The Two Wings of Catholic Thought: Essays on “Fides et ratio” ed. by David Ruel Foster and Joseph W. Kotersi, S.J. (review)

BOOK REVIEWS 325 The Two Wings ofCatholic Thought: Essays on "Fides et ratio." Edited by DAVID RUEL FOSTER and JOSEPH W. KOTERSI, S.J. Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 2003. Pp. 247. $19.95 (paper). ISBN 0-8132-1302-9. "Truth and love are conjoined wings ... for truth cannot fly without love . . . and love cannot hover without truth." So hymned St. Ephrem the Syrian. Some sixteen hundred years later, Pope John Paul II began Fides et ratio (FR) with the same metaphor. He likened faith and reason to "two wings on which the human spirit rises to the contemplation of truth." The book under review takes its title from this opening line of the encyclical. This volume joins two previous book-length collections in English on the encyclical, Faith and Reason, edited by Timothy L. Smith (St. Augustine's Press, 2001) and Restoring Faith in Reason, edited by Laurence Paul Hemming and Susan Frank Parsons (SCM Press, 2002). Of the three collections, The Two Wings is the most unified. The contributors share a philosophical perspective congenial to the pope's. Four of eight completed their doctoral studies in philosophy at the Catholic University of America; Robert Sokolowski's spirit broods over the essays. The book has three parts: four essays on "Doctrinal Perspectives" and four on "Historical Perspective" bookend two essays on practical "Implications."There is a summary outline and an index of topics and proper names for the encyclical, a six-page selected bibliography, and indices of topics and proper names for the book itself. Avery Cardina"l Dulles opens the book with a masterful reading of FR as reframing the 1930s French debate on "Christian philosophy." He identifies three "classical positions." In the first or Augustinian/Gilsonian position, philosophy after Christ can only be Christian. The second, associated with Louvain Thomism, affirms philosophy's independence from faith. Jacques Maritain, Maurice Blondel, and Henri de Lubac represent three variants on the third position . Dulles relates these positions to the three "stances" of philosophy treated in FR 75-77. He locates the pope's own positions as closest to de Lubac's mediation between Gilson and Blondel. Dulles notes both the priority the pope gives to philosophical inquiry over system and his desire to put personalist anthropology at the center of a renewed metaphysics. Delighting in the irony of a pope defending reason, Joseph Koterski reflects on how the metaphysical courage urged by the pope might play out in country, church, and college. He defends the pope's use ofthe language ofliberal political philosophy (FR 24-25) in support of human dignity and solidarity. He contextualizes it in papal social thought, which he in turn correctly frames against the social atomism engendered by modern states. A more than instrumentalist view of democracy requires a philosophy of "genuinely metaphysical range" (FR 83). Without such a metaphysical focus, theology tends to "spiritual good feeling" without intellectual rigor and to the "dislocated philosophical rationalism that is often taught in academic theology courses" (31). Prudence Allen's "Person and Complementarity" recalls an earlier discussion of the "problem of the act of faith" as recapitulated by Roger Aubert in 1958. 326 BOOK REVIEWS Faith is an integral human act. A dynamic philosophy of the person demands "complementarity" between the three couplets of reason and faith, philosophy and theology, and philosophers and theologians. Integral complementarity is more than fractional. It creates something new. A"newevangelization" has taken place in certain Catholic philosophical faculties, including Catholic University's. Allen urges philosophers to join theologians in a new evangelization of Catholic colleges and universities. She decries curricular separations between philosophy and theology that marginalize the latter. As he concludes FR, the pope invokes Mary, Seat of Wisdom. David Meconi enlarges on this brief mention of Mary as a model for philosophers. For an understanding of the "sapiential" dimension of philosophy, this essay is central. It captures the spirit of the encyclical as a whole. Echoing maternal imagery from the history of philosophy, Mary's posture privileges awe and wonder over methodic doubt. Philosophy's openness to a reality not its own ends in the human vocation to receive God. Meconi, like Dulles, returns to...