Medieval Philosophy and the Transcendentals: The Case of Thomas Aquinas by Jan A. Aertsen (review)

146 BOOK REVIEWS academic reflection on a watershed event in the Catholic Church. At the same time I look forward eagerly to volume 3 where John XXIII's council becomes that of Paul VI. My own research on Vatican II has given me an enhanced appreciation of Paul Vi's understanding and monitoring of the council's religious dynamics. He understood the epistemological techniques whereby a pastoral vision of a new humanity was being constituted by the council. It is interesting to note that there is no science in any modern sense employed in the council's style of reflection and analysis. This is a quite significant point in terms of the dominant phenomenological philosophy in Northern Europe. The new strategic vision is based on the Church's religious appreciation of the Whole Christ as the Whole Man. As embodying a concrete universal, this vision of a renewed humanity transfigured by the Glorified Christ projects an image of the new People of God as the global Good Samaritan ministering to the wounds of present-day mankind. It is this type of ecclesial self-identity, rather than that projected for the bishops by this volume, that displays Buttiglione's important insight into the council's "step forward in the philosophical consciousness of all humanity." I hope this type of catalytic notional exchange in the future volumes of this series will stimulate the excitement of anticipation and satisfying enjoyment to be had from research into the nature of the Second Vatican Council. Immaculate Conception Monastery Chicago, Illinois John F. Kobler, C.P. Medieval Philosophy and the Transcendentals: The Case ofThomas Aquinas. By JANA.AERTSEN. Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1996. Pp. 454. $152.50 (cloth). ISBN 90-04-10585-9. The title ofJan Aertsen's Medieval Philosophy and the Transcendentals: The Case ofThomas Aquinas does not quite convey the ambition of this book. In the first place, Aertsen's book offers us yet another hermeneutical key to the thought of Aquinas, to be added to the ranks of such twentieth-century themes as analogy, participation, and the primacy of esse. Aertsen wants to show that Thomas's doctrine of the transcendentals is foundational for his thought. In so doing, he means both to fill a lacuna in Thomistic scholarship and to rescue the medieval doctrine and its name from Kantian appropriations and misinterpretations . The book's second ambition is to show that medieval philosophy is distinguished by a transcendental way of thought absent in antiquity and BOOK REVIEWS 147 modernity. Aertsen offers this conception of medieval philosophy as a correction of Gilson's existential medievalism, the Analytic school's linguistic medievalism, and Alain de Liber's ethical medievalism, all three of which his transcendental conception seeks to incorporate. In his introduction, Aertsen announces that he wants to show that "philosophy in the Middle Ages expresses itself as a way of thought which can be called 'transcendental"' (xi) in answer to the ever-pressing question, what is philosophy in the Middle Ages? He takes Thomas as a representative of medieval thought and his metaphysics as one example of medieval transcendental thought. He criticizes Gilson's notion of "Christian philosophy" for not doing justice, on the one hand, to the historical pluriformity of medieval thought, which includes both alternatives to and criticisms of the metaphysics of being, and, on the other hand, to the independence ascribed by Thomas to philosophy both in method and in principle, notwithstanding the thoroughly theological nature of his own overall synthesis. Aertsen criticizes the new medievalism of the Cambridge History ofLater Medieval Philosophy (1982) for the logico-semantic skew that results from its editorial criterion of philosophical recognizability to the modern (Analytic) mind. He criticizes De Libera for confining the medieval experience of human intellectuality to the faculty of arts and for introducing a separation between philosophy and Christian faith alien to the age. Aertsen prepares the way for his own representation of medieval philosophy as transcendental thought by citing ego-statements of Bonaventure, Aquinas, Scotus, and Eckhart on the resolution of the intellect's concepts to prima, communia, or transcendentia. He then makes an ego-statement of his own: "The doctrine of the transcendentia, among which 'being,' 'one,' 'true...