The Roots Of Christian Mysticism

...A hidden God is always a distant God, but the Christian God's single, unchanging nature is also a trinity of persons, boundlessly creative and generafive, a continuing burst of transcendence...

...On this point, I agree with the Tablet reviewer who wrote that Northcott would have benefited from reading some revisionist Thomists...

...Thus, the ecological crisis is not an isolated problem...

...The book opens with a very careful analysis, an exercise in nonscholastic dogmatic theology, of the inseparable dogmas concerning the Trinity, creation, the Incarnation, and finally the nature and vocation of all humanity in the Resurrection...

...Northcott goes on to set out his own vision of ecological theology...

...usually find it difficult to read books on theology and ecology...

...Discussing the nature of prayer, CI6ment quotes Evagrius of Pontus: "Prayer is the daughter of gentleness....Prayer is the fruit of joy and gratitude...

...In the life of the sacraments, the individual finds nurture and support so that the consciousness of one person is shaped and enriched by the consciousness of all...

...The grace of contemplation is always a gift freely given and freely embraced...

...Always desiring certainty and permanence, we are compelled to read the harsh facts of our existential limits not only in our own being but in everything around us...

...His primary premise is stated very simply in the introduction by Jean-Claude Barreau: "Christianity is in the first place an Oriental religion, and it is a mystical religion...

...Most of them seem predictable in their theological approaches are sentimental or hortatory in style...

...CI4ment is an Orthodox theologian who teaches at the Institute of Saint Sergius in Paris...

...Instead of focusing on the "domination" model (a clich6 since Lynn White's essay in 1967), he insists on the ordering of creation and, further, on the implication of the covenant...

...To enter such a state requires from the individual the greatest degree of trust and self-knowledge...

...In such a situation, there will exist a wholesome and creative fear of the Lord, not a Lord who sits as a fiercely avenging judge, but a Lord who insistently invites the creature to enjoy the feast prepared...

...C16ment makes much of the fact that it is in the church that the fullest and richest contact is made with God...

...Its solution requires a recovery of a sense of justice and of the common good...

...Harold IsbeU's translation 0f Ovid: Heroides is available from Penguin Books...

...theocentric views (for example, J/,irgen Moltmann...

...Toward that end, in some very rich pages, Northcott recommends the resources of the biblical tradition...

...He proposes that we embrace a renewed sense of the Hebrew vision of the created order as well as the Christian understanding of the Trinitarian creator and incarnate redeemer...

...and ecocentric orientations (Matthew Fox...

...Finally, Northcott is to be commended for his attention to the role of the church in this issue...

...First, he surveys recent writing on religion and ecology by constructing a useful set of categories: humanocentric views of ecology (of whom the most famous exponent would be John Paul II...

...Northcott's book, by contrast, is a sober volume that manages to do two things quite well...

...According to Northcott, this reading of the natural law, most systematically represented by John Finnis and Germain Grisez, does not do justice to the medieval view of natural law either...

...Gerard Manley Hopkins put it so succinctly and with wonderful sensuality, "God's Grandeur...will flame out, like shining from shook foil...

...And this rest in God represents the evangelical vocation to be "perfect as the Father is perfect" and to "Love the Lord your God with your whole heart and whole soul and your neighbor as yourself...

...Northcott, for example, judges the pope as "limited" because John Paul relies too heavily on an account of natural law which cannot give due balance to the moral significance or the moral goods of the natural created order...

...Sallie McFague...

...With such a spiritual change comes a renewed awareness that sees with the wisdom, the passion, even the erotic fury that is the Spirit with and within us...

...Cl6ment quotes Augustine---a passage from the "Commentary on Psalm 121"--which echoes and expands upon the familiar opening of The Confessions: "Our hearts are restless, O Lord, until they rest in Thee...

...It seems to me that a principal vehicle for that greater union is to be found in the wonderfully rich tradition of mysticism shared by both East and West...

...From a close reading of patristic texts, primarily the Greek fathers but including Ambrose, Augustine, and Benedict, C16ment argues that the God who is by nature unknowable most mysteriously offers himself to be known by human beings...

...professorship at the Yale Divinity School...

...Restless is the operative word in the title of Beumer's book...

...His spiritual searching would lead him to a stay at a Trappist monastery in New York, an unhappy period at Harvard, extended visits to Latin America, and finally to the L'Arche community in Toronto, where he served as chaplain...

...The late Henri Nouwen was born in Holland, ordained a priest for the diocese of Utrecht, did advanced work in theological studies in Rome, psychology at the Menninger Institute in Kansas, and, after a stint teaching in Holland, in the psychology department at Notre Dame...

...After all, the Roman Catholic church in which I have lived and Orthodoxy have been separated for nearly a thousand years...

...The first is a series of biographical notes on the individual patristic /11 authors cited and quoted...

...Since today's reader might very well need a guide through the period and the subject, these pieces are a valuable adjunct to the book itself...

...I was also impressed by his trinitarian approach to theology since it shifts (as Moltmann and others have insisted) away from monistic ontologies toward a vision of the outpouring Trinity where, at least in the formulation coming from Irenaeus, there is a "ground for differentiation of self and other, of the many and the one, for the diversity of human and nonhuman life, and for the embodied and material life in the cosmos, including the order of human life...

...the second is a series of three essays on Arianism, Monophysitism, and early monasticism...

...The book opens with a carefully presented reminder that we live in an abiding awareness of personal mortality and finitude...

...Each of these visions of the relationship of religion to ecology is subject to fair criticism...

...Rather, the church becomes the vehicle, the means, by which the individual is transformed and sanctified...

...In other words, prayer exists as the product of silence and waiting, as a statement of reality observed with care and devotion, Commonweal 2 2 January 16,1998 or in the words of Evagrius: "If you want to pray, you need God, who gives prayer to one who prays...

...A significant consideration in C16ment's argument is the reality of human freedom...

...Lacking the ability to take even the first step, we must have the grace to pray before we can pray, so that salvation comes by our own love and humility formed and moved by the creative impetus of grace...

...Correspondingly, C16ment notes, in every life there is the persistent call to change, to a metanoia so radically transformative that it may well begin with a lightning bolt on the high road...

...Cobb...

...To those classical biblical doctrines he adds a "thickened" view of natural law which, he argues, is manifest not only in the West but in several sources of Eastern thought...

...John The Environment and Christian Ethics by Michael S. Northcott Cambridge University Press, $21.95, 379 pp...

...For anything like a mystical union to occur, the individual must first freely acquiesce in confidence and humility...

...In an era which hopes for a closer union between the Eastern and Western church, the elements of difference must be seen not as barriers but as attractive qualities that will lead all of us to a closer union in the experience of our common faith...

...Later he held a Henri Nouwen: A Restless Seeking for God by Jurjean Beumer Crossroad, $19.95, 190 pp...

...I especially liked Northcott's reflections on the Hebrew account of creation...

...The wonder of mystical union is the wonder of divine freedom and human freedom coming together...

...C16ment concludes the book with two appendices...

...For me, encountering a religious tradition seemingly so close to my own yet innocent of both the scholastic method and the Council of Trent, is to say the least, a bit disorienting...

...While Christian mysticism requires a strong foundation in Scripture, C16ment reminds us that a full spirituality also looks to the ready manifestation of God's being and nature in the facts of creation...

...In other words, to his sophisticated reading of current moral theory and theology, he also brings a pastoral concern for the world which has come to us from God as "good...

...Beumer shrewdly notes that Nouwen left Holland before the seismic changes in the wake of the Second Vatican Council...

...The ecological crisis derives, he writes, from a breakdown in moral purposiveness and the demise of social justice...

...As a consequence, he was able to reflect on contemporary Christian spirituality with a sort of anguished confidence but without having had personal experience of disappearing theological faculties, emptying parishes, and "virulent reCommonweal 2 3 January 16,1998...

...And yet, as Olivier C16ment so elegantly demonstrates, our beginnings are the same and as conscious as we may be of our differences, the incontrovertible fact remains that we have the same communion of faith and sacraments...

...He lives in San Francisco...

...Such an awareness of mutual dependence takes one well beyond an understanding of the Church as a set of rules and regulations...