Religious booknotes

...Such a model does justice neither to the early Syriac ascetics nor to such medieval lay movements like that of the Beguines which do not fit such a unitary picture of vowed religious life...

...William M. Thompson has produced an impressive record of publication over the past decade or so ranging from a comprehensive Christology and a study of the saints as a locus for the doing of theology to a volume on Berulle and the French School for the Classics of Western Spirituality...

...Question: did that visual character of her prose derive, in part, from the art she saw in Norwich and its environs...

...One can only hope that sooner or later we get a volume (or volumes) on the Helfta mystics in the "Classics of Western Spirituality" to make their lives and doctrines even more accessible in inexpensive volumes for students of spirituality...

...It is, rather, a construct shaped under religious, social, economic, and political pressures...

...Thompson seems to attempt the reconstruction of a "style" Earlier attempts at historical accounts of the Christian spiritual experience assumed a single, socially and culturally uncontaminated spirituality (often cast in the elitist tones of monastic or religious life...

...Francis, is to indulge in a kind of fundamentalist naiveté which does justice neither to Francis and his age nor to the needs of today...

...Motherhood" has often been used as a political metaphor to advance an ideological platform...

...The real merit of her work for this nonspecialist is to see how that question may be asked and how an answer might be pursued...

...That new discourse is explicated against the background of the French School since it so strongly emphasized adoration as coming from contemplation...

...and eccentricities...

...hence, their mystical writings were suffused with scriptural and liturgical echoes...

...By using the concept of motherhood she is able to explore attitudes toward the body, sexuality, pain, family bonding, renunciation, and family vocation...

...Every spiritual school, doctrine, or practice has its historical location and its cultural limitations...

...It is a worthy successor to Atkinson's 1983 revisionist study of that English wife, mother, and pilgrim, Margery Kempe...

...There are some minor lapses (the Ravenna mosaics, at least the monumental apsidal ones, do not show, much less emphasize, the Virgin...

...This single spirituality ran, this view insisted, like a common thread through history...

...Attempts to reclaim a simple spirituality uncritically based, say, on the life of St...

...detailing of medieval Cypriot culture gives her the confidence to answer those questions...

...The latter's book is a careful plea for a more historically nuanced understanding of Christian spirituality...

...She notes—as any reader of Showings knows—how visual Julian's descriptive prose is...

...It is no surprise the Cistercian St...

...What may be most interesting is that their writings are so autobiographical in character that we get, as it were, a window on the religious experiences of medieval women in general and medieval cloistered life in particular...

...At the very end of her work Atkinson says—and rightly—that "motherhood" is never purely "natural...

...Not so, says Sheldrake...

...Thompson's attempt to recover an older tradition of spirituality should win the applause of the English Jesuit (and editor of The Way) Philip Sheldrake...

...Commonweal 5 June 1992: 29...

...Let me cite one obvious place where historical context would illumine Julian's work...

...Finnegan's book is an updated version of a study which was first published in 1962...

...Sheldrake gives two case studies to show how inadequate was the picture of a single kind of vowed religious life evolving from Pachomius in Egypt to Ignatius of Loyola...

...In a sense, those early works were a seedbed from which this current volume springs...

...With all those cautionary words in mind (after all, this is not a scholarly column and readers should be forewarned...

...At the heart of her book is this question: how is a saint recognized as a saint in a particular age and, further, how does that saint function in a given culture and what does that life say about the culture within which it found itself...

...Their lives and writings take on looming importance today both because of the desire to recoup women's history in the church and also to be faithful to Sheldrake's insistence that we put the common history of spirituality into some kind of historical context...

...Brant Pelphrey's 1989 study of Julian suggests as much without systematically following up just how it might have shaped her vision...

...That edition gives us both introduction and the text...

...This is surely true as any consideration of the different understandings of motherhood in our own culture show...

...In effect, Neophytos canonized himself...

...That they all manifested a keen interest in the humanity of Christ and his passion is also explicable in terms of the post-Franciscan devotionalism of medieval culture...

...At the offset let me stipulate that The Making of a Saint is a terribly recondite, frightfully expensive, and earnestly scholarly work on a medieval Cypriot hermit...

...We instinctively check our wallets when politicians invoke the word in public...

...Both Pelphrey and Nuth, the former for cultural background, the latter for theology, are useful in approaching Julian's writings but neither is as good as the long introduction to the Colledge/Walsh edition of Showings (Paulist, 1978) which is still the best first approach to the brilliant Dame Julian...

...What makes its possible for Galatariotou to prove that Neophytos set out to do this is that he wrote voluminously during his lifetime (an appendix listing his work runs to nearly twenty pages) and, from those writings, one can reconstruct both what he took the ideal of sanctity to be and how, in the process, he shaped himself according to that ideal...

...What interests Atkinson is motherhood as it was viewed in the medieval period when the reality of the church was an overwhelming factor in life...

...Finnegan takes up each person in turn, tells her story, and examines her writings both for their own content and in terms of probable influences...

...Did the late medieval emphasis on domesticity (reflected largely, but later, in the household of Martin and Katherina Luther and their rejection of monasticism) herald the rise of the bourgeois family as we know it today...

...While he may have attempted to do too much within the space of a single volume, what he does do most effectively is to show how a sophisticated theologian can absorb a strand of the spiritual tradition into the work of theology in a highly fruitful and sophisticated fashion...

...it is the place to start...

...let me say that I found this book to be wonderfully interesting if only because of its basic thesis, namely, that a medieval recluse named Neophytos set out to become a canonized saint in his own lifetime and, as it were, constructed his life in such a fashion that it not only conformed to the patterns of traditional hagiography but managed to get himself to be the object of a liturgical cult (and the subject of icons) before his death...

...not all the postGregorian reformers emphasized the distance between clerics and laity, etc...

...It can also show us pathology, but Sheldrake does not overly insist on this...

...Commonweal 5 June 1992: 27 enough history in it...

...The reprinting of 28: 5 June 1992 Commonweal Finnegan's book (despite the updating it still shows its age a bit) is a sign of this renaissance...

...her writings reflect both a lay and monastic formation as well as her acquaintance with the courtly love tradition...

...Sheldrake's target, in short, would be those who would attempt to describe The Christian spirituality instead of Christian spiritualities...

...Her subject is a trio of thirteenthcentury nuns—Gertrude the Great, Mechtild of Hackeborn, and Mechtild of Magdeburg—who lived in a Cistercian convent in medieval Saxony...

...Bernard of Clairvaux as well as the Dominicans who had close ties to contemplative women in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries are influential...

...She has fine pages on the increasing importance of married saints (largely drawn from the aristocratic class), changing attitudes toward childbirth, and the spiritualizing of the language of maternity...

...Galatariotou's exhaustive (and exhausting...

...Nuth is a close reader of Julian's writings and her reflections on Julian's theology are genuinely helpful...

...This method, Thompson thinks, not only helps us around the overworked dichotomies of high and low Christologies but also heals the supposed fractures between action and contemplation...

...The above plot summary provides little hint of how rich and suggestive Thompson's book really is...

...Thompson's work has a plot line that runs, roughly, like this: spirituality understood as reflection on Christian experience means that contemplation may be added to the theological discourses of narrative and conversation to produce a methodology which is "theomeditative" (the word is Thompson's...

...Each was a noted spiritual writer, mystic, and director of souls...

...a theology, profoundly respectful of tradition, which has deep roots in adoration but which blossoms out in the air of the postmodern world...

...How did the Franciscan emphasis on the humanity of Christ impact on medieval attitudes toward children and their mothers...

...Its appeal (it is a rewritten doctoral dissertation) is going to be to professional Byzantinists and lovers of things Orthodox...

...These various spiritual paths evolve, not as individual searches for the One but as highly complex social impulses that attempt to make sense of historically conditioned life in the light of the gospel...

...Finally, these women were mystics who were closely identified with the liturgical life of their convent...

...It can show us the side of the Christian life that was underrepresented or erased from our common memory...

...Those attitudes are not rigid since medieval thinkers were forced to compose disparate attitudes into a coherent whole: how, for example, reconcile the vocation of maternity with asceticism...

...Her stated aim to systematize Julian's doctrinal teachings as they appear in the so-called long text (the second version of her work) of the Showings seems realized and, at least at that level, this is a genuine contribution to recovering the theology of this first woman theologian to write in English...

...Mechtild of Magdeburg is, in some ways, most interesting of all because she had lived as a Beguine for forty years before entering the convent...

...For that reason, her research deserves notice beyond the smaller academic coterie who have interests similar to her own...

...Joan Nuth's attempt to systematize the theological teaching of the great latemedieval mystic, Julian of Norwich, is the sort of historical work that Sheldrake had in mind but, I suspect, he would not find of theology which was characteristic of the late Rahner, of von Balthasar, and of Barth...

...This little book should be on the required reading list for any serious student of spirituality...

...This would be only the story of an ascetic megalomaniac if it were not for the fact the author has a larger story she wants to tell...

...Her study, then, is focused on social history but is, simultaneously, deeply in debt to the historical character of theology...

...Neophytos went further: he composed a liturgy in his own honor (to commemorate a miracle worked in his behalf) and got that liturgy entered into the monastic liturgical calendar for annual celebration...

...There is a further reason to pay attention to history...

...Finally—and this is a central interest of Thompson—it helps us to integrate the witness of the saints and the role of Mary in spirituality in a new and, if you will pardon the expression, "postmodern" fashion...

...New translations of the writings of these women now appear as well as articles about their spiritual doctrine...

...It is a theology that tries to avoid both the sterility of the academy and the enthusiasms of the merely pious...

...How account for the inescapable nexus between sexuality and childbearing...

...Nuth's thesis is that Julian was not simply a "spiritual writer" but a theologian of keen originality who, from her anchor hold in the medieval English city of Norwich, modified the Augustinian/Cistercian/Franciscan sources of her piety into an attractive theology which still speaks to us today...

...Nuth, however, excluded any broad historical contextualization from her study (as she admits in her introduction) and that decision, it seems to me, weakens her book...

...Atkinson takes up these and similar questions in this eminently readable and wide-ranging book...

...It is a very important contribution to the study of spirituality—a field which is, at the edges, littered with fads (what the hell is an enneagram...

...but, in general, this is a very fine piece of work...