Review of Why Aquinas Matters Now
Oliver Keenan, Why Aquinas Matters Now. London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2024, pp. 230, $22.00, hardback.
If much of the history of Thomistic scholarship might be described as missing the forest for the trees, then the opposite risk faces Keenan’s 30,000-foot fly-over. Still, the book’s concise but expansive panorama is precisely its strength and accomplishes exactly what Keenan has set out to explain: why Aquinas matters now more than ever.
In his recent monograph, Oliver Keenan offers a compelling case for the relevance of a medieval friar for a post-modern world: Thomas Aquinas can help us overcome the alienation arising from our fractured communities and fractured selves through his unitary yet open vision of human life as a movement coming from God and returning to God. Now Academic Dean at Rippon College, Cuddesdon, Keenan was previously director of the Aquinas Institute at Blackfriars, Oxford. After completing his DPhil at Oxford in 2018, a thesis which draws together English Dominican Cornelius Ernst with Hungarian philosopher Michael Polanyi to present a theological account of meaning, Keenan undertook a research project on Aquinas and Continental Philosophy with Daniel De Haan as part of the Templeton-funded project Widening Horizon’s in Philosophical Theology.
Structurally, the book opens with a brief biography of Thomas Aquinas in chapter one before establishing “conversation” as the book’s organising theme in chapter two. After this stage setting, Keenan’s presentation unfolds in an echo of the Summa Theologiae, building from the God-world relation (“World”) to the trinity (“Symphony”), then to anthropology (“Frontier”) and social and political life (“Belonging”), and finally to Christology (“Consummation”). This Exitus-Reditus paradigm, Keenan suggests,is modelled on the historical revelation of Christ in the life of Israel, which may itself, he also suggests, be taken as the very structure of created reality (p. 190). After culminating in the work of Jesus Christ, the book concludes with a brief postlude offering some practical advice for how to begin reading Aquinas for oneself.
Before presenting Aquinas as an antidote, Keenan provides several observations on the state of late-modern culture. Summarised under the category of alienation, Keenan describes feelings of being disconnected (natural world), rootless (society), homeless or lonely (community), and disenfranchised (politics) (p. 2). Later, he posits the need to recover the unity of the body from its status as a contested site in current discourse (p. 100), arguing that the very possibility of friendship depends on an integrity of self currently threatened by a technologically driven “incapacity to tolerate solitude” (p. 145). Keenan does not attempt to diagnose the historical root of these symptoms, but they serve to establish a sense of urgency many readers will feel for the re-narration that he is offering. Although Keenan presents Aquinas in a post-modern mode through the framework of conversation aimed at those more comfortable with “Foucault, Peterson, Lacan, Žižek, or Badiou” (p. 10), he maintains that there is a potency to the strangeness of Aquinas’s medieval world on account of which it “exposes the provisionality of our own intellectual worlds” (p. 29). If we are willing to engage in this conversation with him, we may end up allowing Aquinas to read and interrogate us as well.
Keenan’s writing clearly exhibits his Dominican formation through pervasive reference to his recent forebearers, post-Wittgensteinian Thomists Herbert McCabe, Cornelius Ernst, Fergus Kerr, and Brian Davies, among others. His style, consequently, will have resonances for anyone familiar with McCabe’s published lectures On Aquinas (2011). Like McCabe, Keenan builds upon the linguistic turn in philosophy to provide a hermeneutic framing for Aquinas’s theology. Although Keenan refers to Aquinas’s technical categories in their original Latin wherever relevant, he often does so offhandedly, even occasionally remarking that these concepts are less than helpful, either because a term has been reified by subsequent scholarship or because the obscurity of the term obfuscates its importance for Aquinas’s broader theological vision. Keenan accepts Ernst’s suggestion that the best concept to express an accepted universality today is no longer “being,” but “meaning” (Ernst, Multiple Echo, 1979). Drawing on his own research in Continental philosophy, Keenan goes beyond McCabe and Davies (Davies, Aquinas, 2004) by presenting Aquinas’s account as a vision of reality as an ongoing conversation ever moving in pursuit of its destiny of communion in the eternal conversation that is the triune God of love.
Structurally, the book opens with a brief biography of Thomas Aquinas in chapter one before establishing “conversation” as the book’s organising theme in chapter two. After this stage setting, Keenan’s presentation unfolds in an echo of the Summa Theologiae, building from the God-world relation (“World”) to the trinity (“Symphony”), then to anthropology (“Frontier”) and social and political life (“Belonging”), and finally to Christology (“Consummation”). This Exitus-Reditus paradigm, Keenan suggests,is modelled on the historical revelation of Christ in the life of Israel, which may itself, he also suggests, be taken as the very structure of created reality (p. 190). After culminating in the work of Jesus Christ, the book concludes with a brief postlude offering some practical advice for how to begin reading Aquinas for oneself.
This linguistic framing throughout the book is developed in two generative ways: It takes the intersubjective dynamism of the aforementioned “conversation” to capture something of the unfolding of being in terms of both becoming and belonging, with all its ontological and ethical implications, and it shifts the grammar of ontology from nouns to verbs. On the latter point, Keenan first states that reality is a verb: “an event, a happening, a communicative motion in the slipstream of which human beings are uniquely entangled” (p. 35). Then he states “God” is a verb, whose attributes are more like adverbs than adjectives, providing a different picture of how agent and action might be identical in God (pp. 71-74). Finally, Keenan posits the same of human beings — we should think of ‘To-human’ as a verb — leading him to conclude that “Being human is a skill” (p. 137). Using the verb-adverb relation also allows one to make sense of hylomorphic integration better: Human materiality is performed spiritually, and human intellectuality is performed in a material mode (p. 103). The consistent alternative to alienation throughout the book is greater wholeness: integrated selves, moral communities, and ecosystems, and a non-contrastive integration of the world with its Creator.
Certainly, any book wading into 700 years of Thomistic inheritance to offer a brief presentation of a thinker whose own word count exceeds 8,000,000 risks triviality. While Keenan mentions Aquinas’s technical categories often enough where relevant, his re-presentation avoids many contentious, long-standing scholarly disputes as well as some of Aquinas’s particularly medieval concerns, such as his metaphysics of angels. In this, Keenan places himself within a particular stream of post-metaphysical Thomism that will feel ahistorical to some: Keenan’s unforeseen concern to establish the non-violence of Aqunas’s ontology in the final chapter, for instance, seems anachronistic, though it is not surprising given the intended audience. For those looking to engage in “Thomism” as a broader field of study, it is worth noting that Keenan’s reading is far more idiosyncratic than his presentation suggests. Nevertheless, the text is replete with endnote citations from primary sources that enable detailed textual engagement for those who wish to do so, yet it manages not to get lost in the minutiae. Thus, despite its rigorous textual grounding, the book remains accessible to the non-specialist or even the intrepid non-academic. For those less concerned with entrenched interpretative disputes, Keenan’s book offers a fresh and captivating reading of Aquinas with a single integrating vision of reality.
Although the book is explicitly a reading of Aquinas, it is still surprising not to see any reference to those post-Barthian and post-Heideggerian Protestants who have also taken conversation as their operative framework for theology. This framework is particularly developed in Eberhard Jüngel’s Tübingen successor, the late Christoph Schwöbel, in his work Gott im Gespräch (Schwöbel, 2011), though the theme appears in Schwöbel’s work by the early 1990s.
Keenan’s approach places him alongside the post-modern reader as an empathetic guide by reframing the systematic structuring and metaphysical categories in terms of an open-ended ontology driven by a movement towards cohesion. If much of the history of Thomistic scholarship might be described as missing the forest for the trees, then the opposite risk faces Keenan’s 30,000-foot fly-over. Still, the book’s concise but expansive panorama is precisely its strength and accomplishes exactly what Keenan has set out to explain: why Aquinas matters now more than ever.
