Saint Thomas Aquinas. Vol. 2.

McDermott, John M.

SAINT THOMAS AQUINAS. VOLUME 2: SPIRITUAL MASTER. By Jean-Pierre Torrell, O.P. Translated from the French by Robert Royal. Washington: Catholic University of America, 2003. Pp. xii + 422. $39.95; $29.95.

This is a worthy successor to Torrell's excellent volume 1, The Person and His Work (1996). All of Thomas's theology is spiritual theology, since faith enlivened by charity seeks understanding. The saint's spirituality is mirrored in his theology. The divine reality is known through conceptual formulations, even while surpassing them. So Thomas is the Christian spiritual master presenting a Catholic view of God and man. Part 1 concentrates on the trinitarian God, the Creator beyond all things, treating analogy (negation as the third step), the Trinity as beginning, end, and experienced presence in creation, the roles of Son and Spirit in creation and redemption, and the community of the redeemed. Part 2 develops Thomas's spiritual anthropology grounded in a theology of creation whereby all things both possess an inherent consistency and stand in a one-sided relation to God. The consistency allows room for creation's goodness and free cooperation in the return to God upon whom all depends. Man is the composite of body and soul, whose unity under reason and God is perfected by habitus. Society likewise reflects a delicate balance of individual and group, while the person surpasses the material world and is under a special providence. An excellent chapter relates synderesis, conscience, natural law, knowledge, and the responsibility of forming conscience in truth. Respecting the natural order with the relative autonomy of the state and secular professions, Thomas nonetheless has everything depend ultimately on supernatural charity, which presupposes faith and hope (the locus of prayer) and integrates all the natural and supernatural virtues. The natural law is implanted in man's tendencies but comes to perfection in love, which means loving God above all and the neighbor as oneself and adhering to Christ.

Thomas's synthesis of Aristotelianism, neo-Platonism, and revelation was ongoing from the more Aristotelian categories of the In sententias to the more neo-Platonic emphasis of later works. Presupposing that earlier explanations are continued unless explicitly rejected, T. joins the earlier emphasis on conceptual clarity, distinction of orders and virtues, and the primacy of natures with the later dynamic integration of the universe in charity's return to its source. This joining leaves many tensions. How are nature and grace distinguished if the natural desire to see God is a major thrust of Thomas's thought? How can the Trinity be intellectually and affectively experienced on earth if faith comes from hearing and man knows through the senses? If faith is dynamically oriented to God, how is it distinguished from charity? If charity supplies the norm for every just act, how can any act be good if charity is lacking (359, 364-65)? If man knows God through nature, how is a vestigium Trinitatis (supernatural mystery) found in all things? Explaining appropriation as the manifestation of the Person in the midst of essential attributes (159) does not ontologically ground separate roles for the Persons in creation, if all grace is given by God, how can Christ the man cause it? (The notions of "ontological exemplarity" and instrumental causality, however conjoined, animate, and free it might be under God, are clearly a pis aller.) The grounding of Christ's status as firstborn of many brothers in his eternal generation (148-49) guarantees his role at the culmination of creation, but it threatens the natural-supernatural distinction. Thomas enjoyed a Christocentric spirituality but had difficulty enunciating it coherently within a Plotinian exitus-reditus schema with an Aristotelian nature as principle of activity and efficient cause. Participation in infinite Good explains divine causality in grace and freedom as choice of the good, but does it fully correspond with a more Aristotelian freedom of indifference that guarantees human cooperation? Love is not only the fulfillment of a natural drive; it is also nature's ecstasy (50, 357).

These tensions that have plagued Thomism through the centuries are rooted in Thomas's works. T. has mirrored the balanced richness of Aquinas's thought, "a rarely broken equilibrium" (383), without recourse to simplifying schemata. For Thomas fidelity to reality's mystery is more important than myopic rational syntheses. So his spirituality is trinitarian, theocentric, Christocentric, objective, realistic, and ecclesial. It lives from the Bible, the Fathers, and Dominican spirituality. The surety of his Catholic faith and the vitality of his interior life made him sane and profound in employing Aristotle and neo-Platonism while preserving the balance of reality's polar tensions. Perhaps the major lacuna in Thomas's thought is the incomplete notion of person as acting subject and in its relation to natures. In T.'s magnificent presentation one wishes more on original sin, assimilation to Christ crucified, the meaning of suffering, and sacraments. But one cannot do everything, even in a magnum opus.

Pontifical College Josephinum, Columbus, Ohio

JOHN M. MCDERMOTT, N.J.