Religion booknotes
Cunningham, Lawrence S.
RELIGION BOOKNOTES Lawrence S. Cunningham It is difficult to keep up with the books published on the experience of women in the Christian tradition. Inevitably, some of this material (especially...
...Even the "bad" Bernard McGinn (as he calls himself when he is criticized for not providing enough social context of the sort Jantzen uses) does possess the conspicuous merits of reading texts carefully, making useful distinctions, and not indulging in sweeping generalizations...
...The mystical sense was similarly employed with regard to the Eucharist and later the church itself to illuminate what was hidden in the bread/wine of the altar or behind the fac,ade of the church as institution...
...Jantzen, it strikes me, is entangled in old quarrels even though her vocabulary is contemporary...
...This skepticism derives from her dissatisfaction with philosophers who attempt to offer such definitions and her tendency to concentrate on first-person accounts of experience...
...Despite a few errors of fact (Tertullian was never a bishop...
...I cite only one example: Jantzen notes, rightly, that the "mystical" sense of Scripture lies hidden under the literal sense of Scripture...
...Well, maybe not...
...Likewise, she has borrowed from those who read the Magnificat through a liberationist lens and, with the help of Alice Laffey, underscores the prophetic antecedents of Mary in the Hebrew Scriptures...
...In Search of Mary: The Woman and the Symbol by Sally Cunneen Ballantine Books, $12.95,416 pp...
...Spiritual direction is increasingly in the hands of women...
...I also noted that in a few places the author had some theological infelicities: to describe mysticism as a manner of "perceiving and organizing knowledge about the forces that control the world" seems reductionistic...
...Bernard McGinn's still unfinished history of mysticism (the first two volumes were reviewed in these notes) has, in my estimation, avoided the impasse of the philosophers thanks to both his theory of what counts for a "mystical" text and to his ability to read mystical texts without being reduction-istic...
...this is a fine book made all the more appetizing by its graceful prose, full bibliography, and index...
...McNamara divides her material into large historical periods: the Roman Empire, the Early Middle Ages, the High Middle Ages, the Early Modern, and the present era...
...The large middle section of her work is deeply historical in its attempt to show that the mystical experience of women is gender specific and frequently suspect...
...Most of the original texts in this anthology are already available in reliable and inexpensive editions...
...I mention this book only because there are a number of such unsatisfactory paste-up jobs around...
...That impression of mine has also struck Grace Jantzen, philosopher of religion...
...pression has been that many of these philosophical discussions float in an ethereal and abstract world free from the anchorhold of actual texts, historical discrimination, and theological context...
...she quite rightly attempts to recover a deeper, less pejorative sense of what humility actually means...
...Nor did Saint Teresa characterize "mystical theology" as the reception of the inner truths of Catholic doctrine (sic) through meditation...
...The precise merit of this highly accessible historical study rests in the author's keen appreciation that the Christian tradition, though organic, is not monodirectional...
...Jantzen's historical chapters call out frequently for correction...
...No straight line of development leads from the desert ascetics to the "active" orders of the modern period...
...Direct experience of the divine grants power, and when women were involved, a patriarchal, misogynistic, and power-greedy institution sometimes resorted to suppression...
...The book has no index and no bibliography...
...The only quarrel I have with this capacious work is that McNamara does not discuss the early Syriac ascetic tradition (about which there are now abundant resources in English), which made its own contribution to the ascetic life for both men and women...
...Indeed, I applaud her sensible analysis of how most philosophers of religion get it wrong when they think of mysticism's purported ineffability as subjective experience rather than the experience of the ineffability of God...
...Anyone who could memorize a psalm or a Pater would engage in lectio...
...This understanding goes all the way back to Origen...
...Furlong's anthology is, alas, an almost textbook example of this problem...
...Though less comprehensive than the older two-volume work on Mary by Hilda Graef, Cunneen's effort is more au courant...
...I know of no other book of such comprehensive scope...
...Visions and Longings: Medieval Women Mystics edited by Monica Furlong Shambhala, $20,248 pp...
...In Search of Mary is a much-needed work that examines the role of our Lady in the Christian tradition, free from the distressingly flamboyant effusions that one so often encounters...
...John of the Cross's poetry (saturated in the language of the Song of Songs) was not about his experience but about what (or better, Whom) he had experienced...
...Filled with deep faith, learning lightly worn, and a sympathetic but critical eye, In Search of Mary is a treat.tical eye, In Search of Mary is a treat...
...Jill Raitt is not a Protestant...
...Sally Cunneen's book has been issued as a softcover trade book, which is fine because more people will be able to afford it...
...Furthermore, while I agree that male and female religious/mystical experiences were quite different (a banality when one thinks about it), they are not so widely riven as she would have us think...
...The title tells us that the subject is mysticism, but one selection is not from a mystic (Heloise), and the text given from another (Clare of Assisi) is not a mystical text but a religious rule...
...Nor does Cunneen have much patience with those who herald the "humility" of Mary in a groveling sort of manner...
...Jantzen argues that the act/practice of reading in the service of mysticism was largely a male enterprise, because males constituted the literate class...
...Jantzen, more ideologically driven, is not always so careful...
...Bernard McGinn, it seems to me, has avoided both of these problems, and has, from a theological point of view, broken the impasse...
...Abundant notes, an excellent bibliographical section keyed to the chapters, and a well-crafted index are also included...
...I suspect McNamara will be closely read in religious communities of women...
...When seen clearly, one understands that mystical language is an attempt to describe the loving encounter with the Divine...
...It was something that anyone could do, as the example of the early desert ascetics and contemporary Orthodox practice of the "Jesus Prayer" make plain...
...Still, one thing Jantzen does not tolerate is any analysis of mysticism focusing on the private and subjective...
...She has also queried a number of contemporary persons to seek their insights into the role of Mary in their spiritual and artistic lives...
...Jantzen makes a sustained argument that one must not only understand Christian mysticism in terms of historical context but, and this is the burden of her work, a serious investigation of gender will greatly change how one views mystical experience...
...It deserves a wide readership for what it tells us about women in the Christian tradition generally and in the ascetic/religious/vowed world in particular...
...In the final analysis, Jantsen is deeply ambivalent about how one defines mysticism in any fundamental sense...
...What counts as mysticism will reflect (and also help to constitute) the institutions of power in which it occurs," Jantzen writes...
...She notes, for example, that when speaking of Mary as Virgin one can emphasize, in that title, the autonomy of Mary rather than needlessly obsessing about sexual continence...
...It could simply be read for its own profit or used as a resource for adult education or academic classes...
...Such a development is yet another example of at least one model of Christian community which is almost completely women-centered...
...The author, a historian at Hunter College in New York City, has not only participated in a working group of scholars interested in this topic but has published widely on women religious in Christian history...
...Following the lead of a number of scholars, Cunneen turns traditional understandings into new insights derived from her commitment both to the role of Mary in the Catholic tradition and to her critical sense of how that role can be abused...
...Every now and again our philosophy department will have a speaker who will read a paper on the subject of mysticism and its putative truth claims...
...The introductory essay is a farrago of cliches and generalizations...
...If a monastic community can be called an ecclesia (as it was all through the Middle Ages), is a woman's monastic community an ecclesia and, if so, in what precise sense...
...Jantzen's real targets, set out vigorously in her first chapter and taken up toward the end of her book, are the heirs of William James's understanding of mysticism as an intense subjective experience that is primarily ineffable...
...This, of course, raises other theological ques-tions...
...Jantzen is an autodidact when it comes to history...
...The chapter headings of this fine work describe the ideal female Christian types that one might find at a given period in the church's life...
...Furlong, a British author, has a certain popular reputation as a writer, so to my mind this rather slapdash work is exemplary of an unfortunate trend...
...Cunneen studies the Mariologi-cal tradition from the New Testament to the contemporary period from within the Roman Catholic perspective but with an ecumenical eye...
...The result is a book that is less tendentious than Marina Warner's overpraised Alone of All Her Sex...
...with female discipleship in the New Testament era and ends with some contemporary reflections on female religious orders today...
...To call the theological principle of post-Tridentine Catholicism "salvation through works" is just flat wrong...
...To each of these assertions one can adduce many compelling proofs, but to allow this perspective to be the exclusive lens through which to read the tradition brings its own distortions...
...However, these small inexactitudes do not detract from the strong historical narrative and the rich panorama of persons that give shape and power to Sisters in Arms...
...She is particularly good at differentiating "models" of female sanctity in their historical context, reminding us that women functioned with greater or lesser autonomy at various times and in various places...
...While inclined to the hermeneutics of trust, she is vividly aware of the feminist critique of much traditional Mariology...
...Is that not the case today...
...By contrast, Jantzen follows the lead of social theorists like Luckmann/Berger and Foucault, seeing mysticism as the "social construction of reality...
...McNamara's work, by contrast, is a learned and readable history of religious women which begins historically Sisters in Arms: Catholic Nuns through Two Millennia by Jo Ann Kay McNamara Harvard University Press, $35, 768 pp...
...My imPower, Gender, and Christian Mysticism by Grace Jantzen Cambridge University Press, $64.95,384 pp...
...A short introduction accompanies each selection and Furlong begins the book with a longer, but not very convincing essay...
...Without being reductionistic, McNamara uses the lens of gender difference to study ways in which those taking up the ascetic life were motivated by the desire to erase gender differences, or find a way for men and women to live in relatively genderless community, or even to create a kind of "third gender...
...Jantzen presents these historical chapters as a "counter tradition" to show the weakness of the analyses of many philosophers of religion...
...McNamara raises many historical questions that remain pertinent for today...
...Gathered here are snippets of writings from eight medieval women and one group of women (the Beguines...
...But the plain fact of the matter is that contemplative lectio had very little to do with advanced literacy and very much to do with the memorization and rumination on texts...
...McNamara has benefited from and participated in the work of serious church historians who are sensitive to gender issues...
...Such attempts to achieve gender parity were prompted by the hegemony that men held over the sacramental life, the "dangers" of celibate friendship, and the power relations inevitable in the rise of the bureaucratic church...
...If not, what is this community, theologically speaking...
...Happily, her final two chapters on ineffability and the future of mysticism are far more restrained, better argued, and quite illuminating...
...Especially irritating is the carelessness with which Furlong corrects, in asides, scholars like Caroline Walker Bynum or lumps visionary and mystical literature together in a facile fashion...
...Cunneen has cast her net wide...
...The mystical reading of texts for someone like Origen was emphatically not a matter of exegesis nor was it connected with initiation into mystery cults (an assertion Jantzen makes more than once) or the like...
...Inevitably, some of this material (especially in the more popular categories) owes its publication more to enthusiasm than to competency...
...For example, women's early monastic communities needed priests only for the confection of the Eucharist and sacramental penance, while most of their liturgical life remained within their own competency...
...Next to those words, in the margin, I wrote: "only...
...She also has some wonderful final chapters discussing the place of Mary in contemporary literature and in women's experience...
...Part of her book was written while she was in France, giving her the opportunity to contemplate a lot of art and visit many classic Marian shrines...
Vol. 123 • November 1996 • No. 20
