Divine Likeness: Toward a Trinitarian Anthropology of the Family by Marc Cardinal Ouellet (review)

BOOK REVIEWS 653 during its operation, especially what is the direct recipient of the motion or activity" (148). For example, the "matter about which" for a carpenter is certain types of wood; for a clergyman, sacred things; for fortitude, dangers of death, etc. (149). "Matter about which" specifies when it is taken in the sense of the "end" (166). The other sense of "matter" that Thomas uses at times as an equivalent of "object" is "due I undue matter" (151). For example, the due matter of buying or selling is one's own thing, whereas undue matter is, for example, a spiritual thing; the due matter of intercourse is one's own wife as opposed to another's wife, etc. (152). Although Pilsner discusses key issues of Thomistic casuistry, he avoids engaging himself in applied ethics. Important topics for such an enterprise, such as the notion of unintended side-effects and the doctrine of the double effect, are not discussed in his study. He also steers clear from recent debates regarding the moral object. Yet by offering a detailed and insightful study of the specification of human actions, Pilsner provides not only a very useful resource for the advancement of current debates, but also a book that is well suited to nonspecialists who are interested in Thomas's ethics. The Catholic University ofAmerica Washington, D.C. TOBIAS HOFFMANN Divine Likeness: Toward a Trinitarian Anthropology of the Family. By MARC CARDINAL OUELLET. Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 2006. Pp. 242. $26.00 {paper). ISBN 0-8028-2833-7. Anthropology ("what it means to be human") is becoming the first area of Christian concern. It has always been true that 'growth in Christ" requires growth in humanity, of which Christ, perfectus homo, is the exemplar. In our contemporary world not only personal spiritual growth but the whole work of evangelization requires a new understanding of "what it means to be human." That brings us to Christ and indeed, through him, back "to the beginning" {the anthropological point of reference to which Pope John Paul II gave such importance). If, as we read in Genesis, man is made in the "divine likeness" ("ad imaginem Dei" [Gen 1:27]), the more his life develops in a truly human way the more "visible" or identifiable God becomes through that life; conversely, the less human that life, the less it leads him (and others) to God. Ifthe dehumanization of modern life is a powerful obstacle to evangelization, it follows that evangelization depends on the rehumanization of the lives of the evangelizers. Only if contemporary man, in some way inevitably aware of his tottering humanity, meets men and women who are strongly human precisely because they are Christian, can he be led by them to the God whom they truly (however imperfectly) image. 654 BOOK REVIEWS The contemporary and growing loss of awareness of the nature and dignity of human realities is nowhere more evident than in the devaluation of marriage and the family. Forty years of conciliar and postconciliar magisterium have repeatedly issued the challenge posed by all of this, a challenge summed up in Familiaris Consortia (para. 17): "Family, become what you are." The present book by Marc Cardinal Ouellet seeks to deepen the theoretical-theological basis to this pastoral challenge, while centering its analysis (as the subtitle implies) on "a Trinitarian anthropology." "Let us make man in our image, after our likeness" (Gen 1:26); "So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them" (Gen 1:27). These verses are the basis for the JudaeoChristian belief that "man" (male-female), alone in visible creation, uniquely "images" God, and that our first understanding of God should arise from the contemplation of man. Again, only when rooted in this concept of man's being an imago Dei can natural anthropology establish man's nature and dignity as a thinking-willing being. In the words of Genesis 1:26 ("ad imaginem ... nostram") Christian thought has also discerned an underlying Trinitarian reference. From this, one might think, does it not follow that "man" is also an "image of the Trinity"? Theology however has not made much...