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The Ethics of Aquinas ed. by Stephen J. Pope (review)
- The Thomist: A Speculative Quarterly Review
- The Catholic University of America Press
- Volume 67, Number 1, January 2003
- pp. 140-143
- 10.1353/tho.2003.0043
- Review
- Additional Information
- Purchase/rental options available:
140 BOOK REVIEWS renewal of dogmatics by spirituality and historical ressourcement. For the latter renewal he was admirably equipped. And at it, despite occasional questionable formulations, he excelled. AIDAN NICHOLS, 0. P. Blackfriars Cambridge, Great Britain The Ethics of Aquinas. Edited by STEPHEN J. POPE. Washington, D.C.: Georgetown University Press, 2002. Pp. 544. $39.95 (paper). ISBN 087840 -888-6. There are many reasons to applaud the recent resurgence of scholarly interest in the moral thought of Thomas Aquinas. Among the most salutary is the recovery of the complex and fundamentally theological character of Aquinas's oeuvre. The conventional account ofAquinas as the epitome ofmedieval "natural law" theory, whose place in the history of western ethics is little more than a sideshow along the golden road to modernity, has always been deeply flawed, of course. Now it is increasingly difficult to deny this fact; and thus almost impossible to pretend to students (or oneself) that the "Treatise on Law" (STh 1-11, qq. 90-97) represents the sum and substance ofAquinas's reflections on the moral life. Those who persist in doing so might justifiably complain that what Pope Leo XIII inAeterniPatris (1879) called the "rivulets" ofthe angelic doctor's teaching are today too numerous and far flung to admit more than a nod in the direction of this complex and theologically minded Aquinas. No more. In The Ethics ofAquinas, editor Stephen Pope has produced a compendium of recent work on Aquinas's moral thought that in one large but manageable volume brings this wide and diffuse scholarship together. As Pope acknowledges in the book's preface, there has been no dearth of brief overviews of Thomistic ethics (his own is included in an introduction to the volume); and on various aspects of Aquinas's moral thought (e.g., on human acts, on the will, on the virtues, etc.) there has over the last few decades been a veritable tsunami of monographs. However, there has never been anything quite like this: a "comprehensivetreatment ofthe basicmoral arguments and content ofAquinas's major moral work, the Second Part of the Summa theologiae" (xi). Although the book deliberately addresses a wide audience-beginner as well as specialist-those unfamiliar with the primary texts will likely find this volume unhelpful in the extreme. To the extent it addresses beginners, The Ethics of Aquinas, like the Summa itself, presumes of its reader a considerable amount of preparation if not interest in Thomistic moral theory. In other words, if one is looking for a secondary source to use in a standard undergraduate introduction BOOK REVIEWS 141 to Aquinas's moral thought, then one of those brief overviews would probably be a better choice. As a resource for advanced undergraduate and graduate study, on the other hand, there is, truly, nothing quite like this book. The book is divided into three main sections, which are introduced by three "orienting essays." The first is Leonard Boyle's slightly reworked version of his influential Gilson Lecture (Toronto), "The Setting of the Summa Theologiae of St. Thomas," originally published in 1982. The decision to put Boyle's essay at the front of the volume reflects not simply the recognition of that essay's influence on subsequent inquiry into Aquinas's ethics {it is frequently cited in the notes to many of the other essays in this collection), but an editorial commitment to the importance of historical context in interpreting both Aquinas's moral thought and the reception of that thought in times and places leading down to and including our own. In fact, if this book has an editorial slant-Pope is emphatic that the selection of contributors does not represent the canonization of any one interpretation of Aquinas's moral thought-it is the insistence on the coherence of Thomist moral theory as a tradition of inquiry, "a scene of lively intellectual development." Of course, it takes more than a juxtaposition of divergent interpretations, or the history of such interpretations, to make this case, and Pope could be faulted for not attending to the complex questions raised by the claim that Thomistic moral theory represents a single coherent tradition, rather than multiple traditions (e.g., Dominican, Redemptorist, Jesuit...