Why Aquinas Matters Now
By Oliver Keenan.
Bloomsbury Continuum, 2025.
Hardcover, 240 pages, $22.
Reviewed by J. Camden Kidwell.
More than seven-hundred years have elapsed since Dominican friar St. Thomas Aquinas passed away. With all the changes in the world since the medieval period, it is tempting to suggest Aquinas no longer has a home in modern society. However, Oliver Keenan, Academic Dean of Cuddesdon College, argues otherwise. Given the recent growth of such organizations as the Thomistic Institute, which seeks to cultivate interest in Aquinas at the college level, and a resurgence of interest in St. Thomas amongst both Catholics and evangelicals, it appears Keenan is not alone. St. Thomas, Keenan writes, “speaks directly to a widespread feeling of alienation that haunts our world.” In his book, Keenan carefully articulates how the Angelic Doctor’s thought pushes us to more deeply connect with ourselves, others, the world, and God.
Keenan begins his exploration of Aquinas’s thought by framing it in the context of the philosopher’s personal life. The Dominican friar lived during a time “of rapid, perhaps uncontrolled, social and intellectual change.” The division in Europe and Aquinas’s time as a professor helped to develop the “opposite of alienation” in his writing: the art of communication. For Keenan, the idea of communication extends beyond talking with another person and instead encompasses a dialogue with reality itself. This can be glimpsed in the structure of the Summa Theologiae itself. The questions, objections, and answers of the multivolume theological tome “lead the student by the hand (manuductio) through an intellectual itinerary that the teacher has already navigated for himself.” A good teacher does not simply present a student with the answer but shares the journey to the conclusion with his pupil. This advancement towards an answer derives from Aquinas’s “unshakeable confidence in the power of reality to truly disclose itself.” Despite the historical distance of Aquinas to our own day, Keenan believes the theologian’s grappling presents us with a challenge: “the question that faces us is not whether or not to involve ourselves in the conversation of reality, but how to make the next communicative move.”
The first step to answering this question is by listening to reality. Instead of immediately trying to problem solve, Keenan suggests we should first listen, contemplating and reflecting on the world. This meditative approach, which seeks to see the whole as giving unity to the parts, confronts us with “three interlocking layers of complexity”: ‘that-ness,’ ’what-ness,’ and ‘how-ness.’ All three of these layers relate to the timeless philosophical inquiry of existence and essence. Keenan methodically, yet still concisely, marches through unpacking Aquinas on form, matter, “esse,” efficient causes, and accidents; from existence being an act to form being “the configuring ‘idea’ that gives shape and purpose to a particular reality.” Yet these concepts, far from locking us in an ivory tower, help reveal “the goodness of reality” and draw us “towards a deeper and more profound encounter with the world” and God.
Engagement with the world requires an awareness of the horizon, a boundary and invitation for advancement. “St. Thomas’s word for this horizon of possibility and discovery is ‘God.’” The beginning of knowledge about God is in recognizing his effects in the world and this Aquinas articulates through “the Five Ways.” From here, Keenan continues in providing a summary of the friar’s thoughts on God’s nature, particularly his divine simplicity and perfection. But to say God is simple is not the same as saying he is completely knowable. Keenan is swift to recognize that the “utterly simple God seems utterly impersonal,” appearing contradictory to the Scriptural presentation of God. The response to the issue is a contested doctrine amongst Thomists called analogy. The premise of the doctrine relies on the concepts Aquinas sees operating in language: ‘univocity’—words possess the same meaning in different contexts—and ‘equivocity’—the meaning of a word changes with the context. Taking the mean between these two is ‘analogy.’ “There is residual similarity or resemblance between the perfections we encounter within the world and the perfection of God from which they emerge.” This way of speaking allows for discussions of such doctrines as the Trinity, where finite terms are used to describe a mystery of the infinite God. The triune relation inside the Godhead cannot be drawn from reality, yet the Trinity can fold back onto reality. This gives a new understanding of the world, even offering “contemporary political and social theorists a non-competitive account of difference as diversity, which supports and presupposes the community of belonging.” To properly know how this might be carried out necessitates a proper understanding of the human being.
It is Keenan’s discussion of the human being, a composite of the spiritual and physical, which feels most relevant to contemporary concerns. This can only occur because Keenan has meticulously demonstrated the nature of humanity’s Creator, as being human is “to be a co-creator with God in the consummation of an as yet unfinished world: we are not only habitat-occupiers, but also home builders.” So who are these home builders? For Aquinas humans are an utterly unique combination of godly attributes—the intellect, the spiritual—with animal elements—instinct, material needs, appetites. For ages philosophers have been trying to separate out these two parts of humanity, but to do so misses the essence of who we are. Keenan refutes any division of the body and soul, and instead advocates for a view of “an embodied soul and an ensouled body.” The soul and the body are intertwined to the extent that bodies are called corpses when a person dies; “there is no such thing, for a Thomist, as a dead body.” The recognition of this unity is vitally important when it comes to disciplining ourselves.
Aquinas’s view on humanity helps us understand our actions. There is no blaming the lower instincts or animal desires, since all are governed by the same intellect which moves us towards God: “the ways in which human beings consume food, comport their bodies and make love are always already imbued with complex webs of meaning that (most of the time) transcend the functional and the transactional.” Humans, unlike animals, possess awareness of our actions. The sensory inputs we experience do not solely generate instinctive reactions, instead humans have the capacity to reframe stimuli in light of a narrative. An emotional outburst is not inevitable. “By modifying the stories we tell ourselves about the world, we can modify our involuntary emotional reactions to it.” The Thomistic categories of such emotions are concupiscible, “the reactive emotions,” and irascible, “the emotions of struggle.” The latter of these too is less intuitive. “The emotions of struggle” relate to our moral responses to a situation; the way we wrestle with a problem possessing ethical consequences. Amongst the irascible emotions is anger. Though anger can be destructive when unguided, Keenan believes that when it is “well channeled, the passion of anger can serve as the root of social improvement” because anger is a response to “arduous evil”—or what is perceived as evil. If our narrative about reality is off, so too is our understanding of our emotions. According to Keenan, to be human requires us “to ask questions about the meanings of our experiences, and ultimately to make judgments about them.” The ability to discern universal concepts from sensory experiences, to perceive how actions interact with God’s will, is uniquely human.
The culmination of the human being and Aquinas’s work is found in Jesus Christ, the second person of the Trinity who was incarnated in human flesh. God the Son, for Keenan, is the ultimate example of Aquinas’s “non-violent” theology. An example of this non-violence in action would be God’s grace. The newness bestowed on a believer by God in no way harms the old self; instead grace perfects the self—an act of restoration with no deconstruction. For Keenan, “grace is the non-identical repetition of the incarnation in the life of the individual.” This building upon the old nature continues with the theological virtues of faith, hope, and charity that help the believer in his pursuit of God. The last of these virtues Aquinas sees as a friendship with the divine made possible by the incarnation. In this action of God “Thomas stresses that there is no violence against the dignity of God perpetrated by God’s entry into materiality.” If anything, God is undoing the division of the divine and material brought about by Adam’s transgression, redeeming the initial act of violence. Ultimately, perhaps ironically, it is the violence done to Christ, with his death on the cross, which most perfectly returns humanity to God. Keenan writes that “the life of Jesus discloses the essential structure of reality as a movement from origination, through progress, to return and ultimately consummation.” Christ is the pinnacle of reality and the end point of Aquinas’s writing.
Attempting to summarize the thoughts of one of the Church’s most prodigious figures, let alone connect them to contemporary culture, is no small task and Keenan knows it. His book does not pretend to be more than it is: a new lens to read Aquinas through. However, the lens is blurry on the edges. Keenan devotes the majority of his words to explaining Aquinas’s theology but neglects connecting them strongly to our present reality. In this there is more work to be done by the readers to discover how this theology might be lived out. Yet perhaps this was the Thomistic thing to do. Keenan has offered an invitation to start dialoguing with Aquinas and the world. Whether or not we accept it is our choice.
J. Camden Kidwell is an Honors Student at Regent University. He is the vice-president of Regent’s Intercollegiate Studies Institute chapter and the former vice-president of the university’s Thomistic Institute chapter.
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