Aquinas in Exile: Irish Dominican Thomists in the Seventeenth Century

Introduction

How did the thought of St Thomas Aquinas feature in the life and mission of Irish Dominicans of the seventeenth century? Inevitably, given the instability and discontinuities which mark this period of Catholic life in Ireland, providing an answer to this question involves the gathering of fragmentary evidence. In the absence of sources like conventual library catalogues, curricula, and students’ notes, we must make the most of what we have: brief remarks in surviving biographies of friars, capitular decisions, records of personal libraries, and the small number of relevant published works that survive. In what follows, I aim to present much of the available evidence in order to substantiate the Thomistic commitments of Irish Dominican friars of the period, which have occasionally been doubted. ¹

In doing so, I will firstly sketch the careers of four seventeenth-century Irish Dominicans in Europe who taught and published in mainstream European centres of Thomism: James Arthur OP, John Baptist Hacket OP, Dominic Lynch OP, and Michael Corcoran OP. I will turn then to the academic institutions founded by Irish Dominicans on the Continent – in Louvain, Lisbon, and Rome – seeking evidence for allegiance to the thought of St Thomas. Finally, I will consider evidence for Thomistic commitments on the ‘Irish mission’, drawing on biographies of missionaries, surviving book catalogues, and various ill-fated plans to establish centres of Dominican learning in Ireland.

Fully appreciating the significance of this evidence requires some knowledge of the situation of the Irish Dominican Province in the period, and of Irish Catholics more generally. I will begin, therefore, by outlining some relevant historical background.

Irish Catholicism in the Seventeenth Century

At the start of the seventeenth century, few of the ancient Dominican priories of Ireland were in the hands of the friars. Those friars who remained in Ireland were often forced to operate in secret. Many of the Gaelic and Gaelicised aristocrats who had traditionally patronised the friars lost lands and power in successive colonial ‘plantations’ implemented by English monarchs, but strategic alliances with friendly local patrons could lead to localised growth and stability for the friars. In the 1620s, for example, the Dominicans of Galway operated a grammar school in association with civic authorities. ² At the same time in Dublin, however, friars lived and ministered in hiding, in the back room of a nondescript building, omitting even to train their novices in chant for fear that their presence would be discovered. ³

There were two periods in the seventeenth century when Dominican friars – along with other members of the clergy – had considerable freedom of activity in Ireland: 1641–1649, when an uprising of Catholic nobles led to the formation of the Catholic Confederation which governed some two-thirds of the country; and 1685–1690, from the accession of the Catholic King James II to the throne of England, Ireland, and Scotland, until his defeat by William of Orange at the Battle of the Boyne. Both of these periods of relative freedom were followed by intense persecution of Irish Catholics: the bloody Cromwellian reconquest of Ireland (1649–1653), and the imposition of laws penalising Catholic practice in the wake of the Williamite victory, including the fairly successful banishment of all regular clergy from Ireland in 1697.

Formation of Irish Clergy

Throughout this turbulent century, Irish clergy who received any substantial intellectual formation typically did so on the European continent. This was not an entirely new departure; already in the medieval period many Irish clerics, especially friars, received intellectual formation outside of Ireland. ⁴ In the early modern period, in the case of the Dominican Order, there is evidence of Irish friars being assigned for studies by the Master of the Order to convents in Spain (including Salamanca, Valladolid, Seville, Barcelona, and Madrid), Italy (Bologna, Rome, Naples, Milan, Alessandria), and France (Paris, Avignon, Rennes, Toulouse). ⁵ Edmund de Burgo OP, writing in 1736, recalls the situation in the west of Ireland in the early seventeenth century, when the friars received novices ‘from the leading families’ in a hidden place in a wood near Athenry, with the protection of the local lord, and sent them after their novitiate for studies in Spain, whence they returned with such ‘diligence and zeal’ that the Order was, by some measures, flourishing in Ireland, against all the odds, by the mid-seventeenth century. ⁶

The European option for clerical formation eventually took the form of a stable network of institutions for the philosophical and theological education of clergy, established by Irish churchmen working with European members of the Irish mercantile and aristocratic diaspora. Several dozen such ‘Irish Colleges’ would emerge, from Paris to Prague, including three Irish Dominican colleges – in Lisbon (1615), Louvain (1624), and Rome (1677), to which we shall return. ⁷

These centres for study had, of course, a missionary purpose. They were designed to provide well trained priests, capable of teaching the faithful in Ireland and responding to Protestant arguments. In the case of Spain, this educational and missionary programme was sustained over many decades by the Spanish crown, in collaboration with Irish ecclesiastical and secular agents in exile. ⁸ The King of Spain paid viatica for Irish missionaries to return to the mission in the north, and paid also – as we shall see – for the supply and transport of books of philosophy, theology, and pastoralia. One particularly active Irish Dominican agent at the Madrid court applied for viatica for 150 of his confrères over several decades. Over the course of the seventeenth century, records attest to the return to Ireland of 258 trained Irish Dominican friars. ⁹

Irish Dominican Thomists in Continental Europe

The first generation of beleaguered Irish friars to arrive at continental centres of study had the good fortune to do so at a time when the Order had renewed its focus on the thought of St Thomas. In 1583, a letter ‘on the reformation of studies’ by Sisto Fabri OP, Master of the Order, recalled Dominicans to the study of (and imitation of) Thomas and later Thomists: ‘In theology we have firstly the Angelic Doctor, St Thomas, together with the numerous army of his followers who have drunk from such a pure source [and who], following [Thomas’s] teaching, expound the books of Aristotle’. ¹⁰

Just over a decade later, the General Chapter at Valencia reminded all Dominican ‘masters, bachelors, and lectors’ of their constitutional commitment to study, teach, and defend ‘the doctrine of our most glorious and angelic doctor, St Thomas Aquinas’, and reminded them too that failure to do so could result in loss of office and rank. ¹¹ This official recommitment to the teaching of St Thomas is part of the background to the work of significant seventeenth-century Thomists in the Order, such as John of St Thomas OP, Pedro de Godoy OP, John Baptist Gonet OP, and Antoine Goudin OP. ¹²

In the case of early-seventeenth-century Iberia, this renewed focus on Thomas was reflected in the Dominican curriculum. It began with four years spent studying Aristotelian philosophy with the help of Thomas’s commentaries, including weekly disputations. The theology cycle placed particular emphasis on the Summa Theologiae, which was studied from beginning to end. Students were also required to have copies of the Summa for personal use. ¹³ The milieu which shaped Irish friars when they entered continental studia was, then, marked by a certain rigour and vitality, and included prolonged exposure to the philosophy and theology of St Thomas Aquinas. We see its effects vividly in the careers of several Irish Dominican Thomists active in European studia, of whom we will consider four: James Arthur, John Baptist Hacket, Dominic Lynch, and Michael Corcoran.

James (alias Didacus) Arthur OP (c. 1578–1670), ¹⁴ a Limerick man, and a member of a family who had patronised the Dominicans there for centuries, ¹⁵ joined the Order in Salamanca after some time studying in the secular Irish College there. ¹⁶ His formation as a friar included studies at the University of Salamanca. In the 1620s he taught theology in the Dominican priory of León and at the University of Salamanca. In 1630 he was made Regent of the Collegio di San Tommaso in Naples, before moving to teach in the Colegio de San Gregorio, Valladolid. His teaching career was crowned in July 1639 when he was appointed by King Philip IV of Spain to the principal chair of theology at the University of Coimbra, ¹⁷ ‘although he was Irish’. ¹⁸

Arthur’s time in this prestigious position came to a dramatic end, however, partly on account of his fidelity to the teaching of Aquinas. In 1646, King John IV of the newly independent Portugal required all theology professors at the University of Coimbra to swear an oath to defend the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception. Arthur refused, and was removed from his post in 1649. ¹⁹ His own arguments on this point are unavailable, but others who lobbied the Portuguese King on his behalf – including the influential Irishman, Dominic of the Rosary O’Daly OP – claimed that Arthur simply could not take the required oath, given his prior oaths ‘to hold and defend all that is held and taught by the Angelic Doctor’. ²⁰

In his final years Arthur worked on a commentary on the entire Summa Theologiae. According to Nicolás Antonio (d. 1684), by the time of his death he had completed his two-part commentary on the Prima Pars, the first of which was printed in 1665, leaving unfinished the ten remaining parts of his commentary. ²¹ It seems, however, that even the unprinted parts of this work were received and used by later students of St Thomas. Writing in 1721, Jacques Echard OP remarked that this commentary, ‘where [it] is preserved either in manuscript or printed, is used in teaching by Spaniards, Portuguese, and his own people, the Irish’. ²²

Some thirty years younger than James Arthur, John Baptist Hacket OP (alias Hackett, Hacquetus, Hacqueto, Hacquet; c. 1606–1676) ²³ was a native of Fethard, Co. Tipperary. ²⁴ He joined the Order in Cashel, Co. Tipperary, studied in Salamanca, ²⁵ and was ordained in Barcelona in 1630. At some point thereafter he was based in Paris, either teaching or engaged in further studies, and he went on to teach in the Order’s studia in Milan, Naples, and Rome. He was awarded the rank of Master at the 1644 General Chapter. It was in Milan that he played a key role in the controversial decision of young Philip Howard, son of the (Anglican) Earl of Arundel, to join the Order of Preachers. ²⁶ In Rome he became a theological adviser to several cardinals, including Aemilius Cardinal Altieri, who, as Pope Clement X, reportedly had intended to raise Hacket to the cardinalate. ²⁷ In the 1650s and 1660s he published a number of manuals in Thomistic philosophy and theology:

The three synopses published in 1659 were dedicated, respectively, to Prince Camillo Pamphili (former cardinal, and nephew of Pope Innocent X), his wife, Olimpia Aldobrandini, and their eleven-year-old son, Giovanni Battista Pamphili. This latter was, it seems, among the intended students of this ‘cursus philosophicus’. ²⁹ Hacket also reportedly composed a Synopsis philosophiae, published in two volumes in Rome in 1662, supposedly a ‘summary of the Cursus Philosophicus of John of St Thomas’, but I have not been able to confirm that this work ever existed. ³⁰ He died in 1676, at Santa Maria sopra Minerva, Rome.

Unlike James Arthur and John Baptist Hacket, the career of Dominic Lynch OP (alias Linze, Lince; 1622–1697), ³¹ was entirely Spanish. Following his novitiate in Galway, he spent the rest of his life in Seville, studying at the Priory of San Pablo, and going on to teach at the College of St Thomas Aquinas, where he was appointed Regent in 1674. Unusually, his Irish background in Ireland is exceptionally clear to us, thanks to the record of an investigation into his family carried out as part of the process of his appointment as Regent. ³² His death is illuminated too by a precious source: the published version of the eulogy preached at his funeral on 20 December 1697. ³³ This latter source repeatedly underlines Lynch’s importance in the intellectual life of Seville. ³⁴ Lynch’s Thomistic credentials are heavily underlined: ‘he was a sturdy wall of the Thomistic school’, he was the ‘shield and wall of the Thomistic army’. ³⁵

Contemporary or near-contemporary Irish friars speak of Lynch in similarly glowing terms. The historian, John O’Heyne OP, who had been in correspondence with him when he was a student in Salamanca in the 1670s, describes him as a ‘shining lamp, spending many years in teaching and expounding with wonderful clearness the angelic theology of our angelic doctor’. ³⁶ O’Heyne reports too the assessment of Lynch’s teacher in Salamanca, Francisco de Reluz OP, who had been asked to read some of his former student’s work in advance of his appointment as Regent. According to O’Heyne, Reluz said that he had ‘never read anything more profound, more learned or more scientifically deduced or concluded’. ³⁷ A Dominican of the following generation, Thomas de Burgo OP, recalls hearing in his youth in Rome the testimony of ‘many of the most learned men’ who heard Lynch take part in theological disputations at the 1686 General Chapter to general applause. ³⁸ His style of disputation – slow and sometimes unclear in raising objections, but unequalled in answering objections – was praised by O’Heyne on the basis that ‘it is of more importance to guard just possessions with energy and perseverance, than to lay claim to new things with verbosity’. ³⁹ Lynch published a complete course in philosophy entitled, Summa philosophiae speculativae iuxta mentem et Doctrinam D. Thomae et Aristotelis (Paris, Sumptibus Antonii Bertier, 1666–86). Its four volumes covered dialectic, logic, and physics. Lynch also reportedly composed a complete course in theology which was lost in a shipwreck on its way to the printer in Paris. ⁴⁰

The fourth in our list of friars had a trajectory quite different from the other three. Little is known about the Irish background of Michael Corcoran OP (alias Corcran; fl. 1680–1720) except that he was from Cashel, Co. Tipperary. ⁴¹ It seems he entered the Order at Morlaix, ⁴² and taught at Morlaix from 1688 to 1695, and at Metz from 1703 to 1704. Apart from these full-time teaching posts, he was assigned various preaching and administrative posts in France and Luxembourg. He was made Preacher General in 1719 and died before 10 January 1725. ⁴³ He was by no means as prominent a Thomist as Arthur, Hacket, or Lynch, but he is worth including in our consideration if only for the originality of his one published work: Rythmus Pan-Sophicus sive Metrica Totius Philosophiae Synopsis Divi Thomae Aquinatis menti coaptata et juxta Sequentiae de Augustissimo Altaris Sacramento ab ipso Angelico Doctore composita Metrum (Morlaix, Ex Typographia de Ploesquellec, 1690). ⁴⁴ It is a series of poems summarising key points of philosophical teaching – dialectic, logic, and natural philosophy – matching the metre of the Lauda Sion. Corcoran makes clear in the preface of his work that he is seeking to achieve for Thomas’s philosophy what an earlier Thomistic poet, François Penon OP, had done for his theology. ⁴⁵ He invites the reader to repeat these verses and to ‘chew over’ (‘masticatis’) them in a reflective spirit, promising that the results will be both useful and delightful, since within these verses – so Corcoran claims – are contained ‘all the disputations, articles, and individual conclusions of [Thomistic] philosophy’. ⁴⁶ The work opens with a verse honouring philosophy:

Pange lingua disciplinam,

Necessariam Doctrinam

Excolendo homini.

Cujus Mentem dum illustrat,

Appetitum cohonestat:

Et conformat Numini. ⁴⁷

[Sing, O tongue, the learning and the teaching necessary to human improvement. It enlightens one’s mind, honours one’s will, and conforms one to God.]

The purpose of the poems is clearly mnemonic, rather than aesthetic or speculative. Philosophical alternatives to Thomism appear in the poem, but only to be peremptorily rejected:

Puncta nec Atomistarum;

Striae nec Carteistarum:

Quina nec Essentia.

Uncinnata non ramenta;

Congesta non Elementa:

Rerum sunt principia. ⁴⁸

[Neither the ‘points’ of the Atomists, nor the ‘striae’ of the Cartesians, nor the ‘fifth essence’, nor ‘hooked particles’, nor heaped-up elements are the principles of things.]

Like Arthur and Lynch, Corcoran appears to have spent his entire Dominican life on the Continent, but his Irishness is underlined in his one published work: it includes a recommendation by another clerical Irish exile, John O’Meagher, and was dedicated to James Porter, the Irish aristocratic general at the court-in-exile of James II. ⁴⁹

Irish Dominican Colleges on the Continent

These four figures are, of course, not the only examples of their kind, and it is no surprise that in the Irish Dominican Colleges we find a similar commitment to Thomism, and the same sense that the Irish friars were active participants within the contemporary ‘Thomistic army’. Among the seventeenth-century lectors in the Irish Dominican Colleges in Lisbon, Louvain, and Rome, for instance, we find many examples of friars whose initial intellectual formation took place in important centres of Thomistic thought, such as Salamanca and Valladolid. ⁵⁰

In the case of Louvain, some insight into the intellectual atmosphere of the college is provided by records of theses defended by several dozen friars there in the seventeenth century. ⁵¹ Covering Trinitarian theology, moral theology, sacramental theology, Christology, and eschatology, their titles invariably signal adherence to ‘the mind of the Angelic Doctor’ and his ‘undefeated and most secure teachings’. ⁵² Such formulae might have been standard, but they are corroborated, in the case of Louvain, by several indications that Irish Dominican friars there were engaged in contemporary debates concerning the efficacy of grace, as defenders of what they held to be the positions of St Thomas and St Augustine. Three cases are worth noting in this respect, the first being that of John Baptist O’Berne OP. Following studies at Salamanca under Pedro de Godoy OP, O’Berne taught philosophy in Prague (1652–1655) before moving to the Irish Dominican College in Louvain:

Being then made regent in the college of Holy Cross, Louvain, he taught theology for many years, to the great benefit of his scholars and other auditors. In the disputations with the anti-Thomists ⁵³ he was a terror to them; for he was thoroughly well versed in the text of our great father Saint Augustine and of Saint Thomas, and followed the scholastic method of our llustrious Godoy, whose disciple he was. ⁵⁴

A contemporary of O’Berne, Thomas Burke OP (active in Louvain from at least 1637 to 1650 ⁵⁵ ), was described in similar terms: ‘He was a man of great talent, so that he was given the nickname “the Thomist” at Louvain, and called “the scourge of the Anti-Thomists”’. ⁵⁶

Finally, it is worth noting that John Nolan OP, an Irish Dominican friar suspected of Jansenism in the second half of the 1650s, had been rector of the Irish Dominican College in Louvain from 1639 to 1640, the very year Jansen’s Augustinus was published. ⁵⁷ A teacher of theology in Dominican priories in France and elsewhere before and after his time in Louvain – one who ‘defended the teachings of Saints Augustine and Thomas’ ⁵⁸ – Nolan debated against Molinists in Rome in 1653, and defended some positions associated with Jansenism. Later that year he was imprisoned by the Roman Inquisition ‘for writing somewhat in favour of Jansenius’, apparently having communicated to Dominican provincials in France and Flanders that some Jansenist interpretations of the five propositions condemned in Cum occasione were, in fact, acceptable. ⁵⁹

The theses defended by Irish Dominicans in Louvain occasionally shine a light on other, less spectacular, contemporary debates. One list of theses defended by an Irish Dominican student had added to it a note by a Jesuit priest, explaining that no Jesuits attended the defence because of unspecified attacks on the controversial Bollandist, Daniel van Papenbroek SJ. ⁶⁰

More mundanely, these documents permit us to partially reconstruct the intellectual formation of individual friars. Antoninus Sall OP, for example, was a son of the Cork priory, but received the habit and made profession in Louvain in 1682, following which he engaged in philosophical and theological studies there. ⁶¹ In Louvain he defended theses in moral theology (on faith, hope, and charity) on 13 May 1687, with John O’Heyne OP presiding. The following year, on 3 June, John O’Brien OP acting as president, he defended theses concerning the Incarnation. ⁶² In 1696 and 1697 he appears as Regent of Studies, presiding over the defence of theses in sacramental theology. ⁶³ He left Louvain shortly thereafter and began teaching theology at the Irish Dominican College in Rome. ⁶⁴

In the case of the Irish Dominican College in Rome, some partial reconstruction of the early curriculum followed by the Irish friars can be attempted on the basis of seventeenth-century books surviving in the library of San Clemente. Apart from the works of St Thomas himself, friars in this period made use of manuals by the leading lights of contemporary Dominican Thomism: Antoine Goudin’s Philosophia iuxta inconcussa tutissimaque divi Thomae dogmata (Lyon, 1692), and Jean Baptiste Gonet’s Clypeus theologiae thomisticae contra novos eius impugnatores (Bordeaux 1659–69). ⁶⁵

The Irish Dominican College in Lisbon is the least-studied of the three institutions. There is evidence from the close of the century for a certain amount of theological liveliness in the College: in 1699, following a theological disputation that came to blows, an Irish Dominican student, Anthony Fitzpatrick OP, was denounced (both by himself and by his disputatious confrère) to the Lisbon Inquisition. Disagreement concerned the sacraments of the Eucharist and marriage, as well as the authority of Councils, and the Inquisition’s investigation led to a relatively light admonition. ⁶⁶ There is no reference to St Thomas or Thomism in this case, but it is certain, of course, that these students – and those in Lisbon before and after them – were trained in this theological tradition. An important resource for future researchers, keen to reconstruct the intellectual atmosphere of this college, is the library of the Dominican Priory in Tallaght: some 3,000 books were received from Lisbon in 1867 to stock the library of the Irish Province’s new house of formation. ⁶⁷ Many of these books date to the seventeenth century, and are still to be found on Tallaght’s library shelves. The libraries of other Dominican priories in Ireland also contain many early printed books whose provenance often indicates an association with Lisbon, Rome, or Louvain. A detailed catalogue of all these books and a systematic study of their provenance and use would do a great deal to illuminate further the intellectual commitments of early modern Irish friars in their continental centres.

Even from this brief consideration of individual Irish Dominican Thomists, and Irish Dominican academic institutions in Europe, it is abundantly clear that the Irish Dominicans, collaborating with Dominican institutions in continental Europe, were operating, occasionally at a high level, in the Thomistic mainstream of the seventeenth century, even as their home Province struggled through persecution.

This evidence on its own is not enough, however, to characterise fully the Irish Province’s commitment to Thomistic philosophy and theology. We might imagine, for example, a radical divide between Irish friars on the Continent and the friars in Ireland: the former, an intellectual elite, safe from harm and free to engage in leisurely study, and the latter, distressed missionaries, too busy dodging capture and potential execution to think about Thomism. This is not, however, the picture that emerges from a careful examination of the surviving evidence.

The Irish Mission (1): Movement of People

The first relevant body of evidence in this regard concerns the friars themselves who returned to Ireland following formation on the Continent. We have already noted that several hundred friars returned to Ireland from Spanish territories alone during the seventeenth century. Some of these doubtless had received only a basic formation, but others, we know, including friars who risked a great deal by their return, were considerably more advanced in their study of philosophy and theology. Of those friars formed in Lisbon in the 1630s, for example, no fewer than five met a martyr’s death. ⁶⁸ Among this number was Thaddeus Moriarty OP, who was remembered in particular for his brilliance in studies, being compared to St Thomas himself in the Acts of the General Chapter of 1656. ⁶⁹ He was described by one who knew him as ‘a distinguished theologian . . . profoundly learned in all the sciences’. ⁷⁰ Significantly for our purposes, he advanced to the Mastership in Sacred Theology during his time in Ireland. ⁷¹ He was active in the area around Tralee, debating energetically with local Protestants, before being arrested by Cromwellian forces while saying Mass on the feast of the Assumption, 1653. He was executed several months later.

There are many more examples of friars who transferred from the relative serenity of Continental studia to the cauldron of seventeenth-century Ireland:

Somewhat outside our period, but worthy of inclusion for his importance as a missionary is Dominic Brullaughan (alias Ó Brolcháin) OP. ⁷⁷ This native of Coleraine studied in Salamanca ⁷⁸ and Louvain, where he defended theses on sacramental theology in 1693 and moral theology in 1694. ⁷⁹ Throughout the first half of the eighteenth century he was active on mission in the north-west of Ireland, gaining a profile in the public imagination and folklore there as ‘An Bráthair Bán’ (‘The Blond Friar’) that endured until the twentieth century. ⁸⁰ Among his published works is one entitled Opusculum de missione et missionariis tractans (1736), a practical handbook aimed at missionaries, including instruction on how to catechise and celebrate the sacraments in impromptu settings. This invaluable witness to contemporary pastoral practice testifies also to Brullaughan’s Thomistic training: he quotes from St Thomas’s works on eight occasions in this manual. ⁸¹

It is evident from each of these cases that the Irish mission was intricately connected with European centres of Thomistic study. European Thomism was not a monolith, however, and there was occasionally competition between its various institutions. This competition affected Irish friars too: they were shaped not just by generic Thomism but also by their institutional affiliations. We know this thanks to an unusual source: the travel writing of a Frenchman named François de la Boullaye Le Gouz. ⁸² On the Irish leg of his travels, in the summer of 1644, he visited Cashel, Co. Tipperary. With the Catholic Confederacy in the ascendant, the Dominican friars of Cashel were ministering in the open. The prior, Fabian Ryan OP (alias Mulryan), introduced himself to the French traveller as one who studied in France, and invited him to visit the priory. His motives were mixed, as the traveller reports: ‘He told me that he needed me, because there were two other Irish religious there who were raised in the Convents of Spain, and who claimed imprudently that the true philosophy and theology were in Spain, and that all the French knew nothing’. ⁸³ The French traveller duly stepped up to the plate, but perhaps not in the way Ryan was hoping: by his own telling, he dazzled the Hispanophile friars with the latest scientific knowledge, and undermined their scholastic philosophy to such an extent that they were reduced to silence. ⁸⁴ Whatever the precise details of the conversation, this event reveals a commitment to intellectual activity among the friars on mission in Ireland, even though they were far from the centres of study which formed them.

The Irish Mission (2): Movement of Books

It is perhaps unsurprising, given the evidence we have amassed so far, that those responsible for the Irish Dominican mission in the seventeenth century were concerned not only to send well-trained friars to Ireland, but also to send books there, including books of Thomistic philosophy and theology. We know, for example, that the Prior Provincial of Ireland, Terence Albert O’Brien OP (elected in 1643, and martyred in 1653) had in his possession some of the works of St Thomas and Cajetan. ⁸⁵ Even in the straitened circumstances of the time, however, it is unlikely that access to such books was rare for Dominican friars in Ireland. Beginning in 1636, procurators for the Irish Dominicans at the Spanish court ⁸⁶ laboured incessantly, with the financial support of the Spanish crown, to collect and transport books to Ireland. ⁸⁷ Surviving documents concerning customs relief on these book shipments indicate that this was a major operation, continuing as late as 1647, involving the transport of tens of thousands of books to Ireland. ⁸⁸ Some of these books were surely intended for lay readership, but it seems likely that the majority were aimed at stocking conventual libraries in Ireland. A precept from the Master in 1647 concerns the appropriation of these books by individual friars – a perennial problem – and commands that these books be returned to the common stock and shared equally among the libraries of Ireland’s Dominican priories, including those newly rebuilt. ⁸⁹

We would like to know, of course, exactly what books were transported, but only a handful have been identified (understandably, given the widespread destruction visited upon Dominican priories in the 1650s). Flynn notes that a catalogue of seventeenth-century books in Trinity College Dublin contains a number of volumes with Dominican provenance, which might have come to Ireland as part of this smuggling campaign. ⁹⁰ He identifies another candidate, a collection of homilies by St John Chrysostom, now in the Provincial Archives of the Irish Dominican Province. ⁹¹ To this short list we can add yet another, now held in the rare books room of the library in St Mary’s Priory, Tallaght: the third volume of the Summae Controversiarum in Primam Secundae Angelici Doctoris S. Thomae Aquinatis by Thomas Vilar OP (Barcelona, Apud Viduam Laurentii, 1647). It was inscribed just six years after its publication by a Dominican friar in Limerick: ‘ad usum fratris patris Jacobi a sancto Dominico alyas Comyne, Sacri Ordinis Praedicatorum, Conventus Sancti Salvatoris Lymericensis 1653’. Just two years earlier, three of his brethren had been executed by Cromwellian forces; six others had died of the plague which followed the siege of the city, and one had been exiled to Barbados. ⁹² The fact that this friar was engaging with Thomas’s thought at a time of social and ecclesial chaos is perhaps the most eloquent testimony to the Irish friars’ commitment to the thought of St Thomas.

Finally, there is evidence from slightly outside our period, but which testifies to the Thomistic book culture which endured beyond the seventeenth century. John Donnelly OP, who taught in Louvain, Rome, and Lisbon, was active also in Drogheda (from which he was formally expelled, along with the rest of his community, in 1744). In one of his books, which survives in the Provincial Archives, Tallaght, he wrote a list of all those books in his use. ⁹³ A great many were aimed at preaching and apologetics, but a good number of them witness to the Thomistic book culture which had endured in the Province. Apart from a complete copy of the Summa Theologiae and the Catena Aurea, Donnelly had access to works by Soto, Gonet, and Contenson, among others. ⁹⁴ Perhaps most interestingly, he also had a copy of Dominic Lynch’s Summa Philosophiae, which had belonged to a friar in Cashel in 1693, a rare witness to the reception in Ireland of the thought of an Irish Thomist. ⁹⁵

The Irish Mission (3): New Studia

The final body of evidence to consider in assessing the Thomistic tradition among seventeenth-century Irish Dominicans concerns the founding of academic institutions in Ireland. We have already noted that grammar schools and novitiates were operated by the friars where conditions permitted. The educational ambitions of the friars in Ireland were not limited to pre-theological training, however, nor were they satisfied to rely exclusively on foreign centres of study. In 1642, for example, the Provincial of Ireland wrote to the Master of the Order assuring him that only those who joined the Order before the age of 25 would be sent abroad for studies, and that the Province was committed to providing instruction locally, in whatever peaceful places could be found. ⁹⁶

During the two periods of greatest freedom for Irish Catholics in the seventeenth century – the 1640s and the late 1680s – Irish Dominicans wasted no time in seeking to establish centres of theological study. The General Chapter of 1644, for example, established five studia generalia in Ireland: in Dublin, Limerick, Cashel, Athenry, and Coleraine. ⁹⁷ The capitulars recognised, however, that the political situation was fragile, and gave local superiors the authority to transfer the studia to other locations if necessary. Needless to say, these institutions, if they were ever founded, were short-lived.

As for the 1680s, we have already noted that Felix MacDowell OP returned from continental Europe precisely to teach philosophy and theology in Irish priories in 1686. By 1688, the confidence of the Irish friars was high. At a Provincial Chapter held that year in Lorrha, Co. Tipperary, the gathered friars witnessed the defence of philosophical and theological theses, ⁹⁸ doubtless with the same Thomistic tenor as those held by them in Louvain. This event, ‘such an uncommon spectacle in Ireland’, was a prelude to the attempted establishment, once again, of a studium generale in Ireland. The chapter fathers sent to the Master of the Order the following request:

Since the winter of persecution has now passed, and flowers begin to appear more abundantly in our land, and since it is needful to plant new vines on which our flowers will be multiplied and conserved . . . we ask that [the Master of the Order] approve a studium generale in our priory of St Mary in Galway. ⁹⁹

As the first moderator of the new studium they proposed Dominic Halloran OP, whose sharpness in theological disputation, they noted, had been made clear to all who attended the Chapter. ¹⁰⁰ The dramatic irony of this scene is rich, since plans were already afoot for the Williamite challenge to James II, a cause which would significantly extend the winter of persecution for Ireland’s Catholics, freezing the development of Thomistic studies in Ireland for a century and more.

Conclusion

I began this article noting the lack, in the case of Irish Dominican Thomists, of the kind of sources normally available to intellectual historians. Considering even these limited resources, however, a clear picture emerges: seventeenth-century Irish Dominican friars engaging consistently with the thought of St Thomas in a great variety of contexts and with considerable creativity, even in the most challenging of circumstances.

Furthermore, it ought to be evident that there are ample opportunities for future researchers interested in further delineating this theological tradition. There are libraries to be systematically explored, for example, and individual works to be carefully studied, especially those of Hacket and Lynch. Research comparing Irish Dominican theologians with their contemporary counterparts among the Irish Jesuits and Franciscans, is also an obvious desideratum.

What can no longer be doubted, however, is that the Irish Dominican friars were thoroughly committed to studying and propagating the thought of their brother, St Thomas. From controversies in Coimbra to disputations in Lorrha, from the smuggling of books to the composition of poetry, from works on mission to works on meteors: all the evidence points to the conclusion that Hibernia Dominicana was also, resolutely, Hibernia Thomistica.