De la vérité, ou La science en Dieu by Thomas D’Aquin (review)

BOOK REVIEWS De la verite, OU La science en Dieu. By THOMAS D'AQUIN. Edited by Serge-Thomas Bonino, O.P. Fribourg: Editions Universitaires, 1996. Pp. 607. SF 65, 00 (paper). ISBN 2-8271-0711-2. This volume contains a French translation of question 2 of the De Veritate preceded by a long introduction (240 pages) and followed by a copious commentary on the text (another 240 pages). Bonino's illuminating scholarship is motivated by the conviction that the understanding of St. Thomas's doctrine of divine knowledge has been skewed by the subsequent historical controversies surrounding the foreknowledge-predestination problem. Bonino shows that there is something ironic about this because Thomas's original treatment involved a transposition of the question of God's knowledge from the traditional Augustinian problematic of foreknowledge and predestination to an Aristotelian-influenced problematic of divine knowledge in general. The aim of Bonino's work is to recover this original historical-doctrinal context and show how Thomas's principal achievement was to close the previously unbridgeable gap between the apparently limited omniscience claims of Metaphysics 12.9 and the exhaustive omniscience claims entailed by the doctrines of divine providence in the Jewish, Christian, and Islamic traditions. As Bonino shows, the success of St. Thomas is attributable not only to his skilled appropriation of Aristotle's noetic, but also, more importantly, to his own original metaphysic of creation. This review will focus on Bonino's introduction, which comprises two main parts. The first provides the broad historical context for Aquinas's work. Bonino catalogues the remote background with a special emphasis on the Neoplatonic tradition embodied in Augustine, Pseudo-Dionysius, and Boethius (later reinforced by the Liber de causis). Pseudo-Dionysius's De divinibus nominibus was especially important for Aquinas in establishing that God knows things other than himself in himself as their cause; the essential link and coextensive range of divine knowing and divine causing will be a linchpin of Aquinas's position. Bonino then reviews twelfth-century theological views in order to display how much the traditional problematic was altered by the introduction of Aristotle. The task facing Thomas and his thirteenth-century contemporaries Albert and Bonaventure (whose positions are consistently referenced by Bonino) was not simply the absorption of the texts of the Philosopher, but rather the assimilation of highly developed systems of Aristotelianism marked by Neoplatonic borrowings and muddied by pseudo-Aristotelian works. The main interlocutors for Aquinas were Avicenna, 133 134 BOOK REVIEWS Averroes, and Maimonides; it was their Aristotelian/Neoplatonic doctrines of divine omniscience that framed the problem. While relatively successful in effecting a reconciliation of divine omniscience with divine simplicity, the Islamic tradition had been unable to bring material singulars within the divine ken. It was the knowledge of material singulars, not future contingents, that was the historical crux intertyretatum. Avicenna's doctrine of God's knowledge of the particular through the universal was the special object of Aquinas's attention. Thomas consistently argued that it is not possible to know the singular qua singular through what is universal; in order to know a material singular, it is necessary to know the matter that is its principle of individuation. The divine knowledge of matter then is the basic epistemological problem exposing what Thomas considered to be the root metaphysical problem: Avicenna's God cannot know material singulars because within his emanationist schema God does not directly and immediately cause material singulars. The second part of Bonino's introduction is a doctrinal overview of the two main elements of Aquinas's position: divine knowing and divine causing. Bonino provides an excellent account of Aquinas's understanding of knowing. In order to avoid the extremes both of agnosticism and of anthropomorphism, Aquinas needs an analogical doctrine of knowledge. Knowing is a perfection realized differently according to the mode of being of the knower. At the heart of the activity of knowing is the knower's intentional realization of the perfections proper to other beings; a knower is a kind of center of synthesis in which the perfections of other beings are united. Knowing is a sharing in the being of the other without becoming the other in a physical sense; Aquinas...