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466 BOOK REVIEWS treatise on the divine names. Had he exposited the text in its own proper order, he might have avoided the suggestion that the order of the Summa theologiae is reversed so far as the logic of de Deo is concerned. Both Trinité et création and its pair are well-informed works of attentive scholarship. Much can be learned from them about Aquinas and the history of philosophical theology. At least as much can be gleaned, however, about the limits the present revival of philosophy among conservative French Catholics places on what we can retrieve from the past, and especially from Aquinas. One hopes that this is not still, and for new reasons as well as the old, because French Catholicism feels embattled. WAYNE HANKEY Dalhousie University and King’s College Halifax, Nova Scotia Du Christ à la Trinité: Penser les Mystères du Christ après Thomas d'Aquin et Balthasar. By ÉTIENNE VETÖ. Paris: Les Éditions du Cerf, 2012. Pp. 478. €45.00 (paper). ISBN 978-2-204-09501-3. This very substantial study contains a detailed and extensive comparison of St. Thomas and Hans Urs von Balthasar in their treatment of the mysteries of the life of Christ. It also proposes a way to take advantage of the complementary strengths of each, avoiding their opposing weaknesses. Part I takes us through a detailed reading of questions 27 to 59 of the Tertia Pars. Saint Thomas pays great attention to the distinction of the divine and human natures in commenting on the mysteries of the life of Christ, and takes for granted the truth of the principle that all works of efficiency ad extra are common to the three persons of the Trinity. Vetö however is concerned to track how St. Thomas does justice to the presentation of the agency of the three persons within the economy of salvation. Because of the aforesaid principle of unity of operation, St. Thomas understands much of the scriptural data as asserting an appropriation of some work to one or another person, based on what he has already established regarding the processions and personal properties in the questions on the Trinity in the Prima Pars. For instance, though Mary conceives by the Holy Spirit (Luke 1:35), the conception of Christ is the common work of the Trinity, and appropriated to the Holy Spirit, first, because the incarnation is a function of the love of God, and the Holy Spirit is proceeding Love; second, because the incarnation is gratuitous, and the Holy Spirit is by appropriation the Spirit of grace; and third, because the Spirit is, within the Trinity, Gift, and the humanity of Christ BOOK REVIEWS 467 is itself endowed with all the gifts of grace (58-65). Or again, when the Spirit leads Christ into the desert, this too should be taken as an appropriation (109). The miracles of Jesus, moreover, though attributed to a charism of the Holy Spirit, are once again common works of the three and manifest the divinity of Christ rather than his filiation (110-11). Still, proper predications are to be discerned in St. Thomas’s analysis: though all three are wise, the Word is wisdom engendered and the splendor of the Father (118). So in the teaching of Jesus, though his words as created proceed from the three persons, there is a certain fittingness that the second person become incarnate so that the words belong personally to him. This analysis of St. Thomas depends on the prior questions on the Trinity, which give him the basic principles by which to discern what is properly predicated of the persons and what is said by appropriation. It is evident that the mysteries of the life of Christ do not so much reveal the Trinity as manifest it to those who already know it. And we Christians know it, not by beholding the events of the Paschal Mystery, but principally by listening to the words of Jesus himself, especially those contained in the Fourth Gospel (20511 ). Saint Thomas often writes as if this or that action is to be attributed straightforwardly to this or that person, but the principle of the unity of operation of...

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