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Thinking Theologically about the Divine Ideas: Reexamining the "Summa" of Thomas Aquinas by Benjamin R. DeSpain (review)

2024; Pontifical Faculty of the Immaculate Conception; Volume: 88; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/tho.2024.a914484

2473-3725

Vivian Boland,

Medieval Philosophy and Theology

Reviewed by: Thinking Theologically about the Divine Ideas: Reexamining the "Summa" of Thomas Aquinas by Benjamin R. DeSpain Vivian Boland O.P. Thinking Theologically about the Divine Ideas: Reexamining the "Summa" of Thomas Aquinas. By Blenjamin R. DeSpain. Brill's Studies in Catholic Theology 11. Leiden: Brill, 2022. Pp. xi + 245. $139.00 (hard). ISBN 978-90-04-51150-7. The doctrine of divine ideas has been getting quite a bit of attention in recent years. In 2021 Oxford University Press published Mark A. McIntosh's book The Divine Ideas Tradition in Christian Mystical Theology, following on Cambridge University Press's publication of Divine Ideas by Thomas M. Ward (2020). The Catholic University of America Press had already published, in 2008, Gregory T. Doolan's work Aquinas on the Divine Ideas as Exemplar Causes, and more recently published an important book by Carl A. Vater, God's Knowledge of the World: Medieval Theories of Divine Ideas from Bonaventure to Ockham (2022). Vater's book contextualizes Aquinas's treatment of the doctrine within the flow of thirteenth-century theological reflection and in this serves as an essential addition to what I was able to do (Vivian Boland, Ideas in God according to Saint Thomas Aquinas: Sources and Synthesis [Brill, 1996]), to what Doolan's book offers, and to what we find in the book under review here. A first point to note is the presence of the term "theologically" in the title of DeSpain's book. Against Doolan's proposal to treat the doctrine purely philosophically, DeSpain argues that such a methodology must fail to do justice to Aquinas's presentation and use of it. Of course there are philosophical aspects to it, but it is not only as a philosophical tool that it is useful to Aquinas. The divine ideas doctrine, DeSpain argues, is central to Aquinas's theology—he can [End Page 159] quote Marie-Dominique Chenu for whom the realm of the divine ideas is "the real spiritual and scientific home of theology"—and it cannot be understood by the application of an exclusively philosophical hermeneutic. The "atomistic interpretive" approach—collating the texts in which the doctrine is presented as well as appeals to it elsewhere in Aquinas's writings—is limited and in recent times tends to be a defensive strategy, seeking to show that the doctrine has an essential place in Aquinas's theological enterprise in the face of contrary arguments. Doubts sown by later presentations of the doctrine of divine ideas, presentations that sometimes border on caricatures, have often put students of Aquinas on the back foot as they seek to respond to questions and concerns about it. Free of such doubts, DeSpain wants to identify and explain what he terms "the contribution of the doctrine's more subtle gestures to Aquinas's works" (5). The term "gestures" is an important one for DeSpain, although he never really defines it. His aim is to treat the theological work of Aquinas as essentially pedagogical, seeking to guide readers from the confession of faith to the wisdom of sacra doctrina. In this pedagogy the doctrine of divine ideas is a type of grammar that provides what he terms "gestures of contemplative fittingness" that support the overall project of showing humanity's dependence on God in creation and salvation. He is not then claiming that Aquinas's theology is really all about the divine ideas, but he believes that the doctrine has what he terms "a peripheral centrality": it is not the focus of Aquinas's theology but once that focus is clear it is also seen that without this doctrine Aquinas's vision would be incomplete. DeSpain's argument unfolds in six movements. First (chap. 2) comes an evaluation of the pedagogical design of Summa theologiae. Some of the standard criticisms of the doctrine of divine ideas—that it is rationalistic, anti-Trinitarian, even non-Christian—fail to take account of its context in Aquinas where it is informed and reordered by the pattern of theological education which explains the form of his theological discourse. Not a closed system, the Summa nevertheless has a pedagogical unity, seeking to lead the reader from faith...