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ROYAL, Robert. A Deeper Vision: The Catholic Intellectual Tradition in the Twentieth Century. San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2015. 619 pp.-It is hazardous to speak of a Catholic intellectual tradition. There are Augustinians, Thomists, Scotists, and perhaps some Ockhamists among the linguistic analysts, not to mention schools of personalism and phenomenology that arose in the twentieth century. Within each tradition some scholars are primarily indebted to Aristotle, others more to Plato or to Neoplatonism. Robert Royal is aware of all of this as he identifies a "core intellectuality" that may be called Catholic. He brings to his work an exceptional erudition, perhaps unsurpassed by any contemporary author.
A Deeper Vision opens with a description of the nineteenth-century Thomistic revival. Pope Leo XIII, aware that philosophy can only be fought by philosophy, in his 1897 encyclical Aetemi Patris recommended the philosophy of St. Thomas as an antidote to the then prevailing empiricisms and positivisms. In describing the extent of that movement Royal calls attention to the work of Jacques Maritain, Etienne Gilson, Maurice Blondel, Yves Simon, Joseph Pieper, Karl Rahner, and Bernard Lonergan, among many others. At mid-twentieth century, observers on the American scene could...