The Ecstasy of Love in the Thought of Thomas Aquinas by Peter A. Kwasniewski

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Ecstasy of Love in the Thought of Thomas Aquinas by Peter A. Kwasniewski Heather M. Erb KWASNIEWSKI, Peter A. The Ecstasy of Love in the Thought of Thomas Aquinas. Steubenville, Ohio: Emmaus Road Publishing, 2021. 403 pp. Cloth, $49.95 The purpose of this book, which is based on the author's doctoral dissertation, is "to gather together, to explain, and to synthesize Thomas's ideas on the extasis amoris," which he describes as "a bright gem in the crown of his philosophy of love." Assembling and organizing a chronological sequence of texts (from the Commentary on the Sentences through the Summa Theologiae), Kwasniewski charts the metaphysical, ethical, psychological, and theological contexts of the ecstasy of love in Aquinas, noting his interpretations and adaptations of his key influences, in particular, Pseudo-Dionysius, Aristotle, and St. Paul. In an indispensable introduction, the author indicates that he assumes familiarity with the philosophical scaffolding of Thomas's doctrine of love, including the hierarchical structure of human appetites, the [End Page 597] teleological and perfective notion of the good, the distinctions between knowledge, will, and the passions, and the Aristotelian theory of friendship. Modern caricatures of Thomas as a dry, barren, and technical thinker are deflated in the author's description of the principal paradox of amor in Thomas's works as "the lived reality of going out of oneself to the other in a self-forgetful oblation or surrender that is also, and for the same reason, the height of self-perfection." In chapter 1, the author traces the sources of Thomas's doctrine of ecstasy and identifies ambiguities and tensions in the notion within the Neoplatonic tradition. The analogous nature of extasis emerges, as indicated by its biblical uses in the contexts of inspiration, prophecy, and rapture, and its Greek and early Christian uses, spanning Plato's Phaedrus (where it refers to divine possession through various activities, such as poetry, rite, prophecy, and philosophy) and Pseudo-Dionysian metaphysics, where the tension between divine simplicity and unity and the duality of ecstasy (as a "standing out" from oneself) is developed, as well as its negative and privative descriptions by Aristotle. The Patristics' negative connotations contrast with Aquinas's borrowing from the medieval monastic traditions, in which the Victorines, Bernardine Cistercian mysticism, and Maximus the Confessor celebrate the positive cognitive and volitional versions of extasis. Chapter 2 focuses on the definition of love and its various effects in the Commentary on the Sentences, book 3, distinction 27. As a "certain transformation of affection into the thing loved," amor involves taking on a thing's form, in a transformation of the lover by a displacing of self into the beloved. The aspects of "penetration" (which involves piercing and transformation), "separation from self" (in connection to both "burning" and "resting"), "melting" (liquefactio), and the extasis of both Eucharistic conversion (of the eater into spiritual food) and of God himself (as the only perfectly liberal Giver) are treated, highlighting the doctrine of the union of love's robust and experiential quality. Throughout the book, the false dualities associated with self-perfection ("natural" love) and self-oblation ("ecstatic" love) are exposed through a sustained metaphysical analysis. In each chapter, initial attention is given to Aquinas's organization of the material and to the synonymous and related terminology for amor and its effects. In addition, concept map summaries are frequently given alongside Aquinas's textual references. Chapter 3 explores the territory of extasis in the Commentary on the Divine Names of Pseudo-Dionysius. The contrast between cognitive and appetitive extases, the analogous sweep of extasis across creation in the imitation of God, and the well-known contrast of the love of friendship and the love of concupiscence make this chapter a keystone in Kwasniewski's treatment of the phenomenology of the effects of love. The "return to self" involved in the love of concupiscence is in contrast to the selfless extasis in the love of friendship. Persons alone and ultimately God are argued to be objects of ecstatic love, and God's extasis is seen as metaphorical only (in his "four ecstatic acts" of creation, governance, [End Page 598] redemption, and glorification—the "work of God...