The Science of Being as Being: Metaphysical Investigations ed. by Gregory T. Doolan (review)

BOOK REVIEWS 477 the way in which la nouvelle théologie told the story of the past. The movement continues to render an immense service when it functions as a guide to the patristic and medieval theological landscape, specifically, by facilitating access to the sources. But la nouvelle théologie can turn into an obstacle when it operates as a new commentatorial tradition wherein the diversity and complexity of the Christian tradition becomes buried underneath outdated categories (e.g., symbolic thinking vs. Scholastic dialectic). Boersma’s book sometimes seems to suffer from the latter problem: a mid-twentiethcentury gloss gains more attention than the story’s main subject, namely, the sacramental tapestry of the pre-Reformation tradition. At times, too much de Lubac or Chenu means too little ressourcement. Boersma’s narrative often returns to the key theme of the “PlatonistChristian synthesis.” That a Christian ontology formed a pillar of Christian theology for many centuries seems beyond doubt. It is not nearly as evident that this pillar was “Platonist-Christian.” And even if a modified Platonic metaphysic had been so dominant, how would we recover it today? Should we make an act of faith in some Church Fathers’ capacities as metaphysicians? Should we rebuild a qualified Platonism in our time by making properly philosophical arguments? And do participation and sacramentality essentially depend on some form of Platonism? Might they already quietly run through much of Scripture, as Gary Anderson and others have suggested? Hasn’t the Christian tradition always been much more diverse in its appropriation of philosophical tools and manner of integrating them, from Irenaeus to Maximus the Confessor and beyond? Ressourcement and the recovery of a sacramental ontology are indeed crucial twin projects for Evangelicals and Catholics today. The devil is in the details. BERNHARD BLANKENHORN, O.P. Pontifical University of St. Thomas Aquinas (Angelicum) Rome, Italy The Science of Being as Being: Metaphysical Investigations. Edited by GREGORY T. DOOLAN. Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 2012. Pp. 323. $45.00 (cloth) ISBN: 978-0-8132-1886-1. One of the challenges for the editor of a book of essays written by different authors is to find their unifying thread. Doolan has fulfilled this task marvelously, presenting a book with remarkable coherence, one that tells a story that is not only instructive but also entertaining. As he says in the introduction, “in organizing the contributions to this volume, I thought it only 478 BOOK REVIEWS fitting to arrange them in an order following the insights of that master whom [John] Wippel knows so well: Thomas Aquinas.” The book is divided into three parts which happen roughly to mirror Aquinas’s own divisio textus in his commentary on Aristotle’s Metaphysics. Part 1 is on the “Subject Matter of Metaphysics,” part 2 is on “Metaphysical Aporiae,” and part 3 is on “The Two Theologies” (natural and supernatural). For the purposes of this short review I shall focus primarily on the four essays that comprise part 1. In dealing with “being as being,” the subject matter of metaphysics, these essays are representative of the whole work. They do a good job of narrating the history of the problem, even as they highlight different aspects of it. Together they tell a coherent, continuous story, from Aristotle (seen through the eyes of Aquinas and Wippel), through the late ancient Neoplatonists and Greek Aristotelian commentators, up to the Middle Ages, and they round off the discussion with a recapitulation of the problem in the contemporary arena. This section is, I think, well worth the price of the book. Sokolowski’s essay, “The Science of Being as Being in Aristotle, Aquinas, and Wippel,” opens the discussion. In the first half, he begins with a fresh philosophical-phenomenological reflection on the meaning of the phrase “being as being,” contrasting the subject matter of metaphysics with that of other sciences. The other, partial sciences, such as physics, he says, have a limited object. Physics, for instance, studies being as mobile. Here the subject of the science is expressed in an awkward, yet concise manner: we begin with the concept “being,” which is all-inclusive, but then the narrowing term “as” is added. This...