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Creator est Creatura: Luthers Christologie als Lehre von der

Idiomenkommunikation [The Creator is a Creature: Luther’s
Christology as Doctrine of the Communication of Properties],
Oswald Bayer and Benjamin Gleede (eds.), Walter de Gruyter, 2007
(ISBN 978-3-11-019276-6), xiii + 323 pp., hb €88/$123
The six essays contained in this volume collectively offer a picture of

Martin Luther’s Christology that takes issue with its customary presen-
tation as a diachronic series of contingent responses to crises and con-
troversies. Luther’s Christological thought did, to be sure, become more
self-aware and more precise, as he was compelled to respond to the
various challenges. But, as these essays so admirably demonstrate,
underlying Luther’s variegated christological reflection was a funda-
mental and uncompromised insistence on the concreteness of the
exchange of properties between Christ’s two natures. As Luther saw it,
only when taken as concrete – that is, as reciprocally holding nothing
back – can the togetherness of the natures in Christ’s person give
adequate expression to his identity as Savior, who as a person is never,
not even conceptually, to be separated from his work.
Contrary to what the volume’s title might indicate, the essays do not
restrict themselves to an analysis of Luther’s christology. They also
situate the reformer’s particular interpretation of the communicatio idi-
omatum more broadly within the Lutheran tradition. And, moving even
further afield, they seek to uncover this interpretation’s forerunners in
the early church, as well as proposing that Luther’s insights constitute
a viable, though neglected, alternative to the speculative or overpsy-
chologized modern depictions of Christ.
The opening essay, ‘The Word Became Flesh: Luther’s Christology
as Doctrine of the Communication of Properties’ by Oswald Bayer,
introduces the central themes of the entire volume. It situates the
project of recovering Luther’s christological metaphysic against the
backdrop of the early-twentieth-century Luther renaissance, which
severed the reformer’s theology of the cross from the underlying
ontology and then distilled this theologia crucis into an abstract
Reviews in Religion and Theology, 16:4 (2009)

© 2009 Blackwell Publishing Ltd., 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA
02148, USA.
Foreign Language Reviews 619
epistemological principle. Against this one-sided depiction, Bayer pre-

sents Luther as a theologian firmly rooted in Chalcedonian dogma.
What Luther inherited from Chalcedon were two emphases: (1) in
Christ God is not impassible, and (2) in Christ there takes place not
some monophysite fusion but a union of the two natures, a union that
is very much concrete in its hypostatic actuality. Because Luther never
lost sight of the soteriological intent of these two points, his christol-
ogy, according to Bayer, was a genuine breakthrough vis-à-vis the
scholastic tradition, which saw any exchange between the natures as
largely a matter of verbal predication and reciprocal application of
names. Luther’s fundamental insight was that, in light of God’s phil-
anthropic act in Jesus Christ, humanity and divinity could no longer
be treated as essences abstractly predetermined and immovably fixed
in their incompatibility. This led Luther to question Thomas’ philo-
sophical denial of the natures’ reciprocal participation in each other, as
well as Ockham’s axiom that there exists no proportion between the
infinite and the finite. Likewise, Luther rejected any notion of a sup-
posital union, whereby the hypostasis of the Son, as such, remains
unaffected by the assumption of the human nature, which is reduced
to a merely instrumental role. But the implications were even farther
reaching. Christ’s theanthropic actuality called for a linguistic revolu-
tion. There could now be no uniform concept of (logical) truth that
would apply both to theology and philosophy. In short, Luther did
not allow semantic logic to function as a strait jacket for capturing the
event of God’s becoming flesh; it was rather the actuality of Christ as
God and man that determined the content of these latter concepts,
their interrelation, as well as the meaning of salvation. As Luther
made the communicatio into the center of salvation-focused christologi-
cal dogma, the actuality of the exchange became the impetus for the
happy exchange between Christ and the sinner.
Benjamin Gleede’s essay, ‘Mixed, Exchanged and Reciprocally Attrib-
uted: On the Changing History of Christ’s Properties in the Ancient
Church’, seeks to accomplish three major purposes. First, it offers a
survey of the christological controversies of the late fourth and early
fifth centuries with a view to discovering when the distinction between
concrete terms (man, God) and abstract terms (humanity, divinity)
arose and what role it played in those controversies. This meticulous
pursuit actually takes Gleede as far back as Tertullian and Origen.
Second, Gleede traces the post-Chalcedonian conceptual development
of what had by then finally become known as the ‘communication of
properties’. The final problem that the essay takes up is the question of
the extent to which Luther’s reduction of the early church’s christologi-
cal commitments to the distinction between concrete and abstract
terms (which underlies the communication of properties) gives faithful
expression to those commitments.
© 2009 Blackwell Publishing Ltd.
620 Foreign Language Reviews
The following essay, ‘Christ Is Made Sin for Us Metaphorically’, by

Anna Vind, owes its title to Luther’s 1521 polemical treatise against the
Louvain theologian Latomus. Vind offers a discussion of Luther’s use of
rhetorical figures. She then tries to situate the reformer’s approach in a
broader perspective by comparing and contrasting it with Quintilian’s
theory of rhetoric and metaphorical language. For Luther, Vind argues,
metaphorical language, with its capacity to assign new meanings, offers
a way of escaping the confines of semantic logic and achieving greater
clarity of expression. Luther’s break with the ancient rhetorical prin-
ciples comes when he rejects that similarity is the basis of metaphor and
when he claims that metaphor involves not merely verbal transfer but
an actual translatio rerum. This makes metaphorical speech closer to
reality than nonmetaphorical speech, crippled as the latter is by its
internal logic. It also makes metaphorical language the prerogative of
God, who through his Word speaks (new and unexpected) reality into
being: God became a human being, and, more than that, sin for us.
Theological language is metaphorical language par excellence.
In his brief essay Gottfried Seebaß offers a useful discussion of the
development of Luther’s christological thought culminating in the Dis-
putation on the Divinity and Humanity of Christ (1540/43). He emphasizes
the role that the communication of properties between Christ’s natures
plays in Luther’s early dismissal of eucharistic transubstantiation.
Seebaß then shows how the same concern about the preservation of the
natures’ concrete communication animates Luther’s polemic against
Karlstadt and Zwingli, eventually leading the reformer to a vehement
dismissal of the christologies of Melchior Hoffman and Caspar von
Schwenckfeld. Even though Luther’s christology, on account of its
emphasis on the actuality of the communicatio, is frequently charged
with monophysitism, Seebaß shows that it was rather Hoffman and
Schwenckfeld who were the true monophysites. Hoffman believed that
Christ’s body actually had its origin in heaven and not from Mary;
Schwenckweld taught the eventual absorption of Christ’s body into his
divinity. By affirming the communication, Luther meant to underscore
that the natures remain two natures, much as they may be influenced by
each other in the actuality of the person.
In the only English-language essay of the volume, which offers a
close reading of Luther’s Disputatio de divinitate and humanitate Christi,
Paul R. Hinlicky tackles the problem of Luther’s alleged Docetism. (The
translated theses of the disputation, which was mysteriously left out of
the American edition of Luther’s Works, are appended.) As Hinlicky
puts it, ‘One gets the impression that by Docetism interpreters question
whether christology offers a plausible or realistic construction of the
human consciousness of Jesus, a view going back through Schleierma-
cher to the Antiochene school of the ancient church. But this will be
something quite distinct, both historically and theologically, from the
denial “that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh” (1 John 4:2) which the
Apostolic Father Ignatius of Antioch first identified as the deviant
teaching of “docetism” ’ (pp. 142–3). In the course of his analysis, Hin-
licky, too, emphasizes the ontological character of the communicatio and
the phenomenon of a ‘new language’ that arises in consequence of the
Incarnation. Of particular interest is Hinlicky’s analytical identification
of two circles, hermeneutical and theological, operative in the disputa-
tion. These circles, he argues, reveal Luther’s privileging of the commu-
nicatio to be not an arbitrary step but rather a decision fully consonant
with the catholic faith (to which Luther explicitly appeals) and the
salvific nature of the Christ event.
The final essay by Jörg Baur takes up over one-third of the entire
volume. It presents both a historical overview and a careful theological
analysis of one of the most difficult implications of Luther’s axiom,
‘where you can say: Here is God, there you must also say: Christ the
man is here also’, – namely, the ‘ubiquity’ of Christ’s body. Baur’s
staggeringly rich discussion ranges from the Nominalist tools that
allowed Luther to conceptualize Christ’s body as participating in the
divine omnipresence to the problems that Luther’s seventeenth-
century successors were still facing when trying to account for the
difference between Christ’s states of humiliation and exaltation. In this
essay Baur clearly sides with Luther and the gnesio-Lutheran party. He
criticizes Philip Melanchthon (as well as Martin Chemnitz) for compro-
mising Luther’s christological contribution by reintroducing a supposi-
tal understanding of the personal union, reducing the exchange of
properties to verbal predication, and treating both divinity and human-
ity as ontologically fixed categories, thereby losing sight of the salvific
impetus of Luther’s theology. This is not to say that Baur is not also
critical of Johannes Brenz and others who strove to carry on Luther’s
mantle. According to Baur, Brenz fails precisely at a point when, in an
effort to conceptualize the omnipresence of Christ’s majestic body, he
denies that heaven is, in any sense, a place and, in doing so, denies to
this body any capacity for locality. Both the faithful successors of Luther
and those who strove to correct some of his most ‘offensive’ theological
doctrines, Baur concludes, compromised his salvific emphasis in the
name of the philosophical coherence of their systems.
If there is any criticism to be made of the entire volume, it is twofold.
The analysis would be even richer if the essayists had been able to
engage each other. A foretaste of that is offered by Hinlicky’s Trinitarian
polemic with Baur’s critique of Chemnitz. Also intriguing is Bayer’s
claim that Luther’s salvific-christological conceptualization of the
togetherness of the infinite and the finite constitutes an attractive alter-
native to the mere scholastic compounding of incommunicative
elements or to a philosophical synthesis, whether speculative
(Hegel) or existential-psychological (Schleiermacher). A more explicit
systematic-theological exploration of the importance (for our day) of

retrieving Luther’s christological insights would have been welcome.
But these criticisms by no means detract from the analytical and his-
torical contribution that this volume makes. All in all, Creator est Crea-
tura presents a splendidly coordinated collection of essays that deal
with the much neglected ontological foundation of Luther’s christol-
ogy. Together, the essays richly illuminate the reformer’s privileging of
the communicatio idiomatum by exploring its metaphysical, soteriologi-
cal, and linguistic implications, as well as by discussing its forerunners
and its reception.
Piotr J. Malysz
Harvard Divinity School
夹夹夹
Henri de Lubac, tome I: De la naissance à la démobilisation

(1896–1919) [Henri de Lubac, Volume 1: From Birth to
Demobilization, 1896–1919], Georges Chantraine, Cerf, 2007 (ISBN
978-2-204-08073-6), 746 pp., pb €63
Georges Chantraine’s biography of Henri de Lubac should transform

understanding of the man and his ideas. It will be an essential acqui-
sition for any research library in modern theology, going far beyond
anything else available in depth, background and sources. Until now,
readers in English have had access to the autobiographical compilation
At the Service of the Church, produced by de Lubac two years before his
death in 1991. In France, this was accompanied by his Mémoire sur mes
vingt premières années [Memoir of my First Twenty Years] available in
volume 33 of his Œuvres complètes. Now, by drawing very extensively
on family archives and de Lubac’s personal archive, for which the
author has had special responsibility, he places a vast quantity of pre-
viously unseen material in the public domain.
The significance of early twentieth-century French culture and poli-
tics for the theology which they occasioned is little understood. For
instance, rhetoric about the church needing to oppose a deviant secular
polity made sense when the religious orders were being expelled from
France and their assets nationalized, but is today employed too freely.
By resituating de Lubac and his confrères in their real context,
Chantraine’s work challenges some present-day interpreters to
embrace a more historically attuned political theology than is often
forthcoming. Here, we learn in detail about his upbringing in a pious
Catholic family that prayed together and was, as a result of royalist
sympathies, able to espouse democratic republicanism rather than

veering toward the modern and reactive variety of conservatism asso-
ciated with Charles Maurras and L’Action Française. De Lubac
attended mass and confession frequently, and was a high achiever. He
read Dostoevsky aged ten, and barely later Claudel and Péguy, com-
posed poetry and was continually searching for new books to devour.
Another formative influence, also identifiable in much later work, was
the 1912 collection Christus, edited by Joseph Huby and with Pierre
Rousselot as a major contributor, which addressed apologetically the
relation of Christianity to other world religions.
This volume will hold considerable interest for modern historians,
including church historians, presenting background history and bio-
graphical details of important but obscure figures via numerous
excurses. During his year studying law in Lyons (1912–1913), for
example, de Lubac developed links with the youth movement the Asso-
ciation Catholique de la Jeunesse Française. Of particular importance
was the Société Brunetière that he founded with several friends during
this period, serving as its secretary. The group combined intellectual
and theological study with cultural critique and charitable work, and
its journal was the first destination for de Lubac’s published work –
with articles on Republicanism, laicism, and the family as the founda-
tion of social solidarity.
Large portions of the book describe de Lubac’s residency at Saint
Stanislas College, the Jesuit noviciate in exile at Hollington Park in Saint
Leonards near Hastings on the south coast of England, and his service
in the First World War that commenced at Verdun. The military austeri-
ties of life spent as a Jesuit novice from October 1913 to April 1915
proved ideal preparation for the rigours of trench warfare. Rising at five
in the morning for meditation and mass, novices were subject to a rigid
timetable and regulations of personal conduct that included one bath a
month, detailed procedures for sea bathing, fortnightly confession, the
optional wearing of penitential chains and bedtime at nine, the whole
being set in a context of discipline, obedience, punctuality, and the
obsessional antimodernism of the dying years of Pope Pius X. On
holidays, a lie-in was permitted lasting precisely ten minutes. There was
even a rule in force prohibiting members of the community from touch-
ing each other.
In the French army from April 1915 to September 1919, de Lubac rose
to the officer rank of sublieutenant. Like most of his fellow soldiers, he
made light of many of the hardships and dangers in letters to his
parents, conscious of their natural anxiety and of military censorship,
even after sustaining a shell injury to his left arm in August 1916 and
traversing later that year the boundless mud of the Somme. Yet, in
France, far more than in Britain or the United States, the First World War
was experienced as a total war, with ten percent of the male population
slaughtered. De Lubac’s most serious engagements came in autumn

1917. He participated in a bombardment of the German line in which
several enemy combatants were killed, but on 1 November was caught
in a surprise German attack in which he suffered a light head injury,
more serious wounding of his right hand and arm, and an ear injury
that was not fully cured until an operation in 1953. In general, a com-
parison of de Lubac’s wartime writings with similar texts by other
soldiers reveals that, despite the adversities endured, he typically
regarded the events that war unleashed from the perspective of a spec-
tator, perhaps inspired by the Jesuit discipline of spiritual detachment.
The general reader might find the sheer quantity of material in this
volume overwhelming, sometimes being left to distil for themselves the
significance of long stretches of descriptive and factual matter. In this
respect, the book is not unlike some of de Lubac’s own. Yet, it includes
a mercifully comprehensive index that will help direct readers to rel-
evant material, as well as a useful timeline. Three further volumes in
this mammoth project are planned. The second will cover de Lubac’s
period of formation from 1919 to 1929, about which very little is known.
The third will extend from 1929, when he began teaching at the Catholic
Theological Faculty in Lyons, to 1960, when he was named a theological
adviser to the Second Vatican Council (1962–1965). The fourth will
continue from 1960 until his death in 1991. Of particular interest in
these volumes is likely to be his time at the Jesuit theologates at Ore
Place, Hastings (1924–1926) and Fourvière, Lyons (1926–1928), the
period surrounding the proclamation of the encyclical Humani generis
(1950), conciliar work in the 1960s, and later reflections.
David Grumett
University of Exeter
夹夹夹
Archéologie du sujet: I. Naissance du sujet [Archeology of the

Subject: I. The Birth of the Subject], Alain de Libera, Vrin, 2007 (ISBN
978-2-7116-1903-0), 352 pp., pb €42
According to a popular narrative in the history of ideas, expressed

forcefully by Heidegger, Descartes invented the notion of a psychologi-
cal subject: a thing to which particular kinds of property, namely, mental
ones, states of consciousness, are ascribed. Behind Heidegger is
Nietzsche’s worry that there is no philosophical principle that secures
the fact that activities such as thinking require subjects that act. Alain de
Libera – one of the best writers, and certainly the most prolific, on the
history of medieval philosophy – believes that Heidegger’s account of

the genesis of the psychological subject is historically mistaken, badly
so, and he proposes to write four volumes, of which the book under
review is the first, to show this. The general argument is that the notion
of a psychological subject arose in the late Middle Ages as the result of
an attempt to read Augustinian psychology in terms of Aristotle’s meta-
physics: specifically, Aristotle’s notion of a subject of predication and
attributes. If we count among attributes psychological ones, something
that Aristotle does not do, but that someone immersed in Augustine’s
analysis of human thinking and willing might be inclined to do, then
we end up with the notion of a psychological subject.
The overall scheme for the four volumes is as follows (p. 123):
volume 1 introduces two competing accounts of the soul (Augustine
and Aristotle), and shows how the high medieval attempt to read
Augustine along Aristotelian lines resulted in the notion of a psycho-
logical subject. Volume 2 continues this narrative into the second
scholasticism of early modernity. Volume 3 will show that Descartes
lacked the notion of a psychological substance that is so often
ascribed to him, and that the real successor of the scholastics on this
question, and the person who did more than anyone else to develop
the scholastic insights, was Leibniz. And volume 4 will show how the
notion of a psychological subject made its way, via Locke and others,
into analytic philosophy.
Volume 1, then, represents the key to the sequence. De Libera first
introduces Heidegger’s distinction between subjectivity – being a psy-
chological center or ego – and ‘subjecticity’ – being a logical or onto-
logical subject of predicates or properties, and outlines how the two
questions relate to each other (Chapter 1). Along the way de Libera
discusses a considerable amount of Trinitarian material: specifically,
some of the Unitarian/Tritheism debates of seventeenth-century
England – providing among other things a quick reminder that much
of the most interesting theological work at that time, in both England
and Europe, was done by people we now think of primarily as phi-
losophers (Locke, Leibniz, and so on). According to the Heideggerian
account that de Libera wants to reject, Descartes was responsible for
introducing an understanding of subjectivity in terms of subjecticity,
and thus for the fallacy identified by Nietzsche. Chapter 2 lays out a
philosophical framework for understanding the nature of both sub-
jectivity and subjecticity. First, de Libera notes, it is possible to think
of the soul/mind either as a substance (‘substantialisme’) or as an
attribute of something else (‘attributivisme’) – for example, of a body.
Intersecting with this division is a further one, between thinking
of mental states as attributes of an ego (‘attributivisme*’), and not
thinking of them in this way. It might be thought that substantialism
would entail attributivism*, and attributivism entail the negation of
attributivism*. But as de Libera points out, Aristotle, at least as inter-

preted by Aquinas, held that the mind is a property of a composite
whole (the human being), and that mental states and dispositions
are not attributes of a mind but of a material composite (and this
amounts to the conjunction of attributivism with the negation of attribu-
tivism*); and Augustine held that the soul is a substance (substantial-
ism), but that its states, capacities and dispositions are not inherent
properties of its (the negation of attributivism*). Rather, Augustine, at
least by the time he came to write De Trinitate, accepts what de Libera
labels a ‘perichoretic’ account of the soul/mind, according to which the
various mental ‘faculties’ (memory, understanding, and will) are three
interpenetrating substances, along the model of the three divine
persons. These observations are important, because in Chapter 3 de
Libera traces the invention of attributivism*, by considering the shift
between the early Augustine of De immortalitate animae and the later
Augustine. De Libera expertly contrasts attributivism* both with theo-
logical material (various Trinitarian formulae) and with philosophical
material – particularly Plotinus. In the fourth and final chapter, de
Libera shows how the recovery of Aristotle’s Physics and Metaphysics in
the thirteenth-century Latin West led to a reinterpretation of the psy-
chological phenomena that were analyzed perichoretically in Augustine
in terms of Aristotle’s strong distinction between a (logical or ontologi-
cal) subject – a hypokeimenon – and its predicates or properties. It was, in
effect, with the more Aristotelian-inclined of the Scholastic theologians
– and most notably Aquinas – that the move to identify the ego with such
a subject was first made. And this amounts to an identification, in
psychological cases, of subjectivity and subjecticity: the move that,
according to Heidegger, is to be ascribed to Descartes, and that accord-
ing to many commentators is one of the most distinctive features
of modernity. Remarkably, as de Libera shows, Leibniz’s famous axiom
about agency – actiones sunt suppositorum – actions belong to subjects –
is the result of a (mis)reading of Aristotle that arose in theological
contexts (Trinity and Incarnation) in Aquinas. The historian Jacques
le Goff sometimes talks of the ‘long Middle Ages’; perhaps, in the light
of de Libera’s investigations, we could as well speak of ‘long Early
Modernity’.
It goes without saying that this enterprise is of signal importance,
not only because of its historical significance, but also because much
of what is called ‘modernity’ presupposes something like Heidegger’s
periodization, and hence much of what is called ‘postmodernity’ does
too, to the extent that postmodernity is explicitly positioned as a con-
trast to modernity. The book is a hard read, not least because de
Libera’s style, and particularly the way in which he structures his
arguments, can tend toward the diffuse and repetitive. To assemble
all the relevant information on any given topic can be hard work, and
require locating passages from more than one part of the book. One
hestitates to wish that a book of this complexity could be even longer,
but I think that it would have been useful if de Libera had considered
more generally the large variety of theories of substances and prop-
erties in the Middle Ages – not just in the context of the soul/mind,
but in terms of more general metaphysics. For example, de Libera
spends considerable time considering Bonaventure’s (modest) modi-
fication of Augustine’s perichoretic model of the soul, but without
going into much detail on what Bonaventure has to say about sub-
stances and properties in other contexts. Thus, de Libera says a great
deal about Bonaventure’s account of the relations of the three divine
persons, but he does not consider what Bonaventure has to say on
divine simplicity relative to the divine attributes. And – likewise – it
is not wholly clear to me that Augustine’s talk about the mind as three
substances should be understood perichoretically in just the way that
de Libera proposes: the claim might just be one about the simplicity
of the soul, lacking constituents or (real) properties at all. De Libera
spends some time considering different senses of ‘subject’ (of
properties/predicates), but does not really integrate these different
senses into his constructive account of subjectivity.
Overall, a challenging but important work; required reading for
anyone interested in medieval philosophy, and – more widely – for
anyone interested in discovering the real origins of the modern subject.
For better or worse, the oversimplifications of Heidegger’s analysis
(accepted uncritically in certain contemporary theological circles) must
certainly be considered decisively refuted.
Richard Cross
University of Notre Dame
夹夹夹
Jean Duns Scot. La théorie du savoir [John Duns Scotus: Theory

of Knowledge], Dominique Demange, J. Vrin, 2007 (ISBN 978-2-
7116-1914-6), 480 pp., pb €55
Demange’s aim in this rich book is to examine Scotus’s theory of knowl-

edge, with a view to locating within this theory Scotus’s account of
scientia – that is, of an intellectual discipline in its general internal
structure and relation to other such disciplines. Central to the argument
is the notion of an object of thought, and Demange begins by considering
two issues in relation to such a notion: first, what the contents of such
objects might be, and second what their ontological status might be.
In his first chapter, Demange takes up the first of these issues. The
fundamental object of thought is (the univocal concept of) being as
such: if it were not, then no cognition of God or substances would be
possible at all (since we can only know of such items inferentially, and
inferences to their existence require that being is a univocal concept).
Our knowledge, in Scotus’s Aristotelian world, is organized into a
series of interrelated sciences, such that each science begins from pre-
mises that are somehow self-evident. For Scotus, these premises can
include propositions that are not necessary or analytic. In such pre-
mises, the properties signified by their predicate terms are caused by
the substances signified by their subject terms ut in pluribus – for the
most part, but not inevitably if circumstances are not appropriate
(Chapter 2). This allows for genuine experiential knowledge within the
structure of an Aristotelian science, even if such a science is supposed
only to include universally true propositions, since we can know with
certainty that events that follow for the most part from prior circum-
stances, where those circumstances do not include free agency, are the
natural effects of those circumstances (Chapter 3).
As Demange shows in Chapter 4, our knowledge is developed by
conceptual analysis, allowing us to move from clear knowledge of the
most general concept (being), through less clear knowledge of less
general concepts, to clear knowledge of the specific natures of things.
Having shown the range of objects knowable by us, Demange goes
on to consider the metaphysical status of such objects. According to
Demange, Scotus distinguishes between extramental objects – in effect,
the remote objects of cognition – and the mental objects or representa-
tions that are the immediate objects of cognition (Chapter 5). Demange
argues that this notion of a mental object is one of Scotus’s most impor-
tant innovations. Among other things, as Demange claims in Chapter 6,
it allows there to be a divide between the structure of our thought and
the structure of reality: for our beliefs and such-like to be true, there is
no need for the propositional structure of our thoughts to correspond
on some kind of one-to-one basis with the metaphysical structure of
reality. For example, the univocity of being is a doctrine about a
concept, not about any extramental reality – there is not, and need not
be, a real attribute, being, univocally shared by different kinds of thing
– even though the univocity of the concept is required for much of our
reasoning processes. The science of metaphysics studies real objects
and their properties, not merely concepts, and the being studied by the
metaphysician is indeed analogous, not univocal, even though the
metaphysician requires that there is a univocal concept of being in
order to undertake the study of real beings.
In Chapter 7 Demange discusses the general interrelations of differ-
ent sciences, and brings his book to a conclusion with two chapters
on the relationship between metaphysics and revealed theology: the
science of theology presupposes the metaphysical proof for God’s exist-

ence, since sciences study real objects (Chapter 8), and this metaphysi-
cal proof, since it starts from the notion of real rather than merely logical
possibility, shows that there are two independent notions of being in
Scotus: one the general univocal one, based on reality, that is the start-
ing point for metaphysics; and one the domain of the intelligible or
logically possible, the first object of the intellect, the basis for the pos-
sibility of any cognition of God or created substances (Chapter 9). In
other words, the questions of the subject of metaphysics and of the first
object of the intellect are to be carefully distinguished from each other,
despite the fact that being seems to be the answer to both questions.
As this summary perhaps makes clear, this book is a dense read, and
is probably not the best starting place for someone interested in Scotus
on these various questions. But the book makes some important points,
particularly about the notion of science in Scotus, and how Scotus
manages to reconcile conflicting trajectories in Aristotle (e.g. the
requirement that science be necessary with the requirement that it be
empirically based). Demange also offers important accounts of both the
process of conceptual analysis and the theory of the proposition that
underwrites that process (though I think he is too ready, on the basis of
too little evidence, to assign to Scotus some theory of mental language).
But the centerpiece of the work is the account of the notion of an object
of thought. Now, it is a commonplace in Scotist studies that the notion
of such an object, with its own mental, intentional, existence, is one of
Scotus’s most significant innovations. It seems to me, however, at least
arguable that the only objects of thought Scotus posits are real, extra-
mental items: particular substances and accidents in the world, and
(more importantly) the common natures shared by substances of a
given kind, and shared by accidents of a given type. For when dealing
with the question of those thoughts that lack real objects, Scotus
appeals not to mental objects to which no external item corresponds,
but rather to an account according to which the contents of such
thoughts are fixed counterfactually: the contents are fixed by the object
that the act of thought would have had had there been such an object.
This means, further, that Scotus is not a representationalist on questions
of epistemic realism: our knowledge of the world is not mediated
by internally accessible mental objects of thought. When Scotus talks
about representations, he means to refer merely to causal mechanisms
involved in conveying information content from things in the world to
our minds – and the language of representation is misleading if it is
understood to refer to anything more than that.
Scotus could still have a notion of mental language on this account:
but its semantic components – concepts – would be not internally
accessible objects of thought, but the occurrent acts of thought them-
selves. (Though as I said above, it is not clear to me whether or not
Scotus has such a notion at all.) Equally, Scotus can still posit that there
need be no simple correspondence between the syntactic structure of
our propositions and/or thoughts, on the one hand, and the metaphysi-
cal structure of the world on the other, since he can identify the com-
ponents of our propositions and/or thoughts as mental acts, not mental
objects. So this element of Demange’s thesis – clearly correct – is not
affected by the denial that Scotus posits internal objects of thought.
Overall, then, a difficult and sophisticated contribution to a series of
debates that will perhaps be of more interest to the specialist than the
neophyte.
Richard Cross
University of Notre Dame
夹夹夹
Fruchtbarkeit und Geburt in den Psalmen [Fertility and Birth in

the Psalms], Marianne Grohmann, Mohr Siebeck, 2007 (ISBN
978-3-16-149326-3), xi + 370 pp., hb €89
Several books have appeared in the last two decades or so which have
focused on one aspect of the theology of the Psalms, for example, on
God as Warrior, Creator, Judge, or Parent. Most of these works have a
distinctly masculine focus. Marianne Grohmann, the first Protestant
woman to publish an Old Testament Habilitation from the University of
Vienna, has given this genre a refreshingly female slant in the attention
she gives to God as Creator of humans (the emphasis on the more
cosmic theology of God as Creator of the universe is not her primary
concern here). Her work is not only theological in emphasis; it is
anthropological as well. Again, there have been many studies on the
psalms which have such an emphasis – for example, the experiences
of the absence and of the judgment of God in the individual lament
psalms, or the experiences of a suppliant’s restoration to life in the
thanksgiving psalms – but Grohmann again offers new insights
because she combines a theocentric approach with an anthropocentric
one. This is undoubtedly a scholarly work, with a lengthy and eclectic
bibliography (mainly, but not exclusively, of German publications) and
three useful indices (unusual for German works, and much to be
applauded).
It is in its eclecticism that one finds both the strength and weakness
of this work. It is broad and imaginative in scope, but because it does
not focus on any one psalmic form its attention to important contex-
tual literary and historical issues within psalmody is necessarily
limited. Small units are selected from individual psalms; the psalm as
a whole is of less importance, and its setting in the Psalter is rarely
commented on. Admittedly, in her first chapter Grohmann compen-
sates for what might be seen as a rather subjective process: she
explains that her analysis of each relevant psalm (or, more accurately,
of verses from each relevant psalm) will try to follow the same
process of reading in each case. She outlines her key approaches
as syntactical, semantic, intertextual, metaphorical, and reception-
historical (the last of which includes an interesting focus on Jewish
reception of these psalms in the Middle Ages). Yet, despite the
attempt to be consistent in method, in practice most of the psalms
lend themselves more to one type of analysis than to another. Hence,
because the selection of psalms is somewhat diffuse, Grohmann’s
reading of them is uneven, so that by the end of the book several
final points (to this reviewer, at least) appeared to be somewhat
unconnected.
The two most significant psalms discussed are 139 (especially vv.
13–16, on God’s intimate knowledge of human life from before birth)
and 22 (especially vv. 10–11, which describes God as a midwife).
Grohmann’s readings here are the most detailed in the book as a
whole, and, forming the greater part of the second chapter, are the
most engaging. Pss. 2.7, 90.2, 110.3, 22.31–2, 72.6, and 87.4–6 are con-
sidered here as well. The purpose of this chapter is to gather together
the more positive reflections on birth and fertility, a theme which she
perceives is a continuous thread running throughout the Psalter as a
whole.
The third chapter looks at the way this theme is dealt with more
variously and ambiguously elsewhere. Pss. 21.11, 37.25–8, 72.16, 105.24,
107.33–8, 127.3–5, and 128.3 are all examined from the point of view of
children being both a blessing for good and a potential for destruction
and evil. Ps. 7.15, which Grohmann argues uses the metaphor of fecun-
dity more negatively, is another example of ambiguity. So too are Pss.
29.8–9 and 46.6–7, which Grohmann advocates have echoes of the more
threatening fertility imagery used in the prophets, and Pss. 35.12, 58.4,9,
144.14, and 22.30–2, which in her view speak of still births and miscar-
riages. Ps. 113.9, with its imagery of infertility, is the final psalm to be
included in this section.
This list reveals just how miscellaneous and wide-ranging her choice
of psalms is. Inevitably, some observations are more convincing than
others. One difficult issue which failed to persuade this reviewer was
that of infertility as a tragedy and curse; in some psalms, as well as in
the case of characters such as Sarah, Rebecca, Rachel, and Hannah, this
curse is turned to blessing; but when for contemporary readers the
outcome may not be as positive as for these biblical heroines, infertility
becomes a highly sensitive issue, particularly if, as Grohmann claims,
ultimately it is in the hands of God. This having been said, we are given
a constant reminder that through the psalms God is involved in all of
human life; despite some of the theological difficulties that this view
creates, such an emphasis is timely.
Another difficulty is the attempt to reread the psalms from a
female point of view. Little of substance has been written on this,
and Grohmann is to be commended for compensating for this lack.
However, although she pleads that birthing imagery within the
psalms often suggests more the influence of women than men, the
Psalter is primarily the product of a patriarchal culture, and much of
its theology and anthropology is profoundly – and, perhaps, in its
early setting, irredeemably – masculine. One might then argue that it
is this very problem which accounts for some of the strange ambigu-
ities about birth and fertility scattered throughout the psalms, because
they are mainly, if not entirely, reflections from male suppliants.
The book’s appendix includes a discussion on the relevance of these
insights to contemporary discussions about human life (e.g. bio-
ethics). Grohmann concludes her work with some intriguing observa-
tions on the way in which the multivalent picture of birthing and
fertility within the psalms – and, indeed, within the Bible as a whole
– should prevent us having too monochrome and idealized view of,
for example, the Incarnation. Certainly, this is a book which engages
with many issues which arise from an innovative reading of these
ancient texts.
Susan Gillingham
Worcester College, Oxford
夹夹夹
Karl Barth als Theologe der Neuzeit. Studien zur kritischen Deutung
seiner Theologie [Karl Barth as a Theologian of Modernity: Studies
in the Critical Interpretation of His Theology], Stefan Holtmann,
Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2007 (ISBN 978-3-525-56346-5), 444 pp., hb
€79.90
One of the dominant trends in contemporary English-language Barth

studies is to view Barth’s thought as a project that overcame the prob-
lems of modernity by returning to the roots of classical dogma; thus
Barth becomes the champion of a renewed (because more deeply tra-
ditional) evangelical orthodoxy, while the problems and questions of
the nineteenth century are passed over as obsolete. Coupled with this is
the tendency to read Barth’s dogmatics as a kind of tour de force, a
magisterial work whose authority is fundamentally beyond question,

and whose thought can be apprehended without any reference to the
historical context within which it was conceived. Even where Barth is
criticized, Anglo-American Barth scholars will typically identify some
‘gap’, some relatively benign deficiency (usually creation or pneuma-
tology) which requires supplementation.
Things are very different in Germany. Under the influence of Trutz
Rendtorff and the so-called ‘Munich school’, several major German
theologians have long pursued a stinging critique of Barth’s entire
project. Here, his work is understood not as a triumph over moder-
nity, but as one particular – and deeply problematic – product of the
Enlightenment. In this impressive, meticulously researched study,
Stefan Holtmann explores the history of this critical reception of
Barth’s thought in Germany. He focuses primarily on Rendtorff
(nearly a third of the book is devoted to him), before offering
extended analyses of Falk Wagner and Friedrich Wilhelm Graf, fol-
lowed by a shorter analysis of the role of Dietrich Korsch and Georg
Pfleiderer in contemporary Barth reception.
Trutz Rendtorff’s work has been one of the most important influ-
ences on the reception of Barth in Germany since the 1960s. Rendtorff
does not regard Barth’s theology as a fundamental break with the
nineteenth century; rather, he argues that Barth represents one particu-
lar constructive development of the nineteenth-century themes of
subjectivity and self-consciousness. Barth takes these Enlightenment
concepts and places them right at the center of his dogmatic edifice: the
notion of autonomous human subjectivity now becomes a doctrine of
the ‘radical autonomy of God’. Barth thus represents a kind of ‘liberal
theology’ writ large.
Rendtorff is not entirely unsympathetic to Barth in this regard; his
criticism of Barth focuses above all on the nature of the church. As
Holtmann demonstrates, the seeds of this critical stance toward Barth
can be seen already in Rendtorff’s 1958 dissertation on ‘The Social
Structure of the Community’, an attempt to subvert the dominance of
the Barthian ‘theology of the Word’ and to recover instead a Troelts-
chian sociological approach to theology. Against Barth’s restrictive dog-
matic orientation around the Bible and the theology of the Reformation,
Rendtorff found in Troeltsch the promise of a renewed ‘rational’ theol-
ogy grounded in a universal methodology. In short, his goal was to
reinstate a ‘theory of Christianity’ as the proper theme of theology, and
this necessarily brought him into conflict with Barth’s dogmatically
grounded ecclesiology.
Holtmann turns next to Falk Wagner, one of many critics who has
taken Rendtorff’s reading of Barth as a basic point of departure. But
whereas Rendtorff’s own response to Barth was marked by a deep
and sustained engagement with Barth’s thought, Wagner is clearly
more interested in denouncing Barth than understanding him,

although Holtmann observes that Wagner nevertheless represents a
fascinating and important episode in the story of Barth’s reception.
Based on his own commitment to a Hegelian ‘theory of the Absolute’
(mediated to him by the Frankfurt philosopher Wolfgang Cramer),
Wagner insisted that theology must always find its ground and center
in the reality of the self-conscious human subject. As he puts it: ‘The
“I”, self-consciousness, or subjectivity: this is the fundamental condi-
tion for the constitution of theology’. Thus, Rendtorff’s interpretation
of ‘the radical autonomy of God’ can only issue in a bitter denuncia-
tion of Barth: for Wagner, Barth’s doctrine of God perpetrates
‘tyranny’; it eliminates all human freedom; it erases ‘the other’; it is
structurally akin to Fascism! While it is clear that such criticisms
cannot be taken seriously as an interpretation of Barth (Eberhard
Jüngel icily described this interpretation as a ‘sin against good taste’),
Holtmann convincingly demonstrates that such a polemical stance
takes root on the soil of a particular set of Hegelian commitments to
the primacy of the human subject.
Holtmann turns next to Friedrich Wilhelm Graf, another Troelts-
chian thinker whose critical response to Barth was influenced by both
Rendtorff and Wagner. While initially Graf followed Wagner’s line of
criticism, he also developed his own constructive project of a histori-
cizing reading of Barth. The aim here was to situate Barth’s genesis
and development within the larger context of twentieth-century social
and intellectual history. Such a historicist approach suspends the
question of truth (and thus renders some aspects of Barth’s thought
inaccessible), but it also opens the way to a deeper understanding of
the specific social and political situations within which Barth was
writing and to which he was trying to respond. As Holtmann sug-
gests, the problem with Graf’s interpretation of Barth is that it needs
to be still more historicist: for example, Graf’s critique of Barth’s the-
ology as an ‘antihistorical’ program, and his criticism of Barth’s stance
toward liberalism and democracy, represent normative judgments
rather than strictly historical ones. And although Holtmann is correct
to observe that such historicizing of Barth’s theology is itself histori-
cally conditioned – and that it belongs to a wider history of German
‘anti-Barthianism’ – it is nevertheless hard not to feel considerable
sympathy for Graf’s approach, and for his attempt (however uneven
the results) to understand Barth’s work as a particular ecclesial-
political intervention, not merely as an exercise of (either sublime or
tyrannous) thought.
One might regard Georg Pfleiderer’s work on Barth as a more suc-
cessful and sophisticated development of the kind of historicist method
which Graf tried to articulate – and it is to Pfleiderer, together
with Dietrich Korsch, that Holtmann turns in the book’s final sections.
Korsch’s reading of Barth is dogmatically oriented: for him, Barth’s

thought should be understood as an articulation of the principle of
Christ’s sheer priority and actuality; Christ is the ‘singular fact’ which
governs theological thinking.
For Pfleiderer, on the other hand – whose work is surely one of the
most impressive and provocative studies of Barth in recent times –
Barth’s work must be understood as a highly contextual and strategic
‘practical theology’. Within his own historical context and in response
to the problems of modernity, Barth seeks nothing else than the for-
mation of a new community, a new kind of church, a ‘corporate iden-
tity’ with its own distinctive mode of subjectivity. Barth’s theology
must therefore be understood not merely in terms of what it says, but
in terms of what it does, in terms of its function and discursive effect.
Its aim is not to produce (as Graf had argued) an ‘antimodern’ theory,
but to bring forth a ‘counter-modern’ community, to constitute a new
subjectivity in the world. Pfleiderer not only criticizes the neo-Kantian
basis of this (distinctively ‘modern’) conception of theology, but
he also argues that Barth’s mode of theologizing is akin to a Schmit-
tian political theology, where a hegemony is mobilized through the
operation of power. In all this, Pfleiderer insists, one must distinguish
between what Barth claims he is doing, and the way his theology
actually functions: his appeal to the authority of scripture, for
example, is a secondary move in service of his real practical-
theological agenda.
Although Holtmann does not attempt his own definitive judgment
on the exact character of Barth’s relation to modernity, he concludes by
noting the very different way in which these five critics have inter-
preted Barth’s response to the problems and questions of the Enlight-
enment. Certainly, Barth’s own thinking remained deeply rooted in
these problems, and he developed a theological response that was at
once creative and critical, regardless of what one might think of its
success. In relation to modernity, perhaps it is best (with Jüngel) to
describe Barth’s theology as a ‘provocation’ – and as a project that
continues to provoke us today.
Our theological landscapes today are probably still much more ‘Bar-
thian’ than we can easily perceive. And to a great extent, the history of
Barth’s reception is a story that remains to be told. This important and
authoritative book is one of the most promising steps toward such a
history.
Benjamin Myers
Charles Sturt University
夹夹夹
Mönchtum und Protestantismus. Probleme und Wege der Forschung

seit 1877. Band 1: Von Hermann Weingarten bis Heinrich Boehmer
[Monasticism and Protestantism. Problems and Paths of Research
since 1877. Volume 1: From Hermann Weingarten to Heinrich
Boehmer], Bernd Jaspert, EOS Verlag Erzabtei St. Ottilien, 2005 (ISBN
3-8306-7139-3), 608 pp., hb €72

seit 1877. Band 2: Von Karl Heussi bis Karl Barth [Monasticism and
Protestantism. Problems and Paths of Research since 1877. Volume 2:
From Karl Heussi to Karl Barth], Bernd Jaspert, EOS Verlag Erzabtei St.
Ottilien, 2006 (ISBN 3-8306-7229-2), 1079 pp., hb €78

seit 1877. Band 3: Von Karlmann Beyschlag bis Martin Tetz
[Monasticism and Protestantism. Problems and Paths of Research
since 1877. Volume 3: From Karlmann Beyschlag to Martin Tetz],
Bernd Jaspert, EOS Verlag Erzabtei St. Ottilien, 2007 (ISBN
978-3-8306-7286-9), 861 pp., hb €76
Traditionally, Protestantism has seen monasticism in a very negative

light. Monks and nuns were freed from the shackles of their vows
(which most of them would not or could not keep anyway) during the
Reformation period, and the corrupt monasteries were closed. This, at
least, is the stereotype on which many have been brought up. Since the
nineteenth century, however, this attitude has changed somewhat, even
within Protestantism, and there are even Lutheran Benedictines in
Denmark and many branches of Protestantism look to Catholic monas-
ticism for guidance in the spiritual life.
Bernd Jaspert has written three out of five volumes of his magnum
opus, published (in German) by St Ottilien (a Benedictine monastery),
and which presents Protestant views of monasticism from the first
Protestant, Martin Luther (a former Augustinian) up to twentieth
century theologians. All those discussed are German-speaking
(except for John Calvin and Huldrych Zwingli), which may mean
that its interest is limited to those who exhibit interest in the
German Protestant/monastic theological scene. In Germany academic
study of monasticism coincided with a resurgence of interest in
patristics in the nineteenth century, which raised two funda-
mental questions for German theologians: is monasticism biblically
grounded as a legitimate following of Christ? Is monasticism a more
perfect form of the Christian life? The sixteenth century Reformers
had an easy answer: they wholly rejected monasticism with its
requirements of vows and celibacy (which they believed that no
one could manage) and considered that although monasticism’s
beginnings were laudable, those who attempted it quickly went off

the rails.
Following a succinct introduction to his work (in volume 1), Jaspert
presents a synthesis of the views of Martin Luther, Philipp Melanch-
thon, Huldrych Zwingli and John Calvin on monasticism. He indicates
that all four major reformers objected not to monasticism in se (indeed
it is noteworthy and often forgotten that the Reformation began with
monks and nuns), but rather to the way in which it was lived in their
time. This is why Luther was able to support contemporary attempts to
live a purified form of Protestant monastic life in places such as Old-
enstadt, Fulda and Gernrode, but these attempts had all failed by the
first half of the seventeenth century. The Reformers recognized that
vows were themselves biblical and therefore could not entirely be fore-
sworn. Hence, Calvin saw that vows may be used as a means of thanks-
giving, penance, caution, and for encouragement to fulfill a duty and
counter human weakness, but all these occasions are temporary and
not legally binding in any sense.
Having considered the Reformers’ views, which must be read and
understood in order to continue, Jaspert then presents a masterly over-
view of 125 years of German Protestant scholarship relating to monas-
ticism. He begins in 1877, because this is when Hermann Weingarten
first doubted the authenticity of Athanasius’ Vita Antonii and claimed
that monasticism grew not out of the New Testament, but out of the
Egyptian cult of Serapis. From then, the interest continued among a
wide range of theologians up to the present day. Each theologian’s
thought is traced through his works, which are often quoted at length.
The potential field for such a work is huge. Jaspert’s original intention
was for two volumes, but the project has now stretched to five, the last
two of which are in preparation. In order to limit himself a little, Jaspert
focuses on German Protestant research, though he early on acknowl-
edges the work carried out by Catholic theologians from a variety of
countries and congregations. He also omits any mention of Anglican-
ism, which he sees as a separate entity, combining aspects of Protes-
tantism and Catholicism (vol. 1, p. 42).
Volume 1 considers the Reformers and then begins the journey
through the works of Hermann Weingarten who started off the
renewed Protestant interest in monasticism, and ending at Heinrich
Boehmer (1869–1927), via such names as Adolf von Harnack and Ernst
Troeltsch and others which are more obscure for the English-speaking
world. (This volume considers the thought of H. Weingarten, E. Lucius,
A. von Harnack, A. Eichhorn, G. Grützmacher, R. Seeberg, O. Zöckler,
E. Preuschen, K. Holl, D. Völter, E. Troeltsch, J. Leipoldt, H. Boehmer).
Volume 2 continues the journey, beginning with Karl Heussi (1877–
1961), who between 1909 and 1936 wrote four key articles on ascesis
and monasticism. He ends with the more famous Karl Barth (1886–
1968), whose writings on monastic themes were written primarily in

the 1960s, and in the meantime examines the thought of W. Franken-
berg, H. Strathmann, F. Parpert, W. Bousset, F. Heiler, E. Peterson, H.C.
Wendlandt, H. Dörries, D. Bonhoeffer, H. von Campenhausen, E. Benz,
W. Stählin, W. Nigg, A. Adam, W. Zeller.
This chronological presentation continues in volume 3 and includes a
number of theologians who are still living (K. Beyschlag, B. Lohse, G.
Maron, H-O. Weber, F. von Lilienfeld, N. Heutger, G. Kretschmar, W.
Schneemelcher, R. Lorenz, P. Nagel, K-V. Selge, B. Jaspert, G.G. Blüm,
G. Wendelborn, M. Tetz). The prologue to the third volume indicates
that the fourth volume will present the thought of Protestant theolo-
gians from Ulrich Köpf to Barbara Müller, who have written works
between 1980 and 2000. Volume 5 presumably will still consider the
ecumenical importance of monasticism (as was originally intended for
the end of volume 2).
The theologians presented in all three volumes have considered a
wide range of themes, and often have a view on Luther’s own insights
into monasticism. The value of this series is the presentation of a large
number of writers on a particular theme in a manner which is easy to
use and which leads one directly to the sources if one wishes to look
further. For the interested reader wishing to gain an insight into a
theologian’s thought on monasticism Jaspert’s presentation will give a
comprehensive view, complete with suitable quotations from the origi-
nal sources. Each volume has a full bibliography, index, list of names,
and of biblical references. The bibliography would be of great assis-
tance to anyone interested in this field, since it contains details of works
not only in German, but also in English, Latin, French, Italian, Spanish,
and even Russian. This is undoubtedly a valuable contribution to the
field of monastic studies.
Anselm Brumwell OSB

Downside Abbey, Bath, UK
夹夹夹
Variations sur la charité [Variations on Charity], Jean-Claude Larchet,

Cerf, 2007 (ISBN 978-2-204-08475-8), 329 pp., pb €29
The love of God and the love of the neighbor form the very center of
Christian faith (cf. Mark 12.30f.). Yet, the precise meaning of charity and
the various ways it can be faithfully embodied remain perennial issues
for theology and the church. Jean-Claude Larchet takes a fresh look at
Christian charity, by presenting the thoughts and practical advice of a
wide range of Eastern Orthodox authors from the patristic era up to the
twentieth century. As the title suggests, the book is modeled on the
analogy of a musical theme and its variations. The choice of this para-
digm is crucial for the correct understanding of Larchet’s book. On the
one hand, charity cannot be reduced to a spontaneous and merely
subjective emotional disposition but is fundamentally a command (cf.
Mark 12.30f.). Accordingly, the practice of charity must be learned, and
this process is to some extent guided by ascetic rules, which are
inscribed in the collective memory of the church. On the other hand,
love defies any systematization. The theme is only ‘understood’ and
appropriated if it gives rise to ever new variations – yet without arbi-
trarily deviating from the pre-given norms.
In the first part of the book, this interplay between theme and varia-
tions is presented in the form of five essays, each of which examines a
particular aspect of Christian charity. Closely drawing on the Greek and
Syrian writers of the patristic period, Larchet considers issues such as
the interrelationship between charity, the love of God, and the love of
oneself, or the uniquely Christian command to love one’s enemies,
which constitutes the highest form of neighborly love. The second part
explores the meaning of charity in the work of the twentieth-century
Eastern Orthodox Elders and Saints Nicholas of Jitcha (1880–1956),
Joseph the Hesychast (1898–1959), Starez Serge (1903–1987), Starez
Silouan (1886–1938), and Elder Porphyrios (1906–1991). Their thoughts
on charity are at once uncompromisingly radical and irresistibly
appealing. A luminous simplicity shines through these texts, and one
realizes that the teachers and their teaching are inseparable. The reader
is thus enabled to catch a true glimpse of the mystery of Christian
charity. The third part consists of an anthology of thirty-five short texts,
each of which is followed by an elucidating commentary. Here, the
range of different writers is much wider than in the previous part and
spans from the New Testament to the twentieth century. The order of
this anthology does not seem to follow a particular plan. Furthermore,
Larchet’s focus is on the lasting, or even ‘timeless’ spiritual meaning of
these writings. No attempt is made to read them in their original his-
torical context, or to point to differences, contradictions, or develop-
ments in the thoughts of these authors.
Throughout the book, the picture of Christian charity Larchet paints
becomes more and more nuanced. With each new ‘variation’, further
aspects of neighborly love come to light. As opposed to the spiritual fast
food which we are all too familiar with in our time, we find here a
notion of love that is consistently shaped by the Trinitarian and Chris-
tological grammar of Christian Orthodoxy. Larchet’s presentation of
charity does not fall prey to the dichotomy of a merely ‘internal’ con-
templative purification versus the performance of charitable actions in
the ‘external’ world. Love of the neighbor, though inconceivable
without a radical transformation of one’s innermost being, is always

concrete and embodied. It equally aims at the other’s material as well as
spiritual well-being. Larchet also rejects the common prejudice that the
institutional aspect of charity is not paid sufficient attention to in the
Orthodox Church. He argues that the limited public presence of Ortho-
doxy in the twentieth century was due to the oppression of the Com-
munist regimes and should not be viewed as an intrinsic weakness of
the Eastern tradition (see pp. 45–60). The Orthodox understanding of
charity cannot be reduced to the narrowly interpersonal level, but
rather forms part of a universal vision of peace that embraces the
animal world as well as the vegetative and inorganic aspects of cre-
ation. Although only human beings are created in the image of God,
God is in different ways and to different degrees present in all creatures
(pp. 314–17). The salvific recapitulation of God’s good but fallen Cre-
ation in and through the second person of the Trinity, safeguards all
differences which are expressions of the world’s divinely instituted
variety and richness, yet overcomes all divisions caused by the curse of
sin. Accordingly, in receiving and enacting charity, human beings syn-
ergistically restore the original beauty of Creation.
Yet, it is not Larchet’s aim to provide a systematic analysis of the
concept of charity. This collection of essays will prove most rewarding
if it is read as a source of practical advice and for one’s own progress in
Christian charity (cf. p. 7f.). However, in spite of its practical rather than
theoretical character, one is often tempted to ask how Larchet’s notion
of charity could be located in contemporary ethical discussions. For
instance, he advocates the ideal of disinterested love, but regards pre-
cisely this disinterestedness as the condition of possibility for reciprocal
love to occur. As he points out, the one who gives disinterestedly and
does not refrain from a complete self-sacrifice will eventually receive
back more than he has given. It would be worthwhile to spell this point
out in greater detail and to relate it to the ongoing debate about the ‘gift’
(cf. Jean-Luc Marion, Jacques Derrida, John Milbank, et al.). Moreover,
Larchet insists that charity does not perceive the neighbor as a general
or abstract reality but as a singular and concrete person. Yet, he at the
same time holds that Christian love is nonexclusive and of universal
scope, and that perfect charity loves all people similarly. Further clari-
fications are needed to show why such a characterization of charity is
not self-contradictory.
To sum up, this book is a real treasure and provides a very profound
and readable survey of the Eastern Orthodox understandings of charity.
Its many variations lead the reader into an ever deeper understanding
of the mystery of neighborly love. But no attempt is made to system-
atize this wide variety of different thoughts, or to discuss alternative
theories of love and justice, which have influenced Western society to
a much greater extent than the texts discussed in this collection.
However, in order to give Christian charity its clearest possible con-

tours, and to mark it off from those notions of love, which do not see
it as a gift of God, a critical engagement with secular thought is
indispensable.
Christoph Schneider
University of Bern
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Der Beitrag von Karl Barths trinitarischer Grammatik zur

Herausbildung einer narrativen Identität [The contribution of Karl
Barth’s Trinitarian Grammar to the Development of a Narrative
Identity], Ina Mähringer, Peter Lang, 2007 (ISBN 978-3-631-57370-9),
331 pp., pb €59.70
Ina Mähringer explores how a Trinitarian reading of the biblical

narratives can shed light on the question of divine and human iden-
tity. She attempts to combine Karl Barth’s interpretation of God’s
Trinitarian self-revelation with Paul Ricœur’s theory of narrativity
and philosophy of the self. Her reflections on Christian identity are
further developed in dialogue with thinkers such as Dietrich Ritschl,
Stanley Hauerwas, and Alasdair MacIntyre. Although most of the
book deals with questions that fall into the domains of systematic
theology, philosophy, and ethics, the guiding question throughout the
book is what role the idea of narrative identity can play in pedagogy
of religion.
The first half of the book consists of a detailed account of Barth’s
conception of divine revelation, as set out in the Prolegomena to the
Church Dogmatics, with particular emphasis on the perichoresis
between the divine hypostaseis. The self-revelation of the one divine
subject to human beings, in ever new ways, leads to a Trinitarian
understanding of God. That is, we are to conceive God’s innertrini-
tarian relationship as well as his relatedness to Creation in terms of a
unity-in-difference or difference-in-unity. On the narrative level, the
doctrine of the Trinity safeguards the unity of the seemingly hetero-
geneous bundle of different biblical stories, most notably between the
Old and the New Testament. At the same time, a Trinitarian under-
standing of divine revelation pinpoints that human beings are always
already entangled in the story of God’s coming into the world. As our
identity is closely interlinked with the divine–human encounter that
happened in Jesus Christ once and for all, it is constituted and formed
by the biblical narratives that witness to this Christ-event. Mähringer
further spells out this fundamental relatedness of God toward Cre-

ation and human beings by giving an account of Barth’s theology of
time. She elucidates how God’s ‘redeemed time’, accomplished in
Jesus Christ, is manifest in our ‘fallen time’.
These considerations serve as the points of connection with
Ricœur’s philosophy of narrativity and the self. Particular reference is
made to Time and Narrative (trans. D. Pellauer et al., vols. 1–3; Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1984–1988) and Oneself as Another (trans.
K. Blamey; Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992). Mähringer
sees a correlation between Barth’s conception of a biblically mediated
Christian identity and Ricœur’s philosophical theory that a human
being’s identity lies in the unity of his or her life story, which is com-
parable to the unity of a narrated story. Drawing on Ricœur’s distinc-
tion between idem- and ipse-identity, as well as on his threefold use of
mimesis, she analyzes the dialogical interplay between self/reader and
text, and self and other. These encounters are viewed as the prereq-
uisite for the development of human identity. The idea of a narrative
self constitutes a task for the human subject, for it requires a continual
process of self-interpretation and self-rectification, in which past,
present and future are creatively synthesized. The narrative self is a
dynamic concept: change and mutability become manifest in ever
new ways of symbolizing one’s life. These configurations and recon-
figurations of heterogeneous elements of experience through narrative
emplotment are mediated by the reading of texts, which serve as
paradigms for this process. The reader’s self undergoes an alienation
from its own world and enters the world of the text. This is followed
by an appropriation, that is, the self is changed due to a dialogue
between the two worlds.
A separate chapter explores the similarities and differences between
Barth’s and Ricœur’s approaches. Only a few important aspects can be
mentioned here. Structurally following Ricœur’s hermeneutics, Barth
views the life of Jesus Christ as that point in history on the basis of
which all time and all narratives must be told anew and told differently.
Mähringer finds further striking parallels between these two thinkers
in the way they envisage the confrontation of the world of the reader
with that of the biblical text. According to Barth, the reader is alienated
from his world when faced with the biblical text, in the sense that his
false autonomy and self-sufficiency is exposed as sinful resistance to the
rule and love of God. Appropriation, however, can be theologically
grasped as the reception of the Holy Spirit, which incorporates the
believer into the church, the Body of Christ.
Although Mähringer by no means fails to point to divergences
between Barth and Ricœur, she clearly waters down major differences
that are directly relevant to the argument of her book. These dif-
ferences concern the aforementioned notion of appropriation. In
accordance with a large number of other commentators, she repeat-

edly points out that Barth places too much emphasis on Christology –
at the expense of Pneumatology. But she does not pay sufficient
attention to how this affects his hermeneutics. Whereas Ricœur
speaks of a dialogical interplay between text and reader, Barth’s
theology is to a large extent characterized by actualistic thought-
categories. Although he does use the term ‘appropriation’ (Aneig-
nung), a close reading of the Prolegomena reveals that the active and
creative involvement of the reader in the act of reading is minimal.
This also applies to Barth’s understanding of the reception of the
orally proclaimed Word of God, which plays such a predominant role
in his theology. Consequently, Barth is also very sceptical about the
possibility and significance of narrative sedimentations resulting from
appropriations of the Gospel narratives by human beings. If one
follows Ricœur, the believer should be able to narrate his own life
story in the light of the Gospel story. But due to Barth’s tendency
toward a Christomonism, there is no real basis for such an interpen-
etration between the Gospel narratives and our own life stories, so
that these sedimentations never really occur. An analysis of volume 4
of the Church Dogmatics would prove more fruitful in this respect. It is
also his later work that was taken as the starting point for the Yale
School, which has produced a vast amount of secondary literature on
Barth, narrativity, and hermeneutics.
Mähringer makes an interesting contribution to the theological
reception of Ricœur’s hermeneutics and philosophy of the self. Yet, her
‘synthesis’ between Barth and Ricœur produces more tensions than she
admits. Her work should thus be read as an elaboration on Barth that
also implies a partial critique. Furthermore, an ecumenical widening of
the debate about narrative identity would be more than desirable.
Although discussions about narrative theology have hitherto been
dominated by Protestant theologians, the Catholic and Eastern Ortho-
dox traditions have much to offer in this respect, particularly on the
phenomenological level. Hagiography, for instance, is hermeneutically
speaking nothing other than a narrative sedimentation of a human
being’s response to God’s call that is considered by the church as
exemplary for the Christian tradition. And the practice of confession
could be interpreted as the endeavor to constantly reconfigure one’s life
story in the light of the Gospel narratives, mediated by the presence of
‘another’.
Christoph Schneider
University of Bern
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Origenes und sein Erbe: Gesammelte Studien [Origen and his

Legacy: Collected Studies], Christoph Markschies, De Gruyter, 2007
(ISBN 978-3-11-019278-0), x + 283 pp., hb €88
It might seem rash to look for a specialism in the cornucopian work

of Christoph Markschies. It would, however, seem that he has pub-
lished most abundantly, and administered his most salutary correc-
tives to error and negligence, on those traditions of early Christian
thought which, before he addressed them, were conventionally asso-
ciated with Egypt. The last two essays in the present volume survey
the history of the GCS edition of Origen’s writings, which com-
menced under the auspices of Harnack and have already been
adorned by the distinguished names of Koetschau, Preusschen,
Klostermann, and Baehrens. Markschies secured his place in this
distinguished company long before his translation to Berlin, with
the publication of his doctoral monograph on Valentinus, in which he
sought to detach the great heresiarch from his entourage of supposed
disciples. His article in this volume, ‘Valentinianische Gnosis in
Alexandrien und Ägypten’, is a sort of appendix to this study, which
reminds us that, although the most sustained and perceptive dia-
logues with Valentinian thought are carried on by authors residing in
Alexandria, the evidence that Valentinus himself was of Egyptian
provenance is insecure. Whether or not the ancient heresiologists have
misled us in this respect, it is their insinuations which, against all the
evidence, tempt modern scholars to trace the speculations of heretical
writers only to pagan sources and to assume that their exegesis of the
scriptures is merely sartorial. That Origen’s Christology should be
informed by his critical reading of Valentinus and his satellites is no
proof that it not authentically biblical or Christian; nor, as Marck-
schies shows in two other articles, does his commerce with the Greek
philosophers justify the common charge that he writes for the school-
room rather than the pulpit. In ‘Was bedeutet ousia?’, he endorses
Cadiou’s hypothesis that Origen’s discussion of this question in his
treatise On Prayer is indebted to the lexicon of Herophilus, though he
adds that Origen makes less use of Stoic materials than his predeces-
sor because of his (obvious though unstated) inclination to the Pla-
tonic view. At the same time, the Platonic identification of ousia with
the incorporeal forms is not explicitly commended, and there is
reason to suspect that he was looking for a third way between the two
schools. Doxographic precision is not his aim here, any more than
in his frequent, though glancing allusions to Epicurus, which, as
Markschies demonstrates in ‘Epikureismus bei Origenes und in die
origenistichen Tradition’, seldom evince any first-hand knowledge of
that philosopher’s writings, and most commonly hold up his teaching
as the antitype to the Christian doctrine of providence. Neither the
lacunae in Origen’s representations of the Greek philosophers nor

his failure to establish a consistent usage of such terms as ousia
throughout his works should be taken as evidence that he lacked
competence in philosophy; these defects, if defects they are, are
natural corollaries of his homiletic method, which aims primarily to
make the reading of scripture a practical discipline for members of
the church.
The article ‘Ambrosius und Origenes’ compares the methods of the
bishop and the lay scholar in the pursuit of this design. Both, Mark-
schies concludes, use philological inquiry as the scaffolding to a pas-
toral application of the text which is ‘methodologically controlled
and theologically responsible’. If Ambrose is less inclined to introduce
scholastic tools for the resolution of knotty questions, that is because
he is almost invariably a preacher, whereas Origen is both preacher
and commentator. While he employs the term allegoria less often than
Origen, he subscribes to the latter’s principle that the scriptures are
many-layered, and may accommodate at least three tiers of meaning.
(I would add here that, in counting occurrences of allegoria and its
cognates in Origen’s writing, one ought to deduct not merely citations
of Galatians 4.24 but other passages, most numerous in his Commen-
tary on John, where he is stigmatizing the practice of the Gnostics.)
Ancient and modern calumnies are refuted in two articles on castra-
tion and the Holy Spirit in Origen. The conclusion of ‘Heilige Geist
und Trinität’ is that pneumatology, the doctrine of the Spirit, is the
coping-stone of Origen’s Trinitarian theology, though he may at times
seem elliptical or fickle for want of ecclesiastical precedent or unam-
biguous testimony in the scriptures. In ‘Kastration und Magenprob-
leme?’, it might be felt that Markschies makes too much of Hanson’s
careless obiter dictum that castration was an everyday practice in
Roman times; of course, it was not, but Markschies furnishes scholars
with a valuable resource by collating the desultory and elusive refer-
ences to self-castration in antiquity. He shows that it was generally
deplored, not only by pagans, and that testimonies to Origen’s muti-
lation of his own flesh are not consistent enough to support a firm
conclusion. Another of Hanson’s dicta – that we do not find ‘the true,
the full’ Origen in his homilies, is contested in ‘für die Gemeinde in
Grossen und Ganzen’, where the conclusion is that, for all that
remains for scholarship to discover, we can already say with confi-
dence that Origen’s aim in his preaching was ‘to make the scriptures
intelligible for the edification of the community’. His commentaries
are the subject of ‘Origenes und die Kommentierung des paulinischen
Römerbriefs’, in which a study of his method is juxtaposed with a
review of antecedents and an inventory of his own exertions in this
discipline. Markschies concludes that subsequent use of the letter as a
canonical text was conditioned both by Origen’s philological inquires
and by his readiness to improve on the literal sense by recourse to

practices which were sanctioned, then, as now, by use and wont,
however foreign they may be to the well-honed instincts of the
modern academic.
Apologists for the looseness and inaccuracy of Eusebius have often
maintained that his project was to assemble the materials for a history,
not to write one. In ‘Eusebius als Scriftsteller’, Markschies shows that
this defence convicts him of misrepresenting his project, which he
plainly conceives as an integrated narrative, and that both the style
and the combination of themes in his study of Origen, which domi-
nates the sixth book of the Ecclesiastical History, conform to the pre-
cepts of ancient rhetoricians. Whether such studies are rightly called
biographies, and whether Eusebius might have looked for historio-
graphic models in the Old Testament as well as in monumental works
of Greek prose, are questions that we have only the time to raise, but
not to answer, within the compass of a review. In his own survey of
the evidence pertaining to the life and career of Origen, Markschies
makes uncharacteristically frugal use of secondary literature, without
challenging the consensus that Origen studied under the tutor of
Plotinus, Ammonius Saccas, and that Platonism supplies the infra-
structure of his theology. Origen’s use of Platonic literature is not in
fact the subject of any article in this volume, though it would not be
unprofitable to compare his attempt to cut a middle way between two
notions of ousia with the Eleatic Stranger’s arbitration between the
giants and the gods in Plato’s Sophist. A full consideration of the Pla-
tonic leaven in the thought of Origen, if it were undertaken today,
would require one to examine not only Heinrich Dorrie’s conjecture
that he was taught by a different Ammonius but also two magnificent
books by P. Tzamalikos which cast him as an ‘anti-Platonist rather
than a Platonist’. It would also need to distinguish between those
tools and tropes that could only have been purloined from Plato or his
Greek epigoni and those which, like the term monas, had already
found a home in the Christian lexicon. As Markschies himself
observes in ‘Gott und Mensch nach Origenes’, the Alexandrian theo-
logian oscillates between theories which imply that the human mind
is of a piece with the essence of God and those which presuppose that
only divine omnipotence can bridge the gulf between them. If there is
one conclusion to be drawn from this rich itinerary of two decades of
scholarship, it is that Origen owes his position in the history of the
church to his ardent piety, his profound grasp of the scriptures and
his dexterous application of techniques that had been devised for a
different use in the pagan schools.
Mark Edwards
Christ Church, Oxford
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Saint Augustin et la Bible: Actes du colloque de l’université

Paul-Verlaine-Metz (7–8 avril 2005) [St Augustine and the Bible:
Proceedings of the Colloquium of Paul Verlaine-Metz University,
7–8 April 2005], Gérard Nauroy and Marie-Anne Vannier (eds.), Peter
Lang, 2008 (ISBN 978-3-03911-590-7), ix + 345 pp., pb €63/$97.95
Augustine was a professional interpreter and exponent of texts. By his

early thirties, he had risen high in his profession as a teacher of rhetoric,
analyzing the art with which the great Latin writers had achieved their
effects and teaching his students how to imitate them. By his early
forties, he had been transformed as a bishop into the custodian and
broadcaster of a different set of texts, the Christian scriptures. It is odd,
then, that French scholarship has come so late to the study of Augustine
and the Bible. These proceedings record a major event held in Metz in
2005: a colloquium attended by two hundred participants, to explore a
hugely important field.
There are eighteen articles, divided into seven sections: Augustine’s
hermeneutical principles; Augustine and Genesis; Augustine and the
Psalms; Augustine addressing Matthew and John; Augustine and Paul;
Augustine between the Bible and Neoplatonism and Augustine’s
legacy. They are prefaced by a brief memoir of Anne-Marie La Bon-
nardière, who died in her early nineties ten years ago, together with a
full bibliography of her writings. In her long and remarkably fruitful
career – she was still writing in her eighties – she made an enormous
contribution to Augustinian studies. Elisabeth Paoli concentrates on her
academic output: it would have been interesting to have heard more of
her personal life and experience.
The volume opens with a useful article by Pierre-Maurice Bogaert,
who patiently reconstructs the different Latin texts of the scriptures that
Augustine used. The Bible as used by Donatists, as rendered in northern
Italy and as translated by Jerome are all explored. This may simply seem
to show the wide range of Latin versions encountered by Augustine
during his life, but Bogaert indicates that Augustine became increasingly
aware of the complexity of biblical textual questions and that he was
committed to a search for the best available rendering of the scriptures
while the passages of the Vetus Latina which can be recovered from his
writings are themselves of interest in reconstructing the Western Text of
the Greek New Testament and the oldest version of the Septuagint.
Isabelle Bochet offers a very different kind of essay in considering the
fundamentals of Augustine’s biblical hermeneutic, relying heavily on a
consideration of the work of Gadamer. She writes with fluent confi-
dence: this is territory on which she has published before. Closely
following on from her essay is an article by Luigi Alici on the relationship

of Augustine’s interpretation of the creation and the origin of meaning.
Looking at Augustine’s handling of the Book of Genesis, Gérard
Nauroy compares the interpretation of Jacob and Esau offered in
sermons by Ambrose and Augustine, showing the limits of Ambrose’s
influence. Ambrose, writing for an educated audience, is interested in
the fusion of scripture and the classical inheritance; Augustine is less
eclectic, simpler in style and more focused on the struggle against heresy
and schism. He observes that Ambrose writes regularly in the same
register whereas Augustine is far more flexible and varied. Gérard Rémy
compares the accounts of the Fall to be found in De Genesi ad litteram and
the City of God, showing the extent to which anti-Manichean and anti-
Pelagian concerns shaped his portrayal of the bliss of paradise and his
understanding of the origin of sin. The more elevated his account of
Adam before the Fall, the more puzzling original sin became. Rémy
argues that this has an unfortunate consequence for Augustine’s chris-
tology: salvation is presented as a suspension of divine justice and while
Adam is the model for humanity, Christ is only the model for the elect.
Augustine as commentator on the Psalms is first addressed by
Michael Fiedrowicz, who shows how Christ sings in his own name, in
our name and in the church’s name and that the Psalms can be under-
stood as the voice of the Totus Christus. Jaime Garcia gives a close
reading of his exposition of Psalm 76 (Ps 77) as an example of the move
from the interiority of the lone voice to the voice being that of the
church, an autobiographical movement reflecting Augustine’s own
conversion. Véronique Fabre looks at the prophetic aspect of the Psalms
in a short essay which only considers four psalms and could profitably
have been considerably longer.
Agnès Bastit considers an early work by Augustine, his explanation
of the Sermon on the Mount, in comparison with Clement of Alexan-
dria, Origen, Ambrose, Gregory of Nyssa and Chrysostom. Clement,
Origen and Gregory form a group, seeing in the Beatitudes a promise of
apokatastasis, the reintegration of the Kingdom and the stripping away
of corporeality; Ambrose and Chrysostom present the Beatitudes
instead as the ascetic steps of the soul’s spiritual education, stressing
their interrelatedness. Compared with these, Augustine is less learned,
more didactic, more moralistic. Marie-Anne Vannier offers a short
introduction to Augustine’s tractates on John, stressing the major
themes of Christ’s divinity, the Trinity, and Christ as the Mediator: this
again could profitably have been a much more developed study of a
major text. Daniel Dideberg devotes about the same amount of space to
the theme of love in the first letter of John, which brings out the great
Augustinian idea of the indwelling love of God which is the Holy Spirit.
Three pointed and fairly brief essays consider Augustine on St Paul.
Bruno Delaroche’s article on the impact of scripture on Augustine’s
involvement in the Pelagian controversy is inevitably strongly Pauline;

Yves Meesen by contrast looks closely at the kenotic hymn in Philippi-
ans while Jeannine Siat examines the differences between Jerome
and Augustine as they interpreted the dispute between Peter and Paul
reported in Galatians: she again points up the contrast between schol-
arship, as represented by Jerome, and the pastoral and catechetical
imperatives which influenced Augustine.
The two articles which deal with Neoplatonism and scripture both
focus very narrowly on particular phrases in the Confessions. François
Heim, in a very brief piece, discusses a few examples of spatial images
and questions the usual translation offered for them. Henri Perrin’s
article, based on his doctoral dissertation, reflects on the meaning of the
land of unlikeness in Confessions 7.10.16. The two articles looking at
Augustine’s legacy add little to the theme of Augustine as reader and
expounder of scripture: Pierre Raffin provides a good survey of Augus-
tine’s interest in monasticism and his Rule; Paul-Irénée Fransen’s article
is a detailed study of the florilegium of Florus of Lyon.
The collection of articles badly needs an essay pulling some of these
findings together. The Augustine who emerges, a close analyst of texts,
interested in problems of translation but less of a polished scholar than
Ambrose or Jerome or his Greek predecessors, ready to use scripture in
a wide variety of registers and always very conscious of his audience, is
recognizable enough. This volume has its value and would usefully find
a place on the shelf alongside Augustine through the Ages, but too many of
the articles are too brief or too narrow to provide the introduction to and
broad overview of the important theme addressed by this conference.
Bernard Green OSB

St Benet’s Hall, Oxford
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Dio? Ateismo della ragione e ragioni della fede [God? The Atheism
of Reason and the Reasons of Faith], Angelo Scola and Paolo Flores
d’Arcais, Marsilio Editori, 2008 (ISBN 8-8317-9470-1), 92 pp., pb €9
Atei o Credenti? Filosofia, politica, etica, scienza [Atheists or

Believers? Philosophy, Politics, Ethics, Science], Paolo Flores
d’Arcais, Michel Onfray and Gianni Vattimo, Fazi Editore, 2007 (ISBN
8-8811-2884-5), 173 pp., pb €15
Dio? Ateismo della ragione e ragione della fede is the latest in what, espe-
cially in Italy, appears to be a thriving subgenre: dialogues between
cardinals and prominent atheist philosophers. In the past several years,

for example, exchanges have been published from Carlo Maria Martini
and Umberto Eco, and Joseph Ratzinger and (separately) Paolo Flores
d’Arcais, Marcello Pera, and Jürgen Habermas. Here, Flores d’Arcais, a
researcher at La Sapienza University in Rome and the editor of the
leftist magazine Micromegas, debates with Angelo Scola, the Patriarch of
Venice and former Rector of the Pontifical Lateran University. Their
public exchange, which took place in Pisa in May 2006, is reproduced
here, followed by two ‘postscripts’ written prior to publication.
Since no substantial writings of Flores d’Arcais have yet been trans-
lated into English, his ideas are worth outlining in some detail. He
begins by disavowing the ‘hypocrisy born from fear’ that typically mars
atheists’ encounters with believers: (intellectual) respect for one’s inter-
locutor (pp. 14–15). He proclaims instead ‘faith’s incurably irrational
character’, ‘the incompatibility of faith and reason’, and thus ‘the atheism
of reason’. Atheism is, Flores d’Arcais affirms, ‘an unavoidable precon-
dition’ for both science and philosophy. This bold claim – which has, of
course, affinities with those recently made by the ‘New Atheists’ – is
justified in two main ways. In the first place, David Hume and (to a
lesser extent) Charles Darwin are cited as having destroyed any pre-
tence to ‘rationality’ that religious belief may once have held. Second, a
tendentious reading of two familiar quotations from Paul (‘the language
of the Cross is folly’) and Tertullian (‘I believe because it is absurd’) is
used to demonstrate that irrationality, the church’s protestations con-
cerning the compatibility of faith and reason notwithstanding, is ‘the
essential distinguishing feature of the Christian’ (p. 32).
Yet, more interesting, however, is Flores d’Arcais’ main positive
assertion: Sappiamo tutto, ‘we know everything’. This is explicitly
intended to oppose and replace the Socratic maxim that he is wisest
who knows he does not know (p. 17). According to him, all the great
metaphysical questions of the past have now been answered by modern
science. Not only do ‘we know how the universe came about, [and] how
it evolved’, but furthermore: ‘We know who we are, where we have
come from, and where we are going to’ (pp. 18–19). He has a point, of
course. There is a sense in which, for example, ‘we know’ – or rather,
have a reasonably good idea – ‘how the universe came about’ (i.e. the
Big Bang). But that said, that this is not the only, or even the most
interesting or troubling, way of construing the great metaphysical ques-
tions ‘where does the universe from?’ and ‘why is there something
rather than nothing?’ scarcely need be pointed out.
Scola’s response is, to a certain extent, disappointing. Rather than
face Flores d’Arcais head-on, refuting his ‘Aut fides aut ratio’ (p. 16)
dichotomy, Scola begins merely by stating that his own ‘concept of
reason is different’ (p. 32). Admittedly, later Scola does affirm, albeit a
little unfairly to Tertullian, ‘With tenacity the Catholic tradition has
defended its own concept of faith in the face of every fideistic claim
based on the adage credo quia absurdum est’ (p. 38). Nonetheless, several
of Flores d’Arcais’ most striking assertions are not directly answered.
Instead, Scola draws heavily on postmodern philosophy, especially
Heidegger and Marion in order to present ‘the reasons of faith’. But
given that Flores d’Arcais’ arguments are so firmly situated within the
Hume-inspired empirical tradition, this results in the two seeming to
speak at cross purposes. And indeed, the very advisability of coopting
Heidegger to defend the Catholic tradition is, not unreasonably, later
questioned by Flores d’Arcais (pp. 58–9). More successful, however, are
Scola’s outrightly theological remarks about atheism itself. Here, he
adopts the time-honored stance of Catholic theologians, affirming that
‘the Nietzschean death of God is, in reality, the dethronement of an idol,
in which inevitably the mere glance of the religious sense freezes God’.
Hence, atheism ‘liberates the field for the vital arrival of God’ (pp. 44–5).
Atei o Credenti? consists of another dialogue involving Flores
d’Arcais. This, however, was a private discussion in November 2006
with the French philosopher Michel Onfray (whose 2005 best-selling
Traité d’athéologie has been translated into seventeen languages), and
the self-professed ‘Christian-Nietzschean’ Italian postmodernist Gianni
Vattimo. In such company, Flores d’Arcais is better able to expand upon
his thought, although its central theme remains the same: ‘Today it is
irrational not to assume atheism as the horizon of philosophy because,
after Hume and Darwin, we can and must tranquilly affirm that we
know everything’ (p. 3). Yet, like Scola, his new conversation partners also
take exception to his concept of ‘reason’. Vattimo leads the charge,
criticizing what he terms ‘Reason with a capital letter’ (p. 10). Onfray
concurs: ‘There is not one reason, but reasons active in the disorder of
our western philosophical tradition’ (p. 17). Following these initial,
good-natured skirmishes, the discussion opens up and is, as the book’s
subtitle might suggest, impressively wide-ranging. In the course of
these interesting exchanges on, among other subjects, cosmology, evil,
democracy, liberal ethics, and the possibility or not of a ‘moderate’
Islam, several memorable opinions and anecdotes are advanced.
Onfray, for example, who seriously believes ‘Jesus no more existed than
did Santa Claus’ (p. 58), recounts his own, suitably idiosyncratic, con-
version to self-professed ‘atheistic idiosyncrasy’ (p. 20).
Both these books are interesting and significant in their own right.
For Anglo-American readers, furthermore, they offer an illuminating
comparison to our own recent flood of atheist literature. Flores d’Arcais
and Onfray do not quote Dawkins, Harris or Dennett; and they, in turn,
do not quote Flores d’Arcais and Onfray. Not surprisingly, then, con-
siderable differences exist. Flores d’Arcais, in particular, shows a far
better grasp of (Catholic) theology – even to the point of actually having
read some – than do Dawkins et al. And not even Dennett, the only
proper philosopher among the New Atheists, would quote Vico, Hegel,
Nietzsche, or Heidegger with such ease. But even so, their affinities
probably outweigh their differences. The fact that the same themes,
concerns, ideas, and even sometimes strikingly similar modes of
expression, have evidently arisen independently, implies the much-
vaunted New Atheism to be, at least in part, epiphenomenal to much
wider social and intellectual trends in the contemporary West.
Stephen Bullivant
Christ Church, Oxford

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F O R E I G N L A N G UA G E R E V I E W S r i rt _ 4 4 2 618..

Creator est Creatura: Luthers Christologie als Lehre von der

The six essays contained in this volume collectively offer a picture of

Reviews in Religion and Theology, 16:4 (2009)

epistemological principle. Against this one-sided depiction, Bayer pre-

The following essay, ‘Christ Is Made Sin for Us Metaphorically’, by

systematic-theological exploration of the importance (for our day) of

Henri de Lubac, tome I: De la naissance à la démobilisation

Georges Chantraine’s biography of Henri de Lubac should transform

sympathies, able to espouse democratic republicanism rather than

slaughtered. De Lubac’s most serious engagements came in autumn

Archéologie du sujet: I. Naissance du sujet [Archeology of the

According to a popular narrative in the history of ideas, expressed

history of medieval philosophy – believes that Heidegger’s account of

attributivism*. But as de Libera points out, Aristotle, at least as inter-

Jean Duns Scot. La théorie du savoir [John Duns Scotus: Theory

Demange’s aim in this rich book is to examine Scotus’s theory of knowl-

science of theology presupposes the metaphysical proof for God’s exist-

Fruchtbarkeit und Geburt in den Psalmen [Fertility and Birth in

One of the dominant trends in contemporary English-language Barth

magisterial work whose authority is fundamentally beyond question,

more interested in denouncing Barth than understanding him,

Korsch’s reading of Barth is dogmatically oriented: for him, Barth’s

Mönchtum und Protestantismus. Probleme und Wege der Forschung

Mönchtum und Protestantismus. Probleme und Wege der Forschung

Mönchtum und Protestantismus. Probleme und Wege der Forschung

Traditionally, Protestantism has seen monasticism in a very negative

beginnings were laudable, those who attempted it quickly went off

1968), whose writings on monastic themes were written primarily in

Anselm Brumwell OSB

Variations sur la charité [Variations on Charity], Jean-Claude Larchet,

without a radical transformation of one’s innermost being, is always

However, in order to give Christian charity its clearest possible con-

Der Beitrag von Karl Barths trinitarischer Grammatik zur

Ina Mähringer explores how a Trinitarian reading of the biblical

further spells out this fundamental relatedness of God toward Cre-

accordance with a large number of other commentators, she repeat-

Origenes und sein Erbe: Gesammelte Studien [Origen and his

It might seem rash to look for a specialism in the cornucopian work

lacunae in Origen’s representations of the Greek philosophers nor

and by his readiness to improve on the literal sense by recourse to

Saint Augustin et la Bible: Actes du colloque de l’université

Augustine was a professional interpreter and exponent of texts. By his

following on from her essay is an article by Luigi Alici on the relationship

involvement in the Pelagian controversy is inevitably strongly Pauline;

Bernard Green OSB

Atei o Credenti? Filosoﬁa, politica, etica, scienza [Atheists or

cardinals and prominent atheist philosophers. In the past several years,

© 2009 Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

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