International Journal for Philosophy of Religion 56: 53–54, 2004. © 2004 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.

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Book review

Brian Shanley. O.P., The Thomist Tradition (Volume 2 of Handbook of Contemporary Philosophy of Religion). Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers B.V. 2002. xiv + 239 pages. $90.00. The Thomist Tradition is volume two in a series edited by Eugene Thomas Long, III, under the general title, Handbook of Contemporary Philosophy of Religion. The focus of this volume – indeed the focus of the series – is not so much religion as it is evidence for affirming the existence of God and the possibility of saying something about Him, an endeavor that used to be called natural theology or philosophy of God. Leibniz called it “theodicy,” but that designation never caught on. Subsequent volumes in Long’s series will explore the subject from perspectives that the editor calls “analytic,” “comparative,” and “process philosophy of religion.” Brian Shanley, a Dominican like Thomas himself, was well chosen to address the Thomistic tradition. Although Thomas was never without disciples in any generation subsequent to his death in 1274/1275, it was Leo XIII’s endorsement of a fledgling 19th-century movement that led to the socalled Thomistic revival. Leo’s motive was clearly the encouragement of a movement which he thought could challenge the materialistic and positivistic philosophies spawned by the Enlightenment, Anglo-French and German. Leo was not alone in his assessment of the threat posed to Christianity by the then reigning philosophies. On this side of the Atlantic, the Journal of Speculative Philosophy was founded in 1867, among other reasons, as William Torrey Harris explained in its first issue, to provide a philosophy of religion much needed when traditional religious teaching and ecclesiastical authority were losing their influence. Leo was convinced that philosophy could only be fought by philosophy and recommended, not Kant or Hegel as many were inclined to do in an effort to avoid a purely fideistic Christianity, but the philosophy of Aquinas. Leo’s encyclical Aternae Patris (1879) fostered a widespread study of St. Thomas and influenced the work of notable scholars such as Etienne Gilson, Jacques Maritain, Maurice Blondel, Louis B. Geiger, Joseph Maréchal, Cornelio Fabro, Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange, Bernard Lonergan, Anthony Kenny, and countless others from all parts of the Western world. The

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Thomistic movement that emerged was anything but uniform as philosophers addressed the issues of the day thrown up by their distinctive intellectual milieus. Shanley captures much of this from the perspective of a thirdgeneration initiate, showing at once the vitality and the intricacies of a one-hundred-and-twenty-five year-old movement. Shanley identifies and explores at length several strains which he calls Early French Dominican, Transcendental Thomism, Thomism after Vatican II, and Analytic Thomism. In subsequent chapters, Shanley discusses from various Thomistic standpoints the relation of faith to reason, religious language, religion and science, evil and suffering, morality, nature and human destiny, and concepts of the “Absolute.” Implicit is a distinction between natural and revealed theology, that is, Thomism as a philosophy and Thomism in the service of Revelation, often called “sacred theology.” It is clear that Thomism of any variety is not a philosophical system in the usual sense of the word. For the most part, those who call themselves Thomists could just as readily be called Aristotelians, even those who recognize the Platonic heritage of Thomism. In their quest for a general account of being, Thomists claim to start with experience, experience consonant with a common-sense report of reality. Some are willing to accept as a starting point “the intuition of being”; others find the object of metaphysics to be a conclusion reached by the philosophy of nature, namely, material being is not the whole of reality. Still others begin with the epistemological question bequeathed by Kant. There are, among other profiles, insightful treatments of Jacques Maritain, Alasdair MacIntyre, John Finnis, and Karl Rahner. The final chapter of the book leaves the domain of natural theology or philosophy of God to reflect on religious pluralism from the vantage point of Christianity. How is one to handle the claim that there is no salvation apart from Christ and yet affirm that God wants all people to be saved, a problem that at once brings out the strength and limitations of Rahner’s transcendental Thomistic theology. Without trying to predict its future, Shanley sees Thomism as an openended philosophical movement, forever drawing upon the insights of the master but developing them within the context of contemporary philosophical efforts. Perennial in its search for wisdom, it is equally open to knowledge gained from science and Revelation. Jude P. Dougherty The Catholic University of America