Commentary on the Book of Causes of St. Thomas Aquinas. trans. by Vincent A. Guagliardo, O.P., Charles R. Hess, O.P., Richard C. Taylor

Abstract

BOOK REVIEWS 477 One minor observation: Scholars not familiar with recent developments in Thomist studies should note that Jean-Pierre Torrell, O.P., Saint Thomas Aquinas: The Person and His Work (Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 1996) has replaced Father Weisheipl's Friar Thomas d'Aquino (Washington, 1983), which Kent cites on p. 62, n. 51, as the standard work for dating the works of Aquinas and for other bibliographical and biographical material on the Angelic Doctor. St. John's Seminary Boston, Massachusetts ROMANUS CESSARIO, 0.P. Commentary on the Book ofCauses ofSt. Thomas Aquinas. Trans. by VINCENT A. GUAGLIARDO, O.P., CHARLES R. HESS, O.P., and RICHARD C. TAYLOR. Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 1996. Pp. xxxvii + 193. $26.95 (cloth), $16.95 (paper). Among his last writings, Aquinas's commentary on the Liber de causis is of particular interest for two reasons. First, it forms, together with the De substantiis separatis, Thomas's most mature expression of the participation metaphysics which he developed in good part from the Liber's creationist adaptation of Neoplatonism. Second, the commentary exemplifies what may be styled Aquinas's Neoplatonic hermeneutic, a hermeneutic which he took over from Neoplatonism, the aim of which was to reconcile in a higher synthesis Platonic participation and Aristotelian causality. The translation into English of the Super libmm De causis expositio is thus a significant contribution to the corpus of an "English Thomas," a corpus that has been growing apace in this century with the waning of Christian Latinity. This first English edition of the Commentary on the Book ofCauses offers an extensive bibliography of both primary and secondary sources. It also includes literature on what Thomas himself first identified in the Middle Ages as the subtext of the De causis, namely Proclus's Elements of Theology. Upon the translation of the Elements into Latin by William of Moerbeke, Thomas saw that the anonymous author of what is probably an Arabic work of the ninth century was engaging in the same project as pseudo-Dionysius, namely the translation ofNeoplatonic emanationism into monotheistic creationism. Whereas Dionysius translated the Platonic hierarchy of subsisting forms into an order of participated perfections unified in the intensively infinite existence of God, the author of the De causis sought to replace the hypostasized perfections of Proclean emanation with a creationist procession from the First Cause of Intellect and Soul, and then the material world. It is the author's 478 BOOK REVIEWS consequent preoccupation with the immanent principles of entity, and with real composition and real causality at every level of entity, that most influenced Aquinas's subsequent synthesis. If Dionysius provided Thomas with a hermeneutic and lexicon for applying the metaphysical intuitions of the Neoplatonists to the creator, then the author of the De causis can be credited for doing the same for creatures. The profound influence of the De causis on Aquinas's metaphysics of creation is well illustrated by Guagliardo's list of the themes Thomas took over from its author (xxx), not least of which is that esse is the first of created things and the most proper and universal effect of God, and that God alone is absolutely infinite and simple, while intelligences or angels are "form and being," or as Aquinas will say, essence and existence. Omitting Proclus's prologue on the one and the many, the author of the De causis begins his treatise on first causes with the work's seminal proposition: "Every primary cause infuses its effect more powerfully than does a universal second cause" (5). That the author thus bypasses the Platonic antinomy between unity and being intimates his creationist shift from a concern with the formal determination of being to a concern with its efficient production, together with the subordination of the former problem to the latter. The author's concern with primary causes, from which came the nickname Liber de causis (the proper title is De bonitate pura), indicates how he will explicate the similitudes of formal exemplar causality in terms of relationships of dynamic dependence and of a total subordination and unification of all effects in the first Cause. In both the...