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318 BOOK REVIEWS up your most central moral you to do so. PHILLIP E. DEVIl'\fE Providence College Providence, Rhode Island Versions of Thomism. By FERGUS KERR. Oxford: Blackwell 2002. viii + 254. ISBN 0631213139. AfterAquinas is a survey of "non-standard" ~r••~•~,.rt• that sees the intelligibility of the world realized in mind-world function of the collaboration of knower and known. Ultimately Aquinas's BOOK REVIEWS 319 confidence about human knowing derives not from a prophylactic argument against skepticism/solipsism, but rather from atheological conviction that we are created in the image and likeness of an intelligent God and set in a world designed for us to realize that identity. The second major misreadingofAquinas stems from assimilating his approach to apologetic responses to Enlightenment skepticism. It is precisely this reading of Aquinas that led Barth to denounce natural theology and analogy as the work of the anti-Christ because of the way in which it supposedly subordinates the living Triune God to a monolithic idol. The role and nature of the famous quinquae viae in Aquinas lie at the heart of this debate. In a chapter that is a "Prolegomena to Natural Theology," Kerr argues that we cannot begin to understand Aquinas if we see him as operating within modern philosophical categories. Aquinas presupposes a much broader notion ofcausality that does not map on to the modern tendency to reduce causality to mechanism and matter. Instead, he has a rich notion of agent causation wherein the Creator's omnicausality is not a monocausality wiping out genuine creaturely causality; there is double agency without rivalry. Aquinas's notion of substance is likewise unmodern insofar as it is dynamic and relational (as per Norris Clarke) rather than static and monolithic. Kerr next offers "Ways of Reading the Five Ways" as an exercise in securing divine transcendence against broadly Anselmian claims about God's existence being per se nota rather than as an answer to a modern atheisitic evidentialist challenge. God is not available as a natural object of human cognition except obliquelyon the basis ofa posteriori argumentation that leaves God's transcendence intact. Aquinas himself was well aware of the cognitive and religious gap between the limited conclusions of the five ways and the triune God, but nonetheless he was confident on the basis of the doctrine of creation that the world provides some kind of cognitive purchase on its Maker. Kerr devotes a chapter to "Stories of Being," designed to unpack Aquinas's notion of God as lpsum esse subsistens. After noting that Aquinas's doctrine of what we can know about God is fundamentally ordered towards its completion in beatific deification, Kerr explores some of the major attempts to come to terms with the doctrine of God as subsistent existence. As Kerr notes, the "seas of language run high" in any attempt to explore this doctrine, and he ultimately evinces little sympathy for Gilsonian, Heideggerian, and Balthasarian readings of Aquinas's metaphysics. In the end they offer incommensurable and often barely intelligible readings of Aquinas.· Kerr devotes two chapters to Aquinas's moral thought. The first explores the problems involved in treating Aquinas as a natural law ethicist. Building on the work of Russell Hittinger, Pamela Hall, and Servais Pinckaers, Kerr shows that it is wrong-headed to extract Aquinas's doctrine of natural law from its broader theological context of providence, beatitude, virtue, sin, and grace as if it could stand on its own as a putative ethics. Indeed there is no modern "ethics" to be found in Aquinas because his concern is explicitly theological. In a companion chapter on "Theological Ethics," Kerr argues (obviously influenced by Pinckaers) that Aquinas's moral theology is best characterized as an ethics of divine 320 BOOK REVIEWS beatitude. The Secunda Pars is dominated by the idea that we are created in the image and likeness of God for the sake of beatific union. In this life the focus is how human beings become disposed in the right way (virtues, gifts, and beatitudes) so as actively to grow into the kind of persons who find fulfillment in God. This conformity of images to the divine requires the redeeming action ofthe Image, so...

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