This work, written by the founder of the Fraternity of St Vincent Ferrer and successfully defended as a doctoral thesis at the Sorbonne, is both an original work of metaphysics and an introduction to the thought of Fr Louis-Bertrand Guérard des Lauriers (1898–1988). Fr Guérard des Lauriers is perhaps not well known to most English students of St Thomas, but was a major and independent-minded figure within the French ‘Thomistic revival’ of the 20th Century.
The author's concern in this book is with the foundations of metaphysics, the science of ‘being qua being’. Hence the phrase ratio entis occurs throughout the book, for example (p. 14), ‘one's entrance into metaphysics depends on the isolation [le dégagement] of the ratio entis’. Normally left untranslated in the text, this phrase might be rendered as ‘the nature of being’, or ‘the meaning of “being”’.
Clearly, one cannot strictly define being, since ‘this would imply that there was something anterior to being by which the ratio entis could be defined’ (ibid.). How then does the author approach his subject? He proposes a three-fold investigation, inspired by the classic repartition of the virtues of the speculative intellect into ‘science’, ‘understanding’ and ‘wisdom’.
The scientific or rational approach to being (chapter III) seeks to show how our experience of reality leads, as if from principles to conclusions, to an awareness of being as both ‘substantial’ and ‘accidental’, to a knowledge of the transcendental ‘properties’ of being, and to a knowledge of act (as opposed to potentiality). The analysis is both scientifically precise and concerned throughout to stay in touch with common human experience.
After this meticulous study of ‘the various ways in which being is said’, the intellective or ‘noetic’ approach (chapter IV) seeks to grasp being in its unity. Here the author considers the different senses of the term ‘abstraction’. He also shows how Guérard des Laurier's thought compares and contrasts with that of Heidegger and Maritain. The author insists that the mental act by which we give a content to the term ‘being’ must involve the first two ‘operations of the mind’, namely, simple apprehension and judgement. Maritain's theory of an ‘intuition of being’ is partly rejected (e.g. p. 244); it would have been interesting to learn what the author would have said of Maritain's development of his theory in the late work Approches sans Entraves.
The ‘sapiential’ approach to being (chapter V) builds on the two preceding chapters, arguing that our experience of the ways in which being is ‘instantiated’, put in the light of what we can grasp of the ratio entis, opens the horizons to new questions (p. 269). In particular, the limitation which being always presents in our experience, though not in its own ratio, leaves the mind unsatisfied. Naturally, then, this last chapter considers the existence of God, the knowledge of this truth being presented as the summit of metaphysics. The author is particularly attentive to the question of how we come to grasp the ‘self-evident’ principles to which St Thomas appeals in this respect, for example, that ‘whatever is moved is moved by another’ (pp. 282ff ).
The first two chapters of this book are devoted to a study of the human mind and its varied approaches to reality. The author insists on the phrase, mens capax entis (p. 45), as the philosophical equivalent of the theological phrase, mens capax Dei. He argues that while the former phrase does not literally appear in the works of St Thomas, it is a faithful summary of his thought (chapter I). He also introduces a favourite theme of Guérard des Lauriers, that of a tripartite distinction of the manner of human knowing, independent of the area of knowledge (pp. 54ff). Whereas the Thomist tradition tends to concentrate on the distinction between understanding (in simple apprehension and judgement) and reasoning, Guérard argued that there is a third, irreducible component in the mind's grasp of reality, what he calls le sens de la question, which we might translate as ‘having the knack of asking the interesting questions’. The author defends the thesis that this third component, (also called by Guérard ‘pneumatism’, from pneuma), consists in a knowledge of being by connaturality and manifests itself most clearly in what is called genius. The author defends this thesis with interesting citations from scientists and artists; the current reviewer, however, is unsure that ‘pneumatic knowledge’ need be considered an operation of the mind really distinct from simple apprehension and judgement.
The theory of ‘pneumatism’ is explained at greater length in chapter II, where it is argued that it has ‘beauty’ for its proper object. ‘The efficacious means of [scientific] discovery’, the author writes, ‘is a certain sensibility to intelligible beauty’ (p. 106). This leads to an original investigation of the place of beauty among the other transcendentals, with the suggestion that it is best defined as ‘the actual shining forth of the communicability of being’, or ens ut communicans.
This dense and meditative book concludes with three important appendices which reveal the depth of the author's knowledge of the corpus of St Thomas. The first and third are statistical analyses of ‘the vocabulary of being’ in the writings of the angelic doctor. Among other things, they reveal the presence in Aquinas’ work of phrases that might have been attributed to a later scholasticism such as natura entitatis. The second appendix, which occupies 97 pages, contains translation of all the passages in St Thomas's writings which contain the phrase ratio entis, or cognate expressions.
The author enjoys a wide command not only of the actual texts of St Thomas but also of the relevant contemporary literature, in English, French and Italian. A concern for scientific precision is dominant throughout, but the book is also marked by an awareness that a well-founded, realist metaphysics must prevail in a society for the sake of the moral and cultural good of its members. Finally, this book is written in a rhetorical style proper to the French philosophical tradition that the English reader may well find daunting, at times; but if he perseveres, he will have received a thorough induction into ‘the mystery of being’.
