BOOK REVIEWS

The Natural Desire to See God according to St. Thomas Aquinas and His Interpreters. By Lawrence Feingold. Second edition. Ave Maria, Fla.: Sapientia Press, 2010. Pp. 528. $34.95 (paper) ISBN: 978-1-932589-54-2.

Few people would have the historical learning and speculative acumen to undertake a comprehensive re-evaluation of the complex issues raised by Henri de Lubac's famous work from 1946, Surnaturel. De Lubac's controversial treatment of the doctrine of St. Thomas Aquinas concerning the final end of man and the natural desire to see God is challenging not only because it appeals (or sometimes leaves unexamined) a broad swath of texts in Aquinas, but also because it makes ambitious claims about a variety of subsequent interpreters whose speculative thoughts are themselves quite involved and subtle--from Scotus and Cajetan to Suárez and Baius--and whose works are often composed in reaction to one another. Lawrence Feingold has produced a work that attempts to revisit the question of Aquinas's doctrine on this contested topic in such a way as to provide criteria for evaluating subsequent interpretations of St. Thomas's doctrine--from Cajetan to De Lubac--through both historical analysis and speculative comparison.

The book is composed of sixteen chapters and a lengthy conclusion. The opening chapters (1-3) treat Aquinas's analysis of natural desire (appetite, inclination, objects of the will, conditional desires), and many of his texts concerning the natural desire to see God. From the beginning of the book, Feingold establishes a distinction that is central to his interpretation not only of St. Thomas but also of the subsequent debate: an innate inclination or appetite of a nature (which precedes any conscious reflection) versus an elicited desire that arises consciously as a result of knowledge, proceeding out of the natural desire for knowledge of causes. The distinction is not proper to Aquinas, but is one employed commonly by theologians on both sides of the debate, from Scotus to Suárez and including De Lubac. (Thus there is no escape from terminological anachronism.) Throughout his work, Feingold is at pains to show that the distinction has a basis in Aquinas's own texts and that without it his various

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statements on the natural desire cannot be treated adequately. Classically, interpreters of Aquinas from Soto and Toledo down to De Lubac have argued that the natural desire to see God in Aquinas is rooted in the first element of the distinction: an innate tendency naturally inscribed in the inclinations or appetites of created spirit as such for the supernatural. Meanwhile, the mainstream Dominican and Jesuit commentary tradition (Sylvester of Ferrara, Báñez, John of St. Thomas, Vázquez, Suárez) has argued for the latter interpretation: the natural desire to know God in himself pertains to a natural appetite for human knowledge, elicited by the knowledge that there exists a first cause of all things, and by the natural desire to see or know immediately this first cause. The two interpretations differ on substantive issues: Is the natural inclination of created spirit capable by its own powers of tending formally toward the supernatural? Is the human desire for immediate knowledge of God demonstrable by reason or known only by way of revelation? Is this desire conditional (based on the idea of a possibility nature cannot realize itself but which would be wonderful were it possible) or something inscribed in the spirit in such a way that its absence would imply natural failure for the creature, considered precisely with respect to its natural orientation toward an end? Ultimately the answers one gives to these various questions affect deeply how one understands the structural relations of grace and nature in spiritual creatures.

Chapters 4 and 5 treat the doctrines of Scotus and of Denis the Carthusian respectively on the natural desire for God. The contrast elaborated between the two is instructive. The Subtle Doctor held to the presence of an innate inclination in created spirits toward the beatific vision, yet based on a potency for what is not due to the creature. Thus Scotus holds that the souls of infants who die without baptism do not suffer from the privation of the vision of God in limbo, and that their nature is not "due" this grace in view of its fulfillment (48-56). Denis the Carthusian, meanwhile, reacts against Scotus's views on the innate tendency toward the supernatural by affirming that the natural end of the human being must be proportionate to a nature's capacities, so that there cannot be a natural desire to see God. Such a desire is made possible only in grace and is made known only through divine revelation. It cannot be demonstrated as a truth available to natural reason concerning the final end of man (69-72).

Chapters 6-8 amount to a 100-page historical and analytical defense of Cajetan's interpretations of Aquinas, with respect to De Lubac's often textually inaccurate and metaphysically confused treatment of this figure. (This was in fact long overdue, and Dr. Feingold is to be commended for his courage in defying the politically correct certitudes of those who continually rehearse De Lubac's metanarrative in a wholesale and uncritical fashion.) Chapter 6 shows how Cajetan in his De potentia neutra responded to Scotus's arguments concerning the natural desire by recourse to Aquinas's arguments that there cannot exist in

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human nature a natural inclination toward the supernatural as such, and that, for this, new principles of supernatural grace (faith, hope, and charity in particular) are required. (Aquinas's view is analyzed synchronically in multiple texts: 85-97.) From this point on in the book a number of things begin to emerge clearly: that Aquinas's treatment of the natural desire cannot accord completely with that of De Lubac; that De Lubac has in some respects taken a Scotist reading of the question and projected it back onto Aquinas without distinguishing their views sufficiently; that De Lubac misunderstood in part what Cajetan was doing theologically (in maintaining a Thomistic distinction of the natural and supernatural against what he rightly perceived to be an ambiguous distinction in Scotus); and that the Thomistic commentary tradition did not always rush to project alien categories onto Aquinas in this dispute, but, at least in this case, appealed to Aquinas's own terminology concerning natural inclinatio in order to fend off a potential misreading that would itself be anachronistic.

Chapter 7 compounds this sense of the shaking of the foundations, as Feingold examines Cajetan's treatment of "obediential potency." Famously, Gilson, Laporta, and De Lubac claimed that this notion in Aquinas appeals above all to the miraculous as such, and therefore was misapplied by Cajetan in his polemic against Scotism to the arena of the soul's elevation to grace. Feingold demonstrates conclusively through an examination of multiple texts of Aquinas that Cajetan interpreted his thought in largely accurate ways. The notion of "obediential potency" is employed by Aquinas to speak of the passive potency of human nature for elevation in grace to the exercise of the theological virtues, the infused virtues, beatification, and the hypostatic union (136-54). Here especially the book seems to show that a widespread assumption of modern theology is in need of re-evaluation.

Chapter 8 argues (to my mind accurately) that Cajetan misinterpreted Aquinas on the natural desire to see God, particularly in his commentary on question 12, article 1 of the Prima pars, precisely by claiming that the desire was supernatural only, as related to a supernatural object. The subsequent Dominican commentatorial tradition commonly criticized this reading, insisting precisely against Scotus and others. that the natural desire to see God that Aquinas speaks of always pertains to an elicited desire, based on the desire to know the hidden cause of manifest effects. Therefore it is properly natural in both its formal constitution and its end or object, and not supernatural as such. Feingold argues, however (175-79), that in his commentary on question 3, article 8 of the Prima secundae, Cajetan does begin to pursue the solution that the Dominicans after him will understand to be textually and metaphysically compelling.

Chapters 9-12 detail the formation of the mature Scholastic synthesis on this topic, in figures such as Sylvester of Ferrara, Medina, Báñez and Suárez, against the counterinterpretations of Aquinas by Soto and Toledo. Feingold returns to

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the texts of Aquinas on multiple related topics to attempt to demonstrate the bases for the later interpreters' readings. The chapter on Sylvester presents the interpretation of Aquinas that Feingold himself ultimately upholds: The natural desire to see God is an elicited desire, a movement of the will that follows on knowledge. It is necessarily aroused whenever a given good is considered (the good of immediate knowledge of God). The desire is related to the consideration of God as the primary cause who can be known to exist through the medium of creatures, but who remains unknown in himself and who the intellect would naturally wish to see in himself. This desire stems, then, from the natural desire to know rooted in the innate appetite for knowledge (189). It is evidently not specified or ordered immediately to the grace of the beatific vision, but is rather the structural natural precondition for the latter grace, so that the intellect is susceptible (in obediential potency) to elevation to the supernatural order.

In chapters 11 and 12 Feingold argues that Medina, Báñez and Suárez built up a set of reflections complementary to those of Sylvester: Aquinas affirms a twofold end of man, one natural and one supernatural. The former is "proportional" to nature's intrinsic powers and inclinations while the latter is not (236-55). While human beings were created in a state of grace, it is possible for the formal structure of the human nature that we now possess in this economy to have been created in a state of pure nature, with a proportionate natural end alone (223-35). The natural desire to see God is a conditional desire, something that permits man to open up naturally to the grace of the vision of God, not something ordering our nature toward divinization such that the vision is due to nature or necessary in order to complete its intrinsic structure qua natural spirit (261-67). Aquinas's arguments from reason for the possibility of the grace of the beatific vision are not demonstrative arguments, but arguments from fittingness (269-76).

On these various subjects, Feingold's arguments are accompanied by analysis of a dense array of texts of Aquinas, as well as a coherent thread of narrative, explaining the gradual development of a doctrine by later interpreters who made appeal to these texts. The argument is accompanied by helpful analysis of the contrary views of Laporta, De Lubac, and several other influential modern interpreters.

In chapter 13 Feingold notes how Jansenius challenged this Scholastic consensus and returned to the notion of an innate natural tendency or appetite for the supernatural. He then presents at length the views of De Lubac and compares these views with those of Aquinas in chapters 14 and 15. The treatment of De Lubac is insightful and certainly respectful in tone. It is in fact possible that those who are sympathetic to De Lubac's overall interpretation of Aquinas will find the identification of the fundamental points of controversy helpful in various ways. Among other things, Feingold does an excellent job of showing how those who

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do uphold the doctrine of an innate natural tendency or appetite for the supernatural (Scotus, Soto, Toledo, Bellarmine, Jansenius, De Lubac) disagree on many important specific issues and therefore articulate the doctrine in a diversity of ways. Such topics include: the possibility of a state of pure nature; the possibility of a painless limbo for nonbaptized, sinless souls deprived of the beatific vision; the sense in which the final end of grace is due to nature; the way in which the desire to see God might be conditional or "absolute"; the way such a desire might be rationally demonstrable or not. In short, Feingold shows that De Lubac's own position is not really marked by a return--behind 700 years of monolithic commentary to the contrary--to the true Aquinas who should be read in light of the Fathers; it is rather a reading of Aquinas that has many precedents in more recent centuries, itself marked by ways of thinking that are irreducibly neo-Scholastic. Furthermore, De Lubac's own interpretation of the problem tends to understate (or ignore?) that this tradition of interpretation is itself marked by contrasting subdifferences that are subtle but quite theologically significant in consequence.

Feingold underscores some of the acute originality of De Lubac's own position, vis-à-vis Scotus, Soto, or Jansenius. The Jesuit takes the natural desire to see God to be an absolute desire. The intellect and will develop dynamically toward the reception of the vision as their unique ultimate object. This object characterizes radically what they are as natural inclinations because they are constituted by a calling to the supernatural (297-305). Therefore, while God might make a spiritual creature in some possible world in a state of pure nature, the spiritual creatures that exist in our world (ourselves and angels) could not--given our natural structure--have possibly existed without a corresponding offer of grace. The gratuity of grace is safeguarded by De Lubac principally by underscoring the gratuity of creation as such of spiritual creatures in grace (309-14).

Feingold's final chapter and conclusion offer a thorough critique of De Lubac's position in light of the preceding study of Aquinas's own texts and of the commentary tradition that treated the desire as an elicited desire for knowledge of the primary cause. It seems to this reader that the historical and speculative arguments offered in defense of the classical position are utterly compelling and that the critique of De Lubac's interpretation of Aquinas is quite convincing. Others, of course, will be reticent to assent. Cardinal De Lubac's disciples will find a loyal engagement with the book very helpful, however, for it aids one greatly to circumscribe better the shape of this multisided and complex debate. Feingold identifies a host of important and subtle theological and historical questions, and his interpretation of the controversy suggests important consequences for our rethinking of the themes of nature and grace.

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One aspect in the study that is underemphasized or that could be considered an important addendum is a consideration of the effects of sin upon the attainment of the natural ends of the human person (natural knowledge and natural love of God). Aquinas is quite adamant about the absence of a capacity in fallen human nature to love God above all things even naturally--in the absence of grace (STh I-II, q. 109, a. 3). He also in various places minimizes the natural capacities of the intellect to contemplate God in most men in virtue of the consequences of sin, ignorance, and cultural limitations. Consequently, if the final natural end of man (the imperfect beatitude of natural knowledge and love of God) is preserved in the economy of redemption, it is also in some real sense restored therein. This means that even if Feingold is right in identifying a more nuanced account of the structure of nature and grace in Aquinas than De Lubac sees, existentially even the natural order is only obtainable in its relative integrity under and in grace. The unity of the two orders (of nature and grace) in the exercise of the economy suggests a unified destiny: the natural ordering of the person toward God cannot function rightly except within and by grace. To say this is not to agree with De Lubac's reading of Aquinas on the final end (to the contrary), but it does show that there is a point of irenic contact between him and a thinker like Sylvester of Ferrara: Ultimately it is only in the calling by grace to the beatific vision that we recover fully even our own natural self and its theocentric tendencies.

Henri de Lubac's Surnaturel thesis was influential, but it is not true to say that his argument (or perhaps more accurately, his constellation of intuitions) was universally compelling. It was and continues to be irreducibly controversial, and this for reasons that are speculative or metaphysical, but also textual and historical. Part of the power and beauty of De Lubac's writing stems from his capacity synthetically to present a host of historical and literary sources. But he almost never presents a complete historical analysis of those sources themselves, sufficiently cited and analyzed in their respective contexts, and arranged diachronically and in relation to subsequent authors and controversies. Even less does he seek systematically to disclose the speculative presuppositions of the thinkers whose ideas he cites, while arranging these speculative views in relation to one another and in refutation of the true and false propositions of the speculative arguments of his adversaries. This is why Feingold's book is important and why it challenges the thesis of Surnaturel so effectively. Feingold returns to the sources De Lubac so often merely alludes to, from Aquinas to Jansenius, and presents a coherent, clear historical and speculative analysis of their various treatments of the problem of the "natural desire to see God." Of course, the controversy surrounding Surnaturel stemmed not only from the content of the theological argument advanced, but also from the form of the method employed (historical ressourcement, as opposed to neo-Scholastic

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presentation). Feingold's work is an interesting reflection of this background: the theological issue being touched upon is treated by recourse to a highly ambitious synthesis of Scholastic and historical methodologies. Interestingly, Feingold has produced what is simultaneously an historical ressourcement of the Thomist Scholastic commentary tradition and a veritable contemporary exercise of the Scholastic speculation which that tradition embodies. Whatever the imperfections of his work, it represents a highly respectable achievement.

Thomas Joseph White, O.P.

Dominican House of Studies
Washington, D.C.

`           In Defense of Common Sense: Lorenzo Valla's Humanist Critique of Scholastic Philosophy. By Lodi Nauta. I Tatti Studies in Italian Renaissance History. Cambridge, Mass., and London: Harvard University Press, 2009. Pp. 401 + xiii. $39.95 (cloth). ISBN: 978-0-674-03269-1.

From its inception with Georg Voigt's Die Wiederbelebung des klassischen Alterthums oder, das erste Jahrhundert des Humanismus (1859) and Jacob Burckhardt's Die Kultur der Renaissance in Italien (1860), the modern study of Italian humanism has labored under a curious burden. Straining to find men who were emancipated from traditional religious authorities, the first students of the Italian Renaissance made their subjects into good liberal Protestants. Although scholars as diverse as Giuseppe Toffanin, Paul Oskar Kristeller, Henri de Lubac, and Edgar Wind have repeatedly challenged such prejudices since the 1950s, historians of philosophy have largely ignored their valiant efforts to return the humanists to their native soil. Such historians, like Wilhelm Dilthey and Ernst Cassirer before them, still imagine the chief moral values of the Renaissance to be individualism and secularism. Lodi Nauta's study of Lorenzo Valla's The Pruning of Dialectic and Philosophy (Repastinatio dialectice et philosophie) is a wonderful response to this ongoing prejudice about the philosophical significance of Italian humanism. Drawing upon but surpassing the previous studies of Gianni Zippel, Charles Trinkaus, Riccardo Fubini, and Scott Blanchard, In Defense of Common Sense is a welcome contribution to our understanding of medieval, Renaissance, and modern philosophy alike.

This is no mean feat. Lorenzo Valla (1406-57), perhaps best known as the man who showed the Donation of Constantine to be a forgery, is a bit of a

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chameleon, having been linked to a motley crew of philosophers including Francis Bacon, Rene Descartes, David Hume, Martin Heidegger, and the late anti-essentialist Wittgenstein. One need not ponder long to understand why historians of philosophy have placed Valla in such mixed company: they have defined the humanist less by his arguments and more by their shared prejudice against the alleged "essentialism" of Scholasticism. Nauta's work is a healthy corrective to this trend. As he drily remarks, "one must be familiar with the scholastic tradition to evaluate Valla's program, and this understandably is not the forte of Neo-Latinists and literary historians" (3). Nauta does note, however, that any study of Lorenzo Valla "will likely be viewed with suspicion by not a few of my colleagues in medieval philosophy" (ix). Such scholars--as myself for example--might see Valla's attempted demolition of Aristotelian metaphysics as misguided at best; indeed, they might wish that such a book not be published at all. At the same time, Nauta imagines that many of his colleagues in the field of Renaissance humanism might be similarly suspicious, but for very different reasons. Enamored of the supposed modernity of the Renaissance humanists, they might very well be angered by a book that places Valla "on the philosophical rack"--as Nauta often does. Steering a fine course between these two extremes, In Defense of Common Sense steadfastly refuses to divorce Valla from his historical context and place him "on the road of modern rationalist empiricism" (144). In doing so, it subjects Valla to a strong but fair criticism, a task that has often been ignored by humanists who possess only a nodding acquaintance with Scholasticism.

Nauta's study is composed of eight chapters in three parts. The first part introduces the reader to Valla's attack on Aristotelian-Scholastic metaphysics in three chapters that explore Valla's sometimes enlightening, but often frustrating, criticisms of the Tree of Porphyry, the Scholastic doctrine of transcendental terms, and the Aristotelian categories. The second part introduces Valla's anthropology, with chapters devoted to his assault on Aristotelian psychology and natural philosophy, his account of the virtues, and his analysis of Scholastic Trinitarian theologies. The third part concerns what we might call the more methodological aspects of Valla's philosophy, namely, his understanding of propositions, demonstration, dialectic, and argumentation. In Defense of Common Sense concludes with a particularly interesting investigation of claims that Valla anticipated the "ordinary language philosophy" of Ludwig Wittgenstein, J. L. Austin, and Gilbert Ryle (269-91).

Nauta's stated aim is to offer a "comprehensive discussion" of Valla's attempted reform of Aristotelian Scholasticism based on a "philosophically-informed analysis" of the entire text of the Repastinatio in its several versions, with appropriate forays into other works such as Valla's dialogue on the highest good, De vero bono. In this respect, Nauta does not hesitate to admit that the

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outcome of his analysis is "not always flattering for Valla" and that the arguments that he levels against Aristotle and the Scholastics are "often poor, inconsistent, and unfair" (4). Nauta's second aim is to evaluate existing interpretations of Valla, especially the claim that Valla's project was inspired by William of Ockham's own attempts to rethink Aristotle's Organon. This, incidentally, is one of the few things upon which Valla's many supporters seem to agree, so Nauta's argument that Valla's program "differs significantly in aim, approach, and argument" from Ockham's own is welcome. The final aim of In Defense of Common Sense is to offer a genuinely philosophical assessment of Valla's project: "Just as the assessment of the historical significance of Valla's program depends on one's wider views on the relationship between scholasticism and humanism, so an evaluation of its philosophical significance depends of [sic] one's view of philosophy" (7). In other words, even if Valla is presented as an anti-philosopher, his work is still shot through with philosophical assumptions. If Nauta believes that Valla's diatribe against the excesses of theoretical jargon is "vitally important," he also believes that the controversy between Scholasticism and humanism "goes to the heart of philosophy itself" (xi).

It is impossible to summarize the varied topics in Nauta's study; in addition to those I have already mentioned, it contains enlightening discussions of the predicables, universals, privation, negation, the nature of definitions and propositions, abstract and concrete terms, the origin of language, the immortality of the soul, sensation, the differences between animal and vegetative souls, the relative merits of Stoicism and Epicureanism, the nature of virtue, and the formal rules for induction. Not surprisingly, a work of such richness contains much to interest readers of The Thomist. Most provocatively, Nauta in his spirited attempt to distance Valla from William of Ockham suggests that Valla's treatment of the categories as modes of predication is compatible with Aquinas's own approach to the analogous predication of esse as described in his expositio of Aristotle's Metaphysics (lect. 9 [Marietti ed., 890] [18-19]). In fact, Nauta often compares Valla to Aquinas, even noting the possibility of influence at one point (68-70), but usually showing how Valla differs from the Angelic Doctor (79, 117, 132). Historians of late medieval Scholasticism might also be interested to learn that Valla's admittedly strained attempt to reduce the ten categories and six transcendental terms of Scholastic philosophy to three categories of substance, quality, and action unified by the single transcendental term res harkens back to the great importance of that term in the metaphysics of Henry of Ghent (298 n. 4). Despite these tantalizing suggestions, the general impression one gets from Nauta's exploration of the Repastinatio is that Valla gained the larger part of his knowledge of Scholasticism by hearsay. Even the authors that he cites, such as Peter of Spain and Paul of Venice, do little to impede--or even affect--the forward march of his anti-Scholastic rhetoric. Their relationship to

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Valla's arguments seems tangential at best. One also gathers from reading Nauta's study that Valla willfully ignored some rather straightforward objections to his views, as when the humanist denies the analogical predication of the term unum (cf. 65-67) necessitated by the Aristotelian understanding that one is the principle of number, or when he offers some rather obtuse reasons for denying that plants have souls (133) or, perhaps best of all, when he remains unaware that his account of the Trinity is Sabellian (194-95).

Of course, one can always quibble with the details when an author has included so much in a single book. I would have preferred that Nauta turn to the more recent studies of Jos Decorte, Carlos Steel, or Juan Carlos Flores for his understanding of Henry of Ghent, or to the work of Armand Maurer for his knowledge of William of Ockham, but the older secondary sources that he uses--such as Henri Paulus and William Courtenay--are still very solid and, in any event, do not alter the substance of his argument. I would have also liked to see him qualify his occasional remarks that Valla preferred an Augustinian account of the soul to the Aristotelian one (129, 149). Still, three themes emerge from Nauta's study with particular clarity, and make the book well worth studying even for those without a professional interest in Italian humanism. In the first place, Nauta skillfully illustrates how polemical conceptions of Scholasticism have unduly influenced scholars of the Renaissance. He consistently shows, for example, how the claim that a thinker "loathes metaphysical speculation" conceals a number of metaphysical assumptions. Nauta's frequent exposure of Valla's vitriol should also give pause to anyone who imagines that humanism was somehow permissive and tolerant, while Scholasticism was rigidly dogmatic. Conversely, Nauta's study of Valla implicitly raises a question of great importance for contemporary Scholasticism, namely, the normative value of Aristotle for philosophy. If Valla's attempt to demolish the foundations of Aristotelian-Scholastic metaphysics, ethics, and natural philosophy must be judged a failure, his attempt to transform Aristotelian logic into a rhetorically and grammatically sensitive dialectic tailored to the practical needs of public debate is certainly intriguing, especially when we notice that many of the features that Nauta valorizes in Valla--especially his great attentiveness to linguistic usage--can be found among the greatest Scholastics. Taken together, these two themes allow for the emergence of a third, namely, the possibility of a stronger connection between the humanist attention to rhetoric and traditional metaphysics than has yet been acknowledged, especially by historians of humanism. In this respect, the Scholastic philosopher might wish to expand the influence of the old masters by returning to their own analyses of the canons of Ciceronian or Quintilian rhetoric, or even create new syntheses based on modern concepts of ordinary language philosophy, as can be seen in the recent emergence of Analytic Thomism.

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These are issues of no small concern for contemporary Scholastic philosophers. If studies of the Renaissance have labored to cast off the yoke of past prejudices, it is all the more amazing how easily Catholic theologians and philosophers indulge in these very prejudices. Many Aristotelians have long imagined that Scholasticism is a worldview entirely sufficient for understanding all aspects of human society, while many humanists have just as easily imagined that thinkers of the caliber of Thomas Aquinas, Henry of Ghent, John Duns Scotus, or Francisco Suárez have nothing to offer the modern Catholic philosopher. But restorationist and progressive alike share a myth of the so-called "waning" of the Middle Ages; indeed, the only thing that separates the one from the other is that they have reversed the terms of an otherwise identical genealogy. For the one, Thomas Aquinas is the summit from which all fall away; for the other, he is the nadir from which all struggle to escape. With such an aggressive rhetoric overdetermining both side of the contemporary debate about Scholasticism, a sensible book on its interaction with humanism during the Renaissance is a welcome balm.

Trent Pomplun

Loyola University Maryland
Baltimore, Maryland

Nouvelle théologie and Sacramental Ontology: A Return to Mystery. By Hans Boersma. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009. Pp. xvi + 336. $120.00 (cloth). ISBN 978-0-19-922964-2.

In this book, Hans Boersma argues that various currents of twentieth-century thought encompassed by the term nouvelle théologie can all be understood as attempts to argue for a "sacramental ontology." What is at issue is not the theology of sacraments, but the sacramentality of ontology, that is, the capacity of all of reality to contain and lead to the divine. The author's thesis, expressed in clear and penetrating prose, is that the nouvelle theologians (in particular, Henri Bouillard, Marie-Dominique Chenu, Yves Congar, Jean Daniélou, Henri de Lubac, and Hans Urs von Balthasar) all wanted "to recover a sacramental ontology" and so to promote a "return to mystery" (viii). This sacramental pattern is found in a number of different fields of theology and is expressed in a variety of ways: the literal meaning of Scripture sacramentally contains the figurative; secular history sacramentally contains the sacred; nature sacramentally

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contains the supernatural. Boersma holds that these nouvelle theologians were promoting this sacramental ontology in opposition to what they regarded as neo-Thomist "extrinsicism," which included a theology of grace that builds on nature while remaining extrinsic to it, instead of elevating and perfecting it from within. This group of theologians, in their methodological return to classic patristic and medieval sources (ressourcement), held that with this extrinsicism, neo-Thomism (unlike St. Thomas's own work) had unwittingly conceded to the Enlightenment the notion of an independent realm of nature (5). This in turn made belief in God difficult for people in the modern world by relegating him to a remote realm that is irrelevant to life in the world. For Boersma, the nouvelle théologie wanted to save the faith from rationalism, at times by saving St. Thomas from neo-Thomism.

Although the author does not present his book primarily as an exposition of his own theological opinions, he clearly has sympathy for the overall outlook of the nouvelle theologians and for many of their views (though he critiques some of them). In particular, the ideas of Henri de Lubac seem to be particularly favored, providing the leitmotif of the book. De Lubac is discussed in every chapter (unlike any of the other five figures), and is spared even mild or oblique criticism, unlike Bouillard (113), Chenu (116, 144-48), or Daniélou (180, 190). Viewpoints opposed to the movement are presented soberly and fairly, albeit rather briefly. Boersma's aim is to explain the nouvelle théologie, including the contexts of the disputes surrounding it, not to offer full coverage of all sides of those disputes.

The book has eight chapters. The first and introductory one, "The Rupture between Faith and Life," presents the main concerns of the nouvelle théologie as well as a concise account of the principal controversies surrounding it. Among the insightful analyses that the author offers is the contrast he notes between the nouvelle théologie and modernism. He points out that ressourcement was indispensable for the nouvelle théologie, but foreign to modernism; he also shows that, unlike such modernists as Loisy and Tyrrell, the nouvelle theologians saw God at work in history and in human discourse. One of the controversies covered is the dispute provoked by de Lubac's Surnaturel over the natural desire for God, which is presented briefly but incisively.

Chapter 2, "Precursors to a Sacramental Ontology," presents four chief influences for the later proponents of the nouvelle théologie: the early-nineteenth-century theologian of the Catholic Tübingen school, Johann Adam Möhler; and the late-nineteenth-/early-twentieth-century figures Maurice Blondel, Joseph Maréchal, and Pierre Rousselot. Boersma shows that their ideas led the nouvelle théologie movement to see historical categories and the human subject as central, and to critique rationalistic truth-claims in favor of more mystical ways of knowing.

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Chapters 3 through 7 are each organized around a theme present in the work of two or more of the featured theologians. The third and fourth chapters concentrate on the relation between nature and the supernatural. Chapter 3 engages de Lubac and Bouillard, beginning with De Lubac's seminal efforts, in Surnaturel and in other writings, to show how theology should favor the idea that humans are naturally ordered to a supernatural end. Boersma explains that for de Lubac, humans are never (in the world as it actually exists) without the desire for God; but they cannot actually attain God without his help. De Lubac opposed the idea that humans have ever existed in a state of "pure nature" with their own natural end, apart from the natural desire for God. He saw the idea of "pure nature" as a neo-Thomist corruption, in that it isolates man from the God who created him. Boersma goes on to discuss Bouillard's ideas, particularly on the development of doctrine, showing how the historical process plays its own role in leading doctrine toward an ever-closer analogical knowledge of God. Boersma's treatment includes a somewhat sympathetic discussion of some objections to these ideas, including the charge that Bouillard's teaching leads to relativism.

Whereas the third chapter deals with an ascent of the natural to the supernatural according to de Lubac and Bouillard, the fourth chapter explores how both Balthasar and Chenu speak of the divine descent upon creatures, the coming of the supernatural to the natural. Both Balthasar and Chenu (like de Lubac and Bouillard) see the supernatural within creation, and oppose the neo-Scholastic separation of grace and nature. Boersma shows how Balthasar, influenced by de Lubac's ressourcement of the Fathers and his "approach to the nature-supernatural relationship" (118), rejected the factual existence of any "pure nature" apart from grace, seeing in the creature an analogous, sacramental participation in the divine. Boersma then describes Chenu's own recovery of older theological insights, chiefly from the tradition of high Scholasticism. Chenu saw theology as a connatural participation in God's own knowledge, making faith an essential component of theology, and making the practice of theology a kind of spirituality. This led him to seek to recover a kind of mysticism that goes beyond the ordinary grace of the theological virtues, without being the reserve of a gifted elite. Boersma shows that despite promoting this recovery of mysticism, Chenu maintained a fundamental optimism about modernity. Indeed, he approved of the medieval emphasis on the autonomy of the created order, the "'desacralizing' of a previously 'sacramentalized' world" that Chenu believed simply becomes more pronounced with modernism. Boersma finds it "difficult to reconcile this interest of Chenu to his more sacramental Dionysian analogical approach" (145); Chenu's commitment to a sacramental ontology remains somewhat ambiguous.

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The fifth chapter explores the attempts by de Lubac and Daniélou to revive a spiritual interpretation of Scripture for the present day. Boersma characterizes De Lubac's recovery of patristic and medieval interpretation, including the multivalent and spiritual interpretation of the Bible, as a "sacramental hermeneutic," in which the spiritual meaning presupposes the historical, countering both the "positivist mindset behind historicist exegesis" (152) and the neo-Thomist exclusion of such multivalence. Boersma then presents Daniélou's own retrieval of an older style of biblical interpretation. Whereas de Lubac had sought a recovery of the patristic and medieval four-fold sense of scripture, Daniélou focused on typological exegesis, in which the Old Testament points toward the New. In Boersma's view, though Daniélou and de Lubac differed in their appropriation of older forms of interpretation, they both sought to highlight God's action in the world, employing a sacramental reading of reality.

The sixth chapter deals with the efforts of several theologians to show how history informs theology while having God as its origin, center, and goal (191). Three main topics are covered: Daniélou's attempt to connect "cosmic and Christian revelation"; theological accounts of the development of doctrine by Chenu, Louis Charlier, and de Lubac; and Congar's influential work on tradition. The seventh chapter concerns the ecclesiology of de Lubac and Congar. Boersma shows that both of them, while at odds in some ways (e.g., de Lubac's break from the Concilium group, including Congar, to help found Communio), in fact uphold the sacramentality of the Church and of all creation.

Boersma's concluding chapter, "The Future of Ressourcement," summarizes his own insights into the nouvelle théologie movement, showing its place in the history of doctrine and proposing how its concerns may be further developed, including a reflection on its ecumenical implications (Boersma himself coming from the Reformed tradition). This wrap-up (seven pages) is very brief, and does not include any extensive analysis of the movement; indeed, the author admits that the "scope of the book was not to evaluate the import of nouvelle théologie, but to describe" its "shared theological sensibility" (289). The conclusion may leave the reader wishing that the author had undertaken a more comprehensive evaluation of the merits of this sacramental ontology for theology today. Without attempting such an evaluation here, we can suggest that there are three difficulties in particular--touched upon in Boersma's work--that will need more thorough attention if one wishes to develop this theological outlook further today.

First, in each form of sacramental ontology described, the supernatural and nature become more closely linked; if the emphasis remains on how tightly interlinked they are, does it become more difficult to distinguish them from each other? Does it thereby become impossible to account for the transcendent at work in the world? Boersma himself notes that some of the nouvelle theologians began to discern these kinds of problems in theology after Vatican II. In the

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early- and mid-twentieth century, they had focused on rejecting "extrinsicism." However, the opposite problem of "immanentism" (the denial of "any transcendent impact on historical cause and effect" [11]) increasingly became a concern at least to de Lubac (254, 257, 262-65). Similarly, Daniélou (180) and Balthasar (11) both expressed a concern over post-Vatican-II "historicism," in contrast to their earlier emphasis on making sure that history would be taken seriously in theology.

A second, related question concerns sin. How do the various forms of sacramental ontology allow for the possibility and reality of sin? After all, do not aspects of created existence point decidedly away from God? Boersma shows how de Lubac, in a late work, saw the need to account for "human sinfulness" in the consideration of the grace/nature relation (263), emphasizing this to a degree not present in his earlier work. This is one of the few places that the issue makes an appearance in Boersma's text.

The third issue regards how St. Thomas's work should be interpreted. In particular, how is the Thomistic commentatorial tradition to be received? Boersma notes that the nouvelle théologie either bypassed the commentators in their interpretation of the Common Doctor, or used that tradition in a new way. The author's treatment is more than adequate for the kind of book he has written, offering resources for further investigation where needed (see, e.g., 95 n. 31); still, more analysis and reflection is required regarding how a fuller ressourcement might include the way Thomas's work has been received by the Church through the commentators.

In the end, Boersma's achievement is to draw together a number of related strands of twentieth-century Catholic theology, synthesizing them under the rubric of a "sacramental ontology." In so doing, he clarifies a recent pivotal turn in theology, suggesting a trajectory for future reflection. However, the merit of Boersma's book is not limited to its broad-brush insights. It provides enough background and references related to the ideas and disputes surrounding the nouvelle théologie that the interested reader can easily pursue a given issue more deeply. This should make the work useful as a part of graduate (or advanced undergraduate) courses in the theology of grace, theological anthropology, or the history of doctrine. Specialists as well as those with a more general interest in theology should find the author's insights and overarching thesis worth engaging. Let us hope that an edition priced for a broader audience will soon become available.

Bryan Kromholtz, O.P.

Dominican School of Philosophy and Theology
Berkeley, California

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Le Père, Alpha et Oméga de la vie trinitaire. By Emmanuel Durand, O.P. Paris: Cerf,  2008. Pp. 300. 33.25 (paper). ISBN  978-2-204-08622-6.

Emmanuel Durand's Le Père Alpha et Oméga de la vie trinitaire, a tour de force of profound and original theological investigation, will be of particular interest to Thomists for its groundbreaking research on Bonaventure's and Aquinas' contrasting accounts of God the Father.

Durand joins an astute reading of Scripture with a penetrating analysis of Aquinas's and Bonaventure's views of the Father, in order to develop his own portrait of the Father as the Alpha and Omega of the life of the Trinity and the created economy. He proposes adhering to a Thomistically inclined "doubly relational" conception (based on paternity and spiration) of the person of the Father, which resituates Bonaventure's guiding intuition in the created order, by taking note of the fact that innascibility and primacy overlap an unfathomable plenitude (244). In this work, Durand describes an eschatological tension that the Father exerts on the whole created order, as soon as he is revealed by Christ, the Son (11-12, 51-148). He shows that the Father is the Alpha and Omega of creation and of our divinization and that he polarizes the whole economy of salvation, because the first initiative and ultimate finality belong to him (18-19, 44-45, 85, 142-44,147-48, 245). In Durand's words, the ultimate end of spiritual creatures properly designates the very person of the Father, and our participation in divine life is revealed to be a father-to-son relationship (35, 140-41).

Another theme highlighted in this book is the transparency of the Son in revealing the Father. Pointing to the parable of the prodigal son, Durand (277) observes that the charity that Jesus showed to sinners manifests the Father's charity, for "he who has seen [Jesus] has seen the Father" (John 14:9). Durand also offers a compelling insight concerning an abiding hiddenness of the Father, despite his being revealed by Christ (14-15). He concludes that a theology of the Father must remain incomplete in a certain way, in patient expectation and suspense; without this appreciation, Christian Christocentrism is sometimes accompanied by a univocal resituation of eschatology in the present that does not respect the importance of the yet unrealized eschatology, consequently leaving the Father in an ambiguous indifference (45-46, 103-4).

This work proposes a fresh look at the theology of God the Father by moving from "the Father's final role in Christian eschatology to the theology of the Father in his Trinitarian mystery, viewed from the angle both of his primacy and of his relations" (11). Durand notes that the anthropological approach, the model most commonly adopted today, has been called into question on account of the collapse of the father's place in the family and in society (9). Another approach particularly common today, arising from interreligious dialogue and

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thus aiming to escape the limits of a twentieth-century Christocentrism, results in an "undetermined" theocentrism, where God is not attached to any particular historical revelation. In place of exaggerated Christocentrism and agnostic indeterminism, Durand proposes a Trinitarian theocentrism that resituates Christocentrism in its proper place (9-10). He offers an original approach in clarifying the Father's primacy in the Trinity by examining his place as the final end of all creatures. Accordingly, this work is divided into two parts: (1) "The Revelation of the Father and the Eschatological Tension Toward Him" and (2) "The Father in His Mystery, Alpha and Omega of the Immanent Trinity." Durand introduces these two parts in a single chapter (ch. 1) in which he lays out the theological issues at stake in a theology of God the Father, as well as possibilities and limits of its lines of development.

In the first part, Durand offers a reflection on the revelation of the Father and the eschatological pull that this revelation exerts on those who receive the revelation. He begins, in chapter 2, with the manifestation of the Father through the only-begotten Son, especially as recorded in St. John's Gospel, in order to grasp the Son's eternal relation to the Father in the Trinity. Durand then examines the significance of the movement in the prologue of John's Gospel from the relative pair "Word-God" to the relative pair "Only Begotten-Father." He proceeds, in chapter 3, to a consideration of our filial communion with the Father, where he ponders our inclusion in the Son, the Church in communion with the Father, and the eschatological gathering of the children of God. This leads into a reflection, in chapter 4, on the Father's eschatological sovereignty. Here Durand engages in a rich meditation on the Paschal Lamb and the Father on his throne in the book of Revelation, and develops a Christocentrism reordered according to its finality in God the Father. Durand includes a critique of Rahner and Balthasar regarding the axiom "the economic Trinity is the immanent Trinity and vice versa," which can lead to Christocentrism that lacks the paternal finality of the whole order of salvation. He explains that there must be an "eschatological hiatus" between the Trinity and its historical engagement, that is, between the immanent Trinity and the economic Trinity; the identity is not pure and simple (111-13). Chapter 5, which completes the first part of the book, treats of the eschatological vision of the Father-- specifically: the glory of the Father in the Word in John's Gospel, Irenaeus' account of man's growing capacity to see God as the Father as he is gradually revealed in the Word, Gregory of Nyssa's understanding of God's incomprehensibility and the eternal newness of desire all the way to union, the complementary images of beatitude in word and Eucharist, and the Father as the final end of the beatific vision.

The second part of this work, building on the first, pursues a speculative examination of the Father in the immanent Trinity. In chapter 6, Durand traces the development of the notion of the Father's innascibility, that is, his being

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without origin. He reports on Peter Lombard's reading of Sts. Augustine and Hilary on innascibility, and the creative interpretations of Lombard's dossier by William of Auxerre and Alexander of Hales. Although Lombard reads Augustine and Hilary as convergent, by the time of Alexander of Hales's commentary on Lombard's Sentences, there are already two camps as regards innascibility: the Augustinian camp which maintains that innascibility is strictly a negation (i.e., the denial that the Father proceeds from any principle), and the Hilarian camp which holds that innascibility bears the positive meaning of primacy or authority (i.e., being the principle of other divine persons).

Chapter 7 undertakes a detailed investigation of Bonaventure's theology of God the Father. In this original research, Durand exposits Bonaventure's understanding of the Father's primacy, where innascibility receives strong emphasis and looms over (surplombe) the Father's relations of paternity and spiration (213). Bonaventure is thus a representative of the Hilarian camp par excellence, and he is squarely in the Franciscan school that views the divine hypostasis as constituted by emanation rather than by relation. In chapter 8, Durand examines Aquinas's theology of God the Father. He shows that for Aquinas the concept of relation is the key to a coherent account of the Trinity, and God the Father's hypostasis must be constituted by the relation of paternity, that is, by his relation to the Son. Innascibility, by contrast, must be a sheer negation and does not include in its meaning the idea of being the principle of another divine person. Aquinas rejects the notion that the Father has primacy or is constituted in some way by his innascibility. This places him unequivocally in the Augustinian camp as regards the Father's innascibility.

In chapter 9, the final chapter of the book, Durand sketches out his own theology of God the Father. His approach might be described as based on Aquinas, with the integration of elements of Bonaventure's paternal primacy, all taken from an eschatological perspective. Durand intends to avoid certain weaknesses he finds in both of these great masters. On one hand, "it is not possible to maintain with Bonaventure that the hypostasis of the Father is 'posited' by virtue of his mere primacy or that his fontal plenitude 'outclasses' the two divine processions of the Son and the Spirit" (272). After all, "this God does not correspond to the God revealed in Jesus Christ, and his primacy looming over all actual fecundity would only be a vague conceptual projection, without name or personal identity" (272-73). On the other hand, it is not fitting to maintain with Aquinas "that the hypostasis of the Father is 'constituted' by his lone relation to the Son" (273). Durand is concerned that Aquinas's insistence on the Father's being constituted only by his relation of paternity, which follows from his understanding of a divine person as a subsistent relation, might reduce the Father's identity to his paternity with respect to the Son. This, observes Durand, is unacceptable because God's incomprehensibility remains normative

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in the background of the whole New Testament (247-48), and the Father is determined not only by his relation to the Son but also by his relation to the Holy Spirit (271). Paternity does not suffice to describe the Father because "the mysterious identity of the Spirit manifests that the original plenitude of the Father is not exhausted in the lone generation of the Son" (ibid.).

Durand embraces the Thomistic centrality of the concept of relation, which offers a coherent account of the unity and distinction of the divine persons, and he develops an understanding of divine paternal primacy from the divine missions, which lead us back to the Father. At the heart of the Trinity, all begins and ends in the Father, who is the unfathomable and inexhaustible source of the whole Trinitarian life; in every divine act the first initiative belongs to the Father (244, 249). Therefore, "to envisage the Father's primacy, we need simply to trace back from the missions of the Son and the Spirit up to the origin of their being sent into the world, namely, to the Father's initiative" (249). With respect to the eschatological role of the other divine persons, "the return to the Father is constitutive of the persons themselves of the Son and the Spirit" (256-58). Durand rules out "all undue subordination within the Trinity" in taking the attraction of the Son and the Holy Spirit in the return to the Father to be "a finality without unrealized potentiality just as their origin from the Father is an origin without becoming" (258). As Durand has it, the Son and Holy Spirit are revealed not only to be originated but also "truly to be persons that 'assume' and 'ratify' their relation of origin" (ibid.). That is, "by their eternal response to the Father, the Son and the Spirit freely assume their relation of origin to the Father" (263). Even a certain "gratuity" comes into play in the life of the Trinity in order to manifest that "throughout the entire necessary unfolding of the intra-divine life, the Father retains his personal primacy and eternal 'initiative' of gift with respect to the Son and the Spirit" (266-67).

Also, in this last chapter, Durand proposes but does not develop two provocative conceptual advances in Trinitarian theology, namely, an understanding of person that, while grounded in substance, extends to "a much broader existential basis," and the expression of the interpersonal plenitude of divine life as "the gift of love according to multiform relations included within the strict relations of origin" (259).

The strict Thomist might be reluctant to welcome the author's assertions that the Son consents to his generation or responds to his generation with gratitude toward the Father (39, 257-58, 263, 266-67) or that the return to the Father is constitutive of the persons themselves of the Son and Holy Spirit (256-58). For if the Son makes some kind of response, it would seem to suggest that the Son is not active in being generated and must therefore respond "afterwards." Fully aware of this, Durand quotes (262 n. 2) Aquinas's explanation that for the Son, to be generated is an action: "by one and the same operation, the Father

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generates and the Son is born; but this operation is in the Father and the Son according to different relations" (I Sent., d. 20, q. 1, a. 1, ad 1). And Durand does not take this filial response to be in the notional act of the Son's being generated but rather in the essential act of concomitant love (258). However, this raises questions as to how the return to the Father could then be constitutive of the Son and the Holy Spirit. For Aquinas clarifies that the Father's reception of the Son's essential concomitant love is not a reception of anything in the real order, just as there is no reception of anything in the real order when the Father loves himself (I Sent., d. 10, q. 1, a. 2, ad 3). For the strict Thomist, what is common must not be confused with what is proper and constitutive of distinct persons.

Since Aquinas was anxious to reject the attribution of primacy or fontal plenitude to the Father, the strict Thomist might also hesitate to embrace Durand's integration of this Bonaventurian element into his theology of the Father. We might note two small points of emphasis in this regard. First, Durand emphasizes incomprehensibility as a characteristic of the Father in particular (17, 20-21). While this is by no means incompatible with Aquinas's view, wherever Aquinas discusses the incomprehensibility of a divine person we find him affirming that the Son is just as incomprehensible as the Father (I Sent., d. 9, q. 1, prol. [the Son's generation]; In Ioan. 1:18 [lect. 11] [the Son's invisibility]; in In ad Heb. 1:4 [lect. 3] [the Son's name]; De Rationibus Fidei, ch. 6 [the Incarnation]; and In ad Eph. 3:19 [lect. 5] [Christ's charity]). It is characteristic of Aquinas's theology strongly to underscore the Son's equality.

Second, in order to avoid the reduction of the Father to his paternity, Durand maintains that "the mysterious identity of the Spirit manifests that the original plenitude of the Father is not exhausted in the lone generation of the Son" (271). While little effort is required to give this a favorable interpretation, if we accept the kenotically suggestive term "exhaust," it would be important to affirm that generation does exhaust the Father's plenitude so that the Son can be understood truly to be equal to the Father; the Holy Spirit would not somehow use up the rest of the Father's plenitude but rather would again exhaust the Father's plenitude according to the order of processions in a knowing and loving being where the communication of being is perfect. Here we can see that one might be forced to choose between Bonaventure's preference for fontal plenitude and Aquinas's central placement of relation, which though perhaps less romantic and dashing is brilliantly coherent and ordered. For the strict Thomist, the connection between generation and spiration should be developed by unpacking the fact that spiration is virtually included in generation.

Le Père Alpha et Oméga de la vie trinitaire offers an important contribution in articulating the eschatological dimension of the economy of salvation as revelatory of the Trinitarian mystery in itself: the innascible Father in the Trinity

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is the Alpha and Omega of creation and of our divinization, and he polarizes the whole economy of salvation, because the first initiative and ultimate finality belong to him. Well founded on Scripture and patristic and medieval sources, this work takes up relevant modern questions, such as the relation between the economic and immanent Trinity; Christocentrism versus theocentrism; the Father's relation to the Holy Spirit; and the concepts of person, substance, and relation. The author's exposition of God the Father in the thought of Bonaventure and Aquinas is superior and original. For that reason alone, Le Père Alpha et Oméga de la vie trinitaire is an indispensable resource for any scholar interested in the theology of God the Father.

 

John Baptist Ku, O.P.

Dominican House of Studies
Washington, D.C.

Thomas Aquinas on the Passions. By Robert Miner. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. Pp.328. $90.00 (cloth). ISBN: 978-0-521-89748-8.

In Thomas Aquinas on the Passions, Robert Miner offers his readers three reasons for studying questions 22 through 48 of the Prima Secundae of the Summa Theologiae. First, reading Thomas on the passions increases our understanding of the historical pedigree of contemporary philosophical reflections on emotions and how these stand in continuity (or discontinuity) with classical traditions. Second, reading Thomas on the passions can help us enter into a constructive conversation with the sciences on the study of human emotions while avoiding "scientistic" reductionism. Finally, Miner adduces a more important reason for taking the time to study Thomas's "treatise" on the passions: It helps us better to understand Thomas's account of the virtues and happiness. Miner's book amply substantiates these reasons, to which this reviewer would like to add yet another reason: Reading Thomas on the passions (with the aid of Miner's study) helps us better understand the role of the passions in our sanctification.

The structure of Miner's study cleaves closely to Thomas's questions on the passions in the Summa Theologiae. The study is divided in three parts: the passions in general, the concupiscible passions, and the irascible passions. In the first part of his study, Miner considers the passions in general, their nature, their

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relation to sensitive apprehension, and their moral significance. In the Summa, Thomas does not offer a strict definition of passion. Instead the angelic doctor leads his readers to greater conceptual penetration by means of carefully sifting through a range of authorities on the subject. Miner too engages a variety of interlocutors in this section (as he seeks to place Thomas's account of the passions in the context of the philosophical debates of his day and ours).

Miner begins his study of Thomas's account of the passions by attending to the sensitive appetite. The passions are acts of the sensitive appetite requiring bodily organs for their operation. Every passion involves some kind of bodily alteration. However, the embodiedness of the passions does not make them exclusively material realities without any relation to the spirit. The subject of the passions is not the body or the soul but the whole person, body and soul. Correlatively, since God and the angels lack bodies, they lack passions. As Miner explains, "Thomas consistently reserves passiones for acts of the sensitive appetite. He uses affectiones (and, less frequently, affectus) for acts that may or may not belong to the sensitive appetite" (35). The joy attributed to God and the angels is a pseudopassion, a simple act of the will that bears a resemblance in its effect to the act of the sensitive appetite. Hence, "it is clear that while Thomas restricts passions, in the proper sense of the term, to acts of the sensitive appetite, he neither overlooks nor denies affections that belong to the rational appetite (pseudopassions). He simply does not label them as passiones" (36).

A thread that runs through Miner's study of Thomas on the passions is the ontological priority of good over evil. Given the structure of the appetite, evil is never sought for its own sake as evil. As Miner avers: "Inclination toward a perceived good is the cause of repugnance from evil, but the converse is not true. Repulsion from evil occurs solely as a reflex of the more basic attraction toward some good, of which the shunned evil is the privation" (26). The affirmation of the ontological priority of good entails the priority of love among the passions, the priority of the concupiscible passions to the irascible ones, and the order among the various passions.

In the second part of his study, Miner considers particular concupiscible passions: love, hatred, pleasure, and sorrow. In his treatment of particular concupiscible and irascible passions, he benefits from his study of Santiago Ramirez's De passionibus animae. While at times disagreeing with particular points of the Spanish Dominican's study of Thomas, he adopts Ramirez's method of paying close attention to the ordo articulorum of the questions on the passions.

On the passion of love, Miner draws underscores the importance of sensitive love. One might expect that a teacher like Thomas who asserts so strongly the centrality of charity in the perfection of the human might minimize or even reject the significance of sensitive love. However, Thomas does not follow this path.

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As Miner explains: "Love in its most proper sense is sensitive love, because sensitive love is most passive. Allowing oneself to be passively helped by God is the precondition of dilectio, of inclining oneself toward God by rational means. Amor sensitivus turns out to be the seed out of which the highest amor rationalis grows" (121). In other words, the cultivation of sensitive love is essential for the rational creature's journey into God. "Lacking the energy of the sensitive appetite, the amor intellectualis Dei will be weak" (122). Surprisingly, on Miner's reading of Thomas, love for others needs to be grounded in love for self. The extension of amor amicitiae to others presupposes that we love ourselves with amor amicitiae. For Thomas, friendship is an image of self-love and not the other way around. "Love for others, proceeding from the unio similitudinis, is modeled on the love of self which proceeds from the unio substantialis" (133).

Miner's close attention to the ordo articulorum pays dividends in his examination of the question of hatred. In his treatment on love, Thomas inquires into the passion itself, before treating its cause, and finally its effects. This tripartite structure is employed time and again throughout the study of the particular passions, but not in question 29 on hatred. Some commentators (like Ramírez) have forced the treatment of hatred into the essence, cause, and effect schema. But Miner convincingly argues that the absence of a de ipso odio is not an accidental omission on Thomas's part but revelatory of something about the "essence" of hatred. Hatred exists in a parasitic relation to reality. The ontological priority of good over evil is reaffirmed. "Hatred is a loathing that cannot exist except in a being that loves the contrary of what is loathed" (141). The relationship between love and hatred is asymmetrical. Hatred presupposes love, but love does not presuppose hatred. Things are loved in so far as they exist, but nothing can be hated simply on account of its existence. By implication, self-hatred is a metaphysical impossibility. "If human beings expend a large amount of energy avoiding evils, they do so in the name of goods which they care about. The intensity with which a person avoids an evil is a function of the intensity with which that person loves the contrary good" (195). Most Christians assume that there is no place for hatred in Christianity, but for Thomas, hatred is a corollary of love. Love for someone entails the rejection of things that threaten the existence or thriving of that someone. Nevertheless, Miner offers an important caution: "hatred should not be cultivated as a good in itself" (149).

In the third part of his study, Miner considers the irascible passions: hope, despair, fear, daring, and anger. Throughout this part of the book the ontological priority of the good and the salutary significance of the passions is frequently reasserted. Love is the dispositional cause of fear. "Amor not only inclines a person toward the bonum conveniens, but also inclines him away from what he perceives as contrary to the suitable good" (244). On anger, Miner suggests that

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Thomas offers a sort of apologia pro ira: "In itself anger is natural and promotes the flourishing of the human person " (269). This positive valuation of anger is a minority opinion in the Christian tradition.

Perhaps the most significant contribution of Miner's study of Thomas on the passions is the elucidation of the role of the passions in the perfection of the human. Happiness requires the perfection of all the powers and appetites of the person. "Right reason is required to perfect the acts of the sensitive appetite. One implication is that reason must know the passions, in order to direct them, just as those who govern must understand the nature of the governed" (296). Kantian approaches that reduce morality to reason's conquest of the passions are incomplete in this regard. "To suppose that humans can attain their full good without attending to the totality of their acts, including those shared with other animals, is to commit the mortal sin of angelism" (92). The passions are a fundamental part of our humanity. As such, the passions are to be cultivated not uprooted. Of course, the cultivation of the passions is not by itself enough for humans to attain the goal of eternal beatitude with God. Humans are in need of grace. But as Miner warns, "to scorn this enterprise, presuming that divine grace magically relieves human beings of any need to order their passions, is dangerous" (229). Granted that God can infuse virtues in souls that have not prepared themselves in any way, still this is not God's usual way of acting. "Souls indifferent to the achievement of human things cannot be expected to assert themselves in divine things" (228).

One area that I think Miner could have profitably explored further is that of Christ's passions. The subject hovers along the margins of the book. In his discussion on sorrow, Miner remarks that "Thomas regards the capacity to feel sorrow as a condition of being human. This explains, at least, in part, why Christ assumes the 'defect of soul' constituted by tristitia"(196). In his study on anger, Miner suggests that "If Christ's assumption of the passion of ira were better known, the popular images of Jesus as Mister Rogers (or some other version of the world's nicest guy) might lose their grip on us" (285 n. 9). Miner's remarks on Jesus' assumption of the passions are suggestive but brief. Granted, he is not writing on the passions of Christ as considered in the Tertia Pars. However, it seems to this reader that in the same way in which the final chapter places the questions on the passions within the framework of the Secunda Pars and Thomas's reflections on happiness and virtue, Miner could have used the epilogue to engage in some fruitful consideration of the role of the passions in the life of Christ as viator. Moreover, attending to the Tertia Pars would also offer an opportunity to reflect on the role of the sacraments in the perfection of the passions. In any case, Miner's study lays the groundwork for future exploration of these topics.

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In sum, Miner's study of Thomas helps us better understand how the passions in general and each passion in particular contribute to human flourishing and prepare the way for a felicity that transcends (but does not leave behind) the passions. Readers who work their way through this lovingly and carefully nuanced exposition of Thomas will find their efforts richly rewarded.

Edgardo Colón-Emeric

Duke Divinity School
Durham, North Carolina

Logos and Revelation: Ibn 'Arabi, Meister Eckhart, and Mystical Hermeneutics. By Robert J. Dobie. Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University America Press, 2009. Pp. xii + 313. $39.95 (paper). ISBN 978-0-8132-1677-5.

This inquiry proposes and sustains the thesis that both Ibn 'Arabi and Eckhart were steeped in their respective revelational traditions, and from that vantage point engaged in a mode of philosophical theology using reason to order and clarify the revelational sources, as well as using those sources to expand standard philosophical categories to negotiate the known perils of discourse regarding divinity. Moreover, both of these thinkers, while working in disparate traditions, proceed dialectically to allow reason and revelation to illuminate each other fruitfully. They accomplish this in four areas--revelation itself, existence, intellect, and the ideal human paradigm--in such a way as to allow each tradition to illuminate the other, yet never eliding difference, especially where difference itself may further illuminate the comparative inquiry.

But let us first position the respective authors. Ibn 'Arabi represents what I like to call the "second phase" of Islamic philosophy, wherein the center of gravity retuned east from Andalusia, while a fresh set of protagonists sought ways to relate revelation with reason rather than contrasting one to another (see my "Islamic Philosophical Theology and the West," Islamochristiana 33 [2007]: 75-90). That would explain why students of philosophy in the West might not recognize Ibn 'Arabi as a philosopher, habituated as they have become to the story that al-Ghazali's critique of Averroës effectively terminated any hope of philosophical inquiry in Islam. That judgment reflects modernist assessments of properly philosophical inquiry, however, rather than attending to the contours of philosophical theology in the wider Muslim world, comprising Shi'ite as well as Sunni perspectives. On a more accurate reading, al-Ghazali's critique

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represents a dialectical moment in Islamic philosophical inquiry, not an end to it, much as recent scholarship finds Averroës to be less a "rationalist" than one who seeks ways to reconcile faith with reason (see Avital Wohlman: Al-Ghazali, Averroes and the Interpretation of the Qur'an: Common Sense and Philosophy in Islam [London: Routledge, 2009]). A trio of Eastern thinkers form the vanguard of this "second phase" of Islamic philosophy, introducing a properly philosophical theology: Suhrawardi, Ibn 'Arabi, and Mulla Sadra. (For leads to them, see Oliver Leaman and Sayyed Hossain Nasr, eds., History of Islamic Philosophy [New York: Routledge, 1996]. For Ibn 'Arabi, the most comprehensive treatment can be found in William Chittick's trilogy: The Sufi Path of Knowledge: Ibn al-'Arabî's Metaphysics of Imagination [Albany, N.Y.: SUNY Press, 1989]; The Self-Disclosure of God: Principles of Ibn al-'Arabî's Cosmology [Albany, N.Y.: SUNY Press, 1997]; and Imaginal Worlds: Ibn al-'Arabî and the Problem of Religious Diversity [Albany, N.Y.: SUNY Press, 1995]; see also Salman Bashier, Ibn al-'Arabi's Barzakh: Concept of the Limit and the Relationship between God and the World (Albany, N.Y.: SUNY Press, 2004). These secondary sources converge to help readers discover the philosophical acumen of Ibn 'Arabi. Though he is often dubbed a "mystic" (or even a "pantheist"), his work is better appreciated when read as a sustained attempt to articulate what Robert Sokolowski has identified as the crucial "distinction" between creator and creatures in a universe founded on free creation (The God of Faith and Reason [Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 1996]).

Now we begin to suspect why Dobie sought to compare Ibn 'Arabi with Meister Eckhart, who has been saddled with similar incomprehension. Yet applying the Sokolowski test allows us to capture Eckhart's intent as well: to show how a focus on Aquinas's masterful account of creation as "the emanation of all of being from the universal cause of being"--existence itself [ipsum esse]--culminates in a "distinction" which eludes proper articulation, since creator and creatures can never be "two" as two creatures are. Let us take their respective treatment of existence, which Aquinas introduces as the only "feature" common to creatures and creator, precisely because it cannot properly be a feature: "only in so far as things are beings can they be similar to God, as the first and universal principle of all existence [esse]" (STh I, q. 4, a. 3), and this only when we recognize that "God alone is being essentially, while all other beings are so by participation" (ibid., ad 3). In employing the Platonic scheme of essentially / by participation, Aquinas introduces what Sokolowski dubs "the distinction." As Dobie puts it, comparatively:

What is important to appreciate in Ibn 'Arabi and Eckhart is the logical rigor or necessity of this understanding of God's nature as

 

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dialectical. The absolute transcendence of God necessarily demands his immanence in all things, for what makes God transcendent is God's existence and sustenance of all that is. Likewise, God's true and utter immanence implies transcendence because what is inmost in all things is precisely that which escapes limitation and objectification into a "this" or a "that." Again the logic here is clear: as Ibn 'Arabi puts it, to assert only the transcendence of God without his immanence is, in effect, to limit him, because you are marking him off from creatures. And to assert his immanence without asserting his transcendence is to limit him to the sum of finite creatures. Similarly for Eckhart, God's distinction from creatures, his transcendence, lies precisely in his indistinction from all things, i.e., in his immanence in all things as their existence, oneness, truth, and goodness--in short, the transcendental properties that "run through" all the categories of existence and that all creatures have insofar as they exist. (95)

This nicely expresses "the distinction" Sokolowski identifies as lying "at the intersection of faith and reason."

Let us explore another of Dobie's four areas, that of revelation. Here especially the very differences will prove illuminating. Ibn 'Arabi's great commentator, Dawud al-Qaysari, notes how, in effect:

The meaning of revelation is found in the faculty of imagination, the ability to strike similitudes for what transcends reason (27). . . . Thus, in a proper hermeneutics of the Qur'an, understanding is becoming what one ultimately is in the real; . . . uncovering what the divine Word means for me and my life, which is to say what it means for me insofar as I exist only in and through God and am what I am in God. It follows that, for Ibn 'Arabi, the imagery of the Qur'an is not a drawback for the rational seeker but an advantage, for through the "imaginal world" (i.e., the interlocking symbolic logic) of the Qur'an and the Prophet (in the hadith traditions), the inner meaning of creation manifests itself in and through a creative appropriation of that imaginal world by the believer (28). [Here lies a clear point of contrast between "first" and "second" phases of Islamic philosophy.] To recognize creation as an act of divine imagination, then, is to recognize, to be sure, the ambiguity of creation. But it is also to see all creation as rooted in the divine reality (34). . . . The Qur'an provides the key: . . . creation as an act of imagination is crucial to understanding the relation between the "book of nature'" and the "divine book of revelation" (40). . . . It is in the Qur'an that the voyage is made that leads man back to his original status, to his divine similitude (54). . . . The goal is the complete assimilation of the self to the Word of God as revealed in the Qur'an. (55)

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Fascinating for both its similarity and its difference is the way "the birth of the Son in the soul . . . is central to Eckhart's interpretation of scripture:

all interpretive activity aims at cracking the "outer shell" of the text to reveal its "hidden marrow," which is precisely the process of inner birth. Eckhart thus argues that the Christian life is not one of mere rational assent to the divine Word of Scripture but an actual giving birth to this Word in the innermost ground of the soul, which then bears fruit in a life of detached freedom and love. (59)

Yet "human reason is structurally unable to grasp God's oneness or the oneness of creation's source," so

the only way to overcome this alienating effect of reason is to present reason's truths under the cover of parables or myths, so that it will stimulate the hearer to the activity of interpretation and thus to an inward penetration of the divine mystery and the indwelling of transcendent truth. (65)

This comparison leads Dobie to delineate "the difference in the ways in which Ibn 'Arabi and Eckhart interpret their respective scriptures, which follows that of their respective religious traditions":

for Eckhart, it is to have the Word of Scripture reborn in the very ground of a fallen and corrupted soul so that the soul may become a true Nobleman [edele Mensch]; for Ibn 'Arabi, it is to understand the inner meaning of the Law or shar'ia that restores the Muslim to the state of perfect vice-regency as the Universal Man [al-insân al-kâmîl], which is itself a return to the pure, original nature of humanity [fitra] in which the human being was a perfect mirror of God's essential attributes. (88)

I have quoted extensively to give a flavor of the author's approach and mastery of each figure. No book-length comparative work on these two axial figures matches this one for thorough grasp of each figure and for clarity of presentation. Dobie has mastered the texts of each, as well as the relevant secondary literature, with a teacher's touch for expressing recondite matters with admirable clarity. From a scholarly viewpoint, all is in order, yet presented in a reader-friendly manner that will offer a model for the work of others, as the area of comparative philosophical theology is currently exploding with a growing number of younger scholars equipped with the tools needed to do the work. Dobie has a special way, however, of combining interpretive skills with stunning theological and philosophical sophistication, all in a remarkably modest manner which accounts for his clarity of expression. Finally, his manner of comparing Islamic with Christian philosophical theology highlights the crucial parallel between the Qur'an and Jesus: where Christians believe that Jesus is the word of God made human, Muslims believe the Qur'an is the Word of God made book. Since this strictly parallel presentation displays substantial differences as well, it allows him to proceed by highlighting similarity-in-difference. His concluding chapter on the venture of comparative study is nothing short of brilliant, with a sustained argument against context-less approaches to "mystical" literature, which he has effectively countered in the work itself by grounding each author's substantive philosophical reflection in his respective revelational tradition.

David Burrell, C.S.C.

Uganda Martyrs University
Nkozi, Uganda

University of Notre Dame
Notre Dame, Indiana

Ethics of Procreation and the Defense of Human Life: Contraception, Artificial Fertilization and Abortion. By Martin Rhonheimer. Edited by William F. Murphy, Jr. Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 2010. Pp 309. $39.95 (paper). ISBN: 978-0-8132-1722-2.

Martin Rhonheimer has been a key voice in the revival of natural law theorizing and casuistry in recent decades. His work is triply important for this revival. First, Rhonheimer has gone beyond the stereotype of natural law as concerned primarily, in his words, with "nature" and "command" to focus instead on "reason" and "good," as the critical terms of a natural law theory. Second, he has distanced his approach from third-person objective accounts of the human act, in favor of a methodological approach that focuses on the "perspective of the acting agent," that is, the perspective a practical agent adopts in considering, choosing, and carrying out an action. And third, he has developed his natural law approach with a view to concrete application to disputed issues, particularly those surrounding the taking, the preventing, and the creating of human life.

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It is the third of these contributions that is the focus of this book. Rhonheimer begins with a discussion of his approach to natural law theory, and his action theory, but his sights are set on a defense of three key theses prominently asserted in recent magisterial documents: the teaching of Humanae vitae on the morality of contraception; the teaching of Donum vitae on the morality of procreation apart from the marital act; and the teaching of Evangelium vitae on the morality of abortion. The discussion of the first and third theses also involve a defense of two further claims: first, that the use of contraceptives as a defense against rape is morally permissible; and second, that the moral teaching on abortion has political consequences.

Rhonheimer's discussion of the natural law corrects a number of important errors. The natural law is not "natural" because it illicitly reads off norms from a naturally given structure, such as the structure of our biological desires. Rather, it is natural because it is "intrinsic to man as a rational creature" (5). Accordingly, the natural law is itself "the ordering act of human reason itself in the sphere of good and evil" (ibid.). Rhonheimer sounds here much like proponents of the so-called "new" natural law theory, such as Germain Grisez and John Finnis, and I will return to this comparison. And, like the new natural law theorists, Rhonheimer argues that natural inclinations are important to our knowledge of the natural law, even though they are not themselves the natural law. He describes the natural inclinations as a "point of departure" for our understanding of goods, such as the good of marriage and marital sexuality, which need to be integrated into the horizon of reason. But the full moral relevance of a natural inclination such as that towards sexuality is only to be found in reason's grasp of the "flowering of marital chastity, of which the inclination is the seed" (9).

From this quotation, one begins to see something that is an important focus of this book, namely, its emphasis on virtue--here, chastity--as central to the norms of the natural law. The picture appears to be this: natural inclinations set us on the road to certain goods which can only be understood and enjoyed insofar as reason recognizes the full meaning of that towards which an inclination directs us. That full meaning is, typically, a virtue: the virtue of marital chastity, for example, or the virtue of justice; and immorality is to be judged as a departure from action in accordance with these virtues. As we will see, the use of contraception is a failure, on Rhonheimer's account, to even pursue, let alone succeed in pursuing, the virtue of marital chastity; abortion and extrasexual means of procreation are failures of the virtue of justice, which fundamentally orients us towards an equal treatment of all human beings.

The heart of Rhonheimer's book consists in an extended argument about the two sides of what Rhonheimer calls the "Inseparability Principle," articulated in Humanae vitae, and a cornerstone of Church teaching on sexual and reproductive ethics. According to Humanae vitae human sexuality has two meanings,

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unitive and procreative, which must never be separated. Contraception is widely understood to do this in one way, by pursuing the unitive without the procreative; and extrasexual modes of reproduction, such as in vitro fertilization, are understood to do this in a different way, by disjoining procreation from sexual union. But these claims are in need of considerable argument, and it is this that Rhonheimer endeavors to provide throughout chapters 2-5.

Rhonheimer takes the Inseparability Principle to be basic; it is incapable of defense by deeper principles, although it may be explicated. He articulates the meaning of the Inseparability Principle as a truth about our body-spirit nature as that nature is manifest in the sexual act. Insofar as that act is bodily, it is procreative in nature; insofar as that act is an act of rational persons, it is a free gift of self to the other. But normatively, these two aspects of the sexual act cannot be disjoined without alienation from one or another side of our body-spirit unity; nor can they be disjoined without, in reality, diminishing the reality of both meanings of the sexual act: "The bodily reality of procreation receives its fully human specification from spiritual love; the spiritual love of the married persons receives its specification as a determinate sort of love from the procreative function of the body" (77). As this passage indicates, the bodily meaning of the sexual act possesses the entirety of its meaning only in the context of a full communion of persons, namely, the communion appropriate to specifically marital love. Thus, not only must the two meanings, unitive and procreative, not be disjoined, but they must be pursued only in the context of marriage.

So the Inseparability Principle grounds a normative principle: that the unitive and the procreative must not be divided. This raises for Rhonheimer the question of whether contracepted marital sexual acts always do, in fact, divide that unity. He defends an affirmative answer by way of an account of what he calls "procreative responsibility," the task given to spouses to fully integrate their sexual drives "into the dominion of reason and will." As integrated, such desires will not simply be suppressed; as under the dominion of reason, such desires will be directed to the common good of the couple; and as desires of a unified person, a rational animal, such desires will be experienced as by a subject, and not allowed, as it were, a life of their own to which the human person is subjected.

A married couple for whom sexual desires are thus integrated into their lives as rational animals will have occasional need to avoid conception in service of the common good of their marriage. Rhonheimer argues that the only way in which they could pursue this common good, and meet the conditions above for integrated sexuality, is by choosing a "willing renouncement to engage here and now in sexual intercourse" (97). This act of renouncement denies in no way the procreative reality of sexual intercourse, nor does it deny the mutual giving of

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self that characterizes marital love. Rhonheimer thus characterizes this renunciation as an act of the virtue of marital chastity.

By contrast, a couple who contracept renounce, in a sense, the need for procreative responsibility and, hence, chastity, by subjecting the procreative dimension of their lives to their technical dominion; but this subjecting is itself a result of their allowing their sexual desires a veto power over the need for reason's rule. Rhonheimer writes, "Contraception is problematic precisely because of the fact that it renders needless a specific sexual behavior informed by procreative responsibility; it also involves a choice against virtuous self-control by continence" (100, emphasis in original). In this choice, Rhonheimer argues, spouses act against the virtue of chastity, and also treat their bodies as objects to be regulated in service of desire, rather than treating their desires as aspects of the person to be integrated into the spiritual aspects of the person's nature.

This terse description of Rhonheimer's argument cannot do full justice to his discussion, which is rich with insight. But, in its contrast with the discussion of abortion in the last part of the book, it illustrates an interesting point about contemporary Catholic thought on the two issues of contraception and abortion.

The book has two long essays on the topic of abortion. The first contains an extended critique of Norbert Heorster, a German thinker who has argued for a significant liberalization of German law regarding the unborn. While philosophically sound, this chapter concentrates perhaps too much on a figure who is not essential to the debates of the English-speaking world. Nevertheless, the crucial point is this: Rhonheimer argues that science shows (and Hoerster does not deny) that the human conceptus is a human being, a member of the species Homo sapiens.

Rhonheimer further argues that this means that human embryos and fetuses have, as part of their nature, certain potentialities which, when actualized, manifest themselves in recognizably personal acts. But the actualization of these potentialities does not change the nature or the species of the individual. Thus, rather than a potential person, the unborn human being is what Rhonheimer calls "a person 'in potential'" (203). Embryos and fetuses should thus be treated, morally, with the respect owed to persons, and, as Rhonheimer argues in the final chapter, they should be given the protection of the law if the law is to serve the true common good of political society.

I would suggest that Rhonheimer's arguments here represent the settled consensus of Catholic philosophers and moral theologians who are working within, not just the Catholic intellectual tradition, as it is sometimes called, but the magisterial tradition of the Church. That is, such thinkers have converged both on the view that human beings exist from conception, and on the view that all human beings are persons. There is no tentativeness based on questions of

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ensoulment or development, nor are there any substantially different ways of approaching the crucial questions.

The case is very different where contraception is concerned. Even among those working within the magisterial tradition, there is a great deal of divergence concerning the question of why contraception is morally impermissible. The divergence has both theoretical and practical consequences, as can be seen in the differences between Rhonheimer's treatment and that of the new natural law theorists, which Rhonheimer critiques.

New natural law theorists diverge in at least two ways from Rhonheimer. First, they do not take the Inseparability Principle to be basic. Rather, they see it as summarizing the results of two arguments, an argument against contraception based on its contra-life character, and an argument against extrasexual creation of human beings because of the implicit treatment of all such created entities as "things" (Rhonheimer too argues for this position, in chapter 5). This is a considerable theoretical difference, as is the "contra-life" argument itself. But that argument has a further consequence, that the wrong of contraception is not exhausted by its relationship to the good of marriage or marital chastity, and can be committed by someone who otherwise does no wrong to those goods, for example, someone who is a victim of rape. So, where Rhonheimer's defense of the (permissible) use of contraceptives for rape victims asserts that the aim of this use is, precisely, to prevent conception, the new natural law approach holds that the aim (when legitimate) is, precisely, to prevent the further invasion of the rapist's sperm into the woman's body. This difference is encapsulated in Rhonheimer's definition of contraception: "To impede, as an alternative to an act of continence, the procreative consequences of one's freely chosen sexual acts" (148). By contrast, the new natural law theorists hold that contraception can take place--and is wrong--even in the context of unchosen sexual acts.

A book review is a forum only for identifying, nor for negotiating such differences. But the differences indicate one direction that future research in the Catholic magisterial tradition must go: towards dialectical exchange amongst defenders of Catholic teaching on sexual and reproductive ethics, where the accounts given by such defenders diverge. Martin Rhonheimer has established himself as one of the thinkers who must be engaged in that dialectical exchange; this important and rewarding book provides a helpful starting point for that conversation.

Christopher Tollefsen

University of South Carolina
Columbia, South Carolina

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Knowledge and the Transcendent: An Inquiry into the Mind's Relationship to God. By Paul A. Macdonald, Jr. Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 2009. Pp. 306. $69.95 (cloth). ISBN 978-0-8132-1577-8.

Macdonald's book demands the attention of philosophers and theologians alike. Philosophically, Macdonald engages skepticism, subjectivism, philosophy of the mind, analytical philosophy, epistemology, realism, and Thomism. Theologically, Macdonald discusses the relation of faith and reason, the role of the intellect and the will in faith, apophatic theology, eschatology, and the significance of theological realism. These twin trajectories inform his answer to the question: "How can God transcend the mind but still remain known to the mind?" Critical of the overwhelmingly negative responses to this question since Kant, Macdonald affirmatively proposes, "Having knowledge of God thus seems to require that our conceptions of God bear on or are directed on God's transcendent reality" (xiii). The aim of the book, therefore, is to offer an epistemology that permits objective knowledge of God that does not diminish God's transcendence. Macdonald accomplishes this by arguing for an epistemology of direct realism and then shows how direct realism is compatible with natural knowledge of God, knowledge gained by faith, and even knowledge in the beatific vision. This last aspect is particularly intriguing since the beatific vision functions as the primary or quintessential instance of direct realism.

Knowledge and the Transcendent is divided into three parts. The first part outlines how subjectivism and skepticism proffer a problematic conception of the mind's relation to God, and traces the influence of this problematic through various philosophical and theological thinkers since Descartes and especially Kant. The second part addresses this problematic by offering an alternative, direct realism, argued for on the basis of a close reading of Aquinas's epistemology (STh I, qq. 78-85) and supported by its consistency with the knowledge of God by reason, faith, and beatitude. Macdonald argues that direct realism ensures objective knowledge of things and correspondingly of God--even if, in the case of the latter, this knowledge is partial, noncomprehensive, and nonabsolute. The third part applies direct realism to contemporary discourses on faith and reason on one hand and theological realism on the other. In this manner, Macdonald orients direct realism and its implications by critically engaging the works of John McDowell, Victor Preller, Norman Kretzmann, Denys Turner, and Peter Byrne.

Modern discussions about knowing the transcendent God have often been falsely construed on the basis of a misconception of the relation between the mind and the world and, derivatively, the mind and God. Modern epistemologies conceive a disjunctive dualism between subject and object, the

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mind and the world, which limits reason to dealing with mere appearances and not things-in-themselves. This restrictive narrowing of reason and objective knowledge by skepticism and subjectivism consequently creates a divide or boundary between the mind and God so that one must either overcome the divide by reducing God to the subject (anthropomorphism) or accentuate it so that God ultimately remains entirely unknown (agnosticism). Macdonald explains the consequences of many modern epistemologies, worth quoting at length,

In short, the problem can be specified as follows: once God is placed outside or beyond a cognitive boundary (given that God is pictured as transcending a cognitive boundary), then there can be no objectivity in what human persons believe and say about God. The beliefs and assertions we hold and make about God . . . can have no bearing on who God objectively is. This leads to skepticism regarding our knowledge of God. The alternative to the skeptical position, which in fact turns out to be an extension of skepticism, is subjectivism. According to this position, we can think and talk about God in terms of our religious symbols and experience; or we can think and talk about God in terms of our individual or collective religious responses and practices; but again, we cannot think and talk about God "in God's self." (3)

As one may expect, Macdonald outlines the genesis of this problematic in Descartes, Hume, and Kant. Their epistemologies result in "theological anti-realism," whether in its anthropomorphic or agnostic forms, indicative of Ludwig Feuerbach, Paul Tillich, Gordon Kaufmann, John Hick, Don Cupitt, and Merold Westphal. Macdonald also discusses the influence of theological anti-realism among analytical thinkers such as D. Z. Phillips and George Lindbeck.

In response Macdonald argues for direct realism, which is intended to abolish the fallacious boundary between the mind and God along with its corresponding subject-object dualism. Macdonald relies on Aquinas by acknowledging, "Aquinas is a direct realist in the following sense: in case of veridical sensation and apprehension, we as cognitive subjects enjoy direct sensory and intellective access to objective aspects or features of empirical reality. This means that the world is directly accessible in sense experience as well as thought, such that in sense experience and thought we are in direct sensory and intellective contact with extra-sensory and extra-mental objects and states of affairs" (82). By "direct," then, Macdonald means the absence of mediation or representation. The senses do not mediate the world--there is no disjunction to be overcome--they conjoin us to the world spontaneously and immediately. It should be noted that Macdonald conceives direct realism and metaphysical

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realism together. "The shorthand of this is that epistemological realism and metaphysical realism go hand-in-hand. . . . what grounds realism in epistemology is realism in metaphysics (or ontology)" (96). This is the case because direct realism necessarily requires formal causality to ensure the immediate conformity between our mind and the world, maintaining "direct cognitive contact with objective, external states of affairs" (89). Having secured direct realism, Macdonald has his basis for theological realism.

Macdonald appeals to the beatific vision as a "paradigm case of direct realism in cognition" (135). As is the case with direct realism, formal causality has a definitive role in the beatific vision. Just as sensible forms are directly accessible to the mind by means of formal causality, so also God is directly and objectively knowable "as God is" because God is the intelligible form of the intellect in beatitude. That God is the form of the intellect in the beatific vision is a fantastic, bold assertion by Aquinas that Macdonald puts to good use, explicating how direct knowledge of God in the beatific vision does not result in those pitfalls that worry modern epistemologies. First, this heightened, graced state does not compromise human subjectivity but rather fulfills it. Second, direct knowledge of God in the beatific vision is not comprehensive knowledge, thus preserving God's transcendence. In contrast to modern epistemologies that posit a boundary between the mind and God, the immediate knowledge of God in the beatific vision shows that God's transcendence need not be conceived in opposition to the knowing mind or vice versa. Theologians will especially find this section insightful and informative.

Can one have objective knowledge of God in this life when God is not the form of the intellect? Following Aquinas, Macdonald argues that in this life we can objectively know God by reason and by faith though God remains "unknown": that is, we do not have knowledge of God's essence in itself. Concerning natural knowledge, Macdonald explains that by means of the via triplex we are capable of arriving at true beliefs about what God is and what God is not. For this to be possible there must be a "requisite ontological relation between creatures and God" (186). Referring to John Wippel, Macdonald specifies this ontological relation as a participated likeness of effects to their uncreated Cause. On the basis of this relation, we can speak truly about God even if names fail to completely convey God's preeminence. In light of Macdonald's appeal to participation metaphysics, one may wish for a more robust account of reason's knowledge of God, especially after remarking on the profundity of Aquinas's doctrine of substantive names. Further elaboration of being, goodness, truth, and unity could have strengthened Macdonald's argument since these provide the first principles not only of nature but of cognition as well, and thus specify precisely how the mind is open and oriented to God. Admittedly, Macdonald limits his argument to securing the "positive

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epistemic status" of our knowledge of God, whether by reason or by faith. To this end he draws upon William Alston's "truth conducive desiderata" and Alvin Plantinga's "doxastic evidence" to show that one does not need to prove that such knowledge is indeed true but only that such knowledge is not unreasonable. Knowledge of God can be shown to have "adequate grounds" or "sufficient warrant" supporting a high probability to be true. Macdonald modestly concludes, "while I have not definitively established that there is, in fact, knowledge of God by way of reason and faith, I have certainly offered good reasons for thinking that reason and faith, properly interpreted, furnish knowledge of God" (224). By bringing Aquinas's natural theology and account of faith into dialogue with contemporary discourses on the epistemology of religious belief, Macdonald applies Aquinas in ways that will certainly interest Thomists, including his description of analogy as a theological epistemology and his account of the will with regard to faith.

By way of conclusion, it may be helpful to briefly consider Macdonald's work with respect to analytical Thomism--the tradition in which he locates his work (xxi). Macdonald adopts many of its major tenets and yet there are other aspects in his work not typically associated with this tradition. For instance, at crucial points Macdonald relies on Thomistic metaphysics--typically considered underdeveloped by analytical Thomists. One may wish to press Macdonald for a further explanation of how he conceives the relation between these two traditions. Furthermore, it has been a growing concern that analytical accounts of the doctrine of analogy, like those by David B. Burrell and Victor Preller, tend to be more apophatic in their construal of the doctrine of analogy than other formulations, such as those of John Wippel or Bernard Montagnes, where ontological concepts of relation provide a basis for the way in which names can be appropriately and substantively predicated of God. It seems more than just coincidence that in his quest to secure objective knowledge of God, Macdonald relies on Wippel's metaphysics of participation. In many ways, then, Knowledge and the Transcendent will be integral to the ongoing debate about the nature of analytical Thomism compared to traditional Thomism.

Nathan R. Strunk

Boston University
Boston, Massachusetts