Lessons from Aquinas: A Resolution of the Problem of Faith and Reason by Creighton Rosental (review)

Creighton Rosental aims to present Thomas Aquinas’s resolution of the problem of faith and reason and to do so in a way that speaks to contemporary analytic conversations about the issue. The subtitle sounds ambitious, but in the first chapter Rosental begins by distinguishing three problems of faith and reason, and narrowing his focus to one of them: the epistemological problem of whether believing something by faith is epistemically responsible. Being epistemically responsible can mean either having rational justification (in the broadly internalist sense), being practically rational (in William Alston’s sense), or being warranted (in Alvin Plantinga’s sense). In what ways faith, for Aquinas, is epistemically responsible is what Rosental aims to tell us.

Rosental proceeds throughout the book to set forth Aquinas’s account of reason, knowledge (scientia), demonstration, opinion, faith, certitude, and how they relate, and he sets all this out in terms of analytically formulated definitions. Along the way, Rosental sheds some light on what Aquinas accomplished. Looking at Aristotle’s picture of human cognition, Aquinas was able to show exactly where Christian faith fit into the Aristotelian picture and how Christian faith transcended that picture and altered it. Rosental ends by attributing to Aquinas a view dubbed Faith Inclusive Foundationalism (FIF). In my own brief summary, FIF is the view that S’s belief that p is epistemically responsible if and only if S has scientia that p or S has epistemically responsible opinio that p or S f-sees that p (where f-seeing is a special sort of seeing that takes place in faith by virtue of charity). In the end, it seems, Rosental holds that faith—as Aquinas understands it—is epistemically responsible in all three senses (the broadly internalist sense, Alston’s, and Plantinga’s).

Three overall points are worth making about Rosental’s book. First, he says early on that “my approach to studying Aquinas falls under the history of philosophy—I am interested in looking closely and carefully at the account Aquinas actually provided” (27). But I sense that pure historians of medieval philosophy will not like this book. For the discussion of knowledge (scientia) and demonstration, Rosental draws heavily from Aquinas’s commentary on Aristotle’s Posterior Analytics rather than from his independent treatises—a choice that many scholars would question. Furthermore, Rosental tends to move very quickly over highly technical discussions in medieval thought so that the subtlety of the medieval claims and debates seems lost. Aquinas scholars who are accustomed to using the term ‘apprehension’ precisely in Aquinas’s sense will likely find Rosental’s talk of “apprehending” a proposition to be a nuisance if not epistemologically misleading. Rosental also speaks of individuals making judgments about propositions (51), whereas Aquinas is clear that one uses a proposition to make judgments about things. Scholars will see here not merely infelicitous speech, but antirealist implications being foisted on Aquinas. Rosental comes close to reducing certitude to a merely psychological state (50), whereas for Aquinas certitude can also be attributed to things cognized or to propositions. Finally, at one point, Rosental writes, “[T]hough Aquinas talks in terms of the truth of things, which makes it seem that objects can be true, this is just a loose and casual way of speaking. . .” (54). Those familiar with the De Veritate q. 1 and Aquinas on the transcendental properties of being will likely recoil at this sentence. Although Rosental’s manner of speaking will likely disturb medievalists, he is not aiming to produce medieval scholarship, but to allow a medieval thinker to speak in terms intelligible to contemporary interlocutors. The question of how to place medieval philosophers in conversation with contemporary ones in a way that is both true to the medieval figure and also intelligible to contemporary ones remains a debated issue.

Second, in his book Knowledge and Faith in Thomas Aquinas, John Jenkins devotes an entire chapter to the same core issue...