A GOD OF ONE'S OWN: RELIGION'S CAPACITY FOR PEACE AND POTENTIAL FOR VIOLENCE by Ulrich Beck

DOI:10.1111/j.1741-2005.2011.01462.x

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A DICTIONARY OF PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION edited by Charles Taliaferroand Elsa Marty, Continuum, London and New York, 2010, pp. xxx + 286,£19.99

KEY TERMS IN PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION by Raymond J. VanArragon,Continuum, London and New York, 2010, pp. vii + 158, £12.99 pbk

The titles of these books may give the impression that they attempt thesame task. They do not. The dictionary pages are set in two columns andmost definitions, whether of terms (e.g. aseity, dharma, doubt, hell, languagegames, natural law, everlasting . . .), personal names (e.g. Al-Ghazali, Bergson,Bultman, Epictetus, Kant, Mencius, Wittgenstein . . .), philosophical systems orpositions and religions (e.g. Christianity, Existentialism, Gnosticism, Islam,Jainism, Occasionalism, Neo-Platonism, Process Philosophy, Rationalism,Realism . . .) occupy a column or less. The entries, by different hands, are iden-tified only in the acknowledgements and by the name of the writer rather thanby topic so that it is more difficult than it need have been to discover who wrotewhat.

As properly becomes a dictionary, the entries do not presume to be controversialbut give the generally accepted meaning or basic information. The entries forMartin Buber and for existence give a flavour of what to expect: ‘Martin Buber(1878–1965). Buber stressed the primacy of personal over against impersonalrelations, which he formulated in terms of “I-You” or “I-Thou” relations, ratherthan “I-It”. The relation to God is a high form of the “I-Thou” relations. In1925 he translated the Hebrew Bible into German, in collaboration with FranzRosenzweig in Frankfurt.’ There follows a list of some of his publications. Thatseems to me to be a good brief definiton for someone who knows him only byname – and, whatever about the reviewer, the user of a dictionary usually consultsit to discover the meaning of an unfamiliar word. The entry for Existence reads:Some philosophers treat ‘existence’ as a property and distinguish between theproperties of existing contingently and existing necessarily. Other philosophersresist thinking of ‘existence’ as a property and claim that it is dispensable in ourdescriptions and explanations of the world; e.g. rather than affirm ‘lions exist’,we should say ‘there are lions’. In each case, there is evidently more to say butwhat is said is appropriate to a dictionary.

Most of the entries that I was competent to check seemed to me to be goodalthough, inevitably, there are some oversights. The entry for Robert Boyle omitsthe fact that his most important and enduring discovery was the relation betweenpressure and volume in an inert gas, and the list of Avicenna’s work ought tohave included The Book of Scientific Knowledge. ‘These defintions, as the editorswrite, are only the beginning of philosophical exploration’ (p. x). There is agood introduction, a useful chronology and a very valuable thematic bibliography(pp. 253–85).

Unlike A Dictionary, Key Terms is a set of essays by a single author. Inthe former the entry for ‘naturalism’ takes up less than half a column but in

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Key Terms an entire page; ‘agnosticism’ in the first is half a column; in thesecond a page. Some essays, for instance, the ‘Kalam cosmological’ argumentruns through four pages. A Dictionary tells how the term ‘ontological argument’is used; in Key Terms there is a seven page discussion of the idea. The books,then, serve very different purposes as do dictionaries and encyclopaedias. Severalessays in Key Terms are in themselves interesting and illuminating contributionsto contemporary debate, some are closer to being simply definitions (the entryon ‘Omnipotence’ is close to being a definition of the term with an addendumabout God’s foreknowledge and freewill) but the entire collection is an excellentintroduction to, and discussion of, contemporary questions in the philosophy ofreligion.

GARRETT BARDEN

NATURA PURA : ON THE RECOVERY OF NATURE IN THE DOCTRINE OFGRACE by Steven A. Long, Fordham University Press, 2010, pp. 282, $65.00

Henri de Lubac’s hugely influential Surnaturel served to turn up the volume in thetwentieth-century on what has been a perennial discussion in Christian theology,namely the relation of grace to nature and its amalgamate theological excursus.Prof. Steven Long argues that, contrary to the thesis of de Lubac, there is forSt. Thomas, in addition to the supernatural end of beatitude, a natural end thatdefines the species of human nature. Natura Pura is a loaded and immediatelycontroversial title; Long grabs the bull by the horns in arguing the thesis that purenature discloses ‘the proximate, proportionate, natural end from which the speciesof man is derived’ (8), and also that the human person could without injusticehave been created for this natural end alone, in a state of pure nature. For Long,the necessity of this thesis arises from the intelligibly and integrity of the naturalorder in its own right. The Thomist tradition has always, maintains Long, insistedthat the gift of creation has its own theonomic character considered in precisionfrom grace.

The book proceeds in two movements: the first chapter calls attentionto the teaching of St. Thomas regarding the theonomic character of nature andthe natural law. The following three chapters head off significant challenges tothe author’s thesis regarding the intelligibility and integrity of natura pura. Thecreated order, maintains Long, discloses real knowledge of God as cause andfirst principle of being. The denial of natura pura – that the gift of nature hasan integral intelligibility and proximate end definitive of the species – reducesnature to an empty limit concept, an autonomist jurisdiction, unintelligible apartfrom grace; this denial results in a veritable ‘ontological evacuation of nature’on the part of theology and philosophy (43). Long writes, ‘Once this theonomiccharacter of natural order and natural law are lost, then sustaining the distinctionof nature and grace simply formalizes the boundaries consequent upon the loss ofGod’ (43).

First, Long argues against an understanding of nature as a ‘vacuole for grace’.Interacting with Balthasar’s The Theology of Karl Barth, Long maintains thatthe account of nature rendered by Balthasar lacks ontological density; it is ‘theequivalent of a theological vacuole or empty Newtonian space, a placeholderfor grace’ (55). Balthasar found the doctrine of natura pura both unhelpful andinsufficient; for him an account of nature outside of the precincts of grace waspurely hypothetical and unintelligible because natura pura is not the ‘concretenature’ we experience. Sed contra, maintains Long, pure nature is a necessaryand valid theological abstraction similar to other theological abstractions thatBalthasar was quite comfortable employing (such as the real distinction between

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essence and existence). Natura pura, while an abstraction, still does constitutereal knowledge. Indeed, the Nicene doctrine that Christ assumed a human naturerequires precisely such an abstraction: ‘The mode of being of human natureis distinct in Christ, and in St. Peter, but the definition of human nature assuch is not’ (87). There is an intelligible ontological density in nature that isequivocally expressed in the Nicene definition and understood by its proximatenatural end. Nature’s further ordering in grace does not connote losing its initialnatural ordering. Thus, the recurring motif in this book is St. Thomas’s principle:‘Nature, and natural ends, do not suddenly vanish upon the promulgation of thelex nova, because grace does not destroy, but perfects nature (i.e., nature and thehierarchy of natural ends actually exist)’ (80).

The loss of a realist ontology within the philosophy of nature has resulted ina vacuum in the contemporary philosophical guild; amongst many philosophersanalytic thought is seen as the rightful heir to classical Thomism. In the thirdchapter Long questions whether analytics is really able to fill this gap. Logicin analytic thought substitutes for a metaphysics of esse and as such is notequipped for the task of a philosophical advertence to the real. Analytic thoughtis propaedeutic to philosophical method, maintains Long; logic is not in of itselfa method, nor does analytic thought have a monopoly on logic, which, rather,is preliminary to every science. Long writes, ‘Logic is not ontology, but ratherit receives its first principle from metaphysics, and the whole subordinate realmoccupied by logic is only intelligible owing to its ordering and relation towards thereal’ (124). As an example, Long points to a number of contemporary analyticattempts to offer an account of analogy. These frequently involve an effort toproduce precise univocal mathematical formalization. Long counters that rigorouslogic alone cannot provide an understanding of analogy that abstracts to differingrelations of proper proportionality - which are admittedly always imperfect, asclassical Thomism has advanced.

The charge most frequently levied against an account of natura pura is that itresults in a type of inveterate Pelagianism. If nature has an integrity and intelli-gibility even in precision from grace, will nature not be putatively understood as‘perfectly fine’, resulting in secular minimalism in which public discourse is her-metically sealed off from theological involvement? Long’s last chapter, ‘NaturaPura: not a secularist stalking horse for secularist minimalism or Pelagianism’,argues to the contrary. The proportionate teleology of nature towards its prox-imate end, argues Long, invites speculative inquiry into the real created orderthat stands under the dictates of divine governance and providence. Thus, theintelligibility of nature is charged with apologetic leverage. Nature is impressednot just with a power or capacity, but contains a genuine motio, an authentic,inexpugnable actus towards its end. This proximate natural end that defines anact discloses specific moral norms even when abstracted from revelation. Nature,therefore, serves as an intelligible ground to the further ordering in grace and as aconsonant foundation to the gift of revelation. Nevertheless, the actual conditionsof the wayfarer after the Fall is such that although the natural law is knowable,its full existential application necessitates the further ordering in grace and thedata of revelation.

Natura Pura makes a convincing case that the natural praeambula fidei need toreceive much greater theological and philosophical contemplation than is currentlyafforded them. The created natural order is the ‘crucial middle term in the dialogueof the Church and the world’ (198), which is ignored to our detriment. Far fromleading to secularist minimalism, Christian involvement in this middle term offersa rational interaction in the speculative truths of theism, it offers real knowledgeregarding the ends of nature and the moral order, and informs practical matterssuch as ethics, politics and law. The gravamen of Long’s effort is to argue thatthe failure to interact with this common middle term shared by the Church and


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the world, i.e., the rejection of natura pura, gives license to a secular agendaintent on banishing Christian interaction in public life and relegating religion tothe purely private, emotive and subjective realm.

Natura Pura is a unique, foundational and crucially important text. Longdemonstrates that discussions surrounding natura pura are not to be consid-ered the purview of arcane, scholastic riddles about a hypothetical, but are anecessary philosophical and theological abstraction offering insight into creation,providence and the real order in which we find ourselves. An account of naturapura informs metaphysics, natural philosophy, anthropology, and ethics. Whenwe ask, ‘Who is Christ?’ the answer is, of course, ‘God and Man’. But, what isman? And more importantly, asks Long, quid sit Deus? He writes, ‘To deny therole of natural knowledge here would appear suicidal for Christian truth’ (210).The author succeeds in his goal of offering a Thomistic vade mecum for thefoundational place of speculative inquiry into the ‘whole ontological density ofnature’ as essential to the theological and philosophical task.

GERALD BOERSMA

JESUS OF NAZARETH: PART 2. HOLY WEEK: FROM THE ENTRANCEINTO JERUSALEM TO THE RESURRECTION by Joseph Ratzinger (PopeBenedict XVI), CTS, London and Ignatius, San Francisco, 2011, pp. xvii + 362,£14.95 hbk.

In this second volume of his Jesus of Nazareth, Pope Benedict, writing in hispersonal capacity as Joseph Ratzinger, turns his attention to the events of HolyWeek and Easter. It is an ambitious project, which he carries out with character-istic clarity, simplicity and profundity.

His overarching purpose – reflecting a motif expressed in speeches and writ-ings over many years – is to offer an exegesis which ‘without abandoning itshistorical character’ (p. xiv) has nonetheless rediscovered its identity as a theo-logical discipline. Yet Benedict is subtle enough a thinker, and receptive enoughto historical-critical questions, to recognize that this is not a straightforward pro-cedure. It is an ‘art’ as much as a ‘science’, and an artist needs insight andimagination in order to accomplish his or her task effectively. Thus, while thereader will certainly find careful discussions appropriate to a more scientific anal-ysis, there is far more to enthuse the soul, and indeed the mind, in an accountwhich refuses to treat Jesus of Nazareth simply as an object of historical curiosity.

The book traces the events of the Passion from the triumphal entry to the cruci-fixion and burial, and from there to the Resurrection, with an epilogue exploringthe meaning of the Ascension. From a historical perspective, this structure isenabled by the fact that the chronology of the gospel passion narratives is muchmore stable than for other parts of the Jesus tradition. Where they are at variance,as on the date of the crucifixion, he follows a good number of recent scholars inopting for the Johannine chronology.

Nevertheless, even in the details of the narratives, Joseph Ratzinger exhibits apreference for what Luke Johnson calls a ‘hermeneutics of generosity or piety’over against a ‘hermeneutics of suspicion’. This does not mean that he under-estimates the historical difficulties of the gospel traditions. Again and again, heshows awareness of the complexity of the text’s tradition-history, and of partic-ular redactional emphases. Thus he describes Jesus’s eschatological discourse as‘woven together’ from individual strands of tradition. He notes that Matthew is‘certainly not recounting historical fact’ in asserting that ‘all the people’ calledfor Jesus to be crucified (Matt. 27:25), but offering a theological aetiology toaccount for the tragic events surrounding the fall of Jerusalem. Indeed, his subtle


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exegesis of this highly problematic verse has rightly earned praise from Jewishscholars.

Rather, he is concerned to establish the ‘broad outline’ of the events, in order to‘ascertain whether the basic convictions of the faith are historically plausible andcredible when today’s exegetical knowledge is taken in all seriousness’ (p. 105).If there are rare occasions when he appears to gloss over historical difficultiesregarding particular events or sayings – the text-critical issues relating to Jesus’‘word from the cross’ at Luke 23:34, for example – these moments should notdetract from his overall purpose, which he eloquently demonstrates throughoutthe book.

Moreover, his dual hermeneutic means that he refuses to accept a fundamentaldistinction between a ‘historical Jesus’ and a ‘Christ of faith’. He presents a robustcase for Christology not beginning with the Church but rather within the visionand sayings of Jesus himself. In other words, he challenges an older scholarlypresupposition (happily itself critiqued from within the scholarly community) thatinterpretation is some kind of ‘add-on’ to originally un-interpreted ‘facts’. Thushis reading of the Passion story is rooted in the conviction that the prophets(notably Isaiah and Zechariah) profoundly influenced Christ’s own thinking. Theimpact of the Zechariah is reflected both in Jesus’ choice of a donkey to enterthe holy city and in his self-understanding as the shepherd whose sheep with bescattered.

This book is full of real didactic gems, a sign of the teacher at work. Hisdefinition of John’s conception of ‘eternal life’ is both succinct and memorable.The chapter on Gethsemane offers a master class in patristic theology in its eluci-dation of Christ’s divine and human wills, as well as drawing out the theologicalsignificance of the varying postures of Jesus at prayer as described by the differ-ent evangelists. The chapter on the Resurrection deals deftly with unsatisfactorytheological understandings (whether crudely materialistic or overly ‘spiritual’) ofwhat Christ’s resurrection means, and manages to encapsulate the Church’s faithin one profound phrase: ‘Jesus’ Resurrection points beyond history but has left afootprint within history’ (p. 275).

Overall, there is a strongly ‘Johannine’ character to Pope Benedict’s book,a perspective suggested from the start by his framing of the passion story byJohn’s chronological scheme. However, this is more than a reflection of his inter-est in distinctly Johannine traditions, such as the foot-washing, the ‘high-priestlyprayer’ or the ‘seamless robe’. Rather, his method is particularly reminiscentof the fourth evangelist, whose ‘spiritual gospel’ represents a profound inter-weaving of history and theology. Like John, Joseph Ratzinger is interested inunderstanding the events of the Passion and Resurrection as it were ‘from theinside’.

Unsurprisingly, perhaps, there is a strongly Germanic feel to the volume, re-flected in its bibliography. Few scholars from the non-German-speaking worldfeature in the main body of the text: rare exceptions include John Meier, whosemulti-volume A Marginal Jew is cited approvingly, and C.K. Barrett, whose vin-tage commentary is clearly a favourite. But there are others from the wider circleof recent scholarship on both Jesus and the gospels who would also have beencreative conversation partners.

More positively, Benedict invites us to rediscover the wisdom of exegetesfar older than Barrett or Bultmann. This extends not only to his significantengagement with patristic exegesis, but also to his use of medieval commentatorssuch as Rupert of Deutz, and Reformation interpreters like the sixteenth-centuryLutheran David Chytraeus (the first to describe the prayer of John 17 as the‘high-priestly prayer’). Reference to the latter (Dietrich Bonhoeffer is another) isan indication of the extent to which this twenty-first century Pope has engagedin the exegetical task within an ecumenical context.


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In the end, what kind of book is this? As the author notes, its genre is difficult toclassify. It is not straightforwardly a historical study of Jesus of Nazareth. Nor isit a study in Christology. A closer fit, he suggests, might be a ‘theological treatiseon the mysteries of the life of Jesus’ (p. xvi) of the sort classically presentedby Aquinas. Even this is not an exact fit, however, given the very differentcontext within which it was written. However it is categorized, Benedict’s bookinvites us to imagine a broader conception of what ‘history’ might mean than therather reductionist understanding which sidesteps questions of theology and truth.‘Salvation history’ may be nearer to what he is articulating, with its interest in theinner logic and meaning of the events describes. The Passion and Resurrectionnarratives, for all their historical foundation, are the fruit of profound ecclesialreflection, as the early church ‘penetrated more deeply into the truth of the Cross’(p. 229). While historians and Scripture scholars have much to learn from thisprofound volume, its primary focus is to offer an account of the events andsayings for those who seek a personal encounter with Jesus of Nazareth. In thisit succeeds masterfully.

IAN BOXALL

LIGHT AND GLORY : THE TRANSFIGURATION OF CHRIST IN EARLYFRANCISCAN AND DOMINICAN THEOLOGY by Aaron Canty, The CatholicUniversity of America Press, Washington DC, 2011, pp. xi + 266, $ 69.95 hbk

What happened at the Transfiguration? What did it ‘mean’? What did it teachtheologically or pastorally? Patristic exegesis provided a basis of doctrinal un-derstanding for the enquiring theologian and the topic was of especial interestin the East in succeeding centuries. The preoccupation of the earliest Christianwriters tended to be with the rebuttal of Gnostic claims about the meaning ofthe Transfiguration. The Gnostics claimed that at the Transfiguration the physicalbody of Christ was made spiritual and denied his humanity. Origen tried to find away to emphasise the spiritual dimension of what had happened without slippinginto dualism. There was a strong interest in the East in the Transfiguration as aforetaste of the Kingdom of God. The Cappadocians explored the idea that the‘glory’ with which Christ shone was his divinity made visible. Some of theseideas found their way into Western exegesis through the Latin Fathers, but inthe nature of things, their nuances in the Greek were hard to render and imper-fectly transmitted. The contribution of the medieval West and in particular thatof Franciscan and Dominican theologians has not previously been traced. This isthe subject of Canty’s new study.

He approaches his story chronologically as far as possible, taking each the-ologian in turn, from Hugh of St. Cher, to Alexander of Hales, Guerric ofSt. Quentin, John of la Rochelle, Albert the Great, Bonaventure and finallyAquinas. There is a sensitivity throughout to the significant shifts of emphasisfrom a Christology in which the Saviour’s earthly and human life are emphasised,to the more abstract metaphysical concerns of high scholasticism.

The problem is that medieval study of the Transfiguration does not readilyform a coherent story. It was touched on, even wrestled with, by these au-thors, but it never developed, at least in the West, the clear focus which wouldhave made it a major topic of controversy. And there was nothing like con-troversy for prompting the scholastic inventiveness which was capable of reallytaking the theology forward. Nor does there seem to have been the prompt-ing of a pastoral need to be met. This remained something of a peripheralsubject.


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The first chapter sets out the Scriptural context, tracing the discrepancies ofdetail between the three versions of the story of the transfiguration in the SynopticGospels and the mention in II Peter 1.16–18. The three Gospels all place the storyimmediately after Jesus’ eschatologically important saying about the imminenceof the end of the world. Peter emphasises the divine ‘authorisation’ of the Son, theexpress approval by God of which he was eyewitness, so the archetypal themesof the transfiguration include ecclesiological implications.

The great contribution of Hugh of St. Cher as a Dominican theologian wasto the evolution of the Glossa Ordinaria. When he writes on the Transfigurationhis predominant interest is in the passage which describes how Jesus’ garmentsbecame white as snow. What does this say about the relation of his humanity tohis divinity? And insofar as the Church is his body, what is to be concluded aboutthe way the clergy and the laity should shine? Next in this study is the FranciscanAlexander of Hales. He was drawn into scholastic analysis of the ways in whichthe Jesus’ body of the transfigured Jesus could have ‘clarity’ when it was not yetglorified. He did not change. It was merely a change of appearance. Guerric ofSt. Quentin , the earliest of the Dominicans to frame a disputed question on thesubject, takes this point forward. Can it be that there was only the appearance ofclarity?

The Franciscan John of la Rochelle made use of Alexander of Hales but hedeveloped and tried to answer a wider range of questions. He also left com-mentaries on the Gospels, which seem to have been written close to his death.The postilla on the Transfiguration in Matthew and that on the Transfigurationin Mark develop complex themes: is the Transfiguration a proof of the truth ofthe Resurrection? A proof of Christ’s glory? A proof of the truth of the Passion?The Postilla super Lucam is less experimental and less demanding in the arrayof sub-questions in which he tests the text. Here he relies partly on Hugh ofSt. Cher.

With Albert the Great we move from these Parisian Masters to Cologne andother centres in German territories. Albert projected a set of six treatises whichwere to form a summa. His discussion of the Transfiguration occurs in thepart which deals with the Resurrection. Bonaventure discussed the Transfigu-ration in the context of his exegesis rather than in works of systematic theology.Thomas Aquinas, by contrast, considered it in both as well as in his Sentencescommentary. For all three the ramifications are more complex than in the ear-lier Western treatments and there are signs of the characteristic later scholasticomnium gatherum of all there is to be said about a matter, listed by argumentsfor and against.

This useful study is sometimes a little mechanical. This is perhaps an unavoid-able consequence of the decision to take each medieval author in turn, and thenask what he said about the Transfiguration and where. There is a helpful tracingof some of the borrowings from earlier medieval work, but the framework of thebook makes it difficult for Canty to bring out the changing patterns of emphasisas the debate about the Transfiguration developed. Indeed, was there a debate?There emerges a range of preoccupations, from the incarnational to the eschato-logical and the ecclesiological. There is puzzling over such technical scholasticquestions as the role of the human soul of Christ in mediating the glory of hisdivinity to his human body. It is a pity that the index is confined solely to propernames and does not allow a comparative search of the themes which emerge.The book lacks an overarching synthesis of what these medieval enquiries reallyachieved as a counterpart to the more adventurous spiritual journeyings of Easterntheologians.

G. R. EVANS


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A GOD OF ONE’S OWN: RELIGION’S CAPACITY FOR PEACE AND POTEN-TIAL FOR VIOLENCE by Ulrich Beck, translated Rodney Livingstone, Polity,Cambridge, 2010, pp. x + 231, £45 hbk

This work marks a radical change of direction in the interests of a prominentand highly productive German sociologist, who divides time between the LondonSchool of Economics and the University of Munich. Beck has pursued long-standing interests in cosmopolitan values, globalisation and ‘reflexive modernisa-tion’, and building on these, he has now found God, or so it would seem. Forone who ranks with Bauman, Bourdieu and Giddens, none of whom is sympa-thetic to religion, this turn to the matters of the Divine cannot but be of interest.Oddly, it would seem that as some vociferous natural scientists are desperatein their deicide, sociologists are gazing at the embers of modernity and seekingHim.

Usually, Anglo-American sociology is concerned with the reverential handlingof French imports, notably the products of Bourdieu, Derrida, Foucault andLacan. As these fade in significance, they seem to be replaced by a Germantriumvirate, of Habermas, Joas and now Beck, who are re-casting radically no-tions of secularisation in ways that take cognizance of the persistence of religionand its theological ambits, hence the rise of interest in a new term of doubtfulpedigree: post-secularity. The term denotes a paradigm shift in sociological theory,very much the outcome of the dialogue between Benedict XVI and Habermas,which commenced in 2004. Reflecting this paradigm shift, Beck wishes to makehis contribution to finding a sociological means for deciphering ‘the religioussignature of the age’ (p. 64).

Whilst admirably sectionalised, with a good index and biography, the work isstimulating, but decidedly inchoate and utterly unconvincing. In this case, it isthe fact of the effort, what the text symbolises, that is of interest and less itsanalytical results. Appearing as novel, this study is indicative of another failureof sociological conceit in a long line of effort to displace God with god, one castaccording to social exigencies which traditional religion, notably Christianity, isill fitted to resolve, as Beck claims. This god seems to have a peculiar insecurityof tenure, shifting from nation to the self and now in Beck’s version, re-cast asan inner reference point to cater for cosmopolitan imperatives, the sensibilitiesgenerated by ‘reflexive modernization’ and the choices that are the properties ofindividualization which emerge with the maturation of modernity. Beck’s researchgroup, dealing with ‘reflexive modernization’, provides the creative discussionsfor this study, which is described as an ‘adventurous excursion into the fascinatingbyways of the volcanic landscapes of religion’ (p. ix). The outcome is curious.

Disavowing the notion that he is writing ‘a theology of a God of one’s own’(p. 10), this caveat does not inhibit Beck from stipulating the nature of his godand how it ought to be constituted. This god should be one emancipated from theclutches of ‘ecclesiastical spell. . . dogmas, liturgies and exegeses’, being instead‘a humanized fellow-God who is both individualized and standardized’ (p.12).Thus, Beck is not marking the end of religion but rather seeking a means of ‘entryinto the self-contradictory narrative of “secular religiosity” which it is our task todecode’ (p.16). Beck, however, does not seem to have much faith in this venture,given the first line of the study, where he asks ‘is it possible to begin a book witha confession of failure?’ (p. 1). He is honest in wondering whether it is ‘a vainquest’ to find an alliance between ‘sociology’s claims to knowledge and perhapsalso of religion’s own self-understanding’ (p. 2). Reflections on the failure of thebook emerge further in a long footnote (pp. 65–66) where he wonders if religions,which are transnational might lapse into nationalistic rhetoric. All the time, Beckis seeking escape from constraints of traditional religions, their capacity to erectboundaries and to sink their identities into nationalism. The universal claims of


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world religions generate worries for Beck over their powers to rank unequally. Itis this tyranny of hierarchy and superiority that concerns Beck.

The first two chapters are the most fruitful in the study. The first chapter,dealing with the diary of a concentration camp victim who discovers the depthsof spiritual being and the second, aptly entitled ‘the Return of the Gods’, aretelling, not least when Beck suggests that ‘the collapse of secularization theory is,therefore, of far greater significance than, for example, the collapse of the SovietUnion and the Eastern bloc’ (p. 21). The flip side of this failure of secularisationgenerates a worry for Beck over the possible emergence of a new dark age(p. 55). Worries over this prospect cause Beck to refine his understandings ofsecularisation suggesting that modernity reveals the way that god as a liabilitycan be converted into an asset.

Secularisation as it appears in the first form of modernity is tied into legislationand nationalism and becomes unsustainable. This death of secularity facilitatesthe rise of a new version of religion, one emerging in the second form of moder-nity, that builds on individualisation, where a multiplicity of choices so generatedprovides the basis for seeking a ‘God of one’s own’ (p. 80). This latter possibilityfinds endorsement with the rise of new religious movements (p. 26)-whose sig-nificance Beck exaggerates. Certainly, he is right to suggest that, taken with theemergence of these and the rise of holistic spirituality, the maturation of moder-nity has undermined the definiteness of secularisation that religion had vanished.His central thesis is that far from diminishing religion, modernisation changes itsappearance, rendering it ambiguous, at one remove emancipating, but also ladenwith dangers (pp. 39–40). This sense of religion uncoupling from its traditionalforms of authority generates a situation where individualisation relates to the in-terior and the cosmopolitan to the exterior. Against this background, Beck seeksto express these changed circumstances in terms of ten core thesis proposition(pp. 85–90). Some strange assertions emerge among these, such as in thesis sixthat ‘Amnesty International may be understood as a modern church dedicated toa God of its own making’ (p. 88).

Beck’s sociology is mobilised to criticise monotheism and the monopolisticclaims to superiority of revelation made by traditional forms of religion, by whichhe means Christianity. For him, a defence of religion in hybrid form affirms theindividual’s search for a God within. There is a curious property to the study thatin its efforts to affirm tolerance and pluralism, the powers of secularisation areenhanced by the indifference these ambitions sustain. In such circumstances, it isnot clear where the incentive for a god of one’s own comes from, given that truthis sacrificed to a quest for peace. In the study, the ambit of the social is neverreconciled to the individualisation of choice and the fears over the narcissism ofholistic spirituality are never adequately confronted. Durkheim lurks unresolvedin this study.

By chapter 4, the study becomes inchoate. The section charging Luther withinventing ‘a God of one’s own’ has Weberian overtones, seeming to suggest thatProtestantism softens up modernity to give to each individual the right to makehis own religion as a hybrid and thus sabotaging the monopolistic claims ofChristianity which so greatly unsettle Beck. This section sits uneasily with theone which follows, on heresy, derived from Sebastian Castellio and John Calvin.This provides a basis for a counter pointing section on Locke’s approach totolerance.

An annoying property of the study is that humdrum analyses suddenly yieldpassages of real richness where Beck indicates the way experience and experi-mentation shape the self to make its own passage of self-fulfilment, a journeyingthat enables sin and the after life to be secularised (pp. 128–129). But is thisfated? Might it be that a postmodern religiosity, which generates ‘a need to dis-cover the combination of religious practices and symbols conducive to one’s own


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wellbeing, one’s happiness and one’s life?’ (p. 136) might also yield worries overend of life? As is often the case, theodicies never intrude in these scenarios, andgiven that an anarchy of subjectivism prevails, with no qualifications by appealto truth, might it be that the religion and the god so enthroned within could bemore dangerous that the traditional forms they replace?

Worries on this point emerge in chapter 5, where five models, ranging fromHabermas to Kung to Gandhi are presented as supplying a basis for civilisingglobal religions. Pure forms of religion and a quest for these are treated asdivisive. A curious idea of a commodified god (with no reference to its illusorybasis for Feuerbach) emerges, one fit for a marketplace, which is pliable andcan be bent to any individual need (pp. 150–154). As implied earlier, the finalchapter entitled ‘Peace instead of Truth?’ is less than persuasive and presents amuffled end to the study. There is perhaps another dimension to ‘the irony ofunintended consequences’, (which forms part of the title of chapter 5) that theunsettlements that generate individualisation might be those that facilitate a returnto a reinvented Catholicism, one subtly fitted to the needs of cosmopolitization.

Perhaps it is a sign of the newly cast sociological times that Benedict XVI getsthe last word in the study, that reason not force is the highest value for believers.This leads Beck to query whether this deference to reason permits faith to be‘civilised’ (p. 200). By this he means religion should be domesticated to the needsof peace, toleration and reconciliation. The uncivilised aspects of religion lie inits claims to possess a monopoly of truth. Reason is the instrument invoked topresage civilised properties fitting for uncovering ‘A God of one’s own’. But thatgod legitimised by appeals to the absolute claims of reason can yield outcomesthat are deeply uncivilised, facilitated as they are by appeals to civilised values.These difficulties find expression in Bauman’s Modernity and the Holocaust.

Beck ends the study, oddly. He asks ‘how will the individual religions react tothe individualization and cosmopolitization of faith? The answer must be reservedfor another book-length poking around in the fog’ (p. 200). One hopes that whatemerges will be less foggy than this study, which, whatever, its demerits, blursthe divisions between religion and theology in ways that unsettle the sociolog-ical imagination which, at present settles for the term post-secularity. The termsuggests that religion has returned, or rather, that sociologists have not takensufficient notice of its persistence. Whether this is good news for theologians, ornot, is another matter.

KIERAN FLANAGAN

BRITISH ROMANTICISM AND THE CATHOLIC QUESTION: RELIGION,HISTORY AND NATIONAL IDENTITY 1778–1829 by Michael Tomko, PalgraveMacmillan, London, 2011, pp. vii + 224, £50

Michael Tomko uses this book to argue that the ‘Catholic question’ which plaguedBritish politics at the end of the eighteenth century has been largely elided fromour understanding of romantic-era culture, a mistake which he hopes to rectifyhere. Tomko provides a reading of the romantic writers which shows that theCatholic question fundamentally permeated romantic-era literature, challengingwriters to engage with ideas of British national and religious identity. This bookclaims that the perceived dangers of Catholicism to “Britishness” (even by pro-emancipation writers such as Byron and Shelley), led to attempts to articulate avia media between religious enthusiasm and superstition.

The first chapter establishes a dialogue between poetic sources and politicalspeeches and pamphlets. In doing so, this chapter also provides a brief but clearoverview of the politics of the Catholic question from the Catholic Relief Act of


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1778 to emancipation in 1829. This is a convenient reminder of the history for thenon-specialized reader, making the book accessible to a fairly broad readership,and Tomko has a real skill in painting a picture of the era. The following chaptersare divided by author and explore the work of Elizabeth Inchbald, Wordsworth,Shelley, and Sir Walter Scott. By using the filter of literature, Tomko draws outcultural anxieties that were often more complex than the political history wouldsuggest. These anxieties, Tomko claims, reveal ambivalence towards the Catholicquestion that was felt by liberal supporters of the cause and conservatives alike.However, the ubiquitous use of this term is perhaps one of the drawbacks ofTomko’s thesis. There is not a single author included in the volume to whom-Tomko does not at some stage apply the term ‘ambivalent’. Indeed, in the firstchapter, Tomko introduces Byron over two pages as a strong and outspoken sup-porter of Catholic emancipation, who saw British anti-Catholic propaganda asthat of a ‘despotic modern empire’. No sooner has Tomko established Byron’sstance, however, than he claims that Byron carried a deep-grained ambivalenceover nation, history and Catholicism. The result is a survey of Byron’s poetrywhich is not short of examples of both pro and anti-Catholic ideas, but which ul-timately provides no clearer picture of Byron’s thought, other than demonstratingByron could sometimes be critical of Roman Catholic history.

The chapter on Inchbald brings a necessary balance to the survey, by focusingon a Catholic author, although occasionally Tomko’s attempt to read the charactersof A Simple Story as representative of national sectarian factions can seem alittle forced. There is a danger at times that Tomko will over-do the allegoryof Inchbald’s characters as members of an unhappy ‘national marriage’, but heeventually concludes with an intriguing reading that Inchbald is instead callingfor a social model based on a community of neighbouring sects. Wordsworth isexamined next, followed by Shelley. The strong stances that both these writersclaimed in regards the Catholic question (Shelley for, Wordsworth against), wouldsuggest that there would not be much more to add, but Tomko rather skilfullydissects the work of the two authors to demonstrate the ever present ambivalence.The chapter on Wordsworth is of particular interest, as Tomko describes howWordsworth attempted to recuperate superstition in such a way that religiousextremes were kept in balance, creating an aesthetic via media. Tomko seemsultimately loath to decide whether this aesthetic balance is successful, but thechapter nonetheless adds an important dimension to Wordsworth’s writings, whichwould be of interest to any scholar of romantic poetry.

After a chapter in which the works of Sir Walter Scott are seen to envisagethe solving of sectarian problems through an ahistorical cultural transformation,Tomko concludes that despite the broad range of views represented by the writersin the book, each one was prey to the inevitable ‘ambivalence’. By bringing apolitical rather than a purely aesthetic reading to romantic writing, Tomko revealsa complexity in which far from an ahistorical transcendent aesthetic, the romanticswere deeply involved in a crisis of British national and religious identity. Such areading adds an important dimension to any modern study of romantic poetry.

ZOE LEHMANN IMFELD

SECULARIZATION: IN DEFENCE OF AN UNFASHIONABLE THEORY bySteve Bruce, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2010, Pp. 243, £25 hbk

In characteristically robust style, Steve Bruce describes, explains and clarifiesthe ‘secularization thesis’, consciously pitching its defence and elaboration into anotably altered register of debate. Once ‘mainstream’ within sociology (and oftenstill referred to as such), the ‘thesis’ is now frequently regarded with suspicion.


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The perception is that religion and spirituality, contrary to thesis expectations,have persisted and revived, prompting the accusation that secularization-ismitself harbours ideological secularism. As the current leading voice on his sideof the house, Bruce moves to rebut this whole train of post-secular questioning(though he does not favour that term).

The social significance of religions in modern societies, and the intensity andspecificity of their defining beliefs, are steadily diminishing. The weakeningof socialization into life-defining religious norms and practices leads towards arelativistic pluralism of faiths, and ‘thin’, free-choice spiritual inclinations, fromwhich situation indifference gradually sets in. In terms of church-going activity,once decline has started, in no country does it recover. In terms of the spectrumof belief, assuming three broad categories (the patently religious, intermediatesand the patently non-religious), the balance is unmistakeably shifting from thefirst and second to the second and third.

Modern societies involve a congeries of inter-related factors signalling the dif-ferentiation of social life into separate institutional spheres, with attendant culturesand mentalities of individualization, techno-economic rationality, egalitarianism,democracy, and relativism. As a result, our lives of work, learning, law, art,leisure, health and social control become structurally and habitually detachedfrom the authority of churches and the guidance of worldviews featuring super-natural deities with powers of moral intervention. Religious doctrines and values,partly in order to survive, and as part of the modern processes themselves, comemerely to reflect societal and normative problems rather than to resolve them. Re-ligion in hyper-modern conditions holds some traction, but this is more about oursense of gravitas, heritage, and nostalgia than about deep, encompassing identity.

Contrary to the ‘second hand caricatures’ and ‘trifling objections’ that makeBruce grumpy about feeling obliged to put an end to the sillier points of dispute(‘here endeth the lesson’, pp. 56, vi-vii), the secularization thesis does not claimthat religion will necessarily die out; or that it is unimportant to those who stillfeel the need for it; or that it cannot revive from time to time; or that it plays novaluable role in society; or that its basic falsity has been exposed by a superiorscientific mindset. Nor is he minded to controvert the view that believers actout of intrinsic religious motivation rather that as dictated to by instrumentalinterests or societal functions – though he knows that sociological accounting forreligion cannot do without some measure of the latter. So sheer reductionism anddeterminism must be avoided, and good stock must be taken of the role of religionwhere it makers a social difference, for example in ‘cultural transitions’ associatedwith migration, and in aspects of minority ‘cultural defence’. But secularizationis ‘retarded’ by such phenomena, not blocked, so that even if secularization hascertainly not been ‘inevitable’, being the product of contingent societal changes,it still looks well-nigh ‘irreversible’

The feeling that secularizationists make too much of declining church atten-dance focuses attention on the extent of religious activity and thought outsideor on the margins of the official institutions. One possibility here is that, justas in the past popular religious belief took many forms that did not conform toestablished Christian doctrine, so there may be widespread forms of Christianityat work today of an informal but nevertheless strong sort. Bruce thinks that thisprotest involves a blatant comparative mismatch. Even if popular religious un-derstanding since medieval times was sometimes very different from, and evenresistant to, that of the clergy, no one reasonably doubts that it was definitivelyChristian rather than, say, pagan, and pervasive, vital, and doctrinal in a way thatsimply does not apply today. To the further counter that we must not mistakethe decline of religion for the key element behind all changes in popular culturein more recent times, namely the sharp demise of deeply collective norms andpractices, Bruce replies that this is precisely the point of secularization theory:


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to be culture- and thought-defining, religion must effectively be passed on tosubsequent generations through uniform, regular, and largely unquestioning com-munity mechanisms, and it is precisely these that the modern processes of indi-vidualization, pluralization and pervasive technological intercourse with the worldhave worn down. Those desiring relief from that gloomy prospect will appeal tothe primordial nature of religion (whether as a matter of innate need or divinegift). But sociologists should regard such appeals as either inherently speculativeor circular, partly because the needs that religion purportedly fulfils are unman-ageably many and conflicting. The key is to examine the social conditions ofreligion’s reproduction.

Bruce insists that churchgoing remains the crucial indicator in the debate,because all manner of remnants of religiously inflected popular culture, fromsupernatural thinking and folk religion, to one’s general sense of religious selfhoodand the ‘social’ use of church facilities and rituals for purposes of marriage,community singing, youth work, baptism, tourism, and so forth, decline in closeassociation with rates of church attendance itself. As for the sort of ‘vicarious’religion supposedly instanced in the way that we seem to invest effervescently incelebrities, raves, ecology, cathedral-visiting, the death of Princess Diana, and soon, Bruce warns against a manifest logical and sociological fallacy: religion andits concomitant intense affect may well be taken very seriously by the devout, butthis does not mean that whatever anyone takes seriously or experiences intenselycan be assimilated to religion. As for studies that perceive organic religiouscommunities in Britain thriving as late as the 1970s, with a hint that they mightstill be lingering on, Bruce is very dubious. Just to make sure, he dashes downfrom Aberdeen to check out Staithes, promptly reporting back the expected totallack of evidence.

Much effort has gone into the possibility that contemporary expressions of spir-ituality represent religion in modern guise, thus offsetting the apparent unpopular-ity of established churches. Bruce admires some of the fieldwork in studies thatpursue this hypothesis, but regrets to inform that the basic findings themselves donot support it. He cannot help scoffing at the idea that yoga, Feng Shui, Findhorn,or the ‘transformational’ rhetoric of management motivation discourse equate tosombre religious conviction, but even a more generous attitude leaves the princi-pal contentions of secularization undisturbed. He calculates that only around 1%of the well-known Kendal Study sample is resolutely spiritual, which converts tojust 270 new-agers as against 11,000 fewer regular worshippers in that town overseveral decades. And a 2001 Scottish survey gives a near-majority identifying asnon-religious, by contrast with 2% spiritual (8% on the loosest definition).

The proposition that religion never disappears has also drawn sustenance from‘supply-side’ theories, so Bruce turns his attention to that quarter, conciselyrubbishing the unsociological rational choice assumptions behind the distinctlyAmerican ‘market conditions’ model, which depicts religion positively thrivingin conditions of competitive diversity. He also disputes the empirical evidence for‘American exceptionalism’ more generally. Of course, comparatively speaking,the USA is plainly more religious than certain European nations. But the crucialbenchmark, again, is historical and internal: over time, the USA shows a distinctbleaching out of both the substantive content and the imperative standing ofChristian belief (God as a real person, hell, miracles, not sinning). The tendencyfor American survey respondents to over-claim their faithfulness may also bechanging.

The charge of Eurocentrism against secularization theory is normally extendedby reference to the vibrancy of religion in non-Western contexts. As with theAmerican case, Bruce does not dispute the relativities involved. Nor do we haveto expect that the Rest will follow the West, exactly, in the achievement of multiplemodernities. Yet, indisputably, the world is modernizing, and as such, for Bruce,


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global secularization processes are becoming more visible, notably in politicalprocedures, institutional organization, and the articulation of civic, public spaceswithin which more liberal concerns and pluralistic contestation are expressed. Nodoubt counter instances of theocratic capture and fundamentalist upsurge can beattested (though these are themselves largely political and modern in logic andconduct), but over the long haul, and alongside marked social stratification andcosmopolitan deliberation, the jury is still out on what Peter Berger calls ‘thedesecularization of the world’. The likely verdict might well follow the Russiancase, where, following a minor religious resurgence after the fall of Communism,all the signposts to secularization have been re-set.

Bruce’s important book stands as the single most articulate guide to the contentand merits of the secularization thesis, though it will hardly bring debate to a halt.Some supporters might find it odd that Bruce plays down the contribution to secu-larization of materialist scientific understanding, given his strong emphasis on cu-mulative inter-generational change. It is not unsociological, as he implies, to high-light the purely ideational aspect, given the centrality of mass and higher educationto modernity. Other sympathisers will accept more readily than him that explana-tion in terms of modernity’s core features and pathways is an enterprise of theo-retical and evaluative (re)construction, not a matter of the empirical record alone.

For religiously minded critics, each batch of evidence presented by Bruce willbe thought to screen out some other batch having contrary implications. Andinductive reasoning, we will be reminded, is never decisive. Does it necessarilyfollow, for example, from the prevalence of belief-pluralism, banal technologicalrationality, and individualization that religion, despite setbacks, will not finallytriumph? A Catholic social interpreter like Charles Taylor cannot bring himselfto think so, trusting instead that pluralism will enrich our ultimate concerns andmultiply access to the Transcendent. Do developments in the non-West necessarilymean that secularization will go all the way there? Not if we are prepared to takethe ‘multiple modernities’ concept seriously, through which lens many and newforms of religious-secular stabilisation might readily be imagined and established.Bruce makes much of the notion that religion will only survive where it has ‘workto do other than relating individuals to the supernatural’ (p. 49), and he treatssuch work as confirmation of the dimension of secularization that is ‘internal’ toreligion. But it will be said that religion always has had such work to do, and thatsuccess in that regard is intrinsically bound up with the values and commitmentsthat motivate it. Such commitments, moreover, can have a sociological and evensocialistic coloration, as in assorted ‘faith in the city’ initiatives. Thus, if, associologists often allege, our modern capitalistic, consumer, pragmatic societiesare becoming chronically anomic, fragmented, dysfunctional and disillusioned,and thus in need of collective transformation in the name of society itself, whyrule out, a priori, the part that religion might play (to its own benefit) in someappropriately grand rectification? It is a pity that Bruce’s rather positivistic postureinclines him to avoid such wider issues, not least because the book lacks aconcluding chapter.

GREGOR McLENNAN

JULIAN OF TOLEDO : PROGNOSTICUM FUTURI SAECULI. FOREKNOWL-EDGE OF THE WORLD TO COME translated, edited and introduced byTommaso Stancati OP, Ancient Christian Writers No. 63, The PaulistPress/The Newman Press, New York 2010, Pp. xv + 608, £ 40.50 hbk

Any theology of the after-life has to make a remote world accessible and con-vincing. If such a theology belongs itself to a distant past, then there is a twofold


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distance to be overcome. St Julian of Toledo lived and died in 7th-century Toledo,where he was its bishop for the last decade of his life (d.690). Fr Stancati hasmore than met the challenges posed. The life, works and times of Julian arecarefully reconstructed, making him much more than a shadowy figure linkedto an early canonical collection (the Hispana), the elaboration of the Mozarabicliturgy, and the ecclesial life and politics of his age. In providing the first fulltranslation into English of Julian’s Prognosticum, with a wealth of informationand commentary, Stancati, a professor at the Pontifical University of St Thomasin Rome, makes widely accessible what can be described as the first systematictheological treatise on eschatology.

While avoiding anachronistic attempts to force the eschatology of Julian intoup-to-date relevance, such is Fr Stancati’s theological intelligence that today’sreader can profit from the Prognosticum as well as understand why it was animmensely influential medieval text. J.N.Hillgarth, editor of the critical editionof the Prognosticum in the Corpus Christianorum, Series Latina vol.115 (1976),observed how the work was to be found in almost all libraries from the 9th to the12th centuries. Thereafter its contribution to the development of eschatologicaltheology was assimilated, and took new forms from Peter Lombard onwards.Julian’s method might be described as the stating of a thesis and its demonstrationfrom biblical and patristic authorities, especially Augustine, interwoven by hisown thinking. In time, there would come various authoritative papal and conciliarteaching on eschatological themes, and his book would be printed as usefulto Catholics in Reformation polemics. All this was in the future, but Juliancontributed to shaping that future.

Julian wrote the Prognosticum as a result of a long conversation he had withthe bishop of Barcelona one Good Friday in Toledo. The work is in three parts,amounting to about a 100 pages; the lauded brevitas. Book I faces the mysteryof death, Book II constructs an intermediate eschatology, while Book III is givenover to the resurrection. The Prognosticum is based solidly on Scripture andTradition, with numerous quotations, yet (and Stancati is insistent on this) thework is much more than an anthology of authoritative texts. The choice of texts,their arrangement and how they were understood are significant. The result isa high degree of thematic completeness combined with a pastoral, didactic andcatechetical purpose most appropriate for a bishop. We are far from the prevalenceof idle speculations on the after-life or an obsession with wanting to know whatGod has withheld from us. Julian aimed at grounding a sustaining faith, and inVirgilian tones he hoped to touch in a more intense way the minds of mortals.Book I in particular is the voice of the pastor, speaking truth in charity – ‘deathis not a good thing, and yet for the good it is good’, and ‘the particular fear thatmakes everyone wonder which is more bearable: to dread several kinds of deathwhile still alive, or to endure the one that actually occurs?’.

Book II is extraordinary and successful. It is a thorough account of what can betermed the intermediate state for the soul between the moment of death and theuniversal bodily resurrection. Here was the theological foundation of purgatory,although of course not the word. Like Stancati, we can admire the equilibriumbetween an anthropological perspective which gives due attention to the destinyof the individual and a collective perspective, also involving the whole cosmos.Julian stresses the vitality of the soul, yet desiring to be embodied, and he quotesCassian as saying that souls are not idle after their separation from the body. Thesouls of some of the just are not immediately gathered into the kingdom of heavenand, quoting Gregory the Great, what is to be understood in this punishment thatcomes from the delay (dilationis damno) if not that they had something less withrespect to perfect justice? Also striking is the passage which states that the churcheffectively pleads here for the dead who lack perfect holiness, and that such are


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purified by medicinal punishments. Both affirmations are vital components of atheology of purgatory.

It is important to centre eschatology on God and on living joyfully with othersin Christ rather than map out the Last ‘Things’. Book III is the longest inthe Prognosticum, and covers an assorted variety of subjects connected to theresurrection although its opening is decisively Christocentric, and makes the pointthat the Lord wanted the time or the day of judgment to be unknown to us. Thisis Julian’s interesting exegesis of Mk 12:32, a perennially problematic text. Juliangenerally adopts a sober approach, although today’s theologian would be unlikelyto discuss all that he did. Stancati might usefully have added some reference tocontemporary discussions of the eschatological destiny of embryos. It is worthrecalling, however, that in the prayer attached to his book, Julian presents himselfto the Lord as one who does not arrogantly define what is unknown, but humblydesires to know what can be known. The magnificent closing passage drawson Augustine, and is headed by Julian as ‘the end without end’. It proclaimsthat Christ, our end, rendering us perfect, will be at the same time solace andour praise; we will praise him forever and, praising him without end, we willlove him.

Stancati, with erudition and a fine theological sensibility, has convincinglyproposed the Prognosticum as deserving the attention not only of historians.

ROBERT OMBRES OP


Documents

A GOD OF ONE'S OWN: RELIGION'S CAPACITY FOR PEACE AND POTENTIAL FOR VIOLENCE by Ulrich Beck