Michael Dodds’ study, originally published at Fribourg in 1986 under the same title but with the sub-title ‘A Study of the Teaching of St Thomas Aquinas on Divine Immutability in View of Certain Contemporary Criticism [sic] of this Doctrine’, has established itself as something of a classic – or at any rate an obvious place to look, along with Thomas Weinandy's diptych Does God Change? and Does God Suffer?, for anyone seeking a defence of the patristic and Thomist doctrine of the unchangeableness of God. The opportunity of a new edition, as distinct from a re-printing with a more accessible publishing house, has been well taken. Apart from the far more pleasing appearance of the text, and an updated bibliography, much of the prose has been recast with the evident intention of employing a more elegant or at least less stiff English, compared with the ‘doctorese’ of a thesis, especially one produced in a Francophone setting. Endnotes have become user-friendly footnotes. The names and provenance of the critics of the doctrine, previously relegated to the end-notes, as was thought suitable, no doubt, for the intellectually criminous – if not only they – in an orthodox environment, have been brought into the main body of the text: a change which enables one to see at a glance where (literally) they are coming from. And at points the argument itself has been subtly shifted.
The overall structure of the book, however, remains the same. It keeps its four parts, which investigate in turn the sense in which creatures of various kinds (or their ontological principles) might be called in certain respects ‘immutable’; the sense in which God is so (this chapter gives an excellent overview of divine metaphysics at large); the ‘motion of the motionless God’– a phrase suggestive of the subtlety of Michael Dodds’ approach (though it comes, in fact, from Thomas's commentary on Denys's The Divine Names), and lastly the application of this accumulated discussion of stasis and mobility to love, both human and divine. In the last three chapters, the author engages with a variety of representative twentieth century critics of divine immutability/impassibility. Prominent among them is the chief rival to classical divinity in Anglo-American Protestant theology of a robustly metaphysical kind: Process thought.
Incontrovertibly, the twenty years or so that have elapsed since this book was written have deprived it of none of its pertinence. The pressures, both extra- and intra-theological, that push Christian thinkers towards a theology of divine mutability and (especially) passibility are much the same now as then. Extra-theologically, there are what might be considered the fresh challenges for theodicy brought by the (arguably) incomparably horrific public atrocities of the twentieth century – the usual suspects: Auschwitz, Hiroshima, the killing-fields. And there is also the increasing intolerance of Western moral sensibility vis-à-vis chronic suffering of any kind – hence the recent campaign for legislation to permit euthanasia, or the withdrawal of basic medical care: abolishing the suffering by eliminating the sufferer. Intra-theologically, there is the long-standing request of ‘biblical theology’ for a less speculative treatment of the reciprocal relations between God and Israel/human beings evidenced in Scripture; the decline (in certain quarters) of Chalcedonian orthodoxy in Christology (clearly, if the One who suffered on the Cross was only the human symbol of God there is not much of a case for divine compassion at Calvary); and the desire – which need not be heterodox – for a theology of the Holy Trinity more pervasively informed by the Paschal mystery, or in the title of a German monograph on Balthasar, the ‘Passio Caritatis’.
Many readers will want this book in order to save themselves the trouble of researching, via the Index Thomisticus, the best part of four thousand individual references to movement and its contrary in the corpus of Aquinas. Others will be more concerned with the overall message, which is assisted by the detailed investigation of a great mediaeval theologian but can also stand independently of it. What brings together unchangeability and love in Dodds's title is also a key truth-claim: namely, that love is the strongest and most perfect of the affections precisely because from its immovably principial character all other affections derive (compare the references to Thomas's corpus given on p. 206, n. 14). Of course, when applied to God this affirmation has to pass through the refining fire of analogical transposition. What emerges? The truth that ‘the immutability Aquinas is predicating of God is the unchangeability of ultimate perfection’ (p. 76). The ‘transient’ (‘transitive’ might be a better term) motion God undertakes in creation and the redemptive missions of Son and Spirit do not compromise his immutability precisely because they entail no intensification (much less diminishment) of an incomparable plenitude. An excellent presentation of Thomas's account of the relations, ‘real’ and otherwise, between the world and God (pp. 165–170) bears this out.
The shift in thought in the book (unless I have missed something in its predecessor) comes on pp. 226–228 where Dodds argues that compassion can be described as a mode of the divine love not only in the sense that God's love acts to overcome the evils that cause suffering (the exclusive emphasis of the first edition) but, further, in that love leads God to make a unitive self-identification with those who suffer (compare St Matthew's parable of the Great Assize and the words spoken in the Resurrection appearance to Paul on the Damascus Road in Acts 22). In this new section Dodds might, conceivably, have found a place for some discussion of Balthasar's notion of a supra-suffering in God, albeit one subordinate to the divine joy and bliss. Gerard O’Hanlon's 1990 study of Balthasar's nuanced approach to the divine immutability, mentioned in a footnote, goes into this.
English Dominican readers will be pleased to see the reference to Gerald Vann on God's ‘illimitable will-to-share’ in suffering (from The Son's Course) on p. 236. They may remember there are fuller thoughts on this subject in Vann's The Pain of Christ and the Sorrow of God.
