Metametaphysical reflection is nothing new. Avant la lettre, Aristotle’s attempt to lay out a science of “being qua being” and its first principles – the scientific discipline that came to be called “metaphysics” – involved an attempt to justify his methodology as well as to develop responses to skeptics. Contemporary metametaphysics has revived some of these discussions. Whereas all metaphysicians roughly agree on the sorts of problems that count as “metaphysics,” and generically that the subject matter concerns the nature and structure of reality, not all metaphysicians agree about what constitutes the form of an answer to such problems. Some contemporary metaphysicians focus on existence questions – listing what exists – whereas others focus on “grounding” or dependence relations of some kind – what depends on what or is fundamental. These differences tend to appear in responses to skeptical challenges to metaphysics.

Much has been written about the historical sources – Aristotelian and neo-Platonic – used by Thomas Aquinas in his theological works. Without neglecting such research, this chapter examines the broader speculative framework of themes at the intersection of faith and reason in Thomistic thought. The goal is to provide philosophers and theologians with a clearer view of Thomism’s key speculative concerns regarding human reason and revealed truth. These include the degree of theology’s influence on faith (Christian philosophy), the preambles of faith, rational credibility, the relationship between common sense, philosophy, and faith, analogy in relation to revealed truths, the scientific structure of theology, and the potential for a Thomist account of knowledge’s historicity.

The conclusion summaries the key arguments and ideas presented in this book. It also offers some brief thoughts on the overlap between Muslims’ and non-Muslims’ ideas about history-writing as well as on the nature of institutions in the early Islamic world.

Chapter 7 argues that feminine imagery is the most pervasive strategy in the fifteenth-century Lollard vernacular treatise The Lanterne of Liȝt for encouraging readers to identify affectively with Christ’s true Church while participating in the liturgical, sacramental, and charitable practices of mainstream ecclesiastical life. The chapter identifies a distinctive “ecclesial spirituality” of relating directly to Lady Church in historical circumstances that were hostile and deadly toward religious dissent.

Chapter 8 examines a neo-Latin university drama, Christus Triumphans, which was written by the English Protestant John Foxe while he was living in exile during the reign of Mary I, and which depicts Mater Ecclesia (Mother Church) as the mother and schoolmistress of the entire human race. The chapter argues that Foxe uses his dramatic work to forge a diverse community of Continental and English Protestants into the impassioned body of the Church as Christ’s bride, who desires the return of Christ and an end to all tyrannical violence.

Chapter 9 examines how a range of writers adapted feminine imagery during the English Reformation, including Roman Catholics promoting recusancy, Catholic conformists or “church papists,” Calvinist English clergymen who critiqued puritanism and separatism, and Laudians advocating greater sacramentality and peaceable subordination to monarchical authority. In the new institutional circumstances of early modern England, some Roman Catholics presented Roman Catholicism as a rightful queen and as the only soteriologically efficacious mother, while some Protestants ascribed maternity to the universal Catholic Church alone and depicted all early Churches as her daughters. English Protestants defended the Church of England as a woman whose lap and bosom were open to many loyal lovers.

According to Aristotle’s hylomorphic analysis of substance, matter and form are metaphysical constituents of a substance that contribute to the reality of the substance. According to Aquinas, prime matter underlies every substance, which is merely a potentiality for substance that has no actual being apart from substantial form. Aquinas’s conception of prime matter was widely rejected by scholastics in favour of theories which endowed matter with intrinsic causal, spatial, and mereological properties. Aristotle’s hylomorphic analysis of substance was subsequently abandoned in the wake of the Scientific Revolution.

In this chapter, I shall raise doubts about contemporary atomistic philosophies that exclude matter or form, and I shall seek to situate Aquinas’s theory of prime matter in relation to the ‘primitive ontology approach’ to quantum mechanics, which posits the existence of a spatiotemporal distribution of matter that lacks any intrinsic properties.

Chapter 10 examines feminizations of the Church in John Donne’s Satyre 3 (“On Religion”) and Holy Sonnet XVIII (“Show me deare Christ, thy Spouse”), assessing how these poems depart from the rhetorical conventions used in defenses of the Church of England from Donne’s milieu. Against claims that the concluding image of Christ’s bride as a promiscuous woman in “Show me deare Christ” is coded Roman Catholic or implies rejection of all earthly Churches, this chapter argues that the poem draws on a long tradition of reading whore-like women as adequate sacraments of Christ’s faithful spouse and reappropriates a slur leveled not only at Roman Catholicism but also at the Church of England, by Catholics and puritans alike.

Chapter 2 examines ecclesiological interpretations of the foremothers of Jesus preserved in a twelfth-century Latin commentary known as Durham Matthew, which survives in a unique manuscript and in a fourteenth-century translation of this commentary into Middle English. The chapter identifies the high ecclesiological principles developed and retained in the genre of continuous biblical commentary, such as Lady Church’s preexistence, incorruptibility, and assumption of incarnate forms in the homiletic and sacramental ministries of ordained men.

Part III of the book looks at the beginnings and purposes of local history-writing. Chapter 7 makes a case for what made local history-writing a popular alternative to other forms of history-writing, particularly universal history but also some other forms as well. It briefly presents the rare occasions on which local histories from the early Islamic centuries say something specific about why they were inspired to compile their work. It then considers some arguments made by other modern historians, for example seeing local history-writing against the context of political fragmentation and ideas about local pride. The chapter then argues that the beginnings of local history-writing have to be understood against the context of emerging ideas about scholarly authority in the Islamic world, particularly the ideas pushed by scholars from Medina, most prominently Mālik b. Anas and his students, offering a historiographical justification for the distinctive authority of the scholars from that town.

Modern proponents of free speech maintain that the value of expression resides in its authenticity-making power, which generates political legitimacy. They simultaneously concede that the value of expression is not without abridgments, no matter how deeply felt or authentically fulfilling such expression may be. Given these commitments, how can free speech be valued for its authenticity-making power, and yet also conditionally regulated? This chapter explores a resolution based on an interpretation of Aquinas’s thought on speech and expression. First, Aquinas clarifies Aristotle’s distinction between vox (animal expression) and loquutio (logical discourse) as an irreducible relationship of explanandum and explanans: loquutio is uniquely disposed to comprehending what is just or unjust within what is pleasant or painful. Second, Thomistic loquutio is directed to truth while permitting false claims as logical-temporal constituents of discourse, requiring above all a “discursive situation” that avoids both contradiction and epistemically unjustified conviction. These characteristics of Thomistic loquutio are supported by his treatment of angelic communication, which is not revelatory so much as consultatory from a second-person perspective and clarificatory from a first-person perspective. Ultimately, this interpretive Thomistic account rejects the modern commitment of authenticity without absolutism, while affirming certain aspects of what makes speech politically valuable.

Chapter 6 demonstrates how Langland’s use of personification allegory, romance tropes, and alliterative verse develops Lady Church as a theologically robust yet devotionally accessible being in Piers Plowman. The chapter argues that Piers Plowman presents Lady Church as a preexistent being who assumes a series of incarnate forms and depicts religious maturation and ecclesiastical reform as a transformed relationship with Lady Church, from dependence on the Church as a maternal figure to a pursuit of her as a promiscuous yet demanding romance heroine.

Thomism is a tradition of thought that has attracted adherents through the centuries. It goes without saying that Thomists recognize the decisive genius of St. Thomas Aquinas. But a commitment to Thomism is not just a commitment to the man, despite whatever admiration we may have for his personal character. Thomism is adopted because it is recognized that the way of thinking involved therein conveys something important, indeed true, about a significant aspect of reality. It is precisely because Aquinas’s way of thought conveys something of the truth that people have been prepared to adopt and defend it through the centuries; hence we have a tradition of thought that is Thomism.

Neoclassical theists reject the traditional divine attributes of impassibility and immutability, holding that God can be affected by the things he has created and is thus changeable. Some claim, for example, that God undergoes changes in emotional state, has desires that can be either satisfied or frustrated, grows in knowledge, and can suffer. I argue that this position rests on a simplistic distortion of perfect being theology grounded in highly contestable intuitions and conceptually sloppy usage of key terms (such as “emotion” and “knowledge”). By contrast, the first-cause theology of Thomism is grounded in a rigorously worked-out metaphysics that neoclassical writers typically engage with only superficially if at all. Nor is “neoclassical” theism really new, but in fact marks a regression to a crudely anthropomorphic conception of God that Western thought moved beyond at the time of Xenophanes.