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206 Book Reviews Erich Przywara And 206 Book Reviews Erich Przywara and Postmodern Natural Law. By Graham James McAleer. Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 2019. xiv + 131 pages. $35.00. That there is currently a long overdue discovery, in the Anglophone world, of the dazzlingly speculative and expansive Catholic vision of the Polish-German philosopher and theologian, Erich Przywara, SJ, (1889–1972) can no longer be denied. Indeed, it is beginning to be recognised that Przywara’s Catholic metaphysical vision is unparal- leled in twentieth century Catholic thought. This most felicitous un- covering is manifested in the following books: Thomas O’Meara’s, Erich Przywara, S.J.: His Theology and his World (2002); Thomas Joseph White’s edited volume, The Analogy of Being: Invention of the Antichrist or the Wisdom of God (2011); the superb translation of Przywara’s magnum opus, Analogia Entis (henceforth AE) by John Betz and David Bentley Hart (2014); Rowan Williams’s Christ the Heart of Creation (2018); my Reimagining the Analogia Entis: The Future of Erich Przywara’s Christian Vision (2019); and now McAleer’s Erich Przywara and Postmodern Natural Law, soon to be followed by Aaron Pidel’s book on Przywara’s ecclesiology. McAleer’s book joins the ranks of the aforementioned texts by ex- hibiting an equally high estimation of Przywara as he, rightfully, holds AE to be “the greatest work of Thomism in the twentieth century” (ix). Readers of Przywara know that such a statement is far from hyperbole. McAleer’s use of Przywara, however, is distinctive as he seeks to ap- ply Przywara’s analogia entis to a theory of “postmodern natural law” and “a history of a metaphysics of morals,” as the title and subtitle suggest. The author’s stated aim is not to offer an exegesis of AE but a commentary, “Copying the style of Francisco de Vitoria’s expansive commentaries on Aquinas, I want to apply Przywara’s conceptual framework to the development of the West’s thoughtscape and its con- temporary problems” (ix–x). The brilliance of AE’s conceptual frame- work is certainly amenable to such enlistment and thus McAleer’s text seeks to update, simplify, add, and extend Przywara’s creaturely met- aphysics towards “a value-phenomenology of civilizations atop a met- aphysics of morals” culminating in liturgical morality and a new the- ory of natural law (xi). The author sees the great merit of AE consisting in the argument that Christianity is the completion and inner truth of metaphysics be- cause Christianity is a religion of the Incarnation, and the Incarnation commits “one to Catholicism” (xi). This commitment to an incarna- tional metaphysics avoids the tendency in Western thought towards disembodiment and “decapitation” (x) where the head/reason is sev- ered from body and body from head/reason. McAleer sees this as aligning with Przywara’s reading of the history of metaphysics where Book Reviews 207 thinkers one-sidedly slide either into univocity (e.g., Parmenides, Plato, Descartes, Kant, and Husserl) and equivocity (e.g., Heraclitus, Aristotle, Hume, Nietzsche, and Heidegger). Analogy does neither, by keeping open the play back and forth between identity and difference without thereby collapsing the one into the other. Thought in the con- text of a metaphysics of morals, the logic of analogy represents a Christian (Thomistic) form of humanism where mind and body are held together in unity without either collapsing one into the other or severing their unity-in-difference. Przywara’s “conceptional frame- work,” when applied this way, avoids the Western tendency towards either angelism (univocity) or vitalism (equivocity) and thus the re- sultant decapitation. Enter McAleer’s eccentric and exciting tour through a kind of ge- nealogy of morals read through this adapted Przywarian optic which takes us from the middle ages to postmodernity. Along the way, one does not find the usual suspects but an odd and interesting cast of char- acters: Robert Kilwardby (chapters 1 and 2); Thomas Reid and Scho- penhauer (chapter 3), Aurel Kolnai and the biocentric nature of Na- tional Socialism (chapter 4); Giorgio Agamben (chapter 5); and Mer- leau-Ponty (chapter 6). The remaining chapters deal with “Value The- ory and Natural Law” (chapter 7) and “Play and Liturgy” (chapter 8), ending with a conclusion entitled “Moral Theory and Liturgy.” McAleer moves ably through the thinkers listed, and the text itself is an enjoyable and thoughtful read, filled with tantalizing lines of thought. The most fascinating thread throughout the text, in my view, was the frequent signalling to the import of analogy for political the- ology. Presumably this is tied to the author’s movement towards a “Christoform natural law” (xiv) in concert with liturgy. However, the connections between, analogy, political theology, and a Christoform version of natural law were more hinted at rather than elaborated. I further found myself reading the majority of the text—immersed in its varied themes and unusual cast of characters—completely forgetting that Przywara was/is the main protagonist, even if the text was never meant to be an exegesis of Przywara. In sum, the text is an enjoyable read, riddled with provocative and alluring lines of thought, but it left me wanting more. Perhaps there it serves its purpose as it invites one to return to the complex “conceptual framework” of that strange-sounding thinker whose work is more and more be regarded as the most significant in Catholic metaphysics in the twentieth century. PHILIP JOHN PAUL GONZALES The Pontifical University of St. Patrick’s College, Maynooth .
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