The Transformation of Natural Philosophy: The Case of Philip Melanchthon (review)

~ooK REVIEWS 463 treated in isolation as a function of its discussion in Book 11 of the Confessions, appears closely connected with Augustine's debate with the Academic skeptics. Similarly, the readily controverted topic of gender and sexuality appears coherently integrated with Rist's most original chapter, his discussion of Augustine's theories of "soul." Meanwhile , Augustine on marriage is relocated--in a way that once would have seemed conventional but now startles the reader--to Rist's discussion of Augustine's views of civil society and its bases. In the treatment of soul, Rist makes his most important substantive contributions. He distinguishes phases in Augustine's career and in particular his growing recognition of the soul's love of body and the positive valuation thus set on body, then connects this with a growing role in Augustine's thought after the year 4oo for a doctrine of the resurrection of the body. Here he offers the very useful observation, unfortunately semi-concealed in an appendix, that Augustine's famous inability to decide among four theories of the origin of soul (souls come to bodies by individual creation, by generation from parents, by falling from a preexistent perfection, and by divine sending of pre-existent souls to govern bodies) lay not in his own indecisiveness so much as in the inadequacy of the conceptual structure that generated the four alternatives. Rist here sees what Augustine himself never quite saw or said, and in so doing clarifies the issues remarkably. The volume ends with a chapter called "Augustinus Redivivus" in which Rist sets out to explore the thought-experiment of what Augustine would say if he returned to life today to review his own opinions. Though prefaced with some good points (that Augustine could not imagine a world in which Christianity would be comfortable, and that part of Augustine's problematic reputation arises from his being taken as more authoritative than he ever imagined he could be), this chapter is mainly an exposition, behind a too-thin veil, of what Rist himself would say, in an Augustinian spirit, and as such is out of tune with the rest of the work. Better this chapter had been more candid, and published elsewhere. How best then to introduce Augustine to the contemporary reader? In a world in which most readers approach him through the Confessions and Brown's biography, there is a clear place for a study of this sort. Remarkably, for all the talent devoted to the effort, no single volume has quite succeeded in establishing itself, and this one is not likely to do so either. That said, it is serious, readable, invariably accurate, with a real, if sometimes self-effacing, originality. No student will go seriously, or even trivially , wrong if this is the introduction of choice, and that is no mean achievement. JAMES J. O'DONNELL University of Pennsylvania Sachiko Kusukawa. The Transformation of Natural Philosophy: The Case of Philip Melanchthon . New York: Cambridge University Press, t995. Pp. xv + ~46. Cloth, $59-95This book is a focused study with a wide agenda. Its substance is a discussion of Melanchthon's conception of learning in general, and natural philosophy in particular, 464 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 35:3 JULY 1997 but it is not a simple synoptic account of those views. Instead, it undertakes to make sense of Melanchthon's natural philosophy as the product of a situated and productive engagement with Lutheran theology in the crucible of the Protestant Reformation, the University of Wittenberg. Taking her lead from recent work by Andrew Cunningham, Kusukawa wishes to stress that "natural philosophy" in this period is not appropriately to be understood as an early form of modern "science." lnstead, it was a coherent enterprise of its own that was centrally directed towards the goal of understanding the natural world taken as God's Creation. Its theological valences were therefore essential rather than peripheral, and any characterization of the sixteenth-century situation in terms of some relationship between "science and religion" would necessarily radically misrepresent the endeavor. From this starting point, Kusukawa pursues her endeavor of contextualization. The story focuses very tightly on Melanchthon himself and his academic endeavors . The...