Friends of God and Prophets
Imbelli, Robert P.
knew that he would be asked for his reaction. In the event he referred to Matthew 25:34, but what was widely quoted and evoked a political storm was his simple statement: "I will not turn my...
...His title tells us that he dismisses literary de-constructionwthis book aims to "see Hopkins plain...
...Though Johnson admits that "boundaries are not absolute" here (and even in her preferred model she finds place for "paradigmatic figures"), she holds that the patterns disclose real attitudes and options with significantly different consequences...
...A CATHOLIC WORK Robert P. Imbelli lizabeth Johnson's new book (in many ways a sequel to her influential She Who Is) explores a crucial component of the Catholic vision: the Communion of Saints...
...Acheson's statement on Hiss was politically disastrous for the president as well as for himself and reduced his effectiveness as secretary of state...
...Whether or not the reality of the communio sanctorum has been so neglected in theology as to merit her description of it as "a sleeping symbol," there is no doubt but that its creative reappropriation is desirable, indeed imperative in a culture often marked more by fragmentation and disconnection than communion...
...The resultant doctrine of God resembles more an elaborated pneumatology than _9 Theological and biblical studies in context _9 Located in Jerusalem _9 Excellent facilities in scenic location _9 International, ecumenical, interre]igioos studies _9 Courses and field trips _9 Worship and daily common prayer Dates fur Programs of Continuing Education and Spiritual Renewal: _9 January 12 through April 8, 1999 _9 May 26 through June 24, 1999 _9 June 29 through July 28, 1999 _9 September 7 throuoh Oocumbor 2, 1999 _9 December 14, 1999 through January 11, 2000 _9 January 18 through AprO 12, 2000 _9 April 14 through May 12, 2000 _9 June 2 through July 1, 2000 _9 July 4 through August.I, 2000 _9 September 12 through December 7, 2000 _9 December 18, 2000 through January 11, 2001 For information and an application: Rector Tantur Ecumenical Institute for Theological Studies P.O...
...However hesitantly and humbly, however analogically and poetically, no theologian can fail, finally, to weave a doctrine of God...
...Then Johnson's depiction of the "prayer of lament" will be fully Catholic and inclusive: "[Lament] calls us out of passivity into active engagement against all premature death caused by human beings...
...Following a talented theologian in the skillful exercise of her craft generates genuine excitement...
...And Johnson is skilled, both in the architectonic sweep of her work and in her careful attention to detail...
...SHAKING OUT THE FOIL Edward T. Wheeler m e have to give thanks to any writer who lets us read anew familiar poems and so to Justus George Lawler gratias agamus...
...Let me probe the issue from another perspective...
...Professedly "feminist" in perspective and sensibility, Johnson has also clearly apprenticed in the school of Rahner whose influence is pervasive...
...Johnson's inclusive communion of holy ones live and move and have their being in the Mystery of God whose Name is "Holy Wisdom," life-gixdng "Spirit-Sophia...
...Particularly informative are his comparisons of Hopkins to Newman and Tennyson, which reveal a man whose supposed idiosyncrasies come out of a religious and literary tradition many of his critics simply know nothing about...
...she alone lends God a "face...
...Civil wars in different countries demand our attention, and modem technology has magnified the threat of terrorism...
...in this book there is total silence concerning the spiritual blight of abortion...
...Feminist insights and scholarship help propel this expansion toward greater inclusivity and equality...
...Friends of God and prophets: neighbors and nourishers, resisters and survivors, distilling Wisdom from the daily...
...A page or two of that study reappears verbatim in the work under review...
...An unanticipated outcome of Johnson's research was to identify two patterns of relating to those acknowledged as holy ones in the memory and practice of the community...
...In the former, recovered by Vatican II, emphasis lies on the equal baptismal dignity of the entire people of God and the universal call to holiness...
...in a book that rises to passionate eloquence regarding the bond between generations and that summons us to nurture companionship in memory and hope...
...As the United States tentatively makes its way in the post-cold war world, many of the institutions for which Acheson is responsible are still in place but are no longer adequate to present needs...
...The second paradigm, which gradually displaces the earlier one, she terms the "patrons/petitioners" paradigm, whose thrust is hierarchical and patriarchal...
...Box 18556 Jerusalem 91194 ISRAEL Telephone: (972) 2-6760-911 Fax: (972) 2-8760-914 E-mail: tantur@ netvision.net.il Commonweal 2 5 October 23, 1998 the "three-personed" God of trinitarian tradition...
...Lawler wishes to dispel an "utterly dubious and tendentious theory" that Hopkins had strong homosexual desires for an extravagant AngloCatholic youth, Digby Macworth Dolben, and that the early poems record both a sexual encounter and a deep sense of loss at Dolben's accidental death...
...After destroying the lunacies of the contemporary criticism, Lawler goes on to attempt a rescue of Hopkins from one of his most recent biographers, Robert Bernard Martin (Gerard Manley Hopkins: A Very Private Life...
...Recovering the memory of victims of oppression, rectifying the distortions of the narrative of women's leadership in the early Christian communities, and rediscovering the subversive tenor of the virgin martyrs' refusal of patriarchal domination, together serve to promote in the present "the coming into being of suppressed selves, newly energized with the fire of the Spirit to bless, to work for justice, to follow Christ by forging new paths of discipleship...
...In the latter, the unique, often thaumaturgical power of those elevated to sainthood relegates the petitioner/client to a subservient and dependent posture...
...Surely a comprehensive discernment of the Communion of Saints needs to be extended to embrace the unborn...
...In political, economic, and military terms the United States is, in this new world, the strongest country there is...
...It is the character of God as Spirit-Sophia which braids this new book on the Communion of Saints so tightly to the perspective upon God spun out at length in She Who Is...
...The book delights as much for its intellectual play of ideas as for its sensuous, if at times repetitive, rhetorical display...
...The doctrine of God reflected in the book's radiant celebration of the Communion of Saints strikes me as a peculiarly undifferentiated one...
...Finally, and most pressingly, despite Johnson's endeavor to establish a trinitarian pattern in her approach to God, does the doctrine of the Trinity truly receive its due...
...Acheson himself believed strongly that "What may be quite proper and moral for a private citizen...often, and rightly, is condemned if done when he assumes legislative or executive powers of government...
...For what is ultimately at stake and spiritually required today is, in the words of Simone Weil, "the saintliness demanded by the present moment, a new saintliness," whose manner may be its leavening fidelity in ordinary life and whose heroism may lie in its patient waiting for God even in the darkness of God's absence...
...It has opportunities and obligations commensurate with its great strength...
...The very title of her book comes from the Old Testament Book of Wisdom which confesses that "in every generation Wisdom pass,q TANTUR ECUMENICAL INSTITUTE FORTHEOLOGICAL STUDIES Founded hy the University of Notre Dame at the ra#uest at Pope Paul u Ecumenical Program of Continuing Education and Spiritual Renewal for Clergy, Lay Ministers and Teachers es into holy souls and makes them friends of God and prophets...
...God appears as Creator Spirit, as Spirit-Sophia, as indwelling Spirit...
...Commonweal ai 4 October23, 1998 apathy and sin...
...Is the biblical foundation for this perspective, relying so heavily upon the Wisdom literature, sufficiently broad and deep...
...Lawler's polyglot style he often uses Latin, German, and French-shows a concern for the liturgical aspects of Hopkins's world and makes a Latin response almost obligatory...
...Asia plays a greater part in an increasingly interdependent global economy and affects our own...
...It weds passion, piety, and conceptual clarity in a way that has become recognizably "Johnsonian...
...And she insists that only the companionship-of-friends pattern is capable of renewing and releasing the power latent in the Communion of Saints symbol...
...But "Sophia" alone bears the entire weight of personality in God...
...Johnson posits, in keeping with the Catholic tradition, the hope of an ultimate personal and communal fulfillment, beyond all imagining: a communion of persons transformed in the "Incomprehensible Mystery" of God...
...All this said, Hopkins Re-Constructed Robert P. Imbelli, a priest of the Archdiocese of New York, teaches theology at Boston College...
...Commonweal 2 6 October 23, 1998...
...Hopkins Re-Constructed requires that readers be familiar with the critical literature and with Martin's biography...
...Hopkins was neither an eccentric nor an anomaly for his ~rne, Lawler argues...
...Today's Russia is a threat principally to itself, China remains a tyranny but is much stronger...
...Doing so, she draws inspiration from the moving conclusion of George Eliot's Middlemarch: "...and that things are not so ill with you and with me as they might have been is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs...
...Indeed, Lawler offers a blistering dismissal of a great deal of the criticism written on Hopkins in the last twenty-five years...
...Chace terms this an act of Christian charity and says it may have marked Acheson's finest hour...
...At other times Acheson acted in political terms as a realist and, as Chace writes, was "relentlessly pragmatic...
...The work is also Catholic, corporate and communal, in vision and discernment...
...In the event he referred to Matthew 25:34, but what was widely quoted and evoked a political storm was his simple statement: "I will not turn my back on Alger Hiss...
...The total absence of "Father" from this otherwise very catholic book more than disappoints...
...The following quote may serve to recapitulate that vision: "In the world of grace as in nature, everyone depends on everyone else, and the courage, witness, and love of one person affects the whole body, as indeed does everyone's James Finn, formerly a Commonweal editor, is president of the Pueblo Institute...
...In a book so rightly reverential toward the relations of life, so discerning regarding the contemporary threats to human solidarity and the spiritual peril of ruptured connections...
...A further unaccountable absence needs to be noted...
...But, in them, such awed "agnosticism" about God's true nature is still situated within the doxological context of the revealed Name of God in whom the whole Communion of Saints is baptized: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit...
...Consider: Acheson was a close friend of Hiss's brother Donald but not of Alger, and he personally believed that Hiss's testimony "did not add up...
...But even that invitation has to have its own caveat: his critical analysis uses a methodology he developed in an earlier work, Celestial Pantomime, twenty years old but reissued recently in a revised edition...
...Christian charity--if, indeed, it was that--does not commend such political imprudence...
...Acheson forces one to conclude that we would be fortunate indeed if, thus historically challenged, we could produce leaders with the competence and character of Harry Truman and Dean Acheson...
...I find this at least questionable...
...In her discussion of the Christian hope for an ultimate destiny with God beyond history, Johnson gently distances herself from Rosemary Reuther's immanentist eschatology of the self-effacing abandonment of personal being into the great "Matrix of life...
...Lawler even advises anyone not interested in his criticism of the critics to skip the first two chapters and go right to the reading of the poems...
...it risks countenancing a less than trinitarian, ultimately impersonal, vision and prayer...
...The ideal Hopkins reader would obviously be Catholic and have spent at least a year in a Jesuit novitiate...
...Does a Wisdom reflection, tied so closely to a theology of creation, offer the resources required to do justice to the full biblical witness regarding human sinfulness (attributed not merely to pitiable foolishness, but to demonic malice), and regarding the transformative newness, the sheer grace and cost of redemption...
...In the new situation posed by postmodernity, "religious attention," Johnson suggests, "shifts away from miraculous deeds that defy the laws of nature to deeds of friendship and prophecy that defy the weight of systemic power and privilege...
...But this also raises critical questions...
...She calls the first the "companionship of friends" paradigm and finds it to be an egalitarian approach to the remembered cloud of witnesses who serve the community as inspiration and encouragement on its own journey of faith...
...Rooted in the distinctively Catholic symbol of the Communion of Saints, Johnson aims to amplify the symbol's scope, extending it in ways that are explicitly egalitarian, ecumenical, and even ecological...
...The Soviet empire is no more and socialism as an ideology has been discredited...
...Friends of God and Prophets is just such a faith-filled and critical reappropriation that seeks to disclose the symboI's "liberating meaning for today...
...The work is Catholic in method: beginning with a first part that "frames the question" and probes the contemporary context, it proceeds to a second part that consults the "living tradition," biblical and patristic, conciliar and papal, before attempting its own systematic synthesis in part three...
...Now such an appeal to the Incomprehensibility of God, beyond all telling, can rightly claim warrant in the Great Tradition from Gregory of Nyssa through Thomas Aquinas to Karl Rahner...
Vol. 125 • October 1998 • No. 18
