In a more specific sense, ethics is introductory insofar as it precedes political philosophy. Politics and ethics may be considered as parts of moral philosophy, since both consider human actions as or­dered to an end. They differ in that ethics deals with actions of in­dividual human beings as directed to an ultimate end, while politics deals with actions of the members of a political society as ordered to an ultimate end. In the study of ethics we see that the realization of an ultimate end for man demands social and political life, and in this way ethics leads to politics.

Ethics leads also to moral theology, and this is another way in which it is introductory to moral science. Ethics is based on prin­ciples known by reason alone and deals with human acts as directed to a natural end. Moral theology is based on revealed principles ac­cepted by faith and deals with human acts as directed to a super-natural end, the vision of God. While it is true that human beings need revealed moral doctrine in order to achieve the supernatural end to which they are ordered, it is also true that moral theology presupposes the reasoned grasp of natural moral doctrine, for the truths of moral theology are not intelligible in a scientific way with-out a comprehension of the moral truths available to human reason. On the one hand, this book is written in such a way that it easily leads to moral theology, not by confusing ethics with moral theology, but by distinguishing ethics from moral theology in order to see the complementary relationship between the two sciences. On the other hand, the position is taken throughout the book—and argued explicitly in several places—that ethics as a science is ade­quate to attain truths about the natural moral order.

This book is an introduction also in the sense that it remains, for the most part, general in its treatment. It does not explicitly cover material contained in what is often called "special ethics," the spe­cific application of moral principles and distinctions to particular problems, as in business ethics, medical ethics, and so on. Such areas are important parts of moral doctrine, deserving of separate and ex­tensive treatment. They are best treated, however, if the general, fundamental principles and distinctions of moral knowledge are first understood in their full exposition as covered by ethics. For many persons, then, ethics is the introduction to more specialized areas of human activity in which they will be professionally engaged.

Still another sense in which ethics should be considered as pre­liminary is as an introduction to the concrete order of singular action. This point needs stressing because there is a common misap­prehension that the knowledge of ethics alone—or the knowledge of moral theology as well—should guarantee a person's being morally good in his actions by providing complete and certain solutions to all courses of action to be taken here and now. In the completely practical order of singular action, each person's rectified will is a prerequisite for good moral action. No one, therefore, can justifiably expect ethics to make him good. On the other hand, with a reasoned grasp of moral doctrine, one will be much better prepared to approach his own moral situations and problems than he would be without any understanding of moral science.

At present there are at least four prevailing tendencies among writers in the field of moral philosophy. One view holds that ethics is "normative" and cannot be a science; all that one can do scientifically is to give a logical analysis of certain moral terms. Careful analysis of terms in moral discourse is necessary, of course, and I have sought to retain this important part of philosophical investigation. At the same time, I have attempted to keep such an analysis in the context of ethics as a practical science, and not to present it as only a logical or semantic problem. A second position adopts a purely empirical and subjective view of ethics, as though it were nothing more than statements of likes and dislikes. The third position offers a rationalistic and sometimes purely theoretical view of ethics as a science. Finally, some Christian authors tend to give a theological exposition of moral philosophy, mixing theological and philosophical elements to a point where they are no longer distin­guishable.

My aim is to recapture ethics as it was originally conceived to be —a practical science based on reasoning derived from common ex­perience, though considering speculative truths as any science must necessarily do. I have also sought to reassert the primary role of virtue in moral doctrine. Consequently, I have followed closely the order of Aristotle in his Nicomachean Ethics, thereby acknowledging that his work still remains the best formulation of the practical science of ethics. I have often followed just as closely the commen­tary on this work by St. Thomas Aquinas, who clearly had the same opinion of the worth of Aristotle's ethics as a science of natural moral doctrine. While I am thus indebted to Aristotle and St. Thomas on almost every page, I have not quoted them directly, since the soundness of what they say is evident on the only authority relevant here—reason itself. However, at the end of each chapter, I have given the appropriate references to Aristotle's Ethics and to the accompanying commentary of St. Thomas. The one exception is the chapter on law, which is drawn principally from the Summa Theologiae of St. Thomas, though I have followed a philosophical order in the exposition of law. Other readings are also cited, though purely in a suggestive manner. Some of these readings are in more or less conformity with the text itself; others are offered as con­trasting views. For the most part, the selections are chosen with an eye to their easy availability.

Volume 6: The Scientific Art of Logic: An Introduction to the Principles of Formal and Material Logic by Edward D. Simmons, 1961

Excerpt: This text in logic is one of the first contributions to the new Christian Culture and Philosophy Series. The book is designed generally to serve the end of the Series, and particularly to make available to undergraduate students and their instructors an elementary, but scientific, presentation of the principles of both formal and material logic. The order follows the division of logic into the logic of the first, second, and third operations of the intellect. In each section, significant logical relations, both formal and material, are examined. Since any scientific inquiry requires hard intellectual labor, it is inevitable that a scientific presentation of logic will entail some difficulty for the student. Yet this is as it must be. Formal logic is easier than material logic, but formal logic alone is an inadequate instrument of the intellect for rational discourse. Since most students take only one course in logic, it is imperative, despite the difficulties involved, that in it they be introduced to material as well as formal logic.

Since scientific inquiry is intellectually taxing, some might argue that the art of logic could be acquired much more easily in an elementary course apart from its science rather than along with it. However, the art and science of logic are indistinguishably one. Unless the rules of logical procedure are scientifically grounded in incontrovertible first principles of the logical order, they cannot adequately serve as principles either for a critique of or defense for scientific discourse. The propriety of a logical process could not be adequately defended by an appeal to a rule of logic unless that rule were itself self-evident or scientifically resolved into what is self-evident. Thus, it is an illusion to think that the art of logic could be acquired in any adequate fashion apart from the science of logic. Consequently, this text attempts to present scientifically the basic principles of both formal and material logic. Its proximate end is to generate in its users an intellectual habit which will serve as an adequate instrument for rational discourse, especially in the other sciences.

This book is not overly difficult, despite what has been said. The point rather is that it is not easy — but neither is logic. It is rigorous — so is logic. More to the point, it can be used successfully only by students who are prepared to put some effort into their work — so too logic cannot be acquired without effort. Every attempt has been made to make the presentation as straightforward as possible, given the intrinsically rigorous character of the subject matter. The opening chapter is designed, among other things, to give the student some appreciation of the nature and divisions of logic so as to orient him for the course to follow. The final chapter is devoted exclusively to the nature of logic. It is felt that at least a semester's work in logic is a prerequisite for any penetrating analysis of the nature of logic. In both the opening and final chapters there is a discussion of the division of logic into the logic of the three operations of the intellect. It is according to this division of logic that the book is divided into three parts. The opening chapter in each part includes an investigation into the nature of the intellectual operation from which that part gets its name. The remaining chapters in each part take up the logical theory pertinent to the part in question. Throughout, an effort has been made to offer sufficient examples so that the usefulness of the logical theory under discussion can be seen in a concrete setting. Each chapter is followed by exercises, which are designed to assist the student to appreciate the meaning and force of the logical theory pre­sented in that chapter. No teacher is ever fully satisfied with another man's exercises, and every teacher has some of his own to offer to his students. However, the exercises suggested in this book are varied enough, both in format and in degree of difficulty, so that every teacher will find them to a greater or less degree of some help for his students. It is the teacher, not the textbook, who determines the program of his course. Any teacher may find that there are things treated in this book which he chooses not to include in his course. Thus, for example, a teacher might choose to pass over the discussion of the truth-functional proposition, or, perhaps, to omit the final chapter on the nature of logic. Perhaps some teacher may choose to omit some of the more difficult matter in some of the chapters. With this in mind several chapters have been ordered so that the more difficult matter is treated separately from the rest. Thus, in the chapter on relations between propositions, the case of the singular proposition — which offers many difficulties — is taken up separately. Again, since an elementary text cannot take up every question, the author has omitted any detailed discussion of the types of analogy and has discussed only the relations of the simply attributive categorical proposition in the chapter on relations between propositions. A teacher using this book may feel it necessary to supplement it with his own treatment of the division of analogy into its types and/or his own treatment of logically related modal propositions or compound propositions. Nonetheless, it has seemed to the author, after some years of experience in the teaching of elementary logic, that the subjects treated in this book are, for the most part, those which generally should and can be handled in an elementary course covering a semester's time.

Like many other textbooks, this is written within the context of the Aristotelian`tradition. Thus, it bears an understandably basic resemblance to many other logic books. The rules of validity for the categorical syl­logism have not changed since they were discovered by Aristotle. We are not scandalized, then, to find them repeated faithfully from textbook to textbook. They are not listed differently here. Yet this text does have several distinctively different features. As we have said, it is not limited to formal logic. Again it aims at the acquisition of the art of logic through the science. of logic and not apart from the science of logic. The second part of the book includes a study of the hypothetical proposition. Among the problems taken up in this chapter are the following: Why cannot hypothetical propositions in the strict sense be truth-functional? What is the significance of a truth-functional proposition? How can symbols and even truth tables be profitably employed both for hypotheticals strictly taken and truth-functional propositions? In the logic of the third operation the chapter on the demonstrative syllogism and the consideration of self-evident propositions in the chapter on induction represent treatments necessary for an adequate course in logic which are either omitted or given scant attention in most logic textbooks. The final chapter, on the nature of logic, is an attempt to investigate this difficult subject matter on a level beyond that usually reached in logic textbooks which speak of the nature of logic only at the beginning of the book.

The book is within the Aristotelian tradition in the sense that, for primary sources, it owes most to the Organon of Aristotle and to logicians who have commented on the Organon and who have attempted to develop their own logical theory from that of Aristotle. The chapters on the categories, on the categorical proposition, on the categorical syllogism, on the demonstrative syllogism, and on fallacious argumentation owe most to Aristotle's Categories, On Interpretation, Prior Analytics, Posterior Analytics, and On Sophistical Refutations. Several chapters are indebted to Aristotle's Topics, especially those which treat of definition, division, and dialectical argumentation. The chapter on the predicables is first of all indebted to Porphyry's Introduction to the Categories of Aristotle. Other primary sources include the commentaries of St. Thomas on the On Interpretation and Posterior Analytics of Aristotle, the com­mentaries of both St. Albert and Cajetan on several of the logical works of Aristotle, and John of St. Thomas' Logical Art. 

On Hope

A Philosophy of Hope: Josef Pieper and the Contemporary Debate on Hope by Bernard N. Schumacher, translated by David C. Schindler (Moral Philosophy and Moral Theology, 5: Fordham University Press) Josef Pieper was one of this century's most influential thinkers. A leading Catholic philosopher and authority on Thomas Aquinas, his writings have won a wide audience through such books as The Four Cardinal Virtues and About Love.

This important book is one of few extended studies of Pieper's thought—in particular, of his contributions to a philosophy of hope. Pieper was one of the first modern philosophers to explore the idea of hope in human life, and Schumacher discusses his development alongside contributions by Sartre, Jaspers, Marcel, Heidegger, Bloch, and other thinkers.

Ranging across the full body of Pieper's work, Schumacher systemati­cally examines Pieper's treatment of hope in the larger context of the debates about hope in every major Western tradition. Pieper's originality, Schumacher demonstrates, is to have emphasized an ontology of not-yet-being as the foundation of hope, and to find a way to reconcile two disparate conceptions of hope—as an individual's relation to possibility and as an historical dimension of human life.

Schumacher looks at hope as a virtue, one opposed by vices such as despair and presumption, particularly as they are treated in existentialism and Marxism. He also explores Pieper's treatment of hope in relation to the ideas of death and immorality, and in the philosophy of history. Using the idea of hope to examine such themes as dignity, ethics, the good, and the just, Schumacher provides a valuable, wide-ranging introduction to a shaper of contemporary Christian thought against a richly drawn intel­lectual background.

Excerpt: The theme of human hope has been put to a severe test at the end of the millennium, a period characterized by a certain pessimism and accompanied by a growing uncertainty about the future of human progress and the dignity of the human person. We need think only of the tragedies scattered throughout the twentieth century: Auschwitz, Hiroshima, Rwanda, the former Yugoslavia, and so on. In an age of nuclear weaponry, we find it difficult to imagine how those in the past could seriously affirm that mankind was making steady and confident progress toward a better state, and how they did not even consider the possibility that the opposite could be the case. Indeed, Lady Hope enjoyed a certain success once she donned the optimistic garb of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century philosophers of progress. In partic­ular, she was viewed as the fundamental impetus of the historical dynamism of mankind in its march toward what Kant calls the "ethical community," or what Bloch calls the "New Jerusalem." Toward the end of the nineteenth century, this hope—that is, optimism about progress toward improvement, which Turgot, Condorcet, Kant, Marx, and Comte all predicted—began to give way to the rise of the nihilism expressed by Nietzsche, and later to the contemporary current of nihilistic existentialism. Hope was treated as an illusion, a vice, a poi­soned gift, a curse that the gods had inflicted upon the human being. It was described as a promise that could not be kept, a beautiful idea bereft of any concrete reality, a folly, an opiate, and even as the greatest enemy, the worst of evils. Certain thinkers have even gone so far as to affirm that Nietzschean nihilism is the epoch-defining event of the beginning of the millennium, which marks the culmination of a universal movement.

This rise of despair has provoked, in turn, a reaction in defense of the primacy of hope, which occupies a decisive place at the dawning of the third millennium. This defense focuses not only, as the philosophers of progress did, on the relation between hope and the historical development of the human species with a view to the end of this devel­opment, but also on the concrete human individual in relation to his future, which is the aspect the ancients considered in their treatment. Indeed, the majority of contemporary philosophers who deal with this subject maintain that the act and the object of hope are not only collective, but also personal.

Nevertheless, the theme of hope is not a uniquely modern concern; it has been the focus of many studies over the course of Western history. Already in ancient Greece, one finds various attempts to define it in dif­ferent historical periods, distinguishing it, for example, from expectation and from desire, and integrating trust into its meaning. The Fathers of the Church and the Scholastics approach it from a theological perspective, while some also analyze hope (espoir) as a passion. Though Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, Hobbes, and Locke devote little attention to the subject, hope reemerges once again as a theme in modern thought in the writings of Kant, for whom it constitutes one of the four principal questions to which the philosopher has an obligation to respond, and also represents a concern for Hume, Mill, and Kierkegaard.

Nevertheless, Bloch was not altogether incorrect in asserting that the theme of hope was "as unexplored as the Antarctic" before the 1956 publication of his The Principle of Hope. Indeed, in the history of philosophy, hope has never been a dominant theme; it was generally treated, if at all, "incidentally," just as it continues to be treated today among the majority of philosophers. And yet, given the urgency of the contemporary historical situation, which manages too often to drive people to despair, it is surprising that such a topic would not have pro­voked more reflection in philosophy, which has for its part too often and too quickly abandoned the theme to sociology, psychology, or theology. But hope is philosophically significant by virtue of the fact that it constitutes a fundamental and central mode of human existence; it is the principal driving force of the historical-temporal human being in via. A human being without hope is like a walking corpse, which is both physiologically and metaphysically absurd.

In fact, there are a number of different twentieth-century philosophical analyses of human hope that appeared long before Bloch's remarkable encyclopedic reflection. The subject of human hope has been approached from various perspectives: ethics, anthropology, phenomenology, politics, and metaphysics. Some develop an ontology of not-yet-being as the foundation undergirding the act of hope; some work out a more clearly defined understanding of the nature of hope by distinguishing it from desire and expectation; some discuss its status as a passion and as a virtue, interpreting it both at the personal and at the communal level.

The purpose of the present study is, on the one hand, to come to an understanding of the German philosopher Josef Pieper's view of hope, and, on the other hand, to set this view into dialogue with other con-temporary understandings. To achieve this purpose, I did not restrict myself to the works Pieper explicitly devoted to hope alone; instead, I took a more general approach, and considered his oeuvre as a whole. This has allowed me better to situate Pieper's understanding of hope within the broader context of his thought and to bring out certain points or underlying ontological and anthropological foundations, which the philosopher himself did not work out in detail in the works specifically devoted to hope. Indeed, an adequate grasp of his position requires a deep and comprehensive reading of all of his writings. Moreover, on occasion I had to read between the lines, which was in many cases the last resort for grasping the most profound dimension of his thinking. "What is self-evident is not discussed" is Pieper's watch-word; we can complement this observation with Heidegger's affirmation that the doctrine of any particular philosopher lies in the "unsaid in what is said." An interpretation of a text ought also to bring out what the author sought to express without saying it explicitly; it ought to lay bare the fundamental intuitions that underlie his thought and run through everything he does in fact say.

In order to illuminate both the originality and the controversial aspects of Pieper's position on the various issues concerning hope, I have set it in dialogue with those contemporary philosophers who have

treated the topic since the beginning of the twentieth century. I did not limit myself to the authors whom Pieper himself discussed and from whom he drew inspiration—for example, Gabriel Marcel and Ernst Bloch—but I also included authors to whom he did not refer, and who belong to various philosophical schools spanning several decades. In addition to the existentialist-neo-Marxist debate, I also took account of phenomenological, analytic, and Anglo-Saxon analyses, as well as dif­ferent psychological, medical, or psychiatric studies insofar as it was possible. This method not only allowed me better to situate Pieper's thought within the heart of the philosophy of the twentieth century��emphasizing not only his unique contribution, but also his inadequa­cies and omissions—but also better to understand the nature of human hope in a systematic way.

With Marcel and Bloch, Pieper contributed to the rediscovery of the ontological foundation of human hope; he articulated an ontology of not-yet-being, which is accompanied by an eschatological dimension expressing the internal structure of human nature ordered toward a future. He thus represents in a certain way one of the pioneers among the twentieth-century philosophers of hope in the rediscovery, not only of the importance of the ontological concept of human existence in via (for which he draws inspiration as much from Thomas Aquinas and Przywara as from Heidegger) for understanding hope, but also of the way to approach it. To be sure, several books and articles on hope were already in existence before the appearance of his first work devoted to the theme, published in 1935 and showing signs of his youth. But these were either theological, or they did not show the intrinsic connec­tion between an ontology of not-yet-being and hope.

It is thus historically false to claim that Bloch and Marcel were alone responsible for reinstating hope as a philosophical problem, or to maintain that, to date, the philosophical problem of hope has not yet been dealt with, as Bloch does with some presumption in the preface to his The Principle of Hope, ignoring all of the philosophies of hope that open up with transcendence toward the transcendent. Nevertheless, it is true that Pieper, inspired by Marcel and provoked by Bloch, completes and deepens his philosophy of hope only after the Second World War, when he enters into a fruitful discussion with contemporary philoso­phers of hope and of the absurd.

In the world of philosophy, Pieper also represents something of a pio­neer in the way he understands the virtues and their importance for`the total fulfillment of the person, an approach that became fashionable only in the 1980s, with the appearance of Maclntyre's celebrated book, After Virtue. Just after the war, Pieper also developed a theory of leisure and celebration, which for him is intrinsically connected to the distinc­tion between the attitude of theoria and that of praxis. His notion of theoria also provides the foundation for his understanding of human hope, insofar as hope is unable to achieve its object simply on the basis of the individual's own resources, but also requires a gift from the other.

Disturbed by the shadows of history and the existential shocks of Auschwitz and Hiroshima, in which the human being became, for the first time in history, as Anders remarks, "the master of the apocalypse," Pieper looks for a foundation for a philosophy of hope. He adopts a position that is not only opposed to the nihilists who proclaim that the Nothing is better than being and that existence is an imperfec­tion and absurdity, but also to the social religions that in the name of science or of praxis promise perfect and endless happiness, the con­struction of the "New Jerusalem" on earth.

This is one of the reasons why today [in 1950], at a time of temptations to despair, it may appear necessary to bring into view a notion of the End in which an utterly realistic freedom from illusion not only does not contradict hope but in which the one serves to confirm and corroborate the other.

Hope thus constitutes one of the cornerstones of Pieper's philosophy; and yet, of the many works that have been published on his philosophy, not one of them has yet taken up this theme as its central focus. One finds studies on goodness and reality, on leisure and celebration, on the university,  on the virtues in general, on philoso­phy and poetry, on truth, or even on anthropology. Moreover, there have not been any works to date that have tried to take account of and synthesize the various currents of contemporary thought on the theme of hope. The great majority of studies focus on one or two authors (Bloch or Marcel, to mention only the two most important), or else they treat only the studies published in a particular language, or remain within a particular school of thought (existentialism, neo-Marxism, phenomenology, neo-Thomism, or analytic philosophy).

The first chapter of the present study analyzes the ontological founda­tions of a philosophy of hope; chapters two through five treat the nature, the characteristics, the object, the content, the reason, and the justification of human hope, as well as contrasting attitudes; finally, the sixth chapter explores the relationship between hope and history in light of the ultimate end of history.

Chapter one lays out the ontological and anthropological founda­tions undergirding a philosophy of hope. On the basis of the distinc­tion between res naturalis and res artificialis, on the one hand, and between a metaphysics of theoria and a metaphysics of praxis, on the other, it is possible to inquire into the origin of human nature, as Sartre and Pieper have done, and more particularly, to ask whether this nature is characterized by a fully autonomous and a priori freedom or whether by a freedom inscribed within a natural inclination toward the complete (determinable) fulfillment of the individual. The two authors share an anthropology in which the human being is essentially project ed, either freely (according to Sartre) or in a manner that is both free and determinate (according to Pieper), toward the future, the place wherein the human being realizes his possibilities. The human being is fundamentally possibility or project. He hopes to become or to possess what he has himself freely projected into the future, or that toward which he has been projected. This inclination and openness toward the future of possibilities, which form the basis of a philosophy of hope, have their roots in an ontology of not-yet-being (Heidegger, Bloch, Pieper), which is in turn rooted in Heidegger's notion of the existentiell temporality of Dasein. According to Pieper and Bloch, the human being hopes to be able to pass from the state of not-yet-being, that is, of minimal-being to the state of being-more or being fulfilled. Human hope is intrinsically linked to the itinerant condition of human existence, which thus always implies existential uncertainty.

Once the anthropological and ontological foundations of an analy­sis of human hope have been outlined, I offer in the second chapter a definition of the act of hope by indicating its constitutive properties, as well as by integrating the diverse perspectives of contemporary philosophers of hope. Here I raise the question, to what extent is human hope—which is an intentional movement toward a good, diffi­cult, possible, and future object distinct from desire and expectation, and to what extent does it necessarily presuppose an act of belief accompanied by an act of trust? Next, I ask whether uncertainty regarding the obtainment of the object hoped for is an essential com­ponent of the act of hope. In addition to the analysis of the elements of fear and love that accompany hope, and the distinction drawn between hope and optimism, I show that the structure of hope is inher­ent both to the philosophical act and to reason.

The distinction between hope as espoir, or ordinary hope, and hope as espérance, or fundamental hope, which is affirmed by the great major­ity of authors, forms the theme of chapter three. Taking my bearings from limit-situations, such as terminal illness, suicide, martyrdom, and being condemned to death, which can be the occasion for the manifes­tation of fundamental hope, I suggest that the object of hope as espoir is interchangeable, that is, it changes constantly according to circumstances, while the object of fundamental hope is by nature unique and identical. While the majority of authors (whether philosophers, doctors, psychologists, or psychiatrists) qualify the object of fundamental hope in different ways, it can be defined as the actualization and complete fulfillment of the person. Hope as espoir is articulated through an analysis of the relation between it and the passions (Thomas Aquinas, Hume, and Bloch), which can be accompanied by moral virtues, such as magnanimity and humility. Fundamental hope can be considered either as one of Dasein's first principles, or as a virtue. It is appropriate to raise the question at this point whether the virtue of hope must be under-stood only as a theological virtue, or, by contrast, whether there also exists a natural virtue of fundamental hope. The discussion of this con­troversial question debated among the philosophers of hope will be followed by a description of the relationship between ordinary hope and fundamental hope as one of dependence and anteriority.

An exploration of human hope entails, moreover, a discussion of attitudes that form a contrast with it namely, presumption and despair. Chapter four will focus its discussion primarily on the attitude of despair, that is, the expectation of nonfullfillment, which is commonly described as anticipated death, or a rupture with existence and corning-to-be. Despair has its roots in the boredom of the Modems and in the acedia of the Ancients, attitudes that are captured well in the notions of verbositas and curiositas, which Heidegger vividly described in his analysis of average-everydayness. In this chapter, despair is then related to the totalitarian state of work and to leisure. The attitude of despair raises the delicate problem of the existence of a total and absolute despair with respect to the fundamental hope that is constitu­tive of human Dasein.

I will then turn my attention in the fifth chapter to one of the essential problems of a philosophy of hope: death, the "anti-utopia," as Bloch describes it, which brutally interrupts the projection of possibilities into the future. Is human Dasein a being-toward-death or a being-toward-hope? In order to answer this question, we will have to examine the reason for the fundamental hope that sustains those people who find themselves in limit situations. In this context, I will primarily set the positions of Pieper and Bloch into dialogue with one another with respect to the arguments they set forth in their attempt to overcome the anti-utopia of death. In doing so, I will bring out both their common points and their basic divergence, at the same time taking into account once again the position of contemporary philosophers of hope in today's world.

The sixth and final chapter is devoted to the relationship between human hope and history or, more specifically, the end of time. A phi­losophy of hope is not concerned solely with the future of the person-al destiny of the historical-temporal individual, but it must at the same time—particularly after Hiroshima—formulate a position with respect to the possibility of the self-destruction of the human race. This collec­tive death represents a correlate to personal death. While it is possible to affirm, as Bloch does, a transcendence of personal death, insofar as man's historical progress continues essentially on its march toward the "new, earthly Jerusalem," and thus in a certain way to safeguard the principle of hope, the possibility of global self-destruction raises the question of the anti-utopia of death in a new way. There is no con­sciousness greater than that of the human race as a whole that would enable us to transcend this "second death." Thus, what position do we take with respect to the uncertain future of history? This is one of the most important questions facing us today. Does the irreducible anti-utopia that finds its symbol in Hiroshima, that is, the death of human­ity, simply wipe out the principle of hope? Does it necessarily give way to nihilistic despair? Or is transcendence possible in spite of everything? Will humanity ever attain Bloch's "homeland," Kant's "ethical community," or even Teilhard's "Omega point"? The ques­tion that is raised once again in this context, just as it was before withrespect to personal death, is the question of the reason that founds fun­damental hope in light of the end of history: What reason do the philosophies of progress or of nihilism offer for affirming that every-thing will turn out well in the end, or that everything will turn out for the worst? Is it reasonable to hope, or ought we rather to hand the lau­rels to the metaphysics of the Nothing and of despair? Will human history end in bitter defeat or nothingness? If so, wouldn't it make more sense to commit suicide immediately rather than wait for the end and suffer needlessly? Or, by contrast, could we say that the creeds of the various currents of the philosophy of progress of the last two centuries are correct to advocate an optimism, which holds that humanity will reach its homeland in spite of personal death, by means of the trans-formation of the world achieved through science and reason? Or again, is there a middle position that would accept the possibility of catastrophe within history, and at the same time offer a justification for hope? What, when all is said and done, is the ultimate reason that would provide the foundation for hope, and even for despair, with respect to both personal and collective death?

On Etienne Gilson

Art and Intellect in the Philosophy of Etienne Gilson by Francesca Aran Murphy (Eric Voegelin Institute Series in Political Philosophy: University of Missouri Press) In Art and Intellect in the Philosophy of Etienne Gilson, Francesca Aran Murphy tells the story of this French philosopher's struggle to reconcile faith and reason. In his lifetime, Gilson often stood alone in presenting Saint Thomas Aquinas as a theologian, one whose philosophy came from his faith. Today, Gilson's view is becoming the prevalent one. Murphy provides us with an intellectual biography of this Thomist leader throughout the stages of his scholarly development.

Murphy covers more than a half century of Gilson's life while reminding readers of the political and social realities that confronted intellectuals of the early twentieth century. She shows the effects inner-church politics had on Gilson and his contemporaries such as Alfred Loisy, Lucien Lévy Bruhl, Charles Maurras, Henri de Lubac, Marie-Dominique Chenu, and Jacques Maritain, while also contextualizing Gilson's own life and thoughts in relation to these philosophers and theologians.

These great thinkers, along with Gilson, continue to be sources of important intellectual debate among scholars, as do the political periods through which Gilson's story threads—World Wars I and II, the rise and fall of Fascism, and the political upheavals of Europe. By placing Gilson's twentieth-century Catholic life against a dramatic back-ground of opposed political allegiances, clashing spiritualities, and warring ideas of philosophy, this book shows how rival factions each used their own interpretations of Thomas Aquinas to legitimate their conceptions of the Catholic Church.

In Art and Intellect in the Philosophy of Etienne Gilson, Murphy shows Gilson's early openness to the artistic revolution of the Cubist and the Expressionist movements and how his love of art inspired his existential theology. She demonstrates the influence that Henri Bergson continued to have on Gilson and how Gilson tried to bring together the intellectual, Dominican side of Christianity with the charismatic, experi­ential Franciscan side.

Murphy concludes with a chapter on issues inspired by the Gilsonist tradition as developed by recent thinkers. This volume makes an original contribution to the study of Gilson, for the first time providing an organic and synthetic treatment of this major spiritual philosopher of modern times. 

Excerpt: This is an "intellectual life" of Étienne Gilson. The "intellect" follows a the­matic order, but lives are chronological. I have tried to give both chronology and thematicism their due, for certain intellectual themes shaped Gilson's life. The thematic currents all flow from one historical fact, the French modernist crisis. Gilson was an impressionable nineteen year old when the modernist crisis began in France. It was like being nineteen during the French Revolution, or like being a real-life Johnny Tremaine at the start of the American Revolution. One can hardly imagine a real Johnny Tremaine putting it all behind him when the War of American Independence con­cluded. This book tries to show how Gilson was marked throughout his life by his reactions to modernism…

Gilson served his apprenticeship in philosophical realism by studying textual, historical facts. We will see how Gilson's first, historical studies of Descartes and Thomas Aquinas led him toward a realistic epistemology, which does not provide its own foundation, or "script," but requires the prompting of faith. Gilson worked as a historian for a quarter of a century before he began writing philosophy books. Rather than noting all of Gilson's historical writings, the book leads in with a few that best symbolize his historical research, like his studies of Descartes and Thomas. Chronology enables one to show how one thing leads to another, and I have selected for description those Gilsonian histories that had some causative influence on his philosophical thought.

In the midst of the modernist crisis, the Parisian Gilson learned to love the new art forms that were being invented by Picasso, the cubists, and the expressionists. Appreciation for the modernist painters helped Gilson to write his first truly beautiful historical book, his study of the Franciscan Bonaven­ture. However much he protested the historical accuracy of his Thomism, Gilson's own philosophy was profoundly colored by a Franciscan spirituality that inches towards the surreal and trans-rational. In the 1920s, Thomism became fashionable in France, its promoters putting themselves forward as defenders of reason in their culture war against "irrationalism." Gilson was at edge with this self-understanding. It was in the mid-1920s that Gilson wrote his first defense of the intrinsic urge of the natural human mind for supernatural vision.

If this set him somewhat apart from contemporaries like Jacques Maritain, the debate about the possibility of Christian philosophy that took place in France in the early 1930s made the two men friends. It also initiated Gilson's transition from historian to philosopher. He began to argue that Christian­ity can combine with philosophy, because Christians make better realists than do their nonbelieving friends. Henri de Lubac was almost alone in appreci­ating the uniqueness of this presentation of Christian philosophy, that Gilson was staking the debate on the heightened metaphysical reality of nature as revealed in the Old Testament scripture, not on the epistemolog­ical foundations or spiritual edification supplied to the philosopher by his religious beliefs. In that debate, and in the brilliant books that flowed out of it, Gilson used arguments that look historical but are really neat philoso­phy, a philosophy of "graced factuality." It was in the mid-1930s that Amer­ica recognized Gilson's achievement as one who had shown the unity of faith and reason. This book contends that American Catholics saw a valuable part of the man, but not the whole. Great actor that he was, he was well-enough attuned to his audience to know what they could hear and what they could not. The "Loisy problem" was outside their auditory range.

As the Second World War approached and the drums of the French ra­tionalists beat louder in their support for Hitler's campaign against social modernism, Gilson argued ever more clearly that realism is grounded, not in the epistemic clarity of intuition, but in the simple mystery of facts. This elite intellectual gave some energy in the mid-1930s to writing popular social and political journalism, trying to turn the tide away from the French dream of a new dictator who would issue the command for the entire French population to attend the Mass. Some of Gilson's historical, mediaevalist opinions, such as his conceptions of Averroës and Dante, have been surpassed by contemporary scholarship. But if one sees these writings for what they are, as products of the late 1930s, their timeless value emerges. For now one can see what Gilson was trying to get at, politically and philosophically, by posing Averroës as a rationalist and Dante as an advocate of an emperor who need take no spiritual, or moral, advice from the church.

It was not by accident that Gilson discovered his existential Thomism in occupied Paris in 1942. It was the summit of forty years' thought about the errors of paleoconservativism and about how to ground reason in a faith to which the call of the transrational sounds like music. Gilson's priest friends, like the Dominican Marie-Dominique Chenu, had followed him in working out historical, factual, and existential interpretations of Aquinas's thought. Others, like de Lubac, had taken his idea that grace speaks from within nature to their hearts. De Lubac's Surnaturel (1946) can be seen as a successor volume to Gilson's defenses of Christian philosophy. Thus there came about, in the late 1940s, the French "nouvelle théologie," followed almost immediately by its condemnation. De Lubac's "intrinsicism" was stigmatized in the encyclical Humani Generis (1950). It was at a Thomist Congress in 1950 that one of the triumphant opponents of new theologies indicated to Gilson that L'être et l'essence had the modernist tinge. At the very same time, the remnants of Charles Maurras' monarchist party began a campaign against Gilson that led to the loss of his retirement pension.

Throughout the 1950s, a rather embittered Gilson began to move still further away from this reactionary Thomism, with its rejection of a "graced nature," to form an epistolary friendship with de Lubac, the disgraced author of Surnaturel, and to write a sideways attack on what he saw as a contem­porary, political version of "extrinsicism" in Maritain's propagandizing for world government. He did not just compose counterblasts, but a philoso­phy of particularity.

He also turned the rudder of his existential philosophy explicitly toward the mystery of the beautiful, writing seven books about philosophy of art and aesthetics between 1950 and 1967. The beautiful was the boundless sea on which he sailed in these years in which, his teaching now on one side, he could write and meditate about what really mattered. These were also what I call "grumpy years" for Gilson; for the only aspect of the spiri­tuality of the Second Vatican Council with which this paradoxical Pascalian Thomist resonated was the encouragement it gave to philosophical pluralism. As Randolph Churchill tactlessly remarked to Pius XII, "None of us is infallible." We conclude by briefly considering the vivid current life of Gilson's thought within contemporary theology, especially that inclined to theological aesthetics.

The four themes are, in fact, continuous throughout Gilson's life; but chronologically, they cross and recross, appear, disappear and reappear. I tell this diachronic tale, which does not make a neatly rounded "story," because the spiritual drama of a man's life is the most direct way of making the phi­losophy accessible. Gilson might concur with Hans Urs von Balthasar's remark that the truths of Christianity are summarized, not in the catechisms, but in the lives of the saints.

 Thomist Naturalist Ethics

The Ethics of Nature by Celia E. Deane-Drummond (Blackwell Publishers) (Hardcover) explores humanity's treatment of the natural world from a Christian perspective. The book presents a range of ethical debates arising from our relationship with nature, including current controversies about the environment, animal rights, biotechnology, consciousness, and cloning. It sets the immediate issues in the context of underlying theological and philosophical assumptions, and draws out broader concerns for social justice. Complex scientific issues are explained in clear and intelligible language.

Throughout the book, the author draws on primary sources from Thomas Aquinas, and develops her own distinctive ethical approach. This demonstrates that a virtue ethic centered on wisdom provides the most appropriate way to approach the ethics of nature. She has held academic posts in both plant science and theology, giving her an ideal vantage point from which to write.

It is the premise of this book that a Christian approach to ethics is justifiable and offers a distinctive contribution to moral reflection. How far the content of theology impinges on ethical reflection has been the subject of much heated debate, for both Catholic moral theologians and Protestant counterparts. On the one hand, there are those who argue that we need to begin with the kerygma of Christian faith, then move on to reflect on various secular alternatives in the light of such beliefs. Michael Banner is a good example of this method, drawing particularly on the theology of Karl Barth for his inspiration. He suggests that:

the task of Christian ethics is to understand the world and humankind in the light of the knowledge of God revealed in Jesus Christ, witnessed to by the Scriptures, and proclaimed by the Creeds, and that Christian ethics may and must explicate this understanding in its significance for human action through a critical engagement with the concerns, claims and problems of other ethics.

Given that we can argue a case for Christian ethics to be a modified version of virtue ethics, what particular virtues are appropriate to consider? While many ethicists have resisted any hierarchy of the virtues, Deane-Drummond suggests that the four cardinal virtues of prudence, justice, fortitude and temperance developed by Thomas Aquinas give a good starting point for reflection on the ethics of natures. The theological virtues of love, faith and hope are the foundation of the other virtues, though in the moral virtues prudence takes priority, in that like love it can also be described as the `mother' of other virtues. Prudence, in particular, is at the heart of Aquinas's reflection on moral virtue, for it is implicit in his own method of dialectical questioning, considering all the options available before arriving at a reasoned decision that informs a particular way of life, a life of virtue. While drawing on Aristotle, Aquinas's view that corruption of reason is impossible to avoid without an act of God's grace runs counter to his position, and indeed that of secular philosophical inquiry. Details of theological debates about the relationship between nature and grace in Thomistic theology need not concern us here. It is sufficient to note that Thomas recognized the reality of original sin but refused to endorse the idea that human nature is eradicated by sin; this would amount to Manicheanism. Instead, something of the goodness of creation remains, even while restricting its capacity for the good. Following Augustine, Aquinas argued for the healing of a disordered nature by grace, but following the Greek tradition, he also argued for the possibility of divinization by grace. Keeping such strands together is important in discussions about the virtues as learned and the virtues received by divine gift of grace.

Prudence, or practical wisdom, for Aquinas is the `mother' of all the other cardinal virtues. In the occidental Christian view Being precedes Truth and Truth precedes Goodness. It might be hard to imagine that prudence is in any sense a prerequisite to goodness, since prudence in colloquial use 'carries the connotation of timorous, small minded self-preservation, of a rather selfish concern about oneself; hence those who shun danger do so by an appeal to 'prudence'. In contrast, the classical approach that Aquinas adopts links prudence specifically with goodness, and moreover there is no justice or fortitude without the virtue of prudence. Instinctive inclinations towards goodness become transformed through prudence, so that prudence gives rise to a perfected ability to make choices as related to practical matters of human reasoning. Hence the free activity of humanity is good in so far as it corresponds to the pattern of prudence. As such prudence is the 'cause, root, mother, measure, precept, guide and prototype of all ethical virtues, it acts in all of them, perfecting them to their true nature, all participate in it, and by virtue of this participation they are virtues Truly human action is the inward shaping of volition and action by reason perfected in truth. However, reason is not understood in a narrow sense, it is 'regard for and openness to reality'. Reality includes both supernatural and natural reality, so that realization of goodness presupposes knowledge of reality — simply good intentions are not sufficient. Prudent decisions have universal and particular/singular components. Universal principles are given by synderesis, which relates to the naturally apprehended principles of ethical conduct, or innate conscience. The love of the good is the message of natural conscience, relating directly to natural law. Deliberation and judgment are charac­teristic of the cognitive stage of prudence, while decision, volition and action demonstrate its practical nature.

What are the advantages of a recovery of prudence for reflection on the ethics of nature? Deane-Drummond suggests that all aspects of the natural world that she considers in this book do well to be approached through the category of prudence. The particular facets of prudence that are most relevant depend on the particular issue under consideration. Yet, overall, the holistic method implicit in the notion of prudence through contemplation/consideration, judgement and action is vitally important to hold together in situations where there is a temptation to split action from judgement. For example, accurate reflection on environmental ethics needs due attention to policy-making, to how far such a desirable end will be achievable in practice. Distortions of prudence may be more exaggerated in one area rather than another, and Aquinas allows such distortions to be distinguished by categoriz­ing the different facets of prudence. In the first place, the ability of prudence to be still, to deliberate well, is a quality desperately needed in the frenzied search for new methods and techniques in biological science that are considered to have particular usefulness for humanity. Deane-Drummond  suggests that taking the time to deliberate and reflect and listen to others by taking counsel does not come easily to the popular mind, concerned with instant results and instant gratification of desires. Second, unlike deontological approaches within Christian ethics that refer to particular traditions that seem unrelated to practical contexts, prudence demands full encounter with experience, including the experience of science, taking time to per­ceive what is true in the natural world. Such close attention to reality as perceived in the scientific world involves a kind of studied attention, a listening to the Other in nature, without trying to force the natural world to conform to human categories. While Aquinas restricted his idea of taking counsel to other human subjects, in the present environmental context it is essential to try as far as possible to perceive from the perspective of all creatures, all of whom are loved by God and under God's providence." Third, prudence invokes not just contemplation of the world, but positive action as well, action that has in mind the goodness of God. Consequentialist approaches to the ethics of nature have sought to frame decisions in terms of costs and benefits, or risks. While prudence would include some perception of risks where they are known, the ability to have accurate foresight depends on how far such decisions promote the overall goal of prudence towards goodness. It is the character of the agents that is as important as the particular consequences of individual decisions made. Hence, the good of humanity is in­cluded along with the goods of other creatures. While those who are not Christian will be able to identify with the goal of goodness, a Christian virtue ethic springing from prudence will seek to move to a particular understanding of goodness, one that coheres with the overall goodness for creation, as well as goodness for human­ity. Deane-Drummond argues that a Christian virtue ethic set in such a context encourages a wider framework of reference to include the cosmic community, rather than simply the human community.

A discussion of the significance of prudence would not be complete without mention of the three other cardinal virtues of justice, fortitude and temperance. Justice is often split off from a consideration of virtue ethics, as it is more commonly associated with rule-based ethics. Onora O'Neill considers the rival views of justice according to universal principles, as opposed to virtue ethics with its concern for the particular. She believes, instead, that justice needs to be inclusive of virtues. Deane-Drummond suggests, alternatively, from the side of virtue ethics, that when considered as a virtue to be developed justice gives consideration of rules and principles a proper place in an overall ethical framework. In addition, a Christian understanding of justice differs from that of secular philosophy, so that it needs some further elab­oration. Justice is concerned broadly with the idea that each is given her or his due. Unlike many other virtues, justice specifically governs relationships with others, and also unlike other virtues it is possible to act justly without necessarily having a proper attitude towards that action. Justice is therefore located in the will, rather, than the emotions, keeping right relations between individuals others and between others in community. Aquinas suggests that `justice is the habit whereby a person with a lasting and constant will renders to each his due'. A particular rule or pattern for prudence prescribes what is a just deed according to reason, and if this is written down it becomes law. One important facet of justice, as Aquinas under-stood it, is that it acts in a general way, directing the action of all other virtues towards the common good'

Deane-Drummond argues throughout this book for a recovery of ways of thinking that are aligned with virtue ethics, though situated in a broader framework of Wisdom theology, orientated towards the good understood in terms of the goodness of God. Aquinas used ways of thinking about the human mind that could not take into account the newer knowledge arising from contemporary psychological studies. It is beyond the scope of this book to explore all areas of the vast spectrum of psychological knowledge in relation to the development of virtues. Deane-Drummond therefore chose to focus the question in a specific way and ask in what sense trends in psychology challenge the possibility of moral agency that is presupposed in virtue ethics. In addition, Deane-Drummond considers how far contemporary psychological study actually enlarges the possibility for moral agency and development of the virtues, arising from a deeper knowledge of self and mental function. Prudence, in particular, involves a process from deliberation through to action, and hence moral agency is integral at all stages of prudential activity. What, for example, are the particular psychological predispositions needed for valuing`the environment and how might they influence the development of virtues? Literature on Christian approaches to environmental ethics seems to have ignored this aspect, perhaps because of the shift away from anthropocentrism towards holism that Deane-Drummond elaborates. However, she argues that it is vital to come to terms with the psychological aspects of human nature if we are to understand ways of fostering more responsible (virtuous) approaches to the natural world. In addition, moral agency is a far more important issue when considering ethics orientated towards virtues compared with other ethical approaches that focus more specifically on external duties or conse­quences of human action. Psychology, situated as it is on the border of neurobiology and social/cultural studies, can form a natural bridge between science and religion. It is also important to stress that while some psychologists are turning to neurobiological studies in order to help to elucidate human behavior, others resist such a move as unwarranted reductionism. Deane-Drummond includes scientific discussion of psychology from the more biological through to the more cultural end of the spectrum, without presuming any superiority of one over the other, but in order to open up the debate about our biological and psychological human nature and moral agency. However, while strides are being made to relate contem­porary psychology to theology, it is disappointing how sparse is the attention being paid to the possible ethical implications from a Christian perspective. Christian ethics is not alone in presuming the freedom of human agency. While it would be impossible to do this enormous field justice Deane-Drummond intends to use illustrative examples of psychological literature in the light of philosophical discussion on the topics in order to ask what this might do to the elaboration of moral agency and thus the real possibility of the development of Christian virtues. Of course, Deane-Drummond has explored what virtues mean from a psychological perspective. However, she suggests that taking this ap­proach would merely enlarge our understanding of what it means, for example, to develop wisdom from a scientific point of view. Deane-Drummond intends to probe those areas of psychology that are becoming increasingly popular`and take on the form of a myth, in much the same way`that genetics could be said to have acquired mythological status. An ethics of nature needs to be robust enough to face this challenge and show how, far from reducing human behavior to scientific analysis, contemporary movements in psychology can, instead, enliven the way we think about ourselves, our identity and who we are both in distinctiveness and in kinship relation to other creatures.

Postmodern Versions of Thomism 

After Aquinas: Versions of Thomism by Fergus Kerr (Blackwell Publishers) (Paperback) Written by a leading theologian, this new account of the writings of Thomas Aquinas and their interpretation by modern commentators reflects the major revival of interest in his work.

After Aquinas makes available in one volume all the material necessary for a rounded appreciation of Aquinas's work and his enduring influence. As well as revisiting Aquinas's own work, Kerr brings together a range of views that have previously appeared in disparate places, thereby exploring alternatives to the standard understanding of Aquinas's writings. This book therefore represents a major revisionist treatment of Thomism and its significance, combining useful exposition with original, creative thinking.

After Aquinas will become essential reading for all undergraduate students and scholars interested in the work of this great theologian.

This book is one of the most fascinating and informative books on Thomas to come along in some time. Kerr focuses on the period beginning with Pope Leo XIII's endorsement of Thomism as a bulwark against post-Cartesian modernism and subjectivism, and the division of Thomism into Transcendental (essentially Kantian-informed) and Existential (anti-Kantian and anti-modern) factions. He shows how modern Thomism has been shaped by, and is thus largely a product of, reactions to modern thinkers, such as Descartes, Kant, Heidegger and other thinkers. He successfully destabilizes the conventional view of Thomas as important mainly for his theistic proofs (the "five ways") and natural law theory, not only by arguing that Thomas's arguments are essentially unintelligible apart from his larger theological purposes, but that these purposes change the way we understand even his philosophical importance. The Thomas that emerges in Kerr's account makes an interesting dialogue partner with contemporary thinkers such as Martin Heidegger and Karl Barth. Furthermore, he holds his own against Barth's misguided claims that Thomas's concept of "nature" doesn't take sin seriously, or that his notion of divine "simplicity" is idolatrous, or that his concept of "analogia entis" is the invention of Antichrist! The Thomism that emerges is strikingly at odds with that which we often encounter in the secular or Protestant "textbook traditions," where Thomas's God is a barren "First Cause" or abstract "immutable substance," for example. Once we understand what Thomas means, Kerr argues, we see that his God is so dynamic that He is more accurately defined by verbs than by nouns! Kerr offers chatty, and sometimes wickedly naughty behind-the-scene peeks into controversies that have shaped modern Thomism, such as the very personal controversy between Garrigou-Lagrange and de Lubac. He also apprears to be thoroughly conversant with recent non-Catholic theology (for example, such as the work of the Lutheran theologian, Robert Jensen, or the New Finnish interpretation of Luther's notion of justification as close to the Greek idea of "theosis"-- an idea for which Kerr finds some parallel in Thomas's view of sanctification). He is, of course, intimately familiar with the usual suspects--the Catholic standards (Gilson, Chenu, Maritain, Von Balthasar).

Excerpt: The hard question is to account for the rival ways of reading Thomas. The mid-nineteenth-century revival of interest, primarily in his supposedly Aristotelian philosophy, was intended to put it to use in containing and eradicating the supposedly Cartesian/Kantian subjectivist individualism by which Roman Catholic thinkers were then attracted. This use of Thomas, as we saw in chapter 2, remains effective in the context of analytic philosophy. It may, however, soon have to deal with a threat from medieval scholarship: anachronism is always a risk when one calls on earlier thinkers to refute current arguments. Anyway, the standard outsider's view of Thomas owes everything to Leonine Thomism: at worst, `arid Aristotelianism', at best a combination of natural theology and natural law ethics which satisfies some and repels others.

On the inside, so to speak, among those educated in institutions where Leonine Thomism was all but mandatory, it was being rejected by the 1920s. Initiated by such remarkable interpreters as Pierre Rousselot and Joseph Maréchal, many students of Thomas concluded that Cartesian/Kantian philosophy could not be outwitted by being regarded as a total mistake; rather, Thomas had to be reread in the light of modern philosophical considerations. The `Copernican revolution' inaugurated by Kant, in his focus on the active role of the knower and the autonomy of the moral agent, turned out, in this rereading, to be anticipated in Thomas's conception of the natural drive of the mind towards truth and being. Far from being a supposedly empiricist epistemology, with the 1 mind being conformed to things in the world, Thomas viewed every act of knowing and choosing as implicitly knowing and choosing the truth and goodness which is the mystery of the divine being. This generated transcendental Thomism.' Kant's analysis of experience is `transcendental', in the sense of getting behind actual experience to lay bare the conditions which make it possible at all. This reading of Thomas disclosed the a priori conditions that Thomas took for granted in his understanding of human experience: namely, that in every act of knowing and loving the human being is tacitly and no doubt mostly unwittingly growing closer to (or further away from) God.

In a somewhat different way, theologians of the same generation, notably Henri de Lubac, reconnected Thomas's thought with the patristic tradition: in short, as we saw in chapter 8, retrieving his under-standing of the human spirit as created in the divine image and naturally desiring the face-to-face vision of God which of course can be granted only as a gift. This puts an end to the two-storey view of grace and nature, setting the two over against each other, in favor of under-standing human life under divine grace as the perfection of human nature. Opponents of this view feared that human nature as always already graced, human reason as always already anticipating beatific vision, and human desire as always already fulfilled in charity, smoothes out the tensions and contradictions and risks allowing nature, reason and desire to collapse into grace, faith and charity – or, by naturalizing the latter, turning Christian life into a form of secular humanism.

In his book on Karl Barth, Hans Urs von Balthasar rejected `sawdust Thomism' in favour of de Lubac's retrieval of Thomas's doctrine of natural desire for God. Balthasar's main concern, however, was to put Thomas's thought back into the context of the entire Western meta-physical tradition, understanding this as repeated disclosure of the divine goodness, truth and beauty, consummated in the self-revelation of God in the Christian dispensation of grace. Above all, Balthasar sought to bring out the importance of Thomas's insistence on the distinction in creatures between their nature and their existence, or, rather, on the complete absence of any such distinction in God.

Thomas, we may agree, is a transitional figure: later than the monastic theology and sacramental sense of the world which we find still in the early thirteenth century, earlier than the fourteenth-century developments that opened tensions and contradictions between nature and grace, reason and faith, and so on, leading eventually to the rejection (in the West) of Aristotle and Christian Platonism. It is not easy, nowadays, to believe in the harmony of reason and faith for which the High Middle Ages, or at least Thomas Aquinas, were once celebrated. It remains an option, on the other hand, to take Thomas either as a key figure in the development of modern theology or as primarily a continuator of pre-modernity. He can be read as inaugurating modern philosophy of religion, but only if his conceptual apparatus, and in particular his understanding of causality and substance, are assumed to anticipate the standard modern view. If, on the other hand, he has a notion of agent causality, and of self-diffusive substance, we find ourselves on a different hermeneutic line altogether.

Similarly with his conception of moral theology as principally an ethics of divine beatitude, and with his conception of sanctification as deified creaturehood, we are once again reading Thomas in the light of theological traditions he inherited, rather than in that of modern and in particular post-Reformation problems.

Sometimes, no doubt, this or that interpretation must be regarded as simply mistaken. On the whole, however, more complex factors are at play. For those who have been trained in analytic philosophy, and are inclined to accept Frege's principle that `existence is not a predicate', Thomas's talk of `Being' will (as Anthony Kenny says) be `sophistry and illusion'. On the other hand, for those who believe Heidegger's grand narrative about the forgetfulness of Being in the metaphysical tradition, Thomas's talk of `Being' will either be `idolatry' or (with Balthasar) the wonderful exception to Heidegger's rule. While there are recent attempts to show that analytic philosophy and hermeneutic/deconstructionist philosophies are not as radically incommensurable as they look, it seems unlikely that students of Thomas from these rival traditions will ever take each other very seriously, let alone come to any common understanding.

Perhaps we should rescue Thomas from philosophy altogether – but then, after all, he is a great philosopher, indeed that is one of the sources of the ambivalence of his thought. He is a philosopher and he is a theologian, and we are never going to agree where to put the emphasis.

In short, as some readings of his natural law theory seem to show, incommensurable yet equally plausible, Thomas's thought, perhaps over a range of issues, contains within itself the Janus-like ambiguities that generate competing interpretations which can never be reconciled. Working out a doctrine of God and of creation in conjunction with Jewish and Islamic metaphysics, a Latin theologian in the new university environment referring all the time to great monastic theologians of the Eastern Church, a Catholic theologian haunted by Catharist dualism, more concerned to protect the faith of friends in the arts faculty against Islamicized Aristotelianism than to avoid alarming his colleagues in divinity with his Aristotelian insights – all along the line Thomas's work, we may surely say, offers readers today little of the `synthesis' and `equilibrium' for which it was widely admired 50 years ago, but, on the contrary, reveals a loose-endedness in its constantly repeated discussions of finally unresolvable problems: `straw', Thomas called his work, in comparison with the knowledge of God for which he hoped and prayed; sketches, we may say, that he made in the course of his long and involved journeyings.

Thomas Aquinas

The Cambridge Companion to Aquinas edited by Norman Kretzmann, Eleonore Stump (Cambridge Companions to Philosophy: Cambridge University Press) (Hardcover) As always, Norman Kretzmann and Eleonore Stump deliver another masterful work together. Each of these writers are experts in their philosophical field of Medieval Metaphysics and philosophy. For anyone interested in gaining a better grasp of one of the greatest philosophers in the history of philosophy, this volume will certainly help. Kretzmann and Stump have edited this volume and included some of the preeminent Thomistic philosophers of the last 40 years. Chapters cover Aquinas' thoughts on ethics, metaphysics, Aristotle and Aquinas, Aquinas' theory of knowledge, law and politics and theological issues. Thus, the essentials of Aquinas are here in one volume. Moreover, his is an excellent work for those who would like to dig deeper and gain a more thorough understanding of Aquinas, or for those who would like to simply be "peeping Thomists" and get a small glimpse of what Aquinas espoused.

Among the great philosophers of the Middle Ages Aquinas is unique in pursuing two apparently disparate projects. On the one hand he developed a philosophical understanding of Christian doctrine in a fully integrated system encompassing all natural and supernatural reality. On the other hand, he was convinced that Aristotle's philosophy afforded the best available philosophical component of such a system. In a relatively brief career Aquinas developed these projects in great detail and with an astonishing degree of success. In this volume ten leading scholars introduce all the important aspects of Aquinas' thought, ranging from its historical background and dependence on Greek, Islamic, and Jewish philosophy and theology, through the metaphysics, epistemology and ethics, to the philosophical approach to Biblical commentary. New readers and nonspecialists will find this the most convenient, accessible guide to Aquinas currently in print. Advanced students and specialists will find a conspectus of recent developments in the interpretation of Aquinas.
By gathering up some of the top Aquinas scholars in the field, this volume presents the major topics of Aquinas' work in a lucid, considered, and (most importantly) easily understood way. While certainly not comprehensive (that is not its aim, and after all, the book would be another 500 pages at least), any potential Thomist scholar would be greatly served by this volume. Not only do the various authors give the reader a general overview of Thomas' thought and development, they also introduce some of the disputes going on within academic Thomist studies. As such, this volume is a good starting point for those interested in Aquinas, be it an academic interest or an desire to learn about the life and thought of a Doctor of the Church.

Admittedly, one should not try and delve into this book with no previous background into Thomas' thought. It does presume some level of familiarity with the terminology Aquinas gained from Aristotle, as well as from the Church Fathers and others. Given this, a general background in philosophy and/or patristic/scholastic theology should suffice for most of the work.

Aquinas by Ralph M. McInerny (Polity Press) (Paperback)  A briefer but no less authoritative introduction to the life and central Aristotelian significance Aquinas, McInerny provides deft look into the central contemporary significance of the philosopher and theologian, with a definite leaning toward the philosophical. This book is a lively and highly accessible introduction to the thought of Thomas Aquinas. While primarily a theologian, Aquinas' conception of theology presupposed an autonomous philosophy. This book concentrates on his philosophy while making clear its openness to theology as reflection on Revelation.

As a philosopher, Aquinas is fundamentally Aristotelian. Like Aristotle, he sees philosophy as emerging from the ordinary thinking of ordinary human beings (and philosophers when they are off duty). Philosophy does not initiate certain knowledge but prolongs it by perfecting the instrument of thinking and expanding its content. The quest for wisdom, like that for happiness, is an inescapable fact of human existence. This book uses key and crucial texts to describe the trajectory of Aquinas' philosophical thought from the analysis of changeable things through the reasoned awareness that to be and to be material are not identical to such knowledge as we con have of God. This brings Aquinas to the threshold of Christian faith.

"Aquinas lived in a time of remarkable intellectual and religious ferment. His thought, which Mclnerny following John Paul Il describes as an implicit philosophy, articulates not just for his own time, but for all times, the philosophical principles implicitly operative in human nature. In his new primer on Aquinas, Ralph Mclnerny manages the impossible. He gives us Aquinas, his times, the core of his philosophical teaching, and the significance of his continued contribution to philosophy and theology. With the deft style of the novelist and the clarity of a seasoned teacher of Aquinas, Mclnerny provides a marvellous path into the thought of the greatest of Catholic teachers.” -Professor Thomas Hibbs, Department of Philosophy, Boston College

"Mclnerny is perhaps the most important Catholic philosopher of his generation. While many limit philosophy to textual exegesis or formal logic, Mclnerny, in the spirit of his immediate predecessors Etienne Gilson and Jacques Maritain, still regards philosophy as the pursuit of wisdom, speculative and practical. Steeped in the history of philosophy, Mclnerny is a reliable guide to Aristotle and Aquinas and their commentators through the ages. He writes not for colleagues down the hall or for the appreciation of a handful of specialists but to be read by those who share his appreciation of antiquity or who seek an intellectual compass in stormy times. Translated into many languages, his work rightly commands a global audience. For its freshness, Aquinas will only enhance Mclnerny's status as a major interpreter of the Angelic Doctor." -Professor Jude P Dougherty, Dean Emeritus, School of Philosophy, The Catholic University of America

Excerpt: There have been many efforts to characterize the shapes and forms of Thomism as the Leonine revival crested. I propose a threefold division: transcendental Thomism, existential Thomism, and Aristotelian Thomism.

• Transcendental Thomism may be roughly characterized as based on the belief that the Kantian critique is justified. Consequently, if Thomism is to gain a hearing from a world in which that view of Kant is shared, a postcritical Thomas must be fashioned. Marcechal can be considered the father of this movement, which includes such figures as Karl Rahner and Bernard Lonergan, all Jesuits. Maurice Blondel's influence on Henri de Lubac is a variant of transcendental Thomism. To simplify even further, transcendental Thomism, having abandoned epistemological realism, seeks to find in the workings of the human mind warrant for objective truths. This type of Thomism is favored by theologians rather than philosophers, as even its proponents acknowledge.

• Existential Thomism, while it bears some incidental relation to post-war Existentialism, is based upon the conviction that the real composition of essence and existence in everything but God is the clef de voute of Thomism. Etienne Gilson and Cornelio Fabro are the giants of this school, but there are significant differences between them. What is shared is the assumption that the distinction of essence and existence provides a warrant for metaphysics without any dependence on a philosophy of nature. Peculiar to Gilson is his insistence that the order of theology is the order of philosophy for Thomas and that his relation to Aristotle is ultimately antagonistic. In the eyes of critics, existential Thomism, in its final Gilsonian phases, is the abandonment of philosophy in favor of a Christian philosophy indistinguishable from theology.

• Aristotelian Thomism is exemplified in Part II of this presentation. It seems to me clearly to be the most faithful and fruitful approach to Thomas. Moreover, by emphasizing the autonomy of philosophy – though of course for the believer philosophizing is never separate from his faith – it is better able to enter the wider philosophical marketplace. Of course, Aristotle is not in the ascendancy in contemporary philosophy, though he remains a permanent point of reference. Obviously, there are merits in the other approaches to Thomas, and it is a mark of Aristotelian Thomism that it is always on the qui vive for such merits since it aspires to assimilate in the principled way of Thomas himself.

It may be noted that theologians often complain that there has been a tendency to make Thomas into a pure philosopher and ignore the fact that he was by profession a theologian. The counter concern is also heard, that stressing Thomas as theologian has the unfortunate effect of estranging him from ongoing philosophizing. The answer to both these concerns is to be found in Thomas himself, as the discus­sion of the relationship between philosophy and theology.

If we have learned anything in the past few decades it is that our ability to foresee what lies around the corner of time is severely limited. Who would have thought in the heyday of Thomism, at the midpoint of the twentieth century, that the wholesale abandonment of Thomas's doctrine by individuals and institutions lay just ahead? That abandonment, if that is not too strong a term, has had the effect of releasing Thomas into the wider scholarly and philosophical scene, into the public domain. No longer is a person's interest in Thomas taken as prima facie evidence that he is on the verge of conversion to Catholicism – always of course a consummation devoutly to be wished. Unprompted by ecclesiastic approval, any number of philosophers have been drawn to the texts of Thomas. Medieval studies has continued its amazing advance into the third millennium, but not all interest in Thomas is of a historical nature. Interest in Thomas is to be found in the most surprising places. We seem to have entered a phase of its history that could be called freelance Thomism.

Once there were graduate programs fashioned to lead the neophyte into the arcana of Thomas's thought, programs that were, ut ita dicam, both Gilsonian and Maritain-like in their aims. Nowadays, many graduate programs in philosophy feature a Thomist, even two, sometimes as exotic novelties, often on the zoological principle followed by Noah in filling the ark. But even if there be but one, breed­ing occurs and a new generation of freelance Thomists is generated. Their sires – or dames – are sometimes remnants of the Leonine Israel long since dispersed. But as often as not these professors are autodi­dacts rather than disciples of a master or mistress. Once Thomists had organizations and journals and meetings in which to disagree with one another. Now there is something like a secret handshake by which the scattered devotees acknowledge one another.

What is lacking in this diaspora is any sense of representing a minority view, an odd specialty tolerated by the dominant secular trends in philosophy. It remains a mark of the Thomist that he does not consider himself to be engaged in a kind of philosophy. A remark-able statement of that conviction can be found in John Paul II's Fides et Ratio, the Aeterni Patris of our times. The pope begins, as presen­tations of Philosophy 101 often do, with the observation that philo­sophical questions, far from being the puzzles of the sophisticated few, represent large issues no one can fail to face sooner or later. In that sense, everyone is a philosopher by dint of being a human being. But then the question of the variety and rivalry of philo­sophical systems is raised, and the encyclical suggests something extremely important. It is not simply that there are certain questions no human person can fail to ask. There are shared answers to those questions.

Although times change and knowledge increases, it is possible to discern a core of philosophical insight within the history of thought as a whole. Consider, for example, the principles of non-contradiction, finality and causality, as well as the concept of the person as a free and intelligent subject, with the capacity to know God, truth and good­ness. Consider as well certain fundamental moral norms which are shared by all. These are among the indications that, beyond different schools of thought, there exists a body of knowledge which may be judged a kind of spiritual heritage of humanity. It is as if we had come upon an implicit philosophy, as a result of which all feel they possess these principles, albeit in a general and unreflective way. (para. 4)

In Part II (chapter 18) we spoke of the pre-philosophical starting points or principles that Thomas assumes as already known and as non-gainsayable. Surely this is what is being referred to in the passage just quoted. It continues: "Precisely because it is shared in some measure by all, this knowledge should serve as a kind of reference point for the different philosophical schools." This is a succinct statement of the attitude that seems to characterize Thomists now as before. If I have been successful in presenting Thomas's world view in Part II, the reader will understand why the more or less technical vocabulary that is developed is anything but a jargon, some patois that separates the speaker from the mass of mankind. All philo­sophers long to be intelligible, perhaps, but the recognition that such intelligibility requires a warm and continuous relation to the knowledge every human person at least implicitly has is not universally recognized. It is the boast of the Thomist, alas often undercut by his practice, that what he puts forward in argument is the efflorescence of what Fides et Ratio calls "implicit philosophy."

Discovering Aquinas: An Introduction to His Life, Work, and Influence by Aidan Nichols (Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Company) offers a lively and authoritative introduction to the life, thought, and ongoing influence of this singular churchman.
This book could not have come at a better time. After a lengthy period of declining interest in Aquinas, we are starting to see a Thomistic renaissance, including a renewed appreciation for the way Aquinas's work so brilliantly weaves together philosophy, theology, spirituality, revelation, and ethics. As Nichols writes, "It is because of the wonderfully integrated character of the wisdom of Thomas Aquinas — integrated not only as supernatural with natural but also as "thinking with love" — that the church in our day should not leave him as a fresco on a wall but find inspiration from his teaching and example."
By means of writing as felicitous as it is insightful, Nichols chronicles the compelling facts of Aquinas's life, explores the major facets of his thought, establishes Aquinas's historical importance, and shows why many today are regarding him as a vital partner in current debates about the future of Christianity.

Aquinas On Truth

Truth in Aquinas by John Milbank, Catherine Pickstock (Radical Orthodoxy: Routledge) Provocative and sophisticated, Truth in Aquinas challenges all those with an interest in contemporary Christian thought to attend once more to the significance of this key medieval thinker. Milbank and Pickstock present an important re-evaluation of a fundamental area--truth--in the work of Aquinas.

In this book, Milbank and Pickstock present a wholesale re-evaluation of the thought of Thomas Aquinas. They claim, against many received readings, that Aquinas's philosophical account of truth is also an entirely theological one. His understanding of truth as adequatio is shown to be inseparable from his metaphysical and doctrinal treatment of the participation of creatures in God as esse; from his theory of the convertibility of the transcendentals as mediated by the transcendental `beauty'; and from his Christology and theology of the Eucharist. This vision is remote from the assumptions undergirding modern accounts of truth as correspon­dence or coherence or redundancy. Since these accounts are all in crisis, Milbank and Pickstock ask whether Aquinas's theological framework is not essential to the affirmation of the reality of truth as such.

Compelling and challenging, Truth in Aquinas develops further the innovative theological project heralded by the publication of the seminal Radical Orthodoxy (Routledge, 1999).

Excerpt: One can detect four main attitudes toward truth in contemporary thought. The first is a doubt as to the possibility of truth altogether; the second is a confinement of truth to practice rather than theory; the third, a confinement of truth to theory rather than practice, but a theory so esoteric that only a tiny minority is privy to it; the fourth promotes, in the face of the first attitude, a fideistic affirmation of some religious truth or other.

In the case of the denial of the possibility of truth, this can take many different forms. Sometimes truth is regarded as an unnecessary term because it is held to denote simply an affirmation of what is the case. But if this `what is the case' is not held to be true, then it reduces to what appears to be the case, or is held to be the case for certain practical purposes. Sometimes, again, truth is regarded as strictly relative to a certain set of cultural assumptions, and where the latter is regarded as arbitrary, then relativism or conventionalism ensues, with the consequence that there is no truth in any absolute sense. Finally, the same approach can receive an ontological extension, in such a way`that even natural arrangements in time are regarded as aleatory. There may be temporary truths of fact, in the sense of contin­gent events of relation between things, including a relation to human under-standing, but these facts do not arise according to truth in the sense of a coherent logic. For this position, the only truth that remains is the truth of the aleatory itself, which is enthroned as a positive value.

For this first position, then, either truth is inaccessible, or else reality itself is not amenable to notions of truth. In the latter case, one has a full theoretical nihilism, whilst in the former case, one has a kind of practical nihilism.

The second position is an elaboration upon one version of the first. It holds that if truth as correspondence to reality is either unavailable or meaningless, then this is no cause for despair, because truth belongs much more naturally to practical rather than theoretical activity. Sufficient truth for human purposes is available in the successful attainment of humanly sought ends. Such attainment discloses to us a certain reality outside of which lies only vain speculation. However, this attitude drains truth of its connotations of the indefeasible, and of its sense of value. The first consequence follows, because if human achievement provides us no clue as to what is ultimately the case, then it is no more than a fleeting and contingent set of contrived circumstances Such circumstances may be true for a time, as truths of factual occurrence, but can in the end prove not true at all. For while, certainly, human access to truth can only be time-bound, if truth has no connotations of the eternal and abiding, then it is hard to see why it is called truth at all.

The second consequence follows because if the only measure of the truth of a practice is its success, then anything that works is regarded as just as good as anything else, so long as it works also, without regard for any judgement as to the inherent desirability of what has been constructed. In this fashion, truth becomes detached from the good. Furthermore, the criterion of success ushers in a bad infinite, for when is one to decree that a process has reached its ripeness? The boundaries of truth so understood perpetually recede, and can only halt by dint of the imposition of an arbitrary assertion of will. So here again a truth confined to time proves elusive within time.

The third position, by contrast, possesses an unbounded confidence not just in the truth of natural science, but in its ability to provide a true ontology rather than merely a very limited disclosure of certain aspects of reality lending themselves to manipulation and prediction (as the present authors would rather assume). Here the truth of science resides not merely in the success of its operations, as for the second position above, but rather in what those operations are held to reveal. In this way, truth is here an entirely theoretical matter and this is all the more the case because truth as a property of the way things are is seen to be entirely indifferent to the goodness of things and to their beauty and value for human beings.

It is characteristic of modern natural science that it will hold something to be true which is extremely counter-intuitive and often remote from what people think to be the case, and indeed from what they are capable of understanding. This imposes a gulf between the everyday world and the ironic gaze of the scientific sage from the height of his privileged insight. Truth, therefore, of the most ultimate kind has here become the property of an élite, by the same token that it is freed from its traditional convertibility with the good and the beautiful. Increasingly, this cold truth is regarded as the only truth, and society, to the detriment of democracy, allows its guardians to take vital decisions which the rest of us can scarcely comprehend.

The fourth position can be regarded as essentially reactive. In the face of secular skepticism, pragmatism and positivism, many religious people tend to take refuge in the notion that there is nonetheless another source of truth enshrined in certain texts, practices and traditions. Ironically, for these texts, practices and traditions to acquire absolute authority outside the workings of human reason, they have to be regarded positivistically, in a fashion which mimics scientific positivism itself. The irrational strangely colludes with the most vigorously reduced rationalism, and often one finds that various funda­mentalisms and fideisms are able happily to coexist with, and even to re­inforce, the technoscientific capitalism of our day.

Against the background of the above delineated crisis of truth, the present authors have undertaken a new reading of Aquinas's understanding of truth. We have turned to Aquinas because, in his writings, one can discover an entirely different approach to truth which allows one, first of all, to recover correspondence without a sense of redundancy; secondly, to regard truth as at once theoretical and practical; thirdly, to demonstrate that all truth is a matter of faith as well as reason, and vice versa; and, fourthly, to indicate that truth is immediately accessible to the simplest apprehension, and yet amenable to profound learned elaboration.

The first chapter, `Truth and correspondence', seeks to show that the notion of truth as correspondence is in crisis only because it is taken in an epistemological rather than ontological sense. Usually Aquinas himself has been read anachronistically according to the canons of epistemology, and read this way, he has nothing to offer contemporary thought. However, we seek to show that in Aquinas, correspondence indicates a real ontological proportion between being and intelligence in a perspective where these are regarded as transcendentally convertible. For Aquinas, within the human modus, there is a distinction between intelligence and being, and yet also an unfathomable link between them which we dimly discern according to an act of aesthetic judgement. This perspective ensures that truth does not simply reduce to our mode of apprehension of what is the case, as is bound to occur on the epistemological model for which the intellect is accorded no necessary ontological dignity, but is merely supposed to mirror a reality itself indifferent to being comprehended. This possibility of retrieving truth as corres­pondence, and therefore truth itself in a strong sense, is however indissociably linked with Aquinas's theology and metaphysics of participation.

In the second chapter, it will be shown how Aquinas's general theory of truth applies both to his understanding of the operation of reason and to the operation of faith. We will argue that, contrary to usual readings, reason and faith in Aquinas represent only different degrees of intensity of particip­ation in the divine light of illumination and different measures of absolute vision. And, furthermore, that reason itself requires faith because it already presupposes the operation of grace, while, inversely, faith still demands discursive argumentation and is only higher than reason because it enjoys a deeper participation in the divine reason which is direct intuition or pure intellectual vision. In this way, Aquinas offers no support to`those who claim that there can be a philosophical approach to God independent of theology, but neither, on the other hand, does he offer support to those who demand a confinement to Biblical revelation independent of the Greek legacy of metaphysical reflection. Rather, it will be shown that, for Aquinas, revealed theology supplements metaphysics with history and requires a completion of the theoretical ascent to truth with a meeting of the divine descent in liturgical practice.

The commencement of this descent is at the Incarnation. In the third chapter, it will be shown not only how, for Aquinas, truth is only restored for fallen men by the hypostatic union, but also how this restoration involves certain ontological revisions in excess of their occasion: namely the conjoining of an ontic event with esse ipsum and a kenotic elevation of the sensory over the intellectual, and more specifically the sensory as touch. In Christ, this new sensorial access to truth is something one both contemplates and reproduces through the enactment of the sacraments.

This double relation to Christ corresponds to the way in which, for Aquinas, truth in God is both something envisaged and something actively performed by the Father in the Logos. Because we participate in this truth, for us also it is something that we see as a reflection of the invisible in the visible, and, at same time, something that we construct, as-it were unwit­tingly, through our artistic and liturgical attempts to praise the divine. Seeing and making are combined in the mutuality of touch which is most intensely taste; and the Eucharist, as foretaste of our beatitude, newly discloses to us that this supreme intuition is itself also a `touching'.

In the fourth chapter, the nature of this liturgical completion of truth is elaborated. Here it will be shown how we have a certain anticipation of the beatific vision in this life because God descends in the Incarnation and its perpetuation in the Eucharist to our immediate sensory awareness, wherein alone we enjoy intuitive understanding. In this fashion, it is the lower reason which is required to educate our higher reason, although this new priority of the sensory is accompanied by a linguistic and emotional play between presence and absence. For Aquinas's Catholic position, the most abstruse intellectual reflection on`truth passes into the more profound and ineffable apprehension of truth in the Eucharist. In this way, there is no gulf for him between the most elite and the most common. 

Summa Theologica

One can find the entire Summa Theologica online but this useful CD-ROM Edition is easier to use and search.

St. Thomas Aquinas and the Summa Theologica CD-ROM Edition (Harmony Media) This CD-ROM is a collection of several of the works of St. Thomas Aquinas (1225 - 1274), also known as the "Angelic Doctor" and honored as the Patron of Catholic Schools. Because of his clarity of thought and massive systematic theological output, St. Thomas is considered the greatest theologian in the Church's history. Hence the importance of a software product devoted to his work.

The core of this program is the Summa Theologica, which is still referenced in the major works of theology today including the new Catechism of the Catholic Church. The entire English Dominican Fathers' translation of the Summa is included here, not merely major portions. The user will be glad to find that all inter-textual references are hyperlinked as are all biblical references linked with the Revised Standard Version of the Bible: Catholic Edition. Some of the references have been modified to match the verse ordering of the current biblical translation.

The goal of the CD-ROM was to understand the Catholic faith as St. Thomas Aquinas did. While the Summa Theologica provides the strong doctrinal foundation, the Holy Bible and the Bible Commentary provide the necessary counter-balance of Divine Revelation.

This CD-ROM includes:

• SUMMA THEOLOGICA: The Summa Theologica is organized into three main parts. They are accordingly named, the First Part, Second Part and Third Part. The First Part focuses on God Himself and as Creator. The Second Part is divided into two sections: Part 1 God as the end of Man and Part 2 Man's return to God. The Third Part looks into Christ who is the way of man to God.
  Each part is organized into treatises, questions and articles. For example, under the Treatise on Sacred Doctrine, there is one question. That question is addressed in ten articles or points of inquiry. St. Thomas then addresses those articles by first explaining the main objections (OBJ) to his point, then providing his answer (I answer that) and replying to the objections (Reply OBJ).
• COMMENTARY ON THE GOSPELS: In the Catena Aurea, a Commentary on the Four Gospels, St. Thomas collects portions of the works of the Fathers of the Church, edits and synthesizes them into a single body of scriptural commentary. Organized by each of the four Gospel writers, the Catena begins by putting forth the verses to be analyzed and then takes each verse phrase by phrase and provides the early Fathers' insights into the passage.
• PRAYERS AND HYMNS: In the Prayers and Hymns of St. Thomas Aquinas, six of the Angelic Doctor's purported works are presented in both the English and Latin translations.
• SUMMA EXCURSION: In the Summa Excursion, a main point from each question is presented and then illustrated with photos and art. References to the main document are hyperlinked at the end of the excerpt.
• HOLY BIBLE: The Revised Standard Version: Catholic Edition is presented here as a particularly appropriate choice for a companion Bible. The RSV is usually the source chosen for references in Church documents and most recently, the new Catechism of the Catholic Church.

Ethics of Aquinas

The Ethics of Aquinas edited by Stephen J. Pope (Moral Traditions Series: Georgetown University Press)  "A remarkable set of in-depth background essays by scholars of erudition, balanced judgment, and clarity of thought. . . . This is a rich and unparalleled resource for scholars of theological ethics." Lisa Sowle Cahill, Monan Professor of Theology, Boston College

In this comprehensive anthology, twenty-seven outstanding scholars from North America and Europe address every major aspect of Thomas Aquinas's understanding of morality and comment on his remarkable legacy.

The opening chapters of The Ethics of Aquinas  introduce readers to the sources, methods, and major themes of Aquinas's ethics. Part II of the book provides an extended discussion of ideas in the Second Part of the Summa Theologiae, in which contributors present cogent interpretations of the structure, major arguments, and themes of each of the treatises. The third and final part examines the legacy of Thomistic ethics for the twentieth century and today.

These essays reflect a diverse group of scholars representing a variety of intellectual perspectives. Contributors span numerous fields of study, including intellectual history, medieval studies, moral philosophy, religious ethics, and moral theology. This remarkable variety underscores how interpretations of Thomas's ethics continue to develop and evolve—and stimulate fervent discussion within the academy and the church.

Recent years have witnessed a remarkable revival of interest in the ethics of Thomas Aquinas. Scholars have produced books and articles on the life of Aquinas, his spirituality, and his understanding of the relation between faith and reason, nature and grace, reason and faith, and other theological themes. Moralists have writ-ten on his accounts of human acts and agency, happiness, the will, the virtues, and various special topics. Some authors provide brief and very general overviews of Thomistic ethics, but none offers a comprehensive treatment of the basic moral arguments and content of Aquinas's major moral work, the Second Part of the Summa theologiae. This work intends to fill this lacuna.

This book addresses a fairly wide audience. It intends to attract the attention of experts, but also to assist readers who are interested, but not necessarily specialists, in the moral thought of Aquinas. Its essays complement, but do not substitute for, a careful study of the primary texts.

The chapters in this volume reflect a variety of intellectual perspectives. The contributors come from numerous fields, including intellectual history, medieval studies, moral philosophy, religious ethics, and moral theology. Some authors have spent a lifetime working with specific texts of Aquinas, others draw from Aquinas as one among a number of resources that help address their primary concerns with contemporary moral issues. As a whole, the contributors to this volume represent a spectrum of viewsabout the meaning and contemporary normative significance of Aquinas's moral thought. They certainly do not comprise a single school of thought. This variety underscores the way in which Thomistic ethics continues to be the scene of lively intellectual development.

The citations in the essays come from a variety of Thomistic texts (including various different texts of the Summa). Some scholars use the latest critical editions made available by the Leonine Commission; others draw from alter-native standard editions such as those published by Marietti. Each author furnishes an English translation of the words of Aquinas in the body of his or her chapter; readers who wish to consult the Latin texts can find them in the notes.

A word about the structure of the volume is in order. The initial chapters introduce`readers to the sources, methods, and major themes of Aquinas's ethics. These orienting essays will be especially helpful for readers who have less familiarity with Aquinas's theology than some others.

The second, more lengthy, part of the book provides an extended discussion of the treatises presented in the Second Part of the Summa. Aquinas himself did not divide the text according to "treatises," but, for the sake of clarity and order, we use this conventional system of demarcation. These chapters are not exactly "commentaries" in the sense of a line-by-line explication of texts; our authors do not provide any critical discussion relating to the establishment of reliable texts, or much in the way of philological and grammatical analysis. They seek only to present cogent interpretations of the structure, major arguments, and themes of each of the "treatises."

The third part of this volume examines various aspects of Thomist ethics in the twentieth century and beyond. Some of the contributors to this section trace various movements within Thomist moral philosophy and moral theology in the last century, others take a more prospective view of future developments of Thomist ethics. These chapters make it abundantly clear that far from being a monolithic and static moral theory, Thomism is a tradition of inquiry that continues to experience the same kind of development that marks other such traditions.

Introduction to Summa Theologica

The Thought of Thomas Aquinas by Brian Davies (Clarendon Paperbacks: Oxford University Press) Thomas Aquinas was one of the greatest Western philosophers and one of the greatest theologians of the Christian church. In this book we at last have a modern, comprehensive presentation of the total thought of Aquinas. Books on Aquinas invariably deal with either his philosophy or his theology. But Aquinas himself made no arbitrary division between his philosophical and his theological thought, and this book allows readers to see him as a whole. It introduces the full range of Aquinas' thinking; and it relates his thinking to writers both earlier and later than Aquinas himself. This book is intended for scholars and students of theology, philosophy, and medieval thought.|/span>

This book represents a long overdue modern comprehensive presentation of the total thought of Aquinas. While traditional studies of Aquinas invariably deal with either his philosophy or his theology, Davies introduces the full range of Aquinas's thinking, relating it to writers earlier and later than Aquinas himself. The book will be of considerable interest to professional theologians and philosophers, as well as to those with particular interest in medieval thinking. It is designed to be accessible to the general reader who has no specialist knowledge of medieval thought or professional training in philosophy or theology.

To study the Summa Theologiae- to do some Summa-wrestling- requires a good grasp of traditional logic, a thorough grasp of Aristotelian-Thomistic metaphysics, and some Thomistic natural philosophy. Understandably, very few have this background, and that is the beauty of Davies' book. Believe it or not, the Summa Theol. was meant for beginners. It's not, but Davies' book certainly is. Davies assumes nothing more than a desire to understand St. Thomas and his greatest work.Davies' writing is both lucid and luminous, just like the fellow Dominican who's thought he is writing about. The Southern writer Flannery O'Conner once wrote (in Wise Blood) that "Thomism usually comes in horrible wrappers." Unfortunately O'Connor never had the pleasure of reading Brian Davies.

Aquinas On Evil

On Evil (De Maleo) by Thomas Aquinas, translated by Richard Regan, introduction and notes by Brian Davies (Oxford University Press) (Paperback) The De Malo represents some of Aquinas' most mature thinking on goodness, badness, and human agency. In it he examines the full range of questions associated with evil: its origin, its nature, its relation to good, and its compatibility with the existence of an omnipotent, benevolent God. This edition offers the Leonine Commission's authoritative edition of the Latin text with Regan's new, clear English translation and an extensive introduction by Brian Davies.

Excerpt: Prospective readers of the De malo may expect to find in it an extended discussion of what is nowadays commonly called "the problem of evil." That is to say, they might expect to find Aquinas dealing directly in it with questions like "Does evil show that there is no God?" or "How can belief in the reality of evil be reconciled with belief in the existence of a good, omniscient, and omnipotent God?" But should the De malo be read as an essay on "the problem of evil' in this sense? The most accurate and short answer to this question is "No." For Aquinas in the De malo never attempts to defend belief in the existence of God. Throughout the text he takes it for granted that God certainly exists. And he never tries to show that we can consistently believe both that there is evil and that God exists. His discussion proceeds on the assumption that evil and God are both somehow there to be talked about. But his treatment of evil in the De malo, and what he says about it in other works, can still be read as engaging with what I am calling "the problem of evil." And we need to be clear as to how this is so.

To begin with, we need to note that there are some popular ways of approaching the problem of evil of which Aquinas does not avail himself. In particular, so I need to stress, he makes no attempt to show that the evil we encounter is something permitted by God for a morally sufficient reason. Also, so I must emphasize, Aquinas never tries to argue that evil arises by virtue of causes over which God has no control. Those who believe in God's existence despite evils occurring often suggest that these evils can always be viewed as necessary means to a good end and that God is morally justified in allowing them or in bringing them about. They often also argue that much occurring evil consists in or derives from the bad moral choices of creatures and that God is therefore not to be blamed for it. But this is not how Aquinas thinks. Why not? Partly because he does not think that the goodness of God is that of someone always acting with morally sufficient reasons. But also because he does not think that the choices of creatures derive from them as opposed to God. Or, to put things another way: God, for Aquinas, is not a good moral agent; and, for Aquinas, the choices of creatures always show forth the action of God, not his permission of actions that somehow arise only from agents other than himself.

With respect to God's goodness, Aquinas's point is not, of course, that God is immoral or submoral. Rather, it is that God cannot be the sort of thing we have in mind when we allude to agents acting (or failing to act) with morally sufficient reasons (i.e., for the most part, people). As we have seen, Aquinas has a lot to say on moral agency. But he does not take what we have seen him to think about this as applicable to God. For him, God is good not because God, like a virtuous human being, is well behaved, but because God is the source of all creaturely goodness which, in turn, reflects (in all its diversity) what God is by essence eternally. Or, in Aquinas's words:

Goodness should be associated above all with God. For goodness is consequent upon desirability. Now things desire their perfection; and an effect's perfection and form consists in resembling its cause, since what a thing does reflects what it is. So the cause itself is desirable and can be called "good," what is desired from it being a share in resembling it. Clearly, then, since God is the primary operative cause of everything, goodness and desirability belong to him.

For Aquinas, created things are made by God, and they all seek to be themselves (they seek their good) by acting in accordance with what God intends (has in mind) for them. For this reason Aquinas suggests that, in seeking (tending to) their good, creatures are manifesting a kind of blueprint in the divine mind, that "all things are said to be good by divine goodness, which is the pattern, source and goal of all goodness." As he sees it, this means that they are seeking God. For their goal is something that lies in God as their maker. God is that by virtue of which there is something instead of nothing. So he is the ultimate maker, the ultimately desirable, the ultimate good. He is the omega because he is the alpha. He is the end (what is desirable) because he is the beginning.

So what does God's goodness therefore amount to in detail? Aquinas does not claim to know. For, as we have seen, he takes God to be fundamentally incomprehensible to us. It is clear, however, that he does not take God's goodness to be that of something like a human being acting in the light of moral considerations. He certainly thinks that terms signifying human moral perfections can be predicated of God. He is clear that we can speak of God as just, truthful, or loving, for instance. But words that designate moral perfections in human beings do not, for him, signify God's moral integrity. They signify what flows from God and what must be somehow in God if God is the source of the being of things. But they do not signify moral attributes had by God as some of his creatures can be said to have such attributes. For Aquinas, therefore, questions like "Does God act with an eye on morally sufficient reasons?" or "Is God well behaved?" are irrelevant when it comes to thinking about God and evil (they are effectively like asking whether God always takes care to keep himself fit, or whether he does enough to provide for his retirement). They spring from confusing the Creator with his creatures.

As for Aquinas on choices independent of God, we have already seen how Aquinas thinks on the matter. For, as I noted above, even free human actions are, for Aquinas, caused by God. A popular line of reasoning frequently advanced in discussions of God and evil runs thus:

1. Much evil is the result of what people freely choose to do.
2. It is good that there should be a world with agents able to act freely, and a world
3. containing such agents would be better than a world of puppets controlled by God.
4. Even an omnipotent God cannot ensure that free people act well (for, if they are
5. free and not puppets controlled by God, what they do is up to them).
6. Therefore, much evil is explicable in terms of God allowing for the possible consequences of his willing a great good.

But this "free will defense," as it is usually called, is simply unavailable to Aquinas, given his account of God as the source of the beings of things and given how he applies it with respect to the actions of reasoning, creaturely agents. For him, there is no such thing as a real creaturely choice that is not caused by God. 

How, then, does Aquinas view evil in the light of God's existence? What, positively speaking, does he say about the problem of evil? If we take what we find him maintaining in the De malo, and if we read it together with his other writings, the main points he makes are these: 

1. God cannot be thought of as a creative cause of evil since evil always consists of absence or a failure to be.
2. All things created by God are good (considered as real or actual). Indeed, they are nothing but good since God (as Creator) makes things to be and since something is good insofar as it exists (is real or actual).
3. Things are had insofar as they fail in some respect. The failure in bad things cannot be thought of as creatively caused by God, though things may sometimes fail because God is bringing it about that other things do well (because God is bringing some good about).
4. Moral evil occurs as free, rational agents turn from what is actually good in order to pursue other goals. As with all evil, its "reality" is that of failure. And it is not something creatively made by God.
5. All that is real when evil comes about is caused to be by God, who is the source of all good.

What Aquinas means by these theses should be relatively clear from what I have written above. Here, therefore, the point most worth stressing, perhaps, is that Aquinas's contribution to discussions of the "the problem of evil" is essentially a negative one. For it is mostly concerned to stress that God does not creatively make evil to be.

At the same time, however (and bearing in mind what he does not want to say on the matter), Aquinas's approach to the topic of God and evil is a rounded and distinctive one. And it is grounded in a whole way of thinking about a variety of questions, not just those that might naturally occur to someone reflecting on what is nowadays often meant by "the problem of evil." Aquinas turns directly to some of these questions in the De malo. And, though it is only in other writings that he deals more directly with the rest, his discussions in the De malo frequently hark back to or presuppose what he says elsewhere. For this reason, as for others, the De malo is one of the works of Aquinas to which readers might most profitably be directed as they seek to understand him in general.

Contemplative Roots of the Trinity

Scripture and Metaphysics: Aquinas and the Renewal of Trinitarian Theology by Matthew Webb Levering (Challenges in Contemporary Theology: Blackwell Publishers) (Hardcover) In this major contribution to contemporary theological and philosophical debates, Matthew Levering bridges the gap between scriptural and metaphysical approaches to the triune God.

Levering's argument rests upon St. Thomas Aquinas's understanding of theology as contemplative wisdom. Taking us through Aquinas's theology of God as One and Three, he demonstrates that Trinitarian theology should be a spiritual exercise assisting our movement from self- to God-centeredness. Crucial to the spiritual exercise is the contemplative appropriation of biblical revelation, which, Levering argues, has to be joined to a correspondingly rich metaphysical analysis if the "God" who is revealed is to be understood in a non-idolatrous fashion. In chapters that broadly follow the structure of Aquinas's treatise on God in his Summa Theologiae, Levering engages with a wide range of contemporary theologians, biblical exegetes, and philosophers.

Excerpt: For Aquinas, Trinitarian theology is ultimately ordered to contempla­tive union, and so at the outset we can note that his Trinitarian theology is not isolated from his doctrine of salvation. In the Eucharistic liturgy, in which the whole Mystical Body shares in Christ's sacrificial fulfillment of Israel's Torah, Christ's members (as the perfect Temple) manifest God's name by worshipping the Trinity. By sharing in the self-emptying form of Christ, revealed by the Spirit in word and sacrament, Christ's cruciform members already mystically "see" the Father. This liturgical union with the Trinity is contemplative, although as a liturgical union requiring the active holiness of Christ's members, Christian contemplation is not thereby bifurcated or cut off from Christian action. As the Fathers and medieval theologians recognized, the contemplative liturgical union with the Trinity that is enjoyed by believers whose faith is formed by charity, is expressed theologically in contemplative and metaphysical modes.

The goal of this book, therefore, is sharing in the Church's manifestation of God's "name" by renewing the practices of theological contem­plation. The first chapter of the book treats sacra doctrina, the sacred teaching or wisdom that is knowledge of God and all things in relation to God. This chapter argues that appropriating the revealed sacred teach­ing has always demanded, even for the biblical authors, metaphysical ques­tioning. Indeed, the practice of metaphysical questioning constitutes a spiritual exercise that purifies from idolatry those who would contemplate the self-revealing God. This unity between rational investigation and con­templative beatitude finds wonderful expression in St. Athanasius's understanding of human sharing in the divine image:

They would be no better than the beasts, had they no knowledge save of earthly things; and why should God have made them at all, if He had not intended them to know Him? But, in fact, the good God has given them a share in His own Image, that is, in our Lord Jesus Christ, and has made even themselves after the same Image and Likeness. Why? Simply in order that through this gift of God-likeness in themselves they may be able to perceive the Image Absolute, that is the Word Himself, and through Him apprehend the Father; which knowledge of their Maker is for men the only really happy and blessed life.

The alleged opposition between metaphysics and salvation history in theology founders when confronted with this understanding of salvation (in history) as holy contemplation, an understanding shared by Aquinas.

The remaining chapters continue in systematic fashion the book's discus­sion of divine "being" with various theologians, most importantly St. Thomas Aquinas." The chapters span the themes contained in Aquinas's treatise on God in the Summa Theologiae 1, qq.2–42. While not directly treating q.43, on the temporal missions of the Son and Spirit, the bookengages this topic by emphasizing the scriptural and soteriological founda­tion of Aquinas's theology of God." Chapters 2 and 3 address God in his unity, in dialogue with Jewish and Christian theologians whose concern is that Aquinas's account of God's "attributes" (what one can say about God as one) distort, in a supersessionist and onto-theological manner, the one living God revealed as YHWH to Israel as narrated in the Old Testament. Chapters 4 through 7 then explore aspects of the theology of the Trinity. Chapter 4 asks whether the Paschal mystery of Jesus Christ is revelatory of the Trinity in such a way as to constitute an analogy for the Trinity. This chapter inquires into the modes by which we understand the "distinction" of Persons in God. The fifth chapter extends this topic by directly consider­ing Aquinas's account of the "psychological analogy" as a means of under-standing the Persons as subsisting relations. In both the fourth and fifth chapters, at stake is whether Aquinas's analogy for understanding the Trinity is grounded sufficiently in God's revelation in Scripture."

The sixth chapter turns to Aquinas's description of the Persons of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Here the theologians in light of whose work I contextualize Aquinas's views are biblical exegetes. Aquinas's description

of the Persons can seem far from the narrative reality that one meets in the New Testament and in the "biblical theology" practiced by contem­porary biblical exegetes. This chapter inquires into whether Aquinas's highly metaphysical (speculative) account treats the themes of "biblical theology," and if so, what is gained by Aquinas's nonnarrative approach. Lastly, the seventh chapter addresses the movement in theology towards developing a metaphysics that is properly theological, in other words a Trinitarian metaphysics. After examining the work of proponents of this development in light of classical Jewish and Muslim concerns, I argue that Aquinas's nuanced analysis of the relationship of "essence" and "Persons" accomplishes the main goals of proponents of "Trinitarian ontology," without creating the conceptual and interreligious problems that Trinitar­ian ontology creates. Aquinas's approach retains the integrity of the Old Testament revelation while fully displaying its integration into Christ Jesus' definitive revelation of God.

In short, the book aims both at reordering contemporary Trinitarian theology and at identifying further "signposts," as Walker Percy might put it, along the contemplative path marked out by God himself in Scripture and tradition. I hope to show that by following a path of contemplation (grounded in the active holiness that sharing in Christ's salvific fulfillment of Israel's Torah involves), Trinitarian theology remains fully inserted within Christ's salvific fulfillment of Israel's Temple, where God's name, against the idols, is manifested.

Aquinas on Faith & Science

Knowledge and Faith in Thomas Aquinas by John I. Jenkins (Cambridge University Press) offers a revisionary account of key epistemological concepts and doctrines of St. Thomas Aquinas, particularly his concept of scientia (science). It proposes a new interpretation of the purpose and composition of Aquinas' most mature and influential work, the Summa theologiae, which has traditionally been regarded as a work for neophytes in theology. John Jenkins' comprehensive and original study will be of interest to readers in philosophy, theology and medieval studies.

Excerpt: The questions of Thomas Aquinas about knowledge and faith are not ours. Twentieth-century philosophers have tried to find in Aquinas answers to our questions, but with predictable results: his detractors have found him either confused or simple-minded, while many of his supporters have tended to assimilate his thought to one or another modern philosophers. Both, I contend, have misunderstood his thought. We cannot find our questions in Aquinas's writings because the interrelated cluster of epistemic concepts denoted by the terms he uses – such as cognitio, intelligere, notitia, credere, opinio, fides and especially scientia – differ in varying degrees from our concepts of cognition, understanding, knowledge, belief, opinion, faith and science. Thus when Aquinas raises broadly epistemic questions, he does so in a different conceptual framework, and in this framework a different set of propositions is considered unproblematic, and another set is open to question. There are undoubtedly affinities between Aquinas's questions and our own, and many of his concerns are quite similar to ours. Still, I want to argue, in an important sense which has not been fully appreciated in the literature, Aquinas asks different questions and pursues different ends in his inquiries. My particular concern in this work will be with the central notion of scientia in Aquinas, and how this concept plays a role in the scientia of sacred doctrine, the scientia of Christian theology which is based upon faith and presented in Aquinas's magnum opus, the Summa theologiae...

In the first chapter of this book I examine Aquinas's understanding of Aristotle's notion of scientia (in the Latin translation Aquinas used), as this is presented in Aquinas's commentary on the Posterior Analytics. The Aristotelian view as presented in this work and in Aquinas's commentary is complex and not easily summarized. A noteworthy feature of this account, however, is that a condition for perfect scientia of some predication is that not only must one know the cause of this predication being true (in the Aristotelian sense of formal, material, efficient or final cause), but one must also know the cause better than its effect. The reason for this rather stringent requirement is that, for perfect scientia, one's awareness of the cause must eventually become the cause of one's awareness of the effect.

This condition for scientia, which seems strange to modern ears, has important implications for the process of acquisition of scientia within a certain field. To acquire such scientia two stages are necessary. In a first stage one becomes familiar with the fundamental concepts within the field and discovers the causes, and thus becomes able to say which causes bring about which effects. In addition to this, however, a second stage is also required which will make the causes sufficiently well known that they become the foundation of one's thinking in that field, and one's knowledge of the causes becomes the cause of one's knowledge of the effects. To use an anachronistic example, consider a car mechanic who knows very well that when octane is combined with oxygen and a spark is applied, combustion occurs. He may even be able to recite the cause of this; he may have learned, through reading it or being told, that octane reacts with oxygen because it has the chemical structure of an alkane hydrocarbon. However, though he in some sense knows the cause of octane's combustibility, he does not have scientia of this fact until he becomes so familiar with the respective structures of hydrogen, carbon and alkane hydrocarbons such as octane that his knowledge of octane's combustibility flows from, is caused by, his knowledge of these chemical forms. The second stage in the acquisition of a scientiais meant to bring about the required familiarity with the cause in a field. Its purpose is to induce habits of thought, intellectual habits, in virtue of which a person's knowledge of the cause becomes the cause of; the epistemic grounds for, his knowledge of the effect. Its purpose, that is, is to make one's thinking in a particular field mirror the order of causality.

In chapter two I argue that in the Summa theologiae Aquinas adopts the Aristotelian notion of scientia, or at least something quite close to it. The structure of the scientia of the Summa theologiae, sacred doctrine or Christian theology, differs from other forms of scientia which humans can have, for in it humans participate in God's own scientia. The principles of this scientia are the articles of faith which have been revealed by God and accepted in faith. Although these principles cannot be fully understood and must remain mysteries in this life, and although this scientia transcends many of the limitations to which other scientiae are subject, sacred doctrine is properly a scientia subject to the fundamental conditions of an Aristotelian scientia.

In chapter three I draw the consequences of the preceding analysis for our understanding of the Summa theologiae and sacred doctrine. There I argue that the Summa was not written for neophytes in the study of theology, as has been widely thought, but was a pedagogical work for very advanced students who had come to the second stage in the acquisition of this scientia. That is, it was intended as a work for students who were already familiar with Christian theology, its concepts and principles, and the philosophy it presupposes, but who stood in need of the intellectual habituation by which the principles in the field, the articles of faith, become the foundation and cause of their thinking about matters in this field. Thus the Summa theologiae offers a synoptic view of the field which, as much as possible, moves from causes to effects so that the proper habits of thought are instilled.

My interpretation of Aquinas on scientia and sacred doctrine raises a question about his view of how we apprehend the principles of the various scientiae. If one's knowledge of principles is to be the cause of one's knowledge of conclusions, and if scientia is to be a practical ideal for inquiry and pedagogy, it must be a practical possibility for us to know the principles of the scientia and to know them better than its conclusions. In chapters four to six I take up this question. In chapter four I give a general sketch of Aquinas's account of our apprehension of the principles of scientiae which are not based upon divine revelation, but on natural human cognitive powers. Aquinas, I contend, held views according to which the required apprehension of principles in these scientiae is at least possible.

In chapter six I consider assent to the principles of sacred doctrine, the articles of faith. Against the standard interpretations, I argue that Aquinas did not think that this assent is inferred from any conclusions of natural theology, nor that it is due to a command of the will which overrides a lack of evidence. Rather one is able immediately to apprehend these propositions as divinely revealed. To prepare for this, I consider in chapter five the nature of grace, which elevates our natural powers, and the theological virtues and Gifts which are due to divine grace.

In the final chapter, I take up two final objections to my reading of the Summa theologiae as a whole and the sort of intellectual virtue which it was trying to instill. This will provide an opportunity to review the way we can acquire the scientia of sacred doctrine. The perfection of this scientia, which is the highest wisdom, is only attained after one's life on this earth when he enjoys the vision of the divine essence and knows other things through God's essence. In this life, however, we can attain an inchoate realization of it which will help us attain the perfect state. I summarize just how the Summa theologiae is meant to instill the imperfect state.

"Philosophy in the ancient world began in wonder," Henry Frankfurt recently observed. "In the modern world, of course, it began in doubt." One might add that the philosophy which began in wonder sought wisdom, while that which began in doubt sought indubitable, or certain, or reliable information about the world. If we take philosophy in its classical sense, as the love of and search for wisdom, the whole of Aquinas's thought, even his Christian theology, can be called philosophical. And, in this wider sense of philosophy, the whole of Aquinas's thought stood within the ancient philosophical tradition. Aquinas was, of course, distinguished from earlier pagan thinkers in that he believed the wisdom philosophy sought could not be fully attained by strictly natural human powers, or in this world. He learned much from his reading of Aristotle and Aristotelians, but his fundamental concern was to understand and articulate a Christian wisdom. This wisdom could not be had through natural, human reasoning, but was possible only through Christian faith and through living a life informed by love of God and neighbor, a love which is realizable only if God elevates us beyond our nature. According to Aquinas's Christian vision, we attain perfect wisdom in heaven, when we will see God as He is (Mt 5:8), and know all other things in and through our grasp of divine essence. Then we will know perfectly, even as we are known (I Cor. 13:12). Indeed, then we will be like God, for we will see God as He is (I Jn 3:2).

My contention, then, is that we distort Aquinas's thought if we remove it from this ancient philosophical tradition and try to find and make central the issues of modern philosophy. A further consequence of my study will be that we miss the impetus and tenor of his thought if we consider elements of it apart from the specifically Christian wisdom which is its end, its Lelos. Aquinas's writings have, I believe, been subject to both sorts of distortion.

My concern in what follows, then, will be with understanding certain pivotal aspects of Aquinas's thought, particularly his concept of scientia and the nature of his project in the Summa theologiae. I will not try to argue whether Aquinas is right or wrong, whether ultimately his views can be defended or whether they must be rejected. As was said, scholarship on Aquinas has often been hampered because scholars were too quick to try to defend his views as viable in the contemporary philosophical debate, and failed to understand them fully. We shall find that simply to understand Aquinas on several key points on which he has been misunderstood will be quite enough to occupy us in the following pages. A sustained and systematic critique or defense of Aquinas's views must be the subject of subsequent work.

Nevertheless, although my concern will be limited to the historical or interpretive question of what Aquinas thought, I hope it will be of some use to those interested in the viability of contemporary Thomism. Since the end of the Second Vatican Council the influence of the central figures of twentieth century Neo-Scholasticism – such as Maréchal, Maritain and Gilson – has waned. But in their place has arisen some excellent work on both understanding and developing Aquinas's views. My hope is that my efforts will aid this strand of contemporary Thomism.

Among Neo-Scholastic Thomists we find a tendency to define Thomism by some set or core of unalterable doctrines. Difficulties arose, however, when someone argued that one or more of these doctrines was not in fact in Aquinas's writings, or was in fact false. Alasdair Maclntyre has argued that a better way to think of Thomism is as a tradition. A tradition is defined with respect to a certain language, shared beliefs, institutions and practices. In the course of time debates, conflicts and inquiries lead those working within a tradition to modify and revise not only the doctrines under consideration, but also aspects of the shared language, background beliefs, institutions and practices. Nevertheless the continuity of debate and inquiry makes for the continuity of an identifiable tradition. If we understand Thomism as a tradition, we can see how we can critique or modify certain doctrines of Aquinas, and yet still remain faithful to the tradition.

Certainly there is much in Aquinas's thought which contemporary thinkers, even contemporary Thomists, will find untenable in light of subsequent scientific, philosophical and theological developments. It would truly be miraculous (in Aquinas's sense of this term) if, given the work of the past seven hundred years, that were not the case. However, I believe that any careful study of Aquinas's views will reveal much that is philosophically and theologically suggestive, true and profound. The most viable contemporary Thomism is one which takes its start from Aquinas's texts, but subjects Aquinas's claims to critical examination, and develops and revises them in light of this subsequent criticism and inquiry. It is this sort of work which constitutes a Thomistic tradition. It is hoped that my effort to reach a better understanding of this medieval Master will also illumine possibilities for the Thomistic tradition.

On Summa Contra Gentiles

Dialectic and Narrative in Aquinas: An Interpretation of the Summa Contra Gentiles by Thomas S. Hibbs (Revisions: a Series of Books on Ethics: University of Notre Dame Press) investigates the intent, method, and structural unity of Thomas Aquinas's Summa Contra Gentiles. In this innovative study Thomas S. Hibbs goes against the grain of most traditional interpretations of the work, which claim it serves a missionary or apologetic end, and argues that the intended audience is Christian and that its subject is Christian wisdom. In the process of making his argument, Hibbs also demonstrates that the Summa Contra Gentiles is the most important of Aquinas's texts on the relationship between faith and reason, theology, and philosophy. 

Since the prologue to the Summa Contra Gentiles has been the focus of nearly all the debates over the work, Hibbs begins with an examination of it and the controversies it has provoked, and tests various interpretations of the prologue in light of the actual text. He then goes on to suggest that the method of the Contra Gentiles is dialectical and that its unifying principle is provided by the narrative structure of scripture. The next chapters are Idevoted to each of the Contra Gentiles' four parts and Hibbs argues that any interpretation of the first three books must consider how the order of Aquinas's discussion is driven by a series of dialectical encounters with received opinions, especially those of Aristotle and his commentators. Hibbs further demonstrates how attention to the dialectical method of the work has two advantages: first, it enables readers to avoid misinterpretations of Aquinas's positions on various issues, and second, it allows the reader to recapture something of Aquinas's original pedagogical intent. Dialectic and Narrative in Aquinas also reveals how the dialectical method of the Contra Gentiles is crucial to Aquinas's project of subordinating philosophy to theology, and in the concluding chapter Hibbs considers in detail the narrative unity of the Contra Gentiles and brings themes from Aquinas into conversation with contemporary work in genre theory.

Aquinas on Aristotle: Dumb Ox Books' Aristotelian Commentary Series: Dumb Ox Books 

Dumb Ox Books' Aristotelian Commentary Series: Dumb Ox Books makes available long out of print commentaries of St. Thomas Aquinas on Aristotle. Each volume has the full text of Aristotle with Bekker numbers, followed by the commentary of St. Thomas, cross-referenced using an easily accessible mode of referring to Aristotle in the Commentary. Each volume is beautifully printed and bound using the finest materials. All copies are printed on acid-free paper and Smyth sewn. They will hold up. 

Commentary on Aristotle's Metaphysics by Thomas Aquinas, translation and introduction by John P. Rowan.   Preface by Ralph McInerny. (Dumb Ox Books' Aristotelian Commentary Series: Dumb Ox Books) (Hardcover) Of all Thomas Aquinas's Commentaries on Aristotle, that on the Metaphysics is in many ways the most intriguing. For most of the twentieth century, Aristotelian studies were governed by the claim of philologists that the Metaphysics is a compilation of disparate materials, probably made by someone after Aristotle, and that the order of the books cannot be taken to represent any literary unity. Indeed, the internal contents of the books were said to represent materials of different date and purpose. Furthermore, presumed aim of these treatises, and indeed of philosophy generally, the acquisition of wisdom, receives in the Metaphysics two radically different accounts. Is God the object of Wisdom or is wisdom the most comprehensive view of the natural world? Is the science Aristotle is seeking in the treatises an ontology or a theology?

In marked contrast to such imaginative accounts, the net effect of which is to discourage rather than to encourage reading of the work, Thomas Aquinas finds the twelve books he comments on wonderful for their order, both overall and in the minutest detail. His reading is governed by what he takes to be the clear sense of the text, his interpretations keep close to what Aristotle actually said, his account is breathtaking in its acuity. Thomas's commentary belongs to the great tradition that was broken - one hopes only temporarily - by the rise of philology, which a cynic has described as the effort to read a text without understanding it. Any student of Aristotle can appraise Thomas's interpretation since its measure is the text of Aristotle.

This edition reproduces the translation of John Rowan as well as his introduction, but in a single volume, rather than in two. The Leonine critical edition of the text will soon appear; in the meantime, as it has for most of this century, the Marietti edition, on which this translation is based, can continue to be help to those who wish to learn from "the master of those who know."

Commentary on Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics by Thomas Aquinas. Translation by C.I. Litzinger, O.P. Foreword by Ralph McInerny. (Dumb Ox Books' Aristotelian Commentary Series: Dumb Ox Books) (Hardcover) Thomas Aquinas was introduced to the "New" Aristotle at the University of Naples and, after becoming a Dominican, studied under Albert the Great at Cologne and edited Albert's commentary on the Ethics of Aristotle. Throughout his career, Thomas exhibits a more-than ordinary interest in the philosophy of Aristotle and an ever deeper appreciation of it. Nonetheless, it was relatively late in his short life that he composed a dozen commentaries on Aristotelian works, spurred on, doubtless, by the controversial use to which Aristotle was put by those in the Faculty of Arts at Paris who are variously called Latin Averroists or Heterodox Aristotelians. These commentaries are among the most careful, helpful, and insightful ever written on the text of Aristotle. It is sometimes mistakenly thought that in them Thomas was somehow "baptizing" Aristotle, wrenching his thought into conformity with Christian doctrine. No one who reads the commentaries could long entertain this libelous view of them.

The translation of Thomas's Commentary on the Nicomachean Ethics made by Father Litzinger has long been out of print. It is here reprinted in a somewhat altered form. The translation itself stands as Litzinger produced it , but the presentation of the Aristotelian text, with accurate identification of Bekker numbers as well as the mode of referring to Aristotle in the commentary have been changed so that the commentary can function better as a Commentary.  

Commentary on Aristotle's De Anima by Thomas Aquinas, translation by Kenelm Foster, O.P., and Silvester Humphries, O.P. Introduction by Ralph McInerny. (Dumb Ox Books' Aristotelian Commentary Series: Dumb Ox Books) (Hardcover) The commentary Thomas Aquinas completed on Aristole's De Anima is thougt to be the first of some dozen such commentaries that he wrote toward the end of his short career. He may have produced the work in 1268 while teaching in the Dominican house of Santa Sabina in Rome. Shortly thereafter he returned to Paris where he was swept into the Latin Averroist controversy, at the centre of which was the proper interpretation of the De Anima.

Avicenna and Averroes, the great Arabic commentators, read the De Anima in such a way that intellect was taken to be a separate substance and not a faculty of the human soul. Some of Thomas's contemporaries, Masters of the Faculty of Arts, accepted the Avicennian and Averroist interpretations as good money and thus came to old positions incompatible with their Christian faith.

What is the correct reading of the De Anima? This commentary, composed before Thomas was caught up in the contemporary controversy, sets out to understand what it is that the text teaches. Many students of Aristotle have come to see this commentary as indispensable to reading the text aright.

Commentary on Aristotle's Physics by Thomas Aquinas, translation by Richard J. Blackwell, Richard J. Spath and W. Edmund Thirlker  Introduction by Vernon J. Bourke. (Dumb Ox Books' Aristotelian Commentary Series: Dumb Ox Books) (Hardcover) Review pending 

Masterful Study of William of Ockham  

The Philosophy of William of Ockham: In the Light of Its Principles by Armand Maurer (Studies and Texts, No 133: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies) Every philosophy is sustained by a number of elemental principles that give it cohesion and unity. Ockham's is no exception. The principles of the divine omnipotence and the rule of parsimony of thought known as 'Ockham's razor', and others like the principle of non-contradiction, help to shape the entire range of his thought. Many of his conclusions on matters as diverse as God's knowledge, will and power, on creation and the causality of natural things, and on human intuition and morality are reducible to them. These principles are not unique to Ockham but were common to all the scholastics. Yet it is precisely in confrontation with the views of his predecessors and contemporaries such as Scotus, Henry of Gent, Aquinas and Chatton that the particular force and character of his thought are revealed. Over and again he sets each principle to powerful use, but allows no single one of dominate, or to yield all its consequences. Martin Heidegger once declared, 'Every thinker thinks but one single thought'. The original and focal point of Ockham's thought is the singular or individual thing (res singularis), as common nature (natura communis) is the central conception of Scotism, and the act of existing (esse) is of Thomism. With Ockham the traditional conjugations of being come to signify the thing itself in its ineluctable unity. The concept of being is univocal, standing for and signifying individuals. A being is radically diverse and incommunicable, differing from every other being not only in number but also in essence. Indeed, an individual thing can no longer be said to have an essence; it is an essence. Ockham takes his place among the great philosophers because, like them, he drew out all the implications of his insight. He remains a seminal thinker: his denial of common essences, his emphasis on language in philosophical discourse, all anticipate significant developments in modern philosophy. 

 American Catholic Culture

 The Catholic Tradition by Thomas Langan (University of Missouri Press) "This is a remarkable work. There are few who possess Langan's historical knowledge and philosophical depth. His reading of the past is informative, insightful, and provocative, all at once. . . . Anyone who wishes to know what Catholicism is, friend, foe, or uninformed Catholic, will find this volume a veritable treasure."--Jude P. Dougherty

In his Tradition and Authenticity in the Search for Ecumenic Wisdom, Thomas Langan argued that the close interaction of traditions in today's society calls for methodical critical appropriation of the beliefs fostered by the principal traditions. He also promised to demonstrate by example how such appropriation could be accomplished. In The Catholic Tradition, Langan successfully fulfills that vow by showing how a tradition--the Catholic--has shaped his own outlook.

In this comprehensive study, Langan examines the history of the Catholic Church and the origins of its teachings since the Church's conception. Although committed to the Catholic religion, Langan does not obscure the Church's failings as he lays out the fundamentals of the Catholic faith.

He provides insight into the great Christological councils, discusses the differences in the spiritualities of East and West, and portrays the crucial roles that the pope and bishops played during the Middle Ages. He incorporates the thought of Augustine, Aquinas, and medieval Catholicism as he traces the rise and decline of Christian Europe, the great issues raised by the reform: priesthood, the Eucharist, spirituality, and Church structure.

Satan has no greater triumph, Langan asserts, than when Catholics, who are recipients of the Good News of God's universal love, allow selections from their tradition to be turned into sectarianism and ideology. This balanced history of the Church as human reality faces such perversions squarely. But despite betrayals by its own across the centuries, the Catholic tradition, with its origin at Sinai, remains the oldest and largest extant religious institution.

In a last section Langan offers a unique overview of the church's present situation, its strengths and weaknesses, the new movement and the challenge of the "new evangelization."  

The Catholic Imagination in American Literature by Ross Labrie (University of Missouri Press) In this well-written and comprehensive volume on Catholic writing in the United States, Ross Labrie focuses on works that meet three criteria: high intellectual and artistic achievement, authorship by a practicing Roman Catholic, and a focus on Catholic themes. Labrie begins with a discussion of the Catholic imagination and sensibility and considers the relationship between art and Catholic theology and philosophy.

Central to Catholic belief is the doctrine of the Incarnation, wherein human experience and the natural world are perceived as both flawed and redeemed. This doctrine can be seen as the axis on which Catholic American literature in general rests and from which variances by particular authors can be measured. The optimism implied in this doctrine, together with an inherited American political consciousness, allowed a number of Catholic authors, from a culture otherwise perceived as outside the American mainstream, to identify with a political idealism that granted dignity to the individual.

Counterpointing this emphasis on the individual, though, is the doctrine of the church as an intermediary between God and humanity and the belief in the community of saints. In concert with the doctrine of the Incarnation, these teachings gave Catholic writing a communal and prophetic dimension aimed at the whole of American society.

Separate chapters are included for each of the writers considered so that the distinctiveness of their works is elucidated, as well as the unity and the rich diversity of Catholic American writing in general. Some of the authors considered are Flannery O'Connor, Walker Percy, Allen Tate, Robert Lowell, Thomas Merton, and Mary Gordon.

A concluding chapter examines the significance of the corpus of Catholic American writing in the years 1940 to 1980, considering it parallel in substance to the body of Jewish American literature of the same period. The Catholic Imagination in American Literature fills a distinctive place in the study of American literature.