Man Becoming: God in Secular Language by Gregory Baum (review)

BOOK REVIEWS 315 of course, theoretically possible that God could posit himself into non-being." (p. 97) Perhaps what Seidel really means here is that one can formulate the statement, " It is possible for God not to be," but this is a long way from saying that it is " theoretically possible " that he might not be. In conclusion, while the book represents a very concerted effort to deal with the most difficult problems of ontology, employing a contemporary terminology heavily interlaced with Hegelian and Heideggerian turns of thought, in the reviewer's opinion it labors under the defect of gnawing ambiguities which mar its development and final outcome. Much insistence is placed on the importance of the distinction between nothing and nonbeing as a point generally overlooked by philosophers and as, in fact, the most fundamental insight of the entire work. Yet " nothing " itself turns out to be only relative nothingness which is apparently identical with the potential principles already employed by Aristotle and Aquinas in their philosophical syntheses. Perhaps one of the unintended pluses of the book, however, is the pointing up of the very real importance of employing a uniform terminology as well as one which avoids needless obscurity and maintains a respectable distance from the seductive ambiguities of metaphorical expression. Admittedly there is an exploitable shock value in the employment of new terms to make or emphasize a point, but it seems a tactical error to attempt to elucidate the most intricate and profound metaphysical problems through the use of metaphors so subject to ambivalent interpretation. There seems to be no need to speak of God as continuing" to stand against non-being." Seattle University Seattle, Washington JAMES B. REICHMANN, S.J. Man Becoming: God in Secular Language. By GREGORY BAUM. New York: Herder and Herder, 1970. This book is Gregory Baum's tribute to Maurice Blonde! as a Christian thinker whose writings at the turn of the century in large measure laid the foundations for much of the contemporary re-thinking of theology among Roman Catholics. In his famous 1893 doctoral dissertation Action, Blondel joined the heavy dialectic of Leibnitz and Hegel with a stress on affectivity and action encouraged in part by the study of Pascal, Maine de Biran, and Olle-Laprune. Throughout a work with all the rigor of The Monadology and The Phenomenology of Mind, he attempted to illuminate the way in which the very dynamism of human action forces man finally to a decision to open or close himself to a transcendent order of absolute 316 BOOK REVIEWS and infinite reality. Action was simultaneously a blow against the positivistic philosophy which would allow no transcendent reference for human life and against the Christian apologetics which forced the supernatural on men as a purely external demand. "The Letter on Apologetics" (1896) applied the philosophy of action to the task of apologetics, and " History and Dogma " (1903) confronted the challenge of biblical criticism as it appeared in Harnack and Loisy. In each instance Blonde! maintained that the subjective turn in philosophy after Descartes and Kant need not work against orthodox Christian belief and indeed that the extrinsicism of the standard apologetics made such belief irrelevant to any real exigency of the men who were to profess it. Baum mentions Blondel's influence in The Credibility of the Church Today (New York, 1968) and Faith and Doctrine (New York, 1969), and anyone just vaguely familiar with the philosopher of Aix would recognize his impact on Baum's rejection of nineteenth-century apologetics and on his effort to construct a new apologetics pertinent to the present moment in those two works. But, whereas the earlier books make but passing reference to Blonde!, Man Becoming develops formally and lengthily the basic insight of Action and develops it not now for the justification of Christian belief but for the understanding of the Good News itself. This Good News, for Baum, is that God is present to us in the most ordinary activities of our existence; and ordinary, this-worldly activity is not simply the unfolding of the pre-determined possibilities of the animal rationale but rather the realization of a humanity whose dimensions remain open in the future...