Louis Roy, The Three Dynamisms of Faith, Searching for Meaning, Fulfillment and Truth. Washington, The Catholic University of America Press, 2017, 15,3 × 22 cm, 256 p., ISBN 978-0-81322-979-9

Writing for contemporary but learned seekers, Roy presents a highly readable, provocative discussion of the affective, reasoned and transcendent dimensions of the human faith journey. Acknowledging warranted suspicion about founding arguments addressing matters of ultimate concern on appeals to cultural or religious authority, Roy adopts a deliberately anthropological approach that resonates with the analysis of open immanence found in the work of his fellow Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor. Approaching a complex topic with a patient, circling pedagogy, Roy probes the intermediating synergies of three dynamisms: affective craving for communion, reasoned questing for meaning and a receptive aspiration for truth beyond subjective manipulation. For readers willing to reflect about and beyond conventional religious practices and theological theories, Roy elucidates these contributing vectors in the journey of faith. Engaging an impressive range of classical and contemporary authors – Thomas Aquinas, John Henry Newman and Bernard Lonergan being his principal interlocutors – he locates a viewpoint and opens a horizon for a critical retrieval and a thoughtful appreciation of the roles of affective knowledge, intellectual reflection and revelation in the Roman Catholic tradition. Although Roy would not object to characterizing his text as apologetic, his account of Christian faith readily acknowledges distortions associated with each of the three vectors: the excess of emotionalism with affective knowledge, reductive rationalism with intellectual reflection and authoritarianism with revealed truth. By offering a realistic account of the perils and successes of maturing faith, Roy locates the theatre in which dramatic contentions within and among the vectors play out. While this reader agrees with the general direction of Roy’s discussion of a constructive contention among the three vectors – notice his recurring use of language such as balance and equilibrium – a more explicit treatment of the provisional nature of achievements in history might help to relate his contribution to discussions of polarity in post-Hegelian authors such as Gaston Fessard and Romano Guardini. Nonetheless, Roy’s praiseworthy choice to locate his contribution within a discussion of the phenomenon of hope and a probing of the (theological) anthropological grounds of affective, intellectual and critical desire presents a credible opportunity to broaden the scope of sometimes unnecessarily constrained theological conversations. Roy peppers his text with insights that clarify and reframe some of the presuppositions that underly such constrictions, often drawing out the implications of Lonergan’s tag that “genuine objectivity is the fruit of authentic subjectivity.” His discussion of quests for meaning, for instance, flags the personal quality of journeys to understand and appropriate the significance of received truth in the context of particular life stories. The depth of Roy’s insight stems from his ability to draw upon and interrelate nuanced interpretations of traditional authors such as Aquinas and Newman to join Lonergan in identifying, clarifying and addressing contemporary concerns in an open conversational manner. His treatment of credere Deum (belief or cognitive affirmations about God), credere Deo (trust in God as the warrant for belief) and credere in Deum (orientation to affective fulfillment in union with divine transcendence) brings clarity to Newman’s distinction between notional and real apprehension, contextualizes Lonergan’s distinction between understanding and judgment and locates complementary invitations to faith and belief in the contemporary context. By identifying and elucidating the distinction and intermediation of the knowing of affectively engaged affirmation and the understanding of hypothetical cognitive apprehension of revealed mysteries, Roy presents a credible account of the journey to faith that resolves the human person’s self-transcending desire and the journey in faith that seeks progressive understanding and expression in action. For Roy, the search for personal meaning is not bound to unfettered relativism but opens to a contextualized plurality …