REVOLUTIONARY THEOLOGY AND POLITICAL THOUGHT T: HE EXTENSIVE literature on alienation and liberation has been characteristically and intentionally centered on man. Ernst Cassirer some time ago captured this essential ingredient when he spoke of the "new anthropology " whose " first postulate ... was the removal of all the artificial barriers that had hitherto separated the human world from the rest of nature." What is removed, according to Cassirer, is the notion that "there is a general providence ruling over the world and the destiny of man." 1 Certainly Marx and Feuerbach are part of this tradition and twentieth century expressions of their thought do not alter this fundamental character. So too, most of the recent literature related to liberation and alienation, as in Marcuse or Fromm or others, maintains the same point, namely, that the described character of the human problem of alienation and its solution is to be examined in human terms alone. 2 It is as if, to borrow a phrase from Cassirer, "neither classical metaphysics nor medieval religion and theology were prepared for this task," 3 the task of resolving the problem of man. There is little doubt then that the emancipation of the social world from the thought and need of God characterized the new anthropology's approach to the problem of man. Cassirer as well as Sabine credit Grotius's celebrated hypothesis, that 1 Ernst Cassirer, An Essay on Man (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1944), p. 13. 2 Herbert Marcuse, cf. especially Reason and Revolution (New York: Beacon Press, 1941), An Essay on Liberation (Boston, 1969), "Repressive Tolerance" (Boston: Beacon Press, 1970); Erich Fromm, cf. especittlly Marx's Concept of Man (New York: Frederick Ungar Publishing, 1961), Man for Himself (New York, 1947), Beyond the Chains of Illusion (New York: Pocket Books, Inc., a Cassirer, op. cit. 847 848 JOHN J. SCHREMS natural law would be the same even if there were no God, as an historical turning point marking the beginning of this liberated tradition. 4 At other times Machiavelli is cited as the principal instrument beginning the empirical trend. 5 The precise time or person marking the turning point is less important than the fact of the acceptance of the thesis that the examination of man could, and should, proceed strictly in human terms, based on " empirical observations and on general logical principles," as Cassirer phrased it. 6 Later, indeed, Feuerbach and Marx were to argue that the very ideas of God, religion and theology, are themselves alienations from which man is to be liberated. While most recent theorists, save perhaps for Cassirer, do not address themselves to either the thesis of Grotius or of Marx they all nonetheless operate within this " liberated " tradition by either accepting it, as does Cassirer, or by not addressing themselves to it. The point of operating within the tradition by not addressing it will be examined later, but at the present suffice it to say that the arrival on the scene of a genre of liberation literature arguing a solution to the problem of man in terms of religion and God appears to be an altogether new dimension which should be examined. In other words the liberation tradition up to now has regarded theology as a source of alienation, for others at least theology has been understood to be a concern of which political theory had no need, and consequently such considerations were never a part of any political solution. Such a contrapuntal dimension in liberation thought is offered in the recent discussions on a " theology of liberation." To this time the great hulk of discussion of this topic has been confined to religious studies circles even though its intentions and consequences are quite political. The question arises as to 4 Cassirer, The Myth of the State (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1946), p. 172. Goerge H. Sabine, A History of Political, Theory (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1950), p. Cassirer, op. cit., p. 140. Cf. John J. Schrems, "Ernst Cassirer and Political Thought," Review of Politics Vol. 29 (1967), pp. 180-208. 6 Cassirer, An Essay on Man, op. cit., p. IS. ° REVOLUTIONARY THEOLOGY AND POLITICAL THOUGHT 349 whether the new religious-politics efforts should be judged in religious terms alone and thus ignored by the social sciences or whether the religious terms should be judged on political grounds. The liberationist themselves invoke the social sciences as having a "central place" 7 or a mediative role 8 in the new theology. Accordingly liberation theology should be examined by the social sciences and specifically, in this case, by studying it in the light of political thought. As Berger in his Pyramids of Sacrifice, 9 although not examining specifically liberation theology, examines the spirit of sacrifice-for-a-cause from the perspective of the social sciences and particularly in terms of human costs, what is proposed here is to examine liberation theology from the perspective of the history, classical and modern, of political theory. From this perspective it may be hypothesized that this development in religion would: one, constitute a genuine and new reconciliation of essential ingredients of both traditional religion and liberated thought, or two, return the problem of man to the previously rejected "artificial" way camouflaged in the language of liberation, or three, continue essentially within the liberated tradition while appearing to make a reconciliation with theology. Gustavo Gutierrez, 10 one of the most prominent of Latin 7 Francois Houtart and Andre Rousseau, The Church and Revolution (Maryknoll, New York: Orbis Books, 1971), p. 345: "Political theology ... must give a central place to sociopolitical analysis, and this casts an entirely new light on the relation between theology and the human sciences." 8 Raul Vidales, " Methodological Issues in Liberation Theology," in Rosino Bibellini, Frontiers of Theology in Latin America (Maryknoll, New York: Orbis Books, 1979), p. 39: "To begin with, liberation theology must accept the mediation of a new type of scientific rationality to which it has not been accustomed. This new line of scientific reasoning is a contribution of the human sciences, of the social sciences specifically." 9 Peter L. Berger, Pyramids of Sacrifice (New York: Basic Books Inc., 1974). Berger clearly points out the human limitation of sacrifice for a cause. However, Berger himself unwittingly becomes a participant in the sacrifice dilemma when he endorses Max Weber's approval and citing of "Machiavelli praising the man who esteems the welfare of his city higher than the salvation of his own soul." Ibid., p. 225. 10 Gustavo Gutierrez, A Theology of Liberation (Maryknoll, New York: Orbis Books, 1973) . 350 JOHN J. SCHREMS American 11 liberation theologians, appears to answer the first query and speaks of Liberation Theology as intending a genuine reconciliation not a return to rejected ways. Gutierrez 12 states his purpose as to " reconsider the great themes of the Christian life within this radically changed perspective " of liberation. 13 Reconciling opposites is indicated in his very understanding and explanation of what is called, " orthopraxis." It is to balance orthodoxy and praxis: Faith in a God who loves and calls to the gift of full communion with him and brotherhood among men not only is not foreign to the transformation of the world; it is necessary to the building up of that brotherhood and communion in history. Moreover, only by doing this truth will our faith be " veri-fied," in the etymological sense of the world. From this notion has recently been derived the term orthopraxis . ... 14 1 1 Liberation theology appears concentrated in Latin America where it is said to have " originated " (1979 Catholic Almanac, Huntington, Indiana: Our Sunday Visitor, Inc., 1978; p. 76), but it is in reality by no means limited to that region. John C. Bennett, (The Radical Imperative: From Theology to Social Ethics, Philadelphia: The Westminister Press, 1975; pp. 105ff.) points out that the same themes are also present in Europe, in "black theology" in the United States, and in a " theology of women's liberation." Bennett sees theologies of liberation as a response to the " global threats to humanity " (ibid., pp. 190-iWO). Andre Dumas (Political Theology and the Life of the Church, Philadelphia: The Westminster Press, 1978; p. 90), reports that "political theologies have in fact arisen in two very different areas: in those countries which have a high level of economic dependence and a developed critical conscience (especially in Latin America), and in countries with considerable economic capacity but little social cohesion (especially in West Germany)." Houtart and Rousseau (in their The Church and Revolution, op. cit.) trace political theology to the French Revolution, the 19th century French workers movement, the Cuban Revolution, the Vietnam War, and revolutionary movements in Southern Africa. 1 2 Gutierrez is regarded as the outstanding liberation theologian. His Theology of Liberation is viewed as " the best and most complete introduction to the subject yet available in English." (J. A. Komonchak, America ms, March 81, 1978; p. Rosio Gibellini (op. cit., p. ix) refers to Gutierrez's work as a "classic" in articulating much more fully this new approach to theology. Juan Luis Segundo, himself a noted Latin American liberation theologian, regards liberation theology as "theology as a whole" (Segundo, "Capitalism Versus Socialism: Crux Theologica," in Gibellini, op. cit., p. !Ml) and he endorses Gutierrez (along with Hugo Assmann) as the "only ... scholarly" reply to European theology's regard of liberation as a passing fad not to be taken seriously. 13 Gutierrez, op. cit., p. ix. 14 Ibid., p. 10. REVOLUTIONARY THEOLOGY AND POLITICAL THOUGHT 851 Let it he clear, Gutierrez intends no return to orthodoxy. This refusal is evidenced in his emphasis on praxis and his intention "to reject the primacy and almost exclusiveness which doctrine has enjoyed in Christian life and above all to modify the emphasis often obsessive, upon the attainment of an orthodoxy which is often nothing more than fidelity to an obsolete tradition or a debatable interpretation." He holds that " the intention . . . is not to deny the meaning of orthodoxy, understood as a proclamation of and reflection on statements considered to be true." His intention is not to deny its "meaning" but to reject the primacy of its practice. To reject fidelity to an obsolete tradition or a debatable interpretation in favor of brotherhood is understandable and not unacceptable. However, to suggest a conflict of orthodoxy and orthopraxis, between which there should be no conflict, and to take one's cue from, recognize the work and imporlance of,1:; conc:ele behavior, of deeds, of action, of praxis is suggestive of the secular liberation traditions. It is more than suggestive if other ingredients are present. One important element is the definition of theology since as Cassirer said a key ingredient of modern thought was its focus on man rather than " artificial barriers " to man. 16 Gutierrez understands theology to be " reflection, a critical attitude." It must be "man's critical reflection on himself, on his own basic principles." 17 Liberation theology changes the direction of theology. Its attention is not on God but on man. This character of the theology of liberation is seen in the fact that it is a reflection which starts with the historical praxis of man. It seeks to rethink the faith from the perspective of that historical praxis, and it is based on the experience of the faith derived from 15 lbid. Essay, p. 13. Gutierrez cites, although he does not evaluate, Cassirer's interpretation of modern thought and its critical view of religion in his " Freedom and Salvation: A Political Problem." (Liberation and Change, Gustavo Gutierrez and Richard Shaull, Atlanta: John Knox Press, 197!, ed. H. D. Safl'rey, Textus Philosophici Friburgen&es 4:/5, (Fribourg/Louvain, 1954), pro'emium, p. 3, 5-8, which cannot predate 1268. On the common doctrine of Dionysius and the author of the Liber see H. D. Safl'rey's introduction to his edition of Thomas's exposition, his "L'etat actuel des recherches sur le Liber de Causis ", Die Metaphysik im Mittelalter, Miscdlanea Mediaevalia, ed. P. Wilpert, ii (Berlin, 1963), pp. 267-281; L. Sweeney, "Doctrine of Creation in Liber de Causis", An Etienne Gilson Tribute, ed. C. J. O'Neil, (Milwaukee, 1959), pp. 274-289; and A. Pattin, " Le Liber de Causis: edition etablie a l'aide de 90 manuscripts avec introduction et notes ", Tijdschrift voor Filosophie 28 (1966), 90-203, esp. 93-94. 5 2 " En efl'et, le chapitre 20 cite deux propositions de Proclus, !es propositions 169 and 196" De Substantiis Separatis, Opera, Omnia (Leonine) XL (Pars D-E), (Romae, 1968), p. D6. 5 s See my "The De Trinitate of St. Boethius ", pp. 368fl'. and R. D. Crouse, "Semina Rationum: St. Augustine and Boethius ", passim. 5 4 There is now a large literature on this subj·ect to which one of the latest contributions is B. Stock "In Search of Eriugena's Augustine" a paper for the Third THE PLACE OF THE PROOF FOR GOD'S EXISTENCE 383 Nonetheless, there are important differences between these two Neoplatonisms which are of consequence for our endeavor to understand the theological context which permits and requires Thomas's proof. First, in Proclus, theology is systemized so as actually to ibegin from God's inner unity. In Proclus's Elements, Dionysius's Divine Names, Eriugena's De Divisione N aturae, and works structured in this tradition, or coming under its influence, but not in Augustine's De Trinitate, or works faithful to it, theology begins from the divine unity. Second, the multiplicity within the divine, whether the Trinity in Eriugena and Dionysius, or the henads and triads in Proclus, is distinguished from the divine unity. 55 The motion and multiplicity within the divine spiritual life is the intelligible pattern and basis of the motion and multiplicity of the sensible world further down. What is distinctive about the Prodan Neoplatonism here is that the going out from the divine unity, the proceeding, 7rp6o8os or exitus, is given equal weight with the return, or conversio. This is not true in Augustine. He is primarily interested in how, addressed by the divine Word in the world in which he finds himself, man can be saved out of it forever. 56 International Eriugena Colloquium, 1979, Albert-Ludwigs-Universitat, Freiburg i. Br. For further items confer notes 14, 15 and 16 in R. D. Crouse "lntentio Moysi: Bede, Augustine, Eriugena and Plato in the Hexaemeron of Honorius Augustodunensis ", Dionysius 2 (1978), 185-157. Dr. Crouse concludes that Eriugena's system is " By no means a rejection, or a tendentious misinterpretation of Augustine (but) a modification by selection and emphasis" (144). This accords with J. J. O'Meara "Eriugena's Use of Augustine in his Teaching on the Return of the Soul and the Vision of God", Jean Scot Erigene et l'histoire de la philosophie, Colloques Internationaux du Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, Laon, 1975, (Paris, 1977), pp. 191-200 and "' Magnorum Virorum Quendam Consensum Velim,us M achinari' (804D) : Eriugena's Use of Augustine's de Genesi ad litteram in the de divisione naturae ", also for the Third Eriugena Colloquium, and certainly is close to Eriugena's own consciousness. 55 See my article " The De Trinitate of St. Boethius " for the result in Christian theology of the differences between the pagan Neoplatonic schools; the pagans are more fully treated in "Aquinas's First Principle", 189 ff. 56 See my "The Place of the Psychological Image of the Trinity" and R. D. Crouse "Semina Rationum ". 384 WAYNE J. HANKEY The third difference between Proclan and Plotinian N eoplatonism, and crucial for us, is the place of the human soul in this structure. Plotinus, looking at the human soul in its causes, sees it partly in the world of sense and body, which soul animates, and partly above in the higher realm of pure intellectual life. This higher soul never loses its contemplation of higher things and its direct access to the intellectual world. Consequently, for Plotinus, as for Augustine and his followers, the movement to God is inward. 57 Proclus, on the other hand, following his predecessor Iamblichus, in accord with their mutual tendency to formalize and to differentiate entities, with his sense of the weight of the downward movement in reality and the weakness and evil of our human situation, sees our soul as altogether fallen into the sensible world. The very last proposition of his Elements of Theology is as follows: Every particular soul, when it descends into temporal process, descends entire; there is not a part of it which remains above and a part which descends. 58 Both the content and the position of this statement are important. The content requires a relation between man and the sensible world. For Proclus, man in his weakened and humbled position requires help from outside. This help takes the form of theurgy, the place of which in pagan Neoplatonism roughly 57 On the division of the soul see Plotinus Enneades, Opera, ed. P. Henry et H. R. Schwyzer, Museum Lessianum, Series Philosophia 88, 8 vol. (Paris/Brussels, 19511978), IV 8,8,2-8; V 1,10 and C. G. Steel The Changing Self, A Study of the Soul in Later Neoplatonism: Iamblichus, Damascius and Priscianus, (Brussels, 1978), p. 81 and elsewhere. On the movement inward see Enneades I 6,8,4; I 6,9,1; III 8,6,40; IV 8,1,2; V 8,2,82; V 8,11,11; VI 9,7,17; VI 9,11,88 and A. H. Armstrong, "Salvation: Plotinian and Christian", The Downside Review 75 (1957), 126-139, reprinted in Plotinian and Christian Studies, Variorum Reprints (London, 1979). 58 Proclus, The Elements of Theology, A Revised Text with translation, introduction and commentary by E. R. Dodds, 2nd ed. (Oxford, 1968), Prop. 211, p. 185. On the positive character of the downward movement for Proclus see "Aquinas's First Principle", 148-151; for its effect on Dionysius see P. Rorem, "The Place of The Mystical Theology in the Pseudo-Dionysian Corpus", Dionysius 4 (1980), 88-89. THE PLACE OF THE PROOF FOR oon's EXISTENCE 385 corresponds to the place of the sacraments in Christian religion.59 Theurgic union is attained only by the perfective operation of unspeakable acts correctly performed, acts which are beyond all understanding, and by the power of unutterable symbols which are intelligible only to the gods.60 Thus, although Proclus, in contrast to St. Thomas, still holds that the soul knows itself through knowing its higher spiritual causes, an essential move towards exterior sensible reality has been made, both in respect to the soul's return to God, and in its location in the cosmos.61 A Christian spirituality moving forward from this position is to be found in pseudo-Dionysius's symbolic theology, which advances to God beginning from symbols " natural, historical, scriptural or sacramental." 62 This theology, worked out in Eriugena, forms a foundation for medieval aesthetics so that Abbot Suger at St. Denis structures and adorns his gothic abbey around the principle that the material light gleaming on silver and gold or in jewel and glass leads the spirit to the immaterial God. 63 The twelfth century revival of this Dionysian spirituality develops a previously absent sense of the reality of the natural world, a universe functioning by its own 59 C. Steel, The Changing Self, pp. 156-157. so Iamblichus De Mysteriia II, 11 trans. by E. R. Dodds, Elements, p. xx. 01 Elements, Prop. 167; for the contrasting doctrine of St. Thomas see ST I, qq. 85-87. For a different view of St. Thomas see B. de Margerie, S.P., "A quelles conditions d'apres Lumen Ecclesiae (para. 15-16) une philosophie peut-etre servir d'instrument a !'elaboration d'une christologie catholique;" to appear in Atti del VIII Congresso Tomistico Internazionale suU'Enciclica "Aeterni Patris ", ed. A. Piolanti, (Roma, 1981), pp. 191-206, esp. p. 195. 62 M. D. Chenu, Nature, Man and Society, p. 125; additional materials on Dionysius and theurgy are given in my "Aquinas's First Principle", 147. Since its appearance there is A. Louth's The Origins of the Christian Mystical Tradition, pp. 162-164 which is also the best treatment of the matter I have found. 63 See Sugerii Abbatis Sancti Dionysii, Liber de Rebus in Administratione Sua Gestis, in E. Panovsky, Abbot Suger, 2nd ed. (Princeton, 1979), XXVII and XXXIII, pp. 46-48 and 62-64 and W. Beierwaltes "N egati Affirmatio; On the World as Metaphor. A Foundation for Mediaeval Aesthetics from the Writings of John Scotus Eriugena ", Dionyaius 1 (1977), 127-159. 386 WAYNE J. HANKEY second causes through which man comes to God.64 This movement towards secularization and feeling for the natural world is crucial to Thomas's use of the Aristotelian proofs and in fact Thomas refers to Dionysius when he wishes to justify the knowledge of God through sensible effects.65 One of the characteristics of the later Neoplatonism identified by modern scholarship is its greater acceptance of Aristotle. This also characterizes the Christian thinkers. 66 Whereas Augustine has little use for Aristotle, Boethius thinks that he and Plato have the same teaching and Boethius is responsible for the first of the three Aristotelian waves to wash the west. 67 Thomas says ·early in his career that Dionysius follows Aristotle 68 and, while he comes later to understand the Platonic character of Dionysius's thought, 69 he continues to see what is usually regarded as the Aristotelian ascent to God through knowledge of the sensible world in Dionysian terms. To Dionysius he credits the following: " Men reach the knowledge of intelligible truth by proceeding from one thing to another." "The intellectual soul then ... holds the last place among intellectual substances ·. . . it must gather its 6 4 M. D. Chenu, Nature, Man and Society. Most of the essays in this volume touch on this question; most important perhaps is " The Platonisms of the Twelfth Century'', pp. 49-98; on the idea that the world constituted a whole see p. 67. Confer also R. D. Crouse, "lntentio Moysi ", 158-5 on Honorius and the Platonists of Chartres, their sense of cosmos, and openness to the world. 6 5 See ST I,1,9 and texts cited below. This is not his unique procedure: "pseudoDionysius himself, thanks to his religious sense, so deflected Platonic idealism toward a keener subjection to sensible realities that later, he was occasionally bracketed with Aristotle in concordances or " harmonies " of " the authorities " (concordia auctoritatum) ". Chenu, Nature, Man and Society, p. 185. See my "Aquinas's First Principle" 148 and S. Gersh, From Iamblichus to Eriugena: An Investigation of the Prehistory and Evolution of the Pseudo-Dionysian Tradition, Studien zur Problemgeschichte der Antiken und Mittelalterlichen Philosophie 8, (Leiden, 1978), pp. fl85-6. '67 See De interpretatione, ed. C. Meiser, ed. secunda, (Leipzig, 1880), p. 79, and R. D. Crouse, "Semina Rationum ", 76-77. 68 " Dionysius autem Jere ubique sequitur Aristotelem, ut patet diligenter inspecienti libros ejus ": In II Sent. d.14,q.l,a.2 (Mandonnet, p. 850). 69 " ••• plerumque utitur stilo et modo loquendi quo utebantur platonici ..• " fa de div. nQ'm,1 proem, THE PLACE OF THE PROOF FOR Gon's EXISTENCE 387 knowledge from divisible things by way of sense." "The human mind cannot rise to the immaterial contemplation of the celestial hierarchies unless it uses the guidance of material things." " Divine things cannot be manifested to men except under sensible likenesses." " Men receive the divine illumination under the likeness of sensible things." 70 It is worth noting the necessity of the turn to the sensible expressed here and that it is precisely this that divides Thomas and Bonaventure, who is also less Aristotelian than Thomas. Bonaventure certainly uses the sensible way in his theology but he regards it as only one way. The soul may also take the Augustinian more directly inward route. 71 Thus, the context of this turning to the sensible in which the Aristotelian proof eventually becomes necessary and intelligible is 01·iginally religious in the most cultic and mystical signification of that term. It is the subsequent development of what has been called a more secular feeling for the natural world and the discovery of the sciences of such a world which actually bring us to the proof itself .12 The place of man and the position of the statement about his place in the Elements of Theology is really part of the content. The human soul descends into the temporal process and all of it is there. In Proclus, this is the final statement in his systemized theology. Although St. Thomas's view of man is exactly of this kind, for him and for the first western Christian systematic theologian, Eriugena, this descent is not the end of theology but man is rather the pivot point, the hinge, or crux, on which the cosmos turns. For these thinkers, man's reason is distinguished from intuition or intellectus by reason's divided or discursive nature. In Eriugena, Genesis associating 10 ST I,79,8; I,76,5; I,88,2 obj. 1; I-II,99,8 ad 8; I,108,1. The list is from A. C. Pegis, Index of Authors, Basic Writings of Saint Thomas Aquinas, 2 vols.,ii, (New York, 1945), p. 1168. 11 Ewert Cousins, Bonaventure, The Soul's Journey into God, The Tree of Life, The Life of Saint Francis, The Classics of Western Spirituality, (London, 1978), p. 28. 12 Chenu, Nature, Man and Society, pp. 45 ff. 388 WAYNE J. HANKEY man with the naming of the beasts, means that the sensible world comes into particularized sensible being through man and his form of divided knowing and is restored to its heavenly and intellectual unity in the redemption of man in Christ. 73 We have seen how man, uniting the material and spiritual creation through his unity of body and soul and, as free agent in the world, forms the structural center of the Sunima Theologiae. Thomas transforms a statement from Proclus about the soul as the " horizon and mutual limit of the corporal and spiritual", mediated to him through the Liber de Causis, into a teaching about man joining the two worlds. 74 N eoplatonic theology, Christian or pagan, by no means universally applauds this anthropocentrism, which is not to be identified with the very general conception that man is a microcosm or little world uniting in himself the elements of spiritual and material reality. 75 One of Plotinus's complaints about the gnostics and, by implication, the Christians, who share their perspective, is the vanity of their anthropocentric pride: But really! For these people who have a body like men have, and desire and griefs and passions, by no means to despise their own power but to say that they can grasp the intelligible but that there is no power in the sun which is freer than this power of ours from affections and more ordered and more unchangeable, and that the 73 De Divisione Naturae IV,8 (PL 122,744A); Il,6 (PL 122, 582A); cf. B. Stock, "The Philosophical Anthropology of Johannes Scotus Eriugena ", Studia Medievalia, 8 (1967), 1-57, R. D. Crouse, "lntentio Moysi ", 142-144. D. F. Duclow, "Dialectic and Christology in Eriugena's Periphyseon '', Dionysius 4 (1980), 99-118; the nicest summary is perhaps I. P. Sheldon-Williams, "Eriugena's Greek Sources", The Mind of Eriugena, ed. J. O'Meara and L. Bieler, (Dublin, 1978), pp. 11-12. 74 See Liber de Causis, Prop. 2 and F. Ruello, "Saint Thomas and Pierre Lombard", San Tommaso, Fonti e rifiessi del suo pensiero, ed. A. Piolanti, Studi Tomistici I, (Roma, n.d.), p. 202. 1 5 Because of Gregory of Nyssa's objection to the term-it seemed to make man an image of the world rather than of God-it is hot used in Eriugena except in one unfavorable context. Cf. Lars Thunberg, Microcosm and Mediator, The Theological Anthropology of Marimus the Confessor, Acta Seminarii Neotestamentici Upsaliensis, (Lund, 1965), p. 142; on Gregory and Eriugena cf. E. Jeauneau, Jean Scot, Homelie sur le prologue de Jean, Sources chretiennes, 151, (Paris, 1969), p. 887. THE PLACE OF THE PROOF FOR Gon's EXISTENCE 889 sun has not a better understanding than we have, who have only just come to birth and are hindered by so many things that cheat us from coming to the truth! And to say that their soul, and the soul of the meanest of men, is immortal and divine but that the whole of heaven and the stars there have no share given them in the immortal soul. 16 'Augustine, 77 Gregory the Great, 78 Boethius, 79 Anselm 80 and Peter Lombard 81 all hold a view which seems incompatible with the anthropocentrism 0£ Eriugena and Aquinas, 82 namely 76 Enneades II 9,5,1-11 translation by A. H. Armstrong in the second volume of the Loeb Plotinus (Cambridge, 1966), p. 289. See also Enn. II 9,9,45-56 and A. H. Armstrong " Man in the Cosmos: A Study of Some Differences between Pagan Neoplatonism and Christianity", Romanitas et Christianitas, ed. W. den Boer et al. (Amsterdam/London, 1978), 5-14, reprinted in Plotinian and Christian Studies. 77 Enchiridion, LXI (PL 40,261): " ... ex ipsa hominum redemptione ruinae illius angelicae detrimenta reparantur ", also XXIX (PL 40,246); De Civ. Dei, XIV,26 (PL 41,485) and XXII,l (PL 41,752). 78 Hom. in Evang. Il,84 (PL 76,1249 and 1252) "Decem vero drachmas habuit mulier, quia novem sunt ordines angelorum. Sed ut compleretur electorum numerus, homo decimus est creatus . . . Quia enim superna illa civitas ex angelis et hominibus constat, ad quam tantum credimus humanum genus ascendere, quantos illic contigit electos angelos remansisse, sicut scriptum est: Statuit terminos gentium secundum mtmerum angelorum Dei." This occurs then in the context of the parable of the ten coins and includes Gregory's listing of the nine orders of angels so like that of ps.-Dionysius. Miss Jean Petersen informs me that "the exegesis of this parable and that of the lost sheep by Gregory, Cyril of Alexandria, Gregory of Nazianzus, Gregory of Nyssa and Origen (scraps only) is extraordinarily similar." This would indicate that in Gregory the Great, at least, the Augustinian and Greek traditions meet here. Anselm, Gregory and Peter Lombard are considered in M. Chenu's treatment of this question "Cur Homo? Le sous-sol d'une controverse" La theologie au douzieme siecle, (Paris, 1966), pp. 52-61. Fr. Chenu thinks that Honorius changed his mind on this matter from the Elucidarium to the Libellus VIII Quaestionum (p. 55). But M. 0. Garrigues has shown that Honorius never held that man was " pro angelo sed non pro ipso creatus ". He never belonged to the more pessimistic Augustinian tradition on this point; cf. her L'oeuvre d'Honorius Augustodunensis: Inventaire critique, unpublished Ph. D. diss., Univ. de Montreal, 1979, pp. 280-299. This is of some importance as Honorius is a main source for the Eriugenian tradition in the twelfth century. 79 De fide Catholica (PL Brevis Fidei Christianae Complexio), last sentence (PL 64,1828). 80 Cur Deus Homo, 1,16-18 (PL 158,881-889). 81 Sent. lib. II,d.l c.9 (PL 192,654) . s2 In II Sententiarium, d.l,q.2,a.8 (Mandonnet, pp. 49 ff.). ST II, prol. cites John of Damascus as the source of his view of man. See also ST 1,98,5 obj. 2 and l,98,9 and R. Southern, Medieval Humanism and Other Studies (Oxford, 1970), p. 50. 390 WAYNE J. HANKEY that man makes up the number of the angels who fell with Satan. In Anselm and Gregory tijis is indeed said to be the reason for his creation. The much more positive view of man in Eriugena, his twelfth century followers, like Honorius Augustodunensis, and in St. Thomas emphasizes rather the human affirmative relation to the sensible creation and man's freedom. 83 In this the dominant influence comes from the Greek fathers. 84 Man's place at the bottom of the ladder of spiritual creatures is seen positively because, as in Eriugena, his knowing is the source of their being, and his redemption the basis of their return to God. In Thomas, man's knowing is also suited to the sensible world so that his body becomes essential, not only to his communication with all other reality, but even for his knowledge of himself .85 We have seen how the Proclan-Dionysian Neoplatonism is at work in this development. Further, the sensible world provides the sphere in which man shows his freedom. As its governor, he stands to it as God stands to the whole of creation and so he is seen as the image of God. 86 It is for him. On this account, the eternal raising up of the sensible world is also related to man. " Because the bodily creation is finally ordered to be in accord with the state o.f man ... it will be necessary for it to have a participation in the light of his glory.'' 87 The sensible 83 Confer note 73 above and M. Chenu "Nature and Man-the Renaissance of the Twelfth Century'', NatU?·e, Man and Society, pp. 1-48 and R. D. Crouse, "Intentio Moysi ", 146 ff. 84 G. Lafont, Structures et methode dans la somme theologique de saint Thomas, Textes et etude theol., (Bruge/Paris, 1961), pp. 192 fl'. J. Pelikan, "Imago Dei, An Explication of Summa Theologiae l,93 ", Calgary Aquinas Studies, ed. A. Parel (Toronto, 1978), pp. 27-48; P. Faucon, Aspects neoplatoniciens. 85 ST I,87,1. 8 6 Confer note 20 above and ScG III,!: " Quaedam namque sic a Deo producta sunt ut, intellectum habentia, ejus similitudinem_gerant et imaginem repraesentent; unde et ipsa non solum aunt directa, sed et seipsa dirigentia secundum proprias actiones in debitum finem. . .." The difference between the freedom and ruling of God and of man is indicated structurally in the Summa Theologiae by placing the treatment of man's nature in the de Deo under creation while his operations go into the Second Part. God's nature and operation are treated together. 87 ScG IV, 97 and Compendium Theologiae I. 169-170. THE PLACE OF THE PROOF J'-OR Gon's EXISTENCE 391 world has become something separate from man but their interrelation requires its resurrection with him. The proof of God's existence is necessitated by the position of man descended into the temporal, sensible world and turning toward it in order to rise out of it. Theology evidently needs this rise in order to make its beginning intelligible to man, for it starts with God, and is addressed to this humble creature separated from the intelligible world. But it is not because theology is human science that man has a crucial place in it. Man's place and role are objectively ghnen. Because theology is primarily the knowledge of God and those who have the vision of him, man's crucial role is determined by the structure of reality. The movement from both God and man which creates the rhythm and structure of the Summa Theologiae is a reflection of the inner rhythm and structure of reality. Not only is the whole a movement from God to material creation and back through man, but this pulse of going out and return runs through the individual parts of the work. The Neoplatonists gave this form to the Aristotelian notion of activity or pure act 88 by which Thomas understands God, and he and they both regard this activity as a kind of motion. 89 This motion structures the five ways of the proof, which allows us some understanding of God's being, just as it orders the proof that he is the first cause in each of the four senses of cause, with which the treatment of creatures begins.90 In both cases the causes are arranged in a way never used by Aristotle.91 Thomas begins with the source of motion and concludes 88 S. E. Gersh, A Study of Spiritual Motion in the Philosophy of Proclus, (Leiden, 1975), pp. 4 and 181. 89 ST l,9,1 ad 1 and ad 2, ST l,18,3 ad 1; ST l,19,1 ad 3: ScG 1,13. Confer. M. Jordan, "The Grammar of Ease", The Thomist 44 (1980), 1-26 and my "Aquinas's First Principle", 169-170. 90 ST1,44. 91 Compare Physica Il,3,194b-195a3: In Octo libros Physicorum Aristotelis Expositio, ed. P. M. Maggiolo (Turin/Rome, 1965), II,v,178-181; Physica Il,7,198a 1-14: In Physicorum Il,xi,241; Metaphysica l,3,983a 24-32: In Metaphysicorum l,iv,70; Metaphysica Il,2,994a 19-994b 27: In Meta. 11,ii, 300-301; Metaphysica, V,2,1013a 24-1018b3: In Meta. V,ii,763,764,765 and 771. 392 WAYNE J,·HANKEY with final cause, so that there is a return to the motionless beginning. 92 Between these two opposed causes are placed, first, the material cause, and then, the formal. The reduction of the material cause to God shows that there is no barrier to his efficacy. The formal is linked to the final, as the moving end is the good as known and perfected in form, here the divine essence itself .93 Thus, the being which God is, is said to return to itself. 94 The treatment of the divine substance, questions two to eleven, passes out from the consideration of his simplicity, to his infinity and being in all things, and back again to his unity. 95 The treatment of his operations moves from intellect, the most undivided spiritual relation, to truth, which requires a reflection on intellection, in that to be truth knowing must know that it knows its object, to will, which is differentiated from knowledge just because the possession of the object known is also desired, to power, by which things outside the self are made, back again to happiness, which belongs to self-conscious beings when knowing and its object are fully in accord. Happiness is primarily an attribute of the self-knowing knower. Similarly, the Trinity involves a real relation, distinction, procession and movement by which the Father generates the Son and both are united in the Spirit. 96 Bernard Lonergan has shown how the questions on the Trinity as a whole describe 92 The doctrine that God remains in himself when he moves upon himself in love and knowledge is found in Dionysius; cf. In de div. nom. IV,vii,369; IV,viii,390; IV,x,439; IV,xi,444. It is worked out systematically in Eriugena. Thomas probably has the doctrine from Dionysius but I try to show in "Aquinas's First Principle" 170, n. 197 that he might also know a portion of De Divisione N aturae containing the notion. 93 ST 1,19,l ad 2. 94 ST 1,14,3 ad 1. 95 This is the argument of my "The Structure of Aristotle's Logic and the Knowledge of God in the Pars Prima of the Summa Theologiae of Thomas Aquinas'', Sprache und Erkenntnis im Mittdalter, Miscellanea Medievalia, ed. A. Zimmerman, 13/2, (Berlin/New York, 1981), pp. 961-968. 96 See my "The Place of the Psychological Image", 107 and "Aquinas's First Principle", 165-166. THE PLACE OF THE PROOF FOR Goo's EXISTENCE 393 a circle beginning in the processions, which come out of the internal operations, and passing on to the plurality of the distinct persons, returning to the original unity in the notional acts, which are the same as the processions. 97 Beyond the divine comes creation, which moves from the spiritual to material creatures and their unity in man. A sim,ilar structure is found within the elements of these parts as well.98 The very being of God, arrived at by the proofs as the motion from below meets that from a;bove, is manifested as being which returns to itself. God's being is self-relation and consequently knowledge, love, creative power and Trinitarian procession. The proof of God's existence is crucial in Thomas because it begins that movement from below, from man to God, which is essential to theology. The proof stands at the beginning but it is not a ladder which is then pushed away; it remains present in the content and structure of what follows. And does it not remain necessary for theology? For it follows first from the religious need of man altogether descended into the world of time and place, and then, from the freedom which belongs to man's growing secularity and scientific progress. Proclus and Iamblichus held the former because any other view is " inconsistent with the facts of human sin and misery." 99 A view we can have no less grounds to adopt. The movement of human freedom towards a secular natural science, which Thomas urged forward with his acceptance of Aristotle, has hardly diminished. It may be that theologians no longer think we can move through nature to God by means of Aristotle. But if this be so, some new means for the same journey must be provided. WAYNE J. HANKEY University of King's College Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada 97 Verbum: Word and Idea in Aquinas, ed. D. B. Burrell, (Notre Dame, 1969), pp. 206-207. 98 See my " The Structure of Aristotle's Logic ''. 99 E. R. Dodds, Elements, p. 809 summarizing Iamblichus according to Proclus In Tim. I c. KNOWING PERSONS AND KNOWING GOD I AM GOING TO propose an account of affirming God's existence which runs counter to a prominent trend in recent philosophy of religion, a trend which defends the meaningfulness of theism by either giving up the concept of God's existence as a category mistake or defining it in terms of the practical value the idea has for religious life. Such defenses are reductionist. They reduce the meaning of ' God exists ' to its functions within what they variously call ' religious language,' the ' religious language game,' or the ' religious form of life.' 1 I, too, want to defend theistic thought and life, but I do not believe that the reductionist defenses work.2 In another paper, 3 1 I have in mind especially the following: R. B. Braithwaite, "An Empiricist's View of the Nature of Religious Belief," The Philosophy of Religion, ed. Basil Mitchell (Oxford, 1971), 72-91. Paul Holmer, "Language and Theology: Some Critical Notes," Harvard Theological Review, LVIII, S (July, 1965), 242-261; "The Nature of Religious Propositions," Religious Language and the Problem of Religious Knowledge, ed. Ronald E. Santoni (Bloomington, 1968); " Wittgenstein and Theology," Refiection, Vol. 65, 4 (1968). Gordon Kaufman, God the Problem (Cambridge, Mass., 1972). See especially chapter 5. D. Z. Phillips, The Concept of Prayer (London, 1965); Faith and Philosophical Enquiry (New York, 1971). P. F. Schmidt, Religious Knowledge (New York, 1961). Elmer Sprague, Metaphysical Thinking (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978). Paul van Buren, The Edges of Language: An Essay in the Logic of Religion (New York, 1972); "Anselm's Formula and the Logic of God," Religious Studies, vol. 9 (1973), 279-288. 2 Many have said as much, but few have argued the case. Kai Nielsen is a notable exception. See his "Wittgensteinian Fideism," Philosophy, Vol. 42 (1967). More frequently one encounters an off-handed rejection of reductionism, as in Patrick Sherry's Religion, Truth, and Language Games (London, 1977) where he notes that " ... it often seems as if Phillips is reducing God to a concept or to some 394 KNOWING PERSONS AND KNOWING GOD 395 I argued that while claiming to leave the practice of theistic religion as it is, reductionist views would, when integrated into believers' lives, lead to so fundamental a change in religious life that instead of defending they would undermine or, as Ninian Smart put it, cause a " colossal revolution " in faith. 4 Be that as it may, I also believe that the reductionist defenses of the uses and meaning of religious language do not take their analytic and phenomenological task sufficiently seriously when it comes to the meaning of affirming God's existence. They attend to other functions of religious language without examining the sense affirming God's existence actually has in the practice of theistic faith. They view religions as complex forms of life organized by peculiar language systems, conceptual schemes, or models which perform practical functions for believers. We have learned much from the concern with the uses of religious language, but the question about God's existence persists. In this paper I shall argue that affirming God's existence is a necessary part of theistic religion and that the affirmation follows the logic of the most certain affirmation of existence we make, viz. affirmations of the existence of human individuals or persons. That being so, if it is rational to affirm the existence of persons, it is rational to affirm the existence of God. In order thus to support the rationality of affirming God's existence, I will develop four main theses: (1) that practicing theistic religion presupposes the idea of God as a personal or suprapersonal individual; (2) that the actual practice of theism involves affirming the existence of God in a sense of existence appropriate to such finite individuals as human persons; (3) that affirming the existence of human persons takes place through an act which attributes intentions and values to something encountered in action; (4) that affirming God's existence follows the same logic as affirming the existence of persons. aspect of the world. . . ." (p. 53) . See also Ninian Smart in The C<>ncept of Worship (New York, 197!'l). 3 "Theistic Reductionism and the Practice of Worship," The International Journal for Philosophy of Religi<>n, Vol. X, No. 1 (Jan., 1979). 4 Ninian Smart, The Concept of Worship, p. 74. 396 EDWARD H. HENDERSON The third thesis is absolutely fundamental to my project and will occupy the greatest share of the space. Since theism conceives God in personal or suprapersonal terms, affirming God's existence should be judged by comparing it with affirming the existence of persons. When we do so in the development of the fourth thesis, we find, not that the affirmation of God's existence is as certain as that of persons, hut that when we judge the believer's affirmation of God's existence by the best knowledge we have of the existence of individuals, we see that it uses and extends rather than abuses and destroys the logic involved in our most certain affirmations of existence. I God as Suprapersonal Individual The conception of God as a suprapersonal individual defines the form through which theistic faith exists. If this claim needs defense at all, we can provide it by considering the place of worship in theism. Ninian Smart has effectively argued in The Concept of Worship " that the substantive concept of God is indissolubly linked to the practice of worship." Worship is the comprehensive activity of faith. Most if not all religious activities are activities of worship. The special objects, clothing, paraphernalia, buildings, etc., all have their religious use in relation to worship. Smart gives a lengthy list: ... prayer, worship, the sacraments, sacramental preaching, altars, communion tables, church buildings, blessings, halleluiahs, hymns, ministrations to the sick and dying, funeral services, sacred weddings, baptisms, anathemas, intercessions, masses, crucifixes, pulpits, chasubles, bands, clerical collars, prostrations, readings from the Bible, the Bible, the prayer-book, creeds, dogmas, descriptions of God, sacred narratives, Good Fridays, Christmases, saints days, places of pilgrimages-and so on. (p. 68) But at the heart of all these is worship. Even though some believers and some groups may eschew many of these elements, worship in some form remains. KNOWING PERSONS AND KNOWING GOD 397 Now, the essence of worship is personal interaction, communicative interaction with God. According to Smart's phenomenological description, worship is a "relational activity" in which the worshiper relates himself in a special way to the "Focus of Worship" (p. 44), which in the case of theistic religions is the one God. Furthermore, as a relational activity it is an activity of addressing God: " In worshiping God one addresses him .... " (p. 50) So theistic worship exists (in part) through a language of personal interaction in which one acknowledges and defers to God's unconditional superiority, recognizes his perfect knowledge, love, and will, pledges devotion and submission to him, and asks for his help in bringing such faith to fruition. The worshiper speaks to God and waits for God to speak to and to help him or her as one person helps another. That the core of theistic life treats God as personal, then, is scarcely debatable. There are, of course, special theologies and mystical views originating from theism which view God in non-personal or transpersonal terms. My point, however, is that regardless of theories about God, theistic worship exists through or by means of an interpersonal form. I hasten to add that the term ' person ' must be taken metaphorically or analogically. Because God is not personal in the very same way that human individuals are, we shall say that God is suprapersonal rather than personal. So doing will make it clear that while God includes, he also transcends the personal. The important point is that the metaphor of God as personal is not one among a variety of metaphors which can be used or not used as one sees fit-not, at least, if one is to practice faith in God. It is the very ftal responsibility and freedom, and can only properly and responsibly do what is intelligible to me, what I can do with a clear intention." s See, for instance, Warner Wick, "Kant's Moral Philosophy," in I. Kant, The Metaphysical Principles of Virtue. trans. by James Ellington (New York: BobbsMerrill, 1964), pp. xv-xvii. KANT'S DOCTRINE OF HOPE 445 The grounds for my doubt about the accuracy of the standard rendition of moral autonomy as the whole story of moral personhood arise principally from the fact that Kant found it necessary to say more about the foundations of human moral existence than what is furnished by an answer, framed in terms of autonomy, to the second of his famous triad of questions: What ought I to do? Raising and answering the third question-What may I hope?-was, for Kant, essential to the full intelligibility and critical grounding of the answers given to the prior two. 4 It is of particular relevance, both to my doubts and to my two theses, that the terms in which Kant frames an answer to the third question, and, thereby, completes the critical phase of his philosophical enterprise, are philosophical counterparts to the three Christian symbols: We are legitimately allowed to hope for the attainment of the highest good (the coming of the Kingdom of God) , which is the proper apportionment of happiness to good conduct for a universe of persons; 5 since the legitimation of our hope, moreover, is based upon an employment of reason which is critically grounded, we have assurance that our hope is not to be disappointed; we are thereby justified in having full confidence that the conditions which make possible the attainment of the highest good -God (as just Ruler and Judge) and immortality (eternal life)-are, in fact, fulfilled.6 There is a simple enough reason both for Kant's raising of the question of hope and for answering it the way he does; simple as the reason is, it is one that may strike us as odd in view of the usual identification of moral personhood with au4 Critique of Pure Reason, trans. by Norman Kemp Smith (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1929), A 805-806/B 833-834. Hereafter cited as CPR; page citations are to the marginal indices of the pagination of the 1st and 2nd editions. s CPR, A 814/B 842; see Critique of Practical, Reason, trans. by Lewis White Beck (New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1956), p. 142, for an explicit identification of the " intelligible world " with the Kingdom of God. Hereafter, the Critique of Practical, Reason will be cited as C Pract R, with pages references to Beck's translation in the Bobbs-Merrill edition. See C Pract R, p. 133, for an identification of the highest good with the Kingdom of God; CPR, A 812/B 840 for an identification of the intelligible world with a "kingdom of grace." o CPR, A 810-811/B 838-839; C Pract R, pp. 147-151. 446 PHILIP J. ROSSI, S.J. tonomy. The reason is this: Although the attainment of happiness is an essential part of moral personhood, such attainment is not ours to control. Kant makes it clear in a number of places that the attainment of happiness is a limiting condition to the moral significance of autonomy and to what we are critically justified in expecting of it. 7 As such a limit, attainment of happiness becomes an essential component of moral personhood. Autonomy, if it is properly exercised, does not bring about that attainment; it simply secures a condition for such attainment: worthiness for it. 8 In and of itself, autonomy does not secure happiness for us. A moral personhood which consisted only in the exercise of autonomy would be for Kant an admirable one, according to the measure with which he admires the Stoics; it would, nonetheless, be a truncated one, for it would lack its proper completion: the attainment of happiness. 9 By holding that the attainment of happiness is not within human power to effect, Kant has placed a limit upon autonomy's role in determining the essential character of human moral personhood. This limit, moreover, is not an accidental one; it has its ground in the character of autonomy as an exercise of reason in its proper human modality: finite reason. The finitude of reason is made manifest for its theoretical and practical uses in the guise of " givenness." For the theoretical use of reason, there is the givenness of sense; 10 for the 7 E.g., C Pract R, p. 133: "But the moral law does not of itself promise happiness, for the latter is not, according to the concepts of any order of nature, necessarily connected with obedience to the law "; cf. also C Pract R, p. 117; CPR, A 810/B 838. s C Pract R, p. 134: "Therefore morals is not really the doctrine of how to make ourselves happy, but of how we are to be worthy of happiness"; cf. CPR, A 808809/B 837-838. 9 For Kant's discussion of virtue and happiness as the completion of moral personhood, cf. C Pract R, pp. 114-115. For his attitude toward the Stoics, cf. C Pract R, pp. 131-134; e.g., "Thus they really lift out of the highest good the second element [personal happiness] since they placed the highest good only in acting and contentment with one's own moral worth including it in the consciousness of moral character." 10 " Givenness " in the mode of sensibility is suggested as a mark of finite reason by the remarks Kant make3 about the character of intellectual intuition as original, CPR, B KANT'S DOCTRINE OF HOPE 447 practical use of reason, there is the givenness of freedom as a " fact " and of the structure of desire as it is ordered to the attainment of happiness. 11 Kant's insistence upon the finite character of human reason, even in what for us is its sole constitutive use, the practical, is at least a faint philosophical echo of the Christian doctrine of creaturely dependence. It becomes a deafening roar, however, in contrast to the views of Hegel, for whom givenness is a scandal.12 It is Hegel, much more than Kant, who should be considered herald and prophet of the rendition of moral autonomy which beguiles us: human destiny under human control. If it is correct to characterize human moral autonomy as finite, i.e., as subject to givenness both in its form, as freedom, and in being ordered, as will, toward completion in the attainment of the highest good, then we have located one of the fundamental grounds in support of my first thesis. History, community, and the worship of God can all be understood as features essential for the foundation and the significance of moral agency in human life inasmuch as they are each forms under which the :finitude of reason in its practical use is concretely acknowledged. In human history, we find the concrete accrual of an abiding moral identity, whose completion in the moral future is represented under the form of hope in immortality .13 In human moral community, the mutual recognition of the moral agency of each and all constitutes the shared world 11 Cf. O Pract R, pp. 81, 48; Critique of Judgment, trans. by J. H. Bernard (New York: Hafner, 1951), pp. 8!i!0-8!i!l, for the givenness of freedom as a" fact" of reason. The givenness of the structure of desire as it is ordered to the attainment of happiness provides one of the grounds on which the antinomy of practical reason is generated; cf. 0 Pract R, pp. 114-115; ll 7-l!i!4. 12 This is the interpretation I make of Hegel's project of overcoming immediacy in all its forms, starting with the immediacy of sense-certainty. 13 C Pract R, pp. HW-l!i!S; cf. Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone, trans. by Theodore M. Greene and Hoyt H. Hudson, 3rd ed. revised and with an essay by John R. Silber (New York: Harper and Row, 1960), pp. 60-61, in which Kant ties moral identity more concretely to the life history of the person. Hereafter this work will be cited as Rdigion, with page references to the Greene and Hudson kanslation. 448 PHILIP J. ROSSI, S.J. of mutual respect and moral interdependence which alone makes concrete moral judgment and action possible.14 In the steadfastness of hope in the attainment of the highest good as the summation of human moral community and history, there is the proper worshipful acknowledgment of a God who is transcendent, at least in terms of the final moral ordering and completion of the universe of human persons. 15 The placement of Kant's notion of autonomy into its essential relations to history, community and the acknowledgment of God enables us to see more clearly his intent in devising a doctrine of hope: it ensures that he has given an account of the foundation for the full range of human moral existence. As the usual rendition gets played, all that he seems seriously interested in accounting for is the foundation for the moment of decision which stands at the center point of human moral existence. 16 The details of Kant's doctrine of hope indicate that his account of moral decision, which puts it on a footing justified in terms of reason's critically founded use, is part of a larger concern about human moral conduct: its efficacy in terms of human moral destiny. Kant speaks of such concern, in connection with the question about hope, in terms of reason's "interest." The focus of reason's interest upon the efficacy of moral conduct comes about because, in Kant's view, surety about our capacity for responding to reason's moral demand-i.e., surety about our freedom-which his critical account has shown we are justified in having, brings us no corresponding surety about what will come about morally from conduct governed by this 14 I take this to be the point of Kant's talk of a "kingdom of ends" and of our elevation, through the acknowledgment of the moral law, to an intelligible "world." 15 C Pract R, pp. 135-136. 16 Iris Murdoch has summed up well the picture of decision as the center of moral existence: " Stripped of the exiguous metaphysical background which Kant was prepared to allow him, this man is with us still, free, independent, lonely, powerful, rational, responsible, brave, the hero of so many novels and books of moral philosophy." "On 'God' and 'Good'" in The Sovereignty of Good, p. SO. KANT'S DOCTRINE OF HOPE 449 response. 11 Kant does not doubt that the latter surety is required by reason in its practical use: it is required in virtue of the ordering of desire to the attainment of happiness. Since, on Kant's view, reason functions to represent totality, the surety which is required to satisfy reason's interest in the moral efficacy of human conduct and, thereby, to ground hope, concerns the good outcome of the totality of human moral conduct.18 Kant's concern for the autonomy of an agent's moral decision is at least equally a concern for the moral destiny of all humanity, if not, in fact, a function of it. There are two aspects of this concern for the moral destiny of all humanity which deserve attention in the context of this paper's theses. The first is that this concern can be understood to arise from a feature of Kant's account of the exercise of human freedom which the standard picture of his moral philosophy often ignores or misinterprets: freedom's essential ordering to the service of human mutuality. The second is that Kant's presentation of this concern provides the basis for the proposal made by my second thesis; it does so inasmuch as this presentation functions as an acknowledgment of the finitude of human moral endeavor and, consequently, as an element which has the power to shape our expectations about the fulfilment of human destiny. As I have already noted, and shall note again at the conclusion of this paper, the expectations shaped by Kant's concern for human destiny have a fundamental congruence with expectations shaped by those Christian convictions and practices which acknowledge that human moral existence takes form in the presence of a God who is transcendent. I shall bring to completion this paper's case for my two theses by explicating in more detail what I take to be the import of 11 This is put succinctly as a question in ReUgion, p. 4: "What is to result from this right conduct of ours? " 18 Kant gives one expression to this concern by noting, in Religion, p. 54, that " Mankind (rational earthly existence in general) in its complete moral perfection is that alone which can render a world the object of a divine decree and the end of creation." 450 PHILIP J. ROSSI, S.J. these two aspects of Kant's concern for human moral destiny. The first aspect is that Kant's concern for human moral destiny, which is presented in his doctrine of hope, arises from human freedom's essential ordering to the service of human mutuality, i.e., to the fashioning of a shared world, and of practices by which we share of ourselves, for the attainment of good for one another. I do not propose to defend in detail here the claim that Kant's account of freedom can be undersfood to involve, as an essential element, such ordering to mutuality. I merely wish to show that the concern which his doctrine of hope shows for the totality of human moral destiny suggests the possibility of this interpretation; it suggests the possibility of this interpretation inasmuch as the origin of this concern can be traced back to reason's fundamental "interest" in the construction of a" world": in the field of human action, reason's world-constructing interest is manifest in the exercise of human freedom, and the "world" which reason seeks to construct can be understood to be constituted by the conditions which make for an rubiding community of human moral agents. In Kant's view, therefore, a concern for human destiny in its totality does not arise from mere chance or curiosity; it arises, rather, because the exercise of freedom in human conduct makes us pose the question of hope in terms which can he satisfied only by the accomplishment of a shared and common human destiny. Thus, the connection Kant makes between the exercise of freedom in human conduct and the origin of hope provides a basis for understanding freedom as essentially ordered to the service of mutuality. This connection is made most dearly in Kant's discussions of the object of the hope to which freedom gives rise; Kant designates this object as " the highest good." The specification he gives to the highest good indicates freedom's ordering to mutuality: the hope to which the exercise of my freedom gives rise is that my conduct will effect the attainment of abiding good, not for myself alone, but for each and all who exercise freedom. Kant's discussion of the highest good makes it clear that KANT'S DOCTRINE OF HOPE 451 even though the question of hope is formulated as singular and personal, it is, nonetheless, more fundamentally about a common and shared human destiny. Kant does not doubt that the -singular and personal good which freedom gives me hope of attaining can be conceived only as the satisfaction of my human cravings; yet his account of hope clearly places the attainment of my singular and personal good in the context of a moral future constituted by the title we each and all can claim to membership in an abiding moral community. This context indicates that, as Kant conceives of hope, its origin can be only in the exercise of freedom as it is ordered to the service of mutuality. Although Kant makes it quite clear that hope has its origin in freedom, commentators have only recently started to note that the freedom which giv,es rise to this hope is ordered to mutuality. 19 The picture which Kant provides of the moral future through his concept of the highest good and his doctrine of hope is that of the full attainment of human community. He speaks of this community in images which make clear its public and shared character: a "kingdom of ends," an " ethical commonwealth," even a" kingdom of grace." 2° Kant's account of the highest good indicates that he sees this future as possible only insofar as our conduct is shaped through the exercise of freedom which keeps the attainment of mutuality constantly m view. There are a number of ways in which Kant's analysis of human conduct takes note of freedom's ordering to the service of human mutuality. A presentation of some of these ways will 19 See, for instance Yirmiahu Yovel, Kant and the Philosophy of History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980), pp. 53-54; 64-66; Wood, Kant's Mora/, Religion, pp. 57-60; 74-78. Yovel, it should be noted, would not find this ordering to mutuality a basis for an affirmation of God. 20 The most familiar of these terms is "kingdom of ends" found, for example in Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals, trans. by H. J. Paton (New York: Harper and Row, 1964), pp. 100-10!!.!. The expression "ethical eommonwealth" appears in Religion, pp. 88-91; " kingdom of grace" appears in CPR, A 81!!.!/B 840 (das Reich der Gnades); A 815/B 843 (reg1mm gratiae). 452 PHILIP J. ROSSI, S.J. indicate how a concern for a shared and common human destiny arises from the exercise of freedom as it is ordered to mutuality. Kant indicates, for instance, that the exercise of freedom places us into an intelligible "world "-into a connected and ordered totality of relations to the moral agency of each and all who constitute human moral community. Kant provides a description, in Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone, of the process of making moral judgments; this description suggests one way in which he takes this process to be a function of our capaJbility for representing an interconnected world of human agents shaping their conduct through the exercise of freedom: Take a man who, honoring the moral law, allows the thought to occur to him (he can scarcely avoid doing so) of what sort of a world he would create, under the guidance of practical reason, were such a thing in his power, a world into which, moreover, he would place himself as a member. He would not merely make the very choice which is determined by the moral idea of the highest good, were he vouchsafed solely the right to choose; he would also will that [such] a world should by all means come into existence (because the moral law demands that the highest good possible by our agency should be realized) and he would will so even though, in accordance with this idea, he saw himself in danger of paying in his own person a heavy price in happiness-it being possible that he might not be adequate to the [moral] demands of the idea, demands which reason lays down as conditioning happiness. Accordingly he would feel compelled by reason to avow this judgment with complete impartiality, as though it were rendered by another and yet, at the same time, as his own; whereby man gives evidence of the need, morally effected in him, of also conceiving a final end for his duties, as their consequence. 21 Our freedom, as Kant here describes its exercise in moral decisions, functions to place us in a world constituted in its moral character by relations of mutuality; these relations are of a particular kind: they are the ones which make it possible for persons to render impartial judgment upon one another's con21 Religion, p. 5. KANT'S DOCTRINE OF HOPE 453 duct. It is particularly important to note that these relations of mutuality do not have as a prior condition an acknowledgment by an individual moral agent just of one's own freedom, as if it were grounded independently of the mutual acknowledgment of human freedom which is effectively rendered by submitting to such impartial judgment. Such a prior condition would seriously misconstrue the character of freedom; it would keep us from seeing that the acknowledgment which I make of my own freedom can take place only in the context of the mutual acknowledgment of freedom which is a constitutive element of moral community. There is a picture of human freedom which denies it this character of mutual acknowledgment-the human agent in lofty and lonely moral solitude at the moment of decisionand, as I have pointed out above, this picture has been mistakenly attributed to Kant. If attention is paid to the connection Kant makes between human freedom and the hope such freedom engenders in human destiny, then the correct picture emerges: the exercise of human freedom in a moral decision to shape conduct is our precise point of contact with one another in mutuality, and it promises us full participation in human community. This description of moral decision is not the only place in which Kant suggests that freedom is ordered to mutuality. There are other discussions in which Kant uses terms which presuppose that there is a shared and interconnected character to the prospect which is opened up to us by the exercise of freedom-a " world " or a " kingdom" of which we find ourselves members. 22 It is in virtue of this participation in a shared world, which is constituted in and by human freedom in human action, that the " interest " of reason manifest in that exercise of freedom gains its focus upon human destiny. This prospect and this focus do not seem to open up for the agent 22 See, for instance, 0 Pract R, pp. 85; 89-90; 109-110; Religion, p. 86; Critique of Judgmont # 86, pp. 292-298. 454 PHILIP J. ROSSI, S.J. whose moral autonomy is pictured as the loneliness of the moment of moral choice. If, therefore, we render moral personhood solely in terms of autonomy as it is pictured in the standard rendition of Kant, there can be no adequate basis for satisfying this interest of reason. Awareness of our autonomy as it is exercised in the making of decisions does not provide surety about the outcome of our personal moral history, and even less about the outcome of the moral history of the human race. What does provide this surety proves ironic in view of the implications frequently drawn from the Kantian doctrine of autonomy: surety is here provided by an acknowledgment of a fundamental sense in which human destiny is not under human control. Human reason, when it confronts itself with the question of human destiny, can have surety about the good outcome of right conduct only if it represents that outcome under the form of hope: the outcome waits upon, and we must await it from, a God who has appointed that destiny and who is to be trusted to bring it to completion. 23 Now that I have proposed grounds which I hope are sufficient to raise doubt about the usual rendition of Kant's account of human moral personhood, and which I think open the way for interpreting Kant along the lines proposed in my first thesis, let me now turn to a consideration of the second aspect of Kant's concern for human moral destiny which I noted earlier: its function as an acknowledgment of the finitude of human moral endeavor and, thereby, its power to shape our expectations of human destiny. This consideration will also explicate the basis on which I offer my second thesis that the efforts to provide a philosophical foundation for the enterprise of Christian ethics can take focus upon our expectations of human destiny. Kant's doctrine of hope, which is the formal philosophical rendering of his concern for human destiny, provides the basis for this thesis, inasmuch as this doctrine makes the critical 23 CPR, A 810-811/B 838-839. KANT'S DOCTRINE OF HOPE 455 measure of our expectations for the accomplishment of our human destiny to be our acknowledgment of human finitude; expectations shaped in accord with this critical measure are thereby able to stand in congruence with expectations about human moral destiny which are shaped by those Christian convictions and practices by which we acknowledge that our human existence takes form before the face of a just, transcendent God. To see how this is so, we need to recall that Kant's doctrine of hope is of a piece with his overall critical enterprise of marking out the limits of the exercise of human reason. Kant's doctrine of hope, moreover, is a capstone for this enterprise: at the limits of the exercise of our reason, hope enables us to comport ourselves properly in the face of a fundamental truth of human existence; we would not be able to justify such comportment were the limits to reason's exercise not acknowledged. This truth is about our mortality and our finitude: left to our own devices, our deepest human cravings go unsatisfied, as they have done for the numberless generations before us. In the face of this truth, freedom nonetheless gives rise to hope as the proper mode of human comportment before it: we are allowed to expect the abiding satisfaction of our deepest cravings, provided we shape our existence with one another to the full achievement of an abiding moral community. 24 Freedom gives rise to this hope on the basis of its-i.e., freedom's-ordering to mutuality. This hope is the most radical expression of reason's world constructing interest; in accord with it, we are required to shape our conduct in congruence with the conditions which have the power to constitute the moral world in its full reality and accomplishment. Kant denotes this world and its conditions as the" things of faith": the highest good, the Being of God, and the immortality of the soul.. Kant's doctrine of hope, therefore, proposes that we give proper shape to our expectations of human moral destiny in 24 C Pract R, pp. 128-124; IS!!-184; Religion, pp. 89; 91-9!!. 456 PHILIP J. ROSSI, S.J. consequence of the limits which his critical enterprise requires us to place upon the exercise of human reason. These expectations take their definite form in accord with the possibility which the critical enterprise has delimited in regard to our conduct's power to effect an abiding moral community. The critical enterprise delimits this possibility in terms of an assent to the "things of faith": as long as we persist in expecting our conduct to effect an aibiding moral world-and we do so persist hy fashioning our conduct in accord with freedom's ordering to mutuality as it is manifest in the demands of the categorical imperative-we thereby also give assent, in our conduct, to the " things of faith," which stand as conditions for our conduct's effecting that world.25 Kant thus depicts assent to the " things of faith" as inseparable from our human fidelity and persistence in moral endeavor. This fidelity to moral endeavor has usually been rendered in terms of the conscientiousness of the individual moral agent; in its most common philosophical rendering, moreover, such conscientiousness has been depicted in terms of a formal account of the structure of human moral decision. Such a formal account of the structure of human moral decision-particularly when it is taken as a part of a picture of human destiny under human control-is not an especially apt locus on which to attempt to set a philosophical foundation for Christian ethics. It is correct, therefore, for the standard versions of Kant's moral philosophy to take his doctrine of moral autonomy to be at odds with certain fundamental Christian convictions rubout human moral existence in the face of God's transcendence-correct, that is, if moral autonomy is rendered as a formal account of the structure of human decision in a world in which human destiny is under human control. The placement of moral autonomy within the context of 25 Critique of Judgment, # 87, pp. 801-304; # 91, pp. 3!M-3!?5; Lectures on Philosophicrd Theology, trans. by Allen W. Wood and Gertrude M. Clark (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1978), p. U!!. See Wood, Kant/a M<>raJ, Religion, pp. 31-3!!. KANT'S DOCTRINE OF HOPE 457 Kant's account of hope, however, suggests otherwise: fidelity to, and persistence in, moral endeavor, which Kant makes the requisite context for sustaining hope and for assenting to the " things of faith," offer the possibility for a quite different interpretation of human moral autonomy. Kant's stress upon persistence in moral endeavor as the context for sustaining hope allows us to read his account of mornl autonomy in terms of freedom's ordering to mutuality: what enables each of us to persist in moral endeavor is not-as much contemporary wisdom, relying upon accounts of the formal structure of moral decision, would have it-principally the conviction of the (rational) unassailability of my decision; what enables each of us to persist in moral endeavor is, rather, the conviction that the abiding success of even my own individual moral endeavor is entrusted not to my hands alone, but to the hands of others as well, and that this success is not to be measured solely in terms of the outcomes I can come to know in the span of my days. In simplest terms, Kant's doctrine of hope enables us to interpret his account of moral autonomy along these lines and thereby to render it congruent with a Christian picture of human moral existence as an anticipation of God's grace, insofar as the doctrine of hope requires that we interpret moral autonomy from the perspective of a shared moral future. Hope in the accomplishment of a shared moral future gives present moral endeavor the shape of mutuality: we are to comport ourselves to one another in trust that we each and all exercise our freedom for the accomplishment of that future. 26 Kant did not himself clearly mark out the full significance of comporting ourselves with such trust: in that trust, we find that fundamental exercise of human freedom which makes moral endeavor possible; such trust shows freedom to have its ground in our human mutuality and interdependence. . Kant's doctrine of hope thus enables us to gain sight of our 26 See CPR, A 808-811/B 886-889. 458 PHILIP J, ROSSI, S.J. freedom's grounding in mutuality by reminding us that our expectations for the accomplishment of our human destiny have their proper focus upon the shared character of the moral future. In bringing our attention to bear upon this feature of human moral existence, Kant's doctrine of hope offers a promising ground on which to set a philosophical foundation for the work of Christian ethics. This is so because this feature renders us open to a perspective on human moral existence which has its most fundamental ground in Christian belief and practice. In accord with those beliefs and practices, human freedom's ordering to, and grounding in, mutuality and interdependence serves as a sign of and pointer to the most fundamental ground constituting human moral existence: God's own mutuality of shared life, expressed in the Christian symbol of Trinity. God's own mutuai.ity serves as foundation for Christian ethics in that it is the enabling power for human freedom and, as freely bestowed gift, it accomplishes for us in full the abiding achievement of that mutuality which is our human destiny. PHILIP Marquette University Milwaukee, Wisconsin J. Rossi, S.J. IS NOMINALISM COMPATIBLE WITH TRUTH? A NOTE I F " TRUE " applies as straightforwardly to things like diamonds and friends as it does to statements, the answer to the above question is " no ". But as against the received view and for the reasons which follow, I here argue that " true " does apply to the former in an as underived a sense as it applies to the latter. How this falsifies nominalism becomes clear as soon as it is shown how the underived truth of things, " ontological truth " as it is sometimes called, implies that universals exist. Supporting the view of those medieval realists who denied that expressions of the sort "true gold " are derivative from the sense of " true " in " true statement ",1 I contend, first, tha;t the standard argument for the view that " true " applies primarily to statements alone (call this the reductionist view) is unsound. Then, in two separate arguments I argue that that same reductionist view is in fact false. Finally, I show how the underived concept of ontological truth implies that universals exist and hence that nominalism is false. To begin, then, what I take to be the standard argument for the reductionist view runs like this: Since, say " Y is a true diamond" implies but is not implied by " It is true that Y is a diamond", it follows that "true" in the latter sense of the term (i.e. in the sense of what is said) , must be the logically primary sense of "true", in which case "true" as ascribed to diamonds as well as to other things constitutes a secondary, 1 According to St. Augustine, St. Anselm and St. Thomas Aquinas, the truthrelation would exist even if human beings were eliminated. They believed that things could be said to be straightforwardly true in the sense of conforming to eternal ideas in the divine intellect. 459 460 JOHN PETERSON derived sense of "true". But in that case there is really no such thing to begin with as an irreducible "truth of things". Alan White has succinctly put the argument as follows: When an X, e.g., a statement or a story, is characterized as true in virtue of what is said in it rather than for itself, such an X is a true X and only if what is said in it is true. When, on the other hand, an X, e.g., a Corgi or courage, is characterized as true other than because of what is said in it, an X is a true X if and only if according to some restrictive standards of X it is true to say that it is an X. The former use of " true" is primary. " This is a true Corgi" implies, but is not implied by, "It is true to say that this is a Corgi." To suppose that it were implied by it would commit one wrongly to holding that " This is a Corgi, but not a true Corgi " is contradictory, and also that when it is true that X is a thief, a professor or a pianist, then he is a true thief, a true professor or a true pianist. But the whole point of characterizing some X other than what is said as true is to suggest that" X" is here being used according to some restrictive standards by which not everything called by that word is, in the user's opinion, truly so called. What commonly passes for a Corgi may not be at Crufts a true Corgi; what is commonly called a rose or mahogany may not, botanically speaking, be a true rose or true mahogany. The higher our standards the more reluctant we are to allow that a certain degree of love, courage, or freedom should truly be called love, courage or freedom; it is not true love, true courage or true freedom. 2 And yet, to reflect a moment on this argument is to realize at once that what gives White free passage to deny "It is true to say that X is a Corgi " implies " X is a true Corgi " is the rather dubious assumption that we always use "true" in expressions like " true Corgi " or " true diamond " to mean that the Corgi or diamond in question is, comparatively speaking, a Corgi or a diamond of a higher quality or a Corgi or diamond to a greater degree than are other Corgis or diamonds with which we are or have been acquainted. But surely the more common case is when we use such expressions not to indicate a difference of quality or degree between Corgis, diamonds, or what have you, but rather to mark off a difference in kind. 2 Alan White, Truth (Garden City, N.Y., 1970), pp. 5-6. IS NOMINALISM COMPATIBLE WITH TRUTH? 461 When, picking out a diamond from a group of imitations, a gemologist says, "This is a true diamond", he means to indicate a difference in kind between the gem he is holding and the other stones in the group. But it is just this sense of " true" with which we are here concerned, i.e. " true " in the sense of "genuine". And when" true" is used in this sense then "It is true that X is a Corgi " does indeed imply " X is a true Corgi ". Accordingly, it cannot be argued that, as applied to, say, a diamond as opposed to a statement, "true " has a non-primary sense and has that derivative sense just because " This is a true diamond " implies but is not implied by " It is true that this is a diamond." For this is simply not the case when " true " means "genuine" as opposed to "spurious". But in that case " the truth of things " has not been eliminated after all, and hence supporters of the reductionist thesis have not made their case. But not only does the reductionist view go unsupported by the foregoing argument for the reasons which have just been given, but in addition it is in fact simply fallacious. To see this, consider the following arguments: Argument I Assume that the reductionist view is true. Then: (1) The concept of a statement or proposition would necessarily be included in the definition of every secondary sense of " true ". (2) But the concept of a statement or proposition is not necessarily included in the sense which" true" has when "true" is attributed to things. (3) Hence, the assumption in question is false. In this argument the crucial step is (1). (1) is simply an exemplification of the rule, based on the definition of referential equivocity, that a secondary or derived sense of a term always includes the primary referent of that term. Take, for example, the secondary senses which " sad " and " healthy " 462 JOHN PETERSON have respectively in the phrases "sad event" and "healthy blood". Here, an event is called sad only because it is conducive to sadness in a person, while blood is called healthy only 'because it is a sign of health in an organism. It is to be noted that the secondary senses which "sad" and "healthy" have in these phrases necessarily include or have reference to (hence the term, referential equivocity) the primary or proper referent of "sad" and "healthy" respectively, namely, a person and an organism. That the primary referent of a term is necessarily included in any secondary sense of that term was pointed out by Aquinas in the context of his discussion of whether names predicated of God are predicated primarily of creatures. St. Thomas says: I answer that, in names predicated of many in an analogical sense, all are predicated through a relation to some one thing; and this one thing must be placed in the definition of them all. And since the essence expressed by the name is the definition as the Philosopher says, such a name must be applied primarily to that which is put in the definition of the other things, and secondarily to these others according as they approach more or less to the first. Thus, for instance, healthy applied to animals comes into the definition of healthy applied to medicine, which is called healthy as being the cause of health in the animal; and also into the definition of healthy which is applied to urine, which is called healthy in so far as it is the sign of the animal's health. 3 Step (2) is just the factual premise of the argument; it states, undeniably that the supposed primary referent of "true", a statement or proposition is not necessarily included in the supposed secondary senses which " true " has when " true " is attributed to things. The truth of (2) is easily shown by citing examples. When a person calls something false gold or calls something else a true diamond, he means by this and is understood to mean that the first objed falls short of the standard of goldness whereas the second object conforms to the standard of diamondhood. In these supposed secondary senses of " false " 8 St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I. Q 18. Art. 6. (Italics are mine.) IS NOMINALISM COMPATIBLE WITH TRUTH? 463 and " true " there is no reference whatsoever to anything like a proposition or a statement. But the joint truth of (1) and (2) imply (3), namely, that the reductionist thesis is false. A_ rgument II Assume that the reductionist view is true. Then, consider the following: (1) If there are pseudo-propositions, then there are genuine propositions. (2) But "true" is a synonym for "genuine" diamond " = " (as "genuine true diamond ") . (3) Hence, genuine propositions may be called true propo- sitions. ( 4) But, as attributed to propositions in (3) "true" must be used in a secondary sense. Otherwise, " true " would not mean " conforms to a fact ", which under the reductionist view it does. (4) But then, by the logic of referential equivocity, "true" in (3) must include in its de£nition the supposed primary referent of "true", namely, a proposition. (6) But no term the use of which in a given context includes its primary referent in its sense is in that context being attributed to its primary referent. (7) Hence, propositions cannot be the primary referents of "true" in (3) . (8) But (7) contradicts the assumption of the reductionist that when attributed to a proposition " true " is necessarily attributed to its primary referent. (9) Hence, if (a) there are pseudo propositions and if (h), synonyms can in all contexts be substituted the one for the other, then the reductionist thesis is inconsistent. Just because it turns on assumptions -(a) and (b) above Argument II is less elegant than is Argument I. Nonetheless, it is worth considering. The cruciral step in Argument II is (6). (6), like (I) in I, goes to the heart of referential equivocity. 464 JOHN PETERSON If something is called 0 in a secondary sense of 0, then that same something cannot in that same context be the primary referent of 0. When, say, you call a certain event sad in, of course, a secondary sense of" sad", that same thing, the event, cannot be the primary referent of " sad ". Or again, when you call walking healthy only because it is conducive to health in an organism, you must then hold that it is an organism and not walking which is the primary referent of " healthy ". If, therefore, on the assumption of the reductionist thesis, steps (I) through (6) be true, in Argument II, then (7) would follow, namely that propositions are not the primary referents of "true " in (3) . But (7) is plainly inconsistent with the nerve of the reductionist thesis that propositions or statements 4 are always and everywhere the primary referents or bearers of "true" (or "false"). Consequently, if there are such things as pseudo-propositions and if synonyms oan generally be substituted the one for the other (as "true" is substituted for "genuine" in step (8) above), then the reductionist thesis is self-contradictory. But now, if the foregoing arguments (I and II) are cogent, must it not follow that nominalism is false? For from the fact that the truth of things is underivable from the truth of statements it appears to follow that univers1als exist. This can be shown in two steps. First, if things such as nuggets of gold and diamonds are called " true " or " false " in as straightforward a sense as are statements, and if in calling such things " true " or "fialse" we mean that they either do or do not exemplify a certain standard, then, as terms of the relation of exemplification, these same standards must have some kind of ontologi. cal status. Second, that the ontological status of these same standards is that of real as opposed to conceptual existence is shown by the fact that a conceptualistic account of standards is possible only if none of our ideas are derived from experience. To see this, suppose it be granted that our ideas of goldness 1 4 The difference between propositions and statements mll.ke3 no difference here.. IS NOMINALISM COMPATIBLE WITH TRUTH? 465 and of diamondhood are derived from sense experience of individual diamonds and gold pieces (call this (D)). Suppose too that the standards of gold and diamond which are implied in the straightforward use of " true " in phrases such as " true gold" and " true diamond" are man-made and not objective standards, so that a conceptualistic rather than a realistic account of standards is true (call this (C) ) . In that case, it would be impossible for those supposed standards of gold and diamonds really to be standards after all. For quite generally, that which is the standard of x cannot be deriV'ed from or be consequent upon x. Otherwise, nonsensically, exemplifications would be prior to or would be the measure of their exemplars and not vice-versa. In other words, (C) is incompatible with (D) . Hence, unless our ideas of gold or diamonds are innate, i.e. not derived from sense experience, a conceptualistic analysis of standards is untenable. But not even the most unbridled rationalist would deny that our ideas of gold and diamonds, at least, are derived from sense experience of individual diamonds and gold pieces. Therefore, unless it be denied outright that " true " in phrases such as " true gold " l'.re used in a straightforward, underived sense (and Arguments I and II undermine 'any such denial) , it must at once be conceded that the standards which are implied by the straightforward use of " true " in such contexts exist independently of minds. JOHN PETERSON University of Rhode Island Kingston, Rhode Island WILLIAM WALLACE'S PRELUDES AND ETUDES: VARIATIONS ON THE CONTINUITY THEME T A REVIEW DISCUSSION * O THOSE OF US familiar with the thorough, solid, and traiLblaz:ing work of Father Wallace, the first impression in perusing this volume is one of deja lu. This is a correct impression. Indeed, as Father Wallace himself points out, the contents reproduce substantially studies and essays published during the past fifteen years. The exceptions to this statement 'are few: a couple of appendices providing further clarification of the author's positions about reasoning ex suppositione and additional examples of Galileo's knowledge of the fourteenth-century Parisian nominalist school; also, a brief article (1based on a 1976 conference paper) discussing Galileo's views on causality. The rest is essentially old hat (i.e., classical), even though it contains sometimes minor rewriting, small modifications, as well as attempts at supplying transitions between the various chapters and parts to make the volume unified and homogeneous. All this does NOT mean that the publication of this volume is unwelcome. Quite the contrary. As Father Wallace indicates, there are some good reasons for collecting the previously widely scattered papers in one readily available tome. Among these reasons, one can mention the following: As an aggregate, these papers " present a unified thesis about the medieval and sixteenth-century sources of early modern science" (p. ix); the volume represents a true ingathering of the author's pertinent historical diaspora, serving to set his interpretation apart from *Prelude to Galileo: Essays on Medieval and Sixteenth-Century Sources of Galileo's Thought. By WILLIAM A. WALLACE. (Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science, Volume 62.) Dordrecht, Boston, and London: D. Reidel Publishing Company, 1981. Pp. xvi + 869. Cloth $49.95, paper $28.50. 466 WILLIAM WALLACE'S PRELUDES AND :filTUDES: 467 those of his illustrious predecessors, Duhem, Maier, Koyre, Moody, and Drake; and, as a whole, the various essays fill in an important lacuna, dealing systematically with Galileo's early works, some of which are seminal for a proper understanding of Galileo's mature contribution to the modern science of motion. The sixteen chapters of greatly unequal length and substance are distributed among the four major subdivisions of the volume. These four parts deal respectively with (1) the medi.ev:il roots of sixteenth-century developments in mechanics, (2) the sixteenth-century achievement in the study of motion, (3) Galileo's crucial contributions to mechanics seen as growing out of both medieval and sixteenth-century preoccupations with the logic and physics of motion, and finally (4) an analysis and critical assessment of the historiographic contributions of Duhem, Anneliese Maier, and Ernest Moody in light of the author's own findings in his own "Etudes Galileennes." Father Wallace's fundamental thesis is prima facie both obvious and welcome to the historically minded reader; indeed it is a historical truism: Galileo Galilei did not spring fully formed out of the ahistorical head of a transcendent Zeus. Though a great genius, he was a man of his times who absorbed the kindred ideas of his predecessors and contemporaries, and it is upon these ideas that his creative spirit exerted itself. In Wallace's own words: "Galileo will never be understood either historically or philosophically, when viewed in isolation from the intellectual background out of which his scientific work emerged" (ibid.). Of course. For the historian this is almost axiomatic. It is the historian's job, however, to flesh out, to substantiate this quasi-axiom. This Wallace does admirably. Dropping Drake's approach to Galileo Studies, an approach which Wallace calls a parte post, and adopting the a parte ante perspective of Duhem, Maier, and Moody, Wallace shows convincingly, by focusing on newly available manuscript sources of Galileo's sixteenth-century notebooks which he has unearthed and dissected (cf. also Galileo's Early Notebooks: The 468 SABETAI UNGURU Physical Questions) , that Galileo's early views on motion owe their ultimate inspiration to thirteenth-century scholastics, that the views of these commentators on Aristotle were known to Galileo primarily through the intermediary of reportationes of lectures of professors at the Collegio Romano, and that realist currents of thought (primarily Thomism, Averroism, Scotism, and, in general, Renaissance Aristotelianism) played a more central role in the genesis of Galileo's nu.ova scienza than heretofore granted by those who (with Duhem, Maier, and Moody) identified nominalism as the demiurge of modern science. These conclusions represent significant enough departures from the previously inherited Galilean scholarship to make Father Wallace's contributions to Galileana essential for all serious future workers in the field. And these conclusions are presented with modesty and humility, thoughtfulness and remarkable balance in tone, features which are indeed characteristic of the man and his style. There is an aura of understatement and lack of fanfare surrounding extremely important claims, which are typically backed up with a plethora of specific textual examples, making the modesty and restraint of the claims all the more impressive. A couple of examples should make this clear. Having established that the kinematics and dynamics of seventeenth century Europe, the terminus ad quem of the medieval science of motion, are made up of two components, one mathematical, and the other physico-experimental (towards both of which the Middle Ages made essential contributions) , Father Wallace analyzes the development of mechanics to the sixteenth century, starting with the crucial contributions of Bradwardine and the Mertonians to the mathematical component mentioned above (i.e., to kinematics) . The other high points of medieval developments in mechanics take place on the Continent, chronologically first at Paris in the fourteenth century (Buridan, Albert of Saxony, Marsilius of Inghen) where Mertonian calculatory techniques are applied for the first time to real physical WILLIAM WALLACE'S PRELUDES AND :filTUDES: 469 motions (falling bodies and celestial motions); next at Padua in the mid-fifteenth century (Paul of Venice and Gaetano da Thiene) where the emphasis on dynamics is further increased by dropping the purely abstract, mathematical, kinematical concerns of a Heytesbury in favor of their application to quasireal physical, practical situations; the next steps in what may be called the increased physicalization of discussions of motion by the adoption of a progressively stronger realistic approach, at the expense of an exclusively nominalistic tendency, are again Paris, in the early sixteenth century (John Major, Jean Dullaert of Ghent, Alvaro Thomaz, and Juan de Celaja), Spain in the mid-sixteenth century (the important figure of Domingo de Soto) where the examples of natural motions offered in support of theoretical classifications cease to be imaginary and become realistic, leading to the identification of uniformly difform motion with freely falling bodies, and, finally, again Padua during the late sixteenth- and early seventeenth century (Tartaglia, Benedetti, and Francesco Buonamici) , leading directly to Galileo in whom all of these developments and traditions coalesced to bring about his unique achievement. And this is how William Wallace ends his essay describing the historical development of mechanics: In this analysis, the least that can be claimed for the movement we have been tracing throughout this essay is that it provided the point of origin, the springboard, for Galileo's distinctive, but later, contributions. . . . [T]he line of argument pursued in this study suggests a modest conclusion. Bradwardine's Trac.tatus de proportionibus and its successors laid the mathematical foundations that made the seventeenth-century accomplishment in Northern Italy a possibility. Less noticeably, perhaps, they introduced the problematic of how motions can he conceived and analyzed mathematically, and at the same time studied in nature or in artificially contrived situations. Scholasticism may have been in its death throes by the time the full solution to this problematic could be worked out, but withal the schoolmen were not completely sterile in the influences they brought to bear on its statement and eventual resolution (p. 59). Another example displaying the same distinctive lineaments comes from the essay " The Enigma of Domingo de Soto." In 470 SABETAI UNGURU this essay, Wallace looks at the historical background leading to Soto's seemingly original conception of uniformiter difformis -motion with free fall-and at Soto's statement that the distance covered in such a motion is calculable from the elapsed time by means of the Mertonian mean-speed theorem. Wallace establishes that Soto's significant achievement was an outgrowth of " a progression of schemata and exemplifications used in the teaching of physics from the fourteenth to the sixteenth centuries .... Soto's uniqueness ... consists in having introduced as an intuitive example the simplification that Galileo and his successors were later to formulate as the law of falling bodies. How Soto came to his result is a good illustration of the devious route that scientific creativity frequently follows before it terminates in a new formulation that is capable of experimental test" (p. 91). And here is Wallace's summation: The contribution of the Spamsh Dominican was not epoch-making, but it was significant nonetheless .... All of Soto's examples, of course, like those of his predecessors, were proposed as intuitive, without empirical proof of any kind. Moreover, he and Diest ... were the most venturesome in attempting to assign a precise quantitative modality to falling motion. Of the two, Soto was ... the better simplifier. He seems also to have been the better teacher, and ... he was philosophically more interested in unifying the abstract formulations of the nominalists with the physical concerns of the realists of his day. Again, he had the advantage of time and of being able to consider more proposals. The strange alchemy of the mind that produces scientific discoveries requires such materials on which to work. It goes without saying that Soto could not know all that was implied in the simplification he had the fortune to make. But then, neither could Galileo, in his more refined simplification, as the subsequent development of the science of mechanics has so abundantly proved " (p. 107) . One encounters the same careful, judicious approach and pregnant characteristics in '1Vallace'sdiscussion of" Causes and Forces at the Collegio Romano " fo which Wallace establishes the fundamental role of Mutius Vitelleschi's ideas in Galileo's early treatises: It could well be, therefore, that what has been sketched is the type of material Galileo studied after leaving the University of Pisa in WILLIAM WALLACE'S PRELUD:E1S AND ETlJDES: 471 1585, and even planned to teach in the late 1580's or early 1590's. This is not to say that the more mature development[s] of the concept of force in Galileo's writings ... or the more explicit development of Johannes Kepler . . . are the same as the ideas here presented. What these researches suggest, however, is that there are subtle connections between concepts of cause and concepts of force, and that the late sixteenth century was the period during which these sets of concepts, which had been used more or less interchangeably for centuries within the Aristotelian tradition, began to get sorted out and assume the form they now have in scientific discourse (p. rn2) . Finally, our last illustration of what is best in Wallace's historical writing comes from the essay " Galileo and the Doctores Parisienses." In this essay, Wallace assesses critically Duhem's continuity thesis and Favaro's criticism thereof in light of Wallace's own unsurpassed knowledge of the manuscript sources of Galileo's early notebooks. The result of this thorough analysis is a significant modification and historical fleshing out of the "Duhem-Favaro theses" into what may rightly be called now the Duhem-Favaro-Wallace thesis of the continuity of development between medieval and modern science. While Duhem identified Galileo's direct precursors as Jean Buridan, Albert of Saxony, and Themo Judei (the so-called Doctores Parisienses), Favaro, unconvinced of the value of historical continuity, dismissed Galileo's reference to the Parisienses in his Pisan notebooks as just youthful scholastic exercises (juvenilia) of an uncommitted, indifferent student who was merely copying indiscriminately from secondary sources, namely his professors' course notes. According to Favaro, then, the value of these youthful, unoriginal jottings for an understanding of Galileo's own original views on motion is naught. Recognizing the problems inherent in both Duhem's original thesis and in Favaro's criticism of it, Father Wallace plunges into an extraordinarily learned discussion Of the contents and sources of MS Gal 46 (containing the so-called Juvenilia in which the two references to the Parisienses appear) and establishes beyond any reasonable doubt that the writings it contains (questions on Aristotle's De caelo et mundo and De generation.e 472 SABETAI UNGURU et corruptione) are " the work of Galileo's head as well as his hand" and that they were probably composed from 1589 to 1591 on the basis of ideas extracted from the printed writings of Christophorus Clavius and Benedictus Pererius as well as from manuscript writings of professors at the Collegio Romano, chief of whom are Paulus Valla and Mutius Vitelleschi. Moreover, what is significant is that the reportationes of both Valla and Vitelleschi refer to the Parisienses in completely similar contexts to those of Galileo. This leads Wallace to his important modification of Duhem's continuity thesis in which he takes into account the valuable elements of Favaro's criticism. He thus comes up with what he calls a qualified continuity thesis which he expounds in the following terms: Viewed from the perspective of this study, ... nominalism and the Doctores Parisienses had little to do proximately with Galileo's natural philosophy or with his methodology. This is not to say that either the movement or the men were unimportant, or that they had nothing to contribute to the rise of modern science. Indeed, they turn out to be an important initial component in the qualified continuity thesis here proposed, chiefly for their development of calculation techniques that permitted the importation of mathematical analyses into studies of local motion, and for their promoting a " critical temper " that made these and other innovations possible within an otherwise conservative Aristotelianism. But Galileo was not the immediate beneficiary of such innovations; they reached him through other hands, and [were] incorporated into a different philosophy. What in fact probably happened is that the young Galileo made his own the basic philosophical stance of Clavius and his Jesuit colleagues at the Collegio Romano, who had imported nominalist and calculatory techniques into a scholastic Aristotelian synthesis based somewhat eclectically on Thomism, Scotism, and Averroism. To these . . . Galileo himself added Archimedean and Platonic elements, but in doing so he remained committed to Clavius's realist ideal of a mathematical physics that demonstrates truth about the physical universe .... What then is to be said of Favaro's critique of the Duhem thesis? An impressive piece of work, marred only by the fact that Favaro did not go far enough in his historical research, and thus lacked the materials on which a nuanced account of continuity WILLIAM WALLACE'S PRELUDES AND ETUDES: 473 could be based. As for Duhem's 'precursors,' they surely were there, yet not the precise ones Duhem had in mind, nor did they think in the context of a philosophy he personally would have endorsed. But these defects notwithstanding, Favaro and Duhem were still giants in the history of science. Without their efforts we would have little precise knowledge of either Galileo or the Doctores Parisienses, let alone the quite complex relationships that probably existed between them (pp. 233-234). Magisterial. Whatever else one can say about this essay, it is clearly a real scholarly tour ite force, appealing as it does to paleographic considerations, calendarical and chronological computations, as well as the history of chronology, and displaying, among other things, a deep knowledge of the history of printed editions of scholarly works, the history and output of the Collegio Rornano, etc., etc., all brought to bear on the Duhem-Favaro clash. It is a fascinating piece of scholarly detective work, limpid, convincing, and important. It gives Wallace's predecessors what they deserve, while modifying significantly their claims and establishing the new claims on solid foundations. It is a truly remarkable study, perhaps the piece de resistance of the entire volume, that only William Wallace could have written. Enough praises. The remainder of this essay review will deal with some of my criticisms of various aspects of Wallace's book. First is Father Wallace's pronounced tendency to use the timeless categories of the philosopher (" realist," " nominalist," "positivist," "instrumentalist," etc., etc.) when discussing historical figures to whom these stark and limpid categories do not starkly and limpidly apply. Instances of this tendency are extremely numerous. And, although these philosophical categorizations have the advantage of making things clear, pregnant, and convincing (they may also explain the inclusion of the book in a series on the philosophy of science), their disadvantage is their very tightness, neatness, and exclusiveness. Even though there is not the slightest doubt about Wallace's impressive historical credentials, one cannot help getting very often the impression that it is Wallace's philosophical hypostasis that has 474 SABETAI UNGURU the upper hand in his historical assessments and that, this being so, history serves as the illustration of basic philosophical distinctions. This, unavoidably, leads to anachronism. A case in point is supplied by Wallace's discussion of Galileo's use of reasoning ex suppositione in which some of the former's explanation is utterly anachronistic, couched as it is in terms of the differential and integral calculus (cf. p. 158, no. 7), which Galileo clearly could not "see." So, saying that Galileo " did not see this immediately" (ibid.) is less a reflection on Galileo's inability and ignorance than it is on Wallace's use of hindsight (cf. also pp. 154-155). There are also other instances in which a purist may discern a historically objectionable way of speaking (for example, on p. 103; cf. also the statement on p. 52: " ... a mathematical basis for seventeenth-century mechanics was apparent to the Mertonians [ ! ] whereas an experimental basis was not .... "). Coupled with this is Wallace's penchant for the language of anticipation in all its rich and variegated synonymy. Thus we read on p. 5 that Augustine anticipated Descartes's Cogito and on p. 6 that Peter Abelard anticipated nominalism. In these cases, the " offenses " seem merely linguistic, i.e., infelicitous ways of saying things rather than assertions involving genuine historical distortions. Still, as one goes on reading the book, one encounters again and again and at an alarmingly increasing rate of repetition the language of " adumbration," or " foreshadowing," or " preparation," or " heralding," or " anticipation," etc., etc. of later views by earlier thinkers (cf. pp. 13, 24, 25, 29, 31, 33, 37, 38, 41, 42, 44, 47, 58, 73, 90 (n. 44), 92, 104, 124 (n. 12), 135, 185 (n. 11), 231, 305-a particularly hackneyed and rebarbative example, in which the 1277 bishops of Paris and Oxford are made into the anticipators of Immanuel Kant-306, 314, etc.), in which one can clearly see a less offensive but nevertheless not innocuous form of " precursoritis." What comes to mind in all these instances is Canguilhem's statement (which I have heard from Gerard Lemaine at the I.A.S. WILLIAM WALLACE'S PRELUDES AND ETUDES: 475 in 1977) that "Le precurseur c'est celui dont on sait apres qu'il est venu avant." An obvious consequence of the book's nature is the fact that there is quite a bit of overlap between the various essays, which often leads to repetitiousness and, sometimes, to unneeded duplications and redundancies both in the text and in the bibliographic information contained in the notes. Essay #5 ("The Calculatores in the Sixteenth Century") is to a large degree an enumeration of a lengthy string of names and works, burdensomely descriptive involving little, if any, analysis of contents and ideas. (But this is, after all, what Wallace set out to do in the original article.) Essay #9 (" Galileo and the Thomists ") is again excruciatingly and wearisomely descriptive and enumerative; it is also tedious and in the nature of " overkill." The point could have been made more economically, I think. (Still, one cannot help being impressed by the great learning and thorough scholarship it displays and by its reliance on previously unresearched primary sources.) The essay seems also to be heavily repetitive. I somehow get the feeling that the table given at the end supplemented by some explanatory comments would suffice to make Wallace's point abundantly clear. It is clear from the above, then, that the quality of the essays included in the book varies; some are impressive, others merely solid. A few more critical remarks, some on rather minor points. Wallace's stated understanding of Averroes's position on the process of abstraction involved in intellection, on the relationships between the various parts of the intellect, and on the bearing these relationships have on personal immortality (pp. 1516) seems to me to be faulty, involving, at best, a serious oversimplification of a very difficult issue in both the Philosopher and the Commentator (cf. the article in the D.S.B., to which Wallace himself refers) . In discussing the dilemmas arising from the traditional understanding of Aristotle's statements on motion in Books 4 and 7 of the Physics (p. 37) , which led to Bradwardine's contributions, Wallace makes an inaccurate as- 476 SABETAI UNGURU sertion about the conditions under which the velocity of a moving body would be finite. In Essay #3 (" The Development of Mechanics to the Sixteenth Century") there seems to me to be an underrating of those elements in Aristotle's theory of motion (like the use of ratios, for example) that were themselves contributory to what will become the via moderna in discussions of motion in the fourteenth century. Essay #8, " Galileo and Reasoning Ex Suppositione," is a most enlightening piece of historico-philosophical research in which Wallace takes issue with both the Platonic and the experimentalist (hypothetico-deductivist) interpretation of Galileo's scientific methodology, advancing instead his own view that "the method utilized by Galileo ... was basically Aristotelian and Archimedean in character " (p. 129) rather than ex hypothesi, which has its modern equivalent in the hypothetico-deductive method. In spite of some minor reservations, I find Wallace's interpretation insightful and convincing; it should put to rest once and for all the one-sided, distorting approaches to Galileo, some of which, however, stubbornly refuse to die. Still, there are a number of assertions in the essay with which I cannot agree. Thus, it is not clear to me that the experiment described by Galileo in Opere 17, pp. 91-92 (see p. 157, n. 4), is one in which "sense observation" plays a decisive role (cf. p. 144). Furthermore, some cases identified by Wallace as illustrative of reasoning ex suppositione could, with equal ease and justification, be taken to be representative of reasoning ex hypothesi (cf. pp. 144-145, 154). In conclusion (and this is not a disparaging observation), the most that one can say about Wallace's own interpretation of Galileo's methodology is that it is itself a piece of historical reasoning ex supposition.e: " If this be admitted, then other aspects of Galileo's contribution follow" (p. 148) . Indeed. And this is, after all, all one can say about good, sound, convincing historical scholarship. A few more observations are needed to wrap up these critical comments. There are instances in which items are referred to in the body of the text without their inclusion in the Bibli- WILLIAM WALLACE'S PRELUDES AND ETUDES: 477 ography (or, sometimes, in any other place). Cases in point are McVaugh, 1967 (p. 32) and Weisheipl, 1963 (p. 40). The book has its share of more or less annoying typographical errors. " Themo Judaeus " (pp. 192-193, 238 n. 32) is an improper appellation, in spite of its currency, as established peremptorily by Henry Hugonnard-l1oche in his L'Oeuvre Astronomique de Themon Juif Maitre Parisien du XIV 6 Siecle (1973). Cf. ibid., p. 13, where the correct name is secured, according to manuscript sources, as Themo Judei in agreement with the medieval spelling. (The second part of the name is either a patronymic or a surname.) It does not necessarily follow that Galileo wrote, or intended to write (p. 195) , on "all the books of Aristotle's Physics" (ibid.); the supportive quotation given in n. rn (p. 236) need not be " an indication of a commentary on the eight books of the Physics" (ibid.), but only on book six: "[ea] quae dicta sunt a nobis 6° Physicorum ... " (ibid.) . Finally, the implication that the only kind of impetus fourteenth-century thinkers considered was of the self-exhausting type (p. 322) is inaccurate. In summation, Prelude to Galileo is a masterful work that documents fully the historical transition from medieval science to the science of Galileo, emphasizing the elements of continuity, consistency, and coherence between the Middle Ages and the early modern era in the natural philosophical domain. It is a work of painstaking and illuminating scholarship that clearly advances to a considerable extent, and significantly modifies, the rich field of Galilean scholarship. All workers in the field must come to grips with its important conclusions. SABETAI UNGURU University of Olclahoma Norman, 0 ldahoma BOOK REVIEWS The Existence of God. By RICHARD SWINBURNE. Oxford: Clarendon Press, $37.50. 1979. Pp. With this book Swinburne has made an excellent and important contribution to the philosophy of religion. It is much more controversial than his recent book, The Coherence of Theism, to which this is the sequel, at least in part insofar as its main issue, the existence of God, is the subject of more debate than the logical coherence of theism. Many readers will undoubtedly consider one or another part of this book mistaken, but no one interested in the philosophy of religion can afford to ignore it. Swinburne's basic idea is that, since no one has succeeded in producing an argument for or against the existence of God whose inferences are clearly valid and whose premisses are generally accepted as true by those whom the argument is intended to convince, it is reasonable to turn to weaker, inductive arguments to see whether there is sufficient evidence to render God's existence more (or less) probable than his non-existence. To this end Swinburne first devotes considerable attention (almost a third of the book) to the nature of explanation and the logic of inductive argument. In the rest of the book he examines in detail various sorts of inductive arguments for God's existence-cosmological and teleological arguments, arguments from consciousness and moral awareness, from providence, from miracles, and from religious experience-as well as the argument from evil for God's non-existence. He concludes: " On our total evidence theism is more probable than not. An argument from all the evidence in this book to the existence of God is a good P-inductive argument [an argument in which the premisses make the conclusion probable]. The experience of so many men in their moments of religious vision corroborates what nature and history shows to be quite likely-that there is a God who made and sustains man and the universe" (p. Swinburne's conclusion and the line of investigation leading to it rest heavily on a fundamental principle: "For large-scale theories [such as theism] the crucial determinant of prior probability is simplicity" (p. 53); " simplex sigillum veri (' The simple is the sign of the true ') is a dominant theme of this book " (p. 56) . This principle has been challenged in recent literature. For example, Nancy Cartwright in" The Truth Doesn't Explain Much" (American Philosophical Quarterly 17 (1981)) says " Covering law theorists [of whom Swinburne is one] tend to think that nature is wellregulated . . . I do not. . . . God may have written just a few laws and grown tired. Determinists, or whomever, may contend that nature must be simple, tidy, an object of beauty and admiration. But there is one outstanding empirical dictum in favor of untidiness: if we must make metaphysical models of reality, we had best make the model as much like our 478 BOOK REVIEWS 479 experience as possible. So I would model the Book of Nature on the best current Encyclopedia of Science; and current encyclopedias of science are a piecemeal hodgepodge of different theories for different kinds of phenomena, with only here and there the odd connecting law for overlapping domains. The best policy is to remain agnostic, or at least not to let other important philosophical issues depend on the outcome. We don't know whether we are in a tidy universe or an untidy one" (p. 161) . For those who share this view, the force of Swinburne's book will be significantly undercut from the outset. But disbelief in or even agnosticism about the simplicity of the universe is clearly at variance with the ordinary, common-sense assumption on which most men, including scientists, base their work and daily lives. And on practical grounds alone such disbelief or agnosticism seems to me a mistake. For example, some of the exciting recent research in elementary particle physics, attempting to unify theories of the electromagnetic, strong, and weak forces into a single theory and to find a single family to which quarks and leptons can both belong, is plainly driven by belief in the simplicity of nature, as physicists themselves acknowledge. (See, for example, Steven Weinberg, "Is Nature Simple?" in The Nature of the Physical Universe, ed. D. Huff and D. Prewett, N.Y., 1979; and Howard Georgi, "A Unified Theory of Elementary Particles and Forces", Scientific American M4 (1981)' 48-63.) Those who readily accept Swinburne's fundamental principle of simplicity may nonetheless feel some qualms about the way he applies it. Swinburne occasionally bases a crucial premiss in his argument solely on our intuitions about what is simple, or good, or even probable. For an example involving probability, here is part of his consideration of the argument from providence: " There are however many other worlds, which if there were no God, would be as likely to come into existence as this one. . . . To take crucial examples, the world might have been one in which the laws of nature were such that there evolved rational agents . . . with the power to hurt each other for endless time or to an infinite intensity .... It follows that the existence of our world rather than of these other worlds, the existence of which is incompatible with the existence of God, which would be equally likely with ours to occur if there is no God, is evidence that God made our world" (pp. 198-199; italics added). In view of the great importance Swinburne attaches to simplicity, such a dependence on unsupported intuition is most striking and most worrisome when it involves judgments about what is simple. -For example, in connection with his discussion of the cosmological argument, Swinburne says what could almost serve as an aphorism for the whole book: " The choice is between the universe as stopping-point and God as stopping-point [of explanation] " (p. 127) . Swinburne argues that it is more rational to accept God as the stopping-point: "There is a complexity, particularity, and fini- 480 BOOK REVIEWS tude about the universe which cries out for explanation, which God does not have ... the existence of the universe has a vast complexity, compared with the existence of God. . .. the supposition that there is a God is an extremely simple supposition; the postulation of a God of infinite power, knowledge, and freedom is the postulation of the simplest kind of person which there could be .... If something has to occur unexplained, a complex physical universe is less to be expected than other things (e.g., God)." (p. 130) For this argument, which is central to his book, Swinburne depends in the first place on our sharing his intuition that a person whose attributes are infinite is simpler than a person whose attributes are finite. Some of his readers will no doubt agree with him, feeling as Swinburne does that postulating a person with less than perfect freedom or power, for example, raises a difficulty that does not arise in connection with a person with the perfection of the same attribute: namely, why this degree of freedom, or power, rather than any other? But for other readers, it may seem that postulating a person who is disembodied, everlasting, uncaused, possessed of infinite power and knowledge, and creator of the physical universe raises a whole host of difficulties not raised by the existence of human persons, some of which Swinburne himself addresses in this book, such as 'Why did God make this universe rather than any other?' But, even if we agree with Swinburne that God is the simplest kind of person there could be, and even if we accept his judgment that the simplest kind of person is a simpler object than the physical universe, we still do not have the conclusion Swinburne wants and needs, which is a claim about the simplicity of a hypothesis. Swinburne slides from the claim that God is a simpler object than the universe to the claim that the supposition of God's existence is a simpler supposition than the supposition of the universe's existence. This seems to me a fallacious move. The history of philosophy and of science abounds with ideas of simple objects the postulation of whose existence was anything but simple. For example, atoms of time, postulated by various thinkers such as the fourteenth-century philosopher Walter Chatton, are extremely simple objects. But the postulation of their existence requires such Byzantine complexity in the attempt to devise consistent explanations of other physical phenomena such as motion that the postulation of their existence has been dropped in favor of the simpler postulation of a spatial continuum, an "object " a great deal less simple than a temporal atom. Hence Swinburne has not, I think, made out his claim that as a stopping-point for explanation the postulation of God's existence is more probable than the postulation of the universe because it is a simpler supposition. But I think that Swinburne would not incur these difficulties if he added simplicity to his list of God's attributes, a characteristic regularly attributed to God by orthodox theologians of the major monotheisms. Thomas Aquinas, for example, takes God to be simple in a technical sense of ' sim- BOOK REVIEWS 481 plicity ' which implies, among other things, that God is identical with his existence (as well as with all his other characteristics), so that God's existence is logically necessary. (For good defense of the coherence of this notion of simplicity, see William Mann, "Divine Simplicity," forthcoming.) And the postulation of God's existence is clearly a simpler supposition and a better final stopping-point of explanation than is the postulation of the universe if God is understood as a logically necessary being. The postulation of the universe as the stopping-point for explanation leaves unanswered the question ' Why does the universe exist? ' or ' Why is there something rather than nothing? '. If God is a logically necessary being, the analogous question in his case has an obvious answer. Swinburne, however, rejects the notion of a logically necessary being for two reasons. In the first place, he claims that "it seems coherent to suppose that there exist a complex physical universe but no God, from which it follows that it is coherent to suppose that there exist no God, from which in turn it follows that God is not a logically necessary being" (p. ms). Swinburne's argument is this: (I) It is coherent to suppose that the universe exists and God does not exist. It is coherent to suppose that God does not exist. (3) God is not a logically necessary being. to (3) to be Since Swinburne obviously intends the inference from valid, he is apparently taking ' it is coherent to suppose that ' as logically equivalent to ' it is logically possible that'. Otherwise, the coherence of our supposition that God does not exist could in no way warrant the denial of God's logically necessary being. On this reading, (1) is of the form <> (pA,--;q) where q is ' God exists '. Since <> (pA,--;q) entails <> ,...._,q) , which is logically equivalent to Swinburne's conclusion, his argument is obviously valid; but no one who understands God to be a logically necessary being would agree that it is coherent to suppose that the universe exists and God does not. And so those whom Swinburne is out to convince with this argument would reject its first premiss. Swinburne's second reason for rejecting the notion of God a3 logically necessary is his principle that " the logically necessary cannot explain the logically contingent" (p. ms); that is, if God is to be the stopping-point of explanation for the contingent physical universe, he cannot be a logically necessary being because " you cannot deduce anything logically contingent from anything logically necessary" (p. 76). This may be a telling criticism for Neo-Platonists who see the universe as flowing ineluctably from God's being. But it has no force against theists who take the universe to be created by an act of God's free will. Orthodox Christians, that is, can take God as logically necessary and also as the stopping-point of explanation 482 BOOK REVIEWS for the contingent physical universe without violating Swinburne's principle because they consider the existence of the universe to be dependent not just on God's logically necessary being but also on acts of his free-that is, logically contingent-will. So neither of the arguments Swinburne gives for rejecting the notion of God as a logically necessary being seems to me a good one, and I think that the central argument of the book would have been considerably strengthened if Swinburne had extended his adherence to simplicity to include acceptance of simplicity in its technical sense as a divine attribute implying God's necessary existence. There are many other issues in Swinburne's book this review might have concentrated on. For example, if we accept the " big bang " theory of the origin of the universe, which appears to be the current view of most scientists, then it seems to me that Swinburne's own version of the teleological argument (which he summarizes and accepts on pp. 140-141) is vitiated by the same sort of objection he himself raises {p. 135) against the simple " spatial order " version of the argument. The " vast uniformity in the powers and liabilities of bodies throughout endless time and space " (p. 140) can be explained naturally by the fact that the entire universe has evolved from the by-products of a single explosion. And although his solution to the problem of evil, based on the value and importance of man's freedom, is ingenious and promising, it seems to me open to some of the well-known objections so eloquently expressed by Ivan Karamazov. Though there is much to disagree with in the book, it is, I think, the best and the most philosophically interesting among recent defenses of theism. It must be taken seriously, and it is well worth studying. ELEONORE STUMP Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University Blacksburg, Virginia Catholicism: Study Edition. By RICHARD P. McBRIEN. Minneapolis: Winston Press, 1981. Pp. U!90. Paperback $24.50. Richard McBrien is a paragon communicator of contemporary theological ideas. He writes in a style that is simple, direct, clear, appealing, and persuasive. He comes from a theologically progressive, renewal-minded position and presents himself as a bridge between the Church of yesterday and the Church of today (p. xxviii) . His is a work of systematic or " constructive theology" (p. xxx). The two-volume trade edition of Catholicism has received a Christopher Award and the Annual Book Award of the College Theology Society. It has been acclaimed by most reviewers as a beau- BOOK REVIEWS 483 tiful summary and a remarkable success. It is a serious attempt at a synthesis of all that is important to the Catholic believer today. It starts from Christian Tradition and displays a basic openness to all truth and every positive value. It acknowledges the real problems of interpretation involved in bringing Catholic doctrine to bear on contemporary problems. It is hope-filled, optimistic; in the best sense it is human in approach. Thus, it uplifts us and challenges us to investigate our faith. The new Study Edition contains an unusual two-page statement from the Bishop of Fort Wayne-South Bend. Father McBrien requested formal ecclesiastical approval for the one volume edition. He made the corrections requested by the censor and was granted a nihil obstat. Nevertheless, Bishop William E. McManus declined to grant the imprimatur. His reasons were that Catholicism is not a "basic text of instruction" and therefore does not require canonical approval according to the latest norms. Secondly, the book attempts a synthesis of traditional and contemporary theological speculation, some of which is only tentative and probable even in the minds of the authors. Thirdly, the bishop anticipates that exten5ive review of the book may result in further perfecting changes in future editions (p. vi) . It is difficult to see how the bishop could miss the point that Catholicism is intended as a textbook, for McBrien states this clearly (p. 19) and even gives instructions on how the book could be used as a text in a one- or two-semester course (pp. 1195-1196) . Whatever one might judge about the appropriateness of giving ecclesiastical approval to this type of book, the bishop's point is well taken, namely that some critical review of Catholicism is called for and may help to improve a future edition of this book or similar ones which may be written. It is with this hope in mind that the remainder of this review proceeds. The Study Edition is not a full scale revision, but it does contain some important changes. The most significant modification is in the section entitled "Recognizing a Dogma; Dissent" (trade edition, pp. 71-7Q) which becomes in the Study Edition" Dogma and Its Development" (pp. 71-74). The new material is characterized by a rejection of the so-called " double magisterium "theory, namely that theologians are presenting themselves as "a co-equal teaching body with the hierarchy". McBrien underlines: " This is not being proposed here " (p. 7Q). In the new material he is at pains to give examples of "some of the Church's major theologians [who] found themselves in disagreement with official positions at one time or another " (Zoe.cit.). His first example is that of Thomas Aquinas, some of whose theological opinions were condemned by the bishop of Paris in 1277 and later by two successive archbishops of Canterbury. Curiously, he fails to note that Aquinas died in IQ74, three years before the first condemnations, and that during his life he was always most respectful of official Church positions. Other noteworthy changes occur on page 513, where a paragraph is added clearly affirming as official teaching that " Jesus was 484 BOOK REVIEWS born of the Virgin Mary " and distinguishing this dogma from contemporary studies which address the meaning of the teaching and the ways to e:i-..'J>ress it today. McBrien deletes a paragraph and adds new material (pp. 517-518) to explain the reconciliation of new scholarship and official teaching on the virgin birth. He substitutes new material (pp. 829, 831, 834, 837) and makes minor corrections in other places concerning the office of the papacy which modify the more restrictive view taken in the trade edition of this work. The author deletes two sentences (pp. 846-847) which stated that in principle every baptized Christian is empowered to administer every sacrament. Finally, McBrien modifies his statements in the moral section on the reaction of bishops' conferences around the world to Humanae Vitae to affirm that these conferences " accepted the encyclical as authoritative teaching" (p. 1024) and clarifies official teaching on homosexuals with new material from the Vatican Declaration on Sexual Ethics (1975) (p. 1029) . Catholicism is organized around an introduction and five main parts. The introductory chapters situate Catholicism at the point of crisis-i.e., a turning point-and lay the ground rules, i.e., McBrien's understanding of faith, theology and belief. The five parts treat of human existence, God, Jesus Christ, the Church, ethical and spiritual questions. McBrien is faithful to a method which he describes as "traditional ", in that it considers every major point of Catholic faith from the sources of revelation, and " contemporary", in that it proceeds inductively rather than deductively. In Chapter II of the introduction McBrien makes his key distinctions between faith, theology, and belief. Faith is "personal knowledge of God " (p. 25); theology is that "process by which we bring our knowledge and understanding of God to the level of expression" (p. 26) . "Faith exists always and only in some theological form " (Zoe. cit.) . Throughout the chapter McBrien accents the " personal " side of faith as an experience of God as God, as though there were no content or propositional aspect of faith. Nowhere does he indicate that faith views the content of revelation as " credible", i.e., as the object of faithful assent to God's witness, whereas theology considers the reality of revelation as "intelligible", having an understandable inner meaning and value. Belief is described as " a formulation of the knowledge we have through faith " (p. 27) . Throughout Chapter II McBrien uses the term belief as an " expression " of faith, e.g., doctrines and dogmas; but in Chapter VI "Belief and Unbelief Today " he seems to be using it more in the sense of the immanent act of belief which Augustine calls" to think with assent", The Study Edition would be improved if these distinctions were made explicit. In Part One McBrien attempts a coherent statement about human existence. He surveys the contemporary world of change in which we live (Chapter III), the range of anthropological answers which thinkers have provided (Chapter IV), and the theology of human existence (Chapter V). BOOK REVIEWS 485 Because "No aspect of theology is untouched by our anthropology" (p. 82), this section bears careful reading. McBrien is relentless in his application of the position on grace which he develops in Chapter V; he interprets all other Catholic doctrines throughout the book in the light of these principles. McBrien proposes to use transcendental Thomism as the integrating principle of his theology of human existence (p. 134). In the grace-nature question this means acceptance of Karl Rahner's theory of the " supernatural existential", which McBrien describes as " a permanent modification of the human spirit which transforms it from within and orients it toward the God of grace and glory (p. 160) . The " supernatural existential " is not grace itself but only God's offer of grace, which, by so modifying the human spirit, enables it freely to accept or reject grace. Although this position is not unchallenged by contemporary theologians, nevertheless, it does have the weight of authority of a leading theologian, who claims to have found its roots in St. Thomas. It is not the acceptance of the supernatural existential by McBrien which is questionable, but rather his development, application, and extension of the theory. In McBrien's treatment God's offer of the supernatural existential is equivalent to grace itself. "Human existence is already graced existence" (p. 162). As one reads this key Chapter V more carefully, it appears that the three themes of human person, grace-nature, and original sin are very loosely connected. Within each of the themes the biblical, historical, and systematic sections, too, are somewhat disconnected. What McBrien says of the field of anthropology is evidenced by this chapter of his book: "Because of the scientific, philosophical, and theological developments outlined in the preceding chapter, the time for an anthropological recasting of all the traditional doctrines is at hand. But the task is as yet uncompleted " (p. 149). One has the distinct impression that McBrien has relied too heavily on source material, which he does not always acknowledge, and has not given sufficient time for the question to unify itself in his own mind. Compare, for example, Catholicism on" Grace" in the Old and New Testaments (pp. 153-155) with John L. McKenzie, Dictionary of the Bible (Milwaukee: Bruce, 1965, "Grace", pp. 324-326); "The Problem of Nature and Grace" (pp. 158-161) with "Nature and Grace" by Juan Alfaro in Sacramentum Mundi (New York: Herder and Herder, 1969, vol. 4, especially points 2 and 3, pp. 177-178); " Original Sin ", a positive statement of contemporary theology (pp. 165-167) with "Original Sin" by Karl Rahner in Sacramentum Mundi (vol. 4, especially" d. Synthesis of the doctrine of original sin ", pp. 331-333) . A re-working of this chapter will give it unity and remove the appearance of being a kind of dictionary of theological terms. Part Two: " God " is a long section in which McBrien takes up a number of fundamental questions: belief and unbelief (Chapter VI), revelation (Chapter VII), religion and its varieties (Chapter VIII), God (Chapter 486 BOOK REVIEWS IX), the Trinity (Chapter X). On the question of belief and unbelief McBrien follows Hans Kung: " His approach is consistent with the one adopted in this book ... That God is cannot be proved or demonstrated or otherwise established beyond all reasonable doubt. It can ultimately be accepted only in a confidence founded on reality itself" (pp. 187, 188). He asserts that this apologetical approach " does not seem to be inconsistent with the official teachings of the First Vatican Council and is certainly not inconsistent with those of the Second Vatican Council " (p. 194) . It would have been helpful if McBrien had explained how or why the position is not inconsistent with Vatican I: " God, the beginning and end of all things, can be known with certainty from the things that were created through the natural light of human reason, for ' ever since the creation of the world His invisible nature has been clearly perceived in the things that have been made ' (Rom. 1: 20)" (Denz. 3004) . Revelation is the" self-communication of God " (p. 234). It is the process by which God communicates and the product of this communication. McBrien's explanation of revelation is controlled by his thesis that every human being is elevated by grace in the depth of his heart: " Even when grace is not adverted to, it is present and operative as a fundamental orientation to God. Thus, every human person is already the recipient of divine revelation in the very core of his or her being in that God is present to every person in grace " (p. 236) . In what might be an attempt to remove " sexist language " from God McBrien plays down the importance of the " Fatherhood" of God: "Even if Jesus had spoken of God as our Mother, he would still have had the' same essential message to communicate about God .... Furthermore, Jesus's references to his own relationship with his Father in heaven simply underscore the intimacy of Jesus with his Father (whether God is spoken of as Father or as Mother, as Husband or Wife, as Son or as Daughter) ... it is not the Fatherhood of God that is important to Jesus but the Godhood of the Father" (p. 334). If Jesus had spoken of God as his mother, husband, wife, son, or daughter, this would seem to have serious consequences for our understanding of the procession by way of generation in God. Part Three, "Jesus Christ," examines the Christ of contemporary culture (Chapter XI), of the New Testament (Chapter XII), of the Fathers, the Councils, medieval theology (Chapter XIII), of twentieth-century theology (Chapter XIV), and concludes with special questions (Chapter XV) and the Christ of the liturgy (Chapter XVI) . This section is marked by its multiplicity of models and opinions: five Jesuses of contemporary popular models (pp. 375-382); the five relationships of Jesus to culture of H. Richard Niebuhr (pp. 382-388); the five clusters of Christological views of the New Testament according to Raymond Brown (pp. 398-403). But it is the chapter on twentieth-century Christology which is most heavily crammed with opinions: a study of ten Catholic theologians, eight Protes- BOOK REVIEWS 487 tant theologians, and one Orthodox theologian in the space of forty pages. l\fcBrien's own comment is apropos: "So broad and diverse a sampling of recent and current Christologies is not easily synthesized" (p. 503). After reading Chapters XI-XIV, one does not have a clear vision of McBrien's .Tesus Christ. But Chapter XV treats of four special questions (the virginal conception of Jesus, his sinlessness, his knowledge, and his sexuality) and gives five criteria for judging Christologies according to the Catholic tradition. In this chapter, especially in the section on criteria for judging, we find that the Jesus Christ according to McBrien is quite orthodox and catholic. The chapter on " The Christ of the Liturgy " seems to be included just to show that there is a mutual influence of contemporary Christological opinion on the liturgy and of liturgy upon current Christology. Part Four," The Church," is a long section which includes: the Church of the New Testament (Chapter XVII), in history (Chapter XVIII), of Vatican Council II (Chapter XIX), of today; its nature and mission (Chapter XX); the Sacraments of Initiation (Chapter XXI); of healing, vocation, and commitment (Chapter XXII); special questions in ecclesiology (Chapter XXIII); Mary and the Church (Chapter XXIV). Ecclesiology is the field in which McBrien has acquired his well-deserved reputation, and, as one might expect, this section flows very smoothly. He is at home with contemporary views of the Church in the New Testament and moves easily through the history of the Church following an outline division of Hubert Jedin and August Franzen. Some might question if it is not too early to judge the Second Vatican in such superlatives: " a moment comparable in historical significance to the early Church's abandonment of circumcision as a condition for membership (p. 648) ... a council unique in the history of the Church because it was the first really ecumenical council " (p. 659) . One might question, too, the judgment that " The single most influential personality associated with the event of Vatican II was Pope John XXIII" (p. 687). By contrast, a careful reading of McBrien's chapter on the Church of the Second Vatican Council reveals only one place where Pope Paul VI is mentioned (p. 684). Yet the last two Popes have taken the names of John Paul to honor the memories of the unique inheritance left to the Church by Popes John XXIII and Paul VI. Chapter XX, "The Church Today: Its Nature and Mission," summarizes the opinions of seven Roman Catholic and four Protestant theologians, the bilateral dialogues, official Catholic documents since Vatican II. Everyone would agree with his description of the Church as " an institutionalized servant-community" (p. 714). But all could not agree with McBrien's definition of the Church: "the whole body, or congregation, of persons who are called by God the Father to acknowledge the Lordship of Jesus, the Son, in word, in sacrament, in witness, and in service, and, through the power of the Holy Spirit, to collaborate with Jesus's historic mission for the sake of the Kingdom of God. The definition embraces all Christians: 488 BOOK REVIEWS Catholics, Orthodox, Anglicans, and Protestants " (loc. cit.) . While it is true that Vatican II used the word " Church " to describe the ecclesial reality of certain Christian communities besides the Roman Catholic Church, it is premature and unrealistic to define the Church as embracing Catholic, Orthodox, Anglican, and Protestant without distinction. The effect of treating the sacraments as an adjunct to the Church is to emphasize their relation to the Church and in consequence to minimize their relationship to Christ. " They are acts of Christ, to be sure. But they are immediately acts of' the Church. They are expressions of the nature and the mission of the Church " (p. 733) . McBrien easily shows that the sacraments are signs of faith, signs of the Church, but it is more difficult to discover in what sense they are causes of grace. "The sacraments signify, celebrate, and effect what God is, in a sense, doing everywhere and for all " (p. 738). Grace and revelation are universally available. " Accordingly, the doctrine that Baptism is necessary for salvation can mean that for those called explicitly to the Church, Baptism is necessary for salvation " (p. 752). The urgency for Baptism and for missionary activity is somewhat modified. McBrien is sanguine, perhaps overly optimistic, about the success of the various bilaterals, especially those on the Eucharist: " What also emerges is a general readiness (except among the Orthodox) to call for some eucharistic sharing, or intercommunion, on the basis of these remarkable convergences on eucharistic doctrine " (p. 767) . In " special questions" (Chapter XXIII) McBrien treats authority, papacy, ministry, women in the Church, intercommunion. Although each is given only a brief study, the solutions proposed are usually balanced and useful. By placing Marian doctrine in relation to the Church rather than more directly in relation to Christ (Chapter XXIV) McBrien gives more emphasis to Mary's role as preeminent member of the redeemed community and less to her role as mediatrix. His position on original sin and the supernatural existential leads him to a re-interpretation of the dogma of the Immaculate Conception: "If, on the other hand, one understands Original Sin as the sinful condition in which every human being is born, then we have to propose a different explanation for the Immaculate Conception. It is not that l\1ary alone was conceived and born in grace, but, that, in view of her role in the redemption, God bestowed upon her an unsurpassable degree of grace from the beginning " (p. 885) . In line with his definition of the Church as embracing Catholics, Orthodox, Anglican, and Protestant Churches, McBrien holds " These two dogmas [Immaculate Conception and Assumption] are not so central or essential to the integrity of Christian faith that one cannot be in the Body of Christ without accepting them " (p. 899). Part Five, " Christian Existence: Ethical and Spiritual Dimensions," may not be entirely adequate by the standards of a professional moralist, but McBrien does pull together a number of useful elements which are not 489 BOOK REVIEWS available elsewhere in so up-to-date a manner. He gives a concise biblical and hi3torical review of Christian moral demands of the individual and of society and states the post-Vatican II Catholic situation in terms of a shift in methodology from classicism to historical consciousness (Chapter XXV) . This is followed by a study of principles and process, which features a distinction of sins into the categories of venial, serious, and mortal; a description of the virtues which blends classicism and historical consciousness; a study of values, norms, and conscience (Chapter XXVI). He considers four special questions, two which have to do with interpersonal ethics: birth control and homosexuality; and two which have to do with social ethics: warfare and the intervention of the state in the economic order (Chapter XXVII). In handling all four questions McBrien gives the official position of the Church and then contemporary views of theologians. When he states the values underlying each position McBrien appears to invite the reader to form his own conscience. On the interpersonal issues, however, McBrien seems to tilt in the direction of theological viewpoints rather than the official teaching, whereas on the issues of social ethics, especially of warfare, he acknowledges the lead which has been taken by the official magisterium and favors magisterium over scholars. McBrien completes his study of morality with a helpful history of Christian spirituality (Chapter XXVIII) and an eschatological study of the Kingdom of God and the four last things (Chapter XXIX). The Conclusion, " Catholicism: a Synthesis " (Chapter XXX) , is a beautiful statement of the distinctiveness of Catholicism, its focus on philosophical realism and its theological foci of sacramentality, mediation, and communion. The warm reception which Richard McBrien's Catholicism has already received is indicative of the need which Catholics feel for a systematic text which will provide a review and updating of theological positions. But McBrien's book is not the final and complete text; it has weaknesses and limitations which will be pointed out by competent teachers. Both the success and the deficiency of Catholicism will inspire other theologians and writers to produce competing texts. The result will be the building of many safe bridges between the Church of yesterday and the Church of today. MATTHEW DONAHUE, Dominican House of Studies Washington, D. C. O.P. 490 BOOK REVIEWS Creativity and God: A Challenge to Process Theology. By RoBERT C. NEVILLE. New York: The Seabury Press, 1980. Pp. xi+ 163. $rn.95. Robert Neville's Creativity and God is a compact, sympathetic, yet critical series of proposals concerning Whitehead, the process theology tradition, and God. It is an intriguing text for anyone interested in one or more of these areas. Within Neville's own textual corpus, CreativityandGod seems to function as in part a summary and in part a controversialist respite from a massive endeavor to develop a speculative theory of religiona theory focused on God as Being-itself (God the Creator, Chicago, 1968) and human beings as free personally, socially (The Cosmology of Freedom, New Haven, 1974), and spiritually (Soldier Sage Saint, New York, 1978). The book is also an important one for those who are-or who would like to see if they are-interested in this impressive project. The central aim is " to provide a sustained critique of process theism, in its roots and at least some branches, from a standpoint at one with Whitehead in appreciation of speculative philosophy, neighboring in general cosmology and opposed regarding the conception of God" (x). Neville frames his discussion by taking the process tradition as an endeavor to work out perceived difficulties in the way Whitehead related God and Creativity. The first seven chapters presume process theism's claim that Whitehead's uniqueness lies in separating or distinguishing God and Creativity. Neville takes the reader through competing strands of " the conceptual structure of process theism" (Chapters I through VI) before a climactic chapter on process theism's endeavors to come to terms with " the structure of experience itself" (116) (Chapter VII). The argument is clear if compact, and its progression is as follows. First, if God is an individual actual entity (Lewis S. Ford, Whitehead) , God will transcend the world too much; indeed, the result is " Whiteheadean deism" {!l!9) (C. II). Further, Creativity on this view remains an irrational, a surd (C. III). On the other hand, if God is a society of actual entities (Charles Hartshorne) , then God is "subject to the strictures of necessity" (33, C. IV). Further, there are links between the social view of God and inadequacies in Hartshorne's handling of personal identity, universals, ambiguity and suffering, and a priori knowledge (C. IV)) . But, if God is neither individual nor society, ought we to jettison the God of Western religions? Neville argues that both Shubert Ogden's critique of the classical tradition and his neo-classical alternative are inadequate (C. V). Further, process philosophy is "fundamentally alien to the transcendental turn" in theology (C. VI). The latter presumes the givenness of a particular theological content, of secular experience, and/or of transcendental projects in themselves. The most one can do (and Neville claims Charles Winquist has done it) is give a Whiteheadian interpretation to the transcendental imagination (113). 491 BOOK REVIEWS Chapter VII is the climactic chapter, for here Neville moves to "the structure of experience itself" as this is articulated in John Cobb's endeavor to come to terms with world religions. The problem here is that Cobb talks as though a choice must be made between, say, Buddhism and Christianity. But Neville thinks that new structures of existence woven from the various unintegrated resources at our disposal are needed (119120). Using Plato's theory of the educable " parts of the soul," he proposes that the quest for new structures of existence is a quest for new forms of the spirited part of the soul (the saint), the rational part of the soul (the sage), and the appetitive part of the soul (the soldier). On the basis of this cumulative critique of the distinction between God and Creativity, the final chapter recommends that the distinction be abandoned. On the process view, the category of the Ultimate (including Creativity, one, and many) remains a kind of irrational given (138-39, 43-47); Neville, on the other hand, wants to distinguish creaturely "cosmological creativity" (the self-constitution of one out of many) from " ontological creativity " (" a transcendent creator that makes itself creator in the act of creating") (8, 139-40, 144-45). Again, the distinction between God and Creativity limits God's presence in the world in the name of human freedom; Neville, on the other hand, prefers to conceive God's presence as "coincident with people's freedom " (141) . In this way, unlike the God of process theism, God can indeed know us in " the subjective immediacy of our hearts" (17). Further, this distinction between God and Creativity limits our presence to God. Neville, on the other hand, claims that our spontaneous immediacy is "the divine character " 10); God (as in "most religions") is " closer to us than we are to ourselves " (18, 34). Finally, the distinction is inadequate as a reading of the theistic tradition, whereas Neville suggests that his notion of ontological creativity may (or may not) be more adequate Quarrels with Neville will naturally have at least three objects: his exegesis of Whitehead, his critique of one or more of the strands of process theism, and his own proposal. For example, does the exegesis devote adequate attention to the fact that the category of the Ultimate (including Creativity) is "presupposed in" the other categories and that Whitehead's " God " is a " derivative notion "? Is it plausible to imply that process theism has a more " identifiable nature" than all the major religions (133) ? And is a "philosophical trinitarianism " (8) which synthesizes theism, quasi-pantheism, and Buddhism a coherent reading of the goods and evils of our individual and collective lives? Evaluation on these or other scores would have to address itself to Neville's other writings. But Creativity and God is valuable as a unique challenge not only to the process tradition but also to classic Christian concepts of divine and human life. JAMES Loyola College Baltimore, Maryland J, BUCKLEY 492 BOOK REVIEWS Total Presence is Thomas Altizer's seventh book. He is one of the few THOMAS J. J. ALTIZER. New York: Seabury Press, 1980. Pp. 108. Total Presence is Thomas Altizer's seventh book. He is one of the few well-known contemporary American theologians who have produced a sizable body of work devoted to the elaboration of a single theological vision. Unfortunately, Altizer in his latest book comes no closer than before to giving us a convincing or even fully intelligible presentation of his vision. Altizer is continuing to elaborate the eschatological understanding of the Christian message and of Western history developed ten years ago in his The Descent into Hell. New in this book is his focus on the parables of Jesus. Altizer finds in these parables 'antistories ' which negate everything previously recognizable as meaning or identity. They actualize a presence that is total and that negates all horizons beyond the pure immediacy of its speech. In these parables, the Kingdom of God is immediately at hand. The eschatological message of Jesus is lost in the Church's pyrrhic victory over the Hellenistic vision. It is recaptured only in the modern revolution that has its roots in medieval apocalypticism, reaches its fullest philosophical expression in Hegel, Marx, and Nietzsche, and is embodied in contemporary avant-garde poetry, painting, and music. The central targets of this revolution are, on the one hand, a transcendent God who can be spoken of as something other than totally and immediately present and, on the other, an interior, self-conscious center of individual identity. These interrelated concepts had an important part to play in the dialectical history of consciousness, but they are now dissolving and must dissolve before the advent of a new, total, and immediate identity in which God and humanity are anonymous, not because they are so distant from each other that naming is impossible, but rather because their presence to each other is so total and immediate that the distance involved in naming has been dissolved. In the new world of mass revolution and of an art in which the individual voice ceases to speak, the alienated, autonomous self-consciousness and the transcendent God which mirrored it both find realization only in their dialectical negation, universal presence. No one can deny the breadth of Altizer's religious vision or of his He writes well, acquaintance with the Western avant-garde tradition. almost too well. The rhythm of his rhetoric can tempt one to turn the page before one has grasped what has been said. Nevertheless, this book is unconvincing at a variety of levels. The presentation takes a form closer to a virtuoso soliloquy than to a contribution to public discussion. Contemporary theologians and philosophers are never mentioned, nor is their impact evident. Various major figures of the past are mentioned over and over again, but their ideas are never analyzed or discussed in detail. The book is-naturally-without footnotes. BOOK REVIEWS 493 The inadequacies of this mode of presentation are most obvious in the discussion of Jesus's parables. Here is one of the few places that Altizer's discussion becomes specific enough for critical evaluation. One presumes Altizer's interpretation grows out of the intense discussion, over the last decade, of the ways in which the parables mean. Altizer does not, however, explicitly draw on this discussion nor give us any idea of where he stands in relation to it. This omission would not be serious if Altizer's reading of the parables could stand on its own, but it cannot. Why should one think that ". . . the intention of parable is to realize an enactment of speech wherein a totality of speakable or realizable identity is wholly present and immediately at hand " (pp. 3f) ? What does it mean to say that parable shatters every speakable distinction (p. 12)? Altizer's interpretation would be easier to come to terms with if he analyzed even one specific parable instead of merely making generalizations about parabolic speech. Altizer's downfall in discussing the parables is the downfall of the entire book: sweeping statements with little evident supporting analysis. Sometimes his generalizations seem illuminating (e.g., that Greek philosophy was the consequence of a vision that received its first expression in art, p. 38). Sometimes they are beyond taking seriously (e.g., that Paul was " ... obssessed by chaos, guilt, and self-judgment," p. They are never backed up with detailed analysis. Altizer's problems, however, run deeper. The foundation of his theological vision is a picture of the history of consciousness that is both descriptive and normative. To be right is to be in step with the history of consciousness. That history is the only possible norm, since consciousness is the ultimate medium in which reality must be real. Reality is real only as it is a moment within consciousness. If truth is a correspondence to reality, then it also must be a correspondence to consciousness and its history. This relation explains Altizer's assumption that the avant-garde is always right. They are right because they express the flow of history. Altizer's parochialism of the avant-garde is an in principle parochialism. Fundamental questions need to be asked about Altizer's assumptions and procedures. First, should consciousness be made that in which all reality must appear in order to be real? What does "consciousness" then refer to? How does Altizer's thorough-going idealism relate to the empiricism and nominalism that are far more typical of modern America? Second, can we so easily construct pictures of the universal history of consciousness, especially on the basis of unsupported generalizations? Despite Altizer's avowed modernity, he seems unbothered by one of the prime specters of modernity, historical relativism. Third, can we rely so exclusively on dialectic to understand history, particularly on a dialectic as inflexible as Altizer's? For a Kierkegaard, dialectic is a tool that exposes nuance and subtlety. For Altizer, it is a Procrustean bed into which everything must be made to fit. Nothing is ever partial for Altizer. Everything is absolute and total. (Some variant of 494 BOOK REVIEWS " total " is used at least 158 times.) In Altizer's world there are no shades of grey, blue, or green. There is only black and white, and even they are only the dialectical reversals of each other. What is odd, however, is that, while Altizer's dialectical categories become quickly predictable, their application remains almost arbitrary. He neither explicitly nor implicitly explains how we are to differentiate dialectical opposition from mere difference. He seems to admit (p. 40) that cultural realities can be in opposition without being dialectically opposite, but gives little hint about how to go about telling one from the other. Altizer remains one of the few American theologians willing to risk elaborating a comprehensive theology through a number of books. Nevertheless, his methods, his conclusions, and perhaps even his fundamental vision of the nature of Jesus's message are inadequate for the development of a theology for contemporary Christian existence. MICHAEL ROOT Lutheran Theological Southern Seminary Columbia, South Carolina The Problem of Self in Buddhism and Christianity. By LYNN A. DE SILVA. New York: Harper & Row Publishers, Inc., Barnes & Noble Import Division, 1979. Pp. 185. This book falls into the growing tradition of Buddhist-Christian dialogue. Rather than pursuing historical scholarship, however, de Silva tries to understand, and resolve in his own terms, one of the most significant Buddhist-Christian contrasts: diverging views on the nature of the soul or self. Detailing the teachings of each tradition-the Buddhist refusal to take a final stand on the question of the soul (saying it is ultimately unimportant for salvation) and the Christian (=Biblical) affirmation of the resurrection of the body and eternal life for the individual soul-de Silva then proposes a meeting point which, he hopes, will open the door for a the concept of anatta-pneuma. Anatta-pneuma, or, as John Hick says in his foreword, " nonegocentric mutuality " (p. ix) , is based on the notion that individuals are not isolated entities, but participants in a dynamic system of interpersonal relationships whereby the boundaries of their own egoity are ultimately transcended in and for the community. It is in light of this " communal selflessness " that de Silva then recasts the original inspirations of the Buddhist and Christian traditions. While his efforts are commendable, and certainly worth working through for anyone with background in either field, the problems of method and context are almost insurmountable. It is important to remember at the outset that de Silva's method is not that of a scholar but that of a theologian, who builds his own philosophical system by taking from each tradition those elements which are most useful BOOK REVIEWS 495 in the construction of a common Buddhist-Christian eschaton. By drawing his own conclusions about the intersection of the two traditions on the self/soul, de Silva denies himself the scholarly status he might have had if he had been more faithful to the historical and philosophical contexts from which the two teachings came. And, in fact, had he been more contextually oriented, the affinities and complementarities which he finds would have been seen to be strained, if not groundless. De Silva's book is an attempt at dialogue, and indeed he does move back and forth with ease between the two traditions. But this ease is deceptive, and in the end proves inappropriate to each tradition. By using Christian terms to clarify Buddhism, for instance, de Silva adds something to the early Buddhist discovery that was not necessarily there before. He selectively chooses concepts, matching them to get a doctrine that is satisfactory to him, but not necessarily approprfate to each tradition. And what appears to be satisfactory to him is whatever will somehow vindicate the Christian message. The hidden agendum of his book, it seems, is to affirm the validity of the Christian Kingdom of God in Buddhist terms: "In the idea of the Kingdom of God, I suggest, we have an answer to the Buddhist quest for self-negation as well as for a form of self-fulfillment . . ." (p. 130) . It is the Kingdom of God, then, which for de Silva provides the symbol for the Buddhist-Christian eschaton whereby there will be the progressive realization of egolessness (the doctrine of 011ULttii) and the progressive actualisation of the participatory individual (the doctrine of pneuma) (p. 123) in a spiritual community. In defense of his methodology de Silva says: The question may be asked: what right have I to use terms and ideas that belong to Buddhism to express Christian truths? The answer is simple: I am doing what is inevitable in a multi-religious context and what most religious teachers have done (p. xiii) . In other words, de Silva is undertaking to do, by himself, what he sees to be the inevitable outcome of any pluralistic historical process: to graft concepts and beliefs from other (and alien) systems on to his own where they seem most appropriate. His collaboration with Christianity provides the structure whereby de Silva miscasts two very important elements in early Buddhism: the nature of Buddhism as a revolutionary ideology and the intent of the Buddhist doctrine of anattii. First, it has been argued in the past, and it is argued revolution within the again by de Silva, that the thrust of the Hindu context was ethical. His position is that the elaborate and meticulous analysis of the nature of conditioned existence is undertaken in Buddhism not for its own sake but rather to give rise to a certain social and ethical attitude that will lead to " release " from the human predicament. De Silva is quite right in focusing on the soteriological nature of the Buddhist movement, but this soteriology is not ethically founded, as he argues, but based 496 BOOK REVIEWS instead upon a new metaphysical perception of the world, a discovery of the causal, and therefore transitory and foundationless, qualities of a world permeated by sorrow. Dulckha is not, as de Silva claims, a word for" disharmony, conflict, unsatisfactoriness, anxiety, etc., a word which describes the predicament in which man is, in his state of alienation" (p. 151), that is, a word which describes the pain 6f man's autonomy and isolation from others. Rather, dukkha is irrevocably bound to the other two Buddhist marks of existence, anicca and anattii: man feels suffering (dukkha) because he is attached to (has tanha, desire, for) elements in his experience which are by nature impermanent (anicca) and without an ultimate ground of being (anattii). In other words, man suffers because he cannot have, on a permanent basis, whatever he desires most. Harmony and the rest are therefore not appropriate in a discussion of the Buddhism of South Asia; causality is. It is only as a consequence of our non-attachment to causal existence that concern for others, at least in the Theravada tradition, arises. Ethics is, therefore, a secondary issue in the soteriology of early Buddhism. We move now to the Buddhist notion of the self and, for de Silva, to the necessary implications of anattii for the Christian God. By and large, de Silva's explications of the Buddhist teachings on the soul are standard. That he does not give the reader anything new in his analysis is due, perhaps, to his apparent reading of the texts from others' translations, rather than in the original. But be that as it may, it is de Silva's interpretation of anattii which proves most troublesome, for in laying out the doctrine's implications he seems most motivated by a desire to ease the radical threat of early Buddhism, rather than to face the doctrine head on. His approach to the " soul question " diverges dramatically from that of the Buddha. In taking up the question of whether or not man has a soul, the Buddha outlines three arguments (Personal Continuity, the Parts and the Whole, and Causality) by which one might argue for a soul. By carefully analyzing these arguments, the Buddha concludes that we simply cannot know whether or not there is a soul. Moreover, we should not even bother to ask the question, for belief in a soul or in no-soul is ultimately unhelpful, that is, is ineffective in the salvific process. He classes it, therefore, amongst those questions he traditionally answers in silence. In contrast to the Buddha's metaphysical position on the question of the soul (attii) is his teaching about individual notions of self, and here de Silva's discussion is appropriate, at least in the beginning. We individuals are nothing more than a complex of matter, feelings, perceptions, compounded mental states, and consciousness. But because of our attachment to existence, we project a transcendent essence on to this complex and call it "I," and it is this attachment to an ultimate personal identity, false and illusory as it is, that is the major cause of suffering. The Buddha's call to non-attachment is the call to render unfounded all perceptions of the significance of the self, to give up all grasping for personal ultimacy, and to BOOK REVIEWS 497 free oneself of the confines of a falsely constructed ego. What de Silva does not explain is that the result of the Buddhist's non-attachment, according to the orthodox tradition, will be the undermining of the karmic power of our actions. And it is only when the fruit of all our actions has been played out that the " self," this complex of causal elements that is tied to existence only by its karma, will no longer have its basis in rebirth (samsiira), and will experience nirvana: the "extinguishing" not only of karmic power but of desire, sorrow, and the illusion of the self as well. The all-important question of karma and rebirth, so essential to Buddhism and especially to the Indian context in which Buddhism arose, is rarely, if ever, addressed by de Silva. Instead, he focuses upon the entirely unfounded notion that is the extinction of the ego (p. 144)-not, as tradition says, the extinction of our false idea that there is an ego or the extinction of the karmic power of our actions. Having defined nirviirpa as the extinction of the ego, however, de Silva cannot rest in the face of such a threat without bringing in the Christian God. " It is my contention that, if anattii is real, God is necessary; it is in relation to the Reality of God that the reality of anattii can be meaningful. . . . If man is really anattii, God is indispensable for his salvation. If God is not, then anattii necessarily implies final extinction" (pp. 138, 145), a horror, apparently, that is entirely unacceptable to him. For de Silva, the experience of nirviirpa is necessarily accompanied by an experience of a reality which goes beyond all rational thinking to some deeper depth of ultimacy. He refuses to leave man's solution to himself, as Buddhism so clearly demands, or to find the key to existence within existence itself, the only way as far as early Buddhism is concerned. Rather, he posits as basic to human nature man's need to transcend himself, to go beyond himself when the boundaries of the ego have broken down. The inevitable transcendence of the individual occurs, in de Silva's Buddhist-Christian system, when man finally affirms the relational nature of his existence in a community of people whose identities are based in the transcendence of the Christian God. De Silva's distortion of early Buddhist thought is compounded when he applies Buddhist terms to the recasting of the Biblical material. He begins by stating that the Genesis account of a creatio ex nihilo implies the impermanence (= anicca) of all elements of our experience-that is, of course, the impermanence of all things as they appear apart from God (p. 78) . His application of anicca here, however, does not take into account the necessary causal underpinnings of anicca: all things are impermanent precisely because they are causally conditioned, and that includes, for the Theravada Buddhist, all notions of a soul and all beliefs in a God, as well as the gods themselves (n.b. the Pali Canon's constant railing against the devas, and its clear bias). De Silva then proceeds to argue that because the (Hebrew material in the) Bible leaves no room for the notion of an immortal soul, and because the Hebrew nepesh and Greek 498 BOOK REVIEWS psyche both refer to the same unitary concept of man (marked, that is, by the absence of a mind/body dualism), there is anattii in the Bible-an anattii, or as de Silva says, a creatureliness, that exists for man when he is apart from the spirit of God (p. 84). De Silva then argues that Christianity takes the doctrine of anattii far beyond that which is found in Buddhism. First, while Buddhism denies an ultimate self, it also argues that man has an intrinsic capacity to work out his own salvation; Christianity, on the other hand, states that man cannot save himself-he can be saved only by the grace of God. Second, the Buddhist theory of karma and rebirth implies that there is a " something " in man which has the power to cause or perpetuate life in other persons after his own death (that something being, though de Silva never really discusses it, man's karmic qualities); the Christian doctrine, on the other hand, says that it is only by the power of God that man inherits eternal life. By trying to show that the Bible has a more thoroughgoing doctrine of anattii (based, for de Silva, on the much more desirable Christian doctrine whereby man is relieved of all soteriological responsibility), he is arguing not only that the Christian doctrine is far more radical than the Buddhist, but that Christianity somehow " out-Buddhizes " Buddhism. For de Silva, the problem is this: if anattii, i.e., no ultimate self, is real, then there must be some other transcendent element which fills in the vacuum. His fear is quite real as he stands before the radical implications of what is in fact the Buddhist doctrine, i.e., that the existence of anything transcendent simply cannot be argued for, and therefore should not be a consideration in the soteriological process. It is at this point that de Silva must, it seems, bring in God and the community. De Silva is quite right in arguing for the transcendental nature of the Christian self. His discussion of man as imago Dei is appropriate as far as it goes, particularly in his assertion that man is not made immortal, but made to be immortal. He overemphasizes, however, the communal nature of this image, saying that what is most important is the direct and positive relation of community between man and God-clearly an argument that would support his own thesis, at the expense, however, of an authentic reading of the Biblical material. Moreover, de Silva's discussion contains little if any Christology. How, we ask, can one understand the transcendence of the Christian self, and particularly man as imago Dei, without an analysis of the Incarnation? His overemphasis on the Holy Spirit and his neglect of Christ must be counted as obvious weaknesses in the Christian side of his argument. It is the issue of transcendence, however, which continues to be his kingpin and, ironically, the main obstacle to the success of his argument. For de Silva, and for Christian doctrine, the existence of a transcendental quality in man which enables him to rise above his finite existence is crucial. But for Buddhism, transcendence is precisely that about which we can say nothing and which must therefore be excluded from the soteriological BOOK REVIEWS 499 process. It was, in fact, the belief in God and the soul which Buddhism so vehemently argued against in its early days. The attribution of a transcendent dimension to Buddhism is not the only thing which proves so fatal to de Silva's argument, however, but the overvalued ethico-social dimension as well. To be sure, the communal element is there in both traditions, but to argue that anattii, for instance, is an ethical concept or that the goal of early Buddhism was a communal eschaton with primarily social implications is to recast the original material into unrecognizable form. While de Silva's book is a thought-provoking introduction to BuddhistChristian conversation, its reworking of the original material is on most accounts inauthentic. ELLISON FINDLAY Trinity College Hartford, Connecticut God Beyond Knowledge. By ARTHUR HERBERT HODGES. New York: Barnes & Noble, 1979. Pp. xii + 181. $22.50. In his posthumously published God Beyond Knowledge, Herbert Arthur Hodges (1905-1976), late Professor of Philosophy at the University of Reading, undertakes to examine the origin of the ' God ' concept, to explore the standard several dimensions of man's reputed knowledge of God, and, perhaps most importantly, to answer the question of our ability to know Him metaphysically. Although this position is not always argued consistently, the author's conclusion about natural theology is basically negative. Given Hodges's presumably early exposure to the British Empirical tradition and his ready acceptance (albeit a pragmatic one) of the scientific model of knowledge, this conclusion would not be surprising except for the fact that Hodges himself was a devout Anglo-Catholic, a lay theologian, and the author of several apologetic works on the Christian religion. Consequently, while he will employ the traditional philosophical concept of God throughout much of the discussion in this book and even make use at times of the Thomistic doctrine of analogy, ostensibley to counter religious anthropomorphism and agnosticism, his true philosophical position finally unmasked is a form of Pyrrhonian scepticism. Consistent with this scepticism, he will embrace Hume's analysis of cause and thus deny the possibility of any a posteriori proof of God's existence. For Hodges, then, one's acceptance of God's existence and of a particular religious creed are both equally choices of the will-the standard Protestant view-not intellectual assents with a foundation in reason. In reviewing this book I will focus upon those chapters in which philosophical material particularly is dominant. In describing the origin of the' God' concept (Chapter 5, "The Genesis 500 BOOK REVIEWS of ' God ' ") Hodges seems primarily concerned with the one prevalent in Western philosophy and theology and in the Judaeo-Christian tradition, although he sees his remarks as applying, mutatis mutandis, to Hinduism as well. This concept, according to Hodges, is that of an "All-Agent" and arises because we tend to view being as essentially connected with activity or agency and to think that the mind-unified reality we call " the world " depends upon a superior being. Why we think it is (1) caused by a single (2) Personal Agent (3) Who transcends finitude Hodges explains respectively through our desire for a unity of pattern or design, our recognition of the perfection of person, and our impatience with limitations and consequent need to find the absolute realized. Thus, " We form the concept of God as being which is wholly self-sufficient and whose activities amount to nothing less than creating and sustaining all that is. God, so conceived, is being in an unqualified sense. He is not something as distinct from something else-that would be limitation-he is without qualification, he is That Which Is, ipsum esse subsistens" (p. 54). Yet Hodges recognizes that such a concept must also be supported by proof of God's existence if it is not to be only a fantasy, "valuable perhaps as poetry or drama but still not a cognition of reality." Consequently, he finds it necessary to re-examine, " but in the light of the present situation," the traditional natural theology's arguments for God's existence. In Chapter 6 (" Metaphysical Arguments for God's Existence ") Hodges considers four traditional arguments for God's existence (to the three Kant recognized he adds a fourth, one based upon the need for satisfying the mind's desire for complete intelligibility). Noting that there are various forms of the cosmological argument (the argument from "contingency" as he prefers to call it) , Hodges states it in what he considers the broadest terms possible, namely, in terms of the dependency of one being upon another for the realization of its potential to be or to be made actual. Since not all beings can be dependent, Hodges argues (following the traditional line), we must therefore arrive at a first cause, one, however, which need not be " first " in a temporal series. In this last connection he writes, " in the heyday of natural theology causality was not necessarily a time-relation. In particular the causal relation between God and the universe was not so. God, being Himself timeless, was the cause of all that is in time by virtue of a timeless act. If the world existed through an infinite past, it was nevertheless dependent, throughout the infinite past time, on the action of the timelessly existing God for its existence and duration " (p. 68) . Hodges then explains how we are led to characterize the first cause as infinite, completely immaterial, and always possessed of a perfect act of understanding and concludes this discussion on a partly Aristotelian note by remarking " Here is a first cause which can hold our interest, and the belief which can give a sense of meaning to our lives " (pp. 65-66) . The argument from design is the next to be considered, and in its summary Hodges comments that "in all these phenomena (of nature) we are BOOK REVIEWS 501 invited to see evidences of purpose at work and since the animals involved cannot themselves be supposed to have the power either to conceive these purposes or to execute them the facts point directly to God " (p. 65). Howeyer, concerning the value of this argument, Hodges points out that it cannot be expected to sustain the whole weight of religious theism, for, at best, it only proves a purposeful controller of the world, not a creator. Regarding the ontological argument, Hodges believes that Kant's refutation remains valid so long as one reads the argument at its surface level, but that there is also its deeper level which accounts for its continued fascination. According to Hodges, this deeper level involves a flash of insight that what is highest in thought must be, or, and here he cites another contemporary writer on the subject, that thought is the criterion of reality and that there is also its deeper level which accounts for its continued fascinapreted the ontological argument would seem to resemble closely the argument from intelligibility. In explaining this latter argument Hodges uses language reminiscent of certain recent Thomist philosophers as he argues that the mind, unsatisfied with mere partial explanation of the real, seeks an explanatory principle which leaves no question unanswered and which makes the whole intelligible, namely, a supreme intelligence and creator whom men call God. At this point in his reading, one could infer that Hodges is prepared to give some credence to the traditional arguments for God's existence. Not so, however, as the reader soon discovers when he arrives at Chapter 8 ("Not Proven"). Here Hodges questions metaphysical realism by arguing that, since our knowledge is restricted to the phenomenal aspects of material reality (which we "objectify" or scientifically describe in quantitative or mathematical terms), "we can form no certain and definitive doctrine concerning the most general structure of being " (p. 93) . Thus, regarding the notion of cause Hodges now claims that it is impossible to know what it is for a cause to act or even to apprehend a necessary relation between cause and effect. All that we know about this latter relationship, he asserts, is that one thing regularly follows another in our experience and thus may be said to " depend " upon it. Consequently, he concludes, as well he may, the arguments from contingency and design fail to prove God's existence. As for the principle that the real is what realizes the demands of the intellect, i.e., the principle of intelligibility, Hodges dismisses it here as a " piece of unsupported dogmatism " which we do not know to be true. In some of the later chapters (9, 10), Hodges -discusses the nature of religious-mystical experience as a possible mode of experiential knowledge of God and also the nature of religious faith. While emphasizing in this context God's incomprehensibility, he will still continue to speak of God in analogical terms, making use of concepts he consistently employs throughout the book, such as agency and person. But it is in his chapter "Credo ut Fiam" (13) that he fully reveals the extent of his scepticism. 502 BOOK REVIEWS As a sample he claims that, although we may rightly accept them on pragmatic grounds, we can never be certain that the guiding principles of our knowledge of reality (e.g., the assumptions that our memories are valid, that the future will resemble the past) are true. It is within this context that he asserts that science and religion are equally based on faith, the principle of which, according to him, is the will to live. In his final chapter (16) he sums up the results of his discussion. Generally stated they are: (1) The foundation of theism is an imaginative vision of existence which can be of deep significance for life but which cannot be verified by reason; what determines belief, therefore, is an existential acceptance, so that, actually, there are no more rational grounds for believing theism to be true rather than its opposite; and (3) one chooses the belief which allows expression to one's authentic self. In concluding, this reviewer feels obligated to offer some remarks about the merits of this book (a "much revised" version, he neglected to mention, of Hodges's Gifford lectures delivered at Aberdeen in 1956-57) . Aside from its lack of internal unity of thought development (a reflection, perhaps, of its original lecture form), what is most disturbing about the book is its obvious violation of the rule of internal consistency. While the author often offers instructive statements concerning our natural knowledge of God and its limits-and argues them as though he thought them of value-their value is ultimately negated by his deeper scepticism. What is also confusing philosophically is that, despite his uncritical acceptance of the Humean concept of cause, Hodges will continue to refer to God as "All-Agent" and Personal Creator even when describing the mystic's awareness of God. It might be said in his defense, perhaps, that these references are based upon the author's religious faith; even so, this does not prevent them from being quite unintelligible from the standpoint of what Hodges has claimed reason can know. Finally, one might also wish to express his dismay that a Christian and a philosopher would have so completely succumbed to this radical form of skepticism without apparently having given too much thought to its logical epistemic consequences. THEODORE J. KoNDOLEON Villanova University Villanova, Pennsylvania Divine Commands and Moral Requirements. By PHILIP L. Qu1NN. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978. Pp. viii + 166. $19.50. In this study, which defends the status of divine command theories of ethics without positively advocating such theories, the author is concerned to set forth a view according to which propositions expressing moral requirements may be coherently and illuminatingly regarded as necessarily BOOK REVIEWS 503 equivalent to propositions expressing the content of those same requirements as divine commands. Divine command theories have fallen on hard times. Thus the author, in defending such theories against objections, has in a sense offered a conceptual account of moral requirements modeled on decrees of God in much the same way that recent philosophy has used alternative worlds and states of worlds to explicate propositional modalities. He begins with a simple theory stating the terms of equivalence and proceeds to amplify the simple theory according to the views of God presupposed by various forms of theism. In the simple theory, it is necessary that for any proposition p it is required that p if and only if God so commands; it is permitted that p if and only if God does not command the denial of p; and it is forbidden that p if and only if God commands that not-p, where the name " God " designates a singular across the class of worlds in which that singular exists and nothing in worlds in which that singular fails to exist, He then takes up ten objections to divine command theories, disposing of them clearly and cogently, in the reviewer's opinion; he urges at length that the most serious objections can be treated so as to show that it is at least more reasonable to suspend judgment on the truth of divine command theories than to reject them. We shall return to this later; for in the reviewer's opinion the author has himself given covert reasons for rejecting such theories in some of his declarations of neutrality. The author, with the same firm competence evident in his defense, works divine command into theory of value and obligation, a theory which deals with conflicting prima facie moral responsibilities and recent deontic logistics. His strategy resembles one of giving a kind of moral semantics in terms of divine commands. It is his final chapter, however, which the reviewer finds most interesting and which raises the question of how well the divine command theory has been defended. Throughout, the author has been at pains to precise his theory without reference to classical theism in any of its special doctrines, doctrines logically independent of the concept of the authority of divine commands as such. The difficulty is whether such independence does not ultimately tip the balance toward a rejection of divine command theories. On p. 140, he states the argument of Minas to the effect that, according to orthodox theism, God cannot legitimately be said to forgive or refrain from punishing to the extent that this involves a prohibited change in attitude on God's part. He counters with the reply that, of course, God can do all this; and proceeds to vindicate " the doctrine that God's activity of forgiving sins consists either in a change of attitude on his part or an act of refraining from adopting a negative attitude" (p. 145). To this, two comments seem in order. First, Minas's characterisation of the aseity of God is questionable in the opinion of the reviewer, who is a classical theist. Quinn is quite correct to regard it as inadequate. Second, his proposed alternative-which does allow changes of attitude and disposition 504 BOOK REVIEWS in God-seems less effective than the position of careful classical theists. Classical theism requires that God be immutable. Hence it must explain apparent "changes of attitude" in God as, say, toward the repentant. While holding to divine immutability, the classical theist must explain the perfectly acceptable intuition that God does resent or view with displeasure certain actions, that he punishes, and that he has compassion on the repentant. The author's own treatment, indeed, permits a defense of the classical view. In its defense, the reviewer would suggest the following account. God is displeased with or resentful of or in a state of personal umbrage at (henceforth we shall say merely " is displeased ") action y just exactly in case He has commanded the avoidance of y. This would apply to the action y simply and without qualification. We would say, then, that God is displeased with the agent X on account of y just exactly when (i) X brings y about (does y, etc.) and (ii) X believes or accepts that God is displeased with y. This makes God's displeasure rest on an agent in terms of the agent's belief about what he does in relation to God. We could then easily say that God is displeased with agent X during the temporal interval ' t-t ' just exactly when there is an action y such that (i) God is displeased with X on account of y (ii) X brought about y at t; and (iii) X repented of y at 't.' This rests the limits of God's displeasure less within the Divine will than within the limits of the unrepented deed. Further we could with equal ease say that God forgives X (the sin) y just exactly when (i) God is displeased with X on account of y; and (ii) there is a time t-future to the time of y-in which X repents of y. Finally, we could say that God is displeased with X simpliciter just exactly when (i) God is displeased with X on account of some y; (ii) X never repents of y. Clearly this transfers the burden of attitude on to the agent who offends and does or does not repent. Changes in divine attitude are explained with reference to the disposition of the offender. But this does not imply the indifference assumed by Minas for God. It is in fact simply an attempt to deal consistently with the consequences of Divine immutability together with our conviction that God should be a forgiving God, indeed, a God of unaltering benevolence, even though circumstances make this attitude now the benevolence of displeasure, now the benevolence of forgiveness, now the benevolence of approbation. The view of the author, however, that God could change his attitudes as he chooses-since no divine command can apply to God himself-in fact runs the risk of making God capricious. Why, for instance, may he not refuse forgiveness or recant on an earlier forgiveness? Neither justice nor benevolence requires it without some special axiom to the effect. The same problem arises when the punishment of sin is considered. Why might God not punish sins forgiven, save for a special prohibitive axiom? This is a nominalist's God whose will is absolute and who may freely bind and un- BOOK REVIEWS 505 bind himself, regardless of what we might think of his noblesse oblige. And, if God has such power to bind and loose in this fashion, then surely a divine command theory of ethics is to be rejected to the extent that it enshrines the possibility of such a God. It would be better to live in a world without God than in a world where God may change his attitude-and not necessarily for the better. The defensibility of divine command theories surely requires support from some form of classical theism with its special and logically independent doctrine of immutabiity and eternity. And, if this is so, then it jeopardizes the author's conclusion that suspending judgment on divine command theories is preferable to rejecting them. All this should not reflect unfavorably on a work so well written, so clear in its program, and so successful in its defense against the weightiest of the traditional objections. Perhaps reading this book will lead others to share the author's stated position on the feasibility of divine command theories: " For my part I once believed that, no matter what the fate of other theological doctrines, divine command theories must be false. . . . Perhaps divine command theories can be refuted, but at present I do not see just how this remarkable feat is to be accomplished." (p. 65) NICHOLAS INGHAM, O.P. Providence College Providence, R.l. Ethical Issues of Death and Dying. Edited by JOHN LADD. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980. Pp. x 214. Cl. $rn.95; ppr. $6.95. + This book is a collection of essays written by noted American and English philosophers and physicians dealing with the ethical aspects of euthanasia, treatment prolongation, and life saving therapies. John Ladd's introductory essay focuses on the moral problem of converting " cacothanasia," or ugly and deformed dying, into " euthanasia," or happy and good death. The fundamental problem for the moralist, in his opinion, is that of clarifying the concepts surrounding the various types of euthanasia, and, after that, distinguishing the various modes of dying, killing, and euthanasia. Whether the method of clarification and analysis is adequate to the problem of resolving the complex questions of euthanasia is open to debate. Philippa Foot's important article "Euthanasia" is reprinted here. It contends that saving life is not always and everywhere a good, for it is conceivable that a prisoner's life could be saved so that he could have more torture inflicted on him. The distinction between active and passive euthanasia is relevant, but the distinction is to be grounded on justice and charity. Charity is regarded as " the virtue that gives attachment to the good of others " (p. 34) , and the adequacy of this notion of charity is subject to dispute. Killing someone who asked to be killed could not be regarded as a violation of justice for the reason that no injury can be done 506 BOOK REVIEWS to a person who consents. Failing to aid another in danger may be against charity, but it is not against justice in each and every case. The physician's ordinary duty is to preserve life within the confines of justice and according to the ordinary standards of medical practice. Active euthanasia against the will of the patient is thus against justice and is prohibited. But Foot contends that voluntary passive and active euthanasia are not morally objectionable. These two forms of euthanasia, along with non-voluntary passive euthanasia, are permissible because neither justice nor charity is violated in any case, no rights are infringed, and no harm is done. Foot confuses the moral good with bringing harm and violating rights here, and her analysis is weak. Acts are not wrong because they bring harm, for, if that were so, then no one could sin against God in that no one could inflict harm on God. The conclusion that voluntary active euthanasia is a good because it gives relief from harm is questionable, for the relief from harm is not a necessary aspect of one's death. She supports the use of living wills, but objects to the legitimization of active euthanasia on practical grounds. The fundamental difficulty with her essay is the inadequate treatment of the nature of the human good. A fuller discussion of this might have led her to very different conclusions. Peter Singer, writing from a utilitarian hedonistic background, attacks the notion of the sanctity of human life as " specist " and discriminating against living members of other species. Contending that certain types of human life are no more worthy of sanctity than other forms, he argues that active nonvoluntary euthanasia could be performed on certain human persons if suffering were minimized by so doing. And he argues, on the other hand, that certain forms of animal life should be granted greater protection because of the close proximity of these forms to human life. Singer, unfortunately, does not understand the ultimate grounds for the ascription of sanctity of life to human beings, as is seen in his brief history of the concept. Human life possesses sanctity because it possesses intelligence and freedom which give the human being mastery over action when the use of reason and freedom is attained. The possession of freedom and intelligence gives the human being an active participation in the divine nature. The human species does not possess sanctity by reason of chance or happenstance but because of a unique mode of participation in divine life which human intelligence and freedom permits. Singer's attempt to unsanctify human life fails because of his failure to understand this theological relationship. Michael Tooley suggests that the only issue involved in euthanasia is that of personhood. Where personhood, defined as a set of psychological states, does not exist, but where only biological life exists, then active termination of life can be underaken. Potential persons, members of the human species who lack a self-concept, a concept of themselves as continuing, and a concept of themselves with a future, can be actively killed because they fail to meet the necessary requirements for membership in BOOK REVIEWS 507 the class of human persons. Infants lacking relational capabilities and brain dead but breathing corpses can be killed because they are only biologically, but not personally, alive. Tooley's concept of the person is quite superficial, and he virtually regards the person as being identical with the psychological states of the individual. A more adequate anthropology would reject this bifurcation of the psychological and biological, and see the person as the causal agent and referential subject of both of these states, yet not identified strictly with either of them. Tooley also fails to see that the person, or soul, exists in all parts of the whole, as it gives existence to the whole. This being the case, the person exists when the parts of the whole, here meaning the major organ systems, retain the capability for integrated and spontaneous, if sometimes assisted, functioning. In dealing with the issue of the rights of the patient and euthanasia, Dan W. Brock stresses the importance of considerations of distributive justice. Models that exclude these considerations, such as strictly patient-centered models of analysis, are inadequate and cannot deal with the demands of justice. John Ladd argues that the rights model of deailng with problems of death and euthanasia is too narrow and rigid. The complexity of these issues requires that such aspects of dying as compassion and kindness to the dying be considered. He opts for what he calls an " ideal rights " model, which is more open ended and positive and which ascribes to society obligations to provide citizens with the good life. As part of this good life, Ladd includes a good death, meaning the ability to choose one's own time and manner of dying. These ideal rights are more dependent on the kindness and generosity of members of society than are the traditional forms of rights. James Rachels contends that there is no rational basis for the activepassive distinction in euthanasia for the reason that there is no distinction of any value between killing and letting die. This criticism of the traditional active-passive distinction is not valid, however, for it fails to see that in morally valid occasions of letting die, there is no means available to the person who permits death significantly to forestall or prohibit death. In killing, there is an option available, and this is what makes it worse than permissible modes of letting die. Rachels also ignores the fact that in legitimate cases of letting die there is no consent or approval of the death of the person as a human good that is to be pursued. In these cases, the will of the person who permits death does not attach to the death of the victim as a good which enhances the character of the agent who permits death. Rachels also fails to see that in valid situations of letting die the omission of the agent is a necessary but not a sufficient condition for the death of the person, for the underlying disease or condition is the necessary and sufficient condition of death. The omission of the agent who lets die does not initiate the deadly occasion, whereas the act of killing does initiate this occasion. In acts of killing, the object of the act is to realize the 508 BOOK REVIEWS death as the end of the act and as a good to be pursued, but in the act of letting die the object of the will is not the death of the patient even though the end of the performance of letting die is the death caused by factors independent of the omission. John Ladd's article on passive and active euthanasia calls into question the classical distinction between these two forms of euthanasia. The logical distinction between these two is not clear, in his opinion, and acts of omission often have the same effects as acts of commission. As is the case with other authors, Ladd seems to pay insufficient attention to the posture of the will in these acts, and the relation of this posture to the character of the moral agent. Raymond S. Duff and A.G. M. Campbell argue that the family, physician, and patient should decide issues dealing with life-prolonging treatments and that, in instances of conflict, a physician should be assigned who would consider only the interests of the patient. It is strange that it should be necessary to appoint an individual to protect the interests of the patient, but it should be the case that no one should be allowed to enter into decisions who does not have the interests of the patient sincerely at heart. The rights of the patient are to be considered, in Duff's and Campbell's opinion, but it is not clear why these rights are not given priority or made absolute, but just made the object of consideration. Because many doctors are actually practicing active euthanasia today, the authors suggest that hypocrisy be avoided, and that approval be given to it as a policy. Why policy should be determined by practice is not even considered by the authors. Society should intervene in the treatment of the patient and in the family-patient-physician relationship only when harm is being done to the patient, and only when society is willing to support those who suffer from unwanted decisions. The concept of harm is not specified in any manner here, which makes unconditional acceptance of this theory impossible, and the reason why society is obliged to support those who suffer from unwanted decisions is not established. Must society out of justice support those who suffer because of unwanted laws against rape or incest? This crucial question remains unanswered. The value of this book could have been enhanced if articles from authors who defend the traditional prohibitions against various types of euthanasia had been included. Also, a couple of the articles repeat the same themes, and other articles fail to advance any new theories or concepts. But this book remains valuable as an introduction to the debates and controversies surrounding the moral permissibility of various types of killing, letting die, ·and euthanasia. Unfortunately, no major new theoretical developments are to be found in this work that have not appeared elsewhere; what this book has done is simply to gather past theories under one cover. ROBERT BARRY, Dominican House of Studies Washington, D. C. O.P.