Aquinas's Summa Theologiae Research Articles

Aquinas's Summa Theologiae and Eucharistic Sacrifice in the Early Modern Period by Reginald M. Lynch, O.P. (review)

Aquinas's Summa Theologiae and Eucharistic Sacrifice in the Early Modern Period by Reginald M. Lynch, O.P. (review)

Teaching the Trinity: Scripture and Performance of the Psychological Analogy in Aquinas's Summa Theologiae

Teaching the Trinity: Scripture and Performance of the Psychological Analogy in Aquinas's Summa Theologiae

The Christological Prudence of the Natural Slave

AbstractThe account of prudence found in Aquinas's Summa Theologiae and the Commentary on the Nicomachean Ethics is bound up with his endorsement of Aristotle's notion of the Natural Slave in his Commentary on Aristotle's Politics. This connection not only hobbles his account of the virtue of prudence, but also weakens other areas of his theology, including his account of providence. A creative rereading of Aquinas's biblical commentaries, however, affords Aquinas the opportunity to correct himself. Aquinas's commentaries on Paul, especially the Commentary on Philippians, provide ample resources for doing so. The Christ hymn of Philippians 2:5-11 forms the cornerstone of a thoroughly Christological, even Apocalyptic, account of prudence, which overcomes the tensions in Aquinas's account of prudence resulting from his endorsement of natural slavery. This scriptural reformulation of prudence heightens the stress on exemplification even further and in so doing makes its exercise more conducive to peaceableness. Due to the political dimensions of prudence, these shifts have an ecclesiological dimension that reveals Aquinas's affinity with Giorgio Agamben's philosophical account of mendicant life.

The Historical Development of Cajetan's Philosophy of Pure Nature and Its Origins in the Thought of John Capreolus

The Historical Development of Cajetan's Philosophy of Pure Nature and Its Origins in the Thought of John Capreolus Steven Waldorf EVER SINCE the controversy concerning how to understand man's desire for the beatific vision as his ultimate end erupted following the publication of Henri de Lubac's Surnaturel in 1946, the issue of Cajetan's conception of human nature has been much debated. De Lubac's work, continuing from Surnaturel in the 1940s to his more mature Augustinisme et théologie moderne in 1965, aimed at both the theological and the historical deconstruction of what he termed the system of "pure nature," that is to say, the view that human nature must reach its complete end or perfection strictly by natural principles. For de Lubac, such a view, which entails the effective denial of a desire for the vision of the divine essence as the complete perfection of human nature as nature, is both theologically and historically problematic. From a doctrinal perspective, it leads to a purely natural end for man that effectively closes man in on himself, severing his nature from any intrinsic connection to grace and the supernatural. Moreover, historically speaking, it represents a rupture with a classical tradition of thought that runs from Augustine to Thomas Aquinas and the other great Scholastics of the thirteenth century. In purporting to find a theory of pure nature in Aquinas's writings, later Scholastic thinkers betrayed and falsified his thought. In de Lubac's narrative, the progenitor of this view of nature was Tommaso de Vio (1469-1534), better known as Cardinal Cajetan, who was a renowned Dominican theologian of the late [End Page 1] fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. Often remembered by historians for his disputation with Martin Luther at Augsburg in 1518, Cajetan was one of the leading theologians of his day, producing a magisterial commentary on Aquinas's Summa theologiae that remained influential into the twentieth century, in addition to dozens of smaller treatises.1 According to de Lubac, Cajetan stands at the origin of the pure-nature theory that the great majority of later Scholastics, including de Lubac's own twentieth-century interlocutors, would adopt.2 Crucially, he was also the first to impute the view to Aquinas himself, passing off his novel philosophy of nature as the latter's own. Nearly all subsequent scholarly discussion of the issues de Lubac raised has addressed the question of whether Cajetan was an accurate interpreter of Aquinas on the pure-nature question. That the Dominican cardinal held a view of nature in which nature must reach its proper perfection in a naturally attainable end is generally not disputed, and the texts, as we shall see, are clear on the point. However, lost in the scholarly debate is sustained treatment of the question of the historical genesis of Cajetan's view. Indeed, contemporary scholars have devoted comparatively little attention to the question of how Cajetan's philosophy of pure nature developed, focusing instead on the question of his fidelity to Aquinas. When such scholars do advert to the question of the origins of the Dominican cardinal's view of natura, they generally do so in passing, attributing it to concerns about the gratuity of grace that supposedly arise from positing a supernaturally attained end as the complete perfection of nature qua nature. Indeed, scholars who find themselves on opposite sides of the debate about Cajetan's faithfulness to Aquinas, such [End Page 2] as Lawrence Feingold3 and Denis Bradley,4 generally concur in attributing the Dominican commentator's view of nature to concerns about this or some other issue of theological orthodoxy. Although theological concerns were foremost in the mind of later proponents of the pure-nature theory, writing in the aftermath of the Baianist controversy, there is less evidence that they preoccupied Cajetan, who was active decades before the controversy erupted. The argument Feingold adduces as proof of the fact that Cajetan's view of nature was motivated by issues of theological orthodoxy is based on a misinterpretation of Cajetan's De potentia neutra, a text in which the Dominican commentator argues against the claim that there can be a natural potency or inclination for...

Thomas Aquinas's Summa Contra Gentiles: A Guide and Commentary by Brian Davies

Reviewed by: Thomas Aquinas's Summa Contra Gentiles: A Guide and Commentary by Brian Davies Raymond Hain Thomas Aquinas's Summa Contra Gentiles: A Guide and Commentary by Brian Davies (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016), xxviii + 485 pp. Brian Davies's Thomas Aquinas's Summa Contra Gentiles: A Guide and Commentary comes two years after the publication of his delightfully (some would say quixotically) ambitious Thomas Aquinas's Summa Theologiae: A Guide and Commentary. Like the first, this second book "aims to be introductory, if also comprehensive, and it does not presume that its reader is already familiar with medieval thinking" (xvii). But while both volumes run close to five hundred pages, the much shorter length of the Summa contra gentiles [SCG] allows Davies a little more breathing room, and the result is a smooth and thoughtful overview of the entire text immensely useful for nonspecialists and worth consulting for specialists. After a brief discussion of Aquinas's life and writings, Davies rejects the view that the SCG was written to aid missionaries, Dominican or otherwise, and instead claims (with the help of the opening chapters of the SCG) that Aquinas has provided "an extended essay in natural theology" in books I–III and then offers "defenses of the articles of faith" in book IV. "And that," he concludes, "is all that we can confidently refer to [End Page 1291] when it comes to the question 'Why did Aquinas write the SCG?'" (15). (But why the need to remark in a footnote that Aquinas "does refer to Islam" in these sections, offering "a brief tirade against Mohammed," even though this "little anti-Islamic outburst" is hardly evidence of a missionary purpose? [397]) Of the remaining seventeen chapters, eight address God's existence, nature, and creative power, six address creatures and their relation to God's providential plan, and the final three address the Trinity, the Incarnation, and the sacraments and salvation. Each chapter follows the same plan: a section of the SCG is explained, with copious quotations and sometimes exhaustive (and exhausting) lists of arguments with lots of examples to make Aquinas's claims both clear and attractive. Each expository section is then followed by Davies's own evaluation of the text. These are the most interesting and readable sections (and worth perusing for a specialist working on the topic at hand), and they make many references to contemporary challenges one might offer to Aquinas, as well as arguments in defense of, and occasionally critical of, Aquinas's views. Davies is most comfortable, and confident, in the eight chapters on God. These make up more than one third of his text (though treating about one fifth of the SCG), and an entire chapter is spent on SCG I, chapter 13 (arguments for God's existence). Davies is certain that Aquinas's arguments for God's existence are not obvious failures, but stops short of calling them successful demonstrations. "My view is that [whether or not they are successful demonstrations] is not an easy question to answer since some of the arguments contain stages that are difficult to understand" (45). Like most defenders of Aquinas, he constructs an example of a causal chain with two types of causes. If my hand holds a stack of books, then each book keeps the book above it from falling to the ground. But my hand is a cause of a different sort, something "whose causal power runs through the chain in such a way as to make the members of the chain do what they do or be what they are" (52). But does Davies think the arguments work? As he often does throughout the commentary, he ends only by quoting from another Aquinas scholar, in this case Edward Feser's defense of this type of argument, and then concludes: "I take it that Feser is suggesting that something that actually exists, but does not have to exist, is potentially nonexistent, and that its sheer existence depends on it being actualized by what cannot not-exist" (55). The remaining chapters on God focus on the divine attributes, which flow (as they do in the parallel questions in the Summa theologiae) from...

Read As You Believe: Redemptive Reading As Spiritual Pedagogy for Integrative Education

That religious and theological education today largely neglects reading as a spiritual discipline is a profound pedagogical oversight. The fallout contributes to the bifurcation of intellectual and spiritual formation in education. While the dominant mode of reading in the academy is beholden to the Weberian solitary, detached, and disenchanted ideal, the Christian tradition presents rich resources for an alternative vision. "Redemptive reading" enacts a friendship hermeneutic exercising well-wishing, conversation, and discernment. Thomas Aquinas's Summa Theologiae exemplifies this approach. Redemptive reading is a spiritual pedagogy for an integrative approach to higher education.

Human Action in Thomas Aquinas, John Duns Scotus, & William of Ockham by Thomas M. Osborne, Jr.

Reviewed by: Human Action in Thomas Aquinas, John Duns Scotus, & William of Ockham by Thomas M. Osborne, Jr. Matthew R. McWhorter Human Action in Thomas Aquinas, John Duns Scotus, & William of Ockham by Thomas M. Osborne, Jr. (Washington DC: Catholic University of America, 2014), 250 pp. Thomas Osborne's Human Action in Thomas Aquinas, John Duns Scotus, & William of Ockham provides a helpful comparative analysis of three key medieval thinkers with respect to their distinct accounts of human action or theories of "moral psychology" (xvi). These thinkers, Osborne states, "are arguably the three most significant philosophers and theologians of the central period in the development of Scholastic thought" (xiii). His work is written in an accessible style that renders it useful not only as a resource for specialist researchers in [End Page 352] the medieval era but also as a supplemental text for course instruction at the graduate level. While the exact focus and content of this study is unique, it is comparable in approach to other recent volumes in medieval ethics and moral theology such as M. V. Dougherty's Moral Dilemmas in Medieval Thought: From Gratian to Aquinas (2013), or to the comparative medieval studies of Marilyn McCord Adams, Richard Cross, or Russell L. Friedman. Osborne states that his study aims to provide an overview of the issues with which medieval moral psychology grappled and that this, in turn, will serve to illuminate key philosophical questions in ethics, as well as to provide historical background for understanding Reformation and early modern thought (xvi). While Osborne states that his primary goal is to provide a systematic overview of the three thinkers under consideration, his study also illustrates a contextual historical understanding of the authors in question. For example, at times, he provides occasional contextual references to other important medieval ethicists such as Anselm of Canterbury, Peter Abelard, Peter Lombard, and Albert the Great. Osborne is explicitly conscious of the methodological need to avoid conforming the authors under consideration to a superficial historical narrative in which Scotus is construed as reacting to Aquinas, and Ockham in turn to Scotus (see 222–23, where Osborne briefly critiques two common historio-graphical trends). On this point, Osborne recognizes that Aquinas in the era prior to his canonization did not have as significant an intellectual import for Franciscan thinkers as contemporary scholars might expect (xix). Overall, Osborne indicates that his comparative studies should serve to provide his reader both with basic familiarity with the moral psychology of each thinker and with a cognizance of the doctrinal currents that proved to be influential upon subsequent Western thought (xxv). In this respect, Osborne points to three main themes that he indicates establish a reliable historical narrative concerning the doctrinal developments in fundamental ethics from Aquinas to Ockham: "(1) a developing separation between nature and will, (2) an increased emphasis on the will's activity, and (3) a changing view of mental causation" with respect to elicited exterior acts (xxiv–xxv, cf. 227). These themes collectively provide a helpful orientation for continued study of these thinkers, a framework that other scholars will benefit from exploring and evaluating. Osborne's work is organized into five chapters enveloped by an introduction and a conclusion. Each of the five chapters is focused on [End Page 353] a particular ethical topic, such as the causes of a moral act (viz., an agent's intellect and will), the stages of a moral act, or the specification of a moral act. Regarding the structure of the book, Osborne states that it "develops thematically" (xxii). The topical arrangement of the study is intended generally to follow the ordo doctrinae found in questions 6–21 of the prima secundae of Aquinas's Summa theologiae, which Osborne maintains is the most complete and systematic treatment of moral psychology found among the works of the three thinkers under consideration (xvi). Each of Osborne's chapters is further divided into four parts. This schema for the most part follows a common pattern of first expositing Aquinas's position on the ethical topic at hand and then the positions of Scotus and Ockham and closing with a synopsis that compares and contrasts the main positions of...

Embracing Wisdom: The "Summa theologiae" as Spiritual Pedagogy by Gilles Mongeau

Reviewed by: Embracing Wisdom: The "Summa theologiae" as Spiritual Pedagogyby Gilles Mongeau Michael A. Dauphinais Embracing Wisdom: The "Summa theologiae" as Spiritual Pedagogy. By G illesM ongeau, S.J.Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 2015. Pp. xi + 221. $30.00 (paper). ISBN:978-0-88844-422-6. Gilles Mongeau has written an illuminating book with many enjoyable insights. This is no small praise for a book that adds to the innumerable discussions of the structure and aims of Thomas Aquinas's Summa theologiae. According to the introduction, Mongeau's work draws upon various streams of Thomistic and medieval studies: Thomas Hibbs's attention to dialectic and narrative in the Summa contra Gentiles, Jean-Pierre Torrell's treatment of the spiritual theology of the Summa theologiae, and Mary Carruthers's retrieval of the rhetorical shape of medieval and Dominican life. Mongeau thus offers a reading of the Summa theologiaeas rhetorically constructed to lead its reader into deeper conformity with the wisdom it seeks to communicate. [End Page 303] He formulates the purpose of his work in his first chapter, "A Wisdom that Makes One Holy." The theme of wisdom as transformative plays a central role in this book. Mongeau thus seeks to overcome some of the separations that have occurred in scholarship on Aquinas. He helpfully summarizes the work of Mark Jordan, Guy-H. Allard, Peter Candler, and Fáinche Ryan and their distinct approaches to viewing the Summathrough the respective lenses of wisdom, rhetoric, deification, and sanctification. He seeks to add to their various emphases a more historical focus on thirteenth-century rhetorical practices. He then turns to a presentation of sacra doctrinaas both scientia(knowledge) and sapientia(wisdom). As scientia, sacra doctrinaconforms the mind to reality. As sapientia, sacra doctrinahelps the wise person order all things both theoretically and practically. Drawing upon the work of Pierre Hadot, Mongeau discerns in such wisdom a way of life, in particular, the way of life embodied in the Dominican friars whom Aquinas sought to instruct. Mongeau summarizes the goal of his book as follows: "I hope that my readers, having become aware of and open to the rhetorical dynamics present in the text, might allow the spiritual pedagogy of the Summa theologiaeto work in them as it did in Thomas' students, leading them to Wisdom's embrace" (17). The book has two major parts. The first part (chapters 2-4) examines the rhetorical order of the Summa theologiaeand presents the work as a ductus—a directed motion or a leading—into divine wisdom. Here the emphasis is on "the historical and methodological context for reading the Summa theologiaeas sacra doctrina" (16). The remainder of the book (chaps. 5-9) deploys that same context in the service of close readings of various parts of the Summa. In each instance, Aquinas's presentation of Christ as the Incarnate Word is revealed as the pattern for contemplating such divine wisdom and handing it on to others. Mongeau, in analyzing many sections of the Summa, "[brings] to the fore the rhetorical ductusthat unites Aquinas' systematic and spiritual concerns" (17). Chapters 2-4 present the heart of the book's thesis, namely, that the often-overlooked rhetorical element of the Summais easily demonstrated when Aquinas's writings and life are placed within their thirteenth-century Dominican context. Mongeau considers the interplay of meaning and culture as found in ancients such as Aristotle and Cicero as well as Philo, Augustine, and Boethius, along with their shared attention to rhetoric within philosophy and theology. Following Marshall McLuhan, Mongeau observes that the rhetorical dimension of meaning has been radically diminished in the post-Cartesian streams of philosophy and theology in the West. In contrast, he avers that rhetoric should be seen as "the art and science which allowed Christian thinkers, pastors, and poets to mediate the intersubjective, aesthetic, and dramatic power of meaning during the patristic and early-medieval period" (38). The recognition of the indispensable role of rhetoric and meaning within the search for truth as opposed to a sterile rationalism is certainly sound and welcome. Furthermore, Mongeau implicitly avoids any [End Page 304]reduction of...

What Does it Mean to Call Thomas Aquinas's Summa Theologiae a ‘Spiritual Exercise’?

What Does it Mean to Call Thomas Aquinas's <i>Summa Theologiae</i> a ‘Spiritual Exercise’?

Saint Thomas Aquinas's Pagan Virtues?

Today's conversations in virtue ethics are enflamed with questions of “pagan virtues,” which often designate non-Christian virtue from a Christian perspective. “Pagan virtues,” “pagan vices,” and their historied interpretations are the subject of Jennifer Herdt's book Putting On Virtue: The Legacy of the Splendid Vices (2008). I argue that the questions and language animating Herdt's book are problematic. I offer an alternative strategy to Herdt's for reading Thomas Aquinas's Summa Theologiae. My results are twofold: (1) a different set of conclusions and questions regarding the moral life that lend a fresh perspective to “pagan virtues” and (2) corresponding methodological suggestions for improving Herdt's project that would, to my mind, reaffirm her normative conclusions regarding the most viable ways forward for contemporary discussions of virtue.

&lt;i&gt;Levinas and Medieval Literature: The “Difficult Reading” of English and Rabbinic Texts&lt;/i&gt; (review)

Reviewed by: Levinas and Medieval Literature: The “Difficult Reading” of English and Rabbinic Texts David Williams Levinas and Medieval Literature: The “Difficult Reading” of English and Rabbinic Texts. Edited by Ann W. Astell and J. A. Jackson. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 2009. Pp. x + 374. $58 (cloth); $24.95 (paper). Since the appearance of Jill Robbins’s seminal work on Levinas and literature, Altered Reading (1999), there have been a number of period-specific applications of the idea. The present collection appears at the same time as Donald R. Wehrs’s and David P. Haney’s 2009 collection on Levinas and nineteenth-century literature. Reading literary texts through the lens of Emmanuel Levinas’s thought can seem counterintuitive given Levinas’s apparent ambivalence toward art. Yet it is this very tension between art and Levinasian ethics that makes this collection of twelve essays and an introduction an intriguing and intellectually stimulating project. The introductory essay economically states the raison d’être of the work, claiming that Levinas’s writings “can truly alter our reception, our reading, of [medieval] literature. Of equal importance is the discovery that the literary works of the medieval period can illumine our understanding of the Levinasian œuvre—its characteristic style, method, and themes, as well as its profound resistance to thematization” (p. 2). The subsequent essays reinforce this claim—more or less. Naturally (and not unjustifiably) contradictions between Levinas’s thought and the medieval worldview are minimized in many of the essays, but there is one difference that cannot and should not be papered over, and that is the priority that Levinas gives to the ethical over the ontological and metaphysical, the centering of truth and value in the “Other,” unless, as some have claimed, the “Other” is, in fact, the Deity. This confusion appears in a remark in Cynthia Kraman’s interesting discussion of the medieval Jewish commentator Rashi, who “understands the Bible to be not only an approach to the divine but, more importantly, a roadmap to human relations . . .” and she goes on to attribute the same view to Levinas (p. 208, my emphasis). While this may be true of Rashi, it is the antithesis of medieval Christian thought expressed at least as early as the writings of Pseudo-Dionysus that gave priority to union with God over all moral goods and ethical relations. A related tension found in several of the essays has to do with the nature of medieval allegory’s “open-endedness.” Although the Middle Ages recognized the limitations of the human intellect and had a finely theorized sense of contingency (for example, Aquinas Summa Theologiae 1: 2,3), it is easy to over-nuance this concept so that it melds with the postmodern infatuation with indeterminacy and its related relativism. Thus Susan Yager in “Levinas, Allegory, and Chaucer’s Clerk’s Tale” associates Levinas’s philosophical thought, which can be “taken in many directions, interpreted in multiple ways,” with medieval allegory: “in reading from either set of Levinasian or medieval texts, we are drawn into a tentative, contingent enterprise” (p. 35). For its proponents, medieval allegory was the way in which the author of Holy Scripture expressed himself, the closest thing to God’s mind, and thus, subject to the limits of human capacity, the vehicle of certitude. Nevertheless, Yager’s reading of Chaucer’s Clerk’s Tale is perceptive and suggests interesting solutions to certain difficulties in the tale, such as Grisilde’s passivity, by linking it to Levinas’s concept of the vulnerable face. Valerie Allen’s essay, “Difficult Reading,” which launches the collection, helpfully [End Page 515] highlights several aspects of Levinas’s thought so that, when they arise and get developed in the subsequent essays, the reader is already somewhat familiar with them. She introduces Levinas’s powerful image of Raba who, while reading, deep in thought, distractedly rubs his foot to the point that the skin is broken and blood flows. Several of the essays take up this image, but oddly none of them connect it with the theory of medieval allegorical reading in which the inner truth of the text is metaphorically covered with a skin (integumentum) that must be stripped (rubbed away?) so...

A Note on Scripture in the Summa theologiae

AbstractBeginning with the question of whether Aquinas's Summa theologiae inevitably distorts the meaning of biblical texts by removing them from their narrative context, this essay suggests that one way to think about Aquinas's use of Scripture in the Summa theologiae is to read together, as an ensemble, the biblical texts that he cites when treating a particular theme. Focusing on his first four questions on the virtue of faith (ST II-II, qq. 1–4), I argue that Aquinas's selection of biblical texts from across the canonical Scriptures enables him to provide a nuanced biblical perspective on a particular theme even without finding it necessary to quote Scripture in every article. I seek to bring to light the way that the various biblical texts in the question—whose functions within the articles are widely diverse, from providing the hinge for a responsio to framing a minor objection–complement and echo one another.

Latin Verses by John Gower and 'John of Bridlington' in a Piers Plowman Manuscript (Bl Add. 35287)

LONDON, British Library, MS Additional 35287, produced c. 1400, is most widely known as an early and very important witness to the B version of Piers Plowman (sigil M), the only substantive work it contains. Also noteworthy, though, are the myriad jottings on its final leaf, fol. 104v, ‘which’, say George Kane and E. Talbot Donaldson, ‘might reward expert and leisured study’,1 a promise fulfilled in the recent edition of the manuscript for The Piers Plowman Electronic Archive by Eric Eliason, Hoyt N. Duggan, and Thorlac Turville-Petre.2 The first of these jottings, they remark, is ‘a Latin nota concerning the ten post-resurrection appearances of Christ’, which, one might add to the editors’ account, traces its lineage to Augustine's De Consensu Evangelistarum III, xxv, 83, quoted as well in Aquinas's Summa Theologiae IIIa q. 55 a. 3 ad 3. Beneath this list, ‘the leaf is dominated by a competent drawing of an elaborate mace standing on a base; the spike of the mace is not completed where it meets the Latin nota, which must therefore have preceded it.’ At the scroll drawn as part of the mace, at the bottom of the leaf, is a version of the Index of Middle English Verse 4202 in a mid-fifteenth-century hand, with ‘mace’ for ‘betul’: ‘With this mace be he smete / That al the worlde may it wete / That geuyth a-way his owne thing / And goth hymsilff a-Beggyng’; above that appears, in a mid-sixteenth-century italic hand, Ovid's Heroides V, 7–8, ‘Leniter ex merito quicquid patiare ferendum est / Que uenit indigno pena dolenda venit’ and the monogram ‘DEN’ dated 1545.

Human Embryo Adoption: Biotechnology, Marriage, and the Right to Life ed. by Thomas V. Berg, L.C., and Edward J. Furton

BOOK REVIEWS 657 extend it equally to the ecclesial mission of the priesthood, religious life, and indeed each of the faithful. Ouellet insists as a main point on "the sacramental grace of marriage as it grounds the ecclesiality of the couple and the family" (168). No doubt one can relate the ecclesial mission of the spouses to the sacrament of matrimony they have received, though it is perhaps more clearly grounded in their baptism. One undoubtedly can and should speak of the ecclesial mission of the family; but in this case the sacramental ground for this mission would seem to lie in baptism, common to all the family members, rather than in matrimony, peculiar to the spouses. It would not be right to end without drawing attention to what may be a typographical oversight but is nevertheless regrettable: the fact that a translation (198) from the Supplementum to Aquinas's Summa Theologiae identifies the bona of marriage and its ends. This is not consistent with the mind of St. Augustine or St. Thomas. The bona refer to the distinctive characteristics of the conjugal covenant (exclusiveness, permanence, openness to life). To confuse them with its ends (the good of the spouses and the procreation/education of children) makes any logical analysis of marriage impossible. This is all the more important in that no small amount of confusion has been created over recent years, in both theological and canonical writing, by a failure to distinguish properties and ends. Strathmore University Nairobi, Kenya CORMAC BURKE Human Embryo Adoption: Biotechnology, Marriage, and the Right to Life. Edited by THOMAS V. BERG, L.C., and EDWARDJ. FURTON. Foreword by ROBERT P. GEORGE. Philadelphia: The National Catholic Bioethics Center; Thornwood, N.Y.: The Westchester Institute for Ethics & The Human Person, 2006. Pp. 347. $24.95 (paper). ISBN 978-0-935372-50-2. Such an extraordinary book cannot easily be laid down. It contains a wealth of bioethical thinking on a question that the Magisterium of the Church has not yet pronounced upon (as of the writing ofthis review): namely, whether it is licit for a woman, married or not, to rescue by a medical transfer into her womb an abandoned embryo that has been frozen by a process of cryopreservation after in-vitro fertilization. Written by sixteen scholars, this brilliant work takes into account both sides ofthe question and seemingly exhausts all possible arguments. Each of the authors attempt to think with the Church, and argue politely for or against each others' positions. Perhaps the best book review is found in the 658 BOOK REVIEWS preface and the afterword of the book, crafted as much intelligence as the essays themselves. With different nuances, six authors defend the liceity of heterologous embryo transfer (hereafter HET) and six others attempt to show that HET is intrinsically evil. It is taken for granted that this embryo is a human person by both sides, based upon both science and philosophy. The "Afterword" attempts to show why a theologian or counselor cannot impose his view ofthe question on women considering this procedure but must give both views as objectively as possible and let the women (with their husbands' consent, if they are married, or even single women) make the decision themselves. The theologian is not the Magisterium and lacks the authority to advise in its name when the Church's official teacher remains silent. Summarizing both positions of this book, pro and con, is difficult because each author adds some distinctions which are not always commented upon by others. Notwithstanding, these subtleties in turn make the text very rich reading indeed. Hence, I will attempt to give the major viewpoints of both sides of the debate, even at the risk of oversimplification. Those authors in favor of the process of adopting embryos (May, Brugger, Ryan, et al.) begin with the notion that the object of the act is bringing a person into the womb of the mother as a home, and its intent is to save the life of a human being. These persons who are frozen have been placed unjustly in a canister filled with nitrogen, and if someone has the courage and generosity to save them, the moral object is...

Ephemerides Thomisticae Analyticae: Metaphysics and Ethics in Stump’s Aquinas

The Thomist 69 (2005): 593-620 EPHEMERIDES THOMISTICAE ANALYTICAE: METAPHYSICS AND ETHICS IN STUMP'S AQUINAS DENIS J. M. BRADLEY Georgetown University Washington, D.C. ELEONORE STUMP has written what is likely to be her magnum opus. Her book, Aquinas,1 is magnus in at least two obvious ways: it is very long (631 pages) and, by the standards that she sets for herself as a "senior scholar" (ix), a benchmark for like-minded "Analytic Thomists." Stump paints on a big canvas: she essays, even if she does not achieve, a comprehensive representation of Aquinas from the standpoint of Analytic Thomism, a movement in which Professor Stump now stands, quite on her own merits-although she continues to acknowledge the debt she owes to her "teacher, mentor and friend" (xii), the late Norman Kretzmann-among the most widely known and eminent practitioners thereof. But Stump's Aquinas, despite its length and breadth and, in many places, depth, is not a Summa philosophiae ad mentem divi Thomae. The topics that it explores do, indeed, reflect more the present-day "vagaries of academic interests and trends " (x)-hence, the title of this review article-than they follow "largely (but not entirely) ... the order of Aquinas's Summa theologiae" (xi). The author has chosen topics where she discerns a "special confluence of Aquinas's views and current philosophical debate" (x), those, 1 Eleonore Stump, Aquinas (London and New York: Routledge, 2003). Pp. xx+ 611. $135.00 (cloth), $43.00 (paper). ISBN 0-415-02960-0 (cloth), ISBN 0-415-37898-2 (paper). Parenthetical page references hereafter, unless otherwise noted, are to this book. 593 594 DENIS J. M. BRADLEY anyway, that have stimulated her "bridge-building efforts" (ibid.) to connect Aquinas with contemporary analytic philosophy. Stump's "Herculean task" (ix) occupies an introduction and sixteen subsequent chapters, some of which are extensively reworked versions of earlier papers. This reworking has required admirable diligence and scholarly responsiveness. But since "each chapter [can be read] on its own" (xi), probably most readers will peruse Aquinas, given its size and density, piecemeal. Stump, happily, groups the chapters into four parts, each of which could provide ample subject matter for a graduate seminar, which would be a suitable, perhaps the best, context in which to read and, in commensurately detailed fashion, deconstruct the complex arguments which thicken this book. The four parts of Aquinas stretch over an impressive range of topics: (Part I) The Ultimate Foundation of Reality: ch. 1, "Metaphysics: A Theory of Things"; ch. 2, "Goodness"; ch. 3, "God's Simplicity"; ch. 4, "God's Eternity"; ch. 5, "God's Knowledge"; (Part II) The Nature ofHuman Beings: ch. 6, "Forms and Bodies: The Soul"; ch. 7, "The Foundations of Knowledge"; ch. 8, "The Mechanisms of Cognition"; ch. 9, "Freedom: Action, Intellect and Will"; (Part HI) The Nature ofHuman Excellence: ch. 10, "A Representative Moral Virtue: Justice; ch. 11, "A Representative Intellectual Virtue: Wisdom"; ch. 12, "A Representative Theological Virtue: Faith; ch. 13, "Grace and Free Will"; (Part IV) God's Relationship to Human Beings: ch. 14, "The Metaphysics of the Incarnation"; ch. 15, "Atonement"; ch. 16, "Providence and Suffering." In the Introduction to these four parts, Stump provides a twenty-page, six-section "overview of Aquinas's thought": metaphysics; philosophy of mind; theory of knowledge; will and action; ethics, law and politics; theology: natural, revealed, and philosophical. Stump's "fat volume" (x), then, covers multa-far too many for this reader to find a clear narrative or conceptual thread. The sequence of book chapters-"following roughly Aquinas's categorization and ordering" (ibid.)-externally imitates the Neoplatonic exitus-reditus theme that structures and holds METAPHYSICS AND ETHICS IN STUMP'S AQUINAS 595 together Aquinas's two theological summae. However, I can discern no comparable doctrinal theme that internally unifies the author's own portrait of Thomas Aquinas as philosophus redivivus, or conceptually focuses her bridge-building, analytic excurses. Pleading that some economizing omissions are necessary , and surely they are, Stump assures us that hers do not prevent the reader from seeing "Aquinas's whole worldview in broad outline" (ibid.), even though the outline omits topics "regularly discussed in standard reference works on Aquinas" (ibid.). These assurances...

A Multidimensional Disclosure: Aspects of Aquinas’s Theological Intentionality

[Extract] To give serious attention to Aquinas's Summa Theologiae is to be continually amazed at the extent of the harmonies and deep resonances that echo through its different parts.1 It works like a hologram, manifesting now this, now that, now some other dimension. In this essay, I wish to pay attention to the theological of St. Thomas's approach , in a way that might enrich our reading, and to continue the discussion that has been taking place more recently in the pages of this journal. It will involve asking what kind of consciousness Aquinas brings to his theological investigation, attending less to the metaphysical objectification offaculties, their objects, and the realities affirmed, and more to the experience in which all this occurs. It will mean a general kind of theological intentionality analysis of Thomas's approach-while, at the same time, deferring to specialists in the area of theological phenomenology for a fuller context.

Closure in Paradise: Dante Outsings Aquinas

is rivaled by Aquinas's Summa theologiae, as if the works were the twin spires of medievalism. Yet it cannot be that Dante's cosmic poem is such a summa too2 because Aquinas's Summa was never summed. The exemplarity of the medieval mind as systematic falters on Aquinas's failure to complete his project. He abruptly ceased writing and dictating his masterpiece in part three at question ninety, on penance. When pressed by his confessor to explain his indolence, he replied, cannot, because everything I have written seems to me chaffy, in respect to those things that I have seen and have been revealed to me.3 Aquinas's silence was not respected. Unfinished works, even fragments, were a bane of medieval literature.4 Dominicall editors covered his shame by completing the Summa theologiae

Narrative and the Natural Law: An Interpretation of Thomistic Ethics

This study offers an alternative to rigid, legalistic interpretations of the substantial discussions of law in Thomas Aquinas's Summa theologiae and defends his ethics from charges of excessive legalism.

El condenado por presumido: The Rhetoric of Death and Damnation in El burlador de Sevilla y convidado de piedra

An examination of the rhetoric of death and damnation in Tirso's Burlador reveals that the play can be read as a dramatized homily about the natural and supernatural realms of God's justice, reflected in the work's natural and supernatural realms of action. Concerning the rhetoric of damnation, much traditional criticism about the Burlador has centered on whether Tirso adopts either a "Thomist" or "Molinist" position concerning the De auxiliis controversy; and on why, or even whether, Don Juan is consigned to hell. Such hermeneutic disputes can be resolved by recognizing that the protagonist is damned for presumption, which all orthodox theology of the period considered to be, like despair, a sin against the theological virtue of hope and, hence, an "unpardonable" sin against the Holy Spirit. As spelled out most systematically in Aquinas's Summa Theologiae , the theology of presumption acts as a referential code for the mechanism of Don Juan's damnation, and thus for Tirso's rendering of the supernatural (eternal) realm of God's justice. In the natural (temporal) realm of God's justice, the matching of "punishment" and "crime" holds equally for the protagonist and his victims. After discussing the crime and punishment of each victim in turn, this study examines how both realms of divine justice converge in the character of the protagonist. His sentence of death for his crimes against other human beings, together with his sentence of damnation for his sin against hope and the Holy Spirit, jointly dramatize the the play's central, "anagogical" theme: that a God who is at once just and merciful exacts from any infraction of either the temporal or eternal order a terrible, fitting price. Lastly, the theological position put forth in Tirso's homiletic play is shown to stand outside the academic debate between "Thomists" and "Molinists" about grace and free will.

In the Realm of the Senses: Saint Thomas Aquinas on Sensory Love, Desire, and Delight

IN THE REALM OF THE SENSES: SAINT THOMAS AQUINAS ON SENSORY LOVE, DESIRE, AND DELIGHT MARK P. DROST University of Rochester Rochester, New York Introduction SAINT THOMAS AQUINAS characterizes delight (delectatio ) as a state in which we are in " union with some good" (I-II, 35, 1).1 Further on he augments this description of delight : " we are not without the good we love, but are at rest in its possession" (35, 6). Concerning love (amor) 2 Aquinas says, "love remains whether the object is present or absent " (28, 1). But Aquinas also says that when we love an obl Unless otherwise indicated all references (ordered by number of question and article) refer to the Blackfriars edition of Aquinas's Summa Theologiae (New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company) V. 19-21 (in the Prima Secundae Questions 22-48), trans. Eric D'Arcy (Questions 22-30, 1967; 31-39, 1975) and John Reid (Questions 40-48, 1965) and V. 11-12 (in the Prima Pars Questions 75-89), trans. Timothy Sutter (Questions 75-83, 1970) and Paul T. Durbin (Questions 84-89, 1968) . 2 " There will be as many kinds of love as there are kinds of orexis and wanting" (26, 1). The notion of love (amor sensitivus) that is under scrutiny here is an event in the sensory orexis and occurs in the body-soul composite. It is not a case of intellectual or spiritual love (which is an act of the will and occurs in the soul alone). We are not dealing with the following notions of love: dilectio (which adds to love the property of election), caritas (charity, which is an act of will), or amicitia (friendship) which is more than love. (With respect to amicitia, unrequited friendship is not possible in principle, but unrequited love is factually real ; hence amicitia requires something more than love, viz. reciprocity.) Surely one is capable of experiencing more than one of these sentiments at a moment. One might be attracted on the basis of one's sensory orexis to someone and simultaneously love that person as a friend. Although these are not simultaneously incompatible affections, I will exclusively focus on the notion of amor sensitivus. 47 48 MARK P. DROST ject, " we are already in some kind of communion with it. Love therefore involves union" (25, 2). These statements are prima facie inconsistent unless Aquinas acknowledges that there are unions in which the object is not possessed. I contend that love is a case of being intentionally directed to a good, but it is not identical to the union which is a result of possessing a good. Although Aquinas describes love as a condition of union, love in fact is a condition of union which is ontologically prior to the union which is exhibited in delight. A consequence of Aquinas's thesis is the ontological possibility of loving something without taking delight in it or desiring it. We cannot, however, take delight in something or desire it unless we love it. I. MOVEMENT AND REST IN THE DESCRIPTION OF EMOTIONS The metaphors of motion, rest, approach, and retreat play a significant role in Aquinas's descriptions of the intentionality in various emotional states. As appetitive powers whose principle of operation is in the body-soul composite,8 Aquinas often describes the emotions through metaphors that suggest a similarity to the movement of physical objects (37, 2). The emotions are instances of orectic movement, and orectic movement is analogous to the movement of the inanimate orexis : Now orectic movement is, in the operations of the soul, what physical movement is in the physical world. Compare the physical movements of approach and withdrawal: approach is, of itself, directed towards something in harmony with nature; withdrawal is, of itself, directed towards something discordant with nature: thus a heavy body by its nature draws away from a higher place and towards a lower one (36, 2). The analogy between motion in the physical world and orectic movement of the soul is a teleological one: just as a light or heavy a Emotions, like perception (e.g. seeing, hearing), are powers whose principle of operation range in the body-soul composite. However, " some of the soul...