Reviews for Aquinas: God and Action

The average rating for Aquinas: God and Action based on 2 reviews is 4 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2010-06-10 00:00:00 Russ Davis I learned more from the God than the Action parts of this book. For me, this book lost steam once he started talking about the concept actus, because at that point the author of the book seemed to have lost his ability to make Aquinas's project compelling. But I really did appreciate his attempts, in the first half of the book, to explain his claim (which is certainly true) that Aquinas is not trying to lay out a doctrine or theory of God. Instead, he argues that what Aquinas is up to in the questions where he treats of God's simpleness, perfection, limitlessness, unchangeableness, and oneness, is that "he is engaged in the metalinguistic project of mapping out the grammar appropriate in divinis." (p. 17) He also notes that the reasons he offers are never ones internal to Christian faith or revelation. "Rather, Aquinas is uniquely concerned with showing 'whatever must belong to the first cause of all things which is beyond all that is caused.' Such a task does not involve settling upon certain empirical generalizations and finding a theory to unify them. It is solely a matter of logical analysis, or as Aquinas understood it, of philosophical grammar." It is find to call this sort of "philosophical grammar" of the divine metaphysics, so long as we remain content in our low expectations of what we can expect from metaphysics in this domain. Because of the completely transcendent nature of God, saying that we can apply certain predicates of him is not to assume that we know what they mean, when applied in such a context. And here he sounds every bit like a follower of McCabe: "God escapes our grasp because every bit of knowledge we possess is knowledge about something. Yet such a statement already violates the divine mode of being. It does so precisely because God's way of being is not a mode of being, but being itself. And we have no way of formulating that since all our expresssions are articulated to fit modalities."(p. 18) I also think Burrell does an admirable showing demonstrating what can be made intelligible about God, given what we can say he is not. From the fact that He is not complex, we can know that he does not have a form nor any potentiality; and from this we can infer that he does not have a body; and from this we can infer that God is to be identified with his own essence and nature, and so on.

Review # 2 was written on 2008-11-15 00:00:00 Patricia Bohram I read this book during a seminar I took from the author. That course changed the way I read Aquinas more than other other. Fr. Burrell is, I believe, the the most gifted interpreter of Aquinas today.