Month: February 2024

St. Thomas Aquinas and ships

~ fatherhorton

If the highest aim of a captain were to preserve his ship, he would keep it in port forever.

Attr. St. Thomas Aquinas.

A friend pointed this out to me, having encountered it in a tweet from the USCCB. He asked if I would check its authenticity.

  • A Google search turned up the usual “quote” aggregation sites. It also turned up one site that called it a paraphrase.
  • I searched Google Books in particular, and after sorting through the chaff of careless quoters, I did find several books (here’s one) that (spoiler alert) gave what I believe to be the correct answer. It’s a very free paraphrase of ST I-II Q2 a5 resp: “Hence a captain does not intend as a last end, the preservation of the ship entrusted to him, since a ship is ordained to something else as its end, viz. to navigation.” This was especially helpful because I could get the original Latin for use in further searches.
  • There’s a handy website with the complete works of St. Thomas, and it has a good search engine that can search for inflected forms of words. The word translated as “captain” is gubernator, and “ship” is navis. So I searched for these two words (in any inflected form), separated by no more than 20 other words. I got sixty hits, including the one in the previous bullet (thus proving that my search worked), but not including the original alleged quote.

So this is indeed a paraphrase (at best). In the course of doing this research, I discovered that Trent Horn had already reached the same conclusion in his book What the Saints Didn’t Say.

I kept looking and found what I believe to be the original source of the paraphrase. Google Books has become steadily less helpful over time, but archive.org is stepping up. In The Morality of Law, L.L. Fuller (2nd ed., 1964; I don’t have ready access to a first edition) on page 185, I found this: “As Thomas Aquinas remarked long ago, if the highest aim of a captain were to preserve his ship, he would keep it in port forever.” This is the exact quote, and since they believed in footnotes in 1964, it’s footnoted, giving the exact text from the Summa cited above. One might quibble as to the accuracy of the paraphrase, but this has to be the source of the misquote.