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Book Reviews
An integrated Catholic worldview
HEART OF THE WORLD, CENTER OF THE CHURCH. By David L. Schindler (William B. Eerdmans
Publishing Company, 255 Jefferson Ave. S.E., Grand Rapids, Michigan 49503, 1996), 322 pp.
HB $37.50.
At the heart of the world and in the center of the Catholic Church lies
the trinitarian God who reveals himself as Love, as Being, and as Communio: “ . . .
all of created being finds its integrity finally in the divine communion of love revealed
by the trinitarian God in Jesus Christ, in and through his sacramental Church.” Dr.
Schindler’s engaging thesis that the world is the created image of God as communio,
the sharing of love in the communion of persons—a concept that informs the Eucharist,
the Trinity, the love between Christ and the Blessed Mother, and the relationship between
Christ and his Church—illuminates the structure of reality as the handiwork of the
God who is Love and whose stamp is everywhere. After exploring the full implications of
the fact of communio—God the Father “pouring out of himself into his Word, whom
he then receives back in the unity of the Holy Spirit” —Dr. Schindler then
applies the logic of love in its mutual giving and receiving, in its generous outpouring
and humble receptivity, to modern political, economic, and academic institutions. The
book’s penetrating, incisive criticism of many modern institutions as
“structures of sin” exposes the failure of politics, economics, and academe to
ground their methods and policies in the “civilization of love” that proceeds
from a communio ecclesiology.
For example, Dr. Schindler does not naively endorse the definition of
freedom in the Anglo-American tradition of liberalism which grants freedom of worship but
remains silent about God, which states “Congress shall make no law respecting an
establishment of religion” but remains indifferent to the content of religion—a
notion of liberty that logically leads to the privatization of religion and to
secularization as Dr. Schindler cogently argues in his statement that “secularism in
America is logically linked to the founding principles of America. . . .” In contrast
to the relativism that follows from the theory of freedom enshrined in liberalism is the
truth of communio, that, in John Paul II’s words, “there is no liberty without
the truth.”
Dr. Schindler offers this precise distinction: “The truth is not a
juridical thing which can be imposed; . . . It is first the person of Jesus Christ, as
revealer of the trinitarian God,” and “it is the way of this love precisely to
be free and to make free.” In other words, there is a higher order of freedom than
the mere separation of church and state that is often idealized as the epitome of humane
government. Falsely assuming a stance of neutrality, the state with its alleged
indifference to the content of religion subtly masks “the con game of liberalism,
which enables it, precisely without argument, to privilege its place in the public
order.” Thus American liberalism, which endorses pluralism, is not the ideal of a
freedom transformed with love which communio embodies, a trinitarian God whose plurality
never compromises his unity.
It is this kind of perceptive observation and critical power that
distinguishes Dr. Schindler’s thought. Ideologies of both the left and the right are
carefully scrutinized and objectively measured against the fullness of God’s love in
communio and the depth of Mary’s love of God in her fiat. Dr. Schindler challenges
the neoconservative assumption that democratic capitalism is an intrinsic good perfectly
compatible with the Gospel. He notes the tendency of capitalism to equate self-interest
with virtue and, echoing Centissimus Annus, warns that “the Pope’s recognition
of the ineliminability of self-interest (due to sin) is not synonymous with the judgment
that self-interest is thereby natural and good.” Dr. Schindler is also critical of
the neoconservative blindness to consumerism as a “structure of sin” that also
obstructs the civilization of love.
The emphasis on the work ethic, the spirit of enterprise, and human
resourcefulness that distinguish capitalism often result in a loss of a contemplative
vision of reality, a spiritual impoverishment, an absence of interiority, and a failure to
appreciate life as a gift. Democratic capitalism is not as innocent as it appears, for the
materialism and utilitarianism that it fosters contribute to the culture of death:
“Is it not precisely the loss of the sense of gift and receptivity, hence the loss of
a sense of the primacy of the contemplative-interior, that spawns the activism and
instrumentalism characteristic of the ‘culture of death’?” Communio
epitomizes the mystery of God’s giving and receiving and the abundant fruitfulness of
love’s generosity—not enlightened self-interest. Thus Dr. Schindler’s
Ockham’s razor cuts through the pretense, exaggeration, and sentimentality that often
disguise the hidden, tacit agendas of fashionable political and economic theories.
Dr. Schindler applies the same discerning acumen to his examination of
the modern university, an institution that also poses as rational, objective, and neutral
in its intellectual orientation and methodological procedures. However, Dr.
Schindler’s trenchant criticism of Descartes’ false notion of
objectivity—his radical separation of subject and object which leads to the view of
the body as a machine—unmasks the predetermined mechanistic worldview that is
inherent in Descartes’ formal method. “The Cartesian priority of method over
content thus involves at once a mechanizing of the meaning of objectivity and a setting
aside of subjectivity as irrelevant,” an orientation that also leads to the
separation of mind and body and a dualism of the intellect and will. Thus the integrity of
the person as body and soul is reduced to the view of man as a ghost in the machine.
Just as Descartes’ method commits him to a mechanistic worldview,
the Catholic college that models itself upon the secular university compromises its sense
of the fullness of the truth: “The sense of priority Fr. Hesburgh accords to the form
of the university in relation to Catholicism, in other words, already commits himself, as
a matter of principle, to a priority of a university that is liberal in character.”
In a communio worldview, however, as Dr. Schindler cogently illuminates, love and being
are convertible. The God who declares “I am who am” is also the incarnate God of
love. When the Word becomes Flesh, truth and love become interchangeable. The dualism of
the secular university, modeled upon the Cartesian dichotomy of subject and object, can
never approximate the oneness of truth and love epitomized by a Catholic university that
integrates the love of learning and the desire for God.
These are just a few examples of the erudition, profundity, and
originality of Dr. Schindler’s thought. His use of both philosophy and theology to
explore the riches of God’s created world and to expose the various “structures
of sin” devoid of love that have been institutionalized in the late twentieth century
reflects the very “liveliness” that he attributes to God’s trinitarian
life, a dynamism marked by “expectation, fulfillment, newness, surprise.” This
book makes fresh, amazing connections: love is the meaning of being; love has been given a
form in Christ; the meaning of love is found in Christology; Christology means trinitarian
theology; this form of love is expressed in all the main doctrines of the Church found in
the creeds; the Trinity, Mary, and the Church epitomize the nature of communio; a
civilization of love is one whose politics, economics, education, art, and families are
permeated by “a love that ‘vestiges-images’ the personal-divine love become
incarnate in Jesus through the fiat of Mary.” Dr. Schindler’s synthesizing
intelligence combines the light of reason and the illumination of faith to form an
integrated Catholic worldview that does not compromise the fullness of the truth in the
manner of the “structures of sin” erected by modern ideologies that offer only a
part of the whole.
Mitchell Kalpakgian, Ph.D.
Simpson College
Indianola, Iowa
Mary’s prayer
THE ROSARY: THE LITTLE SUMMA. By Robert Feeney (Aquinas Press, 207 Newhall Place S.W.,
Leesburg, Va. 22075, 1997), 142 pp. PB $11.45.
Men were saying in France in the thirteenth century that everything
material was evil. Something was needed to counter this heresy. St. Dominic preached
against it, but did not make much progress because the heretics threatened to burn down
the barns and homes of the people who joined the saint. Dominic knelt before the Blessed
Sacrament day and night seeking a solution. Tradition has it that Mary gave him the
Rosary, which from then on he preached fervently.
Robert Feeney in this book about the Rosary reminds us of its glory and
that the Rosary is Mary’s prayer.
In our turbulent days our Blessed Mother will help us, if we pray to
her. Pope John Paul II has said that the Rosary is his favorite prayer. Many saints tell
us this prayer will bring order to disorder. The Rosary is one of our most powerful
prayers against error.
By reflecting on the mysteries of the Rosary we reflect on the life of
Christ and Mary. The author writes, “The whole essence of the Rosary is quiet
thinking of the heart.” After telling about the Rosary, Feeney gives excellent
reflections on each mystery.
A woman wrote me the other day that most books now are too hard to read
for ordinary parishioners. They are for scholars. This book is not like that. This book is
for the people.
The writer tells also about the value of the Our Father and the Hail
Mary. It is a book for those who wish to have greater devotion to the Rosary and our
Blessed Mother.
Fr. Rawley Myers
Colorado Springs, Colo.
Not so dumb
THE QUIET LIGHT. (A Novel about Saint Thomas Aquinas). By Louis de Wohl (Ignatius Press,
P.O. Box 1339, Ft. Collins, Colo. 80522, 1996), 377 pp. PB $14.95.
When I began reading this novel I was impressed by the clever dialogue.
I thought this historical novel could easily be made into a play. Then I read that sixteen
of Louis de Wohl’s novels have been made into films. Mother Angelica would be helpful
if she could put such novels on EWTN. I recall that our Dominican Province used to do such
things through Blackfriars in the forties and fifties through off-Broadway plays.
Louis de Wohl has the whole life of St. Thomas Aquinas in this novel,
beginning with Thomas as a Benedictine Oblate and ending with his death in a Cistercian
monastery as he was trying to make his way to the Council of Lyons. Of course the life is
treated in an imaginative way. It is not pure history, but a consultation of authentic
sources in The Life of St. Thomas Aquinas by Kenelm Foster, O.P., indicates the solid
framework of de Wohl’s novel.
We see Thomas deciding to become a Dominican mendicant friar. His
family is horrified. They would accept his becoming abbot of Monte Cassino, but that he
become a begging friar was unthinkable to these aristocrats. They imprison him, and then
his brothers introduce a loose woman into his room, thinking thus to lead him from his
vocation. He rushes at her with a flaming brand, slams his door and makes a cross on the
door with the flaming brand.
Thomas joins the Dominicans and is mocked as a dumb-ox by his fellow
students. His teacher Albert the Great thunders from the lectern of the classroom:
“You call him the dumb-ox, but I tell you his bellowing will be heard one day from
the ends of the world.”
There follows an imaginary conversation between Albert and Thomas.
Albert says: “With Averroes the birth of Mohammedan philosophy was completed. It was
not an original philosophy. It was, to put it bluntly, a garbled and orientalized
Aristotelian philosophy, but it was a philosophy. And it contained enough Aristotelian
truth to carry oriental errors right into the heart and intellect of Christendom. Islam
had a weapon against the Christian faith, a weapon of such sharpness that it drove our own
philosophers to the terrible admission that there must be two truths . . . that of
revealed faith and that of philosophy.” Thomas replies that Averroes and even
Aristotle need to be corrected. Thomas says: “Not even Aristotle was always right. .
. . By the grace of God I believe; I have faith. There is much in my faith that surpasses
reason but nothing that contradicts it.”
As a background to this intellectual there is bloody strife between the
Emperor, Frederick II and the Pope. The Pope finally has to depose Frederick who is
portrayed as partly a Mohammedan, until his deathbed when he calls a Catholic priest.
Meanwhile the mendicant friars are attacked by some who seek their extinction. Before the
Cardinal judges St. Thomas, St. Bonaventure, St. Albert and Roger Bacon defend the
mendicants and win that battle.
St. Thomas, at the altar, has a vision of Jesus. Jesus says: “Well
have you written of me, Thomas. What reward will you have?” “Only yourself,
Lord,” Thomas replies. Thomas has been working on his Summa which will teach millions
about the Catholic faith. He is not able to finish it. He dies. God tells us: “Not
even a St. Thomas is indispensable.”
Vincent M. Reilly, O.P.
Summit, N.J.
A saint for today
SAINT EDMUND CAMPION: PRIEST AND MARTYR. By Evelyn Waugh (Sophia Institute Press, Box
5284, Manchester, NH 03108, 1996), 236 + xvi pp. PB $15.95.
Evelyn Waugh wrote this biography of Campion, the English Jesuit and
martyr, in 1935. Even Oxford University was preparing to celebrate the 50th anniversary of
Blessed Edmund’s beatification; it was the twentieth century; to find persecuted
Catholics one would have to go to Mexico.
Waugh, a novelist and satirical observer of British society, re-worked
a 19th-century study of Campion into an award-winning book that has remained a minor
classic. Now Sophia Institute Press has published a handsome edition, durably bound, with
readable type and a useful chronology.
Campion is a saint that young Catholics today should get to know. The
richness of the tapestry that Waugh weaves, however—the historical allusions, the
veddy British writing and some antiquated vocabulary—would discourage the average
teenage reader. This is a shame, since parts of the book are action-packed. Teachers could
explain the basic facts about Tudor England and assign excerpts.
The book describes three phases of Campions’s life. The first took
him from a brilliant university career to self-exile and his return to Catholicism. The
second brought him back to England from Prague where he worked for several years as a
Jesuit priest. The third led him to the scaffold after eighteen months of service to the
underground Catholic Church.
There are no dialogues or invented scenes. Waugh kept to the facts.
Little is known of Campion’s family, and he tells us so. Where biographical details
are few, the author supplements with 16th-century historical background (England’s
rivalry with Catholic Spain and France; the Council of Trent). Occasionally the reader
finds quotations from Campion’s letters and literary works. Waugh’s sympathy
with the Elizabethan orator and writer is much in evidence, but he has greater admiration
for the heroic missionary of the later years.
The pageantry in this biography has a purpose. Waugh is astute in
portraying what happened on the English university scene after Henry’s break with
Rome. Having ransacked the monasteries, the crown was obliged to finance the education of
a generation of scholars to lead the new state church. There is a certain fascination in
learning how things went so terribly wrong.
On the other side of the Channel, at Douai, the university became the
seminary for Englishmen in exile and the hub of an emigrant Catholic community. After some
years of hesitation, Campion went to Douai. Waugh is not in the plaster-saint-making
business: he notes that Campion had incurred excommunication at Oxford by taking an oath
recognizing the Queen as head of the Church. He was reconciled to the Catholic Church at
Douai and discovered there his calling to the Society of Jesus.
Despite legends about scheming blackrobes, Waugh shows that the
Catholic mission in 16th-century England was strictly spiritual. Douai seminarians were
not permitted to speak about politics. Campion announced his purpose in two pamphlets
published while he was working underground. Under a regime that hated the Mass, he was
bringing the Sacraments. With a nation that was rejecting Rome and its own church
tradition, he offered to enter a theological debate.
As a condemned man in prison, Campion remained principled, intelligent
and courageous. By his gentility towards his queen and his captors he proved his concern
for their souls.
Rumor had it that strange omens marked the arrival of the first Jesuits
in Protestant England. It is fully documented, though, that moral miracles occurred during
Campion’s captivity: in the Tower he personally forgave his betrayer and converted
his jailer. Waugh’s biography portrays a Renaissance man who placed his learning at
the service of the Church and gave his life for the faith. Little wonder that Edmund
Campion has been revered for centuries by English Catholics.
Michael J. Miller
Glenside, Pa.
Different grades of authority
CREATIVE FIDELITY. By Francis A. Sullivan, S.J. (Paulist Press, 997 Macarthur Blvd.,
Mahwah, N.J. 07430, 1996), 209 pp. PB $14.95.
The title of this volume made me think of another book by a Jesuit
author published in the 1970s. The book of a generation ago is called Should Anyone Say
Forever? and its author is John Haughey. Haughey wrote his book at a time when many were
questioning the capacity and desirability to sustain permanent commitments, especially
those called for in Holy Matrimony, Holy Orders and Religious life. Haughey used the
expression “creative fidelity,” as I recall, to support the Church’s
teaching in the face of increasing social pressure to relax the obligation to honor
life-long vocations. Again, if my memory serves me correctly, Father Haughey was
advocating a fidelity which was not robotic conformity but an imaginative and resourceful
way of answering the call to permanence. The urging to a “creative fidelity” was
sound advice back then for priests and Religious who had a firm sense that the
“creative” was always a qualifier of the “fidelity.”
“Creative,” when it was interpreted as a fresh attitude to the demands,
disappointments and sacrifices of a relationship, was wise counsel for those intent on
living faithfully unto death.
“Creative,” unfortunately, is not a univocal term in the
post-conciliar Church. At times, the word has been used to describe pastoral practices not
exactly in conformity with ecclesial norms. And, from time to time, the word has been used
to refer to individuals whose ideas have not exactly been orthodox. The term is widely
pliable these days in the Church, and it is surely understandable if some Catholics are
somewhat suspicious of it as an accurate identification.
Creative Fidelity, the title of Father Sullivan’s book, is used as
an expression just twice in the body of his work. On page 116, he writes: “The
attitude with which a theologian should undertake this task of communicating a
contemporary understanding of the faith is well described as one of creative
fidelity.” And, again on page 120, Fr. Sullivan instructs: “The creative
fidelity which theologians are to exercise in interpreting dogmas includes respect for the
traditional language in which the church professes its faith, along with freedom to
express a contemporary understanding of the faith in modern patterns of thought and
language—a freedom which is limited by the requirement that their interpretation be
faithful to the meaning of the creed.”
For more than thirty-five years, Fr. Francis Sullivan was a professor
at the Gregorian University in Rome and is now teaching at Boston College. In Creative
Fidelity, he aims to help us weigh and interpret documents of the magisterium. He sets
about his task by covering for his readers those who teach in the Church, the vehicles
they use for their teaching and how these vehicles differ from one another. He carefully
distinguishes between doctrine and dogma, infallible and non-infallible teaching, the
ordinary and universal magisterium and the extraordinary magisterium. He cites Popes,
ecumenical councils and various theologians in an effort to show how we assess properly
the different levels of Church teaching and how we give our assent to the same.
Fr. Sullivan is at his best when he is clarifying and distinguishing
between terms and placing events in their historical contexts. He is careful to note his
own opinion on certain matters. For instance, on the question of contraception, Sullivan
indicates his disagreement with Germain Grisez and some other Catholic moralists who
“hold that the wrongfulness of any use of artificial means of contraception has been
taught infallibly by the ordinary magisterium.” In Sullivan’s judgment, the
teaching on contraception belongs to the “authoritative but non-infallible teaching
of the ordinary papal magisterium “ (pp. 160-61). And, again, on the status of the
teaching that only men can be ordained priests, Sullivan asserts “I did not think it
had been infallibly defined by the pope. In an article which I wrote for The Tablet soon
after the publication of Ordinatio sacerdotalis, I further said that it seemed to me at
least doubtful that the judgment expressed in this papal letter had been infallibly taught
by the ordinary universal magisterium” (p. 181).
Theologians disagreeing with each other on the status of Church
teaching is to be expected according to Sullivan. “The frank exchange of critical
opinion among competent theologians concerning new interpretations of dogma is an
essential part of the theological enterprise” (p. 120) writes Sullivan. He then
quotes Karl Rahner however that there does come a point when an intervention of the
official teaching authority is needed. To paraphrase Rahner, it is the theology of the
magisterium and not the theology of the theologians which decides what is indispensable
and what is not to the Church’s profession of faith (p. 121). When, though, was the
last time you heard an intervention of the magisterium’s theology described as
creative fidelity? Odds are that the so-called experts dubbed it rigid or inflexible,
especially if it pertained to sexual ethics or who is eligible for Holy Orders. The use of
terminology is so important. Even after the magisterium’s theology decided that
Father Charles Curran’s theology was unsuitable to be identified as Catholic, he
could still irritatingly call his own defense Faithful Dissent. The claim of fidelity is
crucial and it makes a big difference today on the pastoral scene what the content of
“creative” is. Creative must remain what Fr. Sullivan says it is on pages 116
and 120 of his book or else there is a quick transition from creative fidelity to creative
dissent. I fear that this transition has already been made in the minds of too many
Catholics.
There is clearly a place in Catholic theology for distinguishing the
different grades of authority in Church teaching. And Father Sullivan’s book helps us
to do just that. But pushed too far, such a project has the effect, intended or not in
modernity and post-modernity, of forcing adherents to rank the doctrines and accept just
those of the highest classification while other doctrines are ignored. Just as there has
been considerable misinterpretation of the “hierarchy of truths” (UR, 11), would
we not invite a similar misinterpretation if we focus too much on the particular status of
the teaching and not enough on the truthfulness of all doctrines?
Those who wish to be faithful to the Church must recognize her
hierarchical nature. Those who wish to be creatively faithful to the Church must recognize
in her doctrine a truthfulness even as we discern a hierarchy there. Otherwise, the
“contemporary understanding of the faith” which Fr. Sullivan sees as so
important to creative fidelity will be cut down to size. Just the top portion, please. A
church of hierarchs. A few men and a few dogmas. Happily, we don’t recognize such a
configuration as the pleroma and the splendor of truth.
Rev. Robert J. Batule
Mineola, N.Y.
The meaning of science
THE MODELING OF NATURE: PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE AND PHILOSOPHY OF NATURE IN SYNTHESIS. By
William A. Wallace, O.P. (The Catholic University of America Press, Washington, D.C.
20064, 1997), 450 pp. Paper.
William Wallace is a Dominican, a remarkable philosopher. He has
devoted his lifetime to the understanding of the relation between philosophy and science
and, in turn, of these to Christian revelation. This is a concise and clear book,
magisterial in its dimensions. The work is of great importance and interest. I confess I
found the book downright exciting to read.
Modernity, it has often been said, began with the rejection of
Aristotle as the primary authority in science. Father Wallace argues clearly and
insightfully that in fact the great scientific discoveries of modern times were in fact
better explained by the Aristotelian tradition than by those scientific explications that
began with Bacon, Descartes, Hume, and their later successors, particularly the logical
positivists. What Wallace argues, convincingly, on the basis of the way science has in
fact operated when it has successfully demonstrated some scientific certitude, is that it
followed implicitly the Aristotelian methodology and understanding of nature. He concludes
that the Aristotelian discussions of rhetoric, dialectics, and science are, in fact, in
their developed form, the proper way to understand what has happened to explain scientific
development.
Though the book is also addressed to scientists, Wallace has a great
capacity to explain clearly to those who are not themselves experts in science what the
history of science and its philosophical implications imply. Of particular interest is the
way Wallace explains the great controversies between the Church and science that
unfortunately had such dire consequences for the Church. Seen from the angle of strict
scientific demonstration that it implies, particularly in the Galileo case, about which
Wallace has made most significant studies, it becomes clear that the controversy did not
so much pit religion against science. Rather it was an examination of what scientific
demonstration, strictly speaking, entailed and the care with which it needed to be
treated. Wallace’s discussion of the role of Jesuit scientists and astronomers, and
particularly the position of Bellarmine, in these early scientific controversies is
particularly appreciated.
For those pastors and academics who need to know something concrete
about the present state of science in its philosophical and theological dimensions, no
better book will be found. Indeed, this is an original book that sums up the whole
tradition of philosophical reflection on the meaning of science. Catholic colleges once
were proud of their careful attention to Aristotle and Aquinas, not merely for their work
in metaphysics or ethics, but for their understanding of the way the human mind works in
its dealing with nature and with the question of what one means by nature. Wallace has
done nothing less than reinstate this tradition at the center of precisely scientific
studies.
The scope of this book is breathtaking. It is not merely a review of
the whole Aristotelian corpus about the nature of science, ontology, epistemology, even
ethics and politics, but it relates this tradition to the actual history of scientific
discoveries, of which indeed it was an abiding part. He explains the relations of logic
and natural philosophy and shows how and what the mind can know, that it knows because it
is in fact connected with the world, which itself was not merely a mental or mathematical
projection. Wallace’s book contains a clear explanation of the old adage that nothing
is in the intellect that was not first in the senses, except the intellect itself, of the
relation of logical and sensory knowledge.
Is this a book for the layman or the busy pastor or the academic
student looking for something more “interesting,” say, than music or sociology?
I think this book is one of those seminal books that are a reminder of the intellectual
depth of a sound realist philosophy combined with a clear understanding of what modern
science, in its strengths and weaknesses, is about. Likewise, it does not hesitate to show
the pertinence of these ideas both to science and to its understanding. Wallace implies
that only with a proper understanding of science will the truths that lie in revelation be
seen for what they are, how they are related to a valid understanding of the world. I
cannot recommend this remarkable book too highly. Father Wallace has given us the fruits
of his long study of science and philosophy. In reminding us of the abiding validity of
perennial philosophy, Wallace articulates how this philosophy is a valid context to
explain what scientists actually do in their explanation of the order of things. In a very
real sense, Wallace, in his explanation of science and its history, is more
“revolutionary” than Kuhn and his followers, who are often given credit for best
explaining the origins of the scientific revolution.”
James V. Schall, S.J.
Georgetown University
Washington, D.C.
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(©Copyright 1998, as translated into HTML for Catholic Information Center on Internet by Jill Gooler, 10/5/98.)