Ephemerides Thomisticae Analyticae: Metaphysics and Ethics in Stump’s Aquinas

The Thomist 69 (2005): 593-620 EPHEMERIDES THOMISTICAE ANALYTICAE: METAPHYSICS AND ETHICS IN STUMP'S AQUINAS DENIS J. M. BRADLEY Georgetown University Washington, D.C. ELEONORE STUMP has written what is likely to be her magnum opus. Her book, Aquinas,1 is magnus in at least two obvious ways: it is very long (631 pages) and, by the standards that she sets for herself as a "senior scholar" (ix), a benchmark for like-minded "Analytic Thomists." Stump paints on a big canvas: she essays, even if she does not achieve, a comprehensive representation of Aquinas from the standpoint of Analytic Thomism, a movement in which Professor Stump now stands, quite on her own merits-although she continues to acknowledge the debt she owes to her "teacher, mentor and friend" (xii), the late Norman Kretzmann-among the most widely known and eminent practitioners thereof. But Stump's Aquinas, despite its length and breadth and, in many places, depth, is not a Summa philosophiae ad mentem divi Thomae. The topics that it explores do, indeed, reflect more the present-day "vagaries of academic interests and trends " (x)-hence, the title of this review article-than they follow "largely (but not entirely) ... the order of Aquinas's Summa theologiae" (xi). The author has chosen topics where she discerns a "special confluence of Aquinas's views and current philosophical debate" (x), those, 1 Eleonore Stump, Aquinas (London and New York: Routledge, 2003). Pp. xx+ 611. $135.00 (cloth), $43.00 (paper). ISBN 0-415-02960-0 (cloth), ISBN 0-415-37898-2 (paper). Parenthetical page references hereafter, unless otherwise noted, are to this book. 593 594 DENIS J. M. BRADLEY anyway, that have stimulated her "bridge-building efforts" (ibid.) to connect Aquinas with contemporary analytic philosophy. Stump's "Herculean task" (ix) occupies an introduction and sixteen subsequent chapters, some of which are extensively reworked versions of earlier papers. This reworking has required admirable diligence and scholarly responsiveness. But since "each chapter [can be read] on its own" (xi), probably most readers will peruse Aquinas, given its size and density, piecemeal. Stump, happily, groups the chapters into four parts, each of which could provide ample subject matter for a graduate seminar, which would be a suitable, perhaps the best, context in which to read and, in commensurately detailed fashion, deconstruct the complex arguments which thicken this book. The four parts of Aquinas stretch over an impressive range of topics: (Part I) The Ultimate Foundation of Reality: ch. 1, "Metaphysics: A Theory of Things"; ch. 2, "Goodness"; ch. 3, "God's Simplicity"; ch. 4, "God's Eternity"; ch. 5, "God's Knowledge"; (Part II) The Nature ofHuman Beings: ch. 6, "Forms and Bodies: The Soul"; ch. 7, "The Foundations of Knowledge"; ch. 8, "The Mechanisms of Cognition"; ch. 9, "Freedom: Action, Intellect and Will"; (Part HI) The Nature ofHuman Excellence: ch. 10, "A Representative Moral Virtue: Justice; ch. 11, "A Representative Intellectual Virtue: Wisdom"; ch. 12, "A Representative Theological Virtue: Faith; ch. 13, "Grace and Free Will"; (Part IV) God's Relationship to Human Beings: ch. 14, "The Metaphysics of the Incarnation"; ch. 15, "Atonement"; ch. 16, "Providence and Suffering." In the Introduction to these four parts, Stump provides a twenty-page, six-section "overview of Aquinas's thought": metaphysics; philosophy of mind; theory of knowledge; will and action; ethics, law and politics; theology: natural, revealed, and philosophical. Stump's "fat volume" (x), then, covers multa-far too many for this reader to find a clear narrative or conceptual thread. The sequence of book chapters-"following roughly Aquinas's categorization and ordering" (ibid.)-externally imitates the Neoplatonic exitus-reditus theme that structures and holds METAPHYSICS AND ETHICS IN STUMP'S AQUINAS 595 together Aquinas's two theological summae. However, I can discern no comparable doctrinal theme that internally unifies the author's own portrait of Thomas Aquinas as philosophus redivivus, or conceptually focuses her bridge-building, analytic excurses. Pleading that some economizing omissions are necessary , and surely they are, Stump assures us that hers do not prevent the reader from seeing "Aquinas's whole worldview in broad outline" (ibid.), even though the outline omits topics "regularly discussed in standard reference works on Aquinas" (ibid.). These assurances...