Matthew Levering

A Note on John Milbank and Thomas Aquinas

The emergence in the 1980s and 1990s of a renewed Thomistic moral theology showed that the same could and should be attempted in dogmatic theology, with full weight given to the biblical, patristic, and spiritual emphases of the Ressourcement movement

We Speak because We Have First Been Spoken: A Grammar of the Preaching Life by Michael Pasquarello III (review)

nuanced observations about the reception and application of Alberts moral teaching precisely in the environment that Albert himself desired to make the most impact-amongst his own confreres and in their dealing with real-life ethical quandaries. To a degree, Cunningham is guilty of the same Aquinascentrism that he rails against, when virtually his sole touchstone and point of comparison for Alberts thought within the Dominican order is that of his more illustrious student. In fairness, Cunninghams is a more philosophical project. He is attempting to show that Albert did indeed stand alone in his time in looking at moral doctrine from a purely philosophical point of view, not as something conditioned by theological assumptions about mans behavior or final end. The opposite of virtue for Albert is not sin, but action contrary to natural law. Still, it is with regard to Cunninghams general premise, rather than his particular readings, that one might raise the most pertinent question, namely, whether he has actually succeeded in demonstrating that Albert did devise a completely new philosophically, as opposed to theologically, coherent system of ethical doctrine. There is no doubt that Cunninghams study has shown Albert to have reached some original conclusions that earlier Scholastics had shied away from, and that he pursued Aristotles thought with an exceptionally clear-sighted rigor. But one is not altogether convinced that it all adds up to a new system. Arguably, what Albert achieved was the first thoroughgoing exposition of Aristotle in the medieval West that did what Cunningham claims it did, which is that it left Christian theological assumptions to one side as it teased out the implications of the natural moral theory Aristotle presents. Where Albert systematically diverges from Aristotle-what makes this something other than an Aristotelian ethical universe-is not nearly so clear in Cunninghams appraisal. But it is an appraisal worth reading.