Dust Bound for Heaven: Explorations in the Theology of Thomas Aquinas by Reinhard Hütter (review)

Dust Bound for Heaven is a multifaceted contribution to the theological anthropology of Thomas Aquinas. Yet Hütter’s aim goes beyond simply adding to the burgeoning Aquinas scholarship of the past two decades. As a Thomist ressourcement theologian he believes that Aquinas’s thought has the potential to lead seekers of wisdom “up-stream to the source of all wisdom” and to foster the reclamation by theology of “the dignity of its proper origin” (4). With this end in view, Hütter puts into practice the restoration of reason in the service of Christian faith through a series of “re-lectures” of Aquinas’s thought, drawing on an impressive range of past and present scholarship.

Dust Bound is framed by a prelude on reason’s “presumption and despair” and a postlude with a metaphysical reflection on the practice of eucharistic adoration. In between, four major sections cover topics on human nature and destiny: the passions and political theology; the natural desire for the vision of God; grace, freedom, the theological virtues, and the unity of theology; and the metaphysics of analogy and the university.

Hütter’s starting point is a critical analysis of the nature and role of reason, which he sees as having been reduced to a largely technical function with attendant instrumental applications. Reason needs to be restored by faith and the graced will to the fullness of its metaphysical range. At the same time, faith itself cannot realize its full potential without the light of reason. Ideally, faith and reason should protect each other from falling into the excess of fideism and the pride of hyper-rationalism.

His critique of reason is followed by a rather polemical consideration of Western civilization from a theological perspective. Hütter identifies three major socio-political configurations that have characterized the West. At best, there is some evidence in the past of a “theologically enlightened, genuine liberalism,” which recognized that “the comprehensive and therefore proper practice of the virtue of justice must needs include the public practice of ‘religio’” (104). Nevertheless, in the modern period this form has declined into “mere liberalism” where religion is paternalistically tolerated, at best (20). This in turn is trending downwards in Europe and the United States toward “sovereign secularism,” described as an “ideological program of comprehensive, immanentist self-sufficiency,” which understands and affirms reality “in intentional independence from any transcendent source in general and from revealed religion in particular” (103). Genuine liberalism, in contrast, is aware of its limits and dependence on the transcendent.

Hütter situates his socio-political critique in the larger context of Aquinas’s theology of states of human nature: integral, corrupt, restored, and glorified. From the perspective of Thomistic anthropology, he sees the decline of genuine liberalism to sovereign secularism as reflecting an “increasing indifference to the sources of transcendence vital for its own flourishing” (107). Two theological considerations related to this decline are explored in detail throughout the book: the woundedness of human nature consequent upon sin and the natural love of God above all.

I found especially valuable the way Hütter not only engages Aquinas, but also draws on subsequent commentaries and current scholarship. In considering the natural desire for the vision of God, he takes on John Milbank’s The Suspended Middle (Eerdmans, 2005), which deals with Henri de Lubac’s controversial Surnaturel (Desclée de Brouwer, 1991). Hütter contrasts Milbank’s views with the detailed study by Lawrence Feingold (The Natural Desire to See God According to St Thomas Aquinas and His Interpreters, 2nd ed., Sapientia, 2010). Also included is a discussion of the response to Surnaturel by Dominican scholar Marie-Joseph Le Guillou. Throughout his treatment, which spans two chapters and comprises a quarter of the book, Hütter convincingly argues that a distinction may be found in Aquinas between the natural desire for the visio...