Love and Understanding by John M. McDermott, S.J. (review)

BOOK REVIEWS 655 vides us with a balanced vision of the Church and its m1ss10n to the world in a chapter significantly titled, "The Church as Counter-Culture." One spontaneously compares this with the vision presented in the Preface to Gaudium et Spes. It does not measure up to that of the pastoral constitution , and yet it has its own value, if only because at the moment the synthetic vision is all-important. The chapter on "The Reign of God" deserves special mention too. Violence and civil disobedience are among the specific issues to which he devotes space. Mott's book inevitably raises the issue of an appropriate method for an enterprise such as his. To adopt a phrase from James M. Gustafson, we need the methodical self-consciousness to press the vital questions. Only when we press these questions do the full riches of Scripture come to light. At the same time, it is in the encounter with God's word that our self-awareness grows and the questions emerge. So it is necessary to explicitate as fully as possible the self-awareness that God's word aims at forming within us. We are in search of a Christian anthropology that is not simply developed in the light of the questions that concern the systematic theologian. Further it must go beyond the overt commands and guidance of Scripture to the underlying spirit and style of Christian life in community. The author has given us a worthwhile book that covers much important ground in a balanced way. The book is well-written, the matter welldivided and lucidly presented. I have some reservations, however, about the use of consequentialist terminology and arguments. Mott quotes with approval from Paul Ramsey to the effect that, whereas love creates community, enlightened selfinterest can do no more than preserve it. Can it do so much' VINCENT HUNT Holy Cross College Mosgiel, New Zealand Love and Understanding. By JOHN M. McDERMOTT, S.J. Analecta Gregoriana, Vol. 229; Series Facultatis Theologiae: Sectio B, n. 77. Rome: Universita Gregoriana Editrice, 1983. This work, a revision of the author's doctoral dissertation, presents a detailed and even convoluted study of the intellectual pilgrimage of Pierre Rousselot, a French Jesuit whose half-dozen years on the theological faculty of the Institut Catholique in Paris were decisive for the transformation of Catholic systematic theology. With the possible exception 656 BOOK REVIEWS of his Jesuit contemporary, Joseph Marechal, Rousselot was more than any other thinker of his time responsible for the ultimate abandonment of the static and nominalist version of Thomism in which the resolutely unimaginative manualists of the nineteenth century had cabined and confined the speculative genius of St. Thomas. Out of the astonishingly venturesome speculation of Rousselot emerged the nouvelle theologie best exemplified by de Lubac, the theological aesthetics of which von Balthasar is the eloquent spokesman, and much of the impetus toward the transcendental theology exemplified by the early Karl Rahner. But Rousselot cannot be identified with any of these movements; his death in one of the unnumbered hecatombs of the Great War left his work unfinished, but it was already marked by a quest for systematic rigor which even then had left Marechal behind and which the transcendental Thomists have been unable to accommodate. Perhaps closest and most responsive to Rousselot's Christocentric insight is that of de Lubac who, schooled in the Augustinian spirituality of the early middle ages, could not accept its ' Thomist ' rationalization, whereby grace became an accident and Christ a propter peccatum coda to creation. With Rousselot's untimely death and, a generation later, the disavowal of the nouvelle theologie by Humani generis, the Thomist enterprise in theology would henceforth be dominated by Marechal, whom Rousselot saw to have missed the Thomist theological problem, that of accounting for the radical immanent unity of the created order. This problem, unresolved also within the essentialist universe of Aristotle and unrecognized by the bulk of Thomist scholarship even today, Rousselot first approached by way of the postulate of a "primordial Adam;" by 1914, the year before he died, this original insight had deepened, to become a theology of creation in Christ. With the passing of Rousselot, however...