GRACE AND FREEDOM: OPERATIVE GRACE IN THE THOUGHT OF SAINT THOMAS AQUINAS.

LIDDY, RICHARD M.

GRACE AND FREEDOM: OPERATIVE GRACE IN THE THOUGHT OF SAINT THOMAS AQUINAS. By Bernard Lonergan, S.J. Edited by Frederick E. Crowe and Robert M. Doran. Collected Works of Bernard Lonergan, vol. 1. Toronto: University of Toronto, 2000. Pp. vi + 506. $80; $24.95.

In May of 1940, two days before the scheduled defense of his doctoral dissertation in Rome, Bernard Lonergan boarded the Conte di Savoia in Genoa to return to his native Canada. Europe was in turmoil, already embroiled in the Second World War, and his superiors thought it best that he immediately return home. He carried with him the doctoral dissertation he had written over the previous two years entitled Gratia Operans: A Study of the Speculative Development in the Writings of St. Thomas of Aquin. It would be six years before he would be officially granted his doctorate in Montreal after the war. In the meantime he would publish a "condensed and abbreviated" version of the dissertation in a series of articles in Theological Studies in 1941-1942 under the title "St. Thomas's Thought on Gratia Operans." These articles, later published in book form, are about half the size of the original dissertation. The present volume--number one in L.'s "Collected Works"--is a critical edition of both the dissertation and the subsequent articles. The editors and the University of Toronto Press are to be congratulated for making available in a very attractive edition this immensely valuable resource.

The problem L. traced in the thought of St. Thomas was the problem bequeathed to the Middle Ages by Augustine in his writings against the Pelagians who taught that divine grace was meted out according to the previous merits of good will. Augustine responded that God cooperates with good will to give it good performance; but alone he operates on bad will to make it good. Alone God replaces our heart of stone with a heart of flesh. "But when once we have willed to be good, we are not straight-away saints and martyrs.... We have our weak and imperfect good will only to pray for strength and spiritual growth; and when in answer to our prayers God enables us to will so firmly that we do perform, nobis cooperatur" (5).

Though Augustine addresses the problem of reconciling divine grace and human freedom, he does not do so with the rigor eventually demanded by the medieval theologians newly awash in Aristotelian thought pouring into Europe through the Arab writers and demanding intellectual rigor. L.'s work is the study of this developing intellectual context and, within it, of the developing mind of Thomas Aquinas on divine grace and human freedom.

Central to Aquinas's development was the breakthrough to the world of theory and to the validity of a line of reference termed "nature." Only in terms of such an abstraction can one think clearly of "sin" on the one hand and of the healing and elevating "supernatural" character of divine grace on the other hand. In the long run and in the concrete the real alternatives remain grace and sin. But the whole problem lies in the abstract, in human thinking, and in the need for "a mental perspective, a set of coordinates, that eliminate the basic fallacy and its attendant host of anomalies" (17).

In his Method in Theology (1972) L. articulates the notion of "intellectual conversion"; that is, the radical breakthrough from "picture thinking" about oneself and the world to a grounded position on knowledge, objectivity, and reality. In Grace and Freedom (orig. ed. 1971) L. in effect demonstrates this conversion operative in the mind of Aquinas as over the years he strove to understand the action of grace. Certainly no area could be more fraught with imaginative figures and "pictures" than this one. What is a "cause"? What does it mean to say that God "applies" a cause to an effect? How conceive of divine providence? How understand God's operation in general, in the light of which one can think and speak about the specific divine operation that is grace?

Finally, what did Aquinas himself hold on all of these issues? For L.'s primary aim here is not to engage in theological speculation but rather to do concrete historical research. "We ask what he said, why he said it and what he meant in saying it." Modern thought on these issues was complicated by the de auxiliis controversy of the 16th century. L's aim is "to get behind the sixteenth century controversy to the intellectual field in which St. Thomas did his thinking" (93).

Thus L. engages in a methodical analysis of the changes in the texts of Thomas: from his initial writings on the issue, which generally reflect the thought of his predecessors, through his developing positions in his more mature writings. Finally, in the Prima secundae "the multitudinous developments of the previous fifteen years" converge to his final position. "Metaphysics and psychology, divine providence and human instrumentality, grace and nature at last have meshed their intricacies in synthesis" (147).

Regarding this work on Aquinas, the young L., soon to leave war-torn Europe on the Conte di Savoia, wrote: "May it be found by those who, like St. Thomas, are drawn `by the admirable delight and love of the truth which is the very Son of God' to have thrown some light on the principles, the method, and the doctrine of the Communis Doctor" (149).

RICHARD M. LIDDY
Seton Hall University, South Orange, N.J.