L’Homme et Ses Problèmes dans la Lumière du Christ by René Latourelle (review)

292 BOOK REVIEWS L'Homme et Ses Problemes dans la Lumiere du Ghl'ist. By RENE LATOURELLE. Montreal: Bellarmine, 1981. Pp. 386. $12.00. In reviewing Latourelle's book, I first will briefly summarize its contents ; then I will offer several positive and negative reactions. I realize that in my brief summary I cannot do justice to all that Latourelle has written. This work could be characterized as a Christian (more precisely a Christo-centric) anthropology with an apologetic intent and is meant to complement the 1978 work, L'acc~s a Jesus par leis Evangiles, which in dealing with the origins of Christianity is a first apologetic step in establishing the credibility of Christianity. However, this latter work, says the author, "... must be completed by a hermeneutic of man himself. For Jesus is not only an irruption of God into the history of man; he is an irruption which reveals man to himself, deciphers, interprets and transfigures him. Man finds meaning only in Christ. Only Christ can accoJTuplish the exegesis of man and his problems. . . . The present work attempts to enlighten this second aspect of the credibility of Christianity " (p. 7). It deals with the question of whether or not Jesus and his message respond to the radical question of the meaning of human existence. Latourelle wishes, therefore, to ground this second apologetic step solidly in man himself, for man is first of all a question about himself and the ultimate meaning of his life. He can no more escape this question than he can escape himself. He cannot escape the questions of who he is, where he is going, why he exists. As Vatican II indicated, people today are looking for a response to the enigmas which deeply trouble them such as: what is man, the meaning and purpose of life, sin, the origin and purpose of suffering, the way to true happiness, death, judgment and retribution after death' Finally, what is the ultimate and ineffable mystery which surrounds us, from which we draw our origin and to which we are drawn? Only Christ can answer these questions. Only he can provide meaning by revealing to man his vocation as son called by grace to the life and glory of God and by shedding light on the concrete problems of human existence. In him who is pure light man discovers his ultimate truth (pp. 7-9). Having established his purpose and his correlative anthropocentricChristocentric methodology or approach. Latourelle moves on in his first chapter to depict the situation of contemporary man as one which constitutes an unexpected opportunity for an encounter and dialogue with Christ. He classifies contemporary man according to eleven types, e.g. a religious or indifferent man, the man of leisure, technological man, the organization man, unidimensional man, consumer man. And he concludes that man today more than ever before is fixated upon himself, experi- BOOK REVIEWS 293 ences hi.Inself as being out of order, is a slave of his own creations and lacks meaning in the midst of a broken world for which he himself is responsible (p. 16). But this situation does not make man a poor candidate for the Gospel. On the contrary, the crises of today which produce protest, revoltl frustration, unrest and anxiety can become " the points of insertion . . . for the Gospel and can constitute the unexpected opportunity for an encounter and dialogue with Christ. . . . Man's awareness of his deformed image can be the occasion for him to :find again his authentic and true image in Jesus Christ" (p. 17). In a world which lacks meaning, Christ appears as the mediator of meaning, as the exegesis of man and his problems, as so many Christian thinkers have shown (Pascal, Blonde!, Guardini, Teilhard de Chardin, Rahner, Marcel, Von Balthasar, Legaut, Zundel, Solzhenitsyn). Each of these (discussed briefly) shows that man can be neither understood nor fully realized outside of Christ and the Gospel. He is an enigma to himself which only Christ can decipher (p. 26). Latourelle then points out that this sensitivity to man, his problems, and his condition is as old as Christianity itself , which is a religion concerned with the salvation of man. But never before...