Virtues of the Will: The Transformation of Ethics in the Late Thirteenth Century by Bonnie Kent

Abstract

BOOK REVIEWS 473 the "character traits" of God and the pattern of salvation. When asked from outside of faith whether the notion of divine action in history makes sense, or why these narratives are to be accorded the status of divine self-revelation, Placher suggests that we heed the wisdom of the past, and balance our assertions of trust in God with a frank recognition that our explanations will never match the firmness of our convictions. He makes the same point with respect to all efforts to explain the presence of evil in creation. If God has revealed himself, there is no question more decisive than how human beings ought to respond in word and action. Placher does the theologians grappling with this question service by demonstrating the existence of a premodern ecumenical consensus based on the character of divine transcendence . The premoderns teach, he argues, that theology must begin and end by trusting a self-revealing deity who remains beyond comprehension, and forego any hopes of explaining its assertions to the satisfaction of outsiders . The implication, of course, is that all such efforts inevitably confuse God with more familiar realities and ensnare God in systems of human thought. The danger is real, and Placher has shown the sorry results. However, I wonder whether the danger stems not solely from a desire to domesticate the transcendent, but also from the jarring claim of Christianity's universal significance. After all, it was the identification of the God of Jesus Christ with the one, true God that first led theologians to enter into dialogue with philosophy. Placher does not make this task his own, and thereby limits the effectiveness of his otherwise excellent book. St. Mary College Leavenworth, Kansas }AMES F. KEATING Virtues of the Will: The Transformation of Ethics in the Late Thirteenth Century. By BONNIE KENT. Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 1995. Pp. viii+ 270. $44.95 (cloth). ISBN 0-81320829 -7. Today, the person enquiring in a bookstore about where to find scientific information on the origins of human behavior would most likely be directed to one of two sections. First, she may be sent to the shelves labeled "evolutionary psychology." There an interested researcher may choose among titles such as Robert Frank's Passions within Reason (1988) or Matt Ridley's more recent The Origins of Virtue (1996). Authors writing in the area of evolutionary psychology proceed on the assumption that, since physical matter in the form 474 BOOK REVIEWS of genes controls our emotional and motivational tendencies, biology not only provides the most reliable explanations for what human beings do but also constitutes the principal explanatory conception behind moral systems. If, however, our enquirer finds the thought repugnant that material causes should provide the exclusive explanation of such apparently distinctive features of the human person as love, honesty, fidelity, and gratitude in the same way that genes are said, with due scientific evidence, both to produce a person's general physiognomy and to determine such features as hair color and cholesterol level, she can move to the sections marked anthropology and sociology. There the one interested in learning what makes human beings tick will encounter a massive collection of organized data on the practices ofhomo sapiens, accompanied by carefully annotated theories that explain human actions as the product of social construction. Can cultural diversity account for the inescapably present desire for a life beyond this life that Christian theology tells us arises in every member of the race? If not, then our enquirer needs to search elsewhere in order to attain complete information about human behavior. Virtues ofthe Will also reports on the efforts of significant scholars to give an account of the causes at work in the comportment of human beings everywhere . But it is highly unlikely that the potential buyer interested in studying its subject matter will discover a volume like this in sections of most bookstores labeled human behavior. Bonnie Kent examines medieval authors who, despite the spectrum of opinions that their Scholastic debates generated, shared the view that specifically human actions flow from a spiritual principle, which informs every human person. In other words, these authors assume, in the...