This fascinating book adds to the wave of books by fine medievalists who are also trained in the best traditions of analytic philosophy. Currently teaching at Loyola College, Baltimore, Maryland, Professor McAleer thanks two of his schoolteachers, at St Cuthbert Mayne High School and Newman College, in Preston, Lancashire; then those who introduced him to philosophy in London; and finally his friends in Leuven where he wrote his dissertation, as well as colleagues at Loyola and Gaming. The book appears in a series edited by Romanus Cessario OP and Joseph Koterski SJ.
Since articles in The Thomist (1997), ‘Matter and the Unity of Being in the Philosophical Theology of Thomas Aquinas’, and in Modern Theology (1999), ‘The Politics of the Flesh: Rahner and Aquinas on Concupiscentia’, Graham McAleer's work has been worth watching. As he is well aware, many Catholic theologians these days, in Western Europe especially, regard a ‘return to Thomas Aquinas’ as a dead end. On his view, however, when philosophers in the analytic tradition are finding new inspiration in his philosophy, while in Anglican theology Radical Orthodoxy promotes a return to Aquinas, Catholics would be mad, in the English-speaking world, to ignore what Thomas has to offer.
Specifically, according to McAleer, Thomas offers a distinctive theory of the human body, which is of great interest in the context of current sexual politics. In the key concept of the concreatum, Thomas held that matter and form are always already internally related, as sensual body and rational soul, which means, down the line, that sensuality is naturally suited to obey reason. Prime matter is a principle of desire, a thesis he found in Aristotle's Physics. Historically, so McAleer argues, Thomas reacted to the concept of congregatum, the key term in the commentary on the same text by Ibn Rushd (1126–98), the Spanish Muslim philosopher whose work became known in Thomas's student days: matter, on his interpretation, is regarded as existing prior to form. This, unsurprisingly, rules out any doctrine of creation. Thomas may well have had in mind neo-Augustinians among his colleagues at Paris, so McAleer suggests. The theory that counts, however, is that of his student, Giles of Rome (c. 1250–1306/9), eventually General of the Hermits of St Augustine. With his concept of aggregatum, we have matter and form, world and God, ultimately united, but brought together ‘aggressively’ so to speak, through violence. McAleer works this out in considerable detail, documenting every move.
Down this line, self-mastery is conceivable only in terms of violent overcoming of sensuality by reason; the converting powers of divine grace are seen as the violent suppression of nature; and so on.
The historical reconstruction of the late thirteenth-century debate has, obviously, a clear ulterior motive! Thomas's view failed to carry the day, even in the Dominican Order. The ‘Aegidian’ view triumphed, to be found in Descartes, Kant and Karl Rahner, to drop a few names: body and soul, sensuality and reason, are never naturally fitted to each other, as on Thomas's view, but rather always in conflict.
This thesis should be congenial to modern admirers of Thomas's attitude to the body. However, McAleer has some surprises for the Thomist. Catholic social thought these days, in papal encyclicals as well, as McAleer says, is largely inspired by Jacques Maritain's ‘equalitarianism’: a natural rights theory developed from what Aquinas says about natural law. To challenge this line of thought McAleer brings in Aurel Kolnai, the Hungarian exile and Jewish convert to Catholicism, who taught philosophy in London, from 1955 until his death in 1973. Profoundly Thomist in his thinking (see `The Sovereignty of the Object: Notes on Truth and Intellectual Humility', in the posthumous collection edited by Brian Klug and Francis Dunlop, Ethics, Value and Reality) Kolnai argued that genuine political pluralism, as he sought in Britain, must acknowledge hierarchies of natural and social privilege — a position incompatible with as elaborate a theory of equal rights as Maritain's (‘Christian-leftist social fantasies’, Kolnai once said).
The other hero of McAleer's book is Karol Wojtyla. In his justifications of the account of marriage in Paul VI's encyclical ‘Humanae Vitae’ (1968), Pope John Paul II could not be more deeply Thomist. This is not only because he takes for granted that sexual activity is ordered to procreation (an increasingly unintelligible thesis, even among Catholics). Much more interestingly, the ‘Thomistic-Wojtylan theory’ upholds a sexual ethic that diminishes violence, in this respect then quite unlike body/soul dualisms that require some degree of repressive violence in self-mastery. According to McAleer, John Paul II simply spells out what Thomas meant: ‘The person, by the light of reason and the support of virtue, discovers in the body the anticipatory signs, the expression and the promise of a gift of self, in conformity with the wise plan of the Creator’ (‘Veritatis Splendor’ 48).
Further down the line, so McAleer's argument goes, the ‘violence against the stranger in the womb’ is the inevitable result of the ‘violence against the flesh’, which is contraception. No wonder, then, that, according to John Paul II, a liberal democracy that sanctions abortion and encourages abortifacient contraception is a ‘tyranny and totalitarianism’, as wicked as Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia (a thesis, as McAleer says, that is as unintelligible to ‘liberals’ as to American ‘patriots’).
There is too much here to discuss. The ‘Aegidian’ view has prevailed, so McAleer says, in influential theologians like Rahner, as well as in much feminist philosophy. Again, while sympathetic to her work, McAleer nevertheless protests against Catherine Pickstock's claim that, for Aquinas, the intellect, the ‘most important part of us’, is not part of our ‘animal essence’ (Truth in Aquinas, p. 12): a suspiciously ‘Cartesian’ claim.
Among several typographical errors, we should read Saward for Seward (p. xvi), Girard for Giraud (pp. 49, 193, 236), and Vienne for Vienna (p. 194: the Council in 1311–12 at which it was defined that the rational soul is per se et essentialiter the form of the body, ruling out ‘Cartesian’ dualism in advance, the point that McAleer is making, though Vienne is better known for suppressing the Templars, under pressure by Philip IV of France, who wanted their wealth; nearly everyone, including the pope, knew they were innocent of the charges of sodomy, blasphemy and heresy). Some readers may be mystified by the undocumented parenthetical gestures towards ‘Gauthier’ (p. 3) and ‘de Libera’ (p. 4). Aurel Kolnai died in 1973, not 1971 (p. xv). But these are minor blemishes in a beautifully produced and printed book, which obviously demands and deserves to be widely discussed.
