"a good deal more difficult"
Alasdair MacIntyre, Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry: Encyclopedia, Genealogy, and Tradition. (1990, p. 135)
“What this view of the reading of Aquinas points us towards is the conclusion that the Summa can only be read as a whole and can only be evaluated as a whole. The parts clearly each have their own import, but they have their import in their character as parts of that whole. It is thus in this view a good deal more difficult to encounter, let alone to evaluate, Aquinas’s thought than either Thomists or their opponents have sometimes supposed. …
“What then this type of holistic reading of the Summa puts in question, in a way that nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Thomism often did not, is how one can be a critic of the Summa without first having been a genuine participant in its processes of dialectical enquiry and discovery, through which the themes of the debates so far, and more especially of the debate between Augustinians and Averroists, were and are reformulated and carried forward. …
“The Summa has proved easy enough to domesticate academically in terms other than its own, but to read it in its own terms from within the tradition which Aquinas reconstituted in the course of writing it is the only way to reckon with it in other than mock and distorting encounter.”
Having finished my first reading of Three Rival Versions, I come away with admiration for the respect, honesty, and seriousness with which MacIntyre considers his philosophical opponents and their texts (in particular, Nietzsche and Foucault, but also the historically significant but to me somewhat obscure editors and contributors to the ninth edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica).
I am persuaded by MacIntyre’s argument that it is only possible to truly engage with a philosophical tradition other than one’s own by learning it as one did one’s own tradition, knowing it as one might “a second first language,” and then engaging in what my own tradition calls “immanent critique.”
MacIntyre persuaded me a few years ago that my own work as a Christian philosopher in the 21st century demands of me that I make an attempt at coming to terms with, at least, the work and example of Thomas Aquinas. This little book has persuaded me that such a coming to terms demands, at least, that I read the whole of the Summa, becoming “a genuine participant in its processes of dialectical enquiry and discovery.”
As always, I am daunted by this task, concerned about the ancillary work involved (for example, I think it is necessary to read at least the key texts from both Aristotle and Augustine, and perhaps also those of Averröes, in support of reading Aquinas), and conscious of my lateness in coming to Aquinas, on the threshold of my sixties.