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BOOK REVIEWS 311 Thomism and Tolerance. BY JOHN F. X. KNASAS. Scranton, Pa.: University of Scranton Press, 2011. Pp. 168. $20.00 (paper). ISBN 978-1-58966215 -5. Thomism and Tolerance, John Knasas writes on the book’s first page, is something of a sequel to his 2003 book, Being and Some Twentieth-Century Thomists. The earlier volume explored the centrality of the notion of being to Thomism since the Leonine revival, while the new book extends this theme to ethics, particularly to the moral status of tolerance. The new book also shares the earlier one’s polemical concern to defend “existential” Thomism against not only its Aristotelian and transcendental Thomist rivals but also against various non-Thomist modern theories connected to classical and contemporary liberalism, pragmatism, and existentialism. While the book is directed both ad intra and ad extra, one senses a certain priority in the concern to address the Thomist audience. Toleration is often regarded as a signal achievement of modernity, so it is important for Thomists to understand that it has roots in Thomism itself and that a certain kind of Thomism is best at explaining this and defending it against Thomism’s modern critics. The book’s (brief) first four chapters lay out a philosophical basis in Aquinas for tolerance, and the much lengthier fifth and sixth chapters engage with rival philosophical theories and with the issue of cultural pluralism. Knasas’s basic argument is that Thomistic natural law is a better ground for tolerance than any other ethical tradition (5). Tolerance, moreover, is not mutual indifference, but what Knasas calls “fraternal” (6, 63, 73, 84), a “sympathetic,” “engaged,” “respectful,” attitude itself grounded in the bedrock of all morality, a “psychology” that sees man first and foremost as “intellector of being” (1, 7, 41). Human dignity is rooted in man’s rational nature, and rationality is itself grounded in “the more profound understanding of the human as intellector” (13). “Intellection” is understood to mean “intuition or contemplation,” what Aquinas calls intellectus and (although Knasas does not mention this) Aristotle calls nous. It is the intellect’s apprehension of being itself, which Knasas follows Gerald Phelan and Joseph Owens in characterizing as “sameness-in-difference,” that is most important: “[t]o apprehend being is to experience an earthquake in one’s intellectual life” (15). Nevertheless, the abstraction of being can “lie unnoticed in the depths of our conscious life” while still “having conscious effects” (16, 83), and its importance transcends one’s actual response to it: “[i]t is there when one is moral; it is there when one is immoral. It is there when one is philosophically correct and when one is incorrect” (7, 41, cf. 90-91). The intellection of being undergirds moral reasoning by way of the convertibility of being and goodness: the ratio boni/ratio entis is the object of the first principle of practical reason (18-20). What is lovable in human beings is “the notion of being” (23, 67); a human being is “an epiphany of the good” (37). Morality concerns how one relates to intellectors of being as objects of 312 BOOK REVIEWS respect: killing, theft, and lying are all disrespectful of that object, and such disrespect is ultimately disrespect of the good itself; similar things could be said of fornication, adultery, and contraception (22, 50). Knasas accordingly reformulates the first principle of practical reason as “Be respectful and solicitous of intellectors of being” (24, 25, 49, 67), and “oughtness” itself is a function of this status (31, 45; cf. 79), which is often unconscious or inchoate (33, 47). This basis of ethics is compatible with moral ignorance, given Aquinas’s accounts of error (about both speculative and practical principles and precepts) in both his commentary on Aristotle’s Metaphysics and the “Treatise on Law” in the Summa theologiae. Moreover, “few grasp that that [obligatory] respect stems from the human’s status as an intellector of being” (40). The social nature of human beings is also grounded in the intellection of being since one naturally wants to be with others who are also “voices” of being, and society requires mutual goodwill and thus tolerance (45-46). The commitment to a...

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