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04.07.17, Davies, ed., Thomas Aquinas

04.07.17, Davies, ed., Thomas Aquinas


The editor of this collection combines a classical English Dominican tradition with a working expertise in Anglo-American philosophy, both of which are reflected in assembling this stellar cast of contributors as well as his own introduction to their work. For what this collation celebrates is the recovery of Aquinas after what had seemed to be his demise in the wake of Vatican II. In less than fifty years, this selection allows us to watch the towering figure of Aquinas emerge from the well-meaning efforts of those who had misconstrued his work as contributing to certitude rather than advancing inquiry. Yet these contributors also rely on work accomplished during the heyday of "Thomism," albeit of a more historical vein, to delineate the axial role Aquinas had played in transforming Hellenic philosophy to the service of faith, with a view to indicating how we might discover similar philosophical strategies in our time. So the watchword of these contributions is "apprenticeship."

First, a word about Brian Davies' Introduction. After delineating the recent philosophical recovery of Aquinas, he proceeds (after a pithy resume of his life and work) to try to explain why, locating the effective "heart of Aquinas' philosophy of God in his claim that everything other than God to God owes its existence and all that is real in it for as long as it exists" (9). So while he regrets omitting Aquinas' "discussions of specifically Christian doctrines, such as the doctrine of the Trinity or the doctrine of the Incarnation" (5), he nonetheless highlights what Robert Sokolowski has dubbed "the distinction" of creator from creation, to celebrate Josef Pieper's insistence that creation is the "hidden element in the philosophy of St. Thomas." This allows him to finesse the strong neo-Thomist separation of philosophy from theology by proceeding to show how Aquinas employed philosophical strategies to better understand revelation, focusing on "God as the source of the being of things (the Creator) and as Ipsum Esse Subsistens" (11), human beings as part of the created universe and as "acting persons [aiming at] what attracts them" (14), as well as the structure peculiar to created freedom, culminating in an astute account of the way his work respects the autonomy proper to philosophical inquiry, while being suffused with a faith-dimension.

The initial four essays--by James Weisheipl, Christopher Hughes, Hermann Weidermann, and Sandra Edwards--are "devoted to some of Aquinas's 'basic metaphysics'" (27), while the next four--by Rudi teValde, Scott Macdonald, John Wippel, and Brian Davies ("Aquinas on what God is Not")--focus on "the scope and limits of human reason when it comes to things divine" (28); followed by three "studies in Aquinas's account of what it is to be human," by Anthony Kenny, Gyula Klima, and Eleonore Stump. Broader ethical issues dominate the final four essays: Eleonore Stump and Norman Kretzmann on the way Aquinas imbeds the criteria for evaluating created action in a creator in which goodness and being are identified, Paul Sigmund on the quality of interaction proper to human society, Herbert McCabe on "practical reason" as akin to what Jane Austen called "good sense," and finally Peter King on the "passions of the soul," as a way of limning what it is to be a created agent.

Since each of these essays has already been published, and received the critical assessment due to them, I can limit myself to some salient remarks about two diverse ways of offering us an appreciation of Aquinas' philosophical acumen. Such exercises can be crudely divided between those who condescendingly extend to him the accolade of "meeting our standards" and those with an ear for identifying the ways in which he effectively transformed the philosophical categories available to him into strategies for elucidating realities which had hitherto escaped philosophical notice--paradigmatically, of course, free creation of the universe. This latter type of appreciation will require at least a modicum of hermeneutic sophistication, in order to identify those salient transformations in such a way as to allow us to learn from Aquinas' art; whereas the other kind can proceed in innocence of hermeneutics, reading Aquinas' texts as though they were our own.

Fortunately, each of the essays in this collection displays requisite hermeneutical sensitivity, as evidenced in the leading observation of Peter King (treating of "the passions") that "it is one of Aquinas's fundamental principles that all of creation tends towards the good" (364), where the deft use of 'creation' rather than 'things' signals the theological context of Aquinas' inquiry, which will proceed to identify "the good" in ways quite unknown to either Plato or Aristotle. So readers are treated to competently argued inquiries into topics of enduring philosophical interest, enhanced by a chronological list of Aquinas' own writings, as well as a comprehensive bibliography of relevant secondary literature arranged according to topics, all of which offers readers (in the editors' modest words): "a helpful place to start when trying to make their own minds up on the significance of Aquinas" (3).