The Philosophical Approach to God by W. Norris Clarke, S.J. (review)

156 BOOK REVIEWS on Latin Americans in many other countries who seek for a new socioeconomic order. In the concluding section McGovern reiterates his central thesis that " Marxism viewed as a self-critical method of analysis is not incompatible " with Christianity. "When tactics and strategies of social change are added on, Marxism may or may not prove incompatible " (p. 310) . He is convinced that " socialism and Marxism both raise the right issue-ownership and control of the means of production" (p. 315). Yet he remains extremely wary of Marxist political groups-or any " ideological " party (Does McGovern think that the American Democratic and Republican Parties are not ideological?) , and his great fear of any kind of revolutionary Marxism is that it will not produce or maintain the value of " democracy " (which tends to become almost an absolute for him). Thus McGovern would advocate a" democratic socialism " similar to what Michael Harrington espouses and actively promotes in the United States. McGovern's final point, in " A Christian Epilogue," is well taken: as Marxism can contribute something important to the Christian perspective on human society, so do Christians" have a precious and important heritage that bears upon Marxism and social change " (p. 3~7) . As Christian Marxists like Miranda have said, what has been historically lacking in socialism, keeping it from being what we would expect and want it to be, is precisely the great and necessary element of Christian faith and the absolute human dignity of every human person it implies. Christians know the Marxists have erred in offering Marxism as a substitute for Christianity. The same Christians have an extremely important mission in the cause of justice within a socialist perspective. McGovern's book can help American Christians to be open to that cause and to further it out of their own heritage. Union Theological Seminary New York, N.Y. JACK RISLEY, 0.P. The Philosophical Approach to God. By W. NORRIS CLARKE, S.J. WinstonSalem , N.C.: Wake Forest University Press, 1979. Pp. viii + 115. In his The Philosophical, Approach to God (the published version of three lectures delivered as the sole invited lectures at the Fourth James Montgomery Hester Seminar at Wake Forest University in 1979) Fr. W. Norris Clarke looks to "update" as well as to explain his own particular brand of Neo-Thomism as it applies to the area of philosophical theology: 1) to update it by accommodating it, in part, to certain recent currents of thought, namely, Transcendental Thomism and process (i.e. Whiteheadian) BOOK REVIEWS 157 philosophy; and Q) to explain it in terms of what he and other QOth-century followers of St. Thomas see to be the central doctrine of his metaphysicsparticipation . In his first lecture, " The Turn to the Inner Way in Contemporary Neo-Thomism," Fr. Clarke describes for his (one presumes) largely non-Catholic audience the movement called Transcendental Thomism and expresses a decided sympathy for it. While acknowledging that this movement is by no means accepted as an authentic development of Thomism by all Thomists today, Fr. Clarke views it as offsetting a too one-sided " cosmological " approach to the question of God's existence characteristic of more familiar forms of Thomism. As he would define it, the essence of Transcendental Thomism consists in the following achievement : "It has brought out of obscurity into full development St. Thomas's own profound doctrine of the dynamism of the human spirit, both as intellect and will, towards the Infinite-a dynamism inscribed in the very nature of man as a priori condition of possibility of both his knowing and willing activities" (p. 16). Accordingly, Fr. Clarke proceeds to show how he believes such an approach can lead to the affirmation of God's existence by arguing that the natural tendencies of intellect and will are, respectively, for the knowledge of something supremely intelligible (absolute being) and the love of something supremely good (absolute goodness) . What this means, according to Clarke, is that only God can completely satisfy the human spirit, Who must therefore exist under pain of allowing that the natural tendency (or dynamism} of the intellect (or the will) is unintelligible or in vain. However, he would also insist, in...