Abstract

“It would take a book to work through all the literature in detail,” observes Michael Gorman on the question of how to interpret Thomas Aquinas’s views on whether Christ had a single esse or two, “and it would be one of the most tedious books ever written”. To the nonspecialist, the details of how a medieval theologian thought the divinity and humanity of Christ relate to each other in terms drawn from Aristotelian metaphysics must rank as one of the most obscure, not to mention uninteresting, problems in the history of philosophy. Sometimes it can seem like that to the specialist, too.Luckily, Gorman’s authoritative and engaging book not only avoids the tedium of the volume he imagines, it makes an excellent...