God the Father in the Theology of St. Thomas Aquinas by John Baptist Ku (review)

150 BOOK REVIEWS God the Father in the Theology of St. Thomas Aquinas. By JOHN BAPTIST KU. New York: Peter Lang, 2012. Pp. 378. $94.00 (cloth). ISBN 978-1-4331-2068-8. In six highly organized and readable chapters, the author contributes to the scholarship on St. Thomas Aquinas’s Trinitarian theology that has enjoyed a steady stream of attention in the last two decades. Some of these efforts have also, like the present work, investigated Aquinas’s theology of God the Father; however, Ku hopes to augment this scholarship by delving more fully into the Thomistic corpus, providing important insights regarding the development of Aquinas’s own theology of the Father. Chapter 1, the briefest of the six, is entitled “The Revelation of the Father.” Ku is aware of the critique that would characterize the Trinitarian theology of Aquinas as highly speculative and philosophical to the point of being detached from the scriptural data. He shows that the Dominican Master, a master in sacra pagina, provides a theology that, although culminating in a robust speculative effort, is rooted in revelation as found in the Holy Scriptures. Aquinas, guided by the faith, provides a theological exegesis based on the Catholic theological tradition in order to achieve a theology that is both philosophical/abstract and biblical/ exegetical. In order to demonstrate this, Ku includes important citations from Aquinas’s scriptural commentaries on key texts dealing with the Father. Chapter 2 delves into Aquinas’s understanding of the innascibility of the Father as a property of the first person. Ku provides texts from three different Thomistic sources, the Commentary on the Sentences, the disputed questions De potentia, and the Summa theologiae in order to show the continuity and development of Aquinas’s thought on this question. Also helpful is the contrast he demonstrates between the thought of Aquinas on innascibility and that of St. Bonaventure. Ku points out that Aquinas, unlike Bonaventure, maintains that innascibility is a notion of the Father distinct from the property of paternity. For Aquinas innascibility, although a notion of a person, is not a person-constituting notion because it does not indicate a relation to another divine person, the persons of the Trinity are constituted precisely by opposed subsistent relations. Innascibility is a notion, therefore, that is logically posterior to our understanding of the Father as constituted by the relation of paternity. Ku succeeds in showing the theological strength of Aquinas’s position as a bulwark opposed to any kind of Eunomian theology that would have the Father constituted as a person prior to and apart from the opposed relation with the Son. Chapter 3 is an explication of Aquinas’s understanding of the Father as the principle or author of the Godhead. Ku is correct to caution here that Aquinas does not name the Father a principle as if he generates or spirates another God. Instead the Father is principle in that he generates the Son and spirates the Holy Spirit, two other divine persons; of course, what is communicated in these acts is the divine essence. Yet the emphasis for Aquinas is on the relation of origin that exists between the divine persons. Although standing clear of causal language to describe the origin of the Son and the Spirit from the Father, Ku points out that Aquinas can use BOOK REVIEWS 151 the language of author (auctor) to describe the relation of origin. However, since the term author also carries the meaning of “not from another,” Aquinas would prefer to use the term only of the Father as principle of the Son; nevertheless, he still defends a more general use of the term author as used by St. Hilary. For Aquinas, since only the Father is a “principle without principle,” the term author is more appropriately applied to him than to the Son, even if the Son is, with the Father, the principle of the Holy Spirit. What Aquinas does not want to do is to imply any kind of hierarchy in the Godhead. Here again Ku points out a difference between the theology of Aquinas and his contemporary, Bonaventure. After presenting the conceptual differences in Aquinas’s Trinitarian thought between origin and relation...