St. Thomas Aquinas wrote the Liber de sortibus ad dominum Iacobum de Tonengo around 1270. In 1963, Dominican friar Peter Bartholomew Carey wrote a master’s thesis translating the De Sortibus into English for the first time. That original translation has been available online, but not in print. A new translation from Peter Carey (subtitled A Letter to a Friend about the Casting of Lots), who had since left the Dominicans and was serving in the Episcopal community until his recent death, fills that lacuna.
In the De sortibus, Aquinas examines the moral permissibility of casting lots, whether rolling dice, drawing straws, or randomly selecting a page in the Bible, for example, in order to divide up responsibilities or ownership, to seek direction for human action, or even to foretell the future. Similar treatments from Aquinas on casting lots can be found in his Summa theologiae, Quodlibetal Questions, and commentary on Ephesians. In this text, Aquinas is not writing a systematic work, but a short, original treatise on the precise topic in response to the prompting of his friend, Giacomo of Tonengo. The De sortibus anticipates and ideally ought to be read together with his subsequent Summa treatment. Whereas the Summa article leads with clarity, the moral judgment of the De sortibus comes only in the final chapter. However, this letter showcases Aquinas’s pedagogical mastery, even a human sensitivity less apparent in the Summa. It also showcases an affable generosity of breadth and depth for such a minor moral question. Thanks to this generosity, the De sortibus offers a wider and deeper account of lots than a single Summa article.
The De sortibus logically proceeds from the proper context of the use of lots to their purpose and the varied types and means before examining their utility and legitimacy. The legitimacy of lots varies according to their purpose (to choose or to divide versus to foreknow) and especially according to their plausibility. Aquinas simultaneously puts great stock in the rational and free agency of human beings, while maintaining a clear efficacious role for lots based on a firm faith in divine providence, which governs both corporeal events as well as characteristically human acts. In other words, any proper use of lots finds its natural context in a properly religious worldview; this is why he treats lots in the Summa under the purview of the virtue of religion, regarding it as a common example of the vice of superstition.
Since even human actions are subject to divine governance, a coin flip to make a decision that otherwise escapes rational determination can be expressive of religiosity—an act of trust in divine assistance to providentially govern all human affairs. The pitfalls are when lots are cast “without necessity,” “without due reverence” to God, for the sake of vain “worldly business,” or when we “leave to lots that which should be done through divine inspiration” (30-31), such as prudent judgments in the selection of a new bishop, which is the precise question prompting his response.
As far as the translation goes, the English is easy to follow while maintaining the idiosyncratically succinct style of Aquinas. The De sortibus reminds one of Aquinas’s biblical commentaries, for example: directly stating what needs to be said, proceeding in a logical argumentative sequence, and including frequent quotes from Scripture as well as both Christian and non-Christian authorities. Carey intentionally has updated his first translation to make it more accessible to a wider audience; such an aim seems to have been accomplished without revolutionizing the language and style of Aquinas, which often results in diluting his meaning. In this respect, the translation is legible and beneficial, a worthwhile contribution.
As far as the publication goes, since the Latin of the De sortibus runs just over 5,000 words, such a slim translation would naturally need supplementation to merit printing as a standalone volume. This new Carey translation is filled out with a foreword by Andrew Davison, as well as eight very brief essays from Davison, Deirdre Good, Matthew Fox, Tobias Haller, Boniface Ramsey, and Christopher Wells, plus biographies of these essayists, as well as two appendices on Aquinas’s life, a Preface, an Acknowledgements section, and an “About the Author and Translator” from Carey. To quantify the emphases, there are twenty-six pages for the translation, and about sixty total pages for all this other material. Frankly, it strikes the reader as excessive for such a simple and relatively minor treatise. If anything, much of the material preceding the translation more explicitly concerns Peter Carey than Thomas Aquinas, exemplified by the incongruous photograph of Carey examining a small painting of Aquinas featured on two distinct pages.
In place of Carey’s lengthy commentary from his original 1963 translation, this publication features the eight aforementioned essays. The first (Davison) and last (Wells) are almost exclusively apologiae for Anglicanism and thus topically irrelevant. Good and Ramsey aim to help the reader notice how Aquinas uses Scripture and the Fathers, respectively, in the De sortibus; only Ramsey’s essay is successfully helpful. The two essays from Fox reveal him to be significantly confused about Aquinas’s theology of prophecy, creation, and pneumatology, as well as wrongly attributing to him both panentheism and a false ecumenism. Haller’s two essays are the best of the bunch, one attempting a rabbinic Judaic parallel, the second homing in on Aquinas’s critical insight into reliance on the Holy Spirit in rational prudential judgments.
This edition is intentionally marketed to those unfamiliar with Aquinas; expectedly, it concerns academic Thomistic scholarship little, outside of providing an English translation in print. Since this edition will indeed make Aquinas more accessible, it is a welcome addition. This reviewer is largely happy to see it, yet skeptical that it will broadly achieve the end it intends, namely, to attract those unfamiliar with Aquinas to finally give him a chance. Yet, with such uncertainty in human affairs, who but God can accurately foreknow the book’s lot?
Brandon L. Wanless is an assistant professor of dogmatic theology at The Saint Paul Seminary, University of St. Thomas.
Brandon L. Wanless
Date Of Review:
March 17, 2023
