Soundings in the History of Hope: New Studies on Thomas Aquinas by Richard Schenk

Abstract

Reviewed by: Soundings in the History of Hope: New Studies on Thomas Aquinas by Richard Schenk T. Adam Van Wart Soundings in the History of Hope: New Studies on Thomas Aquinas by Richard Schenk, O.P., Faith and Reason: Studies in Catholic Theology and Philosophy series (Ave Maria, FL: Sapienta, 2016), x + 332 pp. Consisting largely of a series of essays and articles previously published elsewhere, Richard Schenk's Soundings in the History of Hope engages a variety of current theological conversations by making use of the resources presented by Saint Thomas Aquinas and his contemporaries. The book unfolds in three parts, all variously attempting to point the way forward for Catholic theology through a discerning retrieval of the Church's rich theological past. Thematically uniting the whole, however, is Schenk's manifest desire to take up that past in a way that avoids any and all theological oversimplification, whether that be in repristinationist or progressivist directions. Schenk brings the past and present into conversation in such a way that the cherished ideas of both are challenged and made better for the exchange. The first part, coextensive with the book's opening chapter, is a case in point. Here Schenk suggests specific ways in which Catholic theology, in general, and both Thomism and the Dominican Order, in particular, might best utilize and stay true to the multi-faceted past communicated to them, and this precisely by bringing that past into an open two-way conversation with the present. What Schenk says with respect to Thomism there proves programmatic for the book and his vision of Catholic theology overall: "Thomism as a whole cannot live without a vibrant communication with what is outside it, nor will it flourish without a reflective diversity of methods within it. Genuine Thomism is necessarily collaborative" (25). The rest of the book is the concretization of just that conviction. The second part of the book, then, opens with a chapter that takes up anew the question of how faith's interiority—what is proper to the faith itself—should engage with those truths experienced as exterior to, or only "indirectly expressive" of, the faith. Beginning with Melchior Cano and moving to Saint Thomas's treatment of how all Christ's acts are variously instructive for us, Schenk proceeds to make the case that properly neither "interiority" nor "exteriority" should be pitted against one another, as has too frequently occurred in recent theology. Rather, "faith lives in its own way from a basic sense of exteriority (here the donum Dei) that makes a qualified interiority of human understanding and its openness to the other possible." (68) In the book's third chapter, Schenk explores what he takes to be the occasionally underplayed Platonic elements in Thomas's thought, especially [End Page 718] with respect to Thomas's alleged "realism" and the idea that "grace builds on nature." In so doing, he shows how Saint Thomas was able to bridge the divergent Proclean and Porphyrian streams of Platonic thought as they had been taken up in the West by Dionysius and Saint Augustine, respectively. Father Shenck opines that only by shedding light in this way on how Saint Thomas deployed and developed the Platonic tradition can one truly grasp "the programmatic nature of Thomas's own thought" (70). What is more, such retrievals have added theological benefit in terms of helpfully addressing present concerns, such as, for example, perhaps providing "an alternative to today's antithesis between demythologizing doctrine into our prior experience of humanity and remythologizing as the more genuine faith allegedly new experiences of the Trinity drawn from private revelations" (83). Continuing to seek new convergences where divergence has been presupposed, Father Shenck moves in chapter 4 to reexamine the question of whether or not human labor is chiefly to be seen as a perfecting participation in divine blessing or an ongoing degenerative, post-lapsarian curse. As before, Schenk enters into conversation with Saint Thomas and the broad historical tradition to problematize potential answers to that question which would minimize any aspect of work's theocentric, anthropocentric, or cosmocentric character, or slight its function as avenue for grace. Schenk's fifth chapter makes use of...