Memoirs.

Memoirs, by Frederick C. Copleston, S.J., Sheed & Ward, $14.95, 228pp.

There is an old saw that says "every analogy limps" (omnisanalogia claudicat). Be that as it may, analogies can be very illuminating as Frances Young, Cadbury professor of theology at the University of Birmingham (England), shows. Anxious to overcome the gap that exists between technical biblical exegesis and the Bible as the text of the church, she invites us to turn to music as a fruitful place to begin to think about biblical scholarship in relation to the life of the church.

The biblical canon, in Young's telling of it, can be compared to a musical repertoire (of, say, Mozart) with selections from that corpus being the pericopes used, e.g., in the liturgy or the life of devotion. The rehearsal of the texts is the work of the exegete/students who plumb the text for meaning. Without their work, there is inadequate or shoddy music unfaithful to the text. All preachers, congregations, and individuals are performers who produce results that range from the masterly to the ordinary. The great saints and doctors are our virtuosi. munity of believers.

Young insists that there is still much to be learned from these early "performers" who did not have the advantage of historical-critical studies but did have a profound sense of the ecclesial setting of the Scriptures. I very much like, for instance, her suggestion that the theory of recapitulation, championed by Irenaeus, is similar to the end of a musical composition which brings together the strands and directions of the piece into some kind of synthetic and harmonious whole; think, for example of the fugue. As Northrup Frye, from the perspective of a literary critic, once phrased it, the Scriptures are endlessly self-referential.

Many readers of this very rich and satisfying study will have their own moments of saying "Yes but..." but most, save the intransigently reductionistic, will learn and appreciate what Young is attempting to do. There are lessons here both for the professional theologian and for the pastorally minded. Readers who are sympathetic to works like Sandra Schneiders's The Revelatory Text (1991) which attempt to recover our sense of the Bible as sacred Scripture will welcome Young's project. Like Schneider, Young attempts to bring back into single focus the rich heritage of critical scholarship and the even richer resource which we, as believers, call the Word of God.

I have been a reader of the Catholic Worker for over thirty years. Like most readers I almost identify the paper with the rich illustrations done by artists like Ade Bethune and, above all, the late Fritz Eichenberg (1901-1990). Born into a secular German Jewish family, Eichenberg came to the United States as a refugee in 1933. He made a good living as an illustrator of the classics with his woodcuts for books like Crime and Punishment and Wuthering Heights. In 1949, now a Quaker pacifist, he met Dorothy Day at a meeting at the Quaker center at Pendle Hill. Day importuned him to produce art for her newspaper despite the fact that she could not pay him. Cheerfully, he complied and over the next forty years he produced striking woodcuts of which some, like the Christ of the Breadlines or his various saints like Francis, Benedict, Martin de Porres, have become signature pieces of the Catholic Worker movement.

Robert Ellsberg, himself once the managing editor of the Catholic Worker, had the excellent idea of gathering a number of these illustrations together; they make up the present volume which is fleshed out by an introduction by Jim Forest, an interview with Eichenberg himself, and an essay by Dorothy Day written some years ago. Paging through this volume brought back a flood of wonderful memories: as a college student of meeting Ammon Hennacy, anarchist and quondam Catholic, peddling the Catholic Worker in front of Saint Patrick's on New York's Fifth Avenue; of hearing Dorothy Day, weeks before her death, speak to college students about the "unromantic" life at the Worker houses. Handsomely produced (the book's layout was designed by Eichenberg's widow), this is also a work of virtuoso theology which will be loved by those who love everything the Catholic Workers stand for as refracted through the imagination of a powerfully passionate artist.

In 1967 and 1968, Thomas Merton hosted some small gatherings of contemplative nuns at his Gethsemani hermitage to consider the problems and prospects of the contemplative life. His conferences and responses to questions put to him have been edited off tapes and make up this present volume.

The late 1960s were, to put it mildly, a time of great turmoil in the church and in religious life in particular. The hold of traditional religious life was weakening but what the future held (if anything) was still not clear. These conference notes reflect that uncertain Zeitgeist with its references to the race issue, to Vietnam, to protest within the church, and, interestingly, the first stirrings of the feminist movement. There is, as a consequence, a certain historically dated quality to Merton's words. On closer examination, however, there is still much that was prescient and insightful.

Of one thing Merton was mightily convinced: religious renewal (as well as church renewal more generally) did not mean much if it exhausted its energies about "changes" in the rule or customs of religious life. To indulge in such superficialities was to rearrange the proverbial deck chairs on the Titanic. Merton asked a more fundamental question, a question he would raise again in the very last conference he gave in Thailand in December 1968: What would happen to people if, by some odd stroke, the whole institutional support structure of monasticism was swept away? What would be left? His answer, in brief, was that the church always needs those who are serious enough about the contemplative life "to get together and live it and to make all kinds of sacrifices to do it, to give up other things to do it." In other words, the witness of monasticism and/or the contemplative life is quite different from the forms it might take.

Merton fleshes out the ramifications of his basic faith in monasticism by a two-pronged strategy: demanding that contemplatives get to the heart of what their life is about and holding out the challenge to them to have the courage to seek ways to allow that life to be lived. This strategy might call for painful choices and human disappointment. It also demands enough modesty to seek help from other traditions to deepen an understanding of what contemplative living is all about. In the course of his conferences he notes the value of Zen as an antidote to an overly conceptualized view of Christian faith and points to the Hasidic belief that mysticism should be in the business of "mending" creation.

In the course of these conferences, there are valuable insights into traditional formulations of Christian spirituality, e.g., his understanding of "purity of heart" as being disposed to God; his note that "self-forgetfulness" might be best understood in terms of its reverse: not being too "self-conscious"; that our work and life are always more satisfactory when oriented toward the good of others; that being "prophetic" does not necessarily mean being noisily countercultural because in this age of the mass media being prophetic might just end up being "newsworthy."

And how does the contemplative life serve church and world? Merton spent his mature years thinking about this issue. His short answer is that the contemplative should be able to communicate, individually or communally, from the deep center or ground which is God. That Merton himself was able to do this explains why his writings are still read and his persona still inspires. The Springs of Contemplation is a valuable book for all those in religious life (it should be read in tandem with Merton's letters on the same subject, published in The School of Charity), but others will also profit from his shrewdly authentic observations on Christian spirituality.

Vauchez is one of the premier contemporary students of medieval spirituality. In this book (his major work on the history of medieval saints has never been translated into English) Vauchez makes a startling observation that it is the work of two streams of scholarship that made possible Vatican II's affirmation of the church as the "People of God" and not merely a perfect society hierarchically constituted. One stream was the theological recovery of the laity in the history of the church (e.g., by Yves Congar) and the other was the work of a number of distinguished historians who traced the emergence of the laity and lay piety in the early Middle Ages.

Building on the work of these historians, Vauchez shows how slowly Christians responded to the question of how to lead the evangelical or apostolic life (the vita apostolica) after the eleventh-century reforms initiated by Pope Gregory VII (died 1085). At least one strain of this renewal developed alternatives to traditional monastic or regular fraternities (e.g., the Patarines in Italy or the Beghards/Beguines in the Low Countries). These groups attempted to live in the world, honor work, and, not infrequently, the married state (e.g., in the Third Orders of the mendicant Franciscans) while being faithful to the gospel.

The permutations of these exercises in renewal were many as Vauchez's essays show: there were ecstatic mystics; married pilgrims; etc. A figure like Francis of Assisi is inexplicable without reference to this background just as Joan of Arc in the fourteenth century is only understandable against the tradition of lay female prophets abroad in the land.

What makes this book so valuable, however, is the lesson that Vauchez draws from his careful studies, lessons that are not without applications for today. First, the tradition of lay piety, in all its fits and starts, is not what the church demanded of people; it came from below. As Vauchez states it: the lay people both did not do what the church expected of them while, at the same time, demanding more of the church than it was ready to grant. Nonetheless, the common wisdom of the laity triumphed as canonists were, in time, forced to define a new reality in the church: lay religious (laicus religiosus).

The Laity in the Middle Ages will make demands on the reader not acquainted with medieval history, but it is well worth the effort for those who wish proof of the "thick" nature of the Catholic tradition and, further, as an indication that many of the contemporary experiments in a whole range of ministries and new spiritual experiments have good historical precedent.

Many collegians (myself included) turned to Copleston's multivolumed History of Philosophy to bone up for the dreaded final examination in Philosophy 100. Gifted with a clear expository style and in command of the philosophical tradition from Thales to Wittgenstein, his work has been invaluable. Begun in 1946 as a seminary text, the history eventually expanded to nine volumes. (A tenth, on Russian philosophy, does not belong in the series.) It ended up a standard in the field.

Now in his late eighties (he was born in 1907), Copleston converted to the Catholic church while in public school, entered the Jesuits, did his tertian year in Germany (interrupted by hostilities), and spent most of his academic career commuting between Rome's Gregorian University and Heythrop College in England, teaching a semester in each place. Now retired, his last task was to transfer the venerable Jesuit college from the country to London where, currently, Heythrop is a college of the University of London. He spent his first retirement as a professor at Santa Clara University in California which he remembers with fondness and generosity.

This rather typical life of the Jesuit intellectual would make for somewhat dull reading were it not that Copleston's vivid writing brings alive the places and characters he encountered during his life as an academic. He has vivid memories of Nazi Germany; he tells of his now famous BBC debates with Bertrand Russell and the logical positivist A. J. Ayers; he recounts some of his aristocratically dotty friends with whom he vacationed; he looks back on his public school days with some nostalgia (he was not beaten; he hated games; the food was not terrific; and homosexual liaisons were not mandatory). His final chapter is one of serenity and hope, shaped by the Christian optimism he gained from an appreciative reading of his Jesuit confrere, Teilhard de Chardin.

Among the literary categories that I have established for myself is the "airplane flight" book. Such a work must read well, be informative, and of a size to finish, say, in three or four hours, which means that it can fit into what I call lovingly my OBB (old blue bag). Copleston's Memoirs is exactly that kind of book. I recommend it, then, for frequent flyers or those who are at home with a leisurely evening to spare.

LAWRENCE S. CUNNINGHAM is chair of the theology department at the University of Notre Dame.