Le thomisme et les thomistes by Romanus Cessario, O.P. (review)

BOOK REVIEWS Le thomisme et /es thomistes. By ROMANUS CESSARIO, O.P. Trans. Simone Wyn Griffith-Meister. Paris: Les Editions du Cerf, 1999. Pp. 125. 120 F. ISBN 2-204-06252-9 (paper). In this French translation of a book originally written in English, Fr. Romanus Cessario, O.P., provides a brief, but impressive, survey of the formation ofThomism and its development over the more than seven centuries since Aquinas's death. Relying on some ofthe most recent historical and critical work done over the past decade, Fr. Cessario's book is not aimed at making a contribution to be read by specialists, something that the volume on Jean Capreolus (Jean Capreolus en son temps [Paris, 1997]) by himself, Guy Bedouelle, and Kevin White already accomplishes. Rather the present work is aimed at giving the general reader a thumbnail sketch of the history of Thomism, which history is overlooked by Thomists more often than not. In this regard, Cessario's book is a marked success and should be extremely useful to those just beginning to take an interest in exploring the career of Thomism after 1274. The work is divided into two unequal parts: the first, entitledLe Thomisme, gives an overview ofAquinas's life and writings drawn from the extraordinarily fine historical scholarship of Jean-Pierre Torrell, O.P., and discusses the exclusion/inclusion criteria for identifying Thomists over the course of the centuries; the second, entitled Les Thomistes, recounts briefly the history of Thomistic thought from the thirteenth century to the twentieth century, emphasizing the relationship between Thomism and the wider context of European political and social history. In the first part, Cessario sketches out Aquinas's life, noting in the process that Aquinas's relationship to his predecessors may rightly be considered, as noted by Alasdair Macintyre, both a theoretical articulation of the rationality of tradition and a concrete living instance of the continuity of the rationality of tradition. Such a dear example ofsetting one's own thinkingwithin a dearly defined and consciously recognized ongoing tradition is something that could 137 138 BOOK REVIEWS be well imitated, Cessario hints, by those claiming adherence to Aquinas's tenets. Among the works of outstanding importance for understanding Thomas's own Thomism are the two Summae as well as the Scriptum on the Sentences (20-21). Before launching into the history of Thomism, Cessario considers the various ways that the historians of Thomism have organized the school's history. The most common approach is to divide Thomism into first Thomism (roughly from the thirteenth to the fifteenth, though in some cases to the sixteenth, centuries), second Thomism (the Thomism of the later Spanish Scholastics and the Catholic Reformers), and neo-Thomism (the Thomism of the nineteenth and twentienth centuries). Since the precise points of chronological division are by no means agreed upon by the specialists who have written on the history of Thomism, Cessario elects to organize his treatment (46-53) not by neatly dividing the school's history into periods but by narrating the history of the school continuously and by relating the ebb and flow of the school's prominence to the general course of European history. As to the identity of those called Thomists, Cessario proposes, following Fr. James Weisheipl's classification, a distinction between Thomism in a broad sense and eclectic Thomism (26-27). The latter is characterized by the desire on a given thinker's part to include elements of a distinctively non-Thomistic philosophical or theological system within a framework inspired by, or dominated by, the teaching of St. Thomas. Eclectic Thomism would number among its members historical figures such as Molina, Vasquez, and Suarez, while some ofits more recent representatives would include Marechal, Rabner, and Lonergan. In the main, Cessario focuses on narrating the history of the Thomism of the Thomists in the broad sense, though he does occasionally mention the more distinguished eclectic Thomists. The primitive origins of Thomism lie, according to the narrative developed in this book, in the debates of the 1270s and early 1280s concerning a cluster of doctrinal issues, chief among which was Thomas's doctrine of the unicity of substantial form. Among the earliest defenders of Aquinas are...