Some error occured while loading the Quick View. Please close the Quick View and try reloading the page.
Thinking Theologically traces Aquinas’s subtle grammatical and thematic engagements with the doctrine of the divine ideas throughout the Summa Theologiae. This study offers new insights into the contributions of Aquinas’s doctrine to debates about eschatology, christology, providence, natural law, virtue, and creation’s participation in the trinitarian life of God. It argues that Aquinas adapts the doctrine to support his pedagogical goal of guiding readers from the confession of faith to the wisdom of sacra doctrina. In turn, this demonstrates that Aquinas’s reading of the divine ideas reinforces his understanding of the dynamic exchange between philosophical reasoning and theological inquiry.
Price: $153.00
Pages: 248
Publisher: Brill
Imprint: Brill
Series: Brill's Studies in Catholic Theology
Publication Date:
21 April 2022
ISBN: 9789004511507
Format: Hardcover
Benjamin DeSpain does us a great service by showing that a treatment of the divine ideas in Thomas Aquinas is not solely a philosophical matter but inextricably bound to Aquinas’s pedagogical commitments in the Summa Theologiae and that this doctrine needs to be rehabilitated in contemporary theological inquiry. DeSpain’s work is a formidable step in that direction showing the richness of the doctrine of divine ideas, for it refers not only to the origination of creatures in being and in truth, but also to their action and perfection, and thus to the attainment of their final end, as these ideas or the idea of each one of us is our ultimate measure in the quest for happiness, that is, in seeing God “face to face.” - Alice M. Ramos, Professor of Philosophy, St. John’s University, New York
Thinking Theologically about the Divine Ideas will become the benchmark work on Thomas Aquinas’ doctrine of the divine ideas. It is the book, one suspects, that Aquinas himself would have hoped for in our time, in that it is not simply about the doctrine, curating it and interpreting it as an object of intellectual history, although all of this is done to the highest scholarly standard. Beyond this, DeSpain’s treatment itself embodies and performs the theological task that the doctrine inculcates us into. DeSpain leads us into a conceptual space that is richly-traditioned, but open to mystery, silence, and surprise, and capable of framing our responses to a plenitude of contemporary tasks for theological thinking and practice. Along with Mark McIntosh’s account of the divine ideas in the wider mystical tradition (The Divine Ideas Tradition in Christian Mystical Theology), this work should stir a renewal and retrieval of interest in this neglected doctrine, comparable to the recent retrieval of other classical doctrines such as the Trinity and Divine Simplicity. - Christopher J. Insole, Durham University/Australian Catholic University
Thinking Theologically about the Divine Ideas will become the benchmark work on Thomas Aquinas’ doctrine of the divine ideas. It is the book, one suspects, that Aquinas himself would have hoped for in our time, in that it is not simply about the doctrine, curating it and interpreting it as an object of intellectual history, although all of this is done to the highest scholarly standard. Beyond this, DeSpain’s treatment itself embodies and performs the theological task that the doctrine inculcates us into. DeSpain leads us into a conceptual space that is richly-traditioned, but open to mystery, silence, and surprise, and capable of framing our responses to a plenitude of contemporary tasks for theological thinking and practice. Along with Mark McIntosh’s account of the divine ideas in the wider mystical tradition (The Divine Ideas Tradition in Christian Mystical Theology), this work should stir a renewal and retrieval of interest in this neglected doctrine, comparable to the recent retrieval of other classical doctrines such as the Trinity and Divine Simplicity. - Christopher J. Insole, Durham University/Australian Catholic University
Benjamin R. DeSpain, Ph.D. (2016), Durham University, is a Research Fellow at Australian Catholic University. He has previously published on the theological reception of the divine ideas. His current research focuses on Aquinas's notions of divine and human understanding.