Book Reviews

‘WILL THERE BE FREE WILL IN HEAVEN?’ FREEDOM, IMPECCABILITY,AND BEATITUDE by Simon Francis Gaine OP, T & T Clark, London & NewYork, 2003, pp. 142, £25 hbk.

Etienne Gilson says somewhere that, while Idealists talk about philosophy,Thomist Realists talk about things. Something similar applies to the practitionersof the sacred science that philosophy serves. While some theologians contentthemselves with discussing other theologians, Thomist realists keep their sightson the rei veritas, the truth of the revealed reality that theology seeks tounderstand. The Thomist, too, draws on the work of other divines, especiallythe Fathers and Doctors of the Church, for theology, unlike philosophy, arguesex auctoritate; however, the realist theologian’s chief interest is in the greatthings of the Creed – the Trinity, the Incarnation, Redemption, the Church,the Sacraments, and Everlasting Life – which the authorities of the Traditionhelp us to understand.Fr Simon Gaine OP is a Thomist realist, and so, true to form, he concentrates on

the revealed reality that interests him (the free will of the blessed), and refuses to bedistracted by the fascinations of biography or Dogmengeschichte. The structure ofthis book, his first, resembles the ordering of an article in the Summa. It begins witha statement of the question as it came up on a BBC radio programme just beforeChristmas 1999: How can you be free in Heaven, if you can’t sin there? Like aSchoolman parading the ‘objections’ to the thesis he wants to defend, Gaine goes onto present two extreme positions, those of the otherwise unidentified G. B. Wall andJ. Donnelly. The former thinks the impeccability of Heaven requires the ‘jettisoning’of freedom, while the latter wants to secure the freedom of Heaven by allowing theblessed to sin. Opposed though they are to each other, the arguments of Wall andDonnelly share a common presupposition: if you can’t sin in Heaven, you’re not freein Heaven. This ‘either-or’ is at odds with the ‘both-and’ of orthodoxy, for, accord-ing to Catholic faith, beatitude combines a ‘glorious liberty’ (cf. Rom 8:21) with aserene incapacity to sin.In the main part of the book, as Aquinas does in the body of some of the longer

articles (quidam dicunt . . . alii dicunt), Fr Gaine starts by considering variousattempts to harmonize heavenly impeccability with blessed freedom. Suarez seemsto be on the side of the angels, or at least of the Angel of the Schools, by maintainingthat the blessed are intrinsically impeccable: beatitude itself makes them unchange-able in their rectitude of will. The trouble is that Suarez restricts the freedom of theblessed to a very narrow range of acts: they love God by necessity, but they do notlove Him by necessity in every way in which He can be loved. Gaine is dissatisfiedwith a liberty of glory limited to the dullness of non-obligated acts, and so he asks:‘Is it possible to construct a theology in which freedom is again accorded a greatervalue, butwhere theChristian orthodoxyof heavenly impeccability is retained?’ (p. 33).Scotus would answer yes, and so it is to him, the subtle doctor of the will, that Gainenext turns for enlightenment. If the Spanish Jesuit safeguards impeccability to thedetriment of freedom, the Scottish Franciscan glorifies freedom at the expense ofimpeccability. According to Scotus, God removes, by an extrinsic causality, theproximate power of the blessed for sinning, while leaving intact the remote power.‘[T]he retention of this remote power does not in any way lessen the happiness of the

# The Dominican Council/Blackwell Publishing Ltd 2005, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden,

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blessed, because sin never in fact comes about on account of the divine prevenience’(p. 68).The third opinion is that of Ockham, whose voluntarism is more extreme than

that of his Franciscan predecessor. Like Aristotle and Aquinas, Scotus regards thegood as the proper object of the will, but Ockham thinks the will is ‘free to definethe scope of its object, such that it is possible for the will to will evil as such’ (p. 71).Freedom, for Ockham, is above all the freedom of indifference. What happens,then, when this naturally freewheeling freedom finds itself in Heaven? Left to itself,‘to its own nature and freedom’, the will of the blessed would have the power to goafter any object whatever; it could even ‘nill’ God. But the will of the blessed is notleft to itself. God suspends its activity; God Himself becomes the ‘total cause’ ofthe beatific act. Ironically, extreme voluntarism ends up, like other species ofextremism, in destroying the very thing it prizes so highly. ‘It seems that the greatera promoter of the freedom of indifference one is, the more one must either suppressfreedom in this respect, like Ockham, or suppress impeccability, as Donnelly haddone’ (p. 84f).Having found the first three opinions wanting, Gaine begins his solution with the

help, first, of a fellow Dominican and Thomist, Fr Servais Pinckaers, and, secondly,of St Thomas himself. Pinckaers contrasts the moral thinking of the Fathers andSt Thomas, which is centred on happiness and the virtues, with the moralities of themodern age, which are preoccupied with obligation and commandments. Behindeach tradition stands a concept of freedom: the Ockhamist freedom of indifferenceis what drives the obligation theories, while ‘freedom for excellence’ (liberte dequalite) is the inspiration of the moral doctrine of the Fathers and St Thomas.Whereas the Ockhamists and obligationists feel a tension between natural inclina-tions and the freedom of indifference, the Fathers and St Thomas make naturalinclinations the root from which the freedom for excellence draws its strength.‘Freedom is characterized here not by indifference, but by a spontaneous attractionto all that at least seems true and good. The morality based on this freedom willthus be one of attraction rather than obligation’ (p. 95). In this perspective, theability to sin is accidental to freedom, is indeed a lack of freedom. The closer wecome to God, the less we are inclined to sin, for we begin to share in the freedom ofGod Himself.In the last chapter, drawing explicitly upon St Thomas, Gaine completes his

solution and provides the final answer to the question: ‘There Will Be Free Will inHeaven’. The freedom of the blessed, which includes their freedom from the abilityto sin, is a participation in the freedom of God. ‘I say that there is free will inHeaven. It is a more powerful freedom than freedom had on earth, because it is amore profound sharing in the divine freedom . . . [T]he blessed in Heaven can nolonger sin: their freedom is too perfect for that. It is perfect because they are for everunited to their ultimate end, and so their free choices will for ever be the morepowerful, because, like God’s, their free acts will flow from the ultimate end nowpossessed and from the order of which they never depart, to spread abroad thegoodness and glory of God for all eternity’ (p. 136).Simon Gaine OP has written a little classic, a model of what speculative

theology should be. In a style reminiscent of the late Herbert McCabe OP, hewrites with simplicity, clarity, and a light touch of humour. He asks a questionabout a great revealed mystery and tries to answer it, as the Church and hisorder suggests he should, by drawing on the doctrine of St Thomas and theThomistic school. ‘Will there be free will in Heaven?’ Yes, as Fr Simon Gainehas shown so convincingly. ‘Will there be more books from Fr Simon Gaine?’I sincerely hope so.

JOHN SAWARD

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ALIEN SEX: THE BODY AND DESIRE IN CINEMA AND THEOLOGY by GerardLoughlin, Blackwell, Oxford, 2004, Pp. xxx+ 306, £19.99 pbk.

When I was about eight, I went with some friends to a film called ‘Imitation of life’in the expectation that it would be about androids. It turned out to be a Lana Turnerweepy about race relations in fifties America. Now I have to review a book calledAlien Sex and it turns out to be a book about the cinema, the body and theology.Life is disappointing.Androids and aliens have their place in this book, as the films discussed tend to the

fantastic, to science fiction and the unreal. Nonetheless the discussion is centred onthe human body, and aliens and androids are taken as metaphor for the human bodyperceived in a certain way: distorted, infantilised, de-sexed but still human. Thecinema is seen as a way of thinking about that body. That the cinema is a distinctway of thinking is fundamental to the claims of this book to be more than justtheological ruminations illustrated by various films that the writer has seen.The cinema is not a work of theology, but our society is still pervaded by the

debris of Christian themes, and sometimes debris can be more startling than thepristine works they once were. Greek ruins and their damaged statues grip us morethan the buildings might, if they had been continuously maintained to this day, asindeed some very ancient buildings are in Italy. Yet Christianity cannot be content tolie in ruins. It reasserts itself and Alien Sex may be seen as a commentary on theshards of Christianity to be found in many films, from the perspective of a believingChristian who sees these fragments as themselves indications of the redemption allseek. This is why, as various grim cinematic scenes are brought to our attention, weare consoled by considerations of the hope Christian theology offers us. Manytheological writers appear in this book, admirably well summarised and shown asbeacons of light that make theology itself a sort of cinema. The pessimism of thefilms about the body highlights, in every sense, the optimism of Christian hope. Theenthusiastic summaries of great Christian writers, from Augustine and Gregory ofNyssa to von Balthasar, are beautifully done.Loughlin has criticisms to offer, though. One is a well-worn objection, relevant to

the body, that too many theologians take a male perspective and this affects theirperception of the Trinity. The male perspective is a belief that only the male desiresand loves. Barth and von Balthasar are particularly criticized for this. I think aresponse to this could be made: there is, of course, a circularity in any true relation-ship between man and woman. Of course, both love and are loved, both desire andare desired, both give and receive. What is different is the entry into this circle. Aman desires to love someone who loves him; a woman desires to be loved bysomeone whom she loves. Neither would reasonably want to love without beingloved, or to be loved without loving, but one desire will always have primacy overthe other. When applied to theology it is clear what our perspective is: we seek to beloved by the divine but we would not seek to be loved by a God who was not lovable.Without grace we would have no confidence that either is possible.What is the connection between cinema and the body? On the one hand, the screen

is a sort of body touched by the light of the projector. Yet the point of the cinema isto forget the screen and to be absorbed by the images. The films that are selectedhere are films that make us very aware of the body, but this is because we see thebody subjected to pummellings of various sorts, from ‘Fight Club’ with its brutalbare fistfights to the symbolic murders of the film ‘Seven’ based on the seven deadlysins. The cinema is not a natural medium for the body compared to theatre, whereevery muscle of the actor can be part of the performance. To make us aware ofbodiliness, the cinema tends to over-compensate. The cinema is more like a dreamthan a bodily experience, something internal, and this may affect our thinking.Redemption is a theme of the book, but the redemption of the body may easily beseen as an escape from the body. Platonism haunts us in many forms, and outside

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the careful selection of films in this book, the cinema usually shows us bodies whichare unreal, ageless and tireless. Alien Sex is right therefore to concern itself with sucha strange body of cinema, where the distorted bodies are in fact more real than thebodies of mainstream cinema.

EUAN MARLEY OP

DISCUSSIONS AND ARGUMENTS ON VARIOUS SUBJECTS by John HenryNewman, introduction and notes by Gerard Tracey and James Tolhurst,Gracewing, Leominster & University of Notre Dame Press, Notre Dame IN, 2004,Pp. xlix+490, £25.00 hbk.

Discussions and Arguments on Various Subjects, originally published in 1872, is theseventh volume to be released in The Works of Cardinal Newman: BirminghamOratory Millennium Edition. Works by Newman previously re-published in this seriesinclude titles such as The Arians of the Fourth Century and the Church of the Fathers.Unlike these two particular works, Discussions and Arguments is a collection ofessays developed by Newman over a period of approximately thirty years (March1836 through June 1866). I would argue that one could read this volume as awhole or in parts. As a whole, the essays provide insight into how components ofNewman’s thought developed over the course of an important period of his life. Inparts, these essays offer insights into Newman’s thinking on topics ranging frombiblical exegesis to political philosophy. Regardless of how one chooses to read thistext, Discussions and Arguments provides an indispensable view into the thought ofone of the Church’s most significant theological voices.As a result of the efforts of Gerard Tracey and James Tolhurst, this edition of

Newman’s Discussions and Arguments on Various Subjects comes with an introduc-tion and notes. Earlier versions published by Longmans Green and B. M. Pickeringlack such resources. Gerard Tracey died suddenly while working on the notes;however, James Tolhurst, the editor of this series of Newman’s works, completedthe notes and then added the introduction. As significant Newman scholars, Traceyand Tolhurst’s efforts come together to offer invaluable insights into the significanceof this collection of Newman’s work. For example, in the notes the symbolic natureof many of Newman’s references is afforded greater clarity. Meanwhile the primarypurpose of the introduction is to offer an understanding of the unique context out ofwhich each one of these essays emerged. However, one potential weakness of theintroduction is that it fails to include any assessment of the significance of Discus-sions and Arguments as a whole. As a result, at least one important theme – such asclerical identity – that runs through this volume of Newman’s work goes under-evaluated.Read as a whole, many of the essays in this collection offer insights into Newman’s

understanding of clerical identity and how it relates to his larger view of ecclesiology.For example, in ‘How to Accomplish It’, Newman, as an Anglican, writes that ‘Bythat time we may have buried our temporal guardians: their memories we shallalways revere and bless; but the successors of the Apostles will still have theirwork—if the world last so long—a work (may be) of greater peril and hardship,but of more honour than now’ (p. 24). In ‘An Internal Argument for Christianity’Newman, now a Roman Catholic, argues that ‘Faith is not simply trust in Hislegislation, as the writer says; it is definitely trust in His word, whether that wordbe about heavenly things or earthly; whether it is spoken by his own mouth, orthrough his ministers’ (p. 395). Over the course of time spanning the development ofthese two essays, Newman becomes convinced that the true bearer of apostolicsuccession is Rome, not Canterbury. While this theme does not dominate the essays

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in this collection, Newman never strays too far from this concern regardless of thedominant issue with which he was seeking to develop in a particular essay.Read in parts, the dominant issues present in these essays range from eschatology

to political theory. For example, Discussions and Arguments not only includesNewman’s assessment of the relationship shared by utilitarian thought in relationto the establishment of a reading room or library but also an assessment of theconnections shared by the British Constitution and the presence of British troops inCrimea. Such efforts by Newman demonstrate the dexterity of his intellectual skill.Newman was a theologian with deep and abiding interests in the Church. However,Newman’s understanding of theology as the Church’s language afforded him theability to apply this language to a range of tasks and circumstances.Regardless of how one chooses to read John Henry Newman’s Discussions and

Arguments on Various Subjects, this text proves to be invaluable in terms of under-standing the breadth and the depth of Newman’s theological skill. As a whole or inparts, these essays, along with the introduction and the notes, provide a significantintroduction to Newman’s thought that not only Newman scholars but perhaps alsotheologians in general will want to consider.

TODD C. REAM

TURNING TOWARDS THE LORD: ORIENTATION IN LITURGICAL PRAYER byUwe Michael Lang, Ignatius Press, San Francisco, 2004, Pp. 160, £8.50 pbk.THE ORGANIC DEVELOPMENT OF THE LITURGY by Alcuin Reid OSB, SaintMichael’s Abbey Press, 2004, Pp. 336, £20.95 hbk.

Uwe Michael Lang is a young German patristic scholar of enormous promise who,from a Lutheran background, was received into the Catholic Church while at Oxfordand is now a priest of the London Oratory. In this book he adds his voice – aconsiderable one in terms of not only Teutonic erudition but also feeling for theLiturgy – to the increasing number of those who seek a reconsideration of the hastyintroduction, in the later 1960s, of Eucharistic celebration ‘towards the people’,versus populum. Theologically speaking, the Eucharistic Oblation is not offered bythe priest to the people. It is offered by the people, through and with the priest, to theFather by the mediation of Christ, our Great High Priest, in the Holy Spirit. Whichspatial arrangement makes this theological doctrine more visible – celebration versuspopulum or celebration versus apsidem, where celebrant and assembly face together inthe same direction? One might well reply that to have asked this question is alreadyto have answered it, and nothing more remains to be said.Lang, however, shows that much more can be said, and in the first instance about

the history of liturgical orientation in the ancient Church, to which often ill-informedreference was made in the almost over-night revolution of chipping, hacking andjoinery. A critical analysis of copious patristic materials shows that sacred direction –specifically, to the East – was the most important spatial consideration in earlyChristian prayer. Its significance was primarily eschatological (the East was thedirection of the Christ of the Parousia, cf. especially Mt 24:27 and 30) and, naturally,it applied to all the faithful, including their ministers. Now, where the archaeologicalevidence is concerned, it must be noted that the great majority of ancient churcheshave an oriental apse. Granted that the altar was the most honoured object in suchbuildings, the only safe inference is, accordingly, that the celebrant stood at thepeople’s side, facing East, for the Anaphora. In the minority of buildings (notably atRome and in North Africa) that have, by contrast, an oriented entrance, the positionis less clear. Lang, however, argues persuasively – if with a degree of tentativeness –that the celebrant in such a case prayed facing the doors (and thus the people) but

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did so with hands and eyes alike raised to the ceiling of the apse or arch, where thedecorative schemes of early Christian art are focussed. In any case, all the faithful arelikely to have prayed with arms and faces upward turned – and not in eyeball-to-eyeball contact with the sacred ministers. Lang’s conclusion is inevitable. ‘Thecelebratio versus populum in the modern sense was unknown to Christian antiquity,and it would be anachronistic to see the Eucharistic liturgy in the early Romanbasilica as its prototype’.Even more anachronistic is the notion that the celebrant when facing the people

mimes the role of Jesus at the Last Supper. In late antiquity, the seat of honour attable was not placed centrally but on the far right. And in any case what the Lordcommanded to be enacted ‘in memory of me’ was not the Jewish meal as such but thenew reality of the Sacrament of the Oblation he was instituting.The remainder of Lang’s study, theological and anthropological in character,

explains how, even when sacred direction to the geographical east has been lost inlater church building (as was the case in the West by the end of the Middle Ages), theprinciple of common direction needs to retain its importance. A surprisingly widerange of commentators, Protestant as well as Catholic, argue convergently in thisregard. In the modern cultural conjecture, celebration versus populum can constitutea dangerous symbolic reversal where the gathered church considers primarily itself ascommunity – and not the triune Lord at the end of history towards whom it isprogressing.The introductory endorsement of Lang’s book by Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger

reports that ‘among the faithful there is an increasing sense of the problems inherentin an arrangement that hardly allows the liturgy to be open to the things that areabove and to the world to come’. Anyone who cares for the full dimension of theChurch’s worship can only hope this estimate is correct. Meanwhile, it would beuseful to have from some quarter an essay on the relation between the commonorientation of priest and people on the one hand, and lively consciousness ofEucharistic sacrifice on the other. As Lang remarks, it is surely intuitive that betweenthe two some connexion exists, and this receives negative corroboration in thediminution of the sense of oblation pari passu with the extension of versus populumcelebration. Such a book, or substantial article, would need to combine a phenom-enological study of the symbolics of orientation with a good grasp of the theology ofthe Mass as sacrifice. This is a challenge someone suitably qualified ought as amatter of urgency to take up.Of course the issue of liturgical direction is only one of a number of issues

pertinent to the continuity of the worshipping tradition in the Latin Church. InThe Organic Development of the Liturgy, Dom Alcuin Reid, monk of Farnborough,enables us to situate Lang’s chosen topic in a wider context. Alcuin Reid is also ayoung scholar, and more specifically an historian of the modern development of theRoman rite. His book began life as a doctoral thesis at King’s College, London, butentering into the swim of its argument is a good deal more exhilarating than mostexperiences of ‘doctoralese’. The book starts slowly, with a necessarily selectiveoverview of the development of the Roman rite up to the beginning of the 20th

Century. The emphasis lies on discerning principles at work not only in the main-stream of that development but also in proposals to channel or divert it, whetherthese emanate from popes, bishops or (after that breed arose in the 17th century)professional liturgists. Though much of this material is readily available elsewhere,something is new. And that is the quality of the intelligence brought to bear in anattempt to discern criteria for judging the homogeneity of organic development. Notonly is such development the de facto hallmark of the worshipping life of Westernand Eastern Christendom over time. A Catholic view of the economy of the Spirit inthe Church requires from us de iure commitment to the principles involved just as itdoes – by universal consent – in the analogous case of the providential developmentof doctrine.

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For it is the remaining two chapters of this study which, along with its copiousbibliography, make it an invaluable guide to its sources. Here we have a richlydocumented overview of the thought of the major (and some minor) figures of theLiturgical Movement, along with an account of the principal liturgical Congressesand Roman commissions that sought to give that thought practical effect. Reid’sprovision of copious citations (in English in the body of the text, with originallanguage versions in footnotes), together with his own analytic summaries, enableus to see what is going on. His research confirms the view of those who havemaintained that the predominant orientation of the Liturgical Movement shiftedseismically in the later 1940s. In its earlier phase the Liturgical Movement hadsought above all the engaged participation of the faithful in the received Liturgy,for enhanced fruit-bearing in life. In its later phase, the Movement became revision-ist; not in the benign sense of seeking occasional judicious pruning and carefulaugmentation of the rites, but in a sense far more radical that placed homogeneousdevelopment at risk. ‘Organic development can include a proportionate measure ofsimplification and change’: this, and not the root-and-branch measures of the post-Conciliar Consilium, is all the Second Vatican Council mandated. But by 1969 manyliturgists were minded to find ‘the quickest and easiest route to liturgical participa-tion, regardless of objective liturgical tradition’. The periti who worked to this endhad two supreme instruments at their disposal: ‘selective scholarly antiquarianism’and Ultramontanism. Their combination was all too effective. Mining the work ofthe liturgical scholars, they lit the fuse at the desk of the Pope.Reid makes the valid point that the Liturgy is not a fit subject for reconstruction

precisely because it is not a suitable target for deconstruction. In matters of definingdoctrine we are all, since Vatican I, Ultramontanes now. But the charism of infall-ibility does not underwrite prudential decisions in questions of the Liturgy, while thepastoral office of the Pope is concerned with, above all, the guardianship of the rites,not their manipulation.As those responsible for the re-translation of the Roman Missal into English are

discovering, dumbing down may take generation change to clear up. Meanwhile, westill await the actual ‘organic’ reform the Council Fathers requested.

AIDAN NICHOLS OP

PRAYER by Marcel Mauss edited by W.S.F. Pickering, translated by SusanLeslie, Durkheim Press/Berghahn Books, Oxford, 2003, Pp. 158, £17.00 pbk.

A doctoral thesis, never completed, whose opening sections were privately printed(1909) in six copies, might hardly warrant a review. Yet occasionally heroic failuresin scholarship are more important than successes, and Mauss’s effort to realise apurely sociological account of prayer is a case in point. As Durkheim’s nephew andheir to his intellectual estate, and as author of the famous The Gift, Mauss’s forayinto the issue of prayer, though inchoate, is as unexpected as it is significant. Inkeeping with other productions from the British Centre for Durkheimian Studies atOxford, Pickering has produced a highly scholarly and indispensable volume onMauss on prayer. Impeccably translated, with an array of footnotes and withsome concluding reflections on the place of the thesis in anthropology by HowardMurphy, this will be the standard reference for Mauss on the topic of prayer.Divided into two sections, the first on characterizing prayer in sociological terms

is of far greater interest than the second, on efforts to locate the topic in Australianethnography. Prayer might seem the sole property of religion and theology, an actfar beyond the sociological pale. The value of this work is to remind sociologiststhat prayer is also an issue of vital importance in the sociology of religion. Apart

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from Mauss, the only other major sociologist to deal with prayer was GeorgSimmel, and his approach is entirely different from that of Mauss: for Simmel,prayer was an inward act, a spiritual action that required an external manifestationin and through some social form that gave it a characterizing shape; by contrast,Mauss approached prayer in purely external social terms, in ways that are confinedto religion and are rendered devoid of theological implication. Uncle Emile’s TheElementary Forms of the Religious Life casts a long shadow over Mauss’s approachto prayer. As an act embodied in rite, prayer is directed towards the sacred, what ishallowed and marked off from the profane. In this realm, the social so deified rulesall, hears all and answers all. What Mauss and Durkheim anticipate are the self-justifying forms religion and spirituality sometimes currently take in New Ageforms. Far from being irrelevant, ritual and prayer fulfil decidedly importantfunctions indispensable for the needs of solidarity and harmony. Their currentre-inventions in forms removed from the authority of institutional religion seemto affirm their purely sociological defence whose basis can be traced back toDurkheim and Mauss.Mauss was concerned to wrest prayer from Christianity. By tracing prayer

back to its most elementary form, Mauss hoped to find its factual basis, but alsothe way in which reason could be applied to trace its evolutionary form inarrangements that moved from the mechanical to the organic. In detachingprayer from an issue of subjective preference, Mauss hoped to display itspower in objectified terms in ways that would affirm its ubiquity but also itsindispensable significance in petitionary rites. Mauss would find agreement withtheologians that nobody prays alone (p. 33). In form and ritual practice, prayercan be linked back to a ritual milieu, and to that degree the act has an inheritedsocial dimension. In that context, prayer takes on a property of fact, one thatimposes a constraint over the individual, and it is this power that forms the basisof Mauss’s purely sociological characterization. It is not the truth or falsity ofthe act of prayer that matters, but rather its efficacious functions to be found byreference to the social milieu.The indispensable link between prayer and the social should stimulate

theologians to ponder this work carefully. Although the linkage between prayerand petition is made, it is not clear from this purely sociological approach whyanybody should feel the need to pray. There is no emotion, no spirituality, no self,and no urge to pray in this account. This means that what is apparent as asociological function is decidedly unapparent when reduced to the individual.Although Mauss claims to provide an account devoid of reference to Christianunderstandings, there is a decidedly sacramental property running through theaccount. This arises in the link made between act and efficacy, where acting inthe direction of the sacred effects changes amongst those who pray (pp. 54–7).Teleology has always been the weak strand of functionalism. Is the minded purposeof prayer to be found in the evolutionary basis of the act, where reason and factregulate characterizations, or might there be a figure lurking outside theseprocesses who is transcendent, receiving and controlling? In the end, attitudes tothe outcome of prayer and its domain purposes defeat Mauss. These difficultiesemerge in his efforts to secure an analytical distinction between magic and religion.As Murphy indicates, incantation and prayer become confused in ways thatmuddle distinctions between the individual and the collective (p. 146.)Although a fragment of what might have been uncovered, Mauss’s famous

sociological excursion into the issue of prayer should secure the concept a place inthe sociology of religion. Sociology has its own priesthood and Mauss looms as toolarge a figure to ignore what he consecrates as fit for sociological deliberation.

KIERAN FLANAGAN

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AQUINAS IN DIALOGUE: THOMAS FOR THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURYedited by Jim Fodor and Frederick Christian Bauerschmidt, Blackwell Publishing,Malden (USA), Victoria (Australia) and Oxford, 2004, Pp. ix+185, £19.99 pbk.

This is a new volume in the series Directions in Modern Theology. It comprises eightessays by different authors, Catholics and others. Each essay discusses a particular‘world-view’, ranging from Eastern Orthodoxy to modern nihilism, and comparessome aspect of the world-view with some part of the thought of St Thomas Aquinas.The first essay, written from a Lutheran perspective, considers St Thomas’s notion of

‘merit.’ Michael Root notes that that the greatest stumbling block a Lutheran finds inCatholicism is the doctrine defined by Trent that the justified manmerits eternal life. Hepraises St Thomas for discussingmerit in the context of God’s ordaining all creatures totheir proper end. He also notes that Lutheran theologians are willing to consider eternallife a reward in the sense of a compensation for sufferings. Despite this promising start,Root concludes by suggesting that the term ‘merit’ causes more problems than it solves.An essay on Eastern Orthodoxy considers the allegation that the economy of

salvation would be no different, for St Thomas, if God were not the Holy Trinity.Bruce Marshall, writing from a Methodist university, argues on the contrary thatAquinas’s notion of created grace does not exclude a ‘Trinitarian’ account of man’ssanctification. He also suggests that St Thomas’s account of the relation between theprocessions and missions of the divine persons is more satisfactory than that ofcontemporary Orthodox theologians.‘Thomas Aquinas and Judaism’ is an attempt by two Dutch Catholic theologians

to recruit the Angelic Doctor for the fashionable view that the Mosaic covenant isstill in force. They point out that St Thomas attributed a greater efficacy to circum-cision than did Robert Kilwardby, but ignore the explicit statement in the SummaTheologiæ about the cessation of the ceremonial precepts (Ia2æ Q.103). Their sugges-tion that the co-existence of the divine and human natures in our Lord might be agood analogy for the co-existence of the Church and Judaism seems to this reviewerquite fantastic.‘Thomas Aquinas and Islam’, by Fr David Burrell CSC is not really about Islam,

but about the Liber de Causis. He argues that Proclus’s work, as recast by ananonymous Muslim writer, gave St Thomas a conception of causality not availablein Aristotle, and which was needed in order to speak accurately about God asCreator. He considers that one can thus describe St Thomas’s synthesis as ‘aninterfaith achievement’ (p. 83). Astonishingly for a Catholic religious, Fr Burrellapparently considers the Koran to have been divinely revealed (p. 76).Paul Williams’s essay, ‘Aquinas meets the Buddhists’, is surely the most valuable

in the book. Williams examines the central doctrinal texts of Mahayana Buddhismand shows that they are not, as is sometimes claimed, consonant with apophatictheology, but purely and simply atheistic. He argues that the Buddhist search formeaning is incomplete, since it fails to pose the question, ‘Why is there somethingrather than nothing?’ From this it also follows that the Christian-Buddhist disagree-ment over salvation is ‘radical to the core’ (p. 116). However Williams’s suggestionthat the Christian can only engage in dialogue with Buddhists by acknowledging thathe may be wrong about the existence of God would make such dialogue incom-patible with Vatican I.Fr Fergus Kerr examines the interaction between Thomism and modern analytic

philosophy. He highlights the importance of Franz Brentano, a ‘zealous Thomist’whose work on intentionality had a crucial effect on twentieth-century Anglo-American philosophy. Elizabeth Anscombe and Philippa Foot are also discussedas mediating an Aristotelian-Thomist moral tradition to the otherwise largelyconsequentialist world of Oxford moral philosophy. However, Fr Kerr also indicatesthat not all students of St Thomas are convinced by the use that more ‘mainstream’philosophers make of his writings.

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Denys Turner’s article on atheism and idolatry argues that St Thomas’s descrip-tion of God as ipsum esse subsistens allows him to avoid both these extremes. He alsoshows convincingly that the ‘Five Ways’ are intended to be rigorous proofs of God’sexistence. However his exposition of St Thomas’s discussion of idolatry seemsmistaken: St Thomas does not say that the Catholic and the idolater are using theword ‘God’ analogously, but that the Catholic is when he uses this word to referboth to the true God and to an idol.A final article on Flannery O’Connor aims to show the Thomist, or, at any rate,

Catholic, inspiration of her stories. Frederick Bauerschmidt argues that the shockingnature of her writings was intended not to encourage nihilism, but to make herreaders feel the inadequacy of a life without divine grace.This eclectic volume will not really serve as an introduction to St Thomas, but will

no doubt be of interest to those who are already interested in the various subjectsdiscussed.

THOMAS CREAN OP

A CHRISTIAN THEOLOGY OF PLACE by John Inge, Ashgate, Aldershot,2003, Pp. 161, £15.99 pbk.

The author makes his position clear. ‘Our existence as embodied beings means thatplace is as necessary to us as the air we breathe but, more than that, it seems to methat our human experience is shaped by place’ (p. ix). Yet from Aristotle onwards,place has not been an important category for Western thought. More contemporaryphilosophical reflection is devoted to space, in its abstract generality, than to place inits contemporary particularity. It is a pity that consideration of place has not had thebenefit of the abundant modern thought on corporeity: it shows little interest in thislink between the body and its place in space.Moreover, modern society is undergoing change in its relationship to place:

contemporary humanity is structured by mobility, communication technology, glob-alisation and relocation, not to mention migrants and refugees. These elements donot cut us off from the places we belong to, but make us inhabit them differently.There too, according to Inge, philosophy is largely absent. In Christian thought, wesee the same lack of interest: theological tradition, both historically and today, seemsto repeat this deficiency. This weakness is all the more harmful when we observe thatin the Bible, by contrast, there is keen interest in places and a rich crop of references.Inge, indeed, urges us to read the Old Testament as the narrative of a three-way

interaction between God, a people and a place. It is the story of a land, promised,hoped-for, inhabited, lost and found (and which was to be lost again, outsideScripture, for twenty centuries). Traces remain of this story in Christian life. Forinstance, the Exile: this was God’s means of destroying perverse forms of attachmentof the people to their place, by deporting them elsewhere; this metaphor of relocationendures in Christian spirituality, as the Salve Regina bears witness. Inge says that‘for Jews it is as if Yahweh himself has an address on earth’ (p. 45). The same doesnot seem to be true of Christians. Their relationship to God is no longer channeledthrough a land. It even seems unduly spiritualised in Jewish eyes. Indeed St Paul inhis epistles gives no space to places (Acts is quite different in this respect). For StJohn, God’s place on earth becomes a person, the Word made flesh, in whom themeeting with man occurs. But in spite of this ‘Christification’ every meeting, having asacramental quality, is a human reality and thus situated in space. Eschatology toogives value to places: Jesus tells us that he is ‘going to prepare a place for us’ (Jn14:2), while the Apocalypse sings of the heavenly Jerusalem, the place where all theelect will come together.

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Theologians may have paid little attention to these aspects of revelation, but thepractices of the faithful were certainly different. Early on, certain places were felt tobe significant, and Catholicism especially developed attention to sacred places bymeans of shrines and pilgrimages. The Reformation, on the other hand, distanceditself from them, in its attempt to destroy particular features not only of race but alsoof place. Even so, Inge makes a plea for the rediscovery of the importance of ourstone churches, as anchor-points for the faith of the laity and signs, if they are alive,for a society that longs for points of reference.Thus, this book contains many original insights. It is not convincing when it

claims that no attention has been paid to places in Western thought. There is plentyof philosophical reflection on the subject, for example Gaston Bachelard, ThePoetics of Space deserves more than a passing mention. The contribution ofhuman sciences is also not given its due. Another example: the discussion of spacein Peter Brown’s book The Cult of the Saints: Its Rise and Function in LatinChristianity (which is cited) has superb analyses of the development of Christianityin the West as if in ‘pools’ around the tombs of saints. Maurice Halbwachs’simportant book, La Topographie Legendaire des Evangiles en Terre Sainte wouldhave provided useful distinctions between real places and imaginary places.Yet one hesitates to mention other works, for Inge’s book comes across to a large

extent as a multiplication of references to authors, almost always ‘relocated’ out ofall context, from whom he borrows an idea or quotation before passing on toanother. This makes reading him difficult. Perhaps the subject is, all things consid-ered, less neglected than Inge says, but what we need is a more synthetic reflection.This book has the merit of preparing the way for such an undertaking in the future.

ANTOINE LION OP

KIERKEGAARD’S ETHIC OF LOVE: Divine Commands and Moral Obligations byC. Stephen Evans, Oxford University Press, Oxford, Pp. ix+366, £55.00 hardback.

Recently, as the dust cover of this book reminds us, Oxford University Press haspublished a handful of remarkable books about Kierkegaard: by M. Jamie Ferreira,David R. Law, Stephen Mulhall, Murray Rae and Anthony Rudd, to which thismakes a fine addition. Professor of philosophy at Baylor University, Waco, Texas, aBaptist foundation dating back to 1845, the author has published about fifteenbooks, including The Historical Christ and the Jesus of Faith: The IncarnationalNarrative as History (Oxford University Press, 1996) and Faith Beyond Reason(Edinburgh University Press, 1998). As regards Kierkegaard, besides his bookPassionate Reason: Making Sense of Kierkegaard’s Philosophical Fragments(Indiana University Press, 1992), Professor Evans served as Curator of the Howardand Edna Hong Kierkegaard Library, while at St Olaf College, Northfield, Minnesota.Obviously, the primary readership for this book is scholars who are interested in

Kierkegaard. The thesis for them is that they have not paid enough heed to the placethe related role of divine command and divine authority play in Kierkegaard’s work.God’s commands should be obeyed, on this account, not because of fear of divinepunishment, but out of love and gratitude for the good that God has bestowed onhuman beings by creating them and giving them eternal life with God as theirdestiny. The relation human beings have with God makes possible this ultimatehuman good, thus creating those unique obligations we call moral.The other audience, as Evans hopes, is philosophers and theologians interested in

divine command theories of ethics. Classically, the discussion is traced back toPlato’s dialogue Euthyphro: ‘Do the gods love holiness because it is holy, or is itholy because they love it?’ Does God will the good because it is good, or is it good

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because God wills it? The fear that the latter alternative arouses is that moralitybecomes quite arbitrary: God could change the rules overnight. This is particularlyobjectionable for followers of Thomas Aquinas, who keeps insisting that God actstowards creatures in accordance with a wisdom that is not totally beyond theircapacity to understand. The objection leveled against them, on the other hand, isthat they derive a naturalistic humanism from Aquinas, which owes almost every-thing to Aristotle and leaves little space for God, let alone for the Gospel.Naturalistic versions of Aristotelian ethics, as Evans notes at the outset, are well

represented in current Anglo-American debates. He instances the work of MarthaCraven Nussbaum; he might have mentioned Philippa Foot.He cites Philip Quinn’s objection, from a Christian perspective, that Aristotle’s

optimistic humanism seems worlds apart from ‘the grim realities of the Christiandrama of sin and salvation’. Nevertheless, Evans contends, it is not so difficult toappreciate the affinity, in Aquinas, between Aristotelian and Christian positions. ForAquinas, God created human beings with a particular nature, with a distinctive setof capacities, with a specific idea of what they should be. What he calls Aquinas’stheory of human nature does not ignore the role of divine commands: on thecontrary, human nature is grounded in God’s creative intentions for our moraldevelopment.Far from being on opposite sides of the debate, as would commonly be

assumed, Kierkegaard and Thomas Aquinas turn out, if Evans is right, to maintain ‘deeplyhumanistic’ divine command theories: God’s commands are directed to human flourishing,leading to happiness, by way of an obedience which involves self denial – and whichis anything but the egotistically motivated hedonism that previous generations ofphilosophers feared in Aristotle.Finally, in three very fine chapters, Evans shows the advantages of this version of

Kierkegaardian ethics over the current rivals: evolutionary naturalism, social con-tract theories, and moral relativism.

FERGUS KERR OP

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