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642 BOOK REVIEWS succeeds in deconstructing theodicy. What Job and we need from the Creator God is not an explanation, but rather a renewed dialogical relationship. BRIAN}. SHANLEY, 0.P. Providence College Providence, Rhode Island Reclaiming Moral Agency: The Moral Philosophy ofAlbert the Great. By STANLEY B. CUNNINGHAM. Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 2008. Pp. 294. $79.95 (cloth). ISBN: 978-0-8132-1540-2. In Reclaiming Moral Agency: The Moral Philosophy of Albert the Great, Stanley B. Cunningham sets himself the challenge of mapping Albert the Great's contribution to moral philosophy, which he sees as a largely uncharted region of Albert's otherwise well-sounded "humanism." It is uncharted, Cunningham argues, because scholars have for the most part denied it even existed, preferring to see Albert as the polymath with wide-ranging scientific interests famously sparked by the recovery of the full Aristotelian corpus, rather than as the architect of an integrated theological or philosophical system of his own. But in Cunningham's view Albert did elaborate a coherent moral theory, and, what is more, he-and not his student Thomas Aquinas-was the first medieval thinker to do so, because he was the first medieval truly to accept the premise that man has a natural capacity for moral goodness, achievable without the aid of supernatural grace. This led Albert to explore the notion of natural law, to ask such questions as how virtue is naturally acquired and what the means of attaining natural happiness are and, in the end, to produce, yes, a systematic moral philosophy. Cunningham thus hopes to achieve two things with his book: first, to focus deserved attention on Albert's undeservedly neglected moral theory, especially as revealed in his treatise De bona and his commentary on the ten books of the Nicomachean Ethics, and, second, in so doing to reclaim for Albert some of the spotlight that scholars have always granted instead to his more famous student. Cunningham's study is divided into five parts. The first situates Albert's contribution in relation to developments in thirteenth-century moral philosophy, and also in relation to modern virtue theory. The second teases out Albert's understanding of the domain of "moral science" and the procedures for investigating it. With the third Cunningham's discussion turns to the content ofAlbert's thought, outlining the Swabian's understanding ofthe nature and causes ofvirtue in human behavior. The fourth part treats Albert's conception of natural law and morality's relationship to it. The fifth examines what Cunning-ham terms "virtue's rewards"-friendship, happiness, and our final end. Throughout, Albert's treatise De bona forms the main focus of Cunningham's attention. BOOK REVIEWS 643 That emphasis on De bona is worth considering, for it witnesses to an important aspect of the author's argument. Unlike Albert's commentary on the first ten books of the Ethica Nicomachea, in which he was forced to pursue topics in the order and from the angles that Aristotle's text dictates, in De bona Albert was free to "work out his own principles of order" (72). This, Cunningham suggests, makes De bona the surer indicator of Albert's independent conceptualization of moral theory and of his own ideas, and thus the more significant text within the Albertine corpus. While this is a fairly commonplace observation in the scholarship, Cunningham pushes the argument for the significance of De bona further by showing the extent to which it marks a departure from the approach to man's moral behavior taken by earlier Scholastic authors, who had been similarly constrained by the traditional context within which such questions were raised. Before Albert, man's capacity for virtuous behavior had been treated as a pendant to discussions of grace, because virtue was seen to be possible only with supernatural assistance, not as something attainable by human efforts alone. And this textual reality, this organization of material, Cunningham insists, is one very important reason why most authors, including Peter Lombard, Abelard, and Philip the Chancellor, tended to deemphasize , if not to negate, the importance of naturally acquired virtue in their moral doctrine: the structure of their texts conditioned their responses...

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