Abstract
A group of us invited by Enda McDonagh were gathered in his “rooms” for the second bicentenary of Maynooth—as Irish love to celebrate—when a Texas voice blared out: “Herbert, when is the big book on Aquinas coming out?” “Stanley,” was the answer: “you don’t do that; your students do.” This is that book, named for Herbert yet replete with Aquinas, as Herbert himself was. Now readers of this generation will be able to imbibe Thomas from Herbert, as we all did: from the master among us to our master Thomas, to the Master whose word suffuses the prose.
We discover how exciting and surprising that is, as we relish a wit and prose we wish we could deliver ourselves—without envy, in sheer delight. Astute editors waste no time plunging us into the metaphysics of divine action, where we quickly learn how speaking of God outstrips our ordinary prose. Yet nothing heavy burdens these metaphysical forays, lightened by Herbert’s incisive wit with prescient examples. So we are reminded forcibly how this God is closer to us than our jugular vein, renewing us daily by a sustaining presence: that is to be created, as we each are. And everything turns on the ur-fact of our creation, which alone delivers our creator God to us, and us to ourselves. Yet be prepared for one surprise after another as we learn that we cannot even say that “God is good” lest we end up passing judgment on our creator. And that we can hope to “know God” only as the “unknown.”
Thanks to editors and author, this is no “compendium” of sacred doctrine, though each of the neuralgic issues emerge. Now Herbert is known as an “ethicist,” yet that portion of this study turns centrally on politics, as we are led by Aristotle beyond the “eighteenth-century abstraction of the individual” (MacIntyre) to those among whom we live, flawed as we each are, and as Jesus’s genealogy reminds us he is too (325–31)! So, enjoy this daunting passage through “sacred doctrine” as Thomas practiced it and Herbert delivers it, a journey amazingly up-to-date as we contrast it with “sound bites” assaulting us today on every side. Let the leisure this exercise affords reanimate our own spirit of inquiry.
Faith offers “the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen” (Heb 11:1). With what we do not see but hope for: “the journey of Abraham into the unknown, a journey simply based on a promise” (Heb. 11:9). “In a way the whole thing is a bit like growing up, becoming in fact fully human” (323). That is the journey Herbert undertook and recommends us to take. Are we ready for it?