This article is taken from the February 2025 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10.
The “Now” of this book’s title is certainly justified. Oliver Keenan’s Aquinas is very much a figure of the 2020s, offering a way to confront “threats” posed by artificial intelligence, the “climate emergency” and the widespread alienation characteristic of today’s society. He can do so, Keenan contends, because the hallmark of Aquinas’ thinking is communication, “the opposite of alienation”. Indeed, “communication”, “conversation” and “narrative” are Keenan’s central explanatory terms.
But is this really Aquinas? Keenan himself says that the book “is a work of conversation with and through the thought of Thomas Aquinas”. Someone who already knows the original texts well will see how, in his own present-day audience-friendly language, Keenan is presenting, often with real philosophical grasp and insight, Aquinas’ theories. His novice readers will, however, be likely to think that they are confronted by a completely different, and alien, Aquinas, should they ever pick up one of his works.
Keenan is offering, then, a sort of loose rational reconstruction of Aquinas, into which he has put a good deal of his own, often powerful thinking. For this construction to “matter” to readers, it needs to be convincing to them — and here there is a problem. Unlike many interpreters, Keenan does not try to prise apart Aquinas’ philosophy from his theology.
His communicative and conversational reworking is held together by Aquinas’ account of God as a Trinity of relations, in which Christ is the divine Word, uttered by the Father. Readers will only be convinced by Keenan’s book, therefore, if they share with him and Aquinas the premises of Catholic Christian faith.
Ever since Aquinas’ death, fellow members of his Dominican Order have reformulated and reworked his thinking, for the benefit of their confreres and the wider Christian community, to help them to live more fully thoughtful, philosophically rich, Christian lives. Keenan, a Dominican himself, who as he makes clear is indebted to other recent Aquinas interpreters in the Order, such as Herbert McCabe and Timothy McDermott, adds a new voice to this distinguished living tradition of Thomist thought.
His book does show, therefore, why Aquinas — at one remove — matters now, or should do, to a limited but large readership. But it fails to indicate other ways in which all intelligent readers today can find Aquinas valuable.
One such approach, taken especially by analytical philosophers, is to see his work as a source of arguments, to be engaged with and tested. Keenan shows how Aquinas sets out a vast and coherent system, but never gives the reader any of his arguments. Yet Aquinas’ procedure is always argumentative. Do arguments “matter”? Is not the analytical approach merely a matter of intellectual fireworks? Not at all, if one takes rationality seriously, as Aquinas himself did.
Another approach to Aquinas is an historical one. Keenan’s book is profoundly unhistorical: it is as if Aquinas himself occupied the timeless eternity he reserved for God. Most of the not specifically Christian ideas that Keenan credits to Aquinas came from Aristotle, or from Aristotle’s great 11th-century re-thinker, Avicenna.
Only once Aquinas is seen in the light of the materials which he had to hand and the problems which he faced — and perhaps also, paradoxically, only once we move away from the focus on him as if he were the sole, or most important, medieval philosopher, when he was in fact but one star in a constellation — are we in a position to start understanding what he was trying to say.
The first thing we shall discover is that Aquinas’ world is not ours: pace Keenan, Aquinas’ thought, grasped historically, is initially thoroughly alien and alienating for his readers. Does this reduce him to “a medieval curiosity”, as the jacket puts it? No. First, because there is no reason to be ashamed of history pure and simple. It should matter to us.
Second, because once we have compassed his distance from us, we begin to see how we and Aquinas share similar ultimate philosophical problems and become able not only to read his thinking in the light of ours, but ours in the light of his — and that is perhaps the most important reason why Aquinas or any great thinker of the past matters now and forever.
