Aquinas’ Engagement with Islamic and Jewish Philosophy The American Thomist...

Aquinas’ Engagement with Islamic and Jewish Philosophy The American Thomist, David Burrell C.S.C., is one of the leading advocates of Aquinas as a model for a contemporary Christian theological engagement with non-Western philosophy.[^17] He has made clear both the extent of Aquinas’ engagement with Muslim and Jewish thinkers, especially Avicenna (Ibn Sina) and Moses Maimonides, and the way such non-Western philosophy makes a positive contribution to his theology.

Aquinas treats Muslim and Jewish thinkers as fellow travellers and as interlocutors into common theological concerns, especially the desire to find the right relationship between what they maintain on the basis of faith and what can and should be said by the reason found in Greek philosophy: Aquinas’ intellectual inquiry bridged the divide initially posed by alien faiths, allowing him to discover and exploit cognate strategies for explicating shared perspectives on creation, providence, and often parallel trajectories towards the goal of human fulfilment[^18] Burrell follows Louis Gardet’s characterisation of Aquinas’ approach as one in which Muslim philosophy is seen as a resource to be mined for ‘conceptual strategies.’[^19] He also notes that Aquinas appropriates and transforms the ideas he finds in this philosophy as he thinks it to be useful and necessary for the development of his own theology determined by the principles of Christian faith, just as he does with Aristotle and other Greek thought.[^20] Thus, in order to express the distinction between God as creator and created being Aquinas takes from Avicenna the distinction between essence and existence as a useful conceptual strategy for distinguishing creatures, in whom there is composition of essence and existence and hence dependent being, from the creator, whose existence is his essence.

Yet he rejects the implication he finds in Avicenna that existence should be classified as a form of accidental being that comes to an essence and instead recasts the distinction as being one between the potential and the actual being of a substance.