RELIGION BOOKNOTES.

In the entry on "Doctors of the Church" in The New Catholic Encyclopedia published in 1967, the author assured us that the likelihood of a woman being so honored was slight since women did not exercise the ministry of theological teaching. Three years later Paul VI named Catherine of Siena and Teresa of Avila doctors of the church. More recently, Pope John Paul II added the name of Therese of Lisieux.

It is the burden of McGinn's readable volume to describe how the honorific "doctor of the church" grew in the tradition, to provide brief biographies of the thirty-three persons who are called doctors, and, finally, to speculate on the future, and, more tantalizingly, on who could or should be on the list. McGinn points out that in the Middle Ages theologians and preachers referred to the great patristic writers of the past as doctores (in the Christian East the reference was to "The Fathers"). The doctores had a certain eminence because of the weight assigned to their teaching. The names of Augustine, Gregory the Great, Ambrose, Jerome, as well as Easterners like Gregory of Nyssa and Athanasius, were commonly cited as authoritative theological sources.

It was not until after the Council of Trent that popes began to add new doctors of the church at regular intervals. A Dominican pope declared Thomas Aquinas a doctor of the church in 1568, so it was only natural that a Franciscan pope would name Saint Bonaventure a doctor two decades later. Over a hundred years would pass until a new name (Anselm of Canterbury) would be included in the list. From then the list would grow apace.

One way to assess the importance of the doctors is to look at how frequently they are cited in official teachings. McGinn supplies a handy appendix indicating such citation in the documents of Vatican II and in the Catechism of the Catholic Church. The variations are enormous: Thomas Aquinas leads with nearly eight hundred citations, while Augustine is a close second. Alphonsus Liguori is never cited in the documents of Vatican II, although he is cited once in the catechism. Robert Bellarmine gets twenty-nine citations in Vatican II but none in the catechism. Anselm of Canterbury gets but a single citation.

What person will make the list? (This is rather like handicapping the Nobel Prize!) John Henry Newman is cited nearly thirty times in Vatican II and four times in the catechism, which puts him ahead, by my count, of fourteen of the official doctors. McGinn suggests a number of people for possible inclusion. We think of the teaching of doctrine in a more expansive fashion today, so one might include Francis of Assisi or the monastic witness of John Cassian (also suggested by McGinn). I definitely do not think that Louis de Montfort should make the cut because of the oddly rococo Mariology that he espoused, but McGinn likes him. McGinn further resists the notion of an ecumenical "doctor of the church" because, he argues, doctores should teach the fullness of the Catholic faith. (I have a soft spot in my heart for John Wesley.)

This is an engagingly written book on a topic little studied. One could learn a good deal about the history of theology from it while finding clues for further reading in McGinn's fine bibliographies. The final chapter also permits one to enter the guessing game with the rules he supplies and, for me, that was great fun.

Alister McGrath, principal of Wycliffe Hall at Oxford University, is one of the most prolific theologians writing within the Evangelical tradition. This most recent work is the fruit of six years of teaching spirituality seminars in summer-school sessions on a subject of some urgency for McGrath. As he observed a few years ago, there has been a dearth of solid materials for recently converted Evangelicals seeking to sustain their new Christian lives. Christian Spirituality is designed to fill that need. It is always useful for a Catholic to see how the subject of spirituality is treated in other traditions.

McGrath, a veteran textbook writer, knows how to put a cogent book together. He supplies the obligatory introductory material before providing four meaty chapters fashioned in the style of casebooks. Chapter 4 selects a series of theological themes, gives a definition for each, its location in Christian practice, and finally, how it enters into the spiritual life. Chapter 5 does the same for biblical themes while furnishing information on various writers and schools of spirituality related to these various biblical topoi. Chapter 6 assesses the role of visualization in spirituality and its various Christian manifestations.

The final chapter (and the most instructive) uses a series of short, classic spiritual texts-ranging from Gregory of Nyssa down to more modern writers-to show how one might "interrogate" the text while using "selective attention" to avoid getting bogged down in the peripheral details. This method reminds me of the old Puritan formula for preaching a sermon: an expanded consideration of the text, an explanation of its doctrine, and, finally, an application to the life situation. Not a bad formula at all.

I do have three mild criticisms, however. First, McGrath does not seem to have a firm grasp on all of the historical sources. For example, he goes on at some length about John of the Cross and the "dark night of the soul." John, of course, does not talk generically about the dark night of the soul; he speaks, rather, of the dark night of the senses and the dark night of faith. The distinction is important.

Second, McGrath's bibliographies are not comprehensive. He does not cite the now standard volume of the collected works of John of the Cross by Kieran Kavanaugh and Otilio Rodriguez. Despite a nice list of Web sites, he neglects to note primary sources available in translation and is unselective about secondary literature.

Third, the relationship of spirituality and social action is not addressed. This may be a result of the author's own Evangelical orientation. The general assumption seems to be that spirituality most concerns the individual; little focused attention is paid to spiritual growth in the context of liturgy and service to the world.

Despite these criticisms, I found much to admire in this work. It could be quite useful for any teacher or student who wishes to learn how to study spirituality with some level of intellectual seriousness. Still, this is a book best read in tandem with works that address areas only lightly touched on here. Gustavo Gutierrez's We Drink from Our Own Wells (1983), in which liberation themes are put into dialogue with the life of prayer, worship, and spiritual growth, would be a useful companion volume.

Gutierrez's more recent writings on spirituality can be found in The Density of the Present. Here are six essays that first saw light either as journal articles or as academic addresses. His 1992 paper marking the fourth centenary of the birth of John of the Cross is an excellent example of how Gutierrez approaches an issue. What can John of the Cross say to the teeming masses of Latin America? Is his doctrine too precious and elitist to be of real use? Gutierrez invites us to look again at the great mystic to relearn some fundamental themes: the utter gratuity of God's love for us; the call to freedom in faith; the power of language; and, finally, joy in the midst of trials. Also included in this volume is a wonderful talk on the relationship between theological language and the human condition. Here, Gutierrez is attentive to both the absence and the presence of God in language (especially literary language) and to the way that Emanuel Levinas grounds ethics in his idea of the "other." These essays (others deal with discipleship, the ecclesial dimension of theology, the concordance of the terms "friends of God" and "friends of the poor" ) illustrate how a superbly trained theologian can write skillfully about spirituality without appearing either abstract or elitist. To my mind, Gutierrez does this better than most.

Another book to be read in tandem with McGrath is Charles J. Healey's survey of Christian spirituality. Based on his long experience as a university and seminary professor, this well-written essay takes us from the apostolic fathers down to the period after Vatican II. Healey tells his story chronologically, breaking this pattern only to catch up on spiritual trends outside the Roman Catholic tradition. There he pays attention to Orthodox and Reformation spirituality and also to those traditions (like the Holiness tradition) often glossed over in standard accounts.

Healey provides biographical sketches of the major figures, brief accounts of the cultural matrix within which they lived, and a short analysis of the dominant themes in their writings. There is nothing original in his exposition (he is heavily dependent on standard secondary sources), but neither is there eccentricity or bad judgment. This work could well serve as a companion piece for a course in spirituality along with a selection of primary texts. (I do not think it could be used on its own.) Still, the sheer amount of information conveyed can be staggering. That criticism, however, is not meant as a serious one; the book probably ought to be read in small chunks.

Christian Spirituality has a fairly representative bibliography of English-language sources and a more-than-adequate index. For a relatively modest price, one gets, in short, a kind of brief version of the now out-of-print three-volume The History of Christian Spirituality written by Louis Bouyer et al.

O'Murchu, an Irish priest based in London, is a lover of the big theme. In the limited space of this modest volume he links up creation spirituality, chaos theory, the feminist movement, Jungian archetypes, the new physics, a radical critique of patriarchy, nonjudgmental approaches to sexuality, and various kinds of ecological theory. In contradistinction to these new forms of knowing, he juxtaposes the "guardians of orthodoxy": the stultifying utterances of the magisterium, the rigid moralism of much of Catholicism, etc. In other words, O'Murchu is in full-blown reaction against a Catholicism in which, we presume, he was himself shaped. In his reaction, he does not shrink from identifying himself with "New Age" spirituality.

Announcing a New Age is, of course, hardly a new enterprise. Joachim of Fiore did it in the early Middle Ages. New Age thinking has often veered toward the demonic; think of the Thousand Year Reich or the classless society with its vision of the new Soviet man. O'Murchu, of course, has nothing so apocalyptic in mind. He is, however, quite impatient with the clods and dullards who do not find the Christian tradition hopelessly retrograde. O'Murchu is fed up with "religion" but bullish on "spirituality"-terms which, innocently, he sees as polar opposites. He is out to create great chasms between old and new. Alas, the "new" which he espouses demands a grasp of fractals, quantum theory, chaos theory, and so on. This book, in short, has a feeling of snobbish gnosticism. To be sure, the author includes the obligatory discourse on identifying with the "marginalized," but my suspicion is that those folks could not make heads or tails of this book.

In announcing a "new spiritual vision," O'Murchu eviscerates traditional Christian spirituality through rejection and parody. He is, of course, free to do so. But his book will hardly find a place on any serious bibliography of Christian spirituality. It certainly will find no place on mine.

Lawrence S. Cunningham teaches theology at the University of Notre Dame. His most recent book is Thomas Merton and Monastic Wisdom (Eerdmans).

The Doctors of the Church
by Bernard McGinn
Crossroad, $17.95, 193 pp.

Christian Spirituality:
An Introduction
by Alister McGrath
Blackwell, $28.95, 350 pp.

The Density of the Present: Selected Writings
by Gustavo Gutierrez
Orbis, $22, 213 pp.

Christian Spirituality: An Introduction to the Heritage
by Charles J. Healey
Alba House, $22.95, 432 pp.

Reclaiming Spirituality
by Diarmuid O'Murchu
Crossroad, $15.95, 197 pp.