Drawing on Ciceronian rhetorical tropes, Thomas Aquinas treats the rite of the Eucharist in terms of the classical ars memoriae. The Eucharist, for Aquinas, is the schooling in desire whereby we are trained to order the associations of our memory to their proper objects in terms of their relations to God. He thus conceives of the liturgy of the Mass as rhetoric proper, which truly teaches, moves and delights. Since memory is the condition of all thought, as both Thomas and (...) Augustine claim, the Eucharist is the “site” of all theological production, and therefore the liturgy is the art of memory of which all other similar arts are derivative. (shrink)

What is the theological logic of the particular textual apparatus of the Summa theologiae, and what kinds of implications arise when the text is adapted to a modern format? In this essay, I argue that the peculiar use Thomas makes of the quaestio protests against any attempt to reify the “responses” of Thomas into self-contained monologues, as is often done in recent attempts to render the Summa intelligible to modern readers. Yet doing so undermines not only the historical contexts of (...) the work, but much more importantly, it transforms what is essentially an itinerary of the soul’s return to God into a panoptic map of the commonplaces of theology. I suggest that for Thomas, the ordo disciplinae of the Summa corresponds to the circuit of the reader’s return to God as the source and end of all that is. The textual form, therefore, is not separable from the manuduction of the soul towards beatific vision. (shrink)

Mark Jordan’s recent book, Rewritten Theology, challenges the way in which the achievement of Thomas Aquinas has been both received and reformulated, often in order to serve particular theological and philosophical ends. It helps to unmask the often hidden presuppositions behind efforts to “police” Thomism, efforts which frequently require a revision and a rewriting of the texts of Aquinas themselves. At a time when it appears that there is a repristinization of the Thomistic “synthesis” reminiscent of Garrigou-Lagrange, this book is (...) an auspicious reminder that such “synthesis” often comes at the cost of fidelity to the Master in whose name it is fashioned. (shrink)