La foi philosophique chez Jaspers et saint Thomas d’Aquin by Bernard Welte (review)

570 BOOK REVIEWS The Life and Times of St. Ambrose, Oxford University Press, 1985, II, 509-510). It would have been better to omit St. Ambrose altogether than to categorize him misleadingly on incomplete information. These criticisms, however, touch the surface of the work, not the substance . Judged as a whole, this is an exceptional contribution to the proper understanding of freedom and is sure to become one of the standard references for future studies in this field. Certainly there will now be less excuse than ever for the omnipresent equivocation concerning, freedom. Especially important is the chapter explaining the Marxist use of " liberty " to signify " collective freedom " and nothing more, all other conceptions of freedom being rejected or ignored. This volume is so bulky that it may not attract the audience it should, and the sequel (Book III) promises to be just as large. Book I is short enough as it is, and in any case could not be easily condensed. But Book H could be abridged, and we hope the Institute has such a project planned after the appearance of Book HI. A condensation of the complete study of freedom in four to five hundred pages, in a paperback edition perhaps, would be far more useful to the college and university student than this impressive, but massive, presentation of the evidence. We look forward to the next volume on freedom and all future productions of the Institute. Dominican House of Studies, Washington, D. C. DAVID O'CONNlllLL, 0. P. La foi philosophique chez Jaspers et saint Thomas d'Aquin. By BERNAI!ID WELTE. Translation from the German by Marc Zemb. Paris and Bruges: Desdee De Brouwer, 1958. Pp. 9.l8~. 129 Belgian francs. This is a translation of a monograph originally published in the journal Symposion (voL H, Hl49) under the title: Der pkilosophische Glaube bei Karl Jaspers und die Moglichkeit seiner Deutung durck die Thomistiscke Philosophie. Although somewhat cumbersome, the German title is more informative since it brings out the tentative nature of this interpretation and the need to make an independent reading of Thomistic philosophy, instead of finding a strict correlate in St. Thomas himself. Welte chooses a neat problem, since one of the unusual features in Karl Jaspers is the fact that he allows for a certain kind of faith within philosophy itself, while at the same time defending the need for rational appraisal of arguments. He requires a factor of faith precisely because of his interpretation of the common existentialist theme of transcendence. Some existentialists wiU grant that we can engage in transcendence, but BOOK REVIEWS 571 their meaning for it is that we can move from the self into the world as a type of reality distinct from our own free reflections. But for Jaspers, the domain of immanence is very broad. It includes not only the world surrounding us but also our human reality itself, at least in so far as it is proportioned to the world. Both the self and the world belong in the realm of immanence, which is able to include them as its mutual poles. The immanental aspect of man extends far beyond his brute presence as a fact, a contingent thing that comes and goes. It also embraces his acts of knowing and doing, in the sense that they must adapt themselves to conditions in the visible world of objects in order to become successful operations. For Jaspers, then, transcendence is not characterized simply by surpassing human factuality but by reaching beyond the entire condition of immanence , inclusive of the everyday self and the world. But to engage in the act of transcending requires the use of more resources and other resources than our objective acts of knowing and making and doing can supply. For one thing, the term of the act of transcending is the nonobjective being of God. Who cannot be reduced to the status of a thing grasped by means of objective analyses. Hence when a man undertakes the search for transcendence, he must reveal another aspect of his reality, he must call upon some resources other than his ways of objective knowledge and practice. Jaspers concludes to the need for a nonobjectifying act...