PHILOSOPHY:IN THE FIRST sermon that he preached in University Church, St Stephen's Green, John Henry Newman, rector of the Catholic University, rejected the assumption "that, to be religious, you must be ignorant and to be intellectual, you must be unbelieving", writes Pádraic Conway.
Now, in a magisterial encapsulation of a life's work, Paddy Masterson, former president of UCD, the successor institution to Newman's university, has shown himself to be a worthy heir to the eminent oratorian.
After pursuing a course of undergraduate studies at UCD that he describes in the preface as "mainly, but not narrowly, Thomist in inspiration", Masterson moved to Louvain in the early 1960s. His PhD programme there exposed him to both contemporary continental philosophy and the American pragmatic tradition. In his subsequent academic career at UCD, he broadened his canvas still further through engagement with Wittgenstein and other British-based thinkers. It is one of the finer, but entirely appropriate, compliments to be paid to him, to say that throughout a career of dialogue with the best that philosophy, past and present, has to offer, he has developed and retained a voice that is distinctly his own.
The first flowering of Masterson's interest in the philosophy of religion came with his 1971 book Atheism and Alienation. This work elucidated the twin philosophical sources of contemporary atheism: the scientific revolution of the 16th and 17th centuries and the turn to the thinking subject crystallised in Descartes' cogito ergo sum. If all knowledge derives from empirical science and all meaning and value from human subjectivity, God indeed becomes the unneeded hypothesis. The concluding chapter of that work was the unforgettably-titled trumpet blast 'Chiaroscuro of Hope', which contained the resounding and challenging affirmation that "the affirmation of God can promote a more expansive liberation of the creative possibilities of human subjectivity than is available within the context of a denial".
In The Sense of Creation Masterson continues in affirmative mode. He sets out his stall in the introduction: "I propose to revisit the claim that 'God created the world' is capable of rational confirmation". He focuses on the idea of creation, not in the crude sense with which the term is often evoked in debates between particular types of scientists and so-called creationists, but as evoking what he calls 'the asymmetrical relationship' between the world and God. The three fundamental strands or questions in which this asymmetrical relationship is teased out are the question of meaning, the question of existence and the question of co-existence. The approach is very similar to that taken in his earlier work, with each chapter taking the form of an engagement with key thinkers or groups of thinkers around a particular theme. Various "ciphers of transcendence" are explored through engagement with philosophers as diverse as Aquinas and Levinas and through reflection on our knowledge and our relationships, particularly on the sense of obligation we feel to the most vulnerable. In more traditional mode, Masterson attributes "enduring significance and value to the . . . form of metaphysical enquiry characteristic of traditional natural theology" without which, he suggests, the insights of much current philosophy of religion may well "crystallise into oversights".
An rud is annamh is iontach and there is rare pleasure - a distinctly patriotic type of philosophical gratification - to be derived from seeing two Irish thinkers grapple with each other over the loftiest of themes. Perhaps the most interesting chapter in the book, then, for many will be the one where Masterson critiques the work of his former student Richard Kearney. And the critique is forceful: in a direct reference to Kearney's major work in the field, Masterson states that to refer to God as "a God Who May-Be rather than a God Who Exists is . . . to preclude any affirmation of God". It is, he continues, to make God not a possibility but an impossibility. His fundamental position is, nonetheless, that his relationship to current figures such as Kearney and Jean-Luc Marion is one of complementarity rather than opposition. He certainly cannot be accused of reticence in relation to identifying the gaps that need to be filled.
The Sense of Creation is not a comprehensive work in the philosophy of religion. One might have wished, for example, for a more sustained engagement with the question of evil and suffering - which Aquinas himself identified as among the most difficult problems confronting one who wishes to provide a rational justification for belief in God. The book is, incontrovertibly, a model of responsible engagement with classic texts and thinkers of the past and present which forges an invigorating contemporary re-statement of essentials. And is it not a good sign of any book that one finishes it wishing for more? We should all hope that there will be more to come from Paddy Masterson, philosopher.
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Pádraic Conway is UCD vice-president for university relations and director of the UCD International Centre for Newman Studies
The Sense of Creation: Experience and the God Beyond By Patrick Masterson Ashgate, 153pp. £50