The Mystery of the Trinity in the Theological Thought of Pope John Paul II by Antoine E. Nachef, B.S.O. (review)

BOOK REVIEWS 651 The Mystery ofthe Trinity in the Theological Thought ofPope John Paul II. By ANTOINE E. NACHEF, B.S.0. New York: Peter Lang, 1999. Pp. 289. $32.95 (cloth). ISBN 0-8204-4524-X. The plentiful and intellectually rich writings of Pope John Paul II have occasioned a growing number of studies such as this book, which attempt to analyze various dimensions of his philosophical and theological world-view. Father Nachef, Professor of Theology at the International Marian Research Institute in Dayton, seeks to give a systematic presentation of the Pope's thought on the Trinity. Although John Paul has not written extensively on the Trinity as such, Nachef attempts "a careful tour of his writings from a Trinitarian perspective" (1). At the same time, Nachef situates the pontiff's Trinitarian thought squarely within the larger ensemble of dogmatic themes--creation, anthropology, evil, redemption, Christology. Only after several chapters take up these moments of salvation history do the final two chapters of the book turn toward explicit considerations of Trinitarian theology. Although Nachef states that John Paul's Trinitarian thought should be "located within the framework of other contemporary Trinitarian theology" (ibid.), he makes relatively little attempt to do so. Rather than placing the Pope's thought in dialogue with other contributors to the late twentiethcentury revival of Trinitarian theology (Rahner, Balthasar, Hill, Kasper, etc.), Nachef presents John Paul's thought with specific attention to the question of its philosophical background. Is John Paul "more of a Lublin Thomist or a Schelerian phenomenologist" (18)? Is the Pope's thought "fundamentally phenomenological while borrowing some elements from Thomism, or is it metaphysical and greatly expanding Thomas with insights from phenomenology" (19)? It is, of course, a matter of relative priority; there is no question that John Paul draws from both Thomism and phenomenology. Furthermore, these two influences are but part of a larger complex of ideas and experiences that come together in his unique thought. Still, the slant of one's interpretations of the Pope's writings may be quite different depending upon which source one judges as more determinative. In general, those who read the Pope more from the viewpoint of phenomenology are more inclined to highlight the rather more original and "progressive" elements of his theology, while those who stress the Thomist background seem readier to emphasize the continuity of his theology with the traditional positions of the Neoscholastic manualists. This is the question that drives the book, as Nachef not only offers his own reading of the principal texts but also canvasses the secondary literature for other commentators who have explored the sources of John Paul's thinking. Thus there are those (e.g., R. Harvanek) who assert that the Pope should be interpreted more "from the point of view of Munich phenomenology and Scheler rather than from the perspective of Thomism and Aristotelianism" (37). 652 BOOK REVIEWS On the other side are those (e.g, G. McCool, R. Buttiglione, J. Conley) who, while acknowledging the importance of the phenomenology of consciousness as an element of John Paul's thinking, insist upon the prior importance of a metaphysics of being in the Pope's thought. Nachef unambiguously aligns himself with this later camp in arguing for the relative priority of an objective ontology to the philosophy of the conscious subject in the thought ofJohn Paul (a priority first observed, of course, in the pre-papal writings of Karol Wojtyla, most notably in The Acting Person). The personalist philosophy of John Paul, so fundamental to his theological vision, is the resuh of the integration of a philosophy of conscious subjectivity into a framework of the ontology of human nature. Nachef approvingly cites Buttiglione, who remarks: "In sum, St. Thomas provides an objective personalism, a set of objective features which are necessary to work out an authentic philosophy of the person" (50). Nachef helpfully points out that one cannot simply refer to the Thomism of Wojtyfa/John Paul, but must rather note earlier and later forms of Thomism: "Whereas earlier he used the metaphysics of universal mature whose source was the universal structure of man as such formulated in the universal concept, his later Thomism was a...