In Reasonable Hope

Reviewed by: In Reasonable Hope: Philosophical Reflections on Ultimate Meaning by Patrick Masterson Fiachra Long (bio) Patrick Masterson, In Reasonable Hope: Philosophical Reflections on Ultimate Meaning ( Washington DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2021), 208 pages. It is difficult to classify this book. It is both a philosophical treatise and a personal reflection on death written to express the 'reasonable hope' that the author will one day be reunited with his beloved wife, Frankie, now sadly deceased. Patrick Masterson uses his considerable metaphysical know-how and his vibrant Christian faith to argue that because human love transcends death, it is reasonable to hope that love and life can extend beyond the grave. The book divides into eighteen short chapters and falls into two parts. Written in deceptively simple style, the observations are nuanced, the considerations deep, the author's honesty brave and disarming, but does his metaphysical argument clinch the matter? The first part (chapters 1–6) approaches the question from the perspective of metaphysics and presents three possible frames, three total 'world views'. The first worldview is based on various humanisms, reflecting the dictum, attributed to Protagoras, that 'man is the measure of all things'. In this frame, human love would proclaim its own finitude. Human experience would be considered inexorably bound to the material conditions of life, a view identified as correlationism by French philosopher Quentin Meillassoux, a form of thinking the author finds also reflected in phenomenology and linguistic philosophy. Correlationism effectively compromises human transcendence, returning all human life to its material conditions, including human love which paradoxically operates strongly despite the intervention of death itself. For reasons like these, our author prefers to follow Aquinas's view that human beings are substances not essentially defined by their material connections but capable of forging an emergent kind of love life out of these material conditions. He sets the metaphysical concepts of substance and causality against correlationism in all its forms and argues that human transcendence fractures the assumptions of materialist humanisms. Human substances operate in a manner that is independent of matter in unusual but accessible ways. In sum: In virtue of our intelligence, we transcend the pragmatic immediacy of our pragmatic involvement in the world and exercise the ability [End Page 103] to attain detached objective truth of both a theoretical and a practical nature (39–40) A second total worldview is offered by science whether in the reductive forms of scientism (the view that only science can present a valid account of reality) or scientific naturalism which situates humans along with other animals in the realm of nature. Leaving scientism aside, our author is more attracted by the prospect of a vision of nature arranged according to a hierarchy of life forms and situated in a 'unified natural order' (49) such as described by several writers, including Thomas Nagel (Mind and Cosmos). He agrees that dynamism is evident in nature, a telos or purpose built into the structures of the world, but surely this requires a more robust theory of causality than supported by happenstance? Critical of Nagel's proposal of an order in nature without a cause, Masterson contends that an ultimate cause is needed on purely rational grounds. For Masterson, the human experience of love shows how people might participate in a realm of being that is higher than the scientific explanations can describe. For this reason, he finds solace in the theistic view of life, the third grand narrative he explores. Narrowing this view to the Christian and further to the Catholic understanding of God, he uses Aquinas rather than Karl Barth to follow the twin avenues of reason and faith in his attempt to understand the ordinary experience of human love. A couple of valuable pages (58–60) commenting on Aquinas's Summa contra Gentiles III, ch. 40, guided by the indomitable Belgian philosopher Georges van Riet, offers a valuable clarification on the distinction between knowledge provided by the lumen fidei (light of faith) and that accessible to natural reason alone. I was reminded of Aquinas's great debate with Averroism in the De unitate intellectūs, where Aquinas rejects the Averroistic materialism of the soul. While the soul

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