THE THOMIST
A SPECULATIVE QUARTERLY REVIEW
OF THEOLOGY AND PHILOSOPHY

EDITORS:

THE DOMINICAN FATHERS OF THE PROVINCE OF ST. JOSEPH

Publishers: The Thomist Press, Washington 17, D. C.

VOL.

XII

APRIL,1949

No. fl

REAFFIRMATION

T

EN YEARS AGO this spring, THE THOMIST edged its
way into the ranks of American magazines, with a word
of explanation, almost of apology, on its lips. In view
of the high aims it set for itself, there was reason for both
explanation and apology. In founding THE THOMIST, its
Editors, the Dominican Fathers of St. Joseph's Province, offered
to the English-speaking world the first speculative quarterly
devoted exclusively to the presentation of theology and philosophy. This in itself is a high aim, but THE THOMIST was aimed
higher still. Its Editors proposed to present theology and
philosophy in a manner proportioned to the demands and needs
of the professional and the non-professional alike.
The prospects of success in achieving such an aim were not
encouraging. In itself the aim was dubbed difficult, if not
impossible, of attainment. Further, it was said, there was no
room in America for such a journal; theologians and philosophers worthy of the name were thought rare; such as there
were had little speculative bent. From another point of view,
the times were not right for such a venture. War was in the air;

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THE EDITORS

the practical exigencies of a period of stress and tension would
doom such a review to a death from inattention.
In spite of these very plausible points of argument, the first
of THE THOMIST appeared in the spring of 1939. Many
of the prophecies proved true. The task of producing the kind
of review envisioned was indeed difficult; no one realized the
short-comings of the product better than the Editors. Also, not
many people, relatively-so it turned out-are interested in
that sort of thing even when it is accomplished. The war
indeed came, almost upon the heels of the first number. It
narrowed the choice of contributors, eliminating almost completely those European writers upon whom the Editors had
depended. All European circulation was wiped out, foreign
circulation in general was reduced to a trickle.
Somehow THE THOMIST rode out the storm, despite the
unpromising beginning and the first difficult years. To have
even weathered this last decade has been an accomplishment,
for it was not a time which smiled on journals which were
frankly speculative. However, THE THOMIST'S accomplishments have not been confined to preserving its own existence.
It has achieved its high aims, if not always and in each one of
its efforts, at least with sufficient frequency to give it, to-day,
an established position of honor the world over. The courage
of its founders, the generous loyalty of its sponsors, the labors
of its staff have been vindicated, and it enters its second decade
with the knowledge of achievement and a consciousness of
responsibility.
Through the work of THE THOMIST, the wisdom of St.
Thomas, which· is the wisdom of the Christian Church, has
found a wider public and a deeper understanding in the modern
world. It does not seem too much to say that through THE
THOMIST that wisdom has received a more universal application
to human· affairs. Few subjects which arrest or concern the
modern man have been neglected in its columns. War and Peace,
Marriage and the Family, Democracy, a Supranational Society,
Existentialism, Psychiatry and Human Conduct, these are but

REAFFmMATION

135

a few of the practical aspects of modern living which have been
illumined by the clear light of speculative thought.
But, while we review something of our accomplishments, it
is not with any sense of satisfaction with a work perfectly done.
There is much more to do, there is a nearer approximation of our
aims to be worked towards. And, while THE THOMIST can be
proud of its achievements in our own land and in many others,
it hopes to advance constantly the frontiers of its influence in
the years which lie ahead. If the past is any promise of the
future, the courage, loyalty, and labor which made the first ten
years of THE THOMIST'S life successful should advance it ever
further in the realization of its aims, in future decades.
In its ten years of life THE THOMIST has rejoiced to see itself
joined by other reviews of like, if not identical, aims. On the
occasion of this tenth anniversary of THE THOMIST, its Editors
are particularly happy to welcome a review which is close to it
in blood, in sympathy, and in aim. This new review, CROSS
AND CROWN, edited by the Dominican Fathers of St. Albert's
Province, a Thomistic Review of Spiritual Theology, will fill
a long-felt need. It will be the only magazine in America
devoted to an exposition of the principles and practices of the
spiritual life, written for all classes and all vocations.
The Editors of THE THOMIST hope that as the decades roll
by, the English speaking world and especially our own land,
may experience a quickening sympathy to the wisdom of St.
Thomas, throught the combined efforts of the THE THOMIST
and its younger brother, CROSS AND CROWN.
THE EDITORS.

MAN IN MEDIEVAL THOUGHT

W

RITING of twelfth century Bernard Sylvestris,
Miss Waddell has pointed to the conflict of poet
. and philosopher. "The poet in Bernard . . . has
his moments of rebellion against the muddy vesture of decay,
of lament for the 'poor soul, centre of my sinful earth,' for
'the gross body's treason.' ... 'From splendour to darkness
from Heaven to the Kingdom of Dis, from eternity to the
bodies by the House of the Crab are these spirits doomed to
descend, arid pure in their simple essence, they shudder at the
dull and blind habitations which they see prepared.' But when
he comes to the making of man in that place of green woods
and falling streams, he holds, plainly and determinedly, the
dignity of his creation. . .. Only, he would have a man fix
his eye upon the stars, and his term ended, thither let him
go . . . 'perfect from the perfect, beautiful from the beautiful,
eternal from the eternal: 'from the intellectual world the sensible world was born: full was that which bore it, and its plenitude fashioned it full.' The war between the spirit and the
flesh has ended in a Trace 'of God, even as the Last Judgment
of the Western rose-window in Chartres melts into' heaven's
own colour, blue.' St. Bernard of Clairvaux spoke of the dung
heap of the flesh; Bernard Sylvestris saw in their strange union
a discipline that made for greatness, and the body itself a not
ignoble, hospice for the pilgrim soul. The spirit is richer for
its limitations: this is the prison that makes men free. His
Adam is the Summer of Chartres Cathedral, naked, fearless,
and unbowed. . .. " 1
This long quotation from a brilliant study of medieval
humanities shows something of the complexity, the extremely
variegated nature, the intensity, of this question of Mail in
1

Helen Waddell, The Wandering Scholars, pp. l!U, U!il.

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MAN IN MEDIEVAL

THOUGHT

187

the Middle Ages. It is all too easy to simplify the medieval
man and turn him into a doll, either the evil leering marionette,
or the immovable statue of a saint. The average modern
opinion tends to regard all the ideas about man of that earlier
age as corrupt and materialistic. A recent book by a Quaker
author shows how the Holy Spirit was released by the Reformation. According to this view, man had been buried beneath
an ecclesiastical system of centralised truth which prevented
him from thinking for himself; it had utterly quenched the
Spirit.2 He is taking for granted the authenticity of the picture painted by Coulton, Moorman and many other so-called
historians of the Middle Ages. In that picture, great accuracy
of detail with the more sombre and earthy colours had left a
total impression that can have little connection with reality.
Medieval man as seen from the registers of episcopal visitations and monastic prisons is a gross materialist, all body and
nO' soul. His life is one of competition in a struggle to triumph
over his neighbour, with the clergyman always most successful
in filching money and land from the laity, and the chief clergyman, the Pope, the perfect forerunner of the soulless modern
authoritarianism.
To dip one's brush into the livelier, brighter colours is a
temptation. In order to confound the overaccurate historian,
we could depict a man of wisdom and culture, shining with the
best traditions of ancient Greece and Rome blended with the
spiritual glories of Augustine, Chrysostom, Gregory, and Cyril.
Medieval hagiography would offer grounds for showing the
men of that age to be more angels than men, dispensing iWith
their bodies like St. Catherine unable to take food, developing
their minds like St. Thomas whose body was large but almost
ignored, or exhaling their souls in the tenderest but mightiest
love, like St. Francis and St. Clare. We could tour the great
medieval Cathedrals and admire the artist so preoccupied in
the work of his hands that his name is forgotten and he is
known only by what he had done, even as without grace God
is known not by name but by His creation. We could sing with
• G. F. Nuttall, The Holy Spirit in Puritan Faith and Experience, p. 4.

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CONRAD PEPLER

the troubadours of the divine love hidden within the beloved's
human breast, and we could modulate imperceptibly from that
intensity of human song to the sweet plaint of plain chant
which was so desirable as to have led the Cluniacs to spend
their whole day at it. We could, finally, follow the mystical
teaching of those men who would live in heaven while still
sitting in their hermitages and anchorholds, the men who
inherited Plato through Dionysius, the wisdom of the East
through Avicenna. To take anyone of these aspects and develop it intQ a whole portrait of medieval man is tempting
because it could be encompassed without too much complexity.
To take them all without the Coulton category tempts also
because it is easy and pleasant to swing on the end of a pendulum. But' if we were to give a true picture we should have
to gather all these pigments together and work out a balanced
portrait of a man into whom stream many traditions and from
whom proceed the greatest and the meanest works, the greatest
and the meanest thoughts, from which the Renaissance and
the modern man were .to grow.
It is necessary to insist on the complexity of this question
and hence any fair estiniate of the medieval man must leave
in the reader's mind, not a simple and very clearly delineated
outline, but a hazy, perhaps blurred, idea of a man of many
parts not easily synthesised or fitted together. We will first
consider the N eoplatonic and Augustinian tradition· which is
characteristic of a good deal of the spiritual writing and sermons of the period. The Platonic idea of the soul imprisoned
in the body had gained a very firm foothold in areligion which
taught the importance of the immortal soul and its final destiny
which was usually impeded by the lusts and pride of the flesh,
a religion which since the death of Christ had set such store
on mortification-death to the bodily element. This idea influenced the medieval period through Dionysius rather than
through St. Augustine but it was largely represented in the
later Augustinian tradition which can be seen clearly from St.
Bernard to the English Mystics. It would be wrong, however,
to regard the rage of the Abbot of Clairveaux against the sickly

MAN IN MEDIEVAL

THOUGHT

189

flesh of man as indicating a complete separation and enmity
between these two elements in human nature. We :find his
friend William of St. Thierry speaking of the point where
animality and reason meet, in man's mind by which man can
use his body morally and artistically; " in which things," writes
William, " God has set man above the works of his hands, and
hath set aU those things of the world beneath his feet; to the
proud sensual man, for a witness to the losing of his natural
dignity and the likeness of God; but to the simple and humble,
for an aid to get him that aid again, and to keep that likeness." 3 He shows how such men of necessity use the" many
kind of callings, subtleties, exquisite sciences, arts and eloquences, offices and dignities, and the inventions of this world
without number which come forth from the many manners of
study in books, in works of the hand and in buildings." 4 This
is a remarkable attitude toward the wholeness of the animal
and spiritual of man in one of Abelard's enemies. We find the
image of God in human nature bringing integrity, not to the
soul alone, but also to the whole cultural output which had
already risen to the heights of its powers in chant and was
soon to rise to equal heights in the structure and embellishments of the Cathedrals.
At the same time, Hugh of St. Victor was writing such things
as the Soul's Betrothal Gift in which man in a soliloquy with
his soul leads the latter away from the love 'of worldly things
up to the unseen and mysterious touches of divine love. But
he displays no hatred of the animal side of man. He is simply
setting forth the overwhelming desirability of the divine love
which swamps all other desires: "Look then my rash and
silly soul, look what you are doing when you long to love and
be loved in this world. The whole world is subject to you, and
you do not scorn to admit to your love, I do not say the whole
world, but scarcely a scrap of it, which is eminent neither in
fair seeming nor in needful usefulness nor in great extent nor
in exceeding goodness. If indeed you delight in these things,
• The Golden Epistle, ch. 6, n. 15.

<Ibid.

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CONRAD PEPLER

delight in them as subjects, as things that do you service, as
gifts, the betrothal gift of your bridegroom, as the presents of a
friend, the bounty of a lord . . . love them for his sake, love
him through and above them." 5
Man, the microcosm, man, the crown and glory of the universe, was a conception that had seized these medieval writers
and preachers even when they were tempted to think the universe harboured so many evil allurements that man would be
better out of it. The world lay at man's feet and although he
often tripped over that world it was still destined to support
him, to contribute all its good things for the well-being and
expansion of human nature. The renascence of learning and
the new humanism of the time inevitably took this view of man
in his relation to the rest of the world with its many re-discovered pagan treasures; but for the moment we must insist
that the same attitude was still instinctive among the moralists
who were otherwise suspicious of everything lacking the hallmark of Christianity and the polish of grace: The glory of the
art of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries shows this clearly.
The Cathedrals, which were still the moralists' castles reflected
a translucid objectivity in which the artist is forgotten but man
reigns amid all the wealth of foliage, beasts, and birds, who
join him here to support his praise of God. The trees may be
all trees of knowledge or of' paradise like the beautifully shrublike tree captured by Professor Tristram from Canterbury
Cathedral in his great work on 12th Century English wallpainting. The lambs may be Lambs of God, the eagle the
fourth evangelist, and the pig a hoggish devil in some harrowing of hell, but they are all there. And later we find the thirteenth century foliage of Southvyell Cathedral bringing under
man's eternal control all the trees and shrubs of the English
countryside. 6
These works of man's hands, so wisely brought within the
range of the simple and humble man by William of St. Thierry,
reveal more remarkably the supremacy of the spirit ruling the
• Soul', Betrothal Gift (translated by F. S. Taylor), p. U.
• Cf. The LeaVell of Southwell, by Nikolaus Pevsner.

MAN IN MEDIEVAL

THOUGHT

141

whole of the man himself. The skill and technique of the
twelfth and thirteenth century sculptors and illuminators are
as great as any of the Renaissance and their realism is as
accurate, although many modern reactionary artists of today
seem to overlook this fact. The great difference between medieval art and that of the Renaissance lies in the domination
of the whole man over his material element in the former rather
than his subservience to it in the latter. Technique was in fact
controlled by human nature. In the cathedrals of Toulouse,
Strasbourg, Amiens, Chartres, and all over the rest of Christianised Europe, these sculptors gave to stone the suppleness,
without the pride, of life. They showed a reverence for the
human physical frame which, though it may be partly inspired
by the joy of human love of the troubadours, can only spring
from a recognition of the soul which is wholly in the whole
body and wholly in every single part of the body. There is
no hatred for the animal side of man here, but the vitality of
these works springs from the mortification of the flesh and the
preaching of penance, which from time to time echoed through
these liturgical palaces. We have only to turn for examples of
this fact to a recent brochure of photos called "The Men of
the Middle Ages." 7 The art of the period expresses a conception of the wholeness of man which needed no sophisticated
cult of " integration" to bring it into being. It sprang surely
from an instinctive grasp of the idea of man as the Imago Dei
which saved the medieval theologians and preachers from desecrating the frame in which this image was to be found.
The Albigensian heresies of the period acted as a stimulus
to a true understanding of the whole man, and perhaps we do
not always recognise what a debt we owe to these haters of the
flesh for the sound inspiration of the peak of medieval art.
With these licentious ascetics before us, we should here recall
not only the whole view of man in creation and man in himself in regard to his animality, his flesh and blood, but also his
wholeness in his relation to his fellows. The true and sane view
• Lea Hommes du Moyen Age (Editions du Cerf: Paris, 1947).

CONRAD PEPLER

of human nature stands out most clearly in the loving friendship which existed between such men as St. Bernard and his
brother Gerard, between St. Thomas and Brother Reginald,
between St. Catherine andj:Ler select band, and also in the early
teaching of St. Aelred of Rievaulx. This test of their integrity
stands in contrast to the post-renaissance horror of particular
friendships in all but the married couple.
This living witness in art and in friendship to the true
humanism of the best period in the Middle Ages needs emphasis
because, for a greater part of the period, the synthesis was not
really an intellectual one and there was an increasing tendency
to split man in two, a tendency which sprang from an ardent
and over-simplified devotion to true religion. For example, we
can find an uneasy suspicion of the body hidden under a phrase
in the Ancren Riwle: "Though the flesh be our foe, we are yet
commanded to sustain it. We must however afflict it as it
often well deserves; but not withal to destroy it, for, how
weak soever it be, still it is so coupled, and so firmly united,
to our precious soul, God's own image, that we might soon kill
the one with the other. And this is one of the greatest wonders
on earth, that the highest thing under God, which is the soul of
man, as St. Austin testifieth, should be so firmly joined to the
flesh, which is only mud and dirty earth." And the Riwle continues by describing the degrading of the" heavenly nature"
of the soul by its being drawn into love of the" base nature"
of the flesh.s The soul is indeed the image of God for this
writer but the body is in fact divorced therefrom and finds no
place at all in that image. Can we be surprised that the union
of the two is the greatest wonder on earth? Such a wonder in
fact must either lead to a deepening understanding of the
mystery or to an -increased dissatisfaction with the irrational
element therein disclosed. The unity therefore began to crumble as the breach continued to widen. A century or so later
we find the blessed Ruysbroek, though still professing the
unity of the two, speaking in very similar terms: "Therefore
8

Ancren Riwle, ch. 8, p. 106.

MAN IN MEDIEVAL

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148

we should hate and despise our body as our mortal enemy, who
would lead us away from God into sin; yet we should love and
prize this body and our life of sense as being an instrument of
the service of God. For without the body we cannot render to
God the external service that we owe; fasts, vigils, prayers and
the other good works which we ought to perform. And so we
should be ready to feed and clothe our bodies so that we may
be able to serve God, ourselves and our neighbours." 9 We can
find little sign of integration here, where we ourselves are considered as something quite separate from the body. Man may
be a whole, but the wholeness is rapidly approaching the wholeness of an angeL
Gilson in writing of the disputes between the Arab philosopher and theologians in the earlier Middle Ages says: "The
easiest way for theologians to hold their ground is to show
that philosophy is unable to reach rationally valid conclusions
on any question related to the nature of man and his destiny.
Hence Gazali's scepticism in philosophy, which he tries to redeem, as is usually the case, by mysticism in religion. The God
whom reason cannot know can be reached by the soul's experience .... " 10 It is in this question of knowledge that the separation of spirit and flesh shows itself in its most radical and
argued forms, for the purge of the flesh tends soon to liquidate
the whole of the purely natural side of man and so to show
him as not-being rather than being.
William of St. Thierry in the Golden Epistle underlines the
nobility of the reasoning power of man's mind and how it
should control the rest of man's nature and how (to use our
modern jargon once more) it should integrate all his powers.
But, even, so, the supernatural grace of God is required to
free the reason from the bondage of an attached will. Only
when the will is freed by grace can the reason of man become
dominant. "Now it is truly reason, that is an estate of the
mind which in all things agreeth with the truth. For when
• BI. Jan van Ruysbroeck, The Seven Steps of the Ladder of Spiritual Love
(translated by F. S. Taylor), p. 21.
10 Etienne Gilson, The Unity of Philosophical Experience, p. 35.

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CONRAD PEPLER

the win is freed by the grace that freeth and the spirit beginneth
to be led by the free reason, then is its own indeed, having
free use of itself, and becometh a spirit and a good spirit. A
spirit I say inasmuch as it doth truly animate and perfect its
animal soul. . . . It becometh a good spirit, fearing God and
keeping his commandemnts; for this is the whole man." 11
So far he keeps the balance although he is faced with the
rationalism of Abelard. But later on in the 14th century the
mystic strain seizes on passages in the Pseudo-Denis to support a divorce from reason and the natural man which is made
possible by the invocation of grace as a necessity for the exercise of natural wit. So the author of the Cloud of Unknowing
adopts with eagerness the Neo,.Platonic mysticism of the Hid
Divinity: "Thou friend Timothy, what time that thou purposest thee by the stirring of grace to the actual exercise of
thy blind beholdings: look thou forsake, with a strong and a
sly and a lusty contrition, both thy bodily wits (as hearing,
seeing, smelling, tasting, and touching) and also thy ghostly
wits, the which be called thine understandable workings . . .
look that thou rise with me in this grace . . . to be one with
him that is above all substance and all manner of knowing." 12
Thus the author of The Cloud paraphrases the Mystica Theologia of the Areopagite. No wonder that in his own book he is
so suspicious of natural reason and ordinary human scholarship. Yet he admits that natural- reason is in its nature good
H for it is a beam of the likeness of God." 13 His approach is a
very positive forgetting rather than a despising of the natural
side of human life and knowledge;
Thomas a Kempis goes much farther in his condemnation
of human learning and study. Gerard Groot had begun this
special train of anti-natural thought because of his disgust at
the theological disputations of the Universities, but it was an
over spiritual attitude which is to be found hidden in every
over-simplified appeal to divine wisdom against the possibility
The Golden Epistle, ch .15, p. 89.
The Cloud of Unknowing (edited by Justin McCann, O. S. B.), p.
18 Ibid., p. 29.

11
12

MAN IN MEDIEVAL

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145

of human error; and in every case, although in varying ways,
it involves a deadly attack on the wholeness of man.
It would be interesting at this juncture to allow the Arabian
philosophers and mystics to shed their light on the medieval
man. Undoubtedly there is a strong influence here, although
it was in the main an influence of reaction. The significance of
the Arabian philosophers in this context has been suggested
by Gilson,14 but the extent to which it may have influenced the
later Christian view of man has yet to be studied with the
laborious and wearisome care proper to the professional historian. However, we need not await the fruit of his researches.
Without treading the stony and wearying path of historical
iuvestigation, we have at hand the man par excellence of the
Middle Ages. He took the middle path, to bring together two
realities which had been unnaturally divorced. Unlike the
Scribe and the Levite of the parable, this medieval man, St.
Thomas, would not despise the natural merely because it was
wounded. Nor was he so lost in the contemplation of supernatural truth (a contemplation he enjoyed with the greatest
of the mystics) as to deny the validity of his bodily powers.
So was St. Thomas Aquinas the true representative of the
Middle Ages, for he judged always as a man in his prime, not
as one hurried into the enthusiastic oversimplification of youth
nor as one bogged down in the pessimism of old age. As Gilson
says of him, he was a " very simple and modest man . . . putting everything in its place." 15
From Aristotle, St. Albert and St. Thomas received the
fundamental principle of potency and act to close what had
been conceived as a gulf between spirit and matter. Unaware
of original sin as he was, Aristotle realised the fundamental
unity of human nature and so brought its parts together to
form the whole, rather than dividing and scattering. It is noteworthy that the wholeness achieved by the art of the period
in which the created form controlled and dominated the stone,
wood, and paint, to produce a whole image of man, was con.. Op. cit., ch.

'" Op. cit., p. 61.

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CONRAD PEPLER

temporaneous with St. Thomas; the introduction of Aristotle
was not influenced by this new movement of intellectual integration. The greatest achievement in sculpture, architecture,
and stained glass, as well as in plain chant had been reached
before St. Thomas' death and had begun sixty or seventy years
before his birth. Aristotle had the answer to what the creative
artists knew by instinct but could not explain, the answer to
what the pious theologians tried to explain, with a dichotomy
which broke man in twain. The sculptor knew that in his
fashion he could breathe human life into his stone; but until
he had grasped the proper meaning of materia and forma, figura
and substantia, actus and potentia he could not have understood what he had done. The pious theologians regarded every
fundamental aspect of man as a "thing," an "actus," so that
man had to fall in pieces.
St. Thomas brought Aristotle to show that the body was
not body without the form of the soul, that there could only
be one form in man, an intellectual form which made his toe a
human, living toe even as his ear and his brain were human
organs. This one form, the soul, is not the man; the material
element is equally essential to the concrete human being, who
is only individualised by this materia signata quantitate, and
whose activities are generally the activities of the conjunctum-the body-soul. Thus a man cannot feel, see, or even
appreciate the great works of artand music except his body
and soul are wedded as one. It is not his body, nor his soul
which perceive, for these though separable can not function
apart except by divine intervention. Even the special activities
of the mind, although independent of the body in themselves,
can not in fact proceed without the bodily activity of imagination and even sense. Into this conjunctum St. Thomas works all
the faculties-the sense both exterior and interior,
understanding, and will. The passions, too, like the rest, are
made by God as part of a whole and are in themselves good
and, indeed, wholesome.
Nor is this one thing, the human being, an isolated unit
having relation only to God. St. Thomas follows him in his re-

MAN IN MEDIEVAL THOUGHT

147

lationship to his fellow human beings and indeed to the whole
universe. Man is a social animal. Many of the activities which
flow from his nature involve the give and take of a part of
society; his virtues are not merely an ornament to himself but
they contribute to the bonum commune in which men are
hierarchised to form another sort of body, an organism which
has its own type of unity made up of many men with different
functions and dignities. In his flight right to the outer rim of
created reality he shows that even the heavenly bodies influence man, enhancing or diminishing the movement of his mind
and will, movements which spring from the soul but are thus
not completely independent of the universe.
It is useless to quote from the Doctor Angelicus, for all this
is common knowledge today. People are beginning to discover
the satisfaction of finding their balance in an unbalanced world
and they are turning more and more to this complete and satisfying man of the Middle Ages. But it would be a mistake to
regard his Middle Way as being purely Aristotelian or naturalistic--even rationalistic-as some are indeed tempted to
regard his Philosophia Perennis.
In his tract " On Man" in the First Part of the Summa, St.
Thomas treats of the Ideal Human Being as he was made by
God with all his faculties and passions regulated and possessed
by the supreme power of the Mens. He proceeds thence to
show that the image of God is to be found principally in this
Mens, the superior part of the soul. it is here that St. Thomas
introduces the best elements of the Neo-Platonic teaching about
man. He leaves this Mens nestling in the centre of the whole
man, the man who walks with his head among the stars and his
feet on the sodden earth: "Although the image of God in man
is not to be found in his bodily shape, yet because' the body of
man alone among the terrestial animals is not inclined prone to
the ground, but is adapted to look upward to heaven, for this
reason we may rightly say that it is made to God's image and
likeness rather than the bodies of other animals' as Augustine
remarks. But this is not to be understood as though the image
of God were in man's body; but in the sense that the very

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shape of the human body represents the image of God in the
soul by way of a vestigium.l. 6
This image is the term or end of the production of man because "God made man to his own image and likeness." St.
Thomas in this place views him principally as in the ideal state
before the fall when he was also in grace and so by knowing
and loving God had the gracious image which gave him his
fullness and perfection; this was enhanced by preternatural
gifts which gave him complete power over material creation
with its space and time limitations. But the Saint is not carried away by the ideal into an unreal Platonic humanism. All
these things which go to make up the complete and integral
man have their goodness, but original sin injured man's nature
and disturbed the harmony. The nature and its goodness are
not destroyed-there is still no dichotomy between this central jj,f ens and the physical make-up of man. But the destruction of the harmony between all these powers acts as a wound
in nature, making the nature weak and prone to sink to the
animal level which is virtually included in the soul. The elements are good still but their adjustment is disturbed so that
they rub against each other and cause friction. The image
remains even though it be obscured by a cloud of animality.
There is still a unity; indeed original sin arises from the very
unity of soul and body. It is the conjunctum which inherits
this parental evil. The soul itself is created pure, the body is a
part of a disorganised universe; the two together are a contaminated person. This maladjustment insofar as it is in the
bodily part of man is only a penalty; insofar as it is sin it is of
course to be found resident in the soul.
It may be noted in this connection that St. Thomas corrects
the tendency to condemn the ftin flowering of human friendship in marital union. St. Augustine had seemed almost to
suggest that original sin was to be identified with its most
obvious effects in the unruliness of erotic passion, to be handed
down because each child was generated in concupiscence. St.
1. Summa Theol., I, q. 96, a. 6, ad Sum.

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149

Thomas insists that original sin which is not an act should be
distinguished from its effects. Thus, though marital union
might often be blurred by the evils of unruly concupiscence,
it remained in itself a noble thing. But obviously this wound
in nature together with all the others cried out for the healing
cure of grace, and it would be childish to consider St. Thomas
a champion of the humanurn unredeemed. We must follow his
analysis in sorting the good from the evil but we must never
omit to follow him to the end, for it is only at the end that his
full stature can be recognised. Flesh and animality are not to
be despised; they are not even implacable enemies in themselves; together they are the necessary parts of a whole. Left
in the state of wounded nature the lower part would predominate over the higher and lead to all sorts of actual vices which
are, one and all, against nature.
The nature of man needs grace to restore its powers in itseH
and in its surroundings. Grace is built up on this natural
conjunctum. It does not destroy it or bear the soul post-haste
off to the Elysian fields leaving the animal man to grub about
in the mud flats of the world. Charity comes to restore ·man's
love and overcome his lusts, but charity does not destroy his
natural relationship. Although a man loves the saint more in
theory because of his greater grace, he still loves his wife and
family more intensely within the realms of charity because of
their propinquity. Where there are things in common between
two men, there the common bond of divine love should prosper
and flourish.
There remains of course the war between the flesh and the
spirit in the sense that the penalty of sin remains and indeed
the relics of actual sins whose guilt has been cleansed by grace.
When the Apostle speaks of the war in his members he is
speaking, as St. Thomas tells us (here following St. Augustine) , of man already redeemed and freed from guilt but remaining subject to its penalties, for which reason sin is said to
dwell in the members. The image of God in the soul can be
revealed only by redemption; it lies hidden by sin, until grace
has come to restore it. Even then it has not the perfect like2

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ness precisely because of this penalty in: the flesh of man,
making complete wholeness unattainable this side of the grave
and the final rising on the Last Day. This double view of man
must be taken into account in following the teaching of St.
Thomas who is no upholder of the good pagan (Aristotle's conception) outside the Christian teaching of the Redemption.
Man is made whole and good, his nature has been wounded
by sin, but the grace of redemption builds upon the good
foundation which yet remains. The Summa thus concludes
with the doctrine about the Man, the Word made Flesh, and
his continuation in the Church and the Sacraments. The image
of God in the soul has to be restored by means of the image
of Jesus Christ in the whole man introduced into his Mystical
Body and thus living the Christ-life, both human and divine.
The idea of Christ as the exemplum for man, exciting him to
the love of God and to the fulfilment of his destinY'is no mere
external or accidental occasion of contrition and charity. It
takes its place in the rank of Formal Cause insofar as exemplary
causality must be taken formally. Hence the exemplum is as
a matrix or mould in which all men should be fashioned into
the likeness of Christ.
In this way the flesh of man sanctified is by the Word made
flesh, and his rational knowledge and natural joy in the beautiful are safeguarded, preserved and perfected by faith and the
intellectual gifts of the Holy Spirit. These do not destroy nature but perfect it. As the gift of wisdom does not supersede
faith but perfects and deepens it, so faith does not supersede
natural knowledge but strengthens it as well as encourages its
working on the mysteries presented to it. St. Thomas teaches
that even Christ himself had acquired knowledge for otherwise
he would have been lacking in human experience and therefore
to some extent lacking in wholeness. Here was a balance which
avoided the" theologism" of his opposite number in the Franciscan Order and the pure naturalism of the pagan. Wisdom
was the highest form of knowledge, intuitive and unreasoned,
but the investigation of the natural sciences and philosophy,
was only thereby preserved from error and encouraged. The

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151

faith set up definite milestones to truth but did not necessarily
shorten the road to it. Nature was wounded, the flesh was
prone to lust, the mind prone to error, but Christ the exemplum
had come to rectify the error without destroying the mind and
to sanctify the flesh without dehumanising its instincts. This
was the answer the medieval artist wanted as an explanation
of his work-but of course it followed his ,work as all art criticism must. He acted on St. Thomas's principles without being
conscious of them, because this Middle Way is the way of
common sense. This best of all may be seen in Dante, but with
him it was already more conscious-as it needs must be for
the artist of words. It is to be found too among the more
balanced spiritual writers and it is there we would turn for
examples of the working out of the doctrine of this, the roan
of the Middle Ages in the daily spiritual life of the Medieval
Christian.
We may take Walter Hilton and Mother Julian of Norwich
as the best examples in the later Middle Ages of the flowering
of these Thomistic ideas in the growth of the spiritual man. In
the meantime there had been a tradition of healthy spirituality
established on regenerated human nature as may be seen in
the letters of Blessed Jordan to Blessed Diana, but nowhere
perhaps does it come out more clearly in the spiritual direction
of the fol1owing century than in the Scale of Perfection.
The main theme of the Scale of Perfection is the revelation
of the image of God in man and its restoration by grace. Hilton
begins in the first chapter "Turn thy heart with thy body
principally to God, and shape thee within to his likeness." His
inspiration is of course Pauline and he quotes frequently from
passages referring to the image of God in the soul. .To this he
adds a great deal of Augustinian teaching on the image of the
Trinity in the three powers of the soul. But the interesting
point of hjs doctrine lies in his insistence on the re-forming of
this likeness to the Trinity through the image of Jesus. And
by this he means not simply knowing by faith of the Incarnation, but the identification of the soul with this Exemplar
through union of love. "As long as Jesus findeth not his image

CONRAD PEPLER

reformed in thee, he is strange and far from thee. Shape thee
therefore to be arrayed in his likeness, that is in His meekness
and charity, the which are his liveries, and then will he homely
know thee and show to thee his privities. Thus said he himself
to his disciples 'whoso loveth me, he shall be loved of my
Father, and I shall show myself unto him.''' He may be in
my reason but I am not in him until I have found him.
All this is certainly expressed in terms of the soul alone
wherein is the image of the Trinity, and this emphasis may
be found in Mother Julian who wrote very much under the
same inspiration. But the modelling of man upon Jesus as
Man conveys a balanced view of the whole of human nature.
Thus in the celebrated 16th Revelation Mother Julian saw
" the soul so large as it were an endless world and as it were a
blissful kingdom. And by the conditions that I saw therein I
understood that it is a worshipful City. In the midst of that
City sitteth our Lord Jesus Christ, God and Man, a fair Person
of large stature, highest Bishop, most majestic king. . . . And
the soul, even-right in peace and
worshipfully he sitteth
rest." And this follows her profound teaching on the operation
of the Trinity in the making and saving of the soul with such
statements as "And because of this great, endless love that
God hath to all Mankind, he maketh no disparting in love
between the blessed Soul of Christ and the least soul that
shall be saved."
Of course these two writers share the same hatred of tlii"
world and fleshly loves as their confreres. But the fun manhood of Christ plays such a central part in the whole teaching
that we cannot easily forget the fact of sin. It is sin, not
human nature, that is condemned. Natural reason too is
secured by Hilton's way of contemplation and is not jettisoned.
Indeed the higher reaches of the life of the spirit may not be
attained without considerable use of natural wit, sustained and
redeemed by the intellectual graces ... " with great devotion
in praying and with much business in studying going before."
This passage on Holy Writ continues: "See now how grace
openeth the ghostly eye, and cleareth the wit of the soul won-

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158

derly above the frailty of corrupt kind; it giveth the soul a
new ableness whether it will read Holy Writ or hear or think
it, to understand truly and savourly the the soothfastness of
it ... and to turn readily all reasons and words that are bodily
said into ghostly understandings."
The importance of this 14th century teaching lies in the fact
that the ideal doctrine about Man, made a whole being contrived wondrously of many parts, is brought down to the real
concrete life of man in which he has to struggle against the.
unmanliness of original and actual sin and fight to regain
integrity precisely through identification with this image of
Jesus in the Christian life. And it is here that William I.Jang- .
land is so useful a guide to the practical idea of man and human
living, showing in the figure of Piers Plowman the fulfillment
of St. Thomas's teaching. He has a whoiesollle view of man
himself and in his origins in the divine work of Creation. The
significance of the whole poem lies in the identification of the
common man, blessed by grace and called to follow the path
to truth and lead others there, with the person of Christ himself. Piers begins as the Plowman and stepping forth with the
generality of the poor and down-trodden he passes through
"Do WeI," "Do Bet," and" Do Best" (the three lives upon
which Hilton's scale is also based and with it the writings of
all the Mystics of the period) , and so reaches to an identification with Christ himself. Piers is Christ in the final scenes
when the world is called into the Unity for Truth and Holy
Church. This restoration of human nature through grace and
by the practice of the virtues gradually taking on the image
of Christ the Exemplar, shows the idea of man in the middle
ages at its most perfect and its least Albigensian. Even sin
itself once overcome has contributed to a greater understanding and experience in man, it is here that the 0 Feli.v Culpa
plays its part.
The final contribution of the medieval idea of man is to
identify him with all his good parts, the one good composition,
the one form enfleshed, with the Mediator, who as Man was
head of Mankind. As the period drew to its close !he great

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CONRAD PEPLER

theme of Langland's poem became the inspiration for countless miracle plays, but they had lost this principle moving
power, the cornerstone of the whole structure. The human race
(Humanum Genus) plays a leading part in many of these
productions as, for example, in The Castle of Perseverance in
which the good and bad qualities (Malus Angelus, Mundus,
Belial, Caro, versus Bonus Angelus, Confessio, Schrift) struggle
for the mastery of man. The play is certainly a morality play
and the old dichotomy is well to the fore again, even when the
clowns and buffoons make the evil life so much more jolly and
attractive.
Everyman of course, stands out from this tradition; it bears
the same stamp but holds something more akin to the power
and spirit of Piers Plowman. The idea of Man was then practically swamped by the effects of the nominalism begun by
Scotus in antithesis to St. Thomas and brought to its height
by Ockham. It was nominalism that blessed the dichotomy
between soul and body; it was nominalism that encouraged
the denial of the validity of human reasoning and led people
to go straight to God ignoring all secondary causes. Man of
the Middle Ages, could not live in this scheme, he was either
so old as to have left his body behind altogether and had become an angel dependent on God for direct and immediate
revelation for every idea in his head, or he was left young and
lustful, a mere animal amidst the pleasures of beasts. And
there we find Man blinded by the error of the false philosophies
which had to deny God in order to preserve any apparent
human dignity. The nature assumed and redeemed by the
Word, in Whom all was made and according to Whose image
man was destined to find his goal, was dissected and desecrated.
The Age of this Man was no longer the Middle.
CONRAD PEPLER,

BlackfTiar8,
Oxford, England.

O. P.

THE BASIS OF THE SUAREZIAN TEACHING
ON HUMAN FREEDOM
[Conclusion- The Criticism]

III.

CRITICISM OF THE METAPHYSICAL

BACKGROUND

I. POTENCY AND ACT IN THE ORDER OF BEING
1. The Metaphysical Order. Having seen the teaching of

Suarez on human· freedom and on potency. and act, we are
ready now to begin our analysis and criticism of that teaching.
Since our purpose in considering potency and act is only to
determine whether it throws further light on Suarez' notions
on human freedom, it is clearly reasonable that we should
begin our criticism by considering the teaching on potency and
act; then, later, we shall see how those teachings enter into the
Suarezian treatment of freedom.
The essential thing to be grasped about Suarez' whole treatment of potency and act is its remarkable unity. We have
already indicated that the entire treatment can be unified in
the principle that a simple reality can of itself be both actual
and its own intnnsic limitation of act; conversely, the potential can somehow contain its own act. Is that principle, which
obviously has vast implications for the order of operation, and,
therefore, for free human acts, truly to be found in Suarez'
discussion of (1) potency and act in the order of created being,
both metaphysical and (composed) physical and (2) potency
and act in the order of operation? Our task here is to reexamine the teachings of Suarez and determine the fact. We
shall consider first his discussion of essence and existence,
potency and act in the metaphysical order of being.
1. Potency and Act in the MetaphY8ical Order. At the

155

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beginning of this discussion 415 Suarez assigns as the foundation for real identity of essence and existence the principle
that nothing can be intrinsically and formally constituted in
the ratio of real actual being through something distinct from
itself. The very fact of distinction argues that each is independent of the other. Later Suarez repeats essentially the same
proposition, saying that nothing can be constituted in its very
entity through something distinct from itself.416 The concept
involved in these statements (and Suarez himself identifies
that concept as the foundation of his opinion in this crucial
matter) is the fundamental simplicity of every being. If a
thing can not be formally and intrinsically constituted in the
ratio of real actual being through something distinct from itself,
then of itself it is (whatever its intrinsic limitations) its own
actuality. Here, then, as the very foundation of his teaching
on created essence and existence, Suarez enumerates the very
principle we have indicated above, the principle that a simple
reality is both its own perfection and intrinsic lilnitation of that
perfection. Given the fact of existence, the same reality which
is its own very perfection of being is also of itself that which
limits and restricts being to this limited thing. Potency and
act are not really distinct principles which through a real
composition intrinsically affect one another.
For any Thomist the real identity of these two is unthinkable
for many reasons; 417 of these reasons we will consider three.
(1) Any being in which essence and existence are identical
is pure act. But pure act is unique whereas creatures are
multiple. Therefore, in creatures, essence and existence are
distinct. The major is clear because any essence which is its
own existence is its own being; and the being of existence which
it is is actual being unreceived by any distinct and contracting
principle and not ordered as potency to any further act; therefore it is- purely actual. The minor is also clear because pure
act embraces all perfection; and the all perfect can be only one
<1. Ibid., disp. XXXI, sect. 1, n. 18.
... Ibid., sect. 6, n. S.
... Cf. Del Prado, de Veritate Fundamentali Philosophiae Christianae, pp. ll9-70.

BASIS OF SUAREZ IAN TEACHING

ON HUMAN FREEDOM

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for if there were two or more no one of them could be all-perfect, for each would lack that actual being by which the other
(or others) would be distinct.
If in creatures, essence and existence were identical,
there would be among them no grades of nobility, for if that
which participates being and the being participated do not
differ there can not be in things a diverse participation of being
and therefore a diversity of nobility. On the presumption, there
is nothing to cause the diversity inasmuch as being, of itself,
is simply being and not, in Thomistic thought, also a restriction
and limitation of being.
(3) The creature must be composed of a really distinct
essence and existence; otherwise it would be infinite, for act,
of itself is, in that order in which it is act, unlimited. Now
being-of-existence is of itself being; if therefore it is not truly
composed with a really distinct and limiting potency it is
infinite being. The answer that actual being can be limited
intrinsically by itself the Thomist rejects on the ground that
perfection of itself is unlimited and unique. Wherever actuality is found in a limited, measured way, or wherever it is
found multiplied it must be in union with a limiting or multiplying principle really distinct from itself. Act is that which
by its very nature tends to give the plenitude of perfection of
that order in which it is act. Whatever by nature, tends to
give the full perfection of any order is not also that which limits
and multiplies that same plenitude (since multiplication supposes a limitation). In view of this fundamental principle
underlying Thomism (potency and act are really distinct principles which so divide being that whatever is is either Pure
Act or composed of potency and act as distinct, intrinsic principles) , the answer to the arguments of Suarez is easy.418
His first argument (the being sufficient for the truth of the
proposition "Essence is " is only being of existence) is to be
distinguished. Of being which is subsisting and absolute, it is
conceded, but of being which is a participated being it is denied,
418

Ibid., pp. 15!'l-164.

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THOMAS U. MULLANEY

for the Thomist cannot forget St. Thomas' dictum, "Whenever something is predicated of another through participation
there must be something there besides that which is participated, and therefore in any creature the creature which has
existence is other than its very existence." 419
The second argument (the characteristics attributed to existence convene to the being of an actual essence) is also to be
distinguished. These marks convene to such an essence precisely as it is existing and by reason of its existence, yes; but
that they convene by reason of the essence alone is denied,
for essences in themselves are eternal, necessary, and as such
dependent on God's intellect rather than on His efficiency.
Suarez' third argument proceeds thus: Existential being is
that by which a created thing is formally and immediately
constituted outside its causes, and by which it ceases to be
nothing. But this is that being by which a created thing is
constituted in the actuality of essence. Therefore, essence and
existence are identical. Again the Thomist distinguishes. To
the major he answers that existential being, as an act received
in the essence, as an ultimate act inhering in the substance,
constitutes a created thing outside its causes and outside nothing, yes; but that existential being as an act without a distinct
subject so constitutes a thing is denied. The minor is distinguished in the same sense: this being as an act received in the
essence and completing the substance constitutes the creature
in its .actuality of essence yes; but as an unreceived act, it does
llot, for not everything that actually is, is, of itself alone, actual.
A thing can be actual either because it is act, or because, while
potential in itself it participates act, for while there is no
medium 'between possible being and existing being there is a
medium between a possible thing and the act of existence
namely, the essence which receives that act. Suarez frames his
fourth argument in this way: Being in act is formally the
same as existing. But an existing thing is formally constituted

"9 Quandocumque autem aliquid praedicatur de altero per participationem
oportet ibi aliquid esse praeter id quod participatur; et ideo in qualibet creatura
est aliud ipsa creatura quae habet esse et ipsum esse ejus (Quodl.
a. 8).

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only through existence, so that it is really the same thing to
say " man is " and to say " man is man," if in each case " is "
indicates act and not merely aptitude or truth. The major is
admitted but the minor is denied, because in everything outside
God, the existing thing is not constituted in act by existential
being alone since its existence is not per se stans, so to speak,
but rather adheres to the substance which participates and
receives it.
Suarez' arguments are perfect indications of his mind for
they rest, all of them, on the single concept we have already
explicated, the concept that the principle of every being is
fundamentally simple. In the first argument, for example,
Suarez clearly assumes that all real being is actual existing
being,
in other words, this limited creature is its own
actuality. Essentially the same concept underlies the other
arguments. The second one asserts the fact that an actual
essence is temporal, contingent, and so forth; what is presumed
is that what convenes to a nature must convene to it by reason of itself, that the actual being which these notes characterize is identical with the essence. Suarez then is arguing in
light of the judgment that this limited essence is also its own
actuality. Having postulated such simplicity in things, Suarez
was certain to reach this conclusion. The Thomist asks, granted
that an essence as actual is temporal, contingent, etc., do these
characteristics convene to it precisely by reason of itself, or by
reason of its existential actuality? One little phrase at the end
of the second argument (distinction is a result not a condition
for being) sums up Suarez' thought succinctly. Distinction in
the sense of distinction of things clearly supposes being as
Suarez says; but the question is how can there be a distinction
of actual things unless there be satisfied a prior condition of
distinction in· the principles of things? Actual being of itself
bespeaks only actual being; and actual being is not distinct
from itself nor is it, of itself, multiplied and various. We should
note here, too, that Suarez writes 420 that by the very fact that
•• 0

Disp. Meta., loco cit., n. 8.

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we conceive an actual being made by God we conceive it as
existing. Since there is nothing false in that concept it follows
that no added thing is necessary for the formal effect of existence. One can reach that conclusion from such premises only
if one absolutely accepts the proposition that all being is simple;
whatever fundamentally convenes to it, convenes to it by reason of one principle.
The third and fourth arguments rest on this same assumption that what constitutes a thing as actual is identical with
that which constitutes it this limited thing. What is basic to
these arguments is that an existing thing is constituted only
through existence (or actuality); that is, this intrinsically
limited nature, or this intrinsically limited individual of such a
nature, is exclusively through that perfection which is existence.
The fundamentally simple reality which is that actual perfection is of itself its own restricting limitations.
Consider, too, Suarez' negative argument for the identity
and existence: 421 "Existing" cannot add any ratio distinct
from that of an actual being outside its causes; hence there is
no existence distinct from the being which constitutes each
thing in the actuality of its essence. The very wording of the
consequent shows Suarez'
of all being as itself actual
being. Granted a thing to be actual in the order of essence and
he concludes that that limited actuality is actual existential
being.
From the position, then, that created essence and existence
are not really distinct (a position which rests, as we have
shown, on the principle that all real being is actual of itself
even when it is also, of itself, limited and restricted) certain
consequential propositions are inevitable. To this class of consequential propositions can be reduced every major point of difference, in this matter of created essence and existencecbetween
Suarez and the Thomists.
The first of these (so intimately connected with the position
that created essence and existence are identical as to be virtu, .. Ibid., sect. 5.

BASIS OF SUAREZIAN

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ON HUMAN FREEDOM

161

ally contained in it) is the judgment that in the entitative
order there is no composite to be made of essence and existence. 422 This patently, rests on the principle that the very
actual perfecting principle of acting is also, of itself, the limiting restricting principle, and so no real process is necessary to
show the illation. If there is no composite to be formed, then,
by rigorous necessity, the thing is entitatively simple; hence,
one principle must embrace the two aspects found in the existing creature, namely, the perfection of actually being, and the
limitation to being this restricted thing.
Almost equally closely linked with the identification of
essence and existence is Suarez' teaching that no created
essence can be conserved through an existence other than its
own, even through God's power. 423 Thomists teach that the
human nature of Christ did in fact exist, not through a connatural human existence, but through the existence of the Word
of God, a teaching which supposes (among other things) that
since an essence is potential for existence and not its own actuality (of existence) it can, by God's power be actuated by an
existential act other than that connatural to it. The Suarezian
teaching is a corollary from the identification of essence and
existence, as is clear: If a thing is its own existence it cannot
have another existence than its own because it cannot be other
than itself. But that teaching rests on the premise that everything is entitatively simple; a thing cannot receive an existence
other than its own, even by God's power, because it does not
receive any entitative act at all; each limited creature is its own
actuality.
Following necessarily, too, on the identification of essence
and existence, is Suarez' teaching that some existence can convene to things which are not supposites.For example, incomplete substantial existence can convene to a nature not yet
subsisting; incomplete existence can convene to matter and to
form, accidental existence to accidents, etc. These things have
some essence; therefore if real essence is, of itself, existence,
• 22

Ibid., sect. 18.

,2.

Ibid., sect. l!'l.

THOMAS U. MULLANEY

these realities must of themselves, have some existence. 424 The
argument is easily grasped, but the Thomist cannot accept such
an argument. Existence is that by which a thing is formally
constituted outside its causes and outside nothing. Existence
then, for the Thomist, since it places a thing outside its cause
presupposes the causes of a thing to have already fully exercised their causality so that no further cause of that same order
can cause the existing thing. So the Thomist does not admit
a distinct existence of matter and form, for example, arguing
that if each is existing, then each is already in the order of
being beyond the causality of the other, beyond any intrinsic,
substantially causal union. As the Thomist sees it, the only
union possible between them is that which is had between two
actual things, that is accidental union. How can realities so
perfect in their own actuality that each is outside its causes
and, therefore, beyond further causal intrinsic composition be
yet so imperfect as to be incomplete in the order of essence,
and crying out, so to speak, for composition with the other?
As existing, they cannot mutually exercise substantial causality on one another; so how is their union substantial? Again
the Thomist asks, what would an existing but not yet subsisting substantial nature be? As substantial, and outside its
causes, it is beyond any further causality in the substantial
order; how can it be other than subsisting? The same question arises with regard to the separate existence of primary
matter. This matter of its essence is, formally, actually nothing; its existence then would be the existence of that which is,
formally speaking, no actual thing. As to a substantial form
existing of itself, since it is beyond any intrinsic causality of
matter, the Thomist argues, would it not be, in its order,
unlimited actuality? But these objections, to Suarez, all miss
the point. Because he starts with the judgment that that which
is itself actual can be itself limited, incomplete, imperfect, he
composes in one principle both aspects. Matter and form can
exist independently for even existence can be incomplete, and
imperfect; and so too for the other Thomistic arguments.
·"Ibid., sect.H.

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Suarez· next concludes that creatures can be principal, not
merely instrumental, causes of the existence of their effects.425
Having identified the essence of the effect (which clearly can
be caused by a creature as by a principal cause) with its existence, he could not teach anything else without denying all
principal causality to creatures. (Suarez' argument on this
point is very interesting and has important ramifications for
our principal interest, but before coming to that we must consider the Thomistic answer to this other question.) The
Thomist holds that creatures can be only instruments in the
production of any existence, because a power which is a principal cause of existence must be subsistent being, i. e., it must
have existence of its very nature for a thing must first be such
before it can produce a like thing and a created essence is not
its existence. Suarez, of course, admits that such a cause must
be its own existence, but denies that it is therefore, subsisting
being. His arguments against the position that the creature
effects such being, not being simply, are illuminating.426 In
part, at least, they seem to rest on the motion that the action
of the created cause must effect something or else it is not real
action. If it effects something he would say that it must effect·
(as a principal cause) an existing reality (again we notice the
notion that what is real is of itself actual) for whatever is, is
of itself actual even though it also be of itself limited.
Suarez did not understand the Thomistic position that, since
not all that is actual is itself act, a cause can be the principal
cause of essence without being a principal cause of its existential actuality. What is of more interest to us is this: if the
existence of an effect (action and its term) is from the creature
as from a principal cause, then that cause is not premoved
physically to the action, for a principal cause is that which, by
its own proper power, and not by any instrumental force, produces its effect. If, then, a creature causes its action and the
term of that action as a principal cause it does so by its own
power; the
is by reason of that creature's own power, not
... Ibid., sect. 9.

••• Ibid., n; 12 ft .

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by reason of the application of that power through an instrumental force (physical premotion). It would follow that without premotion any created agent can have some second act
depending on it causally; the very thing, then, which is by
nature a potency, can have second act depending on it without
God's premotion. Truly Suarez judged that whatever is, is,
itself, actual.
Intimately connected with this teaching that creatures can
be principal causes of the existence of their effects is Suarez'
stand that existence is really that through which creatures
cause.427 This clearly supposes that a created existence of itself
has all the limits and restrictions found in any secondary cause.
A Thomist considers existence of itself as simple actuality in
its order; if'it (per impossibile) were to act efficiently, its adequate effect could be only simple actuality in that order of
being supposing no extrinsic limitation of its causality. That
is not true for Suarez, and it is not true for him simply because
he conceived the actual as intrinsically limited by itself.
Side by side with these propositions which flow from Suarez'
are ceridentification of the creature's essence and
tain other judgments which are very revealing-his view of
what is entailed in the Thomistic teaching of a real distinction.
At the outset of his discussion, Suarez points out that if
essence and existence are distinct, then by the very fact that
each is really distinct from the other, as being from being, each
has this that it is a being and distinct; and consequently one
cannot, formally and intrinsically, be through that other. 428
Here the interesting thing is the concept that things really distinct are distinct as being from being, one of which cannot constitute the other. Thomists, in maintaining the real distinction, do not imply that neither of the two can intrinsically
constitute the other, for they never conceive these two as
things, i. e., each a being in itself. Suarez did so conceive them
(on the supposition of a real distinction) because, so it seems,
he did not understand well the Thomistic teaching that the

,.< Ibid., sect. 10.

,28

I bid., sect. 6, n. 8.

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perfecting and the perfectible must be distinct,' yet complementary; they are not things but principles of things. Suarez,
already convinced of the fundamental simplicity of things and
on the assumption that these principles are really distinct, concluded that each of them in its own right must be a real actual
thing.
Again, Suarez writes that, supposing a real distinction between created essence and existence, an actual essence could
be conserved without existence by divine power, for while God
cannot supply for intrinsically component formal causes He can
supply for the dependence of one component part on the
other. 429 This proposition shows how Suarez conceived this
whole question, for even when, for the sake of argument, he
supposes a real distinction of the two elements, even then he
does not conceive them as intrinsically constituting or modifying one another. So utterly basic is his conception that all
real being has some actuality of itself, that, even in supposing
the Thomistic position, he does not suppose the more basic
doctrine behind it, namely, that a reality can be actual through
an act which is not the actuated element, proximately, that an
essence can have actual existence through an act which is not
the very essence itself. It is no accident that Suarez does not
suppose this; his principles do not allow it. He saw that to a
Thomist for any essence to be in nature without any existence
is impossible, but his position, even when he grants the distinction which Thomists teach, is that an actual essence which is
not its existence is impossible. There is one basic reason why
he teaches this: his principle that real being is actual being.
In much the same way, Suarez says 430 that those who hold
for a real distinction can give no reason why God could not
separate a created existence and existence one from the other
and preserve each alone. Thomists do teach a real distinction
and at the same time teach that God cannot preserve each element separately (created existence with no essence, created
essenc.e with no existence). For them this has to be so, because
••• Ibid., sect. 12, n. 3.

3

4.0

Ibid., nn. 9-12 .

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existence, without this determined limiting essence, is pure
actuality; it is being outside of its cause and of itself unlimited.
Essence without existence cannot be preserved in reality bewithout existence, it is not in reality; a non-existing thing
actually in nature is, to Thomists, a contradiction. To Suarez
there is no contradiction; having supposed a real essence he
already supposes entitative actuality, for he does not admit
the doctrine of subjective potency as Thomists understand
it, i. e., a reality which is made actual through an entitative
act distinct from itself. Thus Suarez writes that a thing ceases
to be in potency when it is created.431 The Thomist admits this
but adds that some reality even after it is created continues to
be potency, a potency now actuated, to be sure, but still
potency with respect to that· act. Suarez can write too 432
that if one holds that an essence-in-act adds distinct existence
to an essence already an actual being, but potential with respect to existence, it follows that an actual essence differs from
itself in potency, not in the act of being, but in its very essential entity. Thomists hold that an actual essence, as such, does
add a distinct existence to an essence; they do not teach the
consequent Suarez draws, and that precisely because they teach
that the existence is the actuality of the essence-in-act. Hence
it is through that act of being that the actual essence is distinct
from the potential, and not through some actuality which is
the essence itself.

2. The Physical Order. 'Ve have seen that, in the metaphysical order, the entire body of teaching
which Suarez
differs from the Thomists is reducible to the single principle
that, since even created being is not intrinsically composed of
distinct potency and act as its first and intrinsic principles, all
being is of itself actuaL In the physical order (the realm of
substantial form and primary matter) we shall find again that
the core
Suarezian doctrine is this very principle; here too,
those particular teachings in which Suarez differs from the
Thomists rest on this single foundation .
43'

Ibid., sect. 3, n. 4.

• 3. Ibid., n. 6.

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The heart of the Suarezian teaching about matter and form
is this: each of them has its own distinct entity of essence and
existence; each of them, of itself, is. It is abundantly clear that
this is his teaching. In explicit terms Suarez says that matter
of itself alone has its own entity of essence and existence; 433
it is of itself in an ultimate species of matter; 434 form, too, has
its own being.4B5 These basic proportions of the Suarezian
account of matter and form are simple applications of the
principle we have indicated; if in the physical order both matter
and form have their own separate entities of essence and existence, it can be only because all being is of itself entitatively
actual.
In his arguments for the proper essence and existence of
primary matter Suarez clearly shows how actual he conceived
primary matter. His proof for the independent essential reality
of matter is simple: Matter is a real subject in nature; therefore, it has some real essence. But the essence of matter cannot be constituted intrinsically through form.
Therefore, matter is independent of form. The minor is
proved by this that matter is simple and incomplete; therefore
it is not constituted through anything other than itself. If so
constituted it would be a composite and complete thing.
Suarez adds to this that, since matter can preserve numerically
the same entity while losing one form and gaining another, its
essential perfection is different from that given by the fOi'Ill.436
To all this the Thomist answers that matter certainly is a
with a real function ip. nature, but it is not of itself an
entity, a perfection; it is but mere potency Qr capacity for
being, not actual being.
In view Of the fact that many things have the same specific
being, the Thomist reasons that something which is not that
specific being must receive it and is its principle of limitation
and multiplicity, for one thing cannot of itself be multiple.
The receiving thing since its function is only to receive, is
purely passive. It is not properly a thing but rather one of
••• Ibid., disp. xm, sect. 4.
••• Ibid., sect. 3, n. 18.

.0. Ibid., sect. 5, n. 17; sect. 4.
••• Ibid., sect. 4, nn. 9-11.

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U. MULLANEY

the principles of many things. Hence, it is not really an essence,
but a capacity to compose, with formal actuality, an essence;
therefore, it is not of itself. Even that it be a real capacity to
receive convenes to it not by reason of itself but because it is
constituted as real, and that constitution is through another.
Suarez cannot concede that; to him, if the general proposition
" what is is of itself actual" be true, then this matter which in
nature is must be actual of itself. If nothing can be constituted
in its own reality through something other than itself, then,
certainly matter cannot be so constituted. We have seen his
proposition that matter of itself has being which is real, for if
matter were nothing it would have no real function in nature. 437
From that Suarez concludes that matter has its reality from
itself; he cannot entertain that other possibility advanced by
Thomists, that matter can be real by reason of an actual reality
derived from something other than itself. He cannot entertain
it because of his guiding principle of his: what is, is, of itself,
actual.
The argument for the proposition that matter of itself has
existence is fundamentally this: Matter has its own essence. 438
But existence adds no real thing or real mode to the entity of
essence as this latter is actual and outside its causes. This is
only a particular application of Suarez' general identification of
essence and existence (even partial essences as we have seen) ,
and so we shall not consider it here. But the second proposition by which the argument is confirmed (which teaches the
distinct entity of matter and, therefore, its distinct creation)
most clearly shows that Suarez conceived matter as an actual
thing directly produced by God in its own proper actualityo
The third confirmatory proposition (if matter did not really
exist it could not be a real subject) would be quite acceptable
to all Scholastics. However the conclusion, that matter has this
existence of itself, does not follow for those who hold that not
everything which is actual is its own act but that act can be
4.7
438

Ibid., nn. 3, 5.
Ibid., disp. XV, sect. 8, n. '/'; disp. XIII, sect. 4, n. 13.

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distinct from the thing actuated; on the other hand, it must
follow for those who identify reality with entitative actuality.
In summary, one needs only reread Suarez' argument: Matter
has its own actuality of essence and existence, not from form,
but of itself, because matter is a real subject; therefore, of
itself, it has actual being. One premise is not explicitly advanced in the argument; it is the major" Whatever is real and
actual is of itself real and actual". And there is the crux of the
whole problem. 439
An immediate consequence of Suarez' teaching that both
matter and form have of themselves actuality of essence and
existence, and, as it were, a property of that teaching, is Suarez'
conception of the nature the composition of bodies. He writes,
for instance, that substance cannot be composed of nothing,
but requires at least incomplete substances. 44o Further, he says
that a thing which is per se one can be composed of things
which are Incomplete actual beings. 441 Even more explicitly he
affirms that, as the essence of a corporeal substance is composed of the partial essences of matter and form, so its existence
is composed of the partial existences of these two elements. 442
Suarez could not have fully understood the Thomistic position
that of two actual things a thi.ng which is per se one cannot be
made, for he answers here that the principle is true only of
things which are complete in actual being. To the Thomist
that is not satisfactory; for him the very notion of the actual
is that it be, in its order, perfection. For the Thomist any existing actuality, must be, in the order in which it is actual, complete, for the actually perfect cannot· be incomplete in that
order in which it is perfect. The position then, that a substance
is composed of two actual (though incomplete) existences a
Thomist must dispute on the ground that act of itself, is precisely perfection in its own order. On the other hand, that
position Suarez must affirm on the ground that what is, however imperfect it be, is of itself. Here again is the omnipresent
proposition that created being is simple. Suarez affirms the
•3. Ibid., disp. XIII, sect. 4.
Ibid., nn. 3-5.

HO

441 Ibid., sect. 5, nn.16-17 .
..2 Ibid., sect. 4, n. 13.

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actuality of the incomplete, and implies that one thing, as
actual, has of itself its own perfection. As incomplete he implies that of itself it has its own intrinsic limitation, since nothing extrinsic to it limits it in its actuality. Here then is a clear
application of the central Suarezian proposition.
Flowing from Suarez' notion of the partial actuality of even
primary matter are many other points in which he disagrees
with Thomists. Foremost among them is his teaching about
the pure potentiality of matter.443 By his premise that there is
nothing which does not, of itself, have its own entitative actuality, Suarez was led to assert that matter is metaphysically
an act, but an act which is pure potency in the sense that it
is totally ordered to receiving an informing act. It is, therefore,
an actually existing thing which is at the same time formally
only potential in the physical order, but partially active in
the metaphysical order. We have seen the difficulty of that
position, the difficulty that what is actual, since it is outside
its causes, is already so perfect that it cannot be in dependence
on any other cause in the same order. How can such a thing
be incomplete in the order of essence? Suarez did teach that
matter does not depend on its form as on a cause, and so there
is difficulty in seeing how their union can be substantial. As
to form, also, since it is of itself existing, and therefore is outside its causes, it is hard to see how it can yet depend on matter
as on its cause (as Suarez teaches that it does depend). If
form and matter are so complete and perfect in themselves as
to exist by their own distinct existence and if they can be conserved without one another, the Thomists find it difficult to
understand how they are partial essences. But Suarez, sticking fast to the proposition that one thing can be perfection and
intrinsic limitation (even incompletion) of perfection affirmed
that (1) both matter and form have distinct existences;
matter is purely potential with respect to substantial form; (3)
its union with form is not accidental but substantial, and this
last in spite of the fact that the Suarezian system also main•• S

Ibid., sect. 5.

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tains that it is not of the ratio of existing matter that it have
form, nor does the essence of matter demand this. Truly there
is a conception of substantial potency which is far indeed from
what Thomists name by that term.
Matter is produced and conserved by an act distinct from
the act inducing and conserving its informing form.444 Should
any doubt remain that in the Suarezian system potency, of
itself, is, this proposition must dispel it. Matter (which is substantial potency) as the term of substantial production and
conservation properly is, for, as Suarez affirms, that is properly
made and created which properly is. Hence a thing is, and is
potential in one and the same order, the order of substance.
Suarez would answer of course that only under different aspects
is it both aeutal and potential, entitatively is is actual, formally
it is potential. But the thing to grasp is that here once again
the Suarezian system does in fact admit that in one and the
same order a thing can be both actual and potentiaL
Closely allied to this teaching is Suarez' proposition that matter alone, without any form, can be conserved
nature, not in
the ordinary course of nature, but through God's power/ 45 a
dear coronary from the teaching that matter of itself alone is
and does not have intrinsic dependence on the being of its
form. It is patent that one who teaches this doctrine cannot
conceive primary matter as purely potential to all act. But,
interestingly enough, Suarez develops the point that, even if
essence and existence were really distinct in creatures, there
would be no reason why God could not give existence to matter
alone, as God does in fact make accidents exist which are separated from any subjecL Here Suarez :is maintaining that (on
the supposition of areal distinction) primary matter alone,
and without form could be actuated by an act which is not
primary matter, but is a reality distinct from it. It is clearly
an act, the act of being outside of its cause
outside noth... Ibid., disp. XV, sect. 8, n. 18; d. also sect. 3, :un. 6-'/'; disp. XlII, sect. 4,
nn. 16-17.

··'Ibid., disp. xm, sect. 9, n. 1.

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mg. but it is the act of that which is, of itself, both formally
and entitatively, actually nothing.
The Thomist can not grant what Suarez here supposes, on
the ground that matter, since it is of itself actually nothing.
can not receive existence, for the existence of what is actually
nothing is repugnant. Suarez does not have that difficulty;
having already placed in primary matter its own partial essence.
he can, on his principles, admit a corresponding partial existence, even if that existence be supposed as distinct. Again,
the reason he can teach this is the judgment that what is of
itself limited can, of itself and in the same order, be actual.
The argument of Suarez from the fact that accidents without
a subject can exist to the possibility of matter's separate existence seeins to indicate that he conceives matter, like an accident. as itself having some essence.
The being of matter depends on form, not as on a cause,
but as on a necessary condition and added actuality,446 yet
matter is a true cause of formY1 The first part of this proposition seems to the Thomist a simple deduction from the position
that matter is, of itself, actual; what is already act does not
depend for its entity on the causal influence of some further
act of the same order. This position, immediately following
from Suarez' central proposition of the physical order, is mediately reducible to his central point in the metaphysical orderwhat is, is its own actuality.
The position that form depends on matter as on a cause,
yet has its own separate existence and can be conserved in
nature (by God's power) without matter 448 is, on Suarez' principles, harder for the Thomist to understand. Whatever is
existing for the Thomist, is so perfected and completed that,
having been constituted by all its causes it is placed outside
them and outside nothing. How, then, can form, causally depending on matter, be without matter? On the position that
form depends on matter for its initial constitution, not for its
••• Ibid., disp. XV, sect. 9; sect. 8; disp. XIII, sect. 4, n. 13; disp. XXVII, sect. 2.
4." Ibid., disp. XXVII, sect. 'li, nn. 4-5 .
••• Ibid., disp. XIII, sect. 4.

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conservation, the positions seem reconcilable. In that case, the
Thomist says, given matter and form, each is so complete in
being that it is existing without the other being metaphysically
necessary to it. How is substantial union possible between elements each so complete in its own actuality? Substantial union
is that which is required in order that a thing be so complete
that it can exist without a subject of inhesion and without a
further co-principle. Suarez' basic notion that the substantially
actual can itself be so incomplete as to require further actuality
in the same substantial order allows him to teach what he does.
To be expected from Suarez' principles is his position that a
composed substance is not really or modally distinct from its
essential parts taken together and united, but at most is rationally distinct from them. 449 This would seem to follow necessarily from the position that each element has its own actuality;
the actuality of the composite therefore is a union of the component actualities and not distinct from all of them taken as
united. The Thomists argue there is but one actuality, one
being in any substance, not a union of actualities. The difference is fundamental.

II.

POTENCY_::\ND ACT IN THE ORDER OF OPERATION

In order to understand the background of Suarez' teaching
about the dependence of the human will on God and its motion
by God, we have examined his teaching about potency and act
in general. Our analysis of that doctrine in the order of being
led to the conclusion that it rests upon one principle: whatever is (except God Who is pure act) is both actual (has perfection) and potential (has limitation) of itself, and not by
reason of distinct principles which compose it. Or, equivalently: created act is not limited by potency only but can
limit itself; and, conversely, what is limited can be its own
actuality. That proposition expresses the sum of the Suarezian
teaching about potency and act in metaphysical terms. We
have seen that in the physical order, too, the same judgment
is fundamental to Suarez' doctrine as to Suarez' teachings on
"·Ibid., disp. XXXVI, sect. 8.

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potency and act in the order of operation, the question is
whether that same metaphysical notion is applied by Suarez.
Is the judgment conceived in the order of being adapted to and
applied in the order of operation? The answer is that that
same judgment is applied here also; there is continuity between
the two orders-in Suarez' teaching. The judgment in this order
has its own peculiar form. It can be best expressed, perhaps, in
this way: an operative potency can be at one and the same time
in formal potency and yet have some act, in virtue of which it
can physically reduce itself to formal act. We do not say that
Suarez maintains this of every potency. He does teach, however, that it is not repugnant to the nature of a potency so to
reduce itself to act, and he maintains that some potencies do
thus reduce themselves to act.
It is evident that Suarez teaches passive operative powers
and some active operative powers, although with respect to
formal act they are merely potencies, are yet so actual that
they do not need to be premoved in order to have their acts
depending upon them.
Suarez does not explicitly say of any active powers that
they are, as powers, forms which are a virtual and eminent
act through which they can reduce themselves to the formal
act with respect to which they are in potency. Yet, from the
start of his treatment, it is evident that Suarez did not consider
it repugnant to the nature of an active power that it be, in
itself, so actual that it can reduce itself to formal act. He
writes" they (i. e., active powers) do not suffer by receiving
anything after the manner of first act by which they are completed in the ratio of agent principle, for, as I suppose, they
are principles complete in their own order (i. e., proximate or
instrumental) and do not require a further act by which they
are intrinsically completed for acting. Nor is it to the point
that such faculties sometimes need applieation or the motion
of another potency to exercise their actions ... for this motion
is not through physical action and passion . . . but is brought
about through a sympathy of the powers of the same soul, and

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theref()re this d()es n()t keep such a faculty fr()m being purely
active, physically and pr()perly speaking." 450
Here, then, in clear terms, Suarez indicates his conception
that a purely active plOwer, as such, d()es n()t necessarily need
any physical applicati()n t() its ()wn act. Such a plOwer can be
so c()mplete as to have sufficient actuality in itself to m()ve
itself, without any extrinsic physical application, since as
many potential such a faculty lacks f()rmal act. Since, however, it is physically sufficient t() m()ve itself t() act, it must
have in s()me way the very act which it lacks in a formal way.
This single passage we have quoted might easily lead one to
suppose that Suarez teaches, not ()nly that s()me active powers
are ()f themselves sufficiently actual t() reduce themselves t()
act, but that all active powers are such. However, he teaches
explicitly 451 that when formal act is to be acquired through a
virtual quality through physical and natural m()ti()n, then the
fDrmal act in question is natural to the agent; therefDre, motiDn
tD it is principally from the generator. That dDes not contradict
what Suarez said later. What is involved is not an assertion
that it is intrinsically repugnant fDr a thing to be in virtual act
and in formal potency, but an assertion that motion to a connatural flOI'm is principally from the generator. Hence, in those
cases in which the motion is principally attributed to the
generatDr, Suarez assigns, not the nature of potency, but the
demands of natural mDtion as the reason why the virtual act
which is a potency tD a natural form is moved to formal act.
We must not fDrget that Suarez explicitly states that, even
for active powers which do require application, the application
is through moral not physical motion. In the twenty-second
disputation; he rejects a distinct physical premDtion of created
powers by God; 452 in the thirty-first, he teaches that creatures
450
451

Ibid., disp. XLIII, sect. 2, n. 1; cf. footnote
Ibid., disp. XVIII, sect. 7.

# 392.

452 Dico ergo:
divinus concursus quatenus est aliquid ad extra per se essentialiter
est aliquid permodum actionis vel saltern per modum cujusdam fieri immediate
man311tis a Deo . . . Concursus primae causae praeter id quod est per modum
actionis non includit ex intrinseca necessitate aliquid de novo inditum ipsi causae
secnndae quod sit principium actionis ejus, vel conditio ad illam necessaria. Dico

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can be principal causes of the existence of their effects. 453 The
corollary of these teachings is that at least some created physical powers can physically apply themselves to second act. In
the cases where one thing can not be at one time in virtual act
and in formal potency the reason is the special nature of the
formal act involved and, therefore, of the motion to it. Suarez
teaches that it is not contrary to the nature of an active power
that it can apply itself to its own act, and that some active
powers do so. It would follow that su,ch a faculty as a power,
has in itself in some way the acts in question.
As to passive powers the teaching of Suarez is even more
clear. He writes that a passive power per se ordained to a
determined act is eminently its active principle. 454 Again he
says a passive power, in as much as it has the actual perfection of such a species, can be a power eminently or virtuaUy
containing another act and formally actuable through this act.
Later he implies that a power can both receive an act and be
its principle inasmuch as it contains that act virtually or
eminently.455 Suarez, we have seen, taught that the principle
« one thing cannot be in potency and in act at the same time"
does not apply in the case of immanent or vital actions. 456
Hence, some things can be in virtual act and in formal potency;
as to immanent acts, the second act is contained in first act,
virtually and eminently. In these cases, the dissimilarity between agent and patient is dissimilarity between a form formally taken and another which eminently contains it. The
human will, for example, as first act, eminently contains its
own second act. Any form that contains another form virtually
and eminently has that other in a more perfect mode; it
actually contains it in an exceeding degree. Here, then, in the
notion of the eminent actuality of passive powers and of all
de novo inditum quia certum est concursum causae secundae supponere in ilia
virtutem agendi datam et conservatam a prima causa (Ibid., disp. XXII, sect.
nn. 15, 19; consult this whole section for Suarez' rejection of premotion and
predetermination) .
465 Ibid., sect. 2, n. 14; Ibid., n. 16 ..
4.3 Ibid., disp. XXXI, sect. 9.
456 Ibid., disp. XVIII, sect. 7, n. 19.
••• Ibid., disp. XLIII, sect. 6.

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equivocal agents is his basis for saying that many things seem
to move themselves from potency to act.
n is worth noting that, concerning the particular principle
of immanent acts which is the human will, Suarez teaches that
it alone is the proximate principle quo of both acting and receiving. He rejects the position that, whereas will plus appetition of the end is the principle of acting; the will alone is the
principle of receiving. 457 The will as principle of acting is not
distinct from the principle of receiving even by partial entity
as the including is distinct from the included; by itself it is
sufficient to move itself. Here then in the order of operation is
a clear application of the metaphysical notion that the limited
can itself be somehow actual.
Interesting, too, is the Suarezian teaching about the relative
nobility of potency and act. 458 Speaking of active power he
says that its act is not from its very genus more perfect than
the power for, to the latter, act adds no perfection since it does
not exceed the active power of the potency; that is, the potency
from its very genus is more perfect since the potency perfects
the act rather than the other way around. Speaking later of
passive powers, Suarez says, that the act is in some way the
more perfect, since it is better to be with act than without it,
but this view does not consider things simply.459 A passive
power which is per Se ordered to this act is more perfect than
the act, for the potency is eminently the active principle.
Thomists hold that it does in fact exceed the power of any
faculty, that of itself it actually moves itself to act and through
such motion its act causally depends on it. Since the very perfection of potency consists in actually having its act and since
potency cannot give itself act, the potency receives its perfection; it is not sufficient to give its own perfection to itself.
Then, precisely as potency, it is less perfect for it can not alone
achieve that for which it is, namely, its operation.
Ibid., n. 51.
Ibid., disp. XLIII, sect. 6.
4.9 Ibid., n. 19.
<57

458

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IV.

I.

THOMAS U. MULLANEY
CRITICISM

OF THE TEACHING

ON

HUMAN FREEDOM

THE FREE ACT

1. The Central Doctrine. Having seen the background for
the whole of Suarez' doctrine on potency and act, we can hope
to approach with understanding the task of criticizing his teaching about that potency which is the human will and its act.
The student who would read Suarez on human freedom alone
a;nd attempt to criticize that doctrine without regard to the
more general teaching could hardly arrive at a certain conclusion. While he might suspect the Suarezian principle underlying the teaching on the will, he would not find adequate
verification of the principle in the doctrine on liberty alone.
What then is the underlying concept in Suarez' whole treatment of the human will and its motion under God? The principle involved here is the metaphysical principle we discovered
as basic in the Suarezian concept of potency and act: The
limited and imperfect can be its own actua,lity; the actual can
be its own intrinsic limitation. More proximately, and as
adapted to the order of operation that principle can be formulated thus: A created faculty which is potential with respect
to formal second act can have in itself· a virtual and eminent
actuality in virtue of which it can, without distinct physical
premotion, reduce itself to formal second act. That is the judgment which is basic in Suarez' account of the acts of man's
free will and, its movement by God, and that is the principle
which gives this teaching continuity. with the whole Suarezian
system.
That Suarez bases his doctrine about the free act of man
on that principle is beyond question; the whole foundation of
his teaching about the created free act is that the potency is
not physically premoved to that act, but reduces itself to act
under simultaneous concursus. A thing can be reduced from
potency to
only by a being in act; clearly then, the will
which is (with respect to formal act) potential is yet of itself
so actual as to move itself to that act without a prior reduction
to act. With regard to the motion of the free will, he writes

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tliat in a free act neither the first cause nor the second has any
priority of nature; neither acts on the other.460 It must follow
that God does not move the will, but that it moves itself.
Clearly, then, the very reality which is a potency is somehow
itself actual. Suarez also says that God's concursus is not previous to or distinct from the human act; it is not concerned
with the principle of the act (the faculty), nor does it in any
way incline or strengthen that principle for acting. 461 What can
this mean but that the will alone is a -sufficient physical principle of its own reduction to act and that, therefore, even as
potency it is actual? Is not essentially the same notion involved
in Suarez' statement that God's act ad extra has no priority to
the act of the creature other than a priority of nobility? 462
Especially interesting, however, is Suarez' more detailed
argumentation against God's premotion of the human Will.463
His general reason is that the essential subordination of second
causes to God is amply safeguarded by simultaneous concursus.
He argues, in particular, that the will needs no application to
its act. His reason is that there is a sufficient application
through the proposition of the object. Clearly, then, a faculty
plus its object (which object Suarez insists from the beginning
has no efficiency with regard to the act) is ipso facto sufficiently applied to its own act without a previous divine
intervention applying the faculty. Necessarily, then, either
the faculty in itself contains in some way the very application, or no efficiency at all is required to apply a faculty to
operation. Thomists, insisting on the real distinction between
potency and act, maintain that it is metaphysically impossible
for that which is only power to apply itself to act for nothing
can give a perfection which it itself lacks. Suarez, however,
can teach that the human will needs no extrinsic application
to act, and he can teach this because from the outset he has
judged that the limited and potential is also, in some way, its
own perfection and actuality. Therefore, as his own words
4.00 pU8• Primum, Liber I, cap. 15, n. 7.
,"1

Ibid., cap. 4, n. 6.

••• Ibid., n. 8.
•• Ibid., cappo 5-6.

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THOMAS U. MULLANEY

show clearly, the only application he conceives here is the
presentation of the object to the power. That this power as
such needs application to act he does not see, for the potential is somehow actual. The real point of difference here between Suarez and the Thomists, then, is not simply a question
of human freedom; what is involved is the very nature of
potency and act.
According to Suarez, also, the will needs no motion, for the
motion would have no term which he can determine. The term
can not be the act of the second agent for, if it were, only God
would be active in producing the act. This teachin:g (so
thoroughly in accord with what Suarez had written about the
complete active and dominative power of the will over its own
act) is flatly opposed by Thomists who insist that the will can
be active in producing its act only on condition that it be
moved by God. In itself, the will is (with respect to act) mere
potency which to be active must be activated, for the potential
is not, of itself, actual.
Thus God's motion does not deny activity to the power;
rather it gives activity to it. Suarez reasons that if God moves
the power to act then the power itself must be only passive. He
does not conceive as possible a motion of this power to its act,
a motion which gives to this power the actual activity of the
power. He does not conceive it because he has already conceived the very power as somehow actual in such a way that
for God to activate it would mean that its own connatural
and due power to reduce itself to act is thereby impeded.
In Suarez' view, the will needs no complement in order to
act, for every power is adequate to its own act. Especially to
be noted is his argument against any complement which is a
fluid quality. He argues that a facu1ty with such a quality
and with simultaneous concursus either needs another premotion, or it does not. If it does, the process continues to
infinity (which is patently absurd). If it does not need another,
then the first premotion is not needed either. Second causes by
nature do not require it (since this second cause, viz. faculty
plus quality, does not need premotion), and why could not

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God give creatures permanent powers equal to the combination
of faculty plus quality? The Thomist answers, of course, that
given this quality the faculty does not need another, as a ship
already moving does not need another motion in order that it
be moving. This one premotion, however, is necessary; even
the moved second cause, while moved, requires to be moved.
In other words the second cause can not reduce itself to the
actuality of its own act. Every secondary agent, then, even
the agent which has this quality, does by nature require it in
order to act. In the second place, the Thomist adds,
nent quality is impossible, for the reason that this quality is
essentially a motion not a form. Suarez argues as he does
because he has not understood fully the nature of this motion,
and the reason he has not well understood it is because he has
already excluded the need of any such motion on the ground
that the potency itself is somehow actual.
For Suarez, no excitation of the second cause is needed, and
here again the final reason for his position is the basic judgment
that the will can reduce itself to act. Ultimately the whole
Suarezian position about the motion of the will from first act
to second act rests on the principle that there is no medium
between first and second act. If that be true, if between power
to act and the very acting there is no medium, then, of course,
the will as a power is not moved to act by anything extrinsic
to itself. It can be true only if the power itself is somehow
actual. Only then can the will have (in the Suarezian sense)
that complete active power over its own act which Suarez
postulates, an active power so complete that the very potency
moves itself to act.
As to the determination of the human will it is abundantly
clear that Suarez maintains that it is from the will alone that
the intellectual appetite which is in a special way undetermined
and indifferent (from its very nature as fonowing an intellectual knowledge) can determine itself. Thus, he says that
determination of the will, not only need not be, but can not be
from any agent extrinsic to the will or from any reality previous to the act of the will, for the determination is formally
4

THOMAS U. MULLANE!'

and physically the very act of the will.464 It is, of course,
admitted by all that the determination of the will is the act
of the will; the will determines itself. Suarez does not mean
only that; he means that this determination is from the will
as the latter is untouched by any previous determining quality.
For him, if the will receives determination prior to its act, it
is passive. 465 This is against the position that the will receives
determination to· determine itself. If any doubt remains, we
have his arguments that predetermination of the created will
would destroy indifference of specification and of exercise; he
says that, since thewill.has freedom both of specification and
of exercise, it cannot be pre-determined. 466 Speaking of the
supernatural order, Suarez argues that there is in us no determining aid which is neither habit nor act, and he further notes
that determination (through grace) would destroy that freedom
which the will must have.461
Suarez simply dismisses any predetermining element; the
will is not, in his system, predetermined in order· that it determine itself. His reason is crystal-clear; the proposition "an
indifferent power cannot of itself produce a determined effect"
is true of a power which is indifferent by reason of some imperfection or defect. It is not true· of a power (such as the
will) which is indifferent from its very perfection. 468 A faculty
which is positively and actively indifferent can of its own
intrinsic power .determine itself
acts. Here, too, he
supposing that the undetermined, the potential, is, in an eminent way, its own determination, its own perfection. Indetermination can be an expansive perfection embracing the perfection of the many possible determinations; the potential can
be an expansive actuality which somehow embraces the perfection of the many possible acts. The formula is by now
familiar; there is unity and cohesion in the system of Suarez.

Consequential Teachings. The central and vital point in
Suarez' teaching about the motion of the .free human faculty
••• Ibid., cap. 8.
••• Ibid., n. 4.
•••
cappo 9-11.

•.. Ibid., Liber lll, cap. 12.
oes Ibid., Liber I, cap. 8, n, 6 .

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is clear: the human will can, of its own intrinsic powers, move
and determine itself to second -act without a predetermining
motion by God. The metaphysical basis for that position is
also arrestingly clear: what is potential and undetermined can
contain eminently and virtually, the perfection and determination of many actual determinations. From these notions
stem many of the other points on which Suarez and the
Thomists disagree. That is hardly surprising; one would expect
that disagreement in so fundamental a question as is here
involved would inevitably lead to disagreement on many subsequent points. We shall here indicate some, at least, of these
points, and their connection with this great central point. In
so doing we shall, implicitly, be confirming our thesis that the
differences between Suarezians and Thomists cannot beappro ached or' settled as though they were isolated questions
which bear only on human freedom. Those differences are so
great, so fundamental, as to reach back with surprising proximity to the very starting-points of these two schools. But let
us see the Suarezian propositions which flow from this judgment that the will is somehow its own actuality.
I. God's concursus (with this faculty which is the human
will) must have an eminent, universal, and abstract character;
and, Suarez adds, determination is too restrictive for the Will.469
That is one of the best revelations of the mind of Suarez which
is to be found in all his writings on liberty; there, epitomized,
one' finds the mind of Suarez on this matter. God's concursus
must be eminent and universal because it should be of like
nature with the power with which it concurs, and that power
(the will) is not bound to anyone thing; it is itself an eminent,
universal thing, so eminent and universal from its very perfection that determination is too restrictive for it. The will in its
very aspect of potency and indetermination is conceived as
more. expansive in its perfection than any partic,ular act which
may formally determine and actuate it, for this eminence and
universality of the human will is eminence and universality
<60

Ibid., cap. 14.

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THOMAS U. MULLANEY

from the very perfection of the faculty. The will as a potency
is not conceived here as something of itself imperfect (because
"potential and undetermined) which is simply perfected by the
second act actuating and determining it. Rather, the greater
perfection is in the unrestricted potentiality which from its
eminent virtuality can choose this or that particular act, and
retain under act its own greater perfection. Here we remember
the Suarezian dictum that a passive faculty which is per se
ordered to such or such an act is, simply, more perfect than its
act for it is, eminently, the active principle. 41O
Here, then, is a denial that act is simply more perfect than
potency in the same order, a denial based on the premise that
the potential can be more perfectly actual than that which,
formally, is act. Thomists reject Suarez' teaching about the
motion of the human will on the ground that nothing can
reduce itself from potency to act, that such reduction can come
only from that which is itself in act. But that proposition can
hardly be made to apply in Suarez' eyes. In his system there
is no question of the potency achieving by motion to a determined act a perfection it in no way has of itself. Rather, that
motion is motion to something which is not, simply, more perfect than the will at all but motion only to one of the many
formal actualizations which the will already eminently has of
itself.
Quite clearly, then, the teaching--that God's concursus should
be of an eminent, universal, and abstract character (which is
so contradictory to the Thomistic teaching that concursus is a
determining motion to this particular act) flows from Suarez'
notion of the eminent and virtual actuality of the human will
as a potency. The disagreement about concursus then is proximately rooted in the disagreement about the nature of the will
as an operative potency.
II. In the second place, it is absolutely basic in the Suarezian
teaching that the effectiveness of God's concursus rests with the
determination of the human agent. Thus Suarez writes that
no Disp. Meta., disp. XLIII, sect. 6, n. 20.

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God wills to concur with men who cooperate with Him, but
such a volitional act of God of itself alone effects nothing. 411
The Thomist can not accept that. He can not adopt the stand
that it is the creature who determines that God's volition shall
be effective, and not God Who predetermines the effective
volition of the creature. It is the created will, the Thomist
insists, which of itself alone effects nothing, for the created
will of itself alone is a mere potency, not act. But Suarez was
certain to teach what he here enunciates. If the created potency
is, in an eminent, virtual. way, its own act, if its very nature as
such a potency makes possible (and its free nature demands)
that it move and determine itself, then either God's volition
must be conditional and, of itself alone, actually without the
effect, or God must violate the very freedom He has established. Rejecting the latter alternative Suarez accepted the
former. This position is made possible only by Suarez' starting
point that the will can reduce itself by eminent virtual act to
formal act, more remotely that the potential can itself be actual.
Given that possibility and then the doctrine that freedom
demands that the free potency so reduce itself to act this position became inevitable.
Suarez argues that in the supernatural order man has it in
his own power that God's sufficient grace, already given him,
become concursus,412 i. e., man has it in his power to determine that the good act be placed. He writes that God's influence
in on condition that the human will cooperate. 473
Clearly, Suarez was not maintaining that God's influence was
the moving element 'which predeterm.ined the human will to
cooperate; on the contrary, he maintained that the second
cause determined the effectiveness of the conditional act of
God's will. Here again the Thomist disagrees, insisting that
the potential
human faculty) is determined by God, Who
is pure act, for the potential of itself alone is merely potential.
Suarez could teach that the second cause gives effect to God's

0" Prol. Primum, cap. S.
... Opwt. Primum, Liber III, cap. 6.
Ibid., cap. 14.

,.8

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conditional will only because he conceived the potential as
itself somehow actual. The formula is now familiar. One who
would know Suarez must expect to meet it often, for like
great central theme it rings out again and again in the pages
of Suarez.
III. No less essential in Suarez' account of God's moving of
the human will is the teaching that the efficacy of God's effica..;
cious grace is a moral efficacy, and not physical. 474 It is an
efficacy which is rooted, not in the vocation itself, but in God's
infallible foreknowledge that the created will shall consent to
such a vocation. The Thomist can never accept this; for him
a merely moral efficacy is unacceptable. How, he asks, can
such a grace infallibly have efficacy from God's foreknowledge
since the will as free is not of itself· determined to consent to
this particular vocation. On the supposition, it is not determined by God's motion either. Where, then, is the objective
basis for God's infallible foreknowledge that this is the grace to
which this human will shall consent? Where then is the efficacy
of this grace if it is not in the vocation itself and can not be in
. this supposed foreknowledge of God? Suarez, faced with the
fact of the efficacy of some grace, and with his own position
that grace cannot physically determine the human will, was
bound to resort to an efficacy which is merely moral. The
very possibility of this position, too, rests upon the teaching
that the created will as a power can move itself, by eminent or
. virtual act, to formal act. Had Suarez not first accepted that
proposition he would have had to account for the efficacy grace
in some other way. The interesting thing is Suarez' point that
this efficacy is really rooted in God's foreknowledge. The
Thomist can argue that God's knowledge is an intuition of
reality. Therefore, if God, in knowing this will knows (without God Himself determining it) that the will shall consent to
such or such a call then how can the power be free and of itself
indifferent? There is some kind of determination there in the
very second cause; how else is God's knowledge infallible? If

a

... Ibid., n. 9.

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J87

God knows that the will shall consent, it shall indeed consent,
but if, as Suarez says, the determination that it shall consent
is not· from God, then is it not from the second cause, and
where. then is freedom?
This argument would have little weight in Suarez' eyes, and
that simply because of his notions of potency and act. Since
Suarez held that the will is eminently and virtually its own act,
it is not surprising that he also held that God can foreknow
what the will shall do. Knowledge is indeed of reality, but
the act of the will is already somehow a reality, supposing
Suarez' position that act is eminently virtually in the will as a
power. The very power therefore actually contains it, in an
eminent way. We do not imply that the Suarezian position is
without difficulties. However, granted his fundamental J;lotion
about the nature of potency, his position seems to be much
stronger than one realizes who conceives potency as Thomists
conceive it.
God foreknows is (on Suarez' grounds)
already a reality, already has a certain objective truth and
that without resorting to the alternative that the will is determined in itself and therefore not free. In other words, this position of Suarez seems quite consonant with his teaching about
liberty as a whole, granted the eminent actuality of the will
as a power; that principle makes this position almost inevitable,
certainly reasonable.
IV. Intimately connected with this is the Suarezian teaching about mediate science (scientia media) by which God
knows what the will would do in any given set of circumstaIices.475 Here again one can object that a non,.determining
divine science about what the human will would do in given
cases is impossible because where there is no determined reality
to be known there is no certain science. In this case there is
no determined reality for the· will is not by nature determined
to this act and (on the supposition) it is not determined by
God either. But, again, this position of Suarez really has great
force, accepting the principle that·a potency can eminently conon Ibid., Liber I, cap. 16; Liber m, cap. 14, n. 9.

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tain its own act. If the will as a power does eminently contain
these many possible determinations, then those determinations
are eminently in the will, and so some of the difficulty of maintainin,g that God knows them is removed, for they are (in an
eminent way) actual reality. Here again we do not imply that
the teaching of Suarez is without any difficulty, but that teaching is in light of the basic notion we have explicated, surely reasonable. That notion makes these various teachings of Suarez
unified, all parts of one homogeneous doctrinal body.
V. Suarez explicitly teaches that there is this difference, on
God's part, between efficacious and sufficient grace: God foresees the effect in one and not in the other, but man has it in
his power "to make God foresee that he will consent to the
call." 476 Essentially the same notion (i. e., God's knowledge
depends on the creature and on its activity) is implied in
Suarez' teaching about God's foreknowledge and mediate science. Thomists emphatically reject the position that man can
make God foresee anything, arguing that God's knowledge does
not depend on creatures, that rather His knowledge is a cause
of the creature and of the creature's act. Yet this teaching of
Suarez, so widely divergent from that of the Thomists,. this
position that some of God's knowledge depends on the creature, comes, necessarily, from Suarez'original position that the
will as potency can (and, in order to be free, must) determine
and reduce itself to act. This must follow, for if that be true, if,
physically, the will, without determination by God, reduces
itself to act, then, since God must know that determination,
His knowledge of it can only be knowledge depending on the
human agent. That position is rooted deep in the formula
that what is potential can, by its own eminent actuality, reduce
itself to formal act.
VI. Suarez, having conceived physical premotion and predetermination as impossible, explains God's providence with
regard to our free acts through predefinition. In itself this
predefinition is, " a certain eternal decree of the divine will by
". Ibid., Liber III, cap. 14.

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which it. absolutely establishes that something be done in
time"; it precedes foreknowledge of the future act and it decrees, absolutely,the act. There is no predetermining or necessitating of the human will involved because the execution of
this absolute predefinition takes the form of applying a means
(to the predefined end) which means infallibly attracts the
will, though it does not necessitate it; the human consent to
this means is certain from divine foreknowledge. The connection between predefinition and the execution of the act of the
second' agent is thus founded in divine foreknowledge plus
providence, not in the physical efficacy of a decree determining'the human will to one thing. 477
With all this, again, the Thomist must disagree. He argues
that the will since, it is a free potency, is of itself undetermined that it shall or shall not consent to this means (the
medium through which the predefinition is executed). The will
is, according to Suarez' system, physically not predetermined
by God; it would therefore be impossible (supposing that God
does not predetermine the human will) that God foreknow
the consent of man to this means. Thus God's perfect providence of our free actions could not be saved in the way Suarez
explains. But if ·one grants the Suarezian concept of potency,
if one supposes that the human will as a potency eminently
contains its own act, it is then apparent that much of the
difficulty the Thomist has with this position is removed. If
the will, as a power, eminently contains its own act then that
act is actually, eminently, in the will; there truly is something
there for God to know. Here again, therefore (while admittedly
difficulties do remain), this basic judgment that the potential
can itself be somehow actual seems to be the foundation which
renders possible and explicable another of the great issues which
divide the Suarezian and Thomistic schools.
VII. The judgment (found so often in the pages of Suarez
and used by him as something in the nature of principle) that
predetermination of the human will would be necessitation of
m Ibid., Liber I, cap. 16.

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it is another very great point of difference between him and the
Thomists. The latter teach that the will is as a free power so
potential and indifferent that without determination it can
never have its connatural free act; its very nature demands
that it be reduced to a determined act. Suarez teaches that if
the will received its act from an extrinsic agent it would· be
necessitated, not .free, 478 that predetermination would be necessitation/ 79 that it is the same thing to say that the will is
not necessitated by something other than itself as to say that
it is not determined to one by thatother.480 The notion, then,
that determination is· necessitation is truly a principle which
Suarez uses again and again. Thomists maintain that determination is a genus containing under it, as species, determination
which is contingent, and determination which is necessary.
Why should Suarez go on repeating and so often using the
judgment that determination is necessitation? The answer lies
in his concept thatthe will as a potency, is so eminently actual
that it reduces itself to formal act. Conceive the will as an
eminent actuality which by nature can and (in order to be
free) must reduce itself to formal act, and you must conceive
that the will's connatural way of operating freely is to operate
without determination from any other agent. Therefore, if the
human will in a given instance is determined by another agent,
then that act is altogether outside the way in which the human
will does act freely. The act, in other words is truly necessary
and not free at all. If one grants Suarez' basic notions, then
one must grant the conclusion that the determination of which
Thomists speak would indeed be necessitation. Here, too, then
the fund!1mental reason for this very important difference between the two schools is the omnipresent judgment about the
nature of potency.
VIII. One very obvious difference between the Suarezian
and Thomistic accounts of God's movement of the human will
is in regard to those free acts which are sinful.:l81 The Thomist
<7. Prol. Primum, cap.

,,0 Ibid., cap. 4.

4.0

Disp. Meta., disp. XIX, sect. 6.

4.' Opus. Primum, Liber II, cappo 1-9.

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maintains that, since the will is in potency to act and everything whichis reduced from potency to act is moved by a being
in act, the human will is moved by God even to acts which
have a morally evil aspect. Yet it does not follow at all that
God causes siri (moral evil) as such. Evil as such is not being;
it is a privation of due perfection in an apt subject. As privation it has no per se cause but only a per accidens cause. So,
the Thomist says, what God causes relative to a sinful act is
not its sinfulness (which is not being; and God is not the
Author of what is not) but its actuality, i. e., the natural being
and perfection found in it. The moral defection is totally
attributed to the deficiencies of the second cause, whereas the
physical and metaphysical perfection of the act cannot be ultimately attributed· to him. God causes actual reality, not the
act's deficiency in the moral order. Suarez rejects this, arguing
that if God were both to determine and concur in this act He
would be a cause of sin (which is obviously impossible) for
what is it to concur to an act, even determining concursus to
this evil act, but to be a cause of sin?
The Thomist replies that it is not only possible but necessary that God move second causes. In moving them, however,
He always respects their natures and peculiar exigencies. He
moves them in a fitting way and according as they are disposed
in themselves; so a thing ultimately disposed to act evilly God
moves even knowing that disposition. What underlies Suarez'
position is the judgment that a potency (this potency which is
the will) can reduce itself to act having neither premotion nor
predetermination from God. Because Suarez held that the will
can act without a divine motion falling on it to determine arid
apply it, he could hold that God does not premove a man to
the material element of an act which is evil. In Suarez' view,
the very will itself as a potency can move itself to act; there
is no need then to fall back on God's causality to explain the
physical actuality found in any reduction of a potency to its act.
IX. Last of all we point out a most striking conclusion of
Suarez with regard to God's efficacious grace, the conclusion

THOMAS U. MULLANEY

that (metaphysically or logically speaking) there is no inconvenience in saying that there could be a man whom God could
not call efficaciously (though morally speaking that never
happens) because there could be some one whom God foresees
will never cooperate with grace. 482 Suarez finds it easy to safeguard divine omnipotence by appealing to God's power to impede the use of such a man's freedom. But the conclusion
itself, that· (metaphysically or logically speaking) there could
be a man whose free acts are beyond the reach of God's efficacious grace, a man whose freedom can never be efficaciously
ruled and guided by God's grace, is there and that conclusion,
so far removed from Thomistic teaching, is a natural, an
inevitable outgrowth of Suarez' starting point. If a power,
as a power is so actual that it can reduce itself to act, and if
this power as free must reduce itself to act so that God does
not physically predetermine and premove it, then God's grace
can not physically reach out, so to say, to guide and lead it in
its free acts. Hence this freedom can indeed escape that grace
of God.
Such is the Suarezion account of man's free acts: an account
which is far indeed from that rendered by Thomists. For that
difference there is one reason, Suarez' starting point. To it,
ultimately, can be traced the great outstanding propositions in
which he differs so widely from Thomism.

II.

THE FREE POTENCY

Throughout our criticism of Suarez' teaching about man's
free acts, the point we made was that the various teachings of
Suarez which we discussed all flow from his notion that the
human will as a potency can reduce itself to act. That notion
comes from his position about the very nature of potency and
act. The possibility, therefore, of Suarez' teachings on the acts
of man's free faculty hinges upon that famous conception of
potency and act concerning which so much has already been
said here. But we can not afford to overlook the point that
••• Ibid., Liber ill, cap. 14, n. 16.

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Suarez did not teach that potency must reduce itself to act, nor
that all potency does in fact so reduce itself. However, he does
say that this potency which is a free operative faculty does
reduce itself. We saw that at the very beginning of the previous
section. Now why did Suarez teach that? We know this much:
Suarez' teaching about man's free acts rests upon his doctrine
about the nature of a free power. We know also that the very
possibility of Suarez' doctrine about the free power rests upon
his more general doctrine that at least some potency can be
eminently actual. However, we do not yet know why he maintained that a free potency must be a potency which is of itself
so actual that it can reduce itself to act without a distinct premotion. Until we know this we have not fully seen the basis
of the Suarezian teaching.
The answer to the problem is a very old one. Suarez realized
that freedom is a property which includes (if it is not identical
with) indifference, active indifference in virtue of 'which a
faculty can determine itself to act. The really vital question
about man's liberum arbitrium is this: what faculty or faculties enter into its act? On the answer to that question depends
the kind of indifference one shall posit as necessary to freedom.
St. Thomas answers that this faculty is " none other than intellect and will"; 483 " a free judgment of reason "; 484 and he explains that "the root of liberty is the will as a subject but
reason as a cause; for the will can bear on different things
because of this that reason can have different concepts of the
good." 485 St. Thomas, then, while recognising that the liberum
arbitrium is not a distinct faculty from the will is far indeed
from minimizing the role of intellect in freedom. Election, the
proper act of the liberum arbitrium, is, for him, substantially
4.3 Ergo liberum arbitrium non est aliud ab utroque; liberum arbitrium non est
potentia separata a voluntate et ratione; non videtur quod liberum arbitrium sit
alia potentia a voluntate et ratione (II Sent., d. !!8, q. 19, 8).
4.4 Liberum arbitrium ... definitur esse liberum de ratione judicium (II Cont.
Gent., e. 48).
4.5 Radix libertatis est voluntas sieut subjeetum sed sieut causa est ratio. . . .
Ex hoc enim voluntas libere potest ad diversa ferri, quia ratio potest habere diversas
eoneeptiones veri (Summa Theol., I-II, q. 17 a. 1, ad !!um).

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an act of will, but formally an act of reason, for the form supplied by reason enters in to fashion, so to speak, the act of the
free wilL As. a consequence its act can never be necessitated
with respect to partial goods simply because it is, formally,
from the intellect. Man has, through reason, a norm (which is
the universal good) and so can always compare this particular
good with that universal norm. Seeing the object and act as
partial, particular things, inadequate to his appetite for universal good, he can not be necessitated with regard to them,
for only those volitional acts of man can be necessary which
regard universal good. Hence from the very fact that the act
of liberum arbitrium is formally an arbitrium, L e., a judgment,
it is metaphysically impossible that that act ever be necessary
with regard to a particular thing known to be such.
Suarez, as we have seen, had a quite different notion about
human freedom as a faculty. To be sure, he derived that free
faculty from man's intellectual nature, but practically speaking
he divorced intellect from will in the order of operation. That
divorce is what basically divides Suarez' account
man's free
faculty from the Thomistic account, just as his judgment about
the nature of potency and act is that which basically divides
his teaching about free acts from the Thomistic teaching on
the same point. Having divorced the two, he could still preserve freedom maintaining that its indifference is such indifference of a faculty with respect to its acts, that without divine
premotion the will can move to act. In other words, it is a
power indifferent in the sense that it has such dominion over
its own acts that it can of itself move itself without God's premotion to this· act or to that act, or not move itself at all, just
as it chooses. He does, in fact, indicate that indifference as
liberty. In doing so he made it inevitable that he should teach
the doctrines about free acts which we have already discussed.
1. Tne Central Doctrine. We have already seen that for
Suarez the will is the liberum arbitrium. The proposition that
the will is properly the subject of freedom (since election, the
free act, is substantially a volitional act) is admitted by aU.
But what Suarez really taught was that the will alone of human

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faculties is the per se cause of free acts, and in that lies the
root difficulty. We have seen that he argues that knowledge
is a per accidens cause of the act of an appetite. Again he
teaches that the appetite cannot use the formal apprehension
(of the object) since it exists in another faculty, and that an
appetite is of itself constituted in first act and needs no form
to constitute it in first act.486
It is certain that an appetite is, in its being and without
other modification, an inclination to some good. It does not
follow, the Thomist argues, that, because an appetite is such
in its very being, the will, is also with regard to any operation,
without previous modification, a tendency in first act. If no
form determines the will to this object it can never will this
object, for its natural tendency is to the good in general, not to
p"articular goods. Yet in fact the will tends to existing, concrete objects; hence,even in fust act it must somehow be
modified in order to tend to such concrete goods, by a modification which can only be from knowledge. Even with regard to
the good-in-general the will is not of itself on the order of
operation in first act. That good is the object Qf no particular
act of will, but rather the ratio or driving force of every voluntary act. But Suarez' mind "in this matter is abundantly
clear: the human will alone, without an essentially causal
modification coming from reason, is the principle of the free
act. The free act has no essential, causal dependence on any
faculty other than the will. Suarez did not merely divorce intellect from will" in the free operation"of the latter." He also .freed
the intellect and other faculties from any motion by the will
which is; philosophically, per se efficacious, maintaining that
the will's motion of them is a moral motion,an efficacy which
is, philosophically speaking, per accidens.
That Suarez did not penetrate the interplay of reason and
will in a free act seems evident, too, from his argumentation
against the Thomistic position that intellect determines will
finally and that
determines intellect efficiently.487 In that
OS6

De Anima, Liber V, cappo

487

Disp. Meta., disp. XIX, sect. 6.

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argument Suarez takes the judgment of reason to be the application of the object to the will, an act which precedes the free
choice. In a case where true choice is to be made the application is rather counsel (the proposition of many objects) than
a final judgment. What Suarez conceives as intellectual proposition of the object is actually the free choice itself on its intellectual side: it is the ultimate judgment by which man freely
determines himself to the selected means. Suarez did not make
this " application of the object" an essential part of the free
act; he made it a preceding act. Suarez then failed quite completely to see that the acts of the liberum arbitrium contain in
their very essence an intellectual side; he did not understand
that free choice is in fact rational, formally speaking. Suarez
says that the formula: "a judgment must determine will," is
false in the sense that intellect first judges: "this is to be
elected," for that would be opposed to the liberty of the wilL
In fact, intellect does judge" this is to be elected" and without
prejudice to the free act, for that judgment is precisely the
intellectual phase of the free act.
There can be no doubt then as to the fact: Suarez did teach
a divorce of intellect and will in the order of operation. The
will is not, philosophically speaking, a per se efficient mover of
intellect, and intellect is not a per se cause of a voluntary act;
therefore it is not a per se cause of that voluntary act which is
a free act. Hence, and here is the important conclusion, freedom can not be simply the dominion of the faculty over its own
act coming from the fact that the object of the act is manifested by reason as something indifferent, i. e., inadequate to
the appetite of good in generaL Yet liberty does certainly
imply indifference. So, Suarez, to safeguard human freedom,
appealed to the indifference in the will itself, an indifference he
conceived as complete active indifference by which the will is
so active that it can deterrnine its own indifference without
predetermination by God. Suarez never fully understood the
intimate and intricate connection of intellect and will in any
voluntary act. He divorced those two faculties; he saved the
free power by maintaining that it is an eminently actual thing,

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and in that lies the root of all disagreement between him and
Thomists.

2. Consequential Teachings. To avoid all ambiguity, we
must realize that in describing the free faculty as "active"
Suarez does not use the term as it is frequently used among
Scholastics, i. e., as naming a faculty whose act is transient.
Suarez, of course, said that the act of the free power is an
immanent act, and therefore he classifies that power as " passive" in the technical use of the term. 488 His meaning is clear:
the free will is active in the sense that its act is not a received
act as, let us say, the act of existence is received into created
essences (according to Thomists). Suarez' reason for insisting
on the active quality of the free power is clear: what is received
cannot be rejected. If the will receives its act it cannot reject
that act, and hence is not free, for freedom is power to act
and not-act. Thus the quality of being active is posited as a
necessary consequence of the will's indifference.
This basic doctrine is clearly opposed to the Thomists for,
as we have seen, they teach that the will does receive actuation. Yet, from the actuation necessity does not follow because liberum arbitrium is an appetite which is intellectual,
and which therefore, cannot, under any circumstances, be
necessitated with'regard to certain objects, no matter how it
is moved toward them. The patient, Suarez says, is never free
to reject or accept motion; when the agent moves the patient,
the latter is moved necessarily. On the contrary, the Thomist
says the will is of such a nature that it can not possibly be
moved to any partial good as to something which necessitates
it. The very nature of the will indicates that. The will can
tend to a thing only as that thing is known, through intellectual knowledge. When a particular thing is known to be a
partial, incomplete good, the will can tend to it only as to a
partial good, i. e., as to something the appetition of which is
contingent-always and necessarily contingent, since the will
has as the object of its natural (and, therefore, necessary)
£ ••

Prol. Primum, cap. !l, nn. 1-6.

5

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tendency only the complete and perfect good. Therefore, even
when the will receives motion to act it does not act necessarily;
since, in nature, the will is of such disposition that it cannot be
necessitated by this motion then the motion does not necessitate it. Yet given this motion of God there is truly a necessity
of infallibility about the action. This does not deny freedom of
exercise. The very act is a judged object of the liberum arbitrium. The act itself is known and judged to be something
contingent, i. e., to be something which is not the perfect good,
and which is not connected by a line of strict necessity with the
perfect good. Hence, the act, when placed, is seen and valued
as a contingent thing without which the end of the will (the
necessary thing) can be attained. Thus the very exercise of
the act still is free.
The motion under discussion is adapted to the will, since
God moves things according to their natures. Under this motion the will elects this act as a thing known not to be necessary to it; the motion, therefore, is motion to a contingent and
not to a necessary act, even though the act infallibly follows.
The necessity (of infallibility) is from the efficacy of God
moving the will; the act is still free from the nature of the
as St. Thomas makes clear. As long as the
tends to a
good mown to be incomplete (and· even the exercise of the
act is such a good) the will can not possibly act otherwise than
freely and still retain its nature. Hence the freedom of the
will does not postulate that it be active in the Suarezian sense;
one can still reconcile freedom with divine motion by appealing
to the intellectual nature of a free act.
Suarez again and again, though in slightly different forms,
uses the same argument, i. e., if the will receives determination
prior to its act it is not free. He writes that from a previous
supposition comes necessity, but not from a subsequent supposition:oS9 The answer already given is valid here, too. A
previous supposition falling on a thing which by nature can
not be necessitated does not necessitate the thing in its opera.SO

Ibid., cap. 6, n. 7.

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tion. The will by its very nature can be necessitated by no
supposition (even previous) because in respect of a partial
good man always acts dominatively. He always sees the contingency of his act (unless reason is impeded) and has the
real power to reconsider his judgment and elect not to act.
Suarez attempts to prove that, contrary to Thomists' teaching,
some necessity of consequence is opposed to liberty, saying
that in the argumentation" man sees God, therefore, man loves
Him" there is necessity of consequence, but yet no liberty.
The necessity is necessity of consequent, not, the Thomist
answers, of consequence, .for the nature of man's will absolutely demands that man love God once he sees Him. The
proposition therefore is in necessary matter, not contingent.
Why, in the physical order, did Suarez, contrary to the
Thomists, postulate this peculiar active quality of the will in
virtue of which the very faculty without premotion can move
to act? Simply because of his failure to understand that,
because the will is an intellectual appetite, its act with regard
to any partial good must always be free, and therefore, liberum
arbitrium is free even as moved by God, even in receiving its
act from God. Because he did not see that, he safeguarded
human freedom by appealing to this" active quality". Having
by his divorce of intellect and will, blocked off the will's being
free from the intellectual nature of its act, he saved freedom by
positing a potency so actual as to need no divine motion to
premove it.
From the doctrine that intellect is not a per se cause of
voluntary act, it follows at once that the will without regulation by the intellect can act. That doctrine is in Suarez. Thus,
he says that some free volitions are had without a determining
judgment, i. e., the will, undetermined by a judgment, acts. 490
Reason precedes volition even in the first act, the Thomist
says, for in that act, God directly moves both intellect and
will, but in an ordered way; the intellect in that act, as in all
others, is the first mover of the will in the order of specification .
••• Disp. Meta., disp. XIX, sect. 6, nn.

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Suarez supposes that the will can be ultimate. The position
that the will's own freedom is the unique reason for the choice
of one of several equally eligible means 491 amounts to just that;
it is
assertion that will can act without reason's regulation.
The fact, according to Thomists, is that will, since it is a
rational appetite, always follows reason, i. e., it chooses the
more convenient ( i. e., the better, at least apparently better)
object. In the case of means apprehended as equally good, the
will can not select one until reason indicates some aspect in it
which, in fact, makes it better than the other goods, as St.
Thomas says. But Suarez' position is clear: the will of itself
is (in the order of second cause) sufficient to account for the
choice. Consider, again, Suarez' statement that it is not absolutely necessary that an error of judgment precede a sinful
act.492 It follows that, absolutely speaking, a man can know
what is right (judge properly) and in that act choose what is
wrong. That is a very clear revelation of Suarez' mind in this
matter. It supposes not merely that reason does not here and
now regulate the volitional act; it even supposes that reason
and will can be in open contradiction and yet an act follows. It
is transparently clear that he conceived the free power as
(per se) exclusively volitional, able to act in defiance of (he
reason which, according to Thomists, is of its very essence.
Most certainly that position can rest only on the notion that
intellect and will are not intimately interwoven in any free act.
Suarez, in common with Scholastics generally, teaches that
indifference is necessary for freedom. But the question is what
does indifference mean; does Suarez mean by it precisely what
the Thomist means? It is clear that by indifference Suarez
understands an eminent indetermination in virtue of which the
indifferent faculty can, without God's predetermination determine itself, so that as the will is really for act it is, proximately,
equally'prepared as to both act and non-act. 493 That is not
the Thomistic conception of the indifference of the will. The
•• 1 Cf. ibid., nn.
.
••• Ibid., sect. 7, nn. 9-11 .
••• Prol. Primum, cap. 5; Opus. Primum, Liber I, cap.!.

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Thomist agrees that the faculty is, of itself, determined to
neither alternative; as it is ready for act it is predetermined to
act by God Himself. Yet man is still free because he can reflect
upon this act he is about to place; he can compare it with the
norm reason supplies (the good in general) , see the deficiencies
of this act and so he can not act. Hence, for a Thomist indifference or freedom does not suppose indetermination in the
faculty as that faculty is proximately ready for act. But why .
did Suarez require this indifference (which is indetermination)
even when the will is ready for act? Here again the fundamental reason is Suarez' divorce of intellect from will. In the
face of that separation he found it easy to safeguard the
faculty's dominion over its own act through such indifference.
Had Suarez admitted the Thomistic position that the will is
indifferent precisely because reason proposes to it objects which
are presented as partial goods and which are therefore incapable
of causing a necessary act of the will, had he seen that as a
consequence even the act of selecting such a good must be
itself an object elected as a merely partial good, he would have
seen that the dominative power of the will as that faculty is
proximately disposed to act does not require. indifference in
the sense of indetermination. The will can be determined and
free because, even in choosing, this object is known through
reason to be a contingent good, the willing of which can be
omitted without the will's losing its end, and in that power is
true and sufficient dominion over the act. After all, our freedom is analogous to that of God, yet God's free acts are from
all eternity, determined. Suarez answers that God's eternal
determination does not destroy his freedom because it comes
from that freedom. The Thomist adds that the determination
of the human faculty comes from that free faculty, too, though
not as that is unmoved by God since any potency, free or otherwise, must be reduced to act and, as a potency, can not reduce
itself. We know that God is determined because we know that
He is immutable pure act; we know that He is free because we
know that certain objects cannot possibly necessitate His will
since those objects are merely partial goods. No degree of

THOMAS U. MULLANEY

immutability can necessitate freedom, granted such objects;
and, analogously, no degree of determination destroys man's
freedom provided he is presented with objects known to be
merely partial goods. Hence, for the Thomist there is no contradiction between freedom and predetermination. But for
Suarez there is, because in his system man's reason does not
enter into the act of liberum arbitrium as a per se cause. Therefore, the indifference (with respect to objects) rooted in that
act of reason does not enter as a per se modification of the free
act; .hence if the faculty is determined by God there can be
not left sufficient indifference to safeguard liberty.
Another of the conditions posited by Suarez as necessary to
man's free faculty is that it have complete active and dominative power over its free acts. 494 No Thomist will quarrel with
the statement that the liberum arbitrium has active, dominative power over its acts, for that faculty, under God's motion, does truly determine itself; its act is certainly under its
dominion. The difficulty is with what Suarez understands by
the complete power of the faculty; and there can be no doubt
as to what that is. Suarez means simply that the created free
faculty can move to second act without distinct premotion,
predetermination. We know that Suarez could hold that because he held that it is not repugnant that the potential be,
itself, somehow actual. Why did he hold that this potency
as free must move without premotion? Having denied to intellect any per se causality with respect to a free act he could not
explain the fact of human freedom by appealing to the role of
intellect in free acts, but it was an easy matter, in light of
Suarez' notion of potency to safeguard that freedom by making
the will "completely active and dominative". Here, too, there
is a constant pattern; the possibility of Suarez' teaching on
free acts rests upon his notion of potency and act, that those
notions of potency and act were inevitably applied in treating
of human freedom rests upon the concept of the divorce of
intellect from will. Once they were divorced, Suarez' concept
••• Prol. Primum, cap. !!, nn. lO-I!!.

BASIS OF SU.AREZIAN TEACHING ON HUMAN FREEDOM

of potency and act was a very natural way for him to explain
the fact of man's liberty.
That the will as it is proximately disposed for act must be
equally " expedited" for both act and non-act Suarez insistS.495
The Thomist of course argues that the will under God's motion
is truly unimpeded for act and non-act, yet precisely as ready
for act it does not regard both in the same way, for actions are
individual determined things. Any agent proximately disposed
to act must be disposed to an individual determined thing; he
must not be indifferent to a disjunction. The indifferent faculty
Suarez posits (an eminent thing capable of self determination
without God's premotion) is in harmony with and supposed to,
this teaching. Suarez maintains that to suppose that the will
must, as disposed· for act, be determined to one thing means
that it is proximately impotent as to one part of its power,
therefore not free .
.Thomists answer that with determination freedom is not lost,
for the faculty still has dominion over its act since both act
and object are contingent not necessary things; and man, knowing that, can reconsider and in light of new counsel not act.
God's determining motion is not motion to act in a way which
violates the nature of the free power; it is motion to an act
the object of which is judged to be a contingent good. Hence
as
the act with respect· to it is always revocable. Such
that does not destroy the freedom of the act or of the faculty,
the Thomist argues; that motion is a true cause of the being
of the act and of its being free. What underlies Suarez' argument? The assumption that the will is free in the sense that,
with no distinct premotion, it actuates itself. Having accepted
the Scotistic divorce of intellect from will (in operating) Suarez
saved the fact of liberty in this way. Consider a free act as
per se dependent on intellect and another avenue lies open.
Suarez continues that, supposing Divine premotion, the will
does not have a proximately free power, for the condition for
its not-acting (namely, the withdrawal of God's motion) would
, •• Ibid., nn. 13-15; Opus. Primum, Liber I, cappo I, !to

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not be under the will's power. 496 According to Thomists, even
under divine motion the will has in its power the condition for
its not-acting, namely, the imperation of a contrary judgment.
The divine motion is a motion to the proper act of a faculty
which has that power; it is not a motion which changes the
intrinsic nature of the free faculty. One cannot find anything
to truly exemplify God's motion of the will. Anything other
than the will is naturally and necessarily determined to one act
only; but the liberum arbitrium can never be necessitated be.cause of its peculiar object. But, Suarez writes, an act in which
the power is 4etermined is not free since the act does not have
the note of freedom except from the faculty which, in the case,
is determined and not free.491 That is the concept of freedom
as active indifference carried to a logical conclusion; liberty is
conceived as a disjunction existing in man, both parts of which
disjunction are ready to leap into act. Actually, liberum arbitrium is one faculty bearing in each act on one object with
regard to which it can actually have at one time only one attitude, although the contrary or contradictory attitude is always
possible since the faculty must bear on this object in that way,
i. e., recognizing it as contingent. Therefore even as determined
by God the will must remain free.
The essential thing in all this discussion is that what is
basically in question is the very nature of freedom. Can the
free will be determined, yet free? Yes, the Thomist says. Because its act is formally an act of reason, a judgment indicating the merely partial goodness of this object, man has such
dominance over that act that he can reconsider and elect not
to act for he knows that this act is not necessary. Suarez can
not accept freedom of that kind; he has already judged that a
free act is so much an act of will that reason is not a per se
cause of it. Hence the note of freedom cannot adequately be
preserved by appealing to the influence of intellect. Freedom
becomes the will's own active and dominative power to determine itself without God's distinct predetermination. To such
freedom as that, predetermination is patently opposed .
... Ibid., cap. S, nn. 12-15.

••• Ibid., cap. 2.

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Intimately connected with his failure to penetrate the
Thomistic doctrine on the will as an intellectual appetite, is
Suarez' explicit teaching that agents extrinsic to the will can
necessitate the will with respect to partial goods. We read,
for instance, that the act of a created will can be truly voluntary and therefore free of coaction, yet necessary because impelled by an extrinsic cause. 498 Again, Suarez says that to deny
that God can necessitate the will with regard to indifferent
objects is to deny God's omnipotence. 499 These are but a few
examples of the doctrine. Thomists say that it is a metaphysical impossibility for God, even by His absolute power
(and a fortiori for anyone else) to move the will in such a way
as to make its act with respect to a partial good, known to be
partial, a necessary act. The reason we have already seen.
The liberum arbitrium moves to an object as the object is
known to be a partial good only, a good which does not adequate the norm which man has of the perfect good. Man can
not possibly will this object then as though it were the perfect
good, since will follows knowledge. Since he cannot will it as
the perfect good he,can not will it necessarily, for he sees that
it can be willed or not willed without either attaining or losing
the perfect good (which he does will necessarily) . As partial
good the object has defects, imperfections. Whatever is known
to have defects can never be willed necessarily, for man la;lows
that the act of will bearing on it does not have to be; he can
change his consideration from the good aspects of the object to
the eviL Thus, whether he wills it or not, the act is contingent,
and can be nothing other than contingent. To attribute to
God's omnipotence power to change all this and to move the
will so that it acts in a necessary way for a contingent object
is to ask the impossible; for it demands that the liberum arbitrium become, under God's motion, not what it is, namely, an
appetite which follows reason. But Suarez can maintain this
possibility. In Suarez' eyes, therefore, any predetermining motion falling on the will can only necessitate its act. He teaches
'9. Prol. Primum, cap. L

••• Ibid., cap. 4.

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that simply because he did not admit that an act of liberum
arbitrium is formally an act of reason which manifests the
inadequacy of this object (and act) .. Therefore, the act of
willing or not willing the object can only be free, granted reason's operation, no matter how the will is predetermined.
How could God physically determine the will, which He can
do only by necessitating it? God necessitates the will Suarez
writes, by effectively restraining its natural power of resisting
God's help.50o This is his conclusion, then, that God's physical
predetermination of this human faculty can only be something
contrary to the connatural way in which this faculty acts,
something which impedes the faculty from
in the
way its very nature (according to Thomists) demands. The
very possibility of this teaching lies in the notion that a human
potency can be such as naturally to need no premotion by God.
The teaching that God's physical premotion can only necessitate proximately rests on the supposition that intellect does
not enter as a per se cause of a free act. One who does maintain that causality of reason in this free act sees how the act
cannot be other than free.
From this study of the teachings of Suarez it seems to us
most evident that his teachings on human liberty so different
in themselves from those of the Thomists, do in fact, rest upon
the two principles 'we have indicated. Those principles are the
final reason for the differences between Suarezian congruism
and Thomism. And the fact that those two principles are so
ultimate, each in its own order, has been the explanation of
the continuing disagreement of the two schools. Agreement
between them shall be reached (saving an intervention on the
part of the Church herself) only in that day in which the two
schools shall come to see eye to eye on the nature of potency
and act on the very nature of a free power. Then and only
then shall their differences be reconciled; then and only then
shall there be harmony in their teaching.
THOMAS U. MULLANEY,

Dominican H0'U8B of Studies,
Washington, D.

a.

600

Ibid., cap. 6.

O. P.

BOOK REVIEWS
The Eternal Quest. By WILLIAM R. O'CONNOR. New York: Longmans,
Green, 1947. Pp. 290, with index. $4.00.
Father O'Connor, professor of dogmatic theology at St. Joseph's Seminary, Dunwoodie, gives us in the present volume" the outgrowth of an
article written in 1940 for The New Scholasticism and of a doctoral dissertation submitted to Fordham University in 1943."
"Students of St. Thomas," he says (p. 1), "are aware of the problem
he has bequeathed to his successors in his celebrated doctrine of a natural
desire for the vision of God. Men of the caliber ()f Cajetan and Suarez in
the past and of Billot in the present have found this teaching difficult and
even ambiguous. This is about the only point of agreement among the
commentators when they undertake to explain what St. Thomas meant by
this enigmatic desire."
He says later: "We cannot overlook the fact that the commentators
and exegetes are not in agreement, no matter how confidently some of them
may undertake to speak for St. Thomas on this question. Is it possible
that the difficulty lies not with St. Thomas but with his interpreters?
Could they have brought to this problem certain preoccupations and conceptions of their own which were foreign to the mind of St. Thomas and
which, accordingly, serve only to confuse the issue? If this is the case, the
commentators have to a large extent created their own problem, a problem
that ought to be on the way to a solution if these foreign elements can be
detected and removed. The main thing is to see the issue as St. Thomas
himself saw it, free from the prejudicial influences of later years" (p. 30) .
Following Father Brisbois, S. J., whose ¢icle appeared in 1936 in the
Nouvelle Revue Theologique, the author sums up into four groups all the
explanations given so far on St. Thomas' "desire for God." " These
groups follow the four. great commentators, Banez, Cajetan, Soto, and
Sylvester of Ferrara. . .. These four have set the pattern, as it were, for
all subsequent interpretations. Allowing for certain variations in expression and detail, no major departures from their views are discernible from
their day to the present" (p. 25). As the author remarks: "Surely all
four (main interpretations) cannot be equally right. Is any of them the
correct interpretation? There is always the possibility that the difficulty
lies not with St. Thomas but with his interpreters" (p. 71). Banez and
Cajetan, in fact, "are mainly preoccupied with safeguarding the transcendence of the supernatural" (p. 26 if.). "This preoccupation with the
NATURAL VERSUS SUPERNATURALopposition certainly underlies the interpretation of Cajetan and Banez "(p. 71; cf. pp. 30,38).
It might seem strange that every preoccupation should be misleading or,

BOOK REVIEWS

at least, suspicious. When Leo XIII was urging Catholic bishops to restore
the golden wisdom of St. Thomas, and to spread it as far as they could
for the refutation of errors that were gaining ground, because the Angelic
Doctor not only had vanquished all errors of ancient times but supplies
also an armory of weapons which brings us certain victory in the conflict
with falsehoods ever springing up in the course of years (the En:cyclical
Aetemi Patris), he certainly was not partaking of Father O'Connor's
pessimistic view. Were we ourselves to partake of it, we should declare
misleading or suspicious his own new essay because the preoccupation
that "the teaching of St. Thomas has become encrusted with the ideas
and terminology of commentators and interpreters of later ages" (p. I),
which undoubtedly and strongly inclined the latter to read into St. Thomas
their own viewpoints and conceptions (p. 2), underlies, without a doubt,
his present effort.
Further, if Banez and Cajetan II.re to be rejected on the ground th.at they
were preoccupied, why does the author depart from Soto and from Sylvester
of Ferrara who were not under any preoccupation? It is because of the
influence that Scotus, he says, exercised on them. This influence of Scotus
is not confined to terminology as far as the first interpreter is concerned;
Soto depends on Scotus in several doctrinal points and especially in his
natural desire, altogether innate, by way of pondus naturae (pp. 56-65).
But Sylvester of Ferrara who "rejects the Scotistic interpretation of the
natural desire of God in terms of a purely natural tendency or ordination
of finality" (p. 65), is under Scotus' influence rather for his terminology.
Then a new question arises: why could we not discuss a problem in the .
light of St. Thomas' doctrine using the terminology of Duns Scotus? Suarez
is presented by Father O'Connor himself as keeping Scotus' terminology
(p. 60) and subscribing, in spite of that, to Cajetan's doctrine (pp. 61 ff.)
on this controversy about the natural desire for God.
Abstracting from most of the statements made by Father O'Connor
against the outstanding representatives of the four main interpretations
because, besides the fact that some of them could be easily challenged, all
pertain to the preliminary, destructive part of the book, I pass to the
exposition and criticism of his principal contention which is given as the
constructive portion of the volume. According to Father O'Connor, commentators have misunderstood St. Thomas's desire for the vision of God,
explaining it, in the field of psychology, as a tendency of the will, while
the Angelic Doctor was speaking of it, in the way we must speak of it, in
the field of metaphysics, as a tendency, a necessary tendency, of the intellect (pp. 10,94, 187, 147, 156, 166, 180, et passim).
This is Father O'Connor's theory: For St. Thomas appetere extends as
widely astendere (p. 94); natural appetite and natural desire are equivalent
terms (p. 96). After finding the place for natural appetite within the

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209

broad line of final causality, the Angelic Doctor rooted it also in formal
causality. Because the tendency is rooted in and flows from the nature·of
the object in which it is found, it is properly called natural tendency or
desire (p. 98). "Natural desire is not merely an ordo ad finem, a relation
dignified with the title of transcendental relation of finality. This element
, is certainly present in natural desire, but there is an equally important
element, and that is inclinatio in finem. This inclination comes not from
without but from within. It comes from the form, which is the principium
of a spontaneous tendency towards the end" (p. 106).
kll natural things being inclined towards their ends by God, their author,
they have received from Him natural principles through which they are
intrinsically directed and moved to those ends, which they consequently
seek by natural appetite, tendency or desire (p. 108 fl.). What is true of
natural appetite of things in general is true also of natural appetite in each
of the various powers of the soul: each has a determined tendency towards
its proper object and activity, the sense of sight, to seeing colored objects
and not to hearing sounds (p. 111). "Natural appetite, accordingly, is an
inclination that is found in every nature and in every power of nature.
Natures and powers are innately inclined by God towards their proper
ends and activities through the natural forms that He has given" (p. 116) .
The intellect, then, has a natural tendency, inclination, appetite, or desire
for the acquisition of knowledge (p'. 186). Hence, it seeks to know the
causes of the effects already known and is not satisfied to reach a knowl.
edge of the existence of the cause but naturally looks further to the
knowledge of its essence (p. 147). "The natural desire for God is simply
the culmination of our natural intellectual curiosity" (p. 149).
This does not mean, as Father O'Connor warns us, that there is a separate little will attached to each of man's powers and consequently to the
human intellect; as the good of each power pertains to the good of the
whole man, the special power called the will inclines all the powers of the
soul to its proper operation and thus embraces in its tendency the good
of all other powers (p. 189 fl.) . But, even when the human will is
interested in the acquirement of knowledge by the intellect, it is not for
the sake of knowledge but for the reason that knowledge is good, good
for the intellect as well as for man (p. 164). Thus, if after knowing God's
existence we wish to know His essence, it is not the divine essence as such,
but the knowledge of the divine essence that appeals to the will as something good for the intellect and good for man to' possess (p. 166).
A natural desire, such as has been just described, does not need being
fulfilled. "8t. Thomas is careful to deny that such a tendency must be
satisfied, or that its existence proves that it will be satisfied. All he claims
is that this tendency would not be there if it were not possible, at least,
for it to be satisfied" (p. 141). Again: "Nature does not tend towards

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BOOK REVIEWS

an end or perfection that is impossible of attainment. This would mean
that a natural form is tending by nature to an end that is not an end.
Yet, beyond this possibility of attainment, the presence of the natural
desire tells us absolutely nothing as to whether the attainment will ever
be actually realized" (p. 149 fl.). Hence: "It is true that to arrive at
such a vision (namely of God) the intellect needs to be elevated and
strengthened above its natural powers. No reason exists, however, why
any created intellect cannot, by itself, tend towards a more complete and
perfect knowledge of anything of which it already has the minimum
kn,owledge that it exists" (p. 150) Finally: "The mere presence of this
natural, instinctive tendency to know what God is in Himself after His
existence is known sufficiently indicates for St. Thomas the possibility of
the vision of God, even though this possibility were never to be actually
realized. No natural inclination is possible towards anything intrinsically
impossible, although a natural tendency may be prevented from reaching
its term by the presence of an impediment. The vision of the first truth,
God, does not lie outside the range of possibility for a created intellect. If
it did, we could not speak of a natural desire for this vision. The created
intellect, however, needs to be elevated and strengthened before it can
actually see God. Once this obstacle is removed by grace and the lumen
gloriae, nothing will prevent the natural desire from reaching its term"
(p. 181).
Let us close this summary of Father O'Connor's position with a few lines
on the question of infants who die unbaptized and who are assigned to
Limbo as their eternal tenement. "Knowing nothing about the vision of
God as the end of man and his true beatitude, they have no natural desire
for God under this aspect; consequently, they do not feel that they have
lost true happiness in losing Him. . .. At the same time they have a
natural desire for knowledge that is not and cannot be satisfied short of a
direct vision of God, which in their case will never be realized. Anyone in
this position must feel the angustia which Aristotle and all the praeclara
ingenia of antiquity (to say nothing of ourselves) felt from the impossibility of having their intellectual craving for truth satisfied with anything
less than a knowledge of the first truth" (p. 195 fl.).
Were I not among the writers 011 this particular problem, I would say
that St. Thomas providentially left it unsolved so that the praeclara ingenia
(8 C. Gentes, 48) of his disciples would feel that angustia of explaining
what he meant by this enigmatic desire. To the long list of former commentators, Banez, Cajetan, John of St. Thomas, Soto, Suarez, Sylvester of '
Ferrara, etc., and of modern writers, Brisbois, Cuervo, Doucet, Enrico di
S. Teresa, Fernandez, Gardeil, Garrigou-Lagrange, Laporta, Roland-Gosselin, RitzIer, Sestili, Trancho, Vallaro, Yelle, etc., we must add Fr.
O'Connor who decidedly- intends to deliver us finally from that angustia.
Has he succeeded?

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211

Here is what I honestly think: Leaving aside the numerous texts in
which St. Thomas attributes the desire for knowledge to man or to man's
will, rather than to his intellect, and not considering that the reason for
attributing it at times to the intellect is that he is dealing with formal
beatitude (cf. I-II, q. 4, a. 2), I would say that the fundamental question
is this: is it man's eye that sees, man's intellect that understands, man's
will that wills, or is it rather man who sees by his eyes, understands by his
intellect and wills by his will? I favor the second viewpoint: it is man
who wills and wills by. his will. Thus I understand why the virtue of
studiousness, like the contrary vice of curiosity, is located by St. Thomas,
not in the intellect but in the will (II-II, q. 166), and why the studium
cognoscendi is given by Cajetan as an actus voluntatis passive in potentiis
cognoscitivis existens. (In IT-II, q. 166, a. 1, n. 4.)
Consequently, if the desire for God's vision be said to be the culmination of natural intellectual curiosity, it belongs to the virtue of studiousness
to keep that desire of the will within reasonable limits, since potest esse
vitium ex ipsa inordinatione appetitus et studii ad discendam veritatem
. . . , inquantum aliquis studet ad cognoscendam veritatem supra proprii
ingenii facultatem (II-II, q. 167, a. 1). And as it is but the virtuous man
who has a right to tell us in what real happiness consists (I-II, q. 1, a. 7),
even those words of St. Thomas which are presumed (p. 192) deliberately
to have been omitted in Q. 5, De Malo, find here their suitable place:
Ex hoc quod caret aliquis eo quod suam proportionem excedit, non affiigitur,
si sit rectae rationis (In 2 Sent., d. 33, q. 2, a. 2). And if we were to
speak, as Fr. O'Connor does, of the lumen gloriae as removing an impediment or an obstacle on the part of the intellect (pp. 79, 181, 190) , we have
in mind a distinction made by the Angelic Doctor: Dupliciter aliquid
impeditur ab alio. Uno modo, per modum contrarietatis, sicut frigus impedit actionem caloria: et tale impedimentum operationis repugnat felicitati. Alio modo, per modum cujusdam defectus, quia scilicet res impedita
non habet quidquid ad omnimodam sui perfectionem requiritur: et tale
impedimentum operationis non repugnat felicitati (1-11, q. 4, a. 5, ad 4um).
This restraining of the natural desire .for the vision of God is not so
arduous an act. Studiousness, like other potential parts of temperance,
has to
a tendency which bends easily under the yoke, for as we
have a natural appetite for knowledge, we also feel strongly a natural
inclination to avoid hard work and application. As St. Thomas puts it:
Quantum ad cognitionem, est in homine contraria inclinatio. Quia ex parte
animae, inclinatur homo ad hoc quod cognitionem rerum desideret. . . . Ex
parte vero naturae corporalis, homo inclinatur ad hoc ut laborem inquirendi
scientiam vitet. Quantum igitur ad primum, studiositas in refrenatione
consistit: et secundum hoc ponitur pats temperantiae. Sed quantum ad
secundum, laus virtutis hujusmodi consistit in quadam vehementia inten-

BOOK REVIEWS

tionis ad scientiam rerum percipiendam: et ex hoc nominatur (II-II, q. 166,
a. 2 ad 3).
Though the knowledge of the divine essence stands as a very important
acquisition, the natural desire for that knowledge differs also from the
natural desire for happiness, and the more that desire is kept restricted to
the intellectual and metaphysical order, the less it appears as necessarily
connected with the second desire, which is volit;onal and psychological.
Since we see so many people who, though always and necessarily seeking
after happiness, do not feel the slightest pain at their absolute ignorance
in religious matters, how, if the desire for the vision of God is kept outside
the field of psychology, can we speak of angustia in those praeclara ingenia
of the old philosophers and in infants who die unbaptized? We cannot
speak of pain, of real though metaphysical pain in eyes which actually do
not see because, for instance, we deem it convenient to keep them closed;
we cannot speak of experiencing real pain when most of us, knowing of
the existence of Mars and wishing to know whether it is inhabited by men,
still give up and resign ourselves to being ignorant.
It is a long time since I wrote a paper on the subject: "EI deseo natural
de ver a Dios," in La Ciencia Tomista (vol. 23, 1921, pp. 49-60). Even
after carefully reading and rereading essays like this one of Fr. O'Connor,
I still maintain that this desire is, to put it in modern terms: first, an
elicited desire, for it is desire of the will following cognition on the part
of the intellect, as it only after our knowing God's existence through creatures that we strive after the knowledge of His essence; secondly, a desire
formaliter natural, because it has as its proper object the essence of the
First Cause of the effects that are seen in the universe; thirdly, a desire
inefficacious in Philosophy, since the knowledge of that essence is above
the proportionate object of our intellect (I, q. 12, a. 4) , and it is only after
knowing by faith the possibility of satisfying that desire that a theologian
may say with St. Thomas: Ad perfectam beatitudinem requiritur quod
intellectus humanus pertingat ad ipsam essentiam primae causae (I-II, q. 3,
a. 8).
By explaining the desire under consideration as a purely intellectual
tendency, Fr. O'Connor has escaped only by a miracle the danger of making
it an innate desire by the way of a pondus naturae: his principles and his
limiting of cognitional desire to sensitive appetite and to the will (pp. 110,
120 ff., 126-133, 162, 182, 234) would have spontaneously led him to it.
But he has not escaped the difficulties that he himself opposes to the
elicited desire just explained. If the desire of the intellect is not necessarily
to be fulfilled, such as is the case with the desire attributed to the will: we
have in both cases an inefficacious desire, so far as its realization is concerned. The capacity for intellectual knowledge is infinite, but the capacity
for goodness in the will is infinite also. The beatific vision comes under

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218

the adequate object of the will as much as God's essence comes under the
adequate object of the intellect: bonum et verum convertuntur; what is
summum bonum is also Summum verum. If our will cannot naturally
tend to the beatific vision because this vision is formaliter supernatural,
neither can the intellect naturally tend to the knowledge of God's essence
except insofar as this is formaliter natural, the essence of the First Cause
of natural effects. If it " is not the divine essence as such, but the knowledge and vision of the divine essence that appeals to the will as something
good for the intellect to possess" (p. 166), we can equally say that in the
explanation I just gave it is not the divine essence as such but the possession and the fruition of that essence that appeals to the will as something
good for itself to have, for we are dealing. with subjective beatitude, which
is something created, an operation of man (I-II, Q. 3, a. 1 f.) .
We have to insist on this particular point.
It does not help, in my opinion, to say with Fr. O'Connor that the
supernatural versus natural opposition was not a preoccupation for St.
Thomas, as it was for Banez and Cajetan. On historical grounds St.
Thomas must be given due credit for his keen separation of both orders.
As Leo XIII says of him: "Carefully distinguishing reason from faith, as
is right, and yet joining them together in a harmony of friendship, he so
guarded the rights of each, and so watched over the dignity of each, that,
as far as man is concerned, reason can now hardly rise higher than she
rose, borne up in the flight of Thomas; and faith can hardly gain more
helps and greater helps from reason than those which Thomas gave her"
(Enc. Aeterni Patns). And when Fr. O'Connor tells us that" St. Thomas
does not speak of an obediential potency in the created intellect to know
God as He is in Himself" (p.
or "of an obediential potency either
for happiness or for the vision of God" (p. 37), I have nothing to do
but to remind him of the quotation given on p. 13, where the Angelic
Doctor writes: Est autem duplex hominis bonum ultimum . ... Quorum
unum est proportionatum naturae humanae. . . . Aliud autem bonum
hominis naturae proportionem excedit, quia ad illud obtinendum vires
naturales non sufficiunt, nee ad eogitandum vel desiderandum ... ; et hoc
est vita aeterna (14 De verit.,
.
Were we anxious to know not so much what St. Thomas held as what
is to be held on philosophical and theological grounds, it seems to me that
the natural desire so cherished by Fr. O'Connor meets an insoluble objection, for it is not sufficient to say that a natural desire would indeed be
in vain if it were impossible for it in any circumstances ever to reach its
goal (pp. 141, 189), in which sense we can speak of a natural desire in
man for immortality. Since natural desire is interpreted as a positive
tendency (p.
and motus (pp. 94, 106,
flowing from a
natural form and this form is given as impressed by the author of nature
in order that man's intellect tend by an inner movement towards the end

6

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BOOK REVIEWS

destined to it by the same author of nature, the difficulty lies in this: how
the author of nature could have ordered man's intellect to an end to
which He, the author of nature, cannot finally lead it; how the author of
nature could ever have impressed on man's intellect a positive tendency or
appetite or motus-to be specified by their term-while He, the author of
nature, cannot satisfy that tendency, fulfill that appetite, bring that motion
to rest, because the vision of God, even abstracting from its quality of
beatific vision, is certainly above the heights to which the author of nature
can raise a human or angelic intellect.
,While expressing my personal ideas on the unsatisfactory features of
Fr. O'Connor's explanation of St. Thomas' natural desire for God on purely
intellectual grounds, I am glad to offer him the most sincere and deserved
praise for having enforced by exegetical and philosophical arguments the
elicited character of the desire in question, for having discriminated some
of the elements taken by some Thomists from Scotistic sources, and for
feeling himself deeply that sovereign angustia worthy of the praeclara
ingenia of past and present times.
P. LUMBRERAs, O. P.
OoUegio Angelicum,
Rome, Italy.

Liberty against Government: the Rise, Flowering and Decline of a Famous
Juridical Concept. By EDWARD S. CORWIN. Baton Rouge: Louisiana
State University Press, 1948. Pp.
with index. $3.00.
So long has Edward S. Corwin been considered one of the better writers
on matters of constitutional theory that the appearance of a new book
bearing his name may rightly be regarded as an event. Mr. Corwin's style
is at once forceful, vigorous, and stimulatipg, and his views are generally
refreshingly free from. adherence to convention for its own sake. His latest
study, Liberty against Government, indicates that his comparatively
recent retirement from Princeton has brought no concomitant retirement
from intellectual vigor. This volume contains, in surprisingly small space,
all the features associated with Corwin's earlier works, and a new analysis
of the concept of liberty as found in our Constitution. Since not only the
document, but also its application and interpretation are here treated, it
can be seen that Corwin has, in his usual commendable fashion, compressed much thought into little space. That his manner of treatment'
necessarily should bring to light the defects of his virtues is, however,
inevitable.
Even before considering the merits and demerits of the volume, mention
should be made of the. foreword, written for Mr. Corwin by Alfred L.
Vanderbilt, Chief Justice of the New Jersey Supreme Court; it deserves a

BOOK REVIEWS

special review of its own. Betraying in every line an acceptance of the
sociological jurisprudence of Holmes, the foreword concludes by quoting
with approval his definition of a word: it is not, Holmes remarked, "a
crystal, transparent and unchanging, it is the skin of a living thought,
and may vary greatly in color and content according to the circumstances
and time in which it is used." Passing lightly over the matter of how many
living things vary in color and content according to circumstances, Vanderbilt then remarks that Corwin's work here demonstrates the extent to which
this statement is true of the word" liberty," as used in a juridical sense.
Fortunately for the reader-and for the reputation of the wriierCorwin's work does no such thing. It does, instead, reveal the extent to
which muddled thinking, and failure to recognize any objective standards
of law have played havoc with our juristic institutions. It shows, also,
that the present Court is bewildered by the trend of thought inaugurated
by its predecessors, a trend which has brought this Court into flat contradictions of its own statements in successive opinions. But to say that
Corwin's book vindicates Holmes's expression is simply to ignore the
author's own words.
Corwin's aim, it is true, may have been precisely to illustrate Holmes's
theories; if this is the case, the book is an admirable failure. It would
seem, however, that the author's purpose was somewhat more objective,
and that he is led, albeit reluctantly, to note many defects in the Holmesean approach. He admires Holmes, there can be no question of that,
but he does not apotheosize him. In this alone the book is a refreshing
contrast to most of the modem works which deal with law under any of its
aspects. At the conclusion of his discussion, the author comes, somewhat
abruptly, to a point where the present Court also finds itself: the term
" liberty" applies to almost every phase of modem life, and is therefore
in need of further definition. This is hardly orthodox sociological jurisprudence.
It is the word therefore in the statement above which is significant. If
Corwin's conclusion means anything, it means that the term, liberty, is now
beginning to be understood in its original sense. His discussion of the rise,
flowering, and decline of a famous juridical concept, if it means anything,
can mean only one thing: the concept he defines as liberty was not liberty
at all, but a special kind or category of right. A reading of the book makes
this point evident, and a detailed examination of the presentation is therefore in, order. Parenthetically it may be noted, before beginning this examination, that Corwin's habit of defining is at once an' assistance to the
reader and an illustration of the fallaciousness of the sociological school's
approach.
In his first chapter-which moves provocatively and rapidly toward an
historical survey of origins-Corwin defines liberty as the absense of

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straints imposed by other persons upon our own freedom of choice and
action. Thus defined, and italicized by the author, liberty seems far
removed from such definitions as the right to be directed in one's own
interest, or-more exactly-as the power elective of means so long as the
order to the end is preserved. Mr. Corwin promptly deprives his definition
of some of its peculiarities, however, by noting that, in society, a man has
liberty because restraints are imposed upon others, and upon the government itself. As to the checks imposed upon the man himself, the author
is significantly silent. One may well inquire, then, why define liberty in
this strange fashion at all?
The answer seems to be that such a definition makes possible a graceful
approach to the question of juridical liberty-again Corwin's italics-and
that this libertY'is a type of constitutional liberty "which we Americans
term judicial review." We have, therefore, a statement of the problem.
This is to be a study of the struggle between the legislature and the power
of judicial review. As such a study is not particularly new-even to Corwin
-one might wonder why a new volume, preoccupied with this theme,
should now appear. The saving feature of the book is that Corwin promptly
and cheerfully loses sight of this objective, and concerns himself only
obliquely with it as he discusses numbers of other matters.
There is first his discussion of Roman and English origins. Law, as it
has affected English and American institutions, finds its first philosophical
exposition in Cicero. From Cicero we skip blithely to John Locke, pausing
briefly to note Bracton's invaluable collection and John of Salisbury. There
were no substantial contributions made before Cicero or, after him, until
Locke. Such are Corwin's contentions, and they are the veriest nonsense.
He himself notes (p. 16) that Cicero wrote of a Roman practice to
include in every law a prohibition agaillst what was sacrosanct. This is
nothing less than an admission that Cicero was not inventing judicial
review. Furthermore, Cicero's writings were efforts to make available in
Roman terms a number of Greek concepts. If judicial review can be traced
back to antiquity, and Corwin has not yet shown that it can be, why
begin with Cicero?
If we begin with Corwin's Cicero, must we ignore all the intermediaries
between Cicero and Locke except John of Salisbury? This procedure means
that we ignore, for example, St. John Chrysostom, who held that the ruler
was bound to obey the terms of hill contract. It means that we attribute to
John of Salisbury a doctrine which was taught forcefully for at least three
centuries before the appearance of his Policratwus. It means that the
contribution of Isidore of Seville to the notion of holding the sovereign
to an objective standard of conduct is ignored-or not known. Isidore
taught, preached, wrote that the king was called so because of his kingly
power: rex a regendo, and that regendo meant recte agendo. Isidore's

BOOK REVIEWS

217

etymological proclivities do not concern us; what is important is that John
is pointed out as introducing the idea of making the king rule rightly,
without any credit being given to the general European tradition in which
he wrote. Judicial review cannot be proved as having ancient and respectable origins if only part of its course is traced. Perhaps it had these
origins, but Corwin destroys all but a small percentage of his case when
he suppresses, or fails to use, materials which are easily and abundantly
where
available. He gives himself away completely in a footnote (p.
he remarks, concerning a new edition of Fortescue: "I have gathered" from
a casual examination of it that it says nothing which should require me
to recast what I have already said."
Such cavalier dismissals of the accepted practices of research are perhaps to be expected, or condoned, in a scholar whose reputation has long
been made. They do, however, point up the fact that this book is 'largely
a recasting of old material into new patterns, the latter not yet comfortably
free from the old lines. What value there is in the ensuing discussion,
and there is much of value, must always be measured with this qualification
in mind. Thus when he remarks that English restraint on authority has its
source in a professional or craft mystery (p. 31), not only is he ignoring
the research of other scholars, but he is failing to take into account the very
facts he has just enumerated. If the king was considered to be sub Deo et
lege in Bracton's time, it was not necessary to manufacture a craft mystery
to' account for government's subjection in Fortescue's century.
Corwin indicates his attitude rather clearly, too, in enumerating Coke's
argument in Calvin's case. Coke gave, almost in the same words as were
universally current in the medieval schools, an account of the law of nature
as being the moral law infused into the heart of man. This argument
Corwin labels "quaint" (p. 36), and goes on to talk about an influx of
natural-law ideas from the Continent. Again this is only half-probably
less than half-the truth; again there is an utter failure to recognize the
persistence of a tradition, or even to acknowledge its existence.
Between Coke and Locke there are no significant changes noted, but
when the latter is reached, due process comes to the fore. The cancept of
due process of law was introduced by Locke, according to Cqrwin's presentation, to mean that the government could use only reasonable law. Corwin
sees this as anticipating the modern latitudinarian concept (p. 46); he does
not see it as a seventeenth-century reflection of law framed according to
right reason. Surely the latter conclusion can be justified on historical
grounds, and this professes to be an historical chapter in an historical
discussion.
In the next chapter, the doctrine of judicial review is examined far more
competently, and real contributions are made; for here the distortions are
made not by a commentator whose historical knowledge is sometimes

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BOOK REVIEWS

deficient, but by the jurists themselves. Now judicial review is seen as
exercised in the United States, and-even before the Civil War-exercised
with the idea of preventing government from interfering with property
rights. The tendency to narrow the originally broad application of the
concept is sufficiently obvious in this sound third chapter; with the background better understood and elaborated, damning evidence would have
been presented. The question arises, even as this evidence appears, as to
the amount of responsibility pre-Holmes jurists must bear for shaping his
sociological theories before him. Paradoxically-at least in a book which is
introduced with obeisances to Holmes-the pre-Civil War chapter shows
Kent, Story, Shaw and their -contemporaries piously pronouncing judicial
review doctrines to justify what they feel is necessary for the community
at the time, a Holmesean. attitude if there ever was one. Corwin's contribution to the development of our understanding of American jurisprudence
is here an invaluable, if unconscious, one.
His discussion of the period before the Civil War is notable also for its
inclusion, though sometimes only in footnotes, of the opinions of judges
who kept referring stubbornly to rights of individuals as being larger than
mere property rights. In the case of one such Justice, Ormond of Alabama,
two opinions are given which are allegedly contradictory. As included in
the discussion, their contradiction is not shown, but rather their idep.tity.
On these pages (pp. 95,96) Ormond is insisting on an objective standard
for the law. Even in the case of Wynehamer v. New York, which Corwin
cites to exemplify his analysis of the narrowing content of judicial review
and due process, the justices display some confusion in their terminology.
Here Corwin deserves great praise for sifting out so much of value from
so many cases, and here is to be noted his deficiency because of the lack
of historical knowledge which started his investigations so badly. Occasionally this lack betrays him into the standard. impatience with Taney (pp.
110-11), whose remarks on the lack of due process in the Missouri Compromise may certainly be attributed to the .same attitude as that of Coke.
Again,_in the same argument, Corwin refers (p. Ill) to a statement of
Justice Johnson's as "cryptic," quite ignoring the fact that he had
himself just given its historical foundation.
This matter of ignoring his own earlier discussion reaches heights of
absurdity when he says that due process was originally procedural and
had become broadened to include substantive content of legislation. Happily
for the argument, only the word "broadened " need be affected here; for
the whole chapter showed not a broadening but a narrowing, and not
from adjectival law to substantive law, but entirely within the latter.
The pre-Civil War period is followed by a discussion of liberty under
the Fourteenth Amendment, where some work of great value has been done
in showing the influence of Spencer and jurists who followed him. These
men still further narrowed the idea of judicial review by narrowing the

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219

concept of .liberty. As Corwin felicitously phrases it (p. 138): "The
[American Bar] Association soon became a sort of futuristic sewing circle
for mutual education on the gospel of laissez faire." The arguments from
this point are neatly summarized in Holmes's dissenting opinion in Lochner
v. New York, but Corwin presents, on the other side of the picture, Mr.
Harlan insisting on the existence of a true higher law, distinct from that of
the so-called higher-law school. The preoccupation which immediately
follows with the problem of judicial notice seems to be a strained attempt at justifying the sociologists, but it is difficult to refrain from
giving them some sympathy when the smug arguments of the laissez faire
group are read. Chapter IV is actually the best explanation for the initial
appearance of the sociological jurist that I have seen, and its value is
augmented by the quotation from Holmes which recognizes the "historical validity" of the due process concept. No less valuable is the stigmatizing of Holmes's" clear and present danger" rule as one made up out
of whole cloth. The rule is actually much more soundly based than thatthough Holmes would deny the contention-but it is .good to note that
both Corwin and the members of the Court recognize it as having been
stated as it was as an expedient for the times.
A detailed resume of the contents of the remainder of this chapter would
be interesting to undertake, but of doubtful value. Constructive, destructive, and downright inaccurate statements are made, but the conclusion in
the fifth chapter is at least reassuring. By a somewhat circuitous route,
Corwin arrives at the conclusion that the Court has cast aside the narrow
nineteenth-century concept of liberty, and is back with Cicero and Locke.
The conclusion is more reassuring than accurate, but--even as statedthe journey back to orthodoxy cannot be attributed to the pilotage of Mr.
Holmes, who in these pages is convicted over and over again out of his own
mouthings of platitudes. Since these are the Edward Douglass [sic] White
Lectures, it is interesting to see the Chief Justice's old rival so served.
It is somewhat saddening to see the Chief Justice himself represented
only by one of his characteristically heavy-handed attempts at levity.
There are two major errors in expression which should be noted: on page
105, not is left out of a sentence, which makes Corwin appear to accuse
the Court of being illogical when he intends precisely the opposite. On
page 85, he remarks that the 1830's were susceptible" to crusades against
the legal disabilities of women, slavery, and intoxicants," when of course
intoxicants were then subject to no disabilities of a legal nature. Despite
such inaccuracies as these and those noted in detail above, the study is a
good
and would have been better if Corwin had followed Cooley's
example (p. 117) to admit his own bias.
SISTER MARIE CAROLYN,

Oatholic University of America,
Washington, D. O.

O. P.

BOOK REVIEWS

The Protestant Era. By PAUL TILLICH. Translated and with a Concluding
Essay by James Luther Adams. Chicago: University of ·Chicago
Press, 1948. Pp. 354, with index. $4.00.
Der Glaube bei Emil Brunner. By LoRENZ VoLKEN. Fribourg, Switzezrland: Paulusverlag, 1947. Pp. 242. Fr. 10.20.
The Religion of Philosophers. By JAMEs H. DuNHAM. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1947. Pp. 314, with index. $4.00.
Protestant theology has held little attraction for the contemporary intellectual. His speculative interest, when he has it, moves much more to
philosophy and to theoretical science than to genuine theology, and Belloc
was standing on historical fact when he said that there is not enough
intellectualism left in modern man to formulate a genuine heresy. Maritain
has recently remarked that he did not see how the philosophical spirit of
modern man can develop any further in the direction it has been pursuing.
Meanwhile, in direct opposition to the naturalist belief that the acceptance
of the ultimate stifles the spirit of inquiry, traditional philosophy and
theology continue to grow. Nothing is more inexhaustible than the
ultimate.
Protestantism began as a protest. The philosophical counterpart of this
fact would probably be translated as a Kritik. Kant and later Kierkegaard
were typical expressions of the Protestant spirit, and the one by his formalism, the other by his polemic against Speculation, have given a deeper
dye to the subjectivism latent in Protestant theology since its origin,
shrinking the area of genuine intellectual discussion until religion has come
to mean l).Othing in the way of dogma but simply Kantian " good will " or
Kierkegaardian " passion." It is not startling that there are few original
intellects in modern Protestantism and that the intellects which are most
prominent are anti-intellectual.
Religion without dogma is like a frame
without a picture.
Paul Tillich, an exile from Nazi Germany, has been on the faculty at
Union Theological Seminary, New York. One of the most prolific of Protestant theologians, he represents Evangelical Theology and is broadly associated with its dialectical wing, whose most prominent spokesman is Karl
Barth. The Protestant Era is a collection of his essays and speeches over
a period of almost a quarter century, translated from the German by James
Luther Adams who supplies a concluding essay on what Tillich is trying
to say. _
Like Niebuhr, Tillich is gravely concerned with cultural and social problems, but it is not exactly clear just how this social-consciousness is born
of his more fundamental principles. He is fascinated by the movement of
history, by fate, necessity, and freedom, and yet he nowhere alludes to
the historical underpinning of his own Protestant message. He envisions a

BOOK REVIEWS

kind of Christian socialism as an ideal and even possible society emerging
from the present world crisis, but at the same time his theological background must foment radical individualism among men rather than a public
landscape of social agreement.
If there is any theme threading through this book, it is the application of
the so-called Protestant principle, justification by faith alone, but it is
never quite clear just what kind of faith it is, what are its contents, and
how it is grounded. Faith on Protestant premises ought to be just an act,
without specification by an object, and a principle that is simply a protest
ought not to be called a principle. It really has nothing to enunciate.
The present is part of the Protestant era, Tillich holds, but when and if
the era passes, the Protestant principle will remain, adapting itself to the
new historical situation. But where, as Plato said, does this argument lead?
It certainly makes man the servant of history and the so-called timeless, a
toy of time. Even in the matter of morals which is about all that is left
of Protestantism, it makes religion an affair of circumstance more than a
subscription to unchanging principle. There is a note of Barth in such an
analysis-the same kind of reasoning, or lack of it, which led Barth to
take a stand against Hitler but to refuse a similar protest against Soviet
barbarism in Eastern Europe. It is pragmatism; it is atomism; it is even
Marxian by its underlying historical determinism. It replaces dogma by
dynamism.
Tillich introduces an orginal terminology to characterize the relations of
religion and culture. " ' Theonomy ' has been defined as a culture in which
the ultimate meaning of existence shines through all finite forms of thought
and action; the culture is transparent, and its creations are vessels of a
spiritual content " (p. xvi) . Associated with this concept and descending
from Kierkegaard is the notion of kairos, "the fullest of time" (Chapter 8),
which is not achieved once and for all as in the Incarnation but which in
some participated form is a modality of all right action. Marcel has
stressed this same description of-let us call it-prudence, from the Catholic side, when he insists that truth and goodness are incarnations. But the
difficulty with Tillich and the whole existential approach, including ultimately Marcel's own philosophy, is that it plays upon the unique character
of moral conduct to the neglect of the universal factors which are not just
Hegelian logic, as Kierkegaard liked to say, but reliable guides in reaching
a moral decision.
But there are other difficulties against the concept of theonomy. Are
there ever any actions, even those of a secularized and materialistic modern
man, which do not express the ultimate meaning which the agent attaches
to existence and are not the " vessels of a spiritual content " which he gives
to his own life? Tillich wishes to distinguish theonomy from autonomy
which denies an ultimate aim to civilization and from heteronomy which is

BOOK REVIEWS

the attempt of religion to dominate cultural activity " from the outside."
Does the author have in mind that theonomy is organic? But then the
corporate character of an organism is a long way from the atomism which
the Protestant
commands. Luther became alarmed later on in
his life when he wrote that there were almost as many " sects " as " heads."
From a revolt
a
authority, of doctrine as well as discipline,
binding men to each other, Protestantism has not become transformed
into an organ for achieving social solidarity. Faith without dogma is as
blind as morality without intelligence.
Nor does the author face squarely up to the responsibility in which
Protestantism shares so heavily for the current division among modern
men which has led to wars and depressions, to the jeopardy of civilization
itself whose members have become as atomized as the matter in their
bombs. Tillich, with his historical-consciousness, ought to compare the
social and cultural estate of man three hundred years after the Reformers
with that of the medieval man three hundred years before. He had his
problems, and they were serious ones as human problems
are, and
Europe was threatened at times in the middle ages. But the threat always
came from the outside. The twentieth century presents European man
(and his descendants in America) imperilled from within regarding the
very bases of his civilization. It would be in keeping with the problems
which Tillich treats to ask the question:
It is not historically sound
to ask a doctrine that divides men from each other to unite them into
some semblance of social order and even of Christian socialism. The holes
in a sinking ship cannot be plugged by drilling more of them.
Tillich shows a wide range of historical scholarship. But he seems to
view history more as string of atomistic beads rather than a continuum.
His philosophy of history thus becomes too vertical, a commerce between
God and man that is direct alone and that refuses to trace the flow of time
horizontally back to the kairos where a Church was born and empowered
with a one, holy, Catholic, and apostolic character, no part of which modern
Protestantism can identify in itself.
Religion is more than a matter of will. Faith is will commanding intellect, and it perfects intelligence rather than belittles it. The facts which
natural intelligence discerns in history past and present ought not to contradict a religion that claims to be truly Christian. The leading question
is not what religion does to society or its promotion of culture but whether
it is true. Faith is the assent to something as truth and not primarily as
good, and this intellectual aspect of belief ought to be re-examined by
modern Protestantism.
Until it does so, Protestantism such as that of
Tillich will not only be at variance with supernatural truth but even with
the nature of man which grace presupposes, perfects, and endows with
habits, as opposed to acts, a series of disconnected kairoi.

BOOK REVIEWS

Emil Brunner deserves rank almost with Barth himself as an exponent
of dialectical theology. Yet there are important differences which divide
the two. In a preliminary reply to Niebuhr's speech before the World
Council of Churches at Amsterdam, Barth condemned those who " theologize on their own account." This marks an important difference not
only with Niebuhr but also with Brunner.
Brunner's drift toward speculation, however slight, can be detected from
the philosophy which he has borrowed and applied to express his thought.
It is personalism, chiefly that of Buber, Ebner, and Gogarten.
Like
Bergson, Brunner stands opposed to the intellectual approach to reality
like that of an abstracting mind, examining the objective world. The
highest form of awareness is that of one person for another, eine Personbegnung or as Marcel says a " confrontation." It is only by such an experience of another that a person is constituted, according to Brunner's view.
Brunner does not accept the transcendent God of Barth, where God is
"wholly other." The Personbegnung is not only between man and man
but, in its highest and unique sense, between man and God. It is only
by his relation to God that the person is constituted and the sinner who
remains in sin is not " a personal person." He is a person only in the
material, not in the formal sense. Unlike Barth, Brunner seems somehow
groping toward the analogy of being and is willing to preserve the phrase
imago Dei in something of its traditional sense.
Personality, however, is not the individual substance of a rational nature, as Boethius said. The distinguishing mark of a person is "activity,
actuality," so that the theandric relation which determines man is dynamic.
There are analogies between the human person and the relatio subsistens of
the Trinity. Brunner's account of human personality should be compared
with that of Rene Le Senne.
Another way of describing the God-man relation or the Personbegnung
in the religious sense is faith. It cannot be analyzed, as Catholic theology
insists, into voluntary and intellectual aspects, Brunner holds. It is an act
of the total personality. It is love. It is sentiment, something like the
Frommigkeit of Schleiermacher. It is existential.
Brunner is sharply critical of Catholic theology for supposedly having
depersonalized belief. It has transformed, he charges, the person of Christ
into abstract, doctrinal theses. It is, he goes on, eine Lehre rather than
eine Personbegnung, and as a Protestant theologian, he naturally makes
capital of papal authority by attempting to show it as a human interposition which destroys the dynamic, person-to-person relation of true
Christianity.
God is the Lord God of Hebraic tradition, but at the same time there is
a community between God and mart combining with the Lordship of God
into a dialectical paradox. But history is not meaningful as a continuum
in time, first because Brunner will not accept the depersonalized, intellec-

BOOK REVIEWS

tual way of examining it and secondly because its distant past will not
allow the immediate relation which is all that there is to faith. In Brunner's
view, the past must, as it were, be relived and "presentified" (vergegenwiirtigt). Christ must be immediately there for the believer, as he was for
the Apostles. Brunner is not interested in the relation between Christ and
the Apostles, so much as the relation between Christ and present-day man.
Like Tillich, he escapes from the burden of examining history to test the
historical claims of. doctrine. It is not doctrine that matters for him. It
is persons. When the Word was made Flesh, it became concrete, and
Brunner thinks that Catholic theology has forgotten this fact.
But did the Reformers forget it? In the first dawn of their protesting
movement, they emphasized the personalism of truth, Brunner holds, but
then political and polemical circumstance forced their religion into a casehardened and impersonal form like that of their Catholic opposition.
Protestantism thus came to be another form of doctrine rather than a
Christian personalism, it is added, and the task of contemporary theology
is to recover and rekindle the true light of faith which the Reformers
glimpsed only momentarily.
Lorenz Volken has written a sound and yet rather simple exposition of
Brunner's faith. The chapters are extremely well organized and helpfully
subdivided. The author has a way of repeating himself without becoming
repetitious, and writes with a clarity and a confidence that are reinforced
by a considerable bibliography and copious citation. A discussion on
Hegel's influence in dialectical theology might have further enhanced this
work. Hegel is likewise present in German personalism. This point could
be etched out by asking with a Sartre how, in Hegelianism, we come to
know ourselves and others.
Volken's book starts a new postwar series of Studia Friburgensia, published under the direction of the Dominican professors at the University
of Fribourg. It is recommended reading for all those interested in dialectical theology which has been active in the Germanic sections of Europe
and is beginning to show signs of life in this country.
Volken's critical approach to Brunner is a laudable and entirely Thomistic piece of work. He admits a great deal of Brunner's personalism by distinguishing and contradistinguishing in his arguments and shows his failures
as shortcomings rather than complete aberrations from truth. Catholic
theology, he adroitly points out, does not deny, indeed it insists, that truth
was made concrete for man when the Word became Flesh. But at the
same time, Catholic tradition also affirms that truth is truth and not simply
a blind and existentialist Personbegnung. Volken quotes the New Testament to show examples where Christ asked men to believe in doctrines
and deeds, in principles and promises. He cites Luther to show that he
was not the personalist which Brunner makes him out to be.
Regarding the act of faith as a Totalakt, Volken invokes the principle,

BOOK REVIEWS

actiones sunt suppositorum, to show that the person acts through his will
and his intellect. Even in reference to the supernatural, it is not the
Cartesian but the Thomistic man that corresponds to the demands of reality. But because the intellect is at work in the act of faith, obeying the
command of the will, Volken will not admit the blind existentialism of
Brunner. He shows that faith in Catholic tradition is not the abstract
intellectual approach which Brunner paints, but neither is it, like dialectical
theology, anti-intellectual. It is really supra-intellectual, with faith being
more certain than purely natural knowledge and higher than, rather than
counter to, reason.
The book closes with a section on faith and ecclesiastical authority.
Dialectical theology ought to examine anew the meaning of a Church to
see whether the very existence of a church is not incompatible with existentialism. In this light too, one may ask, as Volken does, what happened to
the Church in which Christ said He would always abide and hence preserve from error, before the Reformation (if not before dialectical theology).
On Protestant principles, were there not more than a thousand years when
error supposedly prevailed in the Church and hence when a clean break
occurred with the Divine origins of historical Christianity. It could also
be asked, especially against Brunner and Barth who make so much of the
private reading of the Bible, what happened to all the souls before Gutenberg's invention of printing made the Bible accessible? Was Christianity
held in abeyance until the invention of printing?
Dunham's book stands in contrast to the themes of Tillich and Brunner.
It examines the philosophy of religion in a supposedly typical cross-section
of western thinkers from Plato to Comte and presents a pageant of intellectuals, rather than existentialists, in their attitude toward religion.
By its general theme, this book recalls the scholastic thesis that there
is a natural religion where the unaided mind can arrive at truths concerning God, man, and the relation between them that we call religion. But
reminding is about all that Dunham does. For though pleading in his
preface that he will let the men speak for themselves, he introduces his own
criticism into their messages which slants the book to agnosticism rather
than to genuine religion. Thus, he allows Kant's arguments against speculative reason to prevail but takes upon himself the burden of criticizing
Augustine. He allows Burne's verdict against religion to be pronounced
uninterruptedly but cracks his whip against Aristotle and Aquinas.
St. Thomas does not merit a chapter by himself. Augustine is the sole
Catholic among the ten figures. This is unfortunate since it was not until
Aquinas spoke that the distinction between natural and supernatural was
clearly. made and it became possible to talk about a philosophy of religion.
Augustine did not keep reason and revelation properly distinct, and his
philosophy of religion is largely his theology of the subject.

BOOK REVIEWS

But omissions are not the only faults in this study. Though Aristotle
is praised as a scholar, he is also portrayed as having grossly misconstrued
Plato's doctrine of ideas and as having persuaded history that they were in
a separate heaven when Plato meant them to be logical rules. This is not
the first time that Arist(/tle's account of Platonism has been challenged,
but the anti-Aristotelians are swimming against heavy swells. There is
ample textual evidence in Plato to show that Aristotle was right, and
besides this, as a student of Plato, he ought to be trusted to tell us what
meaning really subtended the metaphors of his master, especially so if he
were the careful scholar that Dunham depicts him to be. If the Good is
only a "logical principle (p. 19), it can even be denied that Plato believed
in a transcendent God.
Dunham is not nearly as good in his study of Aristotle as he thinks Aristotle was in the study of his subject-matter.
Aristotle did not suppose
that " the passive intellect belongs of necessity to the sensory equipment
of the body" (p. 64), and St. Thomas sufficiently showed how it is possible to reconcile the eternity of motion with the necessity for a Prime
Mover. Nor did Aristotle consider the Nous to be a" logical genus" and
reason to be " the idea which sums up the meaning of human behavior "
(p. 99).
In the chapter on Aristotle, not enough weight is laid on the transcendent
character of the Prime Mover which made Aristotle almost a deist and
drove the fathers of the Church away from him and toward the Provident
God of Plato. The God of Aristotle is not "the aesthetic Whole" (p. 71),
nor even "Pure Actuality" (p. 60) . Dunham would have been more
helpful if he had developed Aristotle's
of God as " the thought
of a thought." He would have been more complete had he also stressed the
moral philosophy of Aristotle. In the sixty-two references in the chapter
on Aristotle, the Ethics is mentioned only four times.
The chapter on Epicurus does not sufficiently emphasize his views on
chance or the " swerve " among the atoms, and it is certainly an overstatement in the chapter on Marcus Aurelius to say that " the doctrine of
the Stoics does not assume that the emotions ate radically infected with
evil " (p.
.
The treatment of Augustine is more than an affair of omissions and
understatements. Mixing philosophy and theology because Augustine was
badly chosen for inclusion among pure philosophers of religion, Dunham
launches into an attack on the doctrine of original sin as based on a
" mythological story," as biologically unsound in its concept of heredity, as
distorting the picture of personality against the facts of modern psychology,
a:;: ethically unrealistic because its evades personal responsibility, and as
contrary to the character of "a gracious Lord" (p. 146). Theologians
will raise more than their eyebrows against this curious misunderstanding.

BOOK REVIEWS

It is naive as the question which J. B. S. Haldane posed some years ago as
to whether Christ is anatomically present in the Eucharist.
Finally, Augustine's argument to the existence of God from truth is by
no means "a preview" of Anselm's ontological argument (p.
and
even if it were, it was not Kant who exposed the inadequacy of Anselm
(ibid.).
In dealing with Spinoza, the author does not wish to label him as a
pantheist. Yet he declares that" God is identical with all substance which
is the basic concept of Spinoza" (p.
It would have been useful if
the author in his apparently wide range of scholarship had also consulted
a dictionary to see what the word" pantheism" means.
Truth would have profited if Dunham were as critical of Hume as he
is of Augustine and Aristotle and if Kant had been presented as constructing such a doctrine of the speculative intellect as to make unreliable even
its awareness of the categorical imperative in the practical intellect. With
all of Kant's inadequacy, he certainly intended God to be more than "a
regulative formula " (p.
.
Though presenting intellectual approaches to religion, this book would
leave the reader just as skeptical as the meditations of Tillich and Brunner.
It is not a reliable presentation of the subject-matter in many places, and
the criticism is sloped to an agnostic viewpoint. In general, it will not
recommend itself to those who want to know what others have taught, and
it is not a worthwhile guide to readers who want to know what to think
themselves.
VINCENT EDWARD SMITH.

Loretto Heights College,
Denver, Colorado.

An Introduction to the Philosophy of Nature. Compiled by R. A.
KocouREK. St. Paul, Minn.: North Central Publishing Co, 1948.
Pp. 176.
A translation of St. Thomas Aquinas' De Principiis Naturae and of the
first two Books of the Commentary on the Physics of Aristotle are the chief
contents of this deceptively simple little book which should be a treasure
for Thomists. It is very economically printed in view of class-room use.
In addition it contains a brief introduction on the nature of scientific
demonstration, plus several precious excerpts from Aristotle and St. Albert
the Great on the utility of the study of natural science, an outline of the
natural science of Aristotle and of Book I of the Physics.
Its appearance is, one may
significant. Hitherto, although the
major theological works of St. Thomas have reached translation, there has

BOOK REVIEWS

been little translated of his philosophical works except the Opuscula. These,
however, can only be footnotes to the fundamental expositions which continue to lie buried in the Commentaries on Aristotle. Since there is a
certain. scarcity even of the Latin editions of these works, there is some
excuse for the absence of translations of them also. But as the truth of
St. Thomas becomes more and more evident, the absence of translations
of his major works is going to become more and more ironical. In the
meantime, we continue to see the anomaly of more and more philosophical
works about St. Thomas, but few or no book of St. Thomas.
The assumption is, no doubt, that the devotees of St. Thomas are perfectly familiar with his major teachings. How this can be, when even his
major Latin editions are not widely circulated, is something of a mystery.
Prof. Kocourek's translation of a substantial portion of one of those major
works may now give us the occasion to reflect whether we do not often
use the term 'Thomistic' with somewhat reckless abandon. For example,
the subject matter of the philosophy of nature-usually called ' cosmology '
in deference to that staunch old "Thomist," Christian Wolff-is occasionally said to be inanimate mobile being. In Book I, Lesson I of Prof.
Kocourek's translation, one will find St. Thomas being quite specific that
the subject of the philosophy of nature is mobile being absolutely. The
study of inanimate mobile being and animate mobile being, as the same
Lesson reveals, comes under a later treatment of particular types of motion.
Likewise there is the question of how the philosopher of nature studies
mobile being. In order to avoid clashes with the scientists it is sometimes
proposed that the philosopher should study from the angle of ens, and' leave
the mobile to the scientist. But Book II, Lesson IV emphasizes that the
natural philosopher studies ens mobile as a single unity: " ... In natural
science there is neither a consideration without sensible matter nor a consideration of matter alone, rather every consideration is of the matter along
with the form. . . . The philosophy of nature considers the form in so far
as it has existence in matter, etc." The two-pronged approach is not
considered since " ens is not a genus " (p. 9l9l) . The initial unity is ens
mobile ut sic, whose intrinsic principles are not ens and mobile, but form
and matter, studied as they exist together. And since "everything which
has matter is mobile " (Bk. I, Lesson I) , and the material being is known
through sensible motion, it is precisely under the aspect of mobile that the
natural philosopher studies his subject. As St. Thomas writes in Book III,
Lesson I: lgnorato motu, ignoratur natura.
Nor should the teacher feel that all this is above the heads of his students. On the contrary, anyone who has dutifully labored year by year to
expound the Aristotelian- Thomistic doctrines of matter and form and the
four causes, will find that St. Thomas' own explanation, in Prof. Kocourek's
fluid and easily-followed text, is better than anyone else's explanation of
his explanation. A few examples added to those of St. Thomas should

BOOK REVIEWS

suffice. The De Principiis Naturae covers the whole matter succinctly in
some 14 pages. Neither teachers nor students need wonder whether the
book is 'Thomistic,'-it is St. Thomas himself!
Finally, this little book which starts one out squarely on the study of
the science of nature with a treatment of matter and form and the causes
of nature, also brings squarely before the eyes of Thomists the AristotelianThomistic doctrines of chance and necessity in nature (Book II, Lesson
VII sq.). There seems to be a certain tendency to skirt apologetically the
Aristotelian- Thomistic philosophy of nature in its full implications. But
while Thomists are apologizing for it, advanced scientists such as E. T.
Whittaker ("Aristotle, Newton, Einstein," Science, Sept. 17,
1943) are
rediscovering it. In fact, in the Lessons mentioned one will find the principles, long ignored, which have now again been recognized not explicitly,
but veritate coacti, in the " principle of indeterminism," one of the most
recent milestones of science. H Aristotle and St. Thomas are not always
abreast of modern scientific theory, it may not be because they are behind
it, but because they are ahead of it. That challenge awaits the intrepid
Thomist. In the meantime, Prof. Kocourek has helped to start lifting the
veil from our crystal balL May he find many coadjutors-and publishers!
PIERRE H. CoNWAY, 0. P.
Providence College,
Providence, Rhode Island.

Cybernetics. Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine.
By NoRBERT WIENER. New York: J. Wiley and Sons, 1948. Pp. 149.
$3.00.
Philosophers have frequently been accused of not taking account of what
happens outside of their speculative world and of living in too often mentioned "ivory tower." They have been advised to step down and to talk
to the people in the market place as did Socrates; whether the people would
have the patience and interest to listen to the philosopher may be questioned. Yet, it is true that philosophers cannot afford to overlook what is
being done in othe!7. fields of human endeavor. Thus, when a book is
announced by the publisher as " of vital importance " for all sorts of specialists, among them the philosopher, it is the latter's task to give due
consideration to the matter. If the philosopher sometimes feels that he has
not gained much, there are nevertheless other instances in which he realizes
the existence of truly philosophical problems arising in fields of which he
has hardly any knoweldge.
The present work constitutes just such an instance. The facts it reports,
the ideas it submits deserve attention and study on the part of the phi-

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BOOK REVIEWS

losopher. The book is written, or at least so claims, to acquaint nonspecialists with highly interesting facts and very suggestive theories and
attitudes. Some chapters, however, are quite technical and contain many
pages of strictly mathematical reasoning which presupposes a greater knowledge than the average reader probably possesses. Nor is the terminology
always intelligible to one not acquainted with certain data, as the case
may be, of mathematics, physics, or biology. Unfortunately, there is also
a number of rather disturbing printing errors. Thus: on p. 67, "group of
operators" rather than "of operations" is probably meant; on p. 77, in
the discussion of the equation (3. 081) the symbols are missing to which
the remark refers; in the formula (3. 942) a bracket is missing; on p. H7,
the discussion is on negative values of t, not of I; the symbols used in the
diagram 2 (p. 121) and those used in the explanation are not the same
(Y in the latter and y in the former). The reader may wonder why the
first equation mentioned has the number (2. 01); suspicion arises that a
part has been cut out. These defects are the more regrettable in that they
render the study of Dr. Wiener's book even more difficult. Nevertheless, a
careful evaluation of the author's ideas is necessary.
Dr. Wiener is professor of mathematics at the Massachusetts Institute
of Technology. He is much more than a mathematician; he possesses an
astonishing grasp of many, apparently heterogeneous matters, which he
knows how to integrate and relate, The introduction tells the story of his
work: how out of technological problems emerged an ever widening inquiry,
and how this was furthered by the collaboration of mathematicians, physicists, engineers, biologists, physicians, and others. This story in itself is a
fascinating chapter in the history of scientific inquiry. Dr. Wiener and
his group came to realize gradually that the problems, and the procedures
by which they were handled, were fundamentally the same in the most
diverse fields. The book's table of contents suffices in evidence: Chapter II
is on "Groups and Statistical Mechanics"; Chapters V, VI, and VII are
concerned with" Computing Machines and the Nervous System,"" Gestalt
and Universals," "Cybernetics and Psychopathology, Information, Language, and Society." The reader, opening the wdrk, may wonder what
relations there may be between statistical mechanics and universals, or
between the former and such topics as psychopathology or language. The
astonishing thing is that there are indeed such relations.
" Cybernetics " is a new name, derived from the Greek kybernetes from
which stems " governor " by way of the Latin gubernium. The elementary
facts to w'hich this name refers can be illustrated by pointing out such
implements as the thermostat; this gadget turns on and off the heating
system and thus, this system of which the thermostat is a part regulates
itself. A similar mechanism exists in living organisms. A directed and
coordinated movement, as, for example, one intended to grasp something,

BOOK REVIEWS

depends for the accuracy of its execution on a continuous " feed-back " of
sensory data originating in the active muscles. German physiology has
spoken, for many years, of Selbststeuerung, self-steering. A pertinent fact
was observed, more than sixty years ago, by the Viennese physiologist
Exner: a horse feeds by grasping the food with the lips; if the sensory
nerve of these organs is severed, the innervation of the muscles remains
unimpaired; yet, the feeding process is disturbed and even rendered impossible, because this process demands that the tactual stimuli, arising
from the contact of the lips with the food, and the kinaesthetic stimuli,
arising in the muscles, be referred back to the central nervous system.
Exner spoke of " sensomobility " to indicate the close cooperation of the
" information " furnished by the sense organs and transmitted through
the afferent fibers on the one hand, and the effectory organs and their
nervous connections oh the other.
If these facts illustrate, as very simple examples, the basic principle, the
further developments are far from simple. The principle of the " feedback " is, for instance, the foundation of the enormously complicated machines which have been invented to do all sorts of calculations, achieving
in an amazingly short time an amount of work which a mathematician
could not accomplish in many days, or even weeks. The mathematical
and technical details need not be reported here. The general nature of the
achievement, however, especially the analogies the machine shows to the
performances and the structure of the brain, and the implications of a
philosophical and social kind, call for our attention.
To comment on the last mentioned aspect first, it must be noted that
the creation of machines which replace human operations to a hitherto
unexpected degree has, as Dr. Wiener says, " unbounded possibilities for
good and for evil." It must be realized that the instruments of mechanical
computation are only one type of implements which may reduce the need
for human activity far more than has ever happened before. They amount
to " a new and most effective collection of mechanical slaves to perform
the labor " of mankind. People who now earn their living by labor face the
competition of the machine to an extent much greater than has been the
case thus far in the industrial revolution. If the latter was, to quote the
author, a " devaluation of the human arm by the competition of a machine," the new phase is " bound to devaluate the human brain at least
in its simpler and more routine decisions." Highly skilled individuals,
scientists or administrators, may survive this " second industrial revolution," as the skilled artisan survived the first; but it may happen that
" the average human being of mediocre attainments or less has nothing to
sell that is worth anyone's money to buy."
Dr. Wiener feels that the dangers of this new development can be avoided
only by having " a society based on human values other than buying and

BOOK REVIEWS

selling." He also feels strongly that " those who have contributed to the
new science stand in a position which is, to say the least, not very comfortable." His wish that a large part of the public understand the situation
is one reason for his publishing the book.
This- admission of responsibility and clarity of vision on the part of a
scientist inaugurating what he believes to be a new era of technological
and, consequently, social developments must be gratefully acknowledged.
Usually the inventor or discoverer sees only the assets of his work and not
the risk all progress in such matters inevitably entails. The broad outlook
of Dr. Wiener leads him also to other statements concerning the significance of his work; on these points, however, remarks can be made only
after reporting on the main ideas of the book.
The first chapter places the whole set of problems }vithin the framework
of a general consideration of some traits characteristic of the present situation. The title: "Newtonian and Bergsonian Time," is indicative of the
broad basis on which the author's views rest. A survey of the history of
science and technology is summarized thus: " If the seventeenth and the
early eighteenth centuries are the age of clocks, and the later eighteenth
and the nineteenth centuries constitute the age of steam-engines, the
present time is the age of communication and control." The age just past
is set over against the present as that of power against communication
engineering. The latter is distinguished from the former by the fact that
its main interest is not economy of energy but the accurate reproduction
of a signal. Related to these problems are those of the automaton, that is,
the " working simulacrum of a living organism." Included is the clockwork which astonished the people of Newtonian times, the combustion
engine later imagined as an analogy of the organism. Today we have
automata which open doors by means of photocells, point guns at a place
indicated by the radar-beam, or solve differential equations. Parallel to this
development can be observed a changing interpretation of the organism.
The physiologists of the immediate past conceived of the organism in terms
of power engineering; notions like energy balance, potential, and others
stand in the foreground. It may be permitted to this reviewer to confirm
this remark. The study of metabolism and of working activity concentrated mostly on questions of "efficiency," the ratio of energy appearing as
work to that " wasted " in the form of heat; the human organism used to
be described as a badly constructed machine, since its efficiency is notably
below that of, e. g., a Diesel motor. Little did anyone wonder then at
the astonishing efficacy of this " badly constructed machine " which keeps
on working under the most variable conditions, is capable of adjustment,
of regeneration, and of co-ordination. The newer study of " automata,
whether in the metal or in the flesh " looks differently at its problems; " its
cardinal notions are those of message, amount of disturbance . . . , quan-

BOOK REVIEWS

tity of information, coding technique, and so on "; the feature of precision
of response to the message received might be added.
Although admittedly fundamental for the whole set of ideas, the succeeding three chapters of Dr. Wiener's work cannot be adequately reported
here since a detailed exposition of mathematical and scientific procedures
and notions would be necessitated. It might again be pointed out that
the book would be much more readable for ,anyone lacking special training
if these chapters were, at least, summarized in a non-technical language.
Further, the average reader will be deterred from perusing pages which
contain important references to problems of biology.
One such problem is that known as homeostasis. This name refers to all
apparatus which, in the organism, works towards the maintenance of a
definite level of performance; body temperature (at least in warm blooded
animals), concentration of hydrogene ions in the blood, regulation of
heart rate, blood pressure, metabolism, and other functions fall under this
heading. Homeostasis is equally important in the machines of the type
discussed by the author. The machines, too, are regulated by" feed-back"
and insofar operate on the same principles as the organism.
The parallel is pursued in Chapter V: " Computing Machines and the
Nervous System." Like the machine, the nervous system contains elements
which function as relays, the so-called neurons. The analogy can be carried further: parallels may be found between the function of memory and
certain devices for " storing information "; between the threshold and
other properties of the machines; between the processes of association,
including the " con,ditioned reflex," and the " learning ability " of the
machine. The author does not wish to state that the organism actually
operates on the same principles, when learning, but that it well might be so.
Chapter VI, "Gestalt and Universals," continues the drawing of parallels.
It should be noted that Dr. Wiener uses the terms: "universal" or "substance," in a sense different from that given to them in Scholastic philosophy. This is, no doubt, his right; yet, it should be realized so as not to
raise unjustified criticisms. The most interesting case discussed ·in this
section is that of an apparatus destined to permit the blind person to read
by means of transforming the visual into an auditory pattern (or Gestalt).
Thus information, usually conveyed by one sense, is replaced by information through another sense. The author reports a remarkable incident:
at a meeting of several men concerned with the different aspects of these
problems, a diagram was shown of a certain arrangement of photocells and
oscillators, exemplifying one principle of such a reading apparatus. One
participant, a student of the brain, asked, when he looked at the diagram,
whether it was a schema of the visual cortex. Dr. Wiener is right in emphasizing this incident; it indeed confirms rather astonishingly the basic legitimacy of his parallels.

BOOK REVIEWS

The considerations which the author devotes to questions of psychopathology appear to this reviewer as less convincing. It is, of course, true,
as Dr. Wiener does not fail to remark, that our knowledge of both the
normal and the abnormal functions of the brain, or mind, is still far from
being satisfactory or allowing far-reaching conclusions.
Organisms which live in " organized " groups can do so only on the basis
of communication; " all the nervous tissue of the beehive is the nervous
tissue of some single bee." The amount of information available to the
race can be
and compared with that available to the individual. The race--or, perhaps more correctly, the community-can profit
from individual information only if the latter modifies somehow the behavior of one individual to another. The principle of the "feed-back"
and all its further developments hold good here also. However, only small
and closely knit communities have a considerable measure of homeostasis.
The notion that competition is itself a homeostatic process is false; the free
market does not result in a stable dynamics of prices, redounding to the
greatest common good. Modern society is, in fact, dominated by the
powerful few; and, their power resides mostly in the control of the means
of communication. An organism is held together by the possession of
means for acquisition, use, retention, and transmission of information. " In
a society too large for the direct contact of its members, these means are
the press ... , books and newspapers, the radio, the telephone system, the
telegraph, the posts, the theatre, the movies, the schools and the church."
These means of communication are subject to a threefold constriction:
elimination of less profitable means in favor of the more profitable; concentration in the hands of a powerful and wealthy minority, and therefore
expressive of their opinions; attraction of those who are ambitious for
power, because communication is the chief tool for achieving power.
These and other factors render it, according to Dr. Wiener,. improbable
that the new science of cybernetics will be of any greater efficacy in regard
to social questions. With remarkable clarity of vision, the author points
out that the success of scientific procedures depends on the possibility to
achieve " a high degree of isolation of the phenomenon from the observer."
There exis.t already in science instances in which this isolation becomes
quite difficult. But, " it is in the social sciences that the coupling between
the observer phenomenon and the observer is hardest to minimize. . . . In
the social sciences we have to deal with short statistical runs, nor can we
be sure that a considerable part of what we observe is not an artefact of
our own creation. , . . There is much which we must leave, whether we
like it or not, to the 'un-scientific ' narrative method of the professional
historian." These are the closing words of the book.
It has, we may assume, become evident in what respect and to what
degree this book is relevant to the philosopher. Some few concluding

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235

remarks, therefore, will suffice. The importance of the work done by Dr.
Wiener and his team may be viewed from three sides: first we learn a
great number of amazing facts; secondly, we realize that there are analogies
between certain mechanical devices and the organism which go much
further than most of us believed; thirdly, we are faced with questions
concerning human life of a tremendous importance.
It is not yet the time to proceed towards a philosophical evaluation of
the facts; they must be studied, pondered, and analyzed. The question is:
do they convey information that is basically new, that is of such a nature
that it might force us to revise certain fundamentals of our outlook on
reality?
A point which seems to allow for present discussion is that of the analogy
or parallel between the machine and the organism. At first sight, it might
be felt that the explanations of the author furnish a strong support for
some mechanistic theory of life. Dr. Wiener himself speaks mostly of
analogies and does not claim that the organism, or the brain in particular,
is " nothing else but " such a machine. Perhaps it would not be wrong
to say that the new discoveries and the many striking analogies remain,
after all, on the same level as prior discoveries; they
us more, much
more, of the physical conditions underlying the vital, and especially the
mental processes; but they do not " reduce " either of these processes to
the strictly mechanical level. The case would be different if the machine
could do more, namely, if it were capable of inventing a brain, as the brain
is capable of inventing a machine. Or, if the machine were to bring forth
its own offspring and educate them.
The most important aspect from the viewpoint of the philosopher is the
third. The dangers of which Dr. Wiener speaks cannot be overrated; they
are very real and imminent. To avert them there is, as the author clearly
realizes, but one way: a basic reform of the modem man's attitude with
regard to his total life, himself, and his fellows that he may be able to cope
with the situation which is sure to arise within not too distant a time. Man
must be ready. And, who else, on the human level, can possibly contribute towards that preparation, towards the reform of the human spirit,
indispensable if mankind is not to be involved in catastrophic difficulties,
but the philosopher? Here an enormous task awaits him, and no small
responsibility.
One is deeply grateful to Dr. Wiener for his clear-sighted awareness of
the limitations of the " scientific approach." His words are yet another
evidence of a new conscience, if one may say so, among the scientists themselves. No warning can be more timely than that expressed by Dr. Wiener
in the last lines of his book.
One further remark, perhaps, the author could have made. His machines are exceedingly clever; they can do the most amazing things; they
regulate themselves and their operations by " feed-back "; they resemble

BOOK REVIEWS

in their structure and achievements the human being to an unexpected
degree. But, one great difference persists: man's behavior, too, is regulated by " feed-back " and resembles in many respects the machine; yet,
the kind of behavior man chooses, he chooses freely. However much he
may be like a computation machine, he is a free agent; and no machine
wiH ever be that.
Obviously, there is ample matter for reflection in this volume. If it is
not easy reading, it is highly rewarding. It is warmly recommended for
thoughtful consideration.
RuooLF ALLERS.
Georgetown University,
Washington, D. C.

A Philosophy of Submission. By HENRY V. SATTLER. Washington:
University Press, 1948. Pp. !i!H!, with index. $9.!.Q5.

Catholic

The subtitle of this dissertation is " A Thomistic Study in Social Philosophy." Relying almost exclusively on the Summa Theologica of the
Angelic Doctor, Father Sattler manages very neatly to construct a valuable
philosophical work. His subject is timely. This fact the author does not
fail to mention in his Introduction. He extends the importance of his
material not only to the obvious fields of totalitarian and democratic
government but likewise into the spheres of capital and labor, the family,
and education. Written in a smooth and literary style with the advantage
of good logical presentation, A Philosophy of Submission makes easy, enjoyable, and worthwhile reading.
Dr. Sattler has divided his work into six chapters. In his first section,
he treats of the nature of submission and its division. He points out that
St. Thomas has no formal treatment of -the concept and hence the author
must seek the word and its synonyms from the texts of the Angelic Doctor.
Father Sattler defines submission generically as " the acceptance of ordination by anything " (p. 5) . This would include, the author continues, all
creatures whether animate <;>r inanimate, whether intellectual or nonintellectuaL However, the writer makes it dear that his concern is with
human submission.
The main interest, then, of the dissertation is with submission insofar
as it is voluntary. "Voluntary submission is that which proceeds from
the will with a knowledge of the end ... as end" (p. lQ). Here Fr.
Sattler employs St. Thomas' doctrine on the voluntarium and draws out of
it something of the nature of submission. From this analysis he makes an
important threefold division of free submission: submission to subjugation,
submission of perfection, and submission of degradation (p. 13) . Thus he
anticipates what he later describes as the two vices and the virtue of
submission. At the end of the first chapter, Dr. Sattler makes the following

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287

observation: " From these brief considerations, it will immediately appear
that submission in itself is neither good nor bad " (p. 18) . For the unwary
reader this is certainly confusing. Since virtues are always good, one
logically concludes that submission is not a virtue. Of course, we can
justify this statement on the grounds that there are no special names to
designate the three varieties of submission and hence submission without
qualification can be either good or bad.
In his next chapter the author examines the habits and acts of submission. Dr. Sattler considers love as a motive rather than a habit or act
of submission. Because submission indicates a debt or obligation (p. !n),
the matter for its further development will be taken from the realm of
justice. The author then shows how submission has a part to play in the
virtues of religion, piety, patriotism, observance, gratitude, and social
justice. Mter all this, the author does not arrive at a distinct virtue called
submission. That he wanted to or not is never indicated. He merely
ignores the possibility. Indeed, he refers to the potential parts of justice
just listed as " virtues of submission " (p. 33) . There is also a treatment
of the acts of religion and these ar.e described as acts of submission.
Although Dr. Sattler declares that obedience and submission are not the
same thing, he admits that obedience is " so bound up with submission
that what is said in general of subordination will have application in
obedience as well" (p. 59).
The third chapter considers the limitations of submission. It is here
that the author proceeds to examine the vices opposed to submission.
However, as yet he has not established that submission is a virtue. What
he actually has shown is that submission is found in many virtues and
their acts. Dr. Sattler certainly has demonstrated that submission is a
condition or prerequisite for many of the potential parts of justice. Nevertheless, he now proceeds as if the fact of submission being a distinct virtue
has already been proved. It has not and the following evaluation made
in his fourth chapter shows that the writer was not sure of what he had
in submission: " As any other virtue, submission once exercised becomes
easier, more delightful and more stable. Exercise of devoted acts begets
more and truer devotion " (p. 125) . He neglected to add that repeated
acts do not make devotion a virtue; we fail to see how submission can be
considered a virtue. Rather we would hold that submission is a necessary
condition for virtues. It would seem from what Dr. Sattler has written that
he should have concluded that submission is an integral part of the virtues
that he mentioned under justice, instead of trying to create a new virtue.
In any event if Dr. Sattler conceived of submission as a virtue, he has
left many questions unanswered. Is it, for example, a general or special
virtue? Is it a distinct virtue? To what ca'rdinal virtue is it annexed?
What is its material cause? What are its formal and material objects?
Two other points of criticism might be mentioned here. In considering

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BOOK REVIEWS

submission's relationship to social justice, the author admits there is a
special problem. Then he attempts to explain away the difficulty with
the statement: " The reason for the confusion seems to be the inadequate
conception of social justice even in the teaching of St. Thomas and down
to our own day" (p. 60). Aside from the fact that the term "social
justice " is comparatively a modern expression, one should be inclined to
admit a lack of penetration of St. Thomas' doctrine rather than to place
any blame on the Angelic Doctor.
The other point is purely minor. It is, after all, very easy to be unfair
in one's criticism of a dissertation. The writer is concentrating on his
material from a very special viewpoint. He may write things that he
knows accurately enough, but because he is not immediately concerned
with them he will leave them rather vague and thus expose himself to
misinterpretation. Hence when Dr. Sattler states that docility is an intellectual virtue (p. 12) he gives the impression that because St. Thomas
considered it as an integral cognoscitive part of prudence therefore it
necessarily follows that doCility is an intellectual virtue. St. Thomas has
no formal treatment of this virtue, but upon investigation it appears to be
a potential part of justice attached to the virtue of observance. At least
one authority, Dr. Mortimer Adler, maintains that it is a moral virtue
annexed to justice. Indeed, the author himself does make docility a moral
virtue by the time he reaches his last chapter.
Notwithstanding these remarks, the dissertation of Dr. Sattler remains
a superior work and a worthy production. One of the characteristics of
the book is the evident thinking that went into its composition. The author
has many excellent insights and although he does not stop to develop them,
since such would exceed the scope of his work, he nevertheless makes them
clear enough for the reader to perceive the implications. For example,
Dr. Sattler definitely establishes the need of decentralization in government
and the resulting notion of personal responsibility. These ideas are particularly brought out in his chapter on the limitations of submission.
A whole chapter is dedicated to an evaluation .of the contributions of
contemporary non-scholastics on the subject of submission. The author
showed excellent perspicacity in his handling of this difficult section of
his book. One of his best contributions is to be found here as he points
out not only what modern authors say but also that what is correct in
what they say is nothing other than St. Thomas in the current vernacular.
The treatment here is admittedly cursory, but it is nonetheless satisfactory.
A Philosophy of Submission deserves a wide audience of readers. The
topic is of major significance in our day. Fr. Sattler's exposition of all the
various angles of submission does justice to the importance of his subject
and affords a valuable document for our times.
RAYMOND

Dominican House of Studies,
Washington, D. C.

SMITH,

O.P.

BOOK REVIEWS

289

Philosophical Commentaries; Essay towards a New Theory of Vision; Theory
of Vision Vindicated. By GEORGE BERKELEY. (Edited by A. A. Luce.)
London: Thomas Nelson and Sons, 1948. Pp. 287, with index. 80s.
This work is the first volume of a projected edition of The Works of
George Berkeley, Bishop of Cloyne, put forth by Prof A. A. Luce, of
Trinity College, Dublin, and Prof. T. E. Jessop, of University College, Hull.
The complete edition will be in eight (or nine) volumes, together with a
Life of George Berkeley by Prof. Luce. The biography and volumes two
and three are announced as forthcoming, while the others are in preparation. ·
The various volumes will include material that has come to light since
A. C. Fraser's editions of 1871 and 1901. Editorial and textual apparatus
will enable the reader to trace changes in the development of Berkeley's
thought. This edition is announced as the first item in a new Bibliotheca
Brittannica Philosophica. The project could hardly begin with a better
representative of British philosophy during the course of the last four
centuries than George Berkeley.
Both in the present work and in a work published in 1944, Prof. Luce
has wisely given the title of Philosophical Commentaries to what is generally, although not properly, known as Berkeley's Commonplace Book.
Here are given the more than nine hundred entries that make up Notebook
B and Notebook A. As is stated in the editor's introduction, the text
printed here is " the text as Berkeley left it, but not, as in the editio
diplomatica, the text in the making." Copious notes on the entries are
given by Prof. Luce. These are based on his 1944 edition, but limitations
of space have led him to reduce his comments and to omit many references
found in the earlier edition. Because of the importance of the Philosophical
Fragments for an understanding of Berkeley's thought, an even larger
annotation of the entries would have added greatly to the volume. The
present reviewer would like to have seen a more thorough documentation
of the various scholastic terms and doctrines, both those accepted by .
Berkeley and those rejected by him, than is given here. It is unfortunate
that the note on No. 749 contains so outmoded a statement as the following:
" Berkeley would banish the arid metaphysics of the schools, but of course
he recognizes metaphysics (e. g. 162-8, 289); his philosophy is metaphysics,
but he claims, with reason, that it is commonsense."
The editor contributes a valuable introduction not only to the Philosophical Commentaries; but also to An Essay towards a New Theory of
Vision, and The Theory of Vision ... Vindicated and Explained. In the
case of the two works on vision, his notes are for the most part textual
in character. The volume does not contain an index, but this is doubtless
in view of a general index to be placed at the end of the complete edition.
The book is well printed on good paper and is attractively bound. The

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BOOK REVIEWS

world of learning should welcome this new and needed edition of Berkeley's
writings. It is hoped that the forthcoming volumes will maintain the
high standards set in the present work.
JoaN K. RYAN.
The Catholic University of America,
Washington, D. 0.

Thomas Heute. Zehn Vortriige zum Aufbau einer neuen existentieUen
Ordnungs-Metaphysik nach Thomas von Aquin. (Thomas To-day.
Ten Contributions for the Composition of a new existential Metaphysical Order according to Thomas Aquinas.) By AMADEO SILvATARoucA. Vienna: Herder, 1947. Pp. !l1!l. S !lS; sfr. 14.
The author presents in ten chapters, which preserve the form of lectures,
the essence of Thomistic philosophy. His intention is to show that the views
of the Doctor Communis are not only timely and allow for an immediate
application to actual problems, but that they constitute the only philosophy
which promises to the modern man understanding of himself and of his
present situation. The keyword is" order." It is order for which the modern
man longs, order which he needs in the midst of the confusion surrounding
him, order to rebuild a decent and meaningful life after the destruction
which overwhelmed him. In Aquinas the author sees the philosopher of
order. The history of the western world and its civilization is the history
of the striving for order. The lasting endeavor of the Occident was to unite
within one encompassing order nature (that is, society, state, art, civilization) , and supernature. The Thomistic synthesis appears as the relatively
best and the hitherto only philosophy of order.
·
This order is not merely a formal one; it is what the author calls an
existential order. As such it tries to follow the very structure of reality,
whereas a formal order, we may add, can be established on the basis of any
arbitrarily chosen principle or propeJ;"ty. To obtain the vision of the existential order one has therefore to follow the indications reality supplies. This discovery proceeds by five steps: the experience of being; the principle
of efficient causality; the existence of God; the principle of finality or the
final cause; the principle of order. St. Thomas was the first to recognize
that the demonstration of God's existence is the foundation of all systematic
interpretation of reality and so also of every philosophical systematization.
As soon as the general validity of the principle of finality is recognized
and it has become evident that every being acts for the sake of some
metaphysically ultimate end, it follows that all created beings are ordered
in regard to one another. Order implies a multitude of ordered members,
a uniform, thoroughgoing principle of relations, and a corresponding articulation, arrangement, or pattern, which is the order itself. Order is discovered

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241

as soon as we approach any experience whatever. We are rendered aware
of four modes of relations in being; that of the external things to sensory
perception; that of sensory data to the process of knowledge; that of the
latter process to the formation of universal concepts; that of the single
concepts, judgments, and conclusions into the scientifically known object.
The existence of a universal and recognizable order can be made intelligible
only within a theocentric conception.
These general ideas, which can be here only indicated and should be
studied in the original work, are then applied in the last five lectures, dealing
with the order of the universe, the optimism of order, the natural philosophy
of order, the position of man in the center of order, and the order of the
love of God.
The interpretation of Thomistic philosophy from the angle of a metaphysics of order throws an interesting light on several questions. Thus, the
author considers the hylemorphic conception as less basic than is usually
the case. " The theocentric doctrine ·of order can . . . be constructed in
its whole width and depth and its comprehension of the universe . . .
without reference to the notions of matter and form in the sense of
·hylemorphism." On the other hand, the notions of potentiality and act
are fundamental insofar as they refer to degrees of perfection and are related
to one another as being capable of perfection to being perfected.
Man is placed between animal and angel; his sensory powers connect
matter and spirit. Substantially, he consists of body and soul forming an
essential unity; nature culminates in man as the microcosm. Whether the
notion of the microcosm is indeed as fundamental in the philosophy of St.
Thomas as the author thinks may be questioned. At least, the Thomistic
notion must be distinguished from pre-Thomistic ideas on the microcosm
as well as from those proposed by the philosophers of the Renaissance and
of later centuries.
The discussions on the points reported are interesting and no less so
is the remainder of the book. At the end six pages of notes are added in
exceedingly small print. Unfortunately, there are many printing errors.
The style is not easy; if these lectures were actually delivered, they must
have taxed their audience rather considerably. It might be worth while
to translate this slender volume because of its many provocative ideas, its
definite novelty of approach, and the ability of the author to present the
Thomistic system in its totality and in reference to problems of the day.
In view of the heaviness of style and certain peculiarities of language, a
translation would, however, amount almost to a rewriting of the work. It is
regrettable that the way in which things are presented renders the study of
the work difficult even for a student well acquainted with German; but if he
is able to overcome these obstacles, he will undoubtedly feel rewarded.

RUDOLF ALLERS.
Georgetown University,
Washington, D. 0.

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States and Morals: A Study in Political Conflicts. By T. D. WELDON.
New York: Whittlesey House, 1947. Pp. ix, 310, with index. $3.00.
The exigencies of the present international situation, as well as the
remembrance of the recent international carnage, have caused many
thoughtful men to
a re-appraisal of our political theory. One of
the most arresting and provocative of these attempts, at least in its initial
stages, is that of T. D. Weldon, in States and Morals. The very juxtaposition of the two concepts in the title is both stimulating and hopeful,
and the subtitle, too, is well-chosen as an explanation.
Weldon is a Fellow of Magdalen College, Oxford, which seems to be
experiencing a new reform movement, somewhat milder and more diffuse
than that of a century ago. In Weldon's case, the effort to reform his
hearers and readers is concerned primarily with political thinking, since
he contends that a reform in political thought will necessarily be followed
by a reform in political action. The book, then, is political philosophy,
very largely, with some condensed history of that tremendous subject,
and with some few conclusions drawn at the errd of these treatments.
There are five chapters devoted to the theoretical and historical exposition of the problem, one to its solution; the balance struck seems to be a
fair one.
In his preface Mr. Weldon points out that there are very many political
conflicts today, each likely to have unpleasant results. If the bases for
misunderstandings were removed, he feels, many of the conflicts would
disintegrate automatically, and opportunities for peace would be' multiplied. What is the basic difficulty in each case is the confusion which
has arisen as to what is basic; if the cOilflicts between nations and individuals are about economic matters, then an economic approach· to an
economic solution must be attempted, but if-as many contend-the
difficulties are really ideological, then a quite different approach must be
used. At least it seems valuable to consider the various political ideologies
now subscribed to, and to determine whether their adherents must always
be opposed to each other.
To arrive at an understanding of the situation, Weldon, taking nothing
for granted, proceeds to examine the aim of political philosophy, and dis·
covers that it is concerned with the grounds upon which the State attempts
to exercise control over its members. This truth, elementary though it
may appear, is worthy of restatement, because disagreements on precisely
this head are frequently basic to other types of disagreements, or are implicit in quarrels ostensibly non-political. By considering a number of

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situations which have arisen as a result of adherence to divergent political
theories, Weldon arrives at the conclusion that all of them are logically
defensible, since no one of them can be more than a practicaloworking hypothesis. With such a conclusion not everyone could agree, but in Weldon's
system it is a perfectly logical corollary to his earlier statement that we
cannot rely upon revelation for an answer to political questions. While
the position taken by Weldon is logical, it cannot, however, be admitted
that his premises or his conclusions are true. The problems he presents
here are ones which he declares are dialectical, whereas they actually exist
in the realm of epistemology, as his final chapter shows definitively.
Having adopted the position that all political
are logically defensible, Weldon can confidently assert that the answer to the important
question: does the individual exist for the State or the State for the
individual? must rest upon something more solid than guesses. Inasmuch
as he has ignored one of the bases for a sound approach to political theory,
this statement comes to the reader as something of a shock; unless Weldon
is willing to place some reliance upon reason, after flouting the possibility
of guidance from revelation, what solid ground can he hope to use for his
answer to this question? Yet his whole treatment of the question up to
this point is a triumph of brilliant logic which aims to discredit human
reasoning rather thoroughly. The remainder of the book is thus a remarkable intellectual exercise, in which the reader is expected to admire
the reasoning by which Weldon dismisses that process.
From . his first chapter the author continues by examining political
theories, and concludes that there are two categories into which the State
may fall, the organic and the mechanical. Next he considers the political
philosophers and compresses their ideas, with real genius, into understandable form. At this point alone-that is, for the first three chapters-the
book would be of great value to the student of political theory.
Then are considered states in theory and in practice, which is another
way of saying, for Weldon, that there is a consideration of his central
thesis, that states are what they are called because the individuals who
inhabit them believe them to be such. Here again the epistemological
difficulty displays itself. This chapter is certainly the weakest in the book.
Like the others, it is admirably written; the phrasing is not only felicitous
but arresting. Where the earlier chapters, however, were capable of concealing the unsound basis of the structure which was being erected, the
fourth, fifth, and sixth chapters exhibit this weakness clearly. The basis
for judgment is experience, and not even objective experience, but intuition, personal conviction based on observation. Although this sort of
conviction must be conceded to have its basis in reality, the difficulties
involved in arriving at conclusions which are sound from such observations alone must also be conceded to be almost insuperable in practice.

BRIEF NOTICES

The book, then, falls flat, after holding out promise of being really
valuable. It is still worth reading, and many of its sections deserve
thoughtful consideration, but when it arrives at chapter six all it can
say is that political dogmatism is dangerous and should be avoided. Weldon
asserts that the same statement might be made about moral dogmatism,
although he feels that it would be " too much to expect that the quest
for certainty in these matters will ever be abandoned." Certainly his
incisive examination into the nature of man and of the state in the opening chapters of this book could not have prepared the reader for so jejune
a conclusion. It is all the more pitiable that a number of the corollaries
drawn from this conclusion are apparently quite sound. Perhaps Mr.
Weldon should abandon his concrete observations, and concentrate longer
on abstract thought.

Proto-history. By H. C. E. ZACHARIAS. St. Louis: B. Herder Book Co.,
1947. Pp. 398. $4.00.
From the time that men began to record the events in which their
social or political groups had engaged, there has been a steadily increasing
mass of material which is called history. It has long been known, however,
that the activities of men before the use of written language became widespread were susceptible of being known through the existence of artifacts
and remains of various kinds. Such materials illumined much of the dark
epoch known as prehistory, and into this epoch Professor Zacharias casts
new light based on recent researches. He refers to the periods and the
peoples he is studying as belonging to a period of protohistory, and he
subtitles his work: An Explicative Account of the Development of Human
Thought from Palaeolithic Times to the Persian Monarchy. On the basis
of this time delimitation and in the light of his concluding paragraphs,
Professor Zacharias obviously intends to carry the story much further into
the historical period.
Such an undertaking, if carried out in the spirit of this book, will be
greeted with enthusiastic approval. Professor Zacharias, who teaches history at the Catholic University of Peiping, presents here in a fascinating
style and thoroughly convincing manner a synthesis of tremenQ.ous amounts
of modern research into the historical activities of early man. Eminently
readable and understandable, the book should make an invaluable addition to the shelves of any history student's library. No technical knowledge of history is necessary for enjoyment of this book, but even an
elementary acquaintance with history and its auxiliary sciences will inspire
respect for the vast erudition of the author of Protohistory.
An additional word might be said about the discussion of auxiliary sci-

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245

ences contained in Dr. Zacharias' book. The functions of linguistics,
anthropology, archaeology, palaeontology, and other disciplines are discussed in simple, lucid fashion in the first chapter. Such discussions are
rare in formal historical literature; this volume could be recommended to
the novice history student, or to the teacher of historical method, on this
basis alone. Professor Zacharias' qualifications to speak on these subjects
are evidenced not only by his treatment of them, but also by his introductory remarks concerning Wilhelm Schmidt, to whom the volume is
dedicated. As a student and follower of Schmidt's method, Zacharias is
perfectly equipped to carry out the task he has set himself.
Following these preliminary notions, in which he incidentally disposes
of a good many popular misconceptions in biology and anthropology, the
author examines in detail· the primary civilization types. These are three,
he maintains: the venatorial or hunters' type; the agriculturalist or peasants' type; the pastoral or shepherds' type. After these three types
of civilization had appeared in the world, they began to intermingle, and,
out of the fusions of strains which resulted, our modern, complex civilizations were built up.
Using these three types, shown to exist almost simultaneously, Zacharias
then proceeds to a masterly examination of the earliest historical societies
which resulted from their evolution. No more thorough or penetrating
analysis exists on this scale in English of the earliest historical activities
and interminglings of Egyptians, Sumerians, Akkadians, Hittites, Cretans,
Babylonians, Assyrians, Persians, and other smaller groups. The book
concludes with the establishment of the Persian empire.
While no fault can be found with the treatment of materials, nor with
the matter covered in this book, there are two minor points which are
somewhat annoying. Nowhere is the term protohistory explained, and
nowhere is there any evidence that the subtitle is accurate, since this is
both more and less than a history of thought. These are errors or defects,
however, which a second edition can easily correct; there is every reason
to hope that many editions will follow this one.

Constitutional Dictatorship: Crisis Government in the Modern Democracies. By CLINTON L. RossiTER. Princeton: Princeton University Press,
1948. Pp. 331, with index. $5.00.
Political events of the past two decades have aroused an extraordinary
amount of interest in the means employed by states to maintain internal
order. Some have resorted to extra-legal devices, others have relied entirely
upon constitutional instruments. The most interesting feature of the use
of these instruments has been their conformity to a constitution. General

8

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BRIEF NOTICES

understanding of the term dictatorship would have presupposed a violent
opposition to constitutionalism. The difficulty may be stated quite simply:
is it possible to havP- a constitutional dictatorship? Clinton Rossiter undertakes to answer the question in a well-written closely-reasoned volume.
The worth of his answer is evident not only in his choice of examples, but
in his analysis of the behavior of states operating as constitutional dictatorships and in the principles he derives from this analysis.
The inspiration for the book was the desire to compare the experiences
of some modem democracies faced by crises. Originally, only France,
England, and the United States were to be considered, but it quickly became obvious that the short-lived Weimar Republic offered so many
opportunities for comment and comparison that it would have to be the
basis for a fourth section of the study. With these ideas in mind, the
author explains in his preface, he began his researches. They were exhaustive, relentlessly so, and they have been placed in proper perspective by
an introductory section on the use of dictatorship in the Roman Republic.
If any faults are to be found with this volume, they must be in the nature
of comments upon the author's explanations for his procedures. Far from
apologizing-as he does-for giving this Roman introduction, he should
point out more vigorously the necessity for a thorough understanding of
the older device in order to appreciate newer ones. ·Only in such apologies,
and in the sometimes flippant manner in which he presents them, is Mr.
Rossiter to be criticized adversely.
Rome's experiences with· dictators during the days of the Republic are
· briefly but thoroughly detailed. There follow sections devoted to Article
48 of the Weimar Constitution, to the French provisions for l'etat de siege,
to the English concept of martial law, and to American experience with
emergency powers conferred upon the executive. Each of these sections
has a fundamental pattern: the history of the device used; the theory of
the device; its practice, and an analysis otits advantages and disadvantages.
Since the states considered differ so widely in so many of their political
practices, the difficulties of adhering to such a scheme are obvious; that it
has been adhered to while the differences were considered and accounted
for is a real testimonial to Mr. Rossiter's technical brilliance. Certainly
no important feature of the
of each of these countries has been
left out of this account.
In his consideration, the author points to the difference of emphasis in
one state after another; now the single-executive dictator is employed, agaip.
the executive-legislative dictator-or cabinet, or the multiple-member legislature subordinated to a committee. In each case, however, the underlying
idea is to make control unitary, a striking illustration of the · Aristotelian
notion of the efficiency of monarchical government. The literature for
the experience of each of the states has been examined so carefully, and so
much use has been made of the leading authorities on politics and inter-

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247

national law as these studies are essayed in the states, that one can only
express awe at the author's erudition. Possibly still greater awe is due his
achievement in presenting his findings in a terse, trenchant, eminently
readable style. To the American reader, the section on the United States
will be not only more appealing but more revealing. Readers from the
other states, however, could surely not complain of the manner in which
their governments have been treated. To the degree that objectivity of
treatment is a virtue, Rossiter may be credited as objective; where his
writings reveal a more interpretative approach, he has been extremely fair
to possible opponents. More praise would be superfluous for Rossiter, but
his press deserves special mention for its attractive presentation of his work.

De Certitudine Principiorum Theologiae; De Auctoritate Summi Pontificis.
By JoHN OF ST. THOMAS. Quebec: Laval University, 1947. Pp. 831,
with indexes.
Perhaps the only, and probably the best way to induce anyone to read
a preface is to publish it as a separate book. Notoriously neglected, prefaces, especially in philosophical and theological works, offer the common
principles and major premises of each of the treatments that follow. Subsistence in print is, therefore, especially appropriate for these tracts of
John of St. Thomas because of their intrinsic value, the authority of their
author, and their contemporary interest.
So great has been the interest among near contemporaries in the principles of dogmatic theology that many have taken what has traditionally
been considered the defensive part of dogmatic theology and erected it into
a separate science, calling it Apologetics. Unwarranted as is the formal
separation of Theology and Apologetics, the emphasis upon the common
defensive principles of theology is certainly justified in this, and any age
of faithlessness and paganism. Moreover, something more than the" question-box" technique is required. Not merely a manual of arms in religion
but a general plan of strategy of theology must be offered to those who are
to combat with equal facility the errors of those who have no faith, have
but the figure of faith, or have truncated their faith with heresy. For
pagans, for Jews, and for Protestants distinct treatment and adroit reasoning according to the principles each already accepts is undoubtedly necessary; such treatment and such skilled and forceful reasoning is provided
in the prefatory principles of this greatest of Thomistic post-reformation
theological works, the Cursus Theologicus of John of St. Thomas.
Because he is the. first great Thomist of the moderri era, John of St.
Thomas enjoys an authority that is unsurpassed by later and lesser figures
in his own Thomistic tradition and by those considered even greater in the
lesser schools within the Church, His prestige, certainly not diminishing,

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BRIEF NOTICES

ie, on the contrary, increasing as theologians appreciate more and more
that counter-reforms depend not upon the solution of cases by accommodations but by the broad sweep of principles.
The solid principles that John of St. Thomas offers in these two tracts
delineate and define the cogency in authority· of both the remote principles
of faith and the proximate animated norm, the Holy Father. While John
of St. Thomas eschews particular cases, he gives all the principles required
to answer difficulties that might arise in defending the faith. Moreover,
he gives all the fundamental objections against the faith that are brought
by the various classes of unbelievers. He answers each succinctly and
with clarity. About the Roman Pontiff, the theological teachings of John
of St. Thomas are clearly defined and for most Thomists definitive.
These authoritative and useful principles are offered in a most readable
form in this edition, whose pagination and format is tantamount to a commentary. Unfortunately, of necessity the editors have followed not the
definitive edition, but the imperfect Vives edition; this reproduces the errors
of previous editions and adds many distinctively its own.· To compensate
for this deficiency in detail, the editors have confected biblical, onomastic,
and analytic indexes, which make of this work not only a readable introduction to theology, but a ready manual for controversy.

Compendium of Theology. By St. Thomas Aquinas, 0. P. (translated by
Cyril Vollert, S. J.) St. Louis: Herder, 1947. Pp. 366, with index.
$4.00.
If you want something done, ask a busy man. Brother Reginald wanted
a simple compendium of the truths of theology, and so he sought out his
friend Saint Thomas. With the unmatched style of a peer in both poetry
and prose Saint Thomas wrote a masterpiece of brevity, readability and
profundity. Its writing, like that of the immortal Summa, was halted by
the divine call summoning Thomas to eternai bliss.
The exposition of theology may be lost to the ken of all but the most
subtle minds, or it may be directed to the knowledge of even the unlearned.
Saint Thomas chose the latter form of exposition in the Compendium. The
words of the prologue indicate that in this he strove to imitate the Divine
Master: "No one can say that he is unable to grasp the teaching of
heavenly wisdom; what the Word taught at great length, although clearly,
throughout the various volumes of Sacred Scripture for those who have the
leisure to study, He has reduced to brief compass for the sake of those
whose time is taken up with the cares of daily life."
The Compendium follows the division of the theological virtues into
faith, hope and charity. These are further subdivided into chapters which

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249

vary in leiJ.gth from a paragraph to several pages. The considerations
under faith treat first of those truths about God which " have been subtly
treated by a number of pagan philosophers." Thereafter, attention is
directed to " other truths about God revealed to us in the teaching of the
Christian religion, which were beyond the reach of the philosophers."
Subsumed under the heading of faith are: the unity and trinity of God,
Creation, Providence, the Incarnation, and the Last Things. Having comchapters on faith, Saint Thomas proceeded to develop the
pleted the
treatise on hope according to the petitions of the Lord's prayer. Prayer is
the expression of hope, and its perfect expression comes to us from the
Divine Master Himself in the Pater Noster. Death intervened in the
writing of the tenth chapter to bring to him the realization of hope.
Father Vollert is to be congratulated on a felicitous translation. He
has notably augmented the arsenal of American Thomists. Whether in
the Lay Theology movement, or on the cleric's bookshelf, or in the hands
of the college student, this book will serve as a perfect companion to the
reading of the Summa or stand on its own as an independent source.

Philosophisches Worterbuch. Edited by WALTER BRUGGER, S.J. Vienna:
Herder, 1948. Pp.
S. fr. 16.50; S 38.
Under the leadership of Father Brugger the faculty of Berchmans College has cooperated with other
savants to give to the non-specialist
a pocket-size dictionary of philosophy. The resultant. work offers a topical
rather than a word by word listing of philosophical terms. Important
words, representing the main notions in philosophy, are selected for treatment. A more exhaustive list is provided at the beginning of the book, and
the reader is referred to the salient word under which he will find the particular term treated. At the very end of the book a similar list of philosophers is-found and a like reference is made.
The authors describe briefly the history of a word's usage, together with
its etymology and its meanings. The genesis of key philosophical doctrines
is described, and their development traced with darting strokes. A bibliography is appended to each item. Included also is a seventy-five page
outline of the history of philosophy starting with the sacred books of ancient
India and ending with the present day.
The value of this little volume can hardly be overstated. Although suffering in a minor respect from the usual misconceptions of Banez' position,
the book is otherwise quite accurate and up to the minute, especially in
its treatment of current philosophies.

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Psychiatry and Religion. By JosHUA L. LIEBMAN (ed.).
Press, 1948. Pp. :t:tl. $3.00.

Boston: Beacon

Fifteen contributors are contained in this account of the proceedings of
the Temple Israel Institute on Religion and Psychiatry held in Boston in
October of 1947. The general subject is the need and effectiveness of
collaboration between psychiatrists and men of the religious profession.
Although the problems as such have no direct bearing upon the matters
usually discussed in these pages, the question has aroused much interest
in recent times, and there are certain basic views which permit of a brief
consideration.
The late Rabbi Liebman says in his preface that " the goal of both
disciplines (religion and psychiatry) at their best is to lead us to an inner
serenity and an inner maturity that will make us friends rather than
enemies of justice and peace." Two comments must be made here. In the
first place, one wonders in what sense this juxtaposition of religion and
psychiatry ought to be understood. They are not on the same level either
by nature or by their place in the order of knowledge. Psychiatry is what
the Greeks called a techne; it is medical knowledge and its application.
Religion is obviously knowledge also, but knowledge of another kind, and
its " application " is primarily the conformity on the part of the individual
to the Divine Law. In the second place, there is the failure to envision
religion under this latter angle. The whole tenor of the book is much
more that of a technique, of using religion as such, hence of making religion
subordinate to the needs of man, and not centering religious behavior
around God. This is clear from a remark made by P. E. Johnson, professor of the Psychology of Religion at Boston University, in replying to a
question (p. 139): "We have varying concepts of sin because sin is a
human invention. It is our interpretation of what God wants us to do .... "
Are there no commandments?
Many contributions supply valuable information and worth while reading. The deficiency of the care for mental patients in even outstanding
hospitals is forcefully pointed out by A. Deutsch. The facts reported
should arouse everyone, especially those who are responsible in the various
States, to the highest efforts toward improvement.
The book is in three parts, of which the first, " Where Psychiatry and
Religion Meet and Part," comprises papers by S. Hiltner for the Protestants, Rev. 0. F. Kelly for the Catholics and by Rabbi Liebman. Father
Kelly remarks that " psychiatry is a relatively young science," which is
true, but not because Harvard Medical School introduced its first course
in psychiatry in 1920. After all, there had been psychiatrists before, and
this science, in 19!t0, could look back over a history of more than one
hundred years,-even in America. The name of Benjamin Rush ought not
to be forgotten.

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251

The second past deals with " Hospital Care," and the third with " The
Individual and His Environment."
The emotional needs of the child, the
conflicts and the sense of guilt in the Adolescent, Problems of Marriage and
the " Grief Situation " are discussed. It is noticeable that the psychiatrists
are not as much opposed to correction and punishment as are some of
the more " progressive " educators.
The general interest in this symposium lies, perhaps, not so much in the
facts and ideas presented as in the recognition, also and e:ven chiefly on
the part of the psychiatrists, that man is in need of faith and of religious
foundations for his daily existence. It is also generally admitted that there
should be no sharp dividing line between the work of the priest, minister
or rabbi on the one hand and that of the psychiatrist on the other. However, this reviewer would like to observe that some caution is necessary in
this regard. First, psychiatric work is essentially medical; the leading part
in it will always be allotted to the psychiatrist. Lay-psychiatry is a dangerous thing. Secondly, there are aspects of religious influence which go
beyond what the lay-person may handle, primarily, of course, in reference
to the sacraments.
There can be no doubt of the seriousness and sincerity with which the
contributors approached their subjects. That religion in its relevance for
human life could be discussed at all in such a manner and by such a forum
is in itself a hopeful indication that the attitude of crude naturalism is
waning and that a new sense of spiritual values is being awakened. This
book is not for everyone, but students of these matters, the Catholic
psychiatrist as well as the priest, will indubitably profit from it.

Chance and Symbol. By RicHARD HERTZ. Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1948. Pp.
with notes. $3.00.
This work, as so many of recent times, seems to be born of dissatisfaction
with and profound worry about the present state of affairs and is expressive
of a search for stability, for ultimate truths and values. This attitude
manifests itself in a nostalgic appreciation of the past, a criticism of the
present, and on optimistic anticipation of the future. Accordingly its
three sections are entitled: "The Tender Past," "The Tough Present,"
and " The Metaphorical Future."
Back of the views presented by the author there are, as he implies, two
experiences. One is that of the generation of 1900 and life in Germany;
the other is that of the conflicts and problems of today and life in America.
Em:opean mentality was fashioned, during the nineteenth century mainly,
though earlier also in a lesser degree,
the impact of the " machine age "
upon a civilization which had slowly grown and which included many
traces, even active factors, stemming from the past. The most

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of these factors was " form "; that is, a system of life and a way to look
at things by which facts were raised to another level by becoming symbols
and allegories. Historical form is opposed to" number." The realm of the
latter is " chance," of the former " symbol." The naked facts which science investigates reveal as such no meaning; they are given meaning when
transformed into allegory. To the progressive mind, form appears as reactionary and value a fictitious quality. This mind lives in " action-space,"
created by the subject's interested analysis; action-space is set over against
"ideal-space," created by the subject's disinterested synopsis.
The modern world suffers from a" cancer of formlessness"; it is a-historical or even hostile to history. "Whenever a restraint dies ... a gentle
manner expires, a throne is dismantled (thrones represent continuity), the
most savage cartoons in American papers celebrate this ... as if the disappearance of history were a guaranty for history in the making." The
vision of significance behind the things has been lost. The Baroque was,
the author thinks, the last age alive to the allegoric or symbolic aspect of
reality and capable of comprising the totality of life in symbolic form.
The author conceives of the world as being dominated by " chance " and
consequently " number " on one hand, and as the manifestation of the
"Process" on the other. Apparently, the Process (always written thus)
takes the place of God and divine providence, with the notable difference
that God creates and maintains the whole of reality, inclusive of chance;
whereas " Process, in the organic, cumulative sense in which the word is
used here, is the presence in the world of an urge ; . . a willingness not to
be trapped by chance on its own level . . . but to beat it by the slowly
developing analogy of a spiritual coherence: the memory of a race, the
myth of a group, the style of a region-a culture." Believing in the Process,
the author also believes in " nature's inner goodness."
But, if we understand correctly the author's idea, this inner goodness will
not become effective nor the Process go on to higher levels unless man
does his part. That he can do it is
by the fact that the world
of chance and number contains regions where chance, which rules the whole
of the universe, is superseded or overcome by integration: the living
organism. Here arise form and value, on a still primitive level indeed. If
one passes from life to mind, the picture changes. No empirical philosophy has ever, Dr. Hertz remarks, explained the "faculty of the human
creature to form an idea of the natural current of his activity in which
he is fatally involved and then to adjust his behavior . . . not to the
dictates of the physical norm but to the idea he imposes upon it."
An old story of Oriental origin to which the author refers illustrates in
fact better than anything else his basic attitude: a man riding his camel
in the desert is suddenly thrown into an abyss by the animal. He manages
to hold on to a rose bush and sees to his terror two mice nibbling away
the roots of his precarious safety; but he sees also a blooming rose and

BRIEF NOTICES

smells its fragrance and is swept away by the beauty of this impression so
that he forgets his danger and his situation to become utterly lost in the
contemplation of beauty.
It may be gathered from this parable and from the whole tenor of the
book that the author is chiefly concerned with what may be called the
" rehabilitation of the spirit." Man inevitably falls prey to the " activist
sin" which is coterminous with life and hence" original." (Question arises
how far Dr. Hertz has been influenced by Heidegger, whom he occasionally
quotes though rather disapprovingly. In the latter's conception there also
figures the notion of a guilt coterminous with man's being.) Life in man,
or man in life, feels guilty " because it is not the form of that perfection
which it can conceive . • • or because it does not correspond to its own
ideas."
Though man has to cooperate, it is ultimately the Process in which the
author places his hopes.
These few remarks can give but an imperfect idea of Dr. Hertz' world of
thought. The reader is dealing with a mind in quest of truth and seeking a
light in the darkness of the present world. The conception submitted is,
in a way, a compromise. However much the author wishes to overcome
and to see overcome "chance" and "number," however much he longs
for an era of renewed spirituality, for a reinstatement of value--which he
apparently believes to be incorporated mainly in art and beauty ,-he apparently cannot free himself wholly from the modes of thought which dominate and fashion the general mentality of the nineteenth and the present
centuries. Many of his propositions are subject to criticism from the metaphysical viewpoint. Yet, he cannot be refused recognition of a serious
effort, a consciousness of the evil state in which man finds himself, or the
earnest will to contribute towards a betterment of human affairs. However much one may disagree with his basic position, one may surely welcome
his work as yet another sign of spiritual awakening.

Tke Everyday Catholic. By MARTIN liAmusoN, 0. P. Oxford: Blackfriars,
1947. Pp. 384. 10f6.

In his Commentary on tke Epistle of St. Paul to the Hebrews (cap. 5,
I. 2) , St. Thomas remarks that " Theology is truly food and drink, because
it nourishes and quenches the soul. Other sciences illumine the mind," he
continues, " but sacred doctrine enlightens the soul." This little-known
passage shows that St. Thomas did not limit Theology to the realm of
intellectual speculation. The same passage could also be used to persuade
people that St. Thomas would be most pleased with Fr. Harrison's Tke
Everyday Catholic.
This compendium of brief and pithy meditations on the chief beliefs and

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BRIEF NOTICES

practices of the Catholic faith does not pretend to qualify as a manual of
Theology, at least not in the ordinary acceptation of that term. The Everyday Catholic certainly qualifies as a vademecum of theology for the laity.
It has particular value for the professional theologian who will find herein
many remarkably original applications of the truths of faith to the spiritual
needs of everyday Catholics.
Father Harrison's book deserves wide acceptance for three principal reasons. First, The Everyday Catholic offers a remarkably complete coverage
of those divine truths that are necessary for salvation and for Christian
living today. Secondly, this book presents these truths with a clarity and
brevity that will whet the appetite of the everyday Catholic for this food
that nourishes the soul. Finally, throughout the whole work there is
evidence of an almost indefinable quality that distinguishes some few of
our spiritual books. Every mediation gives evidence of having been written
by a man who has the rare faculty of being able to communicate something
of his own devout spirit to his readers.

The Two Worlds of Marcel Proust. By HAROLD MARCH. Philadelphia:
University of Pennsylvania Press, 1948. Pp.
with index. $3.50.
Extreme dualism has been a temptation to western thought since Platonism gave classical expression to the doctrine of " the two worlds," and
the history of early scholasticism is the struggle of this Platonic view with
reason's attempt to integrate. The harmony which Aquinas detected between reason and faith, immanence and transcendence, body and soul,
and between many other apparent polarities received only a brief recognition. The later scholastics, by their doctrine of logic and by their
voluntarism, were moving once again toward an exaggerated dualism, and
with the Cartesian and Kantian temper of more recent times, Plato was
reborn.
Literature, in its office as an incarnation of philosophy, records various
tidal stages of human speculation. Dante, as a theologian and philosopher,
is an outstanding example of a poet portraying the thought of his times.
Milton, Pope, Wordsworth, Goethe, and Whitman can be dated in the
history of philosophy as well as in that of literature. Proust is but another
instance that the greater a writer is the more he takes a philosophical
stand. It has often been stated that he expresses a dated (and now dead)
form of social attitude. In this fact alone, he represents a philosophy.
The ultimate meaning of Proust is well stated in the title which Mr.
March has chosen for his book. In the opening chapter, entitled "The
Climate of Ideas " (into which Proust was born) , the reader is introduced
to the motley currents of the 19th century. The flow of this chapter could

BRIEF NOTICES

255

have been made much more effective if the author had organized it to lead
toward the dualism which Proust represented. In this introductory material,
Descartes' name is unmentioned. Without him, it is extremely difficult to
write a clear and coherent background for modern dualism and for Proust.
Fouillee, Guyau, Ravaisson, and Maine de Biran are likewise important
omissions. Ben-Ami Scharfstein has suggested (though perhaps in exaggerated form) the extent to which such men influenced Bergson. If they
did not directly influence Proust, they are responsible for part, .at least, of
his " climate of ideas." The relation of Proust to Bergsonism seems likewise more intimate, perhaps through a common background, than Mr.
March is willing to concede. Georges Cattaui, a keen student of .Proust,
brackets him with Bergson and Cezanne. Though Mr. March devotes some
attention to art, he does not mention Cezanne as part of Proust's intellectual climate. Nor, in a more profound sense, does he emphasize the
Deism which made it at least timely, if not logical, for both Proust and
Bergson to seek " transcendent reality " through supra-intellectual intuitions
instead of seeing God as expressed everywhere through creatures. Mr.
March is perhaps not a professional philosopher who appreciates all these
themes. What he has written in his background chapter is interesting and
enlightening. But it is not complete or profound.
Like Augustine, Kierkegaard, and Bergson, Proust was fascinated by the
fact of remembering. "Involuntary memory," he held, was a means of
living the highest experiences given to man, after the more conventional
ways of knowing restricted him to the world of matter. His chief work
entitled A la Recherche du Temps Perdu. Proust, like Bergson and
Freud, agreed with the more orthodox western view that nothing which
man ever does really dies. In this respect, they endow all experience with a
meaning and even an eternity. This side of Proust stands in contrast to
the decadent and revulsive life that he often gives to his characters; But
the difficulty is that Proust's higher organizing principle of life is not
rational but involuntary. It is more like the unpredictable trajectory of
Bergson's famous snowball than the rule of law which turns life on an axis
of purpose as known and willed. Characters in novels should be more than
psychological studies. They should, in some ultimate way, be morally
conditioned. Where they become matters of mere interest rather than of
inspiration, they tend finally to bore a reader by sheer repetition so that an
author's repertoire of characters must be continually varied, finally seeking
to satisfy interest through the pathological. PsycholQgy is a field of interest,
but the limits of the purely psychological are rather severe. Could Proust
have written another " great " novel?
Proust held that things are not \vhat they seem. He also declared that
our social personalities are merely creations of other minds. Here again
Proust is a philosopher but a bad one, in the sense of disregarding common

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BRIEF NOTICES

experiences of men to which literature ought to give body and depth.
Proust sounds too much like Kant and Bergson, charging that the human
mind is naturally inclined to illusions. He is an expression of Cartesian
skepticism. Though Mr. March does not mention the fact, Sartre has
found Proust an ally, and he cites him freely in L'P.tre et le Neant.
Mr. March has spent considerable time in the patient analysis of Proust's
life and character by reference to his work and in the probing of his great
novel. These analyses are well done and should be helpful in the study and
appreciation of Proust as an author. But just as it is a defect in T. S.
Eliot's poetry that he has to write footnotes to clarify it and just as Shaw's
plays are weak if they require prefaces, so Proust is less of a literary artist
when so much of his life and character is needed to explain his works.

Du Rlftexe au Psychique. By PAUL CossA. Paris: Desclt!e de Brouwer,
1948. Pp. 286. 125 frs. Belges.

In its subtitle this volume is stated to be" A Presentation of the Nervous
System." It is prefaced by a few remarks by R. Dalbiez and concluded
with a "philosophical note" by P. Philippe de la Trinite, 0. C. D. The
renowned French neurologist does, indeed, present the basic features of
the anatomy and physiology of the nervous system in a clear and readable
manner, and with a welcome wealth of references to past and recent
research. The student of these matters will regret the absence of a bibliography; for the average reader, however, this book may serve as an excellent introduction and a source of reliable information. The philosopher will
be mainly interested in the third section: the physiological basis of mental
activity. As Father Philippe points out in the appended note, there is no
datum of experimental or clinical experience that proves incompatible with
the fundamentals of Thomistic philosophy.
The topics discussed in this third part are: sleep, emotion, the function
of certain cortical areas and the evidence of electro-physiological (electroencephalographical) research, the relation of sensation and knowledge, of
motor impulses and movement, speech, conditioned reflexes (the critical and
sensible attitude of the author and this thorough analysis of " reflexology "
are well worth noting) , and a final chapter on " spiritualism and brain
mechanics." Mental troubles, says Dr. Cossa, are not expressive of the
disease itself, but of the response the mind makes to it; hence, these
troubles are highly individualized. The response is one of the total human
being; the mind (or, as the author says, the "psychism ") responds as a
whole to whatever wounds it. There is always present some mental factor
in the causation of organic troubles and some bodily factor in that of
allegedly purely mental disturbances. This seems to agree with the views
proposed today as " psychosomatics," although there is no reference to these

BRIEF NOTICES

studies. The human person must be envisaged, therefore, as substantially
one. Mental activity cannot be " reduced " to cerebral mechanisms. The
spirit is essentially of another nature than is matter.
Thus, it can be easily seen that Father Philippe has no difficulty in
integrating these views into the system of traditional philosophy. Indeed,
he begins his note with a lengthy quotation from Aristotle as the most
appropriate summary of Dr. Cossa's ideas. The scholarly nature of the
work and the mass of information it contains give solid basis to recommend
it most highly.

Les Epilepsies; leurs Formes Cliniques; leurs Traitements. By L. MARCHAND
and J. DE AJURIAGUERRA. Paris: Desclee de Brouwer, 1948. P. 721,
with index. 475 frs. Belges.
This work is strictly a medical treatise, summarizing ably the knowledge
of science concerning the various forms of epileptic disorders. Although
it will prove most useful to the physician and psychiatrist, the book has
little bearing on non-special problems. The medical layman will profit,
however, insofar as he will realize that the question of epilepsy is a very
complex one and that there are yet many points concerning which clarity
is lacking. Popularly, epilepsy is thought of as the trouble productive of
the well known paroxysms or " fits "; in truth, these attacks are but one
symptom among many, the most impressive but not the most important,
as the authors justly point out. The educator, the jurist, and the priest
ought to know that there are definitely epileptic difficulties without a " fit "
occurring. It is also useful to know that, in some cases, epileptic disorders
may cause passing or even lasting disturbances of consciousness which may
be such that the casual and inexpert obserVer fails to notice them. This
fact has obvious and definite legal importance and, more widely, in regard
to all questions involving possible defective consent. It is distinctly commendable that the authors devote a good portion of the work (180 pages)
to the so-called psychic epilepsy and the various mental disturbances
associated with this disease or, rather, group of diseases. Epilepsy may
persist without mental disturbance or deterioration although the latter is
not an uncommon consequence. Hence, a knowledge of these matters is of
importance in regard to problems of marriage, vocation, etc. There is a
good bibliography after each chapter, although the authors assert that,
owing to the conditions of war and post-war times, they have not been
able to survey all the newer studies. Since American medicine has, and
for the same reasons, lost touch with the endeavors of European scholars,
this w.ork should be most welcome.

BOOKS RECEIVED
Ab Abarzuza, F. X., Manuale Theologiae Dogmaticae. (Vol. I) Chile:
Padre Las C!!-sas (Marathon, Wis.: Capuchin Fathers), 1948. Pp. 485,
with index.
Ames, R., Citizen Thomas More and his Utopia. Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1949. Pp.
with index. $3.50.
Aquinas, St. Thomas, Summa Theologiae. (4 vols.) Turin: Marietti, 1948.
with index; vol. II: pp.
with index; vol. ill,
Vol. 1: pp.
pp. 953, with index; vol. IV: pp. 1136, with index.
Aquinas, St. Thomas, The Summa of St. Thomas .Aquinas. (Vol. III) New
York: Benziger, 1948. Pp. 1401, with indexes. $48.00 a set.
Attwater, D., ed., A Catholic Dictionary. New York: Macmillan, 1949.
Pp. 557. $5.00.
Barnett, L., The Universe and Dr. Einstein. New York: William Sloane
Associates, 1949. Pp.
Bouckaert, J. P., Comment Naissent Les Hommes. Bruges: Desclee de
Brouwer, 1948. Pp. 305.
fr. belg.
Callahan, J. F., Four Views of Time in .Ancient Philosophy. Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 1948. Pp.
$3.00.
Cleve, F. M., The Philosophy of .Anaxagoras. New York: King's Crown,
1949. Pp. 186, with index. $3.00.
Cossa, P., Du Reflexe au Psychique. Bruges: Desclee de Brouwer, 1948.
Pp.
fr. belg.
Dafl'ara, M., Cursus Manualis Theologiae Dogmaticae. Turbin: Marietti,
with index;
1944-1948. Vol. 1: pp. 488, with index; vol. II: pp.
vol. III: pp. 485, with index; vol. IV: pp. 865, with index.
Daniel-Rops, Sacred History. New York: Longmans, 1949. Pp. 444, with
index. $4.50.
Denis, P., La Revelation de la Grace. Liege: La Pensee; Catholique, 1948.
Pp. 76.
--,Islam et Chretiente. Liege: La Pensee Catholique, 1948. Pp. 63.
Du Noiiy, L., The Road to Reason. New York: Longmans, 1948. Pp.
with index. $3.50.
Einstein, D. G., Emperor Frederick II. New York: Philosophical Library,
with index. $4.50.
1949. Pp.
Gardiner, H. C., ed., The Great Booktt. New York: Devin-Adair, 1949.
Pp.
with notes.
Gardner, W. H., Gerard Manley Hopkins. New Haven: Yale University
Press, 1948. Pp.
with index. $4.00.

BOOKS RECEIVED

259

Garrigou-Lagrange, R, Three Ages of the Interim· Life.
St. 'Louis:
with index. $7.50.
Herder, 1948. Pp.
--,La Mere du Sauveur et notre Vie Interieure. Ottawa: Editions du
Levrier, 1948. Pp. 400. $3.00.
Graef, H. C., The Way of the Mystics. Westminster: Newman Press, 1948.
Pp. 160.
Halbach, A. A., Definition of Meaning in American Edtwation. Washington: Catholic University Press, 1948. Pp. 160. $1.75.
Harper, R., ExiS'tentialism. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1948.
Pp. 175. $3.00.
Harrold, C. F., ed., The Works of John Henry Newman New York: Longpp. 366 with
mans, 1949. Sermons and Discourses,
1839-1857: pp. 399, with index. $3.50 each.
Hertz, R., Chance and Symbol. Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
with notes. $3.00.
1948. Pp.
Johnson, S. W. and Yost, F. H., Separation of Church and State in the U.S.
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1949. Pp.
with
index. $4.50.
Juenger, F. G., The Failure of Technology. Hindsdale: Henry Regnery,
1949. Pp. 196.
Kelly, B. J., First Steps in the Religious Life. Westminster: Newman
Press, 1948. Pp. 127.
Kerby, W. J., Introduction to Social Living. Washington: Catholic University Press, 194!-l. Pp. 135, with index.
Kluckhohn, C. and Murray, H., Personality in Nature, Society, and Culture.
with index. $4.50.
New York: Knopf, 1948. Pp.
Knox, R., Spiritual Aeneid. Westminster: Newman Press, 1948. Pp.
with index. $3.00.
Lachance, L., Le Concept de Droit selon Aristote et S. Thomas. Ottawa:
Editions du Levrier, 1948. Pp. 336. $3.00.
Lamont, C., Humanism as a Philosophy. New York: Philosophical Library,
1949. Pp. 368, with index. $3.75.
Loomis, C. G., White Magic. Cambridge: Medieval Academy of America,
1949. Pp.
with index and notes. $5.00.
Lovejoy, A. 0., Essays in the History of IdeaS'. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
Press, 1948. Pp. 376, with index. $5.00.
McKeough, M., ed., Administration of the Catholic Secondary School.
Washington: Catholic University Press, 1948. Pp. 180. $3.00.
Marchand, L. and ,Ajuraguerra, J., Epilepsies. Bruges: Desclee de Brouwer,
1948. 475 fr. belg.
Maritain, J., Existence and the Existent. New York: Pantheon, 1948.
Pp. 149. $3.00.
'
Mueller, G., Philosophy of Literature. New York: Philosophical Library,
1948. Pp.
with index. $3.50.

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BOOKS RECEIVED

Oates, W. J., ed., Basic Writings of St. Augustine.
vols.) New York:
Random House, 1948. Vol. I: pp. 887; vol. H: pp. 898, with index.
$10.00.
O'Connor, W. R., The Natural Desire for God. Milwaukee: Marquette
University Press, 1948. Pp. 94. $1.50.
Organ, T. W., An Index to Aristotle. Princeton: Princeton University
Press, Jl949. Pp. 187. $5.00.
Peters, W. A. M., Gerard Manley Hopkins. New York: Oxford, 1948.
Pp. 231, with index. $4.50.
Reiser, 0. L., World Philosophy. Pittsburgh: Pittsburgh University Press,
$2.50.
1948. Pp.
Russell, B., Human Knowledge. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1948.
Pp. 542, with index. $5.00.
Scanlon, C. C. and Scanlon, C. L., Second Latin. St. Louis: Herder, 1948.
Pp. 276. $3.50.
Schilpp, P. A.., ed., The Philosophy of Ernst Cassirer. Evanston, Ill.:
Library of Living Philosophers, 1949. Pp. 954, with index. $6.00.
Smith, G. D., ed., The Teaching of the Catholic Church. (2 vols.) New
York: Macmillan, 1949. Vol. I: pp. 672; vol. H: pp. 670, with index.
$12.50.
Sullivan, J. F., Songs After Sundown. Boston: Bruce Humphries, 1948.
125. $3.00.
Von Hildebrand, D., Transformation In Christ. New York: Longmans,
1948. Pp. 415. $4.50.
Von Rintelen, F. J., Damonie des Willens. Mainz am Rhein: Kirchheim,
1947. Pp. 205, with index.
Warfield, B. B., The Inspiration and Authority of the Bible. Philadelphia:
Presbyterian and Reformed Publishing Co., 1948. Pp. 449. $3.75.
Wiener, N., Cybernetics. New York: John Wiley, 1948. Pp. 194. $3.00.
Wild, J., Introduction to Realistic Philosophy. New York: Harper, 1948.
Pp. 527, with index. $4.50.
Zimmerman, C. C., The Family of Tomorrow. New York: Harper, 194{lo
Pp.
with index. $8.50.