530 - A History of Christian Spirituality: An Analytical Introduction

A History of Christian Spirituality:
An Analytical Introduction
By Urban T. Holmes, III
New York, Seabury, 1980. 166 pp. $10.95.

In its own terms, this volume is "an introduction to the wide variety and great richness of the Christian spiritual experience," omitting almost no one of significance between Philo and Thomas Merton. The author, well known for The Priest in Community, hopes that his analysis can "save us from a shallow or doctrinaire notion" of Christian

531 - A History of Christian Spirituality: An Analytical Introduction

spirituality and can "give us a variety of names for the means and the end of prayer."

Though it does accomplish these aims, the book is not truly a history. It is much too brief (more than 150 figures in 160 small pages), and details surprisingly few external events. It may be possible, for instance, to summarize the spiritual legacy of Gerard Groote without mentioning that he founded the Brethren of the Common Life, but it produces rather a sketch of the development of ascetical doctrine than a history of spirituality.

This is not so much a history as an esquisse, an essay in the strict sense, a conceptual framework to hold all major developments in Christian spirituality and prayer, then to stretch on that frame the thought and teaching of the best known spiritual personalities in the church's history. The author apparently hoped to work with four sets of concepts-from the phenomenology of spirituality, and from psychology, anthropology, and sociology. But he uses only the first set consistently, and the last two sets hardly at all. Further, he inadequately explains them in his introduction.

Here, for instance, is his complete description of the critical, first set of concepts: "The horizontal scale is the apophatic/kataphatic scale. Briefly, this raises the question of the degree to which the ascetical method advocates an emptying (apophatic) technique of meditation or an imaginal (kataphatic) technique of meditation. The vertical scale is the speculative/ affective scale. Briefly, this raises the question of whether the spiritual method emphasizes the illumination of the mind (speculative) or the heart emotions (affective)."

He uses these axes as the major formal framework of his "analytical introduction" to spirituality, and offers useful information covering the crucial questions in spirituality and prayer. Yet he labors under two disadvantages.

First, he has not distingiushed between ascetical methods and methods of prayer. They are quite distinct, and the relationships between their many variations are subtle and complex. Confusing them produces the anomaly that the spirituality of the Desert Fathers "was often kataphatic and affective." But if they prayed discursively and with imagination, they were prime analogues of what would have to be called apophatic spirituality. Their whole ascetical life was an emptying of self.

The second disadvantage of this work is that the terms are so broadly defined in order to comprehend Origen and Philip Neri, Therese of Lisieux and Jonathan Edwards, that they lose their meaning. Of John of the Cross, for instance, the author writes: "In a very kataphatic and sometimes affective manner, he advocates an apophatic and speculative spirituality." What is the truth in such a statement?

The author creates one other bit of framework by assigning a list of instrumental and terminal images to each figure or period. Noting that,

532 - A History of Christian Spirituality: An Analytical Introduction

regularly, "the experience of God is thematized by certain key images," he sets out to "speak of the images pertaining to ascetical theology" as instrumental, and to speak of as terminal those pertaining to "the goals of the life lived under grace." His use of image is idiosyncratic and unexplained, though it includes such inconcrete things as predestination, colloquy, and spiritual direction. In the end, this distinction is not really useful. It forces the listing of "union" as instrumental in the experience and doctrine of Thomas Aquinas and Teresa of Avila and the omission of "decision" from Ignatian instrumental images.

As a catalogue of major figures in the development of Christian spirituality, the book is written in an informal, almost breezy style. The "inner eye" that Richard Rolle speaks of, for example, reminds the author not only of Julian of Norwich, but of shamans and Carlos Castaņeda. His necessary succinctness results in statements that may be true but not very helpful, like the one that John Gerson "believed that mystical knowledge was experimental." Instead of Ignatius' brief statement on the topic, he writes that "Consolation is where love is present." Finally, informal language allows very unusual usages of terms like "exemplarism" and "pietism."

There are signs of haste in both the writing and the production of this book. That is too bad because the need for a brief, comprehensive survey of this kind continues.

Joseph A. Tetlow, S.J.
Jesuit House of Studies
New Orleans, Louisiana