“Guiados por el Espiritu”: El Espiritu Santo y el conocimiento moral en Tomás de Aquino by José Noriega (review)

170 BOOK REVIEWS way we were created. Any being who truly had no orientation towards truth could not be described as human. The same could be said of the other orientations as well. Nevertheless, it is important to note that these inclinations, which can be spelled out as moral precepts, are very general. They do not, of themselves, yield sufficient information or insight to make long experience, disciplined reflection, or the moral virtue of prudence superfluous for the moral agent. More importantly for our purposes, however, is the fact that these general inclinations are open-ended. They imply openness to analogical and graced modes of realization. The inclination to live in society is on one level an openness to communal deliberation. It is on another level an openness to live in God's own society in charity. While Christian revelation offers a critique of a purely horizontal ethics, it also affirms and deepens all that is authentically human. Christian morality may demand liberating renunciations that feel for the moment like impositions from without. But that is only for the moment. The promise of the gospel is that the same God who redeemed us is the one who created us for himself. God promises that nothing authentically human is alien to the gospel. Father Pinckaers has done the whole Church a great favor in reminding us that the tensions between the pursuit of moral goodness and the pursuit of happiness are only apparent and temporary. The heart of the gospel is the promise of beatitude. The New Law already is at work in our hearts, gradually suffusing our lives with the only necessary and sufficient condition for true happiness, which is sanctity. Dominican House ofStudies Washington, D.C. JOHN CORBETT, 0.P. "Guiados por el Espiritu": El Espiritu Santoy el conocimiento moral en Tomas de Aquino. By JOSE NORIEGA. Roma: Pontificia Universita Lateranense, 2000. Pp. 609. L30,000. This book is the author's doctoral dissertation from the Pontifical Institute for Studies on Marriage and the Family at the Lateran University in Rome, directed by Professor Livio Melina. It is a study well worth taking note of for its content, its method, and the conclusions the author draws concerning the teaching of St. Thomas. The author, Jose Noriega Bastos, is a priest of the Disciples of the Hearts of Jesus and Mary, currently a professor of Ethics on the Faculty of Theology of San Damaso at Madrid. The nucleus of the study is the text of Romans 8:14: BOOK REVIEWS 171 "Qui Spiritu Dei aguntur." Noriega attempts to arrive at an adequate understanding of how St. Thomas understood the role of the Holy Spirit in the dynamic of moral knowledge, that is, how the Spirit cooperates with free human activity, so that man is able to do the good. This is one of the central questions of Christian morality, which in the post-conciliar era seeks to bridge the chasm between moral theology, dogmatic theology, and spirituality. Interest in these themes has led many specialists to examine the thought of St. Thomas, and with surprising results. Thomas was a pioneer in orienting moral theory from the point of view of the subject, in describing the exercise of freedom, and in illustrating the intrinsic presence of the end throughout the course of human action. He uses the exitus-reditus scheme to penetrate the dynamism that he calls the "motus rationalis creaturae in Deum." The studies of Pinckaers and Abba, among others, concerning this topic have been groundbreaking. The ethics ofthe person, virtue, the understanding of charity as friendship with God, knowledge by connaturality, and the primacy of the Spirit, have emerged as new Thomist horizons. Such studies have made enormous contributions. But there has been lacking a study of the sources that inspired St. Thomas, and of the evolution that we find in his writings concerning the role of the Spirit, active within the free human act. Noriega seeks to fill this void. This undertaking is difficult and demanding, for it presupposes a critical knowledge of all the works of Thomas and access to the abundant contemporary literature. The author has achieved his purpose and presents the material with mastery, in...