The Openness of Being by Eric L. Mascall (review)

BOOK REVIEWS 587 The Openness of Being. The Gifford Lectures in the University of Edinburgh 1970-71. By ERIC L. MASCALL. London: Darton, Longman & Todd, 1971. Pp. ~78. £8.50. The Anglican theologian Eric Mascall in bringing his gentle scholarship to the 1970-71 series of the Gifford Lectures furthers an already prestigiou~ series-Alfred Whitehead's Process and Reality, for example, originated as the Gifford Lectures of 19~9. Stating that " unnecessary verbosity is at best inconsiderate and at worse immoral," (p. 91) the author manages to avoid both rudeness and sin, while ranging with wit and insight, and completely without obfuscation and mystification, over rather a complete spectrum of what has constituted natural theology discussion over the past few decades. Clearly, a good deal of his own reading comes to the fore in the process, and indeed the bibliographical character of the Lectures is very pronounced. The procedure is largely one of allowing the various arguments and points of view to sound and resonate for themselves in a markedly dispassionate climate that makes for enlightened discourse. It does not preclude the author testing the arguments at their weakest points and appending his own (usually alternative) viewpoints. Most of these, it is true, have been expressed in the author's earlier publications, though they are here newly nuanced at several strategic points. What dominates throughout is Fr. Mascall's epistemological stance of robust Realism. This renders him understandably impatient with the metatheological concerns of much of Anglo-Saxon theology whose fixation on language has indeed produced a paralysis of sorts. It is no surprise then to find him looking with sympathy on the " transformational generative grammar " of Noam Chomsky which-against the claims of logical empiricists and ordinary language analysts--offers some hope for anchoring language in metaphysics rather than vice versa. Nevertheless, the question as to how thought and language do inter-relate remains an open and vexing one for theology, and the feeling persists that Fr. Mascall is disposed to separate them a bit too radically: "... the truths themselves are something other than our assertions of them, and are not in themselves linguistic at all." (p. ~5) If one means truth in things this affords no problem, but formally speaking truth is in the judgmental act of mind, and here the plot thickens. A footnote from J. A. Baker to the extent that "truth does not come to men clothed in words, it comes to them as words " is much to the point in serving to preclude the oft-entertained notion that formal truth somehow or other lies behind and beneath language as having a non-linguistic reality of its own. To think is not merely to acquire language (as Leslie Dewart boldly maintains in his Foundations of Belief, e. g., p. 1~6), at the same time language is not a mere apprendage to thought for the sole sake of communication. Heidegger's aesthetic, almost mystical, notion of Being (Sein) "coming to pass" in Dasein as primal 538 BOOK REVIEWS languages needs a lot more hard-headed verification than his disciples have been able to offer. But the mind is indigeneously dictive; what it knows it necessarily brings to expression (which is not to say the knowing is the interior speaking or conceiving) , and the articulation is, in some primal sense at least, language. There are, of course, further problems: theological language is readily diversified as mythological, symbolic, or analogical, and the truth-bearing capacity is not identical in each case; the distinction between analytic and synthetic judgments (in Hume's sense) implies not only distinct kinds of truth but distinct meaning in language too. At any rate, I for one, can only feel that a satisfactory theological explorative act into the problem of language is yet to come. This same Realism means that the review of the " ontological argument " in the light of current attempts to rehabilitate it, notably that of Charles Hartshorne, is cautious at the very least. Fr. Mascall seems intrigued with the approach of M. J. A. O'Connor who suggests that Anselm understood God as really existing within the mind as well as without it. It is difficult to see how this...