Aquinas in Dialogue: Thomas for the Twenty-First Century. Edited by Jim Fodor and Frederick Christian Bauerschmidt. Pp. x + 185. Oxford: Blackwell, 2004. isbn 1 4051 1931 4. Paper £19.99/$34.95

Abstract

The editors of this book open their preface on a note of surprise: ‘In our era of dialogue and heightened awareness of the other, theologians seem to be discovering a rather odd resource: the thought of the thirteenth-century Dominican friar, Thomas Aquinas’ (p. vii). One cannot help remarking that this surprise may itself seem rather odd to those who have spent time and energy reading and teaching the works of the great theologian and finding in them profound riches of theology and philosophy. However, it is, perhaps, understandable to those who have not been professionally engaged in this activity for, as the editors point out, there still persists a perception of Thomas Aquinas as the supreme Scholastic: one for whom, it would seem, dialogue ‘has become unnecessary because there is nothing new to learn’. After all, as Charles Williams observed in his history of the Church, The Descent of the Dove, the excitement of medieval disputation ‘lay in pointing out that your opponent's arguments, if prolonged, would result in a denial of the formally correct answers with which he was supposed to concur’ (p. 109). On these grounds one can see why it might seem that any attempt at bringing the Angelic Doctor into dialogue with anyone outside the charmed circle of those who shared the same suppositions would be singularly unrewarding. What kind of conversation could there be? For it has to be admitted that Thomas, like many of his contemporaries, was for a long while confined within a historical and theological framework which hindered any fruitful encounter with any system of thought that was perceived to be beyond the boundaries of that framework. It is only relatively recently that these boundaries have been recognized as permeable. The opening out of this closed system gathered pace during the last century and the present volume of essays represents another stage of the process of releasing the medieval thinkers, and Thomas in particular, from the constraints of former ages. It is a striking demonstration of the fact that the strict forms under which the Schoolmen conducted their theological investigations need not prevent the richness of their thought from informing, in interesting and helpful ways, many of our contemporary problems and preoccupations.