The Eternal Quest by William R. O’Connor (review)

BOOK REVIEWS The Eternal Quest. By WILLIAM R. O'CONNOR. New York: Longmans, Green, 1947. Pp. 290, with index. $4.00. Father O'Connor, professor of dogmatic theology at St. Joseph's Seminary , Dunwoodie, gives us in the present volume" the outgrowth of an article written in 1940 for The New Scholasticism and of a doctoral dissertation submitted to Fordham University in 1943." "Students of St. Thomas," he says (p. 1), "are aware of the problem he has bequeathed to his successors in his celebrated doctrine of a natural desire for the vision of God. Men of the caliber ()f Cajetan and Suarez in the past and of Billot in the present have found this teaching difficult and even ambiguous. This is about the only point of agreement among the commentators when they undertake to explain what St. Thomas meant by this enigmatic desire." He says later: "We cannot overlook the fact that the commentators and exegetes are not in agreement, no matter how confidently some of them may undertake to speak for St. Thomas on this question. Is it possible that the difficulty lies not with St. Thomas but with his interpreters? Could they have brought to this problem certain preoccupations and conceptions of their own which were foreign to the mind of St. Thomas and which, accordingly, serve only to confuse the issue? If this is the case, the commentators have to a large extent created their own problem, a problem that ought to be on the way to a solution if these foreign elements can be detected and removed. The main thing is to see the issue as St. Thomas himself saw it, free from the prejudicial influences of later years" (p. 30) . Following Father Brisbois, S. J., whose ¢icle appeared in 1936 in the Nouvelle Revue Theologique, the author sums up into four groups all the explanations given so far on St. Thomas' "desire for God." " These groups follow the four. great commentators, Banez, Cajetan, Soto, and Sylvester of Ferrara. . .. These four have set the pattern, as it were, for all subsequent interpretations. Allowing for certain variations in expression and detail, no major departures from their views are discernible from their day to the present" (p. 25). As the author remarks: "Surely all four (main interpretations) cannot be equally right. Is any of them the correct interpretation? There is always the possibility that the difficulty lies not with St. Thomas but with his interpreters" (p. 71). Banez and Cajetan, in fact, "are mainly preoccupied with safeguarding the transcendence of the supernatural" (p. 26 if.). "This preoccupation with the NATURAL VERSUS SUPERNATURAL opposition certainly underlies the interpretation of Cajetan and Banez "(p. 71; cf. pp. 30,38). It might seem strange that every preoccupation should be misleading or, ~07 ~08 BOOK REVIEWS at least, suspicious. When Leo XIII was urging Catholic bishops to restore the golden wisdom of St. Thomas, and to spread it as far as they could for the refutation of errors that were gaining ground, because the Angelic Doctor not only had vanquished all errors of ancient times but supplies also an armory of weapons which brings us certain victory in the conflict with falsehoods ever springing up in the course of years (the En:cyclical Aetemi Patris), he certainly was not partaking of Father O'Connor's pessimistic view. Were we ourselves to partake of it, we should declare misleading or suspicious his own new essay because the preoccupation that "the teaching of St. Thomas has become encrusted with the ideas and terminology of commentators and interpreters of later ages" (p. I), which undoubtedly and strongly inclined the latter to read into St. Thomas their own viewpoints and conceptions (p. 2), underlies, without a doubt, his present effort. Further, if Banez and Cajetan II.re to be rejected on the ground th.at they were preoccupied, why does the author depart from Soto and from Sylvester of Ferrara who were not under any preoccupation? It is because of the influence that Scotus, he says, exercised on them. This influence of Scotus is not confined to terminology as far as the first interpreter is concerned; Soto depends on Scotus in several doctrinal points and...