Abstract
As Brian Davies remarks, ‘books and articles on Aquinas’s philosophy keep appearing… publishers love him. Works on him tend to sell.’ These comments might, perhaps, be offered with a wry smile. After all, Davies has provided not a few of those books himself, and for that we should be grateful – for commentaries, edited volumes, and works of more general philosophical theology that draw on his Dominican forebear. However, this is a splendid short introduction to Aquinas, at least as viewed from what I might call the ‘calm and clear’ school of recent British Dominicans, which elevates linguistic precision over anything approaching rapture.
The book is divided between ‘history’ and ‘legacy’. ‘History’ offers an outline of Aquinas’s biography, followed by a survey of some of his main metaphysical ideas, his arguments that point to God, an exposition of how he treats the main theological themes, and a section on ‘human beings’, on the soul and body, ethics and the sacraments. The ‘legacy’ section traces the history of Aquinas’s influence from his death to the present day, and concludes with a slightly agglomerative chapter on what Aquinas might offer in the present day. The picture of Aquinas that emerges is one characterized by measured assessment and explanation. In other words, we mainly meet the Aquinas who made such profitable use of Aristotle. Until recently, that was really the only assessment in circulation, and Aquinas certainly stands for many as a model of clarity, charity and breadth of interest. Over the past 50 to 70 years, however, another side to Aquinas has become clearer, and just as influential. It is one characterized as much by Platonic sweep as by that Aristotelian detail. Where I see the influence of Aquinas growing yet further today, not least among those formed first as Protestants (as I was), it is this Platonic Aquinas who captures hearts: the Aquinas of participation, likeness and exemplarity, whose texts are shot through with delight in creation, with God acting in every action, for whom everything about everything comes from God, except for evil, which is an occlusion of that reception. Many of these elements are present in Davies’s book, but they are not particularly celebrated, or brought to prominence.
Davies is the sort of Thomist he is, and he has written a compelling account of Thomas’s thought from that perspective. His prose is lucid, calm and rigorous, and that matches his outlook. It goes in Davies’s favour that there is nothing of the glint of the salesman in his eyes. He informs us about Aquinas’s metaphysics as a series of ‘basic words and concepts’ to have in the background, not as a way to make sense of the world ourselves. He is sure that Aquinas is worth studying, and that we will be better off for coming to terms with some of his thought; he makes no claim that Aquinas will change your life. It would not be Davies’s style to say so, but transformatory encounters with Thomas are far from unknown. To point to that, we still need Josef Pieper and W. Norris Clarke, to stand alongside Brian Davies.