Review in First Things (March 1999) of a book by Rev. John I. Jenkins, C.S.C., the newly-elected president of the University of Notre Dame. The news and the link come courtesy of The Shrine of the Holy Whapping.



Knowledge and Faith in Thomas Aquinas. By John I. Jenkins, CSC. Cambridge University Press. 267 pp. $59.95.



Father Jenkins of Notre Dame’s philosophy and theology departments has written a truly revolutionary book. Most who encounter the Summa Theologiae see a maze of questions, articles, objections, responses, and replies; hence the temptation to turn Aquinas into a textbook on philosophy, theology, morals, and even science. He is accused of creating a "system" of philosophy, which can be opposed to other systems of philosophy and found superior (or, by his critics, quite deficient). Jenkins shows that the Summa is not a system that provides categories of thought, but an attempt to ground all our thoughts about God and his creation in our participation in God’s mind. According to Aristotle, for mere knowledge to be called episteme (roughly, "understanding") requires that we understand the causes of things better than we understand their effects. Jenkins argues persuasively from substantial textual evidence that Aquinas was after episteme: he wanted to understand God, the Cause of all things, better than he understood creation. What’s more, he wanted to view creation through his understanding of God. Along the way to proving his thesis, Jenkins rewrites the book on Aristotle’s Posterior Analytics (his reading, and his devastating criticisms of Oxford’s influential Jonathan Barnes, set the standard for such scholarship) and he shows how even the most decorated of contemporary "philosophers of religion" (Plantinga, Stump, Penelhaum, et al.) grossly misread Aquinas. Through careful scholarship and tightly argued readings, Jenkins does that rarest of things—he says something truly new about what we thought we long ago understood.



On Sunday, May 2, two days after the election of Father Jenkins, Father Edmund P. Joyce, C.S.C., who served as executive vice president of the University of Notre Dame during the 35 years of the presidency of Rev. Theodore M. Hesburgh, died at Holy Cross House on campus. Father Hesburgh administered the last rites of the Church on Saturday evening. Father Ned Joyce was 87.