Images for Self Recognition: The Christian as Player, Sufferer, and Vandal by David Baily Harned (review)

158 onstration. A reading of 11 Po.~terior Analytics, chapter 12, reveals the creative use Aristotle and St. Thomas, in his commentary on the Aristotelian text, make of demonstration from effect to cause. This kind of a posteriori demonstration is heavily used in natural science. In summary, Fr. Kane is to be thanked for providing undergraduate teachers with a good basic text in traditional logic which can easily be used to provide college students with a well founded introduction to logic. The text does have some shortcomings. To those already mentioned in this review should be added the regret that a new edition under a new publisher yields neither updated examples nor any more extensive textual revision than two error corrections. However, in a day when most contemporary texts approach undergraduate logic from the nontraditional point of view, this text presents a viable alternative. The format is flexible and openended , leaving the teacher much freedom for personal adaptation in his or her own course. This may well be the book's greatest asset. This reviewer would seriously consider such a text for an undergraduate course, and could recommend the text to others for similar consideration. The Catholic University of America Washington, D. C. LAURA L. LANDEN, 0.P. Images for Self Recognition: The Christian as Player, Sufferer, and Vandal. By DAVID BAILY HARNED. New York: The Seabury Press, 1977. Pp. 224. $10.95. In his introductory remarks Harned makes some interesting generalizations about what he conceives the theological task to be. These preliminary observations are important for an understanding of what Harned's extremely suggestive work is all about. Theology has a single object: the self-disclosure of the triune God as it is confessed by faith and expressed in the stories and imagery of the Bible. Theology is, furthermore, a practical endeavor and, as such, cannot be divorced from ethics. Thirdly, true to his first two premises, Harned sees theology as a unique discipline among the sciences in that "persons are themselves called into question by their cognitive object instead of finding themselves free to ask of it whatever questions they devise" (p. xi). Next, theology is designed for the nurture of persons and, almost as a corollary, it is as much an art as it is a science since it deals with the life of the imagination. This last point is crucial for Harned's methodolo<:!"y. He insists (following the suggestive work of Austin Farrer) that the Bible is irreducibly imagistic and hence any theological investiga- }30QKi.REVIEWS tion that is genuinely scientific is " one that recognizes the aesthetic component of a self-disclosure in which substance and form cannot be disjoined " (p. xiii) . Harned calls his work a " natural theology," but the reader must understand that his description does not mean foundational theology or theodicy. Natural theology, for Harned, accepts the a priori of the Gospel but is " natural " in the sense that its object is not an application of God's self-disclosure but rather concerns itself with " the ordinary experience and self-understanding of people in the light of that revelation" (p. xiii). Natural theology in that sense is "not so much a questioning but a response to being questioned" (p. xv). It should be clear from these preliminary remarks that Harned is finnly in that tradition that sees theology as being fides quaerens intellectum, that his orientation is strongly biblical, and exhibits a major preoccupation with the current interest in image, metaphor, story, and narrative. In that sense his work is not unlike the studies in religion done by Michael Novak or the creative theologizing of John Dunne, but it seems to this reviewer that his work is closest both in theological method and in temperament to that being done by Stanley Hauerwas in the field of ethics. Serious background reading for Harned's work would have to include, beyond the classical theological sources, such " boundary " thinkers as Walter Ong and William Lynch, as well as philosophical phenomenologists such as Maurice MerleauPonty . At the heart of this book is the argument that three "master images", i.e. player, sufferer, and vandal, derived from our common social world, are important both in relation to the Christian tradition and in ordinary experience . For purposes of explanation we might take the image of vandal. A deep understanding of the image of the vandal, an image that might puzzle the theological reader at first glance, helps us to understand one great mystery of our common life: the human capacity for motiveless evil; the deep urge in the human psyche to destroy or maim just " for the hell of it ". In the case of the vandal the human person is not the subject of multiform natural evils (as in the case of the sufferer) but the initiator of evil. The seemingly irrational evil or destruction causes severe disequilibrium in the human community (alas, we are all aware of this as an existential reality in our culture} . The vandal, then, undermines the basic trust which sustains the normal social acceptance of "playing fair". This master image of the vandal was, of course, laid bare in the brilliant discussion of capricious evil provided by Saint Augustine in Book II of the Confessions in the famous "pear tree " episode. The notion of the vandal, then, helps us to understand the self at its weakest, that is, in the state in which the person is most patently in need of, at the very least, a humanizing therapy. BOOK .llEVIEWS 155 Other chapters pursue· similar analyses of the sufferer and the player. In his summary chapter Harned uses the biblical figure of Adam to tie the image2 together. The " master images " are condensed and crystalized as one reads the story of Adam, who falls through capricious evil. The figure of this fallen Adam stands in dialectical relation to the Christ who becomes Adam as sufferer and player. The biblical image, then, allows us to experience the human images of vandal, sufferer, and player in their deepest, and most salvific, fashion. This book is not an easy one to read. It demands the close attention of the reader because of the density of the language and the closeness of the argument, and because of the wide-ranging learning that the author brings to bear on his subject. Nonetheless, the attentive reader will be rewarded amply, not only because of the arresting insights in the work but also because the book provides a model that could be emulated with profit. Harned, beginning from a rather conservative theological base, has shown how it is possible to use the resources of contemporary culture without being either reductionistic or naively apologetic. As Vernon Ruland has observed about many works that try to " do theology and literature " or "theology and culture" (in his excellent 1975 publication Horizons of Criticism ), we often end up with plot summaries and pious homilies. Harned is free of such charges. He makes ample use of modern literature, both fictional and critical (in the section on the vandal Harned uses William Golding's fiction and W. H. Auden's criticism to good purpose), with full respect for the integrity of literary texts and an evident sensitivity to the autonomy of the critical and literary disciplines. He is a close reader of literature and never " forces" the text for his own argument. He is, in short, secure in his theology while open to the latent riches of the human imagination. It is a compliment to any writer to say that his work is unfinished if the quality of the work means, not that it is incomplete, but that it opens new possibilities of speculation for the reader. What engaged my attention was thinking about other " master images " that would be suggestive not only for self-disclosure but for enlarging our understanding of the religious situation . One image that comes immediately to mind is that of the pilgrim. Pilgrimage has both a corporate character (Christians were early on described as People of the way; we describe our corporate character as a " Pilgrim Church ") and an individual one, as Western literature from the time of Dante and Chaucer down to the novels of the contemporary Catholic writer, Walker Percy, clearly shows. Furthermore, the pilgrim-as opposed, say, to the wanderer-travels purposefully towards a definite goal and, in the Christian dispensation, the goal is an eschatological one. The goal is not separated from the pilgrimage itself. When Saint Thomas Aqu.inas called the Eucharist the esca viatorum, he expressed the profound 156 BOOK IU!:VIEWS notion that the Eucharist nourishes in via while· pointing to the messianic banquet which is the goal of. the pilgrimage itself. The Christian pilgrimage , in turn, is judged and illumined .by the pilgrim way of Christ whose Gospel journey moves purposefully to Calvary and Beyond. Images for Self Recognition enlarges on two earlier works of Harned (Grace and Common Life in 1971 and Faith and Virtue in 1973) which explore in depth some of the ideas which are taken up and advanced in this work. Together they make up a striking contribution as Professor Harned continues to show the nova et vetera of the theological enterprise. The Florida State Univerttity Tallahassee, Florida LAWRENCE s. CUNNINGHAM Naming, Necessity and Natural Kinds. Edited by STEPHEN SCHWARTZ. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977. Pp. Q77; $5.95. Paperback. The traditional theory of references holds that meaning is given to terms by specifying a conjunction of properties. Any item possessing all of the specified properties is considered to be an object of that species or natural kind, and the meaning of terms is considered to be analytic to the concept of the term. When this theory is applied to proper names, it holds that each proper name refers to a set of descriptions and the item which satisfies all of the descriptions is the referent of the proper name. And this theory also holds that identities obtaining between referents such as the identity " Cicero is Tully " or " Hesperus is Phosphorus " are contingent identities. This theory has been rejected by a group of philosophers who propose a totally different account of reference. They theorize that names have no intension, that names defining naturally occurring species (natural kinds) are not determined in their meaning by intension, and that reference is determined by a causal chain rather than by description. Stephen Schwartz has collected a number of articles by these theorists which criticize various aspects of the traditional theory of reference, and has created a work that should prove to be of importance to natural law theory. This new theory is worthy of serious attention, and I would like to consider some of its points here. Keith Donnellan's article, "Reference and Definite Description," makes a major contribution to the new theory of reference by noting that reference can occur when description does not take place, or when .it is mistaken. This is so because descriptions can be either referential or attributive. Referential descriptions enable the audience to pick out whatever is being ...