Two hundred years ago, a Catholic priest from Prague made important contributions to modern language analysis and the philosophy of science. This improbable reality remained hidden from the English-speaking world for a long time, despite the fact that most of his work is available in German; but over the past generation his contributions have become more visible—even in English. A new book by Kamila Veverková, Bernard Bolzano: A New Evaluation of His Thought and His Circle, contributes to our understanding of this great philosopher, especially with regard to Christian theology and ethics. The English translation of Ververkova's book from the Czech by Angelo Shaun Franklin has now appeared in London, but the Czech original does not seem to have been published. This history of Bolzano's influence in the nineteenth century offers new ways to think about the Catholic Enlightenment but also new possibilities for formulating questions that concern theology [theologians] today.

Bernard Bolzano (1781-1848) mattered above all for his sophisticated understanding of modern science, but also for the window his thought provided into the concerns of Catholic theology. He wrote before On the Origin of Species and before the revolutions of 1848, at a time when socialist and liberal intellectuals, but not many Catholics, had begun to address the implications of modern science. Bolzano seems to have believed, like Hegel, that Christianity and the Enlightenment amounted to much the same thing, but this was a difficult view for Catholic theologians to accept in the nineteenth century. This book raises an important question about Christian theology that has not received enough attention: how have peculiarities of historical development and reception distorted our understanding of Christian theology? For example, how did issues of Christian theology look different in the nineteenth century from the perspectives of France or Bohemia, or England or Germany? And how do these differences determine what we take words to mean and how we interpret major issues? How are theological perspectives today still shaped by peculiarities of reception and understanding a century or two ago? Bolzano confronted head-on one of the most important problems of modern intellectual life: what should be the impact of modern science on other areas of human thought? German and Czech intellectuals began in the nineteenth century to address these issues, and, in the Bohemian context, Bolzano's magisterial rethinking of modern science was decisive. His most important book, The Theory of Science, has now been available in English translation for fifty years.

Bolzano worked all his adult life against the rigidity of the Catholic church in Bohemia, and in 1819 he was removed from his position at the university—mainly because of the enormous influence he was having on students not only in his lectures but also in the exhortations he gave during Advent and Lent. Veverková is especially concerned with the impact of secularization and radical modernism on the Czechoslovak Hussite Church, and she wants to encourage more research on the influence of Bolzano's ideas on Czech theology. Veverková concentrates on the work of religious thinkers such as Vincenc Zahradnik and Anton Krombholz, both of whom were influenced by Bolzano. Central to her book are the insights of Zahradnik and Krombholz into practical theology, especially on themes such as the family, industrialization, nationalism, and anti-Semitism. She emphasizes Zahradnik's efforts “to find a truly scientific, open, and Christian method of scientific work” (p. 81). She begins with an account of the late Enlightenment in Bohemia and in the Bolzano Circle and then turns to the ethical foundations of Bolzano's work, to the impact of industrialization on the family, and to Bolzano's view of the Jewish question. Her last three chapters deal with the work of Zahradnik and Krombholz. Veverková's writing is sometimes awkward as she defends Bolzano and his followers against both modernism and conservative Catholicism. The publication of her book in English before its appearance in Czech underscores the difficulties Czechs have in making their work accessible beyond their own country: from Jan Hus to Bernard Bolzano. Nonetheless, it may be that the most important audience for this English text from London is in the Czech Republic.