Aquinas on Pagan Virtue

TributeJohn Thomas Ford, C.S.C. (1932–2021)* Dr. Kenneth L. Parker The field of newman studies suffered the loss of a great scholar and mentor when Fr. John Ford, CSC passed from this life. He died peacefully on 29 December 2021 at Holy Cross House in Notre Dame, Indiana, after a protracted struggle with cancer, and a short bout with COVID, from which he was thought to have recovered. We do not begrudge him the next stage of his journey toward the Beatific Vision; yet, we mourn the loss of his encouraging presence, even as we celebrate the achievements of his life. Though he is best known among us as a leading North American scholar of the life, work, and influence of John Henry Newman, his life story reflects a diversity of interests and the many ways he influenced those who came into contact with him. While this tribute can only touch the surface of his rich and varied life, it is an effort to share with you some of the reasons to be thankful for Fr.John Ford's well-lived life, and to remember with gratitude his generosity of spirit and Christian example. John Thomas Ford was born on 21 November 1932 in Dallas, Texas, and was the only child of Thomas and Leonara (Senn) Ford. He attended elementary school at St. Vincent's School, led by the Sisters of the Holy Cross in Logansport, Indiana, and graduated from Logansport High School in 1950. While attending the University of Notre Dame, Fr. Ford received his call to serve God as a Holy Cross priest and entered the Holy Cross Novitiate in Jordan, Minnesota on 15 August 1951, professed final vows on 16 August 1955, and was ordained a Holy Cross priest on 10 June 1959. After graduating from the University of Notre Dame in 1955 with a bachelor's degree in philosophy, he went on to Holy Cross College in Washington, DC to earn his master's degree in theology in 1959. In 1962, Fr. Ford received his doctorate in theology from the Gregorian University in Rome. In 1962, Fr. Ford taught theology at the University of Notre Dame and served as Prefect in Cavanaugh Hall before he left that fall to teach at Holy Cross College in Washington, DC until 1967. In 1964, he was appointed Assistant Superior at the Foreign Mission Seminary and later became Superior until 1968. From 1968 to 2018, Fr. Ford served on the faculty at Catholic University of America (CUA), in Washington, DC. [End Page 101] I first came to know Fr. Ford toward the end of his years as Chair of the Department of Theology at CUA (1977–1983). I was writing my PhD thesis under the supervision of Eamon Duffy at Cambridge University and anxious to find academic employment. Having applied unsuccessfully for a position in the history of Christian spirituality in his department, I wrote to Fr. Ford to ask advice on how to improve my application materials. He responded with a generous suggestion that we meet when he was in England later that year. He spent a day with me, offering sage advice and encouragement that saw me through the difficult process of beginning an academic career. My experience is but a single example of many lives he touched in that way. As the director of 63 dissertations, 16 on John Henry Newman, he knew the fears and frustrations of the young and managed their struggles with a pastoral touch. A notable dimension of Fr. Ford's life work was his passion for ecumenical dialogue. In the post-conciliar era, he served as a member of the United Methodist/Roman Catholic Bilateral Dialogue (1971–1977), the Faith and Order Commission of the National Council of Churches (1981–2011), the Roman Catholic observer-consultant for the Consultation on Church Union (1974–1988) and its Theology Commission (1982–1985), and the Reformed/Roman Catholic International Consultation (1987–1988). His work in the field of ecumenism was recognized in 2014 by the Franciscan Friars of the Atonement with their Paul Wattson Christian Unity Award. His graduate students benefited from his ecumenical work through his course on The History...

Teaching & Learning Guide for: The Aesthetics of Nature

The Thomist 73 (2009): 29-52 INFUSED VIRTUE AND THE EFFECTS OF ACQUIRED VICE: A TEST CASE FOR THE THOMISTIC THEORY OF INFUSED CARDINAL VIRTUES MICHAELS. SHERWIN, 0.P. University ofFribourg Fribourg, Switzerland SERVAIS PINCKAERS REPEATEDLY affirmed the importance of the infused cardinal virtues for the moral life.1 For Pinckaers, what is at stake in this doctrine is the difference that grace makes in the life of virtue. Grace transforms the source and character of moral excellence. "The first source of moral excellence is no longer located in the human person, but in God through Christ."2 In this reorientation, the most important moral virtues "are not 'acquired' by unaided human effort, but implanted in the human person by the Holy Spirit."3 Nevertheless, as dispositions residing in the powers of the human soul, the infused moral virtues are intimately the excellences of the agent himself. As such, they become the traits of character by means of which the Spirit teaches us the ways of holiness. "Thus, in the context of a gradual education guided by the light of the Gospel, an active cooperation between God and 1 Servais Pinckaers, Morality: The Catholic View (South Bend, Ind.: St. Augustine's Press, 2001), 71-72; The Sources of Christian Ethics, trans. Sr. Mary Thomas Noble, O.P. (Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 1995), 180; "The Sources of the Ethics of St. Thomas Aquinas," in The Ethics ofAquinas, ed. StephenJ. Pope (Washington, D.C.: Georgetown University Press, 2002), 23; "The Place ofPhilosophy in Moral Theology," in The Pinckaers Reader: Renewing Thomistic Moral Theology, edited by John Berkman and Craig Steven Titus (Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 2005), 6768 . 2 Pinckaers, Morality: The Catholic View, 71. 3 Ibid. 29 30 MICHAEL S. SHERWIN, O.P. the human person can develop."4 Pinckaers, therefore, did not see Aquinas's doctrine on the infused moral virtues as a Scholastic vestige, but as something rooted in the scriptural account of moral development. "Some such theory seems necessary if we are to explain what the Scriptures teach concerning the way to live as followers of Christ."5 A cursory analysis of the way New Testament authors employ the Greek terms for the cardinal virtues seems to support their status as infused by God. Ephesians, for example, describes God as having lavished upon us grace that grants us "all wisdom and prudence [phronesis]" (Eph 1:8), while 2 Timothy (1:7) tells us that "God did not give us a spirit of cowardice but rather of power, love and temperance [sophrosyne]," where "power" (dynamis) is one of the New Testament equivalents for the pagan Greek word for courage.6 It is the strength (kratos) that comes from God and emboldens us to resist the devil (Eph 6:10). Lastly, although the New Testament authors radically reinterpret the meaning of justice (dikaiosyne), they affirm that Christ is our justice (1 Cor 1:30) and that in him we become the justice of God (2 Cor 5:21). Prudence, justice, courage, and temperance, therefore, are all described in the New Testament as given to us by God. In this the New Testament authors seem to be following an Old Testament theme that portrays God, through the mysterious action of his wisdom, as teaching the cardinal virtues: "if one loves justice, the fruits of [wisdom's] works are virtues; for she teaches temperance and prudence, justice and courage, and nothing in life is more useful for humans than these" (Wis 8:7). These passages, however, while suggestive, are not of themselves probative. Indeed, many reject the doctrine of infused 4 Ibid. 5 Ibid., 72. 6 One explanation for the virtual absence of the classical Greek term for courage (andreia) in the New Testament is that since its etymological root is the Greek word for man (aner, andros) the New Testament authors wanted to avoid the connotations of self-sufficiency that the term normally conveys. Instead, as Ceslas Spicq notes in his classic study of New Testament morality (Theologie morale du Nouveau Testament [Paris: Librairie Lecoffre, 1965), 354.)), when offering their theology of courage the New Testament authors appeal to a cluster of...

American Religion 1, no. 2 (Spring 2020), pp. 130–132 Copyright © 2020, The Trustees of Indiana University • doi: 10.2979/amerreli.1.2.14 Book Review Jonathan S. Coley, Gay on God’s Campus: Mobilizing for LGBT Equality at Christian Colleges and Universities (Chapel Hill University of North Carolina Press, 2018). John Schmalzbauer Missouri State University, Springfield, USA A fascinating study of student activism, Jonathan Coley’s Gay on God’s Campus breaks new ground in the field of religion and higher education. Previous scholarship on religious colleges and universities has focused on secularization (think Harvard and Yale), student religious life (think Notre Dame), and conservative politics (think Liberty University). Ignoring these topics, Gay on God’s Campus portrays Christian college campuses as an unlikely staging ground for LGBT activism, making a valuable contribution to both the sociology of American religion and the literature on social movements. Coley’s study appears at a time when LGBT activism is surging in religious institutions. According to the 2017 American Freshman Survey, almost 8 percent of freshmen at religiously-affiliated institutions identify as LGBT. In Gay on God’s Campus, Coley notes that about 45 percent of America’s Christian colleges and universities had recognized LGBT groups in 2013, while 55 percent included sexual orientation in their nondiscrimination statements (35). Though sexual orientation and gender identity remain a source of conflict within Christian higher education, there is very little scholarship on this topic. John Schmalzbauer 131 Given the historic barriers to LGBT inclusion, what explains the presence or absence of such organizations in Christian colleges and universities? Analyzing a database of 682 schools, Coley reports that the theological orientation of the school is the best predictor of recognized groups. Institutions affiliated with communitarian denominations (emphasizing social justice) are more likely to host LGBT student organizations than institutions sponsored by individualistic denominations (emphasizing personal morality). After considering the broader landscape of Christian higher education, Gay on God’s Campus zeroes in on four institutions (Belmont University, Catholic University of America, Goshen College, and Loyola University in Chicago), exploring why students join and commit to LGBT-friendly groups. Drawing on interviews with current and former activists, Coley uncovers multiple pathways to LGBT organizing, rather than a single trajectory. Less than onethird of respondents came to LGBT groups with a history of political activism (45), while two-thirds did not. In place of politics, they cited religious motivations and their own LGBT identities as key factors in fueling their public engagement. Calling for an “inclusive understanding of activism” (11), Coley shows how political, religious, and social identities shape campus involvement, channeling students into three different kinds of groups. Not surprisingly, politically-motivated students join groups that emphasize direct action. By contrast, religiouslymotivated students emphasize education, sponsoring panel discussions and lecture series. Lastly, students motivated primarily by sexual orientation and gender identity are more likely to join groups that function as safe spaces. What impact do LGBT student activists have on Christian higher education ? Though LGBT groups struggle to be heard at many institutions, they are thriving on all four of the campuses profiled by Coley. Such groups have been instrumental in changing university policies and providing a place for LGBT students. While constrained by institutional culture, campus activists have made a difference. Like sociological scholarship on the African-American civil rights movement, Gay on God’s Campus shows the capacity of student networks and organizations to foster social change. It also adds to our understanding of social movements by emphasizing the diverse motivations of student activists. While previous scholarship has stressed the primacy of political socialization, Coley argues that “scholars should take into account the multiple ways one can be an activist (7). Coley’s most intriguing analysis contrasts the more confrontational tactics of direct-action groups with the bridge-building rhetoric of educational organizations . While the former foster institutional change, they alienate some LGBT students, who describe their tactics (which are widely used in non-religious American Religion 1:2 132 institutions) as “caustic” and “weird” (79). For these more apolitical students, religious dialogue and peer ministry are preferable strategies. A fine work of social movements scholarship, Gay on God’s Campus would have been...

Reviewed by: Commentary on Thomas Aquinas's Virtue Ethics by J. Budziszewski Raymond Hain Commentary on Thomas Aquinas's Virtue Ethics by J. Budziszewski (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), xxvii + 295 pp. J. Budziszewski's Commentary on Thomas Aquinas's Virtue Ethics follows his similarly structured 2014 Commentary on Thomas Aquinas's Treatise on Law. But while the earlier commentary, over 500 pages long, works straight through all of questions 90–97 of the prima secundae and is supplemented by an additional 250-page online commentary, this commentary is shorter, highly selective, and lacks a supplemental online commentary. And since the first half considers selected articles on the virtues in general, while the second half considers selected articles on justice, the Commentary on Thomas Aquinas's Virtue Ethics itself feels like a supplement to the earlier law commentary. After describing its overall content and structure, I will comment on how useful it might be for its intended audience: "scholars," "students" and "even . . . serious general readers" (xxi). The Commentary on Thomas Aquinas's Virtue Ethics includes the text of, and commentary on, eighteen articles from the Summa theologiae. Ten articles focus on the virtues in general: I-II, q. 55, a. 4 (Whether virtue is suitably defined?) I-II, q. 58, a. 4 (Whether there can be moral without intellectual virtue?) I-II, q. 58, a. 5 (Whether there can be intellectual without moral virtue?) [End Page 583] I-II, q. 61, a. 2 (Whether there are four cardinal virtues?) I-II, q. 61, a. 3 (Whether any other virtues should be called principal rather than these?) I-II, q. 62, a. 1 (Whether there are any theological virtues?) I-II, q. 63, a. 1 (Whether virtue is in us by nature?) I-II, q. 63, a. 2 (Whether any virtue is caused in us by habituation?) I-II, q. 65, a. 1 (Whether the moral virtues are connected with one another) I-II, q. 84, a. 4 (Whether the seven capital vices are suitably reckoned?) And the remaining eight articles focus on the virtue of justice: II-II, q. 30, a. 3 (Whether mercy is a virtue) II-II, q. 58, a. 1 (Whether justice is i described as being the perpetual and constant will to render to each one his right?) II-II, q. 60, a. 1 (Whether judgment is an act of justice?) II-II, q. 60, a. 2 (Whether it is lawful to judge?) II-II, q. 60, a. 5 (Whether we should always judge according to the written law?) II-II, q. 60, a. 6 (Whether judgment is rendered perverse by being usurped?) II-II, q. 80, a. 1 (Whether the virtues annexed to justice are suitably enumerated?) II-II, q. 122, a. 1 (Whether the precepts of the Decalogue are precepts of justice?) The text of each article is presented twice—once in the 1920 Blackfriars translation (now in the public domain and widely available) and once in a paraphrase by Budziszewski. Line-by-line commentary follows each portion of the text and is keyed to the sentences in the Blackfriars translation. Besides the text of the commentary itself, an eleven-page general introduction and an index are included as supporting material. Budziszewski is most interested in understanding the plain meaning of the text, and in working through Aquinas's sources, and there are almost no comments that engage contemporary scholars or critics of Aquinas. As he says, "Some may think I do not spend enough time quarreling with critics of St. Thomas. My conviction is that before we enter these quarrels, we had better make sure we understand him. If we do understand him, many of the criticisms fall away like dead leaves" (xxii). Serious general readers will find this commentary very helpful, especially [End Page 584] if they are coming to Aquinas for the first time. Consider this representative passage from ST I-II, q. 55, a. 4 that discusses the "matter" of virtues and Budziszewski's paraphrase (10–11): Text: [5] Now virtue has no matter "out of which" it is formed, as neither has any other accident; but it has matter "about which" it is concerned, and matter "in which...

The Judicial Response to Police Killings in Latin America: Inequality and the Rule of Law. By Daniel M. Brinks. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 2008. Pp. 289 + xi. $85.00 cloth. Reforming the Administration of Justice in Mexico. Edited by Wayne A. Cornelius and David A. Shirk. San Diego: Center for U.S.-Mexican Studies, University of California, San Diego; Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2007. Pp. 523 + xi. $37.50 paper. Judges beyond Politics in Democracy and Dictatorship: Lessons from Chile. By Lisa Hilbink. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Pp. 299 + xvi. $80.00 cloth. Enforcing the Rule of Law: Social Accountability in the New Latin American Democracies. Edited by Enrique Peruzzotti and Catalina Smulovitz. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2006. Pp. 362 + xiv. $29.95 paper. The Politics of Organized Crime and the Organized Crime of Politics: A Study in Criminal Power. By Alfredo Schulte-Bockholt. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2006. Pp. 263 + ix. $82.00 cloth. $26.95 paper. The Judicialization of Politics in Latin America. Edited by Rachel Sieder, Line Schjolden, and Alan Angell. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. Pp. 320. $64.09 cloth.

In this paper I argue that virtue ethics should be understood as a form of ethics which integrates various domains of the practical in relation to which virtues are excellences. To argue this it is necessary to distinguish two senses of the “moral”: the broad sense which integrates the domains of the practical and a narrow classificatory sense. Virtue ethics, understood as above, believes that all genuine virtue should be understood as what I call virtues proper. To possess a virtue proper (such as an excellent disposition of open-mindedness, an epistemic virtue) is to possess a disposition of overall excellence in relation to the sphere or field of the virtue (being open to the opinions of others). Overall excellence in turn involves excellence in integrating to a sufficient degree, standards of excellence in all relevant practical domains. Epistemic virtues, sporting virtues, moral virtues, and so on are all virtues proper. In particular it is impossible for an epistemic virtue to be a moral (narrow sense) vice.

Author's Introduction Whereas Creationism is usually taught in the context of religion and the history/philosophy of science, this guide has been written in the conviction that creationism is not ultimately about science at all, but is rather about the status of the Bible in the modern world. Creationism as a modern ideology exists in order to defend the authority of the Bible as a repository of trans‐historical truth from the challenges of any and all historical sciences. It belongs to and is inseparable from Protestant Fundamentalists’ desire to resubject the modern world to the authority of the inerrant Bible. Intelligent Design Creationism, to the extent that it distinguishes itself from reactionary biblicism, is a program advocating a supernaturalist, providentialist understanding of the world. This guide outlines an approach to teaching about creationism that situates it in relation to the development, from the early modern period onwards, of the historical, critical study of the Bible and the liberal theology that followed from that study, as well as from the more familiar perspectives of the history and philosophy of science. Annotated Reading List Forrest, Barbara and Paul Gross. Creationism's Trojan Horse: The Wedge of Intelligent Design . Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. A thoughtful critique of Intelligent Design Creationism and a well‐documented expose of the wider cultural program of its proponents. Kitcher, Philip. Living with Darwin: Evolution, Design and the Future of Faith . Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. A philosopher of science argues that Intelligent Design Creationism is ‘dead science’ rather than non‐science, and then reflects on the religious costs of accepting Darwinism. Larson, Edward. Summer for the Gods: The Scopes Trial and America's Continuing Debate over Science and Religion . Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997. The best of the voluminous literature on the Scopes Trial. McCalla, Arthur. The Creationist Debate: The Encounter between the Bible and the Historical Mind . London & New York: Continuum, 2006. A wide‐ranging intellectual history study arguing that the debate between creationists and evolutionists is not only about the content of evolutionary and other historical sciences, but also about historical‐mindedness in relation to the status of the Bible in the modern world. Numbers, Ronald. The Creationists: From Scientific Creationism to Intelligent Design . Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2nd ed. 2006. This new edition of Numbers’ standard work has been expanded to include discussion of Intelligent Design. Pennock, Robert (ed.). Intelligent Design Creationism and Its Critics: Philosophical, Theological, and Scientific Perspectives . Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2001. A valuable compendium of key articles by leading proponents of Intelligent Design Creationism and their critics. Rossi, Paolo. The Dark Abyss of Time: The History of the Earth and the History of Nations from Hooke to Vico , Lydia Cochrane (trans.). Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1984. An intellectual history study of how what came to be called geology and anthropology challenged biblical chronology in the early modern period. Ruse, Michael. Darwin and Design: Does Evolution Have a Purpose? Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003. An accessibly written account of the history and present‐day status of the design argument. Online Materials 1. http://www.ncseweb.org This site of the National Center for Science Education, an organization that defends the teaching of evolution in public schools, monitors anti‐evolution activity in the USA and around the world, provides scientific criticism and historical analysis of creationist claims, and reviews recent publications and videos. 2. http://www.pamd.uscourts.gov/kitzmiller/kitzmiller_342.pdf This is Judge John E. Jones’ 138‐page Memorandum Opinion in Kitzmiller v Dover (2005), the Pennsylvania test case on the constitutionality of teaching Intelligent Design Creationism in public schools. 3. http://www.talkorigins.org A Usenet newsgroup on the creation/evolution controversy and related topics. The site includes an archive of mainstream scientific responses to frequently asked questions in the group and refutations of creationist claims. 4. http://www.icr.org and http://www.answersingenesis.org These are two influential young‐earth creationist websites, maintained by the Institute for Creation Research and Answers in Genesis, respectively. 5. http://www.discovery.org/csc This is the home site of the Discovery Institute, whose Center for Science and Culture spearheads the movement for Intelligent Design. Sample Syllabus This sample syllabus includes readings appropriate to both general‐level courses (indicated by A ) and advanced or seminar courses ( B ). 1. The Earth Acquires A History A Paolo Rossi, The Dark Abyss of Time: The History of the Earth

Reviewed by: Conflicts of Devotion: Liturgical Poetics in Sixteenth-and Seventeenth-Century England by Daniel R. Gibbons Rhema Hokama Gibbons, Daniel R., Conflicts of Devotion: Liturgical Poetics in Sixteenth-and Seventeenth-Century England, Notre Dame, University of Notre Dame Press, 2017; cloth; pp. x, 332; R.R.P. US $60.00; ISBN 9780268101343. In Daniel R. Gibbons's wide-ranging study on early modern liturgy and poetics, the question of what it means to participate in a unified spiritual community emerges as a central preoccupation for both English Protestants and Catholics. Gibbons's analysis of the 1559 Book of Common Prayer liturgies for the Communion and burial rites provides the historical and cultural foundation for his readings of the poems, which he discusses in individual chapters on Spenser's elegies, Southwell's lyric verse, Donne's divine poems, Herbert's The Temple, and Crashaw's English lyrics. Gibbon's central thesis is that the Prayerbook provided a rhetoric that enabled English worshippers to demarcate the boundaries of a unified religious community in post-Reformation England. Through its ambivalent language and prayers that could be interpreted variously to satisfy both traditionalist and Reformed worshippers alike, the Prayerbook's liturgies avoided alienating parishioners who ascribed to a range of religious allegiances — all of whom saw themselves as committed members of the nascent English church. While Gibbons largely moves away from the texts of the liturgies themselves in his readings of the poems, his claim is that the Prayerbook's language of accommodation and exclusion shapes the way poets defined religious identity and sought to include a diversity of religious beliefs in their imagined lyric communities. As a poetic device, this model of rhetorical accommodation allowed the many readers of a single poem — as Gibbons writes in his reading of Donne's Holy Sonnet 'Show me deare Christ' — to 'forge a timeless unified worshipping body' in spite of the 'multiple individual readings of a single prayer-poem' that this body of readers would likely construe (p. 162). Gibbons's study is a continuation of the kind of historicist work accomplished by recent monographs on the literary influence of the Book of Common Prayer, most prominently Ramie Targoff's Common Prayer: The Language [End Page 207] of Public Devotion in Early Modern England (University of Chicago Press, 2001) and Timothy Rosendale's Liturgy and Literature in the Making of Protestant England (Cambridge University Press, 2007). But Gibbons's emphasis on the continuity of Catholic thought in the writing and dissemination of the Prayerbook sets his study apart from the body of recent scholarship on English state worship. Indeed, one of the strengths of Gibbon's book is its inclusion of both Catholic and Protestant poets in its treatment of liturgical poetics. Although Gibbons positions the Book of Common Prayer as the central historical text in his interpretations of the poems, his study is equally inflected by a range of Catholic sources — including Augustine, Nicholas of Cusa, the Spanish mystics, and François de Sales. Gibbons's study is rewarding and worthwhile in that it serves as a reminder that the actual religious practices that we tend to label as 'Anglican' or 'Reformed', and even 'Protestant' and 'Catholic', rarely accommodate themselves to such neatly defined categories. In every chapter, Gibbons re-emphasizes the fluidity — and even self-contradictory quality — of post-Reformation English religious identity. This fluidity is what enables Gibbons to undertake parallel readings of poets who seem to write from vastly different theological commitments. For example, Gibbons makes the claim that both Spenser and Southwell respond to and challenge the cultural and psychological rifts left by the Prayerbook's Order for the Burial of the Dead — despite the fact that the former led state-directed anti-Catholic reforms in Ireland, and the latter was a Jesuit priest executed by the English state for his clandestine missionary work. Gibbons's decision to include in his study poets of diverse religious loyalties is testament to the wide-reaching cultural influence of the Book of Common Prayer, and the way that its liturgical rhetoric was appropriated and reimagined by those from opposing religious poles in Tudor and Stuart England. Rhema Hokama Singapore University of Technology and...

Notes on Contributors

Reviewed by: Thinking about Animals in Thirteenth-Century Paris: Theologians on the Boundary between Humans and Animals by Ian P. Wei Irven M. Resnick Thinking about Animals in Thirteenth-Century Paris: Theologians on the Boundary between Humans and Animals. By Ian P. Wei. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020. Pp. x + 226. $99.99 (hardcover). ISBN 978-1-108-83015-7. The contemporary interest in the inner life of animals and animal rights is an indication of a growing awareness that the line of demarcation between human and animal is not as clear as once thought. A Cartesian view of animals as nonsentient automata that, in the words of Malebranche, "eat without pleasure, cry without pain … desire nothing, fear nothing, [and] know nothing" (Nicholas Malebranche, The Search after the Truth 6.2.7, ed. and trans. Thomas M. Lennon and Paul J. Olscamp [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997], 494-95) seems unsustainable the more we learn of animal behavior. Experiments in animal psychology increasingly challenge the early modern notion that higher animals lack self-consciousness and awareness of their own mortality, thereby depriving them of the imperative to live purposively. Instead, the line between human and animal (or at least between the human and those we call higher animals) seems drawn on ever-shifting sand. Much the same may be said for medieval Scholastic views of animals. Despite attempts to establish a "hard boundary" between human and animal, a fixed boundary remained elusive. Human and animal bodies and behaviors offered too many similarities. It is abundantly clear that medieval Latin exempla and sermons treat animal behavior as instructive for humans. Positively, animals will display naturally some of the most noble human qualities: chastity, monogamy, a self-sacrificing defense of progeny, and even a natural solicitude for elderly parents. Negatively, animals provide examples of the very worst in humanity: predatory behavior, violence, carnality, promiscuity, and gluttony. While medieval bestiaries and medieval fabliaux reveal animals and animal societies to be very nearly human, medieval polemics invoke animal stereotypes to dehumanize and stigmatize religious "others" (i.e., Jews, Muslims, and heretics). Controversy remains over the extent to which animals were valued beyond their contributions to the medieval European domestic economy as food sources (pigs, sheep, dairy cows), as beasts of burden (donkeys, oxen), as hunting aides (dogs, cats, falcons, hawks), as support for warfare (horses), or as sources of entertainment (dancing bears and the organ grinder's monkey). Modern research has proposed, moreover, that in the Middle Ages service animals (e.g., [End Page 479] seeing-eye dogs) even assisted individuals with disabilities, and there is also a growing awareness—promoted, for example, by Kathleen Walker-Meikle's Medieval Pets—that in later medieval culture some animals achieved the special status reserved for our pets today as quasi family members. On the one hand, even though medieval philosophers and theologians generally denied that animals have free will or can be held morally responsible, by the fourteenth century legal proceedings were convened to convict and punish animals for criminal assault against humans or their property. On the other hand, although animals were seen as cognitively inferior to humans, some animals were invested with almost prophetic insight: after Aubry de Montdidier's murder in 1371, his dog Dragon reacted with such violence toward his murderer, Richard Macaire, that King Charles V ordered a trial by combat in which Dragon was victorious and Macaire was condemned for homicide. Furthermore, although these same medieval thinkers denied that animals can sin or possess moral virtue, in popular culture some animals even achieved sainthood (see Jean-Claude Schmitt's The Holy Greyhound: Guinefort, Healer of Children since the Thirteenth Century). Ian P. Wei's Thinking about Animals in Thirteenth-Century Paris is not a cultural history of animals devoted to an investigation of their roles in the medieval domestic economy, in homiletic literature, or in vernacular fabliaux. Instead Wei provides a focused discussion of what several thirteenth-century theology masters at the University of Paris said about humans and animals. He traces Scholastic theological discussions that explore the similarities and differences between "us" and "them." In three chapters Wei provides a "close reading" and detailed paraphrase of a...

Previous articleNext article No AccessBook ReviewC. Fred Alford, . After the Holocaust: The Book of Job, Primo Levi, and the Path to Affliction. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009. xii+172 pp. $80.00 (cloth); $23.99 (paper).Vittorio MontemaggiVittorio MontemaggiUniversity of Notre Dame. Search for more articles by this author University of Notre Dame.PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by The Journal of Religion Volume 90, Number 4October 2010 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/656654 Views: 15Total views on this site © 2010 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved. For permission to reuse, please contact [email protected]PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

BOOK REVIEWS 187 and as linked with the total society and culture, and bring him to consider work, society, and culture in the invaluable light thrown on these realities and concepts by giants who have struggled with them, e. g., Fourier, Comte, Marx, Durkheim and Veblen. He keeps making one well-ordered thought of the problems and of fragmentary solutions in moderns and ancients. I hope Vukan Kuic and others go on editing these important studies and that the editors and Mrs. Simon and son Anthony are working on a biography. An extensive Yves Simon bibliography by Anthony 0. Simon is appended to the present volume. University of Notre Dame Notre Dame, Indiana LEO R. WARD Santiago Ramirez O.P., Su Vida Su Obra. By VICENTE MARRERO. Madrid: Consejo Superior de lnvestigationes Cientificas, 1971. Pp. 334. $3.50. Very few Americans, even among those who are familiar with the current philosophical and theological periodicals, know Father Santiago Ramirez's writings. This phenomenon is even more remarkable when one considers the world popularity attained by some of the theologians of the recent Council, such as Congar, Raimer, Kling, and others. Father Ramirez, however , as history will tell, is superior to all of them. As the best theologian of the twentieth century and the foremost commentator on St. Thomas, he surpasses Cajetan, John of St. Thomas, Bafiez, Vitoria, etc., both in quality and in quantity. The theological stature of Father Ramirez, however, is not unknown in Europe. He was professor at the Angelicum in Rome for three years and at the University of Fribourg for twenty-five. The last twenty years of his life were spent in Salamanca totally devoted to writing and theological research. While there he published La Filosofia de Ortega y Gasset, which, against Father Ramirez's wishes, triggered a philosophical-political controversy which lasted for months. Once the storm was over, he withdrew completely from public life and retired to his monastery where he peacefully spent the last years of his life. Father Ramirez was an exceptional professor. He possessed an unusual clarity, a profound insight into problems, a prodigious memory and an amazing theological erudition. Listening to his lectures was enough to make one realize he was not only a good professor but also a genius, the like of which appears only rarely. Perhaps the phrase that synthesizes his theological attitude is illustrated best by his own words, " Science deals with problems that are eternal. It is not wise to deal with the little problems of everyday life to abandon 188 BOOK REVIEWS those that are perennial." Paradoxically, he knew perfectly the philosophical and theological problems of everyday life and accepted from them everything that could transcend the fashion of the day and be eternal, for truth, wherever it may be found, was his only concern. Father Ramirez was a convinced Thomist, because he believed the fundamental principles for any valid theological synthesis were contained in St. Thomas's theology. His Thomism, however, was not servile, for truth is more important than St. Thomas. In questions concerning grace, not only did he feel St. Augustine to be superior to St. Thomas but he also had words of admiration for Suarez, Scotus, Newman, and other modern theologians and philosophers. Father Ramirez knew modern exegesis as well as the positive sources of theology. He placed, however, much importance on the rational analysis of faith, the theological discourse, and maintained that it is impossible to have a good theology without a good philosophy. The erudition of his knowledge is so great and the analysis of the problems so exhaustive that it may perhaps hinder the appreciation of his writings. There are few ready to follow the detailed and exhaustive analysis of the problems. His approach to them, however, is not purely analytical. In the end he always rPduces everything to unity and order, without which there cannot exist a good theology or philosophy. In theology his method is historical. He approaches the problems by going to the sources and by following their historical development, which he considers essential in evaluating and finding their solutions. His three volumes of De Hominis Beatitudine are pioneer works in this sense. When reading them...

Reviewed by: From Knowledge to Beatitude: St. Victor, Twelfth-Century Schools, and Beyond: Essays in Honor of Grover A. Zinn, Jr ed. by E. Ann Matter and Lesley Smith John D. Cotts From Knowledge to Beatitude: St. Victor, Twelfth-Century Schools, and Beyond: Essays in Honor of Grover A. Zinn, Jr. Edited by E. Ann Matter and Lesley Smith. (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press. 2013. Pp. xxiii, 488. $75.00. ISBN 978-0-268-03528-0.) As a versatile scholar, elegant translator, and masterful teacher, Grover A. Zinn Jr. spent five decades elucidating the school of St. Victor for fellow scholars; general readers; and students at his institution, Oberlin College, and elsewhere. The present volume honors his contributions to medieval studies with a set of essays devoted primarily to high-medieval thought and spirituality, although a few range far beyond the Victorines. The first four contributors explore the art and architecture of St. Victor and its Parisian environs. Catherine Delano-Smith analyzes Richard of St. Victor’s drawings of the Temple of Jerusalem that accompanied his In Visionem Ezechiel and demonstrates the complex interactions between word and image in Victorine exegesis. Her emphasis on images is shared by Walter Cahn, who finds in an illustrated Parisian manuscript of Hugh of St. Victor’s writings an opportunity to consider the interpretive possibilities opened by the visualization of Victorine ideas. William W. Clark offers a useful survey of the evidence for the appearance of the twelfth-century church of St. Victor, whereas Thomas Waldman reflects on what a privilege of Pope Innocent II can tell us about Suger of St. Denis’s vision for church construction. The next three essays delve into the Victorines’ approach to the written word and together provide a clear summary of the order’s intellectual project. Franklin Harkins demonstrates that for students at St. Victor reading led necessarily to a virtuous life and that reading and Christian action reinforced each other. Hugh Feiss turns to the classic Victorine model of teaching by word and example, with attention to vernacular as well as Latin preaching. Turning again to the problem of reading (and, by extension, glossing), Lesley Smith surveys a collection of biblical glosses by the Parisian master Robert Amiclas and presents it as an example of how books operated in the early Scholastic context. Chapters 8 through 11 cover the high speculative thought of the Victorine world. Boyd Taylor Coolman neatly links theology to behavior and argues that Hugh of St. Victor’s conception of beauty had a moral dimension: “spiritual beauty consists in proper measure in desire, thought, and act” (p. 196). Dale M. Coulter and Marcia Colish turn to the reception of the classical inheritance in medieval thought, with Coulter considering the Victorines’ transmutation of Boethius’s idea of speculation and Colish presenting a most erudite account of the medieval peregrinations of Stoic views on conscience. Dominique Poirel rounds out the quartet with another piece on beauty that effectively captures Hugh’s thought at its most conceptually enthralling. A canon’s vocation, she notes, asks him to contemplate beauty and then “radiate it all around [himself] unto the limits of the universe” (p. 196). The final five essays take the collection in very different directions. Barbara Newman looks at the affective spirituality surrounding the metaphor of “exchanging [End Page 618] hearts” from the mid-twelfth to late-thirteenth centuries and argues that women authors, especially the nuns at Helfta, treated the metaphor in their own fashion. In a piece that should become compulsory reading for Anglophone students of St. Hildegard of Bingen, Rachel Fulton imaginatively and persuasively argues that Hildegard’s mysticism is far more methodical and sophisticated than those who see it as primarily a subversion of male clerical authority have allowed. Raymond Clemens concludes the discussion of gender with a careful reception study of medieval female mystics, examining Jacques Lefèvre’s 1513 compilation Liber trium virorum et trium spiritualium virginum. Two contributions by Jeremy Adams and Frans van Liere look at other manifestations of high-medieval spiritual energy: attitudes toward returning crusaders and the reception of Jewish apocalypticism in the twelfth century. In an original and touching final piece, E...

Reviewed by: Knowledge and Faıth in Thomas Aquinas by John I. Jenkins E.J. Ashworth John I. Jenkins. Knowledge and Faıth in Thomas Aquinas. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Pp. xv + 267. Cloth, $59.95. There is a strong tension in the thought of Thomas Aquinas. On the one hand, he is strongly naturalist. He insists that our cognition is rooted in sense-perception and that [End Page 673] it is normally reliable. He insists that our moral life is grounded in our nature both as physical beings, able to feel pain and pleasure, and as social beings, depending on each other for our welfare. But he is also strongly supernaturalist. Human nature by virtue of its cognitive orientation toward the physical is not able through its own powers to know God. Still less is human nature able to achieve moral virtue by its own powers. This is not just because we are cut off from God by original sin; rather, there is a primal lack that was there even before the Fall. To achieve our true end, both cognitive and moral, we depend on God’s free gift of grace which elevates our nature and renders it able both to know God through the beatific vision in Heaven and to respond to God through loving, virtuous action. The gift of faith becomes central to human nature and destiny in a way that was to worry later thinkers such as Duns Scotus, who pertinently asked how our intellect can have the ultimate end of knowing God if it has to be made a different intellect before it achieves that end. Jenkins does not worry about the point raised by Scotus. Instead, he sets out to give an interpretation of the Summa theologiae which will help us understand more deeply the interplay between the natural and the supernatural in Aquinas. He begins by taking advantage of new readings of Aristode’s Posterior Analytics which present Aristode’s account of the demonstration which moves from cause to effect, not just as a pedagogic device for presenting material obtained by moving from effect to cause, but as a recipe for cognitive restructuring. Certainly we have to begin with mere observation, and with the piecemeal discovery of causes, but to achieve true scıentia (to use the medieval Latin term for organized, necessary knowledge) we need to acquire a new vision of how reality is structured and to see how effects flow necessarily from their causes. True demonstration is an expression of this new vision. Jenkins applies this reading of Aristotle to Aquinas. He takes with absolute seriousness Aquinas’s claim at the beginning of the Summa theologıae that theology too is an Aristotelian scientıa, and he sees the work as presenting a recipe for the cognitive restructuring of apprentice theologians (those to whom the work is addressed). The scientıa of the Summa theologiae differs from the scientia of the Posterior Analytics in two ways. First, Aquinas allows the term scientia to have an extended sense, so that God too can have scientia, even though he does not move from principles to conclusions by a process of syllogistic demonstration, but instead grasps all that is knowable in one simple act. Second, the basic principles which are the foundation of theological demonstration are the articles of faith, especially those of the creeds, which cannot be known by us in any naturalistic way. It is through God’s infused light that we assent to these articles as divinely revealed. After a lengthy examination of the role of faith in Aquinas’s account, Jenkins describes the epistemology involved as supernatural externalism. Although Jenkins’s presentation of the relationship between scientıa and faith in the Summa is carefully and lucidly argued, there are two aspects of the book that I would question. First, while it is true that Aquinas does present theology as an Aristotelian scientia, I doubt that this single fact “determines the purpose and structure of the Summa theologiae” (15) in any very detailed way. Jenkins further claims that the structure of the Summa is determined by the structure of God’s knowledge (220), but if God is truly [End...