Metaphysics of Theism: Aquina's Natural Theology in Summa contra gentiles I

Metaphysics of Theism: Aquinas's Natural Theology in Summa contra gentiles I. By Norman Kretzmann. Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press, 1997. xi + 302 pp. $45.00 (cloth).

There is considerable drama in this work, which certainly recommends an explicitly metaphysical text! The principal protagonist is Aquinas, of course, with the author serving as drama critic of his performance as a natural theologian in one of his own prose works: the Summa contra gentiles, now rendered in English by its other title: On the Truth of the Catholic Faith. The Summa Theologiae offers a clear example of the disputational form of oral teaching, but Norman Kretzmann chose the first three books of the other Summa for its attempt to present the truths of faith without explicit recourse to premises gleaned from revelation, though these effectively guided the entire enterprise. His goal is to show how a master like Aquinas developed a "systematic natural theology. . . designed to show that reason unsupported by revelation could have come up with many-not all-of just those propositions that constitute the established subject matter of revealed theology" (p. 7), in the hopes that we might learn something from that effort.

So the aim is expressly philosophical, and he plays close attention to Aquinas's arguments, allowing them in the process to stretch his own presumptions regarding key philosophical issues-presumptions which many of us presumably share, and so can participate in the unfolding of this conceptual drama. What is missing is any care to acquaint us (or himself) with the provenance of Aquinas's key notions, of his debt to Neoplatonic sources for crucial notions like esse; the working presumption is that he is beholden solely to Aristotle, and that we can understand his text while deliberately insouciant about his context. Yet here is where the protagonist succeeds admirably in gradually deconstructing the critic's preconceptions to draw him into Aquinas's world of thought. Note the contrast, for example, between his supposition that "any entity that could count as the first source of being for all things would have to be breath-takingly extraordinary, but even breath-takingly extraordinary isn't yet divine" (p. 86), and his realization, after following Aquinas's elaboration of the perfection proper to a cause of being, that "the uniquely necessary being of the kind that ultimately explains all existing" (p. 128) would have to be "radically different from the all the contingent existence it explains" (p. 126). Readers are invited to participate in the critic's own prise de conscience of Aquinas's appreciation of what it entails to be a "cause of being," something of which the critic initially appeared to be quite innocent.

A similarly dramatic unfolding takes place with regard to freedom, where the critic begins by taking for granted our virtual identification of freedom with the "will's act of choosing" (p. 213), and even presumes that is what Aquinas means by "voluntary action" (p. 208), while acknowledging that on "Aquinas's view [the will's] nature is fundamentally not that of an independent, equipoised capacity for choice, but that of an innate inclination towards what is cognized as good by each individual intellect naturally associated with each individual will" (p. 203). The critic never quite grasps the power of Aquinas's alternative, however, for the best he can do to articulate the acceptance at the heart of freedom so understood is to call it "static volition [which] involves no actual choosing" (p. 214). Some appreciation of Augustine's pregnant distinction between uti and frui here could have saved him from the pejorative "static" which presumes all activity to be frenetic, whereas (unlike Don Juan) spiritual beings can simply take joy [fruit in their goal.

We can also watch the protagonist overcome a formidable set of contemporary philosophical preconceptions in bringing the critic to realize how "ontological union" can be one of genuine love, as he invokes the parentchild analogue (pp. 246-250) to help us appreciate what someone more attuned to Aquinas's use of esse would have seen quite readily. This encounter between protagonist and critic could be a first step for others to realize what current philosophers have to learn from Aquinas, despite our initial myopia. What keeps it a first step, however, is the critic's belief that there is something determinate called "theism" which philosophers can attain and which is coincident with Christian faith, whereas Aquinas insists (in ST 1.32.1.3) that thinkers bereft of a sense of God's triunity will find themselves unable to grasp the gratuity of creation-a contention the critic corroborates. So however astutely Aquinas may help the critic help us to formulate a "metaphysics of theism," he nevertheless fails to exemplify it.

DAVID BURRELL, C.S.C.

University of Notre Dame

Notre Dame, Indiana

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