Experience, Reason and God ed. by Eugene Thomas Long (review)

BOOK REVIEWS 653 This review has questioned the use of texts in support of fundamental elements in the Owens version of St. Thomas's thought. Acceptance of the texts as supportive would seem to require ignorance of St. Thomas's language , usage, methodology, and epistemology, both philosophical and theological . The kind of proof-texting involved is probably required in order to transform the historical " order of exercise" of St. Thomas's work into a philosophical " order of specification." Maritain made the distinction as a caution long ago. Its present relevance is that in the order of specification proper to St. Thomas's own thought and use, even in theology, subsistent esse and the composed structure of all other beings are intelligible to the human mind solely as conclusions. Owens disregards this fundamental point and its implications in favor of an existential focus. Thus the " essenceexistence couplet" becomes a synthesis of nature and existential facticity. The knowledge corresponding becomes a synchronization of the conception of essence and the nonconceptual grasp of factual existence going on before the mind's gaze. This review does not dispute Owen's right to philosophize inventively; but to expound St. Thomas's texts inventively hardly authenti~ cates the resulting interpretation of St. Thomas's thought. THOMAS c. O'BRIEN Washington, D.C. Experience, Reason and God. Edited by EuGENE THOMAS LoNG. Washington , D. C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 1980. Pp. 188. $17.95. This book, Volume 8 in the series Studies in Phuosophy and The History of Philosophy, is a collection of essays representing the reflections of certain prominent Anglo-American (mostly American) philosophers of religion on the subject indicated by its title. As it turns out, this topic proves too broad to control effectively, for not only is allowance made by the editor for separate treatments of the roles of experience and reason in man's putative knowledge of God but also the meaning of " experience " is afforded a relatively wide latitude. Consequently, although this is not unusual with volumes of this type, the book turns out to lack any truly unifying philosophical theme. Nonetheless a number of its essays, particularly the earlier ones, do manage to address themselves to what the editor had indicated might be the central issue of the volume, namely, the role of experience (here· understood in a very special sense which becomes clear later) in justifying religious knowledge or belief. Regarding this proposed thematic point, Long· argues in his brief Introduction (and he will be joined in this argument by 654 BOOK REVIEWS a number of the contributors) that "experience" has been frequently, particularly in empiricist circles, equated with what is subjective or purely intra-mental, in which sense it has come to be viewed as opposed to reason and the two regarded as representing two mutually exclusive, or irreconcilably separate, claims to religious knowledge or belief. (It was an attempt to overcome this impasse, the editor informs us, that led to the idea for this volume.) However, it is Long's contention that when "experience " is construed in a broader, " being-in-the-world" sense, one truly consistent with its ordinary meaning, then experience and reason may be seen, not as separated or opposed, but as mutually allied in support of religious knowledge or belief. Since not all the essays that follow (there are twelve) are, in this reviewer's opinion, of equal interest or value, nor concern themselves with the theme just noted, this review will be deliberately selective in its task of reporting upon the various contributions to the volume, though some effort will be made to mention, however briefly, each one. In the lead-off essay," Experience, Analogy and Insight," John E. Smith considers the question of what might properly serve as a firmament for theology in the wake of the decline of classical metaphysics. According to Smith, the theologian must have an accessible plane on which to project the insight he seeks to express about the divine reality: and a framework of concepts and principles together with this projection plane is what Smith calls a " firmament." After reviewing the theological firmaments of the past and then considering some more recent trends of philosophical...