book reviews

The lesson of the Cross

This title alone is disconcerting enough; the subtitle directs the focus of the author's theme. As might be expected it is enigmatic, deep and disturbing.

At first glance I thought of Why the Cross by Rev. Edward Leen, C.S.Sp. (Sheed and Ward 1938) who conducted a memorable Holy Week retreat in our seminary. The "Paradox of the Cross" has been an inspiration for life and survival for fifty years. This book is a welcome adjunct.

This book approaches the nexus of love and suffering from contemporary history challenging both the reality and nature of God. The military and political events of World War II have survived, while the holocaust of human lives has lurked in the hearts and souls of millions of victims of an age of unprecedented suffering and carnage.

While the idea of the Holocaust was perverse, diabolical, and inhuman, its outcome was shattering and devastating. Human life was tried and tested to its ultimate, yet surviving with unique resilience. God was the object and target, the People of God were the victims sacrificed to Moloch. God's design leads from the Law to the Gospels in the unbroken economy of Salvation. Jews and Christians share the same patrimony.

The matrix of the author's thesis is reminiscent of the captivity experiences of the People of God in Egypt and their eventual Exodus. He develops it in three chapters viz. (1) "The Shame of men and the Silence of God," (2) "The Shame and the Silence become Salvific," and (3) "The mystery of Holy Saturday."

The literature deriving from the Holocaust reveals the evisceration of civilization and its foundations. Victims sensed abandonment by God and by the rest of the world, so that "something in all of us died with them," wrote Elie Wiesal. Cynical authors challenged God in an "atheism of despair" in a world of hatred and extreme sufferings. The bibliography of this section is extensive. Even the Church was challenged despite the protests of Pope Pius XII. Universal fear, ignorance and helplessness accounted for the ineptitude of the "free" world.

The ultimate revelation of the evil perpetrated the apparent "rejection by God" as six million Jews and five million Christians were "sacrificed on the altars of racial and religious hatred." The mystery of iniquity grew through the growth of the Enlightenment and science in the interest of secular liberalism. Liberalism and literature were put to the test and failed so that all that was left is religion.

"The whole argument of this book is that God WAS there amid the sufferings and death of so many." "Between the experience of Jesus' own abandonment on the Cross, his mysterious descent into Sheol, and the experience of abandonment by the Jewish inmates of the death camps there remains the profoundest nexus." Chapter two explains the alleged silence of God as the deeper silence of the Son of God into the state of lostness and desolation to redeem the everlasting hold of death. The Cross is the axis point of history and the key to the travail of every man. The paradox of God's love for the world is portrayed in the Passion and death evident in the Messiah's crucifixion, self-abandonment and descent into "the Silence of Sheol": "He descended into Hell."

The final chapter considers the "mysterious linkage between the Cross and human suffering" as the theological basis for the soteriology of human solidarity with the Cross. Hell is aloneness, love rejected, the prison of self. Christ in Sheol is the Presence of Love. "Mors et vita duello conflixere mirando" . . . "oblatus est quia ipse voluit."

The final chapter on the "Mystery of Holy Saturday" evokes the sense of the silence of death-"dead when life was dead on the tree" as "Jesus Christ conquered death with death" having "freely submitted to the blackest night of obedient love." The lesson of the Cross is hope for all who suffer, "the suffering of Love who wills to descend even to that state of final human suffering and loss where death appears definitively to triumph." There: "Love imparts the message of absolute consolation."

Quoting von Balthasar, the author affirms that "what is uniquely Christian begins and ends with the revelation that the infinite God loves the individual man infinitely." He concludes with the portraits of two heroic examples, viz. the Catholic priest St. Maximilian Kolbe, and the Jewish nun Blessed Edith Stein.

This is a profound study defying casual perusal. It is a multi-faceted examination of human suffering due to sin. The Holocausts of our age are the backdrop behind the paradox of the Death of the God-Man at the hands of "man gods." The Crucifixion reconciled error with Truth, Reason with Love. It is thought-provoking, penetrating, challenging Faith with its consequences, revealing Love as the rationale and essence of Being.

An unusual aspect of this treatise is the plethora of 369 illustrative footnotes. If reading it be an impressive experience, its study should be memorable.

Rev. Peter MacCarthy

Leeds, Ala.

Seeing for the first time

Caryll Houselander, an English laywoman, was deeply spiritual and an outstanding Catholic writer. Msgr. Ronald Knox said of her, "She seems to see everything for the first time: the driest of doctrinal considerations shine out like a restored painting after she has finished with it." This is a reprinting of one of her excellent books. Mitch Finley said of this book: "Wood of the Cradle, Wood of the Cross is Caryll Houselander at her deepest, most poetic and most pleasing. You're going to love this book and want to give copies to all your friends."

In the introduction Caryll writes: "Some truths need to be told over and over again . . . like the rhyme in a song." She adds that this is a book about Jesus and things we have heard before, but are well worth retelling. "This is such a book, and since the basic fact of the Christ-life, which is the key to everything in it, is the indwelling presence of Christ in us," I will repeat things I have written before.

Her chapters are "The Sown Field," "Rest," "Inscape of Tabor," "The Infant," "The Passion of the Infant Christ," "Becoming Like Little Children," "Redemptive Childhood," "Justice," "The Christ-child's Mother," "The Host-life." Just the chapter titles make us want to read more. And Caryll Houselander does not treat these subjects as anyone else. She has new insights that are beautiful.

How in our day, when every new book is called the best thing since the Bible, we have gotten sidetracked from the truly great writers in the spiritual life in this century! Most of our great authors were British converts. They look at the faith in a new and wonderful way.

Here Caryll is speaking of Jesus: "He healed by the touch of His hands, by His journeys on foot. He redeemed not only by pain and weariness and sharp anguish of temptation experienced in mind and body, but by the delight He felt in the loveliness of the earth and sky, the birds, the fields, the movement of water and waves."

Rev. Rawley Myers

Colorado Springs, Colo.

Understanding Saint Paul

The author is a priest and a journalist, with a gift for bringing characters and events into sharp relief. His object here is not simply to write a biography of St. Paul-that has already been done-but to make him real and familiar to readers, and to make vivid the story told in the Acts of the Apostles and the apostle's letters.

Reading this book will send the reader back many times to the Bible itself, to see just how Luke, and Paul himself, tell the story, and this may be done very easily, for Fr. Cremona provides the appropriate references as he goes along. And in addition to recounting occurrences vividly, he brings out the personality of Paul.

Fr. Cremona follows Scripture faithfully, but this reviewer must disagree with him on one point. He says that Paul, unlike the other apostles, never married. There is much support for the belief that none of the apostles except Peter ever married. Peter was apparently a widower at the time of Jesus' ministry, for only his mother-in-law is mentioned, not his wife; and no wives of other apostles are ever mentioned, although if they had existed, they would have been of greater importance than other women who are. Moreover, Jesus would hardly have chosen men who, to follow him, would have had to abandon wives and children. But that is a minor point so far as St. Paul is concerned.

Not being a Scripture scholar, Fr. Cremona does not go into the authorship of the epistles, except to say, correctly, that the author of Hebrews is uncertain. He assumes that the letters that claim Pauline scholarship were written by St. Paul. But a page at the back of the book by an unnamed "editor" tells us that three of the letters were "probably written by a disciple of St. Paul," and three others are "pseudonymous letters" written at a later time. I think he might have done better to say, as the commentary in the Navarre Bible does, that while "some scholars doubt the letters' Pauline authenticity, many others meet the objections they raise."

In the back of the book there is a chronology of the life of St. Paul, and useful maps showing his missionary journeys.

Edith Myers

Fort Worth, Tex.

A theologian's theologian

Fr. Hans Urs von Balthasar (1905-1988) was a Swiss Catholic theologian who wrote and translated scores of books in many areas-theology, philosophy, spirituality, lives of the saints. You name it, and he probably wrote something about it. He is perhaps best known to the English-speaking world for his impressive series on theology called The Glory of the Lord (Herrlichkeit in German).

The author of this short but difficult book on von Balthasar is a bishop and is currently the rector of the Pontifical Lateran University in Rome which, by the way, is also the seminary for the Diocese of Rome. Bishop Scola was a personal friend of von Balthasar and has also published a book-length interview with him.

The book is the result of some lectures that Scola gave on the theology of von Balthasar at the John Paul II Institute on Marriage and the Family which is located near the Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C.

The author presents the "form" or "heart" of von Balthasar's thought in ten short chapters of about ten pages each. He tries to show that von Balthasar's theology takes place on three great planes-aesthetics, dramatics and logic. The central mysteries to his theology are, of course, the Trinity and the Incarnation. So his thinking is certainly Christocentric.

The analogy of being was a key concept in the thinking of von Balthasar. He also made extensive use of the transcendentals-one, true, good, and especially the beautiful. This is emphasized in his "aesthetics."

Along with the author, I also can claim to have known von Balthasar personally. I attended several meetings with him, listened to him lecture a couple of times, had meals with him. I also visited with him on one occasion at his home in Basel, Switzerland. He was a man of great self-possession, dignity and humility. Great men usually are also humble. In meetings he was very circumspect and did not talk very much, but when he did say something it was usually important and right on the point. He was neat and orderly and spoke in a low tone. I never saw him angry or excited. When he spoke everyone listened.

Readers of HPR should know that von Balthasar was not invited to take part in the Second Vatican Council, even though he was one of the leading theologians in Europe at the time. I believe it was Cardinal Ratzinger who said of him on one occasion that he was the most learned man in Europe. And I believe it. His work was not much noticed in this country during his lifetime but it is coming into its own now. This very book is an indication of that. Also, Ignatius Press in San Francisco has contributed to this by publishing many of his most important volumes.

I want to say openly in this review that I do not claim to understand the main lines of von Balthasar's thought. I have read some of his books and many articles. I have also read books about him, but his thinking still eludes me. And this book is no exception. It is very difficult to follow. That may flow from the fact that the author is an Italian, that the chapters were translated from Italian into English. So the process goes from German to Italian to English. I think the problem lies in the fact that this author uses a lot of words and expressions, which are loaded with meaning in the original German, but which are not adequately translated into English. When he talks about the "form" of his theology, and then speaks of his aesthetics and dramatics and logic, without defining what he is talking about, I must confess that I cannot follow him.

With all of the books by von Balthasar now available, and more to come, it would help those of us who are interested in von Balthasar to have a simple presentation of the main ideas of his system in plain English that an educated person can understand. Maybe there is a book like that, but I have not yet run across it.

Scola taught me a few things about von Balthasar but he seems to be trying to convey the main lines of von Balthasar's thought in a language that is so dense that it is impossible to penetrate. I suppose I could read the book three or four times to try to get more out of it, but I have many other things to do. If I can't get it the first time through, I am not going to bother with reading it again.

Finally, von Balthasar has been sharply criticized for his view on hell in his small book, Dare We Hope? (Ignatius Press 1988). Scola says that he has been misunderstood and adds: "He never stated that hell does not exist nor that it is empty; he wanted merely to safeguard the datum of the New Testament revelation which authorizes us to hope for all people" (p. 110). I was happy to see him say that.

Kenneth Baker, S.J.

Fairfield, N.J.

The faith life of Mary

Mystical Rose is the result of the fastidious efforts of Fr. Edward D. O'Connor, C.S.C. in editing a lifetime of reflections of Fr. Thomas Philippe as he meditatively recorded the contributions of the Mother of God as a model of the spiritual life. The author asserts that this age has enjoyed certain graces and spiritual resources not available in the past. Included among these graces are the dogmatic proclamations of the Immaculate Conception and Assumption and the development of Marian theology and spirituality stimulated by them. Modern saints and mystics have brought forth an emphasis on childlikeness, littleness, simplicity and interior poverty. St. Thérèse of Lisieux has brought forth the heroism of littleness which is rooted in a devotion to the Sacred Heart and the Blessed Virgin.

The author sees two fundamental traits in the human ego: self-centeredness and an activism which tends to impose itself on others seeking its own pleasures. The human person possesses that desire to dominate, to possess, that craving for pleasure. The Mother of God did not possess this kind of ego as she was free of sin. Rather, she was drawn toward littleness and humility. Within the life of Mary, love was the unifying factor. Her consciousness was focused on Christ. The author describes her attitude as one of "loving passivity" that is, "eager to be loved, and at the same time ready to respond to love with an offering and effective sacrifice of self."

In referring to religious life, the author states that for Mary, a poverty of spirit and humility of heart draw their inspiration from a virginal love. Poverty and humility are the two basic attitudes of the created intellect and will confronted with a God who reveals the mystery of his being in faith and love. Faith implies detachment and therefore poverty; hope implies absolute confidence and the total self-surrender of a child, what is seen as humility. The author points out that Mary teaches contemplatives to accept the sacrifices implied by the hidden life, that one might "plunge into a life of poverty and humility."

In reflecting upon the event of the Annunciation, the author perceives that a new purification of Mary's faith and hope was necessary. At that moment, Mary now had to rely solely on the Love that dwelled within her.

The Mystical Rose is actually an extended meditation on the life of Mary. References are made to a life regulated by the evangelical counsels in addition to more frequent references to a prayer-filled life. Thomas Philippe's text is an enriching resource for any Roman Catholic who wishes to take a meditative journey in plumbing the faith life of Mary, and thus deepening one's own.

Sr. Madeleine Grace, C.V.I.

Houston, Tex.

Angels really exist

When Professor Kreeft speaks, people listen-even when reading his books. He must surely rate with Catholic apologists of this century. He is a philosopher with a down-to-earth presentation. His course on this topic is reputed to be very popular and successful. With him philosophy is solid common sense and reason rather than arid speculation and theory.

With twenty books to his credit and readers' enjoyment he has gained a position of influence in academia. Masterful on both his content and expression, he engages his audience with clarity, relevancy to current modes of thought and expression in everyday ways, and experiences with subtle humor and figures of speech. His basic structure in this book is a methodical pattern of questions and answers, many of which reflect those common to collegians.

While it readily engages the reader's attention, it is one that allows random reading and consultation. The prevailing tone is truth, reality in contrast with the fables and the cynicism of in-vogue rationalists. His appendix on "Angelistic Philosophy" debunks the gods of materialism and the canard of pseudointellectuals.

Four sections consider fascination with the subject, e.g., how we know about angels, their nature, and questions about Demons. There are appendices pertaining to the Catechism of the Catholic Church, Bible references and "a Snakebite Letter" reminiscent of "Screwtape." The major part (two) explores 65 questions on the nature of Angels. The dominant concept is that they are REAL, supernatural spirits demonstrated by sane, down-to-earth, eminently rational and logical evidence. His arguments are philosophical rather than "religious," "feelings" and conjecture.

Of course he settles the gibe about how many Angels can dance on a pin, their power and influences on us, their knowledge about our secret thoughts, how they tempt or "control" us, their "human" traits, "location" and behavior. Quite logically Kreeft deals with anthropocentrism throughout his answers. Symbolism portrays "what they look like" and metaphors clarify their existence and "life." As might be expected the question of exorcism is raised, a surprise to those who fail to realize Gospel incidents. Yes, the Church has the power to exorcize because she is divine: "it is very rare, but it is very real."

This book is an addition to the theology course that either neglected the topic or treated it in a cursory manner. It arouses consciousness and concern about persons with whom we shall spend eternity. Those who have given little thought to these holy-and also damnable-creatures will find this enlightening, authentic, and refreshing through the awareness that it can stimulate.

Rev. Peter T. MacCarthy

Leeds, Ala.

A rich meditation on Mary

Fr. Cantalamessa, O.F.M. Cap. has written a profoundly beautiful meditation on Mary. His book is scholarly, yet readable; orthodox, yet innovative; ecumenical, yet biblical.

The basic plan of the book incorporates the three great mysteries of Christian redemption: the incarnation, the paschal mystery, and Pentecost. Although the New Testament does not often refer to Mary, it does mention her in association with each of these mysteries. She was certainly present at the incarnation which took place in her. She stood at the cross of Jesus at the paschal mystery. Finally, she was present at Pentecost since she was with the apostles when they received the Holy Spirit.

The author refers to Mary as a "mirror" rather than a "figure" because he believes the former is easier to grasp. Mary is a mirror of the Church in two ways: first by reflecting the light she herself receives from God (as a mirror reflects the light of the sun); secondly, by allowing the Church to reflect herself in Mary.

God's Word is a mirror inasmuch as it reflects God. Because of Mary's intimate relationship with the Word, Fr. Cantalamessa refers to Mary as "this wonderful letter written by God's Spirit."

The book is ecumenical in that its study of Mary begins with Scripture instead of formal principles, theological theses, or the dogmas. When Scripture is the starting point for God's Word, a basis is secured which not only allows the Church to expound what she regards as truth, but one that can be shared by people of other faiths. Hence, Fr. Cantalamessa is generous with his citations of non-Catholic theologians.

A central notion of the book is that mere devotion to Mary is not enough; we should imitate her. Likewise, mere understanding or even enthusiasm for Scripture is not enough; we should live its counsels and commands.

Perhaps the most beautiful section of this study is the treatment of grace. "Grace is the meeting point between creatures and their Creator." God is full of grace in the active sense as one who fills with grace. Mary is full of grace in the passive sense as being filled with grace. But we should not regard Mary herself as passive. The verb Mary used to accept the Motherhood of Christ (génoito) does not signify, in the original text, passive acceptance but a living desire as if her fiat were to be read: "I, too, desire with all my being what God desires."

There are three great "fiats": that of the Creator in saying "let there be light," that of Mary's "let it be done unto me according to thy Word," and that of Jesus on the cross who prefers the Will of the Father to that of his own. But the author includes another fiat: that of the Church and all believers who say Fiat voluntas tua: "Your will be done."

Mary is profoundly, yet distinctively, associated with each Person of the Blessed Trinity: God the Father as her father, Christ as her son, and the Holy Spirit as her spouse. She invites us to love God with two different loves: filial and nuptial. Filial love is made up of obedience, nuptial love is choice. Mary represents the fulfillment of two essential dimensions of maternity: conception and birth. This fact stands impressively against the current tendency exhibited in reproductive technology to separate conception from birth (as in in vitro fertilization) and birth from conception (as in abortion).

Although Mary has been a problem throughout the centuries for many Protestants who believed that the Catholic Church places Mary on the same level with God, the book reiterates the fact that an infinite distance separates God the Creator from Mary the created. Nonetheless, as the author points out, no artist would be offended at seeing students expressing high appreciation for his masterpiece. He would not be tempted to think that they are identifying his art with him the artist. Mary does not detract from her Creator, she glorifies him.

Mirror of the Church, which includes four color icons of Mary, holds a treasure for the meditative mind interested in better understanding Mary as a mirror of God and that by which the Church must mirror itself.

Donald DeMarco

Kitchener, Ontario