This substantial volume assembles some 13 papers in celebration of the 80th birthday of Archbishop Joseph Augustine Di Noia OP. In one of the best (pp. 303–19: ‘Quantum Potes, Tantum Aude’), he himself argues in favour of the ‘mystagogy’ (p. 318) latent in St Thomas’s exposition of sacra doctrina, an idea which, as one recalls, was not of great importance in the heyday of pre-Conciliar neo-Thomism. The Dicastery for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments (as he discloses) is at work on a programme of renewing liturgical formation throughout the Church, with the ‘modest collaboration’ of the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith (formerly the CDF), of which he is currently Adjunct Secretary.
Born in the Bronx, Archbishop Di Noia studied with the Dominicans at Providence College, Rhode Island, before joining the US Eastern Dominicans. In 1980 he earned a doctorate at Yale (‘Catholic Theology of Religions and Interreligious Dialogue’), for which he records gratitude for guidance by George Lindbeck and William Christian, the best-known Yale professors at the time. He taught dogmatic theology at the Dominican House of Studies in Washington for 20 years and served as editor-in-chief of The Thomist. The list of his publications runs to five pages (pp. 329–33). In 2002 he was called to Rome to work at the CDF. He was consecrated to the episcopacy in 2009.
As Fr Andrew Hofer notes (pp. 4–5), the focus on Thomas as a ‘spiritual teacher’ is a considerable shift in our expectations as we read his work. Fr Hofer compares the 1993 Cambridge Companion to Aquinas with the 2022 revised edition, in which Thomas is still a great philosopher but is presented as expounding sacra doctrina as an exercise in contemplative reflection (quite demanding as he thought contemplation was). The picture on the front cover of the volume reproduces the rather severe-looking professor, fluttering the pages of a book, in the painting by Carlo Crivelli (dated to 1470), in the National Gallery in London (not on show). The shift is usefully mapped in the 10-page Select Bibliography (pp. 334–44), which of course includes the studies by Bishop Robert Barron and Jean-Pierre Torrell OP, in both of which Thomas appears as ‘spiritual master’.
The Summa Theologiae itself has recently been presented by the Canadian theologian Gilles Mongeau SJ as a ‘spiritual pedagogy’. Veteran readers of this journal will be pleased to see Fr Victor White’s Holy Teaching (1958) on the list, a seminal text at the beginning of the shift. We may add ‘Mystical Theology Redux: The Pattern of Aquinas’ Summa Theologiae’, by A.N. Williams (Modern Theology, January 1997), herself indebted to reading St Thomas at Yale with Professor Lindbeck. For years at Cambridge, Professor Nicholas Lash lectured on the de Deo questions in the Summa as ‘protocols against idolatry, rather than abstract conclusions in Catholic apologetics’. In the previous generation, in contrast, great Thomist expositors such as Fr Garrigou-Lagrange published books on spirituality quite separately from their commentaries on the Summa. Now, however, readers may work on the Summa as already a mystagogy (in Archbishop Di Noia’s word). However, a student’s personal spirituality may deepen during the often hard graft of working through the disputatious format of the Summa, and Dominicans have not always felt comfortable about spirituality embedded in systematic theology. Indeed, in his great book Reality: A Synthesis of Thomistic Thought (1952), Garrigou-Lagrange hits out at an unnamed theologian, surely Marie-Dominique Chenu, whose doctoral thesis (contemplation in Aquinas) he supervised at the Angelicum – but who now, Garrigou alleges, treated theology as ‘spirituality’, the translation of one’s version of the devout life (Dominican, Jesuit, whatever) into quasi-Euclidean impersonality. The rigour of systematic rational argumentation was being dissolved in subjective experience, feeling rather than reasoning – thus very much the philosophical account of human nature tacitly operating in the Modernism condemned in 1907 by Pope Pius X as the ‘synthesis of all heresies’.
The essays in this volume would each reward discussion. Choosing one, the most philosophical – Aquinas on Moral Self-knowing’ (pp. 111–32) – we find Therese Scarpelli Cory, Professor of Thomistic Studies at Notre Dame, recapitulating the account in her splendid book Aquinas on Human Self-Knowledge (2014, Cambridge University Press). She begins by recalling the famous scene in which Plato has Socrates tell Alcibiades that he is able to know the young man better than he can himself. In what ways, Cory asks, does Thomas think we know ourselves and others?
As Cory recalls, there was a great debate in the 1920s/30s, during which the Dominican philosopher Ambroise Gardeil was ‘excoriated’ by other Thomists (p. 117: Ambroise, incidentally, not Antoine). Indeed, the exchanges among French Thomists were, so Cory says, in her book (p. 192), ‘often heated and vitriolic’. While obviously haunted by the Cartesian cogito, these scholars were well aware of what was at stake in Aquinas’s discussion of how the human soul knows itself and the things inside (Summa Theologiae 1a question 87). The dominant view was that of St Augustine – ‘the mind knows itself through itself, per suam essentiam’ – which Thomas qualifies by quoting Aristotle: ‘mind understands itself the same way as it knows anything else, sicut et alia’. While the concept of the autonomous self is often regarded as a modern philosophical discovery, with Descartes the key figure, Thomas, as Cory shows, was already engaged in his own day in the delicate project of reconciling Augustine’s spiritually attractive picture of the human soul transparent to itself and directly open to God, with Aristotle’s picture of the humdrum down-to-earth embodied agent in multiple practical relationships.
After all, thinking of his being a spiritual master, Cory might have noted that Thomas was teaching students to become confessors as well as lawyers and preachers. It is a fair question to consider, then, whether penitents, or people asking for spiritual guidance, are in a state of grace (Summa 1a 2ae 112, 5). On the authority of Augustine, Thomas says: ‘Grace is in the soul per sui essentiam’, which means that ‘the soul has most certain knowledge of those things which are inside it’. This is a claim to which Thomas agrees: ‘What is inside the soul by their essence is known by experience’ – ‘The soul’s knowledge of what is inside it is certain’. But, as he goes on to say, this is ‘in the sense that we experience our inner principles [reason and will] per actus’ – as potentials actualised in the real world around us. It is almost as if Thomas was agreeing with Wittgenstein (Investigations § 580): ‘An “inner process” stands in need of outward criteria’. In her final paragraph, Cory returns to the insight that Socrates knew he had into the inner life of Alcibiades. Somewhat unexpectedly, she advises us against thinking of the mind as ‘a private Cartesian light-filled space’ (p. 132). She never mentions Wittgenstein. Rather, in the light of Aquinas’s non-Cartesian conception of our access to knowledge of ourselves and of one another, we can see what it means to be a spiritual teacher. Thus, Cory takes one essential step in establishing the approach to St Thomas which this Festschrift commends.
