Erich Przywara, S.J.: His Theology and His World by Thomas F. O’meara, O.P. (review)

BOOK REVIEWS 153 he is well read in all these debates and he is anything but afraid to take his own position in all of them. The problem throughout the book is that the elusive ideas of being and Thomism do not stick together as closely as Knasas wants them to. He knows this, which makes him all the more forceful in the defense of his unmediated realist position, and he hangs tough at every turn, ready to gun down, to use his own metaphor, anything he perceives as opposition or as open to some mediation in our way of conceiving being. OLNA BLANCHETIE Boston College Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts Erich Przywara, S.J.: His Theology andHisWorld. By THOMAS F. O'MEARA, O.P. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2002. Pp. 254. $35.00 (cloth). ISBN 0-268-02763-3. Thomas O'Meara's portrait ofErich Przywara's (1889-1972) contribution to Catholic thought in Germany between the two world wars fills a significant lacuna in the English-speaking world. Most readers, if aware of Przywara's contribution at all, will know it only through footnotes to his work on analogy. Few of his eight hundred publications (including about fifty books) have been translated into English. Although his thought has been the subject of numerous scholarly monographs and articles in German and some in Spanish, Italian, and French, there are only a few such examples of secondary literature in English. Przywara's often convoluted literary dialectic and the difficulty of his written German style partly explains the lack of attention. But O'Meara finds a further explanation in Przywara's intense engagement with the particular concerns of German and Austrian culture after the 1920s. Przywara devoted himself to a wide-ranging conversation between Catholic tradition and the philosophy and culture of the hour. The significance of his contribution is to a large extent defined by that context. O'Meara deftly introduces that world, the issues of the day, some of Przywara's dialogue partners and the Jesuit's contribution to the discussions. O'Meara supplements his own analysis with numerous references to the literature on Przywara and so provides an invaluable introduction to that scholarship also. The first chapter provides an overview of Przywara, his age, and his world. O'Meara describes a man and a Church struggling to come to terms with modernity in the context of German culture. The next two chapters offer an overview ofPrzywara's projects and central themes. Chapter 2 presents his early efforts to address the challenge of being a Catholic in the modern world and the role of his retrieval of Augustine and Thomas Aquinas in furthering that end. 154 BOOK REVIEWS Chapter 3 examines his efforts to articulate a philosophy of religion and an explanation of Catholic sensibility, particularly in dialogue with Newman, Husserl, and Scheler. His conceptions of analogy and grace are central to those projects. Chapter 4 fills out some ofthe details ofPrzywara's perspective through accounts of the theologian's dialogues with leading intellectuals of the time. He was a "lover of the arts," a literary artist and·something of a poet himself, who explored culture, music, art, and fiction as well as religious themes. O'Meara focuses attention here on the Jesuit's conversations with prominent theologians and philosophers. The sampling (Karl Barth, Paul Tillich, Leo Baeck, Edith Stein, Martin Heidegger, Hans Urs von Balthasar, and Karl Rahner) indicates the breadth and ecumenical thrust of his conversations with Protestant, Jewish, and secular thinkers, as well as fellow Catholics. The final chapter looks at his thoughts on Church, spirituality, and liturgy. Przywara saw himself as a pastoral theologian even though his conceptions remained rather abstract and theoretical. Still, his metaphysical theology was shaped and inspired by Ignatian spirituality. He wrote two lengthy and influential studies of the Spiritual Exercises. By the end, O'Meara gives a well-drawn, complex, and fascinating sketch of an "analyst of the moment." But the sketch is also incomplete--suggestive of a richness and contour too multifaceted to capture in a 187-page narrative, and raising a question about what relevance Przywara's thought might have for us today. The complexity of the...