Truth in Aquinas by John Milbank, Catherine Pickstock (review)

632 BOOK REVIEWS Maximus provide suggestions for how we might begin to rethink the relationship of Thomas's moral theology to the thought and practice of Eastern Orthodoxy. Cessario (who goes so far as to speak of divinization) has implicitly opened up a line of research and dialogue with Eastern Orthodoxy that is likely to prove much more fertile thm the internecine battles that have plagued Catholic moral theology in the recent past. THOMAS HIBBS Boston College Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts Truth in Aquinas. By JOHN MILBANK and CATHERINE PICKSTOCK. New York: Routledge, 2001. Pp. xiv+ 144. $55.00 (doth), $15.95 (paper). ISBN 0415 -23334-8 (doth), 0-415-23335-6 (paper). Despite its tide, this book deals only briefly with the concept of truth in Aquinas-that is, with Thomas's notion of the adequation or correspondence of mind and reality. Save for one chapter it consists of previously published papers on Aquinas by its two authors, in which a great many matters come up for consideration: knowledge (especially the importance of intuition), the soul's nature, the senses (especially touch), being, participation, creation, theology and philosophy, the Trinity, the incarnation's motive and its metaphysics, the Eucharist, and much else besides. The authors occasionally suggest a connection between these other issues and the notion of truth. But in brief compass they evidently intend to give a sweeping account of what, as they see it, Aquinas is up to, and what lessons contemporary theology and philosophy ought to learn from him. The opening chapter is the one most dearly concerned with the concept of truth. Catherine Pickstock argues that for Aquinas truth is chiefly conformity to God. Creatures are true by their conformity to God's own k."lowledge of them, and we apprehend the truth, or truths, by grasping this correspondence of creatures to God. To apprehend the truth is thus to grasp the participation of creatures in the divine, and thereby for us as knowers also to participate in the divine. "Since the tree only transmits treeness ... as imitating the divine, what we receive in truth is a participation in the divine. To put it another way, in knowing a tree, we are catching it on its way back to God" (12). Modern philosophers erroneously suppose that we can "grasp phenomena as they are in themselves," whereas Aquinas rightly realizes that we can only grasp them "as they are insofar as they imitate God" (18). This naturally leads one to wonder how one can teH when what we have apprehended is the truth-how we know when the tree we've caught is on its way back to God, and not bound for wherever false trees go. We can, after all, BOOK REVIEWS 633 be mistaken, so the question of how we can tell when we have truth and when we don't presumably merits an answer. Pickstock (rightly) eschews any thought of comparing what is in our minds with the way things are, and shows no interest in the idea that relations among beliefs, for example, might have a role in helping us figure out when our minds are true. In fact "truth is not 'tested' in any way, but sounds itself or shines outwards in beauty" (9); the proportio in which truth consists "is assumed and experienced, but cannot be observed or empirically confirmed" (17). Perhaps understandably, not everyone concerned about how we succeed in telling true from false will find this entirely reassuring. In any case the position the authors attribute to Aquinas seems to rest on some elisions that he declines to make. Aquinas indeed holds that things are "true" by their conformity to God's own mind, while our minds are "true" by their conformity to things. But he doesn't infer from this that to know a tree just is to grasp it as imitating God. The connatural object of our intellect, Aquinas supposes, is the quiddity or nature of the material thing, not the material thing's imitation of, or participation in, God. On this seems to depend the possibility that people who don't know God-in particular, who don't know God as the Trinity, in whom all...