Contemplating Aquinas: On the Varieties of Interpretation

Among the many fruitful and challenging sites for mutual engagement of theology and philosophy, the renewed study of St. Thomas Aquinas has proven to be both lively and controversial. Given particular impetus in recent years by the widespread assessment of modernity that occupies many academic disciplines today, this study is both interesting and relevant to a number of intellectual debates, even as it demands for itself the highest level of scholarship. The essays here arise out of a conference held in 2001 at Heythrop College, University of London, which was introduced by Bishop Malcolm McMahon, OP. This collection reflects the state of Aquinas studies throughout North America, Britain, and Northern Europe, and provides an introduction to this diversity for a general and scholarly readership. Widely differing and often starkly contrasting and even contradictory interpretations of Aquinas are to be found here, which by their very differences invite readers to go deeper into the background from which each emerges and so to find for themselves a way to contemplate Aquinas.

Fergus Kerr, OP, is Regent of Blackfriars, Oxford, and an honorary fellow of the Divinity Faculty of Edinburgh University.