BOOK REVIEWS

Trinity in Aquinas. By Gilles Emery, O.P. Ypsilanti, Mich.: Sapientia Press, 2003. Pp. xxix + 361. $44.95 (cloth). ISBN 0-9706106-9-6.

According to its author, Gilles Emery--Swiss Dominican priest and professor of theology at the University of Fribourg--Trinity in Aquinas does not supply a comprehensive treatment of Aquinas's Trinitarian doctrine but seeks to present some of its major themes. The book comprises seven chapters, six of which were written previously as independent studies, and together they provide a trusty guide into the heart of Thomas's often difficult Trinitarian theology, situating it in its medieval milieu and illumining its central themes and insights from various perspectives.

The book is a combination of historical and speculative theology, offering us a colorful palette of Thomas's doctrinal sources and contemporary interlocutors while hewing closely to the framework and terminology of the master's own thinking about the Trinity. Emery displays expert knowledge of the medieval environment in which Thomas's thought finds its home, and his understanding of Aquinas's Trinitarian themes is nuanced and correct; the reader may feel secure under the guidance of one who knows every contour of the land he has chosen to survey. Topically, the book distills itself into four main areas of inquiry: it begins with an overview of the threeness and oneness of God in medieval Scholasticism; chapters 2-4 and 7 discuss and compare Thomas's Trinitarian doctrine in the commentary on the Sentences, the Summa contra Gentiles, the Summa Theologiae, and the commentary on St. John's gospel; chapter 6 shows why Aquinas deems it necessary to hold that the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Son as well as from the Father; and chapter 5 concerns itself with the contemporary debate about whether Aquinas's treatise on God is essentialist or personalist.

Latin Scholasticism's investigation of plurality within God takes place in an ambience of strict monotheism, and its treatment of the relationship between God's threeness and oneness coalesces into two discussions. The first gauges the epistemological connection between our knowledge of God's oneness and our awareness of God's threeness. Anselm had transmitted to the medieval Scholastics the expectation of finding certain "necessary reasons" which would discover the threeness in the oneness: for Richard of St. Victor and Bonaventure, God's charity and God's goodness, respectively, are those facets of God's

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oneness that necessarily plurify into threeness. Aquinas takes a more modest, "apologetic" tack: although no necessary reasons can conclusively affirm the Trinity, reason under the guidance of faith can disprove any arguments advanced against belief in the Trinity. The second discussion explores the notions of relation and person as the best ways to articulate the divine plurality and also synthesize that plurality with the divine oneness. Trinitarian plurality exercises a creative causality and, antithetical as it may be to certain monist strains of Greek philosophy, even bestows upon created plurality the exalted status of a transcendental.

Thomas's three great theological syntheses hold that natural reason cannot conclusively know the Trinity, but only God's unity of being. There can be no "necessary theological reasons" allowing one to deduce the Trinity from the fecundity of the divine being, although human understanding can help to make the Trinity "reasonably thinkable." These syntheses also ground God's plurality in a theory of relation, though the Trinitarian theology of the Summa contra Gentiles does not investigate the meaning of the word person (nor does the commentary on John) or use hypostasis at all. The Summa Theologiae is clearest and most insightful about Thomas's relational understanding of the divine persons: the inner divine processions of understanding and loving are the foundations of the mutual divine relations, and these relations, as subsisting, are the three divine persons, who are endowed with the three defining marks of personhood: individuality, subsistence, and understanding. On the one hand, Thomas protects a strict Trinitarian monotheism by proving that the divine essence, relations, and persons are all identical in reality; on the other hand, he upholds faith in the Trinity by showing that the divine relations are really distinct vis-à-vis one another.

According to Emery, Aquinas avoids any prerelational conception of the Father or of any other divine person. Thus, he disagrees with Bonaventure about how to understand the doctrine of the Father's innascibility, which Bonaventure sees as a positive nucleus tending to constitute the Father as a divine person prior to any relation to the Son. Aquinas understands the Father's innascibility only negatively, as a "not-being-begotten." In order to comprehend the Son, he uses the concept of the word or interior mental concept (the commentary on John especially stresses the Son as God's Word), which, unlike his contemporaries according to Emery, he distinguishes from the intelligible species by which the intellect is first informed through abstractive cognition. There is a difference in emphasis between the Sentences, the Summa contra Gentiles, and the Summa Theologiae as to how they view the Holy Spirit: while the pneumatology of the first focuses on the Holy Spirit as a subsisting act of love proceeding in God as a mutual bond between Father and Son, the latter two see the Holy Spirit as the fruit of the Father and Son's act of love, that is, as the impression, surge, or dynamic impulse that comes to pass in the loving will of the Father and the Son.

Although building in the Sentences on the contributions of his predecessors Albert the Great and Bonaventure, Aquinas is nevertheless entirely original in his systematic use of the thesis, unparalleled in the commentaries of the other two,

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that the Trinitarian processions exercise--at the nexus of exemplary, efficient, and final causality--a deep influence over creation: "processiones personarum aeternae sunt causa et ratio productionis creaturarum" (I Sent., d. 14, q. 1, a. 1). Paying special attention to the personal dimension of divine actions outside of God, Aquinas states that the Trinitarian processions cause the multitude of creatures to be distinct both from each other and from their Creator: "ex processione personarum distinctarum causatur omnis creaturarum processio et multiplicatio" (I Sent., d. 26, q. 2, a. 2, ad 2).

Closest in style to the Summa contra Gentiles, the commentary on John is for Emery a clear testament to the biblical and patristic bases of Thomas's Trinitarian theology. Emery refers to this commentary to show that Thomas's Trinitarian theology combines biblical exegesis and speculative reflection into a complex unity, although Thomas's style of speculative biblical exegesis, however much Emery tries to justify it, often looks more like eisegesis than exegesis to contemporary theologians and biblical exegetes. He also uses the commentary on John to show that Thomas, pace his critics, does indeed possess a rich understanding of the economic Trinity. Emery argues, moreover, that Thomas's economic Trinity does not spontaneously arise from his reading of the Bible but is rather the third and last stage of a speculative Trinitarian theology, which begins with the scriptural revelation of the Trinity through the economy of salvation and progresses in its second stage to a reflection on the immanent Trinity.

Emery has written a rich, detailed, and well-balanced chapter on Aquinas's attempt to show that the filioque's inclusion in the creed of the Roman Catholic Church is consonant with the faith expressed by the Scriptures, the patristic writers, and the early Church councils. Although Aquinas has no trouble accepting the Cappadocian formulations (through Augustine's Latin) that the Holy Spirit proceeds principaliter from the Father (because of the Father's auctoritas within the Trinity), and per filium, he still argues that it is necessary to hold that the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son. He lines up an impressive array of scriptural texts which speak of the Son sending the Spirit, but his explaining away of the Greek-leaning John 15:26 ("the Spirit of truth who comes from the Father") is weak and unconvincing. He also lays before us an extensive Latin patristic dossier in favor of the filioque, and even does some investigation of the Greek dossier, but he has a limited understanding of Cappadocian and Byzantine Trinitarian theology, and does not really grasp that, for the orthodox East, ekporeusis (processio) is a term reserved for the Father's notional acts within the Trinity. Moreover, to the biblical, patristic, and historical records, Thomas adds the considerable weight of his speculative Trinitarian theology. He first eliminates all forms of distinction between the divine persons (including the Cappadocian diversity of origin from the Father) except the distinction based on relative opposition, and then argues that the only way there can be more than one set of mutually opposed relations within the Trinity is if the Holy Spirit proceeds simultaneously from the Father and the Son. Indeed, he cannot really comprehend, according to his Latin medieval logic,

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how the Greeks can believe in a relational and personal Trinity and yet not grasp the necessity of the filioque to protect and bolster that faith. For Emery, what Aquinas's treatment shows us is that the Roman Catholic Church cannot without great loss simply jettison all that is involved in the affirmation of the filioque, no matter what happens to the official creedal status of the filioque in the future.

Responding to the wave of criticism from Rahner and Kasper and many others, Emery devotes a chapter to the question of whether Aquinas's treatise on God is essentialistic or personalistic. His answer is that it contains both elements, and that the real issue is how well the essentialistic and personalistic elements are integrated together, and in what order they appear in the treatise. The original question can be broken down into two others: Does Aquinas's use of Augustine's "psychological" analogies for the Trinity manage to posit in God some properly personal acts that go beyond the acts of the divine essence? And does the fact that Aquinas discusses the one God before the triune God mean that his overall treatise on God is essentialistic?

As to the first question, Emery shows that for Thomas there can be no derivation of divine persons from an essential divine act, and that even if he explains the divine processions of the second and third persons by reference to acts of the divine mind and will, which belong to God's essence, the resulting names of the divine persons and our understanding of them (e.g., Word and Love), must be taken personally and not essentially. In other words, even if Thomas must include the divine essence whenever he considers the Trinity's processions and notional acts--after all, these are identical to the divine essence--it is still true that the divine relations and persons must be understood personally and not essentially.

As to the second question, Emery correctly emphasizes that Aquinas's whole treatise on God is not to be seen as a treatise De Deo trino tacked on to a treatise De Deo uno, but that the whole treatment concerns the one and only triune God, but from differing perspectives. Thomas is following a long tradition in using the two perspectives to discuss the triune God, one which goes back to Basil of Caesarea, who in order to challenge the Arian Eunomius distinguished between what is commonly held by all three persons because of their common divinity and what properly distinguishes them one from the other. Acutely conscious of the distinction between the proper and the common in God, Thomas realizes it is always necessary to bring in the double perspective of the common divine essence and the proper personal relations if one wants to give a full account of the Church's Trinitarian faith. It is also eminently clear that in questions 27-43 of the Prima pars, where the pedagogical order progresses from processions to relations to persons, he is totally oriented toward what is personal in God.

Would not Thomas have better emphasized the personalism of his Trinitarian theology, as his critics have asserted, if he had begun his treatise on God with the person of the Father and not with the essence of the one God? Emery realizes there are benefits to both approaches but offers two reasons why Aquinas chose the order of presentation he did. First, there is the epistemological principle that one should treat of what is common before one treats of what is proper. The

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second and deeper reason is that to begin the treatise on God with the person of the Father would be to treat the Father in an extensive manner before having grasped the Father in his relation to the Son, which would be tantamount to thinking about the person of the Father prerelationally. In Emery's eyes, then, since Thomas's theology of God is resolutely relational, it is only fitting that he should begin his treatise on God with the one divine essence.

Emery's second reason is quite ingenious and turns the tables on Thomas's critics, though it is perhaps a tad too ingenious to argue that in order to emphasize God as personal one should begin with God as essential. I would like to recommend a third possible reason for Thomas's order of presentation, which as a Christian monotheist he may have felt congenitally though he never adverts to it explicitly: from the perspective of a Christian religion that grew out of a revealed Jewish monotheism, it would appear quite fitting that a speculative treatment of God should mirror the historical course of revelation about that God. The revelation of monotheism had to come first, with good reason, for to think about Trinity before monotheism is firmly entrenched in the human mind would almost certainly end up inviting in the multiple divinities of polytheism. Thomas has to show that the confession of the Trinity is the Christian form of monotheism, and the best way to do this is to start off with the one God and then introduce the divine subsistent relations as both identical with the one God and distinct from one another. From this viewpoint, Aquinas's order of presentation turns out to be more historically astute than his historical-minded critics have imagined.

Gregory Rocca, O.P.

Dominican School of Philosophy and Theology
Berkeley, California

Michel de Montaigne: Accidental Philosopher. By Ann Hartle. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Pp. 296. $60.00 (cloth). ISBN 0-521-82168-1.

Howsoever great Montaigne's standing as a man of letters, he occupies a negligible place in most standard "histories" of philosophy. Even as compared with the other philosophers of his age--that the historians should name it the "Renaissance" provides as clear an indication as any to just how derivative a group of thinkers they suppose them to be--the author of the Essays is generally ranked in the second tier. While many of his contemporaries dreamed of the rebirth of a "Platonism" of one form or another, he seemed to proselytize for one of the lesser schools of philosophical antiquity--scholarly opinions vary as to whether his ultimate allegiances were to Stoicism, Epicureanism, or

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skepticism-- which all have in common, despite or because of the differences between them, the propensity to reduce philosophy to a moral doctrine. Or if the attempt is not made to reconcile Montaigne's endless borrowings from ancient writers of every stripe by alleging some sort of development on his part, they are taken as proof of an eclecticism lacking all rigor or consistency. It is generally agreed, in any case, that he is not a philosopher in the strict or highest sense of the word, notwithstanding his exceptional ability to wield a pen.

In Michel de Montaigne: Accidental Philosopher, Ann Hartle seeks to set straight this piece of the record. On her view, Montaigne was a philosopher of the very greatest stature, whose writing "takes up the most philosophical questions in a profoundly original, comprehensive, and coherent way" (1). Her thesis should make her book of interest to any philosophically inclined reader, and especially to those who desire better to grasp the great temporal or rather argumentative fault lines of philosophy's course through history. It ought also to earn for the book the particular attention of Thomists and other friends of high Scholasticism, who better than most ought to know how much can be learned about one's friends from their foes. For whatever else we might say about Montaigne the philosopher, he has few rivals in the breadth and depth of his opposition to medieval philosophical theology, which he had experienced at fairly close quarters, having published, at his father's behest, a translation of Theologia naturalis sive liber creaturarum by Raymond of Sabunde, a deservedly obscure Spanish Scholastic. Hartle believes that Montaigne's philosophy continues to merit serious consideration; but given her own very real sympathies for Christian Aristotelianism, as also for the school of Plato, she is well equipped to lead into the Essays many who will have hitherto been inclined to leave them behind.

The title of her book is drawn from a statement that appears, as if in passing, in what is by far the longest and easily the best known of the essays, "The Apology of Raymond Sebond," wherein Montaigne makes clear how little he really shares with the theologian whom he had translated some dozen years earlier (the first edition of the Essays appeared in 1580; more or less the definitive edition appeared in 1595, three years after his death). Roughly half way through that essay, he purports to discover himself, by happenstance and after the fact, as a "new figure: a philosopher unpremeditated and accidental." Hartle, then, takes the author at his word. Michel de Montaigne: Accidental Philosopher attempts to demonstrate that Montaigne is not really a "Renaissance" philosopher at all, that he affords us a dramatically new understanding of philosophy and the philosopher. Just how new, though, is Hartle's Montaigne?

The jibes against the schoolmen that are scattered throughout the Essays are not of themselves especially memorable; much worse was written by others in the century and a half or more during which Christian Aristotelianism was the philosophical stalking horse of choice; but those barbs do not really begin to convey the extent of his quarrel with Scholasticism, signs of which may be found at every level of his work. Far more telling in this regard is his astonishing

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announcement, in the last of his essays, that study of himself constitutes both his "metaphysics" and his "physics." And lest we be tempted to construe the point in an unduly spiritual way, Montaigne devotes a great deal of the concluding essay to a consideration of his various bodily functions, which are discussed with a candor that is poles apart from the modus loquendi formalissimus perfected by St. Thomas Aquinas. It is to Hartle's great credit that she does not treat such passages as mere effrontery. By entertaining the possibility that they actually mean what they seem to say, she is led to argue in the second and the sixth of the book's nine chapters that Montaigne does not so much abandon traditional metaphysics as "bend" and "stretch" its categories.

The direction of his conceptual manipulations is, as she readily allows, unilaterally downward (29, 40). She holds, however, that notwithstanding his drastic lowering or hobbling (61) of the old metaphysical standards, Montaigne is not a genuinely "modern" philosopher. In his constant debunking of earlier positions, as in the repeated claims he makes to his own originality, he surely bears some kinship to Machiavelli, Bacon, Descartes, and Hobbes, none of whom ever balked in his efforts to put philosophy on a lower but putatively more solid footing than it had enjoyed in either antiquity or the Middle Ages, at calling attention along the way to his virtues as an innovator. What distinguishes Montaigne from the early modern thinkers, Hartle claims, is that his break with medieval philosophy and theology is not for the sake of rule over human affairs by an allegedly autonomous "reason," a quasi-political ambition that she takes to be the defining feature of modern philosophy as such (1, 8, 77, and 217-39). Otherwise stated, although her Montaigne does have in view a certain "reformation" not only of philosophy but of human affairs, he is not at all a "progressive" thinker. But if his critique of Scholastic metaphysics does not principally look forward, must we not conclude that he is an advocate of a philosophical "Renaissance" after all?

Certainly he cannot rightly be deemed a "skeptic" in the traditional sense. If ancient skepticism is defined by the denial that knowledge of the nature of things is accessible, by the counsel on the basis of that denial to suspend all judgment in one's ongoing engagement with the world, by the desire fueled by that suspension to attain to a state of imperturbability, and, as a consequence of all three premises, by the readiness to accept the laws and customs of one's place at face value, then, Hartle observes, Montaigne was no skeptic (14-15). Although his diffidence about our prospects for knowing certain kinds of things can hardly be denied, he manifests throughout the Essays a very high degree of confidence in his ability to distinguish what is good by nature from what is not. Furthermore, his ultimate "end or goal" cannot be imperturbability or indifference, for he "insists on his changeability and the consistency that he does display is not dependent on his being unaffected by the accidents of life" (16). And while he is respectful of the common moeurs of his country, he does not blindly submit to them (104-5), because he has reason to believe that they contain but thereby also veil truths that are not commonly acknowledged (210-17). In general, Montaigne deems the skeptic's impassibility to be excessively

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high flown or unrealistic, and for this and other reasons he cannot really be counted a Stoic either, or even an Epicurean for that matter, as Hartle notes astutely (27-28, 57-58, 94-97,116, 196).

Our author also makes clear that in the measure that the ancient philosophers were given to voicing moral exhortations or encomia, Montaigne wants little or no part of them. Having argued, in the first part of the book, that the ontological ground so to speak of the "accident" that is his philosophical existence is "contingency," which she terms "the most fundamental category" of his "metaphysics" (172; cf. 7, 38, 123, 157-59), she goes on in her final three chapters to characterize the stance he assumes and perhaps also recommends in the face of the world's, and his, radical contingency. She aptly summarizes this stance, following Montaigne himself, as a combination of the laughter of Democritus and the compassion of Heraclitus, with fellow feeling tempering Democritean scorn, and guffaws ultimately prevailing over sobs (172). More elaborately stated, his "magnanimity without pride" joins a keen appreciation for the fragility of every human life to an exalted sense of his independence, a rare self-detachment to an even rarer self-affection, a preference for the "idleness" of private life to an extraordinary willingness to "go public" in writing, a shameless indifference to ordinary moral sensibilities to an uncompromising defense of the existing social order.

Montaigne's reconfiguration of virtue is paradoxical in numerous ways, as Hartle indicates, and one must agree with her that those paradoxes point to the extent to which Montaigne diverges from most traditional conceptions of virtue. That is not to say, however, that his "moral philosophy" is entirely without ancient precedent, for many, though of course not all (see 176, 227), of the characteristics just mentioned call the Platonic Socrates to mind. This is scarcely surprising, given his admiration for the Athenian philosopher, whom he describes as "the most perfect soul that has come to [his] knowledge." To be fair to Hartle, though, it is not her view that Montaigne's rejection of Scholasticism means to effect a complete break with the philosophical tradition. It would be more accurate to say that he "carries the tradition forward by deepening it" (2). She grants, accordingly, that there are significant affinities between Socratic dialectic and Montaigne's rendering of the relation between philosophy and prephilosophical life (see especially chap. 4). And this brings us to the most novel feature of her interpretation of the Essays, or rather, the very heart of it.

Hartle's is a decidedly Christian reading of Montaigne. It is Christian in the sense that she interprets his thought in the very best light available to her, and thus with a keen desire to put it to the test, not so much for the sake of refuting his errors as in order to secure whatever is good in it. Yet it is also Christian in the sense that she regards the Essays as itself the expression of a thoroughgoing Catholic piety or "outlook" (123). That Montaigne regards his philosophizing as an "accidental" consequence of the world's "contingency" is entirely of a piece, she believes, with his deepest conviction, namely, that the world is created by God ex nihilo. The Christian doctrine of creation illumines every aspect of his philosophy, as she understands it.

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Of course, many readers take Montaigne to be a "fideist," but Hartle is not one of them. To the contrary, she argues--quite convincingly I think--that it staggers all belief to hold that such a compulsively reflective writer could "deliberately keep himself from thinking about the truths that are most important to him" (136), to say nothing of the internal incoherence that infects every fideistic "faith" (see 266 n. 26). She dispatches a second common interpretation of Montaigne's relation to Christian belief in an analogous fashion. To those who ascribe a "mild" or "tepid" religiosity to the author of the Essays, Hartle bluntly but reasonably counters that no "serious" human being can be so indifferent as to "leave the most important questions of human life unexamined" (135). Montaigne is worth reading only on the supposition that he is not a thoroughly shallow pate. By far the most venerable approach to the question of his piety is to take it with a grain of salt. This appears to have been the view of the libertins érudits, so called, who together constituted the closest approximation to a school of Montaigne (Charron, La Mothe le Vayer, Naudé, and others). But it was also the view of quite another sort of reader entirely, namely, Pascal, who is on record as saying that "for those who have any inclination to impiety or vice Montaigne is absolutely pernicious" (Entretien avec M. de Saci), though he himself never hesitated to acknowledge his debts to him. Hartle is perfectly aware of this approach to the Essays (134-36, 233-34), and grants that it enjoys some textual support, for example, "the highly ambiguous character of the 'defense' of natural theology found in the 'Apology'" and his open acknowledgment of "the tradition of the 'noble lie'" (134), although one might also mention, among other things, the numerous assertions throughout the work that are on their face at odds with Christian orthodoxy. She argues, all the same, that the phenomena are better saved if we treat him as no more but also no less than a Christian philosopher. How she elaborates this thesis defies easy summary for, as indicated, it informs the book's every page. It is especially prominent, however, in the fifth chapter's account of "the dialectic" and "the harmony" of faith and reason in the "Apology," and in the ninth and final chapter, wherein Hartle claims that the practical political implication of Montaigne's philosophizing is a "Christian republic."

One need not be persuaded by Hartle's attempt to reconcile Montaigne's reason to Christian faith to be grateful to her on that account. Those who construe his understanding of Christianity exclusively in function of his "prudence" are easily tempted to reduce him, in effect, to a pamphleteer of unbelief, albeit a long-winded one. Hartle never makes that mistake. Montaigne's one hundred and seven essays add up to what is undoubtedly one of the most perplexing books ever written. In its parts and as a whole Michel de Montaigne: Accidental Philosopher is faithful to the insight that persistence in perplexity is a sign, or the sign, of philosophical activity. If its leading thesis should give rise to disputation, that can hardly be counted a stroke against it, especially if it moves the reader to reexamine for himself Montaigne's own words, the questions they pose, and the answers they attempt.

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It should be noted, by way of conclusion, that Hartle's scholarship is a model of its kind. Her footnotes afford the reader a clear, synthetic, and fair-minded survey of an impressively large sample of a voluminous secondary literature.

John C. McCarthy

The Catholic University of America
Washington, D.C.

Being Reconciled: Ontology and Pardon. By John Milbank. London and New York: Routledge, 2003. Pp. 232. $24.95 (paper). ISBN 0-415-30525-X.

From a certain theological perspective, anything that exists, if is to be properly and completely understood, ought to be conceived as a gift. John Milbank's new book is the first in a series of writings designed to articulate such a perspective. At the same time, he identifies it as a sequel to the collection of essays published in 1997 as The Word Made Strange. The present volume guides its readers on an intellectual journey across a wide theological terrain: creation and fall, Incarnation and atonement, sin and grace, Church and Spirit are all among the topics explored here in relation to the core set of insights being developed in the book. The result is a work that is both significant in scope and penetrating in its analysis, an important contribution to contemporary theological conversation.

The focus of Milbank's concern is reconciliation or "for-giveness"--not primarily with the original act of giving, bur rather, "with the restoration of a refused and ruptured gift" (xi). Importantly, Milbank's God is one who "is eternally for-giving as well as giving," a claim that he will press without sacrificing the priority of God's goodness over evil (xii). Nevertheless, it is with an extended meditation on evil that the book begins, followed immediately by a chapter portraying evil as a form of violence. Milbank's first argument is a critique of the theory of "radical evil" which he traces to its origins in Kant's philosophy. Rather than conceiving of evil as something positive, Milbank defends a traditional Augustinian perspective on evil as privation, as lacking "any positive foothold in being" (1).

This argument is by no means a simple one, nor is it easily summarized. Milbank's contention that "evil as positive is evil's own fondest illusion" (22) is buttressed by a subtle analysis of the nature of volition, one that contrasts a Kantian view of the will as "self-bound" and of freedom as something "given" with the preferred Augustinian view of freedom as a gift of grace, and of the will as something that one cannot truly "possess." The upshot of this analysis is Milbank's remarkable conclusion that evil is itself "radically without cause," thus

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inexplicable, so that "there has never been for theologians a 'problem of evil'" (18). That is to say, Milbank links the problem of evil to its roots in modern philosophy, "roughly, the time of Leibniz," much as he perceives the theory of radical evil as being a modern, Kantian invention. Augustine and the medieval theologians were thoroughly innocent of such misconceptions, although the fall into modernity, on Milbank's account, begins already with Duns Scotus, more precisely with a "post-Scotist univocity of Being." From such a perspective, "if the finite equally is, as much as the infinite, then even the lacking that is evil equally is, along with the good," and thus its existence must be accounted for in terms of the original purpose of creation.

This last argument, consistent with Milbank's treatment of Scotism elsewhere, seems to me to be a caricature and dangerously misleading. It seems equally a caricature of modern "liberalism" to identify it as a nascent form of totali-tarianism, as the author does in the final pages of the chapter. (I tend to agree with Jeffrey Stout, in his recent book on Democracy & Tradition, that the continued use of the term "liberalism" by contemporary theorists may actually be blocking the road to inquiry.) His insistence that the modern theory of evil is not only wrong-headed but also partially responsible "for the modern actuality of evil" (4) is overkill, not necessary in order for him to expose that theory as problematic. Nevertheless, the chapter does supply a forceful argument for conceiving of evil as essentially privative; evil is substantively, albeit "not purely and simply," nothing (see 213 n. 14).

Milbank regards evil and violence as "convertible but not identical: exactly like a couple of malign transcendentals" (28). For the privation theorist, peace is a positive reality, not the mere absence of conflict. Evil not only disturbs the peace but also conceals the Good. Violence is really violence, in Milbank's view, only to the extent that it removes or destroys something good, that is, only to the extent that it is evil. Consequently, an act cannot simply appear as violent but must be interpreted or diagnosed as such; not every use of force will constitute an act of violence. Indeed, evil insofar as it is "predatory upon the positive" ought to be opposed with force. And the pacifist who passively gazes on violence without intervening ought also to be judged as violent.

Evil and violence are ultimately to be overcome by forgiveness, conceived not as "negative gesture" but as "positive gift," not as something essentially human but as divine (50). On Milbank's account, forgiveness is as positive as evil is negative; it is not the mere removal of a debt, but an actual gift given for someone, a "for-giving" moved by charity and with the aim of reconciliation. Augustine's meditations on time and memory are central to that account. In order for any evil to be forgiven, whatever is deficient in the past must be "revised out of existence" (54). The past as remembered can be redeemed, much as the meaning of a musical note can be shaped by its relationship to other notes that fall later in a sequence. Meaning is a relationship between events rather than the property of some discrete event isolated in the past. Now while this work of redemption is the gift of an "infinite eternal memory" (55), it must somehow be

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mediated to us, thus the significance of the Incarnation as "the prime paradigm for positive forgiveness" (60).

In his chapter on the Incarnation, Milbank once again identifies Duns Scotus as a favorite target of criticism. The essential link between Incarnation and forgiveness in Thomism is severed by Scotus, for whom Christ represents the "ontological completion of the Creation" (67). Post-Scotus, forgiveness is conceived increasingly as something negative, in legalistic terms, as the removal of a debt, rather than the "sustained giving of the original gift despite its refusal" through sin (68). It is interesting to note that Hans Urs von Balthasar, while also suspicious of the Scotistic doctrine of the univocity of being, nevertheless leaned toward affirming Scotus's view that the Incarnation was presupposed in the act of creation and not simply a consequence of human sin. Milbank rejects Scotus wholesale and actually links the two doctrines. It is precisely his teaching about univocity that infects Scotus's theology of the hypostatic union, with its "reduction of God to one ontic pole within a common univocalized being" (78). For Milbank, "the Scotist God has become more like a bestowing tyrant . . . and positive forgiveness has begun to be dissolved."

Once again, it seems to me that Duns Scotus has become a whipping boy and the principle of univocity a wand that Milbank waves in order to account for much of what he regards as problematic in modern thought. Without denying altogether the revolutionary features of Scotus's philosophy, I perceive him as standing much more in continuity with Augustine and with the medieval Scholastics who came before him.

I remain convinced that it is most productive to trace the trajectory of Scotus's thought to its modern development in the philosophy of Charles Peirce. For Peirce, it was precisely his discovery of Duns Scotus and the Scholastics that supplied him with the intellectual resources he needed in order to repair what he regarded as most defective in Kantianism. Further, a more generous reading of Scotus's theology would portray him as articulating some of the perspectives that Milbank is anxious to affirm. Scotus actually offers a compelling argument for the coincidence of God's justice and mercy in the forgiveness of sins (Ordinatio IV, d. 46). Nor should Scotus's theology of the Incarnation be interpreted as irrelevant to his understanding of the Atonement and of reconciliation, revealing instead the special quality of divine love as steadfast (firmitas). All of this is to say that it is possible to reject this consistently negative critique of Scotus while nevertheless embracing some of the basic features of Milbank's own constructive theological position.

Chapters on the crucifixion and Atonement develop some of the insights introduced earlier in the book. It is Christ crucified who "overcame violence and restored peace" (79). But this Atonement is not achieved as a sacrifice, in compensation to God for sins committed; rather it is to be viewed as God's own continuous "giving in and through our refusals of the gift, to the point where these refusals are overcome" (100). Our dying with Christ is a dying to evil-as-nothing, simultaneously the passing into a new kind of life. That life is always

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one lived in community, a Church nourished and sustained by the Eucharist. Consequently, Milbank's meditations on the Atonement lead naturally to his reflections on ecclesiology.

Milbank wants to affirm both the hierarchical and the democratic aspects of the Church, contending that they exist not in tension but as logically dependent upon one another. This is an interesting claim with important implications for understanding theological method and the proper answer to the question "what authorizes theology?" (109). In exploring this question, Milbank returns the reader yet again to Scotus and the fading of the thirteenth century. Not only Karl Rahner but also Balthasar is faulted for engaging in the "enterprise of 'natural theology', which historians have now shown to go back at the very furthest only to Scotus" (117). Milbank is not proposing a return to the thirteenth century, but rather to "an unknown future that we have missed and must seek to rejoin" (119). I share his concern about the corrosive effects of nominalism on modern thought. But that concern is mediated to me by Peirce who advocated a return to Scholastic realism, albeit of a Scotistic variety, modified and updated in the light both of healthy nominalistic criticisms and insights supplied by modern science. This does not rule out for me the sort of philosophical or "natural theology" in which both Rahner and Balthasar engaged. It does for Milbank, who looks to Nicholas of Cusa in his attempt to recover "what might have been" if the history of thought had not been interrupted by nominalism en route to modernity. Despite my discomfort with Milbank's narrative of events post-1300, his treatment of Cusanus is laced with insight. His account of the bishop as "the true theologian" and "the original President of the Eucharist" (123) is also illuminating, and wonderfully "radical" in its "orthodoxy." This chapter is typical of much of Milbank's writing: aggressively argued, it is easy to find something with which one might disagree, yet one cannot fail to be impressed by the intelligence of the argument or neglect to admire the brilliance of some of its details.

The final three chapters, from this reader's perspective, radiate a very special brilliance. Without abandoning his grand narrative concerning the origins of modernity, Milbank nevertheless devotes a more sustained attention to his concept of "gift," and to the theological vision that enables it. Opposing Patocka, Levinas, Derrida, and others, Milbank rejects the notion of gift as pure self-sacrifice without hope of reward. This austerely other-regarding ethic, as Milbank's subtle argument suggests, is not only "impossible" but also peculiarly self-absorbed. I am inclined to resist some of the details of that argument's formulation; for example, I would contend that there are alternative concepts of "indifference" and of "self-control"--different from the ones that Milbank eschews (e.g., on 141-42) and worth preserving. But the overall argument is a compelling one, with its portrayal of the moral life as endless and reciprocal gift-exchange, understood as absolute surrender to the divine gift of grace (Milbank's theological appropriation of the idea of "moral luck"). This reciprocity is not contractual but is characterized by a certain indeterminacy or asymmetry. Here

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the ethical is not grounded in a hope for death (necessary for the purest form of self-sacrifice), but in hope for community (because every true gift presupposes a mutual exchange of gifts), as well as in hope for the Resurrection (where giving and receiving coincide in a perpetual and ecstatic feast of love).

Michael L. Raposa

Lehigh University
Bethlehem, Pennsylvania

Avicenna's Metaphysics in Context. By Robert Wisnovsky. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2003 Pp. xii + 305. $65.00 (cloth). ISBN 0-8014-4178-1.

As Whitehead claimed that all philosophies are footnotes to Plato, too many histories of philosophy reduce Avicenna's metaphysics to a summary of and commentary on Aristotle, with some footnotes and adaptations. In fact, Avicenna offers a powerful new synthesis, which critically assesses the work of previous philosophers and theologians and courageously rethinks many issues. Its originality and the interest of its philosophical moves can only be understood in context. For Wisnovsky the context has to do with (1) the Greek and early Arabic commentators' efforts to reconcile Aristotle not only with himself but also with Neoplatonism and (2) the works and discussions of the "Mutakallimûn," the practitioners of Kalâm or Islamic theology.

Beginning with the first context, that of the various commentators, Wisnovsky shows how Alexander of Aphrodisias and others tried to reconcile Aristotle's texts, in particular the view of "entelechia" in the definition of the soul in De anima 2.1 and in the definition of change in Physics 3.1. In order to do so they introduced various distinctions which affected the way these Aristotelian passages were translated and understood in the Arabic tradition. The Ammonian synthesis went further and attempted to reconcile Aristotle with Neoplatonism. Wisnovsky contends that Avicenna follows the Ammonian synthesis in shifting the focus from the question of the relation of soul to body to the question of how the soul causes the body. Such a shift, which makes the soul the final cause of the body, allows commentators to find a way to argue for the immortality of the soul, which many passages in Aristotle seem to exclude. Wisnovsky shows, by going painstakingly through various commentators and their terminological shifts, that Avicenna mainly inherits the Ammonian synthesis on this issue. His originality shines in other purely metaphysical themes.

A second issue, which in fact is a double one, that of the distinction of essence and existence and of necessity and possibility, then takes center stage. This

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double issue likewise takes its origin in the commentators and the terminological choices of the Arabic translators but leads to a new synthesis, which displaces that of Ammonius, thanks to an integration of sophisticated Kalâm notions. The clear distinction between essence and existence takes its origin in an integration of the Kalâm concept of "shay," that is, "thing" or "res" in Latin, as a concomitant of "being," the primary metaphysical concept. This also ensures that no multiplicity ensues from considering God as both an efficient and a final cause. As for the famous development of a matrix of distinctions based on "necessary in itself" and "possible in itself," the latter being equated with the "necessary through another," we have to consider Kalâm discussions about God's attributes and the need for Avicenna to find a way to distinguish God from any other eternal realities, such as Intelligences, Heavenly Spheres, and their Souls. For each of these issues Wisnovsky indicates various stages of development in Avicenna's own works, though he considers them more as determined by the specific readership and the length of the various works than by what one could call a distinctive evolution. Wisnovsky also alludes to how much these two elaborations of distinctions influenced the Latin West (a fact very well known, though not always much explored) as well as post-Avicennian philosophy (as illustrated in the Philosophy of Illumination), and also Kalâm, a discovery Richard Frank already adumbrated with his emphasis on the way Avicenna influenced al-Ghazali. Wisnovsky is now working on a systematic exploration of Arabic postclassical philosophical commentaries in order to develop and ground this claim (see, for instance, his essay "The Nature and Scope of Arabic Philosophical Commentary in Post-classical [ca. 1100-1900 AD] Islamic Intellectual History: Some Preliminary Observations," in Philosophy, Science and Exegesis in Greek, Arabic and Latin Commentaries, ed. Peter Adamson, Han Baltussen, and M. W. F. Stone, vol. 2 [London: Institute of Classical Studies, School of Advanced Study, University of London, 2004], 149-91).

Avicenna's Metaphysics in Context is compact and cites many texts for which the author kindly provides an English translation, highlighting the technical terminology in both Greek and Arabic, and based on the Arabic translations or original of these texts. In each case the author delineates the philosophical advantages of making a certain distinction or shift in terminology, as well as its problems. It is a great example of a successful and happy marriage between philology and philosophy. If some readers lose the forest for the technical trees, they may find it useful to look at Wisnovsky's presentation of Avicenna in The Cambridge Companion to Arabic Philosophy (ed. Peter Adamson and Richard C. Taylor [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005], 92-136), which lays out the three principal issues without going through the various texts.

This rich book is a great contribution to the study of Avicenna's metaphysics. The author is fully aware that such a grand project at this stage of our knowledge of the field is somewhat daring and that future research will certainly bring correctives to it. However, such a project does allow us to correct some previous assumptions, such that "falsafa" or philosophy and "Kalâm" were mortal

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enemies, and to develop new research to check and develop some of the avenues opened by Wisnovsky.

Wisnovsky, whose knowledge of both the Greek commentators and Avicenna is truly extensive and nuanced, wisely limits himself to three issues, all of them focused on a study of immaterial beings such as the rational soul, God as both efficient and final cause, and God as distinct from other eternal realities. He examines themes diachronically. Such an approach leads to interesting perspectives and discoveries, but it may also lead the reader to assume (mistakenly) that Avicenna's main concern in metaphysics is a study of immaterial beings and God in particular (i.e., rational theology). Yet, Wisnovsky takes Avicenna's claims in his autobiography very seriously; he is reluctant to speak too hastily of an evolution in Avicenna's thought, since Avicenna there denies it. He also accepts the claim that initially and even after forty readings Avicenna could not make head or tail of Aristotle's metaphysics up to the time he read one of al-Farabi's treatises, which cleared up the mystery of its purpose. He also seems to accepts the view that Avicenna's problem was his confusing metaphysics with rational theology or a form of Kalâm, instead of realizing that it is mainly a study of being and its attributes. The diachronic approach prevents Wisnovsky from highlighting how much these issues emerge from a study of being and its attributes and are consequent and subordinate to ontology.

The careful reading of so many Greek commentators in Arabic translation is very impressive, but one may wonder how much the translators and the commentators themselves were aware of the full philosophical import of their terminological shifts. Besides, Avicenna was mainly self-taught and if, indeed, his basic philosophical insights were already reached when he was eighteen or nineteen, one may wonder how many of these texts he himself had already studied. Avicenna refers to commentaries on books 2 and 12 of Aristotle's Metaphysics, and it is not clear whether or not he had access to much more even if he praises the quality and richness of Sultan Nûh ibn Mansur's own library in Bukhara in which he worked up to around 1002 and where he claimed to have found titles unknown to most and texts he had never seen before and would never see again. At times the development through the commentators and terminological shifts seems somewhat too tidy to me, but this is one of the avenues for research so well opened for us, thanks to the immense and careful work of Wisnovsky.

Thérèse-Anne Druart

The Catholic University of America
Washington, D.C.

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La naissance de la volonté. By Miklos Vetö. Paris: L'Harmattan, 2002. Pp. 332. 26,50 (paper). ISBN 2-7475-3776-5.

Miklos Vetö, a Christian philosopher from Hungary who teaches in France, brings together a number of his areas of interest in his most recent book. While he is no doubt best known for his studies in German Idealism--Schelling, in particular--he has also written on the problem of evil in Christian thought, and provided philosophical interpretations of figures outside the mainstream (Simone Weil and Jonathan Edwards). As the title of the latest book suggests, it recounts the genesis of the notion of will in intellectual history. Vetö's aim in this account is above all philosophical: rather than trace the complex web of historical influences in the ideas of a particular thinker or school of thought, he intends to unfold the concept of will "through thinkers that do not necessarily have historical connections to each other" (7). In this regard, one might compare his approach to Hannah Arendt's work on the Life of the Mind, which Vetö himself cites as an early inspiration.

Such an approach, of course, always begins with a precise destination in mind. For Vetö, "at the end of its more than two-thousand year history, the notion of Will finds its fulfillment in Kant" (304). To understand why requires an understanding of what Vetö means by the "birth" of the will. As he explains in the introduction, the story of the birth of the will is a story of its gradual "purification," by which he means its dissociation from a number of related orders and its emergence into a sphere proper to itself alone, a sphere that Vetö insists possesses a sui generis intelligibility. On the one hand, this entails a separation of the will's activity from its effects in the world, and on the other hand it requires the more difficult, but for Vetö the more essential, dissociation of the will from both the natural desire for the good and the order of the (theoretical) intellect. The confusion of these orders accounts, according to Vetö, for both the impoverishment of some notions of will--for example, the varieties of classical naturalism and intellectualism--and the monstrous exaggerations of the will in more modern thinkers such as Schopenhauer and Nietzsche. The story of the will's "birth," then, is the story of the increasingly decisive articulation of its autonomy, a story that thus reaches its climax in eighteenth-century Königsberg.

The story unfolds in stages. The book's first chapter, "Commencements," covers the broad stretch from Greek thought to the Reformation. While it is Stoicism that first "discovers" the will, Aristotle prepares the way by making a distinction in the practical realm between immanent action (praxis) and production (poesis); the former designates an action whose end lies in itself and thus already marks a certain independence from external effects. Seneca carries this movement a step further by dissociating the will's immanent intention from action. The reduction of will to intention, in fact, is what inaugurates the will's autarchy, that is, its sovereign independence from the vicissitudes of the outside world (28). Nevertheless, the Stoics' internal world is still the world of cosmic (and therefore natural) reason. It is Augustine, according to Vetö, who

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introduces a division within that internal world itself (39), which leads him to draw the crucial distinction "between what is natural in the will and what is spiritual" (40), that is, between what Augustine eventually calls potestas or facultas, and what he calls voluntas proper (45). Later Christian thinkers specify this distinction and its implications further: Anselm realizes that the will's proper object is not the (appetible) good, but justice (51); Duns Scotus extracts the "non-naturality" of the properly free will, which transcends all creatures and is inferior only to God (53); Calvin, finally, succeeds in formalizing the will by subordinating the multiple material instances of its acts to its general orientation or permanent intention (68). Aquinas, according to Vetö, represents a regression in this development insofar as he "resolutely subordinates [the will] to the intellect" (50).

As the book progresses, the historical scope of the chapters begins to narrow. The second chapter weighs the philosophical import of a certain Christian mystical tradition for the notion of the will. The figures that stand out most of all here are John of the Cross and Fénelon, and their contribution concerns the purification of the will. The goal of mysticism, as Vetö reads it, is the creature's union of will with the Creator. To attain this goal requires a detachment from sensible desires, a transcendence of the discursive power of the intellect, and ultimately the perfect disappropriation of self. In this disappropriation--the paradigm of which Vetö finds in Fénelon's notion of disinterested love--the will acquires for the first time a pure spontaneity, insofar as it is no longer moved in any sense by desire, but wills the good, so to speak, utterly gratuitously (100).

Next comes Malebranche, whom Vetö acknowledges as having provided the pivotal insight that shaped his own thinking regarding the will. Radicalizing and generalizing the classical view that traces the choice of evil to a deficient cause, Malebranche identifies the essence of freedom--in contrast to the (natural) will--as nothingness (le rien). The most significant "actions" a person takes, whether they be a consent to sin or a consent to grace, are ultimately "nothing" (118). What Vetö interprets Malebranche to mean by this provocative assertion is that, while the particular goods to which the natural will adheres in a positive way are substantial realities, goodness per se, which transcends these multiple goods in its formal absoluteness, is not itself a positive entity of any sort, and thus neither is the freedom that determines itself in relation to this goodness. Freedom, one might say, is--like the Good--"beyond being."

The pure spontaneity of freedom raises the question of its relation to the moral law. Jonathan Edwards sets into relief a further dimension in Vetö's attempt to address this question. His analysis of Edwards is--in this reader's opinion--one of the book's highlights. Edwards vehemently attacks the notion of freedom of indifference (that is, the identification of freedom with sheer indeterminacy), which makes the determination of moral responsibility problematic. According to Edwards, the freedom of indifference can escape the logical absurdity of an infinite regress only by becoming a perverse imitation of creatio ex nihilo, the introduction into the world of something without any prevenient cause (155). Edwards's response is to reject the Newtonian view of

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causality, which would reduce all determination to the temporal sequence of efficient cause and effect, and would thus make freedom and necessity dialectical opposites. In its place, Edwards proposes what he refers to as "the necessity of a proposition" (157)--what we might call formal causality--which makes freedom and necessity simultaneous. This perspective allows us to judge the morality of the will not merely in terms of sincerity (i.e., according to the disposition prior to choice) but in terms of the objective content of the will in the actuality of its operation: Edwards locates "the good and evil of an act of the will not in its cause, i.e., that which precedes it, but in the act itself" (171).

Rousseau is a bit of an anomaly in Vetö's account; his contribution to the notion of will lies not in the sphere of anthropology, but in that of politics. Nevertheless, Vetö insists on an analogy between the two. He reads Rousseau's rejection of any external representation in the political realm as providing the will's final formalization. This rejection implies a view of the will as a power of legislation in and for itself (214). One suspects that Rousseau appears in this book primarily because of his well-known influence on Kant. However that may be, the step from the rejection of representation to the notion of the autonomy of practical reason is clear.

Vetö offers a thorough treatment of Kant's practical philosophy in two full chapters. While there is little that is new in his presentation, the fundamental aspects do acquire a distinctive character when viewed as the flower of a certain movement in history. The only thing that remains after the climax of the story in Kant is a final chapter--a dénouement, as it were--in which Vetö presents Hegel's notion of the reciprocity of wills as the unfolding of an insight left implicit in Kant: here the "heteronomous" classical problem of the will's effective causality in the world of objects is replaced by the will's effect simply on another will, for which the external world provides nothing but an occasion. With this final step, the will's separation from all that is not itself comes to completion.

The biggest weakness of Vetö's book is that it makes no argument for the normative status it accords Kant's practical philosophy. Kant's notion is the culmination of the history of the will because that history is a progressive attempt to articulate a Kantian notion of will. Indeed, there are a number of fundamental questions one could raise regarding the book's governing presuppositions. For example, Vetö takes for granted that a genuine distinction must be a separation, that is, that orders must be strictly unrelated if they are to possess their own integrity. In other words, he excludes the possibility of metaphysical complexity, which perhaps explains why Aquinas has nothing to offer to the notion of will in his telling of the story. Moreover, the separation of goodness and being that Vetö insists on, and his assertion, with Kant, that the goodness or evil of things is due solely to the will's spontaneous activity (278), arguably justifies Nietzsche's accusation of nihilism since it empties nature of any intrinsic significance. In this respect, his assertion of the goodness of reality seems gratuitous (275). Further, if all receptivity is removed from the will's proper activity, and by the same token all desirability removed from the

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goodness at which it aims, in what sense is the foundation of morality anything but "arbitrary"? (Surely, even the pure formality of the Categorical Imperative must be seen as desirable in some sense in order to have any binding force.) Along the same lines, one can ask how what Vetö refers to as the sui generis intelligibility of the will differs from irrationality. In short, there would be many grounds for raising concerns about the twofold dissociation that Vetö takes at the outset to be an ideal, and his treatment provokes such questions without providing answers.

Whether or not one is willing to accept this ideal, there is a great deal to be learned from Vetö's book. Among other things, the notion of will that governs his analyses sets into relief an unusual constellation of figures in intellectual history, introduces surprising affinities, and shows the philosophical significance of figures normally left out of philosophical discussions. His suggestion, for example, that the structure of the mystical experience of John of the Cross anticipates in decisive ways Husserl's phenomenological reduction (91, 93, 103) is excellent, and the insights he draws from Puritan theology offer a new solution to an old philosophical problem. Even a reader more inclined to espouse a classical understanding the will in relation to the intellect and natural desire will find the story stimulating and provocative, and certainly anyone interested in the history of ideas will find this an exceedingly rich and illuminating book.

D. C. Schindler

Villanova University
Villanova, Pennsylvania

Inspired Metaphysics? Gustav Siewerth's Hermeneutic Reading of the Onto-Theological Tradition. By Andrzej Wiercinski. Toronto: The Hermeneutic Press, 2003. Pp. 214. ISBN 0-9525333-3-2.

Andrzej Wiercinski has written the first English monograph on Gustav Siewerth (1903-63), the twentieth-century German thinker whom Hans Urs von Balthasar regarded as the greatest philosopher of the contemporary age. In numerous major works, in which he negotiates a precarious synthesis of Hegel, Heidegger, and Aquinas, Siewerth constructs some of the most original speculative philosophy of the contemporary period. Yet notwithstanding a significant readership in Germany, Siewerth remains largely unknown in North America.

Wiercinski's book, Inspired Metaphysics? Gustav Siewerth's Hermeneutic Reading of the Onto-Theological Tradition, represents the culmination of twenty years of work on Siewerth. Wiercinski presents Siewerth as an example of the

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hermeneutic vitality of Thomism. Criticized for his speculative departures from the texts of Aquinas, Siewerth in his relationship to Aquinas has methodo-logically much in common with Bernard Lonergan, Max Müller, Johann Baptist Lotz, and to a lesser extent, Joseph Maréchal and the young Karl Rahner. With these thinkers, Siewerth regards the dialogue with modernity as the essential task for Thomism. Yet Siewerth is critical of Thomist appropriations of Kant, as Wiercinski points out in his well-researched chapter "The Transcendental Turn in the Thomist Revival." Siewerth's emphasis on the irreducibility of being, the act of existence (esse) grasped by the intellect as a pure positivity, aligns him with Gilson and the existential Thomists and distances him from the "transcendental Thomists." Siewerth however does not engage in the close textual analysis characteristic of the Gilson school. He retains from his years studying under Martin Heidegger in the 1930s the method of directly engaging the matter of the text (die Sache), even if this requires rethinking it in new terms.

While Wiercinski appears to distance himself from Siewerth (hence the question mark in the title), the central contribution of this volume is not Wiercinski's critique but his thorough exposition of Siewerth's ontology, accompanied by numerous translated quotations from Siewerth's works. After setting the stage by introducing the idea of "hermeneutic reading" ("the situation of the interpretation, of the appropriation of the past in understanding, is always the situation of the living present," Wiercinski writes, "the text has something to say to me, something which requires my attentive response"), Wiercinski deftly guides us through Siewerth's extremely difficult speculative ontology. He argues that Siewerth cannot be understood without a knowledge of the history of medieval philosophy, German idealism, and Heidegger, and carefully illustrates the significance of each of these. Particularly helpful is the examination of Siewerth's understanding of the relationship of Scotus's metaphysics to what Heidegger calls the forgetfulness of the ontological difference between being and beings. Scotus's univocatio entis denies the "mediating mediation" between the Creator and creatures, precipitating both late medieval nominalism and modern idealism.

Siewerth's first attempt at interpreting Aquinas through Hegel and Heidegger was his 1930-31 doctoral dissertation, "Die Metaphysik der Erkenntnis nach Thomas von Aquin." He followed this with his 1937 Habilitationsschrift, "Die transzendentale intellektuelle Anschauung bei Thomas von Aquin. Der Grund der Möglichkeit der Gotteserkenntnis." All but banished from the academy by the Nazis (and his revered teacher Heidegger did nothing to help), Siewerth continued his research without an academic post. Siewerth owes much to Hegel, but, as Wiercinski shows, he does not share Hegel's idealization of being and nothingness. He substitutes a notion of "exemplary identity" for Hegel's dialectical identity. A is not not-A; rather it is imaged in not-A, as God is imaged in being. Even more essential than the appropriation of Hegel is Siewerth's more intimate connection with the later Heidegger. Siewerth singles out Heidegger and Aquinas as the only figures in the history of Western philosophy who

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endeavored to think being in its difference from beings. According to Siewerth, Heidegger's critique of the forgetfulness of being indicts everyone except Aquinas. That Heidegger seems to have missed this in Aquinas--Heidegger is far more interested in Scotus, Suarez, and Luther than he is in Aquinas--does not stop Siewerth from drawing this surprising connection. For Siewerth the question of what Heidegger calls "the ontological difference" is the beginning of every genuine metaphysical inquiry. Metaphysics inevitably takes one of two directions with respect to the question of being: either a monism in which the ontological difference is reduced to appearance (Platonism, conceptualism, essentialism, Scotism), or a pluralism, in which the difference is held to be irreducible (Aquinas, Heidegger). Only in the latter does the difference become a creative spur for philosophy.

The modern forgetfulness of being begins with Scotus, for whom being is exhausted in essentia. The Scotistic denial of the real distinction of essentia and existentia, and the related denial of the inconceivability of God in the notion of univocatio entis, gives birth to the essentialism of modern philosophy and the subjectivism of German idealism. Against this trend Siewerth unfurls a set of hermeneutically revised Thomistic concepts. He shows how Aquinas distinguishes being (esse) from beings (entia) on the grounds that the latter possess essentia, quidditas, which can be abstracted and conceptualized, where the former is pure nonessential act. The "existentialist" formulation of the distinctio realis, however, is not enough to meet the challenge of Heidegger, for both whatness (essentia) and thatness (existentia) belong to the being of substance. Siewerth argues that, in order to answer Heidegger's critique, we must retrieve Aquinas's distinction between act and subsistence: the former is the pure, nonsubstantive, dynamic energy of coming into presence; the latter is the stasis of that which has come to be. The act of being subsists in a being while remaining distinct from it. The distinction underscores Aquinas's often overlooked distinction between the being of God (ipsum esse subsistens) and the being of beings (ipsum esse non-subsistens). The being of a being is a nonsubsistent act, the event of the sheer upsurge of beings from nothingness. It cannot be abstracted into a concept. As Siewerth says, it can be thought (there is a conceptio entis) but not abstracted (there is no conceptus entis).

Neither a being nor God, the being of beings is the perfect image of God, a pure reflection of divine kenosis. It empties itself into beings and comes to realization in them. Hence it depends upon the subsistent being of God as much as beings depend upon it. By distinction, the being of God is subsistent act, that which resides in itself, infinite, eternal, self-sufficient, excluding all potency and requiring nothing else in order for it to be. As the first creation, the being of beings is horizoned by the nothingness of primordial potency; it is "complete and simple, but not subsistent." Just as the triune God is a mediation through otherness (the Father is Father by virtue of the relation to the Son, etc.), being is an identity-in-difference, an identity that realizes itself through its other. It was this Hegel-inspired Trinitarian ontology that proved so fertile for Balthasar. In

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the act of creation, the self-emptying Trinity images itself in that which only exists insofar as it empties itself into a being. Being is kenosis. As nonsubsistent, being is not identical with itself: it is only real insofar as it has poured itself out and allowed a being to be.

Siewerth believes that this nonsubstantive notion of being can accommodate Heidegger's retrieval of the pre-Socratic notion of physis, "self-blossoming emergence," while preserving the Scholastic principle of the subsistence, eternity, and infinity of God. The First and Absolute Being remains the eternal ground of all that is; it excludes time. The being of beings is the condition of the possibility of time. The being in which all things participate, the being the horizon of which is time, to speak Heidegger's language, is not the being of God, but the first act of God, the donation of the energy of his presence in the othering by which creation becomes possible. It is the simple unlimited being of every thing that exists, "das einfache, nicht begrenzte Sein des Seienden." However near to us, it is "a profound mystery," for it includes within itself all possible conceptual determinations, while remaining "uncircumscribed" by any concept. It is the act that actualizes every thing that is, but is "captured and consumed" by none of them.

Siewerth refers to many texts of Aquinas in constructing his central points. One might question whether this metaphysics is true to Aquinas. One cannot, however, question that it is in its own right an important contribution to contemporary metaphysics. That Wiercinski has gone to such lengths to make this contribution better known forgives some of the idiosyncrasies of Inspired Metaphysics? Wiercinski has recently announced the publication of a translation and commentary of Siewerth's seminal treatise, Das Sein als Gleichnis Gottes. Let us hope that these valuable works are the first of many studies of Siewerth.

Sean McGrath

Mount Allison University
Sackville, New Brunswick, Canada

Theism or Atheism: The Eternal Debate. By F. F. Centore. Aldershot, Hants, England and Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate, 2004. Pp. 206 + xiii. $94.95 (cloth). ISBN 0-7546-3670-4.

F. F. Centore begins his book with a playful account of his Thomistic academic pedigree: "It is not too much to say that Gilson begot Owens, who begot Azar, who begot Centore" (xi). A note "About the Author" on the following page observes that Centore died on 24 August 2003, and that the work is being published posthumously. It recalls that "his love of teaching and

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interaction with his students" became "his whole life, second only to his family." The author's love of Aquinas as well as his devotion to his students is evident throughout. The work shows all the fervor of a true disciple of Aquinas along with the occasional outrageousness of a college philosophy classroom.

The book aims to examine rational arguments for the existence of God (vii). It comprises nine chapters. The first serves as a prologue, showing the com-patibility of faith and reason and reviewing some ways in which arguments about God can go wrong. The next three deal with atheism and various types of theism. The remainder of the work examines arguments for God's existence by presenting the thought of representative philosophers for various types of arguments and then using other thinkers to critique them. The historical situation of each philosopher is presented, though with uneven detail.

Atheism (chap. 2) is divided into "naive atheism," represented by Bertrand Russell, who tried to affirm the reality of evil without affirming the reality of God, and "sophisticated atheism," represented by Nietzsche, who denied the reality of God, good and evil, repudiating "all value, meaning and desirability" (16). Theism, in contrast, affirms the existence of God and recognizes that the "unchanging divine standard" is essential for distinguishing good from evil (22).

Theism is divided into "naturalistic theism" (chap. 3), in which God is "the same as the world or some fundamental aspect of the world" (25), and "supernaturalistic theism" (chap. 4), in which God is "separate from the natural world" (35). Examples of naturalistic theism are Hinduism, Buddhism, Stoicism, and Epicureanism. Supernaturalistic theism is divided into polytheism (Zoroastrianism, Manichaeism, Confucianism, and classical paganism) and monotheism, which comprises deism and traditional theism (Judaism, Islam, and Christianity). The latter religions are mentioned but not formally discussed (36).

The rational arguments for God's existence which comprise the rest of the book are of two fundamental types: "as-if" and "for-real." "As-if" arguments (chap. 5) do not prove the existence of God but only "the need to believe in the existence of God" (45). Examples include Blaise Pascal's wager, Immanuel Kant's postulate of practical reason, and William James's pragmatism. The critique of the "as-if" approach is provided through Voltaire, who recognizes that "even though someone might sincerely want to believe in something, such a desire in no way shows the real existence of the thing in question" (58).

The "for-real" way to God can employ either a priori or a posteriori arguments. Saint Anselm's ontological argument exemplifies the a priori approach (chap. 6). A posteriori arguments may begin with either internal or external experience. The "internal" approach is represented by such historically and theologically diverse thinkers as Augustine, Boethius, Descartes, Hegel, and Newman (chap. 7). Each argues in some way from inner knowledge or experience to the existence of God. The thought of Schopenhauer and Freud is used to critique this approach. The conclusion is that, while inner experience may bring some to affirm God as a being existing independently of the world,

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it leads others to see God as identical with the world and fails to provide any objective grounds for deciding between the two (115).

A more secure approach is through "external" experience, which may be based on either essence (chap. 8) or existence (chap. 9). Newton, Paley, and proponents of the "anthropic principle" are presented as examples of the former, which argues from the presence of order in nature to the existence of a designer God. These arguments are critiqued through the thought of David Hume and Charles Darwin. Hume contends that arguments from causality cannot get to God and, even if they could, they would not require the all-perfect God of religion, but only a less-than-perfect "designer" (132). Darwin's theory of evolution requires no designer or creator to explain the complex order of biological life. The ethical and social consequences of these different positions are also reviewed.

For Centore, the best way to argue for the existence of God is the "a posteriori external experience method based on existence," which he identifies as the way of Thomas Aquinas (chap. 9). In distinguishing Aquinas's philosophy from that of his Greek predecessors, Centore argues that "Aquinas could not accept the Greek doctrine of the unintelligibility of matter, for the very simple reason that it conflicted with the biblical book of Genesis. If God produced the universe, then matter . . . must be knowable because God knows what he makes" (171-72). Apart from the rather fideistic cast this gives to Aquinas's philosophy, the argument ignores the distinction between matter as pure potency (unintelligible for both Aquinas and Aristotle in that it has no actuality) and material substances (intelligible both for Aquinas and Aristotle in virtue of their actuality). He contends that for Aquinas God's existence "must be proven" in the "science of metaphysics (natural theology) and not in the . . . lower science of physics" (173), and so seems to ignore Aquinas's own claim, at the conclusion of his commentary on Aristotle's Physics, that Aristotle "ends his general discussion of natural things with the first principle of the whole of nature, who is over all things, God, blessed forever. Amen."

Centore spends only five pages on Aquinas' actual arguments, concentrating on what he calls "Aquinas' core argument for the existence of God" which he finds in On Being and Essence (180). He presents this as a series of three syllogisms, but does not specify from what part of the text he is extracting his arguments. If he is referring to the paragraph in chapter 4 where Aquinas shows "there must be something which causes all things to exist inasmuch as it is subsistent existence," his arguments (which includes such premises as "Any existentially dependent being that has completely exhausted every possible other already really existing external explanatory cause is caused by an existentially independent being") are far more complicated and less clear than those of Aquinas.

Centore makes no reference to the controversy over whether the argument in On Being and Essence is truly a demonstration of the existence of God and whether it was intended as such. Gilson, for instance, contends in his later

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writing that the work "contains no proof of the existence of God" (Le thomisme, [6th ed.; Paris: J. Vrin, 1965], 97 n. 85), quoted in L. Dewan, "St. Thomas and the Existence of God: Owens vs. Gilson, and Beyond," in God and Argument [Ottowa: University of Ottowa Press, 1999], 116).

Aquinas's "five ways" to show God's existence are covered in a brief paragraph, with less than complete accuracy. The fifth is said to conclude to God as "the final cause of all existence and change" (184), though it actually concludes to God as an efficient cause: the "intelligent being by whom all natural things are directed to their end."

It is not clear what audience Centore has in mind for his work. Some insights, such as his analysis of how contemporary issues in the divine action debate find their roots in Descartes, might be useful even to advanced readers (89, 117-18, 133). Aspects of his humor might appeal to many. I enjoyed, for instance, his definition of "panentheism" as "pantheism with an extra syllable in the middle to indicate that [it] is not the usual sort of pantheism" (153). Not infrequently, though, the humor seems odd. Noting that Augustine died in 430, for example, he quips, "a good union man always quits at 4:30" (76). The work is sprinkled with little factoids, such as Darwin's wife taking piano lessons from Chopin (139), Hegel's love for dancing (91), Kant's distress at a delayed delivery of dried fruit (63), and Descartes's practice of sleeping late, the violation of which seems to have caused his death (82, 86). There is also a mistaken reference to the Dominican Catherine of Siena as a "Benedictine saint" (166).

One gets the impression Centore is speaking to undergraduates, where the wise teacher assumes nothing. So he somehow finds it necessary to inform his readers that "[t]o this day, Augustine himself is the subject of many books and articles" (77) and that the Council of Trent was called "to reform the Church from head to toe" (165). He sometimes slips into a rather preachy mode, attacking contemporary "pseudo-liberals" (94-96) or lamenting today's sexual mores in which "the only purpose of sex is fun" (152). In this context, feminism is a recurrent theme and is presented with little nuance.

Centore also offers spiritual advice to his readers which, laudable in itself, seems somehow misplaced in a work whose goal is to review rational arguments for the existence of God. He assures us, for instance, that God "created things for our good and demands our love and obedience. Yet, when we fail to do his will, he is always ready to forgive and welcome home the truly repentant sinner, especially if approached through the Second Person of the Holy Trinity, as when someone sincerely says, 'Lord Jesus Christ, Lamb of God, I trust in your mercy, have mercy on me, a sinner'" (190).

To its credit, the book allows a considerable number of philosophers to speak to one another and so to the reader about the question of the existence of God. As guide in this, Centore shows considerable skill in arranging the conversation, but is often obtrusive in pressing his own point of view. In its tone, the work seems less a discussion of arguments for or against the existence of God and more a polemic on where the modern world went wrong. This takes the form of

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a philosophical romp through the history of ideas, where historical tidbits and snatches of poetry are shaken together with philosophical opinions to produce a montage of arguments roughly centered on the question of the existence of God. For those in the mood for such an adventure and willing to tolerate a certain amount of "attitude" from the author, it's not a bad ride.

Michael J. Dodds, O.P.

Dominican School of Philosophy and Theology
Berkeley, California