ABSTRACT
Truth in Aquinas, by John Milbank and Catherine Pickstock, appeared in 2001.' I shall begin (Sections One and Two) by looking in detail at some parts of it, arguing that it offers a blatant misreading of Aquinas that ignores the ordinary canons of scholarly enquiry. In a number of his writings, however, and even in part of the one essay he wrote on his own for the book on Aquinas, Milbank advances ideas about Aquinas and his place in the history of thought that may indeed be highly questionable, but which, nonetheless, deserve to be considered in earnest, since they are initially plausible and have a currency wider than the narrow circle of the Radically Orthodox (Section Three), In particular, Milbank considers that Aquinas held a view about God and being sharply different from that which became widespread in the later Middle Ages, even among Thomists (Section Four), and he argues that Aquinas did not, as is commonly accepted, make a separation between reason and faith (Section Five). Both of these views are very important as foundations for Radical Orthodoxy. They merit examination, but, as developed by Milbank, they turn out not to be convincingly supported.
