RELIGION BOOKNOTES.

Augustine through the Ages: An Encyclopedia
edited by Allan D. Fitzgerald, O.S.A.
Eerdmans, $75, 902 pp.

Augustine's first biographer, Possidius, writing shortly after the death of the great African bishop, opined that it would be difficult for an educated person to read and understand all of the saint's writings. This is consolation. I cannot make the claim of having read all of Augustine, although some of the "classics" have been staples in my classroom teaching and other works have been a source of edification. After just working through the entire De Trinitate in seminar (anyone who has attempted to do so will applaud our achievement), it was most pleasurable and instructive to read the learned account of that seminal treatise by Rowan Williams in Augustine through the Ages.

This massive volume is an extremely useful and beautifully produced guide to a thinker whose influence on Christianity is inestimable. There are entries on all Augustine's extant writings and thematic articles on major doctrinal and philosophical issues (everything from Christology to Neo-Platonism). Also included are biographical essays on individuals and social groups of Augustine's time, from the schismatic Donatists to the Manichees, of whom Augustine himself had been a member, to the Pelagians with whom he battled. Intellectual influences, such as Augustine's schooling in rhetoric and the impact of Cicero, are taken up as well. Detailed essays on the reception of Augustine's thought (by Thomas Aquinas, Erasmus, Luther, Calvin, and others) chart his lasting influence. His influence on subsequent movements, from the Carolingians and the scholastics through the Renaissance humanists to the modern period, are also covered. Finally, there are wonderful entries on pastoral, homiletic, and liturgical practices in the North African church, and also reports on the extensive archeological research at sites connected to his life and times.

In addition to the treatise on the Trinity, I paid careful attention to the encyclopedia's extensive essay on De Doctrina Christiana, so influential in biblical interpretation and literary theory, Ernest Fortin's comprehensive account of City of God, and, of course, to the entry on Confessions. Confessions still presents formidable scholarly problems (how is it organized? what is its purpose? to what degree is it historical and to what degree rhetorically constructed?) which are surveyed in a balanced fashion. Reading this account makes me all the more convinced that Garry Wills's recent decision in his book on Augustine to translate confessiones as "testament" is wrong since it loses the thick meaning of the word which, as Augustine himself points out in more than one place, suggests a confession of praise and an affirmation of faith as well as a confession of sin.

There are so much valuable synthesis of scholarly material and so many odd pieces of information in Augustine through the Ages that it is difficult to cavil, but cavil a reviewer must. First, the volume should have provided a few visual aids. While there are schematic boxes indicating the order of Augustine's sermons and writings, there is no map of Augustine's North African world. In reading about regional councils and Augustine's visits to various cities it would have been nice to have had a map of where these places were.

Second, this work is not encyclopedic. I offer one example. Augustine wrote a very famous letter on prayer to a woman named Proba. Having recently read that letter (more like a treatise), I looked up Proba. Alas, there was no entry for her. She is mentioned by name in the entry on prayer, but there is no indication of who she was. Finally, in a very good article on Augustine's reflections on the Lord's Prayer, Proba is identified as an aristocratic Roman who had taken refuge in North Africa after the sack of Rome. But had I not already known that the letter to Proba contained a commentary on the Lord's Prayer, I might well have been stymied in finding out even minimal information about her. Nevertheless, this work belongs on the reference shelf of every theological library.

Late Antiquity: A Guide to the Postclassical World
edited by G. W. Bowersock, Peter Brown, and Oleg Grabar
Harvard University Press, $49.95., 780 pp.

By "Late Antiquity" the distinguished editors of this volume mean the period from roughly a.d. 250 to 800, and the world from the Iberian Peninsula east to the Indus River. This designation covers the interlocked worlds of Rome, Byzantium, the Persian Empire, and the newly emerging culture and kingdoms connected to the rise of Islam.

The editors explicitly caution that this work is not an encyclopedia. Because of the complexity of the period, they do not privilege entries dealing with Christianity, information that is readily available in sources like The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church. The book is set out in two parts. The first section has long essays tracing the broad contours of the culture of Late Antiquity. The second consists of more traditional treatments of specific topics. The essays stress that this period should not be seen atomistically.

In pursuit of that goal, there are substantial entries on sacred landscapes, philosophical traditions, religious communities, barbarians and ethnicity, war and violence, empire building, Christian triumphs and controversy, Islam, the "good life," and habitat. The essays touch not only on big ideas and big movements but also on what the many discrete researches, ranging from literary criticism to anthropology, tell us.

In the second part, called "the alphabetical guide," there are hundreds of entries of varying length covering places, persons, movements, and aspects of culture. For some weeks I read systematically through these to satisfy my somewhat promiscuous intellectual curiosity. The range of topics is fascinating: one can read about agriculture, the baking of bread, how the governments of the period handled the problem of famine, the various forms of music at the time, etc. In addition, there are generous treatments of movements as diverse (to stay with just the letter M) as the Manicheans, monasticism, Mandean religion, magic, Muhammad, and Mithraism, to say nothing of mosaics, both ecclesiastical and secular, metal ware, the making of maps and medallions.

The long essays have ample footnotes for further study and the alphabetical entries have a select bibliography. The roster of scholars is impressive. There are also two maps of the Late Antique world, more than forty black-and-white illustrations, and fifteen color plates interspersed in the text. The index seems adequate although there are no cross references at the end of the alphabetical entries themselves. The book is handsome and economically priced. The welter of detail does not detract from the work's overall aim which is to provide a guide to the new directions in the historiography of the era that "point firmly away from any commonly accepted stereotypes of the period."

Christians in Asia before 1500
by Ian Gillman and
Hans-Joachim Klimkeit
University of Michigan, $55, 391 pp.

We tend to think of early Christian expansion in terms of its thrust toward the West: from Jerusalem, say, along the Mediterranean littoral with probes into what is now Turkey (Galatia, Ephesus, etc.). But, of course, Christianity also moved eastward, as the chapter heads under "Christians in Asia before 1500" show: Arabia, Armenia, Georgia, Persia (Iran), India, Central Asia (via the southern and northern silk routes), China, and Southeast Asia. As Christianity moved east, it had inevitable clashes with other great religious traditions: the fire worshipers of Iran, the slow but inexorable spread of Islam from the seventh century on, the religious traditions of the Indus Valley which we conveniently lump under the generic title of Hinduism, and, of course, Buddhism. It is the precise merit of Gillman and Klimkeit's book to illustrate in copious detail how these various religious traditions intermingled, clashed, or lived in uneasy neighborliness. The authors (one an Australian; the other a German) always pause to outline the major Christian doctrinal and liturgical practices that established themselves in different places. They are also good at making use of historical and archaeological evidence to assess the value of competing Christian traditions in the East (for example, the "Thomas" Christians of Southern India who claim apostolic origin).

In this long narrative the crucial role that Syriac played in the expansion of Christianity to the East stands out. A dialect of Aramaic, Syriac developed mainly in Edessa on the east bank of the Euphrates in what is present-day Turkey. Syriac writers, beginning in the fourth century, developed a splendid body of Christian literature as well as a particular church style, ascetic practice, and a Syriac-based liturgy. Syriac Christianity became "the liturgical language in India and China as much as in Mesopotamia," despite the fact that after the rise of Islam it ceased being, for all practical purposes, a spoken language. One can get some sense of this linguistic expansion by recognizing that before the end of the first millennium, "more than five hundred titles of books in Syriac are attested in China, among them a Holy Scripture containing twenty-seven books, including probably Old Testament books."

Today, there is an intense interest in Syriac Christian writings, both because of their inherent beauty (a good deal of this literature is poetic and hymnic in nature), and because of the fascination of seeing a Christian literature that, at least in its earliest examples (the writings of Saint Ephrem is one), was not nourished by Greek thought forms. It is a pity, then, that the authors of this book give no indication that a good deal of Syriac literature is available to us thanks to the labors of such Anglophone scholars as Sebastian Brock, Kathleen McVey, Sidney Griffith, Joseph Amar, Susan Harvey, and Robin Darling Young. In fact, if there is a single criticism to be made of this unfailingly interesting volume, it is that its bibliography contains almost nothing written after the early 1980s.

At the end of their long narrative, the authors offer what seems to be, at least in part, a cautionary tale. It was neither Nestorian nor Orthodox Christians who managed the great penetration into the East. Even before the arrival of the Jesuits, many Christians in the East used local language and ideas to articulate their faith. They subsequently discovered how rigid were the Chalcedonian Christians (the later missionaries from Rome were even worse) in the face of "heretical" Christians, and how little inclined they were to listen and try to understand. The recent discussions between (Chalcedonian) Rome and (Nestorian) Copts of Alexandria are now seeking to undo that damage. This history is a useful reminder that dialogue and the search for mutual understanding are always to be preferred.

Gillman and Klimkeit's work is a perfect complement to the first volume of Samuel Moffett's A History of Christianity in Asia (HarperSanFrancisco, 1992). That earlier volume is more readable, although Gillman and Klimkeit seem more thorough. Their work also benefits from some black-and-white illustrations as well as maps, charts, and a fairly good index. Both volumes invite us to turn our Christian eyes to the East. Somehow the world seems a smaller place when one learns that Tibetans had contact with both the Nestorian Christians of Central Asia and the Manichaeans of Persia as early as the eighth century, and that the decline of Asian Christianity in the fourteenth century may be partially blamed on the same waves of plague that devastated Europe.

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