life together: family, sexuality and community in the new testament and today

Reviews

GOD, CHRIST AND US by Herbert McCabe OP, ed. and introduced by BrianDavies OP, foreword by Archbishop Rowan Williams, Continuum, London,2003, Pp. x+160, £12.99, pbk.

An old friend of Herbert McCabe rang Blackfriars, Oxford the other day. Heaccidentally rang Herbert’s number and was thrown to hear the familiar voicesaying, ‘This is Herbert’s non-answering machine’. Herbert died in 2001. Thosewho knew Herbert McCabe may have a similar feeling reading this collection ofsermons. One can hear the voice of this ‘remarkable, exhausting and loveable man’,as Rowan Williams describes him in the foreword. Herbert wrote every word of hissermons and so what we read in this book is exactly what the congregation wouldhave heard. He wrote so freshly and directly that one had the impression that he wasspeaking spontaneously. He wrote every word because he wished to be as clear aspossible. Clarity and hard thought are necessary if one is to get a glimpse of themystery which is beyond all words. These sermons constantly invite us to think.‘Let’s think about sin.’ (p. 63). He invites us to think about what it means to rejoice,or to worship money, or to be forgiven. This can be testing but not because thesermons are abstract or use technical language. On the contrary, these sermons arewritten as simply as possible, with humour and wit. Herbert had a profound sense ofresponsibility for his words, and the apparent simplicity is the fruit of the repeatedreworking of these texts.Herbert loved to start from a detail of the gospel, but we are always led back to

the central themes of his theology: that God is not a powerful person but is beyondall our concepts; faith and the destruction of idols; that we are made for happinessand friendship with God; the Trinity as our home, etc. The whole of Herbert’s lifewas dedicated to the exploration of these themes. As Thoreau said, ‘Know your ownbone, gnaw at it, bury it, unearth it, and gnaw at it still’. A constant theme is theutter priority of God’s action. In prayer we do not seek to change God’s mind, anymore than in repentance do we try to gain his forgiveness. We are loved and forgivenfrom all eternity. In both cases we are changing our minds about God and not theother way around.Even though I have read most of what Herbert wrote, and many times, I was still

often astonished by fresh new insights. His sermon ‘Motorways and God’ is puredelight. He compares God’s love for us with the M40, on which Herbert so oftensped on his ancient motorbike, slicing through the Chilterns and soaring over HighWycombe. Or there is the wonderful sermon on ‘Poverty and God’. God is poorbecause ‘in God, being alive or being wise or being good are just simply being God andnothing more, nothing extra that he has’ (p. 55). Or there is the delightful sermon inwhich he compares our relationship to the Trinity with that of a child who sits listeningto a group of adults engaged in the play of conversation, ‘the crack’ as the Irish say,sensing that something wonderful is happening though beyond her understanding.There is some repetition. The sermons on ‘Prayer’ and ‘Life after Death’ both

largely repeat material that is found at the second chapter, on hope. But this hardlymatters. Herbert is struggling to liberate us from preconceptions about God andourselves that are so deep rooted and hard to shake, such as that religion is aboutbeing ‘spiritual’, that one is happy to submit once again to his efforts to free us from

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being led astray by images. Of course, he insists that we need images of God, lots ofthem, but we must learn not to take them in the wrong way.Reading through this collection of sermons, I was surprised by the centrality of

certain concerns: the mystery of God’s love for us, sin and the cross. Traditionallythese are fundamental themes of theology, but theologians are often rather nervousof addressing them too explicitly today. Of course God’s love for us is the heart ofChristianity, but it is hard to talk about without sounding trite or saccharine.I recently heard a gifted young preacher confess that he was almost embarrassedat telling the congregation that God loved them, and I understood exactly what hemeant. Herbert succeeds in doing so without sentimentality, refreshing one’s sense ofthe utter mystery of a love that embraces all that we are and gives us existence inevery moment. As he says, God is besotted with us.We may also shy away from talking too much about sin. Catholics often claim to have

been crippled by neurotic guilt from having listened to sermons about hell fire anddamnation. Time and again Herbert returns to the theme of sin, but in ways that havenothing to do with inducing a harmful guilt. Sin is ‘always to construct an illusory selfthat we can admire, instead of the real self we can only love’ (p. 18). It springs from ‘thefear not just that one is playing a false part, wearing a disguise, but that one is nothing butthe disguise’ (p. 70). Facing one’s sin is, for Herbert, part of the entry into true self-love,the knowledge that one is loved utterly, and therefore have no need of pompous self-images. Indeed, as his brethren well knew, and sometimes to our discomfort, he was quickto spot and demolish any hint of pretension or superiority. And finally he repeatedlywrites of the cross, refusing to reduce it to a passing step on the way to glory. It is themoment of Jesus’ complete failure, in which we glimpse the mystery of God.Brian Davies OP has done the Church a profound service in editing these sermons.

I hope that there are some more volumes to come.

TIMOTHY RADCLIFFE OP

THE TWO EYES OF SPINOZA AND OTHER ESSAYS ON PHILOSOPHY byLeszek Kolakowski, translated by Agnieszka Kolakowska and others, editedby Zbigniew Janowski, St Augustine’s Press, South Bend, Indiana, 2004,Pp. vii + 311, $32.00 hbk.

In this collection of sixteen of his early papers, mainly translated from Polish,German and French, Leszek Kolakowski discusses Luther, Spinoza, Pierre Bayle,Uriel de Costa, Pierre Gassendi, Hegel, Marx, Avenarius, Nietzsche, Heidegger andAlthusser. In the foreword Kolakowski says there is no ‘common theme’ in the book(p. vii) but most of the essays are concerned inter alia with the possibility of theology.All are written in an accessible style and are full of human interest. His book is apleasure to read.Kolakowski is rather harsh on Spinoza. The Spinoza of the title ‘miserably

failed’ (p. 14) in his philosophy because he did not avoid inconsistencies over, forexample, freedom and determinism, the existence and non-existence of God,science and mysticism, toleration and stability in politics. Kolakowski diagnosesthe bifurcation between a German ‘metaphysical’ interpretation of Spinoza and aFrench ‘political radical’ interpretation in these inconsistencies. However, manygreat philosophers must be grossly mistaken in their solutions to philosophicalproblems because they disagree with one another. (For example, at most one ofHobbes and Berkeley can be right about what there is.) If Spinoza’s claims are notonly false but contradictory he perhaps deserves special chastisement but thesystems of, say, Plato, Kant or Hegel are difficult to interpret as entirely internallyconsistent.

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Kolakowski is right to be sharply realist about solutions to philosophical problems:If I am free then it is within my power to not do what I do. If my actions are causallydetermined then I cannot but do what I do. If there is a God then it is false that thereis no God and vice versa. If everything knowable is scientifically knowable then there isno knowledge accessible only through mysticism and vice versa, and so on.In ‘The Philosophical Role of the Reformation: Martin Luther and the Origins of

Subjectivity’ (pp. 143–160) Kolakowski calls subjectivity ‘the embryo of modernphilosophy’ and says ‘philosophy is constantly striving to return to a primary, unme-diated human subjectivity’ (pp. 159–160). I contest this. Although Husserl’s doctrineof the transcendental ego admittedly falls under this description, it is an exception. ForKant, subjectivity is formally constituted by the transcendental unity of apperception.For Hegel, subjectivity is socially constituted at a profound level by the struggle ofmaster and slave. In scientific and pseudo-scientific philosophy there is no subject, oronly a reduction of the subject to a complex physical object. In poststructuralism thesubject is deconstructed. If Kolakowski’s embryo grew to be Cartesian it wasaborted soon thereafter. It does not make much sense to speak of the ‘origins’ ofsubjectivity unless these are divine. One’s own existence qua one’s own is a meta-physical mystery that cannot be explained away, or even explained, philosophically.Kolakowski rightly criticises Louis Althusser for a lack of analytical rigour in his For

Marx (1969); grossly and tendentiously assimilating ‘says’ and ‘proves’ for example, andfor huge historical blunders, such as ascribing a quasi-Aristotelian or Scholastic theory ofabstraction to empiricists. It would be interesting to hear Kolakowski’s judgement onAlthusser’s paper ‘Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses’ in Lenin and Philosophyand Other Essays (1971). At the end of ‘Karl Marx and the Classical Definition of Truth’(pp. 173–195) Kolakowski says Antonio Gramsci’s interpretation of Marx’s epistemo-logy is ‘roughly in line’ with his own and arguablyAlthusser’s allocation of causal efficacyto ideology in historical transitions is partly anticipated by Gramsci.In ‘Heresy’ (pp. 263–288) Kolakowski claims ‘A historian cannot accept the

definition of heresy accepted in the Roman (or any other) Church, otherwise hewould be assuming the viewpoint of a particular body, and the teaching of this bodywould be decisive in identifying the historical facts’ (p. 266). Although there is such athing as not assuming the viewpoint of a particular body there is no such thing aswriting history without deploying some set of assumptions. History is more expla-natory if methodologically self-conscious, so if the historian’s assumptions areCatholic they should be made explicit as such. It is the responsibility of the historianto write the truth, to report what happened in the past as it happened. Suppose theRoman Catholic definition of ‘heresy’ is correct. It follows that those doctrinescorrectly identified as heretical by the Church really were heretical. If the historianshould write the truth, he should write that truth. It is historically impossible for thehistorian to deploy a retrospective epoche which guarantees agnosticism aboutbeliefs held in the past, because the historian is himself historically situated. Historyis a relationship between the present and the past, or one time and another.It is not true that by eschewing a Catholic commitment the historian occupies

some ‘neutral’ vantage point. There is no such thing as not being committed.

STEPHEN PRIEST

UNDERSTANDING OLD TESTAMENT ETHICS: APPROACHES ANDEXPLORATIONS by John Barton, Westminster John Knox Press, Louisville &London, 2003, Pp. xi + 212, $ 24.95 pbk.

It is a slightly odd task to review a book which itself amounts to an extended bookreview, and this is what John Barton has produced: a substantial work in its own

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right undoubtedly, but one that serves principally as a review of and a response toEckart Otto’s 1994 work, Theologische Ethik des Alten Testaments. This is by nomeans a bad thing, except inasmuch as the reader unfamiliar with Otto’s book, orperhaps even unable to approach a book not yet available in English, might feel alittle wrong-footed from the beginning. Nonetheless, there are few writers on the OldTestament more worthy than Barton of receiving the reader’s absolute confidence:trust to his reading of Otto, and enjoy a great deal more than a long book review: forthis critique serves as the springboard for a novel and stimulating approach to themoral theology of the Old Testament.It is, moreover, an approach that will be of particular interest to scholars in the

Thomist tradition, for the heart of Barton’s argument is that an important yet oftenignored element of the ethical teaching of the Hebrew Bible is a notion of naturallaw. To be precise, taking the examples of Amos’s Oracles against the Nations(Amos 1.3–2.5), various parts of the Book of Isaiah, and the Book of Daniel, Bartondemonstrates that these prophetic books not so much preach or argue for theconcept of natural law as simply pre-suppose it. Such a view stands in markedcontrast with those, largely of the Barthian tendency and exemplified by WalterEichrodt and Johannes Hempel, who see submission to the divine will as the basis forOld Testament ethics. Barton warns us that the simplistic distinction between this‘Hebrew’ idea and the Greco-Roman concept of natural law and justice will notstand; thus he joins the growing chorus of biblical scholars who will not admit thepresupposition that Hebrew thought, and (or even because) Hebrew language, isfundamentally opposed to Western thought.Indeed it is typical of Barton that he is wary of any simplistic, monolithic

approach to scripture, to the notion that a single conceptual key will unlock thewhole of the bible and thus open the way to an authentically biblical theology. Thehistory of this approach to the Old Testament is well-known and need not berehearsed, but this makes it all the sadder that, now often under the heading‘covenant’ rather than Heilsgeschichte (or whatever), it still tempts the unwaryexegete. Few scholars have a more comprehensive or a more critical awarenessthan Barton of the changing moods of biblical studies, and it is this combinationof wisdom and knowledge that leads him once again to warn us not to exclude largetracts of evidence for the sake of a neat theory.With reference to Otto’s recent book, it is a rather surprising omission of evidence

that has attracted Barton’s attention, namely the content of the prophetic writings.Otto, it appears, limits himself to the legal and the wisdom texts in his task ofuncovering the principal currents of Old Testament ethics. It must be admitted that,surprising though this omission is, it is as great a surprise, though perhaps a happierone, to follow Barton’s clear argument that inclusion of the prophetic books wouldmake one more and not less inclined to admit that an idea of natural law is one ofthe bases of biblical ethics.The argument is no less clear because the book is in fact a collection of originally

separate essays, written between 1978 and 2001. The introduction and conclusionwritten for the present book, along with the careful arrangement of the material,succeed in bringing together what could have been a much more confused collectionto make a very worthwhile whole. It is, of course, inevitable that there is somematerial here not directly germane to the overall thrust of the book: a notableexample is a substantial part of the chapter on Amos, discussing the ‘authenticity’of particular oracles. Such an expression is not one that Barton would use todaywithout a good deal more nuance, but we can perhaps forgive it in an article basedon his doctoral thesis of 1974. In any case, there are great treasures to be found inmany of these seeming dead-ends.Barton ends his study with a look to the future of this aspect of biblical studies. He

places himself firmly and without embarrassment within the historical-criticaltradition and therefore hopes for a volume, to supplement the work of Otto,

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which would explore in detail the ethical teachings and presuppositions of theprophets (as distinct from ‘the prophetic books’, perhaps). One might tentativelyadd, as Barton mentions only in passing, that the narrative parts of the Old Testa-ment also have a role to play in establishing the ethical milieu of the Old Testament.It is to be hoped that someone, perhaps less wary of the literary-critical approach,might take upon themselves the even more daunting task of a volume on this topic.Meanwhile, we should be grateful to John Barton for doing so much to prepare theground, and doing it with such style.

RICHARD OUNSWORTH OP

AD MONACHOS by Evagrius Ponticus, translation and commentary byJeremy Driscoll OSB [Ancient Christian Writers no.59], The Newman Pressimprint of Paulist Press, New York, 2003, Pp. xiv + 398, $ 39.95 hbk.

This new volume from the series Ancient Christian Writers is a welcome addition tothe works of Evagrius Ponticus available in English. The actual text, in both Greekand English, occupies only 25 pages (pp. 41–66) out of 398. It is a strange text,consisting in 137 brief sentences of enigmatic proverb-like sayings. The other 373pages of exposition are therefore not only welcome but essential. In this, Dr Driscollhas provided an admirable addition to the discussion of the works of Evagrius, oneof the major monastic writers of the early Church.The introduction contains a discussion of the reliability of the Greek text used

here, concluding that the 1913 critical edition by H.Gressmann from five Greekmanuscripts (from 12th to 17th centuries) is, with some reference to later work, stillstandard. In part one, the Greek text of Ad Monachos and Driscoll’s Englishtranslation are given. In part two, the structure of the text is examined, showingthat these proverbs are far from haphazard but are presented in a highly sophisticatedorder. Part three gives a perspective on Evagrius as a writer, positioning his workwithin the setting of 4th-century Egypt, and part four returns to a close reading of thetext, proverb by proverb, expounding many of them in detail, as part of the whole ofEvagrius’s thought; as Driscoll says, this is to be reading ‘Evagrius with Evagrius’(p. x). A select bibliography and an index complete the volume.It is clear that this collection of proverbs from Evagrius is of importance for the

understanding of the Evagrius corpus as a whole: it is also clear that it forms a part ofour knowledge of early monasticism. For instance, such sayings as ‘better a man lyingdown to sleep than a monk keeping vigil with idle thoughts’ (p. 50) echo the severecomments of the Desert Fathers about the need for inner commitment rather thanoutward show. Driscoll, however, suggests that these texts are of interest to a wideraudience than monks and scholars, with such sayings as ‘if you imitate Christ you willbecome blessed. Your soul will die his death and it will not derive evil from its flesh;instead your exodus will be like the exodus of a star and your resurrection will glow likethe sun’ (p. 44).The translation aims to follow Origen’s dictum, and be both word for word and

sense for sense, an excellent plan though in this case giving the shape of the Greekwords means at times that the English sense appears somewhat stilted. This is,however, in all other ways an admirable presentation of a text central to the studyof early Christian monasticism, illuminated by the extensive commentary on everyphrase of Evagrius.

BENEDICTA WARD SLG

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DUNS SCOTUS ON DIVINE LOVE: TEXTS AND COMMENTARIES ONGOODNESS AND FREEDOM, GOD AND HUMANS edited by A. Vos,H. Veldhuis, E. Dekker, N. W. den Bok, and A. J. Beck, Ashgate, Aldershot,2003, Pp. x +235, £35.00, hbk.

That the Franciscan tradition, and Duns Scotus in particular, lay especialemphasis on love and the will is a commonplace of the history of theology.Here the Utrecht University ‘Research Group Duns Scotus’ presents a series oftexts and translations, with very helpful commentaries, focused on God’s good-ness and love. The Group includes some highly respected Scotus scholars (mostnotably Antonie Vos), and works through the Scotist texts with great care anddeliberation. A previous publication (Contingency and Freedom: Lectura I 39(Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1994)) centred on the question of Scotus’s modal theoryin its relation to freewill, and the present volume, while freestanding, could usefullybe thought of as a companion volume, continuing further the exploration of Scotus’saccount of action and ethics. The central claim of the earlier volume was that the notionof ‘synchronic contingency’ is the hermeneutical key that unlocks Scotist thought.Contingency is basically to be conceived of in terms of alternative logically possiblestates of affairs. This is the foundation of Scotus’s libertarian or ‘contra-causal’ theory offreedom: the will has it in its power at one and the same time to freely to choose betweenalternative possibilities. This theory covers all will, divine and human, and grounds Scotus’sassertion that quite literally everything other than God is (logically) contingent.The selections and commentaries in the present volume bring out very effectively what

is distinctive about Scotus’s position on the various ethical and theological issuesdiscussed. After a preliminary section on necessity and contingency, the authors presenttwo long selections on the relation between these notions and ethics. The precept that weshould loveGod above all is, according to the authors, the ‘cornerstone’ (p. 8) of Scotus’streatment of ethics, since love of God entails that we love both ourselves and ourneighbour. But Scotus holds that the ethical precepts governing our love for thingsother than God are contingent. The authors argue against the recent interpretation ofThomas Williams, according to which Scotus is a thoroughgoing ethical voluntarist orpositivist. The authors maintain that God’s nature, as maximally good, acts as a kind ofcheck on the range of things that God can will: ‘Every possible divine act is ethically[sic] good, because all possible decisions of God are situated within the rangeconstituted by his best possible nature’ (p. 61). I suspect that the jury is still outon this debate. What is certainly clear is that Scotus does not want God’s will tobe restrained in any way specifically by the contents of his intellect. But this isperhaps consistent with positing that the divine nature is the relevant restrainingfactor. God’s will, after all, could be non-consciously restrained, such that God’sfreedom does not range over every logically possible state of affairs.All but the very final selection – about one half of the whole book – consider

the question of God’s goodness in relation to human salvation: merit, election,and God’s permitting reprobation. The authors take a distinctive view on thisinterpretatively problematic subject. Scotus wants to reject the view that repro-bation is undeserved, and to do this he develops a complex theory of divinepermission, according to which for God to permit something is for God to willthat he abstain from an act of will that would prevent the thing. Reprobation ispermitted in this sense: not willed per se, but not willed to be prevented. Electionand salvation are not like this, however: these are actively willed by God. Thisposition is designed to avoid the view that God actively wills both election andreprobation prior to foreseen merits. What is not clear is how seriously we aresupposed to take the asymmetry. Scotus asserts that God gives to the reprobate‘natural gifts and the right laws, and common assistance, sufficient for salvation’(p. 169). But if God’s active will is required for salvation, these things cannot be‘sufficient’. According to the authors, God’s failure to will (say) Judas’s salvation

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results from Judas’s free choice to persist in sin. But Scotus is elsewhere quiteclear that making divine knowledge and activity contingent on anything externalto God ‘demeans the divine intellect’. These are hard texts, but it would havebeen helpful to see how the Research Group would build this into their reading.The final selection is on the procession of the Holy Spirit – an infinite act of divine

self-love. The selection shows how God’s will is constrained to love the supreme good(i.e. himself), and how it is that love is at the heart of Scotist theology as well as of hisethics. Overall, a very helpful selection of texts and commentaries, written in a stylethat will make it useful not only to specialists but also to undergraduates and othersinterested in an accessible presentation of this distinctive Franciscan theology.

RICHARD CROSS

THE CONCEPT OF WOMAN, Volume II: The Early Humanist Reformation,1250–1500, by Sister Prudence Allen RSM, Wm B. Eerdmans Publishing Co.,Grand Rapids, Michigan, 2002, xxiv + 1161 pp.

In the first volume, The Concept of Woman: The Aristotelian Revolution, 750 BC–AD1250, Sister Prudence Allen, professor of philosophy at St John Vianney TheologicalSeminary, Denver, Colorado, traced the concept of woman from the beginnings ofWestern philosophy until the High Middle Ages. This was the history of the dom-inance of what she calls the ‘gender-polarity’ concept of woman: woman is inferior toman, physically, psychologically, morally and spiritually.Now, in this massively documented and brilliantly conducted work of scholarship,

Allen takes us from the leading thinkers of the High Middle Ages through to theconcept of woman that unfolds in Renaissance humanism. Gradually, over these 250years, the ‘gender-polarity’ concept gives way to the concept of ‘gender-complemen-tarity with equality’. This time, however, we hear the voices of women themselves,attended to for the most part in primary sources, many of which have never beenpreviously researched, and none of which has ever been integrated into a work ofphilosophical insight on this scale.The structure of the book is as follows. Chapter 1 opens up the archive of

medieval women’s religious communities, revealing their unself-conscious self-under-standing, with models of wisdom and virtue, for example, which assume that womanis a generic model for all human beings (Beatrice of Nazareth, Hadewijch, Mechthildof Magdeburg, Marguerite Porete and others). Chapter 2 deals with gender polarityin some male philosophers in the medieval university milieu, captivated by Aristo-telian logic (Albert the Great, Thomas Aquinas especially). Chapter 3 highlights theassumptions in contemporary satires about women (Le Roman de la rose, Le Livre deMatheolus, ‘Frau Welt’, L’Evangile aux Femmes, a couple of dits and Boccaccio’sCorbaccio): monotonously denigratory. Chapter 4 breathes a completely differentair: dialogues in which men respect women (Cavalcanti and the Lady, Dante andBeatrice, Petrarch and Laura, Boccaccio and Fiammetta). Chapter 5 describes howthe idea developed, in leading women religious authors (Mechthild of Hackeborn,Gertrude the Great of Helfta, Bridget of Sweden, Catherine of Siena and Julian ofNorwich) – with twenty pages on ‘the Dominican influence’: Eckhart, Tauler andSuso, all of course formed in the Aristotelian gender-polarity tradition, neverthelessdisclosing a certain openness towards gender complementarity. Partly this is becauseof their Neoplatonism, which tended to a gender unity theory; and partly, no doubt,because they were frequently in conversation with women religious, often at least asintelligent as themselves.The path was not smooth, however. Chapter 6 deals with new coarse and

unlovely satires against women (Le Miroir de mariage, Les Quinze joies de

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mariage); the cases of Margery Kempe and Joan of Arc; and the horrors of theMalleus maleficarum – ‘The hammer of witches’ – in which the two very distin-guished Dominicans, Kramer and Sprenger, while clear that men could be witchestoo, propagated the idea that women are much more susceptible to demonictemptation, thus adding incalculably to the number who were burned or drowned.Chapter 7 is entirely devoted to the work of Christine de Pizan (ca. 1344–1430),

with a handful of contemporary images, including one of her ‘writing in her studyin Paris’ and another of her ‘instructing four men’. Some of her writings wereenormously popular. Evidently made free of her father’s library (he was a physi-cian who held a chair in astronomy at the university of Bologna before moving toParis as physician and astronomer to Charles V, King of France), Christine is akey figure in the history of the philosophical idea of woman. She translated someof Thomas Aquinas’s commentary on Aristotle’s Metaphysics, Ethics and Politicsinto French. She does not engage directly with the Aristotelian concept of womanbut, as Allen shows, Christine is the thinker who first established the philosophicalfoundations for gender complementarity.Chapter 8 analyzes the admission of woman to higher education at the early

Humanist Renaissance. Chapter 9 discusses the gender theories of the great Human-ists: Nicholas of Cusa, Leon Battista Alberti, Lorenzo Valla, Marsilio Ficino andPico della Mirandola – on the whole, in various ways, largely through their admira-tion for Plato’s doctrines of love and friendship, these thinkers were able to breakfree of the dominance of long-standing views that denigrate women.Finally, in chapter 10, we come to Isotta Nogarola (1418–1466) and especially

Laura Cereta (1469–1499), widowed at the age of sixteen, who, in her short life,Allen contends, ‘did more personally in terms of offering a new humanist model forwoman’s identity than any woman before her’.As this skeletal outline of the contents suggests, this book retrieves some

highly important thinkers in the history of the concept of woman, not leastChristine de Pizan, Isotta Nogarola and Laura Cereta. Feminists are no doubtfamiliar with Cereta’s letters, translated and published by Diana Robin in 1997;but much of the work of these remarkable women is unfamiliar in the English-speaking world. More than simply recovering so much fascinating, neglected andeven unknown work, this book sets it all in the context of a powerfully andpersuasively argued thesis. As Diana Robin says on the cover, Sister Prudence’sbook is ‘essential reading for scholars in comparative European studies, women’shistory, and feminist theory’. And especially in theology, Catholic and Protes-tant, one may surely be permitted to add.

FERGUS KERR OP

LIFE TOGETHER: FAMILY, SEXUALITY AND COMMUNITY IN THE NEWTESTAMENT AND TODAY by Stephen C.Barton, T&T Clark, Edinburgh, 2001,Pp. 256, £16.95, pbk.

Dr Barton’s book is at first sight unexciting. It consists of a number of essaysand addresses written or delivered on various occasions, with, as a connectingtheme, the understanding of family and community by the writers of the NewTestament. On a first reading, I was not very impressed. I thought it would havebeen better to ‘cannibalise’ the collected essays and make a new book out of them.Subsequent readings discovered other half-hidden themes, which are not fully devel-oped, but which give the book a stimulating quality.The book is divided into three parts: ‘Family and Sexuality’, ‘Community’ and

‘Interpretation’. In the first part, Barton’s problem is to see how it can be said that

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the New Testament is still normative for Christians in these matters, when our familystructures and understanding of sexuality are so different from those of the first centuryor, indeed, many others of the Christian centuries. Barton tries to find a suitable middleway, between a more or less fundamentalist effort to use texts to justify one particularfamily pattern, and the opposing rejection of the bible teaching as being hopelesslypatriarchal, even though this may be combined with an admiration for Christ and StPaul as life-giving personalities. This leads him to look at the presuppositions of thehistorical-critical method, the dominant form of contemporary exegesis, and to findthem wanting, since simply reading texts as texts falls short of making them effectiveguides to action. He takes as an example the wedding feast at Cana, which contempor-ary critics tend to consider simply in relation to the question of the sources of St John’sgospel, but which the Latin and Greek Fathers considered as illustrating the sanctifica-tion of human marriage by the Incarnation.The essays included under ‘Community’ have a slightly different focus. Differences

between the gospels, which were once ascribed to different attitudes and experienceson the part of the writers, are now explained by their being the products of different,apparently autonomous, Christian communities. As early Christianity is classified asa ‘sect’, it is not surprising that it should have a number of potential sects within it.Barton, quite rightly, calls all this into question. Anyone who wants their writings tobe read will have some kind of audience in mind, but this does not justify anysupposition that the audience either constituted a bounded group with a clear-cutidentity of its own, or that it imposed its view of things on the author. The essay on‘Early Christianity and the Sociology of the Sect’ is particularly valuable, sinceBarton shows, very carefully and very politely, how attempts to look at earlyChristianity as a sectarian movement are extremely naıve, both politically and socio-logically. The closing words of the essay point to ‘the inevitably political nature ofthe act of interpretation’ (p. 138).The final essay, ‘New Testament Interpretation as Performance’ uses an idea

advanced in rather different ways by Nicholas Lash, Rowan Williams and FrancesYoung, that the New Testament can only be understood, not by the meticulous analysisof texts, but by seeing believers put the New Testament into practice. Charmingly,Barton comments on the ideas of Lash, Williams and Young: ‘where the RomanCatholic theologian finds in the Eucharist the epitome of the Christian ‘improvisation’on Scripture, and where the Anglican archbishop finds it in the festal cycle culminatingin Holy Week, the Methodist theologian finds it in preaching!’ (p. 237).I wrote earlier of half-hidden themes not fully developed. One of these would be the

way in which the sacraments create community and help us to see community in action.Another would be the ‘tradition’, in the older sense of the empowerment of the believingcommunity to read Scripture authentically. Another again, mentioned by Barton in aquotation from Frances Young, is the existence of different ‘senses’ of Scripture, whichpermits us to give a valid meaning to a passage, even if it was not intended by theoriginal author. Let us hope that this will not be Dr Barton’s last book.

ADRIAN EDWARDS C.S.SP

BONHOEFFER by Stephen Plant, Continuum, London & New York, 2004,Pp. xii + 157, £12.00 pbk.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer (1906–45) was one of the most provocative of the twentiethcentury’s theologians, and this is a welcome addition to the Outstanding ChristianThinkers series. Its text has been organised so that it is fairly easy for the reader withlimited knowledge of the man and his world to follow it, and for most of the time DrPlant has written in an accessible style.

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Overall he has succeeded in his aims to introduce us both to Bonhoeffer’s life andhis theology, and to put these in context. More than once he has assured us that,compared with the major works of reference that have appeared on Bonhoeffer, thisbook is only going to be of ephemeral value, but here the author is underestimatingthe usefulness of a book like this. If it makes Christians aware that Bonhoeffer ismuch more than a cult figure of the 1960s it will have done an invaluable job.Plant’s third aim, however, is ‘to suggest a means by which the consistencies in

Bonhoeffer’s theology can be brought into the open’. This is where the author comesclosest to confronting the question which readers are almost certain to ask him: Doyou think that Dietrich Bonhoeffer was a ‘great’ theologian? It is now sixty yearssince Hitler ordered him to be hanged in Flossenburg concentration camp. Enoughtime has passed to be able to start assessing the man’s stature reliably.It is this third aim which engages the author in controversy. Against the view

of theologians (including Bonhoeffer’s friend, Karl Barth) who have doubtedwhether ‘his written legacy can be viewed as a coherent totality’, Plant arguesthat ethics are at the core of all his theological thought – ‘an ethics of respon-sibility, lived out in obedience to the God who acts most powerfully in ‘thesilence of the cross’’. Although he was a profoundly loyal Lutheran, Bonhoeffer,unlike the German theologians of his time who were liberal protestants, placedgreat emphasis on the role of community and communal obligations in the life ofa Christian, and he himself tried to live out this conviction. Apparently it was avisit to Rome when he was eighteen that prompted Bonhoeffer to write thedissertation on the Church which became his first book, Sanctorum Communio,and during the following years he became involved with various forms ofChristian fellowship, including ecumenism, pastoral care and the setting up ofa House of Brethren for seminarians.However, in 1939 Bonhoeffer’s pacifism drove him to America, only to return

quickly because, in his own words, he became convinced that ‘I will have no right toparticipate in the reconstruction of Christian life in Germany after the war if I do notshare in the trials of this time with my people’. Nevertheless, he correctly ‘sensed thatif he stayed in Germany he would feel it necessary to be drawn into the conspiracyagainst Hitler’. According to Plant, if the plot had succeeded nearly five million livesin Europe would have been saved. As it is, Bonhoeffer is seen in Germany (and notonly Germany) even today as ‘morally controversial . . . to some a martyr and saint,to others a traitor and murderer’.Mary Fulbrook has said that most of the conspirators ‘were essentially anti-

democratic in outlook’. Moreover, this included Bonhoeffer, difficult although it isfor many of his admirers to accept it. Barth felt that in his last book, Ethics, there was‘just a suggestion of North German Patriarchalism’. Now the most widely-readexcerpts from his writings are those in Letters and Papers from Prison, and theseseemingly are affirming the maturity of today’s world. In fact Bonhoeffer’s wordshere more readily apply to an elite – to people like Bonhoeffer himself. He had anoptimistic faith in benevolent autocracy, and, like St Paul, thought that Christiansshould be content with the social position which they held when they were called todiscipleship. Today’s Germany would have been inconceivable to him.I have given so much space to summarising the book’s main theme precisely because

it raises quite an acute problem. Bonhoeffer was profoundly conscious that church lifewas going to change, and we are inclined to think of him as a ‘modern’ who was cutoff before he was forty and yet who conveys to us a message for our time, but incertain ways he was not ‘modern’. His thinking was formed primarily by Luther andthe Bible, not by ‘our modern world’. It is easy for us to misread him. Dr Planthandles the problem skilfully, so that by and large this is a rewarding introduction toone of the twentieth century’s most influential theologians.

JOHN ORME MILLS OP

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DAVID JONES: WRITER AND ARTIST by Keith Alldritt, Constable, London,2003, Pp. xii + 208, £20.00, hbk.

It is remarkable that, 30 years after his death, this is the first book-length biography ofDavid Jones. Widely acknowledged as a significant painter and engraver and as a majorpoet, Jones’s life is interesting on many counts: a boy from a working-class backgroundwho was educationally backward yet whose natural ability to draw gained him entry tothe Camberwell School of Art at only 14 years of age; a soldier on the Western Frontwho was wounded in action; a convert to Catholicism despite his father’s vehementopposition to it; an associate of Eric Gill at both Ditchling and Capel-y-ffin, who wasfor a while engaged to his daughter and remained his friend for life; a sensuous man,strongly attracted towards women, and possessing the intelligence, kindness, charm andwit which one would expect to win their favour, who yet remained a bachelor andprobably a virgin; someone whose distress at witnessing the decay of Europeancivilisation caused him to reject most modern innovations and eventually to live almostas a recluse. In the Preface, Alldritt states that he has ‘been less concerned . . . to supplya lot of biographical detail than to tell the story of how a life that contained much painand suffering was redeemed by enduring achievements in literature and in painting’(p. viii), an aim that he largely fulfils. Greatly admiring In Parenthesis (1937) and TheAnathemata (1952), he has been especially interested in exploring their bases in thepoet’s experiences and interests.Commendable in any biography, but especially apt in one of an artist who had an

acute sense of genius loci, physical locations, especially Jones’s homes and those of theclose friends whom he visited, are precisely identified and described (as they were thenand are now), and their circumstances, atmosphere and possible influence upon Jones areconsidered. It is obvious that Alldritt has not only taken the trouble to visit these placesbut has also closely examined and reflected upon them. Another welcome characteristicof this work is that Alldritt accurately and efficiently explains the background, roles andrelationships of the numerous people in Jones’s life (such as Harman Grisewood, JimEde, Prudence Pelham, Helen Sutherland, Rene Hague, the Gills, and members of hisown family), as well as the climate in which his work was created and published,benefiting any reader who is unfamiliar with the cultural milieu of early 20th-centuryBritain.There are a few errors and these are minor, all of them showing the author’s

unfamiliarity with Catholicism. For instance, he refers to ‘the Catholic sacrament ofthe Mass’ (p. 46), and gives the title of Introduction to the Devout Life by St Francis deSales as ‘An Introduction to the Devout’ (p. 34). I would have appreciated moreattention given to Jones’s spirituality, especially how it informed his sense of vocationas a writer and artist. His 50 years as a Dominican tertiary must have influenced hislife and his attitudes, yet this is not assessed here.Occasionally Alldritt is needlessly vague, as when the ‘well-known nineteenth-

century architect’ who designed the monastery of Capel-y-ffin, Charles Buckeridge,is unnamed (p. 57). More often, one feels a scarcity of those details which assist thereader’s imagination and understanding, such as what the typical daily regime waslike in that remote mountain community. Alldritt also seems to have overlooked theimportance for Jones, as an artist, of his visits to the Benedictine abbey on Caldey;for, many years later, he asserted that ‘It was in the Vale of Ewyas and on CaldeyIsland that I began to have some idea of what I personally would ask a painting tobe, and I think from 1926 onwards there has been a fairly recognisable direction inmy work’ (David Jones, ‘Life for H.S.Ede’, quoted in Jonathan Miles, Eric Gill &David Jones at Capel-y-ffin, 1992 p. 49). Instead, Alldritt only describes the devastat-ing effect upon Jones of Petra Gill breaking off their long engagement to be married,of which he was informed while on the island.Considering Jones’s paintings, Alldritt prudently stays close to the interpretations

of Jonathan Miles and Derek Shiel, the leading authorities in this area. Being

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primarily a literary scholar (whose previous work includes studies of Yeats, Orwell,Eliot and Lawrence, as well as a biography of Basil Bunting), he is much morecomfortable when discussing Jones’s writings and feels confident about interpretingand evaluating these independently of other scholars. His appraisal of The Anath-emata is particularly astute.We may expect that Thomas Dilworth’s long-awaited biography of David Jones

will be longer, more detailed and more analytical than this book: but Keith Alldrittmust be congratulated for providing the first such work, one that is generallyaccurate, is both affectionate and respectful towards its subject, and is also clearlyand fluently written. David Jones: Writer and Artist will be interesting and useful forJonesian scholars, but I hope it will be read much more widely than that as anaccessible and reliable account of Jones’s life.

MARTIN HAGGERTY

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life together: family, sexuality and community in the new testament and today

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