AN EPISODE IN MEDIEVAL ARISTOTELIANISM: MAIMONIDES AND ST. THOMAS ON THE ACTIVE INTELLECT I N A PREVIOUS STUDY, I touched indirectly on the influence of Aristotle on the thought of Maimonides and St. Thomas while investigating their speculations on the sacred name YHVH. 1 It was suggested that the tetragrammaton can be viewed as marking the boundary between philosophical speculation and belief, reason and revelation. This investigation led to another theme, left unexplored at the time, which has generated a great deal of scholarly concern as well as critical mischief during its lengthy career, that of the Active Intellect. It presents a major difficulty to Aristotle interpretation, a state of affairs passed on with interest to medieval scholarship. The variations on the theme by Maimonides and St. Thomas are valuable not only in themselves but may possibly act as an index reflecting the extent to which Aristotelian elements penetrated into Christian and Jewish thought. I propose to begin with a summary discussion of the De Anima text and pass on to the interpretations of Maimonides and St. Thomas, attempt to draw out pertinent implications, and, if possible, draw out the conclusions which present themselves. Aristotle's De Anima The text of De Anima is manifestly deficient, riddled with corrupt readings, written perhaps in two versions. 2 Moreover, the oldest authority for any part of the work consists in references by Alexander, who was followed by the other 'ancient' l " Maimonides and St. Thomas on the Tetragrammaton: The Exodus of Philosophy", Modern Schoolman, March, 1982, Vol. LIX. 2 Refer to W. David Ross, "The Text of De Anima ", Autour d'Aristote (Louvain: Pub. Univ. de Louvain, 1955), pp. 213-214. 317 318 ROBERT A. HERRARA commentators and paraphrasts, Themistius, Philoponus, Simplicius, and Sophronius, the latter writing some sixteen hundred years after Aristotle. 3 Given the corruption of the text, the complexity of the subject matter, and the dearth of complementary explicative texts, it is hardly surprising that vastly different versions of the Active Intellect were elaborated. (Hirschberger cites a codex in the Basle University library that lists no less than 17 different interpretations of the Nous poietikos.) 4 Scholars are still at a loss how to characterize Aristotle's speculations on the Active Intellect. While A. E. Taylor indicates that the presentation of De An.ima. II, 5, is "the most startling of all the inconsistencies between the naturalistic and the spiritualistic strains in Aristotle's philosophy" 5 and Randall considers it a Platonic wild oat come home to roost 6 , Sir David Ross can suggest that it is the 'culminating point' of Aristotle's psychology. 7 And this is only a representative example of the wide discrepancy which exists between scholars. A close view of the text itself will evidence the difficulties of interpretation. Aristotle initiates De Anima II, 5 by stating that two factors are involved in the whole of nature, in every class of things. He is referring to matter-potentially all the particulars included in the class-and a productive cause. The soul also possesses both a potential element and an actualizing element, the latter being the poietikon (activity) .8 Surprisingly, the Nous poietikos or Active Intellect is not found in the text, but was introduced at a later date by Themistius. 9 At any rate, these ' elements ', both the actualizing and the potential, a Ibid., pp. 207-215. 4 Johannes Hirschberger, Historia de la Filosoffa, trans. by L. Martinez Gomez (Barcelona: Herder, 1968), Vol. I, p. 868. s A. E. Taylor, Aristotle (New York: Dover, 1955), p. 86. 6 John Herman Randall, Jr., Aristotle (New- York: Columbia University Press, 1960), p. 102. 1 W. David Ross, Aristotle (New York: Meridian, 1960), pp. 146-149. s De Anima, 430al 7. 9 Edmond Barbotin, La Theorie Aristotelicienne de L'lntellect D'A'[n'es Theophraste (Louvain: Pub. Univ. de Louvain, 1954), p. 154, note 8. He cites Themistius, In de Anima, 2, 108; 19-22. THE ACTIVE INTELLECT 319 are to be found in the soul (en te psyche). Theophrastus, Aristotle's disciple and successor, understood this as indicating the co-existence of the two elements in the individual soul, a position which will later serve as point of departure for St. Thomas's interpretation. Intellect is then of two kinds, that which " becomes all things", and that which "makes all things", the first compared to the senses, it being a receptive faculty. The second, the Poietikon, is compared to light, as it transforms potential colors into actual colors.10 This passage was used by Themistius to establish the identity of the Active Intellect in all men, it being distributed as is light into various rays. 11 Although this may be chancy, it is clear that the epistemological function of the Poietikon is to actualize the intelligible forms by abstracting them from matter. After the manner of light, it exercises its activity on the noeta in potency, bringing them to actual intelligibility. Aristotle indicates that the Poietikon has four attributes; it is separable, impassible, unmixed, and, in its essential nature, is activity. 12 The term choristos signifies to exist in itself-in an independent manner-and was used previously in De Anima. 13 Both apathes and amiges present little difficulty as they also refer to the Passive Intellect and a fortiori to the Activity. The fourth attribute is reserved by Aristotle to the Poietikon . The words "te ousia on energeia" expresses its unique status. 14 The essence of the Activity is the actuality of thought. Still, the Poietikon does not seem to be identified with God. It is hardly possible after the Metaphysics description of God as Unmoved Mover whose causal activity is one of attraction as end, ensconced within its hedonistic circle of contemplation, 15 10 De Anima, 480al5-17. to E. E. Spicer, Aristotle's Conception of the Soul (London: University of London Press, 1984), p. 104. 12 De Anima, 480al8-19. 13 Jbid., 408b19. 14 Frarn;ois Nuyens, L'Evolution de la Psychologie d'Aristote (Paris: Vrin, 1948)' p. 303. 15 Metaphysics, Book XII, esp. chapters 7 and 9. 11 Refer 320 ROBERT A. HERRARA that Aristotle would have the deity spoonfeeding individual men with intelligibles. The unceasing activity of the Poietikon seems to demand that it not be limited to the role of a mere epistemological principle. Aristotle suggests this when he indicates that the Activity appears as it is only when liberated from its present condition. This alone is immortal, eternal, and impassible. Without it, no one thinks!16 The terms athanaton and aydion are the only predicates aside from unceasing activity which are expressly attributed to the Poietikon alone. According to Bonitz, Aristotle uses the first term only five times-mainly in the Politics-while aydion is a much used expression meaning to possess without interruption. 11 In the Metaphysics, Aristotle speaks of "eternal things", indicating that those things which are capable of not existing are not eternal. 18 It follows that " eternal " has a specific meaning for Aristotle, signifying that which has always existed and will always exist, which is to say, that which is necessary. Additional texts are not really helpful in solving the problem at hand. In the Metaphysics, Aristotle speaks of nous as a form which survives death. 19 But is he referring to the Poietikon? Perhaps so, but the point can hardly be demonstrated. Perhaps the most relevant text found outside the De Anima is from De Generatione Animalium. After a discussion of the development of the human foetus, Aristotle goes on to make the point that ' principles ' the activity of which is physical cannot be present without a physical body: there can be no walking without feet, and so on. The only exception is nous which enters as an additional factor from the outside. It alone is divine because physical activity has nothing whatever to do with its activity. 20 Here the Poietikon is probably meant as the 1a De Anima, 430a22-25. Index, 14bll-15, cited in Nuyens, op. cit., p. 307. 1088123-24. 19 Ibid., 1070a26ff. 20 De Generatione Animalium, 7S6b27-28. 11 Bonitz 18 Metaphysics, TIIE ACTIVE INTELLECT 321 Passive Intellect could not be considered by Aristotle as an additional factor from the outside. The preceding is, in brief, the ground of the convoluted speculations which generated the different versions of the Active Intellect which reached Maimonides and St. Thomas. At least in Maimonides's case, it is a fairly safe generalization to note that, at a relatively early date, Aristotle's notion of the Poietikon was conflated with Neo-Platonic theories of emanation. His 47 or 55 separate intelligences were, in the majority of cases, whittled down to 10, separate intelligence identified with the Active with the Intellect. As Isaac Husik indicated some years ago, in this way the "Active Intellect was thus placed among the ... intelligences whose function it is to control the motions of the sublunar world and in particular to develop the human faculty of reason ". 21 Maimonides Maimonides's thought as presented in the Guide of the Perplexed has its own peculiar difficulties. As Leo Strauss suggests, the Guide is not merely a key to the forest-as Maimonides himself indicates-but is itself an enchanted and hence enchanting forest (the work itself is at best elusive, at worst schizoid, containing both a public and a secret teaching) . As it is not primarily a philosophical book but a Jewish book, 22 one can reasonably ask: what kind of Jew wrote this Jewish book? This leads us to the theme under consideration as the question as to whom the secret teaching is addressed will be seen to be closely linked to the question of the Active Intellect. The contrast between the Aristotelian source of Maimonides's speculation and Jewish belief has been noted repeatedly. Husik suggests that he is apparently unaware of the ' yawning gulf ' :n Isaac Husik, A History of Mediaeval Jewish Philosophy (New York: Atheneum, 1973), pp. xlvii ff. 2 2 "How to Study the Guide of the Perplexed" in Moses Maimonides, The Guide of the Perplexed, trans. and notes by Shlomo Pines (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1964), pp. xiii-xiv; xv fl'. ROBERT A. HERRARA between Aristotelianism and Judaism. 28 Guttmann, more eirenic in approach, indicates that Maimonides throws the opposition between the two into bold relief in order to overcome it by means of a 'genuine synthesis '. 24 Because of this, Maimonides's main concern was to demonstrate the identity between philosophy and religion, that is to say, that philosophy is the sole means for the appropriation of the content of revelation. 25 There is obviously more than a whiff of the suspect in this formulation when viewed from the perspective of the observant Jew. This is compounded by a system of thought in which degrees of philosophic knowledge are equated with those of religious certitude while religious inwardness is made to depend on the deepening of understanding. 26 One fears that the suggested ' genuine synthesis ' may prove to be merely a facade for a drastic turnabout in which religion is reduced to the role of prat-boy to philosophical speculation. The point could be made that this was reflected in the violent reaction against Maimonides within Judaism, including accusations of abandoning belief in Messianic redemption and corporeal resurrection while replacing them with the pagan notion of individual immortality.21 In addition, the Rabbis of northern France condemned him unanimously at an early date although it was left to Hasdai Crescas, some time later, to launch a fullscale attack against Maimonides's Aristotelianism. But, in this respect, we should recall the suspicions which gathered around St. Thomas and which reached their apogee, after his death, in the Paris and Oxford condemnations. 23 Husik, op. cit., p. 800. He indicates that " the very passage from Jeremiah which he quotes as summing up his idea of the summum bonum speaks out against him and he only succeeds in manipulating it in his favor by misinterpreting the word 'wise'". 24 Julius Guttmann, Philosophies of Judaism (New York: Schocken Books, 1976)' p. 172. 25 Ibid., p. 175. 20 Guide, III, 51. 21 Guttmann, op. cit., pp. 208-210. THE ACTIVE INTELLECT 323 Maimonides was certainly an Aristotelian, of that somewhat bizarre genre, hybrid of Aristotle and Neo-Platonism, which was current in Islamic Spain at the time. This is not to say that he did not part company with Aristotle. He certainly did on the important issues of creation, providence, miracles, and the unique status of Moses and Torah. Nevertheless, Maimonides belonged to those who in Islam were called philosophers, in opposition to the mutikallimun, those exponents of Ka.lam described by Wolfson as " a particular system of thought which arose in Islam prior to philosophy ". 28 Moreover, he made a valiant attempt to prove that the equivalent of Greek philosophy once existed in Judaism. 29 In addition, he restricts full participation in religious matters to a small elite: the deepest meaning of Scripture should never be revealed to the masses. 30 Perhaps even more weighty is his apportionment of immortality-itself primarily a Greek notion-to philosophers. The Jewish masses can only qualify by means of professing the thirteen articles given in his Commentary on the Mishna. It is important to realize that this amalgam of the religious and the philosophical was scarcely novel in medieval Jewish thought. Prior to Maimonides, Pseudo-Bahya identified the Active Intellect with the Shekinah-the presence of God-and with Kabod, wisdom.31 More to the point, the 'philosopher ' in Halevi's Kuzari, representing a viewpoint at variance with that of the author, considers that union with the Active Intellect to be man's highest goal. Through it, he becomes like one of the angels. 32 Ibn Daud and Ibn Ezra also reflect, to varying ANIEL O. DAllLBTROM religious faith in the indeterminate gamut of language-games. Marxists (and Freudians) consider religious faith an ideological sedative and even religious existentialists insist that religious faith is a matter of choice, a leap that is only hindered by the weight of a metaphysical system. In the following paper it is not my purpose to explain why these various strands of the modern mentality reject Hegel's view of the relation of philosophy and religion. However, an insight into the character of modern philosophical culture can perhaps be gleaned from a clear perception of what it universally rejects. Indeed, Hegel argues his thesis systematically and historically and both focuses provide important clues, not only to the contemporary rejection of that mutual accountability, but also to the contemporary state of philosophy itself. Feuerbach and Marx are often credited with fashioning a religious model of ideology and then applying that model to philosophies (including Hegel's) . Yet it is Hegel who puts such a model to devastating use in his assessment of philosophies which do not fulfill religion's need for philosophy but simply replicate religion in secular fashion. Hegel's historical argument for the mutual accountability of religion and philosophy is based on a critical account of a religious model of cognition within modern philosophy from the time of Descartes. 2 2 Curiously this theme, which is interwoven in Hegel's views on religion, philosophy, and history, is largely overlooked by scholars. Some have duly recognized the role of the Lutheran Reformation in Hegel's own thinking. See Karl LOwith, From Hegel to Nietzsche, translated by David E. Green (Garden City, New York: Anchor, 1967), pp. 32-33. Identifying the spirit of Hegel and Kierkegaard, Stephen Crites rightly emphasizes the self-conscious dependence of Hegel's own philosophical perspective on his "Lutheranism," viewed as "the modern Protestant culture in which as he [Hegel] sees it, the Christian religion and the secular order have so permeated one another as to be indistinguishable." See Stephen Crites, In the Twilight of Christendom: Hegel v. Kierkegaard on Faith and History (Chalmersburg, Pennsylvania: American Academy of Religion, 1972), p. 51. In this regard Crites echoes a theme, not only of LOwith, but also tof Fackenheim: "For if for Hegel the truth of Spirit is already disclosed in life the disclosure is found-or found decisively-in religious life, reaching its fullness in modern Protestant Christianity." See Emil Fackenheim, The Religious Dimension in MUTUAL NEED AND FRUSTRATION 341 The first part of this paper presents Hegel's systematic account of the different ways in which philosophy and religion respectively need each other. In the second part of the paper the focus shifts to Hegel's account of modern philosophy's religious presupposition, the Reformation, and its reverberations in the Cartesian legacy of modern philosophy. At this stage a central thesis begins to take place. Modern philosophy progresses by giving distinctively philosophic expression to its religious presuppositions in the age of Reformation. Yet modern philosophy stumbles precisely by not maintaining its integrity as against religion. This collapse of modern philosophy into its religious foundation occurs on an epistemological level where philosophy reverts to the immediacy of belief and intuition and to the formal authority of a traditional understanding. I. Philosophy and Religion: A Systematic Presentation In the abstract terms of Hegel's system, religion and philosophy have a common content, viz. an absolute and a human relation to what is absolute. In philosophy the content is in the form of thinking, while religion displays its content in the form of symbolic understanding and in the form of devotion. 3 Hegel's Thought (Bloomington and London: Indiana University Press, 1967), p. 22. See also ibid., p. 212. Yet none of these scholars attempt to explain how, in Hegel's view, the Lutheran Reformation set the stage for modern philosophy, beginning with the Catholic Descartes, in its epistemological model. In fact, another approach suggests that implicit atheism and " revolution against Christianity " characterize the tradition initiated by Descartes, in stark contrast to Hegel's attempt to preserve the wisdom of the ancients. But these concerns are not directly relevant to the theme of this paper. See Stanley Rosen, G. W. F. Hegel: An Introduction to the Science of Wisdom (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1974), pp. 7Jll. 3 G. W. F. Hegel, Einleitung in die Geschichte der Philosophie, herausgegeben von Johannes Hoffmeister (Hamburg: Meiner, 1966), S. 42, 46-47, 167, 288. Hereafter this text is referred to as 'Einleitung.' G. W. F. Hegel, Enzyklopiidie der philosophischen Wissenschaften i,m Grundrisse, herausgegeben von Friedrich Nicolin und Otto Poggeler (Hamburg: Meiner, 1969), § 573, Zusatz, S. 451-461. Hereafter this text is referred to as ' Enzyklopiidie.' For the English, see Heleg's Philosophy of Mind, translated by Miller (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971), pp. 302-313 (hereafter referred to as " HPM ". 342 DANIEL O. DAHLSTROM A. Religion:s Need of Philosophy The mutual accountability holding between religion and philosophy is grounded in the fact that they are alike forms of the human spirit and thus exist within a history of a human community. In order to grasp first how religion both needs and is a prerequisite for philosophy, religion's dual form of symbolic understanding and devotion must be conceived as a form of spirituality. I. Religious understanding and religious devotion. For the genuine believer and practitioner of a faith, the individual's religion in some way expresses the profoundest sense of himself or herself. This sense of oneself is so fused with one's sense of God or what is absolute that the very feeling seems to have an absolute character as though it be itself a unique, transcendent, and divine creation. This fusion of self-awareness and awareness of God within a religious feeling is the hallmark of what Hegel has in mind when he speaks of the religious form of spirituality. The simplest forms of this religious self-awareness and spiritual feeling are devotion and prayer. Even in this most elementary form, however, the self-awareness in religion displays both a communal character and a reliance on the memory and the past, essential ingredients to what Hegel calls " understanding." 4 Religion, with the help of art, gives and develops communal expression for the absolute, an expression (like the absolute itself) formative of that initial, interior, and quite individual feeling of who we are. Thus an individual's religious experience and knowledge of God involve private feelings having public expression. This expression is in the form of representation. A representation is both a symbol and a re-presentation, exhibiting some content anew within an individual consciousness. For example, a representation may signify the content of 4 EVnleitung, S. 46-47 Fackenheim, op. cit., " Just as feeling must be inwardly bound up with representation to be religious, so representation must be bound up with feeling to be religious." MUTUAL NEED AND FRUSTRATION 343 a sensation by relating that sensation to another re-called sensation. This relating of two different intuitions is possible because they are in some sort of order ( "after-one-another " or "next-to-one-another") for some individual. The German word for representation is Vorstellung (literally, " before-placing ") , and expresses perhaps better than the English word the family of meanings Hegel brings to bear on his account of the role of representations in religious self-awareness. The representation need not represent the content of a sensation. But a Vorstellung always involves a consciousness of some content on the model of something sensible, the ordering of which, viz., " after or next-to," is reducible to a private subject, i.e., a subject itself represented as "next-to or after-oneanother." Thus the religious Vorstellung places something in front of (vor) us in terms of what has been placed there before (vor) .5 Thus, on the one hand, self-awareness through religious symbol expresses a community's self-awareness at a definite stage in its history and in an understandable form. That is, religion makes itself understood in artistic symbols or parables which signify or picture the spirit by re-presenting what has already been felt in the community. When someone says "I understand," it usually means that a speaker or writer places before him what he can immediately find re-presented in his experiences. The speaker represents what is customary, what the hearer is well-acquainted with in his daily perceptions and activity. To fail to understand is simply to fail to find, in one's memory, the proper match in the past for something currently placed before us.6 5 Enzyklopadie, § !W, S. 55. For the English, see Hegel:s Logic, translated by William Wallace (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), p. 80. Hereafter this text is referred to as 'HL '. See also M. Clark, Logic and System: A Study of the Transition from ' Vorstellung' to Thought in the Philosophy of Hegel (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1971). 6 Einleitung, S. 48-51; Enzyklopiidie, § 9, S. 4rt (HL, 18) and § 80, S. (HL, 118). 344 DANIEL O. DAHLSTROM On the other hand, representations display their symbolic power by virtue of an individual subject as an ordering unity. This same characteristic carries over into the understanding which accepts or rejects what is placed before it on the grounds of its ordering of representations. Accepting Kant's characterization of understanding as the power of representation, Hegel specifically distinguishes V arstellung from V erstand by attributing to the latter the reflection of relations such as universality and particularity, cause and effect, and the like among representations. 7 Nevertheless, while these reflections are in a sense a negation of representations' direct and reflexlike, communally determined replication of the past, these determinations remain bound to or retain their validity in a private subject with private interests and private acts. 8 Moreover, though this individual certification is itself a communal heritage, the subject too is re-presented and, no less than the content of other representations, separate and outside-another. In other words, in the religious expression of the spirit in the form of understanding, both the absolute and the conscious subject are conceived on the model of a representation, i.e. treated as objects after or next to one another. A metaphysics of custom or "positivity," as the young Hegel termed it, dominates the scene as something is understood only when it represents what is over-or dead. 9 In this manner, the very power constitutive of religious self-consciousness, the absolute is nonetheless represented as something alien-in a temporal or spatial sense-to living human beings, yet commanding their unqualified submission. Thus, this side of religion ultimately betrays the intimate feeling of the spirit, the unity of the religious experience in devotion (including the unity among the individuals themselves) , which led to its expression. Hegel has 1 Enzyklopiidie, § S. 55 (LH, 30); Einleitung, S. s Einleitung, S. 48. 9 Einleitung, S. 50: " Ob etwas verstanden werde oder nicht . . . hangt davon ab, ob es in der Gestalt seiner angewohnten Metaphysik an dasselbe kommt." MUTUAL NEE!> AND FRUSTltATtON 345 in mind explicitly those creeds which locate human beings' inherent sinfulness and salvation in past events and establish these claims in a dogmatic theology. Religious devotion (Andaoht) and the cult, on the other hand, express a sense of the inadequacy of dogmatic understanding. "Devotion" signifies the initial religious feeling of oneness with God, while " cult " stands for communal practice of preserving and recovering that unity. Thus this side of religion often finds itself at odds with a religious understanding. Devotion and cult overcome the human alienation from the absolute precisely by denying religious understanding's exclusive location of salvation in a past and in the positive authority of a church. 10 2. Religious inner contradiction and reconciliation in philosophy. Many a devoutly religious soul sees philosophy as an extension of a religious understanding lost in representations, gradually forgetting the absolute, and preparing for a sceptical atheism. Religious understanding, viewing the freedom of inner conviction in thought or devotion as potentially arbitrary, argues for the acceptance of positive church authority. These conflicting sides of religion constitute a kind of religious model of cognition. For reasons similar to those underlying their mutual opposition, each side of this religious model considers philosophy inimical to religion. In Hegel's view, this connection of philosophy with each side of religion is no accident. Like the devotional side of religion, philosophy is opposed to a solely symbolic understanding which 10 Enzyklopiidie, § 565, S. 447 (HPM, !'l99): "Der absolute Geist in der aufgehobenen Unmittelbarkeit und Sinnlichkeit der Gestalt und des Wissens ist dem lnhalte nach der an fiir sich seiende Geist der Natur und des Geistes, der Form nach ist er zunachst fiir das subjektive Wissen der Vorstellung. Diese gibt den Momenten seines lnhalts einerseits Selbstandigkeit und macht sie gegeneinander zu Voraussetzungen und aufeinander folgenden Erscheinungen und zu einem Zusammenhang des Geschehens nach endlichen Reflexions bestimmungen; andererseits wird solche Form endlicher Vorstellungsweis.e in dem Glauben an den einen Geist und in der Andacht des Kultus auch aufgehoben." See also Enzyklopiidie, Vorrede zur zweiten Ausgab.e, S. 12-18; Einleitumg, S. 4!'l-48, 167. Fackenheim, op. cit, pp. 120-124. 346 DANIEL O. DAHLSTROM transforms the truth into an unreachable goal and demands a meek submission to positive authority. 11 Yet philosophy is just as opposed to any attempt by a devout spirit to fashion a mythical unity with God, i.e. a unity in something other than its distinctively human form-the form of thinking. 12 The truth that is philosophy's object must contain the self-discipline and communicability of thought aspired to by religious understanding but also the oneness and completeness experienced in religious devotion. Howeversomuch they be directed at philosophy as a onesided development of one aspect of religion, the valid criticisms made by each side of religion against the other are in fact philosophic insights. Far from being opposed to religion, philosophy in the Hegelian scheme is needed to complete both sides of the religious act by developing the self-criticism inherent in their mutual antagonism. Philosophy, as Hegel puts it, is " the rebirth of the spirit" emergent from the vain one-sidedness of either a purely symbolic understanding or a thought-less piety. 13 Philosophy for Hegel accomplishes what religion can only point to and make barely conscious in the human being, viz. a human reconciliation with the infinite. Philosophy accomplishes the reconciliation of finite and infinite precisely by overcoming religion's contradictions. Philosophy alone construes the spirit in its proper form, the form of thinking, which is at the same time the mark of humanity. Philosophy expresses in human form the unity of devotion and the cult without submitting the freedom of thought to the positivity of religion. 11 Einleitung, S. 57. S. 57: "In dem Unterschiede, der zwischen dem Mythus und zwischen seiner Bedeutung gemacht wird, und darin, A:N'b FRUSTti.ATf<'.>M lem of truth for the modern age as well as the essentials of its solution precisely by giving philosophic expression to Luther's concept of the free spirit. On the other hand, Descartes's is a philosophy characteristic of a tradition in which philosophy and exact sciences are not distinguished. At the level of first reflection or symbolic understanding at which these sciences take place, the revolutionary nature of reflection's self-sufficiency becomes solely an abstract principle or moment of the truth. 38 At this point philosophy alternates between private intuitions and the symbols of scientific or religious authority. Thus the internal contradiction between understanding and devotion in a religious model of cognition is not resolved but simply duplicated in Descartes's philosophy and its modern legacy. Descartes, whose influence in Hegel's opinion cannot be overestimated, establishes " the protestant principle " as the first principle of his philosophy. This principle, viz. de omnibus dubitandum est, signifies a doubting, not in the sense of scepticism, " but much more the sense that one has to deny every prejudice-i.e. all presuppositions which are assumed to be as true as they are immediate-and begin from thinking, in order lo come initially from thinking to something stable, to reach a pure beginning." 39 Obviously, Descartes's expressed intent was to arrive at objective truth, not to give philosophic expression to some protestant ideal. Nevertheless Hegel perceives the Lutheran notion of the free spirit at the root of Descartes's philosophizing, since objectivity is to be achieved solely through" my thinking." It is the interest of freedom which lies at the bottom; what is recognized as true should possess that rank in that our freedom is contained in it, in that we think. 40 § 114, Zusatz, S. 134-135 (HL, 165-166). VGP, S. 127. 4o VGP, S. 129: "Es ist das Interesse der Freiheit, was zugrunde liegt; was als wahr anerkannt wird, soil die Stellung haben, dass unsere Freiheit darin erhalten ist, dass wir denken." 38 Enzyklopiidie, 39 358 DANIEL O. DAHLSTROM Hegel finds this underlying notion of the free spirit further evidenced in what he considers the second principle of Descartes's philosophy, viz." the immediate certainty of thinking," Descartes's rule of accepting nothing as true that is not recognized clearly and distinctly. 41 Yet this second principle also clearly exemplifies the relative self-sufficiency of a first reflection, duplicating the positivity of religious understanding in two ways. First, the self-certainty of the thinking in the cogito or " I " arrived at through doubt is supposed to be an isolated individual, e.g., before-or-next-toanother in the manner of representations. Yet, Hegel insists, the certainty refers only to thinking in its immediacy or the thinking of self-consciousness in general. "'I' has the significance as thinking, not as the individuality of self-consciousness." 42 As yet there can be no certainty of an individual, let alone determined in spatial or temporal or sensible terms. Secondly, since this is thinking in its immediacy, the unity of thinking and being in the cogito is not an inference. In this unmediated fashion, the thinking and the being of the cogito do not have concrete content. Thus, while the identity of thinking and being in the cogito is, according to Hegel, " the most interesting idea of the modem period [and Descartes] was the first to put it forth," being and thinking nevertheless remain different and Descartes does not prove their identity. 43 Because of its immediacy and because it serves as the beginning of his philosophy, the self-reference of thinking, even in the cogito, functions as a strictly formal principle. Hence Descartes requires a third principle, that of " the transition of this certainty to the truth." 44 According to this principle truth involves something other than thinking and the basis of the 41 VGP, S. 130. S. 130: "lch hat die Bedeutung als Denken, nicht Einzelheit des Selbst bewusstseins." 43 VGP, S. 131-132; 134, 136. 4 4 VGP, S. 136: "Das Dritte ist der Uebergang dieser Gewissheit zur Wahrheit, zu Bestimmtem." 42 VGP, MUTUAL NEED AND -FRUSTRATION 359 transition to that other is God. In his principle of clarity and distinctness, and in the self-sufficiency of thinking achieved by rigorous doubt, Descartes finds no basis for distinguishing among representations vis-a-vis external objects. As soon as I maintain or deny that an external object corresponds to a representation, I find that I can be deceived, or better, I find that there are representations involving an other which I do not think as surely as myself. Hence the question emerges for Descartes: how do I know, even in a clear and distinct representation of something other than myself, that I am not deceiving myself? The remedy is a representation of something other than myself which involves the existence of that other just as surely as that representation is thought. The quasi-divine character of the unity of thinking and being is similar to Hegel's own concept of absolute spirit. However, the nature of Descartes's proof of God's existence relies on the same sort of immediate knowing which characterizes Descartes's account of the cogito. As the identity of thinking and being in the cogito is abstract and not proven but simply affirmed, so are the existence of God and its role in overcoming doubt not adequately established. What betrays Descartes, Hegel claims, is that same symbolic understanding functioning within religion, only now in the guise of the method of the exact sciences. The proof of God's existence is supposed to substantiate determinations about degrees of reality of metaphysical distinctions, in terms of which truth and error might be confidently determined. Yet these very determinations are presupposed in the proof and considered " immediately certain," thus replaying the opposition in religion between the intuitive unity achieved by devotion and the symbolic gap of the understanding. That Descartes was himself aware of this is evidenced by what Hegel considers the fourth principle of Descartes's philosophy: " What is revealed to us by God, we must believe although we do not grasp it." 45 The individuality of the self, "'5 VGP, S. "Das Vierte ist nun, ONALD J. KlllEFE, S.;f. and the theological enterprise also, to the extent that it has been placed under the obligation of answering the same autonomous question. So to obligate theology is to denature it: it becomes a sub-department of some other humanistic inquiry, an implication or a consequence of knowledge already possessed in principle: philosophy, history, sociology nowadays, as earlier the Aristotelian cosmology, or the Newtonian physics. 5 Theology cannot be captive to the self-regarding mind, as a matter of definition: it is a project possible only to a mind extroverted by the worship of God, by the faith which looks to a truth which is God's free and historical gift of Himself. Only this radical historical contingency and particularity of the Christian revelation can free the human inquiry from its immanent and universal necessities, for it is impossible to draw an equal sign, as nineteenth century idealism wished to do, between the freedom of the Christ and the immanent necessity of discursive thought: the " scandal of Christian particularity " stands in the way, the historical Rock upon which founder the projects of autonomous reason. The truth, once revealed to be transcendent to the intrinsic necessities of thought, becomes mystery, not a block to the intelligence, but an invitation, the trahi a Deo of St. Thomas, the illumination of St. Augustine: the invitation is to the appropriation of the gift, to worship. This is historical worship, a worship not submitted to the criteria of autonomous reason, but to those of the historical revelation: it is the worship of the Church, in which that revelation, the Christ, is immanent. 5 This is the flaw, for example, in Lonergan's theological method; its cognitional analysis intends to establish the inevitable and therefore transcendent structure of knowledge, and therefore becomes subject to all the criticism long directed at the classical notion of nature: it reduces the transcendence of the revelation to its own immanence. See Method in Theology, Darton, Longman and Todd, London, 1971, 17-25, 107-111, 282-283. A comparable preoccupation with a philosophy of history embedded in the notion of praxis proceeds to a reduction of Catholic worship to the immanent necessities imposed by that criterion: I have discussed this more at length in "Liberation and the Catholic Church: The Illusion and the Reality," Center Journal, vol. 1, no. 1 (Winter, 1981) 45-65. MARY AS CREATED WISDOM 401 There is no other access to the Truth: it is available only through a conversion, an act of historical freedom by which the freedom and historicity of the New Covenant are appropriated, to become one's own, in Christo; thus a new quaerens begins which seeks henceforth an ever deeper radication in the only reality and truth, concrete actuality rather than abstract possibility, the pleroma, the fullness given us in Christ, mediated by his Church. What is sought in this quaerens is clearly not a system or a construct, but reality: existence in Christo, in ecclesia. It is this Covenantal existence, which theology tries to articulate, whether as a metaphysics of creation in Christ, as a theology of the history of salvation, as a sociology of the people of God, a hermeneutic of the Scripture read in the Church, or as whatever other converted humanism. Such efforts remain always provisional, hypothetical, the possibility rather than the actuality of truth. The actual articulation of the fides quaerens intellectum is always finally liturgical; it is this alone which escapes the radical inadequacies of the autonomous mind, and the insoluble dilemmas of its immanent logic. In this liturgy the actuality of the true and the real is at once given and appropriated in the community which is the worshiping Church. To this dynamic actuality which is the faith of the Church all theological hypotheses are correlative; they live by this correlation, which is their subordination to the faith of the Church. Outside this correlation, such hypotheses are no longer theological, for they then bear upon another truth and serve a different interest from that of a faith seeking understanding. A Catholic Christocentricism must resist those temptations which tum theological reason in upon itself in such wise that it looks no longer to the faith which it would understand, but to a set of immanent laws of thought, of abstract consciousness, out of which it would forge a world God never made, centered not on God but upon man. The cure for such errors is not provided by yet another theological method; it is provided by the worship of the Church, the New Covenant, and not otherwise. DONALD J. KEEFE, S.J. When this is not the center, when some other "Christ" is postulated by the logic of whatever theological method-'metaphysical, historical-critical, sociological, political, etc.the eccentricity is immediately evident: such a theology loses at once its correlation to the revelation mediated in the Church and its own hypothetical character, to become an affirmation competitive with rather than a question in complementarity with the teaching of the Church. Such failures are implicit failures of historical worship, in that the theologian has permitted his method a non-theological and extra-ecclesial autonomy; his scholarship and his faith are then no longer held in correlation. Persisted in, such deviations must reach a level of self-awareness; at this point the personal correlation of the theologian's consciousness, his historicity, to the worship of the Church, to the New Covenant, is placed in issue, and the issue is existentially resolved. Such resolutions are always conversions, whether to faith or to its monist analogue. It is idle to deny that the constructive work of theology always threatens, in a fallen world, to become destructive; like all other ecclesial activities, theology also is in continual need of reformation, a reformation which is always a return to the fundamental worship of the Church. For the reformation of Catholic theology, this return must be ever more explicit: it is no longer, as once it was, to construct a theology a metawhich would prescind from the physics de Dea uno,. de Deo trino, in the manner of the First Part of Thomas's Summa Theologica, or a hermeneutic in the manner of the fifth century Antiochene exegesis which Newman criticized for its sterile literalism and consequent scepticism; neither is it any longer possible to construct a theology of the Incarnation which would consist in a metaphysics of the hypostatic union understood only in its static facticity, prescinding from its historicity, and methodologically unconcerned with the implications of the event-character of the Incarnation, i.e., with its freedom. It is becoming increasingly difficult for the exegetical counterpart of such a metaphysics to con- MARY AS CREATED WISDOM 40$ tinue to neglect the event-character of the Christ-for taken simply as brute fact, the concrete presence of the God-Man makes no sense, whether as metaphysics or as narrative. It is only when the Emmanuel is understood as constituted by a divine freedom which creates the free human response by which God is humanly present among us-in brief, as Covennant-that the Good News of the logos sarx egeneto is capable today of being accepted in a moment in which all the categories of our understanding lose their immanence by conversion to this transcendent truth. This is today the work of theology, as it has been from the beginning: the continual conversion of the categories of our understanding. Of themselves, they possess no potentiality for this transvaluation; only the worship of the Church can open them, not in some mystical experience, but in the theologian's taking with a radical seriousness the fact that the Church's worship is a worship in truth. When, as always, our constructs fail, they fail by having become self-regarding, seeking to solve an immanent problematic, rather than to inquire more deeply into the mystery mediated by the Church; thus the failures of the theologies of de Deo U1UJ, de Deo trino, de Christo, de gratia, de ecclesia and all the rest, which sought in ratio rather than in the multifaceted unity of the Church's worship the sustenance of all theology. Thus also fail the theologies of our own time, but more disastrously. A Thomas Aquinas might arrange his treatises in a way now open to misunderstanding, and perhaps even conducive to it, but his own theology is not one upon which it is legitimate to foist our preoccupations, still less our temptations. In the thirteenth century it was not possible for a Christian to think of history except in terms of liturgy; even the flight from history essayed by the Spiritual Franciscans and by Joachim's speculations in the preceeding century was conceived liturgically; liturgy was the factual framework of human life, by which it had meaning-a sacramental meaning insofar as mainline orthodox Christianity was concerned. Thomas regards history in the context of the Old and the New Covenants, and of their fruition; no other pos- 404 sibility existed for a theologian. The actuality may have been insufficiently reflected upon, but it was not less a historical actuality for that. Our own situation is different. From the time of the death of St. Thomas, the victory of a merely rational Aristotelianism began to disrupt the liturgically-grounded syntheses of the great medieval theologians; the dissolution of the sacramental unity of the medieval world was its consequence. This dissolution is now normative; to contest it upon liturgical grounds is to be accounted anti-intellectual, while to assert the sacramental structure of reality is to become incomprehensible, even in theological discourse. There is no agreement whatever upon any alternative principle of truth and unity, other than that the sacramental-liturgical principle is unacceptable. We continue to struggle for a ratio or a praxis which will provide a place to stand: we demand autonomy. But it remains true that we shall not stand unless we understand, and the price of our autonomy is as it has been, the dissipation of the tradition of the Church. If there is to be a return from this dissipation of the Catholic tradition, if there is to be a restoration of the specifically Catholic interest in the systematic expression of the fides quaeren.s intellectum, it can only begin by again taking seriously the Catholic tradition, and this at the point at which its authenticity is assured, in the sacramental worship of the Church. It is here, at the Eucharistic center, that any future systematic theology must find its ground and sustenance, for it is here that the primacy of Christ is actual by his immanence in the Church. 6 The Eucharistic immanence of the Christ is the single, the unique moment and event by which the Triune God is present to creation, and creation present to God. The Eucharist is thus the recapitulation of salvation history, the New Covenant in which the Old is included and concluded. The narrative of its 6 E.g., Avery Dulles, The Resilient Church, Doubleday, Garden City, N.Y., 1977, 54. MARY AS CREATED WISDOM 405 institution is that by which every element of the New Testament is integrated, at once referred to the past and opened to the future apart from whose reality its own would have failed with the failure of the imminent eschatological hope. But we find among the earliest expressions of this eager expectation of the definitive presence of the Lord among his people the Eucharistic M aranatha, in which expectation and celebration are conjoined. 7 If the Parousia for which the Old Testament longed were not now a historical reality the New Covenant would not be new; if it were not also in the future, it would not be a matter of covenant and promise. To this immanence of God in man, the Logos sarx egeneto Who is the Christ, the " firstborn of all creation," there is a necessary correlative: the free consent of creation, of humanity, to that immanence. It is never to be forgotten that this Covenant of God with man is a gift, not an imposition of the divine will upon a passive inconscient material. To understand that such a gift is possible, it is at once necessary to recast the conventional image of the relation between divine and humalli freedom; four centuries of De auxiliis disputation have left Catholic theologians with the nearly ineradicable impression that these freedoms are competitive, whether the contest be resolved according to Bannezian or Molinist lines. While those scholastic analyses are doubtless little regarded today, their influence continues to suppress the quite obvious truth that God's freedom is exercised precisely in the creation of human freedom. That this creation is definitive in the New Covenant is central to the biblical message. The several theologians of liberation have begun to make this fact familiar, but in a context which re-establishes the ancient dichotomies and their pervading historical pessimism; nor is it merely incidental that these theologies find nothing in Mariology to interest them, for 7 Oscar Cullmann, Early Christian Worship, tr. by A. Stewart Dodd and James B. Torrance, London, S.C.M. Press, 1963, 13-14; The Christology of the New Testament, tr. by Shirley C. Guthrie and Charles A. M. Hall, Philadelphia, Westminster Press, 1963, !'tlO ff. 406 DONALD J. KEEFE, S.J. if the initial exercise of integral freedom by an immaculate Theotokos is not understood to be paradigmatic for the structure of the Good Creation, we shall have thereafter no recourse but to those secular utopian constructs which are now proposed as limits upon what the New Covenant may be. This mistake is an ancient one: the search for extrinsic criteria for the sancta societas qua inhaereamus Deo is as old as the Ebionites, as new as Moltmann and his followers. Whether it be specified by poverty, equality, fraternity,. justice or whatever other substitute for righteousness, there is no lack of secular criteria by which the Catholic and Christian reality may be judged and found wanting, lacking that abstract conceptual purity so essential to the demythologizing mind. The New Covenant, the Good Creation, in despite of such criticism, submits to one norm only, the Triune God in whose image it is made. To this imaging, Mary is essential: it is not too much to say that the entirety of that branch of theology which concerns her is directed to her imaging of God. The remainder of this paper will sketch some elements of that imaging in a very cursory fashion, which may nonetheless serve to point to a more functional notion of Mary than is now current. The first postulate of this discussion is that the Priestly account (Gen. 1: 26-28) of the creation of mankind to the image and likeness of God is to be understood, as Karl Barth has insisted, in terms of the masculine-feminine polarity. 8 The postulate is obviously disputable. I have defended it elsewhere and shall not repeat what was said there, other than to observe that the integrative power of this interpretation is perhaps the last and best argument for its validity. 9 This view of the Good Creation as marital, taken up by the Pauline adaptation of the Yahwist "one flesh " of Gen. 2: 24 in Eph 5: 81, is inseparable from the notion of covenant itself, 8 Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics III/I, tr. by G. Bromley and T. Torrance, Edinburgh, University of Edinburgh Press, 1961, 9 D. Keefe, "Authority in the Church," Communio, vol. 7, no. 4, (Winter, 1980), 848-868. MARY AS CREATED WISDOM 407 whether in the Old Testament or the New. It is also inseparable from the reality of created freedom. As the Old Testament is the record of the summons to freedom, of the liberation, of the People of God, that freedom is more and more clearly presented, from Hoseah to the final chapters of Isaiah and in the later Wisdom literature, as the response to a love which is marital. God's love for his people is the continual offer, by the Lord of the living, of the gift of life: He evokes the bridal return, the mediation, of that love, and condemns its betrayal as a prostitution, i.e., as betraying not only God, but the splendor and beauty of the Good Creation, whose reality is foresworn when its one purpose and truth, the mediation and imaging of God, is refused. Any interpretation of the relation of God to Israel which does not take very seriously, and not as mere metaphor, the bridal symbolism by which that relation is increasingly stated in the later levels of the Old Testament cannot avoid an impoverished and finally inadequate view of the New Covenant as well. If the idea of freedom is taken out of this biblical context, it is immediately deformed by subordination to some alien frame of reference, in terms of which any discussion of its value-as for instance that in which the encyclical M irari vos engaged the rationalist and Romantic corruption of its meaning-becomes less and less concerned with the reality, until finally acquaintance with it is in danger of being lost outright. 10 The consequence is familiar; the dichotomies of rationalism are rediscovered, and become the preoccupation of theology to the neglect of its proper object, the neglected mystery. If it be kept in mind that the covenanted freedom of the people of God is a marital freedom, and that this freedom is no other than the imaging of God which is inseparable from their 10 For a balanced treatment of this remarkable document, see A. Simon's article, "Gregory XVI, Pope," New Catholic Encyclopedia, vol. 6, 788 fl'.; for a discussion of its aftermath, see Roger Aubert's discussion of Catholic liberalism during the pontificate of Pius IX in The Christian Centuries, vol. 5, The Church in a Secularized Society, ed. by Rober Aubert et al., London and New York, Darton, Longman & Todd, and the Paulist Press, 1978, 84 ff. 408 DONALD J. KEEFE, S.J. creation as a people, it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that the marital relation which Paul saw to be grounded in the relation of Christ to the Church is given its primary expression in the " Fiat mihi " by which Mary uttered forth the beauty and splendor of the New Creation in the free affirmation of that Creation's mediatorial destiny. As the Second Eve, by her free appropriation of her own created reality, that of the Theotokos, Mary reverses the refusal of her antetype, and does so in a correspondence to the Second Adam which is the inception of a radically new relation of the Lord of history to the world of men and of Uncreated to Created Wisdom. In this New Crea-" tion, this New Covenant, the immaculate Woman of this New Genesis utters and makes concrete the plenitude which is hers as the Daughter of Zion, the final bearer of the hope of Israel. As unfallen, immaculate, integral, she fulfills totally the mediatorial role of her people: a role at once virginal and maternal, Daughter of Zion, Mother of God, Bride of Yahweh. What would for fallen femininity be an impossible splintering of existence is found integrated in her integrity; she is at once the little child of Proverbs 8: 80, joyful in the creative presence of her Lord, and the Mater Dolorosa at the foot of the Cross, whose soul a sword has pierced. 11 The fragmented elements of fallen femininity, mutually exclusive in their disintegration, find in her their unfallen and eschatological unity, the unity which is the splendor of the Good Creation, once refused by Eve, now realized in the New Covenant of God's definitive presence to His people, the One Flesh of Mary's conception of Our Lord. This relation, the created bi-polarity of the New Adam and the New Eve, constitutes the New Covenant by which God is mediated to and present in our humanity; it is at the same time and under the same aspect the single, the unique relation 11 A. Feuillet, Jesus et Ba Mere, d'a'[YT'es lea recites Lucaniens de l'enfance et d'a'[Yl'es St. Jean: Le role de la vierge Marie dans l'histoire du salut et la place de la femme dans l'eglwe. Paris, Gabalda, 1974, part 3, 199 ff.; see especially note 25, p. 256. See also G. von Rad, Old Testament Theology, vol. 1, Harper and Row, New York, 1962, 447. MARY AS cnEATED WISDOM 409 of God to that creation which, through the New Covenant, is now redeemed. This relation is of course Trinitarian: the Father's sending of the Son to give the Spirit, and its sole mediation, the sine qua non of the mission of the Son and the outpouring of the Spirit, is the Incarnation of the SOn through the motherhood of her by whose" Fiat" the Uncreated and the Created Wisdom are united in a society which is at once the definitive (and because integral, also primordial and eschatological) presence of God in the world, and the equally definitive imaging of God. This imaging is bi-polar; its dialectic is that of Mary's consent, plena gratia, to the plenitude offered her by God, a plenitude which is at once her own creation as the immaculate Woman, and the created immanence within her of the Man, the Son whose mission is also the Gift of the Creator Spiritus in whose outpouring creation is at once given and renewed. The integrally free society of Mary and her Son, the New Adam and the New Eve, the New Covenant and the New Creation, is then that by which the Trinity has signed creation with God's own unity, truth and goodness: qualities of being which can be appropriated only in worship, for they are not concepts but mysteries, to be received as gifts rather than grasped as properties of nature. This New Creation knows no "nature," no latent infra-structure which would not be gift, would not be signed with the Trinitarian image. If one wishes to make rational distinctions between nature and grace, it is then necessary to assign the totality of concrete finitude to grace, upon which postulate, itself no more than a corollary of the Christocentric and Trinitarian faith of the Church, the reality of nature becomes entirely abstract, unreal because uncreated-for only that is created which is created in Christ and sealed with the image of the Trinity. 12 12 For a Thomistic ontology of creation, so viewed, see my Thomism and the Ontological, Theology of Paul Tillich: A Comparison of Systems, Leiden, E. J. Brill, 1971, 1-188, in which the Christocentric method and system of Tillich is contrasted with an equally rigorously Christocentric Thomist metaphysics. 410 DONALD J. KEEFE, S.J. To appreciate the Trinitarian imaging proper to the marital society which is the New Covenant, whether this be viewed most inclusively as the New Adam-New Eve polarity, or as the Christ-Church correlation, or that of the Incarnate Logos and Mary, it must be understood in all these instances that we have to do with the " one flesh " whose eschatological perfection is symbolized uniquely by marriage, rather than by one of the other polarities (father-daughter, mother-son, brother-sister, etc.) found in human sexuality, for of these sexual polarities, only marriage is a sacramental sign and a Trinitarian symbol. Therefore our avenue to any understanding of the Imago Dei is a sacramental one: this should not be astonishing, for sign, sacrament, symbol and imago have a single ground, the actual presence of the eschatological Good Creation within the worship of the Church. This ground is Eucharistic, and as Ephesians assures us, it is also marital. The Trinitarian structure of the marital symbol is evident enough: the total self-donation of two persons to each other is constitutive of each, as husband, as wife, and is productive of a third reality, the marriage bond itself, the marital society, the substantive love of each for each which cannot be undone, and whose self-subsistent character is evidenced by its irrevocability. This love, or covenant, cannot be identified with either of the covenanting parties; this, and its radical permanence as a relation, makes the marital covenant of husband and wife the Trinitarian image and sacrament par excellence. It is only within this context that the Trinity is in fact "imaged" even by the Incarnate Son, for He is Image as sent, as obedient to the Father in a sacrifice which has no other :finality than that sancta societas which is fallen humanity's sole means of union with God. 13 The Christ cannot be approached except by the 13 St. Augustine, De civitate dei, bk. X, ch. 6, defines the relation between sacrifice and the beatitude mediated solely by the sancta societas as follows: Proinde verum sacrijicium est omne opus, quo agitur, ut sancta societate in haereamus deo, relatum scilicet ad illum finem boni quo veraciter beati esse possimus. 4rn DONALD J. KEEFE, S.J. Adam and the New Eve. It is in this Covenant that she is created; her whole reality is Covenantal, as is her Son's. As Paul Tillich might have said, they both manifest this reality under conditions of existence; as Rahner has said, with reference to the hypostatic union, the intuitive vision of God which is proper to Christ's integral humanity does not place him at some beatified remove from our fallen history, for He, like us, is ensarkikos, bound to the suffering and death of fallen humanity.14 So also for his mother, whose integrity and unfallenness and utter freedom only radicated her more deeply in the redemptive suffering of her Son. Her imaging of God, her worship of the Father through her Son in the Spirit which He gave her fully from the first moment of her existence, is the utterance of the splendor and beauty of the New Creation, but in the idiom of a fallen people, for it is addressed to them. In fact, it is by this covenantal presence of the eschatological Good Creation in fallen space and time that this fallenness is valorized and given sacramental (eschatological) significance, for it is of this Good Creation that the sacraments speak; it is this that they signify, and for this reason, the Eucharist, as the sacramental continuation of the New Covenant, underlies the other sacraments, as the New Covenant underlies the Eucharist. Mary's Assumption is similarly to be understood with reference to her eschatological creation. The Assumption into the heavenly Kingdom of the Queen of Heaven is no mere sign of divine favor, no inference from a more or less sentimental love of the Son for his mother; it is the strict counterpart of her Immaculate Conception, of her substantial integrity. As in the Resurrection which is the ontologically first moment of the fulfilled creation, Jesus is lifted up from the subjection to fallen space and time in such wise as to be present in that realm henceforth only in sign and sacrament, so Mary, the immaculate recipient of the fullness of His grace, was also removed, 14 K. Rahner, " Dogmatic Reflections upon the Knowledge and Self-consciousness of Christ," Theological Investigations VI, MARY AS CREATED WISDOM 413 as integral with that fulfilled creation, from the corruption of the earth at her death. The Created Wisdom by which she is Theotokos and Mater dowrosa is that by which she is also Regina coeli, still the first beneficiary of her Son's mission from the Father, his obedience unto death. It is only when systematic theology begins to understand the necessity linking Mary's integrity with her Assumption that the latter can itself be used as a point d' appui for a further inquiry into a point of some difficulty, the meaning of the distance between our own death and our resurrection in Christ. Fallen human beings are not assumed into heaven upon their deaths so as to leave no body after them on this earth. Until the history of its salvation is complete, the earth shall bear some temporal and spatial relation to those whose mortal remains are mingled with its elements-a relation entirely lacking in the Risen Christ and in his mother. Given that upon their death (mox, as wrote Benedict XII) the fallen dead are judged and enter upon their final destiny, nonetheless they do not rise until the last day. 15 The meaning of this truth is not an easy thing to grasp: given the discontinuity between this world's history and whatever manner of duration is appropriate to the fallen dead, the continuity implicit in the postponement of their resurrection to the last day places a real link between even the justified dead and the dust to which they returned upon their deaths, and so to the time and space of the fallen world in which they no longer live, but to whose final redemption and recreation their own is indissolubly connected. The kind of criticism of this Catholic doctrine which rests upon the physical sciences is obviously beside the point, but it is perhaps necessary to remark that the philosophically grounded objection, which would insist that a separated soul has lost the materiality which any waiting or duration after death would imply, also lacks an assured place upon which to 15 Benedict XII, Constitutw "Benedictus Deus," cited in Denzinger-Schoenmetzer (23rd ed.) *1000. 414 DONALD J, KEEFE, S.J. stand. It is all too easy to read into the doctrine which describes death as the separation of soul and body some Aristotelian or quasi-Thomist metaphysic, a procedure no more justified here than in the case of the Tridentine doctrine on transubstantiation.16 A " separated soul" is a doctrinal, not a philosophical concept, despite the metaphysicians' struggles over it. If the doctrine is to be clarified, as distinct from the resolution of some metaphysical difficulty, the appropriate starting point is doctrinal: one proceeds from the " limit case " of an unassailable truth whose meaning is pertinent to the question at issue, and here Mary's Assumption is precisely in point, for it sets off, as Jesus's Resurrection does not (if only because He is divine as well as human) a concrete distinction between integral and fallen humanity, in the unique instance of Mary's death. 11 It is quite clear that the matter is too difficult to be dealt with in this place; nonetheless, it is well to point out the advantages of Mariology for Catholic theology, in a time when, for perhaps the majority of contemporary Catholic thinkers, the doctrines concerning her are felt as a burden and an embarrassment rather than as the enormous resource which they actually are for systematic theology. Even those of us who do not share that embarrassment are too passive in our appropriation of the Marian dogmas, to the point that even for us they do amount to a burden-outposts to be defended, but from which no sorties need be feared. This is a garrison soldier's mentality, inappropriate to a theologian whose legitimate defensive function can be met only by an entire confidence in the truth of the mystery to whose intelligibility without limit he is committed. 16 E. Schillebeeckx, The Eucharist, tr. by N. D. Smith, Sheed and Ward, New York, 1968, is insistent upon the Aristotelian context of the Tridentine definition of the Eucharistic transubstantiation. 1 7 See the Vatican Doctrinal Congregation letter to the Bishops, "Letter on Certain Questions Concerning Eschatology," dated 17 May, 1979, released 14 July, 1979, published in Origins, N. C. Documentary Service, vol. 0, no. 9 (August 1979) 131-133, esp. 133. MARY AS CREATED WISDOM 415 A further illustration 0£ the same point may be ventured: would not much 0£ our confusion over the meaning of Mary's virginity" ante, in et post pa,rtum" be removed by the postulate that integral human sexuality is virginal as such? From this standpoint, physiological integrity need no more be associated with her childbearing than is freedom from the common cold associated with her Immaculate Conception, £or integrity under conditions of a fallen world carries with it no immunity from physical trauma, and it is integrity which controls the meaning of her virginity. Thus viewed, virginity is simply an aspect of Mary's Fiat, of her total self-donation to God in the New Covenant. It is then the physical actuality of the exclusivity of her relation to her Son; by this, her femininity is fulfilled integrally, completely, beyond any possibility of increase or altereity. I£ one must speak 0£ her marriage to Joseph, it should be made clear that this relation is marriage only by an extrinsic denomination, £or it lacks the intrinsic symbolism or sacramental quality which the term marriage demands in its ordinary acceptation. As unfallen, integral, Mary is beyond any sacramental expression of her relation to God, for such an expression looks to and causes a personal completion or integration which was Mary's from her conception. In fact, many 0£ the difficulties which Catholic theologians encounter in meeting the questions posed to them by contemporary dissent from Catholic practice and doctrine may well be met by a firm reliance upon and confidence in the profound truth of those doctrines as the firm ground 0£ much of what has gone unexamined in the traditional practices of Catholic life. A vigorous inquiry into the contemporary implication of such doctrines will find much more meaning in them than the contemporary diffidence has come to expect. How often, for instance, does one hear it argued that priestly celibacy is the strict implication of the priest's sacramental offering of Christ's marital sacrifice £or his bridal Church, and that the abandonment 0£ celibacy by those ordained to offer this sacrifice is also the abandonment of the alter Christus function 416 DONALD J. KEEFE, S.J, by which it is offered? On the other hand, how often is the irrevocable union of Christ with his Church put in issue by talk of a" sinful Church," as if the alternative were a triumphalism contemptuous of history, and as though the Eucharistic Lord could be irrevocably related to the Church through a freedom less integral and a worship less adequate than that of the Woman who is the Church's antetype? Such talk, common enough since the Council, concedes more to the Zeitgeist than a careful examination of central Catholic doctrines can admit. Only a confident rejection of that dispirited mentality, and a Spirit-led return to the doctrinal, moral and liturgical tradition will permit Catholic theologians to perform their task. The Marian component of that task is indispensable. Catholic theology may then be said to have paid too little attention to Mary's integral and eschatological stature; while the Fathers have recognized it since Justin Martyr, while the doctrinal tradition since Ephesus has made it increasingly explicit, and while the liturgical tradition has spoken of it unhesitatingly, Marian theology finds little interest outside of conferences and journals expressly devoted to that now esoteric topic. Particularly, the Vatican II reference to a " hierarchy of truths" is often taken to have a typical if not general reference to the Marian doctrines; these, it is frequently asserted, have less relevance to contemporary catechetical needs than do the central Trinitarian and Christological doctrines.ls Particularly, this is thought to be the case with respect to the relatively recent definitions of the Immaculate Conception and the Assumption. Doubtless there is little point in pursuing an inquiry into the precise sense in which this " hierarchy " is to be understood, since it is quite clear that the Conciliar fathers themselves did not attain to any precision in this matter. The existence of very brief kerygmatic and baptismal formulae of is Avery Dulles, The Resilient Church: The Necessity and Limits of Adaptation, Garden City, N. Y. Doubleday, 1977, ch. 3, "Doctrinal Renewal: A Situa- tionist View," sp.eaks of the "burden of dogma" on p. 51, and discusses the appropriate interpretation of the " hi.erarchy of truths " on pp. 57 ff. MARY AS CREATED WISDOM 417 the faith in the earliest layers of the New Testament tradition is itself testimony to an ecclesial recognition that certain truths are of primary concern for the primitive Church, and that the list of these can be quite compact. It is much less clear that the making of such a list is any longer a possibility; the postConciliar attempts to discover a credal formula satisfactory to the contemporary Church are of a dwindling interest today; such projects as that which would re-institute the earlier Apostles' Creed in place of the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed at the Mass are rather the products of liturgical conferences and commissions than the expression of any need felt in the pews. Academic fashion has little to do with the lex orandi; it owes much more as a rule to the charms of some such anachronism as Schoonenberg's Christology than it does to a valid insight into the sensus fidelium. 19 The fear, not infrequently voiced, that the centuries have piled up far too great a burden of doctrine and dogma to be borne-as though every baptizand, every practicing Catholic, must have to hand a ready recollection of Denzinger's latest edition-has its origin in a profound distrust of history as the medium of the Christian revelation, and in a consequent desire to be rid of its harvest, root and branch. 20 However, it is not necessary to share a rn Piet Schoonenberg, The Christ. A Study of the God-Man Relationship in the Whole of Creation a,nd in Jesus Christ, tr. by Della Couling, Herder and Herder, 1971. In this 1965 book. the author develops a Christology "from below" anti- cipating much of the later work of such revisionists as Kueng and Schillebeeckx, by which the doctrinal themes characteristic of the " high Christology " of the early Councils are relativired by their historical situation. The result is a return to the Monarchian viewpoints patent in such works as Moltmann's The Crucified God. In his latest work, Trimitaet und Reich Gottes, Kaiser, Munich, 1980, Moltmann attempts to discover this fault in the more traditional Trinitarian theology of Karl Rahner. In the end, the dispute is over the meaning of history, and cannot be pursued here. 20 John O'Malley, "Reform, Historical Consciousne8s and Vatican H's Aggiomamento," Theologiool Studies vol. 32, no. 4 (December, 1971) 573-601, argues for the reversibility of Catholic doctrine, resting his case upon modern theories of history. The article is descrbed as a "breakthrough;" what would seem to have been broken through is the Church's claim to an authentic historical continuity. I have replied to this sort of theology of history in the article cited in note 9, supra. 418 DONALD J. KEEFE, S.J. Veuillot's ultramontanism to recognize with Newman that to be Catholic is to be deep in history, a history which is not dispensable. The centuries of the Church's worship are normative for what worship is. Manifestly, one does not require of the ordinary Catholic an articulate familiarity with all of the doctrinal achievements of two thousand years, but one does require-the Church requires-that such a Catholic accept that tradition for the seamless web it is, that he commit himself to that historical reality which is the teaching Church, with its past and its future. The essential simultaneity of the Marian and the ecclesiological doctrines is evidenced by their treatment in a single dogmatic constitution at Vatican II: ecclesiology and Mariology are indissociable, and any attempt to relegate the Marian doctrines to some peripheral Catholic interest immediately runs into major ecclesiological obstacles, obstacles which are not other than the sacramental presence in our fallen world of the eschatological perfection of the New Covenant. This sacramental worship is specific and essential to Catholicism and any dilution of the eschatological stature of our Lady immediately and necessarily puts in issue the ground of the Church's faith: the actual presence in space and time of the Eucharistic Lord in the worship of the Church. It is in Mary's act of eschatological and integral freedom, her consent to be the Mother of God, that this Covenant is given: here and here alone the eternal and the created Wisdom meet; here the freedom of the Creaitor and of the Good Creation are agreed; here the most High is pleased to take to Himself our fallen flesh. It is by Mary's Fiat, where alone the created beauty and wisdom and freedom of our redeemed humanity find adequate and full expression, that He became "one flesh" with us forever, and the promises of the Old Testament are fulfilled, in the Covenant by which He has fixed his tabernacle in his chosen people, irrevocably. But if any of the Marian doctrines are doubted or denied, then the Church is not the Church; if any of them are neglected or disdained, so also is the splendor of the Church. MARY AS CREATED WISDOM 419 The Marian doctrines are therefore not only not negotiable, not dispensable to the Christian faith: their exploration is an essential task of theology, and any systematic theology which would ignore these doctrines, or fail to integrate them, particularly those most recent promulgations of Mary's eschatological perfection, is doomed to lapse into that kind of " identity system " which von Balthasar properly condemned in Barth's dogmatics, which is latent in Tillich's systematic theology, and which is all too easy to extrapolate from any theology which would prefer, for its principle of explanation, some immanent dynamism, human or cosmic, whose relation to the grace of the New Creation is at best and finally uninteresting .21 The Marian doctrines enter theology at the level of method, for the conversion process which the Christian faith demands of any prior anthropology, cosmology, sociology, politics or other humane discipline in order that it become a theology is that by which such a discipline loses its immanent necessity, to become Christocentric. Christ, the new center of existence by which autonomous rationality is freed from its immanence to become a quest for wisdom, is the mediation of the truth of God, but He is this mediation as the Christus integer, the New Covenant, the concrete event of the unity, una 2'1 For a discussion of this difficulty in Rahner's Christology, see Kasp.er, op. cit., 50-52, 57-58; for a Marian resolution of the analogous problem in Tillich's ontology of Essential God-Manhood (integral creation), see my Thomism and the Ontological Theology of Paul Tillich, 316-328. It is curious that although Tillich appears to have been able to accept the Marian definitions, he found no application of them in his system. Karl Barth on the other hand has recognized the marital character of the Covenantal creation (Church Dogmatics 3/1, 183-206) before any of his contemporaries-and is reproached therefore by feminist theologians such as Paul Jewett (Man as Male and Female: A study in sexual rdationships from a theological point of view, Eerdmans, Grand Rapids, Mich., 1975)-but was unable to accept the dogmas of Mary's Immaculate Conception and Assumption: see the letter appended to Hans Kueng's study of Barth, cited in note 5. Consequently, for Barth as for Rahner and Tillich, Chrisbology tends to a monism: in this H. U. von Balthasar's criticism of systematic theology is correct, for none of the systematists, Catholic or Protestant, have taken seriously the Augustinian and Scotist insight into the bi-polarity of the Whole Christ. However, this is hardly a reason for abandoning systematic theology. 420 DONALD J. KEEFE, S.J. caro, of created and Uncreated Wisdom. It is this New Being, to use Tillich's phrase, which is the concern of theology; if it is simply identified with the Son of Man, his presence among us must be understood to be unmediated, unreal, inhuman and unintelligible, except insofar as He is reduced by a" Christology from below" to merely human and non-redemptive dimensions. It is only by Mary's perfect freedom that one may understand that God's presence among men is not inhuman and despotic, an arbitrary exercise of potentia absoluta. It is one of the tragedies of Catholic theology that Scotus's Augustinian insight into the Christ-Mary correlation should have so little interested his contemporaries and followers, so that the Scotism of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries should now provide such a paradigm for the poverty of the theological minimalism which governed the decline of medieval theology and the emergence of the anti-sacramentalism of the Reform, as it now governs the regnant American Catholic theological scholarship. 22 That much deplored axiom of Marian piety, numquam satis de Maria, therefore has sounder foundations than much of what passes for theological sophistication in our schools today. In the six centuries of theological doldrums in which the spirit of Ockham has dominated theological speculation by conforming its subject matter to the immanent structures of autonomous reason, Marian piety, nearly bereft of scholarly sustenance, has fed on another food, the One Flesh of the Eucharist, the New Covenant which cannot be undone, even by our neglect. It is faith in this Whole Christ which is Catholic, and the quae,rens which ever seeks the altitudo of that mystery cannot see it by any other light than that which Mary bore for the world's salvation. 23 DONALD J. KEEFE, S.J. Marquette University Milwaukee, Wisconsin Duns Scotus, In Ill Sent., 8.1: "Per illud patet ..•. " version of this paper was delivered at the Institute for Theological held in Columbus, Ohio Encounter with Science and Tei::luwlogy (!TEST) in January 22 2 3 An earlier AUTHORITY AND THEOLOGICAL METHOD A Review Discussion * I N ECCLESIAL REFLECTION and in its predecessor Ecclesial Man (Fortress Press, 1975) Edward Farley, professor of theology at the Divinity School of Vanderbilt University, intends to offer a prolegomenon to theology. In Ecclesial Man the author addressed what he called " the problem beneath the problem of theological method," that is, the question whether faith in Jesus Christ involves reality-references and reality-apprehensions. Using social phenomenology to probe the linguistic, social, and psychological strata of the faith-world, he showed how faith apprehends directly or indirectly realities of this intersubjective faith-world, the ecclesia, the disrupted but redeemed existence. Ecclesial Reflection, building upon this foundation, discusses the problem of theological method or criteriology proper. It is written with elegance and great didactic skill. The ideas are carefully argued, often clearly enumerated; the main theses are highlighted by italics; each chapter or sub-division recapitulates the previous one and concludes with helpful summaries. It does not, however, mean that the book makes for easy reading, and this partly because it presupposes acquaintance with Husserlian philosophy and social phenomenology with their attendant unfamiliar concepts and vocabularies (e.g. livedspace, social self, cointentions, depth sociality, etc.), partly because Farley is forced at times by his-perspective to use old words with new connotations (e.g. ecclesia, Kerygma, ecclesial *Edward Farley: Ecclesial Reflection: An Anatomy (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1982). of Theological Method PETER C. PHAN universal, generic universal, etc.) , and partly because any discussion of methodology cannot help but be abstract. Apart from its appendix on the general structure of social duration (its conditions, its elements, its process), the book is divided into two almost equal parts, the one critical, the other constructive. Convinced that most contemporary theological work, both Catholic and Protestant, is methodologically incoherent, Farley devotes the first part (pp. 3-168) to a radical critique of the classical criteriology which he calls the " House of Authority." His method is to unearth the various strata from the lowest to the highest that have been inserted into the structure of this House of Authority. He starts out therefore in chapter one with an analysis of the religious matrix that originates the methodology of classical Christian theology: the faith of Israel (Yahwism, covenanted people, land, Torah, tradition); Judaism (synagogue, sacred scriptures, apocalypticism, universalization); and early Christianity which retained and modified these elements of the faith of Israel and of Judaism. Of the faith of Israel, early Christianity preserved the Adamic myth, the heilsgeschichtlich framework, but rejected the motif of the land in the sense of a definitive territory given to the elect people as a nationally defined entity. Of Judaism, it took over the apocalyptic worldview, the Scripture principle, the missionary enterprise, and the synagogal organization, but modified them substantially. Instead of synagogue, we find local congregation; instead of rabbis, missionary preachers, and instead of the Torah piety, the Jesus kerygma and Jesus piety. In the next three chapters Farley traces the route that leads from this religious matrix to the three loci of the classical methodology, namely, Scripture, dogma, and Church. Obviously these three loci are not strictly speaking criteria but norms within the framework of authority. Supporting them are two foundational principles and their middle axioms. The first principle is the interpretative scheme of salvation history with its three elements: the people, their history teleologically interpreted, and the kingly deity who governs through causal AUTHORITY AND THEOLOGICAL METHOD interventions (the" royal metaphor"). This salvation history scheme entails that history can be periodized (e.g. in apocalyptic literature); that the time of revelation can be fixed (e.g. the view that Christian revelation ended with the death of the last apostles); and that in the eschatological age the Church is the definitive institution of doctrinalization and locus of truth. The second principle, that of identity, affirms an identity between what God wills to communicate and what is brought to language in the interpretative act of a human individual or community. Thus the creaturely entity is the ersatz presence of the divine, the divine intention is identified with the human interpretation, divine qualities (e.g. infallibility and inerrancy) are predicated of the human agent. This principle comprises three other middle axioms which Farley calls the axiom of secondary representation, the axiom of leveling, and the axiom of immutability. The first axiom extends this identity from the original authoritative figure (e.g. Paul) to his successors (e.g. Titus), from the oral tradition (e.g. the kerygma) to its written deposit (e.g. the New Testament), from this written deposit to its definitive commentary (e.g. the Fathers), from the primitive group (e.g. the apostles) to an institution whose role is to maintain, protect, explicate the tradition and its ongoing interpretation (e.g. the Magisterium). These organs of secondary representation are, sociologically speaking, vehicles of duration whose purpose is to provide social perpetuity to the original identity between God's intention and the human agent. The axiom of leveling presupposes the identity between God's intention and the vehicles of duration operated by the axiom of secondary representation and extends this identity equally to all the several parts of the vehicles and grants them the same divine status (e.g. the theory of inspiration). The axiom of immutability, a corollary of the other two axioms, adds the note of universal applicability to the bearers of the divinely communicated contents. These founding principles and their middle axioms, which originate from the religion of Israel and Judaism and which 424 PETER C. PHAN are appropriated by the Christian Church, form the strata upon which other strata are erected as the locations of divinehuman identity. The first location is the Sacred Scripture. Farley's thesis is that the Scripture principle is maintained by religions that are somehow dependent on synagogal Judaism (Islam, Christianity, Mormonism) and that it is Judaism which gave birth to that principle. The diaspora Jews, lacking the land, the temple, and the priesthood as institutions of social duration, created a new institution of social persistence, the synagogue. To secure their survival they felt the need of something more identifiable than oral tradition, the written Torah. The synagogue was a place of their gathering under authoritative teachers for the hearing and interpretation of the written Torah which now is meant as Yahweh's exhaustive word, equally valid throughout the variety of its texts, as the law for his dispersed but ethically self-interpreted people. Christianity, in Farley's account, appropriated but modified this Scripture principle by means of a new periodization (the prophecy and fulfillment scheme with Jesus as the dividing center), a new collection of writings (the New Testament), a new function of gospel and doctrine, and a new corporate referent namely the world, and not an ethnic nation. Attempting to preserve the Scripture principle while radically modifying it at the same time, Christianity employs a theological method which is, Farley claims, essentially ambivalent and ultimately incoherent. The second and third locations of identity are dogma and Church. The principle of dogma is rooted in the Scripture principle, since Scripture needs a definitive key to render itself perpetually and universally applicable and resolve its ambiguities. Dogma, granted the divine status by the principle of identity and its middle axioms, became criteria for theology. With Scripture and dogma the Church too is an authority since the first two locations require a social institution to perdure. The Church's specific function (especially the Magisterium) as the teleological community of salvation is to preside over the AUTHORITY AND THEOLOGICAL METHOD 425 process of salvation and therefore must have the authority both to define and guard the saving Scripture and dogmas. In chapter five, having uncovered the layers of religious matrix, founding principles, and the three locations of identity of the House of Authority, Farley describes its theological method itself. Basically for him " theological thinking in the classical criteriology is a method of authority and is not a ' science ' in either the ancient or contemporary sense of the word " (p. 108) . It is a way of authority because it locates evidence for judgments in vehicles of social persistence (authorities) rather than in the immediate manifestation of reality; it is in style and genre citation rather than inquiry, interpretation rather than assessment; it restricts the question of truth to the formal question of internal coherence and coherence with universal rationality. The Church then legitimates this criteriology by making it into an article of belief (the myth of apostolicity). Farley points out that this method is employed not only by the Catholic Church but also by the Protestant churches. Farley concludes the pars destruens with a three-levelled thoroughgoing critique of the classical criteriology. On the first level, historical analysis, particularly modern biblical scholarship, has revealed unacceptable factual claims; moreover, historical consciousness militates against the mode of thought presupposed by the House of Authority. On the second level, social phenomenology shows that the " Scripture principle does not offer a vehicle of duration that corresponds ideally to ecclesial existence" (p. 140) . In fact, for Farley, the Scripture principle is not only unnecessary for the survival of Christianity as a nonethnic and nonhalakic community whose emphasis is not on law but on proclamation, but also incompatible with it as a corporate, universalized, redemptive-existence. Finally on the level of founding principles, Farley argues that the salvation history scheme with its royal metaphor must be rejected because it violates creaturely freedom and autonomy and sacrifices divine goodness and love, and that the principle of iden- PETER C. PHAN tity with its logic of triumph must also be dismissed " partly because it partakes of the same problems as the first foundation stone ... and partly because identity between the divine will and creation is either a synthesis of meaning which is inaccessible or an identity between detailed states of affairs which violates the autonomy of creatures " (p. 165) . Farley ends his description of the collapse of the House of Authority with a warning, in an uncharacteristic flourish of rhetoric, about the dire consequences of the classical methodology: " That vehicle, honored as divine, continues to be the occasion and framework for human pathology, sin, and grief. The way of authority hardened into the Protestant religion of the book and the Catholic religion of the institution. It continues to foster obscurantism, dualisms in the human self, superstition, sexism, reality denial, legalism as a unifying piety and mindset " (p. 168) . With the House of Authority in ruins Farley in the second part (pp. 171-344) sets out to propose a new theological method in which authority will not be allowed to function as a criterion of truth. Three problems immediately present themselves to Farley's enterprise: Which are the criteria of truth in this post-authority theology? How do judgments of truth (understanding as opposed to precriteriological insights of faith) occur? What is the content of faith if the precriteriological insights of faith are not viewed as determinate dogmas and if the kernel and husk metaphor adopted by neo-orthodox Catholic theology to explain the historicity of dogmas is rejected? The success of Farley's proposal depends on whether it can satisfactorily answer these three questions. In the introductory chapter (chapter 8) Farley attends to the first question by explaining what he understands by criteria. Obviously they cannot be " authorities/' nor are they experience itself. Experience mediates the faith-world, Farley points out, but is not the criterion of evidence. Nor can the central and primary" paramount reality" of the faith-world, namely, God, be a criterion of evidence since as absolute mystery he is not AUTHORITY AND THEOLOGICAL METHOD accessible. For Farley, " in post-authority theology criteria are themselves fields of evidence. For theology to subject itself to criteria, to consult criteria to support judgments, means simply that it consults appropriate fields of evidence .... Theological criteriology means, then, the description of these fields and how they operate " (p. 178) . What those fields are and how they operate Farley will describe in chapters 9-U. Before doing so, however, Farley explains how the collapse of the House of Authority alters not only the meaning of criteria but the nature of theology itself. Rather than citation or exrlication, theology is reflective inquiry. It is "the attempt to bring pretheological, apprehended realities to formulations intended as true by interrogating the fields of evidence pertinent to those realities" (p. 183). This ecclesial reflection is performed, according to Farley, in three moments or dimensions. The first moment, corresponding to historical and biblical studies, seeks to answer the question: What is ecclesiality? Or, Is that which is under investigation (a doctrine, practice, claim) ecclesial? In other words, one is attempting to depict the fields of evidence as theological criteria. The second moment, corresponding to systematic theologies, introduces other fields of evidence that are than the ecclesial symbolic universe (the Adam-Gospel story) and the depth social structure of ecclesiality. Here one subjects without reductionism the portraiture of ecclesial existence of the first moment to rational criteria of internal consistency, to external consistency with other realms of factuality, to different ontological philosophies of being and knowledge. This second moment is necessitated by the fact that the Adam-Gospel story claims to be true and valid not only provincially but universally. The outcome of this investigation is the discovery of " determinate universals " as fields of evidence and the truth status of-theological judgments. The third dimension, corresponding to practical theology, moves theological reflection back to the determinacy and concreteness of individual and social situations of the present time. Thus, without the first dimension theology will not be PETER C. PHAN able to describe the truth-intending ecclesial realities; without the second dimension theology will discover only provincially, not universally valid truths; without the third dimension, universally valid truths will remain powerless, irrelevant, incapable of transforming the present moment. Farley acknowledges that his book deals only with the first two dimensions, portraiture of ecclesial existence and the truth status of theological judgments. Farley begins his task of uncovering the fields of evidence with the question whether tradition in the sense of contents (tradita) can function as a criterion for post-authority theology. His answer is a qualified yes. " ... Tradition, the material, historical reference of theology, does occur as a valid criterion (field of evidence) for theological reflection but is insufficient in itself as a sole criterion " (p. 195) . What Farley wants to eschew is both the purely historical method of the liberal " Essence of Christianity " theology and the residual way of authority in neo-orthodox theologies. But how can tradition be criterion and field of evidence? On the one hand against the liberal theology Farley argues that the given and material references which ground theological reflection are not neutral data but pre-reflective faith-informed "picture" of ecclesial existence which will be turned into a " portrait " by a secondary act of theological representation (" portraiture ") . Hence portraiture is a theological activity partly because it is an essential dimension of theological reflection, partly because its object is corporate ecclesial existence both as actual and as ideal, and partly because its results are normative. On the other hand against neo-orthodox theologies he maintains that tradition depicted by portraiture is not found in the relativehistorical institutions and their products granted necessary status by the House of Authority (the tradita) but in the depth sociality, the determinate intersubjectivity of the community. Hence portraiture is an historical activity because it is itself a constantly changing enterprise focusing not on some supposed immutable kernel covered by a changeable husk but on the AUTHORITY AND THEOLOGICAL METHOD 429 unity, the interrelation of features of ecclesiality which is understood not as the essence of Christianity but Christianity as a type of historical existence both as partially actualized in historical Christianity and as a telos, ideal, or entelechy. In Farley's view, there are three regions where ecclesiality emerges: the original transition from older types of corporate existence to the new type; ecclesiality's overall mythos and primary symbols; its depth sociality. These three clues to ecclesial existence involve the study of the origins of ecclesiality, depth linguistics, and depth social structures respectively. Only a combination of these three disciplines can produce a portrait of ecclesiality that will serve as a normative and indispensable source for the second and third dimensions of theological reflection. Farley pursues his task of delineating tradition and traditioning by describing the social duration of ecclesial existence in chapters ten and eleven. The problem is to discern how ecclesiality as a social corporate existence offers itself to theological portraiture, how it rises into fields of evidence which can be drawn on in theological reflection's first dimension. This Farley does by examining the elements of space and time in ecclesial existence with the help of the general phenomenology of social duration (see Appendix for an exposition of this phenomenology) . It is important to note that he does not translate the general structure of social duration into the history of Christianity; this is forbidden by the very nature of ecclesiality which is universal, redemptive existence actualized and ideal. Ecclesial time and space presupposes, according to Farley, an originating, normative event which is now remembered, celebrated, and perpetuated down the generations since ecclesiality as a determinate, historical movement must have a beginning, and above all since it is a corporate, universalized redemptive existence. The originating- event, therefore, must be one whose outcome was a corporate existence, a community, and the nature of the event as any historical transition has to be one of universalization. This event is normative in the sense that " it is definitive for the self-interpretation of subsequent 430 PETER C. PHAN historical expressions of the same type of corporate existence " (p. 225). This event for the Christian is of course Jesus of Nazareth proclaimed as the ideal telos (the "Kingdom of God ") in a linguistic context (the kerygma or gospel) . This normative event gave rise to a redeemed space and time, a new mode of being-in-the-world, both for the individual and for the community (the "social self") . If sin consists according to Farley in absolutizing a particular space and time, then redemption means deabsolutizing provincial space (and therefore there is no provincial space which can be called ecclesial) and universalizing time. " The ecclesial community is marked by a time which rises from the cointentions of redeemed individual existence into corporate memory. Its £unction, however, is to disestablish any provincial ecclesial space as the absolute condition of redemptive being-in-the-world" (p. 239). In ecclesial time, therefore, the normative event re-occurs redemptively in ever-new situations, deabsolutizing and validating ever new provincial spaces. But how does this redemption occur? In other words, what is the structure of the ecclesial process? Farley suggests that there are two poles in this process: transformation and tradition. Transformation because ecclesiality is redemption of provincial space; tradition (in the sense of tradita, and not traditio) because redemptive existence also refers to a continuity which bridges time. The function of retained tradition is the deabsolutizing and validating of provincial spaces. Tradition is retained not for its own sake as immutable norm but as the lens through which contemporaneity is experienced; one does not believe in tradition, rather through it one experiences the ever-changing situations of the world. But how is the past tradition made available today? First by linguistic sedimentation so that it can be remembered, celebrated, and taught in the communities shaped by it; and second, by institutions as vehicles of social persistence so that it may continue across the generations. Ecclesiality, Farley reminds us, is a social process and there- AUTHORITY AND THEOLOGICAL METHOD 481 fore necessarily involves institutionality. Institutions of ecclesial existence, however, are of a special kind; they must correspond to the nature and structure of ecclesial process and consequently cannot have an absolute, non-historical status . .Farley classifies them according to the activities of ecclesial community: proclamatory (preaching, teaching, writing) , sacramental (communion, baptism, marriage, confirmation) and caring (political liberation, individual welfare). These three types of activities have their common matrix in ecclesial process, supplement each other, and pervade each other. They require ecclesial structures that are by nature "paradoxical" (p. 259) insofar as these structures are both separate from and entangled in the contemporary environment; insofar as those who perform these three types of activities are both independent from and dependent on the community; and insofar as the community is both unified and pluralistic. This ecclesial community with distinctive structures, in order to survive, must have, according to Farley, at least the following three features: distinctive leadership in all the three fields of activity; face-to-face relationships; some unity at the level of institutional structure among the various congregations. Chapter twelve completes the description of ecclesial duration by examining linguistic sedimentation and subsequent interpretation of ecclesiality. In Farley's view, the normative event, in order to persist in the community as normative, must (1) find linguistic expression. (2) That language must be further located in a vehicle that will enable it to persist from generation to generation. (8) That language and vehicle must be granted some sort of normative character (p. 268) . The story of how the event of Jesus found a language, first oral, then written, in which he was to be remembered, celebrated, and testified is well known. Having rejected the Scripture principle Farley is concerned to explain how this language, especially in its written form, is normative. Indeed, it is his conviction that " much of the confusion that attends modern theology is a result of ambiguity and vacillation on this point, symptomatized P11JTER C. PHAN in antinomies that attend the commitment to historical-critical methods and the Scripture principle" (p. 273). He refuses to locate the normativity of the Scripture in some residual part of it such as salvation history, revelatory events, a canon within a canon, etc. He also refuses to locate it in the early church's criteria for determining canonicity such as apostolic faith or apostolic origin. Finally he also refuses to locate it in a historically constructed Jesus supposedly more reliable than the Christ of piety. Farley recalls that by normative is meant "definitive for the self-interpretation of subsequent expressions of the same type of historical existence" (p. 274). Now if the Scripture is the linguistic, written sedimentation of the normative event, then the normativity of the event somehow must pass over into the Scripture. But what kind of normativity? Of course, not that propounded by the Scripture principle rejected by Farley. The normativity of the Scripture is determined by its literary genre. Now, Farley observes, the genre of the literature of ecclesial origins is neither Torah nor revealed truths but kerygma. These writings should not be called 'New Testament' since the term is burdened with the Scripture principle and the salvation history framework. Farley proposes to call them ' Kerygma ', with the upper case, as distinguished from ' kerygma ', with the lower case, the oral preaching. How does the Kerygma exercise its normative function then? According to Farley, in two ways: "as a definitive reference to ecclesiality's subsequent self-interpretation " and "as a lens which, when 'seen through', opens up and judges provincial spaces" (p. 278). How can the writings that attest the originating events of ecclesiality be identified (the problem of the canon) ? Farley proposes three criteria. The work identified as embodying the Kerygma should be one from within some part or movement of the community, thus having the characteristic of a witness; it should with some integrity function as a historical account of the forming of ecclesial existence; it should have to do with the originating event, the event and period of origins. AUTHORITY AND THEOLOGICAL METHOD 433 If the ecclesial writings cannot be called New Testament, then the writings of Israel cannot be called Old Testament either. Farley proposes to call them "the writings of Israel's faith" (p. 283). Rejecting the salvation history scheme Farley maintains that " the faith of Israel is immanent in and constitutive of ecclesiality " (p. 285) . Ecclesiality does not therefore replace, fulfill, or destroy the faith of Israel. What is celebrated in ecclesiality is both the event of Jesus Christ and the story of God, human being, and evil and hope which is the faith of Israel. Consequently the writings of Israel are not abolished in theological reflection but continue to function as bearers of corporate memory through which as a lens redemptive reality is seen. Moreover ecclesial writings, whether writings of Israel's faith or Kerygma, are not self-explanatory but need interpretation. Interpretation, however, is for Farley not so much exegesis of texts but looking through them at the provincial spaces and discerning in them both their structure of evil and their possibilities of redemption. This view of interpretation is consistent with the way Farley regards the ecclesial writings, not as deposit of immutable laws or truths, but as hermeneutical horizon of experience through which one interprets contemporaneity. In interpretation a double disclosure occurs: first, the " seeing through " may turn up situational realities of evil and redemption; second, wider and even universal aspects of those realities may contribute to the lens itself, to the insight into the very structure of ecclesiality. Further this living interpretation as discernment tends to become sedimented into tradition: oral, written, and institutional. This tradition-interpretation (e.g. liturgical practices, hymnodies, creeds, classical works, conciliar declarations, confession, etc.) is a vehicle of duration and self-identity of ecclesial existence. It is also a major source of theological portraiture, not as " authorities " with a priori truth status of course, but as partial, relative historical realizations of the ideal, " entelechaic " ecclesiality. The last two chapters of Ecclemal Reflection take up the sec- 434 PETER C. PHAN ond dimension of theology, namely the judgment about the truth and universality of ecclesiality. Of course the truth question, Farley points out, is already present in the prereflective stage of faith and in the first dimension, theological portraiture. Nevertheless it is only in the second dimension, namely theological understanding and judgment, that the question of truth is explicitly raised since here a distinction emerges between the total mythos or tradition of the ecclesial community with all its elements and judgments about these things. The question of truth concerns two things: reality (what grounds theological claims as true?) and criteria (how is the ground present in fields of evidence which function in the making of theological judgments?) Ecclesial Man has already dealt with the first issue; Ecclesial Reflection will examine the second. According to Farley, judgments have four features: they refer to how reality is, in fact or in structure; they have a universal, "as such" character and are therefore universally available; they make a claim, thus implying the appropriate evidence; they represent the subject's transition from mere insight to self-conscious understanding (the process of doctrinalization). The question now is: Can judgments of such features be made of the faith-world? Can corporate, universal, redemptive existence be translated into a general ontology so that the realities of the faith-world, which are the referents of theological judgments, are comparable to Whitehead's res verae, Heidegger's existentials, or Thomas's transcendentals? Farley's answer to these questions is no. His reason for this is that the realities of faith, which are the referents of theological judgments, are universal in a unique way. They are universal and determinate at the same time, or "determinate universals" (p. 310). Their uniqueness and strangeness results from the fact that in Farley's view they refer not only to the totality of the faithworld but also to the world, being, as such (since sin and redemption affect the world as such) ; that sin and redemption to which they refer are not experienced as something ontologically a priori and constitutive of human existence, though universally AUTHORITY AND THEOLOGICAL METHOD 435 present; that all ecclesial universals, and hence all theological judgments, refer to the transcendent, the mystery. If ecclesial universals are not identical with the empirical and generic universals of both the sciences and ontology, how can they be discerned and then formulated in a theological judgment? Farley deals with these two problems in the last chapter of his book. The ecclesial universals are discerned in a process of theological hermeneutics. Farley points out that ecclesial universals are not the result of reflection but are already given there and in some sense precede theological judgment as something to be discerned in two different modes, prereflective and reflective. They are present prerefiectively in the faith-world as the bearers of faith's apprehensions in the form of primary symbols. In the reflective level, that of portraiture, these primary symbols are grasped not only in their overall symbolic setting and their interrelation to each other, but in their universal references as well, although, at this level, the formulation of these references still remains determinate and provincial. The portrait resulting from this first dimension of theological reflection (portraiture) shows forth primary symbols as candidates for ecclesial universals and thus prepares the way for the discernment of the theological judgment which occurs in the second dimension of ecclesial reflection. How then does one go about locating candidates for ecclesial universals according to Farley? By interpreting the three types. of ecclesial literature, the Kerygma, the writings of the faith of Israel, and Interpretation, not as discrete texts (" authorities") but as embodiment of fundamental imagery: the Christ, hope, sin, God. In this interpretation, the Kerygma has a certain primacy in relation to the other two literatures because " it contains in an explicit way the primary paradigm of ecclesiality, the paradigm of a strange, new universal availability of salvation " (p. . Discerning ecclesial universals by means of portraiture alone is not sufficient; Farley strongly insists against historicism and pietism that theological reflection must end with judgments. 486 PETER C. PHAN The move from portraiture to judgment, however, is not a move from hypothesis to verification in the model of scientific explanation, even though elements of causal efficacy are present in the Christian myths. Nevertheless such a move, in Farley's view, retains formal features of judgments as such insofar as it means both a new level of cognition, a seeing into the reference, and a formulation of such in evidential mode. Therefore in its judgments " theology reviews the truth-intentions which attend faith as to their claims about how the world is and as to the evidence for those claims" (pp. 333-334). In judgments, then, theological reflection issues forth in "understanding." Farley summarises neatly the move to theological judgment as " a move from identifying potential candidates for ecclesial universals in their setting in ecclesial existence to a formulation (or abandonment) of these candidates as universals by uncovering their world structural (as suchness) elements" (p. 335) . Implied in this statement is a particular view of the relationship between the symbols and the realities of faith-world on the one hand and the structure of being on the other. Farley suggests that there is on the one hand a distinctive ontological reality content in the faith-world and its symbols different from the generic universals of ontology. On the other hand the world structures are immanent in the experience and the language of the faith-world so that faith realities and world structures are distinguishable yet inseparable. Because there is a distinctive as-suchness and universality immanent in the ecclesial universal itself, the task of theological judgment is to discern and formulate that immanent universality. How can this task be done? Not, of course, by translating ecclesial universals into generic universals of ontology (" generic hermeneutics ") nor by translating them into particulars (" relevance hermeneutics ") . The method suggested by Farley is using generic universals of ontology as" devices, even lenses, through which one can view the figure, the ecclesial universal, by means of which one can uncover the way that the generic universal has undergone modification in the ecclesial universal " (p. 338) . When AUTHORITY AND THEOLOGICAL METHOD 437 that modification is discovered, Farley is confident, a world structural element of the ecclesial universal has appeared, something which gives the reference of the figure its universal character and which is identical neither with the generic universals of ontology nor empirical science. The move, therefore, is from the symbol through the generic universal to the ecclesial universal. Farley's heuristic use of generic universals in order to discover the ecclesial universals implies not only that there is an analogy between them but also that these two groups of universals do not constitute two separable realms side by side to each other. Indeed the generic universals are immanent in the ecclesial universals. The question now is: how do the world structures immanent in ecclesial universals reflect reality as it is discerned by ontology? Farley must answer this question in order to show how theological judgments can be said to be true or false. According to him, theological judgments are true only if their claims can be grounded in as-such and world structural references. He proposes three ways in which these references occur in the faith-world according to the myth of creation and redemption: "(1) as the created reality presupposed by the theodicy myth itself and present in every faith-world reality both as the possibility of redemption and the reality behind the distortion; (2) as the distorted modifications of generic universals in sin; and (3) as a field open to redemption and divine presence" (p. 344). This rather detailed analysis of Ecclesial Reflection reflects the reviewer's conviction that it is an important work with radical consequences for theological method. In the remaining pages I will attempt to indicate the main virtues of this book and raise some questions for further considerations. One of the most useful contributions Farley has render_ed to theology is his consistent appropriation of phenomenology and sociology in working out a prolegomenon to theology and in conceiving the nature of theology and its tasks. Eccle.nal Man contains an excellent introduction to (Husserlian) phenomenology (pp. 3- 438 PETER C. PHAN 82) and its impact on theology (pp. 235-272) and Ecclesial Reflection offers an informative summary of the sociology of social duration (pp. 345-373). While avoiding sociologism, Farley's analysis provides an illuminating account of how Christianity as a social movement originated and survived by means of vehicles of social duration throughout the centuries and still retained its distinctive essence. Whether Farley's attempt to utilize phenomenology and sociology as a comprehensive framework for theology is successful or not remains yet to be determined. As a result of his skillful use of phenomenology and sociology Farley has been able to offer a coherent study of tradition both as traditio and tradita and its positive role for theological reflection. He has also restored a structural unity to the various theological disciplines (biblical-historical studies, systematic theology, and practical theology) by insisting on their necessary ecclesial character. Lastly, important too is his retention of truth (its formulation in judgments) as the goal of theological hermeneutics (portraiture). While acknowledging Farley's valuable contributions to theology, especially to theological method, I would like to point out some issues which in my estimation need further clarification and perhaps also correction. First, his description of the classical method, which he calls the House of Authority. Even allowing for the unavoidable oversimplification attendant to such a description, one must say that it is a portrait of extreme fu:ndamentalistic theology and its method, and not of the mainline, " average " theological tradition, both Catholic and Protestant, not even of the neo-orthodox theologies (Rahner, in particular) . It may be true that the principle of identity and its middle axioms are operative in authoritarian, dogmatist, fundamentalist theologies; but then these theologies are ideologies rather than theologies. It is quite untrue to say they are applied in contemporary Catholic theology, even that of the Magisterium. Farley's statement that in classical theology "the locus of divine-human identity, the authority, is itself the AUTHORITY AND THEOLOGICAL METHOD 439 evidence or the location of evidence for religious belief and theological judgment" (p. 110) is an accurate description of demagogic, Bible-thumbing or Denzinger-leafing preachers but is a caricature of serious past and contemporary theological reflection. The same thing should be said of his characterization of classical theology as citation and exposition, concerned only with the formal question of truth. Finally, his critique of the salvation history scheme and the principle of identity on the ground that both ultimately fail to provide a satisfactory answer to the problem of God's goodness and the presence of evil (pp. 153-165) is understandable enough but quite off the target since the theodicy question is the outcome of our assertions about God's omnipotence and goodness and man's freedom as such, whether the salvation history framework and the principle of identity are adopted or not. The most that can be said is that these two principles make the problem more acute, but it is wrong to think that it will not exist or is resolved if they are not used as methodological principles. Indeed, it is quite doubtful whether any theology, even the one built outside the House of Authority, on Farley's own foundation, is able to provide a satisfactory answer to this problem. Does it follow then that the mainline Christian theology, and for that matter, Farley's theology, can be done without at some point using" authority" (e.g. a text) as evidence? Farley notes in several places (pp. 206-210; 221-225; 248-249) the historical origin of ecclesial existence and points to Jesus of Nazareth as this origin. In Ecclesial Man he described the religious a priori grounding the historical language and intersubjectivity of the corporate, universal, redemptive community (ecclesiality) as the refusal to accept chaos, death, and evil as final (pp. 127-149). Following Husserl's distinction between (direct) presentation and (indirect) appresentation he claims that these direct presentations of religious language, a priori references to redemption, and ecclesial intersubjectivity are accompanied by appresentations of the historical redeemer and transcendent creator (pp. 206-234) . Apart from the question- 440 PETER C. PHAN able assumption that appresentations, which in Husserl are restricted to spatio-temporal objects, can reach the transcendent, it is difficult to see how Farley can identify the Jesus of history as the redeemer (even granting that present appresentations can reach a historical redeemer) without attributing at some point to the texts that proclaim him to be such an " authoritative" status, notwithstanding what he claims in Ecclesial Man, pp. U7-220. This brings up the issue of how Farley proposes to use the writings of Israel, the Kerygma, and Interpretation in theologizing. For him, we may recall, they are to be used as lenses through which one can discern ecclesiality (pp. 277-278, 289, 292-293, 333, 338) . Despite his protest against the charge of perspectivism (p. 278), it is hard to see how he can successfully escape it. Lenses per se are devoid of content; they limit one's vision to a certain mode of perception. If the ecclesial writings in their threefold form are simply " lenses " through which one sees reality, then their material contents should not be given normative status. But if they are to be considered as norm, then the writings themselves should be seen as more than lenses, especially if certain of these contents cannot be reached either through presentation or appresentation but only as asserted by them. An example would clarify this point. Suppose I were to reflect on the origins of Christian existence; obviously I need to look into the "New Testament," especially the gospels. Should I use them merely as lenses to look into reality and hopefully discern evil and redemption in it, or should I also pay serious attention to their claim that Jesus rose from the dead? I presume that Jesus's resurrection, however we understand it, is now available neither to presentation nor to appresentation. How then can Jesus's resurrection, which is the center of the New Testament proclamation, function as a lens, as a hermeneutical horizon, unless I have already accepted it as a fact on the basis (and authority) of the witness? Given the central position of this visual metaphor in Farley's her- AUTHORITY AN1> THEO:tOG:tCAL METHOD 441 meneutics it is regrettable that he has not elaborated more clearly and precisely on how it actually functions in practice. Another matter that needs clarification is Farley's posture towards the writings of Israel and its relationship to the literature of the initial transition to ecclesiality, the "New Testament," which he calls Kerygma. While strongly rejecting the salvation history scheme and consequently insisting that the writings of Israel (the "Old Testament") must be read on their own terms, and not as " a subordinate or inferior source of theological portraiture of ecclesiality" (p. 291), Farley also maintains that in interpreting these writings and their sedimented interpretations a "certain primacy" must be given to the Kerygma in relation to the other two literatures. The reason for this is that the Kerygma testifies to salvation in its universalized mode whereas the writings of Israel testify to it in its territorial and ethnic framework. There is, therefore, in them, to use Farley's words, an "entelechy" (p. 286), a" teleology" (p. 328) towards the Kerygma. One wonders then whether there is anything more than a semantic difference between the classical view (not the extreme allegory exegesis or the fundamentalist prophecy-fulfillment proof-text reading) and Farley's. Indeed, one wonders why he should bother himself with preserving the normativity of the Kerygma collection at all since his three conditions for canonicity (pp. 278-280) would easily be fulfilled by any book at any time. Finally,. one also wonders whether he is fully consistent when on the one hand he blasts against the salvation history framework and its axiom of periodization (pp. 28-32; 155-157) and on the other continues to maintain the three chronologcially successive literatures, the writings of Israel, the Kerygma, and the Interpretation, with the first "entelechizing" towards the second, and the third subjected to both the second and the first. Both Ecclesial Man and Ecclesial Reflection constitute an ambitious enterprise to re-think theology and its method outside the House of Authority. If the "House of Authority" is understood as the fundamentalistic, literalistic, and authori- l>]l)TER C. PltAN tarian way of doing theology, then Farley has delivered a powerful coup de grace to it, and three cheers for him. But if a new method is proposed for theology in which no " authority " of any kind is allowed to function as methodological criterion, then some of the issues cited above need further clarification before" a virtual Newtonian revolution of piety and tradition" (p. 277, n. 6) can occur so that his proposal may be acceptable. PETER University of Dallas Irving, Texas c. PHAN BOOK REVIEWS The Problems of Theology. By BRIAN HEBBLETHWAITE. Cambridge Uni- versity Press: 1980. Pp. 164. $21.50. The main content of this book is a wide ranging study of theology as an academic discipline among other academic disciplines. This includes much discussion of the object and methods of theology compared and contrasted with those of the history or phenomenology of religions, psychology and the social sciences, philosophy and history, both church history and secular history. Particular attention is given to the problem of revelation as a claim to data not generally available or not subject to regular scrutiny, to the relation between ethics and theology and to the problem of the relationship of theology to official church doctrine. All this is done with astonishing competence, considering the range of content and the brevity of the text. It must be said that the writing is very dense and at times extremely hard to follow. Such is the content. The purpose of the book is to demonstrate and defend the place of theology in the (secular) university by explaining its method, content and scope. In the feisty opening chapter, Hebblethwaite lays out all the cards he means to play, but by this time the reader is caught. The harmless looking little book in the bland blue dustjacket turns out to be first cousin to the Trojan horse and fraternal twin to the letter bomb. It unmasks a pervasive hidden assumption, an unacknowledged bias in the main stream of contemporary religious studies with a powerful if idiosyncratic logic. The setting and the manner of the argument are British. American readers may have some difficulty following the thread of the argument at first but the book rewards persevering readers generously. The thesis of the book is this : to include theology within the category of " religious studies " implies an underlying assumption that God does not exist, for if God exists then " religious studies " must necessarily be included in theology ( p. 3). The author's definition of theology is "rational talk about God" (pp. 1, 6, and throughout). His implied definition of " religious studies" appears to be " rational talk about religious behavior and beliefs ", such as would be meaningful whether or not the beliefs are well-founded or the behavior justified. His concern, though never explicitly stated in quite this way, appears to be that there is an alliance at work among three very unlikely partners and that two of them are probably unaware of what is going on. These partners are atheist 448 444 BOOK REVIEWS scholars and academic administrators. whether these be theoretical or merely practical atheists, rigorist or fundamentalist theologians, of whatever faith or denomination they may be, and those extremely liberal (not radical) theologians to whom the particularity of their tradition and its claims is no longer important because they are willing to follow the Hegelian notion that religion attains maturity by resolving itself into philosophy. Hebblethwaite's understanding appears to be that the consensus over establishment of religious studies in universities and colleges (rather than theology, though this might be included as a small area of descriptive study within the " academically respectable " field of religious studies) is totally coherent from the point of view of the atheists, but a trap for the other two parties. The doctrinaire theologian is the one who will not bring his discussion into the public forum of the academic world because he claims privileged data, methods and conclusions. If the establishment of religious studies keeps him out of the academic limelight but guarantees him a corner which he is sure he could not otherwise occupy, he is cautiously satisfied. If religious studies exclude him, he is probably relieved in any case, because he is convinced that he has nothing to discuss with his unbelieving colleagues in the secular university and had better pursue his theological activities in an isolated world of believers. As this world shrinks and many traditions are closely intertwined in society, such theologians have less and less to say even to believers. They can be progressively discounted, which is of course a desirable development from the atheists' point of view. The extremely liberal theologians are happy to be invited into the liberal arena because they judge the validity of the theological enterprise by the atheists' standards. They respond to those standards by readily eliminating the particularity of the tradition and its claims. They are not interested in what is characteristic of their traditions but only in what is common to all traditions. They are chary of claims of revelation and of specific acts of God in history. They are apparently doing this as a way of saving faith and theology in a secular and pluralistic society. They do not see that instead of saving them they are losing them to the atheists' game plan. It should be stated here that nowhere in the book does the author set this out explicitly. However, the embroiled and entangled reviewer, tenaciously following the line of argumentation of the book and trying to discover to whom it was really addressed and why, came to the conclusion .that this is the situation the author sees, and found herself not unsympathetic to the interpretation of the situatiou and to the solution offered when the author sets out " to suggest a particular hypothesis about the proper nature and scope of theology today" (p. viii). That particular hypothesis is not succinctly stated in a way that could be quoted here. Its characteristic elements seem to be : theology has a right to claim its BOOK REVIEWS 445 own particular sources in revelation (almost exactly the position of Aquinas with whom Hebblethwaite remains on very amiable terms throughout) ; theology is obliged to establish the credibility of the revelation in which it is grounded as well as the internal and contextual coherence of the worldview founded upon it (a thoroughly Catholic position from the Anglican Fellow and Dean of Chapel of Queen's College, Cambridge, who is also University Lecturer in Divinity); in our times this must be done in the public forum of honest intellectual exchange with scholars in the human and social sciences, as well as those in the natural sciences, history and philosophy, and that in spite of what the author sees as the fractured condition of philosophy in our times and the limited scope of other disciplines which regard religion often from one aspect which distorts it; in our times it must also be done within a particular tradition but in continuing conversation with the other great religious traditions of the world in sensitive and well-informed awareness of the claims that they are making and the grounds on which they substantiate them; finally it niust genuinely be done in the open forum of the intellectual exchange of the university so that the unbeliever may participate in it as a respected and welcome partner who may both challenge and be challenged on the assumptions made, the coherence of the arguments put forward, and the conclusions drawn. Hebblethwaite assumes that in the contemporary world most educated people do not believe in God (p. 1), an assumption Americans may wish to question. In the name of tolerance and objectivity, therefore, it is usually claimed that the proper object of study is people's religious behavior and belief, a claim with which the author takes issue because it begs the question. If God exists, then theology as he defines it can only be the most comprehensive study which situates all other concerns within the relationship of human persons and the world to God. This will influence the questions asked and the expectations of all other academic disciplines (" subjects" in Hebblethwaite's British vocabulary). Therefore the question of God's existence must at least be seriously pursued. Moreover, because that question cannot be resolved to the point of general consensus, theology has at least the right to exist on its own terms in the secular university side by side with an (explicitly or implicitly) atheist construction of the pursuit of learning. Hebblethwaite goes so far as to give the intellectually honest atheist a role in theology. He bases this on the understanding that such a person can entertain hypotheses by which one may enter sympathetically into the possibility that God exists and construct an interpretation of reality viable within those hypotheses. He envisages a fruitful exchange between believer and unbeliever not only on the grounds for belief but also on the coherence of the interpretations of reality given from the believer's posi- 446 BOOK REVIEWS tion (pp. 4, 32-34). But the point at issue is that this can only be done with intellectual integrity on the believer's ground, that is from within, and not on the unbeliever's ground from without, because it is clear that the coherence of the position cannot be seen from without. Thus he takes issue with the not uncommon assumption that religious questions can be studied with intellectual honesty from a stance of " methodological atheism " and that this gives objectivity to the endeavor. This objection is supported in an interesting way from the structuralist approach of cultural anthropologist Levi-Strauss and the field-work of E. Evans-Pritchard and Godfrey Lienhardt (pp. 49-51). It is his conviction about the subtle but inherent bias of the more usual approach to religious questions by the various academic disciplines that is at stake for Hebblethwaite in the structuring of programs where the choice lies between theology standing in its own right (and including within its horizons various aspects of religious studies) and religious studies as a composite or interdisciplinary field concerning itself with religious behavior, including religious beliefs. In spite of certain disavowals (e.g. pp. 72-73) the author in fact tries to bring theology back almost full circle to the standing among other disciplines and the basic assumptions and starting points that it had for Anselm and Aquinas (pp. 70-73), whom he lauds explicitly (p. 10) along with Athanasius and Augustine. He takes into account the Kantian, Hegelian and (by implication) Comtian revolutions in thinking about God, not to mention the Freudian and Jungian questions thrown into the process, but then discovers a solidity in the traditional authors which survives through these revolutions albeit in further refinement that is not to be understood as excluding other traditions or taking them less than seriously. It is rather a question of bringing Christian tradition into fully serious conversation with other secular and religious traditions, and in this Hebblethwaite does expect the uncovering and testing of truth, even the truth of propositions about God and about the action of God in history and the relationship of human persons and the world to God. What he sees as a positive legacy of the Enlightenment consists of new questions on the appropriate understanding " of the relation between God and the world and of the way God acts in the world" (p. 13). In addressing such new questions, the author rejects the stance taken by Karl Barth, which he characterizes as a retreat into a private certainty not subject to critical study in the open forum and therefore not allowing for theology as an intellectual discipline with its place in the university (p. 15-16). But he also rejects the stance popularized by John A. T. Robinson (of Honest to God fame) because the latter seems to claim too much for common experience. thereby apparently disallowing or devaluing the particular self-revelation of God in Christian history (p. 17). He 447 BOOK REVIEWS rather consistently aligns himself with the basic stance taken by W olfhart Pannenberg (e.g. pp. 115, 120). Hebblethwaite envisages proper method in theology as that which is critical and self-critical in all aspects and therefore also willing to engage in public scrutiny of faith itself and "its rational basis in conviction ", and which is therefore really a plurality of methods akin to the critical methods used in philosophy, history and the study of ancient texts (p. 18). Taking this view, he also takes issue with Bernard Lonergan (Method in Theology) because of his apparent claim to reduce all theological method to one program and because of his insistence on the specific role of religious conversion at one particular point in the program (p. 19). Hebblethwaite's keen sensitivity to the contemporary need to do theology in the wider ecumenical context prompts him to look back to the classics of Catholic theology for an approach that seeks to wed reason with revelation and to enter into public discussion of the rational grounds of credibility. Most of this is really set out in the opening chapter and substantiated in the remainder of the book. In pursuit of his defense of theology the author makes a comparison of its stance and methods with those of comparative religion or phenomenology of religion (Ch. 2), those of psychology and the social sciences (Ch. 3), of philosophy (Ch. 4) and of history (Ch. 6). He exhibits and assumes in the reader a rather wide acquaintance with these fields. He also interpolates a significant reflection on the "problem of revelation" (Ch. 5) and concludes with considerations of the position of ethical problems among these disciplines (Ch. 7) and of the problem of doctrine and doctrinal theology today (Ch. 8). As the author himself readily admits, he is attempting too much in this one brief volume to do justice to these fields. Occasionally one is left gasping over a conspicuous omission, such as that of Karl Rahner on the question of revelation, where Hebblethwaite seems to be groping for just the sort of approach that Rahner provides, and the omission of the political theory of J. B. Metz and the liberation theology of Latin America and other Third World countries in Chapter 7 where these seem to be what he is looking for. The present reviewer, who came to systematic theology by way of the social sciences, found Chapters 2 and 3 insightful but very thin and Chapter 8 only tantalizing for its further possibilities. However, the challenge and usefulness of the book is not in the way the author works out his thesis in detail but rather in the central thesis itself which ought to be studied and discussed widely among American theologians and academic administrators. This is not a book for students but for those who are already professionals. MONIKA Georgetown University Washington, D.C. K. HELLWIG 448 BOOK REVIEWS Skeptical Essays. By BENSON MA.TES. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981. Pp. xi + 176. $17.00. " The principal traditional problems of Philosophy are genuine intellectual knots; they are intelligible enough, but at the same time they are absolutely insoluble." So runs the pessimistic thesis of Benson Mates's Skeptical Essays. The outline of his argument is to identify the essential features of " genuine intellectual knots " or paradoxes, select paradigm paradoxes, and demonstrate tha;t they have these features, and then to identify two principal problems of philosophy which share these essential features. A paradox is a seemingly valid argument that has apparently true premises yet an implausible or self-contradictory conclusion. A paradigm paradox is reasonably short, has logical transitions which satisfy standards as high as are imposed on reasoning anywhere else, and it should appear that there are no slippery logical transitions or ' fuzzy ' terms. In short, there must appear to be no way to avoid the conclusion. Mates selects the Liar's and Russell's Paradoxes as paradigms. After clearly stating each, he rehearses their major purported solutions and carefully indicates the inadequacy of each solution. The intention is to demonstrate not only that these paradoxes have the aforementioned characteristics, but also that, although there is unanimous agreement among philosophers that something is wrong, no proffered solution has ever gained more than a minority as adherents. The two problems of philosophy, identified by Mates as intelligible yet insoluble, concern the freedom of the will and our knowledge of the external world. The former is a metaphysical problem of practical significance, the latter is epistemological with questionable practical implications. Mates, following his program, clearly states each problem, presents significant purported solutions, then points out the shortcomings of each solution. He thereby re-establishes the initial problem and demonstrates the existence of the relevant paradoxical characteristics. The second chapter contains, among other more concise theoretical solutions, an extended discussion of Austin's attempt as presented in his "A Plea For Excuses" to solve the Free Will problem. It is his contention that the very statement of the Free Will problem is unintelligible because of the misuse of the critical qualifiers" freely" and "voluntarily"· In a lucid rebuttal, Mates argues that not only are Austin's criteria for the applicability of these qualifiers mistaken, but also that the Free Will problem can be stated without their use. The third chapter moves briskly through the history of philosophy and the various prominent attempts by notable philosophers to solve the problem of Our Knowledge of the External World. By design, though, no BOOK REVIEWS 449 attempt is made to present either a comprehensive or a meticulous set of solutions or rejections of these solutions. The aim is always to establish and perpetuate a sense of philosophic wonder and paradox. In this respect Mates is successful. But granted that Mates establishes his skeptical thesis, there is little suggestion as to what is to be made of the resulting intellectual paralysis. What is the purpose and value of philosophy in the event that the principal philosophic problems are insoluble' Additionally, what other traditional principal problems does Mates have in mind' No answers are given or suggested. Mates is at his best when stating the relevant philosophic problems and providing a 'map' of the historical attempts to solve them. The prose and logic are straightforward, crisp, and lively. One only wishes he had said a little more about what, if anything, comes next. CRAIG KNOCHE 24 Lawton A venue Cliffside Park, New Jersey Emotion. By WILLIAM LYONS. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980. Pp. xi + 230. $29.50. Dr. Lyons concentrates -0n emotional states rather than on emotions considered dispositionally. His argument is that they can be accounted for by ' the causal-evaluative theory ' in terms of which ' X is deemed an emotional state if and only if X is a physiologically abnormal state caused by the subject of that state's evaluation of his or her situation' (pp. 57 f). According to Lyons, the physiological changes which go with emotional states can be evidence of an emotion's presence, but they are not necessarily evidence of some particular emotion and " there is no one special feeling that we can invariably connect with any particular emotion and with that emotion alone " ( p. 133). Nor is there any particular form of purposive behavior characteristic of any particular emoti-0n, as, say, eating is characteristic of hunger. Lyons also thinks that emotions have formal and particular objects. An emotion's formal object is a general evaluative category (e.g. 'the dangerous '), which is not a cause. A particular object of an emotion is something like a person, an event, or the content of a belief. But it is not necessarily an item " capable of being described in any definite way " (p. 105), and it can be illusory or non-illusory. In Lyons's view emotions can also be motives. Although one can do something from a motive without wanting to do what one actually does, a motive, so Lyons argues, is often 450 BOOK REVIEWS a cause. And when a motive is a cause the action to which it is attributed can be explained by a desire, though desires or wants are not intentions and one can have a motive for doing something without wanting to do it. An emotion can thus be a motive by including a want (either conscious or unconscious) which could have been, or is, or could become a deliberate cause of an action. Lyons also holds that emotions can give rise to purposive behavior, though emotions are not activities and, therefore, they are not things which can be done for a purpose. " Emotions include beliefs, evaluations and wants which cannot be induced at will, as they are not like actions or performances which one can do on demand, but are more like reactions or responses engendered or stirred up in us by conditions which we usually cannot control " ( p. 196). But emotions can be useful to those who have them, and, in this sense, can be purposive, though also disruptive. Turning finally to the topic of emotions and blame, Lyons argues that "there are a number of ways in which we can control our emotions and so a number of ways in which we can be blamed in respect of our emotions" (p. 193). We can put ourselves into, and also avoid, situations where a certain emotional state is likely to arise. We can extricate ourselves from situations which bring about emotional states. We can get ourselves out of an emotional state by listening to argument. We can get ourselves into an emotional state by putting ourselves in the way of believing certain things. We can " protect and promote an emotion by fostering the conditions in which it is likely to prosper" (p. 199). We can also control or hide or wallow in the non-purposive expressions of emotion (e.g. weeping). The conclusion to be drawn is that "if each of the ways we can be said to exercise control over our emotions can give rise to some undesirable upshot so that the person having the emotion can be held responsible for the undesirable upshot, and if it is presumed that, in the cases exemplifying these ways, there are no mitigating circumstances, then all the conditions for blame have been fulfilled in respect of a person's emotions " ( p. 202). Lyons has taken on a difficult and complex subject, and much of what he says invites questions to which he might profitably have addressed himself. Animals, for example, seem able to undergo fear and pleasure, yet in what sense do they evaluate with reference to beliefs¥ According to Lyons "it would seem odd to blame harmless malice" (p. 195); but why can we not blame someone for harboring malicious thoughts' Even if someone always acts well, is it odd to say to him " I know what you're And why should thinking, and you ought to be ashamed of we agree that, as Lyons maintains, for Aquinas " emotion is firstly a felt tendency, that is a desire which is, in the first instance, physiological and set into motion by perception alone, unmediated by beliefs and evalua- 451 BOOK REVIEWS tions" (p. 36) Aquinas holds that the passiones animae depend on their subject's recognition of things as good or bad (S.T. la, 2ae, 22, 2), which means that he does not sharply distinguish between feeling and believing in the way implied by Lyons. These criticisms aside, however, I think it must be said that Lyons has done his job very well indeed. Extraordinarily well, in fact. His book is a model of clarity and it abounds in careful and balanced reasoning. And, as far as I can see, it advances a first-rate defence of the theory for which it argues. Though its tone is constru0tive rather than polemical, it also manages some very effective swipes at a number of dubious pronouncements, notably ones by Descartes, Skinner, Freud, and Sartre. At several points in his text Lyons also offers some useful correctives to Anthony Kenny's .Action, Emotion and Will (1963), with which it must now be included in any serious bibliography on the question of emotion. It might be worth adding that anyone unconvinced by Lyons on emotion and feelings could fruitfully ponder on the following quotation from Pepys's Diary, which is missed by Lyons but cited to good effect in C. S. Lewis's Screwtape Proposes a Toast (1965) : With my wife to the King's House to see The Virgin Martwr, and it was mighty pleasant ... But that which did please me beyond anything in the whole world was the wind musick when the angel comes down, which is so sweet that it ravished me and, indeed, in a word, did wrap up my soul so that it made me really sick, just as I have formerly been when in love with my wife ... and it makes me resolve to practise wind musick and to make my wife do the like. (27th February, 1688.) According to Lyons, " it seems impossible to assert that one is in the grip of such and such an emotion just by introspecting the quality or type of one's present feeling" (p. 133). Pepys would presumably have agreed. BRIAN DAVIES, Blackfriars, O.P. Oxford The Political Philosophy of the Frankfurt School. By GEORGE FRIEDMAN. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1981. Pp. 312. $17.50. Like a guest at a disappointing dinner party, a reader sometimes finishes a book thinking it a splendid failure. Such is my reaction to George Friedman's The Political Philosophy of the Frankfurt School. Since Friedman views the work of the Frankfurt School as itself a failure, there is 452 BOOK REVIEWS more than a little irony in this. By assuming that the Frankfurt School intended to produce a recipe for overcoming " the bankruptcy of modernity," Friedman manages to turn what could have been food for thought into a dining disaster. There is much that is inviting in Friedman's bill of fare. The book is well-written, lucidly presented, and vigorously argued, qualities which rarely come to mind when considering the merits of other discussions of the Frankfurt School. Even more appetizing is the promise of a fresh perspective. First, Friedman advertises his thesis as something other than intellectual history, which Martin Jay, of course, has already done. Instead, his recipe calls for "a systematic treatment of the thought of the Frankfurt School " ( p. 21), a reconstruction of their fundamental doctrine about politics. Second, he does not present this on an hors d'oeuvres tray, as if the Frankfurt School were significant merely in preparing an agenda for the critical theory of Jiirgen Habermas. W ellmer, Schroyer, Bernstein, McCarthy, and Held, all have taken a turn at that arrangement. By contrast, Friedman focuses exclusively on the first generation, Max Horkheimer, Theodor W. Adorno, Walter Benjamin, and Herbert Marcuse. Third, his menu is less restricted than most. There is more here than just one more footnote to the increasingly ponderous tradition of neo-Marxism. \Vhile Friedman does not deny Marxism's formative influence in defining the " problematic" of the Frankfurt School, he insists that " what makes ... [it] ... interesting is the non-Marxist origins of its thought" (p. 49). Having whetted the reader's appetite with such promises, Friedman serves up his thesis as a three-course meal. The first course, " Philosophic Roots of the Frankfurt School,'' makes vegetable soup of what's usually treated as their neo-Marxist Hegelian foundations. Once these roots are washed, sorted, and diced for cooking, it is clear that they have been gathered from the gardens of the Right as well as the Left. Ingredients identified as Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Spengler are used in equal proportion with those labelled Hegel and Marx. For good measure, the traditions of Judaism and the criticisms of Freud are thrown in for seasoning. Upon sampling this mixture, Friedman observes that "although they appropriated Marxism as the most explicit critique of bourgeois life, almost any anti-bourgeois aspect of twentieth century intellectual thought was apt to be pressed into service" (p. 19). Once the soup is served, the chef invites our response, asking whether such an attempt " to go far outside Marxism in order to search out in its enemies the potential for preserving it . . ." marks " the theoretical coup de grace " not only for Marxism but also for the Enlightenment itself. We are given just enough, in other words, to make us hungry for more. So skillfully, then, have our appetites been prepared for the second course, " Posing the Problem of Enlightenment." But here the reader BOOK REVIEWS 453 finds few surprises, as the Frankfurt School's bread and butter issue, "the dialectic of Enlightenment," is served up in four slightly different entvees. In short, modernity's attempt to rationalize the world at the expense of myth and for the benefit of science-along with the paradoxical consequences which have ensued from it-is outlined schematically as four interrelated crises of reason, of art and culture, of the human psyche, and of history. Each of these comes flavored with the sweet and sour sauce of " negative dialectics." Thus each confirms the fact that " the Enlightenment-progressive as long as it was conquering nature, as long as it was negative-became repressive at the moment of its realization" (p. 202). Since this sauce tends to make each entree taste the same, what saves this course from becoming a bore is Friedman's attempt to show how each crisis also undermines the Frankfurt School's own perspective of criticism. The self-destruction of the Enlightenment cannot fail to threaten the principle of critical negativity itself. Since modernity has embraced the positivity of a technocratic society, and since negativity cannot long survive as an abstract theoretical principle, " effective criticism " can only be sustained by reinstitutionalizing the opposition to modernity. Nevertheless, since the crisis also includes the failure of the Marxist proletariat to take up its role as the agent of " transcendence " in history, the Frankfurt School is left with the desperate search for a new solution to the problem it has analyzed so well. Some sauces, in other words, just can't be left to simmer alone, or they'll evaporate. The heat generated by boiling away the principle of critical negativity fuels Friedman's attempt at a third course, a souffle, entitled "The Search for a Solution." As every experienced chef knows, souffles are risky business. But Friedman's menu calls for one, and so he struggles to deliver one. Here his need to find something more substantive in the Frankfurt School leads him to rely heavily on the ingredients provided by Benjamin and Marcuse. More defiant of the law of gravity than most souffles, Friedman's emphasizes the discontinuities between the crisis of modernity and its solution. If the proletariat has failed, some new messiah from the margins of modernity may appear. Thus he uses Benjamin's mystical hermeneutic of history to support Marcuse's view of the revolutionary significance of the Student Revolts of the 60's and the subsequent upheavals in the Third World. Such messianism is the active ingredient which makes the souffle rise; it provides, in other words, the agent of historical " transcendence." Its content, the divine promise messianically fulfilled, is " the transfiguration of being" resulting from the liberation of Eros, once "conditions of scarcity "-economic and otherwise-have been eliminated by revolutionized technology. Thus Marcuse's "eroticization of the body and . . . sensualization of the environment " is to rise to the top of the baking mold, thus giving ultimate expression to the Frankfurt School's vision of society. 454 BOOK REVIEWS Given Friedman's thesis concerning the Frankfurt School's failure, it comes as no surprise that at the moment when this souffle is to be pulled from the oven, we see our chef announce dramatically that it has collapsed. Instead of savoring the liberation of Eros, we are forced to inspect the burnt remains of a recipe for moral and political disaster. Marcuse's speculations, now deflated and "wallowing " in the mire of their own excesses, are condemned as infantile, indeed as " bestial" in that, when judged by the perennial standards of Mosaic faith and Aristotelian civic virtue, they are exposed as a subhuman form of self-gratification. Under such circumstances, there is little that a chef can do but send his guests home empty with the promise of another invitation, once the kitchen is thoroughly cleaned. Yet, as they slip into their overcoats, the guests can't help but wonder, "How strange! What went wrong?!" Friedman's basic error, in my opinion, is to read the Frankfurt School as if it were a recipe for cooking up one more metaphysical world-view. Although the metaphor isn't his, I've used it here to dramatize what I think he's up to. Let me restate the point in methodological terms. It may be subdivided into two parts. The first concerns the appropriateness in principle of giving " systematic treatment" to the thought of the Frankfurt School. As Friedman himself emphasizes, critical theory constitutes something like an "antisystematics " (p. 220), insofar as it defines itself against " the System," i.e., the theory and practice of modern industrial societies. Since the inhumanity of " the System" is revealed in paradigmatic events like Auschwitz and Viet Nam, " :fighting the System" means overcoming dehumanization wherever possible by " negating the negation." Critical theory, which tries to put this protest into theoretical focus, thus proceeds If Friedman is right about the dynamics of as an "antisystematics." critical theory-and I'm quite sure that he is-isn't there something Specifically, can a method of counter-productive about his basic anti-systematic thinking be reduced to a system of doctrines about society Can it, in other words, be used as a recipe for a post-modern and or anti-modern world-view without contradicting its essentially negative character. Second, it seems that in fact Friedman's "systematic treatment" is seriously inadequate. The problem here is the selection of the authors representing the Frankfurt School, and the manner in which their thoughts are harmonized. It is customary to identify Horkheimer and Adorno as central to the school and the others as peripheral. By contrast, Friedman gives Benjamin and Marcuse equal billing with Horkheimer and Adorno, despite the fact that there were deep disagreements between the latter pair and the former. Nevertheless, Friedman's recipe requires a metaphysical sensibility from Benjamin and an ethic and eschatology 455 BOOK REVIEWS from Marcuse. In any case, it remains an interesting thought experiment to try to reconstruct whatever hidden affinities may link Marcuse's Eros and Civilization and Benjamin's " Theses on the Philosophy of History" with Horkheimer's Eclipse of Reason and Adorno's Negative Dialectics. But when Friedman conflates these so that the latter are rounded out doctrinally by appeal to the former, only to condemn the resulting "system " as subhuman, the reader is entitled to suspect that the experiment was rigged from the beginning. The difficulty, in short, is not that Friedman has failed to persuade me to give up my sympathy for the Frankfurt School; rather, it is that a " systematic treatment " pursued in this way makes it impossible to see what critical theory is really all about. Let me try to define the area of disagreement more precisely. Once critical theory is read as another metaphysical world-view, many of Friedman's criticisms make sense. Of course, it fails to provide a satisfactory answer to the ontological question raised by death; of course, it fails to develop a transcendental grounding for a retrieval of Aristotelian civic virtue. Of course, it fails " to get Marx off the hook by partial purchases of a non-Marxist ontology" (p. 299). In short, of course it fails to overcome "the bankruptcy of modernity "; for the questions that modernity poses for Friedman are ultimately metaphysical questions, and he refuses to be satisfied with anything less than a metaphysical answer. Friedman's refusal, no doubt, must be taken seriously; but it is simply a mistake to assume his perspective as the basis for evaluating the work of the Frankfurt School. They are after two different things. Any effective criticism of the Frankfurt School must begin by respecting the metaphysically agnostic character of negative dialectics. There are serious difficulties for both theory and practice entailed by this method, and Friedman has succeeded in identifying many of these. Where he fails is in assuming that these difficulties forced the Frankfurt School quietly to abandon the negative dialectic in favor of a positive and therefore essentially static world-view. Ironically, what gives the lie to Friedman's assumption is the criticisms usually-and more insightfully-directed against Horkheimer and Adorno, namely, that their refusal to be anything but negative leaves them the unwitting representatives of " stoic resignation" in the face of the crisis of modernity. Such may be the case; but even if their silence before the metaphysician's perennial questions amounts to " stoic resignation," it must still be accepted as the point of departure for any insight into the " problematic " of the Frankfurt School. An interpretation of the Frankfurt School's failure would have been welcome; but given Friedman's assumption, what should have been recognized as splendid gets treated as merely contemptible. DENNIS De Paul University Chicago, Illinois P. MCCANN 456 BOOK REVIEWS How Bra;ve a New World? By RrcmARD A. McCoRMIOK. Garden City: Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1981. Pp. 440. $15.95. This is a collection of previously published essays, all of which relate to the ethical issues generated by contemporary biological and medical developments. The volume is divided into seven major sections: (a) general methodological reflections, (b) experimentation and the incompetent, ( c) abortion, morality, and public policy, ( d) contraceptive interventions, ( e) reproductive technological genetics, (f) the preservation of life (especially those cases wherein technology promises seemingly open-ended extension of some degree of life), and (g) the quality of life. There is also an appendix, " The Principle of Double Effect," a concise summary of McCormick's research and refleetions on this topic as of 1976. Those who wrestle with this topic will want to consult this particular statement by McCormick; its brevity and simplicity may help some to understand his Doing Evil to .Achieve Good. Except for the fact that McCormick's name is now inextricably linked with research on double effect, one is surprised to find this appendix in this volume. Indeed, one could read the rest of the volume without becoming aware of McCormick's interest in this issue. Four lengthy essays reprinted here (i.e., an abortion "dossier," H umanae Vitae in 1968 and then ten years later, and the piece on genetic medicine) first appeared in the " Moral Theology Notes " of Theological Studies. They are also only recently published as an integral part of Notes on Moral Theology, 1965 through 1980 (University Press of America, 1981). Hence, readers with limited financial resources will perhaps think twice before purchasing both of the new collections of McCormick's work. McCormick's style in the " Notes" is evident in much of the present volume. He is masterly in reporting accurately and comprehensively what others have said about a particular topic; there is no better way to begin studying the literature on moral topics than by reading along in McCormick's "notes." Over the course of an entire book, however, that style can become burdensome. In this respeet, How Brave a New World'.I' suffers from not being more explicitly integrated around an identifiable theme and/or a set of fundamental principles consistently applied to each new topic. Still, those looking for a Roman Catholic theologian's reflections on bioethics will wisely turn to this volume. It is, in my judgment, possible to begin generalizing about McCormick's method and content when he is doing bioethics. Perhaps this is best done by playing off McCormick against James Gustafson, the other great master in summarizing ethical literature. Indeed, these two are notably the core arguments and insights similar in their talent faithfully to of other moralists. In other ways, however, they are notably dissimilar. I BOOK REVIEWS 457 shall here describe two such instances, the second of which is identified by McCormick himself. First of all, one must ask how important is McCormick's faith as he addresses these biological and medical issues. Explicitly in his preface he identifies himself as a Catholic moral theologian and defends the appearance of still " another book in bioethics" precisely in terms of his conviction that his own "religious faith stamps (him) at a profound and not totally recoverable depth"; that is to say, his Catholic faith makes a difference in what gets said. But, true to his words about its being not totally recoverable, nowhere does McCormick plumb his own depths in an effort to articulate the effects of such a faith-stamping (or is it a faithing stamp'). Of course, that is all right. That is the stuff of another book, or at least of an article that Gustafson might write about McCormick. When one recalls the former's Marquette lecture, The Contribution of Theology to Medical Ethics, one knows that Gustafson could surely trace at least some of the lines left on McCormick by the stamp of faith. Indeed, they are rather obvious. What is ironic, and important to say, is that this McCormick (who is so often branded by his Roman Catholic critics as too contemporary) carries the stamp of Catholic tradition much more obviously than the stamp of moral modernity. While so many others spend themselves to develop moral theories which are explicitly Christian, theories which are emphatically grounded in a personal faith-commitment to Jesus, here is McCormick scarcely mentioning Jesus. In fact, the single principle mentioned (and it infrequently) by McCormick is the identity of love of God and neighbor as recently spelled out by Karl Rahner. That is, I believe, a controlling theme for McCormick's moral theory. But I do not recall any other controlling theme or principle which so clearly relates to the Incarnation. But that is not to deny any faith-stamping whatsoever of McCormick. It is, rather, to set the stage for saying that McCormick grounds his work much more in creation than in Incarnation. Human beings as images of God, always to be respected and cherished-this is the appropriate theological model here. And it is a model of great consequence in McCormick's deft hands. My first point has been, then, that McCormick's faith-stamping does make a difference, even though the difference it makes is expressed in accents of creation more than of Incarnation. O{ course, the fact that the Incarnation is only sketchily visible here could lead some to question what difference Christian faith makes to McCormick. One does not easily pin down a Gustafson, but I would want to argue that at this point he and McCormick are dissimilar (if not "notably" so). Gustafson would surely 458 BOOK REVIEWS recognize the stamp left by McCormick's faith, but his own stamp would be of rather different contours. Which leads me to a second instance of dissimilarity, or perhaps it is only an expansion of the first, because here I hope to show that McCormick is utterly serious in his conviction that the created human mind is able to find in created reality the stuff for some very explicit norms for bioethics. In the essay on genetic medicine McCormick summarizes and critieizes Gustafson (pp. 298-301). The latter is typically able to identify two clear alternatives for ethical decision-makers, but he predietably earves out some middle ground whieh allows one to hold on to the attractive elements of the two extreme alternatives. He is inevitably sensitive to the eomplexities of reality and so also inevitably unwilling (beeause theoretieally unable) to give guidanee whieh is too speeifie. The present review is not meant to be a study of Gustafson; so we need not push all this too far. The point, rather, is that MeCormick is quite willing to work at being speeifie, and here he is notably dissimilar to Gustafson. On p. 300 we read: What Gustafson wants (and rightly) to say is that rational moral discourse is limited, and that there comes a point when the complexity of reality leads us beyond the formulations of traditional wisdom. That, I think, is true. And I believe we have always known it, even though we have not always admitted it. But where that point is located is very important. Failure to specify at least some of the values that can override a primary value or right all too easily suggests that there is no point to which rational deliberation can lead us, that we cannot specify these values, and that this can only be done in individual decisions. Does this not remove moral discourse in principle from objective and rational scrutiny? One can safely characterize MeCormiek's work as the subjeetion of moral diseourse to objective and rational scrutiny. He is almost cemented into the Roman Catholic tradition. If McCormick is the grand reporter on moral theorists, the grand notetaker on what is unfolding in literature on ethics, he is just as surely the grand Roman Catholic casuist of our day. He is determined to be specific about eases, to draw lines, to identify finely-drawn norms which will serve doctors and patients, nurses and parents, judges and legislators. Examples are easy to come by. Of interest to this reviewer is McCormick's consideration of how to decide in the case of severely-disadvantaged newborns. First he reminds us that Roman Catholics have a long tradition of not holding human life as absolutely sacred, necessarily to be protected and safeguarded with every possible resource. Then there is the much shorter, albeit better-known, tradition (stretching to Pius XII) which teaches that humans are not morally bound to employ extraordinary BOOK REVIEWS 459 means to continue human life. McCormick is impatient with those who would stop at the ordinary/ extraordinary distinction. It is possible to go further, he claims. It is not necessary to leave hospital personnel and families of patients with these general principles alone. The moralist can be even more precise in the thoughtful and objective determination of norms; his claim is that we can (and ought to) spell out what human conditions can truly be called extraordinary. In this case, he is led to develop a quality-of-life argument, identifying certain human physical (i.e., observable, measurable) conditions, the presence of which would justify a decision not to continue artificially to prolong that life. (Of course, this is altogether different from arguing that we can justly attack such a life in order to accelerate its anticipated ending; McCormick never espouses such direct and deliberate intervention.) Many object to such a position. They claim that McCormick is opening the gates to all sorts of perverse applications of the quality-of-life argument. They fear what the future might bring if such norms receive theological j ustifica ti on. Very simply, McCormick is aware that the feared future is already here. The decisions are already being made-very often, daily. Human beings are deciding. McCormick's claim is that moralists should be in the middle of these cases, working to express objective norms (which are already implicitly being invoked in some cases by non-professional ethical persons), so that doctors and families need not treat every new case as unique and mysterious. McCormick is a competent contemporary practitioner of Roman Catholic casuistry. Why, then, do today's traditional Catholics get upset with Perhaps because he understands too well what casuistry is. By definition, it is about cases, and so by definition it does not look for timeless eternallyapplicable conclusions. McCormick is impatient with those who would simply leave individual decisions to personal conscience; the casuist can provide (he claims) objective norms to facilitate the process of conscience. On the other hand, he is impatient with those who reject efforts to be specific, lest today's " adaptations" become tomorrow's soft morality (or immorality). Surely he would leave tomorrow's cases to tomorrow's casuists; sufficient for today are the cases thereof. But neither will he concede the field to utilitarians, the secular casuists of America today. He finds in the Catholic tradition transcendent human values which too easily escape utilitarian calculations, but which ought to be major factors in human discerning. He truly does believe that his faith-stamping makes a difference, even to the point of developing general norms for our contemporary cases. McCormick takes a further step, addressing how these specific moral conclusions might be expressed in civil law. First he identifies his theology of law (p. 72). 460 BOOK REVIEWS Morality concerns itself with the rightness or wrongness of our conduct. Law or public policy, on the other hand, is concerned with the common good. Clearly, then, morality and public policy are both re· lated and distinct. They are related because law or public policy has an inherently moral character due to its rootage in existential human ends (goods) . The common good of all persons cannot be unrelated to what is judged to be promotive or destructive of the individual-in other words, judged to be moral or immoral. Morality and public policy are distinct because it is only when individual acts have ascertainable public consequences on the maintenance and stability of society that they are the proper concerns of society, fit subjects for public policy. Two major considerations influence the formulation of public policy. (1) The law must always be feasible. One must anticipate that, in general, it will be enforceable in the public realm. One can expect that some conclusions of the moralists are not truly apt to be obeyed if embodied into law. (2) The law might be more strict than is the moral position. Moralists can envision exceptions as truly exceptional to the general norm; the truly exceptional does not threaten the moral norm. It is difficult, however, to legislate the exceptions; once allowance is made for this or that isolated possibility, the legal door is opened to more wide-ranging deviations from the norm. Again, McCormick is to be commended for specifying his moral theology of civil law. Indeed, this is a traditional concern of the Christian moralist; McCormick helpfully articulates, from his stance as moralist, what might be good law. But McCormick does far more. He moves into the legal realm and attempts to identify what the civil law should say about fetal research, about abortion, about living wills, about in vitro fertilization. There is something very Catholic about this move, but it is also open to misunderstanding. It is surely consistent with the natural law tradition, and with the earlier-noted casuistry, to work at particularizing one's moral principles into quite specific circumstantial considerations. The more specific one becomes, however, the more likely one will need to readjust his judgments as times and cultures shift. This openness to change is not attractive to some recent Catholics, taught to expect only timeless formulations of truth by theologians. Of course, such an insistence forces one out of the realities of the political and legal arenas where the common good is debated. Not infrequently those holding this conviction insist on a moral position which could never realistically be legislated; those who adjust to the real are then accused of moral compromise. Such a charge has been directed at McCormick. However, it is he who is more traditionally Catholic, well aware that his BOOK REVIEWS 461 efforts at particularization must face public debate and probably subsequent revision; in the meantime he will have labored hard to translate into realistic civil law the moral principles which are more nearly unchanging. Those who read McCormick will wisely begin at the beginning, allowing him to spin out his general moral principles, and only subsequently move with him into the more conditioned considerations of what constitutes wise public policy and law in our day. WILLIAM J. FINAN, O.P. Univers-ity of Dallas Irving, Texas Toward A Reformulation of Natural Law. By ANTHONY BATTAGLIA. New York: The Seabury Press, 1981. Pp. ix + 150. $14.95. Anthony Battaglia has written an attractive, erudite essay which basically proposes the natural law doctrine of St. Thomas Aquinas and finds it valid for guiding us in the field of morality today. He does have his reservations about an all-out endorsement of Aquinas, but in the end he comes rather close to one. In his introduction, the author sets forth his purpose " to rescue the chief insights of the natural law tradition from this limbo to which it has recently been relegated" (p. 1). After giving three reasons for the reexamination of the natural law theory, Battaglia describes himself as· presenting " a revisionist understanding of Thomas Aquinas" (p. 4). Four chapters constitute the bulk of the book with a brief concluding chapter. The first chapter is mainly concerned with defending the very treating of natural law in an age inclined to dismiss it, and probably morality itself, as old hat and not relevant to our times. The writer succeeds in capturing the good will of the reader by his engaging presentation and arouses one's interest by hinting at the exploration to come. The second chapter is explicitly on St. Thomas and his teaching on the natural law. Actually the whole book is on Aquinas, as anyone just glancing at the footnotes could discover. Of the 160 notes almost half refer to St. Thomas's writings. However, the second chapter is the ex professo treatment of natural law as found in Thomas's Commentary on the Sentences and the Summa. Also, since the author relates the analogy of law to that found in truth, he has occasion to draw from De V eritate. All of this is done clearly and with considerable creative and original insights. Chapters three and four develop an essential claim the author makes throughout the work for establishing the validity of natural law, namely, 462 BOOK REVIEWS that "moral reason is trustworthy because it is in touch with reality" (p. 5). In these chapters Battaglia brings in other authors than St. Thomas. He wants to gain support from some recent writers for his thesis that natural law still has a role to play for guiding us in moral decisions. He successfully integrates these modern comments into the ever-present doctrine of St. Thomas. As a result he is able to achieve what he set out to do. Early in the book he had written: "Reformulating means, in its commonsense usage, to say the same thing in a different way " ( p. 29). Hence, we conclude with the natural law theory of St. Thomas Aquinas said in a different way, more congenial perhaps to our contemporaries, although a bit watered down by the author's concern for the role of historicity (cf. pp. 13 sq.) as a determining factor for change in morals, especially in the area of sexual morality. But then the human family is always looking for something like that. RAYMOND SMITH, O.P. Dominican House of Studies Washington, D.C. The Being of God: Theology and the Experience of Truth. ScHARLEMANN. New York: The Seabury Press, 1981. By ROBERT Robert Scharlemann has contributed a significant and provocative addition to the debate on the nature of truth and the way in which truth is experienced. His work will undoubtedly arouse discussion and interest among theologians for some time to come. The author's intention is not to engage in a debate about the theoretical nature of truth but rather to focus discussion on how truth is experienced. This distinction allows the author to contend that the theme will " unfold on its own terms for anyone who may care to follow it "; but, as we shall later note, the seeming neglect of the nature of truth itself gives rise to particular problems with the book itself. There are, however, clear indications of the nature and scope of the author's philosophical sources. Anglo-American analytical thought and continental phenomenological and speculative traditions play a major role in Scharlemann's thinking. There are _Kantian overtones to his use of the term ' experience '; something is given to thought itself, and one suspects that Kantian assumptions (including his use of Karl Daub's work) play a significant role in the major thesis of the book that it is as reflectivity upon ' identity in difference ' that truth is experienced. Consideration of the theoretical nature of truth cannot, however, be far BOOK REVIEWS 463 away from the author's perception of how truth is experienced, for the ground which he establishes for his argument precludes any discussion of the object of traditional metaphysics (prior to Kant). For Scharlemann, as indeed for so many proponents of current liberal theology, the death of traditional metaphysics is considered a f ait accompli, and therefore the experience of God as the Supreme Being, the Creator of this world, must be given an altogether different interpretation. Correspondence between human thought and transcendent truth must be re-interpreted. Defining religion as " the consciousness in any person for which ' God' and related words name a realm which is as real as the physical world because the images created by those words are as much given as are the data of sense perception", Scharlemann finds in Heidegger's analytic the beginning of a postmetaphysical thinking of truth. The idea of a Supreme Being is a delusion, but by recoguizing this fact, he claims, the way is made clear for a re-thinking of the experience of truth which takes into full consideration the atheistic experience. In this manner, the author argues, one's conception of truth is freed from ' enslavement' to just one among many variations of truth. It is in turning to the structure of reflection, the focus of which is the 'I' (Heidegger's Dasein-which the author claims is substantially the same as Aristotle's anima and Thomas's ens quad natum est convenire cum omni ente), that the process of understanding the experience of truth begins. Through projection and disclosure the reflective act brings meaning and being together in time. Language is the medium in which the experience of truth takes place, but language is limited by perspectivity of the self, for many points of view accompany historical reflection. A view of a tree from the north can be quite different from the view from the south. Reflection therefore demands openness to several points of view. Likewise, one's standpoint, distinguished from point of view, in which subjective value-judgments are made, and among which there is the likelihood of direct incompatibility, must be characterized by openness. In the second chapter of the book on the meaning and verification of 'God Is', the author attempts to overcome contradictions among standpoints. Interpretation makes clear what is said, while verification determines that what is said is true. The criterion for interpretation is the extent to which the truth expressed by a text is brought to light either by explanation or by putting the same truth into new words that speak it effectively. Such words can then be verified -when the hearer sees that what is said corresponds to who he really is, when the self is illumined. The words are true when they accord with the reality in which we live, with the way things are. The question then is what is the meaning of ' God Is ', given the rejection of traditional metaphysics and of the central doctrine of a Su- 464 BOOK REVIEWS preme Being. A re-working of both Anselm and Aquinas enables the author to assert that ' God Is ' has the same validity as ' light shines ' and secondly that ' God is ' can be understood as an incomplete assertion such as 'God is G '. This interpretation allows one to break from the framework of traditional metaphysics. ' God Is ' designates the agent of an action such as 'the walker walks '. One becomes conscious of God as one's true and essential self. ' God Is ' becomes the language of the unity of events which constitute the self. " To determine whether ' God Is ' we watch or play the game of language and thought that is specified by the rules of theontic thinking". ' God Is' designates what is happening everywhere, and is distinguished from the question of whether there exists something godly. A phenomenology of mind thus becomes the 'revelation ' of the being of God. One suspects that the idea of universal subjectivity underpins this thesis, but a major question remaining concerns the little or no attention which is given to the theoretical philosophical position which underpins Heidegger's concept of the self ( Dasein). This self is historical, and is therefore subject to continuous change. Existing in time, nothing can be ' given ' to Dasein's nature. A second problem follows from this consideration. How can a language about ' God Is' be sustained when one has first of all denied the objective reality of a Supreme Being and when one is compelled to recognize the historical and changing character of language itself? It would seem that when these conditions of human existence are recognized verification of ' God Is ' is rendered impossible, for reality itself is in constant flux. On these important questions, the book offers little help. Perhaps the skepticism concerning the world of traditional metaphysics which one finds in this book ought to be extended with equal readiness to the presuppositions and ground of modern thought also. To give focus to this criticism in the little space available, the author's discussion of the ' death of God ' in chapter three is carried out with no recoguition of the philosophical revolution which is associated with that term and is to be found in the work of F. Nietzsche. When subjectivity becomes the criterion of verification, opinions concerning the death and resurrection of Jesus can take diametrically opposing positions (standpoints). Scharlemann prefers to say that " the atheism of reflection is simultaneously the gospel in religion and the beginning of the experience of the truth of God as such"· In other words, atheism and faith are but two perspectives of the same event. Either Jesus is God or he is a disillusioned preacher. However, it is doubtful that the author can succeed in incorporating these two opposing standpoints, for the philosophical goal of the ' death of God ' theme in Nietzsche's work is the destruction of belief in a trans- BOOK REVIEWS 465 cendent Being and other forms of objective truth (science, reason). In which case, we do not have two perspectives of a tree, one from the north, the other from the south. Rather, one conclusion is that there is a tree, the other that there is no tree at all. The radical nature of this philosophy is neglected by Scharlemann together with the implication that all language about ' God ' is henceforth made redundant when the self is proclaimed in its supremacy, free from transcendent authority of any kind. In The Being of God, the author would like to maintain language of ' God Is ' in the sense that this reality exists in the naming of the human situation and "verifies itself by verifying man". The autonomy of the self is proclaimed clearly ("creator of a world"), and this process is the self-embodying of God. The project is ambitious, but when one moves from experience to consider the theoretical positions associated with Nietzsche's atheism and his attack on Christianity, one is compelled to ask: Is this project successful 1 Can one indeed be faithful to both the Christian experience and the experience of the atheist? In The Being of God, the word ' God' is retained because no other term can fully express what transpires in the be-ing of man. When the sovereignty of the self is proclaimed, how long before even this reduced meaning of the term ' God ' is made redundant? Several other questions arise from these reflections about the book. An autonomous self is one which transcends ethical distinctions too. The author would like to think, quite admirably, that the self is still conscious of 'goodness ', but from whence does 'goodness' originate f If the Kantian understanding of what is ' given ' to human nature is destroyed, not even the sense of ' goodness ' remains. One final consideration. It is unfortunate that the experience of truth is not discussed at some point within the context of the symbolic and the sacramental. Experience of truth is reduced to the thinking of the "mononymous subject", but is not this assertion somewhat selective of human experience itself which remains highly symbolic and thoroughly institutional? If one takes the author at his word, and we free ourselves from preferred theoretical positions, perhaps it will become possible to re-think the experience of truth in the light of the whole metaphysical tradition and not simply from what has transpired philosophically in the past two hundred years. This book helps us to clarify the issues and thereby moves the debate forward. MICHAEL QUIGLEY Rivier College, Nashua, New Hampshire. 466 BOOK REVIEWS Theological Investigations XVIII. By KARL RAHNER. New York: Crossroad, 1981. Pp. 260. $14.95. Concern for the Ohiirch (Theological Investigations XX). RAHNEIR. New York: Crossroad, 1981. Pp. 191. $12.95. By KARL Transcendence is the condition of the possibility of history; history is the mediation of transcendence. This dialectic has grounded Rahner's theological retrieval of the Christian tradition throughout the many volumes of his Theological Investigations. It is again the basic key to Volume XVII wherein he addresses current questions in Christology, Anthropology, and Ecclesiology. As we have come to expect, the characteristically Rahnerian focus is on the transcendental moment in these various issues. However, his insistence on the historical as the concrete mediation of the reality of faith is loud and clear. The genius of Rahner's dialectic of history and transcendence is illustrated in this volume in the relationship between the specificity of Christmas and transcendental freedom, between Christ's resurrection and transcendental hope, between the life and death of Jesus and the Risen Lord, between classical ontic Christology and modern ontological Christology. In his chapter on " Jesus Christ in the non-Christian Religions " Rahner imaginatively recalls the ancient Platonic theme of anamnesis ( memoria) to assert the anticipatory thrust of human consciousness toward a historical ''' recognition " of its salvation. No one finds what he or she is not " constitutionally " looking for. The "always already there" presence of the Holy Spirit in the human spirit constitutes the basis for Rahner's anthropological essays. Accordingly, the Christian message "means awakening and interpreting the innermost thing in man." The same dialectic is in evidence in Rahner's essay on the human body, the " self-consummation of the spirit in space and time." The Incarnation of the Logos is the necessary historical mediation of grace and glory in accord with the same taxonomy. Indeed, the enfleshment of the Word is "the only reason" that we have anything to do with the Trinity. The key to the essay on mysticism remains the same-now rendered: mysticism is the condition of the possibility of prophecy; prophecy is the mediation of mysticism. The prevenience of the grace of the Spirit constitutes all as mystics in principle. The so-called extraordinary mystics are those whose psychology is pervaded by the elevation of grace, those in whom the experience of grace takes " deeper root existentially." In his essay on the " liberty of the sick " Rahner reflects further on his theology of death as the active self-consummation from within as transcendental freedom achieves itself in concrete, total self-surrender. In his discussion BOOK REVIEWS 467 0£ the " intermediate state" Rabner completes his thesis by placing the " moment " 0£ resurrection in coincidence with, the " moment " 0£ death as self-consummation. Self-critical appropriation 0£ the graced fullness 0£ the self requires criticism in the Church. Total rapport between the inner exigencies of lived faith and the outer structures of the Church constitutes the ideal towards which criticism (direct and indirect) in the Church moves. Rahner's criticism of Mysterium Ecclesiae (the 1973 Declaration 0£ the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith) again illustrates another form of his dialectic-in this instance the mutually conditioning relationship between the official teaching of the Church and the ecclesial life of the whole People of God. Rahner clearly indicts the tendencies of the " Roman authorities " to invoke their merely formal authority as the legitimation of doctrine. As he continues his discussion of authority in relation to ministry in the Church, Rahner again indicts "formalism" in his contention that only the content of the actually envisioned ministry legitimizes its sacramental transmission. In relation to the critical issues of authority and power in secular societies today Rahner detects a kairos for the institutional Church-the possibility of setting a social example of what might be called "institutionalized freedom." " See how those Christians love one another " can be translated into " See how they really live together, in liberty and without coercion." In relation to " the one Church and the many Churches " Rahner envisions a communio of the Churches around the " basic Christian substance of faith "-when the "the immobility of the Churches' leaders" is overcome. Again, the official teaching authority in the Church enjoys normative power only when (like a "snapshot") it is the successful reflection of actual lived faith in the Church. This actual faith is the existential correlate of the objective " hierarchy 0£ truths," endorsed officially by Vatican II; this de facto faith is no obstacle to institutional unity. Indeed, contemporary ecumenical initiatives have constituted a "third Church" which, despite its sectarian dangers, can serve as a salutary stimulus toward future unity. Rabner completes his ecclesiological meditations with a reminder that religion (or church) is not the only (or necessarily the better) mediation of true "piety,'' which finds its "material" everywhere in space and in time. Finally, Rahner offers some clarifications aboµt his own work. The limitations engendered by the contemporary "'knowledge explosion" lead to what Rahner calls the need for a haute vulgarisation in the field of theology where " the difference between what is said and what is meant is greater than ever before." The twentieth and last volume of the Theological Investigations series is appropriately titled " Concern for the Church." As he addresses vari- 468 BOOK REVIEWS ous issues in ecclesiology Rahner writes with "holy impatience" with the present state of the institutional Church in light of a vision of hope for the Church of the future. In his essay on " courage for an ecclesial Christianity " Rahner correlates the perennial "unchanging essence" of the Church-human immediacy to God in the Spirit-with the historical, changing structures of the Church-which exists to mediate that immediacy. As the historically visible victory of grace the Church must constantly seek to become what she is. As a theologian Rahner is concerned particularly with the doctrinal dimension of ecclesial visibility, and here he boldly criticizes the narrowminded one-sidedness of many of the procedures of the Roman magisterium. In speaking to the " situation of faith today" Rahner refers to the Church as a "burden " because its authoritarian modus operandi clouds the distinction between the "fundamental dogmas " and secondary issues. He decries magisterial insensitivity to the existential rapport between these "fundamental dogmas" (the fides quae) and the inner sense of faith in the People of God (the fides qua). Indeed, as Rahner always insists, these " fundamental dogmas " become existentially credible only as they bring people home to their true depths. Rahner addresses the issue of the ordination of women through a critical reflection on the 1976 Roman declaration. His conclusion is: the discussion must continue. The primary service of the Church to the freedom of the individual is the " gospel of Christian realism." This gospel service demands extensive changes in church structures to promote freedom within and to witness to freedom without. The political task of the Church today flows from historically conscious faith-it is " institutional redemption." In his theological interpretation of Vatican II Rahner sees the beginning of Christianity as world-Church. He gives us his own rendition of the "three ages" in church history: 1) the short period of Judaeo-Christianity; 2) the period of Hellenistic-European Christianity; 3) the period now beginning of the truly world-Church. A new "Pauline boldness " is necessary and in principle it is affirmed at Vatican II; but, officially, massive structural reform remains a " possibility in principle." Rahner refers to the period from the restoration following the French Revolution up to Vatican II as the " Pian epoch " in Church history. Everything was immutably constituted "from above." Now comes the realization that the Church is "changeable in all its structures to a far greater extent than people thought." All these structures are relative and historically conditioned; the immutable essence of the Church remains the Spirit of Christ as the ground of faith, hope and love. The ever hopeful Rahner relates a dream about a future Pope who ful- BOOK REVIEWS 469 fills the Petrine function of uniting Christians without uniformity-a bold critique of the status quo in the poetic mode of anticipatory memory. The spirituality of the Church of the future will focus on essentials; it will be a communal experience of the Spirit of God that patiently bears the inadequacies of the Church. As the Church becomes world-Church it will become a more tangible manifestation of the eschatological unity of the human race. Ecclesial service to this urgent task of achieving greater unity among peoples will require the unification of the Christian Churches. However, the Church may never understand itself merely in function of a better future for humanity. While love of God and love of neighbor are one, Christianity demands a love of God in and for Himself-a "blessed uselessness" of love for God beyond human interests. In the end Rabner remains the mystic living from and for the Mystery of God through Christ in the Spirit {the" substance of faith"). In everything he writes he is the mystagogue-leading us further into the Incomprehensible Ineffability. MIOHAEL J. SCANLON, O.S •.A Washington Theologica,l Union Washington, D.C. BOOKS RECEIVED Bellarmin: Les Attributions (Categories) by Yvan Pelletier, Ph.D. Collection Noesis. Pp. 251; $20.00. Paulin de Milan et La" Vita Ambrosii" by Emilien Lamirande. Theologie Recherches 30. Pp. 204; $15.00. Catholic League: Constitutional Rights rP: Religious Prejudice: Catholic Education as the Battleground by Peter M. J. Stravinskas. Pp. 221; $14.95. Crossroad: In Memory of Her: A Feminist Theological Reconstruction of Christian Origins by Elisabeth Schussler Fiorenza. Pp. 351; $19.50. 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