A Greek Thomist

Several times in the past decade we have had important new studies emerge to show us that the separations fondly maintained by some Christians--and built upon faulty history while often accompanied by demonization of such figures as Augustine, Anselm, and Aquinas and those apparently horrid "scholastics" more generally--were not nearly as neat, sharp, or straightforward as imagined today by those with an agenda. Thus Marcus Plested's wholly welcome Orthodox Readings of Aquinas, began this important trajectory of clarification and complication. (See here for an interview with him and video of one of his lectures.) Shortly after him, in different but related ways, Christiaan Kappes (interviewed here) continued it with his study of the Immaculate Conception. Others more recently still have joined in.

Coming up next spring we shall have another study revealing just how interconnected the "Greeks" and "Latins" were. I've met the author of this forthcoming work at several conferences over the years and always enjoyed talking with him. So I shall make a point of trying to arrange an interview with him next spring when his book comes out: Matthew C. Briel, A Greek Thomist: Providence in Gennadios Scholarios (University of Notre Dame Press, April 2020), 272 pages.

About this book the publisher tells us this:

Matthew Briel examines for the first time the appropriation and modification of Thomas Aquinas's understanding of providence by a fifteenth-century Greek Orthodox theologian, Gennadios Scholarios. Briel investigates the intersection of Aquinas's theology, the legacy of Greek patristic and later theological traditions, and the use of Aristotle's philosophy by Latin and Greek Christian thinkers in the thirteenth to fifteenth centuries. The broader aim of the book is to reconsider our current understanding of later Byzantine theology by reconfiguring the construction of what constitutes "orthodoxy" within a pro- or anti-Western paradigm. The fruit of this appropriation of Aquinas enriches extant sources for historical and contemporary assessments of Orthodox theology. Moreover, Scholarios's grafting of Thomas onto the later Greek theological tradition changes the account of grace and freedom in Thomistic moral theology. The particular kind of Thomism that Scholarios develops avoids the later vexing issues in the West of the de auxiliis controversy by replacing the Augustinian theology of grace with the highly developed Greek theological concept of synergy.