The New Cambridge Companion to Aquinas

I reviewed The New Cambridge Companion to Aquinas, edited by Eleonore Stump and Thomas Joseph White (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022), for the Heythrop Journal. https://doi.org/10.1111/heyj.14212. You can access that review with the link, or read the pre-pub version below.

Countless students have been introduced to Thomas Aquinas by The Cambridge Companion to Aquinas, edited by Eleonore Stump and the late Norman Kretzmann nearly thirty years ago, and it is in part thanks to that volume that the intervening decades of scholarship have elicited a follow-up. This new companion is one hundred pages longer than the first, composed of sixteen original essays designed to convey the breadth and significance of Aquinas’s thought. Apart from Professor Stump, the list of authors is entirely different from the first companion, introducing a new generation of Thomistic scholars. In a series dedicated to the work of major philosophers, the New Cambridge Companion to Aquinas situates Thomas’s philosophy within his vocation as a theologian, so that the fruits of reason can be seen to be ‘watered from the higher realms of God’s wisdom’, as Aquinas puts it in the quotation that serves as an epigraph to the volume (from Rigans montes de superioribus suis). This approach reflects a growing scholarly acknowledgment of Aquinas’s fundamentally theological vision and the way that vision upholds the integrity of philosophy and provides a context for it to flourish.

Early in the Summa Contra Gentiles, Aquinas writes that ‘to the extent that man devotes himself to the pursuit of wisdom, he already has a certain share of true happiness’. After a brief introduction, the volume opens with an engaging outline of Aquinas’s life characterized in just these terms. Dominic Legge, OP, educes the historical context for understanding Aquinas’s thought and situates his major works biographically, conveying his infectious enthusiasm and deference for St Thomas in the process. The first companion had three chapters on Aquinas’s philosophical context and influences before moving on to specific subjects of enquiry, whereas the new companion addresses his sources in a more systematic series of topical chapters. In place of John Wippel’s wide-ranging essay on Metaphysics, the new companion includes five distinct chapters outlining Thomas’s approach to the structure of reality. This begins with Jeffrey Brower’s patient exposition of Aquinas’s ‘first principles’: hylomorphism and causation. By delineating the diversity of uses to which these principles are put—for example, he notes that in physics matter and form are principles of change whereas in metaphysics they are principles of being—Brower furnishes the reader with the fundamental conceptual resources necessary to grasp Aquinas’s metaphysics. Following this, Thomas Joseph White turns to the foundation of reality, on both a philosophical and theological register. White’s pellucid explanation and demonstration of the real distinction between essence and esse sets up a succinct exposition of divine simplicity and the corresponding conception of Trinitarian persons as subsistent relations—a twenty-eight-page summary of content that he covers over the course of seven hundred pages in his recent monograph.

Gaven Kerr situates Aquinas’s treatment of being within the medieval doctrine of the transcendentals, which, he notes, sought for the first time to elaborate the character of being itself. He also insists that ‘Aquinas is the first person in the history of philosophy to offer a clear articulation of the meaning of participation’ (pg. 96) and provides an elegant summary of that achievement. James Dominic Rooney, OP then follows with a treatment of Aquinas’s notion of secondary causality in relation to modern science. Many of the core principles that have been so essential to recent Thomistic work in theology and science are outlined in this chapter, and it would make excellent assigned reading in a course on the topic. Rounding out the section on metaphysics is Eleonore Stump’s chapter on the nature of human beings, understood in terms of their material, formal, and final cause. As we might expect, she provides a sharp overview of hylomorphism that sets up discussions of the soul, the intermediate state, and the beatific vision.

Aquinas differs from most modern philosophy in that his epistemology is rooted in his metaphysics—his cognitive theory considers the powers of the mind as tending toward certain acts, which then informs his epistemology (see pg. 176n2). There is a growing recognition of the importance of this approach for contemporary thought, and Therese Scarpelli Cory, whose work has been instrumental to that recognition, provides a surefooted orientation to the bewildering array of terms and concepts that are often unintelligible to post-Kantian philosophers attempting to read Aquinas on this topic. She captures the uniqueness of Aquinas’s vision of truth, writing that ‘intellectual perfection does not consist in having as many true beliefs and as few false beliefs as possible, but rather consists in a condition in which the intellect’s own internal complexity most perfectly reflects the complexity of being itself’ (pg. 167). This chapter will be a welcome resource to anyone working on these topics in Aquinas or otherwise.

Angela Knobel’s essay on the intellectual virtues outlines the speculative (science, wisdom, understanding) and practical (prudence, skill) intellectual virtues, and then provides an intricate consideration of understanding as an oft-ignored virtue. In developing this virtue, we come to increase what we habitually know and thereby pave the way for our understanding to operate more readily and effectively. Michael Gorman rounds out the section on epistemology with an instructive treatment of the concept of free choice in Aquinas’s writings—an important and debated subset of the question of free will. He shows Aquinas to be interested not in arbitrary choosing, but in the possibility of deviation when the choice is clear.

Aquinas’s writings on ethics are often isolated from his broader system of thought, allowing readers to compare them with texts similarly abstracted from Hume or Kant, as if they offered conflicting answers to the same basic questions. Not only is this not the case, but central to Aquinas’s view is the belief that without entering dialectically into certain processes of enquiry (processes he outlines in the Summa Theologiae), one should not necessarily expect to assent to his views. Therefore, it is immensely important that Part IV of this volume situates Aquinas’s ethics within his metaphysics and anthropology. Three chapters on grace, moral theory, and virtue ethics position his thought squarely within a teleologically ordered vision of human nature. They helpfully disambiguate Aquinas’s approach from Aristotle’s, noting the sources and details of their convergence, with an eye toward the significance of Thomas’s vision for our understanding of human experience and relationality today.

The final section covers Aquinas’s philosophical theology. Brian Leftow offers a pragmatic look at original sin and the reasons why modern western readers often struggle with Aquinas’s approach. Timothy Pawl provides a characteristically lucid overview of Aquinas’s Christology, addressing central philosophical problems raised by the incarnation. Thomas Williams ambitiously covers evil, sin, and redemption together, showing how Aquinas systematically connects these themes and linking them to the previous chapter on Christ. In the final chapter Simon Gaine outlines the contribution of resurrection to Aquinas’s eschatology. One regularly hears the criticism that Thomas’s eschatology falls short because he does not care about embodiment. Gaine captures the heart of Aquinas’s theology by showing how rigorously he insists that God—not embodiment—is the end of human creatures and nothing can be added to our beatitude that is lacking in Him. ‘While reunion with the body completes the subject that enjoys beatitude, it does not complete the soul’s essential happiness’ (pg. 375). Resurrection does not add to our beatitude, it participates in it. This is a welcome and much needed treatment that is sure to elicit further discussion.

Because of the philosophical focus of the volume, the exegetical and doctrinal core of Aquinas’s thought remains understated. Readers of Pawl’s chapter, for instance, might mistakenly assume that for Thomas, the incarnation is an abstract philosophical conundrum. That is simply to say that this volume is an overview of only a subset of Aquinas’s work, providing one lens through which it might be viewed. This may be why the original Companion included a chapter on Aquinas’s biblical commentaries, and there is no comparable chapter in this volume—nor, as the editors note, is there an entry on politics. Many of the chapters are practices in distinction and definition, comprised of prose that translates easily into diagrams and tables. As such, the elegance of Thomas’s overall vision does not shine through all these pages as well as it might, but they will nonetheless help the reader understand and appreciate Aquinas’s own writings. These essays emphasize clarity, and they are more pedagogic than persuasive in form. The endnotes refer mostly to primary sources, so while one will not find a comprehensive guide to the secondary literature here, the reader can safely assume that most of what is cited is essential reading, which has been collected in a twenty-page bibliography at the back. The frontmatter also includes a useful outline of Aquinas’s works arranged chronologically by genre. Because it assumes little background knowledge, this collection should be accessible to a broad range of readers. This volume is a convincing testament to the enduring consequence of Aquinas’s philosophical insights, and it will be an essential resource for students and teachers of St Thomas.

Austin Stevenson
Pembroke College, Oxford
January 2023