Thomas Cajetan
The Reverend Thomas de Vio Cajetan | |
|---|---|
 Martin Luther in front of Cardinal Cajetan by Ferdinand Pauwels | |
| Born | 20 February 1469 |
| Died | 9 August 1534 (aged 65) |
| Alma mater | University of Padua |
| Notable work | Summula Caietani. |
| Era | Medieval philosophy |
| Region | |
| School | Thomism |
Main interests | |
Thomas Cajetan,
He is not to be confused with his contemporary, Saint Cajetan, the founder of the Theatines.
Life
He was born in
He became general procurator in 1507 and general of the Dominicans a year later in 1508.
In 1511 a group of dissident cardinals called the
At the
Cajetan composed in defence of his position the Tractatus de Comparatione auctoritatis Papæ et conciliorum ad invicem. Jacques Almain answered this work, and Cajetan replied in his Apologia. Cajetan refused to accept Almain's argument that the Church's polity had to be similar to a lay regime, complete with limits on the ruler.[6]
For his support of
In 1517,
In 1518, Cajetan was sent as legate to the Diet of Augsburg and at the behest of the Frederick III, Elector of Saxony was entrusted with examining the teachings of Martin Luther. According to Hilaire Belloc, "[Luther] had not been treated roughly by his opponents, the roughness had been on his side. But things had gone against him, and he had been made to look foolish; he had been cross-examined into denying, for instance, the authority of a General Council — which authority was the trump card to play against the Papacy."[7]
In 1519, Cajetan helped in drawing up the bill of excommunication against Luther.[4]
Having proved to be an able diplomat and administrator, Cajetan was employed in several other negotiations and transactions. In conjunction with Cardinal Giulio de' Medici in the
Cajetan, died in Rome in 1534.
Views
As a philosopher and logician, Cajetan defended the idea of analogy.[8]
Though as a theologian Cajetan was a scholastic of the older
Some Dominicans regarded his views as too independent of those of Saint Thomas. The
Of the
Cajetan was a man of austere piety and fervent zeal. And from the standpoint of the Dominican idea of the supreme necessity of maintaining ecclesiastical discipline, he defended the rights of the papacy and proclaimed that the pope should be "the mirror of God on earth."[4]
Views on papal authority
Against the Council of Pisa's advocacy of conciliarism, which placed the authority of a general council above the pope's authority, Cajetan responded that a general council could only judge a pope if the pope had become a heretic. In the case of a wicked but non-heretical pope, Cajetan insisted that resistance is sufficient to reduce abuses, while deposition is inadmissible as a council convened without a pope would be "headless" (using the scriptural analogy of the relationship between sheep and their shepherd). In the case of heresy, however, Cajetan wrote that an exceptional general council could be convened to grant the reigning pope a fair hearing, and if he was judged to be in heresy, the council could act to sever the bond between the man holding the papacy and the office itself.[11][12] However, he denied that this action constituted the council acting over the pope, which he regarded as theologically impossible. Rather, he considered that such an action merely indicated that the council could undo the election of that particular man to the office of the pope (since the election was also performed by human beings).[11][12] Cajetan, building on similar discussions from John of Paris and Augustinus Triumphus regarding the removal of heretical popes, interpreted Titus 3:10 as saying that a heretical pope should be deposed after two admonitions.[13]
Modern assessment
On Aquinas
In the mid-twentieth century, Cajetan's thought came to be assessed negatively by certain Catholic commentators who, in reacting against
Fergus Kerr wrote a 2002 book, After Aquinas, attacking Cajetan on this. Among others, he cited Étienne Gilson, who was responding to arguments that 'philosophy' and 'Christianity' were incompatible disciplines, there existed in Hellenistic Judaism, patristic thought and the medieval period a way of thinking, animated by the ancient Greek quest for the cause of being, which could rightly be called 'Christian philosophy'. In Gilson's account, it was in Cajetan's thought that this link was first broken, since Cajetan, influenced by Scotism, reduced Thomas Aquinas's metaphysics of the existential act of being to an ontology of substance. Cajetan and his successors therefore, in Gilson's account, represented Thomas as focused on the forms and essences of beings only, and not on the existence of all things as participation in the pure actuality which is God. Accordingly, for Gilson, 'philosophy' and 'Christianity' are only incompatible if Christian thought is understood in its tradition post-Cajetan—a tradition which is worse than the older, more distinguished tradition of Christian thought.[14] Henri de Lubac wrote in Surnaturel (1946), an account of Aquinas’ views on the natural and the supernatural, that Cajetan's interpretation of Aquinas, while influential, was incorrect. De Lubac argued that Cajetan treated Aquinas as an Aristotelian, working with a definition of nature from Aristotle's Physics, which effectively turned human nature into a reality essentially closed in on itself, with its own intrinsic powers, desires and goals. De Lubac did not think Aquinas was an Aristolean, and that subsequent Catholic thought produced mistaken readings of Thomas Aquinas's account of the relationship between nature and grace.[15]
In 2006, Ralph McInerny and other scholars challenged the negative assessment of Cajetan's work made by De Lubac and Gilson. McInerny writes that the criticisms of Cajetan are not in fact supported by evidence from his works, and furthermore that it is not Cajetan but Gilson whose interpretation of Aquinas is a departure from the latter's beliefs.[16]
Other
Works
- Opera omnia (5 vols., 1639)
- Opuscula omnia (1530)
- Summula Caietani (in Latin). Paris: Claude Chevallon. 1530.
- Commentary on Saint Thomas' Summa theologiae (1540)
- De divina institutione Pontificatus Romani Pontificis (1521)
- In Porphyrii Isagogen (1934)
- De comparatione auctoritatis papae and Apologia (1936)
- De Anima (1938)
- Scripta philosophica (6 vols., edited by P. Zammit, M.-H. Laurent and J. Coquelle, 1934–39)
References
Footnotes
- ^ Volz, J. (1908). Tommaso de Vio Gaetani Cajetan. In The Catholic Encyclopedia. New York: Robert Appleton Company. Retrieved September 21, 2019 from New Advent: http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/03145c.htm
- ISBN 978-1-4020-9729-4, retrieved 2020-01-22
- ^ "CATHOLIC ENCYCLOPEDIA: Tommaso de Vio Gaetani Cajetan". Newadvent.org. 1908-11-01. Retrieved 2014-06-07.
- ^ a b c d e f g h Chisholm 1911.
- ^ Cajetan at the Encyclopædia Britannica
- ^ Thomas M. Izbicki, "Cajetan's Attack on Parallels Between Church and State," Cristianesimo nella storia 29 (1999): 81-89.
- ISBN 0-89555-465-8.
- ^ Joshua P. Hochschild, The semantics of analogy: rereading Cajetan's De nominum analogia (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2010).
- ^ Thomas M. Izbicki, "Cajetan on the Acquisition of Stolen Goods in the Old and New Worlds," Rivista di Storia del Cristianesimo 4 (2007): 499-509.
- ^ Cajetan Responds A Reader in Reformation Controversy, ed. Jared Wicks (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1978).
- ^ ISBN 9789004325098.
- ^ ISBN 9781610975698.
- ISBN 9781349492213.)
{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link - ^ Kerr, Fergus. After Aquinas (2002), pp. 80-83.
- ^ Kerr, Fergus. After Aquinas (2002), p. 136.
- ^ McInerny, Ralph, "Preambula Fidei; Thomas Aquinas and the God of the Philosophers"
- ISBN 0-19-826954-4.
Sources
- "Aktenstücke uber das Verhalten der römischen Kurie zur Reformation, 1524‑1531," in Quellen und Forschungen (Kön. Press. Hist. Inst., Rome), vol. iii. p. 1‑20; TM Lindsay, History of the Reformation, vol. i. (Edinburgh, 1906).
- This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Chisholm, Hugh, ed. (1911). "Cajetan, Cardinal". Encyclopædia Britannica. Vol. 4 (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press. p. 961.
This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Herbermann, Charles, ed. (1913). "Tommaso de Vio Gaetani Cajetan". Catholic Encyclopedia. New York: Robert Appleton Company.- Conciliarism and Papalism, trans. J. H. Burns and Thomas M. Izbicki, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997.
External links
- De Vio, Tommaso (1596). Opuscula omnia (in Latin). Lucantonio Giunta, Francesco senese De Franceschi.
- De Vio, Tommaso (1513). Apologia de comparata auctoritate pape et ecclesie (in Latin).
- De Vio, Tommaso (1512). Oratio in secunda sessione Concilii Lateranensis (in Latin). Johann Beplin.
- De Vio, Tommaso (1511). Auctoritas Pape et Concilii siue Ecclesie comparata (in Latin). Marcello Silber.
- Works by Thomas Cajetan at Post-Reformation Digital Library