BOOK REVIEWS

Praeambula Fidei: Thomism and the God of the Philosophers. By Ralph McInerny. Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 2007. Pp. 313. $34.95 (paper). ISBN: 978-0-8132-1458-0.

Ralph McInerny's Gifford Lectures, Characters in Search of their Author (1999-2000) examined criticisms of natural theology posed by various practitioners of modern philosophy. Praeambula Fidei is a more technical, broad, and ambitious attempt to analyze the internal structure of Thomistic natural theological reasoning. It also seeks to respond to thinkers who (according to McInerny) sought to marginalize the place of this doctrine in modern Catholic theology.

The book is polemical in that it takes issue with interpretations of Aquinas developed by such influential figures as Etienne Gilson, Henri de Lubac, and Marie-Dominique Chenu. Simultaneously, however, the presentation is expository, offering a counterproposal based upon the Aristotelianism of Aquinas. McInerny's defense of a distinctly philosophical theology in Aquinas, and of the profound strands of continuity between Aquinas's metaphysics and that of Aristotle, will leave no Thomist indifferent. For contemporary theologians, the book offers interesting arguments about fundamental theology, stressing oft-forgotten truths worthy of serious (re)consideration.

The book proceeds in three parts. In the first section the author exposes the doctrine of the praeambula fidei, those truths revealed by God that are also accessible to human reason. Such truths denote even to the philosophical intellect the potential truth of the Catholic faith: truths such as the existence of the soul, the rationality of the natural law, and, in particular, the philosophical demonstrability of the existence of God. Here McInerny articulates eloquently the Thomistic distinction between knowing by reason and believing by faith. His attentiveness to Aquinas's philosophy of first principles, self-evident propositions, and demonstrative reasoning toward non-self-evident rational truths (7-17) allows him to identify clearly the character of philosophical knowledge of God he wishes to defend. God may be known a posteriori, indirectly, as a cause is known from its effects, even while his existence is not self-evident to us a priori. This genuine form of rational knowledge is absolutely distinct from the revealed truths of divine revelation, which in turn have their own "principles" and (eventual) propositional articulation (20-23). The latter are accepted in love by an act of the will, based upon the authority of God revealing himself. These

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two ways of knowing God are not alien to one another, however, since "the bulk of things we hold as true is based on trust" (16) and, consequently, trust in the word of another is a necessary dimension of human reason. The study of the praeambula fidei guarantees a sense of the potential harmony between faith and reason, since it demonstrates that there exists for natural reason a final term (knowledge of the existence of God) which revelation both complements and completes. In the twentieth century, however, the pursuit of this harmony has been attenuated by "flawed understandings of the nature of Christian philosophy, a tendency to disparage the natural in favor of the supernatural, [and] the suggestion that the philosophy of St. Thomas is to be found only in his theological works, and cannot be separated from them" (32).

In the second section of the book, the author goes on to analyze critically the interpretations of Aquinas offered by Gilson, De Lubac, and Chenu. It is their works in particular that contributed to the above-mentioned problematic ten-dencies. McInerny sees particular evidence of this in their respective treatments of Cardinal Cajetan, and the Dominican commentary tradition more generally. What follows in the second section, then, is an extended defense of Cajetan's reading of Aquinas concerning the metaphysics of esse, the final end of man, and the integrity of philosophical theology as distinct from sacra doctrina. This defense is conducted in dialogue with the writings of Gilson, De Lubac, and Chenu, sequentially.

McInerny first studies Gilson's claim that Aquinas' doctrine of esse (as existence "beyond" essence) was deemphasized or forgotten by the Thomistic school, and principally by Cajetan (39-68). Examining in particular Gilson's "Cajetan et l'existence" (Tijdschriff voor Philosophie 15 [1953]: 267-86), McInerny shows multiple ways in which Gilson misinterpreted the sixteenth-century commentator. For example, in his criticism of Cajetan's treatment of esse as perfection (in his commentary on STh I, q. 4, a. 1, ad 3), Gilson ignores the Dominican's earlier statement (on STh I, q. 3, a. 4) that "existence is the actuality of every form and that no nature is signified in ultimate act except insofar as it is signified as actually exercising existence" (51). In contrast to Gilson's genealogy of the forgetfulness of esse in Western metaphysics, McInerny argues that Cajetan's understanding of Aquinas insists quite plausibly on the compatibility between Aquinas's Aristotelianism and his metaphysics of existence. Despite the appropriateness of these criticisms, McInerny's treatment of Gilson is not always magnanimous in tone (e.g., "The effect of this scorched earth policy [of Gilson toward other commentators] is to turn our attention more and more toward the one operating the flame thrower" [68]).

McInerny then examines De Lubac's conception of the final end of man in Surnaturel and Le mystère du surnaturel. At issue is De Lubac's criticism of Cajetan's theory of nature and grace as a two-storied, extrinsicist model. Here (69-76, 80-90) McInerny's tone is at time excessively shrill. He makes scant reference to actual texts of De Lubac and his presentation is too dependent upon secondary scholarship. Nevertheless, as he goes on to defend Cajetan's own views of the final natural end of man as distinct from the supernatural end

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designated by grace (76-90), he makes several substantive points. First, clearly there is in Aquinas a notion of the obediential potentiality of human nature, capable of the supernatural in the moral domain and not only in the miraculous (contra De Lubac's interpretation, and as Cajetan rightly notes). This suggests that human nature can have a certain kind of autonomous teleological structure, according to Aquinas. Second, Cajetan's interpretation of Aquinas in no way implies that man is a being "closed in on himself"; that is, there is in Cajetan no pure nature/grace extrinsicism. On the contrary, Cajetan (commenting on STh I-II, q. 3, a. 8) argues explicitly that the human person has a natural desire to know God's essence immediately. This stems not from a response to supernatural revelation, but from the fact that created intellect has a natural desire to know the first cause of created effects, God (85). McInerny argues that this interpretation has a basis in Aquinas's own texts that is more historically defensible than the views of De Lubac. Third, Aquinas has an unambiguous doctrine of a twofold final end of man, one natural and imperfect (with reference to Aristotle) and the latter supernatural and perfect (see STh I, q. 62, a. 1). Such texts suggest that for Aquinas the natural end of the human intellect is realized in philosophy, exemplified by the praeambula fidei.

McInerny notes the emergence of Chenu's critique of neo-Scholastic Thomism as a "rationalizing, propositional, essentialist system" in his Le Saulchoir: Une école de théologie (1937). When philosophy is co-opted for the purposes of the praeambula fidei it becomes, according to Chenu, "a series of propositions, premises, or conclusions, which function as the least common denominator of philosophical [thought]" (116). Along with Gilson, Chenu portrayed Cajetan as an interpreter guilty of the "forgetfulness of being." Neo-Scholasticism denatures philosophy by instrumentalizing the latter systematically toward a merely apologetical end. In response, McInerny notes tendencies in Chenu's own thought toward an anti-essentialist historicism that cannot easily sustain any form of transhistorical doctrinal truth (118-19). Here more inquiry into Chenu's writing would have aided McInerny's argument. For example, an examination of Chenu's doctrinal writings in the postconciliar period could have provided yet more evidence of antimetaphysical, historicist tendencies, and allowed McInerny's defense of legitimate concerns in Humani Generis (120) to be presented more poignantly.

The third part of the book is an impressive depiction of "Aristotelian Thomistic" reasoning, attempting to show how Aquinas presents a way of progressive philosophical argumentation that passes from basic human experience to the eventual affirmation of the existence of God. This constructive presentation forms the heart of the book. Here McInerny focuses in particular upon Aquinas's interpretation of Aristotle's philosophical theology. "The assumption of this study is that the native habitat of the praeambula fidei is the Metaphysics of Aristotle, and that its recovery can only be accomplished in that setting" (167-68). The book goes on (169-87) to examine Aquinas's treatment of major Aristotelian themes: the nature of a science, the mind's commensurate object (beings undergoing change), the principles of form and matter, analogical

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predication, and substantial change. The goal is to introduce terms that are propaedeutic to the science of metaphysics. McInerny then goes on to propose (like Charles De Konnick and Benedict Ashley) the controversial idea that metaphysics as a science is possible only once one has demonstrated the existence of immaterial substances. This is achieved by the first-mover argument, as the culmination of a philosophical investigation of nature (188-96). "The predicable range of 'being' is maximal; it can be said of whatever is. But until and unless it is known that there is immaterial being, the predicable range of 'being' will be material things" (190). The perspective contrasts, of course, with the Thomistic interpretations of scholars such as Owens, Wippel, Dewan, and Aersten, as the author is well aware. He defends his interpretation by recourse to numerous statements from Aquinas's commentary on the Metaphysics. After a somewhat extended discussion (196-209) of Aquinas's doctrine of separatio, (that judgment whereby one may affirm that there exist separate substances, distinct from material being), McInerny affirms that "the aim of metaphysics as the culminating science of philosophy is knowledge of the divine. This aim is the key to understanding everything that is undertaken in the science of being as being" (210). In studying the ultimate causes of being, one is engaged in a divine science and a natural theology that perfects philosophy.

After an extended defense of the unity of the Metaphysics as a text (against Jaegar and by appeal to Reale and Aquinas), McInerny offers a helpful exposition of Aquinas's interpretation of book 12 of the Metaphysics (245-82). Of particular interest is the treatment of the universality of causal principles of all material substances (Metaphys. 12.5). All substances imply "matter, form, privation, and the moving cause" (253-54) and these principles are "proportionally the same" in each existent. This analogically "universal" perspective on interdependent, physical beings allows one to develop a further argument. The existence of moving beings requires a primary, universal cause that is beyond all movement and temporality, a pure actuality that is the ultimate source of all changing beings (258-63). McInerny does an excellent job of showing how, according to Aquinas, Aristotle's understanding of the composition of act and potency in secondary substances, and the ontological primacy of actuality, permits in turn a demonstration of God's existence and a study of divine attributes. The God of book 12 of the Metaphysics is pure actuality, immobile, immaterial, eternal, sovereignly good, perfect life, and self-knowledge (263-82). "That is, the God of Aristotle, knowledge of whom is derived from knowledge of things around us and who is magnificently described in his perfection and operation by an examination of human intellection, is the same God Thomas worships as a Christian and who, through revelation, has made known to us things about himself undreamt of in philosophy. It is because those mysteries of faith involve praeambula that Christian theology, however formally different from philosophy, cannot flourish independently of it" (282).

McInerny's book is a powerful and controversial restatement of a classical Thomistic doctrine concerning the relations between faith and reason, philosophy and theology. In the hands of generous readers, it will lead to fruitful

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debate about the place of Aristotle in the interpretation of Aquinas (and vice versa), the perennial importance of Vatican I, and the strengths and weaknesses of la nouvelle théologie. Thomists of vibrantly Aristotelian provenance will find it refreshing (with inevitable partial reservations). In our metaphysically tone-deaf age, the book reopens important discussions on the topic of fundamental theology, and ought to be read by all those seriously interested in the renewal of genuine ontological reflection within Christian theology.

Thomas Joseph White, O.P.

Dominican House of Studies
Washington, D.C.

Norms of Liberty: A Perfectionist Basis for Non-Perfectionist Politics. By Douglas B. Rasmussen and Douglas J. Den Uyl. University Park, Penn.: Penn State Press, 2005. Pp. 358. $25.00 (paper). ISBN 0-271-02701-0.

Douglas Rasmussen and Douglas Den Uyl's Norms of Liberty: A Perfectionist Basis for Non-Perfectionist Politics provides a seminal contribution to liberal political thought that will be of significant interest to Thomists as well as other classically trained Aristotelians and natural law theorists. The book's argument, although occasionally repetitive, is characterized by uncommon rigor and clarity. It suggests a unique approach to the defense of political liberalism that draws upon Aristotelian virtue ethics. The authors contend that contemporary liberal theorists who embrace conventionalism and relativism do so because they misuse the principle of the primacy of political liberty as the basis for a comprehensive ethical doctrine. Rasmussen and Den Uyl agree with critics of liberalism, such as Alasdair MacIntyre, who insist that procedural political theory without a more substantive deep ethical structure is untenable. Contrary to these critics, however, the authors hold that Aristotelian virtue can provide liberalism the defense that it requires. Furthermore, they assert that Aristotelian principles properly applied to the heterogeneity of modern life entail a version of political liberalism.

Three key premises ground this conclusion: (1) there are many different forms of human excellence and as a consequence excellence is radically individualized, (2) liberty or "self-direction" is an essential constitutive feature of human flourishing, but (3) flourishing is "profoundly social." From these premises the authors infer that the protection of certain natural rights is grounded in "metanormative" political principles, rather than ethical norms. Governments and political communities should neither coerce nor encourage the pursuit of human excellence, since doing so would be contrary to the requirements of self-direction. The problem of constructing a political system that permits the pursuit of diverse forms of flourishing that do not conflict with each other the authors call "liberalism's problem."

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Aristotelians and Thomists will find the book's central arguments agreeable in some respects and problematic in others. On the one hand, Rasmussen and Den Uyl grant that the natural right to political liberty must be grounded in an ethical account of the human good. They also endorse metaphysical realism and maintain that human nature has objective significance for ethics. They place principled as opposed to merely pragmatic limits upon the role of state authority, a point they rightly insist is found in Aquinas's distinction between moral and legal obligations. On the other hand, they propose a form of radical individual-ism that appears deficient as an account of human nature and the moral preconditions for the exercise of liberty in a free society. While some Aristotelian critics of liberalism fall into the utopian tendency of yearning for the homogeneity of the ancient polis, the authors' rejection of concrete political norms besides liberty tends to the opposite extreme. They draw a sharp dichotomy between private morality and political authority. This diminishes the significance of intermediate social and political institutions, such as the Church, which can shield individual liberty from the absolute power of the state and foster the common good. To their credit, Rasmussen and Den Uyl are not unaware of these types of criticisms of their position and treat them thoughtfully and extensively.

The key to the book's unique defense of liberalism, and a principal strength, is the distinction that is made between certain necessary and unnecessary features of the theory. The authors accept that contemporary liberalism is in crisis for the very reasons stipulated by many of its critics, but they maintain its fundamental soundness as a political approach. In particular, they observe that many liberals erroneously embrace an Enlightenment conception of rationality, which requires them to reject the traditional teleological account of human nature. In so doing they place the right before the good and maintain this view as the basis for a comprehensive set of ethical norms. Paradoxically, by making Enlightenment skepticism and relativism the deep ethical structure for liberalism, liberalism's most ardent proponents become its worst enemies.

Rasmussen and Den Uyl challenge the notions that liberalism requires the rejection of Aristotelian teleology, and that contemporary Aristotelians can endorse a political approach other than liberalism. Aristotelians such as Mac-Intyre, for instance, have argued that procedural liberalism is untenable because it lacks a substantive theory of the good. Because the authors think that En-lightenment rationality is merely incidental to the core of liberal political theory, they can grant MacIntyre's objection and embrace Aristotelianism, while simul-taneously maintaining the superiority of liberalism and natural rights doctrine.

Whereas MacIntyre insists that liberalism's official neutrality with respect to competing views of the human good renders it shallow, the authors contend that their commitment to Aristotelian ethics allows them to make a morally relevant distinction between the neutrality of politics and the emphatic non-neutrality of ethical principles. This leads to what they describe as a "structural paradox." Liberalism has no ethical foundations of its own, because it is strictly a political theory. It must borrow its ethical foundations from outside. Once liberals

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recognize this structural feature of their theory they need not embrace ethical minimalism. Central to this notion of the distinction between politics and ethical reflection is the idea that political principles are "metanormative." They guide community choices and standards, but they are not a sufficient basis for the guidance of individual conduct. Rasmussen and Den Uyl point out that this unique proposal is characteristic of neither contemporary left nor right-wing political ideology, and that in fact it undermines both programs. Contemporary left-wing liberals fail to recognize liberalism's dependence upon Aristotelian ethical perfectionism. Some conservatives on the right fail to make the necessary distinction between politics and ethics, insisting falsely that the political sphere ought to be governed by more substantive moral principles. Both groups fail because they assume in Platonic fashion that politics is "ethics writ large."

Perhaps the most insightful and compelling part of the book's argument is the careful analysis of the historical relationship between liberalism and normative ethics, and the prescriptive recommendations made concerning the reconceptualization of that relationship. The authors observe that there is significant historical ambivalence in liberal thought about this relationship, from which an apparent paradox concerning the individual emerges. On the one hand, liberals have tended to reject classical ethical perfectionism, not only because they believe it depends upon a questionable teleological conception of human nature, but also because they think it expects too much. The gap between reality and the attainment of moral virtue is deemed to be too wide. Liberals want "workable principles" that acknowledge human beings' limitations. In addition, moral exhortations seem to be of limited usefulness in effecting transformations of character as compared to political and economic institutions. On the other hand, liberals have been committed to the doctrine of human rights and the protection of individual liberty. They see this stance as evidence of the moral superiority of their position. There appears to be an incongruity between the liberal commitment to rights and ethical minimalism.

Rasmussen and Den Uyl enumerate several unsuccessful approaches to explaining this incongruity within the liberal tradition. State-of-nature theories attempt to derive liberalism's focus upon the right and rights from a minimalist conception of the good (self-interest). This effort has encountered many difficulties. The perceived lack of success in social-contract theory has led other liberal theorists to focus more exclusively upon the centrality of the notion of the right, and to minimize the problematic role of the good by privatizing it. Thus, many liberals have treated the right as rational and universal, and the good as particular "interested, and hence amoral" (23). Since the good has to do with the interests of particular individuals, and rights apply universally to no one in particular as such, the shift in emphasis from the good to the right leads to the apparently paradoxical conclusion that liberal theory is not really concerned with individuals.

Remarkably, the authors endorse this aspect of liberal theory as both factual and appropriate, with one important qualification. Liberals ought to "ignore the individual and be universalistic in [their] outlook," but only if they recognize that

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liberalism is not an ethical philosophy (27). Historically, proponents of liberalism have neglected the importance of prudence and attempted to reduce ethics to justice and the social virtues. The authors cite several examples, including: Hobbes, Hume, and Kant. The problem with this reduction is that it leads to minimalism in moral theory because it fails to recognize the "metanormative" relationship between liberty and other ethical principles. Claiming that liberal principles are political metanorms entails that we cannot derive ethical norms directly from them although they may limit or rule out certain ethical norms that are incompatible with those principles.

According to Rasmussen and Den Uyl, we can recognize the dividing line between ethical norms and political metanorms by considering the purpose of a norm. If a norm concerns personal conduct relating to self-perfection it is a moral norm. Norms that do not directly concern self-perfection, including in particular those norms that deal with our duties to others, are not moral norms but political "metanorms." As the authors conclude, "ethical flourishing and ethical conduct are to be found elsewhere than in politics" (40).

This assessment of the relationship between liberalism and ethics is informative and insightful. The "metanormative solution" to the apparent incongruity between liberalism's universalism and ethical concern for the individual offers a novel and intriguing approach. There are several points in this analysis that may be challenged, however. First, the claim that only norms concerning self-perfection are properly moral seems deeply problematic. It rests upon the assumption that liberals correctly privatize the good and that the good must be reduced to self-perfection. Just because the good is always a good for persons and not an impersonal abstraction, does this entail that all goods are private goods or can some goods be genuinely common or communal? As MacIntyre and Henry Veatch have argued, there appear to be goods for persons that cannot be reduced to the good of any one person or a mere aggregation of private goods. Second, the authors assert that liberalism does not imply an ethics, but it does exclude any ethical system that identifies the good with a particular form of life and is incompatible with openness in principle to all forms of flourishing. This principled commitment to unlimited openness excludes many forms of community, especially many traditional communities, and we must wonder whether it engages in a kind of false universalism and abstraction that is contrary to the limited openness that is required for any real community. These issues will be given further consideration below.

Having considered how most liberals historically characterized the relationship between liberalism and ethics, Rasmussen and Den Uyl also point out that, despite its uniqueness, their defense of liberalism has various historical precedents. The thinker whose approach most resembles theirs is Spinoza, who claimed that the purpose of politics is to insure "secure and comfortable living" (42) and that "politics is not suited to the production of virtue" (45). Rasmussen and Den Uyl, following the lead of Spinoza, characterize themselves as ethical but not political perfectionists.

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Most liberals, by contrast, either neglect moral virtue and excellence or define it down by reducing the good to the right. The authors cite Kant and Rawls as examples. The Kantian view resembles their own insofar as Kant thinks politics can promote peace but not moral perfection. Kant's position, however, depends upon his fundamentally pessimistic view of human nature's perfectibility. The authors share Kant's conclusions about the limits of politics, but do so on account of the premises of moral pluralism and individualism. They do not share Kant's pessimism about human nature and his legalism. In his later work John Rawls rejected Liberalism's claim to be a comprehensive ethical doctrine and insisted that political norms must be neutral among all theoretical accounts of the good. The authors assert that, contrary to Rawls, they are comprehensive liberals, because their view is "clearly not neutral between theories. . . . If there is neutralism in our approach at all, it does not come because the theory transcends the good, but rather from an understanding of the nature of the good in practice" (56).

One must wonder how significant these differences are in the final analysis. Kant, for instance, regards the legislative realm of morality to be strictly universal, agent-neutral, and largely interpersonal. The realm of self-interest and desire is transmoral, and is not governed by the legislative approach. Rasmussen and Den Uyl hold moral norms to be primarily about self-interest and self-perfection, whereas political metanorms are universal and concern interpersonal relations. They do certainly disagree about the terrain covered by "morality," but not about the fundamentally limited and legislative character of the realm of interpersonal relations. Similarly, John Rawls' position is neutral between theoretical conceptions of the good because he thinks political theory transcends particular conceptions, while the authors are neutral because they hold that goods themselves are irreducibly plural. This appears to be a theoretical distinction without a practical difference. Both views require political neutrality in principle with respect to particular substantive conceptions of the good, except any substantive conception of the good that is incompatible with such principled neutrality. Such incompatible views include most traditional substantive moral and political theories.

A case in point is natural-law theory, in both its traditional and its more recent forms. The authors discuss the work of Heinrich Rommen, Henry Veatch, and John Finnis, as well as Brian Tierney's analysis of Christian Wolff's early rights theory. They concede that proponents of modern natural-rights theories, due to the influence of Enlightenment rationalism, have neglected the teleological dimension of human nature. In other respects, however, they insist that natural-rights theory is superior to all versions of natural-law theory because it recognizes the plural and individual nature of human goods and the irreducible character of natural rights. With respect to the former point, natural-law theorists postulate certain generic basic goods. In the case of so-called "new natural-law theory" a single predetermined hierarchy of goods is rejected. The authors contend that even these contemporary natural-law theorists fail to recognize the need for openness to the essentially diverse, individual, and

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prudential ordering of goods that is required for human flourishing. Whether a realistic account of the plurality of forms of the good life is incompatible with the substantive moral and political norms these theories propose can certainly be contested. The authors' more fundamental argument against natural-law theories, however, is that in predicating natural rights upon prior moral obligations they fail to recognize the fact that the necessity of self-direction entails that rights are irreducible.

Finnis, for instance, argues that the language of rights adds an important dimension to the natural law because it brings the requirements of justice into sharper focus than the traditional language of moral duties. The authors prefer what they regard as the even stronger position of Veatch, who maintains that the distinctive role of natural rights is founded upon the duty to self-perfection. Veatch asserts that this duty entails a correlative right to noninterference in the pursuit of that perfection. The authors admire Veatch's attempt to ground rights language upon self-perfection, but they insist that he and Finnis ultimately fail to avoid reducing rights to duties. In doing so they commit the "moralist fallacy," which involves failing to distinguish "having a right from doing what is right" (66). Natural-law theory in the authors' view fails to protect the right to moral failure and even self abuse. Natural-law theorists like Veatch and Finnis can of course counter that there is no absolute moral right to failure. Traditional presentations of natural-law theory, such as that of Thomas Aquinas, concur with this view, arguing that human law has the authority to prohibit and even to restrain the commission of some vicious and self-destructive acts. There is only a right to the room for failure that is conditionally required by the freedom needed for moral excellence, and such freedom is not absolute or unlimited.

This, however, is precisely the disputed point, according to the authors. They concede that Christian Wolff probably came closest to an acceptable form of the natural-law position when he argued that the pursuit of self-perfection necessitates a certain domain of freedom, which is an indispensable means to the pursuit of the end of human flourishing. Wolff conceptualized this distinct means as an inherent capacity possessed by the agent. The authors remain unconvinced, insisting that Wolff's moral capacity is ultimately reducible to the concept of moral obligation and that it "does not truly give an independent role to the realm of natural rights" (70).

What appears to be driving the authors' view is a radical conception of the "self-direction" required for human flourishing. Negative natural rights trump every other moral requirement. This includes not only a right not to be coerced into acting virtuously, but also the right not to be compelled to fulfill one's moral duties, and even the right not be restrained from committing moral evil (77). This radical defense of liberty rights is necessitated as a solution to "liberalism's problem." Because human sociality must be open in principle to any human being and any form of flourishing, public norms of conduct cannot guide individual choice or prefer any particular form of flourishing. They may only set the context in which moral action can take place. The protection of individual liberty turns out to be the only primary "metanorm" according to the authors,

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because only it is consistent with the irreducible plurality of forms of human flourishing (88).

Several concerns can be raised about this line of argument. First, it may just be false that human flourishing concretely requires openness to a limitless range of possibilities for human social relationships. Indeed, it is quite possibly the case that genuine sociality and flourishing in real political communities is incompatible with such abstract theoretical neutrality. Actual political communities are not abstract forms, but societies with histories that establish substantive goods and a limited range of compatible forms of life. Claiming this is not the same as asserting naively that modern political communities need to be characterized by the homogeneity of ancient societies. Furthermore, the inability to experience the self-limiting pull of these social forms may be contrary to the moral development that is required for full moral agency. That is, the exercise of moral freedom may require the experience of the priority of certain moral and social obligations. The authors concede the importance of this objection, but it merits further scrutiny.

Another question worth asking is, what is the authors' normative basis for the prescription that we must find a solution to liberalism's problem as it is formulated? While any concrete individual's self-perfection may require openness to a range of potential forms of flourishing, it may not require openness that is unlimited in principle. Metanorms are not self-justifying, but are justified as necessary conditions for the pursuit and attainment of self-perfection. We may not be able to choose a finite range of forms of flourishing from an abstract and agent-neutral point of view. From the agent-relative and self-interested point of view, however, one does not have an interest in making flourishing possible for every other human being unless failing to do so makes flourishing impossible for oneself, which seems unlikely. It would appear that an agent-neutral principle such as the Golden Rule is functioning as a suppressed premise in the argument. But that would be inconsistent with the authors' rejection of deontological justification in favor of individualistic perfectionist teleology.

A more general concern with the authors' modified approach to liberalism is that they acknowledge very little if any public significance, not to mention sanction, for the fostering of virtue and the political relevance of moral norms concerning human flourishing. While they rightly claim that political life cannot produce virtue directly, they insist upon the opposite extreme that it should be limited exclusively to the protection of liberty. Is there not the possibility of a sensible middle ground that acknowledges that we cannot mandate every virtue and prohibit every vice, but that some things are concretely forbidden and promoted by moral norms? Actual political communities may require the existence of plural but limited forms of human flourishing arising from a set of substantive shared conceptions of the good. The genuine interests of concrete individuals for self-perfection and the common good of political communities may not coincide with the abstract theoretical requirements of the authors' position.

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A case for this argument can be found in the work of political theorists such as Pierre Manent. In his recent book A World beyond Politics? A Defense of the Nation State (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006), Manent offers a trenchant criticism of liberal democracy's tendency towards individualism and the "empire of consent" (ibid., 116) He observes that individualism is a "system of separations" (ibid., 13) that threatens as Tocqueville says "to confine [man] solely in the solitude of his heart" (ibid., 113). Paradoxically, individualism deprives human beings of the full exercise of their freedom through genuinely political commitments and activities. The retreat to the private sphere eventually leaves no room for the citizen's public agency and responsibility. Manent observes that modern democracies find it hard to justify compulsory military service, for example, because it is contrary to the principle of consent. Despite Rasmussen and Den Uyl's rejection of "state-of-nature" theories, Manent argues that the individualistic premise of consent ultimately reduces all political arrangements to an imaginary and impossible state of nature because it requires continuous individual consent.

While contemporary liberal democracies aim to reduce all social and political bonds to constructions of human choice, premodern societies accepted that certain prior obligations conditioned the exercise of human freedom. The individual was a debtor to the political community and to intermediate institutions such as the family and the Church. These institutions shaped character, but they also made possible individual agency within the public sphere. Could it be that individualism makes individual flourishing impossible because it lacks the necessary priority of certain political and social commitments, and it corrodes the respect for objective moral truths that protect the individual's freedom of action? Critics of Rasmussen and Den Uyl may contend that individualistic perfectionism fails to account for the common goods that must be prior to individual freedom for the wellbeing of the community in which human flourishing must be situated.

Rasmussen and Den Uyl do reasonably urge against the premodern view that, whereas ancient political communities were more homogeneous, modern life is characterized by greater diversity and a real plurality of viable conceptions of the good life. Manent's criticism of liberal individualism, however, does not rest upon a nostalgic desire for the return to the homogeneity of the ancient polis. Such nostalgia is equally as impossible as the dream of a political community constructed entirely by continuous consent. What Manent recommends is that we must elevate liberal democracy's more fractious tendencies by appealing to resources within democracy itself, and in order to do so we must avoid the excesses of radical individualism. None of this is inconsistent with recognizing real but finite as opposed to theoretically unlimited and abstract plurality.

Alexis de Tocqueville worried that the acid of democratic individualism would corrode public-spiritedness and the cultivation of civic virtues. Manent suggests that we can counter this tendency by defending democratic institutions that require individuals to be engaged politically and socially in their communities at the local level (ibid., 113). Participation in democracy is the key

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to avoiding the isolation and solitude that the democratic "system of separations" enforces upon modern life. Such participation, however, requires that one be able to give consent that is durable over time. The problem is not that premodern societies entirely lacked a notion of consent, but that our contemporary view makes very little room for the durability of permanent or quasi-permanent promises. We are political existentialists according to Manent, who see consent as a continuous act of sustaining a choice that can be withdrawn at any moment. Hence, Rasmussen and Den Uyl insist upon principles of radically free entry to and exit from social and political ties.

Manent asserts, on the other hand, that consent is transformative: "The person who gives consent is different from what he was before giving consent. In the social and political context, he has become part of a whole" (ibid., 119). The transformative capacity of consent is what makes genuine political liberty and civic or social engagement possible. Paradoxically, it is only in appearing to lose some of our freedom through a durable promise that we gain the capacity to be real participants in the public sphere. In this way, the notion of the common good, which has a normative priority over our choices, can be defended even within a conception of liberal democracy that depends upon the principle of consent. This criticism of liberal individualism raises serious concerns for a theory of individualistic perfectionism like that of Rasmussen and Den Uyl. The deep structural defense of their political proceduralism rests upon a teleological conception of human nature. They concede that liberalism cannot be sustained without such a new deep structure. If individualism stands in the way of the attainment of human flourishing, because it neglects the necessary priority of certain civic commitments to individual choice, then their defense of political principles as "metanorms" and the absolute priority of political liberty must be questioned as well.

Notwithstanding the foregoing concerns, natural-law theorists and classically trained Aristotelians would do well to pay careful attention to the exceptionally thoughtful and detailed argument of this important book. Rasmussen and Den Uyl's command of and respect for a wide range of traditions in political theory, including Aristotelian virtue ethics and the Thomistic natural-law tradition, is evident. Their defense of liberalism provides a seminal argument that attempts to embrace and yet answer the objections of Aristotelians critics of liberalism such as MacIntyre. This argument cannot easily be dismissed. The authors also defend moral and metaphysical realism, including the objective significance of human nature for ethics. While readers should question whether Aristotelian ethics requires radical individualism, the authors offer us a salutary reminder that traditional morality must account for the pluralism of modern life and the centrality of human freedom to human excellence.

Gavin T. Colvert

Assumption College
Worcester, Massachusetts

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The Early Heidegger and Medieval Philosophy: Phenomenology for the Godforsaken. By S. J. McGrath. Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 2006. Pp. 268. $69.95 (cloth). ISBN 0-8132-1471-8.

S. J. McGrath's insightful new study of the early Heidegger begins with the observation that Heidegger (much like Wittgenstein) "silenced any philosophy that presumed to speak of God" (ix), only to conclude with the judgment that Sein und Zeit belongs to the history of Jewish-Christian literature (albeit "unwittingly and under protest" [255]). In the pages that intervene, McGrath explores the young Heidegger's relationship to medieval thought, both to the Scholasticism and to the mysticism of the middle ages. The burden of McGrath's argument is to show that the early Heidegger's philosophy was anything but theologically neutral. Indeed, while dramatic shifts did occur in his thinking between 1916 and 1919, these do not mark the secularization of his thought; rather, it is during this period of time that "he became Luther's silent partner" (208). It is a Lutheran theology of "Godforsakeness" that Heidegger comes to embrace in preference to the Scholastic theology on which he had been steadily nurtured as a young man. On McGrath's account, this early shift in Heidegger's thought is not so much a matter of his forsaking God as it is of his coming to portray our human condition as "Godforsaken." This shift is from a Roman Catholic to a Lutheran theological perspective and not, despite appearances, from a religious to a nonreligious one. Having already "situated himself within a certain form of Christian faith," McGrath contends, the question for Heidegger (which only appears to have been "left open") of "Dasein's relation to God . . . has been decided in advance" (12).

It is no simple task to explicate Heidegger's philosophy--early, middle, or late--in terms that will render it somewhat accessible to readers while also supplying the backdrop to an argument about how that philosophy ought to be evaluated. McGrath succeeds admirably in this regard; his book is one of the most clearly written, lucid treatments of Heidegger to have been published in recent years. He begins by supplying a sketch of the "medieval theological paradigm," the worldview that Heidegger abandons as he sheds his early Catholicism. McGrath's argument, at least in part, takes the form of a defense of that worldview, even as it shows how Heidegger's rejection of it was problematic.

Interestingly, that medieval paradigm is portrayed here as being essentially Thomistic, despite the fact that McGrath perceives the diversity of philosophical perspectives in the middle ages as being so great that "there is some question whether there is any sense in speaking of Scholasticism as a unity" (4). It is Duns Scotus, after all, who preoccupied Heidegger as the subject of his Habilitationsschrift, his first book-length philosophical treatise. Yet it is Thomism, organized around the doctrine of the analogia entis, that is taken by McGrath to represent the kind of Scholasticism most clearly rejected by Heidegger (see 22-23). Despite having an entire chapter (chap. 4) devoted to the

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assessment of Duns Scotus's influence on the young Heidegger, this book is very much about the relationship between Heidegger and Aquinas.

This is not to suggest that Scotus and Scotism are insignificant in McGrath's account; indeed he explains that Scotus actually may have helped to supply some of the impetus for Heidegger's rejection of certain basic Thomistic ideas. As early as 1909, for example, Heidegger encountered a modified form of Scotism in the teaching of Carl Braig, one of his instructors at the University of Freiburg. Like Scotus, Braig rejected the doctrine of analogia entis on essentially epistemological grounds--he was convinced that such a doctrine undermines the possibility of any real knowledge of God (31). Of course, the Scotist alternative of the univocatio entis was hardly embraced by Heidegger, as he repudiated it in the opening pages of his Sein und Zeit (35). Nevertheless, his perspective is closer to this latter doctrine than it is to Thomism. As McGrath concludes, "Heidegger wants a Scotus whose univocatio entis has no infinite mode" (117). Had Heidegger not decisively broken with Scholasticism, McGrath speculates, "he would have been a Scotist" (119).

Of course, the Modernist crisis, the sterile nature of much of the neo-Scholasticism to which the young Heidegger was exposed, his reading of Augustine and of Luther, are all factors that helped to facilitate his break with the medieval Catholic tradition. But the early study of Duns Scotus was an important catalyst for this change. Although the author of that study understood himself to be engaged in the task of appropriating the resources of medieval philosophy for contemporary purposes, this work marks a point of turning away from Scholastic metaphysics and towards the development of the outlines of an existential phenomenology (with Husserl also supplying insights that were crucial for this transformation). In McGrath's view, "Heidegger reorients the whole of Scotus's metaphysics away from infinite being toward finite being" (102), with the latter conceived as essentially individuated (Scotus's haecceitas) and thoroughly historical. For Scotus, God as infinite being and the finite self determined in its haecceity are the "two extreme poles of the universe of being" (100). Heidegger rejects the former and dramatically accentuates the significance of the latter. Consequently, his "hermeneutics of facticity began as an exploration of ontology grounded in a univocatio entis but restricted to the finite" (116).

Heidegger's encounter with medieval mysticism, most especially as it was mediated in the writings of Meister Eckhart, was equally important a factor as was his wrestling with Scholastic philosophy for the development of his early thought. Having begun his study of mysticism as early as 1910, Heidegger characterized it, in his Habilitationsschrift on Scotus, as "the living heart of medieval Scholasticism" (120). At that point in time, Heidegger was still able to conceive of the relationship between medieval metaphysics and mysticism as being complementary. But while the significance of Scholastic philosophy gradually diminished for Heidegger with the passing years, mysticism remained for him a lifelong preoccupation. Mystical theology came to supply a paradigm of "meditative thinking" in contrast to the "calculative thinking" exemplified by

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Scholastic metaphysics (121, 135). The mystic is orientated to the nothingness of the Gottheit in a way comparable to Dasein's orientation toward the indeterminate nothingness that is the horizon for all human experience. The focus on interiority and subjectivity in mystical theology prefigures a similar emphasis in Heidegger's mature existential phenomenology. Certain fundamental intentional acts explored in that theology--such as Gelassenheit (letting be), Abgeschiedenheit (detachment), and Hingabe (devotion)--become key elements in Heidegger's later thought (134).

All of these insights gleaned from the study of medieval mysticism between 1910 and 1919 bear fruit in Heidegger's later writings, albeit significantly transformed. The cultivation of detachment through spiritual exercise, for example, is replaced in his phenomenology by an attentiveness to what is disclosed by certain basic human moods, such as anxiety or boredom (134-38). A profound boredom, not a boredom with this or that particular thing but rather a mood in which we ourselves are bored, is disclosive of nothingness for Heidegger, reveals being itself precisely because particular "beings no longer speak to us" (138). Similarly, he elaborates the mystical concept of devotion (Hingabe) in phenomenological terms by correlating it with Husserl's turning "back to the things themselves" (139).

Despite the importance both of Duns Scotus and the medieval mystics, it is Martin Luther who is the key figure in McGrath's account and the book's sixth chapter is devoted to an assessment of his influence on the young Heidegger. By 1919 Heidegger was thoroughly immersed in the study of Luther's theology, to which he had been introduced at least a decade earlier. In McGrath's view, Heidegger's phenomenological attack on the ontological tradition parallels and was inspired by Luther's earlier critique of the Aristotelian-Scholastic elements in theology (151). Luther's return to Christian sources is mirrored in Heidegger's recovery of historical life. Heidegger "conceives the hermeneutics of facticity as an atheological complement to Luther's theologia crucis" (153); philosophy ought to be preoccupied with our human condition as "Godforsaken." For Luther, this fallen, Godforsaken creature, completely incapable of any natural knowledge of God, must patiently wait for the hidden God to appear. So, too, Heidegger's philosophy becomes a philosophy of waiting, a "being-toward-the-future that recapitulates the past" (160).

This is a philosophy that Heidegger presumes to be divorced from theology, to remain silent on theological questions, but it is this presumption that McGrath evaluates as problematic. Indeed, "a hidden theological agenda appears all the more likely the louder Heidegger denies it" (169). Sein und Zeit is "mired," according to McGrath, "in the theological tradition it seeks to overcome" (173). Yet that is not quite accurate, because the argument here is that Heidegger employs freshly acquired Lutheran insights in order to undermine a Scholastic philosophical theology. Luther's original sin becomes transmuted as Heidegger's inauthenticity, while Luther's conscience becomes Dasein's choice of authen-ticity. Both thinkers conceive of human existence as a being-unto-death. The resulting ontology is only masked as being theologically neutral. Rather, echoing

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earlier critiques of Heidegger (Scheler, Arendt, Derrida), McGrath sees ethical and religious ideas as permeating Sein und Zeit.

McGrath turns from his discussion of Heidegger's Lutheranism to a considera-tion of his treatment of early Christianity (including both the New Testament and Augustine), a process facilitated by Heidegger's relationship with Rudolf Bultmann. Then, in the final two chapters, McGrath offers a reconsideration of the Scholastic worldview that Heidegger has rejected, a retrieval and defense of that tradition. These chapters are intrinsically fascinating but bear a somewhat odd relationship to the rest of the book. I share McGrath's deep appreciation of medieval thought (although I probably find more of value in Scotus and Scotism than he would be inclined to do). I also embrace the Scholastic view in which "living is understood as being-held-in-being by a Creator God, whose glory shines through creation," a perspective "censured by Heidegger's ontology" (177). I agree that the experience of boredom can be a potential sign of "religiousness" (which motivated me to write a book about this topic) and not merely a symptom of the emptiness of human existence (251). And I find more that is theologically compelling in Karl Rahner's use of Heidegger than in Hei-degger himself. McGrath characterizes the contrast between these two thinkers succinctly when he states that: "For Heidegger, transcendence is at root an experience of nothingness; for Rahner, transcendence is an experience of God" (237). Finally, I share McGrath's suspicion of certain postmodern philosophers who interpret the later Heidegger as a negative theologian incognito.

But this is just to say that I am still not inclined, McGrath's analysis not-withstanding, to think of Heidegger as a theologian at all or of his philosophical arguments as being religiously motivated (which is different, I agree, from claim-ing that they are religiously neutral, but that seems like a rather stringent require-ment). It is just as possible for Heidegger to have gleaned insights from Scotus, Eckhart, and Luther for specific philosophical purposes as it was for Rahner to employ Heidegger's ideas for the purposes of his theology. Heideggerians are typically annoyed by Rahner's project in the same way that Heidegger bothers McGrath. Such an observation, however, does not support the claim that we should be suspicious of Heidegger when he frames his project as "atheological"; it certainly does not warrant the labeling of Heidegger as a "theological terrorist" (177). And it is probably unfair to Luther for Lutheranism to be regarded as the primary catalyst for the changes that produced such alleged acts of terror.

This is an interesting reading of Heidegger and an important study for philosophers or theologians who care about the contemporary relevance of "the medieval theological paradigm." I just wish that McGrath had portrayed Heidegger as being a bit less disingenuous, the differences between them as being a little more straightforward.

Michael L. Raposa

Lehigh University
Bethlehem, Pennsylvania

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The Specification of Human Actions in St. Thomas Aquinas. By Joseph Pilsner. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006. Pp. xi + 273. £55.00 (cloth). ISBN 0-19-928605-1.

In Aquinas's ethics, the moral character of an action depends above all on what kind of action it is. "Specific kinds of human actions must be pursued to achieve certain specific ends in the moral life" (29). This fundamental characteristic of Aquinas's teaching distinguishes his ethics from any consequentialist or utilitarian ethics and from an ethics of intention: if the action is evil in kind, it does not become good if it has good consequences or if it is done with a good intention.

Aquinas's account of the specification of human, that is, moral actions is one of the most ingenious and difficult aspects of his moral writings. The locus classicus, questions 18-21 of the Prima Secundae, frequently leaves the reader puzzled. The difficulty of interpretation is due to Aquinas's nonuniform terminology, his elliptical writing style, and his parsimonious use of examples. The best way to achieve clarity is to read this key text in the context of the entire corpus of Aquinas's writings, above all the Secunda Secundae, where he discusses his moral principles in connection with concrete situations or specific virtues and vices. Just this sort of study is what Pilsner has provided: his discussions are never kept within the narrow bounds of a specific text, but take all of Aquinas's works into account. Pilsner intends to show that Aquinas's account of specification, despite contrary appearances, is fundamentally coherent (6).

Before summarizing parts of this fine book, I will briefly mention a few points of minor criticism. Regretfully, Pilsner does not pay sufficient attention to previous medieval debates, in light of which Aquinas's personal achievement would appear more clearly. A further complaint regards a certain lack of attention to using the latest critical text. The Latin texts Pilsner uses are taken from Roberto Busa's CD-ROM, which provides the best texts that were available during the course of the creation of this database, yet are not always the best texts today. Also, when citing Aristotle's Ethica Nicomachea in Latin translation, Pilsner does not recur to the critical editions by René Gauthier, but simply cites it from a nineteenth-century edition and refers to it as "old Latin translation" (179, 225). This label obscures the fact that Aquinas used not only the complete translation by Robert Grosseteste, but also the earlier, partial translations called Ethica vetus and Ethica nova. These minor issues do not diminish the value of Pilsner's book.

The study is divided into ten chapters, including an introduction and a conclusion. In addition to the introduction, chapters 2 and 3 have introductory value, providing a summary of Aquinas's ethics (ch. 2) and discussing specification generally in natural things and natural motions (ch. 3). Six chapters examine the five specifying factors of human actions: end, object, matter, circumstance, motive (chs. 4-9). In what follows I will concentrate on chapters 4-6 and 9, where Pilsner discusses the most important specifying factors: end, object, and matter.

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What Aquinas refers to as end (finis) is either "what one wants" or "why one wants something." Only when a thing is willed for its own sake do these two coincide. Otherwise, proximate and remote end are distinct. If I want money to buy a house, then "what I want" are both the house and money, and the remote end, the house, is "why I want" the proximate end, money. Pilsner explores the relationship between proximate and remote end in chapter 9.

In chapter 4, Pilsner examines the role of the end apart from the distinction of proximate and remote end. The end is what constitutes a human action: if one does not pursue an end, one does not act at all (51). An analogy illustrates the fundamental specifying role of the end for human action: what the substantial form is with regard to a corporeal substance, giving it its being and determining its species, is what the end is to a human action (48-51; cf. 30-37). The specifying role of ends can also be seen when human actions are considered as a special kind of motion. Motions receive their species from their term; therefore acts of will, which are a kind of motion, receive their species from their term, which is their end (52; cf. 39-44). (As Pilsner points out, Thomas is using the word "motion" here in the broad sense of change or action.) The most important argument for the specifying role of the end focuses on the fact that ends are freely and consciously pursued by the will and are in this way the principle of human acts (55-60). It is because of this preeminent role of the end in human action that Aquinas innovatively holds that the primary division of human actions is into good and evil: good and evil ends divide human actions primarily into good and evil actions (61-66). An end is evil, and hence a human action is evil, if it lacks due order to an appropriate end (68). How appropriate ends are distinguished from inappropriate ones is part of the discussion of chapter 5.

In chapter 9, Pilsner presents and solves a puzzle of interpretation: when something is done as a proximate end in order to achieve a remote end, which one specifies the action? Seemingly contradictory statements can be found in Aquinas. On occasion, he holds that the proximate end specifies, while at other times he argues that the remote end specifies. Yet as Pilsner shows, the answer to this problem depends on whether Aquinas considers human actions according to their kind or as individual actions. In the first perspective, the remote end is incidental to the species of action; in the second, the remote end is the crucial factor. When one commits adultery in order to steal, then the further end of stealing does not alter the nature of adultery when considered as a kind of action. Conversely, when considered from the perspective of the acting person, the focus is on the remote end as the object of his will, and his action is to be described as theft (by means of adultery). Said in another way, the external act is specified by the proximate end, whereas the internal act, that is, the act of the will, is specified by the remote end (234-38).

Chapter 5, which accounts for almost a third of the entire book, investigates the role of the object in specifying human actions. Pilsner distinguishes three meanings that the term "object" takes on in Aquinas's writings: (1) that to which an action relates; (2) a formal aspect which is crucial in determining an action's species, such as taking one's own or another's thing; (3) the proximate end, that

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is, when something is done for the sake of something else, as when someone steals in order to commit adultery (72). The first meaning of object, that to which an action relates, is the most difficult to interpret. When someone sets out to buy bread, which one of these three is the object of his action: the bread (the thing related to an external action), buying bread (the external action), or the effect accomplished by buying bread (the action's effect)? According to Pilsner, depending on the context and the viewpoint, Aquinas can be found to interpret "object" in any of these three ways (77-91).

The key question is what accounts for an object's function in specification? This is not a physical aspect, but rather a "formal aspect" of the object at hand. The way the formal aspect (or formal ratio) of an object accounts for the specification of human actions is analogous to the formal aspect of an object that specifies the powers of the soul. For example, what specifies an action as either legitimate intercourse or adultery is a formal ratio of the object, that is, whether the woman is one's own wife or another's. "In a way analogous to what happens when 'coloured' or 'sensually attractive' identifies a distinct object for a human power, 'one's own' or 'not one's own' is a ratio which gives formal completion to this object of human action" (105). Since it is the formal ratio and not the material thing that specifies human actions, a single thing considered materially can be the object of two different species of actions or habits when considered formally; vice versa, two different things, materially speaking, can be considered as the same species of human action. An example of the first is when money is either the object of liberality or justice, depending on whether the money is given out of generosity or on account of obligation. An example of the second is pride, which can take as its foundation many different things (knowledge, possessions, etc.) (106-7). How is the formal aspect of an object identified, so that an action can be specified and hence morally evaluated? It is a comparison of the object to right reason that allows for this to happen. It is the standard of right reason that determines that the essential condition of adultery is the formal aspect that the woman is another's wife, rather than her height, etc. (118-21). The standard of right reason, that is, the rule for human actions, is discovered either by reason itself (natural law) or by revelation (divine law) (126-33).

The third meaning of object found in Aquinas is the proximate end. This meaning of "object" is usually found in contexts where he discusses means-end relationships. For example "fighting well" (= object or proximate end) is related to "victory" (= remote end) (133-34). This use of "object" is to be distinguished from the object as what is constituted by a formal ratio. For example, the virtue of religion is about offering things to God. "What is offered" is the object in the sense of proximate end, whereas the fact that it is offered to God constitutes the formal ratio (137-40).

A term that Thomas at times uses interchangeably with the term "object," to which however in many contexts he gives a specific meaning, is "matter." Matter as a specifying element in human action is either "matter about which" (materia circa quam) or "due / undue matter." According to Pilsner, "'matter about which' is what the action or habit is particularly engaged with or specially related to

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during its operation, especially what is the direct recipient of the motion or activity" (148). For example, the "matter about which" for a carpenter is certain types of wood; for a clergyman, sacred things; for fortitude, dangers of death, etc. (149). "Matter about which" specifies when it is taken in the sense of the "end" (166). The other sense of "matter" that Thomas uses at times as an equivalent of "object" is "due / undue matter" (151). For example, the due matter of buying or selling is one's own thing, whereas undue matter is, for example, a spiritual thing; the due matter of intercourse is one's own wife as opposed to another's wife, etc. (152).

Although Pilsner discusses key issues of Thomistic casuistry, he avoids engaging himself in applied ethics. Important topics for such an enterprise, such as the notion of unintended side-effects and the doctrine of the double effect, are not discussed in his study. He also steers clear from recent debates regarding the moral object. Yet by offering a detailed and insightful study of the specification of human actions, Pilsner provides not only a very useful resource for the advancement of current debates, but also a book that is well suited to nonspecialists who are interested in Thomas's ethics.

Tobias Hoffmann

The Catholic University of America
Washington, D.C.

Divine Likeness: Toward a Trinitarian Anthropology of the Family. By Marc Cardinal Ouellet. Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 2006. Pp. 242. $26.00 (paper). ISBN 0-8028-2833-7.

Anthropology ("what it means to be human") is becoming the first area of Christian concern. It has always been true that 'growth in Christ" requires growth in humanity, of which Christ, perfectus homo, is the exemplar. In our contemporary world not only personal spiritual growth but the whole work of evangelization requires a new understanding of "what it means to be human." That brings us to Christ and indeed, through him, back "to the beginning" (the anthropological point of reference to which Pope John Paul II gave such importance). If, as we read in Genesis, man is made in the "divine likeness" ("ad imaginem Dei" [Gen 1:27]), the more his life develops in a truly human way the more "visible" or identifiable God becomes through that life; conversely, the less human that life, the less it leads him (and others) to God.

If the dehumanization of modern life is a powerful obstacle to evangelization, it follows that evangelization depends on the rehumanization of the lives of the evangelizers. Only if contemporary man, in some way inevitably aware of his tottering humanity, meets men and women who are strongly human precisely because they are Christian, can he be led by them to the God whom they truly (however imperfectly) image.

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The contemporary and growing loss of awareness of the nature and dignity of human realities is nowhere more evident than in the devaluation of marriage and the family. Forty years of conciliar and postconciliar magisterium have repeatedly issued the challenge posed by all of this, a challenge summed up in Familiaris Consortio (para. 17): "Family, become what you are." The present book by Marc Cardinal Ouellet seeks to deepen the theoretical-theological basis to this pastoral challenge, while centering its analysis (as the subtitle implies) on "a Trinitarian anthropology."

"Let us make man in our image, after our likeness" (Gen 1:26); "So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them" (Gen 1:27). These verses are the basis for the Judaeo-Christian belief that "man" (male-female), alone in visible creation, uniquely "images" God, and that our first understanding of God should arise from the contemplation of man. Again, only when rooted in this concept of man's being an imago Dei can natural anthropology establish man's nature and dignity as a thinking-willing being.

In the words of Genesis 1:26 ("ad imaginem . . . nostram") Christian thought has also discerned an underlying Trinitarian reference. From this, one might think, does it not follow that "man" is also an "image of the Trinity"? Theology however has not made much progress toward any precise analysis of what this could imply. It has at times been suggested that an imago Trinitatis could be found in the family. This suggestion seems initially tempting, since the triad of "father-mother-child" does indeed appear as a trinity where love is ideally the creative and unitive factor. But endeavors to establish a meaningful analogy between the family and the Trinity have never prospered.

A first impression from Ouellet's book is that he wishes to re-proposes the "family as imago Trinitatis." While he acknowledges the difficulties of applying a "fully trinitarian logic" to the human reality of the family (18), he nevertheless sets out initially to follow a perspective which "invites us to study the relationship between Trinity and family from a theological point of view" (5). Practically speaking, however, he touches on this only in his second chapter, and one fails to find there any real development of the thesis.

Chapter 2 is entitled, "The Family, Image of the Trinity." It opens by invoking the "bold words" of John Paul II in his 1994 Letter to Families: "The original model of the family must be sought in God himself, in the Trinitarian mystery of his life" (LF 6). Ouellet appeals to the pope's idea of the Trinity as model of the family as if it lent support to the thesis of the family as image of the Trinity. While he acknowledges that this latter thesis is "still far from being unanimously welcomed," he does suggest that John Paul's words may hint at a radical departure from traditional views rooted in St. Augustine. "Has John Paul II taken the risk of rehabilitating an analogy set aside as inadequate for so long?" We should "[n]ote the pope's extreme prudence in affirming what he knows to be in contrast with a predominant tradition. . . . Has personalist philosophy, which nourished John Paul's thought.. finally overcome the objections of the great African master . . . ?" (20-21).

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As Ouellet himself recognizes (20), St. Augustine is in "total opposition" to the proposed thesis. It might have been helpful to the reader if Augustine's objections had been recalled--that is, that the implications of the thesis wreak havoc with Trinitarian dogma, inevitably presenting the Holy Spirit as in some way the spouse of the Father, or the Son as the offspring of the love between the Father and the Spirit (cf. De Trinitate 12.5-7).

Returning to the "image-model" question, we can say that the model the Trinity gives to the family is that of a communion of persons and of the creative nature of love. The image the family presents it is indeed one of creative love, but one in which the communion of two persons becomes a community of four, five, six, or more persons--so many separate expressions of the spouses' union and love.

This important distinction between communion and community is clearly expressed in John Paul's Letter to Families. "I have spoken of two closely related yet not identical concepts: the concept of 'communion' and that of community. 'Communion' has to do with the personal relationship between the 'I' and the 'thou.' 'Community' on the other hand transcends this framework and moves toward a society, a we. . . . The communion of the spouses gives rise to the community of the family" (LF 7). Ouellet does not bear these distinctions sufficiently in mind. Therefore a first assessment of his work must be that in what appears as its key chapter, the theme proposed in its title is not convincingly expounded.

That said, one could suggest that the fault in fact lies with the title, which does not do justice to the book. Properly speaking, apart from the 18 pages of chapter 2 (out of a total of 234 pages), the rest of the work, rather than treating of the title thesis, develops a series of rich and suggestive reflections on marriage itself, on its sacramental nature, on marital spirituality, and on the ecclesial mission that the family--spouses and children--has in the contemporary world.

Chapter 5 gives a splendid summary of salvation history as "a spousal drama of Trinitarian revelation: A God who is Bridegroom seeks after his unfaithful bride, he regenerates her in the suffering of humbled love and lifts her up in his glory. The Father sends his Son as the Bridegroom, accompanied by the Holy Spirit, who prepares the bride for the encounter with the Bridegroom and the fulfillment of the eschatological wedding" (80-81).

A very precious contribution of the work is the study of the role of the Holy Spirit within the conjugal covenant. Chapter 5, "The Holy Spirit: Seal of the Conjugal Covenant", sums this up: "The Holy Spirit, 'seal' of Trinitarian love, is given to the spouses as the 'seal' of their conjugal covenant, in prolongation of his spousal gift as the 'seal' of the covenant between God and humanity in Christ" (79).

Ouellet defends and develops the notion of marriage as a "permanent" sacrament (and hence a constant source of grace), and not a merely transient ceremony (cf. 127, 167, 200, 212). I thoroughly agree, though I would have liked to see more precise ascetical and pastoral conclusions drawn from theological statements such as, "Matrimonial grace primarily consists in

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participating in the spousal love of Christ and the Church" (91). An effective catechesis on marriage needs to help the spouses be aware that the sacrament they have received entitles them to everyday aid for their practical task of loving each other and their children.

Ouellet gives a deep theological analysis of the sacramental basis for the spouses' ecclesial mission, very perceptively showing that the mutual love of husband and wife must be open to a third. In giving themselves, they go beyond themselves. From this he develops the further necessary openness of conjugal love to others beyond the family. Hence the social and evangelizing mission of the family. "openness to the 'third' . . . therefore includes not only an openness to the child but also the missionary openness to society" (70).

Combining Pauline doctrine on the nuptial mystery of Christ and the Church (151) and modern personalist reflections on the theology of the gift, Ouellet shows how the mutual self-giving of the spouses should be seen as intimately connected with the Eucharist, the gift "par excellence." This is finely brought out, though there is perhaps an over-insistence on the importance of the liturgical setting for the celebration of marriage, suggesting that the celebration is only fully meaningful and effective when accompanied by a sense of ecclesial mission and participation given by the Eucharist (222-23). No doubt this is valid for specially well-disposed or formed groups. Yet one can wonder if it is equally valid for "those who are not yet initiated into this ideal" (222). It is debatable whether the ecclesial significance of marriage--the mission of the spouses--is driven home more by a liturgical ceremony (in a moment when most couples are in a highly emotional state), or should rather be the consequence of thorough premarital catechesis given over a period when the couple are more likely to weigh the deeper sacramental and ecclesial significance of their marriage.

Ouellet takes the undoubted sacramentality of marriage to suggest an analogous "sacramentality of the family" (51-54; 233). The sacramentality of marriage is unquestioned and fruitfully developed here. The idea of the sacramentality of the family, proposed in a tentative and undeveloped way, may be useful for broad pastoral work but its theological meaning is not clear.

A particular spirituality generally derives from a consciousness of a particular vocation. It is clear that one can speak of, analyze, and develop a conjugal spirituality derived from the sacrament of marriage (always with care not to submerge the individual life of each spouse into an abstract "couple." One spouse can live a deep conjugal spirituality even if the other does not.) It is not so easy to spell out the content of family spirituality, and even less so to give it a specific sacramental origin. So while Ouellet's comments on marital spirituality are profound, one finds a weakness in his attempts to develop the idea of familial spirituality based on the family as a "sacrament of the Trinity." "[T]he whole life of the couple and the family becomes, in Christ and in the Church, a sacramentum Trinitatis that lets the gift of divine unity and fecundity pass through the life of the world" (172). Insofar as one wishes to use the term sacramentum Trinitatis to describe the role of the family, one would have to

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extend it equally to the ecclesial mission of the priesthood, religious life, and indeed each of the faithful.

Ouellet insists as a main point on "the sacramental grace of marriage as it grounds the ecclesiality of the couple and the family" (168). No doubt one can relate the ecclesial mission of the spouses to the sacrament of matrimony they have received, though it is perhaps more clearly grounded in their baptism. One undoubtedly can and should speak of the ecclesial mission of the family; but in this case the sacramental ground for this mission would seem to lie in baptism, common to all the family members, rather than in matrimony, peculiar to the spouses.

It would not be right to end without drawing attention to what may be a typographical oversight but is nevertheless regrettable: the fact that a translation (198) from the Supplementum to Aquinas's Summa Theologiae identifies the bona of marriage and its ends. This is not consistent with the mind of St. Augustine or St. Thomas. The bona refer to the distinctive characteristics of the conjugal covenant (exclusiveness, permanence, openness to life). To confuse them with its ends (the good of the spouses and the procreation/education of children) makes any logical analysis of marriage impossible. This is all the more important in that no small amount of confusion has been created over recent years, in both theological and canonical writing, by a failure to distinguish properties and ends.

Cormac Burke

Strathmore University
Nairobi, Kenya

Human Embryo Adoption: Biotechnology, Marriage, and the Right to Life. Edited by Thomas V. Berg, L.C., and Edward J. Furton. Foreword by Robert P. George. Philadelphia: The National Catholic Bioethics Center; Thornwood, N.Y.: The Westchester Institute for Ethics & The Human Person, 2006. Pp. 347. $24.95 (paper). ISBN 978-0-935372-50-2.

 Such an extraordinary book cannot easily be laid down. It contains a wealth of bioethical thinking on a question that the Magisterium of the Church has not yet pronounced upon (as of the writing of this review): namely, whether it is licit for a woman, married or not, to rescue by a medical transfer into her womb an abandoned embryo that has been frozen by a process of cryopreservation after in-vitro fertilization. Written by sixteen scholars, this brilliant work takes into account both sides of the question and seemingly exhausts all possible arguments. Each of the authors attempt to think with the Church, and argue politely for or against each others' positions. Perhaps the best book review is found in the

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preface and the afterword of the book, crafted as much intelligence as the essays themselves.

With different nuances, six authors defend the liceity of heterologous embryo transfer (hereafter HET) and six others attempt to show that HET is intrinsically evil. It is taken for granted that this embryo is a human person by both sides, based upon both science and philosophy. The "Afterword" attempts to show why a theologian or counselor cannot impose his view of the question on women considering this procedure but must give both views as objectively as possible and let the women (with their husbands' consent, if they are married, or even single women) make the decision themselves. The theologian is not the Magisterium and lacks the authority to advise in its name when the Church's official teacher remains silent.

Summarizing both positions of this book, pro and con, is difficult because each author adds some distinctions which are not always commented upon by others. Notwithstanding, these subtleties in turn make the text very rich reading indeed. Hence, I will attempt to give the major viewpoints of both sides of the debate, even at the risk of oversimplification.

Those authors in favor of the process of adopting embryos (May, Brugger, Ryan, et al.) begin with the notion that the object of the act is bringing a person into the womb of the mother as a home, and its intent is to save the life of a human being. These persons who are frozen have been placed unjustly in a canister filled with nitrogen, and if someone has the courage and generosity to save them, the moral object is merely to transfer them to a hospitable womb where they can be nurtured, and thereby saved from death and hopefully be born. The opposing side would naturally say this is begging the question by merely describing what happens and claiming to have a moral species. Many of the authors in favor of this procedure base this overarching idea on the teaching of Pope John Paul II, as contained in Veritatis Splendor (78):

The morality of the human act depends primarily and fundamentally on the "object" rationally chosen by the deliberate will, as is borne out by the insightful analysis, still valid today, made by Saint Thomas. In order to be able to grasp the object of an act which specifies that act morally, it is therefore necessary to place oneself in the perspective of the acting person. The object of the act of willing is in fact a freely chosen kind of behaviour. To the extent that it is in conformity with the order of reason, it is the cause of the goodness of the will; it perfects us morally, and disposes us to recognize our ultimate end in the perfect good, primordial love. By the object of a given moral act, then, one cannot mean a process or an event of the merely physical order, to be assessed on the basis of its ability to bring about a given state of affairs in the outside world. Rather, that object is the proximate end of a deliberate decision which determines the act of willing on the part of the acting person.

The evil of procreating a human being without authentic conjugal intercourse but by technology has already occurred. Further, the second evil of freezing these

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tiny human persons also exists. Since the possibility of transferring embryos to a mother's womb outside of the marriage act is relatively new, Church teaching has not historically addressed the morality of this transfer. However, the Church has spoken about generation and procreation as the sexual act of parents together with God who creates and infuses the soul. Likewise, if the child exists for one minute, the couple are parents. Paradoxically, if no conjugal or sexual act occurs, the child has no parents, strictly speaking, because he has been the product of science not of a loving act. Therefore, nothing prohibits the liceity of this transfer, since the act of procreation has already happened. That this transfer is a new way of gestation, namely, that someone can become pregnant without conjugal intercourse, means it is an act which is indifferent per se, and linked with a desire for saving a life, an act of generous love.

Whether or not the woman who chooses to bring an embryo into her womb to save it has the resources to do this must also be taken into account for this act to be virtuous. Other due circumstances must be considered as well, including possibility of scandal since one has to go to IFV clinics to make arrangements for the act of embryo adoption. All things considered, May, Brugger, and Ryan argue persuasively that the moral species of the embryo transfer is objectively good, given the correct motives, intentions, and due circumstances included.

On the other hand, the opponents (Pacholczyk, Tonti-Fillipini, Austriaco, et al) claim that the act of transfer is intrinsically evil because it violates the inseparability principle of the conjugal act. Husband and wife together must generate or procreate. Implanting an embryo into a woman without the act of conjugal intercourse objectively impales, in the order of abstraction, the would-be self-donation that should take place in the one-flesh union of marriage. So, even if a couple chooses this act with the husband's consent, it violates the principle of inseparability of the conjugal act, which is to be unitive and procreative in principle.

Further, normally after fertilization gestation takes place in the woman. These authors maintain that this period of nine months in the womb is intrinsically linked to procreation or generation of a human being as a necessary property flowing from procreation which is successful in terms of producing an embryo. In other words, conception, pregnancy, and giving birth is the only way someone should morally be a mother. The opponents of this position would claim that this view is physicalism because it claims that what seems to happen in the physical order is morally normative. Yet while Veritatis Splendor teaches that the moral object or species depends "primarily" and "fundamentally" on the acting person, this does not preclude secondary reasons, based upon science, to discover what is the "right" reason for the morality of an act either.

Austriaco further asserts that the future father renders his wife immunologically ready to accept a child by an authentic conjugal act, which is another segment of the father's contribution to procreation that science has only recently discovered. Moreover, HET renders the father/husband useless and isolates him because the child has no direct relationship with him coming from a sexual act. For Pacholczyk, Tonti-Fillipini, Austriaco, and others, HET willfully

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breaks the one-flesh union of husband and wife. These authors essentially base their arguments on Donum Vitae which says:

For human procreation has specific characteristics by virtue of the personal dignity of the parents and of the children: the procreation of a new person, whereby the man and the woman collaborate with the power of the Creator, must be the fruit and the sign of the mutual self-giving of the spouses, of their love and of their fidelity [Footnote 34. GS 50]. The fidelity of the spouses in the unity of marriage involves reciprocal respect of their right to become a father and a mother only through each other. (A. 1b)

Germain Grisez, in his third volume of The Way of the Lord Jesus, gave certain key reasons for the liceity of adopting embryos, thereby bringing to debate this new problem to the Tradition and challenging moralists to come up with arguments either in favor or against the process. In the present volume, those in favor of the liceity of HET would assert that their opponents have redefined procreation to include gestation, a position not be found in the Tradition. The pro-HET school of thought would also argue that while the attempt to save some embryos is not the best solution to the problem, it at least potentially would save some human lives, the value of which are immeasurable. The best solution, of course, would be to bring these embryos into the womb of the original mother, provided she repents of the whole IVF process (the position of both sides with some exceptions). Finally, these scholars and theologians seem to assume that since there is no clear prohibition of this procedure by the Magisterium, HET is morally indifferent rather than a grave evil. This last assertion, of course, begs the question. Apparent built-in purposes, at least, hinting at the teleology of an action are also part of an analysis to discover "right reason" or the morality of a human action. They may not be primary, but they are for Thomists (being moderate realists) at least part of the equation--in addition to the immediate intention of the acting person--to discover moral species.

Underlying the main arguments of all authors are side-line considerations about the morality of adoption in general, the consent of a husband to the pro-cedure, the wet-nursing analogy, the issue of surrogacy, possible use of artificial wombs if they ever become available, and whether or not even a religious group of sisters could be founded, which would do the work of gestating the lives of the embryos and then letting other people adopt these babies.

The intensity of the debate makes the reading of this book exceedingly interesting. If one takes a side on the question, it does not mean that the opposing position is void of all merit. Now, we wait for the Church to give its guidance for the individual Catholic conscience.

Basil Cole, O.P.

Dominican House of Studies
Washington, D.C.