To Stir a Restless Heart: Thomas Aquinas and Henri de Lubac on Nature, Grace, and the Desire for God by Jacob Wood

Abstract

Reviewed by: To Stir a Restless Heart: Thomas Aquinas and Henri de Lubac on Nature, Grace, and the Desire for God by Jacob Wood Kevin E. Jones To Stir a Restless Heart: Thomas Aquinas and Henri de Lubac on Nature, Grace, and the Desire for God by Jacob Wood (Washington, DC: CUA Press, 2019), xvi + 472 pp. Rarely is it the case that a contribution to the nature–grace debate receives near-universal approval. John Milbank’s The Suspended Middle (Eerdmans, 2005) met approbation from many supporters of Henri de Lubac, and many neo-Thomistic readers reacted similarly to Lawrence Feingold’s The Natural Desire to See God According to St. Thomas Aquinas and His Interpreters (Sapientia Press, 2010 [2nd ed.]). Jacob Wood has succeeded in garnering approval from both camps. More impressive than this peacemaking is the depth of thought and scholarship on display. It is unequivocally the most significant contribution to the nature–grace debate since those works, and lays much of the foundation for a rapprochement between the two sides of the debate. [End Page 688] Wood’s contribution here is so significant precisely because of the methodology he employs. At its heart To Stir a Restless Heart is an examination of the development of two aspects of Thomistic thought: the relation between reason and the will and the relation between matter and form. After an introduction to Augustine’s theology of the desire of God and the contours of the debate over de Lubac, the first chapter lays out the debates taking place in Paris that predated Thomas’s academic work. Wood lays out Peter Lombard’s Augustinian theology of creation and Philip the Chancellor’s attempt to integrate Aristotelian natural philosophy with the received Augustinian theology. He then presents receptions of Avicenna and Averroes, followed by Bonaventure’s attempt to integrate the two Aristotelian traditions. Most fundamental to this section of the book is the relation between matter and form. For Avicenna, the soul desires an end just as a body desires to be at rest in a place, and so moves in that direction; there is “a positive motion toward God” belonging to human nature (132). In William of Auvergne’s hands, Avicenna’s approach lends itself to affirming “a natural inclination that can only be satisfied by the vision of God” (86). In contrast, those reading Averroes would have concluded that what matter (and human nature) naturally desire must be attainable by nature, and so had trouble articulating the openness of human nature to God (135). The next four chapters present St. Thomas’s developing thought on these questions, beginning with his studies as a bachelor of the Sentences in Paris at 1252. As a consequence of matter’s purely passive character, it has a passive appetite that “merely designates the potential to receive” substantial forms (147). As matter possesses a capacity to receive forms from an outside power, such as God, human nature has a capacity to receive grace, such that “what Albert called a potency for obedience is for Thomas contained among the properties of our material potency, broadly conceived” (149). When it comes to the natural desire for God, Aquinas concludes in his commentary on the Sentences that “human nature can by all means be said to have a natural appetite for the vision of God, because it is passively capable of receiving the vision of God, but it cannot be said to have a natural desire to see God . . . because that would require that the vision of God fall within the range of activity” open to the active powers of human nature (177–78). This natural appetite cannot prove that human beings are called by God to supernatural beatitude, but it can prove that such beatitude is possible, and furthermore that it alone would maximally fulfill human nature. Aquinas’s theology of the relation between natural and free will, reason and nature, the Fall, and limbo also ties into the [End Page 689] issues at hand. Limbo in particular throws the difference between desire and appetite into relief; the unbaptized babies “reach an end, because they reach the terminal development of their natural desire, but they do not...