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BOOK REVIEWS 679 What Boguslawski offers here then is an important, if a not a final, word on the question of Aquinas's treatment of the Jews. This book offers a hopeful direction in contemporary work on the Jews within Christian theology. To those engaged in this work, as well as to those whose primary interest is in Aquinas or in readings of Romans 9-11, it give stimulus for further thought. H. T. COOLMAN Providence College Providence, Rhode Island The Disfigured Face: Traditional Natural Law and Its Encounter with Modernity. By LUIS CORTEST. New York: Fordham University Press, 2008. Pp. xvii + 136. $55.00 (cloth). ISBN 978-0-8232-2853-9. In The Disfigured Face, Luis Cortest joins other Thomists who have in recent decades tried to liberate the natural-law doctrine of St. Thomas Aquinas from its modern proponents. Cortest provides a broad historical narrative of what he argues is the modern disfigurement of Aquinas's moral theory. While other studies have covered this ground, Cortest's narrative is unique by emphasizing the importance of the sixteenth-century debates on natural servitude and the imago Dei, which surrounded the Spanish conquest of the New World, and the impact these debates had on modernity. The central argument of The Disfigured Face is that St. Thomas's understanding of morality and the natural law is first and foremost an ontological one. His understanding of justice is contingent on human nature and being itself. Cortest argues that the ontological foundation of Aquinas's thought was gradually abandoned in the legal debates of the sixteenth century and that this contributed to the modern notion of individual autonomy as a basis of positive human rights. Cortest lists three objectives for the book. First, he describes the nature of traditional natural-law doctrine as it was developed by Aquinas and later "reformulated " by sixteenth-century Spanish Thomists. Then, he explores the interaction of traditional natural law with modernity. Finally, he argues that the traditional natural-law theory of Aquinas has survived in modern times through the endorsement of the Roman Catholic Church and its prominence in papal encyclicals throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The traditional natural-law doctrine, he says, is one of the primary tools the Church uses to challenge the "overpowering influence of secular culture" (xvii). The first chapter of the book highlights the central importance of ontology in Aquinas's moral theory by contrasting his view with those of William of Ockham, the Dominicans of Salamanca, and, finally, Francisco Suarez. Cortest 680 BOOK REVIEWS explains that existence is the fundamental category in Aquinas's philosophical system. Our understanding of truth, of nature, and, by extension, of ethics and morality, is dependent on our perception of existence (4-5). Yet, since all existence is from God, "In a very profound sense, philosophy, and especially ontology, is a consideration of a divinely created reality for Aquinas" (12). Cortest offers the standard Thomist critique ofWilliam of Ockham's rejection of this view. Principally, with his rejection of the distinction between existence and essence, Ockham and his students, favored a "science of the particular" instead of the universal metaphysics of Aristotle and Aquinas (5). In line with this, Ockham's morality was voluntarist, emphasizing the primacy of the divine will in moral matters. A human act is right and just because it obeys divine command, not because it is congruent with human nature and existence. The Jesuit Francisco Suarez is presented as a principal antagonist to Aquinas's ontological morality. As Cortest reads him, Suarez subordinated existence to essence and thus rejected Aquinas's carefully constructed system, which emphasized the unity of all being (9-11). When existence is excluded from ontological speculation, Cortest writes, "On the one hand ... we begin to lose contact with the physical world; our observations become purely conceptual or formal. On the other hand, if we are not concerned primarily with existence, the truth of propositions is lost in endless speculation about the possible and that which is not self-contradictory" (3-4). Nevertheless, Cortest continues, there was a revival of Thomism beginning in the late fourteenth century with John Capreolus, which would culminate in the Spanish Thomism of...

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