Aquinas on the Twofold Human Good: Reason and Human Happiness in Aquinas’s Moral Science by Denis J. M. Bradley (review)

486 BOOK REVIEWS as de Lubac loved to repeat, "has brought total newness by bringing himself" (Irenaeus, Adversus Haereses, 4.34.1). The Catholic University ofAmerica Washington, D.C. MARK D. NAPACK Aquinas on the Twofold Human Good: Reason and Human Happiness in Aquinas'sMoral Science. By DENIS}. M. BRADLEY. Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 1997. Pp. 610. $49.95 (cloth). ISBN 0-8132-0861-0 (cloth). Denis Bradley has given us a veritable ten-course dinner in his magnificent new book. His concern is the relationship between philosophy and theology in the moral order, but he has much to say that is relevant to the wider question. Each chapter is a model of research and scholarly writing such that anyone who has spent time on any of the topics he touches will be enlightened by what Bradley has to say. Bradley himself is a theologian. Thomas was a theologian. One is not surprised to find that Bradley feels that much interpretation of Thomas has taken inadequate account of the "integrally theological character of Aquinas's rational argumentation." The vexed question of "Christian philosophy" sums up for Bradley much of the confusion he deplores. Still it is of central importance to his project. "If one does grant-perhaps in the present-day spirit of ecumenical philosophical pluralism-the conceptual possibility and coherence of 'Christian philosophy,' why not also grant that one can construct an autonomous Thomistic philosophical ethics? This is the question that motivates the present study" (xi). Bradley does not leave the reader in suspense. "I reject, in short, the conceptual possibility and coherence of an autonomous or, equivalently, systematic Thomistic moral philosophy." How does he arrive at this position which, as he observes, stands athwart the "still quite alive" Aristotelian-Thomist tradition? His ten chapters are as follows: 1. "Aquinas's Theological Ethics." 2. "Science andTheology." 3. "Aquinas Reading Aristotle." 4. "Aristotle: Practical Wisdom." 5. "Aristotle: Deliberation and Choice." 6. "Practical Reason: The Primary Source of Natural Law." 7. "Will: The Secondary Source of Natural Law." 8. "Imperfect and Perfect Happiness." 9. "A Paradoxical Ethics." 10. "A Thomistic Philosophical Ethics?" These chapter headings cannot begin to convey the range and depth of Bradley's book. He has cast light on dozens of matters that have puzzled many. He maneuvers through the ctJ.oppy waters of controversy with serenity and fairness. No reader will come away from this BOOK REVIEWS 487 book without having learned much, often about things he thought he already knew. And of course no reader will be wholly without disagreement with Bradley. He had made disagreement both easy and difficult. Easy, because he lets us know where he is; difficult, because where he is can only be against the background of prolonged and ranging scholarship. For example, the first chapter deals with Thomas's theological ethics. Proceeding in eight careful steps, Bradley savors the difficulty involved in Thomas's claims (1) that revelation is necessary for an understanding of man's ultimate end, and (2) that the Decalogue contains only rules that reason can also derive. Would not the latter be a philosophical science of morality? To draw that consequence would be, Bradley says, to misconstrue Aquinas's conception ofthe relationship between theology and philosophy. "Although the principles of Thomistic ethics are rational, these moral principles, in the context of Aquinas's own moral science, are theological. They fall precisely under a theological category that Aquinas labels 'revelabilia"' (61). Whatever God can reveal falls to theology. Since God can reveal anything, a rather surprising and sweeping conclusion seems to loom. Does Bradley draw it? In his second chapter, Bradley discusses science and theology. It is a mark of theology in the century of Aquinas that it avails itself of Aristotelian methodology. The arrival of Aristotle permitted a clear distinction to be made between philosophy and theology. The distinction is not a philosophical one, though it can scarcely be understood without understanding what philosophy is. The Summa Theologiae begins by asking whether any science beyond the philosophical sciences is necessary. The reader must understand what philosophical sciences are in order to grasp the question. And it is that grasp that opens the...