RITUAL AND THE SACRED: A NEO-DURKHEIMIAN ANALYSIS OF POLITICS, RELIGION AND THE SELF by Massimo Rosati

DOI:10.1111/j.1741-2005.2011.01443.x

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IGNATIUS OF ANTIOCH AND THE SECOND SOPHISTIC: A STUDY OF ANEARLY CHRISTIAN TRANSFORMATION OF PAGAN CULTURE by Allen Brent,Studien und Texte zu Antike und Christentum 36, Mohr Siebeck, Tubingen2006, pp.377, €84IGNATIUS OF ANTIOCH: A MARTYR BISHOP AND THE ORIGIN OF EPISCO-PACY by Allen Brent, T&T Clark, London 2007, pbk 2009, pp.192, £17.99

Although the first-published of these books (hereafter Second Sophistic) is moreformidably academic in presentation than the second (hereafter Martyr Bishop)this latter should not be seen as merely a popularisation of the first. The twobooks are, in fact, complementary. A reader of Martyr Bishop who wishes totest Brent’s theory will need to come to grips with the detailed evidence set outin Second Sophistic, and the reader of Second Sophistic will gain from MartyrBishop a clearer and, oddly enough, a fuller grasp of Brent’s theory as a whole.

The letters allegedly written by Ignatius of Antioch in the second century havekept scholars of early Christianity fascinated, occupied, vexed, and entertained forcenturies. In the medieval West as many as sixteen letters were known includingexchanges between Ignatius and John the Evangelist and between Ignatius and themother of Jesus. Beneath these lay collections of up to thirteen letters, preserved inboth Greek and Latin manuscripts, which in the seventeenth century were shownto be reducible to seven letters that had been known to Eusebius of Caesarea inthe fourth century, to which a late fourth century forger had added another six.The same forger had also reworked the seven letters known to Eusebius, addingpassages to suggest that Ignatius, in the second century, was pushing the same(heretical) theological barrow that the forger was pushing two centuries later.

Despite the confident judgement of The Oxford Dictionary of the ChristianChurch that the controversy about the authenticity of even the smaller core ofseven letters known to Eusebius ‘was virtually settled in [their] favour . . . by J.Pearson’s Vindiciae Epistolarum S. Ignatii (1672)’, the question has continued tobe hotly debated. A good deal of the heat, now as in the seventeenth century, hasbeen generated by the curious supposition that, if genuine, the Ignatian letterswould in some way authenticate a tiered hierarchy of ministry and order. TheCatechism of the Catholic Church (§ 1593), for example, mis-translates Ignatiusto the Trallians 3.1 to the effect that ‘without the bishop, presbyters, and deacons,one cannot speak of the Church’. As Allen Brent points out, what this text meansis that, without these three orders ‘a Church cannot be summoned’ (SecondSophistic, pp. 25–6, 196), which is not at all the same thing. Those coming tothe study of these letters for the first time will have cause to be grateful to Brentfor the excellent introduction he provides in the first and fifth chapters of MartyrBishop to the controversies these letters have engendered.

Brent has his own novel and intriguing explanation of the origin of the sevenletters known to Eusebius. He thinks that they were indeed written by an earlyChristian who was taken as a prisoner from Antioch in Syria to Rome, thereto be put to death by exposure to wild beasts. Brent is curiously vague aboutthe date of this journey and martyrdom. The traditional date hovers between 107and 115, but these are no more than guesses based upon Eusebius’ guess that ithappened within the reign of Trajan. Brent is confident that he has ‘positioned

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Ignatius of Antioch in the world of the early second century’ (Second Sophisticp. 318), though it seems that ‘early’ might stretch to A.D. 135 (ibid.) or 138(Martyr Bishop, p. 118). For Brent, the crucial thing is that Ignatius must belocated before the middle of the second century, because the understanding of theroles of bishop, priests, and deacons put forward in the letters was quite unlikethe church order that was to emerge from the second half of the second centuryonwards and then become normative. Indeed, it was unlike anything seen in theChristian Church, before or since. In Ignatius there is ‘no trace of an idea of thebishop as teaching successor to the apostles being able to guarantee his validityand authenticity by the elaboration of a diadoche or list of teachers in lineal,chronological descent’. The bishop ‘is neither the successor of the apostles, nordoes he perform an act of ordination upon presbyters, deacons, or one who is tojoin him as a fellow bishop of another congregation’ (Second Sophistic, pp. 26,25, cf Martyr Bishop, p. 116). Ignatius is, indeed, concerned with unity in theChristian community, and he does see the bishop at the centre of his submissiveclergy as ‘the effective sign of unity’ (Martyr Bishop, p. 155). But he does notdescribe ‘an established church order in an existing historical situation’ (MartyrBishop, p. 151). On the contrary, he spins the whole elaborate panoply prettymuch out of his own head, his chief models and reference points being notcontemporary Christian tradition and practice, but ‘the pagan mysteries of theGreek city-states of Asia Minor during the Second Sophistic’ (Martyr Bishop,p. 151). In ‘advocating a new church order of bishop, presbyters, and deacons’Ignatius ‘is constructing social reality rather than reflecting it’ (Martyr Bishop,p. 58); his martyr-procession is ‘a visually choreographed argument for unityand episcopal church government’ (p. 60), ‘a dazzling piece of enacted rhetoric’(p. 158), ‘the kind of political rhetoric which claims that what is believed shouldbe is what in fact is’ (p. 57).

The novelty of Ignatius’ understanding of episcopacy explains both the op-position he met with amongst his fellow Christians at Antioch (Martyr Bishop,p. 53) and the caution and reserve of other early Christians, like Polycarp andIrenaeus, in his regard. It was only because Ignatius so dramatically and effec-tively proclaimed an anti-docetist christology that Polycarp was ‘convinced thatthe strange figure, interpreting his martyr procession as though it was a paganmystery procession, was nevertheless orthodox’ (Second Sophistic p. 313–4, cfMartyr Bishop, p. 158).

Although J. B. Lightfoot had given short shrift to the ‘cheap wisdom whichat the study table or over the pulpit desk declaims against the extravagance ofthe feelings and language of Ignatius, as the vision of martyrdom rose up beforehim’ (Apostolic Fathers II. I, 1889, p. 38), Brent is prepared to acknowledge thatIgnatius had a ‘highly strung and, one might even say, disturbed temperament’(Martyr Bishop, p. 19). Despite the strictures of the great bishop of Durham,some readers of the letters might judge this to be altogether too charitable,and that a more forthright assessment would be that Ignatius was quite simplymad. Certainly, anyone inclined to take that view will find abundant diagnosticcorroboration in the picture of Ignatius that emerges from these two books.

Brent’s argument for the pagan cultic background to Ignatius’ language andimagery is copious and persuasive. He recognises how odd this must have seemedto Ignatius’ more sober-minded Christian contemporaries, grounded in their ownscriptures and traditions, but he argues that, solely for the sake of a spectacularlychoreographed display of anti-docetist christology, they were prepared to buy thewhole package, even if this meant that the weird bits had to be reinterpreted inthe light of their own, emerging, ecclesiology. The case Brent makes for this, ifnot convincing, is at least plausible. However, this thesis might also encourage thespeculation, not entertained by Brent himself, that Ignatius’ journey did not endwith martyrdom in Rome but that, after bamboozling first his own community at

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Antioch and then Polycarp and associated communities in Asia Minor, he castoff the Christian yoke and returned to the paganism in which he was so muchmore at home, to re-emerge at Olympia as Lucian’s Peregrinus Proteus, and toaccomplish near there, by his own doing, the death he claimed to have so longdesired, and that he had so long postponed.

Brent casts a capacious methodological dragnet, and lands a remarkablycatholic catch. In addition to his impressive learning in Ignatian scholarship,and in the literature, epigraphy, and iconography associated with mystery reli-gions, the Imperial cult, and the ‘Second Sophistic’, we are invited to take onboard the epistemological contributions of Wittgenstein, Katz, and Chomsky andspeculations about the behaviour of bishops at Buckingham Palace garden parties,about the deliberations of the Master and Fellows of a Cambridge college, andabout the trials and tribulations of Lindy Chamberlain after her infant daughterhad been taken by dingoes at Ayers Rock.

Both these books would have profited from the more attentive care of copy-editors. In Martyr Bishop it is twice asserted that Peregrinus leapt into his pyre atAthens (pp. 54, 73), though in Second Sophistic (p. 13) the suicide is said to havetaken place at Olympia. It seems to be suggested that the relationship betweena bishop and his presbyters had found expression in the furnishings of apse orchancel even before, by Brent’s own thesis, that relationship (to say nothing ofapse or chancel) had come into existence (Martyr Bishop, pp. 38, 85–6, 108).Nevertheless, Brent has rendered a very worthwhile service to those beginningthe study of Ignatius, and has secured a place for himself in any future discussionof the Ignatian problem. If his contribution to that discussion will be a hotlycontested one it will be none the odder for that.

DENIS MINNS OP

SACRIFICE UNVEILED: THE TRUE MEANING OF CHRISTIAN SACRIFICE byRobert J. Daly, T&T Clark International, London 2009, pp. xv + 260, £24.99pbk

Robert J. Daly’s latest volume, Sacrifice Unveiled, is an apt culmination to theJesuit theologian’s career-long pursuit in revealing what he believes to be a moreChristian construction of sacrifice. According to Daly, Christian sacrifice is, aboveall, the eminently interpersonal, Trinitarian act of ‘[humanity’s] participation,through the Spirit, in the transcendently free and self-giving love of the Fatherand the Son’ (p. 1), all of which is initiated by the Father’s giving of the Son.Sacrifice Unveiled explores the theological and liturgical implications of Daly’sassertion, and the evidence for its Biblical and historical legitimacy.

The book is a chronological account of sacrifice’s evolution, and is structuredin three parts, connected by two bridges. In Part I, Daly begins to demarcate hisTrinitarian redefinition of sacrifice by first rejecting traditional notions of transac-tional satisfaction. He suggests that these notions, at their essence, ‘disastrously. . .look to the religions of the world, and to the characteristics of sacrifice derivedfrom them’ in defining Christian sacrifice, projecting onto Christianity categori-cally non-Christian notions of violent propitiation. Instead, Daly proposes, Chris-tians must ‘look first to the Christ event, and primarily from the perspectiveof that Trinitarian event. . . to understand sacrifice’ (p. 10). From a Trinitarianperspective, sacrifice becomes foremost an act of ‘self-giving’ in which the Fa-ther, Son, and Christians, through the Spirit, intimately interrelate. In light ofTrinitarian sacrifice, the ‘Sacrifice of the Mass’ should also be reinterpreted, nowas the transformational, eschatological event through which the assembly becomes‘more fully members of the Body of Christ’ (p. 19).


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After establishing his theological and liturgical agenda, Daly surveys the evo-lution of Christian sacrifice in Bridge I, using the accounts from the historicalwitnesses of the Old and New Testaments and the works of the Church Fathers –from the Pentateuch to Augustine – ultimately collating three primary points ofhistorical consensus. First, throughout Christian history, Daly notes that Christ’sdeath is perennially assessed through the theological precedent of the Akedah, andis thus understood in sacrificial, albeit non-substitutionary, terms. Second, a pushtowards a spiritualization of sacrifice – moving it from the ritual to the internalrealm – is consistently present throughout the textual witnesses. Finally, Christiansacrifice consistently places precedence on internal and ethical disposition overritual practice. In light of these early Christian developments, however, a questionarises: How did Christians come to embrace the inaccurate and wholly violentforms of sacrifice so prevalent throughout Church history?

Part II, appropriately titled ‘Atonement and Sacrifice: The Distorting Veils’, de-tails the complex process in which both Atonement theory and Mass fell victim toinfluences of non-Christian sacrifice. Concerning Atonement theory, Daly writes,‘Christian antiquity was still a time when sacrifice in the traditional history-of-religions sense of that word, that is, an eternal cultic act involving the destructionof a victim, was generally taken for granted as an essential part of religion’(p. 197). This unfortunate presumption resulted in the systematization (most no-tably in the works of Anselm and Aquinas) of a God bound to anthropocentriccategories of satisfaction. Daly identifies a similar misappropriation of sacrificein both Protestant and Catholic Eucharistic theologies, the developments of whichhe traces from the Reformation to the contemporary Roman magisterium. Contrathe Reformers, Daly demonstrates that, according to early Church liturgies, theEucharist was indeed understood as sacrificial. However, contra the present Ro-man magisterium, and particularly the influences of Robert Bellarmine, elementalchange or destruction of a victim is not required for a truly sacrificial Mass. Dalynotes that both Protestant and Catholic Eucharistic theology, as with Atonementtheory, make ‘the same fateful mistake of inductively analyzing the practice ofsacrifice in the world’s religions in order to establish a definition of sacrificefrom which to examine the so-called Sacrifice of Mass’ (p. 166). What Daly callsfor instead is an ecumenical and truer Trinitarian understanding of the SacrificialMass, amenable to both Catholic and Protestant concerns, in which the presentassembly, through the Holy Spirit, directs its prayer to the Father, and whereChrist presents himself in the elements for the transformation of the assembled.

In his second bridge, Daly traces Christian models of sacrifice from post-Reformation modernity to the present day. After critiquing penal substitutionarydevelopments prevalent in modern Protestant dogma, calling them ‘deeply pagan’constructs that make ‘a shambles of the central biblical self-revelation of. . . a Godof love’ (p. 180), Daly posits that scholastic, moment-of-consecration Eucharistictheology continues to be similarly problematic, namely in its de-emphasis of theTrinitarian dynamic between the assembly, Christ, and the Father. After survey-ing these purported theological errors, Daly turns to unveil seeds of hope forthe present Church. In addition to recent burgeoning ecumenical and liturgicalrenewal movements in both Protestantism and Catholicism, Daly suggests thatRene Girard’s anthropological ‘mimetic theory’ provides a truer model of sacri-ficial origins through which Christians may come to terms with their ‘originalsin’ (pp. 213–16) of innate violence. Through this understanding, Daly hopesChristians will come to ‘reject acquisitive and conflictive mimesis, and embracereceptive and transformative mimesis’ (p. 220), manifested through, and mostaccurately articulated in, Trinitarian formulations of sacrifice.

Part III concludes Daly’s volume with a recapitulation of the preceding dis-cussion told through an autobiographical lens, noting the profound influences ofthe North American Academy of Liturgy, Rene Girard, and most notably, the


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Trinitarianism of Edward J. Kilmartin, on Daly’s own ‘sacrificial’ journey. It be-comes clear that for Daly, Sacrifice Unveiled is more than scholastic exercise;rather, it is a fervent meditation and plea for a truer definition and practice ofChristian sacrifice. In the hands of the neophyte, such a proposition may seemfaddish or, worse yet, unconvincing. However, wielding a lifetime of scholarshipand experience, Daly produces a truly ecumenical work that is commendable inmission, monolithic in scope, and abundant in theological perspicuity.

MATTHEW WONG

THE BANISHED HEART: ORIGINS OF HETEROPRAXIS IN THE CATHOLICCHURCH by Geoffrey Hull, T&T Clark Studies in Fundamental Liturgy, Con-tinuum, London 2010, pp. xiv + 383, £24.99

Reading this book brought to mind the old joke about the terrorist and the liturgist(‘you can negotiate with a terrorist’), not because Geoffrey Hull is either – heis a philologist and a linguist – but because of the book’s subject matter and itsargument: the author regards the ‘reform’ of the Latin rite after Vatican II as acultural and spiritual catastrophe, the deepest wound ever to be suffered by theChurch, made even worse by the fact that it is a self-inflicted wound. Catholicsacramental theologians and liturgists of an earlier period made much use of thework of anthropologists such as Mary Douglas and Victor Turner, so it cannotbe immediately claimed that Geoffrey Hull, with his particular expertise, is notqualified to speak about this. On the contrary, where the use and function ofsigns and rituals is concerned, a philologist and a linguist is someone with acontribution to make. (He is also a traditionalist Catholic and this gives passionto his writing.) Unlike the liturgist in the joke, Hull seems to be someone withwhom an intelligent conversation would be possible (as indeed are some real-lifeliturgists).

Most of the book is concerned with trying to explain how it could have hap-pened that the Roman Church should depart so radically and so drastically fromits Tradition (the capital ‘T’ is important). He sees the roots of it in the ratio-nalism, legalism, pragmatism, and imperialism that, over the centuries, came tocharacterize Roman Catholicism, and in particular the exercise of Papal author-ity. He gives a fascinating reading of the two thousand years of Christian historywhile making it clear that he seeks to focus just on this one problem. Some Popesare criticized for being too weak, others for being too strong. Some are criticizedfor intervening in the affairs of local churches when and how they ought not tohave done, others for not intervening when and how they should have done.

The relationship between East and West is at the heart of his argument. Thedevelopment of papal authority in the West is closely linked with the need forRome to position itself in relation to Constantinople on one side and the Frankishempire on the other. So, great figures like Gregory VII and Innocent III emerge,powerful and authoritative within their (increasingly only western) sphere. Theseemingly natural identification of unity with uniformity had serious consequencesnot just for relationships with the East but also for the survival of liturgical ritesother than that of Rome within the Western church. It is one of the paradoxesthat after Vatican II there were fewer rites in the Latin Church than there werebefore.

Rationalistic and legalistic tendencies are there from the beginning in Latintheology and church government, heavily influenced as it was by Roman law andphilosophy. The vicissitudes of history, in particular the emergence of nominalism,the reformation, the Enlightenment, and the French Revolution – what all thesethings did to the Church and how the Church reacted to them – meant that


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at the beginning of the twentieth century loyalty and obedience to the Popehad become central to what it meant to be a Roman Catholic (and not justfor the Ultramontane). This helps to explain why the vast majority of RomanCatholics went along with changes in the ‘immemorial rite’, changes which, Hullbelieves, their instinct of faith ought to have led them to reject. The Papacyhad come to believe that it could reverse the ancient law of lex orandi, lexcredendi, something Hull sees happening already before Vatican II, with theliturgical changes introduced by Pius X for example. This is also what he meansby ‘heteropraxis’: allowing the law of belief to determine the law of prayer ratherthan the other way round. So one can maintain ‘orthodoxy’ – Rome’s obsessionin recent times – while becoming ‘heteropractic’.

Hull does not believe that one factor alone is sufficient to explain the problemand a short review must perforce truncate his argument drastically. Theology,politics, cultural imperialism, racism, ignorance, rationalism, persecution, warweariness and guilt – all of these are strands in producing the situation in whichthe Church could so easily divest itself so quickly of so much of its tradition.He believes, however, that Rome’s treatment not just of the Eastern OrthodoxChurches but also of Byzantine-rite Catholic Churches is the most importantstrand in understanding the problem as well as in pointing towards a solution.There are some appalling stories related here about the ways in which LatinCatholics treated Catholics of other rites in Eastern Europe, the Middle East,Ethiopia, and India. Things were even more disastrous when Catholics of thoserites migrated to North America, Australia, and New Zealand, and encountereda Latin hierarchy (many of them Irish, sad to say, trying to cope with theirown cultural identity crisis) incapable of understanding the Catholic Church asinvolving anybody other than Latin-rite Catholics.

Rome’s treatment of ‘the East’ clarifies the problem since what it felt able to doto other rites it finally felt able to do to its own. The ‘heart’ that is banished is thecontemplative and doxological appreciation of the liturgy as something received,into which we are invited to enter, and not something we are invited to inventor create as we go along. The East preserves a sense of this given-ness of theliturgy while the West (so Hull believes) has for the most part lost it completely.There is a familiar comparing of the worst excesses of ‘new rite’ liturgies withthe best of ‘old rite’ liturgies.

Two concepts crucial to his argument are never defined clearly enough, how-ever. One is the notion of a rite being ‘immemorial’. Its dictionary meaning is‘ancient beyond memory or record’ (OED) but that alone is not sufficient, evenfor Hull, to determine whether something is or is not to be maintained in a litur-gical rite. He talks about the renewal of rites which will involve removing thingsthat have added themselves somehow: determining what is a valid and what aninvalid addition is not clear simply by identifying something as ‘immemorial’ (atleast on the OED’s definition of the term). Vincent of Lerins, Thomas Aquinas,and John Henry Newman all speak of development (of doctrine) in terms ofmaking explicit what has always been implicit. But how liturgical developmentis to be evaluated seems a more complicated question precisely because of thenature and function of rituals.

Hull speaks about ‘organic’ development: rites will change as time goes by butwill do so authentically only when the change is organic. A major problem Hullsees with the ‘Montinian revolution’ is that it was contrived and artificial, thework of a committee seeking to destroy rather than to build up, and so in no wayan organic development. (Cardinal Ratzinger makes a similar criticism of the post-Conciliar reform in The Spirit of the Liturgy.) But the process of such ‘organicdevelopment’ needs to be explained a bit more: we do not wake up one morning todiscover that our rituals have developed overnight. Presumably any developmentin human rituals will involve consciousness, reflection, evaluation, and choice.


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The Bugnini commission can be accused of antiquarianism and immobilism inthinking that the Latin rite could be returned to some imagined primitive form,but may not traditionalists also be criticized for the same things in proposingthat the Latin rite somehow reached a final ‘perfection’ four centuries ago andin trying now (once again with a certain artificiality and contrivance) to ‘restore’that rite?

The arguments will clearly continue. Hull’s book is an important, well-documented, argumentative, contribution to a question increasingly urgent for theChurch. For him it is the question, and in that one can only agree. At stake is,not the preservation of a cultural museum piece, but the faith of the Church, themeaning of adoration, and the knowledge of Christ that comes through worship.

VIVIAN BOLAND OP

MARTHE ROBIN AND THE FOYERS OF CHARITY by Martin Blake, TheotokosBooks, Nottingham 2010, pp. 161, £7.95

This work has an importance that belies its shortness and unassuming style, beingthe first book written originally in English about the 20th Century French mystic,Marthe Robin, foundress of the ‘Foyers of Charity’. While the name of MartheRobin is known in this country, she has received far less attention here thanin her native France, where Jean Guitton called her ‘the greatest genius I haveever met’ (p. 135), and Jean Danielou spoke of her as ‘the most extraordinaryperson of the century’ (p. 56). Others who have testified to her great influenceupon them include the philosopher Marcel Clement, and Fr Marie-DominiquePhilippe, founder of the Community of St John. Her cause for beatification hasbeen opened.

The present book aims to be no more than an introduction to Marthe Robinand the ‘Foyers’ which she inspired. We read first of her early life: her birth,in 1902, as the sixth child of parents who were small farmers south of Lyon,‘Catholic, if not particularly religious’ (p. 18); her early piety, and the decline ofher health from the age of 16 onwards, leading to blindness and paralysis. Theauthor describes, without excessively dwelling on, the extraordinary phenomenasaid to have accompanied her illness, for example, her reception of the stigmataand continuous shedding of blood, her weekly ‘re-living’ of the Passion, and herpassing of fifty three years, until her death in 1981, without food, drink or sleep.The major theme of the book, however, is the spiritual influence which MartheRobin exercised on the many thousands who came into contact with her, and theimportance of the ‘Foyers of Charity’ which from the 1930s, she predicted wouldbe part of ‘a new Pentecost of love’ within the Church (p. 15).

After Marthe Robin herself, the principal actor in these events was a Frenchpriest of the diocese of Lyon, George Finet. He met Marthe in 1936, and ather request, preached the first ‘Foyer’ retreat in her village of Chateauneuf laterthat year. It was a 5 day, silent retreat, which has remained the pattern for theFoyers ever since. Under the guidance of Marthe, and with the permission ofhis bishop, the Abbe Finet founded a community in the village whose principalwork would be to receive those who would attend such retreats. This is knowntoday as the ‘Central Foyer’ and more than 70 others are spread across severalcontinents, although, as the author remarks, there is still none in the Anglophoneworld. Their Statutes received the final approval from the Pontifical Council forthe Laity in 1999.

It is a remarkable fact that Marthe Robin never visited the Foyer she hadinspired in her own village. Bedridden, she was not able even to assist at Massfor more than half a century, though she received Holy Communion weekly. But


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in her darkened room, she received a constant stream of visitors seeking prayersand counsel. More than 100,000 names appear in the visitors’ book and thisfigure does not take into account those who visited more than once (p. 55). Theauthor writes: ‘Her aim seems to have been to lead her visitors to work out asolution to their problems with the help of the Holy Spirit. She did not regardherself, and disliked being regarded, as a kind of oracle’ (p. 56). Nevertheless, itis clear that many people considered that they had received extraordinary gracesby means of their brief interviews with Marthe and the author includes a fewwell-chosen examples.

The Foyers themselves are also described by some personal testimonies, in-cluding the author’s own. He explains that Marthe Robin believed that she hadbeen instructed directly from heaven that they were to be centres of ‘light, charityand love’, ‘charity’ referring here especially to fraternity among Christians, and‘love’ to the love of God exercised in prayer (p. 114). The members do not takevows, though most are celibates, and may include both men and women. EachFoyer has a priest-member as its spiritual father, though he is not in charge oftemporalities. Some run schools, which the author notes have been a strikingsource of vocations to the priesthood in France (p. 128).

This relatively brief study raises some questions which it would be interestingto see discussed more fully. For example, the author speaks of Marthe as ‘still thesubject of controversy’ (p. 12), but it is not clear what the controversy is about.Elsewhere he mentions a crisis that the movement passed through in the 1970s,but gives very few details (p. 81).

Some of the most interesting testimonies in the book are those of the philoso-pher and ‘academician’, Jean Guitton. He emphasises Marthe Robin’s naturalness,and her capacity to adapt her conversation to those to whom she spoke. He re-marks on the paradox that it was while living for years in complete darkness thatshe spoke of ‘Foyers of light’. We also learn that Guitton was urged by Marthe(p. 75) to encourage his friend Pope Paul VI to remain firm and not to abdicate(it would be interesting to know if she ever spoke of that pontiff’s confrontationwith Archbishop Lefebvre, another of Guitton’s friends.).

This book is written in a personal, even ‘homely’ style. It contains a numberof repetitions and, no doubt to keep down costs, no photographs. A useful bibli-ography of recent books about Marthe Robin, almost all in French, is included.As the author says (p.149), the private writings which Marthe produced between1929 and 1932, as well as the many letters that she dictated, will no doubt bethe subject of much theological study in future years.

THOMAS CREAN OP

A SOUL-CENTRED LIFE: EXPLORING AN ANIMATED SPIRITUALITY byMichael Demkovich OP, The Liturgical Press, Collegeville 2010, pp.144, £13.50pbk

Few serious books on spirituality are predicated upon a pun, but MichaelDemkovich’s A Soul-Centered Life: Exploring an Animated Spirituality is cer-tainly not like most of these books. Both a thoroughgoing critique of the cur-rent state of spirituality, as well as a creative contribution to the field itself,Demkovich’s latest showing is ultimately a plea to re-appropriate the Thomisticteaching on the soul and so literally to reanimate both the Church and the academyin light of the classical teaching.

The author takes on two distinct yet related problems: the first concerningthose who self-identify as ‘spiritual, but not religious’, and the second concerningthe state of spirituality in the contemporary academy. While he stops short of


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identifying an actual causal relation, Demkovich does seem to suggest that if theintellectual pursuit of spirituality were better grounded and more coherent then itis likely that the confused state of contemporary spiritual practice would reflectthat stability. In fact, he structures his book around the connection: the first partlays out the author’s critique of various contemporary models and offers his ownalternative methodology; the second part introduces a fourfold schema which isintended to serve as a model for how academic spirituality can be accomplished ina truly integral way; the final part returns to questions posed at the beginning andfurther argues against the ‘spiritual, but not religious camp’ in a way that is meantto be compelling both to spiritual theologians and everyday undergrads alike.

Demkovich’s major critique with the established schools of spirituality presentin the academy is that in one way or another they all focus too exclusively onparticular practices. In the critique section of the first part the author addressesa number of popular approaches: spirituality as liturgy, as academic discipline,as history, and as theology. For Demkovich none of these will do. When seenas liturgy, spirituality tends to lock practice too fixedly into the rites and rubricsof public worship. As history, it can become too heavily contexualized and soseem remote. And as theology, it tends either to become so distinct an academicdiscipline as to masquerade as autonomous or to become simply another distincthermeneutic or analytic method in the context of some broader theological inquiry.Demkovich proposes an alternative vision, of a discipline which sees the soul asthe integrating factor of the human person and so spirituality as the integratingfield or discipline which binds theology to all other fields as well as to the lifeof the everyday Christian.

Because the soul is the intellectual skeleton-key for Demkovich, this newmethodology is necessarily personal. That is, investigating specific people’s spir-itualities will be what yields an account of the human person in relation to Godthat is at once intellectually significant and morally desirable. Most of the bookis taken up with case studies in his new method, focusing on the characters ofMaximus the Confessor, Catherine of Siena, Ignatius of Loyola, and Teresa ofCalcutta. These sketches attend to three major factors that constitute the per-son’s spirituality: the self, life, and doctrine. Doctrine is of particular interestto Demkovich and so as he associates a particular type of spirituality (ascetic,mystical, aesthetical, and social-critical) with each of the subjects, likewise heidentifies a particular doctrine that he identifies as central to their way of life.For instance, the ascetic spirituality of Maximus the Confessor is associated withthe mystery of the Incarnation, whereas the speculative mysticism of Catherineof Siena is focused particularly on the Blessed Trinity.

As important as the methodological move is for Demkovich, the real upshotcomes in his conclusion where he returns to the question of being spiritual but notreligious. The critical study of spirituality as presented in the book will alwaysyield both a morality and a doctrinal framework of theology operative in thelife of the individual practitioner. The very spiritual person, then, who distancesthemselves from organized religion out of a fear of dogma and an exclusive moralorder, has only succeeded in producing yet another religion. Further, to study anyindividual spiritual writer or their practices outside of their historical and doctrinalcontext will necessarily yield a very flawed picture, and any attempt to emulatethose practices devoid of their doctrinal content will always be wanting, for theanimating force, the very life of the practice, is the doctrine. As Demkovichleaves it, then, the problem of spirituality without religion is either that it is nospirituality at all, or that, in one’s effort to live a given spirituality apart fromthe religious tradition in which it emerged, one succeeds only in producing anentirely new religion and spirituality.

Demkovich sets an enormous task for himself, both to offer a new and insightfulapproach to spirituality as a discipline as well as to give answer to the question


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which he associates with the great hunger of the human heart, and the criticalimportance that doctrine and religious practice have in responding to that need.He accomplishes the latter by way of the former, and in the process takes thereader on a rollicking and sometimes breathtaking romp through the history oflargely Western Christian spirituality. This book will serve as a helpful resourceto both critical scholars in the field and pastoral care workers, and may just helpto answer, at least for some, why ‘spiritual, but not religious’ just won’t cut itfor serious thinkers.

DOMINIC McMANUS OP

PRACTICAL PHILOSOPHY, ETHICS, SOCIETY AND CULTURE by JohnHaldane, Imprint-Academic, Exeter 2009, pp. xv + 400, £17.95 pbkREASONABLE FAITH by John Haldane, Routledge, London 2010, pp. xi +201, £23.99 pbk

Both books collect earlier articles, dating from 1989 to 2008 in Practical Philos-ophy (PP), and from 1994 to 2009 in Reasonable Faith (RF), edited to make asustained argument. Not popularized philosophy, they are addressed to the non-professional, not exclusively Catholic, reader.

PP is divided into a long introduction followed by three parts with six chapterson ethics, five on society, and four on culture. Professor Haldane (JH) explicitlyrejects both idea and image of society as invented by pre-existing individuals(PP 225–26). We are social animals who nonetheless choose the way we livetogether; to that extent human living is ethical and ‘arguably the deepest sourceof ethical experience lies in the recognition of human beings as subjects andfellow persons, and as bearers of various kinds of mutual normative relations.Some of the latter may plausibly be regarded as contractual, such as marriage,but others, such as parenthood are culturally transformed relations rooted in ouranimal nature’ (PP 76). How we choose to live together reveals our values.

The common good is a social order in which good values may be realized.Consequently, to know the common good is to choose, both [a] what and [b]how values are to be realized. Because both [a] and [b] will often be contentious,so also will be what is thought to constitute the common good. In chapter 9,which, with chapter 10, discusses the relationship between the individual, society,and state with reference to the liberalism of John Rawls, JH considers howthe ‘common good’ is properly to be understood. ‘The apparently radical anti-individualism [of ‘the idea that every law should have as its proper goal thewell-being of society as a whole’] is sometimes moderated by commentatorswho urge an interpretation of society as an aggregate, and thereby treat the“common good” as a distributive notion, equivalent to “the good of each andevery member”’ (PP 226). JH opposes that position on the grounds that it is animplausible interpretation of Aquinas (PP 227) and that it misunderstands society.(PP ch. 9 passim). For JH ‘The common good is essentially shared. It is a good-for-many, taken collectively, rather than a ‘good-to-many’ taken distributively’(PP 227). He clarifies his meaning: ‘the common good [includes], for example, thenotion that what justifies the expenditure of society’s resources upon universitieswherein people are supported in their thinking about these very issues is the factthat the goods attained thereby are ‘communicable’, reverting to each member’.This is genuinely thought provoking. Two caveats: first, it does not follow fromthe fact that something enhances the common good that the state ought to provideit through ‘the expenditure of society’s resources’, if ‘society’s resources’ refersto tax revenue; secondly, precisely how ‘. . . within a community we are all betterwhen some of us achieve understanding’ (PP loc.cit.) needs more analysis.


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In the liberal tradition, in opposition to the encroachment of the modern stateon the lives of its citizens, individual freedom became an explicit and fundamentalvalue. Mill’s On Liberty became the foundational text in English. The ‘commongood’ had fused with the ‘good of the state’, and the liberal resistance to everincreasing state organization and control almost inevitably became a resistanceto ‘the common good’. Liberalism, by its opponents, and by at least some of itssupporters, was understood to be the pursuit of individual good, largely irrespec-tive of the good of others. John Rawls’ ‘conception of justice is a private one’(PP228), Ronald Dworkin’s insistence on rights is on the rights of the individual(PP 175), but is not also the Roman definition of justice as the settled and endur-ing willingness to render to each what is due individualist? What is due is dueto individuals and the common good in the domain of the just is achieved wheneach has what is due. Both Rawls and Dworkin may be read as suggesting thatthe good society is achieved only when certain individual rights are honoured.Perhaps it is that aspect of those writers that leads JH to hesitate to align himselfwith communitarianism.

RF is divided into two parts: Reason, Faith and God (chapters 1–6) and Reason,Faith and the Soul (chapters 7–13). In both parts the word ‘Faith’ is used moreto refer to the religious domain than to Christian belief. Christians, religious Jewsand Muslims, believe in God; most have not been convinced by a proof. Butwithin Christianity, Judaism and Islam it has commonly been held that God’sexistence can be proved. JH is concerned less to present a proof than to showthe presuppositions upon which a proof can arise. He makes the very interestingsuggestion in chapters 2 and 3 that ‘the traditional arguments can be worked onthe basis of [how he understands] idealism as well as of realism’ (RF 36).

In several chapters he is concerned centrally with truth, reality and realism. Inthe Catholic tradition the affirmation that God exists is held to be true. For therealist that affirmation is identical with every other affirmation in that, if it is true,its truth is independent of the person affirming it. Truth is a relation of knowingto what is. Realism does not require a distinction between knower and known.JH does not say that it does; nor does he unambiguously say that it does not.

The discussion of Dummett’s ‘anti-realism’ and Berkeley’s idealism is veryilluminating. JH concludes that ‘the argument from anti-realism to theism leadsto the conclusion that ultimately and strictly speaking realism is false and thatBerkeley was correct: to be is to be known – by God’ (RF 46). That recallsRonald Knox’s limerick in response to the man who found it odd that a tree inthe quad continued to be when no one was there to observe it.:

Dear Sir, Your astonishment’s odd.When there’s no one about in the quad,The tree that you seeContinues to be,Observed by, Yours faithfully, God.When realism is understood as the affirmation that being is known in true

propositions then that [a] the created universe including ourselves exists becauseknown by God, and that [b] it exists independently of being known by us, areperfectly compatible.

Because, as a matter of fact, God exists and we are, whether or not we realiseit, oriented to him, chapter 5 discusses the restless heart, and chapter 6 the idea offinding God in nature: ‘God is both the source and the destination of humanity’(RF 94). Chapter 6 is a meditation in part on Hopkins’ poem on the grandeurof God. That the world is ‘charged with the grandeur of God’ becomes, perhapsdeliberately, ‘the world is changed with the grandeur of God’ (RF 94).

The second part of the book discusses the human soul in seven valuablechapters. Eternal life is often overlooked, sometimes disbelieved. I mention onlytwo things. First, in the conclusion of chapter 12 JH discusses very briefly a


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curious and fascinating argument from St Anselm on immortality based on God’slove and our desire to know and love God. Secondly, several times JH quotesa passage from St Thomas’ commentary on the 15th chapter of St Paul’s FirstEpistle to the Corinthians on the resurrection of the dead (c.15, lect.2: the Leonineeditor casts some doubt on the authenticity of the section): ‘The soul is part ofthe body. My soul is not I; and if only souls are saved, I am not saved, nor isany man’. The first sentence is untrue. The soul is not part of the body, and inno other passage that I have found does Aquinas say so. The second sentence isconsonant with Aquinas but the style is atypical (cf. e.g. Summa contra GentilesII.57.16 and IV.79.11; Summa Theologiæ I.29.1 ad 5 and 1.74.4 ad 2). Authenticor not, it evokes the question as to whether the disembodied soul thinks, knowsand loves God. If it does, who does so? If it does not . . .?

Few will leave these, and other chapters and questions that there is no space todiscuss, undisturbed. They may not be convinced of every conclusion but they willhave been stimulated, and will not rest easily in sheer asserted disagreement.

GARRETT BARDEN

THE OXFORD HANDBOOK OF ENGLISH LITERATURE AND THEOLOGYedited by Andrew Hass, David Jasper and Elisabeth Jay, Oxford UniversityPress, Oxford 2009 [first published 2007]), pp. 720, £27.50 pbk

This paperback version of OHELT is particularly welcome, making a fascinatingand pioneering collection of essays accessible to students as well as libraries.The book, despite its title, is not so much a handbook as the representationof an enterprise, its (necessarily tentative) object being, as Elisabeth Jay statesin her introduction, ‘to provide a sense of what it might mean to indulge inthe interdisciplinary study of English Literature and theology’. The Handbookis organised into seven sections: introductory, formation of the tradition, literaryways of reading the Bible, theological ways of reading literature, theology asliterature, the ‘great themes’, and afterword. In the second section, Rhodri Lewis’chapter on the Enlightenment is a particularly thorough and clear introduction forthe literary graduate student, whereas Lynne Long’s account of Biblical translationand prayer books, perhaps aimed at undergraduates, offers only a perfunctory andpartial description of pre-Reformation religious writing, which largely ignores thevast sermon-literature and is apparently unaware of primers such as the widelycirculated Layfolks’ Massbook. Section Three contains some enthralling materialnew to literary students not familiar with Hebrew, but Yvonne Sherwood writingabout prophetic literature perhaps gets closest to describing the strange linguisticwrestlings involved in speaking of God.

The literature/theology nexus is a particularly slippery one to identify and de-fine, and the contributors have interpreted their task in different ways. The essaysare in any case valuable in their own right, but it is no derogation of the handbookto say that many, perhaps most, clarify what the interface ‘might mean’, in Jay’sphrase, by falling strictly outside the interdisciplinary remit yet sketching out aserviceable boundary area. A particularly good example is Norman Vance’s sym-pathetic study of George Eliot and Thomas Hardy. Vance’s careful examinationof the relationship between George Eliot and Christianity serves to show howher concern with human suffering, while it often implies an unfavourable com-parison of contemporary Christian practice with precept, is fundamentally moralrather than religious, let alone theological. Again, Stephen Medcalf’s essay, whichtraces the religious experiences and developments that influenced particular poemsand attitudes in Auden, David Jones and T.S.Eliot, seems at first sight to graspthe interdisciplinary nettle more securely. One might describe it as a spiritual


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biography of poetic themes, and this factual basis gives it, as with Vance’s essay,a visitor’s passport into the literature/theology world.

Certain observations spring to mind. First, it is not literature and theology,strictly speaking, that is the subject of this handbook but literature and religion.OHELT deals with religious writing, devotional writing, and theological writing,which are not all the same thing: Piers Plowman, for instance, is as much aboutecclesiology as theology. Secondly, there is a distinction to be made between theabout of literature and the how. The purpose of OHELT is not to treat theology asa special category just because it happens to be the subject of a poem or a novel:if it were, one could as easily posit a study of literature and psychology or naturalhistory. It could be argued that two separate studies are implied. One, placed atthe rock-face of poetry, asks the question: how does faith affect expression?, downto the use of one word or trope rather than another, or of no tropes at all. JanetSoskice’s important study of this area, Metaphor and religious language (1985),has not been superseded or equalled. Brian Cummings’ chapter on the backgroundof Protestant and Catholic reformations rightly emphasises the importance ofLuther’s ‘profoundly verbal’ approach to theology and the effect of this Lutheranemphasis may be seen in Helen Wilcox’ essay on Donne and Herbert, whichrefers to the argument about a ‘Protestant poetic’ espoused by writers such asBarbara Lewalski. Much work is still to be done on this feature of immediatelypost-Reformation poetry.

The other necessary study is of writing that, as Coleridge put it, understands‘religion as the element in which [the reader] lives, and the region in which hemoves’ (p. 403). Medieval literature falls so obviously into this category that itis easy to ignore the literary implications of what Charles Taylor has describedas the loss of a ‘social imaginary’. After Donne, Herbert, and Milton, this senseof religion as an ‘element’ is hardly to be found in lay writers until the assertionby Coleridge of the poet’s vatic role. Whether Wordsworth could be consideredat all theological, despite his effusions of spirit, is very doubtful, and the essayson later writers are almost all about professional clerics. To what degree ofelegance must a piece of theology aspire in order to be classed as literature?Ian Ker’s essay on Newman points directly to the problem raised by this oddityof nomenclature: Newman was a minor poet and novelist, but one of the greatwriters of non-fictional prose (p. 624)

OHELT’s publisher has ordained in its catalogue that the sermons of LancelotAndrewes are ‘literature’ while those of John Fisher are ‘religion’, a classificationwhich Fisher would not have minded, but, I suspect, Andrewes would. Suchproblems of definition, however, are not the fault of OHELT , which has helpedmightily to clear the air and perhaps the way for subsequent investigations, suchas Regina Schwartz’ recent Sacramental Poetics at the Dawn of Secularism.

Finally, I would venture to suggest that Piers Plowman and many such ‘el-ement’ works are not about theology, nor even about religion: they are aboutsomeone wondering how to live a life. Literature is arguably not a discipline atall, it is something to which people naturally have recourse – and so is religion.The truly theological, then, may be found in strange places, and of all the essaysin this admirable collection it is, I think, Valentine Cunningham’s hectic and eru-dite study of James Joyce that best demonstrates this. It reproduces the explosiveenergy of Joyce’s angry relationship with his Catholic upbringing, quoting ob-scenity and blasphemy in a tour de force that does not make for comfortable orpious reading – almost, but not quite, more Babel than Pentecost. A wild assertionof word and flesh, it rubs our literary and theological noses in the torment andpassion of incarnation.

CECILIA HATT


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RITUAL AND THE SACRED: A NEO-DURKHEIMIAN ANALYSIS OF POLITICS,RELIGION AND THE SELF by Massimo Rosati, Rethinking Classical Sociol-ogy Series, Ashgate, Aldershot 2009, pp. xvi + 163, £55.00 hbk

If the mass media in England were to be relied on, one would have thoughtthat any interest in religion within the social sciences had long expired. Toa remarkable degree, this is not the case. At present, there is a considerablegrowth of interest in religion, theology, and matters of the sacred, well typifiedin this study by Rosati. A paradigm shift in sociology has occurred, involving re-appraisals of the interests of Weber and Simmel in religion. Such concerns alwaysfigured prominently in Durkheim’s writings and these are likely to increase withthe centenary reflections in 2012 on his last great work, The Elementary Formsof the Religious Life.

While not forming a school of thought, there are an unexpected number of Ital-ian sociologists with interests in religion – one has in mind Cipriani, Ferrarotti,Garelli, and Giordan. The works of these Italians translate well, being charac-terised by elan, rhetorical flourish, and some original theoretical re-castings. Theyexhibit interesting bibliographies that are exploited well in their texts. Rosati isprominent amongst these, sharing with some particular interests in Durkheim.Parts of two chapters of this study have been published earlier in DurkheimianStudies (the journal of the British Centre for Durkheimian Studies based atOxford).

Overall, this is a well-structured overview of some wide ranging debates thatare unfamiliarly cast and to that degree the study has much to commend it. Rosaticharacterises his work as a personal interpretation (p. 6). Besides his treatmentof ritual, largely in the first three chapters of the study, Rosati seeks to find areligious basis for a notion of ‘principled tolerance’ (p. 10) and this quest formsits second part. In this latter part, Durkheim slightly melts into the background.

For unknown reasons, the study of ritual has fallen from a dominant positionheld in sociology and anthropology in the 1980s and 1990s. A value of Rosati’swork lies in its resolute defence of the significance of ritual. In his introduction,he claims ‘ritual behaviour is a barrier against cognitive chaos’ (p. 4). Moreassertively, he treats rituals as the building blocks of the social. His aim, for whathe terms Durkheim’s second programme of research, is to seek a ‘marriage ofcultural sociology and religious studies’, which is treated as a ‘very urgent task’in sociology (p. 6).

Chapter 1 starts alluringly with the suggestion that Durkheim is ‘a naıve fig-ure, a deaf and blind positivist’, out of kilter in a strange competition over thetragic basis of modernity (p. 10). This disenchantment with modernity, Rosatisuggests, leads Durkheim to stress the moral significance of ritual and the sacredas means to ameliorate on-setting individualism. There is much of value in thechapter, not least on the Jewish aspects of The Elementary Forms that expand atheological dimension to the study. Theological issues also emerge in chapter 2,on ‘modernity and the rise of the introspective conscience’, which is usefulon Protestantism and individualism (pp. 24–27). This chapter, dealing also withMauss, is thoughtful. Echoing Taylor, he charges Protestant-like religions withobscuring the significance of rituals and the sacred. Rosati is at his best whenwriting closest to Christian theology.

Chapter 3, on society, rituals and tradition marks steps into diffuseness. Rosatiis heavily reliant on the American sociologist of culture, Jeffrey Alexander, andwhat emerges is schematic and not very illuminating. It speaks too much of whatis familiar on performance, but in ways that add little. The material on Turner,Bellah and Collins is interesting but too soft-focused. The work of Seligman onJewish rituals emerges not very profitably in relation to the overall concerns ofthe study (pp. 64–68). In that chapter references start to appear to Rappaport,


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the most important sociologist of late, who dealt innovatively with ritual. Withina bitty chapter 4, on ‘Politics: An Anthropological Gaze’ he is given a usefulexposition (pp. 90–97) but one that somehow blunts his liturgical and theologicalsignificance. Rosati overstates the influence of Durkheim on his work.

No study should by judged by a series editor’s preface, where Chalcraft treatsas ‘almost laughable’ the notion that the Bible should have as sacred a place inthe nation in the early 21st century as it did in 1953, going on to add that ‘Rosatidoes not make these kind of errors’ (p. x). He might be free from ‘error’ with hisrecourse to Islam and Confucianism, but what emerges is expositional, uncritical.and oddly removed from the earlier concerns with Durkheim. There is a peculiarand decidedly unpersuasive property to his section on ‘Comparative Perspectives:Rabbinic ethics and Confucianism’ (pp. 84–88) which sits uncertainly in chapter4 on ‘Self-cultivation: The Individual as a Ceremonial Being’. Insights are castin manners of assertion so that when he turns to Confucianism in relation topolitics and ritual, thin sociological gruel emerges. His main insight drawn fromthis religion is that ‘personalism, within a network ethic of mutual help, is theritualist Confucian way to a constrained democratic engagement’ (p. 110).

Like Taylor, Rosati seeks new outlets and ambiences for rituals ‘consistent witha post-liberal approach, and above all with a post-post-protestant understanding ofreligions within the public sphere’ (p. 112). Besides Confucianism and Judaism(references to Catholicism are oddly brief and perfunctory given his emphasis onliturgy in the study), Rosati looks to Islam for solutions. These emerge in chapter 5on ‘Politics: An Anthropological Gaze’ where he deems Islam as transcending andsubverting politics, which facilitates a fusion of the public and the private in waysthat are peculiarly resistant both to secularisation and to modernity (pp. 102–106).Islam is used in the context of politics, where orthodoxy of practice, not theologymatters most. A glimmer of what Rosati might have in mind as exemplifying hisideal of ritual emerges in his final chapter, on new routes to pluralism in regardto religion. A Jewish dimension unexpectedly emerges though this aspect is notsurprising given Durkheim’s rabbinical background.

Seligman, a Jewish sociologist who has written on ritual (and who gives thestudy a glowing jacket cover endorsement) is invoked as exemplary for the multi-faith ‘Scriptural Reasoning’ sessions he runs as part of an international summerschool, where common religious texts are read in ‘an egalitarian speech situation’,in a ‘neutral place’ (pp. 131–34). He sees these annual sessions as constituting‘a quasi-liturgical practice’, which signifies one of the main purposes of ritual asconceived in the study, of re-casting boundaries and decentring the self. The ritualseems to involve a lot of listening. The aim is to recognise the particularism ofother faiths and to bracket differences, all done in the humility of a ritual orderingwhere utterance of the ‘error’ of others is unspeakable.

The conclusion commences with a vision of multi-faith cacophony in Romerealised by an imaginary figure called Davita who finds solutions in Durkheim’ssociology of religion and his image of society. It then proceeds into crypticcomments on the significance of Durkheim for the new millennium. The endpoint of the study is to conclude that ‘to ritual and the sacred, eventually, liesthe task of teaching (even to moderns) the virtue of the “lightness of thought-fulness”’ (p. 142). Given his current post as Director of the Centre for the Studyand Documentation of Religions and Political Institutions in Post-Secular Society,Rosati’s wrestling with the legacy of Durkheim is interesting in illustrating theincreasingly inchoate ends of modernity which seem so peculiarly resistant tosociological encapsulation.

KIERAN FLANAGAN


Documents

RITUAL AND THE SACRED: A NEO-DURKHEIMIAN ANALYSIS OF POLITICS, RELIGION AND THE SELF by Massimo Rosati