Full Text - Studies in Religion/Sciences Religieuses

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through ’ecstasy’ as the transcendence of self. Then, and only then, it is asserted,
man’ partake of the unmixed light’ or enter upon the process of ’divinization’ by
can
union with the divine nature. This is seen as the true meaning of
’metanoia’ and life ’in the Way.’
Throughout, Meyendorff makes a good, scholarly case for his argument that
Byzantine Orthodoxy is an open-ended, humanistic, God-oriented affirmation of
the universal ’natural order’ by means of a dynamic Christian adaptation of Hellenic metaphysics. Yet at the same time he sees that central to everything else in the
Byzantine tradition is the Pauline conception that man-in his present ’normative
state’ in the world-is incomplete, in need of grace or divine help in his attempts to
walk in this ’Way’ of purification and illumination.
Meyendorff stresses that the Byzantine theological tradition-unlike Western
traditions from St. Thomas Aquinas to Jean Paul Sartre-has refused to develop a
doctrine of ’natural man’ or to postulate a ’natural human potential’ apart from the
affirmation of God’s ultimate cosmic plan for the ’divinization’ of man, or his
’hypostatic union’ with God himself in a transfigured creation, ‘a new heaven, and a
new earth.’ This position would claim that a true and adequately humanistic
framework cannot exist in the world in rationalistic, materialistic, or atheistic
existentialistic categories, and by implication it views modern approaches to the
radical secularization of man’s life and institutions as ultimately dehumanizing.
Man needs clear signs of sacred affirmation to find the Way.
It is acknowledged that the Byzantine affirmation of the need for sacred forms
and signs in every area of man’s life in the world has led, in the past, to a number of
problems in Byzantine theocratic states and, contemporarily, within the Byzantine
churches themselves with respect to problems of secularization in society. An
accomplished historian, the author treats the failures of traditional Byzantine and
Russian religious and cultural developments as realistically and frankly as their
contributions.
Like many of the creative efforts of the Russian emigr6 theological community,
this book arises from existential encounter with, and deep intellectual reflection
upon, the issues involved in presenting the ethos and contextual meaning of Eastern
Orthodox thought to Western minds, Christian and secular alike, from which many
of the metaphysical and cultural presuppositions of the classical Hellenic and Slavic
Christian Weltanschauung are often missing.
This book should be extremely stimulating and challenging to those Western
Christian and other religious thinkers who have never before been presented with
models-for-reality or cosmologies to serve as alternatives to their own for the doing
of theology in the twentieth century. Meyendorff has made Byzantine theology
come alive with a vitality and an implicit relevance which the thoughtful reader will
find both exciting and inspiring.
hypostatic
John Rossner
Sir
George Williams Faculty of Arts, Concordia University
The Gospel and the Land:
W. D. Davies
Berkeley,
CA:
University
Early Christianity
and Jewish Territorial Doctrine
of California Press, 1974.
Pp. 541
W. D. Davies’ new book raises an important question which recent scholarship has
neglected. He begins with the well-known fact that the Land of Israel is of central
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importance in the religious thought of the Hebrew Bible and of post-biblical
Judaism. The Land in general, and Jerusalem and the Temple in particular, represent a central concern of covenant theology, both as powerful religious symbols and
in their own concrete reality. Yet this concern was strikingly absent from Christianity almost from its very beginning. How did this come to be?
The neglect of the question is not surprising. As Davies observes, scholarly
studies of Judaism have tended to follow the rubrics natural to the study of
Christianity-theological rubrics such as God, sin, creation, and the like, scriptural
exegesis, the history of liturgy. The very absence of the Land from Christian
concern thus led to scholars’ neglect of it; Jews had no need to defend their
conception against a different Christian one, and Christians had no interest in it at
all. Davies now comes to restore the question to scholarly attention.
Beginning with a review of the pre-Christian sources and the issues they raise,
Davies devotes the bulk of his book to the New Testament itself. He shows that the
New Testament exhibits a variety of responses to the traditional Jewish concern
with the Land. In the gospels these vary from a relatively moderate revision of older
Jewish eschatology in Mark and Matthew (242), through Luke’s continued emphasis on Jerusalem but neglect of the Land as such (a distinction, Davies says, not
possible to a born Jew, 287), to the insistence of the Fourth Gospel that the sancta
of Judaism had been entirely superseded by the new sanctity of the person of Christ
(316, 335). Paul sought to break out of the Law, and should therefore have lost
interest in the Land; he was not, however, fully able to do so. Jesus himself, Davies
finds, had relatively little interest in the question of the Land. We thus see in general
that the early church struggled with this question and experimented with a variety
of answers. Insofar as she eventually came to reject the Land as a central focus of
her own concern, ’she remained true to the intent of her Lord’ (365).
In a pair of appendices, Davies reproduces two essays he had written for other
occasions. One of these concentrates on the shared concerns and origins of Judaism
and Christianity, what he calls their ’mutual dependence’; the other, a treatment of
’Torah and Dogma,’ reflects instead the reality of their having gone separate ways.
Although neither of these directly addresses the explicit concern of the present
volume, they aptly demonstrate how complicated and subtle the relationship between the two religions is. Davies thus seeks in closing to indicate how the present
question can both be so important and yet have been neglected for so long a time.
Davies’ scholarly procedure throughout the book is admirable for its meticulous care. He considers all points of view, all ramifications of the central question.
Any argument, whether favouring or attacking his own view, receives proper
consideration. His conclusions are always modest; he takes care to press his
arguments no further than the evidence he has presented actually allows.
In short, the book raises a hitherto neglected question, carefully examines its
implications, and lays the available relevant evidence before the reader. The range
of New Testament thought on the matter becomes clear, as do the nature and extent
of the forces which drove the early church to repudiate traditional Jewish thought
on this basic question and to seek its own way. This new way led simultaneously to
Rome and to the farthest reaches of the known world.
The virtue of the book, however, is also its downfall. So many opinions are
carefully considered, so many questions carefully raised, that one loses the actual
thread of the argument. Reading the book, one seems simply to keep moving on
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from one thing to the next; it is sometimes difficult to know which theories the
author endorses and which he seeks to reject. The style, moreover, is occasionally
wooden. Davies tends to write inverted sentences which need to be read several
times before they make sense. Finally, there are misprints and errors, some consequential (302, n. 23: ’Jesus’ instead of ’Jews’; 290, n. 6: ’nationalistic’ in place of
’rationalistic’), some only embarrassing (392: Solomon Schechter’s name comes
out wrong). The result is that a book of obvious importance is just not a pleasure to
read. One comes away feeling that the definitive treatment of an important question
is yet to appear.
In the past the author has given us a long series of cogent, important studies.
There is reason to hope that the definitive treatment of this question, when it
comes, will turn out to be from the pen of W. D. Davies himself.
Robert
Goldenberg New York University
Marriage
in XVIIth
Century Catholicism
Charles B. Paris
Recherches, Théologie, 13
Paris: Desclée et Montréal: Bellarmin, 1975. Pp. 208
ans reconnaitront point par point, dans tous les
cat6ch6tiques et hom6litiques du 17e siecle frangais cit6s et etudies par
1’auteur, la th6ologie, la morale, et la spiritualite du mariage et de la vie familiale
qu’on leur a enseignees. Leurs enfants, au contraire, seront initi6s ~ une culture
religieuse qui, ayant marqu6 profond6ment 1’histoire canadienne des trois cents
dernières annees, ne leur semblera pas moins compl6tement 6trang~re, voire bien
6trange. Cette etude arrive done ~ point.
Conduite avec s6rieux et honnetete, elle met ~ la disposition du lecteur nombre
de textes pastoraux situes clairement dans le mouvement de la R6forme catholique.
Ces textes nous renseignent sur les origines souvent contestables de pratiques et de
doctrines devant lesquelles nous nous sentons-et pour cause !-mal a 1’aise: un
fatalisme providentiel qui rend illusoire la libert6 humaine; une absence d6concertante d’inspiration evangelique; une 6thique (kantienne avant la lettre) du « devoir » ; un arsenal d’arguments sociaux et culturels qu’on brandit comme des
pr6ceptes divins; une attitude anxieuse face a une pulsion sexuelle jugee mauvaise
et qui am~ne ~ substituer la continence ~ une impossible vertu de chastet6; une
th6ologie du mariage dont on ne voit plus qu’il est sacrement de la foi; une notion
toute m6caniste de la causalite sacramentaire; un d6nigrement syst6matique de
1’amour « naturel au profit d’un amour pr6tendument
surnaturel »:
une misogynie clericale odieuse; etc. Ces quelques caract6ristiques de la
doctrine du mariage a la suite des directives du Concile de Trente et sous 1’inspiration de 1’Ecole fran~aise ressortent d’autant mieux que I’auteur ne cherche manifestement pas a vilipender 1’oeuvre des R6formateurs catholiques franrais et n’utilise gu6re les textes les plus outranciers. Pourtant le lecteur contemporain ne pourra
qu’etre agace par les traits n6gatifs de cette doctrine du Grand Siecle.
Mais peut-etre n’est-ce IA qu’un manque de perspectives. C’est d’ailleurs le
reproche le plus s6rieux qu’on peut adresser a 1’auteur: celui de n’avoir pas situ6
Les catholiques de plus de quarante
textes
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