Abstract
In a tightly edited, highly readable volume, Rosenberg locates the still controverted consequences of the imbroglio between the Ressourcement and Neo-Scholastic theological movements, identifies some principal roots of the conflict in the postwar era leading to the Second Vatican Council, and advances a sanatio in radice that transforms the perplexing embroilment into a constructive and transformative exchange.
R. organizes his significant contribution in three thematic movements. First, he combs the social, ecclesial, doctrinal, and theological threads from the entanglement of the Ressourcement and Neo-Scholastic movements to clarify two issues that must be addressed going forward, namely: grounding theology in history and developing a more substantive theological anthropology. Second, he presents a clear, compelling account of the theological resources afforded by Lonergan’s retrieval, transposition, and development of the Thomist tradition; paying special attention to the conscious desire for truth, goodness, and beauty, a dynamic metaphysics of emergence in the natural and social worlds, and a nuanced account of unfolding human desire and its absolutely transcendent fulfilment. Third, R. synthesizes his findings with René Girard’s account of mimetic desire to elaborate a metaphysics of holiness—illustrated with reflections on the exemplary lives of Thérèse of Lisieux and Etty Hillesum—which he employs to redirect undifferentiated religious resistance to secularization toward a more nuanced, critical response to the sacralization of distorted spiritual desire. R. brings a broad, open, evaluative perspective to the roles of secularizing and sacralizing movements in society and theology, and offers a promising alternative to the increasingly sterile culture wars that undermine a more effective (re)evangelization of Western societies.
Scholars acquainted with mid-20th-century Catholic debates over the compromised role of religion in war-ravaged Europe will appreciate R.’s ability to clarify the historical interrelations among resistance to National Socialism, the promotion of social justice, emerging secularism, and theological issues focused on the natural desire for supernatural beatitude. Under R.’s treatment, the social and religious issues at stake in the knotty theological entanglement of the integrity of human nature and the gratuity of divine grace become increasingly lucid. After recognizing the imperatives to engage history and to appreciate metaphysical insight arising from the controversial exchange between Jean Daniélou and Réginald Garrigou-Lagrange, R. analyzes the ressourcement approach of Henri de Lubac to the interpretation of Thomist theology. Beyond retrieving de Lubac’s effort to contend with the dual imperatives by emphasizing the continuity of the human project and its divine fulfilment, R. advances the discussion by addressing the challenges presented by de Lubac’s thoughtful Neo-Scholastic interlocutor, Lawrence Feingold.
R. remains a generous and constructive interpreter of his sources. He appreciates, for instance, the significance of Feingold’s careful parsing of four metaphysical states of the human desire to know God, which turn on the proportion between human acts and a person’s natural, naturally elicited, divinely elicited, and divinely transformed habitual capacities to act (44–45). Engaging Feingold’s claim that only states of desire elicited by knowledge are conscious—whether elicited by the conditional natural knowledge that God exists or unconditional knowledge enabled by revelation or the assistance of (actual) grace—R. turns to Lonergan’s intentionality analysis to advance Feingold’s contribution by arguing that the scope of conscious desire extends to include innate natural desire and innate natural desire habitually transformed by (sanctifying) grace. By introducing Lonergan’s distinction between knowledge and consciousness as self-presence accompanying not only knowledge but all other intentional, cognitional activities, R. embarks on a magisterial discussion of the human person’s natural desire to know God; a discussion that synthesizes the theological aesthetics of Hans Urs von Balthasar, the phenomenology of Jean-Luc Marion, the elucidation of Lonergan’s trinitarian theology by Robert Doran, and illustrative examples drawn from the writings of Jean Vanier and Wendell Berry. R. proposes to his readers that the gift of God’s love (sanctifying grace) and the response of loving God and neighbor in return (the habit of charity) do not establish a new extrinsic end for human nature but introduce a new (conscious) relation to the person’s already innate, natural end (117).
By developing a phenomenologically grounded, intensified theological anthropology, R. relieves the secular–sacral binary that has plagued contemporary conversations about the role of religion in the world. Elucidating the potentially ambiguous, historical unfolding of the human person’s conscious, natural, innate, self-transcending desire for the sacred enables R. to identify the possibility of deviated desire. Recalling Lonergan’s observation that both secularizing and sacralizing social movements can overreach their competence, R. demonstrates the potential of his contribution by analyzing materialism not as advancing the secular to the exclusion of the sacred but as presenting a distorted sacralization; promoting consumerism as the satisfaction of the desire for the sacred. Although readers, at times, may find the breadth of R.’s erudition challenging, he not only avoids fruitless abstractions but offers practical guidance for the journey.