Customer Reviews

Aquinas, Ethics, and Philosophy of Religion: Metaphysics and Practice (Indiana Series in the Philosophy of Religion)

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The author of this book clearly has a superb grasp of philosophical history. But as this book's whole premise seems to make clear, that is not enough to save it from anachronism. It is an anachronism driven by personal religious conviction apparently, and in my book that makes it, to some extent, beyond criticism. Like many Catholics, who want to follow Papal guidance, the theological trend of the Catholic Church, which reached its apotheosis in Pope Leo's encyclical extolling Aquinas, has had a very powerful effect overall. For the strict Catholic believer it is one of sheer guidance. Since alone amongst world religions the Roman Catholic Church actually prescribes not just belief, but since Pope Leo, the necessity of accepting a mode of thought or philosophy, those outside that strict realm are surely justified in assessing the impetus for it as essentially authoritative. That is, not principally in impartial conceptual parsing of intellectual matters. This leads talented fellow like Hibbs here to conundrums. He early on admonishes us not to interpret Aquinas by current trends of thought, or we risk, in his assessment "comic anachronism". And yet, really quite funnily, the whole book seems devoted to the premise to doing just that, naturally in a some special way that he finds would navigate around such anachronism. Well, the whole idea seems forced and tendentious. And that a writer with such a close grasp of issues as Hibbs should not see that is proof of the dis-intellectual valence of a lot right-wing tending Catholic thought nowadays.

The evidence for this can be found in fact in a very interesting video from a recent Conference called "Stuck on Virtue" held at Berry University in Georgia. There Hibbs gives a quite brilliant paper on Descartes, showing a really masterful grasp of issues in relation to the critique of Socrates. There are two things I want to emphasize in relation to this video. First, that Hibbs is clearly one of the Catholic intellectuals who is still capable of reasonable history of ideas. Many Catholic types now seem engaged in an utter propagandistic twisting of that history for dogmatic purposes. Peter Kreeft in his perverse nonsense about Kant comes to mind, as archetypal in this regard. Also another book I recently "reviewed" here by a real Catholic mountebank named Father Barron, in which he tries to portray the entire modern era as some "Heraclitean" protest against the sureties of the past. This lecture by Hibbs on Descartes showed the more reasonable and necessarily complex picture of this quintessential modern philosopher in knowledgeable engagement with the past, even if "ironic", which itself can be seen as a form of reverence. Second, that Hibbs' desire to see the whole question raised by Descartes as just one more thing to help us understand the "Athens-Jerusalem" polarity, shows he is committed to an essentially limited and one might say blinkered ambit of conceptual parsing, even with all his evident intellectual, historical clarity. This somewhat ironically was made even clearer by the very clever and even brilliant response by Daniel Maher that followed .To my surprise Maher raised the possibility that Descartes philosophical position had, as I would take his words, a certain occult meaning. He was hiding behind a "mask" of his philosophical approach. (Perhaps because his noted fear of Galileo's specific fate, which got a mention somewhere in the discussion) Dan Maher's occult explanation was really closely reasoned and fascinating. (And Dan still looks hotly cute as he did when I lived across from the hall from him for several semesters at Catholic University.) But Hibbs ultimate theological ambition in all this was a lot more obvious than Maher's occult one. Thus when Hibbs was introduced as someone who had "published widely on Thomas Aquinas and popular culture" the unwitting funniness of that description did not hide a further insight for the approach. It is an approach which wants to trade in some of the hackneyed elements of "popular culture" and "current thought" and yet through some Goldilocks approach somehow escape the "comic anachronism" which is intoned as a danger for others who might criticize the whole endeavor even with more serious "current" bases, far beyond the "popular culture" that Hibbs seems taken with. It is a shame to see such smart people engaged in such intellectual chicanery. No one is against Catholics having as part of their personal belief a belief in the method of a medieval Dominican friar. But that they ask people of goodwill to pretend along with them that they are doing serious thinking in relation to what they have already committed to believe reagrdless for personal reasons is more than anachronism. It is just an ancient tragedy of humankind writ anew.

Its been a while since I read this book but I remember its very good on signification and offers something compatible with Bernard Montagne's "Analogy of Being" and a slight alternative to McInerny's views where modus significandi directly modifies res significata and they must be taken together to determine the significance. Analogy seems to apply to both the mode of signifying (and the way this is modified among the grades of analogy) and the thing signified in a way not made explicit by McInerny and more compatible with Montagne's "grades of being" pointing to God with names applied analogously (via emminence) to the thing. It seems to me to be a way of understanding or partially comprehending how all the transcendentals (being, one true good) refer to One thing relying on continuity of intelligiblity of different analogues (grades)and unity of reference.
Also an analysis of literary practice underscores the difference between seeing and knowing - in the sense that seeing and a general understanding of a thing (e.g. that Pretty girl) don't in themselves bring love in its fullness especially if you are in Ireland undertaking an Odyssey.