The Doctrine of Thomas Aquinas Regarding Eviternity in the Rational Soul and Separated Substances by Carl J. Peter (review)

162 BOOK REVIEWS The Doctrine of Thomas Aquinas Regarding Eviternity in the Rational Soul and Separated Substances. By CARL J. PETER. Gregorian University Press, Rome, 1964. Pp. 124. This volume is the author's doctoral thesis which was submitted to the faculty of philosophy at the University of St. Thomas (Angelicum) in Rome. Like many published doctoral dissertations it does not appear to have been sufficiently reworked prior to its appearance in book form. What the author has attempted to do, and in this he has for the most part succeeded, is to give a careful account of St. Thomas's philosophical position on duration in separated substances (angels) and the human soul. The book is divided into three chapters of very unequal length. The first presents a brief general conspectus of the meaning of aevum in the writings of Aquinas. The second, comprising the bulk of the volume (76 out of 124 pages), presents a kaleidoscopic view of Aquinas's teaching on duration. The author examines all of Aquinas's works save his commentaries on Sacred Scripture. The concluding chapter presents a rather loose synthesis of the findings of chapter two. The author draws four main conclusions from his investigation. 1) Only in God is duration eternal; 2) Duration in created persons may be eternal by participation; 3) The duration of contingent beings is inversely proportional to their mutability; and 4) Aevum is used of separated substance~ and of the human soul in a fundamentally uniform manner, when the latter is viewed in its relation to its act of existence rather than to its temporal union with body. Thus, regardless of slight differences of emphasis and varying phraseology, the author finds that Aquinas does not refer aevum to the human soul and to angels in ways that are contradictory but complementary . While in his concluding remarks the author does state that the key to the understanding of Aquinas's whole teaching on the problem of duration is the degree to which he views each being as possessing its act of existence, it is regrettable that this point was not more fully exploited . It would have provided a more easily digestable synthesis and made a comparison between the teaching of Aquinas and twentieth-century thinkers on this point considerably more meaningful and more rewarding. What, however, this reviewer found consistently irritating was the manner in which the author chose to present the findings of his research. In this instance it is difficult to see any advantage gained in analyzing each of the works of Aquinas separately and in chronological order. Granted that some questions might profitably be investigated in this way, the question of duration does not seem to be one of them. Here the end result of this approach is a needless proliferation of quoted passages from Aquinas and an obscuring of the latter's overall teaching on duration. Had the author learned from his study of Aquinas's works that there was indeed a genuine progression in his theory of duration, a chronological presentation of texts BOOK REVIEWS 163 would surely have had merit. But the reader can only ask whether such an approach was truly helpful when at the end of his study the author concludes that the Angelic Doctor's treatment of eviternity (aevum) in his Commentary on the Sentences of Peter Lombard and the Summa Theologiae , while differing perhaps verbally, is in effect, "really equivalent in the framework of his system." (p. 114) Equally questionable is the manner in which the author has incorporated so many lengthy, untranslated texts into his main narrative. In numerous instances the author's purpose could just as easily have been served by synthesizing and/or incorporating parts of the texts themselves into his narrative and relegating the full Latin text to a convenient footnote. The final synthesis, too, lacks satisfying sharpness and precision. Even here the reader is confronted with an additional ten pages whose narrative is often interrupted by fresh Latin texts. Yet, despite these shortcomings, all the more unfortunate since a thorough revision of the dissertation's original format could have eliminated most of them, this work is surely representative of thorough and sound scholarship, and should...