William of Auvergne and Robert Grosseteste: New Ideas of Truth in the Early Thirteenth Century by Steven P. Marrone (review)

BOOK REVIEW~ 657 academy a swarm of methodological reductions of grace to necessity in the name of biblical scholarship. This systematic challenge to the Church's historicity has found little response from the ranks of the systematists, apart from the outworn charge of gnosticism-an indictment which, while true enough, is all too easily met with a tu quoque. There are more ways than one of ignoring Christ's lordship of history. The Christocentrism which Rousselot pioneered is nowadays generally accepted, but without the systematic integrity upon which he was intent; it is his rigorous intellectualism which contemporary systematic theology chiefly lacks, as it was lacking also in the schools of Thomist theology in which Rousselot was taught. It is this nominalist heritage, this rooted distrust of the quaerens intellectum, which he labored, with genius, to overcome, without, as Teilhard did, rejecting Thomism out of hand, and without despairing, as von Balthasar has done, of systematic theology across the board. Fr. McDermott has done the theological academy the favor of recalling to its attention the brilliant brief passage of a phenomenal intelligence whose dedication to theological speculation was at one with his dedication to his faith, to his Church. To have accompanied Rousselot in his hurried journey through the life of the mind is to have shared his fascination with the truth of the revelation which is the Christ, and perhaps to have glimpsed from afar some scintilla of that Ancient Beauty whose truth possessed his mind throughout his brief career, driving him headlong to the Vision in which he now knows as he is known. Marquette University Milwaukee, Wisconsin D. J. KEEFE, S.J. William of .Auvergne and Robert Grosseteste: New Ideas of Truth in the Early Thirteenth Century. By STEVEN P. MARRONE. Princeton University Press, 1983. Pp. xi + 319. $32.50. During the course of the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries the Latin West strove to assimilate the world view of the Greeks, mainly through the study of Aristotle in translation. Prior to this renaissance, as Haskins called it, speculation-what there was of it-nurtured itself on Christian sources, and of these, outside of Holy Writ itself, the voluminous work of St. Augustine was far and away the most influential. The confluence of these two traditions-the one, religious, unsystematic and unscientific, the other, secular, relatively lacking in assumptions and 658 BOOK REVIEWS pagan-caused the leading figures of this renaissance to exercise their minds and religious commitment in an attempt to build an enlarged and different world view. Relatively recent historical research has considerably improved our understanding of this important and fascinating human endeavor. The present book is but one more contribution to this process of clarification, and historians along with theologians and philosophers interested in the later medieval period owe Steven Marrone a debt of gratitude for his study. As his title indicates, he selects two prominent men of the early thirteenth century, William of Auvergne, a Parisian, and Robert Grosseteste , an Englishman, in order to examine one of the more fundamental issues which underwent transformation, viz. the idea of truth. Put simply, his general thesis is that these two scholars deserve credit for the way they utilized the newly discovered Greek learning (Aristotle) in the areas of metaphysics, epistemology, and logic, thereby undermining (perhaps 'replacing' is the kinder word) the Augustinian theory of knowledge which held sway for most early medieval thinkers when they discussed the problem of knowledge and truth. One major fault this reviewer finds with the thesis running through the book, however, is that both William of Auvergne and Robert Grosseteste are presented as agents laboring to move away from a fundamentally religious orientation to a more philosophical one. As Marrone sees it, the transition is basically away from Augustine and towards Aristotle as far as the theory of truth and knowledge is concerned. I say 'basically ', for he acknowledges more than once the persistence of what might be described as a religious habit of mind, taken in the moral sense. To be sure, both William and Robert were men of their time; they retained a strong Christian commitment regarding man's destiny and his relation to the J udeo...