Through an in-depth study of four key figures - Pierre Rousselot, Joseph Marechal, Jacques Maritain, and Etienne Gilson - From Unity to Pluralism traces the evolution of Thomism in the first half of the twentieth century. Through their work, Thomisism encountered contemporary thought and rediscovered its authentic roots, and the ideal of a univocal, unitary doctrine of Scholastic truth embodied in the unambiguous teachings of Thomas Aquinas, which had inspired the Thomist revival at the end of the nineteenth century, gradually (...) gave way. The result is the emergence of pluralism within the system itself and the independent development of the theologies of Karl Rahner and Bernard Lonergan. (shrink)

W. Norris Clarke's metaphysics of the universe as a journey rests on six major positions: the unrestricted dynamism of the mind, the primacy of the act of existence, the participation structure of reality, and the person, considered as both the starting point of philosophy and the source of the categories needed for a flexible contemporary metaphysics. Reflecting on his conscious life and the universe around him, the finite person mounts by a two-fold path to its Infinite source, who, though immutable (...) in His natural being, is mutable in the intentional being of His personal knowledge and love. The personal God is the efficient cause from whom the universe comes and the final cause to whom it returns.Less optimistic than Norris Clarke, John Caputo wonders about his metaphysics of the person. In a hermeneutical interpretation of the human face, the person through whom Being "sounds" discloses an ambiguous Being that both reveals and conceals itself. Far from grounding a casual ascent to God, hermeneutical phenomenology allows us no more than the right to interpret the world and its transcendent source through our own free decision.Although impressed by Norris Clarke's attempt to introduce mutability into God, Lewis Ford still finds Clarke's Thomistic God unacceptable. As a Whiteheadian, he proposes in place of Thomas' God, whose perfection consists in static unity, a God whose perfection consists in a never-ending process of unification. John Smith argues against the traditional dichotomy made between the ontological and cosmological arguments. Rather than opposed methods of proving God's existence, they should be taken as complementary journeys to the divine presence which discloses itself, although diversely, in the soul and in the world. There are parallels between Smith's historical study of two arguments and Clarke's two-fold path to God. Yet Smith is critical of Thomas' cosmological journey to God and does not share Clarke's confidence in its validity. Significant studies in their own right, the three essays as a group challenge Clarke's whole metaphysics of the universe as a journey. Meeting the challenge, Clarke clarifies and refines his own thought.An account of Clarke's philosophy by Gerald A. McCool, S.J. preceds this unified and stimulating philosophical discussion. (shrink)

Christian wisdom, carried down through medieval Christian philosophy, French spiritualism, and German idealism, is now feeling the impact of a number of the philosophical currents of the day.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:BOOK REVIEWS 145 sustain such a view. Second, there are a couple of peccadillos concerning the chronology of Aquinas's writings: the " young Aquinas " of the third book of the Commentary on the Sentences (p. 24, note h) is distinguished from the "mature Aquinas " of question 22 of the De veritate (p. 26), though only four years actually searate them (1255 and 1259 approximately) ; there is (...) mention of " Aquinas' constant teaching, from his Commentary on Aristotle's Peri hermeneias to the Summa theologica " (p. 296, n. 12), though the former is dated to 1269-71 and the latter to 1266-73. Third, I have some stylistic cavils about the excessive use of cross-referencing, which tends to clutter the text, and the lavish use of italics, which distracts rather than aids the reader; it almost seems as if the author lacks confidence in the reader's wit and memory. Even with these minor failings, this is a book which has much to recommend it. Dominican School of Philosophy and Theology Berkeley, California GREGORY RoccA, O.P. The Eyes of Faith. By PIERRE RoussELOT, S.J. New York: Fordham University Press, 1990. Pp. 117. $27.50 (cloth). Although small in size, this long-awaited English version of The Eyes of Faith will make an important contribution to our knowledge of Thomism. In addition to Joseph Donceel's translation of Rousselot's famous articles, the volume contains Avery Dulles's translation of his reply to the objections raised against them by Hippolyte Ligeard and Stephane Harent and the summary of Rousselot's theology of faith made by the General of the Society of Jesus, Wlodimir Ledochowski. Although Rousselot was without question one of the outstanding Thomists of this century, his teaching career was very short. Appointed to the faculty of the lnstitut Catholique de Paris in 1909, the year after he received his doctorate from the Sorbonne, Rousselot was mobilized in 1914 and killed in battle in 1915; that early death prevented him from taking part in the remarkable flowering of NeoThomism after the First World War. Of Rousselot's major publications only one, The Intellectualism of Saint Thomas, has been translated into English. The companion work, The Problem of Love in the Middle Ages, published with The Intellectualism in 1908, has been available to English-speaking readers only through secondary sources; it has never been translated. The same has been true both of " The Eyes of Faith," the pair of ground-break- 146 BOOK REVIEWS ing articles on the theology of faith which Rousselot published in 1910, and the set of companion articles which were published in the same year to justify the philosophical foundations on which that theology was built. Scattered rather widely through a number of French reviews, this important set of articles has never been easy for Englishspeaking Thomists to find and, as a result, their knowledge of Rousselot 's theology-and, to some extent, of his philosophy-has had to come to them at second hand. For Thomists this has, of course, been regrettable because of Rousselot 's importance in the history of Neo-Thomism. Years after his death, even in the middle of this century, his influence on the teaching of philosophy and theology in the Society of Jesus remained quite strong, despite the cautions expressed about it by the Order's General. One sign of that influence, perhaps indirect, can be seen in the later work of Bernard Lonergan. Lonergan's cognitional theory and the theological method which he built upon it were justified by the distinction between ratio and intellectus which Lonergan saw in Saint Thomas's philosophy of knowledge. Rousselot had begun the study of that distinction and decades later-in the interval between the appearance of Lonergan's "Verbum" articles and his history-making InsightPegaire was to carry it further in his historical study " lntellectus " et "ratio" selon saint Thomas d'Aquin. In the early years of this century, Rousselot and his Belgian confrere Joseph Marechal attached themselves to the movement in the Society of Jesus away from Suarezianism, a trend which earlier Jesuit Thomists like Giovanni Cornaldi and Louis Billot had started. But unlike these earlier Jesuit Thomists and in opposition... (shrink)