Early Latin Theology by Bernard J. F. Lonergan

630 BOOK REVIEWS this regard. I would only add a slight note of caution: The “Thomism” that was controverted in the second half of the sixteenth century is not the “Thomism” that was controverted in the second half of the nineteenth, nor is it the “Thomism” that serves as a litmus test today. At times, Mantovani can give this impression. He bolsters it by framing the debate about the existence of God in terms of realism versus nominalism, such that Vitoria and Soto become tainted with the contagion of nominalism from Paris—and Báñez is made out to be a prophet of the “realism” that will save us. This framing device, which interprets the history of philosophy using a single issue from the Middle Ages, is a bit timeworn, being a holdover from the historia philosophica philosophiae of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Lutheran historians. It is not that these were not issues debated during the seventeenth century, of course, but the stubbornness with which historians use this trope to interpret every issue is quite alien to the theologians in question. In fine, Mantovani’s work is deeply learned, stimulating, and refreshing. Much needed information bristles upon almost every page. Still, there is one risk in the retrieval of Scholastic theology that I feel compelled to mention—a risk that, in the flowering of the commentatorial traditions during the seventeenth century, was commonly associated with another religious order. In the baroque age, theologians often complained that Jesuits read only Jesuits to the exclusion of the wider debate around them. Thomists today have everything to gain from reading the commentatorial tradition, but they risk misunderstanding it if they commit the sin once attributed to Jesuits. The Dominicans at Salamanca were not afraid to read theologians from other orders, and even learn from them. They were—dare I say—open to broader cultural currents, confident not only in the ability of Thomism, but indeed in the ability of the Church, to address and transform them. TRENT POMPLUN Loyola University Maryland Baltimore, Maryland Early Latin Theology. By BERNARD J. F. LONERGAN. Collected Works of Bernard Lonergan, vol. 19. Translated by MICHAEL G. SHIELDS. Edited by ROBERT M. DORAN and H. DANIEL MONSOUR. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2011. Pp. xviii + 713. $45.00 (paper). ISBN 978-14426 -1235-8. Bernard Lonergan finished his dissertation on operative grace in the thought of Thomas Aquinas in 1939. Whisked out of Rome on the eve of hostilities, he passed the next dozen years teaching in Jesuit theologates at Montreal and Toronto, before reassignment to the Gregorian University BOOK REVIEWS 631 beginning in the fall of 1953. It proved to be one of the most productive periods of his literary career. After rewriting his dissertation for publication (Grace and Freedom), he undertook a major study of Aquinas’s theory of the intellect (Verbum: Word and Idea in Aquinas). before composing his seminal philosophical text, Insight: A Study of Human Understanding (completed in September 1953 but not published until 1957). In addition to these projects that sprang from his personal research interests, his teaching duties engendered supplemental treatises on theoretical questions of special difficulty and high interest. Such comprise the selections in the present volume: three supplements on grace, an analysis of faith, an essay on the notion of sacrifice, and two supplements on Christology. All are reproduced in the original Latin with a facing English translation. His concern, almost entirely, is with the speculative and synthetic rather than the positive and analytic part of theology; it is, in short, to attain that imperfect, uncertain, but highly fruitful understanding of the mysteries lauded by Dei Filius of Vatican I. When Lonergan penned these supplements, his apprenticeship to Aquinas was in full bloom, and in many of these treatises he sets out to demonstrate the superiority of the method, principles, and doctrine of Aquinas, not only over the general run of Scholastic thought (Scotus and Suárez, in particular), but also over significant strands in the tradition of Thomistic commentary (Bañez, John of St. Thomas). His dissertation had taken direct aim at both the “Dominican” and the “Jesuit” parties in the controversy de auxiliis, on grace and freedom...

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