Contingency and Fortune in Aquinas’s Ethics by John Bowlin (review)

492 BOOK REVIEWS questions about education seem to have been deeded over to the practical interests of social-policy makers, while the theoretical research has been left to the social scientists. Yet the important work of education is as universal as the languages we speak and the cultures that inform our actions and desires. Education is a topic all too ripe for philosophical reflection. Mclnerny's book is especially welcome for its move in this direction. University ofDallas Irving, Texas WILLIAM A. FRANK Contingency and Fortune in Aquinas's Ethics. By JOHN BOWLIN. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Pp. 234. $59.95 (cloth). ISBN 0-52162019 -8. This book is set to join several other recent books in English-Jean Porter's The Recovery OfVirtue: The Relevance ofAquinas for Christian Ethics, Daniel Mark Nelson's The Priority of Prudence: Virtue and Natural Law in Thomas Aquinas and the Implications for Modern Ethics, Romanus Cessario's The Moral Virtues and Theological Ethics, Daniel Westberg's Right Practical Reason: Aristotle, Action, and Prudence in Aquinas, Pamela Hall's Narrative and the Natural Law: An Interpretation of Thomistic Ethics-that have become mainstays in reading and construing the ethical thought of St. Thomas in our contemporary setting. That is, the book is in large measure an effort in Thomistic interpretation, but one that is as much influenced by our contemporary collaborative effort to make Thomas's ethics applicable to modern circumstances as it is influenced by received canons of interpretation of medieval texts. In this case it is fair to say that the work's interpretive trajectory has been set primarily by contemporary concernsin the philosophical community and secondarily by the direction Thomas himself placed upon his ethical teaching. Bowlin is aware of this issue, and admits early on that the Thomas he considers sometimes emerges "less as a historical figure and more as a contemporary conversation partner" (18). There is nothing in principle wrong with that, of course; Bowlin is to be thanked for being honest with his reader when he notes that his desire to see whether Thomas has anything to say to us today (19) of necessity requires him to be "harmlessly anachronistic" in reading Thomas's moral theology in a philosophical way, consumed as it is in contemporaryethics by the problems left behind after Hume, and only partially BOOK REVIEWS 493 corrected by Anscombe. The question that remains after the book is whether, despite the interestingand useful philosophical fruit obtainedfrom aharmlessly anachronistic reading, the result is what Thomas would have recognized as his own. What led Bowlin to this book was the fact that most contemporary writers who have written about Thomas's ethics have almost universally centered their considerations upon the role of natural law in his teaching, thus giving rise to disputes about the nature, content, and certitude of the first principles of natural law and the precepts that are generated from them. As Bowlin sees it, both friend and foe ofThomas's teaching have started in the wrong place, and have concentrated "on a side show" of his ethical teaching (3). Bowlin instead notices that the overwhelming mass of moral material in the Secunda Pars of Thomas's Summa Theologiae concerns passions and virtues and vices. More than that, he sees that the concrete, various goods with which the passions and virtues are concerned are, in the quasi-Heraclitean world in which we dwell, difficult to know with certitude in the particular, and difficult to produce even when they are known with certitude. In other words, since Thomas's ethics is about our lived life, as distinct from the life we would live, if possible, we would do well to note how much the notion of difficulty enters into any realistic consideration of the moral life and into the ethics that is meant to describe and ultimately to inform that life. It is true that ethics is about obtaining "the good," but in reality ethics is about obtaining "the difficult good." Thus chapter 1 of the book is devoted to the intimate link between virtue and difficulty, such that, not surprisingly, the cardinal virtue that emerges for special consideration is the virtue of courage, which precisely...