John I. Jenkins

Whether or not Thomas Aquinas adequately integrated Aristotelian method with the entirely non-Aristotelian presuppositions of Christianity is a question which will continue to run and run: this book very helpfully redefines some of the elements of this debate by arguing - very persuasively, it seems to me - that Aquinas was not attempting to demonstrate the self-evident truth of Christian faith-claims by means of Aristotelian philosophy: rather, the 'Summa Theologiae' was conceived as a kind of manual for intellectual formation - a coherent training programme - for the negotiation of knowledge preliminary to asking the kinds of questions which deal with truth and whether or not it might be self-evident. That is to say: Aquinas did not aspire to determine the self-evidence of Christian Truth; he aspired, instead, to nurture the kind of intellectual formation required 'so that what is most intelligible in itself becomes most intelligible to us' - to give the enquirer the best grounding for trying to understand what may defy understanding. This, of course, is something different altogether from the 'Summa' as it has often been described to us. The effect of this recalibration of Aquinas' intentions is that we can see his achievement not as an admirable but ultimately muddled attempt to apply Aristotelian method to faith-claims of an entirely non-Aristotelian kind, but, instead, as a method, all of its own, which is nonetheless in 'deep continuity', as John Jenkins puts it, with Aristotle. I think that this is convincing - that Aquinas was perfectly clever enough to know that questions, for example about transsubstantiation, are simply not susceptible to Aristotle's own method unadjusted; perfectly clever enough not to try and distort Aristotle's method; but perfectly clever enough to have recognised also that Aristotelian patterns of thought have sufficient integrity that they merit being studied with the very greatest interest and care.
What follows is a very thorough exposition of the Thomist understanding of epistemology, of the relationship within Aquinas' theology between reason and 'grace', and of the careful structure of the 'Summa Theologiae' to present arguments which are 'not attempts to establish a conclusion which is in doubt in the context of the work, but ways to help us understand and speak adequately (or less inadequately) about God, to understand God according to the proper, or least improper, description.' John Jenkins cites Leonard Boyle's belief that the 'Summa' was not intended for University students, but for the instruction primarily of friars who would learn from it how best to preach - giving a moral and sacramental function to the text which takes it even further from speculative abstraction.
None of this is easy subject matter, and this is not a book for the theologically faint-hearted. But as an analysis of the greatest of the works of Thomas Aquinas I think it excels: it liberates him from any charge that he has distorted or misunderstood Aristotle; and, by placing at the centre an agenda - the pursuit of God - which is not Aristotelian but entirely Christian, it affirms Aquinas at the centre of properly Christian thought, and not as the perfecter merely of an abstract scholastic method which is as distant from our own world and its questions as is Aristotle's own.… (más)