David Burrell

_FAITH AND FREEDOM_ In this book, David Burrell, one of the foremost philosophical theologians in the English-speaking world, presents the culmination of his work on creation and human freedom. Drawing on his philosophical and theological insights from the last twenty years, he develops an integrated argument with far-reaching consequences for capitalist cultures. Engaging with the Islamic, Judaic and Christian traditions, and with modern and pre-modern systems of thought, Burrell dismantles the ‘libertarian’ approach to freedom that dominates Western politics and economics, proposing that alongside freedom of choice we need freedom of consent. The author’s rigorous approach, wry humor and generous spirit are evident throughout.

First published 30 years ago and long out of print, _Aquinas: God and Action_ appears here for the first time in paperback. This classic volume by eminent philosopher and theologian David Burrell argues that Aquinas’s is not the god of Greek metaphysics, but a god of both being and activity. Aquinas’s plan in the _Summa Theologiae_, according to Burrell, is to instruct humans how to find eternal happiness through acts of knowing and loving. Featuring a new foreword by the author, this edition will be welcomed by philosophers and theologians alike.

_FAITH AND FREEDOM_ In this book, David Burrell, one of the foremost philosophical theologians in the English-speaking world, presents the culmination of his work on creation and human freedom. Drawing on his philosophical and theological insights from the last twenty years, he develops an integrated argument with far-reaching consequences for capitalist cultures. Engaging with the Islamic, Judaic and Christian traditions, and with modern and pre-modern systems of thought, Burrell dismantles the ‘libertarian’ approach to freedom that dominates Western politics and economics, proposing that alongside freedom of choice we need freedom of consent. The author’s rigorous approach, wry humor and generous spirit are evident throughout.

_FAITH AND FREEDOM_ In this book, David Burrell, one of the foremost philosophical theologians in the English-speaking world, presents the culmination of his work on creation and human freedom. Drawing on his philosophical and theological insights from the last twenty years, he develops an integrated argument with far-reaching consequences for capitalist cultures. Engaging with the Islamic, Judaic and Christian traditions, and with modern and pre-modern systems of thought, Burrell dismantles the ‘libertarian’ approach to freedom that dominates Western politics and economics, proposing that alongside freedom of choice we need freedom of consent. The author’s rigorous approach, wry humor and generous spirit are evident throughout.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:484 BOOK REVIEWS faith. Yet faith-knowledge alone is insufficient to account for Jesus' extraordinary gifts as a teacher: for this we must appeal to a special charism along the lines of an infused knowledge. According to Torrell this knowledge is best understood by reference to Aquinas's mature teaching on prophecy: God equipped the prophets with an infused light (but not infused ideas) enabling them to communicate divine truths to others. Likewise, God conferred on Jesus an infused light akin to that of the prophets, but with this qualitative difference: in him the lumen is a permanent feature of his cognitive life (a habitus), while it is given to the prophets only intermittently (per modum actus). The foregoing i;ummary will have served its purpose if it has conveyed to the reader some sense of the very rich historical, philosophical, and theological reflections that comprise this volume. The editorial team of the Revue thomiste is to be commended for the high caliber of this and the other special publications it has produced in recent years: the 1992 commemorative volume on the theological achievement of M.-M. Labourdette; th~ 1993 centenary index ("tables generales 1893-1992"); the Gilson issue of 1994; and most recently an issue devoted to Thomas Aquinas and the onto-theo-logy debate (1995). This reviewer eagerly waits for more. Fordham University Bronx, New York GREGORY M. REICHBERG The Divine Initiative: Grace, World-Order, and Human Freedom in the Early Writings of Bernard Lonergan. By J. MICHAEL STEBBINS. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1995. Pp. xxii + 399. $65.00 (cloth). Aquinas insists that the creator's primary intent is the "order of the universe," and Bernard Lonergan's dissertation on "operating grace" in Aquinas's writings managed to move beyond the stalemated discussion of "sufficient" and "efficacious" grace precisely because he displayed how any discourse about grace had to be connected with larger theorems of the creator's operation in creation. What speaking of the divine action called "grace" requires is a set of metaphysical skills adequate to speaking of the "order of the universe" as created. A tall order, whose scope the published edition of his dissertation-Grace and Freedom-so understated that its implications have been missed by many philosophers and theologians fascinated with such questions. Stebbins's careful reconstruction of that text reminds us of its daunting scope. And part of the reason it can do so is that he illustrates both the method and conclusions of Grace and Freedom through a later text which Lonergan had composed (in Latin) for a course on grace offered from 1947 to 1960: De ente supernaturali (which will appear in volume 16 [Early Latin Theology] of the Collected Works of Bernard Lonergan, published by BOOK REVIEWS 485 University of Toronto Press). The significance of this collateral source is that it can profit from and respond to Henri de Lubac's epochal Surnaturel (1946). For those not familiar with Grace and Freedom, as well as some who thought they were, a list of Stebbins's chapters manages to convey the scope of Lonergan's achievement: 1. The Role of Understanding in Theological Speculation; 2. The Principal Instance of Supernatural Being: The Created Communication of the Divine Nature; 3. Thirteenth-Century Breakthrough (The "Theorem" of the Supernatural); 4. Supernatural Transformation of Human Activity; 5. Obediential Potency and the Natural Desire to See God; 6. Molinist and Bannezian Systems; 7. Theoretical Perspective on Divine Concourse; 8. Contingence, Sin and Divine Efficacy. As always, Lonergan must actively reflect on method while executing a theological inquiry, so Stebbins rightly begins with his insistence that such inquiry must be more than "just a networks of concepts; it is primarily an act of understanding" (xix)-Chapter 1. Then, following the expository order of De ente supematurali, he shows how Lonergan roots the supernatural in the theorems developed to speak of the natural: of creation itself. ("Theorem," as we shall see, is a favorite word of Lonergan's, intimating what it takes to move beyond our imaginations to a set of propositions able to articulate the metaphysical issues at stake.) Following the analogy of nature, we can see how the "two operations by which creatures...

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:BOOK REVIEWS Search for the Absent God: Tradition and Modernity in Religious Understanding. By WILLIAM J. HILL, O.P., MARY CATHERINE HILKERT, 0.P., ed. New York: Crossroad, 1992. Pp. 224. $27.50 (cloth). In presenting the fruit of a lifetime of exploration on the part of this theological craftsman of the highest merit, the editor has performed an unparalleled service. For William Hill is a clear and courageous thinker, and one whose selfless editorial duties have perhaps curtailed his own writing over the years. Yet these essays make up for that, and afford younger students of theology a starting point for their reflections beyond the fads of the moment, yet seizing the challenge of contemporary proposals. His grasp of classical and of modern idiom, together with his range of reading, make him a theologians' theologian par excellence. For with his classical mentors he is concerned with conceptual coherence, yet equally anxious to respond to the anthropological perspectives of contemporary theological inquiry. Briefly characterized, the work brings Thomas Aquinas into dialogue with Heidegger and with Whitehead, using each of the latter figures to challenge an earlier " Thomistic" synthesis of the thought of Thomas Aquinas, and highlight dimensions of his theology hitherto left quite implicit. This creative recovery of medieval thought begins with an established interpretation of Aquinas's metaphysical transformation of the neoplatonized Aristotle of Avicenna: his insistence that esse {existing ) precedes essence (or possibility). The identification of God as that One in whom essence and existing are identical sets the stage for Hill's explicitly theological treatment of free persons, by analogy with the " persons " of the divine triunity: " each divine person ' posits ' the others as over and against himself and thereby posits himself in his hypostatic identity. What all this bases itself upon is the understanding that the Christian revelation of freedom as radically constituting personhood enables it to function as a category which surmounts the Greek dichotomizing of reality into contingency and necessity " (117). If the identification of existing with essence in God confronts Heidegger's critique of " ontology," Hill's use of classical trinitarian thought to suggest a fruitful distinction in human creatures between nature and freedom allows him at once to correct the caricature of Aquinas proffered by process theologians as "classical theism," and 521 522 BOOK REVIEWS also to profit by their criticisms of the use of hellenistic categories like impassibility in divinity. "The key... lies in the mystery of freedom. Abstractly, freedom is a property of nature, but its exercise is the pre· rogative of person as the existential instantiation of nature. The person viewed ontologically (as subject of the act of existing) thus determines itself though its nature to be the sort of person it is, viewed psychologi· cally and historically" (127). Finite natures need to negotiate all sorts of causal influences in effecting such a determination of themselves; not so " an infinite nature whose freedom is transcendent." Yet when that One freely determines itself to be source and goal of all, and espe· cially of rational creatures (cf. Summa Theologiae 1.2 Prol.), then " that choice is one of willing to be constituted, personally and so relationally, and in this sense to be determined, by other free beings" (127). So the God who (in Aquinas' idiom) is not "really related" to the world in the sense of enduring (in Hill's words) "passive influx," nonetheless freely relates to intentional creatures in such a way as to be responsive to their freedom. So his response to Moltmann's conten· tion that God suffers " in his very deity " is an explicitly Christological one: "first, that God remains immutable and impassible in his own intrinsic godhead, so that his genuine love for creatures cannot entail suffering within divinity as such; but second, that God does choose to enter personally and relationally into the heart of humankind's suffering in his transcendentally free and loving response to it. God truly suffers... in and through his humanity which is one with the humanity of all men and women" (162). If this resolution sounds "classical," it is, both in its concern for conceptual coherence and for bringing out the radical implications of doctrines like that of Chalcedon...

In this collection, Stations on the Journey of Inquiry, David Burrell launches a revolutionary reinterpretation of how any inquiry proceeds, boldly critiquing presumptuous theories of knowledge, language, and ethics. While his later publications, Analogy and Philosophical Language (1973) and Aquinas: God and Action (1979), elucidate Aquinas's linguistic theology, these early writings show what often escapes articulation: how one comes to understanding and "takes" a judgment. Although Aquinas serves as an axial figure for Burrell's expansive corpus of scholarship spanning more than fifty years, this selection of essays presents other positions and counterpositions to whom his own philosophical theology is beholden: Plato, Aristotle, Cajetan, Kant, Peirce, Moore, Wittgenstein, Sellars, Weiss, Ross, McInerny, and Lonergan. With renewed interest in philosophy of language by postmodern thinkers as well as in the wake of Mulhall's Stanton Lectures on Wittgenstein and "Grammatical Thomism," the publication of these formative writings proves timely for the academy at large. Burrell invites us to reconsider not only the way in which we conduct an inquiry, but what it is we take language to be and how we take responsibility for what we say.

In Truthfulness and Tragedy Stanley Hauerwas provides an account of moral existence and ethical rationality that shows how Christian convictions operate, or should operate, to form and direct lives. In attempting to conceptualize the basis of Christian ethics in a manner that will render Christian convictions morally intelligible, the author casts fresh light on traditional theoretical issues and articulates the distinctive Christian response to contemporary concerns such as suicide, medical ethics, and child care. The first section of the book deals with methodological issues: the meaning and nature of practical reason, obligation claims, natural law, and self deception, and the affinity of story and ethics. It focuses on the relation of truthfulness and tragedy and the need for a story--a set of religious convictions or "grammar of theology"--that does justice to the tragic character of human existence. The second section addresses substantive issues: suicide, euthanasia, and the value of survival; the moral limits of population growth; the definition of "person" for medical reasons; and social involvement and Christian ethics. The overall theme is the need for a community in which truthfulness is a way of life. In the final section, devoted to the problem of how to care for retarded children, the implications of the author's ethical position are given concrete expression. He discusses the assumptions underlying the willingness to have children, criteria for humanness, medical ethics, and how truthful communities deal with suffering. In Truthfulness and Tragedy Stanley Hauerwas extends and clarifies the ethical position set forth in his earlier books Character and the Christian Life and Vision and Virtue. He is associate professor of theology at the University of Notre Dame. He was a senior fellow in Christian medical ethics at the Joseph and Rose Kennedy Institute for the Study of Reproduction and Bioethics, and taught medical ethics at the University of Texas medical branch in Galveston.