De Hominis Beatitudine by Jacobus M. Ramírez (review)

942 BOOK REVIEWS mental moral option. It is enlightening and I think quite accurate. So also his addenda on venial sin. This is a brief history of the problem of the "finality" in venial sin, O'Brien's choice of solutions and his defence of that choice; all done with a masterly knowledge of the corpus of St. ThomCM's thought. Both he and Gilby are superb in finding other texts of Aquinas t~ substantiate their points. I think, however, both should bring in modern discussions more explicitly. O'Brien remarks somewhere that the best interpreter of Aquinas is Aquinas himself (Sanctus ThomCM sui interpres). But a too great dependence on that rule shuts the door on modern criticism, tends to make a self-sufficient universe of the thought of Aquinas. E. L. Mascall has written in this journal recently of the gulf in philosophy, how philosophers are simply not listening to one another. He wonders if Thomism can act as a bridge. Of course, I think it can, and should; and I am certain Gilby and O'Brien think so too; but a greater explicit awareness of other people's thought in the appendices of these Summa volumes would help make that conviction more available to the scholarly world. Aumann's translation is accurate but even drier than O'Brien's, and that again is based on his deliberate approach to the job: "It is as close as possible to the original Latin without being a transliteration." I cannot agree with that approach, though I know the rationale behind it. And Aumann's assignment was so large-a hundred pages longer than either of the others-he evidently felt he could not do much by way of appendices or long introduction. It is disappointing, then, in not grappling with some recent problems in religious life or in placing the thought of Thomas more securely in its historical setting. Dominican House of Studies Washington, D. C. THOMAS HEATH, 0. P. De Hominis Beatitudine. In I-II Summae Theologiae Divi Thomae commentaria (QQ. I-V). By JACOBUS M. RAMiREZ. Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Cientificas. Institute de Filosofia "Luis Vives," Madrid. 1972 (Obras Completas de Santiago Ramirez, 0. P. Edici6n preparada por Victorino Rodriguez, 0. P. Torno III, vol. 1-5} The Spanish Dominican, J. M. Ramirez, is unfortunately little known and has remained for all practical purposes unacclaimed outside his native Spain. And for all that he was one of the profoundest Catholic theologians of modern times and, it may safely be asserted, one of the Church's greatest thinkers in the period of crisis and upheaval-both on the level of doctrine and on that of practice-that preceded and followed the second Vatican Council. When he died in Salamanca 18 December 1967 he left BOOK REVIEWS 943 behind him a large corpus of unpublished work on theological, philosophical, and cognate problems. His thought was firmly rooted in the living anJ authentic scholastic and thomistic (thomasic!) tradition, but his mind was ever open to the very real problems of the day, as his three lengthy volumes on the thought of Ortega y Gasset (La Filosofia de Ortega y Gasset; Un ortegui.mw cat6lico? ; La zona de Seguridad) and his shorter studies on the history and structure of the ius gentium (El derecho de Gentes) , on the political teaching of Aquinas (Doctrina Politica de Santo To'ITIAis), and on the notion of the common good (Pueblo y Gobernantes al servicio del Bien Comun) clearly show. These studies were all published in Spanish, as was also a large work on the essence of Christian hope (La esencia de la Esperanza Cristiana) and on the nature of philosophy (El Concepto de Filosof'la). The bulk of his work, however, was written in Latin and of this only a minor Part had been published until his friends and admirers decided to bring out an edition of his opera omnia. The problem of analogy, sa fundamental in all philosophical and theological thinking, was the subject of a short study written whilst Ramirez was a young professor in Rome and Salamanca (De analogia secundum doctrinan aristotelico-thomisticam, Madrid 19~~) . This problem occupied his mind down the...