In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

BOOK REVIEWS 523 'With his remarks on Sartre Ussher completes this triad. He esteems the French philosopher as "perhaps the greatest intellectual force today" and his most interesting characterizations of Sartre are those of " Manichean " and "Jansenist." He thinks that the key word in Sartre is not despair, as it is in Kierkegaard, nor dread, as for Heidegger, but "disgust," a disgust from a deep sense of the opposition of other to the self and of the frustrating evil of things. Nevertheless he does not think that Sartre is, in the last analysis, an evil mind, but an exhilarating and courageous one " which just misses being a great one." (p. 95) Ussher suggests, if nothing else, that this existentialist trinity, whether it offers a solution to life or not, concentrates into itself all of the triumphs and failures, hopes and despair of contemporary history. College of Albert the Great, Oakland, Calif. KEVIN wALL, 0. P. An Essay on Christian Philosophy. By JACQUEs MARITAIN. New York: Philosophical Library, 1955. Pp. H6 with index. $2.75. It might be argued that the English translation of Maritain's De la Philosophie Chretienne, available only now, more than twenty years after the French original, is superfluous and redundant. For if one has read Maritain's intervening works, and, above all, if one has tried to follow in his vocation as a Christian philosopher, then-to be epigrammatic-either one has failed in one's endeavors, in which case the Essay will strike no new light, or one has succeeded, in which case the light will not strike as new. But, as is more likely, none of us has failed so utterly or succeeded so singularly that he may not benefit from having the principle of solution to the problem of Christian philosophy spelled out and under_Jined . That principle, according to the Essay, is "the classical distinction between the order of specification and the order of exercise, or again . . . between ' nature ' and ' state.' " (p. 11) The nature of philosophy is, of course, " a pure, abstract essence " and one would be wrong " to endow such an abstraction with reality, to clothe it as such with a concrete existence .'' (p. 16) But, for all that, philosophy does have a nature, and " since the specification of philosophy hinges entirely on its formal object, and since this object is wholly of the rational order, philosophy considered in itselfwhether in a pagan or Christian mind-depends on the same strictly natural or rational intrinsic criteria. So that the designation Christian which we apply to a philosophy does not refer to that which constitutes 524 BOOK REVIEWS it in its philosophic essence: simply as philosophy, reduplicative ut sic, it is independent of the Christian faith as to its object, its principles, and its methods." (p. 15) On the other hard, Maritain stresses, "as soon as it no longer is a question of philosophy considered in itself but of the manner in which men philosophize, and of the divers philosophies which the concrete course of history has brought into existence, the consideration of the essence of philosophy no longer suffices; that of its state must be undertaken." (p. 17) And it is the Christian state that makes Christian philosophy Christian: " the expression Christian philosophy does not designate a simple essence but a complex, that is, an essence taken in a particular state." (p. ~9) The bulk of the Essay is devoted precisely to the definition of such a state and its two chief components, "objective contributions " and " subjective aids," and to elucidations concerning the relations between theology and philosophy, and the special problems of apologetics and moral philosophy. It would be sheer effrontery for all but very few among our generation of Christian philosophers to commend this or any other work of Maritain. As for the translation, most readers will be satisfied that, according to the translator's foreword, Maritain himself has read and corrected the English version, although the purist may object to some turns of phrases and to a Gallicism such as " [mathematical] ensembles " (p. 12) , where aggregates would seem to be indicated. Critical comments, therefore, may be restricted to the historical significance of the Essay; and here one may...

pdf

Share