Much of this volume derives from presentations given in the Annual Maynooth Aquinas Lecture series between 2002 and 2010 (a previous set of Maynooth Aquinas Lectures was published in 2002). The series was founded by Fr. James McEvoy, who was involved in editing the present volume but who died in 2010. Fittingly, therefore, the volume comes with a moving tribute to him. It also comes with several essays on aspects of Aquinas's thought which were not Maynooth lectures and appear in the present book in a separate section. One of these essays is by Thomas Kelly, who took over the management of the Maynooth series in 2004 and who died in 2008. Kelly's piece (on Heidegger on Aquinas on God) is an address he gave in 2007 to the Thomas Aquinas Society of Ireland (Cairde Thomáis Naofa) founded by him. Kelly focusses on a course given by Heidegger in 1926/27 under the title ‘The History of Philosophy from Aquinas to Kant’. Here we find Heidegger's only extended treatment of Aquinas, one which he produced around the time that Sein und Zeit appeared and which can therefore be taken to represent his mature thinking. Kelly is very critical of Heidegger's take on Aquinas.
Thomas Aquinas: Teacher and Scholar is undoubtedly a collection of distinguished essays, but it will, I think, largely be of interest only to people working on Aquinas professionally. You will see what I mean if you look at the contribution by John F. Boyle (‘Aquinas's lost Roman commentary: an historical detective story’). It is erudite, detailed, and altogether excellent. But it is very technical. Working from a manuscript to be found in Lincoln College, Oxford (MS Lat. 95), Boyle persuasively argues that Aquinas wrote a second commentary on Book 1 of the Sentences of Peter Lombard — a hitherto lost commentary, though one referred to by Tolomeo of Lucca, one of Aquinas's contemporaries. Boyle defends this conclusion in ways that historians and experts on medieval manuscripts will applaud, yet his essay is not for the general reader. Nor are some other essays in the present volume. In saying so I am not offering a criticism of the book. I am just noting what I take to be the case.
The first essay in the book (by Liam Walsh OP) is on Aquinas and the Eucharist. It is clearly written and (notwithstanding what I have just been saying) is something from which anyone with an interest in Aquinas can learn. Walsh is concerned with Aquinas on the Eucharist from an ecumenical perspective. On the basis of his reading of Aquinas he argues, among other things, that ‘the real debate about transubstantiation must be a debate about God and about how God acts on the created world’ (p. 26). This conclusion might strike some readers as rather vague. But it is, I think, definitely pointing in the right direction, and it comes with a neat analysis by Walsh of Aquinas's sacramental thinking in general.
The second essay, by William Desmond (‘Exceeding virtue: Aquinas and the Beatitudes’) is very much an essay in contemporary Continental philosophy of religion and will be understood only by those working in that field while appreciating the way in which its practitioners write. I found it to be quite a let down having turned to it after reading Walsh's contribution. It leads the reader through Summa Theologiae,1a2ae,69 in fairly clear terms, but then ends up talking, for example, about the ‘religious porosity’ opened up by the beatitudes, about ‘a fundamental Amen to being’, about ‘the primal “yes” to finite being’, and about the seventh beatitude meaning ‘that polemos is always second born, and falling asleep in agitation to the first peace of being’. Here all I can say is ‘let those who have ears hear’.
Philipp W. Rosemann probably knows as much about Peter Lombard (c.1096–1194) as anyone alive. And in the third essay of the present volume he compares and contrasts Lombard and Aquinas as theologians somewhat to the disparagement of Aquinas. With Lombard, says Rosemann, the emphasis is on sacra pagina (Holy Scripture). With Aquinas it is on scientia divina (divine science). The move here, Rosemann argues, is from the metaphorical and poetic to the ‘conceptually precise, univocal language of the Philosopher’ (p. 69). This seems an odd result to arrive at given what Aquinas says about analogical predication and I suspect that the differences between Lombard and Aquinas are, in the end, less real than Rosemann takes them to be. But I find Sarah Borden Sharkey's account of differences between Aquinas and Edith Stein to be a very convincing one. In ‘The Meaning of being in Thomas Aquinas and Edith Stein’ Sharkey, who has published extensively on Stein, argues that, unlike Stein, Aquinas does not think ‘that there is a meaning of being in the sense that Stein affirmed’ (p. 85) and that Aquinas was right on this matter. Sharkey takes Stein on being (especially what she writes about ‘essential being’) to be in agreement with ideas of Heidegger, and she explains how Aquinas on being cannot be thought of in this way and how he might, therefore, be complimented. Sharkey's essay is a fine contribution to what might be called ‘comparative philosophical analysis’.
It is followed by an equally fine essay in what some people have called ‘Analytical Thomism’. Eleonore Stump's ‘The Problem of Suffering: a Thomistic Approach’ comes from an author who is well known for trying to make Aquinas engage with contemporary analytical philosophy (though she does not invoke the slogan ‘Analytical Thomism’). And it is typical of much that she has written. It artfully blends reference to Aquinas with tough metaphysical argument which will be recognizable to analytical philosophers as being such. It draws on what Stump says in her book Wandering in Darkness: Narrative and the Problem of Evil (Oxford, 2010) and its argument is that suffering (not an easy concept to articulate) can be thought of as justifiably permitted by God because of what Stump, drawing on Aquinas, takes to be its medicinal effect. Some readers of Stump's contribution to discussion of the problem of evil in the present book might take her to be more concerned with providing a theodicy than Aquinas ever was, and I think that they would be right to do so for reasons I give in my Thomas Aquinas on God and Evil (Oxford, 2011). However, what she says about God and evil deserves serious and detailed attention.
The last two of the Maynooth Lectures printed in this volume turn to Aquinas on divine ideas and Aquinas as a teacher. The second lecture is especially engaging. Here Denys Turner offers a lively account of the sins by which teachers are often afflicted and comments on how Aquinas's didactic virtues can be discerned in what he writes. The essays that follow these two lectures discuss Aquinas and the Western reception of Dionysius the Areopagite, Aquinas and ethical consequentialism, and Aquinas on intellect and reality. The final essay in the book is the one by Thomas Kelly noted above. All of these essays are solid ones, though I pass over them in silence now for reasons of space and since the core of the present book lies in the Maynooth lectures already discussed.
