Personalities and Powers by Robert E. Meagher (review)

BOOK REVIEWS 179 the Church, our Lady, suffering, childlike spirituality, emotional maturity, psychiatric aspects of maturity, and a sociological perspective of the crisis of Christianity. Some of them are written by internationally famous authors such as A. Pie, 0. P., B. Ahern, C. P., L. Beirnaert, S. J., and J. McKenzie, S. J. Nevertheless, one wonders why those articles were included in a book that promises to treat of current problems of religious life, while other critical areas of religious living were not discussed. Apart from three or four chapters that contain excellent material (and could have been read in the magazines in which they were first published), this book does not live up to the promise of its title or the blurb on the jacket. Aquinas Institute of Theology Dubuque, Iowa JoRDAN AuMANN, 0. P. Personalities and Powers. By RoBERT E. MEAGHER. New York: Herder and Herder, 1968. Pp. 142. $3.50. This book is aptly subtitled " a theology of personal becoming," which might more aptly have been prefaced by " an approach toward." For its contents and aim seem to be somewhat tentative and exploratory. At the end of his introduction, the author states: " Our project, then, will be to disclose the ways in which one might water himself down and to explore the chance, the limit, the possibility of man in an attempt to give it, or discover, its meaning. Throughout these reflections we will repeatedly confront three critical questions: Who am I? Who is my Lord? Which kingdom do I serve? What will emerge, it is hoped, is the realization that. each of these questions cannot be answered without answering the other two, that, in fact, they form a single inquiry into the meaning of the human limit. Personalities and powers and kingdoms all merge in the experience of human becoming, the experience of becoming a person, the experience of the infinite chance that is man, a chance that he, that I, am infinitely responsible to exploit. And if I am to ask who I am, I must. then be ready to serve a king and to further a kingdom; for man is nothing in himself." (pp. 30-31) A theology of man's becoming is still very much in development. Robert Meagher, a 1966 graduate of Notre Dame University and a doctoral student in philosophical theology at the University of Chicago Divinity School when the book appeared, clearly declares his complete commitment to modern philosophy as a preparation and basis for his reflections upon Christian revelation. He considers " the historicity of truth, the ambiguity of truth, and the personal uniqueness of truth " (p. 180 BOOK REVIEWS 22) to be its cardinal assumptions, and that Martin Heidegger is the "paradigmatic figure of modern philosophy in our century." (p. 84) Meagher contrasts classical and contemporary wisdom by proposing that Plato tried to ascend conceptually from the cave to contemplate eternal (non-historical truth) , while a Heideggerian project is a poetic ascent from the cave where " one creates values under historically conditioned (noneternal ) revelatory dispensations." (p. 85) Hegel is the great philosopher who really made possible the inquiry into the historicity of truth, and Heidegger has been the outstanding twentieth-century continuator of his thought. The author maintains that, while classical philosophy was capable of raising the most basic questions about the world and man, its belief that truth is eternal makes any answers to such questions quite meaningless to modern man. For instance, although he himself acknowledges the probative power of the aristotelian-thomistic arguments for God's existence, they are not meaningful for him because of their powerlessness to convince him of God's love. His fundamental philosophical stance, therefore, is that truth and value are derived from personal decisions and, consequently, that what is true and good for one person is not necessarily so for another. He takes up the actual argument of the book in this context of his understanding of and commitment to modern philosophy. For the purposes of that argument, he proposes that there are three standpoints on life: the decisional, the absolute, and the observational. These standpoints are different postures assumed by man in time and may vary during the course of...