RELIGION BOOKNOTES.

Living Jesus: Learning the Heart of the Gospel
by Luke Timothy Johnson
HarperSanFrancisco, $22, 210 pp.

Spirituality and Theology: Christian Living and the Doctrine of God
by Philip Sheldrake
Orbis, $20, 244 pp.

The Letters of Hildegard of
Bingen-Volume II
translated and edited by Joseph L. Baird and Radd K. Ehrman
Oxford University Press, $45, 215 pp.

Voice of the Living Light: Hildegard of Bingen and Her World
edited by Barbara Newman
University of California Press, $19.95, 278 pp.

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
edited by Ursula King
Orbis, $13, 173 pp.

Luke Timothy Johnson, a frequent contributor to these pages, is a biblical scholar who has a great knack for mediating high-level scholarship to a nonprofessional audience. His current book has a simple aim: to provide an approach to the New Testament that does not reduce Jesus to a facile historical category of sage or wandering preacher or to an evanescent symbol of the modernist mystic. Johnson believes in a living Jesus who is the resurrected Lord. He argues that it is that Christ who is at the center of Christian faith. For Johnson, Jesus Christ is neither a resuscitated corpse nor a figure only in the mind or heart of the believer. Jesus Christ lives as a spiritual person after the manner which Paul describes in 1 Corinthians 15. It is that resurrected Christ who is the object of the belief of each of the writers of the New Testament.

Johnson recognizes that the portraits of Jesus in the New Testament are various; that the meaning of Jesus is polyvalent. The very complexity of the New Testament faith in Christ signals mystery, not incoherence, Johnson writes. He refuses the gambit (as old as the efforts of Tatian and Marcion in the second century) of flattening out the images of Christ in the New Testament writings by pounding them into a synchronized but implausible whole. Johnson argues that the complexity of a person is enhanced, not blurred, when we have various portraits of that person. Our understanding of a person becomes more coherent when we can see what other people thought of him or her.

To describe the living Jesus (as opposed to the "dead" Jesus of academic scholarship), Johnson gives a succinct but comprehensive account of the books of the New Testament as they attempt to answer the old question posed by Jesus himself: "Who is the Christ? What think ye of him?" Living Jesus is in implicit dialogue with critical scholarship but does not have the polemical edge of Johnson's wonderful critique of the Jesus Seminar in his earlier The Real Jesus.

Living Jesus could easily be described as an essay on New Testament spirituality. I read passages of it to my appreciative undergraduate students as we read the Gospels. I cannot pay it higher praise beyond saying that if the book is in a less expensive soft cover this coming academic year, I will adopt it as a required text for background reading. I say "background reading" because I agree with Johnson that reading books about Mark or any other Gospel is no substitute for the "slow, deliberative, ruminative, associative reading of [Mark's] story in sequence," since it is that kind of reading that is most appropriable for those "seeking in the Holy Spirit to 'learn Jesus.'" This rich book is written in a straightforward manner but deserves to be read with the Bible close at hand. Highly recommended.

Philip Sheldrake, a British theologian best known for his influential Spirituality and History, turns his attention in his most recent book to the relationship between theology and spirituality. While indicating why there is a separation between theology and spirituality, he makes the case for why it needs to be closed. One shorthand way of seeing Christian spirituality is as the "Christian life as experience." Sheldrake notes that "our understanding of 'Christian,' 'spiritual,' 'life,' and 'experience' are dependent on our theological presuppositions." He ends the first section of his book with a deft survey of contemporary theologians who argue for a closer congruence between spirituality and systematic theology.

Sheldrake then assays three "test cases" to demonstrate how "spiritual" writers "do" authentic theology. Julian of Norwich is used to show how Trinitarian theology is constructed. In a less successful comparison, the Spiritual Exercises of Saint Ignatius of Loyola is juxtaposed to the work of the Anglican poet-divine George Herbert, who was Loyola's older contemporary. In the third and most original and satisfying test case, Sheldrake reflects on spirituality and place. He previously explored place in spirituality in his little work on Celtic spirituality (Living between Worlds). Here he moves beyond writers who affirm the role of place in the spiritual life (Kathleen Norris, Belden Lane, etc.) to ask a powerful question: What about those places which stand as a contradiction to any desire or drive toward the experience of God? What about Auschwitz? What about the placement of the Carmelite convent adjacent to Auschwitz?

If the Auschwitz example sets the notion of place in stark terms, one must also ask, as Sheldrake does, about the role of place in urban civilization. In a few economical pages he ranges over those thinkers who have looked sympathetically at the contemporary city (Michael Novak, for example) to those who do not (John Milbank). Nor is Sheldrake unaware of the case made by many about sacrality and natural places. Echoing the sentiment of the Anglican theologian Bishop Rowan Williams, Sheldrake thinks we should be suspicious of a too bland invocation of the language of the sacred when discussing some vista of natural beauty. So much intellectual territory is covered in such a short space that readers could well ask for more detail. In the meantime, this is an excellent introduction for those who would like to understand Christian spirituality in its relationship to theology. I could well imagine this book being used in the classroom, although individuals might replace some of the case studies to fit their own needs. The more general chapters give a fair account of the subject at hand.

Co-authors Baird and Ehrman continue their translation work on the writings of the twelfth-century polymath, Hildegard of Bingen. As in their first volume, reviewed previously in these pages (May 19, 1995), the letters are organized according to the rank of the recipient. The first volume contained letters to and from popes, prelates, and at least one famous saint, namely, Bernard of Clairvaux. This volume provides a wide swath of letters to and from abbots and abbesses on a broad range of topics. Hildegard enjoyed such regard in her day that persons constantly wrote her just to get a "good word," or to have a scriptural conundrum solved, or to inquire after questions of music or theology. One exchange is of particular interest. Twelve letters passed between Hildegard and a somewhat awestruck monk, Guibert of Gembloux. Guibert posed a series of questions (what language was used in her visions?) which, when answered, sheds some light on the nature of visionary experience. Hildegard's letter (numbered 103r) is an extraordinary autobiographical confession about how her visionary experiences happen (no sensible audition or vision but an experience "in my spirit") set out in a declaration that she had had such experiences from her childhood. She further stated that she kept these experiences within her memory for a long time and then expressed them in "unpolished" Latin. This epistolary exchange is a precious resource for understanding the character of religious visionary literature.

Equally fascinating is a letter of 1176 where Guibert poses thirty-five questions about the interpretation of Scripture. The questions are interesting in their own right since women did not ordinarily comment on Scripture (that was the right of the theologian, but Hildegard's renown was such that she was praised as being more learned than the masters at Paris). The questions themselves shed a good deal of light on twelfth- century scriptural preoccupations. Some were directed toward solving apparent contradictions while others had to do with whether a passage was to be taken literally or figuratively.

Studies on Hildegard have become something of a cottage industry. Her music is performed, translations of her works come out frequently, and serious studies abound. What is clear from reading these letters is that this woman was a powerful figure in her own day. She dispatched letters to a circle of persons, advising them on their spiritual life (she was a director for both men and women), talking about the singular fashion in which she governed her own community, fighting intramural battles over monastic rights, and urging reform where laxity prevailed.

Two more volumes of correspondence are to come. The two already published are exemplary. The translations read well (the editors tell us that the Latin is often opaque), the notes are helpful, and the brief bibliography and indexes enhance the readability of the text.

The very originality of Hildegard's theological vision, the range of her interests, and the power of her personality might require some introduction to her life and times. Barbara Newman, herself an author of a very fine study of Hildegard, has provided such an introduction by editing a series of studies written by noted scholars covering a wide range of topics connected to Hildegard. Newman contributes the first and last essays, respectively a "life and times" survey and a consideration of Hildegard as a poet. Other essays discuss Hildegard's medical writings, the character of monastic life in her day, her work as an artist, her music, as well as her role as a religious thinker (in what sense was she understood as a theologian?), prophet, reformer, and correspondent. Reading this book, one is again struck by how much Hildegard was the exception to the rule about how women were to conduct themselves in medieval society. Not only did she comment on the Scriptures, but she urged monastic reforms, developed some liturgical texts for her community, created a rather complex theological system, preached in public, fought fiercely for the rights of her own community, and generally acted in public roles. Her ability to act in such a public manner was due, of course, to the widely held perception that she was the recipient of guidance from the Holy Spirit in her prophetic and teaching tasks.

Today, the immense interest in Hildegard not infrequently flows from various ideological agendas. Thus, she often becomes a protofeminist or the mother of "creation spirituality." What these essays show in some depth is that she is far too complex an individual to be hammered into these ideological categories. She is very much a person of her own age, yet a multitalented religious genius. She transformed the learning of her day through the power of her imagination, the utter conviction derived from her religious life, and her passion for that beauty which is a reflection of God's beauty.

This anthology contains scholarly essays of high quality but is written in an accessible style. The volume concludes with a fine bibliography as well as a discography. It is an excellent vade mecum for anyone wishing to study Hildegard's works in any detail.

I first read Teilhard de Chardin in the very late fifties when The Phenomenon of Man first appeared in English. My memory of that reading is quite vivid because my copy came by post from London in a plain brown wrapper. The book was not sold in the Catholic bookstores because of the Vatican's grave suspicions about the author's orthodoxy. I then went through a great Teilhard phase. Nonetheless, it was not until Ursula King's tidily presented anthology of texts, part of the Orbis "Modern Spiritual Masters" series, came to me that I took the opportunity of reacquainting myself with a writer whom I once greatly admired.

On this rereading I discovered that certain convictions I once had still apply. My admiration for Teilhard's cosmic Christology has not abated; the French Jesuit paleontologist has no equal in plumbing the depth of the image of Christ depicted in the prologue to the Gospel of John and the opening chapters of the Pauline letters such as Colossians and Ephesians. Second, one must admire his heroic effort at marrying science and faith in a world view even if one cannot quite say "yes" to what he proposes. Third, he was a master of language who could recreate a sense of grandeur and wonder at the sheer miracle of the cosmos. Is there not a deep truth in his conviction that a God who "made the world less mysterious or smaller or less important to us, than our heart and reason show it to be,...will never be the one before whom the world will kneel"? Finally, I have never had patience with those who criticized him for his theological audacity or heterodox formulations. Had he not been ruthlessly silenced over the years, he might have benefited from the refining fire of scholarly critique and debate. The very oddness of his writing is an evident rebuke to the ham-handed authoritarianism of the Vatican censors of the day.

If there is one criticism of Teilhard that can be made it has to do with the near cosmic sweep of his vision. He is, for the most part, too taken by the macrocosm; too fixated on the high Christology of the New Testament. The human Jesus plays little part in Teilhard's meditations, and the finite, individual person seems to get lost in the dynamic sweep of his speculation. This relative neglect of the person of Jesus may derive from Teilhard's attempt to move the modern believer away from an anthropocentric vision of the world to a larger, more cosmic, vision. If that be the case, then we ought to praise Teilhard for what he did rather than for what he failed to do. Nonetheless, one is inescapably reminded of Soren Kierkegaard's observation about Hegel, namely, that he was like a man who built a great castle and was forced to live outside its walls in a shack. To put it another way: Teilhard's grand deutero- Pauline Christology needs to be balanced with a dose of Mark's insistence on personal discipleship.

We must thank Ursula King for a gracefully written introduction as well as the highly readable selections from Teilhard's writings. The net result is a handy volume useful for reading in small doses as a source for meditation and spiritual enrichment. My own gratitude is more personal since the book has restored to me many of the facets of Teilhard's writings that drew me to him in the first place.

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