DOI:10.1111/j.1741-2005.2012.01506.

Reviews

SEX, WIVES, AND WARRIORS: READING BIBLICAL NARRATIVE WITH ITS

ANCIENT AUDIENCE by Philip F. Esler, Cascade Books, Eugene, Oregon,
2011, pp. xi + 408, $ 41.33 pbk

When I was at school, an important element of the lessons then known as ‘Scrip-
ture’ was what was usually introduced as ‘background’. By this was meant rel-
evant historical and related matters that were known from sources outside the
Bible which might be closely related to the familiar text. They not only illumi-
nated some otherwise mysterious elements but, more to the point, they lent a
greater credence to the historicality of what was written.
It shows how far we have come in the business of biblical interpretation that
Esler has managed to write a work of ‘background’ so radically different from the
previous paradigm that not only is he more or less careless about how historical
the narratives that he is analysing may be, but in some respects he succeeds
in making them live in a hitherto unsuspected manner. As with some of his
previous publications, he illustrates here the approach for which he now has an
international reputation of drawing on the methods and insights of the social
sciences—and anthropology in particular—which enable us to read familiar tales
with fresh appreciation.
Two lengthy introductory chapters set the methodological bases for the readings
that will follow. In my opinion this is a tactical mistake. They are the toughest
chapters to read and may well put off the intelligent lay readers whom Esler
has partly within his sights. The first chapter, indeed, seems to me more or
less unnecessary in the context of this book as it discusses who reads biblical
narratives and why. It also includes a brief survey of the seven basic plots into
which Christopher Booker thought he could reduce every form of story; several of
these feature prominently in the following analysis. The second chapter introduces
an understanding of social anthropology of the ancient Mediterranean world,
with particular reference to family issues (which stretch much wider than our
nuclear family, of course); oft-cited but rarely understood pairings such as honour
and shame or patron and client, and a range of related matters such as group
orientation and limited good, are introduced and explained.
It is true that all these will be of great importance in the chapters that follow.
However, it is usual for Esler then helpfully to reiterate the matters that he has
here introduced at such length (approaching a quarter of the whole text). His
book would have been more inviting if he could have got us into his informed
story-telling very much quicker, with, perhaps, an epilogue or appendix for the
technical issues which, as a scholar, he is anxious to expound.
The essential point that all this amounts to, as Esler emphasizes on a number
of occasions, is that for his purpose it does not matter whether the stories as
told in the Bible are historical or not. They were, however, told in a world
where these social structures and conventions were taken for granted, so that
we cannot do them justice if we try to read them through the lens of modern
Western values. So his research is in that sense historical, even if the narratives
may or may not relate closely to the events of history as such. And on this
basis he proceeds to work through eight narratives, demonstrating time and again
that sometimes the whole narrative structure and sometimes a particular phrase


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or even single word has point and significance that previous commentators have
usually overlooked or misunderstood. Under the heading of wives we have the
stories of Judah and Tamar (Genesis 38) and of Hannah (1 Samuel 1–2); under
warriors we find Saul (1 Samuel 8–31), David and Goliath (1 Samuel 17), David’s
rise to power (1 Samuel 19–2 Samuel 5), and Judith; finally, under sex we
have David and Bathsheba (2 Samuel 10–12)—curiously the one that seemed
to me to be least illuminated—and Amnon’s rape of Tamar (2 Samuel 13). So
this is a spicy selection, and Esler’s good writing style makes the reading fully
absorbing.
It is obviously not possible in the space of a review to pick out all the details
which make these narratives meaningful as we learn to read them, so to speak,
with the eyes of an ancient Israelite. For me one of the most successful chapters
was that on Hannah, with her husband Elkanah and his other wife Penninah. The
family dynamics here are obviously something quite outside our modern experi-
ence, but Esler draws on anthropological fieldwork undertaken among Palestinians
in the 1920s and 1930s to make sense of many aspects of the relationships and
their interactions in 1 Samuel 1 in ways which render the text intelligible even to
those of us who thought we were very familiar with so well-known a tale. The
order of narration, the location of the scenes and the details of the dialogues fall
into place in a wholly fresh manner.
Esler insists from time to time that his work is intended to reach further than
simply explaining a narrative more adequately than before. He claims in addition
that his method has significant theological pay-off. He does not go into this
in much detail, however, so that this twenty-first century reader, at least, was
left wondering how far this was determined by market pressures. Of course, for
committed Christians and Jews the narratives of the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament
are an integral part of our inheritance in the faith; to that extent they are inevitably
theological. But readers who expect to find here an immediate contribution to their
systematics will be disappointed. But not really; for anyone who approaches these
narratives with that sort of expectation will be shutting themselves off from the
riches that they have to offer in terms of human beings in real life—made all the
more real by Esler’s insights—as they struggle in their relationships with all their
joys and heartaches, sometimes in contact with the divine and sometimes less so,
but always recalled in a manner that causes us to reflect more profoundly on the
path through life that neither then nor now is guaranteed to be smooth.

H. G. M. WILLIAMSON

CAPTIVE TO THE WORD: ENGAGING THE SCRIPTURES FOR CONTEM-

PORARY THEOLOGICAL REFLECTION by Miroslav Volf, Eerdemans, Grand
Rapids, 2010, pp.viii + 180, £ 11.99 pbk

A new essay collection by such a reliably high calibre thinker as Miroslav Volf
is always a welcome addition to a body of work. Collections like these en-
able the reader to see the ‘working out in the margins’ of the manuscripts
that become the author’s books. Observing the development and exploration
of ideas is both fascinating and informative as a lesson in the pursuing and
structuring compelling work. This is a summary collection of previously pub-
lished essays which, by being united under one title, will hopefully reach a
wider audience. The final essay was written exclusively for this collection (and
is markedly relevant given that its topic is economics) and there is a lengthy
discursive introduction which argues the case for why Scripture should be read
theologically.

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It is possible that on first glance some readers may be misled by the book’s
title (which is borrowed from a Luther quotation used in the introduction). This
is not a book concerned with Scriptural interpretation in the manner one might
expect from a biblical scholar. What is at stake, as far as this publication is
concerned, is the life and health of the Christian community. According to Volf,
the purpose of theology is to feed a living community of faith with a vision
of the shape of Christian life for today, a vision which is founded on God’s
relationship with human beings throughout our history as recoded in Scripture.
If theologians do not read Scripture theologically then they read it (if at all) in
ways that ignore its present relationship to a living and dynamic community. If
this happens, then theology will be irrelevant to the life of Christian communities
shaped by Scripture. Volf devotes eight pages of his introduction to narrating how
this was precisely the situation for a large portion of the twentieth century. Stale
and infertile theology is no use to Christian communities, he argues. Rather,
what is required is for theology to act as a practical science to help create a
compellingly Christian shape not only to their own lives, but also to economic,
governmental, administrative systems or to their relations to others not like them.
For some twenty years at least, there has been a growing trend for books to
consider the importance of a theological reading of Scripture. Volf’s contribution
departs from many of these in being a less concerned with technical method
and more focused on providing examples of responses that allow Scripture to
comment on specific situations in our world. Volf sees this enterprise explicitly
as part of a much older tradition, going back all the way to Fathers and including
Augustine, Thomas, Luther and Barth to name a few. Those in this tradition
saw themselves primarily as commentators on Scripture rather than ecclesiastical
historians or textual critics.
Furthermore, Volf is not so much interested in the nature and shape of specific
practices in the Church, a fashionable and bourgeoning area of research in itself,
but rather that the Church should be reminded to read Scripture as a living body
which is relevant to the lives of believers and the shape of this world. Indeed,
he suggests ‘practices. . .are Christian insofar as they are “resonances” of God’s
engagement with the world.’(p.57). This idea is explored further in his essay ‘The-
ology for a Way of Life’ in which he argues that practices are shaped by beliefs.
This being the case, our beliefs about God and Scripture as living realities matter
a great deal because they affect how we live our lives in relation to God and
his creation. This essay is followed by ‘Soft Difference: Church and Culture in 1
Peter’ which provides a particularly strong example of Volf’s extended discussion
of a specific area of Scripture drawing in diverse dialogue partners with a view
to informing a contemporary issue. In particular, this discussion explores how the
Church can contribute meaningfully to modern pluralistic societies without ag-
gressively separating or becoming subsumed. To this end, the essay goes into great
detail about the context of the Petrine community and the intentions of the letter
but it does so only to develop an informed perspective on what kind of society
the Church is. Similarly, ‘Hunger for Infinity: Christian Faith and the Dynamics
of Economic Progress’ employs Ecclesiastes extensively to reveal what is natural
about the insatiable nature of human desires and what is a peculiarly modern
adaptation of this. This allows Volf to demonstrate that the perversion of creation
that capitalism, and particularly consumerism, create cannot be wholly thrown out
because it is predicated on something which is natural; the inexhaustible desire
of human beings for God. These issues are determinatively theological questions.
Across all these essays, Volf’s underlying point is not only that a theological
reading of Scripture is the most useful way of approaching it, rather it is that
Scripture is already bound up with our world and the questions it presents for
Christians. So one does not read Scripture to throw light on external problems in
the manner that a, perhaps oblique, Marxist reading of Karl Barth’s work might

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throw up useful insights for understanding both a particular type of Marxism

and Karl Barth’s ethics. Scripture as a living body is necessarily bound up with
present concerns and we read it but order that we come to contemporary issues
with an understanding of the reality of God’s action in this world.
Volf is well versed not only in the Scriptures, the theological and philosoph-
ical tradition (as one would hope from Yale’s Henry B. Wright Professor of
Systematic Theology) but also contemporary writing in the fields of economics,
sociology and psychology to name just a few. Consequently, his detailed foot-
notes send the reader to new and fascinating places to explore. In addition, the
variety of Scriptural sources employed across a wealth of contemporary topics,
including economics, inter-religious relations and political society is evidence of
the relevance of the Bible today that Volf argues for.
Resurgence in the theological reading of Scripture is underway in contemporary
theology and it is to be hoped that this short collection, which touches many topics
that affect modern life, will encourage more work in every area of theology to
read Scripture as a the site of God’s revelation to current issues today. Beyond
academic theology, hopefully this collection of powerful essays will be testament
enough to the contemporary relevance of scriptural thinking that the Word of God
will be opened up to new hearers.
A.D.R. HAYES

AQUINAS’S NOTION OF PURE NATURE AND THE CHRISTIAN INTEGRALISM

OF HENRI DE LUBAC. NOT EVERYTHING IS GRACE, by Bernard Mulcahy,
O. P., Peter Lang , New York, 2011, pp. ix + 246, £ 46.40 hbk

This book, which appears in the series ‘American University Studies’, is a con-
tribution to the current revival of the Cajetanian thesis that nature cannot have
an ontological orientation (‘innate appetite’) for grace – over against the famous
(and highly influential) contrary reading of the texts of St Thomas by the late
Cardinal Henri de Lubac.
The author proceeds in the following way. First of all, he introduces the concept
of pure nature in words taken from Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange – ‘nature with its
intrinsic constituent principles and such as follow from them or are due to them’,
and explains his use of the word ‘integralism’, which is not to be confused with
‘integrism’ – though it is not utterly distinct from it either. ‘Integralism’ denotes
a unitary view of the nature-grace relationship put forward by those who wish to
see a ‘culturally unified [Christian] society’. In the succeeding chapter it is shown
how pervasive in biblical and patristic sources is the vocabulary of ‘nature’ and
‘world’ over against ‘grace’ and ‘Church’. We are then introduced to the principal
protagonists: de Lubac himself who is treated with respect yet whose thesis is
judged plainly wrong; John Milbank whose ‘Radical Orthodoxy’ shows in what
straits integralism can land us; and St Thomas, in whose work nature, like the
month of June in the Rodgers and Hammerstein song, is ‘bustin’ out all over’,
but most characteristically in reflections on mortality, the infused virtues (and
gifts), Limbo, the exercise of kingship, the natural law, and the sciences in their
autonomy vis-à-vis sacra doctrina.
In an intermezzo, Father Mulcahy dons the historian’s cap and seeks to offer
us an alternative genealogy for the emergence of an anti-Christian secularism in
the life of the eldest daughter of the Church: an alternative, that is, to any version
of the emergence of a post-Christian France (or Europe) which would incriminate
natura pura somewhere along the way.
Despite the excellence of much of the exposition, I have several difficulties
with this book. The first is that a great deal of its material, both in its pre-history

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of pure nature and its exegesis of Aquinas, is simply not ad rem. De Lubac had no
objections to the philosophical use of the term ‘nature’ or to the common-sense
use of the word by plain persons. Nor did he dispute the existence of natural
structures within the graced totality of the Christian person or the Christian city.
In A Brief Catechesis on Nature and Grace he described it in fact as ‘sophistry’
to espy naturalism in ‘every explanation of man in which the word “nature”
appears’. (Certainly, however, the theology of Limbo in Thomas is problematic
for de Lubac, ‘an embarrassing case’, as he called it.)
This brings me to my second difficulty. The diligence with which St Thomas’s
thought is expounded is not paralleled in the treatment of de Lubac’s ideas. This
may be because the dual focus on de Lubac and Milbank left the author with
insufficient space. It may be because the spectre of Milbank as the ‘heir’ (but
how legitimately?) of de Lubac drew prematurely ahead the author’s intellectual
gaze. Or it may be that, assured of the truth of the interpretation of Thomas in
the commentatorial tradition of the Renaissance and later, he simply lacked the
sympathy needed for the task. Whatever the cause, one could hardly credit from
his account that in Surnaturel – the book which started this whole controversy
off – de Lubac could write of the supernatural that ‘its achievement lies farther
beyond the powers of our human nature than a miracle surpasses the powers of
the physical agents found in material nature’. In the light of this citation alone it is
apparent that Mulcahy’s anti-Lubacian argument from Thomas’s teaching on the
infused virtues and the gifts (if our intellectual nature had an innate appetite for
the supernatural we should need neither aid) hits the nail – in words of Herbert
McCabe – firmly on the side.
It seems indicative that, to judge by the bibliography, and a (no doubt fallible)
scanning of the notes, Mulcahy has not made use of the principal examination
of Thomas’s texts by a Lubacian: Jorge Laporta’s 1966 work La Destinée de la
nature humaine selon saint Thomas d’Aquin. For those who read French I would
strongly recommend the carefully argued review of this work by Marie-Michel
Labourdette, O. P., in the Revue Thomiste of that year. We are not naturally in
potency to the vision of God (as more than First Cause of the world). And yet it is
nevertheless true that our capacity is such that only that vision can abundantly fill
it (Labourdette’s verb here is combler). Labourdette – well-known for his defence
of Thomism against its detractors in the crisis which climaxed in the promulga-
tion of Humani generis – links this second claim to the biblical and patristic
doctrine of the imagehood of God in man. It was by coming to St Thomas from
Scripture and the Fathers rather than via the later commentators that de Lubac
was able to make his breakthrough – even if he underestimated (often, not always)
the heuristic value of the concept of pure nature for underlining the heterogeneity
of nature and grace.
My third difficulty is less an objection and more a sense of unease. In his
Natura Pura Professor Steven Long is at pains to argue that the commentatorial
doctrine is not a ‘stalking-horse for secularism’. Father Mulcahy seems to have no
such anxieties about the recognition of an ‘autonomous secular sphere’. In point
of fact, Long can only show that even a theonomous account of the intrinsic
constituent principles of human nature can produce a city built on natural reli-
gion. With Mulcahy, whose wide-lens picture of our nature does not emphasize
theonomy, we are even further from Christendom. Actually, Christendom is only
feasible as civic religion if, as Chesterton wrote in The Everlasting Man, (hu-
man) nature is ‘always looking for the supernatural’. As Père Jean-Pierre Torrell
has pointed out, fallen human nature (which is also nature without grace) may
be expected to harbour, if not exhibit, the relic of its once graced condition, in
subterranean longing for intimacy with God.
AIDAN NICHOLS OP

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NATURAL MORAL LAW IN CONTEMPORARY SOCIETY edited by Holger

Zaborowski, Catholic University of America Press, Washington, 2010, pp 359,
£105 hbk

The scene is set with an essay from Benedict XVI, originally written as part
of a debate with Jürgen Habermas. It argued, with typical clarity and balance,
various themes familiar from his papacy: the need for religion and reason to
engage continually in mutual purification; the dangers of political and biotech-
nological power untrammelled by a respectful and truthful understanding of hu-
manity; the need to develop traditional Western understandings of natural law.
Most strikingly, the then Ratzinger argued that the Christian tradition needs to
be in dialogue with not only secular rationality but also other world faiths and
cultural traditions: the search for what is truly ‘natural law’ is only just begin-
ning. It is a pity that none of the essays in the volume takes up that particular
challenge.
Of all the contributors, it is J. Budziszewski who most directly responds to
Benedict’s particular vision, with his forceful and incisive analysis of the way
in which natural law functions as ‘fact, theory and sign of contradiction’. He is
disconcertingly persuasive in his account of the way in which those who refuse to
acknowledge the clear evidence of moral truth suffer increasing moral blindness
and intellectual incoherence. This is ‘normal’, Budziszewski argues, ‘in the sense
that fever is the normal response to infection’. Thus he gives his largely Thomist
analysis a distinctly Augustinian colouring, and also lines up with a growing
philosophical interest in the way in which moral formation shapes the capacity
for moral understanding, something assumed, of course, by the ancients. There
are both parallels and contrasts to be drawn with the post-modernist project of
historicising moral reasoning. Francis Slade, meanwhile, recounts the history of
the European rejection of the truths of natural law. He draws a sharp contrast
between the pre-modern political tradition, in which the polis or res publica is
seen as existing in some sense by nature, and that beginning with Machiavelli, in
which the state of nature is chaotic and formless, and political form is imposed
by human will.
Two other essays focus on the basic nature of natural law. Robert Sokolowski
analyses what natural law is by showing, how, for example we experience the
difference between individual wishes and some ‘deeper’ sense of obligation, or
between our own code of law and another. Reason can recognise natural law
because natural ends exist distinctly from human purposes; the ‘deletion’ of this
belief marks the beginning of modern thought. The essay ends with the intriguing
suggestion that rights are a secondary issue, which come into play only in (often
very limited) contexts of contention. David Oderberg insists on the need for
natural law to be grounded in metaphysics, more precisely in an understanding
of the universe as ordered and of the natures within it as possessing identifiable
essences. Thus human morality is integrated within a greater whole. He goes on
to criticise Grisez, Finnis and their followers for basing their version of natural
law on subjective criteria.
While nearly all natural law theories give important roles to reason, nature,
law and God, different theorists emphasise these to different degrees. Sokolowski
had argued for the importance of allowing natural reason the space to do its own
work without being preempted by appeal to revealed divine law. Budziszewski
and Oderberg stress the law and God, the former arguing from the experience of
conscience that a lawgiver exists, and the latter from the idea of sufficient reason
that the cosmos must have an external orderer.
A couple of essays link natural law to professional practice. Nelson Lund
surveys the recent rejection of a Texan statute criminalizing sodomy and Mon-
tesquieu’s analysis of the English legal system, en route to arguing that the

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Supreme Court should not be trusted with the task of making common law con-
form to natural law. This task should be left rather to the gradual and discreet
moderation of state legislatures. Luke Gormally elegantly employs a teleological
understanding of human nature to provide a precise definition of the nature of
health and the proper goals of medicine. He steers a course between a value-free
account of health as statistically typical bodily function and a subjectivist account
in terms of preferences. The role of medical professionals is to preserve or restore
the natural human good of bodily health, or to control disabling symptoms; he
deliberately sets aside mental illness with no physical component. This definition,
Gormally shows, has clear practical consequences.
John Rist provides a refreshingly Platonist complement to a volume largely
inspired by the Aristotelian tradition. His historical survey of aesthetic theories
shows how Platonism gave Christians from Origen onwards the resources to
integrate beauty into their understanding of God and of the created order, and
indeed to enrich the account of beauty they inherited by equating it with the
personal, trinitarian, God. Rist takes his story on through Kant to Postmodernism,
arguing that once created beauty is no longer seen as grounded in the beauty of
God, it is only to be expected that art will descend into ugliness or banality.
Where great art is produced, however, impersonal or individualistic theories of
art will not suffice to explain it. Art that is no longer inspired by divine beauty
will no longer itself be a source of genuine inspiration.
A minority of the essays in this substantial volume are rather narrowly specialist
or over-concerned with the author’s position within a subtle academic debate. The
contrast between these and the essay by the then Cardinal Ratzinger is particularly
striking: perhaps religion can purify ‘reason’ also in terms of academic topics and
style!
MARGARET ATKINS OSA

RETHINKING FUNDAMENTAL THEOLOGY by Gerald O’Collins SJ, Oxford

University Press, Oxford, 2011, pp. xiv + 384, £35, hbk

Pascal’s famous wager is much misunderstood. Pascal was too much of a Catholic
to think that faith could ever be a mere act of will, unsustained by grace. The
context of the wager was Catholic France in the seventeenth century where Pascal
invites someone to take the first steps in looking for faith by going through the
motions, visiting churches, using holy water and so forth. This is as far as the
wager goes. Everything after that depends on God’s grace.
Gerald O’Collins has been writing on the subject of Theology for so many
years that it might seem strange to now engage in a ‘Rethinking’ of the subject
but what he is trying to do is to get back to what fundamental theology really
is. The obstacle to doing this, is the tendency to move toward subjects which
are closely related, but are not in his view the true foundations. Whether it is
philosophical theology, the philosophy of religion or dogmatic theology, to give
three of his examples, these are not the essence of foundational theology which
lives within the grace of God.
Like Pascal, O’Collins is trying not to dispense with the historical reality, which
has grown up around us, and the human situation which has grown with this
reality. We live in a building with foundations, we don’t live on the foundations
themselves. So fundamental theology concerns itself not just with the revelation
of God but how that revelation has developed. He goes further than Pascal, in
being aware of the wider world of other religious traditions and asks how the
revelation of Jesus is to be seen in these traditions. As he puts it, ‘the impact on
them of the Risen Christ and his Holy Spirit’.

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That quotation should leave us in no doubt that this is a work which does not
prescind from faith. The likeliness of the truth of the message is not separated
from the meaning of the message. At the beginning, and the end of the book, he
pays tribute to another Jesuit, Bernard Lonergan and his influential work, Method
in Theology. From Lonergan, he takes the importance of conversion for any
theologian. O’Connell compares theologians to teachers of drama, who should
not teach drama unless they are themselves frequent attenders of theatre. This
does not quite work as some drama critics happily attend theatre with a view
to sharing their sneers with the wider populace. It is true though, that negative
criticism is of no value, unless the critic admits the possibility of true greatness
in a dramatic performance. We have to believe, if our disbelief is to have any
value.
A concern for me in the use of Lonergan, is the way that, at least as he is
taught in seminaries, his four buzzwords, ‘Experience, Understanding, Judgement
and Decision’, can suggest a linear approach. We understand our experience,
judge our understanding and decide on that basis. So for decades, seminarians
have come out of their colleges, chanting the acronym, ‘EUJD’, often forgetting
what the letters stand for. (They sometimes don’t know what INRI means either).
Yet as St Thomas says, ’voluntas et intellectus mutuo se includunt, nam in-
tellectus intelligit voluntatem, et voluntas vult intellectum intelligere’ (I q. 16 a.
4 ad 1). ‘Will and understanding include each other, for the understanding un-
derstands the will, and the will wants to understand our understanding’. To put
it simply, knowledge precedes love but then love precedes knowledge. In terms
of Lonergan’s work, we can go from experience to decision but we also have to
decide what we will experience. Pascal’s wager is a call for a decision.
In practice, Rethinking Fundamental Theology in its survey of the ways we
come to revelation bears witness to the interpenetration of our understanding and
our desires. It is written in a specific sequence, but any book has be written in a
sequence, because books are material objects. How we understand a book, after
we have read it, brings us into that interpenetration of thought and love which
comes from our being images of the Trinity.
The book is packed with the extensive learning and wisdom that Fr O’Collins
has acquired in his long career. Much of his work has been on Christology and
in this book, the resurrected Jesus, is seem as the fullness of revelation. It is the
Resurrection which gives credence to that revelation. Christ reveals and we can
find that revelation through a faith in him. In reaching out to the larger world, we
can find the presence of Jesus in other religions, and if we have faith, we should
expect to find him there, a finding which continues throughout history.
EUAN MARLEY OP

GEORGE AMIROUTZES: THE PHILOSOPHER AND HIS TRACTATES by John

Monfasani, Peeters, Leuven-Paris-Walpole MA, 2011, pp. vi + 211, € 45, pbk

The story behind John Monfasani’s recent publications on George Amiroutzes

is worth retelling by way of an introduction in this review: it is of an enviably
dramatic nature. Until very recently, Amiroutzes’s known works were very few,
and the main work, the Dialogus de fide, was known only through a Renaissance
Latin translation. Monfasani’s work has changed all that. Asked to review the
edition of the Dialogus de fide published in 2000 by Oscar de la Cruz Palma,
Monfasani started on a voyage of discovery. First, he was able to rediscover the
fifth part of the Latin translation itself: the edition was based on the translator’s
autograph manuscript, located in Paris, from which a fifth of the text was missing.
Monfasani realised that three Vatican manuscripts contained the full text, and

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published an article recording this and providing an edition of the missing text.
But the story does not end there. Monfasani was next able to make a connection
with a manuscript in Toledo, when he realised that the incipit of a text recorded
in an 1892 catalogue as being the work of Theodore of Gaza corresponded
to the opening of Amiroutzes’s Dialogus de fide. Thus was the original Greek
rediscovered. But still the story continues: this manuscript, Biblioteca Capitular
96–67, itself a rather fascinating compendium of texts, also contained a set of
tractates by ‘The Philosopher’, clearly, by virtue of context and content, indicating
their composition by Amiroutzes himself. It is these tractates, with introduction,
edition and translation, which are made available by Monfasani in the volume at
present under review.
The rarity and interest value of this material are considerable. To set the basic
historical context, Amiroutzes was one of a trio of Byzantine lay scholars who
played a major role at the Council of Ferrara-Florence, the other two being the
far better-known George Gemistus Pletho (sic) and George Scholarius. A native
of the far-flung Byzantine territory of Trebizond, Amiroutzes was involved, as a
high-ranking official, in the surrender of Trebizond to Mehmed II in 1461, and
subsequently enjoyed esteem as a philosopher in the household of the Conqueror.
However, although Amiroutzes was evidently, like Pletho and Scholarius, a figure
of considerable note in his time – albeit one with rather different intellectual bias,
as will be seen – his career, particularly with regard to intellectual contribution,
has hitherto been something of a blank.
The fleshing-out of our knowledge and understanding of Amiroutzes enabled
by Monfasani’s work is thus an extremely valuable addition to what is available
for understanding Late-Byzantine intellectual history. The fifteen tractates pub-
lished by Monfasani are not, it should be emphasised, polished works; not, so to
speak, prepared for publication. Monfasani describes them as ‘a residue of George
Amiroutzes’s teaching as a philosopher’ and suggests that ‘at least some of the
tractates reflect Amiroutzes’s activities as a school teacher’. The tractates are of
unequal length, at times rudimentary, at times disjointed. However, what they
contain should be of interest to a wide range of scholars dealing in intellectual
history.
A particular group to whom they should be of interest is one likely to form
part of the readership of this review: namely, Thomists, or those with an in-
terest in Thomism. It is well known that, following the translations of Aquinas
(and other Latin theologians) into Greek from the middle of the fourteenth cen-
tury, by Demetrius Kydones most notably, but also by later figures following
his lead, Thomist influences spread amongst Greek intellectuals. The extent of
this, and its impact, is an under-studied, but increasingly widely-appreciated,
phenomenon. A major project is currently under way aimed at advancing study
into this phenomenon: I refer to the Thoma de Aquino Byzantinus project (see:
www.rhul.ac.uk/Hellenic-Institute/Research/Thomas.htm). Amiroutzes’s tractates,
as Monfasani emphasises, clearly demonstrate the impact of Thomism in his
thinking and approach. I leave it to others far more expert to evaluate the value
and nature of the Thomist element in Amiroutzes: but it is clearly an important
piece in the jigsaw puzzle that makes up the attempt to trace the course and
nature of ‘Byzantine Thomism’.
Briefly, to conclude, a few words about the general tenor of the tractates,
and the kind of material to be found in them. The level, as already mentioned,
is very varied; at times they are little more than very basic introductory notes,
at other times the sequence of thought is lost; the tractates certainly do not
represent a cohesive whole. However, at the same time certain emphases recur
and are developed within them. A particular interest is the nature of being, a
subject which recurs in more than half of the tractates. Amiroutzes, firmly anti-
Platonic and pro-Aristotelian, insists repeatedly on following the opinion of the

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‘legists’ (nomikoi: apparently religious lawgivers in general, not necessarily of

the Christian tradition) rather that the ‘philosophers’ (philosophoi: specifically,
it would seem, in the Platonic tradition) in viewing existence as the product of
divine will rather than as necessary emanation. Monfasani compares this with
another known writing of Amiroutzes, his ‘supplicatory prayer’, which, while
containing no specifically Trinitarian allusions, enunciates this theme, and others
found in the Tractates, strongly.
In terms of style, there is much in the tractates which chimes with Aris-
totelian/Thomist traditions, and will be familiar to readers of such material. De-
ducing precisely where the elements discussed come from and why they are
managed in the specific way in which they are managed would, however, be a
complex task, which Monfasani has started upon but (self-confessedly) by no
means completed. In terms of originality, it is fair to say that a sense emerges
that Amiroutzes was engaging as an original thinker with his material, although
the nature of the text makes it difficult to build up a comprehensive picture of
his teaching and ideas. In general, the tractates are tantalising rather than fully
satisfying; but that they are now available is a huge benefit to scholarship.
JUDITH RYDER

GEORGES GOYAU (1869–1939) – Un intellectuel Catholique sous la IIIe

République, by Jérôme Grondeux, Collection de l’Ecole française de Rome
381, Rome, 2007, pp. ix + 443, € 53, pbk

On the cover of this book, we read: ‘Histoire de l’Ecole française de Rome’.

However, important as that institution was in the life and labours of Georges
Goyau, it is only one of the contexts or locations of this once prominent French
Catholic writer. He was obviously destined for a brilliant academic career from
his lycée years in Orléans where he studied in the company of Charles Péguy
and from a very promising career at the Ecole Normale Supérieure under Léon
Ollé-Laprune. Although Goyau and Péguy remained in touch, their studies there
did not overlap. Thereafter their paths increasingly diverged – Péguy’s was the
more daring way, skirting abysses, Goyau’s the safe and prudent route. Nothing so
clearly brings out the contrast than their divergence over the Dreyfus case. Péguy
was a passionately partisan Dreyfusard and Goyau discreetly in the opposite camp.
Goyau, as Mauriac put it, ‘pousse vers l’Académie française son solide esquif
pavoisé de blanc et de jaune’. Despite flying the papal colours so prominently
throughout his life, Goyau’s national reputation by 1922 made it inevitable that he
would find a berth in the haven of ‘Les immortels’. Such laurels for Péguy were
out of the question, yet his powerful voice continues to resonate and Goyau’s
words having, in a sense, served their purposes, quietly repose in the archives of
the Institut catholique and the Bibliothèque nationale.
Why did Goyau turn aside from that promising career in the Université? Gron-
deux believes that this talented young man, visiting and subsequently working in
Rome, persona grata in influential Vatican circles, was enthralled by the excite-
ment of ecclesial politics. During the years 1888 to 1894, such manoeuvres came
totally to absorb his interest. Indeed, Grondeux goes so far as to claim: ‘Cum
grano salis, nous pourrions dire qu’il y a en Goyau un comploteur’. Here, in
Rome, at the Ecole française he discovered his métier – to expound ‘catholicisme
intégrale’. He would immerse himself in study of the affairs of the Church, using
his talent as a scholar and writer, as an apologist for the course upon which Leo
XIII and Rampolla, the Secretary of State, had set the Church and particularly
the Church in France. In Paris, a Republican and a devout Catholic, Goyau threw
himself into the campaign of ‘Ralliement’ and, as a disciple of Henri Lorin,

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supported emergent Christian Democracy. These ardent young Catholic activists

were inspired by Leo XIII’s remarkable encyclical, Rerum Novarum. Goyau
seized opportunities afforded by this pontificate to promote rapprochement be-
tween Church and state in the acutely polarised politics of fin de siècle France.
Yet, he and his friends were doomed to frustration. The next pontificate, that of
Pius X, was too neurotically defensive. Vatican blunders played into the hands
of determined anti-clerical Republicans in France and the result was the radical
‘séparation’ of Church and state in 1905.
One need only turn to Grondeux’s excellent bibliography to appreciate the
astonishing volume of Goyau’s writings. They range from his many books to
dozens of articles in Le Revue des Deux Mondes, innumerable articles written for
Le Figaro in the 1920s and 1930s. Grondeux devotes twenty-two pages listing
all these writings. Nor is this an exhaustive catalogue. The four volumes of
his L’Allemagne religieuse, much appreciated by leading French and German
Protestants of the day, were remarkable for their objectivity and fair-mindedness.
He was indeed a journalist and a polemicist, but a scholarly, intellectual one. He
brought to his substantial works a theory of history upon which Grondeux, never
one for concision of style, bestows the unwieldy title of ‘Le providentialisme
historico-critique’. Goyau believed that, by the ‘force d’histoire’ and governed
by divine will, the concept of papal infallibility was carried to its consummation
by the decree of July 1870 when authority was at last indisputably ‘incarnated’
in the Pope. Goyau is a latter-day Lamennais, or perhaps more accurately, a
latter-day Joseph de Maistre. His ardent ultramontanism survived the operations
of the Vatican ‘thought-police’ during the pontificate of Pius X when even he,
the safest pair of hands in Catholic Europe, had a brush with the inquisitors.
Goyau is a man whom one may justly call ‘Roman’ in every fibre of his being.
Even the catastrophically inept Vatican handling of the so-called ‘Modernists’,
which he regretted, did not shake the foundations of his ‘romanitas’ – all would
be ultimately for the best in the divine ordering of history. Even the appalling
first world war fulfilled the will of God by humbling nationalism and compelling
Catholics to look more directly to Rome for authoritative guidance. Whether he
sustained that view with any enthusiasm during the rise of National Socialism in
the 1930s, one wonders. He certainly had no time for Nazi ideology and approved
the papal condemnation of Maurras’s Action Française while preserving amicable
relations with the leader who certainly, at times, felt free to mock Goyau. Like
many Catholics in the 1930s, but not Mauriac or Bernanos, he supported Franco
and failed to protest over the bombing of Guernica.
What then is admirable about Goyau and why commend this detailed survey of
his life as a Catholic apologist? His prudence and caution certainly do not make
for a compelling dramatic narrative like that of the life of Félicité de Lamennais.
Yet, Grondeux’s book conducts us with profound erudition through a fascinating
and agitated period in the life of the Church in France. This chronicle underlines
the prescience of the liberal Catholic Montalembert’s appropriation of Cavour’s
mot when, at Malines in 1863, he daringly appealed for a free church in a free
state. That is what Catholic Republicans like Goyau schemed and campaigned
for, though, at the same time, for the preservation of the Church at the heart of
the nation’s culture. However, the rift was too wide for that to be possible. Even
after Catholics had demonstrated their patriotism during the 1914–1918 war, there
was a recrudescence of anti-clericalism and anti-Catholicism on the part of the
Cartel des Gauches. Goyau and his allies saw off that last, not inconsiderable,
threat. An uneasy truce with laicité ensued and has endured to this day, so that
it appears now to be a settled principle of governance in France.
It is much to Goyau’s credit that he insisted that the Church must not evade the
challenges and questions of the age. He was a courteous opponent and, although
well able to deliver a shrewd polemical blow, never descended to the malicious

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contestation which so often disfigures polemics. He demonstrated that it is en-

tirely possible to unite a spirit of liberality to zealous ultramontane convictions.
Although his ‘high’ papalism was enough to make any papabile candidate de-
cline the office, Goyau’s chronic dependence on papal authority might persuade
the reader of Grondeux’s account to think critically about the risk of placing
undue weight on the glib maxim: ‘Roma locuta est; causa finita est.’ He wrote in
Le Vatican (1895): ‘Une incarnation perpetuelle de l’absolutisme divin, voilà le
seul remède pour que la société ne soit point à la fois la dupe et la victime de ces
droits souverains auxquels prétendent les individus. La papauté dans l’histoire,
fut cette incarnation. . .’ Such an authority, ‘le vicariat de Dieu’ he continues,
would be opposed to all abuse of power.
Not without justification did Yves Guyot call Goyau: ‘Légat laı̈que du Pape
de France’. Insufficiently critical of papal authority Goyau may be, certainly in
his public statements, nevertheless he was a voice for moderation in the French
Church as disputatiously and reluctantly she came to terms with the legacy of the
French Revolution. Goyau deserves to be remembered and Grondeux’s account
will ensure that the reputation of this zealous defender of the faith does not
quietly repose in the national archives.
TONY CROSS

KIERKEGAARD’S CRITIQUE OF CHRISTIAN NATIONALISM by Stephen

Backhouse, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2011, pp 272, £65.00 hbk

What relevance can an academic book on Soren Kierkegaard’s 19th -Century social
theology have for the practical social issues of the 21st Century? The likely answer
is: more than many of us may be prepared to accept.
Backhouse’s thesis can be laid out briefly: Kierkegaard’s ruthless critique of
the Christian nationalism of 19th - Century Denmark is directed not merely at
an extreme version of feeling for country but at the idea of Patriotism itself.
Patriotism, the affinity among those who share a common culture and language,
is, according to Kierkegaard, an impediment to the realization of true Christianity.
Backhouse uses two of Kierkegaard’s contemporaries to set the context for his
supporting argument: H.L. Martensen (1808–1884), the head of the established
Lutheran Church in Denmark, and N.F.S. Grundtvig (1783–1872) an evangelical
pastor, writer and politician. Martensen was a cultural imperialist who believed
European Christendom to be the apotheosis of civilisation and an increasingly
close approximation to the Kingdom of God on earth. Grundtvig was both more
radical and more specific in his cultural claims. For him it is the Danish culture
which is demonstrably superior to all other European varieties, even those of
other Scandinavian nations. In choosing these two protagonists, Backhouse has
laid out the boundaries of the theological and political space which Kierkegaard
chose to invade.
Kierkegaard’s choice of intellectual weapons for penetrating this space includes
both theological and philosophical concepts which permeate each other so that it
is difficult to untangle his thinking from his believing. Kierkegaard’s theological
position is that it is not culture that produces either faith or a Christian society,
but rather a continuously renewed decision to live with, for and as Christ that
breaks through all cultural accidentals. Custom, convention, moral attitudes are for
him things that hide Christ. Nationalism, or even the milder attitude of patriotic
feeling, is unchristian principally because it restricts or distorts our judgments
about who is our neighbour, who it is that we are to confront with our own
submission in self-denying charity. Patriotic sentiment is therefore destructive of

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not only Christian relationships but Christian revelation because it diminishes the
radical social and ethical demand of Christ.
There can be little doubt that Kierkegaard lives up to Backhouse’s thesis.
To show that this great pessimist was marginally more pessimistic than was
previously thought would be little achievement; but there is a hidden relevance.
The parallels between mid-19th -Century Denmark and early 21st -Century world
culture are remarkable. True, the field of discussion has shifted from national
culture to economics; but economics has become the world culture, the culture of
calculation, of the corporation, of competitive markets, and of personal success.
This culture is as vulnerable to the Kierkegaardian polemic as were the established
church of Denmark and the pretensions of Nordic cultural superiority.
Martensen’s avatar today is constituted by the mainstream American (and lat-
terly European) Christian denominations which have committed themselves to in-
volvement in national politics. Since modern politics revolve around economics,
the churches are ineluctably drawn into a position on economic theory, in all
respects parallel to the nationalistic and imperialistic cultural theories prevalent
in 19th - Century Europe. Grundtvig’s equivalent in our society are the more or
less independent, evangelical congregations (often as so called Mega or Media
churches), mainly in North America but spreading in Europe, which proclaim
the Prosperity Gospel. Preachers of prosperity argue that corporate ambition and
greed are not only acceptable but an important part of Christian life. The interac-
tion between this brand of evangelism and the establishment produces a spiritual
situation that is analogous to what Kierkegaard confronted. Today’s economic and
social outsiders perceive themselves as tomorrow’s establishment and promote the
power of that establishment in anticipation of divine promotion. The fact that per-
sonal economic success has replaced personal nationalistic hubris does not alter
the basic paradigm.
In a sense therefore, Backhouse’s focus on nationalism is too narrow to do
justice to either his own thought or that of Kierkegaard. Nationalism is but a
manifestation of the larger Hegelian enemy that Kierkegaard wanted to destroy.
That enemy is theologically justified corporatism, the philosophy that the group
creates and has a superior claim on the individual. Hegel believed that the nation
itself was a kind of corporation of corporations. Whether it is convention that
makes the man (or woman) or his tribal connection, the essential Kierkegaardian
evil is the presumption that ‘belonging’ is prior to ‘being’. Not until the 20th
Century did it become clear that the corporate is a very different category than
the national. Today it is the corporate that threatens the existence of independent
nation states as well as individuals. Our culture is one of pervasive corporate
presence with the persistent threat of corporatism through the corruption of in-
dividuals as well as political processes. It is not just Patriotism that Kierkegaard
condemns, it al all corporate Ambition. Few of us in our pursuit of corporate
success may be prepared to appreciate just how relevant Kierkegaard remains.
MICHAEL BLACK

DEATH AND AFTERLIFE : A THEOLOGICAL INTRODUCTION by Terence

Nichols, Brazos Press, Grand Rapids, Michigan, 2010, pp 220, $22.99 pbk

This is a lucid and readable introduction to the problems of the ‘afterlife’, which
is at its best when presenting the importance of philosophical ideas to a Chris-
tian perspective. On pages 73–5, for instance, there is a short section entitled
‘Descartes and the modern period’ which, for all its brevity, is an excellent sum-
mary of a shift in thinking associated with what Nichols calls ‘modern science’
but which is perhaps better seen as the ‘Enlightenment science’ that began to

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break down in the twentieth century. Nichols sees how crucially important a
shift it was when Descartes started to think of the soul not as ‘the life principle
and principle of organisation of the body and the self’ (p.74) but as effectively
synonymous with the mind, ‘a thinking substance’. Bodies became nothing more
than complex machines; minds became spiritual substances somehow located ‘in-
side’ them and somehow able to drive them forward. Philosophers turned to the
mind/body problem and lost interest in souls (Anthony Flew’s introduction to
Body, Mind and Death is still a stimulating though limited account of the trends
involved and his selection of writings remains useful).
In taking this turn, the philosophers lost something that Aristotle and Aquinas
had seen and that was regained in different form through the writings of philoso-
phers like Heidegger in the twentieth century. Enlightenment science had produced
a self-sufficiency of the material world which still feeds the gut understanding of
so many today who simply don’t see the point of theology when, they believe,
there is clearly a self-sufficient world of objects all around – bodies that are born
and die, planets orbiting in regular rhythm, tables that day in day out stay happily
where they are, and so on. The theologian appears as someone who fusses about
unnecessary extras that can simply be ignored – such as souls. The Thomist posi-
tion, which rightly remains at the very heart of Catholic (in particular) theology,
undermines this presumption. The soul is ‘what makes the body a substance and
an independently existing thing’ (p.67). As the ‘substantial form’ of the body,
it is neither another substance inside it nor a superfluous entity that can be dis-
carded altogether, but something without which it is impossible to make sense of
bodies at all. In other words, it is no good theology thinking that it can vacate
the physical realm and set out its stall in some kind of ethereal spirit-world above
it. Nichols sees this very well, and it guides him through the complexities of
understanding notions such as ‘immortality’ and ‘resurrection’.
There are faults. At times it seems to me that philosophical rigour is sold a
little short. The Anglican Bishop of Durham, Tom Wright, is a great favourite in
this book, but what he says is often confusing. Concerning the ascension we are
told (in a quotation from Wright) that we are dealing with ‘two different kinds
of what we call space, two different kinds of what we call matter and also quite
possibly. . .two different kinds of what we call time.’ This kind of ‘bring on the
multiverses’ language hardly makes itself clear. On page 43 Wright is quoted
calling the resurrected body ‘transphysical’. Transphysical?! ‘It is physical, but
it also transcends the limits of our space-time universe’. But what does this
mean? There is a similar quotation from John Polkinghorne (p.144) where it is
suggested that the risen Jesus may be in an ‘alternate universe’. Nichols is not
talking nonsense. He quite rightly sees that physicists are beginning to develop
theories about what they themselves call radically different kinds of universe, and
Polkinghorne has written interestingly about these developments. But Nichols
does have a tendency to be a little pat in his assessments.
The book begins and ends with ‘Dying Well’, pointing out that though we
might prefer (as a wag once put it), to meet our end by keeling over and ‘waking
up dead’ (perhaps like those unfortunate people who fall asleep at the wheel
of their cars), there is much to be said for the sort of preparation of self and
others which comes from a period of dying. There are excellent observations here,
reminding us that this book is useful from a pastoral as well as philosophical
viewpoint (it also has helpful analysis of biblical material and the background of
ancient Judaism)
Because Nichols has Aquinas to carry him through the analysis of beliefs
about the ‘afterlife’, the occasional lapse into easy solutions is held in check.
But occasionally one wishes the book had more steel. On page 130 Nichols tells
us that ‘Like Aquinas, I think of the soul as the form, that is, the formative or
organising principle of the body. In this view, without the soul the body would

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disintegrate into its component molecules.’ The form is therefore more than a
simple pattern. It is what Nichols calls ‘a holistic cause’, something not just
rearranging elements that could perfectly well exist in some other structure, but
giving them the possibility of being in any sort of structure at all – the possibility
of being independently existing things. ‘However,’ he goes on, ‘there is little
support for this in contemporary science, so I do not insist on it’. Instead he says
that it is enough, like Polkinghorne, to call the soul the ‘total informational pattern
of the individual, which develops throughout life’. But does this ‘middle way’
between simple pattern and holistic cause make sense? And what exactly is the
‘contemporary science’ that has sent Nichols from the arms of Aquinas to those
of Polkinghorne? Nichols’s powers of explanation deserve not to be sidetracked
in this way. On the whole they are too good for that.
MARK CORNER

THE PEN AND THE CROSS : CATHOLICISM AND ENGLISH LITERATURE

1850–2000 by Richard Griffiths, Continuum, London, 2010, pp. 260, £19.99,

The Pen and the Cross describes the ways in which Catholic writers of the last
century and a half produced a distinctively Catholic literature. Richard Griffiths
quotes Rowan Williams’s definition of such literature as writing that ‘could not
be understood by a reader who had no knowledge at all of Catholicism and the
particular obligations it entailed for its adherents’. This is a useful definition
and for most of the book Griffiths is faithful to it. He writes with the authority
of a former professor of French at King’s College London and one who has
diligently read his way through a veritable library of books, many of which must
have afforded very little critical gratification. Professor Griffiths was encouraged
to embark on this study by admirers of his much earlier work on the French
Catholic revival of the 19th and 20th Centuries, The Reactionary Revolution. He
records of that enterprise that it caused some young French students to refer to
him as ‘the man who had read more appalling French novels than anyone known’,
and during the earlier part of this book we are certainly relieved to think that in
undertaking his laborious research, Richard Griffiths has saved us the trouble of
reading some very dull English novels indeed.
The early chapter on Catholicism and British Society in the 19th and early 20th
Century is very valuable. Griffiths compares the English and French situations
and describes the social and legal status of Catholics at this time and the (rather
ludicrous) anti-Catholic literature put out by novelists such as Charles Kingsley
(and Wilkie Collins, although Griffiths does not mention him). He identifies
recurrent themes of nineteenth-century Catholic novels, such as renunciation and
conversion and the importance of the priestly role. I found the section on the
early 20th Century Catholic literary scene particularly interesting and useful;
Griffiths traces the development of the early Catholic novel from its primarily
sentimental and didactic manifestations to the more complicated productions of
the new century. He gives a thorough account of why the novels of the time
were so preoccupied with social class and of the general tendency of European
Catholicism to favour political movements which later became identified with
fascism. Many modern writers of course assume that Catholicism is naturally
synonymous with a taste for despotic political systems, and the subject of Catholic
politics re-emerges later in the book.
Although Griffiths includes poetry in his account of English Catholic literature,
one suspects that he is more comfortable with the novel. His chapter on the
‘Solitary Genius’, Gerard Manley Hopkins, is unexceptionable but he has nothing
new to say about the poetry. Hopkins is also an awkward subject in that he cannot

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be said either to have followed a tradition or to have initiated one. Professor

Griffiths is happier with the poetry of David Jones, his deep admiration for which
inspires him into unusual energy of expression, but in general his critical method
is simply to describe the poets he likes, and although this is often interesting, it
does not strike the reader as a particularly useful analytical exercise. It is at the
end of the chapter ‘The Generation of the Nineties’ that one begins to understand
the difficulty of the task Griffiths has set himself- a difficulty that is actually
unnecessary. The chapter concludes, as all the chapters do, with a summary of
its main argument, and in this summary Griffiths writes of ‘specifically Catholic
imagery’ and how its use often produces banal poetry. Nobody could possibly
deny this, and ‘specifically Catholic’ artistic productions since then have included,
and still include, much that is truly dreadful. But what is this specifically Catholic
imagery? It would seem that Griffiths is referring to poems about liturgy or about
sacraments, but in fact the problem is one not of imagery but of vocabulary, of
grandiose terminology, unoriginal ideas and over-heated emotion. Most of these
writers were scuppered not because they were good Catholics but because they
were bad poets. A proper poet like Hopkins might have been able to write a
decent verse about a thurible, but he would be more likely to write about a
bluebell because he could see the beauty of God in it. This strikes me as a
thoroughly Catholic way of looking at things: if one considers the poetry of
Seamus Heaney or George Mackay Brown one will find no religiosity but only a
deep interest in the reality of which God is the source. One does not go looking
for sacraments in the work of Chaucer.
Professor Griffiths, an Anglican, writes with great sympathy for his Catholic
subjects, in some cases with more sympathy than they deserve, but he gives
the impression that being a Catholic may be much the same thing as wearing a
particular kind of hat, albeit a sincerely cherished one. This is perhaps why his
analyses of novels and poems tend to concentrate on the paraphraseable content
that deals with recognisably Catholic themes, whereas the ‘Catholic-ness’ of them
usually subsists in something more difficult to define. For this reason, Griffiths is
weaker on the novels of the later 20th Century. He writes interestingly on Waugh
and Greene, especially on their overtly Catholic works. However, one might be
more cautious in classifying David Lodge’s writing as specifically Catholic: the
terminology and general attitudes he describes are certainly immediately familiar
to a modern Catholic reader, but Lodge does not on the whole engage with what
one might call the workface of belief, at least not in the way that passages of
Brideshead or The Power and the Glory do. Lodge is brilliant at depicting the
sociological Catholicism particular to the time immediately following Vatican II
and the slight change of mores that went with the Council, but there is nothing
in his work that matches that sense of Catholicism as an absolute, unwelcome,
even distressing, requirement that is so characteristic of Greene and Waugh and
of the kind of Catholicism with which many of us grew up. One oddity should be
mentioned. At the end of his chapter on Graham Greene, who had remarked on
Pope John XXIII’s difference from his predecessor, we find this comment: ‘other
Catholic writers [were] sharing that same sense of a new dawn at that time. How
grievously they were to be disappointed!’. In the middle of Griffiths’s unruffled,
almost dispassionate, account, this strikes the reader as an almost embarrassing
lapse of decorum. Whether or not one agrees with the sentiment, one slightly
resents being thus propelled by force into the arena of non-literary opinion.
It is noticeable here that while Griffiths’s information is entirely trustworthy, his
critical pronouncements are less so. For instance he declares that David Lodge’s
Deaf Sentence is ‘among the best he has written’, a judgement with which few
readers would agree, entertaining though that novel often is. His treatment of
Muriel Spark, as a writer whose early work ‘unobtrusively managed to convey
a series of Catholic messages’ is revealing. Griffiths deplores what he sees as

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a decline in the quality of her novels which have become lurid and garish, he
says, but whether this denotes a lessening of Catholicity or a statement about
the ‘conservative cultural base’ of the traditional Catholic novel, we cannot tell.
After all, it is observably possible to be lurid and garish and still be very Catholic
indeed. With Muriel Spark, as with Alice Thomas Ellis, Catholicism is not so
much a matter of the bizarre way people behave as of their being a part of
a particular story. The remark about conservatism being a kind of natural base
reminds us of Griffiths’s earlier account of the right-wing tendencies of earlier
literary Catholicism and it raises important questions about writing, about politics,
even about the omniscient narrator (invoked in a brief but fascinating aside about
David Lodge’s comment on Spark). These are questions which one would like
to pursue, indeed which ought to be pursued. This book, however, has a more
modest though no less difficult brief to follow, which it does very well. One of
its great virtues is its unassuming and unpretentious style; another is Griffiths’s
frequent and grateful reference to other critics, notably Bernard Bergonzi and
Thomas Woodman, and this has the welcome effect of making the reader want
to explore further into this strangely complicated territory.
CECILIA HATT


C 2012 The Author

New Blackfriars 
C 2012 The Dominican Council