This work is a systematic and careful study of what St Thomas Aquinas says of God the Father. Obvious as this subject might seem, it appears that it has not been discussed extensively until now. In fact, as the author points out (p. 3), not just St Thomas's ‘theology of God the Father’, but the ‘theology of God the Father’ as such hardly exists as a separate area of study; witness the fact that we have ‘Christology’ and ‘Pneumatology’, but no corresponding word for this discipline, the term ‘patrology’ already being taken for another use.
Although the author is a Dominican teaching in the United States, the influence of what is sometimes called the Toulouse-Fribourg school is evident in his writing, in particular the work of Fr Gilles Emery OP. This manifests itself by an attention to similarities and contrasts between St Thomas and his contemporaries, as well as a consideration of the historical development discernible within Aquinas's own corpus. On the other hand the author does not consider the Thomistic tradition between the 13th century and the 20th century. More trivially, a French influence can be detected in the author's habit of referring to St Thomas as ‘the Dominican master’, this kind of periphrasis being common in French as a way of reducing repetitions, but rather unusual in English.
After a helpful introduction that explains the technical vocabulary that St Thomas uses when speaking of the Holy Trinity, chapter one presents the scriptural sources of trinitarian theology, with passages from some of Aquinas's commentaries, especially on St John's gospel. This chapter is a fairly gentle introduction to what becomes afterwards a more demanding read.
The rest of the book takes its structure principally from question thirty three of the first part of the Summa Theologiae, dedicated to ‘the Father’. The four articles of this question give rise to chapters two to four and chapter six. Chapter five, dedicated to ‘the Father as Spirator’, is the exception to this structure, since St Thomas considers this subject later in the Summa, when writing directly of the Holy Spirit. The author's investigations, however, range across the whole field of Aquinas's writings, making use in particular of the Scriptum or Commentary on the Sentences.
Chapter two, then, considers the ‘property’ of the Father which is traditionally called ‘innascibility’, that is, the Father's not coming from any other principle. The author shows that St Thomas presents this characteristic of God the Father as a simple negation, and that in this he consciously separated himself from St Bonaventure, for whom innascibility was constitutive of the Father. For St Thomas, the Father is constituted as Father simply by paternity itself. On St Bonaventure's account, He would be on the contrary a ‘suberabundant source logically prior to mutually opposed relations between the divine persons’ (p. 86). As the author observes, were that true, ‘innascibility would seem to belong to the Father not as he is distinct from the Son and the Holy Spirit but as he is the divine essence’; and this is turn would suggest ‘an innascible divine essence that cannot be communicated by the Father to the Son’ (ibid.).
Chapter three, ‘Father Principle’, examines the great care with which St Thomas expressed himself in speaking of the Trinity. Unlike St Bonaventure and St Albert, he refused to use the term ‘hierarchy’ in speaking of the divine persons, even saying that it implied heresy (p. 148). The term auctor he prefers to reserve for the Father, saying that it adds to the idea of being a principle the note of not being from another. Unlike St Bonaventure, he will not speak of subauctores within the Trinity (p. 150). The author translates auctoritas as ‘authority’; this does not seem quite right, since the English term implies the right to command. Chapter four, ‘The name, ‘Father’’, considers why this term is the proper one for the first Person as opposed, for example, to ‘Begetter’ or ‘the Unbegotten’. The author shows an important development in St Thomas's thought between the Scriptum, where the term ‘Word’ was taken to be both an essential term in God, equivalent either to intellection or to the divine essence as understood, and also a personal name for the Son, and the later writings in which it is said to be only a personal name (p. 216). He states that the angelic doctor was the first to achieve clarity on this point.
Chapter five, ‘Father Spirator’, addresses the famous question of the procession of the Holy Spirit. Although the author's presentation is, as elsewhere, both systematic and convincing, a couple of his expressions could be questioned. He writes, ‘spiration formally belongs to the Father as Father’ (p. 257), which if it were strictly true would seem to rule out the Filioque. In various places he says that the Holy Spirit proceeds ‘principally from the Father’ (pp. 255, 279, 332, 336). While it is true that St Thomas uses the word principaliter, this seems to be more from piety towards St Augustine than to express his own thought; and also, the English word ‘principally’ seems unsuitable, as it is generally used to mean ‘mainly’ or ‘more’.
Chapter six, ‘The Father in the Economy’, offers a convincing rebuttal of the charge that the intra-trinitarian distinctions are irrelevant to St Thomas's account of the christian life. While the author explains and defends Aquinas's view that the whole Trinity can be addressed as ‘Father’ (p. 318), he also shows how, in the words of the Scriptum, ‘leading us back to the Father, as to the principle without a principle, Christ taught us to direct prayer to the Father through the Son’ (p. 324). In a particularly interesting passage, he suggests that the ‘quasi-experimental’ knowledge of God of which St Thomas sometimes speaks applies primarily to the Son and the Holy Spirit, since ‘the Father's indwelling does not fill our minds with a likeness that corresponds to one of his properties’(p. 321). But here he only alludes to a debate which lies outside the scope of his work.
This solid and pleasantly didactic work finishes with a summary of each chapter (pp. 328–34) and some proposals for further research. To this reviewer, the suggestion of examining the place which God the Father holds in St Thomas's account of the hypostatic union and of the life of Christ seems particularly promising.
