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The Foundations of Belief
By Leslie Dewart
526 pp. New York, Herder & Herder, 1969. $9.50.

Why is it that the bolder and more creative avant-garde Roman Catholic thinkers tend to write in such an involved and wrapped-up style? Why, despite the exciting nature of their themes and the liberating motives of their work, are they so often unable to express clear thoughts in lucid language? Perhaps the reason is that they are engaged in extricating themselves from a maze, the tortuous maze of fifteen hundred years of Catholic theology. At any rate, whatever the correct analysis, Leslie Dewart's book is a notable example of the phenomenon. The Protestant reader is likely to sympathize with his basic point of view, and to hope that he will succeed in getting out of the maze, but to be less than totally fascinated with the process of thought by which he does it.

Dewart sees Christian belief-surely rightly-as in continuous change, sometimes slow and sometimes rapid, and as evolving within an evolving cultural environment. The function of theology is to express the meaning of religious experience, including the experience of "revelation," within each new cultural-historical situation and in the categories which that situation creates; and theological truth consists in the authenticity of formulations within their social and historical context. Thus

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theology should change through time; and the contemporary transformation of the human situation demands a corresponding transformation of theology.

Having thus indicated his conception of truth as historically conditioned, Dewart argues that Christian belief, in the forms which it has taken until today, has presupposed the Greek definitions of both " reality" and "truth." For Christianity was born into a hellenized world, and its expansion, carried physically on Roman roads, moved metaphysically along the paths opened up by Greek philosophy. It was Plato and Aristotle who (to change the metaphor) had laid the intellectual foundations on which Christian theology has been built. The resulting conception of "reality," in the central stream that flowed through the capacious mind of St. Thomas, was as the intelligible structure of being; and of "truth" as the adequacy of the mind's own reduplication of reality within itself. This led eventually, according to Dewart, to a deadend in the thought of Descartes, who committed what William Temple called the faux-pas of depicting the mind as trapped in its own solipsistic circle where it seeks in vain for grounds on which to affirm the existence of realities beyond itself.

The modern world has seen the progressive but unplanned dehellenization of western thought. But today we must accelerate the process consciously, deliberately abandoning metaphysics (a Greek invention), and rejecting the hellenic dogma of the reducibility of reality to being. We are thus, in the course of human evolution, about to enter a post- or metametaphysical age in which Christianity renounces the metaphysical notion of God on which its theology has hitherto been based, in favor of a metametaphysical concept of deity. But just what this latter understanding of God is, unfortunately never becomes clear in Dewart's book. At the end of this long work, extending to over five-hundred pages, we find that we have only read a prolegomenon. There are hints. God is "the reality beyond being" (p. 481). For "religious experience . . . does not reveal a transcendent being: what it reveals is that being exists in the presence of a reality which transcends it. To conceptualize in the contradictory terms of 'transcendent being' the belief made possible by the awareness of absolute contingency may well have been unavoidable at a certain level of the evolution of human consciousness. But to conceive it in terms of 'transcendent presence to being' may be more adequate today" (pp. 443-4). Again, this approach means "that God is not a being; it means that he may be found in being, but only as other than being; it means that he may be found only as present to being and as manifesting himself in the reality of being" (p. 470). Faith is "the transcendent, future-tensional, truth-orientational, projective dimension of experience"

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(p. 460). All this, and much more in the same vein, is certainly of interest, but it is all left by Dewart in a relatively vague and undeveloped form. To my mind the book would have been more valuable if, instead of coming at the end, these hints had come nearer the beginning, after only a brief rejection of Thomistic metaphysics, and their implications then carefully worked out. If Dewart goes on to produce another volume which begins where this one leaves off, it will be likely to be more interesting and more useful than the present work. But even if the present work is not as exciting as it is meant to be, it is nevertheless more exciting than the' traditionally orthodox works which it seeks to replace.

John Hick
University of Birmingham
Birmingham, England