The Being of God: Theology and the Experience of Truth by Robert Scharlemann

Abstract

462 BOOK REVIEWS that "moral reason is trustworthy because it is in touch with reality" (p. 5). In these chapters Battaglia brings in other authors than St. Thomas. He wants to gain support from some recent writers for his thesis that natural law still has a role to play for guiding us in moral decisions. He successfully integrates these modern comments into the ever-present doctrine of St. Thomas. As a result he is able to achieve what he set out to do. Early in the book he had written: "Reformulating means, in its commonsense usage, to say the same thing in a different way " (p. 29). Hence, we conclude with the natural law theory of St. Thomas Aquinas said in a different way, more congenial perhaps to our contemporaries, although a bit watered down by the author's concern for the role of historicity (cf. pp. 13 sq.) as a determining factor for change in morals, especially in the area of sexual morality. But then the human family is always looking for something like that. Dominican House of Studies Washington, D.C. RAYMOND SMITH, O.P. The Being of God: Theology and the Experience of Truth. By ROBERT ScHARLEMANN. New York: The Seabury Press, 1981. Robert Scharlemann has contributed a significant and provocative addition to the debate on the nature of truth and the way in which truth is experienced. His work will undoubtedly arouse discussion and interest among theologians for some time to come. The author's intention is not to engage in a debate about the theoretical nature of truth but rather to focus discussion on how truth is experienced. This distinction allows the author to contend that the theme will " unfold on its own terms for anyone who may care to follow it "; but, as we shall later note, the seeming neglect of the nature of truth itself gives rise to particular problems with the book itself. There are, however, clear indications of the nature and scope of the author's philosophical sources. Anglo-American analytical thought and continental phenomenological and speculative traditions play a major role in Scharlemann's thinking. There are _Kantian overtones to his use of the term ' experience '; something is given to thought itself, and one suspects that Kantian assumptions (including his use of Karl Daub's work) play a significant role in the major thesis of the book that it is as reflectivity upon ' identity in difference ' that truth is experienced. Consideration of the theoretical nature of truth cannot, however, be far BOOK REVIEWS 463 away from the author's perception of how truth is experienced, for the ground which he establishes for his argument precludes any discussion of the object of traditional metaphysics (prior to Kant). For Scharlemann, as indeed for so many proponents of current liberal theology, the death of traditional metaphysics is considered a fait accompli, and therefore the experience of God as the Supreme Being, the Creator of this world, must be given an altogether different interpretation. Correspondence between human thought and transcendent truth must be re-interpreted. Defining religion as " the consciousness in any person for which ' God' and related words name a realm which is as real as the physical world because the images created by those words are as much given as are the data of sense perception", Scharlemann finds in Heidegger's analytic the beginning of a postmetaphysical thinking of truth. The idea of a Supreme Being is a delusion, but by recoguizing this fact, he claims, the way is made clear for a re-thinking of the experience of truth which takes into full consideration the atheistic experience. In this manner, the author argues, one's conception of truth is freed from ' enslavement' to just one among many variations of truth. It is in turning to the structure of reflection, the focus of which is the 'I' (Heidegger's Dasein-which the author claims is substantially the same as Aristotle's anima and Thomas's ens quad natum est convenire cum omni ente), that the process of understanding the experience of truth begins . Through projection and disclosure the reflective act brings meaning and being together in time. Language is the medium in...