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BOOK REVIEWS 141 dialogue with such alternative expressions, especially ones that attempt to use philosophy with a view to engaging the problems of Catholic theology, is a steady feature of Thomistic thought through the centuries and one that Thomists would find to be worth emulating in the contemporary pluralistic context. The Catholic Univeristy ofAmerica Washington, D.C. TIMOTiiYB. NOONE Measure ofa Different Greatness: The Intensive Infinite, 1250-1650. By ANNE ASHLEY DAVENPORT. Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1999. Pp. 435 ISBN 90-0411481 -5 (cloth). The purpose of Anne Ashley Davenport's Measure ofa Different Greatness: The Intensive Infinite, 1250-1650 is threefold: to analyze medieval texts pertaining to the concept of the intensive infinite; to identify the cultural and political factors that shaped the Scholastic discussion of this concept; and to explore the synergy between medieval spirituality and early modern science (xii). The book's title may be slightly misleading in that the study focuses on the concept of divine infinity and only peripherally considers the more general concept ofintensive infinity. The study is encyclopedic in the range and variety of its material, if not always in the command of it. Extensive footnotes provide the subtexts of Davenport's commentary. In chapter 1, Davenport presents the sudden interest of such thirteenthcentury Catholics as Alexander Nequam and Robert Fishacre in the intensive infinite as a response to the dualism advocated by the Cathars to explain the existence of evil. Both men sought to combat the rational arguments of the Cathars, "to wield Reason in support of Catholic doctrine," so as to obtain a universal consensus in matters of faith which Scripture alone does not seem to provide (18). Davenport credits Nequam with having identified three important properties of divine infinity: that it cannot be increased, cannot be reached by finite means, and cannot be expressed in ordinary quantificational terms. Fishacre goes on to develop the notion in terms of "a state of maximal reduction that corresponds to universal relatedness" (40). Davenport credits Fishacre with capitalizing on Augustine's distinction between an extensive and 142 BOOK REVIEWS an intensive measure of greatness, quantitas molis and quantitas virtutis. She herself gives no independent consideration to the Augustinian, scriptural, and philosophical sources she alludes to in the chapter, although she acknowledges in a footnote that the whole Greco-Arabic Neoplatonic tradition must be taken into account to study the evolution and transmission of the concept of "spiritual quantity." Instead, for an introductory discussion of the infinite Davenport refers the reader several times to Bertrand Russell's OurKnowledge ofthe External World. Chapter 2 pits the Aristotelian scientific "theodicy" of Thomas Aquinas against the Augustinian/Anselmian mystical "theodicy" of Bonaventure. Why Davenport speaks of "theodicy" rather than "theology" is unclear. In any case, her contrast between the theodicies of Aquinas and Bonaventure is done in broad and unpersuasive strokes. She seems unaware of the twentieth-century studies on Aquinas's Neoplatonic heritage. Even though she states that all the Scholastics acknowledge that Aristotle restricted the sense of "infinite" to extensive quantity, she nevertheless attributes Aquinas's concept of intensive infinity to his commitment to Aristotelian natural science. The heart of her argument is quickly sketched in footnote 33 of page 60, in which she traces Aquinas's argument for God's infinity in question 7 of the Prima Pars back to his proof in question 2 for a First Mover. Davenport also attributes to Aquinas the position that natural investigation culminates with the discovery that God is infinite and therefore beyond human knowledge, leaving man dependent on Scripture and the magisterium's "cadres of professional exegetes" for positive quidditative knowledge of God (56). On the one hand, Davenport is apparently unaware that Thomas argues that no knowledge of God in this life can be quidditative, either natural or revealed. On the other hand, she attributes to Aquinas an "apophatic" doctrine that all natural knowledge of God is negative, apparently unaware of his polemic against Maimonides. She moreover ascribes to Aristotle the primacy that Thomas assigns to existence (64), and later in the book suggests that latent in Thomas was the intellectualist notion that intelligere is in fact prior to esse in God. In a word, a...

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