Trinité et création au prisme de la voie négative chez Saint Thomas d’Aquin by Thierry-Dominique Humbrecht (review)

BOOK REVIEWS 463 Trinité et création au prisme de la voie négative chez Saint Thomas d’Aquin. By THIERRY-DOMINIQUE HUMBRECHT. Paris: Parole et Silence, 2011. Pp. 788. $47.00 (paper). ISBN: 978-2-84573-975-8. This massive volume by a prolific Dominican Thomist of Toulouse follows another in the same area, Théologie négative et noms divins chez saint Thomas d’Aquin (Paris: Vrin, 2005). A dissertation directed by Olivier Boulnois, with Gilles Emery, Jean-Luc Marion, Remy Brague, Rudi Imbach, and Alain de Libera on the defense board, Théologie négative earned Fr. Humbrecht a doctorate in philosophy from the purely secular École pratique des hautes études in Paris. Like Théologie négative and, in general, like the scholarly works of Humbrecht’s Toulousian confreres, Trinité et création is simultaneously minutious in its survey of the works of Aquinas, well-informed with respect to the history of philosophy and theology, engaged with contemporary continental philosophy, especially with those issues which Heidegger imposed on it, and devoted to serving the theology of the Catholic Church. Trinité et création was written as Humbrecht’s dissertation for the ecclesiastical doctorate of theology at the Dominican University of Fribourg in Switzerland. It was supervised there by Gilles Emery, with François-Xavier Putallaz and Serge-Thomas Bonino on the jury, among other notable philosophicaltheological scholars of Aquinas. In both doctoral theses, the interests of the Church are understood from a distinctly conservative perspective. Nonetheless, even if what can be preserved from the neo-Thomist revival initiated in the nineteenth century and its Gilsonian continuation is cherished, there are no faux pas resulting from ignorance of history, fantastic invention, or lack of philosophical or theological sophistication. Humbrecht’s framework, questions, and solutions belong to an intellectual world common to him, his supervisors, and his juries. On the philosophical side, and crucial for his treatment of the relation between philosophy and revealed theology, is the framework fixed by JeanLuc Marion’s postmodern criticisms of metaphysics, of negative theology as atheism, and of Neoplatonism as the self-defeating climb up the ladder of negation relegated to abstraction. Despite Humbrecht’s refusal to substitute Marion’s formula, “théologie négative ou noms divins” for his own “théologie négative et noms divins,” and his generally opting for the inclusive “and” rather than the exclusive “or,” Marion’s problematic is always present implicitly or explicitly in Théologie négative. It is evident in the crucial question of the relation between Proclus and Dionysius, namely, the question of the relation between the Neoplatonic metaphysics of the undoubted source of Dionysius’s treatise on the divine names, and its Christian reiteration taken over by Aquinas. Humbrecht does not see so much Aquinas’s delight in the metaphysical play, which, beginning with simplicity, powerfully and surely manifests step by step the divine self-differentiation and self-determination. Rather metaphysics tends to negation, to an emptiness which only Christian 464 BOOK REVIEWS revelation can fill. This is Marion’s Dionysius set in opposition to Neoplatonism. Importantly this chiasmus is carried over into Trinité et création. There Humbrecht treats these subjects in Aquinas through “the prism of the negative way.” Neoplatonism is described as “univocity seeking to pass beyond itself” (Trinité et création, 32). Aquinas is easily able to use terms which belonged to “pagan participation” because “with respect to what is essential they have already been Christianized and metaphysically rectified” by Dionysius vis-à-vis Proclus (Trinité et création, 30; cf. Théologie négative, 743). Nothing is said of how Aquinas misunderstood both Dionysius and Proclus in a most important way on the nature of the First Cause, an error exhibited in his most philosophically sophisticated expositio, that on the Liber de causis. The negative way is described as a monstrous parasite on the tree of theology leaving it empty and dried out needing the Incarnate Word and Aquinas the gardener (Trinité et création, 46; compare Théologie négative, 783-84). The aim of Trinité et création is to find in Aquinas both a thoroughgoing use of the negative way, which prevents the reduction...