaching of the Greek Fathers; all of whom hold
the creation of the angels to have taken place previously to that of the
corporeal world", a teaching which Aquinas regards as 'less probable' but
which, according to him, is nevertheless "not to be deemed erroneous;
especially on account of the opinion of Gregory Nazianzen, 'whose authority
in Christian doctrine is of such weight that no one has ever raised
objection to his teaching, as is also the case with the doctrine of
Athanasius,' as Jerome says" (S.th. I, qu. 61, art. 3).
I have no opinion regarding the question whether Dante, insisting more
strongly than Aquinas that the common doctrine (con-creation) was the only
true one, was "deliberately disregarding the Summa". There is such a long
and frequently misleading tradition of Dante commentary where the _Summa
theologiae_ is taken more or less as the only source and matrix for
interpreting D's theological views, and where every paralell is taken to be
a direct borrowing and every difference regarded as a conscious rejection,
that I feel inclined to avoid this path of investigation as long as other
sources have not been investigated more thoroughly. Maybe Nardi's pages
which I read several years ago but don't remember very well can throw some
more light on the question how Dante's presentation of the matter relates
to his scholastic predecessors.
Best regards,
Otfried
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Otfried Lieberknecht ([log in to unmask], http://www.lieberknecht.de)
D-12163 Berlin, Schoeneberger Str. 11, tel. ++49 +30 8516675
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