The Oxford Handbook of the Reception of Aquinas ed. by Matthew Levering and Marcus Plested (review)

Reading a text is a timely act, and the editors justify this compendious review of the reception of Aquinas by observing, courtesy of H. Gadamer and A. MacIntyre, that "one cannot properly read texts abstracted from their prior reception" (xv). Reading inserts the reader willy-nilly into a tradition, but it does this intelligently and with propriety only if we are conscious of the tradition. Just so, the volume begins with an essay by Jean-Pierre Torrell on the timeliness of Aquinas's own reading: what did he read, and how did he handle his authorities—scriptural, patristic, and philosophical? For Aquinas, all words are from the Word and Spirit, and all theological words are from Christ. Still, he recognizes that as human words they really are timely words, and Torrell discerns on Aquinas's part a practical recognition of the historicity of thought. This introductory chapter complements Torrell's previous essay, "St. Thomas et l'histoire" (Revue thomiste 105 [2005]). Together, these essays assure the reader that the chapters in the Handbook before us are reading Aquinas with Aquinas, in harmony with his own hermeneutical practices, and not against him.

The scope of the Handbook is catholic, and includes Catholic, Orthodox, and Protestant receptions of Aquinas. It is divided into eight sections that treat of receptions "Medieval," "Reformation and Counter-Reformation," "Baroque," "Modern," "Early Twentieth Century," "Late Twentieth Century," "Contemporary Philosophical," and "Contemporary Theological." The last four, from the beginning of the twentieth century onwards, account for almost one-half of the Handbook, which will likely match reader expectations and desires. However, I think it will be a very rare person indeed who, reading the book from stem to stern, will not discover new and sometimes wonderful things in the first half, as well as meeting many old friends and comfortable enemies in the second.

In the first four sections, each chapter addresses the reception of Aquinas as a whole, but of course constrained by what the receivers of the period in question actually made of him—which was sometimes not very much. Medieval receptions, Eastern and Western, reported by Corey Barnes, Ioannis Polemis, Richard Cross, Isabel Iribarren, Pantelis Golitis, and Efrem Jindráček, are sometimes rather refusals to receive, as with Scotus and William of Ockham (Cross). The complicated relation of Orthodox theologians to Aquinas, from enthusiastic welcome to determined rejection (and betimes surreptitious use), is reported by Polemis and Golitsis and, to be sure, with reference to the Palamite controversy. In this regard, the Handbook easily lends itself to very focused interests. One can read of Orthodox and Russian receptions from the fourteenth to the twentieth centuries, of Lutheran and Calvinist relations to Aquinas from the sixteenth to the twentieth centuries, and of Anglican notice of Aquinas from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries.

One should note a change in the status of Aquinas, from that of being simply one more interlocutor among many to that of a perceived authority: first in the Dominicans (Iribarren), reasserted in the fifteenth century (by Capreolus, Torquemada, and Cajetan [Jindráček]), and finally becoming more general in the sixteenth century. Benchmarks for this shift are reported in the second section by David Luy (Dominicans in controversy with Lutherans) and Romanus Cessario (Trent). This section on Reform and Counter-Reform also treats of Calvinist and Eastern receptions by David Sytsma and Klaus-Peter Todt, respectively, and gives us a chapter on Cardinal Cajetan by Cajetan Cuddy. Very rewarding in this section is the wonderful contribution by David Lantigua on the emergence of a more fulsome moral theology in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. He gives us a necessarily short but still sweeping and inspiring account of the great synthetic view of moral theology constructed at Salamanca (F. Vitoria, M. Cano, D. Soto, B. Medina), whose basis is man made in the...