Reinhard Hütter - Dust Bound for Heaven: Explorations in the Theology of Thomas Aquinas

Frail children of dust and feeble as frail,
In thee do we trust, nor find thee to fail;
Thy mercies how tender, how firm to the end,
Our maker, defender, redeemer, and friend.

O Worship the King, All Glorious Above,

Robert Grant (1779-1838)

Dust Bound for Heaven

Explorations in the Theology of Thomas Aquinas

Reinhard Htter

W ILLIAM B. E ERDMANS P UBLISHING C OMPANY
G RAND R APIDS , M ICHIGAN / C AMBRIDGE , U.K.

2012 Reinhard Htter
All rights reserved

Published 2012 by
Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co.
2140 Oak Industrial Drive N.E., Grand Rapids, Michigan 49505 /
P.O. Box 163, Cambridge CB3 9PU U.K.

18 17 16 15 14 13 12 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Htter, Reinhard, 1958-

Dust bound for heaven: explorations in the theology
of Thomas Aquinas / Reinhard Htter.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references (P. ).
ISBN 978-0-8028-6741-4 (cloth: alk. paper)
ISBN 978-1-4674-3672-4 (epub)
Thomas Aquinas, Saint, 1225?-1274. I. Title.

B765.T54H88 2012

230.2092 dc23

2012002499

www.eerdmans.com

To

The Thomistic Institute

at

The Pontifical Faculty of the Immaculate Conception

The Dominican House of Studies

Washington, D.C.

Contents

This book has grown over the course of the last seven years. After a ten-year pilgrimage of theological searching and probing, my wife and I were received into the full communion of the Catholic Church on the Feast of the Holy Innocents, December 28, 2004. Between then and now, between 2004 and 2011, I became again a student of theology, this time of Catholic theology. On the to date seven-year-long journey of becoming a Catholic theologian, I discovered that Thomas Aquinas is still the Common Doctor of the Catholic Church, the Dumb Ox, whose teaching bellows through the ages: He who has ears to hear, let him hear (Mt 11:15; RSV). (A brief account of my theological journey into the Catholic Church can be found in Nova et Vetera: The English Edition of the International Theological Journal 9/4 [Fall 2011].)

A book like this, which has grown over many years, would be inconceivable without the innumerable conversations that have shaped me and the thoughts that have informed this book. For their various ways of helping me in becoming a better student of Thomas Aquinas, a better Dominican Tertiary, a better Catholic theologian, and last but not least a more faithful Christian, my heartfelt thanks go to Sr. Maria of the Angels, O.P., John F. Boyle, James Brent, O.P., Stephen L. Brock, Romanus Cessario, O.P., W. Norris Clarke, S.J., Edgardo Coln-Emeric, Archbishop J. Augustine DiNoia, O.P., Gilles Emery, O.P., Josef Freitag, Paul J. Griffiths, Russell Hittinger, Warren Kinghorn, Gregory LaNave, Matthew L. Lamb, Emma Louise Law, Matthew Levering, Steven A. Long, Edward P. Mahoney, Guy Mansini, O.S.B., Bruce D. Marshall, Ralph McInerny, Gabriel ODonnell, O.P., Philip Rolnick, Miguel Romero, Michael Root, Richard Schenk, O.P., John OCallaghan, Michael Sherwin, O.P., Henry Stachyra, Holly Taylor Coolman, Craig Steven Titus, Jrgen Vijgen, Michael Waldstein, Joseph P. Wawrykow, Thomas Joseph White, O.P., Ian C. Willeford, Msgr. John Joseph Williams, and Msgr. John Wippel. I am especially grateful for the wisdom, patience, and good humor of my wife and best friend Nancy Heitzenrater Htter, without whose unfailing love and support I would not have been able to write this book nor would I be who I am.

I am indebted to the constructive and critical feed-back I received from the academicians of the Pontifical Academy of St. Thomas in regard to earlier versions of two of the following chapters. I am equally indebted to the instructive questions and comments that the faculty and the students at the Dominican House of Studies raised in response to earlier versions of two other chapters that I presented as lectures at the first Thomistic Circles conferences. Last but not least, I am indebted to Thomas Joseph White, O.P., who gave me important feedback at the last stage of this project.

I am also grateful to Jon Pott, editor-in-chief at the William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, for his ongoing interest in my work. Special thanks go to Judith Heyhoe, Colin McGuigan, and Matthew Whelan, without whose constructive comments and criticisms, patient editorial assistance, and able compilation of indices the book would be the poorer.

Some of the chapters in this book have appeared, in earlier forms, in Nova et Vetera: The English Edition of the International Theological Journal and The Thomist. I thank these journals, as well as T&T Clark International and Eerdmans Publishing Company for granting me permission to reprint material that is included here. For further publication details the reader is directed to the credits at the end of the volume.

I dedicate this book in gratitude to The Thomistic Institute at The Pontifical Faculty of the Immaculate Conception, The Dominican House of Studies, Washington, D.C.

R EINHARD H TTER

Feast of St. Thomas Aquinas

January 28, 2012

I. Ressourcement in Thomas Aquinas

This book is an invitation to rediscover the perennial relevance of the theology of Thomas Aquinas, the Common Doctor of the Church. Such an invitation might be met with two objections I want to name up front. There is, first, the objection that after the Enlightenment critique Thomass thought is irretrievably pass, philosophically as well as theologically, and that any investigation into his thought belongs exclusively to the discipline of historical studies. There is, second, the objection that it is virtually impossible to recover a sense of Thomass culture and wherewithal in order to reclaim him as the Common Doctor.

The first is a modern secular objection. It goes roughly like this: At the beginning of the twenty-first century, what could be more irrelevant, inconsequential, unpromising, and, in short, hopeless than returning to the theology of Thomas Aquinas? Has Thomass theology not been put decisively to the side by Protestant theologians since the Reformation and by Catholic theologians since the Second Vatican Council? Has Thomass philosophy not died the death of a thousand qualifications since the dawning of modernity that is, since the days of Bacon, Hume, Kant and especially since the more recent ascendancy of postmodernity under the aegis of Nietzsche, Heidegger, Derrida, and Wittgenstein? My answer will clearly be to affirm Thomass thought, and this I do at length in the prelude, Faith and Reason.

The second objection voices a kind of MacIntyrean reservation, a reservation that is not infrequently held by those who hold Thomas Aquinas John Senior forcefully points out what he regards to be the practical difficulty, indeed, impossibility of a full recovery of Thomas Aquinas as the Common Doctor.

First, he asks where the kind of students who would be the beginners whom Thomas intends to teach, especially with his masterwork, the Summa theologiae , are to be found. Being attuned since elementary school to multitasking on a laptop while listening to their iPods, contemporary beginners in theology are increasingly unaccustomed to and unfit for the practices of silence, prayer, and meditation, the art of reading slowly and attentively, and the training of the memory skills and practices indispensable for rigorous philosophical and theological contemplation. Also, it does not help that college, seminary, and university curricula that would foster these skills and practices in the context of a coherent, teleologically ordered philosophical and theological education belong largely to the past.

Second, and worse, it seems that the kind of culture that once made possible a Thomas Aquinas, a Fra Angelico, and a Dante Alighieri has irreversibly disappeared. Senior puts it as drastically as precisely: