The Treatise on the Divine Nature: Summa Theologiae 1, 1–13 trans. by Brian Shanley, O.P. (review)

BOOK REVIEWS 159 The Treatise on the Divine Nature: Summa Theologiae 1, 1-13. Translated with commentary by BRIAN SHANLEY, O.P. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 2006. Pp. 400. $47.95 (cloth), $16.95 (paper). ISBN 0-87220806 -0 (cloth}, 0-87220-805-2 (paper). Any attempt to offer a translation and commentary on a classical figure will inevitably reflect the current state of scholarship on the thinker in question, as both translation and commentary combine to help readers appropriate his thought. When well-executed, both translation and commentary will facilitate the retrieval necessary to allow that appropriation to expand the reader's understanding through a living encounter with the thinker in question. And when this combined effort is superbly executed, the result proves to be an excellent teaching tool. Such is the work produced here by Brian Shanley. What features of this work prompt such an assessment? How can both translation and commentary display superb execution? First, if the goal is personal appropriation, then "less is more." In general, the translator/ commentator should eschew giving extensive documentation of his sources; a bibliography articulated with reference to each question suffices to reveal the translator's acquaintance with the current state of scholarship, as his pointed commentary will exhibit how he has assimilated that scholarship to help us encounter the riches of the text. The same synoptic grasp will be reflected in the translation itself to a practiced eye, as in this case one seeks deft expression to render Aquinas's lapidary prose. The challenge is heightened in these initial questions of the Summa Theologiae, because Aquinas is himself engaged in an exposition that draws on astute semantic skills to hone the theological language he is employing-largelyAristotelian but also drawn from pseudo-Dionysius-to illuminate, as best we can, the subject of his inquiry (God as "the beginning and end of all thing"), by identifying this reveled and revealing God as a proper object of inquiry. This he accomplishes by showing that there is such a One, and how this One might first be identified (by contrast with anything and everything else}, and then be articulated without falsification-that is, in a nonidolatrous manner. Few writers and thinkers are up to that task, as most preaching and teaching displays! With Aquinas especially, this has proven to be a daunting task, as the rollercoaster of readings since Leo XIII's Aetemae Patris has led readers through a number of personae, some stultifyingly unattractive. In the early decades of the twentieth century these questions were read as establishing a "natural theology," a veritable rational ladder which, once mastered, could lead one ineluctably to God. Karl Barth's resounding "Nein" awoke some Catholic inquirers from so pretentious an endeavor. Soon, however, sensitive historical retrievals began to temper the demand for "systematic" presentations, so that an inquiring subject began to emerge from the texts, alive with the struggle to articulate what had to escape conceptualization: "Because it is not possible for us to know what God is, but rather what God is not, we cannot consider how God exists, but rather how God does not exist" (STh I, q. 3, pro!.). Shanley's translation-cum- 160 BOOK REVIEWS commentary shows how those engaged in this retrieval have opened their minds and hearts to the inner journey of understanding latent in this richly layered, often paradoxical, text. The neo-Thomist bifurcation of "philosophy" from "theology" had notably inhibited access to these opening questions of the Summa, as the modernist presumptions of the neo-Thomists allowed them to pass over question 1, which announces a staunchly theological agenda, to turn the initial questions of the Summa into a philosophical treatise: de Deo uno! How this ahistorical appropriation understood questions 3 to 11 is baffling to us now, as it seemed simply to overlook the prologue just cited, in an effort to confirm an ideological divide between "philosophy" and "theology." The French ressourcement among Dominicans and Jesuits especially (from the 1930s through the 1960s), laid the groundwork for a fresh retrieval of Thomas as well, which flourished in the wake of Vatican H's finding of neo-Thomist readings to be distracting and unhelpful. It is that...