Book Reviews

‘WILL THERE BE FREE WILL IN HEAVEN?’ FREEDOM, IMPECCABILITY,

AND BEATITUDE by Simon Francis Gaine OP, T & T Clark, London & New
York, 2003, pp. 142, £25 hbk.

Étienne Gilson says somewhere that, while Idealists talk about philosophy,
Thomist Realists talk about things. Something similar applies to the practitioners
of the sacred science that philosophy serves. While some theologians content
themselves with discussing other theologians, Thomist realists keep their sights
on the rei veritas, the truth of the revealed reality that theology seeks to
understand. The Thomist, too, draws on the work of other divines, especially
the Fathers and Doctors of the Church, for theology, unlike philosophy, argues
ex auctoritate; however, the realist theologian’s chief interest is in the great
things of the Creed – the Trinity, the Incarnation, Redemption, the Church,
the Sacraments, and Everlasting Life – which the authorities of the Tradition
help us to understand.
Fr Simon Gaine OP is a Thomist realist, and so, true to form, he concentrates on
the revealed reality that interests him (the free will of the blessed), and refuses to be
distracted by the fascinations of biography or Dogmengeschichte. The structure of
this book, his first, resembles the ordering of an article in the Summa. It begins with
a statement of the question as it came up on a BBC radio programme just before
Christmas 1999: How can you be free in Heaven, if you can’t sin there? Like a
Schoolman parading the ‘objections’ to the thesis he wants to defend, Gaine goes on
to present two extreme positions, those of the otherwise unidentified G. B. Wall and
J. Donnelly. The former thinks the impeccability of Heaven requires the ‘jettisoning’
of freedom, while the latter wants to secure the freedom of Heaven by allowing the
blessed to sin. Opposed though they are to each other, the arguments of Wall and
Donnelly share a common presupposition: if you can’t sin in Heaven, you’re not free
in Heaven. This ‘either-or’ is at odds with the ‘both-and’ of orthodoxy, for, accord-
ing to Catholic faith, beatitude combines a ‘glorious liberty’ (cf. Rom 8:21) with a
serene incapacity to sin.
In the main part of the book, as Aquinas does in the body of some of the longer
articles (quidam dicunt . . . alii dicunt), Fr Gaine starts by considering various
attempts to harmonize heavenly impeccability with blessed freedom. Suarez seems
to be on the side of the angels, or at least of the Angel of the Schools, by maintaining
that the blessed are intrinsically impeccable: beatitude itself makes them unchange-
able in their rectitude of will. The trouble is that Suarez restricts the freedom of the
blessed to a very narrow range of acts: they love God by necessity, but they do not
love Him by necessity in every way in which He can be loved. Gaine is dissatisfied
with a liberty of glory limited to the dullness of non-obligated acts, and so he asks:
‘Is it possible to construct a theology in which freedom is again accorded a greater
value, but where the Christian orthodoxy of heavenly impeccability is retained?’ (p. 33).
Scotus would answer yes, and so it is to him, the subtle doctor of the will, that Gaine
next turns for enlightenment. If the Spanish Jesuit safeguards impeccability to the
detriment of freedom, the Scottish Franciscan glorifies freedom at the expense of
impeccability. According to Scotus, God removes, by an extrinsic causality, the
proximate power of the blessed for sinning, while leaving intact the remote power.
‘[T]he retention of this remote power does not in any way lessen the happiness of the

# The Dominican Council/Blackwell Publishing Ltd 2005, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden,
MA 02148, USA
246 Book Reviews

blessed, because sin never in fact comes about on account of the divine prevenience’
(p. 68).
The third opinion is that of Ockham, whose voluntarism is more extreme than
that of his Franciscan predecessor. Like Aristotle and Aquinas, Scotus regards the
good as the proper object of the will, but Ockham thinks the will is ‘free to define
the scope of its object, such that it is possible for the will to will evil as such’ (p. 71).
Freedom, for Ockham, is above all the freedom of indifference. What happens,
then, when this naturally freewheeling freedom finds itself in Heaven? Left to itself,
‘to its own nature and freedom’, the will of the blessed would have the power to go
after any object whatever; it could even ‘nill’ God. But the will of the blessed is not
left to itself. God suspends its activity; God Himself becomes the ‘total cause’ of
the beatific act. Ironically, extreme voluntarism ends up, like other species of
extremism, in destroying the very thing it prizes so highly. ‘It seems that the greater
a promoter of the freedom of indifference one is, the more one must either suppress
freedom in this respect, like Ockham, or suppress impeccability, as Donnelly had
done’ (p. 84f).
Having found the first three opinions wanting, Gaine begins his solution with the
help, first, of a fellow Dominican and Thomist, Fr Servais Pinckaers, and, secondly,
of St Thomas himself. Pinckaers contrasts the moral thinking of the Fathers and
St Thomas, which is centred on happiness and the virtues, with the moralities of the
modern age, which are preoccupied with obligation and commandments. Behind
each tradition stands a concept of freedom: the Ockhamist freedom of indifference
is what drives the obligation theories, while ‘freedom for excellence’ (liberte´ de
qualite´) is the inspiration of the moral doctrine of the Fathers and St Thomas.
Whereas the Ockhamists and obligationists feel a tension between natural inclina-
tions and the freedom of indifference, the Fathers and St Thomas make natural
inclinations the root from which the freedom for excellence draws its strength.
‘Freedom is characterized here not by indifference, but by a spontaneous attraction
to all that at least seems true and good. The morality based on this freedom will
thus be one of attraction rather than obligation’ (p. 95). In this perspective, the
ability to sin is accidental to freedom, is indeed a lack of freedom. The closer we
come to God, the less we are inclined to sin, for we begin to share in the freedom of
God Himself.
In the last chapter, drawing explicitly upon St Thomas, Gaine completes his
solution and provides the final answer to the question: ‘There Will Be Free Will in
Heaven’. The freedom of the blessed, which includes their freedom from the ability
to sin, is a participation in the freedom of God. ‘I say that there is free will in
Heaven. It is a more powerful freedom than freedom had on earth, because it is a
more profound sharing in the divine freedom . . . [T]he blessed in Heaven can no
longer sin: their freedom is too perfect for that. It is perfect because they are for ever
united to their ultimate end, and so their free choices will for ever be the more
powerful, because, like God’s, their free acts will flow from the ultimate end now
possessed and from the order of which they never depart, to spread abroad the
goodness and glory of God for all eternity’ (p. 136).
Simon Gaine OP has written a little classic, a model of what speculative
theology should be. In a style reminiscent of the late Herbert McCabe OP, he
writes with simplicity, clarity, and a light touch of humour. He asks a question
about a great revealed mystery and tries to answer it, as the Church and his
order suggests he should, by drawing on the doctrine of St Thomas and the
Thomistic school. ‘Will there be free will in Heaven?’ Yes, as Fr Simon Gaine
has shown so convincingly. ‘Will there be more books from Fr Simon Gaine?’
I sincerely hope so.

JOHN SAWARD

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 Book Reviews 247

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

When I was about eight, I went with some friends to a film called ‘Imitation of life’
in the expectation that it would be about androids. It turned out to be a Lana Turner
weepy about race relations in fifties America. Now I have to review a book called
Alien Sex and it turns out to be a book about the cinema, the body and theology.
Life is disappointing.
Androids and aliens have their place in this book, as the films discussed tend to the
fantastic, to science fiction and the unreal. Nonetheless the discussion is centred on
the human body, and aliens and androids are taken as metaphor for the human body
perceived in a certain way: distorted, infantilised, de-sexed but still human. The
cinema is seen as a way of thinking about that body. That the cinema is a distinct
way of thinking is fundamental to the claims of this book to be more than just
theological ruminations illustrated by various films that the writer has seen.
The cinema is not a work of theology, but our society is still pervaded by the
debris of Christian themes, and sometimes debris can be more startling than the
pristine works they once were. Greek ruins and their damaged statues grip us more
than the buildings might, if they had been continuously maintained to this day, as
indeed some very ancient buildings are in Italy. Yet Christianity cannot be content to
lie in ruins. It reasserts itself and Alien Sex may be seen as a commentary on the
shards of Christianity to be found in many films, from the perspective of a believing
Christian who sees these fragments as themselves indications of the redemption all
seek. This is why, as various grim cinematic scenes are brought to our attention, we
are consoled by considerations of the hope Christian theology offers us. Many
theological writers appear in this book, admirably well summarised and shown as
beacons of light that make theology itself a sort of cinema. The pessimism of the
films about the body highlights, in every sense, the optimism of Christian hope. The
enthusiastic summaries of great Christian writers, from Augustine and Gregory of
Nyssa to von Balthasar, are beautifully done.
Loughlin has criticisms to offer, though. One is a well-worn objection, relevant to
the body, that too many theologians take a male perspective and this affects their
perception of the Trinity. The male perspective is a belief that only the male desires
and loves. Barth and von Balthasar are particularly criticized for this. I think a
response to this could be made: there is, of course, a circularity in any true relation-
ship between man and woman. Of course, both love and are loved, both desire and
are desired, both give and receive. What is different is the entry into this circle. A
man desires to love someone who loves him; a woman desires to be loved by
someone whom she loves. Neither would reasonably want to love without being
loved, or to be loved without loving, but one desire will always have primacy over
the other. When applied to theology it is clear what our perspective is: we seek to be
loved by the divine but we would not seek to be loved by a God who was not lovable.
Without grace we would have no confidence that either is possible.
What is the connection between cinema and the body? On the one hand, the screen
is a sort of body touched by the light of the projector. Yet the point of the cinema is
to forget the screen and to be absorbed by the images. The films that are selected
here are films that make us very aware of the body, but this is because we see the
body subjected to pummellings of various sorts, from ‘Fight Club’ with its brutal
bare fistfights to the symbolic murders of the film ‘Seven’ based on the seven deadly
sins. The cinema is not a natural medium for the body compared to theatre, where
every muscle of the actor can be part of the performance. To make us aware of
bodiliness, the cinema tends to over-compensate. The cinema is more like a dream
than a bodily experience, something internal, and this may affect our thinking.
Redemption is a theme of the book, but the redemption of the body may easily be
seen as an escape from the body. Platonism haunts us in many forms, and outside

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

EUAN MARLEY OP

DISCUSSIONS AND ARGUMENTS ON VARIOUS SUBJECTS by John Henry

Newman, introduction and notes by Gerard Tracey and James Tolhurst,
Gracewing, Leominster & University of Notre Dame Press, Notre Dame IN, 2004,
Pp. xlix + 490, £25.00 hbk.

Discussions and Arguments on Various Subjects, originally published in 1872, is the

seventh volume to be released in The Works of Cardinal Newman: Birmingham
Oratory Millennium Edition. Works by Newman previously re-published in this series
include titles such as The Arians of the Fourth Century and the Church of the Fathers.
Unlike these two particular works, Discussions and Arguments is a collection of
essays developed by Newman over a period of approximately thirty years (March
1836 through June 1866). I would argue that one could read this volume as a
whole or in parts. As a whole, the essays provide insight into how components of
Newman’s thought developed over the course of an important period of his life. In
parts, these essays offer insights into Newman’s thinking on topics ranging from
biblical exegesis to political philosophy. Regardless of how one chooses to read this
text, Discussions and Arguments provides an indispensable view into the thought of
one of the Church’s most significant theological voices.
As a result of the efforts of Gerard Tracey and James Tolhurst, this edition of
Newman’s Discussions and Arguments on Various Subjects comes with an introduc-
tion and notes. Earlier versions published by Longmans Green and B. M. Pickering
lack such resources. Gerard Tracey died suddenly while working on the notes;
however, James Tolhurst, the editor of this series of Newman’s works, completed
the notes and then added the introduction. As significant Newman scholars, Tracey
and Tolhurst’s efforts come together to offer invaluable insights into the significance
of this collection of Newman’s work. For example, in the notes the symbolic nature
of many of Newman’s references is afforded greater clarity. Meanwhile the primary
purpose of the introduction is to offer an understanding of the unique context out of
which each one of these essays emerged. However, one potential weakness of the
introduction is that it fails to include any assessment of the significance of Discus-
sions and Arguments as a whole. As a result, at least one important theme – such as
clerical identity – that runs through this volume of Newman’s work goes under-
evaluated.
Read as a whole, many of the essays in this collection offer insights into Newman’s
understanding of clerical identity and how it relates to his larger view of ecclesiology.
For example, in ‘How to Accomplish It’, Newman, as an Anglican, writes that ‘By
that time we may have buried our temporal guardians: their memories we shall
always revere and bless; but the successors of the Apostles will still have their
work—if the world last so long—a work (may be) of greater peril and hardship,
but of more honour than now’ (p. 24). In ‘An Internal Argument for Christianity’
Newman, now a Roman Catholic, argues that ‘Faith is not simply trust in His
legislation, as the writer says; it is definitely trust in His word, whether that word
be about heavenly things or earthly; whether it is spoken by his own mouth, or
through his ministers’ (p. 395). Over the course of time spanning the development of
these two essays, Newman becomes convinced that the true bearer of apostolic
succession is Rome, not Canterbury. While this theme does not dominate the essays

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in this collection, Newman never strays too far from this concern regardless of the
dominant issue with which he was seeking to develop in a particular essay.
Read in parts, the dominant issues present in these essays range from eschatology
to political theory. For example, Discussions and Arguments not only includes
Newman’s assessment of the relationship shared by utilitarian thought in relation
to the establishment of a reading room or library but also an assessment of the
connections shared by the British Constitution and the presence of British troops in
Crimea. Such efforts by Newman demonstrate the dexterity of his intellectual skill.
Newman was a theologian with deep and abiding interests in the Church. However,
Newman’s understanding of theology as the Church’s language afforded him the
ability to apply this language to a range of tasks and circumstances.
Regardless of how one chooses to read John Henry Newman’s Discussions and
Arguments on Various Subjects, this text proves to be invaluable in terms of under-
standing the breadth and the depth of Newman’s theological skill. As a whole or in
parts, these essays, along with the introduction and the notes, provide a significant
introduction to Newman’s thought that not only Newman scholars but perhaps also
theologians in general will want to consider.

TODD C. REAM

TURNING TOWARDS THE LORD: ORIENTATION IN LITURGICAL PRAYER by

Uwe Michael Lang, Ignatius Press, San Francisco, 2004, Pp. 160, £8.50 pbk.
THE ORGANIC DEVELOPMENT OF THE LITURGY by Alcuin Reid OSB, Saint
Michael’s Abbey Press, 2004, Pp. 336, £20.95 hbk.

Uwe Michael Lang is a young German patristic scholar of enormous promise who,
from a Lutheran background, was received into the Catholic Church while at Oxford
and is now a priest of the London Oratory. In this book he adds his voice – a
considerable one in terms of not only Teutonic erudition but also feeling for the
Liturgy – to the increasing number of those who seek a reconsideration of the hasty
introduction, in the later 1960s, of Eucharistic celebration ‘towards the people’,
versus populum. Theologically speaking, the Eucharistic Oblation is not offered by
the priest to the people. It is offered by the people, through and with the priest, to the
Father by the mediation of Christ, our Great High Priest, in the Holy Spirit. Which
spatial arrangement makes this theological doctrine more visible – celebration versus
populum or celebration versus apsidem, where celebrant and assembly face together in
the same direction? One might well reply that to have asked this question is already
to have answered it, and nothing more remains to be said.
Lang, however, shows that much more can be said, and in the first instance about
the history of liturgical orientation in the ancient Church, to which often ill-informed
reference was made in the almost over-night revolution of chipping, hacking and
joinery. A critical analysis of copious patristic materials shows that sacred direction –
specifically, to the East – was the most important spatial consideration in early
Christian prayer. Its significance was primarily eschatological (the East was the
direction of the Christ of the Parousia, cf. especially Mt 24:27 and 30) and, naturally,
it applied to all the faithful, including their ministers. Now, where the archaeological
evidence is concerned, it must be noted that the great majority of ancient churches
have an oriental apse. Granted that the altar was the most honoured object in such
buildings, the only safe inference is, accordingly, that the celebrant stood at the
people’s side, facing East, for the Anaphora. In the minority of buildings (notably at
Rome and in North Africa) that have, by contrast, an oriented entrance, the position
is less clear. Lang, however, argues persuasively – if with a degree of tentativeness –
that the celebrant in such a case prayed facing the doors (and thus the people) but

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did so with hands and eyes alike raised to the ceiling of the apse or arch, where the
decorative schemes of early Christian art are focussed. In any case, all the faithful are
likely to have prayed with arms and faces upward turned – and not in eyeball-to-
eyeball contact with the sacred ministers. Lang’s conclusion is inevitable. ‘The
celebratio versus populum in the modern sense was unknown to Christian antiquity,
and it would be anachronistic to see the Eucharistic liturgy in the early Roman
basilica as its prototype’.
Even more anachronistic is the notion that the celebrant when facing the people
mimes the role of Jesus at the Last Supper. In late antiquity, the seat of honour at
table was not placed centrally but on the far right. And in any case what the Lord
commanded to be enacted ‘in memory of me’ was not the Jewish meal as such but the
new reality of the Sacrament of the Oblation he was instituting.
The remainder of Lang’s study, theological and anthropological in character,
explains how, even when sacred direction to the geographical east has been lost in
later church building (as was the case in the West by the end of the Middle Ages), the
principle of common direction needs to retain its importance. A surprisingly wide
range of commentators, Protestant as well as Catholic, argue convergently in this
regard. In the modern cultural conjecture, celebration versus populum can constitute
a dangerous symbolic reversal where the gathered church considers primarily itself as
community – and not the triune Lord at the end of history towards whom it is
progressing.
The introductory endorsement of Lang’s book by Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger
reports that ‘among the faithful there is an increasing sense of the problems inherent
in an arrangement that hardly allows the liturgy to be open to the things that are
above and to the world to come’. Anyone who cares for the full dimension of the
Church’s worship can only hope this estimate is correct. Meanwhile, it would be
useful to have from some quarter an essay on the relation between the common
orientation of priest and people on the one hand, and lively consciousness of
Eucharistic sacrifice on the other. As Lang remarks, it is surely intuitive that between
the two some connexion exists, and this receives negative corroboration in the
diminution of the sense of oblation pari passu with the extension of versus populum
celebration. Such a book, or substantial article, would need to combine a phenom-
enological study of the symbolics of orientation with a good grasp of the theology of
the Mass as sacrifice. This is a challenge someone suitably qualified ought as a
matter of urgency to take up.
Of course the issue of liturgical direction is only one of a number of issues
pertinent to the continuity of the worshipping tradition in the Latin Church. In
The Organic Development of the Liturgy, Dom Alcuin Reid, monk of Farnborough,
enables us to situate Lang’s chosen topic in a wider context. Alcuin Reid is also a
young scholar, and more specifically an historian of the modern development of the
Roman rite. His book began life as a doctoral thesis at King’s College, London, but
entering into the swim of its argument is a good deal more exhilarating than most
experiences of ‘doctoralese’. The book starts slowly, with a necessarily selective
overview of the development of the Roman rite up to the beginning of the 20th
Century. The emphasis lies on discerning principles at work not only in the main-
stream of that development but also in proposals to channel or divert it, whether
these emanate from popes, bishops or (after that breed arose in the 17th century)
professional liturgists. Though much of this material is readily available elsewhere,
something is new. And that is the quality of the intelligence brought to bear in an
attempt to discern criteria for judging the homogeneity of organic development. Not
only is such development the de facto hallmark of the worshipping life of Western
and Eastern Christendom over time. A Catholic view of the economy of the Spirit in
the Church requires from us de iure commitment to the principles involved just as it
does – by universal consent – in the analogous case of the providential development
of doctrine.

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 Book Reviews 251

For it is the remaining two chapters of this study which, along with its copious
bibliography, make it an invaluable guide to its sources. Here we have a richly
documented overview of the thought of the major (and some minor) figures of the
Liturgical Movement, along with an account of the principal liturgical Congresses
and Roman commissions that sought to give that thought practical effect. Reid’s
provision of copious citations (in English in the body of the text, with original
language versions in footnotes), together with his own analytic summaries, enable
us to see what is going on. His research confirms the view of those who have
maintained that the predominant orientation of the Liturgical Movement shifted
seismically in the later 1940s. In its earlier phase the Liturgical Movement had
sought above all the engaged participation of the faithful in the received Liturgy,
for enhanced fruit-bearing in life. In its later phase, the Movement became revision-
ist; not in the benign sense of seeking occasional judicious pruning and careful
augmentation of the rites, but in a sense far more radical that placed homogeneous
development at risk. ‘Organic development can include a proportionate measure of
simplification and change’: this, and not the root-and-branch measures of the post-
Conciliar Consilium, is all the Second Vatican Council mandated. But by 1969 many
liturgists were minded to find ‘the quickest and easiest route to liturgical participa-
tion, regardless of objective liturgical tradition’. The periti who worked to this end
had two supreme instruments at their disposal: ‘selective scholarly antiquarianism’
and Ultramontanism. Their combination was all too effective. Mining the work of
the liturgical scholars, they lit the fuse at the desk of the Pope.
Reid makes the valid point that the Liturgy is not a fit subject for reconstruction
precisely because it is not a suitable target for deconstruction. In matters of defining
doctrine we are all, since Vatican I, Ultramontanes now. But the charism of infall-
ibility does not underwrite prudential decisions in questions of the Liturgy, while the
pastoral office of the Pope is concerned with, above all, the guardianship of the rites,
not their manipulation.
As those responsible for the re-translation of the Roman Missal into English are
discovering, dumbing down may take generation change to clear up. Meanwhile, we
still await the actual ‘organic’ reform the Council Fathers requested.

AIDAN NICHOLS OP

PRAYER by Marcel Mauss edited by W.S.F. Pickering, translated by Susan

Leslie, Durkheim Press/Berghahn Books, Oxford, 2003, Pp. 158, £17.00 pbk.

A doctoral thesis, never completed, whose opening sections were privately printed
(1909) in six copies, might hardly warrant a review. Yet occasionally heroic failures
in scholarship are more important than successes, and Mauss’s effort to realise a
purely sociological account of prayer is a case in point. As Durkheim’s nephew and
heir to his intellectual estate, and as author of the famous The Gift, Mauss’s foray
into the issue of prayer, though inchoate, is as unexpected as it is significant. In
keeping with other productions from the British Centre for Durkheimian Studies at
Oxford, Pickering has produced a highly scholarly and indispensable volume on
Mauss on prayer. Impeccably translated, with an array of footnotes and with
some concluding reflections on the place of the thesis in anthropology by Howard
Murphy, this will be the standard reference for Mauss on the topic of prayer.
Divided into two sections, the first on characterizing prayer in sociological terms
is of far greater interest than the second, on efforts to locate the topic in Australian
ethnography. Prayer might seem the sole property of religion and theology, an act
far beyond the sociological pale. The value of this work is to remind sociologists
that prayer is also an issue of vital importance in the sociology of religion. Apart

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from Mauss, the only other major sociologist to deal with prayer was Georg
Simmel, and his approach is entirely different from that of Mauss: for Simmel,
prayer was an inward act, a spiritual action that required an external manifestation
in and through some social form that gave it a characterizing shape; by contrast,
Mauss approached prayer in purely external social terms, in ways that are confined
to religion and are rendered devoid of theological implication. Uncle Emile’s The
Elementary Forms of the Religious Life casts a long shadow over Mauss’s approach
to prayer. As an act embodied in rite, prayer is directed towards the sacred, what is
hallowed and marked off from the profane. In this realm, the social so deified rules
all, hears all and answers all. What Mauss and Durkheim anticipate are the self-
justifying forms religion and spirituality sometimes currently take in New Age
forms. Far from being irrelevant, ritual and prayer fulfil decidedly important
functions indispensable for the needs of solidarity and harmony. Their current
re-inventions in forms removed from the authority of institutional religion seem
to affirm their purely sociological defence whose basis can be traced back to
Durkheim and Mauss.
Mauss was concerned to wrest prayer from Christianity. By tracing prayer
back to its most elementary form, Mauss hoped to find its factual basis, but also
the way in which reason could be applied to trace its evolutionary form in
arrangements that moved from the mechanical to the organic. In detaching
prayer from an issue of subjective preference, Mauss hoped to display its
power in objectified terms in ways that would affirm its ubiquity but also its
indispensable significance in petitionary rites. Mauss would find agreement with
theologians that nobody prays alone (p. 33). In form and ritual practice, prayer
can be linked back to a ritual milieu, and to that degree the act has an inherited
social dimension. In that context, prayer takes on a property of fact, one that
imposes a constraint over the individual, and it is this power that forms the basis
of Mauss’s purely sociological characterization. It is not the truth or falsity of
the act of prayer that matters, but rather its efficacious functions to be found by
reference to the social milieu.
The indispensable link between prayer and the social should stimulate
theologians to ponder this work carefully. Although the linkage between prayer
and petition is made, it is not clear from this purely sociological approach why
anybody should feel the need to pray. There is no emotion, no spirituality, no self,
and no urge to pray in this account. This means that what is apparent as a
sociological function is decidedly unapparent when reduced to the individual.
Although Mauss claims to provide an account devoid of reference to Christian
understandings, there is a decidedly sacramental property running through the
account. This arises in the link made between act and efficacy, where acting in
the direction of the sacred effects changes amongst those who pray (pp. 54–7).
Teleology has always been the weak strand of functionalism. Is the minded purpose
of prayer to be found in the evolutionary basis of the act, where reason and fact
regulate characterizations, or might there be a figure lurking outside these
processes who is transcendent, receiving and controlling? In the end, attitudes to
the outcome of prayer and its domain purposes defeat Mauss. These difficulties
emerge in his efforts to secure an analytical distinction between magic and religion.
As Murphy indicates, incantation and prayer become confused in ways that
muddle distinctions between the individual and the collective (p. 146.)
Although a fragment of what might have been uncovered, Mauss’s famous
sociological excursion into the issue of prayer should secure the concept a place in
the sociology of religion. Sociology has its own priesthood and Mauss looms as too
large a figure to ignore what he consecrates as fit for sociological deliberation.

KIERAN FLANAGAN

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AQUINAS IN DIALOGUE: THOMAS FOR THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY

edited by Jim Fodor and Frederick Christian Bauerschmidt, Blackwell Publishing,
Malden (USA), Victoria (Australia) and Oxford, 2004, Pp. ix + 185, £19.99 pbk.

This is a new volume in the series Directions in Modern Theology. It comprises eight
essays by different authors, Catholics and others. Each essay discusses a particular
‘world-view’, ranging from Eastern Orthodoxy to modern nihilism, and compares
some aspect of the world-view with some part of the thought of St Thomas Aquinas.
The first essay, written from a Lutheran perspective, considers St Thomas’s notion of
‘merit.’ Michael Root notes that that the greatest stumbling block a Lutheran finds in
Catholicism is the doctrine defined by Trent that the justified man merits eternal life. He
praises St Thomas for discussing merit in the context of God’s ordaining all creatures to
their proper end. He also notes that Lutheran theologians are willing to consider eternal
life a reward in the sense of a compensation for sufferings. Despite this promising start,
Root concludes by suggesting that the term ‘merit’ causes more problems than it solves.
An essay on Eastern Orthodoxy considers the allegation that the economy of
salvation would be no different, for St Thomas, if God were not the Holy Trinity.
Bruce Marshall, writing from a Methodist university, argues on the contrary that
Aquinas’s notion of created grace does not exclude a ‘Trinitarian’ account of man’s
sanctification. He also suggests that St Thomas’s account of the relation between the
processions and missions of the divine persons is more satisfactory than that of
contemporary Orthodox theologians.
‘Thomas Aquinas and Judaism’ is an attempt by two Dutch Catholic theologians
to recruit the Angelic Doctor for the fashionable view that the Mosaic covenant is
still in force. They point out that St Thomas attributed a greater efficacy to circum-
cision than did Robert Kilwardby, but ignore the explicit statement in the Summa
Theologiæ about the cessation of the ceremonial precepts (Ia2æ Q.103). Their sugges-
tion that the co-existence of the divine and human natures in our Lord might be a
good analogy for the co-existence of the Church and Judaism seems to this reviewer
quite fantastic.
‘Thomas Aquinas and Islam’, by Fr David Burrell CSC is not really about Islam,
but about the Liber de Causis. He argues that Proclus’s work, as recast by an
anonymous Muslim writer, gave St Thomas a conception of causality not available
in Aristotle, and which was needed in order to speak accurately about God as
Creator. He considers that one can thus describe St Thomas’s synthesis as ‘an
interfaith achievement’ (p. 83). Astonishingly for a Catholic religious, Fr Burrell
apparently considers the Koran to have been divinely revealed (p. 76).
Paul Williams’s essay, ‘Aquinas meets the Buddhists’, is surely the most valuable
in the book. Williams examines the central doctrinal texts of Mahayana Buddhism
and shows that they are not, as is sometimes claimed, consonant with apophatic
theology, but purely and simply atheistic. He argues that the Buddhist search for
meaning is incomplete, since it fails to pose the question, ‘Why is there something
rather than nothing?’ From this it also follows that the Christian-Buddhist disagree-
ment over salvation is ‘radical to the core’ (p. 116). However Williams’s suggestion
that the Christian can only engage in dialogue with Buddhists by acknowledging that
he may be wrong about the existence of God would make such dialogue incom-
patible with Vatican I.
Fr Fergus Kerr examines the interaction between Thomism and modern analytic
philosophy. He highlights the importance of Franz Brentano, a ‘zealous Thomist’
whose work on intentionality had a crucial effect on twentieth-century Anglo-
American philosophy. Elizabeth Anscombe and Philippa Foot are also discussed
as mediating an Aristotelian-Thomist moral tradition to the otherwise largely
consequentialist world of Oxford moral philosophy. However, Fr Kerr also indicates
that not all students of St Thomas are convinced by the use that more ‘mainstream’
philosophers make of his writings.

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Denys Turner’s article on atheism and idolatry argues that St Thomas’s descrip-
tion of God as ipsum esse subsistens allows him to avoid both these extremes. He also
shows convincingly that the ‘Five Ways’ are intended to be rigorous proofs of God’s
existence. However his exposition of St Thomas’s discussion of idolatry seems
mistaken: St Thomas does not say that the Catholic and the idolater are using the
word ‘God’ analogously, but that the Catholic is when he uses this word to refer
both to the true God and to an idol.
A final article on Flannery O’Connor aims to show the Thomist, or, at any rate,
Catholic, inspiration of her stories. Frederick Bauerschmidt argues that the shocking
nature of her writings was intended not to encourage nihilism, but to make her
readers feel the inadequacy of a life without divine grace.
This eclectic volume will not really serve as an introduction to St Thomas, but will
no doubt be of interest to those who are already interested in the various subjects
discussed.

THOMAS CREAN OP

A CHRISTIAN THEOLOGY OF PLACE by John Inge, Ashgate, Aldershot,

2003, Pp. 161, £15.99 pbk.

The author makes his position clear. ‘Our existence as embodied beings means that
place is as necessary to us as the air we breathe but, more than that, it seems to me
that our human experience is shaped by place’ (p. ix). Yet from Aristotle onwards,
place has not been an important category for Western thought. More contemporary
philosophical reflection is devoted to space, in its abstract generality, than to place in
its contemporary particularity. It is a pity that consideration of place has not had the
benefit of the abundant modern thought on corporeity: it shows little interest in this
link between the body and its place in space.
Moreover, modern society is undergoing change in its relationship to place:
contemporary humanity is structured by mobility, communication technology, glob-
alisation and relocation, not to mention migrants and refugees. These elements do
not cut us off from the places we belong to, but make us inhabit them differently.
There too, according to Inge, philosophy is largely absent. In Christian thought, we
see the same lack of interest: theological tradition, both historically and today, seems
to repeat this deficiency. This weakness is all the more harmful when we observe that
in the Bible, by contrast, there is keen interest in places and a rich crop of references.
Inge, indeed, urges us to read the Old Testament as the narrative of a three-way
interaction between God, a people and a place. It is the story of a land, promised,
hoped-for, inhabited, lost and found (and which was to be lost again, outside
Scripture, for twenty centuries). Traces remain of this story in Christian life. For
instance, the Exile: this was God’s means of destroying perverse forms of attachment
of the people to their place, by deporting them elsewhere; this metaphor of relocation
endures in Christian spirituality, as the Salve Regina bears witness. Inge says that
‘for Jews it is as if Yahweh himself has an address on earth’ (p. 45). The same does
not seem to be true of Christians. Their relationship to God is no longer channeled
through a land. It even seems unduly spiritualised in Jewish eyes. Indeed St Paul in
his epistles gives no space to places (Acts is quite different in this respect). For St
John, God’s place on earth becomes a person, the Word made flesh, in whom the
meeting with man occurs. But in spite of this ‘Christification’ every meeting, having a
sacramental quality, is a human reality and thus situated in space. Eschatology too
gives value to places: Jesus tells us that he is ‘going to prepare a place for us’ (Jn
14:2), while the Apocalypse sings of the heavenly Jerusalem, the place where all the
elect will come together.

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Theologians may have paid little attention to these aspects of revelation, but the
practices of the faithful were certainly different. Early on, certain places were felt to
be significant, and Catholicism especially developed attention to sacred places by
means of shrines and pilgrimages. The Reformation, on the other hand, distanced
itself from them, in its attempt to destroy particular features not only of race but also
of place. Even so, Inge makes a plea for the rediscovery of the importance of our
stone churches, as anchor-points for the faith of the laity and signs, if they are alive,
for a society that longs for points of reference.
Thus, this book contains many original insights. It is not convincing when it
claims that no attention has been paid to places in Western thought. There is plenty
of philosophical reflection on the subject, for example Gaston Bachelard, The
Poetics of Space deserves more than a passing mention. The contribution of
human sciences is also not given its due. Another example: the discussion of space
in Peter Brown’s book The Cult of the Saints: Its Rise and Function in Latin
Christianity (which is cited) has superb analyses of the development of Christianity
in the West as if in ‘pools’ around the tombs of saints. Maurice Halbwachs’s
important book, La Topographie Le´gendaire des Evangiles en Terre Sainte would
have provided useful distinctions between real places and imaginary places.
Yet one hesitates to mention other works, for Inge’s book comes across to a large
extent as a multiplication of references to authors, almost always ‘relocated’ out of
all context, from whom he borrows an idea or quotation before passing on to
another. This makes reading him difficult. Perhaps the subject is, all things consid-
ered, less neglected than Inge says, but what we need is a more synthetic reflection.
This book has the merit of preparing the way for such an undertaking in the future.

ANTOINE LION OP

KIERKEGAARD’S ETHIC OF LOVE: Divine Commands and Moral Obligations by

C. Stephen Evans, Oxford University Press, Oxford, Pp. ix + 366, £55.00 hardback.

Recently, as the dust cover of this book reminds us, Oxford University Press has
published a handful of remarkable books about Kierkegaard: by M. Jamie Ferreira,
David R. Law, Stephen Mulhall, Murray Rae and Anthony Rudd, to which this
makes a fine addition. Professor of philosophy at Baylor University, Waco, Texas, a
Baptist foundation dating back to 1845, the author has published about fifteen
books, including The Historical Christ and the Jesus of Faith: The Incarnational
Narrative as History (Oxford University Press, 1996) and Faith Beyond Reason
(Edinburgh University Press, 1998). As regards Kierkegaard, besides his book
Passionate Reason: Making Sense of Kierkegaard’s Philosophical Fragments
(Indiana University Press, 1992), Professor Evans served as Curator of the Howard
and Edna Hong Kierkegaard Library, while at St Olaf College, Northfield, Minnesota.
Obviously, the primary readership for this book is scholars who are interested in
Kierkegaard. The thesis for them is that they have not paid enough heed to the place
the related role of divine command and divine authority play in Kierkegaard’s work.
God’s commands should be obeyed, on this account, not because of fear of divine
punishment, but out of love and gratitude for the good that God has bestowed on
human beings by creating them and giving them eternal life with God as their
destiny. The relation human beings have with God makes possible this ultimate
human good, thus creating those unique obligations we call moral.
The other audience, as Evans hopes, is philosophers and theologians interested in
divine command theories of ethics. Classically, the discussion is traced back to
Plato’s dialogue Euthyphro: ‘Do the gods love holiness because it is holy, or is it
holy because they love it?’ Does God will the good because it is good, or is it good

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because God wills it? The fear that the latter alternative arouses is that morality
becomes quite arbitrary: God could change the rules overnight. This is particularly
objectionable for followers of Thomas Aquinas, who keeps insisting that God acts
towards creatures in accordance with a wisdom that is not totally beyond their
capacity to understand. The objection leveled against them, on the other hand, is
that they derive a naturalistic humanism from Aquinas, which owes almost every-
thing to Aristotle and leaves little space for God, let alone for the Gospel.
Naturalistic versions of Aristotelian ethics, as Evans notes at the outset, are well
represented in current Anglo-American debates. He instances the work of Martha
Craven Nussbaum; he might have mentioned Philippa Foot.
He cites Philip Quinn’s objection, from a Christian perspective, that Aristotle’s
optimistic humanism seems worlds apart from ‘the grim realities of the Christian
drama of sin and salvation’. Nevertheless, Evans contends, it is not so difficult to
appreciate the affinity, in Aquinas, between Aristotelian and Christian positions. For
Aquinas, God created human beings with a particular nature, with a distinctive set
of capacities, with a specific idea of what they should be. What he calls Aquinas’s
theory of human nature does not ignore the role of divine commands: on the
contrary, human nature is grounded in God’s creative intentions for our moral
development.
Far from being on opposite sides of the debate, as would commonly be
assumed, Kierkegaard and Thomas Aquinas turn out, if Evans is right, to maintain ‘deeply
humanistic’ divine command theories: God’s commands are directed to human flourishing,
leading to happiness, by way of an obedience which involves self denial – and which
is anything but the egotistically motivated hedonism that previous generations of
philosophers feared in Aristotle.
Finally, in three very fine chapters, Evans shows the advantages of this version of
Kierkegaardian ethics over the current rivals: evolutionary naturalism, social con-
tract theories, and moral relativism.

FERGUS KERR OP

# The Dominican Council 2005