Religious booknotes
Cunningham, Lawrence S.
RELIGIOUS BOOKNOTES The human & the holy Lawrence S. Cunningham Heiko Oberman, emeritus of Tubingen and Har-vard, has been the preem-inent Reformation schol-ar of this generation. It was Oberman...
...Similarly, mystics of the reputation of Ruysbroeck and Meister Eckhart were influenced by their contacts with these women who transformed the troubadour and minnesinger tradition of courtly love into deeply felt and beautifully formulated expressions of mysticism...
...I think she has every reason to feel that she has done precisely that...
...Flanagan introduced her work with the hope that it would provide a "comprehensive introduction" to Hildegard...
...Peter Winch's study is definitely not a work to read as a first introduction to Simone Weil...
...Then each author is introduced in the same fashion along with a very lean selection of an original text or portion thereof...
...and-unheard of then (and only done sub rosa now)-went on at least four preaching missions which included audiences both religious and lay...
...His influence on the Second Vatican Council's statement about the Jews and its condemnation of anti-Semitism in Nostra aetate was fundamental...
...As Donald Moore (a long-time Jesuit participant in Jewish-Christian dialogue) makes clear in this well written and very moving study of Heschel (it is only tan-gentially a biography), there are themes in Heschel's writings that are central (and compellingly expressed) to any appropriation of biblically based spirituality...
...Sabina Flanagan's book would be the one that I would recommend as a first intro-duction to Hildegard...
...and it is equally impatient with reductionist readings, whether they be of the polemical (e.g...
...It is worth having...
...What they did provide was a passionate vocabulary and a range of images and metaphors which enriched the mystical vocabulary...
...I found this one of the most satisfying books in the area of historical theology/biography that I have read in a long time...
...The subtitle of Oberman's book is not there for rhetorical flourish...
...Her desire to combine the intellectual life with a commitment to the working class of France as well as her thirst for asceticism and single-minded drive for truth have been recounted in well received biographies by Jacques Cabaud and her one-time classmate, Simone Petrement...
...Heschel was also a central figure in the organization of American clergy who opposed the war in Vietnam in the 1960s, as well as being a charismatic teacher and scholar at the Jewish Theological Seminary of America in New York City...
...This study of Luther, then, comes from the pen of a historian who knows the period with an intimacy that allows him to make discriminations and judgments which would seem apod-ictic in a person less in control of the sources...
...Barbara Newman's excellent study of her thought (Sister of Wisdom, 1983) has argued, persuasively, that she is in the tradition of wisdom or sapiential theology to which she made an important and original contribution...
...Nor is this a biography in the narrow construction of the term...
...it is an interpretation of a life and a mind...
...He gives no indication, either by way of any bibliography or in Fiori's ample notes, that Weil's books (and books about her) are available in English, nor does he bother to give English references for other works used in his study that are also available in translation...
...experience and intellect...
...For that reason alone this is a valuable study which adds much to what we have learned from the well received biography of Petrement...
...A member of that admirable band of intellectuals and spiritual seekers who gave witness to the truth during some of the darkest decades (one thinks also of Silone, Koestler, Orwell, and Camus), Weil was a brilliant essayist, a religious mystic, an eccentric but powerful political thinker, and, above all, a strangely ferocious personality that could even intimidate formidable personages like Leon Trotsky and Simone de Beauvoir...
...carried on a correspondence with everyone from the pope to her contemporary, Saint Bernard of Clairvaux...
...That chapter, like the book itself, is balanced and judicial...
...The greatest value of this book derives from the authors' conviction that these women contributed a new kind of theology in which the primacy of love over intellect was a salient characteristic...
...austerity and exuberance...
...The final bibliography is weighted heavily to European sources...
...This complex study operates with two basic assumptions: Luther was a late medieval man who saw his own life as a titantic battle, waged with ferocity on every plane of earthly existence, between the power of God and the power of Satan...
...This, of course, was not original with them since it was the hallmark of Cistercian spirituality in the twelfth century, as it would be of Franciscan spirituality in the thirteenth...
...Let me cite just a few of the more significant ones: the role of awe at the base of our state of creatureliness which springs from our "ultimate embarrassment" at the largesse of the world in which we find ourselves...
...The translator, alas, has only given us half a loaf...
...It is a work that I read with close attention (there is no other way to read it) and, from that reading, learned a good deal about Simone Weil...
...Indeed, books about Weil appear at a steady rate as my now somewhat crowded bookshelf of Weiliana demonstrates...
...Students of Weil will also be much consoled to know that a paperback edition of this outrageously costly volume is available for $14.95...
...It was Oberman who forced Catholic scholars to look again at what once was considered the "decadence" of late scholasticism and Protestant scholars to admit the deep medieval and "catholic" character of Luther's theology...
...LAWRENCE S. CUNNINGHAM is a professor of theology at the University of Norte Dame...
...Indeed, for those who know something about her life, Fiori 's extensive notes about her old friends and colleagues are almost as interesting as the text itself...
...They are Hildegard of Bingen, Mechthild of Magdeburg, Beatrice of Nazareth, Hadewijch of Antwerp, and Marguerite Porete...
...prayer not as conversation but as vulnerability and self-disclosure before God...
...It is a closely argued monograph devoted to some of her fundamental philosophical ideas written by a philosopher for those who know some philosophy and/or have a taste for its austerities...
...Fiori is also good as a summarizer of Weil's thought, which she does thematically in ample chapters on Weil's intellectual development...
...Marguerite Porete (who died at the stake in Paris as an unrepentant heretic) wrote Mirror of Simple Souls which, despite the suspect reputation of the author, spread to various places in various guises...
...Winch's book is tightly argued but spends little time on Weil as a mystic, although, as he rightly points out, it is often very difficult to draw the line between Weil as philosopher and Weil as a religious thinker...
...Flanagan's study is less thematic than that of Newman but it is a worthy addition to what I hope will be a growing interest in this medieval polymath...
...his emotional violence...
...The German original won a prize for the best historical writing done in Germany between 1975-85 and, on reading the work, one sees why...
...and, secondly, any desire (a post-Enlightenment temptation) to tidy up Luther by downplaying that struggle clouds, rather than aids, our understanding of the man and the movement he triggered...
...This work has no patience with theories about Luther as the first modern man or the herald of the doctrine of individual conscience or the other pieties advanced by his less critical admirers...
...Heschel's greatest gift to us may be this: we will go back and read the Bible with fresh eyes after having encountered the mind and spirit of this great soul...
...his scatological vulgarity...
...Essentially, Winch argues that a detailed examination of Weil's early philosophical writing (especially her thesis on Descartes which now, happily, is available in English in Formative Writings: 1929-1941) is a key to understanding Weil's later thought (which is, as Winch shows, a lot more carefully structured than a first acquaintance with her writings, especially the notebooks, might suggest) and the difficulties that she encountered intellectually as she attempted to be faithful to her original insights...
...In an excellent final chapter, Moore discusses Heschel's under-standing of two of his Hasidic ancestors-the ecstatic and joyful Baal Shem Tov and the austere Kotzker rebbe-to illustrate the inevitable tension that must exist in an authentic religious tradition between ecstasy and law...
...Their influence was not marginal but only recently recognized...
...joy and sorrow...
...The title Women Mystics in Medieval Europe is a bit misleading since this book, part study and part anthology, concentrates, in fact, on five women who all lived in Northern Europe in that tempus muliebre to which we alluded above...
...rather, it sums up the biographer's thesis...
...Every person interested in Christianity should put this on his or her reading list...
...She knows Hildegard's writings well, places them in chronological order (and summarizes them economically) as well as their cultural context, and, in the process, fleshes out Hildegard's life and times...
...Fiori's biography, first published in Italian, is, nonetheless, welcome because of the extensive oral histories the author gathered from those who knew Weil, both in France and, during her years of exile from Vichy and Nazi anti-Semitism, in the United States and England...
...Simone Weil is one of those extraordinary souls, like Pascal and Kierkegaard, whose life is more to be wondered at than emulated...
...One scholar has speculated that her work may have been of importance for the illuministic mysticism of the seventeenth-century Quakers in England...
...In general, this is a very uneven work: a bit too compressed and advanced for the beginner and a bit too hurried for the more knowledgeable...
...What was a revelation to me was how, not infrequently, her thinking was close to that of her contemporary, Ludwig Wittgenstein, who was also, though Winch makes little of it, another tortured spiritual seeker...
...A final chapter, by no means reductionistic, speculates about the relationship of Hildegard's visions (it was her prophetic visions that undergirded her authority to write and preach) and the physical phenomenon of migraine...
...She wrote learned treatises on theology, natural science, medicine, and bibical exegesis...
...the primacy of the deed in biblical religion (hence: no gulf between action and contemplation...
...Hildegard of Bingen (1098-1179) is one of those extraordinary twelfth-century women that has led the historian Friedrich Heer, using a phrase of Hildegard herself, to call the period the tempus muliebre-the women's century...
...The authors (they are French scholars) first provide a general essay on the women, their milieu, spiritual doctrine, and influence...
...Denfle) or psychoanalytical variety (Erikson...
...a composer who wrote both songs and musical drama complete with music...
...A first-time reader of Weil's life would have no idea that most of this extraordinary woman's writings have been accessible in English for well over a generation and others have recently appeared in translation with more promised...
...Descended from a distinguished rabbinic family, Heschel combined his Jewish training and lifelong encounter with the Torah to develop an organic view of life rooted in those sources...
...She was an illustrator of her work...
...Abraham Heschel (1907-1972) is a great spiritual master for the simple reason that he was capable of doing what all great spiritual masters can do: so engage a particular tradition that its greatest insights not only nourish that tradition but illumine others as well...
...What Oberman does provide is a brilliant account of Luther's evolution as a man, a thinker, and a Christian, written with a learned sympathy that permits the author to look at the "dark" Luther (his depressions...
...Furthermore, Heschel was able to mine his tradition in such a way that genuine mysticism, fully engaged with life and tempered to a prophetic edge, emerged...
...His most recent book, from Crossroad, is Catholic Prayer...
...There is an enormous interest, fueled in part by the efforts of the feminist scholars to retrieve women's history, in Hildegard who, by the standard of any age, was an extraordinary person...
...his anti-Semitism) with neither evasion or gloss...
Vol. 117 • March 1990 • No. 5
