Four former colleagues and six former students have, under the editorial guidance of James R. Ginther and Carl N. Still, collaborated to produce this slim volume of essays in memory of Fr. Walter H. Principe CSB, longtime Senior Fellow at The Pontifical Institute for Mediaeval Studies in Toronto, Canada. Fr. Principe's brother Fr. Charles Principe, CSB, provides the volume its personable coup de grace via a brief, fraternal reminiscence.
The volume includes Joanne McWilliam's "Augustine's Early Trinitarian Thought," Abigail Ann Young's "Mission and Message: Two Prophetic Voices in the Twelfth Century," James R. Ginther's "There is a Text in this Classroom: The Bible and Theology in the Medieval University," Philip Lyndon Reynolds's "Efficient Causality and Instrumentality in Thomas Aquinas's Theology of the Sacraments," Mark Johnson's "An Accomplishment of the Moral Part of Aquinas's Summa theologiae," Pamela J. Reeve's "The Metaphysics of Higher Cognitive States in Thomas Aquinas," Romanus Cessario, OP's "Capreolus on Faith and the 'Theologal' Life," Lawrence Dewan, OP's "Richard Swinburne, St. Thomas and Many Gods," Charles Principe, CSB's "Sketches of Walter," a bibliography of Walter H. Principe, CSB, and an index to the volume as a whole.
The secondary title Fortresses and Launching Pads is drawn from the metaphor coined by Fr. Principe in his contribution to the Catholic Theological Society of America volume The Sources of Theology, ed. John P. Boyle (Washington D.C.: Catholic Theological Society of America, 1988). The metaphor is meant to refer to the history of theology's role in the ongoing cultural practice of theology. The history of theology can defend theology and theologians from external attack and it can be the staging point for theology's contemporaneous move to investigate new thematics. The essays in this volume illustrate both of the functions Fr. Principe described via his metaphor. Some, like Lawrence Dewan, OP's contribution, use careful analysis of Thomas Aquinas's texts to argue against Richard Swinburne's recent claims for the conceptual necessity of a divine tri-unity, if there be a God at all. Others, like James R. Ginther's contribution, use consideration of thirteenth-century scholastic culture to illustrate and deepen even as it employs one of the contemporary hermeneutical tools of analysis (textual dispersion) generated in the study of literary intertextuality.
Care is taken in this volume to cover the topics and honour the methodological emphases animating Fr. Principe throughout his academic career.
1. We see Fr. Principe's telltale commitment to work with the history of theology in a manner distinct from historical theology, i.e., in a manner that respects the fit between past theological formulations and arguments and the socio-cultural contexts that gave them rise. Joanne McWilliam's study of the anti-Manichaean concerns manifest in Augustine's early trinitarian thought, and Abigail Ann Young's comparison of the parallel divine commissions legitimating Hildegard of Bingen's and Rupert of Deutz's activities as writers are obvious examples.
2. We see attention to Principe's work on the theological legacy of the generation of Parisian theology masters immediately preceding the generation of Thomas Aquinas and Bonaventure. Jean-Pierre Torrel, OP's study of the Christological materials at play in Guerric of Saint-Quentin's Quodlibets stand out in this regard.
3. Finally, we see a special emphasis given to Principe's concern to understand the theological achievement of Thomas Aquinas against the backdrop of the spiritual dynamism it both articulates and that could be said to have moved it as a final cause moves its effects. Thus, Philip Lyndon Reynolds looks at the causal force of Christ's humanity and the sacraments as Aquinas conceived and wrote of them. He notes the spirit of reticence that comes to condition his formulations in the Summa theologiae. Mark Johnson details the pastoral and religious contexts and genres surrounding and suffusing the Summa theologiae by which he names its achievement as a reconceptualization of moral life within the order of being appropriate to the human creature rather than as suggested by legal precedent, literary topoi or confessional practice. Pamela J. Reeves outlines the metaphysical structures employed by Aquinas to understand the mystery of human capacity for a knowing of God and God's world that is both other than and beyond ordinary human acts of knowing and the natural gnoseological order that makes them intelligible. Carl N. Still examines John Jenkins's recent proposals regarding Aquinas's position on the internal assent of faith and its relationship to human intellect and will on the one hand, God's grace and the gifts of the Spirit knowledge and understanding on the other. Finally, Romanus Cessario, OP roots Aquinas's account of the certitude of faith to its role in a human person's total life of faith ("theologal" life), using Dominican John Capreolus's fraternal dispute with Durandus of Saint Pourçain as his point of entrance.
There are things to be learned in each of the contributions to this volume, though I have neither the space nor the capacity to comment on each as it deserves. Consequently, I restrict my remarks to those articles that sparked questions in me as I read and reread them.
Philip Lyndon Reynolds's project is an exceedingly delicate one. He has set himself the task of demonstrating the existence of a silence in Aquinas's theology against the long volubility of subsequent Thomism, and then of interpreting that silence in a theologically new and suggestive way. He succeeds well enough to my mind in this high wire act, though it would be interesting to hear a response from one who works within the outlines of the later Thomist consensus that his reading calls into question.
Carl N. Still uses his contribution to bring out the simultaneous priority and posteriority of knowledge and understanding vis-a-vis faith's act of assent as Aquinas understands it. As Still leaves matters one faces an unresolved mystery. Of course, it is at least possible that the knowledge and understanding that Thomas holds to be prior to faith's assent are the natural virtues whereas the virtues held to be posterior are the gifts of the Spirit. But let us say that it is undeniably the gifts of the Spirit that must be understood to be simultaneously prior and posterior to faith's assent. Is there really an unresolved dilemma? After all the gifts are necessary for the perfection of the theological virtues. Moreover, the theological virtues are necessary to the act by which a human achieves his or her final end. Consequently, the gifts are, relatively speaking, understandable in relation to the virtue of faith as final causes are with respect to their effect(s). They only become perfectly present and fully operative last of the four causes and so are posterior in an obvious way. But even so they are always already first, in the sense that they are implictly present and operative in the appearance of all the other causes and their effects. Thus, inasmuch as the gifts of knowledge and understanding are to faith as final causes are to their effect, there is a real sense in which they are simultaneously both prior and posterior to faith and its operation, internal assent.
Finally, James R. Ginther's contribution reminds his reader that in the thirteenth century theology had a central and authoritative text, the Bible, and thus cannot be neatly distinguished from exegesis as has been done in past histories of scholastic theology. At the same time, Ginther points out that access to the Bible was a more complex notion than scholars have been minded to recognize. The Bible was itself a highly dispersed text in scholastic culture. One cannot restrict one's focus to magisterial commentary on the Bible and its constituent books if one is to do justice to the scholastic theologian's engagement of his central authority. The Bible is also to be found used in patristic, pastoral and liturgical contexts, all of which affect the meaning available to the scholastic theologian. This is a genial reminder, though the reader is left without a clear idea of just exactly what sort of a difference it might make in concreto to a theologian's understanding of a lemma of scripture that the lemma is also encountered, for example, in a liturgical context. Since the point of Ginther's contribution, however, was to survey the contexts throughout which the Bible was dispersed, I make no accusation in remarking that illustrations of the difference dispersion makes await further studies. Ginther makes a second suggestion that I find particularly interesting--disputatio is to lectio within scholastic discourse as meditatio is to lectio in monastic. In other the words, the creative memoria rerum that allows for conceptual progress via rhetorical invention occurs differently in the university context. In addition to the criteria of similarity, contrareity and propinquity, connectors that were interpreted in terms of verbal and lingual figures, the university theologian was to add corresponding logical figures. This strikes me as a very pregnant suggestion, one that will go far to understand how the three-fold way with language comes to operate in new ways and to be understood differently in the university context, amounting in fact to a new approach to texts. Such a suggestion both complements and limits Mary Carruthers' fertile work on memory, rhetoric and cogitative patterns.
In sum, this volume, bears worthy tribute to the person and career of Fr. Walther H. Principe, CSB. It provides fortresses and launching pads enough to both illustrate and further the work in the history of theology that was a guiding passion of Fr. Principe's long labour as scholar.