The Modern Predicament by H. J. Paton (review)

3!)8 BOOK REVIE"\VS rational establishment of an order superior to nature means that, ". . . through the divine generosity man can therein be rendered capable of knowing God in His essence." (p. 113) This is not to suggest that M. Maritain understands that the natural desire is innate, nor that a desire cannot be at once elicited and necessary. Neither is it to deny that this natural desire is a very effective suasio; an argument of probability having its own urgency. All this is not to place merely cerebral strictures on M. Maritain's vital insights into man's natural pathways to God. It is only to express a caution that these be not overstated. Most of them are heavily weighted towards intuitionism and need the perspective which a strictly philosophical and theological evaluation can impose. It remains true they are " approaches " and not all " proofs "; God initiates them as He will and they are not to be bent to fit our mental categorizing of them. All of them are far removed from genuine "religious" experience; and, needless to say, they are remote from that contact with the living God which is possible only in the luminosity of Faith and in the activity of Grace. This book is Volume One of a series entitled "World Perspectives," edited by Ruth Nanda Anshen. Its purpose is to recapture the authority of truth and human totality " on the basis of the sacredness of each human person and respect for the plurality of cultures." St. Thomas, who took truth where he found it, would approve. Dominican House of Studies Washington, D. C. WILLIAM J. HILL, 0. P. The Modern Predicament. By H. J. PATON. New York: Macmillan, 1955. Pp. 405 with index. $5.~5. The phrase thrust upon the reader by this book is "a point of view." For the modern predicament is brought into focus by the author's examination of the opposition between the points of view of science and of religion, an opposition whose acuteness makes modern a much older difficulty. Each, science and religion, is led to an impasse, surmountable only by an acceptance of its diametrical opposite: science to a practical impasse, the scientific inadmissibility of religious and moral truths necessary for practical life; religion, to a theoretical impasse, the speculative indefensibility of tenets necessary to religion's rationality. The line of reconciliation, in turn, becomes rather a matter of recognizing that opposite points of view need not be taken for real contradiction, but simply for a different perspective upon reality. Professor Paton's main concern, in fact, is to make religion's BOOK REVIEWS point of view less " speculative " and consequently less of an impasse to that of science. But the problem demands of the reader that he determine the perspective of the author himself. Professedly it is philosophical, directed towards the philosophy of religion, for the book is the finished product of the Gifford Lectures of Hl50-l951, a series endowed as a study of "natural theology." While this latter is not to be understood in any scholastic sense, the definition of perspective remains philosophical. The intent of this philosophical study is to determine the principles that make religion possible; the grounds necessary to it that it be religion and not something else; and in so doing to set out some philosophical defense of religion. But there is no such thing as an indeterminate " philosophical " viewpoint; there are the viewpoints of diverse philosophies, each characterized by its premisses, its roots, and, unfailingly, by its assumptions. With Professor Paton, the nature of religion, the condition of its survival, its extrication from the modern predicament, are determined by his own philosophical perspective. His philosophy is suspected by the reader in the preliminary examinations of possible grounds for religion, especially of any speculative effort towards super-empirical truth, and particularly of St. Thomas' quinque viae. The positive exposition of the author's own mind leaves no doubt; this is the Transcendental-philosophie of Immanuel Kant rephrased, and refurbished with allusions to contemporary trends of thought. With his preceptol ', Professor Paton assumes the object of human knowledge to be immanent; its scope limited to the empirical order; its real content no...