Knowing Persons: A Study in Plato by Lloyd P. Gerson (review)

658 BOOK REVIEWS decided to devote their lives to philosophy or to theology or to see whatever they did sub specie aeternitatis" (80). Perhaps it was this last and sublime factor that Maritain encouraged or helped elicit most from his students and readers. I suspect that Maritain's experience of God, and his seeing things from God's point of view, were the principal causes of the religious references in his philosophical writings. But, no matter how absorbed in God or how divinely inspired is one's understanding of things now, and even in eternity, one ought never to let go ofthe realm and rights of sense and reason. This conviction ofthe value of creation, including human intellection, was the source of Maritain's fidelity to the philosophical order. Third, a given Catholic philosopher could be a saint who never admits the light offaith in any way into his philosophy. Another Catholic philosopher could be avoiding deep faith in and love of God, an openness to holiness, and even a needed renunciation of his philosophical reason. Are we Catholic intellectuals humble when we hesitate on the quest for sanctity? How many of us when we were young and heard and read the words and knew of the way of Jacques Maritain were moved to a kinship of life and thought? How many of us have been open to the same sort of immolation of philosophical thinking as Jacques was early in his adult life and have refused the sacrifice? The natural, and supernatural, cognition of Godand all things as related to God is not particularly present in the Catholic college and university today, not just because of a proper and passionate dedication to the relative autonomy ofparticipated being and the rights and demands of reason but also, sometimes, because of our lack of faith and courage: our professional cowardliness, humiliation, and lust, our dalliance caused by an adoration of the earth, and our dilatoriness in looking at the face of God. In any case, I finished Mclnerny's book with gratitude to the director of the Jacques Maritain Center for writing it as he has and being as he is. College ofSaint Benedict Saint Joseph, Minnesota RONALD E. LANE Knowing Persons: A Study in Plato. By UOYD P. GERSON. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003. Pp. 291. $55.00 (cloth). ISBN 0-19-925763-9. In the Neoplatonism of Plotinus, all elements of the world lie between the One, which is fully actual and transcendent, and matter, which is mere potentiality and the sheer deprivation of being. This world view has both epistemological and ethical dimensions. As matter is brought into being through its attraction to the One, so too does it gain in intelligibility and form such that BOOK REVIEWS 659 the resultant objects are fit to be comprehended by the soul. Though attached to a body, the soul may purify itself through asceticism and contemplation and rise up toward the source of existence and truth. Down to the present day, the Plotinian outlook has exerted a tremendous influence on the study of Platonism itself, with the result that it has become almost an historical truism that Plato posits supersensible forms or ideas, eternal and transcendent, that condition the material world of sensible objects. Yet it often seems that Plato fails to specify precisely the relationship between forms and particulars-sometimes speaking as if forms were strictly separate and apart from particulars and sometimes as if forms were present in and seen through particulars. Neoplatonism, therefore, presents itself as a clarification of Platonic philosophy, by fixing the ambiguous status of forms vis-a-vis particulars and describing the series of intermediary elements. I offer the preceding comments to illustrate the sort of Platonism that is assumed in the background ofLloyd Gerson'sKnowingPersons:A Study in Plato. Gerson's central thesis is that a distinction between "human being" and "person," or alternatively, between "embodied soul" and "disembodied ideal" underlies Platonic philosophy. He suggests that once this distinction is appreciated, it renders various aspects of the Platonic dialogues more clear and coherent. Broadly speaking, the Platonic philosophy to which Gerson refers is a two-world metaphysics consisting of the priority of the...