The Modes of Thomistic Discourse: Questions for Corbin’s Le Chemin de la théologie chez Thomas d’Aquin

THE MODES OF THOMISTIC DISCOURSE: QUESTIONS FOR CORBIN'S LE CHEMIN DE LA THEOLOGIE CHEZ THOMAS D'AQUIN.* 1J0 JUDGE ON the public evidence, Michel Corbin's Le chemin de la theologie chez Thomas d'Aquin has yet to get a wide hearing. This is understandable. In the din of septicentennial publications honoring Saint Thomas, Corbin's book stands out as particularly forbidding. It is nine hundred pages long, densely written, jargon-ridden,' Hegelian'. But Corbin's book is one of the few things worth hearing from the year of conferences. This is because Le chemin de la theologie is a work of passionate intelligence. It labors to institute a new sort of discourse about Thomas by sketching and applying a genuinely reflective practice of interpretation. Yet, what is curious and important, the book fails to reflect on the notion of textual language which it assumes and so cannot measure its departure from Thomas's carefully constructed hierarchy of exegeses. I want to rehearse Corbin's main arguments in the hope of giving them a hearing. After a short summary limited to the book's large features, I will frame three sets of questions. If the questions press Corbin in addition to drawing him out, it is because his seriousness demands an equal seriousness in any reader. It would do the book no justice only to praise its obvious merits. I. The Argument There are three movements in Corbin's argument. The first sets the tone of his reading by distinguishing it from the usual sorts. The second shows that Aquinas's methodological texts do *Michel Corbin: Le chemin de la theologie chez Thomas d'Aquin (Paris: Beauchesne , 1974), Bibliotheque des Archives de Philosophie, n.s., # 16. 80 THE MODES OF THOMISTIC DISCOURSE 81 in fact make up the moments of a single development. This step comprises the detailed reading of four texts-portions of the Scriptum on the Sentences, Prologue, Questions ~ and 3 of the commentary on Boethius's De Trinitate, the first nine chapters of the Contra Gentiles, and the first Question of the Summa Theologiae. The third movement argues that the end of the development in the Summa is indeed an end, the resolution of certain fundamental difficulties (however much it might also be the raising of new ones). I ought to make clear that the division into movements is mine. The order of the book itself is more grandly architectonic. A hermeneutical Introduction is followed by four Chapters, one for each of the methodological texts to be studied. The Introduction and each of the Chapters is divided, an echo of Hegel's symmetries, into four Sections and twelve Sub-sections. Still, the sense of the book can be grasped more easily by seeing it as three movements. The first movement lays down rules for exegesis. In more than a hundred anfractuous pages, the Introduction wants to justify the practice about to be adopted. Corbin is taking nothing for granted; he wants the text to unfold as if of itself. He begins, then, by diagnosing the state of the theologianreader who has survived the collapse of rationalism. To such a reader, the medieval texts appear as a place from which to begin afresh, as " the moment from which and after which the way (le chemin) begins to bend and to deviate, only to end at impasses " (p. 34) .1 If medieval texts are to be studied, Thomas Aquinas's writings certainly stand out as prime candidates. But how can this be, since Thomism was part and parcel of the moribund rationalism? Corbin distinguishes, perhaps too perfunctorily , the "sclerotic" Thomism of the recent tradition from Thomas himself.2 He wants to ignore the former and search out the latter (pp. 36-37). 1 Parenthetical references, unless otherwise specified, will be made to the pagination of Michel Corbin's Le chemin de la theologie chez Thomas d'Aquin. All translations from the book are my own; I have erred consistently on the side of literalness. 2 For dissents from Corbin, see Dario Composta, " II concetto di teologia in San Tommaso d'Aquino," Doctor Communis, 30 (1977), 270-79, pp. 270-72 and 274; 82 MARK D. JORDAN There is...