Summaries / Resúmenes - Studia Moralia

498 REVIEWS / RECENSIONESbut with minor attention to his studies on the development inAquinas’s moral conceptions. The same could be said of GeorgWieland’s findings on medieval law and practical reason. The changingfortunes of Thomism from the Middle Ages till Leo XIII where thetensions that characterised twentieth century moral theology foundtheir origins are either side stepped or adverted to fleetingly. This onlyunderlines the fact that there is as yet no recognised history of moraltheology to which to refer. The fascination with the recent past is perhapsthereby rather inevitable. On the other hand moral theology ishere seen through the prism of how the Dominican, Jesuit andRedemptorist traditions sought to develop and apply St. Thomas’sthought within this time span. Attention is principally devoted tomanuals written over the last hundred years and the authors providea fund of information on this evolution. Thomas Hibbs’s“Interpretations of Aquinas’s Ethics Since Vatican II” discerns threegreat movements, proportionalism, virtue ethics, and the theologicalnature of Aquinas’s ethical production. He notes that the supernatural-naturalrelationship as it regards ethics and the question of happinesscalls out for further study and deeper understanding.This volume seeks to be non-polemical and objective even whenit discusses issues that have been subject to fierce public debate. Thetensions regarding proportionalism and the basic goods theory ofnatural law are examined tranquilly in terms of their relationshipwith the wider world of scholarship on St. Thomas. No definitivesolutions are presented but one may discover the great difficulty ofapplying Aquinas to thoroughly modern questions. This becomesobvious when reading Daniel Westberg’s carefully formulated ideason the moral quality of human acts and Ludger Honnefelder’s appreciationof how decisively important consequences can be for the same.One cannot really claim that these authors are in substantial agreement.Yet they witness to how the same text may give birth to differentinterpretations that then result in divergent moral theories.Had this volume been addressed to a British university audiencethere is little doubt that Wittgensteinian and analytic Thomismwould have been the predominant theme throughout. G.E.M.Anscombe, Peter Geach, Anthony Kenny, Herbert McCabe, O.P. anda fleet of others although writing in English have not drawn evenminimum notice. Instead Maritain, Simon and Gilson feature prominentlywhile Lonergan gains separate treatment as representing postmodernity.This points to some of figures whose influence has helped