This is a valuable and in every sense weighty summary of the current state of Molina scholarship (445 pages, an introduction best read last, separate author/subject indices, an excellent concordance for the various editions of De iustitia et iure cited, and a splendid bibliography). It is slanted towards Molina's theology and metaphysics, where much of the recent intellectual effort has been concentrated. However, the essays on Molina's political and ‘economic’ thought are heavyweight, so there is no real imbalance. The book has three sections: ‘Freedom of the Will and God's Providence’, ‘A Rights-Based Theory of Law’ and ‘Molina's Medieval Sources and the Following [sic subsequent] Debates in Modern Times’. This division is something of a makeshift: there is much overlap between the first and third sections, and the second section is only in the very broadest sense on ‘law’. The repetitive expositions of the De concordia's arguments in various chapters is in part due to the virtually total absence of cross-referencing between the essays. Moreover, the connections, if any, between Molina's theology and his political thought could have been explored in more depth. All the same, Petr Dvorak's ‘Divine foreknowledge of future contingents and necessity’ seems to me an expository masterpiece. Jean-Pascal Anfray's ‘Molina and John Duns Scotus’ and Francesco Piro's ‘The philosophical impact of Molinism in the seventeenth century’ are tough going, but repay careful attention. Wolfgang Ertl's ‘“Ludewig” Molina and Kant's libertarian compatibilism’ utterly defeated me, mea culpa. Juan Cruz Cruz's profusion of unexplained technical terms (and some clunky English) in his ‘Predestination and transcendent teleology’, on the other hand, is distinctly user-unfriendly. Romanus Cessario's ‘Molina and Aquinas’ condemns Molina for not understanding or endorsing Aquinas on predestination, and ergo being wrong, albeit not (to Cessario's evident regret) heretical because the Magisterium repeatedly allowed Molina's doctrine. Alexander Aichele's prose places needless obstacles in the way of comprehension of his ‘The real possibility of freedom’. Outstanding among the essays on Molina's political, legal and economic thought is Annabel Brett's ‘Molina on law and power’, a carefully contextualised explanation of the way in which Molina's concentration on commutative justice transformed some received notions of political dominium; this essay is nicely complement by Jörg Alejandro Tellkamp's ‘Rights and dominium’, which argues persuasively that Molina gives the concept of dominium logical priority over ius, contrary to received Thomist doctrine; Matthias Kaufmann's extremely circumspect, revisionist exegesis of Molina on slavery; and Rudolf Schüssler's careful location in the context of the format of casuistry of Molina's ‘economic’ thought and its ‘liberal’ tendencies (both concepts carefully problematised). Also valuable is João Manuel A. A. Fernandez's ‘Molina on war’, but his claims about Molina's Counter-Reformation preoccupations, assigning to the papacy a leading role in determining the justice of any war, seem improbable. The overall quality of the volume would have been much improved by submitting some of the essays to the scrutiny of a native English-speaker.
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