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totle, he (by confronting it with a recent translation of Proclus's Elementatio Theologica) discovered that the content of the allegedly Aristotelian text is in fact apparently Neoplatonic. This philosophical attitude was undoubtedly very mature, but Aquinas usually did not ask whether people thought and wrote according to the world view of their times but, rather, whether it was "correct" to think and write in such a way and therefore whether the text could be ascribed to doctrinal authorities who were never wrong. |
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Aquinas repeatedly used the term authenticus, but for him (as for the Middle Ages in general) the word meant, not "original," but "true." Authenticus denotes the value, the authority, the credibility of a text, not its origin: of a passage in De causis it is said "ideo in hac materia non est authenticus" (Il Sent. 18.2.2 ad 2). But the reason is that here the text cannot be reconciled with Aristotle. |
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As Thurot (1869:103104) says, "an expliquant leur test les glossateurs ne cherchent pas à entendre la pensée de leur auteur, mais à enseigner la science elle-même que l'on supposait y être contenue. Un auteur authentique, comme on disait alors, ne peut ni se tromper, ni se contredire, ni suivre un plan défectueux, ni être en désaccord avec un autre auteur authentique." |
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On the contrary, one can find a modern approach to the content form in Lorenzo Valla, when he shows that a Roman emperor such as Constantine could not have thought what the Constitutum (falsely attributed to him) said. Likewise, Issac Casaubon's argument against the antiquity of the Corpus Hermeticum is that, if in these texts were to be found echoes of Christian ideas, then they had been written in the first centuries of our era. |
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However, even today, such criteria (though based on an adequate knowledge of the world views prevailing in different historical periods) are naturally dependent to a large extent on suppositions and abductions which are open to challenge. |
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6.4. Proof through External Evidences (Referent) |
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According to this criterion, a document is a fake if the external facts reported by it could not have been known at the time of its production. In order to apply this criterion, one must display adequate historical knowledge but must also hold that it is implausible that the alleged ancient author had the gift of prophecy. Before Casaubon, Ficino and Pico della Mirandola had read the Corpus Hermeticum by breaching this principle: they considered the Hermetic writings divinely inspired simply because they "anticipated" Christian conceptions. |
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