The Creative Retrieval of St. Thomas Aquinas: Essays in Thomistic Philosophy, New and Old by W. Norris Clarke, S.J. (review)

BOOK REVIEWS 152 S. J. MCGRATH Memorial University of Newfoundland St. John’s, Newfoundland The Creative Retrieval of St. Thomas Aquinas: Essays in Thomistic Philosophy, New and Old. By W.NORRIS CLARKE,S.J., New York: Fordham University Press, 2009. Pp. 250 $50.00 (cloth). ISBN: 978-0-8232-2928-4. This final volume of essays from one of North America’s best-known philosophers in the Thomistic tradition aptly bears as its title Clarke’s wonted description of his philosophical project, which is constructive rather than strictly exegetical in its relation to Thomas Aquinas. These sixteen selections, twelve of them previously published, represent, in Clarke’s own estimate, “the most significant” of his many articles (vii), and recapitulate, by way of epilogue, the leading themes of his intellectual work. The book has signal virtues for teachers, students, and philosophers. Students will be grateful for Clarke’s straightforward and unadorned style. He takes no pains to conceal his tracks; both the origin and the development of his thought lie in plain view. More importantly, Clarke’s long apprenticeship to St. Thomas bears distinctive and liberating fruit. He presents difficult ideas with an unforbidding freshness, free from quote-and-argue servility. Clarke has a knack for alighting on interesting questions, connecting traditional themes to new problems and currents of thought, and finding a path through vast jungles in the history of philosophy. His wide learning helps him anticipate potential objections, which he acknowledges with laudable candor. If his conclusions are not always persuasive, stimulating questions are a worthy achievement in their own right, and Clarke is not afraid to explore. There is something autobiographical in the exercise of selecting one’s “most significant” work. Fittingly enough, therefore, this volume opens with “The Philosophical Importance of Doing One’s Autobiography.” Clarke ruminates autobiographically upon those experiences and influences most decisive for his philosophic development, and readers curious about his trajectory may be glad of the light shed on it. If the terms of his suggestive title are perhaps thereby vindicated, the reader may yet feel its promise unfulfilled. The paper has a premise, not a thesis. The premise is that it is properly and distinctively human deliberately to “take conscious self-possession of one’s own being” as a unity over time (6). It happens that Clarke’s reflections center on his philosophic development, but it is less clear why the autobiographical exercise, as such, is philosophically important. Is “doing one’s autobiography” philosophically important only if one happens to be a philosopher? BOOK REVIEWS 153 The relationship between Thomistic metaphysics and modern natural science is a focal point for several essays. In “Causality and Time,” Clarke defends the Aristotelian identity (and therefore simultaneity) of action and passion. He traces to Ockham the tendency to mistake the causa cognoscendi for the causa essendi of causal dependence, and hence to attribute the temporal sequence characteristic of the former to the nature of the latter, so conceiving causality as “a two-event process linked in time” (32). The two-event conception is mired in serious metaphysical problems (e.g., is “action . . . some kind of entity” passing through space-time [34]?). The balance of the essay attempts to relate the Aristotelian metaphysical account to the prevailing scientific conception of a “causal relation” understood as a “regular sequence of antecedent-consequent according to law” (37). If I might venture a suggestion upon this point, it would be to eliminate the semantic difficulties: what modern natural science investigates are classical, statistical, and genetic correlations, not causes in any Aristotelian sense. Clarke explored the interconnectedness of contingent being in The One and the Many (2001), and here he takes up a related theme in “System: A New Category of Being.” Modern science has focused attention upon the dynamic systems that condition the emergence and survival of contingent beings at every level of complexity. These systems, as Clarke emphasizes, are real in being and not merely in intention. As, then, we posit substantial and accidental potency, form, and act, so we may take Clarke’s invitation to ask (though he does not put it quite this way) whether there is a ‘systemic’ potency, form, and act found in the...