The Three Isomorphisms of David Burrell: Medieval, Modern, and Hybridised accounts of Language and Reality

From its inception, the underlying realism of David Burrell’s (1933-2023) Aquinas:
God and Action has been doubted. 1 This is witnessed to in both the early reviews
and clearly evidenced in the work itself, especially the chapter ‘Truth in Matters
Religious’ and the broader discontent with any quest for certainty that Burrell
expresses. This doubt around Burrell’s realism has only intensified since the birth of
the moniker ‘grammatical thomism’, which situated Burrell’s reading of Aquinas in a
broader trend in theology and ‘revisited’ the realism. 2
This paper will also revisit Burrell’s realism, but instead of finding Burrell’s realism
wanting, it will argue that Aquinas is purposefully ambiguous as to how we might
narrate the relationship between language and reality.