Ressourcement Thomism: Sacred Doctrine, the Sacraments, and the Moral Life. Essays in Honor of Romanus Cessario, O.P. ed. by Reinhard Hütter and Matthew Levering

Abstract

141 BOOK REVIEWS Ressourcement Thomism: Sacred Doctrine, the Sacraments, and the Moral Life. Essays in Honor of Romanus Cessario, O.P. Edited by REINHARD HÜTTER and MATTHEW LEVERING. Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 2010. Pp. xviii + 409. $64.95 (cloth). ISBN 978-0-81321785 -7. The title of this volume expresses the conviction of its contributors that immersion in the fonts of theology and Thomism are not alternative theological programs but call for one another. The contributors are also animated by the sort of “theological realism” of the distinguished theologian the volume honors, Fr. Romanus Cessario, O.P., according to which, as Archbishop J. Augustine Di Noia puts it, theology is not terminally a discourse about discourse or about texts or traditions but rather a discourse that relies on texts and Tradition to talk about God. These two common convictions are responsible for the timeliness of the contributions. Introductory essays by Mary Ann Glendon and Guy Bedouelle, in addition to that of Di Noia, help the reader understand the contributions of Fr. Cessario to contemporary theological culture, and in the Introduction Reinhard Hütter and Matthew Levering provide an orientation to some of his most important work, paying special attention to his word in moral theology. Hütter’s own essay presents St. Thomas’s theology of the Eucharist as a model of how theology can be done. The first act of this theology is to hear revelation in Scripture, the liturgy, and the Church, and its second is to attain some imperfect understanding of what has been heard with the aid of a metaphysical articulation of being. Hütter deftly shows the necessity of invoking the category of substance and of distinguishing the first and second formal effects of quantity for dealing with what the Tradition says of the presence of Christ in the Eucharist. He shows how the relevant distinctions are rightly to be appreciated as ones achieved within the content of faith itself—or, in short, that they represent an authentic intellectus fidei. In addition to giving a good presentation of St. Thomas on transubstantiation, Hütter succeeds admirably in bringing forth this theology as a perspicuous example of St. Thomas’s theological achievement, an example whose use of metaphysics is both bold and subordinated to the careful hearing of the fonts of revelation. Levering’s short piece on St. Thomas’s inaugural lectures at Paris might seem to be merely a matter of reportage, but it is not. Levering wants us to see the BOOK REVIEWS 142 possibility of a properly systematic ordering of the material of the Bible, one that takes into account Scripture’s purpose: to be an instrument of God moving us to our end precisely by teaching us. Levering also wants us to see St. Thomas’s use of the Old Testament, and he wants us to think about our teaching in relation to the divine teaching. Thomas Joseph White’s essay on modern Dominican theology is especially important. He makes the history of theology illustrate its nature, and St. Thomas’s speculative grasp of its nature shed light on its twentieth-century past and twenty-first century prospects. The point of departure is a contrast between the theological style of M.-D. Chenu, which so privileges the historical constitution of human thought and language that it becomes difficult to defend revelation in its various forms of Scripture and Church doctrine as conveying a true word of God, and that of R. Garrigou-Lagrange, which makes of both doctrine and theology timeless realities viciously abstract from the concrete human condition of hearing the word of God. “In one we have history without sufficient recourse to dogma, while in the other we have dogma without sufficient recourse to history.” Both end up in a sort of perspectivalism, Chenu more openly by dissolving theology into a series of perspectives, GarrigouLagrange more surreptitiously by restricting theology to one perspective, its last premodern, Baroque moment. White explores the radicalizing of Chenu’s position in E. Schillebeeckx and C. Geffré, and makes the case that neither extreme successfully negotiated “the divide between classical dogma and ontology versus modern historical studies.” White next...