Thomas Aquinas: A Portrait Hardcover – May 21, 2013

I have always thought that St Thomas Aquinas, along with all of his fellow scholastics, was “beyond my sympathies,” as Tolkien might say. Eight years ago I spent a few months trying to read his Summa Theologiae (in Timothy McDermott’s paraphrase, no less), and found it exceptionally hard slogging. I finally gave up. What has Athens to do with Jerusalem?

Turner’s introduction to the life and thought of Aquinas has given me a totally different perspective on the Dominican preacher. Modern caricatures picture Aquinas as an academic who was more interested in philosophical precision than the life of faith. How very wrong these caricatures are. I do not know if I will ever return to the Summa Theologiae; but I am grateful to have been introduced to this great theologian who is also a saint. I have discovered that while Aquinas lies well beyond my intellectual capacity he is not beyond my sympathies. “The holiness of Thomas,” writes Turner, “is a theologian’s holiness, the holy teacher invisible otherwise than in the holy teaching itself.”

I have two shelves of books by and on Aquinas, and when I bought this I expected to learn nothing new but to get a different insight into him. I was not disappointed on either score. Turner shocked me a bit when, early on, he deemed Aquinas a materialist. What he means by this is not the current philosophy of materialism born of logical positivism (the scientific method), which holds as foundational that the only reality is material reality, that there is no such dimension as the spiritual, or if there is, we cannot know about it. Aquinas' materialism is not that kind of materialism. Dr Turner explains that Aquinas' materialism is based on the reality of matter and that it is knowable, knowable because of abstraction which is per se nonmaterial in essence. He also maintains that Aquinas does not denigrate matter, as do the Platonists and such. Matter is good, matter has its own value. Humans are body and soul, matter and spirit, and the body has its value and meaning. Aquinas never maintains, as do many philosophers of bygone ages, and a lot of "spiritualities" of the present, that the body is wretched and of no count, that the soul is entrapped in the body like a bird in a cage, and yearns to be free. No, for Aquinas, and for Aristotle whose philosophy he uses and builds upon, the body is an essential part of what it is to be humans. We do not shed our bodies at death and "become angels." We are not angels entrapped in a body. More, while the nonmaterial soul (spirit) of a person survives death--defined as separation of body and soul, matter and spirit, material cause and formal cause--that surviving soul, spiritual and therefore incapable of decomposing, continues to exist as an immortal substance but is not a person. The reason? Aquinas says that a human person is matter, the body, "informed" by the soul, which defines man's nature as a rational animal. Upon death, the soul continues to exist, but not as a person. Only at the general resurrection when God reunites the souls of all those who ever lived with their bodies in some fashion known only to Him, is the person that we are reconstituted.

Dr Turner offers a fresh insight into the principles upon which Aquinas constructed his philosophy, a philosophy which he clearly states is handmaiden to revealed truth of the Judaeo-Christian tradition. It is delightful to see a small but brilliant number of philosophers returning to Aquinas; as G.K. Chesterton said, Aquinas is the philosopher of common sense, appealing to the common man. For Aquinas, matter is reality, the spiritual world is reality and knowable through the material world around us as detected by the five senses and processed through the material brain by the immortal substance that is our soul, or in the words of Aquinas, what "forms" the matter of our bodies to be human.

The price is extremely reasonable. The field of Aquinas is populated with books, most of them of specialist nature and expensive to boot. This one is not. I highly recommend it and in the future I intend to re-read it, for this book is a mine of insights that one reading alone will not exhaust.

As with Turner's other books, this is quite elegantly written, and with depth. Much of the book reflects Turner's long-standing interest in the apophatic tradition -- he stresses more than almost anyone else I have read the refusal of Aquinas to make certain claims about God, and the pressures on language at the limit that Aquinas acknowledges. The book is particularly good at separating Aquinas' theology from various debased versions (Catholic and Protestant and atheist). Much of the first two thirds of the book would be intriguing to a non-believing philosopher -- the discussions of the implications of an Aristotelian approach to (for instance) the characteristics of an intellectual animal are of general interest -- it is only towards the end that specifically Christian theology (belief in the uniqueness of Christ, etc.) appears.

There is not much here on the Trinity (Turner gets started on it, and then stops), and nothing on the subsequent history of Aquinas' influence.

The book is quite dense in its way -- it would not be a good starting point for someone who knew nothing about medieval or Christian theology generally.