Actualitas Omnium Actuum: Man’s Beatific Vision of God as Apprehended by Thomas Aquinas by William J. Hoye

Abstract

BOOK REVIEWS Actualitas Omnium Actuum: Man's Beatific Vision of ·God as Apprehended :by Tlwmus Aquinas. By WILLIAM J. HoYE. Meisenheim am Giilin: Verlag Anion Hain, 1975. Pp. 363. 79 DM. If God is .subsistent esse and creatures are modes of participation in esse, wha:t can we thence conclude concerning man's beatific vision of God? William J. Hoye has posed this problem and worked out an answer. Actualitas Omnium Aofoum represents his effort to apply " existential " Thomism, especially as developed by Gilson, Fabro, and the late William E. Carlo, to eschatology, an enterprise, surely, of interest and importance even in the eyes of those who might question his " existential " exegesis of St. Thomas Aquinas. The big question for the reviewer, then, is how well Hoye has carnied out his chosen task. In the opinion of the present reviewer his work in certain respects deserves praise but at the same time suffers from grave shortcomings. Adopting the more gracious sequence, I shall speak first of the virtues, then of the deficiencies. First of all, Hoye has massively researched almost all facets of his problem , and his book shows admirable zeal in the pursuit of pertinent materials. A quick run-through of his bibliography (from Adamczyk to Zychlinski), a casual riffiing to see how high on the average page lies the division between text and footnotes, will verify this judgment. One notices immediately , also, that this is a decidedly multilingual book: English, Latin (mostly St. Thomas's), French (especially Gilson's and Fabro's-the latter's Italian writings are almost totally ignored) , and German· greet the eye not only in the footnotes but also in the text, which is studded with quotations, sometimes quite lengthy, so that one might well expect even the reader who is competent in all these tongues to weary of the constant switching. The author has read .far and wide in later and particularly in present day literature (though I should perhaps mention that Hoye's research for this 19.75 book stopped, as he tells us on page 307, in early 1970 and that no works published in the seventies are listed in his bibliography); yet he has kept close at all times to the works of Thomas himself, whose doctrine he is trying throughout to expound. His special table of citations to texts of Thomas shows how complete his coverage has been. Furthermore, the general path followed in the book is one that touches all the bases and touches them in the right order, or at least in a good order. There are two main parts, of roughly equal length: one," Uncreated Beatitude," concerned with God as ipsum esse and with the relation of creatures to ipsum esse; the other, "Created Beatitude," treating of man 484 BOOK REVIEWS 485 as subject of beatification. In the first part are chapters on God as unknowable , on God as ipsum esse, on esse commune, on participation (the Fabro influence is here much to the fore), and on God as object of the beatific vision. The second part offers chapters on man as subject of the beatific vision (introductory to the succeeding chapters), on the fulfillment of all desires, ·on the actualization of all potencies in the resurrection , ·on sex in Heaven (an eyebrow-raiser), on the "anthropological factor "'--man's unchangeable nature as perduring in the beatific vision (with a good deal of recourse to Rahner) , on the act of vision (especially the lumen gloriae), and, finally, on life in the world as predetermining life in God. On the whole, the first part seems superior to the second, which is more affected by certain failures-soon to be discussed~to maintain crucial distinctions. Hoye's chapter on the uriknowableness of God is quite good, a weaving together of a rich assortment of texts, a fine startingpoint for reflection. Hoye, at least in this segment of his book, accepts, as not all purported. Thomists really do, the position of Thomas, that we simply do not know the essence of God, that our striving in this life to know God culminates in "learned ignorance." Hoye, in the later chapters, is excessively anxious to establish a kind of extensional...