Aquinas on Metaphysics. A Historico-Doctrinal Study of the Commentary on the Metaphysics by James C. Doig (review)

BOOK REVIEWS Aquinas on Metaphysics. A Historico-Doctrinal Study of the Commentary on tke Metaphysics. By JAMES C. DoiG. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 197Q. Pp. 451. Guilders 5Q,75. This long monograph is remarkable for a number of things-not all of them good. It is a serious effort to interpret Thomas Aquinas's Commentary . Doig undertakes to compare the diverse metaphysics of Aristotle, Avicenna, Averroes, and Albert the Great with the doctrine of the Thomistic Commentary. This is a grandiose project: it would take a marvelous mind and very mature scholarship to collate five such ontologies. In the case of the four predecessors of Aquinas, Doig's interpretations are unconvincing to me. At the end of the second chapter, for instance, we find a summary of the positions of Avicenna, Averroes, and Albert. Five points are stressed: the material object, the formal object, the constructive method, the movement of each metaphysics (i. e., from starting-point to conclusion in each) , plus the way that each thinker proves that God exists. To be quite fair to Doig, he does discuss other metaphysical issues elsewhere, but there is little effort to get at the fundamental relation between knowledge and reality in each thinker, their views on the nature of causality, or on the analogy of being. At one point (pp. 34-35) the Neo-Platonic elements in Avicenna's views on divine attributes and emanation are dismissed as irrelevant to what Aqujnas does in his Commentary. These things are not irrelevant: one cannot understand the metaphysics of any of these men in the Middle Ages without some awareness of the influence of NeoPlatonism . Doig finds Averroes and Albert rather close in much of their metaphysical thinking, and he knows how critically Averroes rejected Avicennism. I wonder about this alignment of Averroes and Albert. If Albert's exposition of the Metaphysics was an early work, then Albert would be expected to know little about Averroes and much about Avicenna. However, we do not know the date of Albert's commentary: it could have been produced at any time between IQ55 and 1Q75. Indeed, we do not know whether Albert's preceded Thomas's commentary! It is also very difficult to talk about Albert's "metaphysics," for he seems to have held several metaphysical poesitions. To save time, I simply refer the reader to Bernard Muller-Thym's book, The Establishment of the University of Being in Meister Eckhart (1939), where we find a very different account of Albert's ontology. In the long run, we may wonder at the value of a comparison ~41 242 BOOK REVIEWS of the work of Albert and Aquinas, when we do not know the chronological relations of their commentaries, and when we are in such ignorance of the manner in which Albertine metaphysics may have influenced Thomas. Another area of doubt on this study centers on the text of Thomas's Commentary on the Metaphysics. We have no critical edition of this work; the Spiazzi text is merely a modified reprint. Solid interpretation will have to wait for the Leonine texts. The newly printed editions of Thomas's expositions of the Ethics and the Politics, made under the direction of R. A. Gauthier, strongly suggest that a critical edition of the Sententia in libros Metaphysicarum will provide us with a text that is significantly different from the present ones. I am in general agreement with Doig's account of the chronology of Thomas's Commentary. He thinks there were two redactions, one from 1265-7 ·in the Papal States, and a second from 1270-2, when many of Thomas's writings were revised or reproduced in fair copies at Paris. Thomas's exposition was based on several Latin versions of the text of Aristotle, not on one text provided by William of Moerbeke. Whether five versions were really used by Aquinas, as Doig suggests, I do not know. What Doig does in interpreting Thomas is far more important than all of these preliminaries. In effect, he claims that Aquinas's Commentary: (1) was "written in the light of one metaphysical system." This depends on the special way in which Doig reads Thomas. (2) Doig says that...