Abstract
The first half of this edited volume is comprised of texts from the Maynooth Aquinas lectures 2002-10, and dedicated to that great scholar of Medieval Philosophy, the late, lamented James McEvoy. The first lecture by Liam Walsh offers a non-Tridentine interpretation of Thomas, and is helpfully clear about the saint’s interest lying more in the signified than the signifier, but does not really do what it promises: that is, show how Thomas arrived at his mature understanding in the Tertia Pars of the Summa. Footnotes are not essential to a lecture, but in published lectures, well, let us say that the opportunity to add them is always there. In turn, William Desmond ponders the connection between the Beatitudes and Beatitude. There is something in what he writes on p. 41 about the vita contemplativa resulting in theoria, but more needs to be said. Christ offers a way to leave the desire of being (conatus essendi) for the passio essendi (the primal patience of our being); but is this really Aquinas? P. Rosemann offers no less than a translation of the whole of the Preface to Lombard’s Sentences, before commenting that it is readable and concerns sin, salvation and the life to come. Thomas makes it clear that one has to understand the natural man first before moving towards ‘grace’ (and then ‘Christ’), but the price he pays is to swap figural language for scholastic precision, although most of the time that seems to be a good thing: e.g. in specifying that human beings not the Holy Spirit are the agents of charity. (Footnote 50 criticises M. Colish for not facing the fact that Lombard’s Christology was indeed defective.) This is a very useful essay. The question as to whether Thomas wrote a second commentary on Book 1 of the Sentences – (is an otherwise anonymous manuscript his?) – is an intriguing one. (This would simply have been Thomas teaching his Roman students, just before he set out on his own Summa.) Along the way we learn that he had little time for Augustine’s uti/frui distinction.
The ghost of Heidegger stalks some of these pages, not least in Thomas Kelly’s concluding contribution (‘Heidegger on Aquinas on God’). There is even a lecture on Edith Stein who tried to respond to his critique of classically metaphysical being, but failed to take account of how being is by definition actual, and cannot not be merely ‘mental’ or ‘essential’. The lecture by Eleanor Stump on suffering is the nearest one gets to ‘analytical Thomism’: she shows that Thomas does not speak to the question of suffering that comes from the loss of one’s heart’s desire, but that one might be able to extend the argument from consolation that comes after purging (as argued in the Commentary on Thessalonians). Denys Turner foregrounds the character of the saint, one that was self-effacing enough to give the Spirit room to work with pupils.
The second half of the book is not quite as strong: although the essay by Declan Lawell comparing the affective Dionysianism of Thomas Gallus with the intellectualism of Albert and Aquinas, where both sides agree that ultimately one is silent before God, deserves special mention, as does the essay by Kelly.