Book Review

East Meets Aquinas

Orthodox Readings of Aquinas
by Marcus Plested
Oxford University Press, 2012
(276 pages, $34.00, paperback)

reviewed by Vincent Rossi

Is Kipling's dictum that "East is East and West is West and never the twain shall meet" true for Christian theology? For many, such has been and still is the case, but signs of scholarly dissatisfaction with a perceived "theology of opposition" between the Eastern and Western Christian traditions are growing. Marcus Plested, in Orthodox Readings of Aquinas, himself invokes Kipling in addressing what he calls "the very human and time-bound construct of an East-West dichotomy." He targets this apparent theological gulf through his analysis of the "reception history" of the Orthodox encounter with Thomas Aquinas. His study of this encounter, from 1354, when the first translations of Aquinas into Greek appeared, down to modern times, makes for an engrossing intellectual detective story. But at the end of his survey, is the reader left with a satisfactory resolution of "whodunit" and, theologically speaking, of how and why?

Aquinas & Palamas

Plested begins his study, not, as one might expect, with the Byzantine reception of Aquinas, but with two chapters that seek to overturn the stereotypical caricatures of both Thomas Aquinas and Gregory Palamas as the ultimate representatives of their respective, and as such totally opposed, theological traditions.

The subject of Chapter One is "Thomas Aquinas and the Greek East." Delving deeply into the enormous explosion of Thomas studies that have been published since Vatican II "demoted" Aquinas from the representative of Roman Catholic theology and thereby allowed him to be studied historically, Plested brilliantly sketches this new image of Thomas as primarily a theologian, whose writings have a clear and consistent scriptural basis and ultimately a monastic (Dominican) context; whose importance as a spiritual teacher and mystic with a commitment to deification cannot be denied; whose genius as a philosopher is underpinned as much by substantial Platonic and neo-Platonic philosophical thought as by what often has been deemed a slavish Aristotelianism; and, most importantly, whose affinity with the Christian East and grounding in the Greek Fathers shows through not only in his indebtedness to the Greek Fathers, but also in his enthusiasm for and pioneering use of the acts of the Ecumenical Councils in the development of his Christology.

Turning to Gregory Palamas in Chapter Two, Plested finds evidence on the part of the great Athonite hesychast of a sympathetic, although not uncritical reception of Augustine, and through him of the Western theological tradition as a whole. He traces this underlying theological congruity through Gregory's Trinitarian thought, which resembles Augustine's in unmistakable ways, and he also finds Palamas surprisingly compatible with Augustine's "essentialism," thus undercutting the supposed opposition between Western "essentialist" and Eastern "personalist" paradigms.

Byzantine Reception

In Part Two, "Byzantine Readings of Aquinas," Plested follows the trajectory of the reception of Aquinas in the Byzantine world from 1354, when Demetrios Kydones published his translation of Thomas's Summa contra gentiles, to the time of Patriarch George (Gennadios) Scholarios (d. 1472) and the beginning of the Ottoman era. Here Plested expertly unpacks the astounding complexity of the Byzantine encounter with Aquinas. Ranging from enthusiastic embrace to nuanced and cautious admiration, from principled and restrained criticism (mostly regarding the filioque) to occasional outright rejection, and all in a context of heightened debate on union with Rome in the hope of saving the empire from the Ottoman threat, the Byzantines are revealed to be sophisticated readers of Aquinas, and even ahead of the medieval West in understanding his supreme importance for Latin theology.

Modern Reception

The modern era is taken up in Part Three. Since the negative readings of Aquinas in modern Orthodox thought have been Plested's target from the beginning, I will reluctantly bypass his solid presentation of the early modern period and concentrate on his treatment of the later modern period of Orthodox theology. Here, in an impressively comprehensive chapter, Plested surveys Orthodox theology through its two primary modern currents, Russian and Greek.

With the Russians, he begins in the mid-nineteenth century with the Slavophiles, Alexei Khomiakov and Ivan Kirievsky, leading through Vladimir Soloviev to the two great Russian thinkers of the early twentieth century, Pavel Florensky and Sergei Bulgakov, and culminating with Vladimir Lossky and Georges Florovsky and the establishment of the latter's "neopatristic synthesis." With the Greeks, he begins with the post-Independence theologians trained in German universities and the scholastic and systematic theology of the University of Athens-based scholars, Christos Androutsos and Panayiotes Trembelas, culminating in the Greek theological revolution of the 1960s, from which emerged the theologies of John Romanides, Christos Yannaras, Philip Sherrard, Nikos Nissiotes, Kallistos Ware, and John Zizioulas.

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