Reviewed by: Analogies of Transcendence: An Essay on Nature, Grace & Modernity by Stephen M. Fields Anthony Rosselli Analogies of Transcendence: An Essay on Nature, Grace & Modernity BY STEPHEN M. FIELDS Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2016. 294 pages. $69.95. ISBN: 0813228557. Stephen Fields's essay on nature and grace admits that a comprehensive treatment of the topic "lies beyond the ken of most mortals" (2). Nevertheless, the tapestry of theological debate is better appreciated by elucidating specific threads within the conversation that de Lubac's 1946 Surnaturel initiated. To this end, Fields focuses on the "vital role that analogy plays in developing an adequate model of nature and grace" (3). Though Newman's relevance is not obvious while wading through the book, that Fields opens the text with a quote from The Idea of a University and returns there in its closing words is not without significance. Indeed, Newman does not feature as one of Fields's central conversation partners, but he remains a foundational voice undergirding Fields's intrinsicist and sacramental conception of nature and grace insofar as, in Newman's mind, grace and nature are in dynamic interrelation with one another. Fields even identifies Newman's passing description of nature's relation to grace as "the cipher" that explains the code which all Christians know (252). The book's opening chapters are historical and account for the emergence of an extrinsicist model of "pure nature" (ch. 1) and some twentieth-century attempts to heal the subsequent "estrangement" between nature and grace (chs. 2 and 3). Following Louis Dupré, Fields locates the cause of this estrangement in the passing of a certain "Baroque harmony," which—in its cultural forms, spirituality, and Tridentine dogmatic assertions—rightly balances the human person's "intrinsic relation to its transcendent source" (9). For Fields, Christian theology itself bears some blame for the passing of the Baroque. Indeed, the movement from a Platonic-Augustinian theological framework to an Aristotelian-Thomistic framework facilitated the emergence of this problematic nature-grace extrinsicism. [End Page 79] Ambiguity in Saint Thomas provides space for this development. It is unclear in Thomas, for example, how ungraced and unmeritorious "goods of utility"—erecting buildings or planting gardens, etc.—relate to the meritorious goods that grace achieves. In what sense can the word "good" be applied to both? Indeed, we have an ambiguity about the nature of analogical language. For Fields, an apparent ontological discontinuity between goods of utility and meritorious goods leans toward an equivocal notion of the good. While there may be ways to defend Thomas, at the very least there is room enough in the ambiguity for his sixteenth-century inheritors to construct an extrinsicist model of grace with a place for nature's autonomous secular. In chapter two, Fields explores "attempted reunions" of nature and grace among twentieth-century thinkers like Möhler, Seckler, Blondel, and Rahner. Fields's engagement with Seckler is especially important to his own proposal. For Seckler, an "instinct of faith" in the human heart serves as the dynamic locus where nature and supernature reciprocate. "The instinct," Fields explains, "represents the subjective action of grace moving the human heart … to apprehend the objective value of revelation as it comes externally to the person. The intrinsic goodness of this object attracts the subject precisely because the subject possesses a potential to be attracted. A congeniality thus obtains between divine and human actions—between … grace and nature" (58). In chapter three, Fields engages both John Paul II and Benedict XVI insofar as they helped to recover the Baroque harmony between nature and grace. Focusing on John Paul II's reflections in Fides et Ratio, John Paul II's use of freedom in expanding the subjective power of the Eucharist, and Benedict XVI's discussion of love and justice, a coherent vision of "nature as grace's sacrament" is articulated. In Fides et Ratio, for example, John Paul II emphasized "the transcendent as ingredient in reality" (78). For the pontiff, reason's engagement with finite reality allows it "almost to surpass its natural limitations,"1 somehow enabling reason to gain "an intuition of its own self-transcending capacity" (75). In this sense, nature perceives...
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Nov 28, 2023
C.J.C Pickstock 
Open Access