23 of 23 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
re-reading aquinas, September 16, 2004
This review is from: Truth in Aquinas (Routledge Radical Orthodoxy) (Paperback)
This book is written by two leading figures in movement known as "radical orthodoxy": John Milbank and Catherine Pickstock. In a brief hundred pages or so they present a dense and exquisite account of Thomas Aquinas' theory of truth, building on the recent work of Michel Corbin, John Jenkins, Mark Jordan, Rudi te Velde, and others. It is difficult and technical reading, but the results are stunning, even if controverisal.
They argue, in part, the following:
[1] Truth, for Aquinas, is not merely an epistemological notion, but an ontological one, involving a real proportion between being and intelligence and their transcendental interconvertibility.
[2] In the case of the human mind, this means we need a model of truth as known in the act of mind-an event between knower and known-and not just as reflected in the mind as if in a passive mirror, thereby overcoming the subject/object dichotomy.
[3] Such an account of truth is irreducibly theological, rooted, as it is for Aquinas, in the eternal intra-relations of the Trinity, in which the generation of the Word is the way in which God knows both himself and creation.
[4] Reason and faith, it follows, are not two different kinds of operations, but simply different degrees of human participation in the one divine light of illumination.
[5] Thus proper reason, for Aquinas, requires faith since it presupposes the gift of grace and so there is no philosophical approach to God independent of theology and revelation. Thus the mature Aquinas does not have any purely natural theology.
[6] The rest of Milbank and Pickstock's book explicates these views of Thomas Aquinas in terms of his theology of the Trinity, the Incarnation, and the liturgy, particularly the Eucharist.
While not for the casual reader, Milbank and Picstock's volume should prove insightful and provocative reading for those with interest and expertise in fundamental theology, philosophical ontology, postmodern theory, and medieval thought.
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4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Truth is Touchable, May 23, 2008
This review is from: Truth in Aquinas (Routledge Radical Orthodoxy) (Paperback)
Milbank and Pickstock (hereafter MP) attempt a postmodern (not in a perjorative sense) rereading of Aquinas that ironically gets back to the source of Aquinas. MP notes that many folks, protestants and Catholics alike, have read correspondence theories of truth back into Aquinas (cf Peter Kreeft's otherwise excellent *Summa of the Summa*). This misses what truth is for Aquinas. Truth is not only epistemological, but ontological. It has a proportion between the other transcendentals. MP illustrates "Truth" in chapters concerning Vision, Touch, and Language.
I will focus primarily on Truth and Touch. MP spends the entire chapter using Aristotle's *De Anima* as a foil. Common sense will tell us that a sense like "Sight" is much superior to "touch," but in a brilliant summary MP convinces us that this is not so. Touch, unlike sight or sound, is not mediated. Sight and Sound are mediated by light and air. Touch is immediate. (Actually, it is not but they take up that point on a chapter devoted to the Eucharist.). Space fails but they demonstrate how "touch", Incarnation, and Aesthetics interrelate.
Their Eucharistic theology foils both what they call Calvinism (which is actually Zwinglianism and U.S. Southern Presbyterianism). Traditional Catholicism, in Derridean terms, is a theology of "presence." E.g., the element is there. Christ is presence. Thus, postmodernism is dead. But maybe not. Protestantism (or what they call it) is a theology of "abscence." Christ isn't there in the elements. Thus, we see parts of a postmodernism. MP then shows how it is both.
Other neat points of controversy: According to MP's reading of Thomas, philosophy and theology aren't separated. They are different in degree,not in kind. This puts Thomas on the same floor with Van Til who said philosophy and theology are the same thing, just using a different vocabulary.
Concerns: If you are new to philosophy, theology, or church history, don't read this book. It is arguably the hardest book I have ever read. I know 3 or 4 languages and I needed several lingual dictionaries to keep up. But if you are interested in Thomism, the Eucharist, or philosophical theology, then this book is for you.
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