Product Description

Provocative and sophisticated, Truth in Aquinas challenges all those with an interest in contemporary Christian thought to attend once more to the significance of this key medieval thinker. Milbank and Pickstock present an important re-evaluation of a fundamental area--truth--in the work of Aquinas. Compelling and challenging, Truth in Aquinas develops further the innovative theological project heralded by the publication of Radical Orthodoxy (Routledge, 1999).

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #946962 in Books
• Published on: 2000-12-13
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 144 pages

Review
... it may not be easy, but it is enjoyable. - Revd Jeremy Craddock, Church Times

... a brilliant, intense, learned, focused account of the issues at the core, not of the English-speaking or wider contemporary or even overall modern theology but, of the whole of Western theological tradition, from the Grek and Latin Fathers to the present. - Laudetur

This book ... is not only one of the most important works in theology in many years but also a fitting way to leave behind the many theological isms of the twentieth century ... This is great theology ... - Stephen H. Webb, Reviews in Religion and Theology

About the Author
John Milbank teaches in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Virginia and is a Fellow of Peterhouse, Cambridge. His previous publications include Theology and Social Theory and The Word Made Strange. Catherine Pickstock is a Fellow of Emmanuel College, Cambridge. Her previous publications include After Writing: On the Liturgical Consummation of Theology. They are the editors, with Graham Ward, of Routledge's Radical Orthodoxy series.

Customer Reviews

Truth is Touchable
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.

re-reading aquinas
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.