Thomas Aquinas: A Historical and Philosophical Profile by Pasquale Porro (review)

This book is a translation of Porro's Tommaso d'Aquino: Un Profile storicofilosofico, published in 2012. Porro is well known as an expert on Aquinas, and in the present volume he offers a magisterial contribution to Aquinas scholarship. Anyone with serious interests in Aquinas who lacks fluency in Italian will be grateful to the translators and to the Catholic University of America Press for making the book available in English.

It has rightly become common to stress that Aquinas was not a philosopher in the modern sense. He did not formally lecture on philosophy. He was a Dominican friar whose interests were chiefly theological. Yet his writings contain much that contemporary philosophers can recognize as philosophical. And Porro picks up on this fact to great effect. He offers a wonderful account of Aquinas's philosophy. He also has much to say about the biography of Aquinas.

Books on the philosophy of Aquinas typically adopt a thematic approach. They expound and comment with an eye on topics or questions addressed by Aquinas. By contrast, Porro turns to his philosophy as it evolved over time. He moves chronologically through Aquinas's writings while also trying to place them in their precise historical contexts. Porro is aware of reasons that might be given for not taking Aquinas to be someone who wrote philosophy. But he explains very well why we can think of Aquinas as sometimes doing just this. In his preface he briefly notes four reasons for thinking that, theologian though he was, Aquinas was also concerned to engage philosophically with many philosophical problems. In the chapters that follow he goes on to make it abundantly clear why those reasons are good ones. The result is an admirably judicious approach to the question "Was Aquinas a theologian or a philosopher?"

When it comes to biographical and related textual matters, Porro is familiar with the most recent findings of the Leonine Commission, to which he frequently draws attention when trying to say how various works of Aquinas can be dated in relation to each other. He does not give us a biography of Aquinas comparable to books such as Jean-Pierre Torrell's Saint Thomas Aquinas: The Person and His Work. (1996). Yet his book exhibits the same high standard of historical scholarship as that displayed by Torrell and scholars similar to him. And Porro's expositions of Aquinas are always solid and defensible. A single volume cannot provide detailed analyses of all philosophically interesting writings that Aquinas produced. So Porro selects some to be noted in detail while passing over others in a cursory way or in silence. But his selection gives readers a good sense of what Aquinas's philosophy amounted to as it evolved. I was especially impressed by his discussion of Aquinas's commentaries on Aristotle. I was also impressed by the way in which he brings out the seriously negative approach to God that Aquinas develops in the wake of his claim that we do not know what God is. Some readers of Aquinas do not seem to realize that he meant what he said when stating that we do not know what God is. Porro explains to such people why Aquinas meant exactly what he said.

Porro seems to favor Aquinas's philosophical thinking, but not rigidly so. He occasionally laments some of Aquinas's conclusions. He does not develop his reasons for approving or disapproving of Aquinas's philosophy to the extent that certain contemporary philosophers might wish him to have done. But then, of course, there is only so much that one can do in a book reporting on a huge number of Aquinas's writings while also trying to contribute to the history of philosophy and the history of Aquinas himself.