Theology as a science (sacred doctrine)

This page is unusual in this collection: nothing here is missing, damaged, or in dispute. Aquinas's opening question in the Summa Theologiae -- his argument that theology counts as a genuine science, reasoning from premises accepted on the authority of revelation rather than from self-evident first principles -- survives complete and is not itself in question. What the linked conjectures do instead is turn scholastic theology's own manuscript and citation habits into the object of study, treating how an argument actually got assembled as more testable, for this page's purposes, than the argument's content.

The conjectures linked here approach scholastic theology from its manuscript and citation habits rather than its arguments directly. Moerbeke's dividend and Commentary converts the quote both treat how a translated or quoted authority, Aristotle by way of William of Moerbeke, patristic sources by way of commentary, actually entered scholastic argument as a traceable transmission event. Objections come from florilegia tests whether stock theological objections were assembled from pre-existing anthologies rather than composed fresh, and Book One swallows the Sentences asks whether Aquinas's own commentary on Peter Lombard's Sentences came to eclipse the text it was originally written to explain.