Cultural Thematics: The Formation of the Faustian Ethos (review)

352 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY particularly, special attention may be paid to his theory of Christian origins in the religiocentric perspective. For he claims that to the Church Fathers the orthodox concept of the Trinity was "an ideal combination of what is best in Jewish monotheism and of what is best in pagan polytheism.''3 Since the Trinity is asserted here to be the source of the Kalam theory of attributes, and since Wolfson's method is one of positing hypotheses to be tested, may we not hypothesize that the controversy over attributes is really a controversy over the relative religious values of monotheism and polytheism? If the religious motive is primary, then each of these theories may be seen as the doctrinal expression of a particular religious attitude toward life. The Attributists, rooted in the primordial religious experience of Islam, are not content with an abstract concept of God. Their God is primarily a trustworthy refuge who can protect the believer from evil and suffering because he alone is creator and ruler of the universe. Thus he must have real power, real wisdom, real mercy and compassion. The Mu'tazilites, on the other hand, are of a more philosophical bent and see God as the opposite of a creation that is compound and thus unstable, transitory, and untrustworthy. God therefore must be pure stasis, unity, and absolute Being. Such a God, like the Philonic God, is approached more through abstract thought and meditation than through the concrete prayer and ritual of traditional Islam. Such a hypothesis seems to deserve testing against the available data. It is clear, however, that such a process of testing could not even begin without the groundwork laid by Professor Wolfson in The Philosophy of the Kalam. He has analyzed the doctrines and their historical backgrounds much more fully than anyone before. Whether or not his particular conclusionsare accepted by other scholars, his work provides a basis on which the study of Kalam by Western scholars, which is still in its beginnings, may proceed. This study provides a major link in the chain Wolfson has constructed from Philo to Spinoza and must be considered seriously by all students of the history of Western philosophy. IRA CHERNUS University of Colorado Cultural Thematics: The Formation of the Faustian Ethos. By T. K. Seung. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1976. Pp. xviii + 283. $16.50) T. K. Seung's project in Cultural Thematics is nothing less than to describe the transformation of the medieval sensibility into the modern sensibility. "Transformation" and "sensibility" are Seung's words, which he uses, I think, advisedly. The first indicates that the modern age evolved out of the middle ages. Seung rejects the view that the modern age came with revolutionary speed or that it, like Melchizedek, lacks ancestry. Rather, the medieval sensibilitygave birth to the modern one and in the process went through a number of intermediate and identifiable stages. The second word, "sensibility," is also consciously chosen, in preference to "mind" or "Weltanschauung," which are overly intellectualistic interpretations of human orientation to the world. Man's intellect is rooted in sensation; what man knows is conditioned by his attitudes and affective postures. Seung characterizes medieval man as passive and submissive to God's sovereignty and contrasts him with modern man who is active and asserts his own sovereignty. While submissionand sovereignty are the respective contents of the medieval and modern sensibilities, analogy and literalness are their respective modes of expression. Medieval man spoke allegorically because he has as his object of discourse a transcendent God, whom the ordinary meaning of words did not fit easily, if at all; thus he had to try to extend the ordinary meanings of words in allegory. Modern man in contrast can and does mean his words literally because he applies his words to their natural domain, the sensible world. The Philosophy of the Church Fathers (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UniversityPress, 1970), 1:362. BOOK REVIEWS 353 Seung traces the career of human sensibility from medieval to modern through two triads: a philosophical one consisting of Bonaventure, Aquinas, and Duns Scotus and a literary one consisting of Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio. Bonaventure and Dante typify the pure medieval...