Saturday, December 1, 2018

Transcendental Mnemonics

My office mate pointed me to a text by one Pelbartus Ladislaus de Themeswar (ca. 1430-1504). He wrote a work called Aureum sacrae theologiae rosarium iuxta quattuor Senteniarum libros quadripartitum ex doctrina doctoris Subtilis, divi Thomae, divi Bonaventurae, aliorumque sacrorum doctorum.

There is an interesting discussion in vol 1, on the topic of "De ente" starting on f. 51rb. Here we get the mnemonic "Reubau" for the transcendentals. It stands for res, ens, unum, bonum, aliquid, verum. According to Jan Aertsen, the same mnemonic occurs in Dominic Soto (1494-1560). A fun little text by Pelbartus, quoted below:

Ens primo, scilicet in communi, secundum Scotorel. di. 3 primi, habet conceptum latissimum ad omnes conceptus positivos: sicut suum oppositum, scilicet, Nihil, habet conceptum latissimum ad omnes conceptus negativos. Unde Commentator .4. propositione de causis dicit Nil est latius ente. Nam et secundum Aristotelem .4. Metaphysicae ens est transcendens, ergo etc.

Pro quo nota quo ut ibidem habetur scilicet .4. metaphysicae, sex sunt transcendentia, quae sunt communia omnibus generibus entium, scilicet Res, Ens, vunum, bonum, aliquid, uerum: quae significantur per literas huius dictionis Reubau. Unde ver. transcendunt omnes quae signat dictio Reubau.

Utrum ens in communi univoce dicatur de Deo et creatura...

"Scotorel." appears to be Peter of Aquila, for Pelbartus adopts the former's theory of univocity as a mode of conception, an attempt to reconcile Scotistic univocity with thomistic analogy.

2 comments:

Benno said...

It's a pretty useless mnemonic, don't you think? I propose to replace it with "bureau".

Lee Faber said...

To be sure, I cannot argue with that.

but does not that commit you do a doubling of unum?