Ontologie der Innerlichkeit. Reditio Completa und Processio Interior bei Thomas von Aquinas by Reto L. Fetz (review)

BOOK REVIEWS 711 Ontologie der Innerlichkeit. Reditio Completa und Processio Interior bei Thomas von Aquinas. By RETO L. FETZ. Freiburg: Universitatsverlag, 1975. Pp. 199. S.Fr.30.00. This is a contribution to our understanding of two dialogues between Thomas Aquinas and philosophers. The first is that between Thomas and Neo-Platonism, with Thomas imbibing influential structures and ideas from Neo-Platonism. The second is the conversation between Aquinas and modern philosophy after Descartes and Kant. Karl Rahner's doctoral dissertation , Geist in Welt (which his professor, the Thomist, Honecker, found unacceptable but which gained attention immediately upon its publication in 1939), had examined in detail the relationship of Aquinas's epistemology to transcendental philosophy, especially that of Kant. Rahner was particularly concerned with the relationship of the transcendental powers of the intellect to their material, the world present in images and species. This movement of the transcendental Thomists had been begun by J. Marechal and was continued not only by Rahner but by Lonergan and Coreth. Here is a further stage in the dialogue between Aquinas and post-Kantian philosophy . Fetz's introduction to his tightly composed book of two hundred pages shifts the attention away from Kant to Hegel. The German Idealists, Schelling and Hegel, knew little of medieval thought, although the end of the Enlightenment had brought Romanticism's enthusiasm for everything medieval. But this medieval replacement of Hellenism was accomplished through the idealization of the late German Middle Ages, even including the Reformation. In their profound indebtedness to Neo-Platonism, Schelling and Hegel knew more about Meister Eckhart than about Thomas Aquinas, and Fetz refers to Hegel as the " German Proclus." Idealism saw itself as fulfilling what Kant had left undone, overcoming those final dualisms (subject and object, morality and speculation) by showing how spirit was the all-embracing paradigm. The task which Fetz has set for himself is the examination of the radical interiority of the human mind, the self-reflective power of spirit. He takes as his primary text one from the Summa contra Gentiles IV (11) where, recalling the De Ente et Essentia, Aquinas moves upwards through the hierarchy of being until he reaches intellectual creatures. " Nam intellectus humanus, etsi seipsum cognoscere possit, tamen primum suae cognitionis initium ab extrinseco sumit...." The task of the book is to explain this inner process by which the human mind can reflect upon itself beneath and within an object. In this central text Aquinas describes intellectual life as an emanation. So the human mind resembles the divine mind creative of the cosmos. Fetz considers not only the self-penetration of the created spirit's intellectual power but the externalization of the created intellect. For the objects of 712 BOOK REVIEWS knowing come from without, and the human mind does not function without phantasms, even a phantasm of its own spiritual self-penetration. Fetz introduces his chapters of difficult epistemology with a historical study where Aristotle, Pseudo-Dionysius, Proclus and other Neo-Platonic thinkers are considered. This concludes in a return to the text from the SCG to see the influence of Neo-Platonism in Aquinas's thought. The two major sections of the book treat procession, return, and externalization in human knowledge. Finally, Fetz contrasts this process in the human mind with the godhead. The conclusion of Fetz's book indicates that in this area Aquinas is first of all influenced by Neo-Platonic thought-from various sources but particularly from Augustine. What I missed at the end of the study were some observations upon three further areas. First, the Trinity is the climax of spiritual interior process. There the processes and the spiritual realizations are eternal and personal. The book stops short of this. Second, the promise of some comparison with Hegel is not fulfilled. At least some sketch of lines of comparison in this area between Aquinas and Idealism is needed. Third, there is no mention of the relationship of mysticism to this process of self-return in the ground of the soul. Again Meister Eckhart comes to mind, for he too is strongly Neo-Platonic; he too is a bridge between Scholasticism and Idealism. For Eckhart the ground of the soul, the point...