Handmaids of the Lord: Holy Women in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages.

edited/translated by Joan M. Petersen Cistercian Publications, $24.95 (paperback), 441 pp.

Thompson, swimming against theological eddies, wishes to do Christology in a "nonsurgical" manner, which is to say to respect the integrity of the body of Scripture. In his words: "Our approach is noninvasive in the sense that it wants to do Christology from within the movements of the Gospel texts (and of Scripture as a whole)." This noninvasive approach leads him to consider such distinctions as "high and low" Christology in a new light: no longer as an either/or, but as the creative interplay of faith and history, divinity and humanity, all belonging to the Word of God.

This approach also binds his scholarship as closely to the body of believers as to the world of Wissenschaft. For it is none other than the ancient and honorable practice of theology once succinctly described by Saint Anselm: "faith seeking understanding [fides quaerens intellectum]." Anyone who thinks such a procedure is retrograde would do well to read Thompson's rich book.

Take his chapter on the psalms. No supersessionist, his reading of the psalter is not a naive search for Christological symbols in anticipation of New Testament "fulfillment," but he nonetheless sees an implicit Christology. Thompson sees the psalms as meditations on the force of revelation and reads the New Testament as providing doctrinal flesh. Psalter and New Testament, as it were, sing to each other antiphonally (an idea which is at least as old as Augustine).

Working from within the tradition, Thompson brings new insights to old materials. Thus his reflections on Wisdom motifs (and especially in Proverbs 8); so also his commentary on the infancy of Jesus in which, true to his earlier research, he draws on the French school of spirituality and links infancy with the playfulness of Proverbs. Thompson argues that a Christology attuned to infancy not only leads us to reconsider both the status of victims (children exhibit helplessness) and the role of women in the redemptive drama, but reminds us also of the cosmic play of Wisdom. Wisdom further keeps revelation open and, in that way, is an entry point for interreligious dialogue (as Thomas Merton underscored).

Thompson's work has affinities with the theological methodology of Hans Urs von Balthasar (and perhaps Barth), by which I mean that it starts from and stands within the community of belief. It may not be everyone's style of theology, but I learned much from this book and was profoundly moved by it. And I recommend it to be read in the manner in which it was written: through the lens of a deep and contemplative faith.

I try to alert readers of these notes when new anthologies of historical sources pertinent for Christian spirituality come onto the market. The late Joan Petersen's anthology contains introductions to and translations of classic sources relating to the lives and works of ascetic women in the early period of the church's life. She provides us with Gregory of Nyssa's life of his sister, Macrina; a generous selection of Saint Jerome's writings on the ascetic women of his era in Rome, Egypt, and Palestine; Palladius's lives of Melania the Elder and Melania the Younger; Gerontius's Life of the Holy Macrina; and, finally, early medieval Gallic documents relating to the life of the royal Radegunde, written by such luminaries as Gregory of Tours and Venantius Fortunatus (the fine hymnist).

Both the introductions and the translations are amply endnoted. The book closes with a bibliography of general sources and particular bibliographies for each of the persons represented but, alas, no index.

A close reading of these vitae teaches us a good deal about asceticism in the early church (although the book never even refers to the quite different practice in the Syriac world of the time) and no little, parenthetically, about the early liturgy, pilgrimages, scriptural interpretation and study, and the social life among, mainly, the late antique aristocratic classes. It was also a personal if somewhat perverse pleasure to reread the dyspeptic Jerome.

Joan Petersen's work deserves an honored place on the bookshelf along with similar books which I have noted in this column, especially Jo Ann MacNamara's Sainted Women of the Dark Ages (1992) and Thomas Noble's Soldiers of Christ (1995). All of these collections of translated materials help in furthering that ressourcement which is at the heart of the study of the Christian spiritual tradition.

Ahlgren's book is less a study of Teresa of Avila's teaching than a close examination of how Teresa managed to become who she was--an extraordinary maestra espiritual (and, subsequently, a doctor of the church) at a time when the church was in full reaction against nonhierarchical (and sometimes heretical) movements in general. It was a period in particular when women who claimed visionary experience wrote and spent time at large (outside the cloister). Ahlgren is further interested in understanding how and why Teresa became the only Spanish woman canonized by the church in the post-Tridentine epoch.

In the telling, Teresa appears only so far as she struggles with the charge that she belonged to the mystical Alumbrados, whom the Spanish Inquisition so feared, and answers critics who railed that the writing of books by women was praeter naturam [beyond their nature].

But Teresa did write, because she wanted to provide her sisters with texts about their own spiritual journey, and she did live a good deal outside of the cloister, because she saw a need to reform Carmelite houses. Her strategy was to submit to her confessors; to protest her orthodoxy; to confess her weakness as a woman; and, most importantly, to write subtly, lest her detractors attack her as an exponent of the feared heretics then known collectively as los luteranos.

Ahlgren's work sets out all of this in great detail (she has done a lot of archival work in Spain) and, to that extent, is really informative. I do think, however, that the feminist lens through which she sees Teresa is a bit narrow. After all, John of the Cross and Ignatius of Loyola also felt the hot breath of the Inquisition. Teresa was canonized a scant 40 years after her death, while John's canonization was postponed 138 years. Furthermore Ahlgren's claim, in her final chapter, that the canonization of Teresa reshaped her vita to conform to the standards of the militant Catholicism of the day could be applied to every saint ever canonized by papal decree. Taking a clue from Amitai Etzioni, I argued nearly twenty years ago in The Meaning of Saints that all lives of the saints are "constructed." Finally, looking at Bayside, New York, or Conyers, Georgia, or Medjurgorje (to name just a few) makes one sympathetic to the "institutional" church when it takes a hard look at visionary claims.

In sum, this book usefully contextualizes the lives of one of the most fascinating women in the history of the church, though the person more or less disappears in the mix. Still, I'm glad to have read it because it does make the reading of Teresa's own work more lively.

Miriam Pollard's book is a work of startling singularity. A contemplative nun for many years, she meditates on the twenty-year prison life of Hitler's architecture and armaments minister, Albert Speer, as he described those years in his diaries published (in English) in 1976. Speer always denied that he knew of the Holocaust but nonetheless emphatically asserted his moral complicity in the whole Nazi enterprise, because, at least by 1943-44, he could have known but kept himself in the dark. This form of ignorance is what the old moral theologians called supine or crass ignorance, and it is what fascinates Pollard. Of it she writes: "Complicity in evil because one has willfully destroyed one's capacity to recognize it... seems as wrong to me as complicity in an evil of which one has definite knowledge."

The conceit of Pollard's book is to find in Speer's prison experience an analogy to her own monastic life: Both have fixed hours, long periods of silence, and regular work; both exact celibacy, asceticism about food, clothing, etc., obedience to superiors, and detachment from the world. Speer, in his diaries, spends a good deal of time wrestling with the enormity of his crimes, guilt in relationship to Christian faith, and the need to acknowledge the consequences of one's actions. The issues Pollard raises are whether we can accept such sentiments at their face value and if the mercy of God exceeds the enormous crimes of the Third Reich.

What makes this book so powerful as an exercise in spiritual reflection (besides Pollard's gifts as a writer) is its freedom from abstraction. Pollard takes a "hard case" and asks: Is mercy to be found here? How does Christ shine forth? These questions are asked against the background of a silent chorus of the murdered. Did God give us twenty years to repent our sins? they ask. If Speer is an exemplary case, where do we stand in this spiritual calculus?

Pollard does not address the victims directly, but no one can read her book without turning to them. This adds a dimension to her writing: It goes beyond the emotions to challenge also our power of imagination. After Speer had finished his sentence, he met a survivor of the camps at a reception. She said that she would have to leave, because of his presence, and hoped that he would forgive her decision. Speer replied that it was he who needed forgiveness and added, "I understand better than you think I do." If that is truly the case, then Pollard's great faith in the mercy of God may not be misplaced at all. But can we imagine it?

Paul Harris is a British disciple of the late John Main (died 1982), the Benedictine monk who did so much to teach contemplative prayer. Since 1947 Harris has collected prayers, aphorisms, observations, and scriptural verses relating to the life of prayer and spiritual advancement. This volume (first published in the U.K.) presents his collection in twelve thematic chapters.

Harris does not think that his book is for reading in large doses; he envisions a careful reader looking, perhaps, at only a page or even a part of a page per day--a sort of lectio divina.

Many of the selections come from standard authors (the Desert Fathers, the contemplative writers, modern spiritual writers like Bede Griffiths, Thomas Merton, Henri Nouwen, John Main, et al.), but there are surprising sources as well (D.H. Lawrence, George Bernard Shaw). The selections also include many non-Christian sources, especially from Buddhist literature. The volume concludes with a helpful index of persons cited, but a biographical blurb on some of the lesser-known authors would have been appreciated.

Readers of these notes know of my weakness for these kinds of anthologies. They make wonderful books just to "keep around" for when one is too distracted or too tired to read a lengthy monograph; one can simply open to a page at random. I keep a whole series of such books (mainly anthologies of prayers) on my desk for precisely such moments. This packed book, modestly priced, will serve nicely for languid afternoons, or as a starter for busy days.

Lawrence S. Cunningham teaches theology and chairs the department at the University of Notre Dame.