In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Reviewed by:
  • Dynamic Transcendentals: Truth, Goodness, & Beauty from a Thomistic Perspective by Alice M. Ramos
  • Kevin E. O’Reilly, O.P.
Dynamic Transcendentals: Truth, Goodness, & Beauty from a Thomistic Perspective by Alice M. Ramos (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2012), 256 pp.

Over the last twenty or so years, various studies have been published on St. Thomas’s doctrine of the transcendental properties of being. Particularly noteworthy among these studies is Jan Aertsen’s Medieval Philosophy and the Transcendentals: The Case of Thomas Aquinas (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1996). In the introduction to her book, Alice Ramos notes that, according to Aertsen’s analysis, Thomas’s doctrine of the transcendentals brings together both theological and anthropological considerations, as well as pointing to the connection between the transcendentals and morality. Ramos is concerned not only with these connections made by Aertsen, but more specifically with the intensification, as it were, of truth, goodness, and beauty effected by the human person as he contributes to the perfection of the universe and, thus, to the return of all things to their Source, namely God. Her appreciation of the intimate connection between Thomas’s metaphysics, anthropology, and ethics enables her to pursue this theme and ably and insightfully to show forth the dynamic nature of Thomas’s conception of truth, goodness, and beauty. And yet, given the debate about whether beauty is, properly speaking, a transcendental property of being, and given that Aertsen has argued that it is not, one wonders why this issue is not addressed by the author.

The book is not a systematic treatise, but rather a collection of essays that approach truth, goodness, and beauty from various perspectives. These essays are, nevertheless, organized into three sections: Part I, [End Page 712] “Truth, Measure, and Virtue”; Part II, “Beauty, Order, and Teleology: The Perfection of Man and the Universe”; and Part III, “Goodness and Beauty: Human Reason and the True Good.” The array of influences and dialogue partners is truly impressive: Joseph de Finance, Oliva Blanchette, Servais Pinckaers, Johnathan Lear, Alasdair MacIntyre, Martin Heidegger, John Rist, Kant, Nietzsche, Foucault, and John Paul II, to name a few. Ramos’s work demonstrates the perennial significance of St. Thomas’s thought—and for that we are in her debt.

Chapter 1 emphasizes the relationship between mind, the universe, and the divinity in Aristotle’s metaphysics. It interprets Aristotle as positing that man has a desire for the supernatural, arguing for the identity of the contemplative life with the happy life. The intelligibility of the world and the fact that God is the author of the world in all its intelligibility mean that true understanding of the world contributes to the divinization of man (17). (Perhaps one might add the qualification, “in a certain respect” to account for the existence of men who extract knowledge from nature for immoral purposes). The second section of this essay engages the Summa contra gentiles and shows, among other things, that, for Thomas, the first truth, which is God, is the good of human intelligence that man naturally desires as his natural end.

Chapter 2 brings out the moral implications of human life in the ontological space between God as Origin and End of all that exists. Relevant here is the Neoplatonist principle according to which an effect seeks to assimilate itself to its cause. In the return of men to the Origin and End, Ramos discerns the operation of two measures—namely, reason and law—although one might see these as constituting a single measure, since for Thomas, law is an opus rationis. Intrinsic to the dynamics of assimilation to God that is this return is virtue, which, in ordering man’s life in accordance with reason, orders him to the good—that is to say, to his end.

A more theological and personalist tenor marks the final essay of Part I. Only faith in Christ can bring reason to the fulfilment of its desire for truth. The truth that Christ reveals to us, however, Ramos writes, requires “more than a theoretical understanding, for the truth that is the Person of Christ wants to enter into a relationship with each human being and for...

pdf

Share