Dialectic and Narrative in Aquinas: An Interpretation of the "Summa contra gentiles" (review)

300 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 35:2 APRIL ~997 Thomas S. Hibbs, Dialectic and Narrative in Aquinas: An Interpretation of the "Summa contra gentiles." Notre Dame and London: University of Notre Dame Press, 1995. Pp. x + 242. NP. An interpretation of Aquinas's Summa contra gentiles (SCG), a still underappreciated classic of natural theology, is welcome. And this one has some special features to recommend it: the author's impressive breadth of acquaintance with relevant secondary literature, as represented in the book's very full bibiography, and the fact that he almost always supplies the Latin underlying his generally good translations of Aquinas's text. (There are some serious mistranslations, e.g., on 3 and 46, and dubious translations, e.g., on 49, where in the space of three words essentia is read as both 'essence' and 'act of being'.) Hibbs very rarely omits references for passages in SCG he's discussing (but see, e.g., 193 n. 66, and 67 and 72). His references are much less helpful than they could easily have been, however, because he never cites the section numbers of the Marietti edition he's using. Although it's good to see SCG getting some of the focused attention it deserves, I'm less sure that an interpretation in terms of "dialectic and narrative" is just what's wanted, partly because 1 find it hard to sayjust what Hibbs has in mind. What he says is things like these: a "distinction between a horizontal and a vertical principle of order suggests two approaches to the text: dialectic and narrative" (22); "the movement from affirmation through negation to affirmation by supereminence is dialectical; it involves an interplay of presence and absence .... In each case, dialectic exhibits the intermediate status of human nature with respect to the whole" (29); "what is accessible to natural reason is subordinate to, and incorporated within, the comprehensive narrative of divine providence" (8-9). My best guess, which I'm sure leaves out a good deal that Hibbs packs into those terms, is that, broadly speaking, 'dialectic' points toward the philosophical component and 'narrative' toward the scriptural/theological component of SCG ("philosophical dialectic," "theological narrative," 135). (The frustrating "Index of Topics," which contains only thirty-three entries, is fuller on 'Dialectic' and 'Narrative' than on any other topics, but it's by no means complete even where they're concerned.) There are two respects in which I think this view of the philosophical and scriptural components is misleading. First, he presents Aquinas's project, even in SCG I-III, the books in which Aquinas develops his natural theology, as definitely not philosophical, as not even Christian philosophical (13)--pointing out, as if it mattered, that "nowhere does Thomas refer to the matter of the first three books as philosophical" (ibid.; emphasis added). Hibbs's denial of their unmistakably philosophical character is based partly on conflating the use of 'philosophy' in twentieth-century English with Aquinas's more restricted thirteenth-century use of philosophia (see also 184). But I think Hibbs also shows signs of having a misinformed animus against philosophy generally and twentieth-century Anglo-American philosophy in particular: "philosophy cannot transcend the complexity and plurality of names" (47); "as is often the case in analytic work in philosophical theology, little attention is paid to the great care medieval thinkers, especially Thomas, exercise in speaking about God" (199 n. 17; see also, e.g., 2o3 n. 69). BOOK REVIEWS 301 Second, while Hibbs rightly points out that in SCG I-III scriptural passages do not "provide premises for arguments" but rather "principles for the exclusion and inclusion of topics," hc also claims that "they confirm and buttress certain arguments" (8; sec also 2o). More mysteriously, Aquinas's "practice of confirming philosophical arguments with scriptural texts.., allows dialectic to pass into the narrative of scripturc" (32). However, the direction of thc confirmation relationship in SCG I-III is really just the reverse, as Hibbs sometimes recognizes: "Thomas wants to show that philosophical argument partially confirms, and in no way conflicts with, the Christian conception of God and his relation to the universe" (63). In systematically developing his natural theology in SCG I...