Pickstock's reading of Plato's Phaedrus and her refutation of Derrida are a cut above. Because Derrida is so obscure in style and terminology, Pickstock's refutation necessarily comes off a bit obscure itself. But she also seems very comfortable with that sort of discourse and makes little effort to speak to those who are untouched by post-modernist drivel. Still, it is a very rich and incisive critique of Derrida, the best I have read.

Many of Pickstock's criticisms of modern philosophy and the evolution of modern languages seem to me to be very original, very accurate, and very important. Unfortunately, she has some gross misunderstandings of medieval philosophy, in particular Duns Scotus and Thomas Aquinas.

For Aquinas, body and soul are *really* distinct. The fact that the two are inseparable in material beings has no bearing on the issue. Wherever there is composition, potency and act must be really distinct. This applies both to the essence/act-of-being distinction and the matter/form distinction. The distinction of matter and form is therefore not a logical one as she claims. This error is astounding in one who claims to follow Thomas.

Her portrayal of Scotus is so flawed that it would take a short book to refute it. But let me get at least to the root of her difficulties, namely the "univocity of being". There is a great danger in learning your Scotism from thomists, because they are so intent on proselytizing Thomas that they rarely make an honest effort to understand alternative formulations. There is a common myth, no doubt reassuring to these thomists, that the golden age of medieval philosophy ended with the death of Aquinas in 1274. (Rather than actually argue the philosophical facts, everyone today seems content with telling these rhetorically charged "histories" of philosophy. They are in fact quite useless.) Everyone before Aquinas is his precursor or opponent. Everyone after him represents a deviation and a failure to understand him. There is a rise, a peak in Aquinas, then a progressive decline. It is a lot more complicated than this. Contrary to Pickstock's claim, Scotus was not primarily addressing Aquinas at all, but Henry of Ghent, who maintained not an analogy of being, but an equivocity of being. Scotus answered that there *had* to be some sense in which being is univocal, notwithstanding the denial of Saint Thomas. (He does not thereby deny that being is also predicated analogously!) But Scotus also meant something different by univocity. Univocity is simply that which suffices for a middle term in a syllogism. It does not have the baggage that Thomists try to foist upon it. And Scotus points out that even those who reject univocal being in fact make constant use of it.

Now Aquinas describes several sorts of "analogy". The "analogy of proportion" is the proportion between essence and act-of-being. It is only within created beings, because there is properly speaking no proportion between essence and act-of-being in God, only identity. The second holds *between* one being and another. This class will later be called the "analogy of attribution." In this latter sort of analogy, there is one "ratio" (aspect) in which two beings are the same and one in which they differ. So this kind of analogy reduces to a combination of univocity and equivocity. Scotus simply isolated this univocal aspect, and showed that it is the foundation of quantitative comparisons of beings. Hence his distinction between the infinite mode of being (God) and the finite mode of being (creatures). Rather than produce these unending mock contests between Scotus and Aquinas, Thomists should spend more time actually reading both philosophers. All of Pickstock's misrepresentations of Scotus flow from this fundamental misunderstanding.

Although I appreciate Pickstock's promotion of the Tridentine Rite, her motivations seem to be misplaced. She seems far too concerned with the social role of religion, as though Christianity were first and foremost about Christians and only then about Christ. A Catholic certainly cannot accept this distortion. The Real Presence for a Catholic must always be the "Body and Blood, Soul and Divinity" of Jesus Christ under the appearance of bread and wine. The Reality follows infallibly from the sacramental action of the ministerial priesthood, not from the priesthood of all believers. This Angelic Bread nourishes and builds up the Mystical Body through the practice of Holy Communion. So the Real Presence has priority over the Mystical Body. And it is precisely this that was forgotten after Vatican II.

This book is flavored with Pickstock's High Church Anglicanism and post-modern agenda. It is worth a read, but Catholics need to be wary when she claims to accurately characterize medieval (i.e. Catholic) thought.