Aquinas in Dialogue: Thomas for the Twenty-First Century ed. by Jim Fodor and Frederick Christian Bauerschmidt (review)

296 BOOK REVIEWS academic theologians in Balthasar's lifetime. One could even cite this volume as a barometer of the surprisingly resilient Anglo-American afterlife of Balthasarian theology, a development that has little parallel in continental Europe today. A final reservation concerns the anachronism conveyed by the idea of Balthasar contra mundum. To be sure, the author of such diatribes as Cordula oder der Ernstfall seemed to revel in his vitriolic excesses. But the center of all Balthasarian theology, if such a beastly label can even be granted, consists of a Christian witness at the heart ofthe world. Rather than King Lear, the figuration of this stance is found in Richard II, the Shakespearean protagonist who according to Balthasar "has become a pure image and metaphor of the totally humbled Son of Man." In placing Balthasar's theology sometimes at the center and sometimes at the margin of academic theology the contributors to this volume seem-perhaps precisely because of their insistence upon his idiosyncrasy-to forget that the usual place from which Balthasar took on the world was not the contemporary guild but the chaplaincy at the University of Basel. The Catholic University ofAmerica Washington, D.C. PETERJ.CASARELLA Aquinas in Dialogue: Thomas for the Twenty-First Century. Edited byJIMFODOR andFREDERICKCHRISTIANBAUERSCHMIDT. Oxford: Blackwell, 2004. Pp. 200. $36.95 (paper). ISBN 1405119314. Given his ecumenical approach and his broadminded confidence in the power of reason, Thomas Aquinas is a particularly apt subject for studies that place him in conversation with various "others." Jim Fodor and Frederick Christian Bauerschmidt have assembled a series of well-crafted and tightly reasoned essays that do just that, establishing engagements between Thomas and Buddhism, analytical philosophy, Islam,Judaism, Eastern Orthodox Christianity, and classical Protestantism. To be sure, all ofthese essays reveal intriguing family resemblances between Thomism and other philosophical and religious perspectives, but what the most compelling of them show is, paradoxically, the distinctiveness ofAquinas's view of God and the radical difference that it makes. David Burrell's treatment of Aquinas and Islam and Paul William's analysis of Aquinas in relation to Buddhism both indicate the uniqueness of Thomas's account of the God who, precisely as creator, is not one thing among others. And Bauerschmidt's own essay on the "hillbilly Thomism" of Flannery O'Connor makes plain the enormous difficulty of explaining this understanding of God within a modern context. O'Connor famously explained the exaggerations and BOOK REVIEWS 297 grotesqueries in her stories by saying, "one must learn to shout in the land of the hard of hearing." The deafness of the modern person is a profound insensitivity to the peculiar form of divine otherness that Thomas Aquinas made central to his doctrine of God. Burrell's presentation commences with the reminder that Thomas had inherited from the Aristotelian tradition a fundamental aporia, namely, the tension between substance as the paradigm of existence and species or form as the telos of the epistemological process. This same dilemma, of course, preoccupied Duns Scotus a generation after Aquinas, leading Scotus to articulate the form of haecceitas. Thomas solved the problem, Burrell tells us, by placing it in the higher context of creation: "The presence of the One as creator, bestowing esse to each individual, retained proper Aristotelian respect for formal structures while offering such immediacy to the creator/creature relation that the status of individuals as paradigms for substance was clearly vindicated." The introduction of this new metaphysical dimension of creation-a sort of metacausality never envisioned by Aristotle-is what led to the peculiar type of "Aristotlese" that Aquinas consistently and creatively employed. For instance, when speaking of God, Thomas will use the Aristotelian designation of prime mover, but he will do so in a highly analogous manner, since he knows that creation is not a type of worldly motion or change, involving a pre-existing substrate. Like the prime mover, God is an efficient cause, but he is not one cause among many, operating within the context of nature; rather, he is the causa essendi of the entire realm of finitude. This means that God is not, in Burrell's own phrase, "the biggest thing around," the highest reality caught...