Thomas Aquinas: Theologian of the Christian Life by Nicholas M. Healy

Abstract

498 BOOK REVIEWS Thomas Aquinas: Theologian of the Christian Life. By NICHOLAS M. HEALY. Aldershot, England: Ashgate, 2003. Pp. 168. $29.95 (paper). ISBN 07546 -1472-7. In his classic The Nature of Doctrine: Toward a Post-Liberal Theology, George Lindbeck distinguished between a cognitivist, an experiential-expressivist , and a cultural-linguistic understanding of Christian doctrine. The major approaches to the interpretation of the thought ofThomas Aquinas over the past century can be seen to correspond, mutatis mutandis, to these categories. The neo-Scholastic school-represented by Garrigou-Lagrange, Maritain, Journet, and in recent times, Ralph Mcinerny and John Wippel-presents a rather cognitivist version of Aquinas, stressing the philosophical doctrine that can be distilled from Thomas's oeuvre. The Transcendental Thomist schoolinaugurated by Marechal and Rousselot and brought to prominence by Lotz, Rahner, and Lonergan--offers a more experiential-expressivist reading of Thomas, emphasizing the subjective sensibilities that inform and condition his teaching. In the last couple of decades, a third school has emerged, one that places emphasis neither on propositions nor underlying experience, but rather on the densely textured and unique world that the writings ofAquinas create and on the form of life that made them possible. This approach, which might be styled cultural-linguistic or postliberal, is on vivid display in Nicholas Healy's Thomas Aquinas: Theologian of the Christian Life. A concern of postliberal Thomists such as Healy is that both neo-Scholasticism and Transcendental Thomism, in their preoccupation to ground the claims of faith in something more elemental (truths arrived at through philosophical reason for the former and universally available experience for the latter), are essentially modernisms, which allow the content of revelation to be marginalized or muted. But Thomas Aquinas was not a modern foundationalist and his principal interlocutor was not the skeptical nonbeliever; hence a new path ofinterpretation-more in line with the assumptions and preoccupations of Thomas's time-must be essayed. It is of supreme importance for Healy that Aquinas was a Dominican, a member of the Order of Preachers, charged with the task of proclaiming the good news of Jesus Christ risen from the dead. Though Karl Barth and many others have complained that Thomas's Christology is incidental to his system, Healy argues throughout his book that evangelical proclamation is, in point of fact, the organizing and animating principle of Thomas's intellectual work. He agrees with Torrell that Aquinas is best read as a Christian spiritual master. Part of the problem is that contemporary interpreters of the Angelic Doctor, saddled as they are with foundationalist assumptions, tend to believe that what comes first is what is most important. Thus because Thomas discusses God in a largely philosophical way in the first part of the Summa Theologiae and gets to a consideration of Jesus Christ only in the third part, it appears as though the rational account provides the ground, setting, and context for the Christology. Healy suggests that this is to have it precisely backward, to forget that the BOOK REVIEWS 499 Thomas's masterpiece is structured along the lines of a liturgical procession in which the most significant players come, not at the beginning, but at the end. When we follow Healy's examination ofAquinas's Christology, a key feature emerges with special clarity. In accord with the formula of Chalcedon, Thomas affirms that divinity and humanity come together in Jesus in a noncompetitive but asymmetrical manner, since the natures are joined "without mixing, mingling, or confusion" but are embedded, so to speak, in the unity of the divine person of the Logos. The creaturely is not overwhelmed, but rather enhanced, by the proximity of the divine, and this noncompetitiveness is guaranteed through the power and primacy of the divine. What is ruled out by this Christology is a view that would either construe God and the creaturely as rivals or allow God to be in any sense positioned by the creaturely. This dynamic understanding of Jesus, which contains elements of what contemporary theologians would call both "high" and "low" Christology, provides, on Healy's reading, the hermeneutical lens for reading the whole of Aquinas's evangelical work. The Christological lens is particularly clarifying in regard to...