Savoir et Pouvoir. Philosophie thomiste et politique cléricale au XXXe siècle by Pierre Thibault (review)

784 BOOK REVIEWS listing of the relevant literature and his calm, factual point of view, puts the reader deeply in his debt. Byzantinisckes lnstitu-e Sckeyern, Germany BoNIFATIUs KoTTER, 0. S. B. Savoir et Pouvoir. Philosophie thomiste et politique clbicale au XXXe siecle. By PIERRE TamAULT. Quebec: Les Presses de l'Universite Laval, 197~. $10.00. The thesis of this book is simple: theories of knowledge are theories of power. Pierre Thibault originally presented and defended this work as a thesis at the Sorbonne early in 1970. It was then entitled L' origine et le sens de la restauration du thom·isme au XIXe siecle and had been directed by Henri Gouhier. He was awarded the title, docteur de l'Universite de Pan-is. M. Emile Poulat, who wrote the Preface to this volume, had sat on the jury. It is an exciting book: it will excite some to fear, resentment, even fury; it will excite others to further research. The author applies the sociology of knowledge to a philosophical development in the 19th century. The great discovery of the sociology of knowledge was that thought, the content of the mind and its structure, are socially grounded, are reflections of the social and political conditions of the thinker's world. While in biblical studies this principal has been accepted and is referred to as Formgeschchte (with its interest in the Sitz im Leben), philosophers and theologians have in general overlooked this. The author tries to show that various philosophical trends in Catholicism have built into them certain social and political consequences and that the struggle of the papacy to affirm neo-thomism was not only a wrestling in the intellectual order but also an affirmation of a particular view of society over against the social and political implications of the competing philosophies. It is not a these de recherche (in the French sense); it does not offer new documentary evidence; indeed, the author leans heavily on the work of Hocedez, Aubert, Foucher, Pelzer, Dezza, Masnovo, Walz (spelled "Waltz" in the text), Van Riet, T'Serclaes, Des Houx, Daniel-Rops, Rougier, Lagarde, Arquilliere, Gilson, etcetera. However, he interprets the evidence in such a way that it opens up new perspectives on the whole history of thomism, not only in the 19th century but in the 13th as well. In the Avant-Propos the author tells us that his book is a settling of accounts. " But one settles an account to the past only by rendering an account " ("On ne regie son compte au passe qu'en rendant compte,'' p. xxiii). In a sense, then, the work is a therapeutic exercise. BOOK REVIEWS 786 According to Thibault, the restoration of thomism in the 19th century is the restoration of an ideology. Thomism (with its conception of the world in general, its naturalism, its theory of ideas-especially that!-and its theory of indirect power (Taparelli d'Azeglio and Leo XIII) was precisely the savoir the Church (the clergy, especially the Pope) required to legitimatize its strategy, namely, to maximize priestly power (pouxiors) in the new order: " le savoir y est discours de legitimation." (p. xxvi} The epistemologies of traditionalism (Louis de Bonald) and ontologism (of Kantian variety, Rosmini; of Malebranchian-Hegelian variety, Gioberti ) were unsuitable for the Church's purpose: traditionalism because of its irrationalism; ontologism because of it subjectivism. In France, traditionalism, while it supported Rome's ultramontane claims and seemed to be an antidote to Cartesian skepticism, " upset the bases of Christian polemics, of religion itself, and of all certitude" (Chaste!, quoted on p. 55). Ventura presented St. Thomas as a traditionalist. He denied any natural metaphysics in the name of a thomism that required the absolute subordination of reason to faith. The damage done by traditionalism was great. However, in its polemic with eclecticism (Cousin), it was the unconscious promoter of ecclesiastical thomism (the thesis of Michelet and Foucher adopted by Thibault, see pp. 8-5) . In Italy, ontologism was the Christian platonism or augustinianism of the 19th century. Kleutgen, the German-Roman thomist, said that ontologism attributes to the natural power of reason a knowledge which belongs to the supernatural order. The divine essence could be grasped directly...