ERIC ROHMER: FILM AS THEOLOGY by Keith Tester

DOI:10.1111/j.1741-2005.2009.01334.x

Reviews

THE OXFORD HANDBOOK OF EARLY CHRISTIAN STUDIES, edited by SusanAshbrook Harvey and David G. Hunter, Oxford University Press, 2008,pp. xxvii + 1020, £85, hbk

EARLY MEDIEVAL CHRISTIANITIES, C. 600-1100: THE CAMBRIDGE HIS-TORY OF CHRISTIANITY VOLUME 3, edited by Thomas F.X. Noble andJulia M.H. Smith, Cambridge University Press, 2008, pp. xxix + 846, £100($195), hbk

To study the early history of Christianity can rarely have seemed more attractive ormore daunting. On the one hand, the blinkers previously imposed by confessionalallegiance have been largely removed, whether those of a Catholicism whichprojected its institutional and doctrinal developments back into its earliest past, orthose of a Protestantism which confused development with moral decay and withthe invasion by foreign elements of an originally pure deposit of faith. The historyof Christianity has been greatly enriched in the past fifty years by insights fromsociology, literature, archaeology and art history, feminist theology, economics,and yet other disciplines. Doctrines and institutions have found new meaning inbroader contexts attentive to rhetoric, politics, popular piety, and more generalcultural history. Scholars over several generations have provided us with criticaleditions of many important texts. A beam of light which previously began bypicking out the Roman empire and then narrowed over time to focus on the LatinWest now illuminates a wider swathe of lands and churches. On the other hand, asa result of these processes, once-simple narratives have fractured. As the title tovolume three of the new Cambridge History of Christianity exemplifies, historiansnow speak of ‘Christianities’ in the attempt to acknowledge the varying patternsof Christian belief and practice across times and places. It becomes ever harderto keep up with new research in any given area, or to put the pieces together andachieve a coherent overview.

In this situation there can be enormous value in handbooks and multi-volumehistories. They serve, at a price, as large-scale maps which orientate the newarrival in an unfamiliar landscape, whether she is the lay person who is visit-ing from further afield in need of an accurate overview, or the student from aneighbouring area of special interest. Handbooks which review previous work,comment on current research and outstanding issues, usually have the shorterlife-span, and are inevitably to some extent out-of-date even when published, butthey are often the more valuable tools. The multi-volume history can hope forlonger relevance, but its approaches and bibliographies are often less helpful tothe person for whom a given chapter is merely the starting-point in addressing aspecific topic.

Both the Oxford Handbook and the Cambridge History reviewed here man-ifestly deserve a place on the library shelves in universities, seminaries, andreligious houses. Together they cover a little more than a millennium. Many ofthe contributors are among the leading scholars in their chosen field. For thehandbook, which covers the period from ca.100–600 CE, authors were asked to‘reflect on the main questions or issues that have animated research, to providean introduction to the relevant primary sources, and to offer some guidance on

C© The author 2010. Journal compilation C© The Dominican Council. Published by Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 2010, 9600 GarsingtonRoad, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK, and 350 Main Street, Malden MA 02148, USA

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the directions in which future research might be profitably pursued’ (p. 2). Forthis reason, the work is of particular value to students. The book is prefaced(i) by essays of general relevance, before sections on (ii) the material and textualevidence; (iii) religious identities; (iv) geographical regions; (v) church struc-tures and authorities; (vi) expressions of Christian culture; (vii) ritual and piety;and (viii) specifically theological and doctrinal issues. Individual chapters eachconclude with guidance on suggested reading and a helpful bibliography.

Space here precludes much comment on individual contributions, thoughWilliam Tabbernee’s entry on ‘epigraphy’ may be praised as exemplifying howthe history of a discipline may be integrated elegantly with an account of whatthe discipline can reveal about Early Christianity. The chapter also offers helpfulupdates on how to interpret particular epigraphic formulae. Andrew Jacobs, writ-ing on Jews and Christians, conveys well the limits of what we can now recoverof a complex past. Chapters by Rebecca Lyman and Mathijs Lamberigts are wel-come for discussing Arians and Pelagians respectively outside the usual framewhich views them from the perspective of their doctrinal opponents. Many whoare not historians of Early Church liturgy may benefit from Maxwell Johnson’sdiscussion of ‘Christian Initiation’, which sets out the variety of baptismal prac-tice, at Epiphany as well as at Easter, before the late fourth century: Easter inthe early churches was not always nor everywhere what the liturgical reformsof the twentieth century have taught Catholics to look back upon as norma-tive. Likewise, the chapter on ‘Doctrine of God’ by Lewis Ayres and AndrewRadde-Gallwitz will alert the reader to new readings of the Apologists and theirengagement with Ancient Philosophy. Clearly no volume, however large, cancover everything. Something more on the Christian appropriation and adaptationof the virtues would certainly have been welcome; but this should not detractfrom what is a well-structured and impressively comprehensive handbook. Per-haps its weakness lies rather in its confidence: the resolutely upbeat nature ofits introductory essays on Early Christian studies. If the traditional confessionalblinkers have been largely removed, what are the other, newer blinkers nowat work?

Early Medieval Christianities c. 600-1100 opens with a magisterial introductoryessay by Peter Brown and is then organized into five sections. The first, sensibly,is a set (i) of overarching regional histories, some of which unavoidably overlap,but which taken together shift the reader from an undue attention on WesternEurope. This is followed (ii) by chapters which outline the relations betweenChristians and Jews, Moslems, and the pagans tribes of northern Europe, aswell as between different Christian churches. The next section (iii) deals withinstitutions, including the tedious (but no doubt necessary) information aboutwhich see was established when, as well as a much more intriguing discussionby Rosemary Morris of how property rights were understood and disputed byclerics and lay people before the Gregorian ‘reforms’. A further section (iv) looksat ‘Christianity as lived experience’, its liturgies, and how religion influenced theway people experienced birth, illness, and death. The final section (v) concerns‘books and ideas’, biblical interpretation, doctrinal orthodoxy and heresy, andbeliefs about the afterlife. The volume finishes with an important essay by JohnVan Engen which might profitably be read first, on how to understand the periodoverall, the relation of early medieval Christianities to the later medieval churchesand to European culture. Van Engen argues that ‘after the year 1100 bishopsceased to play the shaping role in Latin Christendom they had regularly exercisedin early medieval Christian societies’, while monasticism entered a new andunstable era in which the degree of separation of monks from their secularpatrons was repeatedly re-negotiated (pp. 631–32). He examines the shift from aChurch in which baptism was the paradigmatic sacrament to the later centralityof the Eucharist, and notes the difficulty of envisioning ‘the inner shape of

C© The author 2010Journal compilation C© The Dominican Council 2010

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early medieval Christianities, if we peer back too unselfconsciously through theframing of this subsequent order’ (p. 636). Much about this book thus tantalizesits reader: cultures very different from our own are glimpsed in outline, withoccasional details that whet the appetite, like the practice mentioned by JuliaSmith of ‘depositing consecrated bread in an altar whenever saints’ relics wereunavailable’ (p. 603). For want of space, we are left to wonder about the logicinvolved in such acts. The reader is encouraged to move on, and hunt down otherstudies through the bibliographies. It is a mark of this history’s worth, and of theOxford Handbook, to send us further down the shelves in search of more.

RICHARD FINN OP

ANSELM ON FREEDOM by Katherin Rogers, Oxford University Press, 2008,pp. 217, £40 hbk

In Anselm on Freedom, Katherin Rogers develops an original approach to thequestion of Anselm’s understanding of freedom (both human and divine), the keyto which can be found in the following claim: ‘Anselm’s thesis is that God, inmaking man in His image, has succeeded in sharing a measure of His aseity’(p. 91).

Rogers argues uncontroversially that Anselm is a ‘classical theist’, who holdsthat God is absolutely simple, His attributes being identical with each other (chap-ter 1). Although Anselm is one of Augustine’s ‘devoted disciples’ (chapter 2,p. 30), he differs from Augustine in his view of human freedom and does notfollow Augustine’s compatibilism (i.e. that moral choice is ultimately causallyexplicable in terms of external factors). Anselm leaves ‘a small space’ for humanagency (p. 33), for he is a ‘libertarian’ (i.e. he believes that the agent’s free choiceis not explicable in terms of external factors nor of internal factors which them-selves ultimately possess external causes). In chapter 3, ‘The Purpose, Definition,and Structure of Free Choice’, Rogers finds evidence in Anselm’s writings forher claim that the human agent, ‘through its free will, shares in God’s aseity’and ‘imitates God in being a genuine cause’, ‘a primary agent’ (p. 59), whosefreedom is characterized by the power to preserve rightness (rectitudo) of willfor its own sake (see De Libertate Arbitrii, 3). There are two sorts of desire: thedesire for benefit and the desire for rightness (rectitudo). They are not compet-ing desires: ‘the will for rightness is a second order desire that one’s first orderdesires for benefits should be properly ordered and limited in accord with thedivine will’ (p. 72). In chapter 4, ‘Alternative Possibilities and Primary Agency’,Rogers develops her case for Anselm as a ‘libertarian’. Open options, though notdefinitional of freedom, permit the created agent ‘to choose from himself ’ (p. 76).Anselm regards the created agent as confronting ‘alternatives such that its ownfree will genuinely plays a causally efficacious role’ (p. 78). In chapter 5, ‘TheCauses of Sin and the Intelligibility Problem’, Rogers argues that the mysterysurrounding self-caused choice (that a choice whose cause is not derived fromexternal causes is not a random or accidental event) is what ‘one ought to expectto find attached to an imago dei in the universe of traditional classical theism’(p. 87). Anselm’s solution to the intelligibility problem lies in a ‘very modest’autonomy of the agent. There are two genuine causal forces in the world: ‘Godand the free creatures He has made’ (p. 101).

In chapter 6, ‘Creaturely Freedom and God as Creator Omnium’, Rogers askshow God can be the creator of all that exists, but not be responsible for sinfulacts. In De Concordia, 3, Anselm makes it clear that evil actions are the faultof man, since God ‘would not cause them, if man did not will to do them’(p. 121). God chooses to be affected by the created agent’s actions. To deny


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this to God would be to lessen His omnipotence. In chapter 7, ‘Grace and FreeWill’, Rogers attempts to show that Anselm’s position on the relation of graceand freedom differs from that of Augustine. Even after the fall, the human agentretains ‘the ability to keep rightness of will for its own sake’. Chapters 8 and 9 on‘Foreknowledge, Freedom, and Eternity’ address both pre-Anselmian (Augustineand Boethius) and contemporary discussions of divine foreknowledge and humanfreedom, eternity and time. Anselm, it is claimed, holds a four-dimensionalist(i.e. tenseless) theory of time with God’s eternity characterized as a kind of fifthdimension (p. 183). In the final chapter, ‘The Freedom of God’, Rogers attemptsto reconcile the belief that God is obliged to do the best, with His freedom. Shebelieves that Anselm’s position not only entails that God has created the bestactualizable (rather than possible) world, but that ‘Anselm believes our world isthe only world God could make’. She perhaps overstates the case in claiming‘strong textual evidence for this’ (p. 193). To stress her point she italicizes adefinite article in her translation of Anselm’s Latin (p. 194), but Latin of coursehas no definite article.

Rogers recognises the potential problem in her assertion that Anselm wasthe first (Christian) philosopher ‘to attempt a systematic libertarian analysis offreedom’ (p. 1). Anselm was not party to recent discussions of human freedomand applying the soubriquet ‘libertarian’ to Anselm might seem to be ‘pushing it’somewhat. But Rogers sets out to avoid the charge of anachronism by offering a‘close and careful analysis’ of the textual evidence.

It is in deriving from Anselm’s position on the imago dei the notion of ahuman and limited aseity as an explanatory justification for the belief in thefreedom of human choices that Rogers creatively opens up Anselm’s thought towider discussion. Whether or not this view of human aseity is one Anselm heldit makes a real contribution to our understanding of what it means to be madein the image of God. To put the matter in a less qualified manner than Rogerschooses to employ (compare her comments on p. 106, final paragraph): if onetreats the idea that we are made in God’s image as contentful and informativeof philosophical, theological and anthropological thinking, then surely we arecompelled to recognize that in creating us in His image, God has made us co-creators of ourselves. The freedom we possess in our choices, which choicesdetermine who we are, is a reflection of the divine freedom, which is itself thesource of our freedom.

One final point: at the beginning of De Concordia, Anselm sets out his positionthat there is no conflict between divine foreknowledge and human freedom,because the manner of the choice as a free act is foreseen by God. It seems tome that this text is the central statement of Anselm’s view of the compatibility ofdivine foreknowledge and human freedom. Anselm’s solution to the problem isdriven by the logical entailment that whatever God foresees must be the case andthat, if God has created a world in which He foresees free acts, there must be freeacts. Whilst God’s freedom is the source of human freedom, His foreknowledgeis its guarantor.

IAN LOGAN

LE MYSTERE DE L’ETRE: L’ITINERAIRE THOMISTE DE GUERARD DES LAU-RIERS by Louis-Marie de Blignieres, Librairie Philosophique J. Vrin, Paris,2007, pp. 454, €48

This work, written by the founder of the Fraternity of St Vincent Ferrer andsuccessfully defended as a doctoral thesis at the Sorbonne, is both an originalwork of metaphysics and an introduction to the thought of Fr Louis-Bertrand


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Guerard des Lauriers (1898–1988). Fr Guerard des Lauriers is perhaps not wellknown to most English students of St Thomas, but was a major and independent-minded figure within the French ‘Thomistic revival’ of the 20th Century.

The author’s concern in this book is with the foundations of metaphysics, thescience of ‘being qua being’. Hence the phrase ratio entis occurs throughoutthe book, for example (p. 14), ‘one’s entrance into metaphysics depends on theisolation [le degagement] of the ratio entis’. Normally left untranslated in thetext, this phrase might be rendered as ‘the nature of being’, or ‘the meaning of“being”’.

Clearly, one cannot strictly define being, since ‘this would imply that there wassomething anterior to being by which the ratio entis could be defined’ (ibid.). Howthen does the author approach his subject? He proposes a three-fold investigation,inspired by the classic repartition of the virtues of the speculative intellect into‘science’, ‘understanding’ and ‘wisdom’.

The scientific or rational approach to being (chapter III) seeks to show how ourexperience of reality leads, as if from principles to conclusions, to an awareness ofbeing as both ‘substantial’ and ‘accidental’, to a knowledge of the transcendental‘properties’ of being, and to a knowledge of act (as opposed to potentiality). Theanalysis is both scientifically precise and concerned throughout to stay in touchwith common human experience.

After this meticulous study of ‘the various ways in which being is said’, theintellective or ‘noetic’ approach (chapter IV) seeks to grasp being in its unity.Here the author considers the different senses of the term ‘abstraction’. He alsoshows how Guerard des Laurier’s thought compares and contrasts with that ofHeidegger and Maritain. The author insists that the mental act by which we givea content to the term ‘being’ must involve the first two ‘operations of the mind’,namely, simple apprehension and judgement. Maritain’s theory of an ‘intuitionof being’ is partly rejected (e.g. p. 244); it would have been interesting to learnwhat the author would have said of Maritain’s development of his theory in thelate work Approches sans Entraves.

The ‘sapiential’ approach to being (chapter V) builds on the two precedingchapters, arguing that our experience of the ways in which being is ‘instantiated’,put in the light of what we can grasp of the ratio entis, opens the horizons to newquestions (p. 269). In particular, the limitation which being always presents in ourexperience, though not in its own ratio, leaves the mind unsatisfied. Naturally,then, this last chapter considers the existence of God, the knowledge of this truthbeing presented as the summit of metaphysics. The author is particularly attentiveto the question of how we come to grasp the ‘self-evident’ principles to which StThomas appeals in this respect, for example, that ‘whatever is moved is movedby another’ (pp. 282ff ).

The first two chapters of this book are devoted to a study of the human mindand its varied approaches to reality. The author insists on the phrase, mens capaxentis (p. 45), as the philosophical equivalent of the theological phrase, mens capaxDei. He argues that while the former phrase does not literally appear in the worksof St Thomas, it is a faithful summary of his thought (chapter I). He also intro-duces a favourite theme of Guerard des Lauriers, that of a tripartite distinction ofthe manner of human knowing, independent of the area of knowledge (pp. 54ff).Whereas the Thomist tradition tends to concentrate on the distinction betweenunderstanding (in simple apprehension and judgement) and reasoning, Guerardargued that there is a third, irreducible component in the mind’s grasp of reality,what he calls le sens de la question, which we might translate as ‘having theknack of asking the interesting questions’. The author defends the thesis that thisthird component, (also called by Guerard ‘pneumatism’, from pneuma), consistsin a knowledge of being by connaturality and manifests itself most clearly inwhat is called genius. The author defends this thesis with interesting citations


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from scientists and artists; the current reviewer, however, is unsure that ‘pneu-matic knowledge’ need be considered an operation of the mind really distinctfrom simple apprehension and judgement.

The theory of ‘pneumatism’ is explained at greater length in chapter II, whereit is argued that it has ‘beauty’ for its proper object. ‘The efficacious meansof [scientific] discovery’, the author writes, ‘is a certain sensibility to intelli-gible beauty’ (p. 106). This leads to an original investigation of the place ofbeauty among the other transcendentals, with the suggestion that it is best de-fined as ‘the actual shining forth of the communicability of being’, or ens utcommunicans.

This dense and meditative book concludes with three important appendiceswhich reveal the depth of the author’s knowledge of the corpus of St Thomas.The first and third are statistical analyses of ‘the vocabulary of being’ in thewritings of the angelic doctor. Among other things, they reveal the presence inAquinas’ work of phrases that might have been attributed to a later scholasticismsuch as natura entitatis. The second appendix, which occupies 97 pages, containstranslation of all the passages in St Thomas’s writings which contain the phraseratio entis, or cognate expressions.

The author enjoys a wide command not only of the actual texts of St Thomasbut also of the relevant contemporary literature, in English, French and Italian.A concern for scientific precision is dominant throughout, but the book is alsomarked by an awareness that a well-founded, realist metaphysics must prevail ina society for the sake of the moral and cultural good of its members. Finally, thisbook is written in a rhetorical style proper to the French philosophical traditionthat the English reader may well find daunting, at times; but if he perseveres, hewill have received a thorough induction into ‘the mystery of being’.

THOMAS CREAN OP

CHESTERTON AND THE ROMANCE OF ORTHODOXY – THE MAKING OFGKC 1874–1908 by William Oddie, Oxford University Press, 2008, pp. 416,£25 hbk

William Oddie’s Chesterton and the Romance of Orthodoxy is a new biography ofG.K.Chesterton covering the first thirty-four years of his life (he died in 1936).Oddie chooses 1908 as his end date because it saw the appearance of two ofGKC’s major works, Orthodoxy and The Man who Was Thursday. For Oddie,the former in particular was also a key moment in Chesterton’s intellectual andspiritual formation: ‘The publication of Orthodoxy was the end of a journey. Itwas both the conclusion of a process of self-discovery and the key document . . . inwhich he assessed not only where he now stood but how it was that his journeyhad followed the course that it did.’

Indeed, the idea that Chesterton’s ‘intellectual discovery comes to a fairly clearterminus ad quem in 1908 with Orthodoxy’ is the central theme of this book.This is a new and important claim in Chesterton studies; others might disagree.Chesterton himself stated that the major turning point in his life was the MarconiScandal of 1913, which ended his faith in the Liberal Party and which nearlydestroyed his brother Cecil. Another key date was of course his reception intothe Catholic Church in 1922, which inspired a sonnet that is one of his greatestpoems. Indeed, Chesterton and the Romance of Orthodoxy is more a monographon its author’s key subject rather than a traditional biography as is explained inthe introduction: ‘My study is inevitably organised and written in biographicalform, but there are differences to be noted from the biographies which have so farappeared. A general biography must inevitably be a kind of catch-all, organising


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chronologically any material which comes to hand . . . its cornucopian assemblyinevitably brings, to a greater of lesser extent, a certain loss of focus on the onepart of a writer which is of lasting importance: his writings.’

Oddie’s reductionist methodology leads him to ignore much of Chesterton’soutput, the fiction, the poetry, most of the essays, and to concentrate on a relativelysmall number of works that he sees as key to his thesis. He also has little timefor others who have surveyed Chesterton’s life before him: ‘with one exception, Ihave found existing biographies of little help in my own study’. As Oddie states,‘the one exception’ is in fact the two books by Maisie Ward written relativelysoon after GKC’s death, which have been subsequently used as the primary sourceby all successive biographers. She had the huge advantage of not only knowingthe Chestertons personally, but also of being able to write to their friends andhelpers on matters which were not clear, while she also had access to materialthat seems to have been destroyed during the War.

However, Oddie seems more dismissive of other biographers than he needsto be. For example, he rightly stresses the great importance of the poem at thebeginning of The Man who Was Thursday dedicated to GKC’s old friend andformer schoolmate E.C Bentley. In the poem Chesterton looks back to his owntroubled youth (1892–1895) when his mind had almost given way under theweight of evil he saw underlying the decadence of Oscar Wilde, but goes on tomark his path to sanity by the rejection of the Green Carnation (Wilde’s symbol).In 1926 he wrote a foreword to a dramatic version of the book: “I was not thenconsidering whether anything is really evil, but whether everything is really evil”.Curiously Oddie then adds: ‘though most of his biographers ignore it’. Lookingat the Chesterton biographies on my shelves I cannot see the justification for thisremark as at least part of the poem is quoted in all of them: Barker (1973); Dale(1982); Ffinch (1986); Coren (1989), and Pearce (1996). Tellingly, it is absentfrom Ward.

Where Oddie scores well is in the work he has done on the Chestertonmanuscripts, which were not properly catalogued until as late as 2001 by ascholar at the British Library. This has enabled him to uncover some interestingmaterial on Chesterton’s early life that has not been published before. As befits aformer clergyman in the Church of England, he also shows a clear understandingof the Anglo-Catholic world in which GKC moved under the influence of hisfuture wife from the late 1890s onwards.

However, I must say that I am sceptical about Oddie’s central thesis. If GKC’smind was made up by 1908, why did it take him another fourteen years to join theRoman Catholic Church? His nightmarish adolescence left Chesterton constantlywrestling with the interlocking questions of sanity and evil for the rest of hisadult life. It also enabled him to write visions of despair with great power, suchas those found in the Father Brown books, and which were admired as such byKafka and Borges.

This hypersensitivity to evil also left him obsessed with the Book of Job,references to which crop up in all sorts of unexpected places in Chesterton’swork, and it is surprising that Oddie does not discuss GKC’s major 1907 essayon the subject. It would have been useful if he had studied Father Ian Boyd’sbook on Chesterton’s novels, which describes The Man who Was Thursday as ‘anextended commentary on the Book of Job’. Likewise, in a period when employeescan be sacked for wearing a cross, it is also strange that Oddie does not mentionthe parable of the insane atheist obsessed with destroying crosses which beginsThe Ball and the Cross (1910), a piece which was greatly admired by AlbinoLuciani (Pope John Paul I).

To sum up: Dr Oddie has given us an interesting study concentrating onChesterton’s intellectual and spiritual development up to the year 1908, althoughnot all lovers of Chesterton will agree with its key thesis. In any case, it should be


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seen as a monograph rather than a major new biography which replaces MaisieWard.

RUSSELL SPARKES

WEDDING FEAST OF THE LAMB: EUCHARISTIC THEOLOGY FROM A HIS-TORICAL, BIBLICAL AND SYSTEMATIC PERSPECTIVE by Roch A. KeresztyOCist, Hildebrand Books, Chicago/Mundelein, Illinois, 2004(?), pp. x + 274,$35.00

SHEER GRACE: LIVING THE MYSTERY OF GOD by Drasko Dizdar, PaulistPress, New York/Mahwah NJ, 2008, pp. vi + 218, $24.95

There is a growing body of Catholic theology which might be termed ‘creativeorthodoxy’. It is solidly, but unselfconsciously, built on orthodox Catholic theol-ogy, and therefore (not ‘but’) is able to draw freely on a wide variety of schoolsof thought and theological and extra-theological traditions, the ensuing synthesisproducing something new. These two books are good examples. Roch Kereszty’sgraduate text is a detailed historical survey of the Catholic Eucharistic traditionand the Mass, engaging critically but also eirenically with the Protestant tradi-tion, with theories of transsignification and with contemporary pastoral concernsin the celebration of the Eucharistic liturgy. Drasko Dizdar offers us ‘a kindof lyrical liturgical catechesis and mystagogy’ in which his basic framework isa ‘creative dialogue’ between the widely differing scapegoat theology of ReneGirard (via James Alison) and the Temple model of Margaret Barker. The resultsof both studies are interesting and often surprising. Stylistically they could not bemore different. Kereszty maintains a sober (though not dry) tone; Dizdar’s textis possibly the most unvaryingly enthusiastic book I have ever read, and simplyabounds in italics and exclamation marks! Kereszty is aiming at a graduate audi-ence (though not exclusively, as he says); Dizdar is addressing any Catholic whowants to (re-) connect faith and life, liturgy being, in his view, the connectionbetween the two. He roots himself here firmly in the Eastern Christian principleof liturgy as theologia prima.

Kereszty begins his historical survey with an overview, rather too cursory, ofpagan sacrifice, though he makes the interesting point that earth cults are fromdeath to death, whereas sky cults lead from death to life. Dizdar discusses pagansacrifice in detail, after Girard, but this is in order to show how radically differentChristian sacrifice is – God’s gift to us. Kereszty propounds a strongly Eucharis-tic Sitz-im-Leben for the New Testament. (This is also where we encounter hisidiosyncratic Greek transcription, adding h to denote long vowels). He includesa useful parallel presentation of the Institution narratives, although he is a littleinclined simply to favour scholars who advance his views and to be rather sum-mary with those who don’t. His treatment of John shows an engagement withmodern ‘eye-witness/community’ schools of exegesis (p. 51).

After a liturgical reading of Revelation, Keresty surveys the Fathers. St. JohnDamascene’s emphasis on Eucharistic transformation as our transformation pro-vides an entry for what Kereszty clearly sees as the high point of Latin Eucharis-tic theology in Augustinian Platonism, which enabled opinions to co-exist in theChurch: ‘Even the extreme symbolist believed that the symbol of bread and wineparticipates in the reality of the body and blood of Christ. On the other hand,even the extreme realist knew that Christ is present in and through sacramentalsigns so that one cannot literally touch, or even less chew on his body. Both werealso aware that the sacrament of the body and blood of Christ causes the buildingup of the Church as the body of Christ’ (p. 131).


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Enter Aristotle, and, according to Kereszty, the decline began. While acknowl-edging the importance of Aquinas’ philosophy of substance (including for modernscience – see n. 28), Kereszty misunderstands him as focussing on God’s abilityto change bread into ‘any body’ (ibid.). Aquinas is positing existential change,not essential – as Herbert McCabe says, ‘it (the Eucharist) now belongs to a newworld’ (God Still Matters, p. 119).

Kereszty’s point, though, is that the direction of Eucharistic theology, especiallyfrom the late Middle Ages away from the symbolic and ecclesial, was a factorin the Protestant revolt. He acknowledges the recovery of the ecclesial body byLuther and also Calvin’s sense of communion with Christ’s sacrifice, while notingthe fatal drift towards ‘spiritualisation’ and Luther’s opposition of Mass and God’sgrace. Clearly he wants to initiate a real dialogue with Protestants, and whilerecognising the Scriptural and patristic ressourcement of Trent, feels that Trent’sseparate treatment of sacrifice and sacrament leads to a disconnection in ‘average’post-Tridentine theology (although this does not seem borne out by the sacrificialprimacy of pre-Vatican II Eucharistic catechesis). After this Congarian historicaltreatise, Kereszty converges with Dizdar in making a systematic presentation ofthe Mass.

Dizdar is phenomenological, beginning with the Mass which we experience andopening it up, and then using this as the foundation for broader considerationsof liturgical time and space, whereas liturgical time is one of Kereszty’s startingpoints. Both are concerned to express the absolute primacy of God as the ‘doer’and Christ as the celebrant (Dizdar draws heavily on Ratzinger). His sacramentaltheology begins with the image of the birthday party as the ritual of the liturgywhich is a birthday, the sacrament being one’s life (p. 69). This is an appealinganalogy, but it risks reducing the Christian Sacraments, which take place withinand only within rituals, in spite of their effects in our lives. This seems to confuseres and sacramentum. To be fair, Dizdar probably sees our lives as analogicalto the primary Sacraments of Christ and the Church. But he doesn’t make thisentirely clear.

On liturgical space, the two books are again complementary. Also, follow-ing Barker’s idea of Christ restoring the First Temple as a microcosm of thenew creation (symbolised by Genesis), Dizdar applies this to his conception ofliturgical space. However, he is not uncritical of Barker, and his defence of theDeuteronomic Reform is a valuable and original piece of work.

Interestingly, Kereszty sets the uniqueness of Christian sacramentality not inmonotheism versus pantheism – he makes up for his cursory treatment of pagansacrifice in ch.1 with a conception of pagan nature as diaphanous transcendentrather than pantheistic (p. 177). Rather, Christians – even instead of Jews with thecentre of sacrifice in Jerusalem – are freed by the ‘personal space’ of the RisenChrist: the Christian church building takes its sacred character from assembly,but for that reason must be appropriate to the mystery.

Kereszty’s approach to Word and Sacrament is strongly ‘both and’, compar-ing ‘a number of contemporary theologians’ (presumably they know who theyare) with Clement of Alexandria and Origen in juxtaposing but not connectingWord and Sacrament. Communion fulfils Word; but to disengage from the Wordreduces the Mass to subjective sentimentalism (a point also made by Chauvetin Symbol and Sacrament, where he speaks of ‘phantasmagoria’). Also, moderndevotion to the Tridentine Rite is for Kereszty the superficial mystique of arcan-ity – one might question his spirit of dialogue here! While acknowledging thatthe Offertory is late (a point made forcefully by Jungmann, and leading to theliturgical changes of Vatican II), Kereszty makes a strong connection between theTridentine and Eastern rites in the ‘joyful anticipation’ of their offertories. Heinsists that the bread is not annihilated by being transformed – which builds avaluable bridge with Protestants – and he will have no truck with arguments about


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the exact point at which Eucharistic change ‘happens’. In sum, Kereszty upholdsa balance/tension of real presence and real sign: his appendix on ecumenicalimplications of the study could be a very useful resource for ecumenists.

There is some real spiritual food in Kereszty too: for example, he says forthe Mass truly to work from the perspective of the Resurrection, we must re-nounce the dream of infinite earthly happiness, allowing the Resurrection to beour peaceful centre even when suffering eclipses Resurrection joy. Dizdar tendsto neglect such darker realities, and I suspect that many English-speaking readerswill prefer Kereszty’s sober prose to Dizdar’s boundless enthusiasm, languageof chaos and cosmos rivalry, violence and scandals, abundant dramatic quota-tions (e.g Heinrich Zimmer’s ‘the most important things cannot be talked about’).And there are philosophical reasons for objecting to his heavy use of post-modern/psychoanalytic puns (‘From the Mist of Abel to the (s)Myth of Cain’,p. 62) or Mother – Me-As-Other and Father as Far-Other. Surely, all these show isthat one word is coincidentally similar to another. A literary conceit, but it provesnothing. On the other hand, what about the parables of Jesus: riddles, challenges,literally, things ‘thrown in the way’? We do not have to agree with Dizdar’s read-ing of these words to accept his invitation to enter into the realm of the imaginaryand unconscious, which has more influence on our passive intellect and thus onour ability to philosophize rationally than we would sometimes care to admit.

The greatest strength of the book is its imaginative and symbolic power andappeal to bodily experience (even though some of his diagrams, e.g. that of theEucharist on p. 85, are not so easy to follow). I can personally witness to itspastoral usefulness. I have been teaching a small group of people seeking Chris-tian initiation in our parish; most of them have had relatively little educationalopportunity. So when explaining the Mass, the challenge was to keep it attractiveand simple, without ‘dumbing down’. Dizdar notes how, beginning Mass withthe Sign of the Cross, we touch head, belly/womb and then lungs, with all theemotional and psychological significance these have. Making it so ‘real’ quicklyengaged the group, and made it easy then to communicate the healing powerof the Rite of Penance. Without agreeing with all of his conclusions, I wouldstrongly recommend Sheer Grace as a catechetical text.

Both books, I suggest, have a lot to offer in the urgent task of re-evangelisingWestern Christians: Kereszty’s, for its balance, solidity and ecumenical potential,and Dizdar’s not only for its imaginatively (if sometimes wacky) liturgical cate-chesis, but for what it could do for the liturgy. Clear, ‘rational’ theology aloneis insufficient for making interesting and attractive a liturgy which is often, inpractice, very boring, especially for the young. If some of Dizdar’s ideas were ap-plied to liturgical practice, there might be a real possibility of recovering liturgical‘mystery’ in a way wholly free of social and political conservatism.

DOMINIC WHITE OP

THE THEOLOGY OF FOOD: EATING AND THE EUCHARIST by Angel F.Mendez Montoya, Wiley Blackwell, Oxford, 2009, pp. 184, £45 hbk

An Indian Jesuit of my acquaintance introduces the eucharist to his peasantcongregations by taking a wafer in one hand, and a chapatti in the other. ‘What’sthis?’, he enquires, holding up the wafer. Smiling confusedly they mumble, ‘Wedon’t know ayah’. ‘What’s this?’ he responds, holding up the chapatti. ‘Bread!’,they shout triumphantly. He celebrates with the chapatti, making strong andobvious connections between labour, the fruit of the earth, and the eucharist.The author of this essay notes how far the visions he outlines are from Catholicliturgies and the actual life of Catholics. There is a profound irony here in a book


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which insists on non dualism, the material as the spiritual and vice versa, andreality as we almost everywhere experience it.

The book is rich and imaginative, drawing on some obvious texts – IsaakDinesen’s Babette’s Feast, Laura Esquivel’s Like Water for Chocolate – as wellas from unusual aspects of the author’s own Mexican tradition. The first chapterdescribes the making of the Mexican dish Molli, and indeed includes the recipefor doing so. The recipe is ancient, but one source for it is Sister Juana Inezde la Cruz, who was forbidden to read and write and told that she was theworst of sinners for doing so. Banished to the kitchen, where women belong, sheapparently managed to commit recipes to writing. In combining wildly differentingredients and drawing on multiple cultures Montoya suggests that Molli is ametaphor for both the doing of theology and for the eucharist. In the eucharist,the author tells us, difference of gender and sexual orientation is celebrated withinthe one body. At the Eucharistic table all are interdependent. He frequently citesBenedict XVI. One would enjoy the conversation between the two of them asregards the nature of this celebration and this unity, and of the meaning ofinterdependence.

This reviewer, at least, would have welcomed a fuller account of the author’ssacramental theology. He tells us that the fact that God is ultimately excess meansthat signification falls short of its signified signs. However, we are not left withperpetual deferral because ‘God’s signs are nourished by God’s plenitude andsuperabundant gifts’. So the eucharist is a sign. At the same time the language oftransubstantiation is routinely used and we are told that God becomes food anddrink in and through materiality. Perhaps nobody reads Schillebeeckx now but Icontinue to find his account of transignification an illuminating way of makingsense of such language. As it is I was left constantly wondering what the authormeant by ‘sign’.

Montoya takes from Like Water for Chocolate a close relationship betweenknowing and savouring (in Spanish saber and sabor). In the light of the eucharistto know is to participate through intimate savouring of the known. Here food isthe body of Christ. ‘The Eucharist is a banquet of the senses. More intimately, itis a feasting of the sense of touch because tasting, eating, and drinking are formsof proximity, a form of touching.’ One wonders how on earth this can properly besaid of our celebration of the eucharist – something my Jesuit friend felt strongly.

In the third chapter the author draws on two orthodox theologians, AlexanderSchmemann and Bulgakov. The former helps us to see gratitude and adoration asway of seeing, tasting and knowing God. All eating and drinking is sacramentalcommunion with God and the Fall is not primarily disobedience to God’s com-mand but failure to see God as the ultimate source of divine food. For Bulgakovfood discloses our essential metaphysical unity with the world. The eucharist isthe sacramental focus of that unity.

Babette’s feast is an obvious metaphor for the eucharist as grace. FollowingJohn’s gospel Montoya reflects on the gift of manna, a figure, he says, that evokesa certain polis crafted in and through historical pilgrimage: a collective identitybased on God’s gift given as nourishment to sustain and provide a collectivetelos. This is well said, and it links up with his proper emphasis on the relationbetween the eucharist and the stark facts of world hunger and the imbalance ofpower this represents. At the same time more attention could have been paid tothe processes of food production. Readers of the book may like to look out forNorman Wirzba’s forthcoming book of more or less the same title, which hasmuch more to say about farming in all its aspects. Put side-by-side the two bookswill make a fascinating study of Protestant and Catholic accounts not simply ofthe eucharist, but of grace and therefore justice.

TIM GORRINGE


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ERIC ROHMER: FILM AS THEOLOGY by Keith Tester, Palgrave Macmillan,Basingstoke, 2008, pp. vi + 175, £45.00 hbk

The critical acclaim surrounding Danny Boyle’s Slumdog Millionaire has re-directed attention, even in times of rising secularity, to the link between theauteur (the personal vision of the director) and Catholicism. For Ford, Hitch-cock and Scorsese, Catholicism supplied a reverence in framing images, the needfor inference in regard to visual representations, a recognition of the power ofsymbols, and alertness to theological themes of guilt and innocence, redemption,forgiveness, hope and despair. These accentuations have been re-set in their sig-nificance by a realisation that a culture of postmodernity is unexpectedly denotedby theological considerations. The writings of von Balthasar on aesthetics andtheology present a vital support for those seeking to decipher these trends. Morethan any other recent theologian, he has opened out links between the traditionsof theology and the expectations of the humanities in ways that facilitate a cre-ative fusion of both. Thus, his large tome on Georges Bernanos complementsthe French director Robert Bresson who filmed Diary of a Country Priest andin the case of both, understandings of grace operating in culture can be greatlyenhanced. Likewise, adventurous theological insights have emerged by means ofthe link between Flannery O’Connor and John Huston in regard to Wise Blood.

Set against the above considerations, Tester’s search for theological issues inRohmer’s long and distinctive directorial career has much to offer. A labour oflove, the study is crammed with detail about the place of Paris in his films, hisuse of amateur actors, his rigidity regarding scripts, and the degree to whicheverything is planned ahead so that shooting schedules are short. Concise sum-maries of the plots of the films are supplied in the study and these are subject tominute, sometimes ingenious, appraisals. Rohmer’s films might be characterisedby realism, but these are more than mere refractions of everyday life; they ex-hibit moral tales of dilemmas well fitted for close observation. There are twounusual properties to this particular study. The first relates to the author’s disci-plinary background that shapes this interpretation of Rohmer’s significance andthe second points to the distinctive theological themes which Tester uncovers inhis study of the films.

In a sense, this study is a sabbatical from Tester’s more usual pursuits as awidely published sociologist whose works cover culture, morality, and the humancondition. He is also a notable commentator on the extensive writings of the Polishsociologist Zygmunt Bauman, who has sought to think past postmodernity in waysthat lead into recognition of the endemic and enduring properties of the humancondition. These emerge distinctively as modernity matures and as contingencyaccentuates a sense of the indeterminate. The dilemmas these occasion influenceTester in his approach to Rohmer, but unusually for an English sociologist leadhim in the direction of Catholicism. The concerns with fate and chance thatarise for Bauman in his worries over postmodernity and life generate particulartheological needs which Tester wishes to explore.

Given Rohmer’s enigmatic and elusive status (pp. 4–7), Tester’s decision toconcentrate on the territories of this director makes a lot of sociological sense.His interests are with the coming of grace ‘in the human nature of sociability’(p. 18). Concerns with its properties yield realisations of vulnerability where theordinary is called into question most especially when fate strikes. This sense ofprecariousness forms a domain property of Rohmer’s films, notably when tragedyemerges from ‘sad endings brought about by social pressures’ (p. 28). Theseconfine the actors to the mundane, to the empirical world, that seems endowedwith inescapable properties of the immediate, the ‘now’ (pp. 25–28). As Testerwrites ‘it is this atmospheric “now”, our “now” that is the site of Rohmer’smost nuanced work’, hence why his films are denoted by realism (p. 45). By


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illustrating the way the even tenor of the ‘now’ is sabotaged by ambiguities,events and personalities that are so disruptive, a suitable terrain for the receptionof grace is disclosed.

Grace comes as an irruption that thrusts into the routine hazarding of everydaylife, and it comes as a gift that transcends its ambiguities. Sometimes, as Testersuggests, God takes matters in hand and by means of grace blows the ‘now’into the infinite. In Tester’s view, it is this prising open of routines, in whosefissures grace might come, that gives to Rohmer’s films a particular theologicalpotency. But as Tester suggests, Rohmer’s concerns hinge on the degree to whichits conferral might be misrecognised, due to a blindness stemming from hard-ness of heart (pp. 91–92). Yet grace can be discerned by others in unexpectedcircumstances. It is this property of wager that generates an interest in Rohmer’sfilms, even when the viewer has no theological interest in the outcomes. Thefilms’ narratives entice the curious to look closely and think about outcomes thatsometimes are left dangling and open-ended. In the indeterminacy, the viewermight feel the need to look more closely at the everyday and in doing so mightbecome more alert to its unexpected moments of grace.

Pascal emerges as the central theological figure in this study, not least becauseof his place in one of Rohmer’s more famous works, My Night at Maud’s.Strangely, specific examples of grace conferred rarely appear in Rohmer’s workbut an exemplary infusion is to be found in one of his films, A Winter’s Tale.Its central figure, Felicie is given a gift of grace that enables her to make theright choice over conflicting loyalties. The conferral occurs in a cathedral. It isan exemplary infusion. Indeed, as Tester remarks, ‘it is not at all far-fetched toidentify Felicie as the point of redemption in Rohmer’s entire body of work’(p. 160). Pascal also comes into significance over the deceptions and revelationsthe self encounters in the course of the routine round of life where miraclesemerge in chance encounters that reveal all. Leaving aside the worry that graceis everywhere but nowhere in particular, Tester draws attention to its conferral inthe many passages of life portrayed in Rohmer’s films and most notably whenthey are concerned with moral themes.

The sites of Rohmer’s films are meticulously explored, especially his ambigu-ous attitude to Paris. In those films set in the country, Tester finds a telling imageof the wind blowing through the trees. As they sway in the background, theymark the finiteness of life and the impossibility of the dreams of those whoseek to escape from its limitations (pp. 69–70). It is this appeal to what is allaround that makes Tester such an interesting commentator on Rohmer. A legacyof postmodernity is that it has revealed a quandary over the presence or absenceof God, hence the interest in Pascal’s wager. But these concerns arise earlier,as Tester well notes, in Baudelaire’s familiar notion of modernity. The one halfdealing with the fleeting and the transient is well-known; less well known, ordownplayed in the interests of affirming secularity, is the other half which refersto what is eternal (p. 80). This property of the eternal relates to God, who is nottotally absent, but as Tester aptly suggests is lurking about hidden, but wishingto drop down gifts of grace, whose donation involves also making a wager as towhether these irruptions will be recognised or not (p. 88).

While Pascal greatly aids Tester’s theological quest, at its end one feels itis more Flannery O’Connor who comes closest to supplying what he seeks. Herconcern was with the bizarre and with extra-sacramental infusions of grace outsideCatholicism and delivered in bizarre circumstances. These indicate that God isnot to be outfoxed, nor to be compromised by place, time or personality. Testerslightly overplays the infusion of the grace in the ordinary. The realism he findsin Rohmer’s films downplays the irruptions of grace in the imagination whereimages of faith can also be delicately kindled. The ordinary in Rohmer’s filmsmight give comfort to sociological enterprises that best operate when confined to


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the scrutiny of the routines of life. But the imagination is also an apt vehicle forthe exploration of the unexpected and for the grace to see beyond the boundariesof everyday life.

Perhaps the ultimate value of this study is the way it seeks to find in thefilms of Rohmer moments of grace emerging in the ordinary, in unpropitiouscultural times, persons and circumstances that affirm the extraordinary. Thestudy is highly suggestive, credible and alert to many theological possibili-ties that are ripe for exploration in other settings, perhaps in relation to thestudy of other directors for whom the operations of grace yield other intriguingprospects.

KIERAN FLANAGAN

THE BODY OF THIS by Andrew McNabb Warren Machine Company, 2008,pp. 176, £18.50

What first brought this book the way of New Blackfriars is the fact that the authoris a great-grandnephew of Vincent McNabb OP, who was a regular contributor toBlackfriars in its early years and a key figure in the Ditchling experiment centredon Eric Gill, Hilary Pepler, David Jones and others. In this collection of shortstories (some of them very short, no more than a few hundred words), AndrewMcNabb shows the influence of that aspiration to an ‘earthy Catholicism’, seekingto locate the spiritual in the physical, not alongside it, or in the neighbourhood,but simply identified with it.

The collection, as the title suggests, centres on bodies, human bodies in theirvarious functions, relationships and ages, but also the bodies of buildings (which‘evolve’ and ‘breathe’), and the natural body of the created world. The tensionsthese stories recount (and generate in the reader) include those between the naturaland the artificial, between being young and being old, being healthy and beingsick, being rich and being poor, belonging to small city America (the stories areset in Portland, Maine) and not belonging there because one is a foreigner, iscrippled, or is socially inept.

Near the centre of the book is a story entitled ‘Herbert Wenkel Was Not YourAverage Man’. Herbert laments modernity and is obsessed with a ‘New WorldOrder’. He feels better suited for medieval times. So he reads Chesterton andBelloc and convinces his wife that they should try to put these men’s writingsinto practice. He takes his family off to northern Maine to live out the Distributistvision. He is happy among the spades and the hoes, with the seeds sinking intothe rich dark earth, but the experiment does not last long as it proves impossiblefor them to escape the limitations, corruptions and requirements of modern life.Faced with a move from comfortable farming to subsistence living his wife finallysays no. ‘We’re too normal, too average’ she says, ‘and if you want to be closerto God, do it on your own time’. So they return to enjoy the fruits of modernity,Herbert accepting that ‘total devotion’ is not possible in the capitalistic system,‘at least not when you’ve got kids’. The best he can do is garden at the weekends,‘waiting for a bit of that certain something he may never know’. In an earlier storythe narrator concluded that ‘no one can do everything unconventionally . . . youhave to figure out how to fit into the system, at least a little bit’.

There is this poignancy in many of the stories, of something incomplete andunfinished, with aspirations and desires recognized but never satisfactorily ful-filled. Some of the shorter pieces are more like poems than stories. There ishardly time for plot or character to be filled out but they still, perhaps because ofthis, pack a punch. Some of the longer stories (and even these are just a dozenpages or so) do fill out plot and character very effectively. One is reminded at


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times of Flannery O’Connor who must haunt any writer like McNabb who seeksto present himself as an American Catholic author.

If some pieces are like poems, others are like paintings. This is particularlytrue of a story that invites the reader to zoom in from a great height on thenatural beauties of Maine, to find the city between the mountains and the sea,zooming in further to the place where the narrator lives, his district, his street, his‘compartment’ as he calls it. There one meets his neighbours and is introducedto the colours and smells of his functional and utilitarian ‘compartment block’.The couple whose bodies are tattooed and pierced with metal are ‘the architectsof their own structures’ and live in a way that is (are we meant to be surprised?)quiet and hushed. One woman has lived here for years, unable to imagine notbeing contained by these walls and floors, another is still young and will soonbe on her way to a more respectable part of town. We are invited then to zoomout again, to gaze on a completely different landscape. Here are people living inlittle boxes surrounded by a world of great natural beauty, relating and reacting totheir environment in different ways, but puzzled as to how they can penetrate andbe one with that environment. Human architecture is beautiful but does violencein different ways, bodies attract but decay, life itself, as one character puts it, is‘a beautiful but confusing experience’.

The early stories in the collection are the most ‘erotic’, if erotic is the correctword. They are physical, and concern the sexual parts and functioning of humanbodies, but they are more likely to shock and even repulse than they are to attractor titillate. Some readers might be tempted not to persevere through these, shortas they are, but it is well worth doing so. Catholicism is a presence in many ofthe stories, linked with people’s awareness of their bodies. It would be too muchto claim that there is any ‘theology of the body’ operating here: the Eucharistwould have to figure in its theological meaning for that to be the case. But thereis here a frank realism about human bodies and a compassionate acceptance ofhuman desires and failure. In this these stories belong to the quest for an earthyCatholicism, an appropriation in art and literature of the great central truth thatthe Word became flesh and dwelt among us.

VIVIAN BOLAND OP


Documents

ERIC ROHMER: FILM AS THEOLOGY by Keith Tester