HeyJ LVI (2015), pp. 1028–1090 BOOK REVIEWS Recent Catholic Philosophy: The Twentieth Century. By Alan Vincelette. Pp. 447, Milwaukee, WI, Marquette University Press, 2011, $42.00. This volume accompanies a similar one by the author on Catholic philosophy in the nineteenth century [reviewed in HJ 52 (1), 151-2]. In between the Introduction and Conclusion (both very brief) there are seven chapters. These deal with phenomenology, neo-Thomism, transcendental Thomism, personalism, existentialism, analytical philosophy, and postmodernism. In each chapter the work of three representative thinkers is examined, in each case preceded by short biographies. The focus is on Western European and North American thought and topics treated include metaphysics, epistemology, ethics and the philosophy of religion. The phenomenologists here are Edith Stein, Dietrich Von Hildebrand  and Enrique Dussel. The neo-Thomists are Etienne Gilson, Jacques Maritain and Karol Wojtyla [John Paul II]. The transcendental Thomists are Pierre Rousselot, Karl Rahner and Bernard Lonergan. The personalists are Ferdinand Ebner, Emmanuel Mounier and Maurice Nedoncelle. The existentialists are Louis Lavelle, Gabriel Marcel and Xavier Zubiri. The analytical philosophers are Elizabeth Anscombe, Charles Taylor and Francis Jacques. The postmodernists are Jean-Luc Marion, Jean-Yves Lacoste and William Desmond. The Introduction provides readers with the percentage of Catholic philosophers who worked in each category. Twelve focal principles of Catholic philosophy are summarised in the Conclusion. Each chapter traces the principal sources of and the major influences exerted by the philosophers under scrutiny and an indication of the schools of thought associated with their work. The information provided is accessible to those quite unfamiliar with the thinkers, with clear categorisation, helpful translations, judicious quotations and exemplary summaries. There are extensive notes (160 pages of these) which offer further clarification and commentary and exhaustive bibliographies for each person whose work is analysed. These bibliographies, while being intimidatingly lengthy, facilitate follow-up research and should prove invaluable for scholars and more advanced level students. This book provides valuable support for university and seminary courses in Catholic philosophy. However, as a tool in aid of learning, there were some features that I would have hoped to see provided, even if these were at the cost of reducing the number of philosophers examined and cutting back on the bibliographies and notes. If the book is to be used as more than an encyclopaedia to dip into to find information, it would have helped coherence if there had been a set of questions that were consistently posed in relation to the thinkers under review. As a support for classroom study, it would also be useful to include criteria for assessment, interpretative keys, attempts to draw out similarities and differences between thinkers, and if bridges had been constructed between the ideas that are so succinctly presented and the daily lives of students and other readers. Some pages appear dense and unattractive with the text broken up by too many references or very long lists of (sometimes relatively obscure) thinkers (e.g., pp.297 - 304; 308 – 310; 332 – 333). I am not convinced that students need to be given the names and dates of hundreds of twentieth century Thomists from many different countries. Despite these limitations, this book constitutes a valuable guide for university students and it also serves as a helpful research tool for scholars. Each reader will have their own preferences with regard to the philosophers presented, depending on their past reading and their current interests. I particularly enjoyed and was stimulated by Vincelette’s analyses of three French writers. Lavelle (1883 – 1951) has some wonderful insights on vocation, self-realisation and responsible action. One is quoted by Vincelette: ‘The whole art of living consists in preventing our intermittent good impulses from going to waste and withering away. We must take hold of them, set them to work, and make them bear fruit’ (p.149). Jacques (1934 -) is illuminating on three poles of communication and how these contribute to relationship and identity: ‘locution (utterance) – 1) speaking to others while calling myself an ‘I’; 2) allocution – being spoken to by others as a ‘you’; and 3) delocution – being spoken about by others as a ‘him’ or ‘her’ (p.207). C 2015 Trustees for Roman Catholic Purposes Registered. Published by JohnWiley & Sons Ltd, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and V 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA. BOOK REVIEWS Mounier (1905 – 50) gives attention to such fundamental aspects of the person as embodiment, liberty, communion with others, and a transcendent vocation. With regard to the last of these, he says 1029 that it is by denying what we are statically that we discover what we are prospectively (p.129). Liverpool Hope University John Sullivan Approaching God: Between Phenomenology and Theology. By Patrick Masterson. Pp. 204, London/NY, Bloomsbury, 2013, £19.99. Masterson’s works are few but precious. There was Atheism and Alienation in 1973 and The Sense of Creation in 2008. These are characterized by both a stout maintenance of tradition and an incredible openness and curiosity about the new. In 2008 he produced a book with Seamus Heaney, Articulations: Poetry, Philosophy, and the Shaping of Culture. Now emeritus from University College, Dublin, he has produced a culminating chef d’oeuvre; it carries forward the same traits that no one else practices to the same degree: first of all, a meticulous and exhaustive scholarship that is so little concerned to show itself off and is worn so lightly that you at first suspect it doesn’t exist, until he pulls out the apt quote or the most arcane reference that sums up a point perfectly. Secondly, a concern to do total justice to a new position such that he works himself completely inside it and describes its unexamined assumptions and distant consequences with such penetrating concision, a lyrical exactness and beauty, that is so superior to what its own strenuous advocates have achieved that you are convinced they have charmed him out of his independent position to become their newest disciple – only to have this followed by a ‘Nevertheless . . .’ and the gentlest, most understated, almost apologetic - but decisive – criticism and contextualization. All his books are classics, and we should all practice philosophy as irenically, integrally, and modestly as Masterson. This last work showcases the perfection of his art. He takes up three contemporary ways of approaching God: two are philosophic – phenomenology, represented by Marion and Levinas, which attempts an adequate description of religious experience while ‘bracketing’ the question of judgment and the existence of what is being discussed, attaining universality but leaving it at the level of aesthetic spectacle, dream, or ‘show’; and traditional metaphysics, represented by Thomas Aquinas, which candidly admits that all attempts to extend our knowledge beyond finite objects must be indirect but which can nevertheless – pace Maimonides – attain real truth, even if we cannot fully understand what we are saying. The last is theology, represented by a fundamentalistic, evangelical, exclusively scriptural or anti-philosophic Barthian extreme that stresses the insights and transformations that faith, on the basis of grace, makes possible, that carries us well beyond what philosophy can attain and which – through its distinctive categories of creation and salvation – takes us where we need to be to have a serious life. Masterson disentangles, appreciates, and interrelates these three squabbling siblings, each of which presents itself as exclusively correct. Like a good parent he excludes neither, shows the inappropriateness of attempting reconciliation through a Hegelian fusion or Wagnerian Gesamtkunstwerk, and recommends that they each become more modest in recognizing their mutual complementarity and the need for one another in a complete or satisfactory life. Masterson is so irenic and ahead of the rest of us that he should become Secretary General of the U. N. Heythrop College Patrick Madigan Antonio Rosmini: Persecuted Prophet. By John Michael Hill, IC. Pp. xiv, 287, Leominster, Gracewing, 2014, £20.00. Hill is a member of the Institute of Charity, the order of men founded by Rosmini (1797-1855) along with the Sisters of Providence, and he here gives an extraordinarily clear and yet panoramic presentation of the context of Rosmini’s vocation after the French Revolution and the restorationist Congress of Vienna (1815) when the Italian peninsula was divided among foreign powers (Austria, France, Savoy, and the Papal States) yet growing towards independence and unity, and when in the Church as well there was no going back to the pre-1789 situation; rather the Church was called to achieve a reconciliation with the modern world intellectually, culturally, and politically. Hill also builds a powerful case that Rosmini was treated shabbily for responding devoutly to these needs of the time by bishops afraid of offending the conservatism of the secular power that controlled the territory of their diocese (on whom they were dependent and to whom they were beholden for having nominated them in the first place, to which Rome had to bow) and by Pope Pius IX, who morphed from a modernizing 1030 BOOK REVIEWS liberal like Rosmini to a fear-based conservative after his catastrophically poor handling of the drive towards national unity and a democratic constitution. Rosmini’s offending writings have been taken off the Index and he has been beatified, but no apology has been extended nor any recognition made of the injustice and persecution to which he was subjected. This is a debt that must be purged. Rosmini’s spirituality seems remarkably apposite for our own time. Personal conversion and growth in holiness are central. The individual places a concern with his or her own condition and fate first, without apology; after all, that is what we are primarily responsible for. Of course this comes about through charity and community with others, but these flow from the first rather than the other way around. Attending to this priority would remove many of the abuses that have come to light in our own century. Secondly, Rosmini did his studies well before Leo XIII specified the writings of Thomas Aquinas as the basis for seminary education (Aeterni Patris, 1879). Having a degree from the University of Padua, he developed a vocation for writing (encouraged in this by Pope Pius VIII himself after he read some of Rosmini’s works) in dialogue with the philosophers of the Enlightenment, especially the English empiricists, out of which he defended a philosophical study and contemplation of ‘Being’ as the widest category of our experience, as well as a liberal, tolerant political tradition in which church and state respected one another’s rights. Rosmini’s orders had no specified ‘works’ to which they were devoted; rather, they depended, like Rosmini himself, on divine ‘providence’ to present them with local needs to which they should respond. Their labours in these works would also constitute their ‘mortifications’, although Rosmini was keen on community observance of Mass and devotions. Rosmini’s spirituality shows a ferocious zeal for the ministry combined with an extraordinary gentleness and compassion in dealing with member’s weaknesses and individual characteristics; superiors are cautioned to ‘temper the wind to the shorn lamb.’ Individuals are not interchangeable and should not be put in positions that overstretch them. Rosmini shows an extraordinary trust in divine providence to turn even apparent setbacks for the ministry to the good. Things happen in God’s time and at God’s pace, not ours. Rosmini’s story shows a striking convergence of opposed personalities, sometimes for the good, sometimes for the bad. Rosmini was a clear introvert, passive and contemplative (his personal motto was ‘Adore, Be silent, Rejoice’). He recognized and welcomed more extrovert, active recruits with strong religious devotion into his new order (Loewenbruck and Gentili) and was reluctant to have himself made first superior of the order. Similarly Pope Pius IX was idealistic, inexperienced, and na€ıve about political matters. After a traumatic experience with the radical mob he allied himself with Cardinal Alessandro Antonelli as his Secretary of State (who was not ordained priest, of dubious background morals and with authoritarian absolutistic tendencies) to compensate for the absence of these practical elements in his own development. It was Antonelli who caused Rosmini much of his grief. This confirms Rosmini’s insistence that spirituality begins with one’s own holiness and wholeness. Heythrop College Patrick Madigan The Oxford Movement: Europe and the Wider World 1830-1930. Edited by Stewart J. Brown and Peter B. Nockles. Pp. xii, 273, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2012, £60.00/$99.00. ‘The story of the Oxford Movement has yet to be told,’ Thomas Mozley wrote in the Preface to the second edition of his Reminiscences in 1882. One wonders how much, after the vast body of scholarship that has appeared in print since this first systematic history of the movement, still remains to be told. The Oxford Movement is generally seen as an exclusively English and insular movement concerned with questions of restoring elements of medieval worship within the Church of England. The very name describes it as essentially local. This book of casestudies, however, gauges to what extent it was also a global movement by analyzing its active missionary principles and by assessing its ecumenical meaning for the Church of England. And that is largely an untold story of the Oxford Movement. The first essays in this volume investigate the influence of, and reactions against, the Oxford Movement in English-speaking nations, such as Wales, Scotland, Australia and the United States, while the essays in the second part of the book concentrate on the reception of the movement’s tenets in continental Europe. By way of introduction, Peter Nockles opens the volume with an analysis of the geographically restricted academic origins of the movement in Oriel College, Oxford, in which the author delineates how Newman ‘orchestrated a religious movement that captivated an idealistic and serious-minded younger generation’ (p.31). The influence of the Oxford Movement in Wales is examined in John Boneham’s essay on Isaac Williams. If at Oxford moderate views were practised, BOOK REVIEWS the Welsh Tractarians were both more vehement against Protestant Dissent and more critical of Roman Catholicism. Boneham speculates that Isaac Williams writings had a certain influence here, but he admits that the real extent of Williams’s ideas in Wales can only be tentatively assessed. In the following essay, which concentrates on Scotland and the Oxford Movement, Stewart Brown gives more substantial evidence of how English Tractarians ‘looked to Scottish Episcopalism as fertile ground for the revival of Church principles’ (p.66), and it was mainly in that connection that it had its greatest impact in Scotland. But while the Episcopal Church of Scotland was only a small church, the much larger Church of Scotland absorbed some of the Movement’s liturgical reform and thereby arguably reached the greatest number of people in Scotland. In Rowan Strong’s essay Henry Edward Manning’s changing reactions to the institution of the Jerusalem Bishopric are analyzed. He shows how Manning’s interest in the British Empire initially made him a hopeful supporter of the scheme and how he became increasingly critical of it only later. The institution of the Jerusalem Bishopric was never a blow to Manning in the way it had been for Newman, but seemed to offer the possibility of a ‘globally extended Anglicanism’ (p.98). Austen Cooper tells the story of how Tractarian principles were implemented by a small group of Australian bishops, who met in a synod (later cautiously called a ‘conference’) convoked in 1850 by the highchurchman William Grant Broughton. It emerges that these Australian bishops, rather than being derivative of the Oxford Movement, were an active and integral part of it. If Cooper’s essay gives much evidence of the vitality of Tractarianism in Australia, David Hilliard, in the following essay, views it in the context of the wider religious atmosphere. He concludes that the spread of Anglo-Catholicism in Australia was uneven, that ‘the bush rather than the inner-city working-class parish [. . .] became the heartland of Australian Anglo-Catholicism’ (p.123). In the United States of America too the Oxford Movement played a role in the division between evangelical and highchurch exponents of the Episcopal Church, a division which became more obvious as the Tractarian exaltation of catholicity became prominent. It helped to bring to the surface an emerging religious difference between the new republic and its mother country. ‘Without the Oxford Movement,’ Nockles concludes, ‘the progress of American high churchmanship might well have been smoother and have remained better adapted to the realities of American politics and culture’ (p.150). The essays on the influence of the Oxford Movement on Continental Europe in the second part of the volume are introduced by Geoffrey Rowell’s 1031 survey of the influence of European Romanticism on the English Tractarians. Rowell shows that a general reaction against rationalism in religion did not go unnoticed by those components of the Oxford Movement who had links with other European countries. He also points out that, starting from the 1840s, churches were erected on the continent that ‘clearly affirmed that the Church of England in Europe had a catholic inheritance and a catholic identity’ (p.167). Following Rowell’s assessment of the impact of European developments on the Oxford Movement, a series of case-studies analyze the reactions to it in Germany, Belgium, France and the Netherlands. Albrecht Geck, for example, explores Anglo-German relations in church government and concentrates in particular on how the German Protestant theologian Friedrich August Gottreub Tholuck responded to the Tractarians’ claims to catholicity. Geck also pays attention to how the institution of the Jerusalem Bishopric was received in Germany. Jan De Maeyer and Karel Strobbe, on the other hand, report on the reception of the Oxford Movement in nineteenth-century Belgium. They investigate how the developments in the Church of England were seen as a hopeful sign of a rapprochement with Rome. What is irksome in the authors’ approach is that they base their argument on evidence from French periodicals. Admittedly, these were widely read in Belgium, but they were French – not Belgian – responses. Jeremy Morris makes use of the same French periodicals, but this time to analyze the French assessment of the Oxford Movement. Predictably, the French too tended to read in it optimistic signs of a return to Rome, but at the same time their comments reveal a ‘tenacity and ubiquity of French suspicion of Britain’ (p.207). The French view of the Oxford Movement was, moreover, a distorted one: the French tended to interpret it in terms of the recovery of the Catholic Church in France in the postNapoleonic era, and information about the Movement came from small group of biased reporters. Comparing the two essays on the French reactions to the Oxford Movement, one wonders why, in analyzing the French periodicals, Maeyer and Strobbe maintain that ‘[u]ntil 1838 events in Oxford were not reported’ while Morris writes that ‘the first article directly on Tractarianism did not appear until June 1835’ (p.190, p.217). This apparent contradiction should have been tidied up. The last essays in the volume concern ecumenical questions. In Mark Chapman’s ‘The Oxford Movement, Jerusalem, and the Eastern Question’ the point of view shifts for a moment to that of the exponents of the Oxford Movement, while the continental reaction to the Oxford Movement is taken up again in Angela Berlis’s brief account of Ignaz von D€ollinger’s ecumenical interest in the Movement – an essay in which she makes 1032 BOOK REVIEWS interesting use of the German Catholic theologian’s correspondence with Edward Pusey. Nigel Yates closes the volume with a fascinating essay on the difficult ties of the Oxford Movement with Dutch Old Catholics and the Reformed Catholics on the Continent. The Oxford Movement: Europe and the Wider World considers the influence of the Tractarians in a new international perspective. The volume offers many novel and interesting insights into how the Movement was received outside the Church of England, but it also leaves the reader with a series of unanswered questions. How, for example, did the French-speaking countries react to the Jerusalem Bishopric? What was the overall German response to Tractarianism? What about Italian concerns? Although the essays contain much important information on reactions outside England, it is to be doubted whether the Oxford Movement can ever be considered to have had true global influence. University of Urbino, Italy Jan Marten Ivo Klaver Newman and His Family. By Edward Short. Pp. xviii, 425, London/NY, Bloomsbury, 2013, $31.46. This is a follow-up and companion piece to Short’s Newman and his Contemporaries (2011), again giving the cultural background from which Newman emerged and to which he responded, but here in a tighter, more personal ring, as these cultural influences came to Newman initially through his family, and as the response he made to these influences turned out not to be the one made by anyone else in his family. For this is a sad tale, one which, apart from religion would be a tragic story, for the Newman family was early on closer, more integrated, supportive, and joyous than is common, but, as each member responded differently to the same stimuli, and in particular to the brilliant but ultimately disconcerting trajectory of their brother’s career, became more fragmented and divisive than perhaps is common, and this caused the eldest brother deep heartache his entire adult life. The father’s bankruptcy was a blow whose effect Short does not adequately plumb in the other children. John was the eldest, had already taken his turn towards religion, and the effect seems only to have deepened his awareness of the presence and nature of evil, rather than to deflect him from his course. It seems to have made the other four less secure; the girls became more conventionally attached to social judgements as their psychological anchor, and the boys split off in bizarre directions. Charles seems to have taken this disastrous event as a sign that man is never in control of his destiny, and used it as an excuse for giving up taking control of his own life. Frank became initially an extreme literalist in Biblical exegesis, and then, when he found the Bible could not support such scrutiny, turned against religious doctrine altogether. Short provides a feast of selections both from Newman (many from his uncollected works), his family’s letters, letters from acquaintances, as well as testimonies from contemporary authors and prominent personalities, retrieved and positioned in the best possible spot to bring out a particular point. What emerges is the reason for Newman’s early success and the consternation, dread, and panic in his fellow Anglicans at his eventual conversion. For Newman was the soul of his age, the attentive and wise curate who knew and could express each man’s soul better than he could himself. It was possible to disagree finally with Newman, but impossible not to love him – more, to revere him as one’s ‘higher self’. This is what made the break so painful. The critique Newman made of the National Church came from within, by someone who had grown and advanced by drinking from the springs this Church provided at its best, and who loved and was grateful for everything he had received. He put off his eventual departure as long as he could, and did it as privately as he could. Without intending to hurt, Newman had turned the Protestant argument against Catholicism on its head. The Protestant argument was that Catholicism had departed from and corrupted the authentic Christianity of the early Church; Newman showed through his historical studies that the English National Church had separated and deviated from the authentic Christian teaching which the Roman tradition had maintained continuously. The Anglican ambivalence of being both ‘Catholic’ and ‘Protestant’ was its weakness, in that inevitably doctrine began to take second fiddle to moralism, respectability, one’s personal prosperity, and the success of the British Empire. Many Anglicans could accept the justness of Newman’s criticism. What held them back was the reverse side of their prejudices against the Roman Church, their ease with the notion that the proper Christian attitude is not humility but superiority. As Newman’s sister Harriet wrote during a visit to France, after which her Anglican priest husband wanted to convert to Catholicism, ‘We went into a large church . . . last evening at dusk. No service was going on – no priests – but many in pews and side altars – in the last people seem most BOOK REVIEWS engrossed – almost always on their knees on the floor. A good deal of noise with people’s creaking boots in walking, else it was a solemn scene and one to make one feel more and more the sinfulness which somehow or other brought on the present state of things as regards ourselves – for it seems to me no church man can doubt that here they have us at great advantage, and one must have a feeling of being in the wrong as it were – just as one feels in a quarrel, though ourselves 1033 may be ever so conscious of having the right on our side, and that on no account, under no temptation whatever, must one yield one’s cause. There is nothing striking or exciting in the churches here to rouse any such extraordinary feelings – only the view of simple devotion in individuals as one never can see it exhibited at home.’ (quoted p. 258-9) Heythrop College Patrick Madigan The Letters and Diaries of John Henry Newman. Edited and introduced by Francis J. McGrath, FMS. Vol 32 supplement Pp. xvi, 731, Oxford University Press, 2008, $199.00. This last installment of Newman’s letters and diaries compiles some 520 letters that span the years from 1830 to 1890, the year that Newman died. The majority of entries, however, cover Newman’s Catholic life. The volume will prove important for scholars, especially as it reprints Newman’s private diary of his first twenty-nine months building up the Catholic University of Ireland 1853-1856. McGrath supplies copious and well researched background material in the notes that facilitate understanding individual letters and the arc of certain conversations. The notes themselves seem to be a labor of years. There are twelve appendices, a list of letters by correspondents, and a superb index of persons and places. McGrath also includes two letters to Pope Leo XIII petitioning for the canonization of John Fisher, Thomas More, and the English martyrs. Scholars should know, however, that not everything contained in the volume is unpublished. The editor re-publishes the first two rector’s reports to the archbishops and bishops of Ireland as well as many previously published letters of dedication, reminiscences, and notices written by or concerning Newman. In terms of topics, there are letters about the Catholic University of Ireland, Newman’s advice to potential converts and religious seekers, the Oratory school at Edgbaston, and papal infallibility. There is no evidence in the letters of major shifts or dramatic reconsiderations in Newman’s theology. A few areas merit comment. Newman’s correspondence with Thomas Arnold Junior comprises the most letters (33) to any one person. A convert to Catholicism like Newman, Arnold was hired by Newman to be Professor of English Literature at the Catholic University of Ireland but initially opposed by Archbishop (later Cardinal) Paul Cullen. The son of the distinguished Dr. Thomas Arnold, an influential British educator and historian, Arnold was also a collaborator with Newman in the Oratory school at Edgbaston. Though Newman is critical of Arnold’s scholarship and religious views at times, at times he expresses an almost fatherly care as he encourages Arnold to review books, write articles, and work for him. Stephen Dessain reminded scholars about the existence of Newman’s university journal when he published Newman’s Memorandum about My Connection with the Catholic University in Autobiographical Writings (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1957). Dessain claimed that the university journal, cited in the Memorandum, supplied the more ‘interesting matter,’ than is contained in the present volzume and its Rector’s reports. That judgment may stand. Still, one is impressed with Newman’s grasp of the finer details of administration, finance, the politics of hiring, and day-to-day work involved in established the short lived university. Newman was particularly sensitive to how the Irish would react to English professors and tried to limit the number. There is confirmation in his second report that the CUI was consciously modeled on the University of Louvain. There is additional material about how he grew frustrated with certain bishops (McHale, Cullen). One should not take only Newman’s side of the story, however. For a more balanced account of the Newman-Cullen relationship, scholars should read these letters in tandem with Colin Barr’s recent book, Paul Cullen, John Henry Newman, and the Catholic University of Ireland, 1845-1865 (University of Notre Dame, 2003). In the third rector’s report, Newman does point out how unprepared were the Irish students who matriculated. He recounts how this caused unfortunate tension between professors and students. Lastly, in one interesting letter to an unknown correspondent (possibly a Anglican clergyman), readers see Newman distinguishing Anglicanism as established from ‘Protestantism.’ Indeed, Newman pays some religious debts to Anglican divines from whom he learned Catholic doctrine. At the time of the letter, 1864, Newman was much inclined to favor the established church insofar as it protected true Christian practice and teaching from the destructive enthusiasms of Protestant groups. In sum, the full range of material, notes, and appendices is a wealth for researchers to mine and readers to discover. Scholars interested in Newman’s 1034 BOOK REVIEWS work regarding the Catholic University of Ireland, his setting up the Oratory school, and certain personal relationships will find much of interest in this well edited volume. The volume pays tribute to one whose thought and spirit are especially now opening yet more windows on a teaching pastoral church, for believers and seekers. University of Saint Mary, Leavenworth, KS Brian W. Hughes The Fantasy of Reunion: Anglicans, Catholics, and Ecumenism, 1833-1882. By Mark D. Chapman. Pp. ix, 329, Oxford University Press, 2014, $99.00. Chapman gives a complete chronicle of the attempt, first by the Church of England, facing the prospect of disestablishment and a rising popular culture of liberalism, biblical criticism, and reductive rationalism, to shore up its authoritative foundation on its ‘Catholic’ side by stressing apostolic succession, episcopal authority, and the preservation of the primitive deposit of faith. The key here was the ‘branch’ theory of the relation of authentic Christian denominations to one another: unlike extreme Protestants, the claim now was that they had kept intact the doctrines of the ‘undivided’ primitive Church of the first six or seven ecumenical councils without allowing, as did Rome, the proliferation of ‘novelties’ and ‘excesses’ which Rome later tried to include in its de fide definition of authentic Christianity by another desperate ‘novelty’, that of ‘papal infallibility’. Anglo-Catholics hoped to fend off the latter in the upcoming Vatican Council, because it was a move that would cut away the other two ‘Catholic’ branches, the Greeks and the Anglicans. The problem that would soon be discovered was that the ‘primitive’ Church was never ‘undivided’. ‘Unity’ was a goal of the emperor; each apostolic foundation was content to cultivate its own tradition and look askance at the others. More deeply, the gospels and the Pauline letters were written in Greek, all council doctrines and creeds were composed using unscriptural Greek terms to answer ‘Greek’ questions the authors of scripture had never put to themselves, so there was a ‘development’ from day one with no cut-off date projected into the future. As Newman insisted to Pusey, each age puts questions to scripture its authors never anticipated, so that the ‘deposit’ must continually be made to yield answers by our best theologians with new pronouncements, both on doctrine and practice. The pope correctly insisted on maintaining his right and duty to pronounce on temporal matters, but initially made the mistake of taking this to mean he must retain the papal states to keep his ‘street cred’ among other temporal rulers. The opposite was the case; it was only when he lost the papal states that his prestige and respect grew, as now being freed from self-serving motives. Newman was brutally frank with Pusey and Forbes about the unlikelihood of Rome being willing to shear off its ‘accretions’ in order to facilitate reunion with the Anglican communion. Still, the declaration of the Immaculate Conception and, definitively, that of papal infallibility, dashed what Chapman calls the ‘fantasy’ of high-church Anglical ritualists and ecumenists; henceforth their attention would turn to the ‘Old Catholics’ led by D€ollinger in Bavaria and Switzerland as well as the Greek and Russian Orthodox, as potential fellow ‘branches’ in a non-papal ‘Catholic’ Church agreed on its ‘primitive deposit’. A problem appeared in that they were not so agreed. The Greeks and Russians were as attached to their icons as Rome was to its unfolding Marian doctrines. When the Orthodox insisted that ‘filioque’ be struck from the Nicene creed as both heretical and illegally inserted, Pusey surprisingly came to the opposite opinion that it was neither. The fall of empires and the rise of nationalism seemed to augur well for such a ‘national Catholic’ federation, fused with an antipathy to the ‘transnationalism’ now called for by Rome. But nationalism had a devil’s tail of its own which would show that those who mixed religion with ‘patriotism’, or loyalty to one’s ‘national church’, were supping with Satan (or Caesaro-Papism). Nationalistic wars over the next seventy years turned this smiling hope into ashes in the mouth. Heythrop College Patrick Madigan Culture and the Death of God. By Terry Eagleton. Pp. x, 238, New Haven/London, Yale University Press, 2014, £18.99/$25.00. How many times can God die? Resembling a soap opera heroine (or cat) who somehow defies decapitation, a fall from a fifty-story building, multiple on- target gun shots, and let’s add a nuclear explosion, God’s demise in print (whether philosophical, sociological, scientific, literary, or religious) is inevitably BOOK REVIEWS premature; a sequel waiting to happen. In this sense, Terry Eagleton’s title is perhaps best read as he interprets Matthew Arnold’s titles for Culture and Anarchy and Literature and Dogma, in which the conjunction should be ‘or’—not ‘and.’ The result, Culture or the Death of God would be unsatisfactory in a different way (the coupling need not be a valid zero sum game) but at least no grossly false or premature claims are immediately posited. As the Jewish theologian Richard Rubenstein remarked amidst the furor of his critique and denial of the validity of the biblical covenant and God in After Auschwitz, no human being could prove the assertion that God is dead or does not exist. For Eagleton, attempts at replacing religion and belief in God, whether as Reason in the Enlightenment, Spirit and myth in Idealism, Nature for Romantics, Culture and Aesthetics for the Victorians, various nationalisms in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, or what may come closest – capitalism and consumerism in our own age – have all failed. In this sense, his intellectual history with his usual academic sprightliness, humor, and impressive range of thinkers and sources can nevertheless seem despondent, crepuscular, and almost nihilistic. What remains when all else has failed? Teasingly, Eagleton may offer a glint of possible hope on the horizon, but one seemingly overshadowed by the constant claims of God and religion’s demise, and with insinuations that the core of Christianity in particular is so counter-cultural that it has scant hope of any enduring rebirth. And so we read one main thinker after the other who tries to displace, replace, disabuse, and deny belief in God, from Fichte, Schelling, and Nietzsche, to Marx and Freud, and Comte and Durkheim, to those who have no use for theism but still think the masses should so believe, if only for social harmony. Matthew Arnold is the hypocritical archetype for Eagleton in this regard, and gets a fair share of rebuke and deserved jokes at his expense. Stopping only here at Eagleton’s diagnosis yields a book rich in thought, close reading of key thinkers and texts, and provocative statements and claims, deserving of the occasional chuckle or smirk, though sometimes painted with too broad a brush and dark a hue. While the gaps, hypocrisies, and failures of attempts to replace religion are brightly revealed, inclusions of literary characters like Ivan from The Brothers Karamazov or Dr Rieux from The Plague would have rightly complicated the critiques, spurred from a secular humanism, which especially in the latter case, actually embodies his moral ideals, sans religion and God. Here one also encroaches into the realm of theodicy, always involving a put-down or joke on Eagleton’s part, building on his less impressive 2011 work, On Evil. Theodicy for Eagleton is any 1035 attempt at justifying evil (14), employing some faith or belief in reclaiming future good or hope in the face of present loss and despair, so that even Nietzsche employs a type of theodicy (166). But as I have argued elsewhere, there can be no viable theism that avoids the problem of theodicy, and so the problem of theodicy (which cannot be fully solved or justified in this world, with legitimate doubts about any full success for all victims in any putative afterlife) will necessarily impact one’s theism, and hopefully in positive ways – leading to circumspection, humility, and the need for repentance and dialogue. Here, then is the rub: in a work that has very little to say positively and overtly about religion (Eagleton highlights its fundamentalist post 9/11 resurgence) but even less so about its apparent replacements, are we left with any sense of a viable direction or path to take? There are hints, perhaps, of hope. The closing lines of the book entail a call for religious faith to be a voice of conscience through hard truths and harder ethical obligations, thus supporting ‘solidarity with the poor and powerless. It is here that a new configuration of faith, culture and politics might be born’ (208). But as this is the last line, no prescription is outlined or developed, and so large gaps remain in what is otherwise an impressively free-flowing though generally well stitched- together and ambitious text. The titular death of God, – purported, ironic, or defied – always entails ambition but also a deft and deep theological acumen. Hints are shown in some of Eagleton’s asides, here critiquing Nietzsche’s poor reading of the Incarnation: ‘In its [kenosis of the cross] solidarity with the outcast and afflicted, the crucifixion is a critique of all hubristic humanism’ (159), but is undermined by a lack of substantial follow-up and resorting to the rhetorical or comical statement without reflection. Eagleton, thus, writes that Jesus ‘shatters the idolatrous view of Yahweh as irascible despot and shows him up him [sic] instead as vulnerable flesh and blood’ (159). The lack of nuance here is disappointing, and in our post-Shoah world, worrying. So, if there is to be a sequel, I humbly suggest Eagleton delve deeper into contemporary theological texts, especially of liberation theologians Gutierrez and Sobrino, political theologians like Metz (though Eagleton seems to dismiss the nuts and bolts of political theology, 207-208), hermeneutical theologians like David Tracy, theologians such as Joerg Rieger who selectively employ postmodern approaches (Eagleton eschews postmodern theology here, though postmodernity is deftly critiqued), feminist theology (especially of Elizabeth Johnson and Phyllis Trible), along with the work of postcolonial theologians like R.S. Sugirtharajah and Kwok Pui-Lan, 1036 BOOK REVIEWS and the work of the current Pope. If the Death of God claim is still given titular status in Eagleton’s next work, at least no one could then fault him for not engaging with some very good embodiments of its defense. As it stands now, though, and like any supposed replacement for God or religion, we are still waiting. Mater Dei Institute, DCU Peter Admirand The Therapeutic Turn: How Psychology Altered Western Culture. By Ole Jacob Madsen. Pp. x, 198, Hove, East Sussex/NY, Routledge, 2014, £24.99. One of the major concerns about the current interface between psychology and Western culture is that, all too often, solutions to individual problems are used to provide solutions for structural problems, infiltrating every corner of consumer culture, politics, self-help, and sport. Ole Jacob Madsen’s book attempts to counter this. He argues that psychologists, however inadvertently, increase the burden on the shoulders of those whom they are meant to help; simultaneously our capacity to understand individual suffering in the light of changes in society becomes clouded. Madsen is Associate Professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of Oslo. His primary field of research is the unfolding of the therapeutic culture in Scandinavia and the consequent new societal ethical dilemmas facing professional psychologists. After an Introduction, Madsen presents a historical overview of the relation between psychology and the economy, looking in particular at such psychological constructs as the empty self, individualization, and self-realization. He then turns to the crisis of authority in the West and claims that, as Rieff has argued, the social model of Freud and psychology, which we still live with today, is no longer sustainable. Chapter 4 engages along similar lines with religion and asks if the ‘return to religion’ and neoreligiosity and neo-spiritualism of recent decades imply that we must re-evaluate whether our perception of the world is in fact secularised and therapeutic. The fifth chapter looks at self-help and the role of the therapeutic ethos as found in the hands of socalled therapeutic experts in weekly magazines, books, and tv. In the next chapter Madsen explores how psychology and the concept of the mental part have entered the sports arena in recent years. In the seventh chapter he looks more closely at neoliberalism, which, together with psychology give the individual a central position. Chapter 8 addresses the ethos and position of the psychology profession in relation to the ethical issues he has presented thus far and finds that, whereas psychologists have developed a high degree of ethical awareness of client-related factors, their understanding of socio-ethical problems remains under-developed. In the final chapter, a warning is issued, emphasizing some of the more disturbing features of how psychology may develop in the future. Although Madsen draws extensively on psychological practice in Scandinavia, in particular in Norway, his arguments and conclusions include reference to the rest of Europe, in particular the UK, and North America. The book is well referenced and has a good index, mainly of names. Dorset Luke Penkett William James and the Transatlantic Conversation. Edited by Martin Halliwell and Joel D.S. Rasmussen. Pp xi, 235, Oxford University Press, 2014, £65.00. This book sets a quintessential American in his broader context. Part One concerns James’s life context. Nubiola details the reception of James in continental Europe, in which James took a keen interest. After describing the Italian and Germanic receptions he turns to the intense interest of Spanish thinkers in James, Unamuno taking pride of place. His debts to James’s ‘Will to believe’ and understanding of sainthood as exemplified by Don Quixote receive their due. Hollinger follows with a fascinating analysis of James’s influence on liberal Protestantism and secularization. Though they differed from him in their Christian and institutional mind-set, like James these Protestants strove to respond to universe’s disenchantment and the emerging western consciousness of non-Christian religion, with an appeal to religious experience. Though their efforts to be dynamically in the secularizing world arguably led them to lose any distinctive identity and become of it, Hollinger applauds the broad-mindedness it encouraged. King presents an intriguing interpretation of James, drawing on Rieff, as a ‘therapeutic thinker’ in which religion finds its metier as a therapeutic function and thus will not simply pass away from Weber’s disenchanted world. King also notes the BOOK REVIEWS influence of Emerson upon James which is vital to understanding this aspect. To focus as Weber does on the influences of Puritanism and Utilitarianism is to speak only half the truth. Loerzer puts James in his French context, reminding us that James had originally wanted to be a painter and that his understanding of perception was influenced by his French influenced training in its artistic representation. She proceeds beautifully from this to James’s similar approaches to Bergson, whom he knew well, in voicing a psychological theory of perception and ontology of immanence. Kuryla and Halliwell focus on the influences of James’s father and sister respectively. James senior’s psychological difficulties, linked to his missing leg are suggested as having an impact on his sons thought. Similarly, in his sister Alice, James saw first-hand the workings of the morbid soul. Living a life circumscribed by physical and psychological fragility, not to mention being a woman, Alice maintained an intense inner life with which James was intimate. She knew his work and may well have alerted him to the subjective element to experience and its environments along with the insights that morbidity may offer that a healthy-minded superficial cheerfulness may not. Finally for this section, Butler observes James’s early review of Mill on the woman question. Whilst scathing of Mill’s more histrionic opponents, James could not, for all his admiration of Mill’s boldness entirely escape the reservations of a typical man of his environment. How his views on gender equality might have developed if he had thought further on the issue is a winsome speculation. The second part deals with James’s work A Pluralistic Universe. Lamberth presents James as defining religion as functional in its plurality for balancing competing claims within culture and 1037 practice and human experience in general. It is not simply a set of propositions as the New Atheists and their opponents often argue. For James and Lamberth religious studies proves its worth as showing how religion can and does function practically in human experience. Rasmussen strikes ably against Rorty’s characterization of James as a deconstructivist. Though opposed to Absolute Idealism’s dogmatism, James believed that in religious experience something “more” was experienced that had an objective existence outside the experiencer, despite the importantly subjective way it is received. Slater carefully overviews James’s critique of Absolute Idealism as built on flawed logic and reducing the particular beauties of reality to a “block universe” inimical to free-will and a sensitive understanding of evil. There then ensues an attempt to marry Kantian and Jamesian philosophies of religion by Pihlstr€om. Like Kant, James seeks a middle way between evidentialism and fideism, denying the efforts of natural theology to prove God’s existence yet defending the truth of religion on moral grounds. A detailed examination of Kantian metaphysics and how it might be happily married to James’s pragmatic pluralism is conducted. This essay shall stimulate many if not convince all. Finally, drawing upon both parts of this compilation, Carrette provides an elegant summary of the work, seeing in James’s ‘Growing up Zig-Zag’ a commitment to a pluralism in which the local is related but never engulfed by the local. This is a fruitful work on a noteworthy subject, though perhaps more could have been written on James’s understanding of evil, particularly in relation to Absolute Idealism. It is a conversation that deserves a hearing. Braunton Christopher Villiers John Macmurray’s Religious Philosophy. By Esther McIntosh. Pp. xi, 263, Farnham/Burlington, Ashgate, 2011, £50.00. This is the first full-scale study of the entirety of Macmurray’s religious philosophy, including many unpublished manuscripts, and the resulting vision is richly rewarding for readers who have been intrigued by his two most famous works, The Self as Agent and Freedom in the Modern World. The inspiring impulse for M’s oeuvre could be taken from St. Irenaeus’s well-known slogan: ‘The glory of God is man fully alive’. M’s philosophical studies were on Emmanuel Kant, and Kantianism provides the spine of his philosophy, with Kant’s ‘Transcendental Unity of Apperception’ unpacked in a vitalistic, almost Nietzschean direction, rather than simply resolving epistemological and ethical difficulties. Like Kant (and Nietzsche), M holds that man in the modern era is not ‘fully alive’. M defines the nature of man as ‘agency’, but the power of this agency has been hobbled and weakened since Descartes by a serious misunderstanding of the self as mind or separated reflection, with a resulting unclear relation to the body, giving rise dialectically to Hobbes’ equally distorted understanding of the self as body or matter, with a reductionistic understanding of mind. This is the first of a series of dualisms, or ‘antinimonies’ as Kant would call them, from which the modern agent suffers, and it is M’s 1038 BOOK REVIEWS self-appointed role as prophet to cure us. The surprise is that he is so successful. The self is inherently personal, implying and reaching out from its beginning for an ‘other’ that is equally personal and with whom it can communicate in reciprocity for no other purpose than sharing and mutual enjoyment. M’s ‘revelation’ is that, beyond the finite ‘others’ by whom the self is initially received there is an ‘ultimate Other’ who is fully personal, fully constituted from the outset unlike its finite approximations, and who is able and ready to fulfill our hopes and ambition for a personal relationship with the deepest reality in the cosmos, a relationship that will rise above submission, utility, and duty to rest in that friendship which Aristotle defined as the crown of a worthy or satisfying life, and to which Jesus calls his followers in John’s gospel. This is M’s simplified, streamlined version of the meaning of Christianity – and all other religions – but he is surprisingly successful at teasing out all of the traditional satisfactions from this nuclear, anti-otherworldly account, embedded in a rhetoric designed to relate religion to the two other serious pursuits of the modern period, science and art, whom M unpacks as religion’s daughters and of which it is a synthesis. Perhaps the most intriguing part of M’s philosophy – and the part of most lasting value – is his account of infant development, which is the core of his anthropology as well as the basis for his culture critique and criticism of other religions. Agency means self- transcendence, but this hetero-centricity can be frustrated by negative experiences that lead the self into distorted and partial realizations of itself. The infant is a person from the outset, but it needs other persons to fulfill itself. Indeed, the ‘unit’ of human reality is the couple –‘You and I’ – not the individual alone. M’s innovation is to appreciate the ‘form of the personal’ as a positive intention to trust and relationship, but which contains its own ‘negatives’ of distance and fear – which prompt reflection, that ideally leads back to better-informed and improved action, rather than becoming isolated – because at times the personal ‘other’ is not all that he or she should be. These ‘negatives’ are thus included dialectically within the ‘positive’ and can educate the self insofar as they feed back into action – but this is not always the case. In modern capitalism, for example, the stress on competition and efficiency at work has imperiled the personal relationship that is the goal of all work, and fear has similarly pushed us toward an individualism that is a distorted caricature of proper human self-realization. M similarly finds the religions of Buddhism and Islam responding excessively to the ‘negative’ emotion of fear. Again this leads to underdevelopment of the person – to submission and escapist, ideal spirituality with Buddhism, and to aggression and ‘idealized materialism’ with Islam (p. 195) M’s theory of human development rivals that of Freud and offers much to think about. Heythrop College Patrick Madigan C. S. Lewis: a Life – Eccentric Genius, Reluctant Prophet. By Alister McGrath. Pp. 431, London, Bloomsbury, 2013, £10.99. A meticulous detective, McGrath divides Lewis’s life into four parts: Belfast, Oxford, Narnia, and Cambridge, retracing his steps to uncover new clues on the subject. This exploration of the landscape of an author so adept at conveying emotion evoked by other worlds is used to illuminate his inner world, for example, the transcendental feeling that Lewis called sehnsucht, or joy, and the experience of conversion, a ‘process of crystallisation, by which things that were hitherto disconnected and unrelated are suddenly seen to fit into a greater scheme of things.’ An Irishman himself, McGrath’s prelude stresses the roots in County Down. Lewis was born into the heart of the Protestant establishment, and though he loved his country, he hated the politics. He was scarred by the death of his mother at an early age, and became estranged from his father while attending boarding schools in England which he judged worse than the trenches in France. A lonely and introverted boy, Lewis’s precocious literary judge- ment was appreciated by the dialectical rationalist who tutored him and prepared him for Oxford where he would attain a triple first. McGrath’s investigation indicates that Lewis’s (reluctant) decision to join an Infantry unit with which he had no connections may have been related to his relationship with Mrs. Moore, whom Lewis cared for when her son, a fellow soldier, was killed. This arrangement served to rationalize this unusual relationship that was kept hidden from his father. His atheism, already confirmed and articulated in his unsuccessful poetry, was challenged by intelligent literary friends including Barfield, who refuted both Lewis’s ‘chronological snobbery’ and the metaphysics rooted in the rock-bottom reality of the senses, and Tolkien, who considered the doctrine of the Incarnation as ‘myth become fact.’ McGrath’s analysis of the extensive correspondence that Lewis kept up enables him to make an original and convincing case for the revision of some key dates. Thus, the conversion to theism probably took place in Trinity term 1930 after BOOK REVIEWS the death of his father, rather than in the previous year, as Lewis’s subsequent attendance at the College chapel indicates, and his acceptance of the Divinity of Christ was probably more drawn out (there was probably more than one trip to Whipsnade: the bluebells weren’t out in September as Lewis’s autobiography suggests). McGrath also highlights the significance of Lewis for Tolkien. As a critical friend, he acted as a midwife to The Lord of the Rings, and McGrath reproduces the recently unearthed letter recommending him for the Nobel Prize for literature. As well as the Inklings, in fact, Lewis was a member of several literary circles that included many women. McGrath reckons that the last chapter of Lewis’s first scholarly work, The Allegory of Love was the best; the many insights in this chapter on Spenser stimulated renewed interest in the author of The Faerie Queene. Here McGrath does not spell out the fact that Lewis regarded Spenser as significant for bringing to an end the tradition of Courtly Love, and for once he does leave a stone unturned. The House of Busirane of the third book, I suggest, was the inspiration not only for Belbury and Charn, but perhaps for the depiction of Malvern College. This would help to explain the inordinate attention to the place that McGrath notices in Surprised by Joy. McGrath relates Lewis’s growing international fame as a Christian apologist, pointing out that being a relatively unknown layman made Lewis all the more acceptable to the BBC, and explains the ecumenically-motivated idea behind ‘mere Christianity.’ The prophet without honour at home, however, suffered many difficulties that are soberly yet movingly described by McGrath, including the dementia of Mrs. Moore, his brother’s alcoholism, and animosity from fellow academics which tempted Lewis to ‘hatred many times a day.’ 1039 Of the Narnian stories, McGrath takes the threshold as the key theme; like Plato’s cave, they open us to a new world. Talking animals signify Lewis’s protest against vivisection, the foremost being Aslan, whose Turkish name means Lion, and which Lewis probably took from one of Spenser’s biographers. The manner in which the identity of Aslan is gradually revealed suggests that The Lion should be read first. The implicit doctrine of the Atonement in Narnia is illuminated by the great mystery plays of the Middle Ages in which a wily and canny God tricks Satan into overstepping his rights. Michael Ward is credited for discovering that each of the seven stories is associated with one of the seven planets in the discarded medieval view, though the thesis may have to be modified in some details. A chair in Medieval and Renaissance Studies at Cambridge was created for Lewis, and he was elected to the British Academy on the strength of the Oxford History of English Literature in the Sixteenth Century Excluding Drama. McGrath records the ‘very strange marriage’ to Joy Davidman, how Lewis became an ‘American divorcee’s sugar daddy,’ and how her illness brought about a changed attitude in him. Her death evoked the searing emotions of A Grief Observed, a test of faith in which Lewis was refined by fire. McGrath concludes with a consideration of the Lewis phenomenon, especially among American Evangelicals. He notes Lewis’s virtues as a writer: accessible, engaging, clear, cogent, all of which are amply displayed in what must be regarded as the most authoritative biography of this eccentric genius and reluctant prophet. Boston College Christopher Friel C. S. Lewis—On the Christ of a Religious Economy, 3.2: II Knowing Salvation. By P. H. Brazier. Pp. xviii, 326, Eugene, OR, Wipf and Stock, 2014, $38.00. Except for a bibliographical volume, this is the last book in a series with the overall title, C. S. Lewis: Revelation and the Christ. It follows books about revelation, conversion and apologetics published in July 2012, about the work of Christ published in August of 2012, and about God’s creation published in May 2013. Technically, this is the second half of the third volume on Christ and the economy of salvation, which would have reached 650 pages if it had not been published in two parts. Brazier is a Lewis devotee with a background in art, literature and theology who has made a career of teaching, editing, and writing articles for philosophical and theological journals. In the introduction, Brazier explains that he wants to address the belief that Lewis was just ‘an amateur theologian’ and not ‘an original thinker or systematician on the scale of more noted professionals’ (5). Indeed, he has been developing this argument over the previous two and a half volumes. Having written broadly about revelation and salvation in the earlier books, the focus of this one is the person and work of Jesus Christ in human salvation. To a certain extent, it references what was said in those earlier volumes, but it stands on its own and can be read without any feeling that one is missing something. 1040 BOOK REVIEWS Part One presents in some detail the debate between Lewis and G. E. M. Anscombe, both members of the Oxford Socratic Club founded in 1941 ‘for the free and open debate of questions relating to religion’ (5). The first edition of Lewis’ Miracles had argued against philosophical naturalism, which opposed any supernatural explanations of apparently inexplicable happenings. Anscombe was a Catholic, so she was not defending naturalism, but linguistic analysis was then on the rise in English universities, and, measured by its criteria, ‘Lewis’ argument against naturalism [was] sloppy, ill-worked out, indeed illogical’ (58). Lewis was not prepared for the analytic critique of his argument because his own philosophical training had occurred a quarter-century earlier, when he had studied the classics. At root, he was a Platonist, as were many of the church fathers whom he had read in order to deepen his appreciation of the faith after his conversion to Christianity. Like them, he saw reality as shaped by the mind of God, not as something inert and devoid of divine influence. From his perspective, ‘God is eternal rationality (Kocor), reason, purely and absolutely in itself. This is the highest form of reason, and is characterized by a downward movement into the human, who is then raised up, drawn up, into participation’ (72). Like any theologian, and unlike a philosopher, Lewis begins with the understanding that God is what the scriptures and the Christian tradition say about God, and he assumes that the job of the Christian intellectual is to explain how this is the case. During his younger years, Lewis had tried to argue from reason to revelation and had failed—at least from an analytic perspective. From 1948 onward, he instead began arguing from analogy. ‘Reason is complemented by imagination; revelation is transposed into pictures and stories’ (84) such as those found in The Space Trilogy, The Screwtape Letters and The Great Divorce. What critics saw as a retreat from critical thinking, Lewis viewed as an advance into revelation via symbol and narrative. Part Two follows Lewis into the realms of religion and church, as he embarked on an apologetic devised not to convince unbelievers but to awaken believers to the hidden depths of revelation. Lewis’ eschatology is solidly based on biblical and patristic foundations, but at the same time, it appears to be drawn from his own experience of trying to follow Christ in a church that is often more concerned with institutional matters than with spiritual realities. Indicative of this is Lewis’ distinction, borrowed from Augustine, between the visible church and the invisible church, the true church being a spiritual body living in Christ and animated by the Holy Spirit. The Narnian Chronicles illustrate this eschatological notion of church. ‘There are no church buildings as such, no apparent liturgy, no formal worship, though most Narnians follow, respect, the AslanChrist, and acknowledge him for what he is as the Son of the Emperor-beyond-the-Sea’ (145). Part Three systematically presents Lewis’ theology of salvation that is unsystematically scattered throughout his writings. What does atonement mean? How did the incarnation of God’s Word and his death on the cross redeem humankind? How should one interpret biblical passages about election and predestination? What is one to make of beliefs about heaven, hell and purgatory? How should one envision the general resurrection and the new creation that is to come? This last part amply illustrates the strengths and weaknesses of Lewis’ theology. On the one hand, he explores every major doctrinal topic in Christianity since the patristic era, showing how traditional doctrines can make sense to educated believers living in the mid-twentieth-century. On the other hand, in the four decades since his death, the theological landscape has shifted enormously for Christians who today question the literal interpretation of Genesis and indeed any theory of salvation that presupposes the historical existence of a first pair of humans and their fall from grace. For them, the New Testament account of salvation may not be a description of metaphysical occurrences but a symbolic account of spiritual transformations. In any event, the problems faced by theologians today are not just the naturalism and atheism of the past but challenges posed by religious pluralism, cultural relativism, global poverty, non-traditional sexuality, and environmental degradation. While evangelicals and conservative Christians may still be looking at doctrines in the straightforward way that Lewis did, others are looking at them through the lenses of biblical criticism, religious studies, Teilhardian cosmology, and postmodern deconstructionism. Nonetheless, Lewis’ achievement in understanding his faith and helping others to understand theirs remains an admirable accomplishment, and Brazier’s synthesis of Lewis’ life and work provides much insight into that achievement. Louisville, Kentucky, USA Joseph Martos Analytic Philosophy: The History of an Illusion. By Aaron Preston. Pp. xii, 190, London/NY, Continuum, 2007, $99.01. The aim of this book, as the author tells us in his Introduction, is to answer three questions. Why did the original program of analytic philosophy, given that its problems were serious and obvious enough BOOK REVIEWS to cause its complete abandonment in half a century, originally seem so promising as to ensure its social dominance in Britain and North America? How has it been able to maintain its position, given that the official reasons for it have been given up for such a long time? And since its identity was conferred by its original outlook, just what is this entity which ‘has dominated academic philosophy even since that outlook was abandoned?’ (3) When ‘analytic philosophy’ made the transition from its linguistic phase, it was like the end of the story of the Emperor’s new clothes; ‘everyone including the emperor sees the truth, and everyone except the emperor and his aides drop the charade’ (155). It has been, however, socially impossible to admit what is going on, as one would be shown up either as a fool who has been deceived by the illusion, or a knave who has assisted in perpetuating it. ‘(T)he name had to be retained to save face’ (154). I agree with a great deal of what Dr. Preston has to say; he makes many good points, and makes them well; and yet I remain uneasy. What the book really shows, I think, is that ‘analytic philosophy’ is like ‘games’ as famously described by the later Wittgenstein, with no property shared by all, but with a lot of overlapping characteristics. (On Dr. Preston’s account it is more like Sam Pig’s trousers, which had been patched so many times that non of the original material was left.) Among the best items in the bundle are clarity and precision of argument, and avoidance of the high-sounding jargon which is often such a conspicuous feature of ideological commendation and condemnation. The obfuscating and selfserving verbiage in which people indulge on the subjects of, for example, politics or religion, can make one wish that, whatever analytic philosophy is, it had formed some part of their education. Analytic philosophy is at least roughly something; and what it roughly is, at least at its best, is well worth cultivating. And even if all philosophical problems are not due to linguistic confusion, at least it may be worth investigating whether some of them are. As J. L. Austin suggested, if careful consideration of the meaning of the words which one is using is not the last word in philosophy, perhaps it ought at least to be the first word. The deflationary strand was certainly there from the beginning, and has to a great extent remained. The idealists against whom G. E. Moore and Bertrand Russell reacted were the natural allies of moralists and theologians; analytical philosophers in general have by no means been so, though the revival of respect for religion among these philosophers has been a striking feature of the last few decades, as contrasted with the forties and fifties. 1041 Recently I was invited, or rather expected as a matter of course, to give my stamp of approval to a paper which was to be given at a prestigious international conference. The paper beautifully showed what good philosophy is, in the sense meant by analytic philosophers, just by being such a poor example of it. Terms like ‘monism’ and ‘dualism’, and names like ‘Plato’ and ‘Descartes’, were flung about, with only the vaguest and most superficial idea of the thoughts and thinkers they stood for, or of their relevance to the point that the author was trying to make, so far as he had one. Not only did the author not argue, but he appeared to have no idea of what an argument is - it is not making a sententious declaration which is irrelevant to the matter in hand, and then, when your opponent protests, resorting to abuse. (The late Professor Antony Flew suggested, reasonably enough in my view and in typically analytic fashion, that what is essential to philosophy is a study of arguments and their application.) It was the names and the jargon which gave him the thrill, and the impression that using them distinguished him as a member of an intellectual elite. As the author remarks, Michael Corrado contradicts himself when he maintains both that analytic philosophy is just good philosophy; and that Russell was its founder (56-7) - unless one adds the outrageous premise that there was no good philosophy before Russell. The truth of the matter appears to be that Russell and Moore, in contrast with the idealism which prevailed in Britain at the time when they began their work, favoured empiricism, formal logic, and close analysis, and had a deflationary attitude towards systembuilding and to the prevailing pretentiousness and high-sounding rhetoric that went with it. Against the background of the dreary Gifford Lectures which were being churned out at the time, their work must indeed have appeared as a breath of fresh air. ‘The Absolute enters into, but does not itself partake of, evolution and change.’ This may sound impressive; but what does it really amount to when you subject it to examination? Moore went so far as to declare that he saw no philosophical problems in the nature of things, but only in the muddled minds of other philosophers. Later writers have found more of the qualities favoured by analytic philosophers in ancient, medieval, and early modern philosophy, than were apparent in the first fine flush of revolution. In an early paper of Anthony Kenny, one of the most dazzling displays of philosophical pyrotechnics that I have ever seen, William of Occam is paired with the logical positivists, Duns Scotus with Russell, and Thomas Aquinas with Ludwig Wittgenstein, in 1042 BOOK REVIEWS respect to their theories of meaning. Peter of Spain, an influential medieval compiler of logical textbooks (who later became Pope), has been referred to as the fourteenth-century Copi. R. G. Collingwood is rightly singled out by Dr Preston as a prophetic voice (72-7 and elsewhere). Calgary, Canada Hugo Meynell Are You an Illusion? By Mary Midgley. Pp. viii, 167, Durham, Acumen, 2014, £12.99. At 94 Midgley continues to produce a book every three or four years; this one looks fair to being a culmination of sorts in that it repeats the theses of the last half dozen of her eleven books, which have attacked the ‘scientistic mythology’ that has become the new orthodoxy (since God is dead) worshipped by our leading social scientists, into which they do not hesitate to bully the reading public and those attempting to enter the sacred groves of their new clerisy, insisting on a radical ‘conversion’ that involves giving up one’s previous view of the world, or at least way of speaking about it. This book goes further, however, in zeroing in on the central and decisive issue, the nub and bone of contention the attack on which produces a lived contradiction that forces a make-or-break debate whose result will determine which way the social sciences develop: consciousness, or the common-sense notion of a self, which currently must be surrendered in exchange for the credentials to claim to be presenting an ‘objective’ account of the same reality – now brain cells and physico-chemical exchanges – which is what we ‘really’ are. The first casualty is the unity of the self, which Midgley admits is always a ‘work-in-progress’, but further the notion of free will or personal responsibility (since particles and chemicals follow only deterministic laws), at which point the ‘double-speak’, hypocrisy, or cowardice in capitulating to ‘Big Brother’ comes squarely into view, in that these same practitioners never allow their theoretical creed to interfere with or alter their practical behaviour. That is, they do not just ‘let things go’, saying it ‘had to happen’, but continue to hold themselves and others accountable to high personal and professional standards, as if thought and effort in hard, focused mental concentration (and not just the arbitrary firing of brain cells) can and does have an effect on behaviour. They thereby make clear that their scandalous but calmly-delivered manifestoes are only forcefully-elicited professions of faith, responses to scientistic catechism questions dramatically parroted back to get past their official thoughtpolice, and have no impact on their daily lives. A contradiction is thus set up between what they say and do, which clues us in that their project is not really to develop a ‘knowledge’ that encompasses all of our experience, but precisely the opposite, to take leave of our common experience as a perhaps ‘necessary illusion’ for a certain period in our development, up to the point where we catch sight (as did Pythagoras and Plato) of a higher or ‘truer’ realm of mathematical clarity and unchanging reality, where the stronger among us are invited to abandon this less clear, murky realm for the superior, if chillier, delights – consisting largely in a sense of their own superiority – of this alternative universe. They then condescend to inspire the rest of us, alternatively by either admiration or envy, to follow in their footsteps or, failing that, to at least defer docilely to their higher revelation. Midgley beats back these myopic ‘neuro-thugs’ in the name of a paralyzed or atrophied ‘right-brain’ perception of the wider picture that has been culturally suppressed as a consequence of this misplaced reverence for a partial view, appropriate for its own purposes, parading as the ‘complete picture’; this has rendered us as a culture oblivious to anything outside the picture, leading quickly to much personal and social suffering. On many fronts we are marching double-time towards the abyss. Midgley wisely calls these gnostic gurus to come down from their pedestals, join the rest of us, and derive a sense of satisfaction from actually doing something useful here rather than pretending to deliver a new revelation from a ‘higher place’ that doesn’t exist. Heythrop College Patrick Madigan The Soul of The World. By Roger Scruton. Pp. 216, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 2014, £19.95. This book is beautifully written. Scruton’s purpose is to frame an overarching view of the world uniting both sacred and secular. This is a piece of natural theology, but in a sense, it is different from what is commonly thought of as natural theology, due in part to its elegance and comprehensiveness. Contrast Scruton with what is stereotypically perceived as cold, scientific, and analytic approaches to natural theology and one will quickly see a difference. On par with works such as Surviving Death by Mark Johnston, Mind and Cosmos by Thomas Nagel, and The Golden Cord by Charles BOOK REVIEWS Taliaferro, The Soul of the World may be one of the most important pieces of philosophicaltheology in recent years that is at once aesthetically appealing in style and captivating. Scruton approaches the topic of God modestly, yet he is convinced that recent approaches to the world and human persons tied to metaphysical naturalism are seriously flawed (e.g., Daniel Dennett, Patricia Churchland). Scruton sees the world as inexplicable in the language of the natural sciences alone. Not only would the world lose what is most interesting about it, but it would lack an important feature that makes sense of our world. In this way, Scruton is committed to Lebenswelt motivated by Edmund Husserl’s phenomenology. Lebenswelt is a term referring to the apparent realities in the world, which persons know through experience of the world. Scruton, like Husserl, takes it that personal consciousness and perception are basic to the world we live in. So he is interested in asking the question what is basic or ‘given’ in our world, which makes sense of the world. Thus, in some respects, it would not be inaccurate to describe Scruton as affirming an important place for ‘common sense’ and ‘folk psychology’ in his philosophical and theological perspective. Coupled with this, Scruton describes the world in terms of ‘Cognitive Dualism’ drawing from Wilfred Sellars (34). By this he means to convey the notion that the world is one, but can be understood (not explained) in two different ways (e.g., through physical processes seen in the natural sciences, and through ‘interpersonal understanding’ and communication). The world is one (following Spinoza) in the sense that it is a ‘single unified reality’ with many attributes. Most important of those attributes include thought and extension (35). An analogy for understanding this oneness and multiplicity is in terms of the Mona Lisa wherein the famous painting could be understood in terms of physics and in terms of personal knowledge (40). What is crucial for Scruton in understanding reality via ‘Cognitive Dualism’ is understanding ‘intentionality’ in its various contexts. Intentionality accounts for the social nature of the world, the ‘aboutness’, the ‘feltness’, the religious, and the moral. All of these are, you might say, ‘givens’ that shape Scruton’s understanding of Lebenswelt throughout the whole of the book. Scruton is clear that ontological dualism does not find a place in his thinking, however (40). The Soul of the World contains eight chapters. In those eight chapters, Scruton defends a religious worldview or some variation of Theism in contrast to naturalism. All eight chapters comprise an overarching and comprehensive whole, yet each chapter is interesting in its own right. The themes comprise not doctrinal loci within one particular variation of 1043 Theism, but the variety of sensible experiences pointing to religious reality from science, morality, art, and music (i.e., natural religion). It is important to note that with Husserl, Scruton does not approach these topics from the perspective of various ‘subjectivist’ philosophies like Kant’s agnostic transcendentalism, Berkeley’s idealism, Hume’s scepticism and the like, but instead from the phenomenological perspective of the subject that exists in a web of relationships to mind-independent objects in the world. Concerning God as explanation for the sensible data, Scruton proceeds in a manner similar to Thomas Reid where he sees natural signs, yet his procedure is distinct in that instead of objects coming in contact with the subject’s cognitive faculties (where capacities require proper functioning) the subject simply encounters a world of phenomena pregnant with religious/spiritual features. A brief summary is in order, to this we turn. In chapter 1 on ‘Believing in God’, Scruton works through various natural theology figures and suggests that our belief in God is a given from our sensible experience. Both the sacred and the secular are present in the world for subjects of experience. For Scruton, God is very much immanent in basic phenomenal encounters in contrast to said versions of natural theism where God is distant or radically transcendent. Furthermore, he finds scientific theology as less significant than personal encounter. This is to say that Scruton is interested in ‘interpersonal’ encounters and much less interested in cosmological arguments (24). Chapter 2 explores the role religion plays in helping shape the pre-given reality of personal, moral, and emotional encounters thus suggesting that religion is part of reality. Throughout Scruton explores the philosophical relationship between subject and object. He argues that both are givens in one world where individual persons encounter other persons and derivatively other objects in the world. Most importantly, Scruton lays out the concept of ‘cognitive dualism’ in relation to Lebenswelt. Crucial to understanding his ‘cognitive dualism’ is through the lens of qualia and intentionality. These are two features basic to the world where subjects exist intertwined objects, yet these features comprise what is most interesting about the world of humans. Chapter 3 is a rejection of reductionist understandings of human persons by considering the recent emergence of studies in neuro-philosophy following Patricia Churchland. According to ‘cognitive dualism’, we are human animals and human persons. Neither is reducible to the other and both are real interwoven facets of our world. 1044 BOOK REVIEWS Next, Scruton expounds on this interwoven unity between subject and object in the context of human relationships that comprise social and political realities—something at the crux of what it means to be human. Whilst the first-person perspective emerges from the natural world it is not identical to it, yet both first-person perspectives and the IYou relationships are fundamental to the composition of the world we live (76-78). He argues on this ground that covenant relationships are built into the world not to be confused with ‘contracts’. As such covenants are transcendent and ground all that is sacred and moral in human life. The previous chapters then, with the emphasis on selfconscious subjects in the world, serve a robust and foundational role for the remainder of the book. Chapter 5 and 6 are related in that Scruton expounds upon the subject’s world. In chapter 5, Scruton raises the important concept of a ‘smile’ and suggests that only intentional self-conscious agents smile, which makes them unique from the rest of the world where they recognize and contribute a quality to the world. By extension, in chapter 6, Scruton considers the subject’s relationship to ‘space’ and ‘place’ whereby subjects attribute meaning to the objects they encounter. Chapter 7 keeps with the topic of ‘overreaching’ intentionality wherein our intentions have extension into the realm of music. Scruton considers music from the perspective of science (i.e., natural inanimate causes) to interpersonal relationships (e.g., once again ‘cognitive dualism) and argues that we cannot simply approach music in terms of the sounds, but in terms of emotions and meaningful encounters. Music then cannot be reduced to sound whereby we simply associate certain sounds with certain experiences, but that music actually bears intentional content. As a result, music can shape our inner lives toward virtue or vice (170-174). In the final chapter Scruton develops what is most significant about human life. He argues that what is most significant include meaningful encounters and seeking God. What he means by God is not entirely clear given his commitment to mystery, but Scruton understands ‘cognitive dualism’ as the fertile ground for pursuing God in the context of religion. I have two concerns after reading The Soul of the World. First, while Scruton is critical of any sort of ontological dualism it is arguable that ontological dualism (or variations of it) bear the virtues of ‘cognitive dualism’ without the potential baggage. It is true that Scruton only picks on Cartesian dualism, but he remains convinced that ontological dualism is unnecessary. This assumption seems odd because of the many examples Scruton cites wherein it appears that individual self-conscious agents seem to bring about causal change in the world—pointing to their being substances not mere attributes of the one world. If this is the case, then self-conscious individuals are substances or property-bearers that have causal powers unlike other material objects in the world. In which case something like a soul would seem to account for this ‘phenomena’. Furthermore, one need not commit to Cartesian dualism, but instead one could affirm Thomist substance or substantive dualism where souls bear a holistic relationship with their bodies. Second and related, I find Scruton’s manner of concluding a bit brash and mildly depressing. There are two parts worthy of note here in terms of style and in terms of metaphysical commitments. In terms of style, it felt very rushed in relation to the thoughtful development previously in the book. To conclude with death as a kind of Iknow-not-what transcendence seems incomplete. I was left feeling as if more could have been stated and that the reader could be let down a bit easier. In terms of metaphysics it seemed rather odd after spending great energy and time to end by stating that death is it for the ‘I’. My question at this juncture: “Why not accept some variation of ontological dualism?” On the one hand, I understand why Scruton concludes in the manner he does given his understanding of God as ‘apophatic mysticism’ (188-192), and the fact that on his understanding of natural theology he has reached his limit—needing revealed religion. On the other hand, even if revealed religion like Christianity were to teach individual life after death it would appear inconsistent with Scruton’s metaphysical assumptions about the self. Maybe its just me, and the ‘modern’ subconscious nag rearing its ugly head, however, I can’t help but wonder if rational belief in the afterlife is really unattainable. Houston Baptist University Joshua Farris Metaphysics and Grammar. By William Charlton. Pp. 234, Bloomsbury 2014, $29.95. This is a book of rare originality, significance and philosophic power. Its subject is metaphysics: ‘Truth, existence, goodness, time, causation, language, thought’. Unlike ethics or politics, these are the topics that non-philosophers do not discuss: ‘“What time is it?” is a normal question; “What is time?” is not. Try asking it to the woman next to you on the bus. . .’ It is a book for connoisseurs of philosophy, but written with such lucidity and humour that others too will find themselves absorbed. It is also a book for lovers of BOOK REVIEWS languages. Its fundamental thesis is simple and brilliant: the subject-matter of metaphysics corresponds to our grammatical constructions. Whereas sensible things in the world, like trees or the colour red or the movement of walking, correspond to the words which refer to them–the noun ‘tree’, the adjective ‘red’, the verb ‘walk’–in a direct and simple way, the topics of metaphysics correspond instead to grammatical constructions. For example, the meaning of ‘time’ is captured by our tenses, the meaning of “good” by purpose clauses, and the meaning of ‘true’ by assertions. Wittgenstein, for all the brilliance of his linguistic analysis, was limited by his refusal to distinguish between syntax and lexicography. Charlton, a leading exponent of ancient philosophy, and an expert on Aristotle’s theory of explanation, begins with a marvellous account of the origins of philosophy in ancient Athens, showing how Socrates, Plato and Aristotle invented the discipline precisely through careful analysis of language and argument. (He dismisses with expert authority interpretations of Plato as an unworldly mystic.) The subsequent chapters flesh out the central claim of the book. Each metaphysical term is aligned with a grammatical construction, so that we learn what it means as we learn how to use that grammatical form. Thus we learn the meaning of ‘truth’ by learning to assert or deny, or the meaning of ’exist’ by learning to quantify. Modern philosophers have tended to treat such terms as properties–‘truth’ as a property of propositions, or ’goodness’ of objects. Charlton, following Wittgenstein, systematically aims to remove the ‘double vision’ which this creates. For if philosophers reify these terms and then try to make sense of the things they imagine them to be, they will end up as either materialist sceptics or idealists. But ‘true’ and ‘good’, ‘time’ and ‘change’, understood as what is expressed by grammatical forms, can have real meaning without referring to real things. A short review can only hint at the richness of the details of the argument. One example is the powerful use made of the distinction, related to the grammar of aspect, between a process (‘He walked to the centre of town in ten minutes’) and the going on of a process (‘He was walking for ten minutes’). Charlton uses this distinction to show how caused changes and causal action are not different things, but different ways of expressing, for different purposes, the same thing. Philosophers have been puzzled by causation because they have tried to understand causal action as a real and separate thing in the world. Since Descartes, they have also tried to explain causation physically, while understanding the physical world as if its only true properties were geometric. Charlton, following the 1045 ancient philosophers, argues that the materiality of a thing is its causal powers. All languages have constructions for expressing purpose. It is these, Charlton argues, which allow us our concepts not only of ’goodness’, but also of ‘belief’, ‘desire’, ‘command’, ‘counsel’ and even ‘think’ and ‘say’. A belief is neither a neurological pattern in the brain nor a little ghost in the machine; rather, to believe is to have (at least in disposition) a reason for action. The difference between an animate and an inanimate being is that we can properly use teleological expressions of the former, but not the latter. To say is not simply to produce meaningful words, but to do so with the intention that someone else will understand that you intend to communicate with her. The influence of Aristotle is evident throughout, not least in the way that Charlton takes ordinary speech and experience so seriously. He shows how philosophy should start from and explain this, and also how it can also be written accessibly (and entertainingly!). At the same time, he is in constant dialogue with important modern and contemporary philosophers, repeatedly providing illuminating explanations of their errors, and he concludes by comparing his position with that of Chomsky. Chomsky argues for a universal grammar built into the structures of the brain. Charlton is more cautious, and well aware that his discussion exploits the specific structures of English. At the same time, he thinks that all human beings engage in the basic activities of communicating, intending, reasoning and so on. At crucial points, he complements examples from English with French, Latin, Ancient Greek, and the Polynesian language, Marquesan, which uses quite different constructions for parallel purposes. It would be intriguing, and a real test of his thesis, to see if the whole book could readily be translated. For English at least, Charlton proves beyond all doubt the first part of his main thesis, that (almost) all of the main themes of metaphysics correspond to grammatical constructions. The second part of his thesis is that that is all there is to them, and his specific arguments are often plausible and even compelling. Some readers may wonder if his grammatical conjuring trick has succeeded in exorcising the ghost of time: if time is nothing but the process of things changing, does it make sense to say that an earlier revolution of the earth took the same length of time as a later one? More problematic might be his account of goodness: to be good is to be an objective, and to be truly good is to be an objective rightly chosen, that is, one that a sane and wise person would choose. But doesn’t the wise person choose something because it is good and not vice versa? Charlton provides a sketchy account of three types of desirable objectives, roughly personal, social and altruistic, which one 1046 BOOK REVIEWS might want to supplement. But this leaves the question of what desirable means, if it means more than ’regularly desired’. The initially surprising claim that beliefs are nothing but reasons for action is supported plausibly by pointing out that we only know what we really think when we are called upon to act on our beliefs (where action includes speech). The discussion here might be enriched by reference to emotion and to the subconscious, neither of which significantly features in the book. Greater attention to these might also challenge Charlton’s espousal of the ancient belief that apparent ‘weakness of will’ is explained simply by cognitive deficiency. Finally, two major topics of metaphysics are omitted: subjectivity and God. Charlton has writ- ten extensively on religion and philosophy in the past. It would be intriguing to see him connect these two themes to his thesis here, and in particular to that teleological explanation the abandonment of which he identifies as the downfall of modern philosophy. The final chapter explains why it matters to get metaphysics right, pointing out, for example, the connections between industrial capitalism and scientistic philosophy. If we understand the role of grammar in enabling us to express our world, he concludes, we will be set free from the choice between spiritualism or scepticism, set free to seek what is good in ways that are wise and intelligent. Boarbank Hall, Cumbria Sr Margaret Atkins After the New Atheist Debate. By Phil Ryan. Pp. x, 196, Toronto, University of Toronto Press, 2014, $22.95. Ryan has written a lucid, balanced book on the New Atheist debate: free of rancor, invective, and name-calling. In a field often besmirched by clever insults and moral high ground claims, there seems a more recent trend (see also Philip Kitcher’s Life after Faith and The Oxford Handbook of Atheism) where better judgment and mutual respect are again winning the day. While I do not fully agree with Ryan’s conclusions on the impossibility of locating shared moral foundations (124) or his deep support of Rawls’ views on the question of comprehensive doctrine (149), the work is highly recommended for detailing the logical and moral weaknesses in much New Atheist, anti-religious polemics, and the supposedly religious responses that hurl similar invectives in response. Ryan identifies himself as a Christian (5) who can accept much of the critiques labeled at religions (and Christianity in particular, by Hitchens, Dawkins et al). Unfortunately, much of this criticism is against Christians who are radically fundamentalist, living their lives solely on biblical quotations, and more likely to renounce the world and politics rather than compromise their beliefs. Atheists and so-called liberal Christians can certainly unite in partnership towards challenging such provincial views. Ryan is thus correct to show the limitations in any sola-scriptura approach, and rightly demands multiple interpretations, which should also respect and identify biblically central themes (81-82). He also expertly argues why everyone needs to be involved as moral and political citizens, entailing a responsibility to participate in democratic practices and procedures for the good and respect of one’s country and one’s fellow citizens who may not share one’s religious views. Like the Dalai Lama, Ryan also astutely supports the need to articulate and defend a post-religious ethics (85). Such an ethics does not gainsay the living, ongoing contribution of religious faith and doctrine in establishing, formulating and supporting moral rules and ways of life, but practices and affirms those views in a pluralist environment. As David Hollenbach notes in the context of human dignity’s development in Catholic Social Teaching, faith traditions and beliefs are evaluated in light of practical, lived experience. So long as faith systems maintain this sense of development and innovation, they are crucial voices and pieces in striving for greater ethical norms. Thus, Ryan is right to rebuke Rorty’s claim that religion is a conversation stopper (135) and to support ongoing ethical dialogue, in which religious voices are encouraged to partake and contribute. Such a dialogue plays an essential role in helping to forge a more just and moral society. But as noted above, Ryan supports self-restraint of one’s comprehensive doctrine and so supports Rawls’ ‘idea of public reason’ (148). Ryan is balanced in arguing that such a restraint is expected of religious and secular voices, and takes utilitarianism and its offspring, cost-benefit analysis (150), as an apt example. He wants, however, to maintain a clear distinction in the separation of church and state in elected officials who will otherwise pander to the religious vote. Much of this critique, while unidentified, seems to have the Religious Right and George W. Bush in mind, referring to those who vote for a politician from a purely religious connection while the burdens of this bad decision fall ‘on people in other countries, or in future generations left to clean up the mess created by an illconceived war or fiscal irresponsibility’ (152). BOOK REVIEWS Ethical dialogue, though without shared foundations, becomes the key hope moving forward. Such a dialogue, Ryan contends, is always searching and open, having to be satisfied with words like ‘more or less’ (123). This argument, more or less, is acceptable, except when it is not, and here we have a deeper problem. Discussing the role and value of citizenship, as opposed to individualism, Ryan notes how in an American context, ‘the death of soldiers in Iraq is a political problem for the American government, while the death of Iraqis generally is not’ (156). Here is where comprehensive doctrine is especially needed, and why political doctrines built on us/them categories must be challenged, even if solely through metaphysical claims of the dignity of all, the preferential option for the poor, or the Buddhist notion of the interconnection of all living 1047 beings. Likewise, in acknowledging the more or less situation we find ourselves in an ethical context, we must still identify those areas that are universally or fundamentally wrong, and in which there is no going back: from arguments and laws against slavery and rape to child prostitution and other human rights violations. While my foundational argument would employ theistic content, I also recognize other ways to reach a similar vantage point, from the Buddhist notion of interbeing to the Kantian formulation of the categorical imperative, to some natural law arguments. While this core overlap may be limited, it is difficult to dismiss outright, and it is more than just a consensus. Mater Dei Institute, Dublin City University Peter Admirand Walter Benjamin: a Critical Life. By Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings. Pp. 755, London/Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 2014, £25.00. Benjamin (1892-1940) was one of the most provocative thinkers to straddle the pre-World War I Kaizer-Zeit, the war itself and its horrible consequences for Germany, the Weimar Republic battered and ultimately destroyed by extremist forces from Left and Right, and the resulting rise of Fascism, which ironically emphasized his own thesis of the urgency of a return to archaic ‘origins’ on which to re-build society. This biography by Eiland and Jennings will not be superseded for a century, if then; one thing it establishes is the persistence in Benjamin of a theme of extreme NeoPlatonism, going even beyond Plotinus in stressing both the existence and extreme transcendence of a ‘Truth’ beyond this fallen world, but with it the progressive discovery of ever-new, unexpected, and more difficult conditions that must first be put in place in order to occasion a ‘revelation’ of this one principle that could redeem us, personally and collectively. For as with Plotinus (and Heidegger, a few years junior who was otherwise temperamentally opposed to Benjamin) nothing we do can force this revelation; all we can do is remove the obstacles that block its appearance, which means, in a Nietzschean application of rigor, to stop doing things we have been unconsciously doing that are all that prevent us from experiencing this truth – for once these are dismantled, union and revelation will occur automatically and of itself. Such ‘waiting’, however, is harder than any action. Further, it is difficult to stop doing something you are unaware you were doing; and the list of such activities gets longer and more fundamental with each new discovery, so that the salvific ‘Holy Grail’ is pulled further and further away rather than coming closer. Benjamin developed a dialectical rhythm in his personal life of extreme isolation and solitude to do his thinking or ‘contemplation’, followed by a dazzling performance, usually as lectures, whereby the ‘contact’ he had achieved with the ‘Truth’ could be disseminated in incantatory fashion to others, who were to become his ‘disciples’. He could be quite imperious and always saw himself as the leader or oracle. This basic theme was played out in an evolving vocabulary from the German Romantic tradition such that the work of art must come to a higher level of existence and effectiveness in a proper reception, appreciation or ‘criticism’ by its audience so as to work the potential transformation from damnation to redemption. This private trajectory is then married to a Marxist realization that the preconditions for a change in society as a whole require a fundamental alteration in the ownership (and thereby the goals) of the means of production; through contact with Georg Lukacs’ History and Class Consciousness Benjamin became aware of the new technologies for communication, publicity, entertainment and propaganda, and of how these constitute a further mediating layer separating and buffering modern citizens from direct contact with the reality on which they live and depend. This represents a further challenge if social transformation is to be brought about. Both the era in which Benjamin lived and the extreme Neo-Platonic but also strenuously pelagian theme he mobilized to address it – for man must wrest this ‘salvation’ 1048 BOOK REVIEWS for himself, he can expect no help from elsewhere – fast-forwarded ordinary politics with an eschatological urgency that could make his proposals appear mystical, self-dramatizing, impractical, and utopian. As always demanding the conditions for a leisured life of reflection and writing, when these were taken away he could not cope. Attempting to cross from France into Spain in 1940 to escape the Nazis he was turned back, and took his own life. Heythrop Journal Patrick Madigan Heidegger and Theology. By Judith Wolfe. Pp. viii, 242, Bloomsbury T&T Clark, 2014, £16.99/$29.95. Given my interest in—and growing disdain for— Martin Heidegger, I eagerly the publication of this book, which was promised as early as 2010. Judith Wolfe’s strikingly erudite, meticulously researched, and penetrating book rewarded my wait. I highly recommend it, especially for theologians ambivalent toward Heidegger. Wolfe already established herself as a leading theological interpreter of Heidegger in Heidegger’s Eschatology: Theological Horizons in Martin Heidegger’s Early Work (Oxford, 2013). She elucidated in painstaking detail the historicaltheological arc of Heidegger’s early philosophical development (from anti-Modernist Catholic to dogged atheist), using recently published volumes of the Gesamtausgabe and related literature. This work is extended here. Wolfe presents a broader narrative of Heidegger’s philosophical evolution from his earliest to his latest days (chapters 1–6), of his decades-long dealings with theology and theologians (chapter 7), and a schematic discussion of theological appropriations of Heidegger’s thinking (chapter 8). All chapters are solid in ways that commentaries on Heidegger often are not. I shall focus on the first, fifth, and eighth to elucidate Wolfe’s distinctive contribution and, in the case of the final chapter, shortfalls. Chapter one narrates Heidegger’s engagement with Catholicism. Wolfe traces his education from his devout upbringing in Meßkirch through the 1915 thesis on Scotus. The chapter’s chief merit is its careful historical positioning of Heidegger’s particular Catholicism, marked by his father’s ultramontanism and Pius X’s pugnacious papacy (9–17). Wolfe detects in Heidegger’s early denunciations of suspected Modernists and his exhortations to ‘authentic’ Catholic living foreshadowing of his later accusations against the metaphysical tradition and ‘emancipation of philosophy’ (this is the title of chapter three, 61–80). Prior authors have pointed in this direction (most successful is S. J. McGrath), but Wolfe concretizes the connection between Heidegger’s early Catholicism and his philosophy from Being and Time forward better than anyone else. The book’s pivot point is chapter five, ‘Heidegger between Hitler and H€olderlin’ (99–127), whose title alone will garner a host of readers considering the resurgence of dismissals of Heidegger qua Nazi in the wake of Emmanuel Faye’s (overblown, journalistic expose) Heidegger: The Introduction of Nazism into Philosophy (2005). One should be clear: Wolfe’s interest is not in Heidegger as a member of the Nazi party. Nor should it be. Wolfe’s measured tone and vigilant scholarship are absolutely necessary in this chapter, and she delivers beautifully. Her deft handling of German history of ‘nationalism’ and ‘spirit,’ particularly the invaluable section ‘National Socialism as a Messianic Ideology’ (109–113) place Heidegger’s discourse with respect to apocalyptic and, persuasively, to exculpate him of tainting by specifically Nazi apocalyptic. Wolfe foregrounds Heidegger’s ‘apophatic eschatology,’ which he develops through his readings of H€olderlin in the mid-1930s courses and beyond (117–118, see also 143–146). Apophasis functions apologetically to distance Heidegger from Nazism, and to underscore his idiosyncratic eschatological taste: he looks for a new historical time. Heidegger understands H€olderlin as prophesying a necessary watchfulness in a godforsaken age (118, cf. 144–145). Though Wolfe acknowledges the tension between Heidegger’s apophatic eschatology of godforesakenness and mainline Christianity (145, 196), clearly she finds it intriguing and, I believe, convincing. The final chapter shows Wolfe’s positive estimation of Heidegger’s thought as generative for theology. Her treatment of individual theologians speaks loudly, if indirectly, of her commitment to Heidegger, even amid criticisms of him. Comments on the incommensurability of Heidegger’s thought with Karl Barth’s are fair, if loaded in Heidegger’s favor (173–174). Bultmann is amply and generously treated (180–186), which makes sense given his close friendship with Heidegger (discussed much in chapter seven), but makes less sense insofar as his importance has faded. Less than cogent are sharp reproaches against Alfred Delp and Erich Przywara, who are accused of forcing Heidegger’s existential analytic onto the “Procrustean bed” of scholastic ontology (176). Karl Rahner is summarily and unduly dismissed (189). Thankfully Edith Stein comes off well (191–193). Postmetaphysical theologians are briefly BOOK REVIEWS but sensitively treated, with Wolfe highlighting constitutive problems of appropriating Heidegger theologically (193–197). This last chapter, then, which should provide the payoff of Wolfe’s labors, proves a mixed bag. Wolfe is at her best when exegeting Heidegger directly, and her close readings of him are worth the price of admission. Nevertheless, the rela- 1049 tive weakness of her late apologia for theological appropriation of Heidegger makes one wonder, contrary to Wolfe’s intent, whether Heidegger’s influence in theology is—or should be—waning. College of the Holy Cross Peter Joseph Fritz Karl Barth and Post-Reformation Orthodoxy. By Rinse H. Reeling Brouwer. Pp. viii, 275, Aldershot/Burlington, Ashgate, 2015, £65, $119.95, e117.40. The story is well known; certainly amongst Barth scholars, or generally amongst anyone who takes the development of neo-orthodoxy in Reformed/ Evangelical/Protestant theology seriously; that is, how the young Karl Barth, fresh from his youthful years as the ‘red pastor’, a fledgling Reformed Church cleric in an obscure working-class parish in the middle of the Swiss mountains, a young minister who rejected his heritage in nineteenth century neo-Protestant Liberalism, who made no secrecy of his Marxist sympathies, published his controversial commentary on Paul’s Epistle to the Romans. Karl Adams wrote: ‘Barth’s R€ omerbrief (1919). . . hit like a bomb on the playground of the theologians, comparable in its effects to the encyclical on antimoderism of Pope Pius X’. It challenged the prevailing hermeneutic of suspicion, the snobbery of the academy, the KantianHegelian establishment that treated the Bible as an antiquarian curiosity. Despite being panned by critics from the old guard - the establishment Barth ended by joining the establishment; his rebellion was rewarded by his being given a chair in 1921 – a professorship in Reformed Theology! But, as Barth admitted years later, he knew virtually nothing of Reformed theology and Reformed Church history/ so had to learn fast; he was on a fast learning curve. RB’s book examines Barth’s encounter with his Reformed heritage, both church tradition and theology; he shows how the fruits of this reading - what he learned from and with the great theologians of what RB calls ‘post-Reformation orthodoxy’ - led to The Church Dogmatics. Much of this understanding came from the personal collection of what even in the 1920s were rare out-ofprint texts from the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries; Barth sought these texts out for his private collection; this was Reformed Orthodoxy. Working back from The Church Dogmatics, RB identifies, analyses, and discusses the sources of Barth’s ‘conversation’ with this repository and demonstrates how it influenced his professional career - also his use, and sometimes what is considered his mis-use, of parts of the Reformed tradition. What he gives us are six extended essays/chapters of considerable depth and length, with, predictably, the name Heinrich Heppe (nineteenth century German Calvinist theologian and church historian) emerging as perhaps the most important and influential figure, but also Polanus, Cocceius, et al. Heppe’s Reformed Dogmatics powerfully influenced the ultimate shaping of Barth’s The Church Dogmatics. RB concludes ‘... Barth’s development from what was more or less a commentary on Heppe to his far more independent Church Dogmatics can be studied in much greater detail, especially with regard to the doctrine of reconciliation. The same is true for Barth’s elaboration, or rather non-elaboration, of scholastic reasoning. Similarly, the fact that he paid particular attention, with the help of his personal library, to the confessional differences between Reformed and Lutheran theologians has for the most part been neglected here and would be worthy of a separate study’ (p. 243). Most Barth scholars are ignorant of much of the Reformed traditions that Barth laboured so assiduously to master in the 1920s, the fruits emerging initially in The G€ ottingen Dogmatics, the abortive Christian Dogmatics (both from the late 1920s), and finally fully evident in The Church Dogmatics (c. 1936-1968) - even when Barth sometimes – for many, often! – re-writes and re-interprets afresh the Reformed tradition for the benefit of both the detail and the over-arching systematic structure of The Church Dogmatics. Writing from within the Reformed tradition, RB analyses the genealogy of the masterwork of the Swiss theologian whom Pius XII described in 1951 as ‘the greatest theologian since Aquinas’. Wimbledon Paul Brazier 1050 BOOK REVIEWS Election, Atonement and the Holy Spirit. By Matthias Grebe. Pp. xxii, 290, Cambridge, James Clarke, 2014, £45.18, $61.26, e139. Barth’s re-writing of a Calvinistic doctrine of election, in effect turning it on its head, was for many his greatest achievement: all are elected by and in Christ’s crucifixion, not a religious elite only; the crucifixion elects all, the one rejected by God is Jesus Christ in and through His passion; some of the elect (humanity), however, may then be called to bear witness to the Christ event and the potential of salvation for all (but such a calling – contra Calvin (?) – does not constitute a higher form of election). Whether all then elect for salvation is the great unanswered question, although the Gospel points to the rejection of some through their own wilfulness and self-exclusion, or as C.S. Lewis often asserted, hell is locked and triple-bolted from the inside, the gates of heaven are wide open and welcoming. Matthias Grebe here analyses Barth’s doctrine of election and atonement from The Church Dogmatics, responding to Barth’s suggestion to his students and those studying his text, to advance, to exceed, his conclusions, his logic. Many have, over the last 50 years, responded, but Grebe takes an alternative and obvious line that others have failed to notice and to follow: he starts with Barth’s analysis of scripture; he reexamines the heavy biblical exegesis. At the heart of Grebe’s thesis is the question: How can Jesus simultaneously be both the elected and the rejected, as Barth asserts, whereby Jesus acts as both judge of all humanity and yet in his passion, the judged? Grebe accepts the existence of dialectical paradox yet will discover a path of reconciliation by extending the apparent antinomy to consider the role of the Holy Spirit and human freedom: the dialectics of salvation. Does this work? Broadly, yes, but as with Barth’s original thesis, it does not appear to refute all considerations and problems. Grebe rounds up all these antinomies and paradoxes by invoking the ontological heart of existence and the role of delegation: Jesus the judged judge, the elected and rejected by God for God as God – to this end he uses the model of Existenzstellvertretung (existence + delegation: the participation of the sinner in the sacrifice, p. 189f.), therefore, ‘On this basis, the death of Christ should be seen from the perspective of Existenzstellvertretung – Jesus overcoming death and sin and identifying and annihilating the sinful existence of the sinner, bringing about a new creation’ (p. 196). Grebe’s work is in five parts: (1) ‘Election, Rejection, and Exegesis,’ which considers the basis of Barth’s twin doctrines of election and atonement, the pastoral concerns of election, and drawing on Leviticus amongst other passages; (2) ‘Jesus Christ the Elect: Through and Beyond Barth,’ which outlines the exegetical challenge and the question of typology; (3) ‘The Covenant, Humanity and das Nichtige’ which examines the covenantal relationship with humanity, and the Barthian motif of the nihilistic teleology issuing from human sin, the wilful fall into nothingness; (4) ‘Jesus Christ the Judge: Through and Beyond Barth’ where, after an examination of atonement in the early church, considered against Barth’s Reformed heritage, and the importance to Barth of Anselm, Grebe seriously considers Jesus as high priest, Jesus the Victor (from the Blumhardts) and the critical importance of Existenzstellvertretung in an exegesis of the New Testament; (5) ‘Election, Atonement, and the Holy Spirit’ where election and the question of universalism, the relationship between an eternal spirit and the human soul is deliberated in the light of pastoral and systematic considerations. Grebe is not one to shy away from problems, unresolvable problems in Barth’s exegesis and the temporal impasse in Barth’s yesno from God. Grebe notes in conclusion, ‘[I]n order for the atonement to be a truly Trinitarian act – an act of Father, Son, and Spirit in complete unity – the immanent Trinity and the economic Trinity must be congruent. What we say about the immanent Trinity when we say that Jesus is the electing God as well as elected human from eternity must also be reflected in what we say about the economic Trinity. In history, on the cross, Jesus is both rejecting God as well as rejecting human in the sense that he condemns sin in the flesh. We have to argue that on the cross it is the work of both God and man, or rather God as man, which condemns sin and in this way frees humanity from sin’ (p. 258.) Does revisiting the exegesis underpinning Barth’s doctrines of election and atonement resolve the problems? – The jury is still out. However, this study is a seriously considered, erudite, and a relatively conclusive work, exhibiting sound biblical exegesis, offering fresh insights to an understanding of atonement generally, and is an excellent contribution to Barthian studies. Wimbledon Paul Brazier BOOK REVIEWS 1051 Eschatological Presence in Karl Barth’s Gottingen Theology. By Christopher Asprey. Pp. xii, 284, Oxford University Press, 2010, £55, $99, e67.99, ¥9,877. Protestant Metaphysics after Karl Barth and Martin Heidegger. By Timothy Stanley. Pp. xxii, 276, London: SCM Press, 201x, £50, $33, e24.99, ¥,3010. Reconciled Humanity: Karl Barth in Dialogue. By Hans Vium Mikkelsen. Pp. xiv, 280, Grand Rapids, Eerdmans, 2010, £19.99, $30, e22.99, ¥2,556. In reply to the question the eminent logician and mathematician, Heinrich Scholz (originally trained in theology) provocatively put to the mature Karl Barth, enquiring of him, what was the basis on which theology operated as an intellectual discipline in the university, Barth is reported to have answered, assertively, the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead. Barth did not obfuscate, he did not hedge around the use of language and the meaning of words, there was no apologetic squirming, no embarrassed obfuscation around religious emotionalism, no putting any notion of a ‘god’ into a box to be analyzed from the safe secure position of the absolute certainty of the enlightenment endorsed human intellect. To Barth the resurrection was eschatological, and as such it was the only basis on which you could do theology as a distinctive Wissenschaft, all was related to this single event which had cosmic implications: the breaking into time, into the world, of God, in Kierkegaardian terms – incognito, but nonetheless the future made real. Herein lies the intellectual responsibility that underpinned Barth’s massive Der Kirchliche Dogmatik, and the basis of the analogia fidei. Karl Barth’s theological enterprise dominated the twentieth century, and in particular the religio-cultural landscape leading up to Vatican II: Pope Pius XII commented in 1951, that Barth was the greatest theologian since Aquinas. This was no small compliment. What was of greatest importance in Barth’s work? Arguably his bringing the doctrine of the Trinity (and thereby the resurrection) back into the frame as the ground of all theological endeavour. But is this no more than yet more human religion? Perhaps the key to the validity of Barth’s enterprise, Trinitarian and centred on the resurrection, is eschatology. Barthian scholars endlessly debate whether Der Kirchliche Dogmatik represents an over-realised eschatology, and whether the completeness Barth asserts of Christ’s sacrifice and resurrection leaves any scope for a pneumatologically authored human response, but, nonetheless, eschatology is the key, in many ways, to Barth’s theological enterprise. These three books represent this in various ways: the eschatological presence in Barth’s early to middle works; a comparison of sorts with Heidegger’s somewhat secular eschatology; and the manner in which Barth represents traditional orthodoxy, which gives us an on-going dynamic eschatological dialogue with contemporary ‘modern’ and ‘liberal’ Western theology. Christopher Asprey’s book relies on posthumously published lectures of Barth’s from the 1920s; these are essentially from what can be termed the middle period between the angry young radical (of not just one but two theological commentaries on Romans) and the mature professor (of Der Kirchliche Dogmatik). As Asprey demonstrates this middle period at G€ottingen is being considered more and more important in defining and extending the ground in preparation for Barth’s mature work. Perhaps Asprey should have been more ambivalent towards the developmental Unterricht in der christlichen Religion, however, its role in his developing thesis is important: he presents Barth’s theology in the 1920s as being defined by an eschatological encounter between God and mankind. To this extent Barth is beginning to form the theological basis of Der Kirchliche Dogmatik, that is humankind’s responsibility towards the w/Word of God as scripture, church and incarnation (to this extent, Asprey considers Unterricht in der christlichen Religion as dialogical). Asprey does provide what is unique, and is a long-overdue, that is a considered in-depth analysis of Unterricht in der christlichen Religion. Asprey identifies the crucial subject descriptors of revelation, incarnation, resurrection, pneumatology, moral and sacramental theology, yet it is clear that underpinning all is the eschatological presence—which, it may be argued contentiously, Barth never really got to grips with fully in Der Kirchliche Dogmatik in terms of pneumatology because of the thirty odd years it took to write, left unfinished upon his death. By comparison Unterricht in der christlichen Religion, was a mere two year exercise (!). What is important, and is clear from Asprey’s work, is that realised eschatology equals pneumatology. Asprey crucially compares, early on, the nature of eschatological existence in the work of Barth and Bultmann in this period: ‘. . .while Barth certainly does not describe an unmediated direct relation between God and the individual, what he wishes to avoid, is isolating Christology within the economy of revelation’ (p. 52-3). This leads Asprey into a section on the problem of preaching in relation to revelation, which sets the scene for the examination of 1052 BOOK REVIEWS Unterricht in der christlichen Religion. A crucial approach is in using Barth’s lectures on John’s Gospel as exegesis to explicate: ‘informed now by some of the classical Christological and Trinitarian categories whose potential Barth had quickly learned to exploit at G€ottingen’ (p. 122). (This was also against the steep learning curve of Barth’s appropriation of Reformed theology.) The heart of the G€ottingen work is correctly emphasised as Christology from which flows the eschatological action and emphasis: ‘the heart of Barth’s dogmatic theology in G€ottingen is a dialogical concept of revelation: the eschatological encounter between human beings and God, in God’s Word, is the point from which his theology takes its bearings. Everything else is an abstraction from this. Indeed insofar as theology itself is unable to communicate this Word, it is repeatedly forced to face up to this abstraction.’ (p. 260). (Barth’s identification of the innate difficulty theology has in communicating the w/Word of God is a precursor in many ways of his proposition in Der Kirchliche Dogmatik that all religion is inevitably unbelief because it perpetually falls short of the reality of God’s revelation in Christ Jesus, as Lord and Saviour.) Timothy Stanley’s concern in his book is somewhat meta-theological as the title explicates: metaphysics, and in essence from this perspective phenomenology, are primarily considered by him as philosophical categories considered as difficult and probing questions. Considering Barth or Heidegger as metaphysicians is somewhat unusual to say the least. As such Stanley is challenging the orthodoxy of Barth scholars. So what does this tell us about a distinctively Protestant ontology, as distinct from Barth’s Reformed roots, and Heidegger’s relation to Martin Luther? Stanley argues that Barth was grounding metaphysics in the being of the Trinitarian God, the established ontoic argument for Barthian studies, yet claims it was more; likewise, he effectively demonstrates what may be termed the Protestant rudiments in Heidegger’s often confused self-confessed atheistic thought and thereby how this contributed to a developing Protestant metaphysic. However, the aim of all this appears to be a critique of Postmodernism and its relation to Protestantism, and the extent to which a Postmodern perspective effectively negates Protestantism, or does it? ‘What, in the end, does Heidegger’s account of ontotheology mean for Protestant theology today? . . .when we disagree with the suggestion that Postmodernity spells the end of Protestantism, therefore, we do not mean to challenge Protestantism’s roots in the early modern period, nor in its various and vibrant contributions to modern development’ (p. 240). (This raises wider questions, not really tackled here, of the teleological validity of the rebellion that was the Reformation, as opposed to the corruption of the Roman Catholic Church at the end of the Middle Ages—was the Reformation the end of all valid Church activity and theology, something that has only begun to become clear with Postmodernism?) Hans Vium Mikkelsen attempts to demonstrate that Barth remains a significant voice in the contemporary theological conversation (since when did Barth, or Barthian issues, in particular the revival of Trinitarian thinking, cease to dominate the theological agenda or humanity’s perilous situation in its rebellion against God?). Mikkelsen’s aim, however, is to examine what he considers Barth’s re-definition, his reinterpretation, of traditional Christianity. This inevitably leads to comparison with Schleiermacher and Hegel, but also thinkers such as Brunner and Buber, and moving on to Pannenberg, Girard, and Frei. Mikkelsen therefore does successfully situate an indelible continuity between modern thought and Barth’s traditional orthodoxy, his dogmatic certainty. In essence Mikkelsen focuses on revelation and atonement in establishing contemporary, or ‘modern’, dialogue partners for Barth, revelation being the starting point. He then moves into the humanity of the creature, and therefore the nature of sin and nothingness, which raises the question of the necessity for atonement and therefore Christology. The Chalcedonian pattern therefore provides Mikkelsen with a starting point for this discussion of, using Barth’s famous aphorism, ‘The Judged Judge in our Place’. An example of Mikkelsen’s focus on the intersection of Barth’s (neo)orthodoxy with what may be consider to be the more bizarre elements in contemporary ‘modern’ and/or ‘liberal’ theologoumena is in the nature of the death of the Son before the Father. Feminists rally around the accusation that the Father is an abusive, child-killing sadist in his expectation of the death of the Son on the Cross. However, Mikkelsen notes that what is crucial is to accept the role of sacrifice—‘Barth’s way of describing and using the sin in nuce is not without structural similarities to Rene Girard’s demonstration of the connection between violence and the sacred. Girard claims that an opposition to this connection can be found in the Christian narrative, in which God is described as a God for victims. This, according to Girard, is what distinguishes the Christian narrative from myths and other religious narratives’ (p. 183). Once this is accepted, judgement is enacted in the death of Christ Jesus: the crowd who called for his blood, and the God who sought atonement through his death. Drawing on George Hunsinger, and Bruce McCormack (Princeton giants on Barth) Mikkelsen contradicts the Feminist critique and the humanist syncretistic confusion: ‘Either God is evil (killing BOOK REVIEWS his own son) or the human being is evil (killing the Son of God). Either God is violent or the human being is violent. But the case might not be that simple. At least, not if the judgment of Jesus is seen in relation to the atoning act of the Trinitarian God’ (pp. 183-4). As Bruce McCormack has noted elsewhere, too great a degree of individuation leads to the child-killing accusation. Keeping the right balance between the three persons is essential; therefore God sacrifices God to God, and all these fashionable contemporary ‘modern’/’liberal’ objections disappear (it is then essential to avoid the twin horns of polytheism and modalism). 1053 Having said that, is there really a problem in describing the baying crowd before Pilate, who were representative of all humanity, as evil? The ‘modern’/’liberal’ so often seeks to exonerate humanity in perennially neo-Pelagian terms. However much we may seek a dialogue between Barth and the narcissistically indulgent contemporary Western scene there will always be serious fractures of understanding. Orthodoxy, whether Catholic or Evangelical, will always stand apart. Wimbledon Paul Brazier Nations and Nationalism in the Theology of Karl Barth. By Carys Moseley. Pp. x, 219, Oxford University Press, 2013, £57, $102.03, e77.99, ¥10,715. Karl Barth on Theology and Philosophy. By Kenneth Oakes. Pp. xii, 288, Oxford: OUP, 2013. £58, $101.58, e74.68, ¥11,826. Cross Theology: The Classical Theologia Crucis and Karl Barth’s Modern Theology of the Cross. By Rosalene Bradbury. Pp. xiv, 324, Cambridge, James Clarke, 2011, £22.50, $37, e30.04, ¥2,300. Doxological Theology: Karl Barth on Divine Providence, Evil and the Angels. By Christopher C. Green. Pp. xii, 230, London, Continuum, 2011, £65, $130, e92.99, ¥9,493. Scholars never cease to mine Barth’s work, discovering new seams of interest—testimony to the depth and relevance of Barth’s corpus?—or simply the insatiable demand of the academy for books published by their staff, research credits? Nonetheless we have four books here that illuminate Barth’s mission, but four studies that only make sense in the context of the man’s work: read the Church Dogmatics and the context and importance of these studies begins to make sense and be relevant. Or as Colin E. Gunton—a noted Barthian scholar—commented in his Barth Lectures: ‘Read the man himself! . . . Only by reading Barth can one go beyond Barth. . . . read as much of the man himself. You do need the guides, of course, but read the man himself! The way to get into Barth is to select and to read—read him, there is no substitute!’ Carys Moseley takes Barth’s criticism of German nationalism—the corrupting influence of Nazism on the German Protestant Churches—as the starting point. Moseley analyses the historical overview of Barth’s understanding of nationhood in his early and middle periods laying emphasis on the pneumatological roots in his exegesis of the Pentecost narrative, therefore this situates the importance of Israel in the concept of nationhood. Barth’s analysis is shown by Moseley to be by default biblically sourced, an analysis that side-lines the “corrosive effects” of source criticism, particularly in relation to Genesis and the Acts of the Apostles. Moseley places great emphasis on Barth’s critique of German nationalism whereby the answer to National Socialism is to define and rec- ognise nationhood as distinct from the state. Does this work? If the key is found in the Pentecost narrative (Acts 2) then this leads, as Moseley demonstrates, to a doctrine of creation: the election of Israel is part of the election of the community of the people of God. Thus the apparent division of the people of the world into nations leads us to recognise nations as communities of people who are called to seek God. ‘Nationhood . . . is understood as the sphere of the divine command, as a human construction. Barth tacitly accepts the view derived from his plain reading of Scripture that the division and re-division of human history into nations is postlapsarian. . . The Pentecostal narrative is the transformation of Babel, not its simple reversal, as people from every nation can now hear the Gospel in their own language.’ (p. 203.) Oakes’ book is one of the most pertinent of recent volumes on Barth, for here we find the relevance and perceptive logic of Barth and what constituted the crux of his genius: the validity, as such, of philosophy in relation to God’s revelation. Comprehensive analyses of Barth on theology and philosophy are relatively rare. Here we find Barth the young liberal pastor, through to his seminal break with liberalism and therefore the nineteenthcentury background to his middle and mature period works. Oakes asserts what he considers to be a synthetic and constructive view of the relationship between a Barthian account of theology and philosophy. Therefore did Barth ever escape nineteenth century philosophy and theology? This 1054 BOOK REVIEWS is a pertinent question that Oakes raises. Is there, to Oakes, a continual indebtedness to nineteenthcentury neo-Protestant (what Oakes considers to be ‘modern’) Liberal Theology despite his attempts to move beyond it? Oakes salient conclusion relates to how Barth remained concerned with the integrity and independence of theological discourse from philosophy, yet was wedded to a necessary interaction: “The Barthian assumes that the primary intellectual and spiritual task of theology is the correction and criticism of church proclamation in accordance with Scripture. This task in turn influences what the relationship of theology to philosophy is imagined to be.” (p. 259.) With Bradbury’s book we move into the Christological heart of Barth’s mission, endeavour and corpus. That is, Barth as an exponent of a theology of the cross, but more than that, a theologica crucis is here presented as an inherently subversive tradition, which complements Barth the rebel. Questions and reception: Bradbury illustrates how a theologica crucis may be contentious but this is a respectable theological tradition centred on notions of false and true glory, and an ancient conviction that from the cross of Jesus Christ came a revelatory and a saving Word. (But then, where is Barth without the ‘Word’?). Bradbury therefore identifies Barth in an historical tradition (The Apostle Paul, Athanasius, Medieval Mystics, and Martin Luther), some of whom would not normally be uttered in the same breath as Barth. Therefore Barth is to be seen as part of this crucicentric tradition. Bradbury’s work is in two parts: identifying the classical theologia crucis, its dogmatic shape, and, Barth’s “modern” theology of the Cross. Of particular note are two chapters on Barth’s epistemology of the Cross (Chapter 8), and the soteriology of the Cross (Chapter 8). Despite his neo-orthodox credentials, Barth is here presented in a thoroughly, but perhaps questionable, modern light. Bradley asserts that in the hermeneutical light of the classical theologia crucis, it appears that ‘in the modern age Karl Barth vitally recovers the crucicentric system, including its several soteriological elements, so as to present an authentically modern and crucicentric soteriology of his own.’ (p. 291.) Therefore is Barth a modern theologian? Bradley argues that he is because he develops his position in dialogue with both the modern age and the tradition: ‘Modern soteriology has made of the saving God a prisoner either of rationality or felt experience, while presuming to humankind the godlike power to dictate the terms of salvation. Thence he cites it for what it actually is, the reactionary resurgence of old, self-glorifying intent. In its place Barth asserts a peculiarly modern, fresh, and responsive soteriology of his own, one that accounts for human nature individually and communally, one that preferences reason in proclaiming the exclusivity of the glory of the electing God. But Barth is also a crucicentric theologian.’ (p. 291f.) Uncomfortable with many of the dogmatic precedents of his Calvinistic heritage, Barth’s understanding of providence is in many ways in keeping with his Reformed heritage, while at one and the same time being an adaptation and modification of the seventeenth and eighteenth century Calvinists. Praise and providence are to be seen together: that is, the praiseworthiness of the triune God of providence and the doxology of the creature, which gives us Doxological Theology. Christopher C. Green in his book asks the question, how may the theologian pray his or her vocation? Is Theology to be conceived primarily as an act of praise in response to providence? The starting point, as such, of Green’s study is Barth’s post-war assertion of God’s control of events in history, a proclamation that is defiant against the prevailing cynicism of European doubt and scepticism fuelled by the Second World War, a disbelief in the full sovereignty of God: despite the nihilism issuing from original sin that had led to the holocaust, and global war on an unprecedented scale, Barth asserted that the movement or sway of theology was to praise God, acknowledge God’s sovereignty, and pray in praise for the Kingdom. Neither the fragmented governments of the post-war Western nations could stomach this, or the secular academy (as many of the established churches found such a theology indigestible!). Green’s study is a highly specialized analysis based on particular chapters of Barth’s Church Dogmatics. In essence this is a consideration of six sections. Green opens with an exploration of Barth’s so-called ‘radical correction’ of the Protestant orthodox doctrine in The Church Dogmatics. What then follows is a detailed examination of two parts from CD III/3, ‘The Doctrine of Creation’—the creator and his creature First Green analyses, §.49.1 (looking at the divine preserving), §.49.2 (on the divine accompanying), §.49.3 (considering the the divine ruling), §.49.4 (moving into the Christian under the universal lordship of God the Father); this develops and moves into the second part, §.50 (teleological considerations on God and nothingness) and finally §.51 (eschatological considerations in the form of the kingdom of heaven, and as Green notes, the ambassadors of God and their opponents). The conclusion pulls all together in the form of a doxological theology. Green shies not away from Barth’s difficult statements, analysing how they conform to orthodoxy—particularly when dealing with ‘nothingness.’ (p.167.) Green’s study is relatively BOOK REVIEWS unique, particularly as many students fail to read Barth, relying on the studies instead: this work forces them to confront the massive tome and seek out the particular sections. Green’s work, with its emphasis on praise as the aim and objective of theology, is a challenge to the academy: ‘There is, in heaven, an on-going doxology that praises God for all of his glorious perfections. This song takes place without any need for an external justification. It is a response to God’s own self-disclosure in the resurrection of Christ. This song is, in heaven, perfect. It is an obedient praise that takes place entirely at the behest of God’s will. Barth’s use of the Lord’s Prayer climaxes at this point, with a doxology that is not only given by the Lord to his disciples, but is an echo of the doxology that God commands his angels to perform in heaven. When we ascribe the ‘kingdom, power and glory’ to God, 1055 we join in with an anterior, supereminent, and angelic chorus.’ (p. 209.) If doxology is a liturgical formula of praise to God, one is forced to wonder if Barth’s Church Dogmatics, was in the end, somewhat over-done, over-blown—incomplete as it was? But then so many twentieth century theologians merely focused on picking over theology with an eye to their own career development and writing not in praise of God but in ingratiating themselves with their peers. Should theology be focused in the Church, or in the academy? Moseley, Oakes, Bradbury, and Green may not answer that question, but they certainly highlight it by tacitly focusing on the distinction, however valid, between the secular and the divine. Wimbledon Paul Brazier Karl Barth and the Fifth Gospel: Barth’s Theological Exegesis of Isaiah. By Mark S. Gignilliat. Pp. xiv, 167, Aldershot/Burlington, Ashgate, 2009, £55, $99.99, e65.99, ¥9,980. Karl Barth on the Filioque. David Guretzki. Pp. xii, 213, Aldershot/Burlington, Ashgate, 2009, £55, $99.95, e70.99, ¥11,199. Ashgate’s Barth Studies Series goes from strength to strength, though how many expensive hardback volumes the academic market can sustain in an age of digital and virtual publishing is a serious question. It is not books that are becoming redundant but the format books are published in, and the way libraries control and mete out the fruits of scholarship. Much reflective and interpretive material on key theologians such as Karl Barth could be made available digitally on the world wide web at a fraction of the price of a traditional hardback volume: it is the material, the scholarship, the thoughts and ideas, that are important not the volume as an object d’art. There is also the question of how much this interpretive material can be gained by simply reading and studying Barth himself rather than reading secondary opinions. What we have here are two thematic volumes on Barth’s theology, or more accurately small subject areas within Barth’s grand opus. It is tempting to say that what is contained in these volumes can be gleaned by looking up the relevant topic in the large index volume to Barth’s massive Der Kirchliche Dogmatik and reading first hand what the man had to say, however, both Mark S. Gignilliat (Assistant Professor, Beeson Divinity School, Samford University) in Karl Barth and the Fifth Gospel. Barth’s Theological Exegesis of Isaiah and David Guretzki (Associate Professor, Briercrest College & Seminary, Caronport, Saskatchewan) in Karl Barth on the Filioque, do work from a wider source, in particular considering the context of each topic. Mark S. Gignilliat’s title clearly sets The Book of the Prophet Isaiah in a Christian context, although declaring it the fifth Gospel raises serious questions about supersessionism, which are not really tackled here, neither is the question of Barth’s doctrine of Israel, as such. The ground of Gignilliat’s work is in the history of interpretation. This is a work which charts the relationship between exegesis and dogmatics, and is not shy to expose the failure of historical criticism, seen in the paucity of an hermeneutic of suspicion, therefore Gignilliat faces the pertinent question of how we do theological exegesis – he is also critically aware of the need to engage the text rather than losing oneself in a constant analysis of method. This is a work primarily about listening to how Barth engaged as a theological witness with the text of Isaiah. (This ‘listening’ is a dialectical relationship between exegesis and theology and given the ever present specialization that isolates all academic disciplines, any move that blurs the edges between this move towards individualistic specialized focus is to be applauded.) Therefore this work acknowledges and complements Barth’s premise that the Bible is a unique means by which God communicates His presence to His church: theological explication cannot therefore be separated from exegesis. If exegetical analysis is disconnected from witness and illumination, then what is left is (as Barth never ceased to assert in his mature years) antiquarian studies, which are often of little 1056 BOOK REVIEWS value! For example, ‘Barth understood the deadly affect of Old Testament scholarship on the life of a preacher who must engage these texts as the word of God for the people of God’ (p. 23). Gignilliat therefore asserts that in this context Barth sees the Old Testament as confessional and classical (this therefore separates Barth from the religionsgeschichtliche Schule tradition). In Barth’s day this contradicted a ‘Modernist’ canon of truth, yet here Postmodernism and the relativity of truth generated by the Fall in humanity actually aids Barth: ‘The Old Testament is what it is because the selfcommunicative God has deemed it to be so in relation to God’s revelation of himself in Jesus Christ. To seek verifiability outside this realm is to abstract the discussion into philosophical categories foreign to God’s revelation of himself’ (p.59). But this does not stop Barth rejecting elements of the Old Testament generally, certain aspects of Isaiah specifically, which Gignilliat deftly handles. All this, and more, is brought together in the final chapter which forms an extended conclusion: here Gignilliat considers the theological implications of Barth’s Isaianic exegesis: Barth may have had no single uniform methodological approach to The Book of Isaiah yet there is a single identifiable motif (typically Barthian) of Jesus the Jew, born of Jewish flesh, rooted in the soil of the Old Testament. But this does allow Barth to focus on Isaiah’s prophetic Christology without overtly reading an assumed Christological conclusion from the text (does this issue from a respect for the text along the lines of form criticism?). Therefore Gignilliat concludes that ‘Barth’s theological exegesis of Isaiah is multi-layered and multi-functional’ (p. 139), he is, however, pertinently aware that not all of Barth’s reading of Isaiah is persuasive (he identifies Barth’s interpretation of Isaiah 24 as found wanting, and the analysis of Isaiah 48 – a central text from the perspective off theological exegesis – is considered by Gignilliat insufficient. This is a highly considered work that identifies an important omission in Barthian studies – the Hebrew heritage of Jesus the Jew, and the prophetically Christological nature of Isaiah. Theological exegesis (rooted patristically in a style which fell out of fashion with the so-called Enlightenment) is receiving more and more attention. Most readers of Barth’s theological exegesis focus on the New Testament leaving his theological exegesis of the Old Testament in undeserved ignominy. Gignilliat’s addresses this short-fall. Barth is often criticized for asserting rather than discussing, he is disapproved of often by ‘Liberal’ religionists for not conversing with the world around him, he is disparaged because he stands opposed, in many ways, to the zeitgeist. This is, to a degree, true; Barth does not engage with ‘Liberalism’, or ‘Modernism’ for that matter, he stands opposed to them. Barth simply asserts God’s selfrevelation in Jesus of Nazareth, the Christ event, and the salvation thereby wrought universally available to all (though this does not imply universal salvation) in place of universal ‘religion’. The late Colin E. Gunton often used to draw an analogy with the music of Mozart and Beethoven: Mozart asserts; Beethoven argues. This is often why many scholars and students fail to get to grips with Der Kirchliche Dogmatik – if Jesus of Nazareth is the Christ then why are we wasting our time apologetically trying to defend when all we need to do is assert? But there are still gray areas – and is not Barth’s pneumatology such a gray area? David Guretzki focuses on a pertinent issue in Barth’s mature work – pneumatology – in the context of the most obscure of great ecclesiological dividers: the filioque. Despite being known generally as a defender of the filioque, Barth has been ignored by most scholars on this topic, therefore Guretzki treads an interpretative minefield in providing a study, a contribution to the ongoing scholarly investigation of Barth’s work, by focusing on a doctrine of pneumatology generally, the filioque specifically. This is an area that has, in Guretzki’s words, either been largely neglected or, when given attention, has often been dealt with only in summary fashion. Why the neglect? Perhaps because the question of a ‘double procession’ or ‘single procession’ is considered of little importance compared to other questions in theology and ecclesiology. Guretzki’s study, however, outlines the development of Barth’s doctrine of the filioque from his early work through to the more formal systematic defence of the doctrine in Der Kirchliche Dogmatik. In general terms Guretzki defends an identifiable shift in Barth’s theological rationale, that is the ground for a defence of the filioque, between the 1920s and the 1930s. Therefore, Guretzki argues, Barth’s doctrine of, and use for, the filioque matures over the course of his career. This is categorized as a ‘dialectical filioquist pneumatology’, which develops from a ‘latent dialectical Christocentric pneumatology’ in the second edition of Der R€ omerbrief; the more formal discussion then is carried through to Der Kirchliche Dogmatik. But why? Why does Barth deal with a doctrine which for centuries had been regarded as an historical anachronism (but then according to nineteenth century neo-Protestant Liberals, so was the Trinity!)? Because Guretzki demonstrates how the filioque – in a pneumatologically reflective context – is, for Barth, to be seen as a theological assurance of the unison of the function, in many ways, of the economic Trinity. This is the work, to BOOK REVIEWS put it simplistically, of the Son and the Spirit, but it is also an affirmation of the bond of fellowship between the Father and Son, and by analogy between God and humanity, which issues from and is forged and guaranteed by the person of Jesus Christ, which then proceeds from and between God and the body of Christ, the Church. If this is so, and it is a grand thesis to identify (which is, yes, cogent with Barth’s mature work) this identifies the Holy Spirit as eternally active in uniting but also dialectically, and paradoxically, differentiating the Father and the Son (hence can this be seen as a justification for regarding ‘double-procession’ and ‘single procession’ as a complementary dialectic?). So is Barth a Westerner merely having rephrased the ‘double-procession’? Guretzki identifies a link with Barth’s modes of being of clearly identifiable Trinitarian persons. Therefore the old argument between ‘single-’ and ‘double-procession’ dissolves in the face of a typically Barthian concept: ‘beingof-the-modes-of-being-of-the-Father-and-the-Son’. Guretzki concludes that Barth’s position addresses and integrates some of the Eastern concerns in the Monopatrist tradition. Does Guretzki square the circle? ‘In the end it is evident that the problem of the relationship of the economic and immanent 1057 Trinity continue to haunt Barth (and other theologians) and it is precisely in his use of the filioque in CD IV that the problem becomes especially acute’ (p. 177). Guretzki’s analysis is complemented by a systematic approach. Initially he examines the doctrinal history, as such, of the filioque, before examining the genesis and development of the filioque in Barth’s early work, which leads to something of a deconstructive analysis of the key passages, the proto doctrine, in Der Kirchliche Dogmatik I/1; his exploration concludes with an examination of the general pneumatological questions raised in the later volumes of Der Kirchliche Dogmatik and a justification for the function of the filioque. Guretzki’s work is a useful, original, and valuable – and valid – contribution but because it seems to raise more questions than it answers, it points towards the need for a greater systematic analysis of Barth’s doctrine of the Holy Spirit, but then this opens up many of the perceived weaknesses within Barth’s mature work: for example the oft quoted criticism, ‘Did Barth leave room in Der Kirchliche Dogmatik for a fully worked-out pneumatology?’ Wimbledon Paul Brazier Karl Barth’s Emergency Homiletic 1932-1933: A Summons to Prophetic Witness at the Dawn of the Third Reich. By Angela Dienhart Hancock. Pp. xvi, 356, Grand Rapids, MI, Eerdmans, 2013, £28.99/$42.00. This beautifully-written book functions as a corrective for those who see Barth only as the author of the Romans commentaries, or of his Church Dogmatics, that is, as an austere representative of the ‘NeoOrthodox’ movement in Protestant theology calling the latter back from an evacuated ‘liberal’ accommodation of the Christian faith to the scientific, democratic, selffulfilment-centred ethos of the post-Romantic period. He is all this, but this book shows us this great theologian who stressed always the ‘Godness’ of God, that is, His refusal to be captured or contained unambiguously, non-dialectically in any human endeavour, coming from his native Switzerland to step into the pulpit in Germany precisely at the moment when a Germany that had finally achieved political unity under Bismark and cultural-economic-industrial supremacy in Europe at the end of the 19th-century, was, through an apparently back-stabbing defeat in the First World War, French occupation of the Ruhr valley, and crushing war indemnities as a result of an unjust treaty by the victorious allies, and finally a buckling of social structures under the stock-market crash of 1929, subject to a total, unprecedented, and outrageous reversal of its condition and self-image. An overwhelming sense of innocent, injured merit, the feeling by the German Volk that they had no one they could trust or fall back on but themselves, that the Weimar experiment in democracy was merely a cover for leftist, external (or internal) blood-suckers to import the Bolshevik revolution that had recently destroyed order and society in their neighbour to the East into the heart of the greatest industrial nation the world had ever seen to deprive it of its hardwon prosperity, glory and renown. This was a classic context where the outsider or ‘Other’ was demonized, where the horizons of concern for the Church were in danger of shrinking to the day-to-day survival of a people who felt they had done nothing to deserve this, and where the Church was tempted to throw in its lot and support a ‘saviour’ who alone could reach down to retrieve native, ‘Aryan’ values and do whatever it took to throw back the tide of those who would profit from a noble people brought to its knees. To preach the Christian gospel in such a tinderbox situation called for delicacy, discretion and tact, as well as large amounts of the uncommonly-linked virtues of humility and courage. Newly arrived at the University of Bonn, Barth volunteered to add to his heavy teaching duties by introducing a course in homily preparation during the years 1932-33 (when there already was one by an established ‘nationalist’ 1058 BOOK REVIEWS professor) precisely to equip future pastors and preachers who would step into such fraught circumstances to bring their congregations to listen to the Word, to let God be God, to let Him take us where He wants to take us (and not necessarily where we want to go), to expand our horizons to the full world to see God’s plan in history, and not just our own agenda for national vengeance or just retaliation. The word ‘conversion’ does not appear in this book, but that is what Barth was preaching to an audience that thought that everybody else needed to convert, and who seemed to have all the evidence on their side. All doctrinal study is for the sake of preaching, Barth held. This book shows us a Barth we are not accustomed to seeing, a practical example of outstanding servant leadershipby-example, generously reaching out to help future pastors become capable of doing the same. It also gives the best cultural history of Germany from the Bismarkian era to the Second World War you will come across. Heythrop College Patrick Madigan Reading Auschwitz with Barth: The Holocaust as Problem and Promise for Barthian Theology. By Mark R. Lindsay. Pp. xvi, 185. Princeton Theological Monograph. Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2014. £14, $33, e18, ¥2,846. Mark R. Lindsay (Director of Research at MCD University of Divinity, University of Melbourne) in Covenanted Solidarity: the Theological Basis of Karl Barth’s Opposition to Nazi Antisemitism and the Holocaust (2001), and, Barth, Israel and Jesus (2009), tackled what in many ways is the most difficult Barthian subject – with considerable political implications (and yes, theology, like the bible, is political, Barth knew and understood this). Lindsay has traversed the minefield of postmodernity in examining the question of Barth and Israel, a subject originally established by Katherine Sonderegger over twenty years ago. Lindsay has recently extended this subject through the publication of this monograph. Reading Auschwitz with Barth: The Holocaust as Problem and Promise for Barthian Theology examines in critical detail the precise theological nature of the holocaust in the context of Barth’s systematic theological analysis (i.e. The Church Dogmatics). Here, the impact on theology of the Holocaust (the Shoah) of the Jews must for Lindsay be seen as profound, with farreaching consequences for the church’s selfunderstanding and its doctrine of God. Lindsay therefore explores the relationship between Barth’s massive corpus and a post-Holocaust understanding; he extrapolates a dialogue demonstrating how Barthian scholars specifically (and also the Church in all its forms) need to gain some understanding of the implications of Hitler’s so-called final solution, but also to balance it with Barth’s call for a return by Western Christians to the Jews as the chosen people, to Israel as eternally elected, and to the whole Bible. Lindsay here, in the opening section, is prepared to face the tremendum (the terrible, the overwhelming nature, of the holocaust): the Shoah in the context of modern Jewish thought, and in contemporary Christian thought. Lindsay then moves on to what he terms ‘the Barthian Barrier.’ That is, Barth’s position on natural theology and how this effects an understanding of the holocaust, or the Shoah as witness (the extent to which the Holocaust testifies positively to God, yet also demonstrates humanity’s depravity). Lindsay then considers the dialectics of revelation. That is, he deliberates in ‘theological conversation’ with Eliezer Berkovits (1908–1992, Orthodox rabbi and theologian); in particular, Berkovits’ Faith After the Holocaust (1973), and With God in Hell: Judaism in the Ghettoes and Deathcamps (1979); however, Lindsay insists on the proclamation of the solidarity of crucified suffering. Finally he issues a caution to post-holocaust theology, that is, a warning that we may say too much and overemphasize the Shoah. This dialogue does expose flaws not only in post-Holocaust theology but also in, for Lindsay, Barth’s failure to confront the Shoah directly or fully. It may be asserted that Barth failed to confront the Holocaust directly as the later volumes of The Church Dogmatics emerged, post WWII, simply because Barth gave little or no ground to natural theology: the analogia fidei was for him the sole ground for understanding God’s actions in the world, not an event such as the Shoah, although, nonetheless, it was horrific and shocking, diabolical and nihilistic: tremendum. There are many other holocausts which we could consider as a portrait of God’s relationship with humanity (slavery, abortion: both demonstrate not God’s goodness but the depravity of humanity issuing from the freedom of creation), but they do not give us an accurate picture of God (the immanent Trinity) and God’s relationship with humanity in and through the world (the economic Trinity); this may be considered too purist, too detached, however, Barth’s BOOK REVIEWS approach was, nonetheless, far more enlightened than many of his contemporaries. In conclusion Lindsay’s notes: ‘Without resorting to a natural theological epistemology, and thereby risking letting the Shoah become too decisive a word for the church (as though there were no other), Barth’s own theological grammar allows 1059 him to affirm much of what the post-Holocaust movement has wanted to say, yet avoiding the danger that some have fallen into, of allowing the Holocaust to say too much.’ (p. 168.) Wimbledon Paul Brazier Eternal Blessedness for All? A Historical-Systematic Examination of Friedrich Schleiermacher’s Reinterpretation of Predestination. By Anette I. Hagan. Pp. xii, 282, Cambridge, James Clarke & Co., 2013, £22.50, $45, e28.92. Karl Barth and the Resurrection of the Flesh: The Loss of the Body in Participatory Eschatology. By Nathan Hitchcock. Pp.xviii, 209, Cambridge, James Clarke & Co., 2013, £19.50, $39.00, e20. What happens when theologians – specifically Friedrich Schleiermacher and Karl Barth – push too hard in one direction and refuse to back down even though their conclusions point to confusion and failure, even heterodoxy? Anette Hagan demonstrates the somewhat unorthodox problem of universalism as approached over a century before Barth’s attempts to square the circle between God’s righteousness and human depravity. She demonstrates how Schleiermacher contorted from time to time through different approaches, through the historical, the philosophical, to begin to systematize a solution. It is this that Hagan aptly demonstrates, this is the archaeology of the man’s thought, digging in and deep, picking over how Schleiermacher arrived at where he did. The obvious points – his essay, On the Doctrine of Election, as well as his sermons – provide the ground so to speak for analyzing the man’s thinking into what is now, rightly or wrongly, considered the first crucible of modernist theology. Therefore do we have a complete doctrine of the universal restoration of all humanity? Hagan rightly examines the historical and ecumenical context of Schleiermacher’s attempts to redeem humanity’s dilemma, setting his somewhat heterodox-universalist understanding of the Reformed Church theory of double predestination against the Lutheran Church’s position; this inevitably raises the question, did Schleiermacher fail to convince his contemporaries with his universalist doctrine of election and predestination. Is God’s intention that of universal redemption? The theological jury is still out. Hagan’s work is in three parts: Part One: Background and Context for Schleiermacher’s Conception of Election (‘Theological Background: Protestant Confessions’, ‘Historical Developments in Prussia up to the Early Nineteenth Century’, ‘Correspondence and Publications Pro and Contra Church Union’); Part Two: Schleiermacher’s Exploration and Development of Election (‘Schleiermacher’s Source Material’; ‘The Essay On the Doctrine of Election and its Reception’, ‘Election in Christian Faith’, ‘Schleiermacher’s Sermons’); Part Three: Schleiermacher’s Account of Elec- tion in Context (‘Related Doctrines’, ‘Lutheran Concerns’, ‘Universal Restoration and Schleiermacher’s Position’, ‘Appreciation’). Does Hagan do justice to Schleiermacher, however critical one may be of the man’s Romantic liberalism? The answer is yes, this is a salutary and well-researched study: ‘Schleiermacher’s claim that neither the Calvinist nor the Lutheran doctrine pushed him toward universalism any more than the other seems to me to be truthful. Universalism cannot legitimately be derived from either, even though it contains elements of both. It adopts the Reformed elements of the irresistibility of grace and the unconditional decree, and takes from the Lutherans the notion of God’s universal will to salvation. To Schleiermacher, universalism presents the only way in which both God’s grace and God’s justice can be retained intact. The fact that Scripture does not, or not unequivocally, support that theory is glossed over and the fact that the Church has considered it as heresy is quietly ignored.’ (p. 250f.) Hagan’s study is essentially recommended reading for those interested in how despite the best of intentions a noted theologian such as Schleiermacher can end up with unorthodox failings. Despite his orthodox credentials, as compared to Schleiermacher’s closeted heterodoxy, Barth too faced problems. Nathan Hitchcock’s book focuses on a small and seemingly obscure (and given his conclusions, one is tempted to say, irrelevant) nugget of Karl Barth’s theological enterprise: the actual bodily, fleshly nature of the promised general resurrection. Working from the premise of early Christian and Patristic statements on the matter Hitchcock asks where is the resurrection of the flesh today, particularly in Barth’s Church Dogmatics. What is the corporeality of humanity’s promised eternal life. Perhaps a weak point is that he postulates what might have been said in the fifth volume of the Church Dogmatics, should death—Barth’s death of old age—have not intervened? (Was there anything left to say after the existing 6 million words of the 1060 BOOK REVIEWS Church Dogmatics? Or if Barth had failed to say it, to cover all, in 6 million words was there any hope he would eventually get there?) Hitchcock does conclude that there are considerable difficulties in Barth’s corporeal enterprise. The question he raises is, can we consider Barth’s description of the resurrection as manifest eternalization – indeed as incorporation – is this description contrary to its intention, and does it jeopardizes the very contours of the human life it hopes to preserve. For ultimately we must ask what such a particular resurrection preserves? Hitchcock notes, ‘I have registered various concerns all centred around the looming feeling that the participatory eschatology he speaks of abrogates rather than fulfils human identity.’ (p. 183.) Hitchcock notes further how Barth’s aim produces a flesh-like quality only; he even has the audacity to assert—perhaps correctly—that ‘Barth has cast the resurrection as a kind of cryogenic pantomime . . . the dead do not come back to life for Barth. No their histories rise.’ (p. 185.) So, what exactly does Hitchcock conclude? There are three specific concerns. First, the disappearance of the human: eternalization poses the problem of continuity because ‘Barth’s version of the resurrection abolishes the temporal mode of life native to human beings, and instead raises delimited human histories to pan-temporal stasis.’ (p. 183.) Second, in contradiction to the concept of manifestation Hitchcock identifies the problem of creatureliness, that is, Barth construes glorification so much in terms of ‘a publication and knowledge of our deific qualities through fellowship with God’ (i.e. the resurrected Christ) that this marginalizes the human qualities and attributes: flesh may be restored but where is the actual human? Third, in expressing concerns about Barth’s concept of incorporation Hitchcock identifies what he considers to be a problem of particularity: the submerging (converging?) of the human body into into the one body of Christ. ‘That is, Barth’s doctrine of the resurrection of the flesh triply threatens humanity’s basic constitution by memorialization, by deification, and by recapitulation.’ (p. 183.) Despite his attempts to work against Schleiermacher, Barth fell into the trap – as some saw it – of inadvertent universalism: if Christ has done everything then there is very little or no room for a human contribution and response; therefore salvation is potentially universal. Schleiermacher has trodden this path before, but for very different theological reasons. Hagan’s volume demonstrates this well. Hitchcock demonstrates in a well-researched and astutely written volume the difficulties that Barth encountered while pressing the mystery of resurrection too much, and how the failings get submerged even lost in his massive theological enterprise. Ultimately both of these books are about theological failures, theologians who – perhaps inadvertently – refuse to accept that salvation and resurrection, though indeed a fact, is a revealed mystery. Wimbledon Paul Brazier Karl Barth and Hans Urs von Balthasar: A Critical Engagement. By Stephen D. Wigley. Pp. xiv, 178, London/NY, T&T Clark, 2007, £60, $120, e95.99. Karl Barth and Hans Urs von Balthasar are arguably two of the most important theologians of the twentieth century, a century where the theological initiative was wrestled away from nineteenth century liberalism and pushed through new frontiers in a substantial Christocentric agenda by Barth, an initiative then to be taken up by Rome in Vatican II, with much of the creativity, resourcefulness and inventiveness at the council in the hands of Von Balthasar. The ecumenical debate that characterized the friendship of these two Swiss theologians predates and informed Vatican II: a Protestant and a Roman Catholic, it can be argued that Von Balthasar took more, learned more, from Barth than Barth did from Von Balthasar, or from Erich Przywara SJ back in the late 1920s. This is certainly a proposition that undergirds the understanding of the thesis of the Revd Dr. Stephen Wigley (Co-Chair of the Wales Synod of the Methodist Church) in, Karl Barth and Hans Urs von Balthasar: A Critical Engagement. Wigley gets straight to the heart of the matter, informed as he is by the PrzywaraBarth debate, he does not spend thousands of words leading up to the essentials, but gets to that which both united and divided Barth and Von Balthasar: the analogia entis. It was the analogy of being, Roman Catholic natural theology, that drove the development of the discussions with Przywara, and which pulled Barth back from being drawn into the Roman Catholic church. Wigley’s study argues that it is Von Balthasar’s debate with Barth over the analogia entis that determines the shape and content of Von Balthasar’s theology: ‘the contribution of Barth and Von Balthasar to the theological task can be better understood and applied when it is seen how their theology grew and developed out of a particular historical context and relationship.’ (p. 163) The subject of Barth and Von Balthasar has been tackled before, which is no doubt why Wigley BOOK REVIEWS correctly goes to the analogia entis-analogia fidei (though Wigley does not imply a dialectic as I do here) distinction between the two. The work is structured around seven chapters. ‘Chapter 1, No Brief Encounter: an Introduction to the Relationship between Karl Barth and Hans Urs von Balthasar’, deals with the ground to the relationship between the two, and importantly the relationship with and influence of Erich Przywara SJ. ‘Chapter 2, From Dialectic to Analogy: The Theology of Karl Barth’, recapitulates on Barth’s development through the form and structure of Barth’s thought and its relationship to Catholic thinking, the rapprochement between Barth and Rome, and importantly Bruce McCormack’s challenge to Von Balthasar’s reading of Barth and the implications this has for the latter’s theology. Straight away Wigley is approaching the relationship in a more nuanced and balance manner than has been characterized by other commentators in the past. Therefore the stage is set, so to speak, for an examination of ontology and the transcendentals: first in, ‘Chapter 3, Beauty and Being: The Glory of the Lord’, which deals with the ongoing debate with Barth and Von Balthasar (this is achieved in part through a discursive examination of Roland Chia (1999) on beauty and revelation in the Knowledge of God); then in ‘Chapter 4, Participating in the Action: the Theo-Drama’ where Wigley gets to grips with the anthropological implications for Christology, Soteriology and Eschatology, which are seen as a dramatic tension within the theo-drama. This logically and neatly leads into the fifth ‘Chapter 5, Speaking the Truth in Love’, on theo-logic: the truth of the world and of God and the Spirit of truth. The cohesion and rapprochement between Barth and Von Balthasar is the seen in their appreciation of and assimilation of Anselm: ‘Chapter 6, Anselm: a Case Study in the Approaches of Barth and Von Balthasar’. It is then in the concluding chapter that Wigley draws all together (for example, the ontological consideration in relation to natural theology, the Glory of the Lord, the theo-drama, the theo-logic) to try to resolve what each is maintaining but also objecting 1061 to over the analogia entis-analogia fidei. Wigley shows how much Von Balthasar relied on and learnt from Barth by quoting the latter’s acknowledgment: ‘It is almost unnecessary to set out how much I owe to Karl Barth: the vision of a comprehensive biblical theology, combined with the urgent invitation to engage in a dogmatically serious ecumenical dialogue, without which the entire movement would lack foundation.’ (p. 162) The great strength of Wigley’s study lies in his advancing understanding of how the two differed yet shared a degree of commonality over the analogia entis. He understands and asserts how in basing his work, firmly grounded on the transcendentals of being (the beautiful, the good and the true), Von Balthasar is both building on Barth’s Christocentric foundations, but importantly countering what was considered Barth’s misunderstanding of Roman Catholic teaching on natural theology and the role of creation, and thereby to a degree, the analogia entis: Von Balthasar is in effect responding to Barth, for example, the Christological constriction, as it is here termed. Wigley does not work in isolation, he engages with the debate and with late twentieth century scholarship, yet advances well-trodden ground: ‘What this book will seek to show is how Von Balthasar in picking up the debate over the analogy of being, will demonstrate that this issue is of fundamental importance, not just in the interpretation of Barth, but for the study of theology as a whole.’ Therefore the relationship and debate of these two giants deals with the question of what is a proper creaturely response to the theo-drama (Von Balthasar), the Christ event (Barth): the act of God in Christ. Wigley astutely concludes that this is about the degree of Christocentric focus in relation to a doctrine of election. This is an excellent study, a timely reassessment, a painstaking and scrupulously researched and analysed thesis, a sound and astute academic work; Wigley knows his material well, and handles the relationship with dexterity, which sets a benchmark for future ecumenical theological dialogue. Wimbledon Paul Brazier Existence as Prayer: The Consciousness of Christ in the Theology of Hans Urs von Balthasar. By Mark L. Yenson. Pp. xi, 231, New York, Peter Lang 2014, $80.48. Chalcedon’s doctrine of the two natures of Christ has in modern times often been regarded as an artificial, ahistorical abstraction that does not fit well with the historical reality of God present in Christ – hence the thrust in contemporary Christology to highlight the unicity of the person of Christ as a historical subject and the genuinely human character of His consciousness. The Christology of Hans Urs von Balthasar falls into this category. Balthasar worked out the principles of his Christology in his study of Maximus the Confessor, albeit his engagement with Maximus is best described as 1062 BOOK REVIEWS creative. Yenson’s work aims to illustrate this contention with regard to the consciousness of Christ. In brief Yenson argues that what one might describe as ‘a Maximian Neo-Chalcedonian interpretation of Chalcedon’ (p. 8) forms the basis for Balthasar’s treatment of the Christ’s consciousness. Substantiation of this claim entails in the first instance a chapter devoted to Maximus’s thought along with its attendant context, a context that is informed by Chalcedonian doctrine. This council was by and large Cyrilline in character. Following Aloys Grillmeier and Patrick Gray, Yenson views Neo-Chalcedonianism as being in continuity with Chalcedon and with Cyril’s emphasis on the unity of the incarnate Word. Balthasar, in developing his theology of personhood, accepts the doctrine that Christ is ontologically constituted as one hypostasis in two unconfused natures – or, expressed in more Balthasarian terms, ‘the archetypal person defined by mission who enacts in himself the analogia entis’ (p. 107). Balthasar contends that Christ is not only a single ontological subject but also a single psychological subject. As Yenson puts it in the course of his defence of Balthasar’s position: ‘We encounter in Balthasar not just a refusal to speak of the human consciousness of Jesus independently of the Son, but also a refusal to speak of the Logos asarkos, prescinding from Jesus’ human existence’ (p. 143). Christ’s mission, which is fundamentally constitutive of His person, enters into the constitution of His consciousness. With this assertion Balthasar moves beyond the Neo-Chalcedonian doctrine of the enhypostatic humanity of Christ. In working out the implications of the notion that in Christ there can be only one centre of consciousness, Balthasar argues that nescience, faith, and kenotic obedience furnish positive aspects thereof. Ruled out is the traditional ascription of the beatific vision to Christ’s human soul. Faith must be attributed to Christ, therefore, albeit faith that is qualitatively different from that of believers. This faith moreover translates into human terms God’s fidelity as well as the filial obedience of the Son to the Father. Balthasar’s approach to Christ’s consciousness is set in sharper focus in a chapter devoted to passiology. Christ is impelled by His universal salvific mission but in His humanity and his mode of filial receptivity He does not know the content of the ‘hour.’ He is however aware of its essential meaning. Balthasar deems the Fathers to have placed a limit on Christ’s assumption of the consequences of the sin of humanity. They do not allow that Christ in the fullness of His hypostatic reality entered into the darkness of the human sinful state, thereby experiencing complete abandonment by God, an experience that is analogous to hell. Appealing to the hypostatic unity that bears Christ’s consciousness, Balthasar maintains that sin and its effects not only enter into Christ’s body or human soul but also into His very person as Divine Word. His theology of Christ’s descent into hell, which purportedly finds an analogue in the mystical tradition, attempts to carry the logic of the hypostatic union beyond creaturely activity into the state of death. While Yenson does entertain various criticisms levelled against Balthasar, his presentation is very sympathetic, aiming to deal with Balthasar on Balthasar’s own terms. One is however left with some questions. Is Christ’s perfect charity compatible without the full participation of His intellect? Is Balthasar’s hypostatisation of sin metaphysically sound? How does Christ’s nescience square with the fact that the Word Who has assumed human nature and Who undergoes this epistemic self-emptying nonetheless always remains the Word through Whom were created all things and in Whom is contained all the knowledge of the Trinity (and of all else)? Balthasar posits a rupture as it were between Christ’s human knowing and His knowing as the eternal Word of the Father. This last issue leads us into the domain of Trinitarian theology, which perhaps deserves more attention than it receives in this book. St. Saviour’s, Dublin Kevin E. O’Reilly Balthasar on the Spiritual Senses: Perceiving Splendour. By Mark McInroy. Pp. 217, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2014, £50.00. This latest publication in the ‘Changing Paradigms in Historical and Systematic Theology’ series from Oxford University Press focuses on the crucial, though heretofore largely overlooked, role of the ‘spiritual senses’ within the theology—in particular, the theological aesthetics (entailing an accompanying anthropology)—of 20th century Catholic thinker Hans Urs von Balthasar. McInroy points out that this lacuna (which he seeks to fill) in Balthasar scholarship is due primarily to the fact that Balthasar, well known for his ‘resistance to theologies that follow Immanuel Kant’s “turn to the subject”’ (p. 5), has generally been cast by his commentators as an ‘objectivist’—that is, as a theologian ‘resuscitating an objective revelatory claim for BOOK REVIEWS modern theology’ (p. 5), in light of which, so it would seem, there could be no place at all for a discussion of something as subjective as ‘spiritual sensation’. The book’s thesis, however, is that Balthasar gives the spiritual senses an indispensable role in his articulation of a ‘middle way’ between the two dominant positions in the Catholic theology of the early to mid-20th century—namely, the positions of ‘extrinsicism’ and ‘immanentism’. Extrinsicism, the position promoted by the teaching of Vatican I and the trend of Neo-Scholasticism which followed, emphasized the authority of the objective revelation concerning man’s salvation as appearing in Scripture, and to which man must submit himself without the support of the ‘natural’ understanding (though he is helped in his faith by grace)—the danger in this, for Balthasar, being that faith ends up as nothing more than a submissive assent to authority. Immanentism, by contrast, was a position promoted by Catholic ‘Modernists’, largely in reaction to extrinsicism, who held an existential structure in the very depths of the human being to be both the impetus towards, and the capacity to receive, supernatural revelation—the danger here being ‘that God’s revelation will be reduced to that which is already within the human being’ (p. 170), not to mention the fact that such subjectivism devalues the historical particulars of God’s revelation and therewith the historical reality of the Church. What Balthasar was seeking, claims McInroy, was an answer to the fundamental question as to how the human person can ‘be open to the newness of revelation [thus avoiding immanentism] without being deeply disaffected by what he or she experiences [thus avoiding extrinsicism]’ (p. 177). The answer, for Balthasar, was to be found in the doctrine of the spiritual senses. McInroy begins his study with a discussion of Balthasar’s reading of the spiritual senses tradition in the patristic era (chapter 1) and in the medieval and early modern periods (chapter 2), pointing out that the figures on whom Balthasar chooses to focus are determined by two main considerations: first, he largely follows his contemporary, the Modernist Karl Rahner’s selection, whose work on the spiritual senses had already in the early 20th century set a standard on the topic (though Balthasar does not always agree with Rahner’s reading); second, Balthasar passes over those figures whose particular emphases could not be put into the service of his vision of the ‘middle way’ as mentioned above; furthermore, those figures on whom he does choose to focus are often read by him, as McInroy points out, in slightly strained ways so as to serve this vision (though also in surprisingly new and very sensitive ways, for which, claims McInroy, he is often not given the credit he deserves). To that extent, Balthasar is not interested in presenting a complete historical survey of the spiritual senses 1063 tradition as much as he is in looking for resources for his own constructive project and in ‘plac[ing] the idea of the spiritual senses as it has been articulated throughout its history in conversation with similar ideas he finds among his modern interlocutors’ (p. 93). Chapter 3, then, focuses on Balthasar’s engagement with those modern interlocutors, especially Barth, whose emphasis on the unity of the body and the soul, and whose personalist anthropology of the human being as defined by encounter, influenced Balthasar deeply. Next, chapter 4 is a summing up of these various historical and contemporary influences as integrated into Balthasar’s own articulation of the spiritual senses in the service of his vision of the ‘middle way’. McInroy lays out the four cornerstones of this vision as follows: 1) the human person receives his/her spiritual senses in encounter with God and with the neighbour; 2) the body and the soul form a ‘unity-in-duality’; indeed, the spiritual senses are not so much a distinct set of senses over and above the corporeal ones (the standard western Christian view) as they are the corporeal senses themselves having undergone transformation in encounter with God and with the neighbour (more an eastern Christian view historically, in its emphasis on theosis, a point that McInroy does not note). Furthermore, on account of this emphasis on the unity of the body and the soul and the transformation of the corporeal senses, Balthasar insists that no single sense (for example, spiritual vision) should be privileged over the others; rather, the senses must remain fivefold, perceiving God through Christ in the world, in the Church, in the liturgy, and (most broadly of all) in the neighbour (which thus explains, too, as McInroy points out, Balthasar’s penchant for focusing on more kataphatically-, rather than apophatically-, oriented historical representatives of the tradition); 3) the spiritual senses are not to be understood as the achievement of heroic efforts of spiritual discipline and practice, the reward of the final stage of the spiritual path reserved only for the elite; rather, they are granted, among the general gifts of grace, to all Christian persons living their lives in encounter (with God in the world, the Church, the liturgy, and with the neighbour); 4) the spiritual senses find their fullest expression in their fivefold perception of the infinite glory of God made manifest in the beautiful form (Gestalt) of Christ (a Christocentric emphasis which Balthasar also shares with Barth); indeed, this fourth cornerstone, according to McInroy, is the very heart of Balthasar’s theological aesthetics (further explicated in chapter 5) in which beauty is, along with unity, the true, and the good, established as a transcendental property of Being through which God reveals himself, thus entailing 1064 BOOK REVIEWS that God’s self-revelation can only be perceived by the human through form (and, indeed, must be perceived in order for there to be any revelation at all). Finally, chapter 6 situates Balthasar’s theological aesthetics, as his vision of the ‘middle way’, in his contemporary Catholic context of the extrinsicist/immanentist debate, as discussed above. Overall, McInroy’s book is very engaging, extremely well laid out, clearly written (if sometimes a little repetitive in its frequent summing up of what had already been said), commanding in its discussion of Balthasar’s own texts, as well as of much of the secondary literature and literature of influence for Balthasar—and thus, for all these reasons, also a very good entry point for those new to the work of this great Catholic thinker of the 20th century. Also, it was very agreeable to this reader that footnotes (rather than endnotes) were used, and that, as a final treat, the book has been very well-edited (not a single typo did this reader find). Memorial University of Newfoundland Michelle Rebidoux Maurice Blondel: A Philosophical Life. By Oliva Blanchette. Pp. xvi, 820, Grand Rapids/Cambridge, Eerdmans, 2010, $45.00/£29.99. The French philosopher Maurice Blondel (1861 – 1949), despite continuing to be very influential as a thinker across Europe, with a steady stream of publications being devoted to his work in various languages (especially French, German, Italian and Spanish), remains relatively little known in scholarly circles in the English-speaking world. This is due to several factors. First his style of writing is often tortuous, complex, obscure and heavy going - a feature sometimes reflected in this intellectual biography, where the author is so soaked in Blondel’s thought that he occasionally reflects the less than limpid quality of the Frenchman’s language and style, not least in some very lengthy sentences which make the reading rather heavy going. Second, Blondel’s philosophical interests and approaches have in some respects been left behind as new intellectual currents have flowed since his death more than sixty years ago. In many philosophical circles his thinking seems unfashionable in tone and out-of-date in emphasis, as well as in its methodology. Indeed, it cannot be claimed that he was classed as a mainstream philosopher even during his lifetime, being considered too religious to be taken seriously by many secular philosophers and being judged as too unreliable in his orthodoxy by many of his fellow Catholic philosophers. Third, the fact that the bulk of the very substantial work he had published between 1893 and up to the eve of his death in 1949 has not been translated into English is also a major factor contributing to the lack of commentary on and reference to his philosophy by scholars and thus to a lack of familiarity among students with his way of thinking. In recent years this situation has begun to be addressed, as is reflected in some HJ articles and reviews (e.g., 51:4; 52:1; 52:3). Readers are much indebted to Oliva Blanchette for rendering Blondel much more accessible to the English-speaking world, especially those of us who, shamefully, have very limited language skills in other languages. The author is a professor of philosophy at Boston College. He provided a most welcome English translation (in 1984) of Blondel’s first book, L’Action – a landmark work that quickly became famous (and notorious) in France after its publication in 1893. In this magisterial study – surely a labour of love – Blanchette presents the whole panorama of his subject’s life and work. We meet Blondel’s family and friends; we learn about his teachers, examiners, peers and students, his foes and his allies; we eavesdrop on his correspondence; we note the philosophical and spiritual influences (for example, Leibniz and Bernard of Clairvaux) that shaped him and we trace his contributions to a wide range of journals and his observations on the local, national and international events (religious, intellectual, social, cultural, political) of his time, as well his involvement in social movements. We learn about Blondel’s purposes and his method of approach to the issues he tackled, the problems he encountered, the diverse responses he met, the combination of creative loyalty and recalcitrant opposition he aroused. In the process we become familiar with his faith, his family and work, his special balance of discipline and freedom and the trajectory of his research and publications. This book, a colossal undertaking, the fruit of many years of study, does justice to the richness, breadth, complexity, subtlety, fertility and interconnectedness of Blondel’s work, which was symphonic in quality. Even where an essay, article or intervention was occasional and a response to a very specific argument or criticism, Blondel always wanted to demonstrate how his particular contribution was part of a coherent whole; in each piece of writing he seemed to hold in view a comprehensive picture, one where all parts were complementary. Just as he believed that God had a universal plan of salvation for humanity in general, but that this BOOK REVIEWS plan was adapted to meet the needs of each unique individual, so Blondel kept in view, to a remarkable degree, the ‘cathedral’ of his thought as he laid each small brick in its construction. Blanchette is a worthy interpreter and commentator on Blondel, penetrating with painstaking care and sensitivity into his subject’s thinking, aspirations, concerns and projects. Apart from long-term engagement with Blondel’s many writings, the author has drawn very effectively, as a source of personal information, on the experience of Natalie Panis, who spent much of her time in the years 1931 – 49 with Blondel, who was, by then, an elderly widower, blind and hard of hearing. She attended Mass with him, served him breakfast and was his personal secretary, helping him to deal with voluminous correspondence, a stream of journal articles, various conference contributions, but above all, she helped him to assemble his ideas for and to bring to completion and publication the systematic works on Thought (two volumes), Being and Action (two volumes) in the 1930s and then a book on the struggle for civilisation and peace, on the eve of World War II, followed by two further volumes on Philosophy and the Christian Spirit in the 1940s. The day before he died, 3rd June 1949, Blondel signed a contract for another volume (published posthumously) on the philosophical exigencies of Christianity. Blondel suffered from ill-health for much of his life, frequently being in pain, sometimes having to take lengthy periods off from work. He could be anxious about the possibility of being condemned by the Church to which he was so attached – anxiety that is understandable considering what happened to some of his friends who were priests. He steered a line between secularist and sectarian thinkers that endeared him to neither party. He was a very serious person (sometimes one wishes he could ‘lighten up’ a bit), conscientious and precise to a degree that verged on being finicky. Although he attracted controversy he did not seem to relish it or to thrive on it. He was a dedicated and very effective and influential teacher, one who elicited long-lasting loyalty from many students and over the years he mentored many students who took up aspects of his projects as they developed their own scholarly specialisms. Underpinning all his endeavours was a deeply devout spiritual life, nourished by daily Mass and the sacraments, all of which helped to shape, direct, temper and reinforce his intellectual efforts. Blondel sought to bring people to recognise in their engagement with the natural order the necessity of the supernatural order, his special role being to prepare human subjects for what is being offered to them by God, but doing so without entering onto the territory of theology. His task as a philos- 1065 opher was to prepare the ground for, to open the way to, the data of revelation, while remaining strictly in the realm of philosophy. Blondel believed that ‘to define the conditions that render such data discernible, acceptable, and assimilable is in no way to produce, to discover, or to explain them’ (p.19). He wanted to show that we all have to face a fundamental option, where we either open ourselves to or close ourselves off from a gift from outside. For him we have a supernatural vocation. He was fond of the saying from St Thomas, that omnia intendunt assimilari Deo. We might translate this as ‘all things stretch out to be embraced by God.’ If they are faithful to the norms that sustain them from within, each person can be shown to have a need for what surpasses them but which does not suppress them. In 1948 he described his life’s work as being one of helping people to discover and host transcendence within themselves (p.795), thereby prompting them to become open to what is offered by the Church as entry into the life of God that we are invited to share. Despite this apologetic or even missionary motivation, Blondel insisted that he remained always a philosopher, not a theologian. For him philosophy had to maintain, intellectually, its autonomy, if it was to play an appropriate role. For him philosophia non libera nisi adjutrix, non adjutrix nisi libera. If it rigorously and, as a matter of principle, closed itself off from the transcendent, then philosophy could not in the end be fully free; but on the other hand, it could not serve a positive role within the life of faith if it did not jealously protect its autonomy, if it became subordinated to theological priorities or if it was subjected to ecclesial intellectual imperialism. Over the course of his career and then during the years of his retirement, he had penetrating things to say on philosophy, historical methodology, apologetics, tradition, religious practice, the nature and workings of the will, the social implications of Christian faith, aspects of the spiritual life, and the relation (incommensurability and compenetration) between nature and grace. This book is unusual for one on such a massive scale, in that it has no footnotes or endnotes and it does not refer to the secondary literature on Blondel. This is not the place to learn what others – either his contemporaries or ours - have said about Blondel. However, it is an excellent place to experience and a wonderful opportunity to reach up to the hugely encompassing and integrated perspective of someone whose thought still has much to teach us about what is perennially true of the human condition and who offers prophetic insight into what might diminish or enhance it. Liverpool Hope University John Sullivan 1066 BOOK REVIEWS Maurice Blondel, Social Catholicism & Action Française. By Peter Bernardi. Pp. xii, 297, Washington, DC, The Catholic University of America Press, 2009, $79.95. This book is sub-titled ‘The Clash over the Church’s Role in Society during the Modernist Era.’ It might be thought that Catholic modernism is of limited interest today, an obscure and forgotten moment like a firework that fizzed for a brief period (approximately 1900 – 1910), then spluttered and faded away, now dead and long gone. As a movement it appealed only to a small group of thinkers unrepresentative of the wider church. Of all the expressions of modernism, its social and political dimension is even less understood than controversies over biblical and historical scholarship, the development of doctrine and understandings of tradition and authority. Furthermore, of the two protagonists whose extended argument is examined here, one, the Jesuit, Pedro Descoqs (1876 - 1946), scarcely receives a mention in most of the literature on modernism, while the other, Maurice Blondel (1861 – 1949), while much more written about, is a notoriously complex and sometimes inaccessible author. However, such assumptions would be entirely wrong; this book has huge relevance for questions that are live (and neuralgic) today: How should the church relate to secular society in carrying out its public mission? What degree of compromise is allowed in order to ensure that the voice of the church can be heard in the market-place of competing visions of life? Bernardi, an associate professor of religious studies at Loyola University, New Orleans, succeeds admirably in his aim of showing the pertinence of the exchanges, especially between 1909 and 1913, between Descoqs and Blondel as to the appropriate ways for Catholics to express their faith in the social and political domain. His wonderful retrieval and deployment of little known primary sources provides a great service for scholars today who are interested in exploring the implications of a proper understanding of the nature – grace relationship for the public role of the church. Arguments from a century ago, here meticulously analysed, are shown to be still relevant for controversies from our own time, for example, with regard to liberation theology, radical orthodoxy and for the constantly shifting balance of relationships between the church and liberal democracy and capitalism. The author is always a model of clarity, even in the midst of unpacking the most subtle and complex arguments. This substantial work is well signposted; the narrative is clear; the arguments are exposed and analysed in ways that help readers new to the topic, as well as providing new material and fresh interpretations for those familiar with the field. The scholarship on which the work is based is impeccable and reliable. Bernardi provides the context for the exchanges between Blondel and Descoqs; he reveals the key issues at stake between them; subtle developments in the argument are noted and the later repercussions are sketched in. The ongoing and wider significance of the controversy between two mentalities in French Catholicism are kept in focus. Both accepted that faith entails public duties and must have an expression in the public square. Descoqs supported an alliance between French Catholics and Charles Maurrass’s Action Française, as the best way forward in resisting the anticlerical governments of the Third Republic. Blondel favoured those who advocated a more social expression of Catholicism, which he saw as a natural outworking of his philosophy of action. The former favoured a restoration of the monarchy and emphasised order, authority, hierarchy and charity, while the latter supported cooperation with the republic and emphasised justice, freedom, democracy and the place of legislation in alleviating hardship. Blondel coined the term ‘monophoriste’ for his opponents, meaning they proposed a unilateral, top-down approach to both church teaching and to political life, thereby crushing spontaneity and initiative in church members and among citizens. He considered that the kinds of control aimed at by his ecclesial and political opponents were incompatible with Christianity, too militant and machismo. Yet both Descoqs and Blondel, while they disapproved of the alliances respectively engaged in by their opponents, each accepted that in the context of a secular and plural society there had to be cooperation between Christians and non-Christians. Their argument was partly over which types of alliance were legitimate and which were too compromising of the truth. Bernardi not only brings to life, with sensitivity and subtlety, a controversy between two sharply contrasting Catholic interpretations from a century ago as to how the church should respond to social change and political repression; he also provides conceptual resources for a careful exploration of how the church might today engage with the state and in the political arena, steering a path between, on the one hand, fidelity to its constitutive principles and values and, on the other hand, reaching out to collaborate with people of quite different beliefs and priorities in building together a society that promotes human flourishing. Liverpool Hope University John Sullivan BOOK REVIEWS 1067 Maritain, Religion, and Education. By Luz M. Ibarra. Pp. 211, NY, Peter Lang, 2013, £50.00. This book makes a valuable contribution to contemporary Catholic philosophy of education, a neglected area of reflection that urgently needs revisiting and refurbishment. In this retrieval of the thought of Jacques Maritain (1882 – 1973) Ibarra makes a strong case for drawing on the French philosopher’s substantial corpus of work (not just his writing that was explicitly devoted to education) for light, direction, foundation and integration for educational theory in general and as a model for how to approach religious education in particular, especially in Christian settings. She does so in four stages. First, she examines key elements (historical, theological, and philosophical) in the situation which shaped Maritain’s philosophy of education. Second, she provides a clear overview of his life and writings, especially his (nearly) twenty-five years’ teaching in America. Third, she analyses his writings on education, exposing his Catholic philosophy of education. Finally, she develops a synthesis of his teaching on the nature of the human person, indicating its bearing on our understanding of the field of religious education. Maritain was clear that day-to-day practical decisions in various walks of life, including the sphere of education, depend on how we answer fundamental questions about life. In other words, philosophical issues – whether we are aware of them or not cannot help but influence our interpretation of and response to the choices that life presents to us. Pivotal here is our understanding of the human person and the purpose of life. If we get this wrong, then we soon find ourselves working with an inadequate, distorted and damaging approach to education. One of Maritain’s strengths is that he considers human persons in a way that does justice to their multidimensional nature: physical, psychic, rational, political, aesthetic, spiritual, social and supernatural. Too often philosophers have too narrow a focus, even if they succeed in probing deeply. Ibarra quotes Maritain on how every teacher loves a god by whom they are influenced: ‘Spencer nature, Comte humanity, Rousseau freedom, Freud sex, Emerson individuals, Dewey society, Wundt culture’ (p.79). The more comprehensive and all-enveloping treatment of human personhood provided by Maritain offers a more reliable foundation for educational theory than any of the above. Unsurprisingly, Ibarra finds particular value in Maritain’s contribution to our understanding of the nature and ends of human persons, the importance of liberal education and the humanities, his sensitivity to the requirements of democracy, his suspicion of specialisation, his criticism of pragmatism and his emphasis on the primacy of the spiritual. A particular favourite phrase of Maritain’s was ‘the conquest of internal freedom’, an elusive notion that is central to his thought. This freedom is not simply a natural unfolding of the powers that are latent within us or an expansion of the will. It entails discipline, formation, the acceptance of responsibility and close integration with truth and wisdom. At the same time, Maritain stresses the teacher’s duty to awaken and attend to the inner resources of students and to orient these towards their true end, identity and mission, being united to God. Ibarra links the rehabilitation of persons with God and the reconstruction of society, with religious education playing a key role in promoting justice, freedom, respect, peace and love. Not all religious educators would be comfortable with her emphasis on their duty to be teachers of spirituality, though it would seem counter-intuitive to resist this task in the context of faith-based schools. One might question whether her acceptance of Maritain’s response to religious pluralism – ensuring that theological teaching be given to their own adherents by representatives of each religious group and allowing others (for example, the unaffiliated) to opt out - does enough to facilitate inter-faith and ecumenical dialogue or to promote the quality of religious literacy that would equip people to engage constructively in a religiously pluralist society. Some readers might wonder if sufficient account of the plurality of religions and the diversity within each religion is taken by Maritain and Ibarra. Although she acknowledges that Maritain could not take into account new developments in theology such as liberation, feminist and process theology, she might have posed more insistently the question: do the insights of these approaches require any qualifying, modifying or supplementing of his application of Thomas Aquinas to the twentieth century? She does succeed in showing that he modelled how Thomism had something relevant to contribute to our understanding of issues raised by science, by social movements, by anthropology, comparative religion and the philosophy of culture, as well as casting light on the essentially spiritual nature of humanity. However, it would be helpful to bring Maritain into dialogue with other potential theological and philosophical guides for appreciating the nature, purpose and constitutive elements of religious education. Given the Thomist orientation one might have expected to see Lonergan being considered. Also, given the pragmatism that Maritain was responding to in his educational writings, another book published by Peter Lang in 2012 and reviewed in HJ [I do not know which issue this will appear in], John Dewey among the Theologians by Aaron 1068 BOOK REVIEWS Ghiloni, might suggest a more promising relationship is possible between Thomism and pragmatism with regard to education. Maritain certainly provides a very valuable resource, prompt and guide for philosophy of education and for religious educa- tion, but probably one that needs to be supplemented, reinforced and extended by other contributors. Liverpool Hope University John Sullivan Sacred Dread: Raissa Maritain, the Allure of Suffering, and the French Catholic Revival (1905-1944). By Brenna Moore. Pp. xiii, 293, Notre Dame, Indiana, University of Notre Dame Press, 2013, $30.00. An expansion of her Ph. D. dissertation, Moore’s intellectual biography of Ra€ıssa Maritain is, if not encyclopaedic, certainly definitive for our time. It succeeds at leading the reader empathetically into an appreciation of the coherence and power of this tiny Russian Jewess whose contemplative ‘flashes’ provided the intensity behind the lucid scholarly expositions of Thomas Aquinas that her husband Jacques produced, while maintaining an ‘outside’ critical viewpoint that can indicate dangers of distortion or one-sidedness. A strength of the book is that it establishes the enveloping background position to which members of the renouveau catholique of the early years of the 20th century were responding (and subsequent background positions in the years leading up to the Shoah and during the Second World War) without which the enthusiastic claims put forward seem arbitrary and one-sided. An all-conquering secularism and positivism, tied to confidence that the entente cordiale of modern nationalisms had successfully replaced ‘Christendom’ as the basis for European unity, and would lead European man into the promised land of bourgeois comfort and complacency, was experienced as mind-numbing, dispiriting, and profoundly unsatisfactory by the generation that came of age just before the bubble of the promise burst with the outbreak of the First World War. Even before that there had been signs of inadequacy in the new paradigm, as in the Dreyfus affair when the Jew as unassimilable to the secularized ‘citizen’ (because ‘Jew’ was as much an ethnic tag as a religious label, indicating the religious ‘baggage’ the Jew dragged with him which he could not give up). Almost inevitably, as cracks and tensions between the competing nationalistic powers signaled problems in the new paradigm, the unassimilable Jew who was the counter-datum or ‘fly in the ointment’ became the scapegoat or ‘designated sufferer’ on which all frustrations could be safely offloaded. Over sixty years after the founding of the State of Israel, it is difficult for us to recapture a sense of the political impoverishment, precariousness, and danger to which the ‘emancipated’ Jew was increasingly exposed: the Jew had no national ‘homeland’ and thus could not become a ‘player’ at international conferences, but also he was now increasingly being denied citizenship or ‘room’ within any of the European countries as well, for the ‘sin’ of conspicuously not being secular European man - or better, of continually reminding European man of what he also could not honestly or integrally leave behind. The Jew literally had no place to go and was not wanted anywhere. The Nazi’s ‘solution’ was not a discontinuous shock, but rather the logical conclusion to a long process. Contact with Leon Bloy was the key event in the lives of Ra€ıssa and Jacques Maritain, as he showed them how the previously mocked symbols of souffrance within Christianity became revalorized and of pertinent urgency, not only in bringing the best of Judaism to its ‘completion’, but in providing a continuously-available context and subject for the crucial human activity of contemplation leading to self-transcendence and self-transformation, as one cultivated an ‘interior’ life where one experienced the painful-but-joyful love of God in a way that protected the subject from whatever evils were around her, even as she now saw them more clearly and was able to respond to them soberly and without terror, in the way that Jesus, whom she was appropriating, did. One comes away from this study with a heightened appreciation for Ra€ıssa Maritain’s exemplary maturity and holiness during the most traumatic period of the past century. Heythrop College Patrick Madigan The Religious Philosophy of Simone Weil: an Introduction. By Lissa McCullough. Pp. vii, 264, NY/London, I. B. Tauris, 2014, $25.00. This book touts itself as an introduction to the work of Simone Weil, but this is too modest. McCollough has done exhaustive study of all the notebooks as well as the works published by Weil, and has produced a coherent account both of her development and her mature worldview. For a BOOK REVIEWS thinker who expressed herself in paradox and apparent contradiction – or at least a challenge to our conventional understandings of words – this is quite an accomplishment and a service to the reader. This work is likely to stand for years as the best overall study of Weil, her origin, sources, and final system. Because, in spite of its fragmentary and aphoristic manner of composition, it does finally constitute a system, or perhaps a two-story house reflecting the stages of Weil’s own psychological, spiritual, and philosophical development. The key issue is her theodicy, or her way of reconciling belief in a deity she thought was good – indeed, the highest or supreme good – with an unblinking acknowledgment of the reality of evil, and consequently the proper way for a ‘converted’ or true disciple of this deity to face such evil. The significance or power of this theme is given added weight in that Weil was aware that, besides the evils of an economic depression and social turmoil that were leading into another brutal war, special violence was being visited upon her own Jewish people – indeed, they were being made scapegoats for these other problems – and this was unfair. Weil was the offspring of secular Jewish parents and initially was agnostic in a stoic mode. Her way of dealing with evil was through denial, a protective self-defense mechanism involving misdescribing it as its opposite, calling herself and others into a reverse ethic of what would normally be expected, into amor fati. Rather than hating evil, we should put ourselves through the hard school of learning to love it, since it won’t change anyway – it is inevitable or necessary. McCullough traces the cultural atmosphere in which Weil was raised back to French Jansenism, a Catholic version of a harsh and rigorous Calvinism. To this reviewer her position ultimately comes closest to Spinoza in that – beyond ‘loving’ evil being a way to ‘pile ashes’ on the heads of our enemies – one should get past this immature psychological motivation 1069 and realize there are no enemies. No one is responsible; it was necessary, it had to happen. Either emotion, pro or con, is inappropriate. We should aspire to the disinterested contemplation that God himself engages in, simply because it is accurate, and because this is as high as we can go. This requires, of course, a major ‘conversion’ from our normal self-centeredness or self-interest, such that we become virtually a new self-creation; this high and demanding ethic is, however, the best response. And in Weil’s case, it gets ‘worse’. In 1938, while in a condition of intense pain from one of her chronic headaches, Weil felt ‘a presence more personal, more certain, and more real than that of a human being.’ (quoted p. 4) This was a mystical and ecstatic experience that shattered the immanent Spinozistic ‘Deus sive Natura’ with a Plotinian ultra-transcendent God who was more than a Plotinian ‘One’ because it intervened or came ‘towards’ her; it made contact something the ‘One’ can never do. This she interpreted as the Christian God, or Christ himself, and it gave her a new model and energy for loving the world, even in all its injustice and brutality. The recognition or ‘consent’ to necessity evolved into a stronger ‘redemptive suffering’ in which we no longer deny, turn away from, or flee from evil, but meet it the way God meets it – by actively inserting ourselves, and thereby creating a witness to what is unjust or unnecessary about evil as a way to bring about awareness and further conversion. Atonement and fusion with God occur simultaneously as we voluntarily associate ourselves with a God who is impaled on the ‘cross of the world’. This divine example and endorsement provide a stronger incentive to such a wrenching conversion and an ethics that merges into personal call and vocation. It is for each of us to apply this new ‘recognition’ as is appropriate to our own lives and circumstances. Heythrop College Patrick Madigan Redeeming Philosophy: From Metaphysics to Aesthetics. Edited by John J. Conley, SJ. Pp. xii, 342, Washington, DC, American Maritain Association and The Catholic University of America Press, 2014, $24.95. The Philosophical Question of Christ. By Caitlin Smith Gilson. Pp. xxvi, 228, New York and London, Bloomsbury, 2014, $107.99/$29.99. Perhaps the best term for characterizing contemporary Catholic philosophical theology is ‘pluralistic’. While many writers have taken advantage of the Vatican II openness to ongoing developments in all academic fields to produce new, often unorthodox, interpretations of Catholicism, others attempt to preserve the classical interpretations despite their apparent incompatibility with the lived experience of 21st-century Catholics. These two books are examples of the latter outlook. As such, they will be welcomed by traditionalists but dismissed by, for want of a better term, ‘progressive’ thinkers. The American Maritain Association has published many collections of essays on topics that 1070 BOOK REVIEWS were of interest to Jacques Maritain. This volume focuses on his 1944 book, Redeeming the Time, in which he uses ‘the resources of philosophical realism, as found in the works of Aristotle and Aquinas, to challenge and redeem a certain defect in contemporary social relations or in contemporary philosophy’ (p. viii). Most of the 18 contributors to this volume are similarly disposed to find fault with whatever does not conform to classical philosophical realism. The first section of the book is entitled, Metaphysical Turn. For John F.K. Knasas, ‘the primary precepts of Aquinas’s natural law are both known to all and possess a universal truth’ (p. 20). However, people can be honestly confused or ignorant about these precepts because some intellectual sophistication is required to understand them and few have that. An example is the widespread acceptance of contraception, which Knasas considers to be evil. Heather M. Erb’s topic is mysticism: ‘For Maritain, realist metaphysics is shot through with a mystical aspiration for union with the first principle of being’ (pp. 23-24). Whereas Maritain was initially open to a naturalistic mysticism (e.g., Buddhism), he reverted to a more exclusivist Christian concept in his final work, On the Church of Christ. The other three contributors in this section, Daniel D. de Haan, James Capehart and Michael Novak, deal with Thomistic answers to the metaphysical problems of knowing, human identity and the void, respectively. Section two, Theological Turn, contains four chapters. Roger W. Nutt criticizes Maritain and Herman Diepen’s interpretation of St. Thomas on the metaphysical status of Christ’s human nature, i.e., that Christ, as man, was an adopted son of God. James F. Keating’s essay stands apart from all the others; he offers a devastating critique of the neo-scholastic Thomism embraced by most of his fellow contributors: ‘the understandable desire on the part of many theologians to re-enact pre-or non-modern Catholic thought and practice in our present context cannot be authentically Catholic if it eschews the responsibility to present the faith as credible to contemporary minds and hearts’ (pp. 133-4). Since Keating makes no mention of Maritain, it is not clear whether he would include Maritain among those who prefer to uphold rather than reinterpret traditional doctrines. Bernard Doering shows that on one important issue, artificial contraception, Maritain chose tradition over credibility when he assented to Humanae vitae even though he had previously expressed approval of the birth control pill. John J. Conley, S.J. provides a short exposition of Maritain’s semiotic treatment of the sacraments. Section three, Historical Turn, includes just one chapter: Hope and History by Randal B. Smith. He claims, with no citations from Aquinas or Maritain, ‘that all human hopes must find their ultimate foundation in the theological virtues of hope and faith; otherwise, these hopes will remain false and empty’ (p. 174). Section four, Aesthetic Turn, begins with C.A. Tsakiridou’s account of Leon Bloy’s pernicious influence on Jacques and Ra€ıssa Maritain’s attitudes towards Jews. John Marson Dunaway deals with Maritain’s influence on American literature, specifically Caroline Gordon and Flannery O’Connor. Joshua Hren does the same with Walter Percy. The final section is entitled, Social Turn. Anne M. Wiles discusses Maritain’s philosophy of education: ‘Maritain’s own view is that in order to be completely well grounded, education must be based on the [sic.] Christian idea of man’ (p. 255. Samantha Bertrand also deals with education but focusses on Aristotle’s views, not Maritain’s. Bernadette E. O’Connor praises Maritain for promoting gender equality against the traditional theological subordination of women but considers that he did not go far enough in this regard. Nikolaj Zunic makes just one brief reference to Maritain in his discussion of the search for peace. He weakens his case with his claim that ‘The current craze in the Western world with rights and freedoms, especially the right to equality, has the deleterious effect of segregating human beings from each other and pitting humans against humans’ (p. 309). Thomas O’Rourke makes no mention of Maritain in his discussion of economics and politics, focussing instead on Yves Simon’s critique of market capitalism. Many traditionalists, including recent popes, consider it a badge of honour to avoid gender-neutral language. Caitlin Smith Gilson is a prime example; the word ‘man’ appears in nearly every paragraph of this book; ‘woman’ and ‘human beings’ are virtually absent. One might reasonably infer that she is writing exclusively about males, but this does not appear to be the case. Although ostensibly a philosophical treatise, the book actually reads like a prose poem. Perhaps that would be the only way to achieve her stated purpose: ‘a careful philosophical treatment of the figure or idea of Christ as the ecstasy of expectation, the ineluctable and underlying root of all historical, temporal, philosophical, theological, aesthetic, religious, existential, moral, and political meanings, beyond all those categories but not abolishing them’ (p. xiv). Her use of language is reminiscent of James Joyce and Martin Heidegger – idiosyncratic terminology, long and convoluted paragraphs, etc. BOOK REVIEWS Gilson self-identifies as a Thomist, but not like many other (unnamed) ‘Aristotelean’ Thomists who have ‘rendered the philosophical progress of Christianity immobile, sterile, and obsolete’ (p. xxi). Hers is a ‘radical Thomism’, although she quotes Etienne Gilson, Jacques Maritain and Anton Pegis, hardly radicals, to support her approach. She develops her argument in four chapters and an epilogue. In the first, she deals with Christ as filling a void in Greek thought. Chapter two is entitled, The Search for a Method. Its focus is Anselm’s ontological argument for the existence of God and Pascal’s wager. She seems to accept without question or nuance the traditional understanding of original sin. The following chapter treats of Dante, specifically his understanding of ‘man’ as the image of God. Chapter four offers a Thomistic explanation of the unity of body and soul in ‘man’. The Epilogue summarizes the author’s approach culminating in a prayer. Despite her claim that her Thomism is different from, and presumably superior to, other followers of Aquinas, Gilson is quite clearly among those characterized by James F. Keating as eschewing the 1071 responsibility to present the faith as credible to contemporary minds and hearts. Like them, she ignores or rejects such modern challenges to traditional Catholic philosophical theology as the historical-critical approach to the Bible, the ecumenical movement and religious pluralism. Moreover, her philosophical Christ is an abstraction; she never mentions the historical Jesus of the gospels. Even the references to the crucified one and the resurrected one in the Epilogue apply to the believer, not to Jesus. During the twentieth century Catholic theologians such as Karl Rahner and Bernard Lonergan showed that one could be a Thomist and still deal credibly with current issues, whether theological, philosophical, social or economic. Unfortunately, as these two books illustrate, many contemporary Thomists tend to priorize fidelity to the tradition and church authority over credibility. Until the election of Pope Francis, their approach was endorsed by the Vatican and most of the church hierarchy. It remains to be seen whether this will change in the foreseeable future. University of Ottawa John R. Williams Ricoeur on Time and Narrative: An Introduction to Temps Et Recit. By William C. Dowling. Pp. Ix, 121, Notre Dame, University of Notre Dame Press 2011, $26.00. Dowling here seeks to illuminate the positive, systematic strain of hermeneutical insight to be found within the magnum opus of Ricoeur’s career: Time and Narrative. The popular conception of Ricoeur is a philosopher bent on dismantling any and all attempts to achieve an epistemic position outside the hermeneutical circle. Dowling, however, wants to show us the other side of the coin, where understanding is achieved through the narrative dimension of meaning. This systematic strain of Ricoeur’s thought begins with an analysis of the concept of mimesis. Mimesis may be seen, as it was by the ancients, as the simple fact that art imitates life, or narrative imitates action in the world. For Ricoeur, this does not quite do justice to the philosophical problem of narrative experience, for narrative is itself an operator on how humans translate their experience. Mimesis is ‘the epistemic gain of narrative experience’ (16). This analysis is only the surface level of the real problem of narrative, however: for Ricoeur, it is our sense that the objective world, what he calls the time of the world, communicates to us an ultimate meaninglessness, while the time of the soul, something brought to its greatest heights by figures like Augustine, Pascal, and Kierkegaard, speaks to a meaningfulness beyond this worldly time, what Sellars might have called ‘the manifest image of man.’ In true dialectical fashion, it is narrative time, in providing an entire world of characters, actions, motives, moral judgments, and finally a telos where the plot of the story is brought together as a whole, that this temporal contradiction between objective and subjective time is overcome. Art does not simply imitate life. In the holistic, moral and ethical power of narrative, our own way of being in the world is fundamentally altered. We see here already unfolding the positive, systematic account of time and narrative on which Dowling has staked his claim. Ricoeur is not only a philosopher of negativity seeking to deconstruct all attempts by the time of the world to encapsulate the subjective experience of meaning. This is merely the first step in a much larger project which purposes to overcome this very division itself, making narrative time, the experience of events happening in the world for a particular purpose and with specific ethical content, the synthesis that, crucially, connects the worlds of fiction and history. If fictional narrative is clearly about constructing a world through which we can develop a lens to see our own world anew, then historical analysis, rather than being simply a battle over facts and dates, is similarly a conversation about significance: not which alleged facts are true or false, but which 1072 BOOK REVIEWS facts play a significant narrative role in the story. History is then telling an ‘alternative story about the past’ (68). Still, underlying both the poetics of history and the poetics of fiction is this dialectic between the cosmic (time of the world) and the phenomenological (time of the soul), with narrative playing the connective and supersessionist role. In historical analysis, this means that narrative time is necessary for understanding how, in the case of an event like Pearl Harbor, figures like Japan and America (clearly not actual persons in any objective sense) can be understood as actors taking part in the beginning of a long historical drama (with World War II being the narrative telos of this first act battle in the Pacific). In fiction, the same process applies: in reading Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, we neither see a series of meaningless scribbles on a page, nor the subjective wanderings of our or another’s phenomenal consciousness, but an entirely new world, both universal and meaningful, meant to transform our own world through what Ricoeur calls ‘transcendence within immanence.’ This is the moment when the reader takes up the fictive work and “leaps over the ontological gap between fictional narrative and ordinary reality” (100), bringing this alien world into their own. This final chapter, ‘Poetics of Fiction’, is a proper denouement for Dowling’s analysis, for it is here that it becomes clear that Ricoeur meant to be much more than a literary analyst. His is not a philosophy of literature or of fiction, but a philosophy of life and consciousness and how the latter experience the world in its most basic, narrative form. Ricoeur’s concept of narrative is not simply about fiction, for conscious experience itself is fictive – ‘consciousness. . . must always be taken as the medium of literary comprehension’ (96). Life does not hold the key to fiction, as if we could look deeply into the neuronal processes of the brain to discover the meaning of the stories we tell each other (even if we could, this would not be terribly enlightening). Instead, fiction holds the key to life itself, for the meaningfulness of life finds its root in the stories we pass down, from generation to generation, communicating what is of vital human concern across the vicissitudes of time. William Dowling has done us a terrific service in traversing the ‘perversely inconclusive style of philosophical argument’ (ix) Ricoeur is noted for and delivering such a fine introduction to the systematic whole that Time and Narrative was always meant to be. College of the Canyons Troy Polidori Ricoeur on Moral Religion: A Hermeneutics of Ethical Life. By James Carter. Pp. xxii, 169, Oxford University Press, 2014, £50.00. The several attempts to form a systematic account of the mammoth output of the French polymath Paul Ricoeur have rightly concluded that the key to his worldview is to be found in his origins in the French Reformed tradition, with, of course, the fundamental doctrine of radical human corruption removed. Rousseau was kicked out of Geneva; Calvin won the battle but lost the war. The decisive trace of this Reformed background up till now has been Ricoeur’s conviction that even the intellect is fallen into error and arrogance, and his consequent diatribe against the possibility of speculative metaphysics, in even stronger terms than is found in Luther: the attempt to transform the ‘horizon’ of our experience into an ‘object’ of knowledge is not only an illegitimate use of the mind’s a priori categories beyond possible experience, a la Kant; it is to create a sacrilegious idol that replaces the solely proper Deus Absconditus, who may only be approached apophatically in Zen-like intellectual cancellation. Carter’s book confirms this diagnosis and portrait at the practical level: all Ricoeur’s writings were directed toward the elaboration of a universal ‘moral religion’, which in effect is a secular humanism with all particular religious elements hallowed out in the fashion of Rousseau and Kant. The minimal conversion requested of humans as ‘capable beings’ is to get beyond their self-interest enough to acknowledge they are vulnerable, are parts of a larger social whole, and that other ‘capable beings’ are both called and capable of going through the same degree of non-sectarian conversion, whereby they become centres of rights and duties who must consequently be treated as ends and not only as means. Ironically for Ricoeur, who lost his father to the First World War, fought, was captured, and spent five years as a prisoner of war in the Second, it is timidity about recognizing a more radical capacity for evil in human beings - and thus the fear of asking for a more profound ‘conversion’ – that is the weakest element and least-convincing aspect of his worldview. Like Chamberlain dealing with Hitler, Ricoeur is engaging in appeasement built on denial of a deeper potential for perfidy he dare not acknowledge or call by its proper name, for fear of angering it so that it might show its true colours. BOOK REVIEWS Perhaps if we ask less of it, it can be tamed or bought off. The lapse is thus a form of intellectual cowardice. Thomas Mann wrote that in the wake of the National Socialist experience, Germans found that Goethe – who changed the story of Faust, so that he did not have to go to hell – had nothing to say and was of no help to them. He could have made the same point about Kant. Not only had the world failed to live up to this immanentizing of God into a this-wordly ‘religion of humanity’, the German people themselves had failed to perform at that level. Ricoeur combines Spinoza, Aristotle, and Kant – with religion allowed to operate only at the ‘moral’ level, injecting an extra iota of impetus into Spinoza’s conatus for higher development and Aristotle’s social telos in ‘the good life’ (as if to guarantee that this energy will be adequate) – with our appetites and egotism constrained on the other side by Kant’s insistence on social ‘norms’ – to propose an ethical humanism that humans as ‘capable beings’ will convert into, give up whatever propensities to evil they may still harbour, break out into a chorus of Beethoven’s ‘Ode to Joy’, and dance around the laurel tree. Ricoeur is not too much of a Calvinist; he is not enough of one. In desperation, because he has cut the ground from under his own feet for holding humans to anything more, he is willfully 1073 and blindly too Socratic: clearer ideas by themselves are not sufficient to lead to virtue or progress. The evil in the human heart that each human must acknowledge if there is to be any ‘conversion’ at all, is deeper than ‘erring’, as Ricoeur tries to talk himself and us into believing. The part of Calvin he needs is the part he has cut away, or is reluctant to bring forward to insist that others also recognize rather than only himself; he keeps the harsher parts of his religious convictions too privately for himself. He needs to ask for more rather than for less from others. Conversion is still possible, but unfortunately it requires a more searching and honest self-scrutiny than Ricoeur has the courage or inclination to require. History argues that, trying for less, he will come away with nothing. Enlightenment optimism is too thin a dyke against this tide. The Enlightenment is correct in holding that Religion, when perverted, becomes part of the problem. What it omits to say is that, so radical and pervasive is human evil, that only Religion is a solution. Only the poison is a strong enough medicine. In being too compassionate, he has not dared cut away the corruption, which eventually will envelope the whole body. Heythrop College Patrick Madigan Merleau-Ponty and Theology. By Christopher Ben Simpson. Pp. x, 258, London, Bloomsbury T&T Clark, 2014, £50/£16.99; $90/$27.95. The constructive philosophical thought of twentiethcentury French phenomenologist Maurice MerleauPonty is currently the subject of a rising tide of theological interest. In Merleau-Ponty and Theology, Christopher Ben Simpson offers an appreciative introduction to Merleau-Ponty, opening up some potentially rich veins of interdisciplinary possibility by placing Merleau-Ponty in dialogue with voices from the classical Christian tradition. Simpson’s book, divided into two parts, is structured thematically around Merleau-Ponty’s rejection of Cartesian dualism between thought and thing in favour of a dialectical ternary of three interrelated phenomenological ‘orders’: the physical/material (‘corporeal’); the animated/living (‘corporal’); and the mental/ social (‘corporate’). Simpson opens Part One with a biographical and general introduction to Merleau-Ponty (Chapter 1), noting his philosophical heritage in Hegel and Heidegger, along with Husserl’s phenomenology, which Merleau-Ponty nuanced and developed emphasizing the emergence of ideas not in a Cartesian inner subjec- tive realm, but from experiences in the lived world. Simpson notes Merleau-Ponty’s refutation of the binary dogmatisation of science (‘empiricism’) and human reason (‘intellectualism’), preferring something of a liminal via media which accepts the Lebenswelt (‘life world’) as accessible to human knowing (within certain limits) by a reflexive process of interactions through which growing understandings of the world are possible. In Chapter 2 Simpson highlights Merleau-Ponty’s holistic, integrative understanding of the ambiguous and dialectical relations of the three ‘orders’, each of which is different to but emerges ‘miraculously’ from the previous order. From the primordiality of the physical realm of Nature emerges the living being, the latter representing neither simple derivation nor substantive break from the former. In turn for Merleau-Ponty, as Simpson outlines in Chapter 3, from the living being comes the consciousness of the human being, again involving a metamorphic transition to a new order whose Fundierung (founding) remains in the others; thus consciousness is not simply the addition of reason to a human animal, but 1074 BOOK REVIEWS the emergence of an embodied consciousness, for it is only in and through the body that humans perceive the world and each other. In Chapter 4 Simpson outlines Merleau-Ponty’s related ideas on sociality, culture and history, in the grammar of what may be his most theologically promising contributions: observations on subjectivity, intersubjectivity, language and communication. Here again, as Simpson points out, Merleau-Ponty rejected solipsistic Cartesian subjectobject dualisms, in favour of an embodied intersubjectivity, in which thought and language (the inseparably physical aspect of thought) are closely related, and all of which exist only in a shared, intersubjective world. Part Two is the book’s dialogical half, in which Simpson aims to ‘appropriate’ Merleau-Ponty’s ideas for theology by placing them in conversation with primarily patristic voices. After a brief discussion of some of Merleau-Ponty’s explicitly theological observations (Chapter 5), Merleau-Ponty’s three orders of the material, the living, and the mental/social are re-examined side by side with classical Christian doctrines: creation and God’s transcendent/immanent relation thereto (Chapter 6); theological anthropology, incarnation, redemption, theosis, resurrection, and embodied spirituality (Chapter 7); human sociality, pneumatology, ecclesiology and sacramentology (Chapter 8). Here Simpson generally revisits material outlined in Part One, side-by-side with brief summations of, for example Cappadocian and Augustinian views on corporeality, the natural world, or divine transcendence. While this ‘conversation’ allows some interesting and perhaps suggestive points of comparison, it also highlights Merleau-Ponty’s divergence from theological orthodoxy; Merleau-Ponty’s strongly ‘incarnational’ phenomenological urge, for example, leads him toward what could be described as a detranscendentalising Hegelian-shaped modalism: in the Spirit ‘God is no longer in heaven but in human society and communication, whenever men come together in His name’ (Merleau-Ponty, cited p. 91). Though Catholic by birth and burial, Merleau-Ponty did not identify as a theologian, and at one stage confessed that if pressed, he would probably confess to atheism. Nevertheless he engaged openly and often openmindedly with various theological ideas, as Simpson highlights. Simpson’s work obviously emerges from a broad reading of his subject, and his treatment offers an incisive, densely referenced yet succinct overview of Merleau-Ponty’s post-Kantian, post-Cartesian, and indeed post-Husserlian philosophy of phenomenology, alongside a systematic engagement with Christian loci. In the latter regard, Simpson’s choice to limit his dialogue to mostly patristic, and thus preCartesian, theological voices could be queried – it may reflect the specialties of the author, or an intention to present a somewhat univocal Christian tradition vis. a vis. Merleau-Ponty. Merleau-Ponty’s constructively dialectical approach, his thinking on transcendence/immanence, temporality/eternity, subjectivity/intersubjectivity, and rejection of the idea of an ‘Emperor God’ functioning as a foundationalising idealisation of the human mind, are suggestive of an intriguing dialogue with theologians from his own era – Karl Barth, specifically, or, conversely Paul Tillich, with whom he seems to share some contours of thought, perhaps from a common Heideggerian heritage. For similar reasons, including their shared Catholic provenance, Karl Rahner may also have made for an interesting interlocutor; such conversations will need to be developed elsewhere, however. Besides this limitation, a further small complaint might be raised at the lack of critical evaluation, synthesis, or distillation of constructive possibilities emerging from the contrapuntal conversation Simpson does provide. A concluding section in each of the later chapters, and a general conclusion, might have been helpful in this regard. Nevertheless, Simpson, like a growing cohort of theological observers, is right to recognise in Merleau-Ponty’s ideas a fecund resource for theological extrapolation, in a manner resonant with Merleau-Ponty’s own regard for the world as a fecund resource for wonder-evoking phenomenological investigation. It seems likely much more will be said on Merleau-Ponty and theology in future, and this is a lucid, positive early contribution theretowards. King’s College, University of Aberdeen, UK D. J. Konz Levinas and Theology. By Nigel Zimmermann. Pp. x, 199, London, Bloomsbury T&T Clark, 2013, $35.99. This study finds a balanced and nuanced voice somewhere between phenomenology and theology, as much as between Judaism and Christianity. He considers the French philosopher Emmanuel Levinas as not exactly married to theology, but rather as a ‘challenging partner’ for it nonetheless—something that opens this book up to theolo- gians in a striking and very relatable manner. In this, I believe, the book is a wonderful introduction and asset for theologians looking to contemplate the significance of Levinas’ work, as I will try to justify in the exposition of the book that follows. From the outset, Zimmermann makes clear how the ‘provocative turn towards alterity within the BOOK REVIEWS context of inter-subjectivity’ (p. vii) is what comes to characterize Levinas’ philosophy above all else, and why it has had such a major impact upon contemporary continental thinkers in general. Levinas’ focus on ethics as having priority over ontology, and on our responsibility to the Other over our knowledge of a subject, set a trajectory for a series of wide-ranging and profound implications for theological thought which follow. One of the unique things which this book does is to consistently provoke Christian theologians, in the context of Levinas’ work, to look directly at the otherness within their own claims to self-identify, for this is ultimately the form that alterity takes within the Jewish person of Jesus—a point we are reminded of on more than one occasion. The first chapter opens with a consideration of Levinas’ Jewish background, his general life story and how the Second World War and Holocaust affected his philosophy. Zimmermann even looks at some of Levinas’ unfinished literary writings as they encapsulate the most significant conclusions of his philosophical observations. By doing so, Zimmermann is able to underscore themes such as the irreducible otherness of the human being and its excesses, such as eros, that continue to resist definition, but which must be responded to on an ethical level. To see things as such is to highlight that which ‘unsettles’ us within Levinas’ thought— what he will initially contemplate as the nature of ‘existence’ itself—that which theology needs to be particularly attentive to. As is made clear, Levinas’ deceptively simple philosophy of alterity is constructed at its core, according to Zimmermann, as an encounter with and respect for the radical alterity of the Other before us—indeed as located in ‘epiphany’ of appearance in the face that is exposed to us—and which has been subverted by the totalizing logic of Being, its categories and impositions made upon us. For this reason, we have lost sight of the infinite that lies within the Other, and have accepted a rather Greek conceptualization of Being, such as that pursued by Martin Heidegger, among others. The Levinasian task, then, is to find access once again to a revitalized notion of transcendence, but only as gained through the immanent Other(ness) before us, a sort of ‘transcendence-in-immanence’ that characterizes his work. In this setting, care and responsibility toward the Other become inherently political acts insofar as they directly call into question humanity’s reliance upon warfare and the dehumanization of those who differ from the collective, and warring, ‘us’. Zimmermann pursues a discussion of the nature of hospitality in Levinas’ work, as well as how ‘evil’ arises from a denial of our responsibility for the Other—a theme Zimmermann will return to later 1075 on in the book. Letting the Other present itself (him or herself) to us is a strictly phenomenological exercise, and one that gives shape to Levinas’ philosophy, though it is also clear that, despite such an appearance, the Other is never fully known by us, and remains permanently unknown in its radical otherness, calling us to act ethically in defense of its alterity. As such, the problem which humanity faces lies not in trying to identify the Other—this is a distraction and even an abstraction that need not be performed—but in ethically responding to the Other, a situation that brings into being a certain permanently ‘de-centered subjectivity’ (p. 24). Zimmermann continues his study of such Levinasian themes in relation to theology through the work of Jean-Luc Marion and his accounts of the ‘saturated phenomena’, the flesh and incarnate being, the idol/icon distinction, and his account of ‘givenness’ and revelation, finding that ‘This example of a theological interpretation of Levinas’ appeal to alterity is important because it places its accent upon a God who is revealed in the events of human subjectivity’ (p. 33). Likewise, Zimmermann’s placing of emphasis upon the scriptures and how we encounter the divine in such places leads him to note the Levinasian reasoning that considers how ‘The theologian does not meet God qua God in the texts, but meets the Scriptures qua Scripture, and they in turn substantiate the trace of God’ (p. 35). Hence, for Zimmermann, and perhaps for Marion as well, Christ becomes the face of God calling us to take responsibility for the sufferings of those around us—though Levinas himself would always maintain an uneasy relationship with Christian claims, a position that Zimmermann later explores and does a good deal of justice to in examining its benefits and limitations alike. What he yet concludes is that Levinas’ claims ‘[. . .] constitute a project that does not contradict the Christian notion of Incarnation in its dogmatic content’ (p. 40). If the first chapter asks us to consider the (Christian) theological compatibility with Levinas’ phenomenology, then the second probes the manner in which Levinas (and Edmund Husserl before him) resist such religious undertones and try to establish a ‘rigorous science’ in its own right. After first discussing Husserl and the intentional perception of the object by a subject, Zimmermann turns to further helpful meditations upon Levinas’ explorations of ‘the face’ of the Other, as well as Marion, again, and the latter’s critics who often insist that he is attempting to ‘smuggle’ theology in through phenomenological terms (p. 53). Yet Marion, whom Zimmermann unfolds as a further elaboration of what Levinas was after in his positing of the 1076 BOOK REVIEWS ‘unsettledness’ of alterity and existence, is presented as justified in his efforts, as he ‘[. . .] asserts the very real existential moment of saturation, one that is recognized as existing beyond concepts and object categories and certainly beyond the possibility of perfect description’ (p. 54). Zimmerman’s next turn is toward inspecting the political dimensions of phenomenology and its attempts to present the ‘thing itself’. The inherently political implications of phenomenology, we are told, are what prevent theologians from wandering too close to phenomenological descriptions and projects, as this might politically overcommit theology in some sense. Yet, phenomenology is fruitful still for theology in many ways, and is what takes Zimmermann as far as to read Paul’s discourse in Athens on the Areopagus as a phenomenologicaltheological moment within the biblical text. Again and again, in Zimmermann’s reading of Levinas and theology, there is a steady pursuit of Levinas’ phenomenology put up against certain corresponding (Christian) theological positions, and yet with all the implicit and explicit cautions and boundaries being fully heeded. As he describes the significance of such a study at one point, ‘[. . .] Levinas indicates to theologians to reassess their work and imagine a theo-logic as a science of the ethical, and not only as a reasoned defense for faith’ (p. 64)—a great, but necessary challenge indeed, and one that will lead theology, following Levinas, to focus on the marginalized within the world, as this is what theology must pursue in light of its ethical commitments in responsibility for the Other. Such insights flow quite readily to the chapter on ‘The Disturbance of Theology’ which takes note of the problematic ‘thematization of God, whose name cannot be thematized’ (p. 71). Zimmermann provides an apt survey of those modern Christian theologians who have tried to incorporate the suggestive implications of Levinas’ philosophy for theological methods and claims, including Roger Burggraeve, David Bentley Hart, John Milbank and Jean-Luc Marion, among others. What he concludes is that ‘Levinas disturbs theology, not as one who uncovers decaying foundations and unreliable pillars, but as one who discovers the poor man in the dark and wakes him up with warm clothes and food. The provocation of Levinas is such that the poverty of one’s own position is unmasked, not for the sake of public humiliation, but for moving past facades and healing the fragile body one finds’ (p. 81). This centering of theology upon its ethical relations with Otherness lead Zimmermann to consider ‘theology as prayer’ alongside Levinas’ readings of rabbinical literature on prayer and the Jewish ethical vision for all of humanity. He presents prayer thereby as a development of a material spirituality that echoes Levinas’ phenomenological account of finding transcendence in immanence, but also as highlighting the importance of prayer as a form of ‘spiritual surrender’ that mirrors the ethical surrender to the Other that confronts us in our daily lives. Providing a good deal of original creativity, Zimmermann asks the reader to contemplate ‘theology as prayer’ (p. 90) as the unfolding of Levinas’ implications for the practice of theology. The following chapter brings forth a meditation on the ‘littleness’ of the faith of Israel in its sticking to its own particular traditions and revelations, something of the ‘necessary humility’ which Israel must accept in the face of God and those Others before them (p. 109). There is much helpful material provided for a creative reading of Levinas’ work on his scriptural and Talmudic commentaries, writings on Martin Buber, the nature of prophecy, the Torah, his controversial remarks on the State of Israel in the modern world and the vocation of the Jews. What he finds is that ‘The election of the Jew, and the whole people of Israel, is a calling out of the self towards the Other’ (p. 125)—a suggestion that opens up his entire philosophy toward theology at the same time as it withdraws and challenges theology from a certain distance. Providing a nice bridge between Levinas’ philosophical and Jewish writings—a notoriously difficult thing to do—Zimmermann points out how ‘[. . .] it is for Levinas a central Jewish tenet that an authentic community of faith is guided not by dogmatic content, let alone a theology, but by the self-sacrificial relationship of persons’ (p. 125). The final chapter on the ‘return of God’ after the Holocaust introduces us to an understanding of evil as a form of excess that cannot be understood, and that moreover feigns transcendence, but does not actually offer it to us. The question of theodicy and the realities of pain and suffering, generate an ‘anti-theodicy’ in Levinas’ work, as he conjectures ‘a theory as to why theorizing about evil is impossible’ (p. 151). Such a theory allows us then to comprehend why, ‘For Levinas, there is no direct appearance of God, and only the direct correlation of God in the appearance of the Other, in whose face justice is demanded’ (p. 134). God is not present in the evil itself—only in the human relationships that raise up and take seriously the ethical demands which the Other puts before us. In an interesting section of the chapter, Zimmermann provides an overview of Christian theological critiques of Levinas, who is often criticized for not dealing sufficiently with the concepts of ‘mediator’ and ‘participation’—notions very central to Christian theology. Zimmermann, for his part, tries to show how the involvement of such terms does not BOOK REVIEWS reduce the Other in any way, but still respects the radical alterity of the Other, allowing Christian theologians a chance to reinvent theology in Levinas’ wake. Such thoughts are subsequently mirrored in Levinas’ attempts to think God without the ontological categories that we have so often used in the history of western thought—thus challenging a good deal of theological self-understanding in the process. Zimmermann concludes with the affirmation that God can be recovered after the Holocaust, but only in terms of human inter-subjectivity, and not through the reassertion of an ontotheological claim concerning God’s being. In general, Zimmermann’s book provides cautious summaries and observations about how Levinas can 1077 be read only in a productive tension with a given religious tradition, and not as explicitly speaking a particular theological language. Levinas’ work is one that seemingly tasks itself with disturbing theology in order to open it up to new horizons that have yet to be thought. Such a broad but significant quest is what will prompt Zimmermann to conclude that ‘Theology is not itself a glory, but a task in which the Other is glorified’ (p. 161)—a proposition that theologians still need to think through a good deal before they will be able to proceed to the next phases of theological insight. Loyola University Chicago Colby Dickinson Praying to a French God: the Theology of Jean-Yves Lacoste. By Kenneth Jason Wardley. Pp. ix, 246, Farnham, Ashgate, 2014, $109.95. Of all the thinkers of the contemporary French Theological Turn, the work of Jean-Yves Lacoste has been most neglected in the Anglophone world. Not only have few of his many books been translated, but aside from the introductory volume by Joeri Schrijvers (Ashgate 2013), very little secondary scholarship has been written on his work alone. Wardley’s book thus addresses a significant gap in the English scholarship on contemporary French philosophy of religion. Wardley takes his role in addressing this lack very seriously, presenting Lacoste’s work as a whole while triangulating it through other figures in contemporary discourse. This is hardly an easy task to take on, yet Wardley demonstrates extensive knowledge of both Lacoste and his intellectual influences and conversation partners. The book traces Lacoste’s intellectual itinerary thematically, using prayer as the central path through the ambiguous borderlands of philosophy and theology where Lacoste takes up his dwelling. After situating Lacoste in the contemporary French intellectual context in Chapter 1 (God in France), Wardley explicates in Chapter 2 (Prayer) the unique status of liturgy as an act of kenotic nonexperience. Chapter 3 (Ambiguity) recognizes Lacoste’s lack of interest in a strict delineation between the fields of philosophy and theology, as well as the positive role of ambiguity in religious experience. It may surprise readers that C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien are as much an influence on Lacoste as Paul Ricoeur in considering the importance of narratives in reconfiguring one’s relation to the world, discussed in Chapter 4 (Phantasy). Chapter 5 (Flesh) covers another important feature of Lacoste’s work, the inseparability of the body from prayer, as well as the inextricability of the questions of man from the question of God. Chap- ter 6 (Silence) contrasts the conceptual rigor of thinking to the ethical, contemplative, and lived dimensions of silence from which it arises, dimensions which are even more primordially deserving of the title theology. Chapter 7 (Time) lays out the delicate balance of Lacoste’s eschatology between the dangers of Hegelianism and nihilism through the already/not-yet temporality of kairos. Finally, Chapter 8 (Welcoming the French God: Thinking and Thanksgiving) makes the argument that Lacoste’s strong sacramental ontology places him in the tradition of nouvelle th eologie. However, despite the compelling themes that frame this work, Wardley seems to suffer from a lack of a clear aim. Is this a book trying to explain how Lacoste relates to other contemporary thinkers, or a book trying to explain the unity of Lacoste’s thought as a whole? Is it a book introducing Lacoste to beginners, or a book giving a new interpretation to experts? Wardley wants to follow all of these threads at once, but as a result of such complexity, each escapes him at some level. Further, the meticulous amount of reference can be disorienting, especially since Wardley rarely speaks in his own voice. He opts instead to establish points through the words of other notable scholars, intricately shifting from thinker to thinker as he circles around a series of general themes. However, lacking the anchor of the author’s clear guidance, the text becomes a kind of philosophical pointillism. That is, when looking too close, one sees a patchwork of thoughts that abruptly shift from voice to voice, a series of partial conversations without direction, analysis, or conclusion. It is often unclear whether each new thinker is meant to contradict, complicate, or complement what Lacoste is trying to say. 1078 BOOK REVIEWS With a broad enough vantage point see the whole, however, one might be able to make out the larger shapes and colors that these shifting perspectives are meant to evoke. Unfortunately, such a vantage point is not easy to find. One would need to have not only a mastery of Lacoste, but also a mastery of the overall field of thinkers Wardley draws from, a tall order considering his impressive breadth of knowledge. Yet when Wardley finally does enter the fray with his own authorial voice, particularly in the conclusions to each chapter, the ideas suddenly emerge in great clarity. He sets aside his ventriloquism takes the time to unpack the concepts in his own words, connecting them in surprising lucidity. Had he included more of his own analysis throughout the chapters, particularly by setting up clear transitions between the ideas he shifts between, the fruits of his scholarship would be more available for the average reader, not only the experts. Perhaps the beginner might be best served by focusing only on these conclusions. However, here we must also acknowledge the very real limitations dictated by the circumstances of this book’s publication. Fergus Kerr relates that while Wardley was finishing this project as his doctoral thesis at University of Edinburgh, he was diagnosed with a brain tumor and died shortly thereafter.1 It is clear that this work was truly a labor of love, the last efforts of a scholar hoping to leave his legacy for those who would follow. If this is the massive scholarly undertaking at the very beginnings of his career, one can only imagine the future works Wardley would have produced, had he the luxury of time to develop his thought and research more deeply. The field is certainly the lesser for his absence. This is not a book for a beginner to Lacoste or a beginner of philosophy of religion. It is best reserved for the experts looking to find a new frame and a new contextualization of ideas they already know. However, the fruits of Wardley’s meticulous research and encyclopedic knowledge are also ripe for the plucking. With his thorough bibliography of primary and secondary sources as well as his connections to related thinkers, this book could find profitable use as an index of some of Lacoste’s central ideas. If only for this reason, its arrival promises to generate further interest in a very deserving French thinker, and is a welcome addition to our meager resources of English secondary source work. Notes 1 Kerr, Fergus, review of Praying to a French God: The Theology of Jean-Yves Lacoste by Kenneth Jason Wardley, Ashgate Publishing. New Blackfriars 95 (2014): 616–617. Boston College Stephanie Rumpza Degrees of Givenness: On Saturation in Jean-Luc Marion. By Christina M. Geschwandtner. Pp. xvi, 279, Bloomington/Indianapolis, Indiana University Press, 2014, £42.00. Following on her Reading Jean-Luc Marion: Exceeding Metaphysics (2007), Gschwandtner supplies a correctional or ‘friendly’ amendment to a basic move by Marion she applauds and endorses. Marion’s position is that Western philosophy has been deceived, intimidated, and distorted away from its own best and most authentic insights into the richness and depths of our characteristic epistemological experiences, especially in religion, but also in art, history, interpersonal love and even natural science, abandoning a multi-level and transforming or re-orienting paradigm for a flat, tinny, one-level sense of metaphysical ‘objects’ (in the Cartesian sense) that leaves the experiencing subject unchanged. The realm of ‘objects’ counts for ‘empirical reality’ where we all come together in our projects and which arbitrates our disputes; the former is a private or subjective reaction to the same that leads us away from this common ground and – at its limit – into a dream world and mad- ness. Unfortunately according to Marion, exactly the opposite is the case: all experience is emotionally colored, and those that count for us and enrich our lives are the intense or ‘peak’ experiences – closer to what lie at the base of a religious conversion or the adoption of a lifetime’s vocation – in which the ‘devoted’ fixes on an overwhelming, ravishing, and self-donating ‘gift’ with a tractor beam and is decisively re-oriented, transformed, or fulfilled by this experience. We as a culture have been seduced or intimidated away from fidelity to our own experience, filtering it through an epistemological colander that reduces it to what we are told ‘experts’ or ‘adults’ will accept as real or worth talking about. Marion’s postulation of ‘saturated phenomena’ means to call us back to courage and honesty, ‘taking back’ our most valuable world from those prestigious or intimidating cultural figures who would deprive us of it, or persuade us to keep it hidden as an embarrassing fantasy world. BOOK REVIEWS This is the ‘more radical empiricism’ phenomenology should empower us to insist and embark upon, as we explore the nature and variety of experiences that are at once transforming and conventional or banal in the sense that everyone goes through them, in which we are controlled by the ‘object’ rather than controlling it, in which our old ‘self’ is summoned by a ‘call’ towards a new self and dialectical mutuality whose exchanges exceed the world of what we currently take to be real or valuable. Gschwandtner applauds Marion’s correction of the tradition, but feels that the violence of his insistence on the ‘absolute’ or total character of such ‘saturated phenomena’ is not faithful to the variety, modulation, and interaction of the ways 1079 such phenomena can and do engage us up and down the register of our passionate or affective life. By overstating his case, or by defining ‘saturated phenomena’ exclusively by the most intense cases, he poses an unnecessary rhetorical obstacle to its proper reception. Gschwandtner hopes to remove this impediment by here ‘correcting the correction’, toning down its all-or-nothing character and sharpening its focus so that we see more clearly how Marion’s phenomenological descriptions of the historical ‘event’, the work of art, the natural object, the movement into an erotic love – as well as prayer, sacrifice, and the Eucharist – make up ‘degrees of givenness’. Heythrop College Patrick Madigan The Way: Religious Thinkers of the Russian Emigration in Paris and their Journal, 1925–1940. By Antoine Arjakovsky. Pp. xiv, 767, Notre Dame Indiana, University of Notre Dame Press, 2013, $65.00. Georges Florovsky and the Russian Religious Renaissance. By Paul L. Gavrilyuk. Pp. xvi, 297. Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2013, $75.00. Both these books are indispensable for understanding the important contribution of philosophers and theologians of the Russian emigration to modern religious thought. The first, originally published in French in 2002 and ably translated by Jerry Ryan, tells the story of The Way (Put’), a Russian-language periodical published in Paris from 1925 to 1940 under the direction of Nicolas Berdyaev, which sought to reflect on the nature of Russian identity and bring Orthodox religious thought to bear on contemporary problems. The second, a reassessment of one of the most important Orthodox theologians of the twentieth century, who developed an influential ‘neopatristic synthesis’ in reaction to the other thinkers represented in The Way, repositions Florovsky in relation to current Orthodox thinking. Arjakovsky (whose grandmother was Berdayev’s secretary) paints a vivid portrait of the refugees and exiles who ended up in Paris after the Russian Revolution of 1917. Ranging from monarchists eager to return to the good old days of imperial Russia to republicans who had initially welcomed the revolution but had been appalled by the turn it had taken, these exiles did not all share the same political or religious outlook. Some, perhaps the majority, rejected the newly re-established Moscow patriarchate, which they saw as controlled by the Soviets, and adhered to the church (the Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia) that emerged out of the Karlovtsy Synod of 1921. Those who accepted the patriarchate ranged from followers of the Eurasian movement (left-wing Orthodox nationalists) to the heirs of Solovyov and his sophiological ideas. Berdyaev adhered to none of these parties. He was not entirely negative towards the Soviet regime though he deplored its suppression of freedom. He was critical of the Eurasian movement as far too folkloristic. Despite his close co-operation with Bulgakov, he distrusted his sophiology. In theological terms he was a modernist, an approach shared by most of the contributors to The Way. Some of the new thinking they developed has been extraordinarily influential. Nicolas Afanasiev, for example, first set out his understanding of Eucharistic ecclesiology in the pages of The Way. Ecumenical dialogue also occupied a significant place. As a periodical addressed to intellectuals generally and not simply to professional theologians, The Way was unique in the Orthodox world. Not surprisingly, in view of The Way’s concern with Russian identity, the vicissitudes of the emigre community in Paris – some 72,000 by 1931 – are reflected throughout the fifteen years of the periodical’s existence. Arjakovsky analyses in fascinating detail the controversy over Bulgakov’s sophiology and the problems with the Moscow patriarchate that in 1927 led to a schism in the community, when Metropolitan Evlogy, the Russian patriarch’s exarch in Western Europe, broke off communion with Moscow and placed himself under the jurisdiction of the patriarch of Constantinople. Relations with Western Christians also had their difficulties. A dialogue between Berdyaev and Jacques Maritain (whose wife was born in Russia) began in 1925 but came to an end in 1928 when Pope Pius XI condemned the ecumenical 1080 BOOK REVIEWS movement with the publication of Mortalium Animos. Relations with Protestants were easier but not trouble-free. At the first conference of the Faith and Order movement in Lausanne Bulgakov was ordered back to his seat when he brought up the topic of the Mother of God. Yet the Russian community received substantial support from Protestants and Anglicans – The Way was published by the Paris branch of the American YMCA and the annual conferences in England of the Fellowship of St Alban and St Sergius provided a valuable opportunity for interaction with Anglican sympathisers. Besides giving a detailed history of the manner in which The Way documents the evolution of the Russian community in Paris, Arjakovsky is also interested in the journal as a locus of memory for the fifty years from its final issue in 1940 to the collapse of the Soviet system in Russia. For the Russian homeland The Way became a precious testimony to the ‘lost years’ of the Russian theological tradition. Patriarch Alexy II welcomed its publication on CD-ROM in 1998 because ‘it fills the gaps in our theological thought caused by the Revolution’ (p. 3). It does so in a complex way by countering the mythic conception of the emigration – mythic in the sense of a particular symbolic ordering of the memory – that presents the thinking of the exiles as a unified preparation for Russia’s spiritual and cultural renaissance. Yet the countering of the myth should itself ‘be understood as mytho-logical, that is, as neither purely symbolic nor purely Cartesian but rather a synthesis of both’ (p. 572). Arjakovsky concludes this brilliant, wideranging book by reflecting on the role of memory as a pathway to tradition and on the potentiality of the vision of The Way’s authors to revitalize Orthodoxy both in Russia and in the West. Gavrilyuk’s work covers the same ground from the perspective of a theologian who began as one of Berdyaev’s principal collaborators but then struck out on a path of his own. Georges Florovsky (1893–1979) is commonly regarded in the West as the chief spokesman for a normative Orthodoxy that is anti-modernist and neopatristic. In this masterly study Gavrilyuk examines the historical and theological context of Florovsky’s thinking and, in the course of showing how it developed against the background of issues hotly debated by the Russian exiles in Europe, demonstrates how sui generis it really is. A formative influence in Florovsky’s early years was Vladimir Solovyov, whose philosophy of allunity captured his youthful imagination. Much later Florovsky repudiated Solovyov (together with Solovyov’s theological heirs, Florensky, Berdyaev and Bulgakov) for having ‘attempted to build an ecclesial synthesis out of non-ecclesial experience’ (p. 102). After the Revolution he was attracted for a while by the Eurasian movement, whose members – heirs to the Slavophiles – proclaimed the need for an ‘exodus to the east’ in order to free Orthodoxy from its ‘captivity’ to the ‘RomanoGermanic’ West. His later espousal of Christian Hellenism was an exodus to a particular East, the Byzantine, a narrowing down of the broader Asiatic East of the Eurasians. In 1921 he parted company with the Eurasians, becoming ‘less interested in “saving the soul of the Russian nation” (the Eurasian focus) and more concerned with liberating twentieth-century Russian Orthodox theology from its western captivity by turning to the Greek Church Fathers’ (p. 79). This concern was to bear fruit eventually in his magnum opus, The Ways of Russian Theology (Paris 1937). Florovsky was a combative personality who developed his ideas in argument with others, or as Gavrilyuk puts it, who ‘thrived on cognitive dissonance’ (p 115). In The Ways of Russian Theology he maintains against his Russian colleagues that from the time of Peter the Great Russian theology had been dominated by a westernizing spirit, a ‘pseudomorphosis’ that had resulted in Orthodoxy’s ‘Babylonian captivity’ until it could recover its true identity through returning to the Greek Fathers. Florovsky’s expectation that his colleagues would take up his challenge was disappointed. The book was received in stony silence. The only review was a devastating critique by Berdyaev, who argued that Florovsky ‘had opposed German Romanticism with a romanticized Christian Hellenism of his own making’, had brought to bear on the problem ‘an outdated understanding of the binary opposition between East and West’, and had ‘refused to recognize the profoundly creative ways’ in which western ideas had been used in modern Russian thought (pp. 194–5). Alienated from his Russian colleagues in Paris, Florovsky spent the war years in Yugoslavia and afterwards moved to the United States, where he enjoyed a distinguished career as Dean of St Vladimir’s Seminary in New York and a professor at Harvard – though not without continuing difficulties with his Orthodox colleagues. The last part of Gavrilyuk’s book contains a very valuable discussion of the reception of Florovsky’s ideas by both western and Orthodox scholars. Three stages may be discerned in this reception, first Florovsky’s engagement with the ‘fathers’ of the Russian Religious Renaissance and his break with them in consequence of his opposition to Solovyov’s philosophical and theological heritage, second the general acceptance of his programme of a ‘return to the Fathers’ as normative for modern Orthodoxy, and third a criticism and revision of Florovsky’s historical approach. To this third stage Gavrilyuk himself makes a significant contribution. BOOK REVIEWS The two books reviewed here are written in somewhat different idioms. Arjakovsky, dismayed by the increasing authoritarianism of the Orthodox Church in Russia, enthusiastically advocates a modernist Orthodox approach and often uses continental philosophical concepts in doing so. Gavrilyuk’s dispassionate analytical style will be more familiar to Anglophone readers, but the differences are more apparent than real. Both authors share a similar theological perspective, 1081 one that – while respecting the Fathers – seeks to develop for Orthodoxy ‘a different paradigm, not merely a repristination of the ancient one’ (Gavrilyuk, p. 126). One thing that both these excellent books do is to underline the intellectual stature of Berdyaev. It is perhaps time for a renewed engagement with the thinking of this philosopher. St Stephen’s House, Oxford Norman Russell Deleuze and the Naming of God: Post-Secularism and the Future of Immanence. By Daniel Colucciello Barber. Pp. vii, 220, Edinburgh University Press, 2014, $31.20. Beginning with a reassessment of Nietzsche’s proclamation of the ‘death of God’ at the end of the 19th Century as having more to do with a reshaping of our (religious, cultural and political) imaginations and how they create the world we live in, Daniel Colucciello Barber’s book is a highly original and creative synthesis of many ‘loose ends’ within both contemporary continental thought and western (Christian) theology. Though it may strike the occasional reader as heavily invested in a theory-laden ‘insider’s’ philosophical world, the book’s claims to assess and reinvigorate our understanding of the theo-political are not without significant merit. Indeed, having reached the book’s end, I find myself both awed at the scope of his project and challenged to (re)think theology anew. I unreservedly recommend the book to the reader. From the beginning, Barber makes his intentions clear: as the name of God must be invoked in the ‘world-making’ that we do—secularization will not get the job done. Why must God then be invoked? As he immediately responds, ‘[. . .] it is with God that the act of world-making becomes separated from its power’ (p. 4), and this power, he immediately tells us, is immanence. The link between imagination and world-making, which defines immanence, it has mainly been assumed, can only be interrupted by a transcendent God—a logic that Barber’s entire book will be devoted to disrupting. Hence, at this point, we see the entrance of the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze, presented to us in order to sort out exactly what we mean by immanence, and how transcendence might simply be, for some, an ‘otherworldliness’ that has yet to be defined as God, but which is not relevant in developing immanence as a viable theological platform. Barber’s hope is that a particular use of Deleuze might rather give us a ‘discourse of the new’ that is neither Christian nor secular, but rather that displays a distinctively political character in its undoing of our given representations, such as our use of ‘Christian’ and ‘secular’ in the first place. Hence, Barber wants to challenge the very problematic definitions of ‘religion’ that continue to plague us, to go beyond them in fact. His argument, therefore, and following quickly on the heels of several continental thinkers, most notably Deleuze and Adorno, is nothing short of redefining the entire scope of theology and its self-understanding. Following this somewhat heady ride, we begin with a brief but necessary introduction (conveyed as the first chapter) centered on Heidegger and Derrida, whose musings on the tensions between identity and difference help ground the task before Barber to (re)think immanence from a theological perspective. Taking a moment to locate the argument on these grounds is what will also allow Barber to expose the radicality of a Deleuzian ‘differential immanence’ that he will take up in the chapter that immediately follows. The first two chapters, in fact, do much of the ‘hard’ work of mining the conceptual (and even ‘nonconceptual’) networks of immanence in the writings of Heidegger, Derrida and Deleuze. In short, in them we see how the ‘unthought’ gives rise to thought (something which he will return to later in his comments on Adorno) as well as the significance of the role of ‘difference’ in determining such a configuration of things. In many ways providing us with a fairly ‘standard’ readings of Deleuze on our conceptualizations of time, Barber presents how the ‘logic of time’ can be said to ‘crack’ the subject (p. 65), laying the basis for his subsequent focus on our immanent ‘failures’ that will, in reality, define us, and also contrast sharply with those theologies that would rather affix a transcendent meaning to the divine in such a way as to negate such possible openings within the subject. We are led through a wideranging discussion of Deleuze on memory, habit, temporality, ‘re-expression’ and, ultimately, toward 1082 BOOK REVIEWS a formation of an ‘imagination of suffering’ via Deleuze’s thought (p. 71). What is not resolved, at this point, however, is the relationship between God and transcendence, the focal point of the chapter that follows, Barber notes. It is here that we begin to see not only the originality of Barber’s thesis in this book, but also the contrast between his position and that of other, more ‘radically orthodox’ theologians. The critiques of immanence, and specifically Deleuze, that John Milbank and David Bentley Hart have offered, according to Barber, are not satisfactory. First going over their respective critiques of Heidegger and his account of difference, Barber then turns directly to Milbank’s criticisms of Deleuzean immanence as a form of ‘originary violence’. What he finds in this account is rather that Deleuze is not simply to be labeled, as Milbank does, as ‘nihilistic’ and ‘violent’ (p. 91) because Deleuze dismisses traditional accounts of transcendence. The merits of Deleuze’s account of immanence cannot be swept away simply by linking it to a more primordial (‘pagan’) struggle between chaos and cosmos. Analogy (and the ‘analogy of being’), which Milbank and Hart make great use of in their theologies, is an attempt to resolve difference, albeit ‘harmonously’, though it is also a denial of its own vulnerability—something which Deleuze’s account of immanence actually opens us up to in a profoundly realistic way. The process of ‘becoming-minoritarian’, which demonstrates the cracks within immanence, is the only position one can take in this world, according to Deleuze, and this is something which discloses a close relationship of the human being to suffering—the very thing that Barber is hoping to recover for his own eventual theological considerations. What Milbank et al. are actually after, Barber concludes, ‘is the imagination of a world without disturbance’ (p. 103), though this is not the world we live in, one that suffers and has cracks within its façade. In Barber’s words, ‘What is necessary [. . .] is not to patch over the cracks with an invocation of the transcendent, but rather to move into them in a more engaged manner, to make disturbance into an occasion for breaking with the present’ (p. 104). The question, in the face of the demise of traditional analogical claims to transcendence, is whether we can think immanence in theologically productive ways. He therefore turns in the next chapter to the writings of John Howard Yoder in order to provide an alternate account of how theology, in fact, could demonstrate its relevance in an immanent (political) fashion. If Milbank and Hart proceed in their theologies from the starting point of a transcendent deity understood to be rooted in its being, Yoder’s theology begins from the particularity of the person of Jesus—a sharp contrast with serious theological conclusions. As Barber frames it, ‘To understand the excess of Jesus, in Yoder’s approach, it is not necessary to find the (transcendent) ground of that excess, it is enough to follow the excess as it (immanently) emerges’ (p. 110). This is a radical break with the ‘radically orthodox’ to be sure. Yoder, in Barber’s reading, makes clear Jesus’ politics, that is, his stand against the ‘Powers’ that be, which often mask their ‘power’ in a language of transcendence (and even theological justification). Yoder, however, like Jesus, you might say, tries to think the world in a different way than it is currently conceived, and thereby to potentially transform it. What he is after is the creation of a community that can live ‘otherwise’ than according to the ‘Powers’ of this world, and to make clear that any universal claim made by Jesus is only achieved through its extreme particularity, even the particularity of a community living a life devoted to Jesus’ radical message. In Yoder’s account—and this is where Barber produces a great deal of originality through this juxtaposition of Mennonite theologian and French philosopher—Jesus’ activity is not in service of a transcendent, universalized claim, but rather is done ‘[. . .] in the name of that which is real, yet denied or dominated by the determination of the Powers’ (p. 119). Crucially, Jesus’ message is one of nonviolence, and this exposes not only the failures of the Powers of this world, but also the mistaken approach taken by those (theologians) who would fight the ‘sword’ (of the Powers that be) with the sword (of their transcendent analogies). There is a certain ‘secularity’ to Yoder’s theological reading of Jesus as well, insofar as it seeks to bring about a social revolution through its resistance to the Powers of this world. Yet, echoing the Deleuzean undertones of the book, Barber concludes that ‘It is important to note the logical inseparability of Yoder’s Jesus with that which emerges contingently, with that which becomes’ (p. 123). Hence, Yoder’s theology can be explicitly understood as a certain practice of Deleuzean immanence, one that likewise shares in a particular minoritarian view of its social being. Having provided a theological model by which to understand these Deleuzean implications for theological thought, Barber brings his discussion of Deleuzean immanence into the proximity of Theodor Adorno’s negative dialectic so that he might more fully flush out the implications which Adorno’s thought holds for the re-envisioning of relations between subjectivity and objectivity. More specifically, Adorno’s thought provides the BOOK REVIEWS possibility of mediation between subject and object from within an immanent framework, that is, in a way that need not always return to a ‘positively’ established identity in the end (read as: Milbank’s notion of transcendence, etc.). Adorno’s focus on ‘nonidentity’ through a negative dialectic means that immanence remains ‘fluid’ (p. 149) and a more proper model for theological operations. Such ideas will also lead Barber to work with the acceptance within theological thought of such ‘negative’ thoughts as the ‘nonconceptual’, the ‘unthought’, blindness and failure—very fruitful categories for thinking through the reality of one’s embodied (‘immanent’) faith, I would add. Barber, for his part, begins to think the ‘nonphilosophical’, along with Adorno and Deleuze, as a movement toward recognizing the presence of shame and depression within the philosophical, as they both undo philosophy and point toward a ‘metaphilosophical’ understanding. Through a contemplation of senselessness and suffering, Barber paves the way for a theological comprehension of the world as one that can more genuinely transform the world through its embracing of the contingency of existence. Barber’s final chapter appeals to the possible conditions for the rise of an ‘immanent belief’, though not one that is formulated in a way that is wholly incompatible with the Christian narrative. Rather, in his words, ‘[. . .] immanent belief is irreducible to the opposition of secular and religious by being opposed to the transcendence involved in both’ (p. 179). Instead, Barber is seeking a transformation of the immanent world that takes the particularity of life seriously, including its suffering, in order to affirm life despite our suffering, and not to try to translate suffering into a prefabricated ‘sense’. Suffering, within immanent life, should ‘problematize our thought’ (p. 181), and anything less than this would be a capitulation to false notions of transcendence meant to placate (‘harmonize’) the inherent differences within our world. Beyond this, Barber begins to provide some original and critical ways in which to think this ‘discourse of the new’ that he has pointed us toward, providing helpful remarks on both temporality and how art ‘displaces’ us from ourselves. Much in accord with what he has presented us with so far, he suggests that ‘Art generates new forms by thinking from the senselessness of dispersal, rather than by imposing forms of coherence upon dispersal’ (p. 190). Such a position dictates that Barber will argue for the need, at times, to work 1083 ‘against communication’, which, by its nature, tries to bring things together so that we might have a shared intelligibility—though such a thing often also includes certain political undertones to which we are typically deaf. To ‘create real beings’, and to reshape the world we live in, he offers, we must at times ‘break with’ society as it is structured (p. 198), as it ‘communicates’ itself amongst its members. Barber will as such, along with Deleuze, try to think utopia as a form of political resistance, as a constructed ‘fabulation’—like a fable or a story, in this sense, what we ourselves construct—but also as iconic, or that which points to a reality beyond itself. As a highly original series of considerations made in resistance to the normal order of things, but also as that which perhaps more closely approximates the theological legacy of the Christian narrative, Barber discloses how the icon produces an immanent reality that we ourselves create, our own ‘fabulation’ that we can utilize in order to reshape our world. Regarding this world, in fact, he will suggest that ‘Its otherness resides not in transcendence but in the novel relations that emerge in the icon [. . .], in the interstices that constitute its fabulation’ (p. 204). Such remarks prompt him, in the end, to conclude that, ‘It is not enough to say that the future is “to-come”. We must give the future a place – indeed, as many places as we can imagine. We must fabulate the future into existence, here and now, through the creation of icons’ (p. 216). A completely unique eschatological vision of the world—one that is purely immanent to what already goes on in the world. Barber’s vision for reshaping theology—which ultimately means reshaping our world—is a profound summons to rethink the coordinates of theology tout court. I highly recommend this book to anyone well versed enough in contemporary philosophical and theological trends to follow its densely-packed formulations. Though I found myself, in the end, wondering about the absence from this work of J€urgen Moltmann’s theology, which, for its part, steadfastly likewise incorporated Adorno’s negative dialectical method and rejected false notions of transcendence in favor of a focus on the particularity of the suffering, crucified God, I choose to see such an omission as merely a limitation of the declared scope of the book, something that more than succeeds on the strength of its own argumentation. Loyola University Chicago Colby Dickinson 1084 BOOK REVIEWS Out of This World: Deleuze and the Philosophy of Creation. By Peter Hallward. Pp. 199, London/NY, Verso, 2006, Paperback £14.99. The philosophy of Gilles Deleuze is fundamentally theological. This is the claim of Peter Hallward’s new book. Hallward takes creation and redemption to be at the core of Deleuze’s thought and supports this claim through an examination of a dazzling array of Deleuze’s writings, from his two books on cinema to his books and essays on painting, literature, psychoanalysis, and, of course, philosophy. Although Deleuze proclaimed himself an atheist, Hallward argues that the logic of Deleuze’s thought is undeniably religious. This is a novel approach to Deleuze’s work. Hallward takes Deleuze seriously as a major philosopher, but he also critically engages with his thought – in contrast to the typical star-gazing approach that characterizes much of the English language literature on Deleuze. Further, Hallward’s approach markedly differs from the last attempt to read Deleuze through a theological lens: Philip Goodchild argued that Deleuze was in need of a theological supplement for his thought to be relevant to theology. For Hallward, no supplement is needed: Deleuze’s writings are all about theology, all of the time. Hallward is a young British philosopher who rocketed to the top echelons of Anglophone Continental philosophy with his very solid – and felicitously timed – book introducing Alain Badiou to English language audiences. Badiou’s interpretation of Deleuze has clearly influenced Hallward’s new book: both go against the pieties of Deleuze scholarship by reading Deleuze as much closer to Heidegger than Deleuze himself would admit. However, the location of theological concerns at the center of Deleuze’s thought is Hallward’s own innovation. Hallward’s prose is crisp and his points clear, supported by a thorough familiarity with Deleuze’s oeuvre – although, unavoidably perhaps, Deleuze’s own notorious obscurity is only mitigated, not eliminated, in Hallward’s discussion. Creation and redemption are the two themes which animate Deleuze, and a focus on these themes transforms the apparent complexity of Deleuze’s thought into two simple points, Hallward claims. First, Deleuze translates the Heideggerian conception of ‘Being’ into creativity. Being is unlimited creativity, and creativity is all there is. But, the world we ordinarily see around us consists in created things, in what Deleuze calls the ‘actual.’ The created is dependent on creating – as the present-at-hand is dependent on the ready-tohand for Heidegger (the hammer dependent on hammering). When we look at the world around us, we see created things: matter, objects, existent creatures. These are not what there really is. There really is only the ‘virtual’ (so named not to suggest fantasy but to suggest potentiality, as in virtues). This is the realm of creating, not created. Creating is not something that we can see directly, it is not presentable. Differences at the level of the actual reflect deeper differences, differences at the level of the virtual, of the creative process of differentiation. Hallward associates this understanding of creation with Neoplatonic theology and points to John Scottus Eriugena, Meister Eckhart, and Jacob Boehme as precursors of Deleuze’s account of creation (Hallward also has a particular interest in resonances with Islamic Neoplatonism). There is a single creative force which produces all of the actual, the entire world that we ordinarily see. All of the actual is the same sort of thing, all participates in absolute creation. The virtual serves as a ‘conceptual equivalent’ for God; it is the pure creative potential out of which individual things and creatures emerge. Individuation creates the actual out of the virtual, bridging the material and the spiritual worlds. Hallward – not especially convincing on this point – tries to differentiate Deleuze from Neoplatonists by arguing that Neoplatonists always leave room for an unknowable God at a distance from creation while Deleuze identifies creativity with being, leaving no remainder in which a God could hide. Trapped in the world of the actual, Deleuze identifies means by which we can escape to the virtual, means by which creation can be ‘redeemed.’ Our ordinary concerns need to be reoriented not towards another world but towards our own world truly understood, as virtual. Through literature, art, and cinema we can be taken out of the material, actual world and into the spiritual, virtual world of pure creating. Hallward is careful to note that this movement is not an ‘ascent’ but rather involves ‘intensity’ within the plane of immanence, in Deleuze’s terminology. Although Proust and Truffaut help, it is philosophy itself which is the best technique for redemption because it starts in the abstract, in the world of concepts. By allowing her concepts to multiply, the philosopher can finally free herself from the material world. Hallward’s judgment of Deleuze is ultimately negative. Deleuze’s focus on redemption takes us away from the world, pushes us towards contemplative rather than active life. Hallward suggests that Deleuze’s thought does not equip us to resist BOOK REVIEWS the evils of global capitalism – if anything, it enables the ‘oppressors’ by commending new technologies of speed and mobility that repress resistance. Hallward charges that Deleuze’s absolute privileging of the virtual avoids the most important issue: the relationship between the actual and the virtual. Reading Deleuze as a theologian is a novel, provocative, and largely successful strategy. It is a strategy which could be pushed much further. Hallward’s discussions of Christian and Muslim Neoplatonists are cursory; he has much more to say about the similarities of Deleuze’s work to the philosophy of Spinoza and Bergson. But Hallward’s work opens the door for further, more richly theological inquiries – for instance, into the relationship between Deleuze and von Balthasar or between Deleuze and Milbank. Finally, Hallward seems to overlook the most captivating consequence of his reading. If Hallward is correct, Deleuze’s work is structurally identical to what Dominique Janicaud called the ‘theological 1085 turn’ in French phenomenology. Claude Romano, Jean-Luc Marion, Michel Henry, and Emmanuel Levinas each evince the same logic that Hallward attributes to Deleuze. In each case, the Heideggerian problematic is adopted, with the present-at-hand secularized and a variant of the ready-to-hand sanctified, and ultimately deified. Each takes the work of phenomenology to be identifying mechanisms to move from the ontic, material world to a deeper, holier realm – through the event, love, the gift, affect, or saying. And, in each case, the normative force (or quasi-erotic lure) attributed the deeper level can only be justified through an appeal to theology, whether explicit or implicit. If Deleuze can be understood in this way, he looses much of his mystique, but enters into a conversation that has proved fruitful for both philosophy and theology. University of Indiana at South Bend Vincent Lloyd Ontology after Ontotheology: Plurality, Event and Contingency in Contemporary Philosophy. By Gert-Jan van der Heiden. Pp. ix, 340, Pittsburg, Duquesne University Press, 2014, $30.00. The problems of onto-theology (of defining it, critiquing it, overcoming it, avoiding it) have preoccupied many philosophers of note, not least of all Martin Heidegger. In this book Gert-Jan van der Heiden (henceforth, VDH) sets out to describe how a number of recent European philosophers – Giorgio Agamben, Alain Badiou, Quentin Meillassoux, JeanLuc Nancy, and Claude Romano – have developed ontologies that avoid, or at least hope to avoid, onto-theology. As soon as one scans that list of names, a certain amount of incredulity sweeps in. After all, Romano and Nancy seem a far cry from Badiou and Meillassoux. The former work firmly in the phenomenological or hermeneutical tradition as it has been redacted in recent French thought by Levinas, Derrida, and Marion while the latter begin by rejecting that tradition as mere correlationalism (Meillassoux’s term) in favor of other starting points, e.g. Badiou’s appeal to set theory. And Agamben seems to fit in neither camp: he is more often seen as working out a kind of social theory rather than ontology. VDH discerns the implausibility of his grouping and addresses the problem head on the first pages of the book. Recognizing the gap between the hermeneutical-phenomenological approaches of Nancy and Romano and the speculative approach of Badiou and Meillassoux, he argues that despite these obvious differences, the focus on ‘the event’ that one finds on both sides of the divide indicate that they are all part of an attempt to develop an ontology without ontotheology. Whence, despite the vast gulf separating, e.g., Badiou from Romano, if one accepts the premise that they are both working on a common problem – ontology without ontotheology – one can profitably read them together. This does not, however, mean that they agree but that despite disagreements regarding the solution, they are working on the same problem. VDH’s introduction to the book begins with a short discussion of what Heidegger means by ‘ontotheology.’ There is some debate about what exactly Heidegger had in mind in ontotheology, but most commentators agree that it involves positing a single unifying principle as the ground of metaphysics whereby being is approached and analyzed in terms of this single privileged being (typically, but not always, God). VDH cannot rest happily with this understanding of ontotheology insofar as it would enable one to wonder whether the privileging of the event isn’t a revanchist ontotheology despite itself. Whence, VDH claims that while the positing of a single principle may be necessary for ontotheology, it is not sufficient; for a full-fledged ontotheology the former must be combined with the principle of sufficient reason (16). As VDH sees it, the problem of onto-theology is that it subsumes everything under the principle of sufficient reason. The various exercises in ontology without ontotheology analyzed in this book focus their attention on that point. According to VDH, ‘the 1086 BOOK REVIEWS event’, as understood by these thinkers, is precisely that which escapes the principle of sufficient reason, and therefore escapes ontotheology. When VDH claims that ‘contingency is the secret of the event’ (17) he means that the event evades the principle of sufficient reason. So, even if these philosophers overly privilege the event, ontologies of the event nonetheless provide us with a model of ontology without ontotheology. In any case, following his introduction, VDH’s work begins in earnest with a succession of readings of the above named philosophers. Insofar as VDH is dealing with so many thinkers, I won’t attempt to summarize his discussion of each one separately; instead, I will content myself with some general remarks. Not surprisingly, VDH’s approach to each thinker is guided by his account of ontology without ontotheology and each reading endeavors to show that Badiou, Romano, whoever, offers a different iteration on the theme. Along the way there are also comparisons between the figures, as when he contrasts Badiou’ s reading of Plato with that of Nancy. Indeed, Plato – and to a lesser extent Aristotle – is a constant presence in the book. The historical conversation that VDH engages in is one of the highlights of this book both for its own sake and insofar as it serves as a reminder that the attempt to do ontology without ontotheology is in constant dialogue with the ‘ontotheological’ tradition of Western metaphysics. The above summary suggests three questions that any evaluation of the book should address. First, is VDH’s presentation of ontotheology accurate? Second, is his reading of each philosopher accurate? Third, is his argument for the claim that contingency is the secret of the event plausible; must we equate a sufficient reason with a necessary one, or in other words, could not one adduce sufficient reason for a contingent event? I will leave those questions for the reader to answer on their own: each question opens up a barrel of monkeys that could not be contained in a brief book review. This is to VDH’s credit: any disagreements one may want to register with his readings and analysis would be sufficiently technical that airing them would require more space than a review allows. Overall, the book is successful in prosecuting VDH’s major thesis, and introduces a helpful way of thinking about the philosophers with which he is concerned. That said, one should not assume that the chapters in this book could function as summaries or introduction to the philosophers they address. The arguments and readings are much too subtle for that purpose and VDH’s goals go far beyond the provision of an introductory survey of contemporary philosophy. Whence, the book is both expository and argumentative. While the book succeeds admirably at what it attempts to do, throughout my reading of the text, I found myself wondering what was at stake in ontology after onto-theology. Both Badiou and Agamben supplement their work in ontology with political philosophy, broadly construed. Likewise, Romano offers a reconfigured notion of subjectivity that is, presumably, more amicable to religious experience than the autonomous subject of modern onto-theology. Does VDH’s critique of Badiou’s ontology suggest lines for a critique of his political works? Likewise, what is the relationship between Agamben’s account of the event and his project for a genealogy of western politics? Does Romano’s new notion of subjectivity have any practical implications? To be sure, it is churlish to chide a work on ontology for not addressing questions only tangential to the topic, but at the same time, addressing these questions might help the reader see why these fairly arcane topics are worth disputing at all. The last chapter, entitled ‘An Ethos of Contingency,’ suggested that these questions, or similar ones, might be addressed but it doesn’t quite do that; instead it admirably summarizes the results and veers into an interesting reading of Plato’s myth of Er. The reading of the myth of Er is, as I said, interesting, as are the accounts of Plato strewn throughout the book. If VDH had organized his text slightly differently, around the different readings of Plato offered by the philosophers in question, it might have had a wider readership. In any case, specialists in continental metaphysics will profit from a careful study of this book. Texas Woman’s University, Denton, Texas Brian Harding Barbarism. By Michel Henry, translated by Scott Davidson. Pp. xxviii, 148, London/NY, Continuum, 2012, £13.89. ‘We are entering into barbarism’ is the first line of Michel Henry’s incisive critique of late modern culture recently translated into English, entitled simply as Barbarism. The book itself reads more like a manifesto, both in size and tone, than a rig- orous academic treatise. But those familiar with Henry’ many publications will find much here to enjoy. What is typical of every theme Henry takes up is his uncompromising critique of naturalism, biologism, mechanistic metaphysics and modern BOOK REVIEWS technology, each of which designates one of the ever novel avatars of what Henry names the ‘Galilean apriori’ (i.e. Galileo’s scientific revolution). La barbarie, first released in 1987, is a timely translation because it continues to resonate with us today. In Henry’s mind nothing has really changed since 1987, except that the pernicious discourse of the ‘science of mastery and conquest’ that lives within the the environs of the event of modernity has continued to give increase to technology’s dehumanizing power; science is more capable now than ever of permitting technology the capacity to reduce the human being to a thing—this he indicates in a 2000 preface to the second edition. With every year that passes, his book is ever more relevant, indeed. The adjective ‘apocalyptic’ can best capture the essence of Henry’s project in this slim volume of some 130 pages. Among the many apocalyptic theologies that enjoy a wider readership, from Moltmann to Balthasar to Caputo and Derrida, the version found in La barbarie is decidedly more condemnatory of the present age, and its idols of technology and science. Even television comes under the knife of Henry’s sharp and critical analysis (it is sophistry; even often ‘idiotic,’ which is a rather generous translation of the French word null, p.141). Henry’s work will, of course, enter into explicit theological terrain in the 1990s, and so the reader shall have to wait a few years to see how the Johannine apocalypse is on full display there, in Henry’s impressive theological vision of the ‘world.’ But here, under the way of life that is the crisis of Galilean modernity, what is at stake is the living ‘underground’ each of us possesses as our innermost essence. The underground force each of us feels when it tugs at our hearts from deep within, even though we cannot see it, is our subjectivity: my feeling of myself as I crush against myself, all the while never being able to escape myself in that auto-affection. This inner disclosure of myself to myself is invisible, nocturnal and thus, as the conclusion indicates, is an indestructible, if incognito, feeling of life that gives rise to any cultural accomplishment at all, whether it is art, religion, economics, media or scientific discovery itself. But modernity is a menace to humanity precisely because it seeks to eliminate the subjectivity of the subject. It is for this very reason that the revolution of science ‘is also a revolution of the human being’ insofar as it eliminates humanity therein (p. 2). Henry’s project is ambitious because it is both a critique of contemporary incarnations of barbarism and a genealogy of its inception; it is none other than Galileo himself who is chiefly responsible for the age of science, for we inhabit a world that is 1087 thoroughly in his shadow. This is especially true of the university, an institution to which Henry devotes the last chapter, where the ‘destruction of the university’ continues in proportion to the degree science, and especially technology, are prioritized at the expense of the acquisition of knowledge carried out in the idiom of the humanities. But just as important was the effort on the part of university Presidents and administration to reduce the role of the professor by increasing his hours (workload), to suppress his voice in university councils and to hire unqualified professors; above all, the destruction of the university comes at the hands of adminstrators who burden faculty with too many work hours and course loads, so now many faculty now have no time to think and write (p. 124). And the humanities themesleves are dissolving into sub-topics of scientific analysis; the worst case is that of philosophy, in which it is being replaced slowly but surely by scientific psychology and positivism (p. 131). The principally disastrous problem of science, outlined most basically in chapter 3, is that it detaches the objective from the subjective. Take the analysis of colours. Scientific method aims to look at colours entirely apart from the subjective experience of them. The sense of ‘red,’ from the perspective of science, descends into the complex web of material processes and causation theory. What science accomplishes, therefore, is the now de rigueur reduction of all knowledge to the objective sphere, to the neglect of the subjective life in which all knowledge is in fact rooted. This scientific process belongs to the more basic process of abstraction. Hence, ‘the scientific attempt to reduce the lifeworld to a world of idealities and physical-mathematical abstractions is based on the prior illusion that the sensible properties of the world are its own and belong to it and that, since colour is in nature and not in the mind, its natural being can be grasped by a more refined analysis than that of perception, by a physical analysis’ (p. 40). There are thus two worlds: the lifeworld of my subjectivity and the world of science that belongs wholly to the sphere of objectivity. The two never meet, for the subject is the unthematizable transcendental foundation for the latter. But the crisis of modernity is that it does away with this duality in that it privileges the latter at the utter expense of the former. This is the ‘sickness of life’ insofar as life sometimes succumbs to selfcontradiction; it gives birth to that which tries to eliminate it (pp. 60-3). Henry would like to drive the world of science back to its source, the subjectivity of the lifeworld, whereas science would like to proceed from the lifeworld to its own world of objective analysis 1088 BOOK REVIEWS and neutral knowledge—and with that movement abandon the lifeworld altogether. This is the ideology barbarism, and the two great ideologies are the materialisms of Freud and Marx (pp. 90-3). Of further interest to the reader, in this regard, is Henry’s constant retrieval of the ‘growth’ and ‘praxis’ of the subjective ground of the body that lies outside of all naturalistic materialism. Too often the ideologies of barbarism reduce the body to its various parts and molecular structures. But the body, for Henry, is never void of a basic drive or feeling (here Nietzsche and Descartes’ work on the pas- sions of the soul would be in the background, not least Husserl’s emphasis on flesh, Leib). This expression, Corpspropriation is translated by Scott Davidson as ‘Bodily-ownness,’ which is smooth enough for a difficult French conception of the subjective body that Henry prioritizes (especially in chapter 2). There is much to learn here from Henry and the book should be read by philosphers and theologians alike, especially as Henry’s reputation continues to grow in Anglophone destinations. Mater Dei Institute, Dublin Joseph Rivera Between the Canon and the Messiah: The Structure of Faith in Contemporary Continental Thought. By Colby Dickinson. Pp. 266, London: Bloomsbury, 2013, $37.95. Despite what the title suggests, the book is about neither the canon nor the Messiah but about abstract and formal structures of canonicity and the messianic. The key phrase of the book’s title is found in the subtitle: ‘The Structure of Faith in Contemporary Continental Thought.’ One should not expect to find detailed discussions of competing canons (e.g. Septuagint vs Masoretic canons) or how these canons influence (or were influenced by) understandings of who is – or isn’t – the Messiah. Our author tells us that his goal is to articulate the ‘oscillation between normative, institutional structures of tradition [the canonic] and those accompanying forces that seek to undo their dominant narrative [the messianic]’ (2). While not true of all philosophers working in the continental tradition, it seems fairly uncontroversial to say that variations on this theme (i.e. the interruption of totalizing structures – be they metaphysical, epistemic, political or what have you—by something that undermines, overcomes or escapes them) have animated continental philosophy since Kierkegaard sat down to critique Hegel. Indeed, resistance to totalizing structures is perhaps the default position of continental philosophy: once you are on the look-out for this theme, you find versions of it all over the place. This text is particularly helpful as an exposition of how this general theme develops in the work of scholars and topics of contemporary interest: Agamben, Assmann, Benjamin, Butler, Derrida, Ricouer, Scholem, and Taubes. The book is divided into two parts, with two chapters in each part; the body of the text is framed by a general introduction and conclusion. The first part is entitled ‘Between Theology and Philosophy’; the second part is entitled ‘The Radical Hermeneutics of Theology.’ In general, the first part is concerned with showing how some concepts generally thought of as being theological (messian- ism, for example) migrated into philosophy or vice versa. This is a story with a long history in the 20th century (the names L€owith and Blumenburg should suffice to indicate what I have in mind) that our author doesn’t discuss; the reader can decide for themselves the merits of this omission. The second part seeks to develop a ‘radical hermeneutics’ that would answer some questions raised by this kind of political theology. Here we are introduced to the work of Jan Assmann and given a more detailed reading of Walter Benjamin. As part two develops, Judith Butler and Paul Riceour are added to the mix. The first chapter of the book introduces the central concepts of the canonic and the messianic through a discussion of Jacob Taube’s account of St. Paul’s antinomianism. From there, the author moves to a discussion of first Derrida and then Agamben. Not surprisingly, he finds that major parts of Derrida’s thought can be described in terms of the interruption of canonic by the messianic. Over all, the reading of Derrida on offer here doesn’t break new ground: while presenting the major outlines of Derrida’s thinking on the relevant points, it doesn’t dig deep or offer much in the way of a new reading of Derrida. When our author turns to Agamben, however, things get a little more interesting. If for Derrida there are only representations, nothing outside the text, Agamben argues for the possibility of experiencing a presence beyond representation (84). While referring to this as an ‘irresolvable tension’ between Derrida and Agamben, I don’t think that this phrasing does full justice to the seriousness of the disagreement; Agamben’s position can easily be interpreted as lapsing into exactly the kind of metaphysics of presence Derrida spent his career critiquing. This is less a tension than it is an exclusive disjunction: they cannot both be right. The tension between BOOK REVIEWS Derrida and Agamben in part one creates a kind of Gordian knot the untying of which leads not to mastery of Asia, but ‘a new way to approach an aporia of existence’ (85). This aporia leads us the hermeneutical work of part two: radical hermeneutics should enable us to untie the knot (rather than cut it) without losing tension. The pace picks up dramatically here, pulling at the knot from all sides; we are treated to a reading of Assmann and Benjamin in chapter three, Ricouer and Butler (with a shout out to Levinas) in chapter four. The untying culminates in the advocacy of a turn towards ‘canonical forms that admit their own failures, that side with the victims and oppressed of history, and that denounce other more violent canonical forms’ (205). I found this conclusion both a bit disappointing and predictable. I was disappointed by the pairing of the mea culpa of penitence and the tuae maxima culpa of denunciation. Beating my breast ought not to be preparatory for beating someone else’s and alliance with historical victims does not preclude the creation of new victims. It is very easy for the victim and their champions to become victimizers; indeed, the work of R. Girard (briefly alluded to on 61) shows us that victimizers typically think they are defending themselves or others from a villain. The scapegoat, after all, is an innocent (or at least, no more guilty than the others) wrongly blamed as the cause of the evils afflicting the community. If Girard’s reading is right, the scapegoat is a victim of violence sanc- 1089 tioned by the defense of the victims! In light of this, I would argue that the denunciation of others’ violence in the end of the sentence undoes the regret for past violence in the sentence’s beginning. I found the conclusion predicable insofar as it is an instance of that generalized continental theme I spoke of earlier. Indeed, as soon as the author explains what he means by Canonical and Messianic, anyone with passing familiarity with the tradition knew the jig was up: of course the Messianic would interrupt the Canonic, and of course we should prefer open, fallible, canons to closed totalizing ones. If I found the conclusion to chapter four a bit disappointing and predictable, the conclusion to the book as a whole is more exciting and surprising. Here, relying on a short presentation Agamben gave to the clergy of Paris, Dickinson sketches an argument for the Church’s messianic vocation of disrupting the canonical structures of later modern neo-liberalism. Following upon this, Dickinson indicates that he would like to follow up this largely structural discussion with historical and exegetical studies of actual cannons. Both these points suggest promising future research. All in all, this book will be of interest to philosophers and theologians working in the area of contemporary continental social theory associated with the work of Agamben and his circle. Texas Woman’s University Brian Harding Nature and Grace: A New Approach to Thomistic Ressourcement. By Andrew Dean Swafford. Pp. xiv, 205, Cambridge, James Clarke, 2015, $25.00. This is a fascinating study of the cultural fashions that have influenced approaches to the nature/grace relationship. It is agreed by all that in the present economy of sin and grace, man is intended for the beatific vision, though strictly speaking the latter is above and in excess of man’s ‘natural’ faculties. Unfortunately Enlightenment and Revolutionary Europe had ‘hijacked’ reason, flattening it into the disengaged study of necessary processes or a tool of social reform and control. ‘Natural’ man was defined not only as no abstraction, but in fact as the only reality; an alienation from his supernatural call was introduced as the latter was interpreted as an other-worldly wish-fulfilment, ideological compensation, and the abandonment and betrayal of his only true condition and proper aspiration. The victim of hostile positivistic philosophy as well as anti-clerical political policies, the Church tended to become complicit in accepting a sharp division between man’s natural and supernatural call. Henri de Lubac became famous for questioning what he felt to be an excessive and pernicious concession, and one unfaithful to St. Thomas Aquinas, whose works were invoked for making this distinction. De Lubac would move for the ‘retrieval’ of a more encompassing view of reason, and for a recognition of the only satisfying basis for a true ‘humanism’ in man’s supernatural call, though the latter is also clouded by sin. Actually as Swafford shows, de Lubac went too far in practically effacing the natural/supernatural distinction in St. Thomas. Although ‘natural man’ remains ‘hypothetical’ in the present concrete economy, the distinction between his natural species characteristics and his supernatural privilege through grace remains valid, helpful, and even necessary in approaching certain questions. We are thus witnessing a correction to de Lubac’s 1090 BOOK REVIEWS emphasis in the work of contemporary Thomists including Lawrence Feingold and Steven Long. Still, the attempt to integrate a ‘natural’ view of man with a ‘Christocentric’ view of his origin and destiny retains its conceptual interest and urgency. Swafford proposes the work of the 19th-century German theologian Matthias Scheeben, and in par- ticular the introduction of the Logos and divine life not only into Christ’s human nature with the Incarnation, but into the human race as a whole, as the most solid basis for a unitary account of our twin dispensations. Heythrop College Patrick Madigan John Paul II to Aristotle and Back Again: A Christian Philosophy of Life. By Andrew Dean Swafford. Pp. xiii, 83, Eugene, OR, Wipf & Stock, 2015, $13.00. This short book (77 pages of text) grew out of a talk Swafford gave on Pope John Paul II during the week of his canonization in 2014. It explains how the Pope’s ‘Theology of the Person’ builds upon and extends Aristotle’s philosophical foundation for the good life in his division of the soul and theory of the virtues as habits of proper schooling to hit the ‘mean’ presented by practical reason, thereby suffusing the soul with a greater overall satisfaction then if the passions operate without direction. The natural virtues gesture towards the existence of an ‘unmoved mover’ which is the supreme substance (but not the creator of the universe, because for Aristotle the universe is eternal and needs no creator), the contemplation, and hence union which would give us our purest and longest-sustainable satisfaction, but this is difficult to attain for those who do not have sufficient leisure time. Swafford shows how Aristotle’s philosophical doctrine is complemented and filled out by Christian revelation, specifically by Pope John Paul’s ‘Theology of the Person’. Christian faith allows us to identify the highest substance as also the creator of the universe, all of which is good, and as a person who can (and desires to) enter into relations with other persons. A person is someone who can issue or receive a ‘call’, and offer his or her self in response. Proper training in prayer opens up this relation, and also brings us to engage in a ‘spiritual hygiene’ in response to make ourselves more like God and worthy of his friendship and providence. This builds on the natural virtues, but should extend beyond them to a hearkening to the Christian call. The possibility of falling short or not responding to this personal call opens up the topic of sin, and Swafford is perspicacious and specific about how the ‘seven deadly sins’ should register on our radar screen as we engage in ‘spiritual hygiene’, since their first and primary effect is to interrupt or injure this relationship with God. Here God’s coming towards us through his Son should provoke and empower the periodic conversion experience we must be willing to go through, as well as give us a clearer model of the ‘God’ whom we are trying to emulate. Swafford mixes personal experiences with clear theoretical insights to powerful effect for the ‘synthesis’ of natural virtue and Christian faith that will be the best practical foundation to lead us towards happiness. This would be an excellent book for students in their final year of high school to work through, as it provides much material for reflection. Heythrop College Patrick Madigan