Summa theologiae vol. 10 by St. Thomas Aquinas (review)

274 BOOK REVIEWS and enjoying considerable leisure can achieve it. It is a philosopher's answer for the philosophically oriented. Nevertheless, within these bounds, important things are being said about man's ultimate goods and his happiness, which education, as an institutionalized , civilized procedure, should take into account. It must be acknowledged that even the finest educational process will not by itself produce the good man; other factors enter into the mixture even at the level of essential constitutives, e. g., sexual and familial love. And at the level of actual constitutives, still other elements must be considered; how is suffering integrated into the full life's plan, and how are men to achieve the maximum possible of the good life in view of the myriad compromises and compensation they are obliged to make because of personal deficiencies and unyielding circumstances? These questions are outside the scope of this book, but they must be recognized and answered before the whole design of the good life is clear. In the meantime, Dr. Weiss has written an illuminating and even moving account of the part that schooling should handle. St. Stephen's Priory Dover, Massachusetts MICHAEL STOCK, 0. P. St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologiae, vol. 10 (1a. 65-74) (Cosmogony), ed. WILLIAM A. WALLACE, O.P. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1967. $U5. Volume 10 of the new English translation of the Summa theologiae contains St. Thomas's cosmogony or hexaemeron. The editor, William A. Wallace, 0. P., makes no exaggerated claims for this section of the Summa. He notes that " the fact that St. Thomas's treatment of the Hexaemeron is so immersed in patristic exegesis and in the science of the Middle Ages has long made it an antiquarian piece even for Thomistic scholars " (p. xxi), and he refers to this as one of St. Thomas's "weakest expositions" (p. xxiii). And yet it is Father Wallace's contention that "the marks of his genius are still discernible. . . . On the difficult topic of the Hexaemeron he could not offer a correct and definitive solution. Even in error, however, his efforts compare so favourably with those of others that they deserve careful analysis and thoughtful appreciation" (p. xxiii). The section in question is, of course, a commentary on the Genesis account of the six days of creation. Here St. Thomas is forced to deal with such traditional problems as the creation of light on the first day and of the luminous celestial bodies (the principal sources of light) three days later, the perplexing claim that there are waters above the firmament, and the BOOK REVIEWS fl75 suitability of the various terms employed in the Scriptures to describe God's creative work. Other problems appear to have acquired new urgency for St. Thomas through the recovery of the whole corpus of Greek and Islamic science in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Thus he inquires into the possibility that God employed intermediaries in producing the material world; he asks if the celestial bodies are animate; he questions whether matter was formless for a time before diversification. St. Thomas reveals his ample knowledge of science and natural philosophy as he faces the exegetical problems associated with Genesis I and 2; contemporary astronomy, physics, optics, biology, and metaphysics are all brought to bear on the text. This fact reflects St. Thomas's relatively strict "scientific concordism ": the Scriptures are to be interpreted literally, and the Scriptural and scientific accounts of the world must agree in detail. But as Father Wallace points out, in spite of St. Thomas's concordist views and his command of scientific knowledge, this particular section of the Summa is predominantly Biblical and patristic-it was so determined by the great abundance of patristic literature on the subject of the Hexaemeron. Thus on each question St. Thomas faithfully records the views of the various Fathers of the Church and attempts to mediate between their differing viewpoints; and his solution to a problem is more often drawn from a Scriptural text than from a scientific argument. As editor of this volume, Father Wallace has brought to bear on the text of St. Thomas's Hexaemeron not only the" careful analysis and thoughtful appreciation " which...