Philosophy and Christian Theology (review)

BOOK REVIEWS 319 Philosophy and Christian Theology. Proceedings of the American Catholic Philosophical Association. Washington: The Catholic University of America, 1970. Pp. fl75. The forty-fourth meeting of the ACPA was held in San Francisco from March SO to April 1, 1970. Its general theme was: Philosophy and Christian Theology. Around this central theme, as in previous years, the texts which were presented both in the plenary sessions and in the meetings of eight sections took up various subjects which were likely to clarify the problem of the relation between theology and the principal currents of contemporary philosophy: philosophy of language, philosophy of science, Whitehead's philosophy, moral philosophy, metaphysics and natural theology , philosophy of religion, phenomenology, and existentialism. It was in the plenary sessions that the problem of the relations between philosophy and Christian theology was directly taken up. I am thinking in particular of the compact texts of J. F. Smolko and F. Sontag, while P. Ricoeur and J. F. Ross presented precise examples of the changes that philosophy is in a position to contribute in the perspectives of Christian thought. P. Ricoeur, taking up ideas developed earlier (cf. Le conflit des interpretations, pp. 898-415, 491), shows how the problem of hope is capable of renewing philosophical problems, while J. F. Ross appeals to the resources of linguistic analysis for the problems of analogy. Nevertheless, it is through the exposes of Fathers W. A. Wallace and B. Lonergan that we can best perceive the confrontation of two conceptions of philosophy within Christian thought at this time. Fr. Wallace, in his speech as president, argued the case of a " developmental Thomism,'' that is to say, of a real distinction between theology and philosophy which however would not impair a real unity of Thomism. Fr. Lonergan, on the other hand, opted for a more radical change. For him, Thomism would cease to play a central role in order to be situated and thereby integrated into a more general view, no doubt a little like Aristotelian logic or Euclidean geometry in the contemporary logical and mathematical syntheses. It is quite difficult to present the argument in favor of Thomism more clearly and briefly than Fr. Wallace did. All the essential aspects of the question were considered and all the possibilities of solution were examined. In spite of the difficulties and the questions raised, Fr. Wallace remains convinced that Thomism will again, as so many times in the past, find its leading role in Christian thought, theological as well as philosophical. The diversity will be more marked, but this will not prevent sufficient unity, a unity which is guaranteed by an essential reference to the thought of St. Thomas. Fr. Lonergan's point of view is different. He thinks that the essential change which has come about in philosophy is the movement away from eternal truths, as accepted by St. Thomas among others, to the idea of 820 BOOK REVIEWS "developing doctrines." (p. 19) And by that we must not understand simply the historical succession of philosophical systems, for instance, but rather the advent of theoretical interpretations based on the history of human thought, historicism and hermeneutics, which give us a conception of the work of the human intellect quite different from that inspired by Aristotle. " The key task, then, in contemporary Catholic theology is to replace the shattered thought-forms associated with eternal truths and logical ideals with new thought-forms that accord with the dynamics of development and the concrete style of method." (p. Q6) In four pages Fr. Lonergan formulates the program which, in his opinion, philosophy should follow today in order to endow theology with the new forms of thought which it needs. Here transcendental philosophy holds an important place. It would effectively allow us, as Kant had thought, to know what we are doing when we know and consequently to know exactly what we are knowing when we exercise this activity. The radical difference between the positions of Frs. Wallace and Lonergan is obvious. Fr. Wallace places himself within Thomism or supposes that we have already been situated within its perspective. The question which Fr. Lonergan poses is logically prior to such a step. Even more...