The Philosophy of Saint Thomas Aquinas: A Sketch by Stephen L. Brock (review)

“Right now,” Father Stephen Brock observes, “there does seem to be some confusion about nature” (34). At that point in his new book, Fr. Brock is engaged in the task of making intelligible Aristotle’s understanding of nature as a principle and cause that makes certain things move, and he has just finished explaining that Aristotle took the existence of nature, or of things that act from such a cause, to be evident. It must be admitted, however, that “we can get confused even about such obvious truths” (ibid.). This kind of confusion is vexing not merely because we are happier when our thoughts are clearer and more in harmony with our experience of the world, but also because our confusion about matters that should be plain has a way of hindering us from receiving the saving truth of the Gospel in its integrity. If philosophy is, in fact, a “way to come to know fundamental truths about human life” (Pope John Paul II, Fides et Ratio, §5), then its ability to keep us from confusion about matters as foundational as what is and what is not natural is indeed precious. We ought, then, to prize philosophy “as one of the noblest of human tasks” (ibid., §3), and thus warmly welcome Fr. Brock’s invitation to consider it afresh through the eyes of one of its most appealing masters, St. Thomas Aquinas.

The Philosophy of Saint Thomas Aquinas: A Sketch offers readers a tour of the Angelic Doctor’s thinking about nature and the created order that culminates in what Fr. Brock refers to as “reason’s glimpse of God” (109). In less than two hundred crisp and clear pages, he has achieved a work that his colleagues will envy, for it is at once both a satisfying presentation of Aquinas’s thought and a personal engagement with him as a philosophical companion. This “sketch” is an introduction and a survey that is also, and eminently, a work of original reflection. At each step of the way, the reader is offered a look at Aquinas’s thought that is both from the point of view of metaphysical wisdom (and sometimes explicitly theological wisdom) and firmly rooted in common experience and ordinary language.

After an introduction entitled Manuductio that sets forth the work’s essential theme, Fr. Brock dedicates the first of his six chapters to an overview of Aquinas’s life and major works. The middle four chapters of the book are a march through the main topics of theoretical philosophy, beginning with nature and its principles, turning to the soul as a particular kind of nature, then examining the science of being and truth, and finally ascending to the consideration of “invisibles”—the human soul as subsistent form, the angels, and God. Only in the final chapter does Fr. Brock address Aquinas’s practical philosophy, and then decidedly from a metaphysical point of view, attending in particular to the role played by speculative philosophy in the defense and elucidation of the principles of ethics and politics. Aquinas’s considerable labor in the art of logic receives only a brief direct treatment in the chapter on metaphysics, but this is no omission. The art of arts is never far from view at any point in the book. To those readers who are broadly familiar with the literature on Aquinas as a philosopher, Fr. Brock’s decision to privilege a treatment of the theoretical over the practical will not surprise. For while it would be too much to say that there are works aplenty to serve as introductions to Thomas’s ethical thought, it seems fair to say that Fr. Brock has done a great service to the present generation of students by making the effort to introduce the features of Thomas’s thought that are less well known and, almost certainly, more foreign to most of us.

The distinctive excellence of the book is captured in the introductory...