Basic Works by Thomas Aquinas (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Basic Works by Thomas Aquinas Thomas M. Ward Thomas Aquinas, Basic Works, ed.Jeffrey Hause and Robert Pasnau (Indianapolis and Cambridge: Hackett 2014) 688 pp. Basic Works (BW) incorporates new and previously published translations of Aquinas’s works to present an excellent anthology well-suited for university courses on Aquinas’ philosophy. The translations are clear and tend to be fairly literal. Scholars who appreciate the old pre-Vatican II translation of Summa Theologiae by the Fathers of the English Dominican Province for its accuracy but not its archaisms will find this anthology refreshing. In addition to its translations, BW includes a short Introduction (four pages), a very good bibliography of Aquinas’s works and the works of those authors Aquinas cites, and a decent index. BW is divided into three parts. Part I, Philosophical Foundations, includes new translations of the two seminal works of Aquinas’s natural philosophy and metaphysics: On the Principles of Nature, translated by Eleonore Stump and Stephen Chanderbahm; and On Being and Essence, translated by Peter King. Part II, God and Human Nature, includes previously published selections from Summa Theologiae (ST): The Treatise on the Divine Nature (ST I.1–13), translated by Brian J. Shanley, OP; and The Treatise on Human Nature (ST I.75–86), translated by Robert Pasnau. Part III, Ethics and Human Action, includes two newly translated selections from ST, both translated by Thomas Williams: The Treatise on Happiness (ST I–II.1–5) and The Treatise on Human Acts (ST I–II.6–21). It also includes previously [End Page 305] published translations, by Jeffrey Hause and Claudia Eisen Murphy, of Disputed Questions on Virtue, and by Richard J. Regan, of The Treatise on Law (ST I–II.90–97). Notably absent from BW are introductions to individual selections or a glossary of scholastic technical terms. These omissions suggest the book is designed for classroom use, where the neophyte’s readings are carefully contextualized and interpreted by the master, and not for the autodidact’s library. The selections here anthologized closely track those aspects of Aquinas’s thought which have secured his contemporary relevance to academic Anglophone philosophy. The student will not find here anything on the Trinity, the Incarnation, or the sacraments—topics on which the Angelic Doctor spilled gallons of ink. This narrowness of scope is practically unavoidable in a typical modern college or university, given the sharp distinction customarily drawn between philosophy and theology, and given that we have long ceased to view philosophy as theology’s “handmaiden.” For Aquinas to have a place in philosophy curricula, he needs to be sanitized of the weirder aspects of his religious views. This is not to say that Hause and Pasnau have done to Aquinas what Thomas Jefferson did to the Bible; there is still plenty of God and even of Christian mysticism in the anthologized texts. But the selections seem designed, in part, to present an Aquinas who divided up the labor of philosophy more or less as we do and whose intellectual output was devoted to addressing the questions we continue to find important. As I said, this is probably unavoidable, but given the choice to present texts of Aquinas which present him as more philosopher than theologian, the editors might have used their Introduction to say something about the full scope of Aquinas’s oeuvre or about his conception of philosophy’s relationship to theology. A recent book with a similar aim is Timothy McDermott’s anthology, Selected Philosophical Writings. McDermott’s effort includes a much wider range of works by Aquinas, and a slightly wider range of topics addressed by Aquinas, along with a short reflection on the relationship between theology and philosophy, but, in my opinion, the book as a whole suffers from McDermott’s colloquial translation style. BW is, for this reason, on the whole, a definite improvement on McDermott’s effort. Readers who are looking for an Aquinas anthology of wider scope would do well to consider the Penguin Classics’ Selected Writings of Aquinas, edited and translated by Ralph McInerny, which, while not quite comprehensive, covers a wider range of topics than any anthology I know of except for Anton Pegis...