Theology and the Scientific Imagination from the Middle Ages to the Seventeenth Century (review)

BOOK REVIEWS 305 distinguish between moral and meritorious goodness. Scotus does. He refits for service in moral philosophy what originated as a theological doctrine. And, with that typically scholastic combination of deference and distortion, the vast difference between his own views and Anselm's passes almost without remark. The importance of the will is evident in the texts on ethical issues. Unlike Aquinas, who posited temperance and courage in the sense appetite, Scotus attributes all the moral virtues to the will. Since angels as well as human beings have wills, one might object that angels must be able to acquire moral virtues. Kantians will not be entirely disappointed by Scotus' reply. Virtues are generated from correct choices by the will. If an angel's intellect shows it what choices should be made by one subject to passions, then even though the angel itself does not have those passions, it will still be able to choose in accordance with the dictates of its intellect. If it does choose accordingly, moral virtue will be generated in the angel's will. Did Scotus himself believe that angels can acquire moral virtues? He does provide an elaborate argument in support of that position. But he then observes that some may find the position displeasing, and so explains how one might argue against it. Having answered his own answer to an objection, Scotus moves on--leaving the reader to wonder which position, if either, he accepted. The selections on ethics include not only the expected (virtues, God's power, moral goodness, and natural law) but also the unexpected (marriage, perjury, enslavement, and the obligation to keep secrets). If what is wanted is a comprehensive system of ethics, with every thread woven into the fabric of a theory and none left dangling, one is likely to find Scotus a disappointment. The Subtle Doctor is of a more analytical bent, more interested in exploring the issues and offering fresh insights than in ethical system-building. Had he lived to a ripe old age, perhaps he would have produced some vast, tightly woven theory. It is impossible to say. One can say, however, that what we have is both consistent and consistently thought provoking. BONNIE KENT The Catholic University ofAmerica Amos Funkenstein. Theology and the Scientific Imagination from the Middle Ages to the Seventeenth Century. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986. Pp. xii + 4~1. $47.5~9 It is Funkenstein's thesis that "to many seventeenth-century thinkers, theology and science merged into one idiom, part of a veritable secular theology such as never existed before or after" (ix); among the thinkers he has in mind are Galileo, Descartes, Leibniz, Newton, Hobbes, and Vico (3)" The bulk of Funkenstein's book is devoted to "shed[ding] some light on the unique texture of this common idiom by comparing it to past theological interests or modes of reasoning" (346). As to the content of this secular theology, Funkenstein claims that the thinkers mentioned above "dealt with most classical theological issues---God, the Trinity, spirits, demons, salvation, the Eucharist" (3). If this means only that each of the above thinkers on occasion dealt with at least one of 306 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 27:2 APRIL 198 9 these issues, the claim can pass for true, but it must be emphasized that with the exception of Leibniz, who planned a large-scale, ecumenically oriented treatise demonstrating the main Catholic dogmas (3, 1~ none of the other thinkers was ever engaged in anything like the traditional systematic theological enterprise. (Descartes, of course, did find himself discussing transubstantiation in his replies to the fourth set of objections to his Meditations and he did encourage several Jesuits to apply his principles to theology, while Newton was certainly obsessed with refuting the authenticity of the Trinity.) In fact, the theological issues whose history Funkenstein traces in detail from the Middle Ages through the seventeenth century in his three central chapters (~-4) center about questions of divine omnipresence, omnipotence, and providence, and the analytical tools he uses to detect significant patterns in this history are four so-called ideals, which together are supposed to characterize the unique seventeenth-century idiom but which may...