This collection of annual lectures in Thomistic scholarship, augmented by additional commissioned essays, offers insight into the wide range of interests from different philosophical and theological perspectives concerning the thought of Thomas Aquinas. Far from merely explicating Aquinas's views on various topics, each lecture represents the most contemporary investigations aimed at not only understanding what Aquinas was intending to teach through his voluminous corpus, but also putting his views in conversation with more modern and current philosophers and theories. As an edited series of lectures, the chapters as a whole do not cohere around just one particular theme, but this does not betray a lack of virtue insofar as what becomes evident is the cosmopolitan nature of the Thomistic perspective on a variety of subjects. This collection thus provides a valuable study for not only committed Thomists, but also philosophers and theologians who may be indifferent to, or relatively uninformed about, Thomism or Scholasticism more generally.

Stepping back a little from my previous comment, the first four essays do reflect the theme that constitutes the subtitle of this volume: Aquinas as ‘teacher and scholar’. Liam Walsh focuses upon Aquinas's treatment of the Eucharist, engaging in both a historical and an ecumenical analysis. In so doing, he shows how a narrowly-focused discussion of one, albeit central, theological subject yields further exploration into the areas of semiotics and metaphysics, as well as theories of God's nature and relation to the created universe. Questions raised and theories proposed by such exploration can, Walsh claims, offer important lessons for ecumenists who seek both common-ground concepts and points of fruitful comparative analysis for the sake of promoting interfaith dialogue and furthering the intellectual project that is, in this case, sacramental theology. William Desmond's reflections upon Aquinas's treatment of the Beatitudes also provides, although this is not his specified goal, a lesson for scholars engaged in ecumenical dialogue regarding how a fundamentally theological topic may be beneficially examined for the purpose of informing an otherwise impoverished philosophical theory of human happiness and the specific virtues that contribute towards human fulfillment.

Philipp Rosemann offers a comparative analysis of the theological project that is Aquinas's Summa theologiae in light of its predecessor: Peter Lombard's Sentences. Rosemann describes the striking difference in methodology between Lombard's and Aquinas's respective works. Lombard unabashedly utilizes biblical imagery and language from the Church Fathers who preceded him to portray the theological message that Lombard apparently sees himself as a mere conduit for proclaiming. Aquinas, on the other hand, unapologetically engages in scientia divina, plumbing the depths of both Scripture and the tradition he inherited in order to derive new insights and novel ways of expressing and rationally justifying the truths of faith. Thus, on the subject of charity, while Lombard exhorts the Christian to focus attention solely upon Christ as a perfect moral exemplar, Aquinas links the divine mode of charity with the finite human mode that is accounted for in terms of both cultivated virtue and the rationally-understood natural law that governs our relations to both God and our fellow human beings. This difference in approach is significant, I would argue, in accounting for the endurance of Aquinas's philosophical theology among committed believers and the current project among Thomistic scholars – some of whom are represented in this volume and its predecessor (e.g. Eleonore Stump and John Haldane) – to dialogically engage with alternative philosophical perspectives that are dominant among contemporary philosophers but amenable to the Scholastic mind-set. As Rosemann remarks toward the end of his essay,

John F. Boyle's chapter most directly focuses upon providing readers with an image of Aquinas as ‘teacher’, dealing as it does with a revised commentary Aquinas began on Lombard's Sentences while lecturing at the studium he was commissioned to establish in Rome in 1265. The more mature style of this ‘Roman commentary’ over its predecessor offers ‘a glimpse into Thomas’ classroom', in which he is engaged in the twofold telos of teachers ‘to make a difficult subject intelligible and to bring students to form sound intellectual habits’ (84). This theme continues later in the volume with Denys Turner's characterization of the ‘holiness’ of Aquinas's pedagogical methodology, in which Aquinas, the magistro, ‘disappears’ so that he might reflect the light of truth to those whom he was teaching. While such sacred humility may seem best exemplified in the lives of monks such as Aquinas, Turner has emphasized an important lesson for all those endowed with the title ‘doctor’ or ‘professor’, whose vocation is fundamentally one of service in leading students out of the shadowy cave of ignorance into the bright light of revealed truth.

Between Boyle's and Turner's respective essays – one might wish for a more thematic, instead of chronological, organization of the volume's chapters – are three lectures that focus on specific topics in Thomistic thought: meta-ontology, theodicy, and the creative operation of the divine mind. The first, by Sarah Borden Sharkey, outlines the fundamental distinction between the 20^th century philosopher Edith Stein's Heidegerrian investigation into the ‘meaning of being’ and Aquinas's Aristotelian rejection of Stein's conclusion that the being of individual substances is the unfolding of meta-level essences; rather, Aquinas's concept of essence is grounded in the being of individual substances themselves. The question of pre-existent essences also arises in Vivian Boland's lecture concerning the nature of ‘ideas’ in God's mind through which individual substances with specific natures are created.

One point of criticism I would like to raise with Sharkey's interpretive analysis concerns the concept of ‘potentiality’ at work in the developmental growth of an individual living organism. In drawing a contrast between Stein and Aquinas, Sharkey contends that, for the former, a puppy is also an adult dog with respect to its essential being and that its growth over time is simply the ‘unfolding’ of its essential nature; for Aquinas, according to Sharkey, a puppy is just a puppy until and unless it develops into an adult dog (96–7). Sharkey does not take account, though, of the Aristotelian distinction Aquinas employs between ‘active’ and ‘passive’ potentiality and the Thomistic understanding of essence as, in part, a set of active potentialities that should be actualized in the natural course of a living organism's development. Thus, Aquinas would agree with Stein that a puppy bears within itself the essential canine nature: the only difference between a puppy and an adult dog is that the latter has more fully actualized the set of active potentialities definitive of being a member of the canine species. It remains the case for Aquinas, though, that the canine nature exists only as found in the being of individual puppies and dogs; while Stein apparently accepts a more neo-Platonic concept of essences – for species and perhaps for individuals too – as existing eternally.

Eleonore Stump offers a précis of her latest masterful contribution to philosophical theology, Wandering in Darkness: Narrative and the Problem of Suffering (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010). The novel element – at least as a point of emphasis – in Stump's Thomistically-inspired defense of the compatibility of an omnibenevolent God and the existence of suffering is that the telos of suffering is not only to bring the sufferer into a closer relationship with God, which Aquinas understands to be the universally objective ultimate good for all human beings, but also to bring about the satisfaction of the sufferer's individually subjective ‘desires of her heart’ that are compatible with her relationship with God. By shifting the emphasis away from the theologically-oriented goal of human moral activity and proffering examples, through both biblical and non-biblical narratives, of how the satisfaction of one's deepest desires may be achieved in the present life through suffering that is courageously and reflectively endured, Stump's defense effectively undercuts the Marxist critique that religious theodicy provides a mere ‘opiate’ that attempts to justify injustices suffered in this life in favor of greater rewards in the next. Human beings are intended to enjoy happiness – understood eudaimonistically – both in this world, albeit incompletely, and in the world to come.

In the second part of the volume, there is a mix of topics and approaches. Declan Lawell engages in a historical analysis of the influence of Thomas Gallus's interpretation of the pseudo-Dionysian concept of ‘ecstasy’ when one is in communion with the Divine Being, explicating the influence of Gallus, as a foil, on Albert the Great and, in turn, Albert on Aquinas. More than an exercise in intellectual history, Lawell's chapter also elucidates a key point of debate among these thinkers concerning the extent to which union with God is more properly understood as a function of intellect or affect.

Julia Hynes illuminates the Thomistic foundation of a current trend in medical ethics – championed by bioethicists such as Edmund Pellegrino – of defending a virtue-based approach in contrast to the more principle-based alternative. Concurring with Hynes's overall aim and her general presentation of Thomistic virtue theory, I find her analysis to draw an unwarrantedly sharp contrast between Aquinas's moral perspective and deontology. By focusing exclusively on Aquinas's account of virtue, Hynes does not consider his complementary account of natural law, which includes a set of primary and secondary principles that, if adhered to, will contribute to the eudaimonistic flourishing of individual persons according to our shared human nature. Aquinas would thus disagree with Hynes that morality cannot be codified in general principles (197); although he certainly agrees that merely adhering to a set principles does not suffice for one to be a fully mature moral agent. Hynes is thus correct when she describes the dominant ‘principlist’ account of medical ethics to be included within Thomistic moral theory, but that the latter ‘offers much more besides’ (209).

The final two chapters subserve the aim of placing Thomistic thought in comparative dialogue with more modern thinkers – respectively, Immanuel Kant and Martin Heidegger. Thomas Kelly focuses on Aquinas's and Heidegger's distinct ‘ontotheological’ views of the relation of the divine Being to all other forms of being in the created universe. Gaven Kerr demonstrates how Aquinas's Aristotelian concept of essences as found in actually existing individual substances allows for an epistemic realism denied by Kant and post-Kantian philosophers. The upshot of Thomistic realism is that some subject knows some object only by virtue of the latter acting upon the former in both formal and efficient causal ways, such that there comes to be ‘an identity in form between knower and known’ (223). While Kerr's Thomistic exegesis is not groundbreaking, his use of Thomistic epistemic realism in direct engagement with Kantian transcendental idealism well-exemplifies the laudable project of re-introducing and defending Thomism, and Scholasticism more generally, as a venerable philosophical approach worthy of perennial scholarly attention, commentary, and critical engagement. The present volume as a whole serves this goal quite well.